Critically Constituting Organization (Advances in Organization Studies)

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CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION

Advances in Organization Studies Advances in Organization Studies includes cutting-edge work in comparative management and intercultural comparison, studies of organizational culture, communication, and aesthetics, as well as in the area of interorganizational collaboration — strategic alliances, joint ventures, networks and collaborations of all kinds, where comparative, intercultural, and communicative issues have an especial salience. Purely theoretical as well as empirically based studies are included.

General Editors Stewart Clegg School of Management University of Technology Sydney Quay Street, Haymarket P.O.Box 123 Broadway, NSW 2007 Australia [email protected] Alfred Kieser University of Mannheim D 68 131 Mannheim Germany [email protected]

Volume 5 Andrew Chan Critically Constituting Organization

Critically Constituting Organization

ANDREW CHAN City University of Hong Kong

With a foreword by Stewart R. Clegg

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chan, Andrew. Critically constituting organization / Andrew Chan. p. cm. -- (Advances in organization studies, ISSN 1566-1075 ; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Organization. I. Title. II. Series. HD31.C456 2000 302.3’5--dc21 ISBN 90 272 3302 0 (Eur.) / 1 55619 995 3 (US)

00-062132 CIP

© 2000 – John Benjamins Publishing Company No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O.Box 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · USA

Dedicated with love to Jackie, Angus, and En-hao

Contents Foreword by Stewart R. Clegg Introduction PART I. HISTORY Chapter 1 The Conditions of Organization Studies Legacy and Intellectual Development Social Institutional Context

ix xiii 1 3 3 6

Chapter 2 Culture as Discourse Culture as Discourse Discourse Theory of Organizational Analysis

11 11 17

Chapter 3 Critically Representing Culture Concepts and Representations Etymology of Culture Genesis of Culture

21 21 24 29

PART II. KNOWLEDGE Chapter 4 Postmodernism and Organization Theory Counterpoising Postmodernism and its Critiques Postmodernism and Organization Theory Postmodernism and Social Theory Postmodern Ethos of Foucault

39 41 41 42 47 51

Chapter 5 Towards a Genealogy of Organizational Culture Subjectivity and the Body Genealogy Power Knowledge, Truth and the Intellectual

57 57 59 62 66

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PART III. POWER Chapter 6 Discourse and Regimes of Truth Regimes of Truth and Discursive Formations Power in Organizational Culture

69 71 71 78

Chapter 7 Postmodern Critique and Organization Studies The Humanist Present Foucault and Power Foucault, Freedom and Resistance The Art of Refusal

89 89 92 98 104

Chapter 8 Conclusion: Critically Constituting Organization

113

Notes

119

References

131

Foreword

The present book is written within a distinct conjuncture of space and time. The space is that which organization studies occupied after both anthropological and managerial conceptions of culture had been written into it; the time can be characterized as being that which transpired ‘after Foucault’ entered its reading lists. Let me elaborate. That organizations are cultures is evident to any readers of the classics. Weber’s (1976) explanation for the emergence of primitive capitalism was premised on a Protestant ethic being imbued in its member’s consciousness at the outset. Early twentieth century investigators, such as Taylor (1911), saw the necessity of defeating a culture of craft consciousness to lay the foundations of rationalized organization. A couple of decades later, as anthropologically influenced observers of factory life, Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) saw the necessity of widening inquiry into the sources of work design and motivation beyond the tangible material artefacts of the workplace. Involved in inquiry into the determinants of organization performance, looking at issues such as levels of illumination, they discovered that culture got in the way of explanation. Subsequently, they realised that material aspects of the work environment could not be treated independently of the meaning which individuals assigned to them. Thus, they realised that the social organization of formal organization was a cultural achievement, premised on an organizationally enveloped world of inter-subjectivity. From this time onwards, important work on organization culture followed in the anthropological vein, such as Warner and Low (1947) and Goffman (1961, 1967). After all, culture was the key concept of anthropology and anthropology was the appropriate source from which researchers interested in cultures and organizations might draw. In the 1980s the scene changed irrevocably, as Barley et al (1986) charted. Under the influence of the book promoted by McKinsey Consulting, In Search of Excellence (Peters & Waterman 1982), culture became less what organizations are and more something that they have, something that can be managerially designed and manipulated as a variable upon which performance might depend. The wheel had turned full circle: from being a barrier to organization performance enhancement it became a facilitator: indeed, it was now the Holy Grail that could unlock it. Researchers were now able to seek for the determinants of ‘vitalized’ cultures (Kono & Clegg 1998) in successful organizations in order to draw implications for other organizations.

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There was a rearguard action: researchers associated with SCOS (Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism), such as those in the collections edited by Barry Turner (1990) and Pasquale Gagliardi (1990) sought to retain a sophisticated anthropologically influenced perspective on organizations. Meanwhile the contingency theorists, at best, could only accede that culture was another contingency that, if pressed, organizations might have to deal with, whose impact would be at the national level (compare Hickson et al. 1974 with Lammers & Hickson 1979). Elsewhere, neo-Marxists saw culture as a source of hegemony for manufacturing working class consent to ruling class rule (Burawoy 1979), at least before they discovered the importance of sub-cultures of resistance (Sturdy, Knights & Willmott 1992). Both contingency theorists and neo-Marxists reduced culture to an effect of something other than itself. On the one hand, contingency theorists conceptualised culture in terms of four universal attribute of the human condition (Hofstede, 1980), which were expressed in variable national terms while remaining unitary at the organizational level of analysis. On the other hand, culture was a mechanism of ruling class rule for forestalling radical employee consciousness. Both were somewhat totalising — albeit, in different ways. Each constituted its object of inquiry as it made culture metaphorical: as a synonym for either a functionalistic and unitary notion or ideology — each a somewhat impossible pretension. Elsewhere, such pretensions to totality were being punctured, especially in the work of Foucault (see 1977 and 1980, especially). After reading Foucault, for most interpreters, totalities were dissolved. How did organization culture fare? While Foucault has had a considerable impact on organization studies, especially amongst practitioners from outside the North American mainstream (see, for example, Clegg 1989; 1995; McKinlay & Starkey 1998), up to the present no text has systematically addressed what happens to organization culture when it encounter a Foucauldian gaze. Read this book and you will find out. Stewart Clegg September 5, 2000 University of Technology, Sydney

References Barley, S., G. Meyer & D. Gash (1988). Cultures of culture: Academics, practitioners and the pragmatics of normative control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 33, 24-60. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Clegg, S. R. (1994). Weber and Foucault: Social Theory for the study of organizations. Organization, 1, 149-178. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. London: Harmondsworth.

FOREWORD

xi

Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and power, In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester. Gagliardi, P. (1990). Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape. Berlin: de Gruyter. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual. London: Harmondsworth. Hickson, D., C. McMillan, C. Hinings & J. Schwitter (1974). The culture-free context of organization structure: a tri-national comparison. Sociology, 8, 1, 59-80. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences. London: Sage. Kono, T. & S. R. Clegg (1998). Transformations of Corporate Culture: Experiences of Japanese Enterprises. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lammers, C. & D. Hickson (1979). Are organizations culture-bound? In C. J. Lammers & D. J. Hickson (Eds.), Organizations Alike and Unlike: International and Inter-institutional Studies in the Sociology of Organizations (402–419). London: Routledge. McKinlay, A. & K. Starkey (1998). Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. London: Sage. Peters, T. & R. Waterman (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-run Companies. New York: Harper & Row. Roethlisberger, F. & W. Dickson (1939). Management and the Worker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sturdy, A., D. Knight & H. Willmott (1992). Skill and Consent: Contemporary Studies in the Labour Process. London: Routledge. Taylor, F. W. (1911). Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper. Turner, B. (1990). Organizational Symbolism, Berlin: de Gruyter. Warner, W. & L. Low (1947). The Social System of the Modern Factory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weber, M. (1976). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Introduction The legacy of organization culture has been recounted by many (Alvesson 1993; Trice & Beyer 1993; Martin & Frost 1996; Parker, 2000), and these and other reviewers generally agree with the characterization of organizational culture as a contested terrain, stressed by the existence of internal fragmented dynamics and struggles for intellectual dominance. Diversity and agonism are evident in the organizational culture sub-field in which vastly diverse discourses compete to raise consciousness of participants over their subject-specific competencies in managing cultures in organizations. The thematic of organizational culture also seems to represent a microcosm of its mother discipline of organization theory, which is equally inflicted by methodological and epistemological contests. This book begins with the ideas of Foucault to re-describe the ascent of organizational culture and to examine the emergence of this fledging sub-field within organization studies. In this process, I draw on a number of theoretical perspectives associated with postmodernist thinking to raise some fundamental questions about the principal tenets of organization studies, and its nature and status as a legitimate academic discipline. A genealogy of organizational culture and organization studies, like the empirical analyses and whiggish histories of the clinic and madness, would contend that organization studies is engaged not so much in the process of discovery as in a process of constituting its own object. It is argued in this book that the practices of representing culture in organizational discourses are manoeuvres that have had their beginnings in widely varying responses to hugely diverse situations. These intellectual practices of representation, like those studied in the cases of the clinic, the asylum, and the penitentiary, form into expert discourse. Discourse provides “linguistic” and “extra-linguistic” contexts (Laclau & Mouffe 1990) in which manoeuvres of representational practices congeal into learned dialects, research protocols and procedures. Discourse then facilitates extension of the ranges of those dialects to deliberate, act upon and govern agents and their bodies, and of the jurisdictions of those procedures in producing a humanist grammar and epistemological templates of governmentality. In this book, I wish to justify the following claim: Representations in organizational discourse of culture “make up” what I call “culturated subjectivity” — a form of “structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity” (Owen 1994, 1999) that attach agents to certain psychic dispositions and “subject-specific competencies” (Tully 1999) that are in line with the rhetoric

xiv

CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION and articulations in truth statements of that discourse (Hacking 1986; Miller & Rose 1990; du Gay 1996b, 1997; Salaman 1997). As these practices are repressive against the freedom of the subjects’ creative self-representation, the task of critically constituting organization is to raise consciousness of participants, managers and theorists alike to the possibilities of becoming other than what we are.

There are three major parts in this book: History, Knowledge and Power. Firstly, I review the context and the conditions of organization studies to argue a case for explaining the ascent of organizational culture discourse in the light of what both Deleuze and Foucault have agreed as the intricate networking of interests, desires, and power among actors in a discursive field like organization theory. The “struggle of intellectual dominance” of organizational culture (Martin & Frost 1996) can be studied from the point of view of exercises of power which produce specific kinds of knowledge. Working from a discourse theory perspective, I examine the forces and influences over representation practices in Chapter 2. The implications of this assumption for the argument in the rest of the book will also be considered. In Chapter 3, I examine the etymology and genesis of culture to discern the contests over the definition of culture. Evidence in this chapter indicates that there is no essence, but only closed, internal proliferation to impose hierarchy and hegemony over meanings. That kind of anti-foundational analysis anticipates a postmodern perspective through which the arguments in the rest of the book develop. In the second part, Knowledge, I explain the import of postmodernism and its relationship with knowledge in organizations in Chapter 4. There I outline the postmodern ethos of Foucault’s discourse theory, and demonstrate its relevance to my analysis of knowledge production. Chapter 5 makes use of the genealogical approach to examine how discursive formations produce experience constitutive of subjectivity. The ways in which organizational theorists can interrogate this knowledge are also explored. In the third part entitled Power, I trace, in Chapter 6, those power relations among competing strands of discursive formations. This chapter charts how the understanding of culture in organizations has been transformed from an interpretive notion into a performative notion. Assuming the role of a social critic, I examine how representations inscribe identity over the body, and their implications for critique and resistance. Culture as a discourse and as a new institution of governing manifests power/ knowledge. Foucault’s guerrilla history and counter-memory exemplify how to de-realize flawed, essentializing humanist assumptions that insinuate systems and institutions and they show how we are trapped within the institution of organizational culture. In Chapter 7, I consider the critics’ argument against power/ knowledge as an explanan for the social construction of culture in organization theory. I take issue with these criticisms and propose how to resist subjectivizing forces of discursive formations. I outline Foucault’s ethos of critical appraisal of

INTRODUCTION

xv

the ontology of the present that is based on “civil disobedience” (Rajchman 1985) and “reflective indocility” (Ransom 1997). To realize this resistance of critically constituting organization, the organization theorist needs to play the role of what Foucault calls “specific intellectual” (Foucault 1980f, 1988b).

PART I HISTORY

Chapter 1 The Conditions of Organization Studies The dominant cathedral of rational structure has been partially dismantled and, although portions are still standing, many of its building blocks have been carted off to be reconfigured into alternative and challenging constructions. More fragile shelters and colourful but perhaps temporary tents have been thrust up in vacant lots. The scene is one of much animation and energy: raw materials and scaffolding are strewn about; lamps in windows and camp fires burn far into the night. The image I wish to convey of the present situation…is partly that of crisis and confusion but more that of vigorous controversy and an enriching profusion of competing models and methods. W. Richard Scott The Sociology of Organizations (1986)

Legacy and Intellectual Development This chapter begins with a review of the legacy of organization studies as a fledging sub-discipline of social theory. I focus on the epistemological issues many reviewers consider to be central in shaping the intellectual contours of the field (see for example, Burrell & Morgan 1979; Organization 1994; Clegg, Hardy & Nord 1996). For several decades, it has not been an easy task to determine the disciplinary boundaries of organization studies or to settle for an undisputed, clear definition of what it is about. Part of this difficulty springs from the fact that the field’s own “domain assumptions” about the subject matter it purports to study, its own interpretative frameworks, and the ways of capturing knowledge have been exposed to continuous critique and re-evaluation (Astley 1985; Reed 1996). This latter condition, whilst persisting in organization studies, seems to cause the field to remain, in Kuhnian terms, in a phase of “revolutionary” science rather than “normal” science.1 There seems to be little evidence showing that organization studies is turning into a “normal” science phase, mainly because the domain assumptions about the construct organization and the terms in which it comes to be represented have been, and still are, under dispute. There are conflicts and

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disagreements between competing perspectives, and these perspectives form into different schools of thought or approaches (Reed 1992: 36). Organizational sociologist Charles Perrow (1980) has described the field of organization theory as a “zoological garden” housing a “bewildering variety of specimens”, or different types of organizations that range from small to the often “effective, and possibly more ferocious beast — the multinational corporation”. Besides pointing out the different kinds of organizations that are being studied, Perrow goes on to comment that given their different and uncompromising convictions and predilections, the community of organization theorists is seen to populate and thrive within their own discrete ecological niches within “the organizational theory sandpit” (Perrow 1980: 276). To this day, Perrow’s metaphorical characterization of organization studies remains a poignant yet precise depiction of aspects of the current condition of the field. This is largely in terms of the continually diverse research questions, scholarly norms or schools of thought held by the organizational theorists. Reed (1992: 36) describes the “radically divergent views in basic philosophical assumptions” between schools of thought as “discontinuities”, and these discontinuities are “seen to generate deep-seated fissures in the intellectual fabric of organization theory”. In the words of Reed (1992), organization theory tends to be “viewed as a highly fragmented field of study lacking any overarching intellectual coherence or sense of historical direction” (op. cit.). As Clegg and Hardy (1996) have pointed out, the community of theorists and researchers engage in “evolving conversations, with emerging vocabularies and grammars, and with various degrees of discontinuity” (ibid.: 3, italics mine). Attention is drawn to the paradox or constructive falsehood existing between the two authors’ invitation to experience the two metaphors of “conversation” and “discontinuity” as representations of aspects of the prevailing conditions of the field of organization studies. A “conversation” seems to conjure the mental picture of the fruitful production and reflection of the traditions of discourse that have shaped the study of organizations and the practices in which members of organizations engage, whereas “discontinuity” connotes a sense of a sequestration or the fault lines inflicted by the refutation by some organization theorists. The irony is, as Perrow (1980) and Martin and Frost (1996) might infer, some theorists are like “toddlers” playing in “sandpits” (Perrow 1980: 277), or like children in a “war game of King of the Mountain” (Martin & Frost 1996). The chances are some of them are deeply engaged in a succession of role playing the monarch and would-be monarchs claiming victories by destroying the sand castles of the ones they have defeated while there are others who are not very keen on playing the game and so they concentrate on building their own sand castles. In other words, these three reviewers used the metaphors of the sandpits and the war game of King of Mountain to connote the sense of little consensus thriving within the field and a sense of “the struggle for intellectual dominance”. This depiction

THE CONDITIONS OF ORGANIZATION STUDIES

5

echoes Reed’s observation that the field has always been a “historically contested terrain” (Reed 1996). In the introduction to the Handbook of Organization Studies (1996), its editors have also admitted that defining organization studies is not always an easy task. Whilst aware of the nagging debates inherent in the field, the editors of the Handbook propose to conceptualize organization studies as a series of conversations (among) researchers who help to constitute organizations through terms derived from paradigms, methods and assumptions, themselves derived from earlier conversations (Clegg & Hardy 1996: 3).

The fluidity of its boundaries and the absence of an authoritative definition of organization studies do not seem to be a source of discomfort for many members who theorize within the field. This is partly because some of these researchers acknowledge diversity and plurivocality in their research programmes, and they even embrace “paradigm incommensurability” (Jackson & Carter 1991) or dissensus in theoretical and research frameworks in their approaches to the study of organizations (Organization 1994: 2). Another reason is the putative field of organization studies has been embellished by contributions from a variety of social science disciplines and therefore its approaches to capturing organizational knowledge appear to be eclectic and interdisciplinary. This field has always been characterized by debates centered on the nature of the organizational phenomenon (ontological assumptions), on the claims to knowledge in theorizing (epistemological differences), and on the appropriate methodologies for attaining this knowledge (quantitative/qualitative debates). Whether these conditions within organization studies can be considered as facets of evidence of progression, and hence something to be applauded, or as a “cacophony of voices” (Reed 1992: 37) and obstacles that distract and inhibit organization theory from moving on to a phase of “normal” science, would depend heavily upon the beholder’s own personal assumptions, persuasion and predilections. Part of the research community’s consent and support for an inter-disciplinary and multi-paradigmatic approach to organizational enquiry gives rise to ambiguity in the substantive priorities within its research agenda, and this leads to relatively little general consensus thriving within the field. Considerable debates abound among researchers regarding the validity and explanatory power of different research paradigms, and there seems no waning in these debates that have cumulated in what has become known as “paradigm wars” in organization studies (Jackson & Carter 1993). In summary, the vexing issues that have significant impact on the intellectual development of organization studies have been characterized. These depictions are pivotal in indexing those major strands of research paradigms that reflect

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basic assumptions held by different schools of thinking within the research community. Next, the social institutional context of the field of organization studies will be examined.

Social Institutional Context This section explores the differences between “organization studies” and “organization theory”, terms that have been used interchangeably. It is argued that their differences reflect basic and crucial contests between two major ways of “doing knowledge” about organizations. It will be shown how the distinctions insinuate the social, institutional fabric of the field. Organization studies is sometimes synonymous with organization theory. Organization studies is relatively process driven, investigating established social and organizational practices and making inquiries into those aspects with an orientation pertaining to an analytical nature, while organization theory is relatively product oriented in the sense that the knowledge it generates is often expected to contain prescriptions about possible organizational, structural and design configurations that induce effective management. Practically, a less rigorous distinction seems to prevail when the two notions of organization studies and organization theory are used in a non-literal sense in speech and in writing, be it referring to their substantive content, or to their general disposition. A possible explanation is that the boundaries of these two terrains have become porous and permeable in the sense that business schools and management departments in universities are staffed by teaching faculties with backgrounds and research commitments based on a very wide variety of social science disciplines. Another reason is that many people are under the impression that organization studies is multi-disciplinary based and embellished by contributions from a wide variety of social science disciplines including industrial sociology, occupational psychology, industrial relations, and even economics. One further reason is that organization studies is being challenged to “rethink itself almost before it has found a position from which to think” (Knights 1997) and so it is not unusual for such a “young” discipline to deemphasize strict boundarydelimitations. In their book, Work Organizations: A Critical Introduction (1995), the authors criticize organization studies for being a misnomer in the sense that it is “most of the time, not about organizations per se, the overwhelming amount of writing is about (the management of work in) work organizations and those of a business type in particular” (Thompson & McHugh 1995: 3). Whilst the “management of work” is normally the focus of organization theory, this has recently been broadened to include the variegated practices that constitute and organize emotion (Rafaeli & Sutton 1989; Mumby & Putnam 1992; Fineman 1993),


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gender (Mills & Tancred 1992; Gherardi 1995), pleasure (Burrell 1991), sexuality (Burrell 1984; Hearn & Parkin 1987), and eroticism (Brewis & Grey 1994). It comes to seem the criticism levelled by Thompson and McHugh (1995) suggests that there are strong social-institutional dynamics at play that shape and skew the overriding emphasis and general direction of the so-called mainstream organization theory. The dynamics shaping the direction of organization studies may be conceived as overt acquiescence by predominant constituencies (business enterprises) of what is “desirable” and “useful” organizational knowledge. Whilst noting that aspects of social dynamics shaping some of the themes of organization studies, Thompson and McHugh (1995) pose the question whether “organization studies (is) a genuine synthesis of those different voices (or disciplines)”. The two authors believe that in practice it is not. They argue that teaching and writings about organizations, especially in British and American textbooks since the 1950s, have been presented from the two particular perspectives of either organizational behavior or organization theory. Organizational behavior (OB) focuses on how social behavior, springing from cognitive (rational) and affective (emotional) differences among people, influences organizational reality. The OB approach predominantly attends to order and to prescribe practices and structures to solve problems of motivation, and the performance of individuals and groups in business enterprises and organizations. Organization theory (OT) takes a pragmatic and functional approach to the study of organizations as empirical objects, aiming at generalizations concerned with the “trivariate relationship between structure, contingency and performance” (Donaldson 1985). The structural contingency perspective offered by the generations of Aston researchers, including Donaldson himself, represent conventional, functionalist organization theory broadly construed. Within functionalist organization theory, Donaldson (1985) and Pfeffer (1993) are two major supporters who argue in favor of achieving technical certainty and paradigm consensus over research carried out in/for organizations. Donaldson (1985) maintains that it is appropriate for organization theory to concentrate on the analysis of different organizational designs and their contingencies in response to an organization’s task environment and their outcome, that is, the trivariate relationship between structure, contingency and performance. The proper trajectory of organization theory research, according to him, should be to “(re)affirm the commitment to valid general causal laws as the goal” (Donaldson 1985: 84). In order for the field to make progress and to become adept and competitive in contesting for resources, Pfeffer (1993) asserts that it is crucial for the organization theory research community to iron out paradigm differences. The community should relinquish the “ideal value of representativeness, inclusiveness, theoretical and methodological diversity”, because by following that route it will not enable

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technical certainty and consensus, but only dissipate energy, rendering the discipline of organization theory vulnerable to take-over by other disciplines, like, for example, transactional economics (Barney 1990). Pfeffer’s suggestion calls for researchers to converge efforts to strive towards “paradigm consensus and enforcement”, so that the discipline can be made more focused, elitist and influential (Pfeffer 1993). The tacit assumption is that organizational behavior and organization theory, if they are true, can best serve management and its agents. During the 1950s and 1960s, science became the adjudicator of the truth of knowledge and positivism became the adjudicator of science. The more scientific is knowledge, the truer it must be, and the more true, the more practically useful it must be. In the view of some sociologists, the corpus of organization studies knowledge at that time was a normative discourse stemming from the manipulative needs of practical men whose major concern was to distil theories of how organizations function and how they should be managed. Anthony (1986) cautions about this “recruitment of social science to the service of management”, and Tsoukas (1994) points out that these two particular approaches of OB and OT to the study of organizations have attracted a pejorative label of “social engineering”. Aspects of the literature have characterized OB and OT, their normative prescriptions and the knowledge produced by taking a functionalist reading of organizations as “old thinking”. They are old and not in fashion because they take a mechanistic view of organizations and management — that facet of knowledge building that relies upon a few fully knowledgeable individuals whose main concern is the control of an objective reality. In the two decades of the 1950s and 1970s, the functionalist strands clearly dominated publications in organization studies in the U.S. organizational behavior literature and organization theory. Both were predisposed to structure their enquiries around specific problematics which stem from the requirement to meet the needs of the management and their agents. An enormous number of reports on research and journal articles in the English speaking world use the OB and OT perspectives, especially those established in the higher education sector in the U.S. Competition begins in articulating and jostling for a speaking position for an individual’s or a group’s theoretical position. These positions, given time, solidify into regulative and even policing practices that support what Cousins and Hussain (1984) called a “strategy of common institutional and political drift” within discursive formations.2 The jostling for a privileged discursive space, the establishing of a discourse, the appropriating of knowledge and practice, the homogenizing of research paradigms and theoretical positions eventually achieve a dominant outcome — a closure of meaning in favour of an system of “internal proliferation of meaning” (Foucault 1972: 118–121) and a marginalization of other voices. The dominant “voices”, however, make themselves heard more clearly in the sense that they achieve a higher profile through being published in


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professional journals. The dominant voices and the individuals whom they represent are now in a much more favorable situation to be able to gain access to further publication avenues and to reinforce their favored theoretical positions or, in other words, get more of what they want published. In this fashion, some voices or paradigms and theoretical positions become inevitably under-represented because they have been marginalized (Cummings & Frost 1995; Boje, Fitzgibbons & Steingard 1996). This potrayal of the politicized conditions of organization studies foregrounds the significance of discourse theory, which has been employed to examine the social construction of knowledge and its inherent micrological processes (Reed 1998). In other words, important and influential players in the field of organization studies, with different values, assumptions and orientations, desires and interests strategize and bring to bear their instruments of influence on one another. These struggles are histories of their own — they embody localized and subjugated knowledges that constitute organization. In summary, this chapter provides a context and clears the ground over those assumptive differences between OB and OT orientations, especially their implications for the study of culture. The roles of culture will be examined in Chapter 3, after we analyze in the next chapter the substance of a discourse theory perspective and those key issues that we must attend to by adopting that approach.

Chapter 2 Culture as Discourse The present refers to those things that are constituted in our current proceedings in ways we do not realize are rooted in the past, and writing a history of it lays bare that constitution and its consequence. John Rajchman Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (1985)

Culture as Discourse This chapter takes up a discourse theory that deconstructs organizational culture. It sketches the background of the critical questions asked by the author. The chasm between functionalist and pluralist paradigms, modern and postmodern approaches, science and contra-science (Marsden & Townley 1996) is reiterated in many research topics in organization studies. Among these, organizational culture, in the view of many commentators, stands out as the most controversial and heavily contested sub-field (Smircich 1983; Smircich & Calás 1987; Meek 1988; Alvesson 1990, 1993; Alvesson & Berg 1992; Reed 1992; Jeffcutt 1994b; Martin & Frost 1996; Parker 2000). Compared with many other topics, the thematic of culture in organizations is a field of research that is replete with open debates and conflicts that leave their ostensible marks in the published literature, in the sense that authors argue their differences openly in a number of publications (Martin & Frost 1996: 599). One of the major differences centers upon the definition of the construct per se (ontology), and upon the paradigm and methodology used to apprehend it, and then to generate knowledge about it (epistemology). In business and academe, the term “culture” has been used to mean many different things and there is no consensus on its definitions. In the academic community, the meanings of the culture construct and assumptions about its ontology are debated hotly (Martin & Frost 1996). One reason is that culture is situated within the intersection of many social science disciplines. All these disciplines have an intricate and subtle bearing on the very contexts in which culture is transposed or displaced and then used in organiza-

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tional research (see Smircich 1983). Each of these definitions compels careful consideration and evaluation in terms of its validity in interpreting and representing organizational life. The definition of culture and knowledge about it are notoriously difficult to reach any consensus on, especially within the contexts of research taking anthropological and sociological perspectives. Organizational anthropologists have pointed out that the organizational literature has hijacked culture. This is in the sense that the familiar concepts related to it (i.e., rituals, myths, taboos and symbols) have been “used in disconcertingly unrecognizable ways” (Wright 1994). Another organizational anthropologist laments that the displacement or transfer of the terms from anthropology to organization studies is inadequate and far from being satisfying (Helmers 1991). Sociologically informed researchers have shown that culture is not as pliable as practitioners and managers want to think it is. Evidence from these researchers’ studies of occupations like firemen (Hassard 1993), slaughtermen (Ackroyd & Crowdy 1990), supermarket cashiers (Ogbonna & Wilkinson 1990), IT professionals (Kunda 1991; Martin 1992; Parker, 2000) all reveal that distinctive behavioral patterns, people’s underlying assumptions and values have rendered the cultures of these occupations effectively less susceptible to managerial influence and control. The broadly construed “corporate culture” literature embodies consultantdriven reform initiatives for corporations to gain control of their organizations through influencing the value premises on which organizational members’ behaviors are based. Culture insinuates into the argot of business and management consultancy, through popular managerial writings, and captures the attention and imagination of CEOs and their managers (Alvesson 1990). The ontological status of “culture”, though it has not been reified to such an extent as that of “organization”, has been widely accepted (Trice & Beyer 1993; Bates 1994). Panacea attributes of culture have become widely boosted and boasted, identified with and internalized by both the practitioner and managerial communities. Decorous statements of “corporate culture” have established “subject-positions” or interpretations to which practitioners and managers acquiesce. In these subject-positions, the claims of corporate culture emerge as meaningful because these people are subjected to that scheme of apprehension (Salaman 1997; du Gay 1997). Anthony (1994) comments that (T)he very wide claims made for the success of cultural change have led to a state of high excitement in which it has been hailed as one of the most significant advances in the history of organizational studies and as the herald of a new renaissance in management (Anthony 1994: 4).

A certain amount of culture literature throughout the 1980s and the 1990s is about the collectively willed pursuit of excellence in all aspects of their operation and philosophies (see for example, Peters & Waterman 1982; Deal & Kennedy 1982;

CULTURE AS DISCOURSE

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Graves 1986; Lessem 1990; Drennan 1992). The phenomenal enthusiasm in the extolled potency of corporate culture is a consequence of the perception of culture as having assumed the character of a panacea — potentially the answer to many organizational ailments (Payne 1991: 29; Johnson & Gill 1993: 94; Salaman 1997). The business community has no qualms with the seductiveness of cultural management techniques that have infiltrated management circles. The manner in which significant aspects of culture management and reform initiatives are construed as pliable and manipulable leads Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) to critique an early strand of practitioner discourse of culture in the 1980s in the following way: culture hung on the following pseudosyllogism: culture enhances social integration; social integration increases performance and productivity; therefore, if one can enhance social integration by manipulating culture, then substantial increments in performance and productivity should ensue (ibid.: 42, emphases mine).

Anthony (1994: 2–3), Bates (1994), and Schein (1985, 1999) have all warned about taking culture for change itself because such a treatment risks confusion and conflation of a signified for its referent. The moment culture is perceived to assume the attributes of the essential ingredients of reform and to possess a certain quality that managers seek to capture and to “bottle up”, a fallacious co-production of truth effects is activated. Anthony’s account in Managing Culture (1994) of the circular, self-referential aporia of the discourse of “cultural management” is worth quoting here: the attempt…to influence the values of the organization…(is) extended to the point that the leaders” view of the organization’s culture, their values, the corporate culture, is represented as the culture itself. Corporate culture is the claim to be the organization. It is the view of the leaders transposed to the whole. If, as we are told, culture along with its accompaniment of ideology shapes our perception and experience so that contradictions are not recognized or criticised, a corporate culture cannot be challenged. (…) If it is protected from either the practical experience of its inhabitants or the theoretical observation of outsiders, it is given added legitimation: the circle is closed (ibid.: 51).

The gloss of continuity and purpose is conferred upon a postulate that is now so removed from the very context that has permitted the elaboration of the very concepts (originally in anthropology and sociology) on which it has a bearing (Anthony 1994). Despite sober caution from reviewers like Anthony, the debates surrounding culture continue with no resolution of the issues raised in sight. Many of these debates are about research methodology and, more precisely, epistemology. So, let us examine some of these epistemological and methodological issues. On the epistemological front, paraphrasing Martin and Frost (1996), on the one hand, some of the debates about culture vouch for the merit of using quantitative techniques to provide a functionalist account of culture that lend

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themselves more obviously to systematic meta-analyses and the development of empirically based generalizations. On the other hand, some researchers prefer to take up a more pluralist engagement with the culture construct because there are good reasons to choose to employ qualitative methodology and other multiparadigmatic methodologies in developing context-specific descriptions of cultures. Many reviews of organizational culture research have responded to the existence of disagreements over the use of research paradigms and methodologies (Alvesson 1990; Martin 1992; Linstead & Grafton-Small 1992). A number of scholars have tried to understand the differences that cause the conflicts and to generate some new insights about cultural research (e.g., Meek 1988; Reichers & Schneider 1990; Alvesson & Berg 1992; Jeffcutt 1994b; Anthony 1994; Bates 1994; Schein 1999). For almost all of those working in the culture sub-field, regardless of their paradigmatic orientation, culture research represents the lack of paradigm consensus. In the first chapter, I pointed out that Martin and Frost (1996) use the metaphor “culture war games” to describe the paradigm dissensus and struggle for intellectual dominance within both organizational culture research and within organization studies in general. The metaphor of the game of King of the Mountain has been used to depict the struggle between different research communities within organization studies. The two authors have relied on that metaphor for a second time to portray the field of organizational culture research. Many other reviewers agree with such an observation. From the outset, the culture movement has come across as representing a promising alternative to, and even a counter initiative against, the weariness of using functionalist, empirical and quantitative approaches in organization studies (Martin 1990a; Turner 1990; Alvesson & Berg 1992; Martin & Frost 1996). Martin and Frost (1996: 615) point out that culture, when it first appears, represents an “emancipating way of approaching organizational phenomenon, and as a metaphor for revitalizing organization theory”. At the time when the interest in culture began to gather momentum, the general discontent with quantitative approaches and structural contingency theories of organizations had already evolved from the systematic critique of normal organization science developed in the 1970s (Burrell & Morgan 1979). One of the co-founders of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism (SCOS), the late Barry Turner, pointed out that: After a long pre-occupation with the problems of building more rational, efficient and computer-like organizations, students of administrative activities have recently become much more aware of other aspects of human life which contribute to the functioning of organizations and which constitute the nature of social life as it is lived in organizational settings. This new awareness focuses attention upon the symbolic, the qualitative, the sensuous aspects of human relationships and


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upon the central place of these qualities in the operation of organizations (Turner 1990: 1).

Over the years, that new awareness has developed into a number of seams of inquiries into cultures in work organizations. Firstly, research on culture is considered as representing an opportunity to break away from the constraints of dominant quantitative and positivistic approaches (Martin 1990a; Alvesson 1990). It is an enticement to launch offenses, at least for culture’s popularizers, against “systems rationalism”, which was an American managerial wave before the arrival of another “rhetorical wave” of organizational culture (Barley & Kunda 1992: 382). Secondly, culture has also allowed multi-perspective frameworks (Martin 1990a) using qualitative and ethnographic methodologies to acquire legitimacy (Hassard 1993). In the literature, exemplary studies using multi-perspective frameworks include the ethnographies of context-specific cultures (Gregory 1983; Kunda 1990; Martin 1992), the unfolding logic of occupational culture (Young 1989; Ackroyd & Crowdy 1990; Ogbonna & Wilkinson 1990), emotions at work and their implications (Hochschild 1983; Van Maanen & Kunda 1989; Fineman 1993). The underpinnings of these and other similar studies are denominated by Martin (1992) as constituting the differentiation perspective, the opposite to another kind of perspective that she calls an integrationist perspective of culture research. The research grouped under a differentiation perspective, according to Martin (1992), has in common the following attributes, which distinguish it from that of the integrationist perspective: a willingness to acknowledge inconsistencies in attitudes versus behaviour. They see consensus as occurring only within subcultural boundaries. They acknowledge conflicts of interest, for example, between top management or other employees or within top management group. These studies tend to describe whatever inconsistencies and subcultural differences they find. Thus, inconsistency, subcultural consensus, and subcultural clarity are the hallmark characteristics of differentiation research.

Some people consider that the studies conducted using a differentiation perspective produce much more intelligible and hence more enriching interpretations than those conducted using the integrationist framework. According to Martin (1992), the integrationist perspective, including the managerially oriented and popularized culture writings (e.g., Ouchi 1981; Deal & Kennedy 1982; Pascale & Athos 1982), tend to depict culture as an internally consistent package of cultural manifestations that generates organization-wide consensus, usually around some set of shared values. Aspects of change and reform in organizations are seen as an embodiment of organization-wide cultural transformation, whereby an old unity is and can be replaced, hopefully by a new one. The major themes in this integrationist framework have been noted as the management of meaning and the various practices and devices — language, ritual, myth, story, legend, narrative,

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etc. — through which “managers attempt to bring off acceptable definitions of organizational reality as a basis for collective action and change” (Reed 1992). Another key characteristic of the integrationist perspective of culture is its tendency to subscribe to a functionalist interpretation of culture. Writings in this genre reify and conceptualize culture as possessing attributes of a benign panacea with properties that lend themselves to become pliable at will by managers of meaning. Coupled with a functionalist treatment of culture as a tool, the bundle of related concepts are also squashed into operationalizable variables in quantitative studies of culture. The differentiationist perspective, however, has evolved a critique or an assortment of theories of organizations, which oppose the scientification of the cultural theory of organizations. These critiques share a determination to “restore what rationalization has attempted to remove practically, and what normal science attempts to obscure theoretically: those human characteristics of organization which escape calculation — human affectivity” (Marsden & Townley 1996: 667). This bifurcation of cultural research into differentiationist and integrationist camps is seen as a result of the differentiationist camp’s resistance against its opponent — the ruling integrationist, positivist approach to organization theory and culture. In this sense, the character of the legacy of organizational culture is similar to that of the legacy of organization studies. Both the larger field of organization studies and the sub-field of organizational culture are inflicted with battles fought in the name of epistemological and ontological triumphs. Both terrains are inflicted by dynamics originating from the inside and as a result of the chasm between functionalist and anti-functionalist assumptions. Within the organizational culture research community, these two orientations are transformed into two broad categories which may be conveniently called an integrationist research group and a differentiationist research group. The bottom-line of the integrationist group is that pragmatism, certainty, rationality, homogeneity, harmony, and a unified culture are the order of things — they are achievable and something to strive for. A narrative or mastercode of modernity, rationalism and functionalism is the essential ingredient in the subjectposition of that discourse. The differentiation perspective of culture, and the more sociologically oriented cultural investigations within it, level criticism at the integrationists’ “social engineering” and “value management” treatment of culture. Differentionists argue that the existence of dissent and ambiguities, conflicts and confusion in organizations, the workers’ passionate engagement (or disengagement) in work is backgrounded and rendered a counter-language by and in the mainstream integrationist literature.3 In the next part, I unpack the concepts contained in the discourse theory of Foucault. From there, in the next three chapters, I take a more detailed journey into the “making up” of culture, by first looking at the concept in Chapter 3, as it has been used in the contexts of the social and human sciences. In Chapter 4, I


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return to consider the issues arising from adopting a postmodern discourse theory perspective, before I proceed to analyze in more detail in Chapter 5, what examining the culture phenomenon from the perspectives of Foucault may hold for us.

Discourse Theory of Organizational Analysis The advantage of this approach is its versatility and effectiveness in probing the issues of subject/object relationships, the historical, regulative patterns of social construction and the production of expertise knowledge. In many cases, analyses using this approach have produced highly satisfactory, intelligible interpretations. Examples include an exploration into the generative principles of a number of organizational processes including industrial relations (Knights & Willmott 1985), executive management (McKinlay & Starkey 1998), strategic management (Knights & Morgan 1991), aspects of human resource management (Townley 1994, 1997; Findlay & Newton 1998), management control (Robson & Cooper 1989), and self and identity formation at work (Casey 1995). These studies have used Foucault’s ideas of discourse to take account of the complex intricacies of social relations that enable discursive formations. Townley (1994) engages Foucault’s double valence of subject/object duality and their connection with knowledge and discourse: For Foucault, individuals are constructed and known through being made an “object” of knowledge and a target of power. Or they may be constituted as subject, that is, tied to a particular concept of subjectivity, so that they come to see themselves, and be seen in a particular way. (T)he general theme of his research has been “how human beings constitute themselves as subjects and how they treat one another as objects” and to “detail the modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects” (Townley 1994: 12, citing Foucault 1983: 209; italics mine).

“Knowing” and “constructing” are crucial components in the generic term “discourse”; and a discourse, following Foucault, produces both subjects and objects (Fairclough 1992: 41). Admittedly, this constructionist view targets, so to speak, the “individual” or the body as an object pliable for scheming and intervention. Discursive formations, Foucault and his followers assert, “make up” the individual as subject, as a particular sort of person whose structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity are consistent with the conceptions appertaining to that discursive formation (Hacking 1986; Rose 1990; du Gay 1996a, 1997). Hence, the medical gaze pioneered the gestalt shift towards the body as a mapable embodiment of diseases, and psychiatry and juridical-moral principles provided plausible grounds for asserting the “dangerous individual”.4 It is clear that a discourse and discursive activities rely upon a “construction-

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ist mode of representation” (Hall 1997: 61). As Hall puts it, for a discourse to “work”, the discourse has to produce the subject and to define the subjectpositions from which knowledge proceeds. This constructionist mode of representation works by developing a language for “depicting a certain domain that claims both to capture the nature of the “reality” represented and, literally, to “represent” that reality in a form suitable for deliberation, argumentation, scheming and intervention” (du Gay 1996a: 54). Chia (1994) illustrates how the discourse of decision theories accomplishes these ends that du Gay (1996a) talks about. According to Chia (1994), the decision-theory discourse is essentially modernist and Cartesian, based on an “ontology of being”. This means that the organizational process of decision-making is portrayed in static terms. Chia (1994) argues that what gets promulgated are socially orchestrated definitions, models and vocabularies of decision-making that conceive of the process in discrete, static and sequential terms. The “emergence” of and the putting in place of the meanings of decision-making rely on a complex set of contingent events through and against which the concept solidifies its scheme of significations. Specifically, Simon (1997) has identified three phases that he claims define the decisionmaking activity: Finding occasions for making a decision; finding the possible course of action; and choosing among courses of action. These three activities account for quite different fractions of the time budgets of executives (Simon 1997: 1).

This well-known classical depiction of decision-making represents the process of decision-making as “intentional, consequential and optimizing” (March 1988), and, what is more, it sensitizes managers to their very experience of themselves as certain sorts of persons — as busy executives with capacities of deliberation, choice and actions. The sheer experience of ourselves as certain types of persons, according to Rose (1996: 132), is “the outcome of a range of human technologies, or hybrid assemblages of knowledge, instruments, persons, systems of judgement, buildings and spaces that take modes of being human as their object”. These human technologies are underpinned at the programmatic level by certain presuppositions about, and objectives for, human beings. In other words, a discourse of decision-making is a kind of human technology that presupposes the functions of the executive. The decision discourse suggests strongly a kind of managerial reality, posited by a perceived need for tight patterns and for increased influence and control over discrete organizational processes and uncertain external environmental events. The appearance of middle range theories of decision-making have responded, albeit serendipitously, in the last several decades, to this “need”. Chia (1994) suggests that a discourse always already elevates us to a privileged “observatory” and “God’s eye” view with subject-position. A discourse of decision-making becomes an “invention” (Chia 1994) enabling a step-wise process. The body


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becomes the tactile referent of the discourse. The analysis of decision theory in Chia (1994) perceptively illustrates this enabling capacity of discursive formation. There are disadvantages of the discourse theory, as perceived by its critics. This alternative of “doing” organization studies in many ways is criticized as relativistic because what counts as real and knowable relies on, or is determined by, the discursive framework that is chosen and the conceptual system in operation. This admittedly foregrounds power-relations that are considered to exist. This touches upon the notion of power as the cardinal explanan, or explanatory framework, for vexing issues embedded in discursive formations. While subscribing to a constructionist mode of representation, discourse theory operationalizes genealogy, which, I argue in this book, is an ethical showing, through exemplarity, of empirical analyses to reconstruct guerrilla, whiggish histories that provide quizzical problematization of the foundations of organization theory. I shall discuss these in the last two chapters of this book. By problematizing the tenets of organization theory, the discourse perspective disquiets hegemonic claims to knowledge (epistemology) and assumptions about the objects the discipline professes to study (ontology). It is proposed that critique in organization studies has to shift from abiding by a set of modernist assumptions to anticipating critical construction of a vicariously postmodern attitude (Hassard 1993, 1994; Chia 1996; Boje, Gephart & Thatchenkery 1996). The key concern is the underlying power/knowledge or set of conditions that permit and legitimate certain particular claims to truth and, in this sense, the spirit is postmodern. With this discussion, I seek to bring to bear “discourse theory” over a single, specific arena within organization studies: organizational culture. This focus generates analyses and discussion that will fill the gap in the literature along two lines: a. b.

examination of organization and culture as discourses enabling new subjectivities and new subjects; and analysis of power and how a genealogy of its capillary actions illuminates the current conditions of organization studies.

It is believed that this line of analysis will contribute to the current research agenda convened by the postmodern approach to organization studies (Cooper & Burrell 1988; Calás & Smircich 1999) and critical management studies (Fournier & Grey 2000). The merits and disadvantages of these approaches will be examined in Chapter 4, but in the next chapter, let us examine the etymology of culture and its roles in social sciences.

Chapter 3 Critically Representing Culture Concepts are the ultimate form of panopticon. Concepts inscribe their marks upon the body of the literature and in the process of marking with cuts and incisions, they leave behind a trail of lesions behind which all can follow. The deeper cuts are those which make the biggest impression upon those that read off the significance of the author’s remarks for themselves. Gibson Burrell Pandemonium (1997)

Concepts and Representations In the last chapter, it was pointed out how discursive practices have infused prescripted meanings into organization theory. It was also suggested that this prescriptedness is an embodiment of a number of basic assumptions about the aims and purposes of organization theory. Those assumptions reflect the internal development of organization theory that identifies with the diffusion of instrumental reason (Horkheimer 1947), functional rationality (Mannheim 1940), and performativity (Lyotard 1984). This is in the sense that aspects of organization theory appertain to represent a concept like culture in a technical-rational manner as a tool that mediates and intervenes the organizing processes. Within some factions of organization theory, there is a tendency to emphasize structuralfunctionalist interpretations of organizational phenomena and to study the impersonal efficiency of input/output within organization systems (for example, Davis 1984; Deal & Kennedy 1982; Denison 1990; Drennan 1992; Williams, Dobson & Walters 1993; Egan 1994). These overriding emphases on rationality, purposes, functions and performativity begin to limit concepts within their specific domains. The extent of this pervasive Zeitgeist is germane to a proliferation of some of the discursive formations of culture in the disciplines of cultural studies, social anthropology, sociology, and organization studies. This chapter examines the limits of the concept of culture. The first part shows the struggles over discursive space for particular versions of culture.

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Secondly, the ways culture is used in the European languages are examined. I trace the genesis of culture in its etymology and applications in the Anglo-Saxon world. In another part, the implications of culture are examined within the contexts of anthropology and sociology to trace its roots. The definition and application of culture in anthropology and sociology and its transference from its two indigenous disciplines to organization theory will also be examined. There are as many definitions of culture as there are different contexts in which culture serves as a powerful concept. A continual concern within the social science disciplines is the uses and meanings of the term, which are very complex and divergent. Some people feel it becomes impracticable to seek out a fully satisfactory definition. For instance, the entry “culture” in the Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Sociology (1983) contains this comment: Too often the expression (culture) in practice means no more than a general residuary predisposition for a particular population to think and act in certain illdefined ways and is invoked to explain anything left unexplained by other, more precisely defined, variables. In such contexts it is idle to look for consistency or rigor (ibid.: 75).

The concept of culture has been used in the social sciences, especially in cultural studies, social anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and organization studies, to describe many different things, and there is little consensus as to what the concept does and should mean in those disciplines. The recent work of Burrell (1996, 1997) argues that desire, will to knowledge and politics of representations are at play in formations of concepts. Burrell (1997) draws our attention to the history of creation of stasis — the holding of live objects steady so that they might be better examined anatomically. He considers that the creation of stasis is analogous to the organization theorists’ efforts of capturing the moving dynamics of organizations, and submitting these fleeting and mobile elements of organizational life to conceptualization, representation and intervention. By invoking the metaphor of anatomizing stasis, Burrell invites us to experience, in my view, the brutality of representation that suppresses the dynamic and unrepeatable aspects of organizational life. Burrell continues: By classifying and marking their victims, concepts perform an imprisoning act of considerable sophistication. But much more than incarceration takes place. Once immobilized, the body of thought becomes subject to inscription. Concepts inscribe their marks upon the body of the literature and in the process of marking with cuts and incisions, they leave behind a trail of lesions behind which all can follow. The deeper cuts are those which make the biggest impression upon those that read off the significance of the author’s remarks for themselves (Burrell 1997: 19).

Culture’s submission to representation and inscription has a checkered history in organization studies. The trails of the lesions reveal these “cuttings” of the body of

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thought as they seal their inscriptions in the body of literature of organization theory. One of Foucault’s mentors, Georges Canguilheim holds the view that whether any practice of representation can successfully make certain definitions of a concept “stick” depends upon how well that definition is able to articulate and formulate a set of problems to which the concept can be directed to apply (Canguilheim 1991). Concepts are not words: a concept may be stated in different ways by using different words. For Canguilheim, being able to formulate a concept within a given field of knowledge means being able to define a problem: the problem must be capable of being formulated. In Foucault’s view, a representational practice constitutes jostling for a discursive space; representation includes certain aspects that are favored and concurrently it marginalizes and excludes others. To “talk about” and to re-present culture, in one or more sites, is to enter a language game that licenses some theoretical moves and not others (Daudi 1990). The dual movement of inclusion/exclusion is at the nexus of representation and is central to the production and superimposition of meanings over any concept (Westwood 1987; Daudi 1990). Research protocols have also steadily developed into self-policing institutions that distinguish between what is decorous and what is gauche in “knowing” culture.5 A self-reflexive practice or a critical mode of questioning that suspends judgement and sensitizes the desire and contest over meanings is suggested here. In this regard, Street (1993: 25) points out that the task of studying culture is “not of finding and then accepting its definitions but of discovering how and what definitions are made, under what circumstances and for what reasons”. One should refrain from engaging with an essentialist (con)struction of categories and definitions of culture; instead, one should become more self-reflexive and think of culture as a verb and that is, according to Street, “an active process of meaning making and contest over definition, including its own definitions”. A processual view of culture should be used to focus on reconstructing “micro-historical cases of cultural discourse in action” (ibid.: 25). Conceptualization of culture in organization theory is one of the notions of and for stasis through which “the mobile, the dynamic, the restless are forced to offer themselves up unto the gaze of the observer” (Burrell 1997: 19). This view also echoes Foucault’s and Canguilheim’s assessment of the abrasive desires that are bottled up in any concept and knowledge. Foucault rightfully comes across as most sober in his adamant remark that knowledge is not made for understanding — it is made for “cutting” (Foucault 1977a: 154). In the next part, the etymology of “culture” delimits the ways in which the will to knowledge operates to define the concepts and ideas related to culture.

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Etymology of Culture Raymond Williams remarked in his Key words (1976) that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. Williams reviewed the uses of the word “culture” over history and the divergence in contexts and meanings in its various applications. According to Williams, in the sixteenth century “culture” had been used, in English and in other European languages, as a noun of process: i.e., the tending or rearing of crops or animals. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records culture as “the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, and husbandry”. The French word for culture was incorporated into German, spelled first as Cultur and then later as Kultur.6 The independent noun “culture” referring to a general process or to a product of such a process, was shown as a transference of “cultivation” to the human mind or character. This is shown in quotes, which Williams has spotted, in the writings by English philosophers in the seventeenth century: Thus More (undated): “to the culture and profit of their minds”; Bacon (1605): “the culture and manurance of minds”; Hobbes (1651): “a culture of their minds” (Williams 1976: 87).

In the evolution of the use of the term in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, interestingly, the sense of tending of natural growth of crops and plants was extended to the sense of a process of human development. As the uses of the term evolved further, a degree of habituation to the metaphor “culture” began to accentuate even more directly the sense of human tending. As Thompson (1990) points out, in English and in French the uses of the words “culture” and “civilization” overlapped. Both were used increasingly to describe a general process of human development, of becoming “cultivated” or “civilized” (Thompson 1990: 124). This was in the sense that “culture” began to be used as a synonym for the word “civilization”, which was derived from the Latin word civilis, meaning of or belonging to citizens. The term civilization was used in English and in French in the late eighteenth century to describe a progressive process of human development, a movement towards refinement and away from barbarism and savagery. Another entry in the Oxford English Dictionary on culture describes culture as “cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners etc.)”, and the “improvement or refinement by education and training”. The implicit meaning of human tending in the word “culture”, as it was understood in Continental Europe, had been investigated by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose treatise on culture appeared as a recurrent theme in at least three of his works (i.e. Bauman 1987, 1989, 1992). Bauman (1987) suggested that the notion of human tending in “culture” was linked with the public discourse of social control around the time of the Age of the Enlightenment. At that time, absolute states were effectively controlled by monarchs, officials, aristocrats and


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social thinkers who formed an exclusive and elite ruling class separate from the common citizens. The majority within the population who were freed from serfdom were felt to pose an uneasy “threat among the powerful and the wealthy people who experienced the presence of masterless people” (Bauman 1987: 74). These “crowds and mobs” were not unusually problematized as “an unruly force and seed of rebellion” (ibid.: 77).7 Advisors to the monarchs, social thinkers and philosophers were thought to have promulgated a discourse of social order “grounded in the pastoral power of the enlightened despot, or the ‘legislators’, over the individuals”. Such a discourse pertained to a rationale based on the use of reason, discipline, and an application of surveillance-based technologies that “render the conduct of les classes dangereuses manageable, predictable, and thus harmless” (ibid.: 76). In spite of the historical legacies, the aristocracy was buttressed by a long tradition, and so the moral basis of their proselytic discourse was hardly challenged in an open fashion as might be the case nowadays. Bauman’s idea can also be compared with Foucault’s embellishment of pastoral power, which the latter considers to be a form of governmental technique whose lineage descends from the theme of the “art of government” in the midsixteenth century. Pastoral power, according to Foucault (1991), can be considered as a form of rational intervention that is central to modern “governmental” techniques or the efficient management of the population and the manipulation of “men”. Together with the more diffusive idea of the “police”, the theme of “pastorship”, prevalent at the time in Catholic Europe, connects up with Foucault’s notion of governmentality.8 Pastorship is also a form of individualizing power in the sense that individuals are socialized, under a Christian tradition of pastorship, to submit themselves to a whole gamut of apparatuses of self-examination, ascetic renunciation of the world and oneself, confession, guidance and obedience. According to the analysis of McNay (1994), pastorship, as a relation between the shepherd (or the king or the leader) and his flock has undergone subtle transformation, under Christianity, from a relation of obedience to a relation of absolute individual dependence. Pastorship partakes of the requirements of absolute individual dependence, knowledge of oneself, as well as confession and submission to someone else. McNay (1994) has pointed out that it is the Christian notion of pastoral power that, during the course of the eighteenth century, is assimilated into the governmental apparatuses of security. A derivative of pastorship and pastoral power is the technique of the confessional, which is seen by Foucault as one of the fundamental regulatory techniques in contemporary arts of government. Returning to Bauman, he considers that the idea of culture was used by postEnlightenment French social thinkers in public discourse as “a name of an

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activity, of something some people were doing, or exhorted to do, to others — much as a farmer cultivated his plants to ennoble the seeds and enrich the crop” (Bauman 1992: 8). An interesting image conjured by the cardinal precept of culture is that of human tending, or a metaphor of the gardener weeding out “unruly crops”, or the gamekeeper ferreting out the rats and rabbits from the burrows. The contemporary manager, re-imaged as the gardener/farmer and the gamekeeper, partakes in tending an organizational garden wherein his employees are sometimes vicariously treated as the “crop”. Culture, as human tending, has always had, as part of its basic tenets, a hidden agenda and a nether side. It is to this domain that we now turn. Through the unravelling of the etymology of culture and aspects of the history of the uses of the word that it comes to seem that there is a subtle connection between the notion of human tending and the deep-seated desire of management, driven by its self interest, to extract and exploit workers’ co-operation, compliance, and commitment through an appeal to enculturation of organizational values and norms. The ethos of enculturation initiatives within work organizations is a sociological condition, not an ontological given.9 Tendetiously construed, the notion of “human tending’s” subsequent development into an organization’s esprit de corp becomes knowledge-products that cater to the widely perceived necessity among agents of management for a tool and solution that could be used to shape and control workers’ attitudes and sentiments. A desire to know culture is a desire driven by self-interest to appropriate and to define culture as a management tool. Foucault’s interpretation of the Nietzschean notion of the will to knowledge posits that knowledge is produced on a stage where the elements of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, and the will to appropriate struggle against each other.10 Paraphrasing Foucault’s Orders of Discourse (1971), the will to appropriate, the will to knowledge and truth operate like “a system of exclusion” (op. cit.: 10), by relying on “institutional support and distribution”. This means that knowledge is governed by a network of power relations and an apparatus (le dispositif) of heterogeneous discursive and non-discursive practices that enact and construct meanings. The will to represent culture is reinforced and accompanied by nondiscursive practices such as pedagogy (business schools, hero managers, and management gurus), and more profoundly by discursive practices through the “manner which knowledge is applied in a society, the way in which it is exploited, divided and attributed” (Foucault 1971: 11). The proliferation and dissemination of organizational culture in academe and in the corporate world of business is supported by those “strata of institutions and discursive practices” (Foucault 1977c). The epistemological grammar here is to “delimit a field of objects, define a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and fix the norms for elabora-


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tion of concepts and theories” (Foucault 1977c: 199). The capillary action of power manifests itself in “interested” desire by corporations and their management that direct the notion of “human tending” and domestication of culture. These agendas are deeply embedded, as a brief survey of Western management history shows, in its employment relations and in the rhetoric of contemporary human resource management (see for example, Legge 1989, 1995a, 1995b) below will show. Contemporary managers and their historical counterparts endorse basic assumptions about the nether side of human nature. In the two parallel cases of eighteenth century social thinkers and contemporary owner-managers, their assumptions about and views towards the so-called dangerous class and their workers arguably bear very close qualitative similarities. There are subtle similarities in their assumptions about the perceived dark side of human nature, especially those negative aspects attributed to the workers from lower-middle and lower classes in their respective societies. These assumptions are partially reflected in historical aspects of employment relations from 1750 to the 1980s. The following section sketches a summary of these assumptions. The confrontational and adversarial relationships between management and workers goes a long way back to late eighteenth-century industrial England. This period was characterized by acts of legitimizing harsh discipline, coercive shopfloor practices, and even draconian measures in the forms of threats of physical violence. American management historian Daniel Wren succinctly documents this early phase of English and American management history. Wren (1994) explains that in the past there had been good causes for owner-managers to rely on coercion as a tool for securing worker compliance. At least in the early days of the Industrial Revolution in the U.K., workers’ discipline and their compliance seemed to present a common set of problems to many factory owners. According to Wren, during the Industrial Revolution, there were episodes between 1753– 1812 in which workers resisted labor-saving machines that they believed might make them redundant. Some of them sabotaged their employers’ equipment to demonstrate their dissatisfaction towards falling wages, rampant unemployment, and rising food prices. Machine smashing was part of a sporadic and disorganized counter-culture known as the Luddite movement which culminated in the years 1811–12 in Northern England where some of the protesters were later subject to disciplinary efforts including the draconian punishment of death by hanging. Variations of that dramatic version of overt management-labor conflict and mutual antagonism had been domesticated over the years. This was in the sense that control over recalcitrant or unpredictable individuals had been facilitated by the development and use of more rational micro-technologies to effect changes in the structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity (Tully 1999). Those micro-technologies emphasized normative control and aimed to appeal to moral

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involvement and commitment of workers (Barley & Kunda 1992; Rose 1990; Legge 1995a; du Gay 1996a) by interpellating and constructing new personhood (Butler 1997). In his review of the perspectives of motivation, discipline, and control of workers since the Industrial Revolution, Wren expresses the opinion that the efforts to motivate the working class in industrial organizations have, “on close inspection, appeared to have changed only in application, not theory, up to the present day” (1994: 43). Wren argues that motivation, discipline, and control are closely related and that efforts “to motivate people fell into three categories, which included the offering of positive inducements (the carrot), negative sanctions (the stick), and efforts to build a new factory ethos” (ibid.). That last notion is very close to the idea of what is referred to as the cultivation of an esprit de corps or corporate culture in strands of the literature nowadays. In contemporary management discourse, there seems to be a prevalent adoption of the rhetoric of control that operates under a “normative” mode (Barley & Kunda 1992; Salaman 1997). Normative is in the sense that a new psychological image of man at work is to be shaped in the name of an organizational culture project that makes use of techniques and expertise that enable a productive subjectivity (Rose 1990). This rhetoric of control may be coupled with new vocabularies of team-work, quality consciousness, flexibility, quality circles, learning organizations, which reconcile the normative and autonomous aspirations of the employees with the collective entrepreneurialism of the “culture” of organizations (Salaman 1997). According to Rose (1990), there are aspects of the culture management project that entail devices of adjustment of self-images, the remodelling of modes of self presentation by restyling behaviour, speech and vocabulary. They promised to improve both personal and company performance. They chimed with cultural images of autonomous and self-motivated individuality;…(these devices) were attractive to the individuals for they promised them a better self. Key elements from these new technologies for the management of productive subjectivity were to be promoted … (W)ith the rapprochement of the self-actualization of the worker and the competitive advancement of the company, the new psycho-technology of work comes into alignment with the new psycho-technology of subjectivity (Rose 1990: 116–17).

Hope is invested in normative rhetoric and shaping of productive subjectivity largely because of a perception of, and even a belief in, the factual viability of management of and by culture. Expert knowledge (psycho-technological and managerial) is translated into comprehensible prescriptions; they empower the managers to strive to a level of personal effectiveness that can regulate workers by attending not only to their comportment but also to their thoughts and emotions. Management is to work on the ego of the worker itself. To paraphrase Barley and Kunda (1992), the human relations movement and the culture move-


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ment ultimately pertain to winning the “hearts and minds” of the workforce (Peters & Waterman 1982), and hence managers could achieve the most subtle of all forms of control, i.e., what Anthony (1977) has analyzed extensively as “moral authority”. The belief that managers could secure compliance by tools and solutions that can shape workers’ attitudes and sentiments has provided the impetus to the human relations and culture movements in work organizations. Such a will to invest a teleological purpose in organizational culture as a management tool has given rise to the dispossession of a free body of thought about culture. In anthropology, the well-known remarks by Clifford Geertz about culture have been uplifted and massaged to be transformed into a bundle of impressive concepts that are popularly applied in organization theory, with significant implications for both good and bad. In sociology, the structural-functional school of thought becomes the overarching approach used to apprehend culture because the ideological content of that paradigm chimes with that of the managerialist paradigm of performative administrative theories. It is to this tissue of culture’s legacy in the two social science disciplines that we now turn.

Genesis of Culture Studies of organizations and management have been enthusiastically attributing the culture concept to anthropological and sociological sources. In that process of transfer, there are some positive outcomes, which are the generation of new hypotheses and the advancement of knowledge. Less desirable, though, are organization theorists who have expropriated the concepts of culture and formed their own agenda as to what those concepts can do in the service of administrative theory. In the next two parts, we first unravel the influence of social anthropology, especially that of the writings of Clifford Geertz and his “interpretive perspective” on organizational analysis of culture. The second part examines the consequences of functionalist sociology and its influence on the development of the practitioner, integrationist stream of corporate culture. Culture represented in anthropological writings In much fashionable research on culture it has been, and still is, very popular to cite the works of Clifford Geertz. A citation analysis in Ouchi and Wilkins (1985) found that Geertz (1973) had been cited in ten out of thirty-two articles on organizational culture published in the watershed year of 1983.11 Geertz’s ideas on culture are popularly referred to as the “interpretive school” and there are several implications of conceding to his views.

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First the term culture in social anthropology refers to a shared set of beliefs over issues of societal significance such as life, death, kinship relations, religion and ethnicity of a people. Geertz (1966) has pointed out that the narrower ranges of variation in behavior patterns among lower animals are given to them with their physical structure. These behavior patterns are in turn governed by their closed and fixed central nervous systems and genetic programming that ensure they behave in relatively predictable ways — spiders build webs and orioles build nests. But man (sic) has a relatively open nervous system that permits individuals to behave in many different ways. Geertz accepts that the innate nature of man has provided him with only “crude and general response capacities, hence the effectiveness of man’s behavior is very much less precisely regulated” (1966). Because human behavior is less specifically regulated by genetic sources of (in)formation, Geertz calls this condition “living in an ‘information gap’ — between what our body tells us and what we have to know in order to function”. According to Geertz, there is a vacuum we must fill ourselves, and we fill it with information provided by our culture. Geertz has suggested that culture could best be seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns — customs, usage, tradition, habit clusters — but as a set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules and instructions for the governing of behavior. Throughout human history, cultures have provided much of the additional guidance needed for human beings to survive, adapt, and achieve. For what the genetic code does not provide, human beings have, to some degree, developed cultural codes. These codes are open to interpretation and it is these meanings that Geertz is concerned with examining through his interpretive approach. The strength of the interpretive approach is in interpretation and hence understanding. The interpretive school considers that culture is best interpreted and held sustainable through threshing out meanings and semiotic structures in any given cultural context. The basic tenet, according to Geertz, is to make sense of templates of ideas that members of the culture themselves construct and then use to think about their world. Geertz believes that the work of the anthropologist is to appreciate what import, or meaning, a culture has. Geertz’s insistence is on a semiotic approach in search of the “repetitive, interpretive structures that infuse a culture’s everyday life” (Geertz 1973). A semiotic analysis apprehends culture though the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artefacts. Such an analysis requires a process originated by Gilbert Ryle, known as thick description. Geertz keeps his analyses on concrete social events and occasions — the public world of common life. The general strategy is to observe a sequence of relevant, empirical events in detail from a number of perspectives. From these descriptions, a researcher is then able to precipitate out recurrent meanings. Through thick description, the interpretive approach to culture seeks to understand and to interpret “what is going on”.


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Epistemology of culture, according to Geertz, entails uncovering the variability and pliability of cultures by careful observation and interpretation. By acquiescing to the epistemological assumptions of the interpretive school, it has to be accepted that the knowledge generated is predicated upon eventual understanding and interpretation (verstehen) of culture, and not to prediction and explanation (erklaren) of culture. However, in a number of reviews by social anthropologists (e.g., Helmers 1991; Hamada & Sibley 1994; Wright 1994), it is pointed out that practitioners of organization theory have done injustice to the notion of culture by ignoring this important attribute of the interpretive paradigm of culture. Helmers (1991) and Wright (1994) have generally criticized the inappropriate transposing of culture from anthropology to organization theory. Wright (1994) comments that in strands of the organizational culture literature the familiar concepts related to culture (i.e., rituals, myths, taboos, and symbols) have been “used in disconcertingly unrecognizable ways” (Wright 1994: 2). Helmers, a researcher in organizational anthropology, appraises that the displacement or borrowing of terms from anthropology to organization studies has produced unsatisfactory results: Instead of using terms in their anthropological sense, many organizational researchers follow their everyday understanding and thus often fail to make use of the full descriptive power. The displacement is still far from being satisfying (Helmers 1991: 65).

An adequate and satisfying displacement or borrowing of a concept from its home discipline to another, according to Schon (1963), entails a four-step process of continual refinement of the concepts to be displaced until the specific meaning(s), and what is hoped to be accomplished by their use in the new context, can be summarized as follows: Transposition. This beginning, whereby the old concept is transposed to the new situation, is the point at which most of the “playfulness” enters the process. The “as if” nature of a metaphor such as culture will suggest a variety of new and intriguing ways of looking at a unit of analysis such as an organization. Interpretation. Seeing possible new interpretations leads to the displaced concept being assigned to some aspect of the new situation and examined for suitability. This probably is where most current organizational research using the culture metaphor is now. The concept of culture is being assigned a particular role, or place, in organizational research. Agreement on this place is not universal, though. Correction. This means a mutual adaptation between the old and the new, including mutual modifications. In this step, the metaphor becomes widely used and expanded. The theorist/researcher learns which associated concepts may be transposed along with it and how these should be modified. Spelling out. This final stage is an attempt to make the metaphor explicit and to set

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forth as exactly as possible what it means in its new context and what is hoped to be accomplished by its use. Schon cautions that this process is never complete. To date, these criteria, and especially the last one suggested by Schon, seem unmet in organizational culture research because definitions of “culture” remain relatively fuzzy and not explicitly spelled out in organization theory. It has been pointed out that aspects of the organizational literature, especially those of the corporate culture genre, have inappropriately transposed culture and its kindred notions like ritual, myth, and taboo in such ways that they no longer convey the original meanings they hold in anthropology (Helmers 1991).12 The biggest misunderstanding of all these authors is in believing that culture, as used as an attribute of societies, can be treated as if it were culture as used as an attribute of organizations. This genre permissively identifies culture with the sociological notions of “consensus” and “shared meanings”. When they use the term culture, they treat it as synonymous with consensus and shared meanings. Social anthropologist Susan Wright accounts for this permissive and free association in which corporate culture is: equated with a vision statement, implemented from the top of the organization with the aim of drawing into it the informal structures of different departments and levels. Techniques are developed to self-identify these informal cultures and reflect on their difference from the corporate culture with a view of bringing them into line. “Strength” is equated with “coherence”, the new word for consensus (Wright 1994: 23–4).

Alvesson (1993) and Anthony (1994) have pointed out that the corporate culture writers presume a direct causal link between “strong” culture and its perceived “effect” on worker coherence.13 According to this reasoning, by maintaining the workers’ coherence through paying attention to the social and human aspects of “organizing”, an increase in the level of performance, effectiveness and productivity on the part of workers could be sustained. This linear reasoning appeals to simplicity, to directness, and to people’s intuition. However, this reasoning has been pointed out by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) to be a pseudosyllogism whose premises do not follow in a convincing manner from one another.14 Organization theorists articulate their assertions about culture based largely on a structural-functionalist interpretation of that concept (Willmott 1993). The audience is given to accept that culture is a variable, cast in terms applied in a typical input-output relationship within work organizations. The consenting managers are also given to accept that culture is a means and one of the inputs to facilitate and to serve the ends of the moral control of workers. Meek (1988: 455) has pointed out the influence of structural-functional discourse on organization studies. Culture, according to anthropologist Lynn Meek, is treated as a component of a social system that includes social structures for maintaining an orderly social life. That social system also includes adaptation


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mechanisms for maintaining the society’s equilibrium with its physical environment. Translating this presumption into the language of administrative theories, the micro-system called the organization should also possess the kind of adaptation mechanism like culture acting as “managerial tools which managers can use to direct and influence their organizations” (Schwartz & Davis 1981). A structural-functional interpretation of culture treats culture as a variable that can be conveniently latched onto a prescriptive success formula. This use of a structuralfunctionalist interpretation of culture by factions of the organization theory community has a significant effect on how textbooks represent the idea of culture. Huczynski (1993) and Watson (1994) have alluded to the explanation that a structural-functional interpretation of culture appeals to the intuition of managers who long for certainty, predictability of events, and control of workers. It is argued that the widespread popularity of such a structural-functional characterization of culture is attributed to a misconstrual of the well-known Geertzian notion of the “web of significance”, which has been indexed explicitly or implicitly in the ten citations within the articles on organizational culture published in the watershed year of 1983. A much-quoted passage from Geertz (1973) has been expropriated and exploited by some organizational culture writers to add weight to their own claims about culture: The concept of culture I espouse [....] is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in the webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning (Geertz 1973: 5).

The irony is that by citing and referencing this statement made by Geertz, these authors are able to gain its support in their construal of the bundle of ideas about culture, and hence, discursively, make their own version of culture “stick”. It is argued that the “web” features of culture are figuratively construed by OB textbooks, and the corporate culture genre of writings (those throughout the 1980s and 1990s) as “a system of shared meanings held by members that distinguishes [a particular] organization from other organizations” (Robbins, 2000: 340; see also quotes from Drennan 1992; William, Dobson & Walters 1993 below). Some of these definitions of culture, however, reflect their overreliance on the psedosyllogism pointed out by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988): Culture is a pattern of beliefs and expectations shared by the organization’s members. These beliefs and expectations produce norms that powerfully shape the behaviour of individuals and groups in the organization (Schwartz & Davis 1981: 33). Culture is the set of important understandings (often unstated) that members of a community share in common (Sathe 1983: 6).

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And over the decade of the 1980s, the tenor of these positions has not changed: Culture refers to the underlying values, beliefs, and principles that serve as a foundation for an organization’s management system as well as the set of management practices and behaviours that both exemplify and reinforce those basic principles (Denison 1990: 2). Culture is “how things are done around here”. It is what is typical of the organization, the habits, the prevailing attitudes, the grown-up pattern of accepted and expected behaviour (Drennan 1992: 3). Culture is commonly held and relatively stable beliefs, attitudes and values that exist within an organization (William, Dobson & Walters 1993).

All such conventional ways of defining culture as commonly held beliefs, values and attitudes, and characterizing culture as “a normative system” (Silverzweig and Allen 1976), “a system of shared meaning” (Sathe 1983 1985) or variations of the same theme, though problematic, add to the strength of a culture argument. Summarizing, the early practitioner stream of corporate culture consisting of, for instance, Schwartz and Davis (1981), Peters and Waterman (1982), Sathe (1983, 1985) and Silverzweig & Allen (1986), and many others who follow them have been inspired by aspects of the interpretive tradition of Geertz (1973). However, they have routinely given a structural-functional twist to the anthropological notion of culture, and this discursive sleight of hand has given rise to an avalanche of angled misreadings of the concept. It is to this seam in sociology that we now turn to seek further explanation for the substance of signifying practices that enact contested meanings of culture. Functionalist thinking and the sociological roots of culture Burrell and Morgan, in their well known treatise on sociological paradigms and organizational analysis, have pointed out the pervasiveness of the functionalist paradigm and its significant implications for organization studies. These two authors believe that the functionalist worldview has provided the dominant framework for the conduct of academic sociology and the study of organizations. It represents a perspective which is firmly rooted in the sociology of regulation....characterized by a concern for providing explanations of the status quo, social order, consensus, social integration, solidarity, need satisfaction and actuality (Burrell & Morgan 1979: 25–26).

According to Burrell and Morgan, the principal orientation of the functionalist worldview is that of pragmatism, and its aspiration is to seek to provide rational explanation of social affairs. Knowledge so generated shall be put to use and to provide practical solutions to practical problems. Burrell and Morgan (1979) continue:


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It (functionalism) is usually firmly committed to a philosophy of social engineering as a basis of social change and emphasizes the importance of understanding order, equilibrium, and stability in society and the way in which these can be maintained. It is concerned with the effective regulation and control of social affairs (ibid.: 26).

Knowledge generation in a sociology of regulation is influenced by positive, scientific tradition. The epistemological position of regulative sociology is bolstered by the premises of objective and scientific approaches to the apprehension of social and organizational phenomena. Empiricism promotes the measurement of observable phenomena in order to achieve explanation. An explanation is presented by subsuming the event to be explained under a general law to the effect that this thing always occurs, given a set of initial conditions that pertain to the case to be explained (Burrell & Morgan 1979). Empiricism is a cornerstone of functionalist, regulative sociology; and these are parts of a tradition traceable in the thinking of Durkheim. According to Radcliffe-Brown (1952), Durkheim was the first person to systematically formulate the concept of function and to apply it to the strictly scientific study of society. Radcliffe-Brown specifically recognized that the concept of function was based on an analogy between social life and organic life; and Durkheim borrowed freely from the natural sciences in terms of methods to delineate between “structures” and “functions”. As the term is used here, a social structure is defined as a network of relations between constituent entities, which have a certain continuity; e.g., a formal organization conceptualized in terms of its presumed unitary goals that are also held and internalized by individuals whom the organization employs. As the word “function” is used in biology, the life of an organism is conceived as the functioning of its structure. Hence, according to Radcliffe-Brown, the concept of function involves the notion of a structure consisting of a set of relations amongst unit entities, the continuity of the structure being manifested by a life-process made up of the activities of the constituent units (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 180).

Durkheim’s definition of function of a social institution is the correspondence between it and the needs (or necessary conditions of existence) of the social organism. Social structures and their arrangements remain unchanged, and the process by which this structural continuity is maintained is conceived as the ongoing life of a society. These discursive influences from structural-functional sociology imply that culture is the set of relations that serves function(s) that correspond to the needs of the (social structure of) work organizations. The prime search of administrative and organization theories is for a tool like culture that would be discursively turned into something “of value in everyday affairs” with “practical application” (Hassard 1993: 6). What Meek (1988), Helmers (1991), and Wright (1994) are

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saying is that organization theorists may be driven by functional analyses of culture. Organization theorists belonging to the pragmatic, functionalist OT bent partake in the construal of a relationship between culture and the activities of the constituent units within work organizations. The seam of organization theory that discursively espouses systematic understanding of the totality of the living whole has its origin in structural-functional sociology. Summarizing, the fundamental and substantial influence upon research in contemporary sociology, social theory and organization studies is seen as creating an angled misreading of culture. They borrowed from functionalist sociology the pivotal notion of the “adaptive mechanism” to construe meanings for culture to be used in work organizations. This discursive angle maintains that parts of an organization, their structures, and their other “adaptive mechanisms” like culture function in ways that contribute to the maintenance of that whole organization. Such a view is attributed to Radcliffe-Brown’s school of structural-functional anthropology that the field agrees is influenced, in turn, by the functionalist assumptions of Durkheim. That view presumes a causal link between the “element” of culture and its possible effect on the “element” of workers’ solidarity and, ultimately, their productivity. In conclusion, the prevalence of functionalist interpretations of culture form a network of power relations, or a sanctified ethos that privileges a proliferation of a strand of organizational culture studies (for example, Davis 1984; Denison 1990; Kotter & Heskett 1992) that involve the collection and analyses of quantitative field data. These power relations have coagulated into a self-justifying research preference that proclaims the unique merit of following a structuralfunctionalist argument. This way of attaching to the values and norms of a structural-functional paradigm comes to be known, in Chapter 6 , as forming the “variable” school of culture. This school of research directs theorists who subscribe to its tenet that it is viable to explain organizational effectiveness in terms of the functioning of the “adaptive mechanism” of culture. The studies of this school of culture treat culture as an “adaptive mechanism” and maintain their presumed capacity to maintain equilibrium between an organization’s internal structures and its task environment. This seam of culture discourse appears to have committed yet another angled misreading of the construct. Cast as it is, culture is not merely a construct, it becomes a reified object of analysis: an internal variable, a metaphor. The reification of the construct augments its susceptibility to being perceived as a regulatory mechanism possessing properties popularly thought to be capable of dealing with corporate and organizational ailments. The demerits of a purely functionally driven interpretation of culture are intellectual closure and restrictions. Theory constructions using this worldview produce models of corporate culture as an adaptive mechanism. Culture as a control device assumes a parallel-


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ism between the natural and social world. In the same fashion that scientific investigation seems to yield technologies that can control and direct objects and events in the world, the functionalist worldview assumes there is a possibility of equivalent knowledge in the social domain that can exercise control over social phenomena. In this chapter, it is shown what pre-scripted meanings various disciplines have invested in culture, why that is so, and how (by what means) it is done. An evaluation of the idea of culture in anthropology and sociology sensitizes us to the violence in superimposing pre-scripted meanings in/of culture. Echoing Street (1993), it is stressed that the way forward to apprehend culture may not be just “finding and then accepting its definitions”, but instead it should be “discovering how and what definitions are made, under what circumstances and for what reasons”. The critique developed in the rest of the book examines the interplay of that contest over pre-scripted meanings of culture within organization studies. In Chapter 5, I return to examine the genealogical approach to the analysis of subjectivity and power and the regimes of truth in the discursive formations of organizational culture. Given the postmodern nature of the approaches I develop in the rest of the book, I shall explain the import of postmodernism in the next chapter.

PART II KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 4 Postmodernism and Organization Theory The critical ontology of ourselves…has to be considered as 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. Michel Foucault What is Enlightenment? (1984c)

Counterpoising Postmodernism and its Critiques A critical undoing of the discursive formations of organizational culture makes use of several important notions contained in the works of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s thematics will be discussed fully in the next two chapters, but the implications of postmodernism over these thematics are addressed immediately. This chapter furnishes justifications for Foucauldian thematics by grounding them in the overriding philosophical ethos of an “aesthetics of living” which is seen by May (1995), and to a certain extent, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1986), Cook (1993), Norris (1994), and Simons (1995) as furnishing a “moral theory” for the strands of post-stucturalist thinking in Foucault’s work (May 1995). Since these thematics are commited to a poststructural or anti-representational ethos, they must justify their own warrants in as much as they subject their opponents to their deconstruction. I adopt a counterpoise structure in this chapter: the criticisms of postmodernism appear in parts two and three. In those two parts, I catalogue criticisms levelled against postmodern theories. This takes the form of laying out the objections and reservations against postmodernist perspectives in the two fields of organization analysis and in social theory respectively. This accounts for weaknesses and points out the limitations that a postmodern choice may have. This is followed by a three-tier analysis in the last part entitled “Postmodern ethos of Foucault”, which defends Foucault’s thematics as not mere epistemological posturing. I clarify the significance and ramifications of Foucault’s unique be-

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quest for contemporary epistemology and explain what Foucault means by ontology of the “present” and aesthetics as a form of ethics, morality and resistance.

Postmodernism and Organization Theory This part takes up the criticisms of the influence of postmodernism in the subfield of organization theory, and in another part I examine postmodernism in its larger context of social theory. The criticism against importing postmodernism in organization theory is centred on three key issues. Firstly, postmodern theorists are criticised for their preoccupation with linguistic indeterminacy and linguistic relativism, whereby a fixed system of meanings with/(in) which words, images, and symbols correspond has to give way to an arbitrary, artificial “non-system” of signs that produces and reproduces its own world without reference to reality. This means language (or signifiers) is taken as symbols that are assumed to have no direct referential relationship to the referents, the signified, or objects in the real world. In this way, the postmodernist’s theory of language transforms everything, and most significantly, truth, into a largely linguistic convention. Truth, now becomes “truth claims”, or an effect of discourse, and, to the extent that truth strives to re-present reality, it is, for postmodernists, impossible, fraudulent, and even a “surrogate of terrorism” (Rosenau 1992). Critics point out that the paralysis inflicted by these postmodern assumptions is that it is impossible to say anything definite, hence language and any other means of communication cannot assure truth. Since theory implies knowledge and truth, and truth, at least in modern, conventional organization theory, is theoretical in character, the sad implication is, in the minds of critics, postmodern theorizing activities are unable to and incapable of constructing and producing new knowledge in the modern sense of the word. Secondly, postmodern organization theorists (especially deconstructionists) are criticised for their preoccupation with the “minutiae of everyday life” (Reed 1998), specifically with the exploration of language, meaning, overt and covert intentions in/of what somebody says and/or writes. Such a concentration is construed as delving obsessively into a labyrinth of textual entanglement, and it results in a propagation and deployment of “(textualist) methods that multiply paradox, inventing ever more elaborate repertoire of questions, each of which encourages an infinity of answers, rather than methods that settle on solutions” (Rosenau 1992: 117). The consequence of overly subscribing to this kind of deconstruction, or postmodern critique, is sheer “epistemological posturing” and hence it is a “fatal distraction” of mainstream organization research (Thompson 1993). This is mainly because the “thematic continuities” in mainstream research

POSTMODERNISM AND ORGANIZATION THEORY

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program are unnecessarily confused by what critics call trivial issues of methods and rhetoric and the infinite vexing of questions concerning epistemology (Reed 1985, 1998). Thirdly, postmodern theorists are criticised for their disinterest and incapability to specify mechanisms of action and of change in terms of “wider” issues like structures, systems and organizational design. Postmodern theory, in the view of critics like Best and Kellner (1991: 288), has “problems theorizing macro-structures and seeing how totalizing tendencies, like capitalism and gender and racial oppression, permeate microstructures and the plurality and differences celebrated in the theory”. In the minds of mainstream organizational researchers, this weakness is manifested in the postmodernists’ unclear articulation of solid, viable theoretical framework informing proper, prescriptive organizational research (Pfeffer 1993). The analysis of these criticisms to which we now turn depends upon an investigation of the general critique of postmodernism within organization studies. Let us consider these criticisms directly. In Chapter 1, it is pointed out that dissensus within organization studies is partly attributed to “an internal fragmenting dynamic, deep-seated and inherent in the discipline’s accumulated intellectual heritage” (Reed 1993: 163). This intrusion of postmodernist thinking with its definitive break with modernity, the past, its traditions and foundations has been identified as one of the major internal fragmenting dynamics within organization studies. Such a “discontinuity” or break with tradition has been dismissively criticized as a “fatal distraction” (Thompson 1993) that inexorably pushes in the direction of “plurality, ambiguity, contingency and arbitrariness” (Reed 1993: 164). As noted by Reed (1992), a field of knowledge or any discipline can only be considered as “sufficiently developed” and robust if it is “supported by sufficient rudimentary intellectual structures”. These intellectual structures or prerequisites, according to Reed (1992: 39), consist of a collective of “theoretical and moral preoccupation of organizational theorists, who in turn coalesce to form a field of phenomena which yields problems for investigation”. By those standards, critics would argue that postmodern organization theory is arguably still under-developed. The critics have four justifications for this assertion. Firstly, critics hold that postmodern theorists and some of their claims are self-contradictory; this is reflected in their writings that aim at unleashing a widespread, general “epistemic suspicion” (Rosenau 1992) over other modernist discourses. They are criticized for turning the modern knowing subject or producer of organizational knowledge into a “suspect”, who is viewed as insinuated into his “products” (knowledge). Postmodern theorists argue that one should not believe that the claims by those modernist knowing subjects have created any general categories of explanations that are universally valid representations. For postmodernists, the claims of their modernist counterparts are solely the reflec-

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tions of a particular standpoint subscribed by a particular knowledge producer. The construct of objectivity has “no place” in postmodern organizational discourse, in that it is seen as an en-acted aspect of the dual subject-object position espoused by the positivists, and it is contentious, self-contradicting, suspicious and undesirable. On this point, postmodern theorists are attacked because, while warning of other people’s inconsistency, they reject being held to consistency norms themselves. Non-converts dismissed postmodern reflexivity as being sheer “lens-cleansing” (Linstead 1993), self-reflexive examination, and confessions that only promulgate relativism, solipsism, and nihilism. Postmodern organization theorists’ research progammatics are described as pathetic “babble of squabbling factions which speak different languages and are unable to communicate with each other, (let alone) share any sense of intellectual continuity and community” (Reed 1992: 38). Secondly, postmodernist infiltration in organization theory is criticised as not conducive to forming a “field of phenomena which yields problems of investigation” (Reed 1992). There are several reasons for this false start made by the postmodernists. Thompson (1993: 194) points out that the postmodernist approach overly relies on perspectivism, whereby the “constructs of individuals and groups take precedent over facts or objective truths”. Thompson discounts the value of over-emphasis on the fleeting, the unrepeatable, the local, the neglected, and the un-represented. To the minds of the critics, the throughputs and outcomes of these marginal analyses are skewed towards “local narratives, locked in self-limited space and time, focusing on the perceptions and experiences of particular groupings” (Thompson 1993: 197). Critics within organization theory like Reed (1996, 1998) and Thompson (1993) undermine such a constructionist orientation because, by following such a direction, organizational analysis and the research agenda will gradually drift away from those wider issues like structures, systems, and organizational design towards a concern for process rather than content. Whilst traditional organization theory can claim confidently that it has a number of commonly shared “thematic continuities” that focus on organizational content, these thematic continuities have constituted a “field of phenomena which yields problems for investigation” (Reed 1992). The postmodern accent, however, in prioritising their own theoretical preoccupation and moral commitments, has de-emphasized organizational content in favor of organizational process, or issues of knowing, i.e., epistemology (Reed 1996, 1998). For these critics, it comes to seem that the postmodernist initiative has been overly “buried in an obsessive concern for the minutiae of ‘everyday life’ of organizational routines” (Reed 1985: 48, quoted in Thompson 1993). The postmodernist movement within Organization Theory is seen by its critics to undermine the search for and the study of the functions and meanings of structures and


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organizing processes within organizations, and therefore the organization theory community has to be sensitized about this “fatal distraction” lest the principal purposes of the sub-discipline are “forgotten” (Thompson 1993). It has been pointed out earlier that such a preoccupation with theoretical aspects of knowing may lead to a relatively closed, internalist questioning of the validity of those subsequent truth claims. Critics argue that such postmodern improvisations have distracted and defracted the common “thematic continuities” of organization theory. In the eyes of their critics, postmodern theorists are partisan bricoleurs, following “isolationist research strategies” (Reed 1985), and hence, as a group, they could not be considered as having coalesced to “form a field of phenomena which yields problems for investigation”. Thirdly, postmodern organization theorists do not seem to have an organized front. They have partisan interests, a person-culture of individual star-theorists who band together in order to follow better their own bents. Postmodern theorists are characterized as working in an isolated fashion rather than working closely together. It appears they would not mind identifying with the postmodern label, as this can provide convenient theoretical purchase for what they want to say or write. They are unable, critics believe, to form a cohesive front or any consensual, united, mutually supportive position. In terms of published work, a postmodern approach is in a developing stage (for example, Hassard 1994; Boje, Gephart & Thatchenkery 1996; Kilduff & Mehra 1997; Calás & Smircich 1999). There are only a limited number of journal papers that have examined methodological issues concerning epistemology and representation in organization analyses (for example, Cooper 1992; Academy of Management Review Special Issue 1992; Kilduff 1993; Linstead 1993; Hassard 1994). Other publications include, in the eyes of critics, only a diverse assemblage of solipsist selfreflections about ontological commitments, and “theoretical preoccupation” (see for example, Jeffcutt 1994b; Chia 1996; Parker 1992, 1995; Kilduff & Mehra 1997), and quasi-deconstruction of organizational thematics like leadership (Calás & Smircich 1991), gender (Martin 1990b; Gherardi 1995), decision-making (Chia 1994), motivation (Jackson & Carter 1995), and the canons of great writers in organizations (Calás 1987; Kilduff 1993). The strand of commonality among the postmodernists’ loose confederation seems only a vague clamour to replace modernist forms of acquiring knowledge by alternative forms of enquiry that are sensitized to the instability, indeterminacy, and undecidability of meaning. Fourthly, within the modernist, conventional organization theory canon, there is already a widespread consensus over meanings and definitions, which is something taken for granted. However, such a mentality is vehemently protested by the above mentioned postmodern epistemologies, which cast doubt on the viability of a consensus of meanings, because that kind of consensus is seen as prescribing and perpetuating naive, unreflective philosophical bad faith/taste.

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Critics posit that there is little genuine compromise to support and build on the research impetuses propounded by postmodern researchers. No widely accepted and actionable agenda is in sight that explicitly specifies the mechanisms for change. Their ambiguous and variegated political orientation regarding the mechanisms of change within organization theorizing is argued to backtrack to a reactionary position; the postmodernist posture is considered as disinterested in unable and incapable of change at all. Postmodernists dispute the popular belief that objectivity and science are causally linked to public enlightenment and to social progress. Their partisan improvisations do not possess the characteristics and qualities of cogency already possessed by those “overarching and recurring concerns that have exerted a governing influence on the intellectual development of (modern) organization theory” (Reed 1992: 38, addition and emphasis mine). The latter’s recurring concerns have promulgated a relatively well-defined, widely accepted, and enduring social practice, and these concerns have also evolved into a field of study with internally coherent and commonly accepted rules and research protocols. Postmodernism, as the notion is used to denote primarily a way of seeing the (organizational) world, could not be considered to have met those standards. Such a postmodern “turn” in organization theory is seen, summarily by its critics, as advocating a hard or radical postmodern epistemology vouching relativism. As the critics would also say, little theorization is completed amidst this cantankerous din of sulking and bragging by theorists of organizations who are tempered by the postmodern “bad” influence. Critics are convinced that even less accomplishment seems to be in sight, in terms of the postmodernists’ insights and perspectives being able to inform genuinely those continuous, recurring and meaningful organizational-level thematics that appertain to rational design, to minimize uncertainty and maximize efficiency. Summarizing, the reason postmodernism is treated as a pejorative, an intruder, and an undesirable influence is possibly its ambiguous bequest of the humanities to the social sciences. Postmodernism is indigenous to, and “emerges in the humanities, and perhaps too often, its application in the social sciences is grounded on the assumption that there is little difference between the two” (Rosenau 1992). While the rest of the social sciences, like anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, social theory, and politics, generally are more developed in facing the challenges of postmodernism, the fledging sub-discipline of organization studies has been challenged by postmodernism to “rethink itself almost before it has found a position from which to think” (Knights 1997: 1). Equally, theorists working under the banner of postmodernism have been infamous for making bold and anti-foundationalist claims that have produced disquieting effects in the social and human science disciplines, and therefore postmodernism is seen as posing clear and present danger to the establishment, to its traditions


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and to its constituencies. This is primarily the case within the field of social theory, as the following part will explain.

Postmodernism and Social Theory The tradition of modern social theory, according to Best and Kellner (1991: 258) is to “analyze the fundamental structures and processes of modern societies”. Since the classical projects of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, social theory’s main concern lies in differentiating types of social structures as well as the investigation of the causes and consequences of social change. Social theory provides explanations for the causes and consequences of social change, social rationalization, individuation and differentiation, macro-processes such as commodification, massification, reification, and domination. The “historical task of modern social theory” has been to analyse “the ways that the economy, state, society, and culture interact to form social organization that is distinct from those in traditional societies” (Best & Kellner 1991: 258). Social theory is built on the firm foundation of a set of social practices with a fixed system of representation, a consensus about research thematics and agenda, and a warrant about social phenomena to be studied. These modernist assumptions and practices continue to guide and to inform research in social theory, until postmodernism’s “long march from the distant shores of the arts and culture” (especially aesthetic postmodernity) and the humanities (especially literature) begins to vex questions about the tenability of these core tenets of the social sciences and social theory (Thompson 1993). The reception of postmodernism in social theory, like it is in the case of organization theory, is riddled with contests and protests. From the beginning, the self-definition of postmodernism has been a delicate matter, and there is still no consensus about the definition of the different kinds of postmodernisms. In the literature, there are two strands of postmodernisms: postmodernism (with a hyphen) as representing an historical periodization (an epoch), and postmodernism (without a hyphen) as a theoretical perspective or a critique (an epistemology).15 Such a bifurcation in/of theoretical and epochal thresholds produces linked questions and confusion about the clarity or defining characteristics of the idea of the postmodern. Two papers in the 1985 issue of Theory, Culture and Society (Volume 2, No.3) refer to the issue concerning the epoch or period. In the first paper, Ihab Hassan’s remark about the idea of a “period” in literature states the problem: a period is “generally not a period at all; it is rather both a diachronic and synchronic construct” (Hassan 1985: 122). Generally, this perspectives holds that a period or epoch “permeates” the past, the present, and the future; and hence events within both “periods” of modernism and postmodernism are inherently imploded into one another. Time, history and “period” are

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not perceived in terms of linear, successive patterns. The mutually defining characteristics of these components mingle sequentially and concurrently into a texturized history that is “intertextual”: history can be experienced as (through the metaphor of) a palimpsest, or a magic writing pad, on which every text (event) ever “written” is related to every other text (event) that may come before or after it.16 Hassan holds that postmodernism is no exception; to (de)fine and (de)lineate itself as a period (an epoch), postmodernism requires both historical specificity and theoretical precision. Crook (1990, 1991) points out that Hassan’s remark helps to explain the paradox that Axel Honneth notes, in the second paper in Theory, Culture and Society (1985). Honneth points out that the “suggestiveness” of the idea of the postmodern has increased, but at the same time, its “technical and temporal clarity” has decreased (Honneth 1985: 147). Queries have been raised as to how, and in what specific ways post-modernism can claim it is historically “past” modernism.17 There has been a number of reiterations that postmodernism as epistemology (and as critique) is already anticipated in the defining aspects of reflexive or critical modernism (Harvey 1989: 39–65; Crook 1990: 53–58; Crook 1991).18 This means that postmodernism has antecedents in certain latenineteenth to early mid-twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde philosophies and cultural movements focused on relativism, perspectivism, subjectivity, and language. This inherent property of postmodernism, and the relational intricacies arising from the etymological proximity of the term to modernism, tend to water-down the perceived novelty and powers of postmodernism. These vexations of key notions surrounding postmodernism have created considerable repercussions. There are considerable reservations and even criticisms about the ability of postmodernism in delivering its promises and in the capability of postmodernism in fulfilling those expectations of “doing” social theory proper (Best & Kellner 1991; Boyne & Rattansi 1990; Crook 1990; Seidman 1992; Layder 1994). The criticism levelled against postmodernism’s infiltration into the heartland of social theory can be unpacked to reveal three facets. Firstly, postmodernism is seen to map fragments and instability into social science discourses. Its critics have expressed that sceptical postmodernists practise an epistemological nihilism that disavows conventional criteria for representing reality and for evaluating knowledge. The postmodern trajectory within social theory has been described by Seidman as vouching wholesale “epistemic suspicion”, as a variegation of relativism, and as an assault on the modern, realist concept of representation (Seidman 1992). Representation assumes the possibility of a true image being reproduced or re-presented; the postmodern sceptics reject this as impossible. The postmodern position claims that the apprehension of reality is mediated, that we cannot have unmediated access to reality; the metaphor of the mind as a mirror of nature and the subject as an aloof observer of the


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world are seriously doubted. And truth, to the extent that it strives to re-present reality, is considered by postmodernists as fraudulent. The most important implication of this kind of sceptical postmodernism is that there is no difference between truth and ideology or distorted forms of rhetoric and propaganda. Critics of postmodernism believe that by applying such an inherently corrosive heuristic in any theorizing activity, it will inevitably erode the systematic features and the relations of social structure. They also believe that it will cause instability to the nature, validity, and limits of inquiry, which are the basic tenets and foci of social theory research methods. Secondly, aspects of postmodernism assail language, communication, and truth claims, seeing language as a form of domination and representational strategies that use language as their medium as “surrogates of terrorism” (Rosenau 1992: 78). This postmodern proclivity is criticised for its obsession with details and for its regression into a textualist world. Critics of postmodernism believe that such a pervasive predilection inevitably delves in linguistic ideals, and research only slips and transmogrifies into dis-entanglement or struggle with(in) a textualist labyrinth of meanings. The textualist line of enquiry looks to the uniqueness of the parts, rather than to the unity of the theoretical whole, and its limitations are it is restrictive, monistic, and it creates a closed form of thinking and a new kind of supra-disciplinary discourse (Rosenau 1992). It only produces “local narratives”, or parochial claims that are relevant only to its own constituencies. This kind of textual turn treats the social world as a text that is to be “read” rather than as an objective reality to be apprehended. This rhetorical critique and the deconstruction of texts shows how texts create a sense of reality, even in the absence of the capacity of any text to represent or correspond to reality (Rosenau 1992). These critical tools are brought to bear to show the fictive and fictional characters of narratives about the social world. Since these claims reject that realist representation is possible in an un-mediated fashion, reality is considered to be only “constituted through shared language; and we can know reality only through discourse” (Thompson 1993). The claims of the textual turn suggest that all knowledge is metaphoric, offering only signifiers or images by which we understand the world. Such a predilection is devastating for objectivist and structuralist theories of social organization — which are supposed to use analytic concepts to grapple with “real” social processes that are otherwise invisible to everyday appearance. Critics of the postmodern textual turn believe that this kind of thinking paralyses theorizing, distracts effort in attaining knowledge, and dissipates the energy in a “labor of division” amidst minutiae issues of knowing. Commentators and critics warn that such an ethos will result in sterility in thought, in immobility in action, and in unprecedented change within social theory (Best & Kellner 1991; Seidman 1992).

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Thirdly, social theory commentators opine that postmodern theorists, like Baudrillard and Lyotard, are seen not to be doing social theory per se, but rather seen to be eclectically combining “fragments of sociological analysis, literary and cultural readings, historical theorization, and philosophical critiques” in their exegeses (Best & Kellner 1991: 259). The iconoclastic claims of the postmodernists and their collective proclivity are seen, according to Best and Kellner as an one-eyed prejudice against modernism, modernity, and the Enlightenment project, as well as an angled (mis)reading of rationality.19 A widely accepted image of the modernist project is one that amounts to an intellectual effort on the part of Enlightenment thinkers and their successors to develop objective science, universal morality and law. The idea is to use the accumulation of the knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. However, Rosenau (1992) points out that the unfolding of world events throughout the twentieth century, especially militarism and the two world wars, have certainly shattered this optimism. The dis-enchantment with the Enlightenment project and its promises has fuelled the radical interrogation of the modernist project.20 Critics argue that social theory has not harnessed self-reflexive capacity that is part and parcel of the “original” modernist project, but social theory has courted postmodernism. This fatal attraction results in a complex process of colonization by abrasive characteristics of aesthetic postmodernity — the home turf of postmodernism — of social theory per se. A quandary of postmodernism is, according to some of its critics, that postmodern theory fuels and perpetuates a new desire for universality that is equally fascistic and totalizing. In summary, like aesthetic postmodernity, which rejects universal standards of beauty, and instead favors pastiche, heteroglossia, carnivalesque, the marginal, the fleeting, the unrepeatable, postmodernism in social theory champions evocation and re-presentation, language games and agonistics, relativism and diversity. Its major criticism is that eclectic treatment privileges cultural and philosophical analysis over social theory proper, and this skew in the discipline’s overriding emphasis is seen to fail to address sufficiently and effectively those decisive determinants of the social world. The question is what business has a “rejection of universal standards of beauty and a preference for pastiche” got to do with social theory and organization theory? (Thompson 1993). Nevertheless, in the rest of this chapter, it is argued that even though critics make overstated claims that postmodernism has nothing to offer, there are important links among the key aspects of upholding a postmodern ethos or attitude. Postmodern assumptions, as they are embedded in the critical ideas of Foucault, are important because they pronounce a gestalt shift in rethinking the way we do theory in organization studies. It is now time to turn to consider the relevance and


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applicability of the broadly speaking “discourse theory” of Foucault. This aspect of postmodern thinking, I believe, has very significant implications for a yet-to-be reformulated critical organization theory.

Postmodern Ethos of Foucault In this part, I explain Foucault’s ideas concerning the ontology of the present and its relationships with genealogy and resistance. One of the most important contributions of Foucault’s life project is his formulation of the notion of critique; Foucault argues that a critical “ethos” is an embodiment of a free, modern, and truth-speaking individual. In Foucault’s mind, the liberal, creatively self-representing individual engages in the present to interrogate assumptions and to seek those practices that offer the possibility of reforming those structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity and, hence, new ways of acting and being. Two most distinguished leitmotifs in Foucault’s critical philosophy are “critical ontology of the present” and “aesthetics of living”, which provide the basis for a “moral theory of poststructuralism” (May 1995). Foucauldian aesthetics — the ways to respond to one’s own present as difference in history — are important for organization studies in the sense that the field and its members can emulate these standards to bring to bear a critical attitude. As I have pointed out in the first chapter of this book, organization studies has reached a critical stage within its theoretical development in which competing paradigm “war-games” make the task of critical appraisal of our intellectual practices an imperative (Calás & Smircich 1999: 666). Given the diversity and crisis over competing modes of apprehending the self, organization and society, how should anyone who cares about the field act? The answer to that question may be found in Foucault’s principles. In the following three-part illustration, I justify the reasons for my claim. Critical ontology as moral theory In What is Enlightenment? (1984c), a short article that has been considered in recent scholarship as an epitome of the important philosophical outlook of Foucault’s later thinking, Foucault re-reads the philosophy of the Enlightenment and modernity in a “revisionist” way so as to salvage a critical “ethos” or an “attitude”.21 In that work, Foucault contrasts his understanding of aspects of the Enlightenment and modernity with that of Kant. The key notion that both men agree on is that of maturity, which consists of “man’s taking over responsibility for using his critical rationality in the unflinching examination of our most cherished and comforting assumptions” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1986: 110). In

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general terms, Kant conceived of enlightenment as a phenomenon and as “a task and an obligation” requiring mature intellectuals to contemplate the tripartite relationship among reason, the prevalent historical moment, and contemporary society. Kant equated enlightenment with the attainment of intellectual and moral maturity through the use of reason. His famous motto: Aude sapere means “dare to know, have the courage, the audacity to know” entails, in part, critique in its various modes, whether applied to issues of theoretical understanding, to questions of an ethical or political order, or to issues in the sphere of aesthetic judgment.22 Foucault does not conceive of enlightenment as a period in history, or as an epoch. Foucault has no disagreement with Kant’s belief that enlightenment is the attainment of maturity through the use of reason and the exercise of critique, but he would prefer to treat it as a timeless “ethos” and an “attitude” to be taken up by intellectuals at all times (Kelly 1994; Owen 1994; Nilson 1998; Szakolczai 1998). Under that specification, the imperative of maturity for intellectuals becomes more than just facing up to the crisis and collapse of the established order of its time, its values and virtues. The imperative of maturity calls for another set of values and philosophical outlook. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1986: 11), Kelly (1994: 382–389), Owen (1994: 140–143), Nilson (1998: 80–81), and Tully (1999: 94–99) believe that we can get a glimpse of this outlook from the manner in which Foucault reinterprets Kant’s tripartite linking of the historical moment, critical reason and society as a challenge to develop a new version of what it means to lead a philosophical life. That new vision is a “critical ontology of ourselves”. According to Foucault: The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as 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 1984c: 50, italics mine).

Enlightenment, under Foucault’s scrupulous modification and redefinition, involves much less of an analytics of truth but much more of a reflection of the present through/by exemplifying a new “manner of philosophizing” (Foucault 1984c: 43) and investigative and recursive thinking (Foucault 1988f: 95).23 Under such a formulation of critical thought, the basis of criticism is no longer going to be practised in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as an historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In this sense, this criticism is not transcendental….it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method (Foucault 1984c: 45–46).

Heretofore, Foucault has explicated the methods of his genealogical project in


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Nietzsche, Genealogy and History (1971/1984a), and what he offers in What is Enlightenment? (1984c) is a “moral theory” for genealogy.24 In an accompanying discussion of enlightenment entitled: The Art of Telling the Truth (1984/1988f), Foucault proposes that the key of this moral theory would be dependent upon an effective praxis of “working on oneself” — a form of aesthetic heroization that I examine below. Aesthetics as ethics A principal tenet of Foucault is to work on oneself or care for the self via stylization, heroization and an “aesthetics of living” (May 1995). This philosophical outlook is epitomized in a discussion of Baudelaire. In What is Enlightenment? (1984c: 39ff), Foucault has evoked Baudelaire and the latter’s own notion of dandysme to create stylishly an imaginative reading. That reading makes use of allusive intertextual forms, rhetoric and innuendoes to illustrate the leitmotif of exemplarity as critique. “Work on oneself” appertains to the development of “an ethics based on ascesis and aesthesis”, or a special kind of value-free, stylized, self-fashioning and resistance (Norris 1994: 102). I shall clarify this after we consider one of Foucault’s explanations of his concept of the “present” in the following quote: Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time; Baudelaire…defines modernity as “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent”;…for him, being modern lies in adopting a certain attitude that makes it possible to grasp the “heroic” aspect of the present moment. (Modernity) is the will to “heroize” the present,… it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established within oneself (and the) attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. (Foucault 1984c: 39–41).

Dreyfus and Rabinow (1986: 117) have explained that to heroize the present means adopting an ironic stance, otherwise referred to as “sceptical freedom”, “civil disobedience”, and “reflective indocility” toward one’s existential present.25 This epistemological position can be equated with what Hassard calls the method of “serious play” (Hassard 1994: 304; cf. Gergen 1992) In this respect, the taking up of sceptical freedom through exemplarity relinquishes traditional seriousness while preserving active engagement with the present. Empirical analyses of the clinic, madness, and discipline are all ethical showings, without having to, like in the ethical saying of Critical Theory, legislate the question: “Why resist?” (Owen 1994). Foucault’s empirical richness shows and lays bare the practices constitutive of the present, and reveals all those biases and interests that are papered over by a decorous past expressed in the corresponding discourses of medicine and its clinical gaze, of psychiatry and the asylum, and of systems of penality and the penitentiary. Foucault’s sceptical ethical showing has two accompaniments: first, it requires analyzing the limiting

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conditions that subjectify us and resisting “the ways in which we are individualized or rendered into the sort of individuals who we are” (Simons 1995: 2); second, it requires parrhesia–speaking our minds or telling the truth, and this is achieved through creative self-representations in being other than what we are in the “process of moving away from it to become something else” (Ransom 1997: 174). Creative self-representation warrants elastic experimentation with alternatives and even “limit-experiences”, as evidenced in the liminal thinking that manifests in ways Foucault lives his “other private lives” (Macey 1993; Miller 1993). The most significant characteristic of Foucault’s reading of Kant avec Baudelaire is his moving away from an ethics discourse grounded in maxims and postulates of practical reason (ethical saying) to an ethics discourse premised on human existence as an aesthetic phenomenon (ethical showing). A crucial underlying condition that aligns these issues with a cogent ethics of exemplarity (Owen 1994) is the principle of autonomy. Autonomy is, according to Foucault, one of the central notions regarded as essential to a state of “positive freedom”, which I discuss in Chapter 7. That freedom is a self-determination attained through an individual’s exercise of practical will as well as an exercise of critical judgment free from the influence of dominant beliefs and desires.26 Christopher Norris (1994: 93) stresses that the revisionist reading of Kant by Foucault redirects ethics as an aesthetic phenomenon; that ethics, Foucault explains, is a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; a way of thinking and feeling; a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task (Foucault 1984c: 39).

According to Foucault, such an aesthetics is articulated in an orientation in thinking and a critical interrogation of “what we are” — a “critical vigilance” or investigative thinking that lays bare the arbitrariness, contingency and precariousness of present practices that affect structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. Such a genealogical reflection jettisons the adherence to taken-forgranted, ahistorical principles, essentializing and universalizing tendencies, and it shows the radically contingent or historically situated character of discursive formations of, for example, discipline and medicine that interpellate “subjectspecific competencies” in inmates and in patients respectively (Tully 1999). This is the reason many well-known scholars have agreed that Foucault could be characterized, in this specific sense, as postmodern (Rajchman 1985; Lash 1985; Hoy 1988; Hekman 1990).27 My justification is supported by sources feeding into the development of the substance of Foucauldian postmodern thinking, and I rely on Rajchman (1985) in the examination.


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The postmodern ethos of Foucault Foucault’s genealogical thinking is postmodern in character in at least two ways. In the perceptive analysis Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (1985), John Rajchman believes that the spirit of Foucault’s work is postmodern. Firstly, Rajchman points out that Foucault sees to it painstakely that his work “does not fit within a single program; that he reserved the right to always go on to something new and different”. A definitive feature of Foucault’s work is its inconsistency and Foucault often rejects premises made in his earlier work because he is embodying a “learning” experience.28 Secondly, according to Rajchman, Foucault’s philosophy aims for “the freedom of withholding judgement” on dogmas, and for “acquiring relief from the restrictions they introduce into our lives and thoughts” (Rajchman 1985). Rajchman (1985) has argued that aspects of Foucault’s thought belong to a philosophical tradition of scepticism. By casting Foucauldian thought as scepticism, he explains satisfactorily how some of the difficulties and criticisms of Foucault and his ideas have arisen, and how these difficulties are in themselves consequence of a coherent project.29 Foucault’s transgressive philosophy through exemplarity and his rich, nuanced empirical analyses are a kind of ethical showing that is unlike, for example, the ethical saying in critical theory that is a quest for, and a legislating of, a moral ground before resistance can be taken seriously (Smart 1985; Ransom 1997; Owen 1994, 1999).30 Rajchman (1985) has pointed out that this is why we find no discussion, in Foucault’s work, of an emancipatory potential, of socialist utopia, and of the dream of a rational society. In these two senses, Foucault’s thought-style and spirit have postmodern affinities. For these reasons, Foucault genuinely intends to leave behind no single doctrine, method, or school of thought! Summarizing, postmodern leitmotifs are discerneable in Foucault’s re-interpretation of the ethos of enlightenment. That ethos is genealogical in character, and provides leverage to interpret discourses as sites and objects of/for struggle wherein different groups strive for control, and for the production of fixed meaning and ideology (Fairclough 1992). As a “serious play” method, Foucault’s discourse theory counterpoises the “tyranny of globalizing discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges” (Hassard 1994). By applying this kind of analysis to the discursive formations of culture in organization theory, we uncover the construction of structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. In conclusion, Foucault analyzes the institutional bases of discourses, the viewpoints and positions from which people speak, and the power relations these allow and presuppose. In this sense, Foucault’s postmodern innovation has definite relevance for the study of organizational culture, because as the King of Mountains analogy in Chapter 1 shows, knowledge and power are inextricably

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linked within discourse of organizational culture. My counterpoise in this chapter clears the ground for a specific version of postmodern apprehension of the present under the assumption that the past influences the present in ways and with consequences that we do not easily recognize. The way to go about this writing of a history of the present of organizational culture is embodied in the method of genealogy, which I examine in the next two chapters.

Chapter 5 Towards a Genealogy of Organizational Culture I try to show, based upon their historical establishment and formation, those systems which are still ours today and within which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting a critique of our time, based upon retrospective analysis. Michel Foucault Foucault Live (1989)

Subjectivity and the Body This chapter examines how power produces structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. Secondly, it extends the notion of genealogy in which Nietzsche’s conception of descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstehung) of discursive formations will be studied.31 Governmentality, the term Foucault gives to technologies of power will be examined in the third part where I examine the differences between conventional and postmodern conceptions of power. The fourth and final part explores the ways in which the organization theorist can fulfill the role of what Foucault calls a “specific” intellectual to interrogate power/ knowledge regimes. As I have shown in the last chapter, Foucault’s “history of the present” interrogates discursive and non-discursive practices dispersed in a variety of social apparatuses that hone the deep-seated identity of the individual subject. The short history of organizational culture is seen as an accidental, serendipitous, disparate commingling of discrete practices, contrary to a linear view that culture discourse may be seen as an accumulation of knowledge about the culture of organizations and the people within them. This new guerrilla history retheorizes organizational culture, paraphrasing critical psychologists Henriques et al. (1984), to reconstitute the topic “from a point of view located in the present in such a way that the history produced is one which has calculated effects concerning present strategies for action” (Henriques

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et al. 1984; emphasis mine). Foucault asserts that the human subject is not “given” but produced historically, that is, constituted through correlative elements of knowledge and power relations. Canadian philosopher Carlos G. Prado (1996) perceptively paraphrases Foucault’s conception of subjectivity as follows: we are not subjects that preexist the governing influences that subsequently impose norms and beliefs on us. Rather we are, as subjects, wholly historical in being constituted by subjectivities deployed by discourse and practices (Prado 1996: 116; italics mine).

The insights of Foucault in his studies of discipline and sexuality remind us that the production of subjectivities starts from a perspective that assumes that knowledge is production involving the participation and concoction of wider social practices. Discursive organizational culture formations produce subjects and subjectivities in the multiple sites of their constitution: in organizations, in business communities, and within the academic world. Two key words here need clarification; they are “subject/subjectivity” and “culturated”. I outline first their key attributes and continue to elaborate these key notions throughout the rest of this chapter. Firstly, the experience of subjectivity (l’assujetissement), according to Foucault’s definition in The Subject and Power (1983), is the experience of being defined as an intentional individual (or a body with a norm-defined identity) by/ through one’s own self-knowledge, structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity or image of who one is (Foucault 1983: 212). According to Foucault (1980a: 85, 89), the subject is one who is “subjected” to (assujetti) relational power whose operation is “not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control”. Secondly, the adjective “culturated” is used primarily to connote a sense of, following Althusser (1971: 170ff., cf. Butler 1997), the subject being “interpellated” or “pushed” (from the Latin pellare = thrust) to a recognition (la connaissance) or an identification with, and an internalization of, a “norm-saturated” identity or “subject-position” (Hall 1992, 1997; Butler 1997: 106–110).32 Barry Smart (1985: 32) has pointed out that the work of Foucault questions the conditions of possibility for the emergence of man as an object of knowledge as well as for the emergence of certain human sciences like psychology, psychiatry, social work and criminology. This humanist grammar targets the body as having a specific objective nature, replete with the possibilities for emotional expression. People’s emotions are predicated upon an assumption that they may become pliable through means of holistic control, and hence the agents” expression of these emotions may equally be rendered amenable to the organization’s own expectations about these expressions. Burrell (1988, 1996) considers that the body is the site where “minute social practices meet large scale organization of power”. As Westwood puts it, an

TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

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“ordering of knowledge within a discursive frame” is constitutive of discursive and non-discursive practices and, as such, “a discourse is an exercise of power” (Westwood 1987: 197). Bodies of managers have retained the marks, codes and inscriptions of organizational culture because this discourse got “shot through” their bodies. The body is invested with a specific belief-defined identity, expressed in terms of signifying practices. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971/ 84a), Foucault asserts that the body is “the inscribed surface of events;…(the body) manifests the effects of regulating discourses in its habits and gestures, in its postures, in its speech”. The excellence genre in culture discourse is conducive to a construction of a kind of agents imbued with “subject-specific competencies” (Tully 1999). Managers subscribing to the principles suggested in the excellence thesis and their gurus become living bodies emiting signs and codes of a “culturated” subjectivity. Summarizing, culturated subjectivity partakes in a kind of power that, Foucault explains, is a form of power that subjugates the body and makes subject: This form of power categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, impose a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects (Foucault 1983: 212).

The issue of subjectivity and self-subjectivation is therefore one about “what it is to hold certain things as true about oneself, to have a certain perspective on the world, and to speak certain things about oneself” (Prado 1996: 69). The subject does not pre-exist the influences that impose beliefs on us. The subject is wholly historical in being constituted by subjectivities deployed by discourses. Culture talk fabricates the subject and renders its own discourse speakable. Let us now outline the contours of the ways genealogy can help us understand the intricate relationship among discourse, subjectivity, and power.

Genealogy Genealogy unearths lineages, origins, descents of ideas, practices and power (Dean 1994, 1999; Simons 1995; Prado 1996; Ransom 1997). The aim of genealogy is to reveal the miscellaneous and discontinuous nature of beginnings and “moments of arising” of discursive formations.33 In Foucault’s own words, the principal tenet of genealogy is: (…) to identify the accidents, the minute deviations — or conversely, the complete reversals — the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents (Foucault 1984a: 81).

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Nietzsche and Foucault were anti-essential in that they believed that there was “no essences to be discerned behind historical developments (in history and in discourses), and none that explain why things are as they are” (Prado 1996: 33). Both thinkers held a sceptical attitude towards the kind of “traditional” essentializing history that claimed to capture the essence of things and towards history that was conducted as a search for origins in the sense of essential beginnings. Nietzsche and Foucault believed that “what is found at the historical beginning of things is…disparity” (Foucault 1984a: 79). In their views, traditional history proffers to track and to mine a continuous vein through myriad details of the past to discover future-determining continuities; traditional history, for them, also claims to offer synthesis and discernment of unity (Dean 1994). Foucault points out that the genealogist, or the critical historian, will discover the haphazard and arbitrary nature of the origins of things, and that if the genealogist “refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, he will find that essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms”. Examples of some of these “discoveries” include: (…) reason…was born…from chance; devotion to truth and the passion of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussion and their spirit of competition; and the concept of liberty is an “invention of the ruling class” (Foucault 1984a: 78, italics mine).

Two key facets of genealogy are specifically descent and emergence. The first looks out for the myriad accidental events through which and against which a topic was formed; the second examines power and subjection that are operative in the confrontations among agents who enact the respective discursive formations. Descent Descent of a discourse like organizational culture, unlike the traditional search for the “origin” of that concept, pertains to “sift out the continuities that reveal the causes of the present”. A genealogy of culture is a history of the present precisely to the extent that it is a history structured by conclusions and considerations already established concerning present practices of organizational culture. Early strands of discursive formations of organizational culture arose accidentally, and that discourse framed and represented a certain organizational reality that was perceived to exist in the early 1980s. The possible responses to these perceived environments, the guru-authors argued, warranted certain sets of solutions that were to be based on a new conception of the “management of excellence”.34 Organizational culture discourse of the 1980s is about control and it puts a completely new conceptual system of control through “cultural management” or “governmentality” into operation (Salaman 1997; du Gay 1997; Dean 1999). In order to “govern” subjects or shepherd their comportment in organizations, it is


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essential to identify certain characteristics and processes proper to it, to make their features notable, speakable, writable. One also needs to account for these practices according to certain explanatory schemes so as to render having something done to the subjects (managers and employees) amenable — and amenable for these subjects to do things to themselves. Analysis of the descent of organizational culture asks why the subject and the body should have become part of the targets of organizational culture: “What effects did this have on the form of cultural theories?”, and “How did the network of power relations affect the social domain of organization studies with all its contradictions and differences? The histories of the present move beyond the internal calculations and prescriptions contained within the normal discourse of organizational culture to look for their conditions of possibility in other outside practices and contextual considerations. Some of these effects have been examined alongside developments in contiguous disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, social theory, and my analysis of the etymology of the word “culture” in the third chapter of this book. Those conditions of possibility are historically specific events and bodies of statements that have had demonstrable effectivity on the development of organizational culture. The outcome of discursive formations is a result of warring forces of power, subjection and domination, which are the foci of the analysis of Entstehung (emergence). Emergence Emergence (Entstehung) or “moment of arising” unveils power, subjection and domination. Emergence disavows progressive historical evolution and any claims of objectivity. Burrell (1988, 1996) points out that such claims of objectivity “mask subjective motivations, high sounding stories (hiding) the lowest of motives, accidents and lies (that) lie behind the march of history” (Burrell 1988: 224). Entstehung shows that what emerges is not the culmination of anything but is a consequence of an accumulation of factors with no inherent inter-relatedness except the exercise of power (hence a system of subjection).35 Aspects of the “excellence-management” enterprise (see for example, Peters & Waterman 1982; Sathe 1985; Drennan 1992; Egan 1994) are manifestations of power’s actions in constructing and “making up” the subjects. Subjects are “made up” with their specificity, which benchmarks the principles of “excellence-management” models, cultural typologies and strategies for cultural change. The emphasis in the practitioner literature, the means of enhancing and ensuring internalization of corporate values, is paramount. The “culturated” subject, culture taxonomies and change methods are normalizing practices. The presupposition of the categories of culture as adequate representations of subject forms is pivotal to discursive formations. It has become part of the common sense,

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taken-for-granted background for all these normalizing practices. These aspects of power have ultimately “made up” the organizational subjects and “truth” (Hacking 1986; Rose 1989; Butler 1997; DuGay 1997). Organizational culture at once confirms this “truth” while depending on it for its own intelligibility. Foucault considers that subjectivity and discourse are effects of power or products of “(a certain technology of) … power exercised over bodies” (Foucault 1980a: 73–74). Managers’ comportments and psyches are shaped by power relations and pronouncements of management gurus, hero-managers, and corporate CEO’s. These non-discursive elements/practices form networks of subjection at the “moment of arising” of culture discourse that is situated in a dynamic field of human actions that mutually enable and constrain each other. This mutual relation among actions is power. To conceptualize power as “a set of actions upon (bearing on) other actions” must say as much about what power is not, and about how it is misconstrued, as about what it is. In the next part, we shall look at Foucault’s unconventional conception of power, beginning with some of the misconstrual of that notion, and then its derivative notion of governmentality.

Power Foucault differentiates between power (la puissance) that is possessed by someone, and power (le pouvoir) which is the name given to a complex strategic situation in a given society. In what follows, I clarify what power is not and delineate what it is by contextualizing power with another Foucauldian notion of governmentality. Then I explore culture as a signifier and “culturated power” as an embodiment of signifying practices. (Said 1978: 709, quoted in Westwood 1987: 198). 36 Power and governmentality It must be stated outright that power (le pouvoir) “is not an institution, … neither is it a certain strength or power (la puissance) with which certain people are endowed” (Foucault 1980a: 93). To differentiate the two notions, we have to understand the ontology of power (le pouvoir). Power is everywhere, but it does not proceed from a seat or origin of power. Power is everywhere not because anyone possesses enough of it to impose his designs on an entire society, but rather because “it is produced at every instant, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another” (Foucault 1980a: 93). Foucault goes on to state that power is “the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a given society” (Foucault 1980a: 93). Prado (1996) uses a magnet analogy to explain power, and it goes like this:


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Imagine a number of small magnets spread out on a surface but not quite close enough to one another to clump together. We can easily imagine the magnetic force-vectors established among the magnets. Iron fillings scattered over the magnets will trace those vectors by following the magnetic patterns; (…) imagine shifting the magnets around…so we change the force-vectors, and scattering more iron fillings will trace a new set of force-vectors. In this analogy power is the force-vectors and agents are the magnets. Each move of a magnet, or each act on the part of an agent, changes the “strategic situation” in its vicinity and so affects the whole. Each magnet contributes to the totality of force-vectors, by being where it is or by moving; in like manner, agents’ actions contribute to the relational totality that is power, but that totality is not any one agent’s nor any group’s power anymore than the totality of force-vectors is any one magnet’s magnetic field (ibid.: 76).

This analogy clarifies power as a “totality”, “environment”, “a set of actions upon other actions” — not as an attribute possessed by agents, individuals or groups of individuals. Power becomes “a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions” in the sense that power is analogous to the summation of forcevectors that enables some actions and inhibits others (Foucault 1983: 219–220, emphases mine). The impersonal nature of Foucauldian power makes the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate coercion redundant for understanding this new form of power. We tend to think of power in conventional terms of its proper use and, derivatively, of its improper abuse, which is why we readily take as our paradigm of power its legitimate embodiment in state apparatuses. Foucault argues that “the new methods of power (are) … not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control” (Foucault 1980a: 89). Power has to be decentered and seen as “less a confrontation between two adversaries than a question of government” (Foucault 1983: 221). Here, Foucault makes reference to the etymology of “government”, as it is used in the 16th century; it refers to the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed,…(it covers) modes of action which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others (Foucault 1983: 221).

The archaic meaning of government, which refers to the regulation and administration of anything amenable to being managed, makes its connection with power in a very important way, and that is that the latter produces knowledge and disciplines as well as experts. Foucault considers that it is possible to analyze power from below at its most precise point of operation — a “microphysics” of power or an “ascending analysis” of power. The human body is that most specific point at which the micro-strategies of power can be observed. As Miller (1987), and Rose (1990) have observed, “government” or the “governing of the soul depends upon our recognition of

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ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person”.37 The new ways of speaking about ourselves as organizational subjects, and of ordering organizational reality have nourished a new moral dimension of managerial work. This new ordering and the structures of recognition are constitutive of a new culturated identity. Summarizing, culture discourse is a generative context in which the subject emerges: in Foucault’s mind the subject is what we say it is. The emergence of subjectivity in discursive formations of organizational culture is not an abstract metaphysical issue about the ultimate nature of the subject; it is, paraphrasing Foucault, about “what it is to hold certain things as true about oneself, to have a certain perspective on the world, and to speak certain things about oneself” (Prado 1996: 69). The subject and his subjectivity reflexively feed in and sustain the viability of the culture discourse and render the latter speakable as an object and intelligible as a signifier. Signifying practices Organizational culture discourse is about pervasive mechanisms of control, and these control methods are formulated based on prescriptions of norm-defined beliefs, values, symbols, rites and rituals. These are then seen to enable management techniques and habit-inducing routines that culminate in a new consciousness, a new set of beliefs and values. Discursive signifying practices — practices that are manifested in the forms of prescriptive management techniques, societal norms, and compliance are exacted not by force but by habit-inducing routines. As Said (1978) puts it, a signifying practice does not merely represent, it is also an act of will and an attempt to stage certain meanings and not others. Organizational culture knowledge can be seen as signifying practices (Said 1978; Westwood 1987). Westwood (1987) explains “signifying” thus: It is an act that is an attempt to locate and occupy a position, to give a position of intelligibility that offers knowledge: a willful ordering of things in particular ways. It is, then, an act of power. Power is not possessed, not necessarily privileged, acquired or preserved by formal positions, but that which is exercised in these placings themselves. The exercise of power becomes recognizable in the overall effect of these strategic positionings (ibid.: 198–99, italics mine).

Each time a signifying practice is engaged in, there is an exercise of power. Paraphrasing Westwood (1987), a signifying practice is therefore an attempt to control meaning, an attempt to provide closure, to exclude and to incorporate. The corporate culture writing is an exercise of power. Their discourses are prescriptive, and the managerial audience’s concern with efficiency and profitability overrides and defines what can be legitimately talked about and who can talk about it. As Gerlach (1996) has noted:


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the genre’s prescriptive nature and the acceptable forms of intertextuality within the genre community reproduce certain power/knowledge structures. Prescriptions implies that there are a set of problems to be solved; (and) business intellectuals view themselves as solvers of a set of commonly agreed-upon problems, which are pre-existent, commonsensical and thus never questioned (Gerlach 1996: 428).

The a priori interest colors the claims that are constructed. Their interest is in setting the problems and then suggesting a set of solutions that appear, and are written, to flow naturally from the problems. Gerlach (1996) comments further that business writers draw extensively upon large numbers of case studies to demonstrate the validity of their solutions to business problems. Unsuccessful attempts are rarely included, nor is mention made to the negative effects of the proposed changes. Overall, the case studies contribute to the utopian tone of the literature. However that tone can only be maintained through selective choice of exemplary organizations which fit the prescriptions of the authors (Gerlach 1996: 433).

Empiricism is used repeatedly to “demonstrate an accepted fact that can claim the status of science while rival evidence which might suggest other ways of understanding business reality and business problems is ignored” (Gerlach 1996: 434). The culture prescriptions appeal to a managerial audience who welcome seeing their problems are being solved in a commonly accepted manner. This subjection of the managerial community is completed by the genre’s writing power at the moment of arising of their signifying practices. Foucault’s interest centers not on the coercive techniques by which we can be brought around to embrace a certain body of beliefs, but rather “on the ways in which the thinking subject her/himself is created/produced as the delimiting field of possibility for all thought” (Bersani 1977: 3). To paraphrase Burrell (1996), culture is colonized and transmogrified in the sense that culture has been victimized by hegemonic thoughts. Positive knowledge of corporate and organizational culture are expressive of “blind and lowly” forces in history — a drive to manufacture truth (Burrell 1996). Taking the cue from Burrell’s comment that concepts are the ultimate panopticon, let me suggest that culture can be metaphorically depicted as the “disembodied eye of surveillance” (Tabor 1995) in organizations.38 Analysis of Entstehung (emergence) will not be complete without attending to resistance, or “leak” of power that is imbedded in discursive formations. Before closing this part, I briefly introduce this idea, which will be given more attention throughout Chapters 6 and 7. Inherent in the complex relations of signification and discursive formations are the continued movement and dissemination of meaning. American literary critic Leo Bersani, writing in The Subject of Power (1977), points out that every act of signification is, however, “a site for productivity, and as such the possibility exists of a countermanding configuration of signifier being produced” (Bersani

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1977). In this sense, every exercise of power and every act of signification inscribes the potential for resistance, which Foucault attributes to the presence of the plèbe (Foucault 1980g: 138ff.). Relations of power are intrinsically imbedded with points of resistance within its network. This means that subjection of others is never a stable achievement of power. Power “leaks” are localized struggles for re-arrangement of possible meanings. This is the reason for the urge to contain the escape of meaning and the leaks of power, or the plèbe (Bersani, 1977, quoting Foucault 1980g: 138), which I shall illustrate is an essential element in the activity of power. In summary, organizational culture stigmatized as stasis and a “variable” in positive organization theory unilaterally assumes the character of a scientific model of progressivity — a sequence of cumulative and non-reversible transformations. This rarefaction of culture is violence against an otherwise rich concept, and it denies the coterminous nature, contingent characteristics, and plurivocal instances in culture.

Knowledge, Truth and the Intellectual This part explains the final link of a genealogical approach with the criticality of the intellectual. Foucault raises the focus on the intellectuals’ own sets of values they use in critiqueing those assumptions, methods and contrived objectives within their respective disciplines. On many occasions (1977b, 1986), Foucault has pointed out that the intellectual/philosopher’s role is to change something in the minds of people because in what does philosophy consist “if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?” (Foucault 1986: 9). It must be said at once that it will be a gross misunderstanding to think that Foucault, in espousing genealogy, encourages us to engage in polemics in the sense of trying to replace assumptions, methods and objectives he thinks erroneous with those he believes he has discerned to be the correct ones (Prado 1996; Ransom 1997; Owen 1999). In a well known textbook on organizations, Scott (1992) is seminal in commenting how postmodern methods enable the “specific” intellectual working “locally” within the discipline to accomplish a critique of that discipline’s discursive formations.39 Foucault’s “specific intellectual” (Foucault 1980f, 1988e), as opposed to the “universal” intellectual, is a social critic whose critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no


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longer be accepted as such … criticism is absolutely indispensable for any transformation…as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible (Foucault 1988c: 154–55).40

Foucault has pointed out in Two Lectures (1980e) that the philosopher’s role is to oppose the “institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse within a society” (Foucault 1980e: 83–84). Every society has its experts “who are charged with saying what counts as true” (Foucault 1980f: 131). The quandary is rather than discovering truth through investigation, we are “subjected to the production of truth through power” (Foucault 1980e: 93). To counter this, Foucault contends that truth is a result, an outcome, of every society having “its regimes of truth” because truth is seen as a product of power, as “produced…by virtue of multiple forms of constraints” (Foucault 1980f: 131). It is against the power effects of a discourse that renders the latter considered to be scientific that genealogy must “wage its struggle”. Genealogy opposes the “scientific” in the sense of countering authoritative humanist grammar and epistemological templates that establish what is true and what is known. The notion of resistance or struggle implies a struggle for difference in thought,41 which Foucault has alluded to in The Subject and Power (1983: 212) when he says it is becoming more and more important in our society to struggle against “forms of subjection” and the “submission of subjectivity”.42 For Foucault, resistance is necessary to gain “those measures of intellectual freedom and well-being that are achievable by altering dominant relations” (Prado 1996: 113). The local struggles empower the subjects with the capabilities of opposing dominant structures of recognition that make up “subject-specific competencies” (Cook 1993; Butler 1995, 1997; Simons 1995; Ransom 1997; Tully 1999). The task for “specific” intellectuals is to contest regimes of truth in society through providing avenues or space for rethinking our quandary of subjection. This “reciprocal incitation and struggle” or “mutual taunting” (Foucault 1983: 222) is not intended as polemics in itself, but a truly viable alternative. Critical commentators including Gordon (1990), Hekman (1990), and McNay (1994) also accept that Foucault’s genealogical claims are not intended as polemical truthclaims about the machinations of power, but as a novel accent of questioning the objectivist conception of truth by the so-called “experts”. To conclude, genealogy supplies a model: genealogy asks what are the historical antecedents and political consequences when we are construed as subjects. The major agenda of genealogy is to ask why we should not accept carte blanche a moral psychology like corporate culture as given, as having a telos. The key is how to analyze the discursive and non-discursive practices. We need an agent with a certain profile; the organization theorist fulfils Foucault’s criteria of a social critic who rubs shoulders with the discursive formations. Specific intellec-

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tuals analyze, within the context of the problem, how the theorizing community, managers and agents come to be subjected within a configuration of hegemonic practices. It is to the task of delineating the contents of the regimes of truth of discursive formations of organizational culture that we now turn to consider in the next chapter.

PART III POWER

Chapter 6 Discourse and Regimes of Truth Corporate culture is the claim to be the organization. It is the view of the leaders transposed on to the whole. If, as we are told, culture along with its accompaniment of ideology shapes our perception and experience so that contradictions are not recognized, a corporate culture cannot be challenged or criticized. If it is protected from either the practical experience of its inhabitants or the theoretical observation of outsiders, it is given added legitimation; the circle is closed. Peter D. Anthony Managing Culture (1994)

Regimes of Truth and Discursive Formations One of Foucault’s central contentions is that every sphere has “its regimes of truth” and its experts “who are charged with saying what counts as true” (Foucault 1980f: 131). This assertion requires a meticulous genealogy of power which straddles this and the next chapter. In Chapter 7, I shall unravel the inner drift of power and its connection with subjectivity, resistance and the intellectual; in this chapter, I examine the contexts in which power takes up its pivotal role of procreating aspects of the discursive formations of organizational culture. I follow the principle of exemplarity or ethical showing of genealogical critique to critically re-read the constitution of our present to discover organizational culture as guerrilla history. In two parts of this chapter, I firstly tease out how power constructs structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity, and secondly how power represents the discursive formations of organizational culture. I assume the role of a social critic to examine reversible power vectors among different strands of competing discursive formations. In particular, the popular ways of characterizing culture, i.e., the metaphor and variable schools, the differentiationist and integrationist perspectives, and the academic and practitioner pragmatics, will be examined. It is important to disentangle the complex circuitry of multi-directional influence and suffusion that different “streams” of discursive formations have

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upon one another. Firstly, contest and exercise of power relations may be discerned by analyzing the result of the mutual influence between the “academic” and “practitioner” streams of organizational culture (Barley, Meyer & Gash 1988). Secondly, in a three-part analysis of the two broadly labelled “metaphor/ interpretive” school and “variable” school of organizational culture, the agonal relationship as a result of the streaming of the organizational culture discourse is considered. The ever-expanding literature on the culture of work organizations is evidence of the prominence of a culture discourse within organization studies. The descent (Herkunft) of culture displays internal competitive and fragmentary dynamics that is described by Martin and Frost (1996) as a “struggle for intellectual dominance” among different research paradigms. It is also characterized by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) as a competition between “academic discourse” and a “practitioner discourse” of culture. Based on my previous analyses, I suggest that a precondition in the Herkunft of organizational culture is a number of events through which and against which organizational culture is formed and becomes productive. Management gurus, consultants, hero managers, academics, and management practitioners use social and discursive practices to establish their favored meaning of organizational culture. These prescripted enactments of culture serve individuating functions and the making-up of the subject. Pre-scripted enactments of corporate and organizational culture construct organizational culture in a certain way, but they also limit the other ways in which organizational culture can be represented. According to Foucault, a likely scenario would be that there is a continual mutual taunting and contesting among free agents to achieve a privileged position. In other words, a discourse appropriates certain viewpoints and marginalizes others. Given that different constituencies represent only their own interests, knowledge of organizational culture are products of a haphazard and disparate commingling. Parties construct competing discourses — and each discourse is linked to a contestation over power. Implicit within a discourse are the continued productivity of power and the movement of meaning (Bersani 1977; Said 1978; Westwood 1987; Hall 1997). Things are made “true” through signifying practices enacted within a complex strategic situation of agonistic, taunting actions that constitute texturized power. Foucault reminds us, in Discipline and Punish (1977a), that We should admit that power produces knowledge. (…) That power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute (…) power relations (Foucault 1977a: 27).

When a certain school of thought represents organizational culture and the difference between itself and the “Other”, it already sets up a privileged system of

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co-ordinates of representing, “the Other” and the relations between them. Not only is a discourse always implicated in power; a discourse, like the body, is one of the “systems” through which power circulates. This experience constitutive of subjectivity is never a stabilised achievement: the “leak” of power or “localized struggle” provides the opportunity for free agents to re-enact structures that may bear upon the actions of others, thereby bringing about alterations in the power equation. Foucault remarks that a power relation is always productive, albeit in a twofolded way. Firstly, those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true — i.e., to enforce its validity, its scientific status. Secondly, the discursive formations of organizational culture produce subjects. According to Foucault, discursive formation and its statements are policed, and mechanisms and means give status to those who are charged with saying what counts as true (Foucault 1980f: 131). In the words of Foucault, “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered processes for the production, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements” (Foucault 1980f). To examine regimes of truth, one should not rely on the conventional definition of a “regime” as a nodal point or a source that emanates conventional “power-as-capacity” (Hindess 1996). In Truth and Power (1980f), a regime conjures the image of a net or a web in which nobody is exempt from the policing sanctions and the “panoptic gaze” of power. It is used to index the processes through which subjects are “made up” as effects of objectifying power. The “economic apparatuses of truth” include the heterogeneous elements of the university, the army, the media, and writing, to name a few (Foucault 1980f: 132), all of which are imbued with power relationships. In one of his last interviews in May, 1984: The Ethics of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom (1988e), Foucault comments that his own hypothesis of power (or more precisely “relationships of power”) is relatively fully developed, and its focus has now sharpened to include the new domain of “strategic games” and “truth games”, which he explains as follows: I am not sure, when I began to interest myself in this problem of power, of having spoken very clearly about it or used the words needed. Now I have a much clearer idea of all that. It seems to me that we must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties--strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others — and the states of domination, which we ordinarily call power (Foucault 1988e: 19).

This embellishment of power that Foucault becomes “finally” interested in needs to be qualified. Power relations are qualified in three important aspects: first, as being “changeable, reversible, unstable” (Foucault 1988e: 12); second, as being strategic in nature; and third, as being linked to the leverage of “governmentality”. In what sense is the relationship strategic? The “strategic game” is “an ensemble of rules for the production of the truth formation” (ibid.: 16); Foucault

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explains that these rules of truth formation are meaningful relative to those relationships in which “one wishes to direct the behaviour of another” (ibid.: 19).43 First, such a game comprises the ability, on the part of free agents, to instigate mutual taunting and to “resist” against one another. Second, the regime of truth of a discipline and its discursive formations are, paraphrasing Foucault (1988e: 16), linked to the truth apparatus (le dispositif) of non-discursive, social practices of that discipline.44 The totality of such a texturized apparatus may be expressed in a number of ways, for example, in the way the “topic” within that discipline is taught and disseminated, or even in the manner in which the consensus of discursive agents organizes itself, functions in a closed circuit, has its values, or determines what is good (true) and evil (false) in the discursive formations of that discipline, and so on. Summing up, the working definitions of a number of Foucault’s concepts including truth games, apparatus, and relationships of power have been unpacked. These elaborations of the major concepts help in analyzing how theoreticians’ and practitioners’ constituencies interact with each other in a field of strategic power relations to make their versions of culture talk “stick”. In the rest of this part, I closely refer to the study conducted by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) to demonstrate how discursive and non-discursive practices are harnessed to represent knowledge and to enact credibility about organizational culture. Strategic games of framing a topic and an object like organizational culture involve both the larger social context (non-discursive practices), their pragmatics (language use) as well as signifying and discursive practices (Laclau & Mouffe 1987). These agonal relationships are manifested in the streaming of the discursive formation of organizational culture into the metaphor and variable schools and the integrationist and differentionist perspectives. Of bifurcation and agon Organization theory and in its sub-field of organizational culture are characterized by discontinuity and bifurcation in intellectual and epistemological preoccupation. Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) examine this bifurcation and ask whether members of two “subcultures” have influenced each other’s thinking and interpretations about culture over time.45 The practitioner stream is epitomized by culture management prescriptions, war stories, and “lessons” of excellence companies. These representations make use of rhetoric that persuades their audience — managers — by providing them the possibility of objectified knowledge. This objectified knowledge eliminates the messy “necessity to get into direct contact with the things themselves” (Stehr 1994: 93). Some of these culture management prescriptions order an otherwise messy and ambiguous organizational reality and present an account that is pristinely packaged for “symbolic consumption” (Linstead 1993: 49). The audience “consumes” symbolic representations of the contents of culture


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knowledge (in the form of books, journal and feature articles, etc.), which are prepackaged by management and organization theory authors. The academic discourse stream originates from a more theoretically inclined group of researchers. Like their counterparts writing in practitioner journals, these researchers are interested in the social implications of shared interpretations. Unlike the practitioners, this group draws on the works of anthropologists and symbolic interactionists to argue that organizations should be conceived of as having the ontological status of socially constructed systems of meaning (Smircich 1983; Martin 1990a; Alvesson 1993). This stream embraces ethnographic and phenomenological methodologies and sees organizational culture as the basis for a paradigmatic revolution.46 Whereas the practitioner stream focuses on internal dimensions of organizational structure and causal connections between structural variables, the academic stream advocates studying organizations as cultures: that is, how inter-subjective realities may intervene and order organizational life and maintain organizational action. These two positions continue to taunt each other in strategic games of truth in an open, on-going agon or contest that is the very fabric of the condition and legacy of organizational culture. Distinguishing each of these two communities from the other in terms of the pragmatics used in framing organizational culture, Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) operationalized a set of “model-pragmatics” of organizational culture (using 192 published articles between 1975 and 1984 appearing in monographs and journals). They then assessed and analyzed quantitatively the “tendency of influence” of one community over the other.47 Using regression analysis, these model-pragmatics were compared to determine the relationship between theory (represented broadly by the academic stream) and practice (represented by the practitioner stream) with regard to the ways organizational culture was framed. In that study, the three researchers hypothesized three possible convergences, namely, diffusion, political, and mutual: a. seeing the relationship as the diffusion and utilization of knowledge, in which case academics exerted more influence on practitioners’ thinking; and with the former’s discourse remaining relatively stable, the latter’s discourse pragmatics came to resemble that of the former; b. conceptualizing the relationship in a political perspective whereby practitioners came to seem to control at least some of the resources available to the theoreticians, hence practitioners were able to exert more influence on theoreticians’ thinking. As such, those questions investigated by theoreticians (academic stream) were framed, if not directly asked, by practitioners; and hence practitioners’ discourse remained relatively stable but the pragmatics of academic discourse came to resemble that of the practitioners; and c. that actual relations between “theory” and “practice” in this field might lie

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somewhere in between; that there was mutual influence, hence the two regression lines would converge on each other. By analyzing the language, concepts, and content of the literature written for the two communities over time, the three authors were able to ascertain patterns of influence. The results of their study showed that academics and practitioners were initially interested in different aspects of culture and approached its study quite differently. However, the data suggested that the rubric of practitioners’ discourse remained stable over time, while the pragmatics of academic discourse changed…Those who wrote for academics gradually placed more emphasis on the economic value of controlling culture and on rational control and differentiation (ibid.: 52).

Over time, academic researchers became more concerned with the relationship of organizational culture to organizational effectiveness and success. In other words, the second hypothesis of the three authors was confirmed in that the strategic relationship within organizational culture discourse was compromised towards performative concerns and effectiveness issues rather than towards a pure (academic) research orientation. The purpose of referring extensively to this quantitative study of organizational culture is to compare it with Foucault’s characterization of strategic games of truth within discursive formations. The strategic games of truth are played when the practitioner constituency and their “interested desire” have successfully accomplished ordered organizational reality and framed what are subsequently considered as important issues/questions. In the final analysis, organizational culture is seen as a contested terrain — where agon causes interest groups to strive to solidify their own interpretations and meanings: free agents (two speech communities) harness discursive practices (pragmatics, lexicon, language and locution), and non-discursive practices (institutional practices and social structures of power like journals and monographs) to produce meanings and frame a topic. In this signifying process, academics and practitioners engage in strategic games of “agonal taunting” (vying for attention in publications and developing critiques and levelling criticism on the “Other”) and reversible relationships of “resistance” (this specifically applies to the “underdogs”, the “Other” who are temporarily overwhelmed in the din created by the prevalent dominant “voice” and its regime of truth). Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) explained the phenomenon that occurred in organizational culture research between 1975 and 1984 as follows: the pragmatics of academic discourse came to resemble more closely that of the practitioners’ subculture (ibid.: 52).

Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) proposed that organizational culture research had been readily co-opted by the more powerful interests of managers and consultants. Agents in the practitioner stream or with a normative orientation of


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organizational culture were seen to try to “conduct the conduct” of their perceived “Other”. 48 An important implication was in organization theory there “…may exist a set of social pressures strong enough to compromise a stream of pure research in less than half a decade” (ibid.: 20). The existence of compromising social pressures resonates with the view of Foucault about ubiquitous nominalist power in that he believes that all statements and signifying practices are governed by co-ordinates of protocols, sanctions and reversible relationships of power within discursive enactments. The metaphor of “hegemony”, which Foucault also refers to in his works, provides further justification. Foucault’s critical genealogy surrounding descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstehung) of discursive formations of organizational culture can be examined through the metaphor of “hegemony”, which captures the “discursive strategies”, social practices and processes aptly. Barry Smart pithily observes that: hegemony constitutes a form of social cohesion not through force or coercion, …but most effectively by way of practices, techniques, and methods which infiltrate the minds and bodies, cultural practices which cultivate behaviours and beliefs, tastes, desires and needs as naturally occurring qualities and properties embodied in the psychic and physical reality of the human subject (Smart 1994: 210, italics mine).

“Synonymous with the achievement or exercise of hegemony”, Smart (1994: 210) argues is a practice in which human beings in work organizations are made subjects through forms of government and self-government (Dean 1999). Summarising, Herkunft reveals the myriad events through which and against which a discursive formation of organizational culture is formed; it unmasks a form of power suffused by performative and goal-rational interest (represented by the practitioner stream) that compromises its “Other”. Entstehung reveals what happens at the “moment of arising” of the discursive formation as subjection attempts to “conduct the conduct of others”; these attempts are predicated upon principles of agon, or reversible power relationships that characterize the enactment of discursive formations and the exercise of power. The study by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) is used to infer descent in the formation of organizational culture: on the one hand, aspects of the academic discourse competes for a free and open interpretation of a potentially rich concept of culture; and on the other hand, the practitioner discourse continues to vouch for goal-rational and performative interests. Emergence unmasks domineering “systems of subjection” (Foucault 1984a) that are played out by the two streams in “strategic games of truth”. Discursive strategy is exemplified in “model-pragmatics” in terms of lexicon, language and the ways statements and knowledge are produced, disseminated, and circulated. In conclusion, Foucault’s notions have enabled us to reconnect in a productive way the use of critical reason to analyze power at a molecular organizational level. It can be said that power relations in discursive and non-discursive practices

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explicate subtle reasons why the concepts “culture”, “organizational and corporate culture” intrigue corporate managers and academics. The following part shows how practitioners/consultants, academics and management gurus enact and disseminate organizational culture theories and knowledge and how they formulate heterogeneous elements in truth apparatuses into discursive formations.

Power in Organizational Culture Foucault’s analysis of Entstehung (emergence) uncovers a ubiquitous power vector that fortifies organizational culture’s “moment of arising”. Organizational culture does not exist anterior to discourse but is constructed within it by a number of enabling “conditions” that promote its ascent, subsequent growth, and rise to popularity. My genealogical exemplification in this chapter questions power circuits and modes of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. One of the most fruitful adapters of Foucault’s analysis of “enabling conditions of the emergence of discourse” is British linguist Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992), with his modifications of aspects of Foucault’s discourse theory and discourse analysis. Fairclough (1992) has applied Foucault’s notions of “hegemony” and “social practices” to account for the conditions of the emergence of discursive formations. According to Fairclough (1992), ideas and knowledge are inseparable from the social contexts in which they are produced, disseminated, interpreted and “consumed”. Fairclough (1992) calls these “social practices” — the equivalent of Foucault’s “non-discursive practices”. These include heterogeneous elements of material forms (i.e., such as in the form of papers, journal articles, etc.) as well as human agents including practitioners, managers, and theoreticians. Non-discursive practices cover a gamut of assemblages including the printed medium, its texts, journals and articles as well as management guru seminars and consultancy reports on the topic. The underpinning of Fairclough’s application of Foucault’s ideas is that knowledge is a social product. Knowledge and discourse are end-products of a lot of hard work in which heterogeneous non-discursive practices are juxtaposed into a patterned network. The elements of the discursive and non-discursive in the context of organizational culture discourse will be substantiated below. An interesting feature of organizational culture is its dual popularity within the academic and business communities. Ideas of organization and management theories thrive and draw people’s attention but not many of them sustain equal popularity within both academic and business communities at the same time. The substance and content of the organizational culture discourse, in the mid-1980s, successfully held the attention of the relatively more significant and powerful coalitions within these communities. Apparently, organizational culture’s popularity refers to the amount of acceptance, identification and internalization of the


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values its discourse espouses. The sudden “explosion” of interest in culture in the early 1980s is commonly attributed to the commercial success of Ouchi’s Theory Z (1981), Pascale and Athos’ The Art of Japanese Management (1982), Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures (1982), and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982). Given that these are books were written by supposedly knowledgeable persons in their respective fields, their messages had such a great impact on North Americans that they spawned research exploring the link between productivity and organizational culture (Salaman 1997: 244–51). By this time in the mid-1980s, a discursive space was effectively carved out by the discursive formations of organizational culture. Until then, culture was recognized as a construct entangled with other variables in investigations within anthropological and sociological domains. The appearance of the major journals and edited monographs on culture in the watershed year of 1983 established an unique discursive space. If this discursive space is to sustain and expand within organization studies, the discourse has to continue to remain popular. Journals, periodicals, books and the norms manifested in these heterogeneous social institutional elements become the “surfaces of emergence” that empower organizational culture at its “moment of arising”. Management of symbols and meanings has confirmed the perception among the business and practitioner communities that organizational culture is able to order effectively managers and employees, shapes psychic dispositions, govern their conduct and comportment, secure their regulation, and induce a sense of self-governance. Discursive formations of organizational culture have entered managerial argot and become a “language” for depicting an organizational domain and re-presenting it “in a form suitable for deliberation, argumentation, scheming and intervention” (du Gay 1996a: 54). It comes to seem that the main reason for the steady popularity of organizational culture is this achievable potency and promise of “culture” as pliable into a management tool that can unleash the perceived potentials catalogued above. Equally, in the view of Foucault, for an object or a topic to become constructed within a discourse, and then for it to remain popular, three conditions of possibility have to be present: they are, quoting Foucault (1972: 44), “a group of relations established between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification”. These conditions are found in the social domain, stabilized and imbricated within the materiality of specific relations and concrete institutional arrangements. In the case of organizational culture, its Herkunft and Entstehung highlight its social-institutional context is pivotal to its ascent and rise to popularity. This rise features a myriad of relationships between discursive formations and workings of both discursive and non-discursive practices. With regard to the distinction between the two categories of practices, Fairclough (1992) has made this comment:

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CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION “Discursive practice” does not here contrast with “social practice”: the former is a particular form of the latter. In some cases, the social practice may be wholly constituted by the discursive practice, while in others it may involve a mixture of discursive and non-discursive practice. Analysis of a particular discourse as a piece of discursive practice focuses upon processes of text production, distribution and consumption. All of these processes are social and require reference to particular economic, political, and institutional settings within which discourse is generated (ibid.: 71, emphases mine).

Fairclough (1992) suggests examining the economic, political and institutional settings within the three antecedent conditions for the formation of objects and the emergence of discourse that Foucault has expounded in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). Foucault (1972) outlines three conditions or principles that determine the formation of objects within discourse: surface of emergence, authorities of delimitation, and grid of specification. First, “surface of emergence” denotes the relations that delimit what is talked about and give that topic a status that is manifest, nameable, seeable and describable. Second, “authorities of delimitation” are individuals or institutions that define a particular object; these include intellectual communities and perhaps most significantly an authority recognized by public opinion. Finally, “grids of specification” are systems and forms of differentiation against which an object/topic is classified and defined. They refer to an ordering or classification of notions so that we operate within a system of possibility in which statements are made as to what subject matter is important. The caveat is that this system both enables us to do certain things and limits us from doing other things that the system and its apparatus disapprove. Foucault has applied these three conditions to the analyses of the whiggish histories of psychiatry, medicine, and penology, with telling and sober effects (Bové 1986). Let us examine these three conditions in the context of organizational culture below. Conditions of possibility for the emergence of organizational culture Alvesson’s “market” theory (1990, 1992) and Huczynski’s “guru theory” (1993) speculate the reasons for the rise and popularity of culture as a management idea. Basically, Alvesson (1990) offers three reasons that he believes constitute what we know as “planes of emergence” for the development of a cultural perspective of organizations. Firstly, Alvesson argues that there has been an intense demand for new ideas on effective management. Although Alvesson does not provide concrete evidence, elsewhere in the well known quantitative study by Kotter and Heskett (1992), the authors have suggested evidence of the explicit inclinations of some large U.S. corporations to try to improve their financial performance by tampering with their own corporate culture. Alvesson (1990) and Kotter and Heskett (1992) explain that the interest in harnessing the potential of culture as a


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management solution is driven by the pressure of strong stockholders on managers to maintain growth and attractive dividends during periods of inflation and recession, especially in the U.S. in the 1980s. This is the first surface of emergence that Foucault (1972) alludes to. Secondly, another surface of emergence is related to the economic and business hardships, the worrying drop in productivity, and Japanese competition especially with American and European corporations during the 1980s. Heretofore, much comparative international research had emphasized only formal structural comparisons but these failed to uncover any telling difference between Japanese and western firms. Scholars then shifted their attention to investigate the possibility whether or not different national cultures might have consequential effect on managing people. It was no accident that in some studies cultural problems were popularly equated with “people problems”. The success of Japanese corporations in the 1980s was generally taken to be attributed to their specific “cultural” features. The domain of culture in this plane of emergence was therefore delimited and imbricated with other management devices or tools for managing people and enhancing employee solidarity, social cohesion, and ultimately productivity and corporate performance. This is another surface of emergence for organizational culture. Changes in work morality, an increased need for expressivity and involvement at work also make up conditions of the possibility for the emergence of organizational culture (Alvesson 1990). Social-contextual forces in western economies have contributed to the burgeoning awareness of the quality of work. This widespread awareness reinforces the extension of a neo-human relations movement and a Human Resource Management movement (Legge 1989, 1995a; Guest 1987, 1990). The new HRM movement vouches the importance of aligning human resource policies and practices with business strategy. This initiative entails management of corporate culture and meanings in the workplace in order to foster employees’ quality of work-life. This is a third plane of emergence. Foucault’s second condition, authorities of delimitation, can be found in the leads provided in Huczynski (1993). Huczynski (1993) offers his “guru theory”, which proposes that the existence of “authorities of delimitation” like management gurus, management academics and consultants is pivotal to the ascent and rise to popularity of several major management discourses. Authority figures like professional consultants, management academics, and hero managers articulate and package management fads ready for “symbolic consumption”. There are five heterogeneous elements or non-discursive relations that enable discourses to become popular. Paraphrasing Huczynski (1993: 1), in order for an idea and its discourse to remain popular: a. it must be seen to be relevant, dealing with a pressing problem of the day; b. it must be promoted through the available media (e.g. management best-

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sellers), including the education system, training organizations, consultancies, and the print and visual media; c. it must be framed according to the psychological needs and interests of the management consumers; d. it must contain ingredients that ensure that the “customer” will appreciate its relevance; and e. it must be presented in an engaging verbal style so that it can be delivered orally by gurus, consultants and management academics, and by such means as videos and management seminars. Like Huczynski (1993), Alvesson (1993) reviews the enabling conditions that contributed to the popularity of culture discourse in the 1980s. Alvesson captures these forces partly by using a market metaphor. Through this metaphor, academics and practitioners are seen as producers and managers are seen as buyers. The culture concept and its discursive formations are perceived as containing the dual qualities of academic respectability and practical relevance. Alvesson’s view is that the market for knowledge and management ideas is characterized by eager acceptance of recipes and quick fixes that possess that dual quality.49 Alvesson (1993) points out that “symbolic consumption” of the culture recipes may even help managers feel on top of their situations, in control of the organization and subordinates, and even help them to satisfy their eagerness to be seen as modern, updated, enlightened and educated. Organizational culture has received the right blessings, legitimized as the sayable by groups of “authorities of delimitations” (Foucault 1972) like management academics, consultants, hero managers, and management gurus. The condition “grids of specification” are systems and forms of differentiation against which an object is classified and defined. This classification allows us to operate within a system of possibility whereby statements are made about what subject matter is important. Two classifications are located within the co-ordinates of the grid of specification: the “metaphor or interpretive school”, and the “variable or applicable school” (Smircich 1983; Meek 1988; Schneider 1990; Linstead & Grafton-Small 1992; Alvesson 1993). They allow systems of possibility whereby power relations sanction what subject matter is “legitimate”, important, and what can or cannot be said. The first specification posits that organizations be understood as cultures, a view that treats culture as a root metaphor — something an organization is; whereas the second orientation treats culture as a dependent or an independent variable — something an organization has. The first classification follows Clifford Geertz’s interpretive tradition, which takes cultural epistemology as exploratory and descriptive in nature, producing organizational knowledge (or thick description) that attends to questions of interpretation and description. Wilson and Rosenfeld (1990) have distinguished the first specification, the “ana-


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lytic” school of culture, from the second specification that they call the “applicable” school of culture. This second specification tends to produce organizational knowledge that addresses “questions of function and causal explanation”, and “the investigation of antecedent causes (that is, the founder; the societal context) and effects (that is, organizational performance) of organizational culture” (Reichers & Schneider 1990: 22; additions mine). The metaphor/interpretive school of culture The metaphor/interpretive school focuses on the imbrication of shared values, meanings and language-in-use that “mark its occupants as distinct from others” (Anthony 1994: 29).50 The underpinning of culture in work is similar to what Anthony (1994) has called the “implicit and unexamined assumptions and agreements about values and meanings”. These unexamined assumptions or “shared culture” are, paraphrasing Anthony (1994): layered within broad communities, [and in] the world of industrial employment, [Turner (1971) calls it] industrial sub-culture which has marked similarities that become established in association with particular occupations and trades (Anthony 1994: 29).

Sociologists of occupational cultures observe that “people act out their work roles in a manner that is highly dependent on their customary definitions and understandings of their task and its meaning” (Ackroyd & Crowdy 1990).51 The argument is that the behavioral patterns in organizations are shaped by people’s underlying assumptions of the meaning of work as well as their orientation to the value of work. These underlying assumptions tend to be “established and sedimented over time, [and they] do not require to be calculated and defended” (Anthony 1994). In this grid of specification, indigenous culture at work and occupational culture are relatively persistent, less pliable and less susceptible to external changes and intervention that are imposed upon them. The implication is that diversities, subcultures, and countercultures at the workplace have to be carefully accommodated because they are artefacts of real significance that display people’s underlying values and assumptions.52 In summary, the embededness view of culture maintains that culture is less amenable to change and control than some “missionaries” of corporate culture claim it is. Linstead and Grafton-Small (1992) succinctly recapitulate the pluralist notion of “culture in work”, which is […] more organic, being the culture which grows and emerges within the organization and which emphasizes the creativity of organizational members as culture makers, perhaps resisting or ironically evaluating the dominant culture (ibid.: 333).

In its own way the metaphor/interpretive school can be considered as attempting

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its own “closure of meaning”, though in a different way from that of the variable school of culture, which we examine now. The variable school of culture Another grid of specification is classified as the “variable” school of organizational culture. Functionalism and instrumentalism are the basic tenets underpinning this rational tradition of culture (Smircich & Calás 1987: 229). It is more appropriate to use the term “corporate culture” instead of “organizational culture” in this context because the former perspective holds culture as something an organization has. The systems perspective of culture is concerned with “articulating patterns of contingent relationships among a collection of variables that appear to figure in organizational survival” (Smircich 1983: 344). For example, one genre of discursive formations speculates culture as a catch-all notion encompassing those practices and organizational arrangements that are distinctive of the culture of Japanese work organizations in the 1980s.53 A number of comparisons between facets of organizational cultures in the U.S. and Japanese companies have been produced throughout the final twenty years of the last century; for example, Ouchi (1981) and Pascale and Athos (1981). It is popular to argue that the high productivity, high performance and financial prowess of Japanese corporations are the direct consequences of their cultural attributes (Salaman 1997: 244–48).54 There was at one time a widespread enthusiasm in the analyses of possible transferability of a number of the Japanese practices to U.S. companies such as life-long employment, the ringi system (participative decision-making), quality circles, work morale, and team spirit.55 Another genre of corporate culture takes an instrumental view and seeks to achieve an harmonious “fit” that aligns culture with the strategy and internal structural dimensions of organizations (Silverzweig & Allen 1976; Kilmann 1985). Authors of this genre generally regard culture as the belief and value system that the management in a company shares about how to manage themselves and the other employees. The collective desire to the pursue inner workings of that causal link and the authors’ own “will to represent” the authentic viability of such a link can be seen to surface in one of the early articles, in Sloan Management Review, on corporate culture: […] a culture, we define as a set of expected behaviors, or norms which affect every aspect of organizational functioning, including how we dress and when we arrive, how hard we work, how we measure success, how we are rewarded, and how we deal with each other (Silverzweig & Allen 1976: 33, emphasis mine).

If organizational agents take this advice and act upon these prescriptions, the implication is these agents can be considered to be interpellated to new subjectpositions and become “culturated”. The discursive strategies that corporate culture authors use include:


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a. apprehending the messy and ambiguous organizational realities; b. then, using covert textual, locutionary and rhetorical tactics, skilfully transform those experiences and data into “signifiers” with pre-scripted meanings; and c. ordering these signifiers into persuasive representations of perceived organizational realities. These representations are taken as believable and even authentic. For instance, Kilmann (1985) declares euphorically that culture possesses the capacity to provide: meaning, direction, and mobilization — it is the social energy that moves the corporation into allocation…the energy that flows from shared commitments among group members (Kilmann 1985: 352).

This discursive sleight of hand in Kilmann (1985) gives the readers an impression that every firm has a distinctive culture that can be created, developed, managed, and changed (and if need be, even discarded) relatively quickly. The assumed need to come to grips with “managing culture effectively” has been instilled into the minds of many people. This is demonstrated clearly in an opening statement of the article we saw earlier: a number of major American businesses have learned to view themselves as cultures [sic]. The results of this new consciousness are not only increased employee commitment and fulfilment on the job but also bottom-line improvement. The corporate culture program is….an approach based on the idea that the most effective way for an organization to change human behavior is by changing the culture or socio-corporate environment within which that behavior exists (Silverzweig & Allen 1976: 33, emphasis mine).

The new consciousness constitutive of culturated subjectivity is precisely the ubiquitous power/knowledge of governmentality; power produces discursive formations, and in turn “interpellates” agents to “take up subject-positions” (Althusser 1971; Butler 1997). Within the grid of specification of the “variable” school, another discursive formation focuses on the symbolic aspects of meanings and culture and the ways to manage and control them. Decrying the over-reliance on rational strategy in management, Peters (1978), Peters and Waterman (1982), Trice and Beyer (1985), and Schein (1985), to a moderate extent, are generally seen as proselytising “management of symbolic action” in organizations. This delineates patterns of causal relationships among a collection of variables such as leadership, which is seen to enhance corporate performance, organizational effectiveness, and survival (Kilmann, Saxton & Serpa 1985). The argument of Peters and Waterman (1982) goes like this: firstly, rational strategies for managing organizations have begun to yield low returns on productivity and performance; secondly, managers must not under-estimate the power of the importance of embodying norms, values and beliefs in inspiring loyalty; thirdly, managers should harness the potential of the

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symbolic aspects of management and pay more attention to influencing an organization’s norms, values and beliefs; and lastly, “managers should play the roles as leaders” — and “as leaders, they can create and manage culture”. The assumption is that managers as leaders, even if they do not “solely construct corporate cultures, are assumed to have an important influence on their growth” (Anthony 1994: 39).56 For these key people, manipulating and controlling the symbolic aspects of culture has to remain an imperative on the managerial agenda. In summary, Herkunft and Entstehung of organizational culture clearly shows how power relations warrant what is “true” and good, within the terms of reference of their respective “schools of thought”. The prescriptive genre implies, paraphrasing Gerlach (1996: 428), that there are “a set of problems to be solved”, and business intellectuals are seen as “solvers to these commonly agreed-upon problems”. We can see how the power/knowledge structure stigmatises what is “false” and not beneficial to the business if it wants to remain successful. Much of the substance and content of these espousals about corporate culture are impregnated with “axioms about human behavior” (Anthony 1986), which tend to be accepted and even welcomed by manager-consumers of “management know-how”. The tenor of the argument asserts that these authors’ prescriptive actions have constituted the ideal culture for organizations. This “quick-fix” mentality expresses only a modest, even trivialising view of culture; what gets disseminated is rarefied, uninspiring discourse, giving a potentially rich discourse a nondescript connotation. When Foucault talks about rarity or rarefaction of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972: 118–121), he means some texts or discourses are repetitive and restricted in the range of their structure, language choice, tense, statements, events, and narrative figures. On the basis of the wealth of the vocabulary available, there are, in corporate/organizational culture discourse, relatively few things that are said and very little that is written. The reason for this slippage and vacuity is indicative in the caveat of corporate culture discourse, pointed out by Anthony: subjecting culture to the same assumption that what is understood in terms of analysis and categorization can be controlled, […] that the only purpose of understanding is to achieve control because that is the function of science (Anthony 1994: 92).

What gets disseminated is rarefied or deficient discourse whose intelligibility is dependent upon a finite pool of internally proliferated meanings. The truth statement of the discourse is a show-cased one that proclaims assertively and confidently that management of culture involves creating it, changing it, maintaining it, and abandoning it (Davis 1984; Schein 1985; Kilmann 1985; Drennan 1992). In conclusion, discourses of culture are sites of power to manufacture “truth” about that topic. Its emergence and rise to popularity are policed by the apparatus


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of truth that sanctions the norms of the sayable and the seeable. This chapter has examined major aspects of nominalist power, specifically the contexts within organization studies and the “game” phenomenon of the contesting elements that feeds in the internal dynamics of culture discourse. Critical exemplarity has been used as an ethical showing of how, in less than a decade, the understanding of culture in organizations was transformed from a multi-faceted, interpretive notion into a goal-rational, performative notion that reifies attributes directly inscribable onto the psychic dispositions of agents and the structural properties of organizations. In the next chapter, I shall investigate Entstehung of what I call the “humanist present” within organizational culture. It puts into practice the ethos of critical ontology of the present and resistance. A cardinal presumption in Foucault’s conception of resistance is that the relationships of power are reversible (Foucault 1988e: 12ff.). As organization theorist, I am not interested in states of domination whereby power is “fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is limited” (Foucault 1988e: 12). It is to the ubiquitous omnipresence and double valence of power and its ambivalence, which many critics might have misunderstood, that the next chapter is devoted entirely. By attending to these relations of power, resistance and freedom, it is hoped that we may begin to know that we can be “much freer than we feel” (McKinlay & Starkey 1997), after we have discovered “what we have been in the process of moving away from it to become something else” (Ransom 1997: 174).

Chapter 7 Postmodern Critique and Organization Studies At the heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Michel Foucault The Subject and Power (1983)

The Humanist Present In Chapter 4, I argued a case for organization theorists to stylize a postmodern self-reflexivity, a practice to transgress the limits of subjectification and those forms of technologies of power that make individuals subjects. It has been pointed out that a tying of oneself to some moral or scientific definition of who one is is repressive. It is through this in-road into the “humanist present” that this book feeds into theorizing of a new critique and resistance of subjectivizing power.57 In this chapter, I argue that humanist assumptions have tended to treat Man as the subject that knows and as the object of knowledge. As an investigator/ interpreter, he has a privileged access to explanation and interpretation, to the “truth”, and, in addition, that knowledge so gained is independent of relations of power. In the social sciences, even when critical reflection has developed, it often takes the form of “lens cleansing” (Clifford & Marcus 1986), of a pursuit of selfinterpretations (e.g., Mulkay 1992; Reason 1994), or of a pursuit of the background practices and structures on which objectification and social theory are themselves predicated (e.g., Latour 1987, 1988; Layder 1994). Smart (1985) points out that either way it constitutes a pursuit of the essentialist origin which, according to Foucault’s conception of genealogy, is fated to remain unrealized and unrealizable. The critique of this “humanist present” is encapsulated in the “analysis of the relations of power and knowledge which have constituted the modes of objectification through which human beings have become subjects” (Smart 1985: 105).

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In other words, Foucault argues that Man, as the subject, cannot be considered as the foundation, origin or condition of possibility of discourse because of its dubious epistemological status.58 Humanism presupposes the existence of Man, who for Foucault is a figure or an outcome of discourse, a precarious, constructed entity. The existence of Man is contingent upon the systematic epistemological arrangement of the elements of discourse that constitute what Foucault calls the modern epistème (i.e., a conceptual framework, an epistemological configuration or modes of knowledge of being). Due to the mutable and contingent character of these arrangements within the order of thought, Foucault argues that if these arrangements were to disappear (or mutate again), Man would be erased too. Before the modern epistème, within the classical epistème (when, Barry Smart points out, the order of thought was to achieve a classification of representations and signs in the form of a table of differences ordered in terms of degrees of complexity and which would mirror the order of things in the world), there was no space for man as an object of knowledge, no epistemological consciousness of man as such, and hence no place and no possibility for a “science of man” (Foucault 1970). Rather, the subject, and its authorial voice can only be treated as a precarious element within a discursive field, occupying an “enunciative position”, or a privileged space from which it is possible for him to speak or write credibly (Hall 1992; Simons 1995, quoting Foucault 1972: 95–6). Examples of these “authors in enunciative positions” in the works of Foucault include doctors, judges, the police, prison wardens, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists; and I would include, in this book, management gurus, academics and managers.59 Put differently, experts and intellectuals constitute mechanisms of power that are fastened to knowledge production and accumulation. I shall examine the issue of intellectuals in the last part of this chapter, after I examine the tensions of Foucault’s notions of power, freedom, and resistance in the second and third parts. At this juncture, it has to be admitted that this trajectory in Foucault’s critique of the “present” in the human sciences is clearly predicated upon an overriding assumption, derived principally from Nietzsche, that knowledge is inextricably associated with networks of power comprised of subjects and experts in such a way that power produces knowledge; that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (Foucault 1977a: 27).

Mechanisms of power comprising of heterogeneous elements of experts and their discourses are all simultaneous instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge. Foucault calls this feature a “power/knowledge” nexus. Observing

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such a formation of power and accumulation of knowledge, Ransom (1997: 176) comments that “power structures create and maintain themselves by concocting and reproducing individuals (or subjects) who will function for the power relation in question”. He continues: the production of these individuals is intimately bound up with the invention of experiences (in our case, it is the experience of subjectivization by a “culturated” subjectivity) that individuals go through, which in turn become modes of thought; (…) individuals are genes helping to make up the strand of DNA that produces and reproduces power relations (Ransom 1997: 176; emphases and addition mine)

The production/reproduction properties of such a power/knowledge nexus is summarized in two of Foucault’s works. The inter-relationship between power and knowledge is illustrated in I, Pierre Rivière (1975), which documents the confession of a man who murdered his mother, sister and brother. Foucault contrasts this confession with other documents of local authorities who include doctors, police, and the presiding judge, and their reports on whether Rivière is a criminal or insane. These later commentaries illustrate how the individual Rivière becomes constituted through the documentation that surrounds him, so that he becomes known in a particular way and, as a result, is subject to actions by the authorities. A similar work of this period, Herculine Barbin (1980i), reports the case of the experience of a French hermaphrodite; and similarly it was important for the governing authorities that the individual be designated as either a man or a woman. The more that is known about the object the more controllable it becomes. The relevance of Foucault’s work for my work is precisely its recognition of this pervasive power/knowledge nexus within the discursive formations of organizational culture. It is the scrutiny of a particular humanist subjectivity among organizational agents that we have to be most concerned with. Foucault’s work provides the in-road to a critique of this “humanist present” in organization theory in several ways, and these have been tested out throughout the preceding chapters. These attempts culminate in a certain momentum but also raise a number of issues — and it is time to examine the strengths and weaknesses of using a Foucauldian power/knowledge analysis and critique of organizational culture. In raising the focus on the ways that his work functions as criticism and as resistance, Foucault has posed a certain perplexity to his readers and critics. The concept of dispersed power is puzzlement because for most critics, power is negatively valued; power sets limits on the free activity and self-expression of the individual and therefore power must be opposed.60 Critics have also criticized Foucault for his ambiguity and unclarity about the reasons for resistance, as well as his evasiveness in proposing any “normative criteria” (Fraser 1994) for his critical activities and for the visions of a better world. Commentary and critique of

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Foucault’s notions of power, freedom, and resistance have become an intellectual industry itself. The relatively well known criticisms have been collected in Barry Smart’s seven-volume anthology of essays on Foucault, Foucault: Critical Assessment (1994); and these criticisms come from Fraser (1994), Taylor (1994), Habermas (1994), and Ray (1994). Foucault’s responses to these dissatisfactions appear within a series of general observations spread out among a number of his works on the effects of power and resistance. Although Foucault’s clarifying comments about power and resistance are unable to resolve matters completely, I shall interpret the subtle connections, reconcile and redress the critics’ misinterpretations and criticisms surrounding these key notions. As will become clear, their relevance for the study of organizational culture is also justified. The critics’ charge against Foucault’s evasiveness over the reason for resistance is challenged. It will be shown that the art of refusal of who we are is a directed response to the humanist present in quarters of the social sciences, and how this art connects up with Foucault’s later project of “stylization of the self” will be examined.61 In the last part, I try to rescue Foucault via two by-paths: firstly, through a productive interpretation of Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and power and their connection with resistance; and secondly, through referencing his notion of the “specific” intellectual (versus the “universal” intellectual) as a lever in bringing about the kind of “resistance” that Foucault envisages. I situate Foucauldian resistance in a comparison with post-Enlightenment thought, especially that of critical theory. It will be argued how the concept of the specific intellectual provides an impetus for resistance against subjectification or subjectifying power of truth statements in discourses. In that last part, I also examine the significance of the role of organization theorists as intellectuals in the larger context of change.

Foucault and Power Power and domination One of the major problems of Foucault’s theory of power and resistance is the ubiquity of power, and its “vacuity as a concept”. The latter observation is made by Larry Ray, who has pointed out directly that the abstractions “power/resistance” offer merely “vacuous and idealistic accounts of social reality” (Ray 1994). Omnipresent power assumes to “collapse radical differences of contexts within which power is exercised into a monistic framework, decapitating the revelation of the complex differentiated social aspects constitutive of subjectivity” (Ray 1994: 251).


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In the opinion of Ray, power is romanticized in Foucault’s work, and in invoking all-encompassing notions of power and resistance, Foucault also “invokes invariant universals” (Ray 1994: 252). Similarly, while Foucault correctly says that sites of power become sites of resistance, he leaves out of the picture the sociological dynamics of struggle (Ray 1994: 252). This latter aspect tends to weaken the explanatory potential of power within the terms of reference of sociological analysis of resistance in real-world entities like prisons, asylums, hospitals, schools, and work organizations. Ray has also made a highly pertinent point that a “site of power is mediated by the social conditions in which it is embedded, (because) that structure the possibilities of specific outcomes” (Ray 1994: 252, addition mine). It is argued that Ray’s thesis is tenable assuming that we conduct our inquiries under the terms of reference of realist, structural sociological analysis of modes of domination, and of the struggle and resistance against them. In defence, it is pointed out that Foucault’s philosophical and “methodological” preference is predicated upon nominalism or anti-realism. Nominalism partakes of concepts, terms and categories, whereas realism deals with denotable, concrete things. Nominalistic treatment of ubiquitous power offers an innovative speculatory principle for an analysis of discursive formations of organizational culture as a representational practice within organizational discourse. In spite of this unresolved tension between the nominalist and realist debate in the treatment of the notion of power, I proceed to elaborate more clearly how power provides an inroad to the analysis of subjectivity and subjectification. It has been indicated previously that Foucault’s notion of power (le pouvoir) is always a definite worry for those operating within a certain set of traditional sociological expectations (e.g., Reed 1998). Foucault’s work on both the relations of power, knowledge, and modes of objectification of human beings takes a radically different trajectory to that which is found within the domains of mainstream sociology and social theory. In conventional social theory, power is associated with deference, submission, suppression, coercion, and finally domination. But when Foucault’s concept of power arrives, power ceases to be a convenient surrogate for these correlative notions. A much clearer distinction between power and domination becomes imperative. Both Peter Miller and Barry Hindess have suggested succinctly that domination is only a “particular mode of operation of power” (Miller 1987: 2) and “a particular modality of the exercise of power” (Hindess 1996: 102) respectively. Miller, in his Domination and Power (1987), defines domination as a mode of acting upon individuals or groups of individuals directly counter to their aspirations or demands, (for example), in the home, the school, the workplace, and at national and international state levels. It sometimes reaches horrific proportions and as such points may take effect by causing death of the dominated. Therein lies its ultimate sanction (Miller 1987: 2).

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Power, on the other hand, acts indirectly on the interior of the person; power operates through the promotion of subjectivity,…(it) attempts to invest the individual with a series of personal objectives and ambitions (Miller 1987: 2, emphases mine).

The two key notions of production and investment in Miller’s account of power have been discussed before. Discursive formations of organizational culture reconstitute people’s structures of recognition that make up the experience of new personhood and subject-specific competencies (Althusser 1971; Butler 1997; Tully 1999). This observation about the part played by the “body” dovetails with that of Miller in the sense that he considers power is a more “intimate” phenomenon: it knows the individual better, it does not act on the individual at a distance and from the outside. It acts on the interior of the person, through their self. As a mode of intervention on social relations it is one in which the production of a knowledge of the subject and a mode of acting upon the subject is crucial (Miller 1987: 2, emphasis mine).

Miller’s observation about “a mode of acting upon the subject” must not be construed as denoting power as conspiratorial, determinant of the subjects’ behavior, or as covert domination. In this context, power has to be conceived as the relational environment in which actions take place. It is the sum of influences on actions or on comportments — the term Foucault (1983) uses to denote the ways someone conducts oneself, or behaves. The trouble begins when we try to say what power is, in the sense of saying just what the disciplining and regulating quantitative influences on behavior are. However, we have seen that power, for Foucault, is not constraint on behavior in the sense of intimidation and coercion exerted by a person or group on another person or group. Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands… . Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power;… they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its point of application (Foucault 1980e: 98, emphasis mine).

This view highlights that power operates like the “force-vectors of the magnetic field” (Prado 1996: 76), according to the magnet-analogy suggested by Prado, in a networked fashion and individuals are “magnets” in the magnetic field that is power per se. This view warns against a “deductive” study of power, assuming that power starts from a center, and permeates into the base and the most molecular elements of society (Foucault 1980e: 99). Foucault proposes that one must conduct


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an ascending analysis of power, starting from its infinitesimal mechanisms,…(to show) the manner in which the techniques and procedures of power are invested and annexed by more global phenomenon and the subtle fashion in which more general powers or economic interests are able to engage with these technologies that are at once both relatively autonomous of power and act as its infinitesimal elements (Foucault 1980e: 99).

Power is seen when it is exercised, and a definition of power cannot be precise in the sense of articulating an essence; there is not, Foucault admits himself, any “theory of power” per se.62 It is to these properties of power that we turn. Power as relations and strategies The mechanics of power relations can only be “seen when power is exercised” and this activity means precisely the “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary” (Foucault 1984a) of the development of culture in organization studies and its agon for “intellectual dominance” (Martin & Frost 1996). In Foucault’s nominalistic treatment, power has the same ontological status as relations because power is wholly relational. This tautological way of expressing the context and content of power is necessary even though it has caused mis-construal and misreading. Some readers and critics have been disturbed because they expect the question “what is power?” to be answered in definitive ways, given the importance of the notion in Foucault’s thought. Foucault, in The Subject and Power (1983), illustrates that the question should be reframed as “how is power exercised: by what means?”, and “what are the effects of the exercise of power?”, rather than “what is power and where does it come from?”. Only in addressing the question of power in terms of relations can we grapple with the innovative difference that the notion of power and its relational and strategic character has to offer.63 To the extent that we can say what power is, it is, paraphrasing Prado (1996): the sum of past and present comportments as they qualify presently ensuing comportments. Power is the conditioning of ongoing actions by the totality of previous and concurrent actions. This is how power is a “set of actions upon other actions” and not actions bearing on agents (Foucault 1983: 219–20). But to say that comportments are actions bearing on actions, neither strong or weak, enabling or inhibiting in themselves, is not to say that they are acts of intimidation, coercion, or domination in the ordinary sense of “power”, because comportments are, principally, elements of Foucauldian power or power-relations. Individual acts of coercion, domination, and intimidation are of course strong or weak, enabling or inhibiting; they bear on agents not actions. But comportments of Foucauldian power or the web of power-relations are neither strong or weak, enabling or inhibiting, because they bear on actions not agents (emphases mine).

The strategic situation of relation-distribution that makes up “power” must be “understood…as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in

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which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (Foucault 1980a: 92). Power is situationally specific and needs to be reconstructed anew in each situation. Power is a textured totality, an environment or “a general matrix of force relations at a given time” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983). Power becomes the sum of past and present comportments as they bear on presently ensuing comportments, or the “sum influences on actions” (Prado 1996). Power over the ways someone conducts oneself has been explicated by Hindess as a kind of capillary action that affects “behaviour indirectly by acting on the manner in which subjects regulate their own behaviour and conduct” (Hindess 1996: 106). This absorption with “conducting the conduct” and “comportments” of others marks a redirection in Foucault’s interest from the analysis of power as “regulatory practices of the self” (Miller 1987: 1 & 207) to the analysis of governmentality. Governmentality embodies a whole apparatus of a diverse range of projects for the management of populations, investing in them with a view to promoting in them a constant attention over their own conduct. This perspective of subject and governmentality feeds into the task of rethinking discursive formations of organizational culture that promote and invest in individual agents a sense of self-monitoring and vigilance in work organizations (Reed 1989; Willmott 1993). Through insights like these, it can be seen that power (le pouvoir) clearly differs from that contained in the mainstream analysis of quantitative power (la puissance). Foucault has determined to break the ontological and analytical link between “power as manipulative control” and “power as institutional domination”. Foucault (1977a: 26) has remarked that power is a strategy to be appreciated in relational terms: an effect or an instantiation of domination, that “arises not from an appropriation and deployment by a subject but from “manoeuvers, tactics, techniques and functionings”. This strategic aspect of power and its connection with subjectivity will be discussed next. On subjectivities Similar to the discipline discourse, organizational culture targets individual agents; it is a “strategy” that designates a form of rationality functioning to attain a management-centric aim.64 In real-world entities such as prisons, monasteries, barracks, mental asylums, schools, and work organizations, a relation of power does not constitute an obligation or prohibition imposed upon the “powerless”. Rather power invests them; power is also transmitted by and through them (Foucault 1977a).65 Through prescribed techniques and functioning, discursive formations of organizational culture, like those of discipline, psychiatry, medicine, and education, invest and interpellate organizational agents to take up new identities that promote within them their new “selves”. Humanity bears witness to these strategies that roll out penitent inmates, disciplined soldiers, pious monks,


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compliant pupils, acquiescent patients, empowered executives and “designer employees”. Culturated managers and employees come to an awareness of what is presented to them as their nature, not through persuasion or coercion, but through capillary actions of power. Their own subjectivization unfolds before managers and employees a developed sense of selves or a “made-up” identity (du Gay 1997), and they become power “containers” (Giddens 1985) supposedly able to self-monitor their own conduct and to align their actions and behaviors in keeping with the expectations, values and basic assumptions of their respective organizations (du Gay 1997: 294–96, 299–305, 313–16). Foucault tells us in History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1980a) that power is “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate”. Foucault’s analysis of sexuality shows us how becoming and being a sexed subject is a matter of being defined in coming to have certain beliefs and certain comportments and in thinking and acting in specific ways. In the sphere of organization studies, power and knowledge are the dual aspects of that textured totality or comportment-conditioning environment within which subjects are formed and have their being. The sphere of organization studies is arguably a comportment-conditioning environment in which organizational discourses of culture and their regimes of truth subjectify individuals. From the etymology of culture to its displacement from the social sciences to administrative theory, the majority of discourses of organizational culture views the organizational world as “locked into randomness and sometimes chaos, as requiring to be brought into its redeeming order” (Ball 1990). The rarefied language of rationality promotes only internal proliferation of meanings and truth statements pertaining to control and compliance. This language is part of a set of discursive practices that prevent the “escape of meaning” by eschewing and marginalizing problems, difficulties and fears of organizational agents. The managed subject is the objectified product of organization, its values and assumptions that are articulated from multiple points within the textured matrix of powerrelations. Although power is a mediating component in organizational discourse, it is not a possession of any faction of organization theorists. It is nominalistic and impersonal, immanent in the discourse of organizational culture. The innovativeness of ubiquitous power opens up possibilities in studying ways in which exercise of power can mould personalities of individuals, enact their subjectivity or personhood, and “make up” people. The significance of power is its creative and productive effects that appear in the personalities of those who are subject to its exercise. This observation echoes with one of Focault’s comments about power in Discipline and Punishment. In it, Foucault tersely points out that it is necessary to cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces: it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and

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CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained from him belong to this production (Foucault 1977a: 194, emphases mine).

Summing up, Foucault posits that power is a relationship, a textured totality, not a property. It cannot be defined in an a priori fashion, because its capillary character differs in each sphere in which it is exercised. Most important of all, Foucault explains that power does not act directly and immediately on people; rather it acts upon their actions. Power should not be thought of in terms of conspiratorial, overt or covert domination that determines the behavior on whom it is exercised. Equally, it would be wrong-headed to abstract numerous particular instances of domination, coercion, prohibition, and intimidation to see them as constitutive of power, as if power simply were the inclusive whole of such instances. The dispersed character of pervasive power has been taken to issue by critics who expect and insist that power be treated as a cumulative phenomenon somewhat analogous to a physical force in a realist, structural analysis of human agency (Wolin 1988; Best & Kellner 1991: 51–54, 68–69; Layder 1994: 98– 100, 102–3). Even though Foucault’s critics discount the “productive” feature of power, power must not be thought of as concocting any conspiracy because it is a necessary sociological condition. Foucault theorizes that the seed of resistance is sown at the moment of the exercise of power. Therefore, the task of distinguishing Foucault’s concept of power would be incomplete unless we also consider the correlatives of freedom and resistance and the tensions they create.

Foucault, Freedom and Resistance Freedom in power The correlative notion of freedom is another perplexing facet of Foucault’s work. This part offers clarification by comparing and contrasting the difference between the critics’ views of what they think power and freedom should be, and what Foucault thinks power is in the light of his formulation of freedom. The objective is to determine what Foucault means by freedom, although he did not, as usual, instantly and explicitly affirm his own denotation of that notion in his work. Perhaps one reason for the difference between their views is that the kind of freedom and power Foucault is interested in is unlike the kinds his critics are looking for. Clearly Foucault places emphasis on the primacy of what Patton (1989) terms “power to”, and not “power over”, as Taylor (1994) and, to a certain extent, Fraser (1994) and Wolin (1988) would have understood it. American analytical philosopher Charles Taylor (1994) uses the terms “power” and “domination” interchangeably, arguing that the exercise of power or domination requires that some form of constraint be imposed on someone: “something must be


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imposed on someone if there is to be domination” (Taylor 1994: 342). It is in the manner suggested by David Hoy’s earlier remark — “the antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom” — that power stands in direct opposition to freedom. Taylor and other critics of Foucault basically want to point out two things: firstly, that Foucault’s notion of ubiquitous power is incoherent in the absence of a “clearly demarcated perpetrator”, a human “target/victim”, and at least “some notion of constraints imposed on someone by a process in some way related to human agency” (Taylor 1994: 342; see also Fraser 1994: 140, 143; and Wolin 1988: 190); and, secondly, that Foucault makes little sense if power is not linked expressly to the very idea of the possibility of liberation from it (Taylor 1994: 343). Taylor’s objection depends upon the use of a concept of freedom which Foucault is supposed to discount. Let me explain this. Taylor and others, following Isaiah Berlin’s classic statement, consider that power is opposed to freedom to the extent that an agent’s freedom is curtailed by external constraints, locatable outside the agent, hence “negative freedom” (Berlin 1969).66 Foucault’s concern is not so much with a negative “freedom from” than with a positive “freedom to”. Australian philosopher Paul Patton, who defends Foucault against Taylor’s criticisms, explains that “freedom to” has to be qualified in the context of Foucault’s formulation of his own agenda surrounding power and freedom (Patton 1994). For Patton, constraints upon freedom may be regarded in two ways: as that structure of affects which makes up a particular kind of person, (and which also) determines the kinds of decision of which a person is capable; and as the internal features of a person’s intellectual and moral constitution (that) may limit the class of actions capable of being undertaken (ibid.: 354, additions mine).

By the positive term “freedom to”, Patton means the freeing of “internal limits to the kinds of action the agent is capable of undertaking” (op. cit.). This is not to deny the importance of Berlin’s idea of the desire for self-government or personal autonomy that lies behind the tradition of positive freedom. It is, according to Patton (1989), to insist upon the importance of individual capacities as preconditions for the exercise of freedom. For Foucault, the human subject is an acting subject, a subject of freedom endowed with such a “form of liberty” — an (individual) capacity to (re)act (Foucault 1988e: 12), given he is a particular kind of person constituted with internal intellectual and moral features. Hence, it is appropriate to rethink him in terms of “freedom to”, in the way Patton has helped to elaborate for Foucault. It can be said plainly that it is irrelevant to think of freedom from or escape from nominal power. It is common in the literature to associate the twin doublets “freedom from” with “power over”, and “power to” with “freedom to”. According to Foucault, we should be concerned with those internal constraints on actions: those constraints that I have so far referred to as power configurations in subjectification, which

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“make up” a particular kind of personhood as well as those internal features of an agent’s own intellectual and moral constitution that limit the kind of action that he is capable of undertaking. It is precisely these “internal limits” to liberty that Foucault would agree as being, at least in part, pivotal to feeding into his own formulation of the concept of freedom.67 Foucault forms his idea of freedom for a different intellectual and historical outlook. That outlook provides a reconciliation of controversies surrounding subjectivity, power and discursive practices. Foucault rethinks the assumptions involved in the negative, quantitative model of “power over” (la puissance). He rejects categorically the concept of power as exclusion and interdiction, and in doing this, Foucault effectively rejects the traditional conceptualization of freedom as “freedom from” domination or direct, external constraints imposed upon agents. A lingering perplexity and unease caused in many readers remain in the anonymity of a “power perpetrator” or any conspiracy plotted by someone somewhere in relishing to assume forms of domination. I clarify several things in this regard before I return to examine freedom. It has been pointed out earlier that Foucault discounts power as a surrogate of domination and that he raises to focus nominalistic power/knowledge as embodying discursive strategies and techniques (i.e., sanctions and systems of co-ordinates demarcating what is sayable). These techniques must not be construed as conspiratorial where imposition of constraints is conceived as deliberate action on the part of someone or some group. Foucault treats power relationships as agonal and reversible wherein the tables can be turned anytime any party take steps to conduct the conduct of its “Other”. Foucault’s discourse theory does not reveal discursive strategies and techniques by discerning hidden devices and exposing conspiracies, since there is, for him, no perpetrator of power. Foucault does not merely “inventory manipulative devices; if he did only that, his notion of power would be superfluous because the manipulative devices he reveals, in being conspiratorial in nature, would be explicable in terms of the traditional conception of power as the ability to coerce, to prohibit, and to dominate” (Prado 1996: 71). Instead Foucault’s new perspective articulates something of the vast complexity of subject-shaping constraints by saying how comportments and behavior are impersonally regulated as a result of mutations in the structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. What could be said about domination is that we can extract numerous particular instances of coercion, intimidation, and domination from the complex web of constraints that make up power-relations. Instances of domination are found in the constraints that constitute power-relations but not in the powerrelations themselves. It is a mistake to see those instances as constitutive of power or even to “see particular instances of domination as the elements of power as if power were the inclusive whole of such instances” (Prado 1996: 71). Foucault treats freedom not as that which domination excludes but very


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importantly as the possibility of resistance from within the system of subjectification. Foucault’s position is to affirm a form of nominal freedom as opposed to a form of real freedom: the former is rooted in the possibility of a resistance within a set of discursive practices. Here is a better way to rethink the two senses of positive “freedom to” and “power to”, which are the cornerstones of Foucault’s nominal freedom. This kind of freedom makes us realize we are “free not in having a nature, but in being able to reject and transform what is presented to us as our nature” (Rajchman 1985: 75). This kind of critical indocility reflects the plebian aspect (de la plèbe) or inherent ingrained tendencies for resistance by agents against regime of truth that tells us who we are. Agents resist by refusing to have their identities stigmatized, or by being told who they are. The steps to a praxis of resistance will be discussed in the last part of this chapter. Before proceeding to do that, let me clarify Foucault’s idea of resistance. Freedom and resistance My examination of positive “freedom to” opens up the trajectory of practical resistance within the subjectifying discursive practices. The moment power is qualified as a mode of action upon the actions among agents that structures the possible field of action of others, Foucault has implied that those others are free subjects who may refuse to submit to power.68 To work out relations of power, reversal, indocility and refusal, the issue of resistance has to be addressed immediately. Foucault believes that every form in which power is exercised and applied gives rise to corresponding forms of resistance. This view is confirmed by his well-known quotation: at the heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom (Foucault 1983: 221– 22).

There is an unresolved tension between Foucault’s thesis that resistance is an inevitable consequence of power and his own belief that self-conscious subjects are the necessary catalysts for resistance. Let us examine some of the sources of these tensions. From the point of view of his critics, the most frequently asked question is: if power “feeds off of resistance, if it “annexes” the counter-discourses that have developed, how can resistance be made genuinely subversive?” (Haber 1994: 101). Resistance requires subjects who are self-conscious about the effects of power and this does not come very easily. It is highly problematic if individuals are wholly and already constituted by the power/knowledge regime, how can power and subjectification be resisted? If the subject is “constituted through practices of subjugation”, what sense can we make of the (contradictory) claim by Foucault in one of his interviews, (Foucault 1989: 313) that the subject is also

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constituted “through practices of liberation, of freedom”? Haber (1994) remarks that critics debating the issue of ubiquitous power would have begged the following hypothetical questions: how does one start from the conventions of a disciplinary and normalizing culture and end up with practices of liberation and freedom? What tools do they have that are not already co-opted by those very power regimes they are trying to resist? And while Foucault’s analysis may enable us to see ourselves as the objects of those relations of power which have made us what we are, it does not help us to see how we can be the makers of new histories — how Foucault can begin with resistance and end up with self-conscious transformation.

Ransom (1997: 118) evinced that critics imply a “strict determinism” and a conservative and pessimistic assessment of the chances for social change. The critics are uncertain, given we are the sort of individuals that the disciplines and subjectification that Foucault describes make of us, how resistance can be imagined. Critics are oblivious to Foucault’s value-free ethical showing (Owen 1994, 1999) through exemplarity and genealogy. Resistance is not about rekindling an essential human nature that is subdued by social constraints (or “power over”) whose removal, the critics maintain, via negative “freedom from”, will set us free. Resistance is re-telling the guerrilla histories of subject-centred reason and their hegemony of producing subject-specific competencies. According to Ransom (1997), the recital of moral legislation has been rehearsed by many critical theorists who maintain the need for an oppositional lever of some kind, and the need for the search of some group of interests, located somewhere in or outside the current social structure that can oppose the existing dominant social forms and their rationalities. This search has been motivated by the critical theorists’ assumption that some better, truer — more human — human essence can and has to be discovered somewhere now or in the future in order for the job of critique and resistance to become possible. It is motivated by the critical theorists’ insistence on a search for and confirmation of some moral grounds before critique becomes legitimate. It is a mistake to think of Foucault as writing about the power-knowledge regime and describing a single kind of power in the way that the Frankfurt School would have conceptualized it.69 Unfortunately, as long as that is what some of his readers and critics see him as doing, Foucault’s work will still be misunderstood (Kelly 1994; Owen 1999). Foucault’s “positive freedom” means that to be free the agent would already have been a certain kind of person: one who exercises effective control over his actions. Critics only dismiss Foucault’s assumption of power and resistance as problematic because clearly their “modern tendency” is to find a way to eventually “link power closely to agents who possess it and exercise it to define the options of others” (Connolly 1993: 233). To counterpoise that view, the postmodern tendency discovers the link of freedom in “creative” (not repressive) power in agents who interrogate power in order to open up and redefine the


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options for others. American critics such as Taylor, Fraser, Wolin and others hold on steadfastly to the view that freedom refers to the domain within which a person can act on the basis that he is relatively immune from interference or obstruction by others and in the absence of external constraints and imposition on one’s actions. For them, debilitating freedom consists of preconstituted desires, interests or purposes that are eventually frustrated (Patton 1989). These secondary commentators have a great deal of difficulty freeing themselves from the “supposed requirement that oppositional activity makes reference to a normative ideal as realizable before it can be taken seriously” (Ransom 1997: 120). What Foucault’s nominal history proposes to abolish is the “legislation” of an orientation in thinking that is anchored to a “transcendental ideal” (Owen 1999: 21). In nominal history, Foucault writes not histories of things, but of terms, categories, and techniques through which certain things become at certain times the focus of a whole configuration of discussion: (the epistème)…, he offers a historical answer to how such things are “constituted”; to question its raison d’être…, he writes histories of “pseudoobjects”. One of the more general targets of this de-realizing history is the techniques, categories and various kinds of systems of thought through which people have come to identify themselves as subjects (Rajchman 1985: 51–52, emphases in original).

For most of the critics liberation from power is similar to negative “freedom from” domination — the mitigation and minimization of constraints imposed on the agent. Foucault disregards this trajectory of conceptualization of freedom and power, a point acknowledged by the American political theorist William Connolly. The unresolved tension that remains for Connolly is that if we accept Foucault’s view of power as a set of pressures lodged in institutional mechanisms which produce and maintain such privileged norms as the subject…, (then) the key resides in the credibility of the Foucauldian view of the subject. If the subject is construed to be an artifact of power rather than an agent who exercises power then clearly the modern tendency to link power closely to agents would have to be revised (Connolly 1993: 233, additions and emphases mine).

Treating subjectivity and subject as effect/artifact of power and connecting them with freedom requires precisely this revision that Connolly describes. This assertion about the subject as product and the effect of power is linked to Foucault’s subsequent theorization of resistance that I shall look at in the next part. Summing up, the oft-quoted assertion in The Subject and Power (1983) seems much clearer and meaningful now. In that passage, Foucault holds that at “the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom” (ibid.: 221–22). This is precisely “freedom” in “power” because “freedom” taunts and provokes “power”. Foucault earmarks freedom with the notion of what Patton (1989) delimits as positive “power to”,

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and Foucault attributes positive “freedom to” and “power to” to those strategic relationships of power that are reversible. Since Foucault’s power relationships are reversible, there is no question of domination at all, just constraints on actions, not on agents. Domination, if ever it is used by Foucault is only to designate what conventional social theory ordinarily calls power. Domination which refers to those asymmetrical relationships has to be seen from now on as “a particular modality of the exercise of power” (Hindess 1996: 102). In so far as critics appear not to have come to terms with distinctive features of Foucault’s “ethical showing” (Owen 1994, 1999) through empirical, genealogical exemplarity, their criticism largely misses their mark. This deadlock is the source of divergence and incompatibility in theorizing resistance as an inherent, built-in character of the general matrix of power-relations at a given time. Put crudely, agents do not resist organizational culture per se as if it were an ideological and flawed power regime à la the Frankfurt School. The critical study of organizational culture takes a subtle turn because textured power provides a new discursive space to articulate subjectification by considering how comportments and behavior are impersonally regulated by nominal power and discursive practices. Foucault’s point is not to abolish identity or subjectivity but to transform the way in which we experience subjectivity. This involves “ refusal” to be what we are, the kindling of a “reflective indocility” (Ransom 1997) or “civil disobedience” (Rajchman 1985) towards the “humanist present” (Simons 1995) in the social science disciplines. This foregrounds the pivotal role of Foucault’s “specific” intellectuals (as “local” or first-hand participants) in leveraging resistance against the regimes of truth of discourses. In the next part, I examine the context and content of resistance especially the notion of the plèbe, and outline its relationships with the critical ethos of “reflective indocility” (Ransom 1997) and “civil disobedience” (Rajchman 1985). Then I return to the options presented to Foucault’s “specific intellectuals” who counterpoise the self-defining project of subjectifying representational practices.

The Art of Refusal This part justifies the rationale behind resistance of the type suggested by Foucault, clarifies its objectives and examines its relevance for organization studies of culture. I shall demonstrate through examples of subjectification in real-life by introducing the nominal notion of “the plebe” to analyze how it functions as a “seed of resistance” within discourses. Critical theory’s influence of the ways in which Foucault forms his own agenda for the revision of critical thought in his work will be discussed. Finally the links of Foucault’s critical


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project with a correlative notion of the “specific intellectual” will be examined in the last section. In the earlier chapters, I have referred to Foucault’s genealogies of the “history of the present” within medicine, madness, and sex. The major objective is to trace the concrete ways in which particular power fields fabricate determinate structures of psychic dispositions. Even though exercises of power often go along with “hegemony”, “regulation and repression”, “reification” and “fabrication”, Foucault does not think they are a priori objectionable and inadmissible on normative grounds (Smart 1985: 132–36; Ransom 1997: 106–7). Both Simons (1995) and Ransom (1997) consider that specific genealogies of constructed subjectivity and power form the basis for oppositional political action. Exercise of power and corresponding oppositional possibilities involve three simultaneous operations — knowledge, rules, and subjectivity. Firstly knowledge concerning madness, delinquents, sex, Aids and HIV, organizational culture and so forth is neither final nor cumulative, and it is open to interpretation and challenge. As newly changed power-relations and new forms of knowledge develop, new interpretations of the same phenomenon will compete for acceptance. As organization theorists, we assume knowledge about organizational culture is not final and constituted subjectivity is ever-evolving in the contest among agonal discourses. Resistance, in the ways Foucault conceptualizes it, can revalue the rules that govern formation and elaboration of knowledge about agents, their subjectivity and cultures in work organizations. Secondly, according to Laclau and Mouffe (1987) the exercise of power has a material dimension in that it is on the basis of knowledge and the powerrelations in that knowledge that a set of rules is established. That set of rules has to do not only with what will or will not count as knowledge but also with material conditions and actual disposition of the objects of that knowledge. In organization theories of culture, the actual disposition involves the range of options as to what we can do to and with groups of individuals in work organizations. Equally, knowledge of “desirable” comportments constitutive of a “strong culture” becomes discernable from knowledge of a set of less desirable comportments constitutive of sub- or counter-cultures. Thirdly, this knowledge and the rules that regulate both it and its objects establish a realm of activities within which individuals recognize themselves as “made-up” subjects of a certain kind (du Gay 1997: 294–96, 313–16) — as patients, husbands, students, psychiatrists, as managers of “strong culture” and symbolic meanings, and as “champion” employees thriving in a “customercaring” environment, etc. These three moments through which power becomes effective — knowledge, rules, subjectivity — correspond to oppositional possibilities (Ransom 1997: 101–2). According to Foucault, subjectification gives rise to corresponding forms of

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resistance. Resistance becomes possible because there is an “underside”, an “inverse energy”, and “limit of power” that “responds to every advance of power by a movement of disengagement” (Foucault 1980g: 138). In the paper Power and Strategies (1980g), Foucault treats this sociological condition as a centrifugal movement and calls it an “inverse energy” or “the plebes”.70 This “plebian aspect” provides energy and leverage that sustains and propels resistance. Foucault posits that while the individual has certainly been “made up” in some sense, it does not follow that he is irretrievably the creature of dominant powers. “Something like the subject” exists but in “forms which are far from being completed” (Foucault 1989: 263). Individuals are made but never determined all the way down such that a “massive shock of the kind provided by revolutions or emancipation will offer the opportunity for change” (Ransom 1997). Since local circuits of powerknowledge have their own rationality, local struggles do not have to wait for revolutions in the broader structure in order for it to be meaningful for agents to begin to resist and change. In the discursive formations of organizational culture, subjects and their psychic dispositions are not wholly and irretrievably defined. Given the reversible character of power relations in that discursive field, knowledge, subjectivity and the accompanying “rules” are all open to interpretation and reinterpretation; and in a corollary way this may explain the existence of competitive discourses of organizational culture that strive to make their own versions “stick”. It seems that what presages resistance and change always remains in potentiality. For resistance and change to become achievable, Foucault stakes out a position by asking us: “What is the nature of our present?”. What conditions need to be there in society and the social field of power relations in order for change to occur? (See for example, Fraser 1994; Haber 1994; Simons 1995; Ransom 1997). The issue of change within Foucault’s critical thought needs to be addressed at this juncture. One way of seeing Foucault’s work is as an attempt to “save critical thought from the inefficacious and repetitious themes of aspects of critical theory”, which posit that change and resistance is only possible as a result of an emancipation of the social world as a totality (Ransom 1997).71 Critical theory oversimplifies the construction of power formations in society by “treating ‘totalistic’ societies as unified, purposive and conspiratorial”. This results in an oppositional ethos or a set of diametric responses that “swings between the extremes of a millenarianist expectancy and conservative resignation” (ibid.:112). Foucault’s approach frees critical thought from the “extreme requirement of a root transformation of society” and it asserts that the plural and strategic perspective on society is consequential for our view of the possibility of resistance and change in the form of bringing about a reverse in the system of subjugation (Nilson 1998; Szakolczai 1998; Owen 1999). This aspect is illustrated in the following examples of subjectification and instances of resistance in contemporary society.


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Reflective indocility and civil disobedience In the realm of “discipline” Foucault has shown how those “micro-mechanisms of (disciplinary) power have moulded individuals to serve the needs of power” (Ransom 1997: 59). Discipline in a factory produces skilled workers; in an army, efficient fighting units; in the monastery, individuals dedicated to the service of the order; in the hospitals and asylums, consenting and acquiescent patients; in the classroom, receptive students. Similarly in the realm of organizational culture, power of “culturated” subjectivity produces “empowered managers” (Salaman 1997) and “designer employees” (Casey 1995). The techniques of power manifest within configurations of governmentality that seek to affect behaviour indirectly by acting on the manner in which subjects regulate their own behaviour. Techniques of power over individuals and over populations are embodied in Foucault’s notions of “discipline” and “governmentality” respectively. The discourses of management and governmentality, military and cult discipline, medicine and pathology, education, consumerism, and organizational culture are motivated by “interested” desire to win the coveted status of “truth” — to “make up” people and interpellate them to take up “subject-positions” (Althusser 1971; Hall 1997; Butler 1997; Tully 1999). Power invests individuals and power is transmitted by and through them (Foucault 1977a). The individual is an effect of power, its element of articulation and its vehicle since power produces the kinds of individuals that make up society, fill its roles and carry out its functions (Ransom 1997). Unlike Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin in their times, contemporary individuals can now actively resist against being stigmatized. In recent years there have been movements such as identity politics, reacting against ways in which individuals are categorized or constructed as certain kinds of people: for example, as homosexuals, as delinquents, and as “sovereign” consumers. Gays and lesbians refuse to be labeled “homosexuals”, prisoners resist being labeled “delinquents”, cultural theorists deconstruct the imaging of people as consumers with unlimited capacity to acquire new “needs”, etc. Equally organization theorists participate in resistance against definitive statements or the “last word” about organizational culture and any other discourse of subjectivizing practices. Foucault’s suggestion in Subject and Power (1983) about “recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom” is the crux of the matter in the analysis of mechanisms of “creative” power and its own plebian deconstruction. Miller and Rose, in their often quoted work Governing Economic Life (1990), have suggested that “governing” the conduct in work organizations is facilitated by managerial discourses that put in place new subjectivities or new ways for people to be at work. These so-called new ways consist of vocabularies (linguistic elements) as well as material practices (extra-linguistic elements) which are qualitatively similar to the discursive and non-discursive practices respectively.72

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“Government”, paraphrasing Smart (1985) concerns four types of powerrelations: first, relations between self and self; second, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance; third, relations within social institutions; and lastly, relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty. New subjectivities of organizational culture are an ensemble of the first three types of power-relations that operate via capillary actions of power. These new ways comprise images and mechanisms that actively transform the meaning and reality of work, self and identity. Governing involves rendering subjectivity amenable to having something done to the subjects (i.e., subjugation) and having subjects do things to themselves (i.e., subjectification). In these two ways, the worker is both subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his/her own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.73 Formation of new subjectivities is facilitated by a creation of linguistic and extra-linguistic elements embodied in new images and mechanisms that bring the government of individuals in organizations into alignment with new enterprise rationalities, cultural values, and social expectations (Rose 1990; du Gay 1997). The expertise of culture and “excellence” is constitutive of the so-called “culturated subjectivity”: its language permeates people’s ways of thinking, its judgments enter into people’s evaluations, and its norms into their calculation. As Rose (1990: 60) has suggested, the new managerial discourse is central to the fabrication of new languages and techniques of power (e.g., the neo-liberal governmental rationalities that dominated government action in the 1980s and 1990s in the U.K.) to bind the workers to the productive life of enterprising organizations. Managers and employees are “made up” to recognize and internalize subject-specific competencies as well as those prescribed basic assumptions, values and norms of the discursive formations. Summing up, new images and mechanisms of organizational culture “interpellate” the organizational agents to come to believe themselves able to manage culture through creating it, controlling it, and changing it as well as effecting organizational productivity and effectiveness. Such norm-fixing and self-subjection are repressive; and the tying of oneself as a knowing-subject to a certain kind of moral definition of who one is is itself an aporia of the “humanist present” of the organizational theory of culture. These issues feed into warranting organization theorists to resist subjectifying power. It is to this role of “specific intellectuals” that organization theorists can play that we finally turn. Organization theorists as “specific intellectuals” This part examines the rationale of resistance as a practice of liberty: a critical project of change to realize the possibilities of being other than what we are through articulating differences and creative self-representation (Thiele 1990:


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907–909; Owen 1994: 141, 1999: 36–39; Nilson 1998: 85–87). A final connection is made between Foucault’s ethic of resistance and the ways in which that ethic may become a praxis of liberty. The substantive tasks of the organization theorists as “specific intellectuals” are also laid out. Foucault propounds replacing the tired paradigm of revolution envisaged by critical theory that is contested for its description of society as a totality that only a revolution at a universal level could emancipate and transform. The plebian aspect argues that the individual intellectual can fulfill his role in political activity at a local level, not the global, universal level. Foucault provides two reasons for preferring a local over a global approach to change. First, he advises that it is in the local, specific arena that new forms of power are invented, applied, and revised. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1980a), Foucault states that “power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere”; and “power’s condition of possibility…must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point” (Foucault 1980a: 93). This observation echoes his earlier comments about power’s ubiquity in Two Lectures (1980e: 98–99). Foucault is not so much concerned with power with a capital P, or global forms of domination on a large-scale, but with specific resistance at the local level, initiated by specific intellectual(s) in specific disciplines that he can understand and influence. Against such a background, it is worthwhile looking at Two Lectures (1980e) in which Foucault advises that: one must conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting…from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history,…their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been — and continue to be — invested, colonized, transformed, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination (Foucault 1980e: 99).

Second, plurality and reversibility of power relations refer not only to the existence of diverse centers of power but also to forces and different kinds of knowledge that are pulled together to make up larger systems. Local resistance is now exposed to view because it is the building block of larger knowledge configurations. This is the reason genealogy has to be the specific “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary” of the development of specific knowledge configurations and discursive formations. In an ascending analysis of power, the productive site for the creation and application of the disciplines and government is the local setting of the clinic, prison, school, hospital ward, asylum, work organization. As Foucault explains: “when I speak of power relations, I am not referring to Power — with a capital P — dominating and imposing its rationality upon the totality of the social body”. The common conception of power relations in terms of binary division along class lines is clearly rejected by Foucault. Foucault tries to understand relations of

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power through analyses of resistance and struggle that are non-class based — namely, concerning “the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the way people live” (Foucault 1983: 211). These preferences and foci justify Foucault’s criticisms leveled against the inadequacy of both the optimisticliberal version of the enlightenment project74 and critical theory as a means of legislating some moral ground before resistance and change can be possible. The reason is the latter is less apt for analyzing the transversal and intimate forms of power that target people’s bodies, whereby opposition is relatively more directly aimed at local exercises of power over individuals, not “classes”. To the effect that resistance and change are locatable at the local level in the social field, engaging in this kind of political activity has to be agents whom Foucault calls “specific intellectuals”. They can be effective social critics because they are charged with a responsibility on the basis of their close connection with their respective areas of concern. Foucault gives several examples of the specific intellectuals: engineers, lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, etc. As “producers”, “consumers” or “distributors” of “true” discourses, “specific intellectuals” have the expertise in the tripartite apparatus of knowledge-rules-subjectivity of their respective disciplines to enable them to trace a general picture of how power works. Their analyses and critique can suggest grounds for an alliance of struggle. In this regard, it is useful to consider one of Foucault’s earlier arguments about the role of the individual in political activity. In Truth and Power (1980f) and in On Power (1988b: 107), Foucault contrasts the role of the “specific” versus that of the “universal” intellectual. The universal intellectual acts as “the bearer[s] of values”, as spokesperson for some revolutionary entity/agent (the proletariat, the third world, and so on). Universal intellectuals speak of the world as it should be as opposed to its actual, imperfect existence. Universal intellectuals are typified by Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire. In contrast to universal intellectuals, Foucault describes the emergence of specific intellectuals, especially since World War II. Ironically, these figures of specific intellectuals such as the psychiatrist, the technician, the social worker, the scientist, and the organization theorist, though indicted by Foucault for their complicity in a “society of normalization”, are presented as the political agents of alternative oppositional activities. In On Power (1988b), Foucault proposes: Within these different forms of activity, I believe it is quite possible … to do one’s job as a psychiatrist, lawyer, engineer, or technician, and to carry out in that specific area work that may properly be called intellectual, an essentially critical work. (…) a work of examination that consists of suspending as far as possible the system of values to which one refers when … assessing it. In other words: what am I doing at the moment I’m doing it? At the present time … doctors, lawyers, judges carry out a critical examination, a critical questioning of their own jobs that is an essential element in intellectual life (1988b: 107).


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Foucault argues that the specific intellectuals have a considerable impact and cumulative effect in their own specific realm of power-relations. What they can do is to pose a serious but conscientious challenge to the general “regime of truth” that governs the production of “truthful” and “acceptable” statements and actions. According to Foucault in Truth and Power (1980f), the specific intellectual has: a specificity of the politics of truth in our societies. And it’s with this last factor that his position can take on a general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectoral. The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of our society. There is a battle “for truth”…the specific effects of power attached to the true,…a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays (Foucault 1980f: 132).

This characterization of a plebian “quality” within specific intellectuals — as having to understand their own position in the social world, and as having to come to grips with what the world has made of them at the subjective level — dovetails with Foucault’s calling for heroization via “technologies of the self” and “aesthetics of existence”. Foucault’s discussion of “technologies of the self” in his later work on sexuality (Foucault 1980a) echoes with this notion of “stylization of the self” outlined in his earlier work What is Enlightenment? (1984c). The agenda in both of these works sanctions a need to cultivate a criticality of the present as difference in history, and pertinently of modernity. Let’s recall this awareness of modernity and how it is connected with an “aesthetics of existence” in heroization: For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it…otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is (Foucault 1984c: 41).

In What is Enlightenment? (1984c), Foucault posits an artistic relation or attitude expressive of the relation one has with oneself: “To be modern is not to accept oneself as in the flux of passing moments; it is to take oneself as an object of a complex and difficult elaboration…Modernity does not “liberate man in his own being; it compels him to face the task of producing himself” (Foucault 1984c: 41– 42). The relation to the social world and the relation to oneself can be thought of as belonging to the sphere of the specific intellectual and to the care of the self, respectively. Although the two practices refer to different levels of our experience of the world, it is not hard to see how they call out to each other. That “technologies of the self” is an extension of the possibilities of the “specific intellectual” over a broader context. As organization theorists, by entering into the activity of shaping our own subjectivity, each of us can potentially thwart, challenge, or question the ways in which we have been made. Allowing other forces to shape us with no intervention on our part leaves us immature. Art

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and, for that matter, genealogy enter into such practices not as self-absorption, as aimless playfulness, as sheer renegade and unmeasured rebellion but as ethical showing of how we can be other than what we are. Foucault urges us to understand ourselves, to participate in our own selfcreation, to take in our hands an elaborate artifact of modern culture that requires skill to manipulate. It is the lack of that skill — and more, the lack of a perceived need for acquiring it — that leads Foucault to assert in What is Enlightenment? (1984c) that there is still something premature or pre-modern in our comprehension of ourselves and our world. The crucial step of reflexivity is to grapple with the powers that too often are the unnoticed masters of ourselves. The care of the self is to participate actively in the realm of self-construction. This involves not only establishing relations of the self but also relations with others so as to pursue common goals. In conclusion, culture as a discourse of new ways of governing manifests facets of power/knowledge that are productive of subjective states as well as moral and psychological dispositions. In proposing a critique of its discourse through exemplarity, I have introduced a blueprint as to how to go about instigating resistance and change. That agenda calls for an art of refusal and practice of indocility and takes the view that power/knowledge is basically a local phenomenon, and hence amenable to the intervention of self-reflective, specific intellectuals. Organization theorists of culture are suitable candidates to revalue the rules that govern the representational practices in organizational discourses. That is the reason the nexus of power/knowledge of culture is best deconstructed at the threshold of the local, specific genealogy of culture, unveiling its contests, agons, interested desires, and will to knowledge. With the strategic consideration that power is not monolithic or total, Foucault raises our consciousness over our own experience constitutive of subjectivity. That ethical showing shows the possibilities of improving our intellectual practices by questioning our deeply held assumptions in conducting organizational analysis. In postmodern times, critical vigilance and creative self-representation present an in-road for all of us to think very hard about ourselves and to relate to the world around us.

Chapter 8 Conclusion Critically Constituting Organization As a sympathizer with Foucault, I admit that there are still unresolved issues about power/knowledge in the “double valence of subordinating and producing”, and this is largely because they remain unremarked by Foucault (Butler 1997: 2). However, as an organization theorist, I argue in this book that we need to enter into the reciprocal activity of critically constituting organizations and shaping our own subjectivity and thwarting, challenging and questioning the ways in which our subjectivities have been made. That is the angle I cut in a new critique that may contribute to advancement in critical management studies (Fournier & Grey, 2000) and postmodern organization studies (Kilduff & Mehra 1997; Calás & Smircich 1999). In this book and my redescription of the legacy of organization studies and organizational culture, I have argued that organization theory is engaged not so much in a linear material process of discovery as in a process of constituting its own object: a similar view about the social construction of organization theory has been raised in the seminal paper by Astley (1985). Intellectual practices within conventional organization theory are vehemently contested in regards of their claims of being able to turn out objective knowledge because agnostics like Astley (1985), Boje and Dennehy (1994), and Chia (1996) contend that those intellectual practices discerned nothing but “manufactured” their own subjects, their own objects and their own content.75 Basically, I compare and contrast two modes of historical account of the discipline of organization theory. Where “traditional history” celebrates unity, continuity, truth, essential human characteristics, genealogical redescription searches for dispersal, discontinuities, and the accidental. I have argued that this “traditional history” of organizational culture restricted those accounts and their practices to a glossing over of the underlying balances of political forces. The inherent subjection/domination within construals and contests of meaning over the term have been overlooked. I maintain that the representational practices of culture constitute their own sets of systems of meanings, conventions or rules of discourse formations. A key assumption about these practices is a “hazardous

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play of domination” that was predicated upon the Nietzschean conception of the primacy of force over meaning. Having made these points at the start of the book, I have demonstrated in what ways some intellectual practices of culture theorizing “emerged” or had their beginnings in widely varying responses to hugely diverse situations. These responses, I have shown, are social constructions, given the discursive and non-discursive practices surrounding their inventors’ construals of the notion of culture. Forms of recognition constitutive of subjectivity (Owen 1994, 1999) are enacted in a field of power relations among heterogeneous discursive and nondiscursive elements. At the level of a discipline like organization studies, these elements of representational practices include language (semantics and pragmatics) and extra-linguistic, material practices. I have embellished my working definition of “discourse”, highlighting the apparatus (le dispositif) of learned dialects, research protocols and procedures and how these facilitated the extension of the ranges of dialects and jurisdictions of those procedures (Foucault 1972). Once these points have been made, I demonstrate that it is the self-justifying “principles of exclusion” (and the system of “internal proliferation of meanings”) that have ricocheted a self-referencing legitimization of a number of popular beliefs and perceptions about the prowess and potency of organizational culture (Salaman 1997: 244). From this point onwards, the arrival of power distinguishes the presence of a special kind of interpretation and analysis that is uniquely Foucault’s. A major practical implication of this research direction over discourses of organizational culture is that future studies are suggested to include a detailed examination of those heterogeneous elements that form “le dispositif” (Foucault 1972): technologies and institutional apparatus, or what Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) called an “analytical grid” of power/knowledge. These elements are: – “enoncés”, for example, statements about “culture”, “solidarity”, “excellence”, “enterprise”, and “competition” etc; – subjects that personify the discourse — the “managers of ‘strong’ cultures”, “designer employees”, “company credos”, “legends, stories, and myths”; – how knowledge about a topic acquires authority, a sense of embodying the “truth” about it, and constituting the “truth of the matter” at a historical moment; – the practices within institutions for dealing with the subjects — for example, corporate culture strategies for instigating organizational change; processes of dissemination of knowledge in academic publications; non-discursive and discursive practices in solidifying “culturated” subjectivity and governmentality. These heterogeneous elements or institutional apparatus are:

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always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also linked to certain co-ordinates of knowledge. …This is what the apparatus consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting and supported by types of knowledge (Foucault 1980i: 194, 196).

The apparatus of organizational culture is pivotal in an anti-history or a “countermemory” of the organization studies of culture. This book has shown that discursive formations, especially their power, are productive in the sense that they interpellate personhood, demeanour and comportment (Dean 1999), and constitute “structures of recognition” (Owen 1994) over organizational agents to take a “conscious part in the acquisition, learning and modification of the subject-specific competencies” (Tully 1999: 95). Subjects “made up” with this culturated subjectivity are governable as their bodies become attached to certain psychic dispositions that are consistent with the substance in the rhetoric and articulations of the truth statements implied in discursive formations. Allowing these forces to shape the free subjects — managers, workers, and theorists alike — with no intervention on their part leaves the subjects “immature” (Foucault 1984c). In a social field with intellectual practices that rely on the permeability of subjective states, meticulous exemplary, ethical showing and genealogical criticality over our experience of subjectivity is precisely the direction of change that results in newly resistant points. To take to task those systems and structures of subjugation and their regimes, the aim of Foucault’s “permanent criticism” is not an absolute emancipation but rather a partial, local operation on the world framed within a critical ontology of ourselves and supported by an ethics and aesthetics of existence. Echoing the reminders by Burrell (1996, 1997) as well as Calás and Smircich (1999), I show that genealogy enters into critical constitution not as self-absorption, as aimless cacophony, as unmeasured rebellion but as civil disobedience and reflective indocility (Rajchman 1985), practice of liberty (Simons 1995), exemplary critique (Owen 1995), critical resistance (Hoy 1999), and creative selfrepresentation (Ransom 1997). Local “critical resistance” unveils the aporetic internal proliferation of meaning and rarefaction within discursive formations. “Creative self-representation” as an orientation in thinking directs our critical project towards a sensitivity over différence to discover that we have been in the process of moving away from a determinative personhood to realize we can be “other than what we are” by becoming something else. To paraphrase Owen (1995, 1999), genealogy as exemplary critique illustrates the possibility of being other than what we are, not through providing and legislating reasons à la the Frankfurt School why we should want to be otherwise, but through redirecting towards a liminal thinking in which this thinking articulates différence in being through the agonic use of reason.

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The writing of the guerrilla history of organizational culture as an “exemplary critique” aims at exposing those forms of power in people’s lives and moving beyond those forms in which we are entrapped in relation to the diverse ways that we feel, act and think. In other words, critique and “critical resistance” is the active acquiring of a skill of criticality with a special meaning in this context (Hoy 1999). It is the lack of that skill — and more, the lack of the perceived need for acquiring it–which leads Foucault, and Nietzsche and Weber to assert in their works that there is still something “premature” and “premodern” in the comprehension of oneself and the social in modernity (Clegg 1994: 158; Owen 1994: 124–134; Szakloczai 1998). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) and Privitera (1995) have commented that Foucault understands his own work as both the result of, and the interpreter of, a historical constellation of power. The agent in this interpretation is “thought to be free, as is every social subject who derives interpretations, analyses, and plans for action from the particular power configuration or constellation of her or his life relations” (Privitera 1995: 112). Similar to Privitera (1995), I have treated the free subject throughout the book as anticipating the social critical role that the subject/ interpreter will take up. According to Foucault’s particular formulation, interpretation should not reveal, in a hermeneutic manner, any profound meaning that is hidden in the text; rather it should “make comprehensible the context in which the subject is located so that it can be changed” (Privitera 1995: 113). Privitera (1995) stresses that Foucault’s “permanent criticism” emerges neither from subjective motivations nor from “materially” based interests. Rather, genealogical interpretation emerges by creatively appropriating abstract systems of rules, detached from the aporetic striving for foundations of the will to truth that is typical of the Zeitgeist of the science. Foucault rightly insists that his genealogy is an “anti-science”, and this is the reason he relishes Habermas calling him a positivist because his genealogy is really a rational undertaking: his writing of history and the theory of society that accompanied it were not contaminated by the objectifying character of legislated reason. One of the main tasks of the interpretive genealogist/intellectual-critic is to sensitize free subjects to take their own subject formation in their own hands. While I do not entirely dismiss the value and viability of institutional and structural power, I have suggested and justified in my book that these conventional forms of power can be usefully subsumed under Foucault’s presupposition of “the social” — a sociological condition of nominalist “power relations”, with forthcoming results. In closing, let me point out that the significant uptake of “discourse analysis” for organization and management theories is the potential in Foucault’s ideas to revise and transform politically and morally what I call the “fixed views” of organization theory. The role of the organization theorist within these novel construals of moral organization studies form a seam which organization theorists

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could mine fruitfully in future studies. Any new ideas, new claims and new construals or even any new metaphor are vehicles to provide and “enable new ways of thinking and speaking about accepted truths and knowledge, about established institutions and practices, and about our selves” (Prado 1996: 164, quoting Rorty 1991: 3). The cardinal precept of genealogy as exemplary critique has less to do with what the novel construals consist of than what and how the novel construals can forestall and prevent. The point of problematization is to sensitize free subjects to the slippage of being wholly determined by powerrelations of rarefied discourse like that of organizational culture and its effects over structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity. That a moral and political revision of organization theory and its practices is to become possible requires the grappling with the notions surrounding the sociological conditions of “positive” freedom to and critical resistance of the grip of power. That means that instead of finding out what we are, the philosophical implication of Foucault’s “technology of liberation” and its applied character holds promises for analytical tools of a political orientation that were first pointed out by Rajchman (1985), who has interpreted Foucault’s ideas as sceptical freedom. Foucault’s genealogical approach is not merely a new critique of normalizing power and subjectification without norms; it is a redescription that holds out promise of real liberation for organizational theorists on the basis of their self-realization, self-determination, and creative self-representation. As Walter Privitera points out, the uptake of Foucault’s epistemology, and the tools of genealogy may be seen as fruitful when they are applied to organizational analysis because they provide a novel and moral grid of analysis. Echoing with the quotation by W. Richard Scott at the beginning of Chapter 1 of this book: under the “present situation of crisis and confusion” within organization theory, “vigorous controversy and enriching competing methods” should be welcomed and not shut down. To this end I believe this book has made a step in that direction.

Notes 1.

Normal science, according to Khun, is dominated by “puzzle-solving activity and incremental research programmes carried out with generally accepted and strongly institutionalized theoretical frameworks” (Reed 1996, citing Lakatos & Musgrave 1970).

2.

A discourse is seen as made up of an interwoven net of knowledge, theory and practices that are characteristic of the way of thinking or the state of knowledge at any one time (what Foucault called the epistème). A discourse, as Hall (1992: 291, 1997: 44) explains, consists of a body of coherent statements (enoncés), or discursive formations which will appear across a range of texts, and as forms of conduct, at a number of different institutional sites within society. These discursive formations fit together because any one statement implies a relation to all others: they “refer to the same object, share the same style and support a strategy,…a common institutional, administrative or political drift and pattern” (Cousins & Hussain 1984: 84–85).

3.

The subversive elements contained in the voices of the dissidents, deviants and the disenfranchised are papered over by a narrative of the merit of internal harmony, industrial development, liberal economics and the enterprise culture. The movement of a counter-language is downplayed as a “labor problem” within the integrationist and functionalist treatment of culture. In some quarters of the literature, for example by feminists, such a domestication and neglect of the counter cultures of organizational agents is critiqued as being a form of colonization of the culture discourse (Smircich & Calás 1987; Calás & Smircich 1996; Martin 1990b; Gherardi 1995; Itzin & Newman 1995).

4.

Hacking (1986) calls the process of inventing new ways of describing and dealing with human actions “making up people” in order to emphasize the fact that it involves the creation of new kinds of people. One example is the way in which Foucault argues that sex, far from being an autonomous agency, is no less than an historical product, a “multi-layered residue of the different ways in which bodies and their behaviours have been regulated and interpreted over the centuries” (Patton 1989). Sex is no more than “the most speculative ideal and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its hold on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures” (Foucault 1980a: 155). For other examples of examining ways of “making up people”, see Henriques et al. (1984), Rose (1990; 1996), du Gay (1996a).

5.

Daudi (1990) points out that when we identify and apply a certain meaning in management and organization discourse, we are reproducing its “pre-scripted” meanings — i.e., ones that are invested with the dominant discursive practices of modernity; e.g., the exercise of power, the taming and controlling of human forces, and the conformity with a sovereign reason, etc. Equally, modernity has licensed positivism and functionalism as the scientific protocol in investigating “culture”.

6.

The German word Kultur develops from the distinction between high and low Kultur, in 17th century German society. Nowadays, “elite culture” and “popular culture” have gained currency in English parlance thanks to cultural theorists of postmodernism who are so keen to dissolve these versions of culture.

7.

During the Enlightenment, there was moral indignation among French social thinkers about the lower classes at that time. Bauman (1987: 78) quoted: “‘The people’ was for Diderot,

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CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION simply a ‘multitude’; for D’Alembert the ‘multitude’ is ‘ignorant and stupefied’; for Voltaire, ‘the people’ will ‘always be composed of brutes’; and for Holbach the lower classes were ‘scatterbrained, inconstant, impudent, impetuous, subject to fits of enthusiasms, instruments of troublemakers’”. Though, as Bauman has pointed out, there was considerable evidence of naivety, these social thinkers however, “as a rule, showed genuine compassion for the plight of the lower classes” and they believed in a mission of “social management, proselytism and intervention” (ibid.).

8.

The idea of “police”, a descendent of the Greek polis meaning “city” and the Latin politia meaning “policy”, is, for French and German political thinkers of the 17th century, one of the four officials besides the king; these officials are each in charge of justice, the army, the exchequer and the police. The notion of “police” is expressed in more diffusive terms in the task descriptions of this official. The function of the official in charge of the police is to foster among the nation’s subjects “modesty, charity, loyalty, industriouness, friendly cooperation, honesty” (McNay 1994: 119).

9.

The will to or a desire to knowledge is always an “interested” desire. According to Foucault (1977c: 203), the will to know and knowledge is “always in bondage, dependent, and interested”; the word “intéressé” in French also carries the meaning of selfish.

10.

The intrinsic desire for knowledge depicted by Aristotle in Metaphysics relies upon a prior relationship between knowledge, truth, and pleasure. Contra-Aristotle, Nietzsche, in The Gay Science defines an altogether different set of relationships, positing that knowledge is an “invention” behind which lies something completely different from itself: it is linked to “struggle, hate and spitefulness”; it is always in “bondage, dependent, and interested, not in itself, but to those things capable of involving an instinct or the instincts that dominate it”. This model of a selfish “interested” knowledge entails the play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear and the will to appropriate (Foucault 1977c: 203).

11.

These articles appeared in: the anthology by Pondy et al., eds. (1983) Organizational Symbolism; the two special issues on organizational culture in Administrative Science Quarterly, (Volume 28, 3), and Organizational Dynamics (Volume 12, Autumn).

12.

First, Helmers (1991) explains a ritual has a symbolic meaning and it refers to a strictly laid out sequence of action related to the sacred. Second, the original Greek meaning of myth is “a sacred communication in symbolic form that invokes deeply pessimistic sentiments”, and the word taboo stands for “a sacred prohibition, sanctioned by supernatural powers with serious and quite often capital punishment” (Helmers 1991: 63). Helmers (1991) questions the supposedly positive effects of these so-called rituals, myths, and taboos on employee motivation, commitment and productivity.

13.

One problem is these writers fail to articulate what they believe constitutes a strong or a weak culture. For example, the term strength is used extensively without reflecting upon the caveats of such usage. One of these is a normative preference for strong culture — a desirable attribute as opposed to a weak culture, which is perceived to be bad for an organization. The weaknesses of this kind of inference are: first, strong implies an ability to perform as opposed to weak — that is, strong introduces a bias into the assessment of culture; second, the view adopted about cultural strength in the literature has been tautalogical, strong cultures being those, axiomatically, that perform well. Further, organizations can be presumed to have strong vultures because of a long, shared history or because they have to be empirically determined and cannot be presumed from observing surface cultural phenomena (Schein 1990: 111).

14.

Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) have pointed out that the early strand of corporate culture writings rely on a pseudosyllogistic explanation of cultural mechanisms being able to strengthen social intergration, and hence leading to more effective performance and productivity. To recapitulate, the pseudosyllogism that is referred to is as follows: proposition 1 :

NOTES

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Culture leads to social intergation; proposition 2 : Social integration brings about increased performance and productivity, and hence: conclusion: Culture leads to enhanced performance and productivity. 15.

There seems to be a tendency among proponents of the postmodern to make “a badge of honour out of their refusal to define postmodernism” (Rosenau 1992). In the contexts in which the categories of the postmodern, postmodernism, and post-modernity are applied, the syllable “post” causes problems. Hall and Neitz (1993) point out that “post-anything implies a coming after: it is defined not so much in its own terms, but by what has come before. There is little to expect a ‘post’ situation to have any original status, or any definable characteristics, but a jumble. However, this jumble is often celebrated by postmodern thinkers as itself a defining characteristic of the postmodern” (Hall & Neitz: 244).

16.

This is because each text (event) that is “written” has registered its “traces” (pathways or tracks) in the waxed base of the pad even after the double wax surface (paper and celluloid) has been lifted. All other subsequent text (event) can be said to implode into the (im)pression of the traces of the texts (events) previously there.

17.

Crook (1990) points out the difficulty of postmodernism in trying to define just what its “postmodern” status entails, as well as the limitation in differentiating its technical (theoretical) and temporal (epochal) thresholds from that of early modernist radicalisms.

18.

Frequently, what is identified as a postmodern development can be seen to be a prototypical modern trait. Attempts to characterize a postmodernist cultural style in terms of selfreflexivity, indetermanence, ambiguity, and paradox fail to see that these characteristics are already defining features of certain modernist movements (see Graff 1973; Callinicos 1990).

19.

Postmodern theory is criticized for being too undifferentiated in its critiques of rationality. There are many sorts of reason: for example, critical reason and instrumental reason. Aspects of postmodern theories collapse “reason that is critical of existing society from instrumental reason which is part of a rationalizing system of domination” (Best & Kellner 1991: 282).

20.

Postmodernism’s main contention with modernism is, following Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1984), to cast suspicion and to debunk the modernist totems of reason and rationality, objectivity, positivist methods, science, social progress, public enlightenment, and truth, which Lyotard collectively called “meta-narratives” or “grand global worldviews” and “mastercodes” (Rosenau 1992).

21.

See, for example, Gordon (1986); Dreyfus and Rabinow (1986); Hekman (1990: 20ff.); McNay (1992: 132; 1994: 8–10, 142–5, 158–62); Norris (1994: 84–103).

22.

Kant’s notion of critique is premised upon the assumption of his own principles of transcendentalism. Transcendentalism asserts the dependence of our experience on a priori categories, and, as a result, reason and judgment are held as universal, timeless, and self-evident. For Kant, modernity is a project of critical reflection on the ways and the means of enlightened self-knowledge and truth-seeking thought, and as such it concerns an analytic philosophy of truth in general.

23.

For Foucault, writing about the past is a way of criticizing the present under the assumption that the past still informs the present in ways and with consequences we do not recognize. For Foucault, the present “refers to those things that are constituted in our current proceedings in ways we do not realize are rooted in the past, and writing a history of it lays bare that constitution and its consequences” (Rajchman 1985: 58).

24.

Contrary to some interpretations, Foucault’s “revisionist reading” does not advance an all-out condemnation of enlightenment, rationality, and reason here. Interestingly, Foucault maintains a “qualified respect” for Kant and the Enlightenment (as an ethos/attitude). Enlightenment, as per Foucault, has to be seen as involving men who participate collectively and

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CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION voluntarily to understanding the present, and as a philosophical interrogation and a permanent critique (and resistance, if needed) in looking for a difference that today introduces with respect to yesterday (Foucault 1984c: 44).

25.

The sceptical stance, alongside what Rajchman (1985) calls Foucault’s “civil disobedience” or “reflective indocility” (Ransom 1997), form the basis of a “moral theory”, following May (1995), of Foucault’s critical and post-structural projects. In Hassard’s scheme of postmodernism-as-epistemology, Foucault’s brand of sceptical ethos and genealogy would aptly come under the “method” of “serious play” (See Hassard 1994: 304).

26.

Foucault states that a “negative” autonomy is the “absence of any challenge to the freedom of the universal use of reason” (1984c: 37). Such a lack of challenge in “negative” autonomy produces an adverse turnout — an “illegitimate use of reason”, giving rise to “dogmatism and heteronomy” (1984c: 38). “Positive freedom” as it is used here is based on Patton (1989) and not on Berlin (1969).

27.

On the question whether Foucault is a postmodern, several notable researchers consider him as a postmodern. Scott Lash states that despite the fact that Foucault never uses the term postmodern to describe his own work, Foucault’s aesthetics is “distinctly recognisable as a postmodern aesthetics” (Lash 1985: 8). David Hoy claims that Foucault was a “consistent postmodern in that he would never have called himself a postmodern” (Hoy 1988: 30). Susan Hekman argues Foucault’s work embodies the “very essence of postmodernism”, notwithstanding that at the same time, he rejects such labels (Hekman 1990: 17–18). Best and Kellner (1991: 73) acknowledge they find a “complex, eclectic mixture of premodern, modern, and postmodern elements” in Foucault because the latter employed a rhetoric of the postmodern, referring to new forms of knowledge, to a new form of post-disciplinary and post-humanist rights, and to new forms of subjectivity.

28.

As James Miller (1993) points out, the idea of liminal thinking is significant and it involves the necessity every so often of pushing things, ideas, experiences, the mind and body to the limit to see what remains. Foucault is always ready to admit what he did not know, and this was very important to him as a life-project. Foucault has originated a new dimension of transgression in the defining characteristic of postmodernism.

29.

Because his work lacks the kind of coherence, method or doctrine that other people are expecting from him, Foucault’s thoughts have led to many divergent, and often mutually inconsistent, interpretations by commentators and critics. As a result of these difficulties and criticisms, Foucault has been called a structuralist, a post-structuralist, an irrationalist, a relativist, an anarchist, a nihilist. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1986) have also commented that “the tension between Foucault’s preferences and his insights into the impossibility and undesirability of offering a theory justifying his action” is indeed a contradiction, but it is also this “very tension (which) provides the elements for a coherent method” (ibid.:115).

30.

Foucault’s critique does not resemble the critique of ideology and repression that has been formulated philosophically, primarily by the Frankfurt School and by Habermas. Critical theorists and Habermas argue that philosophy has been contemplative and has provided no way of realizing its ideals. The solution to the impasses, according to the critical theorists, is to reinterpret its ideals and then to bring about universal enlightenment and genuine autonomy. Habermas finds in the very nature of human communication the potential and the ideals that philosophy has anticipated, and which is the task of a critical theory to help mankind accept. Critical theory, and Habermas’s universal pragmatics, is an example of a theory with a “practical intent” (Rajchman 1985).

31.

According to Foucault (1984a), the analysis of descent is the examination of the myriad events through which and against which a trait or a concept was formed; and the analysis of emergence is an investigation of the “moment of arising” and an unmasking within that moment of forms of relational power, “systems of subjection” and “play of domination” that are operative in the strategic confrontation among agents enacting discursive formations.

NOTES

123

32.

In his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971), Althusser points out that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects” (ibid.: 170–77). There, Althusser explains how he sees “the subject” as the constitutive category of all ideology: the action of ideology (or discourse) is to “enable/ensure that subject’s recognition of itself in a certain specific way, and simultaneously to construe that specificity as the obvious or natural one for itself” (Barrett 1991: 100, additions and emphases mine). For a discussion of the explanatory potentials and unresolved tension of investing the Foucauldian “body” with such a Althusserian/Lacanian psychic meaning, see also Butler (1995: 238ff). The advantage of my construal lies in its novelty because Foucault has not explicitly commented that the body is substitutable for the subject and the psyche. The downside of this speculation is that it clashes with too many under-theorized and unresolved issues surrounding such a theory of articulating the social formation or construction of the subject.

33.

Foucault builds upon and refines Nietzsche’s idea that history is misconceived as a search for origins (causes and sources) of things, or as a quest for Capital-O Origins as an “attempt to capture the exact essence of things” (Foucault 1984a:78). Both thinkers are sceptical towards the presumption of essence in things. Foucault describes historical beginnings as “lowly, not in the sense of modest…but derisive and ironic; it is the cruelty of history that posits the proliferation of errors” and “what is found at the historical beginning of things…is disparity” (ibid.: 78,79). What genealogy finds is the antithesis of essences, accidents and coincidences united by improvisation and interpretation.

34.

The American authors, in posing the possible responses against the perceived anxiety that came from Japanese competition in the early 1980s, posited that the “new conceptions of organizations and their management have to enable the techniques of government of the internal world of the enterprise to be made consistent with the prevailing American cultural values as well as the personal projects of individual employees” (Rose 1990: 112). Management was to work on the ego of the worker itself; the organization should be reshaped to release the psychological strivings of its members, whereby policies that promoted real positive “mental health” of employees would also stimulate genuine organizational effectiveness achieving its objectives, maintaining its internal system, and adapting to the external environment. Rose continues to explain that organizations have to transform practices that would positively utilize the psychological energy of individuals, and increase their experience of psychological success. The management of excellence, as these authors portrayed it, operated on radically different values, stressing and valuing flexibility, adaptability, informality, ad-hoc groupings, experimentation, cross-functional collaboration, and a personal commitment to the excellence of the product. At root it was based on a different image of the subject (Rose 1990).

35.

Coherence is only by way of some historical interpretation imposed in a post hoc manner. As Rorty puts it, the study of emergence maps the “play of domination” that pertains to “reinterpretation[s] of our predecessors’ reinterpretation[s] of their predecessors’ reinterpretations” (Rorty 1982: xlii). Genealogical analysis denies historical progressive evolution and teleological processes and considers that what comes-to-be is a product of blind conflict and always produced through a particular stage of forces and subjection. Burrell observes that genealogy is “interested in the superficial and the unexpected, (…) reality (does not have) any underlying essences. It is as it appears, and our knowledge of reality is enmeshed in a power field” (Burrell 1988: 225).

36.

A signifying practice is an attempt to stage certain meanings and not others. The signifying practice is what Foucault considers as embodied in the “complex strategic situation in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions” (Foucault 1980a: 122), and we shall see how the will to know makes its most important connection with power.

37.

Construction of the culturated subject entails an infiltration and deployment of a vernacular into the argot of modern managers. The most significant effect has been the use of a language of “corporate culture”, “changing the culture”, “managing through values”, etc. The popular

124

CRITICALLY CONSTITUTING ORGANIZATION culture literature suggests that managers should involve themselves with the moral dimension of management — attending to people’s feelings, desires and values had great appeal to many managers in the mid-1980s who were “disillusioned by what might be called ‘machomanagement’, and highly rationalistic and analytical type of work involving the use of complex and typically quantitative management techniques” (Watson 1994: 14). This resonates with the earlier observation made by Huczynski (1993) that the appeal of cultureexcellence writings of Peters and Waterman (1982) and others has aptly met the needs for comfort, predictability, and stability of managers who began to apprehend the a-rational aspects of their management work.

38.

This visual metaphor is derived from the French verb voir = “to see”, in both pouvoir (power) and savoir (knowledge), which conflate and implode with each other in the production of discursive formations of organizational culture. Interestingly, Philip Tabor (1995) evokes the pithy visual metaphor of “I am a videocam”, following from Gustave Flaubert’s “I am an eye” and Christopher Isherwood’s “I am a camera”.

39.

American sociologist of organizations W. Richard Scott (1992) elaborates the notion of hegemony, pointing out that hegemony means the use of modernist, functionalist ideas, as well as those systematizing and totalizing tendencies inherent within the construction of modernist organizational discourse. Scott (1992) comments that “it may be that the major contribution of postmodernist work will not serve as a guide for designing new forms of organizations but to undermine or challenge the hegemony of existing modernist discourse that permeates most contemporary treatments of organization” (op.cit.,:313, italics mine).

40.

Foucault (1980f 1988b: 107) differentiates between specific intellectuals and universal intellectuals. Universal intellectuals are “bearers of values” and spokespersons for some revolutionary entity, an example of universal intellectuals are Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire. Specific intellectuals have emerged since World War II, according to Foucault, and they are presented as political agents of an alternative oppositional activity. Examples of these people are the psychiatrists, technicians, social workers, scientists.

41.

Foucault (1983) introduces the notion of “agonism”, a “contest” and a “mutual taunting” (p.222), which is the constant provocation between power, will and freedom.

42.

Foucault (1983) considers that there are three kinds of struggles: first, against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); second, against forms of exploitation that separate individuals from what they produce; and third, against a form of the power that subjugates (that which ties an individual to himself, and submits him to others in this way) and makes subjects to. According to Foucault, one of these struggles is found to prevail in different times: in feudal societies, the struggles against the forms of ethnic or social domination were prevalent; in the nineteenth century, the struggle against exploitation came into the foreground; and nowadays, the struggle against forms of subjection — against the submission of subjectivity becomes more and more important.

43.

Foucault reiterates, in the interview (Foucault 1988e: 11), that he hardly uses the word “power”. For him, “power” is “a short cut for the expression I always use: the relationships of power”. Power, for Foucault, is not dominance, a sovereign or a government, a political structure, a power “over”; when he speaks of “relationships of power”, Foucault means that “in human relations, whether it be a question of communicating verbally, or a question of love relationship, an institutional or economic relationship — power is always present”. Here Foucault wants to index the multi-directional network of relationships among subjects who are free, but they are also relationships in which one wishes to direct the behaviour of another”. By saying “relationships of power” are those “relationships in which one wishes to direct the behaviour of another”, Foucault has clearly made the connection between relationships of power with the recurrent theme of governmentality. One further qualifier is that “there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty” (Foucault 1988e: 11–12), a correlative theme imbricated with freedom and resistance.

NOTES

125

44.

Foucault (1988e: 16), in this particular instance, uses the example of two disciplines: psychiatry and mathematics to illustrate his point.

45.

The authors categorize the discourse of these two subcultures into two broad streams — “academics” and “practitioners”, by means of their pragmatics, or changes in the lexicon, language and locutions used to frame the issue of organizational culture. See also footnote 47 below for an elaboration of the correlative term “model-pragmatics”.

46.

Writers in this stream present their notions of culture as counterpoints to the field’s dominant paradigms at the time (e.g., Turner 1986; Martin 1990a; Alvesson & Berg 1992; Alvesson 1993). This is in the sense that quantitative approaches come to seem to give way to the growing popularity of theorizing with a qualitative orientation at that time (Alvesson & Berg 1992). Alvesson and Berg (1992: 21–22) refer to the “retreat of positivism” as “closely connected to the rise of culture studies” and “the breakthrough of culture has contributed to the weakening of the objectivist position in organizational research”.

47.

The use of “model-pragmatics” is a systematic way of comparing the ways the larger contexts and connotations (or properties of the language) shape and affect the meaning of a word or a phrase (lexicon). Assuming the two subcultures use an identical lexicon, the manner in which they frame organizational culture differently (i.e., use of discursive practices) has to be carried by, according to Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988), the larger context (which comprises Foucault’s non-discussive practices) of their discourse.

48.

The articulations in maintaining employee loyalty and in increasing their commitment and productivity are often held as evidence for the continuing vitality of the normative orientation of management theory and practice that began with the human relations movement. An orientation, as the term is used here, refers to a set of social forces that influence the direction of a discourse. “Normative orientation” and “rational orientation” are two waves or sets of social forces in the history of managerial control ideologies whose tenors swing between that of a normative control rhetoric and a rational control rhetoric (Barley & Kunda 1992). Other surges in the last hundred-year history of managerial control ideologies, according to these two authors, include the following: industrial betterment (1870–1900), scientific management (1900–1923), welfare capitalism and human relations (1923–1955), systems rationalism (1955–1980), and neo-human relations (1980-present). Barley and Kunda (1992) have identified that organizational culture belongs to the neohuman relations movement, which is characterized by the implicit use of a normative control rhetoric in its discourse. This is evidenced in the ways in which academic-theoreticians, managers, consultants and their corporate culture prescriptions have cast the cultural model of organizations as a “discovery” — the superlative in corporate success formulae (Baker 1980; Business Week, 1980; Thackray 1986; Egan 1994). Within the decade between the 1970s to 1990s, the manager’s imperative has not changed; her or his agenda is to address cultural transformation fully, which is perceived to be closely linked with or even conducive to the improvement in organizational effectiveness, productivity, performance, human relationship management, and employee motivation (Silverzweig & Allen 1976; Schwartz & Davis 1981; Davis 1984; Drennan 1992). Applied researchers who made a commercial success out of their practitioner-oriented prescriptive literature (e.g., Davis 1984; Sathe 1983; Kilmann et al. 1985; Drennan 1992) have ritualistically pointed out the importance and newness of organizational culture for the functioning of organizations.

49.

Quick fixes embody prescriptive, practitioner-oriented work that provides to boardroom decision-makers recipes of so-called hard-nosed “cultural management”, “cultural transformation”, and organizational development (OD) initiatives within companies and organizations.

50.

See for example, Gregory (1983); Young (1989); Van Mannen and Kunda (1989); Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990); Zuboff (1990); Kunda (1991); Ogbonna (1992); Martin (1992).

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51.

Occupations, for Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) and other sociologists of “culture in work” are analyzed into a “distinctive pattern that is connected in unique ways to external meaning systems”. According to them, these meaning systems are themselves embedded in quite distinctive class, regional and national cultures. Observations made by other researchers concerning the features and functions of culture among different occupations converge, as their results are reported in sociological accounts of occupations like restaurant waiting staff (Marshall 1986), shop-floor machinists (Young 1989), slaughtermen (Ackroyd & Crowdy 1990), supermarket cashiers (Ogbonna 1992), as well as in ethnographic studies about multiple perspectives of culture in a California-based multinational electronics corporation (Martin 1992), hi-tech engineers (Van Mannen & Kunda 1989; Kunda 1991), Silicon Valley technical professionals (Gregory 1983), and workers in hi-tech environments (Zuboff 1988; Casey 1995).

52.

For example, Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990), Ogbonna (1992), and Alvesson (1993) have shown that the distinctive behavioral patterns, and connections with people’s underlying assumptions have rendered the cultures of some of the occupations (like slaughtermen and cashiers at check-out counters) effectively beyond managerial capacity or prerogative to influence, let alone control. In regards of the “manageability” of culture, academic researchers are therefore more cautious about it than practitioners are. Academics like Fombrun (1983) have concluded that “managing corporate culture is an awesome if not impossible task” (ibid.: 151). Other academics argue that culture simply exists and cannot be created and managed by individuals (Martin and Siehl 1983). Schein (1985) argues that deeply held assumptions and beliefs, set in and proven over time, located in the subconscious of individuals are difficult to articulate and to access, not to mention to change. Turner (1986) and Linstead and Grafton-Small (1992) resonate with Anthony (1994) that the significance of culture in work — as an anthropological phenomenon — has consolidated with stability over time; hence, rendering a cultural quick-fix in a turbulent environment comparatively less viable and less attractive.

53.

See for example, Pascale and Athos (1981), Deal and Kennedy (1982), Peters and Waterman (1982), Sathe (1983, 1985), and Kilmann, Saxton and Serpa (1985).

54.

Cultural attribute refers to the feature, property, or quality belonging to, or representative of, a people or their (national) culture per se.

55.

See for example, Lincoln and Kalleberg (1985), and Lincoln and McBride (1987).

56.

The intertext of this discourse by Peters (1978) of culture as “management of symbolic action” indexes with that of Edgar Schein’s well-known discourse about culture and leadership. In Schein (1985: 2), the author asserts directly that leaders can create and manage culture.

57.

Foucault’s earlier work analyses the limits of the discourses of those human sciences in which various definitions of human subjectivity developed. His attention then shifts to power because Foucault has found that the conditions of possibility of true discourses about human subjects include complex relations between knowledge about people and systems of government (i.e., governmentality). Human sciences and modern government mutually constitute each other in the power/knowledge nexus, which Foucault labels variously, in his early works, as discipline, normalization, bio-politics, government, police and pastorialism. At this point, Foucault claims he is not interested in power as such but in the different modes in which relations of power turn human beings into subjects; and in the ways in which people participate in their own subjectification by exercising power over themselves, i.e., tying themselves to moral or scientific definitions of who they are. This is Foucault’s main criticism of the modern era whereby we should resist humanist philosophies of the subject. Refusal of this humanist present and its epistemological grammar entails resisting the regimes of truth that human sciences (including organization theory) pronouce, the modern forms of “government”, and our own self-definitions that subjectify us.

NOTES

127

58.

Man as the complex object of knowledge and the subject that knows was nowhere to be found. Foucault points out that only with the dissolution of the classical epistème did man emerge to occupy a position inextricably associated with the formation of the human sciences and humanism. Humanism is a failed philosophical project in the mind of Foucault because it takes the notion of Man to be its foundation for knowledge, whereas he is merely one of its effects, a figure and a constructed entity. The root of the problem is that of a paradox inherent in the subject position of Man, which Foucault has illustrated using an analogy in his perceptive analysis of the point of “observing” maintainable from the “symbolically sovereign” position occupied by King Philip IV in Velasquez’s Las Meninas, at the beginning of The Order of Things (1970: 3–16). Foucault maintains that the humanist dilemma of the epistemological consciousness of man is that “man appears in his ambiguous position as object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator” (Foucault 1970: 312). Seen in this light, humanism, and the “humanist present” have to be considered, Simons (1995) suggests, as “a series of doctrines which tie us to our subjectivities and to particular notions of personhood. These ties prevent us from attaining maturity and bind us to the authority of the forces that limit us” (ibid.:17).

59.

In other words, organization theorists can only operate as the subjects of organizational discourse if they speak from the correct institutional sites: the university “business schools”, management textbooks and best sellers, the refereed journals. The subject of a discourse such as organization theory is a function of intellectual credibility and academic reputation, criteria of research competence, institutional relations and professional hierarchies.

60.

The humanist consensus is neatly summed up in David Hoy’s remark that “the antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom” (Hoy 1986: 137).

61.

Similar reasons have been suggested by sympathizers like Rajchman who characterizes resistance in terms of “skeptical freedom” and “civil disobedience” (Rajchman 1985); elsewhere, Dumm calls it the “politics of freedom” (Dumm 1996), and Simons (1995) explains how Foucault “agonistic openness” urges us to “refuse who we are” through practice of an ethic of resistance and a practice of liberty.

62.

Sympathetic followers of Foucault understand that it is incompatible with Foucault’s conviction for him to “give definitions” and to “speak for others”. See Paul Bové’s defence — in Bové (1988) — of Foucault’s “style” in his foreword to Deleuze’s Foucault (1988), and Walter Privitera’s Problems of Style: Michel Foucault’s Epistemology (1995); both works explain some of the reasons for the criticisms levelled against Foucault’s “inconsistencies”, “lack of definitions”, and “no concrete advice” etc.

63.

Foucault indicates that in itself the exercise of power is “not violence; nor is it a consent which implicitly is not renewable. It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it is always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects” (Foucault 1983: 220).

64.

Rationality is what Foucault refers to as a moral technology; management of organizational culture can be thought of as a rationality — an all-embracing conception of organizational control.

65.

Compare this with Foucault’s remark in “Two Lectures” in Power/Knowledge (1980e: 98): “The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent that it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle”.

66.

Isaiah Berlin, in Two Concepts of Liberty (1969) contends there are two distinctive concepts of freedom: the negative idea of freedom (freedom from) in which agents are restrained by others from doing what they want; and a positive idea (freedom to) in which agents autonomously conceive and pursue their own ends — the positive concept of liberty “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master” (op.cit.:16).

128


67.

Patton (1989) elaborates his own idea of “positive freedom”, which departs from Berlin’s classic definition. Instead of claiming that there are different concepts of freedom involved — a positive and a negative freedom--Patton focuses on constraints, and he invites us to rethink that there are two ways in which an agent’s capacity to act may be constrained: by external limits to the kinds of act that may be carried out, or by internal limits to the kinds of action the agent is capable of undertaking. In distinguishing positive “freedom to” in this way, Patton is giving a different emphasis to that given in Berlin’s account. His point is to insist upon “the importance of individual capacities as preconditions for the exercise of freedom in either sense (Patton 1989, emphasis mine).

68.

This definition remains his final evaluation of “power relations”, as he reiterates in one of his final interviews in 1984. See “The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom” in The Final Foucault (1988e).

69.

There are many examples of this reading; even the very careful McNay (1994) colludes with this narrow interpretation. See McNay (1994: 5).

70.

Foucault defines “the plebes” as a vitalistic force that circulates throughout the social realm, manifesting itself in individuals, groups and classes. It prevents individuals from becoming passive objects of power relations by imbuing them with a resistant energy. “There is no such thing as ‘the’ plebes, rather there is, as it were, a certain plebian quality or aspect (de la plèbe)” (Foucault 1980g: 138). Foucault’s use of “the plebes” refers to a Nietzschian argument about the nature of knowledge and the kinds of realities and truths that humans build around themselves. Nietzsche believed that all knowledge was a selective process that ignored vast areas of the world around it in order to achieve closure of meaning, and to come up with a representation of the world that was both useful and manageable. Since the functioning of power is creative rather than repressive, there is a need for an oppositional lever that can oppose existing dominant social forms and their power configurations. The plebes fill this gap and complement Foucault’s theorization of nominal power. The plebes are intended as a counter-position to orthodox Marxist theory that essentializes revolutionary force by rendering it an inherent quality of a particular class — the proletariat.

71.

The Frankfurt School provides a two-sided, all-or-nothing scenario associated with viewing the world as a totality. The alternating “optimistic” and “resigned” stances correspond to, firstly, the euphoria prevalent in the 1930s that came from the belief that there is rich prospect of redirecting the social whole, and secondly, the pessimistic ethos in the late 1940s and 1950s that came from the belief that the current totality could not be transformed, respectively (Haber 1994; Ransom 1997).

72.

The subtle activity of “governing” consists of linguistic activity (what someone has/wants to say or theorize about governing) as well as of extra-linguistic, material actions (what someone actually does in the on-going, actual activities of governing). Both language and material practices are imploded in a total process and total operation of “government”. Assumptions about the inseparability between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic form the basic tenet of discourse as conceived by proponents of the “cultural turn” in epistemology (see Laclau & Mouffe 1987: 104–105). Social theorists of the “cultural turn” to refer to this totality as “discourse”. The conception of the discursive undermines divisions between language and material practices by evincing ways in which meaning and use are intimately and ultimately connected.

73.

Both meanings suggest a form of “power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault 1983: 212). In other words, a person’s sense of who he is is constituted and confirmed through his positioning within particular relations of power and a structure of practices/positions.

74.

An optimistic-liberal version of enlightenment assumes a solution predicated upon the provision to individuals with a number of protections and rights as well as the removal of all obstacles to the development of individual autonomy, allowing the natural qualities of individuals to blossom.

NOTES 75.

129

Like aspects of “Anti-Organization Theory” described by Burrell and Morgan (1979), genealogy considers that intellectual practices belong to a dispositif of administrative discourse and are part of the self-serving traditions of a “conservative enterprise” underpinned by the “present system of ideological domination within contemporary society” (Burrell & Morgan 1979: 312), with no greater objective than survival.

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Index A Ackroyd, Steve, 12, 15, 83, 85, 125n50 Agonism, xiii, 76, 95, 115, 124n41 Althusser, Louis, 58, 94, 107, 123n32 Alvesson, Mats, ix, 11–12, 14–15, 32, 75, 80–82 Anthony, Peter, 8, 13–14, 28, 32, 71, 83, 86, 126n52 Astley, Graham, 3, 113 B Ball, Stephen, 97 Barley, Stephen, ix, 13, 15, 28, 32–33, 72, 74, 76–77, 120n14 Barney, Jay, 8 Barrett, Michèle, 123n32 Bates, Paul, 12–14 Bauman, Zygmunt, 24, 26, 119n7 Berlin, Isaiah, 122n26, 127n66 Bersani, Leo, 65–66, 72 Best, Steven, 42, 45, 48–50, 98, 121n19, 122n27 Body, 57, 94, 122n28, 123n32 and discourse, 59, 73. See also surveillance Boje, David, 9, 19, 45, 113 Bové, Paul, 80, 127n62 Boyne, Roy, 48 Brewis, Joanna, 7 Burrell, Gibson, 3, 7, 14, 19, 21–23, 34– 35, 58, 61, 65, 115, 123n35, 129n75 Butler, Judith, 28, 58, 62, 85, 107, 113, 123n32 C Calás, Marta, 11, 19, 45, 50, 84, 115, 119n3 Callinicos, Alex, 121n18 Canguilheim, Georges, 23 Casey, Catherine, 17, 107 Carter, Pippa, 5, 45 Chia, Robert, 18, 19, 45, 113

Civil disobedience, xv, 53, 104, 122n25 Clegg, Stewart, ix, 3–4 Clifford, James, 89 Connolly, William, 102 Cook, Deborah, 41 Cooper, Robert, 19, 45 Corporate culture, 12, 60, 75, 78, 81, 84, 86, 104, 108, 114 practitioner literature of, 81–82, 86 Cousins, Mark, 8, 119n1 Critical ethos, 87, 106, 122n30 Critical theory, 92, 106, 110, 122n30 Critique, 41, 47, 76, 89 and oppositional activity, 42, 102 and thought, 51, 103–104, 116 of organization studies, 89, 105, 116 Crook, Stephen, 48, 121n17 Culture, as an anthropological concept,12, 13, 29, 31, 37 and change, 79, 81, 83, 102 definitions of, 22, 32, 119n7, 120n13 ‘differentiation’ school of, 15, 16, 74 etymology of, 19, 22–24, 97, 119 n6 ‘integrationist’ school of, 15–16, 29, 74 ‘variable’ school of, 36, 66, 72, 82, 84– 85 D Daudi, Philippe, 23, 119n4 Dean, Mitchell, 59–60, 77, 115 Deleuze, Gilles, xiv Denison, Daniel, 21, 34, 36 Difference, 72, 115 in thought, 67, 121n24 Discipline, 74, 107, 126n57 Discourse, 93, 114, 125n45 and discursive space, 8, 21 theory, 9, 11, 17–18, 51, 116 Domination, 61, 93–94, 104, 122n31 and power, 92, 98, 104 Donaldson, Lex, 7

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Dreyfus, Hubert, 41, 50, 53, 96, 114, 116, 122n29 du Gay, Paul, xiv, 12, 17, 18, 28, 62, 79, 97, 105, 108, 119n4 Dumm, Thomas, 126n61 Durkheim, Emile, 35–36 E Enlightenment, 24, 50, 55, 110, 121n24, 124n40 Epistème, 90, 103, 119n2, 127n58 Epistemology, 31, 44, 47 Ethics, and aesthetics, 41, 51, 53, 111 of resistance, 109 Ethos, critical, 51, 98, 106 of Foucault, 41, 51, 53, 55, 95, 107– 108, 121n24 Excellence, 108 In Search of, ix, 79 pursuit of, 12, 59–60, 74, 123n34 Exemplarity, 19, 78, 87, 102, 112, 116 genealogical, 104 F Fairclough, Norman, 35, 78–80 Findlay, Patricia, 17 Fineman, Stephen, 6, 15 Foucault, Michel, and Habermas, 92, 122n30 and Kant, 51, 54 works of Discipline and Punish, 72, 97 History of Sexuality, 97, 109 ‘Subject and Power’, The, 58, 95, 103, 107 ‘What is enlightenment?’, 51, 53, 111– 112 Fournier, Valerie, 19, 113 Frankfurt School, the, 102, 104, 115, 122n30, 128n71 Fraser, Nancy, 91–92, 98, 106 Freedom, 67, 87, 122n26 and power, 67, 87, 98, 100–101 negative ‘freedom from’, 99–100, 104, 127n66, 128n67 positive ‘freedom to’, 99–100, 104, 127n66, 128n67 Frost, Peter, xiii-xiv, 4, 9, 11, 13–14

G Gagliardi, Pasquale, ix Geertz, Clifford, 29–30, 32, 82 Genealogy, 37, 59, 116, 123n33 and critique, 102 and resistance, 102 of culture, 56–57, 115 Gephert, Robert, 19, Gergen, Kenneth, 53 Gerlach, Neil, 64–65, 86 Gherardi, Silvia, 7, 45, 119n3 Gordon, Colin, 67 Government, 63, 77, 108, 123n34, 128n72 art of, 25 Governmentality, 57, 60, 62, 73, 85, 96, 107, 124n43, 126n57 Grafton-Small, Robert, 14, 83, 126n52 Grey, Christopher, 7, 19, 113 H Haber, Honi, 101, 102, 106, 128n71 Habermas, Jürgen, 92, 122n30 Hacking, Ian, xiv, 17, 62, 119n4 Hall, Stuart, 18, 58, 72, 89, 107, 119n1 Hardy, Cynthia, 3–4 Harvey, David, 48 Hassan, Ihab, 47–48 Hassard, John, 12, 19, 35, 45, 53, 55 Hekman, Susan, 67, 122n27 Helmers, Sabine, 31–32, 35, 120n12 Hindess, Barry, 73, 93, 104 History, 103 as counter-memory, xiv guerrilla, xiv, 19, 71, 115 whiggish, 19, 80 Hochschild, Arlie, 15 Hofstede, Geert, ix Honneth, Axel, 48 Horkheimer, Max, 21 Hoy, David, 115–116, 127n60 Huczynski, Andrzej, 80–81, 124n37 Humanism, 90 Humanist present, 87, 89, 91, 108, 121n23, 126n57, 127n58 I Intellectual, 51, 66, 124n40 critique and, 108–111 specific, xv, 57, 66, 92, 108–109 the role of, 67, 92, 109 universal, 66, 92

INDEX J Jackson, Norman, 5, 45 Jeffcutt, Paul, 11, 14 K Kant, 121n22 and Enlightenment, 51 and Foucault, 51, 54 Kelly, Michael, 52, 102 Kellner, Douglas, 42, 45, 48–50, 98, 121n19, 122n27 Kilduff, Martin, 45 Knights, David, ix, 6, 17, 45 Knowledge, and desire, 120n9 and genealogy, 72 and power, 58, 85 Foucault and, 105 subjugated, 105 Kunda, Gideon, 12, 15, 28, 125n48, 125n50, 126n51 L Laclau, Ernesto, xiii, 74, 105, 128n72 Lash, Scott, 122n27 Latour, Bruno, 89 Layder, Derek, 48, 89, 98 Legge, Karen, 27–28, 81 Linstead, Stephen, 14, 44, 45, 74, 82–83, 126n52 Lyotard, Jean-François, 21, 121n20 M Managing culture, 13, 16, 26, 28, 32, 59, 81, 85, 115 Mannheim, Karl, 21 Marsden, Richard, 11, 16 Martin, Joanne, xiii-xiv, 4, 11–15, 45, 75, 119n3, 125n46, 125n50 May, Todd, 41, 50, 53, 122n25 McKinlay, Alan, ix, 17, 87 McNay, Lois, 25, 67, 120n8, 128n69 Meaning, 119n5 closure of, 128n78 escape of, 97 proliferation of, 115 Meek, Lynn, 11, 14, 32, 82 Methodologies, ethnographic, 15 qualitative, 15, 125n46 Miller, James, 122n28

147 Miller, Peter, xiv, 63, 93 Morgan, Gareth, 3, 14, 34–35, 129n75 Morgan, Glenn, 17 Mouffe, Chantal, xiii, 74, 105, 128n72 Mulkay, Gilbert, 89 Mumby, Dennis, 6 N Newton, Tim, 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 90, 113, 120n10, 123n33, 128n70 Nilson, Herman, 52, 106, 109, Nord, Walter, 3 Norris, Christopher, 41, 53 O Ogbonna, Emmanuel, 12, 125n50, 126n51 Organizational behavior, and paradigm differences, 7 Organizational culture, 62, 71, 72, 74, 78, 84–85, 104, 107–108, 113–114, 123 n37 as discourse, 60, 81, 106, 113–114, 124n48 definition of, 84, 106 genesis of, 22, 81, 115, 120n14 managing organizational culture, 59, 78, 81, 84, 104, 120n11, 123n34, 126n52 ‘strong’, 105, 114, 120n13 Organization studies, and social dynamics, 7, 77, 108–109 conditions of, 4, 43, 75, 97, 116 critique and, 43, 104–105, 113 Organization theory, 35, 43, 111, 113 functional, 7 Organizational discourse, 44, 97, 106, 115 Ouchi, William, 15, 29, 79, 84 Owen David, xiii, 52–53, 55, 66, 102, 104, 109, 114 P Parker, Martin, xiii, 11, 45 Patton, Paul, 99, 103, 119n4, 122n26, 128n67 Perrow, Charles, 4 Peters, Tom, ix, 12, 28, 34, 85, 124n37, 126n53 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 7 Plebe (de la plèbe), 66, 101, 104, 106, 128n70

148


Police, 126n57 and policy, 120n8 Pondy, Louis, 120n11 Postmodernism, 37, 41, 46, 121n15, 121n17–19, 122n27 and organization studies, 41–42, 113, 124n39 and social theory, 42 Power, 93, 109, 123n36 and coercion, 94 ascending analysis of, 63, 109 freedom and, 98, 124n43 knowledge and, 58, 91, 120n10, 124n38 resistance to, 87, 109 subject and, 62, 73 Power-knowledge, 85–86, 90, 102, 120n10, 124n38, 126n57 Power relations, 95, 101, 106, 124n43 agonism and, 87 as ‘power over’, 98–99, 103 as ‘power to’, 98–99, 103 Prado, Carlos, 58–60, 62, 64, 66–67, 94– 95, 100, 116 Privitera, Walter, 116 R Rabinow, Paul, 41, 50, 53, 96, 114, 116, 122n29 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 35 Rajchman, John, xv, 55, 101, 104, 115, 117, 121n23, 122n25, 122n30, 126n61 Ransom, John, xv, 54–55, 59, 66, 87, 91, 102–107, 115, 128n71 Rattansi, Ali, 48 Ray, Larry, 92–93 Reed, Michael, 3–4, 9, 11, 16, 42, 44–45, 93, 97, 119n1 Reflective indocility, xv, 53, 104 Representation, 21, 104 in organizational culture, xiii, 79, 85 Resistance, 65–66, 87, 98, 101, 115 power and, 78–79 reasons for, 53, 91–92, 103, 109, 127n61 Rorty, Richard, 117, 123n35 Rose, Nikolas, xiv, 17–18, 28, 62–63, 108, 123n34 Rosenau, Pauline, 42, 45, 49–50, 121n15, 121n20

S Said, Edward, 62, 64, 72 Salaman, Graeme, xiv, 12, 28, 60, 79, 107, 114 Schein, Edgar, 13–14, 120n3, 126n56 Scott, Richard, 3 Seidman, Steven, 48–49 Simons, Jon, 54, 59, 104, 106, 115, 127n61 Smart, Barry, 55–58, 77, 89–90, 104, 108 Smircich, Linda, 11–12, 19, 45, 50, 75, 82, 84, 115, 119n3 Social theory, 36, 42, 47, 93 Starkey, Ken, ix, 17, 87 Street, Brian, 23, 37 Subject, 17, 61, 73, 123n32 -specific competence, xiii, 54, 94, 115 Subjection, 61, 65, 77, 89, 93, 22n31. See also domination Subjectivity, 19, 27, 37, 55, 71, 96, 105 and subjectification, 59, 99, 105–106, 117 and subjugation, 93, 101, 108, 124n42 constituting, 27, 55, 64, 105, 108 Surveillance, disembodied eyes of, 124n38 Szakolczai, Arpád, 52, 106 T Tabor, Philip, 65, 92, 124n38 Taylor, Charles, 98, 99 Thiele, Leslie, 108 Thompson, Paul, 6, 42, 44–45, 47, 49–50 Townley, Barbara, 11, 16–17 Trice, Harrison, xiii, 85 Tsoukas, Haridimos, 8 Tully, James, xiii, 27, 52, 59, 107, 115 Turner, Barry, ix, 14, 125n46 V Values, managing through, 123n37 shared, 83, 85 Van Maanen, John, 15, 125n50, 126n51 W Waterman, Robert, 29, 34, 85, 124n37, 126n53 Watson, Tony, 124n37 Westwood, Robert, 23, 58, 62, 64, 72 Williams, Raymond, 24

149

INDEX Willmott, Hugh, ix, 17, 32 Wolin, Sheldon, 98 Wren, Daniel, 27–28 Wright, Susan, 12, 31, 32, 35

Z Zuboff, Shoshana, 125n50, 126n51

John Benjamins Publishing Company publishes Advances in Organization Studies as a reformulated continuation of the De Gruyter Studies in Organization. 1. ZEYTINOGLU, I¸sik Urla (ed.): Developments in Changing Work Relationships in Industrialized Economies. 1999. 2. HENKE, Holger and Ian BOXILL (eds.): The End of the ‘Asian Model’? 2000. 3. QUACK, Sigrid, Glenn MORGAN and Richard WHITLEY (eds.): National Capitalisms, Global Competition, and Economic Performance. 2000. 4. MAURICE, Marc and Arndt SORGE (eds.): Embedding Organizations. Societal analysis of actors, organizations and socio-economic context. 2000. 5. CHAN, Andrew: Critically Constituting Organization. 2000. 6. BOS, René ten: Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking. 2000. 7. RHODES, Carl: Writing Organization. (Re)presentation and control in narratives at work. 2001. 8. HOSKING, Dian Marie and Sheila McNAMEE (eds.): Organization Behavior. Social constructionist approach. n.y.p.

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