Flexible Firm: The Design of Culture at Bang & Olufsen

By Jakob Krause-Jensen

Bang & Olufsen, the famous Danish producer of high-end home electronics, is well known as an early exponent of value-based management: the idea that there should be consistency in what the organisation does, a certain continuity between what the company develops and sells, and the beliefs and practices of the employees. This study investigates how company values are communicated and the collective identity is articulated through the use of such concepts as ‘culture’, ‘fundamental values’, and ‘corporate religion’, as well as how employees negotiate these ideas in their daily working lives. As this book reveals, the identification of values, meant to create cohesion and solidarity among employees, came to symbolise and engender a split between the staff and the other parts of the company. By examining the rise and fall of the value-based management approach, this volume offers the indispensible insight of anthropological enquiry to expose how social realities challenge conventional management strategies and therefore must be considered in the development of new management techniques.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845458249

Jakob Krause-Jensen

Jakob Krause-Jensen is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. His research focuses on the way ethnographic methods and anthropological theory can be used to understand organizations and the life within them in critical and creative ways.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Starting Fieldwork on ‘The Farm’

For more than two decades this humorous drawing by Gary Larson has been a favourite on the fridge doors and pin-up boards of anthropologists. The cartoon shows a group of ‘primitives’ who are in a panic to remove their TV's, telephones, and VCR's before the anthropologists arrive. Apparently, the ‘primitives’ are intent on keeping the otherworldly scientists locked in their professional illusion of the existence of equally otherworldly ‘pure natives’ living in timeless pockets uncontaminated by MTV and Beverly Hills 9876543 (or whatever the number is). Unfortunately, Larson's comic seems to imply that there are no more blank spots on the map. The object of anthropological investigation is fast disappearing; the world has been ‘entzaubert’, disenchanted, or, as Clifford Geertz puts it, we may simply have to get used to the fact that ‘variety is rapidly softening into a paler, narrower spectrum.’ The days of the headhunters, the matrilinealists, and the widow burners may be counted, but ‘the French will never eat salted butter’ (Geertz 2000: 68).

The following pages might provide unexpected consolation for anthropologists worried about the prospects of disenchantment hinted at by Larson and Geertz: my fieldwork was carried out in Denmark at Bang & Olufsen, one of the crown jewels in the Danish manufacturing industry, a company who has earned its reputation from the production of exclusive, high quality, audiovisual home electronics with a distinct design. For when we turn our gaze on the producers of these machines of modernity and disenchantment, people whom we would perhaps expect to be ‘specialists without a spirit’ (Weber 1991 [1904]: 182), we find instead that this corporate environment offers a strange and surprising inversion of the ‘Tristes Tropes’-ironies implied in Gary Larson's drawing. The ‘natives’ (a couple of them were anthropologists themselves) did not remove their technological equipment when the fieldworker arrived; on the contrary, they proudly presented their televisions, telephones, CD players, and state-of-the-art loudspeakers to the visiting anthropologist. And what was even more engagingly exotic: leading spokespersons insisted that what they produced and sold were not stereos and televisions, but ‘values’ and ‘visions’ (both in the metaphysical sense). This apparent turn-around of a well-known history of rationalisation and this re-enchantment occurring within what is commonly understood to be the heartland of utilitarian rationality – the world of business organizations – was what triggered my curiosity.

Illustration 1.1 The administrative headquarters (the ‘glass cage’) seen from the lobby.

Bang & Olufsen Ltd, known as ‘B&O’ to most Danes, is located in Struer, a town of 20,000 inhabitants in the windswept northwestern periphery of Denmark. The company develops and manufactures audio-visual products,¹ which are world-famous for their distinctive design. Bang & Olufsen is by far the biggest industrial workplace in Struer. Since the mid 1990s, the aim of management has been to turn Bang & Olufsen into a ‘value-based’ corporation. The company assets no longer refer solely to the bottom-line, but rather describe some fundamental orientations and attitudes that are not connected to economics in any immediate way. Fundamental to the value-based corporation is the idea that there should be a consistency in what the organization does: continuity between what the company develops and sells and the beliefs and practices of the employees. But how is the elegant minimalism of B&O's televisions, telephones, and sound systems connected to ways of working together? How do the aesthetic attributes of the products translate into the ethical realm of the organization? How is corporate culture defined and how are company values communicated? How do employees negotiate these ideas in their daily working lives?

The Frame of the Argument

The primary aim of this book is to investigate how the company articulates its collective identity through the use of concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘fundamental values’, and ‘corporate religion’. I want to see how these words are used in corporate discourse² and to trace the connection between these ideas and the social environment of the organization. The general thrust of my argument is that there is a connection between the fragmentation and dispersal at the social level, and the company's efforts to address and mobilise Bang & Olufsen stakeholders through cultural rhetoric on the ideological level.

The business environment in the Western world can be characterised by constant flux and increasing unpredictability (Harvey 1990; Kanter 1989; Harrison 1994; Sennett 1998; Castells 2000). To survive under these conditions of speed-up and instability, business organizations must be able to accommodate to rapidly changing markets, adjust to high degrees of uncertainty, and celebrate neverending technological revolutions. People change jobs at increasing rates, the computer and the internet have made it possible to work from home, outsourcing has become an imperative corporate strategy, the ‘consultant’ is a common employment category, and organizational flexibility is regarded as a universal yet imprecise condition of survival in turbulent markets. Bang & Olufsen's attempts to determine its cultural values, articulate the corporate vision, and thus objectify the company's culture were all an indication that – among an increasing number of employees – establishing a productive business milieu and a sense of common purpose and belonging was becoming increasingly difficult.

The social theorist Robert Cooper (1992) argues that when organizations become increasingly de-localised, when they are looked upon and experienced as mediating networks, orbits of continuous communication, exchange, and motion, then the need to distinguish between those who belong to the organization and those who do not becomes acute. When the boundary between inside and outside the organization is fluid and unstable, then the organization achieves continuity, delimitation, and reality through ongoing symbolic efforts to constitute itself. In this sense, ‘culture’ typically becomes an issue when identity is challenged (Dugay 1996: 57–58). Attempts at establishing corporate identity are thus linked to the fact that the connection between organization and employee, once assumed to be fixed, coherent, and constant, becomes a more fragile and transitory relationship that must be continuously nurtured and won.

The model of the relationship between the business and its environment framing my argument might be visualised as a gravitational field. At the social and economic level, a number of centrifugal forces are in play: flexibility, de-localisation, employee mobility, incessant technological renewal, and the increasing pace of change in the market. At the cultural level, a complementary, centripetal movement can be identified, whereby the company tries to attract employees, investors, and customers through reflexive clarifications of corporate collective identity through an articulation of the fundamental corporate values and a religious rhetoric. Consequently, managerial cultural discourse at Bang & Olufsen must mediate a series of dualities: flexibility and loyalty; individualism and commitment; empowerment and cultural centralisation; non-conformist ‘crazy’ thinking and hard deadlines; and, values of continual change and ‘high fidelity’.

Nevertheless, the aim of my inquiry was not to identify a crucial cultural rock bottom that sustained the Bang & Olufsen corporate community. Rather, I was looking for concepts to grasp both the stability, but also the complexity and change that seemed to be such prevalent facts of life at Bang & Olufsen. Borrowing a distinction from urban anthropology, my ambition was to do an ethnography ‘in’ rather than an ethnography ‘of’ Bang and Olufsen (Rogers and Vertovec 1995: 3): the emphasis of my research question was on how people worked with, experienced, and acted on managerial ideas of culture rather than on describing these ideas as a coherent system (Holy and Stuchlick 1983: 2). I wanted to investigate what sense the employees had of their own situation when helped by these management notions. How do people cope with these ideas in the course of their everyday working lives? I wanted to see how different culture-related concepts were used strategically by the company in an attempt to create commitment and community that went far beyond company boundaries (which are difficult to draw anyway) to include retailers, investors, and customers, and how employees used and negotiated these concepts.

Accessing the Farm and Beginning Fieldwork

It is a convention – almost a cliché – for anthropological studies to start with arrival stories. Strictly speaking, this convention serves to establish the trustworthiness of the participant–observer by testifying to the fact that he or she ‘was there’ as well as being, of course, a stylistic or literary trick to get the reader there as well (Clifford 1983: 118). Typically, the arrival story tells the reader about the difficulties encountered in the field; the first meeting; the negotiation of entry; the talk with the gatekeeper; and the conditions of being present. But, as Barbra Czarniawska-Jorges has remarked (1998: 33), the happy moment when you have gained access and can just get on with your gathering of data does not occur in the ethnography of organizations.³ According to her, this has to do with the fact that the anthropologist, who studies organizations, is likely to be studying ‘up’; i.e., studying people who earn more, have a higher social standing, and are probably more self-conscious than the participant-observer. Furthermore, one might add, organizations are in some sense more clearly bounded than most other locations. It is necessary to get permission from high-standing employees to get access to the locality and to do research.

Nine months before I started the fieldwork, I had an appointment with the personnel manager at B&O. I had written a letter explaining my interest in the use of concepts of culture in company discourse, and he had invited me for a meeting to discuss my project. I was happy that I had opted for the shirt-and-blazer solution, but decided not to wear a tie, as this choice seemed to fit the relatively informal dress code.

The meeting took place in the old headquarters, a three-story red brick building from the 1970s, but I was told that the administration would soon move to new headquarters. When I entered his office, he asked me to sit down and offered coffee. He then folded his hands and looked at me with a smile and a twinkle in his eye: ‘well, what do you want to sell us?’ he said in a mock rural accent.⁴ I had anticipated a question like that, because naturally I was going to have to explain why the gatekeeper should open the door and let me in. So I had two answers ready: I told him that, just like other anthropologists doing fieldwork, I intended to do ‘participant observation’, i.e., to take part in the life of the people I studied. Seen from this perspective, I could be regarded as six months of free labour because the university would be paying my salary. Second, I emphasised that I was not a consultant, but that I would eventually produce an outsider's account of social and cultural processes in the company. He seemed satisfied by the answer and wanted to hear more about my research interests. I was interested in the way that the company was able to play on different notions of culture – the broad anthropological notion and the elite, exclusive notion of culture as ‘distinction’. I told him that I was interested in following the process of working with vision and values. We finally agreed that the best place for me to start my fieldwork was the personnel or Human Resources Department. I was told to be aware that things were pretty chaotic at the moment, and we arranged for me to start fieldwork in April, the spring season, which was the least busy period of the year.

‘The Farm’: Context of Work and Corporate Symbol

On the first day of my fieldwork, the train arrived fifteen minutes late. Realising that the norm of punctuality is likely to be much stronger in a private corporation than in a university department, I hurled myself into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Bang & Olufsen's new headquarters. Noticing the suppressed panic in my voice, the driver told me that ‘the farm’ (gården) was only three minutes away. ‘The farm’, it appeared, was the nickname given to the recently built company administration. Even though country fields surround the building, the unsophisticated, low-tech connotations of the name do not immediately fit the glass and basalt elegance of the headquarters or the tasteful technology and refined design produced by Bang & Olufsen. In this way, the name points to the incongruity of placing this company of urbane technology in Struer in North Western Jutland – a remote, rural, windswept periphery of Denmark. On the other hand, the name refers to the fact that the company was founded by two engineers, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, on Svend Olufsen's family estate seventy-four years ago.

Illustration 1.2 An alternate view of the glass cage seen from the lobby, and the glass corridor connecting the two.

‘The farm’ was built in 1998. It is symbolic of the recently defined corporate values, which are the subject of this book, and the building is also perhaps the most visible manifestation of new corporate affluence. In the beginning of the 1990s, the company came close to bankruptcy, and the then Corporate Executive Officer Anders Knutsen, together with a group of senior executives, launched a plan they called ‘Breakpoint 93’, a reform program that is today widely recognised to have saved Bang & Olufsen from collapse. The plan involved a radical restructuring and downsizing of the company, and one-third or 700 of the company's employees were laid off. From a strategic or corporate perspective, the reorganization was successful: Bang & Olufsen's share prices skyrocketed.⁵ Anders Knutsen subsequently earned star-executive status and was, at the time of fieldwork, often portrayed in the Danish media.

In the last part of the 1990s, after years of tight budgeting following the Breakpoint plan, the time had come to open up the budget for strategic spending, such as building the new company headquarters. One of the areas to be developed was ‘communication’, the marketing of Bang & Olufsen values. Thus, Anders Knutsen (1998) wrote:

A customer who just wants a TV does not buy Bang & Olufsen…Bang & Olufsen has a valuable brand, because customers all over the world know our values (through our products and our own or other people's communication), because they share the values and consequently buy the product…the values must be a part of our everyday lives.

As Anders Knutsen suggests here, what we normally think of as a means of communication, transmitters of sounds and images, are themselves symbols and powerful messages: ‘Bang & Olufsen don't make products. They make tools for creating emotions’, the French composer and musician Jean-Michel Jarre said to the Danish news on 14 June 2000, which was the 75th anniversary of Bang & Olufsen.

This focus on communication, values, and emotions indicates that, officially, the company prefers to perceive itself as a meaning broker rather than as a product producer. This again is a corporate self-understanding that points to Bang & Olufsen's attempt to become a brand. Thus, in the most material of domains, in an ambience that is normally regarded as the stronghold of utilitarian thinking and practical reason – the world of business and organization – concerns and strategies are often defined in cultural terms: companies use metaphor; develop symbols and philosophies; discover foundational myths; have visions, missions, ethics, and rituals.

Fieldwork on the Farm

The ‘farm’ is officially promoted as an important statement of corporate culture, an ideal portrait presented to the world. Quite logically, an organization that produces machines for seeing and listening should have headquarters that match the aesthetic quality of the products. Despite the humble, rural nickname and its recent origin in 1998, the new headquarters have already earned themselves a reputation in the history of Danish industrial architecture. The building is seen as an expression of company values: a link has been forged between that which is developed and produced and the building that houses the company's administrative functions. The administrative building has been praised in the Danish media as a paradigmatic example of corporate architecture. It has been suggested that the building itself resembles a Bang & Olufsen product (Keiding 1999).

From the outside, ‘the farm’ is far from monumental. The glass, steel, and basalt building is a low structure placed in the open fields on the outskirts of Struer. From the parking lot, a cobblestone path takes you down a slope to the main door. The entrance is a glass door tucked away in a corner and suggests a back door rather than a main entrance in its conspicuous lack of monumentality.

When I entered the new corporate headquarters, I looked for company insignia, posters, names, and other loud announcements of corporate identity – but I saw no slogans, no super-sized logos, and no products on display. Instead, I stepped into a spacious, luminous lobby with parquet floors of pale wood and jade-coloured glass and walls of concrete and dark grey stone slates (see illustration 1.2).

The only furniture in the foyer was a table with a few daily newspapers and a couple of chairs designed by the Danish modernist architect Poul Kjærholm. The chairs pointed to the link with the modern Danish design tradition that has been characterised by minimalism – an economy of means – an aesthetic that has been an important characteristic of Bang & Olufsen's products for decades.

I was looking for directly visible symbolic expressions of corporate culture in part because other ethnographic accounts had all described a massive symbolic exposure of company culture: streamers in the back window of employees’ cars, t-shirts and mugs with company logos, videos in the lobby transmitting the CEO's latest speech, posters declaring the corporate commandments, and so on (see Garsten 1994; Kunda 1992; Casey 1999). In contrast, the impression here was not one of importunate corporate slogans. The subtle and indirect quality of the building's references to the company's culture was different from the blunt propaganda I had come to expect from reading other monographs. It was a message suitably wrapped and indirectly conveyed – corporate culture by allusion.⁶ Allusive or not, the building was more than a symbol; it was also the context of work for Bang & Olufsen employees. The material properties and physical layout are a way of communicating organizational values and also in a tangible sense, a means of encouraging and forming patterns of conduct. From my chair in the foyer to the left I had a view of the canteen. As it was only 9:30 AM, the large room was empty. The fact that the room was vacant emphasised its serene beauty and minimalist aesthetics: no food, snacks or drinks were for sale. A red vacuum jug left on the empty buffet table seemed oddly out of place among the long rows of black tables and chairs.

The entire south façade of the foyer is made of non-reflective glass, so that from the lobby, you have a clear view of the three-storied administrative building. A few concrete pillars support the building and elevate it a few metres above the field and the grazing sheep below. The glass front of the building makes it look like a giant aquarium. Inside, people are completely visible. On that April morning, most were sitting at their desks; some were talking to their colleagues. I recognised my contact Søren when he rose from his office chair and moved through the open office along the window to the stairs that took him down to the lobby to pick me up. The floors of the corridor that connect the lobby to the administrative office building are made of jade-green glass in which the light from the huge windows is reflected, creating a stunning effect of clear, cool beauty.

Illustration 1.3 The canteen at the administrative headquarters.

Apart from the aesthetic references to the ‘simplicity’ and ‘purity’ of Danish modernism, the obvious keywords in the architectural message are ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’, and maybe ‘reflexivity’. But the mirror-effect of light and glass also distorts proportions and perspectives, leaves you suspended in mid-air, and thus resonated with the excitement and nervousness I felt on the first day of fieldwork. On the way to the Human Resources Department, I was introduced to a few people from other departments, and Søren stopped several times to exchange short, humorous remarks, throwing out comments and cheerful ‘hellos’ to people, and spontaneously arranged a future meeting with a colleague from another department: ‘This is very typical of Bang & Olufsen culture. We play it by ear,’ he told me, ‘you wouldn't find much formal stuff around here. Things develop as we go along.’ Except for an occasional suit and tie – from the finance department on the first floor, I was told – the dress code was loose and informal, though clearly less casual than at my university's Department of Ethnography and Social Anthropology. Ascending the glass staircase, we reached the third floor at the top of the building, and from here we had a magnificent view of the surrounding landscape with its fjord and fields.

The Human Resources Department

The Human Resources Department (HRD) consists of a small group of about 20 people. They come from various educational backgrounds: correspondence clerks, Bachelors of commerce, an engineer, a variety of social science graduates, a psychologist, and an anthropologist. Until a few days before my arrival, the Human Resources Department (HRD) had been divided into two parts: the ‘Employee Centre’ (medarbejdercenteret) and Human Resources Development, a division which had formalised a distinction between tasks that are administrative and what many saw as the more prestigious strategic work with organizational development. Though the distinction was formally abolished in a new, comprehensive Human Resources Department, relics of the old difference were reflected in the fact that the department is still physically divided. One part of HRD is situated on the first floor together with the Finance Department, and the other part of it is located on the third floor together with the Information Department, close to the centre of power – the office of Chief Executive Officer, Anders Knutsen.

The executives and some managers have their own glass walled offices⁷ at each end of the building, but the rest of the work stations are in groups of four demarcated by specially designed grey shelving units, creating a well-ordered, semi-open office landscape. Thus, the environment is constructed to enhance face-to-face contact and encourage communication. Differences of rank and power are difficult to identify in the office layout of identical workspaces and computer terminals. Each compartment contains four spacious, specially designed mechanically adjustable desks and office chairs in shades of black and grey to match the shelving. The colours are chosen according to company codes. There are no corporate logos, and only a few scattered personal items exist – a child's drawing tucked beneath the transparent desk pad, a personal cup, a toy car. One employee had a conspicuous exhibition of colourful boxes of ‘fair trade’ coffee placed on the top of the shelf, but on the whole, the carefully orchestrated and beautifully designed interior seems to discourage attempts at more personal expression.⁸

I arrived just in time for a weekly departmental event. Friday coffee was arranged on the windowsill, the preferred place for informal social gatherings on the third floor. Over rolls and coffee, news is exchanged, jokes are cracked, wit is displayed, and business matters are discussed. Two employees were talking about an article that described the new corporate headquarters.⁹ Under the headline ‘Musical Masterpiece’, the author had written:

The design is in the material. Brick, concrete, wood, basalt and glass, lots of glass. Nobody would be able to hide here. Not even the CEO, who sits on the top floor of the glasshouse, where he is able to see everybody and everybody is able to see him…There are no doors or steps to the CEO. Guests and employees should not be put in a submissive mood when they enter his office. In a modern corporation, management should be visible and accessible, says Jan Søndergaard [the architect]. Every day the building forces Anders Knutsen to visibility and ‘management-by-walking-around’ as his office is the office farthest removed from the toilets, the stairs, and the canteen. (Børsens Nyhedsmagasin nr. 8, March 29 1999).

During the coffee break, I was introduced to my future ‘colleagues’ as the ‘anthropologist who has come here to study the tribe of Bang & Olufsen’. When I explained my interest in corporate culture, many seemed eager to offer their opinion. One employee pointed out the arbitrariness of my choice of Bang & Olufsen Ltd in Struer and argued that I ought to spend time with Telecom and Medicom, two other companies in Bang & Olufsen Holding. Another suggested that I should pay attention to the relationship between the company and the retailers. An employee with a long history in the company told me that if I wanted to investigate Bang & Olufsen's culture, the Human Resources Department was not the right place to do fieldwork – ’reality is down there, not here [in the HR Department]’, she said and nodded toward the roof of the factory building.

As the group of coffee drinkers slowly dissolved, Simone, a young employee who had recently graduated from the university, pulled me aside and presented me with a model of culture in organizations she had found useful when she wrote her thesis. On a neighbouring desk, I noticed that an employee had a picture of himself talking to Edgar Schein, the Grand Old Man of culture in organizations, who was the main speaker at a conference on ‘the value-based organization’ hosted by Bang & Olufsen the year before.

I was given my own desk, computer, and telephone line and treated in much the same way as any new employee. The fact that I was settling in passed unnoticed on this day of departmental reshuffle. When I arrived, the HR Department had just been through some organizational changes, and the employees were being re-grouped and were moving to their new workstations. One employee was helping his colleague get installed: ‘before we make too much of this, how long are you going to stay here?’ – ‘Well, they just gave me 250 new business cards, so they are not going to kick me out tomorrow’, they joked. As I would soon find out, markets fluctuate unpredictably, new products are developed and produced at an increasing pace, investment capital and personnel are more mobile than ever, corporate reorganizations are normal, and change was an evident social fact in the Human Resources Department.

Constitutive Differences: Comparing Two Departments

My perspective on the Human Resources Department reflected my research interest, but what struck me as peculiar about life in Bang & Olufsen was coloured by my biography in ways that I am both aware and unaware of, including my own organizational experience and background in a university department. A human resources department in a private company and a department of ethnography in a university are different. In one system, money was plentiful and people talked openly about such issues as being cost-conscious, the bottom-line, etc. In the other system, resources were scarce, but rarely mentioned in the same way (this is rapidly changing at the moment of writing, however). In one system, the incidence of turbulence and mobility was enormous. During the year of my fieldwork, more than one-third of the employees in the Human Resources Department moved, either to other departments in the organization or to another more attractive job elsewhere – or because they were simply fired or ‘freed’ (fritstillet), which is the common organizational euphemism.¹⁰ The other system was characterised by social stability and continuity: academic ‘capital’ is slowly accumulated and tied to specific fields, and does not invite rapid exchanges with the larger job market. At Bang & Olufsen, things happened at a speed that made life in my university department seem slow. This slower academic rhythm, for example, is reflected in the fact that this analysis has taken such a long time to complete, at least from a corporate perspective. To the Bang & Olufsen organizational member, the things I am writing now would most likely seem to belong to a distant past; after all, my fieldwork took place in the last millennium.

In one system, people came from different educational backgrounds, but they were engaged in continuous and extensive collaboration in networks and projects in open office landscapes. In the other system, people came from the same educational background, but generally worked on a variety of different, independent research projects and had their own offices. In one system, identifying and talking about culture and values was a common, practical concern. In the other system, the collective identity was not given the same attention, and ‘culture’ was a theoretical concept that was continuously considered problematic.

The point of listing these differences is to stress the fact that my perspective on the HR Department of Bang & Olufsen is shaped by the Department of Ethnography and Anthropology at Aarhus University, not only in the intellectual sense that this department is my alma mater and the place were my concepts were developed and my theories refined, but also in the sense of shaping a more general cultural, organizational background implied in the differences above.

The Glass Cage

¹¹

An important aim of my work is to find out how concepts of culture are used in management discourse. The book deals with the nexus between language and power in value-based management. I want to explore how ideas are shaped, how they change and combine to form systems of meaning, and what kind of social effect they have, i.e., how people in the Human Resources Department cope and work with the cultural models.

As previously mentioned, ‘the farm’ was at once a strong symbol of the corporate values and the context of work for the administrative staff of Bang & Olufsen. It was the locality within which most of my fieldwork took place. In retrospect, the elegant glass building is also a strong and suggestive symbol of power lending itself to a comparison with two famous conceptions of power in twentieth century Western societies as captured in the images of ‘the iron cage’ (Weber 1991: 182ff.) and ‘the panopticon’ (Foucault 1977). On the next pages, I will use ‘the glass cage’ to suggest key themes and topics and lay out some tracks that will be pursued and argued more thoroughly in subsequent chapters.

With the metaphor of ‘the iron cage’, Weber wanted to emphasise that the process of rationalisation epitomised in the efficiency of the bureaucratic organization – the dominant organizational form of modernity – had happened at a cost. Rationalisation is not to be seen as a journey from the darkness of superstition and powerlessness toward enlightenment, individual autonomy, and freedom. Rationalisation, for Weber, is not a win-win game. The rule-governed efficiency of bureaucracy offered some kind of freedom, but its disenchanted environment of experts ‘without heart’ (Weber 1991: 182) created other forms of imprisonment. The ‘iron cage’ points to the entrapment and inflexibility of the ideal-typical bureaucratic organization. To Weber, the military was the model upon which the industrial corporation was built: ‘no special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalism factory’ (quoted in Sennett 1998: 42). Like the army, clear lines of authority and strict adherence to objectified rules defined the iron cage of bureaucracy. The crucial characteristic of bureaucratic authority was the absolute separation of the ‘personal’ and the ‘professional’.

Nevertheless, such dependence on procedures and separation of the personal and the professional is no longer thought to be efficient. Contrary to the iron cage, the glass cage suggests the idea of a ‘greenhouse’, which encourages and inspires personal growth. The ideal of the value-based organization implies the fusion of the personal and the professional. Work should provide the employees with the possibility to express themselves as full human beings. In the flexible, value-based network organization, it was an explicit intention to avoid rules and rigidity that stifled initiative in the old bureaucracy, aiming instead at constant and continuous change.

Glass is a medium of reflection. Whereas the formal means-ends-rationality is the primary element in the iron cage, the glass cage emphasises the importance of demonstrating ‘emotional intelligence’ and versatility in social relations. The ideal is the self-managing employee and in order to become such it is necessary to learn to reflect on yourself and obtain the soft skills required to function in a network or a team. Glass is a material that is used to define and symbolically frame and elevate that contained by it as something deserving attention, something worthy of being exposed. Actually, the image of the glass cage suggests that it may not be a cage at all, but a showcase, a gift box aimed at highlighting the uniqueness of what it contains rather than constraining or oppressing it.

The glass cage can be used to imply that, contrary to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ suggested by Weber, what could be seen in Bang & Olufsen was a re-enchantment of the world. Emotion and fantasy are not subdued on the course of rationalisation. On the contrary, they become crucial ingredients in a consumer-driven capitalism (Gabriel 2001). As we shall see, consultants and managers at Bang & Olufsen talked about mission, vision, and passion. They tried to establish a ‘brand religion’ and believed that intuition and emotion are far more important than facts and numbers.

But glass is a material, which is at once enchanting, but also deceptive and ambiguous. Glass is a distorting material in which light is reflected and refracted and confusing optical effects are created. The glass cage may give us ideas of unrestricted freedom, but if we act on that idea, we will inevitably at some point discover the boundaries and find out that glass is a very hard material. This was concretely and painfully illustrated once during fieldwork, when a HR manager suffered a concussion by walking straight into one of the interior glass walls of the administrative building. In this respect of the discreteness and invisibility of power, the glass cage resembles ‘the panopticon’, Foucault's famous allegory of disciplinary society.

The Panopticon is a perfection of effective supervision, a model of a prison originally developed by the Scottish Utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham. The point of the prison is that the prison guard is positioned in a watchtower in the centre of the building. He is invisible from the cells, but from his central spot he can see all of the cells. The idea is to create in the prisoners a feeling of being under permanent supervision, so that they gradually internalise the gaze of the system and behave as if they were in fact permanently watched. Clearly, the glass cage with its open office landscape, like the panopticon, offers possibilities of supervision. But in some important aspect, it is also a transformation and even an inversion of the panoptic prison. The glass cage is not the site of an indiscernible, managerial omnivision. On the contrary, in the case of Bang & Olufsen, it is the administrators, the staff, the ‘prison keepers’, who are exposed to being watched as well. The HR Department, the Information Department, and the CEO are housed at the top on the 3rd floor. In his corner office, CEO Anders Knutsen was the most visible of all. When I arrived in the early morning by train from my hometown of Silkeborg, I was able to see from my compartment if he had come to work. The manager has to set an example: like the building, he must embody and exemplify the values – he must practice ‘management by walking around’, as it was sometimes said locally.

As an addition to Foucault's notion of ‘governmentality’¹² (his homespun concept for describing a form of power that works through the paradox of the ‘free subject’), the glass cage suggests the phrase ‘monumentality’, referring to the original Latin root of the word monere (‘to remind’). Monu-mentality indicates the fundamental idea behind the building, which was to reflect Bang & Olufsen values, and, by being a constant reminder to the employees of these fundamental values of the company, also was to induce and inspire certain behaviours and attitudes.

Some have used Foucault's ideas of panopticism to argue that supervision has been radicalised, that what is happening is a ‘tightening of the iron cage’ (Barker 1998). This is too blunt to fit the realities in the glass cage. As management researcher Yannis Gabriel (2001) has put it:

What we have here is a picture, where traditional bureaucratic and rational controls are being supplanted by an array of controls, which work through language, emotion, and exposure. The demise of the iron cage of rationality can be seen as leading to a different form of entrapment, an entrapment not as rigid as that effected by traditional bureaucracy but one which affords greater ambiguity and irony, a glass cage perhaps. The very transparency of the glass cage places severe limits to the overt authority that managers are able to exercise.

The transparency of glass implies that at some level the walls and bars have gone, and authority has become invisible. The employees are encouraged and trained to reflect on themselves and their performance and thereby become ‘self-managing’. Perhaps the ‘Big Brother is watching you’-surveillance of the panopticon could be rephrased to capture a new reality of power among staff in Bang & Olufsen: ‘Big Brother is you, watching!’ – that is, by reflecting on your own performance and the performance of your teammates. This does not mean, however, that hierarchical authority has evaporated. Even though the open office landscape, the absence of visible status markers, the informal tone, and the mandate to take responsibility make it difficult to discern differences of power, they still exist. As the US management researcher Rosabeth Moss Kanter has observed, in the network organization ‘restructurings make clear the realities of power’ (1989: 65).

Glass is both a reflecting and a transparent medium. This duality is captured in the efforts of the organization to reflect on and define its own fundamental values, and in the fact that the corporate project of reflecting on and identifying itself is not a purely reflexive, introvert exercise. It is done with the view of making public announcements. Like the material of glass suggests, the reflexivity is done for the purpose of being transparent to – and recognised by – the outside world. Visibility, then, is not turned inwards toward the watchtower of the prison keeper. Nor is it merely a matter of peers supervising each other in an internal, open office landscape. Instead, it is a radicalised transparency turned toward the public – the investors, the customers. It evokes an element of exhibitionism, display, and pride, of the employee becoming part of brand