Telling the future, managing the present: Business restructuring literature as SF

This essay analyzes the techno-futurist vision of mid- to late-1990s busine ss restructuring literature, arguing that the genre prominently employs sf strategies and assumptions. Three central figures emerge: the virtual organ ization, depicted as a revolutionary phenomenon that transcends the materia l constraints of the "real" corporation; the cyborg employee, seen as the u ltimate fantasy of merging the worker with the technologies of capitalism; and cybernetic culture, characterized as the manipulation of transcendent s ymbols for the purposes of rational management. These sf figures in contemp orary business writing work together to close the gap between the conceivab ility and the actualization of technology-driven social transformation, as well as between the present and the future--gaps crucial to sf as a critica l undertaking. In this way, business discourse, with a very different socia l project than sf, brings the future into the realm of the knowable, the pr edictable, and the controllable.