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Book Review: The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media

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Sometimes it feels like reading the right book just at the right time in the right place. Reading Turco’s The Conversational Firm across the years 2016 and 2017, while visiting… Click to show full abstract

Sometimes it feels like reading the right book just at the right time in the right place. Reading Turco’s The Conversational Firm across the years 2016 and 2017, while visiting a US university trying to deal with the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump as US president and reflect on the role of social media in a new political landscape, has felt just like this. The whole world around me passed through those pages. When, just few weeks after, social media as well as newspapers got filled with more or less popular traces of a recently and sadly disappeared Zygmunt Bauman and of his “liquidity” (Bauman, 2006), that feeling became even stronger and sharper. The Conversational Firm is about how traditional bureaucracy can be rethought in the age of social media. The book is an excellent ethnographic account of organizational life at TechCo, an American social media marketing company, willing “to rethink everything” and move to the very opposite of “the standard playbook for how you’re supposed to run a company”, as one of the executives says (p. 1). Weber (1922/1978) and his ideal type of bureaucracy becomes, thus, the main giant on whose shoulders Turco is standing. Although as university employees the practicing of a sort of social media conversational obsession seems rather like a peculiar experiment, Turco convincingly and consistently explains how TechCo was not “one unconventional firm”, but “actually representative of a broader phenomenon” (p. 184). Her ability to zoom in and out around TechCo is definitely one of the qualities that have made the local story of TechCo so telling to my reading. The storyline of Turco’s account is quite simple: social media allow firms to go beyond bureaucracy and organize work in new ways. What she called the conversational firm is characterized by organizing through open conversation. At an extreme, open conversation about pretty much everything and anything takes various forms and is important in itself, almost more than what is discussed. At TechCo, employees of any hierarchical rank can write a post on the internal wiki to openly discuss any topic of their choice, including the culture deck, the lack of organizational chart and other strategic decisions. All day long, they are “engaged in the silent din of digital conversation” on different and simultaneous chat rooms (p. 23). Most of them can come and go, eat and drink (even beer), take vacation, talk on social media as they please, under the so-called UGJ policy – Use Good Judgement – the only existing human-resource policy. Most interestingly, all this is not in the light of a democratic ideology of an anticorporate collective, but of “red-blooded” capitalism, as one of the founders warns Turco: “We do this because we think it’s good business, because we think it’s going to be more profitable in the long run” (p. 15). Turco has made openness the central dimension of her story, which describes different areas of openness and unfolds their consequences in practical organizational life. Openness becomes the 721671OSS0010.1177/0170840617721671 Organization StudiesBook review book-review2017

Keywords: social media; bureaucracy; book; age social; conversational firm

Journal Title: Organization Studies
Year Published: 2017

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