Managers and the Heavenly City: How E-Commerce Metaphors Shape Management Thought

Abstract

This paper draws a correlation between the experience of consumerism portrayed in the critique of Alexander and Baudrillard and in the theory of plenitude derived from Renaissance literature. It draws parallels between features of the modern and antique sensibilities. It suggests that the e-commerce practitioner manipulates a modern economy informed by a cosmology which depicts imagery capable of interpretation in terms of conceptions derived from archaic themes. These are drawn from the High Renaissance and relate to Neoplatonism which is in turn linked to Renaissance occult philosophy. Ecommerce metaphors display these aspects; and thereby both hook into, and valorise — rendering liminal — the experiential dimension of the consumer, and its incipient tensions between desire anticipated and that achieved. The article suggests how the populist magic of consumerism is not only facilitated by e-commerce but how that magic arose at a pre-modern, intellectualist level.

From a philosophical perspective, readers will note the inter-relationship of earlier bodies of thought to contemporary management theories of e-commerce. Academics or practitioners interested in e-commerce or e-business are offered a fresh and radical interpretative perspective on these areas, which expresses a novel role for metaphor in terms of linking features of pre-modern and modern conceptions of reality, aslant the subjective absorption of figurative images of a textual derivation.