Abstract

This paper examines absurdities in contemporary society and workplaces. Absurdity arises from the absence of rationality, where observed human practices paradoxically veer away from official discourse and institutional rhetoric. Absurdity does not exist in a vacuum but is penetrated by and hypernormalized through internalized societal ideologies. Hypernormalization, or the normalization of absurdity, was originally coined by Russian-born anthropologist Yurchak (2003, 2005) to understand the split between ideological, authoritative discourse and practice in the last decades of the Soviet Union. We extend the understanding of hypernormalization to describe how contemporary absurdities are normalized both in society and organizations. Moreover, we explain how hypernormalization unfolds at collective and individual levels through ideological fantasy and internalization. Fantasmatic investment and internalization enable individuals to manage the absurdities arising from the perpetual gap between authoritative discourse (e.g., companies’ commitment to climate action) and actual day-to-day practices (e.g., companies’ continued investment in fossil fuels). We finish by presenting three interrelated steps through which resistance, as a mechanism to deal with hypernormalization, emerges: problematization, resistance and imagination. We contribute to the literature by showing how these three ways may offer a way out of hypernormalization in society and workplaces.