What then are the forms of capital and worker values that are to be found in contemporary organizations? In finding an answer to this question, it is first important to note that an organization of the 21st Century is likely to be a mixture of premodern, modern, and postmodern (Bergquist, 1993). The primary forms of capital in premodern societies are reputation, land, and natural resources. These forms of capital are still important—especially reputation. There is still a lingering attraction of consumers to old brand names (ranging from Cheerios to Louisville Slugger baseball bats). The purchasers of products and services as diverse as automobiles, jewelry, and higher education are still willing to pay an exceptionally large price for something that has prestige and reputation. The most important hybrid, however, concerns the role still played by money in postmodern organizations.
The Role of Money in a Postmodern Context: A Transitional Object
A group of psychoanalytically oriented psychologists and psychotherapists (often associated with Melanie Klein’s object relations school) speak and write about the role played by certain objects (such as blankets and teddy bears) in assisting children through a difficult transition. These transitional objects represent continuity from one era to another era in the life of a child. Organizations also have transitional objects (rituals left over from the past history of the organization, employees who represent and often talk about the good [or bad] old days. Societies may also have transitional objects that assist the shift from one mode of thought and action to a second mode. Money may serve this transitional function in our contemporary society. We still cling to money (as we would a teddy bear), though the way in which money is used is changing (much as the teddy bear for the maturing child takes on new roles).
Much as in the case of the lingering role to be played by the printed word in the postmodern organization, so there is a lingering role for money–perhaps as a transitional object. Much as the printed word takes on new meaning and new form when interwoven with new digital forms of communication, so money takes on new meaning and new form as it interacts with the new forms of capital in our postmodern organizations. I will focus on several of the new postmodern uses of money: (1) the emergence of a debt-based society based on the increasing use of credit cards, (2) the malleable role of money in e-commerce, (3) the role of venture capital in the funding of information-based enterprises, and (4) the shift in accumulated funds from the entrepreneurial investor to pension-funds.
Money as an Invisible Entity: The Debt-Based Economy
Money is still important in our emerging postmodern society. However, it has become much less visible. Cash has been replaced with the checkbook and increasingly with the credit card and the ATM card. In the near future we may find that checks, credit cards and ATM cards are in turn replaced by Smart Cards and other forms of computer-based instantaneous crediting of a financial account. What does this mean? One can think of this is as one further step in the distancing of the seller and purchaser from the tangible exchange of good and services with one another—the basis of a bartering economy. In a premodern world, one person exchanges seeds for the use of a plow, or exchanges reading lessons for a quilt.
The monetary system has been established in part because it is often cumbersome to equate seeds with plows or lessons with quilts. We assign a specific monetary value to the seeds, plow, reading lessons and quilt, and can then engage in commerce free of the need for something specific to exchange that the other person wants (other than money. Furthermore, there doesn’t even have to be a trusting relationship between the two parties doing business (as there must be in a barter) for money itself becomes the vehicle of exchange and this vehicle is protected (in most instances) by the government that issued the money. From this vantage point, we can conclude that bank checks and more recently credit cards and ATM cards are simply one step further removed from the barter. We no longer need actual money, but need only provide a card that suggests (or even guarantees) that there is money in our account to cover the cost of the product or service we are purchasing. The smart card would serve a similar function, but it is yet another step removed.
