Virtual organization as poetic Denkbild (thought-image): the recuperation of a dialectical image

Virtual Organization, once herald of a brave new informational capitalism, is now downgraded, a wearied, almost paleonomic afterthought in management and organization discourse. However, when recomposed as dialectical Denkbild (thought-image), virtual organization would restore a spectral historical urgency that radically counterposes past hope for emancipatory technological change with a new sense of danger and emergency. Incited by parabolic literary and artistic evocation of the consequences of technological modernity, this research paper revisits the marginalised critical import of the theory of virtual organization. Once sanitised and mythologised, almost a genie of empty signification, but now viewed through a Benjaminian lens, virtual organization would be reinvigorated to take on renewed significance. Enabled through the denkbild, we reclaim virtual organization as a vital expression of the precarious, the political, and the transformative in a gesture of recovery of philosophy, literature, and art in management and organization research.