Hyper-Organization and Myths of Community

It is common to depict an opposition between formal organization and solidary community. Contemporary society-wide rationalization constructs organizations as modern purposive actors, or hyper-organizations, operating under high uncertainty environments and with multiple stakeholder interactions. This, we argue, tends to partially reconstruct organizations, their components, and their environments and stakeholders as diffuse and abstract, yet purposive communities. Our arguments and observations suggest a broad shift toward displays of contemporary forms of community. Organizations that depict themselves as more empowered, committed, responsible, and purposive social actors use the term “community” more. Further, the depiction of “community” is highly abstract, rather than a traditional form linked to concrete local geographies or social groups. Overall, we suggest that rationalization in the society of organizations paradoxically generates supra-rational celebration of emotive notions such as community. We find support for our argument in the analyses of 300 annual reports representing 80 large, public United States companies over the period 1960 to 2010.