Kafka on gender, organization and technology: The role of ‘bureaucratic eros’ in administering change

Marinus Ossewaarde

Gender, Work and Organization, 2019, vol. 26, issue 7, 1000-1016

Abstract: In this article, it is argued that Kafka's novels are satirical portraits of the workings of ‘bureaucratic eros’ in gendered organizations. In Kafka's tragi‐comical fiction, a sexually perverse and uncreative ‘bureaucratic eros’ — the opposite of the ‘poetic eros’ — administers highly sexualized gender relationships in hierarchical organizations: law, bureaucratic regulation, administration and execution are expressions of the male officials' sexual desires. Given the lustful manifestations of ‘bureaucratic eros’, Kafka reveals that organizational and technological change is not some process of rationalization (as Max Weber suggests), but, instead, must be poetically understood as metamorphosis. In Kafka's comical portraits of metamorphoses, the remnants of old myths, old desires, tribe‐like organizational forms and primitive uses of technology continue to operate in distorting, disorienting, sexually perverse ways. Thereby, ‘bureaucratic eros’ brings about an incomprehensible world of lawlessness and anxiety — a deplorable condition that, Kafka suggests, can only be overcome by fleeing administrative dictates, into the aesthetic sphere.

Date: 2019
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