Since the process of actualisation requires creation, the focus in this work would be on organizing;
the productive exterior that is based on affirmation of the organization as a creative evolution. The affirmation of the productive organizing principles of NNE transmutes the organization towards something completely heterogeneous to itself. Therefore, this work is not filled with an external inspiration of finality or one correct “road map” illustrating how to organize what simply needs to be revealed in order to actualize a vision. Deleuze writes: “To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden, not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active.”47 Affirmation is the active production or creation of being, of NNE.
Furthermore, affirmation is a break with the resentment which has filled much of the sociological literature about work in the late nineties. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman wrote: “Unlike in the times
of long-term mutual dependency, there is hardly any stimulus to take acute and serious, let alone critical, interest in the wisdom of the common endeavour and related arrangements which are bound to be transient anyway. The place of employment feels like a camping site which one visits for just a few days, and may leave at any moment if the comforts on offer are not delivered or found unsatisfactory when delivered.”48
Bauman is, like most Utopians, driven by resentment. He longs for the good old days similar to Rousseau’s, the “homme de la nature et vérité”. Rousseau, however, did not actually long for the good old days lived at the countryside. Rather he urged for the simplicity and sociality of that time, so it should be understood as taking the productive forms of life of the nature with us into urbanity. The difference between Bauman and Rousseau is a difference between a reactive metaphysic and an active affirmative ontology. The latter is what we are faced with when we take the almost impossible step forward trying to create the virtuality from where a better NNE might emerge. It is a matter of creating a non-place where I as a writer disappear and something else takes form.
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If we return to Bauman once more, then his idea of camping as a metaphor for the present situation on the labor market is passé. Today we cannot compare labor with campers; it is too slow and limited a travel form. Instead, Bauman could have mentioned backpackers who soon, I believe, will be overtaken by what we could call the naked traveller. It is a three-step stairway to emancipation: (1) the camper is filled with ideals and comfort, symbolised by the camper and its vehicle; (2) the backpacker is also filled with ideals and comfort, symbolised by the always present guidebook telling him where to go or not to go. (Note that the comfort is more hidden than with the camper, but with a credit card in his pocket, the backpacker can easily leave and return to security); and (3) the naked traveller who cannot hide behind the guidebook, since he cannot leave because that would be unworthy (i.e. being cynical and bitter). Instead he must face what may come. His actions carry consequences and sacrifices and it is the same schism with labor. Earlier people worked at the same place for most of their lives whether they liked it or not. Then the labor unions came and people suddenly dared “to move their camper.” Then the ecstatic optimism in the late eighties and nineties followed with the flourish of dot.com companies, where the workforce tended to become arrogant (like the backpackers who always know better than the natives in the country they are visiting). Now we are in a more preferable situation where no one can hide. Neither the workforce, nor the
organizations can hide. Everyone has to be open-minded and inclusive, or they will exclude themselves.
The naked traveller can be related to an open definition of organizational competency described by Vidar Lunde as “the collection and use of resources, which allows the organization to produce value creating activities…”49 This opens up for diversity in how such competences work most efficiently together in a given context. Vidar refers to “the VRIO- framework”, an acronym for: Value, Rare, Imitation, and Organization. Those competences, which create value, are often rare and difficult to imitate, and therefore it requires a certain kind of organizing. The VRIO-framework emphasizes the importance of organizing, or how an organization can actualize the potential (competences) already present in the organization. Competences could be defined as: what the organizations do based on what it can, and vice versa.
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The American sociologist Richard Sennett is filled with the same melancholy as Bauman, when he telling the story about a baker and his son who work within the regime of “flexible capitalism.”
According to Sennett the generation gap between father and son is a gap illustrating a decrease in quality and authenticity in life moving towards a Corrosion of Character. Sennett, like Bauman is on the search for an immobile origin. However, Sennett finishes his book with a glimpse of optimism: “…
if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don’t know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.”50
We might read Sennett’s ending as a hope that labor today might consist of something positive as well. If Sennett is right that the potential change happens on the ground i.e. from below, then it is a question whether the organizations and the workforce are willing to sacrifice something known in order to actualize the already existing potential of life. Are the organization and the workforce willing to give up a part of their lives (i.e. the longing of a lost time) and create a new (working and organizational) life? Is NNE willing to give up part of its life, i.e. all the good things about being a member of the Novo family? It will take courage and it might cause some sacrifices.
If we concentrate on Sennett’s open ending, then the challenge is to locate the connections and possibilities for actualizing a better working life. To avoid that NNE’s vision about being independent turns into a Utopia it must internalize the divergent and heterogeneous variations, forces and stories that it is mingled into. NNE does not yet know what it is capable of. Because of this, the work at hand can be read as an affirmative critique, which is open towards the unforeseeable and the immanent potential. What is NNE, what might it become? “It is as if the world [and NNE] is unmade and reconstructed on the basis of that set of thoughts, actions, and intuitions established on the individual and collective singularity that organize it through its desire and its power.”51 This opens up for a two-sided potential of labor: 1) a negative perspective based on the exploitation of the creativity; or, on the other side, 2) an affirmative perspective where labor might create new values and hereby become a counter-power to capitalism. Labor is a possible
“process of valorization,” not only in an economic sense but also in actualizing new forms of life.
This is the challenge of the workforce today.