There are many people in organizations who have feelings of alienation; that is they feel they do not fit in, they get no meaning out of their work, they feel belittled or abused by their superiors or colleagues; they desire to break loose the masks they wear, or to find some sense of meaningfulness. In our paper, we demonstrate our assumption of alienation in the workplace by reviewing a collection of satirical and ironic organizational stories from police officers working at (...) a county sheriff’s department. Our argument is that if it seems that alienation might not be resolved through organizational change efforts and interventions, or might not be resolved through radical change of the economic conditions of modern industrial life, then alienation might be changed through the aggregation of individual projects from below. We discuss the possibility of resolving alienation at the workplace by using the legend of Percival as an analogy. (shrink)

McDonaldization is usually seen as a ‘tragedy’ as humans become more rationalised in their everyday life, but from the view of Marx’s theory of historical change, I suggest that it might be seen as a ‘comedy’. As the world’s labour force becomes culturally the same it may finally gain an ironic awareness that is required for radical social change, thus, global rationalisation may create the conditions for a ‘global Proletariat’. The comedy of McDonaldization is that its repulsiveness as a way (...) of life may actually lead to the possibility of achieving liberation from the domination of global capitalism. (shrink)