Journal of
ISSN 0953-4814
Organizational Change Management
Volume 15 Number 1 2002
Documenting the organization in film and videotape Guest Editors Heather Ho¨pfl and Hugo Letiche Paper format Journal of Organizational Change Management includes six issues in traditional paper format. The contents of this issue are detailed below.
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Access to Journal of Organizational Change Management online _______________________________
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Editorial advisory board ___________________________
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Abstracts and keywords ___________________________
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About the Guest Editors ___________________________
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Guest editorial ____________________________________
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Spectacular metaphors: from theatre to cinema Thomaz Wood Jr _______________________________________________
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Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime Heather Ho¨pfl __________________________________________________
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Vocation to profession: changing images of nursing in Britain Julia Hallam ___________________________________________________
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Dead Man – an encounter with the unknown past Peter Pelzer ____________________________________________________
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Video fractals: research as mass media Hugo Letiche ___________________________________________________
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The ‘‘presence’’ of video Duska Rosenberg _______________________________________________
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Note from the publisher ____________________________
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD James Barker HQ USAFA/DFM Colorado Springs, USA David Barry University of Auckland, New Zealand Jean Bartunek Boston College, USA Dominique Besson IAE de Lille, France Steven Best University of Texas-El Paso, USA Mary Boyce University of Redlands, USA Warner Burke Columbia University, USA Adrian Carr University of Western Sydney-Nepean, Australia Stewart Clegg University of Technology (Sydney), Australia David Collins University of Essex, UK Cary Cooper Manchester School of Management, UMIST, UK Ann L. Cunliffe University of New Hampshire, USA Robert Dennehy Pace University, USA Ken Ehrensal Kutztown University, USA Max Elden University of Houston, USA Andre´ M. Everett University of Otago, New Zealand Dale Fitzgibbons Illinois State University, USA Jeanie M. Forray Western New England College, USA Robert Gephart University of Alberta, Canada Clive Gilson University of Waikato, New Zealand Andy Grimes Lexington, Kentucky, USA John Hassard University of Keele, UK Mary Jo Hatch University of Virginia, USA Mary Ann Hazen University of Detroit Mercy, USA Heather Ho¨pfl University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK
Maria Humphries University of Waikato, New Zealand Arzu Iseri Bogazici University, Turkey David Jamieson Pepperdine University, USA David Knights Keele University, UK Terence Krell Rock Island, Illinois, USA Hugo Letiche University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands Benyamin Lichtenstein University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA Stephen A. Linstead University of Sunderland, UK Slawek Magala Erasmus University, The Netherlands Rickie Moore E.M. Lyon, France Ken Murrell University of West Florida, USA Eric Nielsen Case Western Reserve University, USA Walter Nord University of South Florida, USA Ellen O’Connor Chronos Associates, Los Altos, California, USA Cliff Oswick King’s College, University of London, UK Ian Palmer University of Technology (Sydney), Australia Abraham Shani California Polytechnic State University, USA Ralph Stablein Massey University, New Zealand Carol Steiner Monash University, Australia David S. Steingard St Joseph’s University, USA Ram Tenkasi Benedictine University, USA William Van Buskirk La Salle University, USA Christa Walck Michigan Technological University, USA Hugh Willmott Manchester School of Management, UMIST, UK Richard Woodman Texas A&M University, USA
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Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2002, Abstracts and keywords. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814
Spectacular metaphors: from theatre to cinema Thomaz Wood Jr Keywords Metaphors, Theatre, Cinema The use of metaphoric language has grown in prevalence in recent years. Frontline organizations have become ‘‘magical kingdoms’’: ethereal places where image and substance rarely coincide, and where metaphors turn into powerful tools for consultants and change agents. At the same time, scholars explore the ‘‘wonderful world of metaphors’’. Once simple figures of speech, metaphors have been transformed into a respectable approach for organizational analysis. Although millenarian, the theatre metaphor constitutes an attractive system of ideas for studying organizational phenomena. In this paper, the theatre metaphor is used as a point of departure for the development of another dramaturgical metaphor: the cinema metaphor. It is suggested that the latter might provide a better perspective for studying contemporary organizations in the age of spectacle.
Vocation to profession: changing images of nursing in Britain Julia Hallam Keywords Service, Nurses, United Kingdom, Gender The public image of a profession is an important barometer of the group’s status in society. Media images play a key role in this respect, projecting the ideas and values of the group and negotiating shifts in public perception of their identity. This paper focuses on two periods in Britain when shifts in managerial culture resulted in changes in the core values of the group; the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and the introduction of the internal market within the NHS in the late 1980s. In both periods, nursing leaders sought to change the public image of the profession through altering their relationship with their patients/clients and reconceptualising notions of service. The focus of analysis is the role of popular film and television images in negotiating these shifts in professional values.
Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime Heather Ho¨pfl Keywords Cinema, Gender, Theory This is a paper about the cinematic as spectacle and the construction of the sublime. It is concerned with gendered constructions of desire and construes the object of desire in this case as a sublime object. At the same time, the paper is about decadence and falling, falling away. Therefore, this piece of writing attempts to deal with some thoughts on the relationship between decadence and mortification. So this paper is also about distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the distance that is described by falling from the constructed sublime and its associated melancholy. These ideas are explored via an examination of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most powerful films, Vertigo (1958), and a notion of the tragic sublime. Taken together, the concept of the sublime and the narrative of the film provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representations in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of organisational idealisation.
Dead Man – an encounter with the unknown past Peter Pelzer Keywords Cinema, Organizational change, National cultures, Shareholders, Mergers and acquisitions Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man, apparently a Western, exceeds the genre’s traditional boundaries and shows ambivalence, unclear roles in an environment existing between the times of the nation’s founding and the success of civilisation. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. The film is a provocation for adherents to traditional Western movies. But a closer look at this world offers a surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that also occur after mergers or take-overs in contemporary business organisations. The charm in using the film as a metaphor is at least two-fold. The interpretation with the help of Lyotard and Baudrillard shows a double edged dynamic where the successful new owner after a take-over is not necessarily in charge of the game. Beyond that the use of a movie from outside the mainstream offers a
non-mainstream argument inside the core of a mainstream management topic. Video fractals: research as mass media Hugo Letiche Keywords Video, Mass media, Fractal imaging technology, Research In this article, research as ‘‘mass media’’ (Luhmann) is appraised. ‘‘Videocy’’ or videoed research results are examined. A form of video research with its roots in action research, Delphi methodology and visual anthropology is reported on. The simulacra it produces, wherein feedback loops are used to produce an effect similar to the fractalizations of complexity, achieves a powerful reality-effect. But is it a ‘‘responsible’’ form of (research) practice?
The ‘‘presence’’ of video Duska Rosenberg
Abstracts and keywords
Keywords Computers, Communications technology, Video This paper is based on the study of computermediated communication (CMC) making use of e-mail and video conferencing to facilitate cooperative work at a distance. Video supported contact between remote partners can permit architects, other professionals (such as the structural engineers) and on-site construction personnel, to relate to one another in real-time. Video could provide a channel of communication between remote participants and serve as an analytical tool providing a record of mediated communication. The author investigates communicative issues raised by CMC practice. The theme of ‘‘presence’’ emerges as crucial.
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About the Guest Editors Heather Ho¨pfl is Professor of Organisational Psychology and head of the School of Operations Analysis and HRM, at Northumbria University, UK. She is a visiting professor of the International Graduate School of Management at the University of South Australia and of the Academy of Entrepreneurship in Warsaw. She has held a number of posts in the R&D department of an engineering company, at a convent grammar school and as the tour manager for a repertory company. Her first degree is in Social Psychology and Systems and she holds a PhD from Lancaster University for a thesis on the subjective experience of time. She studied theology with Fr Gerry O’Mahony SJ. Her research is post-structuralist and her published work is concerned with aspects of performance, gender, and the body. She is interested in language and etymology as a tool of deconstruction. Recent/forthcoming articles are in Gender Work and Organisation, JMS, HRDI and she has forthcoming books with Barbara Czarniawska, Casting the Other, and Monika Kostera, Interpreting the Maternal Organisation. She is editor, with Stephen Linstead, of Culture and Organisation, a former chair of SCOS, and a fellow of the British Academy of Management. Hugo Letiche is the ISCE (Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence) Professor of ‘‘Meaning in organization’’ at the University for Humanist Studies (UvH), Utrecht, The Netherlands. He is research fellow at the Imagination Lab, Lausanne, Switzerland and lectures at Keele University and the Rotterdam School of Management. He has previously taught at The Erasmus University Rotterdam, Lancaster University, the Nutsseminarium University of Amsterdam and the Polytechnic de horst. At the UvH he is director of the PhD/DBA programme in the ‘‘humanization of organization’’. He has a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago, a Drs in psychology from Leiden University and a PhD in pedagogics from the Free University Amsterdam. He has published articles and book chapters on: the postmodernism debate in organizational theory, gender and research, aesthetics and organization, and complexity theory. Recent/forthcoming articles are in Gender Work and Organization, JOCM, Emergence, LTA (Finnish Journal of Business Economics) and Consumption Markets & Culture. His current projects are (co-authoring) a book Converging of Coherence (forthcoming, MIT Press) and (co-editing) a book on ‘‘Dialogues of health care’’ (forthcoming, Quorum Press).
Guest editorial The category of the aesthetic has always been a contentious one for criticism, both of a traditional or conservative kind and for a radical or Marxist mode. The problems become all the more pressing, as Benjamin indicated in 1936, with the advent of mechanical reproduction and cinematic form. It is crucial for any critical theory which would have emancipatory credentials to acknowledge the political conditions of culture in the contemporary moment (Docherty, 1996, p. 171).
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. . . a society which leaves its self-observation to the function system of the mass media enters into . . . (the extinction of) the difference of the inside and outside of fiction, the difference of a narrative or a film story on the one hand and an author, machinery of publication and receivers on the other, is undermined by a constant crossing of the boundary. The one side is copied over into the other . . . by offering [viewers] references back to their own life, or, one might say, ‘‘yes, that’s exactly it’’ experiences (Luhmann, 2000, pp. 80-2).
Can we play ‘‘organizational theory’’ and ‘‘mass culture’’ off against each other; that is interpret alternately one with the help of the other, or has the ‘‘crossing over’’ become far too powerful? This issue of JOCM reproduces (publishes) communications (articles) from outcomes (viewing) of communication (film and video). It raises all sorts of issues about ‘‘What is being observed and how is it observed?’’ At the most extreme, how far has the (self-)observation of organization been left to the mass media’s continuous production, of constructions of reality, in text, film/video or text about film/video? Or to paraphrase – ‘‘it’s mass media, all the way down’’. Filmed or videoed ‘‘reality’’ is delimited by a vacillating, indefinite and destabilizing frame. In these articles that ‘‘frame’’ is ‘‘examined’’ from a series of differing perspectives. The project began long ago, in 1995, when Heather Ho¨pfl and Ian Atkin organized a conference at Bolton Institute, UK on ‘‘Film and the visual record, research in film and video tape’’. At that time Hugo Letiche was a visiting professor of the institute, and to the pleasure of the organizers, he became involved in the planning and running of the conference. The event brought together a range of different approaches and methodologies to the use, analysis and critique of film and video in organization studies. Some participants were interested in the use of feature films for analyzing, illustrating and advancing contributions to organizational theory. Others were interested in the cinematic and televisual depiction of various occupational groups – that is, nurses, policemen, and doctors. And a further group of papers looked at the role of film and videotape in research including reports of empirical studies using video documentation. This was the same year as Denzin’s (1995) The Cinematic Society and John Hassard had given a number of papers on Cine´ma Verite´ as he and Ruth Halliday were working on the book that was eventually published in 1998 as Organization-Representation (Hassard and Halliday, 1998). There was The guest editors wish to thank the following reviewers for reviewing manuscripts: Dr Neil Ritson, Dr Harro Ho¨pfl, Professor Gerda Roper, Professor Monika Kostera, Dr Andrena Telford, Dr Martin Dyer-Smith and Nigel van Zwanenberg.
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increasing interest in the visual and particularly in postmodern aesthetics and culture. The ‘‘Aesthetics of organization’’ conference was held at Bolton in that same year (Ho¨pfl and Linstead, 2000). Arguably, one of the most important accounts and certainly one of the most frequently cited (Docherty, 1996, p. 171; Connor, 1989, p. 173), accounts of modern media is to be found in Benjamin’s (1973) ‘‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’’. What Benjamin sees as the threat of the possibility of multiple reproduction to the work of art and the destruction of the moment of contemplation marks the beginning of a theoretical concern with the standpoint of the spectator in relation to mass culture. Above all, Benjamin argues that film breaks down the aura of the work of art, brings an end to its transcendent function and brings it in the world of the familiar. ‘‘Film also allows for the analysis of that familiar world, in much the same way as psychoanalysis analyses the structures of dreams and everyday life’’ (Connor, 1989, p. 173). Benjamin is also concerned with the way in which film breaks down the unity of a performance which, in the theatre would be in one place and at one time, and substitutes a performance which is separated in space and time and given unity by the techniques of (re)production. In this way, the technologies of mass reproduction produce cultures which are signs systems and in which the culture industries manufacture ideologies, lives and lifestyles. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is an increasing preoccupation with the elaborate production of images of one sort or another, apparently to serve the interests of consumption, and a proliferation of excess. There appears to be the offer of a liberating heterogeneity of choice and experience. In fact, there is a fetishized construction and pursuit of sublime objects of desire. The cinematic eye of the spectator both appropriates and is in turn appropriated. Desire and violence are given representational form and run wild gaining potency from reproduction. In his introduction to The Cinematic Society, Denzin says: The postmodern is a visual, cinematic age; it knows itself in part through the reflections that flow from the camera’s eye. The voyeur is the iconic, postmodern self. Adrift in a sea of symbols, we find ourselves, voyeurs all, products of the cinematic gaze (Denzin, 1995, p. 1).
Clearly, there is a need to give attention to the ways in which film and video influence the way we produce and reproduce ourselves. The collection of papers in this special issue on ‘‘Documenting the organization in film and videotape’’ offer a range of perspectives on this question. The first paper, ‘‘Spectacular metaphors: from theatre to cinema’’, by Thomaz Wood examines the shift from theatre to cinema from the point of view of spectacle. In the paper, Wood discusses how the use of metaphorical language has grown in popularity in organizations in recent years. He says that frontline organizations became ‘‘magical kingdoms’’, ethereal places where image and substance rarely coexist. He considers the ways in which metaphors have become powerful tools for consultants and change agents and the subject of academic study for scholars. ‘‘Although millenarian’’, he argues, ‘‘the theatre metaphor constitutes an attractive system of ideas for studying organizational phenomena’’.
However, he uses the theatre metaphor as a point of departure for the development of another dramaturgical metaphor – the cinema metaphor, and goes on to argue that this latter might provide a better perspective for studying contemporary organizations in the age of spectacle. This is a conclusion that lays the foundation for the second paper, ‘‘Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime’’ by Heather Ho¨pfl. This paper deals with cinema as spectacle and with the construction of the sublime. It is concerned with gendered constructions of desire and construes the object of desire as a sublime object. At the same time, the paper attempts to deal with some thoughts on the relationship between decadence and mortification. The paper is about distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the movement caused by falling from the constructed sublime. These ideas are explored via an examination of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most cerebral films, Vertigo (1958), and the notion of the tragic sublime. Taken together, the concept of the sublime and the narrative of the film provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representation in the obsessive pursuit of organizational idealization. This idea of the commodification of images provides the basis for Julia Hallam’s study, ‘‘Vocation to profession: changing images of nursing in Britain’’, which looks at the way in which the image of the nurse has been manipulated and commodified. Hallam starts from the position that the public image of a profession is an important barometer of the group’s status in society. Clearly, media images play a key role in this respect, projecting the ideas and values of the group and negotiating shifts in public perception of their identity. This paper focuses on two periods in Britain when shifts in managerial culture resulted in changes in the core values of the group; the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and the introduction of the internal market within the NHS in the late 1980s. In both periods, nursing leaders sought to change the public image of the profession through altering their relationship with their patients/clients and reconceptualizing notions of service. Hallam examines the process by which the image of nursing is changed via an analysis of the role of popular film and television images in negotiating shifts in professional values. In doing so, she renders the image of the nurse ambivalent and opens it to question. Peter Pelzer has studied Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man. This film is apparently a Western, but it goes beyond the traditional boundary of the genre in order to give emphasis to ambivalence, unclear roles set between the wilderness and the success of civilization. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. The film offers a surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that parallel those frequently found after mergers or take-overs in contemporary business organizations. The charm in using the film as a metaphor is that it shows a double-edged dynamic where, in organizational terms, the successful new owner after a take-over is not necessarily in charge of the game. In his article, Hugo Letiche examines Luhmann’s view of research as ‘‘mass media’’ and he follows Luhmann to argue that ‘‘the system’s own constructions of reality’’ determine what is revealed. The nature of the ‘‘research system’’
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determines what can be researched and how, as well as which research results can be manifested. This is a theme which Letiche takes forward in an analysis of a research project using video research based on action research, Delphi methodology and visual anthropology. His analysis leads him to pose questions about the simulacra produced by research wherein feedback loops are used to produce an effect similar to the fractal-izations of complexity. This, he argues, achieves a powerful reality-effect but is it ‘‘responsible’’ (research) practice? Videocy, he argues, transforms research into the production of mass media artifacts. He concludes that the video research project was an exercise in complex ‘‘sleight of hand’’, and an experiment in complex (but pleasurable) consumerism. Duska Rosenberg’s paper is based on the study of computer-mediated communication (CMC). This is a means of communication via e-mail and video conferencing, intended to facilitate co-operative work at a distance. Video supported contact between remote partners could, she argues, permit architects, professionals (such as the structural engineers) and on-site construction personnel, to relate to one another in real-time. Video provided a channel of communication between remote participants and served as an analytical tool providing a record of mediated communication. Rosenberg investigates a range of communicative issues raised by CMC practice and concludes that the failure of ‘‘presence’’ is crucial to the process. CMC is not, she suggests, a managerial panacea. The paper identifies the need for a real appreciation of the role of video and CMC in organizations and a skeptical view of anticipated benefits. This special issue offers a diverse group of papers addressing a number of issues throwing light on ways in which organization can be constructed, analyzed and researched using film and video. Questioning the solidarity, jouissance and/or hypercomplexity of the blurring of distinctions and mixing of media is salutary to any study of the use of film/video in an organizational context. (see ‘‘Introduction’’ Letiche’s paper) We have enjoyed working on the collection and we are grateful to the contributors for their hard work and enthusiasm. Heather Ho¨pfl Hugo Letiche Guest Editors References Benjamin, W. (1973), ‘‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’’, in Arendt, H. (Ed.) (trans. Zohn, H), Illuminations, Fontana, Glasgow. Connor, S. (1989), Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Blackwell, Oxford. Denzin, N. (1995), The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze, Sage, London. Docherty, T. (1996), Alterities, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hassard, J. and Halliday, R. (1998), Organisation-Representation, Sage, London. Ho¨pfl, H. and Linstead, S. (Eds) (2000), Aesthetics of Organisation, Sage, London. Luhmann, N. (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CT.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
Spectacular metaphors
Spectacular metaphors
From theatre to cinema Thomaz Wood Jr FGV-EAESP, Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil Keywords Metaphors, Theatre, Cinema Abstract The use of metaphoric language has grown in prevalence in recent years. Frontline organizations have become ‘‘magical kingdoms’’: ethereal places where image and substance rarely coincide, and where metaphors turn into powerful tools for consultants and change agents. At the same time, scholars explore the ‘‘wonderful world of metaphors’’. Once simple figures of speech, metaphors have been transformed into a respectable approach for organizational analysis. Although millenarian, the theatre metaphor constitutes an attractive system of ideas for studying organizational phenomena. In this paper, the theatre metaphor is used as a point of departure for the development of another dramaturgical metaphor: the cinema metaphor. It is suggested that the latter might provide a better perspective for studying contemporary organizations in the age of spectacle.
11 Submitted June 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
The screen opens its white walls to a harem of marvellous adolescent sights and sounds, faced with which the most adorable real body appears deformed (Rene´ Clair, quoted by Hill (1992, p. 15)).
Introduction: understanding metaphors? Metaphoric reasoning is a key human skill that functions like a series of bridges which lead to the construction of high-order mental links between entities (Beck, 1987). In simple terms, metaphors interact and come to describe the world in the production of reality/ies where different metaphors inevitably produce different realities. But what does it mean, ultimately, to say that a metaphor was understood? According to Gibbs and Hall (1987), it is the proponent’s intention when he or she suggests or uses a metaphor that is the key to understanding its meaning. Understanding, therefore, involves discovering a system of common points, which are associated with the metaphor and its object. Understanding also includes recognition, on the part of the interlocutor, of the author’s intention when he or she makes a specific declaration. This paper proposes and explores the cinema metaphor. The theatre metaphor is used as a point of departure from which to develop the cinema metaphor. The argument is that the cinema metaphor is appropriate to contemporary analysis and both reflects and transmits the spirit of the times. The cinema metaphor also captures the baffling sense of organization and of organizing within the society of spectacle. The first section of the paper addresses the theatre metaphor through the work of Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman and examines their seminal An early version of this paper was presented at Organizational Theatre Sub Theme Group of the EGOS meeting, Lyon, July 2001. The author would like to thank Ana Paula Paes de Paula, Saara Taalas and Virpi Leikola for their insightful comments.
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contributions to the field. The second section deals with the ‘‘Age of spectacle’’ which corresponds to a cinematic society. In the following section, an outline for a cinema metaphor is put forward and, in the final section, an evaluation summary of the findings is presented. Theatre: a millenary metaphor In order to propose a metaphor of cinema, it is necessary to first explain the theatre metaphor in order to makes sense of the transpositions that have occurred in the move from one to the other. The idea of the world as the stage on which people successively take up and discard roles is not new (Burns, 1972; Riggins, 1993). The theatre metaphor is in fact millenarian. References to human beings as marionettes in the hands of the gods and human life as tragedy and comedy go back to classical Greek theatre. There are various uses of metaphors of dramatic representation which go back to the time of Plato. Similar ideas are found in Horace and Seneca’s works and in those of the early Christians (Curtius, 1967). The Middle Ages provides countless examples of dramatic work related to Christian mystery cycles and the church calendar. This provides ample opportunity for dramatic work to serve as a metaphor for the theatricality of everyday life. For instance, in a somewhat later work, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the following dialogue can be found (Lyman and Scott, 1975, p. 1): ‘‘. . . Come, tell me [says Don Quixote], hast thou not seen a play acted in which kings, emperors, pontiffs, knights, ladies, and divers other personages were introduced? One plays the villain, another the knave, this one the merchant, that the soldier, one the sharp-witted fool, another the foolish lover; and when the play is over, and they have put off the dresses they wore in it, all the actors become equal.’’ ‘‘Yes, I have seen that,’’ said Sancho. ‘‘Well then,’’ said Don Quixote, ‘‘the same thing happens in the comedy and life of this world, where some play emperors, others popes, and, in short, all the characters that can be brought into a play; but when it is over, that is to say when life ends, death strips them all of the garments that distinguish one from the other, and all are equal in the grave.’’ ‘‘A fine comparison!’’ said Sancho; ‘‘though not so new but that I have heard it many and many a time, . . .’’
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cervantes’ contemporary, used his theatre not only as a vehicle for poetry, but directly as a metaphor of reality (Van den Berg, 1985). Among other many outstanding lines, Jaque’s speech in As You Like It is a classic of its type (Lyman and Scott, 1975, p. 3): . . .All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances: And one man in his time plays many parts, . . .
There are several reasons for the popularity of the theatre metaphor in sociology and in organizational studies, but probably one of the most significant is that the sense that life is acting, that everyone is actor, that life is a stage is becoming more and more a matter of day-to-day experience (Riggins,
1993). In our daily affairs, our interactions with other people are situated between two extremes: on one side, we have the so-called natural situations, in which the sensation of spontaneity predominates; and on the other, we have the so-called theatrical situations, in which the perception of behaviors aimed at manipulating impressions is stronger. Therefore, one reason why the theatre metaphor is important is that, arguably, natural situations are becoming more and more rare while theatrical situations are becoming more and more common. As an analytical approach, the theatre metaphor can provide tools for exploring social encounters, and can distinguish form, content, structure, significance and grammar. Such tools help to systematize the study of such events and to place the observer in a different relation to the subject of the study. Kenneth Burke and dramatism Kenneth Burke was a forerunner in the analysis of social processes by giving value to interpretive processes in the study of human interaction (Gusfield, 1989). For Burke, social life is inherently dramatic, because it involves conflict, uncertainty, rhetoric and choice. Burke (1962) gave the name of dramatism to his perspective of human interaction analysis and proposed five terms as generating principles for his investigation. Each of these terms corresponds to one question: (1) what was done, what happened? – the act; (2) when or where was it done? – the scene, the situation in which the act took place; (3) who did it? – the agent, the person who commanded the act; (4) how did she/he do it? – the means or instruments which the agent used; and (5) why did she/he do it? – the purpose of the act. Dramatism is also a method used to explain social action and the corresponding interpretations for these actions (Mangham and Overington, 1983). Its use helps the actors to locate mystifications and reveal them. The basic assumption of the method is the same as the one present in the theoretical proposition by Erving Goffman that people are actors who interpret characters in everyday scenes. Erving Goffman and the dramaturgical analysis In the field of sociology, the influence of Goffman (1975) is so great that his name is frequently used as a synonym for the dramaturgical perspective. Goffman’s central point of analysis is how an individual presents her/himself in day-to-day situations and seeks to control the impression he/she causes. The following paragraphs summarize some key ideas in his work. This serves to provide a foundation for the understanding of the basis of the theatrical metaphor and to demonstrate how it shifts in the move to a cinematic metaphor.
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The first concept to be considered is social entity. For Goffman, a social entity is any place limited by the perception of where an activity takes place. There is a tacit, invisible agreement between the audience and actors to sustain the performance, avoiding breaks and instabilities. Another of Goffman’s key ideas is the difference between the actorindividual – the maker of impressions, who plays a role – and the personaindividual – the figure that the acting should evoke. The persona does not precede the scene, but materializes within it. The self, consequently, becomes a ‘‘hook’’ on which a collaborative construction can be hung; it is a product of stage arrangements. According to Goffman, individuals are moved not by the moral desire of achieving certain standards, but by the moral question of creating an impression of meeting those standards. This is a significant dramatic achievement and consonant with the contemporary use of the Greek word for actor, hypocrite. This approach provides a perspective for analyzing social situations. The priorities of dramaturgical perspective are the descriptions of the techniques for manipulating impressions in a given environment and the study of problems resulting from this manipulation. Goffman’s analysis of human interaction has been compared to that undertaken by Burke (Gusfield, 1989). However, there are differences between the two approaches which go beyond the label: Goffman calls his approach dramaturgical and Burke calls his dramatism. The fundamental difference is that Goffman emphasizes the art of illusion. The actor is a professional illusionist, dramaturgy is the art of illusion, the stage is a metaphor, and reality and stage are two distinct things. Burke, on the other hand, does not use drama as a metaphor for human action. In Burke’s work, the image is an image of interaction, of drama. Theorists of the cinematic society Daniel Boorstin: the image, pseudo-events and celebrities For those who believe that the fusion of fiction and reality is a recent phenomenon, Boorstin’s (1962) book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America appears almost prophetic. Boorstin carried out historical research, showing how US society developed a veritable fetish for the new. To sustain this obsession, the USA began to generate pseudo-events when real ones were lacking and create celebrities to compensate for the absence of heroes. Boorstin (1962, p. 4) claims that Americans have become so accustomed to illusions that they mistake them for reality. The reality began to be inhabited by artificial novelties. These are pseudo-events, that contain an ambiguous relationship with reality and are created with the specific purpose of provoking determined reactions in the audience (Boorstin, 1962, p. 11). The cinema and, more recently, TV began to produce an aberration: we live in a world where the image appears to be more trustworthy than the original and fantasy is more real than reality.
Guy Debord: the society of spectacle While Boorstin (1962) registered the tendencies related to the prevalence of the image over reality, Debord (1994) formulated a theory on the construction of a society based on image. Hence he showed himself to be frankly pessimistic with regard to the direction being taken by what he called the society of the spectacle. Analyzing the breakdown of the Soviet bloc – in the preface of a US edition of his work – Debord states that the spectacularization, together with other trends, leads to the dictatorial liberty of the market, combined with recognition of the rights of the homo spectator. The spectacularization is a consequence and an objective of modernizing production conditions, which breaks the unit of life, withdrawing images from it and grouping them together into a large and unique flow. A separate world is created, in which the relation between people is mediated by images. Everything that was directly experienced becomes a commodified representation. The spectacle creates a self-representation of the world that surpasses the real world itself. It works as a barrier between these two worlds, keeping them isolated. But the spectacle is not abstract. It is not something added to the real world. The spectacle ‘‘is capital accumulated to the point at which it becomes image’’ (Debord, 1994, p. 24). It manifests itself in the news media, in advertising, in public relations work, in cultural activities and in personal interactions. The spectacle is ‘‘at the heart of society’s real unreality’’ (Debord, 1994, p. 13). The spectacle is manifested as grand narrative, totalizing, justifying, legitimizing and celebrating the system. It is not a superficial phenomenon. The whole of society and the social phenomena are based on and permeated by the spectacle. The spectacle is also a product of this same society, a product which results from and refines the system’ s reflexive rationality. The homo spectator does not live in the spectacle society, but merely contemplates it. She/he is a supporting actor, under pressure to find her/his role and act it. The spectacle provides the script, the act and the speech, and even evaluates the performance. In the spectacle, the individual lacking in individuality seeks – and finds – comfort for her/his needs and her/his desires. In fact, the spectacle itself determines which needs and desires are valid and suitable. Norman Denzin: cinema and the game of the real Echoing previous works in the 1990s, US sociologist Denzin (1995) defends the view that society reflects the cinema. According to him, the cinema was responsible for creating a parallel reality, an official version of civil society. The cinematographic apparatus reproduces dominant social values, preconceptions and notions of right and wrong. It organizes and gives sense to the world. It creates the cinematic society. This form of art, during the twentieth century, progressively developed the epistemology of scientific realism (see Allen, 1993; Andrew, 1976; MacCabe, 1976; Bazin, 1971; Metz, 1971). This new cultural logic redefined the form in
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which the world is experienced. The cinema is thus a game of the real. The screen is simultaneously reality and perception. With the cinema, the camera’s viewfinder consolidated its supremacy over the human eye. In the world of voyeurs-spectators, the screen world begins peopling the audience’s feelings, imagination, and fantasies. The cinematographic Other alters the reference system, its interlocutors’ perception and self-perception. Consequently, the cinematic society might be considered a disciplining structure, peopled by voyeurs who obsessively spy on one another. The cinematographic gaze is hegemonic and omnipresent. Nothing escapes it. All dilemmas and social questions are addressed and trivialized. The cinema created a visual and aesthetic illusion starting from classical theatre and from Victorian melodramatic literature. This illusion started to mediate the relationship between the individual and her/his peers and with the medium (see Andrew, 1984). In this process, reality is transformed into a cinematographic production. Real experiences then begin to be judged against their corresponding experience on film (Denzin, 1995, p. 32). The cinema once had a monopoly on images. Today, it shares this space with other media that also produce and generate images, such as TV, video, video games and the Internet. The flow of images is without beginning or end. The image does not represent anything in particular any more. The image exists for itself, ‘‘not transmissible to others, objectivistic, pure exchange value, definitely deprived of transparency’’, as observed Chevrie (1987, p. 27). These then are some of the issues which arise from the study of cinema as art form, as mediator of social life and as means of reproduction. Cinema as metaphor Up to this point in the paper, the attempt has been made to identify reasons which demonstrate the need for a cinematographic perspective: the emergence of a cinematic society. It is now appropriate to identify the ‘‘meaning’’ of the cinema metaphor, explaining the intention of such a metaphor in organizational studies. The theatre metaphor, in spite of being millenarian, still constitutes a powerful instrument for revealing facts beyond appearances. However, specific twentieth and twenty-first centuries phenomena must be incorporated into the dramaturgical perspective. By proposing the cinema metaphor, the objective is to establish a perspective for studying organizational phenomena. What the cinema metaphor seeks to stress is the phenomenon of spectacularization of social life, a phenomenon which finds echo in the organizational world. The cinema metaphor exists in relation to the theatre metaphor. Both are dramaturgical metaphors and are related to a vision of the world which associates reality to the so-called performing arts. In some aspects, the cinema metaphor is an extension of the theatre metaphor; in other aspects they are antagonistic. Table I summarizes the similarities and differences between the two metaphors.
Theatre metaphor
Cinema metaphor
Foci Discusses how individuals play themselves in day-to-day scenes Analyzes the manipulation of impression
Expands the dimensions of role-playing in space and time Adds the spectacle-dimension
Perspective on organization Defines organization as a locus whose Defines organization as an open system, boundaries are set by the perception of the embedded in the environment performance of an activity Emphasis Focuses on the agreement between audience and actors to maintain the act Basic definitions The individual as actor The individual as character The being as a set of characters Analysis unit Considers face-to-face interaction Perspective on human behavior Seeks to segregate natural and artificial behaviors
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Focuses on the fragmentation and complexity of relationships among actors, and the ‘‘fusion’’ between actor and audience The medium – cinema, TV, Internet – as an intervening part in the construction of reality Considers the interaction among images and among discourses Considers naturalness and artificiality as texts of an indivisible whole
Cinema history can be considered as the history of its emancipation from theatre (Sontag, 1991). First, the cinema was emancipated from the theatre’s frontal dimension, eliminating the fourth wall, represented by the camera’s fixed position. Second, the cinema was freed from the theatre’s exaggerated gestures, which became unnecessary with the use of zoom lenses and close-ups. Third, the cinema eliminated the distance between the audience and the act, in a certain way transporting the spectators into the scene. These three movements correspond to a transition from the static to the fluid and from the artificial to the natural. The theatre employs artifices. In many plays, the artifice is outlined. The cinema also uses artifices. Ever since its origin, with Miele`s, cinema has been the art of illusion. However, paradoxically, cinema is also an art that is committed to the discourse of reality. In the cinema, the artifices – the special effects – are camouflaged. Cinema is a media-dependent art. We see a film which was registered by means of a technical apparatus and is being projected by means of another technical apparatus. The film is the record of an ephemeral moment. A theatre play, to the contrary, is seen while it is happening. Cinema is a time machine, which is able to retain in the memory and transport us to other times. The mediation of the cinematographic apparatus opens possibilities in time and
Table I. Dramatic metaphors
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space that are unimaginable in the theatre. Another difference is related to the relationship between the audience and the performance. In the theatre, the space is usually static. The spectator is confined. In the cinema, the spectator also occupies a fixed seat but, aesthetically, she/he is subject to an experience of permanent movement (Sontag, 1991, p. 104; Andrew, 1976, p. 86). Theatre and cinema, although two dramaturgical manifestations, use different approaches for characters. Theatrical characters tend to be ideal types while cinematographic characters are more individualized. On the other hand, theatrical characters tend to be more profound, while cinematographic characters are generally superficial. Theatre and cinema also differ in relation to the form of connecting images and sequences. The basic unit in cinematographic language is not the image, or the act, as it is the case in theatre, but the connection between images, the relationship between present, previous and subsequent takes (Andrew, 1976, pp. 42-75; Machado, 1982). Towards a cinematographic dramatism? The previous sections have sought to develop the cinema metaphor concept as a perspective, a root-metaphor, and sought to explain the concept by contrasting it with the theatre metaphor. It is now appropriate to speculate on a cinematographic extension of Burke’s dramatism. The questions to be addressed are the following: first, what modifications should be made in the five elements of dramatism in order to establish a cinema metaphor. This needs to be addressed via the differences between the theatre metaphor and the cinema metaphor. Second, what categories should be excluded or added? The cinematographic dramatism should review the five elements proposed by Burke (1962), considering the characteristics of the cinema metaphor: the extended dimensions of time and space, the inability to separate stage and audience, the simultaneity of events, the fragmentation of interactions, the interference of the media and the spectacle dimension. For example, the scene could be substituted by the mise-en-sce`ne, which refers to the control on what is happening in front of the camera and involves questions related to what to film and how to film it. It is a complex activity, comprising elements such as framing, shooting angle, lighting, composition, scenery and costumes. The use of this concept can expand dramaturgical analysis to include new symbolic elements – artifacts, myths, sagas, success stories, etc. – emphasizing the balance between these and other elements. Cinematographic dramatism could also include some additional elements such as editing. Films develop as much spatially – through the mise-en-sce`ne – as temporally – through editing (Monaco, 1981). Editing is a dialectic process of constructing senses, as demonstrated by film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Cinematographic editing may be related to the processes of managing the meanings (Smircich and Morgan, 1982), the concept of enactment (Weick, 1979, 1993) and to the concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving (Gioia and
Chittipeddi, 1991). All these occur in a fragmented form and under continuous symbolic interaction. From this perspective, the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) may be seen as a continuous editing of scenes during a process which includes reorganizing the past and re-formulating values. Conclusion In this paper, a new perspective for organizational studies is discussed: the cinema metaphor. First, the paper has presented a brief outline of the concept of metaphor and emphasized its importance to cognitive processes through its capacity to generate alternative views and insights. Then, it deals with the theatre metaphor, emphasizing the seminal contributions by Erving Goffman and Kenneth Burke. Then, the cinema metaphor as a concept is outlined in order to give form to a perspective and to make use of the ideas of Daniel Boorstin, Guy Debord and Norman Denzin. After this view of the world had been established, it has sought to identify the elements and principles of the cinema metaphor in a more explicit form. As with any metaphor, the cinema metaphor consists of a way of seeing, as much as of a way of not seeing the phenomena (see Alvesson, 1993; Morgan, 1986). As with any other metaphor, it has both strengths and weaknesses. Its principal strength is that the cinema metaphor extends the dramaturgical perspective in various ways: by including the spectacle-dimension and expanding the play’s dimensions, by considering the media as interfering in the production of reality and by considering the multiplicity of discourses. This metaphor also provides a complex perspective of relations and reflects the spirit of the times. However, the characteristics that distinguish this metaphor may also contribute to its weaknesses. The cinema metaphor’s principal limitation as a device for exploring organizations is the difficulty of developing an appropriate method of analysis. The intention of this paper has been to examine where the cinema metaphor has advantages over the more traditional theatre metaphor. By identifying how these differ, it is hoped that the paper will contribute to a greater appreciation of the value and uses of the cinema metaphor for the examination of organizational issues and contexts. References Allen, R. (1993), ‘‘Cinema, psychoanalysis, and the film spectator’’, Persistence of Vision, Vol. 10, pp. 5-33. Alvesson, M. (1993), ‘‘The play of metaphors’’, in Hassard, J. and Parker, M. (Eds), Postmodernism and Organizations, Sage, London. Andrew, J.D. (1976), The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Andrew, J.D. (1984), Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bazin, A. (1971), What is Cinema?, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Beck, B.E.F. (1987), ‘‘Metaphors, cognition and artificial intelligence’’, in Haskell, R.E. (Ed.), Cognition and Symbolic Structures: The Psychology of Metaphoric Transformation, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, OH.
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Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Anchor Books, New York, NY. Boorstin, D.J. (1962), The Image: A Guide do Pseudo-events in America, Atheneum, New York, NY. Burke, K. (1962), A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, The World Publishing Co., New York, NY. Burns, E. (1972), Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life, Longman, London. Chevrie, M. (1987), ‘‘La valeur-image’’, Cahiers du Cine´ma, No. 356, pp. 27-30. Curtius, E.R. (1967), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Debord, G. (1994), The Society of Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, NY. Denzin, N.K. (1995), The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze, Sage, London. Gibbs Jr, R.W. and Hall, C.K. (1987), ‘‘What does it mean to say that a metaphor has been understood?’’, in Haskell, R.E. (Ed.), Cognition and Symbolic Structures: The Psychology of Metaphoric Transformation, Ablex, Norwood, OH. Gioia, D.A. and Chittipeddi, K. (1991), ‘‘Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation’’, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 433-48. Goffman, E. (1975), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York, NY. Gusfield, J.R. (1989), ‘‘Introduction’’, in Burke, K. (Ed.), On Symbols and Society, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hill, G. (1992), Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film, Shambbala, Boston, MA. Lyman, S.M. and Scott, M.B. (1975), The Drama of Social Reality, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. MacCabe, C. (1976), ‘‘Theory and film, principles of realism and pleasure’’, Screen, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 7-27. Machado, A. (1982), Serguei M. Eisenstein, Brasiliense, Sa˜o Paulo. Mangham, I.L. and Overington, M.A. (1983), ‘‘Dramatism and the theatrical metaphor’’, in Morgan, G. (Ed.), Beyond the Method: Strategies for Social Research, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA. Metz, C. (1971), Essais sur la Signification au Cine´ma – Tome 1, E´dition Klincksieck, Paris. Monaco, J. (1981), How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Morgan, G. (1986), Images of Organization, Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Riggins, S.H. (1993), ‘‘Life as a metaphor: current issues in dramaturgical analysis’’, Semiotica, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 153-65. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G. (1982), ‘‘Leadership: the management of meaning’’, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 257-73. Sontag, S. (1991), Styles of Radical Will, Anchor Books, New York, NY. Van den Berg, K.T. (1985), Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean Theatre as Metaphor, University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE. Weick, K.E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Weick, K.E. (1993), ‘‘The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: the Mann Gulch disaster’’, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, pp. 628-52.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime
Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the tragic sublime
Heather Ho¨pfl Newcastle Business School, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Keywords Cinema, Gender, Theory Abstract This is a paper about the cinematic as spectacle and the construction of the sublime. It is concerned with gendered constructions of desire and construes the object of desire in this case as a sublime object. At the same time, the paper is about decadence and falling, falling away. Therefore, this piece of writing attempts to deal with some thoughts on the relationship between decadence and mortification. So this paper is also about distance and about movement, about kinema (Greek movement) and the distance that is described by falling from the constructed sublime and its associated melancholy. These ideas are explored via an examination of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most powerful films, Vertigo (1958), and a notion of the tragic sublime. Taken together, the concept of the sublime and the narrative of the film provide insights into the melancholy of commodified representations in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of organisational idealisation.
Defensive structures and high grounds The argument that follows is an attempt to examine the threat of disintegration, collapse and decadence on three levels. First, the level of things: of artefacts, edifices and ruins. Second, on the level of the sublime: of desire and melancholy. Third, on the level of phallogocentric discourse and its implications for the construction of the other. Hitchcock’s cerebral film noir, Vertigo, uses each of these levels of meaning in order to draw the spectator qua audience into a lethal conspiracy (here used as a spurious etymological association with spiral (medieval Latin spiralis, coil cf. Latin spirare, to breathe) to echo the leitmotiv of downward spiralling which dominates the film). Consequently, the paper, like the film, is concerned with women and with madness, with vertigo, and with the fear of falling into the world. It is also about the move from ear to eye in the process of specularisation and, likewise of the audience from auditors to spectators. Clearly, these ideas have a line of descent that can be traced back to Plato and this will be discussed in due course. First, however, in order to pursue these ideas, it is necessary to give some passing attention to the defences that preserve such constructions. Broadly, the first strand of the argument concerns the high place, the acropolis, the fortress, the stronghold, the erected fortifications that defend the site from invasion. Second, the argument is concerned with the psychological structures which defend the ego from threat from the lack in the other and from the threat of the commonplace. The final strand of the argument concerns the defences that protect phallogocentric theorisation from failure and subversion by the disorderly feminine. This latter is a defensive structure which regulates by category and defends its position by either relegating women to its borders or making ‘‘them homologues of men when it educates them’’ (Lyotard, 1989, p. 114).
21 Submitted March 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
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The central concerns, however, are with falling and failing, with mortification and decadence. These themes are explored in the paper via a concern with cinematic representation and with the standpoint of the speculator. Following Lacoue-Labarthe (1989, p. 209), it is argued that the process of specularisation is founded on a model of the tragic in which the spectator can only speculate. That is to say, Lacoue-Labarthe (1989, p. 117) argues that in the face of the tragic one can only ‘‘attempt to circumscribe it theoretically, to put it on stage and theatricalize it in order to try to catch it in the trap of (in)sight [(sa)voir])’’. This observation applies both to the subject matter of the paper, as theorisation, and to the intentions of the film Vertigo, as theatricalisation, and operates in the ‘‘trap of (in)sight’’ where theorisation reveals that the ‘‘only remedy against representation, infinitely precarious, dangers, and unstable (is) representation itself’’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1989, p. 117). The pharmacology (pharmakon) of this operates via the formula where remedy itself is mortification. The argument is inerently unstable, induces dizziness, fails and falls. This, in itself, is tragic to the extent that the argument, like the film, is subject to its own vertigo, ironic subversion and decline. It seeks to show the melancholy of the tragic sublime and, in doing so, as theorisation, exposes itself to melancholia. Edifices fall At the time of writing it is less than four weeks since the atrocities in New York and Washington. It is too soon and would be insensitive to draw on the dreadful and spectacular imagery of the collapse of the two great towers of the World Trade Centre and the apparent stronghold of the Pentagon. However, these powerful and unbelievable images are now inscribed in the collective psyche and have a bearing on this argument (and my hand instinctively goes to my mouth as I write – these things are so unspeakable). The spectator is caught in the ‘‘trap of (in)sight’’. Suffice it at this time to say, that it is germane to the argument to signal the relationship between the cinematic images of the collapse of the twin towers and the paralysing absence (of the material fact of the towers, and of a particular world view) produced by their literal and symbolic fall. It has been the symbolic imagery of the towers which has dominated the discourses of the recovery period. It is apparent that in the immediate aftermath the towers became a cipher for ‘‘freedom’’, ‘‘liberalism’’ and ‘‘all we hold most dear’’: a physical absence made present by discourse. An abstract construction, a tragic sublime, was produced to stand in the space of the loss as an emblem of an absent ‘‘factuality’’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1989, p. 117). The presentation of images of terror renders the spectator powerless and helpless; in the face of tragedy, he/she can only speculate. The only possible response to such ‘‘theatre’’ is theorisation (where theatre and theory are etymologically cognate) but theorisation itself, as edifice, ‘‘cracks under the pressure of seeking with all its power to complete or accomplish itself’’ (LacoueLabarthe, 1989, p. 138).
What follows then is an account of the city of Rome from Gibbon’s (1960) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. A visiting merchant who, coming across the ruins of Ancient Rome, experienced a sense of nostalgic desire in the face of the scene he encountered and his sublime notion of Rome as the centre of a vast imperial empire, wrote it. Poggio writes with a clear sense of loss, of failure. Rome had become decadent and fallen. Accordingly, this passage invokes a sense of the nostalgic sublime. In effect, the passage says, this place which was once a place of power and purpose is no longer here and what has taken its place is mere ruins which do no justice to the importance the place once had: The hill of the Capital, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings . . . This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! the path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill (. . .) The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune (Poggio’s discourse on the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth century, in Gibbon (1960)).
Vertiginous insight The important point here is that, following Lacoue-Labarthe’s (1989, p. 100) translation of Socrates, to gaze into the face of tragedy is to experience a ‘‘corruption of judgement of all listeners [original italics] who do not possess as an antidote [pharmakon] a knowledge of things are they are’’ (Plato, 1941, X. p. 595b). This notion of ‘‘corruption’’ has been translated from the Greek word lobe to mean outrage, shame, ruin, destruction and madness. Lacoue-Labarthe (1989, p. 101) argues that the only response to such injury requires that hearing (the auditors of tragedy) be replaced with sight (insightful theory). In other words, the response to the outrage of tragedy is (sa)voir. The spectacle of tragedy is remedied by the pharmakon of theorisation. In order to take this idea further, it is fruitful to consider the relationship between tragedy and its idealisation as the tragic sublime: the former inducing theorisation and the latter inducing vertigo in the face of its own illusive constructions. When Lacoue-Labarthe argues that the experience of tragedy must be translated from hearing into sight, he is exposing the pharmakon which comes into play as a defence against madness and unreason and, as pharmakon, is both reversible and indeterminate: both cures and kills. One might say that as a response to madness, theorisation produces a means of theorising the very madness that it seeks to cure, and in doing so, doubles its effect in an escapable spiral of spectacle and theorisation. Women and madness In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1957), the notion and action of falling forms the essential motif. Vertigo is a disturbing film with powerful metaphysical
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implications and numerous levels of analysis. One approach to the narrative is via the fascination of the sublime object (Zizek, 1991), desire and mortification. Vertigo is also about the relationship between women and madness. LacoueLabarthe (1989, p. 129) speaks of the major threats to Platonic mimetism [sic] as being women and madness and, indeed, women and madness as themes spiral together as surely as hystera (Greek womb) and the psychological condition of hysteria (as a disturbance of the nervous system thought to be brought about by uterine dysfunction) find a common origin in the function of reproduction. This is a theme which Modleski (1988, p. 94) also identifies in her analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Madeleine’s disorder cannot be madness because for Scotty it can be corrected by reason. In this sense, to be cured requires that she submit herself to Scotty’s psychology (regulation of the psyche by the logos). If Madeleine can only submit herself to Scotty’s superior logic she will realise that everything she has experienced as dreams, fantasies, insanity, is only a projection. She can be turned around (converted) and ‘‘make a clean break between fantasies and reality’’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 273). She can be converted by and conformed to psychology: ‘‘the wisdom of the master. And of mastery’’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 274). When Scotty holds up a mirror to her condition and confronts her with his ‘‘reality’’ she is rendered inanimate by the reflection. What she reflects back to him is his own construction, a sublime illusion, and what she reflects back to herself is mortification. If Scotty can occasion Madeleine to be converted to the logos, he will have demonstrated control over hysteria and, by implication, over the hystera (womb). Madeleine, the infinitely reproducible, turned from reproducer to the reproduced. Scotty’s notion of sanity is synonymous with the absence of vertigo. His psychology introduces speculation into the hystera and so, by this trophism, controls hysteria. In turn, women and madness are subjugated to theorisation via the introduction of the speculum (Irigaray, 1985, pp. 243-64). In the face The film’s credits begin with a close-up shot of a woman’s face and moves into focus on first the mouth and then the right eye from which spirals emerge. The spectator is carried further into the pupil, is falling into the abyss of the other. Then overlaid come the credits, the spirals always forming the shape of a stylised eye until the woman’s eye reappears and from it come the words, ‘‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock’’. Then the abstract sense of falling is reproduced by a scene in which the central male character, Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), in a roof-top pursuit of an unnamed man, falls and hangs from the gutter of the building. The policeman who attempts to help him falls from the roof. This is the beginning of Scotty’s vertigo. In the next scene he explains to his female friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) that he has given up his police job because he is suffering from vertigo brought on by looking down (at the scene on the tragic death of the policemen).
However, another way of looking at this is to understand that it is Scotty’s original conversion to reason that has induced his vertigo. In the fall, he has lost his reason. He cannot and could not act in the face of the tragedy. He can only experience the dizziness of this lack. He cannot speak until he has found the right words to say (Irigaray, 1985, p. 273). In other words, he can only be saved by discourse. It seems that only discourse can rescue him from his hysterical desire, his desire for the security of the womb (Irigaray, 1985, p. 274). Tragedy has taken him to the edge of the abyss and he is dizzy looking down into it. At the same time, the audience too experiences the anxiety of being held on the edge of the abyss. It is never made clear how Scotty escaped his predicament and, consequently, the audience too is left dangling, uncertain and vertiginous from the outset of the film. A pharmacological concern Vertigo is a complex and multiple-layered film that has to be seen. As spectacle, it yields new insights on successive viewing. As a result, in a paper of this sort, it is not possible to do justice to the entire storyline of the film, the hypnotic repetition of imagery and, more powerfully, the repetition of dialogue: first in the mouth of one character and then in the mouth of another (vide: Madeleine to Scotty at San Juan Bautista and, subsequently, Scotty to Judy at San Juan Bautista). Suffice it here to say that in Vertigo, the motif of falling produces a precarious narrative. In the film, this is personified in the character Madeleine who is enigmatic, beautiful, elegant and desirable. Madeleine is an object of fascination. As the story brings to light (vide: ‘‘(take me) somewhere in the light’’), she derives part of her fascination from the context in which she is set: from the poignant and mysterious story that is fabricated around her. Scotty receives a phone call from an old school-friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who says that he wants Scotty to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), in order to find out why she is behaving so strangely. Scotty is reluctant to do this but is drawn into the action by the mysterious account that Elster contrives around Madeleine. When Scotty first sees Madeleine he is captivated. Madeleine becomes the object of his desire. At the same time, she is an emblem of inevitable mortification. As she tells Scotty, she is drawn ‘‘down a long passage towards blackness’’. The first part of the story concerns Madeleine’s strange behaviour and captivation of Scotty as she plays out the idea that she is possessed by the long-dead Carlotta Valdez. In one scene, after begging Scotty to take her ‘‘somewhere in the light’’, Scotty and Madeleine stand on the sea cliffs on Monterey Bay, ‘‘If I’m mad, that would explain everything’’ she offers as an account of her behaviour and a little later extends this by saying, ‘‘Oh Scotty. I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I don’t want to die. There’s someone within me and she says I must die.’’ In other words, she explains her behaviour by saying that she is not mad but possessed. It is only as the film develops that the audience, turned into spectator, turned again into theorist, comes to understand the extent to which she is possessed both by others and by her own desire.
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Modleski (1988, p. 94) comments on this concern for mental stability (as an absence of vertigo), that it is vital that Scotty assure Madeleine of her sanity. Only in this way can he be assured of his own sanity and Modleski continues, ‘‘it is imperative that he make her recognize him, force her . . . to acknowledge his presence and his supremacy’’ (Modleski, 1988, p. 94). In the cliff-top scene when Madeleine clings to Scotty, she is clinging to his view of reason and order, to his reality. Scotty must conform Madeleine to the rule of the logos. She has to be possessed by him, his property, in order to ensure that she is a reflection of him and not vice versa. ‘‘No one possesses you’’, he reassures her in the face of his own desire for precisely such possession (cf. Modleski, 1988, p. 94). He cannot allow the explanation for her behaviour to be simply that she is mad. This would not be a proper reflection and would throw his own sanity into question. Confronted by her strange construction, Scotty seeks a cure for her condition by returning her to the place she has seen in a dream in order to convince her of the ‘‘reality’’ of the place. As Modleski (1988, p. 94) puts it, ‘‘Scotty counters his truth – which is the law of representation and verisimilitude – to hers, which appears to masculine ‘reason’ as mad and supernatural’’ (Modleski, 1988, p. 94). In other words, Madeleine’s (hysterical) disordered state must be subjected to regulation by psycho-logy: regulation by (logical) discourse. He sees himself as her salvation, as the one who can rescue her from destruction and danger. He believes that he can restore her to a proper way of seeing things. However, he is unaware that there is an anterior construction at work and his project is impossible as the audience is soon to find out. Scotty’s obsessive pursuit of Madeleine culminates with her apparent suicide when she falls from the tower of the Mission San Juan Bautista. He has failed to ‘‘cure’’ her and his masculine identity hangs in the balance. He is unable to reconcile himself to his failure and is paralysed by melancholia. His ‘‘cure’’ for Madeleine is, ‘‘in truth’’, a pharmakon that has killed as readily as it might have cured. In turn, he falls into madness: into abject melancholia. Here is another twist, a further turn, a reversion. The logical Scotty has become the disordered Other. Constructing the Other In the next part of the film, ‘‘Madeleine’’ is exposed to have been an impostor, a mere fabrication of Gavin Elster, an ordinary working-girl, hired to act as the mysterious and beautiful Madeleine, who we now discover never existed. Madeleine was not even the author of her own fantasies; she was herself a phantasm; by another turning, it is revealed that she is the construction of another act of male desire. At this point in the film, Hitchcock imposes a considerable disjuncture in the expectation of continuity and, in a gesture of dramatic irony, reveals to the audience that the common Judy is, in fact, the person who realised Madeleine. From this point on, the film induces a dual identification in the spectator. The spectator of the film, first constructed as male, is now given a second identification with the character of Judy. This
achieves a profound disjunction in the experience of the spectator and Hitchcock uses this to reverse the positions of Madeleine and Scotty. In the first part of the film, it is Madeleine who is strange and enigmatic while Scotty is practical and logical. After Madeleine falls and his melancholy begins, Scotty is the one who is strange. His view of himself as one who can cure via discourse has failed. He was unable to theorise Madeleine into sanity and she is dead as a result of his failure. The consequence for Scotty is a catatonic melancholia. His psychology has given way and he is spiralling after the falling Madeleine and follows her into disintegration, madness, and in his dreams, even death. In the film there is a much theorised dream sequence that seems irritatingly out of character with the film and somewhat superficial. However, one line of argument suggests that the extraordinary cartoon-like sequence is intended precisely to convey the artificiality of his grasp on the corporeal Madeleine (Modleski, 1988, p. 95). It is phoney because his desire to save Madeleine for ‘‘reason’’ rendered his relations with her likewise counterfeit. Now, when he discovers Judy, again dressed in green as an echo of the first time he saw Madeleine, he enters a second therapeutic quest although this time it is he himself who is in need of therapy. He begins to work on Judy’s reconstruction as Madeleine and his behaviour becomes even more bizarre. He is now possessed by the phantom of Madeleine in the way that he believed Madeleine to be possessed by Carlotta Valdez. Judy is commonplace and ordinary. She is presented first as a common, unrefined woman, devoid of mystery, obvious and over made-up, gaudily dressed in green, a brunette. When he sees her in the street and catches the resemblance to Madeleine, Scotty follows Judy to her cheap lodgings at the Hotel Empire. Subsequently, Scotty discovers a new obsession and a new object of desire. He must recreate Judy as Madeleine. So begins a section of the film where we see Scotty recreating the clothes, hairstyle, hair colour and mannerisms of Madeleine in the hapless Judy. Judy, of course, is constructed twice over as an object to serve male fantasies. She was created as Madeleine by Elster and is now recreated as Madeleine by Scotty. Everything must be perfect for Scotty. She must be an exact replication of his ideal. His behaviour is hysterical. In order to please Scotty, Judy effaces herself to be Madeleine. Then when Scotty himself is let into the plot, via what he sees in the mirror – the necklace of Carlotta Valdez worn by Judy – and he discovers that Judy is, in fact, Madeleine his behaviour becomes even more bizarre. The sublime Madeleine whom he so desired was a mere fantasy. He has been doubly duped. Like Judy, Madeleine and Carlotta, he is the victim of another’s manipulation and construction. Ironically, when he succumbs to vertigo and falls into the abyss of madness, he comes to be regarded (seen and marked) like the women of the piece, a victim of Gavin Elster. In other words, he loses his reason and, in turn, loses his masculinity. The woman he has tried to construct to resemble the woman he desired he now finds is that woman in the flesh. He cannot have the woman of his desires, first, because he thinks she is dead and, second, because he finds that she never existed. The fact that she is the creation of Judy, a product of her skilful
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dissimulation, means nothing to him. Worse, he expects it to mean nothing to her. Twice he says to her that his request to change her clothes and her hair, ‘‘can’t matter (to you)’’. In viewing her in this way, he turns her accomplishment into mere technique. Her Madeleine is hypocrisy. His Madeleine is sublime and unattainable. Both the corporeal, Judy, and the phantasm, Madeleine, cannot co-exist. From this point in the film, it is clear that Judy has no future. The real is rendered counterfeit Scotty is angry and frustrated by a perception that he cannot reconcile – a condition which Hitchcock skilfully provokes in his audience – and demands of Judy that she ‘‘be Madeleine for a while’’ so that both of them will ‘‘be free’’. He has lost his desire for reason and order and now prefers a complicit construction of illusion rather than face the ‘‘reality’’ of their position. Everything is now falling. Scotty drags Judy up into the tower to confront what she has done. Note that this is the second time they have returned to the tower to confront his ‘‘reality’’ and the second time he has required that she face up to it. As he drags her up the stairs of the bell tower, up into his symbolic erection, he accuses her of being a counterfeit whereas, at this moment, Judy is never more real. Of course, to face up to his reality requires that she efface her own. Judy falls to her death from the same bell tower, just as both the real Mrs Elster and the fantasy figure of Madeleine had fallen, and in so doing brings about the possibility of the recovery of reason, of the restoration of Scotty’s cause and being. The tragic loss of Madeleine had been romantic and heroic: a death that had increased Scotty’s obsession with the sublime. When Madeleine falls, Scotty is consumed by a tragic and poetic melancholy which elevates his own experience and transforms the lost object into a narcissistic emblem of lost beauty and innocence. In contrast, the loss of Judy is both inevitable and cathartic. Scotty loses not only Madeleine but also the realisation that his memories are distortions, his romantic ideals, illusions and his heroic suffering without meaning or object. The object of his desire is transformed into a source of revulsion. That he can have Judy, and Judy is after all the woman who incarnated Madeleine, brings him no satisfaction. When he faces Judy with the accusation, ‘‘He made you over didn’t he? He made you over just like I made you over. Only better. Not only the clothes and the hair. But the looks and the manner and the words. And those beautiful phoney trances. And you jumped into the Bay, didn’t you? . . . Why did you pick on me? Why me? . . . I was the set-up. I was the set-up, wasn’t I? I was a made-to-order witness’’ he realises that his role in the whole affair was as one who sees and interprets events: the theorist who gives validity to an interpretation. He was there to witness the death of Elster’s wife and, in fact, he did. But, Hitchcock is also saying that the eye deceives. When Scotty becomes ‘‘savvy’’, acquires sa/voir, he can see the chain of events. He is cured of his vertigo. When he is free of the woman, he is free of hysteria. He is stable again and recovers from disorder. He can look down from the bell tower. He has no fear of falling because he climbed to the top of the
edifice and distanced himself from hysteria. When he emerges from the slit in the wall of the bell tower and out on to the ledge at the end of the film, he is ‘‘born’’ into a ‘‘true, right, clear, reasonable, intelligible, paternal, masculine’’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 275) world which he has re-mastered. He is cured of his vertigo but, since he has no reflection other than his own on which to speculate, he does not know that there is only a spiralling and repeating pattern of discovery, elevation, fall and loss. Scotty’s melancholia theorised Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy is a useful analytical tool for exploring Scotty’s behaviour after the apparent death of Madeleine in the first part of the film. Freud has discussed melancholia as the reaction to the loss of a loved object, as related to an object loss which is withdrawn from consciousness and as a state which necessitates internal work which produces inhibition. ‘‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’’ (Freud, 1985, p. 254). In melancholia, the ego is presented as worthless, morally inferior. There is considerable self-reproach; no interest in living; in eating or sleeping. Freud observes that the many selfaccusations that melancholics typically call on themselves, appear rarely to describe the patient but, more obviously, someone else whom the patient loves, has loved or should love. The reproaches which attach to the object have been shifted on to the patient’s own ego or, as Freud elegantly puts it, ‘‘the shadow of the object fell on the ego’’ (Freud, 1985, p. 258) and the object loss was transformed into an ego loss. Moreover, it is argued that where the love of the object is expressed as a narcissistic identification the ego wants to incorporate the object into itself, yet at the same time there is ambivalence and conflict. There are two ideas to be carried over from this brief account of Freud’s discussions on melancholy. First, that melancholy is related to loss, to a perceived deficiency or failure in the Other that results in self-reproach and second, that melancholy is, in its course, self-destructive. Modleski (1988, p. 95) has made the same observation about the relevance of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy to the analysis of the film Vertigo. In particular, she points to the way in which after Madeleine’s death Scotty becomes like the mad Carlotta wandering the streets asking strangers about the whereabouts of her child. Scotty ‘‘wanders around’’, a term used by Scotty and Madeleine for the time they spend together, mistaking other women for his lost Madeleine, visiting the places where she had been, being deceived by appearances. As Modleski points out, ‘‘Hitchcock . . . reveals the sight to have been deceptive’’ (Modleski, 1988, p. 96). The visual is rendered suspect and, as Modleski suggests, ‘‘Scottie’s [sic] faulty vision provides additional proof that he now occupies a feminine [original italics] position, in that Hitchcock frequently impairs the vision of his female protagonists in one way or another’’, (Modleski, 1988, p. 96). It is in his regard (care/look) for the supremacy of the eye that Scotty demonstrates most powerfully the working out of Freud’s
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analysis of the relationship between the melancholic and the lost object of consciousness. Judy is fetishised into Madeleine as the lost object and, in the process, she is made the object of inevitable disappointment. Scotty can never be satisfied with the substitutive object and Judy must become the object of his revulsion. ‘‘Hate comes into operation on [the] substitutive object, (the melancholiac) abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering’’ (Freud, 1984, p. 251; Modleski, 1988, p. 97). Certainly Scotty’s transformation of Judy into Madeleine is callous and insensitive. He has become in Hitchcock’s word, ‘‘a maniac’’ (Modleski, 1988, p. 97). The scene in which Scotty drags the forlorn Judy up the stairs of the bell tower to return to the scene of the crime is the scene where Scotty is most sadistic. Never able to relate to ‘‘real’’ women (vide: the many scenes with the devoted Midge), Scotty can only see the women in the film in so far as they reflect himself. His melancholy means that he cannot see Judy at all so it is not difficult for him to view her merely as an object to serve his ends: to establish a proper reflection. Indeed, the recurrent use of mirrors and reflections as part of the mise-en-sce`ne of this film deserves a level of sustained analysis that goes beyond the scope of this paper. This need for a proper reflection also means that there must be a theoretical coincidence between Scotty and Judy/ Madeleine. They/she must see things his way. Constructing the ideal woman Bearing in mind that this paper is simultaneously dealing with an analysis of the film, Vertigo, and at the same time, attempting to face up to the problem of theorisation, part of the argument requires an analysis of Benjamin’s view of allegory. This is particular useful since Benjamin regarded allegory as an inherently melancholic form. Benjamin’s (1977) development of the concept of allegory is explored in his study of Baroque drama. Allegory, for these purposes is understood to be an extended metaphor, the description of one thing under the image of another, a description which is designed to convey a different meaning from that which is being expressed. In allegory, the allegorist takes an ‘‘element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function’’ (Bu¨rger, 1984, p. 69). The allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby, creates meaning – this is ‘‘posited meaning’’ . . . ‘‘it does not derive from the original context of the fragments’’ (Bu¨rger, 1984, p. 69): If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorists, it is unconditionally in his [sic] power. That is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist (Benjamin, 1977, pp. 183-4).
The producer and the product exhibit loss. The construction of Judy as Madeleine is likewise the product of melancholia. Judy is mortified by that construction such that she has no meaning other than that offered to her by Scotty. She is rendered allegorical by the gaze of melancholy and finds herself fragmented, a product of Scotty’s desire. In this way, Judy is irreducibly in the
power of Scotty just as she was in the power of Gavin Elster. Benjamin speaks of the melancholic as being possessed of ‘‘the profound fascination of the sick man with the isolated and insignificant’’ so when Judy qua Madeleine fails to satisfy Scotty, her symbolic role ‘‘is succeeded by the disappointed abandonment of the exhausted emblem’’ (Benjamin, 1977, p. 185). The parallels with Freud’s analysis of melancholy become apparent.
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Failing and falling The sublime cannot be attained. Madeleine’s hold over Scotty is that he cannot have power over her. Judy, in contrast, is constituted in unworthiness and will always be deficient in relation to the sublime Madeleine. Ironically, Judy is twice constructed as Madeleine by Elster and by Scotty. For Scotty, she is an allegorical representation of his loss. This melancholic gesture restores the illusion of Madeleine but, of course, cannot satisfy his desire. It is not intended to satisfy. It is intended to console and reassure. It is intended to produce a narcissistic identification with the lost object: for Scotty to take into himself and fetishise his loss. Poor Judy means nothing to him. Moreover, the fact that she is the creator of Madeleine is denied by Scotty’s further accusation that she is only the creation of the skill of Gavin Elster. Women, it seems, cannot construct themselves (vide: when Midge paints a portrait of Carlotta Valdez and superimposes her own head, Scotty says, ‘‘that isn’t funny’’ and leaves her apartment reneging on their dinner engagement). They can only be the property (the proper reflection of) men. The grotesque reconstruction of Judy as Madeleine produces an emblem that functions to register the loss of Madeleine as sublime object in representational form. For this reason alone, the object of loss is melancholic and saturated with melancholy. Judy cannot offer consolation because, ironically, she can only recall the loss. So, as emblem of the lost object, Judy provides a false reassurance that the satisfaction of desire can be found in a construction. To put this more precisely, it cannot reassure because it arises from a mere erection. It arises from the feminine as a proper reflection of male desire and it is a travesty. It is a feminine which is tidy, logical, entirely representational and without power, ambivalence and sexuality. Indeed, it is merely the speculum of the feminine (Irigaray, 1985). Somewhere here, beyond the mythology of the signature, beyond the authorial theology, the biographical desire has been inscribed in the text. The mark which it has left behind, irreducible though it may be, is just as irreducibly plural . . . L’erection tombe (Derrida, 1978, p. 49).
So, everything succumbs to entropy, gives way to the falling apart of its parts, fails to defend against disintegration, as edifice, l’erection tombe and as edification, l’erection tombe. The therapeutic imperative of Vertigo fails and falls. The doubling of the specular, the ‘‘trap of (in)sight’’ (Lacoue-LaBarthe, 1989, p. 117), operates on the level of the analysis of the film and the analysis of the paper. Irony is the device which causes the erection to fall – both in the dramatic irony of the film and the irony of the subversive twist of the paper – which reveals what is behind the defences, which shows the constructions to be
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constructions. Hitchcock’s clever use of irony allows the audience into the mystery that has been concealed in the first part of the film. This happens shortly after Scotty meets Judy. By use of a flashback, in which Judy recalls the murder of the real Madeleine and her substitution, the audience is allowed to enter into the interplay between the two stories before they become apparent to the Scotty. When Judy puts on Carlotta’s necklace, which she had worn in her previous incarnation as Madeleine, Scotty totters and begins to fall. There are a number of themes that are brought together in this paper. First, the notion of falling and the fear of falling which is experienced as vertigo. In vertigo there is an association with the Latin, vertigo, to turn around, giddiness, revolution, and its Latin root verto, to turn, with all the associations that go with that con-vert, re-vert, sub-vert, in-vert, di-vert and so on. Hence, the various twists and turns of the argument are marked. The argument also puts forward the argument, after Lacoue-LaBarthe, that there is a common etymology of theatre and theory, of theatricalisation and theorisation. Thence, there is a discussion of the way that theorisation is the response to tragedy, that specularisation invites a response of theorisation. This makes both the film, as subject of the paper, and the paper itself, as theorisation, subject to the same trajectory. The film Vertigo offers a rich source of analysis. It is profoundly about constructing the other and its consequences. It is, more specifically, about constructing the other as the sublime object of desire with all that goes with that. Consequently, it is also about psychology – here understood to be the regulation of the psyche by the logos. Hence, it is also about regulation by male discourse and male reflections, male theorisation and male constructions. In other words, it is about male erections. The motif of towers in Vertigo stands as a powerful emblem of male erections. This is not merely a reference to phallic symbolism. It is about the role of standing and authority, about the power to construct and its location, and it is about the power of men (in the film, Scotty) to demand that women account for themselves and confront the erection (in the film: the Coit Tower, the tower of San Juan Bautista). The argument is also about the relationship between hystera and hysteria: women and madness and its logical subjugation. When Scotty follows Madeleine into madness his masculinity falls into question. He is no longer manly but manic: hysterical. At every turn, the spectacle of disorder is subjected to theorisation as the only remedy for the impotence of the spectator. Scotty is dizzy from the desire for the womb (hysterical) as a place of safety after his fear of falling and, later, dizzy from his inability to save Madeleine for reason. He loses his reason because Madeleine rejects reason in favour of her apparent death. With his control of Judy and with her death, he is free – restored to the world of logic and order. He is free from the power of the womb and symbolically reborn at the highest point of the erection, the top of the tower. It is a seminal moment. In organisational terms, the most obvious parallel is with the desire for future and idealised states. In seeking to construct themselves both as sublime manifestations of male desire and as unattainable ideals, organisations lay
themselves open to the same problems. The therapeutic project of saving the organisation via the rule of logic, via insistent authority, and via psychology, is a process of mortification. Moreover, it is founded on a masculine sublime fabricated to reflect the male ego, narcissistic and inevitably melancholic. Women have no place, no reflection, no role in this construction other than to the extent that, in an entirely selective way, they serve as objects within the construction. In this construction, women are hysterical and have to be kept out because, by posing a threat to such representational forms (to mimesis), they threaten good order. Only if women are prepared to submit themselves to the symbol of the erection, primarily as objects of desire but also as homologues, can they enter into reflection. However, they must show a proper reflection. If they lack propriety they are nothing. These are the defences which protect philosophy from failure and subversion by women; a phallocentric psychology which credits itself with the initiative and defends its position by either relegating women to its borders or making ‘‘them homologues of men when it educates them’’ (Lyotard, 1989, p. 114). Clearly, part of this defence rests on power over the control of reflection, theorisation and discourse, and on the control of categories and their meanings. Lyotard argues that this desire to control women and to neutralize difference is exercised by making women into men (making women into objects), ‘‘. . . let her confront death, or castration, the law of the signifier. Otherwise, she will always lack the sense of lack’’ (Lyotard, 1989, p. 113). Organisations want to create the heroic sublime and this is inevitably male. Perhaps this account goes some way towards providing insights into the process. However, the author too is rendered melancholic by the process of theorisation and caught in the ‘‘trap of insight’’. The very theorisation that seeks to address the issue is the demonstration of the fall into homologation. Perhaps the appropriate reversion (Latin vertere, to turn) is to the hystera but Irigaray cautions that if we turn that way ‘‘a dizzy delusion answers to the optical illusion of the fakes’’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 278). Rather, Irigaray says that women privilege touch over vision and that to get away from the (male) speculations requires a language of the body. Woman is required to remain silent or to present herself according to the representation of herself as viewed through the male gaze: to produce a herself in a way which effaces her. There is no place to turn that is, itself, not subject to capture. Consequently, this paper does not propose a resolution to this problem, is inevitably subject to the same capture, fails and falls. One can only speculate. References Benjamin, W. (1977), The Origin of German Tragic Drama, NLB, London. Bu¨rger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Derrida, J. (1978), Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Freud, S. (1985), On Metapsychology, The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
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Gibbon, E. (1960), Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged Low, D.M., Book Club Associates, London. Irigaray, L. (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman, trans G. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Lacoue-Labarthe (1989), Typography, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Lyotard, J.F. (1989), ‘‘One of the things at stake in women’s struggles’’, in Benjamin, A. (Ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 111-21. Modleski, T. (1988), The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Routledge, London. Plato (1941), The Republic, translated by Cornford, F.M., The Clarendon Press, Oxford. Zizek, S. (1991), Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culure, An October Book, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Further reading De Man, P. (1983), Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Methuen, London. Derrida, J (1979), Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Eagleton, T. (1990), The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford. Eco, U. (1990), Foucault’s Pendulum, Pan Books Ltd, London. Hart, K. (1989), The Trespass of the Sign, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hassig, D. (1995), Medieval Bestiaries, Text, Image, Ideology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror, trans Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press, New York, NY. Moi, T. (Ed.) (1989), The Kristeva Reader, Blackwell, Oxford.
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Vocation to profession
Vocation to profession
Changing images of nursing in Britain Julia Hallam University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Keywords Service, Nurses, United Kingdom, Gender Abstract The public image of a profession is an important barometer of the group’s status in society. Media images play a key role in this respect, projecting the ideas and values of the group and negotiating shifts in public perception of their identity. This paper focuses on two periods in Britain when shifts in managerial culture resulted in changes in the core values of the group; the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 and the introduction of the internal market within the NHS in the late 1980s. In both periods, nursing leaders sought to change the public image of the profession through altering their relationship with their patients/clients and reconceptualising notions of service. The focus of analysis is the role of popular film and television images in negotiating these shifts in professional values.
The ongoing crisis in nursing recruitment in Britain has been a topic of concern for some time now, high numbers of vacancies for trained staff adding to the problems that face an over-stretched National Health Service (NHS). Commentators variously blame factors such as low pay and stressful working conditions, an effect of the introduction of an internal market within the NHS, combined with a poor public image of the profession (Thackery, 1999). Successful recruitment to any occupational group depends on how the group is valued in society. What Ho¨pfl (1996) has described as ‘‘transformational metaphors’’ both confer and confirm the specific identity of a group through bricolage and mythopoiesis, the process of cultural mediation which constantly re-negotiates and re-enforces the characteristics and attitudes seen to belong to a particular group in society. Images of nurses play a crucial role in conferring social status on the identity of the profession, creating horizons of aspiration, reinforcing and contradicting the images held by any one individual. A comparison between the recent past and an earlier period of rapid organisational change, when problems of recruitment to the profession led to the lowering of educational entry barriers to training programmes, brings into sharper focus the role played by popular images in negotiating change in nursing’s social status. The focus here is, first of all, on the ways in which a shift in nursing’s managerial culture created by the introduction of the NHS in 1948, and the resulting shift in nursing’s conceptualisation of its service ethos, was negotiated by popular films. In the second period, changes in nursing’s popular image on television are analysed in relation to the late 1980s, the period when the internal market was introduced into the NHS and nursing pursued a professionalising agenda through the re-organisation of its training structures. With the introduction of the NHS, White (1985) detects a change in the attitudes of nurse leaders from one of duty to the profession founded in an ethic of vocational care to one of service to the common good, an ethic of social care.
35 Submitted March 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2002, pp. 35-47. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810210417366
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The pressures that shaped this change from a quasi-religious to a more secular occupational identity can, according to White, be found in the choices made by British nurse leaders as they developed from matrons to managers within the growing bureaucracy of the newly constituted health service. Within this context, the primary objective of the managers was to provide enough labour to staff the wards; their first loyalty was not to nursing as a profession but to the newly established health service and providing free nursing care for all who needed it, irrespective of their ability to pay. By way of contrast, the introduction of the internal market to NHS hospitals in the late 1980s sought to deliver more care for less money. In her account of the effects of these changes on nurses and the nursing profession, Davies (1995) argues that the aim of the reforms was to challenge medical power and to curb the costs of medical care; nursing was considered unimportant, merely a matter of staffing the wards. Because nursing is seen in planning terms as subsidiary to the ‘‘real’’ business of providing medical care, nurses are seen as ancillary pairs of hands who deliver support and ‘‘cover’’ gaps in services, the organisation of which can be undertaken by general managers. The consequence for nursing was the abolition of its management structures and the end of any nursing input into the general management of patient care, leading Davies to conclude that ‘‘the real and painful irony in this context is that there is no clear professional role at all’’ (Davies, 1995, p. 151). Of particular interest in these contexts is how nursing leaders tackled one of nursing’s most intractable and ongoing problems, that of recruitment and attrition, and, as part of this process, attempted to project a more positive identity of nursing in the media. In both periods, images of nurses proliferated across a range of popular media; feature films and television dramas have been selected for particular attention here because of their mass appeal and their frequent preoccupation with stories about nurses and doctors. In the 1940s, cinema going was the Britain’s most popular leisure activity, particularly among young women; it is unsurprising to find that images of nurses featured heavily among female roles in feature films. In the 1980s medical melodramas on television are one of Britain’s most popular genres, with programmes such as Casualty and Peak Practice regularly attracting more than ten million viewers a week. In this analysis, attention is given to changing metaphors of service and their relationship to femininity as a way of mapping and evaluating changes in the social construction of nursing’s professional status. In the final part of the article, consideration is given to how contemporary popular images have served to negotiate shifts in public perceptions of the profession in the context of equal opportunities policies, altering nursing’s public image but leaving unresolved questions of gender and professional status. Nursing and women in post-war Britain Nursing was one of the most acceptable roles for young women seeking a respectable occupation in the immediate post-war period; research at the time points to four commonly approved options for those with a modicum of
secondary education – secretarial work, teaching, nursing and shop work (Marsh and Willcocks, 1965 and Department of Health 1966, cited in McGuire, 1969). Although women had by this time won the right to enter most professions including medicine and the civil service, in practice they still needed to be more highly qualified than their male counterparts and were often forced to abandon their careers if they married – just as they were in nursing (Wilson, 1980). Young women without any educational qualifications left school at 15 to work as cleaners, factory workers, shop assistants, waitresses and low grade clerical workers. The introduction of a non-academic, two year practical training (the state enrolled nurse (SEN) qualification) in 1943 was an attempt to make nursing an accessible occupation to this group by training them in the skills of bedside nursing. It was hoped that the two portal system of entry would alleviate the chronic shortage of nurses in hospitals by extending the recruitment base to working-class girls without compromising the educational entry requirements for the more theoretical, career-orientated training that led to state registration (SRN). It was this group of women that the government and senior nursing staff hoped to attract to the profession through the use of feature films. Nursing leaders and government health officials were aware that the image of nursing held by the public was a crucial factor in determining attitudes among young people towards nursing as a career. Throughout the war, women formed the majority of the cinema-going audience in Britain, with women in paid work attending most frequently. More than 43 per cent of all cinema attendances were from the lower social and economic groups, with younger women forming a large percentage of this figure (Thumim, 1992). At the end of the 1940s, admissions to cinemas in Britain outstripped those in the USA by an average of 28 visits per head per annum, compared to 23. Thumim has analysed the kind of activities and occupations associated with female characters in the most popular films at the British box office between 1945-1965, concluding that, after performers and minor characters of various kinds, nursing was one of the roles that occurred most frequently. Nurses appear as background characters in many films, particularly hospital dramas; less commonly, but significantly, they also appear as leading characters in several British films made between 1943 and 1957 that promote nursing as a career[1]. This was a period when government agencies sought to project an image of nursing as a vocation rather than a job or an occupation, not least because their advisors were drawn from the matron e´lite in charge of nursing services and training at the prestigious London teaching hospitals. As I shall discuss in more detail below, the influence of the matron e´lite created an image of professional identity that was in many ways anachronistic; in general, the public regarded nursing as hard and dirty work, an image that in some ways the films do little to contradict. During wartime, the films division of the Ministry of Information advocated the use of feature films to inform and educate people about their roles as citizens, believing that they could sugar the pill of official propaganda by prescribing it in popular entertainment formats. Although there was no
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detailed empirical evidence to support the claim that feature films had any influence on public perceptions of nurses, there was a general belief that popular films heavily influenced the mass audience of the day (Richards and Sheridan, 1987). In accordance with these views, some sister tutors in charge of recruitment thought that films featuring heroic nurses would increase the numbers of young women attracted to the profession. Senior nurses and government officials shared similar ideas and attitudes about nursing’s role encapsulated by the notion of the ‘‘feminine ideal’’. Rather than projecting an image of nursing focused on professional skills and technical knowledge, the ‘‘feminine ideal’’ presents nursing as an activity governed by rule-bound behaviours that promoted self-presentation and appearance, duty and service to the profession as the essence of the nursing self. For nursing leaders at this time, how nurses looked and acted was far more important than knowing about patient care or demonstrating the skills of nursing practice. In films, popular fiction of all forms and the recruitment literature of the day, those who become nurses are depicted as young, white middle-class women who undergo a process of transformation during training, symbolised by donning the traditional nurses’ uniform. The uniform communicated contradictory connotations and associations. On the one hand, it represented nursing’s authority and social status through its references to a religious past. The veiled hat worn by the novice nurse evoked comparable notions of purity, self-abnegation and ‘‘calling’’ to a higher ideal to those of the religious sisterhoods. On the other, the uniform was often strongly reminiscent of a Victorian parlourmaid’s dress, the stiff white apron, frilly lace cap and thick black stockings providing a wealth of imagery to feed the pornographic imagination[2]. Some uniforms combined the plain apron of domestic service with the lace cap of a lady and the starched Eton collar of the male officer class, displaying the fragmented historical identity of a profession with quasimilitary associations. In feature films and recruitment literature, the uniform plays a vital role; the way that the uniform is worn signifies a nurse’s attitude towards her work and her profession, but it is also a fashion item that negotiates the boundaries between professional identity and wider discourses of femininity and fashion. As Smith (1988) has cogently argued, fashion images are articulated around other meanings of the feminine such as particular virtues and resistances that change over time; by the 1940s, the uniform was wrought by the ideals and values of generations of nursing foremothers, with hats, belts, badges and cuffs all signifying particular aspects of nursing’s varied history. Professional ideals of nursing Perceived by the government as the voice of the profession, the matron e´lite advised ministers on nursing matters until the outbreak of war, at which point the shortage of trained nurses available to staff the wards became an issue of national interest and concern (Dingwall et al., 1988). With the outbreak of war, the shortage of trained staff intensified, exacerbated in the immediate
aftermath by the passing of the National Health Service Act in 1948. In spite of the labour supply problem, the matron e´lite was keen to preserve nursing’s middle-class status and professional credentials by maintaining pre-war educational standards of entry. Their failure to persuade nursing’s professional organisations to agree a coherent staffing policy led to government intervention and a shift in the composition of nursing’s ruling body, the General Nursing Council (GNC). White (1985) points to two influential groups in nursing at this time: the ‘‘professionals’’, those who favoured training academically orientated middle-class girls as the future leaders of the profession and the ‘‘generalists’’, those who favoured training ‘‘the servant class’’, respectable working class girls who would have no difficulty serving others. Reports indicate that the government supported the generalists; they considered nursing a semi-skilled job and believed that a constant stream of young women in training was the cheapest way to staff the wards (see, for example, Ministry of Health, 1948). In the immediate aftermath of war, for the first time membership of the GNC swung in favour of nurses working in the municipal sector, a heavily unionised group who fully supported the policies of the first Labour government to nationalise the health services. For this group, ensuring there were sufficient nurses to staff the wards and provide a free service to all was far more important than preserving pre-war educational entry standards to maintain a hierarchy within the profession. Eager to support the government’s programme of health care reform, municipal sector ‘‘generalists’’ won the day and educational entry requirements for nursing were lowered. Throughout all these changes, matrons from the e´lite teaching hospital sector continued to work as advisors to government departments such as the Ministry of Information (MoI). These nurses were well connected in British society and accustomed to using their prestigious positions to raise money for their hospitals and promote nursing’s professionalising agenda. It is therefore no surprise to find them consulted as nursing advisors by the MoI’s Films Division on most feature and documentary films produced about nursing during the period. During wartime, the matron e´lite were convinced that the shortage of nurses could be met by recruiting more girls from middle-class backgrounds if they could only convince them that nursing offered a noble and fulfilling purpose in life. A wartime recruitment feature film The Lamp Still Burns (1943), whose principal advisor was matron at the London hospital, bears testimony to this view: the central character, Hilary, is an ambitious young architect who gives up her promising career to become a nurse. Symbols of e´lite cultural value situate Hilary’s self-sacrifice in the context of nursing history through a tribute to Florence Nightingale and ‘‘all those who serve’’. Strict enforcement of discipline and the constant surveillance of minor details of self-presentation (‘‘Why aren’t you wearing your cuffs, nurse?’’) depict nurses as petty authoritarians and nursing as a career to be endured rather than enjoyed. Given the need to inspire aspirant working and lower middle-class girls in the audience to become
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nurses, the film offers few incentives other than a promise that the drudgery, hard work and petty authoritarianism will change once the war is over. The screenwriter of The Lamp Still Burns, Monica Dickens (a popular middle-brow writer and granddaughter of Charles Dickens[3]), had a considerable influence on the public image of nursing at this time. Well known for her best selling autobiographical novel One Pair of Feet (1942) which describes her experiences as a first-year trainee nurse in the early days of the war, Dickens was responsible for several screenplays featuring nurses including Life in Her Hands (Crown Film Unit 1951) and The Feminine Touch (Ealing 1956). In One Pair of Feet, Dickens talks about nurses as ‘‘a race of screaming bores’’ whose ‘‘unsubtle, lavatorial humour’’ made her feel dull and inadequate in other social circles (Dickens, 1957, p. 103). Her critique of nursing stems from a liberal fear of institutional conformity; the rigid rules and behavioural regulations of nursing’s training regime teaching women not to use their initiative or express their opinions. Aware of the melodramatic sentimentality of how nurses are represented in popular films, Dickens describes, with more than a hint of irony, how a popular hospital drama Vigil in the Night (USA, 1940, adapted from the novel by British writer A.J. Cronin) encouraged her to undertake nursing training: I was going to be a nurse in a pure white halo cap, and glide swiftly about with oxygen cylinders and, if necessary, give my life for a patient (Dickens, 1957, p. 9).
In her first film script, Dickens plays down this ‘‘angel’’ image in favour of projecting Hilary as a force for change through her determination to abolish outdated practices and modernise nurse training. As her screenwriting career progresses, however, Dickens’ image of nursing moves closer to the feminine ideal promoted by the matron e´lite. In Life in Her Hands (1951), another quasidocumentary feature with a similar recruitment imperative[4], vocationalism is foregrounded in an attempt, perhaps, to persuade women who lost their partners in the war that becoming a nurse can give their lives purpose and direction. Anne, a young widow, becomes a nurse to assuage feelings of guilt and anguish; she was the driver of the car in which her husband died following a crash. Similarly to Hilary, Anne is an upper middle-class young woman, but unlike Hilary, Anne is deemed by her superiors to be a ‘‘born’’ nurse, someone with a vocation. Whereas Hilary struggles with the rigid rules and harsh discipline enforced during training, passionately challenging the outmoded attitudes she encounters, Anne accepts the harsh rules and is assimilated by the vocational ethos. An overall impression of nursing as a religious community, a ‘‘closed order’’ of single women is strongly conveyed not least because of the flowing, veil-like caps worn by the nurses but also because of the strict disciplinary regime which these nurses have imposed on themselves. Heroic visions If, as sister tutors suggested, young women were influenced in their decision to nurse by visions of heroic nurses on the screen, it is difficult to envisage how
these recruitment films might have encouraged young working-class women to imagine themselves as nurses. Far more likely to appeal were films that focused on the lives of famous nursing heroines played by popular stars of the day. By the mid-1950s, Anna Neagle’s star persona epitomised for some senior nurses the vocational ideal and heroic commitment to the profession that they were so keen to promote. In 1951, Neagle played Florence Nightingale in the only British biopic made about her life Lady with the Lamp. By this time Neagle was one of the top British stars at the box office, accruing the persona of an upper-class English lady through her roles as Queen Victoria in 1930s films such as Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years. Lady with the Lamp is similarly hallmarked by the high quality production credentials associated with historical costume dramas featuring figures of national importance. It presents Nightingale as a hardworking, virtuous woman driven by a reforming mission who sacrifices her personal life in the interests of serving the nation. Neagle played senior nurses in several other films during the 1950s, her nursing ‘‘career’’ culminating in her role as Matron in a rather sentimental melodrama set in a children’s hospital No Time for Tears (1957). In an article published in the Nursing Mirror in 1958 she claimed that ‘‘the portrayal of nurses has given me great personal happiness and I am indeed gratified if the nursing profession has found my portrayals satisfying’’ (Neagle, 1958, p. 1). Significantly, this film was the last to portray nurses as self-sacrificing angels and public servants; thereafter, they become silent handmaidens to doctors in small screen dramas or satirised in the ‘‘Carry On’’ films as petty authoritarians and sex symbols[5]. From angels to handmaidens By the early 1950s a marked change is discernible in nursing’s ideas about how to project its image. Nursing’s governing body the GNC was reflecting in its policies the increased presence of senior nurses from the municipal and psychiatric sectors. For the first time, women and men from all sectors of the hospital services had a say in how to recruit staff; the matron e´lite found themselves outnumbered and overruled by the new managerial ethos. In the recruitment literature, more effort was made to appeal to respectable working and lower-middle class young women drawing on similar images to those on the dust covers of popular stories for girls such as the Cherry Ames novels. These US career girl stories became popular in Britain from the late 1940s, replacing traditional images of vocation with a vision of the nurse as intelligent, adventurous, and vivaciously attractive[6]. By the mid-1950s films were also more orientated to popular taste; Ealing’s The Feminine Touch (1956) was released shortly after the success of Doctor in the House, the first screen adaptation of the popular medical stories written by Richard Gordon. Adapted by Monica Dickens from an US account of nurse training The Lamp is Heavy by Sheila Mackay Russell, the film follows the training of five young women at a London teaching hospital. The story focuses on the activities of a glamorous blonde, Susan, and former career girl Pat (a brunette) who has become a nurse
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because, as she cynically admits, she wants to marry a doctor. Although ostensibly about becoming a working woman, the personal satisfaction to be gained from nursing is gleaned not from caring for patients but serving medical men. Nurses move out of the public space of the ward and into the domestic realm of the kitchen, where they spend much of their time stealing food for their doctor boyfriends. Doctors are shown caring for patients, while nurses hover silently in the background, tending to their every need; nursing skills are depicted as ‘‘feminine’’ skills of listening to others, assisting the male in his work, preparing food and cleaning. In these late 1950s films nursing is treated as a suitable training for women’s ‘‘real’’ destiny in life, caring for and serving her husband and children, a theme echoed in the recruitment literature. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the construction of nursing as a vocation fractures into a more complex set of occupational images. The matron e´lite had used the ‘‘angel’’ image to advance its claims to a ‘‘separate but equal’’ professional sphere to that of medicine and to bolster its own claims of autonomy and authority. In a public service economy where nursing is regarded as a right rather than an act of charity or a privilege, there was a growing dislike of the feminine ideal of white middle-class sacrifice and ‘‘maternalism’’ embodied in the image of the ‘‘angel’’. Images of nurses as petty authoritarians, ‘‘battleaxes’’, become more common accompanied by an emphasis on female sexuality, lampooned in the Carry On films. Doctors are deified as the new saviours of the human race, superseding the ministering angels who become their handmaidens in the new ‘‘holy’’ order. Service is redefined, placing the nurse in the hieratic service of medicine personified by the male doctor. During the 1960s, the developing international image market in television serials brought spectacular US images of god-like medical men such as Dr Kildare and Ben Casey to British audiences. The combination of melodrama and machismo in many of these shows reworked 1950s ideas of nursing as service for the common good into self-abnegating images of servility that rendered screen images of nurses into decoration and sexual spectacle, leaving the caring as well as the curing in the hands of medical men. In spite of the growing popularity of these TV doctors, most young women remained unconvinced that the material conditions of nursing work had really changed. Nursing was still regarded as physically hard and emotionally demanding work; the low pay and long, unsociable hours a disincentive to train in a working climate where jobs were plentiful. Those that became nurses often did so because few other options were open to them; popular images, whether of self-sacrificing angels or doctor’s handmaidens, had little effect on the decision-making process (MacGuire, 1969; Hallam, 2000). Gender and professionalism in 1980s The millennium issue of The Nursing Times announced that nursing’s traditional stereotypes are dead and buried, consigned to the bin of history, effectively announcing the end of a 20-year campaign to dissociate nurses from
outdated stereotypes and negative images of service. Throughout this period, nurses have sought public recognition of their professional training and technical skills; they no longer see themselves as ‘‘serving the patient’’ but as advocates of their clients’ rights to health and well-being. By reconceptualising their relationship with those for whom they care from one of passive dependency as patients to active engagement as clients, a relationship based on mutual trust, co-operation and respect, nurses are attempting to create a demand for their skills and increase the market value of their services. A key element of this shift in nursing’s ethics of care has been the gradual reform and transformation of nurse training from hospital schools of nursing to educational institutions. Project 2000 aimed to dissociate training from service delivery and encourage the development of professional expertise through research based practice, thereby enhancing nursing’s professional status in the new market-led system of health care delivery. Student nurses, funded by bursaries rather than wages, now spend most of their time in the classroom rather than on the wards and are independent of the employing authorities. This change has had profound implications for the management and delivery of patient care at the hospital bedside; general managers now employ support staff with vocational qualifications to do the work formerly done by student nurses. Nurses have lost the voice they once had in the planning and managing of care services, their claim to care as their own specific area of expertise in question as increasing numbers of health care assistants with National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) undertake the work formerly done by nurses in training. As various commentators have noted, Project 2000 has re-introduced the split between nurses and nurses aids that it sought to eliminate, with potential implications for the employment of (primarily female) nurses at the bedside who remain in a subservient position (see, for example, Porter, 1992; Warr, 1996). In tandem with these changes, increasing numbers of elderly people have stimulated the demand for nursing care at a time when fewer young people are available to become nurses among the general population. Better-paid opportunities in other sectors of the economy have intensified competition for recruits although nursing continues to be a popular career choice, particularly for young women. A study of young people’s perceptions of nursing in 1999 indicated that although nurses are admired for the work they do, nursing is still considered physically demanding ‘‘dirty’’ work. A high percentage of 17-yearold girls questioned why anyone would want to go to university to become a nurse when they could become a doctor; nurses are not envied and there is little about the nursing role that they aspire to or wish to emulate. Irrespective of the age, gender or social class of the research participants, nursing was perceived as a gender specific, low status service occupation that involves limited intellectual skill (Hemsley-Brown and Foskett, 1999). An important source of information about nursing for young people is its depiction on television; recent research points to the growing impact of television’s mediation of everyday life, particularly amidst those who watch
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television heavily (Gauntlett and Hill, 1999; Silverstone, 1994). The American Medical Association has been aware of television’s role in mediating the public status of physicians since initial studies by Gerbner et al. (1981) attempted to analyse the effect of the media’s image of medicine and medical practice on public perceptions of physicians. More recent work argues that television is an important vehicle for secondary socialisation about professional roles, irrespective of viewers’ direct experiences, because of its revelation of backstage behaviours (Pfau et al., 1995). Contemporary medical dramas illustrate a broader range of behaviours than individuals are likely to experience through professional encounters; professionals manage their public performances, carefully controlling access to the private domain. Giddens argues that success in patrolling the frontier between ‘‘backstage’’ and ‘‘frontstage’’ performances is the ‘‘essence of professionalism’’, a pre-condition for maintaining trust (Giddens, 1990, p. 86). Contemporary medical melodramas take us behind the screens, revealing uncertainties of diagnosis, ethical dilemmas and the personal failings of those entrusted to heal. Pfau et al. (1995) argue that, in the longer term, the revelation of ‘‘backstage’’ behaviours may undermine trust in medical professionals. How are nurses faring in this context? Images of gender and professionalism in the 1980s and 1990s At a first glance, images of nurses on television during the past 20 years would seem to offer a very different conception of professional identity from that of their post-war predecessors, one that makes nursing far more attractive to viewers because it highlights the vital role played by nurses in the medical team. US medical melodramas continued to be popular in Britain during the 1980s, with programmes such as St Elsewhere addressing a broader range of subject matter, engaging with issues such as euthanasia, Aids and rape. Writers of these medical dramas spent far more time researching their stories, drawing on actual incidents and events. Directors emphasised visual realism, authentically recreating horrific injuries using special effects; mobile cameras and faster editing techniques bought a renewed sense of realism, which, combined with an emphasis on ‘‘backstage’’ performances of the medical staff, revitalised the genre. In many of these dramas, the role of the nurse is an updated version of the handmaiden; although nurses are shown as active members of the medical team, narrative agency remains with doctors who are mostly men. British drama has adopted a rather different approach; the BBC’s medical drama Casualty began in 1986 packed with topical issues and a bitingly critical attack on cuts in NHS funding that led to questions of ‘‘bias’’ being raised in parliament (Kerr, 1986, p. 30). It quickly became one of Britain’s most popular programmes, regularly attracting in excess of ten million viewers a week and settling into a reassuring formula, a blend of soap and series drama that focuses on demonstrating life-saving medical procedures coupled with issuebased information. Unusually for a medical drama, Casualty focuses on the work of nurses and the para-medical teams rather than the doctors, their skill
and expertise given equal status in the weekly dose of life-saving situations. Nurses are core members of the medical team, tending those most in need of care, maintaining the values and principles of public service, often in extremely difficult circumstances. During its long run, the series has explored aspects of gendered identity and working relationships including the problems faced by gay male nurses, black male nurses and black female doctors. These shifts would seem to indicate a transformation of notions of service and its gendered and racialised implications; it is possible for anyone, male or female, black or white, gay or straight, to be a nurse. A closer analysis, however, reveals that apart from two notable exceptions, Duffy (Caroline Shipton) and Megan (Brenda Fricker), male nurses have garnered much of the limelight in Casualty, and it is the problems faced by male (gay, straight and black) nurses that have often provided the narrative impetus for ongoing storylines. Charlie (Derek Thompson), Casualty’s longest serving cast member, is known to viewers as a kindly, considerate man who has problems coping with personal relationships. A senior male nurse, he personifies many of the traits conventionally attached to male doctors in earlier medical melodramas; he too is a caring, compassionate man who privileges work rather than personal life and reassures through actions rather than words. By casting a male nurse at the heart of the emergency team, the programme makers ensure continuity with medical melodrama’s most familiar trope, the caring, reassuring medic, while meeting the criteria for ‘‘progressive’’ programming that demonstrates equal opportunities in action. Females are relegated to secondary positions unless they are doctors, emphasising the gendered division of labour in health care and its implications for female nurses. Although there is no hard evidence to support the claim, the Royal College of Nursing suspects that the portrayal of male nurses in Casualty has influenced an increase in male recruitment from under10 per cent to more than 15 per cent of student applications. Research has shown that the career path in nursing is significantly different for men and women; in 1980, almost half of all senior positions in management, education, trade unions, professional associations and statutory bodies concerned with nursing were occupied by men although men constituted only 10 per cent of the workforce (Salvage, 1985, p. 68). Men continue to occupy senior posts in disproportion to their numbers overall, with women, and black women in particular, heavily concentrated in areas of low status work such as geriatrics and psychiatry. Conversely, the increase in female doctors has featured less prominently in popular dramas; women now constitute more than 50 per cent of entrants to medical schools, but their portrayal on television invariably serves to reveal their failings rather than strengths. In Casualty, Charlie’s relationship with Baz (Julia Watson), the consultant in charge of the medical team, often revealed her vulnerability in spite of her high status, while in the US import ER, the most senior female medic is literally and metaphorically crippled by her gender and femininity. Women continue to be denied social status in popular representations of the health care professions, whether they are doctors or nurses (Hallam, 1998). On television, it is male
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nurses that give nursing professional status; female nurses, in recent years, have tended to conform to the more traditional stereotypes of young single trainees and older married women with children and domestic problems. For female nurses, this continuing projection of their ancillary professional status is compounded by what Davies (1995) has termed the ‘‘professional predicament’’ in nursing; nurses are invisible to policy makers not because nurses are women but because nursing, as a profession, is gendered female. Media formations of nursing identity in the 1980s and 1990s were subject to a discourse of equal opportunities that changed the constructions of who can nurse but left the structural inequalities between nursing and medicine largely intact. The point is made in an episode of Casualty where Baz, the consultant in charge and Charlie’s partner, leaves him literally holding their baby while she resuscitates a patient. Situated as gendered female and inferiorly classed, he terminates their relationship because it has tested his ability to cope with role reversal to the limits. Nursing’s professional organisations may have reconceptualised nurses’ relationship to their ‘‘patients’’ and consigned nursing stereotypes to the bin of history, but unless they can change public perceptions of the profession, nurses, irrespective of their gender, will continue to be perceived as inferior to doctors. Defined as women’s work, nursing continues to be devalued and given low status in society. Notes 1. Government sponsored films include The Lamp still Burns (1943), Life in Her Hands (1951); other films include Green for Danger (1946), White Corridors (1951), Lady with the Lamp (1951), The Feminine Touch (1956), No Time for Tears (1957). 2. Feminist historians have explored the connections between Victorian servants and the production of erotic literature; see, for example, Davidoff (1983) and Stanley (1984). 3. Charles Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit, written a century earlier, depicts a drunken nurse, Sara Gamp, often claimed by nursing historians as typical of the nursing workforce in the era before Florence Nightingale began her programme of reform. 4. Publicity billed this film as a documentary; Monthly Film Bulletin (1951) described it as ‘‘combining impersonal information with a personal fictional story’’. 5. Carry on Nurse, 1959, Carry on Doctor, 1968, Carry on again Doctor, 1969, Carry on Matron, 1972. 6. For a full account of the Cherry Ames series and its companion series, the Sue Barton Nurse books see Hallam (1996). References Davies, C. (1995), Gender and the Professional Predicament in Nursing, Open University Press, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA. Davidoff, L. (1983), ‘‘Class and gender in Victorian England’’, in Newton. J., Ryan, M.P. and Wolkowitz , J.R. (Eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History, Routledge, London. Dickens, M. (1957), One Pair of Feet, Pengiun, Harmondsworth. Dingwall, R., Rafferty, A.M. and Webster, C. (Eds) (1988), An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing, Routledge, London.
Gauntlett, D. and Hill, A. (1999), TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life, Routledge/ British Film Institute, London. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M. and Signorielli, N. (1981), ‘‘Special report: health and medicine on television’’, New England Journal of Medicine, No. 305. Giddens, A. (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge. Hallam, J. (1996), ‘‘Nursing an image: the Sue Barton stories’’, in Sceats, S. and Cunningham, G. (Eds), Image and Power: Women in Twentieth Century Fiction, Longmans, London. Hallam, J. (1998), ‘‘Gender and professionalism in TVs medical melodramas’’, in Moody, N. and Hallam, J. (Eds), Medical Fictions, Liverpool John Moores University Press/Association for Research in Popular Fictions, Liverpool. Hallam, J. (2000), Nursing the Image: Media, Culture and Professional Identity, Routledge, London. Hemsley-Brown, J. and Foskett, N. (1999), ‘‘Career desirability: young people’s perceptions of nursing as a career’’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 1342-50. Ho¨pfl, H. with Maddrell, J. (1996), ‘‘Can you resist a dream? Evangelical metaphors and the appropriation of emotion’’, in Grant, D. and Oswick, C. (Eds), Metaphors and Organisations, Sage, London. Kerr, P. (1986), ‘‘TV and political bias’’, The Listener, Vol. 11 No. 13. MacGuire, J. (Ed.) (1969), Threshold to Nursing Occasional Papers on Social Administration, Vol. 30, Bell and Sons Ltd, London. Ministry of Health (1948), Nursing and Domestic Staff in Hospitals: Notes for Guidance of HMCs, HMSO, London. Monthly Film Bulletin (1951), Vol. 210 No. 18, p. 301. Neagle, A. (1958), ‘‘Portraying Edith Cavell and other nurses’’, Nursing Mirror, No. 10, pp. 1-11. Pfau, M., Mullen, L.J. and Garrow, K. (1995), ‘‘The influence of television viewing on public perceptions of physicians’’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, No. 39, pp. 441-58. Porter, S. (1992), ‘‘The poverty of professionalism: a critical analysis of strategies for the occupational advancement of nursing’’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, No. 17, pp. 720-6. Richards, J. and Sheridan, D. (Eds) (1987), Mass Observation at the Movies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Salvage, J. (1985), The Politics of Nursing, Heinemann, London. Silverstone, R. (1994), Television and Everyday Life, Routledge, London. Smith, D. (1988), ‘‘Femininity as discourse’’, in Roman, L., Christian-Smith, L. and Ellsworth, E. (Eds), Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, Falmer Press, London. Stanley, L. (1984), The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Virago, London. Thackery, R. (1999), ‘‘Fast track: carry on nursing please: we need nurses but it seems nobody wants to be one. Except a new breed of highly articulate graduates’’, The Independent, 28 January. Thumim, J. (1992), Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema, Macmillan, London. Warr, J. (1996), ‘‘Vocationalism: a mirror on the profession’’, Nurse Education Today, No. 16, pp. 267-9. White, R. (1985), The Effects of the NHS on the Nursing Profession 1948-61, Kings Fund, London. Wilson, E. (1980), Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Post-War Britain 1945-68, Tavistock, London and New York, NY.
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
JOCM 15,1
Dead Man – an encounter with the unknown past Peter Pelzer
48 Submitted March 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
Independent Consultant, Frankfurt/Main, Germany Keywords Cinema, Organizational change, National cultures, Shareholders, Mergers and acquisitions Abstract Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man, apparently a Western, exceeds the genre’s traditional boundaries and shows ambivalence, unclear roles in an environment existing between the times of the nation’s founding and the success of civilisation. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. The film is a provocation for adherents to traditional Western movies. But a closer look at this world offers a surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that also occur after mergers or take-overs in contemporary business organisations. The charm in using the film as a metaphor is at least twofold. The interpretation with the help of Lyotard and Baudrillard shows a double edged dynamic where the successful new owner after a take-over is not necessarily in charge of the game. Beyond that the use of a movie from outside the mainstream offers a non-mainstream argument inside the core of a mainstream management topic. Every night and every morn some to misery are born every morn and every night some are born to sweet delight some are born to sweet delight some are born to endless night (William Blake[1]).
The use of feature film as a basis for analysis in social theory has already been proved to be useful. Denzin used six films to describe ‘‘Images of postmodernism’’ (Denzin, 1991). The discussion in his book moved from social theory to cinematic representations of contemporary life. The ideas of key theorists were connected to the problematic of the postmodern self, centring on the decisive performances of race, gender and class. His basic thesis is far reaching: The postmodern society . . . is a cinematic, dramaturgical production. Film and television have transformed American, and perhaps all other, societies touched by the camera, into video, visual cultures. Representations of the real have become stand-ins for actual, lived experience (Denzin, 1991, p. ix-x).
For him, reality today is a staged, social production and the real is now judged against the staged, cinematic-video counterpart. The metaphor of the dramaturgical society or life as theatre has now become interactional reality so that they even have taken over: ‘‘Art not only mirrors life, it structures and reproduces it’’ (Denzin, 1991, p. x). Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2002, pp. 48-62. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810210417375
Dead Man is a film directed by Jim Jarmusch for 12-Gauge Production, Pandora Film, JVC and Newmarket Capital Group LP, USA and released in 1995.
A film like Wall Street then is on the one hand an example for the kind of Dead Man – an greedy capitalism that was dominant in the late 1980s. This was one dominant encounter with reading by the critics of that time. This alone would have made it an excellent the unknown past illustration of the value of a film commenting on economic processes and their values, a comment on the ethics of those acting in Wall Street. A decade later it can help to reconstruct a dominant feeling of that time. But Denzin’s reading 49 goes further. He discusses Wall Street’s reality. The representation of companies on the trader’s computer screen turns them into pure numbers: signs, representations and simulations of the real. They can be erased by the touch of the finger. Denzin clearly sees Baudrillard’s vision come true where the cool universe of digitality has absorbed and won out over the reality principle. Wall Street is a demonstration that the manipulation of signs has effects on the reality of millions of people at their workplace and it is the more worrying that these destructive forces operate within the limits of widely accepted values: ‘‘This cool universe, unfeeling, imaginary, and ‘real’ in its peculiar, quaint, ideological way will destroy all of us, and when it does it will do so in the name of family, love, hard work, and honesty’’ (Denzin, 1991, p. 92). Whereas Wall Street has a topic obviously rooted in the economic situation of a certain period of time and can be discussed from this perspective, this is less obvious for the film in question here. Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man (1995), apparently a Western, exceeds the genre’s boundaries and shows ambivalence and unclear roles in an environment existing between the times of the nation’s founding and the success of civilisation. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. But a closer look at this world offers surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that also occur after mergers or take-overs in contemporary business organisations. Both the past of companies in processes of merger or take-over and the immediate past of the process of merging itself are very often ignored, but nevertheless influence the present: this is an encounter with the unknown past, so to speak. What I will try to demonstrate in this paper is that some kind of serious irony is almost necessarily woven into the perception of our daily lives. A naive view of the world has become impossible for people in Western industrialised cultures. The film I refer to is of course not part of our daily life, set into the past and into myth as it is. But it uses a genre – the Western – that is so well known with a distinctive history of its own that any conscious or unconscious interpretation oscillates between multidimensional layers of meaning. Exactly this contingency is, according to Rorty (1992, p. 14), a precondition for irony. The reality of the time at which a Western takes place is inaccessible to us. The picture we have of this time is necessarily incomplete due to selective memory that keeps some things and forgets others in history writing, interpretation of artefacts that are preserved and gain significance only because they are still around while others are destroyed or forgotten. Not only is our own situation characterised by the absence of any extramundane aim or fate, but also our
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perception of history is contingent, determined by the here and now and can, therefore, vary over time and can be used playfully, e. g. in a film. This should be self-evident: with the knowledge accumulated in a century or more our understanding of the past is very different from the view of the plot’s contemporaries. The story of the film may also have been told by those living at the time where it is placed by the script. But the perception would inevitably have been different. For us it is necessarily a long gone past, part of the cultural heritage, still somehow affecting us as we see the movie with interest and pleasure but with a feeling of distance. Ironically one sentence in the film is: ‘‘The world will no longer concern you.’’ And it is directed to the character that represents the civilised man of figures, the accountant from the East. This can be seen as an obvious opinion in the face of a dying man (the accountant was fatally wounded, he is the ‘‘Dead Man’’) but also as a message to the viewer that the world represented in the film does not concern the viewer any more. Dead Man invites the viewer to look back from the end of the twentieth century with the knowledge of its history and the knowledge of the possible idealisations and distortions created by distance in time. And it is a game playing with the viewers’ expectations which are also framed by almost a century of Western movies. The film: Dead Man The movie itself deals with the typical US myth, the Western, but is reluctant to fulfil the usual Hollywood expectations. Instead, it looks like an ongoing destruction or better a silent carrying to the grave – actually quite literally. The staff: a director who has a reputation of being an independent filmmaker – independent meaning working far from Hollywood, far from well-known plots, mainstream happy-endings, without stars ensuring (financial) success by their appearance, far from easy financing; a main actor, Johnny Depp, whose reputation partly results from his preference for European directors and from his refusal of American success stories of the easy Hollywood type[2]; a director of photography, Robby Mu¨ller, who shot his best movies in black and white (my opinion) and could here realise another one in that style; and the music composed and performed by Neil Young which is not just decoration but strong support for the film’s intention. The plot: in the second half of the nineteenth century a young accountant by the name of William Blake is heading for a new job offered to him in a town called Machine at the end of a railway track deep in the West. He invested his last money in the train ride. He had lost his job, his parents died and his fiance´e left him. In a way he follows the track many generations have taken before him but with all the symbolic luggage of an east-coast education: a peculiar, eyecatching suit, glasses, suitcase and without any weapon or the slightest idea how to use one. His journey is a trip out of civilisation he and the viewer are used to. It crosses space and time. For him going to the West means going back in time to gain a chance of another future. The changes are reflected in the other passengers, who have fewer and fewer attributes of nineteenth-century Eastern
America and show more signs of people who rarely see a house from the inside. Dead Man – an Blake is obviously annoyed by these companions and watches them uneasily, encounter with holding his suitcase tightly to his body. In a way he represents modern man the unknown past and so also the viewer, who is taken into a world he cannot understand any more. The difference between Blake and the contemporary viewer lies in the knowledge that the viewer gained through watching other movies which 51 impart all the myths that are nowadays connected to the process of civilisation in America, the founding myth of a country so to say. When Blake finally reaches the village of Machine where he wants to start the new job granted to him by letter, he has to learn that letters are of no value in face of a gun: his job has been given to another person and he is thrown out by the factory’s owner by force of arms. He spends the night with a girl but this moment of calmness and happiness is destroyed by the girl’s former lover who shoots her. Badly wounded by the same bullet which killed the girl Blake kills the lover and flees. When he awakes, the stage is set for a meeting of cultures which is not without absurdities that account for the humour of the movie. Blake is found by a native American (Gary Farmer) who tries to remove the bullet from his body but fails because it is too near to his heart. Blake is already a dead man, although he does not realise his condition: ‘‘Did you kill the white man who killed you?’’ – ‘‘But I’m not dead!’’ The situation has changed completely. The day before a young man on his way to a new job, the next day fatally injured and under suspicion of murder, he is now hunted by head hunters hired by the former lover’s father, who happens to be the owner of the factory. The fate of being an outcast Blake suffers after leaving his cultural background is the usual fate of native Americans. But in the case of this special Indian, this fate has even been doubled as he was also excluded from his tribe because of his parents’ belonging to different tribes: some kind of mirroring of a white man’s illegitimateness. When he was still a child he was caught by English soldiers and brought up in white surroundings. He learned to value Blake’s poetry, a poetry the accountant of that name had never heard of. As the native American is not able to understand that the whites give the same name to different people he thinks he has met the English poet and painter. The native American who prefers to be called ‘‘Nobody’’ sees his task as that of leading the dying and in a way already dead man to the other side. The white man, the WASP, the rational man of numbers, does not understand any of the actions of his new companion. But he learns to kill as Nobody predicts: ‘‘From now on your poetry will be written with blood, William Blake.’’ But Nobody protects and guides Blake in a strange way. From then on their journey to the West is accompanied by men who want to earn the reward set out on Blake’s head, but who either kill each other or get killed by the strange pair. And at the end of the film, shortly after waking up from a coma Blake still has not understood what Nobody has done with him: ‘‘It’s time for you to leave now, William Blake! I triumph for you to go back where you came from. – You mean Cleveland? – Back to the place where all the spirits came from and where all the spirits return. This world will no longer concern you’’. By the way: this is
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a Western that really arrived in the West of America, having the hero moved even more to the West than any other Westerner might have dreamt of: into the open sea of the Pacific ocean. Nobody prepares a canoe for Blake as a means of transport for transmission. All the actions and talk of the Indian remain strange to Blake, who represents the white civilisation living in the same part of the world, seemingly ruling the world and having conquered the natives living in it. Faced with the other, Blake fails to recognise it as part of his life. The movie’s plot draws on the clash of two civilisations and different time horizons; the confrontation of the romantic valuing of nature and the predecessors of today’s rational life of Western civilisation projected into the time when the fight between both seemed to have been ended with the victory of the technical rationality, but with the founding myth of American culture still existing. It is the time of transition when civilisation had to adapt to nature to finally overcome it; where the ‘‘cowboys’’ lived within the landscape but used modern arms technology to subjugate a nature to which native Americans belonged. Nobody is able to listen to and understand the noises that surround him. He claims to smell their pursuers (‘‘The evil stench of white man precedes him’’) and often talks in metaphors connected with nature. On the one hand this was part of the reality of people who had to survive in direct contact with nature. On the other hand, abstracted into talk with a representative of Western culture (meaning first world, rationality, white, etc.), it becomes part of a romantic image of the native’s wisdom and in this way the film is treating white men’s ambivalent attitude of romanticising and violating nature and the past with irony. The white man’s destructive potential is visible anywhere. At the beginning of the journey to Machine, people are shooting out of the train’s windows to kill buffaloes. In Machine itself the signs of death in the form of skulls of dead animals are ubiquitous and the fatal bullet for the Dead Man Blake is supplied. White men constantly kill each other. A completely destroyed Indian village is shown twice. And the Indian village where the famous canoe makers live looks more like an undertaker’s store that it actually is: Nobody gets the canoe from them, the equivalent of a coffin in this case, which will take Blake to his last journey into the ocean, to the other side. At this point it is useful to draw on the works of two Frenchmen. One is telling about the gap between two languages, language games as he calls it in the Wittgensteinian tradition, and the impossibility of bridging them; the other one is playing the game. The cultural gap: Le Diffe´rend It was Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard who described the consequences of this gap. As such the film seems to be a comment on both Lyotard and Baudrillard. The unbridgeable gap between two language games is the presupposition for these two worlds meeting. The history of US civilisation is also a history of colonisation, a history of suppression of native Americans. In philosophical
terms Lyotard shows this to be unavoidable but not acceptable. Lyotard titled Dead Man – an his book Le Diffe´rend, a word that is impossible to translate into English encounter with without a loss of meaning. What Lyotard explicitly does not mean is the the unknown past difference. This is for him a solvable problem in form of a lawsuit. These kinds of conflicts can be solved because the conflicting parties are looking for a judge who decides which interpretation of the law is the right one. All three of them 53 refer to the same basis – the legal system, and after the judge’s decision justice is satisfied; at least, independent judges provided, there would not be injustice. This marks the difference from the other connotation. With the word ‘‘diffe´rend’’ Lyotard wants to describe a conflict which cannot be solved in a legal sense. It is a conflict where the parties in front of the judge do not have the same basis, i.e. belong to different legal systems or are separated by a cultural gap. The problem is that the judge is in this case necessarily partial as he is trained in one legal system and expected to judge accordingly. A plaintiff who was brought up in a legal system or society grounding on different values is deprived of his evidence and is turned into a victim. There are no words in the judge’s idiom which can represent the injustice done to the plaintiff in the trial. A diffe´rend between two parties arises: the settling of the conflict that confronts them is executed within the idiom of one of them while the injustice the other is suffering is not represented in that idiom (Lyotard, 1987, p. 27). We no longer live in the world in transition that the movie depicts. As the viewer knows, the confrontation ended with the victory of technical rationality. But there is room for doubts about rationality’s coexistence with the American founding myth in the Western. Is this definitely the end of the story? The former world defeated and with it its inhabitants? Starting to be sceptical it becomes possible to perceive another possibility, a further development. At this point Jean Baudrillard enters the game. Or at any rate, I have entered him into the game. The bridge Baudrillard sees a bridge over the gap – but from the other side. We have reduced the Other for us into mere difference. We could do that because it is our system from which we judged and we had the power to judge. By including the Other in the market system (e.g. as a result of imperialism) we commit a deep injustice. Every attempt to solve that injustice by giving back land to Aborigines[3] or paying them cannot give justice because it is the wrong language. But, says Baudrillard, the Aborigines, though they are victims, are able to bridge the gap and take revenge in a way we cannot resist. They have the power to destabilise Western rule by revitalising the role and power of the Other. After his arguments for the decline of otherness and replacement through difference, this is surprising. His argument is deeply ironical. Once we despised their cultures, he says, now we respect them. They never respected ours, they only show a great benevolence towards it. We presumed on the right to subdue and exploit them, they took the luxury to mystify us (Baudrillard, 1992, p. 156). We assumed a victory over them, they can wait for their
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mystification to work. It is the way they mediate their myths of origin, of what they tell and what they seemingly conceal. But their secret lies in their way of narrating, on the surface which we cannot decipher, it is an ironical mythology of appearance. And in that way they infect our culture from the inside via anthropology and its popularised versions on the market. We are infected by a primeval slowness, by the virus of origin, of aboriginality. We can notice that nothing that seemed to be outmoded on the path of universal ‘‘progress’’ is really lost, dead, there is no nostalgia and the virus can start its destructive work inside our ultra-refined and ultra prone systems. Nobody is the Other – this is the charm of that name. He is not a specific individual, but more of an archetype. As an archetype he has no body. He is Baudrillard’s aboriginal, the one who remembers where all the life comes from and where it will go to and, therefore, is able to lead the white man to a destination that he does not even know that he is heading for. Blake thinks he is on the run, which of course he is, but at the same time Nobody directs him, gives him a destination – a destiny. Nobody at the same time mythologizes the present Blake and rules out his superiority (‘‘The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow’’). The aboriginal manages to carry the white man out of his life without using physical force. The only problem in comparison to Baudrillard’s thesis is that at the end Nobody, too, is killed – by the last surviving head hunter whom, fatally injured himself, he also shoots. The movie is set in the past, but with a postmodern certainty that the time in between and the consciousness of the experience cannot be obliterated. It sets out a game with this knowledge instead. Baudrillard takes the word game in language game literally. This may be the reason why parts of his book can be read as a plot, even as a script for a movie. And the movie that itself somehow gives the impression of being constructed, more the filming of an idea than telling a story, can in turn also be perceived as a comment on a book of the French philosopher. Dealing with the past, shareholder value and change in contemporary corporations Far-fetched as the film might appear in the context of corporate reality it can serve as a starting point for reflection about the contemporary corporate landscape as well. To save the deeply ironical undertone of Jarmusch’s film: nothing can actually be learned from his film about organisational change management – except, perhaps a certain kind of – truth? Or wisdom? Perfectly convinced of the inappropriateness of the term ‘‘the truth’’, Baudrillard’s ironical play on multiple truths and realities is grounding my argument. In what follows, the already indicated play with the knowledge of the past is contrasted with the attitude that drastic change, like that after mergers and acquisitions, can only be achieved when it is perceived as a complete new beginning. ‘‘Let’s start anew to a better future’’ is the motto implicitly saying that everything up to now has been worse or even worthless. This of course
requires us to listen to the past, to history which is often forgotten, neglected or Dead Man – an even almost violently refused: ‘‘One of the great advantages of America is that encounter with Americans have no memory’’ (Davidow and Malone, 1993, p. 215), not to the unknown past mention Hammer and Champy’s advice to obliterate the past when beginning a programme in business process reengineering (Hammer and Champy, 1994). But does ignorance really mean absence of any consequence of the past? And of 55 course it is not only America that is addressed here. It is as if the angel in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus who is proceeding into the future with his back to it, staring into the past, managed to turn 180 degrees and now turns its back instead to the past necessarily ignoring it as it is now out of sight. But the storm that is blowing from paradise is still strong and driving him to the future. That storm is what we call progress, says Benjamin (1977), leaving a gigantic heap of rubble behind. Angelus Novus suggests that both directions have their weaknesses. Staring exclusively into the past means being driven to the future without controlling the way. This may lead to the impossibility to decide and act according to the challenges the future poses. The dismay at what has happened, at the consequences of one’s own actions can become overwhelming. Turning to the future includes the risk of forgetting the heap of rubble – the unintended consequences of the decisions and actions. Perhaps this is exactly what is – consciously or unconsciously – intended: leaving the present mess behind and staring into a supposed bright future. Nobody wants to see the gigantic heap of rubble. Nobody? The generous aborigine is following us and offers his help. Storm seems to be a good metaphor for the development we are used to calling globalisation. It is seen as an irresistible power, to which the individual, corporations and even nation states can only adapt. And the storm blows us away from the paradise of a protectionist past which saved us from the winds of change. Whether the individual likes it or not, one of the results is a dramatically changing corporate landscape. Friendly and unfriendly takeovers, mergers of equal and not-so-equal companies and speculation about who’s next have become a part of the daily news. The interesting fact is that globalisation is seen as an irresistible force even by the most powerful leaders in this corporate landscape. Rolf Breuer, spokesman of the board of directors of Deutsche Bank, one of the largest and most successful banks in the world, talked about the effects of the changing markets, the expectations of customers and reactions of competitors (Breuer, 1999). From the analysis of these changes he described the strategic reaction of the bank not without mentioning another motivation to change: Let me first emphasize that in the view of the market banks from the Continent do not meet these challenges to the complete satisfaction of the shareholders. Because what we see is that the market capitalisation, the market value, of many banks on the Continent has dropped, relative to the assessment five or ten years ago (Breuer, 1999, p. 6, emphasis in the original, my translation).
As the markets see it: the anonymous force can only be met by adapting to its demands, irrespective of whether one considers its opinion as good or bad.
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Strangely enough, an ‘‘it’’ can have an opinion. Of course all the market participants, i.e. global competition, is meant here and despite being a large actor themselves large banks, too, have to listen. Breuer explained several strategies for gaining more advantage from the structural differences. One strategy was about size. ‘‘Some years ago, I would have bluntly refused to talk about size as an aspect of a bank’s quality’’ (Breuer, 1999, p. 9). But the global markets force even a bank like Deutsche to think about large-scale mergers. This is a direct consequence of the larger European market that emerged in 1999 with the introduction of the single currency (Euro) and the worries of the banks that they were too small to survive independently or, in the case of Deutsche Bank, too small to take part in the large-scale financing of public or corporate debts, the going public of companies of the size of Telekom or syndicated Euro loans. This is one point. The other one has a deeply ironical quality. The shortterm, quarterly-based view of the markets puts a strong pressure on companies to make their decisions equally short term if they do not want to risk their chances of refinancing. There is a strong pressure to announce changes which satisfy the markets. Change for change’s sake can be the result. A merger or an acquisition, by contrast, is a medium- or long-term instrument. The consciousness of the past is a long-term topic as well. The inclusion of the past has no place in quarter-year based thinking that has always to be ready to adapt immediately and change direction without notice. This was analysed by Denzin commenting on the film Wall Street: reality is only the representation of figures on the screen. They can change immediately: ‘‘Delete’’ is the key in question. This virtual reality does not take into account the company’s reality beyond the balance sheet. Banks are in many aspects on the forefront of the markets’ development: as financial advisors, when companies go public, when they support mergers and acquisitions, etc. It is a matter of true irony when those companies – the banks – now have to face the negative effects of their own activities themselves, when they have to meet their own requirements: the markets’ revolution is devouring its parents. Accepting global market forces here as a matter of fact, I would like to concentrate on the contradiction between the postulation to forget the past in parts of the management literature (e.g. Davidow and Malone, 1993, Hammer and Champy, 1994) and the past’s persistence and influence which we can watch. Mergers and acquisitions have historical aspects on two levels: companies look back on their own coming into being and the successes and failures that brought them to the present situation; and the process of merging or overtaking is the first step of the common history. That companies have a history is self-evident. They were founded by concrete persons at a certain point of time and in a concrete place. They flourished, grew and exist over a period of time up to the attempt to take over another company or losing their independence. During that period the company was rooted in the local community, was part of the national economy, its name connected to events of local or national importance like major industrial actions or the turbulences
resulting from closing down a branch. The company’s founder might have Dead Man – an become a mythical part of the nation’s development and his name still part of encounter with the company’s name like Krupp or Rockefeller. Their local importance might be the unknown past so great that working for them forms part of the personal identity for the employees and their families. Generations of the same family may have worked for the same company. Influences from the past on the present company policy 57 and effects on the current balance sheet can be found in topics as diverse as the later poisonous results of a production without environmental standards which have to be cleared up now or the discussion around the compensation for forced labour in German and Austrian companies during the Second World War. All of this of course does not mean that those companies cannot or should not vanish when they are no longer economically successful or become the subject of an acquisition, but it is a strong argument in favour of the impossibility of neglecting the importance of history. A recent example of how the circumstances and time of foundation of a company still are in a way present decades later was examined by Sievers with the example of Volkswagen (Sievers, 2000). His argument is that despite the fact that there is no direct link between the founding date in the 1930s and the fact that it was an important producer of military goods during the war and today’s car manufacturing, there is an ongoing rhetoric of competition as war. How can one seriously believe that after a fierce take-over battle where one company tried to debase the other and its personnel, denying the company’s value (actually contra factual because why then would they want to take it over?) the merged company can behave as if there was nothing? How can a management believe that a merger or a friendly take-over that is called friendly in the perception of the two top managements but not necessarily by others involved will not face serious objections that will last? Whether the past of the companies be successful or a decline of former greatness, the people involved, who invested a large part of their recent life into it, usually are convinced that they are doing a fair job. There is a shared past with the colleagues even if many don’t like each other or do not even know them as they work in branches hundreds of miles away. Above that this perception of the company’s coherence and identity is an intended outcome of corporate identity programs and it is a basic insight of organisational culture research. Mergers take time: time to negotiate at the board level before the merger or the acquisition takes place, time to build up resistance among the employees, whether by the board itself which does not want to be taken over or by the unions, time to work out the strategy of the new company after the merger is carried out, time to find out who asserts him/herself against his/her new and old colleagues on the management level and who is made redundant, time to define the new structure, time to make clear the consequences for the employees at the end of the food chain. Even if all of this happens really fast and can be measured in weeks, in the perception of those not directly involved in the process the uncertainty of what is happening lasts too long. What is happening to my branch, my department, my boss and of course myself? As
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most of these take-over battles or attempts to merge attract much public attention because it affects the quotation on the stock exchanges far more intensively than the announcement of an increase in profits and the information in the media supports the atmosphere of rumours inside the companies in question, the whole process acquires a dynamic of its own which cannot be controlled by the managements involved. Both brief consideration of the history of companies and the possible diaries of the merger process show the obvious: the final closure does not mean a start as if there was nothing before. The start is always burdened with the immediate past and the long-term perspective of the new company is influenced by the history of the old ones. And the figures demonstrate that this is the reality in most of the cases. The results of reports like that by German based consultants Mummert + Partner who say that the analysis of 250 European mergers between 1984 and 1992 showed that profits fell in two-thirds of all cases and in 14 per cent they stagnated. Only 29 per cent can be seen as a success in terms of profitability. Regarding the still rising rate of mergers this is an alarming figure and recent prominent examples like DaimlerChrysler, the failed mergers in the German banking industry (Deutsche and Dresdner, Commerzbank and Dresdner) and the author’s personal experience in the case of one of the largest German IT service providers clearly demonstrate that the dangers are still virulent. Why do so many mergers and acquisitions fail, despite the fact that in many cases independent viewers judge the basic idea as promising? According to Mummert + Partner, in the overwhelming majority of cases the mistakes are not the result of a poor concept but are made during the process of translating it into operation. Fluctuation after mergers increases up to 12 times of the average before. This figure immediately leads to the question of how the employees can be won for the change (Mummert + Partner, 2000). The basic insight of such a question is of course that the employees are the most valuable source of success for the company. The higher the qualification required for complex products, or the more service-oriented the business is (e.g. realising complex applications in IT, consulting), the more important employees become and the more expensive to replace. The basic interest after a merger must therefore be to convince them to remain in the new company. This directs our attention to the fact that is discussed here and not analysed by the consultants. Whenever companies merge or are overtaken the image of an hour zero is a complete illusion. Even more: people who behave like that are shutting their eyes to an obvious complexity. Of course times are changing and there is a justified basic demand on all employees in every industry to adapt to changes. Nevertheless, employees have the right to demand legitimacy. Of course management has the right to change and depending on the legislation around property rights it can also buy other companies or merge their own. But the quest for legitimacy asks for more: changes should make sense beyond the immediate increase in profit. They should also make sense beyond the personal interests of the involved board members: transatlantic mergers are always under the ‘‘suspicion’’ that they are only executed to adapt the board’s lower
European wages to the astronomic US standards. Given such an environment it Dead Man – an is hard to explain the gains of the merger when at the same time branches are encounter with closed down to realise so-called synergy effects. the unknown past The German banking industry provides us with very good examples of mergers. Dresdner Bank was involved in two attempted mergers in 2000. Both of them failed. The first one was an extremely ambitious one. The other bank 59 involved was Deutsche Bank, by far the largest German bank. Both chairmen of the board, Rolf Breuer of Deutsche and Bernd Walter of Dresdner, announced it to the public as a merger of equals. They realised that this was the only chance to lead the merger to a success. But it turned out that the gap between the cultures was too big to accept this basic assumption. After several weeks of working in integration teams Walter stopped the activities in agreement with his colleagues in the Dresdner board. The publicly announced reason was of a considerable openness for the discreet banking industry. It was not possible to realise the agreed merger of equals: Deutsche had tried to dominate the process according to Walter. He took the responsibility for his misjudgement and resigned. History shows both banks as competitors and for a long time No. 1 and 2 of the German market, with Deutsche well ahead of Dresdner. Quite understandably the attitude of Deutsche Bank’s employees derived from their pride in being members of the largest, most powerful bank with the highest prestige. No wonder that others often find this attitude arrogant. But during the merger attempt this self-confidence was somehow mutually confirmed. One side tried to push through all of their products, processes and systems. The other had a defensive, inferior attitude from the beginning and tried to keep at least a few of their own ones: ‘‘they will wipe out everything’’ was a statement to be heard from many sides. This short impression of a central facet of the merger clearly demonstrates that even if the top management, the two chairmen, agree on the conditions and are convinced of their positive effects, the ignorance or the intentional closure of a chapter and a new beginning can fail. The past is too strong. There was no bridge that could cross the deep gap between the bank’s cultures. Only a few months later there was another attempt, this time with Commerzbank. Even given the fact that the difference in size between these banks was much smaller so that it was more plausible to talk about a merger of equals, this merger failed as well as the banks could not agree on their shares in the common institute. The successor of Walter as a chairman of the board of directors of Dresdner Bank, Bernd Fahrholz, recently pleaded for a more differentiated view (Fahrholz, 2001). He said that shareholder’s value is an important concept and served in breaking up outdated structures. But concentrating on it exclusively turns out to be counterproductive. He argues for stakeholder’s value. Quite obviously this is a result of personal experience, since he was one of the protagonists of the prevailing merger attempts. He still argues in favour of a prominent attention to shareholder value, but at the same time he reminds the
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reader that no company will be successful and have any value for the shareholder which ignores the demands of customers, employees and the surrounding society – in that order. After decades of empty management concepts where the price to be paid was on the employees’ side, every new concept not taking into account this onesidedness is discredited from the start. The concept of shareholder value became infamous as it perfectly shows the opposition between one group involved in companies and all the others: employees, customers, suppliers, society, environment. Actually it was an open declaration of preference for one group which was accepted for some time as it was the outcome of the ruling economic theory. What is good for the shareholder will be beneficial for the other stakeholders. But now it serves perfectly as a buzzword, a symbol to attract opposition and even violent rejection, as the negative effects of the absolute prioritisation become more and more obvious. So Fahrholz’s comment can be interpreted as the reaction to the quest for legitimacy. Thomas Middelhoff, CEO of Bertelsmann, goes even further along that path: The task of leading a company is not exclusively defined by shareholder value. That alone is not sufficient to give mental orientation – nor does it generate a sufficient identity for your employees. If you follow shareholder value alone, you will create an empty, aimless, worthless company. You will end up with burnt out employees who ask themselves why they are working and what for. The company’s value does not derive from its stock market value alone or from some graphs, but whether there exist real shared values in the company (Middelhoff, 2001).
This is a nice transformation of the notion of shareholder value. Shared values might be an answer to the one-sidedness of the former if the claim follows Middelhoff and not a generalisation of the former: this would be a typical application of Lyotard’s argument. What’s your name? My name is Nobody. Excuse me? My name is Xebeche – He who talks loud and say nothing. He who talks . . . I thought your name was Nobody? I prefer to be called Nobody (Blake and Nobody in Dead Man (1995)).
But what does all of this have to do with Jarmusch’s film? As I said – almost nothing. Having Nobody tell the story – talking loudly and saying nothing – means to smell the pretender’s evil stench and to watch slightly amused how people who take their part for the whole kill each other and don’t understand how they are taken to the other side by those they thought they could ignore. What Nobody demonstrates, friendly but irresistibly, is that the gigantic heap of rubble that every step into the future leaves behind can be ignored but not wiped out. It is still there and perhaps does not influence the decisions but definitely influences the process of the decisions put into practice. Not taking this into account means to lose control just as Blake who stated after he had spent some time with Nobody: ‘‘I don’t understand a single word of what you were saying since we met.’’ Exactly.
It is just the immediate cause to reflect about mergermania and change Dead Man – an management. Nobody prepared the scene for us and led us into the speculation, encounter with infected us with the virus of primeval slowness, by the virus of origin. The the unknown past comparison is seductive though perhaps dangerously misleading, but who knows? The two cultures of those up there in the hierarchy, the global leaders of multinational corporations and those down there, the anonymous masses of 61 people are for a moment considered as being as distant as the white Western culture from the aborigines. Global management assumed a victory over the particular, they set the rules and standards, defined the language games so that the others are effectively silenced, since there is no accepted language to formulate their claims. Management presumed on the right to exploit the employees, they took the luxury to mystify the Gates, Schrempps, Fahrholz and Middelhoffs. Global leaders like Fahrholz and Middelhoff start to respect the cultures of those down in hierarchy, the others don’t respect them. They wait for their mystification to work. Blake the accountant, the representative of the management culture, left his home base and went to a region he knew nothing about and thought it was like back in Cleveland. He went to the border of the world as he knew it, where the country produced its own laws and made Blake lose the ground below his feet. Without orientation he had to rely on the local scout. Nobody (sic!) tried to teach him about the new reality – which was the past, the old reality in this case – but Blake did not understand. Nevertheless he followed Nobody. What else could he do? His fatal wound was already the result of his original mistake: to come there. But who is talking when nobody speaks? ‘‘He who talks loud and say nothing’’? Does the past speak to the management and they don’t understand that it will lead them to the other side, or even worse: do they not realise that they are already dead, fatally wounded by the one-sidedness of global competition? The mystification is already working and some are infected by what was outmoded for some time. The stakeholders are back. And now we can return to Blake the Dead Man and Nobody, to Jim Jarmusch and Jean Baudrillard and consider ‘‘The end’’. The end The film goes further than Baudrillard. Where Baudrillard tells us about the return of the Other, unchanged as the stronger force in the long run, Jarmusch even ironises the main character. Nobody who otherwise would be in danger of being the naive romantic hero – the noble savage – is played by an actor who is native American but whose appearance somehow contradicts the image given by other movies of that genre. He is rather fat, which makes him look friendly and easy-going, but is at the same time provided with a calmness that gives the impression of an infinite superiority. The wisdom seems to derive from a source completely inaccessible to white men. But for his own people he is the one who ‘‘talks loud and say nothing’’. The superior wisdom symbolised in the native American is nothing more: just a symbol left without any further meaning. No wonder then that Nobody who throughout the film served as a positive
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identification figure, as a contrast to the necromantic white culture, cannot provide us with a hint out of the film into the future: Nobody is nobody. No bridge over the gap between cultures is possible. The bridge finally turns against both. Caught between false identification because of romantic nostalgia and selfpity Blake is symbolising today’s viewer in his/her role as a critic who either condemns the film as irrelevant and boring or celebrates it as the ironical play with possibilities and our unconscious and therefore taken for granted myths. So Jarmusch’s vision turns out to be even darker than Baudrillard’s. The gap between cultures is bridgeable but with the risk of falling off the bridge into the abyss for both parties. Nobody achieves his aim but his involvement in the other culture finally also kills him. In the end the only ‘‘surviving’’ person is the dying ‘‘Dead Man’’ on his way to the other side: this world will no longer concern him as it doesn’t concern any other protagonist. Consequently this is ‘‘The end’’. Notes 1. Blake’s words as quoted by ‘‘Nobody’’ during the film. 2. Which created a success-story of itself but shall not be a topic here. 3. The aborigines are Baudrillard’s example to exemplify his argument (Baudrillard, 1992, pp. 157ff). References Baudrillard, J. (1992), Die Transparenz des Bo¨sen; ein Essay u¨ber extreme Pha¨nomene, Merve Verlag, Berlin. ¨ ber den Begriff der Geschichte’’, in Benjamin, W. (Ed.), Illuminationen, Benjamin, W. (1977), ‘‘U ausgewa¨hlte Schriften, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, pp. 251-63. Breuer, R. (1999), ‘‘Banken im Umbruch: Erfolgsstrategien fu¨r europa¨ische und globale Ma¨rkte’’, 4. internationale Handelsblatt Jahrestagung, 8/9 September, Frankfurt. Davidow, H.D. and Malone, M.S. (1993), The Virtual Corporation – Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY. Denzin, N.K. (1991), Images of Postmodern Society, Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, Sage Publications, London. Fahrholz, B. (2001), ‘‘Gewinn ist nicht alles, aber ohne Gewinn ist alles Nichts’’, Die Woche, No. 3, 11 January. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1994), Business Reengineering, Die Radikalkur fu¨r das Unternehmen, 3, Auflage, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York, NY. Lyotard, J.-F. (1987), Der Widerstreit, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Mu¨nchen. Middelhoff, T. (2001), ‘‘Ich habe einen Traum’’, DIE ZEIT, No. 5, Leben, 25 January, p. 14. Mummert + Partner (2000), Integrationsmanagement, Frankfurt Rorty, R. (1992), Kontingenz, Ironie und Solidarita¨t, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. Sievers, B. (2000), ‘‘Competition as war: towards a socio-analysis of war in and among corporations’’, Socio-Analysis, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 1-27.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
Video fractals Research as mass media
Video fractals: research as mass media
Hugo Letiche University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands Keywords Video, Mass media, Fractal imaging technology, Research Abstract In this article, research as ‘‘mass media’’ (Luhmann) is appraised. ‘‘Videocy’’ or videoed research results are examined. A form of video research with its roots in action research, Delphi methodology and visual anthropology is reported on. The simulacra it produces, wherein feedback loops are used to produce an effect similar to the fractali-zations of complexity, achieves a powerful reality-effect. But is it a ‘‘responsible’’ form of (research) practice?
63 Submitted March 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
Introduction Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through mass media . . . the term ‘‘mass media’’ includes all those institutions of society which make use of copying technologies to disseminate communication . . . The crucial point at any rate is that no interaction among those co-present can take place between sender and receivers. Interaction is ruled out by the interposition of technology (Luhmann, 2000a, pp. 1-2).
For Luhmann, ‘‘the system’s own constructions of reality’’ determine what is revealed. Of course there is media theory here in the tradition of McLuhan. But Luhmann’s emphasis is on radical constructivism. Research is viewed as a closed system of interacts. The nature of the ‘‘research system’’ determines what can be researched and how, as well as which research results can be manifested. The reality we know and/or acknowledge is the reality that emerges in ‘‘research’’. Thus, the ‘‘research system’’ is really a closed system; it is subject and object, cause and effect, observer and observed. Researcher reflexivity, or the observing of the observer, is crucial. There is a danger of unlimited regress – Which observer observes the observer, who observes the observer? etc. etc.? Research methodology mainly focuses on first order issues: ‘‘How do we decide or know that what is contained in research, is ‘really real’’’? Second order questioning: ‘‘How does researcher reflexivity construct the research event and/or artifact?’’ is relatively exceptional. Assuming, as Luhmann does, that the ‘‘research system’’ is a closed system of ‘‘mass media’’, it follows that: . what is investigated; . how it is researched; . the form in which it is written up; . the issues that are discussable; and . the analysis that is acceptable; are all enclosed in the system. Slight ‘‘irritations’’ (changes), will be produced by the system itself. But, by and large, the ‘‘research system’’ will maintain itself
Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2002, pp. 63-80. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810210417384
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quite successfully within its closed boundaries. Researchers will produce material for their (specialist) mass media by obeying the logic of the system. ‘‘Mass media’’ logic is very evident in the ‘‘rankings’’ or ‘‘RAE’’ (the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise); events like the ‘‘Emmy’’ or the ‘‘Booker Prize’’ wherein equivalent products are compared to one another. Research as mass media has already manifested itself in management studies. Burrell embraced the ‘‘media-ization’’ of research, when in a fairly wellknown incident at a conference; he replaced his traditional paper presentation with the showing of a (self-made) video clip. He prefaced the showing of his surreal video clip in Keele (April, 1999) by ‘‘attacking’’ Mike Reed – a prominent representative of the more traditional neo-Weberian research paradigm – with a water pistol. An article ‘‘Eco and the Bunnymen’’ (Burrell, 1993) emerged later, but it only discussed the video clip to a limited degree. Burrell did clarify that the academic ‘‘machine’’ had not found it ‘‘appropriate’’ for him to produce a video clip, instead of doing ‘‘proper research’’ as he was paid to do. Discussing the goal and form of the original clip, mainly has taken place informally. Was Burrell ‘‘putting us on’’ or was there really a serious intent to the video? Was Burrell out to provoke or insult his audience, or did he have other communicative intentions? In his article, he claims postmodern intentions in his attempt at ‘‘videocy’’ (Denzin, 1991, p. 8). In ‘‘videocy’’ new technologies supposedly turn everything into theatrical spectacle – the audience becomes part of the production as if the viewer is being viewed by other viewers. The metaphor is of secret cameras having entered the observer’s home, which are now looking out from inside the TV. ‘‘We are not sure . . . whether we were watching them, or watching them watching themselves’’ (Connor, 1989, p. 153). Videocy produces an ecstasy of communication, an over-abundance of visualizations (Baudrillard, 1988). As Baudrillard pointed out, hyperreal Los Angeles (LA) needs Disneyland so that something even more artificial than LA will make LA seem ‘‘real’’. Burrell’s video, if understood as surrealist intellectual commentary, plays a comparable role towards postmodern investigation. His video may have been an effort at postmodern experimentation. Meaning is a collage, research an image of popular culture, theory is disjointed, the line between popular and high culture has been destroyed. Burrell claimed that he rejected the authority of the author in order to let the tape ‘‘speak for itself’’. He refused to answer questions during or immediately after the presentation. He later claimed that his understanding of the tape’s meaning was as constrained and relative as every other viewer’s. Interpretation was left open (Burrell, 1993, pp. 71-2). Burrell’s ‘‘videocy’’ evoked outrage and confusion. The ‘‘irony’’ of research technology being permitted to construct its own results, of a conference presentation that did away with its ‘‘author’’, of childish behaviour paraded before academic colleagues – was ‘‘nonconformist’’. But does ‘‘videocy’’ really lead to a reduction in authorial voice? The ‘‘theatrical’’ effects of ‘‘videocy’’ seem inevitable enough – agreeing with Susan Sontag, all uses of visual material easily lead to surrealist results:
The mainstream of photographic activity has shown a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise; in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision (Sontag, 1977, p. 52).
It was not the specific form of the Burrell video that was surrealist, but the effort at ‘‘videocy’’. In video, ‘‘natural vision’’ is converted into ‘‘dramatic text’’. The video is a constructed artifact – a pastiche of visual and audio elements. A video is a ‘‘text’’; with a beginning, middle and end, containing narrative order and which obviously is a semiotic construct. Surrealism is an artistic instrument of refusal, directed towards the prevailing culture. It is an intense form of authorial statement. In surrealism, the psychic life of the artist is put to the service of social rebellion (Grundberg, 1990). Thus, Burrell’s identification of ‘‘videocy’’ with the (structuralist/post-structuralist) suppression of ‘‘authorial voice’’ is doubtful. ‘‘Videocy’’ personalizes and individualizes ‘‘text’’ to a degree virtually unknown in the written form. In video the images appeal to ‘‘meaning’’ via the context with which they are provided, which is determined by how they are edited. The ‘‘author’’ or ‘‘director’’ determines context. In a video, the images are discursively positioned: ‘‘videocy’’ is deconstruction in reverse; that is, it is radical constructionism. ‘‘Videocy’’ is achieved by bricoleurs who appropriate visual material(s) and edit them via ‘‘cut and paste’’ to make some sort of representation. As Burrell experienced, the conditions of ‘‘videocy’’ are political (Solomon-Godeau, 1990). The research establishment does not approve of ‘‘videocy’’. Even in visual anthropology, it is not really accepted (Hocking, 1995; Devereux and Hillman, 1995). The fear of pollution by popular culture is too large. Thus which market or for what commodity practices, does ‘‘videocy’’ really exist? Discussion of ‘‘videocy’’ centers on the subjectivism of the representation and the politics of research production. Thus, is the video representation highly personal – a form of semiotic poetry; or does it merely mirror ‘‘reality’’? Videos have to be ‘‘shot’’ and the tapes have to be edited. A video is a constructed artifact. But is this artifact a product of a closed or of an open system? If research videos are examined, could they on a ‘‘depth level’’ have been entirely different or are there a limited number of tropes that inevitably are reproduced? Is there a ‘‘unicity’’ to each video or are they in some essential sense predetermined clones? And what about the politics of making research videos? Is ‘‘videocy’’ libratory or panoptical? Does video production center on solidarity between researcher and researched or the jouissance (pleasure) of total manipulation; or both or none of these? Is solidarity (socialism) or jouissance (psychological well-being) really important in the making of research videos? Luhmann argues that solidarity and jouissance are paradigms of social thought that are no longer able to signify very much (Luhmann, 2000b). In the contemporary world of hypercomplexity, the subject lives his or her hyperreal fantasies in a consumerist paradise that is also a desert. The one person is loosely connected to the other by economic and symbolic matrixes of mass media.
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This article reports on the activity of doing video research. In video research the links to ‘‘mass media’’ are much more apparent than in normal research. In the work that was done the observer, and the observer of the observer, were made visible[1]. The video research was designed not only to ‘‘show’’ the object of research but also to show the mechanisms of doing research. The reflexivity of the researched and the researchers was made more apparent than in traditional ‘‘research systems’’. The radical constructivism of doing research was made evident. What difference did it make that the normally invisible apparatus of the ‘‘research system’’ was, in so far as the technology permitted, made visible? Obviously the aesthetics of the research videos was not the same as that of broadcast television. The effects of ‘‘cut and paste’’ were not disguised. Through fade-outs, flashbacks, etc., broadcast television creates an illusion of continuity. Broadcast TV separates the ‘‘front office’’ (or what the viewer is supposed to see) from the back office (how the technicians make the product). If one follows broadcast aesthetics, one makes making a video covert; the filmmaker becomes a ‘‘fly-on-the-wall’’ who supposedly provides ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘unmediated’’ images. In effect, acceptance of this aesthetic leads to reality TV. Contrastingly, in the research videos before and behind the scene intermixed. The cameraman will suddenly hand his camera to another and start to ask questions. The editing is jerky and clearly visible. Shots of researchers and researched viewing, discussing and assessing video material, are all common. While TV produces an illusion of a well-ordered and coherent ‘‘reality’’, the research videos produce an illusion of a complex, debated and contingent one. As Hassard concludes: in broadcast video ‘‘reality is telescoped, dramatized and reconstructed. Claims to be accessing ‘objective’ reality are . . . ideological effects. The objectivity of [such video is] . . . . nothing more than an ideology operating in the guise of ‘common-sense’’’ (Hasssard, 1998, p. 60). But by understanding research videos, as radical constructivism and assuming that research is mass media, one is no less ideological. In the research videos I helped to make, distinctions between researcher and the researched, the observed and the observer, the natural and the artificial, the human and technique were all blurred. The illusion of an objective research project was destabilized. Assumptions of the researchers, claims of the interviewed and observations of the situations videoed, were all allowed to (seem to) contradict one another. Which source would be prioritized, which point of view was to be favored in the viewing? Cracks in the research process between sources and theories, prejudices and data, research materials and construction, were allowed to be visible. The research system did not function in the ‘‘text’’ – that is, in the research video – as a poetically all-encompassing closed system. The viewer is forced to wrestle with: ‘‘What’s (really) going on here?’’ Such video research asks more questions than it answers. It creates more cracks in the research process than it lays doubts to rest.
Doing video research Video fractals: This article is based on the experience of supervising ten video research research as mass projects. Seven videos were made with full-time or part-time graduate students media in Holland, two were made with a team of Dutch and Slovak students (one was made in Slovakia and one in Holland) and one video was made with Polish academics and managers in Poland. The goal was to experience by doing 67 research, in contradistinction to seeing research as a proof of competency reserved for course culmination – such as in the writing of a ‘‘thesis’’. In each project roughly the same methodology was pursued. Research groups averaging four persons were formed (the smallest was two and the largest six). The researchers were encouraged to choose a theme of investigation, but not to define a hypothesis. Increased insight was a stated goal. The researchers were asked to define their research motives and to investigate their commitment(s) to the object of research. They had to address the question in some depth ‘‘Why do you want to do research, centering on this target group, focused on these problems?’’ When the group felt comfortable with its answers, they began the actual investigation. Attention to thematization can be thought of in postmodern terms as an imposed simulacrum of purpose, intention and ‘‘progress’’. It was a politically correct ‘‘motivation’’, which the research coordinators (that is, myself and my colleagues) ‘‘sold’’ to the researchers. But in time most of the researchers became ‘‘hooked’’ on the research process and experienced it as ‘‘self-justifying’’. Video was employed for observation and interviewing concentrating on agreed to theme(s). The initial video material was edited and shown to targeted stakeholders, eliciting their commentary. Feedback loops were generated, wherein the observed and/or interviewed were confronted with the stakeholders’ videoed commentary of the edited original material and were asked to reply. For instance, in a project with Turkish entrepreneurs initial interviews were held with Turkish ‘‘small business start-ups’’ and feedback loops were created with: . graduate students who helped the starters with their business problems; . Dutch government officials working with ‘‘minorities’’; . successful Turkish businessmen (in Holland); . consultants, trainers and social workers who worked with the target group. Statements, opinions and ideas from each group were shown to the others. The reactions were videoed in turn and shown to all the groups. At each step, all the responses were put on video. Via video the participants ‘‘saw’’ what the various stakeholders had to say about each other. The methodology combined elements of action research, the Delphi method and visual anthropology. From action research came the idea of working in fairly short repeating research cycles. The researchers defined often with the researched, an objective that they were seeking to clarify. It was assumed that
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the researchers and researched would learn most effectively about one another and the situation they confronted when engaged in a shared investigatory effort. Sometimes the researchers chose a very open theme; that is, they assumed that something needed looking at but that they were unsure about what exactly needed investigating. The researchers were encouraged to question if their own perceptions and assumptions needed changing, and/or if one or another stakeholder needed to change. The researchers tried to be open – that is to genuinely investigate a chosen theme rather than to have ‘‘an axe to grind’’. But of course they operated within their own assumptions of what ‘‘research’’ is and what sort of ‘‘social reality’’ is ‘‘real’’. The project facilitators stressed that research has to be more than the implementation of an ide´e fixe. Discovery, doubt or questioning needed to be possible: ‘‘it’s about taking risks: the risk of discovering that realities differ from preconceptions, that the terrain resists’’ (Baudry, 1992). The concept of research never was didactic; the collection of video ‘‘evidence’’ was not permitted to become the mere illustration of the researchers’ preconceptions. Video investigation was not used to ‘‘illustrate’’ linear thought, but to examine interaction(s). The research examined a chosen situation with a focus on (possible) change, but it was also committed to allowing the stakeholders to express themselves in ‘‘their own voice’’. Researchers’ assumptions remained as ‘‘bracketed’’ as possible. For instance in a project focused on (Dutch) educational policy, the researchers approached schoolteachers and principals, as well as policy makers. All were encouraged to express themselves. The viewer is confronted by contradictory claims, wherein policy makers and teachers deny the validity of each other’s statements. The research revealed conflict and the denial by each party of the other’s point of view. The researchers did not choose sides, but tried to make the interactions intelligible. Change, it was supposed, would come when (and if) the teachers and/or policy makers responded to the revealed conflicts. The influence of the Delphi methodology is to be seen in the structured pattern of reflection and discovery (Linstone and Turoff, 1975). As in the Delphi method, the research let the stakeholders speak out, without the influence of normal power relationships. For instance, the Dutch government officials chosen to comment on the problems of the Turkish ‘‘business starters’’ came from a different region from the ‘‘starters’’. Normally these persons would never meet. The officials de facto ‘‘advised’’ the ‘‘starters’’ to break Dutch (social security) law, as the only way to have a reasonable chance of succeeding in their own businesses. The Turkish businessmen were quite surprised to hear this advice coming from Dutch officialdom. In another project a variety of management styles were videoed and shown to employees in subordinate positions in other organizations. This provided very direct commentary from employees, who normally would never speak out to their own management. And it produced surprises – the rather brusque ‘‘no-nonsense’’ manager was told he seemed ‘‘trustworthy’’ and the ‘‘politically correct’’ pro-employee manager was told he was seen to be ‘‘untrustworthy’’. In another project, it emerged that senior managers knew much better how their behaviour appeared
to employees, than the researchers had imagined. And interviews with middle Video fractals: managers revealed many more misunderstandings, misperceptions and much research as mass more mistrust than had been expected. Senior management was far more media isolated from middle management than had been assumed. Top management’s grip on events was weak, thanks to the distance between it and middle management. Senior management could not get policies implemented because 69 of middle management opposition. The researchers had thought that the managerial leadership styles of senior management were determinant, but discovered that vastly different leadership styles ran up against exactly the same problems. The inability of the organization to change was not so much linked to senior management’s leadership style(s), as to the way middle management defended what it saw to be its own self-interest. Middle management would not budge. Researchers who had thought that there was a conflict between their ideas and the leadership styles of the senior management discovered that they were in agreement with senior management but had no answer to middle management’s resistance to change. For senior management, the research re-confirmed their awareness of their isolation and of the danger to them of the lack of middle management carry-through. The Delphi method assumes that data collection can lead to rational discussion, resulting in the discovery of common ground and eventually to shared decision making. It may well be characteristic of Dutch society that the researchers did not assume power relationships but rather that rational interaction can (potentially) form the basis for action. The process of collecting videoed statements, and showing them to other stakeholders for commentary, and then of showing that commentary to the original spokesperson(s), assumes a will to understand, compare and compromise. When filming in a Slovak bakery with quality control as a theme, an incident resulting in burned bread, created a crisis. Several employees were afraid that they would be fired if what everyone knew about the malfunctioning ovens was made explicit and was discussed. If one videos a work situation and the video material is shown in the same organization, one makes things explicit. The methodology of creating and analyzing data via feedback loops, assumes a common ability to face and solve (possible) problems. Video material was used in the research to elicit response via feedback loops as inspired by visual anthropology (Collier and Collier, 1986). By showing pertinent video material to the researched and asking them to explain what is happening and what this means to them, data is gained which is very rich in personal commentary. When confronted with photographic (i.e. video) material drawn from their own lifeworld and asked to comment on it, the researched consistently opened up and revealed their own point of view. An additional advantage to working with video is that the final edited product is often much more accessible for the researched than a written report would be. Turkish businessmen, on seeing the final video, exclaimed ‘‘That is us; those are our problems.’’ This is a response of recognition that a social science report could not elicit. Obviously, the video is a semiotic construct put together by a research team; but it can achieve a form of intuitive ‘‘authenticity’’ virtually
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unknown to social science text. The researchers contextualized their visual material in a way that allowed the researched to see ‘‘their own lifeworld’’. Obviously, the video material, unto itself, means nothing. How the researchers contextualize the material, that is, edit it so that it seems ‘‘to make sense’’, determines the effectiveness of the results. The ‘‘real’’ is the result of a simulated effect; this ‘‘reality effect’’ is not determined by an internal essential connection to events, but by the ability of the researchers to contextualize the data (Krauss, 1990). Video data is collected by the researchers into a pastiche, which to be successful must congeal into a pattern ‘‘which seems to make sense’’; that is a successful simulacra is produced. The video discourse succeeds when this simulacra achieves an intuitively satisfactory ‘‘reality effect’’. This deconstruction of the difference between the real and simulacra deeply threatens the epistemology of traditional researchers. Deconstruction in reverse Visual representation (photography, film, video) has had a reputation of being a virtually transparent medium. The visual ‘‘trace’’ supposedly provides trustworthy verisimilitude (Ritchin, 1990). Critics have attacked this assumption, stressing that the choice of images is the real crux to visual representation (Heritier-Auge, 1992). In video research it is crucial how the images are selected or constructed. To illustrate, an analysis of the tape A Foot Over the Precipice or Who Has to Change? This video was made by researchers who interviewed: . two foreign workers who had taken part in a ‘‘work experience program’’ (Mohammed and Boni); . a project mentor from the same project; and . the personnel director of the organization in which the project took place. The tape opens with one of the researchers sitting before a bookcase – behind him there is a TV monitor. He holds a piece of paper to which he refers while summing up the goals of the ‘‘work experience program’’. Is this meant as a parody of academic symbols, or is it a traditional display of these symbols? The researcher explains that the ‘‘work experience program’’ was launched by major companies who received a subsidy to cover one-third of the salaries of the foreign-born unemployed persons whom they took on for at least six months. The researcher implies that the companies have tried via the program to avoid demands for government monitoring of how many minority personnel they actually employ. The researcher promises that the tape will examine: . the work minorities have to do in such programs to meet employers’ demands; . the expectations (myths) the employers have about their minority personnel; and . how the minority employees experienced the work.
In the next segment, Mohammed who has been introduced as a participant in the Video fractals: ‘‘work experience program’’, is interviewed at the Polytechnic where he worked in research as mass the library. He stresses how ‘‘hospitable’’ he is and how he ‘‘welcomes’’ each person media who comes to the library. He states that he gives lots of attention to his clients and expects to receive the same sort of human warmth back again from them. He is very disappointed and does not really feel at home in his job. The library users are 71 impersonal and ‘‘cold’’. Next there is an interview with Mohammed’s Dutch mentor. He begins his interview with a list of minority employees who have given up their jobs after only a few days of work. He obviously does not expect very much of the minority unemployed when they get a job at the Polytechnic. This is followed by an interview with Boni, an Indonesian women who reports that she has had to work much harder at lower wages than a Dutch person would in the ‘‘work experience program’’. She asserts, ‘‘You have to toil more to be accepted; you have to prove yourself doubly. You have to take shorter pauses and work more resolutely than the others; otherwise the old prejudices reappear. The whispering begins: ‘What is she doing here?’ ‘Does she work hard enough?’’’ Boni wonders if she will be given a permanent job or not – she fears that all the work was for nothing. In the next segment the personnel director is shown watching the interview with Boni and commenting on it. She is annoyed at Boni’s attitude. According to the personnel director the ‘‘work experience program’’ provides the opportunity for an unemployed minority person during six months, to learn and thereby to create a position for him or herself. She argues that minority unemployed ought to grasp the opportunities that are there and not sit and wait for someone else to take care of them. Mohammed’s disappointment she sees as a cultural problem: the Dutch want efficiency and not a ‘‘host’’. For her, unemployed foreigners are persons who have not been successful on the job market and who have to learn necessary skills and adapt. When questioned, she defines the ‘‘otherness’’ of the minority population in terms of their skin color – the darker the more ‘‘other’’. Boni who is light, is much more employable than a black Ghanaian would be. The tape ends with the two researchers discussing – around a table with a glass of wine – their results. They conclude that the unemployed minorities have to work hard to keep a job while the employers do not have to do much of anything. Unemployed minorities seem to be a problem for employers who need personnel, for governments that want to reduce their welfare payments and for an economy that seeks more and more consumers. But no one is really motivated to do very much about it. The researchers accept the personnel director’s definition of ‘‘otherness’’. The more ‘‘black’’ one is the more ‘‘other’’ one is and the more ‘‘other’’ one is the less employable. Mohammed and Boni are right: minority employees are forced to adjust to Dutch demands, while receiving minimal financial rewards and little or no job security. In this video: . the minorities feel discriminated against and mis-used; . the Dutch professionals feel that the minority workers are too passive and ‘‘have a chip on their shoulder’’; and . the researchers see all of this as determined by the employers.
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Three texts have, in response to one another, been created. But these three texts do not come to grips with one another. Each text is revealing. The total lack of communication between them is even more revealing. Each member of the triad provides rich data about his/her myths of foreign workers. The feedback loops have provoked each group to reveal their simulacra of ‘‘otherness’’. All of this was focused on the hiring of unemployed members from minority groups. But the three texts do not interact – that is the ‘‘text’’ of: (1) the ‘‘exploited’’ minority employee; (2) the employer responding to minority personnel; and (3) the researchers who point to employer responsibility No one really listens to any one else; there is no dialogue. In effect this is inaction-research. Via feedback loops, each party reveals him/herself; but no one transcends his/her simulacra. Each position is hyper-real and nonnegotiable. In this tape, the researchers may have wanted to impose their point of view on the data, but they failed to do so. The researchers only form one ‘‘text’’ among three. Direct video data, even when edited, is (often) much less malleable than are written quotes or statistics drawn from interviews or questionnaires, as in traditional research. Mohammed and Boni have not accepted Dutch work norms; neither of them abides by the dominant culture’s demand for performativity or its cult of efficiency. The personnel director and mentor prioritize organizational demands above any issue of cultural diversity or respect for difference. The political choices of the researchers seem to take precedence, for them, above what the directly involved have to say. Each ‘‘reality’’ is bigger than life and incommensurable with the others. Individual commitments are sharply profiled. The research methodology reveals the differing points of view of the researched – each point of view comes through ‘‘strong and clear’’. While written research often creates what are in fact fictional ‘‘mean’’ or ‘‘average’’ statements, the video methodology highlights differences between discourses. In a concrete circumstance, such as this, there are often a very limited number of discourses. Each individual does not have his/her own discourse. This videotape revealed three distinct discourses. This was not an exceptionally simple or complex piece of research – two to four discourses appears to be normal. Video research in this form portrays each discourse as representative of a population, position or stakeholder. As already mentioned, the video dramatized the discourse(s) – a discourse, as portrayed in such a video, is not just so many words among all the rest. It is a ‘‘text’’ on which a spotlight has fallen. Video creates a focusing effect, where attention is concentrated on a speaker, text or discourse. Discourse becomes hyperreal; that is, it is made to represent a whole group or ‘‘truth’’. The ‘‘text’’ is more than just a ‘‘text’’; it represents some group’s identity, its collective aspirations and its social circumstance. Paradoxically, video research simultaneously individualizes by focusing on specific discourse, and generalizes by identifying text as representative of the group or context. The specific represents the
general and/or the abstract; the unique represents something shared. Video fractals: Mohammed and Boni as well as the researchers, the personnel worker and the research as mass mentor, are portrayed as specific unique individuals. But in the video, they also media represent hyperreal points of view. In the tape there are basically four positions; the tape is assembled like a Koch Island fractal via endless reiterations of these four basic elements (see Figure 1).
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Koch Island fractal Each discourse is transformed into an ‘‘ideal type’’ or a shared discourse. The double action of at once individualizing and generalizing happens because specific voices are heard but seem to represent (general) points of view. Such a vacillating relationship between the individual and general is characteristic of hyperreality. In hyperreality the relationship between the individual and the collective is unstable. One is never really sure if one is watching personal speech, generalized discourse or both at once. The analogy to fractals captures the paradox of a simple basic structure of a few elements, which via iteration seems to become just as complex as natural reality. In the Koch Island fractal a simple figure quickly develops from a basic geometric form into something resembling the detailed recursive jaggedness of a coastline. The fractal is made by adding a triangle, at each iteration, to the middle of every straight line. Likewise, when a simple pattern of discourse is reproduced via feedback loops in a research video, it quickly generates a complex pattern of meaning, which
Figure 1. Koch Island fractal
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seems to resemble social interaction. For instance in the video made in Slovakia on ‘‘quality’’, there were four perspectives: (1) the bottom-up perspective of the factory workers centering on their skills and on what goes wrong in the firm(s); (2) the top-down perspective of Slovak management focusing on the economic and political problems of ‘‘transition’’; (3) the point of view of the Slovak student researchers who thought that the ‘‘bottom-up’’ perspective contained a lot of ‘‘truth’’ but who wanted to impose a new ‘‘modern’’ mentality in a top-down manner; and (4) the Dutch students who wanted flat and egalitarian institutions wherein their skill set comes out the best. Through repeated use of feedback loops, the four basic positions produced an effect resembling complexity, forming a hyperreal simulacrum. In the most complex of the research videos, namely the study of Turkish ‘‘business starters’’, the simulacra is constructed from less than ten iterations. As with fractals, a fairly limited number of simple iterations quickly create a complex simulacrum. In the videos it is a simulacrum of the social and discursive lifeworld. The fractals are constructed from fragments of observation and interviews interspersed with feedback loops. The research videos are first level fractals; that is they are created from interview and observation ‘‘data’’ to which meta-level feedback or commentary is added. In second level fractals, such as Burrell’s video, texts and images are self-consciously arranged in a collage. Bourdieu questions if what I have called first level fractals really can exist. Research may be more inherently ‘‘hyperreal’’ than I have claimed. Bourdieu suggests that a rather destabilizing reversal may take place between [what I call] the ‘‘fractal’’ and the research ‘‘circumstance’’ (Bourdieu, 1965). If we assume that the researchers chose to emphasize what they thought were ‘‘significant events’’, then we have to expect that key observations, powerful statements and revealing insights have been edited into the tapes. It is, then, safe to assume that the tapes are ‘‘significant’’, in the sense that they are a selected record of what was thought to be noteworthy. But Bourdieu wonders if the images record such events; or if what we call ‘‘events’’ are in fact merely what is (can be) staged to produce images. Is something defined as a ‘‘fact’’ merely by it having been image-ized? As we have seen, the basic manipulation of video material in constructing a fractal structure, allows complex imagineizing to be achieved quite easily. The resulting simulacra or fractal generates a fantasy of ‘‘reality’’. What sort of ‘‘order’’ or ‘‘meaning’’ does image-izing produce? According to Bourdieu image-izing is a tool to achieve group integration. It generates the fantasme(s) of Turkish ‘‘business starters’’, Polish managers, minority workers, etc. etc. Video research creates images or simulacrum of social cohesion, of organizational integration and of collective reality. Bourdieu argues that image-izing has such enormous social significance because it penetrates much more deeply into society than does, for
instance, normal social science. The photographic discourse of video, Video fractals: accomplishes identity – it is much more accepted as ‘‘real’’, than for instance are research as mass intellectual texts. Video belongs to the ‘‘common man’’ in a manner that social media science does not. The ‘‘average man’’ consumes and makes images that serve as indexes and proof of identity. Image-izing is an instrument or tool for establishing the daily icons of identity. Thus, visual research is much closer to 75 society’s daily means of defining its ‘‘facts’’, than is traditional research. Since contemporary society generates ‘‘meaning’’ via TV soap operas, news-asamusement and advertising, image-izing reproduces, in effect, mass culture inside ‘‘research’’. Hereby ‘‘research’’ is threatened with the same radical implosion into simulacrum as the rest of our visual culture. Are the research videos ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘not-true’’ to ‘‘reality’’? The question is meaningless. The ‘‘real’’ of video research is a technically simulated resemblance, which achieves a reality effect. The research is a product of simulation and of the manipulation of signs. While the research is intuitively powerful and experientially rewarding for both researchers and researched, it is also epistemologically indeterminate. Thus videocy in research is a provocation because it abandons the dominating intellectual voice of the researcher and it permits an explicit invasion of media into a world traditionally reserved for ‘‘high culture’’ text. Hypercomplexity, mass media and video research Both the link to action research and to surrealism imply a (radical) critical stance. But video remains a fairly expensive research tool. Editing equipment as well as other production hardware, not to mention the needed human expertise remain scarce[2]. In my experience, graduate students do not in general have much prior experience of working with video. Thus the conditions of production are elitist. One is working with a fairly uncommon high status medium. Access to interviewees probably just for that reason, is remarkably easy. People like to be videoed. They want to be asked to appear before the camera. The research team is not just perceived as a ‘‘bunch of students’’, but as something more exclusive than that. But the temptation to choose for ‘‘BBC aesthetics’’ threatens the research process. We used video as a direct research tool; there was no script or storyboard. We were not producing modernist art films, journalistic ego documents or ‘‘advertisements for oneself’’. The cameraman could ask a question, microphones could be handed from hand to hand – the medium television was clearly kept subservient to the research goal. Researchers are tempted not to talk to the researched, or to not really observe specific circumstances, but to play-act ‘‘BBC interviewer’’. Observation and discussion, with lots of repetition and slow thematic development, is easily shunted aside for the quick takes of broadcast aesthetics. Researchers have to reject the norms of broadcast television, if they want to focus on a constructivist process of investigation. Video can be a powerful medium of observation and a stimulus for close interpretation. When pertinent videoed material is shown to the researched and
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discussed, one sees ‘‘meaning’’ being attached to circumstance. Likewise, feedback loops can reveal stakeholder positions. Broadcast television focuses on the ‘‘situation there’’ and panders to the viewers’ perspective. Video research is concerned with the ‘‘situation here’’, the researched and researcher(s) grappling with fractals of ‘‘meaning’’. Research videos can trigger a social psychological or political dynamic, which can have serious implications for those involved. For instance, the tape made in Poland focusing on in-factory circumstances, provoked everything from satisfaction and commitment, to outrage and anger. The video material was shot by managers working together with academics. Work processes, structures of responsibility and quality control were examined. The company studied was in deep crisis. Of its sales, 80 per cent had been to the former Soviet Union. It had virtually no market left and was having to reinvent itself. Much of the workforce had been dismissed, but management had been spared. The organization had become very top heavy. The product (heavy machinery) was handmade. In Germany the same product was assembly line produced. The Polish machine probably outlasted the German one many times over. But its design was 30 years out of date. Despite being made entirely by hand, the Polish machine was the less expensive one, because Polish labor costs were so low. But the Polish management knew nothing about marketing or service and therefore could not sell to the West. They thought their problem was quality. In reality their production process was minutely controlled – in fact over-controlled. And the machine was being built to very demanding ‘‘specs’’. The research plan called for the researchers to video in-company situations, in order to generate a detailed analysis of the work process. The researchers experienced the project as alien and highly threatening. Neither the Polish managers, nor the academics, thought that studying workers was normal. The research required videoing work processes and, via feedback loops, questioning workers about their activities. Workers were de facto acknowledged as ‘‘knowing’’ what goes on in the factory. The researchers needed to ‘‘ask’’ them for information. The implicit empowerment of worker discourse was unacceptable for many of the researchers. Respect for worker discourse was unwanted; worker practice they thought ought to be commanded, not heeded. The managers told us, that even when they had reorganized the labor process, they had not talked to the workers involved. And when, as in ISO 9000, they were specifically supposed to examine work practices, managers had not interacted with workers. Workers were defined as voiceless. Managerial status seemed to demand the maintenance of the hiatus between managerial control and the factory floor. In fact, the organizational structure of the factory under study provided for only one linking pin (the production manager) between management and production (or the factory floor). And this job had not been filled for two years. Examination of the factory made it clear that the skilled workforce was potentially a valuable resource. The workers’ ability to make irregular parts
and to do special orders at low prices meant that they had skills that could be Video fractals: effectively sold. But management had no such qualities. Product design, research as mass marketing, after-sales service and logistics did not meet international media standards. But, any focus that would acknowledge (however vaguely) the asset of the workers’ skills would problematize the role of management and thus was unacceptable. 77 In fact, management was willing to let the company go bankrupt before it would acknowledge its own weaknesses. Video research into the factory’s situation was, thus, highly political. Some of the researchers refused to video the production situation, to question workers or to try to clarify in-plant procedures. The politics of this video may have been extreme, but Dutch researchers have also refused to abandon the directive interview – wherein they have control over the research agenda – to take on a more observational or discussion-based approach. The ‘‘illusionary identity’’ of the video researcher – that is, she or he is acting as an interested spectator open to mutual questioning – is very threatening for some (Elsaesser, 1991). In the model of video research discussed here, researchers are engaged spectators and the researched know that they are (going to be) seen. For researchers who demand to be in control of a research process, the myth of the researcher who determines what is researched, how it is analyzed and what sort of ‘‘coherence’’ is created has to be maintained. The research model presented here is threatening for such researchers. Research fuels researcher narcissism when the researchers think they are in control. But if the researchers have to admit that they have, via feedback loops and iteration, lost control of the research process, then research becomes, for some, too threatening. If the researcher is in control the video research will (most likely) produce a researcher simulacra. But if control over the research is contested the result becomes less predictable. When video research mirrors the attitudes, positions and circumstances of the researched, it becomes less a vehicle for researcher narcissism. Video research can be a mass media product that is more voyeuristic than narcissistic. The balance between researchers and researched is problematic. In effect, video research requires a fictional ‘‘observer’’ who balances between the researchers and the researched, and who weighs the claims of the one and the other. But who observes the observer observing, etc. etc. In the videos, a disturbing trend emerges in the relationship between the researcher and the researched. The mix of identities, goals and systems is, more often than not, incoherent. In these videos, the question is implicitly posed: ‘‘What is this (problem, crisis, issue), really all about?’’ and the answer is ‘‘Really there is no answer.’’ In the video about Turkish businesses one sees: Dutch welfare workers trying to stop Turkish businessmen from becoming independent; Turkish immigrants ‘‘choosing’’ to start their own businesses who have absolutely no idea what else they could do; a welfare payment system that strangles initiative; a system of discrimination that criticizes immigrants if they are not economically successful and works against them if they became a threat to existing businesses; graduate students who want to show solidarity to
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Turkish starters but who plan to work for multinationals; and institutions with useful information but impossibly high thresholds making that information unavailable to whoever needs it. The ‘‘businessmen’’ were not really ‘‘businessmen’’; the Dutch officials who were supposed to help often could not or would not; information that was needed sometimes was and often was not available. Identity, thus, was not simple, consistent or clear. The videos show illusionary identities – policy makers who had no power, managers whose decisions are not implemented, staff who can (could) not do anything, change agents who do not want to change anything. In most of the videos, there were: . . . double-binds, where identity is coextensive with its simultaneous denial, [and that] fatally flawed all attempts at reintegration . . . and they formed the basis for a structure of selfestrangement (Elsaesser, 1991, p. 91).
The video research was born under the aegis of action research and Delphi methodology; methodologies that assume that information collecting leads to awareness and that awareness leads to action (change). But most of the videos reveal hypercomplexity wherein every position is also its opposite. The connection between ‘‘knowing’’ and ‘‘doing’’ is anything but self-evident. Social reality emerges as a self-contradictory system of relationships, contradictions and interactions; all of which hold one another in check. The systems investigated turn out to be relatively closed force fields incapable of suggesting any clear course of action. Via video research one can get sucked into circumstance and interaction, but this does not necessarily lead to problem solving. The videos are anxiety provoking when you realize that you know even less about what is to be done, after seeing them, than before. Likewise, the researchers came to realize that they knew a lot less than they had thought they did. Burrell’s videocy was spectacle without ‘‘high theory’’. It produced indeterminate relationships that challenged, teased and frustrated. Had the ‘‘author’’ disappeared in ‘‘media’’; was a critical ‘‘research perspective’’ still possible? In video research the researcher becomes the double to the Other. When the researcher interacts with the researched she or he (re-)experiences the (Lacanian) mirror phase wherein identity is created by projecting ‘‘self’’ onto ‘‘Other’’ and where ‘‘identity’’ depends on projections being reintegrated in acts of ‘‘self-formation’’. If the ‘‘self-formation’’ fails, the Other overwhelms ‘‘identity’’. Videocy plays with losing and regaining identity. In the research videos the surrogate structure(s) of ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’ keep cascading. Did the Polish academics do research into factory conditions or did the investigation center on the Polish academics’ assumptions? When the Polish researchers – because their ‘‘self’’ defined in terms of ‘‘effectiveness’’, ‘‘professionalism’’ and ‘‘in control’’ was (somehow) jeopardized – refused to accept the workers (the proposed ‘‘Other’’) into a mirror phase relationship, they created a refused ‘‘other’’ or ‘‘anOther’’. The resulting video centers on the un-reintegrated ‘‘anOther’’. Likewise the Slovak business students had no idea how to manage; the Dutch change agents were moralists with few change skills and the Dutch management students were better at deconstructing managerial jargon than at
running anything, etc. The Other – discovered via video interviews, Video fractals: observation and feedback loops – deconstructed the ‘‘self’’ and acted as a research as mass destabilizing ‘‘irritation’’. ‘‘Research’’ can avoid all this hypercomplexity by media maintaining the ‘‘specularization’’ of society wherein the ‘‘Other’’ (the researched) and the ‘‘self’’ (the researcher) are a priori defined to be who they are supposed to be (Irigaray, 1985). But in the video research, the Turkish 79 wholesalers were unemployed though they also ran small stores; the Dutch students both demonstrated solidarity to the Turkish outsiders and identified with the multinationals; the educational change agents wanted radical change and surrounded themselves by traditional academic status symbols. No one and nothing was entirely what it seemed to be. The videos are a very different sort of artifact from traditional (business or social science) reports. The video on Turkish businesses was enthusiastically received by the Turkish community, which seems to have intuitively validated it. The central European videos were viewed and discussed with bewilderment and confusion by students in ‘‘Western Europe’’. The blaming practices of the schoolteachers and administrators were analyzed in MEd courses. Research as mass media worked; the artifacts were consumed and discussed. The videos were accepted as self-enclosed microcosms to be analyzed and debated. ‘‘Videocy’’ does break with habitual practices of specularization and does make identity uncertain and researchable. But ‘‘videocy’’ also transforms research into an explicitly mass media process. The video research was more an exercise in complex ‘‘sleight of hand’’ than an affirmation of ‘‘realism’’. Most of the researchers enjoyed the hands-on sense of manipulating data. The researchers liked their experience of research-as-mass-media and as radical constructivism. The viewers appreciated the artifacts. Is research that is in this way consumerism, somehow wrong? Notes 1. Dirk Schouten, at the time lecturer at the Department of Pedagogics of the Amsterdam Polytechnic, provided expert support in video methodology to the projects I supervised. 2. Obviously video cameras are not very expensive but (professional) editing, sound and computer imaging equipment often are. References Baudrillard, (1988), An Ecstacy of Communication, Semiotext, New York, NY. Baudry, P. (1992), ‘‘Une experience unique au monde les ateliers Varan’’, CinemaAction: demain. le cimema ethnographique?, No. 64. Bourdieu, P. (1965), Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la Photographie, Editions Minuit, Paris. Burrell, G. (1993), ‘‘Eco and the Bunnymen’’, in Hassard, J. and Parker, M. (Eds), Postmodemism & Organizations, Sage, London. Collier, J. and Collier, M. (1986), Visual Anthropology, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM. Connor, S. (1989), Postmodernist Culture, Blackwell, Oxford.
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Denzin, N.K. (1991), Images of Postmodern Society. Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, Sage, London. Devereux, L. and Hillman, R. (1995), Fields of Vision, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Elsaesser, T. (1991), ‘‘Primary identification and the historical subject’’, in Bumett, R. (Ed.), Explorations in Film Theory, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Grundberg, A. (l990), ‘‘On the dissecting table’’, in Squiers, C. (Ed.), The Critical Image, Bay Press, Seattle, WA. Hassard, J. (1998), ‘‘Representing reality: cine´ma ve´rite´’’ in Hassard, J. and Holliday, R. (Eds), Organization Representation, Sage, London, pp. 41-66. Heritier-Auge, F. (1992), ‘‘Ou et quand commence une culture?’’, CinemaAction: demain, le cimema ethnographique?, No. 64. Hocking, P. (1995), Principles of Visual Anthropology, 2nd ed., Mouton de Gruyter, New York, NY. Irigaray, L. (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Krauss, R. (1990), ‘‘A note on photography and the simulacral’’, in Squiers, C. (Ed.), The Critical Image, Bay Press, Seattle, WA. Linstone, H. and Turoff, M. (Eds.) (1975), The Dephi Method, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Luhmann, N. (2000a), The Reality of the Mass Media (first published in German 1996), Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Luhmann, N. (2000b), ‘‘Why does society describe itself as postmodern?’’, in Rasch, W. and Wolfe, C. (Eds), Observing Complexity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MI, pp. 35-50. Ritchin, F. (1990), ‘‘Photojournalism in the age of computers’’, in Squiers, C. (Ed.), The Critical Image, Bay Press, Seattle, WA. Solomon-Godeau, A. (1990), ‘‘Living with contradictions’’, in Squiers, C. (Ed.), The Critical Image, Bay Press, Seattle, WA. Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, Farar Straus & Giroux, New York, NY.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm
The ‘‘presence’’ of video
The ‘‘presence’’ of video
Duska Rosenberg Royal Hollaway College, The University of London, London, UK Keywords Computers, Communications technology, Video Abstract This paper is based on the study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) making use of e-mail and video conferencing to facilitate co-operative work at a distance. Video supported contact between remote partners can permit architects, other professionals (such as the structural engineers) and on-site construction personnel, to relate to one another in real-time. Video could provide a channel of communication between remote participants and serve as an analytical tool providing a record of mediated communication. The author investigates communicative issues raised by CMC practice. The theme of ‘‘presence’’ emerges as crucial.
81 Submitted March 2001 Revised October 2001 Accepted October 2001
Introduction The information and communication technology (ICT) potential for supporting co-operative work has been a hotly debated topic in both academic and commercial circles. ICT may or may not change roles in work processes. Live on-site video may be able to redefine work processes. For instance, video at a construction site could involve architects, structural engineers, the building’s future users and other stakeholders in a new relationship of supervision and/or responsibility. Likewise, co-development and co-accountability could strengthen or weaken the role of different categories of stakeholders. Managing may be evolving from an information provider role towards an information co-ordinator role, wherein on-site management has the task of facilitating information use. As information providers, managers are expected to understand the nature of work tasks and to issue instructions on how these tasks are to be performed. As information co-ordinators, managers are expected to understand the informational needs of stakeholders, to decide what resources are required and to ensure that the information is available that the stakeholders need in order to achieve state-of-the-art performance of shared work tasks. The change in managerial roles is significant, though in practice it is often subtle and not obvious in a cursory examination. For this reason, new methods for studying change in the workplace are needed. Bearing in mind that technology-mediated communication generates data in the form of video recordings, chat logs, electronic documents and repositories of shared artefacts used to support the communication and collaboration, I have made use of all this material to study the CMC/ICT context of co-operative work. Video support for remote collaboration The investigation discussed in this article was focused on the use of multimedia communications in collaborative design. Access to the data was made possible The author would like to give special thanks to Dr Mark Perry who carried out a significant part of the fieldwork reported in this paper and also Professor John Sillince for his contribution to the discussion of the findings.
Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 15 No. 1, 2002, pp. 81-92. # MCB UP Limited, 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810210417393
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through a course run at Stanford University. The course ‘‘Computer integrated architecture, engineering, construction’’ (A/E/C) was initiated at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. It implemented a virtual learning environment that brought together the different disciplines involved in construction, through the use of network and information technologies, which were explored as mediators and facilitators for improving communication and co-operation (Fruchter et al., 1998). The course took a multi-site, cross-disciplinary, project-based and teamoriented approach to teaching and learning (Fruchter, 1998). It engaged students, faculty members, researchers and practitioners from all (the building) disciplines. In 1997/1998 the course was offered in a nationwide pilot, where the participants were geographically distributed across Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo) and Georgia Tech. The field study involved a team of A/E/C students collaborating in the design phase of a construction project. They included an architect located at Georgia Tech., an engineer, construction manager and apprentice located at Stanford. With the exception of the apprentice, all were postgraduates with between two and ten years of industrial experience. Their task was to design a building, which was ‘‘owned’’ by a ‘‘client’’ (a staff member). They were able to draw on the experience of consultants (industry-based mentors with specialist skills). The team had access to a range of technologies to aid their collaboration, including e-mail, Web editors and workspaces, desktop video-conferencing and 3D modelling software. The analysis is based on use of computer mediated communication (CMC) by the design team, which was observed while carrying out their joint design task. Two members were co-located and the third was remote. The technology that provided the communication channel was Internet based and included email and video-conferencing as part of NetMeeting. The applications needed for the design task were custom-built, but based on the CAD software normally used in architectural design. The technological platform included a dedicated telephone line, as well as desktop video capability. To all intents and purposes, the design project was as near to a real design task as possible. The design team had to work within tight deadlines and constraints, to complete the project on budget and on time to a high standard of workmanship. The setting is not necessarily a ‘‘typical’’ one for there is really no such ‘‘typical’’ situation. Design projects take many forms, each unique. But the group studied was performing activities that characterize design; that is, they had to collaborate to perform problem solving and most of the constraints that they faced are common in the industry. The non-commercial setting meant that it was possible to easily access project related information, even in what might have been commercially sensitive areas. As is common in today’s knowledge intensive workplaces, the team members were engaged in multiple tasks, the design project under study only being one component of their ongoing work. They had to manage their own time as individuals and to co-ordinate their schedules with others to arrange meetings. All had offices in separate locations, although the three team
members at Stanford had access to a computer room, resourced with high-end PCs, workstations and networking equipment. This was also where the team meetings were observed and video-recorded. The field study took place over nine weeks, as the team was performing the second phase of the design – the detail design phase – fleshing out previous work into more detailed plans. They had already been using the technology for several weeks and were now able to configure and operate it with relative ease. Natural interaction in distributed teamwork Three features of technology mediated interaction were examined: (1) the range of collaborative activities, that the technology can support; (2) the balance between accessibility and privacy of information in the video-based communication; and (3) the demands that have to be made on the collaborative technologies, if they are to fit unobtrusively into the physical (work) environment. Several key characteristics of natural interaction in the real-life workplace were taken into account. When individuals work together in groups over a period of time, some of their work will be done with others in the group and some of it will be done alone. In groups with more than two members, the individual contributions to joint tasks may very well vary. The main issue considered is – how does an individual keep in touch with what everybody else is doing, in order to proactively participate; while ensuring that they do not spend (waste) too much time passively watching and listening? Several means of supporting the grounding process in computer-mediated communication have to be considered, when taking the importance of facilitative feedback in face-to-face conversations into account. The feedback requirements in the video supported work environment were crucial. How can one ensure that awareness of the whereabouts of remote partners is established that provides both opportunities for casual encounters and for focused or pre-planned activities? In a specific communicative situation, the participants share the same collection of conversational ‘‘moves’’, that provide for facilitative feedback about what is currently going on. In a face-to-face conversational environment, such feedback is provided by naturally present clues, but in CMC the needed feedback is problematic. Special clues are needed to maintain an overall understanding of the conversation. When working together in a CMC supported environment, will the context information be rich enough for the participants to follow the conversational ‘‘moves’’? In CMC one can after-the-fact browse the transcripts of the interaction(s) to evaluate communicative effectiveness. Keeping track of the state of conversation and tracking, as well as summarising, the way shared artefacts have been acted on during interaction is possible. The importance of the video link in supporting awareness of ‘‘presence’’ and of revealing (in-)attention of remote partners was highlighted by the shortcomings of audio contact alone. In the absence of clear visual evidence
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that someone is present, remote participants have to rely on verbal mechanisms to stay abreast of each other’s activities: KC: ‘‘Hullo?’’ AC: ‘‘Hi KC. . .’’
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KC: ‘‘Hullo?’’ AC: ‘‘Hi KC. . .’’ KC: . . . ‘‘can you hear me?’’ AC: ‘‘Yes I can.’’
In this simple example, silence is seemingly interpreted as the (potential) loss of connection (for whatever reason). The only way to ensure that the connection still exists is to elicit verbal feedback from the other person – an awkward but necessary device. Another example demonstrates the failure of the audio link to provide the speaker with information about the attentiveness or behaviour of other listeners: . . . at this point KF leaps out of her chair and shoots across the room while KC is engaged in a quite detailed discussion – KC continues – not realising what she’s done. Then DS goes too. KC realised that he’s not getting any [verbal] feedback: says [direct question] – KC: ‘‘do you have any drawings for building B, alt. 1?’’ . . . <no answer> . . . any . . . AC: <pause, leans towards speakerphone> ‘‘Kate is looking for them right now’’. KC: ‘‘OK’’
An audio connection is a poor means of providing a speaker with needed feedback on the presence or absence of other participants. When KC realises that he is getting no informal feedback (such as the frequent ‘‘OK’s’’ and ‘‘Uh huh’s’’ that KF[1] usually makes), he has to make a direct formal request for confirmation that he is still connected (and this is answered by AC). Having to make direct requests for audio feedback is disruptive to the conversation because it involves a breaking away from the topic of interest and the focusing of attention on the technology, in order to resolve the connectivity issue. Cognitive effort is needed to co-ordinate ‘‘turn-taking’’ and awareness of ‘‘presence’’, disturbing the flow of the communication. Providing additional channels (of communication) to overcome these difficulties helps to solve some of the co-ordination problems. Multiple media can be used in combination with each other and they can be co-ordinated, even if distributed over different computers. In the example below, information on two screens was combined, as e-mail was available on one computer while a NetMeeting Web browser session was under way on another: KF: ‘‘OK. What else do we want to talk about? What was on our agenda? Didn’t I have some things I wanted to talk about?’’ AC: ‘‘Yeah, shall I go look on my e-mail?’’ KF: ‘‘Why don’t you do that [. . .]’’
.
Such interaction can also involve the combination of technological and nontechnological media, such as in face-to-face video coupled to the exchange of documentation on paper. Specific design problems can be posed on paper. Analogue information (e.g. a diagram) often cannot be made digital without either describing it or reading it out loud. Text was usually used to convey such information, although a whiteboard and a camera could have been used. An example follows of different technological and non-technological media being brought together with the media co-ordinated through speech and gestures: KF discusses RF’s design requirements; as she does so, AC flicks through his project file, looking for things to aid her with – at one point she asked: KF: do you have this list? AC: yeah, here GL examines the paper. KF then shows him information on the web space relating to the requirements on the sheet of paper, using the mouse to point out features, then at times, using her hands, pointing to the screen.
Social mechanisms for maintaining co-ordination can cause breakdowns in the technical mechanisms for co-ordination because they operate through different protocols that are not always complementary. The following example illustrates this: <Much talking from KC (technical); most of this refers to the PowerPoint slide that KF has made available [i.e. shared over the network via NetMeeting]. . .> KF: <working at a desk that is distant to the telephone>‘‘ask him to take control of the mouse’’. DS: ‘‘KC, KC. You can have control of the mouse if you double click on the PowerPoint presentation . . . you should be able to move the mouse around’’. <But, KC cannot. They don’t realise it, but they each have the same file open on their desktops, and think it is shared – a matter of social co-ordination overtaking the technical. KC realises this all along, but AC and DS do not. See below:> DS: ‘‘Yeah, we’re in ‘collaborate’ mode now. . .’’ KC: ‘‘. . .OK’’ DS: ‘‘. . ., so if you want to, like, direct the PowerPoint presentation, that would be good’’. KC: ‘‘I don’t think we are collaborating. . .’’ DS: ‘‘Oh, you don’t see the screen at all? You don’t see the PowerPoint file?’’. <pause> AC: ‘‘So you have the same file open, but not your own. . .’’ KC: ‘‘Yah . . . I have my own file and my own separate application’’. AC: ‘‘You have your own application, that’s the difference’’
DS and AC at one location and KC at the other have been working with and navigating through the same PowerPoint file on-screen, using verbal cues to
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coordinate their contact. They saw ‘‘the same information’’[2] without realising that they were not actually technically ‘‘sharing’’ the application. When KC wanted to use the mouse to point to something (which is possible in a networked application), the socially co-ordinated system failed (because KC could not take control of the mouse). A breakdown in the flow of the communication occurred. The participants had to (re-)co-ordinate themselves, the one to the other and to the technology, before they could return to their original discussion. The actions of both the people who are present and those who are distant have to be co-ordinated if valuable information is not to be ‘‘lost’’. Information is ‘‘lost’’ if attention is paid to one person, while another is simultaneously communicating something important. In co-present situations, information coordination is managed through visual cues and body signals. But without very rich channel(s) of communication between communicators at a distance, information coordination is much more complicated. It demands behavioural patterns of conversation management that strongly differ from the face-to-face. In the example that follows, KF’s attention is focused on the architect while the apprentice is also speaking. She (KF) appears to focus on KC the architect, and to ignore DS (the apprentice): DS: Is this in the white triangle . . . is that what he’s trying to say?
KF uses body language – holding up her hand – to stop DS, so she can focus on KC. Even though DS is silent (i.e. is using a different modality of communication than KC), KF requests him to discontinue his efforts, at least for the moment. If KF had wanted to attend to RF she would have had no easy mechanism to get KC to stop speaking. KC could not see physical actions directed to him because he was not networked to a two-way video link. The team members also used volume – both quiet and loud conversational speech – as a means of co-ordinating two different conversations – one over the telephone and the other face-to-face. In effect they made use of constraints in the technology. The telephone microphone could not pick up quiet sounds, so their whispers were not heard at the other location. They moved back and forth, towards and away from the microphone. Their ‘‘whispering’’ behaviour, while it might have been considered rude in normal society, was not visible to the distant party and so was not construed as deviant or discourteous. The next illustration shows how important the visual medium is for co-ordinating communication. This example occurred with KF and RF present and KC distant. It examines power relationships, wherein the team leader is asked to be silent by the engineer. It touches on the use of technological
mechanisms to resolve a problem in the conversational ‘‘control’’ of a distant party, something that is not easily realized without visual signals:
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Often two (parallel distant and present) communications can take place simultaneously without problems . . . but when one must take precedence [if it is deemed to be particularly important], a mechanism must allow to turn the other off/temporarily postpone it; this precedence is usually given via ‘‘virtual’’ presence – a physical action is used to cut off the ‘‘present’’ speaker – in this case KF puts up her hand to stop RF from talking. However, this can be managed in different ways – the person can just be ignored – reason: RF was giving some useful advice. If, on the other hand, KF had wanted to attend to RF, she had no easy mechanism to get KC to stop talking [without speaking to him and thereby disrupting RF’s flow of speech] – KC cannot (even if he tried) see physical actions directed to him (because he cannot see KF).
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KC cannot see the physical actions directed to him in this case, because he is not networked via a two-way video link. In the example, KF stops RF in a way that would be considered highly disrespectful and ill-mannered in a face-to-face conversation. RF appears to recognise that KC, as the distant party, requires help in the ‘‘turn taking’’ and she stops talking. KF’s ‘‘rudeness’’ does not become an issue. In circumstances where richer media had been employed or face-to-face conversation had occurred, RF’s comment would have been likely to take precedence over KC’s because she was organizationally ‘‘senior’’ to him. In this example, technology disrupted normal organisational hierarchy. Exceptional social devices have to be employed in CMC to ensure that social cohesion is not compromised. The normal structure of meetings is a major constraint when bandwidth is limited or the modalities of communication available are restricted. The following example occurred in a meeting at Stanford between the team and TN (a mentor/consultant). KC needed to be engaged in this meeting, but apparently found maintaining contact difficult: TN and AC continue talking – but KF tries to involve KC in the conversation. KF: KC . . . KC KC: hello KF: are you able to hear us? KC: KF: can you hear what Tom says? KC: no KF: no? Okay KC: KF: okay, okay. We’ll try to structure it a little better. <cut> KF: the other thing that we could do is, um, bring up issues that we can specifically address to KC, er, questions that we need to answer.
KF noticed that KC was not making a contribution (note: KF was accepted as the chair for this meeting and as team leader). KF tries to draw KC into the meeting. It appears that KC found that the meeting was too unstructured for
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him to follow what was going on. He could not maintain interest or attention for a long period of time. Structuring the meeting better, so that he knew what was being discussed and when he needed to pay close attention, allowed him to function better. The increased need for structuring is probably unnecessary in normal meetings because of the non-verbal aspects of communication, which KC did not have access to. Analysis of video data needs to look closely at why overall understanding is difficult for the user of CMC working in a mediated environment and at the effect these difficulties have on the ‘‘naturalness’’ of the interactions. Computerised real-world images, such as video and audio links provided between people at different locations, provide contextual background for communication. This is particularly important when a high degree of ‘‘presence’’ is required, for example when people are engaged in problem-solving tasks. ‘‘Presence’’ is difficult to establish and maintain in video-conferencing sessions. ‘‘State-of-the-art’’ technological platforms are perceived to be unreliable. People continuously monitor the technology link, which distracts from the purpose of the meeting, in this example jointly designing a building. A particular problem, specific to the work of engineers and architects who primarily deal with graphical forms, is that the technology only allows them to collaborate using very imprecise descriptions. Comments such as ‘‘on the left of the drawing’’ or ‘‘near the columns’’ are very vague. They did not have a simple means of referring to, or pointing at, the particular part of the structure they wanted to discuss. This may just reflect a failing on the part of the currently available software, but it was very frustrating. The participants had to spend much more time reviewing and checking whether other participants understood what they meant, to ensure that breakdowns did not occur in communication and to repair damage from misunderstandings, than they would in face-to-face contact. They appear to have become quite skilled at this. But enhancing the richness of the video environment would provide better possibilities for supporting mediated communication and collaboration. Such enhancements could improve the working environment; video images alone often fail to make the circumstances sufficiently visible. It is often unclear what the remote person is doing, at any given time. For example, a video camera placed on top of a monitor can show a person working at the computer. It does not, however, give enough information to know whether or not the person can be interrupted. A symbolic representation of the person’s role in the social space could show what he or she is doing without unnecessary detail or unwelcome intrusion. As virtual reality (VR) increasingly offers abstract and symbolic representations of personal and social spaces, it will become able to increase the amount of contextual information. Precise visualisations of people’s actions and intentions will provide additional contextual clues; all of which will contribute to the enriched visibility needed to establish and maintain ‘‘presence’’. In the everyday social world, rich contextual information is provided, permitting people to co-ordinate their perspectives on whatever problems or tasks they are working on. Normally the context includes both the physical
space wherein people interact and the social relationships they form. People pick up relevant clues unconsciously from many sources. In spoken language, not only do words have meaning, but also the tone of voice. Body language, gestures, facial expressions, position and orientation all add contextual information, which helps people to understand what is said and what is meant. Gestures impart meaning to verbal information; the information conveyed by gestures can clarify the information carried by the verbal channel. An example: In the meeting, KF and GL are discussing various design solutions; KF asks GL a question: GL: Yeah, OK, ah, you gotta have some . . . KF: OK. . . GL: I’m try, try, searching for justification . . . I personally wouldn’t . . . . . . would want to make that positive.
This interaction could not be captured in an audio link alone. Hand signals in this case, clearly demonstrate the lack of certainty in the information that GL is giving. The verbal information does carry this, but it is emphasized by the visual clues. Attribution of certainty in the information is critical. In design one oscillates between information that is ‘‘known’’ (‘‘facts’’) and more ‘‘fuzzy’’ (speculative or guessed) information. It is important for understanding that the distinction is clearly made as to what sort of information the speaker is trying to communicate. Listeners need to know whether information is a design imperative or a resource for design with potential (but not absolute) application. Of course, similar uses of gesture occur in the world outside of engineering, but the nature of the design process – oscillating between illformed and well-formed problems – makes it of particular importance. The visual channel provides a means of adding context by helping participants to make the leap from what the other person is saying, to what they mean. How this adds to team understanding is illustrated below: The team have just managed to make a visual (one way) connection from KC to Stanford; they can see KC and share documents with him via NetMeeting: RF: OK, so let’s go to, oh! Let me share, . . . er . . . so let’s share Netscape . . . I can see you sooo clear! KC: . . . Yeah? RF: . . . Perfect, just perfect. This is excellent. <sotto voice – cannot be heard by KC, for the benefit of the others present in the room> . . . and let me take his . . . Ah, cool! AC: What is the name of your file KC? KC: I sent email just a moment, I will get my . . . RF: <smiles, leans over to KF, and points to the screen> I see, this time, now we understand what he is doing. When he says ‘‘just a moment’’, he left! This is very good . . . he’s just going over to some other workspace . . . to pick up things. Oh my! KF: Yes, you can see him . . . RF: at the other end of the room. OK. Well, KC, now we see your world, we can understand . . . what’s going on at Georgia Tech? KC: Can you see me? RF: Yes. We can see you. Al’right! This is very good.
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[. . . cut . . . and later . . .] KF: I think we have it, KC <pause, she glances at KC’s video image> I think he’s walking around. RF: This is really good! [. . . cut . . . they look at the drawing]
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RF: Very good KC. Can you hear us? Hello, KC? <She looks at KC’s video image> AC: He’s coming RF: KC! KF: RF: . . . come back to the phone!
With visual cues provided by KC’s camera, the team at Stanford could discover why KC’s voice tended to fade away at various times and why he occasionally did not answer the audio link. They had assumed that the problem was due to a faulty connection, but it was a product of KC moving about. Knowing when KC was present, allowed the team to speak to KC when he was able to answer back. Analysis of video environments Understanding communication in a video environment requires attention to the contextual clues that such an environment provides. It is necessary to analyse the dialogic structure and organisation of the communicative events with attention for: . how contact is made and maintained; . what is made visible; and . the characteristics of the shared (physical and social) environment. Furthermore, attention is required for contextual clues, such as changes in participants’ physical orientation, posture or uses of space that punctuate transitions in interaction. With such parameters, one can analyse the chat logs of the ‘‘architecture experiment’’, comparing the organisation of events in the video supported environment with those in face-to-face environments. Such analysis reveals that the initial process of establishing contact takes considerably longer in the CMC environment than in the traditional one. The video supported environment does not seem to provide enough information to be able to successfully orient oneself and to navigate efficiently through the communicative space of the interactive cooperative work. In the video supported work environment, a combination of methods is needed to monitor the actions of others, but these methods all cost time and energy. Thy do provide the researcher with ample data about the interactions occurring during task performance. They included: . File logging. The computer logging files record when and for how long on-line communication takes place. The chat logs show what communication took place via computer-supported data networks, as opposed to via normal social networks.
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Video data. Video cameras collect information about how collaborators use their working environment (space) in their communication with others. Observation. Observation provides background information about ongoing activities that the file logging and/or video recording do not explore.
The usage patterns of the CMC reveal that the technology-mediated workplace is very problematic[3]. The unreliability of ‘‘presence’’ – that is, is the ‘‘other’’ present, is the ‘‘other’’ attending to what is said, which ‘‘other’’ has been addressed – destabilizes the work relations. In contrast to what Zuboff argued, the new technologies are very imperfect and instead of focusing attention on abstract work processes, distract awareness as participants have to attend to problems in the communicative process (Zuboff, 1988). Audio and video channels do not seem to be powerful enough to facilitate natural interaction. Problems with visibility are frequent, even when reception is good, seemingly because the feedback about the other’s actions is (very) incomplete. Silence is experienced as ambiguous – it can mean that the connection has been broken or that the other is concentrating on a task. Absence from the visual video field is difficult to interpret, which (in particular) influences uses of video. Compensatory mechanisms, such as verbal exchanges seeking confirmation of ‘‘presence’’ or attention, take up a significant proportion of the conversational effort. A variety of media can be used in combination to augment the visibility of participants; two or more computers can be used, one with a shared screen for synchronous communication and the other for asynchronous e-mail, but these measures are cumbersome. Co-ordination of the different media involves the use of verbal cues to signal which information needs to be shared and when. The co-ordination of different team members is even more difficult to achieve, since both co-located and remote participants have to be co-ordinated. Difficulties arise from the limitations of the technology channels in enabling sufficient awareness of ‘‘presence’’. Video conferencing does not support sufficiently finely detailed visual clues and gestures. Rather, unwieldy strategies of conversation management are often needed to control the turn taking, to repair breakdowns in communication and to synchronize attention. It is possible that co-ordination mechanisms will be developed that compensate for the limitations of video conferencing. Video environments may come to include additional communication channels in which significant conversational clues – such as direction of gaze, body posture, nature of gestures and other visual clues – are symbolically represented. But these solutions make interaction more complicated and make it more difficult to manage. CMC does not seem to provide the hoped-for positive impetus to networked cooperation with increased flexibility. The attractiveness of CMC supported interaction was to be the paradoxical achievement at once of diversity and cohesion. Supposedly small organizations with all the advantages of strong social bonds and ad hoc-racy would be networked into larger cooperative networks,
The ‘‘presence’’ of video
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achieving all the advantages of scale. Video would provide the visual context for cooperation and CMC supported cooperation would make on-site expert advice in real-time, available. But multi-modal communication, enabled by video-conferencing, is not a managerial panacea; unable to guarantee a sufficiently strong sense of ‘‘presence’’, it often unravels.
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Notes 1. The initialled names relate to the following people: KC – architect, located at Georgia Tech, and only accessible via NetMeeting and the telephone both by the team and researcher; KF – engineer, present; AC – construction manager, present; DS – apprentice (responsible for technology maintenance), present; RF – team leader (also, the technology expert), present. 2. Or at least believed they had because there had been no ‘‘breakdown’’ in understanding, demonstrating that they were not viewing the same information. 3. This is done as part of the EU Framework V project SANE (Sustainable Accommodation for the New Economy). References Fruchter, R. (1998), ‘‘Roles of computing in P/5/BL: problem-, project-, product-, process-, and people-based learning’’, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design and Manufacturing, Vol. 12, pp. 65-7. Fruchter, R., Reiner, K., Leifer, L. and Toye, G. (1998), ‘‘VisionManager: a computer environment for design evolution capture’’, CERA: Concurrent Engineering: Research and Application Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1. Zuboff, S. (1988), In the Age of the Smart Machine, Heineman, London. Further reading Devlin, K. and Rosenberg, D. (1996), Language at Work, Analyzing Communication in the Workplace to Inform System Design, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA. Gumpertz, J. and Hymes, D. (Eds) (1972), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, Holt Rinehart Winston, New York, NY. Heath, C.C. (1986), Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hughes, J., Prinz, W., Rodden, T. and Schmidt, K. (1997), ‘‘ECSW97’’, Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York, NY. Kendon, A. (1990), Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pinker, S. (1995), The Language Instinct, Harper Perennial, New York, NY. Rogers, Y. (1993), ‘‘Coordinating computer-mediated work’’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Vol. 1, pp. 295-315. Rosenberg, D., Perry, M., Leevers, D. and Farrow, N. (1997), ‘‘People and information finder – an informational perspective, PICT/COST A4’’, The Social Shaping of Multimedia, Vol. 4. Rosenberg, D. (1997), ‘‘Libraries as information environments’’, in Zeitlyn, D. and Bex, J. (Eds), Libraries without Numbers, Special Issue of Education for Information Science. Saville-Troike, M. (1992), The Ethnography of Communication, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Note from the publisher Welcome to the 2002 volume of Journal of Organizational Change Management. For this new volume the journal has a new look. This is aimed at achieving a brand identity for all the titles which make up the Emerald fulltext database. This database is now available in around 800 universities worldwide and this is having a significant impact on the readership of JOCM. Here are some statistics: .
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Between July 2001 (the launch of the new Emerald Web site) and December 2001 this journal experienced a total of 146,428 hits. This involves readers accessing the journal contents, abstracts and full journal articles. During the same period there were 38,040 downloads of articles from JOCM. Readers from 116 countries accessed JOCM material during this period – with the most active countries being the UK, USA and Australia.
If you are thinking of writing an article for inclusion in JOCM you can be assured of a truly worldwide distribution. Forthcoming in this journal The next issue of JOCM is a special issue entitled ‘‘Resistance and readiness in organizational change’’ guest edited by Kevin C. Wooten of the University of Houston – Clear Lake, USA. Articles in this issue will include: .
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‘‘Resistance and the background conversations of change’’. This paper proposes that resistance to change is a function of the background conversations that are ongoingly being spoken and which create the context for both the change initiative and the responses to it. ‘‘When problem solving prevents organizational learning’’. The authors of this paper propose that research on problem solving behavior can provide critical insight into mechanisms through which organizations resist learning and change. ‘‘Case study: identifying resistance in managing change’’. This article examines stakeholder attitudes about change and resistance to change in a management initiative within the US State Department. ‘‘Organizational diagnostics: integrating qualitative and quantitative methodology’’. In this work the challenge to apply theory in the practice of organizational change management is addressed in the context of a field setting.
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‘‘Crafting a change message to create transformational readiness’’. The authors describe how they used various change message components to help an organization create readiness for a major reorganization. ‘‘Development of a measure to assess organizational change’’. This piece discusses the use of the act frequency approach methodology to develop and validate a measure of organizational support of revolutionary change.
Literati Club Our author relations service – the Literati Club – provides services and support for those authors who publish with an Emerald journal. It is a tangible expression of commitment by a publisher to its authors and Editors – we offer support and resources for all Emerald contributors worldwide. For further information about the Literati Club please see www. emeraldinsight.com/authors/index.htm. For further information about JOCM please see www.emeraldinsight.com/jocm.htm
