One could be forgiven for thinking that the large, publicly listed corporations – for decades the economic cornerstones of modern developed societies – are now in crisis. Business change consultants regularly denounce them as organisational dinosaurs, collapsing under their own bureaucratic dead weight. In today's era of hyper-competition, so the argument goes, the management systems and organisational structures of large firms have become redundant, along with thousands of their employees. Firms are arguably obliged, under the pressures of globalisation and the logic of shareholder value, to become flatter, leaner and faster to react to changing conditions. As international competitive pressures grow in their intensity, those corporations that fail to restructure face stagnation or collapse.

This view, of the urgent requirement for corporations to change, has become widespread and influential since the 1990s. Media stories appear regularly of large blue-chip companies making significant job cuts, adding to the sense of corporate crisis. While job losses have always been a harsh fact of life under capitalism, white-collar workers were traditionally insulated from the risk of redundancy. Now their careers are more precarious. For example, in just three weeks in July 2005, Kodak, Sanyo, Hewlett-Packard and Asda all announced deep employment cuts to the British media, referring in their press releases to ‘unnecessary’ white-collar management and ‘back office’ staff. The Ford Motor Company stated its plan to shed 14,000 salaried staff, one-third of the total, in September 2006.