LAUSR

ABSTRACT Since the 1960s ‘ad-hocracy’, an approach to organizations that values provisionality and is especially advantaged by new technological systems, has been understood as a ‘radical’ challenge to the rigidity of bureaucratic institutions. This essay argues that commonsense championing of the temporary, the anti-institutional, and the flexible in corporate, political, educational, and daily life established the conditions that preordained the disastrous handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Most hazardously, a powerful strain of Left critique also advances on a comparable tack, one that too easily embraces temporary and flexible organizational structures over lasting institutional ones, resulting in unintended ideological support for ‘ad-hocracy’.