Back in 1892, the Kent market town of Bromley saw its football club established. Despite me having a somewhat nomadic childhood that encompassed living above shops in Bournemouth, Sevenoaks and Streatham, my parents had found a flat in Bromley when they first married and then moved to a larger one in the town when I was born.
Thereafter, we left briefly but returned to Bromley High Street just as I started school. We moved again which entailed a change of school and location…but returned to Bromley a couple of years later. It remained the family home until my dad retired and he and mum moved to Bexhill on Sea.
As a result, both my brother and I tend to see Bromley as our hometown, to the extent that – when the rental cost of the flat we shared in Balham powered through the roof in light of gentrification – we relocated back to Bromley, which was more affordable and known to us. When we eventually stopped flat sharing, we both found places in which to live in that locality.
This means that its football club has always been an important part of our lives. Hence, we were both overjoyed when – for the first time in their 132-year history – Bromley FC won the play-off final in 2024 in order to gain promotion from the National League to League Two, which is a transition from non-league to league football, a major move. I was lucky enough to be present at Wembley when they achieved this.
My dad – an avid Charlton fan, an affiliation that I have inherited from him and which sits alongside my support for Bromley – was also always of the opinion that a town of the size and status of Bromley should have a football league club. Sadly, he’d passed away a while before that promotion in 2024, so he didn’t see them go up. As a result, he wasn’t here to see them recently move up to League One having won the League Two Championship in the 2025-26 season.
The Eternal Firm
Back in the day, there was an elderly gent who appeared in the single small stand at Bromley’s small and homely ground for what seemed to be every home game. He had a passing resemblance to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, so my brother and I christened him Hobbs. Despite his advanced years and some issues with stability and mobility (where once or twice my brother and I were overwhelmed by a panic that he was about to fall over…and, on one occasion, looked as though he was about to fall backwards at the head of the stone steps), he clearly felt a very strong connection to the club.
In light of my recent work on existentialism, I have found myself considering the contrast of the passing of my dear dad and of Hobbs – and the fact that Bromley FC, having been established near the end of the 19th Century, enjoys a seemingly boundless existence. It possesses what appears to be organisational perpetuity, which stands in sharp contrast to the personal temporality of all of the human beings in and around it.
Much of our engagement with corporate entities in capitalist society looks to be founded on the notion that the organisations around us will always be there. This worldview leads to a strong sense that these organisations are unchallengeable due to their seeming timelessness.
Questioning their Endlessness
As I sit here writing in the office that I share in our house with my wife, the shelving to my right is full of my CD collection. I can step away from my desk right now and draw down the exquisite Velvet Underground boxset that I own…or seek out a long-forgotten item that has come to the fore of my mind because I somehow found myself singing one of its tracks as I sat working at the laptop.
To the left of my keyboard sits my iPhone, which allows me to access my iTunes account, which presently consists of 29.7GB worth of music. The joy of this device is being able to sync it with the car stereo and put that hefty collection of tunes on shuffle (although, given my tastes in music, others in the car very often intercede to flip it from my collection to Radio 1!)
In the first instance, I entered into commercial exchanges where I paid to take actual ownership of a large number of physical artefacts. They belong to me, so I am free to do with them what I will. In contrast, whilst superficially it would appear that I have undertaken a similar deal with the material in my iTunes account, it can often feel as though I am merely renting the music that I have there. Certainly, whilst I can lend one of my CDs to someone, I am not able to do anything like that in regard to my online music account.
Occasionally, these two related perspectives – the sense of perpetuity in respect to a huge corporation such as Apple and the fundamentally tenuous nature of my ownership of all the tracks in my iTunes account – rub up against each other and lead me to think about the upshot if it turned out that the seemingly eternal company in some way disappeared.
An Historic Instance
On a recent Saturday night, it was agreed that the family film that evening would be Pirates of the Caribbean. Despite having seen the movie at least once – and perhaps twice – before, I had forgotten the central villainous role played in the story by the East India Company and the various characters associated with it. I found myself reflecting as a sat in the armchair that this militarised corporation would doubtless have appeared eternal to those living at that time – but it has evaporated into history and, for a good many people, into oblivion.
In his study of the EIC entitled The Corporation That Changed the World, Nick Robins (2012) offers a chronology in which the company was established in 1600 and underwent dissolution in 1874. As a corporate entity, it existed for close to 300 years, whilst, between 1600 and 1800, life expectancy in England was 35 to 40 years due to infant and childhood mortality…but it landed at 60 to 70 for those who survived that early life. Nevertheless, human temporality in this instance would have felt profoundly overshadowed by the apparent timelessness of the corporation, which William Dalrymple in his book about EIC entitled The Anarchy describes thus:
‘We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive. India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.’ (pXXV)
Will companies persist or cease to exist? I assume that Apple will be a timeless presence that will protect my music collection for years to come. But I am mindful now in light of the experience of the East India Company that Apple could disappear at any point. After all, the EIC was a powerful and seemingly boundless entity for an age yet is merely a memory now.
Contesting the Corporation
In light of all of this, it seems evident that if we opt to critically explore the relationship between our human finitude and the notional timelessness of multiple commercial organisations then we can find ourselves realising that everything on Earth literally comes and goes.
Engaging with this connection in this way serves to remind us that human beings and the organisations that surround them in the world of work both arrive out of nothingness…and, just as we see with the EIC, return to that state at some point. A company may well have greater longitude than a person – but both appear in life and then disappear from it at some stage.
When considering the issue of authenticity in respect to existentialism, I am conscious that I have been living in bad faith when sitting in an organisational setting and assuming that it is permanent. To subscribe to this view as I did on many occasions is to deny the actuality of change as a central feature of existence of both people and organisations – and to tacitly assume that change is the exclusive preserve of those who occupy managerial positions in those companies, in terms of designing transformations and finding ways to impose them on the workforce.
In reality, the companies in which I have found myself working may have a history that might encompass hundreds of years – and so may be around long after I have gone. But they are not to be thought of as eternal – and they will be susceptible to change as a key facet of the warp and weft of merely being in the world. The bosses may presume that they have the exclusive capacity to design and deliver organisational change…but the reality is that the mere presence of a structure constituted by a range of people coming together with a shared purpose will lead to it shifting on the basis of intention and action, as well as the practicalities of the practicalities and upshots of the relationships therein.
Existentialism argues that anxiety amongst humankind arises because we find ourselves thrown into a world not of our making and we are required to navigate those circumstances from the moment that we appear. It is also amplified by the simple fact that we tend to try to avoid which is that we have a limited amount of time to spend in respect to our existence here in the world.
Hence, I am left reflexively wondering whether I have sought solace in the past by investing in the illusion that organisations around me will be perpetual – and represent a solid grounding in the world. In this regard, I am led to consider whether it may be that we offer our allegiance to companies as a means of distracting ourselves from our temporality.
This throws into question the extent to which the epiphenomenal activity that is deemed to be the preserve of those at the apex of company pyramids – the confection of visions, missions, values and strategies – directly contributes to this effect. In that regard, it is possible to view such practices as providing a world view that echoes that which arises out of faith and religious belief.
In managerial thought, such practices are deemed to shape the structure and systems that constitute organisational shape and intention; instead, it is possible to see it as a means of denying people the capacity to realise their own meaning and purpose in this context – and to deny their freedom and choice. It refuses them their authenticity in existentialist terms – at the same time as the corporate conversation is constantly insisting that people behave “authentically”.
As Megan Reitz and John Higgins point out in their current work on spaciousness, the focus in most companies is almost exclusively on getting things done. This oppressive preoccupation shrinks the space and time available for conversational connection and the thinking that precedes and follows such dialogue. And – in respect to bad faith – it facilitates a circumstance wherein mindlessly doing things serves to efface the simple act of being in the world, which denies the humanity of all those who work for a living.
Radical OD 