The postmodern approach highlights various perspectives and criticism against the traditional social sciences. It is based on domination and power, as well as challenging management control, bureaucracy, and hierarchy. Its condition is fast, specialized, adaptable to individual performance, and precise. Steward Clegg opines that traditional scientific management is inflexible with workers who have limited skills. He argues that mass consumption is better than market niches, and if an organization’s performance is optimum, the returns will be higher.
The key principles that give the postmodern perspective a competitive edge are decentralized management, a trusting and tolerant organizational culture, a diverse workforce, change of commodity values and existing markets, and flattening hierarchies. Postmodern critics argue for examining the current status quo to determine the maintenance, development, or transformation of a distinct culture’s power and domination. They advocate for adopting tailored stories, rituals, jokes, and mission statements to affirm or introduce a new power structure. They advise people to identify a superior quality or privilege that puts them above other groups and constructs social realities. The approach is used against the employees to entice them to feel indisposed to their employers.
Postmodernists oppose the descriptions and explanations given by scientists and historians whose truth or falsehood is usually objective. The postmodernists reject objective natural realities by asserting the absence of absolute truth. Through research and development based on continued enlightenment, human beings created tools that made their work easier. The postmodernists deny the assertion and claim that science and technology led to the development of the tools used for mass killings during the Second World War. Some of them argue that reason, science, logic, and technology are all destructive by nature since they are used to harm others. They further affirm that almost all the aspects of a person’s psychology are determined by their social interactions with others; therefore, it would be imprudent to state that there is a particular nature of every person.