Organisation, community and utopia

This paper is concerned with the theoretical and ethical-political implications of thinking about organisations as communities, and community as organised. After outlining some of the recent managerialist attempts to articulate organisations as sites of common culture the paper proceeds to make analytic distinctions between society/community and state/organisation. I suggest that both of these poles are ideal types which are better thought of as two empirically unrealisable ends of a continuum of subjective identification and judicial membership. A speculation about the possible structure of an organisational community – the ‘orgunity’– is then put forward and criticised before concluding with some observations about communitarianism, communism and Utopia.