After The Apocalypse
by Monika Kostera

During times of crumbling social structures and deep divisions, we need to find ideas and values on which we as organizers and society members can build bridges, and unite in our journey towards a common future.

Our times of crumbling structures and decaying social bonds are often depicted as apocalyptic. This book takes the apocalypse as a metaphor to help us in the search for meaning in our everyday realities. Yes, the apocalypse is when social structures and institutions fall apart and we are terrified and suffocated by the debris raining down upon us. But “apocalypse" also means “revelation”. The very collapse reveals what dissipating institutions were constructed upon: where there ought to have been foundational common values, most often there is violence and raw power.

Yet the values are there, too, and they can be found. This book is a guide to these values, showing how they can be of help to organizers and organizational dreamers.

Reviews:
So there is hope. And in After the Apocalypse, the Polish economist and professor of management Monika Kostera takes hope as her theme. Hope shapes experience and, crucially, Kostera wants to inspire it.

She makes an earnest and worthy contribution to organisation theory, which deals with the effects of social organisations on the behavior and attitudes of the people within them, as well as the effects of individuals on the organisations. It also considers the success and survival of organisations, the effects of organisations on political and cultural environments, and vice versa, and debates the principles that underpin research in the field.

With familiar social structures and institutions perceived to be failing, with neoliberalism and neoconservatism ‘destroying values such as the public good and active citizenry’, the threat of adverse climate change and of ecological disaster, and with prophets of doom abounding, Kostera takes the ‘sociological apocalypse’ as a metaphor in a bid to help us find the meaningful in everyday life.

Foundational values - The word ‘apocalypse’, coming from the Apocalypse in the biblical book of Revelation, means catastrophic damage or destruction but, as Kostera points out, it also has connotations of ‘revelation’ or ‘uncovering’, showing where things have gone wrong and where common and altruistic foundational values could have led to different outcomes. She offers a guide to such values, showing how they can be of help to organisers and ‘organisational dreamers’. With society comprised of organisations of one kind or another, big and small, from top to bottom, one sees immediately the relevance of her undertaking.

Quoting ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’, from W B Yeats’ apocalyptic poem ‘The Second Coming’, she says that when the centre collapses, and in turbulent times of uncertainty, ‘we look to the margins for a second coming to bring us hope for a future worth living in’. All new ideas tend to be born at the margins, she says, when alternative thinking has been pushed out by the centrifugal force of the centre as it maximises its power.

This huge system — the ‘Megamachine’, to use Scheidler’s word — which has been defining social life for centuries, Kostera says, could be cut off by a cataclysmic event, or simply implode. All trajectories seem to point that way: a workplace without workers (robots instead), driverless cars, classes taught by holograms, empty homes investments, policies without compassion, society without solidarity.

‘In the sociological apocalypse, the process of destruction of structures and institutions, there is also an aspect of revelation of what is lying underneath,’ she writes. ‘Among the omnipresent debris of violence, there are precious values that have the potential to unite people. Hope opens doors to perception that can enable us to see these values.’

After the Apocalypse is in four sections: first, Kostera looks from organisation theory to philosophy, sociology and psychology for a setting in a wider human context; second, she pursues the theme of hope in discussing how the creative spirit of poetics, art and music — a subject surprisingly absent from Scheidler’s book given his background in theatre and the visual arts — can be used to counter the ethos of organisations with ‘closed and oppressive settings’ and help them to be ‘liberating and original’. In the third part, Kostera turns to history, myth and religion to find ‘powerful expressions of human creativity and, at the same time, of our sense-making’; and finally, she invites readers to see hope acquire structure — in architecture, radical politics and organisation theory itself — and usher in ‘a new social reality after the apocalypse’.

To this end, she urges us to ‘read the books less cited, walk the roads less taken, study the organisations less fashionable, explore the theories less popular’.

~ Geoff Ward, Medium.com

Interview around some key topics addressed in the book ~ Interview by Grzegorz Sroczyńśki, https://next.gazeta.pl/next/7,151003,25899197,prof-kostera-wiekszosc-edukacji-na-wydzialach-zarzadzania.html

Tough times deaden thinking and shrink imagination. Kostera undermines such paralysis with a stunning, insightful inventory of pretexts for hope. These actionable pretexts summarize much-needed foundations that reanimate longing. This is a terrific piece of work! ~ Professor Karl E. Weick

Monika Kostera's pathbreaking book offers a sense of hope in a time of dramatic uncertainty and change. She reveals how the present crises can be transformed through new forms of organizing from one of alienation into radical "dis-alienation". It reflects the ways these disruptions, this "apocalypse" of the status quo, can reveal novel and exciting possibilities for recreating society. ~ Professor Peter Bloom, Essex University

This is an original and engaging book, an eclectic piece that crosses boundaries of disciplines in which inspired by sociological imagination Kostera wears Baumanian lens to speaking about the hope, about the future of societies and the new nature of social connections. This rare piece, strongly influenced by the author's experience, connects perfectly different European spaces (Eastern and Western Europe) by mixing of various academic cultures and intellectual backgrounds. Kostera’s work inscribes itself in the prolongation and development of Baumanian world vision.

Combining various disciplines of human intellectual activity as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, architecture, management and organizational studies, radical politics with arts - poetry, literature, mythology, visual arts, painting, music and religion, the author develops, in an eclectic way, a fascinating reflection about the past, present and the future. In this rare book, which proposes some visions about what we will become as a society, after depicting the apocalyptic diagnosis of our present (Occidental) world, Kostera suggests a few propositions for tomorrow. This approach is rare in sociology and seems to be strongly inspired by liberal arts.

The author depicts a utopian future based on the compassion and cooperation, and on the collective way of living and doing things together. This vision which should replace the omnipresent competition is a very attractive proposition. The arts as the core axis to organize the life of our societies seems to be - in the light of Kostera’s book - a possible and seducing solution for the liquid world and destruction of the social bonds. This long term optimism, which took place after short term pessimism places the book in the tradition of Baumanian reflection – a central reference in Kostera’s work. Is this book an example of what Bauman expected, when he spoke about human creativity for resolving the contemporary problems of the times of interregnum? ~ Izabela Wagner, professor at Institute Convergence Migration (Paris) and laboratory DynamE (Strasbourg)