Fifth Variation
As in all things “post”, post-modern has also given some answers, but above all, it has given rise to new questions: thus leaving open spaces that a humanistic-oriented management action can fill.

As of the latter half of the 20^th century, with the beginning of the phase of doubt – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud – we start to live in the “post” age, a prefix applied to all the doctrines and all the models in use: post-metaphysics, post-democracy, post-welfare and so on and so forth. Yet “post” is often an indication of disorientation, losing sight of the shore, the lack of an alternative landing place and the aid of nautical charts or a compass. Eugenio Montale, a keen interpreter of “post”, affirms “The compass, gone haywire, goes looking for adventure / and the throw of the dice does not add up”. The “Montalian”, Lucio Piccolo, speaks of an “Unstill universe of gusts”. Post-ideological, post-Taylorism, post … Ultimately, asymmetric idioms risk telling us what has finished, but not what awaits us. In the meanwhile, the post, not waiting for our definitions before jumping on us, emerges as “the new” that we are able to manage. Above all, because – according to Francis Bacon – “time, like space, has its deserts and its solitudes”: some transformations are more intense and rapid than others, enough to pass unnoticed by those that live it. “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans”, Oscar Wilde would have commented. Let’s see if we can make a little order then.

The industrial society, centred on the mass production of material goods, has covered a period running from the middle of the 18^th century to the middle of the 20^th century. A new epochal discontinuity started in World War II with the rapid affirmation of a completely new socio-economic model, which we shall call post-industrial for convenience, centred of the production of immaterial goods: information, knowledge, services and symbols. In the passage from the 20^th to the 21^st century, this model has revealed with greater clarity some of its characteristics regarding new forms of economy, of culture, and of coexistence centred on creativity and aesthetics. Factors of change such as technological progress (electronics, informatics, new energy sources, new materials, lasers, biotechnologies and pharmacology), organizational development, globalization, mass media and mass education have brought about significant socio-economic consequences, including: longer average longevity of individuals, the destructuring of time and space, and the emergence of new values, new social subjects and new luxuries. Therefore, if post-modernity, on the one hand, is the failing of the regulatory force of modernity, on the other, it emerges as an alternative reference model that, if only in part, has not fully achieved its promises, or has at least highlighted the contradictions. The idea for example that creativity, aesthetics and ethics can become dominant has been shown to be incompatible with elements such as the dominance of the economy over policy, of finance over economy, of globalization over identity: up to causing what Domenico De Masi defines as veritable “social pathologies”, exposed by phenomena such as, for example, the growing mobility towards increasingly low-skilled jobs and the doubling of the prison population in just over twenty years in the United States. Again, De Masi observes, “While globalizations achieves a homogenizing effect, on the other hand, societies and their collective imaginations fragment into subgroups. Standardization competes with subjectivity”.

The failure of the new economy, decreed by the inglorious end of the speculative bubble that reached its peak in 2000, has shown how post-modernity can free energy and imagination, expand the virtual, but, by acting in dribs and drabs, not be capable of providing a real alternative to modern production. Rather, we can define it as a form of consumption – of the ephemeral, the superfluous and the indeterminate – which reappropriates the complexity no longer incapacitated by the control mechanisms of modernity. But until a new form of production is proposed, this reappropriation will be confined to the world of consuming the riches produced by the automatisms and expert systems. If everything becomes contingent and contextual, dragged into a limitless creative vortex, the economic compatibilities of the cognitive process break down. Investments do not return a profit and the background holding up the production of the new – intended as ephemeral, emergent – creaks. So much so that, if one can look with optimism at the capacity of organizations to sustain the coming of the Net and information technology, thus withstanding the impact of that “knowledge economy” which already in 1979 Lyotard defined as the element characterizing the “post-modern condition”, to a great extent it is thanks to the big corporation of the “old economy”, when it succeeded in becoming “like the mythical phoenix: lean and reborn from its ashes, facing the challenge of the future, using the potential offered by new technologies to the full, exploiting its greatest assets – human resources – and the relational network”; consequently grafting some post-modern principles into the context of the modern traditional company, but avoiding emphases, wishful thinking, false illusions and the widespread tendency to state it in negative instead of positive terms (denial of hierarchy, loss of teleology and missing identity). In this sense, precisely with a humanistically-oriented management action, some of the options that emerge from the post-modern affliction could come to life. Especially the transformation of work into “creative leisure” – or rather the synthesis between work, study and play – in which creativity becomes central and allows corporations and society to plan their future combining imagination and substance, individual and collective invention, creative teams and an enthusiastic organizational environment.

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