The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies 9780415702867, 9780203795248

Citation preview

‘This is an inspired collection that revitalizes and re-imagines philosophical engagement in organization studies. I would challenge anyone to come away from reading it without being surprised, challenged, and stimulated.’ Andrew Crane, George R. Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics, York University, Canada

‘Mir, Willmott and Greenwood have assembled leading scholars to provide a much needed in-depth exploration of the philosophical foundations of organization studies. It is an essential read for students and academics who want to understand how philosophy is elemental to the field.’ Stella Nkomo, University of Pretoria, South Africa

‘One might ask why philosophy should play any role in conducting research in organization studies. This new and beautifully orchestrated collection reflects most facets of organizational life, and includes topics ranging from the philosophical foundations of organizational studies to the reality of inequality in organizations. As one reads through the collection, however, one understands why the question could never be whether philosophy should play a role, but given the many roles it does play, covertly and overtly, whether those roles deserve examination. The talented and well-respected editors of this volume make clear that the answer is “yes.”’ Thomas Donaldson, University of Pennsylvania, USA

This page intentionally left blank

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies provides a wide-ranging overview of the significance of philosophy in organizations. The volume brings together a veritable ‘who’swho’ of scholars that are acclaimed international experts in their specialist subject within organizational studies and philosophy. The contributions to this collection are grouped into three distinct sections: • • •

Foundations – exploring philosophical building blocks with which organizational researchers need to become familiar. Theories – representing some of the dominant traditions in organizational studies, and how they are dealt with philosophically. Topics – examining the issues, themes and topics relevant to understanding how philosophy infuses organization studies.

Primarily aimed at students and academics associated with business schools and organizational research, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies is a valuable reference source for anyone engaged in this field. Raza Mir is Professor of Management at William Paterson University, USA. He currently serves as the Chair of the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management. Hugh Willmott is Professor of Management at Cass Business School, City University London and Research Professor of Organization Studies at Cardiff Business School, UK. He is currently an Associate Editor of Academy of Management Review. Michelle Greenwood is Senior Lecturer in Business Ethics at Monash University, Australia. She currently serves as an Associate Editor at Business & Society and Journal of Business Ethics.

Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting

Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting are prestige reference works providing an overview of a whole subject area or sub-discipline. These books survey the state of the discipline including emerging and cutting edge areas. Providing a comprehensive, up to date, definitive work of reference, Routledge Companions can be cited as an authoritative source on the subject. A key aspect of these Routledge Companions is their international scope and relevance. Edited by an array of highly regarded scholars, these volumes also benefit from teams of contributors which reflect an international range of perspectives. Individually, Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting provide an impactful one-stop-shop resource for each theme covered. Collectively, they represent a comprehensive learning and research resource for researchers, postgraduate students and practitioners. Published titles in this series include: The Routledge Companion to Fair Value and Financial Reporting Edited by Peter Walton

The Routledge Companion to International Business Coaching Edited by Michel Moral and Geoffrey Abbott

The Routledge Companion to Nonprofit Marketing Edited by Adrian Sargeant and Walter Wymer Jr

The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change Edited by David M. Boje, Bernard Burnes and John Hassard

The Routledge Companion to Accounting History Edited by John Richard Edwards and Stephen P. Walker

The Routledge Companion to Cost Management Edited by Falconer Mitchell, Hanne Nørreklit and Morten Jakobsen

The Routledge Companion to Creativity Edited by Tudor Rickards, Mark A. Runco and Susan Moger

The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption Edited by Russell W. Belk and Rosa Llamas

The Routledge Companion to Strategic Human Resource Management Edited by John Storey, Patrick M. Wright and David Ulrich

The Routledge Companion to Identity and Consumption Edited by Ayalla A. Ruvio and Russell W. Belk

The Routledge Companion to Public–Private Partnerships Edited by Piet de Vries and Etienne B. Yehoue The Routledge Companion to Accounting, Reporting and Regulation Edited by Carien van Mourik and Peter Walton The Routledge Companion to International Management Education Edited by Denise Tsang, Hamid H. Kazeroony and Guy Ellis

The Routledge Companion to Human Resource Development Edited by Rob F. Poell, Tonette S. Rocco and Gene L. Roth The Routledge Companion to Auditing Edited by David Hay, W. Robert Knechel and Marleen Willekens The Routledge Companion to Entrepreneurship Edited by Ted Baker and Friederike Welter

The Routledge Companion to Accounting Communication Edited by Lisa Jack, Jane Davison and Russell Craig

The Routledge Companion to International Human Resource Management Edited by David G. Collings, Geoffrey T. Wood and Paula Caligiuri

The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization Edited by Emma Bell, Jonathan Schroeder and Samantha Warren

The Routledge Companion to Financial Services Marketing Edited by Tina Harrison and Hooman Estelami

The Routledge Companion to Arts Marketing Edited by Daragh O’Reilly, Ruth Rentschler and Theresa Kirchner

The Routledge Companion to International Entrepreneurship Edited by Stephanie A. Fernhaber and Shameen Prashantham

The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization Edited by Martin Parker, George Cheney, Valerie Fournier and Chris Land

The Routledge Companion to Non-Market Strategy Edited by Thomas C. Lawton and Tazeeb S. Rajwani

The Routledge Companion to the Future of Marketing Edited by Luiz Moutinho, Enrique Bigne and Ajay K. Manrai

The Routledge Companion to Cross-Cultural Management Edited by Nigel Holden, Snejina Michailova and Susanne Tietze

The Routledge Companion to Accounting Education Edited by Richard M. S. Wilson

The Routledge Companion to Financial Accounting Theory Edited by Stewart Jones

The Routledge Companion to Business in Africa Edited by Sonny Nwankwo and Kevin Ibeh

The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations Edited by Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes

The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History Edited by Patricia Genoe McLaren, Albert J. Mills and Terrance G. Weatherbee

The Routledge Handbook of Responsible Investment Edited by Tessa Hebb, James P. Hawley, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Agnes Neher and David Wood

The Routledge Companion to Mergers and Acquisitions Edited by Annette Risberg, David R. King and Olimpia Meglio

The Routledge Handbook to Critical Public Relations Edited by Jacquie L’Etang, David McKie, Nancy Snow and Jordi Xifra

The Routledge Companion to Ethnic Marketing Edited by Ahmad Jamal, Lisa Peñaloza and Michel Laroche

The Routledge Companion to Consumer Behaviour Analysis Edited by Gordon R. Foxall

The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies Edited by Anshuman Prasad, Pushkala Prasad, Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies Edited by Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies

Edited by Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial material, Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies/ edited by Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood. pages cm. — (Routledge companions in business, management and accounting) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-70286-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-203-79524-8 (ebook) 1. Organization. I. Mir, Raza A., editor. II. Willmott, Hugh, editor. III. Greenwood, Michelle, editor. IV. Title: Companion to philosophy in organization studies. HM711.R68 2015 658.1—dc23 2015014486 ISBN: 978-0-415-70286-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-79524-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: philosophy in organization studies – life, knowledge and disruption Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

xiv xxxi

1

PART I

Foundations

13

1 Ontology: philosophical discussions and implications for organization studies Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

15

2 Epistemology: philosophical foundations and organizational controversies Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

33

3 Ethical philosophy, organization studies and good suspicions Edward Wray-Bliss

51

4 Methodology: philosophical underpinnings and their implications Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

66

PART II

Theories 5 Discourse as organizational and practical philosophy Rick Iedema 6 Feminist organization theories: islands of treasure Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

85 87

100

ix

Contents

7 Hermeneutics in organization studies Michael D. Myers

113

8 Institutional theory: reflections on ontology Tim Edwards

125

9 Marxism: a philosophical analysis of class conflict Richard Marens and Raza Mir

138

10 Postcolonial theory: speaking back to empire Gavin Jack

151

11 Poststructuralist theory: thinking organization otherwise Stephen Linstead

171

12 Practice theory: what it is, its philosophical base, and what it offers organization studies Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

184

13 Pragmatism and organization studies Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

199

14 Psychoanalysis and the study of organization Yiannis Gabriel

212

15 Queer theory Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

225

16 Structuration theory: philosophical stance and significance for organizational research Matthew Jones

237

PART III

Special Topics 17 Aesthetics and design: an epistemology of the unseen Antonio Strati 18 Ageing: the lived experience of growing up and older in organizations Kathleen Riach 19 Agency at the intersection of philosophy and social theory Tracy Wilcox x

249 251

260

268

Contents

20 The Body: philosophical paradigms and organizational contributions Torkild Thanem

276

21 Brands: critical and managerial perspectives Adam Arvidsson

285

22 Capital as a neglected, yet essential, topic for organization studies Harry J. Van Buren III

293

23 Commodification and consumption Douglas Brownlie

301

24 Commons and organization: potentiality and expropriation Casper Hoedemaekers

309

25 Conflict theorizing in organization theory: a political philosophical reading Alessia Contu

317

26 Control: philosophical reflections on the organizational limits to autonomy Graham Sewell

324

27 Corporation: reification of the corporate form Jeroen Veldman 28 Debt for all: towards a critical examination of organizational roles in debt practices and financialization Suhaib Riaz

333

343

29 Decision-making: coping with madness beyond reason Peter Edward

352

30 Democracy: philosophical disputes and organizational governance Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

361

31 Diversity studies: the contribution of black philosophers Elaine Swan

370

32 Environment, extractivism and the delusions of nature as capital Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

379

33 Finance: finding a philosophical fit? Geoff Lightfoot and David Harvie

388

xi

Contents

34 Globalization and the rise of the multinational corporation Guido Palazzo

395

35 Governance: changing conceptions of the corporation André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

403

36 Historiography and the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory Michael Rowlinson

412

37 Humour and Organization Nick Butler

421

38 Identity and philosophy in organizations: a femini[st]ne blind spot Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

430

39 Inequality and organizations Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

439

40 Justice: re-membering the Other in organizations Carl Rhodes

449

41 Leadership: philosophical contributions and critiques Jonathan Gosling and Peter Case

458

42 Management and its others Campbell Jones

466

43 Measurement and statistics in ‘organization science’: philosophical, sociological and historical perspectives Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

474

44 Needs and organizations: the case for the philosophical turn Cristina Neesham

483

45 Organization and philosophy: vision and division Martin Parker

491

46 Paradigms, the philosophy of science and organization studies John Hassard

499

47 Performativity: towards a performative turn in organizational studies Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

508

48 Power and organizations: a brief but critical genealogy Stewart Clegg

517

xii

Contents

49 Quantification as a philosophical act Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

525

50 Two tales about resistance: management vs. philosophy Carl Cederström

533

51 Rituals in organizations: rupture, repetition and the institutional event Gazi Islam

542

52 Spirituality, religion and organization Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

550

53 Strategy, power and practice David L. Levy

559

54 Trust: foundations and critical reflections Reinhard Bachmann

568

55 Value: an inquiry into relations, forms and struggles Craig Prichard

575

56 Visual: looking at organization Samantha Warren

584

57 Work: the philosophical limits of an idea in the neo-liberal age Peter Fleming

592

Index

601

xiii

Contributors

Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University of Milan, Italy. He is the author of Brands: meaning and value in media culture (Routledge, 2006), and more recently The Ethical Economy: rebuilding value after the crisis (Columbia University Press, 2013, with Nicolai Peitersen). His research concerns economic change in the information economy, in particular the economy of immateriality and intangible assets and the intersection between the collaborative economy and the market economy. Adam has published widely on brands, creative industries, peer-production and the political economy of information. Alessia Contu is the Chair, Department of Management and Marketing and Associate Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, USA. Her research interests include corporate and organizational power; resistance and politics of organizing; whistle-blowing and ethical issues in management and organization. Her work has been published in several journals, including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Organization and Journal of Management Studies. Amit Nigam is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the Cass Business School. He received his PhD in a joint program in management and sociology at Northwestern University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. His primary research interests include organizational change, institutional change, and the role of professions and occupations in change processes. His research has been published in a mix of management, medical sociology, and health services journals including Organization Science, Organization Studies, Academy of Management Review, Social Science & Medicine and Medical Care Research and Review. André Spicer is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Cass Business School, City University London. He is author of five books including Contesting the Corporation (Cambridge University Press, 2007, with Peter Fleming) and The Wellness Syndrome (Polity Press, 2015, with Carl Cederström). He frequently comments on business issues for media outlets around the world. Currently he is working on a book about stupidity in organization. Andreas Georg Scherer is Professor of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm and

holds a Chair at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). He earned his doctorate in strategic management (1994) and his habilitation degree (2000) in business administration both at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany). From 2000 to 2002 he was Professor of Management and Public Administration at the University of Constance (Germany). His research interests are in business ethics, critical theory, international management, organization theory, and philosophy of science. He has published nine books including the Handbook of Research on

Contributors

Global Corporate Citizenship (Edward Elgar, 2010, co-edited with G. Palazzo). His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organization Studies and in numerous volumes and other journals. He is Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and is a member of the editorial boards of Business & Society, Organization, and Organization Studies. Antonio Strati is Professor at the University of Trento, Italy, and chercheur associé PREG-CRG

(Ecole Polytechnique) of Paris, France, is both a sociologist and an art photographer. He is the author of Organization and Aesthetics (Sage, 1999) which also appeared in French (PUL, 2004), Portuguese (FGV, 2007) and Italian (Mondadori, 2008), and of Theory and Method in Organization Studies (Sage, 2000). He is co-author (with Silvia Gherardi) of Learning and Knowing in Practice-Based Studies (Edward Elgar, 2012). His artistic research in conceptual photography, Photopoesia, has been published in books and photographic journals, and collected at museums and international collections. Bidhan (‘Bobby’) L. Parmar’s research interests focus on how managers make decisions and collaborate in uncertain and changing environments to create value for stakeholders. His work helps executives better handle ambiguity in their decision-making. His recent research examines the impact of authority on moral decision-making in organizations. Parmar’s work has been published in Organization Science and the Journal of Business Ethics. Parmar is a fellow at the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden School of Business. Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Management at Cass Business School, City University London.

His research interests are in the areas of sustainability, critical management studies, corporate social responsibility, postcolonialism, and indigenous ecology. He has published widely and his work has appeared in international scholarly journals including Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Human Relations, Journal of Marketing and Organization Studies. He is the author of two books: Corporate Social Responsibility: the good, the bad and the ugly (Edward Elgar, 2009) and the co-edited volume Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: towards an anthropology of globalization (Edward Elgar, 2009). Bobby is also a Senior Editor at Organization Studies. He spends much of his spare time bemoaning the deplorable state of higher education. Campbell Jones is a philosopher and sociologist specializing in the analysis and critique of capitalist ideology. His early work involved a number of critical studies of the reception of contemporary French philosophy in organization studies and critical management studies. He has edited several books that seek to expand and deepen the reading of philosophy in organizational life. These include [COT, PAO] and several special issues of journals. He also helped establish the journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization. His most recent book is Can the Market Speak? (Zero, 2013) and he is currently writing a book about work. He was previously Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester and Visiting Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, and currently teaches political economy, social change and thought at the University of Auckland. Carl Cederström is Assistant Professor at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. He has previously worked as a Lecturer at Cardiff Business School and been a visiting scholar xv

Contributors

at The New School for Social Research. He is the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome (Polity Press, 2015, with André Spicer), Dead Man Working (Zero, 2012, with Peter Fleming) and How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Polity Press, 2010, conversation book with Simon Critchley) as well as the co-editor of Impossible Objects: interviews with Simon Critchley (Polity Press, 2013, with Todd Kesselman) and Lacan and Organization (Mayfly, 2011, with Casper Hoedemaekers). His work has been published in The Guardian, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, New Scientist, Radical Philosophy, 3:AM Magazine and STRIKE! Magazine. He is a frequent contributor, in Swedish, to the magazines Axess and Arena. Carl Rhodes is Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Macquarie University.

His research focuses on critically interrogating the narration and representation of organizational experience in practice and popular culture, with a particular concern with the possibilities for organizational ethics and responsibility. This work endeavours to contribute to the rigorous and critical questioning of what we appreciate organizations to be about, as well as a reformulation, expansion and democratization for how we go about understanding them. While his work can be located in a ‘critical’ tradition, it tries to perform an affirmative critique that avoids ‘finger pointing’, ‘nay saying’ and ‘wowserism’ in favour of a kind of positive cynicism for the possibilities for more ethically alive ways of working in, and studying, organizations. The work he is doing at the moment concerns such things as the anxiety-ridden relationship between ethics and justice in organizations, organizational ethics as an embodied generosity, and the gendered critique of organizational life in popular music, film and television. Carl’s most recent books are The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Politics in Organizations (Routledge, 2015, with Alison Pullen), and Organizations and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2012, with Simon Lilley). Carl serves as Associate Editor of the journal Organization and Senior Editor of the journal Organization Studies. Casper Hoedemaekers is a Lecturer at Essex Business School, University of Essex. Craig Prichard milks sheep and lives with his family near Palmerston North, a small provincial

city, in the southern end of New Zealand’s North Island. He is currently involved in a performative research project that is developing a New Zealand sheep milk producers’ collective as part of a broader concern with creating more equitable and environmentally sensible forms of food production. He teaches change management courses for Massey University, the country’s distance and agriculture-focused university, and is currently co-editor of Organization, the Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society. Cristina Neesham is a social philosopher and business ethicist with a keen interest in developing conceptual and normative foundations for alternative organizing. Her research focuses on the critique of human needs theories and applications in organization research; the relationship between human, social and economic progress; social value creation; organizations as sources of social order and social change; and the role of moral identity versus moral codes in business and professional ethics. Cristina is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Swinburne University of Technology, Section Editor for the Journal of Business Ethics and Chair of the Australasian Business Ethics Network. A PhD graduate in philosophy from the University of Melbourne, Cristina has directed her academic career towards applications of philosophy to the practice of management and organizing. As a long-standing contributor to philosophy-oriented projects, Cristina is an Editorial Board member of Philosophy of Management and Advisory Board member of the Journal of Philosophical Economics. She is also a member of the Paris Research on Norms in Management and Law (PRIMAL) group at Université de Paris X. xvi

Contributors

David Harvie is a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the

University of Leicester. Most of his publications can be found at http://leicester.academia.edu/ DavidHarvie. David L. Levy is Professor and Director of Grants at the College of Management, University

of Massachusetts, Boston. David founded and is currently Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness, which engages in research, education and outreach to promote a transition to a sustainable and prosperous economy. David’s research examines corporate strategic responses to climate change and the growth of the clean energy business sector. More broadly, his work explores strategic contestation over the governance of controversial issues engaging business, states, and NGOs. David has published widely on these topics, including articles in the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Organization, Business and Society, Organization, Organization Studies, and the Journal of Management Studies. He co-edits the blog Organizations and Social Change. David holds a DBA from Harvard University, an MBA from Tel Aviv University, Recanati School of Management, and a M.Sc. from Manchester University. Dean C. Pierides is a Lecturer of Organisations and Society at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Organisations, Society and Markets at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. His research is about how organizations handle uncertainty and focuses on emergency management, risk, disasters, crises and markets. Most recently, he has researched emergency management in the Australian State of Victoria, government financial management in Australia, and power and politics in the music industry. He is a board member of the Research Committee on Sociology of Organization at the International Sociological Association. Diana Trujillo has been a Professor in the School of Management at the University of Los

Andes since 2001. She is a doctoral candidate at New York University Wagner School of Public Service. Her research areas include management of complex issues, cross-sector collaborations, collaborative governance arrangements, social innovation, and social entrepreneurship. Currently her work is focused on understanding the links between value creation and impact evaluation in cross-sector collaborations. She contributed to: Socially Inclusive Business in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2010), Effective Management of Social Enterprises (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Social Partnering in Latin America: lessons drawn from collaborations of businesses and civil society organizations (2004). She has authored over a dozen case studies. Douglas Brownlie is a Professor of Marketing and Consumer Culture in the School of Business at the University of Dundee. Edward Wray-Bliss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing and Management

at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. His research and teaching examines the ethics of organizational and academic life. Recent writings include a critical reconceptualization of organizational soul; a genealogy of leadership ethics; and an examination of the visual construction of CEO subjectivity. Edward lives in Sydney, with his family, dog and motorbike. Elaine Swan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney where she teaches Global Work, Intercultural Communication and xvii

Contributors

Organisational Change. She is author of Worked up Selves (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) on the interface between therapeutic cultures and the workplace, Food Pedagogies (Ashgate, 2015, with Rick Flowers) and Gender and Diversity in Management (Sage, 2008, with Caroline Gatrell). Recent papers include ‘Cooking up a Storm: politics, labour and bodies’ in a special issue of Leisure/Loisir on food and leisure, ‘States of white ignorance, and audit masculinity in English higher education’ (Social Politics), ‘Commodity diversity and smiling faces’ (Organization). With Rick Flowers, she researches food pedagogies, race and gender, and multiculturalism at work resulting in papers such as ‘Eating the Asian Other? Pedagogies of food multiculturalism in Australia’, (Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies) and ‘Pedagogies of doing good: problematizations, authorities, technologies and teleologies in food activism’ (Australian Journal of Adult Learning), and a co-edited special issue of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning on food pedagogies. Her current research is on multiculturalism as work, examining ethnic food tours, food festivals and food social enterprises. Elisabeth Does is a PhD student and working as a research and teaching assistant at the

Department of Business Administration at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In 2012 she graduated from the University of York, UK, where she obtained a Master of Arts in Philosophy and Economics. Before she studied Business Administration at the Catholic University EichstaettIngolstadt, Germany. One of her main research interests is philosophy of social science, in particular philosophy of economics. Emilio Marti is currently a visiting scholar at Cass Business School (City University London). He received his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include corporate social responsibility, financial innovations, financial regulation, performativity, philosophy of science and socially responsible investing. One of his papers is forthcoming in the journal Academy of Management Review. Emma Bell is Professor of Management and Organisation Studies at Keele University. Her work focuses on organization studies and research methods and methodologies in the context of critical management studies, where she has investigated issues relating to organizational culture, belief, gender and power. A current project, with Nivedita Kothiyal, focuses on the politics and practices of knowledge production in the Indian context. In addition to publishing in scholarly journals, she is the author of Reading Management and Organization in Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), co-author of Business Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 4th edn 2015) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Management Research (Sage, 2013); coeditor of Routledge Companion to Visual Organisation (Routledge, 2013), and Sage Major Works in Qualitative Research in Business and Management (Sage, 2015). Gavin Jack is Professor of Management in the Department of Management at Monash University, Australia. His research interests include: postcolonial theory and analysis of management, organization and marketing topics; cross-cultural management and multilingualism in organizations; gender and diversity in the workplace, including an ongoing team project on women’s experience of the menopause at work; the intersection of sexuality and social class in work and leisure contexts. He has published co-authored monographs, including International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies: a postcolonial reading (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, with R. Westwood), an edited book Core–Periphery Relations and Organisation Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, with R. Westwood, F. R. Khan and M. Frenkel) and essays/articles in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Organization, Sociology, British Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Management International Review and Critical Perspectives on International Business. xviii

Contributors

Gazi Islam is Associate Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management. He has served as faculty at Insper, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. His current research interests include the organizational antecedents and consequences of identity, and the relations between identity, group dynamics and the production of group and organizational cultures. His work been published in journals such as Organization Studies, The Leadership Quarterly, Organization, Human Relations, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Business Ethics, and American Psychologist. Geoff Lightfoot is a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy in the School

of Management at the University of Leicester. His current research centres on the history of financial thought. Graham Sewell is Professor of Organisation Studies and Human Resource Management in the

Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne. His interests focus on workplace surveillance, teamwork, business ethics, organization and management theory, qualitative research methods, evolutionary psychology, strategy development processes and business agility. Guido Palazzo is Professor of Business Ethics at HEC, University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

He earned his PhD in political philosophy at the University of Marburg in Germany. His research deals with corporate responsibility in global supply chains, the mechanisms of (un)ethical decision-making in organizations, social change processes and the fight against organized crime. His articles have been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Business Ethics Quarterly and Journal of Business Ethics. He sits on the editorial boards of the Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Management Studies, the Academy of Management Review and Business & Society. Guido Palazzo has received the Max Weber Award for his research on multinational corporations. Hari Bapuji is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at University of Manitoba. His research is focused on management of organizational problems that have an effect on society and vice versa. He has published two books and numerous scholarly articles in leading management journals, including Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Operations Management, Management and Organization Review, and Management Learning. Dr Bapuji’s research has been widely cited by hundreds of print and electronic media outlets, including New York Times, Huffington Post, Financial Times, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, China Daily, USA Today and CBC. Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management in the University of Cyprus, Cyprus and a Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He obtained his PhD at the Manchester Business School (MBS), University of Manchester, and has worked at MBS, the University of Essex, the University of Strathclyde, and at the ALBA Graduate Business School (Greece). He has published widely in several leading academic journals. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies (2003–2008) and has served on the Editorial Board of several journals. The University of Warwick awarded him the honorary degree Doctor of Science in 2014. With Ann Langley he is the co-founder and co-convener of the annual International Symposium on Process Organization and co-editor of the Perspectives on Process Organization Studies, published annually by Oxford University Press. He has co-edited several xix

Contributors

books, including The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory (Oxford University Press, 2003, with Christian Knudsen) and Philosophy and Organization Theory (Emerald, 2011, with Robert Chia). He is the author of Complex Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2005) and If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2012, 4th edn). Harry J. Van Buren III is the Jack and Donna Rust Professor of Business Ethics at the University

of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management. He has an MS in finance from the University of Illinois’ College of Business, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD in business environment, ethics, and public policy from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business. His research has been published in various journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Business and Society Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, Futures, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Review, Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion. His current research focuses on the ethical implications of contemporary employment practices, the human rights obligations of businesses, the intersection of religious and business ethics, organizational social capital, and stakeholder fairness. He is also an Associate Editor at Business & Society. Hugh Willmott is Professor of Management at Cass Business School and Research Professor

in Organization Studies, Cardiff Business School. He has previously held professorial appointments at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester and visiting appointments at the Universities of Copenhagen, Lund and Cranfield. He has published over twenty books including Making Quality Critical, The Re-engineering Revolution, Managing Knowledge, Management Lives, Studying Management Critically, Fragmenting Work, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies and the textbooks Organizational Behaviour and Management, Organization Theory and Design and Understanding Identity and Organizations. He has a strong interest in the application of poststructuralist thinking, especially the work of Ernesto Laclau, to the field of management and business. He has published widely in social science and management journals, including Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organization Studies and Organization Science and is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies and Journal of Management Studies. He is presently an Associate Editor at Academy of Management Review. Ismaël Al-Amoudi is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Organisational Studies at Cardiff

Business School and Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Ontology (University of Warwick). His work spans across anthropology, management studies, political philosophy, social theory and sociology. One recurring theme in his research concerns the nature of social norms and the basic processes through which they are legitimated or contested. Another recurring theme concerns the contribution of philosophical ontology to the human and social sciences. Recent publications include articles in the British Journal of Sociology, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Organization and Organization Studies. Jean-Pascal Gond is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City

University London, UK. His research mobilizes organization theory and economic sociology to investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR). Key research programmes currently in progress on CSR include the roles of standards and metrics in the institutionalization of CSR in the financial marketplace and in corporations, the influence of CSR on employees and the variations of CSR across varieties of capitalism. His research in economic sociology is concerned with xx

Contributors

the influence of theory on managerial practice (performativity) and the governance of selfregulation. He has published in the fields of CSR, perfomativity and organization theory in leading academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Business & Society, Economy and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies and French journals such as Finance Contrôle Stratégie and Revue Française de Gestion. Jeroen Veldman is a Senior Research Fellow at Cass Business School, City University London. His interests revolve around the corporate form in relation to organization studies. An interest in the historical development of the corporate form developed into a research interest in the way the corporate form functions in discourses of organization studies, management, company law, economics, finance, accounting, politics and corporate governance. With Hugh Willmott, Research Professor at Cass, he is currently engaged in a research project on corporate governance http://themoderncorporation.wordpress.com/. Jeroen has published on these topics in the British Journal of Management, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Business Ethics: European Review, Business and Society Review, ephemera and M@n@gement. Joanne Duberley is a Professor of Organisation Studies and Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Her research interests focus on the study of career. She is particularly interested in the careers of women scientists and engineers and has recently developed a stream of research examining extended working lives and changing configurations of activity in later life. Joe O’Mahoney is a Reader in Organisational Studies at Cardiff University Business School,

Wales. Joe researches critical realism and management knowledge, and has an interest in the ontology of self. Prior to joining academia, Joe was a management consultant specializing in organization start-ups and change management; he also ran a small manufacturing company. John Hassard is Professor of Organisational Analysis at Manchester Business School, UK. Previously he taught at Cardiff University, London Business School and Keele University. From 2000 to 2010 he held a visiting position as the Fellow in Management Learning at the Judge Business School, Cambridge University. His main research interests lie in the areas of organizational analysis and corporate change. For the former, he is interested in critical, historical and philosophical approaches to organization theory; for the latter, his research relates to managerial, operational and structural developments in the modern corporation, as in studies of enterprise restructuring in the Chinese steel industry and company reform in Japan, UK and USA. Professor Hassard has received funding in connection with these studies from the British Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry, and the United Nations. His research has resulted in the publication of 16 books, 70 chapters in edited collections, and 90 articles in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Human Relations, Industrial Relations, Journal of Management Studies and Organisation Studies. He recently received an honorary doctorate for his research in organization theory. Jon Roffe is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne, and a Founding Editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. The co-editor of a number of books on twentieth-century French philosophy, he is also the author of Badiou’s xxi

Contributors

Deleuze (Acumen, 2012), Muttering for the Sake of Stars (Surpllus, 2012), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (EUP, forthcoming 2016), The Works of Gilles Deleuze (forthcoming 2016, re-press) and the co-author with A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP, 2014). Jonathan Gosling is an independent academic with a number of roles, including Professor of Leadership Development at IEDC Bled School of Management, Slovenia. Jonathan brings a philosophical turn of mind to a range of topics. At the time of writing his chapter he was researching the leadership of malaria elimination programmes, of sustainable supply chains in China, and of professional organizations (universities, health care, etc.). He and Peter Case, coauthor of the chapter in this volume, have written a series of papers on the relevance of philosophy to leading and managing. His work is published in journals such as Leadership, Harvard Business Review, Organization, AMLE and Social Epistemology. His most recent book is Napoleonic Leadership: a study in power (Sage, 2015), examining various modes of ‘doing power’. He was an early instigator of the Critical Management Studies movement, and now plays a significant role in the ‘greening’ of management education worldwide, including co-founding the One Planet MBA. He worked many years as a mediator and on other interventions inspired by psychodynamic perspectives on power and organizing. He has served as Visiting Professor at INSEAD, McGill, Bled, Copenhagen Business School and Renmin University of China (lecturing on the Philosophy of Leadership to the School of Philosophy). He is co-founder of Coachingourselves.com and is a keen sailor. Jörgen Sandberg is Professor in the School of Business at the University of Queensland,

Australia. His research interests include competence and learning in organizations, leadership, practice-based research, qualitative research methods and philosophy of science. His work has appeared in several journals, including Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Organization Behavior, Harvard Business Review, and Review of Educational Research. He has published several books, including Invisible Management: the social construction of leadership (Thomson, 2001, with Sjostrand and Tyrstrup), Managing Understanding in Organization (Sage, 2007, with Axel Targama), Constructing Research Questions: doing interesting research (Sage, 2013, with Mats Alvesson) and Leadership and Understanding: an understanding based perspective on humans and organizations (Studentlitteratur, 2014, in Swedish with Axel Targama). He serves on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Review, Journal of Organizational Behavior and Organization Studies. He is currently carrying out research on professional practice and its development, frameworks and methodologies for developing more influential and relevant theories and sensemaking in organizations. Kate Kenny She researches whistleblowing in organizations and is interested in theories of affect, power and psychoanalysis. She holds a research fellowship at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, and is an Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow at Harvard University, 2013–2015. Dr Kenny’s work has been published in Organization Studies and Human Relations among other journals. She is an editorial board member of Organization, the Journal of Organizational Ethnography and ephemera: theory and politics of organization. Her books include Understanding Identity and Organizations (Sage, 2011, with A. Whittle and H. Willmott), and Affect at Work: The Psychosocial and Organization Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, with M. Fotaki). Kathleen Riach is Associate Professor in Management at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests centre on exploring everyday experiences of work that are rarely formally xxii

Contributors

acknowledged involving ageing, bodies, smell, sexuality, the menopause and uncanny encounters. She has published in a range of international journals including Organization Studies, Human Relations, British Journal of Management, Sociology and Urban Studies and she sits on the editorial board of Organization and Gender, Work & Organization. Her work has also been presented and informed discussion in arenas such as the United Nations and UK government and appeared in national media outlets in Australia and the UK. Laure Cabantous is a Senior Lecturer at Cass Business School, City University London, UK.

Her research interests include the performative power of theories, as well as risk management and calculative practices, in particular in the (re)insurance industry. She has also a long-lasting interest in the study of decision-making under uncertainty. Laure’s research has been published in journals such as Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management, International Journal of Management Reviews, Human Relations as well as in decision-making journals such as the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, the Journal of Behavioral Decision-Making, and Theory and Decision. Maria Ceci Misoczky works as a Professor and Researcher in the area of Organization Studies of the Postgraduate Administration Programme at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil). She is also a Visiting Professor at the National University of the South (Bahia Blanca – Argentina) and EAFIT (Medellin – Colombia). She has an interdisciplinary trajectory: being a medical doctor specializing in Public Health; her MSc was in urban and regional planning and her PhD in administration. She is the coordinator of two research groups: Organization and Liberating Praxis and Health Management. Her research interests include organizational practices of social movements and popular struggles, the proposition of a critique of the political economy of organization, social production of public policies, Latin American and Brazilian social thought, organization of health services and systems. Martin Parker works at the University of Leicester School of Management, UK. His recent writing has been about ‘alternative’ organization in two senses. One is work on co-operatives, worker self-management and so on. The other is on different ways of thinking about what ‘organization’ means, so he has written about angels, shipping containers, art galleries, as well as a book on outlaws. His plans for the next few years include work on secret societies, James Bond, comic book villains and tower cranes. Matthew Jones is a Lecturer in Information Management at the Judge Business School and the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Reading and the University of Cambridge where he was involved in the development of computer-based models for public policy decision-making. His research addresses the relationship between information systems and social and organizational change with a particular focus on practice-based approaches and the health care sector. Melissa Tyler is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the University of Essex. Her

work on feminist theory, gender and sexuality, and on emotional, aesthetic and sexualized forms of labour has been published in a range of academic journal articles, authored books and edited collections. She is currently working on collaborative projects on LGBT people’s experience of ageing at work; gender and organizational commemoration; managing, organizing and marketing the past; and workplace discrimination and the desire for recognition. xxiii

Contributors

Michael D. Myers is Professor of Information Systems and Head of the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand. His research interests are in the areas of qualitative research methods in information systems, and the social, organizational and cultural aspects of information systems. Michael wrote a book entitled Qualitative Research in Business and Management (Sage, 2013, second edn). He has also published research articles in many journals including Communications of the ACM, Communications of the AIS, European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Organization, Information Systems Journal, Information Systems Research, Information Technology & People, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, MIS Quarterly and Pacific Asia Journal of AIS. Michael won the Best Paper award (with Heinz Klein) for the most outstanding paper published in MIS Quarterly in 1999. He served as a Senior Editor of MIS Quarterly from 2001 to 2005 and as a Senior Editor of Information Systems Research from 2008 to 2010. He also served as President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) in 2006–2007 and is now a Fellow of AIS. Michael J. Zyphur received his PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Tulane University in 2006. Since then, he has published and delivered multiple week-long workshops on statistical modelling topics such as structural equation modelling, multilevel modelling and multilevel structural equation modelling. His current interests include statistical modelling, the history and sociology of probability and statistics, science studies more generally and classic American pragmatism. Michael Rowlinson is Professor of Management and Organizational History in the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely on the relationship between history and organization theory in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Business History, Human Relations, Organization, and Organization Studies. His research on corporate history concerns the representation of history by organizations, especially the dark side of their involvement in war, slavery, and racism. This has been published in journals such as Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Journal of Organizational Change Management and Labour History Review. His current interests include the methodology of interpretive historical research in organization studies. He edited the journal Management & Organizational History from 2008 to 2013 and he is now a Senior Editor for Organization Studies and a co-editor for the Special Topic Forum of the Academy of Management Review on ‘History and Organization Studies: toward a creative synthesis’. Michelle Greenwood works at the Department of Management at Monash University.

Michelle’s scholarship is dedicated to bringing critical approaches to business ethics. In this regard, her research has focused on ethics and HRM (critiquing ideology in HRM); stakeholder theory (developing political and relational understandings of stakeholder theory); CSR (developing political CSR approaches to HRM); and CSR reporting (analysing visual rhetoric and the constitutive role of communication of corporate reports). This commitment has also driven her involvement as Section Editor (HRM) for Journal of Business Ethics, Associate Editor for Business & Society, and editorial board member for Business Ethics Quarterly and Business and Professional Ethics Journal. Michelle’s participation as co-editor (with Raza Mir and Hugh Willmott) of the Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organisation Studies has been a highpoint in this endeavour. Mieke Verloo is Professor of Comparative Politics and Inequality Issues at Radboud University

Nijmegen and Non-Residential Permanent Fellow at the IWM, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. She has extensive consultancy and training experience on gender mainstreaming and xxiv

Contributors

intersectionality for several European governments and institutions. At the IWM, she was the Scientific Director of the MAGEEQ project, see www.mageeq.net, and of the QUING project, see www.quing.eu. Her latest research focuses on opposition to gender equality. Recent publications have appeared in Signs, Politics, Groups and Identities and the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2013). Nancy Harding is Professor of Organization Theory at Bradford University School of Management. She completed her Ph.D at the University of Wales (Cardiff) in 1987, and worked at the universities of Leeds and Swansea before moving to Bradford in 2006. Her research and teaching focus on critical approaches to understanding organizations, and her particular interest is working lives. She has published papers in many of the expected academic journals, including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Jo. Management Studies, Organization, etc. Her books include a trilogy that explore the manager (Routledge, 2003), the employee (Routledge, 2013) and, eventually, the organization (Routledge, 2017/8). She is co-author of books on the social construction of dementia (Harding and Palfrey, 1997), leadership as identity (Ford, Harding and Learmonth, 2008) and, with Marianna Fotaki, on bringing feminism into 21st century organization studies (Routledge forthcoming). Nick Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University, Sweden. He works in the area of

organization studies, focusing primarily on the sociology of work and critical perspectives on management. His research interests include the politics of excellence and relevance in the business school, the discourse of science in leadership studies, the working lives of stand-up comedians and the philosophy of humour. He is a member of the editorial collective of ephemera. Nick Rumens is Professor of Organization Behaviour at Middlesex University, London, UK.

His research uses queer theory to examine lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans employment issues, workplace friendships, intimacies and identities in organization. He has published on these topics in journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies, British Journal of Management, Organization, Human Resource Management Journal and Gender, Work & Organization. He has also published a number of books: Sexual Orientation at Work: international issues and perspectives (Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Fiona Colgan); American Pragmatism and Organization (Gower, 2013, co-edited with Mihaela Kelemen); Queer Company: friendship in the work lives of gay men (Ashgate, 2011); and An Introduction to Critical Management Research (Sage, 2008, co-authored with Mihaela Kelemen). He is currently writing: Queer Business: queering organisation sexualities, to be published by Routledge. Peter Case is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of the West of England. He

also holds a part-time position as Professor of Management and Organization Studies at James Cook University, Australia. His research interests encompass leadership studies, organization theory and philosophy, organizational ethics and international development. Peter’s books include Worldly Leadership (Palgrave, 2012, with S. Turnbull, G. Edwards, D. Schedlizki and P. Simpson), and Belief and Organizations (Palgrave, 2012, with H. Höpfl and H. Letiche). He is a fellow of the Leadership Trust Foundation and holds editorial board positions on several journals, including Leadership, Leadership and the Humanities and the Leadership & Organizational Development Journal. Peter Edward is a Lecturer in International Business Management at Newcastle University Business School, UK. Before entering academia he had over twenty years’ experience as a xxv

Contributors

chartered engineer and as a management consultant, the latter predominantly in programme management of business transformations and business start-ups and mergers. His research interests are in using poststructural and critical theory to investigate the role of business in society with particular focus on ethics and CSR, sustainability and global growth, and the role of business in ‘Third World’ development. His work on global inequality and the ethics of poverty has been used by the United Nations Development Programme and various charities including the New Economics Foundation. Peter Fleming is Professor of Business and Society at Cass Business School, City University London. His research interests cover a number of areas in critical management studies, including power, neo-liberal capitalism, corporate corruption and class. He is the author and co-author of a number of books including, The End of Corporate Social Responsibility (Sage, 2013), Resisting Work: the corporatization of life and its discontents (Temple University Press, 2014) and The Mythology of Work (Pluto Books, 2015). Phil Johnson is currently Professor of Organization Studies and Head of the OB/HRM Division at the Management School, Sheffield University. His research interests include methodologies and epistemologies in organization studies as well as current developments in HRM praxis in supply chains and changes to organizational forms. R. Edward Freeman is University Professor and Olsson Professor at the Darden School, University of Virginia. He has a PhD in philosophy from Washington University, and is best known for his work on stakeholder theory. Raza Mir is a Professor of Management at William Paterson University. His research mainly

concerns multinational corporations and issues relating to power and resistance in organizations, and he is working on a forthcoming book titled Multinational Corporations: a critical essay. He is also interested in Urdu literature, and is the author of The Taste of Words: an introduction to Urdu poetry (Penguin, 2014). He recently served as the Chair of the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management. Reinhard Bachmann is Professor of International Management and Director of the Centre for Trust Research (CTR) at SOAS, University of London. He has published in leading journals, such as Organization Studies, British Journal of Sociology, Cambridge Journal of Economics and Journal of Trust Research. He is co-editor of various books, including the Handbook of Trust Research and the Handbook of Advances in Trust Research (Edward Elgar, 2006 and 2013, both with Akbar Zaheer), and two Special Issues of Organization Studies on trust (2001 and 2015). Richard Marens is a Professor of Management at the California State University, Sacramento. He earned both a JD and a PhD from the University of Washington and has published in a number of management and ethics journals as well as chapters in books. His research interests include the emergence of labour unions as financial activists, employee ownership, the evolution of the construct of corporate social responsibility within the context of American social and economic history, governmental subsidies of business, the role of class in globalization, and the rise and decline of middle management. Rick Iedema manages the research portfolio at the New South Wales Ministry of Health –

Agency of Clinical Innovation in Sydney, Australia. He is also Professor of Healthcare Innovation xxvi

Contributors

at the University of Tasmania’s Faculty of Health. In 2010 he was made Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia in recognition of his international contribution to social science theory and research. His scholarly focus has been on the organizational and improvement dimensions of health care practice. His main research interests are enabling frontline practitioners’ learning in order to enhance their capability for dealing with in situ complexity, and bringing about large systems change oriented towards implementing broad-ranging practice principles and general care models. He has been awarded AU$15 million for this work from mostly competitive government funding schemes. He has published across a wide range of organizational studies, health sociology, and communication theory journals about the organizational, pedagogic and communication dimensions of health care reform and improvement. His most recent book (Radcliffe Medical Press, 2013, with Jessica Mesman and Katherine Carroll) titled Visualising Healthcare Improvement: innovation from within summarises these findings and arguments. He is currently editing an overview compendium for Cambridge University Press, titled Communicating Safety and Quality in Health Care. Robert Phillips is Professor of Management at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business and has a joint appointment with the program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law (PPEL). His work has appeared in Business Ethics Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, and Academy of Management Review among others. He is author of Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). His other research interests include American pragmatism, stakeholder theory and ethics in network organizations. He is a Senior Fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden School and is past president of the Society for Business Ethics. Samantha Warren is a Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. She is a critical

management scholar, a keen photographer and ardent traveller. Prior to becoming an academic, she spent ten years in the sales and marketing industry while bringing up her two sons, which fuelled her interest in the ‘sharp end’ of organizational life: the impact of management practices on everyday employees at work and the deeply emotional and sensory experience of working life. She joined Cardiff Business School in August 2015, having previously taught at the University of Essex, Surrey and Portsmouth. She has held visiting posts at KTH, Stockholm in Sweden, the Universities of Adelaide and UniSA, Australia and University of Tennessee, USA and was a Visiting Professor at IAE, Lille, France from 2009 to 2013. She is a co-founder of the ESRC funded International Network of Visual Studies in Organizations (www.in-visio.org) a longstanding executive board member of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (www.scos.org) and is a member of the Association of Business Schools (ABS) Research Committee. Sandeep Mishra is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Regina. He received his PhD and MSc degrees in psychology from the University of Lethbridge, and his BSc in psychology from McMaster University. Sandeep’s research is broadly in the areas of judgement and decision-making, personality, and individual differences. Particular research interests include risk-taking, gambling, antisocial conduct and inequality. Scott Taylor is Reader in Leadership and Organization Studies at Birmingham Business School,

University of Birmingham, UK. He previously taught at Manchester Metropolitan, Essex, Exeter and Loughborough Universities, and has visited University of Auckland, University of Delhi, and University of Business Administration Jeddah. Most of Scott’s research takes the meaning xxvii

Contributors

of work in contemporary organizations as its subject, through critical interpretive analysis of qualitative data. He is currently working with Emma Bell on analyses of responses to Steve Jobs’ death to better understand the social construction of charisma post-mortem, and has recently published a co-edited textbook with Brigid Carroll and Jackie Ford on leadership studies (Sage, 2015). He is the co-Chair with Emma Bell of the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management. Steffen Böhm is Director of the Essex Sustainability Institute and Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University of Essex. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and a Visiting Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on political economies and ecologies of the food-energy-water-carbon-environment nexus. He was a co-founder of the open-access journal ephemera: theory and politics in organization, and is co-founder and co-editor of the open-access publishing press Mayfly Books. He has published five books: Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave, 2006), Against Automobility (Blackwell, 2006), Upsetting the Offset: the political economy of carbon markets (Mayfly, 2009), The Atmosphere Business (Mayfly, 2012), and Ecocultures: blueprints for sustainable communities (Routledge, 2014). Stephen Linstead is Professor of Critical Management and Director of Postgraduate Research at The York Management School, University of York. A graduate of the Universities of Keele, Leeds, Sheffield Hallam and Durham, he is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, although his work vigorously promotes the ‘humanitization’ of the field of organization studies. His research encompasses organization theory and philosophy; aesthetic approaches to organization; language-based approaches to organization; gender and sexuality in organizations and qualitative methods, ethnography and culture. His research outputs have included articles in journals including Organization Studies, Organization and Human Relations; several books and special issues, the most recent being The Dark Side of Organization (Organization Studies, 2014, with Garance Marechal and Ricky Griffin); and a handful of musical performances, poems and photographs. He is currently working to integrate ethnographic film into his research practice. Stewart Clegg has had a career that started in Yorkshire but, apart from a short sojourn in Scotland in the early 1990s, that has been spent mostly in Australia from where he now travels frequently to Europe, where he is a Visiting Professor at EM-Lyon, France, Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, Portugal, and Strategic Research Advisor, Newcastle University Business School, in the UK. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant contemporary theorists of power relations he is also one of the most influential contributors to organization studies. In his career he has produced about 50 books, several hundred journal articles, with his most cited work being the classic Frameworks of Power (Sage, 1989). He is Professor of Management and Organization Studies and Executive Director of the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. He is a Distinguished Fellow of ANZAM; a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences; a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge; a Fellow of the British Academy of the Social Sciences, and an Aston Fellow as well as, most recently, a Fellow of the Academy of Management. Suhaib Riaz is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at University of Massachusetts,

Boston. His research interests are in exploring various facets of contestation around strategic, long-term and multiple-stakeholder orientation in organizations. These include issues related to financialization, debt practices and socio-economic inequality. He also has an interest in xxviii

Contributors

innovation around new and alternative organizing forms under institutional complexity and constraints. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Human Relations, Organization, Critical Perspectives on International Business, Journal of World Business and The Leadership Quarterly. Tim Edwards is a Reader in Organizational Analysis at Cardiff Business School. His most recent

work has been focused on institutional theory, critical realism and reflexivity. He has published in a number of top-ranked journals including, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Journal of Business Venturing and the Journal of Management Inquiry. He is currently conducting research in the area of innovation and institutional change with work focused on the Japanese craft industries in Kyoto. His responsibilities include heading up the Cardiff Organizational Research Group (CORGies) and co-organizing the Cardiff Business School’s Innovation Group (I@C). He also has associate editorial responsibilities for Organization, and the International Journal of Management Reviews and he is on the editorial board for Organization Studies. Torkild Thanem is Professor of Management and Organization Studies, Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Sweden. Torkild has a longstanding interest in the philosophy of organization, and the politics, ethics and ontology of embodiment. A central concern throughout has been the Spinozian question of what bodies can do, within and beyond organizations. Over the years, this has also involved empirical research into the lives and work of homeless people, transvestites, public officials, and management consultants, and Torkild is currently conducting research on the management of wellness in organizational performance cultures. Torkild’s research has been published in various journals, including Leadership, Organization, and Organization Studies. Torkild is an Associate Editor of Gender, Work & Organization, and he serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Management and the journal Organization. Torkild has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oregon, Stanford University and University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and he is currently a visiting professor at Newcastle University Business School, UK. He is an out-of-breath cross-country skier, a parttime cross-dresser, and a mediocre crossword solver. Tracy Wilcox is a Lecturer at the Business School, UNSW Australia where she teaches leadership, sustainability and business ethics. Her research interest is in responsible management practice; understanding and enabling this involves bringing together virtue ethics and a sociological understanding of how business contexts enable or constrain management action. Tracy has published work on human resource management ethics, moral agency and business ethics education in edited collections and international journals including the Journal of Business Ethics. Prior to her academic appointment she worked as a chemist in the manufacturing industry. Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at Bath University. Yiannis has a degree

in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader–follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, insults and apologies. Another area of his work has been dedicated to developing a psychoanalytic approach to the study of organizations. Yiannis is founder and coordinator of the Organizational Storytelling Seminar series, now in its twelfth year (see www.organizational-storytelling.org.uk/), the author of nine books and numerous articles. He is Senior Editor of Organization Studies and has been Editor xxix

Contributors

of Management Learning and Associate Editor of Human Relations. His enduring fascination as a researcher lies in what he describes as the unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations. Yvonne Benschop is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Institute for Management Research at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is affiliated with the Institute for Gender Studies at Radboud University. Her main sources of inspiration are feminist organization studies and critical management studies. She is interested in informal organization processes that produce inequalities and in the ways to change these processes and inequalities. Current research projects include the intertwinement of gender practices and networking practices; gender and inclusion in leadership; a European comparative study on gender in precarious academic careers (GARCIA, www.garciaproject.eu) and the development of interventions and instruments for organizational change towards gender equality, diversity and inclusion. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Organization and Associate Editor of Gender, Work & Organization, and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. Publications in English include articles in Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Organization, Accounting, Organization and Society, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Sex Roles and Gender, Work & Organization.

xxx

Acknowledgements

At the 2004 meetings of the Academy of Management (AOM) in New Orleans, Raza co-organized a workshop titled ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Organizational Research’. Due to a quirk of AOM scheduling, the session was allotted to a cavernous ballroom instead of an intimate setting. Much to Raza’s astonishment, the hall quickly filled up with enthusiastic participants. It was clear that the workshop had tapped into an enormous thirst among the AOM members for a discussion on the philosophical underpinnings of the field. The workshop became a staple of the AOM, a tradition that continues till today. Hugh had been working on philosophical issues since the 1970s. His work had peeled many layers of assumptions from organizational studies over the years, particularly as they related to power. Hugh was also one of the early participants in the ‘philosophies’ workshop, and a conversation between him and Raza began to gather steam about formalizing the insights gleaned from the workshop over the years into a coherent and exhaustive book. Michelle had entered the field of philosophy through the entry point of business ethics, and was enthused to bring more critical and political and inquiry to this domain. She and Hugh had met and worked together in that context, and she had been collaborating with several organizational philosophers over the years. The stage was therefore set for the three of us to get together and share ideas on how we wanted to develop and curate this book. The process of producing this book has been a fulfilling journey, and we hope the book will make a contribution to the field, in terms of offering a comprehensive entry point to the intersection between philosophy and organization studies. Much of the credit for birthing this book should go to our editors at Routledge. In particular, David Varley was an enthusiastic champion at the start, and Nicola Cupit and Natalie Tomlinson have been exemplary editors, weathering our last-minute requests for changes to the structure of the manuscript and helping us stick to our deadlines. We also thank Tamsyn Hopkins of Florence Production Ltd for her support in the editing process. We would like to thank all of our contributors for bringing their expertise to bear in producing some remarkable chapters, and doing so within the draconian word-limits we set for them. We would also like to thank the participants of the ‘philosophies’ workshops over the years, for having given us a lot to digest about organizational philosophy, and the critical management studies (CMS) division for having hosted the philosophies workshop. Special thanks are due to David Weir, who has been one of our strongest well-wishers in the audience. We also have a few personal dedications. Raza would like to acknowledge the tremendous generosity of those who contributed their labour to this project, and also to those activists whose work has inspired him. On the home front, Farah has been an intellectual companion in every sense of the word. Safdar’s questions are imbued with philosophical insights, even though he is only twelve years old. And Sahir, who is ten, is a philosophy unto himself! xxxi

Acknowledgements

For Hugh, this project offered the possibility of drawing together the work of so many colleagues whose work he has admired over the years; to collect together in one volume a consolidation of philosophically engaged work across a range of themes and topics; and to build a collection that provides some pointers for the future development of our field. It has been a most enjoyable and fulfilling collaboration. This space also gives him an opportunity to acknowledge the support, inspiration and tolerance provided by Irena, Sasha, Anna and Chloe when developing this volume and its preceding projects. For Michelle, this project meant the creation of an incredible resource and an opportunity to make a modest contribution. She worked on it with pleasure, the pleasure of working with wonderful collaborators, the pleasure of seeing beautiful words and ideas come to action, and the pleasure of providing a morsel to Nicola, Grant and Maxine (for which she thanks Brendan). A final heartaching pleasure was the presence of Jan. And lastly, a message to you, the reader. We hope that this book enables meanings and actions for your own research, editing, reviewing and teaching. We hope you extend and dispute its many ideas, and take the time to tell us so.

xxxii

Introduction: philosophy in organization studies Life, knowledge and disruption Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals, which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us. Max Weber (1912[1949]: 12)

It could be argued that when the philosophical foundations of organizational research get debated, the community of organizational scholars divides into two broad camps. First there are those who would rather not engage with what they regard as irrelevant or tiresome abstractions. For them, the only priority is that of ‘application’, of consensus building, of paradigmatic unity and incremental advancement. A comparatively thoughtful articulation of this view was advanced in the 1990s by Jeffrey Pfeffer who implicitly critiqued ‘values that emphasize representativeness, inclusiveness, and theoretical and methodological diversity’ in organization science because, he declared, they produce negative ‘consequences for the field’s ability to make scientific progress, which almost requires some level of consensus, as well as for its likely ability to compete successfully with adjacent social sciences such as economics in the contest for resources’ (Pfeffer, 1993: 599). Likewise, Lex Donaldson has declared that paradigm profusion in the field has left it ‘fragmented’ and littered with approaches that ‘share an anti-management quality, painting managers in an increasingly negative light’ (Donaldson, 1995: 1). Such vigorous and explicit defences of paradigmatic unity may have abated somewhat, in part because of the rise of a countervailing advocacy of paradigmatic plurality (Willmott, 1993), yet the mainstreams of 1

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

management theory continue to dismiss, or exhibit impatience with, philosophical inquiry. This thinly veiled hostility is evidenced by calls within strategic management to retain ‘firm performance’ as a dependent variable in all research (see Bowen and Wiersema, 1999 for an analysis), or the exhortations towards implicitly positivist ‘evidence-based research’ in management inquiry (Kepes et al., 2014). Turning to the second camp, their number includes those who see the foundations of organizational theory as yet to be charted terrain, worthy of philosophical examination. This philosophical examination has often been variously undertaken from a philosophy of science orientation (examining the ontological, epistemological and methodological orientation of various organizational theories and practices), a sociopolitical standpoint (evaluating the ideological underpinnings of the field with respect to a variety of subjectivities), or some combination of these orientations. Interest in philosophy has been a feature of contemporary organizational research and pedagogy. Books that have served as a bridge between the two camps, such as Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization (1997), have been influential in demonstrating the relevance of philosophy for studying organization. And several of the comparatively few papers published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals that engage directly with philosophical issues attract a substantial audience and are well cited. It is safe to say that philosophical inquiry now occupies an important, yet often under-represented, position in organizational theory and research. In the field of organization studies, a philosophical sensibility is often entwined with an interest in social (including organization) theory. To deny their current entanglement by insisting upon their separation is an act of social construction that is neither credible nor productive. We have viewed Marx and Weber, Durkheim and Freud, Foucault and Spivak, or Gandhi and DuBois as philosophers; and to that extent this book exhibits a somewhat eclectic approach to philosophy. At the same time, we have sought to respect the difference; this is not a book about social theories masquerading as philosophies. Our collective approach to philosophy in this volume (speaking for ourselves as editors but also, we believe, for many of the contributors) is contemplative but also critical. We subscribe to Marx’s invocation in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ‘philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, 1888: 423). Accordingly, our approach tilts toward praxis, at least with regard to changing and acknowledging the heterogeneous and chaotic character of organization theory.

Philosophy and organization studies It is instructive to recall that the first journal of the then newly created discipline of management, titled The Journal of the Academy of Management, which emerged in the late 1950s, featured in each of its first three volumes at least one article that overtly dealt with philosophy (Davis, 1958; Rich, 1959; Jones, 1960). At that time, an explicit appreciation of philosophy informed the development of management and organizational theory. Since economics has become installed as the dominant discipline of management, one could surmise that the field inherited a philosophical approach from aspects of economic theory (e.g. Nourse, 1922). This inheritance has coloured and restricted discussions of philosophical issues within many areas of business and management. For example, finance researchers writing in the 1940s tried to develop the philosophical components of their discipline (Carson, 1949) and accountants writing in the 1950s (Fagerberg, 1956) were concerned about the philosophy of accounting practice. Both fields continue to discuss issues of philosophical import, so much so that the ascendancy of one style 2

Introduction

of financial accounting research over another is sometimes seen as a manifestation of its ‘epistemological superiority’ (Rutherford, 2010: 149). Discussion of their philosophical foundations, which are increasingly unmoored from the confines of economics, can be found in all fields of organizational inquiry, such as strategic management (Mir and Watson, 2000), organizational behaviour (Graham, 2000), human resource management (Greenwood, 2013), marketing (Michel, 2009), operations management (Soni and Morris, 1999), and information systems (Adam and Richardson, 2001), to name a few. Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (1979) made a substantial impact by offering a two by two matrix on which researchers could map the assumptions underlying diverse streams of research. Cited almost 10,000 times in the Google Scholar database to date, it drew together currents of debate that had been surfacing during the 1970s as the determinism of contingency theory was challenged by the voluntarism of the action frame of reference (Silverman, 1970; Child, 1972), and efforts were made to develop ‘new rules’ of sociological analysis (Giddens, 1976; 1979; see also Jones M., Chapter 16 in this volume) that sought to move analysis beyond the dualism of agency and structure. The Burrell and Morgan book disclosed and generated a thirst for more explicit philosophizing or ‘meta-theorizing’ within organization and management theory. The ABI-Inform database that tracks scholarship in organization studies and related disciplines reveals over 5,000 scholarly papers published over the last five years with ‘philosophy’ or related words in their title/abstract. These numbers are merely indicative that a philosophical interest and approach has gained some traction in the field. What is equally evident upon a more qualitative examination is the growing convergence between critical traditions of social and organization theory and philosophical inquiry. This is perhaps to be expected, as critical scholarship is more likely to challenge and de-naturalize the sedimented axioms of ‘mainstream’ organizational theory. The act of uncovering and interrogating the assumptions underlying research is what moves the production of knowledge from the realm of the unremarkable to the domain of the contestable. This reflexive turn in organization studies has produced a rich trove of edited books that bring philosophical issues to the forefront (e.g. Hassard and Pym, 1990; Jones and ten Bos, 2007; Lounsbury et al., 2011; Helin et al., 2014). Related endeavours have sought to connect organizational studies with social theory, often with philosophical undercurrents (see Adler et al., 2014, for a recent example). Specific orientations within management and organization studies – notably critical accounting (Cooper and Hopper, 1990) and critical management studies (Alvesson et al., 2009), have exhibited a strong philosophical orientation. The books cited in the previous paragraph collectively have decentred the dominant paradigm by laying the groundwork for inquiry that offers an alternative to the values and tautologies that support research in our field that self-referentially masquerades as objective. Contributors to these books also historicize the arguments in our field, and connect them to broader debates in other social sciences. Thus, this book adds to a diverse and growing ecosystem of research and inquiry into the philosophical dimensions of the study of the world of organization(s).

Life, knowledge and disruption As the three editors of the book began to discuss the structure of the book, our organizing ideas appeared to follow two interwoven trajectories, the first being the 1909 painting by Gustav Klimt titled The Tree of Life that constitutes the cover image of this book, and the second the quotation by Max Weber that forms the epigraph of this introduction. 3

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

Klimt’s masterpiece offers us an especially serendipitous segue into the theme of our book. The cover design offers only a section of the painting whereas the original (sometimes called Stoclet Frieze) comprises three huge panels with over 20 square feet of design. The symbology of the tree of life cuts across cultures, myths, geographies and theologies. The tree, rooted in the ground and stretching out to the skies, symbolizes a connection between earth and heaven, between the rooted questions of ontology and the febrile queries of epistemology. The curvy twists of the branches of the tree in the painting represent the multiple ways in which the space of knowledge is negotiated across multiple realities. Klimt’s use of artistic conventions from many cultures (the birds and fishes in the branches are drawn from Asian and Islamic art) present to us the heterogeneity of knowledge forms. A solitary figure on the left side of the painting could represent the researcher’s quest for philosophical answers, while the embracing couple at its right could represent the implicit emergence of a community. Finally, a dark raven in the branches, a foreboding figure, represents the pitfalls associated with this process of inquiry. We are intrigued by the idea that, metaphorically, Stoclet Frieze links knowledge to life, and represents multiplicity and heterogeneity as harmony. In the end, the purpose of philosophical inquiry is not to achieve uniformity, but perhaps to attain the mutual amity that we see in the branches of Klimt’s tree. Klimt’s painting emerged a mere five years after the publication of Max Weber’s essay Objectivity in Social Science, from which our opening epigraph is drawn. Here, Weber emphasizes that ideas arising from different political and epistemic contexts can only move ahead if they engage with each other in a spirit of mutual respect. The obverse of this statement was perhaps best articulated by Mr Kurtz, the infamous character in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. Ideas ultimately have consequences, which are articulated as policy and have material impact on people. Philosophical inquiry that is respectful as well as questioning of multiplicity and heterogeneity is therefore not only an act of academic honesty; it is an ethical imperative. It is our willingness to recognize, challenge and reflect on our ideals and the ideals of others, rather than simply investigate what we assume to be real or true, which opens us up to life. Our quest for knowledge is our potential undoing; it bounds our approach to the tree of life. In the words of the poet T.S. Eliot: The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. (Eliot, 1934: 7) 4

Introduction

Weber is clear in his claim that knowledge, and the pursuit thereof, no matter how ‘perfect’, cannot provide the meaning of life. In The Rock Eliot asks: ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?’ Philosophy, from the Greek philosophia, translates as love of wisdom. An invitation to philosophy is a call to move beyond, to start before, to take to task, to undermine, that which is our knowledge. An invitation to philosophy of organization is a call to challenge and disrupt the received wisdom concerning ontology, epistemology and/or ethics in organizational studies. We use the word disruption here somewhat ironically. Disruption (and its variations disrupt and disruptors) became a managerial buzzword to hate in 2014 (Luce, 2013). Whereas historically disrupters were seen as deviants bent on subverting the system, the birth of the construct ‘disruptive innovation’, the term Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen used to describe bringing to markets new ‘game-changing’ technologies, placed the term among the prime movers of capitalism. Consider for example Rupert Murdoch’s headline use of the term when advocating Australia as a ‘disruptive economy’ (Murdoch, 2013). However, the reality of disruption is considerably more savage. One recalls the telling words of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto to recall the disruptions produced by capitalism: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels, 1848[2002]: 4) The booms and busts of life in the age of capitalism, to say nothing of its recurrent military adventures, produce disruptions in the life of the working people of the world that the likes of Christensen and Murdoch seek to paper-over with their benign and ideological terminology. In this book, we seek to disrupt disruption, and re-appropriate this idea for critical use. By being disruptive of received wisdoms, ‘philosophical analysis helps keep meaning open in a scientific field’ (Tsoukas and Chia 2011: 15). Related ideas of discontinuity, impasse and resistance, with regard to time, space or persons have a long and proud history in philosophy. Philosophy and philosophers have since ancient times been disruptive through their demands that we question our beliefs and values, reject conventions in society, resist shared myths and think for ourselves. Consider, for example, that Socrates paid with his life for his attempts to transform Athenian society. In turn, later philosophers sought to disrupt philosophy from the past. Without overlooking his political naivety and complicity, Heidegger’s strategy ‘to disrupt philosophy and the university by exposing it to philosophy’s other . . . to let philosophy be conceptually disrupted by the concrete experience of life’ was aimed at the renewal of philosophy rather than its demise (Caputo, 1993: 57). The influence of great thought and thinkers from the past may be experienced at once as a blessing and a curse, creating the necessity for ‘strong poets to wrestle with their precursors, even to the death’ (Bloom, 1973: 5). Philosophical puzzlement, a state of apoira or seemingly insoluble impasse in inquiry, is the starting point to the opening of disagreement and debate. Recognition that uncontrollability, undecidability and disorganization ‘are not mere supplements to proper organization, but are the property of organization’ is at the heart of a philosophy of organization (Jones and ten Bos, 5

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

2007: 4). Rather than respond to disorganization with rules derived from history or convention, we believe that it is incumbent on us all to resist continuity and to enact other forms of organizing and organization. Philosophy then becomes a dual act of disruption and creation, leading us back to life itself. It is telling that without any hint that we planned to foreground the idea of disruption as part of our positioning of philosophy in organization studies, many contributors to this volume have used the term. We now turn to consider the chapters that comprise this volume, sketching how they relate to the structure of the book, and how they connect to the themes of life, knowledge and disruption.

Foundations, theories and special topics We must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face, which we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence that disposes the world in our favor. We must conceive analysis as a violence we do to things, or in any case as a practice that we impose upon them. Michel Foucault (1983: 127)

In his celebrated lecture The Order of Discourse, Michel Foucault had suggested that for a text to achieve the status of discourse, it must carry the imprimatur of institutional consent. It is obvious that this book, like all other texts, will become part of a certain discourse. But what kind of a discourse should it be? What kind of disciplining devices should it subject itself to, and what kinds of subjectivities will it ultimately find itself line alongside and against? Many of the chapters pose important ethical and methodological questions for organizational researchers. As intellectual collaborators in this enterprise, the co-editors of the book also participate in this process, thus declaring a shared preparedness to question the premises of capitalism and the ways in which management and organizational theory has been shaped by that very system. In that sense, we are in agreement with Foucault when he theorizes discourse as a dialectical relationship between desire (which wants discourse to be unrestricted) and institutions (which seek to rein it in, and align it with their interests). Institutions exert their power in multiple ways. For instance, they operate through exclusion, or the forbidding of various aspects of speech, behaviour, etc. In the context of research, exclusion would be the act of rendering certain forms of representation, or the representation of certain subjectivities as irrelevant, as non-research, as anecdote, as unimportant. Also, institutions may exhibit rarefaction, or the constricting of the terms involved in the discourse in such a way that the multiplicities of their meanings are corralled. For example, one of the criticisms posed against certain forms of research is that it is ‘all over the map’, that it attempts to make far too many connections instead of restricting itself to an institutionally prescribed set of questions. Finally, institutions operate through application, or the imposition of roles on speaking subjects. In other words, the legitimacy of the researcher is directly linked to his or her position in the institutional process. Our collective motivation as intellectual collaborators in this enterprise is to interrupt the disciplining power of dominant discourses, and introduce a resistive polyphony into the mainstreams of organizational theorizing. Hence, a key feature of this volume that sets it aside from any predecessors is the breadth of its coverage, and the insistence that each foundation, theory and topic is examined within a philosophical frame of the author’s choosing. With more than 50 chapters, its contents shine a philosophical light on a variety of assumptions, approaches and topics that constitute both 6

Introduction

traditional and cutting-edge aspects of organizational studies. Its structure facilitates an interweaving of philosophy and organizational studies in multiple ways. In the first, Foundations section, our contributors address central themes of philosophy and bring them toward organizational studies. In the second, Theories section, in contrast, each chapter takes an approach that is central and/or relevant to organizational theory and interrogates it by drawing upon one of more philosophical traditions. Finally, the Topics section allows our contributors some latitude to explore the philosophical indebtedness and philosophical significance of a wide range of topics, and to review and problematize their invariably contested meaning and multiple paths of development. Our aim has been to assemble in a single volume the many different ways in which philosophy infuses the analysis of organization and can serve to illuminate and advance its study. We believe organizational researchers will especially welcome contributions in which scholars knowledgeable about specific fields and topics of inquiry demonstrate the relevance of philosophy to these areas of interest. The Foundations section ‘involve[s] identifying the assumptions that underpin any truth claim and then are disrupted through their denial and the identification of the absent alternatives whose articulation produces an alternative rendition of reality’ (Duberley and Johnson, Chapter 4 this volume). It comprises chapters on four topics that we feel are essential to any volume on philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics and methodology. The authors of these chapters have attempted to accomplish three interrelated tasks. They offer a foundational discussion on how these concepts have been dealt with in the broader philosophical arena. They then focus on how these concepts have been applied by organizational researchers. Finally, they make suggestions for a way forward, discussing how these concepts can be deployed in the future by theorists of organizations. The issues addressed in these chapters are not only fundamental to our knowledge but to our (organized) life. We start with a discussion of ontology. While discussing the nature of reality as represented in organizational studies, Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney (Chapter 1, this volume) unpack the implicit ontology of positivism, and recommend that researchers in our field develop multiple and novel methods of inquiry that are rooted in alternative ethical and political traditions. Likewise, the nature of knowledge remains a contested term for researchers; to that end, Andreas Scherer and colleagues (Chapter 2, this volume) examine the vexing issue of epistemology, offering constructive philosophy as a way to build bridges across apparently incommensurable epistemic systems. We then move on to ethics where the deployment of ‘business ethics’ as a legitimizer of business practices makes this branch of philosophy a particularly fraught terrain in our field, an issue that Edward Wray-Bliss (Chapter 3, this volume) examines with great clarity. Finally, in their discussion of methodology, Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson (Chapter 4, this volume) examine the intricate assumptions, values and rules that researchers bring to bear in their work. They argue that any process of methodological engagement is intrinsically a philosophical act, and outline a range of philosophical perspectives that underpin different methodologies in management research. Philosophy is the source of the deep assumptions upon which we base our knowledge, including our capacity to question these assumptions. As with the roots of the tree, the foundations of our knowledge are not fixed and inert, rather they grow, shift, perhaps die, but always strive to move deeper and seek out the dark. The Theories section comprises chapters that analyse the philosophical underpinnings of many of the theories that constitute our knowledge of organization(s) as they guide analysis and empirical study. Instead of summarizing each chapter, we offer some broad and integrative statements about the theoretical traditions of organizational research and philosophy. Every theory and knowledge claim is infused by value-laden political positions. A scholar engaged with queer theory will be critical of heteronormativity. A feminist is most likely to be opposed to patriarchy, 7

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

a Marxist scholar will almost certainly be anti-capitalist in her approach, and a postcolonialist will see the shadow of colonial relations even in present socio-economic relations, despite the putative departure of formal colonialism from the geopolitical space. To that end, most chapters in this section are transparent in analysing both the political as well as the philosophical assumptions that underlie the theories that they examine. We developed this section by identifying theories that were broadly critical of mainstream theorizing, and then selected scholars whose work we associated with that particular theoretical tradition. We invited our contributors to engage in explicit philosophical contemplation of their theory of choice. The resulting chapters provide original and fascinating analyses of discourse analysis, feminist organizational theories, organizational hermeneutics, institutional theory, Marxist approaches, poststructuralist approaches, postcolonialism, theories of practice, pragmatism, psychoanalytical approaches, queer theory and structuration. Readers may wonder why there is no chapter on resource dependency or network theories. The twin forces of space constraints, and editorial choices must account for our sins of omission as well as commission. The in-depth consideration of these theories by knowledgeable authors delivers original and engaging accounts of the intersection between theories of organization and philosophical approaches. In common with the Topics section, the contributions are extensive but not exhaustive. Exemplifying a poststructural approach, theory can be understood as ‘a process or activity of theorizing that spans disciplines, questioning both its own representations and the way it is itself represented’ (Linstead, Chapter 11 this volume). Seen in this way, theories can be inventive and disruptive as they ‘not only suggest that things could be otherwise than they are, but that things are already otherwise than the ways in which they are represented’. Of all the theories represented in this volume, queer theory probably provokes the greatest disruption to our knowledge and our ways of knowing through ‘its refusal to be reduced to or casually explained away by other philosophies’ due to its very nature of being at odds with the normal (Rumens and Tyler, Chapter 15 this volume). Hence, queer theory becomes ‘an unstable and itinerant philosophical resource for unsettling ontological assumptions’ about social phenomena rather than a statement about those phenomena per se. Put succinctly, queer theory is ‘an attitude of unceasing disruptiveness’ (Parker, 2002: 158). Likewise, Marxism brings a historical and dialectical approach to organizational studies that we ignore at our own peril, and feminist approaches decentre the patriarchal assumptions that threaten to become a common sense within our field. On the other hand, practice theory and pragmatism provide a much-needed philosophical critique of the logic of scientific rationality that hegemonically pervades organizational research, while discursive and hermeneutical approaches incorporate a sense of dynamism into its mainstreams. Structuration theory moves organizational discussions past structure–action dichotomies, while institutional theories equip us with the wherewithal to analyse the shifting relationships between multiple analytic units and categories. Finally, at the heart of any collectivity lies an individual, and psychoanalytic theories help us determine the reflexive relationships between the self and society that renders the political personal and vice versa. The theories presented and philosophically analysed in this volume constitute veritable building blocks of our research as organizational scholars. In the Topics section of the book, we have sought to induce philosophical concerns into a variety of topics addressed by organizational theorists. We did so by generating a wish-list of topics, both new and old, that related to organized life, identifying influential organizational scholars who had done significant and original work on a particular topic, and asking them to prepare comparatively short, imaginative pieces on topics for which they have passion. The result is over 40 chapters that educe some crucial philosophical questions (adapted from Blackburn, 2009) in relation to the selected topics. 8

Introduction

Questions about ‘who are we?’ – the self and the self in relations with others – drive inquiries in the topics around how we enact ourselves such as ageing, body, commodification, diversity, humour, identity, rituals, spirituality and work. Such topics naturally emanate from feminist, psychoanalytic and queer theories to consider how we make ourselves/are made in the process of organizing. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories, we are reminded that identity is influenced by repressed feelings, fantasies and desires, that these ‘unconscious influences act to disrupt a stable sense of self, although people continue to strive for such coherence’ (Kenny and Harding, Chapter 38 this volume). Indeed, it is in response to the transformative possibilities of social change inherent in events that we engage in rituals, whereby invocation of symbolic practices becomes a means of limiting the radical potential of moments of disruption (Islam, Chapter 51 this volume). Following questions around who we are, are questions that broach ‘are we free?’ – freedom, constraint and responsibility – as examined in this volume in chapters on agency, control, governance, leadership, strategy, finance, management, organization power, resistance and trust. Links emerge in discussion of these topics with institutional theory, practice theory, pragmatism, structuration theories and poststructuralism. We live in a society where the institutional norms of research are strongly influenced by external forces. In his critique of the indoctrination of professionals in the modern world of universities and funding agencies, Jeff Schmidt had referred to the concept of ‘assignable curiosity’, which he defines as a subtle narrowing of the possible fields of inquiry by the institutional forces that constrain research parameters and force professionals into realms of inquiry that further the dominant paradigm (Schmidt, 2000). As professionals engaged in research, we constantly are seduced into and resist the siren all of assignable curiosity, and these topics may prove helpful in examining our role, both as agents and interlocutors of the system. To that end, theories that examine resistance to the dominant order such as Marxism and postcolonial theory also address these questions. Questions of ‘how do we know?’ and ‘how can we understand each other?’ within the context of organization arise in debates about aesthetics, decision-making, historiography, performativity, paradigms, quantification, measurement and the visual, which draw from theories such as hermeneutics, discourse and others. Indeed, while the language of organizational research is suffused with words like ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’, we also need to engage with other more fundamental words, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’, and even ‘truth’. Much has been said about the performative role of language. The concern within organization studies with the way that narratives legitimate themselves may indeed by connected to Weber’s central concern with legitimation of domination (Jones, 2003). Performativity in its many guises (see Gond and Cabantos, Chapter 47 this volume) holds that knowledge and discourse, rather than represent reality, are collective and transformative processes. However, social reality can be transformed not only through the performance of narrative, but also through the active mobilization of bodies (Riach, Chapter 18 this volume), images (Warren, Chapter 56 this volume), scientific representations (Nigam and Trujillo, Chapter 49 this volume, Zyphur, Pierides and Roffe, Chapter 43 this volume), and material artefacts (Strati, Chapter 17 this volume). In taking up concrete topics, our contributors have excavated and explicated their significance philosophically. Their willingness to ask the tougher, more profound questions befitting a philosophical approach has enabled them to subject the assumptions that populate the facile metanarratives, and upon which analysis of these topics is routinely restricted, to critical scrutiny. ‘What is society?’ and ‘what are our rights?’ are questions to which our thoughts turn when considering topics such as capital, commons, corporation, debt, democracy, globalization, justice, inequality, conflict, environment, needs and value. It is in these discussions where overlaps between philosophy and social theory are very apparent. The modern world is bedeviled by a plethora of contradictions and escalating crises as well as momentous achievements. The chapters 9

Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood

problematize the foundations, theories and topics of this without being nihilistic. In considering their social relevance, disruptions are understood as birth pangs of an emergent order, where subjectivities that were hitherto oppressed beyond self-expression may begin to assert themselves, with a growing self-confidence, without being defined by marginality within the mainstream, and so strengthened in resolve to deal with their histories, their multiple identities, labours, loves, and lives.

There is nothing more practical than a good philosophy In ‘The Prison Notebooks’ Antonio Gramsci (1971) referred to Marxism as the ‘philosophy of praxis’, presumably to elude his censors. As a consequence of its association with the term, Marxism became the tradition most closely identified with a concern for praxis. But the reality is that many philosophies have, or are attributed, practical intent and application, both in the realm of politics and in the space of inquiry. Likewise, strong philosophical approaches are dialectical, in that they absorb and transform those ideas to which they are opposed. Philosophical approaches work best when they disrupt sectarianism as they respect and incorporate the contributions of idealism and materialism, the scientific and the aesthetic, the harmonious and the contradictory elements of the world. Taken together, the chapters in this book advance an approach to organizational studies and research that decentres the taken-for-granted assumptions populating the ‘common sense’ of our field. Positively, the chapters invite a more reflective, inclusive and politically sensitive understanding of working life and its challenges. The world of work and organizations is characterized by tremendous heterogeneity and upheaval, and the philosophically inspired insights found in the contributions to this Companion display and encourage sensitivity to, and incorporation of, this heterogeneity within the diverse roots and branches of organizational research.

References Adam, A. and Richardson, H. (2001). Feminist philosophy and information systems. Information Systems Frontiers, 3(2): 143. Adler, P.S., du Gay, P., Morgan, G. and Reed, M. (eds) (2014). Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: contemporary currents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds) (2009). The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackburn, S. (2009). The Big Questions: philosophy. London: Quercus Publishing. Bloom, H. (1973). The Anxiety of Influence: a theory of poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Bowen, H.P. and Wiersema, M.F. (1999). Matching method to paradigm in strategy research: limitations of cross-sectional analysis and some methodological alternatives. Strategic Management Journal, 20(7): 625–36. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Caputo, J.D. (1993). Demythologizing Heidegger. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Carson, A.B. (1949). A ‘source and application of funds’ philosophy of financial accounting. Accounting Review, 24: 159–70. Child, J. (1972). Organizational structure, environment and performance: the role of strategic choice. Sociology, 6: 1–22. Conrad, J. (1971). Heart of Darkness. London: Macmillan, p. 69. Cooper, D. and Hopper, T. (1990). Stimulating research in critical accounts, in Cooper, D. and Hopper, T. (eds), Critical Accounts. London: Macmillan, pp. 1–14. Davis, R.C. (1958). A philosophy of management. The Journal of the Academy of Management, 1(3): 37–45. Donaldson, L. (1995). American Anti-management Theories of Organization: a critique of paradigm proliferation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10

Introduction

Eliot, T.S. (1934). The Rock: a pageant play. New York: Harcourt Brace. Fagerberg, D. (1956). A philosophy of accounting practice. Journal of Accountancy, 84: 14–21. Foucault, M. (1983) The order of discourse. In Language and Politics, Shapiro, M.J. (ed). New York: New York University Press: 112–127. Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Heinemann. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Graham, J.W. (2000). Promoting civic virtue organizational citizenship behavior: contemporary questions rooted in classical quandaries from political philosophy. Human Resource Management Review, 10(1): 61–80. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and Transl. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Greenwood, M. (2013). Ethical analyses of HRM: a review and research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(2): 355–66. Hassard, J. and Pym, D. (1990). The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations: critical issues and new perspectives. London: Routledge. Helin, J., Hernes, T., Hjorth, D. and Holt, R. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, C. (2003). Theory after the postmodern condition. Organization, 10(3): 503–25. Jones, C. and ten Bos, R. (2007). Philosophy and Organization. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Jones, M.H. (1960). Evolving a business philosophy. The Journal of the Academy of Management, 3(2): 93–103. Kepes, S., Bennett, A.A. and McDaniel, M.A. (2014). Evidence-based management and the trustworthiness of our cumulative scientific knowledge: implications for teaching, research, and practice. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 13(3): 446–66. Lounsbury, M. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (eds) (2011). Philosophy and Organization Theory Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Vol. 32). New York: Emerald. Luce, E. (2013). America must dump its disrupters in 2014, Financial Times, 22 December. Retrieved on 11 June 2015 from www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0a44ee6c-68cc-11e3-996a-00144feabdc0.html--axzz3TCV wWZNJ. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848[2002]). The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1888[1976]). The German Ideology: including theses on Feuerbach. London: Pyr Books. Michel, R. (2009). Marketing: philosophy of science and ‘epistobabble warfare’. Qualitative Market Research, 12(2): 120–9. Mir, R. and Watson, A. (2000). Strategic management and the philosophy of science: the case for a constructivist methodology. Strategic Management Journal, 21(9): 941–53. Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Murdoch, R. (2013). Let’s learn to thrive on disruption. The Australian. Retrieved on 11 June 2015 from www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/lets-learn-to-thrive-on-disruption/story-e6frg6zo-1226750822326. Nourse, E.G. (1922). The economic philosophy of co-operation. The American Economic Review, 12(4): 577. Parker, M. (2002). Queering management and organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 9(2): 146–66. Pfeffer, J. (1993). Barriers to the advance of organizational science: Paradigm development as a dependent variable. Academy of Management Review, 18(4): 599–620. Rich, F.M. (1959). A businessman’s management philosophy. The Journal of the Academy of Management, 2(2): 89–100. Rutherford, B. (2010). The social scientific turn in UK financial accounting research: a philosophical and sociological analysis. Accounting and Business Research, 40(2): 149–71. Schmidt, J. (2000). Disciplined Minds: a critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Silverman, D. (1970). The Theory of Organizations. London: Heineman. Soni, R. and Morris, S. (1999). Japanese operations philosophies: their cultural foundations. International Journal of Management, 16 (4): 521–8. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2011). Philosophy and Organization Theory. Bingley: Emerald. Weber, M. (1912[1949]). Objectivity in social science and social policy. The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 78: 1–15. Willmott, H. (1993). Breaking the paradigm mentality. Organization Studies, 14(5): 681–719.

11

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Foundations

This page intentionally left blank

1 Ontology Philosophical discussions and implications for organization studies Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

Introduction: what is ontology and why does it matter for organization studies? The word ‘ontology’ refers to the study of being. It is derived from the Greek words ‘onto’ (being) and ‘logos’ (science, discourse). This literal definition is, however, too wide to be of use to substantive enquiries. Indeed, philosophers realized over two thousand years ago that ‘being’ is at once the most universal and the emptiest of concepts. Everything one can think of can also be said to ‘be’ something in some way, be they material objects, animals, people, feelings, ideas, activities, social roles or mathematical objects. All of these have in common that they are, they have some, or participate in, being. Moreover, it is difficult, many would argue impossible, to think of an entity1 that has no being whatsoever. Even atheists recognize that God is real as an idea and absences can be argued to be real. Think, for instance, of the effects that the absence of water or air have for fellow human beings. Even absurd or inexistent entities such as four-sided triangles and unicorns can be said to be real qua absurdities or fictional objects. In the twentieth century, however, philosophers have proposed more restrictive definitions of ontology, often leading to fruitful developments in philosophy. Thus, while all the examples cited above can be said to be, their modes of being are arguably distinguishable. Stars, ducks, people, fear, liberty, writing, lecturers, triangles, draughts and unicorns can usefully be differentiated from one another and it can be said of them that ‘they are different kinds of things’. Moreover, the (discursive) operations through which these objects are distinguished are also worthy of attention, especially for those (epistemologically relativist) commentators who argue that the categories we use to make sense of the world are artificial social constructs that are formulated in the context of social relations of power. It is also interesting to ask therefore: through what processes, and through what power relations, are we allowed – and even obliged – to recognize, and sometimes create, differences between entities? Discussions on ontology among philosophers2 led in turn to novel ways of approaching the human and social sciences, including organizational studies. As we shall argue below, ontological clarification is not a sterile academic exercise as it has profound implications on how researchers approach the phenomena they purport to study. Ontology also tends to structure which 15

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

research questions are worth asking; which methods of investigation can be trusted; and what the practical implications of the activity of researchers are likely to be. The present entry on ontology has no pretension to exhaustivity or even sophistication. Its principle purpose is rather to introduce some of the philosophical approaches that have been particularly influential on the study of organizations, and to take stock of their influence. The first section introduces some of the philosophical contributions that have influenced ontological thinking in organization studies. Particular attention is drawn to how each contribution differs from the positivist vision of the world which still permeates much of sociology and most of management and organization studies. The second section examines how the debates identified in the field of philosophy are reflected and extended in the field of organization studies. It studies the usage, usefulness and inherent limitations of ontological thinking for organization studies. The concluding section examines a few possible developments for ontology in organization studies which hint at promising avenues opened by ontological reflection.

Key philosophical contributions The systematic questioning of being’s differentiation, im/permanence, in/coherence and in/finitude can be traced, in the West, back to pre-Socratic philosophy over 2,400 years ago. The term ‘ontology’ presents us with a fundamental ambiguity as it refers both to the study of the nature of reality and to the study of an author’s or a community’s specific conception of reality. This ambiguity has led to a distinction within the literature, to which we refer throughout this piece, between committed ontology (aka philosophic ontology) and uncommitted ontology (aka scientific ontology). Committed ontology seeks to articulate a general conception of ontology in which to anchor current or future theoretical and empirical research programmes. Uncommitted ontology focuses instead on the elucidation of the ontological presuppositions or assumptions of a particular author, theory or community. While committed ontology is concerned with the existence of those entities it discerns, uncommitted ontology remains agnostic about their existence. Rather than attempting an exhaustive summary of ontological writings over the past couple of millennia, we begin by detailing the positivist ontology which has historically dominated natural and social science, and subsequently attend to a number of alternative philosophical positions which still inform contemporary approaches to organization studies.

Positivism’s implicit ontology In the philosophy of the social sciences, the expression ‘positivism’ is associated with Auguste Comte whose vision of nature, knowledge and history was informed by two principle ideas. First, that the human mind is destined to progress and improve through successive historical stages. Second, that the process of scientific development is linear, from mathematics, to astronomy, to physics, to chemistry, to biology and, finally, to the social sciences. In this chronological, systematic and hierarchical organization, the social sciences occupy a place characterized both by their greater complexity and by their meta-theoretical continuity with the natural sciences. One same ontology is assumed to hold for the natural and for the social sciences alike. Moreover, this ontology is not theorized as one plausible construct among others. Rather, positivism (in the Comtean guise) assumes that alternative ontologies are the mark of, at best, unscientific thinking and, at worst, culturally retarded visions of the world. What are the ontological features characteristic of, or implicit in, positivism? First, positivism assumes that reality is made of physical things that are discrete and additive. Think, for instance, 16

Ontology

of Newtonian physics in which the gravitational force exerted by/on a group of objects can be strictly decomposed in terms of the force exerted by/on each of the objects. Second, for positivism’s ontology, the emergence of novel properties in virtue of the interrelation of elements is bound to either remain a mystery or be explained in terms of interactions (rather than internal relations) between discrete elements. One noteworthy consequence of the ontological principles of discreteness and additivity is that the identity of any entity is independent of the relations in which it stands. For positivism, an object does not become something else by virtue of being related to another object. Third, the objects of positivism are assumed to exist independently of people’s perception. The proverbial Newtonian apple is subject to the same laws independently of how people look at it. Fourth, being is characterized by permanence rather than by impermanence, and stillness is assumed to be primary to movement. The proverbial apple may fall from the tree, but this fall must itself be explained by an assumedly external factor such as the breaking of a branch. Moreover, a satisfactory explanation/description of the fall must invoke a universal and eternal law that applies to all physical bodies alike. This leads us to our fifth characterization of positivism’s ontology: entities are assumed to be governed by universal laws that are expressed in terms of event regularities. For instance: ‘whenever an apple falls at t0, its velocity in t1 is g.(t1–t0)’. The five ontological characteristics of positivism above imply that proper science is about uncovering event regularities through observation and verification or, in the case of Popperianism, through observation, hypothesis formation and falsification. Proper knowledge of the world is best expressed through strict, unambiguous, definitions that allow for mathematical computation and prediction. Whether positivism’s ontology is best qualified as committed or uncommitted ontology depends on the author. While Comte was certainly committed to the truth of positivism’s ontological presuppositions, others such as Quine were arguably agnostic about them.

Interpretation and the specificity of the human sciences An alternative approach to knowledge, however, developed in parallel to the positivist approach to the human and social sciences. This broad approach, commonly termed interpretivist or hermeneutic, can be traced from Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century to Dilthey and Weber in the early twentieth century to Heidegger and Gadamer in the mid-twentieth century. At root in this hermeneutic tradition is the idea that the social and human world is meaningful. Yet, the meaning of what people say and of what they do is not immediately accessible to an external observer and requires an effort of interpretation. What is the ontological import of hermeneutics for the human and social sciences? The first implication is that positivism is fundamentally insufficient for a systematic study of people and societies. Practices of external observation, discovery of general laws and predictionmaking must be complemented or even replaced by interpretations of what people say and do. While the necessity of interpretation is primarily an epistemological implication, it also bears significant ontological implications. Indeed, it implies that the world is also made of meanings, of values (moral or aesthetic), of emotions and of representations that escape the positivist apprehension. How does the subjection of the social sciences to a hermeneutic moment destabilize the ontological features that we attributed above to positivism? First, the world comprises not only discrete and additive physical things but also symbols and human artefacts (think of works of art) that can’t be reduced to their physical thingness without losing their characteristic nature. Indeed, something significant is lost whenever a painting is treated as just a big rectangular chunk of wood and cloth covered with oil and various chemical components. 17

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

Second, the texts, practices and institutions produced by people possess a meaning that is usually irreducible to their constitutive elements. An example is provided by Weber’s reflection on the two meanings of ‘understanding’ as observational meaning (aktuelles Verstehen) as opposed to explanatory understanding (erklarendes Verstehen). The action of a wo/man cutting a tree can be interpreted (observational understanding) as ‘cutting a tree’ by simply looking at the immediate context of the action. However, an explanatory understanding of the wo/man’s action as building a house for herself (as opposed to working for a wage or engaging in a recreational activity) must articulate the specific act of chopping into a wider practice (e.g. housebuilding; wage-earning; leisure, etc.). Third, positivism’s assumption that the objects to which it refers exist independently of people’s perception is either defeated or problematized. It is defeated if the expression ‘people’s perceptions’ is understood to mean ‘some person’s perceptions’. Indeed, interpreting a person’s actions supposes that said person’s perceptions bear significantly on the actions s/he performs. A more sophisticated defence of the perception–independency characteristic would interpret ‘people’s perceptions’ in terms of the observer’s perceptions at the time of observing. But even if we maintain that ‘the meanings held by participants exist independently of the meanings held by social scientists at any given time’, we do not escape a necessary problematization of the researcher/researched relationship. First, because research happens in the context of a relation between researcher and researched. Second, as Gadamer would argue, the researcher brings her own prejudices to research. These prejudices are not biases that could be removed through refined analysis but are, rather, constitutive conditions of the research activity.3 For instance, praiseworthy research on gender inequalities presupposes an assumption by the researcher that there is a distinction between men and women and that this distinction is potentially relevant for understanding inequalities and inequities. More could be said, however, about the ontological problems prompted by the relation between researcher and researched. In particular, the implied division of the world into ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of enquiry indicates that positivism and hermeneutics suffer from the ambiguous ontological status of wo/man as both the (transcendental) subject of knowledge and as the empirical object of study. Positivism either denies subjectivity or attributes subjectivity of a certain kind exclusively to the researcher. Either way, it denies the researched’s subjectivity. Interpretivism is more subtle as it recognizes the subjectivity of both researcher and researched. Yet, two ontological problems arise. The first issue is addressed by Giddens’s discussion of social science’s ‘double hermeneutics’. In Giddens’s view, natural scientists perform a simple hermeneutics4 on natural objects that hold no reflexive powers. The situation is different, however, in the social sciences whose objects of enquiry are also subjects. The latter are therefore capable of acquiring and employing those very concepts and ways of looking used by social researchers. Thus, they perform a ‘double hermeneutic’ consisting in re-interpreting the researcher’s initial interpretations. The unfortunate consequence, for those attached to a detached (i.e. positivist) conception of knowledge, is that those theories used to describe and explain the practices of agents are in turn (and we may add in time) adopted by agents for their subsequent practices. It may be argued, however, that interpretivism can adapt to the problems raised by the double hermeneutics by recognizing the temporality separating the researcher’s initial interpretation from the subsequent interpretations performed by the researched. Interpretivism stumbles, however, on the ontological question of whether the researcher’s initial interpretation can be said to be causally effective on the researched. This leads us to the second ontological problem arising from wo/man’s ambiguous status as both object and subject: does the category of causality apply to thoughts and knowledge? 18

Ontology

Indeed, both positivism and interpretivism assume a Humean conception of causality as event regularities, which creates a dilemma. On one hand, if Humean causality applies to thoughts, then each of our own thoughts would have already been determined by some separate anterior event. Wo/man’s freedom and creativity is thus negated. On the other hand, if thoughts occur in a realm independent of causality, a number of difficulties arise. For instance, it becomes difficult to explain how a person’s thoughts can influence, and be influenced by, other people’s thoughts or by the material relations in which they engage.5 In the remainder of this section, we examine three philosophical traditions, Heideggerian ontology, poststructuralism and critical realism, that have sought in different ways to dis/solve the problems raised by the dual ontological status of wo/man as both object and subject of knowledge.

Heidegger’s return to committed ontology Heidegger’s ontological project is based on a radical redefinition of ontology (Heidegger, 2005[1927]). This project is still viewed by many as the most important contribution to twentiethcentury continental philosophy (see Critchley, 2001; Wheeler, 2013). Its central claim is that the problems of metaphysics (including the divided conception of wo/man as both object and subject inherited from Kant) are traceable to philosophy’s inability to reflect on the meaning of the verb ‘to be’. Thus, before asking ‘what are the different kinds of things that can be said to be?’ Heidegger asks the primordial question: ‘what does being mean?’ By reorienting ontological questioning around the question of the meaning of being, Heidegger opens up a number of new philosophical questions: is being (as a verb) uniform or are there different modes of being? Is our finite existence any different from the presence of those things that surround us? What are the existential conditions of possibility of being’s authentic disclosure as existence rather than as mere presence? And how does a renewed, presumably more authentic, understanding of being allow us to criticize aspects of the epoch in which we live? While Heidegger’s thought is too subtle and complex to be captured satisfactorily in a few lines, we can, however, provide cursory answers to the questions raised above by Heidegger and indicate how his ontology differs from positivism’s. Heidegger’s prose is replete with neologisms and juxtaposes remarks on everyday life with erudite commentary of past philosophers; but most notably, it avoids the expressions ‘man’ and ‘subject’ which were central and constitutive of post-Cartesian philosophy. Heidegger refers instead to ‘those entities which are ourselves’ through the expression Dasein, which literally means ‘being there’ or ‘being here’. This conceptual shift is performed as an attempt to escape from the objectivist limitations of anthropology, psychology and biology (Heidegger, 2005(1927): 45–50). Contrary to positivism, Heidegger proposes that being can take a variety of modalities and that these can be understood pre-scientifically (i.e. more authentically) by attending to our relationship with our familiar environment. Many of the entities that populate our familiar world are related to as equipment. Dasein finds them ready-to-hand and can use them without having to think too much about them. Think for instance of a skilled carpenter manipulating a hammer. In a now-famous paradox, Heidegger proposes that the presence of ready-to-hand entities is revealed precisely when they are damaged or missing! A damaged hammer reveals itself simultaneously as partly ready-tohand and partly present-at-hand. Our carpenter can still use it but she now has to think about it when using it in her familiar activities. The case of the missing hammer is even more telling as the carpenter’s concern reveals fully the previously opaque present-at-hand nature of the hammer. As Heidegger has it ‘when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its 19

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

everyday presence [Zugegensein] has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with and what it was ready to hand for’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, 75). The above passage hints at a conception of the world as constituted by the totality of ‘referential contexts’ of those entities ready-to-hand. Thus, the world is not known through the positive knowledge of independent things in themselves but rather through our circumspection which discloses the totality of involvements through which we relate to ready-to-hand entities. Two characteristics of Dasein follow. First, Dasein is characterized by its fundamental openness as it is continuously interpreting the world in terms of possibilities. Second, not all possibilities are simultaneously disclosed to Dasein. Heidegger refers to the region of Being in which things are revealed as mattering in a certain way (rather than another) by introducing the notion of clearing. Dasein’s mood and its historical heritage (what most social theorists would call its social context) determine which modes of being are more readily disclosed and which tend to remain concealed. In Heidegger’s terminology, mood and heritage determine the clearing that is accessible to Dasein. How does Heidegger’s philosophy allow a critique of positivism’s ontological presuppositions? First, Heidegger argues that the mathematization of science is a symptom rather than a cause of the technological mode of revealing. It is because scientists, like most of their contemporaries (though unlike traditional artisans or romantic poets), are so immersed into the technological mode of being that they are fascinated by mathematical formalisation. Second, Heidegger can say of science’s mode of disclosure that it demands that ‘nature be orderable as standing-reserve’ by requiring that ‘nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information’ (Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 328). It is characteristic of technology’s mode of disclosure that it ‘drives out every possibility of revealing’ and thus enframes and conceals the essentially dynamic unfolding of being. Technological (i.e. objectivist and positivist) thinking involves the view that reality is only susceptible to a single mode of disclosure, thus blinding Dasein to the fundamental structure of being in which any particular clearing is ontologically co-present with an unintelligible plenitude of alternative clearings. In sum, our (social and cultural) heritage conditions the modes of being that may be disclosed to us or that tend to remain mysteriously concealed; and positivism secretes an ontology that is at once particularly reifying and totalizing. It reduces ontological openness to ontic closure and it totalizes its worldview by concealing the concealments that it operates. Heidegger’s ontology discerns the possibility of a dereified conception of being but nonetheless stumbles to describe it accurately in philosophy’s systematic language where, he admits, poets and mystics can venture an extra step.

Post-foundational perspectives: historical and negative ontologies Heidegger’s ontological critique of positivist thinking had a resounding impact on social theory. In particular, it influenced a broad tradition of critical social theory which we refer to as ‘postfoundational perspectives’. This label includes such thinkers as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan and, more recently, Agamben, Butler, Laclau and Žižek. It could very broadly be characterised by a general distrust of grand-narratives such as Comte’s positivist triumphalism (cf. supra) but also historically deterministic interpretations of Hegel or Marx. More specifically, this tradition is united by its scepticism towards the assumption of objectivist forms of knowledge that would (1) presume the existence of epistemological and ontological foundations that are universal or even trans-historical; (2) ignore the historical conditions of possibility of the 20

Ontology

constitution of knowledge, including basic ontologies; and (3) ignore the political effects of knowledge. For simplicity’s sake, we restrict our exposition to the works of Foucault and Laclau. However, many of our arguments remain valid (with occasional tweaks) for the other thinkers cited above. Our discussion of Foucault and Laclau is further channelled by our attentiveness to how they engage, directly or indirectly, with positivism’s ontological presuppositions. Foucault’s historical and critical ontologies of ourselves Foucault’s project of a critical ontology calls for an ongoing critique (i.e. an interrogation of the limits and conditions of possibility) of what we are capable of saying, thinking and doing. Foucault does this by interrogating, through detailed historical studies, the various ways in which we have problematized the practices in which we engage presently (Foucault, 1977, 2005[1966]). This intellectual project has an ethical and practical purpose as it seeks to distinguish possible, and desirable, transgressions to the arbitrary limits constitutive of how we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge, of power relations and of ethical practices. What makes this project of an ontology of ourselves historical? First, Foucault’s studies are more historically specific than those of Kant who studied the assumedly universal contours of the transcendental subject of (objective) knowledge, (moral) action and (founded) judgement. Rather than asking how objective knowledge is possible, Foucault asks under which conditions is a claim to knowledge considered as objective today and, more specifically, how the modern human sciences emerged. Instead of asking how political subjects should organize the polis, he asks under which conditions is an act deemed punishable today and, furthermore, how did our contemporary relations of power emerge from dubious objectifying human sciences and from a typically modern concern with conducting people’s conduct? Note how, whereas Heidegger’s ontological critique of our contemporary epoch stumbled in front of the mystery of presumably possible, though irredeemably enclosed, alternative modes of being (cf. supra), Foucault’s project of a historical ontology interrogates the historical emergence of various horizons of being so as to inspire alternative ways of understanding, of interacting and of cultivating ourselves. In sum, Foucault’s is a philosophical project of uncommitted ontology6 with ethical and political stakes. Laclau’s negative ontology Laclau (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001) extends Foucault’s interrogation of the basic positivities (established and apparently unambiguous concepts) that constitute our knowledge, and of their effects on power relations. Both authors are sceptical towards naively realist conceptions of knowledge that assume a one-to-one correspondence between our representations and the reality they are meant to represent. Both also share the fundamental intuition that systems of knowledge are both a medium and an effect of social relations of power. Laclau, however, clarifies and perhaps radicalizes Foucault’s approach in a number of ways. First, whereas Foucault employed the expression ‘discourse’ in ways covering widely what is said and written, Laclau employs discourse more restrictively. For him, discourse is the basic system of differences through which categories become positive, knowledge becomes objective and statements become meaningful. Discourse, for Laclau, extends beyond recognisably linguistic acts and encompasses non-linguistic practices, as long as the latter are meaningful. Of key significance for Laclau’s thought, discourse is fundamentally incomplete. The fixation of positive identities is ever precarious and contested. First, because the identity of any object is inseparable from what it is not, and second, because what said object is not depends on the discourse in which its identity is inscribed. The resulting picture is that of a negative ontology in which social identities are only artificially fixated by an implicit reference to what they are not. 21

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

Reintroducing and deconstructing materiality The status of materiality in post-foundational ontology has raised significant philosophical and sociological discussions. Deconstructing the common realist distinction between the material and the social, Barad, for example, has used quantum physics to argue that neither material nor human properties precede their interaction, the observation of which (by the researcher) is a ‘cut’ which temporarily instantiates the distinction between the two. Thus the material and the individual are assumed to not exist prior to their interaction, hence the focus on ‘sociomaterial’. In a similar vein, Latour’s Actor–Network Theory presupposes a relational, and antiessentialist ontology that is proudly actualist, rejecting social structures in favour of empirical networks between actors, and arguing that the properties of any actor or entity cannot be ascribed prior to their engagement in an empirical network. Both material objects and actors, therefore, come into being, primarily through their observation in science. For both Barad and Latour, such an approach problematizes not only traditional distinctions between ontology and epistemology, but in doing so, those traditionally made between observers (the individual or ‘science’), the observed (materiality or ‘society’) and the apparatus by which observations are made (technology or experiments).

The critical realist committed ontology Post-foundational thinking provides a powerful deterrent against unqualified metaphysical claims. Does this mean that ontological projects should be restricted to uncommitted ontology and that the prospects of a committed ontology were but an objectivist chimera of the nineteenth century? In this last subsection, we explore an influential – and in our view, promising – attempt proposed by the critical realist movement to argue otherwise. Bhaskar and other authors identifying with ‘critical realism’ (e.g. Archer, Collier, Jessop, Lawson, Norrie, Reed, Sayer, see Archer et al., 2013) defend a humanist realism constitutive of a committed ontology. What are the ontological claims of critical realists (CR) and how are these claims justified? CR’s ontological arguments are structured according to a logics of abduction, that is, of inference to the most plausible hypothesis. Thus CR thinkers start from a description of a practice that both author and reader acknowledge as adequate. Then, they ask what the world must be like for the described practice to hold the characteristics author and reader have agreed on? This interrogation results in a number of competing claims that may further be discussed and refined. Bhaskar (1979) develops transcendental realist arguments for the social sciences, broadly defined as the study of those entities that depend on human activity. His argument begins with everyday social practices. From these he infers that social ontology is necessarily ‘relational’ in the sense that all social entities are defined by and exist in virtue of their relations to other entities. Think for instance of the role of ‘teachers’ who presuppose ‘students’ or ‘parents’ who presuppose ‘children’. Another characteristic of everyday life is that it features agents who hold powers of intentionality and reflexivity. And indeed, we have good reasons to interact with people differently than we do with aubergines. A third characteristic of everyday life is that reasons (whether explicitly formulated or not) are also causes of human action, thus dissolving the hermeneutic dichotomy between reasons and causes. Note that this ontological claim can only be formulated if we replace the Humean conception of causality as event regularity with a realist (Aristotelian) conception of causality as the generation of a difference. Fourth, individuals are not isolated atoms, but evolve within an institutional environment characterized by emergent social structures (systems of positions, relations and conventions) that are inherited from prior generations. Thus, CR defends a dualistic conception of structure and agency that presents similarities and 22

Ontology

sympathies with non-deterministic interpretations of Marx (see for instance Brown et al., 2003). Fifth, the temporal and processual nature of social life is recognized in this social ontology as each new generation of actors continuously adopts, rejects or transforms inherited structures from its predecessors. CR regards social activity as production, that is, as the transformation of pre-existing material causes (Al-Amoudi and Latsis, 2014: 371; Bhaskar, 1979: 34). Finally, CR ontology proposes a neat theorization of absence and need, thus recasting ethical concerns at the heart of sociological enquiry. The resulting picture of Bhaskar’s ontological investigations is one in which social identities are emergent from, though irreducible to, the interactions of humans, who have powers of memory, imagination, reflexivity. The latter are again dependent on, but irreducible to the interaction of a complexity of physiological, psychological and neurological structures, and so on. But emergence does not only occur ‘down’ – if we look ‘up’ from humans, we can see a number of emergent social entities which are dependent upon humans for their production and reproduction, but are not reducible to individuals. Thus, social structures, such as class, gender and organizations, are certainly dependent upon humans for their existence, but cannot be understood at the level of the individual, and have their own properties and (potential) powers, one of which is the ability to socialize humans that inhabit these social structures. At this point, it might be possible to highlight how CR’s ontology stands in diametrical opposition to that of positivism. Let us reconsider the five ontological features of positivism in reverse order. First, reality is not only made of discrete or additive physical things but also encompasses entities that are not necessarily concrete, discrete or additive. Real entities include, for instance, ideas, relations, mechanisms, powers. Second, CR holds that relations are real and that the activities of complex emergent entities can’t be explained solely in terms of the activities of simpler entities that compose them. Emergence is not a mere epistemological artefact but is, rather, a central ontological category. Third, while CR recognizes that the objects of natural science can and should be assumed to exist independently of our perception, this conceptindependence does not hold in the case of the social and human sciences whose objects may temporarily exist independently of the researcher’s perception but never independently of anyone’s perception. Fourth, while impermanence and stillness are deeply problematic for positivism, CR assumes that entities are continuously engaged in activity and that they are subject to continuously changing tendencies. Fifth, CR does not assume that entities are governed by universal laws expressed by event regularities. Entities are assumed, instead, to be subject to powers and tendencies that may or may not be actualized depending on their specific context. Scientific knowledge does not consist in being able to make accurate predictions as much as it consists in being able to provide explanations that are plausible, coherent and helpful.

Ontology in organization studies It should be stated clearly that ontological studies offer no substitute for substantive enquiries of organizing and organization. Thus, scholars interested in ontology and the social sciences sometimes find it useful to establish some distinction between, on the one hand, ontological discussions aiming at disambiguating basic concepts and entities so as to facilitate future substantive research and, on the other, substantive enquiries aiming at studying specific organizational configurations, usually with the help of previous ontological ground clearing. The distinctiveness, and insufficiency, of ontology is recognized both by critical realists and by post-foundational scholars alike. Thus, in the critical realist tradition, Fleetwood and Ackroyd (2004) distinguish between (1) meta-theoretical studies which address questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics; (2) methodological studies which develop methods of analysis compatible with a given ontological 23

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

framework; and (3) substantive studies that study specific institutions or organizations. The difference between meta-theory and substantive enquiry is mirrored, in the post-foundational tradition, by Ezzamel and Willmott (2014: 1015–16) who discern ‘two paths of theory development’. While the first path corresponds roughly to what we are designating here as substantive enquiry, the second corresponds to (a post-positivist variant of) meta-theory. We understand that most researchers in organization studies are more interested in substantive studies than in ontology per se. Yet, while it can be argued that ontology is vacuous in the absence of substantive enquiry, it is equally the case that substantive enquiry is blind in the absence of ontological reflection. Moreover, while ontology is conventionally presented as logically and chronologically anterior to substantive enquiry, the relationship between both practices is iterative rather than linear. On one hand, ontological reflection develops by interrogating factual premises (Descartes’s cogito; Heidegger’s missing hammer; Foucault’s late appearance of ‘sexuality’; Bhaskar’s possibility of experiments). On the other, philosophy is never applied; it is always interpreted. Thus, it is not a matter of getting the ontology ‘right’ before getting the substantive enquiry ‘right’. There is, instead, an ongoing iteration between ontological reflexion based on the finding of previous substantive enquiries and refined substantive enquiries informed by renewed ontological reflection. In defining what exists, what can exist, and the relationality of what exists, ontology acts as an ‘underlabourer’ for understanding not only what organizations are, how they come into being and how they are related to other entities, but also, for those for whom ontology contains a critical or ethical aspect, what they should be. The potential of any study’s theorizing and methodology is, therefore, enabled and constrained by its implied or espoused ontology, as the principles of what exists determine what theories can realistically achieve. Yet, there is no oneto-one match between ontologies and approaches to organizational theorizing: as we see below, different perspectives on organizations can hold radically different descriptive, predictive and prescriptive orientations but still share an ontological underpinning.

Positivist approaches to organization studies Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis provided, as early as 1979, an early attempt to break-out of the hegemony7 of positivist assumptions in organization studies. Their purpose was to identify internally consistent alternatives to the dominant positivist and regulationist paradigm (think Talcott Parsons) in organization studies. Yet, thirty-five years on, positivism still holds the dominant position in studies of management and organizations and, especially in the organizational psychology literature. Within positivist approaches, it may be possible to distinguish between those that treat individuals as their basic unit of analysis and those that focus instead on organizational features. Individualistic approaches. This form of theorizing frequently assumes that the quantification of empirical events, combined with correlation analyses, uncovers generalizable laws that can predict future events. For such approaches, organizations are closed systems, similar to laboratories, in which policy decisions concerning, say, piece-rate systems, will effect predictable outcomes, such as increased output per worker, and thus provide a clear prescription for management. Historically, although the relations between positivism and organization emerged with industrialisation and the scientific management approach of Taylor, Fayol and others, it has proved remarkably resilient, emerging in different guises in human relations and bureaucratic forms of organizing. Today, while the proliferation of ‘enterprise’ IT systems and ‘big data’ offers researchers and managers fertile ground for positivist research, there are scant indications that these approaches are likely to be perturbed by the philosophical interrogation of their 24

Ontology

ontological assumptions. With its one-dimensional approach to conceptualizing the agent, positivist individualism also underpins many ‘rationalist’ approaches to organizations, such as transaction cost economics, agency theory, population ecology, and institutional economics. These approaches borrow the anti-relational and atomistic assumptions that positivism makes of objects (cf. section on positivism above) and apply it to the individual, not only denying the part sociality and subjectivity play in organizational life, but also undermining attempts to study the latter by exploring people’s identities, relations, and groupings. Structural–functionalist accounts. Yet, positivist rationality is not confined to accounts of individuals. It is also combined with, and developed by, an acceptance of social structures in structural–functionalist accounts of organizations. Thus the functionalist accounts of organizations promoted by say Mayo and Parsons emphasize not only the role of organizations as part of systems of society, but also the role of these social structures in reproducing the forms of rationality that allowed systemic or organizational efficiency. Thus, for organization theorists this invited explorations of how best to structure companies, by arranging labour, standardizing tasks and implementing technology to maximize productivity and efficiency. Again, such approaches have hardly fallen out of fashion and still provide the mainstay of many management consulting products and services that currently shape organizational practice. The dominance of positivism in corporations, business schools and publishing however, is not complete and there are a few notable and promising exceptions, to which we now turn.

Orthodox Marxist approaches The ontological acceptance of social structures does not mandate a prescription or description of functionalist harmony. A dissenting voice is provided by Marxist thought which, while realist and structuralist, is, in its theory and ethical implications, distinct from functional modes of thought which prioritize stability and cohesion. The implied ontology of Marx’s work, while still very much under debate, focuses on material dialectics which takes the mode of production as the engine for structural conflict and change. This focus provided organizational theorists, such as Braverman, with a framework to retrace the effects of wider social (class) conflict on capitalist organizations. The subsequent rise of the Labour Process school used Marxist thinking to underpin a diverse flourishing of studies of unions, resistance and workplace conflict which only lost its dominant critical position with the rise of avowedly anti-leftist governments (and the subsequent demise of leftist academic funding policies) in the 1980s. While it would be stretching the truth to posit Marxist organizational analysis as a dominant strand in extant critical organizational analysis, it has recently gained a resurgence as critical realist authors (many ex-Marxists themselves) have argued not only that Marx was a proto-critical realist, but that critical realism develops, and can be developed by, a coupling with Marxism (see Brown et al., 2001).

Critical realism Although there exist non-deterministic interpretations of Marxist thought that display an implicit ontology very close to critical realism’s, the former has declined in popularity in organization studies while the latter has grown. While early sociological interest in critical realism focused on those areas traditionally associated with Marxist organization studies (e.g. trade unions; power and resistance) the prolific output of Margaret Archer on questions of agency and reflexivity has prompted a diversification of studies of society, people and organization inspired by critical realism. Indeed, much of critical realism’s progress in organization studies has come from attempts 25

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

to provide clear and coherent ontological foundations for topics that have traditionally been addressed by ontologically uncommitted post-foundational writers. In recent years there has been a significant growth in management and organization studies using critical realism to provide alternatives to the ‘flat’ approaches of social constructionism and practice ontologies. The result has been a reintroduction of both structure and agency to discussions of discourse (Fairclough, 2013), identity (Marks and O’Mahoney, 2014), and information technology (Mutch, 2013), as well as the more traditional concerns of economics (Fleetwood, 1999), Marxism (Adler, 2011) and class (Sayer, 2005) – although the latter tend to be much more prevalent in sociological journals than those of organization studies. This diversification of critical realism is reflected in a recent edited collection by Edward et al. (2014) which considers the consequences of relying on critical realism in a variety of methodological positions as varied as grounded theory, ethnography and probability modelling, as well as more traditional approaches.

Post-foundational approaches The philosophical contributions identified earlier as ‘post-foundational’ provided a fertile theoretical ground for OS scholars who felt sceptical of the claims of positivism and functionalism to objective, apolitical, knowledge. However, rather than seeking – as CR does – to correct the ontological flaws of positivism, these approaches are marked by their uncommitted stance to ontology. The latter is, in their view, most interesting when it helps unearthing and deconstructing the ontological, theoretical and ethical presuppositions of organizational participants. From these post-foundational perspectives, the practice of ontological questioning is driven less by an interest in metaphysical knowledge than by an interest in understanding the political implications of participants’ ontological assumptions. In other words, participants’ ontologies are of interest because of their performative and political effects on organizations. Foucauldian approaches Foucault has been one of the most influential sources of ontological underlabouring in organization studies and inspired a profusion of identity and discourse studies from the nineties onwards. Early studies (e.g. by David Knights, Peter Miller and Barbara Townley) responded to changing organizational forms by emphasizing both the constructive effects of the new management discourses found in HRM, Total Quality Management and Business Process Re-engineering, and the self-disciplinary effects of the ‘electronic panopticon’ that was enabled by new technologies. In recent years scholars such as Thomas and Hardy (2011) have problematized and extended studies of organizational change by relying on Foucault’s conception of power as a cluster of relations rather than as a substance possessed by some (privileged) agents. Contemporary Foucauldian studies of interest also include critical interrogations of organizational truth-telling (Weiskopf, 2014) and decision-making (Weiskopf and Willmott 2013). Central to these approaches is the idea that ‘truth-telling’ (parhesia) and ethics should be viewed as practices of questioning, rather than merely following, moral orders and moral rules-in-use. In general, the works cited above inherited from Foucault an uncommitted interest in ontology that is more concerned with the ethical and political possibilities opened by (constantly) interrogating organizational orders than with the (self-deceptive) quest for social reality’s ultimate ontological foundations. Negative ontology In recent years, the influence of Butler, Lacan, Laclau and Žižek has grown in organization studies. As we pointed out above, these authors share a scepticism towards narratives claiming 26

Ontology

universality and towards identities claiming unquestionable stability. Their ontology is marked by attentiveness both to hegemony (when discursive stability becomes all but unquestionable) and to negativity (at the root, they contend, of all forms of positivity). Remarkable contributions to organization studies include debates on the labour process with critical realist scholars. Thus, Contu and Willmott (2005) engaged with Reed’s (2005) critical realist agenda. More recently, O’Doherty and Willmott (2009) provided a detailed illustration on how negative ontology can deepen the analysis of the labour process in creative industries. For instance, by attending to participants’ (unpaid) efforts to preserve their precarious sense of identity or by tracing the dislocation of the workplace’s traditional spatial and temporal boundaries into networks of workers–entrepreneurs in which participants commit 18+ hours of their lives every day. Other notable approaches inspired by Žižek and Lacan include Fleming and Sturdy’s (2009) study of neo-normative control, that is, forms of control based on the ontologically absurd and politically self-defeating injunction to ‘just be oneself’. Actor–Network Theory A number of organization studies theorists have drawn on Latour’s (1987) Actor–Network Theory to explain the settlement of controversies and the establishment of actor–networks composed of an ontologically undifferentiated arrangement of people, facts and machines. Key contributions include Bajde (2013) as well as substantive studies that combine ANT with other approaches such as historical ontology (Valentine, 2007) or Science and Technology Studies (Quattrone and Hopper, 2006). In a similar vein, researchers have espoused sociomaterial ontologies (e.g. from Haraway and Barad) which, like Latour, do not distinguish between the social and the material, to address the perceived neglect of the material in organization studies, or at least as a counter to the ostensible determinism of materiality found in Marxism or traditional studies of technology. Process perspectives Process ontologies have inspired studies of organization that emphasize the temporal and ‘becoming’ aspects of organizing. These, drawing on the work of Bergson and Whitehead propose that ‘individuals and organizations are construed as temporarily stabilized event clusters abstracted from a sea of constant flux and change’ (Nayak and Chia, 2011: 281). Process ontologies have influenced a number of organizational writers, including Weick’s studies of social constructionism and Mary-Jo Hatch’s work on organizational culture and Tsoukas and Chia’s (2002) influential reflections on organizational change. McMurray (2010), for example, uses Chia’s approach to better understand change in the NHS, while making an argument for its use of ‘standard research methods for novel processual ends’; while Zhang et al. (2011) present the case for a process ontology underlying the leadership assumptions in Chinese Confucianism. Postcolonial critiques of Western ontologies These approaches are broadly inspired by postcolonial studies initiated by Bhabha, Said and Spivak. One root argument is that academic institutions are ‘workplaces engaged in the ideological production of neo-colonialism’ (Spivak, 1988: 210). Ontological discourse is no exception. The latter’s claims to universality can be problematized, reversed and interrogated as indications of ontology’s imperialistic tendencies. Though relatively small and marginal, there exists a healthy and growing literature in organization studies that problematizes and politicizes the West’s knowledge claims. This literature draws on diverse sources of inspiration fragmented across political studies, literature, geographic studies, history and anthropology. Notable contributions to management and 27

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

organization studies include Banerjee and Linstead (2004), Dar and Cooke (2008), Henry and Pene (2001) and Prasad (2003).

Philosophical though not ontological: ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism Ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism have both been influential approaches in studies of society and organization. The absence of explicit mentions of ‘ontology’ in works identified by their authors as contributions to ethnomethodology or symbolic interactionism (in organization studies) is slightly surprising. Indeed, both approaches display a relatively high degree of reflexivity and (non-positivist) methodological awareness. Two compatible and mutually reinforcing explanations may be ventured. First, a historical/ genealogical explanation would consider the intellectual ancestry of both approaches. Ethnomethodology is most commonly traced to Garfinkel and symbolic interactionism to Goffman. Both authors acknowledge the key influence of sociologist of everyday life Alfred Schütz while Garfinkel refers in his Studies in Ethnomethodology to sceptics of ontology such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. A second, complementary, explanation would venture that both ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism have diffused and developed (sometimes beyond recognition) precisely because they harboured a ‘tool box’ ethos that favoured numerous though loosely related guidelines and successful exemplars over systematic methodologies or ontological reflection. Whether this lack of ontological reflection is problematic is best left, in the context of the present entry, as an open question for future investigation.

Conclusion: future developments Our principle argument is that ontological theorizing has the power to emancipate organization studies from conventional restrictions relative to the research questions; the scope of analysis; the methods of study; the objects of study; the ethical injunctions and the doubts thus raised. Our discussion of ontology in philosophy and in organization studies is meant as an introduction or a refresher rather than an exhaustive exposition or, worse, a toolkit. If anything, the idea that philosophical ideas may be ‘applied’ is fraught with dangers for researchers in organization studies. Philosophy has to be carefully interpreted and can never be automatically translated. No methodological toolkit can ever dispense researchers from engaging in continuous philosophical reflection on the questions they ask, on the way they define their objects of analysis, on the practices in which they engage and on the occasional inconsistencies between theory and practice. That ontology is always to be interpreted and never to be automatically translated brings implications. First, it follows that debate in organizational theory should be understood as a sign of healthy growth rather than a symptom of pre-scientific instability. And indeed, the refinement and clarification of philosophical ideas usually takes the form of (oft lively) debate. Thus, we can witness debates in OS as to whether Foucault’s implicit ontology is best interpreted as (critically) realist (Al-Amoudi, 2007) or as Nietzschean (Bardon and Josserand, 2011). Similarly, Actor–Network Theory has also been the topic of multiple ontological debates. In particular, critical realist organizational theorists such as Mutch (2013) have criticized ANT’s ontological flatness while arguing that without an acceptance of structure or agency as distinct from discourse, explanations tend towards the tautological. However, the critique of post-foundational theorising 28

Ontology

is not an exclusively realist warhorse: for example, Whittle and Spicer (2008) question, from a negative ontology perspective, whether ANT provides the resources for thoroughly critical research. The second implication of the impossibility of translating ontology automatically into useful and rigorous research is that it is quite perilous to predict the future of ontological theorizing in organization studies. We nonetheless close this entry by sketching, very briefly, six developments in ontology which may bear significantly on the future of organization studies. We do so while acknowledging that the specific formulation of these future developments and our interest in them are influenced by our identification with the critical realist programme and our sympathetic curiosity towards Foucauldian scholarship. 1 Encouraging multiple and novel methods of enquiry. In economics (Lawson, 1997), ontological reflection on the nature of social reality attempted to break with the fetishistic treatment of quantitative data and mathematical modelling as signs of intellectual rigour. Rigour, it was instead argued, stems from the adequacy of the tool with the object of analysis. While the situation is not as dire in organization studies as in economics, a glance at the table of contents of the leading North American journals indicates a dominance of quantitative, positivistic, studies (cf. supra). Perhaps ontological reflection could continue the project initiated in the 1970s by Burrell and Morgan of legitimizing different approaches to studying organizations. In particular, while qualitative approaches are increasingly accepted, they are still subject to positivist ontological assumptions and related injunctions (i.e. ‘let the data speak’) that are ill suited to studying such entities as: becoming, meaning, subjectivity or social relations (as opposed to frequencies or social transactions). 2 Asking and reflecting on ‘what is?’ questions. The ontological question par excellence, ‘what is X?’ could perhaps be fruitfully asked for the entities that populate the discourse of organization studies. There exist already a number of works of ontology that interrogate the nature of basic social entities such as conventions (Al-Amoudi and Latsis, 2014); rules (Al-Amoudi, 2010); institutions (Lawson, 2003); technology (Faulkner et al., 2010) and values (Sayer, 2011). However, these works are still restricted to sociology, economics and social theory and have not, to our knowledge, been widely discussed and incorporated into research on organizational phenomena. 3 Completing ‘what is?’ questions with ‘how did?’ and ‘what does it do?’ questions. Our review of the literature has revealed the centrality of processuality and of interrelationality in nonpositivist approaches to ontology. These meta-theoretical ideas have concrete relevance for substantive research in organizations. Indeed, authors who recognize the processuality of being will want to ask the historical question: ‘how did X come to being?’ where X is a social entity of interest. For them, organization studies should bear a fundamentally historical dimension exemplified by Roy Jacques’s fine study of the birth of the employee (Jacques, 1995). Similarly, authors writing from an ontological stance that recognizes the internal-relationality of social entities should be open and interested in interrogations of the conditions of possibility and the effects of those social entities they study. Foucauldian studies of power/knowledge are one example. More generally, attentiveness to the social construction of knowledge prompts interrogating the effects of the ontological categories employed by participants in organizations (see for instance Al-Amoudi and Willmott, 2011). 4 Ethical and political implications of post-positivist ontologies. The break with positivist ontology and epistemology encourages forms of research that recognize and even vindicate their ethical or political dimension. Recent examples basing ethical interrogation on a negative ontology include Ezzamel and Willmott’s (2014) interrogation of an ethical register of theory formation 29

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

or Weiskopf and Willmott’s (2013) re-assessment of the case of the Pentagon Papers. Among critical realists, Collier (1999) and Sayer (2011) have built on Bhaskar’s sophisticated ontological theorizing to interrogate the nature of worth and its relation to the social sciences. While these developments mixing ethics, politics, social theory and organization studies are promising, they are still marginal and embryonic in management studies. 5 Enriching our craft as organizational theorists through critical discussions of the ontology of established authors. Philosophy and ontology should not be seen as ‘banks of knowledge’ featuring methods, concepts and data to be used by scientists. Rather, familiarity with philosophy and social theory sharpens one’s ability to do good research. Through continuous reading in philosophy, we develop an eye for complex systems of dependencies, unavowable conflicts of interests, mystifications of (power) relations and sado-masochistic identifications. The beneficial effects on our craft may include drawing links across the humanities and the social sciences or building more coherent arguments. Most importantly, it involves developing a sense of the societal, political and intellectual stakes inherent to those situations we study. Thus, we suggest that familiarity with philosophical and ontological work has the potential to emancipate our research from the narrow perspectives imposed by hegemonic actors (including management as a social group) on the rest of society. 6 Keeping up with ongoing ontological debates within philosophy. As a final remark: discussions on topics related to ontology are lively in the realm of philosophy and social theory. One can think, within the post-foundational tradition, of Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception as the (negative) foundation of the modern state. And, within the realist tradition, one can start to imagine the import for organization studies of the current discussions on emergence and status functions between the Berkley Social Ontology Group (founded by John Searle) and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group (founded by Tony Lawson). These ontological elaborations are in the making and it would be presumptuous to guess their points of stabilization. It can reasonably be expected, however, that these discussions and others yet to follow, will continue to inspire, challenge, infuriate and exasperate organization studies for quite some time.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

The word ‘entity’ (derived from the Latin ens, to be) refers to anything that is. Contrary to a common misconception, entities can be relational, concept-dependent and processual. The approaches presented in this entry are exclusively inherited from Western philosophies. This partiality reflects both the poverty of our knowledge of non-Western philosophies and the dominance of Western conceptions in organization studies. For discussions of the impossibility of objectivism, see the entries on Epistemology (Scherer et al., Chapter 2 this volume) and Decision-making (Edward, Chapter 29 this volume). We leave with Giddens the responsibility of describing the activities of natural scientists as hermeneutics. Even approaches that privilege ‘conversations’ and ‘narratives’ assume that participants will hear, and be influenced by one another. To say that Foucault’s project consisted in an explicitly uncommitted ontology does not mean that he was not himself implicitly committed to ontological assumptions. See for instance Al-Amoudi (2007). Recall that hegemony consists in presenting a discourse as the only possible system of categories.

References (key texts in bold) Adler, P.S. (2011). Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist contributions to the understanding of some important organizational forms. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32: 123–53. Al-Amoudi, I. (2007). Redrawing Foucault’s social ontology. Organization, 14(4): 543–64. Al-Amoudi, I. (2010). Immanent non-algorithmic rules: an ontological study of social rules. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40(3): 289–313. 30

Ontology

Al-Amoudi, I. and Latsis, J. (2014). The arbitrariness and normativity of social conventions. The British Journal of Sociology, 65(2): 358–78. Al-Amoudi, I. and Willmott, H. (2011). Where constructionism and realism converge: interrogating the domain of epistemological relativism. Organization Studies, 32(1): 27–46. Archer, M.S. et al. (eds) (2013). Critical Realism: essential readings. London: Routledge. Bajde, D. (2013). Consumer culture theory (re)visits actor–network theory: flattening consumption studies. Marketing Theory, 13(2): 227–42. Banerjee, S.B. and Linstead, S. (2004). Masking subversion: neocolonial embeddedness in anthropological accounts of indigenous management. Human Relations, 57(2): 221–47. Bardon, T. and Josserand, E. (2011). A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming. Organization, 18(4): 497–515. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The Possibility of Naturalism: a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Brown, A., Fleetwood, S. and Roberts, J. (2001). Critical Realism and Marxism. London: Routledge. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann Educational. Collier, A. (1999). Being and Worth. London: Routledge. Contu, A. and Willmott, H. (2005). You spin me round: the realist turn in organization and management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 42(8): 1645–62. Critchley, S. (2001). Continental Philosophy. a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dar, S. and Cooke, B. (2008). The New Development Management: critiquing the dual modernization. London: Zed Books. Edward, P., O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (2014). Putting Critical Realism into Practice: a guide to research methods in organization studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2014). Registering ‘the ethical’ in organization theory formation: towards the disclosure of an ‘invisible force’. Organization Studies, 35(7): 1013–39. Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: the critical study of language. London and New York: Routledge. Faulkner, P., Lawson, C. and Runde, J. (2010). Theorising technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1): 1–16. Fleetwood, S. (ed.) (1999). Critical Realism in Economics: development and debate. London: Routledge. Fleetwood, S. and Ackroyd, S. (eds) (2004). Critical Realist Applications in Organisation and Management Studies. London: Routledge. Fleming, P. and Sturdy, A. (2009). Just be yourself! Employee Relations, 31(6): 569–83. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2005[1966]) The Order of Things. London: Taylor & Francis e-library. Heidegger, M. (1993[1953]). The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by Lovitt, W. with revisions by Krell, D.F., in Krell, D.F. (ed.), Martin Heidegger: basic writings. London: Routledge, pp. 311–41. Heidegger, M. (2005[1927]). Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Henry, E. and Pene, H. (2001). Kaupapa Maori: Locating indigenous ontology, epistemology and methodology in the Academy. Organization, 2001(8): 234–42. Jacques, R. (1995). Manufacturing the Employee: management knowledge from the 19th to 21st centuries. London: Sage. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawson, T. (1997). Economics and Reality. London: Routledge. Lawson, T. (2003). Institutionalism: on the need to firm up notions of social structure and the human subject. Journal of Economic Issues, 37(1): 175–207. McMurray, R. (2010). Tracing experiences of NHS change in England: a process philosophy perspective. Public Administration, 88(3): 724–40. Marks, A. and O’Mahoney, J. (2014). Researching identity: a critical realist approach, in Edward, P., O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (eds), Putting Critical Realism into Practice: a guide to research methods in organization studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mutch, A. (2013). Sociomateriality – taking the wrong turning? Information and Organization, 23(1): 28–40. 31

Ismaël Al-Amoudi and Joe O’Mahoney

Nayak, A. and Chia, R. (2011). Thinking becoming and emergence: process philosophy and organization studies. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32: 281–309. O’Doherty, D. and Willmott, H. (2009). The decline of labour process analysis and the future sociology of work. Sociology, 43(5): 931–51. Prasad, A. (ed.) (2003). Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Quattrone, P. and Hopper, T. (2006). What is IT?: SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation. Information and Organization, 16(3): 212–50. Reed, M. (2005). Reflections on the ‘realist turn’ in organization and management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 42(8): 1621–44. Sayer, A. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayer, A. (2011). Why Things Matter to People: social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G.C. (1988). In Other Worlds: essays in cultural politics. New York: Routledge. Thomas, R. and Hardy, C. (2011). Reframing resistance to organizational change. Scandinavian Journal of Management. 27(3): 322–31. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5): 567–82. Valentine, K. (2007). Methadone maintenance treatment and making up people. Sociology, 41(3): 497–514. Weiskopf, R. (2014). Ethical–aesthetic critique of moral organization: inspirations from Michael Haneke’s cinematic work. Culture and Organization, 20(2): 152–74. Weiskopf, R. and Willmott, M. (2013). Ethics as critical practice: the ‘Pentagon Papers’, deciding responsibly, truth-telling, and the unsettling of organizational morality. Organization Studies (01708406), 34(4): 469–93. Wheeler, M. (2013). Martin Heidegger, in Zalta, E.N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, E.N. Zalta (ed.), retrieved on 28 June 2015 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/ heidegger/. Whittle, A. and Spicer, A. (2008). Is actor network theory critique? Organization Studies, 29(4): 611–29. Zhang, H., Cone, M., Everett, A. and Elkin, G. (2011). Aesthetic leadership in Chinese business: a philosophical perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 101(3): 475–91.

32

2 Epistemology Philosophical foundations and organizational controversies Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the possibility of knowledge. In this chapter we show how understanding epistemology is essential for understanding the different ways in which knowledge is developed in organization studies. For that purpose, we begin by introducing philosophical foundations of epistemology and explain why and how knowledge is defined as ‘justified true belief’. We then go on to analyse the assumptions on which different epistemic systems within organization studies are based. Following this analysis, we build on constructivist philosophy to address the incommensurability of different epistemic systems.

Philosophical foundations Following Plato’s writings in the Theaetetus, philosophers traditionally defined knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ (Plato, 369 BC/2014). Beliefs we have may concern phenomena that are commonly encountered in everyday life. To demonstrate the difference between mere beliefs and ‘knowledge’ about something, it is necessary to define how a belief is transformed into knowledge. As we will see, different philosophical positions provide different answers to why and how beliefs need to be true and justified in order to be called knowledge (Moser, 2005).

Truth and justification Truth is the property a belief needs to fulfil in order to be called a true belief. For defining when a belief can be called a true belief we need to know what truth is – which is answered differently depending on one’s philosophical position. Justification, as an additional property a belief needs to fulfil in order to be called knowledge, becomes relevant in different ways, also 33

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

depending on one’s philosophical position. The key distinction is that some philosophers see justification as a property of a belief that exists independently of truth; that is, justification transforms beliefs, which are true already, into knowledge. Other philosophers see justification as constitutive for both truth and knowledge; that is, justification transforms a belief into both true belief and knowledge. To explain those differences in more detail we now introduce three common theories of truth and their relation to justification in epistemological inquiry: correspondence theory, coherence theory, and consensus theory (for a more details overview on different relations between truth, justification, and knowledge see Audi 2010). We first turn to a case where truth and justification of a belief jointly but independently of each other form knowledge. Correspondence theory of truth (e.g. Moore, 1953; Russell,1912) defines a belief as being true when it corresponds to the phenomenon to which it pertains. Correspondence theory relies on a realist ontological assumption – the phenomenon that a belief mirrors exists as a separate entity in an external world, which is independent of its observer (for a more detailed explanation of ontology see the preceding chapter). It follows that, by comparing a belief with the objectively and independently existing phenomenon to which it corresponds, it is possible to define whether that belief is true or not. From an epistemological perspective, in this context it is possible that one accidentally holds a true belief, for example out of a lucky guess (e.g. Steup, 2014). This suggests that it is not sufficient for a true belief to mirror a phenomenon correctly in order to be defined as knowledge. In order to be recognized as knowledge, a true belief has to fulfil a second condition – it needs to be justified. Justification describes what legitimate ways are available to generate knowledge. When guessing becomes eliminated as a legitimate way, a lucky guess remains a belief that is indeed true but cannot be called knowledge. Consequently, when following a correspondence theory of truth, justification becomes constitutive for knowledge, but not for the truth of a belief. There are also cases in which truth and justification of a belief can be seen as interdependent and justification as constitutive both for truth of a belief and knowledge. For example, coherence theory of truth (e.g. Blanshard, 1939; Young, 2001) does not define correspondence of a belief to an objectively given and independently existing phenomenon as constitutive for truth. Instead, a belief about a phenomenon can be called a true belief when it is part of a system of true beliefs that is in itself coherent from a logical perspective. This definition of ‘true belief’ does not require the comparison of a belief with a phenomenon as an objectively and independently existing entity in an external world but rests on how beliefs interrelate. From an epistemological perspective, defining appropriate relationships between beliefs (in the case of coherence theory it is coherence) can be seen as a part of the context in which a belief is generated, and therefore as a form of justification. This means that, if one seeks to define what knowledge is out of a coherence theorist’s view, a fully justified belief is always true and a true belief is automatically justified. Justification appears not only to be constitutive for knowledge, but on a more fundamental level constitutive for truth as well. Consensus theorists (e.g. Habermas, 1984) also view justification as constitutive for both knowledge and truth. Like coherence theorists, they do not espouse the ontological idea of truth as a matter of correspondence with objectively and independently existing phenomena. Instead they define a belief as being true when all people that are affected by it agree that this belief is true. But, as Habermas (1989) puts it, consensus that accidentally exists between people without them having engaged in a discourse before cannot be called truth. Only following predefined rules of a discourse as the appropriate process for generating belief to reach or discover consensus is constitutive for calling the agreed upon belief a true belief. The discourse can be seen as the context in which a belief is generated and therefore as a source of justification that turns accidental 34

Epistemology

agreement into truth or creates agreement and therefore truth where disagreement had existed before. And precisely because this true belief is justified through the discourse it can not only be called true but at the same time knowledge. Consequently, here as well justification is constitutive for knowledge and truth alike (for Habermas’ most recent ideas on the relation between truth and justification, see Habermas, 2003). The difference between coherence theorists and consensus theorists of truth lies in the form of justification they emphasize – while coherence theorists draw upon the logical relationship between beliefs, consensus theorists define a procedure, namely social interaction in a discourse, as a source of justification. In the following we will elaborate in more detail on various forms of justification. We discuss different sources of justification and different relationships that can arise between beliefs to put the findings from above into a broader epistemological perspective.

Sources of justification Evidentialists (e.g. Conee and Feldman, 1985) state that any form of perceptual, introspective, memorial, or intuitional experience that is in support of a person’s belief counts as evidence for this belief being true and therefore as a source of justification. All this evidence stems from cognitive processes internal to a person and, according to evidentialists, does not require any additional source of validation. Note that ‘evidence’ here is not to be confused with what is generally understood by ‘external evidence’; that is, the sort of evidence or data that is collected for the purpose of assessing whether a belief is or is not true. For the evidentialist, such data is an external source of information that triggers an internal cognitive process in the person who holds a belief, while evidence is the result or experience that is produced by this internal process. Reliabilists (e.g. Goldman, 1967) would not necessarily oppose evidentialism, but consider it incomplete. In their view, experiences that are internal to a person can only be seen as valid justifications for true beliefs if this internal source of justification is a reliable source. One must be sure that the cognitive processes that make those experiences salient work reliably and therefore do not deceive a person in her perception. Since the internal cognitive processes of a person are the ones that need to be evaluated as reliable, the evaluating authority cannot be the person herself. To justify a true belief, an external source of justification needs to ensure that a person’s cognitive processes are applied correctly and work reliably so that the observer holds a true belief for the right reasons, not just as a result of good luck. Note that, when two individuals independently from each other form identical beliefs about the same phenomenon, in a reliabilist’s understanding neither observer can be treated as the external source of justification for the other observer’s belief. They are indeed two observers externally to each other, but they both form a belief with reference to the phenomenon they form beliefs about. What is needed according to epistemological reliabilists is an external source of justification that would assure the reliability of the cognitive processes of both observers, independent of any findings regarding the phenomenon under observation. What both evidentialists and reliabilists have in common is that justification of a belief is established with reference to the individual holding that belief and the internal cognitive processes of this individual. Social epistemology (e.g. Goldman, 1999; Kitcher,1993) takes an alternative approach. Whether somebody’s internal cognitive processes work reliably or not becomes a minor question when social interaction is the main device to transcend subjectivity in beliefs. As mentioned before, consensus theorists define conditions under which a discourse can produce agreement between numerous individuals that can legitimately represent truth, for example the conditions of Habermas’ ideal speech situation (Habermas, 1984, 2003). Those conditions focus on regulating the interaction between all who participate in a discourse about 35

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

truth. It follows that not only the construction of a belief over reality and the construction of reality itself become closely intertwined if not the same (Habermas and Luhmann, 1971), but also the source of justification. When following the rules that define and guide participation in social interaction, any belief that is established as a true belief in this social interaction is justified by adherence to those rules. Since truth is constructed in social interaction and agreement defines that truth, everybody who holds the same true belief and has participated in its construction process can be considered to hold this true belief with justified reason. It follows that justification no longer exists with reference to an isolated individual holding that belief (as it is the case for evidentialists and reliabilists), but is established with reference to the social, meaning the interaction between several individuals during the process of belief formation and defence.

Relationships between beliefs Regardless of whether justification refers to the individual that holds a belief or to the interaction between several individuals that hold the same belief, justifying a belief requires that one examines how perception forms this belief and how various interrelated beliefs are connected in a logical way. Foundationalists (e.g. Descartes, 1637[2004]) claim that, since a belief might be justified by another belief which, in turn, is justified by another belief as well, one needs to have a set of ‘basic beliefs’ that are considered as being true without the requirement of any additional justification. Basic beliefs therefore do not need to refer to another belief to be justified. Without such basic beliefs, epistemology would be trapped in infinite regress. Coherentists (e.g. BonJour, 1985, Lewis, 1946), on the other hand, avoid the problem of infinite regress by stating that beliefs do not need to form a chain of hierarchical reference points, but that all beliefs regarding a phenomenon qualify as justified as long as they collectively represent a coherent picture of this phenomenon and do not contain any contradictions. This view enables them to not only escape the problem of infinite regress, but also the tricky question of what exactly is it that defines a basic belief as basic and in itself justified.

Knowledge and values The emergence of social epistemology as a relatively new branch of philosophy has broadened the range of answers to various epistemological questions and, on a more fundamental level, the range of questions one needs to ask. Especially in the context of the social sciences, social epistemology provides grounds for asking whether knowledge has to be value-free, meaning that one should only develop descriptive knowledge about the state of the world, or whether knowledge is value-laden, meaning that one can also develop normative knowledge in order to critique and change the world. This question illustrates a dispute between two positions that fundamentally differ in their view about the validity of value judgements in scientific inquiry (Adorno et al., 1976). The positivist view (Albert, 1988; Popper, 1959) endorses a value free thesis for science and argues that claims on how the world should be are based on subjective values that cannot be generalized nor justified. Therefore, science should stick to descriptive truth claims about what the world is and refrain from making value judgements. The critical view (Habermas, 1971; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972), on the other hand, states that for social scientists, knowledge is always value laden and interest prone. Adherents of the critical view argue that knowledge formation needs to aim at improving the social world for its inhabitants. Therefore social scientists must not refrain from ethical considerations and value judgements in their inquiry. 36

Epistemology

Three epistemological questions for organization studies In the following sections, we will apply the epistemological views we have introduced above to the field of organization studies. In this context we define an epistemic system as a system that combines different elements of epistemological enquiry – sources of justifications, relationships between beliefs, and the relationships between knowledge and values – in a specific way in order to describe how knowledge can be generated. We will distinguish six epistemic systems that lead to different ways of explaining organizational phenomena (Scherer, 2003) and explore the assumptions on which they are based. Following the discussion of epistemological inquiry above, the analysis is structured along the following three questions: 1

2

3

What is the source of justification? Relating to the discussion above, sources of justification can be established with reference to the individual or with reference to the social. ‘Individual’ means that individual experience (following either evidentialism or reliabilism) is a sufficient source of justification. ‘Social’ means that any source of justification with reference to the individual is not sufficient and that social epistemology instead defines social interaction as the source of justification. What is the relationship between different beliefs? Epistemic Systems in organization studies are mapped according to the two options discussed above: coherentism and foundationalism. Is knowledge value-free or value-laden? It is discussed whether an epistemic system in organization studies endorses a positivist or a critical view.

Epistemological controversies in organization studies Organization studies comprise competing epistemic systems, each of which seeks to explain differently how knowledge can be developed. Based on Scherer’s analysis (2003) of different ‘modes of explanation’ in organization studies, we distinguish between six epistemic systems (for related systematizations, see Astley and Van de Ven, 1983; Burrell and Morgan, 1979). We discuss each in turn. The so-called subject–object model was the dominant epistemic system in organization studies up to the 1980s and remains popular to this day (Donaldson 1996a, 1996b). This epistemic system assumes that ‘objects’ such as corporate behaviour or organizational structures exist independently of the ‘subjects’ who do the research. This means that the structures of reality – such as the relation between a multinational corporation and its stakeholders – exist independently of researchers and that researchers can uncover these structures through systematic observation (Scherer, 2003). Approaches such as contingency theory (Donaldson, 1996b) or population ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1977) rely on this epistemic system. Interpretivism has become popular since the 1980s. This system departs from the subject–object model in that it assumes that social phenomena cannot be investigated from outside through the methods that are usually applied in the natural sciences and that the observation of phenomena cannot be detached from the cognizing subject (Scherer, 2003). Interpretivism tries to understand how individuals make sense of the world (Evered and Louis, 1981), for example, by studying how managers or other stakeholders interpret their organizations or the environment (Isabella, 1990). In this system, a phenomenon does not exist independently of the cognizing mind that observes it, but is socially constructed through processes of interpretation. Critical theory builds on interpretivism, but takes into account that knowledge is not objective and value-free and that it always serves the interests of particular individuals or groups (Scherer, 37

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

2009). Critical theory questions the status quo of the social world and the prevalent distribution of power as well as conditions of domination and suppression (Habermas, 1971; Steffy and Grimes, 1986). Critical theory does not limit its scope to describing the world but aims to reform and change social conditions. Critical management scholars have drawn on insights gained from critical theory to scrutinize topics such as leadership (Alvesson and Spicer, 2011) or corporate social responsibility (Scherer and Palazzo, 2007). Postmodernism, in line with interpretivism and critical theory, argues that knowledge is historically and culturally contingent because it always depends on paradigmatic assumptions (Calás and Smircich, 1999). However, while interpretivism and critical theory assume that one could (at least in principle) come to a shared understanding with others, postmodernism regards consensus as a sign that some societal groups have imposed their interpretations on other societal groups (Scherer, 2003). Furthermore, postmodernism suggests that the dominance of any view cannot be justified and argues that the pluralism of values, interpretations, and lifestyles must be protected rather than overcome. This epistemic system has also influenced many critical management scholars (Jones, 2009). Functionalism assumes that individual behaviour cannot fully explain ‘social facts’, such as institutions or social or institutional change (Luhmann, 1995). Instead, functionalism conceives of social phenomena as preconditions of social systems and investigates how these phenomena contribute to social order (Scherer, 2003). Functionalism can be applied both on the organizational and on the societal level and played a major role as an epistemic system in organization studies (Ashby, 1956) and social theory (Parsons, 1977) in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It continues to play a role in some debates, such as that on equifinality in organizational or institutional design (Gresov and Drazin, 1997). Finally, rational choice theory tries to explain macro-level outcomes, such as organizational or societal structures, through micro-level causes – that is, through the preferences and behaviour of individuals (Barney and Hesterley, 1996). With transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1981) and related theories, this epistemic system has also gained some influence in organization studies over the last decades (Scherer, 2003).

What is the source of justification? Some epistemic systems assume that justification depends primarily on the observation of phenomena and on logical thinking. The subject–object-model, interpretivism, functionalism, and rational choice theory all subscribe to this idea. According to these systems, the cognitive processes of individuals constitute the source of justification. While social interaction helps sort out errors made by individual researchers, such interaction is not the primary source of justification (on why interpretivist approaches are ultimately monologic, see Steffy and Grimes, 1986). Other epistemic systems – namely, critical theory and postmodernism – see justification as an inherently social activity and assume that social interaction is the primary source of justification. In the context of organization theory, assuming that social interaction is the source of justification raises the question of whose interests are served through scientific inquiry (Habermas, 1971) – for example, one may ask whether research primarily serves managers or non-managerial employees (Willmott, 2003). While postmodernism argues that research will always serve powerful actors, critical theory upholds the possibility of a rational discourse about how research may serve the different groups that constitute society (Scherer, 2009). Table 2.1 summarizes the epistemological assumptions of the epistemic systems we have examined so far. 38

What is the source of justification?

The subject–object . . . the observations of individual model assumes researchers are the primary source of that . . . justification for beliefs about causeand-effect relationships (individualistic approach to justification) Interpretivism . . . the interpretations of individual assumes that . . . researchers are the primary source of justification for beliefs about social phenomena (individualistic approach to justification) Critical theory . . . social interaction is the primary assumes that . . . source of justification and that researchers should critically reflect on these interactions (social approach to justification) Postmodernism . . . social interaction is the primary assumes that . . . source of justification, and that research will serve the most powerful social groups (social approach to justification) Functionalism . . . the observations of individual assumes that . . . researchers are the primary source of justification for beliefs about systemic relationships (individualistic approach to justification) Rational choice . . . the logical thinking of individual theory assumes researchers is the primary source of that . . . justification for beliefs about the rational behaviour of actors (individualistic approach to justification)

Epistemic system

. . . all knowledge production is part of broader societal processes and thus always shaped by values and interests (value-laden knowledge) . . . powerful social groups tend to influence the production of knowledge and thus shape knowledge through their values and interests (value-laden knowledge) . . . organizational researchers can describe the fundamental laws that govern social systems independently of values and interests (value-free knowledge) . . . organizational researchers can develop general principles of human behaviour (e.g. utility maximization) that do not depend on specific values and interests (value-free knowledge)

. . . beliefs become justified through coherence, but complete coherence between all beliefs is neither possible nor desirable (coherentism) . . . there are certain fundamental laws about social systems that should serve as the foundation of organizational research (foundationalism) . . . there are certain fundamental insights about rational human behaviour that should serve as the foundation of organization studies (foundationalism)

. . . organizational researchers can describe people’s subjective sensemaking processes independently of values and interests (value-free knowledge)

. . . organizational researchers can identify cause-and-effect relationships that do not depend on values and interests (value-free knowledge)

Is knowledge value-free or value-laden?

. . . beliefs become justified insofar as they are coherent with other descriptive and normative beliefs (coherentism)

. . . organization theorists should build on fundamental empirical insights (foundationalism); however, other theorists dismiss the idea of ‘basic beliefs’ as epistemologically flawed (coherentism) . . . beliefs about social reality become justified insofar as they are coherent with other beliefs (coherentism)

What is the relationship between different beliefs?

Table 2.1 Epistemological positions that underlie different epistemic systems

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

Epistemological assumptions about the source of justification are closely connected to some heated controversies in organization studies. For instance, the degree of reflexivity that organizational scholars should develop with regard to their research has often been the subject of vigorous debate (Alvesson et al. 2008; Chia 1996). Reflexivity explores ‘the situated nature of knowledge; the institutional, social and political processes whereby research is conducted and knowledge is produced; the dubious position of the researcher; and the constructive effects of language’ (Alvesson et al. 2008: 480). Reflexivity thus focuses primarily on the social dimension of research: how definitions, methods, and other conventions emerge, whom they serve, and what alternatives might exist. Epistemic systems such as the subject–object model or rational choice theory, which assume that social interaction plays a marginal role in research, see little need for reflexivity. According to these systems, researchers should spend little time on reflecting on social interaction and focus instead on extending their observations and improving the logical stringency of their theories. By contrast, reflexivity is crucial for epistemic systems that see social interaction as the primary source of justification, such as critical theory or postmodernism. Indeed, Fournier and Grey (2000) see reflexivity as a defining characteristic of critical management studies (see also Alvesson et al., 2009). Epistemological assumptions thus shape how different epistemic systems engage in research.

What is the relationship between different beliefs? The epistemological question of how different beliefs interrelate is also pertinent in the context of organization studies. Functionalism and rational choice theory take a foundationalist perspective and presuppose the existence of ‘basic beliefs’ that are true without additional justification. For functionalism, the fundamental laws of social systems are ‘basic beliefs’; for rational choice theory, aspects of rational human behaviour, such as rationality, self-interest, and opportunism, are the starting point of research (Abell, 2000). Some of the proponents of the subject–object model also subscribe to this two-tiered system of beliefs (Donaldson, 1996a, 1996b). By contrast, interpretivism, critical theory, and postmodernism tend to subscribe to coherentism rather than foundationalism. These epistemic systems do not privilege some beliefs over others as ‘basic’ but tend to see coherence as the only option left to justify beliefs. Some of the advocates of the subject–object model (Popper, 1959) also dismiss the idea of ‘basic beliefs’ as epistemologically flawed. The epistemological question of how different beliefs interrelate has implications for the controversy about whether organization studies should build on a limited set of core propositions or not. Pfeffer (1993) has argued that focusing on a limited number of core ideas would allow organization studies to imitate the success model of economics and the natural sciences (see also McKinley, 2007). Pfeffer’s ideas (1993) are likely to appeal particularly to researchers who take a foundationalist epistemological stance and support the idea of ‘basic beliefs’. For example, Donaldson (1996a: 12) has argued that the fundamental principle of contingency theory – namely, that organizational performance requires a fit between contingency factors and structure – should be seen as the ‘hard core’ of organization theory and that all scholarly investigations should be based on this principle. Donaldson (1988) has claimed that the empirical evidence for the validity of this principle is stronger than for any other comparable idea within organization studies (see Scherer and Dowling, 1995). Epistemic systems that side with coherentism reject such claims as dogmatic. They point out that empirical testing can never prove that some beliefs are more basic than others, because 40

Epistemology

empirical testing always depends on assumptions that serve specific interests (Scherer and Dowling, 1995). Furthermore, critical researchers warn that reducing organization studies to a limited set of core propositions would ‘naturalize’ (Alvesson et al., 2009: 9) these propositions, while rendering invisible other aspects of social reality. Postmodernism goes furthest in its critique of foundationalism in that it views core propositions as a sign of domination, which is contrary to the pluralism that this perspective espouses (Calás and Smircich, 1999).

Is knowledge value-free or value-laden? With regard to the question of whether values shape knowledge, some epistemic systems – namely, the subject–object model, interpretivism, functionalism, and rational choice theory – assume that research is, at its core, value-free. The proponents of value-free research, however, acknowledge two intersections between research and values. More specifically, they accept that values and interests influence the topics that researchers investigate (Bacharach, 1989) and that third parties will use the knowledge that researchers produce as an instrument in order to advance their values and interests (Weber, 1949). The idea of value-free research can therefore only mean that research has a value-free core, which is situated after researchers have chosen research topics and before they produced results. Accordingly, when researchers try to explain or understand phenomena, such as the relation between corporate social performance and financial performance (Orlitzky et al., 2003) or sensemaking in groups (Maitlis, 2005), the proponents of value-free research assume that these investigations are not shaped by values and interests. Other epistemic systems – namely, critical theory and postmodernism – deconstruct the idea of a value-free core in two respects. First, critics posit that values and interests do not merely shape the ‘topics’ of research but every aspect of research, including how to select cases, collect and analyse data, or determine significance levels (Connell and Nord, 1996; Ezzamel and Willmott, 2014). The entanglement with values therefore does not end once researchers have selected a topic, but continues throughout the research process. Second, critics point out that research does not merely describe phenomena (Cabantous and Gond, 2011), but may shape phenomena by influencing institutional designs, social norms, and language (Ferraro et al., 2005). The performative entanglement of research with its ‘objects’ confronts researchers with the ‘ethical consequences of theory’ (Ferraro et al., 2009: 673) and undermines the idea that research has a value-free core. However, whereas critical theory posits that discarding value-free research makes possible a rational discourse about values and interests (Habermas, 2003), postmodernism assumes that powerful groups will always distort research in self-interested ways. The epistemological stance of researchers on whether beliefs are value-free or value-laden has important implications for the controversy about how organization theory can best serve the various social groups that constitute society (Tsui, 2013; Walsh et al., 2003). If research has a value-free core, serving society should not affect core research activities, which in that case would remain focused on cause-and-effect relationships (subject–object model), subjective viewpoints (interpretivism), social laws (functionalism), or individual behaviour (rational choice theory). Instead, from the ‘value-free’ viewpoint, serving society implies that researchers must pick research questions that are of high societal importance; doing otherwise would ‘suggest a lack of concern by management scholars for the relevance of our work for the larger society’ (Tsui, 2013: 167). In terms of output, organization scholars would have to think about whether the knowledge they produce is useful for resolving societal problems, and ‘do a better job of connecting our research to the world around us’ (DeNisi, 2010: 196). Assuming that research has no value-free core makes serving society a more intricate endeavour. Researchers would then have to reflect on what values they adopt and whom 41

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

(i.e. which societal groups) these values serve throughout the research process, not merely at its beginning and end (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2014). In this view, reflecting on values is as important for researchers as mastering research methods and acquiring knowledge of existing theories, if their aim is to serve society with its different societal groups (Connell and Nord, 1996).

Epistemic pluralism and incommensurability As we have seen, there are several epistemic systems that shape the views of researchers on how knowledge about organizational phenomena can be developed. If there are no criteria for comparing and assessing the different epistemic systems, then these systems will be regarded as incommensurable and the epistemic pluralism will become problematic (Kuhn, 1962; Rorty, 1979; Scherer, 1998). Incommensurability means that (1) epistemic systems are radically different with respect to how they guide researchers, (2) epistemic systems conflict with each other, which makes it necessary to decide which is superior, and (3) there is no objective criterion by which to decide which of the alternatives to choose (Lueken, 1992; Scherer, 1998; Scherer and Steinmann, 1999). The epistemic systems described in the preceding section are often considered to be isolated from each other (e.g. Burrell and Morgan, 1979). For example, proponents of the interpretive approach see their epistemic system as fundamentally incommensurable with the epistemic system that underlies the subject–object model (Evered and Louis, 1981). Indeed, instead of seeking commonalities between various epistemic systems, many organization scholars focus on the differences. This allows them to distance themselves more easily from alternative ways of doing research and developing knowledge (Jackson and Carter, 1991). As a consequence, epistemological and ideological categories can become performative as researchers take up such categories to create labels for schools, form their identities as researchers, establish research programs, journals, and divisions at academic conferences. This has given rise to pluralism and fragmentation in organization studies. Here, we wish to put into perspective the trenches that exist between different systems and that many organization theorists seem to defend (see, e.g. Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Jackson and Carter, 1991; Van Maanen, 1995). There are several potential answers to the question of whether organization studies can develop and defend knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ and, if so, in what way. Much controversy surrounds the implications of this pluralism (Scherer, 1998; Scherer and Steinmann 1999). Some scholars argue in favour of pluralism with the aim of protecting intellectual freedom (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Van Maanen, 1995); others, however, view pluralism as fragmentation and advocate unity and the integration of different positions within the subject–object model (Pfeffer, 1993). A further group of scholars wish to combine alternative epistemic views in order to develop ‘more comprehensive’ explanations (Gioia and Pitre, 1990); finally, some scholars think that ‘anything goes’ (Feyerabend, 1975). While proponents of these perspectives argue that a comparison or justification across epistemic systems is not possible, they often maintain that theories need to stick to the rules within their epistemic perspective (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). This view implies that researchers should stay within the silos of their epistemic systems, which in turn allows isolation and fragmentation to prevail (see Shepherd and Challenger, 2013). If we conceive of knowledge as justified true belief but we maintain that it is not possible to agree on a universally accepted justification, then the whole endeavour of knowledge creation seems to be at stake. We therefore build upon the social epistemology mentioned in the first section and consider an epistemological perspective that could provide a possible way out of the problem of incommensurability: constructive philosophy (Butts and Brown, 1989; Kamlah 42

Epistemology

and Lorenzen, 1984; Lorenzen, 1987; Mittelstrass, 1985; Scherer and Dowling, 1995; Scherer and Steinmann, 1999). We will show that incommensurability is far from inevitable. Furthermore, we will explain that the deconstruction of the boundaries that are often assumed to exist between different epistemic systems is not merely a theoretical endeavour but can help establish common ground among these systems.

Constructive philosophy Constructive philosophy, which contributes to social epistemology, builds upon the linguistic and the pragmatic turn in modern philosophy. The linguistic turn in philosophy (Rorty, 1992) yielded the insight that philosophical analysis has to be framed in terms of the analysis of language use. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has argued that any reference to the world has to be made with the help of language and that nothing can be conceived outside language. This is expressed in Wittgenstein’s famous quote: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Wittgenstein, 1922: 5.6). The pragmatic turn in philosophy (Bernstein, 2010), by contrast, emphasizes the role of ‘praxis’ and maintains that actions are embedded in natural or social contexts, in which an actor’s experiences are controlled by actual deeds and their accomplishments. The pragmatic turn can be seen as a complement to the linguistic turn insofar that language use is not entirely detached from the world but can be controlled by practical action when individuals ‘cope’ with the world. According to the pragmatic turn, whether a proposition is true is not defined solely in the realm of language and discourse, but verified or disconfirmed when subjects cope with each other in the social world or with objects in the natural world (Habermas, 2003). These ideas will help us demonstrate how the problem of incommensurability can be avoided. Constructive philosophy questions the established wisdom about the relationship between theory and practice. Normally, practice is conceived of as the application of implicit or explicit theories. Consequently, when asked to justify a theory, one has to refer to other theories, which again need to be justified with the help of other theories and so on. The impending infinite regress can only be avoided if the attempt to justify a theory is given up at some point in a dogmatic way or if one refers to theories whose justifications have already been questioned, which, however, would result in a vicious circle. As a result of this trilemma (infinite regress, dogmatism, vicious circle), critical rationalists suggest that, instead of attempting to justify knowledge claims, one should try to test and possibly falsify theories (Albert, 1988; Popper, 1959). Theories that pass the empirical test are not justified as such but at least corroborated, which can be considered a reduced form of justification (see critically Mittelstrass, 1985). However, if we maintain the scientific claim to provide knowledge as justified true belief, we must not abandon the quest for justification. And if we want to avoid the problem of incommensurability, we cannot build on theory as the starting point for justification but have to develop an alternative. In order to address the epistemological question of how knowledge is possible, constructive philosophy develops a distinct understanding of the relationship between theory and practice (Butts and Brown, 1989; Kamlah and Lorenzen 1984; Lorenzen 1987) that rests on the distinction between poiesis, praxis, and theoria, which was originally proposed by Aristotle (350 BC[2010]). Practice is conceived of as the way in which people engage with the natural world (poiesis) and the social world (praxis) when they cope with the world without conscious reflection (theoria). Consequently, practice is considered the starting point of theory building and serves as both the reason and the methodological underpinning of theory (Lueken, 1992; Scherer and Dowling, 1995). In order to find a ‘methodical beginning of thought’ (Lorenzen, 1987: 6), the proponents of constructive philosophy 43

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

are concerned to show how the concepts of science result initially from activity involved in daily practical behaviour. All theoretical concepts are grounded in distinctions made, practical orientations taken, in what Husserl in his later writings called the Lebenswelt, the pre-reflexive, pre-scientific, pre-philosophical world that nevertheless guides scientific and philosophical reflection. It is the familiar world in which we all live, a world taken for granted . . . a world that is pragmatically a priori. The model of creation of theoretical concepts is thus human purposive action. (Butts and Brown, 1989: xvi) Constructive philosophy distinguishes three realms of practice to explore the relationship between theory and practice: pre-theoretical practice, theoretical practice and theory-supported practice (Lueken, 1992; Scherer and Dowling, 1995). We will discuss each in turn. People engage in pre-theoretical practice in the course of their everyday life, when they act without consciously applying theories. They simply have the know-how that enables them to cope with immediate technical or political problems by using practices, recipes or rules of thumb, all of which are acquired through processes of socialization. People know how something works and know that it works, but they do not know why it works. This means that they have beliefs about how to act successfully in the world, but they cannot immediately justify why they are likely to be successful. Consequently, they do not have knowledge but merely know-how. For most activities, this is sufficient. However, in general, practice is a sequence of success and failure, so people tend to partly succeed and partly fail in their lives. In that respect, practice can serve as the starting point of theory building: it motivates individuals to engage in theoretical reflection (in cases when people do not succeed with their practices), and serves as the methodical beginning of theory building (in cases when people can build on practices that routinely work). By contrast, people engage in theoretical practice when they consider validity claims and develop knowledge, i.e. justified true belief. Usually, they do so because they see their actions fail or foresee that they are likely to fail and thus realize that their know-how is not sufficient. While at the stage of pre-theoretical practice people are completely embedded in a situation and simply act without further reflection, at the stage of theoretical practice they reflect upon their actions and action plans and assess validity claims in order to understand a situation better, to consider what they should do, and to increase the likelihood of success. To engage in theoretical practice, people seek to distance themselves from what was self-evident at the stage of pre-theoretical practice, in order to reflect on a situation, ‘objectively’ determine what is the case, and consciously decide what should be done and why. To do so, they have to form justified true beliefs – in other words, to acquire ‘knowledge’ about a problem, their own plans, the contingencies of a situation, and possibly about the plans of anyone else who may influence the success or failure of their actions. The transfer from pre-theoretical to theoretical practice takes place when people try to improve their actions by considering validity claims: in everyday life, in business, in science, and everywhere else. Whenever people consciously apply knowledge developed through theoretical practice in order to solve particular problems, they engage in theory-supported practice. As long as people consciously apply knowledge, they remain in theory-supported practice. However, if the actions they perform to solve particular problems become routinized and are performed without special attention or reflection, then the previously theory-supported actions will become part of pre-theoretical practice, until new problems emerge and the process of reflection starts again. In this way the loop can be closed. Thus, the dynamics of the advancement of knowledge can be understood as a spiral that reaches ever higher levels of insight over time (for a critical discussion on the evolution of knowledge, see Kuhn, 1962). 44

Epistemology

Based on this understanding of how theory and practice are related, constructivist philosophy suggests a way of justifying theories without becoming entangled with the trilemma of infinite regress, dogmatism or vicious circle. In our context, this means that science can be founded in the pre-theoretical skills that are necessary for successful human action (Mittelstrass, 1985). While according to constructive philosophy the justification of a theory cannot be derived from other theories, theories can become justified through their embeddedness in action; i.e. in practice.

Addressing incommensurability As mentioned above, incommensurability can be understood as a conflict between the proponents of different perspectives that arises when an objective criterion for assessing these perspectives and deciding which one is valid is not available (Lueken, 1992; Scherer and Dowling, 1995). Such conflicts may also result from radical differences between epistemic systems that make it impossible to agree on how beliefs can be justified and how their truth can be checked. For scholars who represent incommensurable epistemic systems and engage in dialogue it is not just a matter of disagreeing on various propositions, it may even prove difficult to understand one another. In other words it is hard for them to agree not only on basic concepts, methods and research goals, but also on how truth is defined, on what can be regarded as justification, and on what kind of arguments are allowed in the exchange of views. However, the conflict that is inherent in incommensurable epistemic systems requires that their representatives make certain decisions somehow. This is because they all need to be able to defend their positions not only within their epistemic system but also when confronted with adherents of other epistemic systems. Otherwise, their knowledge claims cannot count as (universally) justified true beliefs. In cases of incommensurability this is difficult, if not impossible, as the proponents of different systems have different ideas on what constitutes a convincing argument. With that in mind, we will now explore the arguments that the proponents of incommensurable positions put forward in an ‘argumentation situation’ (for the following, see Scherer and Dowling, 1995). An argumentation situation between incommensurable epistemic positions starts with a controversy: a knowledge claim that a proponent of one system makes is questioned, either because an opponent does not understand or does not accept the claim. In the following, we will refer to these interlocutors as ‘proponent’ and ‘opponent’. If the interlocutors attempt to explore together whether the claim is justified or not, they engage in a game of reasoning (Toulmin, 1958): the proponent puts forward a claim, to which the opponent forwards an objection, to which the proponent responds by defending the claim on the basis of reasons that support it. In order to do so, the proponent must present assertions that are eventually accepted or further questioned, and so on. Further down, we will argue that besides logical reasoning there is also practical reasoning and that the game of reasoning can develop in two different directions. Both points are important in the context of discussing ways of resolving the incommensurability problem. When the opponent accepts reason B for a claim A that the proponent has made, this means that the opponent has accepted proposition A, as well as proposition B and thus also (implicitly or explicitly) accepted B → A, i.e. that A follows from B, which is a proposition concerning the relationship between B and A. The proposition B → A can be but is not necessarily a logical rule: it can also be a practical rule for a pragmatic relationship between actions B and A (Lueken, 1992). A ‘pragmatic relationship’ describes a systematic connection between distinct actions and implies that this connection is guided by the results that the actors want to achieve. This alludes to the ideas that derive from the pragmatic turn in philosophy that we discussed earlier. For 45

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

example, to create a painted wooden sculpture, one has to carve the figure first and paint the sculpture later. There is no rule of logic that prescribes this particular order of carving and painting; rather, the rule that needs to be followed so that the result is a painted sculpture is practical. Going back to our argumentation situation, if the opponent accepts reason B for claim A, the controversy is resolved (at least for the time being). If reason B is not accepted, however, then the opponent objects either to proposition B or to the relationship between B and A and the game of reasoning continues. This is likely in the case of incommensurable positions. The reasoning game can take different directions (Gethmann, 1979; Lueken, 1992). A game of reasoning is reductive when the interlocutors engage in a sequence of reasons, objections to those reasons, reasons for the objections, and so on, until the interlocutors reach common ground and thus consensus. A game of reasoning is productive when each proposition builds on what has already been accepted by both interlocutors. In the latter case, the dynamic of the reasoning game is directed towards the proposition that was originally questioned. In the case of reductive reasoning, however, the interlocutors may actually move farther away from the original proposition. Thus, the advantage of productive reasoning is that the participants in a discussion take steps in a common direction, starting from a commonly accepted point. The adherents of incommensurable positions normally do not know in advance that their positions are incommensurable. They only realize that when they actually engage in dialogue that progresses in a reductive direction and they discover that they cannot find any points, or reasons, that they commonly agree upon (Lueken, 1991). In that case, a productive direction of the reasoning game seems also impossible in the absence of a common starting point – that is, a commonly accepted proposition. The constructivist approach has developed a remedy for such situations: the interlocutors can create a common starting point through joint effort (for the following, see Lueken, 1992; Scherer and Dowling, 1995). When the game of reasoning does not lead to mutually accepted justifications, the interlocutors must postpone demanding justifications from each other; ‘they must act, without raising demands of legitimacy for these actions’ (Lueken, 1992: 282–3; translation by the authors). Instead, they must ‘enter a kind of mutual field research, an open exchange released from the pressure of reasoning, rules, validity questions and performed to understand the alien [epistemic system] by participation or to create a new one commonly’ (Lueken, 1991: 249). This means that the interlocutors must postpone reflecting on the validity of the claims that are made, in contrast to the course that theoretical practice demands, and enter together the arena of pre-theoretical practice in order to mutually learn and understand the know-how that derives from the epistemic system that each represents. This can be accomplished by engaging jointly in a practice that is unfamiliar to them and learning how it works through participation in routines, rituals, and recipes. The participants in pre-theoretical practice become (at least) partly socialized and learn, both consciously and unconsciously, how the concrete practice that they engage in works. As mentioned earlier, pre-theoretical practice is characterized by actions that do not lead to theoretical reflection. Such reflection is not necessary as long as the actions that are carried out in the context of pre-theoretical practice achieve their pragmatic goals by actualizing the available know-how. What is required of the interlocutors is the willingness to enter each other’s world without asking ‘why’ at each step, but instead by learning what works and realizing that it works without knowing why. How far opposed interlocutors can engage in pre-theoretical practice in this manner is not foreseeable in advance (Scherer and Dowling, 1995). Through practice and joint action, a mutual understanding among the interlocutors can be created: they mutually learn to understand each other’s epistemic system and how each works in practice (Hartman, 1988: 165ff.). When the interlocutors embrace and thus learn to understand, at least in part, each other’s epistemic system, they may be led to reflect on their 46

Epistemology

own epistemic system in a new way so that their perception of the differences between them may change. These learning processes may produce a new, shared epistemic system that may serve as the basis for further games of reasoning in theoretical practice. This may ultimately lead not only to understanding of but also to agreement on concepts, theories and justifications. In the context of organization studies, recent mixed-methods research can represent an example of this approach (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2010). The proposed approach does not represent a formal or theoretical solution to the problem of incommensurable epistemic systems. Although success is not guaranteed, there is potential for pragmatically resolving the problem of incommensurability. It represents a remedy that the proponents of incommensurable epistemic systems can make use of when a controversy arises. Several works on theory pluralism in the social sciences have sought the common ground but could not resolve the problem of incommensurability (for an overview, see Scherer and Dowling 1995; Shepherd and Challenger 2013). In contrast, constructive philosophy argues that the search for communalities is in vain since, as a matter of principle, a common ground does not exist in situations of incommensurable positions. However, the proponents of incommensurable positions can create a common ground jointly through their actions by engaging in pre-theoretical practice and establishing common understandings, routines, and measures of conflict resolution. Generally speaking, this approach can help moderate and may even reverse the performative effects that the strong emphasis on differences in epistemic systems has had on the fragmentation of the field. In organization studies, reversing the effects of fragmentation and establishing common ground between epistemologically different streams of thought could help reconcile apparently incompatible ideas and thus yield new theoretical and empirical insights. It is important to stress, however, that it is not possible to impose a solution to the problem of incommensurability from outside; only the participants in the epistemological debate can determine whether to tackle the problem and, if so, how to tackle it. The proponents of incommensurable positions must be willing to open their own epistemic systems to change and to learn from each other if they wish to resolve the controversies that spring from incommensurability.

Summary In this chapter we have introduced the foundations of epistemology in order to analyse how different epistemic systems in organization studies relate to each other. In our application of epistemological distinctions to those different systems we have shown that they sometimes have more in common than proponents of incommensurability may claim in order to deliberately distinguish their own system from other ways of doing research. Taking this as a starting point, we suggest constructive philosophy as a way to construct common grounds in those aspects where different epistemic systems still appear to be incommensurable. In our pragmatic approach towards finding common grounds the responsibility for succeeding in this endeavour does not lie with the philosopher who seeks to logically dissolve incommensurability, but with organization scholars in their everyday research practice. If they succeed in the establishment of common grounds beyond currently perpetuated trenches, organization studies may flourish in the future not only because new answers can be found to already existing questions, but the range of questions we can ask may broaden as well.

References (key texts in bold) Abell, P. (2000). Sociological theory and rational choice theory, in Turner, B.S. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (2nd edn). Malden: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 223–44. 47

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Dahrendorf, R., Habermas, J., Pilot, H. and Popper, K. (eds) (1976). The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann. Albert, H. (1988). Science and the search for truth. Critical rationalism and the methodology of science, in Agassi, J. and Jarvic, I.C. (eds), Rationality. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 69–82. Alvesson, M. and Spicer, A. (2011). Metaphors We Lead by: Understanding Leadership in the Real World. London: Routledge. Alvesson, M., Hardy, C. and Harley, B. (2008). Reflecting on reflexivity: reflexive textual practices in organization and management theory. Journal of Management Studies, 45: 480–501. Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (2009). ‘Introduction’, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–26. Aristotle (350 BC[2010]). Nicomachean Ethics (trans. R. Crisp). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashby, W.R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. New York: J. Wiley. Astley, W.G. and Van de Ven, A.H. (1983). Central perspectives and debates in organization theory. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 245–73. Audi, R. (2010). Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (3rd edn). London: Routledge. Bacharach, S.B. (1989). Organizational theories: some criteria for evaluation. Academy of Management Review, 14: 496–515. Barney, J.B. and Hesterley, W. (1996). Organizational economics: understanding the relationship between organizations and economic analysis, in Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C. and Nord, W.R. (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, pp. 115–47. Bernstein, R.J. (2010). The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Blanshard, B. (1939). The Nature of Thought. London: Allen & Unwin. BonJour, L. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Butts, R.E. and Brown, J.R. (eds) (1989). Constructivism and Science. Essays in Recent German Philosophy. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Cabantous, L. and Gond, J-P. (2011). Rational decision making as performative praxis: explaining rationality’s éternel retour. Organization Science, 22: 573–86. Calás, M.B. and Smircich, L. (1999). Past postmodernism? Reflections and tentative directions. Academy of Management Review, 24: 649–71. Chia, R. (1996). The problem of reflexivity in organizational research: towards a postmodern science of organization. Organization, 3: 31–59. Conee, E. and Feldman, R. (1985). Evidentialism. Philosophical Studies, 48: 15–35. Connell, A.F. and Nord, W.R. (1996). The bloodless coup: the infiltration of organization science by uncertainty and values. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 32: 407–27. DeNisi, A.S. (2010). 2009 Presidential Address: challenges and opportunities for the Academy in the next decade. Academy of Management Review, 35: 190–201. Descartes, R. (1637/2004). Discourse on Method and Meditations (trans. E. Sanderson Haldane and G.R.T. Ross). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Donaldson, L. (1988). In successful defence of organization theory: a routing of the critics. Organization Studies, 9: 28–32. Donaldson, L. (1996a). For Positivist Organization Theory. Proving the Hard Core. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Donaldson, L. (1996b). The normal science of structural contingency theory, in Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C. and Nord, W.R. (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, pp. 57–76. Evered, R. and Louis, M.R. (1981). Alternative perspectives in the organizational sciences: ‘Inquiry from the inside’ and ‘Inquiry from the outside’. Academy of Management Review, 6, 385–95. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2014). Registering ‘the ethical’ in organization theory formation: towards the disclosure of an ‘invisible force’. Organization Studies, 35: 1013–39. Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I. (2005). Economics language and assumptions: how theories can become self-fulfilling. Academy of Management Review, 30: 8–24. Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I. (2009). How and why theories matter: a comment on Felin and Foss. Organization Science, 20: 669–75. Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. 48

Epistemology

Fournier, V. and Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 53: 7–32. Gethmann, C.F. (1979). Zur formalen Pragmatik der Normenbegründung, in Mittelstrass J. (ed.), Methodenprobleme der Wissenschaften vom gesellschaftlichen Handeln. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 46–76. Gioia, D.A. and Pitre, E. (1990). Multiparadigm perspectives on theory building. Academy of Management Review, 15: 584–602. Goldman, A.I. (1967). What is justified belief?, in Pappas, G.S. (ed.), Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 1–23. Goldman, A.I. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Gresov, C. and Drazin, R. (1997). Equifinality: functional equivalence in organization design. Academy of Management Review, 22: 403–28. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1989). Wahrheitstheorien, in Habermas, J. (ed.), Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 127–83. Habermas, J. (2003). Truth and Justification. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. and Luhmann, N. (1971). Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Hannan, M.T. and Freeman, J. (1977). The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82: 929–64. Hartman, E. (1988). Conceptual Foundations of Organization Theory. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder. Isabella, L.A. (1990). Evolving interpretations as a change unfolds: how managers construe key organizational events. Academy of Management Journal, 33: 7–41. Jackson, N. and Carter, P. (1991). In defence of paradigm incommensurability. Organization Studies, 12: 109–27. Jones, C. (2009). Poststructuralism in critical management studies, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 76–98. Kamlah, W. and Lorenzen, P. (1984). Logical Propaedeutic: pre-school of reasonable discourse. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Kitcher, P. (1993). The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, C.I. (1946). An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. LaSalle: Open Court. Lorenzen, P. (1987). Constructive Philosophy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lueken, G-L. (1991). Incommensurability, rules of argumentation, and anticipation, in van Eemeren, F.H. (ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Argumentation. Amsterdam: SicSat, pp. 244–52. Lueken, G-L. (1992). Inkommensurabilität als Problem rationalen Argumentierens. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Maitlis, S. (2005). The social processes of organizational sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 48: 21–49. McKinley, W. (2007). Managing knowledge in organization studies through instrumentation. Organization, 14: 123–46. Mittelstrass, J. (1985). Scientific rationality and its reconstruction, in Rescher, N. (ed.), Reason and Rationality in Natural Science. Lanham: University Press of America, pp. 83–102. Moore, G.E. (1953). Some Main Problems of Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin. Moser, P.K. (ed.) (2005). The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orlitzky, M., Schmidt, F.L. and Rynes, S.L. (2003). Corporate social and financial performance: a metaanalysis. Organization Studies, 24: 403–41. Parsons, T. (1977). Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory. New York: Free Press. Pfeffer, J. (1993). Barriers to the advance of organizational science: paradigm development as a dependent variable. Academy of Management Review, 18: 599–620. Plato (369 BC/2014). Theaetetus (trans. J. McDowell). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popper, K.R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 49

Andreas Georg Scherer, Elisabeth Does and Emilio Marti

Rorty, R. (1992). The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Russell, B. (1912). The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scherer, A.G. (1998). Pluralism and incommensurability in strategic management and organization theory: a problem in search of a solution. Organization, 5: 147–68. Scherer, A.G. (2003). Modes of explanation in organization theory, in Tsoukas, H. and Knudsen, C. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory. Meta-theoretical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 310–44. Scherer, A.G. (2009). Critical theory and its contribution to critical management studies, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 29–51. Scherer, A.G. and Dowling, M.J. (1995). Towards a reconciliation of the theory pluralism in strategic management: incommensurability and the constructivist approach of the Erlangen school. Advances in Strategic Management, 12A: 195–247. Scherer, A.G. and Palazzo, G. (2007). Toward a political conception of corporate responsibility: business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective. Academy of Management Review, 32: 1096–120. Scherer, A.G. and Steinmann, H. (1999). Some remarks on the problem of incommensurability in organization studies. Organization Studies, 20: 519–44. Shepherd, C. and Challenger, R. (2013). Revisiting paradigm(s) in management research: a rhetorical analysis of the paradigm wars. International Journal of Management Reviews, 15: 225–44. Steffy, B.D. and Grimes, A.J. (1986). A critical theory of organization science. Academy of Management Review, 11: 322–36. Steup, M. (2014). Epistemology, in Zalta, E.N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2014 edn, retrieved on 12 June 2015 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2014/entries/epistemology/ Tashakkori, A. and Teddlie, C. (eds) (2010). Sage Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioral Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Toulmin, S. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsui, A.S. (2013). Presidential address: on compassion in scholarship: why should we care?. Academy of Management Review, 38: 167–80. Van Maanen, J. (1995). Style as theory. Organization Science, 6: 133–43. Walsh, J.P., Weber, K. and Margolis, J.D. (2003). Social issues and management: our lost cause found. Journal of Management, 29: 859–81. Weber, M. (1949). The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press. Williamson, O.E. (1981). The economics of organization: the transaction cost approach. American Journal of Sociology, 87: 548–77. Willmott, H. (2003). Organization theory as a critical science? Forms of analysis and ‘new organizational forms’, in Tsoukas, H. and Knudsen, C. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory. Meta-theoretical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 88–112. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (trans. C.K. Ogden). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Young, J.O. (2001). A defense of the coherence theory of truth. Journal of Philosophical Research, 26: 89–101.

50

3 Ethical philosophy, organization studies and good suspicions Edward Wray-Bliss

Introduction I have argued previously that ethics is an ambivalent subject for the more critically minded scholars of organization (Wray-Bliss, 2009). We have something of a suspicious attitude towards ethics and ethical discourses. Where politics seems to be an appropriate thing to discuss and examine for those interested in organizations – concerned as it is with the public life, with institutions, laws, rules, forces, power – ethics seems somehow too private, too individual, subjective, relative or weak. We can see something of this suspicion of ethics in, for example, Thompson, Smith and Ackroyd’s (2000) response to Parker’s (1999) attempts to use ethics to broach a rapprochement between Marxist and broadly Poststructuralist UK Labour Process Theorists in the late 1990s. Ontology and epistemology for Smith and Ackroyd are the issues that matter for social scientists engaging with the political life of organizations, whereas ethics ‘means finishing with nothing to argue about other than each other’s value preferences’ (ibid.: 1156). Such a view is not limited to Smith and Ackroyd. As Ezzamel and Willmott (2014) have recently argued, organizational scholars have long given attention to the ways that ontology and epistemology condition knowledge construction. However, the ethical is seldom given comparable attention. A suspicion of ethics is carried into organizational studies’ engagement with allied fields which make ethics their central focus. Academic Business Ethics, for example, has been subject to a number of strong and strident critiques: as toothless; as apologist for managerialism and managerial control; and as intellectually and politically impoverished by failing to engage in any sustained way with twentieth-century continental ethical philosophy and social theory (for example Banerjee, 2007; Jones et al., 2005; Parker, 2002; Sorrell, 1998). There is a longer history to this suspicion of ethics in critical social science. As Garber, Hanssen and Walkowitz (2000) observe, ‘To critics working in the domains of feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, this discourse became a target of critique: the critique of humanism was the exposé of ethics’ (Garber et al., 2000: viii). Modifying if not totally mollifying this suspicion of ethics, there has been something of a ‘turn to ethics’ in the social sciences over the last few decades. Things have changed. Ethics is back in literary studies, as it is in philosophy and political theory, and indeed the very critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject that had initially produced a resistance to ethics have now generated a crossover among 51

Edward Wray-Bliss

these various disciplines that sees and does ethics “otherwise”. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. (ibid.: viii–ix) And ethics is back in – if it ever actually left – organization studies. However, the ethics that we see in organization studies is itself a suspicious one. It is an ethics that draws largely – overwhelmingly – upon modern continental philosophical traditions that are themselves highly suspicious of enlightenment concepts such as reason, science, truth, autonomy, sovereignty, even goodness and, of course, organization. In this chapter I attempt to provide an overview and orientation to the main philosophical understandings that have defined the discussion of ethics and the ethical in the organization studies field. My original conception for this chapter was to map out the ideas and contributions of an extensive list of philosophies and philosophers drawn upon by organizational scholars – I wanted to do justice to each and every one, to read them deeply and present them respectfully in their richness (the grand concept of ‘philosophy’ seemed to demand nothing less) – only to realise that such a task was well beyond the limits of word count of this chapter and most probably my own capabilities. Rethinking, I realized that I would have to be painfully partial and selective – and that is what you have here. What I am presenting then in this chapter – with apologies to all that I miss out – are what I think can be characterized as the major currents, the main thematics, of past and present organizational scholars’ engagement with ethical philosophy. What I suggest is that ethical philosophy and allied writings have been drawn upon by organizational scholars to articulate three partly commensurable and partly divergent suspicions: (1) the suspicion that ethics is other to organization; (2) the suspicion that ethics is other to autonomy; and (3) the suspicion that ethics is other to goodness. After outlining each of these, their philosophical roots and their articulations in organization studies, I conclude with a discussion of a small number of the neglected philosophers and philosophies of ethics that organizational scholars could usefully explore. Before I commence, I need to mention an issue of terminology. The terms ethics and morals are used by different philosophers, at different times, to refer to different things. For some authors ‘ethics’ is reserved for the realm of philosophy and ‘morals’ equates to the realm of the everyday enactment of behaviour. For others ‘morals’ and ‘morality’ are terms used to signal the macro-societal level of values and ‘ethics’ is concerned with the micro practices of lived experience. I do not try to disentangle these multiple, different, usages of the terms here. Instead I try, where possible, to stick to using the terms ethics and the ethical throughout – and signal where necessary any slippage in meaning or levels of analysis – and only use morals and morality where these terms stand out in the writings of the philosophers I cite.

Review of organization studies’ engagement with ethical philosophy The ethical as other to organization The first of the philosophically informed tropes regarding the relationship of the ethical with the organizational which I wish to explore centres on the argument that organization is antithetical to its members’ ethical autonomy. Organization here is seen as displacing or marginalising ethics – replacing individual ethical choice and agency with the instrumental rationality of bureaucratic or managerialist processes and ends. Such arguments are most commonly traced to the writings of Weber; however, as we will see this understanding of instrumental rationality as antithetical to ethics may be traced rather further back – to Kant’s 52

Ethics

distinction between ‘practical’ and other forms of reason – and forward to writers that range across the last 80 years of writing about organization, including Arendt (1963), Bauman (1989), Jackall (1988), Marcuse (1941[2005]; 1964), Ritzer (1993), Watson (2003) and Wright Mills (1951). And while not all organizational scholars who engage with ‘Weberian’ arguments see modern organization as necessarily rationalising away the ethical (see Boltanski and Chiapello 1999[2005] and du Gay 2000) this conceptualization is a major thread in organizational scholars’ engagement with ethics. I will start by outlining how these ideas figure in Weber’s writing. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1930 [2001]) traced the ‘correlations’ (ibid.: 49) between historical forms of religious belief and the practical ethics required for valorising the accumulation and reinvestment of capital and for disciplined labour in the service of capital. For Weber, religion bestowed and cultivated the ideals and practices of the self – the ethics – necessary for the development of capitalism in America. Puritanical worldly asceticism, particularly that of Calvinism, prepared individuals for the self-denying ascetic trait required to enable the accumulation and reinvestment of capital and the preparation for service to a duty or calling. This, he argues, was translated under capitalist relations to self-disciplined action directed toward the ‘irrational’ pursuit of sums of wealth which do not enhance human happiness and to the businessman’s existence ‘for the sake of his business, rather than the reverse’ (ibid.: 32). Religious ethics bestowed and cultivated the ethical ideals and practices of the self necessary for the development of capitalism in America. Once it had reached maturity, however, capitalism was ‘emancipated from its old supports’ (ibid.: 34), no longer needing a religiously cultivated ethics of self-discipline and restraint. Instead it confronted humankind as an ‘irresistible force’ (ibid.: 123), imposing the necessary behaviour traits by virtue of the mechanistic discipline of machine production, the seduction of commodity consumption, or the pursuit of wealth almost as a character of sport (Ibid.: 124). The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalist rules of action. (Ibid.: 19)1 Compounding the power of capitalism writ large to reify submission to it as primary ethical duty, Weber presented a corollary analysis of the ways that the internal structuring of organizations inculcated subjects’ diligent procedural service to organizational ends; ends which the subject need not have personal ethical attachment to. The discipline of machine production and socialisation into bureaucratic processes (Weber [in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1946: 262]; see McKinlay, 2002 for a wonderful examination of the latter) resulted in individuals’ organizational behaviour being discharged according to calculable rules, ‘without regards for persons’, such that dehumanized organizations were created that eliminated from ‘official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements’ (ibid.: 215–16). Through such bureaucratic and disciplinary mechanisms, modern society and its organizations restricted the importance of ‘individually differentiated conduct’ (ibid.: 262) and created a ‘whole process of rationalization’ (ibid.: 262). This concept of rationalization – and rationality more generally – are important in Weber’s work and are used to signify a variety of ideas (Brubaker, 1984). Chief for our purposes here is the distinction made between formal and substantive rationality. Formal rationality is ‘goal oriented rational calculation with the technically most adequate available methods’ (Weber, 1978: 85) and it is the form of behaviour and rationality that would come to dominate organizational life. Substantive rationality, in contrast, reflected 53

Edward Wray-Bliss

upon the ultimate aims, goals or values of behaviour. As Clegg (2005: 533) argues, ‘Weber foresaw that ultimate values would be in inexorable decline as modernity, defined in terms of an increasing rationalisation of the world through new institutions and a concomitant decline in beliefs in enchantment, magic and fatalism, developed’. The performance of roles in accordance with given goals (principally numerically calculable goals) and the marginalization of possibilities for exercising substantive rationality was understood to increasingly come to dominate the social world. This differentiation of rationalities sounds a strong echo of enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s, distinction between different forms of reason. For Kant, practical reason sets our ends and aims, it prescribes the ‘imperatives to experience’ (Neiman, 1994). ‘The fact that reason is the sole autonomous faculty, independent of the confines of experience, enables it to be the faculty whose sphere is the order of ends. Only reason is directed by ends it sets for itself’ (Neiman, 1994: 62). Practical reason asks questions of experience, but is not limited to the answers it finds – rather it sets the aims and pursues the means to make experience approach the ideals that it has set. Speculative, theoretical, and other forms of reason are useful in their particular spheres – those of science, contemplation, etc. – however they are, like Weber’s formal rationality, not concerned with the ethical. Following Weber (and, wittingly or otherwise, Kant) both classic and modern scholars of organization and organized society have advanced a critique of the rationalizing-away of individual ethical judgement and agency. In White Collar (1951) Wright Mills, for example, argued that ‘rationality seems to have taken on a new form, to have its seat not in individual men, but in social institutions which by their bureaucratic planning and mathematical foresight usurp both freedom and rationality from the little individual men caught in them’ (ibid.: xvii). Marcuse (1941[2005]) a critical theorist of the Frankfurt School, influential in the development of critical organizational scholarship (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), references both Weber’s ideas and Mumford’s (1934) analysis of the effects of the machine on modern consciousness. Marcuse counterpoised individual rationality – that ‘critical and oppositional attitude that derived freedom of action from the unrestricted liberty of thought and conscience’ (ibid.: 157) – with a machine-like technical rationality, in which ‘liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for reaching a goal which he did not set’ (ibid.: 142). Such technical rationality resulted in individuals being ‘stripped of their individuality, not by external compulsion, but by the very rationality under which they live’ (ibid.: 145), such that they are ‘no longer capable of seizing the fateful moment which constitutes his [sic] freedom’ (ibid.: 152). Such a mechanics of conformity governed behaviour ‘not only in the factories and shops, but also in the offices, schools, assemblies and, finally, the realm of relaxation and entertainment’ (ibid.: 145, also Marcuse, 1964). This extension of the critique of the effects of instrumental or machine rationality from the realm of work to include areas such leisure has been carried forward in a number of subsequent works, including critiques of advertising and consumption (Packard, 1957), fast-food production and its legacies (Ritzer, 1993), and mass/popular culture (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944[1972]). Writing at a time still under the shadow of European fascism, Marcuse also related technical mechanistic rationality to the organizations of that social system. ‘National Socialism is a striking example of the ways in which a highly rationalized and mechanized economy with the utmost efficiency in production can operate in the interests of totalitarian oppression and continued scarcity’ (ibid.: 139). The rise and organization of fascism in Europe – particularly its hold over Germany, a civilized, modern and organized society, steeped in the cultural history of Enlightenment thought and ethics – has made this a crucial site for examining the intersection of ethics and organization. Neiman (2002) maintains that the radical and organized evil of the 54

Ethics

Nazi Holocaust represented the same kind of existential challenge to certain ethical philosophers that the 1755 earthquake at Lisbon represented to thinkers of the Enlightenment. How could such an event, so radically contra to the certainties and conceits of philosophers of the day, have possibly occurred?. A concern with the organization of the Holocaust and its lessons for ethics has been carried into other works that have been influential in organization studies. Bauman (1989), for example, argues that cherished elements of organizational modernity – efficient, large-scale organization, organized along instrumental-rational lines, incorporating modern bureaucratic and hierarchical processes and operating according to clear relations of authority and command – provided some of the necessary structural and interpersonal conditions for the perpetration of the Holocaust. For Bauman, a wider implication of his analysis of the organization of the Holocaust is that individual ethical agency is too unpredictable and autonomous for bureaucratic organization to accommodate. Organization requires predictability and regularity in its members’ conduct. As a consequence we have – both necessarily and disastrously – evolved organizations in ways that divert or silence the unpredictable conscience. Arendt’s (1963) study of the trial of a senior figure of the Nazi administration, Adolf Eichmann, had earlier offered a similar conclusion, along with the haunting concept of the ‘banality of evil’. Evil in modernity is banal, she argued, in that it need not require ‘diabolic or demonic profundity’ (ibid.: 288) on the part of the perpetrator. Rather, acts as atrocious even as mass ‘administrative massacre’ (ibid.) may result from the bureaucrat’s conscientiousness with regard to the technical procedures and organizationally sanctioned duties of their position when mixed with ‘thoughtlessness’ (ibid.) regarding the ends of the actions that the administration has set.2 Highlighting thoughtlessness as a contributor to administrative evil, Arendt posits thinking – reason – as central to the possibility of realising the ethical in our (organized) lives. In her (1971) work, The Life of the Mind, Arendt asks ‘Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be amongst the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it?’ (ibid.: 5). Bringing the discussion of rationality and ethics back to more contemporary times, Robert Jackall’s (1988) heavily cited analysis of American corporate managerial life represented corporate managers as entrapped and seduced within ‘patrimonial’ bureaucracies – organizational milieux which combined Weber’s modernist bureau with the political intrigues of a royal court. These organizational spaces take the form of moral mazes in which individual conscience is lost. It is replaced with an anxious striving to decipher the ambiguous ‘rules in use’ that would allow one to appear successful to one’s superiors and so progress in one’s career. For Jackall only exit from these organizations – through, for example becoming a corporate whistle-blower – offers the managerial subject the chance of redemption. Others, such as Watson (2003), while agreeing with the proposition that ethics is rationalised-away for many – possibly most – managerial subjects, argue that those few who are particularly ‘ethically assertive’ and who occupy positions of strategic influence may still be able to exercise agency to shape organizational behaviour in accordance with their personal ethical positions. To draw this first section to a close, I have identified the rationalizing-away of individual ethical choice, and the supplanting of the individual’s ability to conceive and follow their own (substantive) ethical ends with the (instrumental) performance of procedures and roles, as a significant philosophical trope in the writings of organizational and allied scholars. In such works, the ethical itself is treated as – or seems to default to – an individual’s autonomy, specifically their ability to reason. From Kant, through Weber, to Marcuse and Arendt ethics is couched in terms of individual capacity for thought and (substantive) reason; for Watson – despite 55

Edward Wray-Bliss

referencing Weber’s thesis of the ethical irrationality of the world – the ethical manager is a thinking, strategic subject; and for Jackall it is only by separating self from the irrationalities of the organization that the whistle-blowing (ex)manager can exercise ethics. The next two philosophically informed orientations to the ethical in organization studies both carry through the deep suspicion of organization’s relationship to the ethical. They also, however, articulate quite different understandings of the relationship between reason, ethics and the individual.

The ethical as other to autonomy The second of the three major philosophically informed conceptualizations of ethics and organization that I wish to consider, like the Weberian approach discussed above, understands ethics to be quite other to the instrumental and procedural rationality of organization. It also, however, understands ethics as other to a counterpoising ideal of the rational, ethically autonomous individual that I suggested was the Kantian legacy of these critiques. The philosophical conceptualization of ethics that I look at in this section is not an ethics of reason, autonomy and the distance from others that this implies. Rather it is one of proximity, vulnerability and sensibility. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is central to this articulation of ethics, though it has been carried forward too in the writings of figures such as Derrida (1999), Critchley (2007) and Bauman (1993). Within organization studies, this ethics has been drawn upon by a number of authors to mount a strenuous critique of organizational and managerial attempts to codify, regulate and seek mastery over the ethical. I reference Jones, Parker and ten Bos (2005), Roberts (2001), McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes (2011), Weiskopf and Willmott (2013) in this regard. I start by fleshing-out some of the central elements of this Levinasian conceptualization of ethics. Levinas’ philosophy is driven by the need to understand what is left of ethics given the context of the Nazi Holocaust and those other horrors of modernity: imperialism, enslavement, industrial-scale wars and colonialism. Acutely aware that the great European philosophical history – the Enlightenment and its legacies – and the institutions and subjectivities built around the same, did not protect us from barely imaginable atrocity, Levinas considers it ‘of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality’ (Levinas, 1961[1969]: 21). As we saw in the previous section, these same concerns have been threaded through the work of other mid to late twentieth-century philosophers and writers important to organization studies. Hannah Arendt, as a notable example, wrote in regard to the rise of fascism, it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people. (Arendt, 1965[1994]: 740) However, whereas Arendt turned to Kantian reason to rehabilitate ethics, Levinas turns the other way. For Levinas, the scale of the evils that we have witnessed necessitated a fundamental reconceptualization of the nature of ethics (Bernstein, 2002). Western philosophy had put the autonomy of the rational individual’s reason first. (Witness Kant’s privileging of reason and autonomy: the infinite freedom of acting in accordance only with the moral law that you have rationally arrived at, free because it is chosen by you on the basis of reason, not by compulsion, desire or affect). Conceptualising ethics as reason, understanding or cognition is for Levinas to place a buffer between the individual and the rightful object of their concern: the other person. ‘Western 56

Ethics

philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being’ (Levinas, 1961[1969]: 43). The other person is reduced to the knowable and understandable, they are categorised and conceptualised, limited and contained. Far from the ethical infinity that Kant imagined, ethics conceptualised as autonomy and reason represents the privileging of the self and the ‘neutralization of the other who becomes a theme or an object’ (Levinas, 1961[1969]: 43), it is a step along the road to their totalization. In contrast to this, Levinas argues that ethics does not start with us and our autonomous reason, but rather with the breaking apart of our autonomy and sovereignty. ‘We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics’ (Levinas, 1961[1969]: 43). A breaking apart that comes from the realisation that the other person – to whom we owe responsibility by virtue of their very existence – is not just another ‘us’. They are radically not us, they are ‘alterity’: Otherness with a capital O. Conscience welcomes the Other. It is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naive right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent. (Levinas, 1961[1969]: 84) Such realisation of the separateness of the Other does not, for Levinas, arrive in the form of thinking – it is ‘not a cognition which a subject has of an object’ (Levinas, 1974[1998]: 76) – rather it takes the form of a sensory or sensual experience, like taste, touch, even pain which is experienced before it is rationalized. Responsibility is experienced because of the proximity of an Other: that is the sensuality and vulnerability of their ‘face’ (a loaded term which Levinas uses to signify the irredeemable particularity of the humanity of the other person). Proximity here is much more than mere physical closeness. It is a sensorial, precognitive experience of another person that rips from us a response and, indeed, responsibility. ‘Proximity is quite distinct from every other relationship, and has to be conceived as a responsibility for the other; it might be called humanity, or subjectivity, or self’ (Levinas 1974[1998]: 46). And, just as the other person is not the same as us, is radically not us, our responsibility to them is radically unlimited. It is not reducible to laws or rules or other rational constructs which set limits on what responsibility is – based upon prior assumptions about who the Other is and what they have a right to ask from us – it is not about the autonomy, sovereignty or even survival of the self, and it is not therefore reducible to the procedures or processes of organization. Ethics, rather, is understood as radical exposure to an infinite responsibility to the Other. For Levinas, only such a re-conceptualization of ethics as infinite responsibility can hope to be substantial enough to mount a defence against the kind of organized industrial-scale destruction of others that the twentieth century has shown us capable of. A Levinasian-informed ethical philosophy has been drawn upon by organizational scholars to critique organizational attempts to codify and contain infinite ethical responsibility within manageable limits: for example, the ethics policy, the discharging of minimal legal responsibilities or the delineation of carefully contained rights and duties owed to various parties. A number of works have powerfully critiqued organizational practices in such terms (Roberts, 2001; Jones, 2003). Valuable as these works have been, it is a tall ask to wish organizations to ever embody a Levinasian ethics. As Bauman (1993) observes, instrumental–rational organization simply cannot embody this kind of ethics. Indeed, neither can anyone else meet these demands in full. As Critchley (2007) has argued, Levinas’ ethics is infinitely demanding, it may even run the risk 57

Edward Wray-Bliss

of ‘chronically overloading – indeed masochistically persecuting – the self with responsibility’ (ibid.: 11). To criticise organizations, managers, or anyone else, for not embodying this infinite ethical responsibility might, perhaps, be to risk somewhat missing the wider organizational implications of a Levinasian ethics. These become apparent when we consider the nature of responsibility when we move from the party of two (‘I’ and one other) to consider ‘the third’ – that is when we have to consider responsibility not just to the one person in front of us but to other people beyond them. Once we move into considering the responsibility that we have to more than one other person – once we move from philosophical discussions of ethics’ origins to the realm of the real, where we always face potentially competing calls to respond – then we necessarily and unavoidably enter into the world of compromises, of choices, of knowledge about others, and of decisions regarding how best to embody ethical obligations to multiple conflicting subjects. That is, we shift from a philosophical ethics to enter the realm of politics, where we engage with questions of justice – of how to distribute responsibilities owed within the realities of limited resources and competing demands. Carl Rhodes’ contribution to this volume speaks to a Levinasian conceptualization of justice, so I will not labour it too much here, suffice to say that ‘for Levinas justice is always that through which ethics is imperfectly operationalized in the social world. What arises practically is the need to negotiate the contradictions between ethical relations with the other and rational distribution. It is this that drives the relentless dilemmas that characterize the pursuit of justice’ (Rhodes, 2012: 1322). Recognizing that the organized and interpersonal space of public life necessarily and unavoidably enters us into the realms of politics and its questions of justice does not, however, mean that a Levinasian ethics is therefore a privatized concern – something to worry about in the privacy of the family or the sanctity of the soul – while more important public affairs are carried out with hard-headed political rationality (Rhodes, 2012). Rather, the implication is for the need to conceptualize political, public, organized action as founded upon and continually questioned by the infinite ethical demand: an ethico-politics that originates in a ‘metapolitical’ moment of ethical experience. Where politics is conceived of as ‘an ethical practice that arises in a situation of injustice which exerts a demand for responsibility’ (Critchley, 2007: 92). Drawing upon this conceptualization of political or organized agency informed by an ethics of infinite proximal responsibility, some organizational scholars have begun to use a Levinasian ethical philosophy not merely to critique the limitations of instrumentally rational managerial acts but to also explore the possibilities of a positive enactment of ethical responsibility in organizations. Weiskopf and Willmott (2013) for example have drawn upon this philosophical approach to ethics – read through the writings of Derrida – to examine Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971: papers which revealed the serious obfuscations, omissions and falsehoods that successive US governments had communicated to Congress and the American public concerning US military actions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In a compelling discussion of this event, Weiskopf and Willmott read Ellsberg’s actions as an ethico-political act performed through the countering of the existing rationalizations and reductions of the Vietnamese Other. By leaking these papers, Ellsberg questioned ‘the very system of ordering and categorizing which underlines and produces specific normative evaluations and judgements’ (ibid.: 477). Ethics is here enacted through an undoing of knowledge and certainties – rationalities and rationalizations – about the I and the Other. We can see a similar process and analysis at work in McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes (2011) Levinasian-informed examination of a senior clinician’s extended formal letter of complaint, sent to their employer during a protracted and politically tense bid to take-over the running of the regional health care service. This letter, understood by McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes as an ethically informed act of resistance, 58

Ethics

contests the Primary Care Trust’s self-authorizing certainty in its own goodness and care of patients. Like Weiskopf and Wilmott’s analysis of Ellsberg’s whistle-blowing, the clinician’s letter is seen as an ethical act which is vested in the challenging of the sovereignty and autonomy, the certainty and self-knowledge, of the organization. Drawing further on Levinasian ideas, McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes demonstrate how such ethico-political acts of resistance, while contesting the problematic autonomy of the organization also, perhaps inevitably, totalize and reify the recipient as the embodiment of problematic organization. The infinite responsibility to respect the alterity of others is both embodied and denied in the very act of an ethically informed resistance. Such an understanding is not, McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes argue, a cause for pessimism or inaction. Rather, the implication is that the ethical subject is always as well the political subject; the one who takes action in response to the call of the ethical demand. It is the call to action of these political subjects, prepared to act in the experience of injustice, while not resting easy on their own ethical righteousness that provide an affirmative possibility for research and theorizing ethics within a critical framework. (Ibid.: 557) In this section I have presented an overview of philosophically informed work within organization studies which represents ethics as other to the autonomy and rationality of individuals and which understands ethics to be diminished or to disappear when it is reduced to the sovereignty or rationality of the self. Such work provides a basis for significant challenge not only to the ethics of rational and instrumental organization, but a challenge also to attempts to posit the autonomous ethical individual as the counterpoint to this. The third and final philosophically informed conceptualization of ethics and organization that I wish to consider is perhaps, however, the most ontologically challenging of all. For while the previous two thematics present powerful and demanding critiques – of the instrumental rationality of organization and of the sovereignty or autonomy of the subject – both may be regarded as still holding on to a strong idea of, if I can put it this way, the ‘goodness’ of ethics. Ethics is the assumed good of the individual’s reason – a goodness that instrumental rationality obscures. Or ethics is the goodness of the pre-discursive pull towards the vulnerability of the other – a pull that we all feel and one that founds and defines the uniqueness of self. In the section below I explore philosophically informed understandings of ethics that see the ethical as not other to or prior to but rather as a product of organization: as an outcome and mechanism of dominant power and knowledge regimes.

The ethical as other to the good The various philosophies that I include within this theme cast the ethical, broadly speaking, as a power-laden societal or psychological discourse which assigns subject positions and ascribes attendant obligations, responsibilities, rights and duties. Our ideas of the good, and our sense of an ethical self built upon these ideas, have no authority in some transcendent notion of reason or of pre-discursive humanity. Ethics is power-laden, always authorizing and othering, often taken-for-granted and is foundational to the organization and constitution of subjectivities and identities. This philosophical orientation to ethics can be found in a number of different critical traditions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and may be understood as the implicit, sometimes explicit, backdrop to each of those writings which sought to contest the idea of the sovereign, whole, integrated modern subject. We can therefore see such an ethical move in, among others, Marxism’s fracturing of the subject – the individual – into different 59

Edward Wray-Bliss

classes and different consciousness; in psychoanalysis’ undercutting of the public subject with unconscious drives and desires; in feminism’s contestation of man and the masculine as the privileged marker of the normal and good; in postcolonialism’s critique of whiteness and European identity and culture in similar terms; and in poststructuralism’s more general move to contest ideas of wholeness, autonomy, rationality and sovereignty as the natural and desirable state of the subject. In each of the above philosophically informed traditions or movements, the (classbased, self-mastering, masculine, racist, or modernist) positions bequeathed and authorized for us as modern subjects, and the attendant ethical value systems and conceptualizations of the good which they entail, are rendered deeply problematic. Given the variety and richness of the traditions that articulate this broad critique of the goodness of valorized subjectivities in contemporary society I have to be selective regarding which to discuss in detail in this short section. I have chosen, therefore, to focus upon the philosophical contribution of poststructuralism and in particular the ideas of Michel Foucault since these inform the most extensive body of material in organization studies which articulates a philosophical critique of the goodness of ethics. I reference the work of Rose (1989) and the body of work driven by the contributions of David Knights and Hugh Willmott in this regard, as well contributions by Bardon and Josserand (2011), Barratt (2008) and Wray-Bliss (2002) which have sought to explore what has been argued to be a neglected productive potential of a Foucauldian ethics. Before we get to Foucault’s writings and the organization studies works that have drawn upon these I start with a discussion of another philosopher’s work that is foundational to Foucault’s later engagement: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche argued that ‘we need a critique of moral values’ that ‘the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined – and so we need to know the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed (morality as result, as symptom, as mask, as tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison), since we have neither had this knowledge up till now nor even desired it. People have taken the value of these “values” as given, as factual, as beyond all questioning’ but ‘What’, Nietzsche asked, ‘if the opposite were true?’ What if ‘morality itself was the danger of dangers?’ (Nietzsche, 1887 [1994]: 7–8). Nietzsche’s argument, in his self-proclaimed polemical text On the Genealogy of Morality, was that civilization, particularly the significant hand played in this by Judeo-Christian ethical teachings, was a fetter upon human kind’s ‘instinct for freedom’ (ibid.: 59) – a concept Nietzsche would call the ‘will to power’ (ibid.). Values of meekness, mildness and compassion (the latter privileged by his ‘great teacher’ Schopenhauer, ibid.: 6), raised servitude and subservience to a high ethical plane. Rather than being an example of laudable self-restraint, this subservience represented self-lacerating cruelty (those familiar with Levinas’ penchant for depicting ethics through metaphors of self-violence will see threads here). This self-violence arises as the force of the individual’s instinct for freedom, denied expression in constraining civilized society, is ‘forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself’ (ibid.: 59). Unable to revolt against the forces of society, the individual revolts against herself and her drives, resenting that which cannot be expressed she dedicates herself to seeking out and destroying these drives and desires in her own soul. There is nothing good for Nietzsche about this morality or these ethics, it is rather the means by which the individual is transformed from a being full of potentiality and power into ‘tame and civilised animal, a household pet’ (ibid.: 24). Foucault’s writings – his own genealogical examination of the constitutions of the soul of modern subjects – drew directly upon these Nietzschean ideas and terminology. Foucault would argue that avowed ethical goods of modernity – for instance the ‘compassionate’ treatment of 60

Ethics

the mentally ill (Foucault, 1965), modern approaches to criminality and rehabilitation (Foucault, 1979), the valorisation of the expressive sexual self (Foucault, 1978) – and the ethical subject positions that they entailed and constructed were not self-evidently ethical. Rather, they could be traced back to extensive and intensive forms of psychic – and physical – violence, legitimized and conducted under the auspices of medical, legal, educational and psychological expert knowledge. The particular construction of the sane, healthy, sexual, productive subject of modernity was thus a product of historically traceable, organized, disciplinary practices. Such practices were subsequently folded back from the outside into the interior of the subject. From being a manifestation of power they become a product and goal of ethics. The individual comes to internalise the ideal of self and the concomitant ethical values, engaging in a multitude of self-disciplining practices so as to fashion and affix themselves in the light of this ideal. While history showed the human subject to have always engaged in ethical self-fashioning and disciplining practices of one form or another (Foucault, 1982[2001]) – thus making aspirations of a soul or subject position free of all such operation of power and ethics redundant – for Foucault we might yet seek to turn the ‘artists’ cruelty’ (Nietzsche, 1887[1994]: 59) of a subject imprinting this ethics on the self into a more consciously cultivated practice, where the self becomes a work of art of one’s own creation (Foucault in Rabinow, 1994). Within the organizational studies field, a major contribution to a Foucauldian(/Nietzschean) critique of the goodness of society’s ethically valorised subject positions was the publication of Rose (1989) Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self. Rose’s work extended the empirical scope of Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the modern subject by providing a meticulous historical examination of the technologies, knowledges and practices across the realms of war, work, education and the family that have constructed the subjectivity and procured the productivity of the citizens of the United Kingdom. Subsequently, a substantial and important body of work has been added to the organization studies cannon utilizing Foucauldian ideas, though largely substituting the more prosaic term ‘subjectivity’ for the original overtly ethico/religio term ‘soul’, to consider the constitution of individual subjects through their relationships with organization. Owing much to the contributions of David Knights, Hugh Willmott and colleagues (Knights and Collinson, 1987; Knights and McCabe, 1999; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; Knights and Willmott, 1989) this rich body of work has examined how unacknowledged conceptualizations of self – which may originate as either a product of organizational and managerial practices (a ‘healthy worker’ for instance), in opposition to such practices (‘a resistant subject’) and/or from wider cultural norms and identities (a ‘masculine man’) – recruit individuals into patterns of behaviour that are consistent with affirming their valued self-identity even when this may be understood to be detrimental to the individual’s status or political agency within organizations. Notwithstanding the important contribution of this work, some organizational scholars have argued that the productive political potential of Foucault’s engagement with ethics has been underexplored or obscured (e.g. Barratt, 2008; Newton, 1998) with undesirable unintended consequences for the ethical warrant of such organizational scholarship (Wray-Bliss, 2002). Subsequently, a small number of works have sought to draw upon Foucauldean ideas not merely to problematize the ‘goodness’ of organizationally, culturally or societally sanctioned subject positions but also to consider the possibility that organizational scholarship on ethics might be conducted in a way that valorizes and examines individuals’ attempts to become ‘moral subjects of [their] own actions’ (Bardon and Josserand, 2011: 507). That such work is rather embryonic still, however, further attests to organizational scholars’ enduring tendency towards a suspicious treatment of the ethical in organizations. I have in this section presented an overview of a train of philosophy, and its legacies in organization studies work, which may be regarded as articulating a suspicion that ethics is other 61

Edward Wray-Bliss

to goodness: that it is, rather, a mechanism and means by which power-laden subject positions in contemporary organized life are reinforced by being made the responsibility of individual subjects. Such an orientation to ethics is extremely challenging – challenging even (if we are not most careful in reading also the productive potentialities and generative possibilities of ethics in the originating philosophical works) of the very idea, the very possibility, of ethics being anything other than a cipher for power. I return to this need for organization studies to read ethics, philosophy and organization in productive/generative ways in my discussion, next.

Discussion, conclusion and notes towards future directions I have suggested in this chapter that organizational scholars have long been drawing upon philosophically informed conceptualizations of the ethical. Weberian-influenced critiques of organizational instrumental rationality, for example, were shown to be a located in a rich seam of philosophical discussions of the relationship between reason and ethics – stretching back at least to the writings of Kant and forward through the works of figures such as Arendt, Marcuse, Bauman, Ritzer, Wright Mills and Watson. Notwithstanding such history, it is fair to say that only relatively recently have organizational scholars demonstrated a more general preparedness to explicitly identify their work as concerned with and conceptualized through the ethical. Thus, for example, most of that substantial body of work in organization studies which draws upon Foucauldian ideas – ideas that are deeply indebted to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality – eschew explicit mention of ethics in favour of terms such as subjectivity and power. By not more deliberately and explicitly engaging with ethics and ethical philosophy, organization studies seems to me to be a little like a people separated from a crucial part of their heritage. As with people, sometimes such separation can be devastating, a profound loss and lack that never lets the subject in question develop as it could. For others, a productive and broadly satisfying present is possible. However, there may always be a nagging suspicion that something is missing, some piece of the puzzle of who the subject is and what they are for that is out of reach. This nagging suspicion, in even the otherwise well-adjusted, can be corrosive – a shadow cast on the subject’s views of the world and others, a tendency toward a certain negativity. Something similar may have happened, I suggest, with the subject of organization studies. By exploring ethical philosophy and ethics far less than it might, organization studies seems not to have developed the language or capabilities to talk about and valorize the good. So now, even when ethics becomes the explicit empirical focus and philosophical resource of organizational studies writing, the tendency is to approach it in what I have termed a suspicious way: ethics as a means by which to problematize organizational, managerial and individual efforts and endeavours further. While ethics, in definitional terms, may be concerned broadly with ‘the good’, organizational scholars have drawn upon it largely to consider ‘the bad’. This is not to suggest that the subject of organization studies needs the uncritical ministrations of positive psychology or the kind of enforced hysterical happiness mandated by consumer society (Wilson, 2008). Nor is it to suggest that organizational scholars should adopt what might be criticized as the cheerleading and overly optimistic orientation of much of the Business Ethics field. Rather, it is to say that the ability to notice empirically, to conceptualize, to speak to and to develop ideas and practices of a substantive ethical nature will require a better grounding in and valorization of the ethical – and this must necessarily include those ethical philosophies, past and present, that have shaped and continue to shape the subject of organization studies and the subjects of organization. Both then in terms of broadening the conceptual and empirical focus on ethics and in terms of exploring the wealth of philosophical ethical traditions – the surface of which 62

Ethics

have only been scratched by our field – we could usefully still do much more. To the considerable omissions and partial commissions of ethics in our field, I would like to signal a small number of philosophies and philosophers that organizational scholars might usefully take some time to explore. First, to develop further critical reflexivity on the historical construction of the Western (confessing) ethical subject and on concepts of soul, guilt, conscience and self-critique – so powerful in tying us to our responsibilities as well as giving us reasons for refusing irresponsible commands – further examination of the writings of formative early Christian ethicists is warranted. Augustine’s writings from the fourth and fifth century CE, such as Confessions (Augustine, 1961) and City of God (Augustine, 1972), for example, have been engaged with by theorists from Foucault, to Bataille, to Arendt and can be regarded as central to the decisive departure of Western ethical identity and responsibility from Greco/Roman ethics and the subsequent development of a modern Western subjectivity. But they have largely been neglected by organization studies. Consideration of such works might also enable us to reflect upon whether the subject of organization studies itself has come to be defined and constituted through an unacknowledged Christian/confessing ethics – an organization studies which ever seeks to interrogate self, other and organization for guilty secrets and trespasses and which finds it difficult to articulate and valorize any of its own expressions of the good. Second, to interrogate the mobilizing ideology of individual freedom and the ethical legitimations underpinning the commoditization of labour, the negative ethics of Liberalism articulated in the writings of figures such as John Locke (1690[1980], J.S. Mill (1859[1974], and then rearticulated and refashioned in the neo-liberalism of von Hayek (1960) and Friedman (1962), would benefit from being critically reviewed and re-examined within the organization studies field. Greater understanding of these formative ethical foundations of Western liberal and neo-liberal society opens up further opportunities for conceptually challenging oft takenfor-granted appeals to self-interest and individual freedom legitimizing organizational and managerial demands, as well as increasing the possibility that we may recognize when the practices of other organizational members articulate a different ethics. Finally, while his works inform the discussions and ideas of figures as central to organization studies as Weber, Kant’s phenomenally influential philosophical contribution has received very little sustained examination by scholars studying organization. As a major – for many the major – philosophical writer of modernity, his work would seem to warrant far more consideration both in its own right but also because Kant, as Critchley (2001: iii) observes, represented the ‘final great figure common to both Continental and analytic traditions’. Kant’s writings on ethics and reason, as such, offer potentialities for rapprochement between the critical/continental traditions of organization studies scholarship most familiar to Europeans and the more analytically minded scholarship practised in the American tradition. To bring this chapter to a close, I would like to end by exhorting organizational scholars to engage much further with ethical philosophy – both the large body of work as yet neglected by our field and those works and ideas that have already received some attention. Greater appreciation of the philosophical ethical foundations of contemporary discourses – and the subject positions that they constitute and validate – not only enables us to understand the dominantpresent of organization, it also helps us to note and valorize individual and group behaviours within organization that seek to embodying different ethical relationships and ideals. This may yet help us shift organizational studies research from a critical-suspicious towards a criticalproductive engagement with ethics.

63

Edward Wray-Bliss

Notes 1

2

Boltanski and Chiapello (1999[2005]) have argued that, contra to the characterization of large-scale capitalist organizations as disenchanted and reified spaces, we are witnessing new attempts by organizations to articulate an inspirational organizational ethic – a new spirit of capitalism as it were – so as to attract higher-calibre, socially aware graduates into managerial roles. du Gay (2000), has taken a different approach, stressing that suspension of personal ethical judgements under an ethos of impartial administration is – at least among members of the civil service – a necessary precondition for liberal democracy to function properly (a point previously stressed by both Weber and Marcuse, but probably given less attention than it should have had in organizational scholarship until du Gay’s efforts).

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (eds) (1992). Critical Management Studies. London: Sage. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin. Arendt, H. (1965[1994]). Some questions of moral philosophy. Social Research, 61(4): 739–64. Arendt, H. (1971). The Life of the Mind. Orlando: Harcourt. Augustine. (1961). Confessions (trans. F. J. Sheed). Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel. Augustine. (1972). City of God (trans. H. Bettenson). Harmondsworth, Penguin. Banerjee, B. (2007). Corporate Social Responsibility. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Bardon, T. and Josserand, E. (2011). A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming. Organization, 18(4): 497–515. Barratt, E. (2008). The later Foucault in organization and management studies. Human Relations, 61(4): 515–37. Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bernstein, R. (2002). Evil and the temptation of theodicy, in Critchley, S. and Bernasconi, R. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–67. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (1999[2005]). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Brubaker, R. (1984). The Limits of Rationality. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Clegg, S. (2005). Puritans, visionaries and survivors. Organization Studies, 26(4): 527–45. Critchley, S. (2001). Continental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely Demanding. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. du Gay, P. (2000). In Praise of Bureaucracy. London: Sage. Ezzamel, M. and Wilmott, H. (2014) Registering ‘the Ethical’ in Organization Theory Formation: Towards the Disclosure of an ‘Invisible Force’ Organization Studies 35, 7: 1013–1039 Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilisation. London: Random House. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume One. London: Random House. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Random House. Foucault, M. (1982[2001]). The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Picador. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Garber, M., Hanssen, B. and Walkowitz, R. (eds) (2000). The Turn to Ethics. London: Routledge. Gerth, H. and Wright Mills, C.W. (1946). From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1944[1972]). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder. Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, C. (2003). As if business ethics were possible, within such limits. Organization, 10: 223–48. Jones, C., Parker, M. and ten Bos, R. (2005). For Business Ethics. Abingdon: Routledge. Knights, D. and Collinson, D. (1987). Disciplining the shopfloor: a comparison of the disciplinary effects of managerial psychology and financial accounting. Accounting, Organisation and Society, 12(5): 457–77. Knights, D. and McCabe, D. (1999). Are there no limits to authority? TQM and organizational power. Organization Studies, 20(2): 197–224. Knights, D. and Vurdubakis, T. (1994). Foucault, power, resistance and all that, in Jermier, J., Knights, D. and Nord, W. (eds), Resistance and Power in Organizations: agency, subjectivity and the labour process. London: Routledge, pp. 167–98. 64

Ethics

Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1989). Power and subjectivity at work: from degradation to subjugation in social relations. Sociology, 23(4): 535–58. Levinas, E. (1961[1969]). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1974[1998]). Otherwise than Being: or beyond essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Locke, J. (1690[1980]). Second Treatise on Government (ed. C.B. McPherson). Cambridge: Hackett. McKinlay, A. (2002). ‘Dead selves’: the birth of the modern career. Organization, 9(4): 595–614. McMurray, R., Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (2011). Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: a case of health care tendering. Organization, 18(4): 541–61. Marcuse, H. (1941[2005]). Some social implications of modern technology, in Arato, A. and Gebhardt, E. (eds), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. London: Continuum, pp. 138–62. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1859[1974]). On Liberty. London: Penguin. Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt. Neiman, S. (1994). The Unity of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neiman, S. (2002). Evil in Modern Thought. Melbourne: Scribe. Newton, T.J. (1998). Theorizing subjectivity in organizations: the failure of Foucauldian studies. Organization Studies, 19: 415–47. Nietszche, F. (1887[1994]). On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Packard, V. (1957). The Hidden Persuaders. Ig Publishing. Parker, M. (1999). Capitalism, subjectivity and ethics: debating labour process analysis. Organization Studies, 20(1): 25–45. Parker, M. (2002). Against Management. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1994). Michel Foucault, Ethics: essential works of Foucault 1954–1984. London: Penguin. Rhodes, C. (2012). Ethics, alterity and the rationality of leadership justice. Human Relations, 65(10): 1311–31. Ritzer, G. (1993). The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Roberts, J. (2001). Corporate governance and the ethics of narcissus. Business Ethics Quarterly, 11(1): 109–27. Rose, N. (1989). Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self. London: Routledge. Sorrell, T. (1998). Beyond the fringe? The strange state of business ethics, in Parker, M. (ed.), Ethics and Organizations. London: Sage, pp. 15–29. Thompson, P., Smith, C. and Ackroyd, S. (2000). If ethics is the answer, you are asking the wrong questions. Organization Studies, 21: 1149–58. von Hayek, F. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. London: Routledge. Watson, T. (2003). Ethical choice in managerial work: the scope for moral choices in an ethically irrational world. Human Relations, 56: 167–85. Weber, M. (1930[2001]). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxon: Routledge. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiskopf, R. and Willmott, H. (2013). Ethics as critical practice: the ‘Pentagon Papers’, deciding responsibility, truth-telling, and the unsettling of organizational morality. Organization Studies, 34(4): 469–93. Wilson, E. (2008). Against Happiness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wray-Bliss, E. (2002). Abstract ethics, embodied ethics: the strange marriage of Foucault and Positivism in LPT. Organisation, 9(1): 5–39. Wray-Bliss, E. (2009). Ethics: critique, ambivalence and infinite responsibilities (unmet), in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 267–85. Wright Mills, C. (1951). White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press.

65

4 Methodology Philosophical underpinnings and their implications Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

Introduction Methodology has been defined as both ‘the collection of methods or rules by which a particular piece of research is undertaken’ and the ‘principles, theories and values that underpin a particular approach to research’ (Somekh and Lewin, 2005: 346) while Walter (2006: 35) argues that methodology is the frame of reference for the research which is influenced by the ‘paradigm in which our theoretical perspective is placed or developed’. In this chapter, we are defining methodology in a way similar to the way in which Lincoln and Guba (1985: 15) define paradigm. They argue that paradigms consist of ‘a systematic set of beliefs together with their accompanying methods’. Paradigms epitomize our particular view of the world and as such are the embodiment of our view of ‘reality’. They also provide us as researchers with the guiding principles on which our practices are founded, forming part of our taken for granted assumptions (Lincoln and Guba, 1985: 15). Methodology from this perspective is the overall approach to research linked to the theoretical framework in use. This can be distinguished from method, which refers to systematic modes, procedures or tools used for collection and analysis of data. Clearly however our methods cannot be divorced from their over-arching paradigm or methodology. As we have discussed in detail elsewhere (Johnson and Duberley, 2000), any process of methodological engagement inevitably articulates, and is constituted by, an attachment to particular philosophical commitments. However this aspect of methodology is often given limited attention by researchers, especially if they view the methods they use as merely tools for enabling the collection of particular types and sources of ‘data’ in order to deal with specific research questions. For new researchers, engaging in philosophical debates for the first time can be somewhat bewildering. Indeed, the requirement to account for and deliver upon our philosophical assumptions when discussing methodology can seem rather daunting. We concur with Caelli, Ray and Mill (2003) that researchers should address the following four areas:

66

Methodology

1 2

3 4

the theoretical positioning of the researcher, including their motives, presuppositions and personal history that leads them toward and shapes a particular inquiry; the congruence between methodology, reflecting the beliefs about knowledge that arise from the philosophical framework being employed and methods or tools of data collection and analysis; strategies to establish rigour – in other words they must evaluate their research in a way that is philosophically and methodologically congruent with their enquiry; the analytical lens through which data are examined, in terms of the epistemological and ontological assumptions the researcher makes in engaging with their data.

We would argue that this applies equally whether research is quantitative or qualitative in nature as it seems a useful starting point to ensure that researchers at least consider the philosophical assumptions underpinning their studies. Our intention in this chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of the methodological implications of the various philosophical stances within which research sits. Before presenting an overview of some of the different methodological approaches in management research informed by particular philosophical stances, it is useful to briefly return to the key terms discussed in the previous two chapters which will be encountered in these philosophical discussions, notably epistemology and ontology. As discussed earlier, epistemology is usually understood as being concerned with knowledge about knowledge. In other words, epistemology is the study of the criteria by which we can know what does and does not constitute warranted, or scientific, knowledge. That is, what do we mean by the concept ‘truth’ and how do we know whether or not some claim, including our own, is true or false? Usually people think that such processes of justifying knowledge claims are in principle straightforward: in judging the truth or falsity of any such claim surely ‘the facts speak for themselves’? All we need to do is look for the relevant evidence whose content will either support or refute any claim. Thus it is often thought that what is true is something that corresponds with the given facts: empirical evidence is the ultimate arbiter. Perhaps this view of warranted knowledge initially seems harmless and unproblematic. However, it has been subject to much dispute in both the natural and social sciences: a dispute which has had a direct influence on the evolution of research methodology. Central to this debate is the issue that if we reject the possibility of neutral observation, we have to admit to dealing with a socially constructed reality which may entail a questioning of whether or not what we take to be reality actually exists ‘out there’ at all. This leads us to the philosophical issue that revolves around our ontological assumptions. Ontological questions concern whether or not the phenomenon that we are interested in actually exists independently of our knowing and perceiving it or whether what we see and take to be real is, instead, an outcome of these acts of knowing and perceiving. By combining the ontological assumptions with the competing assumptions regarding epistemology discussed in Chapter 2, this volume, we can see some of the different philosophical positions which impact upon methodology. These philosophical assumptions about ontology and epistemology are always contentious and debatable, because that is all they are – philosophical assumptions. Therefore it is important that we are aware of them; prepared to defend them; and consider their implications. It is the variation in these assumptions that leads to some of the different methodological approaches we can identify with regard to organizational research. It is to these different approaches we now turn.

67

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

Positivist methodology As many authors have highlighted, the development of management and organizational research has been characterised by the domination of positivism as an underlying philosophy. As has been discussed elsewhere (Johnson and Duberley, 2000), there are a variety of different approaches towards positivism, for example Halfpenny (1982) identified twelve varieties. According to some (e.g. Keat and Urry, 1975) two of the most significant characteristics of positivist methodology concern first the claim that science should focus on only directly observable phenomena, with any reference to the intangible or subjective being excluded as being meaningless; and second that theories should be tested, in a hypothetico-deductive fashion, by their confrontation with the facts neutrally gathered from a readily observable external world. Table 4.1 outlines the major preoccupations of positivist methodology. The aim of research from a positivist perspective is to generate and test laws which govern the ways in which organizations operate. This concern to develop causal propositions supported by data and logic underpins an emphasis on experimental and cross sectional survey research designs. The desire to replicate the methods of the natural sciences in the social sciences leads to a focus on the observable. Objectivity is equated with quantification thus the focus of research is upon that which can easily be measured and subjective elements of phenomena are often ignored. Although positivism can be differentiated from empiricism due to its concern with theory, empirical research remains of utmost importance from this perspective as theories are accepted or rejected on the basis of their correspondence with the facts seen in the objective world. Positivist methodology maintains a preoccupation with internal validity or proof of causality. This preoccupation would generally lead to more emphasis on the experimental method and suggests the need for an increasingly controlled environment. However, much management research adopts instead the use of survey methodologies which have been critiqued in relation to their ability to imply causation. A further preoccupation, stemming from the idealization of the scientific method relates to reliability. Here researchers from a positivist tradition attempt to ensure the consistency of measurement in research. According to Kirk and Miller reliability can be judged in three ways: Quixotic reliability, the circumstances in which a single method of observation will always yield an unvarying measurement; diachronic reliability, the stability of an observation through time and synchronic reliability, the similarity of observation in the same time period (Kirk and Miller, 1986: 41–2). Much positivist methodology is concerned with overcoming threats to reliability through subject error, subject bias, observer error and observer bias and focus is placed on replication as a means of eliminating bias and ensuring reliability (Johnson and Duberley, 2000: 51). A third preoccupation of positivist approaches is an emphasis on generalizability. This is often dealt with through the use of probability sampling, although this is not a perfect solution and generalizability remains a concern. Finally, given the importance of empirical observation to the traditional scientific method, and the fact that many constructs are not easily observable, operationalism is another preoccupation for positivist methodology. The process of operationalization ideally involves gaining access to what Moser and Kalton (Marsh, 1979) call the ‘individual true value’ of concepts which methods measure with a greater or lesser degree of precision. In practice, operationalization involves the reduction of concepts into a scale of observable indicators. A further important element of positivist methodology relates to the role of the researcher and their relationship to ‘the subject’. Here the researcher remains a detached observer and as discussed, attempts are made to remove any potential sources of bias through the use of standardised tools and the replication of research. This detachment and lack of bias is assumed at conception of the research project as well as throughout its lifetime. The researcher is assumed to adopt a value-free position and little consideration is given to political or emotional issues. 68

Methodology Table 4.1 Positivist methodology Aims of research Generation of causal laws

The aim of the research should be to identify causal explanations and fundamental laws that explain regularities in human social behaviour

Research approach Unity of natural and social science method

The method of the natural sciences is the only rational source of knowledge and should therefore be adopted in the social sciences. This implies preoccupations with: • Internal validity • External validity • Reliability • Operationalization

Relationship between research and researched Independence theory and neutral observational language

The observer is independent of what is being observed. Therefore the observer can stand back and observe the world objectively

Value freedom

The choice of what to be studied and how to study it can be determined by objective criteria rather than human beliefs and interests

Correspondence theory of truth

Theory can be tested against irreducible statements of observationthe facts of the situation. Research is concerned with producing accounts that correspond to an independent reality

Source: Johnson and Duberley (2000: 39).

Positivist studies have a tendency to reduce human behaviour to the status of automatic responses excited by external stimuli wherein the subjective dimension to that behaviour is lost: intentionally or otherwise. Instead, human behaviour is conceptualized and explained deterministically: as necessary responses to empirically observable, measurable causal variables and antecedent conditions. The resultant approach, often called erklaren (see Outhwaite, 1975), usually investigates human behaviour through the use of Popper’s (1959) hypothetico-deductive method. Here the aim is to produce generalizable knowledge through testing of hypothetical predictions deduced from a priori theory. As such it entails the researcher’s a priori conceptualization, operationalization, and statistical measurement of dimensions of actors’ behaviour rather than beginning with their socially derived (inter)subjective perspectives. This is based on an allegiance to methodological monism: the notion that only natural science methodology can provide certain knowledge and enable prediction and control; it follows that it must be emulated by social scientists (Ross, 1991: 350). To assume that all qualitative research is necessarily anti-positivistic is mistaken. There are examples of qualitative research carried out in this tradition, though the focus is always upon seeking to tightly control the variables and conduct some form of quantification of the qualitative data obtained. Content analysis as originally specified for example (see Lacity and Jansen, 1994 for further discussion) strives to meet the philosophical commitments of positivism. However, concerns regarding the lack of consideration of the subjective nature of social life have led to the promotion of a variety of different philosophical stances aimed to redress the dominance of positivism within the organizational and management field. 69

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

Neo-positivist methodology Even those who reject key aspects of positivism regarding the use of hypothetico-deductive methodology, and the exclusion of the subjective as meaningless, will sometimes retain a commitment to being able to objectively investigate human intersubjective cultural processes by gathering the facts from a readily observable external world. The result is a kind of ‘qualitative positivism’ (see Knights, 1992; Van Maanen, 1995; Schwandt, 1996; Prasad and Prasad, 2002), or ‘neo-empiricism’ (Alvesson and Skolberg, 2009) which although different from mainstream positivism shares its commitment to a theory-neutral observational language: that it is possible to neutrally apprehend the facts ‘out-there’. The belief that science can produce objective knowledge rests on two assumptions: first the assumption of ontological realism – that there is a reality ‘out there’ to be known and second that it is possible to remove subjective bias in the assessment of that reality. These assumptions can be seen to have underpinned certain approaches towards ethnography in the past. For example Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) discuss how early ethnography was often wedded to the notion of realism, which means that while ethnographers may discuss how the subjects of their study socially construct their realities they do not apply this constructivism to the ethnographic process. Indeed it was a classic ethnographer Malinowski who argued that ‘ethnography’s peculiar character is the production of ostensibly ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ knowledge based on personal interaction and subjective experience’ (cited in Yanow and Schwartz-Sheare, 2006: 261). Thus what is ‘out there’ is presumed to be independent of the knower and is accessible to the trained observer or ethnographer following the correct procedures. This leads to a situation where tension exists between a subjectivist attention to actors’ meanings and an objectivist treatment of them as phenomena that exist ‘out there’ independently of the observer’s identification of them (Weiskopf and Willmott, 1996). Alvesson (2003) further discusses the ways in which the research interview is used by neopositivists in order to attempt to access a context free truth about reality by rigidly following a research protocol and minimising researcher influence and other potential sources of bias. He sees the ideal for neo-positivist qualitative research interviewers being ‘a maximum, transparent research process, characterised by objectivity and neutrality’ (Alvesson, 2003: 16) with the interview conversation being seen as ‘a pipeline for transmitting knowledge’ (Holstein and Gubrium, 1997: 113, cited in Alvesson, 2003: 15) where researchers attempt to remove themselves from the process, presenting instead an objective picture, free from the potential distortion of their assumptions and values. Thus although qualitative researchers may seek to distance themselves from positivism, the reliance on tools and techniques; the assumption that bias can be removed; and that with the right tools and techniques peoples’ subjective realities can be accessed; shows some blurring of the boundaries between approaches in the minds of certain researchers.

Interpretivist methodology A variety of different philosophical approaches are covered by the loose term interpretivism. Prasad (2005: 13) suggests that ‘all interpretive traditions emerge from a scholarly position that takes human interpretation as the starting point for developing knowledge about the social world. Particularly important in this tradition is a commitment to verstehen (Outhwaite, 1975) which entails accessing and understanding the actual meanings and interpretations actors subjectively ascribe to phenomena in order to describe and explain their behaviour through investigating how they experience, sustain, articulate and share with others these socially constructed everyday realities. On the philosophical domains of ontology and epistemology, it is more complicated 70

Methodology

to locate this whole body of work. Some of these traditions can be seen as similar to that of neo-positivism, in that a realist ontology is utilised – that is there is a real world with real phenomena to explore – and a subjectivist or constructionist epistemology in that our understanding of that reality is socially constructed. However, some interpretivist traditions are more subjectivist in their ontological stance. One point of connection however, is that interpretivists are less likely to be concerned with mirroring the tenets of positivism and that their search for the understanding of interpretation requires different research designs and a changed role for the researcher. Indeed the researcher themselves may become a focal point of interest in some interpretivist traditions. Prasad (2005: 16) suggests that ‘although a variety of perspectives come under the banner of interpretivism, ideas of social construction, verstehen, intersubjectivity and reification are all integral to the different interpretive traditions. . . . Yet each tradition appropriates and extends these central tenets quite uniquely’. It is impossible to provide a review of all interpretive work, instead a brief exploration of phenomenology, ethnomethodology and hermeneutics below highlights some of the underlying principles. Phenomenology in its broadest terms is concerned with the implicit structure and meaning of human experience (Atkinson, 1972). According to Sanders (1982: 354) it ‘concentrates neither on the subject nor on the object of experience but on the point of contact at which being and consciousness meet’. On the basis of an initial divide between descriptive and interpretive approaches, Gill (2014) classifies and contrasts five phenomenological methodologies. Of central importance in this typology is the distinction between Husserlian descriptive phenomenology and Heiderggerian interpretive phenomenology. The former is concerned with gaining an understanding of what an experience essentially is (Sanders, 1982: 354), a search for ‘essences’ (Gill, 2014). The latter focuses more on the human experience of being and informed the development of hermeneutical approaches which will be discussed next. While there are a variety

Table 4.2 Phenomenological methodology 1. Apprehension of the world

2. Phenomena investigated

3. Problem formulations

4. Research methodology

5. Research aim and inferences

6. Generalization of results

Researcher sees the world largely as indeterminate and problematic. Phenomena under investigation are viewed more directly as functions of perceptions, intuitions and personal meanings (Willis, 1978) Considers lived experiences of subjects. Considers both observed characteristics and specific qualities perceived as personal forms of meaning Begins with attitude of epoché. All personal biases, beliefs or assumptions about causal relationships or suppositions are suspended or bracketed. Questions are formulated and responses analysed Emphasis is placed on describing the world from the point of view of the persons who live in and experience it. All concepts or theories emerge from the data of consciousness of consciousness, requiring an inductive approach that cannot be replicated exactly To arrive at universal pure essences. The logic of inference is one of direct comparison, resulting in new insight or reclassification (Willis, 1978) Generalizations concern only the specific subject(s) under investigation. No generalizations are made beyond this group. Findings serve as a data base for further investigation

Source: Modified from Sanders (1982: 358).

71

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

of potential approaches to descriptive phenomenological methodology (see for example Giorgi, 2006), Sanders (1982) gives very clear guidelines as to the research design involved in phenomenological research. She suggests data collection should be undertaken through oral history interviews, documentary study and participant observation and stresses the importance of recording any interviews. With regard to data analysis, Sanders highlights four questions the researcher must consider: (1) How may the phenomenon or experience under investigation be described? (2) What are the invariants or themes emergent in those descriptions? (3) What are the subjective reflections of those themes? And (4) What are the essences present in those themes and subjective reflections? Table 4.2 outlines the core elements of phenomenological methodology. Hermeneutics is an interpretive phenomenological approach informed by the European social science traditions of Dilthey, Heidegger and others. As with most perspectives, there are alternative positions within the field of hermeneutics (see for discussion Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000) so the brevity of this section may suggest a more unified approach than is actually the case. Howell (2013) argues that the main purpose of hermeneutics is to understand communities/individuals better than the agents themselves and that this requires the use of intuition and empathy, both of which require self-consciousness. Hermeneutical phenomenology sees meaning as being linked directly to context. Heidegger argues that there is no differentiation between subject and object. As human beings ‘the world and the individual are continually at one with on another; we are in the world before we think and reflect so we are both subject and object and at one with the world’ (Howell, 2013: 65). Thus Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000: 53) suggest that the key principle underlying hermeneutics is that the meaning of a part can only be understood if it is related to the whole. Hermeneutics involves a process of ‘continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring both into view simultaneously’ (Geertz, 1973: 239). Hence the meaning of a text is continually interpreted with reference to its context (Howell, 2013: 157). The key heuristic device for understanding and interpretation is the hermeneutic circle. Within the hermeneutic circle the link between pre-understanding and understanding is made. Noone comes to interpretation of any given situation or action with an open mind, rather there is the pre-understanding of the phenomenon that we already have. Hence the hermeneutic circle focuses upon the iteration of interpretation where pre-understanding informs understanding and so on, leading to a greater understanding of both. A decision to engage in research from a phenomenological or hermeneutic perspective would involve the researcher beginning a process of self-reflection. For the phenomenologist the purpose of such reflection is to consider their potential biases or presuppositions with the aim of setting them aside or ‘bracketing’ them (Laverty, 2003). From a hermeneutical perspective rather than setting aside any biases or assumptions, the researcher embeds these into the research process by engaging in a continual process of reflection and consideration of how their views or experience relates to the issues under study (Laverty, 2003). The development of hermeneutic interpretation then forms the basis of approaches to qualitative data analysis, for example where patterns of interpretation of themes from interview transcripts start to shape our understanding of interviewee accounts (McAuley, 2004). Understanding is developed through interaction and participative dialogue so that interpretation is mutually negotiated. Finally, ethnomethodology builds on the philosophy of phenomenology to seek to understand and interpret how individuals make sense of their lifeworlds. The key principles are informed by American sociological traditions and particularly the work of Garfinkel (1967) who was interested in the everyday ways in which individuals construct and make sense of complex social situations. Ethnomethodology is thus more interested in the ways in which interpretive schemas 72

Methodology

are put into practice and accepted, altered or rejected (Prasad, 2005). The methods that tend to be associated with this tradition focus upon examining the social minutiae of happenings in acute detail in order to ‘explore how the lifeworld emerges as a result of microprocesses in the form of social interactions’ (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000: 38). For example various linguistic approaches to qualitative data analysis such as conversational analysis can be located within this approach. Within the business and management field a key use of ethnomethodology is the concept of sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Research in this tradition has focused upon paying attention to how individuals or groups retrospectively make sense of events such as disasters or crises (Brown, 2006). Throughout, these accounts draw upon the documentary method highlighted by Garfinkel (Fox, 2008) with a view that reality is an ongoing and skilful social accomplishment. Within the management field there has also been a growing recognition of the ways in which language shapes how social phenomena are understood (Llewellyn, 2004). Conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis which both have their roots in ethnomethodology have both been used. In the former, emphasis lies with examining narrative and linguistic practices often through analysis of real time interaction (see for example Llewellyn, 2008, 2011; Llewelyn and Hindmarsh, 2011) while the latter examines in depth the formation of social categories – a process which may help link narrative and linguistic practices to the social structure, thus revealing how such practices are socially constrained (Llewellyn, 2004: 963). While there are clear differences between these approaches towards methodology, and it has been argued that ethnomethodology in particular often ‘seeks to imitate the technical approach, rigour and codification of quantitative methodology’ (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000: 48), Gill (2014) outlines a number of similarities. First, they reject the Cartesian subject–object relationship that is central to the natural sciences. The researcher is encouraged to reflect upon their role in the research process and consider their potential assumptions and biases. Second, the emphasis is upon understanding experiences from the point of those having the experiences. There is an assumption that individuals seek meaning in their experiences and that they are able to convey these through the accounts they give. Generally, though not always, small samples and purposive sampling is utilised in research from this perspective, in order to access those who have shared experiences and something to say about the matter at hand and there is an emphasis on ‘thick description’, gaining extensive qualitative accounts rather than reducing people’s experiences through quantitative methods. Finally, Gill suggests that interpretive approaches apply thematic types of analysis to elucidate and unpick the experiences under study.

Critical theory and methodology Critical theory focuses on the inherent connection between power, politics, values and knowledge and thereby provokes a deeper consideration of the politics and values which underpin and legitimize the authority of scientific knowledge (Alvesson et al., 2009). The aim of such approaches towards management research is to examine how the practices and institutions of management are developed and legitimized within particular relations of power and domination such as capitalism. Hegemony and the ways in which elites perpetuate their rule by getting people to consent to their own domination through accepting the legitimacy of existing norms, values and rituals is an important focus for critical theory, highlighting the complex nature of power and domination. Yet critical theory is also concerned with the role of agency and asserts that systems can and should be changed, thus research from this perspective tends to have an orientation towards investigating issues such as exploitation, asymmetrical power relations, distorted communication, and false consciousness. A fundamental tenet is the belief that these 73

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

systems can be transformed to enable emancipation which involves a continuing process of critical self-reflection and associated self-transformation. Prasad and Caproni (1997: 3) identify four broad themes which are integral to research methodology from the perspective of critical theory: an emphasis on the social construction of reality; a focus on issues of power and ideology whereby there is an awareness that social constructions are influenced by power relations and a consideration of the role of ideology in preventing individuals from living fulfilling lives by masking social contradictions and creating false expectations; the need to understand any social or organizational phenomenon with respect to its multiple interconnections and its location within holistic historical contexts; and the importance of praxis, the ongoing construction of social arrangements that are conducive to the flourishing of the human condition. The presupposition of a theory-neutral observational language is rejected by critical theorists who see knowledge as contaminated at source by the influence of sociocultural factors upon sensory experience (see Habermas, 1974). The researcher is no longer the neutral observer. Instead, for emancipation to take place, there is a need to counter the influence of ‘scientism’ which occurs when scientific or ‘objective’ knowledge can lead to domination and dehumanization. Examples from the management and organization arena are highlighted by Willmott (2008: 67) who points out that ‘a positivist conception of objective knowledge has filtered into the field of management through the processes of quantification and the development of seemingly impartial means of legitimising instrumental rationalizations – from scientific management through human relations to BPR’. The role of the critical theorist is to critique these forms of scientism and create opportunities for change. The outcomes of research are influenced by the subjectivity of the social scientist and his or her mode of engagement, which leads to the production of different versions of an independently existing reality which we can never fully know. For Habermas (1974), it is only through reference to human interests that it becomes possible to understand first the criteria which are applied in identifying what are taken to be ‘real’ and second, the criteria by which the validity of such propositions may be evaluated. Given the various commitments of critical theory, a range of different traditions have developed that seek to apply these principles, so research within these traditions uses a range of different methods. For example, participant observation and ethnographies are used to highlight the subjective experiences of how dominance and control are exercised in the workplace. Howell (2013: 124) identifies a number of ethical issues which the critical ethnographer must consider when interpreting and representing the lives of others: First there should be reflection upon the purpose and intent of the research and the identification of consequences and potential harm; continual dialogue between researcher and researched should be maintained throughout the process; the researcher should specify relationships between localism and generality in relation to the human condition and finally there should be consideration of how the research may ensure equity and make a difference in terms of liberty and justice. He further argues that the critical ethnographer should concentrate on close interpretation and critical analysis when dealing with empirical data, arguing that negation should be continually employed in order to overcome the problem of authority that a positivistic position encounters. Famous examples of critical ethnographies in management include Rosen’s (1985) study of an advertising agency; and Jackall’s (1998) tales of managerial ethics. More recently Jakob KrauseJensen’s (2010) ethnography of the ‘cultural projects’ promoted and undertaken by top executives in the globalizing Danish firm Bang & Olufsen and Bone’s (2006) analysis of life in the direct selling industry provide fascinating insights into organizational life. A commitment to emancipation can also be seen in various forms of participatory action research (e.g. Power and Laughlin, 1992; Reason and Bradbury, 2001) where through dialogue participants democratically 74

Methodology

co-determine and co-develop substantive knowledge so that their own interests can be encoded within it.

Critical realism and methodology In recent years increased attention has been given to potential applications of critical realism in organization and management research. From this perspective social research aims to explain social processes and events in terms of the causal powers of both structures and human agency. While positing that there is a reality independent of the researchers’ knowledge of it, critical realists differ from positivists as they suggest a ‘fallibilist epistemology in which researcher’s knowledge of the work is socially produced’ (Miller and Tsang, 2010: 144). Thus critical realists reject ‘judgemental relativism’ where it is impossible to judge the merits of alternative explanations as there is no objective reality to measure them against and argue that theories can be evaluated according to their ability to provide explanation of events based on causal mechanisms. The idea of stratification is of key importance. Critical realists adhere to a ‘depth ontology’ where distinction is drawn between the empirical (what we perceive to be the case), the actual (the events that occur) and the real (the mechanisms and structures which generate the actual). While recognizing that it may not be possible to directly access the real, critical realists attempt through their research to identify and understand these causal mechanisms. O’Mahoney and Vincent (2014) provide a useful overview of the distinctive features of research methodology from a critical realist perspective. They argue initially that critical realism acts as a ‘general orientation to research practice which help create more accurate explanations of (social) phenomena than those which currently exist’ (O’Mahoney and Vincent, 2014: 13). Essentially therefore critical realist researchers aim to provide theoretical explanations for what we observe in the social world and, importantly, they recognise that some explanations will be more accurate than others. Critical realism is of growing influence in management and organizational studies. It is very inclusive in terms of the research designs that can be adopted as this perspective recognises that different methods focus on different aspects of reality and therefore multiple and mixed methods are supported (Edward et al., 2014; Hurrell, 2014). For example Dannermark et al. (2002) distinguish between intensive and extensive methods research designs and argue that these can be used in a complementary way. Table 4.3 highlights the different research strategies that are argued to be relevant to critical realist research. In their typology Ackroyd and Karlsson (2014: 27) consider the following dimensions of research: first, the scope and purpose of the research – varying between intensive and extensive where intensive is oriented towards the discovery of generative methods while extensive research is concerned with the context in which such mechanisms operate. Second, they distinguish between levels of involvement on the part of the researcher, considering the extent to which the research is engaged in diagnosis (detached) or trying to influence the situation they are studying (engaged). This enables them to articulate eight different research designs which they argue are compatible with critical realist approaches. The dominant logic underpinning critical realist methodology appears to be either abduction and/or retroduction. At its most basic abduction is the process through which researchers ‘redescribe the observable everyday objects of social science . . . in an abstracted and more general sense in order to describe the sequence of causation that gives rise to observed regularities in the pattern of events’ (O’Mahoney and Vincent, 2014: 17). Here observations are combined with theory with the aim of producing the most plausible explanation of events. On the other hand, retroduction entails the idea of going back from, below, or behind observed patterns or 75

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson Table 4.3 Eight designs relevant to realist informed research and some of their characteristics Distinctive research strategies Intensive  Extensive What is the mechanism?

How do context and mechanism:

What is the context?

(context as given)

typically interact?

historically intersect?

(Mechanism inferred)

Detached study

Case studies

Comparative Case Analysis

Generative institutional analysis

Research surveys and census data

Engaged study

Action research

Intensive realist evaluation

Barefoot historical research

Extensive realist evaluation

Dominant logic of discovery:

Abduction

Abduction

Abduction/ retroduction

Abduction/ retroduction

Research procedures:

Source: Ackroyd and Karlsson (2014: 27).

regularities to discover what produces them (Blaikie, 2004). Thus it is argued that ‘critical realism confronts the complexity of social phenomena by espousing explanations stated in terms of mechanisms that generalize with empirical effects that are contingent’ (Miller and Tsang, 2010: 153). In this way retroduction enables the identification of generative mechanisms that apply beyond the immediate example of the phenomena under study and are critical to its occurrence. While the retroductive approach appears to embrace a wide variety of methods, Zacharidis, Scott and Barrett (2013: 858) point out, regardless of whichever methods are used the common principle remains that the foundation for knowledge is in the empirical domain. It is argued that when used successfully abduction and retroduction offer new and unanticipated views of social reality. According to O’Mahoney and Vincent (2014: 19) ‘the commitment of CR to both truth (in contrast to constructivism) and “thick” explanation (in contrast to positivism) means that it offers researchers a more powerful critical approach which not only accepts that beliefs can be false but also that the identification and retardation of those mechanisms that can create false beliefs can contribute to emancipation’. Thus it has been suggested that critical realism opens up a particular methodological space that lies between empiricism and interpretivism (Mingers, 2004).

Postmodernism and methodology There is considerable debate within the literature about whether postmodernism and poststructuralism can be seen as having unique identities, or whether poststructuralism is another variant of postmodernism. Given that they share similar concepts such as a focus upon language, discourse and deconstruction, we will treat them together here. Researchers from these traditions favour of a position where subjectivist ontology is combined with a subjectivist epistemology. This involves abandoning ‘the rational and unified subject in favour of a socially and linguistically decentred and fragmented subject’ (Best and Kellner, 1991: 4). Postmodernist epistemology dismisses the positivist rational certainty in the attainability of epistemic privilege and replaces it with a relativist view of science and knowledge. From a postmodern perspective any attempt to develop a rational and generalizable basis to scientific enquiry which explains the world from 76

Methodology

an objective standpoint is futile. Lyotard suggests for example that postmodernists should maintain ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv). Instead a perspective is advanced where all knowledge is indeterminate; what we take to be reality is itself created and determined by those acts of cognition. The social world is not seen as external to us waiting to be discovered, everything is relative to the eye of the beholder. A key element of postmodern research has been a renewed focus on language. The ‘linguistic turn’ suggests that language is never innocent; that no meaning exists beyond language; that knowledge and truth are linguistic entities constantly open to revision (Lyotard, 1984). Thus there is an emphasis in postmodernism on the role of discourses. These are subjective, linguistically formed ways of experiencing, acting and constituting phenomena which we take to be ‘out there’. These discursive conceptions are ‘collectively sustained and continually renegotiated in the process of making sense’ (Parker, 1992: 3). Thus what we take to be knowledge is constructed in and through language. The language of science can’t represent or illuminate some external reality – there is no discoverable true meaning, only a variety of different interpretations. Hence for postmodernists reality can have an infinite number of attributes, since there are as many realities as there are ways of perceiving and explaining. Influential upon our linguistically derived sense making are our social interactions in various milieux which bias us towards particular ways of viewing the world. Usually we remain unaware of these constructive socio-linguistic processes. While we may perceive things as objective and separate from ourselves, as ‘out there’, through language we are active participants in creating what we apprehend (Chia, 1995). However, individuals are not completely free to make their own interpretations. Instead the decentring of the subject which is associated with postmodern writings places emphasis on the development of shared discourses through exposure to which the individual is constituted. Human beings therefore make sense of the world through particular historical and socially contingent discourses. These discursively produced hyper-realities can be mistaken for an external reality. Postmodernists counter this through the use of deconstruction which is a key element of poststructuralist approaches informed by the work of writers such as Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. This originally derives from literary criticism where texts are analysed in order to reveal their inherent contradictions, assumptions and layers of meaning. In organization studies deconstruction attempts to show how any claim to truth, whether made by social scientists or practicing managers is always the product of social construction and therefore always relative. This is attempted by showing how texts contain taken for granted ideas which depend upon the exclusion of other things. Often this will involve identifying the assumptions that underpin any truth claim and then are disrupted through their denial and the identification of the absent alternatives whose articulation produces an alternative rendition of reality. Thus deconstruction denies that any text is ever settled or stable. However it does not offer a tool to find ‘the truth’. At most it offers alternative social constructions of reality within a text which are themselves then available to deconstruction and thereby not allowed to rest in any finalized truth. Thus there is a strong strand of postmodern writing focusing on the deconstruction of existing works in organization studies (see for example Kilduff’s (1993) deconstruction of March and Simon’s work and Carter and Jackson’s (1993) examination of motivation theory or Davidson et al.’s (2006) examination of a Harvard Business Review article promoting web services to explore predictions about the future of IS organizations and IT architecture) which focuses on the logics and contradictions of existing theories, examining gaps and instabilities in time, space and text (Cooper, 1989). While there is a degree of scepticism about empirical work and recognition that scientific methodology ‘loses its status as the chief arbiter of truth’ (Gergen and Thatchenkerry 1996: 12), 77

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

postmodernism offers some important insights into research methodology. Research from this perspective focuses upon gaining an understanding of a situation at a particular point in time, recognising that this is only one of a number of possible understandings. There is no reliance on particular methods to provide accurate correspondence with reality and while there appears to be a preference for qualitative approaches in much postmodernist work, research methods are viewed as embodied in cultural practice and no particular approach is considered to have a privileged status. Thus some management researchers have focused on the liberating potential of the postmodern perspective, arguing that it frees researchers to mix and match various perspectives or research styles in order to challenge conventional wisdom (Kilduff and Mehra, 1997; Gergen and Thatchenkerry, 1996). Others, however, see postmodernist perspectives as aligned with qualitative methods (Cassell, 1996; Kondo 1990), in particular ethnography, which Linstead claims is ‘the language of postmodernism’ (Linstead, 1993a: 98) because it has the ability to evoke rather than just describe. This, according to Linstead, requires both poetic and conceptual rigour from the author in order to produce an account ‘poised in the space between fact and fiction’ (Linstead, 1993b: 70). Other methods informed by these perspectives are the analysis of stories, for example Boje’s (1991, 1995) explorations of the multiple stories in use at Disney, and the analysis of narratives in relation to how identities are constructed (e.g. Brown, 2006; Beech, 2008). As has been discussed in detail elsewhere (Johnson and Duberley, 2000), postmodernism demands that researchers are sceptical about how they engage with the world, the categories they deploy, the assumptions they make and the interpretations they impose. It encourages irony and humility as well as rebellion against the imposition of any unitary scientific discourse (Cooper and Burrell, 1988). It elevates the role of both the producer of research accounts and the reader of them. Authors from this perspective recognize that their work may be interpreted in a multitude of different ways depending on the perspective of the reader (Burrell, 1997). Thus it has been argued that postmodernist approaches enable us to know more and doubt what we know (Richardson, 1998: 358). Often quoted examples of this kind of work include Kondo’s (1990) examination of the production of identity in Japanese workplaces, Ely’s (1995) study of sex roles in organizations, Collinson’s (2006) studies of leadership and Jackson’s (2006) analysis of ‘laddish’ behaviour in schools.

Postcolonial methodology Recent years have seen the development of new methodologies. One example, postcolonialism surfaced within business and management research as a way of critiquing and resisting western modernity (Prasad and Prasad, 2002; Prasad, 2005). Postcolonialism focuses on a critique of colonialism and its continued existence in current social arrangements. As Prasad (2005: 263) suggests: ‘postcolonialism is extraordinarily relevant to management and organization studies because it offers an alternative historical explanation for many commonplace business practices that have their origins in colonial structures’. Indeed Prasad argues that the intensification of globalization makes postcolonialism especially pertinent for management and organizational studies. That said, other authors (see for example Westwood and Jack, 2007) bemoan the relative lack of concern with postcolonial theory from management scholars. Postcolonialism offers a lens which illuminates some of the more unattractive elements of globalisation including epistemic coloniality (Ibarra-Colado, 2006: 464) where ‘the processes by which the institutionalization of knowledge as scientific knowledge permitted the integration of native elites into the dominant Anglo-Euro-Centric ideology of modernity’ (Florescano, 1994: 65). 78

Methodology

Postcolonial researchers are not limited to specific research designs. They adopt a wide variety of methods of data collection including document analysis, interviews and participant observation. What is important though is that studies from this perspective bring global, (frequently imperialist) dynamics into management and organization studies (Prasad, 2006). According to Westwood and Jack, this involves locating and revealing the historical, political, cultural and ideological partialities and limitations of Western knowledge. They suggest that methodologically, postcolonial theory opens up space for knowledge systems that have been repressed, marginalized or silenced by the colonizing propensities of the West’s discourses, knowledge systems and institutions. Through methodological interventions, researchers in this tradition seek to return agency to such people, allowing a reclaiming of an ‘essential identity’ as a temporary strategic device to resist dominance and exclusion, give voice and to reassert a unique identity; a process Spivak (1993) has referred to as ‘strategic essentialism’. Thus, as with critical theory, participatory methods are favoured – although these are recognized to be challenging. Postcolonial theory also calls for an epistemic reflexivity at both the individual scholar level and the broader field level. This requires a full account of the localized particularities of the researcher – historical, ideological, sociocultural, economic, geopolitical – and how that constructs and surrounds the research theoretical resources, interpretative schema and methodological practices he/she brings to research in the field.

Conclusions Any methodology in social research entails a social and political process of knowledge production; assumptions about the nature and meanings of ideas, experience and social reality, and how/if these may be connected (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002). Ramazanoglu and Holland further argue that it should also include critical reflection on what authority can be claimed for the knowledge that results and accountability for the political and ethical implications of knowledge production). In this chapter we have tried to outline the variety of philosophical perspectives upon these issues which implicitly and explicitly underpin different methodologies in management research. The nature of a chapter like this requires that clear divisions are drawn between alternative philosophical approaches. Of course, it may not be possible to draw such neat boundaries in practice. The challenge is not to be able to fit one’s research approach neatly into any particular category but to ensure levels of self-reflexivity and awareness to show the various ways in which our philosophical assumptions have influenced our research. Such reflection may encourage researchers to step outside their ‘methodological comfort zone’ (Aguinas et al., 2009: 109) and consider alternative means of achieving their research objectives. Calls for greater reflexivity have been made a number of times over recent years. Researchers are increasingly being required to reflexively engage with their work by thinking about their own beliefs and how those beliefs have repercussions for what they chose to study and how they undertake research (Willmott, 1998; Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009; Prasad, 2005); to engage in a continual assessment of the relationship between knowledge and the ways of doing knowledge (Calás and Smircich, 1992: 240). This involves reflecting upon how those often tacit, unacknowledged pre-understandings impact upon how those ‘objects’ of research are conceptually constituted by the researcher; what kinds of research question are then asked by the researcher and how the results of research are arrived at, justified and presented to audiences for consumption (e.g. Holland, 1999; Chia, 1995; Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009). Despite increased discussion of reflexivity and the emergence of more critical approaches to studying organizations, Newton, Deetz and Reed (2011: 8) argue that debate and research often progress as though most writers hold positivist or naïve realist assumptions; they contend that 79

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

there remains a tendency to assume that it is relatively straightforward to (1) gain reliable and valid knowledge of organizational life and (2) to use such knowledge to inform management practice or public policy. Further, they argue that many studies assume that knowledge construction and application can proceed in a relatively unproblematic manner ‘so long as the “correct” research methodology is adopted and the “right” questions are asked’ (Newton et al., 2011: 8). Amis and Silk (2008) concur with this in their discussion of the problems of reliance on key texts about research methodology which adopt a foundationalist perspective towards qualitative research. In conclusion, while extended debates about the link between philosophy and methodology may appear to some as navel-gazing, we would argue that it is imperative that the justification of any research methodology must include consideration of fundamental issues such as how we are to know and how we are to act. Central to the further development of the field is an awareness of the relationship between philosophy and methodology and critical engagement with the tensions that methodological choices may create.

Further reading For more in-depth discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of methodology students should look at Howell (2013). An Introduction to The Philosophy of Methodology. There are numerous books which address these issues in qualitative research – see for example Denzin and Lincoln (2007) The Landscape of Qualitative Research (3rd edn), which examines the competing paradigms that underpin qualitative research and their implications for methods. Prasad (2005) Crafting Qualitative Research: working in the postpositivist traditions similarly provides a clear and concise view of alternative traditions that exist within the qualitative field. Marshall (2006) Designing Qualitative Research also provides a useful overview of the implications of various philosophical positions for methodology. It also provides interesting vignettes to illustrate the methodological challenges of qualitative research. There are also useful books which address methodology from one particular philosophical perspective – see for example Edward et al. (2014) Studying Organisations Using Critical Realism. Finally Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009), Reflexive Methodology (2nd edn) gives a thought provoking analysis of the linkages between philosophical assumptions and methods employed which they see as both an ‘intellectualisation of qualitative method’ and ‘a pragmatization of the philosophy of science’ (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009: vii). It is recommended for those wishing to explore the underpinning assumptions of methodology in more depth.

References Ackroyd, S. and Karlsson, J. (2014). Critical realism, research techniques and research designs, in Edward, P., O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (eds), Studying Organisations Using Critical Realism: a practical guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–45. Aguinis, H., Pierce, C., Bosco, F. and Muslin, I. (2009). First decade of organizational research methods: trends in design, measurement and data-analysis topics. Organizational Research Methods, 12: 69–112. Alvesson, M. (2003). Beyond neopositivists, romantics and localists: a reflexive approach to interviews in organisational research. Academy of Management Review, 28(1): 13–33. Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. (2000). Reflexive Methodology: new vistas for qualitative research. London: Sage. Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. (2009). Reflexive Methodology: new vistas for qualitative Research (3rd edn). London: Sage.

80

Methodology

Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (2009). Introduction, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–28. Amis, J.M. and Silk, M.L. (2008). The philosophy and politics of quality in qualitative organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 11 (3): 456–80. Atkinson, M. (1972). A precise phenomenology for the general scholar. Journal of General Education, 23: 261–97. Beech, N. (2008). On the nature of dialogical identity work. Organization, 15(1): 51–74. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: critical interrogations. London: Macmillan. Blaikie, N. (2004). Retroduction, in Lewis-Beck, M., Bryman, A. and Liao, T. (eds), The Sage Encyclopaedia of Social Science Research Methods. London: Sage, pp. 1–2. Boje, D. (1991). The storytelling organization: a study of story performance in an office supply firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(1): 106–26. Boje, D. (1995). Stories of the storytelling organisation: a postmodern analysis of Disney as Tamaraland. Academy of Management Journal, 38(4): 997–1035. Bone, J. (2006). The Hard Sell: An Ethnographic Study of the Direct Selling Industry. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, A.D. (2006). A narrative approach to collective identities. Journal of Management Studies, 43: 731–53. Burrell, G. (1997). Pandemonium: towards a retro-organization theory. Sage: London. Caelli, K., Ray, L. and Mill, J. (2003). Clear as mud: toward greater clarity in generic qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2(2). Calás, M. and Smircich, L. (1992). Using the ‘F’ word: feminist theories and the social consequences of organizational research, in Mills, A.J. and Tancred, P. (eds), Gendering Organizational Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 227–53. Carter, P. and Jackson, N. (1993). Modernism postmodernism and motivation, or why expectancy theory failed to live up to expectations, in Hassard, J. and Parker, M. (eds), Postmodernism and Organizations. London: Sage, pp. 83–100. Cassell, J. (1996). The woman in the surgeon’s body: understanding the difference. American Anthropologist, 98: 41–53. Chia, R. (1995). From modern to postmodern organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 16(4): 579–604. Collinson, D. (2006). Rethinking followership: a post-structuralist analysis of follower identities. The Leadership Quarterly, 17: 179–89. Cooper, R. (1989). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction. Organization Studies, 10(4): 479–502. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, postmodernism and organisational analysis: an introduction. Organization Studies, 9: 91–112. Dannermark, B., Ekstrom, M., Jakobsen, L., Karlsson, J. and Bhaskar, R. (2002). Explaining Society: critical realism in the social science. New York: Routledge. Davidson, D., Chiasson, M. and Ruikar, S. (2006). Taking the people out of the network: a deconstruction of ‘your next IT strategy’, in Trauth, E., Howcroft, D., Butler, T., Fitzgerald, B. and Degross, J. (eds), Social Inclusions: Societal and Organizational Implications for Information Systems. New York: Springer, pp. 317–32. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds) (2007). The Landscape of Qualitative Research (3rd edn). London: Sage. Edward, P., Vincent, S. and O’Mahoney, J. (2014). Concluding comments in Edward, P., O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (eds), Studying Organisations Using Critical Realism: a practical guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 318–26. Ely, R.J. (1995). The power in demography: women’s social construction of gender identity at work. Academy of Management Journal, 38: 589–634. Florescano, E. (1994). Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: from the Aztecs to independence. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Fox, S. (2008). That miracle of familiar organizational things: social and moral order in the MBA classroom. Organization Studies, 29(5): 733–61. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gergen, K. and Thatchenkerry, T.J. (1996). Organization science as social construction: postmodern potentials. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 32(4): 356–77.

81

Joanne Duberley and Phil Johnson

Gill, M. (2014). The possibilities of phenomenology for organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 17(2): 118–37. Giorgi, A. (2006). Concerning variations in the application of the phenomenological method. The Humanistic Psychologist, 34(4): 305–19. Habermas, J. (1974). Theory and Practice. London: Heineman. Halfpenny, P. (1982). Positivism and Sociology: explaining social life. London: Allen & Unwin. Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007). What is Ethnography? Ethnography, principles in practice (3rd edn). New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–19. Holland (1999). Reflexivity. Human Relations, 52(4): 463–83. Howell, K. (2013). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology. London: Sage. Hurrell, S. (2014). Critical realism and mixed methods research: combining the extensive and the intensive at multiple levels, in Edward, P., O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (eds), Studying Organisations Using Critical Realism: a practical guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–63. Ibarra-Colado, E. (2006). From Latin America to the Asia Pacific: thinking otherness from the margins. Organization, 13 (4): 463–587. Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, C. (2006). Lads and Ladettes in School: gender and a fear of failure. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Johnson, P. and Duberley, J. (2000). Understanding Management Research: an introduction to epistemology. London: Sage. Keat, R. and Urry, J. (1975). Social Theory as Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kilduff, M. (1993). Deconstructing organizations. Academy of Management Review, 18(1): 13–31. Kilduff, M. and Mehra, A. (1997). Postmodernism and organizational research. Academy of Management Review, 22 (2): 453–81. Kirk, J. and Miller, M. (1986). Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Knights, D. (1992). Changing spaces: the disruptive impact of a new epistemological location for the study of management. Academy of Management Review, 17(3): 514–36. Kondo, D. (1990). Crafting Ourselves: power, gender and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Krause-Jensen, J. (2010). Flexible Firm: the design of culture at Bang & Olufsen. New York: Berghahn Books. Lacity, M. and Jansen, M.A. (1994) Understanding qualitative data: a framework of text analysis methods. Journal of Management Information Systems, 11: 137–66. Laverty, S. (2003). Hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology: a comparison of historical and methodological considerations. International Journal of Qualitative Methods: 21–35. Lincoln, Y.S. and Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Thousand Oakes CA: Sage. Linstead, S. (1993a). From postmodern anthropology to deconstructive ethnography. Human Relations, 46(1): 97–120. Linstead, S. (1993b). Deconstruction in the study of organisations, in Hassard, J. and Parker, M. (eds), Postmodernism and Organisations. London: Sage, pp. 49–70. Llewellyn, N. (2004). In search of modernization: the negotiation of social identity in organizational reform. Organization Studies, 25(6): 947–68. Llewellyn, N. (2008). Organisation as actual episodes: Harvey Sacks and organisation studies. Organisation Studies, 29: 763–91. Llewellyn, N. (2011). The gift in interaction: the practice of ‘picking up the bill’. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(4): 718–38. Llewellyn, N. and Hindmarsh, J. (2011). Organization, Interaction and Practice: studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McAuley, J. (2004). Hermeneutic understanding, in Cassell, C. and Symon, G. (eds), Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research. London: Sage, pp. 192–202. Marsh, C. (1979) Problems with surveys: methods or epistemology. Sociology, 13(2): 93–107. Marshall, C. (2006). Designing Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Miller, K.D. and Tsang, E. (2010). Testing management theories: critical realist philosophy and research methods. Strategic Management Journal, 32: 139–58. 82

Methodology

Mingers, J. (2004). Re-establishing the real: critical realism and information systems, in Mingers, J. and Willcocks, L.P. (eds), Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems Research. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 372–406. Newton, T., Deetz, S, and Reed, M. (2011). Responses to social constructionism and critical realism in organization studies. Organization Studies, 32(1): 7–26. O’Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (2014). Critical realism as an empirical project, in Edward, P., Mahoney, J. and Vincent, S. (eds), Studying Organisations Using Critical Realism: a practical guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–20. Outhwaite, W. (1975). Understanding Social Life: the method called verstehen. London: George Allen Unwin. Parker, M. (1992). Postmodern organisations or postmodern organisation theory. Organisation Studies, 13: 1–17. Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. Power, M. and Laughlin, R. (1992). Critical theory and accounting, in Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (eds), Critical Management Studies, London: Sage, pp. 113–35. Prasad, A. (2006). Globalization as radical economic transformation: critical implications. Journal of International Business Research, 5(1): 101-17. Prasad, A. and Prasad, P. (2002). The coming age of interpretive organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 5(1): 4–11. Prasad, P. (2005). Crafting Qualitative Research: working in the postpositivist traditions. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Prasad, P. and Caproni, P. (1997). Critical theory in the management classroom: engaging power, ideology and praxis. Journal of Management Education, 21(3): 284–91. Ramazanoglu, C. and Holland, J. (2002). Feminist Methodology: challenges and choices, London, Sage. Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2001). Introduction, in Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds), Handbook of Action Research: participative inquiry and practice, London: Sage, pp. 1–14. Richardson, L. (1998). Writing: a method of inquiry, in Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds), Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 516–29. Rosen, R. (1985). Anticipatory Systems: philosophical, mathematical and methodological foundations. London: Pergamon Press. Ross, D. (1991). The Origins American Social Science. New York: Cambridge. Sanders, P. (1982). Phenomenology: a new way of viewing organizational research. Academy of Management Review, 7(3): 353–60. Schwandt, T.A. (1996). Farewell to criteriology. Qualitative Inquiry, 2(1): 58–72. Somekh, B. and Lewin, C. (2005). Research Methods in the Social Sciences. London: Sage. Spivak, G.C. (1993). Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge. Van Maanen, J. (1995). An end to innocence: the ethnography of ethnography, in Van Maanen, J. (ed.), Representation in Ethnography. London: Sage, pp. 1–36. Walter, M. (2006). Social Science Methods: an Australian perspective. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weiskopf, R. and Willmott, H. (1996). Turning the given into a question: a critical discussion of Chia’s organisational analysis as deconstructive practice. European Journal of Radical Organisation Theory, 3(2): 1–10. Westwood, R. and Jack, G. (2007). Manifesto for a post-colonial international business and management studies: a provocation. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 3(3): 246–65. Willis, P. (1978). Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Willmott, H. (1998). Re-cognizing the other: reflections of a new sensibility in social and organization studies in Chia, R. (ed.), In the Realm of Organization: essays for Robert Cooper. London: Routledge, pp. 213–41. Willmott, H. (2008). Introducing critical management studies: key dimensions. Gestion, 6(November– December): 57–78. Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Sheare, P. (2006). Interpretation and Method: empirical research methods and the interpretive turn. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Zachariadis, M., Scott, S.V. and Barrett, M.I., (2013). Methodological implications of critical realism for mixed-methods information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 37 (3): 855–79.

83

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Theories

This page intentionally left blank

5 Discourse as organizational and practical philosophy Rick Iedema

Introduction This chapter reviews philosophical background to our contemporary perspective on ‘organizational discourse’. The chapter starts with an overview of contemporary discourse theory, identifying two over-arching tenets: discourse synthesis and discourse analysis. Before outlining the basis and contours of a third approach to discourse here referred to as spherogenics, the chapter traces a trajectory that starts at the time when, around the end of the Middle Ages, continental Europe began to unhinge its worldly perspective from the Middle East as stable centre. Attention rapidly shifted towards the West, the oceans and the Americas, spurred on by travel, trade and the organization of work (Sloterdijk, 2005). This reorientation from East to West was accompanied by a shift from belief and conviction towards experimentation and uncertainty, precipitating a journey ‘into disenchantment’. The chapter posits that the notion discourse encapsulates and epitomises this sense of disenchantment, as its principal function is to relativize everything within its remit. Now, in the new century, we have begun to call into question this journey into disenchantment and relativization itself, and with this, speculate about what may lie beyond it.

What is discourse? Discourse has been defined in different ways by different commentators (Torfing, 1999). Some regard discourse as the general patterns of meaning making, knowledge and behaviour displayed by a group or culture (Foucault, 1978b). Others equate discourse with linguistic structures ‘larger than the sentence’ (Coulthard, 1977), and again others regard discourse as ‘language in use’ (van Dijk, 1985). What binds these various perspectives together is that they call into question how we are, think and act, by framing these matters as constituted in and from relations. By discourse . . . I do not mean something that is essentially restricted to the areas of speech and writing, but any complex of elements in which relations play the constitutive role. This means that elements do not pre-exist the relational complex but are constituted through it. (Laclau, 2005: 68) 87

Rick Iedema

Laclau’s emphasis on ‘relations’ echoes de Saussure’s (1972 [1983]) insight that linguistic signs – e.g. ‘five’ or ‘time’ – do not simply reflect or label an external reality. Instead they are terms whose meaning is contingent on a system of internal differences (Thibault, 1997); hence, ‘the arbitrary nature of the sign’. Signs are arbitrary in relation to what they claim to represent, because they are related in the first instance to other signs in the system. For example, ‘Ms’ complements ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’. ‘Ms’ has no prior relation to the people who describe themselves as ‘Ms’. It is tempting to define discourse as a form of linguistic meaning making. However, drawing a neat boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic meaning making is near enough impossible (Willems and Hagoort, 2007). Your nod or you rolling your eyes by way of response to my statement that it is a nice day might not qualify as language, but it is certainly integral to how we accomplish and maintain mutual intelligibility. Even whole body conducts have been characterized as discourse (Grosz, 1990) to explain, for example, how ‘girls are girled’ (Butler, 1993). Other scholars have shown that architecture, art and technologies can also be seen to harbour discourse (O’Toole, 1994). Given this breadth of definition, in this chapter we will err on the side of inclusivity and treat big ‘D’ ‘discourse’ as the overall reservoir of possible meanings or ‘meaning making practices’. We refer to this as ‘meaning making’ for short.1 Its plural and little ‘d’ counterpart ‘discourseS’ is used to refer to specific instantiations of Discourse (cf. Gee, 2014).

How has discourse been investigated? To date, the investigation of discourse has proceeded on two fronts (Grant et al., 2009). The first approach has been synthetic, offering a generalising perspective of social and organizational practices. This perspective is most prominently evident in Foucault’s early work, exploring what can and what cannot be said by who and under what circumstances (Foucault, 1972). By examining how Discourse harbours and imposes rules around who can speak about what and when, Foucault exposes what he terms ‘regimes of truth’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983; Foucault, 1978b). In a similar vein, Laclau and Mouffe define Discourse as did Saussure: ‘a system of differential entities’. What they add is that Discourse is inevitably subverted by an inherent excess that forever prevents ‘fixed meanings’: We have referred to ‘discourse’ as a system of differential entities – that is, of moments. But we have just seen that such a system exists only as a partial limitation of a ‘surplus of meaning’ which subverts it. . . . On this point, our analysis meets up with a number of contemporary currents of thought, which – from Heidegger to Wittgenstein – have insisted on the impossibility of fixing ultimate meanings. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 111) Driven by the desire to fix meaning and achieve closure, we are caught in a never-ending struggle which Jacques Lacan saw as basic to all human communication (Wilden, 1980). The work by Paul Ricoeur (considered below) elaborates on the relevance for discourse theory of desire and affect, both central to excess. The second approach to discourse is analytic. This approach is oriented not in the first instance towards describing over-arching socio-historical and institutional phenomena, but towards specifying ‘text analytical’ structures and procedures that are intrinsic to workplace interaction. This approach was popularized by scholars such as Fairclough, Kress and van Leeuwen (Fairclough, 1992; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; van Leeuwen, 2008). Here, the predictable 88

Discourse

aspects of a conversation, a document, a sound, a visualisation, or any physical or technological ‘text’ is ‘decoded’ according to principles that are inherent in signs – or semiosis. Numerous textbooks set out varieties of decoding procedures (e.g. Gee, 2014). The details of these procedures are not at issue here, but what is at issue are these endeavours’ philosophical origins and principles. Organizational discourse scholarship has drawn on both the archeological–genealogical preoccupations of Foucaultian research and the structuralist-inclined, discourse analytical and social semiotic approaches emerging from within linguistics (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000; Phillips and Hardy, 2002). One critical aspect of these endeavours is their view on the breadth of discourse. As variations of Kant’s philosophy (discussed below), some scholars equate discourse with ‘the real’,2 leaving no remainder outside of discourse (Alvesson and Kärreman’s ‘muscular’ perspective). Others opt for less expansive definitions, acknowledging there is likely to be more to reality than human discourse (Alvesson and Kärreman’s ‘weak’ perspective). The vexing question about the grip of discourse (‘muscular’ or ‘weak’?) on human knowledge and understanding becomes more vexing still when we ask, can we turn discourse theory’s defining principle – ‘everything is relative’ – back on itself? This second question places discourse theory in tension with its own Kantian principle – that all we can say and know is shaped by and through discourse. That is, in positing that all discourse is humanly constructed and that no discourse unproblematically represents ‘the real’, we ipso facto acknowledge there must be something other than discourse. For Meillassoux, this ‘something other’ is unlike anything we know, embodying an ‘absolute capacity-to-be-other’ (Meillassoux, 2009). Let us summarize discourse theory and research for now as setting most store by two central principles: objectification (as ‘practice’ or ‘text’) and distanciation (by the ‘expert analyst’), together underpinning the science of discourse theory and research. More recently, a third approach advocated calling into question distanciation and objectification as the prime methodological operations driving our research (Fox and Alldred, 2014). Shifting the point of gravity towards affect, this work is concerned not with analysing representations but with accounting for phenomena where the non-discursive plays a prominent role; for example, love or war (Fox and Alldred, 2014). Converting this third approach from a theoretical stance into a methodological practice, related work focuses on initiating collaborative investigations with those who populate practices of interest. These collaborations, in effect, transgress the conventional boundaries between researchers and the ‘researched’, and thus between theory, analysis and in situ discourse (Iedema and Carroll, 2015). Referred to as spherogenic, this latter endeavour engages researchers and researched in deciding what and how to investigate and what investigation might entail. Here, both parties declare themselves prepared to call into question – relativize – their own points of departure, knowledge and practices. In this spherogenic research, relational and affective dynamics take centre stage as all stakeholders are enabled to speak and act beyond and outside of their original practices, expertises and subjectivities. Indeed, this research shifts from retrospective analysis to prospective experimentation with ways of going on, with new and different social, practical, interpersonal and intellectual spheres of connection. Before elaborating these issues further, we first need to clarify the way in which the notion ‘discourse’ and the theory that informs it are but one step in a much longer intellectual journey marked by increasingly pervasive mutual/self-questioning. This questioning of our own ways of being, doing, thinking and saying has led to most if not all aspects of human culture to be bleached of normality and necessity – to be regarded as relative, as ‘discourse’. As we shall see below, this journey into questioning and relativity was first characterised by Emmanuel Kant as our journey into the ‘disenchantment of reason’. 89

Rick Iedema

Our journey into disenchantment Early philosophies: the disenchantment of reason Our journey begins at the time when, in the late Middle Ages, our attention began to refocus from the East as centre of religious truth and certainty, towards the West as the space of chance, opportunity and discovery. This journey cannot be divorced of course from the West’s invention of new technologies, particularly those enabling transportation, making possible encounters with new and different societies and cultures. One important, paradoxical and perhaps unintended effect of our rising inclination to travel was having to come to terms with the limits inscribed into our own ways of being, doing, feeling and knowing. In accounting for the progressive disenchantment of how we understood ourselves and the world and how this has affected us over the last several centuries, we will first touch on the influence exerted by Emmanuel Kant, a prominent German philosopher (1724–1804). Kant’s insight was that it is the way we perceive and interact with the world, rather than the world itself, that determines how we make meaning about the world. For Kant, it is not ‘the real’ that shapes how and what we mean. That would be to assume ‘the real’ determines how we mean, with ‘the real’ effecting its own transparent and straightforward conversion into meaning. It is clear from the competing descriptions we often produce about events and experiences that this process of translation is far from straightforward and transparent. Kant concluded that it is our own cognitive structures that shape how and what we mean: Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this pre-supposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get further with the problem of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. (Emmanuel Kant, 1781, Preface to Critique of Pure Reason B/XVI) This insight, as Kant suggested himself, was equal in significance to the Copernican revolution. This would be just like the first thought of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if it might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. (Kant, 1781: B/XVI) With this move, Kant imposes a radical finitude on what it means to be human (Hughes, 2012). That is, Kant denies the human mind and its knowledge the privilege of a divine origin and a God-like apperception of and language about ‘the real’. Kant instead anchors cognition and apperception to what he regards as specifically human affordances. Why did Kant frame these changes in how we understood nature and ourselves as a source of disenchantment, a disillusionment? For him, a loss of illusions was the inevitable effect of Western culture turning away from universal ‘God’s view’ explanations and myths. Exemplary here is the contest waged by Cardinal Bellarmino persuading Galileo that his theory of heliocentrism should be treated as ‘less than a thesis’ – a hypothesis, a discourse – not a fully fledged, mature claim about reality (Blackwell, 1991). Their clash of truths necessitated the invention of a new category – the ‘hypothesis’. The hypothesis served to qualify knowledge by attributing a restricted truth status. As a result, we can now claim to know things, and make claims about the truth status of our own claims. 90

Discourse

In these and related ways, Western culture began to qualify representations about and aspects of itself, hastening its own relativization. Henceforth, knowledge was no longer simply selfevident. It therefore had to be both ‘self-grounding’ and self-legitimating: rather than being the expression of some cosmic order, [knowledge] had both to be selfgrounding and to produce an order for its norms out of itself. (Lumsden, 2013: 74) Half a century later, Nietzsche (1844–1900) was to extend Kant’s project by pushing yet further the point that how and what humans mean is contingent on where and who they are. Where for Kant, meaning making still issues from general and relatively fixed structures of the human mind, for Nietzsche, human meaning making takes on a distinctly locally produced character. Where Kant still sees universality, Nietzsche sees local negotiation and situational effects. “Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as transcending his own location” (Sloterdijk, 2012: 88). Importantly, Nietzsche trained as a philologist. Philology is the study of the historical-linguistic development of languages. Nietzsche’s philological background no doubt inclined him towards the view that cognition is a function of language, or meaning making. As social-historical phenomenon that is shaped itself by local situations and events, meaning making in turn shapes how we understand and experience ‘the real’: here, ‘no fact exists apart from an interpretation’ (Ansell-Pearson, 1994: xix). Since he saw humans and their cognition as fully embroiled in representational practices, Nietzsche did not regard it as possible for us to have transparent access to phenomena an sich. Focusing on compassion, for example, Nietzsche warns against equating this sentiment with a specific feeling, value or behavioural manifestation. Instead, it was to be understood as a locally unique phenomenon emerging at the interstice of historical events and personal enactments. Seen from that angle, the meaning(s) and conduct(s) of ‘compassion’ should not be equated with a socially sanctioned definition or some privileged construal. Hence, compassion, and any other construct like it, lacks a single, identifiable, stable and recognizable centre or origin. Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of origin (Ursprung) . . .? . . . because it [the pursuit of origin] is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities . . . this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. (Foucault, 1977: 142) For Nietzsche, there was no such thing as compassion outside of the ‘world of accident and succession’. That is, he regarded it as impossible for humans to know what compassion is outside of the currents and counter-currents of interest, interaction and interpretation; in short, the discourses that make compassion manifest as such. In rejecting the possibility of the search for origins, and in regarding our enactment of and any meaning attributed to compassion as discourse, Nietzsche regarded it as impossible for us humans to identify a real-world origin for any particular meaning and feeling we might like to enact. Thus, we are unable to retrieve things ‘in and for themselves’, outside of their discursive manifestation. Here, Nietzsche’s views foreshadow the ‘social construction of reality’ thesis which we will address in a moment. We also learn from Nietzsche that not even the scholar or the analyst remains untouched by these conclusions. No amount of objectivity in their approach can forestall the process of interpretation, and, for Nietzsche, ‘interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation 91

Rick Iedema

of a system of rules which in itself has no essential meaning’ (Foucault, 1977: 51). In this sense, analysis of whatever persuasion is done ‘in order to impose a direction, to bend [such system] to a new will, to force its participation in a new game’ (Foucault, 1977: 52). We will return to this insight and the implications it has for what discourse scholars do in the last section of this chapter. Finally, Nietzsche’s view of meaning making as infused with morality is most forcefully expressed in his theory about the human will to power. In The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, 1996), he anchors morality not to objectively defensible and generalizable notions of good versus evil, nor to related values of objectivity, truth and impartial analysis. For him, our judgement about what is good and what is evil is no different to our feeling of compassion: neither are experiential or ontological ‘prime numbers’. They must instead be understood as arising from our ‘will to power’. Put differently, human existence is steeped in and shaped by an inclination – a determination? – to fit ‘the real’ into conceptions and interpretations that realize and optimise people’s sway over things; their power. This is a theme that is also at the heart of discourse theory: meaning making is the articulation of the human will to bend an otherwise indifferent world to suit its values and interpretations (Nietzsche, 1996). Our view of the relationship between being human and making meaning took yet another leap with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Heidegger fully rejected Kant’s intellectualism and located the point of gravity of meaning making no longer in human will, as did Nietzsche, but in a far more abstract phenomenon: complexity. Anchoring his thinking in a posthuman logic, Heidegger construed meaning making as a complex system in and for itself, exacting authority over humankind to ensure its existence and continuation (Edwards, 1990). For Heidegger, humanity’s obligation to make meaning is inherent in the supra-human intelligence that is produced from our ‘doing discourse’. Heidegger’s way of forcing this point home was to insist that ‘language speaks us’ (Heidegger, 1971). Language is not a work of human beings: language speaks. Humans speak only insofar as they co-respond to language. (Heidegger, cited in Guignon, 1983: 125–6) Our role as humans is to ensure that ‘language continues to speak’. On this view, our ‘speaking’ (here: meaning making) is not in the first instance an expression of feelings and intentions or an exchange of thoughts and information, but an acquittal of a debt to the overarching task of ‘building and maintaining the house of being’ (Sloterdijk, 2013: 9).3 We owe this debt to language (discourse) because it embodies a supra-human intelligence that shelters and guides us. In a moment we will pick up again this notion of discourse as ‘the house of being’, and explain its significance for understanding discourse not just as a source of intellectual intelligibility and personal connection, but also as a source of immunity granted to those who partake in it, and thereby being sheltered by it. In effect, with Heidegger the Copernican revolution comes full circle. Humanity is now displaced well away from the centre of meaning making, and the origin of meaning making is fully unhinged from human cognition and intention. We have been relegated to the role of ‘extras’ in events and practices that are choreographed neither by God, nor by the structure of the human mind, nor by the communicative aspirations of individual actors. Instead, we have come to regard ourselves as entrained and steered by phenomena that supersede us in terms of agency, logic and power. Indeed, these phenomena at once precede us in time (they are prepersonal), and they exceed us in terms of their power and their logic (they are post-human). The implications of regarding discourse as pre-personal and as post-human will be addressed in the next section of this chapter. 92

Discourse

Twentieth century theories: building multiple houses of being Above, the productive capacity of discourse was evident from its acting as ‘the house(s) of being’. Our contribution as humans is to ‘build’ discourse through our everyday exchanges and interactions: these are our ‘molecular’ building activities. It is through these activities of course too that we contribute to the formation of ‘regimes of truth’: power. Power has been a critical concern for all varieties of discourse research, particularly that focusing on organizations. In the rather long quote that follows, Antonio Gramsci explains how ‘molecular’ activities are the building blocks of ‘collective historical movements’ (of which organizations are one example). Here, molecular activities produce and are channelled by ‘hegemonic’ or dominant discourses: One could study in actual fact the formation of a collective historical movement, analysing it in all its molecular phases, which is not usually done . . . instead we assume the currents of opinion already established around a group or a dominant personality. It is the problem that in modern times is expressed in terms of a party or a coalition of parties: how to initiate the founding of a party, how to develop its organised force and social influence, and so on. It is a question of a molecular process, very detailed, of extreme analysis, extending everywhere, whose documentation is constituted by a boundless quantity of books, pamphlets, articles in journals and newspapers, conversations and oral debates which are repeated an infinite number of times and which in their gigantic unity represent this work from which is born a collective will of a certain level of homogeneity. (Gramsci, cited in Thibault, 1991: 212) Thanks to being ‘repeated an infinite number of times’ either orally, or technologically (i.e. print, etc.), ‘molecular’ phenomena accrue a ‘gigantic unity’: a movement, an institution. What is gigantic, of course, is also powerful, or hegemonic. Gramsci’s agenda was to illuminate how we as ordinary citizens contribute to the formation and perpetuation of hegemony. Gramsci’s views are echoed most famously in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) thesis about the ‘social construction of reality’, where the social world gains in durability through its sustained transmission as and through discourse. the social world gains its massivity in the course of its transmission. (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 79) The durability and ‘massivity’ of discourse is echoed in its earlier Heideggerian conceptualization as ‘the house(s) of being’. These notions highlight a solidity that results from humans expending energy in re-enacting particular ways of being, doing, feeling, saying and knowing an infinite number of times. Our performance of discourse – our ‘discourse practices’ (cf. Foucault) – produces not just historical and hegemonic movements (cf. Gramsci) but ‘reality’ per se (cf. Berger and Luckmann). Note that now we have moved a long way from ‘articulating what is out there’, and we have arrived at ‘constructing what is out there’. Far from seeking to reduce the world to a flatland of representations or pure discourse, Gramsci’s ‘molecular processes’ and Berger and Luckmann’s ‘social construction of reality’ are anchored in everyday practice and materiality. In that regard, their ideas are cognate with Foucault’s (later) thesis about ‘capillary power’ (Foucault, 1978a). ‘Capillary power’ describes molecular human activity and meaning making that contribute to the production and maintenance of social formations, regimes of truth – power. In sum, what these ideas share is 93

Rick Iedema

the view that humankind is embroiled in the (social) construction of realities – houses of being, or spheres of power. But these theorists also favour a complex view of power; that is, power is neither a privilege of specific individuals or factions, nor an outcome of the application of force. Complexity must be thought of instead as operating in capillary, or molecular, ways too multidimensional for any person or faction to control. For its part, discourse theory at times errs on the side of framing power as a conspiracy exacted by the privileged few on unwitting citizens whose only hope is analytical deconstruction of its main resource – discourse (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997). It is important to counterbalance this reductive tendency, and account for a dimension of discourse practice that exceeds both individuals’ and organizations’ power and control: affect.

Discourse and lack/desire It is important to acknowledge that, by and large, the investigation of discourse is about challenging power and domination. Here, whether understood as ways of being or as ways of representing, discourse is ‘deconstructed’ to lay bare the resources of hegemony. This approach avoids the questions, however, about how and why any power is contingent on its confirmation and perpetuation by many who are not in power, other than by assuming that people are ‘taken in by it’, or that they derive benefit from it in some way. Focusing on individuals’ personal motivations for making and identifying with particular meanings, the French philosopher Ricoeur switches our attention from discourse’s house(s) of being to people’s unconscious motivations: their affects. Above we referred to the notion of ‘surplus of meaning’, or the problem that our discourse never fully captures or contains what we want it to express. For Ricoeur, this surplus of meaning is the logical consequence of our ‘essential inability to communicate’. For him, we are caught in having to resolve a persistent sense of lack that comes about as our progressive subjectification and individualization divorces us from ‘the other’. Here, discourse counters ‘the fundamental solitude of each human being’, but, at the same time, it is bound to fail as ‘[m]y experience cannot become your experience’ (Ricoeur, 1976: 15–16). Communication in this way is the overcoming of the radical non-communicability of lived experience as lived. (Ricoeur, 1976: 16) Taking Jacques Lacan’s lack and desire as starting points, Ricoeur’s stance on discourse sets itself apart from philosophies that promoted the agency of language and discourse at the expense of human agency (Gilbert, 2004). Ricoeur’s focus on lack and desire to a degree revitalises our interest in the uniquely human energies or affects that undergird and drive discourse per se. But what is affect, and how does it relate to discourse?

Speculations about the other side of discourse Speculating about extra-discursive phenomena The twenty-first century has been claimed to pose unique questions and problems arising from ‘a systematic breakdown of modernity; a breakdown that the resources of modernity, by their very nature, are unable to resolve through a rational renegotiation of its practices’ (Lumsden, 2013: 79). Jean-Luc Nancy articulates this idea in these terms: 94

Discourse

A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or to perfect delicate works of signification. (Nancy, 1993: 6) A realization has set in that ‘[c]hange does not need more reasoned discourse, but change in the material-bodily structures of everyday life’ (Lumsden, 2013: 73). It is this material-bodily angle that defines affect theory and speculative theory – both offering critical revisions of our assumption that we and ‘the real’ are constituted in and through discourse. Affect theory promotes consideration of life’s material-bodily vitalities, as manifested for example in seemingly logic-less viral phenomena that we witness almost every day (TicinetoClough, 2008). In shifting attention to such hard-to-explain energies and their becoming, affect theorists dismiss discourse research as concerned with ‘structure where nothing happens’, and regard discourse research as pursuing an ‘explanatory heaven’: structure is the place where nothing happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. (Massumi, 2002: 27) Affect theorists’ shift towards energy and becoming is motivated by the realization that consciousness arises not from the recognition of structures, but thanks to ‘matters becoming different’ (Blackman and Venn, 2010). That is, for us as humans ‘the first things’ are not pregiven entities or static patterns, but shifting tendencies: The first things are not simple givens but tendencies swinging between extremes: becoming heavier, becoming lighter, becoming narrower, becoming wider, preferences, dislikes, descents, ascents. These comprise . . . a complex of pre-logical resolutions and orientations upon which are contingent our logical, factual and evaluative relations with the world. (Sloterdijk, 2009: 255)4 If our understanding of the world is not based on ‘simple givens’ (coherent discourses) but on ‘shifting tendencies’ (viral energies), we may also be obliged to rethink Kant’s Copernican revolution and discourse theory’s first principle: our apprehension and understanding of ‘what is’ are hostage to the structures of human cognition and discourse. Extending affect theory’s questioning of discourse theory’s first principle, the recent ‘speculative turn’ in philosophy thus directs our attention to that which precedes and exceeds discourse (Meillassoux, 2009): fossils, earthquakes, uprisings, and the like – phenomena whose logic corresponds less with identifiable patterns and structures, than with rapid-fire escalations and inexplicable disappearances. We are aware of reservations about its theses (Roffe, 2012), yet the speculative turn confronts us with an important dilemma: is the ponderous and reflexive enterprise of discourse research still appropriate in today’s ‘runaway’ world where we face increasing numbers of wicked problems, unidentifiable causes, tragic outcomes, lightning-fast developments and unpredictable futures?

Reinventing discourse Affect theory and speculative theory refocus on material doing and becoming. These types of theories have significant implications for our role as social science researchers. For a long time, we have presumed to speak ‘the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who 95

Rick Iedema

were forbidden to speak the truth: [they have been] conscience, consciousness, and eloquence’ (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 207). The characterization of our findings as ‘truth’ however normalizes our privileged position: informing lay people about ‘what is really going on’, ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 207) of everyday practice. But we are now facing an upheaval: The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it . . . he [sic] was conscience, consciousness and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates [lay people] . . . Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power – the idea of their responsibility for ‘consciousness’ and discourse forms part of the system. (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 207). In Foucault’s and Deleuze’s eyes, the intellectual commits the ‘indignity of speaking for others’ (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 209) for three reasons. First, the presumption that one’s expertise is valid, yet the contemporary world is now so complex that any expertise risks overgeneralising and rendering unduly static domains of social life that are multifaceted and in flux. Second, those experiencing local complexity, when given the opportunity, display insight into their own practices and circumstances that may be more practically relevant and sensitive than the pronouncements of experts (Iedema and Carroll, 2010). Third, experts, including discourse researchers, misrecognise the role of theory as one of ‘informing practice’ rather than as one of ‘affecting practice’. Instead of arming themselves with elaborate procedures which are themselves forms of power, Foucault and Deleuze suggest the intellectual should ‘struggle against the forms of power that transform him [sic] into its object and instrument’ (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 208). This latter stance involves the intellectual in questioning their own assumed role as illuminating the lives and practices of others ‘from a safe distance’: In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. . . . It is not to ‘awaken consciousness’ . . . but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977: 208). Leaving aside wholesale rejections of discourse theory that promote a return to a simplistically realist agenda framing social and organizational phenomena (Reed, 1998), we may consider Allan Luke as among the first to apply Foucault’s and Deleuze’s questions to contemporary discourse theory: if we are to take the axiom of ‘what is to be done’ seriously in current conditions, critical discourse studies must turn towards a reconstructive agenda, one designed towards redress, reconciliation and the rebuilding of social structure, institutional lives and identities. (Luke, 2004: 151) If we fail to engage such a reconstructive agenda, conventional discourse theory’s focus on ‘[r]ecognising our culture, our discourses, or our “construction of reality” [remains] just one more way of allowing ourselves to remain who we are, enslaved to an image of thought’ 96

Discourse

(Colebrook, 2002: 66). On this view, the continued investigation of the means of ‘recognition’ – discourse structures and patterns – prevents us from really confronting what shapes us, and it prevents ‘discourse experts’ from confronting their own points of departure, cementing these as forms of power. Hence, discourse theory now must face the question, what does it mean to practice ‘active thinking: a thinking that is not defined by an image it creates of itself, but that reforms itself’ (Colebrook, 2002: 66)? It is here that spherogenics radicalizes discourse theory and research, through accommodating affect and speculation. It positions the affective relationships among researcher and researched as primary, and it challenges both to reform their thinking and their practice – to allow thinking and practice to become (Iedema and Carroll, 2010, 2013). Here, discourse research acknowledges and targets how we are together, how the world is and what it may become, and how we can go on together. Such research does not simply objectify the world as patterns of meaning and distanciate us from its structures of feeling. Instead it seeks to involve researchers and researched in facing up to wicked problems and runaway situations. Here, we collaborate on conceiving theories and enacting practices using our own unique bodily material circumstances, resources and relationships as both our starting point and final goal.

Conclusion Discourse theory has served to level explanations that previously enjoyed special status. Its synthetic and analytic discourse investigations have alerted us to the shared and overarching features of such explanations as ‘meanings’, or ‘discourses’. This scientific attitude emerged from an extended journey into disenchantment – entailing our own decentring. This was helped along by our global travels which unseated the logic and legitimacy of our ways of being, doing, feeling and knowing, revealing them to be just ‘discourses’. Then we proceeded to relativize discourse itself as a way of understanding our position in the world, acknowledging it itself is contingent on other, prior, and very different, phenomena: affect, and the non-human. This latter move towards affect and the speculation about material reality may well be a tactic to re-enchant the world, suggesting there are aspects to life that we cannot represent as or reduce to discourse. There may well be such aspects, and acknowledging this means relativizing discourse theory. That is to say, we are now experiencing phenomena – just think of environmental destruction, social conflicts, and climate change – that exceed discourse in logic, complexity, and impact. One response may be to construe discourse no longer as disembodied object for technical dissection according to pre-determined methods and procedures. Discourse researchers’ conclusions need no longer be timeless claims about the structural regularities of what people do and say, intended to evoke awareness, and effectively ‘pulling the rug from underneath them’ (Latour, 2004). Instead, discourse research could be harnessed to create new and common ground between researcher and researched. Here, researchers are as challenged as those who are conventionally subjected to research, inviting all involved in research to rethink how they are and act in the contemporary world.

Notes 1

Communication and meaning making are closely related terms. Where the notion communication tends to foreground humans’ intention to convey something, meaning making also encompasses those aspects of human conduct that exceed intentionality; for example, I ‘sub-consciously’ change my facial expression when running into a colleague known for gaming their academic track record. 97

Rick Iedema

2 3

4

We put ‘the real’ in scare quotes throughout this chapter to indicate that ‘the real’ is a discursive construction. The English translation of Sloterdijk’s 2009 book Du mußt dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik appeared in 2013 after the writing of this chapter had already started. For this reason, and because the translation has a number of problems, we retain our references to the original German publication rather than switching to the English translation. My translation. The original reads: ‘Die Ersten Dinge sind keine Gegebenheiten, sondern Tendenzzüge zwischen Extremen: Erschwerungen, Erleichterungen, Engungen, Weitungen, Hinneigungen, Abneigungen, Senkungen, Hebungen. Sie bilden . . . einen Komplex aus vorlogischen Aufschlüssen und Orientierungen, in welche die logischen, gegenständlichen und wertenden Weltbezüge eingehängt sind.’

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. and Kärreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: on the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53(9): 1125–49. Ansell-Pearson, K. (1994). Introduction: on Nietzsche’s critique of morality, in On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii–xxx. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blackman, L. and Venn, C. (2010). Affect. Body & Society, 16(1): 7-28. Blackwell, R. (1991). Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Coulthard, M. (1977). Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, J.C. (1990). The Authority of Language: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the threat of philosophical nihilism. Tampa: University of South Florida Press. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis, in van Dijk, T. (ed.), Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, pp. 258–84. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, genealogy, history, in Bouchard, D.F. (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press pp. 139–64. Foucault, M. (1978a). The History of Sexuality Vol I. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1978b). Politics and the study of discourse. Ideology and Consciousness, 3(spring): 7-26. Foucault, M. and Deleuze, G. (1977). Intellectuals and power, in Bouchard, D.F. (ed.), Language, CounterMemory, Practice: selected essays and interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 205–17. Fox, N. and Alldred, P. (2014). New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, doi: 10.1080/13645579.2014.921458. Gee, J. (2014). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: theory and method. New York: Routledge. Gilbert, J. (2004). Signifying nothing: ‘culture’, ‘discourse’ and the sociality of affect. Culture Machine, 6(2004), www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/8/7. Grant, D., Iedema, R. and Oswick, C. (2009). Discourse in critical management studies, in Alvesson, M., Willmott, H. and Bridgman, T. (eds), Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford Oxford University Press, pp. 213–31. Grosz, E. (1990). Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal, in Threadgold, T. and Cranny-Francis, A. (eds), Feminine, Masculine and Representation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 62–74. Guignon, C. (1983). Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company. Heidegger, M. (1971). The Way to Language. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. Hughes, J. (2012). Philosophy after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury. Iedema, R. and Carroll, K. (2010). Discourse research that intervenes in the quality and safety of clinical practice. Discourse & Communication, 4(1): 68–86. Iedema, R. and Carroll, K. (2013). Intervening in health care communication using discourse analysis, in Flowerdew, J. (ed.), Discourses in Contexts. London: Continuum, pp. 185–204. 98

Discourse

Iedema, R. and Carroll, K. (2015). Research as affect-sphere: towards spherogenics. Emotion Review, 7(1): 1–7. Kant, E. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason. Etext.library.adelaide.edu.au. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodality. London: Sage. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Enquiry, 30(Winter 2004): 225–48. Luke, A. (2004). Notes on the future of critical discourse studies. Critical Discourse Studies, 1(1): 149–52. Lumsden, S. (2013). Habits and the limits of the autonomous subject. Body & Society, 19(2–3): 58–82. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude: An Essay on the Nessecity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Nancy, J.-L. (1993). The Birth to Presence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the Genealogy of Morals (D. Smith, trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Toole, M. (1994). The Language of Displayed Art. London: Leicester University Press. Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (2002). Discourse Analysis: Investigating processes of social construction. London: Sage. Reed, M. (1998). Organizational analysis as discourse analysis: a critique, in Grant, D., Keenoy, T. and Oswick, C. (eds), Discourse and Organization. London: Sage, pp. 193–213. Ricoeur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: discourse and the surplus of meaning. Fort Worth (Texas): Texas Christian University Press. Roffe, J. (2012). Time and ground. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 17(1): 57–67. Saussure, F. de (1972 [1983]). Course in General Linguistics (R. Harris, trans.). London: Duckworth. Sloterdijk, P. (2005). Im Weltinnenraum Des Kapitals: Für Eine Philosophische Theorie Der Globalisierung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Du Mußt Dein Leben Ändern: Über Anthropotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2012). The Art of Philosophy: wisdom as a practice. New York: Columbia University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2013). You Must Change Your Life (W. Hoban, trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Thibault, P. (1991). Social Semiotics as Praxis: text, social meaning making, and Nabokov’s Ada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thibault, P. (1997). Re-reading Saussure: the dynamics of signs in social life. London: Routledge. Ticineto-Clough, P. (2008). The affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory Culture and Society, 25(1): 1–22. Torfing, J. (1999). New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford: Blackwell. van Dijk, T.A. (1985). Introduction: the role of discourse analysis in society, in van Dijk, T.A. (ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Vol. 4. Discourse Analysis in Society). London: Sage, pp. 1–8. van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: new tools for critical discourse analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilden, A. (1980). System and Structure: essays in communication and exchange (2nd edn). London: Tavistock. Willems, R.M. and Hagoort, P. (2007). Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: a review. Brain and Language, 101(3): 278–89.

99

6 Feminist organization theories Islands of treasure Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

Introduction Feminism is a success (Walby, 2011) however contested that assertion may be at a time when gender inequalities still persist. Projects and programmes for gender equality can be found in many domains and organizations. Feminist theory, the academic strand of successful feminism, has over the years developed into many different strands informing an impressive amount of multidisciplinary academic research. In this chapter, we examine how feminist theories have contributed to our understanding of organizations and organizing. Overall, feminist theorists have called attention to the gendered limitations to knowledge production in the field of organization studies, taking issue with claims to the ‘gender neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ of any knowledge (Martin, 1994). Though we can see that the production of knowledge on the reproduction of gender inequality has blossomed, much less attention is paid to the processes that are needed to change organizations into gender-equitable workplaces (Benschop and Verloo, 2011) The impact of different contexts and the variation these bring to organizations and organizing also remain understudied (Ahonen et al., 2014), especially for nonWestern contexts (Özbilgin et al., 2012). Despite the success of feminism, virtually all theories of organizations and management remain silent about gender (Hatch, 2012), and some assert that feminist thought and gender theory are marginalized or even ‘ghettoized’ in the field of organization studies (Alvesson and Billing, 2009). One indication of this may be that the separate chapter on gender issues in edited organization theory books is the only place where gender is addressed at all. The feminist ancestry of some insights on inequalities, justice and equal opportunities that have now been mainstreamed into organization studies is also not addressed. This development is sometimes referred to as postfeminism, a critical response undermining the achievements of feminism and presenting it as out of date (McRobbie, 2004). Between these assertions of feminist success and achievement on the one hand and the isolation and marginalization of feminist theory on the other is where we write this chapter. Here we find ourselves amidst various debates and controversies, both in- and outside the various strands of feminist thought. These strands have previously been analysed by Calás and Smircich (1996, 2006), whose influential overview of the impact of feminist theorizing on organization studies 100

Feminist organization theories

comprises liberal, radical, psychoanalytical, socialist, poststructuralist/postmodern and transnational/postcolonial feminisms. While we acknowledge that psychoanalytical feminism (Fotaki et al., 2012; Harding et al., 2013; Vachhani, 2012), feminist postcolonialism, and transnational feminism (Gill, 2006; Metcalfe and Woodhams, 2012; Calás and Smircich, 2011) have certainly impacted management and organization studies; given the restrictions of this chapter, we will here focus on the four major strands of feminist thought that arguably have been most influential in contemporary management and organization theory. Two of them, (neo)liberal feminism and socialist feminism, are grounded in prominent political ideologies and philosophies, and the other two, social construction feminism and poststructuralist feminism, are rooted in the domain of social theories. As an exhaustive discussion of the merits of each of those strands is clearly beyond the scope of a single chapter, we will highlight and discuss the key contributions each strand makes to our understanding of organizations and organizing. First, we will analyse the impact of (neo)liberal feminism on the study of leadership, calling attention to numerical representation and to perceptions of leadership styles. Second, we will highlight the impact of socialist feminism on what we know about the production and reproduction of inequalities in the workplace, particularly the dual intersecting inequalities of class and gender. Third, we will emphasize how social constructionist feminism’s insights into the genderedness of organizations and identities contribute to our understanding of the gendered social order in organizations. Fourth, we will discuss how poststructuralist feminist thought has had a major impact through its focus on discursive practices of gender and its emphasis on masculinity and femininity performances, and on subjectivities and sexualities at work. We will end our chapter with a section that goes beyond these four strands to discuss promising developments in the impact of feminist organization theories on the field of organization studies.

Liberal feminism Liberal feminism is one of the most influential strands of feminism in management and organization studies. Rooted in political philosophy, the notion of liberalism embraces the core idea of individual liberty as a political value. While for classic liberalism and liberal democracy (Jewson and Mason, 1986) individual freedom, choice, opportunity and equality are core notions, philosophical debates continue on how individual freedom has to be balanced against equality and social justice. Feminist philosophers engaging with liberal political theory have pointed out that without social and political equality, justice in the sense of fairness is meaningless to women (Okin, 2005). Furthermore, these feminist philosophers challenge liberalism for separating and opposing the private and the public spheres (Pateman, 1989). The focus of liberal feminism is on individual women and men getting equal opportunities to develop themselves as they choose and to engage in free competition for social rewards (Jewson and Mason, 1986). Liberal feminism thus meshes well with the political ideals of the free labour market and the meritocratic workplace, and uses those ideals to critique existing gender inequalities like those in wages and positions of authority. Recently, several authors have noted how neo-liberal feminism is quickly replacing liberal feminism (Eisenstein, 2009). The key difference with liberal feminism is the lack of critique in neo-liberal feminism, which seems all too well attuned to the neo-liberal dominance of capitalist market values and its emphasis on individualistic, entrepreneurial women embracing full responsibility for their own lives and careers (Rottenberg, 2014). In her influential article, Fraser (2009: 108) argues that we are dealing with a ‘disturbing convergence’ of neo-liberal capitalist and feminist ideas, in which the cultural recognition of identity and difference prevails over the 101

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

redistribution of economic resources. While liberal feminism traditionally called for legislation against the discrimination of women and fought for affirmative action to increase the number of women in management positions (Lorber, 1997), we now witness how neo-liberal feminism dresses up as corporate feminism, urging individual elite women ‘to lean in’ (Sandberg, 2013) and be ideal workers (Acker, 1992) without questioning the underlying masculine and capitalist norms of that ideal. In both of its incarnations, liberal feminism has shaped some of the core questions on leadership by placing gender centre stage. First, the unequal distribution of positions of authority is a question of numerical representation that can be perfectly summarized as ‘Why so few?’ (Valian, 1999). Studies on the underrepresentation of women on corporate boards and the debate about quota systems in business (Storvik and Teigen, 2010) both address this issue. The popular, though contested, metaphor of the glass ceiling refers to the almost invisible barriers that prevent women from advancing to positions of leadership and authority. These barriers have been exposed by making it clear how both gender and leadership are linked to status. Agentic women leaders are perceived as breaching the status expectations for women when they take up high-status positions of authority primarily associated with men and masculinity in the gender hierarchy (Rudman et al., 2012). Even in the twenty-first century, women leaders are not typical leaders, nor are they typical women (Eagly and Karau, 2002). Liberal feminists believe that these stereotypical expectations of women and men stand in the way of both the individual’s freedom of choice and of the meritocratic free labour market and that they should be replaced by equal opportunities for equally qualified women and men. This idea of equality as formal equal opportunities also features in the second issue pertaining to gender differences in styles of leadership (Eagly et al., 2003). There are constant clashes between the ‘no-difference’ camp, which emphasizes how intra-group differences exceed differences between women and men, and the ‘crucial difference’ camp, which points at small but significant sex differences in leadership style congruent with the alleged communal qualities of women and agentic qualities of men. In either case, liberal feminists emphasize the equality of the sexes, and seek their explanations for perceptions of difference in the cultural masculinity of leader stereotypes (Koenig et al., 2011). Additionally, (neo-)liberal feminism has a profound impact by placing the issue of work–life balance on the agenda of management and organization studies. For many, the public and the private are no longer the separate domains in which a gendered division of labour created order. With the intensification of work and the increasing number of dual-career households, work–life balance is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in organizations (Hoobler et al.; 2009 Mescher, 2011). Outsourcing household and care tasks to the market is the preferred neo-liberal solution to conflicting demands, making this another area of ‘the dangerous liaison between feminism and marketization’ (Fraser, 2009). Rottenberg points out how ‘the [neo-liberal] feminist ideal is not a one-track professional woman, but a high-powered woman who manages to balance a spectacularly successful career with a satisfying home life’ (Rottenberg, 2014: 11). Neo-liberal feminism thus stresses how entrepreneurial subjects have to make individual choices for balance, drawing on a market rationality of efficiency and cost–benefit analysis (Rottenberg, 2014: 12). This portrayal of work–life balance as a personal problem hinders any systematic critique of the inequality regime (Acker, 2006) of organizations that demand a flexibility and availability from their employees that does not sit well with these employees’ activities and responsibilities in other spheres of life. And as (neo-)liberal feminism maintains that hiring (migrant) domestic care workers and nannies can be a solution for the ‘personal problem’ of work–life balance, the larger implications of this ‘personal choice’ are not problematized as contributing to societal gender inequalities (Dyer et al., 2011). 102

Feminist organization theories

Overall, (neo-)liberal feminism has had a profound impact on management and organization studies by introducing gender as an issue in questions of leadership and work–life balance. Yet, it seems to be satisfied as soon as women are also included in the myth that ‘everyone can make it to the top’, resulting in a fetish for research that limits itself to managers and professionals. Perhaps its success in management and organization studies stems more from the unproblematic fit of its assumptions about individual agency and choice with the mainstream neo-liberal discourses that dominate current management and organization studies than from its innovative solutions for gender inequality.

Socialist feminism Though both liberal feminism and socialist feminism were born from the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, socialist feminism is closely connected to Marxist political philosophy through key notions such as social reproduction, domination, exploitation and oppression. Dissatisfied with the Marxist prioritizing of workers’ oppression over women’s oppression (Calás and Smircich, 2006), socialist feminist philosophy stresses that the system of capitalism alone does not sufficiently explain the persistence of gender inequalities, and calls for critical attention to the relation between capitalism and patriarchy as related structures of domination (Hartmann, 1979; Holvino, 2010). The core issues for socialist feminism are thus the inseparable relations of power and privilege related to the intersections of class and gender (Brenner and Holmstrom, 2012). Contemporary socialist feminist scholars make a strong claim for intersectionality (Verloo, 2013), including other social categories such as race/ethnicity and sexuality in their analyses of working-class women and men (Zanoni, 2011). Acker’s (2006: 441) notion of inequality regimes – the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing classed, gendered and racial inequalities in work organizations – combines the classic system focus of socialist feminist theory with the newer recognition of the importance of intersectional inequalities. In contrast to liberal feminist organization studies, with its fetish for managers and professionals, socialist feminism-inspired research has expanded its perspective to all layers of organizations, starting with comprehensive studies of blue-collar work. Systemic analyses of the gendered division of labour have thus been performed under the label of ‘industrial relations’. Prominent examples are studies of gender segregation that show how women are more likely to be employed in low-qualified, low-valued, labour-intensive, temporary, numerically flexible jobs. Such gender-stereotyped jobs are making women vulnerable to low wages and to low career/development opportunities, and they provide little job security (Rubery and Rafferty, 2013). Under the label of organization studies, we find socialist feminism-inspired research on lower-class and migrant women working in call centres (Ng and Mitter, 2005), care work (Jonsson, 2011), cleaning (Soni-Sinha and Yates, 2013), nursing (Henttonen et al., 2013), and hotel services (Adib and Guerrier, 2003; Dyer et al., 2010). This strand of research reveals the lived realities of disadvantaged workers at the intersection of class and gender in times of globalization and transnational exploitation. Following the post-2008 financial crises, socialist feminist theories regained prominence as business scandals resonated with their critique on the excesses of the patriarchal capitalist system and its rising levels of inequality and insecurity. Linking macro developments in the globalized economy to both meso sectorial and organizational employment trends and micro work preferences and experiences, socialist feminism inspired new research on non-standard employment, the politics of austerity and the growing precariousness (Armano and Murgia, 2013). The most gendered form of non-standard employment is part-time work. Socialist feminisminspired research on the exploitation of part-time workers suggests that, in the UK context, 103

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

men and women part-timers are both exploited but in different ways, with men working longer unpaid overtime and women missing out on promotion opportunities (Conway and Sturges, 2014). And deteriorating working conditions and job insecurities related to non-standard employment do no longer only characterize the lowest strata of organizations; they are rapidly expanding into the realm of professional work (Kelan, 2014; Hoque and Kirkpatrick, 2003). Furthermore, as a response to the financial crises, the politics of austerity often involve structural reductions of welfare-state provisions, which turn out to have specific gendered impacts (Karamessini and Rubery, 2013). Analysing the different austerity measures of states, employers and unions, research shows that these measures are reshaping the household-workplacecommunity nexus, re-invoking outdated and conservative views of women’s place, and reconfiguring the positioning of women’s rights (Briskin, 2014) although they are not leading to women’s return to the household (Walby, 2015). Very recently, scholars have been developing new concepts to grasp the increasing insecurity and instability of employment relations. The term ‘precariat’, for instance, refers to ‘an emergent class in the making’ consisting of those who face multiple related work and income insecurities (Standing, 2011). These notions are currently inspiring new research on age, class and gender, for instance in academic careers (see www.garciaproject.eu). Overall, socialist feminist work has inspired organization studies to look at the detrimental effects of gendered and classed divisions of labour, emphasizing the systemic and structural dimensions of capitalist inequality regimes. Furthermore, the attention for the intersections of gender and class has opened opportunities to incorporate other axes of inequality, such as race/ethnicity, sexuality and age, in the study of organizations’ power dynamics. It unlocked new lines of research that are responsive to current economic dynamics and realities.

Social construction feminism Unlike the previous strands of feminism, social construction feminism does not originate in political philosophy or political movements, but in social theories about knowledge. Though one could argue that it is inspired by poststructuralist philosophical debates on realism/relativism (Burr, 2003), social construction feminism is most often seen as rooted in sociology and ethnomethodology, emphasizing social interactions as constitutive elements of social processes (Holstein and Gubrium, 2005). In a landmark article, West and Zimmerman (1987) coined the notion of ‘doing gender’, introducing a new conceptualization of gender in which it is seen as a routine, ongoing methodological social accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. Gender can thus be studied as something that is said and done dynamically, within the boundaries of the gender order – the relatively stable cultural prototypes of masculinity and femininity that are experienced as universal, natural truths (Connell, 1987; Gherardi, 1994). ‘Gendering’ here becomes a verb referring to processes and practices that are enacted in various locations and relations, and also, prominently, in work organizations. Examining the social construction of gender as the dynamic practice of distinguishing between women and men, or articulating the differences between masculinity and femininity, can thus provide insights in power processes and in the production of social inequalities. These insights in the ongoing production of social inequalities in the workplace have had a profound impact on management and organization studies. Social construction feminism calls out the alleged gender neutrality of organization theory and organization processes, pointing to the persistent reproduction of gender inequalities in organizational realities (Acker, 1992). Social construction feminism shows how norms about gender equality at work that emphasize the gender neutrality of jobs, skills and qualifications co-exist with norms and rules about 104

Feminist organization theories

appropriate gender behaviour that imply differential assessments of femininity and masculinity at work (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998b). A key contribution of this strand is the notion of the ‘ideal worker’ (Acker, 1990, 1992); this disembodied, abstract conception is characterized by more than full-time availability, mobility, flexibility, high qualifications, high ambitions, high commitment, a strong work orientation, and no other obligations or responsibilities in life other than the ones required by the organization. Acker (1992: 257) notes how, since the rules and codes that prescribe workplace behaviour incorporate assumptions about a separation of the public and the private spheres, the assumptions about this ideal worker fit men much better than women, rendering women less than ideal organizational participants. Over the years, several authors have contextualized the ideal worker in different sectors, industries, organizations or functions (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998a; Tienari et al., 2002; Kelan, 2010; Styhre, 2012; Kelly et al., 2010; Pas et al., 2014), but all find an implicit masculinity in the norm that continuously constructs masculine work patterns as normal and legitimate. The social construction of gender is also elaborated in studies on women and men in nontraditional occupations. This research explores the experiences and identity work of women in masculine (top) positions and of men in feminized occupations, documenting the doing of gender in occupations that are traditionally held by the other sex. Non-traditional occupations are a particularly interesting site to study doing gender, as for instance demonstrated by studies on men in nursing and women in engineering (Simpson, 2014; Joshi, 2014). As the men and women working those jobs have to assert their competence and suitability for these gender-typed jobs, doing so means they have to challenge norms about masculinity or femininity in the conventional gender order. They thus develop strategies to manage gender in their daily work practices, complying with some constructions of masculinity and femininity, and resisting others. This body of research is connected to, and informed by, studies on masculinities in organizations. Social construction feminism is one of the key inspirations for this strand of research, named critical studies on men and masculinities, interested in the power-laden social constructions of men and masculinities in specific contexts, times, and places (Hearn, 2014). Taking issue with the taken-for-granted equation of men and masculinities with management, leadership, and authority, Connell (1995) and Collinson and Hearn (1994) were among the first scholars to think critically about the concepts of ‘men’, ‘masculinity’, ‘multiple masculinities’, and ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in the context of organizations. Though this strand could contribute substantially to management and organization studies, its impact has been relatively small so far. The strength of social construction feminism has also become apparent in the efforts to understand the slow pace of organizational change towards gender equality. Following Organization’s special ‘Beyond armchair feminism’ issue (2000), the debate about organizational change has lost its naiveté because simply ‘fixing the women’ or ‘creating structural equal opportunities’ or ‘valuing difference’ will be all too easily absorbed into the ongoing reproduction of gender inequality (Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Benschop and Verloo, 2006; Van den Brink and Stobbe, 2014). Realizing the resilience of gender inequality in organizations has wider implications for management and organization studies, as a social construction perspective on initiatives for change has proven to fully grasp the complexities of organizational change. However, with the spotlight on the difficulty or near impossibility of organizational change towards gender equality, this perspective is currently more invested in analyses of failed change than in providing suggestions and conditions for successful change. Overall, social construction feminism has contributed to management and organization studies through its insights in the dynamic interplay of organizational structures, cultural norms and identities, and their continuous reproduction of the symbolic gender order. The potential to 105

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

change and transcend the gender order, however, though theoretically possible within the scope of this perspective, has so far been de facto understudied.

Poststructuralist feminism The origins of poststructuralist feminism can be traced back to poststructural/postmodern philosophy and social theory. In line with de Saussure’s (1966) structural linguistics, Derrida’s (1978) core ideas about the impossibility of a universal truth, the dominance of oppositional dichotomies in our thinking, and deconstruction as a method to unveil ambivalences, fluidities, and absences, and Foucault’s (1980) notion of the power of discourses, poststructuralist feminism questions unitary notions of woman and femininity, demonstrating that everyday social relations are characterized by instabilities and differences. As Lorber (1997: 32) says, poststructuralist feminism goes the ‘furthest in challenging gender categories as dual, oppositional and fixed, arguing instead that gender and sexuality are shifting fluid, multiple categories’. By focusing on discursive practices of gender, poststructuralist feminism deconstructs the binary logic of gender that is hindering more sophisticated and subversive conceptualizations of gender as a performative social practice (Butler, 1990; Poggio, 2006; Pullen, 2006). Gender and sexualities are no longer essentialized, but seen as multiple and fluid, situated performances. With the deconstruction of masculinity and femininity, there no longer is a solid gender order. In this perspective, the emphasis is on ‘subjectivity’ as a discursive effect, which means that subject positions – necessary in order to enact agency – are the result of cultural representations. According to poststructuralist feminism, what constitutes the subject position of a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is the outcome of the whole complex of performances in specific spatial-temporal settings. Intertwined with the binary logic of gender as two oppositional categories of women and men is a logic of desire that sees sexual attraction as the result of this gendered opposition. Gender and heteronormativity are thus simultaneously produced in dominant discourses (Pringle, 2008). Queer theory is a poststructuralist mode of critique that challenges such assumptions about relations between gender and sexuality and about the management of desire (De Lauretis, 1991). The influence of poststructuralist feminism has been particularly felt in like-minded strands of management and organization studies such as critical management studies. These also point to the political power of knowledge and science and to the illusion of scientific neutrality and objectivity. Poststructuralist feminist analyses of the performativity of gender have also found their way into management and organization studies in questioning how people perform gender in organizational life, or how people do and undo gender at work. Hancock and Tyler (2007), for instance, analyse images taken from corporate recruitment brochures as locations where idealized, embodied gendered subjectivities are represented, revealing the gendered organization of aesthetics and desire. Another example is Kelan (2010), who shows that the very act of being a female ICT worker discursively challenged multiple forms of masculinities and femininities in ICT. While discursive constructions of gender have been most prominent in poststructuralist feminist writings, this emphasis on discourse also triggered attention for the material dimensions of organizations. Focusing on the way gender is materialized in and through organizational space, Tyler and Cohen (2010) analyse how gendered subjectivities are performed and valued in organizations through the interplay of bodies with aesthetic and symbolic artefacts in workspaces. Building on the notion of the multiplicity and fluidity of gender, poststructuralist feminist approaches have extended to integrating other dimensions of inequality in their analyses. A good example of integrating intersectionality in a poststructuralist perspective is Riach et al.’s (2014) analysis of how lived experiences of age, gender and sexuality are negotiated and narrated within organizations. Taking issue with heteronormativity (the prescribed conditions that assume 106

Feminist organization theories

heterosexual and gender-normative coupling) and chrononormativity (the life course corollary of the heterosexual matrix), they show how older, self-identified LGTB professionals experience a fundamental vulnerability in their attempts to narrate and live coherent selves in the organizations they are part of (Riach et al., 2014). An important contribution of poststructuralist feminism to management and organization studies is that it places reflections on knowledge production centre stage – in line with the poststructuralist questioning of universal truths. A prime example is Lewis and Simpson’s (2012) revisiting of Kanter’s famous book, Men and Women of the Corporation. Their poststructuralist re-evaluation uses the so-called (In)visibility Vortex – the normative dynamics constituting visibility and invisibility in the maintenance of gendered power – to unearth Kanter’s hidden contributions to the understanding of the effects of numerical representation and number-based solutions in organizations on gendered power processes. Another manifestation of this poststructuralist feminist-induced reflexivity is a heightened awareness that the social location of researchers affects their production of knowledge (Pullen, 2006; Essers, 2009). Overall, poststructuralist feminism has mainly contributed to management and organization studies through its focus on performativities and subjectivities. It has also inspired a higher degree of reflexivity among knowledge producers both in terms of their accountability as often privileged researchers and their potential complicity in gendered power relations.

Concluding thoughts and directions onwards In this chapter we have shown that various strands of feminist thought have all made specific contributions to the field of management and organization studies. Yet the way in which these contributions of feminist scholarship have been recognized varies, especially in the degree to which they have been integrated in mainstream research. The chapters on gender in handbooks of organization theory and the multiple articles on gender issues in general management and organization journals do testify to the successful agenda setting of feminist scholarship. And as a separate field of studies, gender-and-organization studies has certainly matured, as evidenced by their own conferences, journals and handbooks (Kumra et al., 2014; Jeanes et al., 2012). Feminist theorists and researchers are rightly convinced that their sophisticated insights and results could inform and improve the understanding of organizational phenomena, even when their work is overlooked or ghettoized. For the mainstream, however, it seems as if gender and especially sex differences are palatable concepts, whereas feminist theory is hard to swallow (Ely and Padavic, 2007). This has been analysed as due to the inherent critical stance of feminist theory, which at times is perceived as mere troublemaking, rendering feminists killjoys who spoil illusions of happiness by pointing out practices of sexism and gender inequality (Ahmed, 2010). Although feminist theories thus meet resistance for their problematization and politics of changing organization theories, their contributions and thinking certainly have the potential to enrich and revitalize management and organization studies. Feminist scholars have also taken this resistance against feminist knowledge on board as a research subject, inspiring research on the causes, dynamics and consequences of resistance against feminist interventions in organizations (Benschop and Verloo, 2006; Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013). These insights in the dynamics of resistance to feminism could be used to come to a better understanding of, and design better strategies for, the integration of feminist theories into organization theories, benefitting both. Ideally, the influence between feminist theory and organization theory is two-way, and the analysis of organizational phenomena can be improved 107

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

by organization scholars looking at feminisms and feminists looking at organization theories (Thomas and Davies, 2005). Our overview of the impact of feminist theorizing on organization studies points to three potential future directions of feminist organization research: searching for cross-disciplinary inspiration, cross-epistemological collaboration and transnational theorizations overcoming the current Western bias. We argue that the first two directions would help overcome two kinds of fragmentations or compartmentalizations: the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences on the one hand and the epistemological boundaries between the different strands of feminist philosophy and feminist theory on the other. First, to surmount disciplinary fragmentation, multidisciplinary dialogues between feminist organization studies and cultural studies could, for instance, help spark new understandings of the backlash against feminism and the postfeminist taming of feminism into an acceptable corporate feminism (Lewis, 2014). Another example of crossing disciplinary borders would be to seek inspiration in gender and politics scholarship (Waylen et al., 2013), which would help foster contextualizations and explanations of the conditions of success and failure of feminist organizational change. This connection to gender and politics would tap into a body of knowledge that has developed a rich vocabulary to grasp the differential impact of political and societal contexts, an area that has received scarce attention in organization studies, as noted in our introduction. Second, and even more challengingly, to surmount epistemological compartmentalization, crossing and merging the various strands of feminist thought might deliver surprising contributions. This can only start by recognizing the specific contributions of each strand (as identified in this chapter) and being willing to engage in respectful dialogue and transversal politics (Squires, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Transversal politics here refers to a dialogue between different positions that departs from a common commitment to a broad feminist equality project. This dialogue can be productive to interpret insights stemming from one strand in another strand of feminist theory. Obvious examples are to be found in poststructuralist deconstructions of the liberal feminist theme of leadership (Davis et al., 2014) or the unbalanced numerical representation of women managers (Lewis and Simpson, 2012). Another example can be found in the crossing of the socialist feminist’s classic system focus with the sophisticated analyses of performed identities in McDowell’s (2012) study of the labour market exclusion of workingclass youth in times of austerity. While feminist theory has not been totally oblivious to its Western bias, non-Western, postcolonial studies and Voices from the South have primarily been developed as separate strands of feminist thought. Inspired by the pioneering works of Mohanty (1988), Spivak (1988) and others, there is a substantial body of scholarship questioning the globalized politics of knowledge production and the roots of organization theories in imperialist legacies (Calás and Smircich, 2006, 2011; Metcalfe and Woodhams, 2012; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2012). This restores the agency of both scholars and workers from the non-West and provides learning opportunities for those from the West (Mir and Mir, 2013). Postcolonial scholarship offers various promising starting points for further feminist theorizing, for instance on leadership (Nkomo, 2011), entrepreneurship (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2014), immigration (Prasad, 2012), and expatriates (Berry and Bell, 2012). There is clearly a high potential for cross-fertilization of this work with intersectional approaches and the theorizing of inequality regimes. In this chapter, we have outlined how many necessary ingredients for further progress are already in place to widen the scope of feminist organization studies’ success, hoping to inspire future generations of scholars building on our insights or contesting them. 108

Feminist organization theories

References (key texts in bold) Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society, 4: 139–58. Acker, J. (1992). Gendering organizational theory, in Mills, A.J. and Tancred, P. (eds), Gendering Organizational Analysis. Newbury Park: Sage, pp. 248–60. Acker, J. (2006). Inequality regimes: gender, class, and race in organizations. Gender & Society, 20: 441–64. Adib, A. and Guerrier, Y. (2003). The interlocking of gender with nationality, race, ethnicity and class: the narratives of women in hotel work. Gender, Work & Organization, 10: 413–32. Ahmed, S. (2010). Killing joy: feminism and the history of happiness. Signs, 35: 571–94. Ahonen, P., Tienari, J., Meriläinen, S. and Pullen, A. (2014). Hidden contexts and invisible power relations: a Foucauldian reading of diversity research. Human Relations, 67: 263–86. Alvesson, M. and Billing, Y.D. (2009). Understanding Gender and Organizations. London: Sage. Armano, E. and Murgia, A. (2013). The precariousnesses of young knowledge workers: a subject-oriented approach. Global Discourse, 3: 486–501. Benschop, Y. and Doorewaard, H. (1998a). Six of one and half a dozen of the other: the gender subtext of Taylorism and team-based work. Gender, Work & Organization, 5: 5–18. Benschop, Y. and Doorewaard, H. (1998b). Covered by equality: the gender subtext of organizations. Organization Studies, 19: 787–805. Benschop, Y. and Verloo, M. (2006). Sisyphus’ sisters: can gender mainstreaming escape the genderedness of organizations? Journal of Gender Studies, 15, 19–33. Benschop, Y. and Verloo, M. (2011). Gender change, organizational change, and gender equality strategies, in Jeanes, E., Knights, D. and Martin, P.Y. (eds), Handbook of Gender, Work & Organization. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 277–91. Berry, D.P. and Bell, M.P. (2012). ‘Expatriates’: gender, race and class distinctions in international management. Gender, Work & Organization, 19: 10–28. Brenner, J. and Holmstrom, N. (2012). Socialist-feminist strategy today. Socialist Register, 49: 266–87. Briskin, L. (2014). Austerity, union policy and gender equality bargaining. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 20: 115–33. Burr, V. (2003). Social Constructionism. London, Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Calás, M. and Smircich, L. (1996). From ‘The Woman’s’ point of view: feminist approaches to organization studies, in Clegg, S., Hardy, C. and Nord, W. (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, pp. 218–57. Calás, M. and Smircich, L. (2006). From the ‘woman’s point of view’ ten years later: towards a feminist organization studies, in Clegg, S., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T. and Nord, W. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, pp. 284–306. Calás, M.B. and Smircich, L. (2011). In the back and forth of transmigration: rethinking organization studies in a transnational key, in Jeanes, E., Knights, D. and Martin, P.Y. (eds), Handbook of Gender, Work and Organization. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 411–28. Collinson, D. and Hearn, J. (1994). Naming men as men: implications for work, organization and management. Gender, Work & Organization, 1: 2–22. Connell, R. (1987). Gender and Power: society, the person and sexual politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, R.W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Conway, N. and Sturges, J. (2014). Investigating unpaid overtime working among the part-time workforce. British Journal of Management, 25: 755–71. Davis, K., Krieg, S. and Smith, K. (2014). Leading otherwise: using a feminist-poststructuralist and postcolonial lens to create alternative spaces for early childhood educational leaders. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–18. De Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Dyer, S., McDowell, L. and Batnitzky, A. (2010). The impact of migration on the gendering of service work: the case of a West London hotel. Gender, Work & Organization, 17: 635–57. Dyer, S., McDowell, L. and Batnitzky, A. (2011). Migrant work, precarious work–life balance: what the experiences of migrant workers in the service sector in Greater London tell us about the adult worker model. Gender, Place and Culture, 18: 685–700. Eagly, A.H. and Karau, S.J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109: 573–98. 109

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

Eagly, A.H., Johannesen-Schmidt, M.C. and Van Engen, M.L. (2003). Transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles: a meta-analysis comparing women and men. Psychological Bulletin, 129: 569–91. Eisenstein, H. (2009). Feminism Seduced: how global elites use women’s labor and ideas to exploit the world. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Ely, R.J. and Meyerson, D.E. (2000). Advancing gender equity in organizations: the challenge and importance of maintaining a gender narrative. Organization, 7: 589–608. Ely, R. and Padavic, I. (2007). A feminist analysis of organizational research on sex differences. Academy of Management Review, 32: 1121–43. Essers, C. (2009). Reflections on the narrative approach: dilemmas of power, emotions and social location while constructing life-stories. Organization, 16: 163–81. Fotaki, M., Long, S. and Schwartz, H.S. (2012). What can psychoanalysis offer organization studies today? Taking stock of current developments and thinking about future directions. Organization Studies, 33: 1105–120. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. London: Random House. Fraser, N. (2009). Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history. New Left Review, 97–117. Gherardi, S. (1994). The gender we think, the gender we do in our everyday organizational lives. Human Relations, 47: 591–610. Gill, R. (2006). Review essay: global feminism: trends in the literature. Organization, 13: 589–98. Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2007). Un/doing gender and the aesthetics of organizational performance. Gender, Work & Organization, 14: 512–33. Harding, N., Ford, J. and Fotaki, M. (2013). Is the ‘F’-word still dirty? A past, present and future of/for feminist and gender studies in Organization. Organization, 20: 51–65. Hartmann, H.I. (1979). The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union. Capital & Class, 3: 1–33. Hatch, M.J. (2012). Organization Theory: modern, symbolic and postmodern perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hearn, J. (2014). On men, organizations and intersectionality: personal, working, political and theoretical reflections (or how organization studies met profeminism). Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 33: 414–28. Henttonen, E., Lapointe, K., Pesonen, S. and Vanhala, S. (2013). A stain on the white uniform: the discursive construction of nurses’ industrial action in the media. Gender, Work & Organization, 20: 56–70. Holstein, J.A. and Gubrium, J.F. (2005). Interpretive practice and social action. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3: 483–505. Holvino, E. (2010). Intersections: the simultaneity of race, gender and class in organization studies. Gender, Work & Organization, 17: 248–77. Hoobler, J.M., Wayne, S.J. and Lemmon, G. (2009). Bosses perceptions of family–work conflict and women’s promotability: glass ceiling effects. Academy of Management Journal, 52: 939–57. Hoque, K. and Kirkpatrick, I. (2003). Non-standard employment in the management and professional workforce: training, consultation and gender implications. Work, Employment and Society, 17: 667–89. Jeanes, E., Knights, D. and Martin, P.Y. (2012). Handbook of Gender, Work & Organization. London: John Wiley & Sons. Jewson, N. and Mason, D. (1986). The theory and practice of equality policies: liberal and radical approaches. The Sociological Review, 34: 307–34. Jonsson, I. (2011). Working hours and gender equality: examples from care work in the Swedish public sector. Gender, Work & Organization, 18: 508–27. Joshi, A. (2014). By whom and when is women’s expertise recognized? The interactive effects of gender and education in science and engineering teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 59: 202–39. Karamessini, M. and Rubery, J. (2013). Women and Austerity: the economic crisis and the future for gender equality. London: Routledge. Kelan, E.K. (2010). Gender logic and (un)doing gender at work. Gender, Work & Organization, 17: 174–94. Kelan, E.K. (2014). From biological clocks to unspeakable inequalities: the intersectional positioning of young professionals. British Journal of Management, 25: 790–804. Kelly, E.L., Ammons, S.K., Chermack, K. and Moen, P. (2010). Gendered challenge, gendered response confronting the ideal worker norm in a white-collar organization. Gender & Society, 24: 281–303. 110

Feminist organization theories

Koenig, A.M., Eagly, A.H., Mitchell, A.A. and Ristikari, T. (2011). Are leader stereotypes masculine? A meta-analysis of three research paradigms. Psychological Bulletin, 137: 616–42. Kumra, S., Simpson, R. and Burke, R.J. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Gender in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, P. (2014). Postfeminism, femininities and organization studies: exploring a new agenda. Organization Studies, 35: 1845–66. Lewis, P. and Simpson, R. (2012). Kanter revisited: gender, power and (in)visibility. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14: 141–58. Lombardo, E. and Mergaert, L. (2013). Gender mainstreaming and resistance to gender training: a framework for studying implementation. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 21: 296–311. Lorber, J. (1997). The Variety of Feminisms and their Contributions to Gender Equality. Oldenburg: BIS. McDowell, L. (2012). Post-crisis, post-Ford and post-gender? Youth identities in an era of austerity. Journal of Youth Studies, 15: 573–90. McRobbie, A. (2004). Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies, 4: 255–64. Martin, J. (1994). The organization of exclusion: institutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs and gendered knowledge in organizational theory and research. Organization, 1: 401–31. Mescher, S. (2011). Ambiguities in Work–Life Balance Support, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Radboud Universiteit. Metcalfe, B.D. and Woodhams, C. (2012). Introduction: new directions in gender, diversity and organization theorizing: re-imagining feminist post-colonialism, transnationalism and geographies of power. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14: 123–40. Mir R. and Mir, A. (2013). The colony writes back: organization as an early champion of non-Western organizational theory. Organization, 20: 91–101. Mohanty, C.T. (1988). Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review, 30: 61–88. Ng, C. and Mitter, S. (2005). Valuing women’s voices: call center workers in Malaysia and India. Gender, Technology and Development, 9: 209–33. Nkomo, S.M. (2011). A postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of ‘African’leadership and management in organization studies: tensions, contradictions and possibilities. Organization, 18: 365–86. Okin, S.M. (2005). ‘Forty acres and a mule’ for women: Rawls and feminism. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 4: 233–48. Özbilgin, M.F., Syed, J., Ali, F. and Torunoglu, D. (2012). International transfer of policies and practices of gender equality in employment to and among Muslim majority countries. Gender, Work & Organization, 19: 345–69. Ozkazanc-Pan, B. (2012). Postcolonial feminist research: challenges and complexities. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 31: 573–91. Ozkazanc-Pan, B. (2014). Postcolonial feminist analysis of high-technology entrepreneuring. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, 20: 155–72. Pas, B., Peters, P., Doorewaard, H., Eisinga, R. and Lagro-Janssen, T. (2014). Supporting ‘superwomen’? Conflicting role prescriptions, gender-equality arrangements and career motivation among Dutch women physicians. Human Relations, 67: 175–204. Pateman, C. (1989). The Disorder of Women: democracy, feminism, and political theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Poggio, B. (2006). Outline of a theory of gender practices. Gender, Work & Organization, 13: 225–33. Prasad, P. (2012). Scandinavian workplace, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 54–72. Pringle, J.K. (2008). Gender in management: theorizing gender as heterogender. British Journal of Management, 19: 110–19. Pullen, A. (2006). Gendering the research self: social practice and corporeal multiplicity in the writing of organizational research. Gender, Work & Organization, 13: 277–98. Riach, K., Rumens, N. and Tyler, M. (2014). Un/doing chrononormativity: negotiating ageing, gender and sexuality in organizational life. Organization Studies, 35: 1677–98. Rottenberg, C. (2014). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Cultural Studies, 28: 418–37. Rubery, J. and Rafferty, A. (2013). Women and recession revisited. Work, Employment and Society, 27: 414–32. 111

Yvonne Benschop and Mieke Verloo

Rudman, L.A., Moss-Racusin, C.A., Phelan, J.E. and Nauts, S. (2012). Status incongruity and backlash effects: defending the gender hierarchy motivates prejudice against female leaders. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48: 165–79. Sandberg, S. (2013). Lean In: women, work, and the will to lead. New York: Knopf. Saussure, F. de. (1966). Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill Simpson, R. (2014). Doing gender differently: men in caring occupations, in Kumra, S., Simpson, R. and Burke, R.J. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Gender in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 480–98. Soni-Sinha, U. and Yates, C.A. (2013). ‘Dirty work?’Gender, race and the union in industrial cleaning. Gender, Work & Organization, 20: 737–51. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313. Squires, J. (2007). The New Politics of Gender Equality. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: the new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury. Storvik, A. and Teigen, M. (2010). Women on Board: the Norwegian experience. Berlin: Friedrich-EbertStiftung. Styhre, A. (2012). Identification work in the construction industry: ideal selves, project performance, and disidentification. Leadership and Organization Development Journal, 33: 632–45. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005). What have the feminists done for us? Feminist theory and organizational resistance. Organization, 12: 711–40. Tienari, J., Quack, S. and Theobald, H. (2002). Organizational reforms, ‘ideal workers’ and gender orders: a cross-societal comparison. Organization Studies, 23: 249–79. Tyler, M. and Cohen, L. (2010). Spaces that matter: gender performativity and organizational space. Organization Studies, 31: 175–98. Vachhani, S.J. (2012). The subordination of the feminine? Developing a critical feminist approach to the psychoanalysis of organizations. Organization Studies, 33: 1237–55. Valian, V. (1999). Why so Slow? The advancement of women. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Van Den Brink, M. and Stobbe, L. (2014). The support paradox: overcoming dilemmas in gender equality programs. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30: 163–74. Verloo, M. (2013). Intersectional and cross-movement politics and policies: reflections on current practices and debates. Signs, 38: 893–915. Walby, S. (2011). The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Walby,S. (2015). Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Waylen, G., Celis, K., Kantola, J. and Weldon, S. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, C. and Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1: 125–51. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13: 193–209. Zanoni, P. (2011). Diversity in the lean automobile factory: doing class through gender, disability and age. Organization, 18: 105–27.

112

7 Hermeneutics in organization studies Michael D. Myers

Introduction Hermeneutics is primarily concerned with human understanding: how it is possible for us to understand the meaning of a text. The word ‘text’ is interpreted broadly in contemporary hermeneutics and refers to written text, speech and any kind of human communication (which may be non-verbal). Hermeneutics can be described as both an underlying philosophy and as a specific way of analysing qualitative data (Bleicher, 1980). As a philosophical approach to human understanding, it provides one of the philosophical groundings for interpretivism (Klein and Myers, 1999). As a mode of analysis, it provides a set of concepts for analysing qualitative data in qualitative research projects. Scholars in organization studies have engaged with hermeneutic philosophy in various ways. Some have used hermeneutic philosophy to establish and extend social constructivism and interpretive research as a viable research philosophy within management and organization studies (Klein and Myers, 1999). Interpretive research is now well accepted and has ‘come of age’ in organizational studies (Prasad and Prasad, 2002; Walsham, 1995). Others, however, have used hermeneutics as a way of analysing their qualitative data, and in fact that is the most common usage. In recent years critical hermeneutics seems to have come to the fore, with hermeneutically informed studies of culture, identity and sensemaking within the context of organizations. For example, Gopinath and Prasad (2012) used critical hermeneutics to challenge the conventional understanding and interpretation of a particular event, viz. Coca-Cola’s exit from India in the 1970s. While most previous researchers had blamed the protectionist policies in India for CocaCola’s demise, their hermeneutic analysis, focusing on the wider macroeconomic and historical context, suggests that the company lost a valuable opportunity due to its own inflexible policies. As another example, Robinson and Kerr (2009) used critical hermeneutics to study charismatic leadership in a British organization. Although charismatic leadership is usually associated with positive organizational change, Robinson and Kerr say that charismatic leadership and extreme leadership episodes in organizations can lead to long term damage. Hermeneutics is important in the study of organizations because it provides a way to understand how socially constructed systems of meaning become accepted (legitimate) or challenged. As Phillips and Brown (1993) explain, any act of communication that attempts to change or reinforce 113

Michael D. Myers

the interpretive frameworks of the organizational actors is potentially a subject for hermeneutic analysis. Even a subject such as government contracting can be analysed using hermeneutics, since the parties to a contract need ‘to come to a mutual agreement about the meaning of a contract and the circumstances surrounding it’ (White, 2009: 303). Despite its potential to provide deep insights into the study of organizational phenomena, however, hermeneutic philosophy has been used by a relatively small number of scholars in organization studies. Over the past 20 years most of the major journals have published only three to four articles that engage with hermeneutic philosophy in some way. One of the possible reasons for this is that some of the classic texts on hermeneutics are not easy to understand. It can be a struggle for PhD students and researchers in organization studies to digest some of the essential hermeneutic works. For example, Gadamer’s (1975) book Truth and Method provides an extensive review of the hermeneutical relevance of many important philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger. He also engages with literary criticism, theology, semiotics and various European thinkers such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Derrida. Gadamer simply assumes that his readers will be familiar with these thinkers and their ideas, something which cannot be taken for granted with PhD students and scholars in business and organization studies. Hence it can be difficult for many scholars in organization studies to engage with hermeneutic philosophy in a meaningful way. Some of the classic texts are rather abstract and difficult to penetrate. However, probably the main reason for hermeneutics remaining the domain of a minority of organizational scholars is that most scholars in organization studies are committed to a positivist view of knowledge, one that tries to emulate the natural sciences (Barrett et al., 2011). Positivist researchers want to remain value-free and like their research findings to be seen as objective. Hermeneutics, by contrast, sees prejudice, biases and prior knowledge as an essential element in the process of human understanding. Researchers using hermeneutics see their research findings as not purely subjective or objective, but rather, as inter-subjective. This is probably a leap too far for many organizational scholars and goes against their ideal of how scientific research should be conducted. I believe these two reasons largely explain why hermeneutic philosophy has been somewhat neglected in studies of organizations. The main purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explain the potential for hermeneutics for organizational studies. I hope that more organizational scholars will become interested in it and use it in their research work. The outline of this chapter is as follows. The next section looks at the historical origins of hermeneutics and briefly explains some fundamental hermeneutic concepts. The following section reviews how hermeneutic philosophy has been used by organizational scholars. The final section is the discussion and conclusions and suggests some possible directions for the future development of philosophical and critical hermeneutics in organization studies. Some key texts for further reading are suggested.

Hermeneutic concepts This section looks briefly at the historical origins of hermeneutics and explains some of the fundamental concepts of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics first arose in Western Europe during the Reformation, when Reformed scholars raised the question of Biblical interpretation. They argued that the meaning of the Scriptures could only be understood by interpreting the various texts within their social and cultural context. It was only in the eighteenth century, however, that the German philosopher Schleiermacher proposed hermeneutics as a general theory for the interpretation of all texts, not just sacred 114

Hermeneutics

texts. He suggested that ‘all text needs to be interpreted within a larger context, and that the process of understanding a text is circular, moving back and forth between the parts and the whole’ (Barrett et al., 2011: 184). These ideas were then developed further by philosophers such as Dilthey and Heidegger. Subsequently, most organizational scholars have based their work on more recent social philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. In these more recent works, the word ‘text’ in hermeneutics is no longer restricted to its literal meaning. Rather, the focus of contemporary hermeneutics is on text and text-analogues. The word ‘text’ is thus interpreted metaphorically: A text or text-analogue is anything that can be treated as a text, such as any human artefact, action, organization or culture. Organizational practices, social structures, and organizational culture can all be understood and interpreted in the same way that we might read and understand a written text. Hence the main focus of scholars using hermeneutics in organization studies nowadays is the textual treatment of social and organizational settings. The hermeneutic effort consists of an attempt to make clear, or to make sense of, some organizational phenomenon within its particular social and cultural context. I will now briefly explain some of the fundamental concepts of hermeneutics.

Historicity One of the most fundamental concepts in hermeneutic philosophy is that of historicity. Historicity implies that as human beings, we are our history. Who we are is a function of the historical circumstances and community that we find ourselves in, the historical language we speak, the historically evolving habits and practice we appropriate, the temporally conditioned choices we make. . . . In short, hermeneutics defends the ontological claim that human beings are their history. (Wachterhauser, 1986: 7) The concept of historicity implies that our understanding of ourselves and others occurs in an historical context where our own historical background and experience informs our interpretation of any topic or subject.

The hermeneutic circle Another fundamental concept in hermeneutic philosophy is that of the hermeneutic circle. The idea of a hermeneutic circle refers to the dialectic between the understanding of the text as a whole and the interpretation of its parts, in which descriptions are guided by anticipated explanations (Myers, 2004). As Gadamer explains: It is a circular relationship. . . . The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes explicit understanding in that the parts, that are determined by the whole, themselves also determine this whole. (Gadamer, 1976a: 117) The idea of the hermeneutic circle can be applied not just to texts, but to any text-analogue. For example, if a researcher in organization studies is studying entrepreneurship in an organization, then the organization itself can be treated as a text. The researcher might start by gaining some general knowledge about the organization by reading the newspaper, searching the Internet etc. After doing this, the researcher might then interview specific people within the organization. As the researcher dives into the details, his or her understanding of the 115

Michael D. Myers

organization as a whole develops. The movement of understanding ‘is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole’ (Myers, 2004).

Prejudice Another important concept in hermeneutics is that of ‘prejudice’. Hermeneutics suggests that our attempt to understand a text always involves some prior knowledge or expectation of what the text is about. For example, at a minimum we must have some understanding of the language in order to understand the written or spoken word. Although we tend to think of the word ‘prejudice’ in a negative light (e.g. racial prejudice), Gadamer points out that prior knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding. We tend to take this prior knowledge for granted. Gadamer argues that the critical task of hermeneutics then becomes one of distinguishing between ‘true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones by which we misunderstand’ (Gadamer, 1976b: 124). Of course, the suspension of our prejudices is necessary if we are to begin to understand a text or text-analogue. But as Gadamer points out, this does not mean that we simply set aside our prejudices. Rather, it means that we, as researchers, must become aware of our own historicity (Gadamer, 1976b: 125). By this he means that we need to become aware of our own views and biases and how these affect the way in which we make sense of the world or interpret a text. The idea that we need to become aware of our own prejudices brings to the fore the realization that, for any understanding to take place, there needs to be a dialogue between the text and the interpreter.

Tradition Although one might think that our prejudices are simply a matter of our own personal preferences, Gadamer points out that this is not so. Rather, our prejudices are often based on tradition – the culture and customs that we have been taught, usually with the imprint of some form of authority. Tradition, along with our own historicity, forms the background and serves as the condition of our knowledge. However, this does not mean that we should remain uncritical of tradition; rather, tradition is the starting point for any understanding at all.

Autonomization Another hermeneutic concept is that of autonomization. Ricoeur (1981) says that the author’s meaning, once it is inscribed in a text, takes on a life of its own. This process of autonomization takes place whenever speech is inscribed in a text: the text takes on a fixed, finite and external representation. This means that the text now has an autonomous, ‘objective’ existence independent of the author. Nowadays this can be illustrated by the Internet: once something is published on the web, it is almost impossible to delete it.

Distanciation Distanciation refers to the inevitable distance that occurs in time and space between the text and its original author on the one hand, and the readers of the text (the audience) on the other (Lee, 1994). Ricoeur (1991) points out that, since the text takes on a life of its own, it becomes dissociated from the original author, the originally intended audience, and even its original 116

Hermeneutics

meaning. The older the text is, and the further away it is in space (culturally and geographically etc.), the greater the distance between the author and the reader.

Appropriation and engagement Hermeneutics suggests that to understand the meaning of a text we must appropriate the meaning of it for ourselves. We have to make the text our own. Gadamer suggests that meaning does not reside in ‘the subjective feelings of the interpreter’ nor in ‘the intentions of the author’. Rather, meaning emerges from the engagement of reader and text. This process of critical engagement with the text is crucial (Myers, 2004).

Fusion of horizons Gadamer says that true understanding comes from the fusion of horizons. The expansion of our own horizon (viewpoint) is only possible if we are prepared to engage in a dialogue with the text. The key idea is that we should be prepared to allow our own horizons to be challenged as we engage with the text or text-analogue e.g. another person or organization.

Types of hermeneutics There are different types of hermeneutics. The first one is what Prasad (2002) calls classical hermeneutics. Classical hermeneutics refers to the early hermeneutic philosophers such as Dilthey who advocated a ‘pure hermeneutics’ which stressed empathic understanding and the understanding of human action from the ‘inside’. The focus was on interpreting a text in order to recover the author’s originally intended meaning. The second type of hermeneutics is called philosophical hermeneutics. Philosophical hermeneutics is usually associated with more recent hermeneutic scholars such as Heidegger and Gadamer. These scholars rejected the idea that it was possible to fully grasp the author’s originally intended meaning. Rather, they emphasized that there is always a dialogue between the text and the interpreter, and any interpretation must acknowledge the reader’s historicity, prejudices and traditions. Philosophical hermeneutics is sometimes criticized for being too subjectivistic and relativistic, although Gadamer did not agree with these criticisms (Prasad, 2002). The third type of hermeneutics is called critical hermeneutics. Critical hermeneutics emerged following the debates between Gadamer and Habermas (a critical theorist). While acknowledging the necessary dialectic between the interpreter and the text, critical hermeneutic philosophers reject the idea that interpretation is necessarily subjective and relativistic. They argue that some interpretations are better than others. Critical hermeneutic philosophers also suggest that there are socio-economic and political constraints within which human communication takes place. In this form of hermeneutics there is thus an attempt to mediate ‘hermeneutically-grounded self-understanding’ and ‘the objective context in which it is formed’ (Bleicher, 1982: 150). The idea is to critique ‘the ideological aspects of the text being interpreted’ (Prasad, 2002: 16). Both Ricoeur and Thompson are scholars who advocate critical hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1974, 1976b, 1981; Thompson, 1981). Ricoeur, for example, says there are two poles or distinct aspects of hermeneutics: the first is a hermeneutics of trust and involves the restoration of meaning; the second is a hermeneutics of suspicion and involves the reduction of illusion. This second pole involves the critique of ideology and implies that consciousness is, to some extent at least, ‘false consciousness’ (Ricoeur, 1976a). Ricoeur argues that both poles are a necessary part of hermeneutic interpretation. 117

Michael D. Myers

Closely related to that of critical hermeneutics is ‘depth hermeneutics’. Depth hermeneutics assumes that the surface meaning of the ‘text’ hides, but also expresses, a deeper meaning (Myers, 2004). ‘It assumes a continuing contradiction between the author’s conscious and unconscious mind, a false consciousness, which appears in the text’ (Diesing, 1991: 130). Depth hermeneutics thus gives more emphasis to one of Ricoeur’s poles of hermeneutics (the hermeneutics of suspicion) rather than the other (the restoration of meaning).

The engagement of organization studies with hermeneutics In this section I review some of the main themes that have been addressed by organizational scholars using hermeneutics. These include organizational theory, organizational culture, organizational narrative, organizational identity, leadership and organizational research methods. I provide a few examples of how scholars in organization studies have engaged with each of these themes.

Organizational theory Some scholars have used hermeneutic philosophy to critique organizational theories. For example, Addleson (1996) critiques the organizational learning literature from the perspective of hermeneutics. He suggests that hermeneutics provides a deeper understanding of how people view organizational problems and how they might be solved. Using Gadamer’s concept of prejudice and pre-judgement, he points out that, just as the organization means different things to different people, so organizational problems are constituted in terms of their own understanding. He argues that the usual metaphor in the organizational learning literature of the organization as an integrated system or network (in which knowledge accumulates and circulates) is misconstrued, because from a hermeneutic standpoint ‘organizational life is characterized by enormously varied points of view and by many conflicting and changing stories’ (Addleson, 1996: 38). Discourse is about shaping people’s interpretations and he argues that this is a firmer basis on which to build a theory of organizational learning. Burrell discusses the relevance of Habermas for organizational theory and mentions hermeneutics in the context of Habermas’ theory of knowledge and human interests. He suggests that organizational theorists need to become more like philosophers and hence become more familiar with contemporary philosophy (Burrell, 1994). Likewise, Blackler (1993) questions some of the conventional, deep-seated assumptions about managerial and organizational rationality. Using hermeneutics, he proposes a theory of organizations as activity systems which emphasize ‘the interplay of actions, language, technologies, social structures, implicit and explicit rules, history and institutions’ (Blackler, 1993: 882).

Organizational culture Organizational scholars have used hermeneutics in their study of organizational culture. They have looked at interpretation, meaning and culture in organizational settings. Instead of studying organizational culture from a functionalist, unitary perspective, scholars using hermeneutics tend to seek an in-depth understanding of the complex and diverse ways in which people interpret their culture (Barrett et al., 2011). I tend to think that most hermeneutic studies of organizations can be seen as studies of organizational culture, although some explicitly refer to culture more than others. 118

Hermeneutics

Organizational storytelling and narrative Closely related to the study of organizational culture is the study of organizational stories, storytelling and narrative. Although there are many approaches to narrative, hermeneutics is one of them (Boyce, 1996). Gabriel uses hermeneutics to explore the idea of organizational stories as myth. He says that myths, while often expressing ambivalent and contradictory wishes, actually permit different or competing interpretations. He suggests that these myths represent efforts ‘to deal with life’s harshness, unpredictability and arbitrariness’ (Gabriel, 1991: 873). Phillips (1995) suggests that narrative fiction (e.g. novels, short stories, plays, songs, poems and films) provides a useful way to think about organizations. He argues that the narrative approach to organizational analysis is complementary, rather than opposed to, traditional forms of organizational analysis. ‘The importance of narrative fiction lies in the fact that it tells a story, and in telling a story it creates a space for the representation of the life-world within which individuals find themselves. . . . Many different viewpoints can be included in the text, each represented by a character’ (Phillips, 1995: 628). Narrative fiction allows for different stories to be told and for doubts, uncertainties, contradictions and paradoxes to be acknowledged rather than hidden. Myers (1994) uses hermeneutics to tell the story of the failure of an information systems project. This study reveals how and why there were conflicting interpretations of what happened and who was to blame. He looks at the diverse views of the various stakeholders and how the story unfolded over time. From a hermeneutic point of view, he makes the point that ‘success’ is a matter of interpretation and depends upon whose perspective is being considered. Prasad and Mir (2002) use critical hermeneutics to examine CEO letters to shareholders in the oil industry. The CEO letter is seen by the authors as an account of, and justification for, the company’s activities and performance over the previous year. Focusing on the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Prasad and Mir show that the American oil companies used Western cultural myths to portray their international partners in the Arab world as unreliable and potentially dangerous in order to protect their power interests at home (Prasad and Mir, 2002). A hermeneutic analysis thus shows the letters of CEOs to be a form of action, and not simply a means of communications. Kets de Vries and Miller (1987) say that interpretation is at the centre of organizational work. Researchers and managers need to search for themes and patterns in the text, and hermeneutics is very valuable in this regard. One example of searching for themes and patterns is Lee’s (1994) study of an email exchange. In a critique of information richness theory, Lee argues that there is a world of meaning in email communications within an organizational context. He uses several hermeneutic concepts to reveal how information richness occurs – it is an emergent property of the interaction of the email medium with its organizational context.

Organizational identity Brown and Humphreys (2006) explore organizational identity in the context of how different groups of people develop a shared understanding of place. Drawing on hermeneutics, they see organizations as social constructions and treat organizational identities as extremely fluid discursive constructions rather than as static and objective entities. Not only were there multiple, diverse and conflicting accounts or narratives of the organization’s identity, but these accounts 119

Michael D. Myers

enabled people to enact the version which they preferred. Looking at the meanings that people ascribe to place, they show ‘how different groups can draw on “place” as a resource in their efforts to develop, promote, and protect their preferred versions of themselves and their organization’ (Brown and Humphreys, 2006: 252).

Organizational design Boland and Day (1989) look at information systems design in organizations as a process of giving meaning to the world through language and action. Their study is a hermeneutic of organizational action in that it reveals the structures of meaning that are drawn upon during the systems design process for organizations. In a similar way, Butler and Murphy (2007) apply concepts from phenomenology and hermeneutics to understand how social actors interpret and understand their world. They use this understanding to develop a set of design principles for the development of knowledge management systems in organizations.

Organizational research methods Organization scholars have also proposed hermeneutics as being relevant for research methods and approaches. Interpretive approaches to research are usually regarded as those which draw on hermeneutics (Alvesson and Deetz, 1996; Hardy and Clegg, 2007). For example, Brannick and Coghlan (2007) suggest hermeneutics as a research paradigm for insider research – research that understands social reality by interpreting the meanings held by people or members of a social group. Klein and Myers (1999) propose hermeneutics as one of the philosophical foundations for doing interpretive field research. Although interpretive research is usually seen as opposed and irreconcilable with positivist research, Lee (1991) argues that the two are not mutually exclusive and that both can be integrated in some way. Prasad (2002) suggests methodological guidelines for employing hermeneutics in organizational research. Similarly, Lueger et al. (2005) suggest hermeneutics as a methodology for capturing sensemaking activities and the underlying social structures. They call this approach ‘objective hermeneutics’ since their focus is on the subject-independent structures of social fields. Of course, an understanding of these social structures can only be obtained via the subjective interpretations of the actors. Their proposed hermeneutic process consists of reconstructing the underlying rules that apply in a specific social and organizational context. They demonstrate this methodology in a study of how influence is exercised within organizations. Butcher (2013) focuses on the researcher’s identity while doing ethnographic fieldwork. Using the concept of reflexive hermeneutics, Butcher discusses how shared meanings developed with the research participants. He concludes that a researcher from outside can never truly belong in the field, no matter how much one wants to (Butcher, 2013).

The field of organization studies Lastly, some scholars have used hermeneutics to critique the field of organization studies itself. Rao and Pasmore (1989) suggest that the study of organizations is incited by divergent interests. They argue that there are four different paradigms within organizational studies; these paradigms are the social innovation viewpoint, the critical viewpoint, the language game viewpoint, and the hermeneutic viewpoint. They say that the hermeneutic viewpoint is the least developed of the four, but has much to offer organizational studies. 120

Hermeneutics

Discussion and conclusions As we have seen, hermeneutics has much to offer organizational studies. Whether the theme is organization theory, organizational culture, narrative, identity and/or research methods, the use of hermeneutics has the potential to provide deep insights into organizational phenomena. Hermeneutics is valuable, not just for making sense of a text or text-analogue that may be unclear, but also for challenging accepted interpretations. Critical hermeneutics in particular is a powerful way of critiquing ideology, power relations and culture. However, one notable feature of the literature in organization studies is the way that many authors cite one or more concepts from hermeneutics as informing their work, but apart from a brief mention their engagement with hermeneutic philosophy is perhaps best described as rather limited. For example, Yanow (2004) discusses how the local knowledge of lower level workers is often discounted and dismissed by managers and executives higher up in the organization. She focuses on the nature of local, contextual knowledge about organizational practices and how this knowledge might be translated to others higher up or outside of the organization. Although the subject matter is one of culture, meaning and power, and Yanow’s article is clearly informed by hermeneutics, she only discusses hermeneutics very briefly (Yanow, 2004). Alvesson (2010), likewise, provides an overview of the key images of identity in organizations and how individual identity is metaphorically understood by researchers. He mentions the hermeneutic circle, with reference to how we understand the meaning of texts, but apart from that, there is no further discussion of any hermeneutic concepts. Phillips’ (1995) treatment of organizational narrative is similar: his article about narrative fiction is obviously informed by hermeneutics, but he mentions the word just once. Some organizational scholars, however, do not mention hermeneutics at all, despite some of the key concepts apparently being informed by hermeneutics. For example, Weick et al. (2005) discuss sensemaking in organizations. Their discussion is informed by and appears to draw on various hermeneutic concepts (Weick et al., 2005), yet hermeneutics is not mentioned at all and no hermeneutic philosophers are cited. One possible future direction for organizational scholars using hermeneutics is a focus on leadership. At the moment there are very few hermeneutically informed articles on leadership, but I believe hermeneutics could offer rich insights into this subject. For example, Sparrowe (2005) focuses on authenticity in leadership as an emergent narrative process in which others play an important role. This is a different perspective than that which is usually adopted in studies of leadership, where authenticity is analysed in terms of the motivational effects of the leader’s values and behaviour, and the consistency of these values with those of their followers (Sparrowe, 2005). Drawing on Ricoeur’s critical hermeneutics, Sparrowe focuses on narrative and identity in his study of leadership. He argues that, rather than seeing the self as static, the narrative self is one that experiences change, reversal and surprise. We use different kinds of stories to make sense of these events, both to ourselves and others. He suggests that the concept of the narrative self, grounded in hermeneutics, provides a rich conceptual framework for understanding identity in relation to authenticity and leadership (Sparrowe, 2005). We can summarize the current state of play by saying that hermeneutics has made a positive contribution to organization studies. However, at this stage the use of hermeneutics within organization studies still remains something of a cottage industry. While many organizational scholars seem to be informed by hermeneutics, only a small proportion explicitly use hermeneutic concepts. Prasad’s comment, made more than a decade ago, that philosophical discussions of hermeneutics in management and organizational research remains rather limited is still true today 121

Michael D. Myers

(Prasad, 2002). Hence there is still much potential for scholars of organizations to better engage with hermeneutic philosophy.

Key texts for further reading Prasad (2002) provides a very accessible introduction to hermeneutics and its relevance for organizational studies. He also suggests methodological guidelines for employing hermeneutics in organizational research. A more comprehensive set of guidelines for employing hermeneutics is provided by Klein and Myers (1999). They suggest a set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive research in information systems. These principles are derived primarily from anthropology, phenomenology and hermeneutics. Although this article was written primarily for information systems scholars, I believe it is equally relevant for those seeking to use hermeneutics in organizational studies as well. A good empirical example of the use of hermeneutics in organizational research is Phillips and Brown’s (1993) study of a corporation’s image advertising campaign. Their study nicely illustrates how critical hermeneutics can be used to study corporate communications. They show how culture and power are constituted and maintained by the ongoing communicative interaction of the organization’s members (Phillips and Brown, 1993). After reading these articles it is probably a good idea to read one or more of the general philosophical introductions. A good place to start would be Palmer’s (1969) collection of readings. This book includes selected works by prominent hermeneutic scholars. Gadamer’s (1975) book Truth and Method is regarded as a classic in the field, but it is more difficult to read than the more general introductions. Gadamer’s main concern is the veracity of interpretation; given our subjectivity, how can we avoid being purely relativistic? Gadamer’s solution is to suggest that our prejudices and biases can be made subject to critical scrutiny (Myers, 2004).

References (key texts in bold) Addleson, M. (1996). Resolving the spirit and substance of organizational learning. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 9: 32–41. Alvesson, M. (2010). Self-doubters, strugglers, storytellers, surfers and others: images of self-identities in organization studies. Human Relations, 63: 193–217. Alvesson, M. and Deetz, S. (1996). Critical theory and postmodemism approaches to organizational studies, in Clegg, S., Hardy, C. and Nord, W. (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, pp. 255–83. Barrett, F.J., Powley, E.H. and Pearce, B. (2011). Hermeneutic philosophy and organizational theory, in Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 181–213. Blackler, F. (1993). Knowledge and the theory of organizations: organizations as activity systems and the reframing of management. Journal of Management Studies, 30: 863–84. Bleicher, J. (1980). Contemporary Hermeneutics: hermeneutics as method, philosophy and critique. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bleicher, J. (1982). The Hermeneutic Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Boland, R.J. and Day, W.F. (1989). The experience of system design: a hermeneutic of organizational action. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 5(2): 87–104. Boyce, M. (1996). Organizational story and storytelling: a critical review. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 9: 5–26. Brannick, T. and Coghlan, D. (2007). In defense of being ‘native’: the case for insider academic research. Organizational Research Methods, 10: 59–74. Brown, A. and Humphreys, M. (2006). Organizational identity and place: a discursive exploration of hegemony and resistance. Journal of Management Studies, 43: 231–57. 122

Hermeneutics

Burrell, G. (1994). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: the contribution of Jurgen Habermas. Organization Studies, 15: 1–19. Butcher, T. (2013). Longing to belong. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 8: 242–57. Butler, T. and Murphy, C. (2007). Understanding the design of information technologies for knowledge management in organizations: a pragmatic perspective. Information Systems Journal, 17: 143–63. Diesing, P. (1991). How Does Social Science Work? Reflections on practice. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Gabriel, Y. (1991). Turning facts into stories and stories into facts: a hermeneutic exploration of organizational folklore. Human Relations, 44: 857–75. Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and Method. New York: Seasbury Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1976a). The historicity of understanding, in Connerton, P. (ed.), Critical Sociology, Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 117–33. Gadamer, H.-G. (1976b). Philosophical Hermeneutics. California: University of California Press. Gopinath, C. and Prasad, A. (2012). Toward a critical framework for understanding MNE operations: revisiting Coca-Cola’s exit from India. Organization, 20: 212–32. Hardy, C. and Clegg, S. (2007). Relativity without relativism: reflexivity in post-paradigm organization studies. British Journal of Management, 8: S5–S17. Kets de Vries, M.F.R. and Miller, D. (1987). Interpreting organizational texts. Journal of Management Studies, 24: 233–47. Klein, H.K. and Myers, M.D. (1999). A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 23(1): 67–93. Lee, A.S. (1991). Integrating positivist and interpretive approaches to organizational research. Organizational Science, 2(4): 342–65. Lee, A.S. (1994). Electronic mail as a medium for rich communication: an empirical investigation using hermeneutic interpretation. MIS Quarterly, 18(2): 143–57. Lueger, M., Sandner, K., Meyer, R. and Hammerschmid, G. (2005). Contextualizing influence activities: an objective hermeneutical approach. Organization Studies, 26: 1145–68. Myers, M.D. (1994). A disaster for everyone to see: an interpretive analysis of a failed IS project. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 4(4): 185–201. Myers, M.D. (2004). Hermeneutics in information systems research, in Mingers, J. and Willcocks, L.P. (eds), Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 103–28. Palmer, R. (1969). Hermeneutics: interpretation theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Phillips, N. (1995). Telling organizational tales: on the role of narrative fiction in the study of organizations. Organization Studies, 16: 625–49. Phillips, N. and Brown, J.L. (1993). Analyzing communication in and around organizations: a critical hermeneutic approach. Academy of Management Journal, 36(6): 1547. Prasad, A. (2002). The contest over meaning: hermeneutics as an interpretive methodology for understanding texts. Organizational Research Methods, 5: 12–33. Prasad, A. and Mir, R. (2002). Digging deep for meaning: a critical hermeneutic analysis of CEO letters to shareholders in the oil industry. Journal of Business Communication, 39: 92–116. Prasad, A. and Prasad, P. (2002). The coming of age of interpretive organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 5: 4–11. Rao, M.V.H. and Pasmore, W.A. (1989). Knowledge and interests in organization studies: a conflict of interpretations. Organization Studies, 10: 225–39. Ricoeur, P. (1974). The Conflict of Interpretations: essays in hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1976a). Hermeneutics: restoration of meaning or reduction of illusion?, in Connerton, P. (ed.), Critical Sociology, Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 194–203. Ricoeur, P. (1976b). Interpretation Theory, Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991). From Text to Action: essays in hermeneutics, II. Translated by Blamey, K. and Thompson, J.B. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Robinson, S.K. and Kerr, R. (2009). The symbolic violence of leadership: a critical hermeneutic study of leadership and succession in a British organization in the post-Soviet context. Human Relations, 62: 875–903. 123

Michael D. Myers

Sparrowe, R.T. (2005). Authentic leadership and the narrative self. The Leadership Quarterly, 16: 419–39. Thompson, J.B. (1981). Critical Hermeneutics: a study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wachterhauser, B.R. (1986). Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Walsham, G. (1995). The emergence of interpretivism in IS research. Information Systems Research, 6: 376–94. Weick, K.E., Sutcliffe, K.M. and Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16: 409–21. White, J.D. (2009). The hermeneutics of government contracting. Administrative Theory and Praxis, 31: 302–321. Yanow, D. (2004). Translating local knowledge at organizational peripheries. British Journal of Management, 15: 9–25.

124

8 Institutional theory Reflections on ontology Tim Edwards

Introduction The philosophical foundations of institutional theory continue to be obscured by the problem of meta-theory, the ontological ideas that necessarily underpin institutional theory. These concern statements about the way the social world is, of the relationship between human agents and social structures and the transformational nature of that relationship. These are significant issues because ontology informs how scholars approach the phenomena they want to study, shaping the research questions asked and the methodology adopted, which informs what can be said about it (AlAmoudi and O’Mahoney, Chapter 1, this volume). The origins of the issue reveal distinct points of connection and contention, of how institutional theory has been conceived across disciplines (Nielson, 2001; Mutch et al., 2006; DiMaggio, 2008), which for organizational studies scholars becomes apparent when looking at the concept of ‘isomorphism’. The points of connection concern the necessary role of agency in explaining institutionalization; the points of contention relate to the ontological assumptions that might underpin the agency–structure relationship. The notion of isomorphism has been scrutinised by scholars interested in institutional logics (Friedland and Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012) and related sub-themes around institutional work (DiMaggio, 1988; Zucker 1988b; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006) and institutional complexity (Greenwood et al., 2011) because this work tended to focus on institutionalization as an outcome rather than as a process (DiMaggio, 2008). Early institutional reviews confirm the explanatory limitations of treating isomorphism as an outcome. For DiMaggio (1988) the puzzle was to begin to explain institutional entrepreneurship in highly institutionalized fields whereas for Zucker (1988b) the opposite issue was observed, which was to explain institutional stability in the context of social entropy. For both the challenge was to overcome the totalizing assumptions pervading previous institutional studies (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), which meant giving explanatory attention to the way actors mobilized their interests to change or stabilise their social world. For Zucker this presented an opportunity to assess ‘self-interest introduced by noninstitutional processes’ (Zucker, 1988b: 44) that for DiMaggio in contrast meant considering institutionalization as ‘a product of the political efforts of actors to accomplish their ends’ (Zucker, 1988b: 13). By drawing attention to these different interactional dynamics both scholars, albeit with a different emphasis, created an important point of departure for institutional scholars, which was to encourage them to re-consider and explain institutionalization processes. 125

Tim Edwards

To this end, many scholars found utility in the work of Anthony Giddens (1984) who, building on Berger and Luckman’s (1967) idea of the ‘mutual constitution of individuals and society’, developed the notion of structuring based on the reciprocal causality of the duality of structure (Jones, Chapter 16, this volume). The adoption of Giddens’ ideas seemed appropriate because previous institutional scholarship that had drawn inspiration from social interactionism (Blumer, 1962) clearly resonated: ‘the notion of structuring was long latent in interactionist scholarship [while] structural duality was also implicit in how interactionists understood the core concepts around which they organized their research’ (DiMaggio, 2008: 499, italics in original). ‘Exposing’ these conceptual links precipitated growth in structurational accounts of institutionalization (Barley, 1986; Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Lounsbury and Kaghan, 2001; Battilana, 2006; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; DiMaggio, 2008) and it initiated a shift in the field prompting some scholars to reject an ‘empirical agenda’ that ignored how institutions were created, altered and reproduced to one that included new discussions of how to frame the reciprocal relationship between institutions and action (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). While this period of reflection enabled some scholars to move beyond concerns over ‘isomorphism’ it is notable this process has only until recently included critical debate over the ontological merits of Giddens’ model of structuration and his interpretation of the mutual constitution of individuals and society, despite considerable – critical – deliberation elsewhere in sociology (Layder, 1987; Thompson, 1989; Cohen 1990; Archer, 1995; Stones, 2005). In many respects, interest in the ontological foundations of institutionalism has only just started to be taken seriously in the institutional field because it is only now that some scholars have begun to draw attention to the consequences of ontology for institutional research (see Mutch et al., 2006). In the case of Giddens’ work a counterpoint position based on an alternative view of structuring has emerged that relies on critical realism (CR) as a meta-theory (Archer, 1995, 2003). This work is distinct in so far as, rather than treating institutions as the medium and outcome of action based on the duality of structure, critical realists, such as Margaret Archer (1995, 2003), propose to hold social structures and agency separate, based on analytical dualism. These conceptual ideas have been taken up by a small number of critical management theorists involved in institutional research who have proposed the merits of treating structure and agency as distinct categories of analysis albeit related through practice to advance explanations that prioritize the historical foundations of institutional arrangements, while at the same time pushing for a more developed appraisal of the ‘agent’ involved in social interactions (Mutch, 2007; Leca and Naccache, 2006; Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006; Delbridge and Edwards, 2013). In what follows, my aim is to attend to the differences attentiveness to philosophy, or some element of it, might have for understanding (and advancing) institutional theory. The chapter proceeds with a brief review of those commentaries concerning the conceptual issues facing institutional scholars interested in dealing with agency in institutional accounts. This is followed by a discussion of the way Giddens’ ideas have informed recent institutional work, which is then followed by a CR counterpoint position and the consequences this has for the future development of the field. Such reflections provide an opportunity to consider the role and significance of different ontologies for social science research, such as institutionalism.

Tracing the debate over agency and structure in institutional theory Indication of the core conceptual issues pertaining to the development of institutional theory can be gleaned from the introductory remarks made by Lynne Zucker in an edited book written following an American Sociological Society conference on the ‘Problems of the Discipline’ 126

Instititional theory

(Zucker, 1988a). It is perhaps telling when outlining the book that Zucker issues a cautionary note about the two conceptual chapters (written by her and Paul DiMaggio) on institutional work, because as she comments, they are ‘so different that it may be difficult to see how both can be labelled institutional’ (Zucker, 1988a: xiv). Her opening remarks indicate the lack of a coherent underpinning in institutional theory, because as she noted, DiMaggio showed that much of the institutional literature assumed social systems were tightly structured while for her these same systems were more likely to suffer from social entropy. This situation seemed to confirm the limits of agreement in explaining stasis and change, which confirmed the newness of the discipline (DiMaggio, 1988) but also the lack of understanding of ontology or even of its significance among exponents of institutionalism. According to DiMaggio the strength of institutional theory had been its focus on those parts of ‘organizational life that are so exteriorized and intersubjective that no actor is likely to question them’ (DiMaggio, 1988: 6). DiMaggio draws attention to the early work of Selznick (1949) on norms and more latterly to the literature around taken-for-granted assumptions to explain why variation in actor interests was not deemed significant in explaining outcomes. For the most part, it was thought: ‘as long as action is guided by norms or constitutive expectations, variation in actor interest will not play a role in its outcome’ (DiMaggio, 1988: 5). Expectations of high institutionalization confirmed institutions constituted ‘multifaceted, durable social structures, made up of symbolic elements, social activities and material resources’ that ensured stability and shared meaning (Scott, 2001: 49), and it was because actors preferred ‘certainty and predictability in organizational life’ that institutional change was unlikely (DiMaggio 1988: 8). While this provided a strong rebuttal to rational-actor models of agency it was also apparent that this topdown version of social order presented a narrow view of that social world. It illustrated one mode of the agency–structure relationship rather than a statement about the range of possible sets of relationship that might emerge in different social settings. As DiMaggio went on to argue these foundational elements could not be allowed to set limits on what might be possible within an institutional framework. The issue concerned the introduction of agency within institutional theory, which meant establishing ‘the ways in which institutional and interest-based approaches to organizational change are consistent with and capable of enriching one another’ (DiMaggio, 1988: 12). How agency and interest might be introduced and therefore jointly conceived was expressed as follows: Institutionalization is a product of the political efforts of actors to accomplish their ends and that the success of an institutionalization project and the form that the resulting institution takes depend on the relative power of the actors who support, oppose, or otherwise strive to influence it . . . Institutionalization as an outcome places organizational structures and practices beyond the reach of interests and politics. By contrast, institutionalization as a process is profoundly political and reflects the relative power or organized interests and the actors who mobilize around them. (DiMaggio 1988: 13, italics in original) This is significant because DiMaggio suggests that institutions existed beyond simple manipulation (outcome) while change was an inherently agentic-political endeavour (process). His solution to this interactional paradox was to treat institutional work as ‘situated’ in so far as institutions tended to persist when the material or ideal interests of actors aligned with existing arrangements and when these did not align due to emergent political interests then the potential for deinstitutionalization was likely. The implication was that the agency–structure relationship shifted in respect of ‘situated’ sets of institution-related processes when actors mobilized organized 127

Tim Edwards

interests. To explain change DiMaggio suggests that actors could ‘push against’ institutions because the internal dynamics of institutional processes presented space for actors to bargain and negotiate, at which point new and alternative institutional forms could be envisioned. Zucker (1988b) maps out a different version of social order, one that emphasizes social entropy. This contrasts with DiMaggio’s framing in so far as his discussion draws attention to the challenge of changing institutions and hence asks institutional scholars to explain the scope for institutional entrepreneurship despite pressures towards stasis (Holm, 1995; Seo and Creed, 2002; Delbridge and Edwards, 2008; Battilana et al., 2009). Zucker, on the other hand, draws attention to social entropy, which means institutions tend to decay and therefore have to be ‘actively’ maintained (Zucker, 1988a: xv). The issue was to examine the relationship between what Zucker (1988b) described as institutional and non-institutional processes as well as multilevel discrepancies between micro and macro level processes. As Zucker described: ‘entropy in a social system is increased not only by the natural decay of institutional elements and by self-interest introduced by noninstitutional processes, it is also increased by inconsistencies or even conflict between social order at the macro- and micro-levels’ (Zucker, 1988b: 44). Here Zucker drew attention to distinctions between the micro and macro order, which are variations between different levels of analysis, between the actions of individuals at a local, organizational level and the broader institutions that spanned much wider tracts of time and space. Attention focused on times when the micro and macro lost ‘synchronicity’ when endogenous processes of decay might occur. What is interesting about Zucker’s work is that she treated levels of analysis as distinct categories of social reality albeit interconnected by social practice (Friedland and Alford, 1991). DiMaggio also argued that while institutions may be enduring institutional processes connected these structures with the actors involved. In each, the problem of the agency–structure relationship focused around a common dilemma, albeit articulated differently, of how to link institutions and actors without reverting to determinism or allowing rational-action models in through the rear door. While both wanted to conceptualize the links between actors and the social order shaping action, neither developed an articulated social ontology. Instead, the issue of stasis and change in institutional analysis remained unresolved albeit with this loosely framed by the idea that institutions endure and decay and that in some way these processes inculcate actors who are not social dopes because institutions do not have totalizing effects on action.

The first tentative moves toward a social ontology of institutional theory Moves towards specifying a social ontology of institutional theory explicitly emerged in the work of Barley and Tolbert (1997). This seminal paper mapped out those unarticulated ontological ideas often implied in many institutional studies and reviews (Zucker, 1988a) that were now aligned with the work of Anthony Giddens (1984), as was specified in his theory of society (also see DiMaggio, 2008). Barley and Tolbert’s (1997) structurational model of institutions was firmly based on a ‘praxis’ reading of institutionalization because it was claimed that earlier institutional work was consistent with the causal idea of the ‘duality of structure’ (i.e. structuring), even though much of this work focused on the outcomes of institutional processes. In particular, they argued that DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) concept of field explicitly demonstrated that ‘institutions exhibit an inherent duality: they both arise from and constrain social action’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 96). And, consistent with this they argued that fields could only be understood in terms of the interactions ensuring their existence. For DiMaggio and Powell (1983: 148) fields only existed to the extent they were institutionally 128

Instititional theory

defined and institutional definition relied on interactions among actors and broader structures; such interactions required actors to be knowledgeable (not social dopes) as they had to be aware of a shared enterprise; and structures constrained action due to inter-organizational structures of domination (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 148). This interpretation presented an opportunity to specify interactions as the mechanism through which agency and structure connected, and in doing so, it seemed possible to resolve the ‘problem’ of earlier institutional scholarship that had treated institutions as exogenous to organizational action (e.g. Meyer and Scott, 1983; Scott and Meyer, 1987; Sutton et al., 1994; Scott and Meyer, 1994). Overcoming this issue was seen as necessary because it rectified the problem of reification when institutions were depicted ‘as somehow distinct from those who comply and, more importantly, from the act of compliance itself’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 96). Here Barley and Tolbert (1997) specified a social reality whereby institutions no longer existed separately from practice and by implication individuals could not be specified outside of a social context. Put in the context of the earlier work of DiMaggio (1988) and Zucker (1988b), the solution for accounting for institutions as outcomes and processes was to focus on the social practices that could be used to frame the connections between the institutional realm and realm of action (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). Building on Giddens’ model but elaborating in ways that revealed earlier adaptations (see Barley, 1986) they define institutions as the ‘shared rules and typifications that identify categories of social actors and their appropriate activities or relationships’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 96, italics in original), which in keeping with Giddens meant institutions were to social action as grammars are to speech: Speech allows for an infinite variety of expressions, yet to be comprehensible, every expression must conform to an underlying set of tacitly understood rules that specify relations between classes of lexemes. Similarly, social actions may vary in their particulars, but to be interpretable their contours must conform to taken-for-granted assumptions about the activities and interactions appropriate for different classes of actors. (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 96–7) This meant institutions were enacted through scripts (Barley, 1986) – the ‘observable, recurrent activities and patterns of interaction characteristic of a particular setting’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 99) that encoded the logic of a specific setting which appeared as local variations of broader institutional principles. In this sense, institutions only became manifest when actors used them as stocks of practical knowledge to engage in social behaviour. These features of the ontology of praxis indicated actors were capable of skilful action rather than reflecting taken-for-granted norms in the manner of simple cultural dopes (Fligstein, 1997); institutions were constituted in practice, they did not exist ‘out there’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 1993; de Certeau, 1984; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Giddens, 1995) and all action was in some way set around pre-existing institutionalized rules. While contexts revealed the imprint of institutions it was because actors were skilful they could modify them albeit depending on the unfolding context that may or may not lead to institutional change (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). These ideas offered a way to resolve the issues raised by Zucker (1988b) because they accommodated ‘micro and macro processes’ that may or may not be synchronized and because the ‘political negotiations’ (DiMaggio, 1988) that implicated actors in the enactment of scripts could now be explained with reference to the skilful, knowledgeable actor. 129

Tim Edwards

Tensions in the ontology of practice In developing their model it is noteworthy that Tolbert and Zucker (1997) were quite aware of the criticisms made by some scholars unwilling to treat structure and agency as a duality or inseparable (Layder, 1987; Thompson, 1989; Cohen 1990; Archer, 1995). Treating agency and structure as complementary features (Thompson, 1989: 58) was viewed as a key problem in Giddens’ model because, as Archer (1995: 93–4) had contended, an examination of the performance of social action resulted in conflationism: ‘By enjoining the examination of a single process in the present tense, issues surrounding the relative independence, causal influence and temporal precedence of the components have been eliminated at a stroke.’ Although this was believed to settle reification the approach left little room, it was argued, to explore ‘prior structured distributions of vested interests’ (Archer, 1995: 99). This was also recognized by Barley and Tolbert (1997: 99) who stated: ‘Unless an institution exists prior to action, it is difficult to understand how it can affect behaviour and how one can examine its implications for action or speak of action’s subsequent effects on the institution.’ However, rather than deal with this ontological issue head-on they made the following – partial – concession: Although the critics of structuration theory have aimed their critique at problems they believe to be inherent to the theory’s logic and, for this reason, have sometimes argued for re-establishing the separation between structure and action that Giddens sought to transcend (Archer 1989: 103–4), we submit that the worth of the critique actually lies in the epistemological rather than the ontological issues that it raises. (Barley and Tolbert, 1997: 99) While Barley and Tolbert (1997) wanted to separate actions and structures to be able to talk about the historicity of institutions they effectively stopped short of treating these features as distinct because they relied on scripts to frame the connection between agency and structure. The upshot was a ‘side-step’ to the ontological question of the status of actors and institutions because the instantiation argument confined explanation to the enactment of scripts that did not ‘allow’ structure to exist as prior to action, or agency as potentially separate to total ‘social specification’. A criticism of the framing of structuring from a Giddens’ perspective was that while this acknowledged actors were knowledgeable it did not really consider the sets of agentic processes that explained how actors made judgements about how they navigated situations, acting creatively (or perhaps not) (Archer, 1995). The focus on scripts was criticized because it was thought to flatten social reality despite an acknowledgement of the prior status of social structures and the importance of actors in explaining institutional stasis and change. These criticisms are reflected in the work of a small number of critical management scholars who have begun to debate the problem of conflationism within the institutional field (Mutch et al., 2006; Leca and Naccache, 2006; Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006; Mutch, 2007). These conversations reveal how questions over the nature of social reality are beginning to inform how institutional complexity and change is researched as examples of conditioned action (Delbridge and Edwards, 2013).

Points of contention: ontology in institutional theory As noted, issues around ontology have percolated debates in institutional theory since the work of Barley and Tolbert (1997). To this end, an emergent body of work derived from CR has 130

Instititional theory

for some represented a significant move to adding ‘a firmer grounding’ to current theorizing (Palmer et al., 2008). This ontology is based on the analytical dualism of CR, which in recognizing the pre-existence of social structures provides the conceptual framework for empirical investigation into how such structures, such as institutions ‘impact’ agents. This is based on the basic idea that to explore how actors, with differing perceptions and depth of knowledge of their contexts, engage in institutional processes, it is necessary to commit to an empirical strategy that specifies such processes according to structure, social interplay and outcome. This is consistent with a diachronic model of social reality but differs in important ways to that specified by Barley and Tolbert (1997) because specific attention is given to explaining how institutions pre-date action and in treating actors as distinct categories of analysis. The key distinction is that while such a view recognizes the importance of practice in terms of process the analysis is not restricted to those social interactions. This is because the analysis explores the structural condition of action and then looks at how actors engage in practice given the relationality between social structures and the reflexive capacities of actors (Archer, 2003). The key difference is that attention is given to the context of interaction (before that interaction) and to the reflexive abilities of actors as a feature of their institutional biography (Suddaby et al., 2012) as well as their social positioning (Archer, 2003).

CR and analytical dualism The challenge facing scholars interested in proposing a CR ontology for institutional analysis is captured by Hesketh and Fleetwood (2006: 683, italics in original) when they state: Establishing the connection between critical realism and institutional theory is difficult not only because there are many versions of institutionalism, but also because critical realism, as a philosophy of science, inhabits a meta-theoretical domain, whereas institutionalism inhabits a theoretical domain: the role of meta-theory is to interrogate the pre-suppositions of any theory. In this respect, Nielsen (2001) offers a useful review of different institutional theories or approaches, which allows him to confirm that in most cases other than institutionalism in political science (because of its commitment to positivism) such approaches are compatible with CR in respect of the following points. First: Human agency is seen as purposeful, or intended rational, endowed with some freedom to deliberate or choose in accordance with individual psychology rather than, on the one hand, as irrational, automatic rule-followers or totally encapsulated in an externally defined role or, on the other hand, rational in the sense of isolated maximizing ‘economic man’; second: ‘they emphasize the constitutive importance of the cultural and cognitive framework’; third: ‘they recognize the central and pervasive role of power and conflict’; and finally, ‘they focus on the role of institutions such as habits, routines, and norms in the coordination of behaviour’ (Nielsen, 2001: 512). As might be noted these same conditions are commensurate with Giddens’ structurational model; the difference for scholars of CR is in the way these features are conceived in terms of their specificity and relationality and therefore how they inform research practice. CR is a meta-theory rooted in ontology that asserts: ‘The social world consists of human agents and social structures by which we mean institutions, mechanisms, resources, rules, 131

Tim Edwards

conventions, habits, procedures and so on’ (Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006: 685). To explain the transformational nature of the social world critical realists recognize that social systems can be either open or closed, which resonates with the commentaries of DiMaggio (1988) and Zucker (1988b). In the case of closed systems it is assumed that relationships and activities are highly regular, much in the same way as described by DiMaggio when referring to isomorphism. However, critical realists also acknowledge, as with Zucker (1988b) that the more common situation is when social systems are open and therefore lack event regularity (Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006). In the case of open systems critical realists follow a different ‘script’ to those advocating structuration theory. This is described by Thompson (1989: 74): To explore the space between the differential distribution of options, on the one hand, and the wants and needs of different kinds and different categories of individuals, on the other, is to examine the degrees of freedom and constraint which are entailed by social structure. Such an analysis would show that, while structure and agency are not antinomies, nevertheless they are not as complementary and mutually supporting as Giddens would like us to believe. How this is achieved relies on a different notion of social reproduction as compared with Giddens’ interpretation of ‘structuring’. For critical realists, rather than rely on the causality of the duality of structure the focus is ‘analytical dualism’, which is a ‘method for examining the interplay between these strata; it is analytical precisely because the two are inter-dependent but it is dualistic because each stratum is held to have its own emergent properties’ (Archer, 1995: 133–4). CR is based on the main assumption ‘that structure necessarily predates the action(s) which transform it’. What this means is that institutions are ‘neither the creation of contemporary actors nor are ontologically reducible to ‘material existents’ (raw resources) and [not] dependent upon current acts of human instantiation (rule governed) for all their current effects’ (Archer, 1995: 138). This is different to Giddens’ assertion, because ‘social systems only exist through their continuous structuration in the course of time’ (Giddens, 1979: 217). In CR, institutions are the ‘generative mechanisms’ that give rise to social outcomes as empirical tendencies. The relationship between institutions and action is explained using a stratified ontology. Institutions condition action in specific ways because the meta-theory of CR specifies three ontological domains: the real, the actual and the empirical. Institutions constitute the real domain, which for critical realists cause social interactions (the domain of the actual) that are the subject of empirical observations (the domain of the empirical). The link between institutions and action is not straightforward because different societal orders may only function within a particular range of constraints, which as Archer (1995: 149) has noted means: ‘the emergent properties of structures and the actual experiences of agents are not synchronized’. Analytical dualism asserts there are discontinuities in the institutionalization process that indicate ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ moments. This reformulation of ‘structuring’ as discontinuous means that institutions have ‘emergent properties which are irreducible to the doings of contemporary actors, yet derive from the historical actions which generated them, thus creating the context for current action’ (Archer, 1995: 139). This is the same for actors as they too are treated as in some part autonomous from the process of institutionalization. In this respect, the most recent work by Archer (2003) has added further ‘meat’ to the CR meta-theory with greater attention being given to the concept of agency. These developments have also helped institutional scholars address the way in which Giddens frames actor knowledgeability because Archer (2003) draws attention to the ‘reflexive capacity’ of actors and their ability to see opportunities where others in the same position only see barriers. 132

Instititional theory

Archer’s work has been embraced by some scholars because she offers an insight into the properties and powers that are possessed by individuals as opposed to those pertaining to social forms. In particular, she draws attention to the range for reflexive deliberation available to actors, which is viewed as important because ‘agents have to diagnose their situations, they have to identify their own interests and they must design projects they deem appropriate to attaining their ends’ (Archer, 2003: 9). This for some might appear to imply a reified representation of individuals but instead is a major feature of the CR project because it is assumed that no social structure ‘is constraining or causal tout court’ (Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006: 692). By holding agency and structure apart and treating each as having distinct emergent properties CR sets out to explain those distinct components that come together in social interaction but in ways that treat them as analytically separate. For Archer (2003), individuals embark on ‘agential enterprise’, which for that person is a personal project. Such projects are important because when actors deliberate over them they engage in a personal process that identifies the causal mechanisms – institutions and social structures – that connects to their agency (Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006: 692). While institutions may have the power to facilitate or restrain action the significance of this power is contingent on those actors who conceive their projects. This means that institutions do not determine action rather such social structures shape action in-relation to the agentic properties of those engaged in action.

Ontology shaping research: a case example An example of this CR inspired approach in the institutional literature is elaborated by Delbridge and Edwards, (2013) when they report on their research into the super-yacht field. Here, they explain the historical development of the industry to explain variability in agency within different project arrangements. We see how their CR inspired treatment of agency and structure aids explanation by first giving attention to the ‘structural conditions’ that pre-date action: The importance of treating agency as discrete for analytical purposes in relation to organizational and plural institutional settings became apparent when we looked at the emergence of two different types of project – custom and in-house. Up until the early 1970s, yachts for the wealthy were designed, decorated and built in-house by a small number of European and American shipyards. It was only after the intervention of Jon Bannenberg that custom-built vessels emerged as a legitimate industry offering. Custom projects involve the shipyard with an independent designer in building a one-off yacht for a client, while in-house projects are conducted by the shipyard and their own design team, often building to an established formula. Each project type involves different levels of regulation associated with contractual arrangements and how actors engage in negotiations. For example, projects which rely on in-house shipyard designers for the creative input provide an environment where concerns over economic cost and efficiency . . . are prevalent in shaping design. . . . However, in custom projects involving independent designers, rather than builds being shaped by risk and cost assessments set by the shipyard, there are usually moves to push the boundaries of the design and budget envelope. Under these conditions, which are characterized by a network arrangement (the independent designer is contracted to the client, not the shipyard), designers exercise their professional interests thereby involving the shipyards, their engineers and the client in potentially complex negotiations informed by varying expectations on aesthetics, functionality and cost. (Delbridge and Edwards, 2013: 931) 133

Tim Edwards

This historical analysis of two project arrangements – custom and in-house – confirm the tensions between different actors engaged in the same design and build process. The brief overview draws our particular attention to the configuration of organizational structures that shape subsequent social practices and it is because these pre-date action it is possible to show how different arrangements reveal different structures of domination relating to professional and market rules. This formulation necessarily maps out the historicity and contentions that are often implicit in institutional processes (DiMaggio, 1988). However, these structures do not determine action because as Delbridge and Edwards (2013) go on to demonstrate some shipyard owners and willing designers created a new third project arrangement that meant the shipyard commissioned designers prior to finding a client for the vessel ensuring the risks associated with innovative design (custom builds) was largely negated: In recent years, several independent designers working with a well-established shipyard have introduced a new way of commissioning, which is to develop limited series of boats that have been ordered by the shipyard rather than a private client. The new project indicates the potential for actors working in particular actor positions to reflect further on their social worlds and to find alternate project arrangements to organize the design-and-build process. On this occasion, a well-resourced shipyard challenged the status quo in terms of the role of independent designers but did so with the co-operation of established and highly reputed designers who had a long-term relationship with the shipyard (based on custom builds). This was an opportunity for the shipyard management to shift the relations by co-opting the independent designers to work for them as the ‘client’. Interestingly, this worked both ways; while the new relations enabled managers to take control of the commissioning process, much in the same way as in-house projects have for other shipyards, it suited the independent designers as this guaranteed economic rents. Such changes show how established institutional arrangements are not static and that the motivation for change can be driven by the reflexive deliberations of actors deeply embedded within the field. (Delbridge and Edwards, 2013: 931, italics added) The reflexive deliberation of actors is a separate but necessary category in explaining the scope for agency. The process of developing limited series boats could not be adequately explained by the interactions of the designer and shipyard without first allowing conceptual space to explain the origins of these arrangements nor would it be sufficient without due care being given to the reflexive performance of the designer and shipyard managers. The reason why these actors decided on this course of action is explained around the ‘interplay between the subjective world of agents and the objective and independent world of social structures and institutions’ (Hesketh and Fleetwood, 2006: 693). This formulation confirms the actions of agents are framed by increasing levels of complexity specified by the project arrangements and competing institutionalized rules around design and economics but at the same time the focus on interactions allow access to the agentic moves of different actors despite this complexity.

Some implications of this alternative ontology for institutional studies Analytical dualism provides an alternative to the causality of the duality of structure and as such provides an alternative to explaining how institutions and agency as distinct yet interconnected levels of social reality connect (Archer, 1995, 2003). While scholars of CR see considerable potential in this meta-theory others continue to see problems with ‘reductionism’ and ‘reification’ in the ontology (DiMaggio, 2008). However, there is growing evidence that scholars are also 134

Instititional theory

seeing problems in the focus on social practice. This is recognized by Hallett and Ventresca (2006: 229) who concede that the focus on interactions runs the risk of obscuring wider structures in the assessment of local interactions. This is echoed by Reed (2012: 206) who warns that our understanding of power elites, for example, must ‘be focused on the relations and interactions between corporate agents who have the “structural place” and “organizational power” (Archer, 2003) to shape the governing structures and regimes through which the everyday lives of citizens are ordered and managed’. This does not mean that the focus of analysis is simply those interactions but must reveal ‘the complex interplay between established structures of domination, the elite ruling strategies and relations that emerge from creative engagement with the latter, and the modes of resistance which they, in turn, engender on the part of corporate agents formally excluded from the process and practice of elite rule’ (italics in original). The existence of enduring structures of domination confirm, it is argued, the ‘structural’ elements that exist prior to and independent of practice albeit their continued existence (or transformation), which relies on their causal power, will necessarily be mediated through human agency. In presenting CR as providing a distinct ontology for institutionalism, which has been based on a criticism of Giddens’ particular account of structuring, it should be recognized that the ‘third way’ that has been associated with CR in management studies (Reed, 2005) has not been without criticism by other critical management scholars (Contu and Willmott, 2005) who are not convinced by the ontological benefits just outlined. For these commentators critical realists (and by implication advocates of CR for framing institutional theory) need to explain with greater clarity the pre-existence and ‘independence’ of the generative mechanisms that are thought to generate and shape events. The problem is that in proposing that generative mechanisms constitute the ontological domain of the real this demands that we accept the real a priori – it is a truism and so confounds adequate explanation (Contu and Willmott, 2005: 1649). Despite these problems the same protagonists recognize that CR does begin to throw light on questions such as ‘why is the world the way it is?’ and as such frame concerns over points of domination. In the case of the work of Delbridge and Edwards (2013) such questions allow us to unpack enduring power relations and struggles among different professional groups and how specific shipyard managers and independent designers have leveraged influence to overcome economic barriers and meaning systems to create a new type of super-yacht offering. While there is no doubt for some the problem of meta-theory in CR is the assumption of the domain of the real, it is also apparent that despite this the move to ask questions about the way institutionalization is by keeping agency and structure apart does offer opportunities to develop institutional theory in new directions.

Conclusions This chapter has set-out to broadly map the ontological foundations of institutional theory following work on isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). This is significant because ‘ontology matters’: opinions about the way the social world is inform how we make sense of key relationships and the role of power in institutional processes. As I hope to have shown in this brief and stylized discussion, these questions have remained largely obscured because there has been a reluctance to confront them. Once placed under the spotlight it is apparent that while there is unwillingness to countenance the possibility of reductionist approaches there is also a realisation that institutions are historical and therefore seemingly exist ‘out there’ at least as ‘prior’ features of the social world. This tension continues when understood from a praxis perspective because for some scholars – advocating a CR meta-theory – the idea of the duality of structure restricts our understanding of the various ways actors and structures link and operate. 135

Tim Edwards

The debate that is now gradually emerging concerns how we deal with the agency–structure relationship, which is a marked advance from where institutional scholars were at the end of the 1980s. What remains to be seen is how studies from these distinct ‘structuring’ schools of social reality – such as those inspired by Giddens and Archer – inform institutional scholarship into the future and what distinct contributions each make because of the differing ontological foundations (and problems associated with them) of that work.

References Archer, M. (1995). Realist Social Theory: the morphogenetic approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Barley, S.R. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 32: 78–108. Barley, S.R. and Tolbert, P.S. (1997). Institutional links and structuration: studying the links between action and institution. Organization Studies, 18(1): 93–117. Battilana, J. (2006). Agency and institutions: the enabling role of individuals’ social position. Organization, 13(5): 653–76. Battilana, J., Leca, B., and Boxenbaum E., (2009). How actors change institutions: towards a theory of institutional entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Annals (3): 65–107. Berger, P. and Luckman, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Penguin. Blumer, H. (1962). Society as symbolic interaction, in Rose, A.M. (ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 179–92. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). Sociology in Question. London: Sage. Cohen, I.J. (1990). Structuration theory and social order: five issues in brief, in Modgil, C.J. and Modgil, S. (eds), Anthony Giddens: Consensus and Controversy, Falmer Press, London, pp. 311–57. Contu, A. and Willmott, H. (2005). You spin me around: the realist turn in organization and management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 42(8): 1645–62. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Delbridge, R. and Edwards, T. (2008). Challenging conventions: roles and processes during nonisomorphic institutional change. Human Relations, 61: 299–325. Delbridge, R. and Edwards, T. (2013). Inhabiting institutions: critical realist refinements to understanding institutional complexity and change. Organization Studies, doi: 10.1177/0170840613483805. DiMaggio, P. (1988). Interest and agency in institutional theory, in Zucker, L. (ed.), Institutional Patterns and Organizations: culture and environment. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, pp. 3–21. DiMaggio, P. (2008). Coalface institutionalism, in Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Sahlin, K. and Suddaby, R. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. New York: Sage, pp. 491–518. DiMaggio, P. and Powell, W.W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48 (April): 147–60. Fligstein, N. (1997). Social skill and institutional theory. American Behavioral Scientist, 40: 397–405. Friedland, R. and Alford, R.R. (1991). Bringing society back in: symbols, practices, and institutional contradictions, in Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 311–36. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeih, F., Micelotta, E.R. and Lounsbury, M. (2011). Institutional complexity and organizational responses. Academy of Management Annals, 5: 317–71. Hallett, T. and Ventresca, M.J. (2006). Inhabited institutions: social interactions and organizational forms in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35: 213–36. Hesketh, A. and Fleetwood, S. (2006). Beyond measuring the human resources management-organizational performance link: applying critical realist meta-theory. Organization, 13: 677–99. Holm, P. (1995). The dynamics of institutionalization: transformation processes in Norwegian fisheries. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40: 398–422. 136

Instititional theory

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, T.B. and Suddaby, R. (2006), Institutions and institutional work, in Clegg, S., Hardy, C., Nord, W.W. and Lawrence, T. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (2nd edn).Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 215–54. Layder, D. (1987). Key issues in structuration theory: some critical remarks. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 8: 24–46. Leca, B. and Naccache, P. (2006). A critical realist approach to institutional entrepreneurship. Organization, 13: 627–51. Lounsbury, M. and Kaghan, W.N. (2001). Organizations, occupations and the structuration of work, in Vallas, S. (ed.), The Transformation of Work (Research in the Sociology of Work, Volume 10). Bingley: Emerald, pp. 25–50. Meyer, J. and Scott, W. (1983). Organizational Environments: ritual and rationality. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Mutch, A. (2007). Reflexivity and the institutional entrepreneur: a historical exploration. Organization Studies, 28: 1123–40. Mutch, A., Delbridge, R. and Ventresca, M. (2006). Situating organizational action: the relational sociology of organizations. Organization, 13: 607–26. Nielsen, K. (2001). Institutionalist approaches in the social sciences: typology, dialogue and future challenges. Journal of Economic Issues, 35(2): 505–16. Palmer, D, Biggart, N.W. and Dick, B. (2008). Is the new institutionalism a theory? In Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Sahlin, K. and Suddaby, R. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. New York: Sage, pp. 739–68. Reed, M.I. (2005). Reflections on the ‘realist turn’ in organization and management studies. Journal of Management Studies, 42(8): 1621–44. Reed, M.I. (2012). Masters of the universe: power and elites in organizational studies. Organization Studies, 33: 203–22. Scott, W.R. (2001). Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scott, W. and Meyer, J. (1987). Environmental linkages and organizational complexity: public and private schools, in Levin, H.M. and James, T. (eds), Comparing Public and Private Schools. New York: Falmer Press, pp. 128–60. Scott, W. and Meyer, J. (1994). Institutional Environments and Organizations: structural complexity and individualism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Selznick, P. (1949). TVA and the Grass Roots: a study in the sociology of formal organization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Seo, M-G. and Creed, D.W.E. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: a dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27: 222–47. Stones, R. (2005). Structuration Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Suddaby, R., Viale, T. and Gendron, Y. (2012). Institutional reflexivity: the role of the individual in institutional work. Paper presented at Meiji University, Japan, October. Sutton, J., Dobbin, F., Meyer, J. and Scott, W. (1994). The legalization of the workplace. American Journal of Sociology, 99: 944–71. Thompson, J.B. (1989). The theory of structuration, in Held, D. and Thompson, J.B. (eds), Social Theory in Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thornton, P.H., Ocasio, W. and Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: a new approach to culture, structure and process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zucker, L.G. (1988a). Introduction: institutional theories of organization – conceptual development and research agenda. In Zucker, L.G. (ed.), Institutional Patterns and Organizations: culture and environment. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, pp. xii–xix. Zucker, L.G. (1988b). Where do institutional patterns come from? Organizations as actors in social systems, in Zucker, L.G. (ed.), Institutional Patterns and Organizations: culture and environment. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, pp. 23–52.

137

9 Marxism A philosophical analysis of class conflict Richard Marens and Raza Mir

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (Karl Marx, 1888[1976]: 423)

The most technical arguments of Capital are also those in which the categories of logic and ontology, the representations of the individual and the social bond, were wrested from their traditional definitions and re-thought in terms of the necessities of historical analysis. (Etienne Balibar, 2014: 5)

With the possible exceptions of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, no thinker has exercised more influence over the evolution of academic scholarship in the social sciences than Karl Marx. This becomes especially true if one counts as ‘influenced’ the veritable library of published work written in response to or even in outright opposition to Marxist theory. Moreover, the impact of Marx’s ideas has gone past social science to encompass the humanities, leading one neoconservative historian to complain that ‘we are all Marxists now’ (Himmelfarb, 1989: 34). Given this extraordinary degree of influence, coupled with the preoccupation of Marx and so many of his intellectual descendants with the dynamic of capitalism, one might be puzzled as to why those who study organizations, especially business organizations, do not routinely tap this rich tradition more than they do. Marxism has of course, been deployed in multiple ways in organizational settings. Political economists studying the ‘varieties of capitalism’ idea (Hall and Soskice, 2001) or economic geographers analysing ‘post-Fordism’ (Graham, 1992) have routinely brought Marxist ideas into an organizational frame of analysis. Radical economists deploy Marxist ideas to analyse broader phenomena such as the economic crisis of the early twenty-first century within the organizational realm (Wolff, 2008). Marx himself delved into the bowels of the organization while studying the internal differences within the capitalist class in Capital (III) (Marx, 1894[1971]). However, it is doubtless safe to say that the mainstreams of organizational theory have been characterized by a conspicuous neglect of Marxist analytics. 138

Marxism

In writing this chapter, we hope to contribute to rectifying this neglect, by demonstrating the relevance of a central construct of Marxism (perhaps the central construct), the ubiquity of class conflict, to the study of organizations. In doing so, we also try to highlight the philosophical traditions of Marxism, for despite Marx’s apparent hostility to philosophy as evidenced in the quotation that introduces this chapter, it is clear that Marx’s writings focus on unpacking the unexamined assumptions that underlie mainstream ideas. Theorists have studied Marx’s analyses of the pernicious role of ideology in naturalizing unjust socio-economic systems (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), the role of reification (‘commodity fetishism’) in enhancing the exploitative regimes of capitalism (Godelier, 1977), the contrary ontologies imbedded in the dialectical process (Merleau-Ponty, 1973), and the need to have a theory of time and progress in order to analyse the trans-epochal nature of class relations (Anderson, 1992) among several other themes.1 The philosophical introspection of such work underscores the easy relationship between Marxism and philosophy. A philosophical approach is imbedded within Marxism: scholars who work within the Marxist tradition, including those who take issue with one or more political or analytical assertions of its founder, start from the premise that no social structure or social pattern of behaviour can be entirely understood without some consideration of the latent or open conflict between classes over the surplus a society produces. The definition of surplus is itself a philosophical concept, for it can be defined in multiple ways. Fundamentally, surplus is defined as whatever a society produces that exceeds the minimum levels of material goods necessary, not only for physical survival, but also for participation within that society. This need not be in the form of money or even consumables. Surpluses can also accumulate in the form of prestige goods, obligations to perform personal services, agricultural produce, or anything else that possesses value within a particular society, although within a capitalist economy, this surplus is likely to either originate in or be converted to monetary form. The institutionalized and regularized seizing of any such surplus from those who create it is what Marxists label exploitation. In this chapter, we focus primarily on class conflict. This does not presume that the dynamics or outcomes of such conflict explains all social phenomena or is even always the primary explanans. There are explanatory limitations to Marxism, as there are with any social science theory, and one can find such limitations even within the brief definition we have provided. Studying class conflict and accepting its important role as a driver of social change will not by itself explain, let alone predict, what endows one particular good with more ‘prestige’ or ‘value’ than another within a given society, or entirely account for how even such a seemingly objective and measurable entity as ‘profit’ will be socially constructed at any particular time and place (e.g. Hopper et al., 1987; Partnoy, 2003). Nonetheless, identifying and analysing class conflict can explain a great deal, and is especially applicable to the study of business organizations, in which present and future access to revenues is inevitability entwined with the interests and behaviour of workers, investors and those, especially top management, whose functions overlap both categories. If the reality of exploitation does not determine the precise nature of the sensemaking and the resulting behaviour of organizational actors who are exploited (McCabe, 2011), at the very least, the fundamental need of most of us to accept a degree of exploitation in our work life sets the limits and possibilities for other social interactions. This not only holds for direct responses to exploitation such as internalization or resistance, but also those horizontal relationships between workers that may be compensatory or even solidaristic, but just as easily unpleasant and even oppressive to one another (Collinson, 1988). This near ubiquity of class conflict and exploitation across organized societies holds three implications for the study of organizations, especially business organizations. According to Knights 139

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

and Willmott (1990: 348), orthodox organizational analysis [erroneously] presumes the reality of organizations ‘can be grasped without recourse to either a theory of action through which this reality is produced or to a theory of society in which it is located’. Even a cursory examination of many of the most influential texts in organizational theory suggests that Knights and Willmott are justified to a great extent in condemning these exclusions. Organizational scholars of great repute and influence in organizational theory (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Hannan and Freeman, 1977; Jones, 1995; March, 1991; Nelson and Winter, 1982; Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) demonstrate this philosophical blind spot, and more recent mainstream organization theory built upon these iconic articles has done little to remedy these two failings. Marxian class analysis, however, can assist organization scholars in understanding both action within organizations and interaction with the larger society. First, class conflict can explain a great deal regarding both the exercise of power and the rise of conflict within organizations, two crucial factors in understanding the rationale of a great deal of both organizational structure and managerial practices. Second and perhaps less obviously, tracing class conflict can provide an important tool in understanding the ways in which organizations interact with the larger society, an interaction in which causality runs both ways since organizations impacted by the broader class struggles endemic to a given society collectively influence the trajectory of these same struggles through their aggregated responses. Analysing the organizational dynamics of both the internal and external arenas of class conflict leads to a third contribution, a theory of organizational change, exactly what several organization scholars working within more mainstream paradigms have argued is necessary for moving their field forward (Clemens and Cook, 1999; Seo and Creed, 2002). In this chapter, we consider each of these three potential contributions to organization studies. The first section discusses how class conflict relates to organizational structure and change. The second section uses the concept of class interests to account for the emergence and partial disappearance of Marxism as an accepted tool for understanding organizations. This is followed by a third section, which examines how class conflict can be used to understand how organizations relate to the larger society in a relationship of mutual influence, in effect endogenizing these relationships. All these issues are described and analysed with attention toward the philosophical influences that underlie them. The chapter concludes with suggestions intended to assist the organization scholar interested in applying class conflict in his or her own work.

Class conflict within organizations The story of class conflict also provides an important philosophical dimension to Marxian analysis. Class is after all, a manifestation of dynamic and fluid relations of production, which defy and challenge our methodologies as well as our understandings of knowledge, reality and society. While a Weberian perspective frames class conflict relatively narrowly as the clash of economic interests within a market society (e.g. Davis, 1994), a Marxist approach views class conflict as endemic to any society sufficiently organized to generate stratification. From this perspective, most of the events we tend to regard as ‘history’ are at least partly explicable in terms of class conflict. For Marx, however, the key class conflict that was transforming the world in which he lived was between workers and capitalists. This conflict has remained central to any deep philosophical understanding of the trajectory of the contemporary world, even though the rise of the large corporation at the turn of the last century generated a plethora of intermediate or ‘contradictory’ managerial and professional class positions that were rare or even non-existent in Marx’s own time (Wright and Perrone, 1977). 140

Marxism

However, even new relatively well-paid occupations can be analysed in terms of the exploitation they suffer and/or impose upon others. For example, a skilled programmer may be paid relatively well, but still considerably less than her contribution to generating profits for her employer, and might be pressed by the threat of outsourcing to work longer hours or take less money than if the outsourcing alternative was not available (Hira and Hira, 2005). Moreover, nothing in Marxist theory precludes individuals from holding multiple class positions. A junior executive, for example, can function as (a) an agent overseeing the exploitation of others, (b) an owner of company stock who benefits from squeezing workers to raise the stock price, and (c) a worker pressured to put in excessive hours and neglect his family for the sake of advancing his career. Periods of relative corporate egalitarianism, whether located in a reputedly good employer such as IBM up to the 1980s or, in a more diluted form, across large swathes of a society such as post-war America, are themselves unstable, since new entrants using either cheaper or more efficiently exploited labour eventually turn the higher road into an expensive luxury, especially as work becomes increasingly standardized. As a result, it is unlikely that management teams can reliably make voluntary commitments to permanently end the tendency to increase exploitation in favour of maintaining a trusting relationship (Holusha, 1993; Thompson, 2003). Nor does intensifying exploitation necessarily require the trigger of competitive pressure, as demonstrated by monopolistic Microsoft when it attempted to cut employee benefits despite possessing $56 billion in cash reserves in the early 2000s (Peterson, 2004), or by Xerox when it repudiated a cooperation program with its union (Holusha, 1993), or by Bank of America, once regarded as ‘the people’s bank’, when it not only began to outsource programmers but used severance packages to pressure workers into training their replacements (Lazarus, 2005). Workplace class conflict need not manifest itself in overtly planned or organized activities such as strikes or sabotage on the part of workers, or speedups or harsh and punitive discipline on the part of management. It can also be latent as individual managers and workers struggle over how much work and responsibility should be delivered over a given unit of pay (Burawoy, 1979). From the days of the earliest corporate consultants, commentators warned management that the passive aggression or even petty sabotages of individual workers could prove to be a bigger threat to profitability than the organized opposition of labour unions (Leiserson, 1929). Class conflict exists in the inherent gap between ‘labour power’ and actual labour. It is here that a philosophical distinction makes itself useful. ‘Labour power’ refers to the general obedience that the capitalist firm purchases from a worker for a fixed period of time, while ‘labour’ is the actual work performed by the same worker, and a major task of any management system is to extract as much productive labour as possible from the labour power it purchases. This is not to suggest that the average worker would necessarily prefer to simply collect a cheque and loaf rather than exert some effort at tasks that feel useful or creative. But being engaged by one’s work and wanting to perform it well – a desire Marx certainly acknowledged – is not the same as working as hard and diligently as possible for an entire work day, and certainly one central task of management is to threaten, cajole, manipulate or otherwise encourage workers to generate more output than they would choose to deliver on their own (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2001; Thompson and Smith, 2001). Obviously, class conflict is hardly the source of all conflict or displays of power in any workplace. Other theories can provide insights regarding these phenomena that do not rely on Marxian notions of class and exploitation. Mainstream organization theorists have invoked control over vital knowledge or resources, or the ability to choose strategies to follow or problems to solve, as sources of organizational power and wellsprings for conflict, many of them between actors on the same level of formal authority (Crozier, 1964; Gouldner, 1954; Pfeffer and Salacnik, 141

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

1978). Critical scholars, for their part, have focused on various forms of domination or oppression that are not simply reducible to exploitation (Barker, 1993; Foucault, 1977; McCabe, 2011; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992). A Marxist perspective on these dynamics of class relations sets constraints upon the operation of these other exercises of power, especially with regard to business organizations, which necessarily requires some degree of exploitation (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2001), without which there would likely be no profit-oriented organization in which various political battles and non-economic oppression would operate. Furthermore, workers tolerate domination as well as various forms of oppressions (that do not necessarily originate from managerial personnel) precisely because they regard allowing themselves to be exploited as a necessity within a capitalist society. As the Marxist historical sociologist, Joan Robinson noted, the only thing worse under capitalism than to be exploited, is not to be exploited!

Organizational class conflict Marx’s understanding of class conflict was shaped by three philosophical forces, namely German philosophy (including Hegel’s analysis of dialectics), French socialism (especially the work centred around the Paris Commune of 1871) and British political economy (notably the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo) (Balibar, 2014: 7). In particular, his transformation of Hegel’s philosophical idealism into a socially materialist science of society constitutes the fundamental building block of his class analysis (Bottomore et al., 1983: 368–74). An examination of the history of scholars attempting to apply this analysis to the understanding of organizational practices both demonstrates what Marxism brings to the subject and why, nonetheless, it has failed to gain traction as an essential tool of organization scholars, especially those working within US business schools. If class conflict is unavoidable under capitalism, at least in a latent form, it follows that both organizational structures and policies that survive for any length of time must both reflect and manage this reality, and theorists have used historical data and case studies to explain various organizational outcomes from this perspective. The work of Steve Marglin (1974), Harry Braverman (1974) and Katherine Stone (1974) represent the starting point of a continuous stream of Marx-influenced organizational scholarship. Marglin argued from historical examples that the factory itself was originally established to allow the owner/managers to keep better control of both material and workers than the putting-out system it replaced. According to Marglin, technologies of the first industrial revolution arose that would not have been cost effective under a regime of home production only because it was possible to take advantage of the large group of workers essentially imprisoned along with the requisite raw materials, thus reducing both slacking off and embezzlement. Even if Marglin overstated the role of exploitation in the emergence of factories as some of his critics have argued (Landes, 1986), he successfully demonstrated a methodology for applying class analysis for a better understanding of organizational innovation. Braverman (1974) looked further down the road to the class conflict at the heart of the second industrial revolution and the large oligarchical firms that arose from it. He viewed the development of corporate management as the product of a campaign to ‘deskill’ workers. The purpose of the then new corporate organizations was to find ways of organizing work and productive technology in which skills necessary for production were selected and controlled by management, thus stripping independently trained craft workers of their traditional bargaining power. Stone’s (1974) case study of the development of occupations within the steel industry paralleled and extended Braverman’s analysis, viewed this deskilling of craftsmen and the subsequent reskilling on the part of the corporation itself as providing the impetus for creating the dependent, if skilled, white collar ‘organization man’ while narrowing the potential scope 142

Marxism

of revised unionism to bargaining over the distribution of profits resulting from managerialcontrolled production. Others followed these pioneers. Burawoy’s (1979) factory floor study both extended and limited Braverman’s thesis by pointing to ideology and carefully designed incentives that put skilled workers in competition with one another, thus leading them to contribute to their own exploitation. Edwards (1979) broadened the perspective on ways management could exploit workers by suggesting multiple methods beyond traditional authoritarianism or even deskilling to include bureaucratic rules, technologically driven demands on workers, and the provisioning of ‘welfare capitalist’ benefits programme to ameliorate conflict. Furthermore, these more modern forms of control also tightened oversight on foremen and other supervisors, limiting their scope for corruption, favouritism and petty tyranny, practices whose oppressive nature not only did not add to exploitation, they often triggered outright resistance on the part of workers. It was no accident that some American scholars began to systematically apply class conflict at this time to the rise and operation of the large corporations that so dominated the nation’s economy. Not only did the decade of the 1960s feature challenges to the established social order through a variety of snowballing social movements, the unprecedentedly broadly shared economic growth of the post-war generation, which did so much to stimulate these social movements, was beginning to peter out by the early years of the 1970s. Corporate leaders began experiencing pressures from productivity slowdowns, higher oil prices, inflation and new sources of competition after decades of relative corporate stability (Edwards, 1975), and started to organize opposition to what they perceived as the recalcitrance of organized labour and the meddling of Naderite reformists (Brenner, 2002). Scapegoating what they regarded as excessively and undeservedly high wages and job security achieved through previous class struggle, they increasingly joined forces with what was then a smaller but well-funded permanent opposition to the post-New-Deal status quo to reverse these trends (Clawson et al., 1998). Young scholars, faced with underlying class conflict far more in the open than it was for their academic predecessors, one of whom famously declared ‘the end of ideology’ (Bell, 1962), and seasoned by participation in confrontational civil rights and anti-war movements, applied Marxian analysis to a variety of social science topics in opposition to this reaction. As the seventies unfolded, O’Connor (1973) wrote on the related issue of governments’ (failing) role in ameliorating the very class conflicts that arose out of the development of corporate capitalism. Wright and Perrone (1977) theorized the class position of managers, an occupation, while not unknown in Marx’s time, that grew enormously in terms of both numbers and importance with the emergence of large corporations. During this same time period, Robert Brenner (1976), who had been both a labour activist (he contributed to the formation of what would become the Teamsters for a Democratic Union) and a historian of revolutionary merchants of the seventeenth century, formulated a new Marxist grand theory regarding the rise of capitalism that emphasized class conflict more than most previous efforts. This surge of Marxist scholarship among American academics declined with the closing of the decade, and largely petered out with regard to the study of organizations. One overall obstacle was a result of the very fiscal crisis of the state identified by O’Connor. As money for public higher education dried up, there were fewer job openings and opportunities for tenure in sociology, the primary home at the time for organizational studies, and Marxist-influenced scholars, always a minority, were disproportionately impacted by the decline in opportunity (Calhoun and van Antwerpen, 2007). Economics was hurt less than sociology or history by cutbacks, but it became increasingly intolerant of heterodox approaches that fell outside of a neoclassical school that celebrated the hypothesized social contributions of corporate management (e.g. Alchain and Demsetz, 1972; Williamson, 1975). Moreover, as a ruling class reaction gained 143

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

steam, and as business schools began expanding their faculties along with the return to profitability of corporation, the locus of the study of organizations shifted from the disciplines to business schools. Salvaging the field in this way came with a price. As one CEO put in an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review as organized reaction began to mobilize, ‘Corporate support of education: some strings attached’ (Malott, 1978). Increasingly, the American study of business organizations would be conducted by academics affiliated and increasingly trained by an institution dependent on the patronage of American corporate executives, a group whose increasing paranoia regarding criticism and advocacy of government intervention was reflected in the purge of even the once mildly Keynesian staff of the Committee on Economic Development (Clark, 1976). Would-be organization theorists responded appropriately. Not only did Marxism disappear from the field, other more mainstream and less critical approaches that focused on power and organizational politics became increasingly disfavoured. Even theories or studies of power in organizations that were more mainstream than Marxism were now regarded as old-fashioned or excessively cynical. A managerial strata that was increasingly finding common (class) cause with the investors seeking to extract as much surplus as possible (Useem, 1996), was not going to appreciate scholars and teachers employed by ‘their’ schools raising the unpleasant realities of the power they exercised in prompting this cause, and successful academics were, insightful or not, always among those whose work just did not happen to offend. The influential ‘new’ institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) for example, focused on why organizations were so structurally similar, earning the disapproval of ‘old’ institutionalists, who had routinely dealt with organizational politics and conflict (Hirsch, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). Organizational learning theorists avoided serious discussion of how learning or innovating was shaped by class interests or influenced by the outcomes of class conflict (March, 1991; Nelson and Winter, 1982), and population ecology dispensed with human behaviour and organizational change altogether within either the organization itself or its metaphorical ‘environment’, although ironically, these theorists explain away organizational change by borrowing the core/periphery dichotomy from Marxian dependency theory in order to dismiss any observable change in an organization to a trivialized ‘periphery’ (Frank, 1967). The business school field of ‘business and society’, with roots in Keynesian economics and industrial relations, was supplanted by a banal ‘business ethics’ drawn from philosophy ill-informed as regarding actual business behaviour (Marens, 2010). Ironically, those economists who turned to the issue of explaining the existence of firms in a market economy possessed sufficient pro-capitalist legitimacy that they could discuss what Marxists would label ‘exploitation’, albeit framed with a great deal more appreciation of the exploiters. Alchian and Demsetz (1972) argued that people who depended on teams required managers to order them about, while Williamson (1975) suggested that business hierarchies exist to prevent the opportunism of workers, many of who might be in a position to hold up a firm due to its dependence on their specific skills or responsibilities. Similarly, Jensen and Meckling (1976) understood, as Marxists have (Sweezy, 1953), that the supposed separation of ownership and control between managers and investors is largely a tempest in a teapot, an inevitable divergence of interests that both groups are quite capable of satisfactorily dealing with, at least during periods when the overall results are satisfactory to both. The conditions that favoured the suppression of Marxism in the United States, however, did not necessarily exist elsewhere to the same degree, and organization scholars in other Englishspeaking nations continued to apply class conflict to the study of the topic. While a corporate reaction occurred in the United Kingdom as well, the impact was not as great on organization 144

Marxism

scholarship. This created an opening for British sociologists trained in workplace studies, and many were influenced by their American predecessors of the 1970s (Thompson and Smith, 2001), often exposed to their work in graduate school through such texts as a widely assigned collection of articles that included Bowles, Braverman, Burawoy and Marglin (Nichols, 1980). What resulted was a series of ‘labour process’ conferences that provided a locus of this activity, resulting in a stream of published pieces influenced by Marxism, many of which were first presented at one of these conferences. This theoretical and empirical scholarship continued to focus predominantly on class conflict in the workplace, but with a far broader scope than what was covered by the Americans of the 1970s, let alone Marx and Engels. These scholars covered how class relations and the resulting exploitation operated within other kinds of workplaces and non-industrial occupations, ranging from insurance offices (Knights and Wilmott, 1990) to technical workers and bank employees (McCabe, 2011) to accountants and accounting practices (Bryer, 2006). Other factors in exploitation, such as labour markets and the role of finance entered the discourse to an extent, as did other approaches that relied on theories of domination that compliment a class conflict perspective (McCabe, 2011; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Thompson and Smith, 2001). A few Americans continued to investigate class conflict within organizations. A student of Burawoy’s, for example, studied how the top executives of a major bank once known for its benevolent human resource policies intensified the exploitation of its middle managers in response to crisis. Not surprisingly this body of work generated controversies among these academics involved regarding a number of issues, even the epistemological one of how insight and usefulness ought to be determined (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2001). Whatever one’s position with regard to the inevitable academic controversies, however, there is no denying that the collective body of work that arose out of labour process scholarship has left a rich legacy that deserves to be studied by anyone hoping to understand organizational behaviour and structure. This is however an era of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, unshared productivity gains, unions surrendering benefits, outsourcing increasingly touching upon middle-class occupations, and Thomas Piketty’s (2014) Capital reaching the top of the bestseller list. Ignoring or denying the importance of power and class conflict within business organizations has become intellectually unsustainable. But the class construct can do more than explain a great deal of internal organizational outcomes. By applying it more broadly to the society at large, it can explain much about the relationship between organizations and the societies in which they are embedded.

Endogenizing the organizational environment The dynamics of and outcomes from class conflict can contribute greatly to endogenizing those factors that explain those strategies and structures that organizations adopt. Mainstream theories tend to treat the social environment as a separate ‘thing’ from the particular organization being studied. For resource dependency, the demand for one or another skill that shifts the balances of power within an organization is a product of this separate environment (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), as are the laws, common practices and social expectations that mould organizations into similar shapes from the perspective of new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Stakeholder theorists generally ignore the question as to how one group but not another wins legitimacy from the larger society for any claims to stakeholder status (Jones, 1995). Organization ecology pays some attention to how organizations feedback into the environment that sustains them (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), but the metaphor that the theory relies upon tends to obfuscate how living breathing humans actually impact one another. In short, the relationship 145

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

between organizations and their environments, while not entirely ignored by mainstream theories, is treated as causally unidirectional, with little attention paid as to how the aggregation of organizational choices and structural modifications feeds back into the environment around them, ultimately transforming it. Applying class conflict to rectify this neglect need not supplant these other approaches. Instead it can complement them, explaining, for example, why certain normative practices but not others successfully impose organizational isomorphism, or why one form of expertise is most valued at some given time or place, or where the social ‘resources’ that organizations extract from their environments originally arose from. Obviously, no single business organization changes the social environment entirely on its own, notwithstanding Charles Wilson’s infamous claim with regard to General Motors’ interests being synonymous with those of the entire United States. From a Marxist perspective, however, there are enough similarities regarding the dynamics of class conflict across organizations within the same industry or sector, if not always within the entire economy, to aggregate the impact of these ongoing conflicts as influences on the larger society. Since organizations subject to isomorphic pressures share structural similarities as well as shared environments, their responses to various pressures, including those generated by class conflict, are likely to overlap and generate an amplified impact on the larger environment, even without conscious coordination between them. As a result, schools, labour markets, political movements, neighbourhoods, the practices of investment fund managers and the like, not only furnish the social resources that feed and constrain organizations, they themselves are shaped by the sum total of decisions and practices of these same organizations. Marxist theoreticians of the dynamics of capitalism have actually made more progress trying to find coherence among these seemingly infinitely circulating loops of dialectical reactions. Given their preoccupation with the dynamics of capitalism, it is not surprising that for over a century, beginning most famously with Kondratiev (see Loucã, 1999) and Hilferding (1981), Marxists have attempted make sense of capitalism’s interconnected set of tensions, instabilities and contradictions, framing them as either stages of development or repeated cycles. While there are major differences among the various formulations, Marxists have generally viewed whatever set of political, social and economic relationships exist at a given point in the history of a capitalist system as temporary. No matter how seemingly stable or ‘normal’ to the current participants, each set of arrangements contains, in Marx’s own Hegelian terms, the seeds of its own contradiction, which cause a particular ‘regime’ or set of social relationships to, paraphrasing Marx and Engels (1848 [1977]), melt into air after a generation or two either gradually eroding or exploding into full blown crisis. It is here that a non-positivist philosophical approach is necessary, particularly to understand the ways in which class relations under capitalism continue to reconfigure themselves despite their seemingly inherent contradictions. The construct of class needs a more dynamic understanding, which is evidenced by the works of later Marxist theoreticians, who subscribe in the main to interpretive and critical-realist philosophical positions. One such set of theories, the ‘regulationist’ school (Aglietta, 1979; Jessop and Sum, 2006) has put forward models of capitalist accumulation that ought to be of great utility for organization scholars. What regulationist theory seeks to do is to ‘integrate analysis of political economy with analysis of civil society and/or State to show how they interact to normalize the capital relation and govern the conflictual and crisis-mediated course of capital accumulation’ (Jessop and Sum, 2006: 4). In other words, under capitalism, a given society generates a set of interlocking institutional arrangements – laws and other government policies, expectations and values promulgated through education and media, organizational forms – in fact the very sort of institutions that the new institutionalism points to as generators of isomorphism. 146

Marxism

Regulationist theory, however, differs or at least adds to neo-institutionalism in at least two ways. First, regulationism views these institutions, generating through both deliberate policies and Darwinian survival, as fitting together to create a reasonably stable social environment for accumulating capital. To return to the previous example, if firms accept the rents of military spending they must also share these with otherwise troublesome unions, strengthening union leaders in the process who defend this arrangement within their own labour organizations from more anti-capitalist elements. Second, pressures for conformity to norms, laws and practices not only eventually erode, they are at least as likely to do so not because of their success in promoting stability as because of their failure. For example, if a set of social arrangements allow businesses to excessively exploit workers, these result in weak consumer markets and apathetic workers. Similarly, promoting innovation can result in bankrupting even highly functional laggards. If these two difficulties are overcome with easy credit, then when a crisis finally arrives the impact is amplified. The work of Giovanni Arrighi also provides an example worth emulating of placing the class analysis of organizational change in a dynamic historical and philosophical context. Arrighi’s (1994) model of capitalist change is especially interesting because it encompasses aspects of both the cyclical and developmental approaches to changes with the capitalist system.

Conclusion: putting Marxist philosophy to work As we had discussed earlier, despite its conscious disavowal of philosophy, the Marxist tradition is characterized by a deep suspicion of sedimented assumptions characterized as ‘nature’. These assumptions could be about the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge or the way we reach conclusions about social phenomena. Put in other words, Marxist approaches are ontologically reflexive, epistemologically dynamic and methodologically heterodox, the very definition of a philosophical approach. In this chapter, we have tried to survey Marxist-influenced scholarship that might assist the present or future organization researcher or theorist. As such, it is not meant to offer either complete coverage or an in-depth explanation of all Marxist theory. There is more to Marxism than class conflict and the resulting struggles, although we do assert that no single Marxist construct would prove more valuable for understanding organizational structure and change. The hope here is that organization scholars will be sufficiently interested in what was explained to go back to some of the work cited above and explore it in more depth. Within this body of work there are certainly major disagreements, but even the controversies should be of interest, perhaps especially so, since such controversies are expressions of uncertainty, and those areas ripe for further investigation (Thompson and Smith, 2001). In addition, the reader should bear in mind that we have included a commentary regarding the disfavouring of Marxist analysis for a very practical reason. Any reliance on Marxist ideas is always fraught with risk unrelated to the value of the particular construct in explaining the world, precisely because as Marx himself put it, he hoped to change it, and not in ways favourable to the ruling class. The risks associated with applying Marx are not confined to the obvious case of business schools. With the increasing corporatization of the rest of the university coupled to the austerity pressures placed on traditional government spending on education and research, applying Marxism is a potential handicap to publishing and promoting a career even within the liberal arts disciplines, and one that requires planning and strategy to overcome. Jensen and Fagan (1996) displayed sufficient loyalty to the system to predict the further squeezing of wages, but someone with the scent of opposition on their work will likely find themselves in a less tolerant situation. Fortunately, however, at a time when even the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board speaks publicly about the dangers of inequality, the careerist risks involved in applying class conflict may be changing for the better, at least incrementally. 147

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

Finally, Marxism needs to be studied not only for the knowledge insights on the workings of capitalism and the organizations that compromise it, but to glean how to think dialectically. A major strength of Marxism is its global and multidirectional perspective on causality. Learning how to think dialectically can only help in generating insights and making connections. Marxist analysis is highly insightful, and one does not need to embrace the labour theory of value or the desirability of proletarian revolution to appreciate and employ its depth and sophistication.

Note 1

Etienne Balibar’s book The Philosophy of Marx deals with Marxist philosophy in a comprehensive manner, and advances the paradoxical thesis that ‘there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; [and] on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before’ (Balibar, 2014: 1). It is also important to direct the reader towards other chapters in this volume, including those on capital, conflict, historiography and value among others, which also deal with Marxian concepts. Our attempt here has been to write this chapter in a manner that avoids overlaps with those chapters.

References (key texts in bold) Aglietta, M. (1979). A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US experience. London: NLB. Alchian, A.A. and Demsetz, H. (1972). Production, information, costs, and economic organization. American Economic Review, 62: 777–92. Anderson, P. (1992). A Zone of Engagement. New York: Verso. Arrighi, G. (1994). The Long Twentieth Century: money, power, and the origins of our times. New York: Verso. Balibar, E. (2014). The Philosophy of Marx. London: Verso. Barker, J. R. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 408–37. Bell, D. (1962). The End of Ideology: on the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bottomore, T.B., Kiernan, V. G. and Miliband, R. (1983). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brenner, R. (1976). Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe. Past and Present, 70: 30–74. Brenner, R. (2002). The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the world economy. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Bryer, R. (2006). Accounting and control of the labour process. Critical Perspectives on Accounting,17: 551–98. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Calhoun, C. and van Antwerpen, J. (2007). Orthodoxy, heterodoxy and hierarchy: mainstream sociology and its challengers, in Calhoun, C. (ed.), Sociology in America: a history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 367–409. Clark, L.H. (1976). Rehabilitation project: once-mighty CED panel of executives seeks a revival. Wall Street Journal, 17 December, 38. Clawson, D., Neustadtl, A. and Weller, M. (1998). Dollars and Votes: how business campaign contributions subvert democracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Clemens, E. S. and Cook, J. M. (1999). Politics and institutionialism: explaining durability and change. American Review of Sociology, 25: 441–66. Collinson, D.L. (1988). Engineering humor: masculinity, joking, and conflict, in shop-floor relations. Organization Studies, 1(3): 58–76. Crozier, M. (1964). Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davis, G.F. (1994). Corporate elite and the politics of corporate control, in Prendergast, C. and Nottnerus, J.D. (eds), Current Perspectives in Sociology, Supplement I. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. 148

Marxism

DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48: 147–60. Edwards, R.E. (1975). Stages in corporate stability and the risk of corporate failure. Journal of Economic History, 35: 428–57. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested Terrain: the transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Random House. Frank, A.G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Godelier, M. (1977). Économie marchande, fétichisme, magie et science selon Marx dans Le Capital. Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie, 2: 201–24. Gouldner, A.W. (1954). Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. New York: Free Press. Graham, J. 1992. Post-Fordism as politics: the political consequences of narratives on the left. Society and Space, 10(4): 393–410. Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hannan, M.T. and Freeman, J. (1977). The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 82: 929–64. Hilferding, R. (1981). Finance Capital: a study of the latest phase of capitalist development. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Himmelfarb, G. (1989). Some reflections on the new history. The American Historical Review: 661–70. Hira, R. and Hira, A. (2005). Outsourcing America: what’s behind our national crisis, how we can reclaim our jobs. New York: AMACOM. Hirsch, P.M. (1997). Sociology without social structure: neoinstitutional theory meets brave new world. American Journal of Sociology, 102: 1702–23. Holusha, J. (1993). Profitable Xerox plans to cut staff by 10,000. New York Times, 9 December, D1. Hopper, T., Storey, J. and Willmott, H. (1987). Accounting for accounting: towards the development of a dialectical view. Accounting Organization and Society,12: 437–56. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: philosophical fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jensen, M.C. and Fagan, P. (1996). Capitalism isn’t broken. Wall Street Journal, 29 March, A10. Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1976). Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3: 305–60. Jessop, B. and Sum, N. (2006). Beyond the Regulation Approach: putting capitalist economies in their place. New York: Edward Elgar. Jones, T.M. (1995). Instrumental stakeholder theory: a synthesis of ethics and economics. Academy of Management Review, 20: 404–37. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1990). Exploring the class and organizational implications of the UK financial services, in Clegg, S.E. (ed.), Organization Theory and Class Analysis. New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 345–66. Landes, D.S. (1986). What do bosses really do? The Journal of Economic History, 46: 585–623. Lazarus, D. (2005). BoA: train your replacement, or no severance pay for you. San Francisco Chronicle, 9 June. Leiserson, W.M. (1929). Contributions of personnel management to improved labor relations, in Wertheim Lectures on Industrial Relations: 1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Louçã, F. (1999). Nikolai Kondratiev and the early consensus and dissensions about history and statistics. History of political economy, 31(1), 169–181. McCabe, D. (2011). Accounting for consent: exploring the reproduction of the labor process. Sociology, 45: 430–46. Malott, R.H. (1978). Corporate support of education: some strings attached. Harvard Business Review, 56(4): 133–8. March, J.G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2: 71–87. Marens, R. (2010). Destroying the village to save it: corporate social responsibility, labour relations, and the rise and fall of American hegemony. Organization, 17: 743–66. Marglin, S. (1974). What do bosses do? Review of Radical Political Economics, 7 (1): 20–37. Marx, K. (1888 [1976]). The German Ideology: including theses on Feuerbach. London: Pyr Books. Marx, K. (1894 [1971]). Capital, Volume 3 (trans. David Fernbach). Harmondsworth: Penguin. 149

Richard Marens and Raza Mir

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848 [1977]). The Communist Manifesto, in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nelson, R.R. and Winter, S.G. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nichols, T. (1980). Capital and Labour: studies in the capitalist labor process. London: Athlone Press. O’Connor, J. (1973). The Fiscal Crisis of the State, Livingston, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Partnoy, F. (2003). Infectious Greed: how deceit and risk corrupted the financial markets. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Peterson, K. (2004). Microsoft workers vent over cuts in benefits. Seattle Times, 26 May. Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G. R. (1978), The External Control of Organizations: a resource dependence perspective. New York: Harper & Row. Picketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J. (2001). Marxist political economy, revolutionary politics, and labour process theory. International Studies of Management and Organization, 30(4): 86–111. Seo, M.G. and Creed, W.E.D. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: a dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27: 222–47. Sewell, G. and Wilkinson, B. (1992). Someone to watch over me: surveillance, discipline and the justin-time labour process. Sociology, 26: 271–89. Stinchcombe, A.L. (1997). On the virtues of the old institutionalism. Annual Review of Sociology, 1997: 1–18. Stone, K. (1974). Origins of job structures in the steel industry. Review of Radical Political Economics, 6(2): 61–97. Sweezy, P. (1953). Present as History. New York: Monthly Review Press. Thompson, P. (2003). Disconnected capitalism: or why employers can’t keep their side of the bargain. Work, Employment, and Society, 17: 359–78. Thompson, P. and Smith, C. (2001). Follow the redbrick road: reflections on the pathways in and out of the labor process debate. International Studies of Management and Organization, 30(4): 40–67. Useem, M. (1996). Investor Capitalism: how money managers are changing the face of corporate America. New York: Basic Books. Williamson,O. E. (1975). Markets and Hierarchies: a study in the economics of internal organization. New York: Free Press. Wolff, R. (2008). Capitalist crisis, Marx’s shadow. Monthly Review, 26(09): 1–18. Wright, E. O. and Perrone, L. (1977). Marxist class categories and income inequality. American Sociological Review, 42: 32–55.

150

10 Postcolonial theory Speaking back to empire Gavin Jack

By the 1930s, colonies and ex-colonies covered 84.6 per cent of the land surface of the globe. Only parts of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Tibet, China, Siam and Japan had never been under formal European government. (Loomba, 1998: xiii)

Mainstream social science pictures the world as understood by the educated and affluent in Europe and North America. From Weber to Keynes to Friedman and Foucault, theorists from the global North dominate the imagination of social scientists, and the reading lists of students, all over the world. For most of modern history, the majority world has served social science only as a data mine. Yet the global South does produce knowledge and understanding of society. (From the back cover of Connell, 2007)

Introduction: working with (and against) postcolonial theory Colonialism – ‘the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods’ (Loomba, 1998: 2) – has been a constant feature of human history.1 However, it is usually the expansion, conquest and occupation by European powers of the majority world in Africa, Asia and the Americas from roughly the sixteenth century onwards, and the subsequent contraction of those empires and political independence of former colonies, that form the historical backdrop for the interests of postcolonial scholars. Postcolonialism is a critical response to this history and the contemporary global system which bears its legacy; postcolonial theory provides a set of intellectual resources and an interrogative space to animate this response. Postcolonialism is a highly significant body of work for organizational researchers for two crucial and interrelated reasons. First, because (varieties of) (neo-)colonialism and imperialism are historical and contemporary lived realities for the vast majority of peoples in the world. That nearly 85 per cent of the world’s population was subject to colonization less than 100 years ago, as Loomba notes, is a condition of possibility and ever-changing reality of the global political economy in which organizations function and organizing takes places. Young’s (2001) concept of ‘postcoloniality’ as ‘the economic, material 151

Gavin Jack

and cultural conditions that determine the global system in which the postcolonial nation is required to operate – one heavily weighted towards the interests of international capital and the G7 powers’ (Young, 2001: 57) encapsulates this state of affairs. Legal and illegal migration, farmer suicides and protest movements in India, Islamaphobia in Western Europe, and the struggles for self-determination by Indigenous peoples across the world all have certain roots in various colonial pasts and imperial presents. Second, postcolonialism is important for organizational researchers because we are part of this neo-colonial world, inhabiting and inhabited by scholarly traditions and academic disciplines that often grew out of the colonial encounter (notably anthropology and sociology). As social scientists, we participate in an inequitable system of knowledge production (Alatas, 2003), in which the ideas and institutions of the Global North2 enjoy a position of privilege. Connell (2007) argues above with respect to social theory and sociology, that student reading lists and conventional theoretical frames are dominated by authors and ideas from the Global North, while theoretical knowledge generated in/about the Global South is often overlooked, devalued or ‘unimaginable’. The same could be said of organization studies. As Calás and Smircich (2003: 45) note: ‘The stories we have written in much organization theory, our concepts and representations, no matter how “global” (or precisely because of this), represent the ways of thinking of certain peoples and not others.’ Postcolonial theory calls upon organizational scholars to locate their work within this context, to consider whose values, interests and knowledges underpin that work, and to contribute to nothing less than a reconfiguration and decolonization of both the imaginative and material basis of organizational scholarship, and the social, economic, cultural and organizational realities it surveys. As an established interrogative space for such critical scholarship, postcolonial theory has opened new vistas in organizational research, including: historicizing the development of management and organizational theory and practice in terms of the colonial encounter; bringing distinctive conceptual and empirical concerns to the field; providing a set of theoretical resources for denaturalizing, provincializing and critiquing organizational thought (for overviews, see Prasad, 1997, 2003; Jack et al., 2011) and underlying concepts like order, progress and modernity (Calás and Smircich, 2003). A philosophical perspective is important to organizational scholars of postcolonialism because it engenders use of a range of analytical approaches and reflexive questioning techniques that historicize, politicize and enable new articulations of management and organizational theory, but refracted through the distinctive lens of the colonial encounter. Philosophical domains and concerns articulated via postcolonial theory of relevance to organizational scholars include: epistemology, the human sciences and non-Western knowledge systems, notably in the form of critiques of Western metaphysics, humanism and foundationalism; subjectivity, ideology and values; language, notably in relation to the concept of colonial discourse; feminism(s), notably transnational and Third World variants; political philosophy and state-civil society relations. Crucially, postcolonial theory is a diverse and (internally and externally) contested body of knowledge whose ‘putting to work’ by organizational scholars requires a reflexive vigilance, a working with and against. First of all, there is no singular form of postcolonial theory; instead it covers several different, often interconnecting and sometimes competing theoretical and political perspectives (often associated with the heterogeneous tradition of continental philosophy, and including poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminisms). Just as different regions/countries/societies are ‘postcolonial’ in different ways and at different times (Loomba, 1998), so too postcolonial scholarship is marked by the location-specific experiences and varied philosophical interests 152

Postcolonial theory

of scholars. Scholars from, and scholarship about, South/South-East Asian experiences of colonialism and Indian Marxism, for instance, have been especially influential in the development of postcolonial theory. Young (2001), however, identifies in postcolonial scholarship a key ‘disjunctive articulation’ between ‘colonialism as an institutional performative discourse of power-knowledge and colonialism understood according to the dialectical formations elaborated in tricontinental Marxism’ that cuts across this diversity and ‘could be said to operate as the theoretical kernel of postcolonial theory itself’ (Young, 2001: 410). Second, the prefix ‘post’ in postcolonialism is contentious in its allusion to the end of colonial relations following the political independence of formerly colonized countries. Cultural, economic and political ties between colonizer and colonized remain and mutate even after formal independence (neocolonialism), as new forms of imperialism emerge and internal colonialism (of Indigenous communities) persists (Banerjee, 2011). The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview and discussion of how the philosophical concerns underpinning postcolonial theory inform and enable organizational research. The first section will briefly review the core theses, philosophical orientations, and main criticisms of three foundational thinkers in postcolonial theory: Edward Said; Homi Bhabha; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The second section selectively summarizes existing postcolonial organization studies, noting how the philosophical underpinnings of postcolonial theory are put to work to generate distinctive insights. The final third section gives future directions for philosophical, interdisciplinary and empirical organizational research using postcolonial theory.

Foundational thinkers in postcolonial theory Said, Bhabha and Spivak are sometimes referred to as the ‘Holy Trinity’ of postcolonial theory (Moore-Gilbert, 1997): a trio of influential thinkers whose distinctive works together comprise a theoretical apparatus for the critical analysis of colonialism and imperialism. Given space constraints, I will provide a very short overview of their works which have proven foundational to postcolonial theory (for more extended syntheses and critiques, see Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Young, 1990, 2001; and in organization studies, Prasad, 2003; Őzkazanç-Pan, 2008). Beginning with Said and Bhabha, I highlight the ‘problem’ of colonial discourse as pivotal in postcolonial theory, turning then to Spivak to progress an understanding of postcolonial theory from ‘colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies’ (Spivak, 1999: x). In working with/against postcolonial theory, I highlight certain specific criticisms of these authors’ works, and use them as a vehicle for a more general critique inspired by Young’s ‘disjunctive articulation’. I should state explicitly that I have restricted my interpretation of what counts as ‘postcolonial theory’ in this section to core works by these writers (as per Moore-Gilbert, 1997). However, the Holy Trinity of postcolonial theory is preceded by earlier writings, political speeches and treatises, and armed/non-violent forms of resistance associated with anti-colonialism, tricontinentalism (that is, the interlinked ‘struggles of people of African descent across America, the Caribbean and Africa or what Gilroy has labelled the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy, 1993)’ (Nkomo, 2011: 368)) and national liberation movements. In this respect, writings and political actions (often inspired through engagement with Marxism and socialism) by resistance leaders, anti-colonial thinkers and politicians – including, among many others, Gandhi (1927[1982]), James (1938, 1969), Fanon (1952[1986]), Césaire (1955[1972]), Nkrumah (1961, 1965), Senghor (1964), Cabral (1969), Memmi (1965), Guevara (1969), Mariátegui (1971), Rodney (1974) – are a vital part of the broader terrain of postcolonialism, and precursor for postcolonial theory. 153

Gavin Jack

Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient Regarded as the book that ‘effectively founded postcolonial studies as an academic discipline’ (Young, 2001: 383), Said’s text presents an exposition and critique of Orientalism: a field of Western scholarship, ‘style of thought’ (Said, 1978: 2) and ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (ibid.: 3). From a Saidian perspective, colonial discourse (as exemplified by Orientalism) can be considered an epistemic weapon of the oppressor, used by colonial powers to control and govern the colonized. The Orient was a fabrication (and so too its dialectical opposite, the Occident), a ‘man-made’ (sic) (ibid.: 5) fiction, rather than an already existing reality ripe for ‘neutral representation’, effected through the creation of a vast assemblage of knowledge about the Other. To illustrate how the Orient is generated discursively, Said presents a textual analysis of the writings (novels, poetry, academic writing, religious texts, travel books, journalism, political treatises) of a number of predominantly French and British ‘Orientalists’ (scholars, writers, philologists, lexicographers, philosophers, economists etc.) from the eighteenth century onwards. Importantly, he distinguishes latent Orientalism as an (almost) unconscious underlying structure (of dreams, myths, fantasies) whose ‘unanimity, stability, and durability is almost constant’ (Said, 1978: 206) from manifest Orientalism as externalizations of this structure in Orientalist writing. At the core of Said’s analytical approach is the elucidation of Orientalist writers’ use of (colonial) binary divisions, and associated classifications, categorizations and figures of speech that position the Occident as culturally, morally and scientifically ‘superior’ (i.e. more ‘modern’ or ‘civilized’) to the relatively ‘inferior’ Orient. Such discrepant positionalities gave the colonizer grounds for justifying the colonial enterprise, while effectively ‘blam[-ing] the victim’ (Brantlinger, 1985: 198) for their own colonization. The perpetuation of Orientalism had (cultural) hegemonic effects which explained, according to Said, its ‘durability and strength’ (Said, 1978: 7). He wrote: ‘So impressive have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor’ (ibid.: 108–9). Said’s exposition of how colonial discourse works to achieve such effects in colonial settings is founded on: Michel Foucault’s writings about discourse, the subject and power-knowledge from The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972) and Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison (Foucault, 1977) respectively (to theorise Orientalism as a discursive formation, and the colonized subject as an ‘object of [both] disciplinary practices and objectifying disciplines’ (West, 1996: 175)); Antonio Gramsci on hegemony from The Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971); and Sigmund Freud (presumably The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, 1913, although this text is not explicitly cited by Said) in his distinction of latent and manifest Orientalism. In moving ‘the analysis of colonialism, imperialism and the struggles against it to the question of discourse’ (Young, 2001: 384; emphasis added), Said’s work was reflective of contemporary anti-humanist and antifoundationalist currents in US/European humanities, and a constructionist philosophy of language. It is perhaps no surprise then that, following Said, postcolonial theory would become institutionalized as a form of literary and cultural critique (usually of Western ‘high’ culture) and a strategy for reading that ‘refuses the humanist assumption that literary texts exist above their historical contexts’ (McLeod, 2000: 38). While Saidian colonial discourse analysis as exemplified in Orientalism has become a general conceptual paradigm for postcolonial theory (Young, 2001), it has been subject to a number 154

Postcolonial theory

of criticisms. First, for conceiving colonial discourse as a homogeneous and totalizing phenomenon, rather than a heterogeneous one (e.g. reflecting historical and locational differences), and underestimating social differences in the experiences of colonial subjectivities (e.g. along gender, race, religion and class/caste lines among and between colonizer-colonized groups). Second, Orientalism has been criticized for underplaying the multiple forms of violent and non-violent counter-hegemonic struggle and resistance to colonial discourse (a point Said would later redress in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism) and the ways that discourses themselves cultivate the grounds of their own subversion (McLeod, 2000). Third, Young’s (2001) multifaceted evaluation of Said’s notion of colonial discourse highlights inter alia: contradictions in Said’s ontological position (notably in his use of Foucault); and crucially in terms of a broader critique of postcolonial theory, Marxist and historical scholars’ (Ahmad, 1992; Dirlik, 1997) criticisms of Said’s emphasis on the textual nature of history ‘at the expense of materialist historical inquiry and politicized understanding’ (Young, 2001: 390). Together, these critiques have become generative of the ‘problem’ of colonial discourse in postcolonial theory.

Homi Bhabha’s (1994) The Location of Culture The Location of Culture is a collection of essays in which literary and cultural theorist Homi Bhabha outlines his philosophy of cultural identification and difference, and an associated ‘revisionary model of colonial discourse’ (Young, 2001: 392) through concepts including hybridity and the Third Space, ambivalence, the stereotype and mimicry. The book begins by arguing that the contemporary mode of cultural engagement in postmodern times involves ‘living on the borderlines’ (Bhabha, 1994: 1) invoked by social change, migration, and ethnic strife. Bhabha’s borderline epistemology means that, rather than conceiving cultural difference on the basis of two (or more) fixed, homogeneous, pre-formed categories of (national) culture or ethnicity (or a singular category like gender or class), we must pay attention to how cultural identities and differences are negotiated through conflict or collaboration in the ‘interstitial passage’ of a Third Space of enunciation. It is here that the multiple knowledges and positionalities of majority and minority groups intersect back and forth across cultural boundaries to produce hybrids that confound the idea of ‘an originary identity or a “received” tradition’ (Bhabha, 1994: 3; see also Bhabha (1990) on the pedagogical and performative elements of national culture in Nation and Narration). Bhabha carries forward this hybridizing sensibility – in contradistinction to Said’s binaristic logic – in the development of his more fractious view of colonial discourse in which ambivalence and anxiety provide the generative psychical (unconscious) apparatus. Ambivalence is the ‘co-existence and interdependence of two contrary impulses or affects (typically love and hate, desire and fear)’ (Hook, 2012: 162). Bhabha illustrates it with reference to the figure of the ‘Negro’ (inspired by Frantz Fanon’s 1952[1986] autobiographical experience of realizing his colonial objectification as ‘Negro’ in Black Skin, White Masks): ‘The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces’ (Bhabha, 1994: 118). The racial Other is thus the site and object of desire and derision, an irresolvable tension that provokes anxiety and neuroses for both colonizer and colonized. Movement between these two poles involves a transgression of the (supposedly discrete) boundary that separates colonizer and colonized, such that the Other is rendered both radically different/unrecognizable (outside the epistemological categories of the colonizer) and knowable/recognizable (coming inside those same categories). The breaching of this boundary means that the clear-cut subject positions (colonizer-colonized) and the one-way gaze (and 155

Gavin Jack

associated processes of objectification and dehumanization of the Other) imagined by Said are untenable and will inevitably fail, as the colonizer’s goal to ‘fix’ the Other into an inferior and radical alterity is constantly undone. Instead colonial discourse involves a partial gaze (a looking relation) in which the Other is glimpsed, looks back and is momentarily recognized as another (human) subject, presenting a ‘hidden threat’ (ibid.: 127) to colonial authority and the grounds of possibility for subverting colonial discourse. Bhabha’s theorization of colonial discourse rests on two key concepts. First the stereotype, whose characteristically repeated use by the colonizer to ‘fix’ the ambivalence of colonial relations by normalizing difference through representation, is rendered futile precisely because of the irresolvability of that ambivalence. Second mimicry, which is often narrowly understood as a strategy used by the colonized to partake in (and subvert) the machinations of colonial power (for instance through parody, exaggeration or cynical adherence). In so far as Bhabha refers to mimicry as ‘one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (ibid.: 122), it might be more appropriately or primarily interpreted in terms of the desire of the colonizer for ‘a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (ibid.; emphasis in the original); it is thus ‘not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance’ (ibid.: 128–9). The characteristic indeterminacy of mimicry is the core ‘problematic of colonial subjection’ (ibid.: 129) in that ‘in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference’, thus becoming ‘the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal’ (ibid.: 122). Bhabha draws on a wide range of intellectual resources spanning multiple texts, but his articulation of colonial discourse is based on an engagement of poststructuralist (notably Foucault (1972, 1977; like Said) and Derrida (1978) on différance) and psychoanalytic theory (Freud’s (1927/1981) writing on fetishism to theorize the stereotype and most importantly, Lacan’s (1977) mirror phase and the Imaginary on colonial subjectivities). Crucially, Bhabha is an interlocutor of colonial psychiatrist and freedom fighter in the Algerian War of Independence (from France) Frantz Fanon, writing the foreword to the 1986 edition of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Bhabha’s theoretical plasticity and oft-remarked ‘challenging’ writing style make him a tricky read. Beyond that, there are a number of substantive problems with his work, cogently and extensively summarized by Moore-Gilbert (1997) including: Bhabha’s unquestioning use of the transcendental (yet arguably Eurocentric) concepts of psychoanalysis to investigate the profoundly historical phenomenon that is colonialism; his insufficient attention to resistance, gender relations and economic aspects of colonialism; and above all, and paradoxically given Bhabha’s critique of Said, his unified conception of the colonial subject in which both the colonizer and the colonized are viewed as equally affected by ‘the imperative of the colonizer’s consistent and unvarying unconscious need/demand for psychic affirmation’ (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 149).

Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? A commitment to self-reflexivity and self-transformation, and against intellectual colonialism, has driven the development of Spivak’s overarching interest in the institutional responsibility of the critic (echoing Said, 1983), and the ethics and politics of reading in the context of globalization, postcoloniality and relations of power. As a literary theorist, translator and teacher of (comparative) literature, Gayatri Spivak can be regarded as an analyst of colonial discourse in so far as she, like Bhabha and Said, illuminates the colonizing/imperialist (and Western metaphysical) logic, silences and writerly complicities of a variety of canonical (English) literary works, philosophical and political economic treatises. In her early essays on feminism (1981, 1985a), for instance, she unpicks the uninspected privilege, Western self-referentiality and cultural 156

Postcolonial theory

imperialism in selected French feminist works, and the parochial possessive individualism of US feminism. She shares a postcolonial and Third World feminist critique of Western feminism’s invocation of a universal (generalizable) category of ‘woman’ (Mohanty, 1984, 2003) and an associated ‘benevolent sisterhood’ (Sanders, 2006: 82) as epistemologically and politically problematic in its masking of diversity and hierarchy in women’s relationalities (see Benschop and Verloo, Chapter 6 this volume). Concerns with the politics of knowledge are most extensively articulated by Spivak in her famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, the answer to which would move between the essay’s earlier iterations (1985b, 1988 [the one I primarily rely on here]) and its inclusion in her magnum opus A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) (abbreviated to PC in the remainder of this section). This multifaceted essay examines ‘the intersection of a theory of representation and the political economy of global capitalism’ (Spivak, 1988: 271). It begins with Spivak’s dissatisfaction with a published conversation between Deleuze and Foucault in which Deleuze ‘runs together’ (ibid.: 275) what she considers two different and discontinuous meanings of representation: ‘representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’ (ibid.). She argues that an adequate theory of representation requires both these senses – ‘representation within the state and political economy’ and ‘within the theory of the subject’ (ibid.: 275–6) – and puts them to work in her critique of the representation of ‘the third-world subject . . . within Western discourse’ (ibid.: 271). This subject is ‘the subaltern’ (influenced here by Gramsci, 1971, and the Subaltern Studies group, for instance, Guha, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987) and more specifically ‘the subaltern woman’, who is doubly colonized by imperialism and patriarchy. In the 1988 version, she declares that the subaltern woman cannot speak, a position Spivak reaches based on her analysis in the main body of the essay of the staging of the sati (widow sacrifice in India) in colonial law and Hindu scripture, and the specific case in the coda of the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri. Her analysis is both a generic critique of the essentialism inherent in attempts to re-discover subaltern (women’s) consciousness (which she calls a ‘nostalgia for lost origins’ (Spivak 1988: 291), though famously argues that [strategic] essentialism can be a vital political tool), and a gendered critique of the incapacity for the subaltern woman to speak in her own terms, instead only audible through the subject positions afforded by the systems of representation of others (e.g. the Western colonizer, or the Indigenous patriarch). Spivak would later declare her lament ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ an ‘inadvisable comment’ (Spivak 1999: 309; see pp. 308–11 for her revisionary comments) following critics’ questions about whom counts as subaltern and on what basis, and the empirical fact that subaltern women do speak (but still cannot be heard) and that there might instead be ‘a number of intermediate positions between full subalternity and hegemony’ (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 107). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason rearticulates her views about the necessity to inspect one’s privilege and complicity in domination and to learn from below by ‘seeking to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’ (Spivak, 1999: 295). As a teacher of literature (in the metropolitan US) and literacy (in regional Bangladesh and India), Spivak has an enduring interest in pedagogy (see Spivak, 1993). According to Sanders (2006), Spivak directs her advice in PC about the need to be self-reflexive to migrant groups in metropolitan locations (including her students), underlining their potential for complicity in the exploitation of the subaltern as a ‘native informant’ speaking on behalf of others. She articulates her interdisciplinary theory and practice of transnational literacy as a mode of self-knowing, or self-othering, based on the capacity for literature to give students training in imagining other worlds, considering their relative privilege and exploring an ethical relation to the Other. 157

Gavin Jack

Uneasy with the label postcolonial theorist, Spivak describes herself (according to Sanders, 2006) as a ‘practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist’, and her writings attest to a ‘quite formidable span of reference’ (Eagleton, 1999: 4). Her theoretical matrix (rather than singular position) enables her to work with and against a number of philosophical orientations (e.g. with and against Foucauldian poststructuralist thinking about the subject, and with and against aspects of the Subaltern Studies project). However it is Derridean deconstruction that she consistently sets to work as her underlying analytical approach (reflective of her role as translator and author of the preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976)). Moore-Gilbert (1997) summarizes core problems with Spivak’s work, a difficult task given Spivak’s continuous revision of her positions. Nonetheless, he notes that Spivak tends to downplay subaltern resistance and to reinscribe the metropolitan intellectual as a privileged object of investigation. He identifies tensions in her conceptions of history caused by her invocation of Marxism and discourse theory, and paradoxes in her reflexive statements about her positionality as a middle-class Indian intellectual working in a privileged metropolitan location. Like Bhabha, Spivak’s theoretical eclecticism and writingstyle have been critiqued, the latter famously as ‘obscurantist’, and an ‘intellectual version of Attention Deficit Disorder’, by Terry Eagleton (1999) in his ‘lively’ review of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. That said, Eagleton (ibid.: 5) does point to important broader limitations of postcolonial theory as a ‘way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist’, leading him to describe it as a ‘peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a “post-political” world’ (which he feels Spivak only partly exhibits, compared with Said or Bhabha). In sum, Said, Bhabha and Spivak have contributed foundational texts and analytical approaches from colonial discourse analysis to transnational cultural studies as the basis for postcolonial theory. While they are key thinkers for postcolonial organizational scholars, I would re-iterate not only that they were preceded by many important anti-colonial thinkers and activists, but also that there are many other contemporary writers for postcolonial organizational scholars to consider from Latin America (Anzaldua, 1987; Quijano, 2000; Dussel, 1995; Mignolo, 2000), Arab/ Turkish writers in the US (Asad, 2003; Dirlik, 2007), and Islamic writers (Shariati, 1986), alongside long-standing South Asian (Nandy, 1983; Chatterjee, 1986, 2005) and under-appreciated African voices (Mudimbe, 1988; Hountondji, 1995).

Postcolonial organization studies This section places a spotlight on two principal foci of existing scholarship in postcolonial organization studies (for a more extensive review, see Jack et al., 2011): knowledge and identity. It synthesizes key themes and illustrates the specific ways that philosophy is used by organizational scholars who draw upon postcolonial theory to generate distinctive understandings of management and organization theory, knowledge and/or practice with respect to these two foci.

Knowledge: representations, texts and flows/counter-flows The overriding philosophical and political concerns of postcolonial organizational scholars have been with issues of knowledge, representation and textual modes of analysis, most notably in respect of academic disciplines. Postcolonial theory brings a distinctive theoretical inflection to long-standing critiques by mainstream and critical scholars alike (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991; Clegg et al., 2000; Tsui, 2007) on the narrow constituency and parochial nature of the academic production of ‘global’ management knowledge, notably through the concept of Eurocentrism (more below). The wide-ranging scope and goodly number of postcolonial studies about these 158

Postcolonial theory

knowledge-related problems illustrate the endemic nature of the (philosophical) issues at hand (epistemology, ontology, values, power-knowledge). To give a selective review, organizational scholars working with and against postcolonial theory have studied the politics of knowledge (sometimes in relation to wider institutional and economic concerns) through analyses of: • •

• •

•

foundational texts (historical and contemporary) in the discipline (e.g. Hofstede’s (1980) Culture’s Consequences; see Fougère and Moulettes, 2009, 2012; Ailon 2008); core management and organizational concepts including corruption (de Maria, 2008, 2012), organizational control (Mir et al., 2003), organizational culture (Cooke, 2003), workplace resistance (Prasad and Prasad, 2003), information and communication technologies (Gopal et al., 2003), governance (Schwabenland, 2012; notably in relation to Indigenous communities in Australia (Sullivan, 2012) and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Panoho and Stablein, 2012)), leadership (in the context of Africa (Nkomo, 2011); and Ma¯ori ancestral leadership in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Kelly et al., 2014)), the network society (Hodge, 2014), development management and administration (Cooke, 2003a, 2004; Cooke and Dar, 2008), NGOs (Claeyé, 2014), sustainable development (Banerjee, 2003), Indigenous enterprise (Banerjee and Tedmanson, 2010), and capacity building (Tedmanson, 2012); student textbooks (Coronado, 2012; Fougère and Moulettes, 2012a) and curriculum content (Jaya, 2001; Joy and Poonamallee, 2013; Ruwhiu, 2014); whole disciplinary fields/sub-fields, most notably comparative (Westwood, 2001, 2004, 2006) and cross-cultural management (Jack and Westwood, 2009), and international business/ globalization studies (Banerjee and Linstead, 2001; Banerjee et al., 2009); business journalism (Priyadharshini, 2003) and commercial/marketing/popular cultural practices (Echtner and Prasad, 2003; Schroeder and Borgerson, 2012).

This long list is indicative of the ‘truism’ described by Mir and Mir (2012: 9) that: ‘modern organizational theory has tended to objectify the colonized nations, and the subjects of imperialism’. As organizational scholars we need to call out parochialism and decentre Eurocentrism, not just because it can engender ethnocentric (even racist) attitudes, ways of knowing and objectifying tendencies, but also because it actively produces ignorance, ‘a way of not knowing’ (Mueller, 1987: 8). This limits the relevance of our work for the majority world and for understanding and acting within the complex global assemblages (Ong and Collier, 2005) of contemporary economic and cultural life. To this end, the various philosophical perspectives and concerns of postcolonial theorists have been put to work by organizational scholars. A (postcolonial) philosophical inflection is evident, above all, in the types of research goals and questioning practices that postcolonial organizational scholars pursue. In this respect, active verbs are important, in the sense that through philosophical inquiry, we are doing things with knowledge, as well as to that knowledge, productively reconfiguring it to generate critique or new concepts with which to understand or more ambitiously attempt to change the world. These verbs may be particular to postcolonial thinking, or more generic and include: (1) to provincialize, defamiliarize and decolonize academic and practitioner knowledge (in the form of dominant epistemes and theoretical perspectives, core concepts, and methodological protocols) in specific disciplinary fields of management and organization studies; (2) name and critique underlying Eurocentrism and associated forms of Othering; (3) illuminate how (Western) management and organization theory (and practice) acts as a ‘mechanism of colonization’ (IbarraColado, 2006). Together, these varied but interconnected goals can be referred to as ‘postcolonializing organization theory’ (Jones, 2005), that is to say, ‘a more general decolonization 159

Gavin Jack

of organization theory’, or, ‘the postcolonial as an unworking of organization theory’ (Jones, 2005: 238–9). Anshuman Prasad (2012) provides an excellent overview of the nature, development and negative effects (see Box 10.1) of Eurocentrism as a ‘taken-for-granted ideology or world-view’ (A. Prasad, 2012: 18) and the key instruments through which it emerged, including works of art/literature/philosophy, the European project of cartography, and the fabrication of ‘universalistic social science deeply imbued with notions of European exceptionalism’ and ‘the superiority of the European mind’ (A. Prasad, 2012: 19). Prasad’s definition of Eurocentrism is rather restrictive, however, since it tethers the concept to Europe alone. Mufti (2005: 474) expands the epistemic space of Eurocentrism, with particular significance for scholars working in the US-dominated discipline of management studies, by noting how it ‘underwrit[es] narratives of American universalism as well as those of a uniquely European polity and culture in the geographically specific sense’. To ‘provincialize’ knowledge, following Chakrabarty (2000), is to deploy theoretical scholarship and analytic practices to reveal and disrupt the hegemonic and universalizing status of Eurocentric modes of knowing and associated teleology. To this end, and with texts as the key unit of analysis, the general conceptual model of colonial discourse offered by Said (sometimes in combination with concepts or methodological approaches from other scholars, notably Bhabha) has been oft used by postcolonial organizational scholars. Coronado (2012), for example, combined Said’s colonial discourse with Hodge and Kress’s (1993) discourse analytic methodology to identify and critique four key discursive strategies deployed by writers of a sample of leading international business textbooks: speaking in one authoritative voice to a single audience; scientific stereotyping (i.e. talking in terms of static, homogeneous, ahistorical, fact-like cultural essences); presenting putatively neutral but negative evaluations of the Other based on imperialist semiotics; use of a range of other problematic discursive devices (e.g. overgeneralization, ideologically charged word choice, use of fictionalized case studies). Similarly, Priyadharshini (2003) uses Said to explore the discursive construction of ‘the Indian economy’ in selected issues

Box 10.1 The Problems of Eurocentrism •

Tendency to essentialize and exoticize the non-Western ‘Other’, and to portray non-Western

•

Flattens global heterogeneity

•

Can blind researchers to Europe’s historical connections and interdependencies with the rest

•

Devalues cultural self-scrutiny in the West (and leads to an uncritical celebration of Western

•

Frequent failure by Western researchers to see theoretical sophistication in the non-West

cultures as simple, naïve or child-like

of the world institutions and practices) (see also Connell, 2007); instead, they make frequent use of readily available Eurocentric stereotypes in theorizing non-Western cultural, economic, political and other institutions and practices •

Engenders cultural parochialism and/or paranoia in Western societies, often generating unflattering/menacing images of non-Western Others

Source: Adapted from A. Prasad, 2012: 19–20.

160

Postcolonial theory

of The Economist and Newsweek, but powerfully and distinctively combines it with Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, ambivalence and the stereotype in an exemplary analysis of how Orientalist modes of knowing and profound ambivalences are co-terminous in such texts. Finally, and broader in scope, Jack and Westwood (2009) combine Said, Bhabha and the concept of ‘organization field’ to illuminate the perverse example of international/cross-cultural management (ICCM) studies. These are academic disciplines whose ‘eye on the world’ and substantive interest in cultural difference and borders of various kinds might be expected to generate disciplinary characteristics of epistemic diversity and an openness to multiple ways of knowing. However, hiding behind the myth of the detached observer that dominates these conventionally functionalist, positivist, Western disciplines lie a plethora of problems, including the overlooking of a large number of countries and peoples not deemed ‘relevant’ to ICCM research, and the positioning of locations/scholars ‘at the periphery’ (of the global academic system) as sites/hands for data collection (rather than theory generation) (Prichard et al., 2007) and (willing or unwilling) victims of ‘epistemic coloniality’ (Ibarra-Colado, 2006: 933). Beyond a concern with provincializing knowledge, postcolonial organizational scholars have explored what happens when corporate and organizational knowledge takes leave from one location and travels to another, for example in the form of corporate policies and practices, productivity models or knowledge management systems. This is a topic of particular concern for postcolonial scholars since ‘knowledge transfer’ has been a central technique of cultural imperialism, and the history of corporations as vehicles for such transfers is inextricably linked to the interconnected projects of Euromodernity and (colonial) capitalism(s) (Mir et al., 2003). In a present day context where old and new forms of imperialism co-exist and interact, intraorganizational knowledge transfer can be studied as a power-laden mode of ‘corporate imperialism’ (Banerjee et al., 2009). Mir and Mir (2009), for instance, conducted an ethnographic study of knowledge transfer between a US MNC and its Indian subsidiary that demonstrated how ‘much of the interaction reflected older relationships in the era of colonialism’ (Mir and Mir, 2009: 11). Bhabha’s work has been singularly important in developing a specifically postcolonial sensibility towards the study of knowledge transfer, and the attendant complex, ambiguous and culturally embedded processes of accommodation, resistance and hybridization. Frenkel’s work has been vital in this respect: (1) by illustrating the hybrid patterns of knowledge that developed in Israel after British and US models of productivity were exported and interacted with local Israeli ones (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2003); (2) by developing a conceptualization of knowledge transfer as a Bhabhaian Third Space (Frenkel, 2008): an ambivalent process never closed to the possibilities that the colonized will creatively subvert the knowledge imposed by the colonizer. With the emergence of the BRICS nations, and Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, and other regional multinationals, postcolonial scholars have noted the potential for counter- or backflows that may reverse colonial hierarchies of knowledge, or perhaps generate new imperialist ones in South–South settings (Jackson, 2012, on Africa–China relations). However, Frenkel’s (2014) study of DE-MNCs (developing and emerging multinational corporations) notes the tenacity of what she calls ‘the postcolonial imagination’ as a barrier to realizing the reversal of colonialist hierarchies. She writes: ‘against all odds and in contrast to stereotypical predictions, firms emerging from the south have shown that they can sometimes play the free market game of the north even better than the (northern) indigenous people (or firms) themselves. Surprisingly (or not), this fact has yet to transform the ways in which north and south conceptualise themselves and each other’ (Frenkel, 2014: 48). A final set of concerns in postcolonial organization studies involves questions of resistance to/decentring of dominant Western modes of knowing (Faria et al., 2013), reversing negative 161

Gavin Jack

representations of others’ ways of organizing (Nkomo, 2011) and revaluing/learning about already existing alternative forms of organizational knowledge, notably from diverse Indigenous cultures (Henry and Pene, 2001; Misoczky, 2011; Humphries and Verbos, 2014). While many of Spivak’s core concerns are of relevance and sometimes cited in these regards, questions of resistance are generally not well explored by the Holy Trinity (as noted above). These tasks might broadly be encompassed as those of ‘writing back’ to the centre (Ashcroft et al., 1989); subjugated groups rewriting themselves back into history, memory and social science. Or, as Alcadipani et al. (2012: 131) more whimsically note with respect to organization studies, reminding scholars at the centre that ‘there is life beyond Northern academia, both in terms of managerial theoretical concepts and in terms of organizational practices’. Responses to these concerns have been varied, but two are noteworthy. First, postcolonial organizational scholars have addressed the questions of how to create relational conditions for theory development (Jack et al., 2008) and generate epistemic diversity, methodological pluralism, and greater levels of individual researcher reflexivity in a future vision of the discipline. Őzkazanç-Pan (2012) shows how researchers conducting fieldwork in international settings might use postcolonial feminist conceptions of subalternity, reflexivity and representation to address the risk of reproducing and re-inscribing inappropriate and imperious Western assumptions and research approaches. Second, researchers from Latin America, and notably Brazil (Faria et al., 2013; also Islam, 2012), have demonstrated the organizational insights offered by indigenous concepts such ‘anthropophagy’ as well as a distinctive decolonial (following Mignolo, 2000) approach to considering how to generate a pluriversal form of critical management studies. While indigenous knowledge systems offer valuable alternative modes of organizing and challenges to the deleterious effects of Euromodernity, care is needed among non-indigenous researchers in particular not to essentialize, homogenize or romanticize them (Vargas-Cetina, 2001), and attention paid to the tensions between postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, and to critical Indigenous studies scholarship (e.g. Moreton-Robinson, 2009). As Warrior (2009: 122) notes, postcolonial concerns with Western categories of knowing mean that it has ‘never accounted for Native worldviews’.

Identity-work and subjectivity in neo-colonial workplaces The predominant focus on text-based analyses of knowledge/representations has resulted in only ‘modest attention to questions of practice and identity’ (Srinivas, 2012: 1658), that is to say, with the lived experience of colonialism/imperialism as enacted through processes of subjectivation, agency and social practice. Just how, and with what effects, are colonial and other modes of (self-)knowing taken up and practised by colonial/imperial subjects? A small but important number of conceptual, autobiography-based and empirical studies of the identity-work of managers or employees employed in past and present colonial and neo-colonial workplaces variously illuminate experiences of racial privilege and subordination, struggle and resistance, and ambivalence. In short, identity work in neo-colonial contexts is not a case of ‘simple’ interpellation through colonial discourse (as imagined by Said), but a more complex set of subjective processes, affective responses, and psychical/emotional coping strategies (as imagined by Bhabha or Spivak). A small subset of studies in this domain, specifically drawing on Said and Bhabha, focuses on understanding how organizations with dedicated diversity management policies nonetheless reproduce hierarchies of racial and cultural difference. Prasad’s (2006) conceptual essay contests a positive reading of diversity management initiatives as ‘organizational reform projects that would empower marginalized groups, and bring them to a position of equality with the privileged white 162

Postcolonial theory

group’ (Prasad, 2006: 135; emphasis in the original). Instead he argues that their function (wittingly or unwittingly) is to maintain white majority privilege by sustaining rather than dismantling the racial binaries that produce hierarchical relations of privilege and subordination. Following Bhabha, Prasad views diversity discourse as a linguistic repair and maintenance mechanism for the underlying ambivalence of dominant white groups towards racial Others, ‘traceable, in part, to the continuing imprint of . . . colonialist schizophrenia’ (Prasad, 2006: 136). Kalonaityte’s (2010) study of diversity management in a Swedish adult education institution (with many non-Swedish immigrant students) conceptualizes it as a mode of ‘internal border control’. She demonstrates empirically (through interviews with Swedish teachers) what Prasad contends, namely that ambivalences and contradictions (e.g. in the teachers’ self-representations of Swedishness) are the generative mechanism for a race-based hierarchy of inclusion and exclusion in that organization, but also noting ongoing resistance to it. Based on the same data, but using a postcolonial feminist lens (combining Said and Spivak) to illuminate the subject-positioning of female immigrant students (e.g. from Afghanistan and Iraq), Kalonaityte (2012: 117) shows how ‘the content and structure of the teaching practices, but also the conditions for student agency and gender equality’ construct these students as ‘the absolute victims of Orientalist cultures, Islam and native patriarchies’. Doubly colonized on grounds of gender and imperialism, such data demonstrate the continued presence of what P. Prasad (2012; writing with respect to discourses of the veil in the Scandinavian workplace) refers to as the ‘cultural fantasies . . . about Muslim women that have long captured the European imagination’ (P. Prasad, 2012: 55). Other studies concerned with identity dynamics and practices in colonial/neo-colonial workplaces focus on recorded experiences of managers or employees (even researchers doing fieldwork; see Alcadipani et al., 2015), demonstrating a number of different subjective processes and responses (Ulus, 2014). Yousfi’s (2013) empirical study of the modernization of a Tunisian organization based on a US management model evinced not just the local cultural hybridization of that model, but the ambivalent effects of its implementation by local managers on their identity constructions (see also Mirchandani et al.’s 2012 research with employees of Indian call centres). In neither wholeheartedly adopting nor completely resisting the implementation of the model, the managers effected ‘hybrid forms of identity presentation’ (Yousfi, 2013: 415) in which they ‘engage[d] with the adoption process without taking on a subaltern position’ (ibid.). From a different time and context, Srinivas (2012) explored the question ‘could a subaltern manage?’ through an analysis of the autobiography of Prakash Tandon, the first Indian Chief Executive of Lever Brothers India. Srinivas’s analysis (using Spivak and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus) highlights three distinct identity-work practices (self-monitoring, constructing a duality, finding a calling) developed by Tandon to respond to the expectations of European (mostly British) managers about what comprised professional managerial conduct and identity in a context of accepted racial inequality where ‘they were not to let exclusion get under the skin’ (Tandon, 1971: 59, in Srinivas, 2012: 1662). Anger, frustration, hurt and rage are typical emotions in neo-colonial workplaces that still manifest old colonial and new imperial forms of racism.

Future directions Postcolonial approaches are now an established feature of the critical theoretical terrain in organization studies, offering a distinct (but varied) set of intellectual and political resources for mounting anti-Eurocentric, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial inquiry. Notwithstanding this encouraging sign, our engagement with postcolonial theory (both within the field of postcolonial organizational studies, as well as this chapter) has been selective. I therefore conclude with two sets of suggestions for future work with and against postcolonial theory. 163

Gavin Jack

First, there is further reading and philosophical reflection to be done, involving consideration of what, how and under what circumstances. With respect to ‘what’ (else) we might read, despite the apparent privileging of Said’s Orientalism and Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (with relatively less use of Spivak), we seem to have scratched only the surface of these texts and critical responses to them. I would suggest constant re-readings of these books, looking to surface more productive insights from each (e.g. working with Bhabha’s concept of the stereotype in a more complex fashion could yield further insights into the libidinal economy of neo-colonial racism in the workplace), including greater consideration of criticisms of their work (Young, 1990; MooreGilbert, 1997). Next, we might also add to the ‘library’ of postcolonial organizational scholarship by reading and writing about more work by anti-colonial writers/fighters for independence noted earlier, including: Fanon and other diverse voices from Africa to counteract ‘the omission of an “authentic and well sustained African input” . . . into postcolonialism’ (Nkomo, 2011: 366) and postcolonial organization studies (Nyathi, 2008); and Robert Young’s (2001) tricontinental theory which offers a starting point for postcolonial analysis more clearly grounded in anti-colonial/nationalist struggles for independence, and Marxism. Both these suggestions offer vehicles for philosophical reflection on the well-noted fault-lines between postcolonialism and poststructuralism (a question of the Eurocentric basis of the latter), postcolonial theory and Marxism (a question of the Eurocentric basis of the latter, and the textual rather than materialist emphasis of the former; see Parry, 1987), and postcolonialism and postmodernism (a question of whether the latter is a Eurocentric critical narrative that reinscribes the West at the centre of social theory; Radhakrishnan, 1994). In terms of ‘how’ we might read, and under what conditions, scholars might consider Connell’s (2007) approach in Southern Theory as exemplary in showcasing the distinctive theoretical insights about ‘modern’ society generated by diverse writers from ‘peripheral’ locations, while Spivak’s (1999) interdisciplinary and transnational approach to reading emphasizes the need for the study of global political economy to inform textual analysis. Postcolonial theory could be used as a foil for greater articulation and productive contrast with contemporary currents in queer theory and whiteness studies as applied to the study of organizations/organizing (see Rumens and Tyler, Chapter 15, and Swan, Chapter 31, both this volume). With respect to gender and sexuality, for instance, more study is needed of contemporary postcolonial and queer masculinities and femininities in/across organizations, and how these intersect with racial, classed and other hierarchies. The second set of suggested directions calls for more interdisciplinary (e.g. by working with international relations scholars or anthropologists located in multiple locations) and empirical research that can enable better understandings of the lived realities and experiences of metropolitan and rural subaltern groups (and others), and specifically the Global Poor (Mir and Mir, 2012) under conditions of postcoloniality. This recommendation would bring the philosophical concerns of postcolonial theory, and criticisms of it, closer to the materialist study of economic imperialism (in the globalizing guise of neo-liberalism; see, for instance, Banerjee’s (2008) work on necrocapitalism), and state–civil society relations in national and transnational perspective. In this respect, expanding postcolonial and transnational feminist thinking holds particular importance because of the ways that it can, according to Kim (2007: 118): ‘bridge[s] discursive and material analyses’; ‘highlight[s] the importance of social structure and the state’; ‘shift[s] analyses to linkages [and] various forms of border crossings, including conceptual, temporal, bureaucratic, geopolitical, geographic, economic, cultural’; and ‘stress[es] the role of empirical research’. As a corollary, such empirical scholarship could strengthen the theory–praxis engagement of postcolonial organization studies, and might ideally involve 164

Postcolonial theory

collaboration with individuals, groups and organizations that advocate for social change and anti-corporate protest such as farmers’ protest movements, trade unions, and indigenous organizations. In sum, there is much future potential for postcolonial theory in organizational studies, and reflexive vigilance should be its watch-words. A good place to enact them is this very Companion, asking questions about whose philosophical approaches to organization and thus voices and values are represented, how, and with what consequences for future scholarship, and whose voices are missing and/or silenced. That is to ask: Just whose library is this?

Notes 1 2

I would like to thank Kathleen Riach for reading drafts of this chapter and helping me to clarify the key ideas. The terrain of postcolonialism – in common with cognate areas like development studies, geography, international relations – is typically characterized by the use of a set of spatial dualities and associated references including: ‘the West’ and the non-West (or even ‘the rest’; the Occident and the Orient); the First, Second and Third Worlds of development studies; the Global North and the Global South; and of course the notions of centre or core/periphery, or metropole-periphery, associated with dependency theory. These terms should not be interpreted as neutral geographical referents, instead as problematic (since they are essentialisms, and objectifying and homogenizing categories, if not treated with care) and thus contested and contestable forms of epistemological shorthand. However, and appropriating Spivak (1988), I use them as examples of strategic essentialisms (or heuristics) that enable a relatively unencumbered mode of writing in this chapter.

References (key texts in bold) Ahmad, A. (1992). In Theory: classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso. Ailon, G. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: culture’s consequences in a value test of its own design. Academy of Management Review, 33(4): 885–904. Alatas, S.F. (2003). Academic dependency and the global division of labour in the social sciences. Current Sociology, 28(1): 599–613. Alcadipani, R., Khan, F.R., Gantman, E. and Nkomo, S. (2012). Southern voices in management and organization knowledge. Organization, 19(2): 131–43. Alcadipani, R., Westwood, R. and Rose, A. (2015). The politics of identity in organizational ethnographic research: ethnicity and tropicalist intrusions. Human Relations, 68(1): 79–106. Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989). The Empire Strikes Back: theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. London: Routledge. Banerjee, S.B. (2003). Who sustains whose development? Sustainable development and the reinvention of nature. Organization Studies, 24(1): 143–80. Banerjee, S.B. (2008). Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12): 1541–63. Banerjee, S.B. (2011). Voices of the governed: towards a theory of the translocal. Organization, 18(3): 323–44. Banerjee, S.B. and Linstead, S. (2001). Globalization, multiculturalism and other fictions: Colonialism for the new millennium? Organization, 8(4): 683–722. Banerjee, S.B. and Tedmanson, D. (2010). Grass burning under our feet: indigenous enterprise development in a political economy of whiteness. Management Learning, 41(2): 147–65. Banerjee, S.B., Chio, V. and Mir, R. (2009). Organizations, Markets and Imperial Formations: towards an anthropology of globalization. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Bhabha, H. (1990). Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boyacigiller, N.A. and Adler, N.J. (1991). The parochial dinosaur: organizational science in a global context. Academy of Management Review, 16(2): 262–90. 165

Gavin Jack

Brantlinger, P. (1985). Victorians and Africans: the genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent. Critical Inquiry, 12: 166–203. Cabral, A. (1969). Revolution in Guinea: an African people’s struggle. London: Stage 1. Calás, M.B. and Smircich, L. (2003). To be done with progress and other heretical thoughts for organization and management studies, in Locke, E.A. (ed.), Post-modernism and Management: pros, cons and the alternative. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 21, Oxford: Elsevier Science, pp. 29–56. Césaire, A. (1955[1972]). Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chakrabarty, P. (2000). Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1986). Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: derivative discourse? New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, P. (2005). Politics of the Governed in Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Claeyé, F. (2014). Managing Nongovernmental Organizations: culture, power and resistance. London: Routledge. Clegg, S., Linstead, S. and Sewell, G. (2000). Only penguins: a polemic on organization theory from the edge of the world. Organization Studies, 21: 103–27. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: the global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Cooke, B. (2003). Managing organizational culture and imperialism, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 75–94. Cooke, B. (2003a). A new continuity with colonial administration: participation in development management. Third World Quarterly, 24(1): 47–61. Cooke, B. (2004). The managing of the (Third) world. Organization, 11(5): 603–29. Cooke, B. and Dar, S. (eds) (2008). The New Development Management: critiquing the dual modernization. London: Zed Books. Coronado, F. (2012). Constructing the ‘neocolonial’ manager: orientalizing Latin America in the textbooks, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 155–76. de Maria, B. (2008). Neo-colonialism through measurement: a critique of the corruption perception index. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 4(2/3): 184–202. de Maria, W. (2012). The new war on African ‘corruption’: just another neo-colonial adventure? In Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Pres, pp. 218–48. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Dirlik. A. (1997). The Postcolonial Aura: Third World criticism in the age of global capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Dirlik, A. (2007). Global South: predicament and promise. The Global South, 1(1/2): 12–23. Dussel, E. (1995). The Invention of the Americas: eclipse of the ‘Other’ and the myth of modernity. New York: Continuum. Eagleton, T. (1999). In the gaudy supermarket. London Review of Books, 21(10): 3–6. Retrieved on 16 June 2015 from www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/terry-eagleton/in-the-gaudy-supermarket. Echtner, C.M. and Prasad, P. (2003). The context of Third World tourism marketing. Annals of Tourism Research, 30(3): 660–82. Fanon, F. (1952[1986]). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Faria, A., Wanderley, S., Reiz, Y. and Celano, A. (2013). Can the subaltern teach? Performativity otherwise through anthropophagy, in Malin, V., Murphy, J. and Siltaoja, M. (eds), Getting Things Done, Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, Vol. 2, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 205–24. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Penguin. Fougère, M. and Moulettes, A. (2009). The construction of the modern West and the backward rest: studying the discourse of Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2(1): 1–19. Fougère, M. and Moulettes, A. (2012). A postcolonial reading of Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 276–301. 166

Postcolonial theory

Fougère, M. and Moulettes, A. (2012a). Disclaimers, dichotomies and disappearances in international business textbooks: a postcolonial deconstruction. Management Learning, 43(1): 5–24. Frenkel, M. (2008). The multinational corporation as a Third Space: rethinking international management discourse on knowledge transfer through Homi Bhabha. Academy of Management Review, 33(4): 924–42. Frenkel, M. (2014). Can the periphery write back? Periphery-to-centre knowledge flows in multinationals based in developing and emerging economies, in Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds), Core–Periphery Relations in Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 33–52. Frenkel, M. and Shenhav, Y. (2003). From Americanization to colonization: the diffusion of productivity models revisited Organization Studies, 24: 1537–61. Freud, S. (1913) The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1927[1981]). On Sexuality. Vol VII. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gandhi, M.K. (1927[1982]). An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gopal, A., Willis, R. and Gopal, Y. (2003). From the colonial enterprise to enterprise systems: parallels between colonization and globalization, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 233–54. Gramsci, A. (1971). The Prison Notebooks: selections. New York: International Publishers. Guevara, E.C. (1969). Che: selected works of Ernesto Guevara. Edited by R.B. Bonachea and N.P. Valdes, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Guha, R. (ed.) (1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987). Subaltern Studies I–V: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Henry, E. and Pene, H. (2001). Kaupapa Ma¯ori: locating indigenous ontology, epistemology and methodology in the academy. Organization, 8(2): 234–42. Hodge, B. (2014). Sorry, the network society has already been invented: why management education needs indigenous input, in Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds), Core–Periphery Relations in Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 204–22. Hodge, B. and Kress, G. (1993). Language as Ideology. London: Routledge. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences: international differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hook, D. (2012). A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: the mind of apartheid. London and New York: Routledge. Hountondji, P. (1995). Producing knowledge in African today. African Studies Review, 38(3): 1–10. Humphries, M. and Verbos, A.K. (2014). Transforming the institutional logic of the centre through indigenous wisdom, in Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds), Core–Periphery Relations in Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 139–63. Ibarra-Colado, E. (2006). Organization studies and epistemic coloniality in Latin America: thinking otherness from the margins. Organization, 13(4): 463–88. Islam, G. (2012) Can the subaltern eat? Anthropophagic culture as a Brazilian lens on post-colonial theory. Organization, 19(2): 159–80. Jack, G. and Westwood, R. (2009). International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies: a postcolonial reading. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jack, G., Calás, M.B., Nkomo, S.M. and Peltonen, T. (2008). International management and critique: an uneasy relationship. Academy of Management Review, 33(4): 870–84. Jack, G., Westwood, R., Srinivas, N. and Ziauddin, S. (2011). Deepening, broadening and re-asserting a postcolonial interrogative space in organization studies. Organization, 18(3): 275–302. Jackson, T. (2012). Postcolonialism and organizational knowledge in the wake of China’s presence in Africa: interrogating south–south relations. Organization, 19(2): 181–204. James, C.L.R. (1938). History of Negro Revolt. London: Fact Monographs. James, C.L.R. (1969). A History of Pan-African Revolt (2nd edn). Washington: Drum and Spear Press. Jaya, P. (2001). Do we really ‘know’ and ‘profess’? Decolonizing management knowledge. Organization, 8(2): 227–33. Jones, C. (2005). Practical deconstructivist feminist Marxist organization theory: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Jones, C. and Munro, R. (eds), Contemporary Organization Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 228–44. Joy, S. and Poonamallee, L. (2013). Cross-cultural teaching in globalized management classrooms: time to move from functionalist to postcolonial approaches? Academy of Management Learning and Education, 12(3): 396–413. 167

Gavin Jack

Kalonaityte, V. (2010). The case of vanishing borders: theorizing diversity management as internal border control. Organization, 17(1): 31–52. Kalonaityte, V. (2012). Inscribing the body: the construction of educational practices for the female other, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: Advances in Postcolonial Organization Studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 116–34. Kelly, D., Jackson, B. and Henare, M. (2014). ‘He Apiti Hono, He Ta¯tai Hono’: ancestral leadership, cyclical learning and the eternal continuity of leadership, in Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds), Core–Periphery Relations in Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 164–84. Kim, H.S. (2007). The politics of border crossings: black, postcolonial, and transnational feminist perspectives, in Hesse-Bieber, N.S. (ed.), The Handbook of Feminist Research: theory and praxis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 107–22. Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: The Hogarth Press. Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Mariátegui, J.C. (1971). Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Translated by M. Urquidi. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Memmi, A. (1965). The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: The Orion Press. Mignolo, W. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledge, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mir, R. and Mir, A. (2009) From the colony to the corporation: studying knowledge transfer across international boundaries. Group and Organization Management, 34(1): 90–113. Mir, R. and Mir, A. (2012). The colony writers back: organization as an early champion of non-Western organizational theory. Organization, 20(1): 91–101. Mir, R., Mir, A. and Upadhyaya, P. (2003). Toward a postcolonial reading of organisational control, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 47–74. Mirchandani, K., Maitra, S. and Sangha, J. (2012). Treats and threats: global cultures in India’s call centers, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: Advances in Postcolonial Organization Studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 135–54. Misoczky, M. (2011). World visions in dispute in contemporary Latin America: development x harmonic life. Organization, 18(3): 345–63. Mohanty, C.T. (1984). Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary, 12(3)/13(1): 333–58. Mohanty, C.T. (2003). Feminism without Borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial Theory: contexts, practices, politics. London and New York: Verso. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2009). Imagining the good indigenous citizen: race war and the pathology of patriarchal white sovereignty. Cultural Studies Review – Issue on Critical Indigenous Theory, 15(2): 61–79. Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988). The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mueller, A. (1987). Power and naming in the development institution: the ‘discovery’ of ‘women in Peru’. Paper presented at the annual Third World Conference, Chicago. Mufti, A. (2005). Global comparativism. Critical Inquiry, 31(2): 472–89. Nandy. A. (1983). The Intimate Enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nkomo, S. (2011). A postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies. Organization, 18(3): 356–86. Nkrumah, N. (1961). I Speak of Freedom: a statement of African ideology. London: Heinemann. Nkrumah, N. (1965). Neo-Colonialism: the last stage of imperialism. London: Heinemann. Nyathi, N. (2008). The Organisational Imagination in African Anti-Colonial Thought. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Leicester, UK. Ong, A. and Collier, S.J. (eds) (2005). Global Assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Őzkazanç-Pan, B. (2008). International management research meets ‘the rest of the world’. Academy of Management Review, 33(4): 964–74. 168

Postcolonial theory

Őzkazanç-Pan, B. (2012). Postcolonial feminist research: challenges and complexities. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 31(5/6): 573–91. Panoho, J. and Stablein, R. (2012). A postcolonial perspective on organizational governance in New Zealand: reconciling Ma˜ori and Pa˜keha˜ forms, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 200–17. Parry, B. (1987). Problems in current theories of colonial discourse. Oxford Literary Review, 9(1/2): 27–58. Prasad, A. (1997). The colonizing consciousness and representations of the Other: a postcolonial critique of the discourse of oil, in Prasad, P., Mills, A.J., Elmes, M. and Prasad, A. (eds), Managing the Organizational Melting Pot – Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 285–311. Prasad, A. (ed.) (2003). Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Prasad, A. (2006). The jewel in the crown: postcolonial theory and workplace diversity, in Konrad, A.M., Prasad, P. and Pringle, J.K. (eds), Handbook of Workplace Diversity. London: Sage, pp. 21–44. Prasad, A. (2012). Working against the grain: beyond Eurocentrism in organization studies, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: Advances in Postcolonial Organization Studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 13–31. Prasad, P. (2012). Unveiling Europe’s civilized face: gender relations, new immigrants and the discourse of the veil in the Scandinavian workplace, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 54–72. Prasad, A. and Prasad, P. (2003). The empire of organizations and the organization of empires: postcolonial considerations on theorizing workplace resistance, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 95–120. Prichard, C., Sayers, J. and Bathurst, R. (2007). Franchise, margin and locale: constructing a critical management studies locale in Aotearoa New Zealand. New Zealand Sociology, 22(1): 22–44. Priyadharshini, E. (2003). Reading the rhetoric of Otherness in the discourse of business and economics: towards a postdisciplinary practice, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–92. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Radhakrishnan, R. (1994). Postmodernism and the rest of the world. Organization, 1(2): 305–40. Rodney, W. (1974). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington DC: Howard University Press. Ruwhiu, D. (2014). Voices that matter: speaking up for the ‘indigenous’ in business education, in Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds), Core–Periphery Relations In Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–203. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Said, E. (1983). The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said. E. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Sanders, M. (2006). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: live theory. London: Continuum. Schroeder, J.E. and Borgerson, J.L. (2012). Packaging paradise: organizing representations of Hawaii, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 32–53. Schwabenland, C. (2012). Swachh Narayani, the goddess of good governance: the ‘creation’ of a goddess as an organizational intervention, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 73–94. Senghor, L. (1964). On African Socialism. Translated by M. Cook. London: Pall Mall. Shariati, A. (1986). What is to be done? The enlightened thinkers and an Islamic renaissance. Houston: Institute for Research and Islamic Studies. Spivak, G.C. (1981). French feminism in an international frame. Yale French Studies, 62: 154–84. Spivak, G.C. (1985a). Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism. Critical Inquiry, 12(1): 243–61. Spivak, G.C. (1985b). Can the subaltern speak? Speculations on widow sacrifice. Wedge, 7/8: 120–30. Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313. Spivak, G.C. (1993). Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge. Spivak, G.C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Srinivas, N. (2012). Could a subaltern manage? Identity work and habitus in a colonial workplace. Organization Studies, 34(11): 1655–74. 169

Gavin Jack

Sullivan, P. (2012). Indigenous governance: The Harvard project, Australian Aboriginal organizations and cultural subsidiarity, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 95–115. Tedmanson, D. (2012). Whose capacity needs building? In Prasad, A. (ed.), Against the Grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. Malmo: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 249–75. Tsui, A. (2007). From homogenization to pluralism: international management research in the Academy and beyond. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6): 1353–64. Ulus, E. (2014). Workplace emotions in postcolonial spaces: enduring legacies, ambivalence, and subversion. Organization, 1–19, doi: 10.1177/1350508414522316. Vargas-Cetina, G. (2001). Postcolonial sites and markets: indigenous organizations in Chiapas, Mexico. TAMARA: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 1(3): 68–79. Warrior, R. (2009). Native American scholarship and the transnational turn. Cultural Studies Review – Issue on Critical Indigenous Theory, 15(2): 119–30. West, D. (1996). An Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Westwood, R. (2001). Appropriating the Other in the discourses of comparative management, in Westwood, R.I. and Linstead, S. (eds), The Language of Organisation. London: Sage, pp. 241–62. Westwood, R. (2004). Towards a postcolonial research paradigm in international business and comparative management, in Marschan-Piekkari, R. and Welch, C. (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in International Business. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 56–83. Westwood, R.I. (2006). International business and management studies as an orientalist discourse: a postcolonial critique. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 2(2): 91–113. Westwood, R., Jack, G., Khan, F.R. and Frenkel, M. (eds) (2014). Core–Periphery Relations and Organisation Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yousfi, H. (2013). Rethinking hybridity in postcolonial contexts: what changes and what persists? The Tunisian case of Poulina’s managers. Organization Studies, 35(3): 393–421. Young, R.J.C. (1990). White Mythologies: writing history and the West. London: Routledge. Young, R.J.C. (2001). Postcolonialism: an historical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

170

11 Poststructuralist theory Thinking organization otherwise Stephen Linstead

‘Theory’ in poststructuralism is a process or activity of theorizing that spans disciplines, questioning both its own representations and the way it is itself represented (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Jones, 2009; Linstead, 2004; Palmer, 2008). It draws attention to the limits and lack of language and other representational systems, the challenges of reflexivity, the importance of negativity in and for experience, the critique of structures as patterns within relational processes, and the nature of the human – even extending this critique to the self as a site rather than a source of meaning. It not only suggests that things could be otherwise than they are, but that things are already otherwise than the ways in which they are represented. Ironically, it implies that the prefix ‘post’ indicates a return to the recognition of a process that precedes structure and remains at work behind and beneath structure. Thinking backwards in this way has a disruptive effect on knowledge. The instability, or trembling, it recognizes in the relationality of representations and reality blurs the boundaries between them. This destabilizes knowledge assumptions that include foundations, teleology, causality, depth and surface, creating what has been seen as a flattening of epistemology and ontology. Analysis then becomes a series of differential horizontal moves between alternative genres rather than a revelation of essential qualities, underlying determinants, or deeper insight. This has impacted particularly on social science knowledge, creatively interrupting thought in terms of aesthetics, critique, politics, psychoanalysis, ethics, ontology, epistemology and metaphysics.

In the beginning . . . or was it the middle Poststructuralism as a term poses its own originary problem – to what ‘structuralism’ is it post? It might appear to be a radically relativist phenomenological reaction to the big picture positivism of structural sociology, but pursuing an answer involves tracing how mostly French twentieth century philosophical thought has raised telling questions about core concepts in the sociology of organization. Saussure. Structuralism emerged in Francophone thought with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916[1983]). Saussure’s seminal contribution was to create semiology as a ‘science of signs’ that rested on an understanding of a sign as a pairing of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. He drew attention to the difference between the ‘object’ signified and the ‘concept’ 171

Stephen Linstead

signified, and the initially arbitrary nature of the signifier (sound–image) that over time becomes conventional, institutionalised in language. Words (or sounds) gain their meaning not from their relation to the object, but from their relation to each other within a system of difference. This applied to representations – any pairing of object/concept and representational form (sound, text, image, sound even smell) that could constitute a sign. Saussure’s semiology then could be applied not only to any formally recognized sign system such as language, art or music, but more importantly to any system of relations with signifying potential (architecture, cooking, fashion, transport, sport). For Saussure, each field would have a range of styles of enunciation (at the level equivalent to speech, or parole) but the system of difference was governed by a hidden set of ordering principles (at the level of grammar, or langue). The important point was that there were no natural relations between sounds, or words, and meanings. There were only conventional relations, and these different sets of relations (languages) produced different concepts, and different versions of reality. Saussure turned linguistic thinking away from a causal model of analysis as employed in the sciences towards a structural but relational model. He also diverted it away from a diachronic (or historical) mode of analysis to a synchronic mode, that of considering the relations between elements of a system at any given moment in time, rather than their evolution. The explanation of a phenomenon was not to be found in terms of history’s impact on its development, but by revealing the underlying relations of difference governing its position within a wider system of reference. Saussure challenged realism (we don’t know the real world) with a linguistic relativism (we can know the systems of concepts generated by language) and displaced human agency to the extent that language is not the property of any individual – change in language, and hence in systems of thinking, is only slowly achieved. Lévi-Strauss. Influenced by Saussure, Lévi-Strauss argued that social phenomena can be understood as convergences of two or more terms, in relation. Mythology (Lévi-Strauss, 1962[1966], 1978[2003]) is particularly important for structuralism more generally. While the human mind becomes adept at thinking with contrasts, and seeing similarity in the ways things differ, it also has to address the problem of oppositions and contradictions. If it cannot resolve them, it must mediate in some way. This is the role of myth. Myths use basic units of meaning such as categories of food, tastes, sounds, silence, seasons, climates etc., and deploy them in a structured pattern both to express the contradictions of life, and render them intelligible and to some degree manageable, or at least endurable. They act as codes that lead us towards possible, or at least attempted, solutions of universal dilemmas. Patterns of behaviour and critical events in organizations can also be decoded (Turner, 1983; Linstead, 1985). The point was to penetrate the often bewildering subtleties of subcultural relations to get a sense of what wider connections might be possible, and conflicts discernible. Lacan. Lacan (1964[1977a], 1977b) occupies a pivotal position between structuralism and poststructuralism, taking Saussure’s idea of two characteristic functions of language being paradigmatic (a matter of vertical substitutability as a result of similarity) or syntagmatic (a matter of horizontal sequencing). Hence phrases like ‘the cat sat on the fluffy mat’ and ‘his dog jumped over my tumbledown wall’ are similar in structure but different in meaning. Lacan adapts this with Jakobson’s observation that paradigmatic association is that of metaphor (association of images – ‘my love is like a red, red rose’), while syntagmatic association is that of metonymy (association by contiguity – ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’). In metonomy the whole can stand for the part, or the part the whole. This shifts the emphasis from the functionality of language in Saussure to its poetic dimensions, and can be linked to Freud’s processes of condensation (one image contains several) and displacement (a fear of or wish for a forbidden object is deflected onto a different object with a non-obvious association) in the unconscious. 172

Poststructuralist theory

This is important because although Saussure had said that the signifier can only be what it is in relation to other signifiers, he still concentrated, as a linguist, on the relation between the signifier (as sound image) and the signified as concept. For Lacan (1977b: 154), if the meaning of the signifier is determined in relation to other signifiers, the signified is another signifier. This produces a slippery view of language – signifiers change when placed into different contexts with other signifiers, but these signifiers are not stable either and slide into the signified. But the signified also slides relative to the signifier resulting in a general instability of meaning. Where structuralists saw difference as underpinned by more stable universal meanings that analytic effort was needed to reveal, this radicalizing turn, which is poststructuralist, shows that effort revealing more instability – and not just in language. Subjectivity is not a self-contained entity that expresses itself in language, but is a set of relationships called into being by the entry into a particular semiological (language) system. The process of identifying oneself in seeing oneself reflected (mirrored) back in language is also a moment when the self is lost, given up to the signifying system – ironically, like an object. For Lacan (1977b: 170), the unconscious is not the ultimate private place, primordial or instinctual, where desires can be revealed for what they are, but is the repository of the language or discourse of the other, and so is very public. It is the ground where the tension between giving up to the totalitarianism of language and resisting it to the point of isolation and madness in non-linguistic freedom is at work. Language is therefore the site of the unconscious. The struggle is not to realize desires, for these cannot be known and fulfilled outside language, but to trace the chains of (sliding) signifiers that they have travelled. Relatedly, Lacan (1964[1977a]) discusses three registers of subjectivity: the Real (which is pre-linguistic experience, that which always eludes language as its remainder); the Imaginary (at the level of everyday experience where fantasy and expression meet, and create the illusion that we have natural access to the Real); and the Symbolic (which is where everyday experience is ordered and made meaningful – the whole signifying system of human culture and institutions, its permissions and prohibitions). The sign as part of the symbolic order sets up the principle of the Law that Freud had associated with biologically based patriarchy as linguistic. This establishing of patterns of alienation, repression, and unfulfilled desires and claiming these as natural ‘murders’ the thing, or the Real (a point later developed by Baudrillard). For Lacan then, analysis is based on words because this creates the reality that we experience, and the unconscious is not outside this language to be reached through it, revealed by structural analysis, but is within it and present in it. Thus the psychoanalytic analysis of cultural institutions is possible through close attention to the language in which they are established and conducted. This radicalization of Saussure takes us a move beyond structuralism. In recent years Lacan’s work has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in psychoanalytic studies of organizations (Contu et al., 2010) and in critical management studies via the work of Slavoj Žižek (Böhm and De Cock, 2006). Barthes. Barthes developed Saussure’s linguistic work formally but also extended its compass into other cultural phenomena such as fashion, wrestling, advertising, death, toys, strip-tease and food marketing (Barthes, 1957[1972]). These latter analyses, however, are paired with an important theoretical essay, ‘Myth Today’, that contemporises both Saussure and Lévi-Strauss in making a political point: that myth naturalizes and depoliticizes speech by motivating prefabricated responses that obscure contradiction. Resonating with concepts of ideology and kitsch (Linstead, 2002), Barthes demonstrated that signification operates on at least two levels beyond basic ostensive labelling. The first, which he called denotation, consists of the pairing of a signifier (say red roses) with a signified concept (say passion) which gives red roses as a sign for passion that is immediately and unreflectively decoded. However, at the level of connotation, this red rose of passion sign (the passionified rose) becomes a signifier for the signified Valentine’s Day. A fully commodified sign is delivered that valorizes consumption and expense as obligatory 173

Stephen Linstead

for romance. Barthes called this normalization myth – showing Lévi-Strauss’ (1962[1966]) ‘savage mind’ at work at the heart of the market economy. Although his earlier work partly inspired the development of cultural and media studies in the 1970s, later Barthes became increasingly uneasy about the position of the ‘mythologist’ or critic who appeared to have some sort of scientific privilege, where structuralism should have a decentring effect. His influence has been widely diffused, but examples of its direct impact in organization studies include Czarniawska (1999) and Golding (1996). Foucault. At the same time, historian and philosopher Michel Foucault was articulating a growing suspicion of a series of overarching explanatory models which led him to distance himself from Marxism, psychoanalysis, Sartre and ultimately from structuralism itself. In his early works Foucault takes a structuralist line that content masks form, which means for him that language masks the workings of desire and power, and adopts its anti-essentialist position that relationships, forged in arbitrary and autonomous systems of representation, determine reality. What Foucault does takes up Barthes’ position in regarding language as ideological but develops the insight that language is power in action shaping knowledge, which in turn shapes power. This connects to Lacan on subjectivity and its socially or other-determined nature, because language determines not just what may be said, but who is allowed to say it – in the process defining the speaker. His preferred term here was ‘discourse’, but discourse was more than a ‘regulated system of statements’, because it included the articulations of power/knowledge through actions and institutions. Discourse works to determine knowledge and truth rather than reveal them: truth is, more accurately, a truth-effect of power. Discourse is deceptive and paradoxical, shown by Foucault’s (1961[1964]) demonstration in Madness and Civilisation that madness, rather than being the opposite of classical reason, is at the heart of its paranoid Cartesian method of doubt obsessively centred upon the self, which when perfected to extremes (of categorization, exclusion and inclusion, measurement and containment) provided ‘the ultimate language of madness’ (Foucault, 1961: 65). Foucault takes a Nietzschean view of the discontinuities (rather than continuities) of history, arguing that it is possible to discern knowledge-based periods, or epistemes, in which discursive practices are united in generating particular epistemologies (such as nineteenth century positivism), sciences (such as eighteenth century medicine) and formalized systems (such as law and education). These periods have what he called regimes of truth: ‘the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ and the ‘mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish [both]true and false statements, [and] the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’ [including doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges, priests, teachers]. Epistemes are characteristically normalized, and history is essentially a ‘history of the same’ that also carries with it a dark side, a suppressed and silenced history of the abnormal, its equally characteristic ‘other’. What is important in this stage of Foucault’s work is that power is repressive, that language is the model for other systems, and that systems of division on the basis of scientific/knowledge categories (such as medicine) become the basis of moral distinctions (the sick are guilty). This is indicative of reason’s defence against unreason, most developed in modernism, and only in opening up a dialogue between reason and unreason can art be possible: and for Foucault, all human life is art. Madness is the absence of art from human life as it lies in the absolute domination of either unreason or reason and the suppression of the connection between them that art sustains. Here Foucault also argues for the importance of intensity and ‘limit-experiences’ that pull the subject out of the constraints of the ordering systems that define and speciously unify it, testing their limitations. This may provide a key to both his work and his life. 174

Poststructuralist theory

Organization as writing: Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida criticised Saussure and Lévi-Strauss in demonstrating that while their arguments hold on a practical or historical level, they contradict themselves at a logical level. Despite taking a relational view of the signifier, they privilege the ‘grammatical’ structural systems that discipline meaning. This logocentrism, however, runs against the evidence of play at work in signification they themselves present. Derrida accordingly argues that ‘play’ is inherent in every form of representation, and that logic itself – and structures derived from it – are unstable. ‘Authority’ then is undecidable, but this has been widely misunderstood as a generic justification for ‘anything goes’. His approach was termed by American scholars poststructuralism. Derrida’s (1967a, 1967b[1976], 1967c[1978], 1972) early significant works critique the metaphysics of presence, a mode of thought that privileges the type of expression most accessible to immediate experience as being the closest to true consciousness. So speech is privileged over writing, a process of phonocentrism emanating from Plato. Thinkers including Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss have given writing this ‘unnatural’ role. But Derrida argues, from close readings of the latter authors and Saussure, that although historically speech is prior to writing, logically this cannot be so as being, especially for structuralists, is constituted by the relations between the terms in which it is expressed. This, as we have seen in Lacan, includes the self and the unconscious. These relations shape the ways that become available for apprehending reality, and what is experienced is always already rendered intelligible through processes of ordering, sequencing, marginalizing and spacing that are typical of writing. This abstract ‘writing’ then precedes the ‘speech’ that it is supposed to inscribe. There is no concept of speech that adequately distinguishes it from the concept of writing. What is absent is more influential than what is present: or more precisely, absence and presence are inseparable and meaning depends on a dynamic relation – an absent presence – between the two. Other binary distinctions important to structuralism that break down similarly are nature/culture and origin/supplement, even being/non-being. Meaning does not reside in one term (a logic of identity) or even in the difference between two terms, but is distributed through a whole sign system, with each sign containing traces of the other signs. While the difference between black and white might be obvious and present as I type this text, the difference between these and other colours is also necessary for the concept of colour, but absent and deferred. Meaning as difference depends on relations between signs that are always deferred in language, which Derrida (1972) calls différance, producing the perpetual glissement or sliding of meaning. Because of this, and the fact that language always betrays its lack of control by simultaneously leaving aspects of reality unarticulated, while also setting in motion a surplus of meaning beyond it, margins are necessary – footnotes of clarification, marginal amplifications, parenthetical asides – to arrest the movement of the text. Margins seek to determine the centre – decentring textual and logical ‘authority’. The ‘grammar’ that structuralism identifies attempts to stabilize this decentring effect, and Derrida (1967b[1976]) terms his study of the ways in which grammar works to construct meaning, grammatology. Deconstruction is the process (often presented as a method) through which he exposes the ways in which binaries collapse, rhetoric and authorial intention diverge and conflict, and power is exerted through language to unilaterally resolve the play of difference. As language is public, it constitutes an encounter with the other that is also a matter of ethics, but at the same time, if signs are both unstable and constitutive of the idea of self, then subjectivity itself is unstable. Even the self is thus decentred. The use of ‘deconstruction’ as a somewhat radical and irreverent method has received considerable attention from commentators and critics, but this attention often fails to recognise that deconstruction is a movement already present within texts (sign-systems). Derrida as analyst merely teases out and seduces this movement to 175

Stephen Linstead

prominence. Similarly, power and ethics have always been present in Derrida’s work, although they are most explicit in his later contributions, but again are frequently overlooked (Jones, 2004). Derrida’s work has been usefully discussed and applied conceptually and empirically by Cooper (1989), Chia (1996), Linstead and Grafton-Small (1992), Learmonth (2005), Linstead (1993) and Rasche (2011).

Rethinking institutions: Michel Foucault Power and subjectivity are impossible to overlook in Foucault’s later work, as he shifts his attention to a more genealogical approach that looks more closely at non-linguistic aspects of discourse to trace discontinuities in epistemes. Where in his earlier work Foucault had tended to view power in terms of repression, exclusion and compulsion, for Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975[1977]) he develops a view of power as productive, in which the interactions of institutions, practices and language as discourse create power and themselves are shaped by power. Power makes certain practices, institutional formations and subjectivities possible, and generates new desires. It is everywhere rather than centred: no-one is outside it, no-one is powerless, and it operates through capillary action rather than centre-periphery flows. This does not necessarily mean that everyone is equally powerful, however; nor does it mean that there is no room for resistance. Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish that since the eighteenth century there was a governmental move from the type of corporeal power that sought to control people through physical means (of constraint, containment, banishment, punishment, torture, execution) towards a form of power that led them to internalize certain values and imperatives that controlled them from within, as self-disciplining or docile subjects. He illustrates this through the example of the Panopticon, a form of prison design in which prisoners were always visible, but never knew whether they were being watched. As a result, they had to behave according to the rules (the contemporary roadside speed-camera, which may or may not have film in it, operates on the same principle). Ultimately, the internalized discipline may be so powerful, and so normalized, that even implied surveillance is not necessary for conformance to occur. Individuals employ ‘technologies of the self’ in order to meet the implied demands of society with the same logic that they swot for professional examinations or prepare themselves for religious confession. This has informed a wide range of studies of workplace surveillance and human resource management (cf. McKinley and Starkey, 1998). Examination and confession become part of ‘governmentality’, the techniques and strategies by which a society is rendered governable. Within these dynamics power and knowledge are so mutually imbricated that he finds it necessary to coin the neologism power/knowledge. Foucault (1976[1978]) later turns to analysing the way in which discourse affects sexuality, rejecting Freud’s repressive hypothesis in showing how discourse shapes the sort of statements that can be made, how sexual relations are represented, and in what ways these enable the active construction of both sexuality and gender for docile and governable subjects. This institutional approach to the discursive construction of sex influenced work in organization studies on gender and sexuality since the 1980s (Knights, 2004). Later Foucault (1984a[1985], 1984b[1986]) turns to exploring the historical relations between the body, ethics and aesthetics that have more recently been taken up in studies of gender and organization. The capacity developed by postructuralist thinkers to read a ‘text’ against itself, often reversing the accepted interpretation of that text, but using the resources already found within it, is also evident in the work of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari who take the concerns of poststructuralism in a ‘postmodern’ direction. 176

Poststructuralist theory

What’s the big idea? Lyotard from language to justice The term postmodern was brought to prominence in the social sciences by Jean-Francois Lyotard. A philosopher of aesthetics, ethics and politics, his Libidinal Economy (1974[1993]) had gained him a controversial profile in an angry critique of semiotics, Marx and Freud, that accused them of a dehumanizing turn away from the other, despite their rhetoric. The intellectual structures that they developed to liberate, all end up becoming systems of totalization and closure – what was outside the system was unrecognized, silenced, and denied access. Lyotard argued against the structuring idea of desire as lack (or desire-as-wish) and for a view of desire as exuberance (desire-as-force). This positioned him against Lacan, but alongside Deleuze and Guattari and Baudrillard, taking up a legacy from Bataille. Part of Lyotard’s argument was that just as subjectivity is not simply a matter of being co-opted through one’s desires into capitalism and hence authorizing and legitimating it, resistance cannot be reduced to the anarchistic opposition of desire to capital. It proceeds most constructively by inventively exploiting the tensions of its own difference, using the channels created by the possibilities of co-option to disrupt and subvert capitalism. Identity, rather than being coherent and defined, is produced by intensity moving around and between dominant chains of signification, rationalization, commodification and colonization, unsettling them. In libidinal economy, Lyotard saw the pulsion of passion changing the world: in his subsequent thought he saw even here the tendency of ‘strong’ structured regimes of thought to do injustice to others. He came to prefer modest approaches with no explicit political intent that reflexively listen to silenced voices, rather than risking the imposition of silence on others, improvising identity and connection in the spaces of sublime supplementarity that evade reification into opposition. These concerns with legitimation resonated with those of Habermas and he addressed these specifically in Lyotard (1979 in French, 1984 in English). This work has been widely quoted in organization studies, but almost as widely misunderstood to the extent that it is often accused of neglecting issues which are its core concern. Lyotard argues that science is modern if it appeals for its legitimation to a metadiscourse via a grand narrative. Knowledge is historically animated by a limited number of Kantian ‘Ideas’ – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the West the big idea has been emancipation. Below this overarching level, alternative ‘grand narratives’ compete to claim their right as the dominant channel for attaining the ‘Idea’. Lyotard (1988[1992]) identifies five such ‘philosophies of history’: emancipation from sin by redemption through love (Christianity); emancipation from ignorance and servitude through knowledge and egalitarianism (Enlightenment); emancipation from exploitation and alienation through the socialisation of work (Marxism); emancipation from poverty through industrial development (Capitalism); and what he calls ‘the speculative narrative of realization of the Universal through the dialectic of the concrete’ (Materialism). These may articulate, as do Christianity and Capitalism in Weber’s Protestant Ethic, or Capitalism and Enlightenment in liberal political economy; none is to be regarded as more ‘grand’ than any other. Modern science legitimates its knowledge through recourse to grand narratives But for Lyotard the postmodern condition is one in which the old grand narratives no longer convince, and new forms of legitimation have emerged. Lyotard identifies three – performativity, consensus and paralogy. Performativity is the dominant response where all activities need to be justified in terms of their value to and impact on capitalism and techno-science (rights are displaced by calculations, justice by efficiency, all elements are commensurable and subject to the ‘business case’ for their existence). Knowledge and power circulate in an algorithm of wealth, efficiency and truth, decisions being made with an arrogance that is the equivalent of ‘terror’. Consensus is Habermas’ preferred response, but this inevitably reproduces the tendency to sameness and 177

Stephen Linstead

exclusion, because it trusts that knowledge and power can be mediated through language. Lyotard argues that language can never represent experience, or do justice to reality, and in use ‘regimes’ of phrases cannot do justice to those outside those regimes. Language ‘games’ have serious consequences – the question is how such games can ever be ‘just’ (Lyotard and Thébaut, 1985). Judgement is therefore a matter of deciding how injustice is to be done. Paralogy is an approach to reassert the incommensurable difference, the limits of logic, the contradictions of reason, and articulate little narratives (petits reçus) that offer tentative accounts of local knowledges, aware of their sources and their audiences, that aim at the inclusion of specific and different others to avoid injustice. This suspicion of structures and language marks Lyotard as poststructuralist, and his work after The Postmodern Condition maintains his central focus on language and how it works socially, politically and ethically to establish the power to define, judge and literally ‘sentence’ the other (Letiche, 2004a; Linstead, 1994).

Crimes against reality: Baudrillard from sign consumption to hyper-reality and crisis Jean Baudrillard also came to prominence with critiques of semiotics and Marx and his argument that their approaches reproduced the relations (of production or signification) that they intended to challenge, which formed the basis of his critique of the consumer society (Baudrillard, 1970[1998], 1976[1993]). The consumer society depends on information, the circulation of knowledge as formulae. The knowledge economy is not based on blueprints taken from a model that exists to produce copies: it is based on patterns of information that can generate endless simulacra with no ‘original’. Baudrillard’s early work was influenced by Barthes and he emulated him in launching his critique of commodification through classifying objects as functional, (traditional or modern), non-functional (or marginal) and metafunctional (useless, aberrant and schizofunctional), and subjecting them to semiotic analysis. He extends this to a critique of production, arguing that ‘sign-value’ has displaced use-value and exchange value and meaning is what is transferred through the consumption of objects. The individual buys a group identity and a feeling of metaphysical order with each purchase, fulfilling the needs of the productive system while being reassured that they are servicing their private desires. The over-determination of each transaction leads to the implosion of signifiers into each other such that categories become blurred and the real becomes unknowable among a proliferation of specificities – ‘the law of confusion’. Baudrillard (1981[1994) specifies quite clearly what he considers to be the four stages of the ‘precession of simulacra’ – that is, how the simulation comes to displace the real. In the fourth stage cultural products no longer pretend to be real or representational, and lives tend to be lived in hyper-real – more real than the real – terms. These are ‘third-order’ or late capitalist simulacra. Appeal to the real is viewed as sentimental, uncritical, lacking reflexivity and irony; seduction draws us into the play of simulation as we simultaneously distance ourselves from responsibility for meaning as we abandon ourselves to its interactive working out. George Ritzer (2009) connects this early phase of Baudrillard’s work on consumption and the hyper-real with his own reading of Weber and applies them to the experience economy. But Baudrillard’s deconstruction of simulation goes much further. The frantic metaphysics of the real determines the subject, which means that the displaced subject cannot retake possession of the real. The only way for subjective consciousness to survive, rather than subsiding into nostalgia for ‘authenticity’ or the somnolence of kitsch, is to imitate the artificial dynamism of the capitalist real: to become more object than the object and reclaim the principle of activity rather than the subjective paralysis of the hyper-real. Baudrillard displaces metaphysics with pataphysics, seeking to accelerate the tendencies within the hyper-real – out-simulating 178

Poststructuralist theory

simulation – until it implodes in catastrophic consumerism. What we might expect to see in organizations then is a pulsion into the ‘absurdity of ecstatic control and into the insane overdeterminations of all actions’, a direction towards which we might think the audit society is heading; or the strategy that Baudrillard followed in his later work, using writing to conceal his subjectivity in a situationist style rather than the highly reflexive and confessional styles that characterize some poststructural accounts that engage with the organized world (Letiche, 2004b). But this latter strategy nevertheless connects with the poststructuralist suspicion of language and the tendency to avoid semiotic capture, to resist by stealth and concealment, although Baudrillard is by contrast ‘hiding in the light’. Baudrillard’s approach to language takes a different, more extreme and more melancholic turn to that of Lyotard: although they both wrestle with the problem of entrapment and capture by regimes of signification, Baudrillard’s apparent narcissism shows no real concern with knowing the ‘Other’, and despite its insights leaves us with no sense of what renewed purpose might be salvaged from the ruins of catastrophe. His work has been used widely in the study of consumption, and in other areas of management including strategy (Grandy and Mills, 2004).

Becoming organized: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Deleuze and Guattari began their partnership following the events of May 1968 and a patronizing and dismissive attack by conservative French Freudians on the students, Marcuse, and Deleuze himself, who were all accused of being victims in flight from reality and with a utopian desire to return to the womb. This typical Freudian position, that rational accounts of action only mask unconscious motivations of desire, opposed the Marxist view of power deriving from relations of production to generate repressive social structures. Lacan rejected Freud’s psychosexual model of the unconscious, but replaced it with a psycho-social model that was nevertheless a structure of ‘authority’. Philosopher Deleuze and psychoanalyst Guattari saw the problem in both Freud and Lacan as Oedipal (of authority, control, restriction and necessary comportment), but resulting from the alignment of psychology with the powerful interests of capital. Capital was not simply an economic system, but a psychological and moral one: it sought to control, prescribe and channel meaning to produce behaviours that maintain desire as desire for the products of capitalist production (material and virtual). It established abstract equivalences that turned goods, bodies, actions, ideas and images into commodities to be exchanged for money; subjectivity was semiotically manipulated to be a matter of fitting in to this dissembling structure of authority, anxiety a result of not doing so effectively. Power was power over signification. Deleuze and Guattari (1972[1980]) sought to reconcile power (Marx) and desire (Freud) in critiquing capitalism through Nietzsche’s affirmative, active and creative view of desire. Here power was an object of desire rather than a structural feature of either society or the subjective unconscious. Structural features were temporary arrangements between different forces of power. Desire was not the desire of the partially unified subject to complete itself resulting from perceived lack, but preceded the subject: desire was free flowing and deterritorialized, lack was created by striations of signification, and the subject came into being only as a result of the repression of certain channels and possibilities of desire. Desire for identity, subjective reterritorialization, then became a paradoxical desire for one’s own repression and enslavement to the system, as victim, while appearing to be beneficiary. Deleuze and Guattari see desire as infinite possibility, with chaos as a normal state from which immanent order has to be filtered. If desire is force, power is its domestication, its capture by signifiers drawn into capitalist logic. The force that evades this is one of connection and expansion, a positive process they embrace as ‘schizophrenia’, on the principle that this condition of 179

Stephen Linstead

multiplicity is not pathological until it is judged so by totalizing and normalizing power, because it questions the truths power wishes to be self-evident. Schizoanalysis unmasks homogeneities for their suppressed difference, problematizes the taken-for-granted, releases possibilities and potential, argues that there are always alternatives and attempts to think the Other of capitalism. Like Lyotard and Foucault, it resists the incorporation of its dissent, its reterritorialization, and like Derrida, challenges the authority of power to ‘author’ it. It argues, like Baudrillard that the madness is in the system not outside it, and regardless of its rhetoric ‘caring’ capitalism is not, and has never been humane, liberal or paternal. This line of thought is not melancholic to the point of tragedy, as in Baudrillard; it is radical, but positive. Deleuze and Guattari (1984[1987]) use a number of metaphors to explore the motility of desire, and thought, and their connectivity: desiring-machines, assemblages, nomadic thought and rhizome, all intended to emphasize process over state, becoming over being, the molecular over the molar, non-identity over identity, multiplicity over definition and even dialectics (Linstead and Thanem, 2007). Thought that is mainstream and normalized, or becomes appropriated to the mainstream through participating in its logics and regimes of signification, they call majoritarian: thought that resists appropriation, connects with others, disinvests from territorialized desire they call minoritarian. Although in Deleuze’s individual philosophical work this is not always the case, in his work with Guattari thinking of alternatives to capital is always the political, social and psychological goal. When they argue that the task of philosophy is to generate new concepts this is still a matter of avoiding capture, of proliferating to resist translation and appropriation. This is very much a poststructuralist approach to theory (Carter and Jackson, 2004).

Future directions Poststructuralist theorizing emphasizes the capacity of signifying systems to re-present rather than represent reality through the processes they use to ‘capture’ it, and in recognizing that these signifying processes always lead to other significations that cannot be evaded (there is nothing that can be articulated and remain ‘outside’ the signifying process) looks carefully at these processes placing particular emphasis on their capacity to mask their contingent and dynamic nature. At the same time, recognition of the problems of reality capture through signification also reflexively acknowledges the tendency for the auto-capture of the users of the system in subjectification to the system. What energizes this seems to be a common recognition that there is always an inarticulable remainder to representation, subliminal, in excess of signification, that brings logocentrism up against its limits and operates non-dialectically. Resistance is not dialectical: poststructuralism is not anti-, contra- or counter- to some logos, but radically decompositional in exposing the workings of power as the power to define within representational systems and generate logocentric (truth) effects. Respect for the Otherness of signification leads to respect for alternative narratives, different truths, and a responsibility for finding ways of recognizing the ethics of the untranslatable. Politics is of becoming rather than perfectibility, even in the apparently tragic hypertheory of Baudrillard: who knows what will be liberated by the rubble of catastrophe? The power to define is also the power to seduce, and resistance is always subject to appropriation and incorporation. That which does not totalize, which appears as an excess, is also humble; exuberance is intensive but modest, elusive and minor; it is always vulnerable to habitual circulations of majoritarian logic and significations. In some presentations, postmodern theory has been offered as a means to widening perspectives, increasing creativity, opening up strategic foresight and responsive capacity – improving capitalism by moderating its fetishism 180

Poststructuralist theory

for design and control. Organization studies should not ignore the fact that even where specific organizations themselves are not capitalistic, they operate in a world where logics and representations of the values of capitalism as the neutralizing logic of organizing economies, societies and selves penetrate everywhere. But most mainstream studies of organization do ignore it, and don’t question it, and where they consider it at all, tend to depoliticize power. As a result they have tended to regard poststructuralism as a marginal disturbance within interpretive inquiry, concerned largely with forms of discourse analysis. More energetic critiques of poststructuralism have emerged from other critical approaches to organization. As early as the late 1970s Anthony Giddens, while helping to introduce continental structuralism and hermeneutics to Anglo-Saxon sociology and sympathetic to poststructuralism, attempted to distance himself from it in developing structuration theory as an alternative to reconcile agency and structure. His characterizations and critical comments have been influential in some areas of organization studies. Poststructuralism has been castigated for its apparent failure to adequately address structural features of power such as hegemony, and the organization of resistance – politics in an everyday organizational and practical sense. Associated with this is an alleged lack of thinking through the consequences of conceptual fragmentation/ decentring of the self for human agency (and its apparent disappearance) within and beyond subject formation. Its interrogation of ‘authority’ has occasioned views that it renders questions of both individual and organizational identity ephemeral. Another accusation is of obsession with the overdetermination of language and text and neglect of non-discursive (material, corporeal) elements of organizational life. Critical realists, in particular, take issue with its dynamic blurring of the boundaries between ontology and epistemology, and see in relationality radical relativism. Marxists see in its ‘superstructuralism’ a neglect of economic interests rather than symbolic constraints. Critical responses, such as Giddens’ pronouncement of both structuralism and poststructuralism as ‘dead thought’, suffer from a partial reading of material available, mostly in translation, in the 1980s, and even some recent contributions reproduce dated and inattentive critiques as unexamined assumptions – the problems often stemming from reading poststructural concerns through existing categories of organizational sociology rather than being sensitive to their philosophical inventiveness. Willmott (2005) offers a careful and cogent response to questions raised by critical realists, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985[2001]) recasting of ‘discourse’ in relation to Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’, by way of their reading of Lacan. This has proved a useful resource for organization scholars keen to maintain an overt concern with emancipation and an explicitly political dimension to subjectivity within a wider definition of discourse than offered by, for example, critical discourse analysis. Also within Laclau and Mouffe’s category of ‘postmarxism’ Rancière develops a highly original line on politics from a kernel of Foucauldian inspiration that also challenges Lyotard’s ‘differend’ with ‘dissensus’. Finally, motivating a different concept of desire from Lacanian analyses, Deleuze and Guattari have been influentially engaged by Hardt and Negri (2000) in conceptualizing global ‘empire’. Postmodern theory challenges us to move away from the taken-for-granteds and perversions of power to release desire, encounter otherness and embrace alternatives. The radical nature of this thinking often leads to evocative terms like breaking, exploding, imploding, crashing, crisis or catastrophe – that are sometimes dismissed as hyperbolic and symptomatic of the depthless play of signifiers. Poststructuralist theory, for all its emphasis on flux and slipperiness, places power, domination, ethics, otherness, responsibility and resistance at the heart of its thinking, challenges the logics that keep the (capitalist) world in place, and challenges us to do something about them. 181

Stephen Linstead

References (key texts in bold) Barthes, R. (1957[1972]). Mythologies. London: Paladin. Baudrillard, J. (1970[1998]). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Baudrillard, J. (1976[1993]). Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage. Baudrillard, J. (1981[1994]) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Böhm, S. and De Cock, C. (2006). Everything you wanted to know about organization theory . . . but were afraid to ask Slavoj Žižek. The Sociological Review, 53(s1): 279–91. Carter, P. and Jackson, N. (2004). Deleuze and Guattari, in Linstead, S.A. (2004), pp 105–26. Chia, R. (1996). Organizational Analysis as Deconstructive Practice. Berlin: De Gruyter. Contu, A., Driver, M. and Jones, C. (eds) (2010). Jacques Lacan with organization studies. Special Issue of Organization, 17(3): 307–15. Cooper, R. (1989). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 3: the contribution of Jacques Derrida. Organization Studies, 10(4): 479–502. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction. Organization Studies, 9(1): 91–112. Czarniawska, B. (1999). Writing Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972[1980]). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Vol. 1. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984[1987]). A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Vol. 2. London: Athlone. Derrida, J. (1967a). Speech and Phenomena. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1967b[1976]). Of Grammatology. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1967c[1978]). Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1972). Margins of Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1961[1964 abridged]). Madness and Civilisation: a history of insanity in the age of reason. New York NY: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1975[1977]). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. New York NY: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1976[1978]). History of Sexuality Vol. 1: the will to knowledge. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1984a[1985]). History of Sexuality Vol. 2: the uses of pleasure. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1984b[1986]). History of Sexuality Vol. 3: the care of the self. London: Allen Lane. Golding, D. (1996). Establishing blissful clarity in organisational life, in Linstead, S.A., Grafton-Small, R. and Jeffcutt, P. (eds), Understanding Management. London: Sage, pp. 51–65. Grandy, G. and Mills, A.J. (2004). Strategy as simulacra? A radical reflexive look at the discipline and practice of strategy. Journal of Management Studies, 41(7): 1153–70. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, C. (2004). Jacques Derrida, in Linstead, S.A. (2004), pp. 34–63. Jones, C. (2009). Poststructuralism in critical management studies, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 76–98. Knights, D. (2004). Michel Foucault, in Linstead, S.A. (2004), pp 14–33. Lacan, J. (1964[1977a]). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, J. (1977b). Écrits: a selection. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985[2001]). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Learmonth, M. (2005). Doing things with words: the case of ‘management’ and ‘administration’. Public Administration, 83 (3): 617–37. Letiche, H. (2004a). Jean-Francois Lyotard, in Linstead, S.A. (2004), pp. 64–87. Letiche, H. (2004b). Jean Baudrillard, in Linstead, S.A. (2004), pp. 127–48. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962[1966]). The Savage Mind. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978[2003]). Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge. Linstead, S.A. (1985). Breaking the purity rule: industrial sabotage and the symbolic process. Personnel Review, 14(3): 12–19. Linstead, S.A. (1993). From postmodern anthropology to deconstructive ethnography. Human Relations, 46(1): 97–120. Linstead, S.A. (1994). Objectivity, reflexivity and fiction: humanity, inhumanity and the science of the social. Human Relations, 47(11): 1321–46. 182

Poststructuralist theory

Linstead, S.A. (2002). Organizational kitsch. Organization, 9(4): 657–84. Linstead, S.A. (ed.) (2004). Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought. London: Sage. Linstead, S. A. and Grafton Small, R. (1992). On reading organizational culture. Organization Studies, 13(3): 331–55. Linstead, S.A. and Thanem, T. (2007). Multiplicity, virtuality and organization: the contribution of Gilles Deleuze. Organization Studies, 28(10): 1483–501. Lyotard, J-F. (1974[1993]). Libidinal Economy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1979[1984]). The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1988[1992]). The Postmodern Explained to Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J-F. and Thébaut, J-L. (1985). Just Gaming. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McKinley, A. and Starkey, K. (1998). Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: from panopticon to technologies of self. London: Sage. Palmer, D.D. (2008). Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners. London: Steerforth Press. Rasche, A. (2011). Organizing Derrida organizing: deconstruction and organization theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32: 251–80. Ritzer, G. (2009). Enchanting a Disenchanted World: revolutionising the means of consumption. London: Sage. Saussure, F. de (1916[1983]). Course in General Linguistics (ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye). London: Duckworth. Turner, S.P. (1983). Studying organizations through Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism’, in Morgan, G. (ed.), Beyond Method: a study of organizational research strategies. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, PP. 189–201. Willmott, H.C. (2005). Theorizing contemporary control: some post-structuralist responses to some critical realist questions. Organization, 12 (5): 747–80.

183

12 Practice theory What it is, its philosophical base, and what it offers organization studies Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

Introduction During the last decades practice theory has steadily increased in popularity within organization studies (hereafter OS) (Nicolini, 2013). It is also forming part of a larger movement within the social sciences that emphasize ‘materiality’, ‘embodiment’, ‘emotions’, and ‘practice’, rather than the hitherto prevalent focus on cognition in various forms (e.g. cognitive schemata, interpretation, language, discourse) as a way to explain human action and social order (Coole and Frost, 2010). Its advocates claim that practice theory provides a substantive alternative to a range of ‘recent paths of thinking, including intellectualism, representationalism, individualisms (e.g. rational choice theory, methodological individualism, network analysis) structuralism, structure-functionalism, system theory, semiotics, and many strains of humanism and poststructuralism’ (Schatzki et al., 2001: 2). Similarly, Reckwitz (2002) distinguishes practice theory from three other major theory clusters, namely mentalism (e.g. classical structuralism and interpretivism), intersubjectivism (e.g. theory of communicative action, symbolic interactionism) and textualism (e.g. poststructuralism and various forms of postmodernism). The overall purpose of this chapter is to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of the perspective commonly known as ‘practice theory’. Scrutinizing its philosophical base is important for two major reasons. First, it enables us to see more clearly what is unique with practice theory and what it has to offer OS. As Bacharach (1989: 498) noted: ‘if a theory is to be properly used or tested, the theorist’s implicit assumptions which form the boundaries of the theory must be understood’. Moreover, as Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) note, understanding the philosophical assumptions underlying a theory is also crucial for being able to further develop it. Second, since practice theory is not a monolithic block but consists of a range of different theories, understanding its philosophical underpinnings makes it possible to see more clearly the differences and similarities among diverse practice theories and, thus, how each of them enables us to theorize and conduct empirical investigations within OS. 184

Practice theory

The chapter is structured as follows. We begin by discussing the philosophical underpinnings of practice theory, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the two most prominent philosophers of practice. Thereafter, we distinguish three approaches to the study of practice: commonsensical theories of practice, general theories of practice, and domainspecific theories of practice. Finally, we highlight four critical features of practices that are of special relevance to OS and suggest ways domain-specific practice theories may be further developed.

The philosophical underpinnings of practice: insights from Wittgenstein and Heidegger Practice theory originates and has grown out from the long-standing philosophical critique of the logic of scientific rationality, which underlies a large majority of theories within OS and social science more generally (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Specifically, scientific rationality consists of three interconnected core assumptions that have historically underpinned scientific inquiries, including theory development in organization and management research. First, the world is made up of a totality of isolatable entities, with distinct properties, externally related to each other (Inwagen, 2001). Second, the epistemological subject–object relation forms the basis for all human knowledge: independent subjects aim at knowing about the properties of the entities making up the world. And third, the knowledge developed through the subject–object relation is representational: practitioners face a world of discrete objects, whose pregiven features they represent through cognitive activity (Varela et al., 1991: 134–5) and, on the basis of those representations, undertake action (Chia and Holt, 2006: 474). Likewise, researchers face a world of contingently linked behaviours, inner mental states, and objects, which they seek to scientifically represent in order to ascertain certain regularities (Taylor, 1985: Chapter 1; Tsoukas, 1998: 790). However, the representational knowledge about organizational practice developed by researchers following the canons of scientific method is typically seen as more objective, precise, and rational than the one developed by the practitioners (Robbins, 1989: 8–9; cf. Schön, 1983: 21). It is therefore believed that organizational and, more generally, human practices can be made more rigorous and will be substantially improved if they are based on – derived from – scientific knowledge developed through the epistemological subject–object relation. The importance of Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s work is that these philosophers made us see that there is an understanding manifested in human action and activities that is more basic than the explicit representations that actors and social scientists form (Braver, 2012; Rouse, 2007: 503). This is where practice comes in. Heidegger and Wittgenstein show that social practices provide the inevitable background understanding on which explicit interpretations (representations) form. Below, we briefly present Wittgenstein’s perspective on rule-following and then Heidegger’s approach to entwinement, which both show how social practices form the basis for our action, activities, as well as for our self-understanding and identity.

Wittgenstein and rule-following A great deal of what people do in organizations is guided by rules. Actors follow rules that enable them to carry out their tasks. But how do they know how to follow the rules? According to the cognitivist view, rules are mental signs: they are internalized by actors and are present in or before the mind when actors use them. For example, I know how to use the king in 185

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

chess because I have a mental sign that tells me how the king is used. Understanding a rule in this view becomes a matter of hitting the correct interpretation of a sign (Tejedor, 2011: 139–46). However, if understanding a rule is a question of finding the correct interpretation, how does one know that one has found it? For example, I ask a friend to follow the rule ‘+2’, as in the series: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc. My friend may continue the series until she reaches 1000, and then writes: 1004, 1008, 1012, etc. If I say that what she is doing is wrong, she may reply that her understanding of the rule was: ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on’ (Stueber, 1994: 15–16; Taylor, 1993b: 46; Winch, 1958: 29–30; Wittgenstein, 1958: 185). I need then to suggest another rule, which will clarify the first rule. But this leads to the problem of infinite regress: ‘understanding any one given rule requires understanding an infinite series of other rules’ (Tejedor, 2011: 143; see also Taylor, 1993b: 45–6). One way of addressing the problem of infinite regress is that a rule follower is shown in advance all possible misinterpretations of a rule. This, however, is problematic for it would require that we have ‘an infinite number of thoughts in our heads to follow even the simplest instructions’ (Taylor, 1993b: 46). Clearly, this is untenable. The only sensible conclusion we are left with is that the ‘application of rules cannot be done by rules’ (Gadamer, 1980: 83). According to Wittgenstein, following a rule is not about finding the correct interpretation but taking part in a practice: ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: para. 201). ‘“[O]beying a rule” is a practice’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: para. 202). ‘Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: para. 206). For example, when encountering a road sign we do not first stop to interpret it before following it. Rather we act according to how we have been trained when facing road signs. Thus, every act of understanding is essentially grounded on a taken-for-granted background practice (Taylor, 1993b: 47). It is when we lack a common practice that misunderstandings arise and, thus, are forced to articulate the practice and explain it to ourselves and to others (Winograd and Flores, 1987: 36–7).

Heidegger and entwinement Through the elaboration of his existential ontology, Heidegger has provided the most comprehensive and consistent ontological alternative to scientific rationality. In his analysis of the ontological structure of human existence, Heidegger showed that the epistemological subjectobject relation is not our most basic way of relating to the world but, rather, is derived from a more fundamental way of existence – that of being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1962[1927]: 49–58). Contrary to the ontology underlying scientific rationality, which assumes disconnection – namely, that we, as sentient beings, are initially separated from the world to which we subsequently become contingently connected – the notion of being-in-the-world stipulates that our most basic form of being is entwinement: we are never separated but always already entwined (internally related) with others and things in specific sociomaterial practice worlds, such as teaching, nursing, managing, and so on (Dreyfus, 1995; Sandberg and Dall’Alba, 2009; Schatzki, 2005; Taylor, 1993a). Taking entwinement as the primary mode of existence means that for something to be, it needs to show up as something – namely, as part of a meaningful relational whole with other beings. For example, the specific tools used by flute makers (Cook and Yanow, 1996: 441) and the BlackBerrys used by investment and senior support staff at a private equity firm (Orlikowski, 2007: 1441) all receive their meaning as specific tools from their entwinement in, respectively, 186

Practice theory

flute manufacturing and investment banking as specific sociomaterial practices. As Bartky remarked, ‘All these things form a structure both of being and of meaning and apart from such a structure a thing can neither be, nor be understood’ (Bartky, 1979: 213). In other words, being entwined with the world makes it possible for something to be at all, to be intelligible as something (Dreyfus, 2003: 2), and, insofar as this is the case, entwinement constitutes the logic of practice. Entwinement stipulates that ‘absorbed coping’ (Dreyfus, 1995: 69) is our primary mode of engagement with the world. Absorbed coping is primary in the sense that practice forms a familiar relational whole that actors are absorbed in and, at the same time, embody. In this mode, actors are immersed in practice, spontaneously responding to the developing situation at hand ‘independently of any representation’ of it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 139). It is only when we encounter some form of disturbance in our absorbed coping that we start to focus on – represent – the sociomaterial practice (i.e. ourselves, others and tools) as something separate and discrete, singling people and tools out from their relational whole, and, thus, ‘change over’ to the epistemological subject–object relation (Heidegger, 1962[1927]: para. 74; Dreyfus, 1995: 60–89). In other words, being absorbed in a sociomaterial practice world comes before the subject–object separation. It is our engagement in – entwinement with – certain practices that enables us to understand ourselves as particular subjects and objects as particular things in the first place.1 From the above, it should be clear that both Wittgenstein and Heidegger point to the primacy of practice, which constitutes a background understanding that is prior to any explicit interpretations of it. As Rouse (2007: 503) remarks, ‘the upshot of [Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s] criticisms is that there must be a level or dimension of human understanding expressed in what we do that is more fundamental than any explicit interpretation of that understanding’. In other words, Heidegger and Wittgenstein provide a broader and more basic onto-epistemology that transcends the prevalent substance-dualistic onto-epistemology underlying the prevailing logic of scientific rationality within OS and social science more generally.

Approaches to the study of practice In reviews of what practice theories stand for, it is commonly claimed that their most unique feature is that they take practice as their ‘primary object of study’ (Rouse, 2007: 499), treat ‘practices as the fundamental component of social life’ (Schatzki, 1996: 12), and by doing so ‘foreground the importance of activity, performance, and work in the creation and perpetuation of all aspects of social life’ (Nicolini, 2013: 3). At a first glance, claiming the primacy of practice may sound perplexing to OS scholars since they are supposed to have been studying it all along. Ever since Frederick Taylor’s (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management, the raison d’être of OS research has been to investigate – through the framework of scientific rationality – management and organizational practices as thoroughly as possible, in order to develop theories that explain how those practices function and, thus, how they can be improved (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). However, what ‘practice’ actually is and how it can be studied is far from clear within OS. Below, we distinguish three approaches to the study of practice: commonsensical theories of practice, general theories of practice and domain-specific theories of practice. We devote considerably more space to the latter two since they are most relevant to the purpose of the present chapter.

Commonsensical theories of practice The notion of ‘practice’ adopted in mainstream OS research typically reflects a commonsensical understanding of the term practice, as simply what people do. For example, a recent edited 187

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

volume The Work of Managers: towards a practice theory of management (Tengblad, 2012), claims to provide a distinct focus on management practice and develop theories of management practice: This book presents an understanding of management practice that is substantially more grounded in empirical evidence than one typically encounters in management literature or in the classroom . . . [and] in order to portray the complexity, contextuality, and uncertainty – inherent in the work of managers – the chapters in this book differ from the mainstream management tradition that is more oriented towards developing abstract theories about management than with describing management as it is practiced. (Tengblad, 2012: 337–8) Although commonsensical theories of practice like the ones in the volume above can be helpful in the sense that they may report phenomena about which we do not know a great deal, the largely a-theoretical nature of such commonsensical practice-oriented research presents it with significant limits. Notice in particular the unhelpful distinction between abstract theorizing and empirically grounded understanding of management practice in the quote above. The distinction is failing because the problem is not abstract theory as juxtaposed to concrete practice. The root of the problem is rather the particular kind of theorizing that, informed by the logic of scientific rationality, makes practice derivative of theory and, thus, practical relevance more abstract and less rich. However, pursued from within the logic of practical rationality, namely by adopting the onto-epistemological orientation outlined earlier and further developed below, theorizing makes theory derivative of practice and, thus, more reflective of the richness of practice. In other words, if we want to capture the logic of practice, we need to conduct our studies from within the logic of practical rationality (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011), rather than de-theorizing our research for the sake of capturing the mythical purity of practice. This is what the general practice theories enable us to do.

General theories of practice What above all characterizes general theories of practice is that they provide a systematic and comprehensive conceptualization of what defines practice as such and how it may be explained (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011: 1241). This conceptualization can then be used for investigating and theorizing aspects of management and organizational practice in a more informed way and, thus, provide more accurate accounts of the logic of practice. The perhaps most extensive and fully fledged general theories of practice are those developed by Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990, 1998), Giddens (1976, 1979, 1984) and, more lately, Schatzki (1996, 2002, 2010). Although they are informed by several philosophers, including Wittgenstein and Marx, Heidegger’s existential ontology forms the basis in all of them. In addition, other theories that are often regarded as general practice theories are actor–network theory (Latour, 1999; Law and Hassard, 1999), Vygotski’s (1978) activity theory, and possibly Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology (Miettinen et al., 2009). More recently, there have also been attempts to develop a practice theory by drawing on pragmatism and pragmatist thinkers such as Dewey, James, Mead and Pierce (e.g. Simpson, 2009; Thevenot, 2001. See also Parmar et al., Chapter 13 this volume). However, given that Bourdieu, Giddens and Schatzki are typically seen as having offered the most extensive general theories of practice, we review them briefly below and how they all, in various ways, draw on Heidegger’s existential ontology together with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. 188

Practice theory

Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory Bourdieu offers an extensive and highly elaborated general theory of practice, consisting of three main interrelated concepts, succinctly captured in the following formula: ‘[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 101). In outlining his theory of practice, Bourdieu (1990) takes point of departure in the objectivism – subjectivism divide, which he critiques for failing to capture the logic of social practices properly. On the one hand, Bourdieu (1990: 30–51) argues that objectivism (in the form of structuralism) is right in its claim that social practices are made up by ‘objective2 structures and regularities’, in the sense of historically and intersubjectively developed and sedimented activities, procedures, routines, and norms for what is right and wrong. However, he criticizes objectivism as fundamentally flawed in that it turns human beings into deterministic causality machines, failing to take into account how human interpretation determines their action. On the other hand, Bourdieu contends that subjectivism (social phenomenology, interpretive sociology) is right in its claim that the way humans interpret their specific situation and its contingencies, as well as what motives them (e.g. money, fame, career), significantly determines their actions and, thus, is part of social practices. Yet, he claims that subjectivism is ignorant about how the sedimented structures and regularities of social practices actually shape human interpretation and motives and, thus, action. Drawing on phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others Bourdieu (1977: 72–95; 1990: 52–65) introduces the notion of habitus to overcome the inherent deficiencies of objectivism and subjectivism. According to Bourdieu, habitus forms an ongoing generative dialectic between sedimented structures and practitioners’ interpretations and motives, which constantly produce and reproduce social practices. It consists of ‘systems of durable, transposable [embodied] dispositions’ of how to perceive, think and act that enable practitioners to respond and adjust to the unfolding contingencies of the situation at hand in such a way that give consistency and coherency to social practices over time (Bourdieu, 1977: 72). Although habitus provides constancy of social practices, it is not entirely circular and deterministic, but rather spirally defined through ‘the generative principle of regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 57). Actions can never be completely deterministic due to the unfolding contingencies of the situation at hand, to which practitioners constantly respond and adjust. Nor can actions be completely random as they are predisposed by sedimented structures and regularities making up social practices. Instead, people, through their embodied habitus, respond to the unfolding contingences of practice, not deterministically or arbitrarily, but in ways that seem sensible or reasonable within that practice (Bourdieu, 1990: 55). As Bourdieu (1998: 25) notes, ‘habitus is this kind of practical sense for what it is to be done in a given situation – what is called in sport a “feel” for the game, that is, the art of anticipating how a particular game will likely evolve, which is inscribed in the present state of play’. Not only habitus but also the concepts of ‘field’ and ‘capital’ play a critical role in Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Bourdieu regards society as a meaningful whole made up of interlocking fields of social practices, in which we are constantly engaged, such as the academic field, the business field, and the arts field. Various forms of capital such as symbolic, social, economic and cultural provide exchange values that enable as well as predispose practitioners to do certain things and not others within their particular field. The notions of field and capital are closely related to habitus in that what is seen as valuable and sought-after within the field shape the practitioners’ interpretation and motivation for carrying out specific actions in significant ways and, thus, the enactment of social practices. For example, the academic habitus making up the social practices within today’s OS field, is largely shaped 189

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

by OS researchers trying to accumulate valuable capital by getting published in prestigious journals, chasing academic titles and honourable positions and awards. Anthony Giddens’ practice theory

Giddens’ theory of practice is mainly articulated in his ‘structuration theory’. Similar to Bourdieu, Giddens takes as his point of departure the deep chasm between objectivism (structuralism and functionalism) and subjectivism (interpretive sociology) within social sciences. In order to transcend the problems generated by objectivism and subjectivism, Giddens (1979: 3) develops the notion of ‘duality of structure’ strongly influenced by Heidegger’s existential ontology. Simply put, duality of structure captures ‘the essential recursiveness of social life, as constituted in social practices: structure is both medium and outcome of practices. Structures enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and “exists” in the generating moments of this constitution’ (Giddens, 1979: 5). Hence, contrary to objectivism and subjectivism, the notion of duality of structure suggests that agency and structure do not oppose but presuppose each other in the constitution of social practices. But how can structure be both the medium that produces social practice and at the same time the outcome of social practices? In order to answer that question we need to elaborate further what Giddens means by ‘structure’. Giddens (1984: 17) conceptualizes structure as the ‘structuring properties . . . which make it possible for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and which lend them “systemic” form’. The structuring properties making up social practices are specific ‘rules’ and ‘resources’. By rules Giddens does not have in mind rules like, for example, traffic rules (e.g. ‘stop when red light’). Instead, he takes a more Wittgensteinian perspective and regards rules as something constantly invoked in the enactment of social practices (as knowing how to go on), namely ‘as techniques or generalizable procedures applied in the enactment/ reproduction of social practices’ (Giddens, 1979: 133). Giddens (1979: 100) conceptualizes resources as the specific capabilities employed in the enactment of social practices. Hence, in the ‘duality of structure’ structure is seen as the structuring properties of social practices, in the sense of the specific procedures and techniques (rules) actors apply and the capabilities (resources) they use in producing and reproducing social practices. Importantly, regarding structure as enacted procedures and capabilities means that structures do not exist independently from the actors enacting them. Rather, structure is only manifest ‘in its instantiations in such [social] practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents’ (Giddens, 1979: 130). It is in this sense that agents and structure form a duality: the structure of social practice requires agents to carry out its specific procedures using specific capabilities, at the same time as the agents require a distinct know-how of how to go on. Although agents enact social practice in a recursive manner, it does not mean that they mindlessly produce and reproduce it. Instead, they enact social practice in a reflective manner, in the sense of constantly monitoring the conduct of their practice. The reflexive form of knowledgeability that Giddens (1979: 57) refers to has the character of what he labels ‘practical consciousness: tacit knowledge that is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively’. According to Giddens (1984: 21–2), the structural properties, ‘expressed first and foremost in practical consciousness, [are] the very core of knowledgeability which specifically characterizes human agents’. In this sense, doing and reflexive monitoring are intra-related. As Shove et al. (2012: 5) aptly note, ‘making a batch

190

Practice theory

of cement mortar requires constant observation and adaptation: adding a bit more liquid, mixing, checking and adding again until the consistency is just right’. Hence, the ongoing reflexive monitoring that actors are involved in means that the duality of structure is not only recursive but, also, transformational (Giddens, 1979: 103–5): that is, actors’ ongoing adjustment of their procedures and capabilities means that the structural properties that enabled them to act in the first instance are simultaneously transformed. As Schatzki (1996: 290) notes, in this way, social practices, ‘extend themselves by continuously renewing the conditions that determine them’.3 Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory

Although both Bourdieu and Giddens have developed extensive theories of practice, Schatzki has probably outlined the most fully elaborated practice theory through a range of seminal publications (Schatzki, 1996, 2002, 2010). In elaborating his practice theory, Schatzki (1996, Ch1; 2002, Ch1) takes point of departure in the ontological chasm between the two master ontologies: individualism and socialism (which largely overlap with subjectivism and objectivism respectively in Bourdieu and Giddens’s work). Individualist ontologies stipulate that individuals and their interrelations ultimately constitute society. Accordingly, schools of thought based on an individualist ontology, such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology (for the most part) and neoclassical economics, place ‘actions, strategies, mental states, and rationality of individuals’ at the centre (Schatzki, 1996: 6). Socialism ontologies, on the other hand, stipulate that society or other collectives are ultimately defined by ‘a kind of totality that exists beyond its parts, and that this totality specify the nature and meaning of the parts’ (Schatzki, 1996: 2). Consequently, schools of thought underpinned by socialism ontologies try to understand and explain human action by identifying the (external) totality making up the social, such as particular structures or systems, and see how it determines human actions and social order. In order to transcend the problematic ‘either/or’ dichotomy of individualism and socialism, Schatzki aims to develop a practice theory that provides a ‘general conception of social life that is equal to the interwoven complexity and lack of totality emphasized by recent writers and underwrites better understanding of the social constitution of the individual’ (Schatzki, 1996: 10). In this theoretical endeavour, he draws primarily on Heidegger’s existential ontology and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (e.g. Schatzki, 1996: xi; Schatzki, 2002: xii; Schatzki, 2010: x). Following Heidegger (and Taylor), Schatzki (2002: 70) claims that the basic constitution of the human world is neither individuals nor societies, but social practices in which we are constantly engaged. Through socialization, education and work, we grow up in, embody and enact various everyday social practices, such as greeting, talking, eating, parenting and driving, as well as more work-related practices, such as teaching, nursing, managing and so on. As Dreyfus (1995: 34) observes, Heidegger shows that ‘human beings are a set of meaningful social practices and how these practices give rise to intelligibility and themselves can be made intelligible’. But how are social practices made up? According to Schatzki’s practice theory: ‘a practice is a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings and sayings linked by practical understandings, rules, teleoaffective structure, and general understanding’ (Schatzki, 2002: 87). Let us unpack this quote as a way to better understand the main thrust of Schatzki’s practice theory, using the practice of cooking as an illustration. First of all, that practice is ‘open and temporally evolving’ means that practices are not static but ongoing and ever changing through our constant engagement in them.

191

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

Second, all social practices are made up of a range of activities comprised of specific doings and sayings. For example, cooking is made up of a range of doings and sayings in which chefs are constantly engaged, such as sourcing ingredients, preparing ingredients, cooking dishes and plating the dishes, while also uttering requests, commands, etc. Moreover, the activities that compose practices are always bound up with material arrangements (artefacts, things, raw material etc.) (Schatzki, 2013). For example, the activities of cooking involve material arrangements of ingredients, knives, cutting boards, strainers, ladles, whisks, brushes, scales etc. Third, the nexuses of doings and sayings making up a practice are organized by four closely related components, namely practical understandings, rules, teleoaffective structures and general understandings (Schatzki, 2013: 3). Practical understanding involves certain abilities about how to go on, that is, how to carry out the specific doings and sayings of a practice. Practical understanding in Schatzki’s (2002: 79) account, is therefore similar to Bourdieu’s habitus and Giddens’s practical consciousness in that it is an embodied ‘skill or capacity that underlies’ the activities of a practice. For example, chefs in a restaurant kitchen embody a practical understanding of how to prepare ingredients, cook dishes and plate the dishes. Another component that joins the doings and sayings of a particular practice is rules. By rules Schatzki means explicitly formulated principles, instructions and prescripts that direct people to carry out the doings and saying of a given practice in specific ways, particularly by taking into account and adhering ‘to the same rules’ (Schatzki, 2002: 79). For example, chefs in a particular restaurant typically follow specific recipes and instructions in their cooking as a way to provide consistency and sameness of the dishes offered on the menu. Teleoaffective structure is another, perhaps the most crucial, component of organizing an array of doings and sayings into a specific practice. The teleoaffective structure of a practice is made up of a range of normative and hierarchically related ends its practitioners are supposed to pursue. For example, a restaurant chef is sourcing a specific fish with the purpose of making sashimi for the sake of being a Japanese restaurant. The ends actors pursue indicate what matters to actors, thus, furnishing them with an affective orientation. Finally, general understanding, organizes the doings and sayings of a practice through a shared sense of common concerns and standards, such as what matters and what doesn’t, what is worthy and what is trivial, what is proper and what is not proper behaviour. For example, the chefs in a Japanese restaurant embody a general understanding about what are proper and not proper ways of cooking Japanese food. Taken together, Schatzki (1996: 110–32) argues that the social practices in which actors are constantly engaged provide intelligibility to what they do and who they are in the sense that human action, beliefs, desires etc. presuppose social practices. It is only on the basis of specific practices we can make sense of what we do, what counts as equipment, how we use equipment, and who we are. For example, being a teacher carrying out specific teaching activities like having discussion with students would be unthinkable without the social practice of teaching. In other words, it is not the individual as such nor an abstract structure beyond the individual, but the practice of teaching that enables us to act and to understand ourselves as teachers. From the above, we hope it is clear that all three general theories of practice owe a big philosophical debt to Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of intellectualism permeating most of the philosophical tradition. Each one (Bourdieu, Giddens and Schatzki) in his own way, elaborates on what they see as the critical aspects of practice. The common thread running through their analyses is their effort to overcome and move beyond the subjectivism–objectivism divide by showing that embodied human actors, embedded in sociomaterial practices, tacitly draw on the understandings, rules and resources of the practices they partake, in order to undertake situated action, thus reproducing and changing practices over time. We will see next how this insight has informed research on organizational knowledge. 192

Practice theory

Domain-specific theories of practice: the case of organizational knowledge Several domain-specific theories of practice can be found in OS. These, inter alia, include a performative approach to routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), understanding strategy as practice (Whittington and Vaara, 2012; Golsorkhi et al., 2010), a stucturationist approach to technology (Orlikowski, 2000), and a practice-based view on organizational knowledge and learning (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini et al., 2003; Sandberg and Pinnington, 2009; Tsoukas, 1996, 2009, 2011). For the sake of illustration we will follow the latter, especially organizational knowledge. A practice perspective on organizational knowledge and learning takes seriously the philosophical insight that explicit interpretations are necessarily based on specific social practices, which transcend unhelpful dualisms (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011: 1242). Here, we will consider two such dualisms: individual versus collective knowledge and tacit versus explicit knowledge. The two dualisms may be explicitly related, as in Spender’s (1996) typology. According to an intellectualist or cognitivist view, knowledge is seen as held either by an individual or a collective. A good example of this dualistic way of thinking is in Crossan et al.’s (1999) influential 4I framework of organizational learning. The authors distinguish four processes (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing) that occur at three distinct levels: individual, group and organizational. Thus, for example, they note that intuiting, understood as preconscious pattern recognition, ‘is a uniquely individual process’. Individual processes are thought of as ontologically independent of, and contingently linked with, collective processes. A prime example of the second form of dualism is Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) influential typology of knowledge creation. For the authors, ‘knowledge [in organizations] is created through the interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 62). Moreover, tacit and explicit knowledge are thought to be ‘independent’ and ‘convertible’ to each other. The ‘conversion’ of tacit to explicit knowledge and vice versa, gives rise to four modes of knowledge conversion, each one characterized by a particular content. Research informed by practice theory eschews such dualisms, which it regards as unproductive. Individual knowledge is possible precisely because of the sociomaterial practices in which individuals engage (Orlikowski, 2002). Intuition is achieved by virtue of individuals having been socialized in a particular practice and having been taught to competently use concepts, rules and tools in that practice (Klein, 2003). Tacit is not set against explicit knowledge; the two are, rather, mutually constituted (Tsoukas, 1996, 2009, 2011). Individuals use their knowledge to draw distinctions and see patterns because they have been trained to do so within a collective domain of action (a relational whole). Thus, for a medical student to learn to discern the medically significant pattern of an x-ray picture, she necessarily draws on a collectively produced and sustained body of knowledge (Polanyi, 1962: 101; Tsoukas and Vladimirou, 2001), guided by more experienced others. Similarly, for a photocopier repair technician to be able to diagnose a faulty photocopier, he needs to draw on a specific body of expertise, which is produced and sustained by the company that makes photocopiers and by the community of technicians as a whole (Orr, 1996). The reason this is so is that the key categories implicated in human action, such as, for example, ‘physiological variation’ and ‘pathological change’ (Polanyi, 1962: 101), ‘faulty photocopier’ (Orr, 1996), or a ‘clunky flute’ (Cook and Brown, 1999; Cook and Yanow, 1996), derive their meanings from the way they have been used within particular relational wholes or forms of life (the medical community, the technicians’ community, the flute makers’ community respectively). In other words, knowing how to act within a collective domain of action (a practice) 193

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

is to make competent use of the categories and the distinctions constituting that domain. Knowledgeability, as Bourdieu (1990) and Giddens (1984) have noted, forms as an inherent feature of being a member of a practice. Hence, tacit and explicit knowledge are not contingently linked but mutually constituted (i.e. internally related). Tacit knowledge can be formalized and explicitly communicated if we focus our attention on it. And vice versa: explicit knowledge, no matter how abstract and codified it is (Boisot, 1995), is always grounded on a tacit component. Tacit and explicit knowledge are two sides of the same coin – being mutually constituted, they cannot ‘interact’, nor ‘convert’ to one another. As Cook and Brown (1999: 385) aptly remark, when we ride a bicycle, the explicit knowledge does not lie inside the tacit knowledge in a dormant form; it is rather generated in the context of riding with the aid of tacit knowledge. If we persist in misunderstanding tacit knowledge as explicit knowledge-in-waiting, we risk hypostatizing tacit knowledge and treating it as a set of quasi-rules waiting to be discovered. However, the distinctive feature of tacit knowledge is that it provides the unarticulated background of what is taken for granted, which is a necessary prerequisite for action. Therefore, from a practice theory perspective, knowledge in organizations is better appreciated if hitherto known dualisms are abandoned. All interpretations (articulated knowledge) are based on an unarticulated background practice providing subsidiary particulars, which are tacitly integrated by embodied agents. These particulars reside in sociomaterial-cum-discursive practices, in which agents are embedded. ‘Knowing is an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted in everyday practice’ (Orlikowski, 2002: 252). The locus of understanding is not so much in the head as in the practice individuals partake. As Lave (1993: 9) rightly notes: knowledge ‘cannot be pinned down to the heads or bodies of individuals or to assigned tasks or to external tools or to the environment, but lies instead in the relations among them’.

Discussion and conclusions As argued earlier, practice theory aims at overcoming and moving beyond unhelpful dualisms (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Tsoukas, 2005). More specifically, it aims to capture the basic understandings manifested in how actors and materials are entwined in a relational whole, over time. Moreover, seeing actors as embedded in practices orients researchers to explore how actors follow rules and handle their experiences in enacting the practices they partake in. In that sense, practice theory is processual: viewing the enactment of practice as a performance implies focusing on how actors skilfully accomplish what they do over time. In other words, practice theory has the potential to bring OS scholars closer to understanding how organizational practices are constituted and, thus, being able to developing theories more relevant to organizational practitioners. However, although domain specific theories of practice emphasize relationality, many are still captured by the very dualistic ontology they criticize (Dall’Alba and Sandberg, 2014; Fox, 2006; Sandberg and Dall’Alba, 2009). As Dall’Alba and Sandberg (2014: 283–4) note, while practice-based approaches regard subject and object as interrelated, several of these approaches continue to treat them as separate entities that become related through practice. As a consequence, these practice-based approaches still operate within the subject–object constellation, albeit in a more sophisticated manner than conventional approaches to work and learning. In order to avoid these shortcomings and to further advance the domain-specific theories of practice, we highlight below four critical features of practices that are of special relevance to OS. 194

Practice theory

First, taking entwinement as the point of departure highlights the logic of practice in the sense of the internal relations between the components of the relational whole and, thus, the non-contingent manner in which practitioners are related to their practices. This does not preclude historical contingency but does underscore the taken-for-granted nature of reality members of a practice experience. For example, there are many ways in which the practice of teaching may exist across space and time (hence, historical contingency) but teachers are, at any point in time, internally (i.e. non-contingently) linked with the practice they partake in. The ends to be achieved, the standards of excellence pursued, and the key distinctions constituting the practice are part of the inarticulate background making up the practice, which actors tacitly draw upon in enacting the practice (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011: 344). Second, practices are simultaneously social, discursive and material. They are social insofar as the norms and rules actors follow are intersubjectively defined and collectively sustained. Intersubjective meanings are shared not so much in the sense that each actor holds the ‘same’ meaning in her individual mind, as in the sense that actors are part of a common reference world, which is constitutive of their individual mind. Practices are discursive, since they involve the use of signs ‘for which there are norms of right and wrong use’ (Harre and Gillett, 1994: 28–9). And they are material in a strong sense that organizational life, from the most mundane to the most knowledge-intensive, forms a nexus of ‘constitutive entanglements (e.g. configurations, networks, associations, mangles, assemblages, etc.) of humans and technologies’ (Orlikowski, 2010: 135). Taken together, the sociality, discursivity and materiality of organizational life imply that the meanings underlying human agency are not just in the minds of individuals but in the practices themselves and that the capacities for action are crucially shaped by how intersubjective meanings are entangled with technological/material affordances. Third, the embodied nature of agency is important for practice theory. Membership in a practice is embodied in the sense that the person who enacts a practice embodies it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) and is susceptible to certain affects (Schatzki, 1996). For example, being a member of a particular practice, a car repairer (Harper, 1987) or a photocopier service technician (Orr, 1996) develops a deep understanding of materials, tools and techniques, as well as an affective orientation concerning what matters, which become incorporated in his body as specific car repair or photocopier repair know-how. Similarly, becoming a member of a practice consists in training the body through ‘basic-level interactions with the environment’ (Lakoff, 1987: 297) and the forming of preconceptual experience tied to gestalt perception, mental imagery and motor movement (Lakoff, 1987: 267–8). As Bourdieu (1990: 54) remarked, the embodiment of practice ‘tends to guarantee the “correctness” of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms’. Fourth, practice theory sensitizes researchers to the temporality of practice (Hernes, 2014; Schatzki, 2010). The relational whole of a practice is temporal, not only in the sense of taking place in time but, more fundamentally, as immediate anticipations in the actual carrying out of action (Shotter, 2006; Bourdieu, 1990). The temporal structure of a practice, namely its rhythm, tempo, and directionality, is constitutive of its meaning (Bourdieu, 1990: 81). This is most clearly seen in sports, in which engagement in a game is a uniquely temporal experience. Bourdieu (1990: 81–2) has remarked insightfully on this as follows: A player who is involved and caught up in the game adjusts not to what he sees but to what he fore-sees, sees in advance in the directly perceived present; he passes the ball not to the spot where his team-mate is but to the spot he will reach – before his opponent – a moment later, anticipating the anticipations of the others. . . . One only has to stand outside the game, as the observer does, in order to sweep away the urgency, the appeals, the threats, the steps to be taken, which make up the real, really lived-in, world. 195

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

In conclusion, practice theory offers important insights to OS researchers. In studying organizational phenomena and capturing the logic underlying organizational practices, practice theory urges researchers to: (a) take practices as their point of departure and simultaneously consider their social, discursive and material aspects – what categories and rules members of a practice follow, for what ends, with whom, with what tools; (b) look for how practitioners competently perform doings and saying, drawing on what resources, with what results; and (c) search for distinct ways in which performances are enacted in particular contexts and junctures.

Notes 1 2

3

For further discussion of Heidegger’s existential ontology, see Al-Almoudi and O’Mahoney in this volume. Bourdieu is not thinking about ‘objective’ in a strong sense but rather in the sense that activities, routines, norms etc. that have been developed and agreed on, have become naturalized and sedimented and therefore experienced as ‘objective’. It is an intersubjective objectivity, not objective in an absolute sense. For further discussion of Gidden’s structuration theory, see Jones this volume.

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. and Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36: 247–71. Bacharach, S. (1989). Organizational theories. Some criteria for evaluation. Academy of Management Review, 14: 496–515. Bartky, S. (1979). Heidegger and the modes of world disclosure. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 40: 212–36. Boisot, M.H. (1995). Information Space. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braver, L. (2012). Groundless Grounds. A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006). Strategy as practical coping: a Heideggerian perspective. Organization Studies, 27: 635–55. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2010). New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Cook, S.D.N. and Brown, J.S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: the generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization Science, 10: 381–400. Cook, S. and Yanow, D. (1996). Culture and organizational learning, in Cohen, M.D. and Sproull, L.S. (eds), Organizational Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 430–59. Crossan, M.M, Lane, H.W. and White, R.E. (1999). An organizational learning framework: from intuition to institution. Academy of Management Review, 24: 522–37. Dall’Alba, G. and Sandberg, J. (2014). A phenomenological perspective on researching work and learning, in Billett, S. et al. (eds), International Handbook of Research in Professional and Practice-Based Learning. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 369–91. Dreyfus, H. L. (1995). Being-in-the-world: a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, Dreyfus, H. L. (2003). Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault. Working Paper, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley. Feldman, M. and Orlikowski, W. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization Science, 5: 1240–53. Feldman, M. and Pentland, B.T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48: 94–118. 196

Practice theory

Fox, S. (2006). Inquiries of every imaginable kind: ethnomethodology, practical action and the new socially situated learning theory. The Sociological Review, 54: 426–45. Gadamer, H.G. (1980). Practical philosophy as a model for the human sciences. Research in Phenomenology, 9: 74–85. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizational knowledge: the texture of workplace learning. Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. London: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Golsorkhi, D., Rouleau, L., Seidl, D. and Vaara, E. (eds) (2010). Strategy as Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, D. (1987). Working Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harre, R. and Gillett, G. (1994). The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New York: SCM Press. Hernes, T. (2014). A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inwagen, P. (2001). Ontology, Identity and Modality: essays in metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, G. (2003). The Power of Intuition. New York: Currency-Doubleday. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lave, J. (1993). The practice of learning, in Chaiklin, S. and Lave, J. (eds), Understanding Practice: perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–32. Law, J. and Hassard, J. (eds) (1999). Actor Network Theory and After. Boston: Blackwell. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miettinen, R., Samra-Fredericks, D. and Yanow, D. (2009). Re-turn to practice: an introductory essay. Organization Studies, 30: 1309–27. Nicolini, D. (2013). Practice Theory, Work, and Organization. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicolini, D., Gherardi, S. and Yanow, D. (eds) (2003). Knowing in Organizations: a practicebased approach. Arnmonk: M. E. Sharpe. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. New York: Oxford University Press. Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11: 404–28. Orlikowski, W. (2002). Knowing in practice: enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13: 249–73. Orlikowski, W. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28: 1435–48. Orlikowski, W. (2010). The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34: 125–41. Orr, J. (1996). Talking about Machines. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reckwitz. A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: a development in culturalist theorising. European Journal of Social Theory, 5: 243–63. Robbins, S. (1989). Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Rouse, J. (2007). Practice Theory. Division I Faculty Publications, Wesleyan University. Paper 43. Sandberg, J. and Dall’Alba, G. (2009). Returning to practice anew: a life-world perspective. Organization Studies, 30: 1349–68. Sandberg, J. and Pinnington, A. (2009). Professional competence as ways of being: an existential phenomenological perspective. Journal of Management Studies, 46: 1138–70. Sandberg, J. and Tsoukas, H. (2011). Grasping the logic of practice: theorizing through practical rationality. Academy of Management Review, 36: 338–60. 197

Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas

Schatzki, T. (1996). Social Practices: a Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, T.R. (2002). The Site of the Social: a philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T. (2005). The sites of organizations. Organization Studies, 26: 465–84. Schatzki, T.R. (2010). The Timespace of Human Activity. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Schatzki, T. (2013). A primer on practices, in Higgs, J. et al. (eds), Practice-Based Education: perspectives and strategies. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, pp. 13–26. Schatzki, T.R., Knorr-Cetina, K. and Savigny, E. (eds) (2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schön, D.A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Shotter, J. (2006). Understanding process from within: an argument for ‘withness’-thinking. Organization Studies, 27: 585–604. Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of Social Practice: everyday and how it changes. London: Sage. Simpson, B. (2009). Pragmatism, Mead and the practice turn. Organization Studies, 12: 1329–47. Spender, J-C. (1996). Making knowledge the basis of a dynamic theory of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17 (Special Winter Issue): 45–62. Stueber, K. (1994). Practice, indeterminacy and private language: Wittgenstein’s dissolution of skepticism. Philosophical Investigations, 17: 14–36. Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. (1993a). Engaged agency and background in Heidegger, in Guignon, C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 317–36. Taylor, C. (1993b). To follow a rule, in Calhoun, C., LiPuma, E. and Postone, M. (eds), Bourdieu: critical perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 45–60. Taylor, F.W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper. Tejedor, C. (2011). Starting with Wittgenstein. London: Continuum. Tengblad, S. (ed.) (2012). The Work of Managers: towards a practice theory of management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thevenot, L. (2001). Pragmatic regimes governing the engagement with the world, in Schatzki, T.R., Knorr-Cetina, K. and Savigny, E. (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 56–73. Tsoukas, H. (1996). The firm as a distributed knowledge system: a constructionistic approach. Strategic Management Journal, 17: 11–25. Tsoukas, H. (1998). The word and the world: a critique of representationalism in management research. International Journal of Public Administration, 21: 781– 817. Tsoukas, H. (2005). Complex Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas, H. (2009). A dialogical approach to the creation of new knowledge in organizations. Organization Science, 20: 941–57. Tsoukas, H. (2011). How should we understand tacit knowledge? A phenomenological view, in EasterbySmith, M. and Lyles, M.A. (eds), Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management (2nd edn). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 453–76. Tsoukas, H. and Vladimirou, E. (2001). What is organizational knowledge? Journal of Management Studies, 38: 973–93. Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whittington, R. and Vaara, E. (2012). Strategy-as-practice: taking social practices seriously. The Academy of Management Annals, 6: 285–336. Winch, P. (1958). The Idea of Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1987). Understanding Computers and Cognition. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (2nd edn) (trans. G.E M. Anscombe). Oxford: Blackwell.

198

13 Pragmatism and organization studies Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to give an introductory account of the main tenets of a philosophical approach called ‘pragmatism’. Pragmatism has its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the work of the American philosophers Charles S. Pierce, William James, John Dewey and others. It has experienced a renaissance in recent years under the auspices of modern philosophers such as Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, Hilary Putnam, and increasingly, many others. These more modern philosophers have established a myriad of connections to other intellectual movements and to other philosophers. For instance Rorty writes a great deal about the connections between Dewey and so-called Continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and others. Little work has been done applying pragmatism to organization studies. There is a stream of work in business ethics especially in what has come to be called ‘stakeholder theory’ (Freeman et al., 2010), and the beginnings of a stream of work in organization theory (Kelemen and Rumens, 2013; Wicks and Freeman, 1998). In the second section we give a brief historical view of the development of pragmatism. In the third section we explain some central pragmatist ideas, even though not all pragmatists will agree. In the fourth section we argue why these ideas are important for organization scholars.

A brief history and key references It is important to note that pragmatism has been developed as a way to understand a set of traditional philosophical problems, rather than as a way to understand how human beings create value and trade with each other (business and management). However, we believe that a pragmatist approach to business and management offers great potential in practice and in theory. Pragmatism developed in opposition to some traditional philosophical claims. The first kind of claim – typical of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy – is that thinking must be somehow founded on a priori first principles. So, when James defends his ‘radical empiricism’, he is pitting it against the sort of theorizing that is thought to be prior to any empirical observation. For example, while science and the scientific method play vital roles the authority of science can be over-stated (e.g. positivism). Pragmatists are (generally) at great pain to demonstrate the 199

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

relevance of moral thinking alongside scientific thinking. As we read the sample passages below, we may have cause to recognize this reductionist vice that the authors seek to pry open. Pragmatism shares, broadly, the features described below. At the margins, however, pragmatism comes in as many flavours as there are scholars writing about it. In 1908, Arthur O. Lovejoy isolated 13 different variations of pragmatism – a number Richard Bernstein called ‘far too conservative’ (Bernstein, 2010: 5). At the periphery there are arguments about who should be included in the Pantheon and who was (or is), a closet pragmatist whether they claimed the mantle or not. We will not attempt to summarize or adjudicate these questions here. The authors we summarize here were all quite wide-ranging in their interests and writings. We have isolated representative passages from each writer to give the reader a sense of each author’s style. While Charles Sanders Peirce1 is typically regarded as the first pragmatist, later in life, Peirce began describing his own work as ‘pragmaticism’ (‘a word ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’) in order to distinguish it from what pragmatism had grown into. This quasi-apostasy notwithstanding, Peirce is credited by the other early pragmatists as the originator. Durand and Vaara (2009) adapt some of Peirce’s work for uses in understanding strategic management research. Here is a taste of Peirce’s (1878[1965]) work: From all these sophisms we shall be perfectly safe so long as we reflect that the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action; and that whatever there is connected with a thought, but irrelevant to its purpose, is an accretion to it, but no part of it. (Peirce, 1878[1965]: 256)

To develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves. (Peirce, 1878[1965]: 257) William James, considered the father of experimental psychology, is among the most accessible and reader-friendly of the early pragmatists. Combining a capacity for deep thought with remarkable writing skills and an eschewal of jargon, his work was able to speak to both scholarly and popular audiences alike. Margolis and Walsh (2003) make good use of James’s work in their influential discussion of businesses’ social initiatives. Here are representative passages from James (1907[2014]): In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute, based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it, – and let me speak now confidentially, as it were, and merely in my own private person, – it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account. It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which I am the enemy, I find that it entangles me and metaphysical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. But as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays to me; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principal. (James, 1907[2014]: 78) A prominent public intellectual with a long-time interest in education, John Dewey emphasized the role that humans have in creating our world, not merely acting and reacting 200

Pragmatism

within it. Dewey consistently emphasized the role of art, literature and morals – in addition to science – in co-creating our world. Dewey’s work was deeply influential on the later work of Richard Rorty (see below); Mahoney (1993) relies on Dewey and others to examine the role of determinism in strategic management. The following passages (Dewey, 1908[1998]) are representative of his critique of prior philosophizing and his beliefs in the centrality of values: If we suppose the traditions of philosophic discussion wiped out and philosophy starting afresh from the most active tendencies of to-day, – those striving in social life, in science, in literature, and art, – one can hardly imagine any philosophic view springing up and gaining credence, which did not give large place, in its scheme of things, to the practical and personal, and to them without employing disparaging terms, such as phenomenal, merely subjective, and so on. (Dewey, 1908[1998]: 125) To frame a theory of knowledge which makes it necessary to deny the validity of moral ideas, or else to refer them to some other and separate kind of universe from that of common sense and science, is both provincial and arbitrary. The pragmatist has at least tried to face, and not to dodge, the question of how it is that moral and scientific ‘knowledge’ can both hold of one and the same world. And whatever the difficulties and his proffered solution, the conception the scientific judgments are to be assimilated to moral is closer to common sense than is the theory that validity is to be denied of moral judgments because they do not square with a preconceived theory of the nature of the world to which scientific judgments must refer. (Dewey, 1908[1998]: 127) After a bit of a lull in philosophical interest in the middle part of the twentieth century, pragmatism was forcefully revived with the writings of Richard Rorty.2 Controversial among mainstream philosophers, Rorty considered language as the medium for making sense of the world and the poet (in a broad sense) as the one who shows us new and better ways to live. As with others on our list, Rorty was an apostate with a history in analytic philosophy. Wicks and Freeman’s (1998) work bears the marks of Rorty’s influence. The following passages give a sense of Rorty’s (2010) distinctive writing style: communities are held together by agreement on what counts as coherent, but make progress only when linguistic innovators break this agreement. One of their strategies is by talking about objects that we have no agreed-upon ways of talking about . . . Without a consensus to break, innovation would be pointless. Without innovation the crust of convention would never be broken. The alternation between the two has made it possible for human beings to move from poem to poem, from language game to language game, and from poorer to richer forms of life. (Rorty, 2010: 194) Like Peirce, Hilary Putnam is a mathematician as well as a pragmatist philosopher. Richard Rorty (1991) calls him ‘the most important contemporary philosopher to call himself a pragmatist’. Purnell and Freeman (2012) rely on Putnam’s collapsing of the fact/value distinction in assessing the quality of ethics conversations among investment bankers. While Putnam’s writing has perhaps less lyrical quality (poetry) to it than James or Rorty, it is less technical and jargon-laden than Peirce; it is clear, careful and precise. This is evident in the passages below (Putnam, 2002): There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ – and to draw it in such a way that ‘values’ are put outside the realm of rational argument 201

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

all together. For one thing, it is much easier to say, ‘that’s a value judgment’, meaning, ‘that’s just a matter of subjective preference’, and to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination. . . . The worst thing about the fact/value dichotomy is that in practice it functions as a discussion-stopper, and not just a discussionstopper, but a thought-stopper. (Putnam, 2002: 43ff) More recently, Hilary Putnam calls Richard J. Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn, ‘by far the best and most sophisticated account of recent and present-day pragmatist thought’. With chapters centrally focused on Peirce, James, Dewey, Hegel, Putnam and Rorty among others, this book is an excellent critical introduction to the history of pragmatism, the surface of which is barely scratched here. Many, many others could have been on this list including, but not limited to O.W. Holmes, R.W. Emerson, C.I. Lewis, W.V.O. Quine, L. Wittgenstein, and C. West. And there are pragmatist interpretations of many others besides (e.g. Bernstein has a chapter entitled ‘Jürgen Habermas’s Kantian Pragmatism’). But any serious investigation into pragmatism and its potential role in the study of organizations must eventually contend with the work of the authors above.

What do pragmatists believe? While there are almost as many versions of pragmatism as there are pragmatist philosophers, there is a great deal of agreement on a few general principles, many of which are about what counts as doing work in philosophy that is useful. We isolate the following commonalities: 1 2 3 4

All ‘theory’ is based in experience and practice. Most dualisms and dichotomies are at best misleading. Framing and language use is central to understanding the world. Hope and freedom should be the goals of discourse rather than ‘truth’.

All ‘theory’ is based in experience and practice The founders of pragmatism, Pierce, James and Dewey, all believed that good thinking was rooted in experience. They talk about the primacy of both practice and experience. And, they all had an idea of experience as a primary conceptualization of humans encountering the world. Dewey especially thought that our conceptual apparatus evolved to solve problems. We became language users somewhere in our evolutionary history as it gave us an ability to solve complex problems, and an advantage over some of our natural competitors and predators. Dewey (1930[1998]) writes: Mankind has hardly inquired what would happen if the possibilities of experience were seriously explored and exploited. There has been much systematic exploration in science and much frantic exploitation in politics, business, and amusement. But this attention has been, so to say, incidental and in contravention to the professedly ruling scheme of belief. It has not been the product of belief in the power of experience to furnish organizing principles and directive ends. (Dewey, 1930 [1998]: 23) These pragmatists eschewed the idea of theorizing for the sake of theorizing that characterizes so much of contemporary philosophy, not to mention much of management theory. Pragmatists see the point of intellectual life as solving real problems that come from experience. 202

Pragmatism

Gregory Pappas (2008) suggests that another related hallmark of Dewey’s thought is ‘seeing problems from the inside’. What does this problem feel like if you are experiencing it yourself? It is often too easy to intellectualize a problem away, or simply use one of our favourite theories to understand the problem. Pappas suggest that this is seeing the problem as a spectator, and that doing so loses most of what we gain when we actually have an experience. A good example is Dewey’s approach to ethics where he does not begin with a theory like utilitarianism, or deontology, or virtue, but he begins by trying to understand the particular aspects of a moral problem from the inside. As we see how these aspects are related to one another, and to other problems we have had, we can draw on these more theoretical ideas to help solve the problem. But, we are not trying to prove the theories in any case. Every situation is different, but there are common aspects. The pragmatists look for the particularity as well as the generality in experiences.

Most dualisms and dichotomies are at best misleading Much of modern philosophy depends on a set of dichotomies or dualisms that contrast ways of seeing the world. For instance, ‘mind versus body’, ‘external world versus internal world’, ‘things as they appear versus things in themselves’, ‘theoretical versus empirical’, ‘science versus non science’, ‘self-interest versus altruism’, ‘facts versus values’, etc. The list is almost endless and it has been said that Dewey never met a dichotomy that he didn’t want to collapse. Quine (1951) identified two of these dualisms as important dogmas of empiricism that are regrettably present in current management thinking as well. The first was the theory–observation distinction, or what philosophers would call ‘analytic–synthetic’ distinction. Analytic sentences were true by definition and synthetic sentences were true by virtue of their relationship to the world. The idea from the positivists was that certain terms were theoretical terms while other terms were observational (data), and that data stood in a relationship of confirmation or disconfirmation to the theoretical terms. Quine argued that there was no way to enforce this distinction without appealing to a set of terms that were circular in their meaning. Dewey’s version of the same argument was that the data that you look for is already at least partially contained in how you frame a hypothesis. Theory does bear a connection to the world, but only in terms of theory as a whole, not particular hypotheses. Quine’s dictum is that ‘[O]ur statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body’ (Quine, 1951: 38) People always bring their background theories, disciplines, ideas, etc. with them. In a similar way, Hilary Putnam has argued that facts and values are entangled (see quoted passage above), much in the way that theory and data are entangled. Putnam’s example is that to call someone ‘cruel’ is to state a fact, if they are acting cruelly, and it is to make a value judgement at the same time, since calling someone cruel is to disapprove of them. Much of our language works this way. Putnam and Bernstein would argue that facts and values are interwoven with theory and practice, so that facts, values, and interpretations are always relevant to some interpretive community or other.

Framing and language use is central to understanding the world Most pragmatists would agree with Wittgenstein when he argued that we should not look to a world of meanings of words to understand language, but we should look to how the words are used. When children learn a language they learn what the words will do, what problems they will solve and what problems they will not solve. Meanings emerge out of these uses and problems solved, as ‘short hands’ or ‘rules of thumb’. They are not a representation of the 203

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

relationship of language to the world. Indeed most modern pragmatists would argue that many people (philosophers) misunderstand the nature of language. As language-using primates we managed to coordinate our behaviour in powerful ways to become the dominant species on the planet. Indeed Tomasello and his colleagues (2012) have suggested that human evolution selects for being ‘good collaborators’. We coordinate our behaviour by making marks and noises that indicate what we are doing. Of course this is now very sophisticated yielding many vocabularies in fields as diverse as mixing concrete and quantum mechanics. According to philosopher Donald Davidson, language is an unbroken whole. By that he means that we can’t divide up language into different ‘mind sets’ or ‘conceptual schemes’ that are wholly different from each other. He argues that one of the main mistakes in both science and social science is the idea that such a ‘scheme-content distinction’ is possible. He articulates the problem of conceptual relativism as follows: Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. There may be no translating from one scheme to another in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes, and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another. (Davidson, 1984: 183) Davidson then argues the idea of a total failure to translate from one conceptual scheme to another makes no sense, and then shows how even a partial failure to translate doesn’t imply separate conceptual schemes. Language is all we have. Indeed even though we may not know how to navigate from one mindset to the other, it has to be possible even if sometimes it isn’t very useful. For instance, what does the vocabulary of nineteenth century romantic poetry have to do with the vocabulary of twenty-first century organization studies? One might find that the passion present in the stanzas of nineteenth century romantic poetry is simply missing in current organization studies. Such a comparison might lead to a question about why that is the case, and a call for a renewed vocabulary for understanding our humanity in organizations. The pragmatist program of seeing what problems vocabularies solve and why some are better than others, and how some can be enriched by comparison with others, yields very different methods for studying organizations than are currently used in the most scholarship on management and organizations.

Hope and freedom should be the goals of discourse rather than ‘truth’ When many scholars hear the word ‘pragmatism’ they immediately associate it with the idea that ‘truth is what is useful’. This often cuts against the very reasons that scholars have chosen their field, i.e. to ‘get to the truth of the matter’. In fact, many pragmatists have a far more nuanced view of ‘truth’, and there has been substantial philosophical debate about the idea in the literature among pragmatists. For instance, Davidson believes that even if we give up the idea of an ‘uninterpreted reality’ to be approximated by language, a view of objective truth is still possible. Davidson writes: Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but 204

Pragmatism

re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. (Davidson, 1984: 198) Rorty on the other hand, thinks that the idea of truth is best understood as reminding us that any belief that we have is potentially revisable. Knowledge for Rorty is the idea of warranted assertability, and whether a claim is warranted is largely a matter of an interpretive community. The idea of an assertion being true reminds us that all the evidence for assertion may not be in. Rorty argues that vocabularies can be useful ways to solve problems or not. In that spirit, Hilary Putnam suggests that if you want to know why a square peg won’t fit into a round hole, the vocabulary of molecular structure won’t work very well (atoms and molecules being mostly empty space). There are lots of ways to talk about the world, and no one of them gets at the world ‘as it really is’. Rorty has gone further than most here by claiming that hope and freedom are more tangible goals than truth. By this he means engaging in the search for solidarity with others, seeing ‘them’ as ‘us’ rather than some outside ‘other’. He writes: The trouble with aiming at truth is that you would not know when you had reached it, even if you had in fact reached it. But you can aim at ever more justification, the assuagement of ever more doubt. Analogously you cannot aim at ‘doing what is right’, because you will never know if you have hit the mark. Long after you are dead, better informed and more sophisticated people may judge your action to have been a tragic mistake, just as they may judge your scientific beliefs as intelligible only by reference to an obsolete paradigm. But you can aim at ever more sensitivity to pain, and ever greater satisfaction of ever more various needs. Pragmatists think that the idea of something nonhuman luring us human beings on should be replaced with the idea of getting more and more human beings into our community – of taking the needs and interests and views of more and more diverse human beings into account. (Rorty, 1999: 82) What these ideas mean for research is that we need to engage in a conversation that at once moves across vocabularies. When researchers embrace a plurality of metaphors it can unsettle the dominant paradigm and provide a broader toolkit from which to craft a better world. In order to generate a plurality of metaphors and stories, researchers would be better served to relax assumptions about truth and focus instead on conversation. Conversation is where different perspectives encounter one another and form the basis for a constructive dialogue about the cash-value of particular metaphors.

Pragmatism and organization studies In 1959 the Ford and Carnegie Foundations issued separate reports on the state of universitybased business schools in the US. These reports were highly critical of the low standards and rigour in a majority of business schools and sought to instigate change by infusing these institutions with a dose of the newly emerging ‘management science’ – including a methodology for managerial decision-making honed during World War II. This new decision-making science included tools such as decision analysis, game theory and insights from emerging behavioural science. The hope was that knowledge from these new disciplines would allow managers to make decisions using reason and analysis rather than intuition and judgement. To realize the vision of a scientifically based business school and management profession, a new kind of faculty was needed, ‘one focused more on fundamental research than on descriptive 205

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

analysis, and deriving decision making principles more from theory than from existing practice’ (Khurana, 2007: 271). Therefore new faculty were trained in behavioural sciences, particularly economics, and were encouraged to increase research productivity and publish in academic journals to raise the research profile of their institutions. Just five years after the publication of the Ford report, faculty at the 25 leading business schools in the US were significantly more research oriented and published more in academic journals. This new emphasis on science brought with it a positivist epistemology, rather than a science based on Dewey’s pragmatic experimentation. Positivism makes the assumption that the study of business and organizations can occur through a scientific approach that is value free and is superior to nonscientific methods because it corresponds to objective reality. Astley (1985: 497) argues that positivism embraces a conventional model of scientific progress as cumulative discovery of objective truth, where knowledge grows linearly as new data are added to the existing stock of research findings. Positivism, and its newer incarnations post-positivism and neo-positivism, are all attempts to uncover objective Truth or True Reality. Post-positivism differs from positivism in holding that reality can be known only probabilistically, and hence verification is not possible. Neopositivism asserts that science must deal in exact descriptions and generalization, both of which require ‘the quantitative statement’. Both post- and neo-positivism share the belief that science should not – and cannot – deal with value statements. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, little changed in university-based business schools as faculty continued to publish research and focus on quantitative methods as a vehicle for discovering Truth. In the late twentieth century the introduction of programmatic rankings for graduate business schools (and similar ranking for journals) accelerated and focused these trends in ways that reduced the diversity of research published in these journals and increased the dominance of positivism. Rankings of business school programs typically include surveys of stakeholders such as students, alumni and recruiters but also count the number of articles that faculty have in a finite number of journals deemed ‘A’ journals. By constraining the space in which research publications ‘count’ as good research, rankings such as BusinessWeek and U.S. News & World Report increase competition for publishing in the journals they deem worthy as more faculty aimed for these journals to get tenure and increase their own research reputation. This increased competition in turn serves to strengthen ‘normal’ science and reinforce the dominant theoretical and epistemological perspectives as academic reviewers fall back on their own assumptions about epistemology and truth to make judgements on papers and ideas that they think are ‘True’ and therefore worth publishing. Constrained space for what counts as ‘good’ research makes new ideas and different approaches more difficult to publish, because those authors have to compete with authors who publish ‘normal’ science that fits dominant assumptions and expectations about how science should look. Given this background on the current state of management theory and scholarship, we now turn to several ways in which a pragmatist may seek to improve this situation.

Practice-focused research Pragmatism sees theory as a tool for doing things better in the world. For Dewey, the role of thought and knowledge is not to passively reflect a pre-existing world, but to change and improve reality. The outcome of a successful inquiry is a ‘transformation of the situation’. On Dewey’s account, the most ‘basic conception of inquiry’ is ‘as determination of an indeterminate situation’ (Dewey, 2008) or, to use another term, sensemaking. 206

Pragmatism

Pragmatism encourages scholars to show how theoretical differences make a real difference to practice. This focus on practice shifts the focus on theory building in management science away from insular conversations between academics and towards practice relevant research. Research that is focused on theory only for the sake of theory makes the assumption that good theory is a value-neutral and Objective view of the world from which many different purposes can be achieved. Therefore academics focus on proof and evidence as mechanisms for creating Truth. This emphasis crowds out discussion of practical relevance and stacks the deck in favour of ‘an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance’ rather than ‘a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things’ (Rorty, 1989). Positivist assumptions direct research towards those questions that can be more easily ‘proved’ with statistics rather than questions that impact how we should live, but may not be as easily measurable. Organizational scholars have debated their relevance to practice in journal articles, books, and conferences: (i.e. Administrative Science Quarterly 1982, 27(4); Academy of Management Journal, 2001, 44(2); Lawler, 1999; Larwood and Gattiker, 1999; Mowday, 1997; Hitt et al., 1998; Huff, 2000). Some scholars argue that academics and practitioners hold irreconcilably different views about research that is relevant and of high quality (Shrivastava and Mitroff, 1984). Scholars have long called for practically relevant research, and that argues that there exist modest zones of agreement between practitioners and academics about what constitutes interesting research (Baldridge et al., 2004), but yet the actual practice of publishing work that has practical relevance is still difficult. If ‘management science’ is to become focused on practice, there are several prescriptions based on Dewey’s pragmatic experimentation that can make it more relevant and useful. First, publishing null findings is a useful practice so that researchers and practitioners know what does not work. Only publishing positive findings that fit existing theory is not a practice that fosters the sensemaking necessary to create more useful explanations. Rather it is an artificial way to limit the kind of research that ‘counts’. By not publishing null findings current research practice reinforces the ideas of Objectivity and Truth because there is less emphasis placed on the boundary conditions of a theory, and theoretical limitations are less salient when only positive findings are published with a small paragraph about hypothesized limitations. Additionally, according to Dewey, the scientific spirit requires seeking out new problems that are not widely known or experienced. Pragmatism would encourage management science to look for novel problems and develop new and distinct processes for evaluating novel work. Treating new ideas in the same way as old established ideas is a sure way to kill innovation and experimentation. Finally, inquiry is based in particular perspectives and theoretical lenses. These lenses were crafted for particular purposes and to address specific problems. Scholars must become clearer about the purposes for which their explanations were created, to encourage more careful use and experimentation with theory. Research is not an objective map of reality that can be used for any purpose, but itself is a purpose-driven activity, that must be clear about the uses it has been developed for so that others can pick up the right tool for the right job. For example, using economic assumptions to narrowly describe the corporate objective is a use of a theory in a way that creates negative outcomes for companies and their stakeholders. This is a use that is more likely to occur when scholars do not attend to the purpose for which a theory was originally created. Forgetting the purpose for which a particular theory is created can lead to what Daniel Dennett calls, greedy reductionism, where, ‘in their eagerness for a bargain, in their zeal to explain too much too fast, scientists and philosophers . . . underestimate the complexities, trying to skip whole layers or levels of theory in their rush to fasten everything securely and neatly to the foundation’ (Dennett, 1995: 82). 207

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

Bringing back knowing how According to Dewey, knowing-that is a kind of knowledge that ‘involves reflection and conscious appreciation’. It is our ability to consciously reason about things. Dewey sees knowing-that as a kind of reflective thinking which is an active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Krueger, 2009: 36). Dewey sees most of everyday human action and interaction as involving a different sort of knowledge – knowing-how, or the experiential or embodied learning that is activated prior to, or without the invocation of, reflective thinking. This sort of knowledge is a pre reflective coping or skill-knowledge that enables us to navigate our world with a high degree of expert interaction. (Krueger, 2009: 37) This distinction is important for management theory because it largely focuses on ‘knowingthat’ and assumes that ‘knowing-that’ is sufficient to cope with the world in better ways. This distinction is connected to the need for practice-focused research. Theories and concepts solve problems. When they no longer solve problems they are discarded in favour of other theories and concepts that do a better job. For instance, astrology once solved a problem about why certain events occurred, and what we should do in the future given these astrological predictions. Ultimately, better explanations emerged, from biology, physics and psychology, and astrology has been largely discarded. It does not help us to solve the problems of what we should do in the future nearly as well as the theories and concepts of these more modern disciplines. When children learn language, they do not learn the meanings of the words. Rather they learn what the words do, including sometimes irritating their parents. We do things with words. This distinction helps us to see that much work must be done to build ‘knowing-how’. Faculty in business schools must think differently about how they teach and research, so that their students build the capacity to know how to live better. The problem a great deal of published research seems to solve is the problem of ‘how do faculty get published in A journals’, which has nothing to do with the kinds of problems that organizational members experience.

Fetish around perfect definitions As research becomes more insular, there is a growing emphasis on tight definitions and constructs. Tightly defined constructs are seen as necessary for science to accurately measure phenomena and to more closely reflect reality. Suddaby (2010: 353) argues that, For positivists, construct clarity helps them test theory, since precisely defined constructs are easier to operationalize and test (Schwab, 1980) and it is easier for researchers to compare and contrast results (Bagozzi and Edwards, 1998) . . . in some instances constructs become so clearly defined, measurable, and operationalized over time that they lose relevance with the empirical world and, ultimately, reappear under a different name. A pragmatist does not see these constructs as reflective of the world, but as shared assumptions and expectations within a community of scholars, trying to solve a set of real world problems. 208

Pragmatism

Increased precision in constructs can be helpful as shared meaning about a construct increases understanding and coordination between the author and her readers. Suddaby (2010: 352) agrees when he argues that, The creation of a common vocabulary avoids the ‘Tower of Babel’ effect, in which subcommunities of researchers have no common means of communication. In the absence of common and well-articulated constructs, the boundaries between sub-communities become more sharply defined and organizational knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented. But these expectations about construct clarity can be also be a detriment when expectations about the precision of constructs gives license to scholars to reject work that does not share their personal (sometime idiosyncratic) definitions. For example, Suddaby continues, ‘finding a single exception is often fatal to a construct because it implies that any proposition associated with the construct is false. Reviewers may take this position even in cases where there is substantial positive empirical support for a construct, largely because most reviewers have been oversocialized to accept falsification as the basis of scientific truth’ (Suddaby, 2010: 349). The meanings of these constructs are negotiated in conversation, but in the journal review process the burden of translating new ideas into the old vocabulary is placed on the new author not the incumbent, thereby significantly decreasing the likelihood that novel work will be published in ‘A’ journals. Additionally, the assumption that research is an endeavour to produce Truth can give license to reviewers to reject work that does not fit their world view instead of engaging in conversation with the authors. It also disadvantages new vocabularies from being published when they contain constructs that are defined and used in a consistent and logical way, but may fall short of empirical testing.

Seeing problems from the inside Another important aspect of pragmatism is the focus on lived experience and seeing problems from the inside. When theorists develop descriptions of problems, their perspective and goals are different from those of the people who experience the problem. To help those successfully address the problem, it is important to see the issues from the perspective of individuals who experience those problems. For example in the study of ethics, John Dewey argues that traditional moral theories have abstracted out the qualitative experience of moral problems and the social context in which they occur. In his own masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1902[1985]) sees matters of religion and faith in terms of common, if difficult to explain, experiences. By disregarding the lived experience of ethical issues, scholars increase the likelihood that their theories will be less useful to those individuals. In organization studies, taking the lived experience seriously can mean several things. For example, in social psychological work on ethics we can examine not just how context shapes behaviour, but how people experience and interpret context differently. Across disciplines, we may work to understand how people experience and apply the theories we generate, rather than assume that their application is straightforward or obvious. Attending to how people experience and apply theories can shed light on how to make them more useful and applicable. One way to take experience seriously is highlight that organizational phenomena are socially constructed. In addition to redescribing phenomena as contingent and created, pragmatism encourages organizational scholars to pay attention to the effects of different social constructions. Each way of construing a situation or problem has benefits and costs that are differentially 209

Bidhan L. Parmar, Robert Phillips and R. Edward Freeman

distributed across stakeholder groups. Therefore we must not stop at describing a process of social construction or at claiming that something is socially constructed, but also examine the effects of those constructions, how those effects themselves are created and maintained, and how they shape the ability of others to live better.

Conclusion We believe that pragmatism holds great promise in shaping organizational studies in ways that can help organizational actors live better lives. In this chapter we have provided a brief history of pragmatist thought, outlined several of its central tenets, and provided a few directions which the studies of organizations and management can take if scholars want to take pragmatist ideas seriously. It is important to note that ideas are only the beginning, and while a growing number of academics now sympathize with pragmatist thought and decry the narrow view of science that pervades our journals, action is important. To change existing practice is difficult, but necessary if we are serious about living and helping others to live better lives through our scholarship.

Notes 1 2

Though resembling Pierce, Peirce is homophonous with ‘purse’. Freeman (2004) has written a book review essay entitled ‘The relevance of Richard Rorty to management research’ in Academy of Management Review.

References (key texts in bold) Astley, W.G. (1985). Administrative Science as Socially Constructed Truth. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30: 497–513. Bagozzi, R.P. and Edwards, J.R. (1998). A general approach for representing constructs in organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 1(1): 45–87. Baldridge, D. C., Floyd, S.W. and Markóczy, L. (2004). Are managers from Mars and academicians from Venus? Toward an understanding of the relationship between academic quality and practical relevance. Strategic Management Journal, 25(11): 1063–74. Bernstein, R.J. (2010). The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D.C. (1995). Darwin’s dangerous idea. The Sciences, 35(3): 34–40. Dewey, J. (1908[1998]). Does reality possess practical character? In Hickman, L. and Alexander, T. (eds), The Essential Dewey Volume 1, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 124–33. Dewey, J. (1930[1998]). What I Believe, in Hickman, L. and Alexander, T. (eds), The Essential Dewey Volume 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22–8. Dewey, J. (2008). The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 7, 1925–1953: 1932, Ethics. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Durand, R. and Vaara, E. (2009). Causation, counterfactuals, and competitive advantage. Strategic Management Journal, 30(12): 1245–64. Freeman, R.E. (2004). Book review essay: the relevance of Richard Rorty to management research. Academy of Management Review, 29(1): 127–44. Freeman, R.E., Harrison, J. S., Wicks, A.C., Parmar, B. L. and De Colle, S. (2010). Stakeholder Theory: the state of the art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hitt, M.A., Gimeno, J. and Hoskisson, R.E. (1998).Current and future research methods in strategic management. Organizational Research Methods, 1(1): 6–44. Huff, A.S. (2000). 1999 presidential address: changes in organizational knowledge production. Academy of Management Review, 25(2): 288–93. James, W. (1902[1985]) The Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1907[2014]). Pragmatism. New York: Cambridge University Press. 210

Pragmatism

Kelemen, M. and Rumens, N. (eds) (2013). American Pragmatism and Organization. Surrey, UK: Gower. Khurana, R. (2007). From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: the social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Krueger, J.W. (2009). Knowing through the body: the daodejing and Dewey. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 36(1): 31–52. Larwood, L. and Gattiker, U.E. (eds) (1999). Impact Analysis: how research can enter application and make a difference. New York: Psychology Press. Lawler, E.E. (ed.) (1999). Doing research that is useful for theory and practice. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Mahoney, J.T. (1993). Strategic management and determinism: sustaining the conversation. Journal of Management Studies, 30(1): 173–91. Margolis, J. D., and Walsh, J.P. (2003). Misery loves companies: rethinking social initiatives by business. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48: 268–305. Mowday, R.T. (1997). Celebrating 40 years of the Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 40(6): 1400–14. Pappas, G.F. (ed.) (2008). John Dewey’s ethics: democracy as experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, C.S. (1878[1965]). How to make our ideas clear. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 5). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Purnell, L.S. and Freeman R.E. (2012). Stakeholder theory, fact/value dichotomy, and the normative core: how wall street stops the ethics conversation. Journal of Business Ethics, 109(1): 109–16. Putnam, H. (2002). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W.V. (1951). Main trends in recent philosophy: two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60(1): 20–43. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1991). Feminism and Pragmatism – The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. Rorty, R. (2010). Reply to Aldo Giorgio Gargani, in Auxier, R.E. and Hahn, L.E. (eds). The Philosophy of Richard Rorty. Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. 193–95. Schwab, D. P. (1980). Construct validity in organizational behaviour, in Staw, B.M. and Cummings, L.L. (eds), Research in Organizational Behavior (Vol. 2). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 3–43. Shrivastava, P. and Mitroff, I.I. (1984). Enhancing organizational research utilization: the role of decision makers’ assumptions. Academy of Management Review, 9(1): 18–26. Suddaby, R. (2010). Editor’s comments: construct clarity in theories of management and organization. Academy of Management Review, 35(3): 346–57. Tomasello, M., Melis, A.P., Tennie, C., Wyman, E. and Herrman, E. (2012). Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: the interdependence hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 53(6): 673–92. Wicks, A. C. and Freeman, R.E. (1998). Organization studies and the new pragmatism: positivism, antipositivism, and the search for ethics. Organization Science, 9(2): 123–40.

211

14 Psychoanalysis and the study of organization Yiannis Gabriel

Psychoanalysis is how Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in 1896 described his clinical method for the treatment of neurotic disorders. The method, quite radical for its time, involved nothing more than a conversation between patient and therapist. During this conversation, the patient was encouraged to give voice to his or her thoughts and ideas without seeking to organize or control them. The systematic exploration and interpretation of the products of this free association opened up possibilities of investigating mental processes that take place outside the patient’s consciousness, but underpin conscious experiences, such as perceptions, emotions, judgements, decisions and desires. As a therapeutic technique, psychoanalysis had variable but at times spectacular results, as depicted in the film A Dangerous Method (2011). Starting as a clinical practice, psychoanalysis developed a theory of the unconscious that encompasses a wide range of phenomena, both normal and pathological, by problematizing the former and normalizing the latter. More generally psychoanalysis developed a wide range of critical theories that have had a direct bearing on the study of politics, culture and organizations. As a result, psychoanalysis has had a considerable influence on numerous disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, linguistics and others. The originality of its ideas and their ability to illuminate hitherto opaque phenomena made psychoanalysis an important cultural current in the last hundred years whose influence reaches outside scholarly and clinical contexts, in arts, music and popular culture. The relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy has been a complex and troubled one. Some philosophers have censured psychoanalysis as unscientific, self-contradictory, essentialist, reductionist, conservative, masculinist, fantastic and/or mythological. Yet others have taken a more nuanced view and some have even defended psychoanalysis as being itself a branch of philosophy, taking off where Schopenhauer and Nietzsche ended. The contributions of psychoanalysis to the study of organizations have been varied. Some of them have sprung from a hermeneutic perspective using psychoanalytic theories to examine organizational artefacts, some have embraced more pragmatic quasi-therapeutic approaches to account for persistent organizational irrationalities and dysfunctions, while others have adopted an approach consistent with critical management studies (CMS), seeking to denaturalize and critique mainstream theories and to discover some emancipatory possibilities. What all these psychoanalytic approaches share is an emphasis on unconscious organizational processes and an interest in irrational, fantastic qualities of organizational life. 212

Psychoanalysis

Key contributions Psychoanalysis owes its distinctness, its power and its controversial status to the premise that a large part of mental life is unconscious and that much of what is unconscious – desires, emotions, ideas – is the product of psychological defences seeking to ward off suffering. It follows that many conscious phenomena, such as actions (‘behaviours’), wishes, feelings and ideas, are but smokescreens for unconscious ones, for processes that do not simply happen to be inaccessible to consciousness but are systematically prevented from reaching consciousness. The meaning, therefore, of many conscious phenomena is distorted to obfuscate deeper unconscious ones and requires careful interpretation to bring to light. Psychoanalytic interpretation, as Ricoeur argued, is the ‘systematic exercise of suspicion’ (1970: 32). What conventional psychology addresses as motivation, psychoanalysis approaches through the concept of desire: many human motives and desires are unconscious, though not unknowable. Conscious desires, such desires for material objects, for specific careers or for particular forms of sexual gratification, frequently reveal themselves to be substitutes or surrogates for unrealized unconscious desires, some of which may be traced to earlier life. The mobility, volatility and frequent irrationality of human desires are the consequences of the properties of the unconscious and of the mechanisms of defence through which people seek to ward off anxiety-provoking thoughts and emotions. Thus, the psychoanalytic conceptualization of the unconscious is irrevocably linked with the idea of psychological defence. The ramifications of this conceptualization are far-reaching and present some challenges to philosophy that were appreciated early by thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein (1966), Sartre (1956) and Popper (1963). Psychoanalysis argues that the subject harbours in him/herself a stranger, an agent who often takes over his/her thoughts, fantasies and actions without him/her being conscious. This can be highly disconcerting, if we consider that this stranger can have unpredictable, destructive and self-destructive appetites, an idea captured in Freud’s statement that ‘the ego is not the master even in its own house’ (Freud, 1917: 143). Anticipating subsequent discourses on the decentred subject and fragmented identities, Freud developed a model of the mind split into three regions which he dubbed the id, ego and superego. The id is the space of where various urges, drives or instincts reside and operate entirely unconsciously feeding different fantasies and desires. These are manifested in dreams and other conscious phenomena as ‘compromise formations’ – in other words, as outcomes of the struggle between the original desire seeking gratification and the censoring forces that seek to suppress it, civilize it or redirect it. Censoring forces generally reside in the ego, the seat of consciousness, which deploys logic, memory and judgement in an endeavour to satisfy the demands of the id within parameters set by what it constructs as an external reality and its mental representative, the superego. The subdivision of the mind into different regions is not novel, but it has drawn criticism from philosophers, notably Sartre (1956) and Thalberg (1982), who have argued that a subject cannot be simultaneously conscious and unconscious of something. Defenders of psychoanalysis (e.g. Gabriel, 1983; Gardner, 2000) have sought to refute such criticisms by pointing out that the ego is not operating entirely in the conscious domain. Many of its processes and contents are unconscious. In initiating psychological defences like denial or rationalization, the ego operates unconsciously. Its efforts to make itself the object of self-love in order to meet in response to narcissistic strivings is also unconscious. So too is the superego, the part of the ego that becomes society’s ‘fifth column’ in the subject, concerned with maintaining and enforcing moral and social norms and prohibitions, by wielding an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ (Freud, 1924[1961]). In this way, in addition to the id, substantial parts of the ego and superego reside in the unconscious and the relationship between the three is dynamic: 213

Yiannis Gabriel

The ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles to master its economic task. . . . If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out in anxiety – anxiety [fear] regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the superego and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id. (Freud, 1933[1988]: 110–11). Conflict is unavoidable and constitutive of the subject. The division of the subject assumes great significance in Lacanian approaches which treat it as ‘constitutionally conflictual in its organization . . . characterized by an original and radical lack of identity or a “lack of being”‘ (Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007: 362). Unresolved conflicts can result in different pathologies, ranging from phobia to hysteria and from depression to paranoia. In its attempt to avoid such acute psychopathologies, the ego deploys a variety of mechanisms that largely operate in the realm of the unconscious, some of which have now become part of the layperson’s language. They include repression, regression, rationalization, denial, sublimation, identification, projection, displacement and reaction formation. Defences operate in different ways – they can contain conflict for a certain period holding back anxiety or other threatening emotions; they may trigger symptoms that are socially unacceptable, thus prompting further defences; or they may backfire altogether. In light of this, Freud (1937) described normality as an ‘ideal fiction’ and argued that neurosis is itself normal – what distinguishes people categorized as normal from others is that they hide their neurosis, that they adopt socially acceptable forms of neurosis or that they have a diluted mixture of neurotic symptoms rather than any one specific one. Psychoanalysis was the first serious psychological theory to accord great significance to the early years of life, when the individual emerges as a subject. Defences that prove useful or effective during this period are liable to resurface in later life, sometimes with profoundly unsettling effects. Experiences in infancy and early childhood leave indelible marks – these include an ever expanding range of unconscious meanings, desires, defences and traumas, many of which have a sexual nature. Sexuality is thus conceptualized by psychoanalysis as a complex motivational force that can assume many different forms, focusing on different objects, activities and desires, but always aiming at pleasure. In this regard, psychoanalysis, at least in its original configuration, stands with philosophical traditions that approach humans as desiring subjects, subjects that are not primarily driven by reason or by the quest for meaning but by the pursuit of happiness, including sensuous pleasure (Marcuse, 1955). Since its beginnings, psychoanalysis has been a diverse body of knowledge. Some of this knowledge focused on the treatment of an ever widening range of mental disorders, its main ambition being to relieve extreme symptoms of distress and return patients to functional roles in society. For this reason, it was critiqued by Foucault (1969[1972], 1978) and others as an apparatus of normalization and control. Yet psychoanalysis has also supported a critical tradition in the human sciences that stems from a recognition that ‘the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of civilization’ (Marcuse, 1955: 244), a theme that preoccupied Freud in his final years. The emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis, whether as a type of knowledge representing an emancipatory interest (Habermas, 1972) aimed at challenging self-deceptions or as a doctrine seeking to combine political with sexual emancipation (Brown, 1959; Marcuse, 1955; Reich, 1970) has preoccupied numerous thinkers, not least those who sought a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and Marxism (Fromm, 1973; Marcuse, 1955). Today, psychoanalysis has evolved into numerous schools of thought that live more or less comfortably together. Some of the rancour that characterized earlier relations between psychoanalytic traditions and led to various more or less acrimonious splits has evaporated as has the quest for orthodoxy. Instead, psychoanalytic approaches have infiltrated, under different 214

Psychoanalysis

guises and often in combinations – existential, object relations, Lacanian, ego psychology – a number of scholarly discourses, including feminism, linguistics, history, as well as cultural and consumer and organizational studies.

Psychoanalysis and organizational studies Psychoanalysing organizations The world of organizations, impersonal and formalized, was for some time thought of as being at the opposite end of the intimate and personal relations that provided the early cradle of psychoanalytic thinking. Against this background, the establishment of the Tavistock Institute in the UK marked a significant development. Founded shortly after WWII, the institute was the product of the belief that social science could revolutionize workplace relations and advance the Labour government’s post-war social agenda. The institute’s chief publication, Human Relations dedicated to the ‘integration of social sciences’ summed up its philosophy of making this a better world through the enlightened application of scientific knowledge. The institute’s early associates included several psychiatrists trained or well-versed in psychoanalysis, including Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Bion, who used psychoanalytic insights to study organizational and group phenomena. The contribution of these studies stemmed from the argument that psychological defences against anxiety do not operate only at the individual level but also at the group, organizational and even societal level. Groups, organizations, and other social collectivities have an unconscious life and even unconscious mental processes that are duplicated across their members. The work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1961) in this respect was seminal. Bion argued that groups, like individuals, generate a variety of destructive emotions, such as envy, guilt and especially anxiety. Failure to tame and contain these emotions leads groups to lose sight of the tasks they seek to accomplish and tips them into what he termed ‘basic assumption’ functioning. By this, he meant that group dynamics are taken over by various fantasies or collective delusions that severely distort their sense of proportion and reality. When groups lapse into basic assumption behaviour they are liable to experience overwhelming fears of annihilation from greatly exaggerated dangers or conversely excessive optimism and denial that they are under any real danger. They are liable to feel strong love and hate for particular objects and to misjudge seriously their capabilities and limitations. In this way, basic assumptions act as collective defence mechanisms that seek to alleviate group troubles, but end up by compounding them. Bion identified three basic assumptions – dependency, fight-flight and pairing – each with a characteristic set of behaviours and emotions. In basic assumption dependency, group members act as if the leader, who is seen as the messiah, will save them without them having to do any work. In this state, groups eventually become disappointed with their leader who cannot possibly live up to the members’ exaggerated expectations. In basic assumption fight-flight mode, groups act as if there is a great danger that must be confronted, either by attacking it or by running away from it. This imaginary danger can be from inside or outside the group and typically acts as a scapegoat that obscures other, potentially serious dangers. In basic assumption pairing mode, groups experience strong feelings of hopefulness, imagining that two members of the group will get together to generate an idea or give birth to a person who can solve all the group’s problems. The focus of the group turns away from difficult issues of the present to an imagined blissful future in which all such difficulties are overcome. Bion’s contribution to group psychodynamics has found extensive applications in organizational consulting (French and Simpson, 2010). His emphasis on the containment of collective anxieties was one that was translated from the level of groups to that of organizations 215

Yiannis Gabriel

by subsequent Tavistock theorists, including Elliott Jaques (1955), Isabel Menzies (1960) and Eric Miller (1976). Anxiety is seen as an incapacitating emotion which sets off mechanisms of defence. Organizations are systematic generators of anxiety. The containment of such anxieties within organizations has been the focus of numerous theories developed by Tavistock theorists. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein (Klein and Mitchell, 1987), they argued that large bureaucratic organizations offer social defences in the form of hierarchies, impersonal rules and procedures, organizational and role boundaries and so forth. The downside of these defences is that in containing anxieties, organizations often resort to dysfunctional routines which stunt creativity, block the expression of emotion or conflict, and, above all, undermine the organization’s rational and effective functioning (Jaques, 1955; Menzies, 1960). Just as individual defences immerse the individual in a world of neurotic make-belief detached from reality, so too do organizational defences immerse their members in collective delusions, in which they pursue chimerical projects or run blindly away from non-existent threats. It is now generally agreed that the management of anxiety is a core task in every organization – excessive anxiety leads to dysfunctional defensive routines, while inadequate anxiety breeds complacency, inertia and gradual decay (Baum, 1987; French and Vince, 1999; Hirschhorn, 1988). The extent to which organizational consultants may help contain the anxieties is subject to much debate. Certainly part of such consultants’ role is to identify and distinguish those defences which bolster the organization’s ability to cope with uncertainty and danger, to build solidarity and to organize its tasks effectively from those that merely act as causes of the vicious circles noted above. The ‘Tavistock paradigm’ (French and Vince, 1999) has given rise to an approach described as ‘psychoanalysing organizations’ (Gabriel and Carr, 2002), that starts from a pragmatic concern over an organization’s performance and the well-being of those working for it, seeking to psychoanalyse organizations ‘as if’ they were patients. If psychoanalysis can return an individual to ‘normal’ functioning, can it not be used as a method of organizational intervention, enhancing organizational functioning? Organizational interventions seek to identify repressed forces, such as rivalries, fears of failure, taboo subjects, anger over betrayals, disappointments and frustrations, which systematically inhibit collaboration, creativity, harmony and organizational performance and thereafter to redress them (see e.g. Diamond, 1993; Hirschhorn, 1988; Levinson, 1968[1981]; Zaleznik, 1977). In psychoanalysing organizations, many of these theorists identified pathological conditions and processes in organizations, such as paranoia, megalomania, self-delusion, narcissism and depression, which directly mirror individual psychopathologies, so that, in a certain way, it can be said that the entire organization becomes afflicted by neurosis. The psychodynamics and especially the dysfunctions of leadership, such as narcissism and authoritarianism, have been an important preoccupation of this approach (Gabriel, 2011; Goldman, 2009; Hirschhorn, 1997; Kets de Vries and Miller, 1984; Levinson, 1968[1981]; Obholzer, 1999; Sievers, 1994; Stein, 2005). Coaching and mentoring leaders has thus emerged as an important organizational analogue of individual psychoanalysis with numerous psychoanalysts, especially in the US, turning their professional expertise to this new practice. Psychoanalysing organizations raises numerous philosophical and ethical objections. The translation of unconscious processes (such as repression, projection, splitting) from the individual to a group or social level calls for numerous assumptions that are difficult to justify (Smelser, 1998). Furthermore, the sharp difference between normal and dysfunctional functioning that characterizes this perspective involves numerous thorny normative assumptions. When does healthy skepticism become paranoid anxiety and when does healthy pride lapse into pathological narcissism? Finally, and maybe most importantly, could it not be the case that individual pathologies and collective pathologies are distinct and that unhappy, neurotic individuals may sometimes be quite functional and even thrive in organizational environments? (Gabriel, 1999) 216

Psychoanalysis

Studying organizations psychoanalytically An alternative form of engagement of psychoanalysis with organizations has been undertaken by theorists without therapeutic ambitions who have used psychoanalytic insights to study organizations, their effects on people’s emotional lives and the manner in which they feature in people’s fantasies and dreams. A whole range of organizational phenomena can be approached in this way, including leadership, group dynamics, insults and jokes, sexual harassment, psychological contracts and obedience, and so forth. This approach can be summed up as ‘studying organizations psychoanalytically’ (see e.g. Arnaud, 2012; Fotaki, 2011; Fotaki et al., 2012; Gabriel, 1998, 1999; Schwartz, 1987, 1990; Sievers, 1986, 1994) and takes as its starting point Freud’s injunction that ‘the expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right to exist’ (Freud, 1933[1988]: 189). If individual pathologies have ‘a right to exist’, so too have group and organizational pathologies – the point is to understand their causes and ramifications, even if it is not possible to treat them. The starting point of this approach is the psychoanalytic interpretation of organizational texts and artefacts. This is akin to the way in which psychoanalysis first approaches other phenomena symptomatically, whether at the individual level (e.g. dreams, symptoms, fantasies) or at the cultural (e.g. works of art, religious practices, myths). Reading symptomatically approaches various texts as conscious expressions of unconscious phenomena and became an important feature in Althusser’s (Althusser and Balibar, 1970) re-reading of Marxist texts. Organizational ceremonials, stories, texts, brands and material artefacts, such as buildings, furniture, uniforms and brochures, can be interpreted or ‘read’ as expressions of unconscious. The aim of psychoanalytic interpretations is to reveal the deeper meaning of symbolic phenomena by making conscious what was unconscious, namely repressed wishes and desires that may be too troublesome or painful to be admitted into consciousness. A story of an employee’s suicide can, under certain circumstances, disclose a fantasy of the managers as murderers, just as a vast atrium at the heart of a corporate building can disclose a fantasy of the heartless core of an organization (Gabriel, 2000). Psychoanalytic interpretations of organizational texts, like other interpretations can never be final or conclusive. A single organizational text, just like a single myth, can have many divergent or even conflicting meanings, something entirely consistent with the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious that can contain conflicting meanings and emotions. The interpretive aspect of psychoanalysis places it, in the view of Ricoeur (1970) in the great hermeneutic tradition of philosophy represented by Vico, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer and others that moved from the exegesis of religious texts to the exploration of the possibility of human communication. Psychoanalysis represents a novel attempt to reveal how a dream, a neurotic symptom, a slip of the tongue or a cultural artefact may communicate meaning. It does so by proposing that ‘to interpret is to understand a double meaning’ (Ricoeur, 1970: 8); behind the ‘innocent meaning’ of a cough, a memory lapse or a work of art, psychoanalysis invites us to pursue the possibility of deeper, and potentially more disturbing meanings. What psychoanalytic interpretations reveal is the power of fantasy in organizational life, something that tended to be overlooked by more traditional analyses. The power of fantasy has been closely studied in relation to several phenomena, notably leader-follower relations, identity formation and the contrasted images of organization as perfect or as evil. Psychoanalysis addressed the leadership romance before it became fashionable to do so (Meindl et al., 1985). Followers, argued Freud (1921[1985]) form powerful emotional relations with their leaders, triggered by memories of earlier relations with figures of authority. The powerful figures of authority that dominate most people’s early lives are their mother and their father. To the 217

Yiannis Gabriel

eyes of the helpless child, these figures appear immense and god-like, a ‘primal mother’ and a ‘primal father’, who inspire powerful emotions. These frequently resurface in later life, transferred onto leaders who are experienced as reincarnations of the primal mother, caring, giving and loving, or primal father, omnipotent, omniscient but also strict and terrifying. Just as children are liable to idealize parents in early life, followers then idealize their leaders in later life, they identify with them and often emulate their appearance, actions and values. Of course, leaders almost invariably fail to live up to the fantasies in which they are cast by their followers, hence the leadership romance often ends up in tears (Gabriel, 1997; Kohut, 1971). Psychoanalytic approaches to leadership have at times been criticized for reductionism of politics to psychology, a charge that is not altogether unjustified. The importance of fantasy is also highlighted in psychoanalytic accounts of organizational and occupational identities. For psychoanalysis, the mental personality is decentred and fragmented. In as much as subjects can be said to have unique and enduring identities, these are coextensive with various truths, half-truths and fantasies that they maintain about themselves (Arnaud, 2012; Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007). Thus a factual element (‘I am working as an analyst for Company X’) can be as much part of my identity as an idealized fantasy (‘which is the most famous brand in the industry’), a wishful fantasy (‘where I am by far the smartest among my peers’), a half-truth (‘and have received innumerable prizes for my innovations’), a persecutory fantasy (‘in spite of the envy of my peers’) and an ambivalent evaluation (‘and this job is killing me but I love it’). As Schwartz (1987) argued, individual identities frequently contain idealized elements of the organizations with which we are associated. This is what Schwartz calls ‘organizational ideal’ which is analogous to and contiguous with the ego-ideal. By identifying with the glamour, power and other fantastic qualities of organizations that the subject associates with, as employee, as customer or merely as admirer, he or she derives a narcissistic satisfaction. Part of the organization’s allure becomes internalized by those associated with it. Organizations are often idealized but they are also frequently vilified and disparaged. This split between good and bad is a psychological defence (Klein and Mitchell, 1987) dating to the earlier part of life when the child, unable to comprehend how the same mother who is present and nourishing sometimes is absent and unavailable at others, splits the mother into a good mother and a bad mother. This defence is liable to recur in later life, for example, an organization being split into all good and all bad – thus, organization of old can be idealized as a perfect family and today’s organization can be vilified as a labour camp or even a killing camp. Instead of power and glamour, an organization can then epitomize oppression and corruption, experienced as ‘psychic prison’ (Morgan, 1986[2006]). Instead of an organizational ideal, the fantasy of organization which emerges then is precisely the opposite, an ‘organizational malignant’ (Gabriel, 1997), a caricature of undesirable or laughable attributes. In such cases, organizations become the object of cynical distancing (Fleming and Spicer, 2003). Like idealization and identification, cynicism represents an organization substantially distorted by psychological defences.

Significance of philosophy The contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of organizations hinges on the unconscious. If one accepts this as a fundamental dimension of individual, organizational and social life, psychoanalysis provides a unique way of illuminating it. If, on the other hand, the unconscious can be questioned or dismissed, psychoanalysis is reduced to an interesting mythology that opens the way to ingenuous speculation without any possibility of validation or confirmation. This is a topic that has long preoccupied philosophy, and generally divides up positivist and falsificationist 218

Psychoanalysis

traditions which reject the unconscious (Grünbaum, 1984; Popper, 1963) as inherently unverifiable from more critical interpretive traditions that have, sometimes cautiously, accepted the unconscious (Gardner, 1993; Habermas, 1972; Marcuse, 1955; Ricoeur, 1970; Wollheim and Hopkins, 1982).1 Anticipating many subsequent criticisms, Freud sought to present psychoanalysis as a hard science like physics and medicine. He believed that the main danger facing psychoanalysis was a descent into mysticism. Yet, he was clear (at least after the mid-1890s) that psychoanalytic method and theories differed in some important ways from a positivist model of scientific theory. Interpretations and inferences about unconscious mental processes cannot be made along similar lines as medical diagnoses of physical disorders, since the inquiring subject is also the object of the inquiry. The standards of validity of interpretations and the nature of inferences are different from those of other disciplines. Towards the end of his life Freud explicitly recognized the futility of viewing psychoanalysis as an off-shoot of medicine. In the ‘Postscript to “An Autobiographical Study”’, he wrote: After a lifelong detour over the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, my interests returned to those cultural problems which had once captivated the youth who had barely awakened to deeper thought. These interests had centered on the events of the history of man, the mutual influences between man’s nature, the development of culture, and those residues of prehistoric events of which religion is the foremost representation . . . studies which originate in psychoanalysis but go beyond it. (Bettelheim, 1983: 48) Defending psychoanalysis as a natural science does it little justice, although Fischer and Greenberg (1996) have diligently reviewed 800 empirical studies and have found extensive support for some, though not for all, psychoanalytic theories. Yet, in current Anglo-Saxon culture, where much else sinks to the standing of ‘personal experience’ or ‘storytelling’, science alone, in the idealized model of physics or genetics, has come to be viewed as valid or objective knowledge. Freud was writing within a cultural milieu which took for granted a radical discontinuity between natural and human sciences, the latter encompassing not only psychology and sociology, but also history, ethics and other areas of philosophy. Meaning, will and motives as well as a lasting pre-occupation with the nature of the good life, these are the vital concerns of the Geisteswissenschaften, which generally deal with the peculiarities and singularities of unique, unrepeatable events rather than predictable regularities (Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007). Large parts of the social sciences in the United States and Britain have pretended that there is no difference between themselves and natural sciences. At worst, they see themselves as less developed versions of the natural sciences which, given time, will approach the same degree of objectivity and rigour as the established natural sciences. Concerned about being branded charlatans peddling glorified common-sense, many social science traditions sought to stay as close to the narrow model of science, that of natural science as possible. Yet, as Lear has argued: If psychoanalysis were to imitate the methods of physical science, it would be useless for interpreting people. Psychoanalysis is an extension of our ordinary psychological ways of interpreting people in terms of their beliefs, desires, hopes and fears. The extension is important because psychoanalysis attributes to people other forms of motivation – in particular wish and fantasy – which attempt to account for outbreaks of irrationality and other puzzling human behavior. In fact, it is a sign of psychoanalysis’s success as an interpretive science that its causal claims cannot be validated in the same way as those of the physical sciences. (Lear, 1995: 25) 219

Yiannis Gabriel

If psychoanalysis cannot be defended as a natural science what would its claims to validity and value be? In the first place, psychoanalysis can be defended as an interpretive discipline, which can reveal different meanings behind opaque phenomena and offer guidelines for corroborating such interpretations. In this respect, psychoanalysis offers not only a systematic way of examining symbolic transformations of ideas and desires but powerful insights into human motivation and the meanings, often contradictory and ambivalent, of human actions and experiences. Of course, one does not need psychoanalysis in order to interpret one’s own behaviour or that of others for that matter. Everybody is ceaselessly involved in interpretation and self-interpretation. Psychoanalysis, however, enables us to go beyond ‘innocent interpretations’ and probe for selfdeceptions and double-meanings. In as much as it calls for a close scrutiny of the interpreter’s own motives, psychoanalysis is a truly reflexive discipline. A different defence of psychoanalysis concentrates on the understanding which is made possible through the concept of the unconscious, in illuminating countless phenomena that are otherwise opaque, as distorted expressions of hidden desires. Ultimately, even when repudiated, the unconscious has become an indispensable idea for most human sciences. The Marxist concept of ideology and the sociological concept of norm would lose their bearings, without the implicit or explicit assumption that there is an unconscious in which they become internalized. The unconscious is equally indispensable in linguistics, in which it is argued that people can learn a language without knowing its grammar in a conscious way – the unconscious is ‘a way of explaining how [the system of linguistic rules] can be simultaneously unknown and yet effectively present’ (Culler 1976: 76). The study of mythology, folklore, fairytales, symbolism and magic are largely dependent on the assumption of the unconscious. In all of these areas, cultural elements (like linguistic structures, symbols, moral constraints etc.) become constitutive of the individual by becoming engraved in unconscious areas of his/her mind, from where they can regulate his/her behaviour and shape his/her conscious perception and understanding. It is not an exaggeration then to argue that the unconscious is not a concept conveniently invoked by the human sciences on disparate occasions, but a theoretical foundation on which many of their concepts are anchored. Thus Foucault, in spite of his hostility to psychoanalysis, acknowledges that the problem of the unconscious – its possibility, status, mode of existence, the means of knowing it and bringing it to light – is not simply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ultimately coextensive with their very existence . . . an unveiling of the non-conscious is constitutive of all the sciences of man. (Foucault, 1970: 364) Psychoanalysis, concludes Foucault, paves the way for the human sciences to pursue their ‘project of bringing man’s consciousness back to its real conditions, of restoring it to the contents and forms that brought it into being, and elude us within it’ (Foucault, 1970: 364).

Future directions Future psychoanalytic studies of organizations are likely to continue focusing on a diffuse range of topics which generally revolve around the emotional, irrational and destructive aspects of organizational life. In particular, relations between leaders and followers, group dynamics, organizational learning (and the enduring failure to learn) and various organizational dysfunctions are likely to continue attracting psychoanalytic scholarship. The areas of health studies and clinical leadership will continue to provide rich material for psychoanalytic analysis. Lacanian approaches 220

Psychoanalysis

to gender and sexuality are likely to continue growing while there is some evidence of a resurgent interest in Jungian theory of unconscious archetypes and their organizational manifestations (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2012; Moxnes, 1999). One area in which psychoanalysis has not as yet yielded much scholarship but may well do so in the future is the burgeoning field of identity studies in connection with work and occupational identities as well as consumer identities. Identification is a core concept of psychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1921[1985]; Lacan, 1966[1977]) and identity was a concept that emerged from the psychoanalytic tradition (Erikson, 1950[1978]). Yet current approaches to identity and identity work from a variety of angles have not demonstrated much of an appetite to cross-fertilize or even engage in a serious dialogue with psychoanalytic approaches, something that may change in due course, most especially due to the resurgence of interest in narcissism both as an individual and a collective phenomenon. Fundamentally an open question remains whether experience is the product of subjectivity or vice versa, an issue on which psychoanalysis and other traditions of scholarship take fundamentally different positions. Currently there is a growing interest in Lacanian approaches to the study of organizations phenomena (see e.g. Arnaud, 2002; Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007; Driver, 2009; Faÿ, 2008; Harding, 2007; Vidaillet, 2007). Unlike Freudian and object relations approaches, these place a greater emphasis on how organizations constitute the subject through a variety of discursive and symbolized activities, indeed to ‘reintroduce the subject into management . . . in the belief that] paying attention to subjectivity removes the necessity for this subjectivity to find its expression in aspects of the organization’s regular functioning, which then presents itself as irrational or pathological’ (Arnaud and Vanheule, 2007: 365). Possibly one of the most promising future developments will arise from a cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious with rapidly emerging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science that highlight the wide range of mental phenomena that are concealed from consciousness (Damasio, 1999). In light of overwhelming experimental evidence that a huge part of mental functioning takes place outside the radar of consciousness, the prospect of a radical rediscovery of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious by the mainstream must certainly feature on the agenda.

Conclusions Psychoanalysis has maintained a rather low-profile presence in organizational discourses, which have generally been more attracted to other traditions in the human sciences, such as functionalist sociology, social constructionism, Marxism and poststructuralism. Several factors account for this, not least the enduring critique of some of its philosophical assumptions, its substantial blindspots regarding some issues of major importance, such as gender and race, the decline of psychoanalytic therapy, and its own fragmentation into different schools that have looked at each other with suspicion. Finally, unlike other far less troublesome and provocative discourses, psychoanalysis presents theorists with some highly uncomfortable possibilities regarding their own standing and practices. All the same, its rich range of ideas and theories, with their enduring ability to illuminate opaque social phenomena, is likely to maintain its presence within the variety of theoretical resources deployed in understanding organizations.

Note 1

This chapter will not address the emerging field of the non-conscious and preconscious currently proposed by neuroscience. See, for example, Hassin et al. (2005). 221

Yiannis Gabriel

References (key texts in bold) Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970). Reading Capital (trans. B. Brewster). London: New Left Books. Arnaud, G. (2002). The organization and the symbolic: organizational dynamics viewed from a Lacanian perspective. Human Relations, 55(6): 691–716. Arnaud, G. (2012). The contribution of psychoanalysis to organization studies and management: an overview. Organization Studies, 33(9): 1121–35. Arnaud, G. and Vanheule, S. (2007). The division of the subject and the organization: a Lacanian approach to subjectivity at work. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20(3): 359–69. Baum, H.S. (1987). The Invisible Bureaucracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bettelheim, B. (1983). Freud and Man’s Soul (1st edn). London: Chatto and Windus. Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock. Brown, N.O. (1959). Life against Death. New York: Random House. Culler, J. (1976). Saussure. London: Fontana. Damasio, A.R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness (1st edn). New York: Harcourt Brace. Diamond, M.A. (1993). The Unconscious Life of Organizations: interpreting organizational identity. London: Quorum Books. Driver, M. (2009). Struggling with lack: a Lacanian perspective on organizational identity. Organization Studies, 30(1): 55–72. Erikson, E.H. (1950[1978]). Childhood and Society (2nd edn). New York: Norton. Faÿ, E. (2008). Derision and management. Organization, 15(6): 831–50. Fischer, S. and Greenberg, R.P. (1996). Freud Scientifically Reappraised: testing the theories and therapy. New York: John Wiley. Fleming, P. and Spicer, A. (2003). Working at a cynical distance: implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization, 10(1): 157–79. Fotaki, M. (2011). The sublime object of desire (for knowledge): sexuality at work in business and management schools in England. British Journal of Management, 22(1): 42–53. Fotaki, M., Long, S. and Schwartz, H.S. (2012). What can psychoanalysis offer organization studies today? Taking stock of current developments and thinking about future directions. Organization Studies, 33(9): 1105–20. Foucault, M. (1969[1972]). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality: an introduction (Vol. 1) (trans. R. Hurley). Harmondsworth: Penguin. French, R.B. and Simpson, P. (2010). The ‘work group’: redressing the balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups. Human Relations, 63(2): 1859–78. French, R. and Vince, R. (eds) (1999). Group Relations, Management, and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, S. (1917). A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis (Standard edn). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1921[1985]). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Civilization, Society and Religion, 12: 91–178. Harmondsworth: Pelican Freud Library. Freud, S. (1924[1961). The economic problem of masochism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, pp. 155–70. Freud, S. (1933[1988]). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Pelican Freud Library. Freud, S. (1937). Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Standard edn). London: Hogarth Press. Fromm, E. (1973). The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: essays on Freud, Marx and social psychology. London: Penguin. Gabriel, Y. (1983). Freud and Society. London: Routledge. Gabriel, Y. (1997). Meeting God: when organizational members come face to face with the supreme leader. Human Relations, 50(4): 315–42. Gabriel, Y. (1998). Psychoanalytic contributions to the study of the emotional life of organizations. Administration and Society, 30(3): 291–314. Gabriel, Y. (1999). Organizations in Depth: The psychoanalysis of organizations. London: Sage. Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in Organizations: facts, fictions, fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabriel, Y. (2011). Psychoanalytic approaches to leadership, in Bryman, A., Collinson, D., Grint, K., Jackson, B. and Uhl-Bien, M. (eds), The Sage Handbok of Leadership. London: Sage, pp. 393–405. 222

Psychoanalysis

Gabriel, Y. and Carr, A. (2002). Organizations, management and psychoanalysis: an overview. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17(5): 348–65. Gardner, S. (1993). Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, S. (2000). Psychoanalysis and the personal/sub-personal distinction. Philosophical Explorations, 3(1): 96–119. Goldman, A. (2009). Destructive Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizations: a therapeutic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grünbaum, A. (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: a philosophical critique. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (1972). Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann. Harding, N. (2007). On Lacan and the ‘becoming-ness’ of organizations/selves. Organization Studies, 28(11): 1761–73. Hassin, R.R., Uleman, J.S. and Bargh, J.A. (2005). The New Unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1988). The Workplace Within. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hirschhorn, L. (1997). Reworking Authority: leading and following in the post-modern organization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jaques, E. (1955). Social systems as a defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety, in Klein, M., Heimann, P. and Money-Kyrle, R.E. (eds), New Directions in Psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock, pp. 478–98. Kets de Vries, M.F.R. and Miller, D. (1984). The Neurotic Organization. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Klein, M. and Mitchell, J. (1987). The Selected Melanie Klein (1st American edn). New York: Free Press. Kociatkiewicz, J. and Kostera, M. (2012). The good manager: an archetypical quest for morally sustainable leadership. Organization Studies, 33(7): 861–78. Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. Lacan, J. (1966[1977]). Ecrits (trans. A. Sheridan). London: Routledge. Lear, J. (1995). The shrink is in. New Republic: 18–25. Levinson, H. (1968[1981]). Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilization: a philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon. Meindl, J.R., Ehrlich, S.B. and Dukerich, J.M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1): 78–108. Menzies, I. (1960). A case study in functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations, 13: 95–121. Miller, E.J. (1976). Task and Organization. New York: Wiley. Morgan, G. (1986[2006]). Images of Organization (Updated edn). London: Sage. Moxnes, P. (1999). Deep roles: twelve primordial roles of mind and organization. Human Relations, 52(11): 1427–44. Obholzer, A. (1999). Managing the unconscious at work, in French, R. and Vince, R. (eds), Group Relations, Management, and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 87–97. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Reich, W. (1970). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. New York: Philosophical Library. Schwartz, H.S. (1987). Anti-social actions of committed organizational participants: an existential psychoanalytic perspective. Organization Studies, 8(4): 327–40. Schwartz, H.S. (1990). Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. New York: New York University Press. Sievers, B. (1986). Beyond the surrogate of motivation. Organization Studies, 7(4): 335–51. Sievers, B. (1994). Work, Death and Life Itself. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Smelser, N.J. (ed.) (1998). The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stein, M. (2005). The Othello conundrum: the inner contagion of leadership. Organization Studies, 26(9): 1405–19. Thalberg, I. (1982). Freud’s anatomies of the self, in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 241–63. Vidaillet, B. (2007). Lacanian theory’s contribution to the study of workplace envy. Human Relations, 60(11): 1669–1700. 223

Yiannis Gabriel

Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (1982). Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zaleznik, A. (1977). Managers and leaders: are they different? Harvard Business Review, 55(May–June): 47–60.

224

15 Queer theory Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

Introduction Queer theory demands that we question the dominant foundational assumptions about what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘abnormal’ through a process of incessant critique, typically to disrupt claims about the essential nature of sexuality and gender. The focus of queer theory has largely been on the discursive provisionality of the sexual and gendered subject, destabilizing the normalizing tendencies of a sexual order that privileges heterosexuality. Perhaps the greatest contribution of queer theory has been the interrogation of heteronormativity which Berlant and Warner criticise for maintaining damaging binaries within ‘institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent – that is, organised as a sexuality – but also privileged’ (Bertlant and Warner, 1998: 548). Queer theory has sought to expose, celebrate and provide the conditions of possibility for non-heteronormative practices and subjects (typically lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans [LGBT]) as crucial sites of resistance (Butler, 1990, 1993, 2004a; Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 1998, 2005; Halperin, 1995, 2011; Warner, 1993, 1999). While it is almost commonplace to identify queer theory with a concern with heteronormativity and LGBT people, queer theory’s concern with unsettling processes of normalization has relevance for other disciplines outside the humanities from which it first emerged in the early 1990s. Indeed, queer theory has been embraced by organizational scholars unhappy with how heteronormativity has shaped and continues to shape dominant academic understandings of sexuality, gender, management and organization (see Parker, 2001, 2002 and Harding et al., 2011 for notable examples). With this in mind, this chapter seeks to account for the philosophical underpinnings of queer theory in the first section before reviewing its impact on organization studies in the second. These sections introduce queer theory to scholars who have yet to consider its offerings, but also to consider, for readers already familiar with its characteristic ideas and more widely cited writings, what else queer theory might offer to organization studies. With regard to the latter, the third and fourth sections of this chapter draw on intriguing aspects of queer theory that remain under-developed within organizational studies such as its ethic of openness to the Other and its orientation towards ‘undoing’ heteronormative binaries, in order to open up opportunities for ethical and political critique within and of organization studies. 225

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

In the light of this discussion, the final section points to potential avenues of future queer theory research within organization studies.

Queer theory’s philosophical contributions Queer theory has its genesis in a number of interconnected philosophies, most significantly feminism, postmodernism and poststructuralism, which have developed critiques of humanistic theories of identity, the self and difference. Inheriting much of the critical concern shown by poststructuralists and postmodern feminists for understanding how normative discourses have an essentializing and thus limiting effect on how identities, selves and differences may be constructed and performed (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1979; Fuss, 1991; Sedgwick 1990), and how subjects might also mobilize discourse to transcend such constraints (Butler, 2004a; Foucault, 2005), queer theory burst onto the academic scene as a radical and vibrant philosophy that was quickly put to use by scholars of sexuality and gender (e.g. Halberstam 1998; Halperin, 1995). Specifically, queer theory appeared in academic discourse when it was adopted by feminist Teresa de Lauretis in the introduction to the published proceedings of a 1990 conference, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’, convened at the University of California. Then, queer theory was used to ‘theorize lesbian and gay sexualities’ (de Lauretis, 1991: iii), focusing on how lesbian and gay identities were discursively constructed through and within the confines of heteronormative discourse in particular. There was good reason for queer theory to be concerned with the discursive limits of gay and lesbian identity categories, not the least of them being the particularly pejorative associations these identities evoked at that point in time (e.g. death, waste, excess, disease), and the violence done to LGBT people through upholding a rigid and restrictive binary gender and sexual order (Sullivan, 2003). Indeed, forms of queer activism emerged as a radical response to an American political context in the 1980s blighted by sexual prejudice towards LGBT people. Queer groups such as OutRage, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation campaigned vigorously to transform widespread sexual prejudice against LGBT people, amplified aggressively during the AIDS crisis (Watney, 1994). Queer activism is intertwined with queer theory in that their histories are enmeshed and both encourage critical thinking and action. Perhaps nowhere is this more conspicuous than in how queer theory, and forms of queer activism that employ parody, play and irony as tools to destabilize systems of knowledge and power, propound an understanding of sexuality and gender as performative. In Butler’s (1988, 1990, 1993, 2004a) writing, this performative ontology is premised on her conviction that gender is a corporeal style, an act as it were, which ‘is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’ (Butler, 1990: 177, original emphasis). Through acts of repetition and recitation, gender becomes ritualized, the effects of which make it appear natural. Arguing that ‘this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject’ (Butler 1993: 95), Butler emphasizes that subject positions are continually evoked through stylized acts of repetition, including those compelled by heteronormativity through mundane acts of gesture and inflection. Butler, along with other pioneering feminist theorists such as Sedgwick (1990) and Fuss (1991) who over the years have achieved iconic status as the ‘high priestesses’ of queer theory, questions the essentialist nature of sexual categories such as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’. Each has, in different ways, interrogated how sexuality and gender are configured in hierarchical binaries (e.g. heterosexual/ homosexual, masculine/feminine) considering the consequences for those who cannot or will 226

Queer theory

not fit into these categories. Drawing on Butler’s (1988, 1990) idea that sexual and gendered identities are performative, queer theorists have delved into how these identities are also historically patterned, contextually contingent and ascribed meaning at specific moments in time. In this sense, queer theorists have raised ontological and epistemological questions regarding the limits of heteronormative identity politics such as: can ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ identities adequately account for the diversity in erotic expression that many people feel as they explore their sexuality and gender over a life time? In light of the above we start to gain a sense of the specific philosophical contributions of queer theory related to the challenge it presents to ontologies of sexuality and gender that are imbued with a sense of stability and which have become taken-for-granted and categorized as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. At this juncture, it is important to point out that queer theory is not reducible to poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism or gay and lesbian studies, all of which have provided it with its necessary conditions of possibility. Queer theory’s distinctiveness resides precisely in its refusal to be reduced to or casually explained away by other philosophies, marking it out as something that questions the status quo and the normativity ascribed to it. Indeed, David Halperin sums this up when he notes how ‘queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers’ (Halperin, 1995: 62 emphasis in original). The idea of queer theory as an unstable and itinerant philosophical resource for unsettling ontological assumptions about sexuality (especially those coded in heteronormativity) rather than making a statement about sexuality per se, is a theme that runs through much queer theory literature. This is apparent in Jagose’s description of queer theory: ‘Queer itself can have neither a fundamental logic, nor a consistent set of characteristics’(Jagose, 1996: 96). While Edelman, discussing queer theory in No Future, submits that ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’ (Edelman, 2004: 17). With queer theory’s underpinning philosophy articulated in this way, queer is established as an enfant terrible, a standard bearer of nonconformity, producing feelings of uncomfortableness as it seeks to undo the stability and certainty subjects develop through their attachments to particular identity categories. As such, queer theory’s refusal to be pinned to any definition is often seen as a necessary virtue of a theory that is suspicious of identity categories that appear static and of the rigidity and violence with which they are enforced in everyday life (Sullivan, 2003). Put differently, a concern that anything other than a constant deferral of meaning may result in constraining queer’s radical potential by closing off potential future significations of the term appears to motivate the reluctance among many queer theorists to ‘name’ queer. Indeed, this understanding of queer theory as a form of immanent critique underpins Parker’s queer-inspired, performative critique of management in which he describes queer theory as ‘an attitude of unceasing disruptiveness’ (Parker, 2002: 158). It is in this spirit that Parker’s research invites organization studies scholars to tap into the critical potential of queer theory to challenge dominant modes of understanding management and organization, a nascent literature to which we turn now.

Queer theory and organization studies While queer theory has found a clearing in the humanities in which it has set up camp for some years now, the humanities has not been able to contain queer theory; indeed, if such a thing were either possible or desirable. We marvel at how queer theory has crept into other academic disciplines such as law, technology, politics, education and organization studies. Regarding the latter, queer theory now informs a small and important body of organizational scholarship, barely two decades old. And although queer theory’s incursion into organization studies came at a time when notable advocates of queer theory had already declared it a ‘conceptually vacuous 227

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

creature of the publishing industry’ (de Lauretis, 1994: 297), its debut in Parker’s (2001, 2002) writing on queering management and organization signaled another instance of queer theory’s renewable energy. Parker (2001, 2002) was one of the first to articulate queer theory’s capacity to question what we take-for-granted about management as an occupation, as an organizational role performed by an individual, as an organizational practice and finally, as an academic discipline. Deriving inspiration from Butler (1990) and Sedgwick (1990), Parker (2002) reasons that if management can be shown to be a social construction, historically patterned, it follows that we may wish to explore how we can ‘do’ management in ways that do not engender ‘considerable cruelty and inequality’, currently stifled ‘through the generalized application of managerialism as the one best way’ (2002: 184). In that regard, Parker turns to queer theory and engages with it on the understanding that it is ‘not merely reducible to a concern with sex, gender or sexuality’ (Parker, 2002: 158). Although Parker acknowledges the salience of these focal points for exposing and problematizing the heteronormativity of management and organization, he expands queer theory to denaturalize what we currently understand about management in order that new forms of ‘doing management’ or ‘becoming manager’ may emerge. In this respect, queer theory may help organization studies scholars to question the common (business) sense that reasons managerialism is a ‘good’ thing, reminding us that managing is only one way of organizing among many. As such, queer theory is set up as having the potential to reinvigorate debates about management and organizing by drawing attention to the idea that ‘doing manager’ is performative in the Butlerian (1990) sense, revealing management as something that is constructed through a continuous and re-iterative enactment. More than this, however, Parker (2002) echoes Warner’s desire ‘to make theory queer’ (1993: xxvi) rather than spinning a strand of queer theory management. In this sense, Parker (2002) subscribes to a process of queering management that exposes the provisionality of management and the complicity of management academics in producing knowledge about management and organization in ways that come to be regarded as normative. An insightful and important jumping off point, Parker’s (2001, 2002) use of queer theory is characteristic of a now wider engagement with queer theory within critical management studies that questions the normativity of management, leadership and organization (Bendl et al., 2008; Courtney, 2014; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Harding et al., 2011; Muhr and Sullivan, 2013; Tyler and Cohen, 2008). Taking leadership as an example, Muhr and Sullivan (2013) employ Butler’s notion of performativity and the heterosexual matrix to examine the relationship between the body and leadership in the case of a transgender leader. They argue that a transgender leader’s body, presumed gender and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered construction of leadership reproduces restrictive gender dichotomies that constrain the ways leadership can be performed by a transgender subject. Like Harding et al. (2011), they invite organization studies scholars to queer leadership rather than create a theory of queer leaders by starting from the understanding that, ‘all managers perform leadership according to certain scripts set by the expectations generated by their gendered bodies, which produces limitations to the way leadership is seen as natural/ unnatural for a specific leader’s body’ (Muhr and Sullivan, 2013: 418). At the same time, the construction of leadership through a transgender body sensitizes organization studies scholars to the exploration of performativity, particularly the performative relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality and leadership and how a trans body can benefit from queering leadership. Courtney’s (2014) study of LGB school leaders also encourages organization studies scholars to escape the semantic calcification of leadership by using queer theory to examine the disciplinary and normalizing effects of heteronormative discourses of leadership. Notably, although the LGB school 228

Queer theory

leaders participating in Courtney’s study neither identified as queer nor attached queer motivations to their embodiment and enactment of leadership, they still engaged in inadvertent acts of disturbing (queering) gender and sexual norms that unsettle, Courtney argues, the heteronormative assumptions underpinning how leadership ought to be performed in specific work contexts. At the same time, another strand of queer theory inspired organizational scholarship has problematized the presumed heteronormativity of work life. Specifically, this nascent literature casts a queer lens on LGBT people’s lived experiences within organizational settings, with a view to expanding knowledge about the habitual (re)production of heteronormativity within and through organization and its disciplinary effects on LGBT employees (Lee et al., 2008; Ozturk and Rumens, 2014; Rumens, 2010, 2012; Tindall and Waters, 2012; Ward and Winstanley, 2003; Williams et al., 2009; Williams and Giuffre, 2011). Ward and Winstanley (2003), for example, reveal how LGBT employees can be silenced by heteronormative discourses in the workplace and subjected to forms of homophobia and discrimination. They argue that silence can take many forms: (1) silence as reactive (where colleagues react to LGBT ‘coming out’ with silence, as opposed to the pervasive discussion of heterosexual employees’ lives); (2) silence as a means of suppression (where talk of LGBT sexualities is discouraged to render them invisible); (3) silence as censorship (where for instance, legislation and heterosexist policies can drive sexuality underground in social life). Elsewhere, US research draws on queer theory to problematize the discursive restrictions associated with disclosing and sustaining sexual identities within workplaces that have been shaped by a wider social trend towards the ‘normalization’ of gay and lesbian sexualities. For instance, Williams et al. (2009) examine the discursive closure levied on gay and lesbian employees by prevailing heteronormative expectations about how ‘normal’ gay men and lesbians should dress and behave, that is without attracting unnecessary attention to their sexuality, as a condition of being able to participate openly in organizational life. The authors found that performing ‘normal’ gay and lesbian identities at work is contingent on maintaining a state of ‘invisibility’, in that becoming ‘normal’ means many gay men and lesbians must emphasize their similarities with normative constructions of heterosexuality. On the one hand, this brings some gay men and lesbians much closer to heteronormativity with the advantages this confers (e.g. being understood in the workplace in terms of respectability, as ‘productive’ organizational citizens worthy of inclusion and equal to heterosexuals). On the other hand, as queer theorist David Halperin avers, the determination displayed by many gay men and lesbians to integrate themselves into all facets of heteronormative society, by demonstrating their essential normality, signals a disturbing move toward valorizing ‘heterosexual forms of life, including heterosexual norms’ (Halperin, 2011: 443) at the cost of those that may be understood as ‘queer’. Put differently, as more and more gay men and lesbians accept the terms upon which heterosexual dominance is expressed as the keynote of assimilationist politics in and outside work, opportunities for queer to disrupt, destabilize and enable individuals to think the unthinkable are constrained. As such, the importance of this type of queer theory organizational research lies in its ability to interrogate how norms impose the limits of what Butler (2004a) calls a ‘livable life’, a concept elaborated upon in the next section. In sum, despite its short occupancy within organization studies, some scholars have mobilized queer theory to occasion opportunities for us to consider alternative ways of becoming within and through the workplace that sustain human flourishing and organizing in ways that transcend heteronormativity. These explorations are emergent and much remains open both empirically and theoretically. In light of this, we turn next to discuss another aspect of organizational life that, in our view, remains relatively untouched by queer theory’s growing tendrils: ethics. 229

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

Queer theory, an ethics of openness and organization Queer theory’s presence in organization studies is apposite at a time when new possibilities for living sexual and gender diversity are being documented in many Western nations (Seidman, 2002; Weeks, 2007). Yet the ethics of how the sexual organization of the social is undergoing change, and how this is currently felt by heterosexual and LGBT identified subjects in the workplace, is seldom considered by organization studies scholars, even those familiar with queer theory. One way to approach this issue is to consider how the norms by which subjects are recognized as viable in the workplace can produce a differential sense of which lives are livable, and which are not. In cultivating the capacity to develop a critical relation to the functioning of norms that shape what ‘counts’ as a livable life, we must recognize that the viability of a ‘livable’ life is understood in terms that confer what it is to be ‘human’ on some subjects, and not others (Butler, 2004a). What it is to be human is fundamentally contingent on social norms and because social norms of recognition change, so does what ‘counts’ as a livable life. Butler’s ethical dispositions on such issues in Undoing Gender (2004a) and Precarious Life (2004b) prepare organization studies scholars for understanding how organizations can demean the complex ways in which sexual and gendered lives are experienced and maintained. In addressing the possibility of how organizations might be transformed so that such complexity is not disavowed, one critical question thus becomes, how does one engage openly with the Other in the workplace? It is Butler’s writing on subjectivity, politics and ethics that helps us both to explore what form an ethics of openness to the Other might take, and also to re-consider the potential merits for organizational scholars of engaging with the more phenomenological aspects of her writing, as these are manifest in an integrated queer politics and ethics. In Butler’s hands, queer can be discerned not as a political or even ethical position but rather an ontological premise based upon recognition of our mutual corporeal vulnerability. This approach to queer is articulated most fully in Butler’s (2004b) essay on ‘Violence, Mourning and Politics’ in Precarious Life, in which she argues that Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (Butler, 2004b: 20) This ethics of relationality is grounded in queer theory’s concern with vulnerability and violence, framed theoretically in terms of the risk attached to exposing oneself to the Other, manifest in the homophobia that continues to contour countless organizational worlds. This risk is also apparent in the constant vigilance attached to fears around enforced ‘outing’ that shapes the everyday lives of LGBT people. In Butler’s hands, these risks are grounded in the phenomenological preoccupation with the desire for recognition of oneself as a viable subject. That our bodies are sites of publicity, ‘at once assertive and exposed’ means that in seeking recognition of ourselves as viable subjects, we are perpetually at risk of being subject to the violence brought about by misrecognition. As Butler herself puts it, emphasizing the mutual vulnerability engendered by our need for recognition, we stake a claim to recognition but simultaneously run the risk of misrecognition. Yet without taking this risk we cannot live a livable life, one shaped by the sociality attached to mutual recognition and all that it promises. Or to coin Butler’s words ‘we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’ (Butler, 2004b: 23). 230

Queer theory

In queer terms, Butler invites us to think through the challenges for queer ethics and politics posed by a theoretical recognition of our mutual interdependency and the need for us to develop an openness to the Other based on a reflexive understanding of the constraints governing the conferral of recognition, and the consequences of its denial. By opening ourselves up to the Other, Butler reminds us that we both reaffirm our existence and render ourselves vulnerable, yet our embodied way of being in the world means that we can do no other. Butler submits that, from our very beginning, ‘we are given over to the Other’ rendering us vulnerable to the eradication of our being at one extreme, and the unfaltering physical support for our lives at the other. This basic inter-corporeal premise, the recognition that we are ‘given over’ to the Other constitutes what Butler describes as ‘the condition of primary vulnerability’ (Butler, 2004b: 31) as the basis for ethics and politics; one that, we would argue, has considerable potential for thinking through an alternative queer ethico-politics of organization. In her own development of this position on inter-corporeal vulnerability into a distinctively queer ethics, Butler goes on to emphasize how it connects to her performative ontology of gender subjectivity: as a mode of relation, neither gender nor sexuality is precisely a possession, but, rather, is a mode of being dispossessed, a way of being for another or by virtue of another (Butler, 2004b: 24). However, Butler’s concern to develop an ethics of openness to the Other leads her to question the term ‘relationality’ as the basis for an integrated queer ethics and politics; for Butler, ‘we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well’ (Butler, 2004b: 24). With this in mind, Butler’s notion of a distinctively queer ethics, an ‘ec-static’ ethic can be discerned in her concern to understand how our ethical compulsions and political impetus derive from being ‘beside oneself’, a way of being that follows from our embodied existence, one characterized by vulnerability and exposure to the Other. Yet as Butler herself acknowledges, at the same time as recognizing this ec-static ethic, a queer politics must also proceed on the basis of a claim to bodily integrity and self-determination. In apparent contradiction to the ethical position outlined above therefore, is a parallel queer politics premised on the recognition that, as Butler articulates, ‘it is important to claim that our bodies are in a sense our own and that we are entitled to claim rights of autonomy over our bodies’ (Butler, 2004b: 25). Reflecting on the consequences of this for a queer politics proceeding from a performative ontology of the subject and an Other-orientated ethos of openness, Butler concedes how ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, to make these claims without recourse to autonomy’ (Butler, 2004b: 25). This political-ethical dilemma arguably characterizes queer theory, or indeed the normative aspirations of any social movement that seeks protection and freedom. Butler’s response to this is to reiterate how, in addition to autonomy, there exists ‘another normative aspiration that we must also seek to articulate and to defend . . . a sense of ourselves as “in community”, impressed upon by others, impinging upon them as well’ (Butler, 2004b: 26–7). This inter-corporeal ethics of openness, and its political implications for embedded autonomy enables Butler to reclaim an ethics-politics of relationality as a fundamental ontologicalnormative premise: This way of imagining community affirms relationality not only as a descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also as an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political 231

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence. (Butler, 2004b: 27, emphasis added) This basic vulnerability means that we are always at risk from violence, and exploitation of this primary connection, one imposed upon us by the materiality of our existence; that we are physically dependent upon each other means that we are simultaneously physically vulnerable to one another. But Butler’s phenomenological ethics means that this is also the case ontologically: ‘we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another’ (Butler, 2004b: 27). A queer ethicopolitics therefore proceeds from a basic recognition of ‘the fundamental sociality of embodied life’ (Butler, 2004b: 28), an ethical awareness of the ways in which we are ‘from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own’ (Butler, 2004b: 28). Recognition of this shared dispossession potentially leads to a normative reorientation of politics for Butler based on inter-corporeal vulnerability. However, as Butler emphasizes throughout her essays in Precarious Life, some of us are more vulnerable than others, precisely because we are all ‘implicated in lives that are not our own’ existing within social relations in which our collective responsibility for others becomes occluded. The constant foreclosure of a collective recognition of the mutual vulnerability engendered by our inter-corporeal dependency eradicates what for Butler is one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way in the world. As such, a consideration of the vulnerability of others, and hence of ourselves, represents the means by which ‘we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others’ (Butler, 2004b: 30). Driving this queer ethic forward therefore is a concern to ask: at what cost do we establish the normative? Reconciling the mobilization of both autonomy and sociality referred to above represents a considerable challenge, as queer demands a social world in which our vulnerability is protected without being eradicated, recognized without being co-opted, and forms the basis of what Butler describes, albeit rather idealistically, as a ‘sensate democracy’ (Butler, 2004b: 151). Queer in this respect steers us away from an ethic of tolerance (putting up with the Other), as well as an ethic of generosity (giving oneself to the Other), ever mindful of the risks of appropriation, exploitation and normalization (Warner, 1999) associated with both strategies, towards an ethic of openness to the Other (being given over to the Other), premised upon a mutual recognition of the artifice of ethical boundaries between oneself and others, and of the political consequences of those boundaries. Turning to the workplace, we explore an ethics of openness through one vignette, presented below, drawn from Rumens’ (2010) research on the sexual and gender dynamics of gay men’s workplace friendships with heterosexual men.

Negotiating an ethics of openness at work Employing queer theory as a theoretical lens, Rumens (2010) examines the friendship between Callum (a gay man) and Armand (a heterosexual man), both of whom are university academics who appear to enjoy the exchange of scholarly ideas, perspectives and values that are part and parcel of their everyday activities and interactions as academics. This shared understanding has helped them to establish a form of intellectual closeness which has influenced how they relate to each other as friends and as manager–subordinate. From Callum’s perspective, their friendship has occasioned opportunities for both men to explore alternative ways of relating, allowing them to challenge heteronormative constructions of male friendship characterised as emotionally tepid and fraught with homophobia (Nardi, 1992). Seen as such, friendships between gay and heterosexual men are considered to be rare, difficult to negotiate and sustain, not least due to 232

Queer theory

how the Otherness of homosexuality is negotiated between friends (Fee,1999). In Rumens (2010), Armand is said to make a point of being openly affectionate towards Callum, often in front of other academics and students, sometimes during departmental meetings or on campus. In these situations, Callum is often greeted by Armand with a ‘hug’ or a ‘kiss on the lips’, which he often experiences as moments of ‘tenderness’ and intellectualizes as ‘disrupting gendered organizational codes of conduct’. Certainly, the open expression of affection between these male friends is notable within the public arena of work for its potentially destabilizing effect on organizational discourses that promote largely instrumental ways of relating at work. At the same time, however, these gendered performances can be experienced in terms of personal discomfort and ambiguity as they negotiate heteronormative friendship norms that impose limits on how male workplace friendships ought to be lived. For instance, Callum admits that he has sometimes found ‘being kissed [by Armand] on campus in front of undergraduates . . . uncomfortable’. Although Callum seems to be supportive of Armand’s unconventional gender performances, negotiating an ethics of openness within friendships can be difficult, as Callum’s doubts indicate: I do think sometimes that he gives nothing away, particularly as he moves from one identity to the next, making himself ambiguous in terms of gender and sexuality. . . . So he moves between those things and I find it intriguing in one sense, but sometimes I wonder if he’s performing for my benefit or at my expense . . . it’s a conversation I’ve yet to have with him. From this excerpt, we can understand how Callum positions his friendship with Armand within discourses that contain competing and contradictory elements. On the one hand, Callum draws upon discourses on the performativity of gender and sexuality to intellectualize Armand’s performances of intimate friendship as ‘intriguing’. Armand’s discursive activities underline the constructed and performative qualities of gender and sexuality, and are certainly not out of place against a cultural backdrop of contemporary sexualities and genders within this particular social and organizational setting. This allows Callum to understand his friendship with Armand as ‘novel’ and ‘experimental’, not least because this male friendship exhibits a move beyond an ethics of tolerance toward an ethics of openness that recognises how heteronormative friendship norms narrowly constitute what counts as a viable friendship between men. On the other hand, Callum struggles to understand if Armand’s performances of gender are for his benefit or at his expense. On this matter, it is no small thing that friendships are often constructed idealistically, as relationships in which people can be themselves without pretence or dishonesty. Negotiating an ethics of openness in workplace friendships may lead friends to understand that there is not a fixed authentic self that can be accessed through friendship. Rather it might be that friends mutually recognize that one of the pleasures of friendship is about being able to nurture a process of becoming whereby friends can explore who and what they wish to become in terms of alternative identities, selves and modes of relating which can foster an openness to the Other. In this vein, Callum’s commentary encourages us to see the potential in cross-sexuality workplace friendship for this kind of queer activity and ethics, but also reminds us that in negotiating an ethics of openness, friends have to confront and reflect on each other’s discursive performances as well as their own. In this respect, the performative ontology and corresponding emphasis on a perpetual undoing considered above connects to the development of an ethics of openness in organizational relationships such as friendship. From a Butlerian perspective, this takes the form of a ‘petition’; through petitioning the Other, ‘when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking 233

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

for an Other to see us as we are’ but rather our aim is ‘to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other’ (Butler, 2004b: 44). This version of ethics represents arguably a queer-infused Hegelian dialectic, a departure emphasizing not the sameness of the Other but our common vulnerability and collective responsibility given that ‘we are outside ourselves, constituted in cultural norms that precede and exceed us, given over to a set of cultural norms and a field of power that condition us fundamentally’ (Butler, 2004b: 45). In practice, this potentially implies a way of proceeding, of organizing ourselves and others, based upon this complex yet commonsensically appealing ethico-political imperative.

Conclusion As indicated at the outset of this chapter, its inherently critical orientation makes queer theory not only difficult, but undesirable, to capture or categorize what it means to be or even do ‘queer’, with queer being associated variously with a cacophony of ideas at odds with whatever is deemed ‘normal’, the aim of which is to continually disrupt and disturb (Edelman, 2004; Halperin, 1995, 2011; Jagose, 1996). If it is anything fixed or fixable, queer represents a philosophical challenge to normatively prescriptive ways of being and doing characterized by a politics of parodic critique and an analytical orientation towards a perpetual process of ‘undoing’ (Butler, 2004a). This challenge to normativity is underpinned by a concern with destabilizing the ontological-epistemic schema that organizes the relationship between sexual and ontological desire heteronormatively, what Butler (1990) described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’ in her earlier writing. In this respect, queer’s recurring preoccupation is with disrupting how our need for pleasure, intimacy and connection is shaped by and shapes our corresponding need for recognition of ourselves as culturally intelligible and socially viable, beginning with understanding how one becomes an impediment to the other, and exploring the conditions of possibility that might enable this relationship to be ‘done’ [organized] differently. In order to illustrate this, we have tapped into queer theory’s orientation towards ‘undoing’ heteronormative binaries to show how it can help organization studies scholars to open up opportunities for ethical and political alternatives to organization and organizing. With regard to the latter, we draw in particular on important aspects of queer theory that remain under-developed within organizational studies such as its ethic of openness to the Other, considering what this ethos might offer to the already more familiar tenets within queer theory such as the critical orientation towards ‘undoing’ heteronormative binaries considered thus far. We have started to think through what this might mean in regard to workplace friendships between gay and heterosexual men, but other avenues of research pertaining to an ethics of openness in particular and queer theory more generally have yet to be explored by organization studies scholars. Examples include how an ethics of openness is negotiated in work contexts where LGBT people are compelled to normalize their sexual and gender identities, and what the consequences might be in terms of sustaining the complexity of gendered and sexual lives. There is scope to craft analyses of how lives that resist processes of heteronormative assimilation may be sheltered and nourished within organizations. More widely, there is further research to be done that builds on prior efforts to queer academic knowledge production across the discipline of management (e.g. Harding et al., 2011; Parker, 2001, 2002; Rumens, 2013), allowing organization studies scholars to explore what would be necessary for us to organize ourselves differently. Both encouraging and enticing then, is that the future for queer theory and organization studies is an open question, an ontological and epistemological potential that is very much in keeping with its politics and ethics of openness that we have considered throughout our discussion here. 234

Queer theory

References (key texts in bold) Bendl, R., Fleischmann, A. and Walenta, C. (2008). Diversity management discourse meets queer theory. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 23(6): 382–94. Berlant, L. and Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2): 547–66. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theater Journal, 40: 519–31. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004a). Undoing Gender. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004b). Precarious Life. London: Verso. Courtney, S. (2014). Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders. Organization, 21(3): 383–99. de Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3(2): iii–xvii. de Lauretis, T. (1994). Habit changes. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6(2–3): 296–313. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Fee, D. (1999). ‘One of the guys’: instrumentality and intimacy in gay men’s friendships with straight men, in Nardi, P.M. (ed.), Gay Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 44–65. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject. (ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell). New York: Picador. Fuss, D. (ed.) (1991). Inside/Out: lesbian theories, gay theories. New York, London: Routledge. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). Queer(y)ing capitalist organization. Organization, 3(4): 541–45. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Halperin, D.M. (1995). Saint Foucault: towards a gay hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Halperin, D.M. (2011). How To Be Gay. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Harding, N., Lee, H., Ford, J. and Learmonth, M. (2011). Leadership and charisma: a desire that cannot speak its name? Human Relations, 64(7): 927–49. Jagose, A. (1996). Queer Theory: an introduction. New York: New York University Press. Lee, H., Learmonth, M. and Harding, N. (2008). Queer(y)ing public administration. Public Administration, 86(1): 149–67. Muhr, S.L. and Sullivan, K. (2013). None so queer as folk: gendered expectations and transgressive bodies in leadership. Leadership, 9(3): 416–35. Nardi, P.M. (ed.) (1992). Men’s Friendships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ozturk, M.B. and Rumens, N. (2014). Gay male academics in UK business and management schools: negotiating heteronormativities in everyday work life. British Journal of Management, 25(3): 503–17 Parker, M. (2001). Fucking management: queer, theory and reflexivity. ephemera, 1(1): 36–53. Parker, M. (2002). Queering management and organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 9(2): 146–66. Rumens, N. (2010). Workplace friendships between men: gay men’s perspectives and experiences. Human Relations, 63(10): 1541–62. Rumens, N. (2012). Queering cross-sex friendships: an analysis of gay and bisexual men’s workplace friendships with heterosexual women. Human Relations, 65(8): 955–78. Rumens, N. (2013). Queering men and masculinities in construction: towards a research agenda. Construction Management and Economics, 31(8): 802–15. Sedgwick, E.K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Seidman, S. (2002). Beyond the Closet: the transformation of gay and lesbian life. New York: Routledge. Sullivan, N. (2003). A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press. Tindall, N.T. and Waters, R. D. (2012). Coming out to tell our stories: using queer theory to understand the career experiences of gay men in public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research, 24(5): 451–75. Tyler, M. and Cohen, L. (2008). Management in/as comic relief: queer theory and gender performativity in The Office. Gender, Work & Organization, 15(2): 113–32. Ward, J. and Winstanley, D. (2003). The absent present: negative space within discourse and the construction of minority sexual identity in the workplace. Human Relations, 56(10): 1255–80. 235

Nick Rumens and Melissa Tyler

Warner, M. (1993). Fear of a Queer Planet: queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Warner, M. (1999). The Trouble with Normal: sex, politics and the ethics of queer life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watney, S. (1994). Practices of Freedom: selected writings on HIV/AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press. Weeks, J. (2007). The World We Have Won. London: Routledge. Williams, C. and Giuffre, P. (2011). From organizational sexuality to queer organizations: research on homosexuality and the workplace. Sociology Compass, 5(7): 551–63. Williams, C.L., Giuffre, P.A. and Dellinger, K. (2009). The gay-friendly closet. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 6(1): 29–45.

236

16 Structuration theory Philosophical stance and significance for organizational research Matthew Jones

Introduction Since the 1980s structuration theory has had a significant influence in the social sciences and humanities. Bryant and Jary (2001: 57) credit it with ‘reconstituting disciplines’ and ‘framing empirical research’ across a range of academic fields from archaeology and criminology to sociology and urban studies, among which they explicitly identify accountancy, management and organization studies. In order to understand the nature of this influence, particularly as it relates to the philosophical assumptions that inform structuration theory, it would seem necessary first to understand its origins and the philosophical debates to which it was seeking to contribute.

The origins and development of structuration theory Writing in 1982, John Urry, identified the recent emergence of what he referred to as a ‘structurationist school’ that was seeking to move beyond the long-standing dichotomy between structure and action in social theory. Instigated, he argued, by Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967) with its conception of the mutual constitution of individuals and society, the key features of this school were described as: a rejection of both structural determinist and voluntarist accounts of social life; the proposal of concepts that mediate between structure and agency; an emphasis on the role of tacit, practical consciousness in analysing human action; and an attention to the spatial and temporal location of social interaction. Although a number of sociologists and philosophers, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Roy Bhaskar, were seen by Urry (1982) as contributing to the development of structurationism, the concept is most widely associated with the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and it is his work that will be the main focus of this chapter. Giddens developed his structuration theory in a series of books in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Giddens, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1984). In the first of these, New Rules of Sociological Method, he positions his work as pursuing a critical analysis of the legacy of nineteenth century social theory, in particular the Comtean idea of a natural science of society, and also the elaboration 237

Matthew Jones

of an alternative conception of the social sciences drawing on analytic philosophy and phenomenology, particularly Heidegger, later Wittgenstein, Winch and Schütz. These alternative schools of thought, he argues, share a common perspective on the significance of Verstehen to social interaction (and hence to the phenomena that constitute the object of social research), and on the taken for grantedness of the knowledge that members of society draw on in making sense of the social world (and that the concepts employed by social researchers are consequently dependent upon). Giddens argues, however, that the interpretive sociologies that derive from these schools of thought also have their weaknesses. In particular, they treat action primarily as meaning rather than as the practical realization of interests, neglect the significance of power in social life and overlook the differing interpretations of social norms. At the end of New Rules of Sociological Method, Giddens introduced the notion of ‘structuration’ to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both structuralism and functionalism on the one hand and post-Wittgensteinian ‘philosophy of action’ on the other. Structuralism, which he associates with the work of Lévi-Strauss and Saussure, and functionalism (e.g. Durkheim, Parsons), he argues, both treat the reproduction of social structure as a mechanical outcome rather than an active process of constitution. They are ‘strong on structure, but weak on action’ as he puts it (Giddens, 1993: 4). The action philosophy of writers such as Peter Winch, in contrast, is ‘strong on action, but weak on structure’ (Giddens, 1993: 4), focusing solely on production and offers no analysis of structure. Hence structuration (from the French for structuring) proposes that social life should be seen neither as just ‘society’, independent of human agency, nor as just the product of individual action, but as recurrent practices that themselves produce and reproduce the larger institutions of society. Structure is thus both the medium and outcome of human agency. Giddens terms this the ‘duality of structure’, in contrast to the dualism of the earlier traditions in which either structure or agency predominate. Giddens proposes that the duality of structure may be represented in terms of three dimensions (reflecting, it may be argued, his earlier work on Durkheim, Marx and Weber respectively), as shown in Figure 16.1. The modalities in this schema represent the interrelationship of structure and action that is bracketed by interpretive sociologists as stocks of knowledge and resources drawn on by individuals, and by functionalist sociologists as institutionalized rules and resources. Giddens emphasizes that the dimensions are purely analytical categories that do not exist independently of each other and that particular practices are always at the intersection of multiple sets of rules and resources. This account was elaborated in Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens, 1979) and in The Constitution of Society (Giddens, 1984). In the former, Giddens introduces a number of recurrent themes in his later writing. In particular he emphasizes the temporal and spatial situatedness of social practices. The latter contains both an exposition of the elements of the theory of structuration, but also chapters connecting this project to other themes including: consciousness, self

INTERACTION

Communication

Power

Sanction

(MODALITY)

Interpretive scheme

Facility

Norm

STRUCTURE

Signification

Domination

Legitimation

Figure 16.1 The dimensions of the duality of structure Source: Giddens (1976: 129).

238

Structuration theory

and social encounters (drawing on the work of Erikson and Goffman); time, space and regionalization (drawing on Hägerstrand and Goffman again); structure, system and reproduction (involving a critique of Durkheim’s conception of constraint); and change, evolution and power (deconstructing Marx’s historical materialism). At the end of this book Giddens provides a summary of key structurational concepts and discusses the theory’s relevance to empirical research and its implications for the nature of social research. This manifesto includes statements on the innate knowledgeability of human beings (even if they are not always able to articulate this discursively), on the accessibility of sociologists’ research findings to ‘lay actors’ (members of the public) and of the influence of these findings on their practices (which he terms the double hermeneutic), on the inherently hermeneutic character of social research (and of the dependence of quantitative research on qualitative interpretations), and on the implausibility of universal laws in social research. With structuration, therefore, Giddens was seeking to ‘transcend, without discarding altogether’ (Giddens, 1981: 26) two major traditions of thought in the social sciences. The first of these he terms ‘naturalistic’ sociology, on account of its adherence to the methods and logic of the natural sciences with the objective of establishing explanatory laws of society equivalent to those seen as having been developed for natural phenomena. The second, ‘interpretivist’, tradition, rejects any such equivalence on the grounds that society, being a human product, is fundamentally different from nature, and the social sciences therefore need their own methods and logics of enquiry. In doing so, he argues, structuration reconciles macro and micro accounts of society (that see it as independent of individual action, or as merely an epiphenomenon of that action) as well as the dichotomy of structure and agency. Notwithstanding his claims to be offering a middle way between two positions that view the object of social science in what they would consider to be completely opposed ways, the greater weight of Giddens’ arguments tend to be directed against the naturalistic tradition. Thus he emphasizes the knowledgeability and agency of social actors, rejecting any view of them as cultural and social dupes whose actions are determined by macrosocial structures. His methodological position also emphasizes the irretrievably hermeneutic character of the social sciences. Although he acknowledges that quantitative methods may play a valuable role in social research, and that structuration theory has no specific methodological implications that would preclude the use of quantitative techniques, he states that social research, even where it employs such techniques, necessarily ‘presumes ethnography’ (Giddens, 1991: 219). Perhaps precisely because of Giddens’ claim to have resolved long-standing differences in the social sciences, structuration has faced criticism on a number of fronts. These predominantly revolve around three key issues. The first of these tends to come from naturalistic researchers, who regard structuration as overly voluntaristic – it accords individuals greater influence over social structure than they actually possess. According to Giddens, these critics argue, structural constraint never imposes itself on individuals, it is always a negotiable outcome in immediate interaction. Certainly there is much in his writing that can be seen to suggest this, from statements that individuals, except where physically or chemically coerced, always ‘have the possibility of doing otherwise’ (Giddens, 1989: 258), to an insistence that every instant of reproduction of social structure is also potentially one of change. Giddens’ response, however, is to argue that any alternative to his view of agency amounts to determinism, and to stress the potential of subordinates to influence those who seek to control them, even in seemingly inescapable circumstances (including those of death threats). This he calls the ‘dialectic of control’. Power, for Giddens, is thus not a resource, but a relational property that is intrinsic to agency. A second focus of criticism is Giddens’ definition of structure, which sees it as ‘rules and resources, organized as properties of social systems’ that only exists in its instantiation in social 239

Matthew Jones

practices and in ‘memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents’ (Giddens, 1984: 7). Structure is therefore virtual, even when the resources in question, such as land, say, have a material existence. It is only when they are drawn on in the process of structuration that they become real resources that affect social practices. This is problematic, however, not just for social researchers uncomfortable with the notion that material resources exist inertly in some limbo state until they are taken up by social actors, but also for researchers who see properties of social systems, such as class or hierarchy, as not just individual memory traces that are only brought into play in specific instances of action, but as enduring influences that condition action in significant ways. Archer (1990) argues, furthermore, that this central conflation of structure and agency, that means that structure only exists in the instant of action, renders structuration incapable of accounting for change. There is no ‘before’ that provides a reference point for change, just an infinite series of unconnected ‘nows’. Rather, building on Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Activity (Bhaskar, 1989), she argues for a temporally extended view of structure/agency interaction in which structure precedes action, but is reproduced or transformed through the actions that it shapes. The third strand of criticism of structuration focuses on its relevance to empirical research (e.g. Gregson, 1989). In part this can be seen as reflecting the almost exclusively theoretical character of Giddens’ own writing. While he claims (Giddens, 1983: 75) that structuration provides a ‘a set of methodological concepts relevant to the practice of the social sciences’, discusses the implications of structuration theory for social research quite extensively in his work (e.g. Giddens, 1984: 281–4) and comments approvingly on studies that have sought to apply structurational concepts in a ‘sparing and critical fashion’ (Giddens, 1991: 213), the closest he comes to engaging with empirical research himself is in secondary commentaries on other people’s studies, such as Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977) in Giddens (1984: 289–309). Indeed, as he makes clear in the apparently misleadingly named New Rules of Sociological Method (Giddens, 1976: viii), he does not see himself as providing a ‘guide to “how to do practical research”’ or any specific research proposals. Rather, following the example of Durkheim’s original Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1938), his aim is ‘the clarification of logical issues’. Giddens’ theorizing, his critics argue moreover, is of an abstract and generalized nature, providing a high-level account of the constitution of society that has little to offer in understanding specific social phenomena. It is also expressed in such broad terms that it can be taken as describing almost any situation. Coupled with Giddens’ idiosyncratic definition of key concepts, the volume and fluency of his writing (he has published more than 30 substantive books and 85 major articles of social theory) and his frequent restatement (or, as critics would claim, revision) of his argument, in the light of challenges, it can be hard to pin down the theory’s implications such that they might be subjected to empirical investigation. While best known for structuration theory, structuration formed only a part of Giddens’ output and he added little directly to it, apart from responses to his critics, after the publication of The Constitution of Society in 1984. His broader interests in this work included a range of topics, such as the multiplicity of, often conflicting, social systems that impinge on organizations (that, as Whittington (1992) notes, received little attention in the management literature), theories of the state and of class society and an analysis of modernity. The last of these, in particular, became a major theme in his later work (Giddens, 1990), branching out into studies of selfidentity (Giddens, 1992) and into practical engagement with national and international politics, through the championing of Third Way (Giddens, 1994, 1998) and contributions to the theory of the risk society and globalization (Beck et al., 1995; Giddens, 1999). Although Giddens identifies all his writings as pursuing a common project, little of his later work is specifically philosophical 240

Structuration theory

in orientation nor does it revisit or revise the core principles of structuration as he initially described them. The contribution of structuration to philosophy in organization studies has not been substantially extended therefore in more than 30 years.

The philosophical stance of structuration As the outline of structuration above illustrates, Giddens has drawn widely on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Winch and Schütz in the development of his thinking and he sees both empirical social analysis and sociological theorizing as necessarily dependent on philosophy. ‘The social sciences are lost’, he argues (Giddens, 1984: xvii), ‘if they are not directly related to philosophical problems by those who practice them’. The focus of his account of structuration, however, is almost exclusively ontological. As has already been noted, Giddens has little to say on methodology. Nor, despite arguing in Giddens (1994: xviii) that critical theory ‘should have a positive conception of ethics’, does the topic receive any significant further discussion in his writings. Perhaps more problematically, Giddens’ ontology is not matched by a corresponding attention to epistemology (Bryant, 1992, Hekman, 1990). This is not an accidental oversight on Giddens’ part, though. Indeed in Giddens (1990: 300) he directly states ‘I am not particularly interested in epistemology, but in the ontology of social life’. If he recognizes that structuration necessarily carries epistemological implications, therefore, he does not see it as his responsibility to address them. In part this would seem to be, Stones (2005) argues, because he regards ontological questions as prior to those of epistemology, but also, as Bryant (1992) notes, because he sees little prospect of any immediate resolution to epistemological debates in the social sciences and believes that this should not stand in the way of the pursuit of social research. This is unsatisfactory, Bryant (1992) argues, as it leaves the status to be accorded to structuration as an account of the social world unresolved. On what grounds, for example, should we consider structuration to be preferable to any other theory of the social? Stones (2005) relates this lack of attention to epistemology back to Giddens’ restriction of the development of structuration to the abstract, philosophical level of what he describes as ‘ontology in general’, to the neglect of ‘ontology in situ’, that is of specific, situated social practices. Stones argues, however, that it is possible to recover a more complete account of structuration, in which epistemological questions are given due systematic attention, from Giddens’ writings, a project that Stones describes as ‘strong structuration’. This proposes an analytical division of the duality of structure into four aspects: external structures at the abstract ontological level that constitute the perceived action-horizon of social actors; internal structures, further subdivided into conjuncturally specific knowledge of external structures and general dispositional attitudes; active agency shaped, pre-reflexively or consciously, by these internal structures; and outcomes that shape the production and reproduction of external and internal structures and events. Whether or not this is seen to address his neglect of epistemology, that Giddens did not himself see fit to elaborate his thinking in this way, leaves structuration still vulnerable to accusations of selective attention. Even in terms of ontology, however, Giddens has shown himself unwilling to elaborate his position, restricting himself to remarks that, for example, the concepts he develops are ‘compatible with a realist ontology’ (Giddens, 1979: 63), but then declining to defend the claim. Similarly, Bryant (1992) reports that Giddens describes himself as a naïve realist, in the sense that he believes that there is a world out there that we encounter directly in our everyday experience, and Giddens has commented that, while he conceptualizes social structure as virtual, physical structures have a different mode of existence and exert causal effects that are ‘strongly 241

Matthew Jones

relevant to the possibilities and constraints facing any individual or group’ (Giddens and Pierson, 1998: 82). He has little to say, though, on the implications of this position. In distinguishing so clearly between physical and social structures and locating the latter in memory traces and instantiation in action Giddens places structuration at odds with other schools of realist social theory, especially Critical Realism (Bhaskar, 1989; Archer, 1995 – see also AlAlmoudi and O’Mahoney, Chapter 1 this volume). There is no ontological stratification in structuration, with levels of the actual and real underlying the empirical, that social researchers can seek to uncover as the basis for their knowledge claims. In Giddens’ formulation (if not in Stones’), ‘the causal effects of structural properties of human institutions . . . are there simply because they are produced and reproduced in everyday actions’ (Giddens and Pierson, 1998: 83).

The significance of structuration for the study of organizations At the simplest level, structuration can be seen as providing a distinctive ontology of social (and hence organizational) life, which, while it may not be immune to criticism, has a strong and well-documented sociological pedigree. It is also a very general theory and thus applicable to almost any area of study in organizations. For researchers studying a wide range of organizational phenomena who are seeking a credible, but relatively simple (especially if reduced to Figure 16.1), account of ‘what sorts of things are out there in the [organizational] world’ (Craib, 1992: 108) it therefore has some evident attraction. Perhaps of greater significance for the study of organizations, however, has been its provision of a non-dualistic account of social life that claims to avoid both determinism and voluntarism and bridges the micro/macro divide. Thus, rather than seeing organizations as fixed entities that dictate the behaviour of passive individuals, structuration emphasizes the continuous active role of individuals in sustaining, but always also potentially changing, the organizations of which they are members. On the other hand, organizations are not simply seen as an agglomeration of individual practices, but as relatively enduring relations of power, legitimacy and meaning that shape, but are also shaped by, the practices of organization members. Such a lens provides a dynamic perspective on organizations that promotes a focus on both agency and structure and their interactions. More rarely, a few authors have argued that structuration is of potentially greater significance as a, if not the, means of transcending what are claimed to be the mutually exclusive beliefs of different paradigms in organizational research, the so-called ‘incommensurability thesis’ (Hassard, 1988; Willmott, 1993 – see also Scherer et al., Chapter 2 this volume). Thus Weaver and Gioia (1994) propose structuration as a meta-theoretic perspective that can eliminate the dichotomies (e.g. structure/agency, causation/meaning, description/prescription) that are taken as differentiating between paradigms and provide a more comprehensive view of organization that recognizes the differences, similarities and relationship across different schools of research.

Structuration and organizational research Within management, structurational research can be found in several sub-fields including strategy, accounting, organization studies, but also especially (if somewhat unexpectedly given Giddens’ conceptualization of structure as virtual and the almost complete absence of any discussion of technology in his work) in information systems (Pozzebon and Pinsonneault, 2005). There have been a number of reviews of this literature, including Whittington (1992), Jones (1999), Poole and DeSanctis (2004) and Jones and Karsten (2008), with the latter two focused predominantly on the use of structuration in the information systems field (broadly defined). 242

Structuration theory

What these reviews have shown is that structuration has been taken up by management researchers in a number of different ways that bear varying degrees of alignment with the philosophical position proposed by Giddens. Much of this literature, which amounts now to more than 2,000 articles across all areas of business research, moreover, may not even be based on Giddens’ work, but rather on secondary literature that appears to have played a critical role in the diffusion of structurational ideas within the field. Whittington identifies the significance of a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Ranson et al. (1980) in the early adoption of Giddens’ ideas, while Jones and Karsten (2008) focus on the contributions of Orlikowski (1992, 1996, 2000) and of DeSanctis and Poole (1994), both of whom proposed adaptations of structuration theory to better fit it for the study of information systems. Other influential contributors to the organizational literature employing structuration theory include Barley (Barley, 1986, 1990; Barley and Tolbert, 1997) and Willmott (1981, 1987; Knights and Willmott, 1989). The paper by Ranson et al. (1980) was a contribution to debates on how changes in organizational structures over time may be explained. Citing Giddens, they argue that structuration enables the elaboration of a theoretical model that is able to accommodate both of the traditionally dichotomous structuralist and interactionist perspectives on organizational construction and change. Their interpretation of structuration was questioned by Willmott (1981), however, who argued that, in proposing that the ‘structure as framework’ and ‘structure as interaction’ perspectives can be integrated within a single framework, and that structure may be viewed as separate from and conditioned by the external environment, they may have adopted Giddens’ rhetoric, but had misinterpreted his argument. In this disjuncture between the citing of Giddens and the use made of his work, and in the way that their paper subsequently became widely discussed as an example of structurational analysis without reference to the work of Giddens, Ranson et al. (1980) may be seen as foreshadowing many later studies in the organizational literature. Willmott’s own contributions to structurational research were themselves highlighted as influential by Whittington (1992), in particular his 1987 paper critically analysing the neglect of institutional analysis in behavioural studies of management practice (e.g. Mintzberg, 1973). Drawing on structuration, he argues that managerial work is both the medium and outcome of the structural properties of the wider capitalist system and therefore provides a resource for critical organizational research. Barley’s paper on the adoption of computed tomography scanners in two hospitals (Barley, 1986), is very highly cited both for its same technology/different outcome findings, but also for its use of structuration, in combination with negotiated-order theory (Strauss, 1993), to study the link between institution and actions. Although acknowledging that his analysis ‘parses structuring’s ceaseless flow into temporal phases’ (Barley, 1986: 82), he argues that this enables the interactions of the two ‘realms’ of structure, that of institutions and that of action, to be more clearly delineated and draws attention to the cumulative nature of the change process. The model of sequential interaction as developed in the paper and elaborated in Barley and Tolbert (1997), with its notion of scripts as recurrent patterns of observable activities that encode the logic of particular interactions in place of Giddens’ modalities, however, would seem to reify what in structuration is a specifically ‘virtual order of transformative relations’ (Giddens, 1984: 17). This is of a piece, however, with Barley’s interests in institutional theory and his ongoing critique of social constructivism (Leonardi and Barley, 2010). A similar concern with exploring how structuration might be extended to better understand the interaction of technology and organizations motivated the development of two different structurational approaches in the early 1990s: Orlikowski’s duality of technology (Orlikowski and Robey, 1991; Orlikowski, 1992) and Adaptive Structuration Theory (Poole and DeSanctis 243

Matthew Jones

1990; Poole and McPhee 1983; DeSanctis and Poole, 1994). The former sought to position technology within Giddens’ duality, positing technology as both a product and medium of human action and as having direct institutional consequences. Although described as inherently social, in that it is created, adapted and used for particular human purposes, Orlikowski (1992) defines technology as material artefacts and talks of structures being embedded in technology, both of which would seem ontologically inconsistent with the virtual character of Giddens’ original duality. This would seem to be recognized in her later paper drawing on Giddens (Orlikowski, 2000), in which she emphasizes that structures are emergent rather than embedded. Adopting what she describes as a ‘practice lens’, she differentiates between technology as an artefact and the enacted structures of technology in use that she terms ‘technology-in-practice’. In line with Giddens, these structures are not fixed, but are continually produced and reproduced through the situated practices of particular human agents. Such a move may be seen as positioning structuration within the emerging ‘practice turn’ in social and organizational research (Schatzki et al., 2001; Reckwitz, 2002, Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; see also Sandberg and Tsoukas, Chapter 13 this volume). Adaptive Structuration Theory, in contrast, is a much more explicit reworking of structuration that treats technology as ‘one source of social structures . . . which are embedded in technology by designers during development and then dynamically changed as users interact with technology’ (Poole and DeSanctis, 2004: 211). This is necessary, they argue to ‘accommodate the deterministic impacts of structure on action’ and to support ‘functional’ analysis of social systems as a ‘network of causal, moderating, and correlational relationships among abstract variables’ (Poole and DeSanctis, 2004: 216). In its alignment with a positivist model of enduring causal relationships and its pursuit of testable theories, both things that Giddens explicitly identifies as incompatible with structuration, adaptive structuration theory is therefore significantly at odds with the ontological position developed by Giddens. As Jones and Karsten (2009) argue this does not invalidate adaptive structuration theory as a contribution to organizational analysis, but rather suggests that the substantial stream of research drawing on this approach is based on rather different ontological assumptions than those proposed by Giddens in his original account of structuration theory. While there is now a substantial body of research drawing on these extensions of structuration theory, frequently without reference to Giddens, the greater proportion of structurational literature in the organizational field is concerned with ‘applying’ structuration, either as a whole or focusing on particular concepts. The paper by Orlikowski and Robey (1991) illustrates an application of the first type, using the elements of Figure 16.1 to develop a framework for investigating the structuration of information systems development and use. More selective use is illustrated by Elkjaer et al. (1991) who explore power relations in systems development consulting. As Jones and Karsten (2008) observe, however, the extent to which the ontology adopted in studies of either type is consistent with Giddens is sometimes debatable. The contribution of structuration to the philosophy in organization studies may therefore be less than the number of papers claiming to employ the notion might suggest.

Possible directions for future research Given the date of many of the articles discussed in this chapter and the claim by Bryant (1992) that Giddens made no contribution to the epistemology of structuration after 1977 (thereby, it could be argued, leaving the philosophy of structuration only half completed) it might seem that structuration as a contribution to the philosophy of organizations is just of historical interest. A quick search of Google scholar or of online bibliographic databases, such as ABI/Inform, 244

Structuration theory

200

6000

180 5000

160 140

4000

120 3000

ABI/lnform 100

Google

Scholar

80 2000

60 40

1000

20 0

0

1990

2000

1995 A B I/lnform

2005

2010

Google Scholar

Figure 16.2 References to structuration on ABI/Inform and Google Scholar 1986–2013

however, suggests that, far from having died out in 1984, structuration in the organizational literature did not really take off until at least a decade later, and would seem to have continued to grow over the ensuing decades, as shown in Figure 16.2. Apart from the possible slow diffusion of sociological concepts into the organizational field, what does this tell us about the future of structuration in the philosophy of organizational research? The earlier analyses suggest that not all of this growth in the use of structuration in organizational literature necessarily indicates that the philosophical stance of structuration has been taken up, or even recognized, by organizational researchers. The persistence of interest in structuration, however, suggests that its non-dualistic approach continues to have appeal. In its later association with practice theory, stemming, in large part it may be argued, from the practice lens paper of Orlikowski (2000), it would seem to have gained renewed impetus as a focus for organizational theorizing. Whether in such work the influence of structuration has become so attenuated that it could be considered to be continuing to make any substantive philosophical contribution to the field, however, would seem open to debate.

Conclusions The continuing growth in references to structuration in the organizational literature, whether or not these adhere faithfully to Giddens’ philosophical assumptions, may be considered as indicating that it is still seen as providing insight and legitimacy for researchers seeking alternatives to mainstream ‘positivist’ research. Interest in structuration, however, may also reflect its positive critique of interpretive sociologies, suggesting a recognition that there may be more to the development of a critical account of social practice that acknowledges human agency than the simple rejection of naturalism. If Giddens’ particular formulation of such an account is not without its critics and perhaps does not provide quite the complete solution to controversies in social theory that he might claim, in its breadth of reference and attention to ‘problems of philosophy’ (albeit perhaps somewhat idiosyncratically defined), it nevertheless offers a rich resource for organizational research. 245

Matthew Jones

References (key texts in bold) Archer, M. (1990). Human agency and social structure: a critique of Giddens, in Clark, J., Modgil, C. and Modgil, J. (eds), Anthony Giddens: consensus and controversy. Brighton: Falmer Press, pp. 73–84. Archer, M.S. (1995). Realist Social Theory: the morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barley, S.R. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: evidence from observation of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31: 78–108. Barley, S.R. (1990). The alignment of technology and structure through roles and networks. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35: 61–103. Barley, S.R. and Tolbert, P.S. (1997). Institutionalization and structuration: studying the links between action and institution. Organization Studies, 18(1): 93–117. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1995). Reflexive Modernization: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, P.L and Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Allen Lane. Bhaskar, R. (1989). Reclaiming Reality. London: Verso. Bryant, C.G. (1992). Sociology without philosophy? The case of Giddens’s structuration theory. Sociological Theory, 10(2): 137–49. Bryant, C.G.A. and Jary, D. (2001). The Contemporary Giddens: social theory in a globalizing age. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Craib, I. (1992). Anthony Giddens. London: Routledge. DeSanctis, G. and Poole, M.S. (1994). Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: adaptive structuration theory. Organization Science, 5(2): 121–47. Durkheim, É. (1938). The Rules of Sociological Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Elkjaer, B., Flensburg, P., Mouritsen, J. and Willmott, H. (1991). The commodification of expertise: the case of systems development consulting. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 1(2): 139–56. Feldman, M.S. and Orlikowski, W.J. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization Science, 22(5): 1240–53. Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson (2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan (2nd edn, 1994). Giddens, A. (1983). Comments on the theory of structuration. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 13: 75–80. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1989). A reply to my critics, in Held, D. and Thompson, J.B. (eds), Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–301. Giddens, A. (1990). Structuration theory and sociological analysis, in Clark, J., Modgil, C. and Modgil, J. (eds), Anthony Giddens: consensus and controversy. Brighton: Falmer Press, pp. 297–315. Giddens, A. (1991). Structuration theory: past, present and future, in Bryant, C.G.A and Jary, D. (eds), Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: a critical appreciation. London: Routledge, pp. 201–21. Giddens, A. (1992). The Transformation of Intimacy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1993). New Rules of Sociological Method (2nd ed.), Cambridge, UK: Polity Press Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond Left and Right. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1999). Runaway World. London: Profile Books. Giddens, A. and Pierson, C. (1998). Conversations with Anthony Giddens. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gregson, N. (1989). On the (ir)relevance of structuration theory to empirical research, in Held, D. and Thompson, J.B. (eds), Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–48. Hassard, J. (1988). Overcoming hermeticism in organization theory: an alternative to paradigm incommensurability. Human Relations, 41(3): 247–59. Hekman, S. (1990). Hermeneutics and the crisis of social theory: a critique of Giddens’ epistemology, in Clark, J., Modgil, C. and Modgil, C. (eds), Anthony Giddens, Consensus and Controversy. Basingstoke: Falmer, pp. 155–65. 246

Structuration theory

Jones, M.R. (1999). Structuration theory, in Currie, W.J. and Galliers, R. (eds), Re-thinking Management Information Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 103–35. Jones, M.R. and Karsten, H. (2008). Giddens’s structuration theory and information systems research. MIS Quarterly, 32(1): 127–57. Jones, M.R. and Karsten, H. (2009). Divided by a common language? A response to Marshall Scott Poole. MIS Quarterly, 33(3): 589–95. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1989). Power and subjectivity at work: from degradation to subjugation in social relations. Sociology, 23(4): 535–58. Leonardi, P.M. and Barley, S.R. (2010). What’s under construction here? Social action, materiality, and power in constructivist studies of technology and organizing. The Academy of Management Annals, 4(1): 1–51. Mintzberg, H. (1973). The Nature of Managerial Work. New York: Harper & Row. Orlikowski, W.J. (1992). The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organization Science, 3 (3): 398–427. Orlikowski W.J. (1996). Improvising organizational transformation over time: a situated change perspective. Information Systems Research, 7(1): 63–92. Orlikowski, W.J. (2000). Using technology and constituting structures: a practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11(4): 404–28. Orlikowski, W.J. and Robey, D. (1991). Information technology and the structuring of organizations. Information Systems Research, 2(2): 143–69. Poole, M.S. and DeSanctis, G. (1990). Understanding the use of group decision support systems: the theory of adaptive structuration, in Fulk, J. and Steinfeld, C. (eds), Organizations and Communication Technology. Beverly Hills: Sage, pp. 173–93. Poole, M.S. and DeSanctis, G. (2004). Structuration theory in information systems research: methods and controversies, in Whitman, M.E. and Woszczynski, A. (eds), Handbook of Information Systems Research. Hershey, PA: Idea Group, pp. 206–49. Poole, M. S. and McPhee, R. D. (1983). A structurational theory of organizational climate, in Putnam, L. and Pacanowsky, M. (eds), Communications and Organizations: an interpretive approach. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 195–219. Pozzebon, M. and Pinsonneault, A. (2005). Challenges in conducting empirical work using structuration theory: learning from IT research. Organization Studies, 26(9): 1353–76. Ranson, S., Hinings, B, and Greenwood, R. (1980). The structuring of organizational structures. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25: 1–17. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2): 243–63. Schatzki, T.R., Knorr-Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Stones, R. (2005). Structuration Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Strauss, A.L. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine. Urry, J. (1982). Duality of structure: some critical issues. Theory, Culture and Society, 1(2): 100–106. Weaver, G.R. and Gioia, D.A. (1994). Paradigms lost: incommensurability vs structurationist inquiry. Organization Studies, 15(4): 565–89. Whittington, R. (1992). Putting Giddens into action: social systems and managerial agency. Journal of Management Studies, 29(6): 693–712. Willis, P.E. (1977). Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House. Willmott, H. (1981). The structuring of organizational structure: a note. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26: 470–74. Willmott, H. (1987). Studying managerial work: a critique and a proposal. Journal of Management Studies, 24(3): 249–70. Willmott, H. (1993). Breaking the paradigm mentality. Organization Studies, 14(5): 681–719.

247

This page intentionally left blank

Part III

Special Topics

This page intentionally left blank

17 Aesthetics and design An epistemology of the unseen Antonio Strati

Writings on aesthetics and design in organizational life have extended the boundaries of organizational theory and management studies by envisaging a highly specific approach whereby aesthetics and design become part of the way in which organizational life is understood and managed. They range across a broad array of references to philosophical, anthropological, psychological, semiotic, sociological and cultural studies, and theories of art. They share the general feature of conducting an epistemological polemic against the dominant image conveyed by the rationalist paradigm, according to which it is only analytical-scientific thinking that provides a valid description of organization. Since the end of the 1980s, this manner of understanding and describing organizational phenomena has lost its aura of universality and objectivity. This has been due to both critical reflections within the paradigm itself and the emergence of new ways to conduct organizational analysis, which, each in a specific manner, have given rise to the so-called Cultural Turn in organization theory and management studies. One of these new approaches is the aesthetic study of the organization, which holds that art and science cannot be kept separate if the intention is to understand everyday routine in organizations. It has been driven by the cultural-symbolist debates of the 1980s on the image of organization, aesthetics and organizational skills, and the pathos of organizational artefacts. At that time there appeared the first publications on aesthetics and design in organizational life, especially influential among which were the Special Issue on ‘Art and Organization’ of Dragon (1987) and the collected volume Symbols and Artifacts (Gagliardi, 1990). There followed the shift from the symbolic study of the aesthetic dimension of the organization to the aesthetic approach (Strati, 1992). Closer attention was paid to aesthetic philosophy, philosophy of art, and theories of art, as evidenced by collective publications like the Special Issue of the international journal Organization (1996), and two books, Organization and Aesthetics (Strati, 1999) and The Art Firm (Guillet de Monthoux, 2004). The novel feature of all these works was that, from the earliest of them onwards, aesthetics, design, and art were considered to be, not the mere embellishment of everyday routine in organizations, but rather a fundamental dimension of such routine which had hitherto remained 251

Antonio Strati

unnoticed and unstudied (Linstead and Höpfl, 2000). The novelty also extended to the philosophy and social theory researched and debated through critical reflections on the use made in organizational aesthetics research of the categories of aesthetics, on the one hand, and art on the other (Chytry, 2008). Thus incorporated into the organizational debate were philosophies which hitherto had not been considered – as I shall show in this chapter by considering first, in the next section, the relationship between aesthetic philosophy and organizational citizenship, and then the co-presence of three main philosophical sensibilities, hermeneutic, aesthetic and performative.

Aesthetics and organizational citizenship There is no philosopher who has not been immersed in aesthetic experience – or put otherwise, who has not been an active subject of the knowledge and interaction that passes through sensory perception and the sensory-aesthetic judgement. This is the thesis put forward between 1735 and 1750 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his philosophical treatises devoted to sensory intelligence (ty aisthetà) and its distinction and autonomy from cognitive intelligence. After Baumgarten, numerous philosophers dealt with aesthetics, also giving it new facets. The first was Immanuel Kant, whose writings have been particularly influential until the present day. The term ‘aesthetics’, which originated in ancient Greek, highlights the crucial importance of activating the perceptive faculties of sensory-aesthetic judgment. It became mixed with that of ‘art’ (from Latin), which denotes the transformation of raw material with skill and intelligence. This is a mixture whereby ‘aesthetic’ and ‘art’ evoke each other but remain distinct. Above all, both ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ highlight, on the one hand, the proactive nature of sensitive intelligence and artistry, and on the other, their ‘an-aesthetic’ nature when the sensory faculties and aesthetic judgment are manipulated in order to soothe and dull the mind. Almost two and a half centuries later, arguments similar to Baumgarten’s were put forward in organizational studies: •

•

•

There is no manager, worker, technician, or administrator that does not use the perceptivesensory faculties and aesthetic judgement in his/her work, because the participants in organizational life ‘are craftpersons and aesthetes’ (Jones et al., 1988: 160–1). There is no organization that does not exercise influence and control at the pre-cognitive stage on the individuals and groups with which it works and interacts, because of the pathos of the artifacts that it produces and with which it is surrounded (Gagliardi, 1990). There is no organizational scholar that does not undergo aesthetic experience, either when conducting field research or when processing and communicating the results of that research through texts, lessons and lectures, even if they then do not know how to express that experience for research purposes (Strati, 1992).

What happened to induce some scholars to interest themselves in the aesthetic dimension of the organization? It was the above-mentioned cultural turn of the 1980s, in the course of which, on the one hand, the dominance of the positivist and functionalist paradigm was disputed and, on the other, new ways to study organizations and new themes to consider were conceived. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, de-constructionism, feminist studies, interpretationism and symbolic understanding resonated in organizational research and likewise in the aesthetic study of organizations. 252

Aesthetics and design

The aesthetic discourse on organizations made its own theoretical contribution by conducting an epistemological critique of the cognitive interpretation of organizational phenomena which still pervaded the new approaches: 1

2

3

4

5

Although the cognitive level of intelligence is still important, a great deal of organizational life eludes it, and is instead grasped by another form of intelligence, namely sensory intelligence. The places in which people work, the technologies that they use, the rhythms and times of their activities, their relationships with other workers, managerial strategies and organizational decisions result from aesthetic choices and arouse aesthetic feelings ranging from pleasure to disgust. Everyday work routine in organizations consists of the interactions between corporealities that belong to individuals, groups and collectives, and those that belong to physical, intangible or virtual artefacts. These interactions are not mere mental constructs, nor semiotic concepts, but concrete relationships with a pathos that gives rise to the complex aesthetic world of the organization. The aesthetic materiality of organizational life gives salience to the finite nature of the organization, i.e. that it is a down-to-earth sensible experience rather than an objective reality that transcends the intersubjectivities that embody it. In organizational contexts, people are immersed in the aesthetic experience, both as organizational actors and as organization scholars.

The epistemological critique of cognitivism also concerns the issue of logic. Besides analyticalrational logic, there is the ‘poetic logic’ proposed – again in the first half of the eighteenth century – by another founder of aesthetics, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. In 1725, Vico published The New Science, in which he attacked the theories of Descartes. The interactions among individuals and between individuals and their world, he wrote, do not follow the abstract principles of Cartesian rationality. If one considers historical processes and the dynamics of social life (mondo civile), one sees that ‘mythical thinking’, evocation, and metaphor are fundamental. People use gestures, they resort to images, and invent metaphors to express themselves; they communicate through signs that are as cryptic as hieroglyphics; they invent myths and rituals; they recount stories and fairytales; and through them they seek to identify with the world and with things. They relate to the surrounding world through the imagination of which their senses and passions are capable. Organizational aesthetics research philosophically examines this aesthetic invention of both the person and his/her relationship with the civilized world. It is in this eighteenth-century revolution of the conception of the person that aesthetic research finds assonance with that particular form of organizational citizenship – ‘aesthetic citizenship’ – which it investigates. In this citizenship, it is the ‘taste’ of people that assumes importance and centrality, as stressed by a third founder of aesthetics, Joseph Addison, in the eleven instalments devoted to the pleasures of the imagination published by the Engish cultural magazine The Spectator in 1712. Taste, sensory perception, aesthetic judgement, and poetic logic are the foundations of the individual’s ‘aesthetic’ invention. Art contributed greatly to this profound change in the concept of the person that occurred in the eighteenth century. An outright revolution came about in painting, music and literature. Art eschewed the sacred, aristocratic and grandiose, depicting instead the quotidian world of the sentiments. In other words, everyday life was to be represented in and of itself, detached from the divine or aristocratic. 253

Antonio Strati

But this was only one aspect of the change. The other was that mundane life became increasingly aestheticized. This was particularly evident at the end of the twentieth century, when philosophers themselves spoke of a veritable ‘aesthetic turn’: We are without doubt currently experiencing an aesthetic boom. It extends from individual styling, urban design and the economy through to theory. More and more elements of reality are being aesthetically mantled, and reality as a whole is coming increasingly to count as an aesthetic construction to us. (Welsch, 1996: 1) The organizational experience is ‘designed’, pleasure and dependence invite one to forget the problematic sides of working life, and the focus of design moves from the object-artefact to experience as a designed organizational artefact (Figures de l’art, 2013). However, it was aesthetic reflection that construed this process of ‘aestheticization which in truth is tantamount to an anaestheticization’ (Welsch, 1996: 18). Aesthetic sentiments collected during empirical research in organizations often highlighted the dark side of organizational life: working in that organization is ugly. Buildings are ugly, people are ugly, everything’s ugly, and we grow more and more ugly as the days pass. (Strati, 1999: 104) And the contribution of aesthetic and artistic theories to improving the quality of organizational life and management styles was critically analysed (Human Relations, 2002; Meisiek and Barry, 2014). The contribution of aesthetic research to organizational theories consists, in fact, in critical analysis of the aestheticization of society and the managerial manipulation of the organization’s aesthetic dimension: Opposing alienating and manipulative processes, an aesthetic approach is critical of positivist perspectives, challenging the distinction between the value of research and the pleasure of doing it. Critical also of managerial standpoints, aesthetic research is concerned with emancipation and the exercise of aesthetic judgement. (Buchanan and Bryman, 2009: xxxi) These considerations conclude this section devoted to aesthetic citizenship of the organization. The next section discusses the hermeneutic, aesthetic and performative standpoints that are the philosophical and sociological referents of the four approaches into which the aesthetic discourse on the organization divides.

Hermeneutics, aesthetics and performativity The philosophical and sociological standpoints of the aesthetic study of organizations stem mainly from three ‘philosophical sensibilities’ which still profoundly influence organizational aesthetics research: 1 2 3

254

the Hermeneutic Sensibility, which both links with the symbolic approach to the study of organizations and detaches itself from it; the Aesthetic Sensibility, which gives a definitive shape to the set of contributions on organizational aesthetics; the Performative Sensibility, which although always present in aesthetic research on the organization, assumed distinctive features at the turn of this century.

Aesthetics and design

These three philosophical sensibilities are generally present throughout the aesthetic discourse on the organization, but their emphases differ according to each of the four approaches that make up the aesthetic study of organizations (Strati, 2009). These approaches, in fact, focus on theoretical-methodological issues, ranges of action, and specific themes. Hence those who adopt the archaeological approach consider organizational aesthetics in order to grasp cultures and symbols that distinguish organizations as if they were studying some form of civilization. Those who adopt the empathic-logical approach focus on the aesthetic and pre-cognitive influence of the organizational artefacts that constitute, together with individuals, the organization’s symbolic landscape – the purpose also being to identify the forms of organizational control enacted. Those who adopt the aesthetic approach study the forms of constant collective and social negotiation of organizational aesthetics in routine work. And those who adopt the artistic approach investigate artistic experience in order to obtain information about the management of organizational processes.

Hermeneutic sensibility Like aesthetics, also hermeneutics arose as a branch of philosophy in the eighteenth century. It is a philosophical theory that considers understanding to be an interpretative process. Schlegel and Schleiermacher discerned this process in all linguistic activity, Heidegger maintained that it is the foundation of human life, rather than being a mere cognitive attitude. Gadamer tied it to aesthetics: art transforms those involved with it, so that it is an authentic experience of truth which concentrates on the self and at the same time expresses the symbolic character which, from the hermeneutic point of view, distinguishes the individual. Organizational aesthetics research has often drawn on hermeneutics in order to refine its organizational analyses. Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of its foremost proponents, but also the Italian school, first with Luigi Pareyson (1954) who tied hermeneutics to existentialism, and then with his pupil Umberto Eco who has investigated also the limits of interpretation: the hermeneutic process must regard the ‘sign’ as resulting from complex operations which involve different modes of production and recognition, and not take signs to be the minimal units on the basis of which to create the typologies that reproduce the centuries-long debate on the differences among verbal, iconic or gestural language. For organizational aesthetics, the user has equal importance with the creator of the work. This is a crucial aspect whereby the aesthetic-hermeneutic experience transcends the protagonists while involving them and is a constantly open and unconcluded event. This was well illustrated by Roland Barthes (1989) when, reflecting on the Eiffel Tower, he expressed astonishment that Paris had taken so long to have its own symbol. This symbol, he pointed out, was born amid negotiations, conflicts, disputes and conflicts involving, among others, the community of Parisian artists and the art world. The Eiffel Tower’s architecture does not participate in the sacredness of art, but merely extols science and positivism. It is therefore surprising that the Eiffel Tower has become the symbol of Paris. But on closer consideration, one notes that it refers directly to all Paris, rather than the monarchy as does the Louvre, or the empire as does the Arc de Triomphe. On visiting it, one visits Paris: one deconstructs the city. And if one visits Paris, one sees the tower from almost everywhere: a pure sign, virtually empty, based on simple lines that join, mythically, earth and heaven. This movement between the creation of meaning and its interpretation in the context of organizational life is important for all the approaches of organizational aesthetics research, but it is particularly studied by the artistic approach. It is by means of the performance that, for example, the choreographer shows whether s/he has really mastered the hermeneutics of the 255

Antonio Strati

representation. In other words, the ‘aesthetic method, which is otherwise so closely related to hermeneutics that we can call it a hermeneutics of action, creates rather than interprets’ (Guillet de Monthoux, 2007: 139).

Aesthetic sensibility The aesthetic sensibility concerns philosophical reflection on contemporary design and aesthetic philosophies centred on ordinary beauty (Przychodzen et al., 2010), on collectively constructed and socially negotiated action, on the sensory intelligence that makes one individual different from another but at the same time equal to him/her, on what makes a way of working or an organizational setting beautiful or unpleasant, and on the organizational creativity that appeals because of the unusual and uncommon experience that it furnishes. The theory draws from and reflects on different aesthetic philosophies, most notably Immanuel Kant’s modern aesthetics, Friedrich Schiller’s romantic aesthetics, Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics of the crisis of rationalism, Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s neo-Marxist aesthetics, Edmund Husserl’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics, Martin Heidegger’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics, the hermeneutic-existentialist aesthetics of Luigi Pareyson, the aesthetics of John Dewey’s pragmatic-naturalist theory, Susanne Langer’s post-Vico aesthetics, Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernism and Georg Simmel’s sociology. This, therefore, is a highly diversified array of theories in which the aesthetic philosophy of the first half of the eighteenth century, on which the aesthetic approach has mainly drawn, has become an essential and almost ritualistic reference for organizational aesthetics research. Constructed upon it have been some theoretical mainstays of the aesthetic discourse on organizations. a

b

c

256

Aesthetics concerns the world of sensible knowledge, the thinking of the body that remains imprisoned within the body (Legros, 2005: 159). Aesthetics is not art, therefore, but rather the sensory world in which individuals are immersed since birth, and by virtue of which they act and interact in both their everyday work and private lives (Merleau-Ponty, 1947). Art nevertheless pertains to aesthetics because of its sensible, concrete, and material nature. Indeed, in the West, art arose together with aesthetics because, until two and a half centuries ago, there was art of every kind except art for its own sake – the art directed to its own excellence as such. This was a profound change in the forms of sensory experience, in perceptions of it and in the modes of understanding it (Rancière, 2011). The art with which organizational aesthetics research is most concerned is art as experience, according to the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who wrote, in 1934, that aesthetic experience should not be restricted to the relationship with works of art alone, and according to Pareyson, who maintained that there is something artistic in every human action and that works in every field are due to the activity of formativeness which, while producing them invents how to do so. Design is the most obvious manifestation of this aesthetic and artistic process tied to industrial mass production. At the beginning of the last century, with the promotion of Machinenstil by the Deutscher Werkbund of Munich and of rationalism by the Bauhaus, there arose two important contexts in which to consider the aestheticization of everyday objects and environments. Design’s contemporary features make it a phenomenon at the same time industrial and artisanal, with products either at low prices, such as cell phones or kitchen utensils, or astronomical ones like Ferrari cars. This is not the so-called ‘art world’, but the

Aesthetics and design

one in which art is combined with technique, and beauty with utility, to the point that during the second half of the last century design became the conceptualization of manufacturing methods and corporate management processes (Sudjic, 2008).

Performative sensibility Performative sensibility characterizes all four approaches to the study of organizational aesthetics, but with different nuances and objects of inquiry. While for the archaeological approach performative sensibility represents awareness of a general kind, it is the main feature of the artistic approach because of the image of organizational interaction as artistic performance. It is Marina Abramovic’s art and theories on the art of performance, which is investigated and discussed in order to draw insights for the management of work processes in the organization. It is the creative use of unconventional materials in the art world in order to expand art in existential experience. Joseph Beuys’s experimental research on plastic transformations, or the ‘poor art’ of Michelangelo Pistoletto and his project for socially useful art, are explored in terms of artistic and organizational management in order to gain insights useful for management theories. Performative sensibility is Robert Wilson’s art and his theatrical innovations designed to capture the ways in which creative capacity combines with an equal globalized organizational capacity and draws stimuli useful for organizational leadership in the age of globalization. In the empathic-logical approach, performative sensibility regards the symbolic artefacts that constitute the organizational landscape as agents able to convey and stimulate aesthetic feelings and to exercise pre-cognitive organizational control. The focus is therefore on the hidden dimension of organizational dynamics. This dimension consists of interactions which often go unexplored because they are difficult to observe and investigate, and because they operate without conscious awareness of them. The performative sensibility of the aesthetic approach is directed to give a language – poetic logic – to the tacit dimension of knowledge that is essential for social practice in organizations. It was the Hungarian philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1958) who introduced the distinction between the tacit and explicit dimensions of knowledge on the basis of empirical research, and who described how the tacit dimension is constitutive of people’s personal knowledge and expertise. The skill of a surgeon performing a heart operation is generally not the same as that of his colleague, even if they have received the same training and therefore have had access to the same explicit knowledge. Likewise, the talent of a pianist is not the same as that of a fellow student. Sidney Pollack (2005) investigated with tact and delicacy this subtle relationship among aesthetics, the tacit dimension of knowledge, and design in his documentary film on Frank Gehry’s architectural work. This applies to all the forms of expert knowledge at the basis of the social practices of work in organizations, as the wide-ranging debate on the aesthetic dimension of practice in organizational studies illustrates (Gherardi and Strati, 2012). The performative sensibility of the aesthetic approach thus focuses on micro-organizational practices, i.e. the elementary relationships that underpin social interaction in societies and which, at the beginning of the last century, the sociologist Georg Simmel identified in sensory and aesthetic interaction.

Towards a greater philosophical awareness In this chapter I have referred mostly to collective publications. I have done so because they give better account of the collective work of research, theory and debate on which the study of aesthetics and design in organizations was originally founded, and thereafter the aesthetic 257

Antonio Strati

understanding of organizational life. These are collections of papers, special issues devoted to organizational aesthetics by leading international journals specialized in organizational topics, the journal devoted to aesthetics and organizational design Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life, and the online journal Organizational Aesthetics. The debate sometimes extends beyond the confines of organizational theory to illustrate the philosophical implications of organizational aesthetics, and the research methods used to investigate embodiment, creativity and design (King and Vickery, 2013). Nevertheless, much of the debate still remains within those confines, while philosophy and social theory frequently receive dutiful but only fleeting reference. I envisage, therefore, two main scenarios for the future development of the study of aesthetics and design in organizations. The first relates to the field of organizational studies. An important future direction, in fact, is the spread among scholars of organizational aesthetics and design of greater awareness that it is necessary not only to know but also to engage with the themes and issues debated in the philosophy of aesthetics, theories of art, and social theory more generally, on the basis of the experience gained through research practices. The second scenario concerns so-called ‘disciplinary studies’, namely philosophy, art history, semiotics, sociology and many others. Except for the theories of art developed in the past decade, very rare, though valuable, are cases in which attention is paid to the debate on aesthetics and design in the world of work and organizational management. One of them is the collected volume L’esthétique du beau ordinaire dans une perspective transdisciplinaire (Przychodzen et al., 2010), which, drawing on aesthetic philosophy, ranges from the anthropology of everyday aesthetics to the aesthetic study of organizations. Another one is Aesthetic Capitalism (Murphy and de La Fuente, 2014), a collected volume which discusses the aesthetic dimension of capitalism by ‘investigating the aesthetics’ of financial speculation, fiscal policies, organizational life, architecture and art.

References (key texts in bold) Barthes, R. (1989). La Tour Eiffel. Paris: Seuil (partial English trans.: The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Buchanan, D. and Bryman, A. (eds) (2009). The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. London: Sage. Chytry, J. (2008). Organizational aesthetics: the artful firm and the aesthetic moment in contemporary business and management theory. Aesthesis: International Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Management and Organizational Life, 2(2): 60–72. http://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/ aesthesis/23. Dragon, the Journal of SCOS (1987). Special Issue on ‘Art and organization’, 2 (4). Edited by P-J. Benghozi. Figures de l’art (2013). Special Issue on ‘Philosophie du design’, 25. Edited by B. Lafargue and S. Cardoso. Gagliardi, P. (ed.) (1990). Symbols and Artifacts: views of the corporate landscape. Berlin: de Gruyter. Gherardi, S. and Strati, A. (2012). Learning and Knowing in Practice-based Studies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Guillet de Monthoux, P. (2004). The Art Firm: aesthetic management and metaphysical marketing from Wagner to Wilson. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books. Guillet de Monthoux, P. (2007). Aesthetic perspective: hermeneutics of action, in Gustavsson, B. (ed.), The Principles of Knowledge Creation: research methods in the social sciences. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 131–46. Human Relations (2002). Special Issue on ‘Organising aesthetics’, 55 (7). Edited by A. Strati and P. Guillet de Monthoux. Jones, M.O., Moore, M.D. and Snyder, R.C. (eds) (1988). Inside Organizations. Understanding the Human Dimension. Newbury Park: Sage. King, I.W. and Vickery, J. (eds) (2013). Experiencing Organisations: new aesthetic perspectives. Faringdon: Libri Publishing. 258

Aesthetics and design

Legros, R. (2005). La naissance de l’individu moderne, in Foccroulle, B., Legros, R. and Todorov, T. (eds), La naissance de l’individu dans l’art. Paris: Grasset, pp. 121–200. Linstead, S. and Höpfl, H. (eds) (2000). The Aesthetic of Organization. London: Sage. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1947). Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques. Grenoble: Cynara (English trans.: The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, And Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Meisiek, S. and Barry, D. (2014). The science of making management an art, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(1): 134–41. Murphy, P. and de La Fuente, E. (eds) (2014). Aesthetic Capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Organization (1996). Special Issue on ‘Essays on aesthetics and organization’, 3 (2). Edited by E. Ottensmeyer. Pareyson, L. (1954). Estetica. Teoria della formatività. Torino: Edizioni di “Filosofia”. Reprinted 1988, Milano: Bompiani. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy. Second edn. 1962, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pollack, S. (2005). Sketches of Frank Gehry, Documentary Film, USA, 83’. Przychodzen, J., Boucher, F-E. and David, S. (eds) (2010). L’esthétique du beau ordinaire dans une perspective transdisciplinaire. Ni du gouffre ni du ciel, Paris: l’Harmattan. Rancière, J. (2011). Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art. Paris: Éditions Galilée (English trans.: Aisthesis: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art. Trans. Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013). Strati, A. (1992). Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. Academy of Management Review, 17(3): 568–81. Strati, A. (1999). Organization and Aesthetics. London: Sage. Strati, A. (2009). ‘Do you do beautiful things?’: aesthetics and art in qualitative methods of organization studies, in Buchanan, D. and Bryman, A. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Research Methods, London: Sage, pp. 230–45. Sudjic, D. (2008). The Language of Things. London: Penguin. Welsch, W. (1996). Aestheticization processes. Theory, Culture and Society, 13(1): 1–24.

259

18 Ageing The lived experience of growing up and older in organizations Kathleen Riach

Everybody ages as they work. But not everybody experiences ageing in the same way. Given that philosophy provides us with ways of making sense and meaning of our day-to-day experiences within particular settings, it is surprising that theorizing ageing as both organizational and an organizing concept through drawing on key philosophical traditions still remains in its infancy in accounts of age in organization studies. By way of surveying why this might be the case and suggesting ways into a philosophy of ageing in organization studies, this chapter will begin by suggesting what a more philosophical orientation might bring. It will then briefly outline the influence of functionalist, life course, political economy and poststructuralist traditions in exploring age in an organizational context. In reflecting on the enduring challenge facing organization studies that requires sensitivity to both sociocultural aspects that shape our meaning of age and the situated materiality of ageing, I will suggest how a turn towards the lived experience of ageing may open up new opportunities for the philosophical investigation of ageing in organization studies.

Why is age a philosophical concern to organizational scholars? Ageing, understood as how individuals and cohorts of people grow older within society, is very much a ‘hot topic’ within political and social debates and shows little sign of fading. Commentaries surrounding pensionable ages and health care costs of an ageing demographic are of pertinent interest to organizations not only in terms of perceptions surrounding employee needs, employee capacity and labour supply, but also in relation to potential markets surrounding aged care and new patterns of consumption. In many ways this topicality is both an opportunity and rod in the backs of researchers in organization studies exploring ageing and organizations. On the one hand, it provides a number of avenues to engage with people who sit outside organization studies, business schools, or the Academy, but who have an intimate and immediate interest in working through the challenges and opportunities commonly associated with ageing. On the other hand, there are conundrums over how best to navigate the various paradigmatic 260

Ageing

waters which dominate policy, health and cultural arenas that may very quickly dismiss the value of theorizing about ageing in organizations. To this extent, many scholars in age and organization studies (or more broadly, ‘age and employment studies’ as the dominant disciplinary terrain is known) face a conundrum: either relent and slip into an ontology where age and ageing are chronologically fixed in some way, or risk theorizing at a level that is perceived as too abstract to ‘usefully’ inform issues that may impact on organizations as employees grow up and older. However, I would argue that turning to a philosophical understanding of ageing is of pertinent importance to accounts of age and organization, providing us with vocabularies and frameworks of thinking about ageing and work that question what age is and subsequently its relevance or relationship to organization. Engaging with age and ageing as a philosophical issue provides multiple Opportunities. In particular, it allows organizational scholars to: Denaturalize or question assumptions that are often made about age in Organization Studies. Age as ‘a number’ has significant power in ascribing particular values or assumptions without telling us what those values and assumptions might actually mean. For example, many studies still persist in providing a chronological age of participants with little evidence this formed part of the analysis. As a result, we are invited to ‘read’ this number as significant, but given little direction as to how we make sense of this number. Develop organizational studies as a discipline to challenge dominant paradigms surrounding age and ageing. The dominance of bio-medical approaches in age research seeps into the study of organizational life in a variety of ways; for example, through occupational health or capacity concerns or ‘appropriate’ modes of working as part of a life cycle. This gives little due consideration of organizational and institutional conditions and dynamics that may shape ageing as both a phenomenon and lived experience. While the network of scholars who focus exclusively on ageing in a work context is a small but growing community, topics of concern to many organization studies scholars such as health and well-being, career and equality, make ageing and employment a potential meeting place for a range of philosophical positions. Organization Studies has huge potential to be both a corrective and valuable voice within such multi-disciplinary dialogues surrounding ageing through providing rich insights that put the organizational context and organizing as a principle centre stage theoretically. To understand how we currently think about ageing and organization, it is important to consider that from its earliest roots, scholars exploring the relationship between age and work have sought to work against a dominant and enduring concept of age as solely biologically driven, In challenging this legacy, scholars exploring age and organization have not necessarily drawn explicitly or exclusively from a particular philosophical tradition but rather focused on the ways in which age comes to influence organizational relations. By ways of an overview, we can see this being achieved predominantly through four paradigms.

Orientations and influences in studies of ageing and organization Functionalist: While explicit reference to particular scholars in the functionalist traditions such as Parsons and Eisenhardt is rare, studies during the 1960s that began to explore the relationship between age and work were heavily influenced by a functionalist paradigm. Functionalistinformed theories of ageing include disengagement theory, which suggests as individuals grow older, they gradually sever strands between themselves and society (Cumming and Henry, 1961) and activity theory, which stresses the importance of continual, albeit different modes of engagement through the different stages of life (Lemon et al., 1972). Both share a concern with structures that facilitate the integration, flow and subsequent exit of individuals into society 261

Kathleen Riach

through assigning particular stages or expectations according to chronological age or designated stage in the life cycle (Blaikie, 1999). More recent terms, such as ‘gerotranscendence’ (Tornstam, 1989) draw on concerns surrounding increasing spiritual engagement as one grows older, but continue to align stage with behaviour. For organizations, the focus centres around identifying causal patterns and chains between chronological age and what individuals can or cannot do. Inherent in this approach is a slippage in mistaking the proxy of chronology for a fact about how useful or otherwise an employee’s contribution is. This makes it difficult to integrate ideas that ageing may be influenced or even constituted by socio-economic conditions. Subsequently, when such an approach is adopted in to studies of work, we find that the age of an employee is often correlated with a predictive value of behaviour or outlook surrounding motivation or performance. While a majority of studies are clearly situated by a psychological or organizational behaviour approach, it is also common to give chronology some explanatory purchase without analytical interrogation within the organizational studies domain (e.g. BackesGellner et al., 2011). As such, the legacy of functionalism set an agenda and the parameters of what is important about ageing to organizations that is still followed today, even influencing the research of those who work in direct opposition to this perspective. For example, numerous studies concentrate on particular cohorts, and when researching ‘older workers’, there is often a chronologically driven definition. It is therefore useful to stop and reflect on why even organizational scholars find the organizing principles of age derived from a functionalist position so seductive. Is it simply symptomatic of trying to bound our interrogation of age in a way that carries some political purchase (since researchers are aware there is funding for research that provides the ‘answer’ to an older demographic)? Or is it that, no matter how chronic the theoretical fault lines within a functionalist interpretation of age, it is too difficult to escape the idea of a complete separation of causalities surrounding chronology and behaviour? In asking such questions, recognizing chronology as being both a sign and a system of signification becomes a pertinent point of reflection for organizational scholars. Life course: The life course approach has developed through starting with a consideration of the intersections between social and individually located dimensions of ageing; a way of ‘envisaging the passage of a lifetime less as the mechanical turning of a wheel and more as the unpredictable flow of the river’ (Hockey and James, 2003: 5). While not regarded as following a particular philosophical orientation in itself, a life course perspective is one of the few approaches where age is centre stage theoretically and therefore worthy of exploring in terms of its underlying tenets in a philosophical sense. Its early roots can be found in Mannheim’s (1923) seminal essay ‘The problem of generations’, which moves from a Parsons–Eisenhardt concept of generations towards a contextually sensitive definition. Specifically it argues that age should be understood within broader socio-historical and cultural conditions. In other words, a cohort who has experienced similar conditions or events across time and space may share some mode of affinity or outlook with other organizational members they perceive to be in their cohort which intersects with personal biography. This enables analysis to explore how individuals negotiate personalized events and episodes within the context of socially recognized trajectories and organizational norms. In this sense, it provides a valuable underpinning for exploring relationships between organizational experiences that emerge over time, such as career in combination with our socially situated sense of identity. For example, McMullin et al.’s (2007) study of IT workers demonstrates how immersion in technology varies for different cohorts and results in workers expressing affinities with those of a similar age vis-à-vis others, which in turn may exacerbate stereotypical perceptions and biases. Analyses informed by a life course perspective also allow a more holistic consideration of lifestyle trajectories and work beyond the employee-organizational dyad; exploring how gendered relations may shape responsibilities surrounding childcare suggest 262

Ageing

women’s choices in later life working are often intertwined with or influenced by their partner’s retirement decisions (Loretto and Vickerstaff, 2013). At the same time, life course studies vary in their approach to enduring structure–agency questions in terms of the explanatory power given to deep structure (Jones, Chapter 16 this volume) or agency and individual freedom (Wilcox, Chapter 19 this volume) in terms of how one comes to experience age. While this provides a valuable way of taking into account the role of culture or change for individuals or affiliated cohorts, the organizational context is still presented as a background that affects, rather than is affected, by ageing. Political economy: Contrary to viewing organizations as a neutral background in which ageing takes place, political economy of ageing perspectives argue that particular forces are at play that ascribe value to certain ages in ways that subsequently privilege or marginalize (often age-defined) cohorts (Minkler and Estes, 1984; Phillipson, 1998). For example, ‘interlocking institutional arrangements’ (Marens and Mir, Chapter 9 this volume) surrounding pension entitlement and norms of career progression serve to situate older workers as a ‘reserve army’ (O’Brien, 2010), called upon in times of economic buoyancy, and displaced during periods of downturn. Similarly, a focus on inter-generational conflict on the work floor and suggestions of the older workforce ‘bottle-necking’ jobs are seen as distracting attention from fundamental inequalities and the exercise of power and hierarchy both within organizations and in the broader context of the economy, including neo-liberal agendas that use ‘the pension crisis’ as a means of justifying particular pension reforms (Grady, 2013). Such a position is particularly useful in highlighting age inequality within organizations and the labour market more generally as both accumulative and variegated across gender, class and ethnicity. For example, patterns of women’s pension provisions must be understood not simply as a later life issue, but the consequence of gendered wage inequalities and career patterns across their working lives. At the same time, in focusing on the systems of relations surrounding value and exchange, less consideration is given to an individual’s own subjective experience of ageing as they move in and over space and time. Postructuralist: By far, the most influential movement in age and organization studies over the past ten years has been a move towards conceptualizing age as constituted through a constellation of ideological repertoires and systems of signification that organizes how we come to ‘know’ age and our own experiences of ageing. Such a position is extremely helpful in decoupling chronology from a realist ontology, as well as revealing how age is a (socially constructed) principle that is both informed and in turn informs a range of organizational vocabularies and practices such as the ‘experience’ trope or expectations surrounding promotion or retirement. Marginalizing (or even denying) the existence of grand structures (see Linstead, Chapter 11 this volume), discursive perspectives are most commonly based within Foucauldian interpretations of power and discourse, leading to age being read through particular ideologically informed ideals and assumptions surrounding growing up and older. Consequently, studies have sought to highlight how subject positions surrounding ‘the older worker’ are inscribed through assumptions surrounding productivity (Rudman and Molke, 2009), or how particular youthinfused discourses inform how we come to think of the ideal worker (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2008). Discursive positions have also enabled an alternative reading of policies that have a direct impact on organizations as seen in Moulaert and Biggs’ (2013) evaluation of work and retirement policies. Alternatively, studies have drawn on narrative positions to explore how individuals narrate the self at particular points of their working lives, such as Gabriel et al.’s (2010) account of managers becoming unemployed during their fifties. Increasingly, concern surrounding age and other modes of inequality has benefitted from an intersectional approach; for example, gendered ageism is seen as more than simply the sum and substance of gender and age regimes (Søndergaard, 2005). This has provided the opportunity for a theoretical (rather than simply 263

Kathleen Riach

empirical) integration of ideas surrounding pertinent ‘aged’ issues experienced in a variety of ways throughout one’s life. At the same time, however, despite agreement that age is a ‘bodybased system of social categorization’ (Ainsworth, 2002: 581), recent critiques have suggested that the popularity of a poststructuralist stance that focuses only on age and ageing as discursively constituted negates a consideration of the corporeal experience of ageing – how we experience ageing in and through bodily engagement.

From age to ageing: the lived experience of ageing As shown above, dominant approaches to ageing, in seeking to correct a biologically determinist account of ageing, have often been hesitant to occupy a position where we can appreciate ageing as both a symbolic and materially important component in organizational life. To explore how this tension may be alleviated, I now turn to the concept of ‘lived experience’ as a means of exploring ageing as an experiential phenomenon. Lived experience is part of a broader phenomenological commitment to an ontology emphasizing engagement in a world where we are simultaneously constituting and constituted through meanings that are neither of our own creation nor autonomous from us (Merleau-Ponty, 1945[2006]). Lived experience is thus an ontological expression of the way humans exist as a self through their ongoing and inevitable embeddedness and engagement with the world. Because of this, individuals are ‘open’ to the world as both an ontological necessity and as a constitutive part of their intentionality, where consciousness can only ever be consciousness of something, rather than existing in and of itself. This suggests that we depart from exploring ageing as something we live through passively, driven from inside us by our biology, or externally, as is the case in a focus on mechanisms or stages that organize age, or through the interpellation of particular sociocultural scripts. Rather we live in ageing through our immersion in the world and the entangled strands of the relations in which we are embedded and embodied. In recognizing that as we grow up and older, our bodies are dynamic in both their mode and substance, embodied sensibility thus becomes the existential ground for ageing, making it a potential site for engaging in large issues of philosophical concern for organizational scholars. Specifically, the lived experience of ageing reminds us of three interrelated issues about how we come to be, know and constitute our organizational worlds. First, we experience ageing as embodied. The body is the means through which we are ‘anchored’ in the world, not in a materialist sense, but as the ‘intentional arc’ from which we both know and come to be in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 157). Thanem’s (Chapter 20, this volume) excellent overview of orientations to the body in organization studies highlights the value of considering a more embodied way of being in organizations. Similarly, the ageing body brings into sharp focus the challenge of situating bodies analytically in a way that ensures they are neither reduced to their material matter nor abstracted into becoming the sum of a discourse. To acknowledge the ageing body is to acknowledge that our body changes, morphs and engages (or fails to) in ways that may not always be of our choosing, but is always part of what we do and who we are. This in turn has powerful implications for the way we occupy organizations and how occupations come to be shaped around bodily capability or perceived capacity. Subsequently, studies of embodiment move the analytical focus from age as a category to ageing as part of the constantly shifting dialectical relations between self and world. This ageing body becomes an active site that is simultaneously lived through and lived in a world crafted through my perceptions, the perceptions of others and how I perceive them. Similarly, we can understand organizational ageing as manifested through the fleshy negotiation of our situated bodily presence within various organizational locations over our lives. Through this practical 264

Ageing

involvement and necessary openness, organizations can harm the ageing body through endurances or stresses that come to disturb, disrupt or reorientate our engagement in the world. Ultimately, the vulnerability of ageing then is not simply through inequality expressed in the mode of age discrimination, but is inherently corporeal. Second, we experience ageing as temporal. This requires us to consider the ageing body as a material manifestation of time. Although time has been dealt with extensively through a variety of philosophical orientations, notably the traditions of Heidegger (1927[1962]), Bergson (1968[1999]) and Ricoeur (1984), the lived experience of time forefronts how the present moment of being-in-the-world is the only sphere and means through which the past and future constantly shift and reorientate in relation to (but not in correlation or linear succession with) each other. These axes, what Husserl (1928[1991]) expresses as retentions (the presentation of a past present) and protentions (the moment that is still to be perceived), are not simply memetic or imagined but operate as interrelated ‘intentionalities which anchor me to an environment’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 483–4). Temporality is therefore as much about directionality as it is experience where our ‘being is always pressing into the future as we thoughtlessly engage with things in already existing, but constantly evolving social practices’(Holt and Sandberg, 2011: 221). In doing so, ageing as temporal provides both a means of articulating how it feels to occupy an organizational location, or how organizations situate themselves against a mosaic of experiences across working lives. This also provides a way of understanding how people experience or make meaning of different organizational pathways and trajectories without being consigned to linearity or biography. However, as Burch (1944: 137) suggests, ‘the self of lived experience is essentially “situated” and thus is both limited and enabled by conditions not wholly reducible to its self-defining freedom’. For example, the experiencing self is open to particular ideas of age that, in the West at least, forefront the Newtonian measurement of time as a primary organizing principle that may subsequently close down a plurality of how we think about the passing and duration of life. This is not objectively experienced as ‘things’ imposed on us, but rather intertwined with how both meaning and being are constituted. Therefore, a lived experience allows us to view ageing as a bricolage of temporal experiences that is both informed and informs the variegated organizational patterns that shape organization – some of which may inherently privilege or marginalize the ways that people age in organizational settings (see Riach and Kelly, 2014). Finally, we experience ageing as relational. This is not to say we all experience ageing in the same way, or even in similar contexts, but rather our experience of ageing is derived from the necessary entanglement of engagement with the world and others. In this sense, scholars do not ascribe ageing simply to the individual and how we navigate our way within various discourses, but instead situate ageing ontologies as located and constituted within relations. Studies beyond the organizational realm have already begun to draw on a humanistic perspective for exploring the intimacies of old age which we all inevitably face (since the alternative is rarely desirable). For example, Kitwood’s (1997: 8) seminal work exploring dementia uses the concept of personhood to suggest that being is ‘a standing or status that is bestowed on one human being, by others, in the context of relationship and social being. It implies recognition, respect and trust’. Through this we may begin to move to the idea of a relational ethics of ageing where the interpersonal lies at the heart of any inquiry; where we do not simply rely on others for our constitution, but are accountable in the practice of this recognition for others, even if they are not ‘like us’. On the one hand, this relational connection provides a way of exploring themes of interdependency that are particularly pertinent to ageing lives, such as care, without descending into transactional debates surrounding burdens, costs or one-sided dependency. On the other hand, it allows us to return to thinking more broadly about what work means across 265

Kathleen Riach

the life course, and explore new ways of questioning whether organizations, despite being manmade, are really made for all members of society throughout their lives. As people work for longer into their lives, either through choice, circumstance or necessity, it may be time to begin to explore not simply the physical implications of this, but the experiential consequences of our ongoing interactions and practices within organizational settings. In doing so, we may begin to consider a longer working life not just in terms of number of years worked, but a sustainable working life in terms of engaging in labour over a life time that is meaningful, valuable and nourishing to one’s sense of self. The elements discussed above suggest that a range of issues pertinent to contemporary organizational analysis surrounding the body, temporality and relationality can be further explored through ageing. Moreover, it suggests that ageing as a phenomenon in itself is such a rich heuristic lens that it is perhaps time for organization studies to pay attention to philosophical accounts that place age at the heart of analysis such as Friedan’s The Fountain of Age (1993) and de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age/Old Age (1970). To return to our starting point, everybody ages as they work, but not everybody experiences ageing in the same way. Multiple inequalities, experiences and trajectories mean that exploring organizational lives and experiences holds a huge array of exciting possibilities for understanding both ageing in organizations and organizations through the lens of ageing. In turning towards future vistas, exploring ageing from a more experiential perspective allows us to question the assumptions that are a ubiquitous and pervasive feature of tropes surrounding the ageing population or the pension crisis, and their relevance or implications for organizations. Moreover, an experiential account of ageing has the potential to provide us with insights into how organizations themselves are organized surrounding systems of temporality, history, planning and change – in other words, aspects of organizational life that are intimately associated with ageing.

References (key texts in bold) Ainsworth, S. (2002). The ‘feminine advantage’: a discursive analysis of the invisibility of older women workers. Gender, Work & Organization, 9: 579–601. Ainsworth, S. and Hardy, C. (2008). The enterprising self: an unsuitable job for an older worker. Organization, 15: 389–405. Backes-Gellner, U., Schneider, M. and Veen, S. (2011). Effect of workforce age on quantitative and qualitative organizational performance: conceptual framework and case study evidence. Organization Studies, 32: 1103–21. Bergson, H. (1968[1999]). Duration and Simultaneity (trans. M. Lewis and L. Jacobson). Manchester: Clinamen Press. Blaikie, A. (1999). Ageing and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burch, R. (1944). Phenomenology, lived experience: taking a measure of the topic. Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 8: 130–60. Cumming, E. and Henry, W. (1961). Growing Old: the process of disengagement. New York: Basic Books. de Beauvoir, S. (1970). The Coming of Age/Old Age. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Friedan, B. (1993). The Fountain of Age. New York: Simon & Schuster. Gabriel, Y., Gray, D. and Goregaokar, H. (2010). Temporary derailment or the end of the line? Managers coping with unemployment at 50. Organization Studies, 31: 1687–712. Grady, J. (2013). Trade unions and the pension crisis: defending member interests in a neoliberal world. Employee Relations, 35: 294–308. Heidegger, M. (1927[1962]). Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Hockey, J. and James, A. (2003). Social Identities across the Life Course. London: Palgrave. Holt, R. and Sandberg, J. (2011). Phenomenology and organization theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32: 215–49. Husserl, E. (1928[1991]). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (trans. J. Brought). Boston: Kluwer. 266

Ageing

Kitwood, T. (1997). Dementia Reconsidered: the person comes first. Buckingham: Oxford University Press. Lemon, B., Bengtson, V.L. and Petersen, J.A. (1972). An exploration of the activity theory of aging: activity types and life expectation among in-movers to a retirement community. Journal of Gerontology, 27: 511–23. Loretto, W. and Vickerstaff, S. (2013). The domestic and gendered context for retirement. Human Relations, 66: 65–86. McMullin, J., Duerden Comeau, T. and Jovic, E. (2007). Generational affinities and discourses of difference: a case study of highly skilled information technology workers. The British Journal of Sociology, 58: 297–316. Mannheim, K. (1923[1964]). The sociological problem of generations, in Kecskemeti, P. (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Gottingen: Steidl, pp. 163–95. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945[2006]). Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). London: Routledge. Minkler, M. and Estes, C. (1984). Introduction, in Minkler, M. and Estes, C. (eds), Readings in the Political Economy of Aging. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood, pp. 10–22. Moulaert, T. and Biggs, S. (2013). International and European policy on work and retirement: reinventing critical perspectives on active ageing and mature subjectivity. Human Relations, 66: 23–43. O’Brien, M. (2010). Exploring older male worker labour force participation across OECD countries in the context of ageing populations: a reserve army of labour? Economics Working Papers University of Wollongong, NSW. Phillipson, C. (1998). Reconstructing Old Age: new agendas in social theory and practice. London: Sage. Riach, K. and Kelly, S. (2014). The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens. Organization, 2014, doi: 1350508413508999. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative, 3 vols (trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rudman, D. and Molke, D. (2009). Forever productive: the discursive shaping of later life workers in contemporary Canadian newspapers. Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment and Rehabilitation, 32: 377–89. Søndergaard, D.M. (2005). Making sense of gender, age, power and disciplinary position: intersecting discourses in the Academy. Feminism & Psychology, 15: 189–208. Tornstam, L. (1989). Gero-transcendence: a reformulation of the disengagement theory. Aging Clinical and Experimental Research, 1: 55–63.

267

19 Agency at the intersection of philosophy and social theory Tracy Wilcox

Introduction The question of agency has always been an important one in organization studies. Interest in agency – its limits, possibilities and necessity – has heightened as the effects of increasingly complex and constraining systems of financialized capitalism, on individuals, societies and nations have become more apparent. This chapter considers recent conceptual and empirical work that brings philosophical insights into accounts of agency, and suggests some future directions for research into organizations and organizing. Philosophy has given us a range of perspectives on agency, ranging from the extreme reductionism of ‘neuro-philosophy’ to the ‘decentred’ agency implicit in, for example, the work of Foucault. Given the vast array of literature, what is offered here is a partial and selective account of agency, one informed by the ‘middle ground’ perspective offered by critical realist ontology (see Chapter 1, this volume). The idea of agency as the ‘intentional causal intervention in the world, subject to the possibility of a reflexive monitoring of that intervention’ (Ratner, 2000), provides us with a good starting point. Philosophers and social theorists have long grappled with what is meant by intent, causes, choice and being an agent in the world, and formulating a ‘satisfactory philosophical account’ of agency has been a ‘far from trivial’ exercise (Ferrero, 2009). Philosophical interest in agency, typically relating to metaphysical concerns, dates back to the time of Socrates. The treatment of agency in metaphysics includes broader ontological and epistemological concerns stemming from the philosophy of science; concerns about the nature and effect of free will, causal powers, action and personhood. There is by now a substantial literature drawing on the work of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill and others (for an overview see Groff, 2013). More recently, a distinct philosophy of action has emerged (Aguilar et al., 2011; Ferrero, 2009). Within this field, philosophical treatments of agency have started from what has been termed the ‘standard story’ of action, which essentially holds that for an action to be seen as involving agency, it needs to be caused (and rationalized) by an agent’s desires for an outcome, and their belief that particular behaviours will lead to such outcomes (Ferrero, 2009; Smith, 2012). Building on this is the idea of ‘full-blooded’ intentional agency (Velleman, 1992), which in essence involves situations where agents are aware of their actions and their reasons, they identify with those reasons, and their action stems from their deliberations (Aguilar et al., 2011; Ferrero, 2009). 268

Agency

Full-blooded agency, for philosophers of action, is more than simply purposive behaviour, it involves a sense that one’s actions reflect one’s ‘true self’ in some way. In essence, the aim has been to extend the standard story by aiming for ‘psychological richness’ in explaining the mental states held by agents and the degree to which motivations, desires or identifications function as causal antecedents to agency (Mele, 2003). In extreme cases, this may involve appeals to contemporary neuroscience (Flanagan, 1996) and the emerging field of ‘neuro-philosophy’ to explain in physiological terms what ‘agency’ means (e.g. Moll et al., 2007; Synofzik et al., 2008). In these finely wrought philosophical accounts of agents’ beliefs, desires, motivations, reasons, intentions and deliberations there are parallels with psychological explanations of human behaviour, and they share some common shortcomings. Agency can be reified, becoming in some cases a mere phenomenon, or a fixed and essential attribute that people unproblematically ‘have’. Moreover, many philosophical considerations of agency involve some form of abstraction or idealization of agents and the conditions in which they may exercise their agency (Hill, 1998), and an implicit methodological individualism. Common also is a sense that qualities such as intentionality and purposefulness are shared by all to the same degree (Kaghan and Lounsbury, 2011). Moreover, atomistic, individualist and asocial views of agency are not value-free, nor are they apolitical – they ‘exempt society from critique’ by implying that people are responsible for their own problems, and can convey a ‘false sense of equality, democracy and fulfillment’ (Ratner, 2000: 429). This shortcoming has been highlighted by feminist philosophers, for whom (women’s) agency is always expressed in terms of their social and material conditions (typically of oppression). Thus while an actor’s agency is underpinned by notions of self-conception, identity, and self-worth (and relatedly their embodied subjectivity), these self-evaluations are socially conditioned, by, for example, structures of patriarchy (see Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000). Agency (and autonomy) is in this sense relational – a function of salient social relations and of an agent’s relation to the social structures within which they are situated (see also Chapter 26 on autonomy, this volume). MacIntyre shares this sense of relationality in his explication of moral agency. For him, moral agency requires an understanding of oneself as having an identity apart from that of one’s role, along with a capacity to critically evaluate social standards and norms and an understanding of oneself as accountable to others (MacIntyre, 1999). More broadly within the field of ethics, the idea that agents should be held responsible and accountable for their actions prevails. In conventional ethical accounts, however, the complexity, singularity, and the ‘wholeness’ of each human being can be overlooked (Rozuel, 2011); agents are seen as rational, mutually disinterested and knowledgeable, and precedence is given to moral judgement over moral agency (MacIntyre, 1985). Rawl’s theory of justice, for example, is based on this presupposition (Hill, 1998). A key question relating to agency is, of course; to what extent are an agent’s motivations, reasons, and sense of ‘causal efficacy’ a product of socially, physically or materially determined pre-existing causes? Unsurprisingly, this question of determinism and its relationship to agency has also been explored within the fields of ethics and metaphysics. It is central to debates around the nature of free will, and the extent to which humans can claim moral responsibility and accountability for their actions (Mele, 2003). To answer this question in full we need to move beyond philosophies of agency, and consider where philosophy intersects with contemporary social theory (cf. MacIntyre, 1985). Some of these questions have been covered in greater detail in the chapter on structuration, so they will only be briefly considered here. The following section explores how selected social theorists and feminist philosophers have provided solutions to the shortcomings of essentialist philosophical accounts, particularly reified notions of intentionality and the self. 269

Tracy Wilcox

Agency and social theory Scholars in social theory and feminist philosophy have shown us that agency is only realized through social relations (Ratner, 2000), and is embedded in and constituted through the ‘contexts’ within which agents are situated (Shilling, 1997). These contexts have multiple elements (social-structural, cultural and social-psychological dimensions, as well as material (see Chapter 1, this volume for further discussion). In switching our focus from having agency to being an agent, many of the shortcomings of abstract individualist accounts of agency can be addressed. We have established that agents should not be seen as having essential and unchanging properties that operate independently of the social world (cf. Delbridge and Edwards, 2013). Moreover, agents do not experience the social world uniformly, and they will have differing perceptions of and knowledge about it, for example. Agency, like one’s sense of self, has a temporal dimension, it is ‘diachronic’ in character (Mackenzie, 2014). The iterational (past-oriented) element of agency involves the ‘selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thought and action’, while the projective (future-oriented) element entails the ‘imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). In addition to juggling these two elements, agents (whether consciously or not) also make practical and normative assessments of alternatives in response to the particulars of a situation – what is termed the ‘practical evaluative’ (present-oriented) element of agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). If we wish to explore in more depth how the ‘causal powers of humans emerge’ (ElderVass, 2008), it is necessary to engage with the ‘temporally defined interplay between structure and agency’ (Stones, 2005: 53). As we have seen in Chapter 16 on structuration, this volume, both Giddens and Archer have carefully spelt out their (diverging) conceptualizations of the relationship between agency and social structures (see, e.g. Archer, 1995; Giddens, 1984). In spite of their substantive differences, however, both Giddens and Archer see human agents as embodied, in possession of causal powers and irreduceable to desires, beliefs or other psychological capacities (Shilling, 1997). Giddens and Archer also share a normative/emancipatory sense of agency as ‘making a difference’. Here we will consider Stones’ (2005) synthesis of social theory and philosophy, which incorporates the work of Giddens, Bourdieu, Archer, Mouzelis and Cohen, among others, into a quadripartite model of structuration. Within this model, active agency involves an actor’s engagement with their ‘internal’ structures or ‘agentic orientations’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). These internal structures will be both general-dispositional (taken-for-granted cultural schemas, discourses, habitus), and conjuncturally specific or positional (an agent’s knowledge of pertinent roles, normative expectations, interpretive schemes, or power relations) (Stones, 2005). It is from this engagement with a specific array of structural features that actors make ‘action-informing assessments’ of salient ‘hermeneuticstructural processes’ (Stones, 2005), and these are the bases of ‘active’ agency. There is a spectrum of agentic possibilities more or less available in a given situation, ranging from unquestioning, taken-for-granted engagement with and reproduction of internal structures (and their embodiment in for example, discourses, interpretive schema or norms) through to a critical, reflexive and ultimately transformative stance towards these same conditions. Where agents sit on this spectrum will always depend on the exigencies of the specific situation, on actors’ orientations towards their positions and dispositions, and their ‘power to deliberate internally upon what to do in situations that were not of [their] own making’, as Archer (2003: 342) puts it. For Archer, it is these ‘stances’ that actors take towards their situations, the outcomes of reflexive ‘internal conversations’ that give rise to their sense of agency. Active agency is not confined to the realm of individuals. Coole (2005: 124) for example, distinguishes political agency (the ‘power to bring about effective change in collective life’, which 270

Agency

may be exercised by groups, social movements or organizations) from individual human agency. In a similar vein, Archer (2003) speaks of corporate agents who act collectively to reproduce or transform their cultural and structural contexts. In these instances, reflexive deliberations and intersubjective assessments of positions and dispositions become a social exercise. Here Archer’s ideas converge with those of MacIntyre.

Agency in organizational studies It is one thing to possess agency but another altogether to exercise it (Barnes, 2000). As power relations are typically asymmetrical within and between organizations, questions of agency are crucial. One of the key features of late modernity is the centrality of global financialized capitalism, and the global business organization, to social and political (as well as economic) life. This, coupled with ‘informatization’ (Kallinikos, 2009) and ‘individualism, acquisitiveness and the elevation of the values of the market to a central social place’ (MacIntyre, 1999), has meant that agency (particularly moral agency) faces new and evolving constraints, as our ‘selves’ become ‘divided’. ‘Role modularity’ (Kallinikos, 2009) or ‘compartmentalisation’ (MacIntyre, 1999) involves the insulation of distinct social structures so that the various spheres of social activity have their ‘own role structure, governed by its own specific norms in relative independence of other such spheres’. These institutionalized roles and norms, and other internal and external social structures shape behaviour by ‘dictat[ing] which kinds of consideration are to be treated as relevant to decision-making and which are excluded’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 322). Many of the key questions around agency are best approached empirically, and in organization studies we have seen numerous examples of empirical work exploring, for example, structure–agency relationships and structuration, institutional theory and embedded agency, identity and agency, and power and agency. Rather than attempt a broad review of all work that considers agency, the focus here will be on selected examples from the currently dominant framework, institutional theory, and outside this field. Institutional theory is pervasive in organization studies (Clegg, 2010), and recent endeavours to ‘bring agency back in’ can be seen as important correctives to a field originally seen to be skewed towards ‘structure’ and over-determined explanations (Battilana, 2006; Suddaby et al., 2010). Treatments of agency can be found in two areas of neo-institutional research; institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work. There is by now a very large body of published work dealing with the former (for a review see Hardy and Maguire, 2008), much of which has been concerned with ‘strategic’ or purposive action in pursuit of institutional change, with institutional entrepreneurs typically elite organizations or individuals playing somewhat heroic roles. Agency, if acknowledged, is ‘hypermuscular’ and issues of interest and power are often overlooked (Clegg, 2010). Lawrence’s (2008) study is an exception here; (in considering interest-based institutional politics he explores how individual and collective actors ‘create, transform, and disrupt institutions’. His conceptualization of institutional agency brings the political nature of much institutional entrepreneurship to the foreground, highlighting the relational element of power as well as the various forms of resistance available. Similarly, Seo and Creed (2002), argue for dialectical analyses of institutional (change) agency, incorporating praxis as well as a holistic understanding of social structures as ‘interpenetrating’ and ‘operating at multiple levels and in multiple sectors’. For these authors, agency is a collective process directed at change. The concept of ‘institutional work’ has also been employed as a means of explaining a broader range of action, starting from the reference point of actors rather than institutions. Lawrence et al. (2011) argue that this line of research allows for more critical perspectives to be incorporated into institutional theory, highlighting the reflexive (or ‘appreciative’) processes central to active agency. 271

Tracy Wilcox

The institutionalist approach to agency in organization studies is not without its critics. Willmott (2011), for example, has pointed out that the notion of ‘individual’ has itself become institutionalized, carrying with it an implicit sense of difference and autonomy, part of a limiting and problematic individual–institution (or agency–structure) dualism. Willmott advocates instead the use of terms such as human- or social-being, when considering human agency (Willmott, 2011: 69), as a means of opening up the ‘agency question’ to a ‘conception of human beings as creative contributors to processes of social reproduction and transformation’ (Willmott, 2011: 68). One way in which institutionalist conceptions of organizational agency have been extended is through work in relational sociology (Mutch et al., 2006). Mutch’s (2007) study of a British industrialist and Delbridge and Edwards’ (2013) analysis of the super yacht industry both employ critical realist methodologies in their nuanced accounts of agency, for example. The ‘practice turn’ in organizational strategy research (Whittington, 1996, 2011) has also created new space for discussions of agency in organizations. By exploring the micro-practices of strategizing, and the ways in which routines, artefacts and practices unfold in everyday organizational settings, issues of individual and aggregate agency are brought forth out of the ‘black box’ of the firm. Practices, along with praxis, have been explored at the micro-, mesoand macro-levels (Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009), with the agents-in-focus typically managers, consultants, or accountants (e.g. Mantere, 2008; Skaerbaek and Tryggestad 2010). While this field has contributed rich and detailed accounts of agency in organizations, what is lacking is a critical discussion of the ‘different characteristics in agency’ and intrinsically ‘different kinds of social relations’ (cf. Ratner, 2000) outside these groups of organizational elites. It would be fruitful to explore, for example, the strategic praxis and corresponding agency of workplace unions, marginalized employees or communities affected by organizational decisions, using the same conceptual tools. Within accounting and information systems research we have also seen considerations of non-human agency, in studies adopting actor–network theory (ANT) (Law, 1992). The methodological/semiotic approach central to actor–network theory eschews the essentialism of structure–agency dualities (among other things), and adds non-human actors – such as standards, spreadsheets, management information systems and the like. Artefacts such as these are seen to exhibit agency through their ‘mediating’ role (Doolin and Lowe, 2002; Justesen and Mouritsen, 2011; Roberts, 2014). From this perspective, agency is less about intentionality and causality, and non-humans act as both ‘necessary stabilizers of the human collective’, and as mediators ‘continually modifying relations between actors’ (Sayes, 2014: 138). Paradoxically, the ANT frameworks simultaneously extend and foreclose a range of empirical possibilities for investigating agency (by bringing together human and non-human actors across ‘different temporal and spatial orders’ (Sayes, 2014: 135) but also precluding explorations of intentionality, autonomy, and responsibility as agents are treated as temporary ‘effects’ of micro-level processes (Reed, 1997). Yet another demonstration of agency research in organizational studies can be found in Caldwell’s (e.g. 2006) work on change agency. Caldwell moves across range of social theoretical positions, ontologies and epistemologies in his carefully drawn consideration of agency in pursuit of organizational change, exploring four competing discourses on agency and change: rationalist accounts which give priority to intentionality and autonomy in the achievement of goals (centred agency); contextualist approaches which see agency as embedded in emergent processes within a constellation of competing interests and resource struggles; dispersalist perspectives which are grounded in complexity theory and see agency as modes of self-organization within complex systems; and constructionist theories which build on Foucault’s rejection of structure/agency dichotomies and instead consider processes of organizing/changing – with four central components of discourse, power/knowledge, embodiment and self-reflexivity (decentred agency). 272

Agency

He sees limitations in all of these approaches but the possibility of building on each through ‘creative pluralism and the reinvention of practice’ (Caldwell, 2006: 167). In terms of moral agency, much of the work in organization studies has been framed in terms of individual psychological capacity (Wilcox, 2012). There is a paucity of empirical work that takes into account the issues and considerations outlined in this chapter and considers moral agency in actual organizational settings, in the context of the constraints placed on ethical action by the workings of twenty-first century globalized capitalism, for example.

Empirical questions – future directions Understanding agency need not just be a ‘technical question’ as Archer (2003) notes. Empirical explorations of different agencies, grounded in the specifics of a particular time, place and set of actors, allow a richer, more nuanced picture of agency within and around organizations. A critical approach to agency in organization studies would recognise the heterogeneity of agency, and consider differing agentic orientations of organizational and extra-organizational actors, in order to ‘chart [the] varying degrees of manoeuvrability, inventiveness and reflexive choice’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 964) displayed by these actors in relation to their structural/ contextual conditioning (cf. Delbridge and Edwards, 2013). One example of this kind of approach is Llewellyn’s (2007) study of the merger of two international corporations, which incorporates an extended discussion of Archer and Giddens’ contrasting approaches to agency. The range of agents-in-focus should extend beyond organizations, managers or specialist groups. A focus on the emancipatory potential of agency from the perspective of, say, contract employees within a globalized supply chain, social entrepreneurs or other ‘third sector’ agents, marginalized workers, or the unemployed, would enhance the current stock of understanding. Frangi’s (2014) study of Brazilian workers is an interesting example of this type of research, as is Tracey et al.’s (2011) account of social entrepreneurship. Such work would need to pay attention to the specific contingencies of past, present and future contexts (the structural conditioning pertinent to the agents-in-focus) and the agents’ own reflexive processes (including, insofar as it is possible, their internal conversations). It would also need a reflexive awareness on the part of the researcher, particularly with regard to their own privileged position in the knowledge ‘supply chain’.

Concluding remarks Many of the questions raised in philosophical treatments of agency connect with organizational research. Overall, from philosophy we can take three central lines of thinking, which together provide us with the means of tapping more deeply into our understanding of agency in and of organizations. First, philosophy encourages us to explore in depth the nature of the complex self, the ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘we’. Second, are questions of what it means to be a human being and acting in the world, and how this connects with agency. Finally, an exploration of the interconnections between agency, autonomy and responsibility, provides us with an additional repertoire for critiquing the actions and effects of powerful organizations and powerful organizational actors. Agency is more than ‘action’ or inaction – the term implies acting within and through contextual elements that include social structures, cultures, histories, ‘geographies’, roles and identities. Colapietro (1992: 435), writing in the pragmatist tradition, reminds us that the human self is first and foremost, an embodied agent, one whose very agency bears the stamp of various communities and thus of tangled histories. . . . Such recognition requires us to conceive 273

Tracy Wilcox

human experience as an ongoing transaction between a historically situated agent and an insistently problematic world. In its fullest sense, the term presupposes a holistic view of human beings, acting in relation to other beings in the natural and social world. It is this capacity for agency, and how it is enacted, that provides actors and organizations with scope for continuity or change. Within organization studies, there remains a rich vein of research to be mined through the melding of insights from philosophy and sociology. Understanding agency is no longer an abstract theoretical concern; for it is in the exercising of agency, that scope (and hope) for transforming or recalibrating the now-dominant logics of late modernity can be found. Or, as Caldwell (2006: 112) puts it, the ‘vital centre of gravity [is] the hope that we can make a difference’.

References (key texts in bold) Aguilar, J., Buckareff, A. and Frankish, F. (2011). Introduction, in Aguilar, J., Buckareff, A. and Frankish, F. (eds), New Waves in Philosophy of Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–10. Archer, M. (1995). Realist Social Theory: the morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: the problem of agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, B. (2000). Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London: Sage. Battilana, J. (2006). Agency and institutions: the enabling role of individuals’ social position. Organization, 13: 653–76. Caldwell, R. (2006). Agency and Change: rethinking change agency in organizations. London: Routledge. Clegg, S. (2010). The state, power, and agency: Missing in action in institutional theory? Journal of Management Inquiry, 19: 4–13. Colapietro, V.M. (1992). Purpose, power, and agency. The Monist: 423–44. Coole, D. (2005). Rethinking agency: a phenomenological approach to embodiment and agentic capacities. Political Studies, 53: 124–42. Delbridge, R. and Edwards, T. (2013). Inhabiting institutions: critical realist refinements to understanding institutional complexity and change. Organization Studies, 34: 927–47. Doolin, B. and Lowe, A. (2002). To reveal is to critique: actor–network theory and critical information systems research. Journal of Information Technology 17: 69–78. Elder-Vass, D. (2008). Integrating institutional, relational and embodied structure: an emergentist perspective. The British Journal of Sociology, 59: 281–99. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology. 103: 962–1023. Ferrero, L. (2009). Action, in Shand, J. (ed.), Central Issues in Philosophy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 137–51. Flanagan, O. (1996). Self Expressions: mind, morals, and the meaning of life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frangi, L. (2014). Introducing workers’ embedded agency: insights from the Brazilian subsidiaries of a multinational corporation. Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations, 69: 60–86. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. California: University of California Press. Groff, R. (2013). Ontology Revisited: metaphysics in social and political philosophy. Routledge, New York. Hardy, C. and Maguire, S. (2008). Institutional entrepreneurship, in Greenwood, R. and Oliver, C. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, pp. 198–217. Hill Jr, T.E. (1998). Autonomy and agency. William and Mary Law Review, 40: 847. Jarzabkowski, P. and Spee, A.P. (2009). Strategy-as-practice: a review and future directions for the field. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11: 69–95. Justesen, L. and Mouritsen, J. (2011). Effects of actor–network theory in accounting research. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 24: 161–93. Kaghan, W. and Lounsbury, M. (2011). Institutions and work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20: 73–81. Kallinikos, J. (2009). On the computational rendition of reality: artefacts and human agency. Organization, 16: 183–202. 274

Agency

Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor–network: ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5: 379–93. Lawrence, T. (2008). Power, institutions and organizations, in Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Suddaby, R. and Sahlin-Andersson, K. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. London: Sage, pp. 170–97. Lawrence, T., Suddaby, R. and Leca, B. (2011). Institutional work: refocusing institutional studies of organization. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20: 52. Llewellyn, S. (2007). Introducing the agents. Organization Studies, 28: 133–53. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue: a study in moral theory. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1999). Social structures and their threats to moral agency. Philosophy, 74: 311–29. Mackenzie, C. (2014). Embodied agents, narrative selves. Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 17: 154–71. Mackenzie, C. and Stoljar, N. (2000). Relational Autonomy: feminist perspectives on automony, agency, and the social self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mantere, S. (2008). Role expectations and middle managers strategic agency. Journal of Management Studies, 45: 294–316. Mele, A.R. (2003). Motivation and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moll, J., Oliveira-Souza, R.d., Garrido, G.J., Bramati, I.E., Caparelli-Daquer, E.M., Paiva, M.L., Zahn, R. and Grafman, J. (2007). The self as a moral agent: linking the neural bases of social agency and moral sensitivity. Social Neuroscience, 2: 336–52. Mutch, A. (2007). Reflexivity and the institutional entrepreneur: a historical exploration. Organization Studies, 28: 1123–40. Mutch, A., Delbridge, R. and Ventresca, M. (2006). Situating organizational action: the relational sociology of organizations. Organization, 13: 607–25. Ratner, C. (2000). Agency and culture. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 30: 413–34. Reed, M.I. (1997). In praise of duality and dualism: rethinking agency and structure in organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 18: 21–42. Roberts, J. (2014). Testing the limits of structuration theory in accounting research. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 25: 135–41. Rozuel, C. (2011). The moral threat of compartmentalization: self, roles and responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 102: 685–97. Sayes, E. (2014). Actor–network theory and methodology: just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency? Social Studies of Science, 44: 134–49. Seo, M-G. and Creed, W.E.D. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: a dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27: 222–47. Shilling, C. (1997). The undersocialised conception of the embodied agent in modern sociology. Sociology, 31: 737–54. Skaerbaek, P. and Tryggestad, K. (2010). The role of accounting devices in performing corporate strategy. Accounting Organizations and Society, 35: 108–24. Smith, M. (2012). Four objections to the standard story of action. Philosophical Issues, 22: 387–401. Stones, R. (2005). Structuration Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Suddaby, R., Elsbach, K.D., Greenwood, R., Meyer, J.W. and Zilber, T.B. (2010). Organizations and their institutional environments: bringing meaning, values and culture back in. Academy of Management Journal, 53: 1234–40. Synofzik, M., Vosgerau, G. and Newen, A. (2008). I move, therefore I am: a new theoretical framework to investigate agency and ownership. Consciousness and Cognition, 17: 411–24. Tracey, P., Phillips, N. and Jarvis, O. (2011). Bridging institutional entrepreneurship and the creation of new organizational forms: a multilevel model. Organization Science, 22: 60–80. Velleman, J.D. (1992). What happens when someone acts? Mind: 461–81. Whittington, R. (1996). Strategy as practice. Long Range Planning, 29: 731–5. Whittington, R. (2011). The practice turn in organization research: towards a disciplined transdisciplinarity. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36: 183. Wilcox, T. (2012). Human resource management in a compartmentalized world: whither moral agency?, Journal of Business Ethics, 111: 85–96. Willmott, H. (2011). ‘Institutional work’ for what? Problems and prospects of institutional theory’ Journal of Management Inquiry, 20: 67. 275

20 The Body Philosophical paradigms and organizational contributions Torkild Thanem

Introduction Given the constrained relationship that organization theory and philosophy have towards the body, it may seem ironic to deal with the body from the perspective of organizational philosophy. While organization theory was founded on a Cartesian mind/body dualism that deems the human mind rational and capable of managing the allegedly passive and irrational body, few philosophers, before or after Descartes (1996[1641]), have managed to think beyond this dualism, and no one has managed to think without it. Even Spinoza (1994[1677]), who remains one of Descartes’ strongest critics, had to interrogate the mind/body dualism to move beyond it. But despite these snags it is worth reminding ourselves that organization theory’s rising interest in the body coincided with a growing interest in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century – with a vibrant paradigm debate (e.g. Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Jackson and Carter, 1991; Willmott, 1993) and a curiosity for poststructuralist ideas and concepts (e.g. Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Hassard and Pym, 1993). It is not unusual for fin-de-siècles to harbour avant garde movements in thought and practice, and in certain quarters of organization theory continental variants of philosophy were embraced with enthusiasm in a quest to push the frontiers of the field – to rethink the concept of organization and to re-evaluate the relationship between organization and the human. By engaging with the semi-philosophical poststructuralism of Foucault in particular, organization theorists started to challenge dominant notions of disembodied organizations and cognitivist models of the human. Burrell’s and Cooper’s pieces in the journal Organization Studies were particularly important in this respect (e.g. Burrell, 1984, 1988; Cooper and Burrell, 1988). The Body and Organization anthology (Hassard et al., 2000) was another landmark publication, pulling together contributions from various organizational and philosophical paradigms – poststructuralist, feminist, phenomenological and critical theorist. Since then, a growing literature has generated significant insights about bodies within and around organizations. Even though philosophical engagement is lacking or limited in parts of this literature, much of it is influenced by philosophical concepts of the body. To simplify, it 276

Body politics

may be argued that organization theory has dealt with the body in the following six ways: (1) drawing on poststructuralist and feminist philosophy, the body has been construed as an object of discursive construction and disciplinary control, discrimination, oppression and identity expression; (2) building on materialist varieties of feminist and poststructuralist philosophy, the body has been explored as a force of desire and resistance that precedes and exceeds discursive construction and disciplinary management; (3) with inspiration from Marxist philosophy, the body has been examined as a subject and object of work and a target of capitalist exploitation; (4) utilizing phenomenological philosophy, the body has been investigated as a subject and object of lived experience and social interaction, work, management and knowledge creation; (5) moreover, phenomenological and feminist philosophy have been combined to explore the body as a subject of qualitative research methods; (6) finally, through readings of feminist philosophy as well as the philosophical works of Levinas and Spinoza, the body has been construed as an ethical subject that (a) foregrounds recognition of the other, or (b) pursues affective relations in organizational life. The area’s overlapping concerns illustrate the difficulty of tracing a specific contribution in organization theory back to a specific philosophical paradigm. Apparently distinct conceptualizations of the body are not necessarily unique to one paradigm, and individual writers have drawn eclectically on concepts and ideas from different paradigms in one and the same text. Meanwhile, disparate concerns and conflicting arguments mean that it is meaningful to highlight the concepts and approaches that characterize specific paradigms and organizational contributions. Body politics has been a point of partition in this respect – a primary concern in the poststructuralist and feminist literature, less so in phenomenological research. But before elaborating how the body has been investigated as an object and subject of knowledge and power in organization theory, I must say something about why the body was neglected for so many years.

The body’s absent presence in organization theory Following Dale’s (2001) tenet of the anatomization of organization theory, the neglect of the body can be traced back to the field’s Cartesian heritage, to its silent adoption of the mind/body dualism, and to the establishing of the social sciences as a distinct area of scholarly inquiry. Although Descartes’ philosophical treatment of the mind–body relationship received limited attention among the founding figures of the social sciences and their successors in organization theory, it did shape the epistemic boundaries of the social sciences and basic notions of what it means to do social science research. When Durkheim (1982[1895]) sought to establish the social sciences as independent from the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century, he lauded Descartes’ rationalism and effectively accepted the Cartesian denigration of the body. Emphasizing the need to focus on the sui generis of the social, Durkheim insisted on an epistemic division of labour, where the social sciences should focus on objects of knowledge unique to the social world of humans and avoid phenomena associated with the natural world. Although Durkheim exploited organicist metaphors and argued for a naturalist social science that would employ the objectivist methods of the natural sciences, this tuned social science inquiry into the semantics of social life and away from most things physical. The pioneers of organization theory at Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s were well aware of Durkheim’s programme, and his work has been a profound influence on the disembodied theorizing that continues to dominate organization theory. Mayo and his colleagues at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory were particularly influential in this respect. Initially concerned 277

Torkild Thanem

with the effects of physical factors such as exhaustion among manual labourers (Dill, 1928) and the illumination of work environments, they eventually concluded, with the Hawthorne Effect, that physical conditions have a negligible impact on the output and efficiency of work groups compared with the social effects of being observed (Landsberger, 1958; Mayo, 1933). But like Durkheim, this did not prevent them from embracing the organism metaphor, thus continuing a tradition going back to Plato’s Republic. This anatomization is continued in the classical and current mainstreams of functionalist, structuralist and critical research, from the cultural-cognitive frameworks of Simon, March and neo-institutionalism, to Morgan’s ‘images of organization’, to the socio-linguistic patterns of critical discourse analysis. The management skills, institutional logics, symbolic constructs and politicized discourses emphasized in these approaches are typically deemed separate from the bodies that enact them, experience them and are targeted by them.

Body politics in organizational life Ultimately, our engagement and disengagement with the body has consequences for our understanding of human nature, the nature of organization, and the conditions under which people in organizations live and work. In the most concrete, these questions are matters of body politics – how bodies interact in, precede and exceed relations of power and knowledge. This was a key concern in some of the first texts that engaged with the body in organization theory. Informed by poststructuralist and feminist philosophy, pioneering work in the area started to grasp body politics as struggle, as dynamic and extra-oppositional relations of power and resistance between bodies. In one early text, Burrell (1984) drew on Foucault’s poststructuralism to examine the processes of desexualization that underpin the management of people in organizations and the resistance this provokes among employees. In a genealogical manner, Burrell invokes historical examples from pre-industrial and industrial organizations, including the elaborate codes of punishment for various sexual activities that were instituted in medieval Catholic monasteries and the long working hours that were imposed in early industrialism to minimize the time available to workers to engage in sloth, sex and ‘bingelike consumption’ (Burrell, 1984: 107). These disciplinary measures were implemented, Burrell insists (with Foucault, 1979), because sexual activity among employees was regarded a widespread problem. Although Burrell’s primary concern was with the management of sexuality and the significance of sexuality as a force of resistance, this raises fundamental issues regarding the nature of the body in organizational life and the relationship between the body as an object of discipline and discourse: following Foucault’s (1979: 95) tenet that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, the body becomes an object of disciplinary control in organizations because it is a sexual subject of desire and transgression; and, via Foucault’s (1979) concept of bio-power, Burrell argues that the control of sex became a crucial element in the wider control of individual bodies and populations, which required sex to become an object of discourse, whether religious, judicial, economic, or scientific. However, Burrell also gestures towards feminist and Marxist concerns, (1) acknowledging that sexualized bodies are victims of discrimination, harassment and rape in organizations, and (2) arguing that the politics of desexualization through bodily discipline is underpinned by an economic doctrine which assumes that disciplined and desexualized bodies are more productive than promiscuous ones. The discursive construction of the body is more clearly brought out in organizational research that draws on Butler’s feminist poststructuralist philosophy. Again, sexuality and gender are 278

Body politics

primary concerns, as illustrated in Brewis et al.’s (1997) discussion of female power dressing and male transvestism. And again, the body is not reduced to an object wholly consumed and shaped by discourse, but reiterated as a medium of identity expression and resistance. Acknowledging that bodily materiality precedes and exceeds discourse, Brewis et al. argue that ‘the materiality of the body has come to signify culturally specific ideas’ (Butler in Brewis et al., 1997: 1277). As individuals, we therefore understand ourselves as masculine or feminine and perform gender and sexuality in relation to dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity. This view is intensified in Butler’s (1993) own work, where she argues that ‘the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms’ (Butler, 1993: x). Whereas bodies that conform to dominant discourse are intelligible, legitimate and liveable, bodies that transgress these norms by expressing alternative gender identities either become unthinkable, abject and unliveable, or embody forces of resistance that make gender trouble by challenging the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity as well as the assumed correspondence between social gender and biological sex (see also Hancock and Tyler, 2007; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2014). This theme has been further explored in accounts engaging with the semi-materialist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) as well as with feminist interpretations of their work. In some of my own work I have mobilized their concepts of ‘the body without organs’, ‘becoming-woman’ and ‘creative involution’ to explore how transgender and marginalized bodies precede, subvert and exceed the binary sexual-social order (Thanem, 2004, 2006). In a similar vein, Linstead and Pullen (2006) utilize their concept of ‘the rhizome’, along with Braidotti’s (1994) and Grosz’s (1994) feminist commentaries, to explore the body’s ungendered and multiple corporeality. Via the ideal case of transgender, they argue that every body’s pre-discursive corporeality is multiplicitly genderful and ungendered. In contrast, other accounts have utilized Irigaray’s (e.g. 1985) work to explore the essentially different corporeality of women in relation to life and work within and around organizations (see e.g. Vachhani, 2012; Phillips et al., 2014). Without ignoring that discourse has disciplinary effects on bodies, these literatures pay more attention to the corporeal forces of bodily desire that precede and exceed, transgress and subvert discursive and disciplinary arrangements. While later studies have problematized the power of transgender bodies to exercise resistance in organizations (see Schilt and Connell, 2007; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2014), the topic of embodied resistance remains empirically and conceptually underdeveloped. And even though Deleuze and Guattari operated in the interstices of philosophical concepts and political tools, we still know little about the bodily practices through which people exercise resistance, and how embodied resistance is exercised beyond the context of identity politics. To further advance our understanding of body politics in organizational life it would therefore make sense to move beyond the micro-politics of discourse, discipline and identity, elaborate Deleuze and Guattari’s libidinal politics of desire, and reconnect with Marxist questions of capitalist exploitation. Not that organizational research has neglected the parallel concerns of poststructuralism and Marxism (Burrell, 2006; Wolkowitz and Warhurst, 2010), or how capitalist firms turn the body into an object of exploitation and a possible subject of resistance. Post-Marxist and feminist research on the labour process has provided significant insights into how capitalist exploitation is facilitated by (1) subjecting service employees to disciplinary regimes of aesthetic and emotional labour that increase value creation in face-to-face interaction with customers (e.g. Witz et al., 2003; Wolkowitz, 2007), and by (2) inscribing manual labour with stigmatizing notions of dirty work that push down salary levels (e.g. Simpson et al., 2012). And even though the dominance of sociological concerns undermines philosophical engagement in much of this literature, Marx’s influence is obvious, making it possible to understand how the body is both 279

Torkild Thanem

a subject of labour and a socially constructed product of labour (Wolkowitz and Warhurst, 2010), how it is appropriated as a source of labour and value production and transformed into a target of exploitation that requires disciplinary management and differentiation. Like the poststructuralist body, the Marxist body is part socially constructed, but in Marxism it is constructed through labour rather than discourse. However, Marx has more to offer if we follow the heterodox Marxisms of Deleuze and Guattari (1984) and Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004). While labour process studies construe the body as a subject and product of labour and an object of exploitation, Deleuze and Guattari take Marx further by exploring how the political economy of capital is intersected by a libidinal economy of desire. As Hardt and Negri remind us, Marx (1973) addressed forces of human desire in the Grundrisse, through his concept of ‘living labour’ – the creative energy that enables and escapes the control of capital. In our current era of knowledge work and aesthetic labour the general intellect has come to infiltrate ever more lines of work; at the same time, the increasing conflation of work and life makes it more difficult to distinguish between the values that are produced by employees at work and outside work. Whereas the creativity of living labour increases the total amount of value produced, it becomes increasingly difficult for capital to capture, control and exploit these values. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the reterritorialization of desire by capital is exceeded and subverted by the productive, excessively creative and deterritorializing forces of desire. The libidinal politics of living labour necessarily takes us in the direction of lived embodiment, and appeals to embody the labour process have hinted that more attention needs to be directed towards the embodied experiences and practices that constitute living labour (Wolkowitz and Warhurst, 2010). Lived embodiment is traditionally a phenomenological concern. But even though previous research has utilized the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (esp. 1962) to show how the body is an active medium of work, management and knowledge creation (e.g. Küpers, 2005; Yakhlef, 2010), phenomenological research has so far offered limited insights into the politics of embodied relations.

Embodied writing and methods in organizational inquiry Meanwhile, phenomenological and feminist ideas inform recent efforts to explore the methodological challenges of researching bodies within and around organizations, and to experiment with embodied forms of writing that are more in tune with the affective and extracognitive nature of embodiment. In some of my own work (e.g. Thanem and Knights, 2012) this has helped me write my body into the research process, turning it into a source of autoethnographic engagement to reflect about my embodied experiences as a male transvestite academic, trying to make sense of how my embodiment affects the research process and relations with research participants (see also Brewis, 2005; Sinclair, 2007). Others have pursued embodied writing via the écriture féminine of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, articulating embodied experiences forcefully, directly and poetically, against and beyond the phallogocentric abstractions dominating academic prose (e.g. Phillips et al., 2014). Höpfl’s (e.g. 2005) writing is unique in this respect, expressing the powerful intersection of life, work and organization in the flesh. Efforts have also been made to explore new tools and techniques for generating data about bodily practices and experiences. This goes beyond the ethnographic recognition that the researcher’s body is ‘the main instrument of ethnographic knowing’ (Yanow, 2012: 33). Slutskaya et al. (2012) have shown how photoelicitization facilitates conversations with initially reticent participants, spurring butchers to share embodied experiences such as ‘the “fleeting” and pleasurable sensation of a sharp knife passing smoothly through meat’ (Slutskaya et al., 2012: 280

Body politics

29). In a different vein, Riach and Warren (2015) have developed an olfactory method, mixing videotaped smell interviews, paper strips and audio smell diaries with face-to-face interviews, and powerfully grasping the somatic work that people engage in to deal with their sensory experiences, whether smelly colleagues or stinking sandwiches. Not that embodied research is without risks – of narcissism as authors indulge in our own pains and pleasures, of methodological fetishism that reduces embodied research to a question of tools and techniques, and of ethical dubiousness as we encourage participants to revisit painful experiences of harassment, burnout and degradation. Still, isn’t it more problematic to submit to the lifeless procedures of the disembodied convention? After all, embodied accounts might destabilize rather than reify authorial identities. Moreover, I would argue that painful accounts can be told as long as participants are comfortable with doing so – and that they need to be told to express how social problems translate into personal troubles. Since we cannot rid ourselves of our bodies, however much we try, we cannot, Höpfl (2005) argues, write other than in the flesh.

Bodily ethics While these issues force us to ask ethical questions about how we embody the research process, the body actualizes broader questions about the ethics of organizational life, including what forms of life are possible in organizations. Recent attempts to develop an embodied ethics of organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘impossible’ ethics of recognition, which puts the face-to-face encounter with the other as an embodied given which demands absolute recognition of the other, infinite responsibility for the other (e.g. Hancock, 2008; Rhodes, 2012), and radical openness to the gift of the other, even at the risk of violence and death (Jones, 2003). Although Levinas (e.g. 1969) separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization, part of this literature argues that Levinasian ethics enables organizations to be embodied in ways that make them more diverse and inclusive, and more respectful towards difference. Against this position, Wallenberg and I have recently argued that Levinasian ethics and its separation from politics and organization is unrealistic, unsustainable and unhelpful (Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015). Instead, we have pursued an embodied ethics of organizational life through Spinoza’s (1994[1677]) affective ethics. Neither a moral rule system nor an infinite duty to recognize the other, Spinoza offers a theory of the good, powerful and joyful life by asking what bodies can do. And rather than an unrestrained, irresponsible and individualistic quest for power and freedom, this suggests that we enhance our capacities to affect and be affected by relating to a variety of different bodies. As bodies are related in our strivings to affect and be affected by others, ethics involves enhancing our affective capacities to do so. While this appetite leads individual bodies to seek to enhance their power and freedom, Spinoza suggests that joyful and powerful ethical relations can only be crafted and sustained by communities of reasonable individuals who take responsibility for honouring and nurturing the difference and freedom of others. Hence, we must understand the limits of our freedom, take responsibility for how we affect and are affected by others, and pursue encounters that enhance our own and others’ bodily capacities. But since we can never suppress or fully understand our bodily desires, we must experiment with how we relate to our own bodies and to embodied others, and open ourselves up to affect and be affected by a variety of different bodies in a variety of ways. Although organizations frequently diminish our opportunities to do so, we must strive to subvert such powers by exercising our bodily capacities in concert with others – not because we selflessly recognise the other or selfishly care for ourselves only, but for our mutual and open-ended flourishing. 281

Torkild Thanem

Limitations and future directions This discussion of embodied ethics draws attention to some of the challenges that arise from organization theory’s engagement with philosophy – accusations that philosophy is an abstract, jargonized and impractical exercise that diverts attention away from the everyday problems of real people in real organizations, and that organization theorists rarely have the skills to engage properly with philosophy or the space available to do so in writing. However, I would insist that continued philosophical engagement is crucial for the future flourishing of organization theory, including our ability to engage with the body as an object and subject of knowledge and power. Since the body occupies a terrain between the natural and the social, the material and the discursive, organizational writings on the body actualize fundamental issues of philosophical inquiry – ontological, epistemological, anthropological, ethical and methodological: What is the relationship between the body and our knowledge of the body? To what extent are our bodies naturally given, and to what extent are they constructed by the concepts and ideas that we use to make sense of them? Are our bodies determined by natural, historical, and social laws, are we able to recreate our bodies as we wish, or are they indeterminate products of a multiplicity of material and discursive forces? Do our bodies undermine our capacity to generate knowledge and make rational decisions, or are they subjects of learning and decision-making? Should we seek to master and curtail our bodily desires in order to live virtuously, or is it through bodily encounters with others that the good life must be pursued? Is it possible to study bodies in a disembodied fashion, or does embodied research require embodied methods and styles of writing, by which we express the visceral experience of being immersed in the field? While there are no simple answers to any of these questions, it would be a mistake to assume that they only concern the philosophically minded student of bodies in organizations. For students of organization, philosophical engagement is a balancing act. Too much philosophy risks diverting attention away from the embodied and political realities that people in organizations inhabit. Too little philosophy might bog us so far down in the dominant social order that it blocks conceptual and theoretical sophistication, and prevents us from asking fundamental questions about what a body is, what bodies experience and what bodies can do. However, if we pose such questions through a combination of empirical exploration and conceptual experimentation, we might be able to investigate the problems that we encounter with our bodies in organizational life through nuanced concepts, and we might be able to explore radical trajectories of embodying organizational life.

References (key texts in bold) Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press. Brewis, J. (2005). Signing my life away? Researching sex and organization. Organization, 12(4): 493–510. Brewis, J., Hampton, M. and Linstead, S. (1997). Unpacking Priscilla: subjectivity and identity in the organization of gendered appearance. Human Relations, 50(10): 1275–304. Burrell, G. (1984). Sex and organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 5(2): 97–118. Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, post modernism and organizational analysis 2: the contribution of Michel Foucault. Organization Studies, 9(2): 221–35. Burrell, G. (2006). Foucauldian and postmodern thought and the analysis of work, in Korczynski, M., Hodson, R. and Edward, P. (eds), Social Theory at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–81. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction. Organization Studies, 9(1): 91–112. 282

Body politics

Dale, K. (2001). Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Volume 1. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Volume 2. London: Athlone. Descartes, R. (1996[1641]). Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dill, D.B. (1928). Studies in muscular activity. Journal of Physiology, 46 (2) October: 10. Durkheim, E. (1982[1895]). The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Allen Lane. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hancock, P. (2008). Embodied generosity and an ethics of organization. Organization Studies, 29(10): 1357–73. Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2007), Un/doing gender and the aesthetics of organizational performance. Gender, Work & Organization, 14(6): 512–33. Hardt, M. and Negri, T. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, T. (2004). Multitude. New York: Penguin. Hassard, J. and Pym, D. (eds) (1993). The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations. London: Psychology Press. Hassard, J. Holliday, R. and Willmott, H. (eds) (2000). Body and Organization. London: Sage. Höpfl, H. (2005). The organisation and the mouth of hell. Culture and Organization, 11(3): 167–79. Irigaray, L. (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jackson, N. and Carter, P. (1991). In defence of paradigm incommensurability. Organization Studies, 12(1): 109–27. Jones, C. (2003). As if ethics were possible, ‘within such limits’. . . . Organization, 10(2): 223–48. Küpers, W. (2005). Phenomenology of embodied implicit and narrative knowing. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(6): 114–33. Landsberger, H.A. (1958). Hawthorne Revisited. Ithaca, NY. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh PA: Dusquesne University Press. Linstead, S. and Pullen A. (2006) ‘Gender as multiplicity: Desire, displacement, difference and dispersion’, Human Relations 59(9): 1287–1310. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mayo, E. (1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York: Viking Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Phillips, M., Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (2014). Writing organization as gendered practice: interrupting the libidinal economy. Organization Studies, 35(3): 313–33. Rhodes, C. (2012). Ethics, alterity and the rationality of leadership justice. Human Relations, 65(10): 1311–31. Riach, K. and Warren, S. (2015). Smell organization: bodies and corporeal porosity in office work. Human Relations, 68(5): 789–809. Schilt, K. and Connell, C. (2007). Do workplace gender transitions make gender trouble?, Gender, Work & Organization, 14(6): 596–618. Simpson, R., Slutskaya, N. and Hughes, J. (2012). Gendering and embodying dirty work: men managing taint in the context of nursing care, in Simpson, R., Slutskaya, N., Lewis, P. and Höpfl, H. (eds), Dirty Work: concepts and identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165–81. Sinclair, A. (2007). Teaching leadership critically to MBAs: experiences from heaven and hell. Management Learning, 38(4): 458–72. Slutskaya, N., Simpson, A. and Hughes, J. (2012). Lessons from photoelicitation: encouraging working men to speak. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 7(1): 16–33. Spinoza, B. de (1994[1677]). The Ethics and Other Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thanem, T. (2004). The body without organs: nonorganizational desire in organizational life. Culture and Organization, 10(3): 203–17. Thanem, T. (2006). Living on the edge: towards a monstrous organization theory. Organization, 13(2): 163–93. Thanem, T. and Knights, D. (2012). Feeling and speaking through our gendered bodies: embodied selfreflection and research practice in organisation studies. International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 5(1): 91–108. Thanem, T. and Wallenberg, L. (2014). Just doing gender? Transvestism and the power of underdoing gender in everyday life and work. Organization, doi: 10.1177/1350508414547559. Thanem, T. and Wallenberg, L. (2015). What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life. Organization, 21(2). 283

Torkild Thanem

Vachhani, S.J. (2012). The subordination of the feminine? Developing a critical feminist approach to the psychoanalysis of organizations. Organization Studies, 33(9): 1237–55. Willmott, H. (1993). Breaking the paradigm mentality. Organization Studies, 14(5): 681–719. Witz, A., Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2003). The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. Organization, 10(1): 33–54. Wolkowitz, C. (2007). Body Work. London: Sage. Wolkowitz, C. and Warhurst, C. (2010). Embodying labour, in Thompson, P. and Smith, C. (eds), Working Life: renewing labour process analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 223–43. Yakhlef, A. (2010). The corporeality of practice-based learning. Organization Studies, 31(4): 409–30. Yanow, D. (2012). Organizational ethnography between toolbox and world-making. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 1(1): 31–42.

284

21 Brands Critical and managerial perspectives Adam Arvidsson

Branding has been central to corporate practice since the inception of modern consumer culture in the early twentieth century. Until the 1980s branding was mainly deployed to organize consumer demand. But since then the domain of branding has expanded to include organizations, cities and identities, among many other things. The brand has become a generic organizational device deployed in widely diverse contexts. Even though branding as a managerial practice has a longer history, scholarly writings about brands and branding only took off in the 1950s. While branding as a practice has been present in some form since the beginnings of commerce, brands and branding as objects of managerial and social thought have a much shorter history. Even if brand management dates back to the 1930s, it was only in the late 1950s, as marketing and advertising practice introduced a distinction between brands and products, that brands and branding emerged as objects of theoretical interest in their own right. (Bartels, 1976) However in the first half of the twentieth century managers and social theorists addressed a number of phenomena that we usually associate with branding, such as the cultural and social significance of consumer goods, the creation of ties of loyalty and affect around commercial products, the organization of marketing and distribution channels and the programming of consumer practices. This means that it is possible to reconstruct an intellectual history of branding ante litteram, so to say. Throughout its history approaches to branding can be divided into three philosophical frames. All of these frames are present in contemporary discourse about brands and branding, but they have each dominated such discourse in specific historical periods. I call these frames the ‘reification frame’, wherein branding was understood as a matter of the standardization of naturally diverse consumer practices and desires; the ‘semiotic frame’ wherein branding was understood to be about the differentiation between different consumer-related symbolic universes, or ‘lifestyles’, and the ‘biopolitical frame’, wherein branding was understood as a matter of constructing artificial forms of life. Throughout this history branding has been about the creation of objective meaning systems organized around commodities, and later organizations and identities. The reification frame dealt with the substitution of such objective meaning systems for subjective experience, the semiotic frame dealt with the differentiation between objective meaning systems, and the biopolitical 285

Adam Arvidsson

frame deals with the construction of objective forms of life that, at the same time, allowed for pre-structured subjective experiences. Tellingly, early thought about branding was organized around the difference between subjective and objective culture.

The reification frame Brands and branding in their modern form developed as managerial responses to the problem of managing mass production for mass consumerism. Mass production required predictable demand and the organization of long value chains. Mass consumption required that commodities be endowed with artificial identities that enabled consumer identification and producer responsibility. The result was that, starting in the 1920s, branded consumer goods along with branding tools like advertising and a sponsored commercial culture began to have an impact on Western societies, first in the US and subsequently in Europe. The first critical response to this development understood it as a process of ‘reification’ whereby mass-produced, artificial and objective forms of meaning were substituted for traditional, genuine and subjectively authentic ones. The distinction between objective and subjective meanings is important here. With objective meanings, theorists of reification understood meaning systems that, like the features of a brand, appear to be natural components of objects themselves and to have a positive existence that was independent of subjective recognition. The basic example of such objective meanings is the objective price (or ‘exchange value’) that objects acquire once they enter into the market as commodities and that appears to be a natural feature of these object themselves. Marx called the social attribution of such objective meanings to goods ‘commodity fetishism’ (Marx, 1979). Subjective meanings, on the other hand, are anchored in tradition and practice and are conferred upon objects through the lived experience of human subjects. The substitution of objective for subjective meanings was a major theme for early theorists of modernity. In his The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel (1900) argued that the diffusion of money throughout the web of social relations tended to also diffuse a perception of the value of people and things as objective and independent of particular relations or circumstances. This implied the possibility of individuality and choice on the one hand, as people were ‘set free’ from traditional value systems and could put these into perspective. It also entailed the diffusion of a calculative mentality, as people tended to treat objects as well as other subjects as embodiments of calculable quantities of objective value. Simmel’s analysis was further developed in relation to commodities and consumer culture by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who made it the subject of one part of his magnum opus, History and Class Consciousness (1923), entitled ‘Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat.’ Lukács drew on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and enriched it with Max Weber’s (1904) idea of an ‘iron cage of rationality’ as a basic feature of modern societies. Lukács argued that as use values were exclusively available as commodities, this tended to produce a ‘reified consciousness’. With this he meant that as the relation between objects now appeared as a set of relations between objective values that could be evaluated and compared with each other in rational ways, so would the relations between subjects and objects as well as between subjects and other subjects take on a nature of objectivity and calculability. Lukács’ insights became a stepping stone for the Frankfurt School’s critiques of consumer modernity on the part of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944) as well as, later, Herbert Marcuse (1964). They would extend his analysis by describing how the culture industries, including the emerging advertising industry, promoted the spread of an industrially produced culture made of objectified meanings and narratives, which was imposed on and sometimes 286

Brands

replaced the subjective culture of tradition and popular culture. Lukács also inspired Jurgen Habermas’ (1961) analysis of the ‘colonization of the life world’, which described a similar phenomenon, as industrially produced cultural forms, like brands (along with the bureaucratic rationality of the welfare state), tended to invade and transform the intimate meanings of interpersonal relations. Another foundational thinker who, without speaking of brands, articulated the basis for contemporary critical understandings of the cultural consequences of branding was Walter Benjamin. In his essay on ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (Benjamin, 1936), Benjamin suggested that the ‘mechanical’ production of meaning, chiefly by means of film and photography, led to a cultural shift whereby art objects were dissociated from their traditional ‘aura’. With this term he referred to the metaphysical significance that was given to art works by their place in traditional rituals. (For example, a crucifix in a church has an aura that conveys elaborate layers of metaphysical significance on it by virtue of its place within the ritual fabric of the catholic liturgy.) Like Lukács, Benjamin suggested that this loss of aura tended to create a culture dominated by objective rationality, with little place for subjective meanings. But he also added that the loss of traditional aura in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ entailed the possibility of the artificial production of new auratic qualities. Indeed, to Benjamin fascism was an example of how such mechanical production of aura was put to work in order to generate new forms of affective identification that went far beyond the rational. By means of the swastika and the elaborate rituals created around it National Socialism was able to mobilize the masses in ways that were more profound and engaging than what could have been achieved by rational argument alone. In many ways Benjamin’s theory of fascism describes the principle behind the engineering of affective identification that has become a basic principle of contemporary branding (cf. Falasca-Zamponi, 1997). Fascism, like brands, rested on the rational organization of objective culture. While these theorists of modernity never explicitly spoke about brands or branding, their examples imply that they wrote against the backdrop of the early developments of a modern consumer society. Their theory of reification came to inspire the general intellectual reception of early consumer modernity, on the Left as well as on the Right, in the US as well as in Europe. At the same time the emerging academic discipline of marketing was principally preoccupied with how to organize and implement processes of reification. American companies began to launch specialized sales departments in the 1890s (Chandler, 1977) and Marketing began to be taught in US Business Schools in the first decade of the twentieth century (Cochoy, 1999: 94 ff.). Inspired by German Institutional Economics, early academic marketing was principally oriented towards empirical analyses of production and distribution chains (e.g. Shaw, 1912). One important aim was to argue for the social utility of ‘the middleman’ and defend against accusations of profiteering. However, as Cochoy (1999: 107, ff.) suggests in his history of the discipline, the development from a first academic and analytic phase into a second practically oriented and prescriptive phase was chiefly driven by the influence of Taylorism. In industrial production Taylorism had showed its efficiency by increasing productivity rates massively through he standardization of work and the re-engineering of the production process. When applied to marketing the aim of a Taylorist approach was to achieve something similar in relation to consumer practices, needs and desires. Sheldon and Arens put this succinctly in their 1932 programmatic pamphlet with the appropriate title ‘Consumer Engineering’. The key to prosperity, they argued was to apply the engineering logic that had proved its worth in Taylorist scientific management to consumption. In so doing the aim was to create consumer desires, needs and wants that were functional to the needs of business, in order to replace the irrational diversity of needs and desires that prevailed among consumers ‘naturally’. They put this rather 287

Adam Arvidsson

explicitly: ‘Consumer engineering, then, is the science of finding customers, and it involves the making of customers when findings are slim’ (Sheldon and Arens, 1932: 19). While Sheldon and Arens do not speak explicitly of brands (indeed the brand manager as a professional figure was just being introduced into US companies at the time of their writing, cf. Low and Fullerton, 1994), they imagine the brand as the institutional vehicle around which such processes of consumer engineering should be implemented. In other words, the object of consumer engineering was to substitute needs, desires and consumer practices embodied in an objective brand, for the subjective diversity of traditional cultures. As they illustrated the process with the, at the time famous, case of Californian oranges: The orange-growers of California have increased the per capita consumption of oranges from 17 to 67 per year, not by advertising oranges, but by employing experts to think up new and better ways of using oranges, and advertising that. (Sheldon and Arens, 1932: 7)

The semiotic frame In the post-war years consumer culture reached maturity in the US and most of Western Europe. Social and cultural theorists began to look at brands and consumer goods as symbols that conveyed deep and complex meanings, as a sort of material ideology that was instrumental in maintaining consensus for what, at the time, was known as ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel, 1975). This semiotic perspective (from the Greek σηµεῖον, sign), developed in different contexts at about the same time. In the UK Raymond Williams (1958) and Richard Hoggart (1957) started what came to be known as the ‘Cultural Studies’ tradition wherein popular culture, including commercial cultural practices like consumption and mass entertainment became the object of critical analyses. In the North American context, Marshall McLuhan (1964) popularized ‘medium theory’, where poplar cultural phenomena like brands and advertising received the kind of serious scholarly attention previously reserved for the classics of the literary cannon. The most influential of these developments occurred in France and gave birth to what was to be properly known as ‘semiotics’. In his path-breaking work Mythologies Roland Barthes (1953) pioneered a new way of looking at popular culture. Rather than dismissing low-brow cultural objects like the new Citroen model or steak-frites, Barthes saw them as rich with signification. Mirroring the structuralist approach pioneered in anthropology by his colleague Claude Lévi-Strauss, Barthes ‘decoded’ these mythical objects unmasking how they reproduced the mythological structures that served to legitimize and reinforce the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism. The semiotic tradition was continued by Jean Baudrillard (1968) and by Umberto Eco (1975). Both conducted a series of analyses of popular culture, including brands, which investigated their role not as consumer goods but as cultural signifiers that underpinned or supported the ideology of capitalist modernity. Central to such early semiotics was the idea that the meaningful differentiation between objects mirrored social differences, primarily in terms of class and power. This insight was developed by Pierre Bourdieu: in his work Distinction (1979) he conducted a systematic investigation of the role of consumer practices, including brands in constructing, maintaining and legitimizing social power relations. Although Bourdieu never recognized his debt to earlier market research, his methods build on what had been developed within the tradition of psychographics and lifestyle segmentation, which in turn built on earlier, albeit less complete efforts in Bourdieu’s direction on the part of American sociologists like Rainwater (1959). Obviously Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective was different. While La Distinction basically replicated the empirical findings of contemporary lifestyle studies, Bourdieu’s interpretation of the findings was diametrically opposed. To Bourdieu the existence of several class-specific clusters 288

Brands

of consumer preferences showed how taste was a social construction that served to legitimize an inequitable distribution of resources and to keep people in their place through the exercise of ‘soft’ symbolic power. At roughly the same time marketing scholars reached similar conclusions, but they drew different implications from them. During the 1950s the pre-war notion of Consumer Engineering had developed into what became known as the ‘marketing concept’. In his classic 1960s article on the marketing revolution Pillsbury manager Robert J. Keith (1960) defined marketing as the systematic organization of the business of a corporation around the needs and desires of consumers. And the responsibility for implementing this reorientation rested with the brand manager. In Keith’s vision, the brand manager stands in a curious relation to the consumer. On a theoretical level he must relate to the consumer as an independent external reality, as ‘the condition of truth’ for his marketing practice (to use Michel Foucault’s term). At the same time the practice of marketing implies deploying a number of techniques of knowledge production that effectively create the (imagined) consumer as an effect of the marketing process. Keith himself neatly sums up this double role of the consumer, similar to what Foucault identified in most of his analyses of power/knowledge practices: Marketing begins and ends with the consumer. New product ideas are conceived after careful study of her wants and needs, her likes and dislikes. Then marketing takes the idea and marshals all the forces of the corporation to translate the idea into product and the product into sales. (Keith, 1960, 38) In practice this entailed orienting the company around a specific nexus of needs, products, meanings and images that were all contained in the brand. At the level of practice this resulted in investing advertising resources in differentiating between brands, enabling each to ‘stand for’ a specific bundle of products, needs and meanings. Indeed the new attention to brands that developed during the 1950s came with a strong emphasis on the necessity of differentiation, and this differentiation of brands corresponded to what was understood as a basic drive on the part of consumers to differentiate themselves from others. In their classic Harvard Business Review article on ‘The product and the brand’, Burleigh Gardner and Sydney Levy make this point strongly: ‘It is rarely possible for a product or brand to be all things to all people’ (Gardner and Levy, 1955: 137); instead the brand manager must decide what consumer segment to cater to, and develop the brand in relation to the specific lifestyle of that segment. Indeed in his series of writings on brands and branding throughout the 1960s, Sydney Levy would consistently associate the necessity of brand differentiation with the new drive for lifestyle differentiation that marked contemporary consumers. The need for branding was driven by a wide range of motives, beyond ‘a) the striving to be economical and b) the desire to emulate people of higher status’ (ibid.: 133), that now proliferated among consumers. And the development of branding was paired with the growth and sophistication in market research where more detailed technologies like motivation research and psychographics discovered an ever more complex range of desires and motivations on the part of consumers. In the 1960s these discourses converged upon a semiotic perspective on consumers, similar to that developed in critical social theory. Levy suggested that as basic needs were satisfied, consumer behaviour became largely symbolic and people bought things ‘not for what they can do, but for what they mean’ (Levy, 1959: 205). Conversely a ‘consumer’s personality can be seen as the peculiar total of the products he consumes’ (Levy, 1963: 223). 289

Adam Arvidsson

Biopolitics The conception of branding as the construction of differentiated semiotic universes embodying particular needs and desires intensified during the 1970s as marketing management was consolidated as a business practice. At the same time new data sources like psychographic lifestyle research and, later on, data from bar codes and credit card scans offered richer raw materials for engaging in the construction of consumers. In the 1980s media market liberalization enabled a further differentiation of channels and platforms, and consumer lifestyles began to be embodied not only in brands, but in media objects like television channels and magazines. To marketers, the cultural context of consumption seemed to be ever more open for intervention (Arvidsson, 2006). Importantly, deregulation of media markets opened up for the diffusion of a uniform global culture, made up of content brands like MTV, Star Wars or Dallas. This became a basis for the development of global brands, which like Nike, Starbucks or Apple, aimed at constructing globally uniform consumer lifestyles able to cross over national borders and prosper in widely diverse cultural ecosystems (Levitt, 1983). With his new phase of branding the status of the consumer as an external, independent ‘condition of truth’ for branding practice became weaker, and it became ever more apparent that consumer needs, desires and lifestyles could be constructed around brands in relative freedom. This new realm of freedom also expanded branding practices beyond consumption and marketing. Corporations discovered that constructing an attractive corporate brand might serve to motivate knowledge work and creativity (Maravelias, 2003, Ouchi, 1980). Cities and nations discovered branding as a way of creating the kinds of affective climates that would be conducive to developing knowledge intensive ‘creative industries’ or, more often, inflating real estate prices (Pike, 2011). Personal brands became a must have in competitive freelance economies where the value of work and skills ever more relied on impersonal forms of reputation (Hearn, 2008; Marwick, 2013). Increasingly the construction of such branded forms of life happened though interventions that went beyond the semiotic level. Brands began to be understood as experiential devices that, through a combination of design, taste, smell, sound and tactility would instil a similar experience in consumers (or citizens or peers) all across the world (Olins, 2003). As Pine and Gilmore pointed out in their successful book on The Experience Economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) corporations should make use of this new plastic environment to deploy sensory, architectural and other stimuli in order to create artificial experiences around brands. Apple perfected this approach offering an Apple experience that, while difficult to put into words, nevertheless distinguished not only Apple products but the people using those products from everyone else, to the point of providing a seemingly religious affiliation (Belk and Tumbat, 2005). Similar branded forms of artificial life constituted successful efforts in affective engineering that enabled people in a plurality of widely diverse contexts to ‘feel’ in similar ways about a brand. Branding took part in what Nigel Thrift (2004) identified as a new principle of social structuration, based on the organization of spatial flows of affect. Such organized affectivity would now contribute to a experientially laden ‘service’, which marketing scholars began to suggest as the true source of value, above and beyond the benefits of products (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Within the marketing literature there was a growing awareness that tying consumers to the brand through the creation of such artificial experiences or service experiences played a part in activating them as participants to the extended process of creation of ‘customer based brand equity’ (Keller, 1993), that is, a conception of the value of the brand as resting not with its intrinsic qualities, but with its ability to activate consumer participation in particular ways (in particular with the diffusion of the internet and social media platforms, the emphasis on customer co-production as an important dimension of brand value increased (Prahalad and Venkat, 2004, Zwick et al., 2008). 290

Brands

This development triggered new critical accounts of brands and branding. Sociologists like Celia Lury (2004) argued that brands should be understood as something far deeper and more complex than symbols. Rather, brands were assemblages of material objects, cultural meanings, and a number of other tools – like software or affectively charged ambiences – that created selfcontained artificial realties that cut deeply into the biopolitical framework of everyday life. These new artificial entities were able to exercise what Scott Lash (2007) called ‘ontological power’, that is they were able to construct new relations of existence that could give direction and coherence to flows of meaning and value within the global economy, without the need for legitimizing forms of knowledge. Such manifestations of what Lury et al. (2012) called ‘topological culture’ could naturally direct the agency of subjects into the creation of new forms of intangible value. They did this by enabling their desires and (part of) their lives to unfold on the artificial plane of the brand where, like in a video game, the environment of action had been carefully engineered.

Conclusion Using the term ‘biopolicial’ to designate the last, most contemporary phase in the development of branding thought and practice is somewhat misleading. Brands and branding have always been about biopolitical intervention, in the sense that these practices have sought to orchestrate forms of life that could render the functioning of consumer society smoother and more efficient. In the latest phase of branding this biopolitical ambition has reached maturity. This is because of the culmination of a theoretical development within marketing thought and practice, whereby the possibility of constructing brand-related forms of life has arrived to present itself as a practical possibility. It is also because of the increasing plasticity of social life that allows such construction to take place. This plasticity is a result of the arrival of new forms of digital mediation and, more generally of the expansion of capitalist relations of power further into everyday life. This plasticity is likely to intensify as corporate branding practices will unfold on new channels like virtual reality, ubiquitous connectivity and the internet of things. At the same time similar principles of branding are deployed by social movements and other non-corporate actors. It is likely that branding in its most recent biopolitical form will remain a significant organizational device, within as well as outside the world of corporate capitalism, in the decades to come.

References (key texts in bold) Arvidsson, A. (2006). Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge. Bartels, R. (1976). The History of Marketing Thought. Columbus, OH: Grid Press. Barthes, R. (1953). Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Baudrillard, J. (1968). Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard. Benjamin, W. (1936). L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction méchanisée. Zeithschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. V. Paris: Félix Alcan, pp. 40–68. Belk, R. and Tumbat, G. (2005). The cult of Macintosh. Consumption Markets and Culture, 8: 205–17. Bourdieu, P. (1979). La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Chandler Jr, A.D. (1977). The Visible Hand: the managerial revolution in American business. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Cochoy, F. (1999). Une histoire du marketing. Discipliner l’economie du marché. Paris: La Découverte. Eco, U. (1975). Trattato di semiotica generale. Milano: Bompiani. Falasca-Zamponi, S. (1997). Fascist Spectacle. The aesthetics of power in Mussolini’s Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 291

Adam Arvidsson

Gardner, B. and Levy, S. (1955). The product and the brand. Harvard Business Review. 33(2): 33–9. Habermas, J. (1961). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchunungen zu einer Kategorie der burglichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hearn, A. (2008). Meat, mask, burden. Probing the contours of the branded self. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8: 197–217. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1944). Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam: Querido. Keith, R.J. (1960). The marketing revolution. Journal of Marketing, 24: 35–8. Keller, K. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. The Journal of Marketing: 1–22. Lash, S. (2007). Power after hegemony cultural studies in mutation? Theory, Culture and Society, 24: 55–78. Levitt, T. (1983). The globalization of markets. Harvard Business Review, May/June: 92–102. Levy, S. (1959). Symbols for sale. Harvard Business Review, 37(4): 117–24. Levy, S. (1963). Symbolism and life style. Proceedings. American Marketing Association: 140–50 Low, G. and Fullerton, R. (1994). Brands, brand managers and the brand management system. A criticalhistorical evaluation. Journal of Marketing Research, 21: 173–90. Lukács, G. (1923). Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik. Berlin: Malik Verlag. Lury, C. (2004). Brands. The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge. Lury, C., Parisi, L. and Terranova, T. (2012). Introduction: the becoming topological of culture. Theory, Culture and Society, 29(4–5): 3–35. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mandel, E. (1975). Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Maravelias, C. (2003). Post-bureaucracy–control through professional freedom. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 16(5): 547–66. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. London: Abacus. Marx, K. (1979). Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin. Marwick, A. (2013). Status Update. Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Olins, W. (2003). On brand. London: Thames & Hudson. Ouchi, W. (1980). Theory Z: meeting the Japanese challenge. Reading, MA: Addison. Pike, A. (ed.) (2011). Brands and Branding Geographies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pine J. and Gilmore, J. (1999). The Experience Economy. Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Prahalad, C. and Venkat R. (2004). Co-creation experiences: the next practice in value creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3): 5–14. Rainwater, L. (1959). The Working Man’s Wife. Her Personality, World and Life Style. New York: Oceana Publications. Shaw, A.W. (1912). Some problems in market distribution. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 26(4): 703–65. Sheldon, R. and Arens, E. (1932). Consumer Engineering. A New Technique for Prosperity. New York: Harper Brothers. Simmel, G. (1900). Philosophie des Geldes. Leipzi: Duncker and Humbolt Verlag. Thrift., N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler, B, 86(1): 57–78. Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68: 1–17. Weber, M. (1904). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Tubingen: Mohr. Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society 1780–1940. New York: Columbia University Press. Zwick, D., Bonsu, S. and Darmody, A. (2008). Putting consumers to work: co-creation and new marketing govern-mentality. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(4): 163–96.

292

22 Capital as a neglected, yet essential, topic for organization studies Harry J. Van Buren III

Introduction Capital is fundamental to capitalism and to the study thereof. This statement is so fundamentally true as to be banal. Classical economics (Smith, 1776[1993]) specified the importance of capital as one of the factors of production and twentieth-century neoclassical economics (Friedman, 1962) subsequently elevated its importance relative to labour and other factors of production. The common-sense notion that the definition and deployment of capital is fundamental to capitalism underpins much of what we know – or think we know – about capitalism as an economic system. Capital, in contrast to its importance for economic theory and analysis, has been significantly under studied and under theorized in organization studies and organizational scholarship. This is not to say that capital has been ignored in this literature, of course. Capital largely seems to be treated as a given: something that organizations need to be successful. Both Marxist and capitalist economic theory posit the centrality of capital, albeit for different reasons: the former as an explanation of why subjugation and alienation persist in organizations and in society, the latter as an essential factor of production without which other productive resources do not produce as much value. The forms of capital – financial, physical, human and social – that have been the subject of scholarship in organization studies have largely been studied in isolation from each other. Particularly lacking in the organization studies literature is an interrogation of the concept of capital through a philosophical and ethical lens. This is problematic, because an analysis of what capital is, what counts as capital, who determines what counts as capital, how holders of capital are identified and rewarded, who decides how various forms of capital are to be deployed and how, and whether the ways in which capital is currently conceptualized promote organizational justice or injustice should be central to philosophy and organization studies. It is past time that organizational scholars took capital seriously, not least because the ways in which it is currently conceptualized support neo-liberal political regimes and unjust organizational practices that work to the detriment of the overwhelming majority of people who only have their labour with which to make a living. Philosophically and critically oriented 293

Harry J. Van Buren III

analyses of capital within organization studies have the potential to surface issues of power, inequity, and inequality. More to the point, the point that Karl Marx took great pains to make – that capital is not a thing, but rather a social relation – should inform analyses of capital in organization studies. Making organizations fairer and more just requires giving attention to the hegemony of capital as a dominant form of discourse and as a signifier of power relations. This chapter is an attempt to remedy the lack of attention that has been given among organizational scholars to the study of capital. This chapter will first look at how capital has been conceptualized in organizational scholarship, noting that much of the current work that takes up this topic is largely positivist and managerialist in its orientation. Through an analysis of scientific management and its ongoing legacy, Marx’s analysis of worker alienation will be connected to the relationship between workers and managers as representatives of financial capital owners. Analysing the relationship between extant definitions of capital and social (in)justice therefore advances the integration of philosophy and organizational studies, and in this essay such an integration will be explored through consideration of fairness in organization–stakeholder relations vis-à-vis ideologies of capital. Finally, future research directions will be considered.

Capital in contemporary organization studies Capital is largely treated within organizational studies as a resource. Generally, having more capital is understood to be better than having less of it, for individuals and for organizations, in the same way that organizations want more resources generally. In organization studies, capital has largely been studied from a positivist and managerialist framework to the extent that it has been studied at all as a distinct concept. Much of the extant literature on capital in organization studies has focused on identifying different forms of capital, in much the same way that economics does. Financial capital – and by extension – the interests of shareholders and other financial capital providers – has been central to mainstream organizational studies. Indeed, the retronym ‘financial’ would hardly seem necessary (or perhaps even been seen as a distraction) to many mainstream economists and organizational scholars: in such lines of inquiry, there’s financial capital, and then there are other things that are called capital but only are only approximations of the real thing (and only to the extent that non-financial forms of capital can be monetized). Physical capital – plant and equipment – are understood to be decent proxies for financial capital because they can be sold and valued in financial terms. Similarly, intellectual property is understood to be a kind of capital (Bontis, 2001) because it creates value for organizations and can be monetized, either directly by an organization or by its sale to another organization that can realize its full financial value. These analyses and definitions of capital are largely denuded from social context, social relationships, and power dynamics. Understood on its own, for example, financial capital is a simply a stock concept that is measured in a commonly accepted unit of exchange and has latent productive value. But on its own, financial capital is not productive in an economic or organizational sense: it must be combined with other forms of capital in order to be so. In this sense, advocates for the interests of financial capital should be more modest about its supposed primacy. Other forms of capital that have come to the fore within economics and organizational scholarship more recently, such as human capital and social capital, attempt to bring the social back into the conceptualization of capital as relevant to organization studies (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). Human capital, for example, conceptually seeks to establish the knowledge of individuals as a form of capital that is valuable both to themselves and to organizations (Crook et al., 2011; Lepak and Snell, 1999). However, not everyone is posited to have human capital; 294

Capital

some people work, but are not considered to be holders of capital because their knowledge is not deemed to be valuable (Rose, 2004). Education has largely been used as a proxy for human capital, leaving supposedly low-skill workers out as providers of human capital (Rose, 2004). There is an implicit distinction made in mainstream organizational scholarship and practice between labour (in which human capital is largely considered to be absent) and skilled work (in which human capital is a necessary requirement). Having one’s skills defined as human capital offers advantages and lauds the holder thereof; implicit in much of the discourse of human capital is the supposed cultural superiority of some and the cultural inferiority of others; only holders of human ‘capital’ can claim superiority (McDermott and Nygreen, 2013). In this respect the attribution of human capital is also an attribution of cultural capital, the latter arguably being more valuable in the labour market (Bourdieu, 1986) while also being emblematic of embedded power relations within society. Some people – that is, perceived non-holders of human capital – are thus mere labourers, while others are able to deploy their human capital to negotiate the terms of exchange with the organizations that employ them. Social capital (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Leana and Van Buren, 1999; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998) goes a step further than does human capital in bringing a social dimension into the analysis and definition of capital, positing that the relationships among an organization’s members are themselves a form of capital that creates advantage for an organization, although organizationallevel social capital may or may not have beneficial effects for individuals whose actions contribute to its creation and maintenance (Leana and Van Buren, 1999). Social capital, in contrast to other forms of capital, is a moral resource (Hirshman, 1984); the more it is used, the more it grows – in contrast to other forms of capital that are depleted when put to productive use. Much of the extant organizational scholarship on social capital proposes that it allows the value of human capital to be more fully realized in organizations and in so doing positing – albeit in a positivist and managerialist sense – that capital is a social relation. Social capital is also argued by scholars working in the area to be complementary to other forms of capital, such as financial capital (Robison et al., 2002). In some sense, human capital and social capital theorists are seeking to place human beings – what they know and how they relate to each other within organizations – into the frame as complements to financial capital. However, this strategy is also fraught with problems: most particularly, there are philosophical concerns regarding social capital at these levels of analysis vis-à-vis ‘capitalizing’ human relationships and then appropriating their value for organizational benefit. Human relationships serve multiple purposes, but to reduce them to their monetary and organizational benefits is reductionist in the extreme. Largely assumed in mainstream organizational scholarship is the role of the manager in deciding what gets recognized as capital, how capital is deployed, and which capital holders the manager is ultimately responsible for satisfying. The primacy of the financial capital holder – often expressed as shareholder primacy (Fama and Jensen, 1983; Jensen, 1986) – has been frequently assumed but not questioned (Stout, 2001). Accounting practice, which privileges financial capital holders over other capital holders – especially employees whose skills may or may not be classified by their organizations as ‘human capital’ – has the effect of subjugating and controlling labour (Armstrong, 1985). The fact that financial capital is more amenable to quantification than other forms of capital further privileges it over other forms of capital, and certainly above the interests of labour (Bryan et al., 2009). Capital is understood, therefore, to be a resource that has and creates value for organizations. However, there are a number of problems relevant to organization studies that appear to be largely unaddressed in mainstream scholarship. First, there seems to be a hierarchy of capitals: financial at the top and other forms of capital that are valuable to the extent that they can be valued as financial capital. Second, while some forms of capital are more social than others, 295

Harry J. Van Buren III

much of the work in capital uncritically accepts the language and framing of financial capital (Smith and Kulynych, 2002). Third, there is little critical analysis of how conceptualizations of capital create and reify power dynamics within and across organizations. Fourth, some forms of capital relevant to organization studies, such as cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) are left largely unexamined (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). Fifth, the ideology of capital has not been taken up by organization scholars, especially with regard to how capital is ideologically freighted. As Young (2006) points out, in current economic relationships some people own capital while most do not. Non-capital owners must work for wages to survive, while capital owners are in a privileged position in society (and by extension, in organizations).

Capital, managerial control and scientific management: worker alienation Fundamental to Marx’s analysis of the relationship between capital and labour is the concept of alienation (Bakshi, 2011; Jossa, 2013; Marx, 1844[1964]). For Marx, alienation was the product of living in a socially stratified society. Four types of alienation (Entfremdung) were identified by Marx: alienation of the worker from his work and the product of his labour, alienation of the worker from the act of producing, alienation of the worker from herself, and alienation of the worker from other workers. The commodification of labour brought about these forms of alienation, which allowed the owners of financial capital to extract value from workers (Mészáros 1970[2006]). Ironically, while financial capital is a commodity and generally fungible, one outcome of capitalism is to turn labour into a commodity (Adler, 2011). While alienation as a concept is most closely associated with Marx, it should be remembered that Adam Smith earlier wrote about alienation, suggesting that capitalism could bring about favourable economic outcomes while also creating unfavourable social outcomes (West, 1969). The concept of alienation can be put into conversation with work from scientific management, one of the earliest and most important management theories of the twentieth century, to understand how capital brings about control of workers within organizations and capture of the value that they create. One of the dominant concerns in early twentieth-century management thought was supporting the claim that managers have a right to manage because of their superior knowledge and ability to make firms more efficient (Van Buren, 2008). Frederick Taylor’s (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management can be understood as one of the earliest attempts to buttress the right of managers to structure work. The application of scientific management, however, also brought about worker alienation and buttressed value extraction by managers and owners. Here it should be noted that among Marxist scholars (see Adler, 2011 for a review), there are optimistic (scientific management led to economic gains for workers) and critical perspectives; following Braverman’s (1974) claim that scientific management provided the template for labour’s exploitation, the present analysis will take a more critical stance. Within scientific management, the manager as a representative of the organization’s owner(s) had an obligation to maximize output. Workers, through their mistaken beliefs (according to Taylor) that restricting output was good for their jobs, acted in ways that were contrary to the interests of the organization; indeed, workers would collude to do so. Workers were, in Taylor’s thinking, not smart enough to structure their work in the most effective way or to understand their true interests; in this respect, scientific management devalued the knowledge and the dignity of the rank-and-file worker (Rose, 2004). The only way that workers would benefit – and in so doing, the organization become most efficient – was through the application of scientific methods for breaking down work into simple tasks, teaching those tasks to the workers, and then creating 296

Capital

an incentive system that would reward workers for doing the ‘right’ thing according to the system of work and the incentive structure designed by the manager. Scientific management as a method and as an ideology (Merkel, 1980) perfectly captures each element of alienation as specified by Marx. It remains important as an implicit framework – and ideology – used by managers to structure work and employment relationships (Simha and Lemak, 2010). The method of production was determined not by the worker, but by the representative of the owner and provider of financial capital – the manager. The ‘one best way of doing things’ (see Kanigel, 2005), which as ascertained by time-and-motion studies took autonomy and personal control away from workers, alienating them from themselves. Scientific management further intentionally sought to alienate workers from other workers, creating individual contractual relationships – mediated by individually administered incentive structures – while seeking to prevent supposed acts of collective employee sabotage against organizations. Theories of human capital simply build on individuated ways of recognizing which employees have ‘value’ and which do not, and collective-level definitions of capital have not yet gained enough traction to provide an effective counterbalance to the supremacy of financial capital as a perceived productive resource. While the focus of this section has been on how capitalism and the privileging of financial capital leads to employee alienation, much of this analysis can be extended to other non-financial stakeholders such as communities.

Capital and organizational fairness: bringing together philosophy and organization studies Since Rawls’ (1971) work on justice, ethicists (business and otherwise) have been seeking to bring fairness-oriented arguments to bear on analyses of organizational practices. One of the critical elements of Rawls’ analysis of justice is the difference principle. Rawls proposed that social and economic inequities can only be justified to the extent that they work to the benefit of the least well off in society. It should be manifest that the ways in which capital is generally defined, deployed, and rewarded in organizations do not work to the benefit of the least well off. Indeed, the privileging of financial capital and the narrow definitions of ‘human capital’ that are recognized by organizational managers do quite the opposite. Opening up organizationally relevant definitions of capital to encompass more than only financial capital, proxies for financial capital and forms of non-financial capital that are believed to be valuable would do much to start to remedy inequities in organizational life. Work in stakeholder theory and fairness offers another way of integrating philosophy and organizational studies through critiques of contemporary ways of defining capital. Phillips (1997) and Van Buren (2001), writing in the normative stakeholder literature, both argue for principles of fairness in organization–stakeholder relationships that encompass the contributions to and sacrifices that various stakeholders make to organizations, defining organizations as collective schemes for mutual benefit. Financial capital holders make contributions to and incur sacrifices for organizations, but so do employees as contributors of human capital and as contributors to an organization’s stock of social capital. Extending the idea of capital further, communities offer a kind of capital to organizations, but often do not get fair recompense for the harms they suffer as the result of organizational activities. Part of the reason that financial capital is so privileged in managerial action and some forms of economic theory is that the holders thereof are theorized to take on a unique set of risks: as residual claimants, holders of financial capital supposedly cannot protect themselves from contracts as other stakeholders can. Such arguments have been heavily disputed as a matter of corporate law (Stout, 2001) and of stakeholder analysis (Freeman et al., 2004). 297

Harry J. Van Buren III

Philosophical analyses of capital ask fundamental questions about why financial capital is privileged relative to other contributions to an organization’s productive capacity. Organization studies similarly addresses concerns related to privilege and power. The ways in which capital has been defined, recognized and rewarded have had deleterious effects on the least well off, particularly for employees treated by organizations as commodities. A full-fledged philosophical analysis of capital would interrogate power dynamics between organizations and stakeholders, in addition to power dynamics within stakeholder networks. It would unpack how managers decide to recognize a stakeholder as a contributor of capital, and how such recognition leads to better outcomes for that stakeholder. It further would move beyond considering classes of stakeholders as a whole – such as employees – and consider how those groups differ with regard to their contributions to an organization’s success and their rewards for doing so. In short, a philosophical analysis of capital in organizations would seek to unpack whose contributions really matter to managers, and whether managerial perceptions of those contributions need to change, whether termed as ‘capital’ or something else. It would also change the frame: focusing on risk, sacrifice, and contributions to organizations from various stakeholders rather than on their status vis-à-vis capital.

Future directions There are a number of future directions that might usefully be pursued with regard to philosophically analysing capital within organization studies. First and foremost, there is a need for critically oriented analyses of capital. As noted earlier, capital is largely latent within mainstream organizational scholarship. Critically oriented organization studies could do much to surface implicit ideologies of who counts and who doesn’t, whose contributions are valued and whose aren’t, and who has voice and who doesn’t. Further, it is necessary to link conceptualizations of capital to analyses of power and injustice in organizations. Since Marx’s analysis of capital as power relation, radical economists (Cumbers and McMaster, 2012), philosophers (Sayers, 2011), and labour scholars (Braverman, 1974) have taken up questions related to who has power and who suffers injustice as a result of organizational activities. The distinction between ‘possessor of human capital’ and mere labourer, for example, is essential for understanding which organizational employees have the ability to negotiate the terms of exchange with their employing organizations and which are governed by contracts of adhesion (Van Buren, 2001) that can be accepted or rejected by employees but not modified or negotiated by them. More to the point, possessors of financial capital generally receive superior treatment – and an outsize portion of returns – from the activities of organizations (Piketty, 2014). Questions of power and capital are deeply philosophical in their import, as are cognate questions of privilege and reward, and merit further explication as they intersect with organization studies. More fundamentally, a philosophical analysis of capital within organization studies should be actively questioning the primacy of capital: not just financial capital, but all forms of capital and even the concept itself. Capital flattens social relationships, reducing them to their economic value to organizations. Even ideas such as organizational social capital (Leana and Van Buren, 1999) that seek to bring social relationships within organizations back into the analysis of productive organizational resources assess them in economic terms. But people work for a variety of reasons, and not all outcomes that organizations can produce are equally amenable to quantification as is financial capital. Philosophically informed analyses of organizations can question the primacy of capital and the wisdom of focusing primarily on what can be quantified in financial terms. 298

Capital

Finally, and returning the subject of worker alienation in capitalism brought about by capital owners and their managerial representatives, what is the meaning of work for the worker? Despite the development of frameworks such as organizational social capital, the trend in organizational practice has been toward further worker alienation from other workers and from themselves, brought about by the deskilling of work (Attewell, 1987; O’Donohue and Nelson, 2014; Shantz et al., 2014). The economic and managerial ideology (Mepham, 1972) of financial capital’s supremacy – combined with changing employment practices – have increased alienation for many workers. Capital matters for organization studies because the ways in which managers have defined it within organizations have increased both worker alienation and unfair treatment of non-financial stakeholders.

References (key texts in bold) Adler, P.S. (2011). Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist contributions to the understanding of some important organizational forms. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32: 123–53. Adler, P.S. and Kwon, S.W. (2002). Social capital: prospects for a new concept. Academy of Management Review, 27(1): 17–40. Armstrong, P. (1985). Changing management control strategies: the role of competition between accountancy and other organisational professions. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 10(2): 129–48. Attewell, P. (1987). The deskilling controversy. Work and Occupations, 14(3): 323–46. Bakshi, O. (2011). Marx’s concept of man: alienation, exploitation, and socialism. International Studies, 48(2): 85–111. Bontis, N. (2001). Assessing knowledge assets: a review of the models used to measure intellectual capital. International Journal of Management Reviews, 3(1): 41–60. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital, in Henderson, J.W. (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 46–58. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: NYU Press. Bryan, D., Martin, R. and Rafferty, M. (2009). Financialization and Marx: giving labor and capital a financial makeover. Review of Radical Political Economics, 41(4): 458–72. Crook, T.R., Todd, S.Y., Combs, J.G., Woehr, D.J. and Ketchen Jr, D.J. (2011). Does human capital matter? A meta-analysis of the relationship between human capital and firm performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3): 443–56. Cumbers, A, and McMaster, R. (2012). Revisiting public ownership: knowledge, democracy and participation in economic decision making. Review of Radical Political Economics, 44(3): 358–73. Emirbayer, M. and Johnson, V. (2008). Bourdieu and organizational analysis. Theory and Society, 37(1): 1–44. Fama, E.F. and Jensen, M.C. (1983). Separation of ownership and control. Journal of Law and Economics, 26(2): 301–25. Freeman, R.E., Wicks, A.C. and Parmar, B. (2004). Stakeholder theory and ‘the corporate objective revisited’. Organization Science, 15(3): 364–69. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hirschman, A.O. (1984). Against parsimony: three easy ways of complicating some categories of economic discourse. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 37(8): 11–28. Jensen, M.C. (1986). Agency costs of free cash flow, corporate finance, and takeovers. The American Economic Review, 76(2): 323–29. Jossa, B. (2013). Alienation and the self-managed firm system. Review of Radical Political Economics, doi: 0486613413488064. Kanigel, R. (2005). The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Leana, C.R. and Van Buren, H.J. (1999). Organizational social capital and employment practices. Academy of Management Review, 24(3): 538–55. Lepak, D.P. and Snell, S.A. (1999). The human resource architecture: toward a theory of human capital allocation and development. Academy of Management Review, 24(1): 31–48. 299

Harry J. Van Buren III

McDermott, K.A. and Nygreen, K. (2013). Educational new paternalism: human capital, cultural capital, and the politics of equal opportunity. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(1): 84–97. Marx, K. (1844[1964]). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers. Mepham, J. (1972). The theory of ideology in capital. Radical Philosophy, 2(1): 12–19. Merkel, J.A. (1980). Management and Ideology: the legacy of the international scientific management movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mészáros, I. (1970[2006]). Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press. Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242–66. O’Donohue, W. and Nelson L. (2014). Alienation: an old concept with contemporary relevance for human resource management. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 22(3): 301–16. Phillips, R.A. (1997). Stakeholder theory and a principle of fairness. Business Ethics Quarterly, 7(1): 51–66. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (trans. A. Goldhammer). Boston: Belknap Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Boston: Belknap Press. Robison, L.J., Schmid, A.A. and Siles, M.E. (2002). Is social capital really capital? Review of Social Economy, 60(1): 1–21. Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin. Sayers, S. (2011). Alienation as a critical concept. International Critical Thought, 1(3): 287–304. Simha, A. and Lemak, D.J. (2010). The value of original source readings in management education: the case of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Journal of Management History, 16(2): 233–52. Smith, A. (1776[1993]). The Wealth of Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, S. and Kulynych, J. (2002). It may be social, but why is it capital? The social construction of social capital and the politics of language. Politics & Society, 30(1): 149–86. Shantz, A., Alfes, K. and Truss, C. (2014). Alienation from work: Marxist ideologies and twenty-first century practice. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(18): 2529–50. Stout, L.A. (2001). Bad and not-so-bad arguments for shareholder primacy. Southern California Law Review, 75: 1189–209. Taylor, F.W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper Brothers. Van Buren III, H.J. (2001). If fairness is the problem, is consent the solution? Integrating ISCT and stakeholder theory. Business Ethics Quarterly, 11(3): 481–99. Van Buren III, H.J. (2008). Fairness and the main management theories of the twentieth century: a historical review, 1900–1965. Journal of Business Ethics, 82(3): 633–44. West, E.G. (1969). The political economy of alienation: Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Oxford International Papers, 21(1): 1–23. Young, I.M. (2006). Taking the basic structure seriously. Perspectives on Politics, 4(1): 91–97.

300

23 Commodification and consumption Douglas Brownlie

Introduction In discussions of economy and culture notions of commodification and consumption are domains of major key abstraction for some; and for others the setting for everyday variations of a minor hue: on one cornflake sit labour theorists rehearsing Marx, the very synecdoche for critical thought; on another cornflake sit ethnographers of the banal – the shopper, the hobbyist, the fan, the addict, the viewer, the voter, the gambler, the employee, the patient – denying homologies and essentialisms that reduce context to immutable social circumstance. Contest and disputation abound and moral disposition is invoked; careers progress and occasionally ambition surfaces for air as scholarly consensus around newly legitimated forms of social autonomy in consumer culture theory. As a feature of structural treatments of value and the social bond under capitalism the commodity form carries with it the freight of ‘production’ as the keystone of social theorizing around capital and class relations (Marx, 1990). It also carries the related technocracy of fetishism, reification and objectification: the latter reducing social relations to reproduction deficits of estrangement and domination under the ideological apparatus of consumption. The recent institutionalisation of consumption in discourse organizing social theory springs partly from the sheer intensity of commodity exchange mediating so many areas of social life and the discrediting of traditional critiques of the commodity form as the mystification of authentic use value via the strategic manipulation of fetishism. The logic of commodity exchange is characterized by calculability, universality and abstraction, leading to the dominance of these values in capitalist societies. The vast interpenetration of commodities appropriated or produced for market exchange and its influence on the shape of everyday living has altered the relation between production and consumption, focusing on reflexivity, transformation and identity: that, plus the critique of exchange value as the reduction of culture to utility and instrumental calculation, unsettles the politics of canon formation to the extent that the cultural logic of use value and symbolic exchange within relations of consumption is reframed as a structuring principle of society. Production, it is argued, is insufficient to the task of capturing the transformative complexity of consumption and the related growth of reflexive object worlds in a risk society of unstable norms, values and relational practices (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994). Sitting uncomfortably as intersecting topics of transdisciplinary concern, consumption and commodification energize debate about mass consumer society and the place 301

Douglas Brownlie

of the artefact in social reproduction, disrupting economic grammars that appeal to normative modelling of utility and choice to reduce diversity and inventiveness to objects predetermined by power, conflict and fetish. That tastes, affect and interests, organized as lifestyle, and expressed through choices regarding leisure, outlook, and well-being are more likely than paid employment to shape patterns of living, interpersonal relationships and social positioning recasts everyday life as the site of the reflexive articulation of identity (Bennett, 2005). Far from closing down matters of self-realization and autonomy, interest in the cultural products of fashion, design, gender, the arts, sports, the media, inequality, collecting, cuisine, travel, heritage, mothering, diversity, addiction, poverty and shopping enhance the reflexive project of the self through generating experiences suggestive of diverse identities and cultural narratives that ‘take us out of ourselves and place us somewhere else’ (Frith, 1996: 275). While the consumer society has been constructed before our eyes and with our collusion during the last 150 years it is hardly surprising that consumption comes to displace class consciousness and production as central organizing themes of social theory. Indeed, the consumer has emerged as a master category of identity in discourse around the organization of commodity exchange (Trentman, 2006). In this setting some argue that consumption deskills actors in matters of interpersonal relations (Bauman, 2003); others argue that consumption radiates sociality and is the constitutive arena through which object worlds come to possess transformative potential such that the ‘shaping of the object no longer escapes being adapted to the process of our subjectivity’ (Simmel, 2004: 447). To say that the subject is constituted in ‘socially reflexive praxis’ (Miller, 1987: 32) then recasts the logic of the commodity form as the articulation of modes of relational being which a production-centred way of thinking about social structure is unable to capture. Writing in 1991 Said observes that we generally assume that knowledge about human beings is inexhaustible and cumulative, and so it must be possible to say new things. And if that is possible, then the thresholds or limits that give a field of specialization its outline are very loose, if not fictitious. Anyone who thinks seriously about this proposition will see that it is utopian, if only because what defines something as new is something defining everything else as not-new, and in neither case is one individual capable of making such judgments; therefore everyone working in a field, by a process of acculturation and professionalization, accepts certain guild standards by which the new and non-new are recognizable. (Said, 1991: 180–1) This comment on the conditions of the production of interest and influence was made in the context of a discussion of theories that travel and settled others that acquire immobility by guarantee and acquiescence. He had once asked: What happens to a theory when it moves from one place to another . . . what happens to it when, in different circumstances, and for new reasons, it is used again and, in still more different circumstances, again? What can this tell us about theory itself – its limits, its possibilities, its inherent problems – and what can it suggest to us about the relationship between theory and criticism, on the one hand, and society and culture on the other? (Said, 1991: 230) The idea of fixity being recast under the force of imminent incompatibility and disagreement frames the topic of consumption and commodity since the gaze that sustains it is so clearly supported by a historical web of disputed ideological commitments and implications (Miller, 1987). That idea offers this chapter the advantage of a point of perspective on a topic freighted 302

Commodification and consumption

heavily with a complex backstory, rich with high theorizing, fixity and calculated travel. While economists and critical sociologists have danced around the topic for many years, in turn reducing it to the modelling of choice and utility; the plaything of production and profit; the work of alienated, oppressed and deluded ruminants bound by the dominant forces of capital; the acquiescence of all cultural sensibility to the hegemony of popular culture; and the descent of moral foundation to the dark cesspit of materialism: it is only within the ambit of the last two generations of scholars that the topic has managed to escape surly bonds chaining it to ‘guild standard’ guarantees to emerge as a positive domain that takes everyday social relations as its subject and diverse cultural milieux as liberating context. In some ways this marks a return to the notions of commodity and consumption as a way of problematizing social change and development, as previously captured in the work of Benjamin (1973), Simmel (2004) and Veblen (1970), where consumption objects, functioning as socializing artefacts, help perform the relational work of status and social positioning through conspicuous display (Bourdieu, 1984). This object form is embedded in particularizing cultural milieux; it is not simply socially determined; and it is not simply reducible to a commodity structure governing relations of exchange value: the artefact is socially coded and grounds social distinctions in acts appropriating social relations through consumption. However, as Miller (1987: 11) remarks, ‘social positioning is only one element in the construction of identity’; and objects constituted as social forms continue to have an important part to play in how we engage with ideas of social development through framing consumers as social beings involved in ‘a process of objectification – that is, a use of goods and services in which the object or activity becomes simultaneously a practice in the world and form in which we construct our understanding of ourselves in the world ‘(Miller, 1995: 30). This chapter takes as its subject the insertion of the actor, the active, changeable and diverse consumer (Mort, 1996) into disciplinary dialogues of consumption and commodity as generative fields of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1983), focusing on how actors appropriate objects of consumption to construct local forms of social organization and related identity projects – not necessarily those planned by producers. Consumers cannot simply be understood as the taken-for-granted carriers of abstract ordering principles, conveniently objectified cyphers that choose, buy and use given commodity goods and services according to the guarantees of some formula of exchange value and functionality. Reducing consumers to passive objects not only ruptures the logic of social relations as reproductive context; it articulates the object as commodity, the fetishized object, so masking the place for the socialized object, the gift, the ‘ekphrastic’ artefact (Godfrey, 2009) in all its illuminative liveliness developing the subject. As Slater (1997) argues, we must reframe mindless consumers as actors that ‘can and do interpret, transform, rework, recuperate the material and experiential commodities that are offered’ (Slater, 1997: 211). Indeed he goes on to observe that we have to be capable of all this simply in order to make sense of what is on offer and to assimilate into everyday life in either critical or conformist mode. We also deploy a wide variety of devices ironically to distance ourselves from identification with the system of goods, to make it a matter of play, into something superficial and endlessly transformable rather than deep, fixed and fixing. (Slater, 1997: 211) Reframing consumers as active sensemakers grounds the resulting transformation of discourse around social differentiation and the production and reproduction of difference in the construction of everyday worlds of experience and expression. Denzin (2001) notes that the interplay between consumption and consumer is more complex and nuanced than suggested 303

Douglas Brownlie

by the cultural colonisation of commodity fetishism, no more so than in the subtle interpenetration of ploys through which ‘consumers use the resources of popular culture for personal and group empowerment’ (Denzin, 2001: 328). A close reading of Douglas (1996) reveals that modern consumption was itself born of resistance, itself the product of what Baudrillard (1998) refers to as the ‘social logic of differentiation’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 91). Furthermore, the cultural logic of consumption (Jameson, 1989) is bound up with the urge to break out of the constraints of local givens, such as hearth and community, towards the formation of new collectives and forms of ‘floating sociality’ (Maffesoli, 1996) based upon interests, enthusiasms and inclinations: the ‘culture of quirk’ (Hebdige and Potter, 2007). Constructing new ‘subversively quirky’ collectives is then as much the prerogative of those with shared interests in the appeal of, say, compost making or cross city zombie chases as it is of those with shared interests in branding employees or forms of state-sponsored social activism around health and well-being. And this process plays a key role not only in the making of today’s complex relations of inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, but also in how we make our experience of those relations meaningful and come to acquire a reflexive relation to identity. While reviewing the work of high-minded absolutes is not the focus of this chapter, it does attend to ‘divisions that flatten’ (Hetherington and Munro, 1997) visions of contemporary culture as constituted within everyday acts of creative consumption. Drawing on Hegel’s (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit theory of objectification Miller argues that through ‘access to culture, as the externalisation through which the social group is constructed’ (Miller, 1987: 162), we can understand consumption as the basis for social development manifesting as diverse forms of local social arrangements through which subjects realise themselves. Miller (1987: 28) uses the term ‘objectification’ to describe cultural processes by which the subject externalizes itself (through self-alienation) in creative acts of differentiation, and in turn re-appropriates such externalizations through acts of sublation (reabsorption). This is the basis of Miller’s ‘positive’ model of the consuming subject’s potential development and transformation under consumption (Miller, 2005). Marketing, brands, knowledge retailers and other cultural intermediaries are then understood as processes by means of which society appropriates its own culture and the culture of others (see also Arvidsson’s illuminating treatment of brands; Arvidsson, 2006). This chapter takes as its subject the cultural logic of consumption (Jameson, 1989) whereby creative acts of repurposing and translation invite us to reassess commodification, not only as a site of agency and new forms of sociality, but as a site of consumption objects with the capacity to ‘make things happen without referring that agency back to the intentions of subjects’ (Lury, 2011: 57). Through focusing on consumption as a site of creative interpretive practice, of vernacular theorizing (McLaughlin, 1996) of wily acts of appropriation, poaching and negotiation undoing custom and habit (de Certeau, 1984), the chapter illustrates some of the more recent philosophical movement that has occurred around consumption and commodity as an ‘entirely different kind of production, characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation, its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility’ (de Certeau, 1984: 30). To address related matters and help organize observations, the chapter now develops a line of argument that introduces mythologies and the basic principle of mythical thought, anthropomorphism. It illustrates a particular form of symbolic circulation which, with others, is embedded in consumption and encoded webs of image-loaded media commodities which appropriate and re-appropriate signs reworked and poached from other cultural texts. It discusses this as reflexive accumulation by virtue of which social actors achieve expressivity through practices of mythologizing the ‘imaginative productions’ of others (Geertz, 1983: 44). This is understood as the contemporary context of consumption and the immaterial commodity experience. 304

Commodification and consumption

Narrative capitalism I write this piece just after a visit to Belfast’s waterfront development. The Titanic Belfast exhibition opened April 2012, 100 years after the iconic luxury liner’s doomed maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Set within the space of the original Harland and Wolff shipyards, now rebranded the Titanic Quarter, the exhibition describes itself as an amazing experience of nine interactive galleries, providing innovative features that bring the Titanic’s story to life, including a ride through the recreated shipyards of 1911. Indeed, every temple needs its relics, displayed, assembled and contextualized as evidence in support of a matrix of narrative pathways. Through engineering the immaterial commodity experience as social interaction in material context the heritage system not only renders accessible accounts of culture, it also distributes the sign-making machinery from which its staged spectacles derive their seductive power. Through capitalising narrative and experience design it sets out a busy stall of social technology by means of which to assemble culture and articulate consumption. In offering culture in the making to the gaze of the interested spectator, the commodity sign-making methodologies of the heritage system are made available for interrogation and disassembly. Anthropomorphism is a particular instance of appropriation, of consumer bricolage, of constructing worlds from cultural materials in circulation and available to hand. Simply understood as the projection of human qualities onto non-human objects, ‘the projection onto nature of the subjective’ as put by Horkheimer and Adorno (1998: 6), we overlook the associative dynamic within language whereby subjects and objects are manufactured, articulated and set in motion through practices of signification, ritual and mythologizing which embody sensemaking. Anthropomorphism is then a byword for what Jenkins (1992) refers to as ‘participatory culture’, whereby cultural texts, including those of social relations mediated by anthropomorphisms, are creatively reworked, poached and ‘reinserted into ongoing social interactions’ (Jenkins, 1992: 53). Buttressed by the keen conservative force of nostalgia and shaped by strategic curation for narrative capital, the visitor thus finds the re-imagined Titanic – Titanic the manufactured cultural commodity – setting to work the forces of contemporary collective memory and mythologizing (Howells, 1999) among the prized cultural texts and sculptured spaces of cranes, gangways, berths and slipways. As an instance of the catalytic work of the heritage system it brings Hollywoodstyle imagineering to consumption and commodity; for this effort is not simply memorialization, but harnessing the power of spectacle to the ends of celebrity (Debord, 1994). In reworking mythopoeic resources, the galleries of the exhibition hall do not merely stage-manage narratives and other ‘catalysers of collective memory’ (Eco, 1987: 198) by way of rendering plausible accounts of how things once were; they also render persuasive accounts of how things imaginatively are in that space where ‘what goes without saying’ presents itself for inspection (Barthes, 1972). Curators conceptualizing the voice of the artefact seek to tame the untameable creative potency of the imagination as it procures fascination which, as Haug (1986) observes means simply that ‘aesthetic images capture people’s sensuality’. Acts of curation nurture the socialising object ensuring it can speak for itself and others in calculated symbolic networks that remake commodity social relations, offering them up through enactment as inspectable accounts. These assembled spectacles knowingly nudge and cue and mediate and frame the viewer in the view, reappropriating particularized marketplaces which have ‘become a pre-eminent source of mythic and symbolic resources through which [people] construct narratives of identity’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005: 871). Acts of everyday creativity reuse and recombine the materials supplied by the market in curating everyday life, where creativity is born of individual acts of ‘consumption-production’ (Fiske, 1989: 37). Curatorial engineering of social interaction in (im)material context then sets in play reworked tropics of heritage, ‘winks upon winks upon 305

Douglas Brownlie

winks’ (Geertz, 1973: 9). In this way they revivify particular worlds through imagery, scenes and spaces that explain ‘ourselves’ in terms we can understand, so that we can begin to understand what might otherwise remain inexplicable. Summoning images and emotions on the basis of the calculated constructions of impression management, self-branding and self-presentation may be everyday working practices. The availability of practices of reworking, appropriation and re-inscription is not merely restricted to professional mythologizers, such as curators, interpreters and other such authors of cultural texts, but to all those seeking to capture or maintain power and influence within the domain of identity work across the wide vista of social interaction. In seeking to answer the question about what it means to commodify, to transform one object into another; to transform a sacred artefact into a cultural good; to transform the vestigial into the material; to transform a work into a cult object, Eco (1987) states that ‘one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole’ (Eco, 1987: 198). That is to say, that culture is about the way every day social life is experienced and handled, the meaning and values which inform human action which are embodied in and mediate social relations. Transformation or shapeshifting liminality (Turner, 1969) becomes a process of collective reworking, borrowing, reconstructing and bricolage as the interplay of re-signification and re-inscription produces new immaterial cultural creations which function as signs caught in always evolving webs of significance. Thus it is in the world of soft toys that when the Velveteen Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what makes things real, the Skin Horse replies that it is not a matter of how you are made, or having things inside you that buzz; that being real does not happen all at once . . . it takes a long time . . . and by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. (Williams, 2004: 10–11) Jenkins (1992) builds his idea of textual poaching upon this classic children’s story and makes the point that the child’s investment in the toy will give it meaning unanticipated by the toymaker, ‘a meaning that comes not from its intrinsic merits or economic value but rather from the significance the child bestows upon the commodity through its use’ (Jenkins, 1992: 51). Thus, as Jenkins (1992) observes ‘The reader’s [visitor’s] activity is no longer seen simply as the task of recovering the author’s [curator’s] meanings but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit them into the context of lived experience’(Jenkins, 1992: 52). Heritage, as a domain of signifying practice partly comprehended through lenses such as that of the anthropomorphic fetish, can thus be seen as a specific instance of ‘textual poaching’, of contemporary mythologizing in pursuit of cultural production. In this way ritualized assimilation opens us up to the possibilities of other subjectivities and bears witness to the agency of actors and the everyday work they perform to impute character to objects and situations. As Douglas and Isherwood (1978) advise, ‘forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking [with]; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty’ (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978: 62).

Of cocks and conclusions Reflecting on art forms as collectively sustained symbolic structures Geertz (1973) observes that string quartets, still lifes and Balinese cockfights ‘generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display. [They] are not merely reflections of a pre-existing sensibility 306

Commodification and consumption

analogically represented; they are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such sensibility’ (Geertz, 1973: 451). As ways of ‘saying something of something’, he argues that art forms organize subjectivity, rendering it inspectable, making everyday experience comprehensible by ‘presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed’ (Geertz, 1973: 443). Such collectively sustained social structures are constitutive: that is to say, the rituals and ceremonies capital they reproduce give shape to our lives through permitting the ‘re-enactment of social practices across the generations’ (Giddens, 1991: 23). Geertz argues that cockfights are symbolic expressions of self whose function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds and money, to display them. For him the slaughter in the ring is not a depiction of how things literally are among Balinese men, but of how, from a particular angle they imaginatively are. It is in this sense that we come to understand the social function of what in other worlds is refracted through the lenses of commodity and consumption. Miller (2005: 230) observes ‘there is no more eloquent confrontation with the abstraction of money, the state and modernity than a life devoted to racing pigeons, or medieval fantasies played out on a microcomputer’, or indeed the writing of critical accounts of consumer culture. It seems that the key function of consumption is its capacity to make lives social through making sense; and to make meaningful is to communicate and make narrative value as much as to make relations of commodity exchange and economy.

References (key texts in bold) Arnould, E.J. and Thompson, C.J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(March): 868–82. Arvidsson, A. (2006). Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: myths and structures. London: Sage. Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive Modernization. Cambridge, Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (1973). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in Benjamin. W., Illuminations. London: Fontana, pp. 211–46. Bennett, A. (2005). Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1983). The Field of Cultural Production. Oxford: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. Debord, G. (1994). Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Denzin, N.K. (2001). The seventh moment: qualitative inquiry and the practices of a more radical consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(September): 324–30. Douglas, M. (1996). Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1978). The World of Goods: towards an anthropology of consumption. London: Allen Lane. Eco, U. (1987). Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador. Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Godfrey, T. (2009). Understanding Art Objects. London: Sothebys. Haug, W. (1986). Critique of Commodity Aesthetics. Oxford: Polity Press. Hebdige, D. and Potter, A. (2007). A critical reframing of subcultural cool and consumption, in Borghini, S., McGrath, M.A. and Otnes, C. (eds), European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8. Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research, pp. 527–30. Hegel, G. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hetherington, K. and Munro, R. (1997). Ideas of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. 307

Douglas Brownlie

Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1998). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Howells, R. (1999). The Myth of the Titanic. London and New York: The Macmillan Press and St Martin’s Press. Jameson, F. (1989). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Lury, Celia (2011). Consumer Culture (2nd edn). London. Routledge. McLaughlin, T. (1996). Street Smarts and Critical Theory. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. Marx, K. (1990). Capital, Vol. 1. London. Penguin Classics. Miller, D. (1987). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, D. (1995). Acknowledging Consumption: a review of new studies. London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2005). Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press. Mort, F. (1996). Cultures of Consumption. Masculinities and Social Space in Late-Twentieth Century Britain. London: Routledge. Said, E.W. (1991). Traveling Theory, in Said, E.W. (ed.), The World, The Text and The Critic. London: Vintage, pp. 226–47. Simmel, G. (2004). The Philosophy of Money (3rd edn) (D. Frisby, ed.). London: Routledge. Slater, D. (1997). Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Trentman, F. (2006). The Making of the Consumer: knowledge, power and identity in the modern world. Oxford: Berg. Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: structure and anti-structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Veblen, T. (1970). The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Allen & Unwin. Williams, M. (2004). The Velveteen Rabbit. London: Egmont.

308

24 Commons and organization Potentiality and expropriation Casper Hoedemaekers

Organization and management studies have long relied on philosophy for support, critique and inspiration. One obvious engagement here has been with the work of Marx, which although focused on the political economy, has also had significant philosophical reverberations. In recent years, we have seen a renewal of the interest in Marxist notions of value and commodification, alongside further elaboration of the notion of subjectivity and power within work and organized settings. In this chapter I will examine the notion of commons, which designates a shared wealth that is produced within a specific set of social relations. In recent years, a number of theorists have argued that various public goods that are produced in communities, real and virtual, are increasingly targets for capitalist appropriation and value extraction. These forms of public good have often been produced in a non-instrumental manner, i.e. not for economic gain but driven by moral and aesthetic motives, and importantly mostly outside of the traditional sphere of paid employment. For autonomist Marxist theorists (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Hardt, 2009), the commodification of such commons is conceptualized as a site in which capital extracts value already realized, and has been dubbed the ‘social factory’ to signify how capitalist expropriation of value has moved beyond the traditional workplace in other spheres of life. As such, it not only changes how we may conceptualize capital but also what we may regard as labour. One prominent example of this can be seen in the ways that property developers have increasingly marketized the historically grown and collectively produced culture and locale of specific urban neighbourhoods to aid speculation on property price rises, often pushing out existing residents (Harvey, 2013). The value of a neighbourhood’s character, while diffuse and ambiguous, here becomes repackaged into the property commodity and sold at market prices. In this movement, the contribution to a commonly experienced cultural ethos and diversified locale by long-standing working class and minority communities as well as resident artists and creative workers becomes re-appropriated by those who hold owner’s deeds. In this process, the distinction between owners and residents is elided, which means that tenants often find themselves without a claim to their stake in the produced commons. We can recognize similar capitalist appropriation of commons produced in education, community-based initiatives, health care, social networking and other areas. Examining this appropriation provides additional insight into processes of privatization, marketization and commodification. 309

Casper Hoedemaekers

This strand of thinking has its roots within autonomist Marxism, and has been gaining purchase within critical political and social analysis. The notion of commons has been central both in the critique of contemporary political economy and the state of late neo-liberal capitalism, and the ways in which resistance to it may be developed. As such, theorists such as Hardt and Negri, Virno and Bifo have pointed out that the commons provide a site in which resistance can take shape. Here, the same bonds that have produced common wealth can provide a solidarity that can give rise to a shared political imagination and sustain collective action. In what follows, I would like to explore the potential relevance of this concept for our understanding of work and organization. I will illustrate this by means of a brief look at work in the cultural industries, in which the productive capacity of workers is often reliant upon their place in peer networks (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012), and drawing on a collectively produced ‘general intellect’ (Virno, 2002).

Commons, enclosure, biopolitics To enrich our understanding of the notion of the commons, it is useful to imagine what might be seen as a historical version of it. For example, we can imagine that in a pre-industrial autarkic village, the fields surrounding the village and the well that provides its drinking water are shared resources. For the village to thrive, and for sustained survival for its inhabitants, a shared use of these vital means is necessary. Also, labour may be organized in collective ways at certain moments when a lot of it is needed all at once, such as periods of harvest. These resources of land, water and labour are shared, and for that very reason, the produce that results from it has a collective basis of ownership. These means and products are the commons – they belong to all, since they are of vital importance to all, rely on a shared sense of responsibility, and are the result of collective labour. Was there ever such a place? Anthropologists could point to a number of historical situations in which we may have found such arrangements, often accompanied by carefully developed cultural and social norms and codes according to which the economy of local communities was safeguarded. Graeber (2011) calls these human economies, which he distinguishes from the modern transactional economies created by credit money and abstract exchange. To reflect on the commons before their enclosure means imagining the utopian underpinnings of the notion of commons, linked as it is with a utopian politics. To think of something as commons means to imagine it before the capitalist enclosure of it, as a shared wealth of which the wider community may have been deprived. It also allows us to imagine what a re-appropriation of those commons might look like. I just gave the illustration of a village with natural resources that must by virtue of their vital importance be shared. These commons are natural, but it is easy enough to imagine common wealth that is not naturally given but in fact the result of collective work. Hardt (2010) initially differentiates between the natural commons and the artificial commons. The former consist of water, land, air and other imaginable resources (sun, wind, minerals, etc.) within the external world. The latter refers to those resources that result from human work and cooperation over time. As Hardt readily points out, this distinction can often be problematized, as natural resources derive their vital importance and value from people’s use of them. We can easily think of ways in which capital seeks to appropriate natural commons. Think for example of the way in which a mining corporation might acquire a piece of land, and then in a short space of time divest it of the resources that took millions of years to develop. Or a water company that acquires a reservoir after a privatization, upon which thousands of people are reliant for their water supply, and which has been built with public funds. Similarly, we 310

Commons

can imagine how artificial commons may be appropriated. Pharmaceutical companies may patent new medicines that rely to a large extent on publicly funded research. Or indeed, private academic publishers may sell wholly publicly funded academic research articles at premium prices because academics are forced to ‘publish or perish’ by their institutions. Here, collectively owned value is appropriated and sold at the behest of private industry. The commons are enclosed by capital. But there is more to this question than simply the enclosure of commons by capital by stealth or force. In order to understand this, we must take into account aspects of scarcity and materiality. These can be illuminated by introducing two further concepts, general intellect and immaterial labour. Autonomist Marxist theorist Virno (2002) introduced the notion of general intellect, a shared capacity for (social) production. This concept references the way in which generic human skills of language, imagination, symbolism and representation are acquired and transmitted within social groups, often outside of the context of the workplace. They are general, meaning that they are not tied to any particular group or profession but a necessity for and product of socialized human life. However, these very abilities and skills are of crucial importance in the work context and often form the basis for the production of value. This is especially the case when we look beyond the strictly material aspects of work. All types of work involve material and immaterial aspects, but it is possible to argue that within contemporary developed economies work has increasingly stressed informational, interpretive and conceptual skills. In recognizing this shift, Lazzarato (1996) elaborated the concept of immaterial labour, which he defined as ‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133). From this follows that the produced common wealth may also be immaterial. Lotringer (in Virno, 2002) has pointed out that the labour power for immaterial labour reproduces itself in its idle time, which means that surplus value is no longer stored in the commodity, but instead constantly replenished outside of the workplace by means of social interactions (often aided by information technology). In material industrial labour, value is created by the worker in exchange for a wage payment that is by definition less than the value embodied in the commodity, from which the capitalist derives surplus value. In immaterial labour, production relies on abilities that are not confined to the labour process but that are continuously learned and honed. In industrial settings, the end point is an object in which the worker’s wage and the expropriated surplus value are embodied. In immaterial production, the situation is different as value is not strictly embodied within the largely immaterial object. The object that is produced is then really a subject, in that it only really exists within social relationships and shared meaning (Hardt, 2010: 354). For this reason, this is often referred to as biopolitical production. Capital here acts on the bios, on forms of life that are produced within the commons. Immaterial labour thereby implies several areas of immateriality: the nature of the labour (immaterial labour), the produced value (largely consisting of symbolic meaning), and labour power (general intellect). But there is a further dimension that is worth considering here, and that is that of scarcity (see also Hardt, 2010: 351). In an exchange economy dominated by industrial production, we find that the scarcity of resources that feed into the production process allow for the creation of surplus value. Value is here embodied within the commodity, and as such the notion of private ownership as it is defended by the state implies that the use of a commodity is limited to its rightful owner. For example, a car can only be used by one driver at a time (and their passengers) and a host of restrictions mean that sharing such a commodity out between a large number of people is quite difficult. The use of a material commodity usually restricts or precludes another’s use of it. However, in the case of biopolitical production, the use of an immaterial commodity does not usually preclude another’s use of it. For example, my enjoyment of a piece of music, or a 311

Casper Hoedemaekers

literary text, is not diminished by sharing it with others, and any restrictions apply here to the materiality of its medium rather than the actual work. In many cases, the value of the commodity is even enhanced by sharing its use. Through wider usage, their use value may be improved, such as in the case of social networking applications such as WhatsApp or Skype, for example. Or their meaning may be enhanced, such as in the case of a media text that resonates with its readers. Images and ideas become more useful and more powerful through a higher take-up. It should therefore be clear that the commodities of biopolitical production have a different logic attached to them than those of industrial production. We have seen that the productive capacity for biopolitical production is held in common, and that immaterial commodities are not naturally scarce but instead appreciate in value by their common use. This means that for capitalist appropriation of common wealth to be successful, it must manufacture scarcity. There is a contradiction here between the capitalist need to sell commodities and the basis of immaterial value within the commons. There is therefore an artificial scarcity at play within biopolitical production, which infringes upon the need for the reproduction of the common, which is essential for the capitalist accumulation of immaterial surplus value. As Hardt (2009: 25) states The centrality of the common is perhaps even more explicit in affective and linguistic production, which cannot take place without social relations. These are immediately and necessarily social forms of production, which constantly rely on and generate the common. And as the capitalist mode of production shifts further towards biopolitics, we can then see another contradiction emerging. From the discussion above, one can infer that the existence of the commons implies a capacity for organization among those who produce and reproduce it. For value to be produced in the commons, it is necessary that exchange is open and that cooperation occurs. The commons are necessarily collective and accessible. And the skills needed for biopolitical production are similar to those for politics: imagination, autonomy, organization (Hardt, 2009: 26). Such dynamics cannot easily be co-opted for capitalist ends. The affects, images and ideas produced under the instrumentality of capitalist biopolitical production exceed their goals (Hardt, 2009: 26). From this excess, a solidarity may emerge, in which these can be held in common. As an example of this, imagine a call centre worker who is required to maintain a responsive and caring attitude to customers, which must be presented convincingly to the people she speaks to. She may feel torn between the plight of those she speaks to, and the insistence of performance quota from her organization at the same time. This person will perhaps encounter similar sentiments of frustration among her peers, who likewise feel alienated by the contradictions posed between this affective labour on one hand and the instrumental goals of the organization on the other. These workers draw on repertoires of speech, emotional performance and rhetoric developed outside of the workplace, mostly within the context of family and friends. These skills cannot be divorced from the non-instrumental realm in which they originate, nor can they be wholly divested of emotional and moral baggage. The potential for organized resistance smoulders underneath this kind of immaterial labour, because of its relationship to the commons.

Creative work and the commons How can we understand such commons in the context of work and organization? One useful case to examine is that of work in the cultural industries, or what in late neo-liberal parlance has come to be known as the ‘creative industries’ (Florida, 2002). The nature of work fits well 312

Commons

with the conceptualization of immaterial labour, and demonstrates how the productive capacity of workers relies on social networks, shared informational and symbolic skills, and selforganization. The cultural industries encompass sectors such as advertising, publishing, film and TV, media, fashion and music. These sectors were long regarded as belonging generally to the arts rather than industry. But in the course of the twentieth century, as audiences, leisure time and disposable income grew, many of them professionalized and became industrial sectors characterized by large bureaucratic organizations with a clear profit motive (Hesmondhalgh, 2012). What these industries share is that they produce commodities whose primary value resides in their symbolic meaning. A film might be sold in the form of physical medium such as a DVD, but its primary value to the consumer resides in its meaning. In other words, its use value is primarily symbolic rather than material. This is true to a lesser extent for a piece of clothing, but while its use value is one part of the equation, the meaning the wearer seeks to communicate to others is no less important (which is reflected in great variety of styles and branding of fashion). This use of symbolic texts in self-expression and identity work is a major part of the consumption of almost any commodity, and for this reason we find creative workers in many industries besides the cultural industries. In the 1990s and early 2000s, some academic studies and policy research (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999; Florida, 2002) posited that such cultural industries represent a source of major economic potential, with the ability to socially and economically regenerate deprived urban areas in particular. This led to the emergence of a raft of economic development policies and stimuli, aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship among workers in the cultural industries. Ross (2009) and Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2012) point out how the reality of creative work is markedly different from the rhetoric presented in policy and policy-oriented academic studies. Much of the labour in the cultural industries is poorly paid, uncertain and characterized by irregular working hours, often varying between periods of overwork and idleness. Workers mostly have a very strong identification with their chosen field, and endure the difficult professional existence with a view to retaining autonomy and creativity in their work. In order to acquire opportunities for paid work, they craft very strong social bonds with their peers, and invest a lot of their non-work time in networking, socializing and immersing themselves in the wider context of their field. For instance, someone who works in fashion will likely attend many fashion events, have friends who also work in fashion, and keenly keep up with trends and developments within the field. Such engagement represents a blurring of the boundary between work and non-work time, where it is difficult to see which time is part of the labour process and which is leisure time. A surface reading might lead some to conclude that here leisure time becomes instrumentalized for the benefit of a livelihood. But the situation is more complex than this. Many skills needed for creative work are not tied to the work itself, but are part of the ‘general intellect’, the collective social capacity for immaterial production. As was already mentioned above, Hesmondhalgh (2012) argues that the overarching focus on the production of symbolic meaning is the defining feature of creative labour. But what allows people to engage in such production of meaning? Or, to put the question differently, what are the means of production within creative labour? Here we can use the notion of the commons. If the primary use value of cultural industry products is the communication of meaning, the skills needed for producing it are to be found in the wider social world outside of the labour process, namely within the social relations in which work–life takes place. A creative worker will continuously refine and reflect on her aesthetic abilities, knowledge of relevant symbolic repertoire and familiarity with media semiotics, among other things. For example, a photographer needs to have a very refined sense of her audience 313

Casper Hoedemaekers

to be able to make a photo that is considered expressive. A graphic designer who is asked to provide a company logo will often be given a mission statement and core values that must be communicated by it. Such work requires imagination and affective labour, which must happen alongside the technical skills inherent in their profession. At the same time, creative professionals will look to produce something that will build their portfolio and professional profile, and can be seen as distinctive of their personal style and approach. After all, such things will determine whether they get hired for subsequent jobs. The abilities for this symbolic and affective labour are not simply located with the individual designers, photographers, illustrators, journalists, filmmakers, etc. A creative work is rarely wholly original, but relies on intertextuality (i.e. it references other works and cultural aspects) and it can be located within a genre or tradition. To be able to mobilize one’s efforts to produce something meaningful implies then that one is able to participate in an established and ongoing rapport between audiences and makers.1 Creative professionals work on this in a variety of ways. They usually maintain strong networks with their peers, in order to share information, resources, learn about developments in the field, and socialize. We can also see this reflected in the proliferation of co-working spaces for freelance workers (Land et al., 2012), or any number of online platforms and hubs. Such creative communities of peers are often an important part of maintaining their profession, and they operate on the basis of a more complex notion of value than a narrow economic conception would allow for. Creative workers stress the importance of making work that they consider of good quality, and over which they have a degree of autonomy and creative license (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2012). Here, criteria of authenticity and aesthetics are often brought to bear on the work. These can also be seen in the communities of peers in which creative workers are embedded, often alongside an ethos of mutuality and solidarity. While such professional and social bonds are not free of hierarchy and self-interest, they are characterized by a complex constellation of different forms of living and notions of value.

Discussion In the preceding discussion, one might be tempted to use the notions of social capital and symbolic capital to analyse the issues raised, to conceptualize the way that certain abilities or skills are embedded within wider social networks. However, these notions of social and symbolic capital are ultimately problematic in this context. Capital, as concept, implies something that is fundamentally held or owned, and then invested to yield returns. The problem with this in relation to the dynamic sketched above is that no individual holds the value, but that it only exists within social relations; it is held in common, and its value is dependent on this commonality. In other words, the common has a public nature that clashes with the inherently private notion of capital. As Hardt (2009) points out, attempts to maximize surplus value in relation to the common stand in contradiction to it: an idea or image needs to be widely shared for a maximum of usefulness and meaningfulness, which makes restricting and monetizing its use problematic. This contradiction within biopolitical production has consequences for the strategies taken by capital to accumulate surplus value. Marxist theorists have argued that in the shift from industrial to biopolitical capitalism, surplus value creation has shifted from profit-seeking to rent-seeking (Hardt, 2010; see also Harvey, 2013). In rent-seeking, capital is external to production, as opposed to profit-seeking where capital is directly implicated in production. In profit-based capitalism, capital owns the means of production and extracts greater labour than it pays for, and this is where surplus value is realized in the commodity. Rent-seeking however operates on the premise 314

Commons

that certain assets cannot be replicated, and that a monopoly rent can therefore be charged for their use. A traditional example of this would be where landowners receive a fixed price in exchange for use of their land. Here, capital is not directly implicated in the production process but by virtue of its non-replicable (and necessary) assets can cream off profits from it. In the contemporary economy, this role is more likely taken by finance. Capital hereby removes itself from the productive process, and removes itself from the inherent contradictions in monetizing the common by restricting access. An example here would be the way in which property developers are able to benefit very strongly from the gentrification produced by so-called ‘creative clusters’ in cities (Harvey, 2013), as I mentioned earlier. So far, I have drawn attention to the ways in which the common relates to autonomous labour, its productive capacity and value creation. The common can also be used to theorize aspects of more formal organizations, in which labour occurs under employment contracts. Here we can look at aspects of an organization that escape the managerial appropriation of value for capitalist accumulation.2 As work becomes more knowledge-intensive and complex, it draws ever more strongly on abilities and productive capacity that is acquired and honed beyond the confines of the labour contract and the workplace. Let’s take the example of an IT professional; it is very likely that much of their non-work time is spent familiarizing themselves with new technologies, software applications, gadgets, games, etc. They might spend time in online communities organized around particular interests and activities, such as coding or games. For the employee in question, this investment all feeds into a deeper knowledge on the interface between the software and the user, the interests that drive particular consumer communities, and the emergence of new sensibilities and desires in relation to the use of information technology, for example. Besides blurring the line between work and leisure, it also blurs the boundary between the economic and the social. What is valorized in the work relationship between employer and employee is the employee’s integration into social and professional communities that precisely exist because of an enthusiasm and affect that is not primarily instrumental in its nature. The knowledge and skills that are produced and shared here are there because instrumentality has not yet been able to enclose them, portion them off and sell them on, but they can freely grow in their usefulness in a mutual exchange. Needless to say, there is collective labour here that is not rewarded by those who profit from it. But at the same time, from such self-organized communities and bonds may emerge collective identifications and mobilizations that can push back against their enclosure. Within the value that is produced within biopolitics are intersections between particular forms of life and ways of seeing and understanding. These may be enclosed but never exhaustively appropriated. What is seen, perceived, sensed, is deeply intertwined with the idea of meaning. If, as in biopolitical production, ideas and images become the primary objects of capitalist systems of production, there is a serious political potential within work itself.

Notes 1 2

There is of course a great deal of work that points out that audiences are becoming increasingly involved in co-creation or prosumption of cultural products (see Hesmondhalgh, 2012). The informal organization might be a useful concept to re-read in light of the common. However, this is beyond the scope of this chapter.

References (key texts in bold) Florida, R. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. 315

Casper Hoedemaekers

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: the first 5000 years. New York: Melville House. Grugulis, I. and Stoyanova, D. (2012). Social capital and networks in film and TV: jobs for the boys? Organization Studies, 33: 1311–31. Hardt, M. (2009). Production and distribution of the common. Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, 16: 20–31. Hardt, M. (2010). The common in communism. Rethinking Marxism, 22(3): 346–56. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2013). Rebel Cities. London: Verso. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2012). The Cultural Industries. London: Sage. Hesmondhalgh, D. and Baker, S. (2012). Creative Labour: media work in three cultural industries. London: Routledge. Land, C., Otto, B. and Böhm, S. (2012). Creative community or co-mutiny? Practices, positions and political potentials in coworking spaces, The 6th Art of Management and Organization Conference, University of York, 4–7 September, 2012. Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labour, in Virno, P. and Hardt, M. (2006). Radical Thought in Italy: a potential politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–50. Leadbeater, C. and Oakley, K. (1999). The Independents: Britain’s new cultural entrepreneurs. London: Demos. Ross, A. (2009). Nice Work If You Can Get It: life and labor in precarious times. New York: NYU Press. Virno, P. (2002). General intellect, exodus, multitude (trans. Nate Holdren). Archipélago, 54: retrieved on 22 June 2015 from www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno2.htm.

316

25 Conflict theorizing in organization theory A political philosophical reading Alessia Contu

Introduction Conflict is ubiquitous. We have different names for conflict, i.e. friction, abrasion, antagonism, struggle, even war; and we address it with different disciplines and theoretical tools. Borrowing from other work (Contu, 2015) in this review I focus on Organization Theory (OT) to show what philosophical insights can offer to our understanding of conflict by touching upon epistemological and ontological considerations. I also address the ethico-political consequences of organizational theoretical constructions. First, I analyse the way this signifier is woven into theories that are directly of conflict. Produced by mostly white, male and American scholars, their horizon was squarely capitalist. They tended to see conflict as transcendent to order and furthered a managerialist logic and ethos to domesticate conflict. Interestingly, broad conflict theorizing has largely disappeared from the main OT scene to become a specialist, diverse and rather parochial arena dedicated to conflict management and resolution (Morrill and Rudes, 2010). Second and briefly, I recount how conflict in OT can be theorized as the index of an impossible, real antagonism that is immanent to any organization, i.e. anything that reaches a semblance of consistency, and returns as a symptom that produces friction and disruption. Some radical theorizations, such as Marxism, have thematized such a view of immanent conflict and have been instrumental, with others, in generating critical studies of managing, working and organizing. I conclude by indicating the current rising conflicts in contemporary organizing and check how OT is responding, if at all, to the new conflict challenges of our time.

The signifier ‘conflict’: on theories of conflict in OT The signifier ‘conflict’ is key to theorizations that are directly of ‘conflict’ (e.g. Deutsch, 1969; Robbins, 1978). For mainstream OT theories are testable hypotheses which produce value-free models that approximate the processes of the natural sciences. According to Kolb and Putnam (1992: 312) conflict is the phenomenon that affects organizations when ‘there are real and 317

Alessia Contu

perceived differences that arise in specific organizational circumstances and that engender emotions as a consequence’. Clearly the emotional reaction to such differences is perceived as negative, often denoted as incompatibility, dissonance (Rahim, 2010: 207) and one could add struggle, antagonism and opposition. Relational, interactionist theories (Hatch, 2012; Robbins and Judge, 2010) can be considered the ‘normal science’ in conflict theorizations in OT. The aim of these theories is to suggest to managers the use of constructive conflict for positive ends while reducing negative conflict (Ayoko et al., 2014; De Dreu and Van de Vliert, 1997; Robbins, 1978). As Morrill (2000: 639) put it this knowledge treats conflict as if it was ‘isolated from ongoing organizational struggles, perceptions and values related to organizational change, control and justice’. In other words, it has no explicit links with the political and social context it refers to, and in which it is situated. Additionally, there has been little theoretical development in OT. As Mannix (2003) indicated conflict started with a strong theoretical leaning but it has virtually disappeared from organization theory per se. As Roche et al. (2014: 2) notice conflict and conflict management initiatives have grown but the field overall ‘remains deeply under-theorised’. Research focuses on negotiation, bargaining and institutionalization but these theories are often empirically focused, reductive and parochial (Morrill and Rudes, 2010). Luis Pondy noticed as much early on, questioning the lack of work to test his classic model: I can only conclude that people liked the image of conflict as structured, benign and episodic so much that they didn’t want to risk having the model proved wrong by mere data. Models that seem to order the world are comforting. Why rock the boat? (Pondy, 1992: 257) Why ‘rock the boat’ indeed? Mobilizing philosophical analysis I review this long-standing theorization of conflict questioning the ‘comfort’ offered by such theories of conflict and to whom.

The philosophy of knowledge of interactionist theories of organizational conflict The social ontological status of classic OT views conflict as transcendental to order. Taylor, Fayol and Mayo considered conflict as external to order. Conflict is mostly seen as interference to be restrained since it ruins organizational equilibrium and disturbs goal attainment. The assumption is that society and organizations are cohesive and based on relations of cooperation and trust (Pondy, 1992). Coser (1956) suggested that conflict is, however, not only disruptive but also functional to the social order. ‘Interactionist’ theories of conflict then started considering the productive aspects of conflict to be exploited for organizational purposes while managers also must seek the reduction of negative conflict (De Dreu and Van de Vliert, 1997; Pondy, 1967; Litterer, 1966; Robbins, 1978; Rahim, 2010). With this relational interactionist theorization a fundamental shift seems to have occurred in the key assumption of conflict theory in OT – one that moves from transcendence to immanence. The move would seem to be from an organizational perspective that Alan Fox (1974: 249) called ‘unitarist’ where each fulfils its function and responds to one authority source; towards one that is ‘pluralist’ with rival sources of authority and leadership. Conflict starts to be understood as immanent to order; as something intrinsic, endemic and physiological to social and organizational life. Conflict becomes desirable, even. As to avoid stagnation, groupthink, and subsequently low performance, managers are invited to stimulate positive conflict. 318

Conflict

A reverse-U curve linking the level of conflict to the level of organizational effectiveness has been theorized to give such a functional view of conflict a mathematical polish. Alas, there is no strong support to the validity of such a relation between conflict and organizational effectiveness. As Rahim (2010: 50) suggests so far ‘no study on this function has satisfied the requirements of proper control’. Nonetheless, this function is reported in widely adopted management textbooks (e.g. Robbins and Judge, 2010; Buchanan and Huczynski, 2010) as if it was a solid and reliable piece of management knowledge on which management education and practice can be based. But this is clearly not the case. What is going on? One must consider that such theories start considering, almost forty years later, what Parker Follett suggested in 1925 that ‘conflict is the appearance of differences in opinion and interests’. Conflict as she puts it is ‘in the world’. This consideration has the potential to deliver a knowledge that posits the significance of difference in such things as ‘interests’ and ‘opinion’. Reasonably then this appreciation would call for inquiries on the origin/constitution/reproduction of such different interests and opinion. Alas, for such a functional, interactionist and contingent view of conflict (Hatch, 2012) a deep understanding of plurality and immanence of conflict ‘in the world’ was not to be. The world was always already posited as a functional whole with work organizations as sub-units of the economy. Conflict estimation is always linked to its utility function as decided by management in signalling breakdown in standard procedures and calling for new solutions (Litterer, 1966; March and Simon, 1958). Epistemologically, the manager, the Barnardian Executive with his managerial prerogative is still the engineer, the demiurge of a social/organizational change that can only go in a limited number of directions, i.e. those deemed to produce a change conceived from his point of view as a ‘betterment’ of the organizational system. Different voices, needs, interests become tolerable only if they serve the established criteria of organizational efficiency, organizational learning and so on. Management of conflict then focuses on the strategies and processes to garner the productive aspects of conflict as in the transcendental perspective, while (what are deemed from the management point of view) its unproductive aspects are be eliminated and/or subdued. Burrell and Morgan (1979) pointed out that in conflict functionalist perspectives the notions of ‘interests’ or of how ‘consensus’ is achieved and, one should add, issues of inequality and justice are settled, while important are never fully asked. What is lacking is a deep appreciation of the differences ‘in the world’ and specifically what their ontological status as ‘differences’ actually is. For example, questions of exploitation and unequal value exchange, as Gouldner (1973) indicated, are fundamental but are sidelined since they are deemed ‘ideological’. As such they are not worthy of proper scientific investigation and dismissed as part of a suspect leftleaning critique of modern capitalist societies even if, he continues ‘their compulsive rejection is by no means less ideological’ (Gouldner, 1973: 235). After all, as Pondy (1992: 260) admits, such conflict theories are biased towards ‘social harmony and cooperation’. Checking their bias however would mean to abandon a founding assumption and this might lead to the undoing of the identity and coherence of this body of knowledge. It becomes possible then to account for the resistance, as noticed by Pondy in his 1992 article, to actually engage in the ‘proper’ scientific processes advocated here. Things would be made ‘uncomfortable’ by rocking the boat, and more dangerously its very buoyancy would be compromised. Considering deep questions on significance, origins and implications of differences in the world would challenge the premises of this knowledge predicated, as it is, on objectivism, neutrality and valuefree propositions. This is a managerialist perspective, i.e. management-centred and always already involved in supporting and forwarding managers’ interests. After all, the ‘object’ of OT is the business firm and for most business firms the goal is that of profit making (Simon, 1977: 277). While forty years on, as we see later, this has been enshrined in the collective consciousness as a datum it is hardly value-free stuff. 319

Alessia Contu

Such theories of conflict in a Marxian reading would be ideological and part of a bourgeois knowledge that while espousing neutrality serves the interest of a particular class – that of capital and its agents – the managers. Wright Mills pointed out this type and mode of knowledge is linked with a conservative style of thinking (Wright Mills, 1959: 59) with the aim of reproducing and regulating the order, the status quo. The interactionist theories of conflict are exactly stuck in a desire for ‘proper’ science but methodologically unable and philosophically and politically unwilling to deliver it. In summary, theories of ‘conflict’ in OT have proposed a ‘conflict’ that has been sanitized, transformed into a benign force, which is part and parcel of managerial control over performance, innovation and value. One of the consequences of such theories of conflict, with their scientism, is that when ‘conflict’ is the signifier of opposing differences and radical contradictions such things as structural antagonism, struggle and revolts, cannot effectively be formulated. ‘This’ conflict is effaced; it cannot, as Wright Mills would say, ‘be imagined’. This view and its lack of imagination has meant that theorizations that are directly of ‘conflict’ disappeared from the theoretical terrain in OT and pressed into conflict management specialism. The contention here is, however, that theories that are directly about organizational conflict, as they are presented in management and organization theory, journals and textbooks, tell us only a half-truth about conflict and, specifically, of organizational conflict. I explore this further in the following pages. When one shifts the focus on the ideological dimension of organization and management theories (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005) and how such theoretical constructions tap into a fundamental ideological fantasy, i.e. a scenario that solidifies meanings and practices importantly by organizing desires and passionate attachments (Bloom and Cederström, 2009; Contu, 2014, 2008; Contu and Willmott, 2006; Žižek, 1989; Butler, 2001) one notices that today the fantasmatic scenario of the work organization as ‘happy family’, proper of the interactionist, functional perspectives in OT has been mostly dislocated, among other things, by such things as globalization, restructuring and financialization. In other words, it is the capitalist economy with its contradictions that returns to haunt the fantasy of the ‘happy family’ with is assumptions of the social as cohesive, cooperative and consensus-based. Marx was one of the first to articulate clearly the ‘imbrication’ of the social and the economic and to name and theorize the symptom haunting work relations under capitalism (Žižek, 1989). Conflict for Marx is primary, foundational, and has a clear name, i.e. class struggle. This is based on the antagonistic relations between capital (and its agent, i.e. management) and labour; and processes of accumulation, commodification and exploitation that generate fundamentally unequal and unjust social relations. In other words, Marx questions the ‘system’ and the ‘world’ itself. Radical perspectives in OT have thematized and developed this insight where conflict is fully ‘in the world’, immanent to the re-production (and challenges) of the social order. In this the organized management of the labour process is seen as a key domain for such re-production to occur (e.g. Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1979; Knights and Willmott, 1990, etc.). Labour process theory, as an organizational perspective, has been significant in opening up a broad set of debates to a diverse array of studies and interventions. Radical ideas in philosophy and social sciences, including different interpretations of Marxism, as well as radical feminism, black studies, queer theory, postcolonialism have seeped into OT. They brought in radical notions of power and conflict and epistemologies and ontology that question and face ‘otherness’ in order to deconstruct not only the difference established between labour and capital, but also the power relations subtending binaries such as North/South, East/West, Man/Women, Black/White, Gay/Straight. The specific notion of science seen as central thus far was also called into question stimulating what some, in bafflement, called the maelstrom of critique (Reed, 1992). These organizational perspectives have enriched greatly our understanding of work organization and 320

Conflict

organizing proposing a knowledge that follows, for example, Habermas’ hermeneutic and critical interests and reflexively acknowledges OT’s performativity, critical and otherwise. For all the attention on micro organizational conflicts and emancipatory processes and relations such critical and hermeneutic knowledge(s) has yet to link up successfully, theoretically and empirically, a critical outlook on organized work relations, organizing and managing in general, with broader political and social contestations and transformations. These theorizations/interventions, apart from noticeable and growing exceptions, mostly have stayed confined to academia and in few business schools. The majority of business schools have instead forwarded and perpetuated a specific strand of OT that took to heart the importance of the capitalist economy, making it central to organizing. The neo-liberal theory of the firm is the milk drunk by the young managerial cadre in leading business schools primarily in the US and then, as it happens, in the rest of the world for thirty years or so. This together with myriads of practices, decisions and actions in legislation, regulation, etc. resulted in the current neo-liberal social formation (Crouch, 2011; Harvey, 2007). The fantasmatic scenario supporting this social formation is the promise of progress that increases markets, harnesses risk and produces growth and wealth. These, as the promise goes, will trickle down to whoever plays (read works) hard enough to get it. This scenario always actively excludes the enemies of this promise; individuals who want (or support) ‘free-riders’, such as illegal immigrants, or any other ‘scroungers’ who use social benefits and ‘advantages’ of various kinds, the inefficient state bureaucrats, and so on. This social formation while still dominant is, however, under crisis. The financial and economic crisis of 2008 multiplied dislocations that are becoming more evident by the day and its fantasy is deeply tainted. Rather than deliver wealth benefits to all hard working people, as promised, it has delivered an economic aristocracy (Kelly, 2012). In our new Gilded Age (Piketty, 2014) 99 per cent of the population lives off the crumbles of global wealth concentrated in the hands of the other 1 per cent. Record levels of income inequality globally, staggeringly inhumane working conditions, wage stagnation, ‘precarity’, a continuous stream of corporate scandals and, as evident in the US, corporate/business interests groups capturing the political process proper, cannot easily be integrated in the neo-liberal beatific fantasy with its promise of growth and wealth. Counter movements such as Occupy and lately those that involve anti-austerity politics in various European countries, and the rise of rightwing, violent anti-immigrant, racist xenophobes are attempts to give name to the real antagonism at the heart of neo-liberal capitalism. Not secondary to all of these are also the emerging conflicts brought about by social formations that experiment with different versions of capitalism or those who radically and violently reject secular values; all interconnected, as they are currently, by global finance. These are the deep conflicts facing us today. OT has mostly been complicit in as far as it has let itself be bewitched and cannibalized by neo-liberal economics. Some theoretical elaborations in OT and concurrent practices associated with such things as ‘enlightened stakeholder theory’, ‘shared value’, ‘organizational citizenship’, etc. foster the idea that it is still possible to tweak some aspects of the current social formation and make it better, more just, fairer and so on. But these might be considered attempts by the minority, liberal elite to pacify conflict once more by papering over the cracks and injecting a semblance of morality and legitimacy to the existing hegemonic market governance. The capitalist horizon, as we know it, remains intact. Unsurprising then that organization and management scholars in ‘leading’ Business Schools with their theories, conferences, textbooks, research programmes and journals are not exactly natural forgers of revolutionary ideas that imagine a different way of life. Yet there are countless realities that are radically different in terms of ownership, governance systems and logic of transactions from the dominant ones. These are studied, elaborated and 321

Alessia Contu

discussed by scholars and activists in different strands of radical political economy, geography, political theory and labour studies (feminist, Marxist, ecologist, decolonialist, socialist etc.) and sporadically in OT. Lately some of these ideas and ways of life have been showcased in the fringes of OT, for example in edited collections (Atzeni, 2012; Parker et al., 2014) and a special issue of Organization (Cheney et al., 2014). These organizational realities regard cooperatives, partnerships and various forms of workers’ self-directed enterprises, community organizations, state, municipal and regional enterprises, etc. There is a huge diversity of practices, ideas and people working at the interstices of neo-liberal capitalism. Some academic work is worth mentioning here as it aims to re-politicize the economy socializing it in a radical democratic direction. If disparate in inspirations, tactics and solutions, authors as diverse as, for example, Castoriadis, 2005; Latouche, 2009; Kelly, 2012; GibsonGraham, 1996, 2006; and Wolff, 2012 share some key values and practices. Specifically, all these authors are directly and actively political in questioning the deep logic of capitalism as we know it. The challenge is now to OT. How, while maintaining a permanent critique that never forgets the unevenness and antagonism of the social terrain, are we, organization theorists, to produce phronetic research for theorizations and ideas that support and suggest forms of governance, leadership, communication and ownership, and, with them, foster subjectivities that imagine and actualize better ways of working and organizing? Collective ways of working and organizing that remain true to the immanence of conflict while constantly upholding and testing themselves on the radical democratic values of liberty, equality and justice.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on Contu, A. (2015). Organizational conflict: where we’ve been and where we’re going, retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract= (Accessed August 25, 2015). I thank Maurizio Atzeni for sharing with me some of his amazing work.

References (key texts in bold) Atzeni. M. (2012). Alternative Work Organizations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ayoko, O.B., Ashkanasy, N.M. and Jehn, K.A. (2014). Handbook of Conflict Management Research. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Barley, S. and Kunda, G. (1992). Design and devotion: surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 363–39. Bloom, P. and Cederström, C. (2009). The sky’s the limit: fantasy in the age of market rationality. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22(2): 159–80. Braverman H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Buchanan, D. and Huczynski, A. (2010). Organizational Behaviour (7th edn). London: Financial Times Prentice Hall. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: changes in the labour process under monopoly capital. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Butler, J. (2001). The end of sexual difference. Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, 414-34. Castoriadis, C. (2005). Une société à la dérive. Seuil, Paris, 246-258. Cheney, G., Santa Cruz, I., Peredo, A. M., & Nazareno, E. (2014). Worker cooperatives as an organizational alternative: Challenges, achievements and promise in business governance and ownership. Organization, 21(5), 591-603. Contu, A. (2008). Decaf resistance: on misbehavior, cynicism, and desire in liberal workplaces. Management Communication Quarterly, 21(3): 364–79. Contu, A. (2014). On boundaries and difference: communities of practice and power relations in creative work. Management Learning, 45(3): 289–316. Contu, A. (2015). Organizational conflict: where we’ve been and where we’re going, retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract= (Accessed August 25, 2015). 322

Conflict

Contu, A. and Willmott, H. (2006). Studying practice: situating talking about machine. Organization Studies, 27(12): 1769–82. Coser, L. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict. New York: The Free Press. Crouch, C. (2011). The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. London: Polity Press. De Dreu, C.K. and Van de Vliert, E. (1997). Using Conflict in Organizations. London: Sage. Deutsch, M. (1969). Conflicts: productive and destructive. Journal of Social Issues, 25(1): 7–42. Follett, M. P. (1925). Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers. (HC Metcalf & LF Urwick 1940 ed.) New York: Routledge. Fox, A. (1974). Beyond Contract: work, power and trust relations. London: Faber. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1973). For sociology: Renewal and critique in sociology today (pp. 27-68). London: Allen Lane. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatch, M.J. (2012). Organization Theory: modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, M. (2012). Owning Our Future: the emerging ownership revolution. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Knights, D., & Willmott, H. (1989). Power and subjectivity at work: From degradation to subjugation in social relations. Sociology, 23(4), 535-558. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1990). The Labour Process Debate. Kolb, D. and Putnam, L.L. (1992). The multiple faces of conflict in organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(3): 311–24. Kunda, G. and Ailon-Souday, G. (2005). Managers, markets and ideologies: design and devotion revisited, in Ackroyd, S., Batt, R., Thompson, P. and Tolbert, P. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–19. Latouche, S. (2009). Farwell to Growth. Cambridge: Polity Press. Litterer, J. A. (1966). Conflict in organization: A re-examination. Academy of Management Journal, 9(3), 178-186. Mannix, E. (2003). Editor’s Comments: conflict and conflict resolution – a return to theorizing. Academy of Management Review, 28(4): 543–46. March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley. Mills, C. W. (1959). 2000. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrill, C. (2000). Using conflict in organizations – Book Review. Administrative Science Quarterly, September: 638–40. Morrill, C. and Rudes, D. (2010). Conflict resolution in organizations. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 6: 627–51. Parker, M. Cheney, C., Fournier, V. and Land, C. (2014). The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. Routledge: London. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pondy, L.R. (1967). Organizational conflict: concepts and models. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(2): 296–320. Pondy, L.R. (1992). Reflections on organizational conflict. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(3): 257–61. Rahim, M.A. (2010). Managing Conflict in Organizations (4th edn). New York: Praeger. Robbins. S.P. (1978). Conflict management and conflict resolution are not synonymous terms. California Management Review, 21 (2): 67–75. Robbins, S.P. and Judge, T.A. (2010). Organizational Behavior (14th edn). London: Prentice Hall. Roche, W., Teague, P. and Colvin, A. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Conflict Management in Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon, H. A. (1977). The structure of ill-structured problems. In Models of Discovery (pp. 304-325). Houten, The Netherlands: Springer Media. Wolff, R. (2012). Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

323

26 Control Philosophical reflections on the organizational limits to autonomy Graham Sewell

Control in organizations: a philosophical overview Who controls? Who is controlled? Why is control enacted? Although these would appear to be the most obvious questions to ask when considering organizational control, when it comes to thinking about the matter philosophically all of them incorporate the same underlying first order assumption: the presence of control (however, it is defined) means that human beings end up doing things they might not otherwise have done in its absence. This brings into consideration the central philosophical problem of human agency where the tension between the role played by free will in any deliberations undertaken prior to acting are set against the legitimate imposition of constraints on those subsequent actions deriving from some notion of our obligations toward others. From an organizational perspective this is related to the sociological problem of the role of human agency in maintaining social order or promoting social change. We can bring together these notions of free will, human agency, and social dynamics under a shared philosophical rubric by discussing the nature of autonomy as it is commonly understood in an everyday sense: i.e. the capacity to conduct ourselves according to purposes and motives that we devise through the exercise of our own faculties of reason and in the absence of coercive external forces. In this way orthodox discussions of control in organizations usually go hand-in-hand with an implicit consideration of autonomy as follows: control is seen as external coercive force that constrains the ability of an organization’s members to exercise autonomy.

Control as a constraint on autonomy: free will from the Christian apologists to Nietzsche and the death of God This simple definition of control as a constraint on autonomy and, thus, on the exercise of free will has been at the heart of moral and political philosophy at least since the days of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) and is still pervasive in many sophisticated psychological and sociological treatments of agency that, through their reliance on the principle of methodological 324

Control

individualism, inform orthodox organizational studies (Coleman, 1986; Fiske and Taylor, 2008). Augustine was operating during the post-Constantinian consolidation of the Roman Church where important matters of doctrine and governance were thought to have been settled by the Council of Nicea (325 CE). Here the Church was still dealing with popular and enduring heresies relating to matters of theodicy and eschatology that drew on the teaching of Arias (250–336 CE) and Mani (216–276 CE – Augustine was himself a Manichean until converting in 386 CE). Put simply, if you believe that men can only be redeemed by the intercession of God’s grace alone following the Fall then what role does free will play in human affairs? Put another way, if God is infallible and exists outside our conception of time then he must have known at the moment of creation who is to be saved and who is to be damned at any time in the past, present, and future. So, if nothing we do in our lifetimes can change our ultimate destiny then why exercise any kind of self-restraint at all here on earth? This question would later prove to be crucial to the theological debates surrounding the Reformation and subsequent notions of modernity (Giddens, 2005) but Augustine was primarily concerned with reconciling the early Church’s apocalyptic teachings on personal salvation with Greek (especially Platonic and Aristotelian) notions of the role of reason as part of our personal responsibility for leading a good life. An enduring feature of Augustine’s formulation that, along with the intuitively reasonable expectation that we have the right to personal autonomy in earthly matters, comes some kind of moral obligation to exercise that autonomy responsibly. This expectation is evident in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his extended reflections on the nature of ‘Moral autonomy’ – that is, the ability to regulate one’s own behaviour on the basis of objective reason – as a fundamental organizing principle at the heart of morally defensible social interactions (Hill, 1989). Thus, autonomy is not some untrammelled freedom to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects others: for Kant it is a matter, not only of our ability to arrive independently at authentic purposes and motives that then move us to act, but also whether those purposes and motives measure up to some kind universally recognizable standard. This is, of course, the famous ‘a priori categorical imperative’ and Max Weber (1864–1920) later moderated Kant’s advice that we ought to ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’ by adding that the universal law in question may not be immutable and universal at all but will reflect the prevailing circumstances at a particular historical moment in space and time (Sewell and Barker, 2005). This becomes important from the perspective of organizational control because it underpins Weber’s notion of legitimate legal authority in a modern ideal type rational bureaucracy in that, if you are a bureaucratic office holder, you can justify issuing instructions to subordinates on the ground that you are following mutually binding rational principles that were deliberately arrived at through the application of impartial reason, rather than say through imposition of tradition or the personal will of a charismatic figure (Weber, 1958; Bendix, 1977). A key assumption here is that the rationalization of more and more aspects of modern life can unite (or, at least, create the possibility of uniting) all parties around a common set of principles of right conduct that have been established through the application of reason. While this sounds like a veiled appeal to a Whiggish notion of liberal progress – if only we would let reason prevail then we could all get along without the need for coercion – it should be noted that some Marxists (most notably, Lenin) also believed that, once the fault line of capitalism had been removed under Communism, bureaucracy would come into its own as a perfectly disinterested and efficient mode of administration that could serve the interests of ‘a class for itself’ (Gouldner, 1955). Still, regardless of whether bureaucracy is justified under conditions of liberalism or socialism, when considered in this way it nevertheless leads to a pathologization of deviance in that a refusal to 325

Graham Sewell

follow the prevailing principles of right conduct is cast as an affront to a common morality that can therefore be legitimately subject to correction. This position is summed up in Cohen’s (1983: 1) definition of social control as a matter of the way in which ‘society responds to behavior and people it regards as deviant, problematic, worrying, threatening, troublesome or undesirable in some way’. Thus, control is couched as a negative heuristic, that is, how we prevent people from failing to live up to our prevailing standards of right conduct. In an organizational context, Elton Mayo (1880–1949) prominently subscribed to this view through his belief that employee disobedience and recalcitrance was not an authentic expression of autonomy in the pursuit of true interests but the manifestation of ‘reveries’ that would disappear if only the poor unfortunates could be brought to see the error of their ways (Mayo, 1933). In such a situation managers are not only perfectly entitled to coerce subordinates to comply with the organization’s edicts and expectations for the good of everyone; they are actually morally obliged to do so for the sake of the recalcitrant employee’s personal well-being. Mayo’s view thus still runs through much of the human resource management literature that emphasizes the pursuit of unitary interests, with the corollary that any kind dissent or disobedience is, by definition, an irrational act. The development of such a position implicitly involves a particularly tendentious interpretation of Weber’s concept of legitimate authority that found its most prominent exponent in Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). He argued that social control was not a conscious act of domination but that individual practices of control emerged as rational solutions to particular problems that, if left to fester, would eventually undermine the collective desire for social stability. Thus, Without deliberate planning on anyone’s part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and rewardpunishment sanctions. (Parsons, 1951: 319–20) A corrective to Parsons’ functionalist view on control is to consider the influence that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) exerted on Weber. Following Nietzsche, Weber considered all social relationships in a bureaucratic organization to be relationships of power and domination, regardless of whether all parties agreed on the ends to which that organization’s activities were directed (Sewell and Barker, 2005). Schecter (2000) goes as far to say that Weber could not have conceived of the notion of legal/rational authority without recognizing, courtesy of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, that any talk of disinterested neutral administration associated with bureaucracy was primarily a discourse that legitimated domination. Nietzsche’s influence on Weber is also evident in the latter’s cultural pessimism: for Weber, yielding to the march of ever increasing rationalization in the name of efficiency and impartiality inevitably involved a subordination of the will to some degree (even if he didn’t go as far as Nietzsche in describing this as evidence of the triumph of a ‘slave mentality’). Finally, Weber followed Nietzsche in recognizing that pursuing a vocation or submitting to some notion of duty also involved a voluntary subordination of the will on the part of a bureaucratic office holder. These three points of similarity between Weber and Nietzsche are important because, among other things, they lead us to appreciate that control is not necessarily an external force that works through the application of technical instruments of physical coercion but can be an internalized normative force that informs our conduct. This strong, if widely underestimated, influence exerted by Nietzsche on Weber is an appropriate point to introduce the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984). There are two main reasons for this move. The first of these is that Foucault – also reflecting the influence of 326

Control

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals – wrote at length on what has become known in the context of organizational studies as normative or socio-ideological control (Willmott, 1993; Alvesson and Kärreman 2000): i.e. a notion of self-restraint of the kind where an organization’s members reflect on their conscience in order to police their own conduct without the need for external direct intervention from others. Although we must acknowledge that such a conception of selfrestraint figures prominently in traditional philosophical discussions of autonomy, one of Foucault’s main contributions has been to get us to focus on the historical origins of discourses of morally justifiable conduct toward which a subject’s intentional ethical actions may be directed in this way (Mahon, 1992). Foucault called this deontological process the ‘mode of subjection’ where each of us establishes our own relation to the moral code inherent in a discourse by recognizing our obligation to act according to its edicts so that our conduct is seen by others to be praiseworthy. Importantly, our notion of the rational self-knowing agent cannot stand outside of this mode of subjection. Take as a practical example the everyday notion of employee disobedience in an organization. Here the purpose and consequences of the operation of managerial control can be understood through a discourse of protecting the interests of the many from the activities of a selfish, disruptive, and even dangerous few – a situation where disobedience comes to be seen by all as irrational (perhaps even the delinquents themselves). Managerial control thereby remains a prophylactic necessity only until disobedience is eradicated and the organization is entirely populated by rational self-policing subjects (Sewell and Barker, 2006). In contrast, the operation of managerial control can simultaneously be understood through a discourse of protecting the interests of the few against the many – a situation where disobedience comes to be seen as a rational response that reflects the conscious pursuit of opposing interests and where control will always be aimed at coercing the majority to do the bidding of a minority (Sewell and Barker, 2006). In the former situation control is an achievement of capillary power that is diffused throughout the social body in the form of quotidian practices that act on everyone while, in the later situation, control is associated with a more orthodox notion of power as a clash between opposing forces (Clegg, 1989; see also Clegg, Chapter 48 this volume). An important philosophical corollary of Foucault’s focus on the history of practices that are aimed at dealing with deviance is that it means we do not beg the question of what a knowing human subject is. Rather, it leads us to recognize that, as a necessary condition of the modern project, we had to learn to see ourselves as autonomous rational actors in the classical liberal mould before we were able to start acting like one (Hacking, 2007; Willmott, 2011). In this way what seems to be our intuitive and everyday understanding of autonomy is a very recent development in terms of human history. This mention of power and its relation to the exercise of autonomy through deviance is a useful segue into the second reason for reflecting on the work of Michel Foucault here for it allows us to develop a positive heuristic in terms of the operation of organizational control. This point becomes clearest if we reflect on Foucault’s (1982) essay, The Subject and Power, where he observes that it is the very existence of a widespread belief that human subjects have some kind of freedom to exercise autonomy – i.e. there are conditions of possibility where they could do otherwise in almost any setting – that enables us to conceive of power in a meaningful social sense. In short, according to Foucault power relations can obtain only between subjects because those subjects themselves possess some understanding of their volitional and rational capacities to indulge in conduct that challenges the prevailing mode of subjection. That is why the abject domination of complete physical control (say, under extreme conditions of imprisonment or forced labour) does not involve the exercise of power in Foucault’s terms. In a modern organizational setting, however, we can think of how we might control willful conduct that can still be deemed to be praiseworthy even though it actually deviates from the prevailing 327

Graham Sewell

norms of behaviour – for example, when a particularly innovative employee finds a way of doing things that improves upon the standards of performance imposed on them by their superiors (Sewell, 1998). From this point of view control might initially be enacted through overt practices of performance measurement and training that direct such deviant conduct toward the goal of improved organizational performance. Such a positive view of the operation of control – that it is not just repressive and conservative but can also be productive and dynamic – is consonant with Foucault’s wider notion of ‘governmentality’ in modern societies in that familiar things such as performance measurement not only produce knowledge about individual employees but also support a broader discourse of what it means to be a ‘good’ employee as an autonomous rational actor who should be striving for the benefit of organization. In this way, we can posit an inverse relationship between overt and coercive forms of control that attempt to minimize negative deviance while maximizing positive deviance and the emergence of normative forms of control that come to operate on an employee’s conscience; while the former may decline the latter may gather momentum.

A feminist critique of autonomy and its relevance to control More broadly, interest has been gathering for some time around historical and contextual treatments of control and its relationship to the nominally autonomous subject (of which, Foucault represents but one approach). These are united in their attempts to answer an obvious question: Why does anyone consent to being controlled in the first place and even go as far as internalizing norms of behaviour that appear to shore up oppressive social relations? For example, a version of this question was a central theme in the work of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). It also featured prominently in the writings of members of the Frankfurt School and, later, critics associated with the New Left who tried to account for the apparently puzzling fact that members of the working class frequently consented to their own subordination and exploitation. A broad and diverse critique of ideology and culture has developed from these beginnings but here I wish to examine one important approach to the notion of autonomy that can broaden the scope of our discussion of organizational control. What has become known by the umbrella term of ‘relational autonomy’ includes a range of perspectives sharing the conviction that, persons are socially embedded and that agents’ identities are formed within the context of social relationship and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity. Thus the focus of relational approaches is to analyze the implications of the intersubjective and social dimensions of selfhood and identity for conceptions of individual autonomy and moral and political agency. (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000: 4) This is interesting for us because it opens up the possibility of a distinctly feminist critique (as well as critiques based on race or ethnicity, of course) of the circumstances in which it is deemed right and proper to stop other persons from living their lives in accordance with their own conception of the good. The importance of this approach for this chapter also becomes evident when we consider that organizations, as a prominent feature of modernity, are often the sites where such decisions are made, whether it is for the purposes of controlling an organization’s own members or for the purposes of controlling what might be called the organization’s ‘clients’. In other words, it also opens up the discussion to a consideration of the control of organizations (i.e. what takes place inside its own nominal boundaries) and control by organization (i.e. when its control activities extend beyond its nominal boundaries). Mackenzie (2008) demonstrates 328

Control

this by examining the case of health care organizations which, to put it crudely, treat women, ethnic minorities and the aged very differently to the way in which they treat white, middleclass, middle-aged males, whether they are employees or patients. At a basic empirical level then, this sector has become a major employer wedded to systems of performance measurement (at least in developed industrial societies) so our previous discussion of the control of deviance inside an organization still has a good deal of resonance but Mackenzie extends this by focusing on how health care organizations – especially those concerned with mental health – are often charged with making decisions about a patient’s capacity to exercise moral agency. If a patient is deemed to be incapable of doing so this has legal and practical implications in that their autonomy can legitimately be constrained. This presupposes, however, that a healthy person’s normative authority over their own moral agency is a reflection of their singular, settled and integrated identity as a self-determining subject whose conduct is a faithful analogue of their authentic desires and values. The problem with this is that the notion of relational authority recognizes a person’s identity may not only be fragmented but may also be ‘shaped by false norms and beliefs and distorted values arising from unjust social practices or political institutions; and it may incorporate destructive affective attitudes toward herself, such as lack of self-respect or mistrust of her own judgments’ (Mackenzie, 2008: 513). The problem then is that, even though we may appear to be acting in accordance with our settled identity, this is not necessarily a guarantee that we are doing so autonomously. Building on this premise, relational approaches then go on to investigate the relationship between formal notions of autonomy and everyday feelings of self-respect, self-worth and self-trust by focusing on the specific ways in which socialization and oppressive social relationships impinge on our actions (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000). This involves three levels of analysis, the first of which deals with the role that institutionalized social relationships play in shaping our beliefs, desires and attitudes as agents. This creates the potential to forge a link between critiques of organizational control and the burgeoning literature on organizational institutionalism through an appreciation of the way in which taken-for-granted managerial practices such as measurement, classification and training differentially affect us depending on our gender, age, ethnic background, etc. An obvious example of this would be the way in which practices such as ‘forced distributions’ or ‘rank-and-yank’ evaluations systematically favour some groups and disadvantage others. A second and related level of analysis concerns an appreciation of how a person’s social situation limits their ability to act upon their desires and objectives (leaving aside, for the moment, whether such desires and objectives are authentic). Importantly for the discussion at hand, this encourages us to consider the way in which both coercive and normative forms of control differentially affect groups in and around organizations. This is because our ability to act is not only impeded by overt restrictions on our freedom but also by social norms, institutions, practices, and relationships that effectively limit the range of viable options available to us (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000). The third level of analysis is to focus on how we differentially develop the competencies and capacities that are deemed to be necessary for us to act as autonomous social agents at any moment in history (Meyers, 1989). This is why even today people in organizations who may see themselves as being scrupulously fair and objective can still seek to coerce others simply because they do not share the same idea of what it means to be an effective contributor (Young, 1986).

The future of organizational control: what happens if there’s no such thing as free will? I started this chapter by linking our understanding of organizational control to philosophically pertinent matters such as the nature of free will and our intuitive sense that we are autonomous 329

Graham Sewell

agents acting out our authentic desires and needs. But what if free will is nothing but an illusion and that our sense of autonomy is a long-running and cruel hoax? Descartes’ (1596–1650) response to this troubling prospect was that we should put our faith in a benign God who would never do such a mischievous thing but, to us, such a suggestion seems absurd in these secular times. Talk of such things then may seem nothing but a metaphysical parlour game except that, with the explosion of interest in neuroscience, it has become philosophically respectable to state that humans have little or even no capacity whatsoever to exercise free will. Note, this is not some subtly nuanced argument that our social and historical circumstances mean that free will means different things to different people at different times. Rather, it is blanket statement that free will is an impossibility based on our physiology as evolved animals. There have been numerous reports claiming to confirm this statement based on experimental evidence using things such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electromyography (see, for example, Soon et al., 2008). These try to show that the kinds of nervous system activities associated with motor functions consistently precede the kind of neural activity associated with cognition. In other words, we do before we think. And, if true, then our own thinking about acting is no more than perpetuating the cruel hoax of free will. Thus, such findings would render as nonsense the merest suggestion that we exercise any meaningful self-determined agency, even in the simplest social situations. Before considering the plausibility of these claims let us for a moment accept that they could be valid and reflect on the implications they have for the study of organizational control. The most obvious point to make is that it brings us full circle to the earliest debates about free will that started this chapter, namely that we live an existence that is not of our own making and whose details are determined in advance by something other than our own conscious reflection. In Augustine’s terms, this was a matter of divine providence, but today determinism – i.e. that if we consider antecedent events together with the laws of nature we ought to be able to predict every possible future outcome, so long as we have sufficient data – is alive and well and stalking the corridors of neuroscience departments the world over. As such, the humanities, the social sciences and even philosophy itself would become subservient to the natural sciences and may eventually be superseded altogether. In such a situation, questions about the purposes of control and its consequences for individuals and organizations lose their significance, even if they do not become completely inconsequential. For example, whether disobedience is in an agent’s conscious and rational interests or whether it is a manifestation of some irrational compulsion becomes moot; control is simply a technical solution to atheoretical and extramoral problems of order, efficiency, social cohesion, etc. To be sure, for centuries prominent philosophers (for example, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and, more recently, P.F. Strawson, his son Galen Strawson, and Daniel Dennett) have addressed the troubling proposition that free will is an illusion. Their consistent response has been to come up with various versions of ‘compatiblism’ by using philosophically complex arguments well beyond the scope of this chapter to show that some notions of free will, however impoverished, still obtain in any consideration of morally responsible agency because even natural laws of causation can accommodate more than one configuration of events. In this respect the question becomes one of how much determinism we have to account for rather than whether it is present or not. Importantly, if even the merest sliver of free will is present then our previous reflections on the nature of control hold to some extent. Still, it should come as a great relief to anyone with a professional interest in the social sciences that the experimental claims of the illusory nature of free will made by some neuroscientists and their acolytes appear to be built on very flimsy scientific (not to mention philosophical) ground indeed (Mele, 2014). So, we can argue the toss for some time to come over what exactly free will consists in and what it means for autonomy, human agency and, ultimately, organizational control. 330

Control

Further reading For a basic introduction to the problem of free will and the nature of autonomy in Western thought see Bourke (1964). For a more recent (and philosophically controversial) treatment of problem of free will see Dennett (1984). This can be read in conjunction with Mele (2014) who offers a more optimistic commentary on free will and autonomy. For a brief but highly informative discussion of orthodox philosophical notions about autonomy and their relation to social control see Dworkin (1976). For an excellent review of recent debates on organizational control as feature of capitalist political economy that implicitly considers much of the material covered in this chapter see Thompson (2010).

References Alvesson, M. and Karreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: on the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53: 1125–49. Bendix, R. (1977). Max Weber: an intellectual portrait. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourke, V. (1964). Will in Western Thought. New York: Sheed & Ward. Clegg, S.R. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Cohen, S. (1983). Folk Devils and Moral Panics (3rd edn). London: Routledge. Coleman, J.S. (1986). Social theory, social research, and a theory of action. American Journal of Sociology, 91: 1309–35. Dennett, D.C. (1984). Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dworkin, G. (1976). Autonomy and behavior control. The Hastings Center Report, 6: 23–8. Fiske, S.T. and Taylor, S.E. (2008). Social cognition: from brains to culture. New York: McGraw-Hill. Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8: 777–95. Giddens, A. (2005). Introduction by Anthony Giddens, in Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, pp. vii–xxiv. Gouldner, A.W. (1955). Metaphysical pathos and the theory of bureaucracy. American Political Science Review, 49: 496–507. Hacking, I. (2007). Kinds of people: moving targets. Proceedings of the British Academy, 151: 285–318. Hill, T. (1989). The Kantian conception of autonomy, in Christman, J. (ed.), The Inner Citadel: essays on individual autonomy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91–105. Mackenzie, C. (2008). Relational autonomy, normative authority and perfectionism. Journal of Social Philosophy, 39: 512–33. Mackenzie, C. and Stoljar, N. (2000). Introduction: autonomy refigured, in Mackenzie, C. and Stoljar, N. (eds), Relational Autonomy: feminist perspectives on automony, agency, and the social self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–34. Mahon, M. (1992). Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: truth, power, and the subject. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mayo, E. (1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Boston, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Mele, A. (2014). Free: why science hasn’t disproved free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyers, D.T. (1989). Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Schecter, D. (2000). Sovereign States or Political Communities: civil society and contemporary politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sewell, G. (1998). The discipline of teams: the control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 43: 397–428. Sewell, G. and Barker, J.R. (2005). Max Weber and the irony of bureaucracy, in Korczynski, M., Hodson, R. and Edward, P. (eds), Social Theory at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–87. Sewell, G. and Barker, J.R. (2006). Coercion versus care: using irony to make sense of organizational surveillance. Academy of Management Review, 31: 934–61. Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H-J. and Haynes, J-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11: 543–45. Thompson, P. (2010). The capitalist labour process: concepts and connections, Capital & Class, 34: 7–14. 331

Graham Sewell

Weber, M. (1958). From Max Weber: essays in sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willmott, H. (1993). Strength is ignorance, slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 30: 515–52. Willmott, H. (2011). Institutional work for what? Problems and prospects of institutional theory. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20: 67–72. Young, R. (1986). Autonomy: beyond negative and positive liberty. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

332

27 Corporation Reification of the corporate form Jeroen Veldman

Introduction The corporation is commonly perceived as a self-evident way of understanding what a business is and how it operates. And yet, almost all of the specific properties that make up the modern corporation would have been unthinkable less than two centuries ago. Until the start of the nineteenth century, the partnership form remained dominant for private ventures and the law of partnerships ruled the ventures that did receive a corporate charter (Ireland, 2010; Mclean, 2004). Most of the ideas that define the modern corporation, including incorporation and perpetuity for private ventures; limited liability; the separate legal entity; attributions of ownership; attributions of (citizenship) rights and (contractual) agency to a separate legal ‘entity’; the capacity for a corporate entity to ‘own’ another corporate entity; and the capacity for groups of such entities to operate over jurisdictional borders are concepts that have been developed mostly during the nineteenth century. Arguably, the development and application of these ideas has turned the corporate form into a very successful and highly dominant type of business representation, which during the twentieth century replaced the partnership form as the most prevalent legal form for private ventures in the US (Guinnane et al., 2007). However, the fact that the overall success of the corporation may well rely on a set of very specific concepts is often forgotten. In a remarkable article Berger and Pullberg argued that reification can make us take a social construct for granted (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 206). The problem with reification, they argued, is that we bestow an ‘ontological status on social roles and institutions’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 206), but that we then perceive of such a social role or institution unconnected from ‘the human activity by which it has been produced’(Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 199). If this happens, we end up with institutions that ‘are reified by mystifying their true character as human objectivations and by defining them, again, as supra-human facticities analogous to the facticities of nature’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 207). Such reification, they argue, leads to ‘a narrow empiricism oblivious of its own theoretical foundations or to build highly abstract theoretical systems emptied of empirical content’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 211) and ‘minimizes the range of reflection and choice, automatizes conduct in the socially prescribed channels and fixates the taken-for-granted perception of the world’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 208). 333

Jeroen Veldman

Following Berger and Pullberg, I will problematize the corporate form as a reified social construct. To do this, I will ask two types of questions with regard to the corporate form. The first is a question about its ontological status (see also Al-Amoudi and O’Mahoney, Chapter 1, this volume): what is the corporation? The second is a question about its epistemological status (see also Duberley and Johnson, Chapter 4 this volume; Scherer et al., Chapter 2 this volume): how can we establish criteria ‘by which we can know what does and does not constitute warranted, or scientific, knowledge’ (Duberley and Johnson, Chapter 4 this volume) in relation to the corporate form? To answer these questions I will first show that currently dominant accounts of the corporation and of corporate governance (the theory of how corporation should be governed) assumes that corporations share the same ontological status as all other types of organizations, i.e. that all organizations essentially exist as aggregations of individuals. I will then show how the corporate form provides a construct that in theory and in practice operates on very different ontological assumptions. Finally, this will lead me to a critical analysis of the reified nature of the corporate form and to a number of suggestions about how we can start to demystify this social construct.

The corporate form as an aggregation of individuals “[. . .] corporations have a life, and even citizenship, of their own, with attendant rights and powers. Corporations are ‘persons’ within the meaning of the United States Federal Constitution and Bill of Rights” (Monks and Minow, 2009: 14). As Monks and Minow show, equating a corporation to a (legal) person connects to the history of the corporate form, in which the corporation was increasingly projected as a personified social construct (see next section). Such personified approaches to the status of the corporation have been countered in legal and economic scholarship by those who argue that in essence, the corporation is no more than a collection of individuals. Lord Hoffman argued in the Meridian case that there is no such thing as a company ‘of which one can meaningfully say that it can or cannot do something. There is in fact no such thing as a company as such’ (Meridian Global Funds Management Asia Ltd v. Securities Commission [1995] 2 AC 500 at 507). From this perspective, it can be said that ‘Corporations, whatever they are, are not individuals and do not act as unitary individuals’ (Wells, 2005: 147) and we can arrive at the conclusion that ‘despite its long history of entity, a corporation is at bottom but an association of individuals united for a common purpose and permitted by law to use a common name’ (Berle, 1954: 352). Such approaches that focus on the individuals that constitute the corporation to understand its ontological status as a social and legal construct fit well with wider pragmatic, political (Bowman, 1996) and epistemological (Elster, 2007) arguments that would urge us to ‘bracket’ any imputation of agency, ownership, and rights to social constructs, whether organizations, corporations, or states. From the 1950s onwards the Chicago schools of law and economics turned this view into a strong ontological argument. Rather than ‘bracketing’ the ontological status of the corporate form for the sake of convenience, they reduced the status of the corporation to an aggregation of individuals: ‘It finds the firm’s separate characteristics to be insignificant and attaches determinant significance to the relationship’s aggregate parts’ (Bratton, 1989: 423). As a result, it could be argued that ‘Individuals are ontologically prior to corporations, which, as fictions, have significance only because of the freely contracted arrangements of their human constituents’ (Scruton and Finnis, 1989: 254). With such strong ontological assumptions in place all types of social constructs – whether corporations, organizations, or states, were in essence merely aggregations of ‘individuals’ (Jensen and Meckling, 1976: 310–11), while the ontological status of the corporation as a specific kind of social or legal representation was reduced to that of a 334

Corporation

mere ‘legal fiction’ (Friedman, 1970). Any imputation of consciousness (Lederman in Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993: 488), intent (Cressey in Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993: 490; Jensen and Meckling, 1976: 310–11), agency (Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993: 475), responsibility (Friedman, 1970: 1), or liability to a social construct such as the corporation was, therefore, squarely redirected toward the individuals making up that social construct. Since the 1970s, the ontological and epistemological assumptions of this seductively simple theory have become dominant in company law, economics and in corporate governance and have had a strong influence on court decisions and regulatory changes (Becker, 1974; Bratton, 1989; Daily et al., 2003; Foucault, 2008[1979]; Ghoshal, 2005: 81; Perrow, 1986: 15).

Singular and multiple The ontological approach developed in the Chicago School of law and economics seemed to connect well to a methodological approach based on methodological individualism (Schrader 1993: 159). However, the reduction of all organizational forms to an aggregation of individuals went well beyond the ‘bracketing’ of the corporate form as a social construct (see also Hodgson, 2007). In practice, this approach denied the conceptual possibility for an ontological status for the corporate form as a construct in the legal, economic, and political imaginaries (Veldman and Willmott, 2013). The denial of the possibility for an explanation of this separate status is problematic when we take a closer look at the historical development of this construct. Until the end of the eighteenth century, corporations, even when used for private purposes, were conceptualized in a way similar to other business ventures: corporate charters were conditional, and limited liability was a feature that was only sparingly attributed (Djelic, 2013; McLean, 2004; Handlin and Handlin, 1945) and they were ruled by the partnership law (Ireland, 2010; Perrow, 2002). In this setting, the legal representation produced by incorporation did not convey a strong conception of an ‘entity’, separate from the aggregation of individuals. Without a strong ontological status for the corporate form in the legal imaginary, attributions of agency, ownership or rights and, by extension, attributions of responsibility and liability, were mostly attributed directly to the individuals within the corporation (see Post, 1934). This perception started to shift during the nineteenth century when the pooling of capital by increasing numbers of shareholders created a growing separation between shareholders and ‘the company’ (Veldman and Willmott, 2013). To accommodate the increasing distance of shareholder from ownership functions, shareholders were separated from the assets, operations, and risks of the corporation by shifting these onto the separate legal entity. This conceptual shift allowed for the protection of the rights of minority shareholders; the general grant of limited liability; and the development of liquid shareholding and thus the trading of shares in a share market. However, this move also meant that the separate legal entity increasingly came to represent ‘the corporation’ as a conceptual construct that could be attributed with ownership over the assets and liabilities of the corporation in the legal and economic domain. The exact status of this ‘entity’ was never really settled in legal scholarship (Avi-Yonah and Sivan, 2007; Dewey, 1926; Hallis, 1978; Harris, 2006). By the end of the nineteenth century, Freund related to the idea of a ‘corporate personality’ as a convenient shortcut – ‘in most cases in which we speak of an act or an attribute as corporate, it is not corporate in the psychologically collective sense, but merely representative, and imputed to the corporation for reasons of policy and convenience’ (Freund, 1897: 39). Others however, argued that the separate legal entity creates ‘a body, which by no fiction of law, but by the very nature of things, differs from the individuals of whom it is constituted’ (Dicey, 1894–95 in Maitland, 2003: 63). Fully separate from the aggregation of individuals, this ‘body’ 335

Jeroen Veldman

could be inserted into the slot of the legal ‘subject’: ‘As legal subjects they are distinct and in kind different from the visible aggregate of their individual members. These individuals do not constitute the substance of that entity to which the law ascribes personality when it recognizes a corporation aggregate as a legal subject’ (Hallis, 1978: xliii). The status of the corporate form as a legal construct thus slipped to that of singularized ‘entity’, existing as a separate ‘body’, apart from the aggregation of individuals. Inserted as a construct into the slot of the legal ‘subject’, it could then be understood as a ‘body corporate’, ‘legal person’, ‘legal personality’ or ‘legal subject’ (Freund, 1897; Horwitz, 1985; Nace, 2003). Subsequently, the use of all kinds of anthropomorphic imagery (Nace, 2003) resulted in a rapid increase in the attribution of agency, ownership, and rights (Bowman, 1996; Harris, 2006; Ireland, 1999; McLean, 2004) to this construct that was increasingly depicted as singular legal ‘subject’ in and by itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, this process had progressed to the extent that the corporate form allowed for one ‘entity’ holding ownership over another ‘entity’, which enabled the holding company and operations across jurisdictional borders (Veldman, 2013). As a result of such singularization and objectification, it became possible to imagine that the corporate form would also be attributable with contracting agency, and would contract as a ‘legal subject’, not just outside the corporation or on behalf of the corporation, but also with the individuals inside the corporation (Maitland, 2003). To shift the corporate form as a legal construct from the status of a technical and passive construct that would ‘hold’ ownership in lieu of the shareholders, to a legal construct that could be attributed with agency, ownership and rights as an ‘entity’ that would exist in the form of a singular ‘legal subject’ apart from the aggregation of individuals, legal scholars had to introduce multiple inconsistent assumptions about the status of the corporate form. To justify the wide variety of attributions made to this construct, both in its perceived capacity as an ‘entity’ and in its perceived capacity as an aggregation of individuals, multiple assumptions about the ontological status of this construct had to be kept in play at the same time (Veldman, 2010). By the 1920s, it was generally accepted in US and British legal scholarship that in order to maintain all properties and functions attributed to the corporate form, it was necessary to understand the corporate form as both an aggregate construct (an ‘aggregation of individuals’, a ‘nexus of contracts’) and as a singular construct (an ‘entity’, ‘subject’, ‘person’, or ‘agent’) (Dewey, 1926; Harris, 2006). This inherent multiplicity of ontological assumptions and referents would have wide consequences.

Corporations and organizations Generally speaking, we can argue that the corporate form rests on multiple, mutually exclusive, philosophical conceptions in the domains of law and economics and that, for this reason, it functions as a social construct with an extremely weak theoretical foundation (Berle and Means, 2007[1932]; Freund, 1897; Gamble et al., 2000; Ireland, 2003; Laufer, 2006; Wells, 2005). Some have argued that this is not a real issue, because we can develop pragmatic ways of dealing with the corporate form (see Dan-Cohen, 1986; French, 1984). Others have argued that it is imperative that this weak theoretical status is treated with pragmatism, because of the perceived economic benefits the corporate form provides (Hessen, 1979; Osborne, 2007). There are three main reasons to question such calls for pragmatism. First, it is important to recognize that at the most basic level, the contemporary corporate form is structurally built on two competing ontological assumptions. The simultaneous use of these ontological assumptions means that the corporate form acquires two referents for theorizing in the legal and economic domains: it can be understood as a reduced aggregation of individuals, 336

Corporation

and it can be understood as a fully reified ‘entity’.2 The effect of this double referent is that the corporate form can relate to a wide set of possible ontological positions. The corporate form can, for instance, be understood as a legal ‘subject’, attributable with citizenship rights and liability for manslaughter; as an ideal-typical economic ‘agent’ contracting with employees and operating in a broader market; as an object of property that can be bought and sold at will; or as a ‘nexus of contracts’. As such, the corporate form presents a highly problematic social construct, which escapes a clear and defined relation to ontological reasoning. With no possibility to exclude one or the other position, it becomes very hard to establish the epistemological basis that establishes the ‘criteria by which we can know what does and does not constitute warranted, or scientific, knowledge’ (Duberley and Johnson, Chapter 4 this volume) in relation to the corporate form. Second, the weak theoretical foundation of the corporate form and the resulting multiplicity of referents are quite relevant beyond academic theorizing. In both the legal and the economic imaginaries (Veldman and Willmott, 2013) the corporate form constitutes a reified singular construct with attributions of agency, ownership, and rights. At the same time, we find that the dominant perception of the corporate form in contemporary law and economics and in corporate governance theory strongly denies the ontological status of this construct. This is highly problematic, because it denies and makes invisible many of the functions and outcomes of the reified status of the corporate form in law and in economics. I will give two examples, relating to liability and to the attribution of contractual agency. The first example focuses on the attribution of liability to the corporation in the legal sphere. Given the reified status of the corporate form in company law, not just the employees or ‘the company’, but the corporate form itself can be used for direct attributions of civil and criminal agency and liability (Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993; Laufer, 2006) for any valid legal or economic actions (Guinnane et al., 2007). At the same time, the dominant ontological understanding of the corporate form in contemporary corporate governance requires that all attributions of agency, responsibility, and liability are explicitly redirected toward individual members of the corporation (Clarkson, 1996; Jensen and Meckling, 1976: 310; Wells, 2005). The combination of mutually exclusive ontological assumptions thus produces the corporate form as a very slippery construct, with the abilities of a schizophrenic (Allen, 1992) Cheshire Cat3 (Naffine, 2003), which is ‘notoriously nimble’ (Dewey, 1926: 669) and confers a theoretical ‘elasticity’ that gives ‘considerable room in which to manoeuvre’ (Dewey 1926: 667–8) and to produce a ‘corporate vanishing trick’ (Ireland, 1999: 56) in relation to the attribution of responsibility and liability (Bratton, 1989; Fisse and Braithwaite, 1993; Law Reform Commission (Ireland), 2002; Lederman, 2000; Wells, 2005). The second example concerns the attribution of contractual agency in the economic domain. Notwithstanding the emphatic rejection of an ontological status for the corporate form in contemporary law and economics, the corporate form contracts with individuals and groups inside and outside the corporation as a separate legal entity. By presenting a separate legal entity that can be attributed with its own contractual agency as an economic ‘agent’ in the economic domain, the corporate form negates the strong ontological program by which it was qualified as a ‘purely conceptual artifact’ (Jensen and Meckling, 1994: 24), a simple technical necessity or a ‘legal fiction’ (Friedman, 1970) and is reconstructed in the economic domain as a fullblown ‘entity’ with contracting agency. In this conceptual model it becomes acceptable to argue that ‘the corporation’ can be afforded with contractual agency in the economic domain, but the same multiplicity of ontological assumptions that applies to the corporate form in the legal imaginary obscures the answer to the question what is the exact status of this construct that is attributed with contractual agency in the economic domain. 337

Jeroen Veldman

Apart from problems with the identification of the exact point of attribution for contractual and wider agency attributed to the corporate form in the legal and economic imaginary (see Gindis, 2009: 39–40), the unclear status of the corporate form affects the category of the ‘subject’ and the ‘agent’ more generally (see also Veldman, forthcoming). Remember that in law and economics, a strong ontological program restricted all attributions of agency to social constructs with a singular status, such as ‘individuals’, ‘persons’, and ‘agents’ (see Friedman, 1970; Jensen and Meckling, 1994). With a theory of organizations in which the individual agent is ‘the elementary unit of analysis’ (Jensen, 1983: 15), the contractual agency attributed to the corporate form by necessity is also attributed to such an ‘individual’ or ‘agent’. Projecting the corporate form as an ‘individual’ in the economic domain for purposes of attributing contractual agency, therefore, provides a concrete ontology, in which the corporate form engages as a singular economic ‘individual’ or ‘agent’ in contractual relations, both within the corporation and in the wider marketplace (Maitland, 2003). In so far as this construct is attributed with contractual ‘agency’ it doesn’t contract as an ordinary ‘individual’, but typically answers to ideal-type behavioural attributions coming from neoclassical economics, e.g. the corporate form projects the idea of an ideal-type ‘individual’ ‘agent’ in the possession of full knowledge and an indefinite time horizon (Bratton, 1989). The denial of a clear ontological status for the corporate form thus means that, as a construct, it is projected into the slot of the singular economic ‘agent’ as an ‘agent’ with ideal-type ontological properties, while retaining both its singular and aggregate referents and the attributions of agency, ownership, and rights that have been granted on the basis of the use of this duplicitous status (Veldman and Parker, 2012). This is a problematic situation, because it creates a highly elusive construct in the legal and economic domains; because it restructures the notion of contract in such a way that ideal-type ontology and ideal-type agency come to govern that relation in the economic and in the legal imaginary (Aglietta and Rebérioux, 2005; Bratton, 1989; Ghoshal, 2005; Schrader, 1993; Sen, 1977; Williamson and Winter, 1991); and because it makes the ontological and behavioural assumptions pertaining to such an ideal-type economic ‘agent’ the default for the ontological status of other constructs in the category of the legal ‘subject’ and the economic ‘agent’ (Veldman, forthcoming).

Conclusions: the political economy of reification In this chapter, I have showed how an engagement with philosophy can be instructive for interrogating the ontological and epistemological status of the corporate form and showed some outcomes in the domains of law and economics. To provide the means for further critical inquiry, I will connect this status and these outcomes to the critique of reification provided by Berger and Pullberg in this section. Berger and Pullberg argue that by reifying a social construct we run the risk of developing conceptual systems in which we end up with ‘a narrow empiricism oblivious of its own theoretical foundations or to build highly abstract theoretical systems emptied of empirical content’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 211). We saw how a specific ‘ontological status’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 206) has been devised for the corporate form as a social institution in law and in economics, which allowed to endow this social construct with a large set of specific properties, including ownership, agency and rights. We also saw how the contemporary idea of the corporate form in law and economics essentially negated the specificity of the corporate form and its status. As a result, we have an ontological status of the corporate form that refers to multiple referents and a set of hegemonic assumptions in law and economics that negates the specificity of the corporate form as a social construct. 338

Corporation

As shown, the structurally inconsistent basis this creates for theorizing about the corporate form is highly problematic, both in terms of the development of a coherent understanding of the corporate form in the domains of law and economics, and in terms of coming to grips with its outcomes. What’s more, the strong ontological program in law and economics as well as the unclear ontological and epistemological status of the corporate form spill over into adjacent academic domains, such as accounting, management and politics, most particularly by informing the way other social constructs, such as individuals, organizations, and states are imagined, both by themselves, and in relation to each other (Bowman, 1996; Naffine, 2003; Lederman, 2000; Schrader, 1993; Veldman, 2013; Wilks, 2013). The epistemological outcome of the reified status of the corporate form is, therefore, that it ‘minimizes the range of reflection and choice, automatizes conduct in the socially prescribed channels and fixates the taken-for-granted perception of the world’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 208). To address these problems, I argue that we need to become aware again that the corporate form is a social construct that is produced by human beings (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 200, 204). From this perspective, it becomes clear that the strong ontological assumptions underlying the treatment of the corporate form in contemporary law and economics and in corporate governance theory obscure the fact that the corporate form presents a social construct, which is based on multiple referents. To understand the status of this corporate form, we need to return to an approach, in which we do not simply deny and obscure the de facto status of the corporate form, but rather ‘bracket’ our assumptions with regard to the corporate form as a social construct. By bracketing our assumptions, we find that the corporate form presents a de facto singularized social construct in law and economics, and that historical attributions of agency, ownership, and rights to this social construct have established it firmly as a construct with a de facto ontological status. Acknowledging the reality of this de facto social construct is important, because the de facto existence of this construct, as well as its weak theoretical underpinnings, has broad effects in relation to other (social) constructs, such as individuals, organizations and states. In this sense, this chapter on the corporate form presents an example of ‘ontological theorizing’, which ‘has the power to emancipate organization studies from conventional restrictions relative to the research questions; the scope of analysis; the methods of study; the objects of study posited and the doubts raised’ (see Chapter 1, this volume). Beyond ontological theorizing, bracketing our assumptions and finding the problematic status of the corporate form provides the basis for a critical perspective. It has become clear in this chapter that a long history of conceptual slippages in law and economics created the corporate form as a highly specific social construct. I showed how inserting the corporate form as an idealtype construct in contractual relations has turned the corporate form into a central organizing concept for the construction of an economic ‘grid’ in which all kinds of constructs, including individuals, organizations and states, are re-conceptualized as nominally equivalent ‘entities’ with nominally equivalent ‘agency’ (Veldman, forthcoming; see also the ‘individualistic approaches’ in Chapter 1, this volume). In this sense, the corporate form has been central to the construction of an overarching economic ‘grid’ that legitimates a fetishized kind of knowledge of ourselves and our social and economic relations with other social constructs (see Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 199). More to the point, this ‘grid’ allows for a broad reinterpretation of the relative ontological status of individuals, corporations, organizations, and states, which has empowered corporations vis-à-vis individuals and states (Veldman, forthcoming). Also, within this grid, the ontological status of the corporate remains uncontested and continues to provide ample possibilities to enhance attributions of agency, ownership and rights, while at the same time obscuring possibilities for the attribution of responsibility and liability in the legal, economic and political domains (Veldman and Parker, 2012). 339

Jeroen Veldman

This analysis informs a critical perspective, in which we focus on ‘the inherent connection between power, politics, values and knowledge and thereby provokes a deeper consideration of the politics and values which underpin and legitimise the authority of scientific knowledge’ (Alvesson et al., 2009). Taking into account that knowledge always serves certain purposes and groups (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), we may reimagine the construction of the corporate form as a set of discursive operations (see Chapters 1, 2 and 5, this volume), primarily in the domains of law and economics, that create ‘artificial social constructs that are formulated in the context of social relations of power’ (Al-Amoudi and O’Mahoney, Chapter 1 this volume). From this perspective, it becomes clear that further reification of the corporate form will make sure that it will remain unconnected from ‘the human activity by which it has been produced’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 199) and will, therefore, remain being taken for granted (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 206) as a construct that is ‘analogous to the facticities of nature’ (Berger and Pullberg, 1965: 207). From this perspective, it also becomes clear that it is this reified status of the corporate form as a social construct that allows it to continue to function as a highly evasive kind of social construct at the heart of the global legal, economic and political system, which shields individuals with managerial positions and (controlling) shareholders; allows for the further concentration of economic (Perrow, 2002), legal (Buxbaum, 1984: 518–19; Robé, 1997: 59) and political power (Barley, 2007: 201; Wilks, 2013); and to a large extent supports (Aglietta and Rebérioux, 2005) the current worldwide division of wealth (Piketty, 2014) on behalf of small subsets of individuals (Ireland, 2010). Combining the reified status of the corporate form with its convenience for the perpetuation of a particular kind of political economy, it can be argued that the highly problematic ontological and epistemological status of the corporate form may very well not be the result of simple theoretical and methodological aberration, and will probably not be solved by better theory formation. Instead, what is needed is a more critical approach, in which the ongoing reification of the corporate form is related to its effects for global political economy.

Notes 1 2

3

See also www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2h8ujX6T0A. Please note that in the dominant contemporary perspective on corporate governance, such a dualistic notion of supra-individual ontology is explicitly denied for other types of supra-individual representation, such as the state (see Veldman, 2013). The Cheshire Cat is a figure from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It can appear and disappear at will. In the story, the cat disappears at some point, leaving nothing but its grin. Alice then remarks she has seen a cat without a grin before, but never a grin without a cat.

References (key texts in bold) Aglietta, M. and Rebérioux, A. (2005). Corporate Governance Adrift: a critique of shareholder value. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Allen, W.T. (1992). Our schizophrenic conception of the business corporation. Cardozo Law Review, 14(2): 261–81. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (1992). Critical theory and management studies: an introduction, in Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (eds), Critical Management Studies. London: Sage, pp. 1–20. Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (2009). Introduction, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–28. Avi-Yonah, R.S. and Sivan, D. (2007). Corporate form and real entity, in Biondi, Y. and Canziani, T. (eds), The Firm as an Entity: implications for economics, accounting and the law. London: Routledge, pp. 153–85. 340

Corporation

Barley, S.R. (2007). Corporations, democracy, and the public good. Journal of Management Inquiry, 16(3): 201–15. Becker, G.S. (1974). Crime and punishment: an economic approach in Becker, G. and Lander, W.M. (eds), Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, pp. 1–54. Berger, P. and Pullberg, S. (1965). Reification and the sociological critique of consciousness. History and Theory, 4(2): 196–211. Berle, A.A. (1954). The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution. Harcourt, Brace, New York. Berle, A.A. and Means, G.C. (2007[1932]). The Modern Corporation and Private Property (revised edn). New Brunswick, NJ; London: Transaction Publishers. Bowman, S.R. (1996). The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: law, power, and ideology. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Bratton Jr, W.W. (1989). Nexus of contracts corporation: a critical appraisal. Cornell Law Review, 74: 407–65. Buxbaum, R.M. (1984). Corporate legitimacy, economic theory, and legal doctrine. Ohio State Law Journal, 45: 515–43. Clarkson, C.M.V. (1996). Kicking corporate bodies and damning their souls. The Modern Law Review, 59(4): 557–72. Daily, C.M., Dalton, D.R. and Cannella, A.A. (2003). Corporate governance: decades of dialogue and data. Academy of Management Review, 28(3): 371–82. Dan-Cohen, M. (1986). Rights, Persons, and Organizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dewey, J. (1926). The historic background of corporate legal personality. Yale Law Journal, 35(6): 655–73. Djelic, M. (2013). When limited liability was (still) an issue: mobilization and politics of signification in 19th-century England. Organization Studies, 34(5–6): 595–621. Elster, J. (2007). Explaining Social Behavior: more nuts and bolts for the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisse, B. and Braithwaite, J. (1993). Corporations, Crime, and Accountability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (2008[1979]). The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the College De France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador. French, P.A. (1984). Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York; Guildford: Columbia University Press. Freund, E. (1897). The Legal Nature of Corporations. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Friedman, M. (1970). The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. New York Times Magazine, 13(1970): 32–3. Gamble, A., Kelly, G. and Parkinson, J. (2000). Introduction: the political economy of the company in Parkinson, J.E., Gamble, A. and Kelly, G. (eds), The Political Economy of the Company. Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 1–20. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(1): 75–91. Gindis, D. (2009). From fictions and aggregates to real entities in the theory of the firm, Journal of Institutional Economics 5(01): 25–46. Guinnane, T., Harris, R., Lamoreaux, N.R. and Rosenthal, J.L. (2007). Putting the corporation in its place. Enterprise and Society, 8(3): 687–729. Hallis, F. (1978). Corporate Personality: a study in jurisprudence. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. Handlin, O. and Handlin, M.F. (1945). Origins of the American business corporation. The Journal of Economic History, 5(1): 1–23. Harris, R. (2006). The transplantation of the legal discourse on corporate personality theories: from German codification to British political pluralism and American big business. Washington and Lee Law Review, 63: 1421–78. Hessen, R. (1979): In defense of the Corporation. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Hodgson, G.M. (2007). Meanings of methodological individualism. Journal of Economic Methodology, 14(2); 211–26. Horwitz, M.J. (1985). Santa Clara revisited: the development of corporate theory. West Virginia Law Review, 88: 173–224. Ireland, P. (2003). Property and contract in contemporary corporate theory. Legal Studies, 23(3): 453–509. Ireland, P. (1999). Company law and the myth of shareholder ownership. Modern Law Review, 62(1): 32–57. 341

Jeroen Veldman

Ireland, P. (2010). Limited liability, shareholder rights and the problem of corporate irresponsibility. Cambridge Journal of Economics,34(5): 837–56. Jensen, M.C. (1983). Organization theory and methodology. The Accounting Review, 58(2): 319–39. Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1976). Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4): 305–60. Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1994). The nature of man. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 7(2): 4–19. Laufer, W.S. (2006). Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds: the failure of corporate criminal liability. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Law Reform Commission (Ireland) (2002). Consultation paper on corporate killing, Law Reform Commission, Dublin. Lederman, E. (2000). Models for imposing corporate criminal liability: from adaptation and imitation toward aggregation and the search for self-identity. Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 4(1): 641–708. McLean, J. (2004). Transnational corporation in history: lessons for today. Indiana Law Journal, 79(2): 363–77. Maitland, F.W. (2003). State, Trust and Corporation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monks, R. A. G. and Minow, N. (2009) Corporate Governance. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Nace, T. (2003). Gangs of America. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Naffine, N. (2003). Who are law’s persons? From Cheshire Cats to responsible subjects. The Modern Law Review, 66(3): 346–67. Osborne, E. (2007). The Rise of the Anti-corporate Movement: corporations and the people who hate them. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Perrow, C. (1986). Economic theories of organization. Theory and Society, 15(1): 11–45. Perrow, C. (2002). Organizing America: wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Post, G. (1934). Parisian masters as a corporation, 1200–1246. Speculum, 9(4): 421–45. Robé, J.P. (1997). Multinational enterprises: the constitution of a pluralistic legal order, in Teubner, G. (ed.), Global Law Without a State. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing, pp. 45–78. Schrader, D.E. (1993). The Corporation as Anomaly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, R. and Finnis, J. (1989). Corporate persons. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 63: 239–74. Sen, A.K. (1977). Rational fools: a critique of the behavioral foundations of economic theory. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 6(4): 317–44. Veldman, J. (2010). The Corporate Condition. Leicester: University of Leicester. Veldman, J. (2013). Politics of the corporation. British Journal of Management, 24(1): 18–30. Veldman, J. (forthcoming). Embodiment, in Walgenbach, P. and Weik, E. (eds), Institutions Inc. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Veldman, J. and Parker, M. (2012). Specters, Inc.: the elusive basis of the corporation. Business and Society Review, 117(4): 413–41. Veldman, J. and Willmott, H. (2013). What is the corporation and why does it matter?, M@n@gement, 16(5): 605–20. Wells, C. (2005). Corporations and Criminal Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilks, S. (2013). The Political Power of the Business Corporation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Williamson, O.E. and Winter, S.G. (1991). The Nature of the Firm: origins, evolution, and development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

342

28 Debt for all Towards a critical examination of organizational roles in debt practices and financialization Suhaib Riaz

Introduction Debt is considered an essential feature of contemporary economies. In economies characterized by declines in wages and savings, consumer debt is relied upon to fuel aggregate demand (Mahmud, 2012; Rajan, 2010). Over the years, debt has achieved such a taken-for-granted status that it is rarely subject to critique (Graeber, 2011). The onset of the global financial crisis renewed attention towards financial industry practices associated with the crisis (Riaz, 2009; Riaz et al., 2011) and a stream of research on debt practices is emerging (Mian and Sufi, 2014). The prominent role of debt is closely connected to increasing financialization (Van der Zwan, 2014) i.e. the ‘increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions’ in the economy (Epstein, 2005). This includes the trend of economic activity moving from production and other service sectors to finance, leading to the rise of financial capitalism (Foster, 2007) and the increasing influence of financial organizations over economic policy (Palley, 2007; Stiglitz, 2012). Specifically, financialization is tied to debt because it increases the embeddedness of all social and economic relations in interest-paying financial transactions (Mahmud, 2012). Thus, debt thrives in current times on the material and discursive backbone of the overall financialization of the economy and society (Davis, 2009). The ideas of ‘debt for all’ and ‘debt-ownership for all’ as I discuss later in this chapter are closely tied to the idea of the financial citizen as envisaged in a financialized economy. Scholarship on debt (and financialization) has typically been restricted to macro analyses at the level of the overall economy. Further, studies within dominant paradigms of finance or economics typically do not problematize the issues surrounding debt from a critical perspective. In this chapter, I call for overcoming these limitations by taking on a critical examination of debt and foregrounding the role of powerful financial organizations. Debt practices, as they appear in and influence society and economy, are richly shaped and determined in organizational sites and a critical perspective is needed to uncover issues of organizational power around the contract of debt. Relevant questions that could arise in such examinations include: how do organizational forms, characteristics and power influence the practices surrounding debt? How do financial 343

Suhaib Riaz

organizations interact with the institutional environment – including the regulatory environment – to shape debt practices? How do various debt products and services designed and enforced by organizations impact society? This chapter attempts to lay the groundwork for engaging organizational scholars to undertake such examinations. In the following section, I briefly discuss key angles that may serve as starting points of such critical examinations. I then draw on this background to comment on the moral philosophy implications of debt practices. Next, I discuss the expansion of debt-ownership and the associated ideas of financial democracy. I close with a few words on the paradoxes of mainstream ideological and political positions on debt.

Debt for all: winners, losers and the dead In this section, I discuss three interrelated themes: The role of debt as ‘stressor’, ‘differentiator’ and ‘death’.

Health and well-being: debt as stressor Several scholars have demonstrated a link between debt and health. In a study of OECD countries, Clayton and colleagues find that higher household debt is associated with poorer general health, and that long-term household debt lowers life expectancy and increases premature mortality (Clayton et al., 2014). Earlier studies have found that the psychological health of those with debt is generally worse than those with low or no debt (e.g. Bridges and Disney, 2010; Brown et al., 2005). The type of debt may also be an important factor in determining health outcomes. Some of the most vulnerable parts of society typically resort to the use of payday loans, which are associated with the highest levels of stress of any type of debt; other non-collaterized loans such as credit card debt and student loans, which may also be more prevalent among non-elite borrowers, are next in line in their impact on stress (Dunn and Mirzaie, 2014). Recent studies also suggest that the negative impact of debt does not apply to affluent borrowers and is most strongly felt by middle class borrowers (low-income classes are excluded due to other constraints on their borrowing) (Hodson et al., 2014). In general, the differential health and well-being outcomes due to debt across socioeconomic status and across debt types (which may, in turn be related to the lack of resources) are an initial indicator that there may be overall differences in how debt transactions are experienced by various constituents. I now turn to a broader discussion of this aspect.

Non-elite borrowers, elite borrowers and financial organizations: debt as differentiator A crucial angle to understand the impact of debt on overall society is by asking the question: Who gains from debt and who loses? Several pieces of evidence suggest that the playing field is skewed in favour of elite borrowers and large financial organizations. At the outset, the debt profiles of those with higher economic status are strikingly different compared with those below them. The top 1 per cent by wealth (in the US context) have lower debt than others. They also see a constant ratio of debt to primary residence asset over time (1 to 2 per cent across 2001 to 2010) (see Keister and Lee, 2014). The ratio is higher for the next 9 per cent (about 5 to 7 per cent) and highest for the last 90 per cent (from 19 to a high of 27 per cent, a noticeable increase over time). Further, the debt to income ratio of the top one per cent remains between 32 and 61 per cent across 2001 to 2010. In comparison, this ratio increases from 65 to 107 per cent over time for the next 9 per cent, and balloons from 95 to 145 per cent for those in the last 90 per cent (Keister and Lee, 2014). 344

Debt

These numbers suggest that those of middle or lower socio-economic status, i.e. non-elite borrowers, have debt profiles that are likely more difficult to manage and suffer more than others through debt (Coco, 2014; Fligstein and Goldstein, 2012; Rajan, 2010). This raises questions about the mainstream rhetoric that brushes aside differences due to socio-economic status and regards debt-access via financialization of everyday life as equally liberating and uplifting for all (Van der Zwan, 2014). These differential experiences of debt extend to individual borrowers versus businesses. Historically, those engaged in business activities (‘traders’) were forgiven for debt-bankruptcies whereas non-business borrowers forced into debt-bankruptcies faced incarceration (Roberts, 2014). Such differential standards have reappeared in modern garb. Following a similar logic that underlay earlier regulations – wherein the traders were seen as suffering losses due to no fault of their own – the modern financial organizations with all the experts and resources at their disposal are absolved of blame and are even forgiven their (near-) bankruptcies through state bailouts. In contrast, the individual non-elite borrower with limited resources – now portrayed as financial citizen – is held solely responsible for his or her decisions in the face of powerful socio-economic pressures (such as the rise and fall of the housing market, lower wages, increase in unemployment, increase in education costs, etc.). System-level problems in debt practices are pushed to the background while the individual borrower becomes undeserving of forgiveness or bailout. While non-elite borrowers lack the resources of elite borrowers and are denied the bailout privileges of elite financial organizations, they are constrained further through the power of financial organizations as lenders and collectors. The increasingly documented role of powerful financial organizations in shaping the regulatory environment around financial practices is pertinent in this regard (e.g. Johnson and Kwak, 2011; Levitin, 2014: Levitin, 2008). For example, the enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) in 2005 by amending the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 opened the doors not to ‘consumer protection’, but rather the protection of large creditor organizations from the upcoming losses during the financial crisis and beyond. As Coco (2014: 9) points out, BAPCPA effectively ‘forces the debtor to pay creditors a portion of the debtor’s income and live on a “bread and water” diet for five years’ by eliminating several protections under the erstwhile law. Similarly, in an environment where non-elite youth have little recourse at social mobility except through education via student loans, such loans are ineligible for bankruptcy relief in order to protect bank profits; thus some youth may be indentured for life and may be unable to ever retire (Fasenfest, 2014). Further, the increased indebtedness of non-elite borrowers coupled with the new standards of enforcement has led to an expanded role for debt-buying organizations, which have emerged as an important supplement to the role of creditor organizations. A key reason for this is the securitization of debt, which creates a distance between the borrower and creditor that renders the possibility of any case-by-case resettlement based on the immediate conditions of the borrower practically too complex to execute. Securitization allows for a ‘commodification of unpaid debt’ (Roberts, 2014: 2) that creates opportunities for buying, selling and collecting unpaid debt. Drawing on their financial resources and expertise, these organizations are able to exploit the power differences between themselves and non-elite borrowers to enforce debt collection. There are increasing concerns about this business, leading to a large number of lawsuits (Roberts, 2014).1 The encounters between these power-wielding organizations and households have a particularly stressful impact on vulnerable borrowers, which may include minorities and women (Dunn and Mirzaie, 2014). 345

Suhaib Riaz

Beyond the immediate profitability of these activities for financial organizations, they are evocative of earlier times when enforcement of the debt contract through coercive means served to discipline borrowers. In addition to these overt practices, it has been argued that in the neoliberal era the disciplinary impact also takes place through the ‘self-discipline of debtors’ (Mahmud, 2012: 482). A potential borrower has to subscribe to certain standards of normalcy when seeking a loan and then continues conformist conduct in most aspects of economic life (Soederberg, 2013). As LeBaron argues, ‘debt creates individual and collective pressure to sell labor, regardless of the pay or conditions involved’ (LeBaron, 2014: 10) and has therefore ‘become a widespread form of labor discipline and control’ (LeBaron, 2014: 13). The disciplined borrower – through both external coercive and self-disciplinary pressures – is thus crafted as the perfect subject in the financialized economy. In this winnowing out of winners and losers, the state has also played an important role. As demonstrated by the BAPCPA example above, there has been a steady deregulation of the financial industry accompanied with laws crafted in favour of powerful financial organizations (Levitin, 2014). It may thus be argued that in the financialized economy, the state has been transformed rather than driven back (Mahmud, 2012) and now functions to strengthen the power of large financial organizations vis-à-vis non-elite borrowers (Roberts, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012). Seen in this light, state-backed organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided the conduit for global investors to take on US mortgage-backed securities, thus connecting US consumer debt with global financialization (Mahmud, 2012; Davis, 2009). Due to this subordination of the state (Riaz and Buchanan, 2014), contrary to the earlier Keynesian mandate of making finance capital subservient to production, financialization has increased the dominance of powerful financial organizations over non-finance firms, the state and society at large (Van der Zwan, 2014; Mukunda, 2014; Mahmud, 2012). This rise in power of financial organizations versus the increasing constraints on non-elite borrowers contributes to the power imbalance around debt practices. In sum, the current state of affairs suggests clear winners and losers in the business of debt. Winners are likely to be elite individual borrowers, lending organizations and other financial organizations in the businesses spawned by debt. The losers are non-elite borrowers who face various constraints as evidenced by their debt profile, have overall lower power compared with financial organizations in the contract and in terms of regulations surrounding debt, are bound by personal responsibility in the face of systemic problems and larger socio-economic forces, and suffer the constraints and disciplinary effects of debt on their overall economic life.

The poorest borrowers: debt as death The discussion in the above section is incomplete without a mention of loans to the poorest borrowers, i.e. microfinance (microcredit). In the world of microfinance, the unequal power status of the lending organizations and the poverty-stricken borrower is glaringly obvious. This should raise concerns about who will appropriate value from the transactions put into contract on this unequal basis, and whether loans with interest are the most appropriate way to empower those already on the margins of the socio-economic system in terms of education, skills and other resources? Even though some early successes of microfinance arguably relied more on skills training and other forms of support (e.g. Yunus, 1998) rather than the cold calculations of how many loans could be made and recovered, a bias for debt-access backed by the overall logic of financialization crowded out other possible options (including contracts designed around profit-sharing). 346

Debt

Lending organizations unable to find any resources to serve as collateral even considered it prudent to exploit the last fallback resource of such borrowers – social relations with others in the community. Accordingly, pressure from the community was deemed an effective way of enforcing debt recovery. What would be the outcome for a borrower whose poverty-based needs and social relations have been sufficiently financialized through debt transactions? Under the rhetoric of empowering and entering that person into the economy, a system for their eventual exit from life itself may effectively be set up. In the case of impoverished farmers in India, the power inequality between the large lenders and the poverty-stricken farmers was indeed so high that it literally drove some borrowers to death (Bateman and Chang, 2012; Nair, 2011; Sriram, 2010). Debt, in a very real sense became death by creating a conduit for the further exploitation of an impoverished person and a flow of value from the weak to the strong to its theoretical extreme – the loss of all life and its associated value. This extreme example serves as an evocative reminder that contrary to the rhetoric of debt-access and financialization, not everyone wins in an encounter with debt practices.

Upending moral philosophy: debt as a contract of inequality I suggest that foregrounding the role of powerful financial organizations versus non-elite borrowers as in the discussion above helps reveal the picture of debt as a contract of inequality. I argue that the contract of debt does not derive from commonly accepted moral philosophy principles, but is rather a negation of them. As an illustration of the conflicts with moral philosophy, I discuss the application of ideas in Rawlsian philosophy.2 Though conflicts are most readily apparent with this approach, there are likely several other moral philosophy angles from which the problems with debt practices may be probed. In brief, Rawls’ first principle emphasizes equality in basic rights and liberties. His second principle addresses issues of equality of opportunity and also the unequal distribution of rewards (see for example, Rawls, 2001). Included in this second principle are specific conditions under which inequalities in a society may be morally defensible from the perspective of social justice. In particular, Rawls argues that any social and economic inequalities are tenable only when they are of the most benefit to the least-advantaged in a society (the ‘difference principle’). I argue that extending this inspiration of justice from Rawlsian philosophy and applying it to the realm of contemporary debt practices reveals problematic features of debt that are rarely mentioned in current views. As highlighted by the points in the previous section, the unequal resources between the non-elite borrower and the lender make this contract possible in the first place, and later contribute to enforcement that is decidedly in favour of the large financial organizations. Such a contract between two parties of unequal power is designed and enforced to result not in a voluntary exchange of value (LeBaron, 2014), let alone for the larger benefit to the weaker party, but rather for the ultimate benefit of the powerful actor – in this case, the financial organizations. Debt in the hands of large and powerful actors could therefore be easily subject to abuse. As discussed in detail earlier, those who are most disadvantaged in society tend to suffer the most in terms of the impact of debt on borrower health and well-being (e.g. Dunn and Mirzaie, 2014). Further, those who are able to take advantage of debt as borrowers are the ones already advantaged in socio-economic terms, and are therefore likely to emerge as winners based on their debt profile, pre-existing resources and capabilities (e.g. Fligstein and Goldstein, 2012; Keister and Lee, 2014). In contrast, those who are least advantaged are likely to suffer the most through the design and enforcement of exploitative debt practices in the realm of payday loans, home mortgages (subprime loans), microfinance, etc. (e.g. Bateman and Chang, 2012) and also through practices surrounding debt such as debt-collection (e.g. Roberts, 2014). In sum, a fuller 347

Suhaib Riaz

picture of the impact of debt on society suggests that it may be advantageous for some members who already have resources to use it to their advantage and for large financial organizations who are party to designing and enforcing such contracts, but is disadvantageous for those who have less resources and are vulnerable members of society. Seen in this way, contemporary practices of debt have an overall impact on society that is largely in conflict with Rawlsian moral philosophy, specifically with the ‘difference principle’ which would hold that a practice is justified only if it accords the highest gains to the least advantaged. Stated in more direct and evocative terms, debt turns the legitimate and moral question of whether those who have owe to those who don’t on its head and places those who don’t have in a material and symbolic ‘I owe you’ contract to those who do. The morally untenable nature of this unequal contract is cloaked in the rhetoric of access and opportunity supported by the broader financialization of the society and economy (Davis, 2009). As LeBaron (2014: 13) argues, ‘extending the neoclassical conception of debt as a voluntary and harmonious exchange, the role of debt in deepening systemic relations of domination, exploitation, and discipline within the labor market is rarely foregrounded’. There are few mechanisms to check these power differences and reverse the equation of who gains the most from such contracts. Whereas in an earlier time, this contract may have been enforced through fear induced by local elites, now it is enforced by regulations in favour of financial organizations that tie it back into a world system of debt where these inequalities are traded and exchanged – indeed a market for debt exists through the process of securitization, bringing together all who wish to partake in these contracts of inequality. While indefensible in the realm of moral philosophy, there are other attempts to reduce the visibility of the power inequalities in this contract by making the ownership of debt open to all. This expansion of debt-ownership and the mirage of ‘financial democracy’ through financialization is what I turn to next.

Debt-ownership for all: the illusio of financialization In current times, the old adage may be rephrased such: ‘both a borrower and lender be’. The idea of financial democracy as envisaged in financialization has extended beyond creating debtaccess for all as borrowers to creating access for all as lenders. The practices of securitization have played a major role in making this a reality. Securitization helps transform almost any future earnings, be it music royalties or house mortgages, into a contract that can then be cascaded through multiple investors and financial organizations creating a highly complex and interlinked web of debt (Davis, 2009). In this manner, pensioners in a remote European village or savers in China could be connected to US mortgages and other debt. The surge in the securitization business thus enables the expansion of debt-ownership across the economy, which may imply that powerful organizations are not the only actors that stand to gain from being lenders. However, there is a need to dig deeper. First, there may be several problems with the securitization process itself and the role of powerful financial organizations in it. For example, recent accounts reveal that financial organizations actively took a role in ‘explaining’ the desired ratings for securities to ratings agencies. Thousands of securities were rated AAA (highest possible rating) at a time when only a handful of companies in the world were rated at that level (Taibbi, 2013). Rating of debt is a key step in making it palatable to a wider set of investors – and yet the rating itself may be skewed in favour of powerful financial organizations. As the financial crisis unfolded, such ratings were revealed to be highly unreliable (Carruthers, 2013). The expansion of securities ownership in such instances could turn into a means for appropriating the savings of the common investor by powerful financial actors. 348

Debt

Second, there is a need for empirical studies on the actual dispersion of debt ownership. Those who lend may often be different from those who borrow. For example, recent research finds the dispersion in ownership of US Treasury debt is highly skewed. Hager (2013) shows that over the last three decades the ownership of federal bonds has become concentrated in the top 1 per cent of US households and the largest 2,500 corporations. Such concentration serves to increase the power of those already entrenched in higher socio-economic positions. Finally, there is a larger and longer-term impact of this expansion of debt-ownership. The financial citizen who assumes the role of a lender, even if through an indirect channel such as securities, may be predisposed to view the constraints of borrowers with less concern. This citizen now has a stake in how the financial markets perform because his or her pension funds, savings etc. are the source of debt for other citizens who are borrowers. This situation may be akin to the neo-liberal project of creating a certain type of financial citizen through encouraging home ownership – one who has a stake in the financialized economy as a responsible participant (Davis, 2009). Rather than seeing the access to debt-ownership as an equalizing opportunity, I argue that this notion of ‘financial democracy’ (Erturk et al., 2007) serves as an ‘illusio’ (Bourdieu, 1990; 2000; also see Golsorkhi et al., 2009). In an increasingly financialized economy, individual members acting as financial citizens through debt-ownership come to believe in the specific stakes of this ‘game’ and try to pursue the accumulation of capital – such as the capabilities for savvy financial decision-making – that is specific to the game. These shared beliefs and struggles, which are regarded as highly meaningful by those who are brought into the fold of this game, constitute the illusio (Bourdieu, 2000). However, the stakes and regulations in the illusio favour those who are already entrenched in advantageous positions and possess higher amounts of capital that is needed for success (Golsorkhi et al., 2009). Accordingly, the common investor taking on debt-ownership is in a position of disadvantage as compared with the elite investors backed by superior resources. Such debt-ownership transactions are often conducted through advisory resources and systems of financial organizations to which elite investors may have better access, along with their own better capabilities to make use of them (Fligstein and Goldstein, 2012).3 The participation of non-elite actors by investing themselves in the illusio and respecting its rules serves to reinforce the illusio (Bourdieu, 1990). The inclusion of new members in debtownership creates financial citizens of a certain mould who, rather than recognizing the negative possibilities of financialization, now seek to embrace them. As Mahmud argues, ‘risk, which was deemed harmful and needed careful calculation and management by actuarial experts, is now represented as an opportunity to be negotiated, cultivated, and exploited by the entrepreneurial financial subject’ (Mahmud, 2012: 483) and accordingly participants in the illusio become ‘compliant subjects disciplined to conform to the logic of the financialized market’ (Mahmud, 2012: 470). Participation of the new non-elite actors therefore co-opts resistance to the financialization project: the more ‘inclusive’ the game of financialization becomes, the weaker the opposition and the less likely any chance of fundamental change. The project of financial democracy via financialization as it is currently executed can thus actually serve to strengthen the domination of elite actors.

Debt, politics and ideology: paradoxes In current times, any discussion of debt would be incomplete without highlighting the paradoxical nature of mainstream arguments around public debt and consumer debt. The first paradox relates to substantive concerns about the impact of taking on debt. Within dominant political discourse, consumer debt – including home mortgages, credit cards and student 349

Suhaib Riaz

loans – is valorized as necessary for a well-functioning consumerist economy (Hodson et al., 2014; Mahmud, 2012). In contrast, public debt is demonized because of its association with redistribution outcomes, such as those related to social security, health care, public infrastructure, etc. Accordingly, there are arguments for reduction of public debt by curtailing state expenditure and thereby reducing the power of the state and its agencies in redressing socio-economic inequalities. However, public debt is considered acceptable in situations where it reinforces existing power differences rather than reduces them, such as the case of bailouts of large financial organizations (Johnson and Kwak, 2011; Levitin, 2014). The second paradox relates to moral concerns about debt. Moral arguments are often employed in the case of private debt to exhort borrowers to pay back their prior loans in order to continue being successful borrowers (Graeber, 2011; Coco, 2014). These arguments do not fundamentally question the practices of private consumer debt per se. In contrast, arguments against public debt often centre on the need to reduce or even eliminate it per se. The reduction in public debt through austerity measures is considered acceptable even though the associated reduction in state-funded programs may force more individual borrowers into private debt. For example, as public funding for higher education is reduced in a context of wage stagnation and unemployment, the youth are forced to take on increasingly higher levels of student debt – which in turn is not subject to the same moral arguments as public debt. The ideological, political and moral issues around debt are thus selectively discussed, often with a priority towards the interests of elite actors and powerful financial organizations. I thus close with a call for scholars to critically examine the practices of debt in more detail to reveal how they serve to perpetuate societal imbalances and inequalities.

Notes 1 2 3

In a related vein, recent debt collection practices by Wonga in the UK involved threats via fake letters from non-existent law firms. For another example, see practices by Portfolio Recovery Associates. I thank Christopher Stein for insightful discussions on philosophy during his time at UMass Boston. Among others, see recent issues in a similar context around trading in ‘dark pools’ at large banks.

References (key texts in bold) Bateman, M. and Chang, H.J. (2012). Microfinance and the illusion of development: from hubris to nemesis in thirty years. World Economic Review, 1(1): 13–36. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bridges, S. and Disney, R. (2010). Debt and depression. Journal of Health Economics, 29(3): 388–401. Brown, S., Taylor, K. and Price, S. (2005). Debt and distress: evaluating the psychological cost of credit. Journal of Economic Psychology, 26(5): 642–63. Carruthers, B.G. (2013). From uncertainty toward risk: the case of credit ratings. Socio-Economic Review, 11(3): 525–51. Clayton, M., Liñares-Zegarra, J.M. and Wilson, J. (2014). Can debt affect your health? Cross country evidence on the debt-health nexus. Working Paper, Centre for Responsible Banking and Finance. Retrieved on 22 June 2015 from http://ssrn.com/abstract=2429025 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.2429025 [24 April 2014]. Coco, L.E. (2014). The cultural logics of the bankruptcy abuse prevention and consumer protection act of 2005: fiscal identities and financial failure. Critical Sociology, 40: 711–27. Davis, G.F. (2009). Managed By The Markets: how finance re-shaped America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, L.F. and Mirzaie, I.A. (2014). Consumer debt stress, changes in household debt, and the great recession. Retrieved on 22 June 2015 from http://ssrn.com/abstract=2331477 or http://dx.doi.org/ 10.2139/ssrn.2331477 [1 July 2014]. 350

Debt

Erturk, I., Froud, J., Johal, S., Leaver, A. and Williams, K. (2007). The democratization of finance? Promises, outcomes and conditions. Review of International Political Economy, 14(4): 553–75. Epstein, G.A. (ed.) (2005). Financialization and the World Economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Fasenfest, D. (2014). The legacy of debt. Critical Sociology, 40(5): 651–3. Fligstein, N. and Goldstein, A. (2012). The emergence of a finance culture in American households, 1989–2007. Paper presented at the Inequality and Social Policy seminar series, Harvard University. Foster, J.B. (2007). The financialization of capitalism. Monthly Review, 58(11): 1–14. Golsorkhi, D., Leca, B., Lounsbury, M. and Ramirez, C. (2009). Analysing, accounting for and unmasking domination: on our role as scholars of practice, practitioners of social science and public intellectuals. Organization, 16(6): 779–97. Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House Publishing. Hager, S.B. (2013). Public Debt, Ownership and Power: the political economy of distribution and redistribution. Doctoral dissertation, York University, Toronto, Ontario. Hodson, R., Dwyer, R.E. and Neilson, L.A. (2014). Credit card blues: the middle class and the hidden costs of easy credit. The Sociological Quarterly, 55(2): 315–40. Johnson, S. and Kwak, J. (2011). 13 bankers: the Wall Street takeover and the next financial meltdown. New York: Random House. Keister, L.A. and Lee, H.Y. (2014). The one percent top incomes and wealth in sociological research. Social Currents, 1(1): 13–24. LeBaron, G. (2014). Reconceptualizing debt bondage: debt as a class-based form of labor discipline. Critical Sociology, 40: 763–80. Levitin, A.J. (2008). A critique of the American bankers association’s study on credit card regulation. Georgetown Law and Economics Research Paper. Retrieved on 22 June 2015 from http://ssrn.com/ abstract=1029191 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1029191 [1 July 2014]. Levitin, A.J. (2014). The politics of financial regulation and the regulation of financial politics: a review essay. Harvard Law Review, 127: 1991–2068. Mahmud, T. (2012). Debt and discipline. American Quarterly, 64(3): 469–94. Mian, A. and Sufi, A. (2014). House of Debt: how they (and you) caused the great recession, and how we can prevent it from happening again. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mukunda, G. (2014). The price of Wall Street’s power. Harvard Business Review, 92(6): 70–78. Nair, T. (2011). Microfinance: lessons from a crisis. Economic and Political Weekly, 46: 23–6. Palley, T.I. (2007). Financialization: what it is and why it matters. Working Paper No. 525, the Levy Economics Institute. Rajan, R. (2010). Fault Lines: how hidden fractures still threaten the world economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (ed.) (2001). Justice as Fairness: a restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riaz, S. (2009). The global financial crisis: an institutional theory analysis. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 5(1–2): 26–35. Riaz, S. and Buchanan, S. (2014). Relational work by elite actors: defining authority relationships as institutional maintenance. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. doi: 10.5465/AMBPP.2014.16 [12 February 2015]. Riaz, S., Buchanan, S. and Bapuji, H. (2011). Institutional work amidst the financial crisis: emerging positions of elite actors. Organization, 18: 187–214. Roberts, A. (2014). Doing borrowed time: the state, the law and the coercive governance of ‘undeserving’ debtors. Critical Sociology, 40: 669–87. Soederberg, S. (2013). The US debtfare state and the credit card industry: forging spaces of dispossession. Antipode, 45(2): 493–512. Sriram, M.S. (2010). Microfinance: a fairy tale turns into a nightmare. Economic and Political Weekly, 45: 10–13. Stiglitz, J.E. (2012). The Price of Inequality: how today’s divided society endangers our future. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Taibbi, M. (2013). The last mystery of the financial crisis. Rolling Stone. Retrieved on 22 June 2015 from www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-last-mystery-of-the-financial-crisis-20130619?print=true. Van der Zwan, N. (2014). Making sense of financialization. Socio-Economic Review, 12(1): 99–129. Yunus, M. (1998). Banker to the Poor, New York: Public Affairs.

351

29 Decision-making Coping with madness beyond reason Peter Edward

Decision-making has been described as one of the principal aspects of managing organizations (Barnard, 1938) and even as ‘the key distinctive activity of managers’ (Pugh, 2007: 251). Critical trends in organization theory, however, have increasingly moved away from such dualist perspectives, where decisions are reasoned actions of managers aimed at realizing prior, and separately identifiable, goals. Instead, decision-making is becoming understood in terms of processoriented and poststructural philosophies in which reasons, goals and decisions all co-emerge from our collective attempts to organize (that is, to construct order and meaning out of) a world of experience that lacks any externally guaranteed order and that is inherently meaningless. From this philosophical perspective, far from being a moment of reason and careful calculation the decision appears to be an act of ‘madness’ with significant risks and consequences for individual and collective identities. Reviewing the impact of these diverse philosophical approaches to decision-making, this chapter highlights that it is through emotion, not reason, that the decision (as a mad moment of disruption of settled identities) becomes established. This implies that future research on decision-making needs to pay much closer attention to the role of emotions – for example, through the use of humour and irony and the reliance on friendship – in the processes out of which decisions emerge.

Dualism and the classical stages model Because of the perceived centrality of decision-making to the management of organizations, it is through organizational decision-making (ODM) theory that philosophy has had some of its most direct influence on management practice. Such theory has largely relied on Descartes’ dualism whereby the ‘mind plans, whereas the body, the merely extended, passive and inert material, acts according to this plan’ (Clegg et al., 2007) Extended by Adam Smith’s attention to the division of labour, dualism readily supported modern management theories based on principles of rational planning and control (Fayol, 1949) – in other words, a division between managers who use their minds to make reasoned decisions and workers who, preferably largely unthinkingly, are required merely to use their bodies to enact those decisions (as described, somewhat brutally, by Taylor, 1911[1967]). 352

Decision-making

This separation of the act of decision-making from the enactment of the decision largely accounts for the dominance of a classical model that understands decision-making as a predominantly rational process passing through functional stages. Typically this starts with recognition of an issue (and so, by implication, of a goal to resolve the issue) and proceeds by defining the issue then identifying and evaluating solutions before finally implementing a preferred solution. In organization studies, this model is most explicit in literature on ethical decision-making (for example Jones, 1991) but it also underscores many of the other ‘canonical texts’ of ODM. These texts use the overarching frame of the classical model to expose the socially contingent nature of specific stages of the decision process – but in doing so they largely overlook how, by exposing its inherent limits, these critiques call into question the entire model on which they rely. For example, in the theory of bounded rationality (March, 1978; March and Simon, 1958) individuals’ and groups’ abilities to evaluate possible courses of action are curtailed by socially contingent limits to experience and knowledge, but the influence of the social on other stages remains under-theorized. Similarly, in the theory of satisficing (Simon, 1959) while the selection of solutions is recognized as contingent, but ‘good enough’ in the circumstances and contexts to hand, the role of the social in the formation of those circumstances and contexts is largely ignored. And in the theory of ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959) while the experimental and incremental, and therefore dialectical rather than algorithmic, nature of decision-making is acknowledged this remains largely confined to the later (evaluation and implementation) stages of the classical model.

Decision-making without dualism Much of the problem here arises from the dualist tendencies that infuse so much management theory. Dualism presumes an ontology in which an external world furnishes us with issues and with the need to take action so as to influence and modify that world. Epistemologically, this presumes that we form representations of that external world so as to identify and make sense of those issues. By using rational, and largely algorithmic, calculation among evaluated alternatives whose consequences can be reasonably anticipated, we develop goals and then decide on and ultimately enact courses of action aimed at realizing those goals. It may be surprising then to find that the origins of the stages model can be traced back to John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. For the founders of American pragmatism (Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James), the function of knowledge is ‘not to represent [or copy] reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively’ (Rorty, 2000a: 704). This is a non-dualist ontology in which the stages model should be understood as an ‘ideal-type’. Its purpose is not to establish a representation of the ‘ideal’ decision-making process. Instead, ideal-types merely furnish us with a set of ideas through which to think about and make sense of the world. The value of ideal-types lies, therefore, not in any instrumental prescriptions derived from them but in how, by thinking at the limits of their validity, they challenge us to develop new, and potentially radically different, models and understandings. Dewey himself was keenly aware of the limitations of the stages model and especially of the way its ‘issue-goals-decision-action’ sequence relies on, or at least encourages, an undersocialized understanding of the initial framing of issues and goals: ‘The heavy lifting may be in the framing of an issue, where a problem identified is a problem half solved’ (Dewey, 1938[2009]). March similarly became increasingly aware that it is largely through action and experimentation that we come to know and make sense of the world, and so to identify the issues and goals that (supposedly) precede the decision. He therefore suggests that: 353

Peter Edward

we treat action as a way of creating interesting goals at the same time as we treat goals as a way of justifying action. . . . Individuals and organizations need ways of doing things for which they have no good reason. Not always. Not usually. But sometimes. They need to act before they think. (March, 1976[2007]: 345) March called this a technology of foolishness and proposed it as a supplement to the technology of reason of classical decision-making. This ‘sometimes, not usually’ separation of foolishness from reason has, within mainstream management and organization studies, led to the suggestion that innovation is a distinct process of irrational and non-algorithmic playfulness and experimentation that supplements rational decision-making. However that separation is challenged by, for example, Weick, for whom: to analyze decision-making is to take a closer look at what people are doing at the time they single out portions of streaming inputs for closer attention, how they size up and label what they think they face, and how continuing activity shapes and is shaped by this sensemaking. This bracketing, labeling, and acting may create the sense that a choice is called for, but that is an outcome whose content is largely foreshadowed in its formulation. (Weick, 2009: 111 emphasis added) And even March’s own ‘garbage can model’ (Cohen et al., 1972), proposes a more ambiguous and emergent decision-making model where solutions, problems (issues or goals) and participants interact without a clear beginning or end. In effect, problems and solutions become so intertwined that, in a radical reversal of the classical model, problems become defined in ways that align to available solutions and ‘decisions’ are merely post-hoc attempts to make that alignment seem rational and meaningful.

Power or freedom? Pettigrew contributes to a stronger understanding of the significance of issue framing by turning attention to the power-laden nature of decision-making. He places power, as a struggle between people with ‘access to varying amounts of resources’ (Pettigrew, 1972: 202), at the centre of the decision-making process so that the decision becomes the outcome resulting from the ability to manipulate the framing of both the issue and possible solutions to the issue. This focus on power draws attention to the structural nature of the decision, dependent on institutional and organizational structures and their associated processes of social interaction. While this may be regarded as a useful corrective to the dualist presumption of a largely autonomous rationalizing actor, there is a danger that this attention to power comes at the expense of making the actor a mere cipher for structural forces so that the stages model’s idealized ‘freedom to decide’ of the autonomous actor is merely subsumed under the strait-jacket of structural determinism. In institutional theory this gives rise to the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ which struggles to account for freedom of will if actions, intentions and rationality are all conditioned by the institutions actors wish to change. It is at this point, where reason has started to give way to foolishness and structural determinism seems to be closing out agency, that it is worth reflecting that what makes decisionmaking so central and compelling (both in organization theory and in our own intuitive understandings of what it means to be human) is its association with ideas of freedom and praxis – freedom to act differently, and praxis as an act that makes a difference. As noted earlier, effective action – action that has an effect – sits at the core of Dewey’s pragmatism. Rorty draws attention 354

Decision-making

to ‘Dewey’s ideas that [human beings] are special because we can . . . take ourselves in directions that have neither precedent nor justification in either biology or history’ (Rorty 2000b: 3 emphasis added) and therefore Dewey would ‘sympathize with Castoriadis’ emphasis on imagination, rather than reason, as the engine of moral progress’ (Rorty 2000b: 26 emphasis added). It is because freedom is a confrontation with the unjustifiable that the decision is neither structurally determined nor an autonomous act of rational algorithmic calculation.

Significance of philosophy This is where Rorty’s bridging between pragmatist and poststructural philosophies is especially productive. The point of connection here can be found in pragmatism’s recognition that there is no necessary correspondence between knowledge and an external reality. Because knowledge is always produced in and through social practice there can never be a universal or unchanging (i.e. transcendent) knowledge that we can hold to be indubitably and permanently true. The pragmatist approach to this situation is largely to eschew analytical philosophy’s concerns with metaphysics and ontology and instead to focus on truth and knowledge merely as providing successful rules for action. Poststructural philosophy, however, does interrogate metaphysics and ontology by exploring the conditions of possibility for the formation, and hence also transformation, of the thoroughly contingent or created character of human experience. This entails replacing a view of knowledge as correspondence to reality with one that sees knowledge as coherence within shared, but partial and particular, systems of meaning and judgement. The search for justification and knowledge, or the ‘desire to know . . . runs together three different things: the need to make one’s beliefs coherent, the need for the respect of one’s peers, and curiosity’ (Rorty 2000b: 15 emphasis added). Decision-making is not about using knowledge to make decisive judgements but about acting in ways that, through the construction of (new) coherence, the generation of respect (and commitment/support) and the novelty of curiosity (to make new sense of the world), lead to new forms of knowledge and justification. It is not that reason leads to judgement from which decisive action follows. Rather, it is that in decisive action new shared meanings and understandings (coherences and respect) become instantiated and accepted (justified). Rejecting instrumental, dualist and representationist interpretations, decision-making is better understood as a series of moments of meaningful articulation (through both discourse and practice) that invoke, and hence objectify, the social reality they aspire to represent. Rather than re-presenting an external reality, the act of decision instantiates – and so makes present for the first time – its own particular and unique articulation of meanings, goals and justifications. The force of this articulation derives from its success in present-ing the particular and novel variant of social reality that it enacts as if it was already there (that is, as if it can be guaranteed by an external reality that merely needed to be revealed and re-presented). In normal life, the success of this retroactive articulation relies on its being misrecognized by us as a process of representation, rather than original signification, and the force of the articulation derives not from a correspondence to external reality but from the way it successfully invokes our own motivations towards coherence, respect and curiosity. This means that every decision is always an act that brings into being a particular social reality at the expense of other possibilities. It therefore has significant ethical and political implications; inviting individuals to identify with and become subject to its particular retroactively instantiated truth, knowledge and meanings. However, Rorty’s privileging of coherence and respect rather marginalizes the exclusionary nature of the decision inasmuch that ‘to choose a course of action implies an act of coercion with respect to other possible courses of action’ (Laclau, 1990: 171) 355

Peter Edward

As a result Rorty advocates a liberal, and so normatively conservative, philosophy which marginalizes and de-legitimizes alternative, more radical, forms of ethico-political activity based on antagonism, resistance and confrontation. It is Foucault who more rigorously pursues a philosophy free from conservative leanings. While Foucault’s earlier work focuses on the socially constructed nature of truth/knowledge and power, in his later work he paid increasing attention to the historical process and ‘different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’ (Foucault, 1982: 208) Increasingly this led to something of a crisis for Foucault as he struggled to explain how freedom can be possible if the subject is constituted merely as the embodiment of social regimes and has no extra-social essence or nature. The route out of this dilemma is found in recognizing how those regimes do not only furnish systems of meaning and justification but also, by delineating what is justifiable and thinkable, at their limit they construct the ever elusive locus of that which is unjustifiable, unthinkable and undecidable. It is in this ineffable locus of undecidability that social regimes construct the possibility of their own transgression and trans-formation. Foucault’s subject is therefore much more thoroughly socially embedded, permeated and constructed than could ever be accommodated under any modifications or convolutions of the classical stages decision-making model. Nevertheless, he (not unlike Dewey) ultimately arrives at the point where freedom – to think and act differently and decisively – arises not in reason and in calculation but through experimentation, although for Foucault experimentation is not understood as innovation separate to reason but as ‘practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’ (Foucault, 2007: 113) of reason and meaning and as ‘a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond’ (Foucault, 2007: 115). Freedom therefore is always undefined and praxis, as the enactment of freedom, is always unjustifiable. This requires of us ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (Foucault, 2007: 118). For Foucault then the purpose of philosophical analysis is not to produce logical and reasoned justifications but to bring us to an awareness of the limits of our justifications and so to the point of crisis where we find that logic and reason fail us and we are forced to confront the need to take action that is undecidable, unjustifiable and without prior reason (precedent). Foucault therefore attends to how praxis, as moments and acts of decision, is a confrontation with the inescapable presence of the undecidable at the limit of reason and meaning. However there is another dimension to this confrontation, namely that it is a confrontation with an ineffable absence or aporia encountered at the limit of meaning. The moment of decision is therefore not simply a moment of re-presentation or constitution of a revised subjectivity, it is also – and more frighteningly – a moment of dissolution and deconstruction of subjectivity. Derrida, whose deconstructive philosophy is especially attentive to the confrontation with the aporia of undecidability, therefore describes the decision as: a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical moment, of this reflection or this deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. The instance of the decision is a madness, says Kierkegaard. (Derrida, 1992: 26 original emphasis) Recognizing undecidability as an absence draws attention away from the particular content of the decision-making situation – in Heidegger’s terms the ontic content, already laden with ethical 356

Decision-making

and political significance (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Heidegger, 1997) – and towards a more fundamental ontological moment of crisis, but also freedom, in confrontation with a radical and inescapable absence of any foundation to the meanings, values and seeming objectivity that constitute our ‘reality’.1 Because the ordeal of freedom arises as a transgression beyond the limits of this ontic ‘reality’, freedom does not in itself carry any necessary particular ethical or political orientation. But the way in which freedom comes to be played out, as praxis, has fundamental implications for the values and political content of the (newly modified) meanings that the transgression leads to. Pre-existing structures, values and meanings are necessary but they are present as the landscape or horizon that the transgression goes beyond. One might say they define the ‘normal’ that precipitates the urgency of the ‘madness’ of the decision.

Future directions The classical stages model has been a useful ideal-type for thinking through the limits of its own privileging of reason and rationality, but the more recent deconstructive understanding of decision-making that has now emerged in social philosophy so radically disrupts the logic of the classical model that it is no longer useful (Clegg et al., 2007). Deconstructive studies readily acknowledge that decision-making in organizations can never become a ritualistic application of corporate principles (Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013). Clegg et al. consider (briefly) the organizational implications of this. Recognizing that ethical decisions cannot be confined (proscribed) or prescribed by organizational regimes, nevertheless they cannot be made independently of them. Instead they must be made in relation to those regimes – so that organizational regimes provide (part of) the delineating horizon that the decision(-maker) must transgress. This leads them to call ‘in a world of social relations increasingly dominated by organizations’ (Clegg et al., 2007: 407) for democratic politics to become more widespread organizationally. There is considerable scope for more research here on how organizational and inter-organizational settings might enable individuals and teams, as transgressive decisionmakers, to go beyond (explicit or implicit) rules, policies and prior principles and to experiment with the madness of disruptive and risky confrontation with freedom and undecidability. But this confrontation is not merely an organizational challenge. It is also a crisis of identity and subjectivity for individuals but few studies have yet explicitly explored how individuals cope with this. Chia (1994) does present an early deconstructive analysis but, by presupposing an innate ‘will to order’, he sidesteps the implications for the individual. Roberts recognizes the issue but can only suggest that individuals will cope with it ‘using their frail and vital sentience and following the path that this assigns’ (Roberts, 2003: 263). This brings back into focus the issue and challenge of subjective experience of undecidability. Laclau has proposed a fluid concept of the social self as inserted into webs of multiple, intersecting discourses (and practices). As a consequence of the undecidability inherent to this ‘We live as bricoleurs in a plural world, having to take decisions within incomplete systems of rules (incompletion here means undecidability). . . . It is because of this constitutive incompletion that decisions have to be taken’ (Laclau, 1996: 79 original emphasis). Various critics have observed that what is missing here is a recognition of the constitutive role of emotional and affective investment in sustaining subjects’ relatively stable identities (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2004). They have proposed that a useful supplement can be found in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory where the disruptive threat of the undecidable becomes stabilized through an affective investment in a fantasy (the Lacanian Real, jouissance and objet-a respectively) that occludes the inescapable presence of 357

Peter Edward

undecidability. Space precludes discussion of these issues here other than to note that the challenge of the moment of decision remains as a transgressive passage through a crisis of ‘letting go’ of identification with old fantasies to the re-stabilization of subjectivity in identification with new or modified fantasies (Žižek, 1997). What is brought into focus here is the central role of affective investment, beyond reason, in the passage through the ‘mad’ transgressive moment and act that becomes recognized (retroactively) as the decision. Much more work remains to be done to investigate and understand the role that emotion plays in how individuals and groups sustain themselves through the crisis of dis-identification and re-identification that lies at the transgressive core of decisionmaking. One avenue to pursue may be found in Critchley’s poststructural philosophy of ethical subjectivity. Critchley identifies the trauma of the transgression as the recognition of an infinitely demanding ethical responsibility to the other that fundamentally challenges our own subjectivity: ‘The ethical subject shapes itself in relation to a demand that splits it open. . . . How can I respond in infinite responsibility to the other without extinguishing myself as a subject?’ (Critchley, 2007: 69). The way to sustain our traumatized, transforming identity through this crisis is, Critchley suggests, through humour and irony: ‘dark, sardonic, wicked humour . . . . The subject looks at itself like an abject object and instead of weeping bitter tears, it laughs at itself and finds consolation therein’ (Critchley, 2007: 81). It is however debateable whether humour is the sole or even dominant sustaining mechanism for individuals in decision-making situations. Critchley’s approach seems to revert to the idea of the heroic individual finding inner resources to sustain herself through the ordeal of the decision. Foucault would almost certainly have sought a more inter-subjective perspective from which to illuminate the affective dynamics that sustain deciding subjects. While research entirely within organizational contexts may prove useful here, the trauma of transgression is probably more likely to be exposed in situations where individuals find themselves confronted with tensions between ‘normal’ organizational logics, discourses and practices and the demands of extraorganizational logics (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). Such sites might arise in boundary-spanning situations such as stakeholder engagement, customer service or some aspects of corporate responsibility activities (for example where market logics run up against humanitarian development logics). However whistle-blowing may well provide some of the most informative empirical examples. At first sight whistle-blowing appears to be a highly individualistic activity and so a perverse case to investigate when exploring the inter-subjective affective dimension. However, the journey that whistle-blowers take, in the transition from identification with organizational logics to the ‘mad’ moment of forever rejecting those logics and throwing themselves and their fate more widely onto society, is rarely taken in isolation. Instead there is evidence that changing relationships and the formation of new friendships may be closely related to the emergence of a readiness to step into the unknown beyond the security of past identities, career and organizational affiliations.2 If that is the case then the route to more ethical decision-making in organizations will be found neither in proscriptive responsibility procedures nor in carefully reasoned moralizing nor in heroic individuals. Instead it will be found in better recognition that truly ethical decisions are moments of collective crisis where our old logics and identities fail us – and what sustains us in that frailty is the sort of friendship that can recognize such madness not as a moment of weakness calling us to fall back on old habits and comforts but as an opportunity for mutual support as we experiment and explore beyond the limits of the justifiable.

358

Decision-making

Notes 1

2

Recent institutional theory explains freedom as responses to inhabiting ‘multiple contrasting and often contradictory institutional logics’ (Thornton et al., 2012: 83). By viewing freedom as mediation between the ontic content of ambiguous logics, this approach stops well short of recognizing freedom as a transgressive confrontation with the undecidable that lies at the limits of all discourse or logic. For a fuller discussion of whistle-blowing that seems to have relied on friendship rather than selfdeprecating, ironic humour see Edward and Willmott (2015).

References (key texts in bold) Barnard, C.I. (1938). The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chia, R. (1994). The concept of decision: a deconstructive analysis. Journal of Management Studies, 31(6): 781–806. Clegg, S., Kornberger, M. and Rhodes, C. (2007). Organizational ethics, decision making, undecidability. The Sociological Review, 55(2): 393–409. Cohen, M.D., March, J.G. and Olsen, J. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1): 1–25. Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely Demanding: ethics of commitment, politics and resistance. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (1992). Force of law: the ‘mystical foundation of authority’, in Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M. and Gray Carlson, D. (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. London: Routledge, pp. 3–67. Dewey, J. (1938[2009]). The pattern of inquiry, in Hickman, L.A. and Alexander, T.M. (eds), The Essential Dewey: ethics, logic, psychology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 169–79. Edward, P. and Willmott, H. (2015). Decision-making: between reason and the ethico-political moment, in Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and Organizations. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 198–215. Fayol, H. (1949). General and Industrial Management. London: Pitman. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power, in Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 97–119. Foucault, M. (2007). What is enlightenment, in Lotringer, S. (ed.), The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 97–119. Glynos, J. and Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. London: Routledge. Glynos, J. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2004). Encounters of the real kind: sussing out the limits of Laclau’s embrace of Lacan, in Critchley, S. and Marchart, O. (eds), Laclau: a critical reader. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 201–16. Heidegger, M. (1997). Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Jones, T.M. (1991). Ethical decision making by individuals in organizations: an issuecontingent model. Academy of Management Review, 16(2): 366–95. Laclau, E. (1990). New Reflections on the Revolutions of our Time. London: Verso. Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Lindblom, C. (1959). The science of muddling through. Public Administration Review, 39(6): 517–26. March, J.G. (1976[2007]). The technology of foolishness, in Pugh, D.S. (ed.), Organization Theory: selected classic readings (5th edn). London: Penguin, pp. 339–52. March, J.G. (1978). Bounded rationality, ambiguity, and the engineering of choice. Bell Journal of Economics, 9(2): 587–608. March, J.G. and Simon, H.A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley. Pettigrew, A.M. (1972). Information control as a power resource. Sociology, 6(2): 187–204. Pugh, D.S. (ed.) (2007). Organization Theory: selected classic readings(5th edn). London: Penguin. Roberts, J. (2003). The manufacture of corporate social responsibility: constructing corporate sensibility. Organization, 10 (2): 249–66. Rorty, R.M. (2000a). Pragmatism, in Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, pp. 704–5. Rorty, R.M. (2000b). Universality and truth, in Brandom, R.D. (ed.), Rorty and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–30. 359

Peter Edward

Simon, H.A. (1959). Theories of decision-making in economics and behavioral science. The American Economic Review, 49 (3): 253–83. Taylor, F. (1911[1967]). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Norton. Thornton, P.H., Ocasio, W. and Lounsbury, M. (2012). The Institutional Logics Perspective: a new approach to culture, structure and process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weick, K.E. (2009). Making Sense of the Organization: the impermanent organization. London: Sage. Weiskopf, R. and Willmott, H. (2013). Ethics as critical practice: the ‘Pentagon Papers’, deciding responsibly, truth-telling, and the unsettling of organizational morality. Organization Studies, 34(4): 469–93. Žižek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

360

30 Democracy Philosophical disputes and organizational governance Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

Introduction The advent of liberal democracy was cautiously theorized by Alexis de Tocqueville (1840[2000]) and more recently heralded by Fukayama (1992) as the triumphal denouement of humanity’s ideological evolution due to its superior moral legitimacy. However Fukayama’s universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government, refers only to the state’s governance of the civic sphere. By default, democratization of the workplace was excluded from his prognostications. In doing so he maintained a long-standing incongruence created by the disjunction between state and workplace governance that, for Pateman, reflected a key feature of liberal democratic theory itself: ‘the separation or autonomy of the political and private spheres’ (Pateman, 1975: 6–7) where state power is also assumed to be the power in society and hence democratic requirements are met when state governance alone is democratically accountable. This disjunction simultaneously serves to reinforce the naturalistic ontological assumption that hierarchy in the workplace is incorrigibly normal thereby encouraging exemption from any requirement for democratic accountability to employees. For example, even the recent postbureaucratic calls for the attenuation of hierarchies through employee empowerment seem to be merely efficiency-enhancing innovations that rhetorically attempt to psychologically engineer consent and through co-optation leave preceding authority structures largely unharmed. Hence, most present-day work organizations remain isomorphic in their commitment to ‘hierarchism’ (Blaug, 2009; Child, 2009). This prevalence is considered to be antidemocratic and to justify managerialism (Diefenbach, 2013: 34). Here managers wield sovereign power with no democratic accountability to the majority of the workforce whose occasional ‘empowerment’ is at most disingenuously restricted to within closely patrolled task-related enclaves. This pervasiveness is sometimes explained and justified by empiricist appeal to hierarchism’s natural selection as an optimal solution by the self-regulating efficiency mandate of free markets (Williamson, 1980). In a similar vein, management theorists have long presented the ubiquity 361

Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

of hierarchy as demonstration of its self-evidently natural status: a necessary cultural predisposition that throughout history has guided collective human relationships and therefore must be a valid, moral and just institutional response to the functional imperatives of collective action (e.g. Mayo, 1919; Barnard, 1938; Drucker, 1977; Jaques, 1990). By implication, calls for workplace democratization are sometimes dismissed as naive, with its occasional presence explained away as being an unnatural intrusion only of ‘ephemeral duration’ (Williamson, 1980: 35): aberrations presumably permitted by temporary market failures. Given this context, this chapter will explore philosophical arguments that undermine the hegemony of workplace hierarchism by critiquing key conceptual structures located in its often unnoticed philosophical commitments and by philosophically justifying democracy as an alternative mode of organization. First we will consider how rival metaphysical assumptions about human ontology have influenced how the potential for workplace democracy has been construed in competing theoretical and normative stances. Second, we will consider rival epistemological positions that either justify contemporary hierarchism or conversely undermine hierarchism and promote workplace democracy.

Human ontological assumptions Here we consider the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) whose importance lies in their explicit presentation of contrasting views upon the moral and ethical significance of democracy that derive largely from their competing ontological assumptions about ‘human nature’. Here, the most significant of Hobbes’ work is The Leviathan (Hobbes, 1651[2002]). This was written in response to the upheavals of the English Civil War and especially the offering of democratic alternatives by Levellers and Diggers that articulated unprecedented challenges to traditional authority that had even infected the military with the election of officers in the Parliamentarian army (see Hill, 1984: 21; Linebaugh, 1991: 43). According to Hobbes, human behaviour, in a hypothetical state of nature, is driven by unconstrained appetites or passions: aggression, avariciousness, pride, selfishness and fear. Life before the development of society and the social control provided by sovereigns was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’: a ‘condition of war of everyone against everyone’ driven by the aggressive individualism inherent to the human condition (Hobbes, 1651[2002]: 91v) where humans were construed as having nothing in common in their competition over scarce resources. Here Hobbes articulates what Kumar (1987: 4) has called a Platonic fear of the amoral and chaotic realm of nature: the demands of Levellers and Diggers for freedom and democracy would merely result in a return to a natural state that would unfetter the individual’s incessant selfish desires and cause perpetual conflict (see Hill, 1984: 92). As Wolin (1990) observes, Hobbes is thereby supporting the Cartesian ontology that required the divorce of humanity from natural processes. To avoid such conflict and insecurity Hobbes argued that individual freedom had to be curtailed through an implicit social contract where citizens gave the sovereign absolute authority in return for guaranteed security: a human need that Hobbes defined as objective and universal regardless of what people might subjectively think. Here Hobbes deployed a rhetorical strategy that used some of the idiom deployed by the Levellers in their demands for democracy against them. He argued that it was only by forming a social contract with what he called the Leviathan or ‘common wealth’, which accepted the absolute and divine authority of the sovereign, that people could escape the threat of unremitting chaos. Hence it was incumbent upon absolute rulers to persuade people that it was reasonable to entrust power to them. 362

Democracy

Hobbes’ ontology has an important contemporary relevance as it underpins definitions and analyses of the ‘problems’ that arise in society as being caused by what amounts to an issue of under-control wherein the insatiable egoistic instincts fail to be effectively repressed. Social order is brought to this potential through the imposition of authority thereby legitimizing hierarchism in principle. In the field of management this philosophical stance underlies Mayo’s (1919; 1933; 1949) deployment of anomie as a theoretical platform where he focused upon the role of emotions and sentiments in the regulation of workers’ behaviour. Mayo is important here because his influence persists in the development of much recent post-bureaucratic discourse and the development of cultural control as a solution to the problem of order created by the perceived decline in the efficacy of bureaucracy (Johnson and Duberley, 2011). For example Mayo (1949: 31–50) adopts much of Ricardo’s Hobbesian stance but rejects his view of ‘natural’ society as consisting of an unorganized horde of individuals acting in a manner rationally calculated to secure self-interest. Instead Mayo drew upon Pareto to present the individual worker as pursuing self-interest but in a non-logical manner. In doing so, he claims a debt to Durkheim’s theory of anomie (e.g. Mayo, 1949: 5–14), which was actually a critique of the spread of Utilitarian norms (Johnson and Duberley, 2011). By deploying Hobbes’ philosophical assumptions it is evident that Mayo reduced Durkheim’s approach to a form of social engineering: anomie became a technical problem concerning maladjusted workers that could be resolved through more effective management. Again Mayo drew upon Pareto who had argued that ruling elites, because of their superior knowledge and skills, should provide rational direction to subordinates. Hence Mayo translated his Hobbesian interpretation of anomie into a managerial problem: how to forestall the unleashing ‘of man’s fundamental rottenness’ (Mayo, 1919: 41) that fed what he saw as refractory employees ‘who had no understanding of . . . [their] . . . real needs’ (Mayo, 1933: 183). Here Mayo rejected what Durkheim (1863[1964]: 25–9) actually thought to be potential sources of work place (organic) social solidarity, such as collective ownership and work place democracy by condemning them engendering ‘collective mediocrity’ (Mayo, 1919: 57). So, through an epistemic privileging of hierarchy Mayo sought to ensure the enhancement of management prerogative so that ‘in all matters . . . the widest knowledge and the highest skill should be sovereign’ (Mayo, 1919: 59). A key requirement for managers was to manipulate employees’ non-logical sentiments and instil the ‘desire and capacity to work better with management’ (Mayo, 1949: 74–5) so as to link employees to ‘rational’ managerial goals without them being aware. His approach was virtually institutionalized by the subsequent development of the Human Relations Movement, which embraced the idea that management could become the manipulators of social harmony, and more recently by the practice of culture management (see Johnson and Duberley, 2011). According to Hill (1984: 107), in contrast to Hobbes, the Levellers and Diggers adopted a more optimistic and collectivist concept of human ontology that resonated in the later work of Rousseau (1755[1984], 1762[1983]). For example, by emphasizing the sociological underpinnings and hence ontological plasticity of ‘human nature’, Rousseau argued that the unpleasant characteristics Hobbes associated with the natural human condition did not derive from nature but from the development of an unequal society which had created dystopian social relations inimical to self-worth and freedom. Furthermore Rousseau argued that the renunciation of freedom at the heart of absolutist governance was contrary to human nature and an offence against reason: to comply with such demands constituted an abdication of moral agency but people had been duped into surrendering their liberties (Rousseau, 1762[1983], Ch 1.4). Compliance with authority perpetuated a fraud that corrupted humanity’s innate potential wherein the state of nature, prior to the development of inequality, was presented by Rousseau as one of freedom, harmony, compassion, empathy and mutual respect. Therefore human redemption 363

Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

was only possible through the (re)establishment of the moral worth, freedom and dignity of the individual though the democratic sovereignty of the people, freely and therefore rationally expressed in the social contract. The issue for Rousseau was how people could acquire, retain and exercise such sovereignty in a manner that expresses the general will and avoids the development of oligarchy while remaining free and equal yet interdependent citizens who retain moral agency. Herein lay several tensions and ambiguities in Rousseau’s work which are reflected in debates both around the efficacy of direct and indirect (representative) democracy as well as the tolerance of pluralism and diversity. Lukes (1978) argues that Rousseau’s work was influential upon Marx’s conception of alienation. Albeit in a mutated form, alienation theory has been articulated in the homo actualis assumptions of Neo Human Relations Management theorists (see Antony, 1977) in their production of remedial analyses of the factors affecting employee motivation that derive from the divorce of conception from execution through the bureaucratization of labour processes. This socio-technical approach to participation only refers to the extending employees’ everyday participation in deciding how tasks, distributed through the division of labour, should be undertaken. In other words, employees have a say in some aspects of work relations by autonomously undertaking enriched tasks but not in setting overall organizational direction. Thus socio-technical participation relates directly to the conventional empowerment literature that ignores political participation at the commanding heights of the governance of the firm as a means of empowerment. However these job-redesign remedial interventions have been prescriptively extended by some to embrace what Pateman (1970) called ‘full’ workplace democracy by creating a situation in which each employee has equal decision-making power. In other words, to potentially transform hierarchical authority structures by all employees’ ‘political participation’ in, and ultimately the democratization of, the formulation and implementation of overall organizational strategies, policies and practices. In some cases this prescription extends to employee ownership. Here there appear to be two underlying arguments in favour workplace democracy. The first is to do with human welfare: that democracy at work makes for greater dignity and wellbeing per se, and can serve as a foundation for a more democratic social order for society at large (e.g. Erdal, 2008). Simultaneously, recent comparative epidemiological research (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010) argues that traditional workplace hierarchies are significant sources of relative inequality that are detrimental to human well-being: a situation only resolvable through wider employee ownership and experimentation with different forms of workplace democracy. The second is an efficiency argument: this seeks to promote organizational democratization as a viable solution to the problems associated with traditional hierarchies in a globalized postmodern business context. Here, democratic modes of organization are also presented as more efficient and effective because they ameliorate the perceived inflexibilities of traditional hierarchies and create a participation effect that has important motivational implications as it reduces the alienation of workers caused through their exclusion from decision-making and ownership of the products of their labour (e.g. Melman, 2001; Cloke and Goldsmith, 2002). In part, some of these critiques of the relative inefficiencies of hierarchy vis-à-vis democratic modes of governance embrace a tacit epistemological critique of hierarchism in the sense that it is thought that the uncertainties associated with a postmodern period mean that the world has fundamentally changed in a manner that makes the hierarchical ordering of knowledge in the workplace impossible. However this periodized epistemological argument largely ignores long-standing critiques of positivist epistemology and its assertion of a theory-neutral observational language. It is to these epistemological critiques which undermine hierarchism and endorse workplace democracy to which we now turn. 364

Democracy

Workplace democracy and epistemology It is evident that hierarchism serves to routinely immunize the decision-making of organizational super-ordinates against the views of subordinates. Such processes of disenfranchisement have historically varied in how they have been discursively legitimated. Today, expressed largely in terms of management prerogative, hierarchism is morally and intellectually supported by persuasive claims to technocratic expertise grounded in requisite superior knowledge: a hierarchical ordering of knowledge within workplace divisions of labour. Ideologically, such epistemological claims are vital to explaining how hierarchies might deliver more efficient organization through a legitimate concentration of power – an issue often left implicit in appeals to the transcendent primacy of market imperatives as the driving force behind the ubiquity of hierarchy. However the legitimacy of this claim in turn depends upon the a priori epistemological assumption that a privileged access to reality is possible in the first place by the suitably educated and experienced (manager). A key epistemic prop for hierarchism’s assertion of legitimacy via the superior knowledgeclaims of organizational elites derives implicitly and explicitly from positivist philosophy. Embedded in Comte’s original definition of the term (Comte, 1853), positivist notions of ‘truth’ have always resided in an observer’s privileged access to the ‘positively given’ via what Rorty (1979: 46) has described, metaphorically, as a ‘mirror in the mind’. Through the accumulation of empirical ‘data’ from a reality, awaiting discovery, theories may be neutrally tested through falsificationism, or inductively built and verified. Both processes have been subject to much debate and dispute in the social sciences. Nevertheless they share the presumption of an a priori neutral observational language that, through a separation of the knower from what is known, enables the possibility of an objective and disinterested foundation for scientific knowledge. For Bradbury and Lichtenstein (2000; see also Brief, 2000), such a presumption is vital as it serves to legitimate and suppress discussion of hierarchical asymmetries in the first place. For example, provided that managers appear to apply neutral scientific knowledge, their practices are more likely to be construed as merely functional and technical activities that progressively transcend partisan interest because they are grounded in objective analyses of reality (Alvesson and Willmott, 2012). Such appearances of scientific authenticity, decoupled from vested interest, add credibility to any pronouncement and are pivotal to excluding subordinates from decision-making while also instilling compliance and learned helplessness (Sidanius et al., 2004). By authorizing objective analysis, positivism provides management with the possibility of access to privileged and esoteric knowledge in their necessary pursuit of technical imperatives (Fournier and Grey, 2000). Indeed the form of knowledge that positivism provides seems particularly suited to meeting managers’ instrumentally rational technocratic aspirations and expectations during their discharge of fiduciary responsibilities. Such scientism lends credence to the idea that work organizations can and must be ruled by privileged technical reason that focuses upon means and displaces ethical consideration of ends, while simultaneously engendering unitary imageries that make democratic ideals redundant and further reinforcing the idea that economic life is a morally distinct sphere of action to the civic. Moreover positivist epistemology ethically legitimates hierarchy and its associated inequalities by supporting its appearance as being a just social order. Indeed the possibility of progress up the hierarchy through merit is epistemologically supported: those with superior talent and prepared to accumulate expertise and esoteric privileged knowledge should gravitate up the echelons of the work place through that demonstration of worthiness. Thanks to their exposure to suitable education, experiences and specialization, incumbents of the commanding heights are thus presumed to be epistemologically privileged in a hierarchical distribution of knowledge. Although a consequence of technocracy 365

Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

can be the exclusion or marginalization of ethical considerations in the pursuit of taken-forgranted ends (see Alvesson and Willmott, 2012: 67), it is simultaneously evident that it articulates the notion that in order for any organization to materially benefit, management’s decisions and direction must take moral precedence over the formulations of self-evidently less knowledgeable and deserving subordinates. However, there has been attrition of positivist hegemony by those who have dismissed the possibility of a neutral observational language through invocation of Habermas’ (1984, 1987) inter-subjective theory of communication. Once such profound scepticism is established regarding any objective foundation for knowledge, claims to truth as correspondence with an accessible external reality are re-construed as the outcomes of prestigious discursive practices which sublimate partiality. It follows that a key implication of this epistemological attack is the undermining of hierarchism’s technocratic and moral legitimacy: any claim that organizational hierarchies are necessarily founded upon a hierarchical ordering of objective, merely technical, knowledge becomes epistemologically unsustainable and (re)presented as a legitimizing myth that has colonized and culturally impoverished our lifeworlds (Fournier and Grey, 2000). Simultaneously, hierarchism’s reduction of subordinates to disenfranchized objects becomes morally indefensible (see Rehg, 1994). These epistemological and moral questions have been translated into demands for workplace democracy by any array of scholars usually, directly or indirectly, associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Like earlier critical theorists (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947) in his inter-subjective theory of communication Habermas (1984) rejected positivist epistemology in favour of an epistemology that emphasizes the role of a priori inter-subjective processes in the social construction of knowledge. In a Kantian fashion, Habermas retains ontological realism by accepting the existence of an independent social reality that remains ultimately unknowable, to human engagements due to the action of the socially constructed a priori, but nevertheless imposes practical contingencies upon any human endeavour. However, in rejecting positivist objectivity he is haunted by the spectre of relativism. Therefore, Habermas proposes an alternative epistemic standard: a consensus theory of truth where what is true is that which we democratically agree to be true. This epistemic standard he relates to the conditions of what he calls the ‘ideal-speech situation’ where epistemologically legitimate knowledge is produced by consensus that freely derives from argument and analysis with an absence of coercion, distortion or duplicity: ‘the forceless force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1990: 23). Such an ideal expresses Habermas’ emancipatory interest which, located in the principle of self-reflection upon their organizational predicaments, aims to liberate people from asymmetrical power relations, dependencies and constraints. For Habermas (1984) such communicative rationality, together with epistemologically and ethically legitimate organizational practices, will only occur where democratic social relations have been previously established. Any discourses produced outside such conditions are by implication the result of power asymmetries that result in systematic distortions. So, inspired largely by Habermas, democratic self-organization is presented as the basis for socio-rational, epistemologically and therefore ethically legitimate, workplace governance (Alvesson and Willmott, 2012). However critical theorists also raise important issues regarding the implementation of workplace democracy and the form it takes. Possibly apprehensive of the oligarchic tendencies first identified in Michels’ (1915[1956]) prescient analysis of trade unions and socialist political movements, an important point made by critical theorists is that it is only through the free participation of all in democratic discourse, and crucially, through the prior development of a critical consciousness, that ‘cultural doping’ to manufacture of consent can be avoided. For example Friere (1972) argued that the aim is to develop a critical consciousness that in Habermas’ terms is central to open and free debate 366

Democracy

(Habermas, 1990) whist de-reifying extant hierarchical praxis (Bernstein, 1980). Key is developing self-conceptions as epistemic subjects are able to determine and change their situation, as opposed to powerless objects determined by an immutable situation presented to them by technocrats’ supposedly authoritative instrumental analyses. For Gaventa and Cornwall (2006) it is through such critical reasoning wherein lies workplace democracy, emancipation and freedom, as the negotiation of alternative renditions of reality creates novel questions, inaugurates new problems and makes socially transformative forms of organizational practice sensible and therefore possible. In certain respects this echoes Rousseau’s (1762[1983]) analysis of situations in which democratic decisions would reflect the ‘general will’ and thereby represent the good of the community as a whole. Indeed, as with Rousseau, an important question arises around the extent to which critical theorists seem to be aiming to achieve a unified consensus which implies the possibly of suppression of difference and/or the premature closure of discourse. For some, striving for such a consensus would be dangerous because it may encourage permanent closure thereby reducing plurality and difference, rather than recognizing difference and the need to facilitate disagreement and the expression and deliberation of difference (see Connolly, 1995). However rejection of positivist epistemology does not necessarily entail support for democratization. For example, democracy may be questioned as an epistemic standard for arbitrating between rival truth claims because knowledge can never be divorced from the exercise of power (e.g. Foucault, 1980). As Alvesson and Willmott (2012: 76) observe, post structuralist critique conceives critical theorists’ ideals about democracy ‘as incoherent . . . because all forms of knowledge – including the idea of the ideal speech situation and communicative action – are articulations of power and, inescapably, exert a subjugating effect upon those who identify them as truth’. Hence critical theory’s guiding presuppositions are seen as essentialist: that democratic consensus may act as an epistemic standard, in the pursuit of liberation, that is ‘somehow exempt from oppressive effects’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2012: 76). Indeed such presuppositions are also sometimes dismissed as unsustainable ‘grand’ narratives which arbitrarily ‘assume the validity of their own truth claims’ (Rosenau, 1992: xi). Therefore from a poststructuralist stance there is the fear that any attempted discursive closure constitutes a threat to the proliferation of discursive practices. Instead it is a preference-less toleration of the polyphonic (many voices) which is pivotal since any discursive closure, whether grounded in democratic consensus or otherwise, implies the arbitrary and oppressive dominance of a particular discourse which serves to silence alternative possible voices. However a likely rejoinder from critical theorists would be that such philosophy encounters judgemental relativism as there appears to be no grounds for differentiating between discourses: something which undermines the possibility of critique of the status quo and hence entails conservative potential.

Conclusions This chapter has explored certain philosophical arguments that undermine contemporary prevalence of hierarchism and offer workplace democracy as an alternative. In doing so, we have outlined the legacy of Hobbes’ anti-democratic ontology and then contrasted it with Rousseau’s emphasis upon re-establishing human freedom and dignity through democracy. We then considered the challenge to hierarchism deriving from certain long-standing critiques of positivist epistemology and its role in legitimizing undemocratic organizational hierarchies through providing a moral mandate located in the possibility of a hierarchical ordering of knowledge in organizations. While attacks upon the viability of such epistemological assumptions do not necessarily lead to philosophical stances that attempt to legitimate democratic workplaces, there 367

Phil Johnson and Joanne Duberley

are currents deriving from critical theory that evidently do so through articulating what amounts to a consensus theory of truth which has implications for the forms of organizational democracy sanctioned. A key point that critical theorists articulate (e.g. Rehg, 1994) is that if one thinks that knowledge is not and cannot be hierarchically distributed in the workplace then any moral or ethical justification for contemporary hierarchism seems unsustainable. Simultaneously critical theory’s promulgation of democracy upon epistemological grounds is clearly allied to the broader ethical argument that democracy is a good thing in itself (e.g. Archer, 1996) because those affected by governance decisions in the workplace, or anywhere else for that matter, should have the right to participate in them.

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H.C. (2012). Making Sense of Management: a critical introduction (2nd edn). London: Sage. Antony, P.D. (1977). The Ideology of Work. London: Tavistock. Archer, R. (1996). The philosophical case for economic democracy, in Pagano, U. and Rowthorn, R. (eds), Democracy and Efficiency in the Economic Enterprise. London: Routledge, pp. 13–38. Barnard, C. (1938). The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, P. (1980). Workplace Democratization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Blaug, R. (2009). Why is there hierarchy? Democracy and the question of organizational form. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 12(1): 85–99. Bradbury, H. and Lichtenstein, B. (2000). Relationality in organizational research: exploring the space between. Organization Science, 11: 551–64. Brief, A.P. (2000). Still servants of power. Journal of Management Inquiry, 9(4): 342–51. Child, J. (2009). Challenging hierarchy, in Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. and Willmott, H. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 501–14. Cloke, K. and Goldsmith J. (2002). The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Comte, A. (1853). The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. London: Chapman. Connolly, W.E. (1995). The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. de Tocqueville, A. (1840[2000]). Democracy in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Diefenbach, T. (2013). Hierarchy and Organisation: toward a general theory of Hierarchical Social Systems. London: Routledge. Drucker, P. (1977). Management. London: Pan. Durkheim, E. (1893[1964]). The Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press. Erdal, D. (2008). Local Heroes. London: Viking. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester. Fournier, V. and Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 53(10): 7–32. Friere, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and The Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gaventa, J. and Cornwall, A. (2006). Power and knowledge, in Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds), Handbook of Action Research: Concise Paperback Edition. London: Sage, pp. 71–83. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: reason and the rationalization of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2; Lifeworlds and System: a critique of functionalist reason. London: Heineman. Habermas, J. (1990). Reconstruction and interpretation in the social sciences, in Habermas, J. (ed.), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, pp. 21–42. Hill, C. (1984). The World Turned Upside Down. London: Peregrine Books. Hobbes T. (1651[2002]). Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1947). Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder. Jaques, E. (1990). In praise of hierarchy. Harvard Business Review, 68(1): 127–33. 368

Democracy

Johnson, P. and Duberley, J. (2011). Anomie and Culture Management: reappraising Durkheim. Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society, 18(4): 563–84. Kumar, K. (1987). Utopia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell. Linebaugh, P. (1991). The London Hanged. London: Penguin. Lukes S. (1978). Alienation and anomie, in Laslett, P. and Runciman, W.G. (eds), Philosophy Politics and Society. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 93–107. Mayo, E. (1919). Democracy and Freedom: an essay in social logic. Melbourne: Macmillan. Mayo, E. (1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York: Macmillan. Mayo, E. (1949). The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Melman, S. (2001). After Capitalism: from managerialism to workplace democracy. New York: Random House. Michels, R. (1915[1956]). Political Parties: a sociological study of the emergence of leadership, the psychology of power and the oligarchical tendencies of organization. New York: Dover. Patemen, C. (1970). Participation and Democratic Theory. London: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, C. (1975). Part 1. A contribution to the political theory of organizational democracy. Administration and Society, 7(1): 5–26. Rehg, W. (1994). Insight and Solidarity: a study in the discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenau, P.M. (1992). Post-modernism and the Social Sciences: insights, inroads and intrusions. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Rousseau, J-J. (1762[1983]). On the Social Contract and Discourses. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Rousseau, J-J. (1755[1984]). A Discourse on Inequality. London: Penguin. Sidanius, J., Pratto, F., van Laar, C. and Levin, S. (2004). Social dominance theory: its agenda and method. Political Psychology, 25(6): 845–80. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010). The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williamson, O.E. (1980). The organization of work: a comparative institutional assessment. Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, 1(1): 5–38. Wolin, S. (1990). Hobbes and the culture of despotism, in Dietz, M. (ed.), Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, pp. 55–70.

369

31 Diversity studies The contribution of black philosophers Elaine Swan

For mainstream First World political philosophy, race barely exists. What accounts for this silence? (Mills, 1998: 97)

Introduction In this chapter, I outline the contribution the philosophy of race to the growing sub-field of critical diversity studies in organizational theory. To do this, I introduce two scholars: critical race theorist and feminist, Sara Ahmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies, and Charles Mills, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. Mills identifies as a philosopher, Ahmed not; both draw on Western and postcolonial philosophers and feminist and critical race theorists to examine how white people reproduce a white racist order in organizations and institutions. Ahmed and Mills write extensively and so in this chapter, I can only sketch the depth and breadth of their thinking, introducing core concepts which have strong resonance for critical diversity studies. The work of Ahmed and Mills is not of concern just for critical diversity studies but also for philosophy as they rewrite the white canon of philosophy and some of its foundational ideas. As Mills argues: Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic diversity . . . both demographically and conceptually, it is one of the ‘whitest’ of the humanities. (Mills, 1997: 2) His main point here is to emphasize the whiteness of the academics and of the theorizing in the discipline, problems which affect organizational studies. Postcolonial critique brings race to the centre of critical diversity studies (see for example Jack and Lorbiecki, 2003; Mir et al., 2006; Prasad et al., 2006; Prasad et al., 1997) but these are exceptions and focus less on whiteness. Ahmed and Mills offer incisive philosophical arguments about the persistence of racism and inequality in institutions, through a genealogy of black philosophers and critical race theorists such as Audre Lorde, Franz Fanon and Gayatri Spivak. While white philosophers, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault influence critical diversity theorists 370

Diversity

intensively, to date there is little response to Ahmed (2000, 2006) and Mills’ work (1997; 2000; 2007), although Ahmed’s (2012) recent book on diversity is starting to be taken up. The omission of Mills’ work is striking given that the racial contract extends feminist political philosopher, Carole Pateman’s (1988) argument about the sexual contract. Pateman roundly criticizes political philosophy’s social contract theory because it posits a falsely universalist explanation of relations between the state and citizens, and assumes relations are egalitarian, ignoring the effect of race, gender and class. Her critique shaped a raft of feminist studies on inequalities in organizations: for instance, Joan Acker (2006), and Nirmal Puwar (2004) who use Pateman to challenge the notion of the ‘ideal worker’ underpinning organizational practices such as job descriptions, promotions, and corporate embodiment because it is male, white and able-bodied. Overall though, academics in critical diversity studies under-theorize how whiteness operates to reproduce inequalities in organizations (see Grimes, 2002; Hunter et al., 2010; Kerston, 2000; Swan, 2010a, 2010b for exceptions). To start to address these issues, the chapter starts with an overview of how theorists in critical diversity studies debate the nature of ‘difference’ and concludes with a summary of how Ahmed and Mills help us re-think how organizations racialize. An emerging sub-field in organizations studies, critical diversity studies grew out of opposition to mainstream diversity studies and practices. North American positivist, prescriptive research dominates mainstream diversity studies, reproducing ideas about how organizations can ‘manage’ the imagined ‘problem’ of the changing demographics of the workplace (Prasad and Mills, 1997; Mir et al., 2006). Such research ‘individuates difference, conceals inequalities and neutralizes histories of antagonism and struggle’ (Ahmed and Swan, 2006: 96). Influenced by discourse analysis, poststructural feminism, and to a lesser extent critical race theory and postcolonial theory, critical diversity studies brings an analysis of power, inequality and social justice to studies of diversity. Early writing in the field challenged the turn to diversity and a turn away from terms used to address discrimination, such as equal opportunities, affirmative action and anti-racism (Ahmed and Swan, 2006). Diversity was positioned as a more ‘palatable’ means of promoting equality given the white backlash to equal opportunities practices imagined to be a less ‘fractious’ analytical category than ‘race’ and less ‘divisive’ than affirmative action (Prasad et al., 1997; Mir et al., 2006: 171). The turn to diversity represents a shift in pragmatic, philosophical and political assumptions about what constitutes difference, and how to respond to it in the workplace. In philosophical terms, these shifts represent debates on the ontology of difference, although they are rarely discussed explicitly as such. Hence, in equal opportunities theory and practice, social relations produce differences related to race, gender, age and sexuality, with these categories ‘markers of hierarchy and oppression’ (Brah, 1996: 126; Kirton and Greene, 2005). Cultural and historical patterns and practices reproduce racial difference (Scott, 1999). These patterns lead to wider systems of discrimination, oppression and exploitation in society that need adjusting for in employment practices. In contrast, difference in diversity expands to include non-minoritized groups and idiosyncratic differentiators such as working styles, lifestyles and views (Benschop, 2001). Diversity recognizes and even ‘rewards’ difference at the level of the individual because rather than being seen as a product of social relations, it becomes an individual’s possession or achievement (Liff, 1999; Kirton and Greene, 2000). With white men included, diversity ignores the power asymmetries in the workplace and wider society. While there is little explicit philosophizing of difference in critical diversity studies, there is a long history elsewhere of theorizing the ways in which we produce difference through processes of Othering. 371

Elaine Swan

The ontological view that the Other constitutes our sense of self underpins the writing of a number of philosophers and postcolonial theorists: from Simone de Beauvoir and the Othering of women; and Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Franz Fanon on the Othering of racialized women and men. Drawing from different philosophical traditions, Othering refers to the multidimensional processes through which we socially differentiate and hierarchize people into ‘us’ and ‘them’, often based on notions of moral and intellectual inferiority and superiority (Jensen, 2011). In a rare attempt to discuss Othering and diversity in the workplace, organizational theorists Bodgan Costea and Lucas Introna (2008) draw on the existential phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas to stress that the Other is profoundly mysterious and unknowable. Hence, the Otherness of the Other cannot be rationalized for diversity management purposes. Indeed, they claim that diversity management ‘assaults human difference’ and reproduces sameness, creating ironically a ‘reduction of human diversity’ (Costea and Introna, 2008: 56; emphasis added). Diversity management cannot let the Other be Other. This position, however, can be a practical and political ‘dead-end’. Hence, critical race theorists such as Sanjay Sharma (2006) and Ahmed (2000, 2002) deploy a Levinasian philosophy of the Other in more optimistic ways. Accordingly, Sharma (2006) argues that when we think about these processes of Othering ethically, we need to distinguish between an abstract ontological fantasy Other and concrete Others whom we meet in specific relations and contexts. Thus, they suggest that it is possible to develop ethical relations to difference outside of appropriation, domination and assimilation.

Philosophy of race: ontology and epistemology Having provided a brief outline of the concept of difference in critical diversity studies, I turn to Mills and Ahmed. Mills’ main project is to place race at the centre of political philosophy – rather than in what he calls ‘the wings’ – to understand how white privilege is sustained across institutions such as education, housing, health and the law. To do this, he coins the term the ‘racial contract’ to characterize how the state systematically upholds a racial hierarchy to give white people advantages through the uneven distribution of, and access to resources, status and institutions. This is achieved through the ‘exploitation of non-white bodies, by withholding land and resources from them, and denying equal socio-economic opportunities to nonWhites’ (Mills, 1997: 58). He emphasizes how histories of European colonialism created global ‘racialized distributions of economic, political and cultural power’ (Mills, 1998: 98). This is of consequence for critical diversity studies, because he stresses that racism is a far reaching ‘institutionalized politico-economic structure’ not just a set of ideas or values (Mills, 1998: 100). Thus, he shows how forms and practices of organizing reproduce white advantage. With the racial contract, Mills critiques the social contract tradition which has dominated European political philosophy from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and in the twentieth century John Rawls. Like Pateman (1988), Mills challenges social contract theory because it assumes a ‘social ontology of the equality of (those counted as) persons’ (Mills, 1998: 107). But he extends her critique to focus on race. As he writes: ‘the universalist and colorless language of personhood fails to register the embedded structures of differentiated treatment and dichotomized moral psychology that “subpersonhood” captures’ (Mills, 1998: 109). Hence he stressed that the racial contract is the social contract with racialized aims and effects: a polity created by white people for their own advantage; and done so organizationally and institutionally. Importantly, in his view, the racial contract is extensive and exclusionary: it entails the historic functioning of the state and legal system, the workings of the economy, the development of particular moral psychologies and moral codes. Mills is quite clear that: ‘All Whites are 372

Diversity

beneficiaries of the contract, though some Whites are not signatories to it’ (Mills, 1997: 59). Historically the contract was required to conquest, colonize and enslave (Mills, 1997: 19). Today, it operates through economic exploitation, uneven distribution of public goods and services such as housing, and violence of the prison, army and police in order to sustain white privilege, all issues of importance for organization studies. The racial contract works to produce the morality and psychology of whiteness, discussed in the following section.

Epistemology of ignorance Critical race theorists and anti-racist activists have shifted from a commonplace understanding of racism as ignorance to that of institutional racism: systemic patterns of inequality produced through organizational practices. Racism as ignorance reproduced a reductive, individualistic, cognitive ‘bad apple’ model of racism. Mills, however, returns to ignorance but recasts it as a collective epistemology. Epistemological because white people ‘are unable to understand the world they have made’ meaning they ‘fail to understand genuine social realities’ (Mills, 1997: 67–8). In so doing, Mills expands ignorance and refers to processes such as misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, self-deception, historical amnesia and moral rationalization (Mills, 1997: 190). Hence, white people participate in a deep and systematic form of forgetting about, or refusing to recognize, their implication in relations of domination, subordination and privilege and the injustice, cruelty and suffering they cause (Mills, 1997; 2000; 2007; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). White ignorance is a structured, ‘implicit agreement to misrepresent the world’ (Mills, 1997: 80). And it is this which sustains the racial contract and its iniquitous effects in organizations and institutions. Mills’ work is an argument about white epistemology. In other words, white people see the world from a distorted white ‘standpoint’. Furthermore, whites do not pre-exist the racial contract, but come into existence as white through the contract. Race then is not, as he writes, DNA but ‘learned, rehearsed, and performed’ (Mills, 2000: 448). Importantly for critical diversity studies, he insists that we see race as embedded in legal decisions, social mores, networks of belief, institutions, structures of economic privilege and disadvantage, refuting an ‘anomaly view of racism’: Obviously, this does not mean that whites cannot grasp the Contract; many do, but they cannot accomplish this from the white point of view, a world-view which, according to Gibson, projects a ‘delusional world’, ‘a racial fantasyland’, and ‘a consensual hallucination’. (cited in Mills, 1997: 18) In conceptualizing racism as deeply systemic, grounded in the workings of institutions and repeatedly, collectively ignored in multiple ways by white people, Mills provides us with resources for examining how privilege is reproduced in, and by organizations. Although working with a different set of philosophical and theoretical resources, I show how Ahmed helps us understand how systematic forgetting operates and how organizations are produced as white.

The ontology of strange encounters and phenomenology of whiteness Overall, Ahmed’s work is always interested in racialisation: the processes through which race and racial bodies and spaces are made. These should be of critical significance to critical diversity studies. Her project is to investigate how identities, bodies, space and institutions produce, and 373

Elaine Swan

are produced through, racialized emotions and embodied dynamics. I start with how Ahmed understands Othering through ‘Strangering’ and, then turn to her work on the phenomenology of whiteness. Ahmed (2000, 2002) extends philosophical and postcolonial discussions on the Other using phenomenological philosopher Levinas’ call to recognize the ‘otherness of the other’ as her point of departure. Contra Costea and Introna (2008), she argues that Levinas’ ‘assumption that an attention to the particularity of others involves a negation of otherness needs to be challenged’ (Ahmed, 2002: 560). Ahmed’s point is that it is the mode of encounter with the Other – particular, specific and concrete – not their ontological status that can give us the opportunity for a political and ethical opening up to difference, not containing or assimilating it. Difference is not ‘something in the body of another . . . [but] happens in the encounter’ (Ahmed, 2000: 144). What she means by this is that we try to understand the terms through which we produce the idea of difference in specific modes of encounters, influenced by the traces of colonial past, processes of racialization and our own prejudices, bodies and emotions. In other words, we need to understand how difference is determined in concrete meetings with ‘others I meet in the world’ through broader social and historical processes (ibid). The fulcrum of her argument is that we already recognize who and what the stranger is before we meet them because of ideas that circulate in the media, policy and culture. As she (Ahmed, 2000) puts it, the stranger is not that strange. Hence rather than experiencing a bodily encounter with a concrete Other, we transform the stranger into a predetermined universalized figure: the Stranger. We imagine them as ‘ontologically prior’ to the social relations that construct them, disregarding the political and historical processes through which people are ‘made’ strange (Ahmed, 2000: 9). She calls the process through which the Other is translated into the figure of the stranger and cut off from the ‘histories of its determination’ stranger fetishism (Ahmed, 2000: 5). Thus, she extends the Marxist’s concept of commodity fetishism in which histories of the production of objects are erased, and objects seen to be autonomous, with a life of their own, by suggesting that objects are transformed into figures. In this case, the figure is the stranger: a relational effect, not an ontological. What matters in this process is that we forget ‘the social and material relations which over-determine their existence, and the consequent perception that such figures have a ‘life of their own’ (Ahmed, 2000: 7). For example, writing of Muslim women who wear the hijab, Ahmed argues that universalism is a ‘fantasy of proximity’: For, at one level, reading the ‘veiled woman’ as an oppressed woman who is sexually controlled involves a fantasy that one can inhabit the place of the other, that one already knows what ‘the other’ means (and therefore needs). (Ahmed, 2000: 166) As she writes, ‘we can only avoid stranger fetishism . . . by examining the social relationships that are concealed by this very fetishism. . . . [W]e need to consider how the stranger is an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion’ (Ahmed, 2000: 6). This entails us understanding how difference is located and determined by the particularity of mode of the encounter, not in the Other’s body. This ontological process of stranger fetishism is unevenly distributed racially as Ahmed (2000) shows in her analysis of social cultural and organizational practices of making strangers: neighbourhood watch, multicultural policy, migration, ethnography and diversity training. Strangerness is not universal as we react to some bodies as disgusting or fearful and not others. In this way, the idea of the Stranger works as mechanism for sorting people into good and bad; friendly and those of whom we should be afraid (Ahmed, 2004). 374

Diversity

Ahmed’s argument about stranger fetishism matters for critical diversity studies because institutions make strangers. As strangers already being ‘known’, ‘strangers become objects not only of feeling but also of governance: strangers are bodies that are managed’ (Ahmed, 2014). Diversity can be seen as one such form of governance; but there are more grave institutional processes: to be seen as suspicious, dangerous or to be feared can have lethal consequences (Ahmed, 2014). Stranger fetishism produces some bodies that feel at home and others that feels existentially and physically deeply ill-at-ease how belonging is unevenly allocated in organizational spaces I turn to in this final section on Ahmed’s work.

White orientations in organizations Using phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Fanon as her point of departure, Ahmed (2006, 2007, 2012) explores ‘what allows whiteness to be done’ and ‘how whiteness is lived’ in organizations (Ahmed, 2007: 50). She describes her approach as a ‘phenomenology of whiteness’ the aim of which is to show how whiteness is ‘“real”, material and lived’, the ‘background to experience’ (Ahmed, 2007: 150). Whiteness starts from the ‘here’ of the body to what is around and how this affects how the world unfolds (Ahmed, 2007). A phenomenological approach enables her to examine how white bodies feel at home, comfortable, a sense of fitting in organizations. Using the concept of orientations, she emphasises the body and the significance of what is to hand: what and who is near and how this enables a feeling of familiarity and belonging. In this way, she sees whiteness as an orientation in the world: a product of habits of tending towards objects that are ‘in reach, available within the bodily horizon’ which shape bodies and worlds (Ahmed, 2007: 55). A shared inheritance in whiteness affects how we ‘inhabit space’ and ‘who’ or ‘what’ we orient ourselves towards, repeating white habits and producing white space. As a result of historic and present-day colonialism, the world is inherited as white, and continually, reproduced as white (Ahmed, 2009). More specifically, ‘institutionalized whiteness’ characterizes how whiteness works through institutional habits and bodily orientations in physical and social space. Hence, she defines whiteness as ‘an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they “take up” space, and what they “can do”’ (Ahmed, 2009: 149). Organizations operate through white habits that are inherited and reproduced. As she writes: Whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. By objects, we would include not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits. Race becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do ‘things’ with. (Ahmed, 2009: 154) These orientations enable white people to move easily and feel at home in organizations, while minoritized others feel out of place. The habitual actions of bodies give organizations a habitual shape of whiteness: thus, ‘spaces acquire the shape of the bodies that “inhabit” them’ (Ahmed, 2007: 156). As a result, white people can take up more space, do and reach more in organizations, extending ‘into spaces that have already taken their shape’ (Ahmed, 2007: 158). Reminding us of the ongoing effects of colonialism, she writes: Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space and what they ‘can do’. (Ahmed, 2009: 149) 375

Elaine Swan

In this way, and of significance for critical diversity studies, Ahmed problematizes organizational practices such as recruitment, promotion and networks based on notions of individual merit and skill. Even with equality and diversity practices, racially minoritized women and men cannot feel an easy sense of belonging or familiarity. This is because phenomenologically: familiarity is shaped by the ‘feel’ of space or by how spaces ‘impress’ upon bodies. . . . The familiar is an effect of an inheritance . . . the familiar is shaped by actions that reach out towards objects that are already in reach. (Ahmed, 2000: 7) As a result, minorities in white space are made to feel disoriented: and their extending towards spaces and objects can fail. And importantly, as Ahmed (2007) insists, it is not always obvious which places are the ones where racially minoritized people can feel at home. This is not to say that racially minoritized women and men do not have individual and collective skills and strategies to succeed in, and challenge organizations but to point to the effects of entrenched whiteness and racism.

Future development In this chapter, I introduce the work of Ahmed and Mills through four concepts to show how they can extend our thinking in critical diversity studies. There is much more in their scholarship, and that of other race philosophers than I can cover here. Overall, their work challenges the somewhat reductive but prevalent assumption that ‘once we have more women and racialised minorities, or other groups, represented in the hierarchies of organizations . . . then we shall have diversity’ (Puwar, 2004: 1). Their work emphasizes how organizations are inflected by colonialist histories in structural and interpersonal ways through bodies and emotions. Of great concern to critical diversity studies, they insist on the collective labour undertaken by white people which continues to produces whiteness, power and ignorance. As Ahmed put it: The institutionalization of whiteness involves work: the institution comes to have a body as an effect of this work. It is important that we do not reify institutions, by presuming they are simply given and that they decide what we do. Rather, institutions become given, as an effect of the repetition of decisions made over time, which shapes the surface of institutional spaces. Institutions involve the accumulation of past decisions about how to allocate resources, as well as ‘who’ to recruit. (Ahmed, 2009: 157) This calls for critical diversity researchers to examine more closely social and cultural processes which create organizational practices, particularly those which reproduce inequalities in all its forms. Ultimately, Ahmed and Mills show us the working of whiteness in all its manifestations and thus a fundamental challenge is how we change diversity practice from being about ‘changing perceptions of whiteness . . . [to] changing the whiteness of organisations’ (Ahmed, 2009: 4). In different ways, Ahmed and Mills address the larger matter of why current equality and diversity approaches do not change organizational practices. They underscore how colonial pasts haunt what we do, think and feel today. At stake in Ahmed’s research (2014) is how racialized emotions produce bodies and space in ways which mean that some bodies arrive with a particular ‘charge’ which they have to work against. Ahmed’s point that spaces become white and close down to minoritized bodies means that we need to research diversity practices more phenomenologically. The upshot of Mill’s thinking is that white people will put much energy 376

Diversity

and work – consciously and unconsciously – into ignoring, misrepresenting and forgetting about racial inequalities in the workplace. To put it bluntly, he shows how white people and organizations benefit from exploitation and racism. Indeed, their thinking raises a significant challenge for critical diversity theorists and practitioners to examine the production and effects of institutional whiteness. This includes how critical diversity studies and organizational studies work as spaces of white collective ignorance and habits.

Bibliography (key texts in bold) Acker, J. (2006). Inequality regimes gender, class, and race in organisations. Gender & Society, 20(4): 441–64. Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2002). This other and other others. Economy and Society, 31(4): 558–72. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2): 149–68. Ahmed, S. (2009). Embodying diversity: problems and paradoxes for Black feminists. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(1): 41–52. Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). Making Strangers, retrieved on 7 November 2014 from http://feministkilljoys.com/ 2014/08/04/making-strangers/. Ahmed, S. and Swan, E. (2006). Doing diversity. Policy Futures in Education, 4(2): 96–100. Benschop, Y. (2001). Pride, prejudice and performance: relations between HRM, diversity and performance. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 12: 1166–81. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: contesting identities. London: Routledge. Costea, B. and Introna, L.D. (2008). On the mystery of the other and diversity management, in Fay, E., Ilharco, F. and Introna, L. (eds), Phenomenology, Organisation and Technology. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora and POT Books, 187–206. de Beauvoir, S. (1997). The Second Sex. London: Vintage [first published in French in 1949]. Grimes, D.S. (2002). Challenging the status quo? Whiteness in the diversity management literature. Management Communication Quarterly, 15(3): 381–409. Hunter, S., Swan, E. and Grimes, D. (2010). Introduction: reproducing and resisting whiteness in organisations, policies, and places. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 17(4): 407–22. Jack, G. and Lorbiecki, A. (2003). Asserting possibilities of resistance in the cross-cultural teaching machine: re-viewing videos of others, in Prasad, A. (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and Organisational Analysis: a critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 213–32. Jensen, S. (2011). Othering, Identity formation and agency. Qualitative Studies, 2(2): 63–78. Kersten, A. (2000). Diversity management: dialogue, dialectics and diversion. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 13(3): 235–48. Kirton, G. and Greene, A.M. (2000). The Dynamics of Managing Diversity. Oxford: Elsevier ButterworthHeinemann. Kirton, G. and Greene, A.M. (2005) (2nd edn). The Dynamics of Managing Diversity. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Liff, S. (1997). Two routes to managing diversity; individual differences or social group characteristics. Employee Relations, 9(1): 11–27. Liff, S. (1999). Diversity and equal opportunities: room for a constructive compromise? Human Resource Management Journal, 9(1): 65–75. Mills, C. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. (1998). Blackness Visible: essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. (2000). Race and the social contract tradition. Social Identities, 6(4): 441–62. Mills, C. (2007). White ignorance. Race and epistemologies of ignorance, in Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 11–38. Mills, C. (2008). Racial Liberalism. PMLA, 123(5): 1380–97. Mir, R. Mir, A. and Wong, D.J. (2006). Diversity: the cultural logic of global capital, in Konrad, A.M., Prasad, P. and Pringle, J.K. (eds), Handbook of Workplace Diversity. London: Sage, pp. 167–88. 377

Elaine Swan

Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press. Prasad, P. and Mills, A.J. (1997). From showcasing to shadows, in Prasad, P., Mills, A.J., Elmes, M. and Prasad, A. (eds), Managing the Organisational Melting Pot: dilemmas of workplace diversity. London: Sage, pp. 3–30. Prasad, P., Mills, A.J., Elmes, M. and Prasad, A. (eds) (1997). Managing the Organisational Melting Pot: dilemmas of workplace diversity. London: Sage. Prasad, P., Pringle, J.K. and Konrad, A.M. (2006). Examining the contours of workplace diversity: concepts, contexts and challenges, in Konrad, A.M., Prasad P. and Pringle, J.K. (eds), Handbook of Workplace Diversity. London: Sage, pp. 1–24. Puwar, N. (2004). Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford: Berg. Said, E. (1995). Orientalism. London: Penguin [first published in 1978]. Scott, J. (1999). The Conundrum of Equality. Paper No. 2. Princeton, NJ: Institute for Advanced Study. Sharma, S. (2006). Multicultural Encounters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Spivak G.C. (1985). The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in reading the archives. History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, 24(3): 247–72. Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds) (2007). Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Swan, E. (2010a). States of White Ignorance, and Audit Masculinity in English Higher Education. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 17(4): 477–506. Swan, E. (2010b). Commodity diversity: smiling faces as a strategy of containment. Organisation, 17(1): 77–100.

378

32 Environment, extractivism and the delusions of nature as capital Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

Prelude In 2012 we visited two communities in the North of Argentina. The people of Andalgalá have been living a stone’s throw away from Argentina’s biggest open-pit mine since the late 1990s. Our research (Misoczky and Böhm, 2013) revealed a string of environmental impacts of the mine, which is run by a consortium of multinational mining companies, led by Xstrata, now part of Glencore, the world’s second biggest miner. Local activists, with the help of university students and researchers, have been collecting samples from water sources close to the town, showing that there has been considerable pollution and a threat to human and animal health as well as wider biodiversity – which is however contested by the company. While the people of Andalgalá have been living with the mine for almost two decades, a few hundred kilometres to the South, in Famatina, the people have been successfully resisting the arrival of Canadian and Chinese mining companies. We witnessed (Misoczky and Böhm, 2015) the struggle of local, ordinary people against local, regional and national state authorities who, over a period of ten years, have been trying to pave the way for international capital to exploit the mining riches of the Famatina mountain. People all over Argentina and Latin America are resisting the extraordinary expansion of mining activities, which have already caused environmental damages and continue to polarize people (Giarraca, 2007; Svampa, 2009; Machado et al., 2011; Massuh, 2012). While jobs and economic betterment are promised by the state authorities and the investing companies, communities’ livelihoods are under threat due to considerable threats of water and air contamination as well as the social, economic and cultural ills of what is called ‘boomtown syndrome’ (Wenner, 1992). Spurred by hyper-development in China and other emerging economies and the exploding global demand for consumer and technology products, mining – and the extractive industries in general – is delivering the required extraordinary amounts of energy (coal, oil, gas, etc.) and 379

Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

raw materials (copper, silver, gold, rare earth, etc.). To meet the rising demand and satisfy the needs of international shareholders for ever-increasing share prices and dividends, new mining and extraction technologies have been introduced, which have increased the environmental risks significantly. Large aspects of mining today are dependent on the use of large amounts of toxic chemicals and extraordinary quantities of water. For example, open pit mining is essentially about removing entire mountains, and then, with the help of chemicals and water, washing tiny particles of gold, silver and copper out of the crushed rock. Equally, fracking is a technique that pumps a mixture of sand, chemicals and water at high pressure into rock formations, releasing gas and oil trapped there. A host of other so-called unconventional extraction methods (e.g. oil sands, deep-ocean drilling, etc.) have been, and continue to be, invented to reach the last remaining energy sources and raw materials on this planet. As hyper-industrial activities reach ever new frontiers, such as the Andes, the Arctic, the Canadian tundra, etc., pristine and fragile ecosystems and their biodiversity are threatened, as are the communities living with and off that land. These tend to be indigenous communities, which have become marginalized through centuries of colonialism and exploitation. These traditional, often close-knit communities can be called ‘ecocultures’ (Böhm et al., 2014), as they live in close connection to nature and are dependent on the land for their livelihoods. Traditional as well as emerging ecocultures all over the world are threatened by expanding extractive industries: Sámi communities in Sweden, Finland and Russia; Aboriginal communities in Australia, the Amungme and Komoro peoples in West Papua, and many other indigenous and rural communities in the Pacific, Africa, North and South America – essentially around the world. If Harvey (2014) is correct, then the environment is one of the key and most pronounced contradictions of capital. Yet the environmental contradictions involved in capitalist economic activity are largely invisible or ignored in organization studies. This chapter tries to explain why this might be and ways to remedy the situation, making use of philosophical and social theoretical concepts from both the Global South and the Global North.

Business environment: nature as capital In mainstream organization and management studies (OMS), ‘the environment’ is often approached as an institutional factor that has to be taken into account when doing business. For example, Carney and Gedajlovic (2002: 2) develop the idea of ‘mutual and reciprocal influence between institutional environments and organizational action’. That is, organizational decision-making and leadership is embedded in a wider institutional environment, including national laws and culture, political frames and ideologies, entrepreneurial climate and education levels, to name but a few. In OMS considerable attention has been put on studying these relationships between organizations and wider socio-economic and institutional set-ups, with a particular emphasis on the ever-changing nature of the organization–environment interface. One of these recent changes has been the dramatic rise of virtual environments in which organizing takes place. For example, Verona et al. (2006) study the dialogic relationships firms build with customers through online platforms. Blanchard (2011) shows how organizations can profit from newly emerging social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter. Selsky et al. (2007) argue that ever more turbulent, that is changing, environments require organizations to engage in different styles and types of strategy making than in the past. 380

Environment

In fact, Selsky et al.’s (2007) paper is insightful for their use of concepts – such as nature, socio-ecological thinking, and environment – which seemingly belong to the environmental sciences rather than the field of OMS. This is due to an import of ideas and concepts from complexity theory into OMS, helping organizational theorists to see organizations ‘as embedded in complex social systems and cultural contexts’. Decision-makers, hence, need to ‘take into account long-term effects and repercussions of action . . . working long “shadows of the future” into strategic decisions’ (Selsky et al., 2007: 75–6). What these mainstream OMS perspectives have in common is an instrumental and narrow view and conceptualization of ‘the environment’, which needs to be managed for the purpose of profit- and strategy-making. Here, ‘the environment’ is not a natural system that features complex, adaptive and evolutionary interactions between plants, animals, soils, climates and other aspects of the natural world. Instead, it is conceived of as a social system that can be manipulated, organized, managed and strategically changed. That the environment as natural system has been disavowed in OMS, has been recognized since at least the early 1990s. One of the early examples was delivered by Shrivastava’s (1994, 1995) devastating critique, exposing the severe limitations of OMS’ treatment of ‘the environment’. Shrivastava (1994) problematizes the anthropocentrism at the heart of how organizational scholars mostly engage with the environment, treating it as a social, or, even more narrowly, a business concern, rather than seeing nature in its own right. Nature, in his view, is represented in OMS in shallow, abstract, ahistorical ways; something that can be exploited, reified and denaturalized. What needs to replace this anthropocentric, instrumental and managerial view of nature and the environment is a conception of what Shrivastava (1994) calls the ‘eco-biosphere’. Based on eco-feminism, deep ecology and other ecological thought, he maintains that natural ecosystems are self-regulating systems that maintain themselves (Lovelock, 2000). This leads him to claim that organizations can no longer be treated primarily as rational, neutral, technical systems of production, as is done in traditional OS. They must also be seen as systems of destruction. They systemically destroy environmental value. This destruction cannot be dismissed away as an ‘externality’ of production. Organizations must become accountable for these externalities, which are a central and systematic feature of organized economic activity. (Shrivastava, 1994: 721, emphasis in original) It is precisely the incorporation of the environmental externalities – such as pollution, destruction of ecosystems, deforestation, etc. – that has defined much of the debate of the organizations’ impact on the environment over the past two decades. Let us now discuss in more detail how corporations and other organizations have responded to this challenge set out by Shrivastava.

Environmental governance and corporate environmentalism Shrivastava’s (1994) intervention was written at the time when the destructive environmental impact of businesses became a central concern for corporations and governments. The Rio ‘Earth Summit’ was held in 1992, following the publication of the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987). Both landmark events put global environmental crises (such as climate change, biodiversity loss and deforestation) firmly on the map of economic and political decision-making at a global level. While both Rio 1992 and Brundtland 1987 are often portrayed as crucial starting points for the modern day sustainability movement, it is often forgotten that these (inter-)governmental 381

Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

efforts should be seen as responses to the environmental, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements that emerged around the world since the 1960s. It is these movements that have long argued that capitalism and its organizational set-up are ecologically destructive and environmentally unsustainable (Esteva, 1987; Guha, 1988; Shiva, 2005). While the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s criticized the environmental performance of governmental and corporate organizations, which they openly linked to a fundamental questioning of the capitalist system and its economic growth mantra, the landmark Brundtland and Rio events introduced the idea that environmental sustainability and capitalism do not have to be mutually exclusive. In line with dominant ideological discourses and practices of that time, ‘sustainable development’ was now positioned as something that has to and can be achieved by sound environmental governance, which would see governments, corporations and civil society working together to solve the most pressing environmental and social problems of humanity. Such a neo-liberal approach, which has become the dominant force in the world, is premised on the assumption, taken from the work of Kuznets (1973), that rapid economic growth is a precondition for environmental sustainability. That is, the richer nations, economies and communities become, the more they would look after their natural environment. In addition, the ideological assumption has been that market-based organizations – business, corporations and industries – do not need to be regulated by governments and other state authorities. Instead, they can regulate themselves in collaboration with civil society actors, applying market-based tools of cooperation and competition (Bernstein, 2002). The political ground that was prepared for this fundamentally new approach to business regulation and environmental governance in the early 1990s has led to a string of corporate discourses and practices on dealing with stakeholders and the ethical and environmental conduct of corporations. Stakeholder management, business ethics, corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility (CSR), green and ethical marketing – these are just some examples of the terms that have become popular over the past two decades, propagated in management textbooks and journals and implemented by entire armies of academic experts, managers and consultants. Within OMS, environmental management was institutionalized through the establishment of the Greening of Industry Network in 1989, the Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) special interest group of the Academy of Management in 1994, and specialized academic journals, such as Business Strategy and the Environment in 1992, Organization and Environment (started as Industrial and Environmental Crisis Quarterly in 1987 and changed to Organization and Environment in 1997), and the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 1997 (Hoffman and Georg, 2012). While research on ‘the issue of organizations and the environment is broad and multilayered’ (Etzioni, 2007: 657), the mainstream canon has been about incorporating the natural environment into a concern that can be dealt with by the managerial institution. That is, the natural environmental has become the organizational environment, which again can be managed, captured and denaturalized. Dahlmann and Brammer (2011), for example, show how US companies have adapted and selected corporate environmental strategies. Hoffman (1999), in one of the most cited papers on corporate environmentalism, analyses processes of institutional evolution and change in the US chemical industry. Delmas and Toffel (2004) look at how companies engage with stakeholders within the context of environmental management practices. What underlines these approaches is the belief that capitalist high-growth economic development is possible to combine with social justice and environmental integrity. Business gurus, such as Haque (2011) and Porter and Kramer (2011) see this as a new phase of capitalist development that reduces (or eliminates) the destructive production of externalities, putting the current economic system on a more sustainable footing. 382

Environment

Nature as capital John Elkington (1998) was one of the first writers and practitioners who called for, what he termed, a ‘triple bottom line’ approach, which would put the drive for business profits on the same level as the concern for people and the planet. The three Ps – people, planet and profit – always have to be seen and enacted together, he argues, if true sustainability is the objective. In Elkington’s eyes – as well as those of many other environmentalists, management writers and business consultants (e.g. Hawken et al., 2013 and Juniper, 2013) – this new approach would start the next industrial revolution, radically reforming the way capitalism functions. In the words of Tony Juniper (2013), who was Executive Director of Friends of the Earth, England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as Vice Chair of Friends of the Earth International from 2000 to 2008, ‘money really does grow on trees’. What he means is that the economy should not be seen in opposition to the environment. Instead, nature provides many so-called ‘ecosystems services’ to us, the inhabitants of this planet, and our economies for free, which implies that we need to look after nature and protect it well. Take crop pollination for example. Bees all over the world provide a free service to agriculture by pollinating our crops, without which there would not be any food on humanity’s table. Ecological economists, such as Costanza and Daly (1992) – see also Costanza et al. (1997) and Costanza et al. (1998) – have thus, for the past two to three decades, tried to calculate how much nature provides to us and our economies, literally trying to put a price tag on all the ecosystem services, as economists call them, that nature provides for free. In 1997 the value of ecosystem services was estimated to be around $46 trillion a year (in 2007 $US). The most recent 2011 estimate (Costanza et al., 2014) puts that price tag at $125 trillion a year (in 2007 $US). Costanza and his colleagues have also calculated the loss of eco-services from 1997 to 2011 due to land use change, which they put at about $4.3 trillion to $20.2 trillion a year. While such calculations are often well-intentioned, showing how business and other human activity threaten and destroy nature, they have also been critiqued by many social scientists and political economists for reducing nature to numbers and price tags. Arsel and Büscher (2012), Büscher et al. (2012) and Sullivan (2009) all show how these economic calculations help to reposition nature as provider of services to capital. While in their latest paper Costanza et al. (2014) are at pains to emphasize that such ecosystem services valuations do not automatically have to lead to the commodification and privatization of nature, it is clear that such calculations are being used for exactly these purposes. That is, dominant neo-liberal ideologies and accumulation strategies (Harvey, 2005) cannot help but turn nature into, what is called, ‘natural capital’ (Kareiva et al., 2011). Büscher et al. (2012: 4) show how the natural capital approach is part of the idea of ‘neoliberal conservation as an amalgamation of ideology and techniques informed by the premise that natures can only be “saved” through their submission to capital and its subsequent revaluation in capitalist terms, what McAfee (1999) has aptly labeled “selling nature to save it”’. This has had widespread application in economic policies such as: carbon trading (Böhm and Dabhi, 2009), biodiversity offsetting (Hannis and Sullivan, 2012) and other neo-liberal conservation strategies. Valuing nature as capital is often propagated by environmentalists, such as Juniper (2013), in order to counteract the widespread approach by organizations to ‘greenwash’ or ‘astroturf’ their way into a green public image. Fineman (2001), for example, talks about the ‘greening’ of business and industry as a management fashion, strategically used to gain legitimacy for unsustainable business methods. Similarly, Peattie and Crane (2005) expose the green marketing efforts of large companies as anything but ‘green’. Kraemer et al. (2013) critically discuss the way a large Indian mining company has set up a ‘fake’ environmental NGO to further its business aims – an approach that has been dubbed ‘astroturfing’. 383

Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

These are cynical attempts by large organizations to legitimize and expand their power bases. While in public their might use the language of following a ‘triple bottom line’ approach, in practice what matters are the quarterly profit results and the dividends paid to shareholders, or the efficiency gains made in public service organizations. ‘The environment’ is on many managers’ lips nowadays, but, following Harvey’s (2014) realistic yet devastating critique, we must understand these environmental efforts as being subsumed to the constant drive of capital to expand its accumulation and legitimacy base. At the same time, these efforts have an enormous adverse impact, producing territorial fragmentation and destroying any chance of a multidimensional organization of labour and production. They are examples of a practice that, ‘with respect to the physical world and within the web of ecological life . . . changes the face of the earth in often dramatic and irreversible ways’ (Harvey, 2010: 185).

Post-script In the last decades, Latin America has being experiencing a new wave of developmentalism, which has also been dubbed ‘extractivism’ (Gudynas, 2009). Rapid expansion of mining, oil and gas, monocultural agriculture and other environmentally damaging business sectors have been at the heart of this attempt to develop and progress national economies on this continent. This is not a new phenomenon though. Latin America has a long history of extractivism (Bunker, 1985), which started in colonial times, which was so emphatically described by Galeano (1971: 1) in his famous Open Veins of Latin America: The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role. We are no longer in the era of marvels when face surpassed fable and imagination was shamed by the trophies of conquest – the lodes of gold, the mountains of silver. But our region still works as a menial. It continues to exist at the service of others’ needs, as a source and reserve of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them. While extractivism was already devastating for the Latin American people during colonial times, it has been further intensified recently. For a short period – after recognizing that, in the long run, declining terms of trade would frustrate the development of Latin America (Prebisch, 1950) – national governments of the region directed their economic policies towards, what has been called, industrialization by import substitution (Baer, 1972). That is, rather than heavily relying on exporting raw materials and importing semi-processed or processed goods, governments developed national industries and manufacturing bases. However, because of the civil-military dictatorships of the 1970s, the debt crisis of the 1980s and the structural adjustment policies in the 1990s, the theory of comparative advantage prevailed, pushing Latin American countries back into the role of raw materials providers (Lander, 2014). Today, Latin America is again in a process of deindustrialization, refocusing on producing primary commodities, such as minerals, soya, corn, timber, etc. Svampa (2012) names this the ‘commodity consensus’, which has emerged everywhere in Latin America recently, regardless of the professed political differences between governments of the region. This is also the case for countries that have adopted progressive political frameworks in their newly adopted 384

Environment

constitutions. Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, incorporated the indigenous cosmovision of harmonic life (Sumak Kawsay) in their national constitutions. However, both governments are pressing forward with extractive developments in mining, oil and gas operations. This economic growth strategy, shared among all so-called left-wing governments in Latin America (including Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela) has been termed ‘progressive neo-extractivism’ (Gudynas, 2009) and ‘left extractivism’ (Klein, 2014). In response to the lack of concern of the region’s governments for the environment and their inabilities to see and prevent ecological destructions and displacements of communities, large-scale mass struggles and social movements have emerged across the region, demanding protection of the commons, the rights of nature and the value of life. Popular, indigenous, peasant, environmentalist and feminist opposition to the commodification of nature and the commons has been increasing steadily over the past two decades (Flores, 2013; Flores and Misoczky, 2014). Consequently, the organized opposition to extractivism has been widely criminalized all over the region, which includes attempts to deny people the right to protest and struggle. With local, regional and national governments joining forces with NGOs, church leaders and national and multinational corporations to advance extractivism in Latin America, it is down to grassroots social movements to struggle for alternatives. It is on their land that they see nature being commodified in the name of jobs, economic growth and development; yet it is also on their land where they take inspiration for their struggle to maintain the value of life and selfdetermination. These people are firmly in opposition to the extractive model of development, to the contamination of water, to the destruction of their land, to the dissemination of disease and death. At the same time, they imagine and struggle for a different future; a future that cannot be defined by the forces of capital accumulation, but by the people as they seek to collectively define how they want to live in harmony with the nature and themselves.

References (key texts in bold) Arsel, M. and Büscher, B. (2012). Nature(tm) Inc.: changes and continuities in neoliberal conservation and market-based environmental policy. Development and Change, 43(1): 53–78. Baer, W. (1972): Import substitution and industrialization in Latin America: experiences and interpretations. Latin American Research Review, 1972: 95–122. Bernstein, S. (2002). Liberal environmentalism and global environmental governance. Global Environmental Politics, 2(3): 1–16. Blanchard, O. (2011). Social Media ROI: managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization. London: Pearson Education. Böhm S. and Dabhi, S. (eds) (2009). Upsetting the Offset: the political economy of carbon markets. London: Mayfly. Retrieved on 15 February 2015 from http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=21. Böhm, S., Bharucha, Z. and Pretty, J. (2014). Ecocultures: blueprints for sustainable communities. London: Routledge. Bunker, S.G. (1985). Underdeveloping the Amazon: extraction, unequal exchange, and the failure of the modern state. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J. and Brockington, D. (2012). Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23(2): 4–30. Carney, M. and Gedajlovic, E. (2002). The co-evolution of institutional environments and organizational strategies: the rise of family business groups in the ASEAN region. Organization Studies, 23(1): 1–29. Costanza, R. and Daly, H.E. (1992). Natural capital and sustainable development. Conservation Biology, 6(1): 37–46. Costanza, R., d’Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farberk, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B. . . . and van den Belt, M. (1997). The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature, 387: 253. 385

Steffen Böhm and Maria Ceci Misoczky

Costanza, R., d’Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farberk, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B. . . . and van den Belt, M. (1998). The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Ecological Economics, 25: 5–15. Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Ploeg, S., Anderson, S.J., Kubiszewski, I. . . . and Turner, R.K. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26: 152–8. Dahlmann, F. and Brammer, S. (2011). Exploring and explaining patterns of adaptation and selection in corporate environmental strategy in the USA. Organization Studies, 32(4): 527–53. Delmas, M. and Toffel, M.W. (2004). Stakeholders and environmental management practices: an institutional framework. Business Strategy and the Environment, 13(4): 209–22. Elkington, J. (1998). Cannibals with Forks: the triple bottom line of sustainability. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Esteva, G. (1987). Regenerating people’s space. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 12(1): 125–152. Etzioni, D. (2007). Research on organizations and the natural environment, 1992–present: a review. Journal of Management, 33(4): 637–64. Fineman, S. (2001). Fashioning the environment. Organization, 8(1): 17–31. Flores, R.K. (2013). Dos antagonismos na apropriação capitalista da água à sua concepção como bem comum. PhD Thesis, PPGA-UFRGS. Retrieved on 15 February 2015 from www.bibliotecadigital.ufrgs.br/da. php?nrb=000882278&loc=2013&l=b4c0a6bca982fe93. Flores, R.K. and Misoczky, M.C. (2014). Towards a concept of water as a common good, presented at the V Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies, Havana. Galeano, E. (1971). Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Ciudad de México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores (the English version is available at www.e-reading.link/bookreader.php/149187/ Open_Veins_of_Latin_America.pdf.). Giarraca, N. (2007). The tragedy of development: disputes over natural resources in Argentina. Sociedad, 3: 1–14. Gudynas, E. (2009). Diez Tesis Urgentes Sobre el Nuevo Extractivismo, in CAAP (ed.), Extractivismo, política y sociedad. Quito: CLAES, pp. 187–225. Guha, R. (1988). Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford University Press. Hannis, M. and Sullivan, S. (2012). Offsetting Nature? Habitat banking and biodiversity offsets in the English land use planning system. Retrieved on 15 February 2015 from www.greenhousethinktank. org/files/greenhouse/home/offsetting_nature_inner_final.pdf. Haque, U. (2011). The New Capitalist Manifesto: building a disruptively better business. Harvard Business Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2010). The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawken, P., Lovins, A.B. and Lovins, L.H. (2013). Natural Capitalism: the next industrial revolution. London: Routledge. Hoffman, A.J. (1999). Institutional evolution and change: environmentalism and the US chemical industry. Academy of Management Journal, 42(4): 351–71. Hoffman, A. and Georg, S. (2012). A history of research on business and the natural environment: conversations from the field, in Hoffman, A.J. and Susse, G. (eds), Critical Perspectives in Business and Management: business and the natural environment. London: Routledge, pp. 5–54. Juniper, T. (2013). What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?: How money really does grow on trees. London: Profile Books. Kareiva, P., Tallis, H., Ricketts, T.H., Daily, G.C. and Polasky, S. (eds) (2011). Natural Capital: theory and practice of mapping ecosystem services. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: capitalism vs the climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kraemer, R., Whiteman, G. and Banerjee, B. (2013). Conflict and astroturfing in Niyamgiri: the importance of national advocacy networks in anti-corporate social movements. Organization Studies, 34(5–6): 823–52. Kuznets, S.S. (1973). Population, Capital and Growth. New York: Norton. Lander, E. (2014). El neoextractivismo como modelo de desarrollo en América Latina y sus contradiciones. México: Henrich Böll Stiftung. Lovelock, J. (2000). Gaia: a new look at life on earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAfee, K. (1999). Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and green developmentalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17(2): 133–54. 386

Environment

Machado, H. et al. (2011). 15 mitos y realidades de la minería transnacional en la Argentina: guía para desmontar el imaginario prominero. Buenos Aires: El Colectivo-Herramienta. Massuh, G. (ed.) (2012). Renunciar al bien común: extractivismo y (pos)desarrollo en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Mardulce. Misoczky, M.C. and Böhm, S. (2013). Resisting neocolonial development: Andalgalá’s people struggle against mega-mining projects. Cadernos EBAPE. BR, 11(2): 311–39. Retrieved on 15 June 2015 from http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/cadernosebape/article/ view/9223/8321. Misoczky, M.C. and Böhm, S. (2015). The oppressed organize against mega-mining in Famatina, Argentina: Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation, in Pullen, A. and Rhodes, C. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Politics and the Organization. London: Routledge, pp. 67–84. Peattie, K. and Crane, A. (2005). Green marketing: legend, myth, farce or prophesy? Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 8(4): 357–70. Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M.R. (2011). Creating shared value. Harvard Business Review 89(1/2): 62–77. Prebisch, R. (1950). The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New York: CEPAL. Selsky, J.W., Goes, J., and Babüroğlu, O.N. (2007). Contrasting perspectives of strategy making: applications in ‘hyper’ environments. Organization Studies, 28(1): 71–94. Shiva, V. (2005). Earth democracy: justice, sustainability and peace. London: Zed Books. Shrivastava, P. (1994). Castrated environment: greening organizational studies. Organization Studies, 15(5): 705–26. Shrivastava, P. (1995). Ecocentric management for a risk society. Academy of Management Review, 20(1): 118–37. Sullivan, S. (2009): Green capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service-provider. Radical Anthropology, 3: 8–27. Svampa, M. (2009): Pensar el desarrollo desde América Latina, in Massuh, G. (ed.), Renunciar al bien común: extractivismo y (pos)desarrollo en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Mardulce, pp. 17–58. Svampa, Maristella. (2012) Consenso de los commodities, giro ecoterritorial y pensamiento critic en América Latina. OSAL, XIII(32): 15: 38. Verona, G., Prandelli, E. and Sawhney, M. (2006). Innovation and virtual environments: towards virtual knowledge brokers. Organization Studies, 27(6): 765–88. WCED, UN (1987). Our common future. World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wenner, L.N. (1992). Minerals, people, and dollars: social economic and technological aspects of mineral resource development. US Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Region.

387

33 Finance Finding a philosophical fit? Geoff Lightfoot and David Harvie

Introduction At first sight, the idea of a philosophy of finance appears risible. The editors of the leading journals that service the academic community of finance scholars resolutely insist that philosophical inquiry is of interest neither to them nor to their readers. And this is reflected in what is published – articles discussing philosophy (or even related studies such as ethics) are vanishingly rare and what is published engages with the subject in only the most superficial manner. Against that, however, the reminiscences of some of the scholars who helped define the field, collected by the Academy of Finance, show that they feel that a greater philosophical understanding would benefit scholars within the discipline. Although, unsurprisingly, the works suggested lean towards empiricism, this does imply that the field of finance is not (or need not be) entirely anti-philosophical. Of course, finance as an area of study is mostly not defined by academic concerns (although the relationship between finance scholars and finance professionals has shaped both discipline and practice). Yet overt discussion of philosophy is perhaps even rarer among practitioners (even following the financial crisis, when a consideration of ethics might have been demanded) and speakers on behalf of the industry typically avoid any debate that might lead to philosophical discussion. Thus, in the absence of an avowed philosophy of finance, we discuss what kind of philosophical interventions might assist in comprehending finance. In this, we ultimately seek an angle of philosophical enquiry that is not one of simply admonishing finance for its shortcomings but one that has the possibility of engaging with those working in the field. However, the consequences of financialization are profound, and it would be remiss of us to eschew the potential of philosophy to deliver a critical examination of finance. Finance has a complex relationship with neo-liberalism, delivering much of its continuing impetus through ever-extending financial markets and the financialization of evermore of everyday life. It has also provided some key intellectual concepts – such as Fama’s efficient market hypothesis (Fama, 1970) and Jensen’s agency theory (Jensen and Meckling, 1976) – which have both legitimated neo-liberal theory and corporate and financial practice, despite the key actors being peripheral to the groups that formulated the central principles of neo-liberalism (see, for example, Harvey 388

Finance

(2005) and Mirowski (2013)). Yet finance also appears inherently antagonistic to one of the key tenets of neo-liberalism – the strong state – and many of the repercussions from the financial crisis appear to demonstrate the impotency of government institutions and the relics of corporatist management in the face of global financial markets that those institutions helped put in place. A consideration of all the angles of philosophical inquiry that have, or could be used to critique finance is beyond the scope of this chapter. We therefore first consider what the philosophy of finance in practice might be, and what possibilities there might be for using philosophy to illuminate the practices of finance. We then consider a general critique, drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler before examining in more detail the possibilities that the Object-Oriented-Ontology of Graham Harman offers.

Paying attention to finance The financial crisis in 2008 was when the tool broke. Finance briefly seemed to go from readyto-hand to present-at-hand and, as we paid attention turned to the splintered implement, we glimpsed more of the machine. Comprehending it in its entirety – of course not: Heidegger reminds us that we cannot even do that of a simple hammer. But seeing more of what was there, an understanding of the sheer size of the enterprise, realizing more of the different aspects, capturing a sense of some of the tendrils that had worked their ways through all of society: yes. Unfortunately, such attention is inevitably short-lived. Opening the door to be confronted by what seems to be a zombie apocalypse (cf. C. Harman, 2009), rather than seeking the necessary weapons to decapitate those that make up the horde, the response is more, ‘That looks bad. Perhaps I won’t go out today.’ Thus, finance has been left to continue much as before. A brief flash of interest from a range of disciplines following the crisis now seems to have dimmed, either because of impotence or perhaps because the machine just appears too complex to comprehend. This complexity is at all levels – from the system as a whole down to the individual financial instruments which not even those working in the field appear to fully understand. Given those problems, what might philosophy offer? The first question is probably whether there is already a philosophy of finance. Certainly there is not one that openly travels as such within the academic discipline or along the corridors of Wall Street, although the ‘Greed is good’ manifesto of Gordon Gecko sometimes seems to fill the gap. Philosophy is often treated with contempt – in a rare engagement with ethics, Brickley, Smith and Zimmerman (2002: 1821) critique the discipline by suggesting that ‘Despite considerable effort by some of history’s best minds, there is no consensus as to which behaviours are ethical and which are unethical.’ Their solution to this quandary is to suggest that ethical behaviour is reflected in the price of individual stocks. This tenet can be seen reflected in a series of core beliefs that permeate finance, such as the primacy of shareholder value, the efficient market hypothesis and agency theory. However, if these make up a tacit philosophy of finance, it is a curious admixture of pragmatics, empiricism and liberalism. Our task here is not to study such a philosophy but to explore ways in which philosophy might extend our understanding of finance. In the absence of an extant body of work, one path in is to follow work that may have mapped out equivalent trajectories. The development of Social Studies of Science has stimulated a vibrant and ongoing research movement in the Social Studies of Finance, utilizing many of the same tools and techniques as its progenitor. Thus, perhaps, we might borrow from those who have put forward different philosophies of science. There is much to ruminate on as to what we might glean from there – but some of the core questions that drive that discipline might not be particularly useful when applied to finance. 389

Geoff Lightfoot and David Harvie

Concerns as to what counts as science (Popper, 1935[1959]) are essential when there are so many turf wars that need to be fought against the barbarians without. Yet such a concern is tangential to those who would study finance. We might, as academics, seek to separate finance from accounting, for example. We might present a strong argument that accounting has always been entwined with human civilization and that finance is but a swaggering teenager in comparison. Yet we would not try, or indeed wish to, counter the argument that finance has subsumed much of accounting, even though we might shy away from Eugene Fama’s proposition that accounting is no more than ‘event studies’ (a specific methodology in quantitative finance deployed by academics and professionals). A similarly derived question from the philosophy of science would be what is finance for? This has more purchase, particularly since theory and practice here appear considerably at odds. An introductory course on finance may present finance as a series of loosely connected concepts, some of which are even accepted as ludicrous by finance academics. Thus, one widely accepted (and widely taught) explanation is that finance is the bridge between deficit agents and surplus agents. Thus, finance can be seen as a mechanism for transferring money from those who have a surplus (lenders or investors) to those who have a need for, or can profitably employ it (borrowers or entrepreneurs). It can be seen as a means of ameliorating risk by, for example, the use of derivatives yet, as has been frequently noted, the trade in derivatives massively outstrips any potential risk-management usage (see, for example Rotman (1987) or Arrow (2006)). However, even in the shaping of this brief discussion, we see some of the problems in a concentration on the question of what is finance for. We can see that it does do the work of risk-management; that it does connect surplus agents and deficit agents; that it is about money management; that it does deal with the allocation of assets over time under conditions of uncertainty. But we can also see that it is a world of speculation – for both good and ill, since Mises (1949[1990]) suggests that entrepreneurship is but risk-bearing and most visibly seen in the financial markets. Similarly, alongside the transfer of capital from surplus to deficit agents, beyond the straightforward issue of capital accumulation, we can see deliberate misallocation of risk, casual looting, manipulation of markets and the deliberate creation of information asymmetries in order to benefit financial intermediaries. It would be equally viable to argue that these practices, however distasteful they might appear, are also part of what finance is for. These different facets indicate the problems inherent in finding a comprehensive and coherent philosophy of finance. For sure, we can find elements of applied philosophy that can deliver a critique of finance. One such is the work of Bernard Stiegler, particularly his work in For a New Critique of Political Economy (Stiegler, 2010a). Stiegler’s work is interesting in that it brings together a number of different strands of how we can consider finance and financialization, at both an individual and systemic level. Stiegler pursues a line of thinking that capitalism, through finance, is ‘turning belief into something calculable’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 67). This in itself is not particularly new – we could point out that, among others, Simmel (1900[2004]) explores similar themes in his Philosophy of Money, that it is one of the central propositions of Mises’ (1949[1990]) Human Action, that it follows the principles of Adorno’s ‘exchange society’ (Tauschgesellschaft) (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997) and that the idea has been extended by Martin’s (2002) Financialization of Daily Life. Stiegler extends the critique in suggesting that since finance is not directly connected to productive relations, it can be blamed for the ‘liquidation of social relations’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 57) as only actions that can be captured by a calculation can be considered meaningful in the system. However, running alongside this, Stiegler extends Marx’s concept of ‘proletarianization’, suggesting that even the financial elites have been proletarianized: ‘deprived of knowledge of their own logic and by their own logic – a logic reduced to a calculation without remainder and leading 390

Finance

as well to a market of fools (Stiegler, 2010a: 47, italics in original). Here, Stiegler is arguing that technics, the prosthetic supplementation of the human (Stiegler, 1998: 188) that covers all mental actions, have become increasingly ordered by capitalism, and thus brought under the purview of finance. In other words, we should not be surprised that, during the financial crisis, we were unable to get explanations from finance practitioners or academics as to what was happening, for their tools for understanding had ultimately been removed by their own industry. It is worth unpacking some of the steps outlined above. Stiegler uses the concept of ‘psychopower’, which corresponds to the ‘technological, industrial, systematic and constant capture of attention that has been called cultural capitalism has been made possible by the emergence of psychotechnologies’ (Stiegler, 2010b: 13). These technologies (and Stiegler highlights the internet and computer gaming as specific examples) have created the impossibility of maintaining attention, of serious thought. These industries are capitalist, dependent on finance, and thus Stiegler is able to draw a link (albeit rather unconvincing) between finance capitalism and the shaping of human consciousness. The overall effect is one of ‘closing the system off from any future, that is, to a blockage of the process of anticipation’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 91). We are incapable, according to Stiegler, of envisaging a future outside that already laid down.

Different directions Although such scathing commentary as Stiegler’s is valuable in sharpening up our understanding of the possible consequences of finance, and even of setting out alternative social structures to hide away from its pervasive effects, that is perhaps as far as it goes. The components of finance remain as much a mystery as ever, as yet unyielding to philosophical enquiry. This is not to say that there have not been important insights. We can take the work of Georg Simmel, for example, where he explores the difference between money and credit: The significance of money is much more evident in its extended form as credit. Credit extends the series of conceptions still further and with a greater awareness of their unrestricted breadth than does the intermediate instance of cash. The pivot of the relationship between creditor and debtor lies [as] it were, outside the straight line of contact between them and is set at a further distance from them: the individual’s activity and transactions thereby gain the qualities of far-sightedness and enhanced symbolism. (Simmel, 1900[2004]: 479) For Simmel, even this pre-modern form of credit changes relationships completely, drawing down a necessity for a greater consideration of what is at play. This is not straightforward: ‘credit has become a technical form of transaction’ (Simmel, 1900[2004]: 480) – an allocative decision based upon the holding of place rather than personal assessment of a debtor’s character. The link between lender and borrower is no longer direct but depends upon an intervening body of an orderly, trustworthy ‘society’. Think, for example, of the difference between individualized credit notes, tying two specific bodies together, and a bill of exchange in which a nameless drawee holds the place of a nominal, unspecified, individual. However, there is an implicit tension between nameless individuals and ‘society’ that suggests impermanence. Brian Rotman suggests where this leads. In his discussion of Euro-dollars transformation into ‘xeno-money’, he suggests (Rotman, 1987: 90): For ‘Euro’ and ‘dollars’ one should write ‘xeno’ and ‘money’ respectively. The Eurodollar has long since shed its attachment to Europe. It is in fact, no longer geographically located, 391

Geoff Lightfoot and David Harvie

but circulates within an electronic global market which, though still called the Eurodollar market, is now the international capital market. The international capital market dissolves the relationship with ‘society’ The product – xenomoney – now takes on the mode of being of the signifier of value that is related only and inevitably to its own future states of value, as exemplified by the relation between the futures and spot markets for the imaginary currency of the Eurodollar. The value of xeno-money is then entirely self-referential, and in this it is akin to the disconnection of finance in the commentary of Stiegler. Yet there is something else important at play: Donald Mackenzie (2011) demonstrates how this self-referentiality, and the absence of an anchor outside finance, allowed the ‘slicing and dicing’ (Lewis, 1989) of financial instruments, ultimately leading to the creation of toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that were at the heart of the financial crisis. This suggests that an attention to the elements of finance may be quite as important, if we are to comprehend finance, as the consequences.

Finance objects Therefore, in search of a philosophy that can address the components of finance, we turn to an approach that (at least partly) shares common roots with the Social Studies of Finance: the work of Graham Harman in Object-Oriented-Ontology (O-O-O). Harman suggests that Latour (in Prince of Networks, G. Harman, 2009) offered the key to a philosophy that pays sufficient attention to ‘objects’. For Harman, objects are ‘autonomous realities of any kind, with the added advantage that this term also makes room for the temporary and artificial objects too often excluded from the ranks of substance’ (Harman, 2007: 189). This definition potentially allows us to include all manner of financial instruments, however synthetic and separated from a material equivalent. Within this, Harman identifies initially two different types of object: the real from Heidegger (and specifically through his tool-analysis); and the ‘sensual’, drawn from Husserl’s intentional (Harman, 2002). Harman suggests that the essential point of Heidegger is that we can never come close to grasping all of the ‘dark reality’ of objects – always ‘reducing them to one sided caricatures’. When we merely use a tool, we pay no attention to it – it is ready-to-hand. When a tool malfunctions, it drives us to a consideration of it, however temporary it may be, and an awareness that the tool is more than just the tool that we were using. But even in considering a broken hammer, we do not, cannot, engage with the totality of what that hammer is. There are always ‘thundering depths’ to which we remain oblivious. Thus, by implication, when the financial system malfunctions, we pay attention to it. But our glance still just skates across the surface – we cannot comprehend but small aspects of the whole. Importantly, in Harman’s analysis, real objects are always withdrawing from contact, from relationships. Our attention to finance is but short-lived – it sinks back to obscurity. This is in contrast with sensual objects, which always ‘lie directly before us’. Such objects are what we experience in perception, and we always see them as what appears to be the whole. Yet the picture is slightly more complicated – we can create an infinite number of ways of seeing the object, shifting through mood, context, distance and angle. In other words, my CDO that I picture is probably very different from that of the finance professional who creates them. Yet despite these perceptual differences, this is where the action is: for Harman, ‘the only place in the cosmos where interactions occur is the sensual, phenomenal realm’ (Harman, 2007: 195). Real objects, in always withdrawing from contact, do not interact: their ‘discrete, autonomous form lies only in the depths, while dramatic power and interaction float along the surface’. This 392

Finance

pushes us to an intriguing position – we cannot know what a real CDO, and the CDOs that we deal with are always sensual objects. Add to this the suggestion that ‘a real object is always more than the specific qualities that we ascribe to it, an intentional object is always less’ (Harman, 2007: 199) and we sidestep some of the potential objections to philosophical engagement with finance. None of us, not academics from other fields, or finance academics, or finance professionals can grasp real financial instruments. We just have different levels of an incomplete comprehension. A further dimension is added when we consider that, for Harman, real objects and sensual objects have their own qualities. This does lead to a quadratic – real objects, real qualities, sensual objects and sensual qualities – with ‘tensions’ between each. The real object is related to its real qualities through essence, the sensual object to sensual qualities through time. Qualities can change, yet in doing so, do not alter the object to which they are attached. In other words, a quality, such as hardness, is part of the essence of a hammer head. A further exploration is that between a real object and its sensual qualities. Harman deems this ‘tension’ to be space. This is space in two senses – in terms of both ‘nearness and distance’ the site of ‘both relation and non-relation’ (Harman, 2011: 218). Thus the sensual object with which we interact is not cleanly perceived but is encrusted with its qualities, ‘like cosmetics and jewels’. These cosmetic qualities are potentially a key means of investigating finance through philosophy. Harman points to the concept of allure: ‘the separation of an object from its qualities’ (Harman, 2005: 153), so that they may be ‘transferred from substance to another while still retaining the trace of their previous substance’ (G. Harman, 2009: 200–21) Allure is potentially revolutionary, allowing the creation of new real objects with qualities of the old. This is, perhaps, where we come closer to the processes of contemporary finance, which increasingly seems to operate through stripping qualities from one object and then letting them adhere to another, in conjunction with other qualities from different objects. A prime example would be synthetic financial instruments which are created to mimic existing instruments by pulling together the qualities of different financial instruments. The simplest example is probably that by taking two opposing (put and call) options on a share, the risk/reward characteristics of that share can be recreated without the actual purchase of the share. These new, ‘artificial’ entities are no less real in Harman’s terms than the objects from which they are derived, yet they are more completely withdrawn since even their sensual qualities are but fleetingly glimpsed. Why else might this focus on objects be helpful in considering finance? It seems to us that this approach highlights some of our concerns with and the contradictions that run through finance. First, of course, there is the suggestion that we have no more of an inkling of the objects with which finance deals. We can see where such a superficial understanding might lead. Pierides and Woodman explore how such applied to ‘fire’ and ‘wind’ in bushfires in Victorian Australia: ‘Pretending that . . . they could have been subordinated to human access all along does violence to those very objects and their demonstrated capacity to surprise and sometimes overwhelm us. As such, our attempts to register such objects will fail’ (Pierides and Woodman, 2012: 664). We might as easily say the same thing about collateralized debt obligations, or any of the other objects that are implicated in the financial crisis – again ‘we’ pretended that they were mere components that readily yielded to our financial mastery, yet we were surprised and overwhelmed with their potential. This is, of course, not to suggest that attempts to fully comprehend such objects might be possible but merely to acknowledge that in our trite understandings, there will always be the capacity for chaotic surprise. And as barely glimpsed synthetic they continue to multiply, the chance for surprise seems ever greater. If real objects cannot touch – their relationship being either contiguous or none, then we might get more an inkling of some of the other relationships in finance. Thus, as Lewis (1989) 393

Geoff Lightfoot and David Harvie

implicitly outlined in his discussion of the emergence of the mortgage bonds market, a real mortgage and a real investor do not, and cannot, touch – rather, to put it in Harman’s terms, ‘objects hide from one another endlessly, and inflict their mutual blows only through some vicar or intermediary’ (Harman, 2007: 189–90). We have to look at the relationships of real objects, sensual objects, real qualities and sensual qualities that enable new real objects, such as mortgage bonds, to emerge. This insight is perhaps small, but essential. For finance, both in theory and practice, has eschewed any consideration of the non-real. Finance, in its never-ending search for true arbitration through monetary value, abutted by economic theorization, places the sensate as beyond the pale: hard economic logic is what drives finance. Yet, taken seriously, Harman’s suggestion is that sensual objects, and sensual qualities, are as important as the real, and arguably more important if we are to consider the emergence of new objects. In practice, this means that a teleological, determinist view of finance is a fiction – that finance innovation comes out of meeting of the phenomenal with the real. This is what the anthropologists of finance have been telling us all along, albeit couched in a different register. Can we take it further, using insights from philosophy?

References Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Arrow, K. (2006). American Finance Association Interview. Retrieved on 23 June 2015 from www.afajof. org/details/video/2870871/Kenneth-Arrow-Interview.html. Brickley, J.A., Smith Jr, C.W. and Zimmerman, J.L. (2002). Business ethics and organizational architecture. Journal of Banking and Finance, 26(9): 1821–35. Fama, E.F. (1970). Efficient capital markets: a review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2): 383–417. Harman, C. (2009). Zombie Capitalism. London: Bookmarks. Harman, G. (2002). Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing. Harman, G. (2005). Guerilla Metaphysics. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing. Harman, G. (2007). On vicarious causation. Collapse, 2: 171–205. Harman, G. (2009). Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Netaphysics. Prahran, Vic.: Re.press. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. London: Zero Books. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1976). Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4): 305-60. Lewis, M. (1989). Liar’s Poker. London: Corgi. Mackenzie, D. (2011). Knowledge production in financial markets: credit default swaps, the ABX and the subprime crisis. Retrieved on 23 June 2015 from www.sps.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/55936/ ABX13.pdf. Martin, R. (2002). Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. London: Verso. Mises, L. v. (1949[1990]) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (ed. B.B. Greaves). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Pierides, D. and Woodman, D. (2012). Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the material turn. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4): 662–79. Popper, K. (1935[1959]). The Logic of Scientific Discovery (translation of Logik der Forschung). London: Hutchinson. Rotman, B. (1987). Signifying Nothing: the semiotics of zero. London: Macmillan. Simmel, G. (1900[2004]). The Philosophy of Money (ed. D. Frisby). London: Routledge. Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time 1: the fault of Epimetheus (trans. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, B. (2010a). For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stiegler, B. (2010b). Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. 394

34 Globalization and the rise of the multinational corporation Guido Palazzo

Situating the recent wave of globalization On 12 October 1492 at about two o’clock in the morning, Rodrigo de Triana, one of the sailors on Christopher Columbus’s ship La Pinto shouted ‘tierra, tierra’. On his imagined journey to India, Columbus had eventually arrived in America. Was this the beginning of a process we call globalization? Or is globalization a rather recent phenomenon that is better examined along the global expansion of US American modes of production and consumption? Obviously, globalization is not a new phenomenon. It has accompanied humanity for millennia. It comes (and goes!) in waves. This chapter will focus on the most recent wave of globalization that started after World War II, but took speed in 1989 as the result of a coincidence of a geopolitical and technological change: In this year, the Berlin Wall came down and the World Wide Web was invented. The events of 1989 started to erode the institutional order of the world, threatened the balance between private and public actors and led to a power shift from governments to corporations. Since then, the multinational corporation has become a dominating actor in our globalizing world. It comes as no surprise that numerous scholars examine globalization mainly as an economic process of cross-border integration of trade and investments. Of course, the economic integration of the planet is not a new phenomenon. While already in ancient times, commodities travelled from China or India to Europe, the cross-border trade scholars normally examine started in the 1850s and was disrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the return of cross border integration after World War II with an acceleration since the 1970s (Hirst and Thompson, 2003). In this context, 1989 is perceived as an important landmark: It is not interpreted as a simple continuation of this economic integration but as a confirmation of the global power of the free market ideology, or even as a global (and final) victory of Western ideology (e.g. Fukuyama, 1992; Irwin, 2002; Norberg, 2003). Such a rather narrow discussion on globalization as an economic phenomenon contrasts with a second narrative of globalization as a cultural process. This interpretation stands in the tradition of Immanuel Kant’s early reflections on a cosmopolitan world-order in his essay on perpetual peace from 1795. Kant hoped for a global mindset that would make it possible that the violation of the rule of law in one place would globally resonate and trigger the same indignation in many other places in the world. Here, globalization represents the hope that the rule of law 395

Guido Palazzo

becomes a dominating principle everywhere and we eventually start to share beliefs, practices and values and develop a global or cosmopolitan culture. In the end, we would have global peace. Kant’s idea finds its modern manifestation in the claim that photos of slave children in coltan mines in the Congo trigger moral indignation across the planet from Europe to the US to China. The argument is that it becomes more difficult to hide side effects in a transnationally stretched public space, while at the same time the sensitivity for human right violations will grow (along with growing consensus on the definition of human rights). The events of 1989 provoked a new debate on Kantian Cosmopolitanism with Western style rule of law and vibrant civil societies as key features expected to be rolled out and implemented globally. From such a perspective the recent wave of globalization promotes a global cultural learning process that starts in the Age of Enlightenment with the rise of modernity and will now lead to a globally networked world culture and a global spread of liberal democracy (Appiah, 2007; Benhabib, 2008; Held, 2010). Neither of the two interpretations of the most recent wave of globalization is undisputed. A third interpretation of globalization takes critical perspective and highlights the dark side of both the optimistic cultural and economic interpretations of global integration. Huntington (1993) has for instance argued that globalization will lead to an identity crisis within nation states, which will reinforce cultural differences: Where limits in time and space seem to disappear, people will tend to reconstruct them with the cultural material they have at their disposition. If national borders lose their meaning, people will tend to use a different narrative to rebuild borders, in particular their own religious traditions. As a consequence, we will have more tensions along the borders of cultural and religious differences (Huntington, 1993). Others have challenged the free market narrative of globalization. Since the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, scholars started to critically examine the power of economic actors, in particular corporations, to undermine the sovereignty of governments (Barber, 1992; Beck, 2000). From such a perspective, globally networked business operations intensify the already existing repressive system of capitalist production and consumption. Globalization represents a process in which Western standards and rules are imposed on an increasing number of countries, sharpening differences between the poor and the rich within and across countries and fuelling a new wave of global colonialization with multinational corporations as key actors (Barber, 1992; Forrester, 1999; Klein, 2000). While the above interpretations of globalization are partly incompatible with each other, most scholars involved in the debate would agree that globalization results from an increasing level of social interconnectedness of humankind across space and time (Castells, 1996; Giddens, 1999). This interconnectedness does in particular manifest in the global integration of production system and consumption patterns. While global commerce is nothing new, the integration of production processes in global production networks and the standardization of Western-style consumer habits is a recent phenomenon: When we listen to music on our computer, we might listen to a French interpretation of US-American rap music on a device that has been assembled in China. It contains coltan from the Congo, microchips from South Korea, software from India and a brand image from the US while the technology used to digitalize the music has been invented by German scientists. As soon as we buy a new computer, the old one is probably illegally dumped in South Italy, Somalia or China. The integration of the whole planet – with the exception of a few resisting spots such as North Korea – into one integrated network of production and consumption is made possible by technological progress that shrinks geographical and temporal distances and increases the global mobility of people, information and products. As Chanda (2007: xiii) has argued, 396

Globalization

the big differences that mark the globalization of the early years with that of the present are in the velocity with which products and ideas are transferred, the ever-growing volume of consumers and products and their variety, and the resultant increase in the visibility of the process. Therefore, the difference between the present and past waves of globalization can also be told as a story of technological progress. We can differentiate between technologies that improve (and accelerate) the transportation of people and commodities and those that improve (and accelerate) the transmission of information. The invention of the container in 1956 revolutionized the global trade since it standardized transportation, made it more efficient and cheaper (Levinson, 2008). In addition, crossing the oceans has also become considerably less risky. This is nicely illustrated by looking at the risks to which premodern merchants were exposed: Between 1500 and 1634 when the Portuguese dominated the oceans, an estimated 28 per cent of the ships were lost between Lisbon and India (Curtin, 1984). Comparable drop out numbers have been reported for the fleet that transported commodities to Ostia, the harbour of Rome in the Ancient Roman Empire (Angela, 2009). A similar progress has been made with regards to information. For many centuries, the transmission of information was connected to the speed of travelling humans carrying the information. The ships of the East India Company had to sail for either six months or twelve months (depending on the timing with regards to monsoons) to go from England to Java. As a result, a simple question–answer communication between the headquarters and local managers could easily take two years. In contrast, about 1 billion people were globally connected through their computers in 2006 and could communicate with each other in real time. Voice over internet technologies such as Skype connect today even people in remote places via satellites and at the fragment of the costs of a phone call ten years ago (Chanda, 2007). Dropping costs, better access and higher efficiency of technologies that transport people, commodities and information accelerated the process of global integration in recent decades. The fall of the Berlin Wall turned the whole planet into one playing field for private corporations which they could use to organize production and create markets. Already in 1964, Marshall McLuhan reflected upon the shrinking distances of human interaction. He created the metaphor of the ‘global village’ to describe the transformational power of new media – an observation that certainly gets confirmed by the communication possibilities provided by the World Wide Web today (McLuhan, 1964). We can imagine the potential impact of new information technologies on the process of global transformation if we look back at a comparable moment in human history: The cultural achievements and the rise of science in the Western world which globally spread afterwards is unimaginable without the invention of the book print by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century (Abel, 2011). It revolutionized the access to information and the quality of information, which both were controlled by the Church until then. It led to a broad alphabetization in Europe, provided the basis for scientific progress, made it easier to spread (also critical) information and triggered the rise of civil society which began in Europe as coffee house meetings between readers (Habermas, 1991) (ironically, the coffee houses such as Starbucks have become the symbol of how in the recent wave of globalization the lifeworld is colonialized and democracy is threatens). Finally, the recent wave of globalization differs from previous ones by the fact that it is accompanied by intensive debates about globalization itself. There can be no doubt that the most recent technological innovations will lead to a similar transformation not only of the material world but also of our cultural systems of beliefs and values. Globalization slowly started to trigger a cognitive transformation. Giddens has argued that events in various parts of the world are now bound together in a way that our perception of time and space is transformed (Giddens, 397

Guido Palazzo

1999). This points to the assumption that technological progress is not only important for bridging the distances for people, commodities, and information, it also leads to a higher level of cognitive interconnectedness, which eventually (so the hope of cosmopolitan thinkers) leads to a global mindset. Modern globalization is characterized by a higher level of reflexivity: We are aware of the fact that our societies go through a profound transformation process. Ancient Indians probably did not reflect much upon their connectedness with the Roman Empire. However, when the Roman Empire fell, towns in India that were relying on the trade with the Romans declined as well (Chanda, 2007). We might also assume that the riders of Genghis Khan did not reflect much upon the consequences of their expansions that connected China with Europe. Modernity in contrast is characterized by such higher order reflectivity on its own activities (Beck et al., 1994). Waters (1995: 3) highlights this in his definition of globalization as a ‘social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receeding’. Reflective modernity manifests in particular in the awareness for the globalization of risks to which societies are exposed.

World risk society and its normative consequences Since the early 1960s the negative consequences of technological progress have been discussed. Rachel Carson (1962) is one of the first natural scientists to point to the dark side of technology. Examining the use of DDT in agriculture, she demonstrates how technological progress in one context leads to unintended negative side effects in another context. She highlights the need of a less linear and more systemic analysis of human interaction. The spectacular photo the crew of the Apollo 11 mission took of the ‘earth rise’ seen from the surface of the moon in July 1969 has become an icon of the discussion on environmental risk that grows along with technological progress: Humankind shares the same vulnerable planet. Drawing from ancient Greek mythology, the ecologist James Lovelock (1979[2000]) shapes the powerful metaphor of ‘Gaia’ describing the planet as ‘mother Earth’, a living and fragile organism. Ulrich Beck (1986) describes the social consequences of systemic risk of modern technology. While natural disasters have occurred throughout human history with often devastating effects on society – from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD to the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 – we are now facing a new type of disaster with comparable consequences. Disasters are manmade, they result from the progress of our own technologies and most importantly, they have global effects. The explosion of Chernobyl, which occurred shortly after Beck published his thoughts on the emerging risk society, delivered some empirical evidence of this new type of risk. Today, it has become a taken-for-granted fact that many of the most urgent challenges of humanity are following a transnational logic and cannot be dealt with inside the nation state container: global warming, the overfishing of the oceans, the accelerating loss of biodiversity, the control of organized crime, or new epidemics such as bird flu or Ebola. We are now living in a ‘world risk society’ and many of those risks are now created by private actors (Beck, 2008). This awareness for the transnational character of modern risks has triggered a debate on the regulatory challenges and normative consequences of globalization. The idea of moral responsibility has been discussed along with the new spatiotemporal conditions of human power. The philosopher Hans Jonas (1979) has been one of the first to discuss normative consequences of global impact. He points at the future consequences of current decisions, arguing that our technologies might not only have severe side effects but that these side effects might be irreversible and damage the planet for thousands of years in the future. We are increasingly interconnected not only across space but also across time. However, according to Jonas, we lack the ethical skills to deal with such consequences for future generations. While we become global giants 398

Globalization

with regards to our technological power, we rely on inappropriate face-to-face and short-term ethical principles. Young (2004) claims that globally stretched social systems require a new understanding of responsibility moving from a liability concept (‘I am responsible for what I do’) to a social connectedness concept (‘I am co-responsible for the harm to which I am connected’). Pogge (2001) has argued that globalization requires a discussion on moral obligations between nation states and the establishment of new institutions to globally protect the rights of individuals. Other philosophers are rather sceptical when it comes to the expansion of moral duties. For Rawls (1996), for instance, moral obligations have to be formulated for people who live together within political communities or on a meta-level between such aggregated communities. Cosmopolitan responsibilities of individual actors and their organizations seem to be overstretched claims from such a perspective. Some philosophers have argued that the normative consequences of globalization should be less discussed as ethical questions and more as political questions. Rorty (1991) has favoured a priority of democracy over philosophy and Habermas (2001) reflects upon the transnational institutionalization of legitimate democratic structures.

‘Masters of speed’ – the rise of the multinational corporation One of the key aspects of the normative debate on globalization is the rise of private power and the decrease of governmental power. Habermas (2001, also Beck, 2000) has argued that until the twentieth century our modern world was organized along a nation state logic. This quite stable order had emerged with the peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, found its basic structure under Napoleon and remained the defining regulatory order since then. Today, we move into a post-national (Habermas, 2001) or post-Westphalian (Kobrin, 2001) world order. The most recent acceleration of globalization that followed the collapse of the Communist world, leads to a situation in which private actors increasingly organize themselves transnationally. This reduces the ability of governments to regulate those private actors. Corporations can simply leave particular regulatory context, when they perceive rules as too strict, or wages and tax as too high. They shift their activities to other countries with lower tax, lower wages and more relaxed environmental or labour laws. According to Habermas (2001), globalization is threatening the power balance between private and public actors. Power is shifted from the sovereign of the territory to the master of speed. Put differently: from governments to corporations. In earlier waves of globalization, the sovereigns of the territory played a dominating role: the Americas, Africa and large parts of Asia were conquered, colonialized and exploited in the name of far distant European kings and queens for many centuries. Globally integrated production systems of production and consumption, however, are designed and managed in the name of far distant corporate shareholders. The regulatory power of governments over private actors was a taken-for-granted element of the concept of liberal market democracy. Corporations operated within a more or less functioning national regulatory container. Globalization lifts the regulatory container. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 accelerated a process that had slowly started in the 1960s already: the outsourcing of the production of textiles from Europe and the US to Asia followed by the development of highly integrated global production networks dominated by (mostly Western) multinational corporations. The rise of the multinational corporation has provoked political questions since it damaged the balance between corporate and political actors. If corporations can leave a regulatory context and optimize their operations across numerous countries, local contexts as such become irrelevant. Decisions follow a transnational logic. Behind the neo-liberal model of the profit maximizing company is the taken-for-granted assumption that (democratic) 399

Guido Palazzo

governments set limits to corporate greed if the interests of the common good are at stake. Even the most ideological advocates of free markets such as Milton Friedman (1970) did not question the fact that corporations have to follow the law. In the 1960s, when Friedman developed his ideas on free markets, capitalism was the economic model of mainly Europe, Japan and the US. Put differently, it is a model that builds on the assumption that corporate activities are embedded in a functioning democratic regulatory context. Today, multinational corporations operate in zones of conflict, in corrupt countries and in repressive countries. They operate in countries with no or dysfunctional democratic institutions and no adequate regulation (KoenigArchibugi, 2005) where governments are either not willing or not able to keep them in check. The ability of corporations to move activities elsewhere does even reduce the willingness of still powerful nation states to impose too demanding conditions on corporations. They rather engage in a race to the bottom, competing with other countries over the best conditions for those companies (Kobrin, 2001). There is no doubt that globalized free markets have a dark side and the most recent wave of globalization has revealed that dark side. Currently, about thirty million people are held in slavery (Crane, 2013) and many of them can be found in the supply chains of multinational corporations: Slaves dig the coltan that we find in our computers and harvest the cocoa we need for our chocolate. They pick the cotton of our t-shirts or weave our carpets. Today, products tell a story of a global journey, which usually is a story of harm doing. Multinational corporations thus have become a symbol of the dark side of globalization. They are described as ‘the new Leviathan’ (Chandler and Mazlish, 2005), ‘barbarians at the gate’ (Burrough and Helyar, 2004), ‘cannibals with forks’ (Elkington, 1998) or ‘robber barons’ (Burbach, 2001). Non-governmental organizations have started to fill the regulatory gap and launch campaigns against multinational corporations – starting with the apparel industry in the late 1980s, covering more and more industries since then and systematically revealing the regulatory gaps around those corporations. Habermas (2001) has argued that in a world that is increasingly organized globally, it becomes necessary to reorganize the process of public will-formation and regulation accordingly. In a similar mood, Barber (1992: 275) has criticized that ‘we have managed to globalize markets in goods, labor, currencies, and information, without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the free market’s indispensable context’. Existing international institutions cannot fill the regulatory vacuum since they either have no enforcement power (such as the United Nations or the Fair Labor Organization) or they use their power not to control corporations but to promote free trade (such as the World Trade Organization). The fact that corporations today often operate in a legal vacuum has led to three consequences. First, private business actors get increasingly involved in human rights violation and second, these human rights violations trigger the resistance of civil society which finally pushes some corporations to engage in self-regulatory activities. They become political actors. Together with NGOs, some corporations have started to fill the regulatory gap left by nationally bound governments. Rosenau and Czempiel (1992) have described this as ‘governance without governments’. Multistakeholder initiatives such as the Fair Labor Association which try to develop and implement behavioural standards for transnationally operating companies are mushrooming (Mena and Palazzo, 2012). It remains, however, an open and highly disputed question whether or not such initiatives are able to sufficiently replace the lack of hard law regulation for a global world (Scherer and Palazzo, 2007; for a critical view on private regulation, see Banerjee, 2007). Alternatives, such as the regulatory power of larger geographical units such as the European Union have been discussed as an alternative (Habermas, 2001). Globalization can be understood as the increasing economic, political and cultural interconnectedness on a planetary scale. Earlier waves of globalization were largely driven by 400

Globalization

the interests and the power of governmental actors and the individual adventurers who colonialized the world on their behalf. The current wave of globalization is driven by corporations who globally expand on behalf of their shareholders. This raises numerous ethical and political challenges humankind has never faced before. We have to navigate through these unchartered waters and build the global institutions that eventually frame and tame private actors.

References (key texts in bold) Abel, R. (2011). The Gutenberg Revolution. A History of Print Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Angela, A. (2009). A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome. New York: Europa Editions. Appiah, K.A. (2007). Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers. New York: W.W. Norton. Banerjee, S.B. (2007). Corporate Social Responsibility: the good, the bad and the ugly. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Barber, B. (1992). Jihad versus McWorld. Atlantic Monthly, March: 53–65. Beck, U. (1986). Risikogesellschaft – Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. In English: Risk Society: towards a new modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Beck, U. (2000). What is globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2008). World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, AS. (1994). Reflexive Modernization: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benhabib, S. (2008). Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burbach, R. (2001). Globalization and Postmodern Politics. From Zapistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto Press. Burrough B. and Helyar, J. (2004). Barbarians at the Gate. Lancashire: Arrow. Carson, R. (1962). The Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Chanda, N. (2007). Bound Together. How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chandler A.D. and Mazlish, B. (2005). Leviathans: multinational corporations and the new global history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crane, A. (2013). Modern slavery as a management practice: exploring the conditions and capabilities for human exploitation. Academy of Management Review, 38: 45–69. Curtin, P.D. (1984). Cross-cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elkington, J. (1998). Cannibals with Forks. The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. Gabriola Island: New Society. Forrester, V. (1999). The Economic Horror. Cambridge: Polity Press. Friedman, M. (1970). The social responsibility of business is to increase its profit. The New York Times Magazine, 13 September. Reprinted in Donaldson, T. and Werhane, P.H. (eds), (1970). Ethical Issues in Business. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 217–23. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Giddens, A. (1999). The Third Way. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. Boston: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2001). The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Held, D. (2010). Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (2003). The future of globalization, in Michie, J. (ed.), The Handbook of Globalization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 17–36. Huntington, S. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, summer: 22–49. Irwin, D.A. (2002). Free Trade under Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jonas, H. (1979). Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. In English: The Imperative of Responsibility: in search of ethics for the technological age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Klein, N. (2000). No Logo. New York: Picador. Kobrin, S.J. (2001). Sovereignity@bay: globalization, multinational enterprise, and the international political system, in Rugman, A.M. and Brewer, T.L. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Business. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–205. 401

Guido Palazzo

Koenig-Archibugi, M. (2005). Transnational corporations and public accountability, in Held, D. and KoenigArchibugi, M. (eds), Global Governance and Public Accountability. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 110–35. Levinson, M. (2008). The Box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lovelock, J. (1979[2000]). Gaia: a new look at life on earth (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mena, S. and Palazzo, G. (2012). Input and output legitimacies of multi-stakeholder initiatives. Business Ethics Quarterly, 22 (3): 259–60. Norberg, J. (2003). In Defence of Global Capitalism. Washington, DC: Cato Institute. Pogge, T.W. (2001). Priorities of global justice. Metaphilosophy, 32(1–2): 6–24. Rawls, J. (1996). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty, R. (1991). The priority of democracy to philosophy, in Rorty, R. (ed.), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: philosophical papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175–96. Rosenau, J.N. and Czempiel, E-O. (1992). Governance without Government: order and change in world politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scherer, A.G. and Palazzo, G. (2007). Toward a political conception of corporate responsibility. Business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective. Academy of Management Review, 32: 1096–120. Waters, M. (1995). Globalization. New York: Routledge. Young, I.M. (2004). Responsibility and global labor justice. Journal of Political Philosophy, 12: 365–88.

402

35 Governance Changing conceptions of the corporation André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

Introduction In 2009, one of the most well-known celebrity CEOs in the world, Jack Welch, made a small remark that created shockwaves around the world. During an interview with a journalist at the Financial Times, Mr Welch stated that maximizing shareholder value was ‘the dumbest idea in world’. To the uninitiated, this statement may seem insignificant. But to anyone with an understanding of debates about the modern corporations, these are fighting words. In recent years, the modern corporation has been run with one over-riding objective in mind: maximizing shareholder value. Behind this phrase is a set of interests which are served and implicit ideas about what good corporate governance is. Vital here is the idea that corporations should be run in the interests of their shareholders. This means ensuring shareholders get the maximum amount of returns on their investment. To govern a corporation effectively means ensuring that there is no wavering from this goal. It means ‘special interest groups’ (managers, workers, citizens, national governments, in fact anyone who is not a shareholder) are stopped from pursuing their individual goals on the corporate coin. Underlying these ideas about what good governance of the corporation looks like are an implicit set of philosophical assumptions. Corporate governance is founded on assumptions about political philosophy. These are claims about what should count as a good social order and what this might look like in the context of a corporation. According to proponents of shareholder value maximization, the good corporation is one which is designed to ultimately serve its shareholders. In addition, the field is also founded on philosophical assumptions about the ontology of the corporation. These are ideas about the nature of the corporation as such – it is an attempt to define what precisely a corporation actually is. As we will see, for proponents of shareholder value maximization, the corporation should be conceptualized primarily as a contract between principals and agents. By deriding shareholder value maximization, Jack Welsh was not just questioning what the objectives of a corporation are. He was, perhaps unwittingly, doing something much more profound: beginning to create a space for questioning the political philosophy and ontological assumptions about the corporation. Welsh’s claim has opened up a space for a broader debate 403

André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

about what a good corporation might look like, what the nature of the corporation actually is, and what implications this has for corporate governance. In this chapter, we explore shifting philosophical assumptions about corporate governance (see also Veldman, Chapter 27 this volume). We do this by tracing changes in the ontology of the corporation, the underlying political philosophy and the implications it has for corporate governance. We will argue that the corporation has shifted from being seen as a concession by the state to a real entity which has many of the characteristics of an actor and then to being seen as a contract between principals and agents. We argue that as each of these shifts have taken place, there has been an associated transformation in how we think about governance – from ensuring the sovereign is served, to ensuring the corporate entity is sustained, to ensuring that principals serve their agents. We claim each of these shifts in how we think about the corporation and its governance have been driven by movements whereby different elite groups have sought to seize control of not only corporations but also our philosophical assumptions about the corporation. Concession-based approaches were driven by the merchant class attempting to seize power, the rise of entity-based approaches was driven by an increasingly managerial professional class attempting to seize power, and more recent agency-based conceptions were driven by the financial class. Finally, we argue that significant cracks are currently appearing in agency-based conception of governance – this leads us to speculate whether we are undergoing another great revolution in governance. What this may lead to is a new ontology and political philosophy of the corporation as well as novel ideas about what good corporate governance looks like.

Corporation as concession During this early modern era, an increasingly powerful and wealthy merchant class was beginning to demand more power, particularly in the realm of economic activity. At the same time, sovereigns had increasingly grand ambitions to undertake projects and adventures. Often this came in the form of colonial plundering. These two tendencies – demands for economic freedom from merchants, and desire for extended dominion on the part of sovereigns – came together in the form of a novel entity: the early modern corporation. The early modern corporation was seen as a concession which a sovereign made to an entrepreneur (or ‘adventurer’) to allow them to undertake a very particular project. In return, the adventurer needed to re-compensate the sovereign. One notable aspect is that the concession of the corporation was always given for a particular activity. For instance, the East India Company received its royal concession for trading in a particular geographic region. A second important aspect is that because the concession was in the gift of the sovereign, the sovereign could always revoke it. What this meant was that if an entrepreneur did not engage in their assigned undertaking and did something entirely different, then their concession could be revoked. Seeing the corporation as a concession had some significant implications for how people thought about governance. Because the corporation was seen as a small piece of power that the sovereign gave away temporarily on particular terms, the process of governing the corporation largely involved the sovereign (or their representative) checking to see whether the demands were met and the corporation did not exceed its very specific jurisdiction. The implication of this was that the corporation could only exist for a very specific project or purpose. Once the project was fulfilled, the corporation would cease to exist. A further implication is that the corporation could not stray beyond that original purpose without formal changes to its charter. The final implication is that if the corporation did not live up to the demands which the sovereign made of it, then its charter could be revoked. 404

Governance

The corporation as an entity With the growth of industrialism during the nineteenth century, the view of the corporation of the concession began to gradually break down. Part of this was due to a new commercial class of industrialists who sought to challenge the idea that the corporation was an impermanent grace of the sovereign. Instead the corporation gradually came to be seen as an entity in and of itself. At the heart of changes in how we think about the corporation during this period was that the corporation came to be invested with increasing degrees of agency in its own right. This included the right to own property, to enter into contracts and an indefinable existence. The corporation came to be seen as an artificial person in its own right. What this meant was that rather than being a grant which the sovereign temporarily gave away (which could be revoked) the corporation became a person in and of itself. Along with this change in ontology came a sharp shift in who actually ran the corporation. While shareholders gained additional rights, the actual holdings of shares changed significantly. Instead of holdings being relatively centralized among a few parties who had personal knowledge of each other as well as the business, shareholdings became widely distributed. As a result, despite the fact that they now had potentially more control over the corporation, shareholders had increasingly less knowledge and ultimately less say in the direction of the company. Instead, companies came to be increasingly controlled by a cadre of professionalized managers whose task it was to ensure the growth of the corporation. This so-called ‘managerial revolution’ (Berle and Means, 1932[1991]) entailed a shift of control of the corporation from entrepreneurs themselves to a body of managers whose claim to authority was largely their expertise. As the conception of what the corporation was changed, so too did ideas about how the corporation should be governed. Instead of seeing corporate governance as ensuring compliance with the demands of the sovereign, governance became about maintaining the continuity of the corporation itself. It was not the sovereign, but the professional manager who was charged with nurturing the corporation. As a result, sustaining and growing the corporation became the central criteria for governing the corporation. Concerns about whether the corporation was serving the sovereign or undertaking the task which it was supposed to became secondary. The primary question of governance was to ensure that the corporation maintained itself and pursued opportunities for growth. Given the complexity of the corporation, and uninformed nature of most shareholders, this was seen as a task which was best left to expert managers and a few carefully selected board members.

The corporation as a contract In the late twentieth century, the idea that a corporation was an entity in and of itself came into question. An important aspect of this was the shift of power within the commercial elite – at least in the US – from a class of executives whose skills and status were closely tied with industrial efficiency (most notably engineers), towards another class of executives whose power was tied to their position in relationship to the financial market. This new financial elite sought to question whether a corporation might be seen as an entity at all. Instead, they promoted a view of the corporation as a contract between principals and agents. A vital part of this movement to rethink the ontology of the corporation was the law and economics movement. This group of lawyers and economists were largely inspired by neoliberal thought coming out of institutions like the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester (Fourcade and Khurana, 2013). They argued that the corporation should be seen as 405

André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

a contract between principals (the owners of capital) and agents (managers who are entrusted with that capital). Thus, in Jensen and Meckling’s (1976) influential work on principal–agency theory corporations were ‘simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals’ (Jensen and Meckling, 1976: 309). In this nexus of contracts, the idea is that the principals entrust agents with their capital so that they may pursue the goals laid out by the principals. It was assumed that the principal is a rational economic actor. It then followed that their one goal would be to maximize the value of their investment. A further implication was that the central goal of the corporation should be to pursue the interests of the principals – which is in practice meant to maximize shareholder value. If we assume that corporations are a contract between principals and agents, then corporate governance largely comes to be seen as the process of ensuring that the agents do not take advantage of principals by using investors’ resources to pursue their own interests. A whole movement around ‘good governance’ has appeared which focuses on bolstering the interests of shareholders vis-à-vis corporate management. The central assumption is that the board needs to avoid being captured by senior management. It should also provide active monitoring of the decisions of management. Finally, it must ensure that the firm pursues the goals of maximizing shareholder value rather than other idiosyncratic goals which might be suggested by management, employees or other ‘special interest groups’. If indeed the interests of shareholders are not being pursued, then it behoves investors and ultimately the board to consider whether the contract might be dissolved and investment dispersed back to investors. The implication then is that the corporation is not a relatively stable entity. It is just a contract. The art of good governance becomes all about monitoring contracts.

Beyond the corporation as a contract Seeing the corporation as a ‘nexus of contracts’ was the dominant view – at least in the AngloSaxon world – until the eve of the 2007 financial crisis. There was a broad consensus among elite groups about the correct way to govern corporations – and this model of good governance was based on agency theory. What is even more striking is that these ideas of good governance were being pushed out of their home turf in the corporate sector and into other sectors and indeed other countries with very different traditions of corporate governance. Standards of ‘good governance’ – largely informed by agency theory – have been applied in the public sector and increasingly the non-profit sector. For instance, many government services have developed corporate style boards. This has meant structures of control and oversight begin to make the governance of public and non-profit organizations increasingly resemble large corporates. Assumptions about good governance based on agency theory have also been extended from an Anglo-Saxon context into other national corporate governance codes. For instance, some Scandinavian countries, which had more corporatist traditions of corporate governance involving representatives of labour and capital, have recently written into their laws some basic aspects of agency theory – such as the assumption that corporations should maximize shareholder value. At the very time when agency-theory-based assumptions about governance are apparently spreading across the world, cracks are beginning to appear in the idea. There have also been some important populist critiques of the contemporary conceptions of the corporation, most notably the book and documentary simply entitled The Corporation (Bakan, 2004). Legal scholars have pointed out fatal flaws in agency-based conceptions of the corporations, including the fact that shareholders do not own a corporation, but they own a share (Stout, 2012). Economists have pointed out that shareholder primacy has actually led to a decreasing lifespan for companies and poor returns for their investors (Mayer, 2013). Management researchers have highlighted 406

Governance

how assumptions encoded into agency theory have led to managers acting in more self-interested and ultimately destructive ways (Ghoshal, 2005). Scholars have recently been joined by a number of high profile business leaders who have questioned the idea of shareholder value maximization such as Jack Welch (ex-CEO of GE), Paul Polman (CEO of Unilever), Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) and Marc Benioff (CEO of Sales Force). Some investors – particularly long-term-oriented pension funds – have started questioning the focus on shareholder value. Even the World Economic Forum, one of central meeting points for the global capitalist elite, has started to regularly hold sessions exploring what the purpose of the corporation is beyond maximizing shareholder value. All this suggests is that an idea about how to govern corporations – and much else besides – which had once captured the thinking of the elite may now be breaking down. The big question of course is what, if anything, will arise to take its place.

Reconceptualizing the corporate governance in the twenty-first century At the same time as agency-theory-based conceptions of the corporation are being called into question, there have been some significant radical changes in what corporations do. In an era of neo-liberal globalization, boundaries between the market, the state and civil society have become increasingly blurred. The retreat of the state from many activities once considered the sole purview of governments (education, welfare, provision of community services) has meant that corporations have become the main provider of these services. In developed countries like the UK, about a half of government spending is channelled through private sector providers such as outsourcing companies. In some developing countries, corporations appear to operate as de facto governments. They provide basic social services, contribute to basic public infrastructure, and in some cases even provide security. At the same time, the boundaries between corporations and civil society become increasingly blurred: large media companies like Twitter and Facebook provide central platforms for civil society. In addition, many civil society organizations increasingly use corporations to help fulfil their goals. For instance, many aid agencies have turned to corporations in the logistics sphere to help them distribute relief packages. But not all interactions between corporations and civil society are so peaceable. Many civil society actors have reoriented their activism away from what they see as an increasingly ineffective state and towards large corporations (Spicer and Böhm, 2007). As a result, corporations have become increasingly important focal points for political protest. When corporations begin to operate in such complex circumstances, they begin to play a quasi-state role. In particular, they are increasingly seen as a mechanism for providing basic citizenship rights such as access to basic social services, regulation and political voice (Matten and Crane, 2005). As a result, corporations come to be increasingly seen as a mechanism for addressing ‘governance gaps’ created by failures by states or civil society (Scherer and Palazzo, 2007). When this begins to happen, it becomes clear that it is not just the relationship between shareholders and professionalized management that seems to be central to the corporation. Rather, the corporation appears to be less like a nexus of contracts, and more like a locus of multiple political demands. Some have suggested that corporations have become a point of interaction between multiple stakeholders such as buyers, suppliers, employees and regulators (Freeman, 1984). Others see this vision of the corporation as hopelessly limited insofar as it assumes the corporation is the locus of a series of trade-offs between the demands of different stakeholders. Instead of assuming relatively stable needs, an alternative conception is to see how corporations seek to internalize democratic mechanisms within their boundaries – becoming a locus of ongoing dialogue between different actors (Scherer et al., 2013). 407

André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

It may seem attractive to understand the corporation as a locus of trade-offs or even a dialogue between different stakeholders. There may be cases where carefully managed trade-offs or dialogue increase and give rise to win–win outcomes. However, in many cases the result is likely to be either a win–lose or lose–lose outcome. When there are incommensurable goals between particular stakeholders and corporations, dialogue or trade-offs many be impossible. More than 80 years ago, Berle recognized this dilemma when he stated: ‘You cannot abandon emphasis on the view that business corporations exist for sole purpose of making profits for their shareholders until such time as you are prepared to offer a clear and reasonably enforceable scheme of responsibilities to someone else’ (Berle, 1932: 1365). The idea of the corporation as a locus of dialogue between a range of stakeholders has some serious implications for how corporations are governed. Instead of seeing the board’s role as ensuring that managers pursue the interests of their shareholders, the board becomes seen as made up of a wider range of stakeholders. Furthermore, the board does not just play an oversight role. It becomes a space where a range of very different sets of interests are traded off, negotiated and even reformulated. But perhaps an even more far-reaching implication of a more democratic approach for corporations is to recognize that governance is not just restricted to the board of directors. Rather, governance becomes something that spills out beyond the boundaries of the board, or even of the corporation. This involves shifting the locus of governance from internal preoccupations to a more sprawling set of governmental institutions that are distributed across an industry and indeed the broader political economy. The governance of the corporation might take place in a wide range of forums well beyond the board of directors. These forums might include industry associations, cross-industry groups, international standards bodies and a wide range of other forms of ‘private governance’. As the purposes of the corporation multiply, and forums involved in governing the corporation also multiply, one of the key questions becomes how should a corporation be governed and controlled, especially when their activities negatively impact vulnerable stakeholders who have limited power and resources to influence corporate decisions? The problem becomes more acute when governmental interests are more aligned with corporate interests, as they tend to be in extractive industries in developing countries, for instance. Facing both market failure and state failure, communities up against the brunt of extractive activities have few options but to organize resistance movements, sometimes with the support of civil society actors. Communities and other groups frequently find that they become marginalized from these various governance forums. When this happens, social movements can serve as an important vehicle for transforming the governance of the corporation. For instance, the shareholder rights movement itself was instrumental in changing in whose interests the corporation was run (Davis and Thompson, 1994). In addition, social movements can seek to create shifts in the political economy leading to changes in social arrangements about property rights, governance, authority and accountability, which in turn influence decision-making processes and outcomes in corporations. Thus, the corporation might be seen as a facilitator of social actions that can be assessed not just against market transactions, but on the social outcomes it generates. As an entity that is bestowed with property rights, a corporation can generate wealth for its shareholders. However, if marginalized and vulnerable stakeholders are allowed to exercise their common and customary property rights through social movements, then corporate performance can be assessed not by the amounts of profits or surplus value generated by corporations but on the basis of how these profits were generated, at what social and environmental cost, which segments had to bear these costs and which segments reaped the rewards. 408

Governance

Such a shift requires the creation of new governance regimes similar to current regulatory and governance mechanisms that protect community rights (including the right to say no to extraction in the name of development). What is lost by not articulating the social processes that constitute a corporation is a more meaningful notion of social accountability (as opposed to responsibility). The focus shifts from responsibility to accountability because focusing primarily on the responsibilities of a corporation as a legal entity, even in its progressive stakeholder form, will still produce limited social outcomes where a corporation is responsible to everyone and accountable to no one (but its shareholders). Discourses of responsibility and corporate citizenship obscure the power of business in setting the CSR agenda while notions of accountability demand a more explicit acknowledgement of the effects of asymmetrical power relations.

Conclusion In this chapter we have traced the shifts in how the corporation has been conceived (their ontology) and the normative assumptions about what good governance might be. Typically, political philosophy has focused on assumptions about the state and normative statements about how the state should operate. In this short chapter, we have tried to show that there is also a hidden political philosophy of the corporation. Rather than taking an entirely normative position of claiming that one vision of the corporation is better than another, we have tried to trace struggles around competing visions of the corporation. We have argued that shifts between these different visions of the corporations are driven by different elite groups seeking to pursue their own interests as well as idiosyncratic visions of what is good through the corporate structure. We have argued that since the appearance of the first early modern corporations in Europe during the sixteenth century, there have been at least three distinctive visions of the corporation – each with their own particular philosophical assumptions about what the corporation is, and how a corporation should be governed. Initially, the early modern corporation was seen as a concession from the sovereign and governance involved ensuring the standards of this concession were fulfilled. With the rise of industrialism and large firms, corporations increasingly became seen as entities in and of themselves which were governed by an elite group of professionalized managers. This vision of the corporation came under attack with the rise of a financial elite who vigorously promoted a vision of the firm as a nexus of contracts. According to this view, good governance involves ensuring that the interests and aims of principals are pursued rather than the ‘special interests’ of agents. Despite the hegemony of this view, it has increasingly come under attack from activists, experts, corporate managements and even investors. As a result, there are experiments afoot with alternative conceptions of the corporation with a more democratic bent. Although new, more democratic, ontologies of the corporation have begun to emerge, it remains unclear exactly what this new vision of the corporation looks like. There is little agreement about what exactly are the ontological or normative assumptions behind such a view. Is it realistic to see the corporation having democratic qualities at all? If so, should the corporation be seen as a liberal democracy which tries to trade off different stakeholder groups’ preferences or should it be seen as a deliberative democracy which provides a platform for ongoing learning and dialogue? What does this mean for how the corporation is governed? For instance, what might a more democratic board look like? What does it mean if governance gets increasingly displaced from boards and shifted to other forums? There are also pressing questions about the extent to which either boards or other extra-organizational forums might actually prove to foster a process of democratization at all. For instance, some studies of apparently 409

André Spicer and Bobby Banerjee

‘exemplary’ deliberative democratic forums have found that they can be relatively ineffectual and also exclude various already marginalized stakeholders (Moog et al., 2014). At the heart of the emergence of such a new vision of the corporation is a struggle between a professionalized vision of this scattered form of governance on the one hand and a more democratic and participatory vision on the other. It will be fascinating to see how this struggle plays out, and how different images and ideas about the corporation get established and how they subsequently drive ideas about what good governance is and what it could be. A further fascinating question is how these new emerging visions of governance are beginning to spread into other sectors. For instance, how would more democratic visions of governance play out in the public sector, the voluntary sector or in the governance of common property resources? There are also questions about how such visions of governance might move across different institutional contexts. For instance, how would deliberative modes of democracy work in contexts where there are very different – or indeed a complete lack of – democratic traditions? How is it possible to build up deliberation in contexts where people have little background experience in deliberative processes? Also there are questions about how this deliberative vision of the corporation squares with the resurgence of the state’s involvement in the corporation. Perhaps the most fascinating future question is whether this diffusion of corporate governance also is associated with an increasing diffusion – and perhaps dissolution – of the corporation itself. A vision of an archipelago of governance regimes might also lead us to see the corporation in a similar disconnected way. Indeed, there is evidence that corporations are now archipelagos of a kind – large multinational corporate groups are actually made up of hundreds of different corporations rather than one. In addition, contemporary corporations often rely on increasingly diffuse supply chains where responsibility and activity are widely distributed. Some have suggested that this process of diffusion is actually linked with the decline of the corporate form itself. If indeed the corporation is in decline as the preferred mode of organizing economic activity, this raises the question of what alternative forms might replace it and how these might work.

References Bakan, J. (2004). The Corporation: the pathological pursuit of profit and power. London: Hachette. Berle, A.A. (1932). For whom are corporate managers trustees? Harvard Law Review, 45: 1365–67. Berle, A.A. and Means, G.G.C. (1932[1991]). The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Davis, G.F. and Thompson, T.A. (1994). A social movement perspective on corporate control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 141–73. Fourcade, M. and Khurana, R. (2013). From social control to financial economics: the linked ecologies of economics and business in twentieth century America. Theory and Society, 42(2): 121–59. Freeman, R.E. (1984). Stakeholder management: framework and philosophy. Mansfield, MA: Pitman. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(1): 75–91. Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1976). Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs, and ownership structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4): 78–9. Matten, D. and Crane, A. (2005). Corporate citizenship: toward an extended theoretical conceptualization. Academy of Management Review, 30(1): 166–79. Mayer, C. (2013). Firm Commitments: why corporations are failing and how to restore trust in it. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moog, S., Spicer, A. and Böhm, S. (2014). The politics of multi-stakeholder initiatives: the crisis of the Forest Stewardship Council. Journal of Business Ethics, 1–25. Scherer, A.G. and Palazzo, G. (2007). Toward a political conception of corporate responsibility: business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective. Academy of Management Review, 32(4): 1096–120. 410

Governance

Scherer, A.G. Baumann-Poulley, D. and Schnider, A. (2013). Democratising corporate governance: compensating for the democratic deficit of corporate political activity and corporate citizenship. Business & Society, 52(3): 473–514. Spicer, A. and Böhm, A. (2007). Moving management: theorizing struggles against the hegemony of management. Organization Studies, 28(11): 1667–98. Stout, L.A. (2012). The Shareholder Value Myth: how putting shareholders first harms investors, corporations, and the public. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

411

36 Historiography and the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory Michael Rowlinson

Historical researchers have consistently argued for history to be taken more seriously in organization studies (Kieser, 1994), even making the case for an ‘historic turn’ (Booth and Rowlinson, 2006; Clark and Rowlinson, 2004), or historical ‘reorientation’ within organization theory (Üsdiken and Kieser, 2004). An historic turn would follow from the move towards more historical approaches in the wider social sciences (McDonald, 1996), as well as calls for more engagement with the humanities, both in organizational research (Zald, 1993) and the business school curriculum (Colby et al., 2011). As a historian Sewell (2005: 358) sees the ‘emergence of the diachronic metaphor of social construction’ as a manifestation of an historic, or ‘historical turn’ within social science. He cites the example of Giddens’ (1984) ‘move from the problematic of structure, synchronically understood, to that of the diachronic process of . . . “structuration”‘ (Sewell, 2005: 358). This is reflected in organization studies with the rise of more explicitly social constructionist theories, in particular new institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 2012), in which several foundational studies are based on longitudinal (e.g. Fligstein, 1991) or archival research (DiMaggio, 1991). However, the ontological and methodological shift away from the synchronic excess of structural contingency theory and the reduced reliance on cross sectional correlations does not necessarily represent a conscious turn towards history. The implication of referring to an historic turn is that history cannot simply be incorporated for the purpose of testing or illustrating theory. Historical researchers maintain that although organization theorists may appear to be keen to engage with history, ‘they tend to underrate the need to engage with the historiography’, and rarely position their findings against the relevant historical literature (Greenwood and Bernardi, 2014: 917; Jacques, 2006). Taking history seriously would involve a recognition of history as historiography, which can be defined most straightforwardly as ‘the writing of history and the study of historical writing’ (Jordanova, 2006: 228), with its own theoretical and philosophical debates. The main implication of historiography is that there are many different kinds of history. This leads to a consideration both of different approaches to writing history in organization studies, as well as the implications of theory and philosophy of history for organization theory. The historiographical focus for this chapter derives from five recent articles and book chapters that explore the historic turn and the role of history in organization studies. First, Rowlinson, 412

Historiography

Hassard and Decker’s (2014b) exposition of three epistemological dualisms derived from historical theory frames the subsequent discussion of divergences between the concerns of history and organization theory. Second, Yates’s (2014) examination of the genre differences between history and qualitative research in organization studies, which reflects the three epistemological dualisms identified by Rowlinson et al. (2014b). Third, Leblebici’s (2014) case for a transdisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary perspective recognizes genre and epistemological differences but maintains that history and organization theory can be brought together. Fourth, Kipping and Üsdiken’s (2014) survey of a vast literature identifies several different approaches to history within organization studies, making the case that there is more organizational research that could be considered as historical than might at first be realized. Finally Greenwood and Bernardi’s (2014) consideration of the relevance of history for organization theory in the broader context of relationship between history and sociology, which leads them to question the desirability of integrating history into organization studies. What distinguishes these various contributions is that each of the authors is able to draw on direct experience from conducting historical research, which means that historians cannot dismiss them as theorists who have never dirtied their hands in an archive.

Epistemological dualisms In order to facilitate historiographical dialogue between historical theory and organization theory Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker (2014b) have set out three epistemological dualisms which tend to separate the two fields. In the first dualism of explanation historical theorists are preoccupied with the legitimacy of narrative construction by historians (Roberts, 2001); the question of whether ‘to narrate or not?’ (Rigney, 2013: 191). By contrast in organization studies narrative is eschewed as a legitimate form of representation for reporting research in favour of analysis, albeit that the typical research article imposes a narrative on the research process itself (Bedeian, 1997). The interest in narrative from organization theorists such as Czarniawska (1999) derives from literary theory and ‘narratology’ in cultural studies, where the concern is with the analysis of narrative as a form of cultural representation, rather than the ‘functionality’ of narrative ‘in the production of historical knowledge’ (Rigney, 2013: 185). Philosophers of history such as David Carr (1986), Hayden White (1973, 1987), and Paul Ricoeur (1985, 1990a, 1990b) offer distinctive perspectives on narrative which can be used to question the prevalent view in organization theory that narrative represents an inevitable imposition on interpretations of the past, and therefore should be avoided in favour of rigorous methodological analysis. According to Carr and Ricoeur individuals experience life as a story, therefore historians can recover the lived narratives of historical actors. White disagrees and argues that this represents a retreat into the kind of historical objectivism in which narratives are supposedly found rather than imposed (Doran, 2012: 109). White’s (1987) view is that there is inevitably a fictional element in historical emplotment, but that ironically acknowledging this can improve historical writing, making a virtue of the necessity to narrate. In the second dualism of evidence historians are preoccupied with the provenance and reliability of the heterogeneous sources they find in that ill-defined location they refer to as ‘the archive’. One of the most eloquent and succinct definitions of what historians mean by ‘the archive’ comes from Foucault (1972: 128–9), who refers to it as ‘the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past’, although Foucault then explains that this is precisely not what he means by ‘the archive’. Historical writing is more or less synonymous with narrative, and as anyone who has ever entered an archive appreciates it is almost impossible not to narrate in order to select and explain a diverse range of sources. 413

Michael Rowlinson

A narrative posits a plot that links a sequence of logically and chronologically related events, but the contestable evidence for these events is found in the sources. Organization theorists, in common with other social scientists, generally overcome the problem of imposing order on the archive by using a specified technique for constructing data from a selected set of sources. A variety of organizational research methods have been developed for analysing historical data, ranging from highly quantitative event history analysis through to interpretive discourse analysis. But almost all of these are predicated upon an assumption that the repeated facts identified in sources to construct a dataset can and should be taken out of their archival context. What this tends to mean in practice is that the questions addressed are generated from organization theory rather than problems that arise from the sources themselves or historiographical debates. In the final dualism of temporality historians confront the perennial problem of periodization, which even organization theorists who do longitudinal or archival research are much less troubled by so long as they can establish a chronological sequence of events. The dilemma of finding ‘an organizing principle other than divine purpose’ is nicely summarized by a historian as follows: How do we divide up the past? Can we separate out coherent and comprehensible blocks of time? Can we define major ‘turning points’, ‘watersheds’, or other metaphoric indicators of fundamental change? Many historians stay away from this terrain, where even obvious landmarks like the French, Russian or Chinese Revolutions can evaporate as continuities are exposed. . . . Nevertheless . . . it is not easy to do without a set of markers. Agreement about periodization, however, remains both fraught and elusive. (Rabb, 2013) Organization theorists may sidestep the problem of periodization by borrowing a ready-made organization of time from historiography, but as Foucault (1972: 3–5; O’Farrell, 2013: 173) recognized, almost every question in history requires different ‘criteria of periodization’. The point to emphasize is that questions in organization theory do not necessarily require any periodization if they are seeking to make generalizations that apply in any and every historical context. These three dualisms provide a template for understanding divergences within and between history and organization studies in relation to research and writing organizational history. The dualisms can be used to construct a template that resonates with the divisions identified by other scholars who are interested in promoting dialogue between historians and organization theorists. On one side would be conventional narrative history with detailed citations to sources and a periodization derived from those sources in conjunction with historiography, but usually lacking any explicit methodological account or epistemological justification for its narrative form. On the other side would be conventional analytical social science research with an explicit account of the methods used to construct data from historical sources, and for qualitative research in particular an epistemological explanation for the chosen methodological approach, with a periodization derived from the availability of a chronologically continuous dataset or borrowed from historiography.

Genres of historical research As an experienced historical researcher, Yates (2014) deploys the literary concept of genre to explore the differences between writing in business history and qualitative research in organization studies. Her starting point is that historians in general, and business historians in particular, need guidance if they are to publish in leading management and organization studies 414

Historiography

journals, because in ‘historical journals, historians typically do not explicitly articulate their historical methods, favoring a more narrative approach’ (Yates, 2014: 265 emphasis added). She makes a convincing case that historical research can be adapted to the genre of an article in organization studies that uses qualitative methods, as long as historians can explain the nature of their sources in a methods section and explicitly differentiate historical methods from other types of qualitative research. Yates’ (2014) objective is to use genre as a means by which the expectations of leading management journals can be made sufficiently explicit for business historians to be able to adapt the ‘historical article genre’. An important part of this is that Yates explains how qualitative research has gained ground in organization studies by making distinctions, for example between case studies and ethnographic research. Business historians would therefore be better advised to explicate the historiographical assumptions that underpin their research, rather than try to disguise their research as a form of qualitative research, such as a case study. While this advice is undoubtedly invaluable for any individual business historians seeking to publish in management journals, it does raise the question of whether history should be subordinated to the genre of social science. One implication of an historic turn is that the social scientific format could be questioned in order to facilitate the publication of historiographical articles in management and organization studies journals. Historians face a ‘series of misconceptions concerning archival research on the part of organizational researchers’ which other qualitative researchers do not face (Rowlinson, 2004), or at least they have not faced such misconceptions to the same extent since qualitative methods were articulated in a series of now canonical publications (e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989; Langley, 1999; Pentland, 1999). Yates (2014: 281) argues that historians need to be able to cite their own set of ‘canonical sources justifying historical methods to social scientists’. The book chapters by Yates (2014) and Leblebici (2014), as well as the articles by Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker (Rowlinson et al., 2014b), Kipping and Üsdiken (2014), and Greenwood and Bernardi (2014) are clearly intended to constitute such a canon for historiography organization studies. However it would also be desirable if the historiographical canon could be extended retrospectively. Yates’ (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992) own highly cited theoretical work on the use of genre in organization studies draws on an extended historical illustration that shows how the memo genre developed in the nineteenth century, which includes an historically informed periodization. It could therefore be argued that the genre approach in organization studies is underpinned by Yates’ (1989) own previous extensive research on the history of organizational communication, which represents an exceptional demonstration of how historical research can inform theory development.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives From an extensive survey of business school doctoral dissertations based on historical data or analyses from 2000 to 2010, as well as articles in major management journals that are ‘based on historical data, analyses, or narrative’, Leblebici (2014) comes to conciliatory conclusions regarding the role of history in organization studies. He recognizes the ‘basic dilemma’ that faces ‘interdisciplinary’ research, which is that one discipline drives the research agenda while the other becomes a ‘secondary contributor’. Instead Leblebici (2014: 78–80) favours a ‘transdisciplinary research perspective’ which acknowledges the unique contributions of organization theorists and historians. This presents a cumulative view of knowledge production with business historians and organization theorists producing complementary knowledge. The transdisciplinary agenda therefore avoids the implication that historians need to become organization theorists or that organization theorists need to become historians. 415

Michael Rowlinson

Leblebici (2014: 79) makes a useful distinction between theoretical organizational history, where, for example, organization theory is inserted into business history, and historical organization theory, where history is drawn into organization theory. Theoretical organizational history, ‘is situational; concentrates on explaining a particular phenomenon; uses social theory to frame the research; and concentrates on identifying unique causes of events’. On the other hand historical organization theory, ‘subscribes to a meta-theory of history; applies organization theory to explain specific historical cases; tests hypotheses through comparative analysis of multiple cases; and, uses historical explanation to identify unique effects in the process’ (Leblebici, 2014: 79). Leblebici’s (Leblebici et al., 1991) own research on the source of innovation in organizational fields stands as a widely cited exemplar of historical organization theory within new institutionalism, and significantly his article is identified as ‘an organizational history’ in its title rather than disguising its historical orientation. As such it could be termed ‘historical new institutionalism’, which represents an important contribution to new institutional theory. What could be called ‘new institutionalist history’, on the other hand, as a variant of historical organization theory, uses new institutional theory to frame research but in order to contribute to historiographical debate (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2013). There is a rare example of this in business history, where Harvey, Press, and Maclean (2011) explain how William Morris was institutionalized as both a British and an international cultural icon.

History, theory, and historical cognizance Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker’s (2014b) epistemological dualisms, along with Yates’ (2014) exploration of genres, and Leblebici’s (2014) proposal for transdisciplinarity, are mainly concerned with relations between history and organization studies. By contrast Kipping and Üsdiken (2014: 541) distinguish between two broad approaches to history within organization theory. First ‘history to theory’ refers to the ‘use of historical data (both quantitative and qualitative) to develop new or modify or test extant theories’. Theory itself remains timeless but historical data are used to build or test theory. Second, ‘history in theory’ uses ‘the past as an integral part of the theoretical model itself, such as imprinting or path dependence’’ In addition Kipping and Üsdiken also identify studies of organization that ‘took history seriously’, which they refer to as ‘historical cognizance’ and come from either ‘history to theory’, or ‘history in theory’. Historically cognizant studies from ‘history to theory’ would formulate their ‘hypotheses in a context-specific manner’, whereas for ‘history in theory’ the ‘historical conditionality’ for theorizing would need to be acknowledged. The historical context could therefore either constitute a variable in its own right, or as a component for theory construction history may represent a qualification to the universal claims that are usually made for organization theory. The distinction between ‘history in theory’ and ‘history to theory’ (Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014) works well as a device to categorize a vast range of historical research within organization studies. Kipping and Üsdiken suggest that there is much more historical research going on in organization studies than has generally been recognized, but much of it, especially that which they characterize as ‘history to theory’, is not necessarily identified as being historical. It is only by delving into these articles that the historical nature of the data used becomes apparent. It could be argued that only historically cognizant studies can be counted as historiographical in any real sense, but by extending their survey and discussion well beyond the articles that are usually seen as historical exemplars, Kipping and Üsdiken open up a debate about the boundary of what counts as history and historical methods. Likewise much of the historiographical discussion in theory and philosophy concerns narrative history that is for the most part historiographically unreflexive. 416

Historiography

Historical theorists such as Alun Munslow (2012: 128) have criticized unreflexive narrative history for making a common ‘category error’, in which ‘history’ and ‘the past’ are thought of as synonymous. A similar problem arises with Kipping and Üsdiken’s (2014: 541) expansive categories of historical research in organization studies, where ‘history’ simply refers to the past, not history as historiography. If history is equated with the past then that might imply that somehow the past can be accessed and incorporated into organization theory without acknowledging the epistemological problems discussed by Rowlinson, Hassard an Decker (2014b) of how the past is represented in history. In fact Kipping and Üsdiken recognize this tension between the past and history when they discuss the Resource Based View of the firm, and the under-explored notion of firms being ‘captives of their own history’ (Oliver, 1997; cited in Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014). The implication is that organizations are imprisoned by their past through processes such as imprinting. But new institutionalists (Foster et al., 2011; Suddaby et al., 2010), along with more theoretically inclined business historians (Hansen, 2012; Rowlinson et al., 2014a; Mordhorst, 2014), have increasingly recognized that organizations are enabled and constrained by history as represented by narratives of the past, which can therefore be used for strategic purposes. Only the most naïve objectivist business historians would claim that rhetorical narrative history could be countered by a true account of ‘what actually happened’ (cf. Jeremy and Tweedale, 2005). Equating the past with history can result in a range of ontological and epistemological ‘category mistakes’ (Munslow, 2012: 128), including the view that history is merely a repository for ‘anecdote and chronology’, as Kuhn (1970: 1) put it. So, for example, in an otherwise sophisticated discussion of methods in organization theory, it is asserted that, ‘Historians of science (e.g. Kuhn) . . . have discovered that the traditional account [of research] bears little resemblance to the practices of working scientists’ (Stablein, 2006: 350 emphasis added). But then as a result, it is argued, ‘most scholars would conclude that we invent rather than discover the empirical world’ (Stablein, 2006: 350 emphasis added). This is paradoxical, suggesting that historians have empirically discovered that the empirical world is invented. If the history of science was credited with developing the theoretical notion that the empirical world is invented through Kuhn’s deployment of paradigms as a concept for describing, or narrating, the history of scientific revolutions, then the conceptual role of historians and the value of historiography in theory development would receive greater recognition.

Historical sociology For a more explicitly historiographical examination of history in organization studies Greenwood and Bernardi (2014) refer to the long-standing debates, going back at least to Weber, over the relationship between history and sociology and the rise of historical sociology. They note that historians in general are largely unconcerned by debates in organization studies, but that history has been profoundly affected by critiques from sociology, even if that has often meant forceful resistance to the importation of social scientific research methods. The current discussions between business historians and organization theorists (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014; Popp, 2009) can therefore be seen as a continuation of long running debates within and between history and sociology over the desirability of integration. Greenwood and Bernardi explain how historians understand the past with a particular thematic focus, such as business history, or theoretical orientation. But that in addition to their conscious research focus and theoretical orientation, which may or may not be stated in their work, historians are also influenced by the historical context in which they are writing. So, ‘both with knowing it, and without knowing it historians reflect the preoccupations of their . . . contemporaneous 417

Michael Rowlinson

context’. Historiography is therefore essentially concerned with dissecting the ‘multiplicity of intentions and influences’ in historical writing (Greenwood and Bernardi, 2014: 912). Historiography, as ‘the history of historical writing’ (Budd, 2009: xiii), is at a relatively early stage in organization theory, and as it develops further the epistemological dualisms, choices of genre, discipline and relationship to theory outlined in this chapter will become increasingly apparent.

Recommended further reading The three journal articles (Greenwood and Bernardi, 2014; Kipping and Üsdiken, 2014; Rowlinson et al., 2014b) and two book chapters (Leblebici, 2014; Yates, 2014) featured in this chapter provide further guidance, as well as other chapters in the edited book (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014).

References Bedeian, A.G. (1997). Of fiction and fraud: a comment on Barry and Elmes’ Article. Academy of Management Review, 22(4): 840–42. Booth, C. and Rowlinson, M. (2006). Management and organizational history: prospects. Management & Organizational History, 1(1): 5–30. Bucheli, M. and Wadhwani, R.D. (eds) (2014). Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. New York: Oxford University Press. Budd, A. (2009). The Modern Historiography Reader: Western sources, London: Routledge. Carr, D. (1986). Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, P. and Rowlinson, M. (2004). The treatment of history in organisation studies: towards an ‘historic turn’? Business History, 46(3): 331–52. Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Sullivan, W.M. and Dolle, J.R. (2011). Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: liberal learning for the profession (1st edn). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Czarniawska, B. (1999). Writing Management: organization theory as a literary genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DiMaggio, P.J. (1991). Constructing an organizational field as a professional project: US art museums, 1920–1940, in Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (eds), The New Institutionalism In Organizational Analysis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 267–92. Doran, R. (2012). The work of Hayden White I: mimesis, figuration and the writing of history, in Partner, N. and Foot, S. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Los Angeles: Sage, pp. 106–18. Eisenhardt, K.M. (1989). Building theories from case-study research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4): 532–50. Fligstein, N. (1991). The structural transformation of American industry: an institutional account of the causes of diversification in the largest firms, 1919–1979, in Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (eds), The New Institutionalism In Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 311–36. Foster, W.M., Suddaby, R., Minkus, A. and Wiebe, E. (2011). History as social memory assets: the example of Tim Hortons. Management & Organizational History, 6(1): 101–20. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London,: Tavistock Publications. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Greenwood, A. and Bernardi, A. (2014). Understanding the rift, the (still) uneasy bedfellows of History and Organization Studies. Organization, 21(6): 907–32. Hansen, P.H. (2012). Business history: a cultural and narrative approach. Business History Review, 86(4): 693–717. Harvey, C., Press, J. and Maclean, M. (2011). William Morris, cultural leadership, and the dynamics of taste. Business History Review, 85(2): 245–71. Jacques, R.S. (2006). History, historiography and organization studies: the challenge and the potential. Management & Organizational History, 1(1): 31–49. Jeremy, D.J. and Tweedale, G. (2005). Editors’ introduction, in Jeremy, D.J. and Tweedale, G. (eds), Business History, Vol. I. London: Sage, pp. vii–xxxiv. 418

Historiography

Jordanova, L. (2006). History in Practice (2nd edn). London: Hodder Education. Kieser, A. (1994). Crossroads – why organization theory needs historical analyses – and how these should be performed. Organization Science, 5(4): 608–20. Kipping, M. and Üsdiken, B. (2014). History in organization and management theory: more than meets the eye. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1): 535–88. Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd, enlarged edn). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for theorizing from process data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4): 691–710. Leblebici, H. (2014). History and Organization theory: potential for a transdisciplinary convergence, in Bucheli, M. and Wadhwani, R.D. (eds), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–99. Leblebici, H., Salancik, G.R., Copay, A. and King, T. (1991). Institutional change and the transformation of interorganizational fields: an organizational history of the United States broadcasting industry. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(3): 333–63. McDonald, T.J. (ed.) (1996). The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mordhorst, M. (2014). Arla and Danish national identity: business history as cultural history. Business History, 56(1): 116–33. Munslow, A. (2012). A History of History. New York: Routledge. O’Farrell, C. (2013). Michel Foucault: the unconscious of history and culture, in Partner, N. and Foot, S. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. London: Sage, pp. 162–82. Oliver, C. (1997). Sustainable competitive advantage: combining institutional and resource-based views. Strategic Management Journal, 18(9): 697–713. Pentland, B.T. (1999). Building process theory with narrative: from description to explanation. Academy of Management Review, 24(4): 711–24. Popp, A. (2009). History, a useful ‘science’ for management? A response. Enterprise and Society, 10(4): 831–36. Powell, W.W. and DiMaggio, P.J. (2012). The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rabb, T.K. (2013). A world of fires and ice. Times Literary Supplement (5746): 10–11. Ricoeur, P. (1985). Time and Narrative: Volume 2 (trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1990a). Time and Narrative: Volume 1 (trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer) (Paperback edn). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1990b). Time and Narrative: Volume 3 (trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer). Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Rigney, A. (2013). History as text: narrative theory and history, in Partner, N. and Foot, S. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. London: Sage, pp. 183–201. Roberts, G. (ed.) (2001). The History and Narrative Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Rowlinson, M. (2004). Historical analysis of company documents, in Cassell, C. and Symon, G. (eds), Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research. London: Sage, pp. 301–11. Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J.S. (2013). Historical neo-institutionalism or neo-institutionalist history? Historical research in management and organization studies. Management & Organizational History, 8(2): 111–26. Rowlinson, M., Casey, A., Hansen, P.H. and Mills, A.J. (2014a). Narratives and memory in organizations. Organization, 21(4): 441–46. Rowlinson, M., Hassard, J. and Decker, S. (2014b). Research Strategies for organizational history: a dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3): 250–74. Sewell, W.H.J. (2005). Logics of History: social theory and social transformation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stablein, R. (2006). Data in organization studies, in Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T.B. and Nord, W.R. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 347–69. Suddaby, R., Foster, W.M. and Trank, C.Q. (2010). Rhetorical history as a source of competitive advantage, in Baum, J.A.C. and Lampel, J. (eds), Globalization of Strategy Research, Vol. 27. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 147–73. 419

Michael Rowlinson

Üsdiken, B. and Kieser, A. (2004). Introduction: history in organisation studies. Business History, 46(3): 321–30. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yates, J. (1989). Control through Communication: the rise of system in American management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yates, J. (2014). Understanding historical methods in organization studies, in Bucheli, M. and Wadhwani, D. (eds), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 265–83. Yates, J. and Orlikowski, W.J. (1992). Genres of organizational communication: a structurational approach to studying communication and media. Academy of Management Review, 17(2): 299–326. Zald, M.N. (1993). Organization studies as a scientific and humanistic enterprise: toward a reconceptualization of the foundations of the field. Organization Science, 4(4): 513–28.

420

37 Humour and organization Nick Butler

Introduction The meaning and significance of humour has been widely debated throughout the history of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes and Locke to Kant and Schopenhauer (see Morreall, 1987). At first glance, the idea of heavyweight thinkers contemplating something as frivolous as humour may strike us as rather improbable, even inadvertently amusing. Veteran British comic Ken Dodd made great play of the disparity between the sheltered world of philosophy and the gritty reality of comedy in his well-known quip that the trouble with Freud – who wrote about jokes from a psychoanalytic perspective – was that he never had to play the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after both Rangers and Celtic had lost (Palmer, 1994). Humour might not appear to be the natural territory of the intellectual since it interrupts, with a giggle or a guffaw, matters of more consequence. But probe a little deeper and we find that a philosophical concern with humour – understood in the broadest sense of any verbal or visual phenomena that is experienced as funny1 – has the potential to contribute meaningfully to serious ontological, epistemological and ethical questions. Following Walter Benjamin (1998[1966]: 101), we might justifiably claim that ‘there is no better starting point for thought than laughter’. Given that humour permeates our everyday working lives in manifold ways, the philosophy of humour has obvious implications for studying organizations (Westwood and Rhodes, 2007). At stake is the significance of joking practices among workers, such as clowning, lampooning, horseplay and comic banter. For some, humour enables workers to undermine management control and subvert power structures, interrupting the serious world of business. For others, humour acts as a safety valve for employee discontent, offering light relief from the pressures of work. On the managerial side, humour might be seen as a resource to motivate organizational members, harness creativity and stimulate productivity. This tells us that humour is an inherently unstable phenomenon that can be used for a variety of purposes, from worker resistance to management discipline. The resources of philosophy can therefore be drawn on to explore the ‘inescapable ambiguity of humour’ (Kenny and Euchlar, 2012: 307) in social and organizational contexts. This chapter begins by providing an overview of philosophical theories of humour and laughter before examining the prevalence of joking practices in workplace settings. The chapter concludes by considering how we might productively integrate humour within the study of organizations. 421

Nick Butler

Philosophy and humour Aristotle (2001: 276) famously claimed that no other animal laughs apart from man. While dogs may draw back their teeth into a snarling smile and chimpanzees sometimes emit laughter-like vocalizations, homo sapiens are uniquely endowed with the capacity to crack wise and burst out laughing. For this reason, the phenomenon of laughter provides a basis on which our capacities and limitations as human beings may be understood. Seen from one perspective, laughter calls to mind the fallibility of our condition. We laugh at a pratfall, for example, because such behaviour doesn’t measure up to our image of how a person should ideally conduct themselves. Put into Cartesian terms, laughter emerges whenever we become acutely aware of the gulf between the mind and the body. This explains why we find scatological humour so funny, reducing as it does the ideal to the real, the metaphysical to the physical – in other words, drawing attention to ‘the gap between our souls and arseholes’ (Critchley, 2002: 45–6; emphasis in original). But laughter doesn’t just remind us of our failure to live up to an abstract image of perfection. It also underlines the fact that we possess the ability to speculate on other possible realities. After all, what is a joke if not a reflection on how things could be otherwise? For example, the world of humour asks us to imagine a doctor who, instead of prescribing a course of cognitive behavioural therapy to a patient who is feeling like a pair of curtains, pointedly instructs them to ‘pull yourself together’. In this sense, jokes present a counter-reality to the one we normally inhabit, pointing towards another way of understanding the world around us. Laughter therefore distinguishes us from other animals not simply because we are physiologically capable of laughing, but because the experience of humour rests on our singular ability to distance ourselves from the reality we are presented with (Plessner, 1970[1941]). The notion of incongruity provides a common point of entry into the philosophical analysis of humour. As Berger (1997: x) puts it: ‘[F]rom its simplest to its most sophisticated expressions, the comic is experienced as incongruence’ (emphasis in original). We are prompted to laugh whenever two or more ideas that have little in common with each other are brought together in unanticipated ways – such as our souls and arseholes. This is most succinctly expressed by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher James Beattie (1779: 318), who argued that laughter arises ‘from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage’. Of course, not all incongruity is intrinsically funny: we may feel pity or fear when we encounter certain types of disjunctive phenomena, like a child lost in a supermarket or an explosion in a train station. But there are few instances of humour that do not involve some kind of disparity between how things are and how things should be. This is neatly expressed in the classic ‘pull back and reveal’ technique used by stand-up comedians in which a scenario is first described (e.g. drinking, smoking, being in a state of undress) before we discover the amusingly inappropriate context in which these activities take place (e.g. on a bus, in a school, at a police station). Such jokes are funny because we are led to expect one thing but receive quite another. This is no doubt what Schopenhauer (1969[1844]: 59) had in mind when he noted that laughter arises from ‘the suddenly perceived incongruity between a concept and the real objects that [have] been thought through it in some relation’. Think, for instance, of the famous Einsteinian gag: light travels faster than sound – that’s why some people appear bright before you hear them speak. Here, a concrete object of perception (i.e. the way certain people seem to be intelligent before they open their mouths) is unexpectedly subsumed within an abstract concept that bears little resemblance to the object beyond a surface similarity on the level of wordplay (i.e. light/bright, sound/speak). Humour thus has the capacity to bring together ideas that, strictly speaking, ought not to be intermingled if the rules of analytical reason are properly followed. 422

Humour

This explains why, prior to the twentieth century, humour was marginalized from philosophical thought. Take the example of British empiricist John Locke’s (2008[1690]) Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here, the comic imagination is strictly demarcated from the domain of philosophy to the extent that Locke can claim that ‘Men who have a great deal of Wit . . . have not always the clearest Judgement, or deepest Reason’ (Locke, 2008[1690]: 92). Whereas judgement is based on the meticulous discernment of ideas received from the empirical world – thus providing a firm foundation for knowledge – wit works in precisely the opposite direction, ‘lying . . . in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy’ (Locke, 2008: 92; emphasis in original). The phenomenon of humour is banished from the operation of reason because it leads us astray from the path of certainty; wit may be pleasing, but it does not stand the test of slow, methodical judgement. Given its capacity to disrupt stable categories of knowledge, it is little wonder that humour was rigorously separated from the serious task of philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It is precisely this rogue dimension to comic incongruity that has attracted more contemporary thinkers to the topic of laughter. Since it is located on the very limit of signification, laughter calls into question the dualistic interplay between meaning and non-meaning that typically characterizes Western thought (Nancy, 1987). This is the kind of overwhelming gelastic outburst described by Foucault (2002[1966]: xvi) in the opening pages of The Order of Things: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (emphasis in original) The passage in Borges refers to a fictional Chinese encyclopaedia that sorts animals into bizarre and preposterous categories: embalmed animals, innumerable animals, animals that from a distance look like flies, animals that have just broken a jug of water, animals that are included in the present classification, etc. The laughter provoked by this ludicrous taxonomy is radically disordering to the modes of conceptual organization – the titular ‘order of things’ – that direct our engagement with the world. It is in this sense that Parvulescu (2010: 13) suggests that Foucault articulates ‘the strongest formulation of the promise of laughter’ in contemporary philosophical thought, situating him firmly within a ‘community of laughers’ that also includes Bataille, Nancy, Derrida and Cixous. What these thinkers have in common is the fact that they are all attracted to excessive laughter, laughter that overflows and bursts systems of meaning that present themselves as closed and absolute (Davis, 2000). Following Nietzsche (2003[1886]: 218), might it not be time to propose ‘an order of rank among philosophers according to the rank of their laughter’?

Laughter at work In workplace settings, instances of humour can serve as what Peter Berger (1997: 206), following Schütz, calls ‘finite provinces of meaning’. The occurrence of these provinces temporarily interrupts the serious world of work by presenting a counter-reality to the one offered by the dominant corporate culture. Consider the outrageous pranks recounted in Taylor 423

Nick Butler

and Bain’s (2003) study of two call centres in the UK: one involves filling up a condom with cold chicken soup, stapling it to a Christmas card and leaving it in a manager’s locker, while another consists of wearing deliberately garish shirts and outrageous ties to subvert the company’s professional dress-code. Such practical jokes serve to shift the ‘accent of reality’ from the serious to the comic (Berger, 1997: 7), allowing participants to briefly escape from everyday routines of work. Similar examples are found in Collinson’s (1988) seminal study of a factory in the north of England. Here, joking practices among workers are seen as an expression of autonomy in the face of highly constrained working lives, contrasted to the perceived politeness and restraint of the white-collar office staff. In the words of one manual labourer: ‘You can have a load of fun on the shop-floor, but in the offices, they’re not the type to have a laff [sic] and a joke. You can’t say “you fucking twat!” in the offices’ (Collinson, 1988: 186). By underlining the basic tension between the imperatives of capital (i.e. discipline and order) and the recalcitrance of labour (i.e. hijinks and misbehaviour), humour at work serves not only as a survival strategy but also as a mode of resistance against managerial authority – in other words, a finite province of meaning that poses a palpable threat to the paramount reality of organizational life. Given its subversive potential, it is little wonder that joking practices were strictly prohibited in most workplaces for much of the twentieth century. This is illustrated most vividly by the story of the assembly line worker who was fired because he was smiling and laughing with his colleagues, thus disrupting the flow of production (Collinson, 2002: 276). A more contemporary example can be found in the case of an IT developer who was fired when he was overheard making sexually suggestive comments about ‘big dongles’ at a technology conference (Smith, 2013). Such joking practices serve to unsettle or even dissolve the boundary between work and non-work, which explains why management has typically sought to stamp it out. The problem, of course, is that there is nothing more likely to invite ridicule than a buttoned-up killjoy who tries to put a stop to the fun. It is no coincidence that in popular cultural representations of work, managers often serve as the butt of jokes – from middle-ranking executives like David Brent in The Office to powerful CEOs like Mr Burns in The Simpsons – rather than appearing as the noble and charismatic leaders that are commonly eulogized in the business press. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, efforts have been made in recent years to slap a smile on the face of management. Humour is increasingly coming to be seen as a potentially valuable resource for managing employees, rather than an intrinsic threat to labour discipline. Popular texts with titles like Funny Business, Laughing Nine to Five, You Can’t Be Serious! and 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work extoll the virtues of fun and frivolity in the service of bottom-line objectives, pointing to the fact that organizationally sanctioned humour can be used as a ‘multifunctional management tool’ (Romero and Cruthirds 2006: 58). This is evinced most clearly by so-called ‘cultures of fun’ in contemporary organizations where employees are encouraged to participate in light-hearted and amusing activities during working hours, ranging from the relatively mild (e.g. wacky Fridays, laughter workshops, the use of micro-scooters and space-hoppers in the office) to the more extreme (e.g. office clocks emitting farting noises every hour, workspaces decorated with gay pornography, food throwing in the canteen) (Bolton and Houlihan, 2009; Plester, 2009). The attempt by management to artificially induce an atmosphere of jollity and playfulness in the workplace through ‘packaged fun’ initiatives can, however, backfire spectacularly. Consider Warren and Fineman’s (2007) account of a IT firm that invested heavily in developing fun initiatives. When the company purchased a family of five oversized ‘Russian dolls’ dressed in business attire to stand in the corridor, some employees responded mischievously by hiding them around the workplace (e.g. in a cubicle in the ladies’ toilet, in the elevator to greet clients). Predictably, management took exception to this misuse of company property. In the end, CCTV 424

Humour

was installed to monitor the dolls after disgruntled employees started to punch them repeatedly in the face. Such acts of comic sabotage should come as no surprise; after all, there is probably nothing less likely to raise a smile than being forced to enjoy yourself, especially when the terms and conditions are determined by your employer. The use of humour at work appears to be characterized by a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand, workers can draw on the resources of humour to challenge managerial prerogatives and disrupt – albeit temporarily – organizational norms. On the other hand, managers can deploy a range of joking practices in order to elicit consent among the workforce. Some commentators have accounted for this ambiguity by insisting on a strict distinction between ‘contestive’ and ‘repressive’ forms of humour (Holmes, 2000). The task for the critical organizational scholar would be to carefully demarcate between instances of humour that overturn established power relations and those that reinforce management control. Others are quick to point out, however, that such a distinction between rebellious and disciplinary humour is difficult to sustain in practice, especially since comic laughter can simultaneously serve to undermine power structures on one level while reinforcing the status quo on another (Westwood and Johnston, 2012). Recall, for example, the off-colour quips made by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or the foppish buffoonery of Conservative politician and London Mayor Boris Johnson – such humour upsets the straight-laced political order while simultaneously reinforcing established structures of power with a cheeky grin. One way out of this impasse is to turn to the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson (2008[1900]), whose treatise on laughter provides insight into the meaning and significance of humour in organizations. For Bergson, laughter is prompted whenever we encounter individuals acting in a comically rigid way who fail to adapt to the world around them. This implies that individuals who deviate from accepted norms and social customs will likely be met with ridicule; by laughing at them, we exercise a social gesture of embarrassment that seeks to rectify such aberrant behaviour and return individuals to the normal flow of life. To this extent, ‘rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective’ (Bergson, 2008[1900]: 17). This is the basis of all humour found in the well-known comic strip Dilbert: whether directed at petty bureaucrats or at office nerds, our laughter emerges from a disjunction between how the various employees ought to behave or how organizations ought to be run and how they are actually portrayed. A joke is therefore rarely ever innocent but always contains an implicit set of assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’ organizational conduct, whether from the perspective of blue-collar labourers or middle-class executives. The work of Bergson thus allows us to avoid the problematic rebellion–discipline dyad and instead reorient the study of workplace humour around the normative dynamics of laughter in organizational settings (Butler, 2015).

In search of lost (academic) cheekiness The academic literature is perhaps not the first place to look if we want to read something amusing. Indeed, scholarly journal articles are not particularly renowned for their wit or waggishness. This is no doubt related to assumptions of ‘seriousness’ – in every sense – that inform the production of scientific knowledge. Despite (or because of) this, there is a case to be made for introducing a comic perspective into academic work. For example, Watson (2015) proposes to adopt ‘planned incongruity’ as a methodological principle for injecting much-needed humour into sociological investigations. This could involve an ironic treatment of UK-based research audits like the RAE and the REF – see, for instance, Butler and Spoelstra’s (2012) tongue-in-cheek guide to ‘the secrets of excellence’ in academia. Elsewhere, Driessen (1997) notes that while most studies in the field of anthropology are devoid of wit, a few researchers 425

Nick Butler

have actively sought to mobilize the resources of humour to defamiliarize their own cultures through parodic articles. To this extent, Driessen suggests that the ‘anthropologist as trickster’ has the capacity to challenge commonplace assumptions about the form and content of academic research in this field of study. We can discern similar trends in organization studies. Drawing on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Śliwa et al. (2013) outline a method of ‘profanation’ in relation to leadership concepts and practices. Profanation involves the neutralization of power structures that have gained an aura of sanctity (Śliwa et al., 2013: 866). In effect, profanation occurs by touching that which is sacred and therefore ‘untouchable’ (Śliwa et al., 2012: 867). As an example of profanation, Śliwa et al. approvingly cite an article by Boje and Rhodes (2006) in which the corporate clown Ronald McDonald is characterized as a transformational leader. Here, the sacred is profaned by equating a marketing device for selling hamburgers to children with the most visionary model of leadership. The idea of Ronald McDonald as a transformational leader is a subversive mode of parody precisely because it changes something serious into something comic at the same time as maintaining the formal elements that make it acceptable for publication in a highly ranked scientific journal. These are promising developments within organization studies. However, alongside the potential of humour to profane that which is seen to be sacred, there is also a risk that introducing a humorous attitude into academia may play into the hands of what social psychologist Michael Billig (2005: 11) has termed ‘ideological positivism’. We are surrounded on all sides today by the injunction to look on the bright side – ‘don’t worry, be happy!’, etc. – linked to positive psychology and the discourse of positive thinking (Ehrenreich, 2009). Part of this injunction involves the capacity of humour to deal with life’s troubles, to ‘see the funny side’ even in the most desperate circumstances. One need only look to the self-help literature on this topic to get a sense of how humour is used as a panacea for every imaginable personal setback, from stress and job loss to cancer and bereavement (Klein, 1989, 2000). The problem is that this emphasis on positive thinking neglects the wider social and political context in which such problems are situated (e.g. privatized health care, weakening of employment laws, etc.). To this extent, laughter and humour can be viewed as an integral component of neo-liberal capitalist ideology (Zupančič, 2008). This does not mean we should give up on humour entirely. Indeed, we can turn at this point to the work of Sloterdijk to find a way forward. In his Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk (1987[1983]: 143) contrasts the ideology of the modern cynic with the disruptive force of ‘kynical’ laughter: When the cynic smiles melancholically-contemptuously, from the illusionless heights of power, it is characteristic for the kynic to laugh so loudly and unabashedly that refined people shake their heads. Kynical laughter comes from the intestines; it is grounded at the animal level and lets itself go without restraint. Lest we imagine that kynical belly laughter entirely replaces intellectual engagement with the brute physicality of the body, Sloterdijk reminds us that the figure of the kynic finds its archetypal expression in Diogenes of Sinope, the so-called ‘dog philosopher’ of ancient Athens. What is at stake here is a way of speaking truth to power and challenging accepted norms of society through a series of public provocations. For example, at an athletic contest in Isthmia Diogenes forcefully took a crown and placed it on his head, arguing that he had won a more difficult and demanding victory in his life against poverty and exile. He later placed a crown on the head of a horse that had bucked and brayed valiantly when fighting with another horse. Foucault 426

Humour

(2001: 121–2) reflects on the effects of such effrontery: ‘What are you really doing when you award someone with a crown in the Isthmian games? For if the crown is awarded to someone as a moral victory, then Diogenes deserves a crown. But if it is only a question of superior physical strength, then there is no reason why the horse should not be given a crown.’ In other words, Diogenes calls into question a system of rule in a particular field (e.g. an athletic festival) by drawing attention to its ultimate contingency. Kynicism is therefore characterized by Sloterdijk as ‘a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme’ (Sloterdijk, 1987[1983]: 102; emphasis in original) – consider Diogenes’ propensity to fart, shit, piss and masturbate in the agora, thus overturning accepted standards of decency and decorum. Unlike the tradition of the ‘holy fool’ in Orthodoxy Christianity, whereby devout individuals demonstrate their piety by inverting worldly values through self-abasement (Ivanov, 2006), Diogenes can be seen to exercise a courageous impudence that advances an ‘uncivil enlightenment’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 102), undermining rather than strengthening higher authority, whether social, political or religious. Along these lines, might we dare to imagine the business school as a potential site of unruly cheekiness? This would minimally involve an attempt to elicit laughter that ‘wipes away illusions and postures’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 144) in management research. Such illusions and postures include faith in social entrepreneurship’s ability to reconcile private wealth accumulation with the social good, or a belief in the radical transformative power of leadership despite the mundane reality of organizational bureaucracy. Perhaps one could even envisage the emergence of the ‘organization theorist as trickster’, metaphorically urinating in the academy and pissing against the managerialist wind. If nothing else, to paraphrase Nietzsche (2003[1886]: 152), then at least our laughter may still have a future in the business school.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Sverre Spoelstra, Helen Delaney, Christian Garmann Johnsen and Bent Meier Sørensen for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.

Note 1

Etymologically, the term ‘humour’ derives from ancient Greek theories of the bodily humours that were said to determine our moods. The modern usage of the term is linked to the presentation of comic characters in seventeenth century theatre plays who were characterized by certain exaggerated temperaments or ‘humours’ (i.e. sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic). In this chapter, I treat the term as a placeholder for comic phenomena in general.

References (key texts in bold) Aristotle (2001). On the parts of animals (trans. J.G. Lennox). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beattie, J. (1779). Essays: on poetry and music. London: E. and C. Dilly. (Facsimile edn.) Benjamin, W. (1998[1966]). Understanding Brecht (trans. A. Bostock). London and New York: Verso. Berger, P. (1997). Redeeming laughter: the comic experience of human experience. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bergson, H. (2008[1900]). Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic (trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell). Rockville: Arc Manor. Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: towards a social critique of humour. London: Sage. Boje, D.M. and Rhodes, C. (2006). The leadership of Ronald McDonald: double narration and stylistic lines of transformation. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(1): 94–103. 427

Nick Butler

Bolton, S.C. and Houlihan, M. (2009). Are we having fun yet? A consideration of workplace fun and engagement. Employee Relations, 32(6): 556–68. Butler, N. (2015). Joking aside: theorizing laughter in organizations. Culture and Organization, 21(1): 42–58. Butler, N. and Spoelstra, S. (2012). Your excellency. Organization, 19(6): 891–903. Collinson, D.L. (1988). Engineering humour: masculinity, joking and conflict in shop-floor relations. Organization Studies, 9(2): 181–99. Collinson, D.L. (2002). Managing humour. Journal of Management Studies, 39(3): 269–88. Critchley, S. (2002). On Humour. London: Routledge. Davis, D.D. (2000). Breaking up (at) Totality: a rhetoric of laughter. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Driessen, H. (1997). Humour, laughter and the field: reflections from anthropology, in Bremmer, J. and Roodenburg, H. (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: from antiquity to the present day. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, pp. 222–41. Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Smile or Die: how positive thinking fooled America and the world. London: Granta. Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2002[1966]). The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences (trans. Anon). London and New York: Routledge. Holmes, J. (2000). Politeness, power and provocation: how humour functions in the workplace. Discourse Studies 2(2): 159–85. Ivanov, S.A. (2006). Holy fools in Byzantium and Beyond (trans. S. Franklin). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenny, K. and Euchlar, G. (2012). ‘Some good clean fun’: humour, control and subversion in an advertising agency. Gender, Work & Organization, 9(3): 306–23. Klein, A. (1989). The Healing Power of Laughter: techniques for getting through loss, setbacks, upsets, disappointments, difficulties, trials, tribulations, and all that not-so-funny stuff. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher. Klein, A. (2000). The Courage to Laugh: humor, hope and healing in the face of death and dying. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher. Locke, J. (2008[1690]). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morreall, J. (ed.) (1987). The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nancy, J-L. (1987). Wild laughter in the throat of death. Modern Language Notes, 102(4): 719–36. Nietzsche, F. (2003[1886]). Beyond Good and Evil: a prelude to a philosophy of the future (trans. R.J. Hollingdale). London: Penguin. Palmer, J. (1994). Taking Humour Seriously. London and New York: Routledge. Parvulescu, A. (2010). Laughter: notes on a passion. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Plessner, H. (1970[1941]). Laughing and Crying: a study of the limits of human behaviour (trans. J. Churchill and M. Greene). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Plester, B. (2009). Crossing the line: boundaries of workplace humour and fun. Employee Relations, 31(6): 584–99. Romero, E.J. and Cruthirds, K.W. (2006). The use of humour in the workplace. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2): 58–69. Schopenhauer, A. (1969[1844]). The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1 (trans. E.F.J. Payne). New York: Dover. Śliwa, M., Spoelstra, S., Sørensen, B.M. and Land, C. (2013). Profaning the sacred in leadership studies: a reading of Murakami’s A wild sheep chase. Organization, 20(6): 860–80. Sloterdijk, P. (1987[1983]). Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. M. Eldred). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, K. (2013). A joke about dongles led to two people losing their jobs and a huge mess for the tech world. Business Insider, 22 March, retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.businessinsider.com/adriarichards-dongle-and-forking-jokes-2013–3. Taylor, P. and Bain, P. (2003). ‘Subterranean worksick blues’: humour as subversion in two call centres. Organization Studies, 24(9): 1487–509. Warren, S. and Fineman, S. (2007). ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun here, but . . .’: ambivalence and paradox in a ‘fun’ work environment, in Westwood, R. and Rhodes, C. (eds), Humour, Work and Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 92–112. Watson, C. (2015). A sociologist walks into a bar (and other academic challenges): towards a methodology of humour. Sociology, 49(3): 407–21. 428

Humour

Westwood, R. and Johnston, A. (2012). Reclaiming authentic selves: control, resistive humour and identity work in the office. Organization, 19(6): 787–808. Westwood, R. and Rhodes, C. (eds) (2007). Humour, Work and Organization. Abingdon: Routledge. Zupančič, A. (2008). The Odd One In. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

429

38 Identity and philosophy in organizations A femini[st]ne blind spot Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

Introduction Popular for almost thirty years, identity in organization studies (Identity OS) has lately inspired journal special issues (Alvesson et al., 2008; Ybema et al., 2009), and book-length overviews (Kenny et al., 2011; Pullen et al., 2007). Now is a good time to examine the philosophical underpinnings of this area (Alvesson et al., 2008; Brown, 2015), and this is the task of our chapter. We discuss four dominant approaches to identity OS, influenced by Foucault, Lacan, Goffman and others, noting that they share an understanding of the self as relational. The other, and its relation to the self, is key in Identity OS, and we propose that arguably the most influential philosopher of relationality in contemporary Western thought, Hegel, has long influenced the field. We discuss the consequences of this and conclude that the pessimism of the Hegelian tradition needs counterbalancing with an ethical theory of recognition currently emerging within feminist theory.

Identity in organization studies The self and the organization Identity, or person’s subjective perspectives of who they are, is a central concept in organization studies (Brown, 2015). It comprises a wide range of approaches and theories, but reasons of space limit us to focusing on identity as it pertains to individuals ‘embedded in organizational contexts’ (Alvesson et al., 2008: 6), whose identities are understood as subjectively construed ‘through discursive and other symbolic means’ (Brown, 2015: 2). This approach has been extremely popular for over fifteen years, particularly with European scholars, resulting in a vast number of studies focusing on individuals, the symbolic and the discursive (Brown, 2015: 4); 430

Identity

these have been categorized in a variety of ways (Alvesson et al., 2008; Alvesson, 2010; Brown, 2015). In this chapter, we use Kenny et al.’s (2011) categorization according to philosophical underpinnings, and we focus on: poststructural, symbolic interactionist, psychoanalytic and narrative approaches to Identity OS. Like other authors in this Companion (see Riach, Chapter 18 this volume), we acknowledge the limitations of drawing such artificial distinctions, but appreciate their usefulness as heuristic devices.

Poststructural A Foucauldian-inspired critical/poststructural approach is hugely influential in Identity OS (Alvesson et al., 2008; Ybema et al., 2009). Here, identification is seen as a process of subjection to powerful discourses (Knights and Willmott, 1989). Scholars use the term ‘subjectivity’ rather than ‘identity’ to highlight this. Insightful papers include Brewis (2004) who discusses subjection to discourses of professionalism and norms of mental health, in the context of working as an academic. Simpson and Carroll (2008) draw on the Foucauldian notion of subject position to reconceptualize the notion of ‘role’ and its relation to identity construction. Carroll and Levy (2008) similarly adopt a poststructural position that understands the dynamics of different identities in forging a partial, incomplete and ongoing sense of self at work (see also Willmott, 1993).

Psychoanalytic Inspired largely by Freud and Lacan, identification is here influenced by such aspects of the psyche as repressed feelings, fantasies and desires (Gabriel, 1999). The idea is that various unconscious influences act to disrupt a stable sense of self, although people continue to strive for such coherence (Driver, 2005; Harding, 2007). This leads to powerful attachments and identifications with aspects of the social world, including one’s organization (Kenny, 2012; Schwartz, 1990). A psychoanalytic approach helps us understand how, for example, people are drawn to the profession of management and the linguistic and symbolic worlds it encompasses, seeking its sense of control over the world. Rhetoric around strategy and planning gives the illusory impression that managers are in charge, feeding the need for a stable and managed sense of self (Roberts, 2005). Workplace cultures are shown to tap into psychic vulnerabilities, engendering strong attachments on the part of workers (Gabriel, 1999).

Narrative Here, people’s identities are intertwined with stories they tell about themselves and the narratives they encounter in social life (Czarniawska, 1998). A sense of meaning and continuity is gained from narrativizing one’s story of identity. Giddens’ (1991) ideas are influential, for example in Lutgen-Sandvik’s (2008) exploration of the identity work undertaken by staff that are bullied, their identities thrown into crisis. She defines identity work as ‘the capacity to keep a particular narrative going’ (Giddens, 1991, in Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008: 54). Wright et al. (2012) show how climate sustainability managers and consultants engage in narrative identity work to balance tensions that emerge between a sense of self, and work and non-work contexts in which they find themselves. These narratives have effects, they argue; they influence the ways in which respondents engage with climate change issues. 431

Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

Symbolic interactionist This approach understands identity as emerging in interactions with others (Gardner and Avolio, 1998; Mangham, 1986). Some studies are inspired by Mead’s distinction between the ‘me’ (how we assume we are perceived by others) and the ‘I’ (our subjective experience of our selves). Others draw on Goffman’s notion that identity is a continual process involving our ‘presentations of self’ to others. Examples include Mangham’s (1986) dramaturgical perspective that examines the performances of senior male executives in a boardroom. He notes that interactive displays help structure power relations between the men; use of the body, including facial expressions, is key (see also Watson, 2008). Symbolic interactionism informs Down and Reveley’s (2009) study that brings Goffman and narrative theory together. Arguing that the display of oneself in spoken interaction with others is central to identity formation, they analyse a manager whose face-to-face interactions with team members verify his managerial identification and sense of self-worth (Down and Reveley, 2009: 397). Micro-interactionist perspectives, inspired by Garfinkel, examine how people deploy identity categories in distinct ways, depending on their encounters and their aims (Llewellyn and Burrow, 2007). Some scholars bring together a variety of theoretical assumptions. For example, Clarke et al.’s (2009) exploration of managers’ constructions of identities refers to Foucault, Goffman and Giddens. Alvesson and Willmott (2002) use both Giddens and Foucault to understand subjection to management control initiatives. Viewing self-identity as involving an ongoing, ‘reflexively organized narrative, derived from participation in competing discourses and various experiences, that is productive of a degree of existential continuity and security’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 625), they show how employees are encouraged to constitute identities that are congruent with management’s wishes.

Identity OS: philosophical roots? The above approaches differ in their theoretical and philosophical assumptions but all, to varying degrees, explore how an ongoing sense of the ‘self’ is maintained in interaction with others and the social environment (Ybema et al., 2009: 300). All refer explicitly or implicitly to the necessity for interaction in the constitution of identity. For example, implicit in Clarke et al.’s (2009) study of managers’ identity narratives is the question: who listens to someone’s narrative of the self and, through listening, recognizes the storyteller as the person in that story? Although focusing on discourses, quotes from study participants show discourses operate within and through interactions: identity is sought through engagement with the other. Likewise, Simpson and Carroll describe identity construction as a dynamic, relational process, with role construed as an intermediary (Simpson and Carroll, 2008: 34) that facilitates the emergence of identities by translating meanings backwards and forwards between actors. Identity is thus constructed in ‘relational interactions’ (op. cit.). Again for Carroll and Levy (2008) identity is a dynamic interaction, in which a ‘default identity’ (here, that of the manager) interacts with a new and more desirable identity, that of the leader. Identity is thus invariably perceived as something achieved through interaction with an Other; it is a relational phenomenon. However authors rarely interrogate the philosophical assumptions underpinning the social, relational encounter in which identity is achieved. Our own explorations suggest Hegel, and in particular his master/slave dialectic, informs much of Identity OS, albeit indirectly and usually without explicit recognition. We next outline this concept, before discussing its impact on the field. 432

Identity

Hegel’s master/slave dialectic Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is ‘neither more nor less than the science of the experience of consciousness’ (Rockmore, 2003: 85), that is, Hegel aims to outline a theory of the (self-) consciousness of the modern, individuated subject. The master/slave dialectic is a mythical scene that encapsulates the conditions by which European subjectivities are constituted. The dialectic begins with a master/lord and a slave/bondsman. Each cannot exist as a social being (become self-conscious) without recognition from the other. But seeking recognition is dangerous. It requires meeting the other consciousness, a consciousness that is threatening and desires to kill the other self so that it can live (Benjamin, 1988). Only one party can win and earn the other’s recognition. Gurevitch (2001) illustrates this: think of an occasion when you have been in a discussion. Individual voices struggle to be heard – all are anxious to make their point – but only one person can speak at a time if anyone is to be heard. There is a slight feeling of resentment when someone speaks over us just as we start to make our point. In Hegelian terms, we reached out to seek recognition (that is, acknowledgement that we are someone with good ideas), but in speaking over us, the other has denied us that recognition (‘shut up – my words are more important than yours’). They metaphorically kill us, and our silent resentment is a metaphorical wish to kill them (‘will you SHUT UP and let me speak’). But we must remain in a relationship of interdependency (we cannot be heard without the other speaker’s presence). Only through finding ways of achieving that relationship, albeit one based on inequality, can both parties survive and possess a sense of self (Cole, 2004). However, survival means one is superior, the other submissive. The slave, forced to produce goods for the master, eventually sees himself reflected in the products he has created, realizes he has produced the world and comes to self-consciousness. The master cannot gain recognition from such an inferior form of life as a slave so cannot attain self-consciousness. Hyppolite suggests this shows that ‘the truth of the master reveals that he is the slave, and that the slave is revealed to be the master of the master’ (Hyppolite, in Cole, 2004: 579).

Hegel and Identity OS We propose that Hegel’s legacy permeates the approaches to Identity OS outlined above. In some cases this is because Hegel influenced the theorists who influence OS theorists. Beech (2008) for example draws on Wittgenstein and Bakhtin to explore how people’s identities become meaningful to themselves and others. Beech conceptualizes the process as a dialogue that generates meaningfulness (Beech, 2008: 52): Wittgenstein channelled Hegel’s ideas through his work. The same is true of Marx, who inspires Costas and Fleming’s (2009) study of self-alienation in a global management consultancy firm. They show how people ‘dis-identify’ from identities desired by the organization through maintaining and protecting a ‘real’ but nonetheless imaginary self. Deriving the concept of self-alienation from Marx’s theory of alienation, they come close to explicitly acknowledging Hegel as a theoretical inspiration (albeit that Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head). Hegel’s legacy is clear in poststructural Identity OS, where the master/slave dialectic has occupied a position of ‘extraordinary centrality’ since the 1940s (Osborne, 1995: 71). Poststructural scholars view identity as ‘a powerful way to understand contemporary relations of control and resistance’ (Alvesson et al., 2008: 9; see also Brewis, 2004; Simpson and Carroll, 2008; Carroll and Levy, 2008; Clarke et al., 2009; Watson, 2008), a conceptualization that echoes the dialectical struggle for recognition of the self as controller (master) and resister (bondsperson/ slave). The master/slave dialectic’s influence on the narrative approach is echoed by LutgenSandvik (2008) who notes that a challenge in keeping a coherent identity narrative going is 433

Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

that it can only be maintained when internally perceived as authentic, and externally approved by important others (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2008: 109). Thus self-identity is interdependent and founded on recognition: it needs support and validation from other parties. Dramaturgical and interactionist accounts involve a self–other need for affirmation and recognition so similar to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic that we can perhaps argue that Goffman, Giddens and others are post-Hegelian. While perhaps not directly influenced by Hegel’s work, the percolation of his ideas throughout the European and English-speaking world, with its critique of the Cartesian monad, will have made possible ways of thinking that would otherwise have been unavailable. Several authors of the above papers implicitly refer to Hegel in their use of particular concepts. Watson (2008, 2009) proposes the term ‘dialectic’ for conceptualizing ‘the relationship between the internal/inward-facing aspect of identity work and (its) external/ outward-facing aspect’ (Watson, 2009: 436). He locates his arguments within a Hegelian frame through noting that identity work is ‘the mutually constitutive process in which people strive to shape a relatively coherent and distinctive notion of personal self-identity, and struggle to come to terms with and, within limits, to influence the various social identities which pertain to them’ (Watson, 2009: 431, emphasis added). Ybema et al. (2009) similarly refer to dialectic in identity construction, noting a ‘permanent dialectic’ between the self and social structure (Ybema et al., 2009: 300); identity construction is a ‘dialogical process [that] is invariably dialectical’ (see also Beech, 2008). This gives a sense of the influence of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic on the field of identity OS. We now explore some consequences of its enduring legacy.

Implications of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic for Identity OS The master/slave dialectic offers a valuable way of understanding intersubjective relationality; however the ‘version’ that persists, for example in psychoanalytic, poststructural and Marxist thought, assumes that intersubjectivity is an inherently negative, or ‘zero-sum’, dynamic. The subject’s relations with itself and its proximate others are founded exclusively on a logic of aggression, domination and submission. This departs somewhat from Hegel’s text itself, in which a productive acceptance and inclusion of ‘the other in the self’ is emphasized. Why the divergence? For some, the aggression/domination account of Hegelian subjectivity comes from a particular interpretation of Hegel by Kojève, a key influence for prominent poststructural thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s (Butler, 1987; MacDonald, 2014; Osborne, 1995). Emphasizing how two consciousnesses are continuously struggling against each other, to the death, within the Phenomenology, Kojève bequeaths an account of relationality within poststructural thought in which this ‘zero-sum’ legacy persists and dominates (Benjamin, 1988; Osborne, 1995). We discern this in a number of approaches to Identity OS. Poststructural accounts for example, have been criticized for over-stating the fragility of the self in the face of dominant and oppressive discourses (Newton, 1998; Speer, 1999). Subjects overpowered by discourse have little room for resistance or adaptation (Fournier and Grey, 1999; Alvesson and Karreman, 2000), or for emerging from the state of oppression. Psychoanalytic accounts are likewise critiqued for adopting such a deterministic and negative account of subjection. For example, Jameson (2002) writes that Lacan’s important account of development, in which a key influence is Hegel (Butler, 1987; MacDonald, 2014), is ‘radically incontestable’ (Jameson, 2002: 35) because it represents a deterministic account of inevitable subjection to the power of the Symbolic (see also Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1992; Vanheule et al., 2003). 434

Identity

A similar legacy persists via Marx, who turned Hegel’s potentially happy outcome on its head, pointing out that under capitalism the labourer is inevitably alienated (Marx, 1988; Singer, 2010). In this reading, there exists no counterbalance to an assumption of either submission or domination, so revolution is inevitable. Thus one particular ‘version’ of Hegel’s theorizing haunts thinking and theorizing in Identity OS, influencing an ultimately pessimistic account of the subject’s formation. Its interpretive power is undeniable – the human animal is in many ways red in tooth and claw, and the wish to destroy the other through denying its independent existence (Osborne, 1995) describes much that goes on in organizations. But this reduces the human subject to only one aspect of existence: its will to control the other, using violence if necessary. However feminist theorists, including noted Hegelians such as Judith Butler, recently call for a counterbalance to post-Hegelian approaches and their focus on death: that is, its opposite, birth. Feminist thinkers oppose what we might call patriarchal pessimism with matriarchal optimism’s focus on life and its beginnings. We now consider alternative approaches, emerging from recent, feminist, theorizations of relationality and recognition, for their contribution to identity OS.

Future directions Two contemporary philosophers are leading the way towards a new ethics of recognition: Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger.

Butler and embodied relationality Butler’s most recent books (2004, 2009, Butler and Athanasiou, 2013) call for a revivified left politics based on a new ontology of the body. She explores the conditions that facilitate the recognition of some people as human and others as less than human; the forms taken by violence enacted in and as a consequence of the process of exclusion from categories of the human. Her new bodily ontology implies ‘the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work and the claims of language and social belonging’ (Butler, 2009: 2). She argues that the self can exist only through its connectivity with others. Through acknowledging mutual dependence we abjure trying to annihilate others in favour of recognizing their separate existence as necessary to our own. Most importantly, we should see others not as somehow inhuman creatures that masquerade in human form, but as living, breathing, emoting beings. We therefore have a duty to identify how we categorize some people as less than human, and work to eliminate such forms of recognition.

Ettinger and trans-subjectivity Bracha Ettinger is a feminist artist, psychoanalytical theorist and philosopher. Influential in the Arts, her ideas on identity and subjectivity, grounded in ‘matrixial trans-subjectivity’ (Ettinger, 2006) are of great relevance to Identity OS (Kenny and Fotaki, 2015). Like Butler she highlights interdependency and the duty to care for (rather than annihilate) the other. The major novelty of her work is the conception of the co-emergence of a partial subject (the mother and the baby) within the matrixial borderspace, where the emerging subjectivity is that of an encounter rather than a lack, split or death-struggle. Ettinger emphasizes the experience of the maternal for understanding subjectivity. She describes how a ‘feminine-matrixial connectivity’ denotes the subject’s early affective engagements with a ‘separate’ other (Ettinger, 2010: 1), and problematizes that separation. Importantly, the impulse to care counters other 435

Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

affects in the psyche including desires for domination, submission and abjection. This is because the self’s permeable boundaries leave it vulnerable, and this vulnerability requires that one encounters another without attempting to dominate or destroy. Ettinger therefore provides a conceptual framing of the subject as relational, and as encompassing both psychic impulses for difference and separation, and towards connectivity. These ‘post-Hegelian’, feminist approaches to relationality and recognition are fruitful for Identity OS, particularly Marxist, psychoanalytic, interactional and Foucauldian approaches. We do not argue for a denial of Hegel’s pessimistic analysis of subjectivity and the self’s destructive urge to destroy the other. Rejecting Hegel in favour of this emergent feminist theory of an ethics of recognition, grounded in vulnerability and interdependency, would replace one partial account of the subject with another. Rather, we suggest we should recognize that our assumptions might usefully be informed by a theory of the subject as riven by contradictory desires to both notionally kill the other and, at the same time, reach out and offer/accept intersubjective affect, care, mutuality, relationality and vulnerability.

Concluding thoughts Although philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and others may offer what many understand as the best that has been thought, that ‘best’ has often rested on the subordination of the non-philosophical classes, including women, and the men who labour in the crafts and as manual workers. An emancipatory organization studies should recognize the partiality and limitations of the works of even the greatest of philosophers. Our search for the philosophical underpinnings of identity OS leads to the observation that contemporary feminist philosophers offer new ways of seeing and thinking that should influence management and organization studies. What would they bring to identity OS? Re-thinking the identity of ‘manager’ provides one answer. ‘Management’ is predicated upon rationality and power over others; it is thoroughly Hegelian in its requirement that managerial identity requires quashing others. The new feminist ethics changes the terms through which managerial identities are constituted. They become carers with and of others as well as (or instead of) duty to the bottom line, whose identities are as vulnerable as those of the staff with whom they exist in a mutually caring relationship, in a situation of radical interdependency.

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. (2010). Self-doubters, strugglers, storytellers, surfers and others: images of self-identities in organization studies. Human Relations, 63: 193–217. Alvesson, M. and Karreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: on the study of organisations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53: 1125–49. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (2002). Identity regulation as organizational control: producing the appropriate individual. Journal of Management Studies, 39(5): 619–44. Alvesson, M., Ashcraft, K.L. and Thomas, R. (2008). Identity matters: reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies. Organization, 15: 5–28. Beech, N. (2008). On the nature of dialogic identity work. Organization, 15(1): 51–74. Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: psychoanalysis, feminism and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon. Brewis, J. (2004). Refusing to be ‘me’, in Thomas, R., Mills, A.J. and Helms Mills, J. (eds), Identity Politics at Work – (Resisting Gender, Gendering Resistance). London: Routledge, pp. 23–39. Brown, A.D. (2015). Identities and Identity Work in Organizations. International Journal of Management Reviews, 17: 20–40. doi: 10.1111/ijmr.12035. Butler, J. (1987). Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. 436

Identity

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: when is life grievable? London: Verso. Butler, J. and Athanasiou, A. (2013). Dispossession: the performative in the political. Cambridge: Polity Press. Carroll, B. and Levy, L. (2008). Defaulting to management: leadership defined by what it is not. Organization, 15(1): 75–96. Clarke, C., Brown, A. and Hope Hailey, V. (2009). Working identities? Antagonistic discursive resources and managerial identity. Human Relations, 62(3): 323–53. Cole, A. (2004). What Hegel’s master/slave dialectic really means. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34(3): 577–610. Costas, J. and Fleming, P. (2009) Beyond dis-identification: towards a discursive approach to self-alienation in contemporary organizations. Human Relations, 62(3): 353–78. Czarniawska, B. (1998). Narrative Approach to Organization Studies. London: Sage. Down, S. and Reveley, J. (2009). Between narration and interaction: situating first-line supervisor identity work, Human Relations, 62(3): 379–401. Driver, M. (2005). From empty speech to full speech? Reconceptualizing spirituality in organizations based on a psychoanalytically-grounded understanding of the self. Human Relations, 58: 1091–110. Ettinger, B.L. (2006). The Matrixial Borderspace (essays from 1994–1999). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ettinger, B.L. (2010). (M)other re-spect: maternal subjectivity, the ready-made mother-monster and the ethics of respecting. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/documents/ettinger.pdf. Fournier, V. and Grey, C. (1999). Too much, too little and too often: a critique of Du Gay’s analysis of enterprise. Organization, 6(1): 107–28. Gabriel, Y. (1999). Beyond happy families: a critical re-evaluation of the control-resistance-identity triangle. Human Relations, 52(2): 179–203. Gardner, W.L. and Avolio, B.J. (1998). Charismatic leadership, a dramaturgical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 23(1): 32–58. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gurevitch, Z. (2001). Dialectical dialogue: the struggle for speech, repressive silence, and the shift to multiplicity. British Journal of Sociology, 52(1): 87–104. Harding, N. (2007). On Lacan and the ‘becoming-ness’ of organizations/selves. Organization Studies, 28: 1761–73. Jameson, F. (2002). Imaginary and symbolic in Lacan, in Žižek, S. (ed.), Jacques Lacan: critical evaluations in cultural theory, society, politics, ideology, Vol. 3. London: Routledge, pp. 3–43. Kenny, K. (2012) ‘Someone big and important’: Identification and affect in an international development organization. Organization Studies (33): 1175–1193 Kenny, K., Whittle, A. and Willmott, H. (2011). Understanding Identity and Organizations. London: Sage Kenny, K. and Fotaki, M. (2015). From gendered organizations to compassionate borderspaces: reading corporeal ethics with Bracha Ettinger. Organization, doi: 10.1177/1350508414558723. Knights, D. and Willmott, H. (1989). Power and subjectivity at work. Sociology, 23(4): 535–58. Llewellyn, N. and Burrow, R. (2007). Negotiating identities of consumption: insights from conversation analysis, in Pullen, A., Beech, N. and Sims, D. (eds), Exploring Identity: concepts and methods. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 302–15. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and Nancy, J.L. (1992). The Title of the Letter: a reading of Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lutgen-Sandvik, P. (2008). Intensive remedial identity work: responses to workplace bullying as trauma and stigma. Organization, 15(1): 97–119. MacDonald, M. (2014). Hegel and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Mangham, I. (1986). Power and Performance in Organizations: an exploration of executive process. Oxford: Blackwell. Marx, K. (1988). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Prometheus Books. Newton, T. (1998). Theorizing subjectivity in organizations: the failure of Foucauldian studies? Organization Studies, 19(3): 415–48. Osborne, P. (1995). The Politics of Time. London: Verso. Pullen, A., Beech, N. and Sims, D. (2007). Exploring Identity: concepts and methods. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Roberts, J. (2005). The power of the ‘imaginary’ in disciplinary processes. Organization, 12(5): 619–42. Rockmore, T. (2003). Before and After Hegel. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Schwartz, H. (1990). Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. New York: New York University Press. 437

Kate Kenny and Nancy Harding

Simpson, B. and Carroll, B. (2008). Reviewing role in processes of identity construction. Organization, 15(1): 29–50. Singer, P. (2010). Hegel, in Scruton, R., Singer, P., Janaway, C. and Tanner, M. (eds), German Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 105–214. Speer, S.A. (1999). Feminism and conversation analysis: an oxymoron? Feminism & Psychology, 9(4): 471–78. Vanheule, S., Lievrouw, A. and Verhaeghe, P. (2003). Burnout and intersubjectivity: a psychoanalytical study from a Lacanian perspective. Human Relations, 56: 321–39. Watson, T.J. (2008). Managing identity: Identity work, personal predicaments and structural circumstances. Organization, 15(1): 121–43. Watson, T.J. (2009). Narrative life story and the management of identity: a case study in autobiographical identity work. Human Relations, 62(3): 1–28. Willmott, H. (1993). Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 30(4): 515–52. Wright C., Nyberg D. and Grant D. (2012). Hippies on the third floor: climate change, narrative identity and the micro-politics of corporate environmentalism. Organization Studies, 33(11): 1451–75. Ybema, S., Keenoy, T., Oswick, C., Beverungen, A. Ellis, N. and Sabelis, I. (2009). Articulating identities. Human Relations, 62(3): 299–322.

438

39 Inequality and organizations Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra1

Over the course of human history, philosophical thought on inequality has shifted from a predominantly hierarchical understanding of human ability and output to a much more egalitarian understanding. This progress has been reflected in the rich modern social science literature documenting the far-reaching societal ills of inequality. Organizational research has, however, remained relatively unmoved by the wider discourse on inequality. Through this chapter, we seek to highlight the growing importance of examining inequality in the context of organizations. Specifically, we discuss inequality research by examining it from the perspective of distributive justice. We then outline the adverse consequences of inequality to societies and organizations. We conclude by discussing the need to critically examine inequality and to study why it is maintained in organizations and societies, despite its adverse effects.

A (brief) history of the philosophy of inequality Inequality, broadly conceived, describes the degree to which people are considered or treated unequally, or experience unequal outcomes. Inequality can be considered in several domains: moral (are all people equal in worth or value?), legal (are all people governed by the same laws?), political (do all people have the same voice in the political process?) and social (do all people have equal access to opportunity and resources?). Philosophers have been debating the nature of inequality for centuries. A comprehensive review of the various philosophical approaches to understanding inequality would require many volumes; however, it is possible to briefly follow patterns of philosophical thought on inequality over time. Plato argued that a utopian society could be established by placing people into four tiered socio-economic classes: ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, and ‘iron’. Those with the power of command were argued to have been made of gold by ‘God’, auxiliaries made of silver, and husbandmen and craftsmen made of bronze and iron. Although rigidly hierarchical, Plato’s concept of societal hierarchies was one of the first to not include an ultimate aristocratic class. Rather, he argued that ‘gold’ citizens were ‘philosopher kings’ who valued wisdom and reason above all else (Jowett, 1888).2 The Enlightenment brought further philosophical considerations of inequality. Rousseau considered moral inequality to be of great importance (as opposed to natural/physical inequality). He argued that moral inequality is a defining characteristic of civil society and is strongly associated 439

Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

with downstream differences in power and wealth. Rousseau concluded that civil society distorts the natural human state of isolation, which allows individuals to satisfy their own needs (and desires) without the interference of others. He further argued that civil society allows the powerful to control the weak and maintain their political and social power and wealth (an argument still made by some contemporary philosophers and economists). Rousseau argued in one of his later writings, ‘one of the most important tasks of government [is] to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes . . . by shielding citizens from becoming poor’ (Gourevitch, 2003: 19). In the modern era, John Rawls (1971) advocated for a societal structure based on the assumption of a ‘veil of ignorance’ – that ‘we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be’ (Krugman, 2011). Rawls put forth two principles to support this approach. First, a society should guarantee equal basic liberties for all. Second, a society should ensure (a) social and economic inequality only manifests as a consequence of positions that can be obtained through fair and equal competition, and (b) inequality should be used to most greatly benefit the least-advantaged members of society. Most liberal democracies have used (and continue to use) Rawlsian principles to structure their societies (e.g. utilizing a progressive income tax to provide a social safety net). Amartya Sen (1992) further expanded on Rawls’ ideas by arguing that a well-structured society must mitigate any forms of discrimination that limit human ‘functions’, which include both basic needs (e.g. good health and shelter) and social needs (e.g. self-respect and dignity; Sen, 1992).

The modern issue of inequality Recent rising levels of economic inequality in the world have demanded considerable public attention. The rapidly increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has been documented by researchers (e.g. Piketty, 2014), government agencies (e.g. the United States Congressional Budget Office; CBO, 2014), non-government agencies (e.g. Oxfam International; Oxfam, 2014), international economic organizations (e.g. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; OECD, 2011), pollsters (e.g. Newport, 2011), industry bodies (e.g. Conference Board of Canada; CBOC, 2013), and the popular press (Beddoes, 2012), among others. The existence of inequality is neither new nor unknown; indeed, differences in wealth and status have been characteristic of most civil societies for all of documented history. However, current attention has been particularly focused on identifying the negative consequences of inequality in modern Western industrialized nations. This attention has included growing discussion on interventions that might mitigate the enormous negative consequences of a growing disparity between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. This effort is particularly salient given that modern Western industrial societies supposedly embody the ideals of meritocracy and equal opportunity for all. That inequality continues to rise, unchecked, raises questions about the effectiveness of economic development to create fair and just societies. Scholars in a number of disciplines, including economics, epidemiology, sociology and psychology, have devoted much attention over the years to understanding the causes and consequences of growing inequality to societies (reviewed in Neckerman and Torche, 2007). Much of this research has led to public policy prescriptions designed to reduce inequality (e.g. introducing progressive taxation; universal health care; accessible education). However, academic discourse (and resultant policy) has rarely involved organizational research or practice, even though organizations play a fundamental role in creating and maintaining societal inequality. Philosophical understandings of inequality over time (briefly reviewed above) have shifted from earlier characterizations of people being rigidly hierarchically structured (usually due to 440

Inequality

some ‘innate’ reasons) to a more egalitarian understanding of all people being granted ample opportunity to fulfil their potential. Although a large body of research has examined the effect of inequality on societies and individuals, little work has been conducted in the field of organization studies. This chapter aims to draw attention of organizational scholars to this issue. We begin by briefly discussing the concept of inequality and its treatment in management research and practice. We then outline some consequences of inequality to societies and organizations. We conclude with a discussion of potential future research that would allow for a better understanding of the causes and consequences of organizational inequality.

Inequality in organizational research and practice What is organizational inequality? Within organizational research and practice, two broad types of inequality can be found: demographic and economic. Demographic inequality describes disparities in experiences or outcomes that have a basis in demographic characteristics (e.g. gender; race; age). Broadly, economic inequality describes disparity that is a consequence of the monetary value attached to the possessions and contributions of individuals in organizations and societies. Gender inequality refers to unequal treatment (i.e. experiences and outcomes) of women in society as well as in organizations. Gender inequality research has not only highlighted the different outcomes and experiences women face in their everyday social lives (compared with men), but has also identified significantly lower representation of women in various fields (ranging from science to politics), the disparities in incomes between women and men for comparable work, and the ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents women from rising to higher-level positions. Along similar lines, racial inequality reflects unequal treatment of people based on race, with resultant disparities in social and health outcomes (e.g. housing, education, health) as well as economic and organizational outcomes (e.g. income, employment, career growth). More recently, acknowledgement of systematic biases against sexual minorities has sparked public discourse, with (in more progressive jurisdictions) resultant policy prescriptions for equal treatment. A number of organizations have also adopted policies to this effect, while those who opposed equal treatment of sexual minorities have (largely) faced the wrath of the broader community. Yet another fast emerging topic of debate is unequal economic opportunities for younger members of society (i.e. the much-maligned ‘millennial’ generation), especially in comparison with older generations (i.e. the more economically privileged ‘baby boomer’ generation). Past research has used economic inequality to refer to disparity in the distribution of economic assets among individuals or households in a society, which includes both income and wealth inequality. The former refers to the disparities in money received on a regular basis in the form of salaries, rents, royalties, dividends and other sources of regular income. The latter refers to uneven distribution of wealth (i.e. mobile assets such as stocks and bonds, and immobile assets such as houses and land). That is, wealth describes the stock of assets held at a given point, while income describes the flow of money on a regular basis. It should be noted that economic inequality is different from poverty, which refers to the lack of economic means to fulfil basic human needs or to achieve a defined level of material possessions. In other words, poverty is about meeting basic needs, whereas economic inequality places in focus the unevenness in the distribution of income and wealth, irrespective of the presence and absence of poverty. 441

Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

Inequality and distributive justice Before we address the issue of inequality in organizations more explicitly, it is necessary to situate inequality in the broader context of distributive justice. Distributive justice describes norms concerning the distribution of resources to group members. These norms take three primary forms: need, equity and equality (Deutsch, 1975). Need norms involve the allocation of resources to those who have high levels of need. For example, that new parents receive paternity or maternity leave whereas non-parents do not receive an equivalent form of leave reflects a need norm. Equity norms are centred on the comparison of individuals’ inputs (e.g. education, experience, skills, hard work) to outputs (e.g. pay, status, time off) relative to appropriate others (e.g. other organization members, others in the same position at other organizations). For example, most people see it as fair that doctors are paid generously compared with most other occupations because doctors hold difficult positions requiring substantial training, expertise and personal sacrifice. In other words, doctors provide greater inputs and thus receive more outputs as a consequence. In contrast to need and equity, equality focuses on the degree to which outcomes experienced are equal, regardless of inputs or need. For example, all employees at a worker cooperative may be paid equally regardless of their role in the organization. This distribution norm is based on the assumption that individuals, given their skills and opportunities available to them, contribute uniquely to an organization and such unique contributions cannot be accurately compared and definitively assigned a monetary value. Further, the equality norm is also rooted in the perspective that all human beings are equal and deserve similar rights and entitlements. The three distributive justice norms – need, equity and equality – were theorized by Deutsch (1975) to be evoked by different (but not necessarily independent) organizational goals. Economic productivity should be most associated with equity norms, individual development with need norms, and social relationship building with equality norms (Deutsch, 1975). Because modern organizations typically emphasize economic productivity above all other goals, research on organizational distributive justice has focused almost exclusively on equity issues (e.g. Colquitt et al., 2001; Deutsch, 1975). Furthermore, the dominant distributive justice literature has focused almost exclusively on the distribution of economic resources and outcomes, namely, pay, promotions and bonuses. However, other workplace resources and outcomes – such as status, power, influence and respect – are also key components of people’s workplace experiences, and the distribution of these resources should have broad effects on organizational outcomes. Another key issue with canonical research on distributive justice is its focus on the effect of (primarily economic) outcome distributions determined by group membership and social identity. Research examining the effects of gender, ethnic and class inequalities has been quite common, and a large body of evidence suggests that inequality across group identity has clear and serious negative effects. Essentially every individual-level workplace experience or outcome is worse, on average, for women and ethnic minorities. These outcomes include lower pay, poorer mental and physical health, lower well-being, lesser feelings of empowerment and autonomy, lack of organizational mobility and lower organizational attachment (e.g. Greenhaus et al., 1990; Tsui et al., 1992). These effects are particularly ironic given that greater racial and gender diversity in organizations is associated with increased sales revenue, greater profits, more customers and increased market share (Herring, 2009). One important caveat is that inequality in organizations may reflect pre-existing inequality outside of organizations, and may not itself be a product of organizational policy or management decisions. Consider ethnic differences in educational attainment. In the United States, AfricanAmericans and Latinos are less likely to have completed high school, and as a consequence, less 442

Inequality

likely to have completed any post-secondary education (or even had the opportunity to attend a post-secondary institution at all). In Canada, aboriginal people experience the same lack of opportunity. These educational inequalities lead to a lack of hiring into positions that might allow for upward mobility, with the consequence that marginalized groups are less able to gain important workplace experience. As such, certain groups necessarily have fewer ‘inputs’ to offer an organization (through no fault of members of these groups), and may suffer the many consequences of inequality as a result. Later in this chapter, we describe some research on the consequences of societal inequality. In sum, the study of inequality in organizations has predominantly focused on group membership and social identity at the expense of the more general phenomena of skewed distributions of outcomes and resources. That inequality manifests and has negative effects across easily identifiable group memberships is not particularly surprising. However, those who are victims of inequality suffer negative effects in the workplace regardless of their group membership or social identity. A broader focus on the root causes and consequences of inequality may lead to new insights for organizational research and practice above and beyond the group identity based research done to date.

Consequences of inequality Societal consequences of inequality A large body of evidence demonstrates that high levels of income inequality at the societal level facilitate a wide array of negative social, health, and well-being outcomes. In the social domain, inequality has been strongly linked with higher rates of teenage pregnancy, lower social capital, community support and trust, as well as increased violent and property crime, including homicide (reviewed in Wilkinson and Pickett, 2006, 2007, 2009). Societal inequality has also been strongly linked to diverse health and well-being outcomes. Specific physical ailments such as obesity and cardiovascular illness (among others) are associated with inequality, as are more downstream outcomes such as greater general mortality and lower life expectancy. In the mental health domain, inequality has been linked with depression, stress and a variety of other psychopathology (reviewed in Wilkinson and Pickett, 2006, 2007, 2009). Importantly, these negative effects of inequality have been demonstrated independent of individual-level socio-economic status and aggregate economic measures (e.g. gross domestic product; Kennedy et al., 1998; reviewed in Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). These results suggest that what is key is relative standing, not absolute standing. This is an important point to emphasize: inequality appears to affect outcomes for all individuals, not just those who are the bottom of a hierarchy (e.g. Weich et al., 2001; reviewed in Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). Everyone in a society is subject to relative comparisons, and knowing that there is great disparity among others is damaging, regardless of whether one is at the top or the bottom. For example, it is better to be poor in more egalitarian Scandinavian countries than rich in less egalitarian countries with regard to a wide array of social, health and well-being outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that there is something important about inequality above and beyond absolute individual-level outcomes. It is clear that inequality at the societal level has substantial and robust social, health and well-being effects on individuals. It is important to recognize that almost all research at the societal level on inequality has focused on examining the effects of income inequality manifesting at the household level. This is likely because income inequality is relatively easy to identify and quantify using such measures as the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of the distribution of income among households in 443

Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

a population. However, as described earlier, inequality manifests not only in terms of financial currency, but also in terms of other resources and opportunities that are of general importance to people (e.g. social status, prestige, power and/or influence). We therefore suggest that inequality writ large – that is, inequality in resources, status, reputation and influence – should have impacts at the societal, organizational and individual levels. The mechanisms that link inequality to various outcomes should be conserved regardless of what domain inequality manifests in. Some preliminary research suggests that disparities in different domains (i.e. not just income) affect relevant outcomes at the organizational level. We briefly review this evidence below.

Organizational consequences of inequality Organizations are in effect ‘mini’ societies, in that they involve collections of people who interact in a structured community with shared institutions, relationships and a common culture (Macionis, 2014; Schaefer and Moos, 1993). Just like larger societies, organizations involve varied social structures, policies and norms, with consequent status, power, income and resource disparities. These disparities – manifestations of inequality – should have workplace consequences for workers, just as societal-level inequality has consequences for individuals in higher-level communities. Remarkably little research, however, has directly examined the effect of inequality on organizational outcomes, although some research is suggestive. In the workplace, inequality can manifest as a consequence of objective disparities in outcomes (e.g. pay dispersion, hierarchical complexity; e.g. Carillo and Kopelman, 1991; McCall and Kenworthy, 2009) or as a consequence of perceived or subjective interpretations of disparities in outcomes (e.g. perceptions of equality-related distributive justice/fairness; e.g. Bartunek and Keys, 1982; Spreitzer, 1995). Components of both objective disparity and subjective perceptions of disparity have been associated with negative outcomes in the workplace, (e.g. organizational fairness and justice, participative climate, and empowerment). More specifically, these components of inequality have been associated with diverse negative organizational outcomes: reduced social capital, including less cooperation, trust, and mutual support (e.g. Tyler and Blader, 2003), lower commitment (e.g. Meyer et al., 2002), lower psychological empowerment (e.g. Spreitzer, 1996), poorer well-being and health (e.g. Christie and Barling, 2010; Danna and Griffin, 1999) and lower performance (e.g. Christie and Barling, 2010). Together, these findings are highly suggestive of a link between organizational inequality and workplace outcomes, although it is important to note again that very little research has directly examined the influence of inequality (either objective or perceptual) on relevant workplace outcomes (but see Son Hing et al., Working Paper). It is likely that other organizational analogues of societal-level outcomes – for example, counterproductive work behaviour (a form of antisocial and risk-taking behaviour more generally) and organizational citizenship behaviour (a consequence of trust and social capital) are likely affected by inequality as well. Outcomes that have been linked with organizational inequality – lower social capital, poorer health and well-being, lower commitment and lower empowerment – are in turn linked with higher rates of absenteeism and turnover, and lower motivation and performance (reviewed in Johns and Saks, 2014). All of these downstream outcomes have enormous economic implications for organizations. Not surprisingly, it has been argued that economic inequality affects organizational performance by influencing the attitudes and behaviours of individuals, workplace interactions they engage in, and the institutional environment that shapes organizational actions (Bapuji, 2015). Therefore, addressing issues of inequality can be considered not only an issue 444

Inequality

of justice, but also an issue of financial and economic relevance to organizations (and to society more generally). In sum, research in disciplines ranging from economics to epidemiology has shown that inequality has deleterious consequences for individuals and societies. By extension, these consequences are also likely to affect organizations, a point borne out by some suggestive evidence within organizational research. However, substantial additional research is required to better understand the effect of inequality on organizations; we suggest some potentially fruitful future directions below.

Inequality and organizations: future directions Very little research has examined the effect of inequality on and within organizations. Accordingly, a number of questions are ripe for research, ranging from how inequality affects organizations to how organizations affect inequality, and what various stakeholders can do to address inequality. In this section, we focus on two promising areas of inquiry. The first is aimed at better understanding inequality and its workplace consequences; the second is focused on understanding maintenance of inequality in organizations.

Understanding inequality and the bias against equality Past organizational research has shown that women and ethnic minorities experience worse workplace outcomes. The most common explanation for such inequality is systematic prejudice and discrimination stemming from in-group/out-group comparisons (i.e. social identity comparisons; Tajfel and Turner, 1979). However, inequality based on group membership and/or identity necessarily involves inequality in the distribution of resources in the workplace: pay, promotions, status, power, influence and respect, among others. It is therefore possible that the key variable that explains poorer organizational outcomes for women and minorities is inequality in resource allocation, not necessarily group identity. Put another way, it is possible that if inequality in resources in the workplace were ameliorated, we would not observe systemic group or social identity effects. Following this line of thinking, it is likely that those who are at the bottom of an inequality hierarchy – regardless of social or group identity – suffer worse outcomes. As a consequence, we suggest that organizational scholars would benefit from more deeply exploring whether inequality in resources independent of group membership or social identity has important social, health and productivity consequences in organizations. Of course, inequality of resources necessarily interacts with (and is in large part a cause of) group-based inequality, which makes its study even more important. The above distinction highlights that inequality has been examined as an outcome experienced by some organizational members. The issue of distribution of resources, or unequal access to opportunities, however, has largely escaped the attention of organizational scholars. Without consideration of inequality in opportunity, no amount of research focused on inequalities in outcomes can fully explicate inequality experienced by disadvantaged groups. Much of the research that has been conducted to date examining inequalities in rewards along demographic lines has served to describe and highlight the problem. However, this research has not (and cannot) address underlying causes that perpetuate inequalities (e.g. social structures or ideologies). Productive advances can be made by understanding inequality derived from both access to opportunities (e.g. skill development, education, health) and rewards for production (e.g. pay, status, career progression). 445

Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

The discussion above brings to the fore the contentious issue of accepting equality as a guiding norm of fairness in organizations. The vast majority of organizational research on inequality has been centred on understanding the equity norm. Under this view, pay and status disparities as a consequence of gender or race are clearly unacceptable as long as individuals possess similar skills, education, experience and/or capabilities. In contrast, the equality norm assumes that all people are equal and bring equal value to the production process, independent of the type of skill, experience, capabilities or education contributed. Accepting this norm runs firmly counter to the predominant business paradigm of rewarding members based on the economic value of their inputs (i.e. as a consequence of supply and demand, or credentialing). A shift from a focus on equity to equality thus calls for a fundamental shift in thinking. At the very least, this shift calls for reflecting on the value of various inputs into the production process, and the sociopolitical nature of such assessment.

Maintenance of inequality Given the ubiquitous and wide-reaching effects of inequality, why is it maintained? Perception of a just, meritocratic system likely plays an important role. The job market is typically seen as an independent arbiter of talent and dedication – those who work hard and have the best skills will get hired for the best positions in the best organizations. In this sense, organizations actively foster inequality through sorting of those who are deemed to be meritorious of resources and status and those who are not (Cobb, 2015). This process reflects the equity norm that defines organizations driven by economic concerns. However, this process also necessarily facilitates inequality. Any time a process sorts ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ – regardless of whether there is a rational reason for doing so – there will be resultant inequality. This tension presents a large problem for organizational and societal policy. As reviewed above, inequality has a slate of negative impacts at both the societal and organizational level. However, a market economy also requires incentives that spur striving and greater performance. A key problem is that the balance between incentives for upward striving and minimization of unjust inequality has become deeply unbalanced in the last few decades. Disproportionate gains have been realized by the richest in society, and these gains are in large part a consequence of organizational policy and decision-making. Chief executive officer (CEO) pay has soared astronomically, while those in the lower rungs of organizations have realized take-home pay losses after accounting for inflation (e.g. McKenzie, 2012). Complicating any policy response to inequality are psychological variables that lead people to favour the status quo. Even in the wake of movements like Occupy Wall Street and increased attention on the societal harms of inequality, public opinion polling suggests that typical citizens do not place much of a priority on addressing economic inequality (e.g. Newport, 2011). Even those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder – those most adversely impacted by inequality – do not strongly prefer more equal distributions of income and wealth (Norton and Ariely, 2011). System justification theory suggests that people are motivated to defend and justify the status quo, which almost always involves high levels of inequality. The theory specifically suggests that in order to minimize cognitive dissonance, people espouse and support views that the system is just, fair and meritocratic (reviewed in Jost et al., 2004). Together, the lack of interest in inequality-related policy and psychological mechanisms that support the status quo make it difficult to enact change that reduces the negative impacts of inequality. In conclusion, organizational research on inequality conducted thus far has been valuable, but has been fairly limited in its scope. We believe that enriching our conceptual understanding of what inequality is and how various forms of inequality (e.g. gender, race, health and 446

Inequality

education) are related to each other will facilitate greater understanding of how inequality affects organizations and why inequality is maintained in organizations.

Notes 1 2

Both authors contributed equally to this chapter. Interestingly, a very similar social structure exists in the form of the Indian caste system, with the argument being that ‘God’ created people of four types from His own body: Brahmins (philosophers) from his mouth, Kshatriyas (warriors) from his arms, Vaisyas (traders) from his thighs, and Sudras (craftsmen) from his feet. In modern India, the caste system holds significant influence (even though it is formally outlawed), where one’s family history (i.e. last name in most cases) dictates social and economic roles, as well as hierarchical status.

References (key texts in bold) Bapuji, H. (2015). Individuals, interactions and institutions: how economic inequality affects organizations. Human Relations, 68: 1059–83. Bartunek, J.M. and Keys, C.B. (1982). Power equalization in schools through organizational development. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18: 171–83. Beddoes, Z.M. (2012). For richer, for poorer. The Economist, 13 October. Carillo, P.M. and Kopelman, R.E. (1991). Organization structure and productivity: effects of subunit size, vertical complexity, and administrative intensity on operating efficiency. Group and Organization Management, 16: 44–59. CBO. (2014). Trends in the distribution of household income between 1979 and 2007. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.cbo.gov/publication/42729. CBOC. (2013). Income inequality. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/ details/society/income-inequality.aspx. Christie, A.M. and Barling, J. (2010). Beyond status: relating status inequality to performance and health in teams. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95: 920–34. Cobb, J. (2015). How firms shape income inequality: stakeholder power, executive decisionmaking, and the structuring of employment relationships. Academy of Management Review, doi: 10.5465/amr.2013.0451. Colquitt, J.A., Conlon, D.E., Wesson, M.J., Porter, C.O. and Ng, K.Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: a meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86: 425–45. Danna, K. and Griffin, R.W. (1999). Health and well-being in the workplace: a review and synthesis of the literature. Journal of Management, 25: 357–84. Deutsch, M. (1975). Equity, equality, and need: what determines which value will be used as the basis of distributive justice? Journal of Social Issues, 31: 137–49. Gourevitch, V. (ed.) (2003). Rousseau: The Social Contract and other later political writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Greenhaus, J.H., Parasuraman, S. and Wormley, W.M. (1990). Effects of race on organizational experiences, job performance evaluations, and career outcomes. Academy of Management Journal, 33: 64–86. Herring, C. (2009). Does diversity pay? Race, gender, and the business case for diversity. American Sociological Review, 74: 208–24. Johns, G. and Saks, A.M. (2014). Organizational behavior: understanding and managing life at work (9th edn). Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall. Jost, J.T., Banaji, M.R. and Nosek, B.A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25: 881–919. Jowett, B. (1888). The Republic of Plato (trans. B. Jowett). Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press. Kennedy, B.P., Kawachi, I., Glass, R. and Prothrow-Stith, D. (1998). Income distribution, socioeconomic status, and self-rated health in the US. British Medical Journal, 317: 917–21. Krugman, P. (2011). More thoughts on equality of opportunity. The New York Times. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/more-thoughts-on-equality-ofopportunity/. 447

Hari Bapuji and Sandeep Mishra

McCall, L. and Kenworthy, L. (2009). Americans’ social policy preferences in the era of rising inequality. Perspectives on Politics, 7: 459–84. Macionis, J. (2014). Sociology (15th edn). New York: Pearson. McKenzie, H. (2012). Canada’s CEO Elite 100: the 0.01%. Report prepared for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/ canada’s-ceo-elite-100. Meyer, J.P., Stanley, D.J., Herscovitch, L. and Topolnytsky, L. (2002). Affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the organization: a meta-analysis of antecedents, correlates, and consequences. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 61: 20–52. Neckerman, K., and Torche, F. (2007). Inequality: causes and consequences. Annual Review of Sociology, 33: 335–57. Newport, F. (2011). Americans prioritize economy over reducing wealth gap. Gallup Economy. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.gallup.com/poll/151568/americans-prioritize-growing-economyreducing-wealth-gap.aspx. Norton, M. and Ariely, D. (2011). Building a better America: one wealth quintile at a time. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6: 9–12. OECD. (2011). An overview of growing income inequalities in OECD countries: main findings. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf. Oxfam. (2014). Even it up: Time to end extreme inequality. Retrieved on 24 June 2015 from www.oxfam.ca/ sites/default/files/file_attachments/even-it-up-extreme-inequality-291014-full_report-en.pdf. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schaefer, J.A. and Moos, R.H. (1993). Work stressors in health care: context and outcomes. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 3: 235–42. Sen, A. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Son Hing, L.S., Mishra, S., Yip, C. and Garcia, D.M. (Working Paper). The importance of inequality. The forgotten justice principle. Spreitzer, G.M. (1995). Individual psychological empowerment in the workplace: dimensions, measurement, validation. Academy of Management Journal, 38: 1442–65. Spreitzer, G.M. (1996). Social structural characteristics of psychological empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 39: 483–504. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J.C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict, in Worchel, S. and Austin, W. (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks and Cole, pp. 33–48. Tsui, A.S., Egan, T.D. and O’Reilly, C.A. (1992). Being different: relational demography and organizational attachment. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 549–79. Tyler, T.R. and Blader, S.L. (2003). The group engagement model: procedural justice, social identity, and cooperative behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7: 349–61. Weich, S., Lewis, G. and Jenkins, S.P. (2001). Income inequality and the prevalence of common mental disorders in Britain. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 178: 222–7. Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K.E. (2006). Income inequality and population health: a review and explanation of the evidence. Social Science & Medicine, 62: 1768–84. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K.E. (2007). The problems of relative deprivation: why some societies do better than others. Social Science & Medicine, 65: 1965–78. Wilkinson, R.G. and Pickett, K.E. (2009). The spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Penguin.

448

40 Justice Re-membering the Other in organizations Carl Rhodes

Introduction Justice is one of the oldest concepts in Western philosophy. In Aristotle’s (2014) virtue ethics it holds a special place as a ‘complete virtue’ and ‘the most excellent of the virtues’ (Aristotle, 2014: 78). What sets justice apart, for Aristotle, is that it is a virtue that has as its condition the other person, rather than just concerning the constitution and demeanour of the self. While other virtues are matters of individual character and capacity for thinking, justice arises when a person uses virtue for the advantage of someone else. Aristotle explains this relation in terms of injustice, understood by him as being related to a form of greed where a person desires and pursues more than what is a fair share of what is due to them. Aristotle also distinguishes the idea of justice as lawfulness from that of justice as fairness. With the latter he regards injustice as the unfair pursuit of personal profit at the expense of another person. This justice thus concerns fairness and equality within a community, with no one getting more or less of the common wealth than their rightful share. The ancient philosophical idea of justice as fairness has, in recent times, been adopted wholeheartedly in the study of what is referred to as ‘organizational justice’. Positioning justice as a phenomenon subject to social scientific investigation, organizational justice is defined as a person’s individual and subjective perception that that a work-based event is fair (Cropanzano and Stein, 2009). As a well-established field of inquiry, organizational justice research has almost exclusively focused on understanding justice through what are presented as its three ‘dimensions’: (1) distributive justice and the question of whether the various resources and rewards available through work are distributed fairly among employees, (2) procedural justice and the question of whether the same rules and procedures are applied equally to all people in an organization, and (3) interactional justice and whether people are treated fairly in terms of their interactions with other people in organizations and the nature of the communication involved in those interactions (Colquitt et al., 2005). Those who research organizational justice in this way have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with philosophy. On the one hand their research is reliant at its very centre on one of Western philosophy’s most potent and long-lasting concepts (Cohen and Greenberg, 1982). On the other hand proponents of organizational justice have disparaged this philosophical 449

Carl Rhodes

inheritance, arguing somewhat dismissively that while philosophers are interested in a normative theorization of justice, social scientists focus more on describing people’s perceptions of justice in the workplace (Cropanzano et al., 2007). When works of philosophy are cited in the organizational justice literature it is most commonly in passing, with reference being largely limited to either ancient Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato and Aristotle) or modern American ones (e.g. Nozick and Rawls). This chapter mounts a critique of the dominant social scientific approach to organizational justice arguing that it is flawed because while being wholeheartedly indebted to and infused with philosophy for its central concept it has eschewed adequate or explicit attention to or deliberation over that philosophy. Further this primary flaw is related to an even more damning secondary flaw: that distinguishing itself from philosophy has enabled organizational justice research to make claims to descriptive objectivity, with this being a thin veil for a neo-liberal political instrumentalism which renders justice secondary to the market. The chapter argues that the dominant conception of organizational justice is based on the assumptions that justice should be at the service of organizational and business strategy. This assumption serves to deploy justice not so much in the liberal philosophical tradition that sees it as a central pillar of a fair society to which organizations should be held to account, but limits justice to being merely a resource at an organization’s disposal in the pursuit of its own selfinterest. Organizational justice thus both appropriates and abrogates the philosophical idea of justice, squandering the value of its meaning by reducing it to yet another tool through which to enhance organizational power and prerogative. While there are many possible philosophical approaches that might be used to reconsider organizational justice and the limits of its managerialism, the chapter considers in particular the philosophy of justice found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and how it has begun to be taken up in organizational studies and business ethics. The chapter concludes by considering possible futures for research and theory in organizational justice.

Organizational justice and philosophy The idea of ‘organizational justice’ as studied in the social sciences is very much a late twentieth century phenomena. In tracing the history of organizational justice social scientists commonly begin the narrative with studies of distributive justice beginning in the 1960s. Adams’ (1963) ‘equity theory’ is a particular touchstone as it relates to the relationship between work effort and the fairness of the rewards one receives from work. In organizational contexts distributive justice has been understood more generally as ‘the perceived fairness of the amounts of compensation employees receive’ (Folger and Konovsky, 1989). With distributive justice, the work of organizational researchers was clearly located in an Aristotelian tradition, with the issue of fair distribution being central to Aristotle’s (2014) ethics and politics. While Aristotle himself may not be considered in any explicit detail, it is taken that if distributive justice is an appropriate concept through which to consider political communities, then it can be applied also to organizations (French, 1964). While acknowledging the value of distributive justice, in the 1980s social scientists became interested in the ways that justice was also relevant to the fairness with which procedures were applied to different people. Philosophically this approach began to take a more Rawlsian flavour, with the focus shifting to include the process of justice as well as its outcome (Rawls, 1971). This was directly informed by Thibaut and Walker’s (1975) studies of procedures used in legal dispute resolution, and their findings that the perceived fairness of the process through which disputes were resolved related to whether people felt the resolution itself was fair. In organizational contexts it has been surmised that higher levels of procedural justice will be perceived when decision-making processes are 450

Justice

consistent, free from bias, based on accurate information, are aligned with stated organizational values, and account for the concerns of stakeholders (Leventhal et al., 1980). Interactional justice, as the third dimension of organizational justice, began to be researched in the late 1980s, arising out of specifically social scientific rather than philosophical antecedents. Understood as ‘the fairness of the interpersonal treatment that one receives at the hand of an authority figure’ (Byrne and Cropanzano, 2001: 17) interactional justice refers to the character of workplace relationships within the context of formal organizational hierarchies. An early study of employee recruitment conducted by Bies and Moag (1986) was especially influential in showing that people’s perception of fairness was influenced by the truthfulness of communication, respect shown to them, the communicated justification of decisions, and lack of prejudice. Studies of organizational justice have brought the concept of justice centrally to bear on management theory and practice in a way that was hitherto absent – especially as it relates to the philosophical idea of ‘justice a fairness’ (Rawls, 1971). What is curious in these developments, however, is the way that the proponents of organizational justice deliberately and explicitly distance themselves from philosophy, both in general and in relation to the specific philosophers (notably Aristotle and Rawls) that their work relies on conceptually. The justification for this is the claim that philosophical approaches to justice are normative in nature, while within the social sciences the approach is descriptive. Colquitt, Greenberg and Zapata-Phelan (2013), for example, express the sweeping view that across the many and various philosophical explorations of justice from ancient to modern times, all, bar none, ‘share a common prescriptive orientation, conceiving of justice as a normative ideal’. Conversely the social sciences have a ‘descriptive orientation’ whose ‘conceptualizations focus on justice not as it should be, but as it is perceived by individuals’ (Colquitt et al., 2005: 4). Cropanzano, Bowen and Gilliland (2007) concur with this unsubstantiated generalization stating that: ‘Unlike the work of philosophers and attorneys, managerial scientists are less concerned with what is just and more concerned with what people believe to be just’ (Cropanzano et al., 2007: 35, italics in original) This crude bifurcation echoes throughout the literature on organizational justice. It is suggested that it ‘is clear where philosopher and social scientists diverge. Ethical philosophers are interested in providing prescriptive or normative definitions of justice’ while for social scientists justice is a ‘perceptual cognition’ (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998), we are informed. Similarly it is asserted that ‘the philosophical approach to studying business ethics is inherently prescriptive . . . whereas the approach of social scientists is primarily descriptive’ (Greenberg and Bies, 1992: 433). Philosophy’s explicit presence in the organizational justice literature is thus present through its othering. It does not end here. With surprising social scientific hubris, when philosophical ethics is discussed it has even be castigated as being inferior. Greenberg and Bies (1992) for example, evaluated ethical theories including utilitarian and deontological ethics in relation to empirical findings in social scientific studies of organizational justice. Their unequivocal position was that ‘the underlying philosophical premises [of these theories] were concluded to be overly simplistic in view of complexities about human nature revealed in empirical research’ (Greenberg and Bies, 1992: 433). Social scientists, we are thus informed, are not only superior to philosophers in their appreciation of justice, they also have the formidable ability to suspend their own judgements so as to truly understand justice in phenomenal nudity and complexity!

The politics of organizational justice While social scientific research into organizational justice has done much to erect a standardized body of knowledge on the basis of its own definition of justice, that standardization has also 451

Carl Rhodes

seen a range of questionable assumptions and false dichotomies become institutionalized and as such un-scrutinized. Following on from the comments above a significant one of these is the assumption that a social scientific and philosophical approach to justice are and should be seen as separate and different, despite the central conceptual scaffolding of organizational justice being borrowed from a long philosophical tradition. The notion that the social scientific approach to justice is non-prescriptive is highly dubious. It is true that the focus is on ‘perceived’ justice on the part of employees, but one does not need to dig deep beneath the surface to see that there is a moral judgement in place that deems that it is ‘good’ if these perceptions are positive. Further, the managerialist focus of organizational justice theory comes to the fore in claiming the managerial benefits that high levels of perceived justice in an organization will reduce troublemaking, facilitate the implementation of managerially driven change, enhance managerial authority, reduce workers’ perceptions of being exploited, and render people more aligned with organizational culture and identity (Colquitt et al., 2005: 5–6). Justice is also said to positively influence ‘motivation, well-being, performance, attitudes, behaviours and other outcomes relevant for organizations and organizational members’ (Fortin, 2008: 93). What this implies is that justice is not an end or virtue in itself, but is rather focused ultimately on ‘the unique effects of justice dimensions on key outcomes’ (Colquitt et al., 2001: 86) most especially productivity (de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2003: 858). In all its crudeness the credo is: ‘being fair costs little and pays off handsomely’ (Brockner, 2006: 122). Put simply, organizational justice has developed as a means to an end – that of enhanced organizational performance (see also Fortin and Fellenz, 2008). Moreover this is normative; it is something that organizations should do. To suggest that this is not prescriptive is naïve at best, conspiratorial at worst. If we admit that a solid call to descriptivism as a justifying trope of the dominant social science approach to organizational justice is false, then what we are left with is a particular theoretical (albeit avowedly non-philosophical) approach to justice which equates justice with individual perception of the justice done unto that individual by a superordinate organizational authority. While Aristotle had it that justice was the most excellent of the virtues, it would seem that the virtues deemed most excellent in organizational justice research are managerial power and corporate success. While earlier it was commented that the general Aristotelian notion of justice as fairness was used in the social sciences, Aristotle is seldom addressed in any detail in the current organizational justice literature. Perhaps not surprisingly what Aristotle understands as fairness differs from the understanding proffered in relation to organizational justice. It is highly relevant to this discussion that when Aristotle discusses justice, he does so with direct reference to matters of organized work and market-based exchange. Community exists, for Aristotle, when people with different skills and abilities fairly exchange the products of their labour with each other. Using money as the medium it is thus possible, in Aristotle’s example, for shoemakers, famers and builders to engage in fair exchange so that each has shoes, food and shelter. Moreover a just person is the one who, in engaging with others, deliberately and voluntarily ensures both that s/he does not acquire too much, and that others do not acquire too little. Justice is that which enables communities to exist through fair forms of exchange and commerce. What happens with the social science literature is that this originary ethico-political import of the very concept of justice is neutered – first by disavowing philosophy, second by rendering justice servile to managerial prerogative, and third by individualizing what is an inherently social concept. There is obviously not the space here to provide a review of justice theory from antiquity to the present; however, even the most superficial understanding of justice would realize that 452

Justice

we are dealing with a political concept, and a part of political philosophy. Clearly to de-politicize it, as achieved by organizational justice theory, is to rob it of its very meaning, rendering it instead just another managerial tool to be used in the pursuit of business and organizational imperatives. As such organizational justice research’s explicit non-normative stance serves only to hide the norms that it privileges; norms rooted in a neo-liberal moralization of capitalism and individualism. In sum, the abandonment of philosophy by social science approaches to organizational justice has meant that the very meaning of justice has too been abandoned.

An ‘other’ justice If the meaning of justice has been lost, where might it be found again? Clearly what is required is a return to political philosophy through inter-disciplinary inquiry that re-politicizes the notion of justice in organizations. The whole canon of Western philosophy offers opportunities for this to be done, and indeed within the disciplines of organization studies and business ethics many philosophers associated with justice have been drawn upon. Notable examples include Aristotelian approaches to business ethics (Solomon, 2004), the deployment of social contract theory originating with Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes for managing the dilemmas of global business (Donaldson and Dunfee, 2002), and the use of Rawls’ political theory to inform an ethical basis for stakeholder theory (Phillips, 2003). To review all of these and other possible directions is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead one particularly productive example will be discussed in order to demonstrate how philosophical work has recently been used as a means to consider justice in organizations. This example relates to the way that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has been drawn on to inform recent research and theory on the relationship between ethics and justice in organizations. Levinas’ philosophy is an important one to consider in that, since the 1990s, his work is said to have ushered in an ‘ethical turn’ in literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy and social theory, through his radical rethinking of the relationship of the self to ethics, and the implications of this for justice and politics (Hofmeyr, 2009). This turn has affected studies of ethics in organizations too with Levinas’ unique understanding of ethics and justice having been drawn on to develop some of the most innovative and compelling new ways to approach ethical issues in organizations. This includes theoretical investigations into the meaning of justice in organizations (e.g. Aasland, 2007, 2009; Bevan and Corvellec, 2007; Byers and Rhodes, 2007) as well as applications of that to studying leadership (Knights and O’Leary, 2006; Rhodes, 2012), diversity management (Muhr, 2008), decision-making (Lewis and Farnsworth, 2007), corporate codes of ethics (Painter-Morland, 2010), corporate responsibility (Soares, 2008), corporate reporting (Campbell et al., 2009) and software piracy (Introna, 2007). What Levinas offers these studies is an approach to justice that, rather than relying on narrow notions of individual perceptions, understands justice as a political response to an ethical dilemma. Levinas (1998) bases his understanding of justice on a prior ethics such that the ethical primacy of care and devotion to other people is the wellspring of justice. For Levinas (1969) ethics arises in the context of face-to-face relationships; relationships where the other person is considered simultaneously close and distant. That is, while the other might be close in physical proximity but at the same time infinitely distant in their uniqueness, particularity and knowability. The other is prior to ourselves to the extent that we are hostage to the other for our own existence, as we take responsibility for them. Ethics, for Levinas happens when one is called into question by the other and becomes responsible for the other. Levinasian ethics is thus non-selfish and relational; it is about one’s care and devotion to the other person before and above one’s self. 453

Carl Rhodes

It is in the practical problems in enacting such ethics that, for Levinas (1998), justice is called forth. Indeed, if we have a notion of ethics based on the sanctity of and responsibility towards the other person, what happens when one is called to responsibility for more than one person? This is what Levinas calls the entry of the ‘third party’ that divides one’s ethical attention between multiple others. It is in this sense that we might regard justice as the impossible but necessary task of dividing one’s care, duty and resources between people, each of whom is unique and incomparable as well as deserving. Levinas (1985) answers the question ‘how is it there is justice?’ as follows: I answer that it is the fact of the multiplicity of men [sic] and the presence of someone else next to the Other, which condition the laws and establish justice. If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; but there is someone else. Do I know what my neighbor is in relation to someone else? Do I know if someone else has an understanding with him or his victim? Who is my neighbor? It is consequently necessary to weigh, to think, to judge, in comparing the incomparable. The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also establish with other men; it is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions, which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation. (Levinas, 1985: 89–90) Justice is thus about how ethics manifests in the real world of interpersonal social relations. As such while it is an ethical desire for and service to the other that inaugurates the need for justice, justice demands rules and rationality so as to decide and justify how things might be divided between all of the others. With such a philosophical view, the idea that organizational justice can be reduced to a matter of individual perceptions is an abrogation of the very term justice. So, when organizational justice researchers claim that organizations should enact ‘some noticeable act of fairness’ (Janson et al., 2008: 267) so as to improve ‘performance, and organizational commitment’ (de Cremer et al., 2007: 1798) they are simultaneously relinquishing organizations from any responsibility for justice other than that which is at the service of their own selfinterest. Moreover, it is precisely this obsession with (in this case organizational) self-interest that is diametrically opposed to ethics in the Levinasian sense. As such, even with such a brief exposition as is permitted here, a turn to philosophy is a means through which to radically rethink the entrenched and impoverished notion of organization justice that has developed in the ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1970) of social science. What Levinas teaches us is that while it might be possible for managers to motivate perceptions of fairness among employees such that corporate interests are realized, can be achieved and can be righteously aligned with corporate interests, this is not justice. Instead the remarkably more urgent and difficult task of justice concerns the very nature of the exercise of organizational power if that power is to be exercised in a manner that places ethics prior to it. Justice is a practice of fair distribution, but also a practice of engaging with the dilemma over what is fair in terms of who does and does not benefit from justice. As I have suggested elsewhere, in practice this calls for ‘an ongoing questioning of the self in relation to the others to whom one is responsible’ such that organizational justice is not about trying to ensure people perceive their experience in organizations as fair in order to improve effectiveness ‘it is about navigating the ethical quandaries and dilemmas that leading other people, and being responsible for them, inevitably raise’ in the political realities of organizational life (Rhodes, 2012: 1322).

454

Justice

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the dominant social science approach to organizational justice, offering a critique of it based on its theoretically limited and managerially oriented character. It has been suggested that organization justice is ambivalent to philosophy in that it depends on philosophical ideas and concepts, yet has explicitly distanced itself from philosophy. Partly as a result of this ambivalence the literature on organizational justice encases a philosophically and ethically impoverished notion of justice. It was further proposed that organizational justice could benefit from a much more direct and explicit consideration of the long and deep history of how justice has been conceived of in philosophy. This was illustrated by a consideration of Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy and how it has been drawn on in organization studies and business ethics. It was argued that Levinas’ philosophy leads to a radically different understanding of organizational justice – one that reaches to the heart of the tense and difficult political realities of organizational life and its implications for fair distribution within organizational and within society itself. In parting ways with this chapter I will now finally speculate as to the possible future of studies in organizational justice. If we are to be honest, on account of their entrenched and institutionalized nature, it is most likely that for at least the medium term, social scientific approaches to organizational justice will remain dominant while undergoing the incremental improvements that one expects of ‘normal science’. Moreover, the ethical and political shortcomings of this approach are likely to remain unchanged. Such is the fate of vested interests and established power structures! Despite this pessimistic outlook, what is more important is that a turn to philosophy offers a radically different possible future, and as demonstrated in this chapter Levinas in particular provides a radical antidote to the anodyne manageralism of conventional social science. More generally we might envisage a future by looking to the ancient past. As commented earlier, for Aristotle justice is primarily about the fairness of economic distribution in a society and the political means through which that might be achieved. In an era where income inequality is radically widening, where a managerial class are the disciplined and trained henchmen of capital, where discrimination and oppression at work are rife, and where social scientists sing together in a chorus of justice, is it not now time to put the philosophy and politics back into a true justice for organizational life?

References (key texts in bold) Aasland, D.G. (2007). The exteriority of ethics in management and its transition into justice: a Levinasian approach to ethics in business. Business Ethics; A European Review, 16(3): 220–26. Aasland, D.G. (2009). Ethics and Economy: after Levinas. London: MayFlyBooks. Adams, J.S. (1963). Toward an understanding of inequity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67: 422–36. Aristotle (2014). Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett. Bevan, D. and Corvellec, H. (2007). The impossibility of corporate ethics: for a Levinasian approach to managerial ethics. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16 (3): 208–19. Bies, R.J. and Moag, J. (1986). Interactional Justice: communication criteria for fairness, in Lewicki, R., Sheppard, B. and Bazerman, M. (eds), Research on Negotiation in Organizations Vol. 1. Greenwich: JAI Press, pp. 43–55. Brockner, J. (2006). Why it’s so hard to be fair. Harvard Business Review, 84(3): 122–29. Byers, D. and Rhodes, C. (2007). Ethics, alterity and organizational justice. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3): 239–50. 455

Carl Rhodes

Byrne, Z.C. and Cropanzano, R. (2001). The history of organizational justice: the founders speak, in Cropanzano, R. (ed.), Justice in the Workplace: from theory to practice. Mahwah NJ: Laurence Erlbaum, pp. 3–26. Campbell, D., McPhail, K. and Slack, R. (2009). Face work in annual reports: a study of the management of encounter through annual reports, informed by Levinas and Bauman. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 22(6): 907–32. Cohen, R.L. and Greenberg, J. (1982). The justice concept in social psychology, in Greenberg, J. and Cohen, R.L. (eds), Equity and Justice in Social Behavior. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–41. Colquitt, J.A., Conlon, D.E., Wesson, M.J., Porter, C. and Ng, K.Y. (2001). Justice at the millenium: a meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3): 425–45. Colquitt, J.A., Greenberg, J. and Zapata-Phelan, C.P. (2005). What is organizational justice: a historical overview, in Greenberg, J. and Colquitt, J.A. (eds), The Handbook of Organizational Justice. Mahwah NJ: Laurence Erbaum, pp. 3–57. Cropanzano, R. and Stein, J.H. (2009). Organizational justice and behavioral ethics: promises and prospects. Business Ethics Quarterly, 19(2): 193–233. Cropanzano, R., Bowen, D.E. and Gilliland, S.W. (2007). The management of organizational justice. The Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(4): 34–48. de Cremer, D. and van Knippenberg, D. (2003). How do leaders promote cooperation? The effects of charisma and procedural fairness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(5): 858–66. de Cremer, D., van Dijke, M. and Bos, A.E.R. (2007). When leaders are seen as transformational: the effects of organizational justice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37(8): 1797–816. Donaldson, T. and Dunfee, T.W. (2002). Ties that bind in business ethics: social contracts and why they matter. Journal of Banking and Finance, 26(9): 1853–65. Folger R. and Cropanzano, R. (1998). Organizational Justice and Human Resource Management. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Folger, R. and Konovsky, M.A. (1989). Effects of procedural and distributive justice on reactions to pay raise decisions. Academy of Management Journal, 32(1): 115–30. Fortin, M. (2008) Perspective on organizational justice: concept clarification, social context integration, time and links with morality. International Journal of Management Reviews, 10(2): 93–126. Fortin, M. and Fellenz, M.R. (2008). Hypocrisies of fairness: towards a more reflexive ethical base in organizational justice research and practice. Journal of Business Ethics, 78(3): 415–33. French, W. (1964). The Personnel Management Process. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Greenberg, J. and Bies, R.J. (1992). Establishing the role of empirical studies of organizational justice in philosophical inquiries into business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 11(5–6): 433–44. Hofmeyr, B. (2009). Radical Passivity: rethinking ethical agency in Levinas. New York: Springer. Introna, L. (2007). Singular justice and software privacy. Business Ethics: A European Review, 16(3): 264–7. Janson, A., Levy, L. Sitkin, S.B. and Lind, E.A. (2008). Fairness and other leadership heuristics: a fournation study. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 17(2): 251–72. Knights, D., and O’Leary, M. (2006). Leadership, ethics and responsibility to the other. Journal of Business Ethics, 67(2): 125–37. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leventhal, G.S., Karuza, J. and Fry, W.R. (1980). Beyond fairness: a theory of allocation preferences. Justice and Social Interaction, 167–218. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E., (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lewis, M. and Farnsworth, J. (2007). Financialisation and the ethical moment: Levinas and the encounter with business practice. Society and Business Review, 2(2), 179–92. Muhr, S.L. (2008). Reflections on responsibility and justice: coaching human rights in South Africa. Management Decision, 46(8), 1175–86. Painter-Morland, M. (2010). Questioning corporate codes of ethics. Business Ethics: A European Review, 19(3): 265–79. 456

Justice

Phillips, R. (2003). Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rhodes, C. (2012). Ethics, alterity and the rationality of leadership justice. Human Relations, 65(10): 1311–31. Soares, C. (2008). Corporate legal responsibility: a Levinasian perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 81(3): 545–53. Solomon, R.C. (2004). Aristotle, ethics and business organizations. Organization Studies, 25(6): 1021–43. Thibaut, J. and Walker, L. (1975). Procedural Justice: a psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

457

41 Leadership Philosophical contributions and critiques Jonathan Gosling and Peter Case

Let us first distinguish between what philosophers say about leadership, and ways in which philosophy has been helpful for leaders. This chapter deals with both, and will show that they serve each other: just as leaders have often turned to philosophers to guide or justify their actions, so philosophers have mined the actions of leaders for problems and examples of the philosophical issues they wish to address. It can be helpful, therefore, to differentiate between: (a) ‘philosophies of leadership’ which represent philosophical enquiry into the sociomaterial processes associated with power, authority, influence and governance; and (b) ‘leadership philosophies’ which represent the ways in which philosophical ideas have been taken up and enacted by practitioners. Invoking such concepts as power, authority, influence, etc., philosophies of leadership are invariably ideological in nature and range across a spectrum of political positions. In offering justifications for choices and actions, moreover, these philosophies are de facto ethical manifestos of one form or another. As such, individual virtue is often a preoccupation of leadership philosophies in contexts that are inevitably social and political. Similarly, when individuals practise leadership philosophies, the choices they make and resulting organizational consequences are based on ideological and ethical dispositions. Having claimed that there is often a (typically heroic) privileging of the individual in both philosophies of leadership and leadership philosophies, for completeness we should also acknowledge minority academic and practitioner positions that deny or detract from the notion of the individual leader; that is, philosophies which emphasize the distributed character of leadership and those which see acts of individual leaders dissolved into a field of sociomaterial process. This section is organized around a number of themes that philosophers have tackled; each a distinct way in which leadership has been framed and analysed. Somewhat simplified, they ask who or what should lead, what functions does leadership perform, what is effected by leadership, how is leadership constituted in language, and how does it relate to the good. Our brief foray into the philosophy of leadership will see us tracing a broad curve through history and across civilizations, as we journey from the Platonism of Ancient Greece to Taoism and 458

Leadership

Confucianism in China; en route adopting perspectives provided, inter alia, by Stoicism, Marxism, language philosophy and poststructural philosophy. It will be a necessarily selective account but, however partial the connections, our purpose will be to stake out the beginnings of a cross-cultural history of ideas in relation to the philosophy of leadership. The aim is to generate an appreciation of the fact that there are multiple genealogies that prefigure and condition what we understand, in both lay and professional terms, by the words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’. What this journey will reveal is the inevitable tension between the way in which notions of leadership, qua the expression of authority and influence, seems always to be clothed in historically and culturally local apparel. Philosophies of leadership are inevitably the product of particular temporal and cultural conditions. And yet, there are also what appear to be universal characteristics and expressions of the human condition that manifest in those philosophies. In other words, attempts to organize the social appear empirically to evoke generic trans-cultural and trans-temporal challenges. The ways in which individuals and collectives respond to such challenges are perceived and recovered within any given societal language as ‘leadership’. Or, at least, that is how it appears to ‘us’ in the English-speaking world looking backwards and outwards from the contemporary and inevitably ethnocentric position that we are adopting here and now. What this implies, philosophically, is that while there may be patterns to the emergence of leaders and acts of leadership it proves an impossible task to isolate or define any essences to these phenomena. The leadership scholar Keith Grint (2001, 2005) argues convincingly, for example, that leadership is, pace Gallie (1955/56), an essentially contested concept. There is no unequivocal ontology to leaders or leadership. Pursuing this line of thinking perhaps the best we can do philosophically is to identify analytical containers that assist us in making sense of leadership phenomena. Grint suggests that there is a kind of underlying grammar (our choice of term) to the way in which different observers – hailing from different societies in different times – explain the emergence of leaders and acts of leadership. We can map vocabularies of motive and processes by asking questions that relate to the who, what, how, where and why of leadership. In trying to answer these questions we find differences and similarities across time and geography. In some narratives it is who leaders are that makes them leaders, in others it is what leaders achieve, where they are located, how they get things done, or their ability to explain why particular ends should be pursued that qualifies them as leaders. Forms of explanation can be located within this conceptual alembic; some focusing exclusively on one dimension and others proposing an admixture of the ‘who, what, where, how and why’ motives. Having made some general remarks about the need to introduce relativity into our approach to understanding philosophies of leadership and leadership philosophies, we now commence our journey proper. The starting place is ancient Athens and the words of one of the most influential Classical thinkers of the Western cannon: When I considered all this, the type of men who are administering affairs, and the condition of the Law and of public morality – the more I considered it and the older I grew, the more difficult appeared to me the task of decent government. . . . And so I was forced to extol true philosophy and to declare that through it alone can real justice both for the State and for the individual be discovered and enforced. Mankind (I said) will find no cessation from evil until either the real philosophers gain political control or else the politicians become by some miracle real philosophers. (Plato, The Republic, 326d) The question of who should lead is tackled by Plato through the figure of the philosopher king. He poses the paradox that the king we most want is a wise one, but anyone truly wise would 459

Jonathan Gosling and Peter Case

not want to be king (and anyone who seeks to rule is thereby suspect). But the question is a rhetorical one at the start of The Republic, in which leadership is identified with justice, a state in which the potential of each is fulfilled in its functions relating to a greater whole. Thus the ideal philosopher king is alert to the potential perfection of every movement and idea; and by virtue of this insight can legitimately govern – even manipulate – conventional norms. So the ideal Platonic leader operates at the hyparxis of a world that is perpetually evolving in the fulfilment of potential, and in so doing each creature transcends its own nature through relations to the whole, which is ultimately One and therefore Good. For Platonists the leader – that which we follow – is the ideal of good; thus leadership stands above daily life, for the inspiration, care and control of ‘lower’ nature. Plato describes five intellectual competencies that serve as a route to such superiority. First arithmetic, relating to things as they appear in themselves; then geometry, concerned with the relations between things; then astronomy, patterns of movement; then harmonics, flowing beauty; and fifth, dialectics, through which one contemplates being and becoming. However, although presented in The Republic as a progressive curriculum for educating leaders, this is primarily a device to describe a hierarchy of knowledge: a hierarchy that is integral to the legitimate authority of those with higher insight. Plato uses the figure of the philosopher king as a means to explore justice and order; he is not (here at least) concerned with the conduct of actual leaders, or the regulation of powers and responsibilities of leadership. But these were primary concerns of near-contemporaries Xenophon and Aristotle. Xenophon, a distinguished general and fellow student of Socrates, wrote as a historian and commentator rather than a philosopher, but in so doing addressed many philosophical themes. The historical novel Cyropaedia tells of an attempt (by Cyrus the Great of Persia) to reward soldiers according to merit, rather than status. This undermined the solidarity of the more privileged classes, whose members now competed to ingratiate themselves with the emperor, as they had no guarantee of proven merit. Thus Xenophon embeds leadership in relations of interdependency, problematizing judgements about merit, virtue, just deserts, loyalty and obedience, which have no fixed standards, but are negotiated in a fragile balance of power, most stable in well-established oligarchy. Aristotle focused on the personal and intellectual virtues that would best enable proper deliberation on collective well-being. Well-being is an outcome of virtuous individuals engaging in virtuous social practices towards noble ends. Leadership is the art of persuasion, drawing on arguments (logos), the disposition of the audience (pathos) and the character (ethos) projected by the leader. Friendship is central to this, because conversations between those who love each other will have their best interests at heart; and these are best served by a philosophical life, in which deliberation about what matters, rather than simply what action to take, is at the core of personal and political life. The notion that leadership – of the self, of a household, a city, an army or a state – is consonant with, if not actually identical to, the practice of philosophy as reworked in Stoicism, the main exponents of which were Epictetus (slave), Seneca (statesman) and Marcus Aurelius (emperor). Facing the numerous dilemmas, setbacks and challenges of life, it is necessary to tolerate those one cannot change, to have the competence and courage to act where one can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Philosophy, in Stoicism, comprises ‘practices of the self’, a curriculum that is both cognitive and meditative: by ‘physics’ one studies how the world works, and one’s own agency in relation to it; by ‘ethics’ one discerns and pursues the good; and by ‘logic’ one acquires knowledge of one’s duty to the community. Leadership poses these challenges at a large scale because so much seems to be within the leader’s orbit, and this demands especially accomplished askesis, disciplined practice of the virtues. 460

Leadership

There are links between these Classical philosophies of leadership and contemporary theories. Certain contemporary philosophies, which can be grouped under a broad heading of ‘the art of living’, take up the idea of crafting philosophical selves more generally. The work of Michel Foucault, particularly the third volume of his History of Sexuality, entitled Care of the Self (Foucault, 1986) traces the genealogy of this Greek influence on western culture and has also been important in informing the art of living movement (Nehamas, 2000). While ‘care of self’ sounds as though it might be a somewhat narcissistic preoccupation, study of both Classical and contemporary literature on the subject reveals the direct opposite to be the case. ‘Care of the self’ is actually promoting concern with one’s relation and obligation to one’s community, i.e. the polis (Hadot, 1995, 2002). For the Ancient Greeks, those taking up positions of power and authority – leaders in contemporary parlance – would feel particularly strong obligations to develop the virtues required to carry out the duties of leadership, again in relation to their domain of social influence. Philosophies of leadership rooted in a ‘care of the self’ ethos can be seen to have influenced at least two strands of current leadership philosophy. The concept of the mindful leader, for example, claims that self-awareness and self-control of the individual are crucial to effective leadership. The qualities appropriate for leadership, moreover, are created through philosophical practices and habits, such that the creation of the philosophical self is accomplished through the activity of leading. Similarly, theories of relational leadership (Hosking, 2007; Hosking and Shamir, 2012) draw implicitly on the reciprocity of relationship epitomized in both Classical and contemporary conceptions of ‘care of the self’. Returning to the conundrum posed by Plato, the same paradox – how could a leader become wise, and why would a wise person want to lead? – appears also in Taoism and is expressed in the theory of non-attached action termed wu-wei. Because the self is created by the conditions of consciousness, self-originating agency is actually subject to the conditions that created it – so is far from free. Refraining from action is itself an action, thus action and non-action are conceptually indistinguishable. The absence of an alternative concept (of non-conditioned action) thus becomes a presence; awareness of this has a luminous effect, and enables a leader to ‘place yourself below others’, such that ‘they believe they have accomplished it all by themselves’ (LaoTzu 1999, chapters 66 and 17). The quietism of Taoism is contrasted by resolute Confucian activism, in which acquiring knowledge and applying it skilfully qualifies one to rise through a hierarchy; to lead from the top (Jullien, 2004). So far we have considered the idea that a person might be qualified to lead by the practice of philosophical disciplines. In Semitic traditions the problem of ‘philosopher as ruler’ became confounded with ‘ruler as saviour’, especially in Christian thought. The leader might now transform and liberate the self, rather than merely guide action. Salvation implies the possibility of liberation from the normal bounded conditions of material life (and for some, from original sin), which is why leaders positioned as saviours are associated with supernatural occurrences, or special connections with the divine. Their transcendence of death is always significantly symbolized in some way: if not in their own resurrection then in the seismic impact of their death upon the world (often construed as a sacrifice) (St Paul, Romans 10:9). In such a world, a leader, rather than a political or social order, becomes central to the legitimation of power and thus of authority at all levels. So these two ideas – that a leader is super-natural and is the key to a necessary salvation – underpin the varied theological philosophies from St Paul and Augustine through Aquinas to Calvin and Luther (and pre-date all these in the theocractic mythologies of ancient Egypt) (Augustine, 1974). In practice, philosophies of salvation inform both elaborate hierarchies and enthusiastic communities; but what they have in common is a leader who directly communes with God or the gods, or who at least claims authority from supernatural sources to which others have no direct access. 461

Jonathan Gosling and Peter Case

The political philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment challenged this view. Hobbes (1588–1679) argued that people surrender authority to a sovereign to ensure peace and stability, thus constituting a social contract for leadership. Hobbes believed that to minimize conflict and confusion, people would cede authority to an absolute monarch, and thence have no grounds for complaining: they are bound by the social contract that they have implicitly made. Locke (1632–1704) elaborated the idea of the social contract, arguing that it was a contract to protect rights to ‘life, health, liberty or possessions’ (Locke, 1690), in defence of which revolution against an established leader could be justified. Montesquieu (1689–1755) specified the separation of powers between church, judiciary and state, so that leadership could be legitimate in so far as it was subject to these institutional frameworks. Thus leadership was conceived as a function of social institutions that existed to contain and represent human desires and rights. It depends neither on the perfection of virtue nor a link to the Divine, but on a more-or-less negotiated social contract. This philosophical ethos characterized the French and American revolutions, most eloquently in the American Declaration of Independence. The notion that this social contract could be in some sense in the interests of all citizens was always contested (see, for example, the opening sections of The Republic, in which Glaucon argues that justice is the interest of anyone who has the power to enforce it), and clearly articulated in the political philosophy of Marx and Engels (1977[1848]), who pointed out that leadership implies the exercise of power in the interests of one class over the interests of another. All societies are characterized by an underlying conflict of interests between those who own or have access to capital – land or money – and those who have only their labour to sell. As a class, labour has to organize in order to exert power in the production process, and this calls for leadership. Hence leadership can be understood mainly as the expression of class interest and the organization and direction of one class in contrast (often conflict) to others. Leadership studies have not been immune to the wider climatic changes that have been shaping social scientific enquiry and explanation in the latter part of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries. What have come to be labelled the cultural and linguistic turns in social science, for example, have had a significant effect philosophically on the way in which leaders and leadership processes are understood. Both of these broad perspectives are rooted on a premise that, to a greater of lesser degree, language is constitutive of social realities. In other words, the way we access reality is inevitably and inexorably mediated by linguistically fashioned perceptions which are themselves a product of shared language. The argument that language is constitutive of social reality is perhaps most famously associated with the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), whose concept of language games (Wittgenstein, 1978[1953]) suggests ways in which the social use of language simultaneously embodies nascent action. This is an idea which Wittgenstein’s contemporary John Austin (1911–1960) also explored through his work on the notion of speech acts; the point being that when we use language we also produce social effects. Language is, in Austin’s words, performative (Austin, 1976 [1955]). The fundamental philosophical idea that language constitutes the social world has been given influential voice in the social scientific community by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann whose seminal work The Social Constructive of Reality explores the political economic and ideological effects of language-mediated worldviews (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Similarly important is the work of the philosopher Peter Winch whose Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy sets out a Wittgenstein-inspired polemic for a radically interpretative (as opposed to positivist) approach to explaining social phenomena. As Winch puts it, ‘the concept of understanding is rooted in a social context’ (Winch, 1958: 70, emphasis added). Elaborating on Wittgenstein’s concept of forms of life, Winch suggests that human societies are characterized by 462

Leadership

differing social epistemologies consisting in, ‘different and competing ways of life, each offering a different account of the intelligibility of things’ (Winch, 1958: 96). Thus we see how language, culture, knowledge and understanding are intimately bound up with one another. How do these philosophical arguments connect with approaches to understanding leadership? Well, as we pointed out in the introduction to this section, leaders and leadership processes are invariably the product of particular socio-historical conditions. The way in which we see, understand, commit to or are enrolled within acts of leadership is – according to this philosophical standpoint – mediated by the language-based perceptions and meanings we deploy to make sense of the world around us. This philosophy has been taken up and articulated by Karl Weick whose books The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick, 1979) and Sensemaking in Organizations (Weick, 1995) set out an interpretative approach to understanding social organization including, of course, the exercise of authority, power and influence. The idea of sensemaking and meaning-making are also central to Gareth Morgan’s account of sociopolitical organizational processes in his seminal book Images of Organization (Morgan, 1986). According to Morgan, power and influence are exercised in modern organizations by those who are able to create and manipulate the meanings that others attach to objects and relationships in the workplace. Of course, leaders in positions of formal authority are uniquely positioned and privileged to engage in the manipulations of the cultural resources – symbols and signifiers – through which meaning is made. Insofar as leaders seek to influence how others construe themselves in relation to a collective task – a putatively shared apprehension of ‘who we are’, ‘what we want to achieve’ and ‘why we want to achieve it’ – they might even be described as entrepreneurs of identity (Reicher and Hopkins, 2001). Language also plays a key role is the poststructural philosophy of the French historian and social theorist Michel Foucault. There are strong family resemblances between Wittgenstein’s account of the constitutive nature of language, Austin’s point about the performativity of language and Foucault’s exploration of the part played by discourse in the production of social order. For Foucault, however discourse cannot be reduced to mere language-use or speech acts; rather its effects are potentially far more malign and far-reaching as it spills over almost imperceptibly into the construction of regimes that are typically characterized by inequity, injustice and discrimination. The social world is made up of multiply intersecting discourses, each of which mediate humans in differing ways and bring about differing effects. Foucault contends that power embodied in, and enacted through, discourse is productive of particular objects, subjectivities and relations (Foucault, 1980). Language is never neutral or merely descriptive. In Foucault’s terms, discourses, ‘systematically form the object of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972: 49), and, ‘power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1977: 194). This philosophy has clear implications for understanding how filaments of power surreptitiously fabricate differing social orders, according to time and geography, and in so doing produce and position ‘leaders’, ‘followers’, their relationships and objects of attention. In the field of leadership studies, Gail Fairhurst (2007, 2011a, 2011b) is a leading exponent of Foucault-inspired discourse analysis. What does the future hold for philosophies of leadership and leadership philosophies? Programmes of research relating to critical leadership studies aimed at exposing and ‘denaturalizing’ the ideological and political economic inequalities of existing social orders are likely to continue to garner considerable interest. Such critique derives variously from feminist, postcolonial, psycho-social and ecological perspectives. Taken as a whole, these positions challenge a perceived bias in mainstream leadership studies towards ‘goodness’. There is, for example, a small but growing critical interest in the toxicity and potential evil of leaders and leadership (Lemmergaard and Muhr 2014). Ecological ethics poses potentially fruitful challenges 463

Jonathan Gosling and Peter Case

for leadership studies, as a means to explore ways of knowing and acting that acknowledge the human in the context of more extensive life forces. Process-informed studies of relationality and complexity are also likely to develop further, possibly in combination with insights from non-essentialist philosophical traditions such as Vedanta and Buddhism. This brings us to perhaps the most significant future development: languages and etymologies of leadership philosophy (differing civilizations – as already suggested – and differing national languages) and how these relate to diverse social epistemologies and ontologies. In other words, while we have addressed leadership mainly from the perspective of the Graeco-Judeic heritage in which the concept has emerged, the underlying issues of agency, influence, authority (etc.) may be discussed in other languages and societies in different ways, opening the possibility of meanings that cannot be foreseen in English. Philosophical starting points and trajectories are different too, so we expect much from emerging comparative philosophies of leadership.

Key texts for further reading Ciulla, J. (ed.) (1998). Ethics, The Heart of Leadership. London: Praeger. Curry, P. (2006). Ecological Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grint, K. (2005). Leadership: limits and possibilities. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell. MacGregor Burns, J. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row. Nussbaum, M. (1986). Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1987). The Republic (trans. H.D.P. Lee). London: Penguin Classics. Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (edited by A.R. Henderson and T. Parsons). London: Hodge & Co.

References Augustine (1974). The Essential Augustine (2nd edn) (edited by V.J. Bourke). Indianapolis: Hackett. Austin, J.L. (1976[1955]). How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fairhurst, G.T. (2007). Discursive Leadership: in conversation with leadership psychology. London: Sage. Fairhurst, G.T. (2011a). The Power of Framing: creating the language of leadership. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass. Fairhurst, G.T. (2011b). Discursive leadership, in Bryman, A., Collinson, D., Grint, K., Jackson, B. and Uhl-Bien, M. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Leadership. London: Sage, pp. 493–505. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1986). The Care of the Self: the history of sexuality Vol.3. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gallie, W.B. (1955/56). Essentially contested concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56: 167–98. Grint, K. (2001). The Arts of Leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grint, K. (2005). Leadership: Limits and Possibilities. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault (trans. M. Chase). Oxford: Blackwell. Hadot, P. (2002). What is Ancient Philosophy? (trans. M. Chase). London: Harvard University Press. Hosking, D.M. (2007). Not leaders, not followers: a post-modern discourse of leadership processes, in Shamir, B., Pillai, R., Bligh, M. and Uhl-Bien, M. (eds), Follower-Centered Perspectives on Leadership: a tribute to the memory of James R. Meindl. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, pp. 243–63. Hosking, D.M. and Shamir, B. (2012). A dialogue on imitative and relational discourses, in Uhl Bien, M. and Ospina, S. (eds), Advancing Relational Leadership Theory: a conversation among perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, pp. 463–76. Jullien, F. (2004). A Treatise on Efficacy. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. 464

Leadership

Lao-Tzu (1999). Tao Tē Ching (trans. S. Mitchell). London: Frances Lincoln. Lemmergaard, J. and Muhr, S.L. (2014). Critical Perspectives on Leadership: emotion, toxicity, and dysfunction. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Locke, John (1690). Second Treatise of Government (10th edn). Retrieved on 25 September 2014 from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977[1848]). Manifesto of the Communist Party (trans. S. Moore). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. London: Sage. Nehamas, A. (2000). The Art of Living: Socratic reflections from Plato to Foucault. London: University of California Press. Reicher, S. and Hopkins, N. (2001). Self and Nation. London: Sage. Weick, K.E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing (2nd edn). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage. Winch, P. (1958). The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1978[1953]). Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe). Oxford: Blackwell.

465

42 Management and its others Campbell Jones

Management is perpetually in a precarious relation to its others in which it seeks to command others which always threaten to be and do otherwise. The relation of management to its others is not optional nor is it the preserve of a few select managers who have chosen the pathway of morality and goodness. Management is necessarily and logically a relation to the other, a relation of need and dependence that can be surprising when that dependence is forgotten or denied. When the initiative and capacities of the other are forgotten, this is the moment when the other can appear with the most radically disruptive consequences. That management is management of the other is no hidden mystery. It is something well known in daily practice. The problem is that what is known is not always thought. Management seeks to turn the powers of its others in its direction. At the same time the others that management necessarily encounters have in their nature something unruly, uncontrollable, unmanageable. Moreover, the other is constantly changing and over time its powers can increase dramatically. In the process of seeking to benefit from the other, management faces the multiplication of the powers of the other. The fact of the elusive powers of the other and their multiplication lie at the heart of numerous practical and political puzzles that face both management and the others of management. Put simply, management takes itself as, and is widely taken to be, the locus of initiative and power, but management is always decentred. Far from being the always victorious initiator of an always successful dominion, management is a response to the initiative and capacities of the other. The other is not an abstract concept that lives in the books of Emmanuel Levinas (1969) or the manifold esoterica of university libraries. The other is the very nature of reality itself. The other is all that is on the outside of intending consciousness. It should be noted, however, that even the interior of consciousness is itself the outside brought within. To simplify to the extreme, and in order to structure the account that will follow, one could say that the other refers to, at least: first, the reality of immediate material things; second, other people; and third, other possibilities. Management is a relation to the other in each of these senses. First, the other of management is the material things that it acts on at a distance. Second, the other of management is the people through which it seeks to actualize and increase capacities. Third, the other of management is the possibilities for the alternative combination of things and people that arise at any particular moment within any particular world. The objective of this short text is to demonstrate some of the ways in which management is other than what it seems. Specifically, I seek to stress how the powers and the capacities of 466

Management

management are outside management, in the other, and it is these others of management that are the starting point of any management. Further, this reality is already known but not thought. That management needs its others is acknowledged, more than ever today, but the consequence of this for both management and its others, remain to be thought. Management is an effort to direct and command, to be sure, but the relation to its others is constantly interrupted at every moment, precisely for the reason of this dependence on its others. This can be seen whether those others are things, people or possibilities.

Things The word ‘management’ derives from the action of the hand, from the Latin manus via the Italian maneggio. In this case, linguistic origin and material reality work together in the figures of reaching, grasping and handling of material things. Management is a reaching out for other things, inspecting them and their actual and potential capacities, sifting through, discarding some and finding use in others, and putting the most valuable to best use. As the most obvious features of management are informational, cognitive and discursive, the practice of management acts at a certain remove from the immediate handling of material things. The activity of management involves communication, travel and endless conversation, and this can occlude the relation of management to material things. It is often thought, then, that direct action on matter is ‘manual’ labour in the sense of action of hands on matter, while management is more ‘mental’ or ‘intellectual’ in its remove from matter. This remove from the immediacy of acting on matter can greatly enhance human capacities. Faced with the dull obduracy of matter which confronts all human efforts to turn matter to our purposes, human intelligence can overcome that resistance by stepping back from it in order to return to it in another way, from another angle. This repose and return can remarkably increase the powers of human hands, which does not mean that action is now disconnected from matter but quite the contrary is strengthened, and in doing so the command over matter is greatly increased. Both functions can be achieved in one body, or alternatively the task of conception can be taken up by a separate agency from the one that acts on matter. When conception and execution are enacted by separate social groups then there is meaningfully a distinct group that can be known as management. Management acts on material nature but does so by acting on matter through the actions of others. With management the matter at hand is the capacity to command the capacities of other things and other people. Management is only ‘immaterial’ when it is ineffective. It is materially involved in the materials acted on, and indeed, the material consequences of management are massive in their significance and their capacities. Today, the capacities for action on matter have never been greater, as is clear in the fact that the very existence of various forms of matter and their radical transformation are not a fantasy but the very fact and reality of management. None of this is abstract but is rather the outcome of and the demonstration of the power of abstraction and the concerted recombination of productive capacities. We act on things that precede influence and even existence, and such things present themselves as the ‘gifts of nature’. Thus fish and other animals, forests and plants, water and land embody the work of time, processes by which others than humans have created things that come to, or can be adapted to, human purposes. At any moment in time these processes in nature present sedimentations that human endeavour can seize upon and make use of. Human management can certainly seize control of nature in ever new ways, but is at the same time always caught in a relation of dependence on the capacities and demands of nature. If nature cannot resist human management, it can perform the ultimate act of sabotage and just die, in 467

Campbell Jones

part or in whole. In this way, the extinction of a species or material depletion of a region implies a kind of refusal, an unheard demand to not be grasped in a particular way. Nature is radically multiple and this multiplicity produces profoundly variable outcomes. This is not simply to do with the fact that the capacities of management vary greatly. Nature in all of its variety responds diversely to the efforts to turn it to new purposes. The processes by which material nature exists and subsists can fall outside the demands put on them. Of course very little of the matter encountered by human beings today is natural in the sense of not having been touched in one way or another by previous human action. The creations of nature condense time as the work of things. Similarly, very nearly all material things encountered today bear the traces of the work of other people. Thus even the most immediate material things we take in our hands are mediated through and bear the imprint of the vast previous work of others. This work of others does not announce itself and therefore often goes unheard, but the history of that work of others, which is today the direct condition of possibility of action, is the history of human effort. It is no mystery that the things encountered today are profoundly animated, bearing a ‘soul’ which often appears their own but is animated by the work of others. Management acts on and through objects in these mediations, acting at a distance on things, and creating things that then in turn act with all manner of consequences and often for centuries after their immediate useful life. The concrete history of management thus destroys any notion of the immediacy of things, and with this of immediate access to things. This in no way eliminates things but rather renders them exponentially more powerful, with all manner of ways of return. At any particular moment, then, management meets things, even if not immediately. But the handling of others refers beyond material objects and involves human subjects, and it is on these others that management rests. Management encounters subjects both immediately in the form of people and in mediated form in the objects that result from the previous work of others.

People Human society reflects the incompleteness of human bodies, which perpetually strive to extend themselves by acting with and for others and having others act for them. Society is always at least partially a matter of economy, insofar as economics in the sense of oikonomia refers to the arrangement in a household (oikos) of a combination of material things and people. Likewise, what came later to be known as ‘stewardship’ involved a particular steward being appointed to coordinate the affairs of another through the arrangement of the work of other people. This work of actually combining things and people is in turn effected by the work of others, while moreover that which can be actualized at any particular moment depends upon the previous work of others and the productive capacities that the work of others has produced. Management diverges from economics or stewardship in the allocation of the function of direction and appointment to a separate set of functionaries designated with the role of directing the work of other people. In Peter Drucker’s formulation management is, on the one hand, a distinct social group referring to bosses or ‘the management’ and, on the other hand, a distinct social function. As a social function, ‘one defines a manager as someone who directs the work of others and who, as a slogan puts it, “does his work by getting other people to do theirs”’ (Drucker, 1954: 6). This idea of directing others and getting others to do things makes clear, if it needs to be said, that management is a power relation. But what is more important here is that it also signals the recognition that management is nothing without the other, that there is no management, no need for management, indeed nothing to be managed, without the other. The crucial matter 468

Management

then becomes the question of how the capacities of management and its others are taken by the various parties to this relationship. Languages of management often present the capacities of management as awesome and incontestable. There are good reasons why the nineteenth and, in particular, the twentieth centuries have been characterized by a ‘managerial revolution’ (Burnham, 1945) and that management has been so powerfully identified as the ‘visible hand’ of capitalism (Chandler, 1977). In grand designs for total control and eradication of risk, there is certainly a monumental, if not totalitarian, desire for subjugation of the body and the will of the other. In university discourse on management, the mythical image of management with its powers to command and control is a central part of what is sold to students of management. It is a story which is bought and sold more for its charm than for any reality outside the classroom. These exaggerated powers, and the apparently mystical character of business leaders and entrepreneurs, along with the fact that it is hard to know what distinguishes them from others, are crucial in the justification of a sense of entitlement. Management would not hold the incredible air of importance it has if it did not entail a sense of both entitlement to command and moreover the purported right to take credit for the work of others. Those who live off the work of others have always known how hard it is to direct others. This is why there is such a constant complaint about what Adam Smith (1999) called ‘sauntering’ and what Frederick Taylor (1947) called ‘soldiering’. This complaint about the lack of compliance of the other makes clear that the origin of management is a response to a certain recalcitrance, refusal, resistance or ‘misbehaviour’ of the other (see Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). For management, relying as it does on the other, the initiative and capacities of the other are at once the treasure sought and the threat to be overcome. This desire of management for the other is therefore also a desire that the other not remain totally other. To bring the other into the household on the terms of the one who needs the other always involves actual or potential domestication of the otherness of the other. With this, the reduction of the other to the dominant means that the unity of interests between one and the other has always been the goal of management, whether in the immediacy of direct subjugation or in the diverse strategies that seek to secure or at least assert a harmony of interests between management and its others. The other only surprises when it is underestimated. This is a fact of the reality of the other as other, and also of the price that is put on that otherness. The intervention of the other only produces surprise when the initiative and capacities of the other were not anticipated. To the extent that the initiative and capacities of the other are disavowed, they always promise and in daily life effect the threat of return. In this symbolic game of the estimation of capacities, the threat of the other to management becomes an immediately practical matter for management. This, it should be stressed, is just as vital for those people and possibilities that are slipping through the fingers of management. For the others of management, it is management that is the other. From this other side, the practical challenge is often fight or flight, to draw out the limits of what is acceptable before outright refusal boils over. The others of management show great generosity and often a great deal of patience. When better organized, these others make clear that their philanthropy has its own limits, and then it is noted that management is nothing without its others, while its others would still persist without being managed. Management lives off the efforts of those others that sustain it. Its point of origin is in the other. The important thing is that ‘resistance’ to management does not necessarily, logically or temporally follow the action of management. Management is just as much a response to the dynamics initiated by others. This misbehaviour, of not acting as commanded, is the reality of 469

Campbell Jones

the otherness of the other in relation to management. Management, which is so often cast as the ‘agent’ of a ‘principal’ that acts through them from beyond, has an agency in its own right. And the same with other others. With management, no matter how total the vision or imagination of command over the other, this command is constantly failing. This is on the one hand logical, in the sense that the other as other always bears the threat of remaining other. On the other hand, this is also due to the nature of the objects that management encounters. Acting on the actions of others, management encounters the radical openness of those others and the added complexity that those others further act on other others. This results from the simple reality that the objects encountered by management are at one and the same time subjects.

Possibilities The history of the practice of management is therefore the history of a response to the initiative and capacities of others. This involves the expanding capacities of production which develop both inside and outside of manufacture and the factory system. Bringing workers together in vast factories created new productive powers, new social relations and social forms both in the production and the consumption of products. Equally, urbanization and its new forms of a public sphere and prospects for social intercourse themselves produced new productive capacities and new demands and relations to command. Management is a response to economic and social realities that have a life of their own and develop outside the powers of management. This is one of the reasons why recognition of ‘management’ as a social category and function comes very late in the development of capitalism, arising as a distinct function and power only in the nineteenth century and expanding through the twentieth. Because management is as much as anything a response to capacities that develop autonomously from management, in fear of that autonomy, management seeks both to lay hands on those new productive capacities and social forms and when possible to take credit for what it has found as if this were its own creation. In this process management has always been and is today more than ever charmed by the capacities of the other. If the other is disavowed then at the same time there is a celebration of the inventiveness and creativity of the other. Indeed, management is more fascinated than ever with the entire life of the other. In a way, there is nothing outside of management, as it seeks to ingest the other whole. While these capacities have always been the object of managerial vision, they have also radically proliferated in the new forms of cooperation that have developed in the workplace and the vast array of democratizations of social life that result from definite social struggle. This development of relationships and abilities in work and outside it has created expectations and demands that again further change the nature of the object that management seeks to command and with which it must negotiate. These capacities to make demands are at the same time capacities for imagination, creation and thought, which have themselves become objects of management. The twentieth century witnessed the massive expansion of technologies of managerial command. This included technologies of vision based in observation and surveillance of both visible action and assessment of the deep psychological factors thought to motivate action. It involved technologies of operations management and logistics, the selection and manipulation of ‘human resources’ and tactics of designing remuneration to maximize effort. These became embedded in information technologies and comparative analysis of performance and in those labour laws designed to support the necessity of submission to managerial command. A culture circulated the radically improbable idea of the need for constant instruction and above all the unavoidability and necessity that everything and everyone needed to be managed. 470

Management

This multiplication of the powers of management has often led to an almost fatal resignation to the dominion of management and managerial command. But with the other in view what becomes clear is that this expansion of the powers of management was a response necessitated by collective action in the workplace and legislation to protect and promote the rights of workers. This in turn is the upshot of the fact of the massive multiplication of the powers of others. The history of the last century is not simply one of the dominion of management but rather a desperate effort to retain control. This means that management is not the automatic victor in a class war but rather is one and not the only protagonist in an arms race of powers. In this process it is not only the powers of management that have been multiplied, but equally the powers of the living others on whom management relies. One measure of the multiplication of powers of the other can be found in simple measures of labour productivity, which has increased enormously over the past century. But the actual productivity of labour does not bear any immediate relation to the capacity to successfully make demands. This is ultimately a matter of political struggle. In terms of this politics of the other, what is crucial is the recognition of the capacities of those who are managed. In the practice of management today the capacities of the other are widely known, while they are generally not thought. Indeed, management is nothing other than this reaching out for the other, and these technologies of management are precisely efforts to recognize and to seize on those capacities of the other. In reaching out and grasping the other, commanding the other, there is an effort towards the internalization of the powers of the other, a denial that the other is totally or absolutely other. Management is thus captivated by the other, but when the other displays its powers, these powers are ‘miraculated’ as the powers of management (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). When the body of the manager stands over the worker, the creations of the worker are both physically and symbolically taken to stick to the body of the manager. This is an alienation that is not so much about the subjective states or the experiences of the worker, but about claims concerning where these capacities originate. Because many of the new productive capacities emerge only under conditions of the ‘real subsumption’ of workers under capitalist management, there is as has been noted an almost necessary falsity in the attribution of that increased productivity to the management of the work of others. When control over the labour process is ceded to managers of capitalist enterprise, the new productive powers of labour that develop ‘appear as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a new productive power inherent in capital’ (Marx, 1990: 451). With the extension of managerial control over labour there is not simply a multiplication of the productive powers of labour. Moreover, these productive forces and the social context of labour appear in the immediate labour process as shifted from labour to capital. Capital thereby becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing from its own womb. (Marx, 1991: 966) For management the capacities of the worker might appear as a ‘gift’ analogous to the gifts of nature that it also seizes. At the same time, however making the most of that gift is hard work, only realizable with constant fear that the work of others might be misdirected, which is to say, to be put to purposes other than those that management serves. Of course management does not only serve the purpose of expanding the existing wealth of investors in the form of capital, even if this is the principal form that management takes. In serving that particular purpose, investors always face the risk that their ‘agents’ will have agency, or worse, that their managerial 471

Campbell Jones

agents will open themselves to an agency that pushes in directions not solely focused on expanding their existing wealth. In this scene, which is also known, in short, as class struggle, management knows full well the powers of the other. This importantly signals in practice an astonishing reverence for the work of others, and an intrigued fascination at the marvel that is the productive capacities that others possess. While praising the capacities of others, the exchange process that is the wage bargain under conditions of capital accumulation at the same time involves an assertion of the incapacity of those very same others. This is perhaps not surprising if, as Jacques Rancière puts it, ‘The only song the bourgeoisie has every sung to the workers is the song of their impotence, of the impossibility for things to be different than they are or – in any case – of the workers’ inability to change them’ (Rancière, 2011: 90). But the song of the impotence of the other is not the only song that management sings, even if it might be hummed under its breath while negotiating employment contracts. Management also sings the other song that praises the bounty of nature, the riches of the earth, and the astonishing productive powers that human beings now collectively possess. And it acts with constant concern and vigilance at the risk of the movement of initiative to the other side. Whenever work is moved elsewhere management admits, perhaps perversely, great respect for the other in both the home and also the host location. At home, a respect for the powers of resistance of the other; elsewhere, respect for the productive powers of the other. International labour arbitrage, purchasing the same or similar capacities at a different price because of different local conditions demonstrates a logic of equivalence of capacities across vastly dissimilar conditions. Such labour arbitrage both feeds on the differential conditions from which labour issues and at the same time demonstrates the similarity of productive capacities across those locations. The diversity of conditions from which one contracts to labour thereby presents management an opportunity and a grave threat. As Badiou insists, alterity is simply what there is – being is multiplicity (Badiou, 2005). There is nothing abstract in this thesis, unless it is taken outside the context of the sale and command of labour in the capitalist market. Concretely, the others that are encountered are always multiple, and the capacity for command of the other always depends on the conditions of those others and further on the demands they make. This inequality of conditions of the others of management is therefore a practical challenge but at the same time the greatest gift to those who profit from management. The situation today is not, as it has never been, of a boss faced by a monolithic mass of faceless workers. The challenge of management is to secure command of productive capacities, capacities which are always moving and multiplying. Such is the reality of living labour. The history of management is a history of failed attempts at command and control, a search for ever new avenues and pathways of least resistance. The others of management raise their heads when they claim the rights of their productive powers as their own. Critical and philosophical analysis of management must not start from the assumption that the nature or the capacities of management are what they are said to be. The reality of management is a history of massive failure to achieve the things that it has claimed it might achieve. This is a reality because the location of the initiative and powers of management do not rest with management. By seeking the expansion of productive powers, management creates an other that it could never command. Philosophy does not put to management tricks or cute turns of phrase in an effort to ‘humanize’ management or to make it more enlightened. If philosophy is a lesson in what one does not know, a demonstration of the limits of what was thought to be known, then the lesson of thought for management is of the very limits of the capacities and entitlements of management. And just as thought teaches management a lesson 472

Management

in finitude, at the same time it starts to glimpse the vast potential, the capacities and powers of the other.

References Ackroyd, S. and Thompson, P. (1999). Organizational Misbehaviour. London: Sage. Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event (trans. O. Feltham). London: Continuum. Burnham, J. (1945). The Managerial Revolution. London: Pelican. Chandler, A. (1977). The Visible Hand: the managerial revolution in American Business. Harvard, MA: Belknap Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drucker, P. (1954). The Practice of Management. London: Heron. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity (trans. A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume 1 (trans. B. Fowkes). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1991). Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume 3 (trans. D. Fernbach). London: Penguin. Rancière, J. (2011). Althusser’s Lesson (trans. E. Battista). London: Continuum. Smith, A. (1999). The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III (ed. A. Skinner). London: Penguin. Taylor, F.W. (1947). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Norton.

473

43 Measurement and statistics in ‘organization science’ Philosophical, sociological and historical perspectives Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

Introduction Measurement and statistical practices are ubiquitous across many areas of organization research. For example, in 2012 the Academy of Management Journal had an average of 89 p-values1 in each article (Gigerenzer and Marewski, 2015). Given this prevalence, it is unfortunate that measurement and statistics are usually deployed in ways that ignore their social and material character, instead directing attention to abstract concepts like ‘validity’, ‘truth’, and ‘objectivity’. By focusing on such concepts, researchers remain wedded to unexamined foundational assumptions with origins in now-antiquated seventeenth century philosophy (see Shapin, 1994, 1996, 2010; Williams, 2005). It is, therefore, unsurprising that existing approaches to measurement and statistics cause problems in contemporary contexts wherein these foundations are difficult to maintain. Some problems include: (1) a habitual dismissal of other philosophical, scientific and social scientific traditions, especially when these repudiate the antiquated philosophy on which measurement and statistics are founded; (2) a lack of reflexivity that limits organization research and attempts to constrain its philosophical plurality; and (3) decontextualized, abstracted and ahistorical accounts of ‘best practices’ that produce irrelevant and uncreative research that is disconnected from organizational life and the practice of research itself. Some researchers are critical of existing approaches to measurement and statistics (e.g. Ainsworth and Hardy, 2012; Gephart, 2006; Law, 2004; Morgan, 1983; Morgan and Smircich, 1980); however, most of them are outside of the quantitative research community and are unnoticed by it. To break the cycle of reproducing typical measurement and statistical foundations, change from within the community is needed. 474

Measurement and statistics

This chapter promotes such change by articulating and then doffing the philosophical foundations common to most measurement and statistical practices. We focus on theories of representation and correspondence because these help produce the three problems described previously. Instead of replacing these foundations with others, our goal is to motivate an antifoundational approach, with a reflexive focus on the activities and practical consequences associated with measurement and statistics. We draw on literature from organization research as well as the history, philosophy and sociology of science to grapple with how quantitative research may be done differently. We seek to support quantitative research by advancing the proposition that research is a form of work. By doing the work of measurement and statistics, and taking its effects into account, abstractions like ‘validity’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ can be remade so that they enable solutions to worldly problems rather than functioning merely as community-specific conventions that often impede such solutions. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we describe the state of measurement and statistics in organization research, describing the kinds of questions they often address and summarizing the philosophical foundations that are typically invoked to justify their use. Second, we review contemporary research from the history, philosophy and sociology of science that explores measurement and statistics in a situated manner, thus laying bare how their ‘foundations’ are both untenable on their own terms and unhelpful when the goal of research is to solve contextualized problems of social and material action. Third, we endorse an anti-foundational, pragmatist philosophy of measurement and statistics that will release researchers from the shackles of naïve ‘foundations’ in a manner that retains the useful character of quantitative tools when these are put to work, solving worldly problems. Before continuing we offer a caveat. Measurement and statistics often involve the use of probability to work with uncertainty. Although the philosophy of probability has been debated for roughly 200 years, our focus is not on theories of probability (for discussions see Bandyopadhyay and Forster, 2011; Gabbay et al., 2010; Galavotti, 2005). Because theories of probability involve the theories of representation and correspondence that we describe below, and probabilities are types of statistics, our chapter treats statistics and probability as being involved in similar research work.2

Current state of the field Measurement and statistics are deployed to answer substantive questions in ways that embody the disciplinary histories of organizational researchers. For example, some researchers measure individual emotions, personality and attitudes with notions of mental or cognitive structures (psychology); others measure relations of power and influence with notions of social structure (sociology); and others measure the activities of firms and their causes with notions of utility and rationality (economics). To work with these data, statistics are used in ways that have links to disciplinary histories. To work with mental or cognitive phenomena, variants of factor analysis are used to model ‘latent variables’ or ‘constructs’ (psychology); to work with social structures, forms of network analysis are used to model relational ties among sets of people (sociology); to work with utility and rationality, probabilistic expectations are used to model the risk of choices about an uncertain future (economics). The capacity to deploy these tools in conjunction with the rise of management and organizations has led to the creation of a large academic field that wields considerable authority on what counts as legitimate organization research. Despite this field’s diversity, measurement and statistics are uniformly theorized as representing worldly states of affairs or ‘reality’. For measurement, the task is to develop and deploy tools 475

Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

that produce numerical representations of amounts or degrees of worldly phenomena. From a classic book on measurement we thus find this script: ‘When measuring some attribute of a class of objects or events, we associate numbers . . . with the objects in such a way that the properties of the attribute are faithfully represented as numerical properties’ (Krantz et al., 1971: 1). For statistics, the task is to develop and deploy tools that describe patterns in observed measurements in order to represent worldly phenomena, often with an interest in representing ‘causal effects’. From a classic paper on statistics we thus find this script: ‘in its most concrete form, the object of statistical methods is the reduction of data. A quantity of data . . . is to be replaced by relatively few quantities which shall adequately represent the whole’ (Fisher, 1922: 311), where ‘the whole’ may be observed quantities that are described (such as a set of data), or it may be unobserved quantities about which researchers infer (such as a ‘causal effect’). By purporting to function representationally, measurement and statistics involve two foundational philosophical theories that are meant to justify and guide the interpretive practice of mapping worldly phenomena onto numbers (as in Lord and Novick, 1968; Shadish et al., 2002). The first theory is a representational theory of meaning, stipulating that the meaning of measurements or statistics are the worldly phenomena to which they refer. The second theory is a theory of truth or validity wherein these emerge if measurements and statistics correspond to what it is they are meant to represent. Indeed, the point of most measurement and statistical theories is to describe how correspondence can be conceptualized and assessed, including theories of ‘construct validity’, statistical ‘model fit’, and inference with ‘hypothesis testing’. However, because such approaches rely on a theory of representations, uncertainty regarding correspondence among worldly phenomena and their quantitative representations will always exist – wordly phenomena cannot be observed ‘in themselves’ (they can only be represented). To deal with this uncertainty, probability is recruited. It quantifies the representational accuracy of measurements, including statistics – most prominently with hypothesis tests using p-values and ‘model fit’ statistics. Unfortunately, the theories of representation and correspondence that purportedly ground measurement and statistics have led to various dilemmas: (1) more rigorous methods produce less relevant research, in part because the reality that is represented by researchers is not fluently recognized or immediately lived by people in organizations (Van de Ven, 2007); (2) there exists unending and continuously shifting debate regarding ‘best practices’ for producing and assessing correspondence among representations and worldly phenomena (e.g. Cortina and Landis, 2011; Zyphur and Oswald, 2015); and (3) with the edict that research should represent a singular reality, there is apprehension to do research in new ways because these can appear to reject reality, and researchers who do so are often named ‘postmodernist’, ‘constructivist, operationalist, or instrumentalist rather than realist’, and only the latter is purported to be ‘eminently reasonable’ (as in Edwards, 2011: 382) – such a researcher often ‘assumes that alternative ontologies are the mark of, at best, unscientific thinking and, at worst, culturally retarded visions of the world’ (Al-Amoudi and O’Mahoney, Chapter 1 this volume, p. 16). These three problems illustrate how theories of representation and correspondence limit organization research in at least two ways. First, escaping representational and correspondence theories is difficult because it appears to entail a rejection of ‘reality’, even though adherence to this reality is precisely what limits reflexivity – in this case, researchers’ abilities to apply their own knowledge about people at work to their own research practices. For example, when asking psychologists, sociologists, or economists what the same statistic represents, they may reply ‘personalities’, ‘institutions’, or ‘choices’, respectively. Each answer is correct in the appropriate 476

Measurement and statistics

community even though each represents a different reality (Astley and Zammuto, 1992). Unfortunately, adjudicating among these realities is impossible with representational and correspondence theories because putting these into practice would first require agreement on the kinds of things that are being represented, an agreement which is absent and impossible to achieve across the vast diversity of organization researchers. The implication is that researchers who rely on representational and correspondence theories miss the sociomateriality of research, failing to apply to themselves their own understanding of people at work, and thereby failing to recognize that an ‘eminently reasonable’ reality is reasonable only because it fits the practices of speaking, writing, thinking and acting of a specific research community (see Chapter 2 on Epistemology, this volume). The second limitation is that by emphasizing representation and correspondence, researchers fail to attend to worldly problems and practical solutions to those problems. Instead, measurements and statistics that attempt to correspond are repeatedly produced and debated as community-specific representations. In turn, a closed loop is formed within communities of researchers as they engage in the continuous internal development, deployment, and justification of methods for producing representations and assessing correspondence (see Kuhn, 2012). Local ‘validity’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ emerge if a community agrees that representations have achieved correspondence, but these terms are always community-specific and often have little to do with contextualized practical action that can solve worldly problems. Such insularity exemplifies a problematic interest in abstracted and decontextualized forms of knowledge that organizational researchers find difficult to usefully apply (see Pearce, 2004; Smith, 2008). Indeed, the constant quest to represent a singular reality fails to grasp what may be usefully seen as the point of science: grappling with the practical consequences of different ways of knowing, thinking, speaking and acting (Cartwright, 2007). In sum, we propose that the majority of work on measurement and statistics begins a step too late, with a notion of ‘reality’ already in place but without an adequate interest in how it got there and whether or not it works to solve worldly problems. In turn, researchers are left grappling with epistemological concerns that try to achieve representation and correspondence with a reality that is as community-specific as it is under-theorized. To break free of this way of working, we now examine what is happening when measurement and statistics are done as activities, and why these seem reasonable to the members of the communities wherein they occur.

Where philosophical, sociological and historical perspectives meet There has been substantial philosophical debate about the realist foundations of representation and correspondence versus ‘constructivist, operationalist, or instrumentalist’ positions. This often smacks of foundational debate between realism and nominalism (Chang and Cartwright, 2008) – ‘a contemporary version of an ancient debate between two metaphysical pictures of the relationship between thought and the world’ (Hacking, 1999: 82). We avoid such foundations and the debates over them because our focus is on practical action and because there is reason to be wary of abstracted, decontextualized, ahistorical ‘foundations’ (see Davidson, 1973; Quine, 1951, 1969). Indeed, history shows that foundations do not exist a priori or arise de novo, nor are they ‘discovered’. Instead, foundations emerge as discourse that is associated with community-specific activities of thinking, speaking, writing and behaving (Shapin, 1994, 1996, 2010). To be clear, foundations are things that people do, not things that are candidates for an abstracted, decontextualized, ahistorical or otherwise universal ‘truth’ or ‘validity’ (Hacking, 2002). 477

Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

Doffing an interest in this kind of truth or validity, we turn instead to the practice of measurement and statistics, and the conditions that make this practice possible, including the making of foundations as a productive act, done by people at work. Sociological and historical approaches are useful here because they offer a description of the theoretical moves that give measurement and statistics their character(s), while contextualizing their emergence in social and material settings (for exemplars see Danziger, 1990; Foucault, 1970; Hacking, 2006). In turn, this has the potential to orient researchers away from having to search for or debate ‘foundations’. Instead, they can focus on addressing worldly problems in useful ways. To illustrate our point, we now summarize the emergence of measurement and statistics. First, in the seventeenth century figures like Descartes, Galileo and Locke helped dethrone the authority of the church in Western Europe by creating new ways of knowing. This was done by theorizing: (1) objects of study; (2) a self that could study and know about them; and (3) methods for doing so. This respective theorizing proceeded as follows: (1) the truth and laws of a singular biblical deity were transferred into a singular ‘nature’ that operated with ‘natural laws’ (e.g. today’s ‘causal effects’); (2) a religious soul was reformed into a seeing ‘mind’ that could observe and represent nature; and (3) because a deity had purportedly written nature in the language of mathematics, the work of research became that of proposing and testing quantitative theories and models of natural laws (Shapin, 1994, 1996, 2010; Williams, 2005). This legacy of a mind set apart from a quantitative nature helped create notions of the scientific ‘observer’ as well as foundations for measurement and statistics by theorizing a nature that could be quantitatively represented with degrees of correspondence. Second, statistics emerged in the 1800s when concepts and tools from astronomy were adopted by ‘statists’ to study the emerging federations or ‘states’, which began conducting large-scale censuses. In turn, censuses were analysed to produce novel quantitative images of social aggregates. These developments led to quantitative social science by: (1) theorizing individuals and groups as having attributes that could be quantitatively represented; (2) inventing and borrowing methods for doing so; and (3) putting all of this to work for specific interests. These respective outcomes emerged as the astronomer Quetelet used physicalist metaphors to theorize about ‘social’ and ‘mental’ ‘structures’ and ‘laws’, paving the way for the social sciences to emerge as quantitative, with statistics placed in the role of representing all of the new theoretical objects. Borrowing from Quetelet, Galton invented the ‘correlation’ to investigate physical and mental inheritance, and Yule produced a first statistical ‘causal effect’ by using a technique that was initially invented to infer the location of planets (today it is named ‘regression’). Uses of the new statistics by figures like Florence Nightingale were great successes for raising public health awareness, but Galton and other eugenicists used the correlation to argue for controlling childbearing among lower classes, and Yule argued against a kind of social welfare by purportedly showing that it increased poverty (MacKenzie, 1981; Porter, 1986). Although these developments show how the use of measurement and statistics is always a political act, by the turn of the twentieth century statistical societies and journals had helped institutionalize the notion of ‘objective’ measurement and statistics, assumed to be devoid of politics (MacKenzie, 1981; Porter, 1986). Convincing others that the use of numbers could achieve objectivity, it was not long before quantitative measurement and statistics swept the social sciences in order to give the appearance of objectivity that agreement about numbers so often brings (Daston and Galison, 2007). In sum, measurement and statistics emerged as a function of people with particular interests, including the many political acts of borrowing theories and tools from the physical sciences in order to populate experience with theoretical objects like ‘minds’, ‘societies’, ‘structures’ and ‘laws’ or ‘causal effects’ that were made in the images of the theories and tools themselves. The result is a constant, global, and misleading application and 478

Measurement and statistics

defence of representational and correspondence theories that owe their existence to a time when reality was singularized because it was the domain of a singular deity. This occurs with a quantitative way of inventing theoretical objects from the 1800s that still finds its way into representational and correspondence discourse today (e.g. by measuring ‘constructs’ or ‘distributions’). Organizational researchers should care about this history because it shows how all ‘foundations’ emerge contingently through particular people at work. In turn, as barriers between theory and method dissolve, so too do those between philosophy and science. Importantly, an unreflexive distinction between researchers and their objects of study is also deflated – both the researcher and the objects of study are coproduced during the activity of research. Understood this way, the shackles of foundations become unnecessary, and researchers using measurement and statistics can begin to work in new ways. To facilitate this new work, it is important to spell out that virtually none of the logic in measurement and statistics was designed to understand today’s organizations and worldly problems. Instead, concepts like ‘validity’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ emerged in contexts that existed before modern organizations were even possible (Daston and Galison, 2007). By focusing on such concepts, a kind of abstracted knowledge is given precedence rather than the activities of researchers and the communities in which they develop – not to mention the practical action of people attempting to address worldly problems. Therefore, instead of debating ‘foundations’, we propose that measurement and statistics should be reconceptualized without recourse to foundations. Foundations may need to be critiqued in order to forge ahead, but once this is done then foundations should be dropped, not replaced. Then, organizational researchers can squarely direct their attention to problems that matter, such as climate change, forms of inequality and human suffering. To do so, new ways of deploying measurement and statistics will be needed that work not because they allow representations that correspond, but because they do practical work when put into action in the service of addressing worldly problems. Specifically, we propose that measurement and statistics can be understood as forms of work (e.g. Shapin, 2008; Weber, 1919[2004]), which encourages reflexivity by showing how it is the doing of measurement and statistics in particular ways that promotes particular foundations, rather than foundations existing prior to or somehow apart from practice. Consequently, no foundation can be called ‘true’ outside of the activity that produces it. For example, consider that the statistics software used by researchers embodies centuries of work by those who invented its logics. This logic was created in the context of inventing theorems, analysing data, and battling over whose results would be called ‘true’ and have their theories and techniques persist, which in turn brought on specific ‘foundations’ (Howie, 2002). Thus, it is the use of statistics software that tends to facilitate work on specific foundational terms. Although different organizational researchers and communities imbue measurement and statistics with different meanings to produce different types of images of organizations, each type carries the stamp of the foundations that the practice embodies. Over time, particular types of images become normalized in specific communities, becoming as real as the practices and professional identities of the researchers that produced them (Morgan, 2006). However, this is a two-way street, since quantitative practices create types of researchers as new techniques flow through a community and expertise is generated as ‘networks that link together objects, actors, techniques, devices, and institutional and spatial arrangements’ (Eyal, 2013: 864). In turn, all of these can be studied as work, including their so-called foundations and how they produce types of researchers at work. 479

Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

A pragmatist opportunity Instead of looking for foundations, we propose that organizational researchers should appreciate the anti-foundationalist philosophy of pragmatism (see alternative ‘post-foundational perspectives’ in Chapter 1, this volume). Many pragmatists propose that organizing practical action is the point of thinking and speaking, and these are done not for representation or correspondence, but in order to create useful ways of being in the world (see Parmar et al., Chapter 13 this volume; relatedly, see Sandberg and Tsoukas, Chapter 12 this volume). Here, ‘by “the practical” one often means the distinctively concrete, the individual, particular, and effective, as opposed to the abstract, general, and inert. . . . “Pragmata” are things in their plurality’ (James, 1910[1987]: 209). Indeed, the practical ‘may be aesthetic, or moral, or political, or religious in quality – anything you please’ (Dewey, 1916: 330). The point is that a focus on practicality means rejecting abstract ‘foundations’, because ‘knowing is literally something which we do . . . analysis is ultimately physical and active . . . meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving’ (Dewey, 1916: 331–2). In turn, when researchers consider a theory, including theories of measurement and statistics, ‘[t]he highest criterion that we shall present is that [a] hypothesis shall work into the complex of forces into which we introduce it’, as is already done with quantitative hypothesis testing (Mead, 1899: 369). However, when theories do work, the pragmatist does not explain this with notions of representation or correspondence. Instead, a pragmatist ‘drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope’ (Rorty, 1982: xvii). By eliminating the reference to a priori ‘foundations’ for measurement and statistical practices, a pragmatist approach can tackle problems on whatever terms may be considered most useful for a particular problem in a particular setting. In turn, this puts an emphasis on situating research and its findings, which can assist in the relevance of organization research by encouraging a problem-focused style of work (see also du Gay and Vikkelsø, 2013). For example, instead of having to gather large samples to avoid statistical errors in inference, researchers would be better off trying to guard against actions that have unhelpful consequences. Good guessing about useful action might require large samples, but for rare events this is impossible and such events can be tackled with small samples even if this contravenes usual notions of ‘validity’ or ‘statistical power’. In the absence of foundationalist demands, contextualized empirical studies of which measurement and statistical tools tend to work best in different situations can be conducted in order to help researchers use tools that work for specific problems. Such an empirical focus on empirical methods may not only increase relevance, it may also help researchers get away from unhelpful abstractions about ‘foundations’ in order to focus on what measurement and statistical tools work for specific practical ends.

Conclusion In this chapter we discuss the importance of doffing representational and correspondence foundations for measurement and statistics, as well as foundations more generally. We proposed that sociological and historical approaches to understanding foundations can usefully re-orient researchers. Instead of foundations, we endorse a pragmatist approach to research, focusing on practical means and ends. We hope that future work is more critical in its evaluation of the measurement and statistical practices in the communities that deploy them. Only through such analysis will quantitative researchers be able to fulfil their potential to address and solve worldly problems in practical ways. 480

Measurement and statistics

Notes 1 2

A p-value is the most common way of working with probability for inferences with quantitative data, and so its prevalence gives a good picture of the reliance on measurement and statistics. For a recent and exemplary critique of theories of probability, we recommend Ayache (2014).

References (key texts in bold) Ainsworth, S. and Hardy, C. (2012). Subjects of inquiry: statistics, stories, and the production of knowledge. Organization Studies, 33: 1693–714. Astley, W.G. and Zammuto, R.F. (1992). Organization science, managers, and language games. Organization Science, 3: 443–60. Ayache, E. (2014). The end of probability, in Pitici, M. (ed.), The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 213–24. Bandyopadhyay, P.S. and Forster, M.R. (eds) (2011). Philosophy of Statistics. Oxford: Elsevier. Cartwright, N. (2007). Hunting causes and using them: approaches in philosophy and economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chang, H. and Cartwright, N. (2008). Measurement, in Psillos, S. and Curd, M. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science. New York: Routledge, pp. 367–75. Cortina, J.M. and Landis, R.S. (2011). The earth is not round (p = .00). Organizational Research Methods, 14: 332–49. Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject: historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daston, L. and Galison. P. (2007). Objectivity. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Davidson, D. (1973). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47: 5–20. Dewey, J. (1916). Essays in Experimental Logic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. du Gay, P. and Vikkelsø, S. (2013). Exploitation, exploration and exaltation: notes on a metaphysical (re)turn to ‘one best way of organizing’. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 37: 249–79. Edwards, J.R. (2011). The fallacy of formative measurement. Organizational Research Methods, 14: 370–88. Eyal, G. (2013). For a sociology of expertise: the social origins of the autism epidemic. American Journal of Sociology, 118: 863–907. Fisher, R.A. (1922). On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 222: 309–68. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Random House. Gabbay, D.M., Hartmann, S. and Woods, J. (eds) (2010). Handbook of the History of Logic Volume 10: inductive logic. Oxford: Elsevier. Galavotti, M.C. (2005). A Philosophical Introduction to Probability. Palo Alto: CSLI Publications. Gephart, R.P. (2006). Ethnostatistics and organizational research methodologies: an introduction. Organizational Research Methods, 9: 417–31. Gigerenzer G. and Marewski J.N. (2015). Surrogate science: the idol of a universal method for inference. Journal of Management, 41: 421–40. Hacking, I. (1999). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hacking, I. (2006). The Emergence of Probability: a philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howie, D. (2002). Interpreting Probability: controversies and developments in the early twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, W. (1910[1987]). The meaning of truth, in Kuklick, B. (ed.), William James: Writings 1902–1910. Chicago, IL: Harvard University Press, pp. 821–978. Krantz, D.H., Luce, R.D., Suppes, P. and Tversky, A. (1971). Foundations of Measurement Volume 1: additive and polynomial representations. San Diego: Academic Press. Kuhn, T. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th edn). Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Law, J. (2004). After Method: mess in social science research. New York: Rutledge. Lord, F.M. and Novick, M.R. (1968). Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores. Reading: Addison-Welsley. MacKenzie, D.A. (1981). Statistics in Britain: 1865–1930: the social construction of knowledge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 481

Michael J. Zyphur, Dean C. Pierides and Jon Roffe

Mead, G.H. (1899). The working hypothesis in social reform. American Journal of Sociology, 5: 369–71. Morgan, G. (1983). Beyond Method: strategies for social research. Beverly Hills: Sage. Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Morgan, G. and Smircich, L. (1980). The case for qualitative research. Academy of Management Review, 5: 491–500. Pearce, J.L. (2004). AOM Presidential address, 2003: what do we know and how do we really know it? Academy of Management Review, 29: 175–9. Porter, T.M. (1986). The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quine, V.W.O. (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60: 20–43. Quine, V.W.O. (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shadish, W.R., Cook, T.D. and Campbell, D.T. (2002). Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Shapin, S. (1994). A Social History of Truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S. (1996). The Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S. (2008). The Scientific Life: A moral history of a late modern vocation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S. (2010). Never Pure: historical studies of science as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, K.G. (2008). AOM presidential address, 2007: fighting the orthodoxy: learning to be pragmatic. Academy of Management Review, 33: 304–8. Van de Ven, A.H. (2007). Engaged Scholarship: a guide for organizational and social research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1919[2004]). The Vocation Lectures: science as a vocation, politics as a vocation (trans. R. Livingstone). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers. Williams, B. (2005). Descartes: the project of pure inquiry. New York: Routledge. Zyphur, M.J. and Oswald, F.L. (2015). Bayesian estimation and inference: a user’s guide. Journal of Management, 41: 387–9.

482

44 Needs and organizations The case for the philosophical turn Cristina Neesham

Preamble The concept of ‘needs’ is foundational to any philosophy of human nature, rationality and human action. Beyond philosophy, many other disciplines such as psychology, economics, sociology, political science, social policy, ecology and sustainability, have engaged in ample research programs to address needs. Organization research makes no exception: its long history of interest in needs requires a separate monograph. At work, just as anywhere else in life, needs are omnipresent – yet in theorizing about needs no task has been more difficult than defining them. To complicate things further, the term ‘needs’ carries a heavy common use baggage, which tends to cloud rather than assist our understanding. In everyday English, for instance, we use ‘need’ in ambiguous ways, in which the idea of lacking something necessary, useful or desirable combines with that of a motivating factor eliciting action to compensate for what is lacking. However, this amorphous list of vague (sometimes conflicting) interpretations does not capture the distinctive moral and political strength of claims associated with the concept of ‘needs’ as used in philosophy and most other fields of inquiry. Here, ‘needs’ claims catalyse efforts to create social institutions whose explicit raison d’être is to satisfy them. Such institutions are symptoms of our higher regard for social orders in which human dignity, freedom and meaningful life are protected and nurtured. Based on this humanist agenda, it seems reasonable to expect that the study of organization should focus on the creation of more effective organizations, according to these criteria, as a matter of overriding concern. Yet, as suggested in this chapter, the history of ‘needs’ research in this field is far from consistent with a humanist agenda. Driven by a philosophically questionable connection with motivation, in organization research the concept of ‘needs’ has been vaguely and ambiguously employed to serve different (and sometimes conflicting) interests. In the competition for legitimacy between the needs of employees and the ‘needs’ of the organization, instrumental managerialism, marking the priority of the latter over the former, has triumphed. By encouraging a thorough exploration of the nature of needs, of their social construction and its ideological effects, philosophy can restore a primary interest in the potential of organizations to meet human needs. The purpose of this chapter is not to fully recount how needs 483

Cristina Neesham

have been conceptualized and theorized in either organization research or philosophy but to highlight the less explored contributions that philosophy can make to challenging organizational instrumentalism and to reviving the humanist agenda in the study of needs in organizations. This chapter begins by presenting a selection of key philosophical perspectives on needs, and then identifies some entrenched assumptions in the study of needs in organizations which, I argue, should be challenged. I then suggest some ways in which philosophy can be applied within organization research to unsettle these assumptions and forge new directions of thinking on this topic. Comments on further readings are also included.

Needs in philosophy A considerable amount of philosophical thought has been channelled into defining the concept of ‘needs’. When we appeal to needs as representing what is necessary, we tend to interpret this necessity in one of two very different ways. The first refers to what is needed relative to a pre-stated goal, of any kind; the second is about needs for avoiding serious harm (Thomson, 2005) or, more broadly, for living a worthwhile life (Flew, 1977). Engaging needs as instruments of goals that may lie outside the horizon of reflection is a dangerous prospect: surely, the Nazi regime needed many large gas chambers and sophisticated management systems in place in order to successfully carry out its social policies. It is, therefore, the second meaning of needs that is more useful, as it substantiates moral and political claims that can be generalized and, at the same time, provides a secure conceptual connection with humanist purposes, thus keeping the normative debate in sight. But, as the discussion of needs in organizations will show, awareness of both meanings is important in understanding the propensity of our arguments to oscillate uncritically and therefore allow instrumentalism to overtake humanist projects. Beyond safeguarding against the threat of instrumentalism, our interpretation of the source and nature of needs requires further investigation for other reasons as well. It is important to consider, for example, whether needs are objective, i.e. derived from given facts of nature, or whether they are (inter)subjectively determined through a collaborative creation of the meaning of ‘what is necessary’, within a certain understanding of the human condition and of its essence that is upheld in an individual’s conscience and/or shared within a community. In this context, it does not help at all that needs have often been confused with wants, desires, drives, motives and interests. Unlike wants and desires, for instance, needs are considered to have some empirical basis outside the wishes of the experiencing subject (Bay, 1968; Marcuse, 1964). They point to what is essential to living a worthwhile life, independently of what we may wish for at a particular point in time: thus, we may want things we do not need (or even things that cause us harm), and we may not want things we do need (Minogue, 1963). Wants, as signals routinely expressed in economic exchanges, gratify our sense of having, which is not essential to our whole-of-life purposes. By contrast, needs refer to satisfying our sense of being and doing, which are essential in this way: nutriments for survival and labour as self-creation are such examples (Marx, 1964). This distinction is important in legitimizing ways in which needs can be said to be ‘objective’. Furthermore, unlike desires, as conscious psychological states of wanting which can be insatiable, and unlike drives, their unconscious and much less controllable counterpart (Lacan, 1977), needs are finite, in that they are satisfied as soon as harm is avoided, and inescapable, in that they lead to harm when undiscovered and unsatisfied. In addition, underneath Maslow’s (1954) axiomatic connection between needs and motivation lies another crucial conceptual distinction: while motives are emotionally and/or intellectually experienced reasons to act (Hume, 1738[1978]), needs may indicate the imperative of harm avoidance independently of the subject’s experiences 484

Needs

(Doyal and Gough, 1991; Thomson, 2005) – which opens the possibility that others may understand our needs better than ourselves, as well as the possibility that we may be impaired, by various internal and external factors, in our ability to understand our own needs. But perhaps the most important and difficult distinction is between needs and interests. It has been said that needs respond to one’s core interests (Thomson, 2005). We define our interests precisely in relation to what is good for our purposes, and core interests in terms of what is good for furthering our whole-of-life projects (Flew, 1977). However, when defined by the imperative to avoid harm, needs are understood as a special kind of interests, leading to powerful moral and political claims (Minogue, 1963). Needs connect with rights much more strongly than interests (Brock, 2005), especially when both needs and rights are understood in universal terms, e.g. basic physiological needs such as food, water and shelter (Maslow, 1954); and basic psychological needs such as affiliation, achievement and power (McClelland, 1975) or autonomy, freedom and dignity (Ciulla, 2000). Beside the humanist emphasis on an intrinsic relationship between needs, avoidance of harm and achievement of a worthwhile life, three philosophical themes are of particular interest as potential contributions to the study of needs in organizations: the objective versus subjective nature of needs; the existence or non-existence of a privileged locus of knowledge from which needs can be understood and evaluated (and, within this, the role of the experiencing subject); and, the subject’s moral tension between agency and dependence. The last two themes, in particular, have a political dimension of central importance for organization research. On whether needs are objective or subjectively experienced, the debate has often been fuelled by an unproductive dichotomy. While, at one end of the spectrum, nutrition can be regarded as an objectively necessary condition for physical survival – at the other end, needs for belonging and companionship, for instance, make little sense outside the evaluation of the experiencing subject. Both extremes are equally essential for living a worthwhile life, and there are also essential hybrids in between (e.g. security). Sen (1999) transcends this dichotomy by focusing on the process of evaluating needs. In this context, he defines needs as things that we have ‘good reason to value’ (Sen, 1999: 11) and develops a perspective on needs in which empirical evidence and value judgement stand in a dialectical relationship. However, making sense of a needs evaluation process rests not only on assumptions about the nature of the needs in question but also about the knowledge credentials of the evaluator. This raises the issue of who (if anyone in particular) is best placed to understand one’s needs and therefore undertake an authoritative evaluation – whether it is experts (drawing their referent authority from a variety of sources), politicians, policy makers, philosophers, the public, communities or individuals as experiencing subjects. For Marx and Engels (1845[1970]), needs are socially constructed. In a strong sense, they are historically determined by the social order and its class structure. Consequently, just as needs are inescapable, so is the political dimension of needs claims. According to Habermas (1987), the flourishing of the human life-world should be the objective of a thorough analysis of political processes. It is only through communicative action that power differences are made explicit and an ethic of autonomous human fulfilment can have a chance. By democratizing the ways in which we construct and communicate meaning we are more likely to respond to our genuine needs and escape institutionalized alienation and oppression. But, while progressive in its political awareness, this perspective still assumes a sovereign subject, able to confidently assert their agency and have full control of their life and its meaning(s). In emphasizing the unconscious dimension of needs, Lacan (1966) questions this assumption, pointing to internal barriers to self-understanding. 485

Cristina Neesham

To this, postmodern philosophy adds two relevant discussions of external barriers and their internalization. As power structures and relations shape the very constitution of knowledge (Foucault, 1975[1995]), our ability to independently know and understand our own needs is threatened. In fact, there is doubt as to whether individuals can even possess this ability in a consumer society, which uses discourse to constantly induce in individuals symbolic needs for social recognition and affirmation (Baudrillard, 1970[1988]). Language, which is perhaps the most intimate conduit for our thoughts, is also a received body of signs and meanings structured by dominant ideologies. This suggests the absence of an Archimedean point from which the individual can autonomously experience their needs. Baudrillard’s conclusion, however, does not erode the individual’s political claim to sovereignty. On the contrary, the tension between the imperative of protecting this sovereignty (Habermas, 1971, 1987) and acknowledging the inescapable dependence entailed by needs claims (Lacan, 1966; Thomson, 2005) now takes a different turn. While in mainstream liberal political thought (e.g. Hayek, 1960) assumptions of full agency become a barrier to interest in needs, as the associated dependence is considered to be a source of paternalism and humiliation (Flew, 1977), in postmodern thought awareness of the necessity to live with contingency (Heller and Feher, 1989) gives new strength to the experiencing subject’s voice in expressing needs as moral and political claims.

Needs in organizations Traditionally informed by industrial psychology research, organization studies of needs rely on theories that assume a necessary link between needs and motivation (e.g. Maslow,1954; McClelland, 1975). The managerial project, therefore, involves using needs as a predictor of human behaviour, in order to recommend best ways to harness employee motivation to benefit the organization and its goals. In the aftermath of the human relations movement initiated by Mayo (1933), most psychological studies of human needs in organizations maintained interest in human needs only insofar as it was compatible with other organizational interests. One step further, it was human needs that were being used to satisfy organizations, rather than organizations being engaged to meet human needs. Morgan (1997) recounts how the concept of ‘needs’ was incorporated by some systems theories within a metaphor of the organization as organism. This had the effect of humanizing the organization at the expense of de-humanizing the people who participated in it. As suggested by Grey (2013) and Watson (2013), later theories (e.g. Burns and Stalker, 1961; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967) identified factors other than needs (e.g. organization culture) as drivers for individual motivation. These findings, combined with the conceptual subordination of needs to motivation, paved the way for a replacement of needs studies with corporate culture research. Significantly, overemphasis of the needs–motivation nexus has obscured the relationship between needs and harm, which is central to a humanist perspective. More successful in retaining a humanist focus on harm avoidance has been the adoption of concepts from development and welfare economics, in particular Sen’s (1985) capability approach, on organizational justice and bottom-of-the-pyramid business strategy research – but such studies are far less widespread. Beyond the uncritical instrumentalism that dominates needs research in organization studies, the theoretical frameworks employed in support of this research tend to entrench a set of philosophical assumptions that should, instead, be radically challenged. One such assumption emphasizes the objective aspects of needs over the subjective ones, with the effect of weakening the authority of the experiencing subject in the evaluation and interpretation of their needs. 486

Needs

This also legitimates a second assumption, namely the existence of a privileged locus of knowledge about needs, which may be found in the manager, the organization or the positivist empirical researcher who operates with the best instruments to apprehend such objective reality. Finally, this privileged position is assumed to be impartial and, as a consequence, glosses over political implications of the research process itself, despite the evident regularity of recommendations provided in the service of managerialist projects of the organization. The ideological effect of the organization developing discourses that promote full individual agency is, paradoxically, an increase of the individual’s dependence on the organization. For example, ‘soft’ people management dominated by corporate culturalism only allows for individual discretion under the patronage of organizational goals. This leads to a silencing of the critical capacities of the employee to appraise and change their work situation independently of the organization’s imperatives (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). A radical challenge of the above assumptions can only occur through a systematic engagement with philosophical perspectives that revisit the role of subjectivity in needs evaluation, question the existence of privileged knowledge about needs, and engage with the moral tension between agency and dependence. Some attempts at challenging these assumptions have indeed been made. Of Marxist inspiration, labour process theory (Willmott, 1997; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2000) has occasionally been combined with welfare philosophy to theorize on meaningful work (Michaelson et al., 2014). Moreover, in undertaking a compelling critique of liberal political thought, Yeoman (2014) proposes a reconceptualization of meaningful work as a fundamental human need. Foucauldian analysis of power–knowledge relations has also been applied to rethink the psychological and social needs of workers in team work (Sewell, 2005). Other attempts, while providing pertinent critique, fall short of engaging in a comprehensive study of needs. For example, in response to Kuchinke’s (2010) call for placing human development – and, with it, Sen’s capability approach – at the centre of human resource management practices, Fenwick (2011) observes that, even under explicit humanist priorities, a perspective that privileges objective over subjective dimensions of needs and overlooks the political factors at play in defining needs remains just as vulnerable to instrumentalism as traditional human resource management theories. Townley (1995) uses Foucault’s (1988) distinction between self-awareness and self-formation as technologies of the self to deconstruct ‘management discourse as the interpretation and satisfaction of needs’ (Townley, 1995: 273). Adding to the critique of corporate culturalism, Hancock (1999) revisits psychological theories of human needs and their link with motivation, using Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality to question our ability to understand our own needs independently of dominant ideologies of consumption. As objects dominate the subject, the only way to escape is to become indifferent to the world of objects and consumption and to avoid emotional investment in sign value and sign exchange. In sum, the above critiques suggest that there is much more to be said about needs, at a fundamental level, in the study of organizations, in ways that challenge the traditional paradigm.

The future of needs Philosophy can inform alternative perspectives on needs, by supporting the development of a humanist sensitivity to the vulnerable ‘self’ – a self who may not be autonomous, and not in full control and knowledge of their own needs, but nevertheless retains a political entitlement to sovereignty. In this context, the role of the organization is not to occupy the position of 487

Cristina Neesham

expert but to acknowledge and assume responsibility for the subtler, ideological ways in which it induces human suffering, through the co-optation and colonization of discourses about needs. While systemically edited out of the organization’s discourse, this suffering is real. This discourse of individual needs and agency, voiced by the organization within the framework of its goals, is inevitably reductionist, leaving the complex individual longing, speechless, for a space that has the power to dissent from the priorities of organizing. The individual thus suffers from an inability to pursue unpredictable experiences as a free and complex human being, as well as from an inability to articulate this suffering within the boundaries of the established discourse. This kind of suffering is an indicator of what the organization, as a social system, leaves unattended to, and unsatisfied, in the people who spend their lives in it. In this context, applying a revised version of the Marxian concept of radical needs, to develop an alternative perspective on organizations and organizing as sources of social change, may prove useful. According to Heller’s (1974) synthesis of the Marxian theory of need, radical needs are needs that, necessarily, cannot be met by any needs-satisfying systems provided within the institutions of capitalism. The satisfaction of radical needs thus requires a revolutionary transformation of the economic system, e.g. from an economy of material production to one of leisure time, based on a different approach to surplus value distribution (Marx 1862[1969]). With the benefit of directly experiencing socialism as dictatorship over needs (Heller et al., 1983), philosophers of the Budapest School, Heller in particular, have filtered the concept of radical needs through postmodern reflection, thus usefully replacing Marxian deterministic premises with a view of the individual’s existential and political condition as contingent (Heller and Feher, 1989). Leaving aside the all-encompassing, macro level ambitions of Marx’s grand narrative, the idea of transforming social systems to satisfy (rather than perpetuate) radical needs may be productive when adapted to the level of needs-satisfying systems in organizations. In the interpretation proposed here, radical needs, which by necessity cannot be satisfied by the existing modes of organizing, contain the seed of change. Exploration of radical needs-satisfying systems would thus support innovative humanist projects at organizational level, leading to alternative modes of organizing. Research of radical needs-responsive organizing may provide a fertile, constructive direction following philosophical critiques of traditional needs studies. In response to the issue of privileging objective over subjective dimensions of needs, the concept of radical needs focuses, from its Marxian inception, on abundant examples of harm derived not from purely objective sources but anchored in the social experiences of the subject. The human needs associated with these experiences are both real and fundamental to living a worthwhile, fully human life (Marx, 1964). Furthermore, on the existence of a privileged locus of knowledge about needs, Heller rejects this implication of Marxian needs theory and suggests, instead, a postmodern ethic that enables the individual to live and develop their humanness in a world where there are no absolute points of reference, where our only perennial epistemic and political condition is contingency (Heller and Feher, 1989). Despite the loss of ultimate authority on needs evaluation, distinguishing between needs and wants is still, logically (Thomson, 2005) and ethically (Heller and Feher, 1989), possible. On the moral tension between agency and dependence, focus on radical needs should combine Lacan’s (1966) perspective on (un)conscious needs as defined by appeal to another for their satisfaction with Heller and Feher’s (1989) investment in the agency of the subject as the liberating (albeit daunting) effect of assuming a contingent world. By developing practices of radical needs-responsive organizing as grassroots movements, by taking ownership of these systemic change processes, people in organizations may be better able to acknowledge their dependence on one another through empowerment rather than humiliation. 488

Needs

These alternative modes of organizing may actively respond to radical needs by providing opportunities for developing talents, enduring relationships and rich experiences as catalysts of new life projects. Therefore, an organization should: allow space for existential self-critique and, with it, for critiques of its goals, systems and structures; renounce assumptions of interests alignment and accept a plurality of terms on which different individuals choose to engage with it; and recognize the right of any individual, irrespective of their status and position, to open new spaces for self-determination, of themselves and others – by nurturing reciprocal (rather than hierarchical) relations. Whether the postmodern organization, imagined as a work environment adjusted for the open-ended self-realization of complex human beings, is at all possible is a matter for validation by both theory and practice. Whatever the answer, philosophical reflection remains indispensable to challenging the dominant paradigm and forging new ways forward in the humanist study of needs in organization research.

Suggestions for further reading From an organization research perspective, Grey (2013) provides an insightful account of the place of needs theories in the history of organization studies, between scientific management and corporate culturalism. From a philosophical perspective, Doyal and Gough’s (1991) theory of universal and objective needs is prefaced by a set of counterarguments to several schools that criticize the basic needs concept, thus providing a useful sketch of the debate about the objective versus subjective dimensions of needs. More philosophical debates around needs are summarized in Reader (2005). For further theory building, Heller and Feher’s The Postmodern Political Condition (1989) is recommended, as it offers a refreshing interpretation of the human condition in today’s world, theorizes on needs satisfaction in a post-consumer society and develops a political agenda on this basis. For the time-pressed reader searching for a thematic synthesis of needs theories across domains and paradigms, Dean (2010) offers some useful taxonomies.

References (key texts in bold) Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (1992). On the idea of emancipation in management and organization studies. Academy of Management Review, 17(3): 432–64. Baudrillard, J. (1970[1988]). Selected Writings (ed. M. Poster). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bay, C. (1968). Needs, wants and political legitimacy. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1(3): 241–60. Brock, G. (2005). Needs and global justice, in Reader, S. (ed.), The Philosophy of Need. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 51–72. Burns, T. and Stalker, G.M. (1961). The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock Publications. Ciulla, J.B. (2000). The Working Life: the promise and betrayal of modern work. New York: Random House. Dean, H. (2010). Understanding Human Need: social issues, policy and practice. Bristol: Policy Press. Doyal, L. and Gough, I. (1991). A Theory of Human Need. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fenwick, T. (2011). Developing who, for what? Notes of caution in rethinking a global H(R)D: a response to Kuchinke. Human Resource Development International, 14(1): 83–9. Flew, A.G.N. (1977). Wants or needs, choices or commands, in Fitzgerald, R. (ed.), Human Needs and Politics. Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 213–28. Foucault, M. (1975[1995]). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the Self. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Grey, C. (2013). A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations. London: Sage. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press. 489

Cristina Neesham

Hancock, J. (1999). Baudrillard and the metaphysics of motivation: a reappraisal of corporate culturalism in the light of the work and ideas of Jean Baudrillard. Journal of Management Studies, 36(2): 155–75. Hayek, F. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heller, A. (1974). The Theory of Need in Marx. London: Allison & Busby. Heller, A. and Feher, F. (1989). The Postmodern Political Condition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heller, A., Feher, F. and Markus, G. (1983). Dictatorship Over Needs. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hume, D. (1738[1978]) A Treatise of Human Nature (ed. A. Selby-Bigge) (2nd edn). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kuchinke, P.K. (2010). Human development as central goal for human resource development. Human Resource Development International, 13(5): 575–85. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press. Lawrence, P.R. and Lorsch, J.W. (1967). Differentiation and integration in complex organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(1): 1–47. McClelland, D.C. (1975). Power: the inner experience. Oxford: Irvington. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, K. (1862[1969]). Theories of Surplus Value. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (1964). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1845[1970]). The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper. Mayo, E. (1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. Michaelson, C., Pratt, M., Grant, A. and Dunn, C. (2014). Meaningful work: connecting business ethics and organization studies. Journal of Business Ethics, 121(1): 77–90. Minogue, K.R. (1963). The Liberal Mind. London: Methuen. Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reader, S. (ed.) (2005). The Philosophy of Need. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowlinson, M. and Hassard, J. (2000). Marxist political economy, revolutionary politics, and labor process theory. International Studies of Management and Organization, 30(4): 85–111. Sen, A. (1985). Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Sen, A.K. (1999). Democracy as a universal value. Journal of Democracy, 10(3): 3–17. Sewell, G. (2005). Doing what comes naturally? Why we need a practical ethics of teamwork. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 16(2): 202–18. Thomson, G. (2005). Fundamental needs, in Reader, S. (ed.), The Philosophy of Need. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175–86. Townley, B. (1995). ‘Know thyself’: self-awareness, self-formation and managing. Organization, 2(2): 271–89. Watson, T. (2013). Management, Organisation and Employment Strategy: new directions in theory and practice. London: Routledge. Willmott, H. (1997). Rethinking management and managerial work: capitalism, control, and subjectivity. Human Relations, 50(11): 1329–59. Yeoman, R. (2014). Conceptualising meaningful work as a fundamental human need. Journal of Business Ethics, 125(2): 235–51.

490

45 Organization and philosophy Vision and division Martin Parker

Organization is a ubiquitous yet often unthought concept within the contemporary business school.1 It is in the title of this volume, and names a discipline, yet its ontology and epistemology are often assumed as authors and researchers get on and do things with and to organizations and organizing. The phrase ‘organization studies’, for example, marks a boundary between what the discipline includes and what it excludes, and that itself is an operation of organization. It makes a certain sort of vision possible, and hence encourages particular forms of intellectual labour, but also prevents other things from being seen through a ‘labour of division’ (Cooper. 1989: 51) which separates things in order to arrange them. As Spoelstra puts it ‘Being occupied with organizations is thus a way to stop thinking about organization’ (Spoelstra, 2005: 113). It is often hard to think about what we assume, but that is why philosophy is important, and in this short essay, I want to begin to show just what a complicated concept organization is. I will start by considering some definitions of, and attitudes towards, the idea of organization, and then move to a review of the differences between entity and process views. This leads into a discussion of the ontological and epistemological issues raised by different formulations of organization, before concluding with some remarks on some common ethical and political attitudes towards the concept.

Organs and institutions The etymology gives us the Latin organa, as an instrument or tool for a particular purpose, which in turn comes from organon, a Greek word which means something like ‘that with which one works’. In English, the musical instrument and part of a body sense of organ are both fifteenth century, as is the sense of organization (organizationem) as an action, as something that is done. It is not until the nineteenth century that the word solidifies into a thing, into an institution which is the precondition and/or consequence of a form of labour. The root of the word is some sort of device which effects a transformation, an arrangement which causes one thing to become something else. This is a productive notion and it implies a way of intervening in the world, of making the world different through the use of tools, of organs which produce a world which we can understand and work with. It is in this sense that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari used Artaud’s metaphor of the ‘Body without Organs’ to suggest that organs impose an order 491

Martin Parker

on experience, they shape the world in predictable ways (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998[2004]: 166). Further, they suggest, humans are themselves organs for the social organism, elements playing ordered roles. Being ‘without organs’ then suggests a relation to the world which can exploit its potentials, rather than processing it to produce predictable effects. They are clear that this is not a state that can be reached in some absolute sense, but rather a tendency which needs to be cultivated in order to escape from unthinking habits or determinations. This version of organs, and of organization, in this and earlier works by Deleuze, and by Deleuze and Guattari, was written in the shadow of the counter-culture of the 1960s, and specifically of the events of France 1968. It was common enough at that time for some version of desire and freedom to be counter-posed to the coercions of bureaucracy and the state, and hence for organization to become a word which provoked suspicion. Think about the forms of organization that made the twentieth century – in the political machines of Lenin and Hitler, both of whom use the word continually in their writings; in the supermarket, shipping container, death camp, and Manhattan Project; or in the cultural criticisms of the obedience of ‘organization man’ (Whyte, 1961) or ‘one dimensional man’ (Marcuse, 1964). Within Michel Foucault’s philosophy, for example, organizations are generally described as social arrangements which classify, stratify, imprison and so on (Foucault, 1975/1977). We see similar moves in Paul Feyerabend’s account of scientific institutions as structures which prevent innovation and free thought (Feyerabend, 1975[2010]); Ivan Illich’s sustained arguments concerning the failures of the state and its apparatus, and the growing influence of the work of critical theorists such as Adorno, Fromm and Marcuse. All, it seemed, had organizations in their sights, and so perhaps it was not surprising that ‘poststructuralists’ such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Agamben and others were often also understood in similar ways, as prophets of a liberation which could be gained through reflexivity about the way that language and power chained thought. Of course this is to homogenize, and often to foreground the reception of a theorist over their texts, but it seems fair to say that from the 1970s onwards many philosophers were rhetorically opposing themselves to various senses of organization and bureaucracy, usually in the name of some sort of emancipation. Within organization studies, Burrell and Morgan classified some of these as radical humanist ‘anti-organization’ theorists (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 310), a current of anti-authoritarian scepticism that appeared to occupy the moral high ground, though not the centres of power. But, despite the distaste which hangs around the concept, most radicals still find it hard to be done with organization. Che Guevara, for example, in his attempts to explain the strategies for guerrilla warfare (Guevara, 1961/2006) has continual recourse to the concept, and suggests that lack of organization will result in disaster. Most practically oriented anarchists, feminists, greens and socialists have always assumed that the question of organization would not go away, but that the specific forms that it takes must be made political, in the sense of showing what consequences might follow from different organizational arrangements. More recently, this idea has been revived in the alterglobalization movement with the idea of ‘prefigurative’ organization and politics. This is a hopeful term which collapses the distinction between means and ends in order to assert that being against organization – in the sense I have suggested was rhetorically common to philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century – makes little sense. The question should instead be how we organize, how we make the world with others and how the world that we make also makes us.

Organizations and organizing This sustained interest among more practical radicals in the politics of ‘means as ends’ is one way into opening up the most common distinction made within philosophical discussions of 492

Organization

organization theory – between organization as an already existing entity and organizing as an unending process. The distinction between processes of organizing and organizations as finished products is one that produces both political and epistemological problems. In some sense, we perceive organizations as things, as arrangements of human and non-human materials which have a certain spatial and temporal durability to them. This is despite the fact that ‘the organization’ as such is only ever materialized in materials which are taken as metonyms for the concept – a building, person, machine, email and so on. Nonetheless, organizations are often used as examples of the ‘structures’ which many realist social theorists suggest provide an armature for social life, and which in some sense shape the patterns of human action which flow through and around them (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000). On the other hand, as ‘agency’ and ‘social constructionist’ theorists would insist, organizing is an ongoing achievement, a continued reassembling in which change and movement are constant, and stability only appears as the result of ways of seeing that produce frozen moments (Silverman, 1970). However, the dramatization of a distinction between these two positions is often unhelpful (Giddens, 1984). There are actually very few theorists who would suggest that social structures or institutions are entirely determining of human action simply because it is then difficult to account for any sort of social change or subjectivity which deviates from a norm. Similarly, there are few social constructionists who would ignore the role of rules, routines, habituations, materials and so on, suggesting that institutions are not produced fresh every morning when the caretaker switches the light on. In practice, entity and process elements of organization are necessarily co-produced. As an illustration, language is organized, in the sense that a condition of intelligibility is that signs are not randomly allocated and are largely arranged in sequences following grammatical rules. Yet the existence of such rules does not determine every utterance made within a language, does not determine regional accents, new words or the existence of poetry. This sort of example, in this case Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, is usually employed to show the necessary entanglements of structure and agency but it can also be used to open up the complexity of a single word. The idea of ‘organization’ is clearly such a word, with its double sense of noun and verb, structure and process, of the precondition and finished product or state, as well as of the act of planning itself. The word itself refuses to settle as a sign with a fixed meaning, and instead its meaning always originates from a relation to other words or contexts. This begins to move us towards a more interesting echo of the structure/agency dualism which Cooper and Law name the ‘distal’ and ‘proximal’ conceptions of organizing (Cooper, 1992; Cooper and Law,1995). For those who prefer the distal, organizing can be described as an arrangement of materials emplaced in what the philosopher Whitehead called ‘simple location’ (Whitehead, 1925[1985]). In this ‘Newtonian’ view of organizing, the finished pattern is already there to be found, the labour of division has produced a consequence which can be seen as categorized materials with bridges and spaces between them. In contrast, proximal thinking stresses relations and movement, and contrasts an universe of things to an universe of motions, circuits, speeds and intensities. This implies the entity is not already there in the world, but is an effect of the relations and divisions which allow for connection and disconnection, and which produce the appearance of order. The implication of the proximal view is that organization is always in process (Hernes and Matlis, 2010), always a form of work which produces what John Law calls ‘pools of order’, the temporary appearance of something that looks like an entity (Law, 1994). In other words, organization needs endless organizing because it is a perpetuum mobile of moving relations which need to be continually remade to prevent the collapse of order into disorder, into entropy. As Nick Lee suggests, if the world is process, then the appearance of order is a question of relative 493

Martin Parker

speeds (Lee, 1998). The rise and fall of timeless mountains is normally imperceptible to us because it is so slow, and the movement of the humming bird’s wing is imperceptible because too fast. In the same way, the relative permanence of different social orders is not because some are enduring structures and other are ephemeral acts of agency, but because they move at different speeds, and what we see as stable is hence a ‘bundle of time’ which produces Law’s ‘pool of order’. Another way of thinking this relationality is through what is commonly termed Actor Network Theory. In this sense, organizing is the production of a network of actants that is more or less durable, a materially heterogeneous set of connections between human beings, animals, objects, technologies and so on that produce something that can be recognized as ‘cyborganization’ (Cooper and Law, 1995; Parker and Cooper, 1998). In summary, the proximal view, as influenced by thinkers such as Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze and Cooper suggests that the task of philosophers of organization is not to be bewitched by a distal sense of finished things with humans at their centre, and instead look at ‘the production of organization rather than the organization of production’ (Cooper and Burrell, 1988: 106). Structures (including agents themselves) become effects of organizing in time, and with nonhumans, but this moves us on to a further question. How do we recognize ‘organization’?

Perspectives on organization There is a third meaning to this productive word too, not just entity or process but something like ‘state of affairs’. So when we observe a distribution of matter, we are likely to want to decide whether or not it is organized or lacks organization. If we observed a series of points in rows and lines, we might assume that this was an organized arrangement, a pattern which reflected either a natural order or perhaps was the result of some sort of conscious intention. It might seem that establishing the existence of organization is simply an observational matter, but a few examples will show the problem. First, we might not be able to perceive a form of organization because of spatial perspective. When seen from a particular point of view, a particular pattern can seem chaotic. Moving to another space, an arrangement of points might resolve itself into a pattern, revealing organization which wasn’t visible from our original standpoint. Second, we might not be able to see an order because of the moment of time that we are observing. A series of points could begin as an order and then move into what looks likes disorder, before resolving into order again. Third, what we see as organized might depend on scale. The pattern of pebbles on a beach might have no apparent organization from close up, but a wider scale might show a gradation of rocks from one side of the beach to another, depending on the movements of wave and wind. Finally, we might need expertise to ‘see’ the organization, just as a forester can ‘read’ a forest, while a business school academic would just see a woody chaos. The point is that perceptions of organization are perspectival, not absolute. The same is clearly true of disorganization, since what appears disorganized from one point of view, at one time, at a particular scale, might appear organized at another. There is an echo of this in the use of the word ‘circus’ in English. Commonly, describing something as a circus is to suggest that it is disorganized, chaotic, messy. A moment’s thought suggests that the organization of an actual circus is actually a very complex process, requiring the coordination of people and materials to give the appearance of something which is dangerous, transgressive and so on. But what you see depends whether you sit in the audience or behind the scenes. Social order is not an objective phenomena that can be found in the world but the outcome of a way of seeing which looks for patterns, at particular times, in particular places and at particular (usually human) scales. Optical illusions are very often used to demonstrate this sort of process in visual terms. Our perception can be tricked into seeing a chair from one position but if we move we see an oddly shaped 494

Organization

arrangement of wooden parts. Organization appears not to be an objective property of things, but a classification from a particular point of view. As Henri Bergson said ‘Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for. You cannot suppress one order even by thought, without causing a new one to spring up’ (Bergson, 2002: 228). This is what we might call an epistemology of organization, in the sense of foregrounding the role of the observer in constructing what is then categorized as organized, such as the randomness of the distribution of stars congealing into the order of the constellations. Yet this perspectival epistemology leaves open an ontology of organizing, that is to say, an account of just what is prior to the act of observation. There seem to be broadly two possibilities here. One is that organization is waiting in the universe to be revealed, and it is the task of the thinker, of the scientist, to pull apart the curtains of perception and reveal it. So the distribution of stars is not random, but caused by specific mechanisms and chains of cause and effect. There is no chaos, merely complicated patterns which might appear chaotic because we do not have the complex models to predict them. At the level of human organization, the same assumptions would apply for realists, in the sense that what appears to be messy is assumed retroductively to be the result of mechanisms which operate beneath or behind the surface of the social world. This laminated ontology allows us to understand social organization as an effect of something else, as a result of economic forces, mimetic tendencies, population ecologies or whatever primary mechanism is posited (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000). An alternative ontology would suggest that the universe is only organized when we make it so. That is to say, that which exists before observation is simply an undifferentiated sea of relations, a Kantian noumena (as opposed to phenomena) of the ‘things-in-themselves’, or what Cooper calls ‘the zero degree of organization’ (Cooper, 1990: 182). The move that separates this from that, that pulls something into view and hence makes organization different from disorganization is hence the operation of a boundary which classifies one thing and another. So rather than organization existing prior to us in the world then we would instead say that the recognition of something as organized, or as an organization, is itself an act of organizing. In what is either a contradiction or a proof (depending on your theory of language), we cannot understand the ontology of the concept ‘organization’ without deploying the concept ‘organization’. Importantly also, and to take this argument back to the etymology that we began with, the boundary that cuts organization out from the ‘things-in-themselves’ is itself the organ, the thing that effects a transformation. Cooper insists that: the division between terms be conceived no longer just as separation but also as a structure that joins terms together, i.e. division both separates and joins. In fact, it is the act of separation which, paradoxically, creates the perception of something that is also whole or unitary. (Cooper, 1990: 173) Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, the boundary, or ‘seam’ (Cooper, 1989) is then itself an organ which makes self and other, inside and outside possible. It produces the assemblage which is the field of organization studies, and the concept of organization as something which always exceeds and escapes it. At the level of human organization, the question then becomes not how patterns can be revealed by attending carefully to the objects in the world, but how that world is made by our forms of attention and relation. So, for example, the construction of ideas of ‘information’, ‘rationality’, ‘management’ or whatever rely on differentiating some feature of the social world from some other ‘noise’, ‘irrationality’, ‘anarchy’ and so on. The order in the world is the order that we make, which doesn’t make it any the less compelling or real in its consequences, but does suggest that it is contingent, and could be otherwise. 495

Martin Parker

Politics and organizing We have seen that opening up what it means to study ‘organization’ takes us to central epistemological and ontological issues. It suggests that what we deem to be organized is inextricably attached to some idea of disorganization, of a difference which is both required and repressed in order that the dominant term has meaning. This is the sort of understanding that is commonly termed ‘poststructuralist’, in the sense that it assumes that the structures of meaning are never immanent to the world, but produced through repeated operations of difference and distinction (Derrida, 1978; Cooper, 1990). Further, any decision which places something in the category of the ‘organized’ is perspectival, in the sense that it depends where we stand, what we look at, when we look and who we are. Finally, in the social world, there is a clear moral economy to these divisions and decisions, with a normative force being attached to the idea that something is organized, while dirt, mess, chaos and anarchy are seen to be problematic and in need of repair. These are powerful arguments, and it is easy to see why they have become popular in the last thirty years as the influences of poststructural and phenomenological philosophy have reached organization studies, often under the broad umbrella of critical management studies. Yet, as I suggested above, there is a danger that these forms of thinking themselves construct a dualism which emplaces a certain orthodoxy and becomes a set of unexamined ethical and political assumptions. The problem stems in part from the fact that proximal arguments have had to be made very stridently in order to counter the dominance of distal thinking within the social sciences generally, and within the business school in particular, which often makes the utility of entities into a positive (and positivist) virtue. Since the contemporary conditions of possibility of the latter require certain formal organizations as its object of interest and means of support, it is unsurprising that divisions of the state and business organizations are then treated as real entities with observable properties. For those influenced by philosophy, to ask questions about the nature of those objects seems like a valuable thing to do, a way of opening up the ethics and politics of the matters that the business school deals with, but it might be that the lesson of philosophy is rarely that we can simply ‘have done with’ whatever concept we have placed into question. The distal does not go away because we think it so. As Land puts it, some of the writers in this area seem to celebrate a ‘rejection of fixity, sameness and even organization itself’ (Land, 2001: 416) as if all nouns can be replaced by verbs, and as if all talk of entities and locations must be prohibited. It seems that the recognition of process then licenses a sense that it is possible to construct a politics or ethics which is beyond or against organization. This certainly echoes the anti-authoritarian politics common in the last half-century of European philosophy, but the problem with such a position, rarely explicit but often rhetorically gestured towards, is performative in two senses. First, because it ends up rehearsing a predictable dualism by celebrating its opposite, and second because it is a position often articulated by well-paid employees of formal organizations. That is to say that it is not at all clear what a politics of the proximal might look like, and what sort of organizations it might build beyond ‘an almost pre-modern metaphysics of movement and spirituality’ (Land, 2001: 416). The move that questions the solidities of the distal is an important one and should not be dismissed as ‘mere philosophy’, but moves can end as empty gestures if their implications are merely left hanging at the end of a provocative argument. Instead, it might be that being reflexive about organizing, about how it happens and what it does, should encourage more attention to the ways in which certain forms of organizing are both ontologically and epistemologically dismissed (as disorganized or insufficiently efficient) and politically sidelined as inconceivable alternatives to the present order (Parker et al., 2014, 496

Organization

2016). Cooper suggested that ‘[f]or the distal thinker, the destination is more important than the journey; for the proximal thinker, to travel is better than to arrive’ (Cooper, 1992: 373). This is an important corrective against any assumption that ‘we’ already know where ‘we’ should be going and how to get there, but it does not mean that the material difficulties of human life can be wished away by intellectual fiat. Insisting that organizing is mutable, and that boundaries and seams matter, means that the world can be otherwise. This immediately means that organizing has clear ethical and political implications, as its distal solidification acts as an effect and cause of power relations (Cooper, 1990: 187 passim). It is not a question of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ organization, or for process and against institutions. If organizing is politics made durable, then it is not that we can ever be done with distal ‘organization’, as if this were possible. Rather we must always be attentive to what sort of organization is produced as an effect of the ways that human beings live in the world, and of the qualities of human being that are produced by organization.

Note 1

This essay is dedicated to Bob Cooper, who died in 2013. He was one of the first people to introduce poststructuralist forms of thought into organization theory, and always insisted that the philosophical sense of organization was insufficiently understood (see Chia, 1998a, 1998b; Burrell and Parker, 2016). He intensely disliked the idea that ‘organization studies’ should be reduced to the study of organizations, but saw this happening continually as the Business School coalesced in the British university during his career. Many of his key works were hence reactions to the managerialism of the noun, and an insistence that rigorous thought should not be confined by ideas of utility or discipline. Thanks to Steven Brown and Gibson Burrell for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

References (key texts in bold) Ackroyd, S. and Fleetwood, S. (eds) (2000). Realist Perspectives on Management and Organization. London: Routledge. Bergson, H. (2002). The possible and the real, in Ansell-Pearson, K. and Mullarky, J. (eds), Henri Bergson: key writings. London: Continuum, pp. 223–32. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Burrell, G. and Parker, M. (eds) (2016). For Bob Cooper: Collected Works. London: Routledge. Chia, R. (ed.) (1998a). In the Realm of Organization: essays for Robert Cooper. London: Routledge. Chia, R. (ed.) (1998b). Organized Worlds: explorations in technology and organization with Robert Cooper. London: Routledge. Cooper, R. (1989). The visibility of social systems, in Jackson, M.C., Keys, P. and Cropper, S. (eds), Operational Research and the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum, pp. 51–7. Cooper, R. (1990). Organization/disorganization, in Hassard, J. and Pym, D. (eds), The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations. London: Routledge, pp. 167–97. Cooper. R. (1992). Systems and organizations: proximal and distal thinking. Systems Practice, 5(4): 373–7. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 1: an introduction. Organization Studies, 9(1): 91–112. Cooper, R. and Law, J. (1995). Organization: distal and proximal views, in Bacharach, S.B., Gagliardi, P. and Mundell, B. (eds), Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 275–301. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1998[2004]). A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Feyerabend, P. (1975[2010]). Against Method. New York: Verso. Foucault, M. (1975[1977]). Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Oxford: Polity Press. Guevara, E. (1961[2006]). Guerilla Warfare. Melbourne: Ocean Press. Hernes, T. and Matlis, S. (eds) (2010). Process, Sensemaking and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 497

Martin Parker

Land. C. (2001). Exploring the (expanded) realm of organization. Ephemera, 1(4): 404–22. Law, J. (1994). Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Lee, N. (1998). Two speeds: how are real stabilities possible? in Chia, R. (ed.), Organized Worlds: explorations in technology and organization with Robert Cooper. London: Routledge, pp. 36–61. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Parker, M. and Cooper, R. (1998). Cyborganization: cinema as nervous system, in Hassard, J. and Holliday, R. (eds), In Organization – Representation: work and organization in popular culture. London: Sage, pp. 201–28. Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V. and Land, C. (eds) (2014). The Companion to Alternative Organization. London: Routledge. Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V. and Land, C. (2016). Organizing is politics made durable, in Spicer, A. and Baars, G. (eds), The Corporation: a critical interdisciplinary handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming). Silverman, D. (1970). The Theory of Organisations. London: Heinemann. Spoelstra, S. (2005). Robert Cooper: beyond organization, in Jones, C. and Munro, R. (eds), Contemporary Organization Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 106–19. Whitehead, A.N. (1925[1985]). Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association. Whyte, W.H. (1961). The Organisation Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

498

46 Paradigms, the philosophy of science and organization studies John Hassard

Introduction The chapter offers an historical overview of theorizing associated with the concept of paradigm in the philosophy of science, social science and organization theory. Initially we address the origins of the concept in the philosophy of science and especially with reference to the writings of Thomas Kuhn. We then document the impact of Kuhn’s philosophy on the social sciences and specifically assess the adoption of the paradigm concept as the explanatory centrepiece of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan’s book (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, which represents one of the most referenced works in organization theory (OT) of the last half-century. Their four-paradigm model (viz. functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist and radical structuralist) made an enormous impact on the field through defining the metatheoretical assumptions underpinning major theoretical and methodological positions. The chapter accounts not only for the popularity of the Burrell and Morgan model but also for arguments critical of their theoretical model and epistemological map. Finally we assess prospects for paradigmatic analysis in sociology and OT for the period since Burrell and Morgan published their landmark work. In particular we discuss the rise of postmodernism and poststructuralism and the options for accounting for such theorizing within paradigmatic models.

Key contributions The concept of ‘paradigm’ is associated primarily with the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (1962[1970]). In this respect it is possibly more accurate to talk of a key contribution, to the development of this concept rather than contributions. The widespread reputation of Kuhn’s book resulted from the claim that traditional wisdom in the philosophy of science did not equate with the historical evidence. Kuhn’s well known suggestion is that dominant theories of scientific practice – whether inductivist or falsificationist – are incompatible with the facts of how science has actually progressed. Thus falsificationists – however ‘sophisticated’ (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970) – are methodologists whose ideals are never met. Scientific practice is never realized in Popperian terms, and as such ‘no process yet discovered by the historical study of scientific development 499

John Hassard

at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature (Kuhn, 1962[1970]: 77). The essence of Kuhn’s thesis is that the everyday reality of science is more akin to the life cycle of the political community than it is to dictates of formal logic. Here theories portraying science as the linear accretion of verified hypotheses are completely rejected, as Kuhn instead speaks of discontinuous periods of normative and revolutionary activity. Kuhn’s analysis centres on the claim that the history of science has consistently witnessed upheavals in which accepted wisdom is replaced by a new way of seeing, the process serving to change fundamentally a science’s reality concept. Indeed the degree of change is such that the standards, concepts and procedures of the post-revolutionary approach are held to be totally incompatible with those of the pre-revolutionary consensus. For scientists, the experience is essentially akin to the appreciation of a new gestalt, with the process also being similar to religious conversion. In sum, when science changes, a new approach emerges based upon the philosophical axioms of an alternative scientific community, the new tradition, like the old, being what Kuhn terms a ‘paradigm’. If we examine the thesis in terms of scientific development, we find that so-called ‘everyday’ or ‘normal’ science is both perpetuated through, and justified by, this unique domain of paradigm. While initially it is the classic experiment that determines the community’s problems, methods and solutions, in time socialization promotes consolidation and, as such, prevents scientists having to begin every new investigation from scratch; for principles, methodology and scientific language are already laid down in paradigm materials and technologies (e.g. textbook laws, published results, standard methods). Thus, young scientists, because of their exclusive paradigm training, are unaware of displaying paradigm-oriented behaviour, as instead their learned way of practising science is simply the way. The ‘reality’ of science is in fact only questioned when so-called ‘crisis’ comes to the paradigm. Although the negation of isolated criticism is a characteristic of normal science, over time an ageing paradigm is threatened by the presence of ‘anomalies’, which eventually question the fundamental principles on which the paradigm is built. At first such instances are treated like other problems – as being merely aberrant occurrences requiring remediation or solution. Thus unexpected findings do not act as catalysts to spark the (scientific) revolution, but instead represent new challenges to the community. Indeed it is only the persistent anomaly that gains attention; with, in time, a proliferation of ad hoc suggestions being made to account for this increasingly central issue for the community. However although normal science becomes more ill-defined when a crucial anomaly consumes the paradigm, the paradigm itself remains intact, as no viable alternative has yet presented itself. For Kuhn, true scientific change can only occur with the formation of a new and alternative paradigm; one capable of comprehending and accounting for major anomalies. The evolution of such a challenging paradigm must thus occur contemporaneous to the atrophy of the existing one. At this point, while for the majority of scientists there is recourse to fundamentals (and notably to philosophy), for an important minority there is a re-examination of the paradigm’s basic tenets. It is this minority to whom the development of the new paradigm is owed, with these scientists tending to be among the younger members of the community; whose professional education, on including the centrality of major anomalies, has avoided such a rigid training in the paradigm. The emerging paradigm, then, begins to ask qualitatively different research questions and employ contrasting and incomparable scientific standards. For Kuhn it is this sense in which scientists of competing paradigms hold differing world views. The pedestrian nature of normal science comes to a sudden end with the onset of ‘revolutionary science’ and the open challenge of the alternative paradigm. The actual changing 500

Paradigms

of allegiance by individual scientists is, as noted, like religious conversion or gestalt switch. As Kuhn (1962[1970]: 85) states, ‘scientists do not see something as something else; instead they simply see it’. What is important here however is that the change of paradigm is not based on open debate; for Kuhn suggests there are no logical arguments upon which to demonstrate the superiority of one paradigm over another. As the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old, there is no recourse to a mediating third party. Thus there can be no logical demarcation of the supremacy of one paradigm over another, for the advocates of differing paradigms hold fast to separate sets of standards and metaphysical assumptions. Advocates of different paradigms will not concede to the other’s basic foundations: they will not similarly accept the other’s arguments or findings. For Kuhn (1962[1970]: 94) ‘when paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defence’. At the time of crisis, there is no choice other than to remain true to traditional beliefs or to throw one’s lot in with the new pretenders. Only two frames of reference are possible and ‘proof’ is inaccessible. Rival paradigms account for the world with different standards, assumptions and language. Thus the ‘normal science tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before’ (Kuhn, 1962[1970]: 103). In attacking the notion of theory independent ‘facts’, Kuhn’s position seems to deny the possibility of objective choice between paradigms. There can be no ‘good reasons’ for preference of a new paradigm as such reasons will always be paradigm-dependent. Thus for Kuhn (1962[1970]: 147), ‘the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs’. Therefore in Kuhnian theory the two traditional pillars of science – objectivity and progress – are seemingly lost. Not only are we bereft of means of relationally evaluating competing paradigms, we appear to be deprived of any way of comparing them at all: the only world we see is that of our paradigm. This position, then, appears a relativist one, as it seems that while scientific theories change, such change cannot signal ‘progress’. As Kuhn (1962[1970]: 94) argued ‘like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life’.

Significance to organization studies Kuhn’s thesis on the concept of paradigm has been used extensively in social science as a means of assessing the developmental status of constituent disciplines and sub-disciplines; for example sociology and organization theory. Numerous writers in social science have employed Kuhnian theory to plot paradigmatic models or schemes for explaining the structure and character of academic fields. However although Kuhn’s work has been so widely embraced, the degree of sophistication with which his central tenets have been handled has often been problematical. Frequently writers have engaged in discussion, for example, of paradigm’ structures while making only passing reference to Kuhn’s central concepts. This has seen his paradigm concept often used as a philosophical catch-all to explain the culture or structure of a discipline, theory, school or perspective. Such uncertainly over key concepts is not however altogether surprising, for Kuhn’s own proposals on the developmental status of the social sciences are often ambiguous. Commentators on Kuhn’s work have recurrently pointed to vacillations in the author’s main theoretical writings. Although Kuhn consistently advocated that the social sciences (and focally sociology) are ‘immature’ sciences, he seems to offer different reasons at different times. First, in the original 1962 edition of SSR, he suggests that sociology is ‘pre-paradigmatic’ and therefore ‘immature’. 501

John Hassard

Second, in the Postscript to the 1970 (second) edition of SSR that sociology is ‘multiparadigmatic’, but also ‘immature’ because its paradigms lack exemplars. And third, in his article ‘Reflections on my critics’ (in Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970) that sociology is multi-paradigmatic, with each paradigm comprising its own exemplars, but immature because no one paradigm is shared by all the discipline’s members. Such inconsistency has, in turn, spread to the works of those wishing to apply Kuhn’s thesis in the decades following his seminal work. Historically, again three main positions can be identified among the myriad works that adopted a Kuhnian perspective from around the 1970s onwards, or a decade in which ‘sociology [was] characterised by attempts to define its paradigmatic status’ (Ritzer, 1978: 1): First, that sociology was pre-paradigmatic and at best held only ‘partial’ paradigms. Second, that sociology has always been a multi-paradigmatic social science. And third, that although modern sociology is multi-paradigmatic, in the past it witnessed full paradigmatic development, notably under structural functionalism. Such analytical confusion was reflected in a comment by Eckburg and Hill (1979: 925) around this time, that: ‘There are almost as many views of the paradigmatic status of sociology as there are sociologists attempting such analyses.’ The fundamental difference, historically, was that while the importance or dominance of structural functionalism was well attested, the question of whether it ever held full paradigm status remained moot. Similarly while the timing of its decline in the early to mid-1960s was well supported, the list of paradigm rivals and replacement candidates offered was less unanimous. Many of the themes of community structure and theory development found in paradigmatic accounts in sociology were found similarly in the main sub-discipline dealing with institutions, occupations and work – organization theory. One work above all gained recognition for making sense not only of the theoretical structure of OT but also of social science in general; this was the book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (SPOA) (1979) by Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, which reflected many of the Kuhnian arguments abounding in social science around this time. Like other theorists Burrell and Morgan were concerned with the development and specification of alternatives to the functionalist ‘orthodoxy’ – alternatives they referred to as ‘paradigms’. Such alternatives had in fact been found in the wake of two linked critiques claiming that functionalism was both a ‘static’ and ‘consensus’ theory, and as such one incapable of accounting for change and conflict. The so-called ‘crisis’ in sociology, so eloquently described almost a decade earlier by Alvin Gouldner (1970), was predicated on positions capable of accounting for conflict and action, both separately and in concert. For the former, a revival in ‘prophetic’ theories was noted, especially interest in the ‘humanistic’ works of Marx; as expressed, for example, in writings by Louis Althusser (1969) and colleagues in philosophy and sociology. For the latter, an advance in phenomenological sociology was the most notable force in the existential concern for the subject–actor from around the mid-1960s. Among the most influential proposals here – in what was essentially an extension of Alfred Schütz’s (1967) philosophy – was a methodological concentration on the role of implicit assumptions in everyday experience, and perhaps most notoriously so in Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) work on ethnomethodology. The popularity of the Burrell and Morgan model however stemmed from the fact that, unlike other theses, it offered an epistemological map to account for the various paradigmatic alternatives being discussed in the literature. In particular it offered a structure for explaining many of the established theoretical dichotomies invoked to explain theory developments both in sociology and organization theory (e.g. conflict–consensus; objective–subjective; order–conflict; qualitative–quantitative). Their model basically offered guidelines for understanding the metatheoretical assumptions at the base of an academic community’s theoretical orientation. They 502

Paradigms

sought to provide intellectual grounding for meta-theoretical beliefs in order to clarify how theory communities were both themselves positioned and territorially related to one another. Expanding this thesis Burrell and Morgan suggested four main paradigms for sociology and OT – functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, radical structuralist. These were developed through interesting ‘subject–object’ debates about the ‘nature of social science’ and ‘consensus– conflict’ debates about the ‘theory of society’. They argued for charting paradigm locations in OT by use of a framework that also located major theoretical positions in social science generally (including for example, behaviourism, existentialism, positivism, hermeneutics, etc.). The result was a model adopted widely as a guide to the paradigmatic structure of various social science fields and disciplines. So popular has the model been that SPOA has amassed over 8,000 citations on Google Scholar to date, making it one of the most influential books in the history of OT. As a result of this profile it has been handsomely praised, closely questioned and harshly attacked. To explain the principles of the model, Burrell and Morgan dissect social science notably by reference to the philosopher’s toolkit of ontology and epistemology. Basically, they concentrate upon the meta-theoretical assumptions made by various schools, and in identifying such seek to plot various positions on their four-paradigm model. As noted, the model is produced by interesting various meta-theoretical assumptions about the ‘nature of social science’ and the ‘nature of society’, with the antinomies of the former representing the x axis, while those of the latter the y. For assumptions about the nature of social science it is useful the authors argue to conceptualize social science in terms of four sets of assumptions related to ontology, epistemology, human nature and methodology (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 1). They maintain that all social scientists, implicitly or explicitly, approach their discipline via assumptions about the nature of the social world and how it should be researched. For assumptions about the ‘nature of society’ Burrell and Morgan invoke attempts by social theorists to distinguish between ‘those approaches to sociology which concentrate upon explaining the nature of social order and equilibrium . . . and those . . . concerned with the problems of change, conflict and coercion’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 1) However instead of the more usual nomenclature of ‘order–conflict’ or ‘consensus–conflict’, they talk instead of differences between the ‘sociology of regulation’ and the ‘sociology of radical change’. Through the polarization of such consensus and conflict assumptions the politically conservative functionalist and interpretive paradigms are contrasted with the conflict-oriented radical humanist and radical structuralist. Conversely with regard to the nature of social science, the functionalist and radical structuralist paradigms, which accept an objectivist ‘scientific’ stance towards the study of social reality, are contrasted with the more subjectivist emphasis of the interpretive and radical humanist paradigms. In this way, Burrell and Morgan argue for their paradigms to be viewed as ‘contiguous but separate – contiguous because of the shared characteristics, but separate because the differentiation is . . . of sufficient importance to warrant treatment of the paradigms as four distinct entities’. As such, the four paradigms, ‘define fundamentally different perspectives for the analysis of social phenomena. They approach this endeavour from contrasting standpoints and generate quite different concepts and analytical tools’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 23) (see Figures 46.1 and 46.2). From its publication in 1979 this model came to represent the dominant means for defining the community structure of OT (and of management and organization studies generally). It gave rise to a virtual industry based on the challenge of identifying the paradigm location of key theoretical schools and major empirical contributions (see Shepherd and Challenger, 2013, for a recent review). Indeed although other paradigm models were offered in social science prior to theirs, as Deetz (1996: 191) argued ‘none have gained the almost hegemonic capacity to define the alternatives in organizational analysis’. 503

John Hassard

There remain however certain features of the model which require scrutiny before we consider the significance not only of paradigm thinking in the wake of Burrell and Morgan but also of potential developments in the future. First is their use of the primary term ‘paradigm’. It can be argued that Burrell and Morgan’s work is more in the spirit of Kuhnian theory than an explicit contribution or exposition. Although their paradigms are held to represent ‘the frame of reference,

THE SOCIOLOGY OF RADICAL CHANGE

‘Radical humanist’

‘Radical structuralist’

SUBJECTIVE

OBJECTIVE

‘Interpretative’

‘Functionalist’

THE SOCIOLOGY OF REGULATION

Figure 46.1 Paradigms of social theory (Burrell and Morgan, 1979)

THE SOCIOLOGY OF RADICAL CHANGE Radical humanism

S U B J E C T I V E

S o l i p s i s m

Radical structuralism

Anarchistic Individualism

French extentialism

Critical Theory

Phenomenology

Hermeneutics

Russian Social Theory

Contemporary Mediterranean Marxism Conflict theory

Integrative theory

Phenomenological sociology

Social system theory Objectivism

Interactionism and social action theory Interpretative sociology

Functionalist sociology

THE SOCIOLOGY OF REGULATION

Figure 46.2 Map of social theory (Burrell and Morgan, 1979) 504

O B J E C T I V E

Paradigms

mode of theorizing and modus operandi of the social theorists who operate within them’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 23) – which can be equated roughly with Kuhn’s notion of paradigm as a ‘disciplinary matrix’ – discussion of the concept in terms directly relevant to the history or philosophy of science is largely missing. Instead their use of ‘paradigm’ is more of a loose catchall for describing the four analytical quadrants that comprise their model. A second problem confronting Burrell and Morgan’s theorizing is their treatment of the metatheoretical notions that underpin the paradigms model. In particular their treatment of ontology has been questioned as to its philosophical appropriateness. In a paper developed in the wake of SPOA, Pinder and Bourgeoise (1981: 6) cite Burrell and Morgan as an example of social scientists ‘borrowing from philosophy’ but who may ‘not be capable of detecting any shortcomings in what is imported’. As such they argue that the ‘net value of the transaction’ may ultimately be ‘negative rather than positive’. Pinder and Bourgeoise suggest that Burrell and Morgan adopted a ‘non-standard’ use of ontology; specifically a use which refers to the ‘existential propositions’ of a theory (the set of assumptions about existence that must be made if one is to accept a certain theory) rather than ontology per se. They argue that for the past three centuries ontology has had a relatively stable meaning as ‘the study of qua being, i.e. the study of existence in general, independent of any particular existing things’. Pinder and Bourgeoise suggest: ‘It is not a question of ontology to ask whether organizations exist . . . whether organizations exist is a matter for science to deal with because it concerns the existence of particular things, not the nature of existence (Pinder and Bourgeoise, 1981: 13). And third, as Burrell and Morgan consider their four paradigms to be ‘self-exclusive’ phenomena, such a position raises questions about philosophical issues of incommensurability and relativism. We are given, for example, no firm testament as to how inter-paradigm debate, movement and understanding can take place, other than through pointing to possible ‘epistemological breaks’ (e.g. in economics by Karl Marx; philosophy, Louis Althusser; or organization theory, David Silverman, etc.). In fact references to inter-paradigm understanding are rather confusing. While initially there is a firm assertion that ‘the four paradigms are mutually exclusive . . . they offer different ways of seeing’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 25), later there is equivocation, this starting with the view that ‘some inter-paradigm debate is also possible’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 36, emphasis in original) and later that relations between the paradigms are better described in terms of ‘disinterested hostility’ rather than ‘debate’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 36). Although rarely discussed in commentaries on Burrell and Morgan, on page 27 of their book there is a graphic (i.e. Figure 3.2) that clearly illustrates how theorizing in one paradigm can be directly influenced by that of others, with the specific illustration of ‘intellectual influences upon the functionalist paradigm’. This reflects a criticism made by several writers in the 1970s and 1980s that such multiple paradigm theorizing was arguing for paradigm ‘blindness’ and paradigm ‘bridges’ at the same time.

Significance of philosophy It can be argued that in the time since Burrell and Morgan developed their paradigmatic scheme the field of OT has changed considerably. From the 1990s, in particular, a philosophically ‘different’ domain of theorizing has evolved in the form of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The ascent of such poststructural forms of analysis has seen the tradition of defining research societies as paradigms go into significant decline. Notably the conventional mainstay of paradigm thought in sociology and OT – the ‘subjective–objective’ dimension, used recurrently to elucidate issues of agency and structure – has seemed problematical as a foundation for explaining deconstructionist concepts, with this causing some commentators to suggest that the 505

John Hassard

‘subjectivity–objectivity’ division had now been ‘eroded’. Such a line of analysis has underpinned a number of ‘synthetic’ perspectives – under the guise for example of structuration theory, critical realism, rhetorical institutionalism, etc. However, while this move toward reconciliatory analysis has suggested the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies, other authors have argued that many of these synthetic proposals are theoretically tentative. Others have argued that the attrition of ontological and epistemological antonyms – and the related decline in paradigmatic theorizing – may be factors that have worked to the detriment of basic sociological and organizational theorizing (Hassard and Wolfram Cox, 2013). The suggestion is that the move from paradigmatic analysis may unintentionally rob researchers of ways of understanding the fundamental philosophical principles upon which sociological and OT perspectives are based. Although this form of theorizing was widespread in what might be called the ‘Kuhnian’ period for OT, in recent times organization theorists have become less au fait with the significance of meta-theoretical differences for realizing important research. Arguably a significant development for the field, therefore, would be a research programme directed at revisiting paradigm models in order to determine if they still have explanatory power for interpreting the ‘post-paradigm times’ of contemporary OT. In comparison with recent theoretical advances, an argument can be made for returning to paradigm in order to explain sociological knowledge meta-theoretically. This would see paradigmatic thinking deployed to conceptualize the major theory and research domains of the field. In Kuhnian terms, the argument would be that as ‘disciplinary matrices’ representing ‘constellations of commitments’, paradigm communities naturally take recourse to assumptions of what constitutes appropriate professional behaviour, with everyday research replicating the authority of scientific ‘exemplars’ for the field. In terms of recent OT, such an enterprise would account for the philosophical suppositions that underscore what are arguably the three main sociological paradigms of modern times – structural, anti-structural and poststructural forms of theory and research (Hassard and Wolfram Cox, 2013). The goal of such an endeavour would be simple – to go against the grain of recent thinking in order to help researchers in their conceptualization of OT and its recent evolution. The argument would suggest it is wholly proper to schematize theoretical orientations which eschew schematization – for while certain scholarly communities may not welcome such an enterprise this is not a reason for its prohibition.

Future directions Finally, in terms of commenting on any future directions the paradigm concept may take in organization studies, while it may be foolhardy to predict the trajectory of philosophical theorizing it may arguably be less so to speculate on methodological innovations that may come to mind. When considering prospects for OT, we can suggest that as this field has profited previously from joining theory to method pluralistically, a useful product of considering recent paradigm developments (i.e. structural, anti-structural and poststructural) may be a research approach founded on their triangulation. In comparison with earlier methodological advances, this may see poststructural meta-theories used alongside those for structure and agency as the foundation for pursuing pluralistic inquiries. Similar to approaches such as paradigm interplay, multiple paradigm research and meta-triangulation – and acknowledging both sites of overlap and areas of contradiction – this might represent, conceptually, a more comprehensive scheme for examining current concerns for organization research. Despite the view that field research founded on pluralistic paradigms may be shallow or superficial, an advance such as this might help researchers to meet Bechara and Van de Ven’s (2011) challenge for triangulating philosophies 506

Paradigms

in order to appreciate organizational issues more holistically. This approach may also permit researchers, at once, to appreciate key distinctions among epistemic communities, consider the value of ‘fringe’ theories and methods, and confront the authority of dominant methodological and research narratives.

References (key texts in bold) Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bechara, J. and Van de Ven, A. (2011). Triangulating philosophies of science to understand complex organizational and managerial problems. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 32, 342–64. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Deetz, S. (1996). Describing differences in approaches to organizational science: rethinking Burrell and Morgan and their legacy. Organization Science, 7, 191–207. Eckburg, D. and Hill, L. (1979). The paradigm concept and sociology: a critical review. American Sociological Review, 44: 925–37. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gouldner, A. (1970). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann. Hassard, J. and Wolfram Cox, J. (2013). Can sociological paradigms still inform organizational analysis? Organization Studies, 34 (11): 1701–28. Kuhn, T. (1962[1970]). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds) (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinder, C. and Bourgeoise, L. (1981). Borrowing and the effectiveness of administrative science. Working Paper 848, University of British Columbia. Ritzer, G. (1978). Sociology: a multiple paradigm science. New York: Allyn & Bacon. Schütz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Shepherd, C. and Challenger, R. (2013). Revisiting paradigm(s) in management research: a rhetorical analysis of the paradigm wars. International Journal of Management Reviews, 15(2): 225–44.

507

47 Performativity Towards a performative turn in organizational studies Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

Introduction Since John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How to Do Things With Words (Austin, 1962) authors from a variety of disciplines, such as philosophy (Derrida, 1979; Lyotard, 1984 [1979]), gender studies (Barad, 2003; Butler, 1990), sociology (Callon, 1998; MacKenzie and Millo, 2003), communication studies (Taylor and Van Every, 2000), or literary criticsm (Fish, 1976) have taken over Austin’s insight that ‘words can do things’. These translations have in turn influenced organization scholars who have used the performativity concept to shed light on a number of organizational phenomena. Thus, even though some scholars have argued that ‘over the last decades, J.L. Austin’s work has slid into a state of respectable semi-obscurity’ (Crary, 2002: 59), it is fair to say that Austin’s original insights had a very high generative power across disciplines. In what follows, our intention is not to review all the translations of the performativity concepts that exist, but to focus on a few perspectives that have inspired organization scholars. To this aim, we first present Austin’s initial insights and explain how it has been used in organization studies. Then, we review four distinct approaches to performativity that have led to important developments in current organization theory (Diedrich et al., 2013; Guérard et al., 2013; Gond et al., 2015), namely: Derrida and Butler’s conception of performativity as constitution through citation; Callon’s conception of performativity as bringing theory into being; Barad’s conception of performativity as sociomateriality mattering; and, finally, Lyotard’s conception of performativity as searching for efficiency. For each of these conceptualizations, we describe the underlying performativity mechanism and provide illustrations of their use in organizational studies. Our conclusion highlights some of the common features that these perspectives on performativity share and some of the debates related to tensions inherent to their co-existence in organizational studies.

Austin’s seminal insight on performative utterances and the uses of language J.L. Austin (1911–1960) is a British philosopher who was part of an Oxford-based group of philosophers, known as the ‘ordinary language’ school of philosophy, and which included 508

Performativity

language and law philosophers such as H.P. Grice and H.L. Hart. During the famous ‘Saturday Mornings’, this new generation of Oxford philosophers was discussing the uses of everyday language and promoting a pragmatic approach to language focused on ‘utterances’ (i.e. the intentional acts of speakers at time and place). In so doing, these philosophers were introducing important changes in the philosophy of language, which until then had mainly been concerned with semantics and the meaning of linguistic expressions. Against the semantic approach to language promoted by Cambridge-based philosophers like Russell or Wittgenstein, or logical philosophers like Carnap, Austin considered that philosophers should study the many uses of language and the information generated by the act of uttering (or speech acts) instead of focusing on what linguistic items mean in themselves. Austin has enunciated his ideas about language in a collection of essays: How to Do Things With Words. A core concept of this book is that of performative utterances, ‘in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying something we are doing something’ (Austin, 1962: 12). For instance, the phrase ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’ is not a statement which is true or false (i.e. a constative or descriptive utterance), rather it is a performative utterance which does what it says by the very fact of being pronounced. Such a statement however, can only ‘do’ things if (1) the conditions are felicitous – the sentence has to be said by a person who has some form of authority (e.g. by a priest during a wedding ceremony); and (2) the intention of the speaker is serious – if the sentence is said as a joke or in fake contexts then the conditions become in felicitous. Austin and his pupil John Searle (Searle, 1969) elaborated on this insight to develop a theory of ‘speech acts’ that distinguish notably: locutionary acts which refer to the explicit meaning of an utterance, from illocutionary acts which refer to their intention, or perlocutionary acts that point to the actual effect produced by an utterance, being it intentional or not. Organization scholars have imported Austin and Searle’s ideas to inform our understanding of a variety of organizational phenomena. Ford and Ford’s (1995) model of intentional change in organizations, for instance, offers a striking illustration of how speech act theory can inform organizational studies. For these authors, intentional organizational change is a ‘communicationbased and communication driven phenomenon’ (Ford and Ford, 1995: 542): it happens because change agents rely on various types of conversations – each composed of a ‘distinct combination of speech act’ (Ford and Ford, 1995: 543) – which complement each other and interplay to make an intentional organizational change ‘happen’. Ford and Ford (1995) further argue that ‘each speech act establishes a new reality (or continues the current reality) with which the listeners must now interact’ (Ford and Ford, 1995: 544). For instance, to start a process of organizational change, change agents initiate conversations that rely on assertions (e.g. ‘We need to do something about the deteriorating situation in the East.’), declarations (e.g. ‘We will substantially increase the availability of health care.’), requests (e.g. ‘Will you approve our undertaking a new program to restructure the department?’) or promises (e.g. ‘We will reduce the budget deficit by 25 per cent this year.’). Every phase of the organizational change process, from its initiation to its closure, involves conversations and speech acts which are performative. Hence, conversation and speech acts are the very medium of intentional change, up to the point that: the production of intentional change begins with the recognition that speech is performative. If a manager believes that talk is cheap, then the power of designing intentional conversations to move a change project through its constitutive communications should be abandoned. (Ford and Ford 1995: 556) The work of scholars from the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) school of thought, such as Cooren, is another important body of work in organization studies that has 509

Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

elaborated on Austin’s and Searle’s legacy. CCO scholars mobilize Austin and Searle’s work on speech act and insights from actor–network theory to develop the idea that organizations are constituted through communicative events. In so doing, they have developed a notion of performativity which remains attached to Austin’s interest for language but recognizes the materiality of communication. For CCO scholars, the performativity of communication comes both from a process of textualization by which organizations are stabilized as recognizable actors, and a process of conversation by which organizations are accomplished in situ. CCO works thus show how organizational communication (e.g. text, reports, memos) shapes the stabilization and repetition of organizational activities, and brings the organization into existence (Cooren, 2004). For instance, this approach has been used to conceptualize the functioning of clandestine organizations, which despite their limited room to constitute themselves through communication, nonetheless exist precisely thanks to communicative acts. Terrorist organizations, such as al Quaeda, exist (partly) through the communicative acts of third parties, such as the media, which make their actions highly visible (Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012).

Four performativity perspectives that have inspired organization scholars Performativity as constitution through citation (Derrida, Butler) The French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the American gender theorist Judith Butler have developed original translations of Austin’s idea, which both insist on citation as a core mechanism of performativity. Derrida (1979) first engaged with Austin in his essay titled ‘Signature, event, context’ where he argued that the ‘force’ (or success) of a performative utterance derives less from the intentions of the speakers or the context in which it has been said than from an underlying mechanism of iterability or citation. For Derrida thus, what makes a performative successful is the fact that these utterances are ‘identifiable in some sort of way as “a citation”’ (Derrida, 1979: 192) and that the intention of the speaker is perceived as fully serious. For instance, one cannot get married unless the wedding ceremony is already in existence and people attending the event can identify the situation as being serious rather than fictitious (e.g. a wedding ceremony organized for the purpose of movie-making). Through this mechanism of citation, the self is actively constituted as well as its context. In organizational analysis, Derrida’s mechanism of citation has been used by various scholars, such as Learmonth (2005) who studies the consequences of discursive changes in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Learmonth shows what the shift from an ‘administrative’ (e.g. ‘administrator’) to a ‘managerial’ (e.g. ‘chief executive’) vocabulary – and the growing use of ‘discourses of leadership’ – do to the world and the people working in the NHS. As one of the NHS trust chief executives explains: when consultants actually want to diminish what I do, they call me an administrator [a term predominantly used in the 1980s] because that’s about your job is to support what we do; accepting that I’m actually a chief executive gives me a leadership position. (Learmonth, 2005: 624) For Learmonth, ‘the words “administrator” or “chief executive” in the mouth of a consultant have a force that works in a way that is not dissimilar to the wedding pronouncement of a priest’ (Learmonth, 2005: 624–5), and this example reflects Derrida’s mechanism of citation, as 510

Performativity

‘[t]his speech act can do the things it does because it has accumulated cultural intelligibility given constant authoritative use – its citation in particular ways’ (Learmonth, 2005: 625). Building on Derrida’s original insights, Judith Butler has investigated the process whereby the self is constituted through citation by exploring gender’s performativity in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter (Butler, 1990, 1993). In these books, Butler has further developed the mechanism of constitution through citation by stressing the involvement of materiality in the process of gender constitution. For her, gender is performatively constituted through cultural discourse and the materiality of the body, and the ‘inner truth of gender is a fabrication’ (Butler, 1990: 110). All the micro-movements of the body and repeated acts occur within a set of meanings that facilitate the constitution of gendered bodies. Butler’s view on performativity has been heavily mobilized in organizational analysis, notably by scholars studying gender issues or the constitution of identities in the workplace (e.g. Ford and Harding 2004; see also Chapter 38 in this volume). Tyler and Cohen (2010) built on Butler’s work to investigate the gendering of the workplace in relation to space. Their study shows how women working in a UK university manage space constraints, deal with spatial invasion of their workplace by their (male) colleagues, and personalize their workspaces by displaying (or not) certain types of photographs (e.g. family photos), artworks (e.g. children’s artwork) or personal items (e.g. holiday memento), depending on how they perceive the informal rules of the organization in relation to space, gender and identity. This study reveals how ‘gender performativity is materialized in and through organizational space’ (Tyler and Cohen, 2010: 177).

Performativity as bringing theory into being (Callon, MacKenzie, Muniesa) A recent turn in the conceptualization performativity is due to the French sociologist and actor–network theorist Michel Callon. For Callon (2007), Austin’s insight can be applied to any kind of statement, including scientific ones. Accordingly, scientific statements (or models) do not describe an external reality but contribute to constitute this reality through interventions which usually involve material, political and cultural activities. Callon (1998) mobilized this idea in a collective book, The Laws of the Markets, in which he developed the ‘performativity of economics thesis’ and invited sociologists to investigate how economics contributes to build the economy it is supposed to describe. MacKenzie and Millo (2003) have offered a striking illustration of this thesis by showing how economic knowledge has been actively mobilized in the creation of financial derivatives exchanges. These authors showed how the predictive power of the ‘Black-Scholes’ option pricing formula increased thanks to its inscription within tools, such as Black-Scholes price sheets, or computers programmed with Black-Scholes solutions, that traders use to price options. Subsequent works have categorized this form of performativity as an extreme case, labelled ‘Barnesian performativity’, and identified three other types of performativity: ‘generic performativity’ corresponds to the cases where concepts or causal relationships from economics are actually used by actors; ‘effective performativity’ captures situations in which such a mobilization makes a difference and produces effects in economic processes, whereas ‘counterperformativity’ points to cases within which the adoption of a theory by actors decreases its empirical verisimilitude (MacKenzie, 2007). Other works have focused on the role of material artefacts in the performativity of finance and economic theory (MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu 2007), and on how management knowledge helps ‘provoking’ the creation of economic realities by organizing ‘simulacrum’ which can take the form of focus groups aiming at evaluating consumers’ tastes, or case study teaching (Muniesa, 2014). 511

Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

Organizations scholars have built on this approach in order to study specific forms of organizational routines and practices that are rooted in expert bodies of knowledge, or theories. Cabantous and Gond (2011) proposed the concept of ‘performative praxis’ to document the practices that help instantiating and performing economic knowledge within organizations. These authors, who studied the specific case of rational choice theory, theorized three processes, engineering, conventionalizing and commodification, whereby economic knowledge supports organizational practices. D’Adderio and Pollock (2014) have shown how the concept of modularity, which has first been theorized from the analysis of a few leading organizations, has then be injected in organizations through the design of routines that deeply altered organizational functioning, hence ‘bringing into being’ (or performing) specific forms of modularity.

Performativity as sociomateriality mattering (Barad) Another translation of the concept of performativity that has gained currency in organization studies is the one developed by Karen Barad, a feminist theorist with a PhD in physics. Barad’s notion of ‘posthumanist performativity’ consolidates Austin and Butler’s perspectives on performativity while relying on quantic physics and the work of actor–network theorists such as Latour and Law. Barad reconsiders radically the linguistic approach to performativity to affirm its profound materiality: both non-human and human elements have to be regarded as material elements, and the ‘natural’ separations between objects and humans have to be challenged. A ‘posthumanist’ notion of performativity – [is] one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors. Such a posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. (Barad, 2003: 808) Barad’s perspective focuses researchers’ attention on the micro-entanglements, the shaping of the boundaries that separate the material from the social, and the continuous flow of practice that brings actors, objects and ultimately meaning into being. Her concepts of ‘agential cuts’ and ‘intra-actions’ suggest that agents realize ‘cuts’ to delineate objects and humans and constitute specific entities. Barad’s approach of performativity as ‘sociomateriality mattering’ has been used by organizational scholars, in particular those working on information technology (Orlikowski and Scott, 2014), in order to shed light on the sociomaterial constitution of organizations. Nyberg’s (2009) analysis of the functioning of a call centre nicely illustrates the value of Barad’s approach to performativity. This paper shows how the practice of performing a customer service call simultaneously involves the customers, the operator and sets of material devices – the operators’ computers, a central system managing incoming calls and the customer’s own phone – in intricate interactions linking all these entities. Nyberg’s findings show how entities artificially created by the informatics system ultimately reshaped actors’ practices and altered their capacity to meaningfully conduct their job. Though fruitful, Barad’s conceptualization of performativity is currently debated, as the categories she has developed (e.g. intra-actions) appear difficult to operationalize for organizations scholars used to neat separations between human and non-human entities. Showing how material and non-material are intertwined through existing research methods may involve analytically distinguishing between them, an approach which arguably contradicts Barad’s radical ontological assumptions about performativity. 512

Performativity

Performativity as the search for performance (Lyotard) A fourth perspective on performativity that has marked organizational analysis is the one developed by Jean-François Lyotard, in his 1979 essay, The Postmodern Condition. In this book, Lyotard (1984 [1979]) questioned the taken-for-grantedness of the search for ‘performance’ in the production of knowledge by educative systems and defined performativity as the search for efficacy in the achievement of tasks and operations which, according to him, characterizes our contemporary ‘postmodern’ societies. In so doing, Lyotard suggested that postmodern knowledge is ‘performative’ since its intent is to increase performance and efficiency. Lyotard thus denaturalized the contemporary search for performance by showing its ideological dimension and created the possibility to reconsider it. Although Lyotard linked his analysis to Austin – in claiming in a footnote that ‘Austin’s performative realizes the optimal performance’ (Lyotard, 1984[1979]: 88) – the meaning he attached to performativity is seldom associated to Austin’s seminal work. Lyotard’s conception of performativity has proven fruitful in organizational analysis where some scholars have characterized the critical management studies (CMS) tradition by its ‘antiperformative stance’ and its constant questioning of the alignement of knowledge, truth and efficiency (Fournier and Grey, 2000: 17). For most CMS scholars, management knowledge should avoid being ‘performative’, i.e. it should not aim at improving organizational efficiency. The traditional CMS anti-performative stance however, has been challenged by Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman (2009). These authors have proposed to adopt a meaning of performativity that builds on Butler’s approach, instead of Lyotard’s, and have advanced a concept of ‘critical performativity’ to suggest that even though critical management knowledge should not focus on the search for organizational performance, new forms of critical engagement with managerial discourse would be welcomed. Spicer et al. (2009) encourage scholars to develop tactics aiming at promoting an ‘ethics of care’, refocusing managers on the ‘normative’ dimension of their practice, and reshaping managerial practice to align it with ideas rooted in critical management theory (see also Wickert and Schaefer 2015). In reconsidering a constitutive element of the identity of CMS scholars, the critical performativity concept has generated several lines of tensions and debates. On the one hand, it has been interpreted as a betrayal of an ideal of independent critical scholarship that can deconstruct managerial thinking thanks to its (critical or cynical) distance from managerial practice and/or as an unwelcome gesture toward the search for managerial impact mainly driven by institutional demands weighting on the educative system (Fleming and Banerjee, 2015). On the other hand, the concept has been attacked on the conceptual ground that it focuses on a discursive interpretation of Butler’s works, and has missed the opportunity to rely on Callon’s approach of performativity to advance a new agenda for critical scholars (Cabantous et al., 2015; Leca et al., 2014). In particular the material component of performativity seems to have been lost in the translation of Butler’s work by the promoters of critical performativity.

Common features of performativity studies The multiple perspectives of performativity which point to distinct mechanisms and a diversity of organizational contexts may give a feeling of confusion. Beyond apparent differences, it is possible to identify common features to current studies of performativity, in addition to their ‘vaguely similar (pragmatist) direction’ (Muniesa, 2014: 15).

513

Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

A non-representational view of knowledge and discourse Instead of considering that knowledge and discourse ‘represent’ reality, most performativity works favour an understanding of knowledge as a collective and transformative process. Performativity involves the idea that social reality can be transformed through the active mobilization of bodies (Butler), texts (Austin, Derrida), images and/or scientific representations (Callon), and that performativity mechanisms are expressed through embodied practice as well as material artefacts (Tserekis, 2007). In this regard, performativity works reflect a profound move from structural to anti- and poststructural approaches to social reality that has underlined social studies over the past 30 years. Performativity studies move beyond linguistics and the ‘problem of description’ – i.e. the debated idea that there would be a clear and easy cut between ‘constative’ (descriptive) and ‘performative’ utterances – to go deeper ‘into a pragmatist, materialist philosophy of signification’ and to start from the idea that ‘descriptions [whatever their style of reference] add to the world’ (Muniesa, 2014: 18).

Relationality Relationality is a second dimension underlying performativity studies. It builds on the semiotic insight according to which there are no essentialist oppositions between pre-existing entities having well-defined properties, such as large and small, materiality and sociality, and that instead entities and their properties are produced in relation with one another (Law, 1999). In applying a relational assumption to all types of entities, not only linguistic ones, performativity works insist on the idea that entities and their properties are produced in and by their relations with one another: this is through relations that entities are ‘performed’. What matters thus, is to study the continuous activities that are needed for such relations to be maintained and what the network of relations performs.

An ontology of becoming Such a relational take on reality leads to an interest for the becoming of things and actors across performativity works (Diedrich et al., 2013). A relational approach to social reality invites scholars to study unfolding relations and the dynamic processes of ‘becoming’, instead of assuming that the social world is made of static things. A performative approach thus directs scholars’ attention to the actual doing of actors and resonates well with the process and practice turns in organization studies.

Materiality Finally, most works on performativity are interested in materiality of discourse or knowledge in social contexts, and aim at understanding either the material effects of discursive practices (Cooren, 2004), the sociomaterial nature of knowledge constitution (Barad, 2003) or the sociomaterial expressions of knowledge mobilization (MacKenzie and Millo, 2003). This makes performativity works also aligned with the ‘material turn’ in organizational analysis.

Conclusion: challenges to organize the performative turn in organization studies In capitalizing on the multiple translations of performativity across social sciences, organizational analyses of performativity have espoused the move from a locus of attention initially focused 514

Performativity

on language, to an interest for the non-representative, relational, processual and material dimensions of organizational life. These analyses point to a renewed definition of performativity focused on the constitution of relationships between activity, materiality and temporality (Denis, 2006). Yet, in so doing organizational scholars have also imported approaches to performativity that reflect distinct mechanisms and do not emphasize the same dimensions of performativity (Gond et al., 2015). As a result, the rich concept of performativity has not yet given rise to a clear stream of research or an easily identifiable body of organizational work. This situation raises multiple questions, such as: to what extent multiple performativity mechanisms co-exist and interact within organizations; how to balance tensions across performativity conceptualizations (e.g. the critical performativity versus anti-performativity debate); or how to design a space in organizational studies in order to advance our knowledge of performativity. Finally, most recent developments on performativity stress the distributed and collective nature of the performativity process which may involve multiple entities operating at a distance through ‘ventriloquism’ (Cooren, 2012). They thus point to the importance of organization in performativity. This gives organizational scholars a unique opportunity to theorize the organizing of performativity, document the coexistence and interactions of multiple forms of performativity and help organize a pluralistic understanding of performativity. We hope that this chapter, in specifying and bringing together various meanings of performativity as well as areas of convergence and constructive tensions, will further help performing a ‘performative turn’ in organizational studies.

References (key texts in bold) Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3): 801–31. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Cabantous, L. and Gond, J-P. (2011). Rational decision-making as ‘performative praxis’: explaining rationality’s éternel retour. Organization Science, 22(3): 573–86. Cabantous, L., Gond, J.-P., Hardy, N. and Learmonth, M. (2015). Reconsidering critical performativity. Human Relations (Published online). DOI: 10.1177/0018726715584690. Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, M. (2007). What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu, L. (eds). Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 311–57. Cooren, F. (2004). Textual agency: how texts do things in organizational settings. Organization, 11(3): 373–93. Cooren, F. (2012). Communication theory at the center: ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of reality. Journal of Communication, 61(2): 1–20. Crary, A. (2002). The happy truth: J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words. Inquiry, 45: 59–80. D’Adderio, L. and Pollock, N. (2014). Performing modularity: competing rules, performative struggles and the effect of organizational theories on the organization. Organization Studies, 35(12): 1813–43. Denis, J. (2006). Préface: les nouveaux visages de la performativité. Études de Communications, 29(12): 7–24. Derrida, J. (1979). Signature, event, context. Glyph, 1: 172–97. Diedrich, A., Eriksson-Zetterquist, U., Ewertsson, L. et al. (2013). Exploring the performativity turn in management studies. GRI-rapport, 2013: 2. Gothenburg Research Institute. Fish, S. (1976). How to do things with Austin and Searle: speech act theory and literary criticism. MLN, 91(5): 983–1025. Fleming, P. and Banerjee, S.B. (2015). When performativity fails: Implications for critical management studies. Human Relations. Forthcoming. Ford, J. and Harding, N. (2004). We went looking for an organization but could only find the metaphysics of its presence. Sociology, 38(4): 815–30. 515

Jean-Pascal Gond and Laure Cabantous

Ford, J.D. and Ford, L.W. (1995). The role of conversations in producing intentional change in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20(3): 541–70. Fournier, V. and Grey, C. (2000). ‘At the critical moment’: conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 53(1): 7–32. Gond, J.-P., Cabantous, L., Hardy, N. and Learmonth, M. (2015). What do we mean by performativity in organization studies? The uses and abuses of performativity. International Journal of Management Reviews (Published online). DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12074. Guérard, S., Langley, A. and Seidl, D. (2013). From performance to performativity in strategy research. M@n@gement, 16(5): 264–76. Law, J. (1999). After ANT: complexity, naming and topology. The Sociological Review, 47(S1): 1–14. Learmonth, M. (2005). Doing things with words: the case of management and administration. Public Administration, 83: 617–37. Leca, B., Gond, J.-P. and Barin-Cruz, L. (2014). Building critical performativity engines for deprived communities. The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil. Organization, 21(4): 683–712. Lyotard, J-F. (1984 [1979]). The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacKenzie, D. (2007). Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets, in MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu, L. (eds), Do Economists Make Markets?: On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 54–86. MacKenzie, D. and Millo, Y. (2003). Constructing a market, performing a theory: the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange. American Review of Sociology, 109(1): 107–45. MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu L. (eds) (2007). Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Muniesa, F. (2014). The Provoked Economy. Economic Reality and the Performative Turn. London and New York: Routledge. Nyberg, D. (2009). Computers, customer service operatives and cyborgs: intra-actions in call centres. Organization Studies, 30(11): 1181–99. Orlikowski, W.J. and Scott, S.V. (2014). What happens when evaluation goes online? Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector. Organization Science, 25(3): 868–91. Schoeneborn, D. and Scherer, A.G. (2012). Clandestine organizations, al Qaeda, and the paradox of (in)visibility: a response to Stohl and Stohl. Organization Studies, 33(7): 963–71. Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spicer, A., Alvesson, M. and Kärreman, D. (2009). Critical performativity: the unfinished business of critical management studies. Human Relations, 62(4): 537–60. Taylor, J.R. and Van Every, E.J. (2000). The Emergent Organization: Communication as its Site and Surface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tserekis, C. (2008). Performativity, in Ritzer, G. (ed.), Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology. Blackwell Reference Online, www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9781405124331_yr2010 _chunk_g978140512433122_ss1-52 (accessed 7 July 2015). Tyler, M. and Cohen, L. (2010). Spaces that matter: gender performativity and organizational space. Organization Studies, 31(2): 175–98. Wickert, C. and Schaefer, S.M. (2015). Towards a progressive understanding of performativity in critical management studies. Human Relations, 68(1): 107–30.

516

48 Power and organizations A brief but critical genealogy Stewart Clegg

Power, by some calculations, is the central concept of the social sciences generally. Surprisingly perhaps, this is not a view commonly expressed in management and organization studies. Concerns with legitimacy conceived as authority have been far more evident than concerns with power, usually cast as authority’s other, as illegitimate. Issues of legitimacy have been central to discussions of power from the outset.

Prolegomenon The Ancient Athenians distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate power in terms of a contrast between power that accorded to the dictates of law (nomos) and power that exalted the glorification of a specific individual (hubris). In the work of Aristotle (350 BC), this became refined in terms of a six-fold classification of governments according to whose interests are served. Monarchy is the government of the many in the interests of all, Aristocracy by the few in the interests of all, Constitutional government is by the majority in the interests of all, while the corrupt illegitimate versions are Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy, in which the one, the few or the majority each govern in their own interests, disregarding the interests of the whole. Most modern for profit organizations are oligarchies, with ‘shareholder value’ inscribed as the oligarchical slogan. A normative and prescriptive emphasis on how power should be designed was the major form of reflection in ancient philosophy and in theology until the Renaissance, when a newer, modern form of reflection emerged in fifteenth-century Florentine society that, by contrast with Christendom’s expressed pieties (as opposed to many of its practices), could only seem shockingly pragmatic. Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat, courtier and spurned servant of power in the Medici court, thought in terms of statecraft, strategy and political gamesmanship best suited to the expedient achievement of specific ends. Machiavelli regarded power in terms of intrigue, illusion and artifice, as he developed in his work, The Prince (Machiavelli, 1961), written around 1513 but not published until about 1532. As such power flows through strategic action produced by differentially competent and skilled actors – actors in every sense of the word. Strategic action often demanded the theatre of violence, of cruelty, of acts of dissimulation and deceit. 517

Stewart Clegg

If Niccolò Machiavelli offers one influential modern template for thinking about power, Thomas Hobbes (1658[1982]) offers another. In Hobbes (1658[1982]), the sovereign political actor creates society as an architectonic product, which gives individuals a capacity for action. The ultimate backing for power is violence and coercion over which the Sovereign holds a monopoly. Power was viewed through metaphors of clockwork: it was seen as equivalent to a cause – to be able to cause something to happen was to exercise power conceived as mechanical motion. Somewhat later the causal conception was maintained but the metaphors shifted from those of cogs and flywheels to those of a gentleman’s sport: billiards. Locke (1959[1690]) conceived of causal relations as in terms of the motion of billiard balls, a metaphor later used by Hume (1748). Causal relations, he argued, are discoverable by induction. The idea that an object at rest stays at rest unless some force acts upon it is nicely illustrated on the billiard table and accorded with the views of classical mechanics. These terms, of forces acting upon one another and the determination of superior force being evident in the observation of movement became inscribed as the normalcy of writing about power in the twentieth century when political theory evolved into political science, with strongly behaviourist foundations. Machiavelli’s spirit of pragmatic realism can also be seen later in Nietzsche (1901[1967]), for whom power is a capacity to define reality. If you can define the real and the moral, you create the conditions of legitimacy. The terms of trade of legitimacy have changed markedly: what is at issue now, of course, is not normative legitimacy, as in Aristotle, but legitimacy as a sociological fact of domination. One scholar influenced by Nietzsche’s work was the great sociologist, Max Weber (1978), whose corpus of comparative sociology was focused on the social construction of relations of power, domination and legitimacy, particularly through the different world religions. In Weber’s (1978) work, power could be either legitimate or based upon the threat of violence.

The dawning of modern concerns with power Various concepts of power are absolutely central to any understanding of organizations and organization studies. No organization can escape power relations because all organization encroaches on the autonomy of those subjected to it: contractual terms governing relations of employment and instruments of employee prescription, description and correction related to them are all tools of power. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that any organization should be conceived not just as a tool, as something purposive, instrumental and goal oriented: it is also always a tool of power. Organization entails limits on individual discretion, autonomy and management of the self. The notion of power as a causal mechanism is strikingly modern. Power becomes seen not just as something that some might have but as a property of relations between subjects best guaranteed by an overarching sovereignty conceived as legitimate rulership of those subject to it; in modern organizations, the assumption of the rights of rulership are vested in managers whose job is essentially that of stewardship, husbandry and innovation in the disposition of those resources over which they have day-to-day control. In the twentieth century, objectively perceived relations of causal impact and subsequent movement in positions in pursuit of some apparent future good were to be used to define what was to become seen as the essential nature of power: the ability of one party to get other parties to do things that they would not otherwise do, whose achievement will be signalled by such an objectively observable shift in position. From this perspective a whole discourse of power constituted in terms of preferences, decision-making and interests could be, and was, generated. It was premised on a mechanical, causal and atomistic conception of power. 518

Power

The intricacies of legitimate versus illegitimate power; of coercion versus authority; of collective systemic versus individual agent specific power; of constitutive power versus power from which there is escape, and of power as autonomy versus constraint, are all aspects of power’s many faces which have shaped contemporary perceptions of power in the social sciences. Tangled up with these central perceptions of power’s empirical character are a great many normative issues, often encoded in different forms of address of the same topic. For instance, political philosophy or political theory were both more inclined to engage with power in normative terms, with what should be done, while political science from the late 1920s and early 1930s explicitly engaged with power in empirical terms, looking at what is done rather than what should be done. Yet, for all this institutional separation, there has been a tendency for normative issues to intrude, except for the most self-consciously ascetically empiricist of practitioners. This is especially the case in more recent debates in which the threads of genealogy, that we have briefly sketched, have tended to wend their way into empirical analysis.

Power in modern social theory Lukes’ 1974 book, Power: a radical view, published in an expanded second edition in 2005, was a major landmark in the conceptualization of power. He shows that different dimensions of power rest on a different set of moral assumptions: The one-dimensional view of power is premised on liberal assumptions; the second dimensional view of power is premised on a reformist view, while it is the moral assumptions of radicalism that underlie the third dimensional way of seeing power. The one-dimensional view of power pivots around an account of the different preferences that actors might hold and how these will be settled empirically. Philosophically, it was bedded in behaviourism and best depicted in 1957 by Robert Dahl. The behavioural view concentrates on observable behaviour and concrete decisions that are expressed in overt conflict concerning specific issues, revealed in political participation. The two-dimensional view adds some features to the primary view. This emerged from an interpretive critique of the behavioural position by Bachrach and Baratz (1962), identifying what they termed the ‘second face’ of power, one that sought to admit analysis not only of observable behaviours but also of intuited intentions, nondecisions as well as decisions. It does not focus just on observable behaviour but seeks to make an interpretative understanding of the intentions that are seen to lie behind social actions. These come into play, especially, when choices are made concerning what agenda items are ruled in or ruled out; when it is determined that, strategically, for whatever reasons, some areas remain a zone of non-decision rather than decision. What is important is how some issues realize their potential to mature while some others do not; how some become manifest while others remain latent. Given that an issue may remain latent then conflict is not merely overt; it may also be covert, as resentment simmers about something that has yet to surface publicly. One may address these two-dimensional phenomena not so much through discrete political participation as through express policy preferences embodied in sub-political grievances. From Lukes’ point of view, the two-dimensional position is an improvement on that which is one dimensional – but it could be improved further. Hence, he provides what he calls a threedimensional view – a radical view to be contrasted with what he sees as the liberal disposition of behaviourist views and their reform by interpretative accounts. While the previous views both define their field of analysis in terms of policy preferences, with the second dimension relating them to sub-political grievances, the radical view relates policy preferences to real interests. Real interests are defined as something objective, as distinct from the interests that people express through their preferences. By definition, real interests are what the analyst would have them 519

Stewart Clegg

be: they cannot be judged by the subject who does not express them – because such subjects are systematically deluded about their interests: a condition which he refers to as being subject to hegemony, a term that he borrows from the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971). For Gramsci hegemony is the normal form of control: it is rare for ruling groups to have recourse to explicit force or violence to assert their will – in fact that they have to do so shows that they lack real power – because it means that they have not successfully established hegemony. Hegemony occurs when the ruled consent to their rule and imagine the reality of their everyday existence in terms of concepts that cannot do other than reproduce their consent and subordination. Usually, these concepts are provided by organizations in civil society rather than the state: it is to the institutions of the church, schools, unions and media that one should look to find the loci of hegemony. Here organic intellectuals attached to the dominant class reproduce its worldviews, concepts and categories for popular consumption. One consequence of Gramsci’s view is that power rarely needs to be exercised where hegemony reigns. Hegemony legitimates existing distributions and structures of power. It is only when there is some crisis in the normal reproduction of these powers, when the illusions of hegemony are exposed, that those in positions of power seek to exercise it in order to reassert control. Hence, the exercise of power, rather than being a talisman of forcefulness, becomes a tacit admission of weakness. Real power, power that is secure, power that rules successfully, does so through hegemony. Under hegemonic conditions the favoured groups that dominate have their interests routinely attended to by all the everyday aspects of existence that are taken-for-granted in the ways things normally work. We should look for power as something present in uneventful routines that attain naturalness and are reproduced as if they were natural in such a way that they are rarely if ever challenged. With the third dimensional view of power the concept shifts into a radical interiority: it is tied up with what people find themselves able to articulate and say, what their consciousness, defined in terms of normal discourses and language, enables them to think and feel. In other words, what we have is a kind of negative account: rather than shaping consciousness positively, through discourse, radical theorists such as Lukes see power as prohibitory, negative and restrictive. If people are systematically deluded about their interests they cannot emancipate themselves; if their individuality and autonomy is to be respected then no one else can emancipate them – only they can emancipate themselves from mental slavery – but lacking the tools to do so, they never will unless some external agency interferes. But, if it does so, then it will be acting in their interests as that external agency constitutes them – not as the people whose interests they are would define them. The third-dimension of hegemonic power comes into play when subordinated groups become dispirited and stop struggling. Where people are unable to express themselves positively through power relations with others then they have no opportunity for building skills in and knowledge of power. Where people are subject to many competing interpellations that chronically disorganize their consciousness, so that they cannot decide what to believe, then they will be more likely subject to hegemony. Hegemony bites philosophically on the disorganization of the masses and deepens it through their further fragmentation, individuation and pacification.

Power in modern organizations Despite their differences both Hobbes and Machiavelli were realists about power; they differed on what it was, not that it was. Modern social theory also harbours no illusions about power 520

Power

relations: they are hegemonic; they are shaping people’s sense of real interests falsely. Modern organization theorists, perversely, for a long time did not share the same realism. While they could bring themselves to write about the functions of the executive and leadership they were far less forthcoming about what was being executed and how leading was done. Where they touched on it at all they preferred to discuss the social action component of execution and leadership in terms of authority: modern organizations were characterized by authority, defined by legitimacy, which made it absolutely normal that hierarchy would prevail, that imperative command would be the order of the day and that order would be achieved through subordination. Surprisingly, despite some lip service in the post-war era to recent translations of Max Weber’s work into English from the German, in which work concepts of domination and power were absolutely central, power was rarely theorized as the centrepiece of all organizational life. Such reluctance may seem surprising when one considers that almost every organization consists of stratified imperative chains of command and obedience, even if only between a small business person and employee. All the features of routine organizational life that one takes for granted, such as selling others one’s time and command over the exercise of one’s capabilities during that time, having routines imposed as if they were drill, learning to adopt behavioural repertoires such as texts, contexts and costumes, coming to terms with the subjugation of the I of the self in the We of the organization, even through resistance – all these work on a subject of power. Some of it is explicitly Hobbesian: one clocks on and off; one performs in terms of key performance indicators as signs of an apparent future good, and some of it is implicitly Machiavellian as one manoeuvres one’s way through the various arenas and games of organizational life, dissembling here, conniving there, and acting everywhere. Still, in many of the classics of the field one would look in vain for explicit recognition of the phenomena canvassed in the preceding paragraph. Power is not conceived as the raison d’être that runs through the whole structural arrangement and processes of organizations; rather, it is conceived as an illegitimate and occasional form of social action that somehow perturbs the accepted order of things, that disrupts normal authority relations at worst or at best reconfigures them entrepreneurially. The largely functionalist tone of mainstream organization theory is responsible for this skewing of power analysis off-centre. Power conceived of as everyday power over others and other things disrupts functional harmony, disrupts the taken-for-granted order of things. It is when takenfor-granted order is violated that power can be seen in the conflict that ensues. Power thus becomes associated not with the construction of an appearance of order but its questioning, as illegitimate. Power disorders. How is order possible? Hobbes thought that it was only possible through an implicit social contract and this assumption has migrated easily into organization theory. People are conceived of as joining organizations when there is a balance between the inducements offered and the contribution they are asked to make. Where the contribution has major implications for the future, where the time span of discretion is measured in many years rather than a few seconds or even minutes, then the inducements are expected to be exponentially greater. Where the time span of discretion is long then trust has to be vested in the long term as well, although it can be hedged by the many inducements that agency theory, as a modern conception of constitutional theory (governance), has made its own, such as stock options, pension plans and golden handshakes. Less inducements attach to short term discretion: here the contribution can be closely monitored, displaying a lack of trust and an excess of surveillance which, at its most effective, becomes reflexively embedded in one’s self-monitoring capacity as one acts as one not trusted and, in all probability, under some form of surveillance, whether visual or virtual, and strives to present an appropriate impression of the self to superordinate others and their devices. 521

Stewart Clegg

The importance of surveillance as a technique of power came into prominence with the work of Michel Foucault, especially his Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977). Today, of course, surveillance devices are ubiquitous: CCTV, digital data and call monitoring are only the most obvious illustrations. Foucault’s influence does not stop at a stress on surveillance: he also opened up discussions of ways in which concepts of identity and subjectivity are shaped and framed by power relations. The margins of organization theory have many largely neglected voices, some of which have been mentioned. One who has not was the American theorist of practical community democracy, Mary Parker Follett (1995), who started from the assumption that there was a surfeit of power over others in contemporary organizations but a dearth of more collaborative power with and power to. More recent versions of the facilitative power to conception build from the work of Talcott Parsons, who represented power as a system property of the political system, analogous to money in the economy. It is a view of power that sees it in overwhelmingly positive terms. Power conceived this way is creative, it accomplishes acts, and it changes the nature of things and relations. The effects of power as productive or negative are strictly contingent, so for some people the effect may be positive while for others it will be negative. Power itself isn’t ‘over’ or ‘to’ in a transcendent way; it is ‘over’ or ‘to’ depending on the specific situation and the contingent position of the agents involved in the relation. You have the power to access certain areas on the corporate website that are closed to the public while your employer has power over your life chances: offend or upset the employer and you can be retrenched. Power will always exist in a complex contingent tension between a capacity to extend the freedom of some to achieve something or other and an ability to restrict the freedoms of others in doing something or other. These ideas recur repeatedly – but not in the mainstream. We find them in the ideas of the Tavistock Institute and the humanization of work movement, which had considerable influence in northern Europe; they recur in Scandinavian social democracy tutored under the pragmatic working class philosophy of Ernst Wigforss (Dow and Higgins, 2014). However, with the onslaught of economic neo-liberalism from the 1980s onwards they become marginalized. In organization theory the onslaught is registered as a heightened managerialism that recasts Hobbesian social contract theory with the manager as the new sovereign. Managerialism occurs when management ensconces itself systematically in an organization and deprives other stakeholders of their decision-making powers (including the distribution of emoluments) and justifies its takeover on the grounds of the managing group’s professionalized education and exclusive possession of codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of organizations; in other words, managerialism accentuates the claims of modern management to be ‘rational’. The power over that manager’s exercise is embedded in relations of control vested in such a way as to frame their actions. Increasingly, of course, with neo-liberalism, control over more and more passes to ever more concentrated capital, as Thomas Piketty (2014) has charted, making the reproduction of the underlying model of increasingly concentrated capital unsustainable in the long run.

What of future power? In a world of organizations where power over is increasingly framed either directly by capital or by politicians striving to serve what they construct as its interests, there seems little alternative. Yet, as Follett identified, power need not be just restrictive, negative and authoritarian: it can be positive; it can be power to and power with. How might we build a new world of organizations founded on a philosophy of power to do things that would not otherwise be done and that build capacities for power with others and other things to be enhanced? 522

Power

A first step would be working with rather than exploiting nature and each other. Working with nature means moving towards long-term sustainable modes of energy production, resource utilization, recovery and recycling. The use of state power to shift production and consumption preferences through taxation and legislation is absolutely necessary; hence, the growth of grassroots democracy as Follett envisaged it, will be necessary for common people to express their preferences for saving the future rather than furthering its destruction. Essential to this will be the development of organizations as much more polyphonic than monotonic, as arenas in which the fiat of managerialism is loosened, in which decision-making processes are opened up to the many rather than restricted to the few, in which strategic choices become far more liquid, flowing through channels that arise from an overarching strategic intent in the future, in the continuity of life on earth rather than its rapacious exploitation. Markets will have to become limited and framed by expressions of the popular will through new digital possibilities and new social movements creating new public spaces in which the dominant elite’s strategies for maintaining their dominance can be resisted and destabilized. The network-making power of elite power vested in ownership and control of media resources is under attack as the digital commons expands and new networks of meaning construction become possible. The rise of mass self-communication makes the privatization of the digital commons a profitable sphere for old established elite forms of capital but the space constituted is a wild, anarchic space, in which all sorts of new pluralities of ideas may and do circulate, with subversive, resistant effects. Networks of power in various spheres of life are dynamically and contingently networked among themselves and are mediated through switching power: the capacity to connect two or more different networks in the process of making power for each one of them in their respective field – a theory of necessary nodal or obligatory passage points. The networks of power in and around the state constitute the default network for all other networks because the state has ultimate steering capacity. Harnessing the powers of the digital commons institutionally, we should be able to build on available models of codetermination for reformed governance structures of non-financial firms with limited voting rights attached to institutional shareholders, in which all stakeholders should have power over the appointment of CEOs and Boards as well as remuneration strategies. The importance of democracy and of politics need to be rediscovered and taught as staples of professional management responsive and responsible to all stakeholders, including trade unions, non-management employees, communities and ecologies. Managers need to work on the basis of models of power with and power to in preference to power over founded on simpleminded models of exploitation. In short, we need a new philosophy of management premised on a realist and more nuanced grasp of power for the twenty-first century (Clegg et al., 2006). We will not change the world dramatically as a result – abstract ideas rarely do this – but we may make some small contributions to practice that help to develop change-making agendas.

References (key texts in bold) Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S. (1962). The two faces of power. The American Political Science Review, 56(4): 947–52. Clegg, S.R., Courpasson, D., and Phillips, N. (2006). Power and Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dahl, R.A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2: 201–5. Dow, G. and Higgins, W. (2014). Politics Against Pessimism: social democratic possibilities since Ernst Wigforss. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Follett, M.P. (1995). Mary Parker Follett – Prophet of Management: a celebration of writings from the 1920s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 523

Stewart Clegg

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hobbes, T. (1658[1982]). Leviathan, edited by and with an introduction by C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hume, D. (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Retrieved on 9 July 2015 from http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hume/enquiry.pdf. Locke, J. (1959[1690]). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. A. Fraser), 2 vols. New York: Dover. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan. Machiavelli, N. (1961). The Prince. Translated and edited by G. Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1901[1967]). The Will to Power: attempt at a revaluation of all values. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: outline of an interpretive sociology. Edited and translated by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

524

49 Quantification as a philosophical act Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

Introduction: quantification as a technology of distance Quantification is an explicitly philosophical act. Quantitative data, produced through a process of quantification, is a foundation for contemporary social science research and for public policy. The philosophical underpinnings of our choices in the process of quantification, however, are not always explicit. Choices, tacit or explicit about what to quantify, how to quantify, etc. have both a political component and a philosophical one in that both the way we conceive the nature of things (ontology) and the ways of knowing about things (epistemological choices) are implicit in the choices we make. We draw on contemporary research in the philosophy of knowledge focused on quantification as a distinctive form of knowing, grounded in largely implicit philosophical approaches to conceiving and knowing about the world, to identify four challenges that face the production and consumption of data that might distort our understanding and decision-making. Contemporary work in the philosophy of knowledge has theorized that quantification is a distinctive, and relatively modern, form of knowledge (Thongchai, 1994; Porter, 1995; Espeland, 1998; Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Scott, 1998). Quantification is a technology of simplification and abstracting. It involves taking rich, descriptive information or knowledge that is qualitative in nature, and was at some point gained through direct experience, and converting it into more concise, abstract, quantitative knowledge. Espeland (1998) describes quantification as ‘a system for throwing away information’, noting ‘[It] creates new forms of information for decision makers. It is largely a process of abstracting and reducing what is known and often obscures the link between what is represented and the empirical world’ (Espeland, 1998: 25). Quantification is one variant of a broader class of technologies of simplification, which can also include maps, classification systems, or standardized weights and measures (Thongchai, 1994; Espeland, 1998; Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Scott, 1998). As a way of abstracting and simplifying complex qualitative information, quantification is a technology of distance. It is a form of knowing used by states and other large organizations to make a complex world sensible, and to discipline and control a complex reality (Scott, 1998; 525

Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

Espeland, 1998). Conceived as a technology of simplification and abstractions developed initially for use by states and large organizations, there are four challenges that face the production and consumption of data in organizational research: the challenge of judgement in the production of data, the challenge of uncertainty absorption in the consumption of data, the challenge of the performativity of data, and the challenge of the embeddedness of data collection systems in broader, and unequal institutions. We describe each of the four challenges below. We illustrate our arguments both with examples drawn from the literature on quantification, and with the additional example of impact evaluation of a series of regional peace and development programs in regions that were affected by armed conflict in Colombia. The programs grew from a bottom-up initiative of organizations in the Magdalena Medio region in Colombia in1995. That year, the effects of the armed conflict on the regional operations of ECOPETROL – Columbia’s largest oil company – triggered a conversation between the Human Rights Committee of ECOPETROL’s union, company directors, the non-profit Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) and the office in the local diocese of the Catholic Church in charge of social work. The peace and development program they formed was conceived as an alternative to mainstream thinking in development. Its aim was the collective construction of public affairs in the territory. To do this, the program would build capacities in these communities so that they could define and live the lives they had reason to value (Sen, 1999). In 1998, the partners behind the peace and development movement created a formal organization, the Magdalena Medio Peace and Development Corporation. People in other regions came to see the Magdalena Medio peace and development model as an alternative to more traditional development programmes. By 2014, there were 23 initiatives spread throughout the country. These regional peace and development programmes combined elements of both a social movement and a formal non-profit organization to find ways to build peace and development in regions affected by armed conflict. More significantly, these programmes shared a core purpose – to build community capacity for defining and achieving the collective future that they envision and perceive as valuable. Between 2002 and 2010, the government of Colombia and international funders designed two big aid packages to support Regional Peace and Development Programs (RPDP) work: Peace and Development, and Peace Laboratories from the World Bank and the European Union respectively. While these programmes injected $180 million to projects in Colombian regions through the regional peace and development programmes, it is not clear that international funders or the Colombian government were primarily focused on building community capacity for defining and achieving locally and collectively defined futures. Rather, they necessarily embraced more traditional, and commonly quantified, development goals. In 2005, the division of policy evaluation at the National Planning Department initiated an evaluation of the impact of these two development assistance programmes. The evaluation did not simply represent the impacts of the peace and development programmes. Instead, it threw some information away, focused attention on information retained, reframed the peace and development programmes’ goals, and imported the institutional logics of the organizational field of international development assistance into the evaluation process and outcomes. The evaluation focused on the individual as the unit of analysis for measuring impact, despite the fact that the programmes were initially created to create community capacity. While it did aim to capture ‘intangible elements’ of the programmes such as trust, solidarity, empowerment and collective action, it measured ‘objective aspects like income and expenses that reflected the socioeconomic situation of individuals’ (DNP, 2008: 22). 526

Quantification

Judgement and bias in the production of data The first challenge of quantification involves the production of data. This challenge stems from judgement and bias in the categorization processes involved in constructing data. Judgement and bias can emerge in both defining the categories that will be used to collect quantified data, and in assigning quantified values within the constraints of a given category system. Underlying all data is a process of categorization. A firm can be categorized as small, medium or large. A patient must be categorized as obese or not, or schizophrenic or not. A bond has to be classified as AAA or of a lesser category. The system of categories specifies what data will be quantified and collected. Firms can be categorized by size, but they can also be categorized by industry, profitability, ownership type, or along other dimensions. Patients are categorized by their diagnoses, which draw on a system of diagnostic categories (Bowker and Star, 1999). Debt is categorized based on perceived risk, or the likelihood that the borrower will honour its debt to a lender. Once created, the category systems that form the basis for quantified information can seem objective or natural. Category systems, however, are far from natural or objective. Rather, they inevitably involve simplifying complexity, and collapsing complex judgements about how to group objects, people or organizations based on a limited set of dimensions. As a result, the simplification involved in categorizing and quantifying inevitably leads to distortions that reflect the biases and judgements of the actors who create the category systems that form the basis for quantification (Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Scott 1998). Scott (1998) depicts the simplifications and distortions involved in quantification in his account of the emergence of scientific forestry in Prussia and Saxony in the late eighteenth century. He notes that long before the emergence of scientific forestry, European states viewed their forests as a means of generating revenue from timber. Timber yields, then, were the main basis by which states valued their forests. While addressing the needs of the state, this simplification distorted the actual forest, and minimized the importance and interests of other users of the forest. As Scott notes, Missing . . . were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. (Scott, 1998: 12) Scientific forestry, as an emergent profession, embraced better ability to quantify the value of a ‘typical’ forest as one of its early goals. Scott describes a first attempt to precisely measure a forest, in which a team of scientists selected a representative plot of forest, and tallied the number of trees in each of five categories of tree size. This allowed foresters to quantify or estimate the value of the forest, based on the simplified and interested lens of the state. While the quantification ignored the value of alternate uses of the forest in modern Europe, in the context of the impact evaluation of peace and development programmes in Colombia, quantification mis-specified and transformed the programmes’ initial goals. In attempting to quantify the benefits of peace and development programmes, researchers doing the impact evaluation focused attention mainly on socio-economic measures like income and asset accumulation. Income, however, was the least important goal of the programme’s founders. The initial goal of the programme was to strengthen community capacity so that people could act collectively. The community members participating in the programme, the government, 527

Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

and even the evaluators understood that increasing income was not the main, or even an important goal of the programme. The evaluators, in their first qualitative descriptions of the peace and development programmes, highlighted the dual goal of the programmes to collectively construct public affairs in the territory, and to promote sustainable development through building collective action capacities in these communities. Despite this, in their initial attempts to quantify the programme’s impacts, they transformed a peripheral goal into the central goal, and marginalized the programme’s initial aims. Judgement and bias can also distort how quantified values are assigned within a category system. These biases can be exacerbated by financial incentives. For example, within the category system for rating the risk of financial products, ratings agencies in the United States categorize risk using categories (e.g. AAA, AA, BB) that correspond to particular meanings (e.g. prime debt, high grade, non-investment grade, junk bonds). Given a system for quantifying risk, individual actors then exercise judgement in specific bonds (e.g. a mortgage-backed security) to specific categories (e.g. AA). Once assigned, these categories can seem real. As the financial crisis of 2008 so clearly demonstrated, however, these judgements can be far from perfect. In the case of quantifying the risk of mortgage-backed securities, assigning quantified values to specific securities was systematically distorted by incentives. Prior to the financial crisis, individuals at every stage of the system for classifying mortgage loans, grouping them into bonds, and rating those bonds had various incentives to exaggerate their security and underplay their risks. This was reflected, at each stage, in quantified indicators of credit risk for borrowers or of the riskiness of bonds.

Uncertainty absorption in the consumption of data While the production of data raises challenges of the category systems that define what data is collected, and distortion in placing exemplars into categories, the consumption of data erases the judgements, biases and distortions involved in creating data. Uncertainty absorption is a process by which the judgements involved in creating data get stripped away or ignored when they are communicated more broadly (March and Simon, 1958; Weick, 1979). It involves giving numbers, created through a series of judgements and potentially distorted by incentives, a veneer of cold, hard, objectivity. March and Simon (1958) described uncertainty absorption as an inherent feature of communication of quantified information within organizations. Judgements, for example, go into assigning individuals with annual performance ratings. The judgements involve both the creation of the dimensions on which performance may be rated, and assigning individuals scores on these dimensions. Once a performance rating is assigned, however, they can be communicated as objective information throughout the organization. While a direct supervisor may see the judgements made, these judgements disappear by the time a business unit head sees the information in making decisions about promotions, dismissals or pay increases. Uncertainty absorption characterizes all consumption of quantified information, not just information communicated within organizations. When ratings agencies assessed the underlying risk of mortgage-backed securities, and rated them as investment grade, the judgements and distortions throughout the risk assessment process disappeared. Securities laws in the United States allowed that institutional investors such as pension funds or banks investing federally insured deposits faced no limits in their investments in investment-grade securities. Judgements in the rating process are not accounted for by law. Given pressure to find higher returns, institutional investors had additional incentives to ignore the judgements made in classifying securities as investment grade, instead accepting their ratings as fact. As a result, quantified indicators (e.g. 528

Quantification

a security rating) are in fact extremely condensed narratives that can link a particular case (e.g. this mortgage-backed security) to a category with socially accepted meaning (e.g. investmentgrade investment with limited risk of default). They have the effect of establishing the narratives that they contain as social facts (Ocasio et al., 2015). Uncertainty absorption also characterized the consumption of the initial impact evaluation of the peace and development programmes in Colombia. One, among many, judgements involved in the production of data quantifying the impact of the programmes involved deciding who was classified as a beneficiary. The peace and development programmes originated in the mid1990s in a local experience in Magdalena Medio region, which later became a national-level social movement. The movement’s early activists embraced respect for individuals’ autonomy as one of their core principles. They acted from the premise that individuals must decide whether they want to participate or not. This focus on individual autonomy would likely shape the judgements that the early activists in the peace and development programmes would make in deciding who is a beneficiary. In all likelihood, beneficiaries should be the people who continue to identify and affiliate with the movement. Identity and ongoing affiliation, however, are not practical to quantify as part of an impact evaluation. If individuals can form, dissolve, and reform their affiliation with the movement over time, it would increase the challenges involved in to quantifying an impact of the programmes for a clearly defined group of ‘beneficiaries’. As a result, evaluators made different judgements about who counts as a beneficiary, deciding, for example, if they would include anybody who received money from a programme, anybody educated at a programme-funded school, or even entire communities in which a programme was active. Once decided, however, evaluators can measure whether beneficiaries, now an objective category, experienced increase in income, itself a distortion of the peace and development programmes’ original goals. This information can be communicated to the government agencies that administer the programme, and can decide whether to continue the programme in the future, as well as to the programme’s global funders. The judgements in classifying beneficiaries and the principle of autonomy that was a core value for the movement that originated the programme are both conveniently erased.

The performativity of data The performativity of data and numbers refers to the idea that data, once understood as objective, form a basis for action that in turn reshapes the social world (Scott, 1998; Sauder, 2008; Sauder and Espeland, 2009). American mortgage-backed securities, rated as investment grade, entered investment portfolios in both the wealthy and poorer world, potentially attracting resources away from ‘riskier’ countries or ventures. The securities themselves, as well as the ratings that they acquired that conveyed a seemingly objective assessment of their risk of default, became the basis for the creation and trading in derivatives and other, more esoteric financial products. Local banks and savings and loans, now known as mortgage originators, began to make lending decisions based on the assumption that the mortgages they underwrite will be quickly sold to a third party. Even the material world, inner-city neighbourhoods and new subdivisions in exurbs distant from any city, were impacted by decisions and actions in the financial sector and construction industry that were, in part, shaped by the quantification of the risk of default of bundles of home mortgages. Examples of the performativity of quantified data abound. For example, law school rankings in the United States are a relatively recent phenomenon, initiated by the magazine U.S. News & World Report. As the sole mass-market ranking of law school quality, the U.S. News rankings defined the set of criteria by which the quality of all American law schools would be judged. 529

Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

The rankings quickly attracted significant attention from students, funders, faculty, employers and administrators, many of whom came to accept the rankings, and what often amounted to small differences between large numbers of schools, as definitive and meaningful. As moving up in the rankings became increasingly important strategic objectives for law schools, schools started to engage in practices aimed at impacting the rankings, independent of their effects on the quality of education. As a result, schools started to devote resources to producing glossy brochures to send to deans and administrators in order to influence the reputation scores that were a significant component of the rankings. They also began to hire their own graduates who did not have jobs after law school in order to boost their employment outcome scores, even though temporary employment at their school is likely not the outcome that students envisioned in choosing a law school (Sauder, 2008; Sauder and Espeland, 2009). A similar story of the performativity of numbers unfolded through the use and public disclosure of quantified indicators of health care quality. Since the late nineteenth century, with the professionalization of medicine, health care quality was primarily judged for individual cases by an individual physician who drew on his or her professional knowledge to assess whether a patient was treated appropriately, given the particularities of the case. Since the mid-1980s, the quality of health care increasingly came to be defined through adherence to rules – or guidelines – defining evidence-based care or through the use of quality measures that were based on a mix of guideline adherence and clinical outcomes (Wiener, 2000; Nigam, 2012, 2013). Performance on quality measures has begun to assume the status of social facts. Governments, in the US and in the UK have begun to make performance on quality indicators publicly available, potentially shaping patients’ choice of providers. The performativity of quality data, however, can have adverse consequences. Because our methods of risk adjustment are imperfect (i.e. distortion in the creation of data), hospitals and physicians, mindful of their quality scores, may avoid taking on more complicated cases or sicker patients, whose true risk cannot be quantified. Similarly, they may also avoid treating poor patients, or members of racial minorities, who tend to experience worse clinical outcomes when adjusting for measurable risk factors. The end result may be that the production of imperfect measures, and their transformation of these measures into social facts, can through actors’ responses to the system of measurement have real effects that undermine the initial goal of quality that motivated measurement in the first place (Werner and Asch, 2005; Werner et al., 2005). The performativity of data simply means that judgements in the production of data become social facts, and that these social facts become a basis for action. As a result, the simplifications, and skewed assumptions that shape the production of data may become magnified or take on a life of their own.

Institutionalized distortion The final challenge of quantification is the potential that the distortions that come from the production, consumption and the performativity are in fact institutionalized distortions. Distortions can be an artefact of the fact that quantification, particularly the choices about what will be quantified and hence valued, reflect, potentially through taken-for-granted institutional logics and beliefs and technical language, the power structures of the organizational fields in which they are embedded. The power from quantification, according to Scott, emerges because it is wedded with state power. Scientific forestry is a system of quantification that is aligned with the state’s lens and interest in viewing and valuing forests. Because of this alignment, not due to some accident, scientific foresters measured forests in a way that made invisible uses of the forest that were important to communities. State power was also instrumental in bringing 530

Quantification

about the performative effects of numbers. After creating a system for quantifying the value of forests, based on the metric of timber volume, scientific forestry, backed by state power, was able to bring a new type of forest into existence. Consistent with state interests, this new type of cultivated forest took the form of mono-cropped tracts of trees cleared of underbrush and planted in grids to promote ease of access. These physical forests were designed to maximize state revenues, at the expense of both communities and nature. They represent the culmination of the idea of the modern nation state, and of its assumption of the power to manage and reorder society. Distortion in the impact evaluation of the peace and development programmes in Colombia are similarly institutionalized distortions. First, it is not clear that the purpose of the evaluation was to learn from and improve the programmes themselves, or to better build community capacity – the initial goal of the social movement that emerged from the programmes. Rather, it seems that the purpose of the evaluation – the very fact of quantification – was to legitimate the international cooperation programmes in the World Bank and European Union. These aid programmes used the institutional architecture of the original peace and development programmes in order to inject large amounts of money into the regions where the peace and development programmes operated. In addition to giving powerful funders access to opportunities for doing the development work that is the source of their legitimacy, the impact evaluation was also institutionalized in that it reflected the biases and assumptions – or institutional logics – of mainstream thinking in the academic field of impact evaluation. The initial goals of the peace and development programmes were to build community capacity, so that these communities could live the life they had reason to value. An important piece of this, from the perspective of the social movement that initiated the programmes, was to build shared frames of the challenges the community faced, and of the appropriate way forward. Shared frames are evidence of the capacity for collective action in a community, and can over time lead to increased income, or materialize as political and cultural projects. By themselves, however, shared frames, in addition to being tricky to measure, are also not widely embraced as a legitimate outcome or impact. It would have limited scientific validity in the academic field of impact evaluation. Nor would it be effective in providing legitimacy for the international cooperation programmes of the global funders. Income gains, in contrast, are a legitimate impact. One could say that their legitimacy as an impact is taken for granted in the organizational field of international development assistance. As a result, documenting income gain would greatly contribute to the legitimacy of the international funding agencies, and perhaps the government. The distortions of the system of categorization that guided the quantification in the impact evaluation, then, has institutionalized roots. We raise these four challenges as a means of encouraging critical reflection. Judgements, simplification, abstraction and quantification are inevitable in a large, complex, interconnected world. The first challenge, biases and judgements in creating particular systems of quantification, and in assigning quantified values to particular cases, will never go away. Calling attention to it, however, can be a means of focusing attention on, and potentially mitigating the effects of uncertainty absorption in consuming data, and the performativity of numbers. We can be more critical in our consumption of data, and try to understand what types of judgements and distortions were involved in its production. In doing so, we can be more cautious or draw on multiple types of data – quantitative, qualitative – before acting on it. Focusing attention on the institutionalized sources of distortion in quantification provides us with fodder for analysing, understanding, and critiquing the category systems that systematically highlight and throw away information, making visible information that serves the interests of powerful actor and making invisible information that is inconvenient. 531

Amit Nigam and Diana Trujillo

References (key texts in bold) Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: classification and its consequences. Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press. Departamento Nacional de Planeacion (DNP) (2008). Impact evaluation of peace and development, and peace laboratories programs: baseline and preliminary impacts. Towards consolidating a proposal to evaluate the impact of the regional programs for peace and development. P.P.E. Unit. Bogota, DNP. Espeland, W.N. (1998). The Struggle for Water: politics, rationality, and identity in the American Southwest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Espeland, W.N. and Stevens, M.L. (1998). Commensuration as a Social Process. Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 313–43. March, J.G. and Simon, H.A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley. Nigam, A. (2012). Changing health care quality paradigms: the rise of clinical guidelines and quality measures in American medicine. Social Science & Medicine, 75(11): 1933–7. Nigam, A. (2013). How institutional change and individual researchers helped advance clinical guidelines in American health care. Social Science & Medicine, 87: 16–22. Ocasio, W., Loewenstein, J. and Nigam, A. (2015). How streams of communication reproduce and change institutional logics: the role of categories. Academy of Management Review, 40: 28–48. Porter, T. (1995). Trust in Numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sauder, M. (2008). Interlopers and field change: the entry of U.S. News into the field of legal education. Administrative Science Quarterly, 53(2): 209–34. Sauder, M. and Espeland, W.N. (2009). The discipline of rankings: tight coupling and organizational change. American Sociological Review, 74(1): 63–82. Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. New York, Knopf. Thongchai, W. (1994). Siam Mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Weick, K.E. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill. Werner, R.M. and Asch D.A. (2005). The unintended consequences of publicly reporting quality information. Journal of the American Medical Association, 293(10): 1239–44. Werner, R.M., Asch, D.A. and Polsky, D. (2005). Racial profiling: the unintended consequences of coronary artery bypass graft report cards. Circulation, 111(10): 1257–63. Wiener, C.L. (2000). The Elusive Quest: accountability in hospitals. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

532

50 Two tales about resistance Management vs. philosophy Carl Cederström

Students of management typically come across the word resistance when reading about organizational change. They are taught that organizations need to constantly renew themselves and that effective change management is a prerequisite for them to prosper. With these mantras hammered into their heads, students are trained into regarding resistance as a problem, or, phrased more professionally, as a ‘challenge’. It is presented to them as an unwanted expression that needs to be dealt with. Those who resist – we can call them the saboteurs – are theorized as weak-willed, pathological, or even cancerous (stop them, students are taught, or else the illness will spread throughout the system). Management theory begins with declaring war on resistance. Fredrick Winslow Taylor asked a few strong Hungarians to work as hard as they could for a short time. He measured their performance, and then required the rest of the workforce to adapt to the same pace (Stewart, 2010). Henceforth, it became hugely difficult for the workers to shirk the duties imposed on them, let alone exercise any conceivable form of resistance. Philosophy, however, begins elsewhere – more specifically with the trial and execution of Socrates. His offence was questioning and challenging the authorities of Athens, debunking the political elite’s self-declared moral and intellectual superiority. Exposed to these stories, students of philosophy usually come to the word resistance from a dramatically different angle. For them, resistance is not threatening the survival of a system (the corporation). Rather, it is an activity of critical thinking that is necessary for a system not to be overtaken by corrupt powers and spiral out of control. More romantically, resistance is a heroic act requiring profound courage. Talking about his native France during World War II, Jacques Derrida referred to resistance as that ‘which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of this country’ (Derrida, 1998: 2, as cited in Caygill, 2013: 7). From a philosophical perspective, then, resistance appears to be a beautiful word evoking a collective wish to set things right. ‘Resistance is motivated above all by a desire to justice’, Horward Caygill writes in On Resistance: a philosophy of defiance, ‘its acts are performed by subjectivities possessed of extreme courage and fortitude and its practice guided by prudence’ (Caygill, 2013: 12). Seen in this way, resistance evokes an array of positive emotions, as if inseparable from the pursuit of truth, a pursuit that privileges the collective good over the immediate well-being of the individual self, let alone the corporation. The task of philosophy, Simon Critchley asserts, is to 533

Carl Cederström

‘challenge what passes for doxa in a specific context’ (Critchley and Cederström, 2012: 28). In other words, philosophy is an activity of critical reflection that calls into question what otherwise passes as an uncontested truth. By raising questions of a universal form – What is knowledge? What is justice? What is resistance? – these accepted truths could be liberated from the stranglehold of common-sense and the ‘pursuit of these questions can have an educative, emancipatory effect’ (ibid.). As we will see, there are also philosophically sophisticated accounts of resistance in the study of organizations, some of which perceptively reflect on its political and ethical significance. But for many students of management, these philosophical texts disappear under the weight of managerial accounts whereby resistance is reduced to an inherently troublesome phenomenon. That was the case for me. Even though I had been reading philosophy on the side for a long time, my undergraduate studies in business administration and information systems had presented resistance as an indisputable problem that required a solution. Presented in that manner, I could see no immediate connections to philosophy. The courses I had taken (management strategy, information systems, organization theory, and so on and so forth) only briefly engaged with the concept of resistance. We were taught that resistance could become a huge cost, a hazard to investors. Hence, changing people’s minds was a key feature in the process of change management programs and, especially, when implementing a new technology. I had not given the topic much thought until the late summer of 2005 when I attended a peculiar kick-off. This was during my PhD studies and I had come to the event to collect data for a study of a Swedish-based call-centre. The kick-off, it turned out, would become a firsthand lesson in managerialism and how this ideology demonizes those identified as resisters. Like most others, I was already familiar with the ways in which authorities habitually operate in order to suppress deviant opinions and aberrant behaviour. A few years in an old-fashioned boarding school, populated with authoritarian figures gleefully exercising discipline and arbitrarily handing out punishment, had given me valuable insights into this spectacle. But what occurred here, at the kick-off, was different. Deviance was not suppressed in the name of authority, as a simple exercise of power. It was more sophisticated. Resistance was theorized as an attitudinal issue and declared morally problematic, as though it was a reckless violation against the utilitarian goals of good management. I will share my experience from that day in some detail because, as it happens, this event captures rather well the essence of what a surprisingly large portion of management literature has to say about the meaning and nature of resistance. So, on that particular morning, about twenty group-leaders from the call centre had gathered in an old sports centre. A senior manager had informed me that the group leaders were particularly important to get on ‘our side’. They were seen as opinion leaders, and one of the purposes with the kick-off was to instruct them how to best facilitate the ongoing implementation of a large CRM-system. They were expected to make their subordinates, the people in their groups, appropriately enthusiastic, upbeat and motivated. The room was much too big for the relatively small number of participants, leaving an uncomfortably large number of seats gaping empty. The venue was set just outside of the city, surrounded by empty car parks and slumbering industrial plants. The group leaders arrived first. They took their seats, waiting for the CEO and three external consultants to make the final preparations for their introductory presentation. It was going to be a long day, filled with seminars, group exercises and a series of other motivational activities – all of which were designed to instil the correct attitude among the group leaders. It was never officially stated, but everyone knew that the real reason for the kick-off was that many of the employees were distressed and enraged. Far-reaching changes had been planned. Employees were going to be reshuffled. They would loose their present roles and be assigned 534

Resistance

new tasks. As these changes had been announced the previous month, some had violently rushed out of the meeting room. Others had been found crying afterwards. These negative emotions, as they were called, had to be curbed before they became epidemic. That was the view expressed by some of the managers I had been talking to. Hence the kick-off. The presentation began. The first picture to appear was familiar: a glass of water. ‘Is it halffull or half-empty?’, the consultants rhetorically asked. Without waiting for a response, they went on to briefly cover a range of aspects thought to be relevant when implementing new technological systems, such as organizational fit and the need to seriously examine existing work processes. They then returned to what they regarded as the most important issue, namely attitude. The only way to pull this off, they affirmed, was to make sure that everyone had the appropriate attitude. Sadly, the consultants continued, some people find it difficult to adopt such attitude. These people are slaves under their own emotions. After all, resistance is an emotional response. They described such attitude as reactionary and old-fashioned, rather like the attitude of a deranged and obstinate hippy. To emphasize this point, they introduced, about halfway into the presentation, an entirely new concept: ‘curry-hugger’. ‘Curry’ was the name of the system that was now going to be replaced. It was given this name, I was told, because the system had been developed in India (a detail that might lend itself to a separate analysis, read, perhaps, through the lens of postcolonialism). The second-part of the newly conceived expression, ‘hugger’, alluded to ‘tree huggers’. What exactly did this imply? That those who objected to the new initiatives were emotionally unbalanced hippies? I felt rather ill at ease at the thought, and it did not help that, at this point, one of the more enthusiastic group-leaders started waving her arms. ‘I totally agree’, she shouted from the back of the room. ‘Some people just love rock ’n’ roll whereas others, as soon as they hear the word change, see black; they kind of panic.’ It did not stop there, however. A few PowerPoint slides later, we were introduced to a supposedly funny comic strip, comparing an elderly lady walking her dog with a manager trying to inspire his workforce. The first of the three panels displayed a dog, glued to the ground, stubbornly refusing to move. The caption read: ‘some people tend to resist change’. In the next panel, the dog was running ahead of his master, stretching the leash and pulling the lady’s arm. The accompanying text read: ‘change requires patience’. On the last panel, the dog obediently walked in the same pace as the woman, the caption reading: ‘to carry out change requires time and effort’. One might assume that this comparison would provoke a series of critical responses. Likening recalcitrant employees with dogs may appear controversial, if not distasteful and demeaning. Yet, silence prevailed that day. No critical remarks were made. If people felt uncomfortable they did a good job hiding it. Philosophy, as an activity of challenging doxa, felt remote. Outwardly, everyone agreed that resistance was a bad thing, and that the employees had to work on their attitudes. Looking into classical management theory, instead, we find an almost perfect match. In one of the earliest, and most classic accounts on the subject Lawrence makes clear that resistance is a problem, stating that ‘[e]ven the more petty forms of resistance can be troublesome’ (Lawrence, 1954: 49). Resistance is a troublesome issue indeed. It may be expressed, Kirkman and Shapiro explain, ‘in such behaviours as sabotage and vocal protests or in such attitudes as withdrawal and reduced commitment’ (Kirkman and Shapiro, 1997: 732). But why do these people engage in such ostensibly destructive behaviour? The answers offered by management theory commonly suggest that the problem is to be found within the individual. One popular theory is that people are simply afraid of change and that they want things to remain the same forever. Zaltman and Duncan pursue this line of reasoning, suggesting that people resist because they want ‘to maintain 535

Carl Cederström

the status quo in the face of pressure to alter the status quo’ (Zaltman and Duncan, 1977: 63). Echoing the story from the kick-off above, this indicates that people who resist change harbour reactionary impulses. As people, they are likely to be old-fashioned. It might even be, to quote the enthusiastic group leader, that these people ‘just don’t love rock’n’roll’, and that they cringe at the thought of change. That is one theory. Another, no less demeaning conjecture is offered by Abraham Zaleznik. He proposes that those who resist change suffer from an inability to subordinate themselves, a disorder stemming from what he calls an inner conflict of the self. These psychologically unhinged people are haunted by a secret desire to commit parricide. ‘The effort is to overthrow authority and flout its symbols, usually with the unconscious aim of displacing the father’ (Zaleznik, 1965: 120). Classic management theory reveals a recurring impatience with people who may, for whatever reason, resist change. In a critical review of the subject, examining how resistance has been conceptualized historically in management literature, Dent and Goldberg point out that the assumption that people automatically resist change has become a mental model that ‘is almost universally shared in organization life’ (Dent and Goldberg, 1999: 25). Moreover, they reveal that a default response is to offer prescriptions on how to overcome resistance. Throughout that kick-off, resistance was far away. The philosophical meaning of resistance, as an act of extreme courage and fortitude, motivated by a desire for justice, now seemed depressingly distant. Resistance had been cast as a shameful act, exercised only by those willing to be seen as old-fashioned reactionary naggers. Insofar as resistance at all played a role, it had been effectively overcome. I kept returning to the call-centre for another year. Management went ahead with the planned changes. People were assigned new roles. I met again with those who had initially protested. They now appeared silent, explaining that there was no point in voicing their discontent, at least not openly. In the case of Socrates, I recalled, resistance was also effectively overcome. At least the surface expression had been wiped away.

Why the corporation loves the protester In 2011, Time magazine voted the protester the person of the year. Their motivation read: ‘No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed their world’ (retrieved on 9 July 2015 from http://content.time.com/time/person-of-the-year/2011/). As the protesters turned into heroes, how did business corporations react? Did they continue to operate a take-no-prisoners policy? Were they still determined to overcome resistance? And if so, how were they planning to refine their strategies? Contrary to the assumption that people have an in-built tendency to oppose authoritarian demands, many analyses have observed that people are surprisingly obedient (Burawoy, 1979; Zimbardo, 2007). Often they do what they can to adapt to new situations. Still, it is a thesis that is maintained in management theory, partly because it is convenient to assume that some people are maliciously intent on destroying management initiative. It offers a useful explanation in the face of thoughtless change projects, which are doomed from the outset. ‘When the magical thinking comes to a crashing disappointment’, Krantz remarks, ‘blaming the lower-downs for being resistant is a readily available explanation (perhaps a kind of mantra) that can be mobilized to account for the distressing results’ (Krantz, 1999: 42). For a long time, management theory assumed that the fault invariably lay at the receiving end of a change process. On the one hand you had innovative, progressive managers, making great efforts to improve the organization. 536

Resistance

On the other you had reactionary employees, seizing every opportunity to sabotage the organization. This bias was noted in the work of Ford, Ford and D’Amelio arguing that ‘change agents are portrayed as undeserving victims of the irrational and dysfunctional responses of change recipients’ (Ford et al., 2008: 362). As these authors contend, resistance can also be a resource for change and innovation, a remark that echoes Piderit’s claim that, ‘in studies of resistance to change, researchers have largely overlooked the potentially positive intentions that may motivate negative responses to change’ (Piderit, 2000: 783). This might suggest that management theory has progressed over the years. Resistance is no longer viewed as an absolute evil; it is now seen as a potential source of change, innovation and constructive renewal. Yet, this story is somewhat misleading, because no such progression exists, at least not in a chronologically linear sense. Looking more carefully, we find that even some of the earliest accounts viewed resistance as something potentially positive. Lawrence (1954), for instance, promoted increased participation. Resisters should not be marginalized, he argued. They should be integrated into the change process. Herbert and Estes (1977) pushed this point further. They claimed that an organization consisting exclusively of yes-men would benefit no one. Creativity would go out the window. And, worse, no one would be present to make sure that wise decisions were being made. Surely, when everyone is in agreement, decision-making will suffer badly. They offered a fascinating solution to this problem. ‘To ensure valid decision-making inputs’, they wrote, ‘the device of the Corporate Devil’s Advocate is proposed. Creating an official “Nay-sayer”, charged with the responsibility of dissenting with recommendations, aids in pointing out logical flaws and other fallacies or inaccuracies in major one-sided proposals’ (Herbert and Estes, 1977: 666). Similar points have been made since. Joni and Beyer, for instance, make a case against harmony and alignment, arguing that it was precisely that sort of culture that pushed Lehman Brothers over the cliff. ‘Most leadership experts argue that the best way to manage change is to create alignment’, they argue, ‘but our research indicates that for large-scale change or innovation initiatives, a healthy dose of dissent is usually just as important’ (Joni and Beyer, 2009: 50). Does this suggest that organizations are politically progressive, open to dissenters, and prepared to overthrow themselves? Is Socrates with his cutting questions welcomed back into the organizational space, as an official nay-sayer? Indeed, if management theory proposes a Corporate Devil’s Advocate, then why not appointing a Corporate Socrates too, replete with beard and toga? And if the corporation is said to have opened up for critique, where does that leave the protesters? Are they friends or foes? The protester typically emerges in relation to major political events, whether we consider the French resistance during World War II, the uprising of the people in the Paris commune in the late nineteenth century, the Gandhian resistance against the British Empire, or any other form of anti-colonial struggle. To better understand how protesters are viewed by management theory, we need to know something about the latter’s relation to political events of this kind. Some have maintained that such relationship hardly exists. Management theory is simply not interested in the outside world. Examining the top 20 journals in the field of business and management, Dunne, Harney and Parker revealed that contemporary political issues were routinely ignored. This shows, the authors write, a ‘general state of myopia on the part of business and management scholars towards a variety of political issues, even making a virtue out of ignorance’ (Dunne et al., 2008: 271). Yet some interest seems to exist, although it might be for the wrong reasons. In the beginning of the 1970s two intriguing articles appeared in Harvard Business Review. The first of these, written by Joe Kelly (1970), only tentatively alluded to the ‘turbulent times’. The second text, however, 537

Carl Cederström

‘An anatomy of activism for executives’, written by Samuel A. Culbert and James M. Elden (1970), went much further. They discussed, up front, the US invasion of Cambodia and the ensuing student protests at UCLA and Kent State University, the latter resulting in the police shooting and killing four students. Each of these texts announces that it is time to stop sweeping conflicts under the carpet. Conflicts are there; conflicts are real; and they are not going away. ‘Old concepts of human relations, including the notion that conflict per se is harmful and should be avoided at all cost, do not square with the facts any longer’, Kelly suggests. ‘Indeed, the new approach is that conflict, if properly handled, can lead to more effective and appropriate arrangements’ (Kelly, 1970: 103). These principles, we are told, apply also in the face of protests. The young people expressing their anger should neither be silenced, nor ignored. They need to be brought into dialogue, because, in a few years’ time, these young people will enter corporations as colleagues of the older generation. But more importantly, management needs new insights and ideas, and that is precisely what this younger generation possesses. This is the key point that Culbert and Elden set out. ‘If executives could only open their eyes to what underlies slogans like “revolution” and “liberation”, they could profit from, rather than merely react against, the motivation of educated youth’ (Culbert and Elden, 1970: 132). These texts reveal, with sufficient clarity, the disposition of management and the logic of the corporation. Management seeks to manage, even, or especially, that which otherwise escapes management. The corporation, meanwhile, incorporates – it accommodates, harnesses and monetizes. Protests, revolutions, uprisings, deviance, dissent, resistance – all of these expressions can, and ultimately should, be brought back into the control of the corporation. They can even be used productively, as a means to make profit. The only thing that needs to be done first is to domesticate the ideas, de-radicalizing them, so that they can neatly fit into the purpose of the corporation. This is the essence of what, in social and political theory, is termed recuperation. It is the opposite to what the Situationists called détournement, meaning rerouting or hi-jacking. More specifically, détournement is a critical method used to turn capitalist expressions against themselves, whether in the form of political subversive pranks or satirical parody. These subversive acts are always recuperable, however, which means that the corporation may not just dodge the critical blow directed against it, but use the critique to its own ends. Wikipedia helpfully defines recuperation as, ‘the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed and commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective’. There are many examples of this. In 2012, for instance, Mercedes Benz used the face of Che Guevarra (with the Mercedes emblem stamped on his beret) to promote car sharing. The chairman of Mercedes Benz presented the new initiative by saying that some ‘colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism’, then adding: ‘But if that’s the case, viva la revolución’. Which brings us back to the question of philosophy as an activity of critical engagement. Is the corporation engaged in such critical inquiry? Is using the face of Che Guevarra suggesting that the corporation is now becoming involved in social and political critique? The answer, of course, is no. They just happen to know that ‘the rebel sell’, to use the title of Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s book in which they claim that ‘countercultural rebellion has reinvigorated consumer capitalism’ (Heath and Potter, 2005: 11). Corporations employ imageries of counterculture, not because they wish to inquire into the nature of capital exploitation, but because it adds a positive glow, an indication that they are youthful, unconventional and creative (Fleming, 2009). 538

Resistance

Resistance in critical management studies Observing that the literature on organizational change either demonizes or celebrates resistance, Thomas and Hardy (2011) argue that these perspectives have something significant in common: they both myopically regard resistance from the viewpoint of management and what they call change agents – that is, those whose role it is to implement a new change project. In their role as change agents, they entertain a privileged interpretative position because they can determine what counts as resistance. An attempt to avoid such normative bias is found in Ackroyd and Thompson’s Organizational Misbehaviour (1999) in which they steer their attention to all of those things that people do in organizations that they are not supposed to. Even though the word misbehaviour often comes from the top, denoting the behaviour of those who find themselves lower down in the organizational hierarchy, Ackroyd and Thompson note that also managers may feel disconnected from managerial interests. As they point out, organizations have always been a place in which imposed rules are met with a range of subversive expressions, whether they come in the form of satirical jokes, skiving, absenteeism, pilferage, soldiering, sabotage, vandalism and so on and so forth. In short, ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, as Foucault (1978: 95–6) famously put it. Indeed, among the more philosophically oriented treatments of resistance in organization studies, Foucault is a recurring reference (Jermier et al., 1994, Thomas and Davies, 2005). Engaging with the work of Foucault, these authors have revealed the complex interplay between power and resistance, demonstrating the ways in which subjectivity is not simply suppressed by power, but brought into life, negotiated and ultimately constituted through power. Within management and organization theory, the interest in Foucault (and poststructuralism more generally) emerges in the beginning of the 1990s as an extension, or perhaps alternative, to more Marxist-inspired studies. This move was motivated by a stronger interest in issues of language, identity, power and the ways in which subjectivity is shaped and controlled. Ever since, management theory has dipped in and out of a broad array of theories to unpack the meaning of resistance, whether these theories are related to post-Marxism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, anarchism, workerism, feminism, postcolonialism and so on. We will not lose ourselves in these internal debates but instead note that, when looking at resistance in the workplace from these alternative viewpoints, whether we want to call such perspective political, philosophical or perhaps even ethical, we can begin to appreciate resistance neither as an individual expression, triggered by an experience of frustration, anger or just general disappointment, nor as a potentially profitable resource. Rather, we can begin to appreciate what may, from a political viewpoint, constitute a powerful instantiation of resistance, or what some would like to see as an authentic response against oppression. Envisaging such an authentic response is not easy. As Caygill notes, assuming a division between an authentic resistance and an inauthentic flight is problematic because it fails to adequately consider the space in which resistance takes place. Searching for authenticity is perhaps not advisable, at least not within the context of work. In the Paris student protests of 1968, one of the complaints revolved around authenticity. People experienced a sense of inauthenticity: that they had been forced to adopt identities and to lead lives that were not of their own choice. These messages were later brought back into corporations, not to increase workers’ freedom, but to make them more productive. As Boltanski and Chiapello put it in The New Spirit of Capitalism ‘capitalism has, in a way, recuperated the demand for authenticity in the sense that it has profited from it’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 447). This has been documented in great detail by Peter Fleming in a series of works (Fleming, 2009; Fleming and Sturdy, 2009; Cederström and Fleming, 2012). 539

Carl Cederström

And yet, what gives resistance meaning from a philosophical and political viewpoint is precisely that it constantly seeks new ways to confront, circumscribe or undermine various forms of oppressive power. Applying this principle to management studies implies that, to constantly renew our understanding of resistance, we need to thoroughly examine the ways in which the line between recuperation and subversion moves. What appears to be resistance in one moment, can swiftly turn into its opposite. This shifting nature of resistance is acutely felt in today’s capitalist society in which demands for authenticity, freedom, co-operation and social inclusion have been co-opted by capitalism (Fleming, 2014). Moreover, this ambivalent nature of resistance is visible also closer to home, in the field with which many of the authors of this edited volume would be associated – that is, the field of critical management studies. One might say that the defining feature of this program is, to repeat Critchley’s words from above, to challenge ‘what passes for doxa in a specific context’. In this specific context, it means, among other things, debunking the mythologies produced by mainstream management studies. As such, this critical project shares something vital with a resistance movement: the struggle against preconceived ideological truths and the attempt to create alternative routes. However, internal critics have had good reasons to ask whether this project is at all relevant, claiming that, as scholars, we are often too introspective, routinely out of touch with wider political questions, and generally incapable of presenting any real alternatives (Spicer et al., 2009). We may, smugly, think that we are part of the resistance, meanwhile serving as the perfect alibi, or scapegoat, for the kind of management theory we so ardently reject. The battle between resistance, as an act of subversion, and recuperation, as a force of domestication, will most certainly continue, in the academy as much as in other workplaces. The lesson that we can draw from the Situationists is that resistance has to be conceived, again and again, always in a new fashion, or else it will cease to have an effect, quickly and imperceptibly becoming part of, and facilitating, that which it originally set out to oppose.

References (key texts in bold) Ackroyd, S. and Thompson, P. (1999). Organizational Misbehaviour. London: Sage. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Caygill, H. (2013). Resistance: a philosophy of defiance. Bloomsbury: New York. Cederström, C. and Fleming, P. (2012). Dead Man Working. London: Zero Books. Critchley, S. and Cederström, C. (2012). How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Cambridge: Polity Press. Culbert, S.A. and Elden, J.M. (1970). An anatomy of activism for executives. Harvard Business Review, 48(6): 131–42. Dent, E. and Goldberg, S. (1999). Challenging ‘resistance to change’. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 35: 25–41. Derrida, D. (1998). Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dunne, S., Harney, S. and Parker, M. (2008). The responsibilities of management intellectuals: a survey. Organization, 15(2): 271–82. Fleming, P. (2009). Authenticity and the Cultural Politics of Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleming, P. (2014). Resisting Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fleming, P. and Sturdy, A. (2009). ‘Just be yourself!’: towards neonormative control in organizations? Employee Relations, 31(6): 569–83. Ford, J.D., Ford, L.W. and D’Amelio, A. (2008). Resistance to change: the rest of the story. Academy of Management Review, 33: 362–77. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: an Introduction. New York: Random House. Heath, J. and Potter, A. (2005) The Rebel Sell: how the counter culture became consumer culture. Oxford: Capstone Publishing. 540

Resistance

Herbert, T.T. and Estes, P.W. (1977). Improving executive decisions by formalizing dissent: the corporate devil’s advocate. Academy of Management Review, 662–7. Jermier, J.M., Knights, D. and Nord, W.R. (1994). Resistance and power in organizations: agency, subjectivity and the labour process, in Jermier, J.M., Knights, D. and Nord, W.R. (eds), Resistance and Power in Organizations. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24. Joni, S-N. and Beyer, D. (2009). How to pick a good fight. Harvard Business Review, December: 48–57. Kelly, J. (1970). Make conflict work for you. Harvard Business Review, 48(4): 103–13. Kirkman, B.L. and Shapiro, D.L. (1997). The impact of cultural values on employee resistance to teams: toward a model of globalized self-managing work team effectiveness. Academy of Management Review, 22(3): 730–57. Krantz, J. (1999). Comment on ‘challenging resistance to change’. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. 35: 42–44. Lawrence, P.R. (1954). How to deal with resistance to change. Harvard Business Review, 32: 49–57. Piderit, S.K. (2000). Rethinking resistance and recognizing ambivalence: a multidimensional view of attitudes toward an organizational change. Academy of Management Review, 25: 783–94. Spicer, A., Alvesson, M. and Kärreman, D. (2009). Critical performativity: the unfinished business of critical management studies. Human Relations, 62(4): 537–60. Stewart, M. (2010). The Management Myth: debunking modern business philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton. Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005). Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: new public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5): 683–706. Thomas, R. and Hardy, C. (2011). Reframing resistance to organizational change. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 27: 322–31. Zaleznik, A. (1965). The dynamics of subordinacy. Harvard Business Review, 43: 119–31. Zaltman, G. and Duncan, R. (1977). Strategies for Planned Change. New York: Wiley. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House.

541

51 Rituals in organizations Rupture, repetition and the institutional event Gazi Islam

Rituals in organizations have been increasingly recognized as key to understanding the creation and maintenance of institutional orders, as well as organizational norms and values. Rituals consist of public, emotionally salient, formalized behavioural practices, bringing actors together and communicating shared social meanings. Held by some to run counter to modern notions of bureaucratic rationality and instrumental action, the study of rituals has traditionally been associated with pre-modern, non-Western cultures. However, organizational scholars in the 1980s, in the wake of renewed interest in organizational culture and symbolism, rekindled ritual studies (e.g. Trice and Beyer, 1984), leading to a slow but consistently accumulating stream of literature on the topic. Organizational scholars, increasingly recognizing that ‘rationalized’ administrative systems are often built from ceremonial, even sacred, foundations, have turned to ritual as a tool for understanding organizational and institutional orders. Although some of the extant literature specifies ritual mechanisms (e.g. Smith and Stuart, 2011), explanations of why rituals function are still largely absent in organizational studies. Most work focuses on aspects of sensemaking, repetition and symbolism that are true of symbolic approaches more generally, and not specific to ritual. It is true that rituals are symbolic and removed from daily behaviour. Yet, at the same time, they are situated and local, involving concrete action and specific sites of performance. Rituals thus function simultaneously at the concrete level of action, and at the abstract level of wider organizational and institutional meanings. In fact, what makes ritual unique as a form of institutional action is its emphasis on presence, immediacy, and embodiment as ways to constitute abstract institutions. This aspect of rituals has been largely neglected in organizational studies, but may be the aspect holding the most theoretical and philosophical potential for organization studies. In this chapter, I will focus on the situated and local aspect of rituals, linking them with philosophical treatments around the notion of the ‘event’. This notion, deriving from Whitehead’s process philosophy but adapted and popularized independently by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, involves occurrences that interrupt the flow of the everyday, disrupting explanation and opening the possibility for radical social change. I draw a parallel, within ritual theory, to Van Gennep’s notion of ‘life crises’, as moments in which ruptures to the social fabric 542

Rituals

threaten community bonds. Ritual emerges as a response to life crises/events, attempting to contain their radical potential, while not blocking entirely the transformative potentialities opened up by events. The layout of the chapter will begin with a short introduction on rituals, describing the theoretical lacuna I wish to explore in the chapter. Next, turning to the event notion, I will discuss this concept in the context of rituals, bringing up the idea that what, in ritual studies is called the ‘liminal’, can best be described as the institutional containment of event moments. I will then describe how ritual can manage events in distinct ways, leading to different forms of institutional maintenance and change. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this way of thinking about rituals for the philosophy of institutions.

Rituals and organization theory Rituals are performative events that are public, collective, and involve exposure or enactment of social values or beliefs (e.g. Smith and Stuart, 2011; Islam and Zyphur, 2009; Trice and Beyer, 1984). Rituals may entail both run-of-the mill, daily activities and seemingly common activities (e.g. Di Domenico and Phillips, 2009), or large events that define organizations and individuals, such as births or deaths, events known as ‘life crises’ (van Gennep, 1909[1960]). Rituals are highly symbolized, and tend to involve ceremonial gestures and formalized rules (Dacin et al., 2010, Smith and Stuart, 2011). Rituals in organizational theory have been studied in the context of formalized dining events (Dacin et al., 2010), meetings and workshops within organizations (Johnson et al., 2010), competitions such as the Grammy awards (Anand and Watson, 2004) and human resource management practices (Kamoche, 1995), among other settings. Regarding their domains of theoretical application within organization studies, rituals first appeared within the area of organizational culture (e.g. Trice and Beyer, 1984), later moving to institutional theory (Dacin et al., 2010), and developing some links with the emerging area of field-configuring events (e.g. Anand and Watson, 2004). Ritual theory, although still relatively sparsely used in the organizational literature, has mainly brought theoretical contributions linked to three broad areas. The first, drawing from early studies in the organizational culture area, involves creating and maintaining cultures via ritual events, such as rites of passage, rites of degradation, rites of enhancement, rites of renewal, rites of conflict resolution, and rites of integration (Trice and Beyer, 1993, 1984). These different rites have the functions of integrating individuals into and out of organizational roles, preparing organizations for change, renewing social ties, and more generally, navigating between the needs of stability and change within the organization (Islam and Zyphur, 2009). As such, they are drivers of organizations identities and meanings, providing opportunities for collective sensemaking (Maitlis and Christianson, 2013), and allowing for the shared establishment of organizational visions among members. While this first wave of ritual studies emphasized organizational level cultures and managerial uses of ritual events, more recent studies have looked at ritual as an aspect of institutional maintenance and reproduction (e.g. Dacin et al., 2010; Anand and Watson, 2004). Particularly in aspects of institutional theory that involve value internalization and socialization (e.g. Dacin et al., 2010), ritual also has important implications for balancing institutional change and continuity (Islam and Zyphur, 2009). The use of ritual as a mechanism to link institutions to practices that reinforce or change underlying structures suggests that ritual is a form of ‘institutional work’ (e.g. Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006) in that it involves practices that construct or remake institutions in specific and programmatic, although not always predictable, ways. Finally, while it has received less explicit attention in organization studies, ritual theory has often been used as a way to show the everyday process of institutionalization within workplaces 543

Gazi Islam

(e.g. Johnson et al., 2010). Relevant to recent concerns with institutional ‘micro-processes’ (e.g. Suddaby et al., 2010), phenomena such as workshops (Johnson et al., 2010) or business dinners (Connolly, 2010) become the everyday spaces where organizational and institutional norms are worked out. Moving from everyday practices to institutional structures, moreover, involves a formalization of the everyday (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) that is largely undertheorized. Moving from lived meanings to formal institutions changes the symbolic status of a practice, not just maintaining the practice but qualitatively transforming it. Such theorizing much explains not only the diffusion or habituation of practices, but their symbolic transfer across symbolic spheres, by which they take on an air of the ‘sacred’ (Durkheim, 1912[1995]). Ritual, with its origins in the study of the sacred (e.g. Bell, 1997), becomes an important mechanism for understanding how to bridge the contingent activities of everyday life and the quasi-transcendent forms of institutional structures or logics. In short, the key aspects of ritual that have emerged from the literature have been focused around their importance for dealing with uncertainty, consolidating identity and establishing, maintaining and transforming institutions. While ritual theory does have important insights in each of these areas, they are largely areas which could also be explained via more general sensemaking or other micro-institutional practices, including institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), as well as practice-based theories (e.g. Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). What such uses of ritual theory miss, however, are the unique aspects of ritual involving the ‘eventful’ nature of rituals. This aspect links up with, but expands beyond, the third contribution to organization studies mentioned above, that of linking formalized structures with the everyday. In short, rituals are events in the sense that they occur in the here-and-now, require some kind of collective presence, and have a memorable, icon-like episodic structure (McCauley and Lawson, 2002), giving them a singularity that is both key to their functioning and paradoxical, as I describe in the next section.

The ‘eventful’ aspect of rituals What may be the most conceptually rich aspect of rituals, as suggested above, is the singularity implied in their material, present, immediate aspect. This immediacy is key in bringing to everyday practices the transcendental and impalpable logics behind institutional regulations and cultures. Juxtaposed against this ‘eventful’ aspect, however, is a paradox, for rituals are also marked by their repetitive and formulaic structure. Indeed, when we talk about a ‘morning ritual’, or describe a meeting as ‘just a ritual’, we are not referring to the idiosyncratic or singular aspects of the event, but rather their subsumption under a general category that flattens diversity and makes the event feel ‘merely symbolic’ rather than materially and phenomenologically rich. Thus, ritual is deeply embedded in a paradox between stability and change that, in its enactment, is somehow constitutive, reinforcing, and transformative of social orders (Islam and Zyphur, 2009). How both sides of this paradox are able to play out in practice, and give the ritual event a kind of social power, remains an issue of contention in ritual studies (Bell, 1997), and is virtually absent from organizational and institutional studies of ritual. Similarly, what is rarely discussed in organizational studies is the origin of ritual in ‘life crises’ (van Gennep, 1909[1960]), in which key moments of rupture (e.g. birth, transformation, death) give rise to social processes of sensemaking via ritual that attempt to overlay stability and change. This paradox is heightened by the fact that the principles of stability and change do not simply alternate over time and situation; rather, ritual’s ‘eventful’ nature demands that both be represented in a given space and time, brought together in a ritual act whose significance is to locate stability within change and vice versa. Thus, to understand ritual as a discrete, public performance of 544

Rituals

contradictory principles, it is important to examine more closely the notion of the ‘event’, that which differentiates ritual action from other kinds of symbolic action or institutional practice. By examining the idea of events, scholars might be able to gain a window into organizational and institutional processes that are occluded by conceiving of organizational space and time as linear, homogeneous and undifferentiated. The centrality of the ‘event’ as an ontological category, although marginalized throughout most of Western philosophy (Shaviro, 2007), took centre stage with Whitehead’s (1929[1978]) Process and Reality, which made the event a central constituent of being. The world, in this conception, is constituted not primarily of things, but of happenings, moments that can become concretized into things only in a derivative manner. These moments, or in Whiteheadian terminology, ‘actual occasions’, are constitutive of reality, and events are composed of a complex nexus of actual occasions. Foundational to a process perspective of reality (e.g. Coghlan, 2011), objects are always in transitory states of ‘eventful’ being, in flux, and persist or change as aggregates of their constituent occasions. In this sense, reality is, at each moment, a ‘renewal, a novelty, a fresh creation’ (Shaviro, 2007: 2). At the same time, however, the process aspect of reality gives rise to its inverse, that moments are pregnant with their pasts, and are definable only to the extent that they bring together occasions in ways that allow momentary meaning. As Cobb (2007) describes, Whitehead’s process philosophy necessitates locating the history of the past as internal to present moments, to give these moments their present character, so as not to appear as senseless and disconnected. In this way, reality from a process perspective simultaneously undermines and reinforces the ‘solidity’ of temporal events. First, they are undermined because their constituent elements are not solid objects by ephemeral happenings, occasions in a flux that are always ready to be reconstituted at any subsequent moment. Yet, events are also reinforced because of their ability to capture the sum of their pasts, embodying the cutting edge of a ‘becoming of continuity’ (Whitehead, 1929[1978]: 35). Thus, in a way evocative of how ritual moments are used to call up ancestors or reconnect with foundational values, events can be conceptualized as the entirety of history as displayed in the immanent now, a collapsing of past and present that infuses the present with the power of history just as it removes what is unique or solid about the present. Whitehead’s conception of the event was taken up, albeit in somewhat different ways, by philosophers interested in renewing philosophical perspectives on being with an ontology that integrated moments of flux, rupture, or immanence. The notion of the event in particular became central to two important contemporary philosophers, Gilles Deleuze (e.g. 1993, 1987) and Alain Badiou (e.g. 1988). Although these thinkers were influenced by diverse philosophies of ‘becoming’ (e.g. in particular Bergson, in the case of Deleuze), there is a clear continuity in the preoccupation with the notion of the event as ontologically central. For Deleuze, the notion of actual occasions is related to that of ‘singularity’, a ‘point of inflection or of discontinuous transformation’ (cf. Shaviro, 2007: 3), in which the past is transferred into the present moment, which nevertheless exists as a self-creating, discrete unit of reality. The Deleuzian event is ‘inessential, unexpected, anomalous, seemingly impossible from the current state of affairs, and therefore capable of opening up the future, making a difference, and changing the world’ (Linstead and Thanem, 2007: 1493). In short, similarly to Whitehead, the potential of the event is in its ability to undo the apparent stability of objects or things, and to fix our attention instead on the aspect of movement that underlies stable reality. Similarly concerned about the notion of singularity and flux in history, Badiou (2001) moves towards events for their transformative potential, seeing in them moments of potential disruption. Rather than historical components, events are seen by Badiou as original happenings that are 545

Gazi Islam

self-sufficient, pure ruptures with the historical backgrounds of their contexts, embodying excess and unable to be foreseen. Events are ‘a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears’ (Badiou, 2001: 67). Influenced by Deleuze, Badiou is concerned to understand how reflection and practice respond to the inarticulable event, that is, whether they seek to recuperate in it its danger and unpredictability, or alternatively, attempt to reduce events to what is routine, predictable, and already known. In this vision, events themselves constitute ‘life crises’ in van Gennep’s sense, and ritual action is not so much an event itself, but a symbolic frame with which to deal with an event, either by attempting to do justice to the event or by attempting to contain its threatening aspect. In sum, processual notions of the event have highlighted several related aspects that can be developed in the context of ritual action. The importance of the event as a nexus of moments in which past and present are fused, yet where the present also takes on a singularity and unique nature, provides an important clue for understanding ritual. If ritual itself can be seen as the dramatic performance of such an event, its use as a form of commemoration and community building is evident. Yet in this very evocation of the past, the ritual event confirms itself as a memorable, affect-laden, and critical event itself, reproducing and reaffirming the past that it represents. Further, the openness of events as represented in Deleuze makes ritual an organizational moment in which communal energies can be mobilized and directed. Finally, the notion of rupture contained in Badiou’s conception of the event can illustrate both aspects of ritual: first, the emancipatory aspect, in which social reality is opened up, revealed as provisional, and order is radically interrupted, and second, where symbolic work is done to contain and infuse this very danger and transcendent force with social meanings, harnessing its sacred power for social purposes. Thus, the dual nature of ritual, as repetition and as rupture, are twin aspects that can be read from the ‘eventful’ nature of rituals. We turn to these two aspects next.

Two readings of ritual Based on the above, we can read ritual actions in two distinct ways, as rupture or as repetition, the latter, conservative of social structures, the former, transformative. These two distinct aspects of ritual are both dialectically opposed and mutually reinforcing, calling into question the distinction between institutional change and renewal. This distinction makes it practically difficult for social scientists, given a particular institutional activity, to conclude whether this activity reinforces or subverts order.

Ritual as rupture The event at the centre of ritual activities, following the conceptions outlined above, may be considered a kind of undefinable moment of uncertainty, what is described in the ritual literature as a liminal moment (van Gennep, 1909[1960]). The concept of liminality refers to the transitionary phase of ritual, originally discussed with reference to rites of passage but applicable to ritual more generally. In the liminal moment of ritual, identities are bracketed, such that actors shed their social identities and institutional roles, losing themselves in the enactment of ritual. Rather than simply an individual loss of identity, the liminal moment is a moment of unity between the person, the community and the world, a feeling described by Turner (1969) as communitas. Yet this moment is also a moment of ordeal, where one is lost, together and lost in the flux of being. The liminal moment is the transcendental aspect of ritual, where the event as interruption and danger is most acutely felt. 546

Rituals

The question arises as to why, if moments of liminality are so threatening to institutional structures, would they be performed so systematically across cultures in ritual acts. A simple answer might be that cultures are threatened externally by events outside of cultural control, e.g. climactic upheavals, wars and seasons, but also normal ‘life crises’ such as births and deaths, where the ability of social institutions to structure reality is severely questioned. In such situations, danger is unavoidable, and performance may be a way to deal with liminality that is unavoidable. A more nuanced response, however, might recognize that institutions often depend on transcendental links with something beyond the institution, a sense of enchantment or totality that is only indirectly graspable, but that social structures depend on for their legitimacy and their sense of reality. Allowing rupture within social performances is a way of representing the reality of the society, an acknowledgement of the limits of organization, which allow structures to define themselves negatively against the backdrop of the limitless or sublime.

Ritual as repetition Although liminality is central to ritual activities, it is always bracketed in by pre-liminal and post-liminal structuring practices that work to contain the sublime moment of the liminal. It is in this sense that while liminality has a transgressive or unpredictable nature, its use in symbolic practices is often associated with system-maintenance rather than change. One might say that the controlled presentation and overcoming of liminal moments in ritual exerts a reassuring moment of social certainty, in which the limits of society are neatly contained within, rather than overflowing from, social structures. In this way, sociability can profit from its own limits by showing how society persists despite births and deaths, identity continues in the face of maturation and transformation, and organizations survive their material changes and member turnover. Given that some kind of organizational changes are inevitable in a contingent world, the next best thing to total control is containment of the natural shocks to society. Such an interpretation, however, may overlook that, as noted above, rupture is not only controlled by ritual, but may also be co-opted in order to be made to serve institutional purposes. The maintenance and repetition of institutional or organizational practices is made difficult because, first, without any transcendent purpose or value, such repletion may seem monotonous, bereft of affect or passion, and thus ultimately uninteresting to members. Second, organizational values and practices may seem to make little sense to members unless seen as necessary to ‘holding the ground’ against dissolution into chaos or bankruptcy, for maintaining an organized space in the face of entropy. Organizational accounts often draw on images of rules and structures as ensuring survival, keeping things together, and thus implicitly invoke the spectre of a world without boundaries where society would be untenable, that must be held at bay through organized action. Where ritual performatively enacts society’s struggle against dissolution, it places liminality not only as a threat, but as the raison d’être for social rules, giving legitimacy to institutional structures.

Agenda for the organizational study of rituals The key issue throughout this chapter has been the paradoxical double nature of rituals, which reify and celebrate the ruptures that threaten underlying cultural systems, which, for their own part, give structure and voice to these ruptures themselves. As an enduring social theoretic question, then, one might ask ‘Why is it that social systems can ultimately only reproduce themselves through the performative representation of their own impossibility?’ This question opens up agendas for research, both conceptual and empirical, that touch both on the ethical issues and critical 547

Gazi Islam

possibilities of ritual action, as well as the underexplored but central notion of liminality that ritual brings. First, how would an ‘ethics of the event’ (Badiou, 2001) deal with the fact that the liminality of rituals is ultimately used for social reproduction and often turns into its opposite? Following Badiou, an ethics of the event could involve recognizing how the singularity and rupture of events are recognized or not by social actors, that is, to what extent they take seriously the possibility of change inherent in liminal moments. As Badiou (2001: 67) states ‘genuine ethics is of truths in the plural – or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world’. Such an ethics would be ‘based on the recognition of the material singularity of each event’ (Malpas and Wake, 2006: 147). Exploring the possibility for such an ethics, is there a possibility of representing the liminal in ritual in a way that preserves its multiplicity and potential for transformation without falling back into given forms. If so, what are the conditions of possibility, individual and collective, for such a form of ritual? It seems necessary that social structures would have to remain open to radical change in the face of liminality, while the singular notion of the moment also would not be able to give any certain template for what such a radical change might look like in practice. Thus a dilemma seems to be opened up, since liminality seems to express the contingent nature of practices without giving any determinate form to new structures of practice. At the very least, then, such an ethics might provide a form of awareness by which actors, even in maintaining their institutional forms, remain aware of the ultimate contingency of these forms and their ultimate incapacity to do justice to the singular point of origin from which they arise. Finally, given that descriptions of events are not limited to ritual, but involve a larger engagement with process philosophy and critical approaches, how might the study of events be expanded beyond ritual, and comparisons made between ritual and other types of events? For instance, the growing area of field-configuring events (e.g. Lampel and Meyer, 2008), as well as studies of festivals (e.g. Islam et al., 2008), an array of different kinds of events, with different postures on the possibility of deep institutional change, are available for contrast. These events involve different distributions of rupture and repetition, configuring transformative possibilities in distinct ways. Ultimately, a more general study of the event might be possible by drawing insights across these diverse fields.

References (key texts in bold) Anand, N. and Watson, M.R. (2004). Tournament rituals in the evolution of fields: the case of the Grammy Awards. Academy of Management Journal, 47(1): 59–80. Badiou, A. (1988). L’Être et l’évènement. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil (trans. Peter Hallward). London: Verso. Bell. C. (1997). Ritual: perspectives and dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cobb, J.B. (2007). Person-in-community: Whiteheadian insights into community and institution. Organization Studies. 28(4): 567–88. Coghlan, D. (2011). Action research: exploring perspectives on a philosophy of practical knowing. The Academy of Management Annals, 5(1): 53–87. Connolly, T. (2010). Business ritual studies: corporate ceremony and sacred space. International Journal of Business, 1(2): 32–48. Dacin, M.T., Munir, K. and Tracey, P. (2010). Formal dining at Cambridge colleges: linking ritual performance and institutional maintenance. The Academy of Management Journal, 53(6): 1393–418. Deleuze, G. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (trans. T. Conley). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Di Domenico, M. and Phillips, N. (2009). Sustaining the ivory tower: Oxbridge formal dining as organizational ritual. Journal of Management Inquiry, 18(4): 326–43. 548

Rituals

Durkheim, E. (1912[1995]). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Islam, G. and Zyphur, M. (2009). Rituals in organizations: a review and expansion of current theory. Group and Organization Management, 34(1), 114–39. Islam, G., Zyphur, M.J. and Boje, D. (2008). Carnival and spectacle in Krewe de Vieux and the Mystic Krewe of Spermes: the mingling of organization and celebration. Organization Studies, 29(12): 1565–89. Johnson, G., Prashantham, S., Floyd, S.W. and Bourque, N. (2010). The ritualization of strategy workshops. Organization Studies, 31(12): 1589–618. Kamoche, K. (1995). Rhetoric, ritualism, and totemism in human resource management. Human Relations, 48: 367–85. Lampel, J. and Meyer, A.D. (2008). Field-configuring events as structuring mechanisms: How conferences, ceremonies, and trade shows constitute new technologies, industries, and markets. Journal of Management Studies, 45: 1025–35. Lawrence, T.B. and Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work, in Clegg, S.R., Hardy, C., Lawrence, T.B. and Nord, W.R. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (2nd edn). London: Sage, pp. 215–54. Linstead, S. and Thanem, T. (2007). Multiplicity, virtuality and organization: the contribution of Gilles Deleuze. Organization Studies, 28(10): 1483–501. McCauley, R.N. and Lawson, E.T. (2002). Bringing Ritual to Mind: psychological foundations of cultural forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maitlis, S. and Christianson, M. (2013). Sensemaking in organizations: taking stock and moving forward. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1): 1–98. Malpas, S. and Wake, P. (2006). The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. New York: Routledge. Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2): 340–63. Sandberg, J. and Tsoukas, H. (2011). Grasping the logic of practice: theorizing through practical rationality. Academy of Management Review, 36(2): 338–60. Shaviro, S. (2007). Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. Retrieved on 28 August 2013 from www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/DeleuzeWhitehead.pdf. Smith, A.C.T. and Stuart, B. (2011). Organizational rituals: features, functions and mechanisms. International Journal of Management Reviews, 13: 113–33. Suddaby, R., Elsbach, K.D., Greenwood, R., Meyer, J.W. and Zilber, T.B. (2010). Organizations and their institutional environments – bringing meaning, values, and culture back in: introduction to the special research forum. The Academy of Management Journal, 53: 1234–40. Trice, H.M. and Beyer, J.M. (1984). Studying organizational cultures through rites and ceremonials. Academy of Management Review, 9: 653–69. Trice, H.M. and Beyer, J. (1993). The Cultures of Work Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Turner, V.W. (1969). The Ritual Process. Chicago, IL: Aldine. van Gennep, A. (1909[1960]). The Rites of Passage (trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitehead, A.N. (1929[1978]). Process and Reality. New York: Free Press.

549

52 Spirituality, religion and organization Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

Introduction Spirituality is a term associated with the diffusion of the sacred across the public sphere, into contexts traditionally seen as secular, including work organizations. Interest in this topic has increased over the past decade and a half, and has encouraged a more fluid, dynamic understanding of religious practice and meaning. The rise of spirituality is associated with declining institutional religious participation in Western European countries, including the UK, but not in the US where high levels of church attendance continue (Davie, 1994; Beckford, 1992). It is also associated with the cultural spread of Eastern belief systems in Western societies (Campbell, 2007), a trend which is aligned with the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This has led to the growth of the New Age movement which draws on various, especially nonWestern, religious practices and emphasizes individual spiritual discovery through self-expression and realization of inner being (Heelas, 1996). Spirituality can therefore be seen as a feature of the cultural post-secular turn (McLennan, 2007, 2010), an aspect of religious revivalism promoted by contemporary globalization (Robertson and Garrett, 1991), and evidence of unorthodox, transient or ‘liquid religion’ (Turner, 2011). While the societal origins of spirituality are relatively clear, there remain ongoing difficulties in defining what is being studied under the label of spirituality in organization studies and determining how research might be done. The extent of this controversy is evident from the use of the term ‘workplace spirituality’, which has generated numerous, inconclusive attempts at definition (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000; Gotsis and Kortesi, 2007). Some mainstream organizational researchers have argued that spirituality is distinct and separable from religion (Mitroff, 2003; Delbecq, 2005), others suggest that it represents a manifestation of shifting conceptions of sacred beliefs and practices in Western societies that cannot be understood without reference to religion (Hicks, 2003; Long and Helms Mills, 2010). Critical organizational researchers further argue that this ambiguity renders spirituality an empty and misleading slogan that leaves it open to corporate-led takeover (Carrette and King, 2005; Bell and Taylor 2003; Long and Helms-Mills, 2010). 550

Spirituality

Here we seek to engage with these debates by considering spirituality ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically. We locate spirituality through the sociology of Marx and Weber, which we draw on to inform our account of the changing philosophical positioning of belief in the context of modernity. These classical sociological theories provide the foundations for the secularization thesis, and associated notions of rationalization and disenchantment, which we suggest encourage an inherently secular ‘unconscious metaphysics’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2011: 6) within organization studies. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore the ontological and epistemological challenges raised by the study of spirituality that arise as a consequence of these explicitly metaphysical aspects which are presumed by believers to exist independently of human constructions of meaning. We further argue that mainstream, mainly North American, workplace spirituality studies tend to reject a secular metaphysics in favour of particular theological approaches. These are concerned with assessing the truth claims associated with specific religious belief systems and relating them in a functionalistic manner to various aspects of organization. Instead we propose an analytical strategy that suspends or ‘brackets’ (Berger, 1967) ontological and epistemological assumptions about ‘what there is’ and ‘what can be known’ about spirituality and organization, and focuses on understanding how they are socially constructed. To avoid reducing spirituality to the status of an epiphenomenon, either through secular or theological philosophical positioning, we propose a ‘methodologically agnostic’ (Bell and Taylor, 2014) approach that acknowledges the uncertainty associated with studying metaphysical issues. Drawing on the work of James (1902) and Berger (1967), we suggest methods that focus on experience and socially constructed reality as the bases for understanding spiritualities as postsecular action-guiding ethics (Bell et al., 2012a) in the context of positivist post-Enlightenment rationality.

Marx, Weber and re-enchantment in organization studies The centrality of religion in the work of Marx and Weber, if acknowledged at all, is often read within organization studies as an accident of timing. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, religion still occupied a privileged position in Western societies and cultures. Empirical positivist science and secular industrial modernism were emerging as the dominant social forces in Europe and North America, but spiritual and religious beliefs remained significant in everyday life, including economic life, which involved frequent engagement with religious institutions, ritual practices and moral frameworks. Both Marx and Weber predicted that religion would (and in Marx’s case should) disappear from modern society, through secularization, disenchantment or political action. However, it is evident that in the twenty-first century most of the world remains ‘furiously religious’ (Berger, 1999: 3) – ‘as of 2005, 33 per cent of adherents’ belong to the category Christianity, 21 per cent to Islam, and 14 per cent to Hinduism. Just 16 per cent belong to the category “non-religious” – a percentage which includes atheists, agnostics and secular humanists, together with people who report “none” or who have no religious preference’ (Heelas, 2008: 222–3). Belief in all its forms remains significant as a basis for human activity, in the public as well as the private sphere, and in ways which affect secular as well as religious organizations, in the context of the global political economy. It is therefore important that the conceptual status of belief within organization studies is revived and revised in order to enable analysis of spirituality and religion. Yet despite the importance of religion in foundational accounts of organization, and its continuing importance in society, contemporary analyses of the intersections between classical 551

Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

sociological theory and organization studies tend to be based on an unreflexively secular metaphysics. Adler (2009), for example, notes only in passing that Marx’s materialist philosophy positions religion as an aspect of the political-ideological superstructure that enables class domination. Clegg and Lounsbury (2009) and du Gay (2009) provide wide-ranging readings of Weberian concepts such as authority, rationality and vocation, without acknowledging the essential place of religious belief in their development. We suggest that these analyses, taken from the Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies, are indicative of a long-term tendency within organization studies to see other-worldly or metaphysical beliefs as theoretically insignificant. This oversight of spirituality and religion may be related to the importance of Marxist philosophy in organization studies. The philosophy that provides the underpinnings of Marx’s theories of ideology, political economy and social action describes religion as inessential to a good human life – indeed, as obstructive to its pursuit under conditions of capitalism. In developing his perspective on alienation, which would in turn inform economic materialism and his conceptions of power, Marx was engaging directly with a debate that centred on the philosophical nature of Christianity and its social implications. In doing so, he built on Feuerbach’s critiques of Hegelian phenomenology. Feuerbach’s reading of Hegel’s philosophy suggested the secularized reproduction of religion by implying that philosophy is also a form of belief, mythological and therefore productive of alienation rather than helpful in addressing it. Marx extended Feuerbach’s critique significantly by locating metaphysical belief as entirely outside necessary human experience. Analysis of the material and economic, as Marx famously and repeatedly argued, would allow better development of understanding, theory and then action than any form of supernatural belief. Religion in all its forms could only ever be a distraction from realizing the full potential of humanity, politically, socially and existentially. This is the position expressed when popular Marxian homilies describing religion as the ‘opium of the people’ or the ‘sigh of an oppressed creature’ are invoked. Marx’s philosophical account of religion is, however, considerably more open to interpretation than this stereotypical representation suggests, as MacIntyre (1995[1968]) makes clear. He argues that Marxism does not stand in opposition or antagonism to Christianity, and by implication, to supernatural metaphysical belief systems. Rather, the metaphysics and politics of both should be understood as variations on the theme of how to lead a good life under conditions of capitalism, especially in its liberalist and neo-liberalist forms. MacIntyre makes a strong case for re-interpreting Marx’s writings as a transcendent metaphysics of hope that can exist alongside theological critiques of capitalism’s effects on individual and community. MacIntyre’s reading of the Hegel–Feuerbach–Marx debate through the lens of twentieth-century modernism’s economic and political developments, is an original re-interpretation of Marx’s work and its translation into praxis, and as such has the potential to inform new empirical and analytical possibilities for organization studies. The activities of French worker-priests and British Industrial Mission chaplains, for example, in constructing a practice-based morality for living with and challenging capitalism, illustrate such a potential synthesis (Bell, 2008). The philosophical neglect of religion is also evident in how Weber’s writings are interpreted in contemporary organization studies. Clegg and Lounsbury (2009) object to the transfer of Weber’s work from an ‘Old Europe’ preoccupied with issues of power and domination, to inform functionalist or institutionalist analyses in the ‘New World’, enabled by Talcott Parsons’ reading and translation. In particular, they call for closer engagement with the cultural dimension of Weberian sociology to revive its potential for political, discursive perspectives on organization. This could happen through more detailed contemporary re-readings of Weber’s writing for its relevance to the conceptual and empirical conditions within which we now experience 552

Spirituality

capitalism (Gane, 2012). To do so, however, requires acknowledgement of Weber’s repeated contention that belief in the supernatural is inherent to the human condition and therefore cultural dynamics. Weber’s most prominent empirical development of this theme is in his account of the Protestant ethic’s relationship to modern rational capitalism, and especially that belief system’s influence in encouraging specific commitments to work and economic conduct. Weber’s claim to have found an essential condition for ‘sober bourgeois capitalism’ (Weber, 1930: 24) in its affinity with Calvinist, ascetic religious values is, to say the least, controversial. However, it neatly illustrates the fundamental empirical and conceptual importance of metaphysical beliefs in the construction of capitalism and in its development. The ‘spirit’ Weber identifies as key to capitalism’s logic continues to resonate today, in both secular analytical forms (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), and in more supernatural empirical form (Ong, 1987). Religion and spirituality are also central to Weber’s methodological arguments. Crude characterization of Weberian methodology positions it in idealist opposition to Marxist materialism. However, this is misleading for Weber was ‘engaged in a fruitful battle’ (Gerth and Mills, 2009[1948]: 63) throughout his working life with Marx’s substantive arguments and their underlying philosophies. Weber’s approach to conceptual development consistently suggests that the empirical starting point of sociological analysis must always be an ‘empathetic understanding of social life and culture’ as a basis for the researcher to engage in a ‘confrontation with the pre-conceptual realm of the empirical’ to attempt understanding of ‘the immediacy of lived experience in order to take up the impossible challenge of presenting this world in thought’ (Gane, 2012: 20–1). This suggests that Weber was working more in parallel with Marx’s ideas than against them. Religion presented a key empirical site for Weber’s conceptual work, in that he was committed to interpretive explanations of social action that sought meaning from individual or collective constructions of purpose. Purpose and meaning, and therefore emergent concepts such as rationality and disenchantment, not only took religion into account but located it as an autonomous aspect of being human and of human cultures. From this perspective, metaphysical beliefs remain differentiated, positioned as value systems at least equivalent to the economic or aesthetic, and therefore not subordinated as structural-functional dynamics that can be rationally managed (Taylor and Bell, 2012). The magical and mysterious that so fascinated Weber can then be researched in their own right, perhaps as value orientations that challenge the rationalization and disenchantment embedded in modern rational capitalism and its associated managerial practices, for example by reframing notions such as sustainability through feminist eco-spiritualities (Bell et al., 2012a).

Organizational study of spirituality As the brief preceding review highlights, the study of spirituality and organization raises complex ontological and epistemological challenges related to the metaphysical status of belief. It also presents particular challenges to scientific values and the Enlightenment positioning of religion as either irrelevant or simply an aspect of human behaviour like any other (McCutcheon, 1999). A number of organizational researchers have approached this topic from a secular, functionalist perspective. Their focus is managerial, involving evaluation of the psychological and social effects of spirituality on organizations and their members with a view to establishing causal links between spirituality and positive organizational outcomes, such as enhanced productivity. These ‘consequentialist’ (Gotsis and Kortezi, 2007) studies are founded on the principle of operationalism, relying on observable indicators of spirituality such as intrinsic job satisfaction, commitment, or personal growth as proxies, rarely considering whether metaphysical 553

Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

concepts such as ‘soul’, ‘god’ or ‘spirit’ have a reality beyond the psychological or structuralfunctional. They assume that the effects of spirituality are systematically observable and can be studied using positivist methods of inquiry. This produces an ironic contradiction, as they are also critical of modernist scientific forms of knowing, seeing spirituality as contributing an alternative in the form of mystical knowledge – yet they continue to study spirituality in reductionist ways (Forniciari and Lund Dean, 2001). This creates an epistemological tension, through using positivistic methods which are rooted in a secular philosophy of knowledge to study something that is understood to be sacred and metaphysical in nature (Bell and Taylor, 2003). Other researchers take an explicitly or implicitly sacred perspective, arguing that understanding spirituality necessitates belief in the existence of a reality beyond what is empirically observable (Lips-Wiersma, 2003; Delbecq, 2005). These writers assume that spirituality is a fundamental feature of the human condition, thereby suggesting that religious atheism (e.g. some forms of Buddhism or Quakerism) or humanism should be included as belief systems. They also elide distinctions between the practice and study of religion, often bringing their own religious faith to bear on the subject in ways which leave them open to the charge that they are seeking to ‘smuggle’ (Segal, 1999) their commitment to a particular religion into their scholarship. Related to this is the growth in theological approaches to understanding spirituality and organization, which engage directly with the truth claims associated with particular religious belief systems such as Islam, Christianity or Buddhism, and relate them to various aspects of organization, including leadership, business ethics and culture. Metaphysical concepts such as ‘soul’, ‘god’ or ‘spirit’ are employed in ways which suggest they are real. Much of this literature is based on relatively simplistic hermeneutic readings of particular religious texts and traditions, which are engaged with superficially for the purpose of demonstrating the functional purposes of religion (Durkheim, 1915) in a normative and prescriptive way, and usually in the service of global neoliberal capitalism (Sørensen et al., 2012). In the section that follows we therefore suggest an alternative in the form of methodological agnosticism (Bell and Taylor, 2014).

Knowing the metaphysical Methodological agnosticism avoids the question of whether or not belief systems have an ontological reality independent of the social actors who believe in them, by ‘bracketing’ (Berger, 1967) this issue. Spirituality is thereby granted ontological equivalence to the material and social, and belief systems are positioned as ‘aporetic, infinitely complex, impossible to know, and always open to question’ (Bell and Taylor, 2014: 550). Adopting this stance in the study of spirituality and organization rules out the possibility of a privileged insider or outsider position and proceeds on the basis of ‘not knowing’. Although this can be precarious in a fieldwork setting, for example by implying that the researcher is not fully competent in accomplishing a fieldwork self, methodological agnosticism helps to engender reflexive research practice and enables sympathetic engagement with a variety of belief systems. Through cultivating doubt, not just as a temporary problem to be solved through discovery (Locke et al., 2008) but as a permanent feature in the study of spirituality, explanations about the nature of reality are held in a dynamic tension that must be accepted rather than resolved. Methodological agnosticism therefore involves suspending ontological assumptions about ‘what there is’ and instead focuses on what can be known about spirituality and organization. Emphasis is placed on how spirituality and religion are experienced and socially constructed in organizations. This locates religion as a social and historical product which is embodied and experienced (James, 1902). Interpretation and enactment varies across time and place, that 554

Spirituality

organizational members and researchers institutionalize, or ‘externalize’ and ‘objectivate’ (Berger, 1967), for specific purposes and outcomes. This is based on the notion that religion has always been essential to achieving the socially constructed realities that frame human culture. The enduring influence of such belief systems arises from their use in explaining subjectivity, society, culture and reality with reference to ‘an ultimately valid ontological status . . . by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference’ (Berger 1967: 33). The unique ontological status of religion helps persuade cultural members that dominant reality constructions are legitimate, valid, and to be taken-for-granted. Thus religion and spirituality are specific plausibility structures that allow ‘the establishment, through human activity, of an all-embracing sacred order, that is, of a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the ever-present face of chaos’ (Berger 1967: 51). The existence or presence of the supernatural is not in question; that issue is left to theologians or religionists. However the social processes of constructing reality through belief, and their consequential effects, are empirically observable. Concern with the consequential effects of belief systems and their use as action-guiding ethics leads us to a second way of thinking about them methodologically, through pragmatism. The epistemological status of religion has been subject to controversy since Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant constructed epistemologies that did not assume the supernatural occupied a clearly differentiated ontological (and therefore ethical) position. This is especially prominent in the sociocultural effects of value orientations, or ethics, that so fascinated both Marx and Weber. Weber suggested that two of modernity’s key consequences, rationalization and secularization, resulted in the ‘dedifferentiation’ of religious ethics, such that they are considered equivalent to (or lesser than) scientific, economic, political, aesthetic and affective value systems. In other words, religion is no longer transcendent in resolving ethical or valuebased conflict. It is at best one among equals in everyday life, and at worst dismissed as a relic of pre-modern superstition that we should be evolving away from. Pragmatism ‘brackets’ questions of ultimate truth, or propositions about the nature of the world and humanity, quite differently. It maintains that the world-building which happens through perspectives on cosmological reality (religious or atheist) are best understood through social analysis that is sensitive to beliefs rather than dismissive of them. This can take the form of personal experience, participant observation or empathetic methodologies (Bell and Taylor, 2014). The version of pragmatism that has become influential in studying religion draws on James’ (1902) claim that research ought to take into account ‘sensible experience’ in accounting for the practical psychological and social consequences of belief. James asserts that belief systems should be analysed as ethics with a social purpose. This anti-foundationalist position, akin ontologically to Berger’s social constructionism, implies disinterest in the metaphysical content of spiritualities. It stands opposed to the more common ‘onto-theology’ of the twentieth century, which sought to understand religion cognitively and rationally (Rorty, 2005), and leads contemporary pragmatists to see religion as differentiated once again, but not in a hierarchical sense. In other words, pragmatist methodologies enable understanding of belief alongside scientific explorations of the world, by concentrating on what James called the ‘fruits’ of belief, rather than its ‘roots’. Methodological and philosophical re-engagement with religion forms part of what may be a ‘post-secular turn’ in society and social theory (McLennan, 2010). This current of thought challenges the assumption in radical thinking and critique that religious beliefs would wither and be replaced by a philosophico-scientific materialism. There is a wide spectrum of thought developing here, from Žižek interpreting Judaeo-Christian thought through Leninism, to Taylor’s (2007) case for transcendence (McLennan, 2010). In the middle, we find pragmatist perspectives such as those of Rorty and Habermas and poststructuralist positions. We are 555

Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

suggesting here that social constructionist and pragmatist perspectives are also potentially productive because their roots can be traced to an empirical desire to understand belief in the context of modernity.

Future directions We conclude this chapter by identifying directions for further research on spirituality, religion and organization. Building on a recent review of religion and organization studies by Tracey (2012), we selectively highlight those aspects of this review which we consider to hold the most potential. First, there is a need for studies which explore the role of the sacred in secular organizations; this includes analyses of the power of multinational corporations which may be implicitly as well as explicitly religious, especially in shaping consumer and employee subjectivities. Second, as Tracey notes, there is a need for more detailed understanding of the role of spirituality and religion as forms of identity-based disciplinary control in organizations. However, there is also a need for analyses of belief systems as ideologically based forms of social and political control whose influence extends beyond the organizational level, such as WalMart (Bell et al., 2012b) and Hobby Lobby1, which exert considerable political influence in countries such as the US. Third, as Tracey suggests, there is a need to understand how spiritualities can be used to challenge established moralities, including issues of misconduct. An example that illustrates this potential relates to the 2011–12 Occupy London protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. This institutionalized religious place in the heart of the City of London was used to highlight the moral issues associated with economic inequality and prompted public reconsideration of attitudes towards neo-liberal capitalism. As this example highlights, power elites within religious organizations do not have exclusive access to the symbolism and ethics of belief, since outsiders can draw on religion as a mobilizing resource in legitimating concerns about corporate capitalism. An overarching consideration which is shared by all of these areas of potential future study relates to the status of religion as a template for understanding all institutions. As Friedland (2013) argues, this relevance potentially applies to all domains of action which are oriented towards ultimate values, including value spheres which are associated with modern science because ‘all institutions have a metaphysical foundation beyond sense and reason’ (Friedland, 2013: 3), and all value rationalities are religious in the sense that they are not grounded in instrumental rationality or the senses. However, one of the weaknesses associated with much contemporary study of spirituality and organization is that it predominantly positions human subjects as subordinate to a higher being, as inherently flawed and as legitimate exploiters of the natural world. We suggest that this anthropocentric perspective, which is rooted primarily in a Judeo-Christian religious tradition, needs to be challenged, especially in light of the current environmental crises that confront our world (Bell et al., 2012a). As Curry (2006) argues, post-secular eco-spiritualities pose a challenge to modernist science as a value-free enterprise, by challenging the distinction between the material and the spiritual that underpins rational forms of organizing. Through this, we suggest there is potential for development of critical spiritualities of organization that question taken-for-granted assumptions about neo-liberalism and global capitalism and the values that underpin them. This opens up possibilities for more critical engagement between environmental and social concerns, religion and spirituality, including through the development of postcolonial theory and indigenous methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). This could enable greater recognition of alternative modes of knowing that challenge the dominance of rationalist epistemologies and propose post-secular alternatives to the dominant faith in modernist progress through scientific reason. 556

Spirituality

To conclude, Tsoukas and Chia (2011: 7) suggest that philosophy can illuminate ‘the possibility of a realm of tacit knowing and practical understanding [of organization] that resists logic, linguistic formulation and theoretical explanation’. In this chapter we have explored the reasons why the study of spirituality, religion and organization has been limited by traditional Marxist and Weberian philosophical approaches to organization studies. Through methodological agnosticism, we have sought to identify ways in which this could be remedied. While philosophical debates about reality and knowledge are undoubtedly important in all areas of organization studies, they are particularly important in the study of spirituality, religion and organization because of the ontological, epistemological and methodological complexities that are associated with this particular subject and the weaknesses and contradictions which are likely to be generated through its neglect.

Note 1

See David Levy’s recent posts on this http://organizationsandsocialchange.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/ whose-values-count-the-hobby-lobby-decision-and-corporate-social-responsibility/. Accessed on 6 August 2015.

References (key texts in bold) Adler, P. (2009). Marx and organization studies today, in Adler, P. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 62–91. Ashmos, D. and Duchon, D. (2000). Spirituality at work: a conceptualization and measure. Journal of Management Inquiry, 9(2): 134–45. Beckford, J. (1992). Religion, modernity and postmodernity, in Wilson, B. (ed.), Religion: contemporary issues. London: Bellew, pp. 11–23. Bell, E. (2008). Towards a critical spirituality of organization. Culture and Organization, 14(3): 293–307. Bell, E. and Taylor, S. (2003). The elevation of work: pastoral power and the New Age work ethic. Organization, 10(2): 329–49. Bell, E. and Taylor, S. (2014). Uncertainty in the study of belief: the risks and benefits of methodological agnosticism. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17(5): 543–57. Bell, E. Cullen, J. and Taylor, S. (2012a). Sustainability and the spiritual work ethic, in Case, P., Hopfl, H. and Letiche, H. (eds), Belief and Organization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–203. Bell, E., Taylor, S. and Driscoll, C. (2012b). Varieties of organizational soul: the ethics of belief in organizations. Organization, 19(4): 425–39. Berger, P. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: elements of a sociological theory of religion. New York: Doubleday. Berger, P. (1999). The desecularization of the world: a global overview, in Berger, P. (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, pp. 1–18. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Campbell, C. (2007). The Easternization of the West. London: Paradigm. Carrette, J. and King, R. (2005). Selling Spirituality: the silent takeover of religion. London: Routledge. Clegg, S. and Lounsbury, M. (2009). Weber: sintering the iron cage: Translation, domination and rationality, in Adler, P. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 118–45. Curry, P. (2006). Ecological Ethics: an introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davie, G. (1994). Religion in Britain since 1945: believing without belonging. London: John Wiley & Sons. Delbecq, A. (2005). Spiritually-informed management theory: overlaying the experience of teaching managers. Journal of Management Inquiry, 14(3): 242–6. du Gay, P. (2009). Max Weber and the ethics of office, in Adler, P. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 146–73. Durkheim, E. (1915). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin. 557

Emma Bell and Scott Taylor

Forniciari, C. and Lund Dean, K. (2001). Making the quantum leap: lessons from physics on studying spirituality and religion in organizations. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 14(4): 335–51. Friedland, R. (2013). God, love and other good reasons for practice: thinking through institutional logics, in Lounsbury, M. and Boxenbaum, E. (eds), Institutional Logics in Action. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 39A. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 25–50. Gane, N. (2012). Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gerth, H. and Mills, C.W. (2009[1948]). Introduction: The man and his work, in Gerth, H. and Mills, C.W. (eds), From Max Weber: essays in sociology. London: Routledge, pp. 3–74. Gotsis, G. and Kortezi, Z. (2007). Philosophical foundations of workplace spirituality: a critical approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 78(4): 575–600. Heelas, P. (1996). The New Age Movement: the celebration of the self and the sacralisation of modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Heelas, P. (2008). Spiritualities of Life: New Age romanticism and consumptive capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hicks, D. (2003). Religion and the Workplace: pluralism, spirituality, leadership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in human nature. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Lips-Wiersma, M. (2003). Making conscious choices in doing research on workplace spirituality. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 16(4), 406–25. Locke, K. Golden-Biddle, K. and Feldman, M.S. (2008). Making doubt generative: rethinking the role of doubt in the research process. Organization Science, 19(6): 907–18. Long, B. and Helms-Mills, J. (2010). Workplace spirituality, contested meaning, and the culture of organization: a critical sensemaking account. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23(3): 325–41. McCutcheon, R.T. (1999). The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion. London: Continuum. MacIntyre, A. (1995[1968]). Marxism and Christianity (2nd edn). London: Duckworth.\ McLennan, G. (2007). Towards postsecular sociology. Sociology, 41(5): 857–70. McLennan, G. (2010). The postsecular turn. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(4): 3–20. Mitroff, I. (2003). Do not promote religion under the guise of spirituality. Organization, 10(2): 375–82. Ong, A. (1987). Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: factory women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Robertson, R. and Garrett, W.R. (eds) (1991). Religion and Global Order. New York: Paragon House. Rorty, R. (2005). Anticlericalism and atheism, in Rorty, R. and Vattimo, G. (ed. Zabala, S.), The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 29–42. Segal, R.A. (1999). In defense of reductionism, in McCutcheon, R. (ed.), The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion. London: Continuum, pp. 139–63. Sørensen, B., Spoelstra, S., Höpfl, H. and Critchley, S. (2012). Theology and organization. Organization, 19(3): 267–79. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, S. and Bell, E. (2012). The promise of re-enchantment: organizational culture and the spirituality at work movement, in Boje, D., Burnes, B. and Hassard, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change. London: Routledge, pp. 569–79. Tracey, P. (2012). Religion and organization: a critical review of current trends and future directions. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1): 87–134. Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2011). Philosophy and Organizational Theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 32. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 1–21. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Turner, B. (2011). Religion and Modern Society: citizenship, secularization and the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

558

53 Strategy, power and practice David L. Levy

This chapter elaborates a strategic conception of power and demonstrates its relevance in contemporary economic, environmental and social struggles. We review traditional conceptions of strategy based on calculating rational actors in a predictable, highly structured world, and discuss various critiques, including ‘strategy as process’ as well as more critical approaches. We argue that strategy does have instrumental value in complex socio-economic fields that are sufficiently patterned to allow for purposive action. Indeed, the indeterminacy of these fields is key to understanding the potential and limitations of a strategic conception of power, exercised through the coordination of material, discursive and organizational resources. Senior managers practise strategy by setting goals and directing corporate resources, through political and market strategies, in the process shaping relations of production and meaning, societal norms, institutions and governance mechanisms. Senior managers attempt to preserve the domain of strategy for themselves because it is a key domain of power. Critical scholars need to understand the strategic mechanisms of power because they offer the emancipatory potential for contesting contemporary issues. We suggest that complexity theory offers some theoretical grounding for this understanding of strategic power as the process by which agents analyse complex systems and attempt to effect change.

Classical strategy The concept of strategy has classical roots stretching back over 2,500 years to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (1988), which describes not only timeless principles such as familiarity with terrain and analysis of adversaries, but also strategies for confronting more powerful foes, such as careful planning, building alliances, and avoiding direct confrontation: ‘What you gain by your calculations is much, so you can win before you even fight’ (Sun Tzu, 1988: 20). Many of these precepts have found their way into contemporary military strategy and underlie the concern in business strategy with industry and company analysis, particularly Porter’s (1980) focus on relative market power and avoidance of intense competition. Strategy is far from a unified field, however, as exemplified by Mintzberg et al.’s (1998) description of ten schools and five definitions of strategy. Perhaps the most common understanding of strategy, in business and beyond, relates to analysis, planning and positioning. Strategy begins with analysis of one’s own organization in relation 559

David L Levy

to the competitive terrain, comprising competitors, the ‘rules of the game’ and associated governance mechanisms, and features of the terrain that shape competitive dynamics, such as barriers to entry. Strategy is thus centrally concerned with comprehending the interdependence between an actor and other agents in a structured environment, highlighting the relational, contingent and context-bound nature of strategy. A systemic understanding of structures, actors and relationships facilitates the advantageous deployment of resources to secure an enduring, structural advantage. The Resource Based View (RBV) of strategy attaches importance to rare and difficult to imitate assets in securing durable advantage (Barney, 1991), while the ‘positioning’ school emphasizes barriers to competition, or ‘strategic moats’, that exploit systemic rigidities in market structures (Mintzberg et al., 1998; Porter, 1980, 1985). A common theme in strategy is that the skilful coordination and deployment of resources is more important than mere possession of money, technologies or armies. Proponents of a ‘dynamic capabilities’ approach have begun to ask how organizations develop, coordinate, and defend the uniqueness and value of a set of capabilities in the face of a changing environment (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Teece et al., 2001). If the RBV was a Ricardian theory of rents, the dynamic capabilities approach reclaims ‘strategy’ by highlighting how skilful intervention within a dynamic web of competitive and (potentially) cooperative relationships can secure a degree of systemic stability and resilience, and hence enduring advantage. It moves us closer to understanding strategy in the context of complex systems and the Gramscian concept of hegemony.

Critiques of classical strategy Critiques of the classical view of strategy have focused on its unrealistic assumptions regarding rationality and competition, its instrumental, technocratic approach (Whittington, 1993), its ethical implications and its reproduction of hierarchical structures of power. Traditional strategy, from Chandler (1962) to Porter (1980), presumes a single rational actor with clear goals who analyses the terrain, anticipates outcomes, and implements decisions. This reliance on a logical, linear model does not, however, reflect the intense complexity and unpredictability of the world, nor the limitations on human rationality and cognition (Simon, 1962). Strategy has also been challenged on ethical and political grounds due to its focus on achieving particular goals, without questioning whose interests they serve, the distributive justice of outcomes (Rawls, 2009) or, drawing from Kant, the means adopted to pursue them (Korsgaard, 1996). These critiques have generated new approaches to strategy. Mintzberg and colleagues (1998; Mintzberg, 1994) have argued that the actuality of strategy is better characterized as an emergent, messy process rather than a planned, rational phenomenon. Mintzberg emphasizes the recursive processes of learning, negotiation and adaptation by which strategy is actually enacted, and suggests that this is not only inevitable but functional. Some scholars have revisited Sun Tzu’s work to unveil an approach that is non-linear, unpredictable and paradoxical, commending the title ‘The Art’ rather than ‘Science’ of War (Luttwak, 1987). Understanding strategy-as-process also motivates those who view it as political bargaining among managerial elites (Bower and Doz, 1979). A greater attentiveness to strategy as process has been accompanied by increased appreciation of the cognitive models that channel managers’ perceptions of their environment (El Sawy and Pauchant, 1988), and how these perceptions constitute managerial cognition and action (Daft and Weick, 1984). Corporate strategies thus reflect the institutionalized logics and calculative mechanisms of senior managers (Callon, 1998; Scott and Meyer, 1994), who have been educated in specific techniques of strategy and are embedded in sectoral, cultural, and national 560

Strategy

contexts (Kostova and Roth, 2002; Levy and Kolk, 2002). This is likely to reproduce the ideological frameworks and sectional interests of senior managers (Bourgeois and Brodwin, 1984; Smircich and Stubbart, 1985). Despite the critical potential of the constructivist perspective to reveal the contingent nature of strategy and its role in reproducing power relations (Alvesson and Willmott, 1995), few authors have pursued these implications. Quite the contrary, the perspective is invoked to generate suggestions for managers to improve strategy-making by avoiding personal ‘bias’. Similarly, the strategy-as-bargaining school has focused on internal struggles among managerial factions rather than contestation with labour or civil society groups, avoiding more overt political implications (Pettigrew, 1985). Whittington (1993: 38), for example, has proposed mechanisms to ensure that the strategy process remains ‘objective’ rather than being captured by a particular management faction, and suggests that managers can mobilize sources of power, such as ‘the political resources of the state, the network resources of ethnicity, or . . . the patriarchal resources of masculinity’.

Strategy as ideology and discourse The strategy-as-process school moves beyond the rational model, but neglects how strategy operates as a dimension of power. More critical approaches attempt to explore how managers monopolize decision-making in key areas and how the strategy process reproduces organizational hierarchies and wider political and economic structures. Strategy, from this perspective, constitutes a set of practices and discourses linked to wider asymmetries, which systematically privilege the interests and worldviews of some groups while marginalizing others (Alvesson and Willmott, 1995). Critical theory questions the technical rationality predominant in strategy, which is fixated on efficiency and objectives and silences debate over goals and values. Moreover, strategy bestows legitimacy and rewards upon designated ‘strategists’, while its military connotations reinforce patriarchal notions of organization. Shrivastava (1986) concluded that strategic management was highly ideological in the way it universalizes sectional interests, masks conflict and contradiction, and naturalizes extant power structures and inequalities. Approaching strategy as narrative, Barry and Elmes (1997: 430) contend that ‘strategy must rank as one as one of the most prominent, influential, and costly stories told in organizations’. Strategy constructs a commonality of organizational purpose that subsumes individual needs by positing lofty aspirations (Harfield, 1998) and invoking military metaphors to brand competitors as ‘enemies’. Knights and Morgan (1991: 252) emphasize the constitutive power of strategic discourse, which ‘transforms managers and employees alike into subjects who secure their sense of purpose and reality by formulating, evaluating and conducting strategy’. Corporate power is concentrated among an organizational ‘strategic elite’, who enjoy higher salaries and dominate decision-making. Strategic discourse also constitutes ‘the problems for which it claims to be a solution’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991: 255), such as attaining infinite growth, securing market power and continuous cost reductions, thereby contributing toward an instrumental, technocratic orientation that neglects environmental or social considerations. Moreover, the discourse and techniques of strategic management are increasingly colonizing governmental and civil society organizations, under the guise of professionalism and efficiency (Stoney, 1998). While it is often acknowledged that strategic discourse has broader impacts on economic and power relations (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2004; Smircich and Stubbart, 1985), critical theorists have tended to avoid the ‘truth of strategy’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991: 252). Booth (1998: 2) suggests that ‘it is not the practices of strategic management which require urgent investigation’. It is tempting to dismiss the instrumental value of strategy, given the complexity 561

David L Levy

of socio-economic arenas and limitations on human agency. Strategy has a history of faddish aphorisms rather than reliable theories, from trends towards conglomerate acquisitions in the 1970s, to admonitions to ‘stick to your knitting’ in the 1980s (Peters and Waterman, 1982), and Total Quality Management (McCabe et al., 1998). Mintzberg (1994) reviews numerous empirical studies that failed to find a financial payoff from strategic planning. Nevertheless, we argue that the relationship between strategy and power extends beyond the realm of discourse and ideology. The practices of strategy require investigation because strategy has significant instrumentality in fields with a degree of structure, from geopolitics to competition in economic and social arenas. The complexity, fluidity, and indeterminacy of the social and economic world, emphasized in postmodern critiques, do not negate the potential for purposive action in contested terrain that is partially structured. Strategy can be used to defend the privileged position of particular organizations and the asymmetrical structures in which they are embedded, but strategy also has emancipatory potential to destabilize these structures and advance the interests of weaker groups. Indeed, we develop the argument that it is precisely the complexity of fields of strategic action and the bounded rationality of actors that enable (and constrain) strategic agency.

Strategy, power, and hegemony: a Gramscian approach Sun Tzu’s Art of War foreshadows the Gramscian concept of hegemony by elaborating a pragmatic politics of social order founded on confluent interests and the minimal use of force. According to Cleary (1989: 10), in classical Chinese political ideology, military strategy was a subordinate branch of social strategy. Accordingly, the first line of national defense against disruption of order by external or internal forces was believed to lie in the moral strength of the united people. Military effectiveness was seen as contingent on the willingness of the people to obey leaders, which required respect and trust (Cleary, 1989: 21). Gramsci likewise recognized that a dominant group secures hegemony through a balance of consent and coercion, achieved with the assertion of moral and intellectual leadership, and the synchronization of ideologies and interests with other societal groups. More fundamentally, hegemony suggests a rich notion of power that envisages agents located, constrained, and constituted within broader economic and political structures, yet with sufficient autonomy for reflection and intervention (Giddens, 1984). Moreover, it represents a critical, emancipatory concept of power in which disadvantaged groups can act strategically for change. Machiavelli, in a critical bridge between Sun Tzu and Gramsci, pioneered the study of statecraft as a systematic technique of power, and emphasized the study of ‘rules of the game’ in the world ‘as it is’, in order to change it (Adams, 1992; Clegg, 1989: 31). Machiavelli stressed the importance of commanding love and respect for leaders, so they could exercise an ‘economy of violence’ (Wolin, 1960: 220–35). Where the Chinese classic was embedded within Taoist philosophy and spirituality, however, Machiavelli’s writing reflects a more modern and secular cynicism that is wary of harmony, humility or honesty. Instead ‘the focus is on strategies, deals, negotiation, fraud and conflict in which myths concerning moral action become game players’ resources’ (Clegg, 1989: 30). For Machiavelli, strategy represents a facet of power, as Clegg (1989: 32) observes: ‘Power is not any thing nor is it necessarily inherent in any one; it is a tenuously produced and reproduced effect which is contingent upon the strategic competencies and skills of actors who would be powerful.’ 562

Strategy

Gramsci’s intellectual debt to Machiavelli is evident in his description of the ‘The Modern Prince’ (Gramsci, 1971: 125–205) as an ‘active politician’ engaged in analysing the current order and developing strategies for transformation. Gramsci extended his analysis from the formal political realm to consider the complex dynamics of the capitalist system as economic classes interacted with political, social, and religious formations. He used the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the stability of a dominant alliance, or ‘historical bloc’, constructed on a broad foundation of consent (Fontana, 1993). Dominant groups secure this consent through the coercive and bureaucratic authority of the state, dominance in the economic realm, pervasive ideologies rooted in the media and civil society, and accommodations with other groups (Gramsci, 1971: 181–2, 285). Hegemony is always contingent due to underlying tensions in socio-economic structures, ‘a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). The pressures of economic competition, technological innovation, and political and discursive contestation can disrupt the balance of forces, creating space for strategic agency to wage an extended struggle, or a ‘war of position’, that challenges the hegemonic formation. To sustain their position, dominant groups therefore need to engage in ‘a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups’ (Gramsci, 1971: 182). Gramsci’s conceptions of hegemony and strategy resonate strikingly with more recent work on complexity theory and the study of networks of agents in dynamic systems (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997). Complex systems are, at least partially and contingently, structured and patterned with a degree of resiliency; simultaneously, they are dynamic and unpredictable, potentially shifting to alternative phase-states, or patterns of structured order (Lissack, 1999). Agents, though embedded and shaped within the system, can never fully comprehend or control it; nevertheless, they are capable of limited, purposeful action. Complex systems evolve in a constrained path over time; a range of alternative futures is possible, but not an infinite set of possibilities. Strategic power thus entails interventions to steer the system, a process of ‘mindful deviation’ rather than creation de novo (Garud and Karnoe, 2001). No intervention, however skilful, can achieve some imaginary utopia that is not grounded in the reality of the evolving system: ‘The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but he neither creates from nothing nor does he move in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). Gramsci proposed that people are capable of envisioning and enacting alternative futures, because their common sense, derived from daily experience, is never fully colonized by dominant ideologies (Gramsci 1971: 327). For Gramsci, politics involves strategic intervention to challenge and shift the system. Gramsci’s ‘active politician’ attempts to develop strategies guided by a pragmatic philosophy of what ‘ought to be’ rather than ‘idle fancy, yearning, daydream’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). The indeterminacy and contingent nature of complex systems, rather than negating the possibility of strategy, is actually central to its meaning. Strategic power is both constituted and constrained by the indeterminacy, contingency and inertia of complex systems. The social and economic world possesses sufficient regularity to enable purposive action, yet is not so structurally rigid that it extinguishes meaningful agency. Bounded rationality in the face of complexity and uncertainty prevents the calculation of optimized moves yielding deterministic outcomes; strategy is necessarily a form of ‘satisficing’ (Simon, 1962). In the real world, one needs not precise, rigid rules but more flexible and contingent strategies, a broader set of guidelines or algorithms based on a partial understanding of the ‘deep structure’ of a system (Drazin and Sandelands, 1992). Some strategies yield superior outcomes, though we can never be sure which ones will succeed, a priori. This indeterminacy is critical, because if field dominants held the levers of power in a deterministic, predictable world, there would remain no scope for political contestability. Gramsci recognized this in his harsh critique of economic determinism; 563

David L Levy

indeterminacy in a complex hegemonic formation makes defensive strategies fallible and structural power vulnerable. Yet the same indeterminacy constrains the power of aspiring change agents, as they cannot fully comprehend and control a complex field (Lane and Maxfield, 1996; Lissack, 1999). Their power is also constrained by field inertia and path-dependence.

The emancipatory potential of strategic power While dominant actors have superior access to resources and benefit from the structural inertia of hegemonic stability, strategic analysis and skill is particularly important for subordinate groups. Although this has long been recognized by activists and some social movement scholars, (Alinsky, 1971; Ganz, 2000), critical management scholars have tended to neglect the emancipatory potential of a ‘strategic face of power’; strategy is often viewed as too corporate, militaristic, rational or ‘Machievellian’. For Gramsci, emancipatory change requires that politician-philosophers catalyse popular consciousness and mobilize collective will, leading to a moral, intellectual, and political transformation. It is the unstable and indeterminate nature of hegemony and the persistence of plural and interpenetrating social and cultural forms that permit agency and resistance (Giddens, 1984; Whittington, 1992). Subordinate groups have their own extra-hegemonic conceptions of the world, implicit in their lived experience, ‘even if only embryonic’ (Gramsci, 1971: 327). Consent represents nuanced, strategic compliance, based on a pragmatic assessment of the balance of forces and accommodations from dominant groups. Social movement theory has observed how subordinate groups maintain skeletal organizational forms and sustain their ideologies in ‘abeyance structures’, providing the seeds of change when conditions are ripe (Larana et al., 1994). Hegemony is thus incomplete and contingent rather than the imposition of ‘false class consciousness’ on passive dupes (Abercrombie et al., 1980). Subordinate groups can therefore employ skilful analysis, coordination and planning – the central elements of strategy – to offset a lack of conventional resources of power. Though hegemony derives from the homeostaticity, or resiliency of complex systems in the face of small perturbations, such systems are also occasionally susceptible to more dramatic, discontinuous change (Lissack, 1999). Actors can identify key points of instability and leverage, even if outcomes cannot be precisely predicted. Indeed, the uncertainty and indeterminacy in complex systems offers weaker groups the opportunity to use strategic power to their advantage, because they can exploit the miscalculations of others, seize windows of opportunity, and pursue unanticipated causal pathways (Levy and Scully, 2007). McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996) argue that effective social movements exploit particular temporal disjunctures, develop organizational and material resources and frame issues in ways which challenge hegemonic understandings yet resonate sufficiently with extant cultural forms to mobilize broad support. Ganz, (2000) contends that the UFW succeeded in organizing California farmworkers due to strategic capacity, comprising a well-networked leadership, and an organizational form that encouraged accountability, diverse perspectives and explicit strategymaking. Gramsci outlined two particular forms of strategy commonly evinced in social conflicts. The concept of ‘war of position’ employs a military metaphor to suggest how subordinate groups might avoid a futile frontal assault against entrenched adversaries, and instead pursue a longerterm strategy, coordinated across multiple bases of power. ‘Passive revolution’ describes a process of evolutionary, reformist change that, while preserving the essential aspects of social structure, entails extensive concessions by relatively weak hegemonic groups (Morton, 2007). Passive revolution reflects a long term series of ‘molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes’ (Gramsci, 564

Strategy

1971: 109). The concept is ambiguous regarding the ultimate extent to which a system is transformed, and whether such transformation is the result of intentional strategy, piecemeal reforms or organic systemic processes (Sassoon, 2000). As such, passive revolution bears affinity with recent work on the co-evolution of socio-technical systems in response to disruptions and challenges (Child and Rodrigues, 2011; Meadowcroft, 2005). This approach of deploying pragmatic, reformist strategies to stimulate accommodation by dominant groups is captured in the term ‘tempered radicals’, who seek to advance their cause from within the structures they seek to change. They frequently use insider language and practices to build support and reveal contradictions between stated ideals and actual practice (Meyerson and Scully, 1995). They often ‘embed calls for change within accepted models’ in order to secure a base of legitimacy (Clemens and Cook, 1999: 459). Dominant groups typically respond with concessions that address the most serious grievances, discursive strategies that co-opt challengers’ language, and organizational moves to collaborate with moderate elements (Barker et al., 2001; Levy et al., 2010). Over time, however, these defensive accommodations can shift the balance of power and restructure a field in more fundamental ways (Levy and Scully, 2007). Of course, strategic power can also be used by corporate managers in the pursuit of goals that conflict with those of labour, minority groups or environmentalists. Levy and Egan (1998) have examined the response of the fossil fuel industry to the threat of climate change regulation, while Sell and Prakash (2004) have described how a coalition of media, pharmaceutical and software companies led an effort to strengthen the global regime for intellectual property rights. Labour process debates have examined various strategies for controlling labour (Barker, 1993; Edwards, 1979), as well as the ideological, constitutive nature of management tools such as TQM and reengineering (Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998; Knights and McCabe, 1998). These strategies have material dimensions, rooted in production processes as well as discursive and disciplinary techniques (Smith and Thompson, 1998). For social movements interested in resisting and changing the hierarchical structures that arise from these processes, it is not sufficient to identify and critique these forms of control; rather, this needs to be a starting point for developing strategic practices that challenge them.

References (key texts in bold) Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B.S. (1980). The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen & Unwin. Adams, R.M. (ed.) (1992). The Prince (2nd edn). New York: W.W. Norton. Alinsky, S. (1971). Rules for Radicals: a practical primer for realistic radicals. New York: Random House. Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (1995). Strategic management as domination and emancipation: from planning and process to communication and praxis. Advances in Strategic Management, 12A: 85–112. Barker, C., Johnson, A. and Lavalette, M. (eds) (2001). Leadership and Social Movements. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barker, J.R. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(3): 408–38. Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17: 99–120. Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (1997). Strategy retold: toward a narrative view of strategic discourse. Academy of Management Review, 22(2): 429–52. Booth, C. (1998). Critical approaches to strategy: an introduction to the special issue. Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory, 4(1). Bourgeois, L. and Brodwin, D. (1984). Strategic implementation; five approaches to an elusive phenomenon. Strategic Management Journal, 5: 241–64. Bower, J.L. and Doz, Y. (1979). Strategy formulation: a social and political process, in Schendel, D.E. and Hofer, C.W. (eds), Strategic Management. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 152–66. 565

David L Levy

Brown, S. and Eisenhardt, K. (1997). The art of continuous change: linking complexity theory and time-paced evolution in relentlessly shifting organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42: 1–34. Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Chandler, A.D. (1962). Strategy and Structure: chapters in the history of the American indstrial enterprise. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Child, J. and Rodrigues, S.B. (2011). How organizations engage with external complexity: a political action perspective. Organization Studies, 32(6): 803–24. Cleary, T. (ed.) (1989). Mastering the Art of War: Zhuge Liang’s and Liu Ji’s commentaries on the classic by Sun Tzu. Boston: Shambhala. Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Clemens, E.S. and Cook, J.M. (1999). Politics and institutionalism: explaining durability and change. Annual Review of Sociology, 25(1): 441–66. Daft, R.L. and Weick, K.E. (1984). Toward a model of organizations as interpretation systems. Academy of Management Review, 9(2): 284–95. Drazin, R. and Sandelands, L. (1992). Autogenesis: a perspective on the process of organizing. Organization Science, 3(2): 230–50. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested Terrain: the transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books. Eisenhardt, K.M. and Martin, J.A. (2000). Dynamic capabilities: what are they? Strategic Management Journal, 21(10): 1105–21. El Sawy, O.A. and Pauchant, T.C. (1988). Triggers, templates, and twitches in the tracking of emerging strategic issues. Strategic Management Journal, 7(2): 455–74. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (1998). Accounting for teamwork: a critical study of group-based systems of organizational control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 43(2): 358–97. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2004). Rethinking strategy: contemporary perspectives and debates. European Management Review, 1(1): 43–8. Fontana, B. (1993). Hegemony and power: on the relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ganz, M. (2000). Resources and resourcefulness: strategic capacity in the unionization of California agriculture, 1959–1966. American Journal of Sociology, 105(4): 1003–62. Garud, R. and Karnoe, P. (2001). Path creation as a process of mindful deviation, in Garud, R. and Karnoe, P. (eds), Path Dependence and Creation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 1–40. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith). New York: International Publishers. Harfield, T. (1998). Strategic management and Michael Porter: a postmodern reading. Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory, 4(1). Knights, D. and McCabe, D. (1998). When ‘life is but a dream’: obliterating politics through business process reengineering? Human Relations, 51(6): 761–99. Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991). Corporate strategy, organizations, and subjectivity: a critique. Organisation Studies, 12(2): 251–73. Korsgaard, C.M. (1996). Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kostova, T. and Roth, K. (2002). Adoption of an organizational practice by the subsidiaries of the MNC: institutional and relational effects. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1): 215–33. Lane, D. and Maxfield, R. (1996). Strategy under complexity: fostering generative relationships. Long Range Planning, 29(2): 215–31. Larana, E., Johnston, H. and Gusfield, J.R. (eds) (1994). New Social Movements: from ideology to identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Levy, D.L. and Egan, D. (1998). Capital contests: national and transnational channels of corporate influence on the climate change negotiations. Politics & Society, 26(3): 337–61. Levy, D.L. and Kolk, A. (2002). Strategic responses to global climate change: conflicting pressures on multinationals in the oil industry. Business and Politics, 4(3): 275–300. Levy, D. and Scully, M. (2007). The institutional entrepreneur as modern prince: the strategic face of power in contested fields. Organization Studies, 28(7): 971–91. 566

Strategy

Levy, D.L., Brown, H.S. and de Jong, M. (2010). The contested politics of corporate governance: the case of the global reporting initiative. Business & Society, 49(1): 88–115. Lissack, M.R. (1999). Complexity: the science, its vocabulary, and its relation to organizations. Emergence, 1(1). Luttwak, E.N. (1987). Strategy: the logic of war and peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McAdam, D., McCarthy, J. and Zald, M. (1996) Comparative perspectives on social movements. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCabe, D., Knights, D., Kerfoot, D., Morgan, G. and Willmott, H. (1998). Making sense of ‘quality’? Toward a review and critique of quality initiatives in financial services. Human Relations, 51(3): 389–412. Meadowcroft, J. (2005). Environmental political economy, technological transitions, and the state. New Political Economy, 10(4): 479–98. Meyerson, D. and Scully, M.A. (1995). Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change. Organization Science, 6(5): 585–600. Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York: Free Press. Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B. and Lampel, J. (1998). Strategy Safari: a guided tour through the wilds of strategic management. New York: Free Press. Morton, A.D. (2007). Unravelling Gramsci: hegemony and passive revolution in the global economy. London: Pluto Press. Peters, T.H. and Waterman, R.H. (1982). In Search of Excellence. New York: Harper & Row. Pettigrew, A. (1985). The Awakening Giant: continuity and change in ICI. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Porter, M.E. (1980). Competitive Strategy: techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. New York: Free Press. Porter, M.E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance. New York: Free Press. Rawls, J. (2009). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sassoon, A.S. (2000). Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: beyond pessimism of the intellect. London: Routledge. Scott, W.R. and Meyer, J.W. (eds) (1994). Institutional Environments and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sell, S.K. and Prakash, A. (2004). Using ideas strategically: the contest between business and NGO networks in intellectual property rights. International Studies Quarterly, 48(1): 143–75. Shrivastava, P. (1986). Is strategic management ideological? Journal of Management, 12: 363–77. Simon, H.A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106: 467–82. Smircich, L. and Stubbart, C. (1985). Strategic management in an enacted world. Academy of Management Review, 10(4): 724–36. Smith, C. and Thompson, P. (1998). Re-evaluating the labour process debate. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 19(4): 551–77. Stoney, C. (1998). Lifting the lid on strategic management: a sociological narrative. Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory, 4(1). Sun Tzu (1988). The Art of War (trans. T. Cleary). Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications. Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. (2001). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management, in Dosi, G., Nelson, R.R. and Winter, S.G. (eds), Nature and Dynamics of Organizational Capabilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 334–63. Whittington, R. (1992). Putting Giddens into action: social systems and managerial agency. Journal of Management Studies, 29(6): 493–512. Whittington, R. (1993). What is Strategy – and Does it Matter? London: Routledge. Wolin, S.S. (1960). The Politics of Vision. Boston: Little Brown.

567

54 Trust Foundations and critical reflections Reinhard Bachmann

Introduction Ordinary social actors as well as their academic observers have placed enormous emphasis on the issue of trust in the past two decades or so. Many social relationships within and across organizational boundaries have been viewed as being characterized by a high or low level of trust, and antecedents as well as consequences of specific levels of trust have been examined. At the societal level, trust – or indeed its absence – has been seen as an important factor bearing on the welfare of individuals, organizations, nation-states and beyond. Trust has truly become a big issue. Not least within management research a great number of books and articles have been published, many of them hinging on the argument that trust has a high potential to save (transaction) costs as well as to stimulate performance and innovation.

The interest in trust – now and then The long history of philosophical thought does not show much explicit interest in the concept of trust, and just briefly looking into the formative years of modern social theory in the early twentieth century confirms that trust has not always caught so much attention as it does today. Political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1994) and David Hume (1978) were divided in whether human nature lends itself to the idea that trust is a useful basis for successful social interaction but they hardly explicitly discussed the nature of trust. Apart from Georg Simmel (1950), there was virtually no major representative of classic social theory who found the phenomenon of trust worth considering in greater detail. In Max Weber’s work, for example, the modern bureaucratic organization appeared as being built on small-cut and clearly defined work tasks (Weber, 1968). All processes were driven by rules and no extra-role activities were expected or tolerated. Taylorism mirrored these ideas and suggested that managers should establish and control all organizational processes on the basis of scientifically proven principles of efficiency. In some way one might argue that the problem of trust, i.e. the risk that it can be disappointed, is perfectly solved in this setting; or, one might 568

Trust

prefer to say that trust is simply not needed in the bureaucratic organization. Can we, conversely, conclude that we need trust today more than a century ago and, at the same time, find it to be a scarce resource in contemporary socio-economic systems? Is this the reason why trust has attracted so much attention in our time? Probably the answer to both questions is ‘yes’, and the following argument might be seen as an explanation for it: Under conditions of ever more complex organizational and societal structures it seems ever less likely that individuals’ activities can be monitored and controlled comprehensively. Many highly and broadly skilled experts working in complex production environments can only be trusted. Lay people as most of us are in a growing number of knowledge domains have no other choice. This is what Giddens (1990) describes as unavoidable in differentiated modern societies and this is also what some scholars see specifically as the underlying condition of post-bureaucratic forms of work organization (Grey and Garsten 2001). The de-standardization of working arrangements (flexible working hours, total quality management etc.), as first discovered by Piore and Sabel (1982), is key to this concept and can be seen as producing a massively increased necessity to use trust, for example in employment relationships (Heckscher and Adler, 2006) or business relationships which cut across organizational boundaries (Sydow and Windeler, 1998; Bachmann and Inkpen, 2011). Equally, society has become considerably more mobile and flexible in the past few decades and citizens need to be trusted more by their government and vice versa. From this point of view, trust may be seen as a means to compensate for a lack of controllability of socio-economic activities taking place in the organizational realm, which is deeply embedded in society as a whole. One may argue that this might have been true for about two decades spanning from the 1980s to the mid-2000s but not much longer. Most recently, major efforts can be observed which challenge this approach and aim to withdraw or reduce trust which has been granted to employees, customers, citizens, institutions, suppliers, employers, governments etc. for perhaps only a short period of time. In the name of accountability and transparency, rigid control mechanisms are being (re-)installed in government agencies, hospitals, universities, private contractual relationships etc. Trust itself, as it seems, is actually not trusted exuberantly in the wake of the Western world’s recent financial crisis and the ongoing austerity policies designed to recover considerable sums of money which were lost when bailing out almost the entire banking sector in the US and Europe. Against this background, a general decrease of trust in society and economy may be seen as straightforward and most adequate. After all, the global financial crisis did not emerge because of a lack of trust in bankers and financial advisors. Quite the opposite is true. We offered almost blind trust to the financial industry and paid a high price for this. However, the dark side of the recent reduction of trust is quite visible as well. The current economic crisis seems to strongly play into the increase of control as well as IT-based surveillance and discourage a high degree of trust on the part of employers and governments in increasingly deprived and potentially resistant employees and citizens. Aggressive managerialism in workplaces and the monitoring of all our digital communication seem to be ‘trusted’ more than trust itself when political and economic elites consider their options to get their will. In many ways stakes seem to be higher today than in pre-crisis times. Some win more and others lose more than ever before. So, where do we stand with trust? Will trust still become the hallmark of the twenty-first century and swiftly regain momentum when – sooner or later – the austerity measures will be lifted, or will trust lose attention and be forgotten again, both in practice and research? In order to answer this question it might be useful to briefly consider the nature of trust as well as the function it can fulfil in modern organizations and societies. 569

Reinhard Bachmann

What is trust? Trust has been suggested to be a fundamental social coordination mechanism (Bachmann, 2001). On the basis of trust, expectations can be aligned between individuals and interaction can be facilitated between them. Trust is not the only social coordination mechanism; power, for example, can do a similar job in very effectively organizing social interaction. But trust can certainly be viewed as one of the most efficient and fundamental coordination principles in social relationships. How does trust work? Anyone who considers trust as the dominant coordination mechanism in his or her social relationships to potential trustees makes specific assumptions about their future behaviour. A potential trustor will not indiscriminately assume that all conceivable behaviours of a potential trustee are equally likely. Instead, he or she will select one or a small number of assumptions about the trustee’s future behaviour and ignore the rest of assumptions which in principle all could turn out to be true. A potential trustor will focus on those assumptions which he or she finds more realistic than others, although he or she will not have sufficient information to do this on a ‘rational’ basis. But this is the whole point when trust comes into play. There would be absolutely no need for trust if complete and precise information was available. Conversely, if the trustor has no information at all about the trustee’s past behaviour and/or the situation in which the trustee’s future behaviour will be embedded, trust will also make no sense. Trust has its place where an actor, i.e. a trustor, needs or wants to prioritize specific assumptions about another actor’s, i.e. a trustee’s, future behaviour although there will be no guarantees or even ‘rational’ grounds to ignore all other possible future behaviours the trustee is in principle free to choose. This is what Simmel had described as a ‘leap of faith’, and why Luhmann (1979) suggested that a trustor simply ‘extrapolates’ from the available information. However one may look at it, trust is undoubtedly a risky investment and there is no way to avoid risk once trust has been chosen as the primary coordination mechanism in a social relationship. Of course, this is not where our analysis of the nature of trust ends. Rather, more questions arise at this point. Why, for example, would an actor be willing to accept the inherent risk of trust? The answer is not too difficult to find: Trust allows for swift interaction and sometimes – if no alternative coordination mechanisms such as power or monetary incentive systems are available – it makes interaction, for example economic transactions, possible in the first place. Many transactions would not exist if trust was not facilitating them. In the case that other coordination mechanisms are at hand a potential trustor might well consider these options before making a final decision. And then trust might appear as the best and occasionally as the only viable option to coordinate expectations and interaction between two social actors. In any case, like those other coordination mechanisms, trust has advantages and disadvantages, so that the key question is if and how a trustor can handle the biggest disadvantage of trust, i.e. to get to grips with the fact that there will always be the risk that he or she will be betrayed and find his or her trust investment misplaced. Although any trustor must generally be willing to accept risk he or she is keen to at least roughly assess the risk involved in the decision to trust another actor. What a trustor needs is not a risk calculation on the basis of exact information – the possibility of which would in fact rule out the need to trust – but ‘good reasons’ (Bachmann, 2001) to assume that the risk is at least bearable and does not exceed a certain level. If the risk appears very high, this might well discourage a potential trustor to actually invest trust in a relationship. It might occur that an actor who in principle is willing to build a relationship on trust eventually shies back from such an investment if he or she feels that the risk would simply be too high. A potential trustor wants 570

Trust

to know that the risk of trust does at least not reach beyond a level which he or she sees as acceptable. If that was the case and he or she still decided to choose trust as the basis of a relationship, there would not be many people to comfort him or her if it goes wrong. It would just be seen as self-inflicted damage, caused by outright stupidity. Thus, the following question moves centre-stage. What can provide these ‘good reasons’ which a potential trustor can take as an indication that the risk of trust is low enough to be acceptable? In principle there are two sources of such ‘good reasons’: the potential trustee’s past behaviour, and the socio-economic environment in which the trustee’s cognition, emotions and behaviour are embedded. If the potential trustee, for example, is known to the potential trustor first hand or via a third party and is seen as honest and reliable, this can reduce the risk perceived by the potential trustor who might then actually decide to invest trust in a relationship. If, by contrast, the socio-economic environment imposes certain behavioural rules on the potential trustee, this can equally reduce risk and allow a potential trustor to more easily invest trust in a relationship because he or she has then also ‘good reasons’ to assume that the inherent risk of trust does not exceed a certain threshold. At least one of these sources needs to provide sufficient ‘good reasons’ so that a potential trustor can roughly assess the risk of a trust investment and then make a final decision to trust a potential trustee or refrain from doing so. In business contexts environmental conditions are particularly important. For many transactions there is not much time, chance and also no need to establish a full picture of the trustee’s past behaviour. But the existence of institutional arrangements such as commercial law, business associations, systems of vocational training etc., can also – often more efficiently – make potential trustees’ future behaviour relatively predictable. Thus, such arrangements can deliver exactly those ‘good reasons’ that a potential trustor is keen to have. However, where such ‘good reasons’ cannot be found at all, switching to a different coordination mechanism such as power or market-based incentive systems or indeed withdrawing from potential business transactions altogether are then the other options a potential trustor will consider.

How can trust be safeguarded and/or restored when it has broken down? Trust has some considerable advantages compared with other coordination mechanisms. This is what makes it so attractive. If there is, for example, trust within an organization, employees are more committed to common goals, more willing to share knowledge, prepared to help out in difficult situations, and to offer extra-role behaviour which sometimes makes all the difference in terms of organizational performance. Equally, inter-organizational relationships, for example supplier relations, can be organized more efficiently on the basis of trust. In many cases trust also increases the innovativeness of collaborating firms, and one might conclude that trust is generally a very positive phenomenon whereever it occurs. However, there are also the negative sides of trust (Gargiulo and Ertug, 2006). If the level of trust is too high this can lead to complacency, complicity and reduced innovativeness, for example in work teams. Moreover, there is – as mentioned above – the unavoidable inherent risk of trust. This, as such, cannot count on the positive side either. Sometimes it gets forgotten in an ongoing trust-based relationship but if a trustee unexpectedly defects in a critical situations the relationships will often irretrievably break down. Organizations may collapse where trust is suddenly withdrawn, be it by employees, suppliers or customers. Even whole societies might be turned into chaos and civil war might be not far off where distrust replaces trust between large ethnic or politically differently oriented groups. 571

Reinhard Bachmann

Considering the disadvantages of trust one may ask the question of what can prevent them coming to the fore. In order to avoid this or even to repair trust if it has already broken down, the following three options are considered among trust researches as well as the wider public: more transparency, more business ethics and more regulation. All of these three approaches may have some value but it depends on the business environment in which such measures can be taken and successfully applied. It is mostly ‘liberal’ capitalist systems, such as the US or the UK, where more business ethics is demanded, and regulation is suggested in the already relatively highly regulated business systems, i.e. the ‘coordinated market economies’, which can for example be found in continental Europe (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Generally, both regulation and business ethics can be useful approaches in preventing trust from breaking down and repairing trust, but their effectiveness is limited. It is more than questionable that fraudsters suddenly behave trustworthily when they have attended enough lectures on business ethics. With regard to regulation, some scholars ask the question ‘who regulates the regulators’ and thus point to a logical problem (‘infinite regress’). But, admittedly, despite the fact that there might be no guarantees, in reality regulation can undoubtedly have effects, especially if it is enforced reliably. Reality sometimes works its way around logical problems. The more rules exist and are enforced the better we can predict human behaviour. However, extreme levels of regulation also have massive political downsides and the question remains whether trust can exist at all in such circumstances. Transparency is arguably the most ambiguous approach to prevent the negative sides of trust. The proponents of this approach suggest establishing organizational structures and procedures which promote rationality, efficiency and fairness. Not least the Corporate Governance literature (Brennan and Solomon, 2008) and the debates on New Public Management (Dunleavy et al., 2006) draw on these ideas and insist that organizations are to follow principles of accountability, transparency, disclosure and compliance. But the question of whether these principles form an appropriate concept for safeguarding trust and/or restoring it when it has collapsed is difficult to answer. On the one hand, transparency can have a reassuring effect for those who may otherwise find it difficult to trust (again). On the other hand, it seems worth asking whether such an approach, which tries to restrict human ingenuity and pragmatism, had already been built up for some time before 2008 and is perhaps to be viewed as one of the causes of the Western world’s financial meltdown and the subsequent trust crisis rather than a remedy. In contrast to the business ethics approach, both regulation and transparency can be thought of as concepts which essentially replace trust rather than helping to safeguard or restore it. Why do we need to trust anyone if we can have enforceable rules and/or full transparency? Both concepts have many advocates, with regulation usually preferred by those who are sceptical about the consequences of the untamed forces of capitalism, and transparency suggested by a growing number of neo-liberal managerialists. Thus, the regulation camp seems to suggest going back to the post-World War II capitalist order, whereas the neo-liberalists appear to be eager to finally complete the modernist project which – among other things – promised a whole new world based on meritocracy and democracy, openness and fairness. Neither of these two approaches, however, is necessarily the solution to the trust crisis which has come onto us in the wake of 2008 and in the face of an endless stream of massive corporate scandals as well as an unprecedented acceleration of the redistribution of wealth from the working many to the very few super rich. On the one hand, extreme forms of regulation can suffocate individual freedom and innovation. On the other, the neo-liberal dream of the fully transparent organization which can permanently and autonomously re-balance its internal clockwork leads to a rebureaucratization of work processes and the intrusive monitoring of all aspects of our professional as well as private lives. 572

Trust

What about alternative social coordination mechanisms? If trust has – despite its undeniable advantages – also a problematic side and weaknesses, especially when one considers the costs and possibilities of safeguarding or repairing it, it could be worth briefly considering the two other social coordination mechanisms which might be able to replace trust as they can fulfil the same basic function, namely to align actors’ expectation and interaction: power and monetary incentive systems. Power can organize social relationships very effectively, just as trust can. Communication and transactions on the basis of power are swift and efficient. However, when both mechanisms are compared with regard to their potentials to save transaction costs and/or stimulate innovation power seems less capable than trust. And even with regard to safeguarding and repairing costs, power has no real advantages over trust. Power, like trust, can easily break down and will then leave a situation behind where illegitimate coercion or – more likely in a business context – silence will take over. The predominant advantage of monetary incentive systems is said to lie in their selfregulatory capabilities. According to the (neo-)liberal credo, markets have an intrinsic tendency to always fall back into an equilibrium which is claimed to be most beneficial for everyone involved. However, the latter assumption only holds for ‘perfect markets’ which exist in theory but hardly in reality. Compared to power and trust, markets also allow for a swift and efficient coordination of exchanges. But similar to power and unlike trust, they have no capability to save transaction costs and can only stimulate innovation processes which build on competition rather than on cooperation. Specifically in the early phases of innovation, market principles are not suitable to encourage creativity, the latter being reflected in the fact that private research departments and public research universities are typically withdrawn from the world of market competition when they are supposed to create fundamentally new ideas and technologies. Thus, we may conclude that, despite some weaknesses, trust is highly valuable as it offers some essential advantages which other coordination mechanisms can hardly deliver.

So, will trust just vanish again soon? Can we do without trust? Will we lose our interest in trust just as we gained it about two decades ago? It seems possible in a world which is as much – if not more – in the grip of neoliberal ideology as it was before the Western financial crisis. An authentic concept of trust is not on the neo-liberal agenda, and non-normative trust research has no place among the new pseudo-academic subjects, such as Leadership and Entrepreneurship, which neo-liberalist policy makers expect Business Schools to place emphasis on in their curricula. The underlying assumptions about human nature borrow more from the Hobbesian notion of the ‘state of nature’ and Machiavelli’s (Machiavelli, 1999) idea of purely self-interested individuals who will not be held back from pursuing their egoistical goals whatsoever. New managerialism, being the spearhead of contemporary neo-liberal ideology, has the potential to achieve short-term effects without any costly long-term investments in human talent. The proponents of this approach have a clear vision and promise a fairer distribution of rights and duties among employees as well as flatter hierarchies. Like the self-regulated free market, the imagined organization of the future is a fully transparent and well-oiled machinery, firmly focused on output and performance. The neo-liberal promise is to liberate us from the need to trust the opaque practices of middle managers, their goodwill which they might grant us or not, the acceptance of under-performing colleagues (‘dead wood’) who defend parochial structures on the basis of seniority rules. In fact, new managerialists are planning and implementing what might almost be seen as a way towards more social equality: a strong, perhaps 573

Reinhard Bachmann

even authoritarian, leadership, but the rest of the members of the organization are equal to one another and only judged on measurable performance. This scenario may be seen as the completion of the modernist project and/or the complete dehumanization of work. In the brave new world of contemporary neo-liberalism we might all feel reduced to our ability to perform, both as diligent producers and – not least – also as happy consumers. This is what Marcuse foresaw as the world of the ‘one-dimensional man’ (Marcuse, 1964). It is a world where trust has no place. Trust might still be seen as acceptable in private life (or what may be left of it then) but certainly not in the workplace or in business relationships. This scenario is not unlikely to dominate work and business in the future but there is one crucially important thing that the tightly monitored and fully functional producer–consumer will not deliver: creativity. Growth might be upheld in the short-term by means other than human creativity, but not in the longer run. Creativity and meaningful innovation have never emerged out of work places where monitoring and permanent measuring of performance have replaced trust. It is trust, and not power or markets, that seems to be the only source of ‘Mehrwert’ that we have. With trust we save on inputs and harvest more than we have seeded. This is what Marx viewed as a characteristic of creative human work, and this is the reason why trust is so valuable and cannot be replaced in its vital function within advanced societies. The more our economies depend on knowledge-intensive work, the more we will see the need for flexibility and trust. This is why trust and trust research will not vanish in the coming decades and why the neo-liberated project will find its natural end soon.

References (key texts in bold) Bachmann, R. (2001). Trust, power and control in trans-organizational relations. Organization Studies, 22(2): 337–65. Bachmann, R. and Inkpen, A. (2011). Understanding institutional-based trust building processes in inter-organizational relations. Organization Studies, 32(2): 281–301. Brennan, N.M. and Solomon, J. (2008). Corporate governance, accountability and mechanisms of accountability: an overview. Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal, 21(7): 885–906. Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S. and Tinkler, J. (2006). New Public Management is dead – long live digital-era governance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16(3): 467–94. Gargiulo, M. and Ertug, G. (2006). The dark side of trust, in Bachmann, R. and Zaheer, A. (eds), Handbook of Trust Research. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar: pp. 165–86. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grey, C. and Garsten, C. (2001). Trust, control and post-bureaucracy. Organization Studies, 22(2), 229–50. Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heckscher, C. and Adler, P. (2006). The Firm as a Collaborative Community: reconstructing trust in the knowledge economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T. (1994). Leviathan, with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1678 (edited by Curley, E.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hume, D. (1978). A Treatise of Human Nature (edited by Selby-Bigge, L.A. and revised by Nidditch, P.H) (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and Power. Chichester: Wiley. Machiavelli, N. (1999). The Prince (translated by G. Bull) (revised edn). London: Penguin. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon. Piore, M. and Sabel, C. (1982). The Second Industrial Divide. New York: Basic Books. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel (compiled and translated by K. Wolff). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sydow, J. and Windeler, A. (1998). Organizing and evaluating inter-firm networks: a structurationist perspective on network processes and effectiveness. Organization Science, 9(3): 265–84. Weber, M. (1968). Economy and Society: an outline of interpretive sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. 574

55 Value An inquiry into relations, forms and struggles Craig Prichard

What ‘is’ value? Organization studies is currently in the midst of a revival of interest in value relations (Böhm and Land, 2012; Levy and Spicer, 2013). The field appears to be rediscovering a political economy of organizations (Burrell and Morgan, 1979), dusting off some of its core texts (Marx, 1967), engaging with ‘rebooted’ versions of Marxian structuralism and humanism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Hardt and Negri, 2009, De Angelis, 2007), and beginning to offer new empirical and analytical works on ‘value’ (Beverungen et al., 2013, Reinecke, 2011; Willmott 2012). Underpinning such works are ongoing questions about the nature of value and the kind of role value plays. Value is certainly among the most mentioned concepts in management and organization studies. Mundanely, value is simply an accountant’s way of gauging incomes. But in popular management discourse, informed by the problem of how to create an economic return from knowledge, value is much more. From the ubiquitous ‘value added’ through ‘value creation’, ‘value destruction’, ‘value chains’ and ‘value propositions’, value is something added above and beyond the mundane; something that appears to carry or contribute to the desires, dreams, plans and projects of its users (Osterwalder et al., 2014). In academic management discourse, shaped as it is by the problem and the purpose of knowing, value appears to act differently. It seems to perform as a kind of container to be filled, coated or sculptured by particular kinds of activities or conditions. There is ‘economic value’ (of course!), but also ‘symbolic value’, ‘cultural value’ and recently ‘ethical value’ (Arvidsson, 2010). Willmott, in this vein, organizes these streams of work into three representational regimes: ‘business value’, ‘surplus value’ and ‘sign value’ (Willmott, 2012). In this chapter I use the terms ‘value form’ or ‘value formation’ to present different ways to consider value (Appadurai, 1988). There are surely many ways to reply to the question: ‘what is value?’ One way would be to regard it as a kind of philosophical query; something that asks about the relations between the meaning of things and the material world in which they exist. The question challenges us in particularly to ask what might be the conditions that produce a concept such as value which carries such a raft of complex meanings. What is it that creates the demand that value carry such diverse meanings so that it references a quality in one moment, a substance or a thing the 575

Craig Prichard

next, and then reappears as a magnitude (such as price or a ratio)? In this sense the question ‘what is value?’ turns not to the identification of the particular substance of value (labour or consumer wants) but to the character of the formation that orchestrates value’s ‘travelling performances’. A formation here is a set of different rules, different practices and different relations and subjectivities. In other words, value as a relation that appears in different substances as an effect of different rules, practices and subjectivities of these formations (Milios, 2009; Appardurai, 1994; Strathern,1992). We can see these different relations at work in the two most prominent formations, the commodity and the gift. But there are other value forms including the subsidy, the donation, the grant, the inheritance and perhaps even the memento. In the case of the commodity, value’s passage is organized by money to a point where its accumulations seems to be the commodity form’s main objective. So while value originating in labour can pass through capital, means of production and related commodities aided by value in money form, and directed by the detailed and strictly enforceable rules of sale and purchase, by contrast value’s ‘travel’ in the form of the gift is shaped by rules, norms, expectations and challenges posed by reciprocity, equality, intimacy, recognition and the existence or formation of a social bond. This is not to say that there is no gift exploitation. Paradoxically the giving of a gift is highly provocative turning the receiver into a potentially ‘inferior’ or subordinated subject who is thus forced into an exchange where they return a gift of similar productive worth in order to equalize the relation. But while gifts can spell danger for the less well resourced (Mauss, 1990), they also create opportunities for the two protagonists in the gift relation to alternately appropriate surplus, e.g. first I realize and appropriate value from your gift and then when I return to you a gift you appropriate a portion of my surplus from my gift to you. Before we move to discuss new value formations it is helpful to identify from empirical example some of the rules, norms and practices of the commodity and gift formations. One way to explore these is through the tensions and struggles involved in forming new commodities and new gift relations. I will briefly illustrate this through Sut Jhally’s analysis of the formation of commercial television audience as a commodity (Jhally and Livant, 1986), and workers’ assertion of gift relations with managers in George Akerlof’s (1982) analysis of women electricity workers.

Illustrating value’s travels – the commodity value form Television programming began simply as a means of selling television sets. In other words, value in the money form brought-together capital, factories and labour – including that of embryonic broadcasters and programme makers – to realize a return simply from the one-off sale of the television sets. However, as sales increased, the producers of other commodities turned to broadcasters to promote their goods to increase sales and through this a market for advertising time developed. But what was it that broadcasters were selling? As the owner of the technical means of collecting viewers’ attention, they were selling advertisers viewers’ aggregated attention to television sets in, for example, 10, 20 or 30-second segments. But there was a catch and herein lies the source of the tension or struggle between broadcasters and their audience over the formation of the commodity form from viewing work/labour. While some might argue that all the content of commercial television is advertiser friendly, and therefore a form of advertising, viewers are nevertheless reluctant to simply watch paid-for advertisements. To keep viewers watching, and thus working, broadcasters ‘pay’ for a certain amount of programming that they might purchase or produce themselves. But how much programming time is enough? How much is needed to keep viewers watching and thus working? 576

Value

Herein lies the struggle over value organized through the commodity value form between aggregated ‘workers’ (viewers) and the owners of broadcasting capital. This same struggle is of course now played out in newer broadcasting modes and sites including between YouTube and its audiences, and between Facebook and its profile holders (Fuchs, 2010). How much advertising is too much advertising? How much surplus attention time uplifted by which party is too much uplifted attention time? By and large such questions are settled in efforts by both parties to create expectations, rules and norms that guide practice (in some instances the state is mobilized to try and settle this tension by regulating advertising time per hour). But there is a further, and perhaps more fundamental, struggle. This one is not over who gets what portion of value but which value form shapes value’s passage itself. The most famous empirical contest between value forms in broadcasting is between public and private television, and in the UK advertising, which subjects the viewers’ time to the commodity value formation, confronts the licence fee as a competing value form (Barnett and Seaton, 2010). The BBC’s yearly licence fee is levelled by the state on all owners of equipment that can receive TV broadcasting. What’s involved here is a struggle for dominance through various political means between value forms, between the different value relations and their relative value producing, consuming and distributing practices and the various institutions involved in that struggle (the state, the market and the profession). But to grasp the particular character of these value forms we must compare them with the characteristics of the gift.

Illustrating value’s passage – the gift We tend to regard gifts and commodities as separate classes of things with different qualities. In value formation terms, that would be right. Gifts involve a performance of value and a challenge to the receiver against norms of reciprocity and equality. Gift giving is a complex practice. The traffic of value is guided by intimate evaluations of others where reciprocation and recognition are at stake. Indeed, as compared with commodities, gifts seem to have a spirit of their own and it is easy to ‘get things wrong’. But there are few instances of pure gifts. In many instances value travels between different forms as one form meets the other all with particular effects. Such is the case in George Akerlof’s re-analysis of women electricity company workers (Akerlof, 1982) from George Homans study of ‘cash posters’ (Homans, 1954). What Akerlof sought to explain, was why a group of women electrical workers did 15 per cent more hours than necessary for no extra pay. Neoclassical economics was, he suggested, unable to satisfactorily explain this outcome. He argued that the extra work was part of the development of gift relations between these workers and the firm built around attachments between members of a group, and between that group and the organization. In our terms, this attachment is the particular form of subjection, or subjectivity, constituted through the performance of the gift value form. Akerlof noted that Persons who work for an institution tend to develop sentiment for their co-workers and for that institution . . . it is natural that persons have utility for making gifts to institutions. (Akerlof, 1982: 550) However, Akerlof argued that the women’s freely gifted labour was an effort to challenge management to establish gift relations, alongside and intertwined with that of the wage commodity form. In other words, such an effort was far from random or naïve. The women developed norms of overworking that amounted to an effort to institute a more advantageous position 577

Craig Prichard

with the bosses through the value formation of the gift (hence the danger of gifts). Under gift relations the receivers (the bosses) are required to reciprocate the gift in some way, or risk the loss of recognition, status and group membership. For its part the firm, the bosses, did indeed recognize this gifted effort, forming a strong bond with the women, and paying wages higher than the women would have been able to achieve elsewhere for similar work. In other words the women successfully mobilized the value formation of the gift in order to secure a greater share of the firm’s returns. How does this help us? If we are interested in value then it is helpful to study not just the practices, relations and modes of subjectivity of single value formations, such as the commodity, but to focus on the relations between forms and particularly how one form merges, challenges, undermines or in some cases complements others. For example in family businesses we might study the difference between the wage and inheritance forms as complimentary and sometimes conflictual staging posts for value, and as efforts to challenge existing value forms and develop new ones that mix some of the characteristics of gift and other forms.

Is the commodity value’s dominant mode of travel? Behind Akerlof’s work is a question about how widespread is the gift value formation in work organizations – a site where we might consider commodities to be dominant. Gifts would indeed be a socially complex basis upon which to organize work. For one thing, they have no clear termination date. If payments to workers in exchange for work are indeed gifts, and work a gift to firms, then neither firms nor workers would have much idea as to when they would be liable for reciprocal return. For firms, the gift form (even in relatively small amounts of total exchange) carries the expectation, and risk, that firms will maintain workforces during tough times and ‘recover’ some of this expense when times improve. In 1997 fellow economist Aver Offer extended Akerlof’s discussion of gift relations across a broader range of spheres. For him gift relations are part of a broad economy of regard where sentiment, personal bonds and relationships continually undermine price-based economic decision-making. This ‘economy of regard’ not only maintains above-normal wages, and the production of unpaid labour in workplaces, it is also central to the sale of goods and services. Offer argues that the production of ‘regard’ for customers through the massive efforts that go into sales may well be the only remaining source of market advantage. He notes that firms spend more than twice as much on customer service work creating an economy of regard with clients and customers, than they do on advertising. Now some might assume that the value form of the gift is a quaint, dated and largely privatized mode of value transfer which has little place in a highly commoditized market economy. Offer’s argument challenges this. Taken broadly, the gift value form could be said to be at the core of what are now hugely complex and dense domains of business activity both in relations between workers and organizations; where value has much less to do with time ‘on the job’ and much more to do with the richness of the relationship with others particularly customers, clients and members. Empirically, we can also show that gift forms are at the core of high-risk business enterprises e.g. diamond trade and the formation of long-distance business relationships. More widely, Offer discusses the importance of gift giving, or guanxi, in the formation of Chinese business networks (Yang, 2000). He notes that guanxi-infused networks have significant control over investment and export processes in and out of China. Offer goes further arguing that strong gift relations are indeed a viable basis for organizing wide spheres of activities among networks of business people and professionals which in some instances, entirely ‘crowds out’ conventional commodity-based market exchange. In this way Offer’s work supports Adam Arvidsson’s 578

Value

recent work on the development of ‘ethical value’ as a new value form involved in the formation of the ‘ethical economy’. We discuss this below but it is important to set this discussion against the backdrop of the struggles in conventional management knowledge over the commodity value form (Offer, 1997).

Back to management discourses – tensions around value forms How might we grasp the character of conventional accounts of value processes in the academic management literature in relation to our discussion of competing, and sometimes complementary, value forms? If we take Michael Porter’s work on industries to be a dominant account of value’s travel, where is this work located? For Porter, value is organized through an industry’s structure and manifested in the strength of the five competitive forces, [this] determines the industry’s long-run profit potential because it determines how the economic value created by the industry is divided – how much is retained by companies in the industry versus bargained away by customers and suppliers, limited by substitutes, or constrained by potential new entrants. By considering all five forces, a strategist keeps overall structure in mind instead of gravitating to any one element. In addition, the strategist’s attention remains focused on structural conditions rather than on fleeting factors. (Porter, 2008: 82) Thus value takes the singular form of a quantitative pool of surplus created in and by an industry and this pool is divided up on the basis of the relative strength of Porter’s five forces (rivalry, supplier and buyer power, threats of new entrants and substitutes). In this view, value’s successful return to the corporation, in an expanded form via the sale of commodities, is a function of the skills of the corporation’s strategists who attempt to mitigate the negative and accentuate the positive aspects of the five forces. In other words, ‘above normal’ value flows because of the manager’s ‘business skills’. In such a reading any gift process would likely be regarded as simply a tactic for moderating negative industry forces. Sponsoring collective events and giving away advice are simply ways of heading off rivals and defending against new entrants and substitutes. Yet this position has been widely criticized for its inability to question its own assumptions. Writing in his 2005 article ‘Bad management theories are destroying good management practices’, Sumantra Ghoshal points out that In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risk than do shareholders. Also their contributions of knowledge, skills and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contribution of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply. (Ghoshal, 2005: 80) In other words, the claims by capital on firm value exemplified by Porter’s work are largely illegitimate and the result of a history of successful mobilization by capital over workers and consumers in which, Ghoshal says, academic management knowledge has been complicit. Furthermore, dressed up as academic knowledge – namely agency theory – these forms of academic knowledge produce, he says, the kinds of corporate abuse we now associate with names such as Enron and Lehmann Brothers. What is needed, Ghoshal argues, is a thorough questioning of management education, and the re-establishment of the corporation as a collective institution. 579

Craig Prichard

So how would we re-establish the corporation as a collective institution? If we regard ‘value’ as organized through a set of value forms or formations with particular rules, norms and expectations that create particular kinds of relations and subjectivities, this would require the formulation, establishment or adoption of a new or at least renovated value form; one that might in some way perhaps ‘remember’ the conditions and relations of its production and reflect these in its distributive practices. The practicalities of establishing such a value form are daunting. Organized labour has been in retreat for decades and corporations use a range of means to avoid direct bargaining situations e.g. career increments, collective agreements. Alongside this is a veritable panoply of historical and contemporary discourses on the ‘market’, ‘business’, ‘investment’ and ‘managerial control’ that maintain the general directionalities of the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment. Building a different value form around, for instance Ardvisson and Pieterson’s ‘ethical value’ (2013), would involve re-routing the current directionalities. It seems extremely challenging! With that said, I conclude this chapter with a short review of some of this work with the aim of drawing out some of the challenges facing the development of a contending value formation.

Toward a contending value form At the core of Stewart Clegg’s classic labour process analysis of the class and control in corporations (Clegg, 1981) is the claim that the current mode of exploitation is a product of complex historical struggles between groups of agents at various scales (local, regional and nation state) played out through particular technologies and socially regulative rules. This combination of struggles, technologies and rules is further mediated by the changing patterns of accumulation (i.e. expansionary and contradictionary phases). Based on Clegg’s analysis, the development of a contending value formation would necessarily involve an active struggle over the distribution of surplus played out through the development of a competing rule set materialized in new technologies. In this sense there is a line of continuity between Clegg’s analysis and Adam Arvidsson’s argument for the new value form he entitles ‘ethical value’, and the formation of an ethical economy (Arvidsson and Pietersen, 2013). Arvidsson’s claims for the formation of ‘ethical value’ are based around the development of giftlike rule sets embedded in reputational dynamics played out through now largely ubiquitous internet platforms. Ethical value as a new value form is taking its first steps towards objectification in the proliferation of ratings and reviewing in e-commerce; the success of social media like Facebook or Twitter that in some sense objectify one’s ‘ethical value’, (visible in the activity level of one’s profile, for example), as well as the growing use of bottom-up tagging systems, or ‘folksonomies’ as ways to evaluate the utility of information (starting, albeit imperfectly, with Google or at least the number of one’s friends and some aspects of the quality of one’s interaction with them itself). (Arvidsson, 2010: 641) So while value production in the industrial economy was based around labour hours, such as watching labour time in the case of television advertising, value production in the ethical economy is based around building reputation through active participation in collective work projects. This kind of reputational-driven work is not far removed from what organizational researchers discovered about industrial capitalism. If we look closely at ethnographies of industrial work places we can see some interesting continuities. 580

Value

Michael Burawoy’s ethnography of factory life of industrial capitalism (1979) shows how workers were far from the drone-like ‘walking dead’ of popular accounts of factory work. For Burawoy, workers actively consented to the exploitative practices of capitalist workplace regimes through their engagement in workplace practice and particularly games e.g. piece rate regimes. The explanation for this active consent is found in the seduction and enrolment of workers in the workshop production ‘game’. When I first entered the shop I was somewhat contemptuous of this game of making out [achieving production levels that produced incentive payments] which appeared to advance Allied’s profit margins more than operators’ interests. . . . Once I knew I had a chance of making out the rewards of participating in a game in which the outcomes were uncertain absorbed my attention, and I found myself spontaneously cooperating with management in the production of greater surplus value. (Burawoy, 1979: 64) In other words, from the inside, Burawoy found that securing the production of surplus labour from workers was not based on threat, zombification or detailed wage-effort bargain. Rather it involved working with others in such a way that built a reputation and thus secured a relatively stable sense of self in relations with others through work practices and organizationally legitimate forms of knowledge. The labour that underwrites ethical value and the ethical economy is much the same. The ethical economy is located in what Arvidsson and Pietersen call ‘productive publics’. A ‘public’ is a new institutional space where value creation develops through highly socialized open-sourced forums. In productive publics reputation is conferred on actors by their peers, according to a comprehensive judgement of excellence in the use of common resources and the virtue of their conduct. Furthermore, such reputation can function as what we called ‘ethical capital’, an asset that has tangible economic value for both individuals and organizations. In other words value has become public in new ways. The value of a person or a brand is not set according to fixed standards, but determined in more or less open-ended ways. (Arvidsson and Pietersen, 2013: 109) We can see easy comparisons here between Burawoy’s ‘making out’ in the productive games of the factory and the reputational dynamics of the Arvidsson and Pietersen’s publics. Despite the terminology, the ethics of ethical value is necessarily built through intensive cooperative and communicative work which forms what they term an ethical mentality. This is primarily a sense of self more conscious of the importance of others, as well as collaborative community, a new way of jointly arriving at value that would guide cooperation. (Arvidsson, 2010: 18)

Conclusion In this short chapter I’ve suggested that value’s noted definitional fluidity is in part a consequence of the differences between various value forms (gift and commodity) and the performative role value plays under the sway of the commodity form in particular. We then identified key challenges that dominant accounts of value in management discourse confront given their allegiance to the commodity form (in wage labour), and then discussed briefly how this challenge presents 581

Craig Prichard

opportunities (undoubtedly against the odds) for both questioning the existing rules, relations and identities of the commodity value form, and contributing to the development of new forms (ethical value being our example). In this vein I have concluded by highlighting some of the continuities between two pieces of original work by noted organizational scholars and the work of Adam Arvidsson and his colleagues around ‘ethical value’ as part of the formation of an ethical economy. For researchers interested in engaging with value there seem to be two particular challenges here. One would be to show empirically how new media platforms not only promote but also materialize new value relations, and second, how combinations of value forms (the subsidy and the gift for example) might underwrite the flow of value through productive publics. Both offer engaging work for those concerned to challenge and perhaps undermine the dominance of the commodity form.

References (key texts in bold) Akerlof, G. (1982). Labour contracts as partial gift exchange. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 97(4): 543–69. Appadurai, A. (1988). Introduction: commodities and the politics of value, in Appadurai, A. (ed.), The Social Life of Things in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–63. Arvidsson, A. (2010). The ethical economy: new forms of value in the information society? Organization, 17(5): 637–44. Arvidsson, A. and Pietersen, N. (2013). The Ethical Economy: rebuilding value after the crisis. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Barnett, S. and Seaton, J. (2010). Why the BBC matters: memo to the new Parliament about a unique British institution. The Political Quarterly, 81(3): 327–32. Beverungen, A., Murtola, A. and Schwartz, G. (eds) (2013). The communism of capital. [Special Issue] ephemera, 13(3): 483–495. Böhm, S. and Land, C. (2012). The new ‘hidden abode’: reflections on value and labour in the new economy. The Sociological Review, 60(2): 217–40. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 18(3–4): 161–88). Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006).On Justification: economies of worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis (Vol. 248). London: Heinemann. Clegg, S. (1981). Organization and control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4): 545–62. De Angelis, M. (2007). The Beginning of History: value struggles and global capital. London: Pluto Press. Fuchs, C. (2010). Class, knowledge and new media. Media, Culture & Society, 32(1): 141. Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(1): 75–91. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Homans, G.C. (1954). The cash posters: a study of a group of working girls. American Sociological Review, 724–33. Jhally, S. and Livant, B. (1986). Watching as working: the valorization of audience consciousness. Journal of Communication, 36(3): 124–43. Levy, D. and Spicer, A. (2013). Contested imaginaries and the cultural political economy of climate change. Organization, 20(5): 659–78. Marx, K. (1967). Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume 1. New York: International Publishers. Mauss, M. (1990 [1925]). The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies (trans. I. Cunnison). New York: Norton. Milios, J. (2009). Rethinking Marx’s value-form analysis from an Althusserian perspective. Rethinking Marxism, 21(2): 260–74. 582

Value

Offer, A. (1997). Between the gift and the market: the economy of regard. The Ecomomic History Review, 50(3): 450–76. Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G. and Smith, A. (2014). Value Proposition Design. London: Wiley. Porter, M.E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1): 25–40. Reinecke, J. (2009). Beyond a subjective theory of value and towards a ‘fair price’: an organizational perspective on Fairtrade minimum price setting. Organization, 17(5): 563–81. Strathern, M. (1992). Qualified value: the perspective of gift exchange, in Humphrey, C. and High-Jones, S. (eds), Barter, Exchange and Value: an anthropological approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–91. Willmott, H. (2012). What is ‘Value’? Unpacking an overlooked key concept, paper presented to the Academy of Management Annual Meeting (Submission #16009). Yang, M. (2000). Putting global capitalism in its place. Current Anthropology, 41(4): 477–509.

583

56 Visual Looking at organization Samantha Warren

Introducing visual(s) and organization The philosophical significance of the visual extends beyond a consideration of the sense impressions from our eyes or an analysis of what we can see. Since the enlightenment, we claim that ‘seeing is believing’ and position sight as the primary way in which we engage with the world – in first-world ‘Western’ society at least (Berger, 1972). Thus the visual determines reality, becomes an arbiter of truth and is presumed to be the bedrock of valid knowledge far more than other sense data (Kavanagh, 2014). To investigate the visual is to ask how the very structure of human experience is organized. The value of a philosophy of organization is in using ‘big’ ideas to ask ‘big’ questions that unsettle our everyday ways of thinking and theorizing and so in this chapter I open up ideas, rather than offer a whistle-stop tour of how specific philosophical schools or writers have treated the topic of vision in their work. This is not least because a philosophical consideration of the ‘visual’ in relation to organizations is an extraordinarily broad one as we shall see, and vision and visuality have exercised just about every philosopher at some point in their writing. This has largely been in connection with discussions of art and aesthetics (see Strati, Chapter 17 this volume) but also imbricated in investigations of (un)consciousness, perception, knowledge, ethics, truth and the nature of reality (e.g. see Manghani et al., 2006). Despite this, business, management and organization as visual entities are marginal in a discipline that has historically interrogated and described its subject matter in words and numbers (Bell and Davison, 2013). Yet, from the commodities they produce, to the buildings they inhabit and the logos, advertisements and livery that come to stand for them, organizations and their brands are inherently visual, and this is especially so as we move further into the screenmediated virtual age of the internet (Bell et al., 2014). And even when we are not looking, we also imag(e-)ine the organized world with our mind’s eye. At their most fundamental, organizations are brought into being through the ‘visions’ of their founders with inscriptions giving them form, conventions and ultimately coming to stand for the ‘organization’ itself (Puyou et al., 2012). A combination of advances in digital and internet technologies, mass media prevalence and the fact that we simply cannot ignore the proliferation of images in society anymore, are cited as reasons for this growing interest (Warren, 2009). 584

Visual

Visual organization studies can be grouped according to whether they attend to images themselves – treating the visual artefact as data – or whether they employ methods that visualize organizational life (Warren, 2009). These camps can be further classified, e.g. is attention directed to pre-existing images strategically produced by organizations, those created especially for the research, or found in wider culture? Do studies utilize member, researcher or co-produced visuals?. Yanow (2014) gives a comprehensive taxonomy of logics of enquiry in visual analysis which summarizes a much wider range of distinctions than I have space for here, but the philosophical issues underlying these classificatory systems are the same as those I will be concerned with in this chapter: ‘What is the visual doing? What form does it take? What effects does it have? How does the visual organize?’

Who’s looking at who? When considering organizational research agendas that take into account the act of looking, philosophical questions should be asked about what or who is legitimating that gaze, and in doing so, constructing the field of vision. As Parker (2014: 380) observes: ‘The places we look from are not innocent, but shape what we can see, what we can’t see, and how we see things at all.’ The act of looking is an agentic one, replete with questions of autonomy and intentionality as Wilcox (Chapter 19, this volume) points out. Whether ‘looking at’ or ‘looking for’, an intention to visually search out the Other is implied. Both constitute relations of power and control because there is a subject who is doing the looking, placing what they are looking at (of for) under their gaze, either willingly or unwillingly. As Foucault’s (1977) classic discussion of Bentham’s panopticon established, the conditions that legitimate such surveillance are politically motivated but appear naturalized as a neutral gaze, which is internalized by both watched and watcher as part of their visual culture. For example, from a feminist perspective, Mulvey (1989) observes this in relation to women’s representations in film, and Pollock (2006) similarly considers female nudes in painting and we can clearly draw parallels to the use of the gendered body in advertising (Gill, 2006). The women’s positioning in these images is not ‘natural’, nor ‘normal’, but arranged for the pleasures of a heterosexual male viewer – a subject position that ultimately comes to define the norms of who can look at who, and how (Shapiro, 2003). In organization studies we can extend these ideas to other forms of strategic communication in which the framing, angle, gaze and aesthetic composition of images are used to place the viewer in a certain relation with the image – Campbell et al. (2009) discuss how faces are used to invoke a particular ethical relationship between viewer and viewed in the context of sustainability reports. Those we are expected to feel sorry for, or privileged over are positioned below our eyeline, and only those in power are permitted to hold a direct and steady gaze out at us. Organizations thus exploit (and indeed amplify) taken-for-granted ways of seeing to reinforce desired norms and values around their missions and purpose. For Lacan (1998) knowing one can be gazed upon is at the heart of the realization that we are objects as well as a subject: we can be seen as well as see, and we are also aware that we can ‘see ourselves seeing ourselves’. Looking (or more accurately the gaze) is therefore an objectifying process and our awareness of being visible to others changes our relationship with ourselves and is at the heart of understanding the self in Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking. The significance of this is that once we conceive of ourselves as an object, we can then think of ourselves as malleable, with characteristics to be ‘worked on’ for self-improvement, for example, or traits that we may distance ourselves from if we consider them to be less than desirable – legitimating acts we might otherwise consider immoral or unethical perhaps. In advanced consumer capitalism objectification has also become synonymous with commodification, an example 585

Samantha Warren

being the ‘aestheticized labour’ prevalent in the service industries where workers’ bodies are rendered extensions of the brands that they sell (Hancock and Tyler, 2000).

Do we only see with our eyes? If looking is an outward gaze directed at some other object, then conceptually at least, we can think of seeing as its internal counterpart. Phenomenologists recognize vision as indivisible from a totality of ‘being’ in the world and which involves the whole body (Ingold, 2011; MerleauPonty, 1962). From eye movements and their electrical impulses, to the way sight is ‘felt’ as a total sense impression (Pink, 2009) a good organizational philosopher of the visual will recognize the interconnectedness of the senses and how the visual comes to stand as a proxy for all experience (Pink, 2009; Ingold, 2011). In other words, sight is not particularly special or important and we would do better to think of the eyes as just one entry point to a much more complex and messy sensorium. Fetishizing sight in this way is called occularcentrism and can be traced back to Plato’s insistence that sight equates with thought and is therefore the most important of the human sense impressions. Jay (1993) explains how this assumption was reinforced through the icon-worship of mediaeval religion, (where sight was synonymous with spirituality) and on through the period of the enlightenment, the invention of perspective, mathematics and so on. Kavanagh (2014) extends these ideas specifically into an organizational context drawing attention to how the language of organization is littered with visual metaphors, such as corporate ‘visions’, ‘seeing the bigger picture’, and the ‘helicopter view’ which reifies the objectifying/distancing tendency of organizational processes in turn enabling them to exert control over their objects (see Küpers, 2014 for a fuller discussion). Seeing is also the act through which we make visual sense of the world, through the biosocial processes of perception. In other words sight is a cultural construction as much as one enabled by the body (Jay, 2002), for example in the ways ‘professional vision’ is established among organizational actors (Ewenstein and Whyte, 2009; Styhre, 2014). Mitchell (2007: 395) has provocatively stated that in fact ‘there are no visual media’ because it is not the eye and its apparatus that ‘sees’. Instead, what can be seen depends on the conventions of those doing the looking: ‘visual skills are trained and acquired and embedded in concentration and attention rather than being natural-born competencies’ (Styhre, 2014: 358). In other words we learn how to see based on our stock of cultural knowledge – what to pay attention to, what is figure, what lies in the background, and the salience of certain marks over others to name but a few (Burgin, 1986). For organizational research then, what becomes interesting is how communities construct scopic regimes of truth, establishing the ‘right’ way to perceive visual objects through ‘forms of collective professional vision or enskilled vision that [rest] on underlying beliefs and assumptions regarding how and what to observe in day-to-day work’ (Styhre, 2014: 354). Finally we can return to Mitchell’s (2007) charge that there are ‘no visual media’ as there is no such thing as vision isolated from other sensory impressions. Edwards and Hart (2004) stress the materiality of the visual as tangible objects that are physically picked up, pointed at, gathered around, moved through, put on display or hidden from view, enmeshed in the social interactions that give them meaning (particularly photographs). As objects, visuals have form, presence and weight. Movies and television are accompanied by a soundtrack and glossy magazines emit a distinctive smell as you flick through their pages. Furthermore, Elkins (2000) reminds us of the place of technology in determining what can and cannot be seen, thus seeing also depends on the operation of touch and manual dexterity in handling a microscope, telescope, camera, MRI scanner or the like. 586

Visual

Imagining the real . . . As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, the visual does not just relate to looking and seeing in the external world, but also encompasses those mental images of our mind’s eye – our imag(e)ination. According to Dufrenne (1973[2006]: 138), imagination is what allows us to conjure up possible future scenarios, and thus opens up a space for how things might be. But this imagination is not limitless, for we cannot imagine what we have never encountered. As he puts it, in our imaginations ‘anticipation becomes reminiscence’ (ibid.: 140) because even the most fanciful of imaginings rests on what we’ve previously known, even if that knowledge is perhaps very old, partial, mediated or abstracted. Imagination is central to organizing because it is through imagining what organizational processes might look like (e.g. having form in an external world) that they are brought into being. Giraudeau (2012: 213) describes new venture creation as an ‘existential twilight zone: [businesses] do exist, as projects, but they do not exist yet as operating exercises’. He goes on to trace the genealogy of the ‘business plan’ as an inscription device to attract financial investment by concretizing what is really still someone’s imagination. Likewise, Justesen and Mouritsen’s (2009) study of accountability in housing development showed how clients complained when building specifications changed in the course of construction, thereby differing from the highly realistic computer-generated impressions of the ‘finished’ structure. Quattrone (2009) links the birth of modern accounting to the ways in which inventory was visually organized by early book-keepers. Similarly, the way in which management knowledge is encoded in particular visual forms influences the meaning that is gleaned from that presentation and therefore the image that audiences have in mind about that entity – the organization chart, the graph, and more latterly infographics have changed the way we understand organizations in our imagination, and this is in part due to the forms through which we encounter them (e.g. see Tufte, 2001). Enlarging the scale on a graph meant investors were more likely to ‘see’ good performance, for example (Beattie and Jones, 2002). What all these imaginings have in common is that they stand for some facet of the organization itself as if it were real. As Baudrillard (1994) puts it, they are simulations that no longer merely represent reality – they are reality – as ‘perfect copies’ of things that actually have never existed, they are simulacra. As we see quite clearly in the case of the business plan, these simulations are not benign flights of fancy, or just mere ‘appearances’, they exist within and indeed create, circuits of economic value with real-world effects. Indeed, much of the global financial system is imaginary; derivatives and futures markets, for example, are bought and sold without ever existing outside of the trades that define them. The language of inscription is also routinely used to refer to real-world processes, for instance, business people speak of being ‘ahead of the curve’ – alluding to a favourable position relative to an imaginary trend on a graph, or of actions affecting ‘the bottom line’, a reference to net profit which is the raison d’être for many firms, but here made ‘real’ through its position on an organizational representation. And so we are back to Dufrenne’s reminiscent anticipation. What is representing what?

How do images work? However, the analysis of visuals that result from imaginative processes such as those discussed above, is what the bulk of visual organization studies writing addresses to date. Drawing from the linguistic disciplines and writers such as Barthes (1982), Peirce (1960), Derrida (see Campbell, 2012), art history (Schroeder, 2002) and most latterly media and communication studies (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006), it is assumed that images have significant effects on emotion and cognition and therefore shape perception, behaviours, organization and by extension society. 587

Samantha Warren

As briefly noted above, studies of religious icons show how visual representations have always been powerful (Peers, 2009), and the lengths contemporary organizations will go to in order to protect their visual identity through copyright, for example, underscores their contemporary power too. Indeed, Davison (2009) argues that although not formally accounted for, intangible brands can be one of a company’s most valuable assets. Annual company reports are one of the image-rich documents that image-based studies often focus on (Davison and Skerratt, 2007) along with advertisements (Schroeder, 2002), graphs (Beattie and Jones, 2002) and websites (Elliot and Robinson, 2014). Moving images and dynamic visual material pose a further set of challenges in that they are often so life-like that their representational or iconographical relationship with reality is so taken for granted that they are not recognized as images at all. As noted above in relation to looking and gaze, the cinematic mode positions the viewer as voyeur – a precarious yet safe space designed to titillate (Metz, 1982). Even though we know movies are perhaps the most staged of all visual media, the processes by which they are constructed recede into the background as we watch. Film is an intensely immersive medium, which of course is why Mitchell (2007) argues that it is not visual at all. So what can a philosophical perspective bring to understanding such a wide-ranging set of materials? What unites studies that analyse images is a belief that they have a communicative power that results from a fusion of the viewer’s tacit cultural knowledge and the presentational forms of the image and it is here that we should ask our ‘big questions’. Significantly, images are either understood as a language in and of themselves or thought to bypass (or augment) the need for verbal explanation (or a position between the two extremes) which has given rise to terms such as visual rhetoric, visual discourse, visual competence and visual communication, each with their own disciplinary commitments and theoretical assumptions. Briefly here, rhetorical approaches to the visual contend that the forms and conventions of images speak to us as if they were characters, words and phrases in a language that can be ‘read’, for example Barthes’ (1977) early work Image, Music, Text, inspired by the linguistic semiotics of Saussure (Davison, 2014). Semiotic approaches continue to flourish in visual studies – largely developed from Williamson’s (1978) classic study of gender and ideology in advertisements, and give rise to the assumption that there are more or less universal properties of images that can be encoded, reproduced and understood and widely shared. More recently these ideas have been extended to develop the concept of ‘visual discourse’ in which the language of the visual is placed into its social context as a more embedded mode of communication and more situationally and culturally specific (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 2006). The ability to read images is considered in what it means to be ‘visually competent’ (Müller, 2008) and moves us away from a realist philosophical position in which meaning is inherent in the text, and towards more poststructuralist approaches that emphasize the role of the author/viewer in creating it. Barthes (1982), for example distinguishes between the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’ of an image to explain how it can have both universal and personal meaning at the same time – the studium being the representational features that most people would recognize in an image, and the punctum being a detail noticed within it which strikes a personal emotional chord. In contrast, Langer (1957) argues that we apprehend all the elements of a work of art simultaneously which has a holistic impression on us that we would find hard to describe as emanating from any one feature of the image. Rancière (2007) describes this as the image’s ‘silent speech’ to encapsulate the power of pictures to communicate without necessarily ‘saying’ anything, an idea that connects with ineffability of aesthetic experience in general (Strati, Chapter 17 this volume). Through the senses, the body knows more than the mind can translate. 588

Visual

Far sight: concluding remarks and future possibilities In this short chapter, I have asked philosophical questions about how we organize visually and how visuals organize us and anchor their significance in implications for everyday life and work. In the first section, I considered how looking and specifically the gaze, are at the heart of ideas about self, subjectivity and Other, embroiled in power relations of who can and does look at whom and with what effects. In thinking about seeing, I moved to questions about truth and knowledge, noting how a preoccupation with vision can be seen as occularcentric, marginalizing other bodily and social processes that are just as important to ‘seeing’ as the apparatus of the eye itself. The nature of reality was called into question in my third section on imagining, showing how simulations are central to circuits of value and yet remain intangible as images. Finally, I asked how we understand an image – where is its meaning? Are there features of an image accessible by all and that we can replicate? Or do images work at a level that transcends any attempt to do so? Treating organizational visual(s) to a philosophical examination is not a historical project that answering these questions will complete. At the time of writing this chapter, the virtual reality (VR) gaming helmet Occulus Rift has just been launched and it – and other VR technologies – signal philosophical avenues yet to be travelled as new experiential realms are opened up through the body’s own visual mechanisms (Rubin, 2014). The organizational implications of these new technologies are far reaching, performing surgery remotely or training medical professionals, VR technology continues a long tradition of simulations in organizational life which as Hoffman (2014) reminds us already call into question the demarcation of ‘real’ from ‘play’. Other consequences of new visual technologies are already apparent in the management of social media – uploaded user-generated media content disrupts traditional notions of what it means to be a producer and a consumer, for example reframing ideas of how value is produced and indeed what value even is under these new conditions (Arvidsson, 2005, Böhm et al., 2012). Likewise, new social media, particularly YouTube and viral videos change the ways organizations need to address their stakeholders and even question where the boundaries of organizations lie (Bell and McArthur, 2014). Skype collapses distance and seemingly time, to enable new forms of organizational working that alter perceptions of presence and absence in ways which we are only just beginning to appreciate as knowledge work in particular is conducted across different locales and temporalities. Finally, advances in personal computing mean the manipulation of ‘big data’ is now possible in ways unthought of only a few years ago – what kinds of new organizational phenomena will this give rise to as organizational researchers are able to visualize networks and relationships with increasing sophistication? From CCTV in the streets and instagram culture, to Facebook clicks and GPS, as we become accustomed to being watched, monitored, mapped and recorded, technology is extending the limits of looking and redrawing all manner of boundaries between self and other, public and private, real and imaginary (Graham et al., 2011).

References (key texts in bold) Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands: meaning and value in media culture. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press. Barthes, R. (1982). Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulations. Michigan: Ann Arbor. Beattie, V.A. and Jones, M.J. (2002). Measurement distortion of graphs in corporate reports: an experimental study. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 15(4): 546–64. 589

Samantha Warren

Bell, E. and Davison, J. (2013). Visual management studies: empirical and theoretical approaches. International Journal of Management Reviews, 15(2): 167–84. Bell, E. and McArthur (2014). Visual authenticity and organizational sustainability, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 365–78. Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (2014). The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Böhm S., Land C. and Beverungen, A. (2012). The value of Marx: free labour, rent and the ‘primitive’ accumulation in Facebook. University of Essex Business School Working Paper. Burgin, V. (1986). The End of Art Theory: criticism and postmodernity. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Campbell, D., McPhail, K. and Slack, R. (2009). Facework in annual reports: a study of the management encounter through annual reports, informed by Levinas and Bauman. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 22(6): 907–32. Campbell, N. (2012). Regarding Derrida: the tasks of visual deconstruction. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 7(1): 105–24. Davison, J. (2009). Icon, iconography, iconology: visual branding, banking and the case of the bowlerhat. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 22(6): 883–906. Davison, J. (2014). The visual organization: Barthesian perspectives, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 33–45. Davison, J. and Skerratt, L. (2007). Words, Pictures and Intangibles in the Corporate Report. Edinburgh: ICAS. Dufrenne, M. (1973[2006]). Imagination, in Manghani, S., Piper, A. and Simons, J. (eds), Images: a reader. London: Sage, pp. 138–41. Edwards, E. and Hart, J. (2004). Introduction: photographs as objects, in Edwards, E. and Hart, J. (eds), Photographs Objects Histories: on the materiality of images. London: Routledge, pp. 1–15. Elkins, J. (2000). How to Use Your Eyes. Abingdon: Routledge. Elliot, C. and Robinson, S. (2014). Towards an understanding of corporate web identity, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 273–88. Ewenstein, B. and Whyte, J. (2009). Knowledge practices in design: the role of visual representations as ‘epistemic objects’. Organization Studies, 30(1): 7–30. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. London: Penguin. Gill, R. (2006). Gender and the Media. London: Polity Press. Giraudeau, M. (2012). Imagining (the future) business: how to make firms with plans? in Puyou, F., Quattrone, P., McLean, C. and Thrift, N. (eds), Imagining Business: performative imagery in business and beyond. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, pp. 213–29. Graham, C., Laurier, E., O’Brien, V. and Rouncefield, M. (2011). New visual technologies: shifting boundaries, shared moments. Visual Studies, 26(2): 87–91. Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2000). The look of love: gender and the organization of aesthetics, in Hassard, J., Holliday, R. and Willmott, H. (eds), Body and Organization. London: Sage, pp. 108–29. Hoffman, S. (2014). Simulated realities (Or why boxers and Artificial Intelligence scientists do mostly the same thing), in Bell, E., Warren, S. and J. Schroeder (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Routledge: Abingdon, pp. 335–50. Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Jay, M. (1993). Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jay, M. (2002). Cultural relativism and the visual turn. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(3): 267–78. Justesen, L. and Mouritsen, J. (2009). The triple visual: translations between photographs, 3-D visualisations and calculations. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 22 (6): 973–90. Kavanagh, D. (2014). The limits of visualization: occularcentrism and organization, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 64–76. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Küpers, W. (2014). Between the visible and the invisible in organizations, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and J. Schroeder (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 19–32. Lacan, J. (1998). The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis. London: Vintage. Langer, S. (1957). Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 590

Visual

Manghani, S., Piper, A. and Simon, J. (2006). Images: a reader. London: Sage Merleau Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Metz, C. (1982). Psychoanalysis and Cinema. London: Macmillan. Mitchell, J.W.T. (2007). There are no visual media, in Grau, O. (ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 395–406. Müller, M. (2008). A new paradigm for studying visuals in the social sciences. Visual Studies, 23(2): 101–12. Mulvey, L. (1989). The Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan Parker, M. (2014). (Seeing) organizing in popular culture: discipline and method, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 379–90. Peers, G. (2009). Icons spirited love. Religion and the Arts, 13: 218–47. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Pollock, G. (2006). The image in psychoanalysis and the archaeological metaphor, in Pollock G. (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–29. Puyou, F., Quattrone, P., McLean, C. and Thrift, N. (2012). Imagining Business: performative imagery in business and beyond. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Quattrone, P. (2009). Books to be practiced. Memory, the Power of the Visual and the Success of Accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34 (1): 85–118. Rancière, J. (2007). The Future of the Image. London: Verso. Rubin, P. (2014). The inside story of oculus rift and how virtual reality became reality. Wired. Retrieved on 3 November 2014 from www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/. Schroeder, J. (2002). Visual Consumption. London: Routledge. Shapiro, G. (2003). Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on seeing and saying. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Styhre, A. (2014). The organization of vision within professions, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 353–64. Tufte, E. (2001). The Quantitative Display of Visual Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Warren, S. (2009). Visual methods in organizational research, in Bryman, A. and Buchanan, D. (eds), Handbook of Organizational Research Methods. London: Sage, pp. 566–82. Williamson, J. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: ideology and meaning in advertising. London: Boyars. Yanow, D. (2014). Methodological ways of seeing and knowing, in Bell, E., Warren, S. and Schroeder, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 165–87.

591

57 Work The philosophical limits of an idea in the neo-liberal age Peter Fleming

Introduction One does not have to listen to a governmental minister for very long before the concept of work is mentioned in unquestionably and adoringly positive terms. We are ensured that they stand for jobs and more jobs. Many more jobs. Conversely the unemployed are rebuked as a drain on society and lacking the requisite motivation. They must build their lives almost totally around the mission of obtaining paid employment – nothing else matters. The prospects that might await our children, of course, are also a constant source of stress in terms of employability. It is easy to explain our current preoccupation with work as the result of only economic forces, namely the rationalization processes associated with the rise of neo-liberal capitalism (i.e. governmental regimes that dogmatically believe societal welfare can only be achieved by singularly promoting commercial welfare). That is important. However, ‘work-mania’ is also the result of a new kind of discourse. Whereas work under Fordism required myths to justify the otherwise ‘naked’ act of simple doing (e.g. screwing on a bolt), working today has itself become an ideological meme, an all-encompassing signifier that echoes a particular form of governance, especially associated with late capitalism. Neo-liberal societies are literally saturated with talk about work in this respect. It is synonymous with not only economic necessity and survival but also ethical rectitude, mental well-being and human normality itself. This is peculiar given that good jobs are increasingly difficult to come by and employment more generally is now the leading source of anxiety, depression and existential malaise (Gorz, 2010; Fleming, 2014). This chapter maintains that working today has really little to do with physiological survival and is now purely ideological. We work simply to assume a specific type of subject position and this proximate positionality qualifies all other social activities. As a result, work is not merely something we do among other things but is who we are. And this represents quite a philosophical achievement, as Foucault (2008) points out in his analysis of the neo-liberal intellectual movement. For Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Gary Becker and many others, the capitalist 592

Work

objective was to individualize economic activity so that each person would become their own private enterprise. In this political philosophical view, there is little room for the state, trade unions or ostensibly non-economic grouping such as the family or even romantic couples. All activity could be individually economized and thus rendered calculable in the marketplace – even the ‘self’ or what Gary Becker preferred to call ‘human capital’. For these philosophers, this would represent epitome of human freedom. In order for this theory of life to become reality (when writing in the 1940s the views of F.A. Hayek were considered extremely unorthodox and undesirable), a new type of power had to be ordained. This Foucault (2008) labelled biopower, the key regulative currency of neo-liberal governmentality and its class relations. Work was especially important in this power shift, because the ‘enterprising subject’ was seen as the ultimate template for ‘life itself’ (or bios). Henceforth, our work-mania is no longer anchored to the organic demands of basal selfpreservation, but the fulfilment of a particular philosophical worldview. One of the chief outcomes of this neo-liberal philosophical aggrandizement of work is that we begin to truly embody our jobs and find it difficult to turn off. This is partially the result of the type of work encouraged under post-Fordism, being more cognitive and reliant on social and personable qualities (e.g. see Costea, Crump and Amiridis, 2008; Hanlon, 2015; Callaghan and Thompson, 2002). But I suggest there is also strong ideological component functioning here too related to the ideal-employee that echoes the normative values propounded by neoliberal philosophers, ideals that have finally become hegemonic. One reason why we often miss this socially constructed nature of work is because it has become so commonplace and reified. Only when the underlying ideal of a ‘working life’ is pursued to its impossible limit that we suddenly see the template that neo-liberal society has in mind for all of us. For example, the 21-year-old banking intern, Moritz Erhardt, died in his London apartment in 2013 following 72 straight hours of stressful work. Subsequent reports discovered that the banking culture considered working incredibly long hours a badge of honour, something to be proud of and rewarded by the company. Or take Li Zheng, a 24-year-old Chinese employed by a global PR firm. He dropped dead on his first day back at the office following a stress-induced holiday. Investigators discovered that Zheng described himself on a social media site as ‘an over-worker in overworking season’, and an earlier post revealed that the young man did not leave the office until 11pm on the day of his death (News China, 2013). Such tragic and extreme cases are noteworthy because they reveal the ideal-type of employee that is now championed by the governmental practices of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberal philosophers aimed to make ‘life itself’ the object of permanent self-calculation continuously calibrated to market forces – via skill, qualification and social aptitude. Because the notion of ‘human capital’ sounds so misleadingly neutral and inoffensive, my preferred term – the ‘I, Job’ function – hopes to better capture the political nature of this transformation, a change that has seen work become something we are rather than simply do among other things. When the ‘I, Job’ function is operating smoothly, work is experienced as an inescapable way of life, 24/7. Is it possible to resist this kind of power?

From mere work to the ‘I, job’ function To substantiate my argument, let’s first investigate how the nature of work (and management) has changed over recent years before demonstrating the philosophical roots of this change in some rather audacious neo-liberal propositions. For work to become a permanent and unending way of life, as envisaged by Hayek and Becker, a radically different view of employment had to be forged. For many years industrial work represented a kind of confinement or a temporary 593

Peter Fleming

deference of life. According to Marx (1867[1972]), we can understand why this is so by analysing capitalism. When I enter the factory or office, I sell my time and abilities to an employer who seeks to make good use of them. These unfree hours were invariably controlled and shaped through processes of rationalization, standardization and depersonalization. Life itself was expunged: the worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced. (Marx, 1988: 74) Subsequent studies of a variety of jobs, including retail employment (Leidner, 1993) and financial services provision (Costas and Fleming, 2009), have noted similar patterns of selfalienation. We see this banishing of life from the workplace in classic depictions of office employment too. According to Weber (1946), what makes the bureaucratic organizational form so superior to pre-modern work arrangements was its strict separation between the office holder (i.e. his/her rich and diverse individual qualities) and the official role in the organization, with the latter dominating the work (also see Edwards, 1979; Jackall, 1988). In the prototypical bureau, there is no place for love, hate, curiosity or wonder. Office holders have a duty to behave like machines during the hours of employment. Only after they have checked out can they begin to feel human again. While the 1930s and 1940s Human Relations movement attempted to curb some of the more soul deadening aspects of alienation and rationalization, it nevertheless continued to organize work as an activity highly distinct from broader life projects (Gillespie, 1991). The advent of culture management in the 1980s appeared to signal a major break with these earlier traditions of management given its emphasis on emotion, loyalty, commitment and love (Kunda, 1992; Willmott, 1993). However, because ‘strong cultures’ function like ‘clans’ (Ouchi, 1980) or even ‘cults’ (O’Reilly and Chatman, 1996), their architects could not resist policing the boundary between work selves and non-work influences, just in case outside stimuli might dilute the bonds of commitment (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011). Over the last 15 to 20 years, however, I suggest we have witnessed an important departure from these organizational approaches to work, corresponding with the rise of neo-liberalism, biopower and what I earlier dubbed the ‘I, Job’ function. In particular, organizations are much less committed to compositional procedures (e.g. sculpting the perfect employee) and instead cast the workforce as self-reliant readymade enactments of ‘human capital’. Hence in the 1990s there was a sudden prominence of self-managing teams, tacit knowledge, flexi-jobs and so-forth. The worker is essentially on their own in terms of job security and contractual obligations. But it is the existential and social autonomy that these changes conspicuously promote that really matters. Life itself (or bios) becomes a major reservoir of value that is tapped by the firm. Two features are especially evident in relation to employment systems in neo-liberal societies. First, employers seek to capture rather than simply ‘craft’ (Kondo, 1990) or ‘design’ (Casey, 1995) the raw material of labour power into standardized employee identikits. Workers are urged to ‘just be themselves’ and deploy their own time and gumption to get the job done well; regardless of whether they are on paid time or not (Fleming, 2009; Gregg, 2011). This is why contemporary management discourse appears to shun the metaphors of control and instead celebrate freedom, liberty and autonomy, as epitomized by the Liberation Management fad in the US (Peters, 2005; Semler, 2007). The already-present social intelligence and practical initiative of employees, those qualities that earlier management regimes viewed as dangerous to production, might actually be put to work in the immaterial economies of late capitalism. And many of 594

Work

these value-adding qualities are formed outside of the formal organizational sphere. Describing this shift in power relations, Gorz (2010) notes that whereas workers in Taylorized industries became optimal only after they had been deprived of practical knowledge, skills and habits developed by the culture of everyday life . . . post-Fordist workers have to come to the production process with all the cultural baggage they have acquired through games, team sports, arguments . . . (Gorz, 2010: 9–10) Gorz’s insight provides a germane transition to the second feature that differentiates work organizations today. Over the last 15 to 20 years the boundary between formal work time and non-work time has been slowly displaced in Western societies. Roaming technology such as smartphones and iWatches has certainly been influential here of course. However, a different psychological contract accompanies these technological innovations concerning what can be expected of the employee. For example, in one recent survey it was revealed that ‘one in three British workers check their emails before 6.30am, while 80% of British employers consider it acceptable to phone employees out of hours. 16% would happily call between 10pm and midnight’ (Hart, 2014: 66). This boundary conflation is also a consequence of a different approach to organizing work. Ressler and Thompson’s (2011) analysis of US employment is useful here concerning the inordinate interest in ‘Results Only Work Environments’ (or ROWE). Whereas traditional managerialism assumed that productivity can only be achieved by controlling inputs (the disciplinary approach), ROWE argues that firms focus on outputs. Discretion over inputs is entirely in the employee’s hands. Of course, a typical Fordist manager would view ROWE with a worried eye. Would leaving workers to their own devises surely be a recipe for laziness, shirking and misbehaviour? Not really. As Ressler and Thompson (2011) report, employees actually end up working more hours (and more productively) than if they had to check in at 9am and numbly stare at a computer monitor (what Paulsen, 2014 calls ‘empty labor’). When the work/non-work boundary is relaxed, the logic of work begins to takeover ‘life itself’ rather than the opposite. In her discussion of project management and employment, Kamp (2013) describes the extension and deepening of the work-mentality under these employment systems: ‘the “normal working day” is gradually being effaced . . . in reality, working hours are no longer defined by actual work time spent but by the nature of the assignment, by solution strategies, and by the level of ambition involved, as well as individual factors and preferences’ (Kamp, 2013: 129). Emerging from these the trends described above is the perfect neo-liberal philosophical ideal, what we have called the ‘I, Job’ function, the human embodiment of biopower. From now on, work is no longer merely an external task but also a mode of social being and a 24/7 way of life (Crary, 2013). As a result, some put it before anything, as the tragic examples of Moritz Erhardt and Li Zheng mentioned earlier attest (also see Michel, 2012). Indeed, as an ideological manifestation with ritualistic overtones, the ‘I, Job’ function compels its victims to work even when it is not functionally necessary (Paulsen, 2014) and even in our dreams at 3am (Lucas, 2010).

The crisis of Fordism, neo-liberalism and biopower at work A major objective of this chapter is to resist a functional and/or naturalistic explanation of the employment trends noted above. A functional reading would put the rising prominence of human capital (i.e. ‘I, Job’ function) down to the increasing perfection of rationalized market forces. The argument goes like this. Organizations in capitalist societies have evolved away from the 595

Peter Fleming

cumbersome inefficiencies of Fordism and have slowly become more agile, streamlined, flexible and effective. Outsourced, individualized and flexible ‘portfolio’ careers represent (for better or for worse) the type of worker best suited for these zero-waste conditions (an example of this reading would be Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005). But as I will argue below, biopower and the ‘I, Job’ function is rooted in a particular philosophical worldview. What counts as inefficient and wasteful, for example, depends on certain political assumptions that ultimately rest on philosophical axioms. The arbitrary and normative nature of so-called market discipline is therefore missed in teleological interpretations that point to numerical rationalization alone. A naturalist reading of the employment trends outlined above sees in work something inexorably connected to economic survival, necessity and perhaps even nature itself. The more we seek to be lifted out of the abyss of poverty, the more we must work. Standards of living, health and well-being are directly correlated to productivity, and therefore work. However, there is a major problem with this line of analysis as Gorz (1989, 2005) so insightfully points out. Work under neo-liberal conditions has been thoroughly decoupled from material selfpreservation. There is little link between the massive extension of the working day over the last 20 years and material wealth and well-being (in fact, just the opposite!). No, the recent emergence of a ‘workers society’ is the outcome of a definite philosophical project, which holds deep (and historically arbitrary) normative assumptions concerning the kind of people it thinks you and I ought to be. F.A. Hayek (1944, 1948, 1960) and Ludwig von Mises (1929[2005], 1947[2014]) had a clear set of beliefs in this regard, typically clarified in counter-distinction to soviet communism from the 1930s and 1940s onwards. All societal ills result from mass state administration because it inevitably tramples over individual liberties. On the other hand, the capitalist market system is self-regulating and thus requires no state coercion. Therefore individuals are freer. If we design society around that principle, we result in the freest of all possible social arrangements. In addition, markets reward the most competitive and innovative enterprising workplaces. Therefore, both the most desirable and free society would be one in which individuals themselves acted like individual workplaces and enterprises, constantly improving their economic capabilities in all spheres of life. From here a second wave of theoreticians – including Gary Becker (1964) and R. Lucas (1972) – explored the implications of this philosophical worldview: perhaps life itself can become a kind accruable and liberating form of capital. If so, it then follows that the valueadding activity of work should no longer be confined to a clearly delineated time and space as typified by Fordism. Instead, work can be more of an ongoing life project that is expansive, dynamic, individually rewarding and of one’s own volition (of course, in reality, this approach to ‘life’ is frequently experienced as the exact opposite, as I have pointed out elsewhere [see Fleming, 2014]). Hayek and Mises’ profound dislike of state intervention is perhaps understandable in light of Stalin’s rather distinctive method of social administration. However, analysts like Gary Becker and R. Lucas decontextualized early neo-liberal thought in this regard. They instead sought to convert its assumptions into econometric ‘truths’ and apply them to literally everything. No wonder Ronald Reagan loved it! Every facet of human life, including family, education, crime and sexual relations, could be approached as a cost–benefit calculation and value-creation opportunity. As Foucault (2008) notes in his study of neoclassical economics, neo-liberalism sought to reconstruct the individual’s very existence as a continuous economic project. This entails ‘generalizing the “enterprise” from within the social body or social fabric. . . . The individual’s life itself – with his [sic] relationships to his private property, with his family, household, insurance and retirement – must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise’ (Foucault, 2008: 241). In this sense, you are not only a worker who does a job, but 596

Work

a permanent instance of potential ‘employability’ and skills refinement. Enter the ‘I, Job’ function whereby work is more of an ideological social role rather than a mere means to survival. However, philosophy is one thing. A hegemonic ideology that shapes and guides human affairs is another. For it must be remembered that Hayek, for example, remained a philosophical outcast for many years after he proclaimed his normative worldview. And the work of Gary Becker and the Chicago School in the 1970s was largely confined to academic circles. How did these abstract principles come to organize such large parts of contemporary business and society? In short, the capitalist empire struck back following the crisis of Fordism – and the ideology of work was a decisive weapon in that assault. Two points are pertinent. The first pertains to the socio-economic conditions precipitated by the demise of Fordism and the neo-liberalization of society from the 1980s onwards. Right-wing governments blamed labour organizations and excessive democratic dialogue for the stagnating economy (see Dardot and Laval, 2014). So they began to take the recommendations of neo-liberal economists seriously by privatizing society (businesses do things better) and rebuilding social institutions around the precepts of market competition. However, there was a fundamental snag with the idea of transforming everyone into a ‘permanent enterprise’, especially in the workplace. As Perelman (2011) rightly argues, neo-liberal axioms – strict individualism, private property, cutthroat competition, an aversion to sharing, etc. – cause social chaos when applied to even the most basic organizational objectives (see Juravich, 1985; Fleming, 2014). Pure unalloyed freemarket capitalism cannot operate on its own. Most employment situations require a high degree of cooperative discretion and shared knowhow to function, qualities that are generally anathema to the antisocial economic formalism espoused by the pundits of ultra-economization. Perhaps as a remedy, then, we notice the widespread appearance of more social-based themes related to self-reliance and self-managing teams emerge as a major theme in corporate discourse from the 1990s onwards. Our very social abilities are enlisted to make a highly unworkable economic paradigm function in order to get jobs done at all (for example, see an illustrative study by Orr, 1996). When this occurs, work inevitably becomes something very intimate to us, from which it is difficult to simply walk away. The second driver that saw neo-liberal philosophy become a practical ideology in the form of the ‘I, Job’ function relates to a major shift in how the post-Fordist employee is viewed by the employer. Multinational corporations first pioneered this view in the Global South and now it is practised everywhere: an employee is not a cost of production but a useful bearer of cost. Most negative revenue streams (i.e. the costs of production) can be externalized onto the individual worker, so that they must carry the burden of reproducing a chaotic socio-economic system. Even when not formally ‘clocked in’, as Gregg (2011) notes. For example, a major airline in the UK recently fired its pilots and rehired them as self-employed agents. This means that the pilots (rather than the company) now have to pay for stopover accommodation, uniforms, pensions and health care. Having employees bear the costs of production (and an inefficient neo-liberal mode of economic organization) has also precipitated the widespread proliferation of precarious employment or what Weil (2014) terms the fissured workplace (i.e. fragmented, outsourced and part-time employment). With the help of propitious governmental legislation, organizations are able to gain the economic benefits of work without the expenses associated with full-time employment. Moreover, this growing group of precarious workers not only absorb externalized costs and are perpetually insecure, but they also experience a dramatic decrease in pay and conditions as a result. For example, Monagham (2014: 25) notes the massive rise of selfemployment in the UK, individuals who move from one part-time job to another: ‘Self-employed people have on average experienced a 22% fall in real pay since 2008–09 . . . with average earnings 597

Peter Fleming

of £207 a week, less than half of employees, and with no sick pay or holiday pay, and no employer to contribute towards their pension’. These people live their work in the worst possible sense, which is perhaps the cold reality of biopower for most, the dark endpoint of neo-liberal philosophy put into practice.

Can the ‘I, job’ function be killed? Is it possible to reclaim life itself so that it is no longer engulfed by the ideology of work? Can we escape the ‘I, Job’ function and its biopolitical capture, a fate bequeathed to us by long dead neo-liberal philosophers who genuinely believed it would set us free? It is tragic that for some individuals, who see no escape from their jobs (or the pressure to find work) and the debt that accrues around work, harming themselves or even ending their lives seems like the only option left (see Cederström and Fleming, 2012). They mistake the ‘I, Job’ function for their own bodies and begin to see it as the enemy – even attempt to kill it. With burnout and stress an inevitable result of an overactive ‘I, Job function’, capitalist companies themselves have been endeavouring to curb its obsessional will-to-work. Firms in France, for example, have banned their employees from checking work emails after 6pm. Volkswagen and Daimler automatically delete emails sent to employees on holiday so they arrive back to the office with an empty in-box. But as we noted above, technology is more symptomatic of the emergent trends around how work is socially organized. So it remains to be seen if Volkswagen and Daimler’s interventions can curb the excesses of work-mania. Other forms of resistance have explored the emancipatory potential of exit. When work is experienced as all encompassing, the desire to simply escape is understandable. For example, a veritable ‘escape industry’ has recently appeared, instructing workers on the difficult art of quitting or scaling down their employment commitments (Fleming, 2014). The Escape Manifesto (Escape the City, 2013), for example, targets city bankers and provides ample reasons why they ought to hand in their notice immediately. However, this is a rather individualist and fanciful approach to resistance. And not everyone can afford to lose themselves in dreams of departure. According to Gorz (1989, 2005), the ultimate purpose of working ought to be significantly scrutinized and revised. In light of technological developments and unemployment, it is fairly clear that we do not require all of this labour in order to be ‘modern’. Therefore the socially constructed character of work should be politicized so that new institutions can be forged: ‘the generalized reduction of working time amounts to a choice as to the kind of society we wish to live in’ (Gorz, 1989: 192). Not only less work, but also better work is important here. This in turn would require rolling back some of the major trends in neo-liberal practice, from outsourcing, sub-contracting, and so-forth. For the ‘I, Job’ function itself is but a symptom of this particularly extreme configuration of the capitalist mode of production.

References (key texts in bold) Becker, G.S. (1964). Human Capital: a theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Callaghan, G. and Thompson, P. (2002). We recruit attitude: the selection and shaping of call centre labour. Journal of Management Studies, 39(2): 233–54. Casey, C. (1995). Work, Self and Society: after industrialism. London: Sage. Cederström, C. and Fleming, P. (2012). Dead Man Working. London: Zero Books. Costas, J. and Fleming, P. (2009). Beyond dis-identification: towards a discursive approach to self-alienation in contemporary organizations. Human Relations, 62(3): 353–78. Costea, B., Crump, N. and Amiridis, K. (2008). Managerialism. The therapeutic habitus and the self in contemporary organising. Human Relations, 61(5): 661–85. 598

Work

Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep. London: Verso. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014). The New Way of the World: on neoliberal society. London: Verso. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested Terrain: the transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books. Escape the City (2013). The Escape Manifesto. London: Capstone. Fleming, P. (2009). Authenticity and Cultural Politics of Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fleming, P. (2014). Resisting Work: the corporatization of life and its discontents. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fleming, P. and Sturdy, A. (2011). Being yourself in the electronic sweatshop: new forms of normative control. Human Relations, 64: 177–20. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the College de France, 1978–79. London: Palgrave. Gillespie, R. (1991). Manufacturing Knowledge: a history of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gorz, A. (1989). Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. Gorz, A. (2005). Reclaiming Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gorz, A. (2010). Immaterial. London: Seagull Books. Gregg, M. (2011). Work’s Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hanlon, G. (2015). The Dark Side of Management. New York: Routledge. Hart, A. (2014). Why everyone’s started clock watching. Stylist, 30 April, p. 64. Hayek, F.A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F.A. (1948). Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago, IL: Regnery Press. Hayek, F.A. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: the world of corporate managers. New York: Oxford University Press. Juravich, T. (1985). Chaos on the Shop Floor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kamp, A. (2013). New concepts of work and time, in Hoegsberg, M. and Fisher, C. (eds), Living Labor. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 129–47. Kondo, D. (1990). Crafting Selves: power, gender and discourse of identity in a Japanese workplace. New York: Columbia University Press. Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering Culture: control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kunda, G. and Ailon-Souday, G. (2005). Managers, markets and ideologies: design and devotion revisited, in Ackroyd, S., Batt, R., Thompson, P. and Tolberts, P. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–19. Leidner, R. (1993). Fast Food, Fast Talk: service work and the routinization of everyday life. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Lucas, R. (1972). Expectations and the neutrality of money. Journal of Economic Theory, 4(2): 103–12. Lucas, R. (2010). Dreaming in code. New Left Review, 62: 125–32. Marx, K. (1867[1972]). Capital. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1988). The 1844 Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts. New York: Moscow Press. Michel, A. (2012). Transcending socialization: a nine-year ethnography of the body’s role in organizational control and knowledge workers transformation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3): 325–68. Mises, L. v. (1929[2005]). A Critique of Interventionism. Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute. Mises, L. v. (1947[2014]). Planned Chaos. Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute. Monaghan, A. (2014). Self-employment at highest level for 40 years. The Guardian, 21 August, p. 25. News China (2013). Worked to death. Retrieved on 26 June 2015 from www.newschinamag.com/ magazine/worked-to-death. O’Reilly, C. and Chatman, J. (1996). Culture as Social Control: Corporations, Cults and Commitment, in Staw, B. and Cummings, L. (eds), Research in Organization Behaviour. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 157–200. Orr, J. (1996). Talking About Machines: an ethnography of a modern job. New York: Cornell University Press. Ouchi, A. (1980). Markets, bureaucracies, clans. Administrative Science Quarterly, 25: 129–41. Paulsen, R. (2014). Empty Labour: subjectivity and idleness at work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perelman, M. (2011). The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: how market tyranny stifles the economy by stunting workers. New York: Monthly Review Press. Peters, T. (2005). Leadership: Inspire, Liberate. London: DK Adult. 599

Peter Fleming

Ressler, C. and Thompson, J. (2011). Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: the results only revolution. New York: Portfolio. Semler, R. (2007). The Seven-Day Weekend. New York: Penguin. Weber, M. (1946). From Max Weber: essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Weil, D. (2014). The Fissured Workplace: why work became so bad for so many and what can be done to improve it. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willmott, H. (1993). Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: managing cultures in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 30(4): 515–52.

600

Index

ABI/Inform 244–5 absent presence of body politics 277–8 academic management discourse 575 accounting practice 295 Ackroyd, S. 23–4, 539 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak) 157–8 active agency 270–1 activism 373; corporate governance 407; executives 537–8; extractivism 379–87; leadership 461; queer theory 226; see also feminism Actor–Network Theory (ANT) 22, 27–9, 272, 494, 509–10 actual ontology, institutional theory 132 Adaptive Structuration Theory 243–4 Administrative Science Quarterly (Ranson) 243 administrators 510–11 adult education institutions 163 aesthetics and design 251–67; awareness 257–8; empathic-logical 255; hermeneutics 254–7; organizational citizenship 252–4; performativity 254–7; sensibilities 254–7 affect theory 95 African-Americans 153, 442–3 ageing 260–7; bottle-necking of jobs 263; concern 260–1; functionalist 261–2; interlocking institutional arrangements 263; lived experience 264–6; orientations/influences 261–4; relational 265–6 agency 268–84; active 270–1; ageing 262–3; asocial views 269; atomistic views 269; conjuncturally specific or positional structures 270; critical theory 73–5; decision-making 354; discourse and lack/desire 94; disenchantment of reason 92; embedded 354; ethics 52–5, 58, 61; future directions 273; governance 405–7; institutional theory 126–35; Jensen’s theory 388–9; leadership 460–1, 464; liberal feminism 103; management 467, 469–72; needs 485–8; neocolonial workplaces 162–3; ontology 22–3,

25–6; organization 493–4; organizational life 278–80; organizational studies 271–3; paradigms 505–6; postcolonial methodology 79; poststructuralist feminism 106; poststructuralist theory 172, 181; power 520–1; practice theory 190, 195; social theory 270–1; strategy 561–4; structuration theory 237–42; value 579 agential enterprise 133 agriculture 383, 398 Ahmed, S. 372–6 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 226 Akerlof, G. 577–8 aktuelles Verstehen (observational meaning) 18 Alchian, A.A. 144 alienation: aesthetics and design 254; commodification/consumption 303–4; commons 312; identity 433–5; management 471; needs 485; poststructuralist theory 173, 177; spirituality 552; work 593–4 alternative organisation 573 Alvesson, M. 70, 71–3, 367 American Declaration of Independence 462 analytical dualism, institutional theory 131–5 analytical investigations of discourse 88–9 An Autobiographical Study (Freud) 219 Anglo-Euro-Centric ideology of modernity 78 Anglo-Saxon culture 219 ANT see Actor–Network Theory anthropomorphism 305–6, 336 anticipation, practice theory 189 anti-foundationalism 154, 480, 555 anti-racist activists 373 Apple products 290 appropriation, hermeneutics 117 archaeological aesthetics 255 Archer, M. 132–3, 240 Arendt, H. 55–6 Arens, E. 287–8 Aristotle 43, 422 601

Index

arrogance, poststructuralist theory 177–8 artificial commons 310–11 artistic aesthetics 255 Arvidsson, A. 580 asceticism 53 asocial views of agency 269 assertions 509 Atkinson, M. 70 atomistic views of agency 269 Augustine of Hippo 324–5 Austin, J.L. 508–10 authority see control; leadership autonomy: control 324–32; hermeneutics 116 awareness 257–8 Bain, P. 423–4 Bakan, J. 406 Baker, S. 313–14 bankruptcy 147, 345–6, 547 Barad, K. 512–13 Barber, B. 400 Barley, S.R. 128–31, 243 Barnesian performativity 511 Barthes, R. 173–4, 255, 288 Baudrillard, J. 178–9, 288, 587 Bauman, Z. 52–3, 55–7, 62, 302 Beattie, J. 422 Becker, G. 596 Beck, U. 398 becoming: performativity 514; see also body politics Benjamin, W. 287 Berger, P. 93–4, 237, 423–4 Bergson, H. 425 Bernardi, A. 417–18 Bernstein, R.J. 202 Bhabha, H. 153, 155–6, 161–2 Bhaskar, R. 22–3 bias: quantification 527–8; see also inequality Biblical, hermeneutics 114–15 binaries: conflict 320–1; see also dualism; gender Bion, W. 215–16 biopolitics 290–1, 310–12 biopower 595–8 Blackler, F. 118 black philosophers 370–8 Black-Scholes pricing formulae 511 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 155–6 Bodies that Matter (Butler) 511 body politics 276–84; absent presence 277–8; ethics 281; limitations/future 282; organizational inquiry 280–1 Boltanski, L. 539 bottle-necking of jobs, ageing 263 602

Bourdieu, P. 189–90, 288–9 brands 217, 285–92, 304, 584–6, 588; biopolitics 290–1; poststructuralist theory 178–9; reification frame 286–7; semiotic frame 288–9; topological culture 291 Brannick, T. 120 Braverman, H. 142–5 bronze socio-economic classes 439–40 Brown, J.S. 194 Brundtland environmental event 381–2 Burawoy, M. 143, 144–5, 581 bureaucracy: brands 286–7; commons 312–13; control 325–6; democracy 363–4; ethics 52–5; humour 427; psychoanalysis 216; strategy 562–3; trust 568–9, 572; vision 492; work 594 Burrell, G. 24–5, 118, 278, 319, 502–5 business environment 380–1, 572 Butcher, T. 120 Butler, J. 120, 226–8, 229–32, 278–9, 435, 510–11 Callon, M. 511–12 Calvinism 53 Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak) 156–8 capillary power 93–4 capital 293–300, 580–1; alienation 296–7; commons 310–11; contemporary studies 294–6; fairness 297–8; future directions 298–9; managerial control 296–7; nature 379–87; practice theory 189–90; scientific management 296–7 Caproni, P. 74 Carr, D. 413 Carson, R. 398 category error 417 category systems see quantification Catholic Church, quantification 526 causality: agency 273; institutional theory 126, 132; Marxism 140; methodology 68; ontology 18–19, 22–3; practice theory 189 Caygill, H. 533–4 CCO see Communicative Constitution of Organization CDOs see collateralized debt obligations Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) 526 Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens) 238–9 CEOs see chief executives Chanda, N. 396–7 cheekiness 425–7 Chiapello, E. 539 chief executives 119, 144, 406–7, 424, 510–11, 523 Christian religion 324–8

Index

Church, Christianity 526 CINEP see Center for Research and Popular Education ‘the circle of hermeneutics 115–16 citizenships 252–4, 336–7, 407, 409 class conflict 138–50; endogenizing 145–7; organizational 142–5; within organizations 140–2 classical hermeneutics 117 classical stages models in decision-making 352–3 classical strategy 559–61 Clegg, S. 53–4, 580 Cochoy, F. 287 Coghlan, D. 120 cognizance: historiography 416–17; see also knowledge Cohen, S. 325–6 coherence theory of truth 34 coherent discourses 95 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 392–3 collective epistemology 373 collectors see debt colonization: of the life world 286–7; see also postcolonial critiques committed ontology 16, 19–20, 22–3 commodification 296, 301–8, 345; nature 383, 385; poststructuralist theory 173–4, 178; visual 585–6 commodity consensus 384–5 commodity fetishism 139, 286, 303–4, 374 commodity value 576–7, 578–9 commons 309–16 commonsensical theories of practice 187–8 common wealth 310–12, 362–3 ‘common wealth’ 362–3 Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) 509–10 communitas 546 compassion 60–1, 91–2, 363–4 complexity phenomena 92, 93–4 Comtean idea of natural science of society 237–8 conflationism 130 conflict 138–50, 317–23 conjuncturally specific or positional structures, agency 270 connotation 173–4 consciousness: democracy 366–7; practice theory 190–1; psychoanalysis 213 consensus theorists 366–7, 406; conflict 319–20; epistemology 34–5; paradigms 502–3; pragmatism 201 constitution through citation, performativity 510–11 constructive philosophy, epistemology 43–5

‘Consumer Engineering’ see brands consumerism see capital; globalization consumption 301–8, 528–9; ageing 260–1; body politics 278; brands 286–8, 290; poststructuralist theory 173–4, 178–9 contestive forms of humour 425 contingency theory 40 contracts: capital 297; commons 315; corporation 336–9; democracy 362–4; diversity 372–3; governance 405–6; inequality 347–8 control 324–32, 374, 397–8; body politics 277–80; capital 295–7; conflict 318–20; discourse 93–4; governance 405–6, 408; humour 425; identity 431–5; inequality 440; institutional theory 134; leadership 459–61; management 467–72; Marxism 141–4; measurement and statistics 478; methodology 68–9, 74; needs 484–5; postcolonial theory 154, 163; poststructuralist theory 175–9; resistance 538–9; rituals 547; strategy 563–5; trust 568–9; value 578–80; visual 585–6; work 594–5; see also power Cook, S.D.N. 194 coordination mechanisms of trust 568–83 Cornwall, A. 367 Coronado, F. 160 corporate environmentalism 381–2 corporate managerial life 55 corporation 333–42; aggregation of individuals 334–5; as concession 404; as contract 405–6; as entity 405; multinational 395–402; multiple corporations 335–6; and organizations 336–8; protest 536–9; singular corporation 335–6; twenty-first century 407–9 corpus igitur ego sum 276–84 correspondence theory of truth 34 Coser, L. 318 Costanza, R. 383 Courtney, S. 228–9 creative industries, commons 312–14 crime 178–9, 337, 385, 398, 443 Critchley, S. 57 critical consciousness 366–7 critical hermeneutics 117, 118 critical management studies of resistance 539–40 critical ontology of ourselves 21 critical perspectives of brands 285–92 critical realism (CR): institutional theory 130–3, 135; methodology 75–6; ontology 25–6; structuration theory 241–2 critical realist committed ontology 22–3 critical theory: epistemology 37–8, 39, 40; methodology 73–5 critical viewpoints: epistemology 36; hermeneutics 120 603

Index

Critique of Cynical Reason (Sloterdijk) 426–7 ‘crucial difference’ camp of feminist organization theories 102 Culbert, S.A. 537–8 culture: globalization 395–6; heritage 20; hermeneutics 118, see also brands Culture and Imperialism (Said) 155 custom project arrangements 133–4 Czempiel, E-O. 400 Dale, K. 277 Daly, H.E. 383 Dasein (being there/here) 19–20 data 475–6, 527–30; body politics 280–1; brands 290; conflict 318; control 330; democracy 365; historiography 414–16; ontology 24–5, 29–30; pragmatism 203–4, 206 Davidson, D. 204–5 DDT 398 death: debt 346–7; of God 324–8 debt 343–51 decision-making 205, 352–60; classical stages models 352–3 declarations 462, 509 deconstruction 22, 175–6, 178–9 deference, poststructuralist theory 175 definitions, as fetishism 208–9 Deleuze, G. 96, 179–80, 279, 280 democracy 361–9; debt 348–9; globalization 399–400; liberal feminism 101; power 517, 522–3; queer theory 232; trust 572 demographic inequality 441 Demsetz, H. 144 Dennett, D. 207 denotation 173–4 dependency 215 depth hermeneutics 118 depth ontology 75 Derrida, J. 158, 175–6, 356, 510–11 descriptive phenomenology 71 design see aesthetics and design desire: discourse 94; poststructuralist theory 180; psychoanalysis 213 Dewey, J. 200–3, 206–8, 353–5 diachronic reliability 68 dichotomies 203 difference principles 347–8 differentiators 344–6 DiMaggio, P. 127–9, 131–2 Diogenes of Sinope 426–7 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 154, 176, 522 discontinuities 132 discourse 87–99; analysis 88–9; definition 87–8; desire 94; disenchantment 89–94; early philosophy 90–2; extra-discursive phenomena 94–5; investigation 88–9; lack 94; muscular 604

grips 89; otherness 94–7; performativity 514; postcolonial theory 154–6; poststructuralist theory 174; pragmatism 204–5; reinventing 95–7; reinventing of 95–7; strategy 561–2; twentieth century theories 93–4; value 575 disenchantment 89–94 distanciation: discourse 89; hermeneutics 116–17 Distinction (Bourdieu) 288–9 distributive justice 442–3 diversity 163, 370–8 ‘dog philosopher’ of ancient Athens 426–7 domain-specific theories of practice 193–4 dominant discourse 93 double hermeneutics 18 dramaturgical identity 434 dualism: agency 272; body politics 277; decisionmaking 352–3; historiography 413–14, 416–18; institutional theory 131–5; organization 493, 496; practice theory 193–4; pragmatism 202–5; structuralist theory 238 duality: practice theory 191; structuration theory 238, 243–4 Dufrenne, M. 587 Durkheim, É 240, 277–8 Eagleton, T. 158 earth 384, 398 Earth Summit 381–2 economic processes: globalization 395; inequality 441; see also capital; finance ECOPETROL 526 ecosystems see nature as capital Eco, U. 288 Edelman, L. 227 education: capital 294–5; debt 345–6, 350; democracy 365–6; inequality 442–3; practice theory 191; pragmatism 200–1 Edwards, R.E. 143 efficient market hypothesis 388–9 ego, psychoanalysis 213–14 Eiffel Tower 255 Elden, J.M. 537–8 electricity company workers 577–8 electronic Panopticon 26, 176, 585 elite borrowers 344–6 elite power 523 Elkington, J. 383 emails 118 emancipatory potential: agency 273; psychoanalysis 214; strategic power 562, 564–5; work 598 embedded agency 354 embodied ageing 264–5 embodied relationality 435 embodied writing 280–1

Index

empathic-logical aesthetics 255 empirical ontology 132 empiricism 70 empowerment see control; power enclosure 310–12 endogenizing of class conflict 145–7 engagement: ethical philosophy 52–61; hermeneutics 117, 118–20; psychoanalysis 217 enterprise 133 Entfremdung (alienation) 296–7 environment 379–87; ageing 265; brands 290–1; debt 345; globalization 398–9; governance 408–9; identity 432; inequality 444–5; institutional theory 133; Marxism 144–7; methodology 68; ontology 19, 22–3; practice theory 195; strategy 559–61; structuration theory 243; trust 569–72; work 595; see also workplace environments epistemes 174, 176 epistemology 33–50; aesthetics and design 251–67; conflict 319; constructive philosophy 43–5; controversies 37–42; critical theory 37–8, 39, 40; decision-making 353; democracy 365–7; diversity studies 372–5; functionalism 38, 39, 40; historiography 413–14; incommensurability 42–7; inter-belief relationships 36, 40–1; interpretivism 18–19, 37, 39, 40, 70–1; justification 33–6, 38, 40; knowledge 36; philosophical foundations 33–6; pluralism 42–7; postmodernism 76–7; subject–object models 37, 39; truth 33–5; ‘unseen’ 251–67; value 41–2; values 36 equality: debt 347–8; democracy 363–4; diversity 163, 370–8; feminism 100–12; identity 433; inequality/organizations 439–48; justice 449–57; see also inequality equity: brands 290; diversity 463; justice 442, 450; methodology 74 erklaren 69 erklarendes Verstehen (explanatory understanding) 18 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 423 Estes, P.W. 537 ethics 51–65; body politics 281; engagement 52–61; otherness 52–61; queer theory 229–34; rituals 548 ethnic differences 442–3; see also diversity studies ethnography: body politics 280–1; hermeneutics 120; methodology 70 ethnomethodology 28, 72–3 Ettinger, B. 435–6 Eurocentrism 78, 160 evaluation, ambivalent 218 events, rituals 542–9

evidence 413–14 evidentialists 35 ‘exchange society’ 390 exchange values 286 existence 19 experience: pragmatism 202–4; see also lived experience explanation 413 explanatory understanding 18 expropriation 309–16 extractivism 379–87 extra-discursive phenomena 94–5 eyes see visuals factory life 580–1 factual elements 218 fairness 297–8; see also equality false prejudice 116 falsificationists 499–500 Fama’s efficient market hypothesis 388–9 Fanon, F. 155–6, 375 fantasy 218 fascism 54–6, 287 father 217–18 femininity 101, 104–6, 278–9 feminism 100–12; agency 269; autonomy/control 328–9; body politics 278–80; ‘crucial difference’ camp 102; liberal feminism 101–3; organization theories 102; postcolonial theory 156–7; poststructuralist feminism 106–7; social construction feminism 104–6; socialist feminism 103–4; transsubjectivity 435–6 fetishism: commodity 139, 286, 303–4, 374; perfect definitions 208–9; poststructuralist theory 180–1; strangers 374–5 field notions, practice theory 189–90 field studies, hermeneutics 120 fight-flight 215 film 212, 585–6, 588 finance 388–94; debt 343–51; illusion of 348–9; trust 573 financial capital 294 Financialization of Daily Life (Martin) 390 Fineman, S. 424–5 finite provinces of meaning 423–4 finitude of humanity 90 ‘fixed meanings’ 88 Fleetwood, S. 23–4, 131 Follett, M.P. 522 ‘followers’ 217–18 Ford and Carnegie Foundations 205 Fordism 595–8 forms 575–83 For a New Critique of Political Economy (Stiegler) 390–1 605

Index

Foucault, M. 21, 26, 60–1, 88, 96, 154, 174, 176, 278, 326–8, 356, 423, 463, 487, 522, 585 foundationalists 36, 40, 80; anti-foundationalism 154, 480, 555 foundations 13–32; epistemology 33–50; ethical philosophy 51–65; good suspicions 51–65; methodology 66–83; ontology 15–32 framing 303–4, 353–4; capital 295–6; discourse 87–8, 94, 96; institutional theory 130; Marxism 146; pragmatism 203–4 freedom: decision-making 354–5; pragmatism 204–5 Freeman, R.E. 201 free will see autonomy; control; freedom Freud, S. 154, 213–14; see also psychoanalysis Friedman, M. 399–400 Friere, P. 366–7 ‘full’ workplace democracy 364 functionalism 38, 39, 40, 261–2 Fuss, D. 226 Gabriel, Y. 118 Gadamer, H-G. 115, 116–17 Gaia (mother Earth) 398 Galeano, E. 384 Gardner, B. 289 Garfinkel, H. 72–3 Gaventa, J. 367 gay see queer theory Geisteswissenschaften 219 gender 104–5; ageing 262–3; body politics 278–9; inequality 441; performativity 510–11; value 577–8; see also queer theory Gender Trouble (Butler) 511 general-dispositional structures 270 general intellect 311, 313–14; body politics 280; brands 287; commons 310–13 generalizability 24–5, 68–9, 76–7, 156–7, 190 General Motors 146 general theories of practice 188 general understanding 192 generations, problem of 262 Giddens, A. 18, 129–30, 135, 190–1, 237–41, 397–8 gifts 467–8, 471–2, 576–80 Gill, M. 71, 73 Gilmore, J. 290 Giraudeau, M. 587 global brands 290 globalization 395–402 God 90, 439–40, 461; concept 217–18, 553–4; is dead 324–8 gold socio-economic classes 439–40 good suspicions 51–65 Google Scholar 244–5 606

Gorz, A. 594–5, 598 governance 361–9, 403–11; environment 381–2; multinational corporation 400 Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self (Rose) 61 governmentality 176, 328, 593 grammar: commodification/consumption 301–2; institutional theory 129; leadership 459; poststructuralist theory 172, 175–6; psychoanalysis 220 grammatology 158, 175 Grammatology (Derrida) 158 Gramsci, A. 93–4, 154, 328, 520, 562–5 grand narratives 20–1, 177–8, 367 green marketing 382–3 Greenwood, A. 417–18 Grice, H.P. 508–9 Grundrisse (Marx) 280 Guattari, F. 179–80, 279, 280 Gutenberg, J. 397 Habermas, J. 115, 118, 286–7, 366–7, 399–400, 485 Hager, S.B. 349 half-truth 218 Hallet, T. 134–5 Hammersley, M. 70 happenings 545 Harding, N. 228 Hardt, M. 280, 312 Harman, G. 392–3 Hart, H.L. 508–9 Harvard Business Review 77, 144, 289, 537–8 Harvey, D. 384 Hayek, F.A. 596 health/well-being 443–5, 530, 596–7; ageing 260–1; commodification/consumption 304; control 328–9; debt 344, 347; ethics 58–61 Hegel, G.W.F. 433–5 hegemony: discourse 93; power 520, 562–4; strategic power 562–4; work 597 Heidegger, M. 19–21, 92, 185, 186–7, 190–2, 356 Heiderggerian interpretive phenomenology 71 Herbert, T.T. 537 heritage 20, 305–6 hermeneutics 113–24; aesthetics and design 254–7; appropriation 117; autonomization 116; circle 115–16; classical 117; concepts 114–17; depth 118; distanciation 116–17; engagement 117, 118–20; field studies 120; fusion of horizons 117; historicity 115; interpretivist methodology 71–2; ontology 18; organizational culture 118; organizational design 120; organizational identity 119–20; organizational research methods 120;

Index

organizational storytelling/narrative 119; organizational studies 120; organizational theory 118; prejudice 116; tradition 116; types 117–18; viewpoints 120 hermeneutic-structural processes 270 Hesketh, A. 131 Hesmondhalgh, D. 312–14 heterosexuality see queer theory Hill, C. 363 historical analysis of institutional theory 133–4 historical heritage 20, 305–6 historical ontology 20–1 historicity, hermeneutics 115 historiography 412–20 Hobbes, T. 362–3, 518 Hodge, B. 160 Hoggart, R. 288 Holocaust 54–5 homosexuality see queer theory hope, pragmatism 204–5 houses of being 93–4 How to Do Things With Words (Austin) 509 human capital 294–5 humanism: ageing 265–6; needs 484–9; ontology 22; paradigms 502–5; postcolonial theory 154; queer theory 226 human ontology 362–4 Human Relations publication (Tavistock Institute) 215 Humean conception of causality 19 humour 421–9 Husserlian descriptive phenomenology 71 hyper-reality 77, 178–9 ‘the hypothesis’ 90–1 ICCM see international/cross-cultural management studies ideal fictions 214 idealized fantasy 218 ideal-speech situation 35–6, 366 ‘ideal worker’ 105 identity 430–8; body politics 276–84; ethics 62–3; feminism 101–2, 105; hermeneutics 119–20; methodology 79; ontology 21–2, 26–7; postcolonial theory 162–3, 175, 177–81; queer theory 229; see also psychoanalysis ideology: debt 349–50; Eurocentrism 160; hermeneutics 117; Marxism 139, 143; postcolonial theory 78, 160; strategy 561–2; see also ethics ignorance 373, 440 ‘I, job’ functions 593–5, 598 illocutionary acts 509 illusion of financialization 348–9

images see visuals imaginary registers of subjectivity 173 immaterial labour 311–14 incommensurability 42–7, 242, 505 incongruity 422 individualistic positivist approaches 24–5 individualist views of agency 269 industrial economy 580–1 inequality: ageing 263–5; conflict 321; debt 347–8; democracy 363–4; diversity 373; feminism 100–12; identity 433; justice 449–57; management 472; organizations 439–48; postcolonial theory 163; queer theory 228 inequity, diversity 463 information systems 119–20, 242–4, 272 in-house project arrangements 133–4 injustice 177–8; see also justice innovation: decision-making 354, 356; finance objects 394; hermeneutics 120; historiography 416; organization 492; power 518; resistance 537; trust 572–4; work 594–5 inquiry: aesthetics and design 257; ageing 265–6; body politics 277, 280–2; capital 294; epistemology 33–40; finance 389; inequality 445–7; justice 453; postcolonial theory 159–60; pragmatism 206–7; psychoanalysis 219; resistance 538; spirituality 553–4; value 575–83 institutionalism 125–37; ageing 263; agency 126–35; analytical dualism 131–3; class conflict 146–7; critical theory 130–3, 135; distortion 530–1; implications 134–5; ontology 128–35; organs 491–2; points of contention 130–1; poststructuralist theory 176; rituals 542–9; social ontology 128–9; structure 126–35; whiteness 375–6 intellect 311, 313–14 intelligibility 191–2 interactionism: conflict 318–22; identity 432, 434; institutional theory 128–9; ontology 28 interdisciplinary historiography 415–16 interlocking institutional arrangements, ageing 263 interlocutors 45–7 internalization: control 326, 328; governance 407; management 471; Marxism 139; needs 485–6; poststructuralist theory 176; practice theory 185–6; psychoanalysis 218, 220; rituals 543; visual 585 international/cross-cultural management (ICCM) studies 161 Internet 116, 397 interpretation: hermeneutics 119, 120; psychoanalysis 217 607

Index

interpretivism: epistemology 18–19, 37, 39, 40; methodology 70–3; phenomenology 71; psychoanalysis 220; structuration theory 239 inter-subjective theory of communication 366 ‘I owe you’ contracts 348 Irigaray, L. 280 iron socio-economic classes 439–40 Jackall, R. 55 Jack, G. 161 James, W. 200, 202, 209 Jaques, E. 215–16 Jenkins, H. 306 Jensen, M.C. 144, 406 Jensen’s agency theory 388–9 jokes see humour Jonas, H. 398 judgement 177–8, 527–8 Juniper, T. 383 justice: ethical 58; inequality 442–3; otherness 449–57; and philosophy 450–1; politics 451–3; poststructuralist theory 177–8 justification 33–5, 38, 40 Kalonaityte, V. 163 Kant, E. 54, 89–91, 325 Keith, R.J. 289 Kelly, J. 537–8 Kets de Vries, M.F.R. 119 kings, philosopher 439–40 Kipping, M. 416–17 Klein, H.K. 120 Knights, D. 561 knowledge: commodification 304–6; conflict 318–22; consumption 304–6; decision-making 353; epistemology 33, 36; local 304–6; performativity 514; postcolonial theory 158–62; poststructuralist theory 176, 177–8; practice theory 193–4; pragmatism 208 Kolb, D. 317–18 Kress, G. 160 Kuhn, T. 499–507 kynicism 426–7 labour see work labour process: body politics 277–80; capital 295–7; commons 309–14; conflict 320–2; decision-making 352; democracy 364–5; management 471; Marxism 25, 144–7; needs 487; ontology 25, 27; organization 491–3; strategy 565; value 580 Lacan, J. 94, 172–3, 585–6 lack, discourse 94 Laclau, E. 21, 88 608

language: capital 295–6; commodification/ consumption 305; democracy 364–6; diversity 372; epistemology 40–3; game viewpoints 120; leadership 458–9, 462–4; management 469; needs 486; ontology 20; organization 492–5; paradigms 500–1; performativity 508–10; poststructuralist theory 171–9; pragmatism 203–4; strategy 565; visual 586–8 Lash, S. 291 latent Orientalism 154 Latinos 442–3 Latour’s Actor–Network Theory 22, 27 laughter see humour de Lauretis, T. 226 Laverty, S. 72 Lazzarato, M. 311 leadership 458–65; aesthetics and design 257; conflict 318, 322; environment 380–1; hermeneutics 121; humour 426–7; leadership 228–9; liberal feminism 101–3; performativity 510–11; psychoanalysis 216–18; resistance 537; social construction feminism 105; strategy 562–4; trust 573–4 Lear, J. 219 Learmonth, M. 510–11 LeBaron, G. 346, 348 Leblebici, H. 415–16 Lee, A.S. 119 left extractivism 385 legal fictions 334–5, 337, 405–6 lenders see debt lesbians see queer theory Levinas, E. 56–7, 58–9, 281, 374 Lèvi-Strauss, C. 172–4 Levy, S. 289 Lewis, P. 107 LGBT sexualities see queer theory liability concept 398–9 liberal feminism 101–3 liberal work environments 592–600 Libidinal Economy (Lyotard) 177 life course ageing 262–3 light 422 liminality 306, 547–8 linguistic turn in philosophy 43 ‘livable life’ 229 lived experience 94, 162; ageing 260–7; brands 286; commodification/consumption 306; ethics 52; feminism 106–7; pragmatism 209; queer theory 229; spirituality 553; strategy 564 lived narratives 413 ‘living labour’ 280 local knowledge 304–6 Locke, J. 423, 518 locutionary acts 509

Index

logos 175, 313–14, 460, 584 looking at organization 584–91 Lovelock, J. 398 Lucas, R. 596 Luckmann, T. 93–4, 237 Lukács, G. 286–7 Lukes, S. 364, 519–20 Lury, C. 291 Lutgen-Sandvik, P. 433–4 Lyotard, F. 76–7, 177–8 McAfee, K. 383 Machiavelli, N. 517–18, 562–3 MacIntyre, A. 269 Mackenzie, C. 328–9, 511–12 McLuhan, M. 397 McMurray, R. 58–9 Madness and Civilisation (Foucault) 174 maelstrom of critique 320–1 Mahmud, T. 349 maintenance of inequality 446–7 management discourse 26, 487, 575, 579–80, 594–5 managerialism: brands 285–92; capital 296–7; ethics 55; nature as capital 380–2; otherness 466–77; power 522; pragmatism 205, 207, 208; resistance 539–40; value 575, 579–80; see also governance manifest Orientalism 154 Mannheim, K. 262 Mannix, E. 318 Marcuse, H. 54 Marglin, S. 144–5 Margolis, J.D. 200 marketing see brands Marx, K. 22–3, 138–50, 286, 296–7, 390–1, 435, 551–3 masculinity 101, 102, 104–6, 278–9, 561 master/slave dialectic 432–5; see also control; freedom materiality 22, 513, 514 Mayo, E. 326, 363 measurement and statistics 474–82 mechanisms of trust 568–83 Meckling, W.H. 144, 406 media resources 523 Men and Women of the Corporation (Kanter) 107 Menzies, I. 215–16 Mercedes Benz 538 meritocracy 572 Merleau-Ponty, M. 375 metaphor: aesthetics and design 253; body politics 277–8; democracy 365; ethics 60; feminism 102; globalization 397, 398; hermeneutics 115, 118, 121; historiography 414; humour 427; identity 433; Marxism 144,

145–6; measurement/statistics 478; needs 486; organization 491–2; poststructuralist theory 172, 180; power 518; pragmatism 205; strategy 561, 564–5; visual 586 metaphysics: brands 287; control 329–30; decision-making 355; democracy 362–4; discourse 90; humour 422; measurement/statistics 477; ontology 19, 22, 26, 28; organization 496; paradigms 500–1; poststructuralist theory 175, 178–9; pragmatism 200–1; spirituality 551–6 meta-theory 23–4 methodology 66–83; critical realism 75–6; critical theory 73–5; ethnomethodology 28, 72–3; falsificationists 499–500; hermeneutics 120; interpretivist 70–3; neo-positivist 70; ontology 23–4; positivist 68–9; postcolonial 78–9; postmodernism 76–8 metonymy 172 Michels, R. 366–7 Miller, D. 119 Miller, E. 215–16 Mills, W. 54, 320, 372–3 von Mises, L. 596 Mitchell, J.W.T. 586 ‘modes of explanation’ 37–8, 39 modes of subjection 327 molecular activities of discourse 93–4 mondo civile (social life) 253 monetary systems see finance monism 69 mood 20 Moore-Gilbert, 158 morals: agency 269; autonomy 325; debt 347–8; inequality 439–40; see also ethics Morgan, G. 24–5, 319, 502–5, 561 Morrill, C. 318 mother 217–18 mother Earth 398 Mouffe, C. 88 movies 212, 585–6, 588 multiple corporations 335–6 multiple houses of being 93–4 Muniesa, F. 511–12 Murphy, C. 120 muscular grips of discourse 89 mysticism 219 myth: aesthetics and design 253, 255; commodification/consumption 305–6; democracy 366; discourse 90; feminism 103; globalization 398; hermeneutics 119; identity 433; management 469; normalization 173–4; postcolonial theory 154, 161; poststructuralist theory 172–4; psychoanalysis 217–20; resistance 540; spirituality 552; strategy 562 Mythologies (Barthes) 288 609

Index

narcissism 179, 213, 216, 218, 221, 281 narrative: hermeneutics 119; historiography 413, 416–17; identity 431, 433–4 National Health Service (NHS) 27, 510 National Socialism 54–5, 287 natural commons 310–11 naturalistic sociology 239 natural science of society 237–8 nature as capital 379–87 Nazi Holocaust 54–5 need 442, 483–90 negative ontology 20–1, 26–7 Negri, T. 280 Neiman, S. 54 neo-colonial workplaces 162–3 neo-extractivism 385 neo-institutionalism, class conflict 146–7 neo-liberal feminist organization theories 101–3 neo-liberal models of multinational corporation 399–400 neo-liberal work environments 592–600 neo-positivist methodology 70 network-making power 523 neurosis 214, 216, 217 New Rules of Sociological Method (Giddens) 237–8, 240 New York Times 58 NHS see National Health Service Nielsen, K. 131 Nietzsche, F. 60, 91–2, 324–8 ‘no-difference’ camp of feminist organization theories 102 No Future (Edelman) 227 Nonaka, I. 193 non-elite borrowers 344–6 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 383, 385, 400 non-representational views of knowledge/discourse 514 normality 214 normalization myth 173–4 null findings 207 objectification 89, 155–6, 303–4, 580, 585–6 objective hermeneutics 120 objective price 286 objects of enquiry 18 objects of finance 392–4 observational meaning 18 occularcentrism 586 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 145, 446 O’Connor, J. 143 ODM see decision-making oil companies 526 olfactory method 281 oligarchy 517 610

one-dimensional views of power 519 On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche) 60, 92, 326–7 On Resistance: a philosophy of defiance (Caygill) 533–4 ontology 15–32; Actor–Network Theory 22, 27; brands 291; committed 16, 19–20, 22–3; corporation 335–7; critical realism 22–3, 25–6; definition 15–16; democracy 362–4; depth 75; diversity studies 372–5; empirical 132; ethnomethodology 28; Foucault 21, 26; governance 405–6; Heidegger 19–20; historical 20–1; human 362–4; institutional theory 128–35; interpretation/specificity 17–19; interpretivist methodology 70–1; key contributions 16–23; Laclau 21; materiality 22; methodology 75; negative 20–1, 26–7; in organization studies 23–8; orthodox Marxist ontology 25; performativity 514; philosophic 16; positivist approaches 16–17, 24–5; postcolonial critiques 27–8; post-foundational approaches 20–1, 26; process perspectives 27; real 132; self-critical ontology 21; substantive studies 23–4; symbolic interactionism 28; uncommitted 16; Western ontologies 27–8 openness, queer theory 230–4 Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano) 384 opponent interlocutors 45–7 ordering principles 172 organizational environment, endogenizing 145–7 ‘organizational ideal’ 218 Organizational Misbehaviour (Ackroyd/Thompson) 539 organization and philosophy 491–8 organon (organs) 491–2 Orientalism 154–5 Orlikowski, W. 243–4 orthodox Marxist ontology 25 otherness: discourse 94–7; ethical philosophy 52–61; justice 449–57; management 466–77; postcolonial theory 155–6; queer theory 231–2; see also diversity studies OutRage 226 OWS see Occupy Wall Street Panopticon 26, 176, 585 Pappas, G. 203 paradigms 499–507; epistemology 38; hermeneutics 120; ontology 24; postcolonial theory 154–5; poststructuralist theory 172; work 597 paradoxes: debt 349–50; embedded agency 354 parhesia (truth-telling) 26 Parker, F. 227–8, 319, 585

Index

Parsons, T. 522 Pasmore, W.A. 120 Pateman, C. 364 pension crises 263 Pentagon Papers 58 people management and its others 468–70 perfect definitions 208–9 performativity 508–16; aesthetics and design 254–7; data 529–30 perlocutionary acts 509 Perrone, L. 143 persecutory fantasy 218 Pettigrew, A.M. 354 phenomenology: hermeneutics 120; interpretivist methodology 70–2; practice theory 189; whiteness 373–5 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 433–4 Phillips, N. 119 Phillips, R.A. 297 philosophical hermeneutics 117 philosophic ontology 16; see also committed ontology physical capital 294 Pickett, K.E. 443 Pierce, C.S. 200, 202 Pierides, D. 393 Piketty, T. 522 Pine, J. 290 Plato 33, 439–40 pluralism 42–7; agency 272–3; epistemology 38–47 poetic logic 257 poiesis, epistemology 43 Polanyi, M. 257 politics: ageing 263; agency 270–1; biopolitics 290–1, 310–12; debt 349–50; justice 451–3; organizing 496–7 Pollack, S. 257 Pollock, G. 585 Pondy, L.R. 319 Popper, K. 213 popular management discourse 575 positivism: democracy 365; epistemology 36; methodology 68–9; ontology 16–17, 24–5; pragmatism 206 postcolonial theory 151–70; foundational thinkers 153, 154–8; future directions 163–5; identity 162–3; knowledge 158–62; methodology 78–9; ontology 27–8; organizational studies 158–63; subjectivity 162–3; working with 151–3 post-foundational approaches 20–1, 26 post-Marxist research 279–80 postmodernism: epistemology 38, 39, 40; methodology 76–8 post-positivism 206

poststructuralism 171–83; ageing 263–4; body politics 278–9; decision-making 355; feminism 106–7; future directions 180–1; hyper-reality 178–9; identity 431; justice 177–8; language 171–5, 177–9; rethinking institutions 176; sign consumption 178–9; writing 175–6 potentiality 309–16 potential of strategic power 564–5 Powell, W.W. 128–9 Power: a radical view (Lukes) 519–20 power 517–24; biopower 595–8; brands 291; capillary 93–4; concerns 518–19; decisionmaking 354–5; future 522–3; one-dimensional views 519; in organizations 520–2; poststructuralist theory 176, 177–8; prolegomenon 517–18; social theory 519–20; strategy 559–67; trust 573; two-dimensional views 519 practical consciousness 190–1 practical understanding 192 practice lenses, structuration theory 244 practice theory 44–6, 184–98; domain-specific 193–4; institutional theory 130; pragmatism 202–3, 206–7; Schatzki 191–2; study approaches 187–92; technology-in-practice 244; transformational duality 191; underpinnings 185–7, see also experience pragmatism 199–211; belief 202–5; corporation 336–7; decision-making 353, 355; dichotomies 203; dualism 202–5; epistemology 45–6; experience 202–3, 209; framing 203–4; freedom 204–5; history 199–202; hope 204–5; key references 199–202; knowledge 208; language 203–4; measurement and statistics 480; organization studies 205–9; practice 202–3; practicefocused research 206–7; problems from the inside 209; turn in philosophy 43 praxis: epistemology 43; institutional theory 128; performativity 512 Precarious Life (Butler) 230, 232 prejudice 116, 373; see also inequality pre-theoretical practice, epistemology 44, 46 pricing formulae 511 primal parenthood 217–18 Priyadharshini, E. 160–1 ‘the problem of generations’ 262 process perspectives 27 Process and Reality (Whitehead) 545 profession see work progressive neo-extractivism 385 projection 216 prolegomenon 517–18 proletarianization 390–1 promises 321, 423, 509 611

Index

proponent interlocutors 45–7 prosthetic supplementation of the human 390–1 protest 407, 533–41; see also resistance psychoanalysis 212–24; future directions 220–1; identity 431; key contributions 213–15; organizational studies 215–18; significance 218–20 psychotechnologies 390–1 pull back and reveal humour 422 Pullen, A. 58–9 puritanical worldly asceticism 53 Putnam, H. 201–2, 203, 205 Putnam, L.L. 317–18 qualitative positivism 70 quantification 525–32 Quattrone, P. 587 Queer Nation 226 queer theory 106, 225–36; contributions 226–7; ethics 229–34; openness 230–4; organization studies 227–9; violence 231–2; workplace environments 229, 232 Quine, W.V. 203 quixotic reliability 68 racial philosophy 155–6, 441; see also diversity racism 373 Ranson, S. 243 Rao, M.V.H. 120 rational choice theory 38, 39, 40 Rawls, J. 297, 399, 440 ready-to-hand entities 19–20 realism: methodology 75–6; see also Critical Realism reality: poststructuralist theory 178–9; science 500–1 real ontology 132 real registers of subjectivity 173 reason: discourse 89–92; epistemology 46; ethics 55 reductionism: capital 295; conflict 318; corporation 335; debt 349–50; democracy 366; diversity 372; epistemology 46; ethics 56; hermeneutics 117; institutional theory 134–5; management 469; measurement and statistics 476; positivist methodology 68; pragmatism 199–200, 207; psychoanalysis 217–18; spirituality 553–4; trust 569 Reed, M.I. 135 re-enchantment 551–3 reflexivity 120, 131–2; agency 273–4; epistemology 40; ethics 62–3; feminism 107; globalization 397–8; measurement and statistics 476–7, 479; ontology 22–8; organization 492; postcolonial theory 79, 156–7, 162; poststructuralist theory 178 612

regimes of truth 88, 174 registers of subjectivity 173 regulationist schools 146–7 reification 134–5, 286–7 reinventing of discourse 95–7 relationality 231, 575–83; Actor–Network Theory 22, 27–9, 272, 494, 509–10; ageing 265–6; agency 269; autonomy 328; embodied 435; institutional theory 131; leadership 463–4; master/slave dialectic 432–5; ontology 24, 29; performativity 509–10, 514; poststructuralist theory 181; queer theory 230–2; trans-subjectivity 435–6 reliabilists 35–6 reliability 68 religion 324–8, 550–8; control 324–8; ethics 53; hermeneutics 114–15; quantification 526 repetition, rituals 542, 547 representations 91–3, 476 repression 216, 425; see also inequality reserve army 263 resistance 533–41; body politics 278–9; commodification/consumption 303–4; commons 312; conflict 349; ethics 58–9; globalization 400; governance 408; historiography 417; humour 424; identity 433–4; institutional theory 135; Marxism 143; ontology 25–6; people 469–70, 472; postcolonial theory 153–63; power 521; things 467; see also conflict responsibility: agency 269; body politics 281; brands 286, 289; commons 310; control 325; corporation 335–7; debt 346; discourse 96; ethics 57–8, 61, 233–4; feminism 101–2; globalization 398–9; justice 453–4; Marxism 141; postcolonial theory 156–7; poststructuralist theory 178; queer theory 232–4; resistance 537; structuration theory 241 reveries 326 Rhodes, C. 58–9 Ricoeur, P. 94, 115, 116, 217, 413 Rio environmental event 381–2 rituals 542–9 Robey, D. 244 Ronald McDonald 426 Rorty, R. 201, 205, 354–5, 399 Rose, N. 61 Rosenau, J.N. 400 Rotman, B. 391–2 Rottenberg, C. 102 Rousseau, J.J. 362, 363–4, 367 rule-following 185–6 Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim) 240 Rumens, N. 232–4 rupture, rituals 542, 546–7

Index

Said, E. 154–5, 160–2 Sartre, J-P. 213 sauntering 469 Saussure, F. 88, 171–2, 173 Saxon culture 219 Schatzki, T. 191–2 schizophrenia 179–80 Schleiermacher, F. 114–15 Schopenhauer, A. 422 Schwartz, H.S. 218 science: capital 296–7; measurement and statistics 474–82; ontology 16; paradigms 500–1; pragmatism 207; see also sociology Scott, J.C. 527 securitization 345 Sedgwick, E.K. 226, 228 the self 430–1 self-awareness 257–8 self-critical ontology 21 self-discipline of debtors 346 self-restraint 326–7 “selling nature to save it” 383 semiology, poststructuralist theory 171–2 semiosis, discourse 88–9 semiotics: agency 272; brands 288–90; commons 313–14; discourse 89; poststructuralist theory 177–9; visual 588; see also relationality Sen, A. 440 sensibilities 254–7 sexuality 214; body politics 278–9; see also queer theory shapeshifting liminality 306 shareholders: capital 294–5; corporation 335–6; environment 379–80; globalization 399–401; governance 405–9; hermeneutics 119; power 517, 523; value 579 Sheldon, R. 287–8 ships 397 sign consumption 178–9 signification 171–4 signifiers of conflict 317–18 silver socio-economic classes 439–40 Simmel, G. 286, 391 Simpson, R. 107 singular corporation 335–6 Skoldberg, K. 71–3 slavery 432–5; see also control; freedom sliding of meaning, poststructuralist theory 175 Sloterdijk, P. 426–7 Slutskaya, N. 280–1 smell 281, 290, 586 Smith, A. 469 social construction: brands 288–9; corporation 334–8; democracy 366; discourse 93–4; feminism 104–6; methodology 71, 74, 77; ontology 26, 27, 29; organization 493; power

518; pragmatism 209; queer theory 228; spirituality 555–6; structuration theory 237, 243 social theory 191–2, 253; agency 268–84; brands 290; capital 294–5; connectedness concept 398–9; construction feminism 104–6; contracts 362–4; epistemology 35–6; feminism 103–4; heritage 20; institutional ontology 128–9; political movements 366–7; power 519–20; trust 568–83; see also sociology societal consequences of inequality 443–4 socio-economic classes 439–40 Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis (Burrell/Morgan) 24–5, 502–5 sociology: historiography 417–18; measurement and statistics 477–9; structuration theory 238–9 sociomateriality 22, 512–13 soldiering 469 sound 171–3, 290, 422, 586 special topics 249; aesthetics and design 251–67; ageing 260–7; agency 268–84; body politics 276–84; brands 285–92; capital 293–300; commodification 301–8; commons 309–16; conflict 317–23; consumption 301–8; control 324–32; corporation 333–42, 395–402; debt 343–51; decision-making 352–60; diversity studies 370–8; environment 379–87; extractivism 379–87; finance 388–94; globalization 395–402; governance 403–11; historiography 412–20; humour 421–9; identity 430–8; inequality 439–48; justice 449–57; leadership 458–65; management and its others 466–77; measurement and statistics 474–82; multinational corporation 395–402; nature as capital 379–87; needs 483–90; organization and philosophy 491–8; paradigms 499–507; performativity 508–16; power 517–24, 559–67; qualification 525–32; religion 550–8; resistance 533–41; rituals 542–9; spirituality 550–8; strategic power 559–67; trust 568–83; value 575–83; visuals 584–91; work 592–600 speculative theory 95 speech: autonomization 116; commons 312; democracy 366–7; epistemology 35–6; institutional theory 129; leadership 462–3; performativity 508–11; poststructuralist theory 172–5; visual 588 spherogenics 89, 97 Spinoza, B. 281 spirituality 550–8; strategy 562 Spivak, G. 153, 156–8, 161–2 Srinivas, N. 163 SSR see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions static theory 502 613

Index

statistics see measurement and statistics Stiegler, B. 390–1 Stones, R. 241 storytelling/narrative 119, 219, 432; see also narrative strange encounters 373–5 strategy 559–67; agency 272; capital 295; democracy 362; environment 380–2; humour 424; identity 431; institutional theory 131; justice 450; needs 486; postcolonial theory 154–6; poststructuralist theory 179; spirituality 551 stratification 75, 132 stressors 344 structural–functional positivist approaches 25 structuration theory 237–47; agency 270; brands 290; future research 244–5; institutional theory 126–35; organizational research 242–4; origins/development 237–41; practice theory 192; significance 242; stance 241–2, see also poststructuralist theory struggles 575–83; see also protest; resistance subjection: control 327; identity 431–4; ontology 17–18; postcolonial 156; value 577 subjectivity: ethics 57, 61; feminism 106; identity 431, 434–6; methodology 74; needs 487; neo-colonial workplaces 162–3; ontology 18; paradigms 505–6; poststructuralist theory 173–80; power 522; psychoanalysis 221; queer theory 230–1; resistance 539; value 577–8 subjects of enquiry 18 subject–object models, epistemology 37, 39 substantive studies, ontology 23–4 Suddaby, R. 208–9 Sun Tzu 559 superego 213–14 surveillance devices 522; see also Panopticon suspicion 51–65 Svampa, M. 384–5 symbolic interactionism: identity 432; ontology 28 symbolic registers of subjectivity 173 synchronic reliability 68 syntagmatic language 172 synthetic investigations of discourse 88 system-level problems in debt practices 345 Takeuchi, H. 193 Tauschgesellschaft (exchange society) 390 Tavistock Institute 215–16 Taylor, F. 296–7, 469 Taylor, P. 423–4 technology 396–7; democracy 365–6; Panopticon 26, 176, 585; psychotechnologies 390–1; quantification 525–32; structuration theory 243–4; technology-in-practice 244 614

teleoaffective structure 192 television 586 television programming 576–7 temporality: ageing 260–7; epistemological dualisms 414 tensions, value forms 579–80 terror 177–8 textual poaching 306 Theaetetus (Plato) 33 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 154 The Art of War (Sun Tzu) 559 The Constitution of Society (Giddens) 238–9, 240 The Corporation (Bakan) 406 The Experience Economy (Pine/Gilmore) 290 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 154 The Laws of The Market (Callon) 511 The Leviathan (Hobbes) 362–3 The Life of the Mind (Arendt) 55 The Location of Culture (Babha) 155–6 The New Science (Vico) 253 The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski/Chiapello) 539 The Order of Things (Foucault) 423 theoria 43 theory 85–247; Actor–Network Theory 22, 27–9, 272, 494, 509–10; conflict 317–23; discourse 87–99; feminist organization theories 100–12; hermeneutics 113–24; historiography 416–17; institutional theory 125–37; Marxism 138–50; meta-theory 23–4; performativity 511–12; postcolonial theory 151–70; poststructuralist theory 171–83; practice theory 44–6, 130, 184–98, 202–7, 244; pragmatism 199–211; psychoanalysis 212–24; queer theory 225–36; rituals 543–4; structuration theory 237–47; truth 34 The Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 286 The Pragmatic Turn (Bernstein) 202 The Prince (Machiavelli) 517–18 The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) 296 The Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 154 ‘The product and the brand’ (Gardner/Levy) 289 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 53 The Social Construction of Reality (Berger/Luckmann) 237 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) 499–500 The Subject and Power (Foucault) 327 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James) 209 The Velveteen Rabbit (Williams) 306 The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin) 287 things, management and its others 467–8 Thompson, P. 539

Index

three-dimensional views of power 519–20 Thrift, N. 290 time 265, 414 Tolbert, P.S. 128–31 topological culture, brands 291 Townley, B. 487 traders 345 trade unions 366–7 tradition, hermeneutics 116 transdisciplinary historiography 415–16 transformation 306 transformational duality, practice theory 191 transgenderism 228–9, 279 transparency 569, 572 trans-subjectivity 435–6 travel 578–9 true prejudice 116 trust 568–83; ageing 265–6; conflict 318; control 329; finance 391–2; governance 405–6; hermeneutics 117; inequality 443–4; Marxism 141; power 521; strategy 562 truth 26; epistemology 33–5; poststructuralist theory 174; pragmatism 204–5 two-dimensional views of power 519 tyranny 517 uncommitted ontology 16 unconsciousness 213, 218–19; see also consciousness understanding: inequality 445–6; practice theory 192; pragmatism 203–4 Undoing Gender (Butler) 230 unitarism 318 Universities 163 unreflexive narrative 416–17 ‘unseen’ epistemology 251–67 Üsdiken, B. 416–17 utilitarianism 203, 363, 451, 534 utopian society 439–40 utterances 493, 508–10, 514 value 68, 575–83; commodity value 576–7, 578–9; contending value form 580–1; definition 575–6; epistemology 36, 41–2; gifts 577–8; management discourse 575, 579–80; travel 578–9 value form 580–1 Van Buren, H.J. 297 ‘veil of ignorance’ 440 Ventresca, M.J. 134–5 Vico, G. 253 views of agency 269 views of power 519 violence, queer theory 231–2 viral energies 95

Virno, P. 311 (In)visibility Vortex 107 visuals 584–91 Wall Street 145, 446 Walsh, J.P. 200 Warren, S. 424–5 Watson, T. 55 weak grips of discourse 89 wealth: commons 310–12; conflict 321; corporation 340; debt 344–5; democracy 362–3; ethics 53, 62; governance 408–9; humour 427; inequality 439–45; management 471–2; poststructuralist theory 177–8; trust 572 Weber, M. 52–4, 325–6, 551–3 Weiskopf, R. 58 well-being 344; see also health/well-being Western Conceptions of the Orient (Said) 154–5 Western ontologies 27–8 Westwood, R. 161 White Collar (Mills) 54 White, H. 413 Whitehead, A.N. 545 whiteness 373–6 Wicks, A.C. 201 Wigforss, E. 522 Wilkinson, R.G. 443 Williams, M. 306 Williamson, O.E. 144 Williams, R. 288 Willmott, H. 58, 243, 367 wishful fantasy 218 Wittgenstein, L. 185–6, 190–2, 213 women’s rights see feminism Woodman, D. 393 words 171–2 work 592–600; ageing 262–3; commons 310–14; conflict 318–22; democracy 363–4 workplace environments: alienation 296–7; democracy 363–7; humour 423–4; nature as capital 380–1; postcolonial theory 162–3; queer theory 229, 232 world risk society 398–9 Wright, E.O. 143 writing 175–6, 280–1 xeno-money 391–2 Yates, J. 414–15 Young, I.M. 398–9 Yousfi, H. 163 zero-sum dynamic 434 Zucker, L.G. 129–32

615