Abstract
Hartmut Rosa presents in this book an empirical diagnosis of how concrete organisational arrangements reshape power relations and what he calls “Handlungsspielraum” (scope for action or discretionary latitude), describing a gradual erosion of agency. Readers familiar with his earlier writings on social acceleration and resonance will recognise many of his enduring concerns (e.g. frenetic standstill, alienation), yet the reflections gathered here possess a somewhat different, more concrete pathology. Rosa is less interested in describing the speed of modern life than in examining how modern organisational forms of rationality quietly reshape our ways of working and living together. What is distinctive about this book is less the observation that formal rules and bureaucratic arrangements constrain action, as much of Weberian interpretations would have it, than Rosa’s diagnosis of how contemporary forms of rationalisation redistribute responsibility and erode the conditions for situated judgement, giving rise to what he terms “structured irresponsibility.” More specifically, Rosa advances two closely related claims: first, that organisations are increasingly shaped by a “constellationism,” a cultural and institutional logic that seeks to decompose meaningful wholes into calculable and governable elements; and second, that this shift is gradually transforming us from “actors into executors” of pre-structured processes (p. 5).
The book takes its point of departure in the work of Schmitz (2005), widely regarded as the founder of New Phenomenology. Reflecting this orientation, the text does not revolve around a single empirically rich case study but unfolds through a series of everyday vignettes and accessible examples. It opens by illustrating the shift from situations to constellations through the changing role of the football referee in the era of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). The referee, once the central interpreter of the unfolding match, now occupies a more tentative position. Rather than deciding in the flow of the game, they are increasingly required to pause and defer to the judgement of a technological system whose inner workings remain largely opaque to players and spectators alike. Offside decisions are now calculated down to the centimetre, and fouls are examined in still images that isolate a single instant from the movement of the game. In this process, all other aspects of the game are temporarily bracketed out: the scoreline, the broader conduct of the player, the atmosphere of the match, and other contextual conditions are artificially suspended. What is produced in this process, Rosa suggests, is a constellation: an “arrangement of clearly identifiable individual elements that stand in a fixed, measurable, and often binary-coded relation to one another” (p. 6).
In chapter three, Rosa turns to a more systematic conceptual clarification, taking the time to develop the distinction between situations and constellations. By situation, he refers to the full, meaningful context in which an event unfolds. According to Schmitz, situations are characterised by a constitutive indeterminacy (“konstitutive Unschärfe”), such that their meanings, horizons of possibility, and courses of action can never be rendered fully transparent; situations cannot be reduced to the sum of their individual components and their interrelations. Constellations, by contrast, emerge through the analytical fragmentation of such meaningful wholes into manageable, measurable, and controllable factors. Situations, Schmitz argues, demand individual judgement and retain a degree of personal recognisability in decision-making (as when different individuals prepare the same meal); they exhibit a certain “inner diffusion,” being too complex and expansive to be exhaustively decomposed into discrete elements and their interrelations. Building on this, Rosa understands the erosion of individual agency as the systematic restriction of situational, open, and contingent fields of action through the decomposition of such wholes into individual, manageable factors.
Rosa acknowledges that bureaucratisation, juridification, and the proliferation of instruction manuals for technical devices have already been addressed by the classical theorists of sociology. Yet he pushes Max Weber’s diagnosis of the bureaucratisation of social life beyond the well-known figure of the “specialists without spirit” (Weber, 2004 [1905]). For Weber, the central concern was that bureaucratic rationalisation traps individuals in systems of formal control. Rosa radicalises this insight by arguing that contemporary organisational arrangements do not merely constrain action but increasingly absorb the responsibility that once accompanied it. In this way, responsibility can be deferred to procedures, data, or organisational systems rather than being grounded in situated judgement. At stake, then, is not merely a loss of meaning or “spirit,” but a transformation in the very conditions under which responsibility can be assumed and individuality expressed. As Rosa illustrates: “A Thermomix meal may be better, healthier, and cheaper than one cooked from scratch; a Lego model ship more elegant and impressive than one designed by hand [. . .]. Yet what these products lack is expressive quality: however flawless they may be, they do not constitute an adequate expression of their creator” (p. 80).
While Hartmut Rosa’s analysis is developed at a broad sociological level, his conceptual vocabulary offers fertile ground for engagement within organisation theory. A platform worker following algorithmic instructions, for example, may still appear to act, yet key decisions are effectively displaced onto ratings systems, automated prompts and opaque technical infrastructures. For organisation theorists, Rosa’s book specifically adds a crucial conceptual dimension to existing studies of algorithmic control by showing not only how gig workers engage in “anticipatory compliance” practices aimed at pacifying opaque algorithms (Bucher et al., 2021), but also how responsibility itself is progressively offloaded onto the platform and its technical infrastructures. It likewise extends studies of algorithmic surveillance by showing that the privileging of abstract, data-driven representations over the embodied and situational realities of labour has implications not only for visibility and control (Newlands, 2021), but also for the erosion of responsibility and expressive agency. This paradoxically “frees” individuals not from constraint but from acting itself, transforming them from situated agents into executors of technological systems and, in some cases, into “supercarriers of formal rationality” (Lindebaum et al., 2020: 248). Rosa’s propositions thus provide organisation scholars with valuable conceptual tools to analyse the “constellative power” of organisational structures, particularly in the context of digitalisation, where organisations often invoke concerns such as security or potential corruption to legitimise the introduction of new control mechanisms. They also complement studies of algorithmic ideology by showing how workers may become affectively attached to systems that appear to relieve them of responsibility while simultaneously deepening their subordination to opaque forms of control (Pignot, 2023). More broadly, Rosa’s notion of constellationism helps to specify the mechanism through which neo-bureaucratic forms of control operate. Whereas the literature on neo-bureaucracy has shown that market-oriented reforms often intensify rather than diminish bureaucratic control (Farrell and Morris, 2003), Rosa demonstrates how this occurs through the systematic decomposition of open-ended situations into measurable and governable elements. In this sense, many of the professionals described in this literature would likely recognise themselves in Rosa’s figure of the executor.
From my reading, there are at least two areas in which further discussion could usefully extend Hartmut Rosa’s account into organisational contexts. First, the normative status of scope for action remains somewhat under-specified. Rosa acknowledges that an expanded room for manoeuvre may enable arbitrariness, favouritism or strategic manipulation, while standardised procedures may, conversely, foster transparency, equal treatment, and more efficient processes. What would further strengthen the argument, however, is a more systematic theoretical reflection on when a situation becomes a constellation, and under what conditions agency enhances responsibility rather than undermines it. This also raises the question of whether there are organisational contexts in which an increase in agency may be less desirable. Without such nuance, the critique of constellationism may risk leaning towards a romanticisation of situational openness, overlooking how appeals to flexibility, creativity, and informality can themselves be mobilised in the pursuit of “radically conflicting goals” (Lopdrup-Hjorth and du Gay, 2020), including managerial or political projects that present tighter forms of control as autonomy and empowerment.
Second, Rosa’s macro-diagnosis may benefit from further differentiation across social systems and organisational contexts. Legal decision-making, for instance, cannot easily be subsumed under a purely constellational logic. Modern legal orders deliberately employ indeterminate legal concepts that require contextual interpretation and evaluative judgement. Terms such as “public order” are designed to preserve precisely the kind of situational responsiveness that Rosa fears is being eroded. This suggests that constellationist dynamics may not operate uniformly across all domains, and that a more nuanced analysis of institutional rationalities could further enrich the account. This opens up a fruitful dialogue with performativity research (e.g. D’Adderio and Pollock, 2014) and discussions on economies of worth (e.g. Jagd, 2011), both of which highlight how competing imaginaries and justificatory principles are enacted and contested in practice, and how particular conceptions of what constitutes a “good” organisation come to prevail.
But Hartmut Rosa does not conclude on a pessimistic note. In the final chapter, he draws on metaphors such as Jeitinho, a Brazilian notion describing the creative and often informal navigation of rigid rules, and Jugaad, a Hindi term for improvised and resourceful problem-solving under conditions of scarcity. These practices point to alternative epistemologies and alternative ethics in which flexibility, improvisation, and situational responsiveness are not treated as deficiencies but as necessary and valuable modes of action. In this vein, Rosa suggests that a more balanced approach would involve consciously widening the scope for agency within organisations and societies by enabling contextual judgement, experimentation, and creative responsiveness, an issue that invites further exploration within organisation theory. Whether this is enough to loosen what Max Weber once described as the iron cage of formal rationality remains an open and pressing question.
