Theoretical Foundation: A Multidisciplinary Review of Absurdity and Hypernormalization

This chapter discusses the theoretical foundations of absurdity in contemporary society and workplaces. Absurdity arises from the absence of rationality, where observed practices paradoxically veer away from official discourse and institutional rhetoric. We discuss the definitions, dimensions, and foundations of absurdity and integrate it into an understanding of absurdity in relation to the normal, abnormal, and hypernormal. By discussing what absurdity is not, we also highlight how it is related to neighboring concepts. Moreover, 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 (Comp Stud Soc Hist, 45(3):480–510, 2003; Everything was forever, until it was no more: the last Soviet generation. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005) to understand the split between ideological discourse and practice in the last decades of the Soviet Union. We extend the understanding of hypernormalization to describe how contemporary absurdities are normalized. Moreover, we explain how hypernormalization unfolds at collective, societal, or organizational levels.