Traditional management accounting history as been fixated on a search for origins, on the questio... more Traditional management accounting history as been fixated on a search for origins, on the questions of who did what first, and when. Preoccupied with invention, rather than with diffusion and application, writings in this genre have been rich in narrative terms but they have neglected to explore the important linkages between phases of accounting development and their socioeconomic context. Given the belief that this perceived deficiency needs to be addressed, then the recent marriage between accounting antiquarianism and the doctrines of liberal economics constitutes a definite theoretical advance. Premised on the notion that changes in the forms of business organisation and control systems are driven by searches for efficiency in competitive environments, accounting development is seen as an integral part of this evolutionary process. Johnson and Kaplan's Relevance Lost (1987) is the most thorough-going exemplar to date of this new tradition. Given the impact of this work there are good reasons for subjecting its historical and theoretical adequacy to close scrutiny. In conformity with their evolutionary model, Johnson and Kaplan portray the initial phases of cost accounting development as a steady accretion of knowledge and technique achieved by practicing engineers and managers in their searches for efficiency. As a result of this process, they argue, virtually all contemporary techniques of management accounting were in operational use by about 1920. Johnson and Kaplan then depart from their basic evolutionary model to argue that many of the achievements of this " Golden Age " have subsequently been stifled by the influences of financial reporting and academic teaching. Accounting information systems of questionable relevance are said to be used in a mechanical fashion by a generation of American executives brought up to manage " by the numbers. " This, in turn, is held responsible for a decline in the international competitiveness of American businesses, especially in relation to the Japanese. Despite the respect in which Johnson and Kaplan's work must be held, the argument of this paper is that their theory is flawed, their history partial and some of their prescriptions neglectful of the socioeconomic conditions on which the achievements of the 1920s depended. In contrast to the social harmony and self-equilibrating behaviour of individuals, firms and markets assumed in the transaction cost framework employed by Johnson and Kaplan, many of the historical events used to argue the thesis of Relevance Lost are better understood through a " labour process " approach to economic and industrial history. The core presupposition of this perspective is that social and economic conflicts arising from the modes of control which characterise particular phases of capitalistic development stimulate the creation of new forms of control intended to eliminate or accommodate resistance and to solve the associated problems of profitability. These new forms of control, in turn, decay, partly because their competitive advantage disappears as a consequence of their generalisation and partly because they give rise to new contradictions and forms of resistance. Thus a labour process approach, in contrast to one utilising transaction cost theory, stresses crisis rather than continuity; contradiction rather than internal consistency; social and political conflict rather than harmony; the monopoly power of corporations rather than self-equilibrating competitive markets, patterns of class formation in specific economies rather than an atomised view of the individual; and human agency in its cultural and institutional setting rather than economistic reductionism. A re-examination, along these " labour process " lines, of Johnson and Kaplan's chosen exemplars of efficiency-driven development indicates that mid 19 th century cost accounting systems were employed to intensify labour in response to increased competition as well as to stimulate searches for efficiency. Because some of the usages of accounting information depended upon a lack of resistance from organised labour, it is by no means accidental that Johnson and Kaplan's apogee of management accounting
It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19 th century Paris involved... more It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19 th century Paris involved the creation of a system of collaboration between dealer and critic. This dealer-critic system prospered because it offered aspirant dealers and young artists a means of overcoming the barriers to entry into the art market. This paper argues that the system has imperatives of its own which are independent of those which brought it into being, principally that the works in which it deals and the critical vocabularies through which they are promoted must be distinctive. Thus a pressure to innovate is built into the dealer-critic system and this may be a contributory factor behind proliferation of movements and manifestos which have characterised the art world from the late 19 th century onwards.
Abstract: Design is more than an individual act of creation, it is also defined by extended negot... more Abstract: Design is more than an individual act of creation, it is also defined by extended negotiations between designer and client. Expressed as differences of opinion on trial designs, the need for such negotiations stems from different conceptions of the role and possibilities of design. Negotiation between client and designer is conventionally presented as the means by which the end result (design) is achieved. In this paper, we take a different view, arguing that design can be seen as a medium through which broader relationships ...
Materials at High Temperatures Vol. 24, No. 1 pp. 1-26, 2007
Inelastic stress analysis would be totally impractical without simplified mathematical models of ... more Inelastic stress analysis would be totally impractical without simplified mathematical models of the behaviour of structural materials. Naturally these should be as accurate as possible; they should, for instance, display a Bauschinger effect in time-independent plasticity.
Existing attempts to do this do not appear to be wholly adequate and a new material behaviour model is proposed here. On the available evidence it appears to represent plasticity more accurately than previous models.
The extension of the proposed behaviour model to include time dependent effects is discussed briefly.
Apart from a few brief remarks which broadly equate emancipation with the negative freedom of lib... more Apart from a few brief remarks which broadly equate emancipation with the negative freedom of liberal individualism, critical management studies (CMS) has had remarkably little to say on what emancipation might mean. With one or two exceptions, it has also proved reluctant to name management itself as a primary source of the oppressions against which its emancipatory project is directed. In combination, these omissions leave it unclear how far the CMS concept of emancipation differs from the freedom of neo-liberalism. As a first-pass response to this state of affairs, this paper explores the interconnections and incompatibilities between the negative freedom of personal autonomy and the positive freedom of collective self-determination, concluding that each creates difficulties for the other. There follows a consideration of how far a concept of emancipation can be consistent with social inequality, observing that the relationship can vary from mere constraint (each places limits on the other) to near-synonymy (as when an oppressed group achieves the status of the general population). The paper then proceeds to a consideration of social inequality. It is first noted that the tendency to think in terms of a map of the social order obscures the fact that social inequalities are produced by human action, albeit as a (largely) unintended consequence. The paper uses the case of growing inequalities in universities to argue that the connection between action and consequence might usefully be analysed by considering inequality as the output of a system whose internal relationships deflect human motives so as to produce inequality as an outcome. The final section of the paper uses David Lockwood’s distinction between social integration and system integration to defend this approach against the usual objections to functionalism.
This paper discusses aspects of the ‘emancipatory project’ of critical management studies. It doe... more This paper discusses aspects of the ‘emancipatory project’ of critical management studies. It does so through a consideration of the implications of Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott’s 1992 proposal that the concept of emancipation can be usefully employed within critical management and organizational studies. After questioning Alvesson and Willmott’s engagement with critical theory, it is pointed out that both approaches – the critical theoretical original and Alvesson and Willmott’s proposed revision - fail to consider the organizational practicalities of emancipatory struggle within capitalist society. In Alvesson and Willmott’s case, this failure is compounded by their reluctance to acknowledge that most of the unfreedoms with which emancipatory struggle is confronted in the workplace originate with management itself, and that ‘micro-emancipation’ within such a social order must therefore entail, at the very least, a recognition of rights by management. These issues suggest that contemporary critical management studies might be usefully augmented by the substantial literature on workplace organizing, collective bargaining and worker democracy.
ephemera Volume 8, Number 4 (December 2008), pp. 457-488
The purpose of this paper is to question the standards of scholarship now current in the discipli... more The purpose of this paper is to question the standards of scholarship now current in the discipline of organization studies. It does so through a close-reading of a paper which has a fair claim to seminal status, since it is widely cited within the literature, is described as seminal in a number of recent contributions and is included in Mats Alvesson’s Classics in Critical Management Studies (2011). The paper is Knights and Morgan’s Foucaultian analysis of strategic management (1991) and the present analysis is best read with that text to hand.
Read in detail, Knights and Morgan’s paper turns out to be deficient in almost every respect. Their claim that strategic management needs to be understood as a discourse which ‘constitutes the subjectivities’ of its practitioners amounts to an innovative of terminology only, since there is no suggestion as to what kind of evidence might distinguish that process from the conventional acquisition of technique. Their proposed history of the origins of strategic management does not fit the historical record. Their claims to theoretical and methodological advances over previous major works in the field are not substantiated and depend in any case on serious misrepresentations of those works. They present a drastically one-sided account of Foucault’s views on power, the application of which to strategic management is claimed as one of their major innovations. The one positive and original thing they have to say about strategic management – that it confers psychological benefits on those who practice it (‘power effects’) – is supported neither by evidence nor convincing argument.
The analysis then proceeds to a 1995 paper by the same authors on the introduction of strategic approaches to IT and product management in a life insurance company. Interesting as a conventional narrative, the notable absence of ‘constituted subjectivities’, ‘power effects’ and, indeed, of any mention of Foucault in this study is primae facia evidence of the complete irrelevance of the ‘genealogical’ approach advocated in the 1991 paper. This conclusion is reinforced by two recent papers which claim to have provided empirical support for the original Foucaultian approach. Neither of them achieve anything of the kind.
The analysis concludes by suggesting that Knights and Morgan’s 1991 paper continues to be cited in despite of its evident shortcomings because of the feverish intellectual climate which now prevails within organizational studies. Under pressure to produce innovative work in fields dominated by established reputations, young researchers may be attracted to any intellectual direction which promises to subvert those reputations and so provide space for new models of academic distinction. This, it is suggested, is the true nature of Knights and Morgan’s achievement, and it is one which may account for the failure of the academic community to take due note of the deficiencies of their work. In this sense it may be symptomatic of a discipline in which standards of scholarship have been eroded in a frantic search for novelty.
Chapter in Myth and the Market. Ed. Norah Campbell, John Desmond, James Fitchett, Donncha Kavanagh, Pierre McDonagh, Aidan O’Driscoll, Andrea Prothero. Dublin. UCD Business School, University College Dublin: pp.365-374 , Jun 2014
Pursuant to a deregulatory project inherited from the Thatcher and New Labour administrations, th... more Pursuant to a deregulatory project inherited from the Thatcher and New Labour administrations, the UK’s Coalition government is now making a particular target of what Prime Minister Cameron has called, ‘the health and safety monster’. The rationale appears to be two-fold: that the present system of health and safety regulation, in conjunction with a ‘compensation culture’ created by ambulance-chasing lawyers, imposes an administrative workload which is both costly in itself and which additionally inhibits, or distracts from entrepreneurial activity. Successive enquiries into this ‘burden’ have failed to confirm either contention. The ‘entrepreneurial suppression’ thesis remains entirely conjectural whilst government calculations of the compliance costs saved by scrapping particular regulations show them to minor relative to the costs of the activities regulated. This is the case even though the calculations ignore any benefits which might accrue from improved record-keeping and any ‘displacement effect’ whereby costs are externalized onto employees and the public rather than saved. Faced with these inconvenient findings, the government’s fall-back position is that the claimed adverse economic consequences are the function of a perception of excessive regulation, irrespective of any basis which this might have in fact.
On this view of the matter, the logical policy would be to work with the Health and Safety Executive’s ‘Myth-Buster’s Panel’ to challenge the mythos of rampant ‘elf ‘n safety’ perpetrated by certain elements of the UK media. Instead, government spokespersons have chosen to recycle the anecdotes on which this feeds in justification of the removal of actual regulations. This suggests that the supposed economic benefits of deregulation are not the real issue, that health and safety protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of the small state and an essentially Hayekian moral order.
The theory that the contemporary self is largely constituted in the sphere of consumption has bec... more The theory that the contemporary self is largely constituted in the sphere of consumption has become something of an orthodoxy in recent years. Against this view, it is argued that there are many areas of consumption in which taste has become commodified as a kind of expertise. The creation of a market for this expertise depends on a ‘disabling professionalism’ (Illich, 1977) which undermines the individual’s confidence in, and capacity for, independent judgment. The result is an alienation of consumption in which its immediate use-value is subordinated to an exchange value which Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’. In the process consumption loses its capacity to express the individual’s species-being, becoming objectified instead as a medium of social stratification.
The means by which disabling professionalism undermines its clients’ confidence in their own taste are illustrated by two vignettes, The first is from the collecting of art at the millionaire level and the second from interior decoration at the level of the suburban semi-detached. In both cases the outcome is an alienation of consumption in that the tastes expressed are not the clients’ own.
As a prolegomenon to this argument, the paper begins by arguing that the concept of alienation can be defended from its critics by redefining it as an impairment of the capacity for collective intentionality. Whereas consumption possesses a potential for collective intentionality, this is negated when it is objectified as the exchange value which Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’. In Distinction, however, Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital as deriving from the practices of an ‘aristocracy of culture’ is unconvincing. As an alternative it is suggested that cultural capital is the product of alliances between cultural producers, critics, educators and commercial interests. It is these agencies which employ the tactics of disabling professionalism in the commodification of taste and in doing so, are responsible for an alienation of consumption.
International Journal of Literature and Art. Nov 2013. pp. 15-21, 2013
It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19th century Paris involved ... more It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19th century Paris involved the creation of a system of collaboration between dealer and critic. This dealer-critic system prospered because it offered aspirant dealers and young artists a means of overcoming the barriers to entry into the art market. This paper argues that the system has imperatives of its own which are independent of those which brought it into being, principally that the works in which it deals and the critical vocabularies through which they are promoted must be distinctive. Thus a pressure to innovate is built into the dealer-critic system and this may be a contributory factor behind proliferation of movements and manifestos which have characterised the artworld from the late 19th century onwards.
Abstract
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and... more Abstract Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves. In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination. The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed. The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation. The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
Abstract
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications... more Abstract
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications addressed to questions of identity bears witness to the continuing attractions of the concept(s) as a means of discovering theoretical significance in fieldwork data. As with all well-established research paradigms, ‘standing in the field’ has congealed into a form of social capital which depends for its value on the suppression of doubt concerning its presuppositions and procedures. This paper seeks to re-activate those doubts in the particular case of ‘soft identity’ theorised as the processual outcome of the play of discourse. In order to allow the approach a fair hearing, it is examined in situ, through a close-reading of a particularly competent and sophisticated example - Thomas and Linstead’s (2002) study of middle managers.
The major conclusion is that Thomas and Linstead (2002) were able to discover the processes of discursive identity formation in their interviews only by claiming that certain words or phrases 1) showed that the interviewees were ‘drawing upon’ particular discourses and 2) that the same words or phrases also signified that their identities had changed correspondingly. Contrary to the authors’ laudable intention to respect the authorship of their interviewees, moreover, this self-validating procedure also had the effect of symptomising their utterances. Clearly expressed worries about the pressures of work and the possibility of redundancy were interpreted as indications of an interplay between discourse and identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that the pressures to subject lay utterances to comparatively exotic interpretations of this kind are endemic to the situation of the academic researcher and that the tendency to locate agency in discourse may have its origins in the lived experience of academia.
Thomas, Robyn and Alison Linstead (2002) Losing the Plot? Middle Managers and Identity. Organization 9(1) 71-93"
Accounting, Organizations and Society, Jan 1, 1985
Abstract
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants... more Abstract
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants and other financial specialists relative to other professions. It is argued that a key to understanding this is the extent of the adoption of each profession’s characteristic strategy for controlling labour. Animated by a desire for collective mobility within the management hierarchies of large corporations, it is shown that engineers, accountants and personnel specialists have all sought to advance by developing, from their original specialised techniques, relatively comprehensive strategies for controlling labour. It is also argued that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the functionalism of many accounts of changes in the mode of control of the labour process which seek to explain later forms of control solely in terms of the problems encountered with earlier forms.
Traditional management accounting history as been fixated on a search for origins, on the questio... more Traditional management accounting history as been fixated on a search for origins, on the questions of who did what first, and when. Preoccupied with invention, rather than with diffusion and application, writings in this genre have been rich in narrative terms but they have neglected to explore the important linkages between phases of accounting development and their socioeconomic context. Given the belief that this perceived deficiency needs to be addressed, then the recent marriage between accounting antiquarianism and the doctrines of liberal economics constitutes a definite theoretical advance. Premised on the notion that changes in the forms of business organisation and control systems are driven by searches for efficiency in competitive environments, accounting development is seen as an integral part of this evolutionary process. Johnson and Kaplan's Relevance Lost (1987) is the most thorough-going exemplar to date of this new tradition. Given the impact of this work there are good reasons for subjecting its historical and theoretical adequacy to close scrutiny. In conformity with their evolutionary model, Johnson and Kaplan portray the initial phases of cost accounting development as a steady accretion of knowledge and technique achieved by practicing engineers and managers in their searches for efficiency. As a result of this process, they argue, virtually all contemporary techniques of management accounting were in operational use by about 1920. Johnson and Kaplan then depart from their basic evolutionary model to argue that many of the achievements of this " Golden Age " have subsequently been stifled by the influences of financial reporting and academic teaching. Accounting information systems of questionable relevance are said to be used in a mechanical fashion by a generation of American executives brought up to manage " by the numbers. " This, in turn, is held responsible for a decline in the international competitiveness of American businesses, especially in relation to the Japanese. Despite the respect in which Johnson and Kaplan's work must be held, the argument of this paper is that their theory is flawed, their history partial and some of their prescriptions neglectful of the socioeconomic conditions on which the achievements of the 1920s depended. In contrast to the social harmony and self-equilibrating behaviour of individuals, firms and markets assumed in the transaction cost framework employed by Johnson and Kaplan, many of the historical events used to argue the thesis of Relevance Lost are better understood through a " labour process " approach to economic and industrial history. The core presupposition of this perspective is that social and economic conflicts arising from the modes of control which characterise particular phases of capitalistic development stimulate the creation of new forms of control intended to eliminate or accommodate resistance and to solve the associated problems of profitability. These new forms of control, in turn, decay, partly because their competitive advantage disappears as a consequence of their generalisation and partly because they give rise to new contradictions and forms of resistance. Thus a labour process approach, in contrast to one utilising transaction cost theory, stresses crisis rather than continuity; contradiction rather than internal consistency; social and political conflict rather than harmony; the monopoly power of corporations rather than self-equilibrating competitive markets, patterns of class formation in specific economies rather than an atomised view of the individual; and human agency in its cultural and institutional setting rather than economistic reductionism. A re-examination, along these " labour process " lines, of Johnson and Kaplan's chosen exemplars of efficiency-driven development indicates that mid 19 th century cost accounting systems were employed to intensify labour in response to increased competition as well as to stimulate searches for efficiency. Because some of the usages of accounting information depended upon a lack of resistance from organised labour, it is by no means accidental that Johnson and Kaplan's apogee of management accounting
It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19 th century Paris involved... more It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19 th century Paris involved the creation of a system of collaboration between dealer and critic. This dealer-critic system prospered because it offered aspirant dealers and young artists a means of overcoming the barriers to entry into the art market. This paper argues that the system has imperatives of its own which are independent of those which brought it into being, principally that the works in which it deals and the critical vocabularies through which they are promoted must be distinctive. Thus a pressure to innovate is built into the dealer-critic system and this may be a contributory factor behind proliferation of movements and manifestos which have characterised the art world from the late 19 th century onwards.
Abstract: Design is more than an individual act of creation, it is also defined by extended negot... more Abstract: Design is more than an individual act of creation, it is also defined by extended negotiations between designer and client. Expressed as differences of opinion on trial designs, the need for such negotiations stems from different conceptions of the role and possibilities of design. Negotiation between client and designer is conventionally presented as the means by which the end result (design) is achieved. In this paper, we take a different view, arguing that design can be seen as a medium through which broader relationships ...
Materials at High Temperatures Vol. 24, No. 1 pp. 1-26, 2007
Inelastic stress analysis would be totally impractical without simplified mathematical models of ... more Inelastic stress analysis would be totally impractical without simplified mathematical models of the behaviour of structural materials. Naturally these should be as accurate as possible; they should, for instance, display a Bauschinger effect in time-independent plasticity.
Existing attempts to do this do not appear to be wholly adequate and a new material behaviour model is proposed here. On the available evidence it appears to represent plasticity more accurately than previous models.
The extension of the proposed behaviour model to include time dependent effects is discussed briefly.
Apart from a few brief remarks which broadly equate emancipation with the negative freedom of lib... more Apart from a few brief remarks which broadly equate emancipation with the negative freedom of liberal individualism, critical management studies (CMS) has had remarkably little to say on what emancipation might mean. With one or two exceptions, it has also proved reluctant to name management itself as a primary source of the oppressions against which its emancipatory project is directed. In combination, these omissions leave it unclear how far the CMS concept of emancipation differs from the freedom of neo-liberalism. As a first-pass response to this state of affairs, this paper explores the interconnections and incompatibilities between the negative freedom of personal autonomy and the positive freedom of collective self-determination, concluding that each creates difficulties for the other. There follows a consideration of how far a concept of emancipation can be consistent with social inequality, observing that the relationship can vary from mere constraint (each places limits on the other) to near-synonymy (as when an oppressed group achieves the status of the general population). The paper then proceeds to a consideration of social inequality. It is first noted that the tendency to think in terms of a map of the social order obscures the fact that social inequalities are produced by human action, albeit as a (largely) unintended consequence. The paper uses the case of growing inequalities in universities to argue that the connection between action and consequence might usefully be analysed by considering inequality as the output of a system whose internal relationships deflect human motives so as to produce inequality as an outcome. The final section of the paper uses David Lockwood’s distinction between social integration and system integration to defend this approach against the usual objections to functionalism.
This paper discusses aspects of the ‘emancipatory project’ of critical management studies. It doe... more This paper discusses aspects of the ‘emancipatory project’ of critical management studies. It does so through a consideration of the implications of Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott’s 1992 proposal that the concept of emancipation can be usefully employed within critical management and organizational studies. After questioning Alvesson and Willmott’s engagement with critical theory, it is pointed out that both approaches – the critical theoretical original and Alvesson and Willmott’s proposed revision - fail to consider the organizational practicalities of emancipatory struggle within capitalist society. In Alvesson and Willmott’s case, this failure is compounded by their reluctance to acknowledge that most of the unfreedoms with which emancipatory struggle is confronted in the workplace originate with management itself, and that ‘micro-emancipation’ within such a social order must therefore entail, at the very least, a recognition of rights by management. These issues suggest that contemporary critical management studies might be usefully augmented by the substantial literature on workplace organizing, collective bargaining and worker democracy.
ephemera Volume 8, Number 4 (December 2008), pp. 457-488
The purpose of this paper is to question the standards of scholarship now current in the discipli... more The purpose of this paper is to question the standards of scholarship now current in the discipline of organization studies. It does so through a close-reading of a paper which has a fair claim to seminal status, since it is widely cited within the literature, is described as seminal in a number of recent contributions and is included in Mats Alvesson’s Classics in Critical Management Studies (2011). The paper is Knights and Morgan’s Foucaultian analysis of strategic management (1991) and the present analysis is best read with that text to hand.
Read in detail, Knights and Morgan’s paper turns out to be deficient in almost every respect. Their claim that strategic management needs to be understood as a discourse which ‘constitutes the subjectivities’ of its practitioners amounts to an innovative of terminology only, since there is no suggestion as to what kind of evidence might distinguish that process from the conventional acquisition of technique. Their proposed history of the origins of strategic management does not fit the historical record. Their claims to theoretical and methodological advances over previous major works in the field are not substantiated and depend in any case on serious misrepresentations of those works. They present a drastically one-sided account of Foucault’s views on power, the application of which to strategic management is claimed as one of their major innovations. The one positive and original thing they have to say about strategic management – that it confers psychological benefits on those who practice it (‘power effects’) – is supported neither by evidence nor convincing argument.
The analysis then proceeds to a 1995 paper by the same authors on the introduction of strategic approaches to IT and product management in a life insurance company. Interesting as a conventional narrative, the notable absence of ‘constituted subjectivities’, ‘power effects’ and, indeed, of any mention of Foucault in this study is primae facia evidence of the complete irrelevance of the ‘genealogical’ approach advocated in the 1991 paper. This conclusion is reinforced by two recent papers which claim to have provided empirical support for the original Foucaultian approach. Neither of them achieve anything of the kind.
The analysis concludes by suggesting that Knights and Morgan’s 1991 paper continues to be cited in despite of its evident shortcomings because of the feverish intellectual climate which now prevails within organizational studies. Under pressure to produce innovative work in fields dominated by established reputations, young researchers may be attracted to any intellectual direction which promises to subvert those reputations and so provide space for new models of academic distinction. This, it is suggested, is the true nature of Knights and Morgan’s achievement, and it is one which may account for the failure of the academic community to take due note of the deficiencies of their work. In this sense it may be symptomatic of a discipline in which standards of scholarship have been eroded in a frantic search for novelty.
Chapter in Myth and the Market. Ed. Norah Campbell, John Desmond, James Fitchett, Donncha Kavanagh, Pierre McDonagh, Aidan O’Driscoll, Andrea Prothero. Dublin. UCD Business School, University College Dublin: pp.365-374 , Jun 2014
Pursuant to a deregulatory project inherited from the Thatcher and New Labour administrations, th... more Pursuant to a deregulatory project inherited from the Thatcher and New Labour administrations, the UK’s Coalition government is now making a particular target of what Prime Minister Cameron has called, ‘the health and safety monster’. The rationale appears to be two-fold: that the present system of health and safety regulation, in conjunction with a ‘compensation culture’ created by ambulance-chasing lawyers, imposes an administrative workload which is both costly in itself and which additionally inhibits, or distracts from entrepreneurial activity. Successive enquiries into this ‘burden’ have failed to confirm either contention. The ‘entrepreneurial suppression’ thesis remains entirely conjectural whilst government calculations of the compliance costs saved by scrapping particular regulations show them to minor relative to the costs of the activities regulated. This is the case even though the calculations ignore any benefits which might accrue from improved record-keeping and any ‘displacement effect’ whereby costs are externalized onto employees and the public rather than saved. Faced with these inconvenient findings, the government’s fall-back position is that the claimed adverse economic consequences are the function of a perception of excessive regulation, irrespective of any basis which this might have in fact.
On this view of the matter, the logical policy would be to work with the Health and Safety Executive’s ‘Myth-Buster’s Panel’ to challenge the mythos of rampant ‘elf ‘n safety’ perpetrated by certain elements of the UK media. Instead, government spokespersons have chosen to recycle the anecdotes on which this feeds in justification of the removal of actual regulations. This suggests that the supposed economic benefits of deregulation are not the real issue, that health and safety protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of the small state and an essentially Hayekian moral order.
The theory that the contemporary self is largely constituted in the sphere of consumption has bec... more The theory that the contemporary self is largely constituted in the sphere of consumption has become something of an orthodoxy in recent years. Against this view, it is argued that there are many areas of consumption in which taste has become commodified as a kind of expertise. The creation of a market for this expertise depends on a ‘disabling professionalism’ (Illich, 1977) which undermines the individual’s confidence in, and capacity for, independent judgment. The result is an alienation of consumption in which its immediate use-value is subordinated to an exchange value which Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’. In the process consumption loses its capacity to express the individual’s species-being, becoming objectified instead as a medium of social stratification.
The means by which disabling professionalism undermines its clients’ confidence in their own taste are illustrated by two vignettes, The first is from the collecting of art at the millionaire level and the second from interior decoration at the level of the suburban semi-detached. In both cases the outcome is an alienation of consumption in that the tastes expressed are not the clients’ own.
As a prolegomenon to this argument, the paper begins by arguing that the concept of alienation can be defended from its critics by redefining it as an impairment of the capacity for collective intentionality. Whereas consumption possesses a potential for collective intentionality, this is negated when it is objectified as the exchange value which Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’. In Distinction, however, Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital as deriving from the practices of an ‘aristocracy of culture’ is unconvincing. As an alternative it is suggested that cultural capital is the product of alliances between cultural producers, critics, educators and commercial interests. It is these agencies which employ the tactics of disabling professionalism in the commodification of taste and in doing so, are responsible for an alienation of consumption.
International Journal of Literature and Art. Nov 2013. pp. 15-21, 2013
It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19th century Paris involved ... more It is well-known that the ascendancy of French Impressionism in late 19th century Paris involved the creation of a system of collaboration between dealer and critic. This dealer-critic system prospered because it offered aspirant dealers and young artists a means of overcoming the barriers to entry into the art market. This paper argues that the system has imperatives of its own which are independent of those which brought it into being, principally that the works in which it deals and the critical vocabularies through which they are promoted must be distinctive. Thus a pressure to innovate is built into the dealer-critic system and this may be a contributory factor behind proliferation of movements and manifestos which have characterised the artworld from the late 19th century onwards.
Abstract
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and... more Abstract Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves. In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination. The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed. The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation. The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
Abstract
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications... more Abstract
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications addressed to questions of identity bears witness to the continuing attractions of the concept(s) as a means of discovering theoretical significance in fieldwork data. As with all well-established research paradigms, ‘standing in the field’ has congealed into a form of social capital which depends for its value on the suppression of doubt concerning its presuppositions and procedures. This paper seeks to re-activate those doubts in the particular case of ‘soft identity’ theorised as the processual outcome of the play of discourse. In order to allow the approach a fair hearing, it is examined in situ, through a close-reading of a particularly competent and sophisticated example - Thomas and Linstead’s (2002) study of middle managers.
The major conclusion is that Thomas and Linstead (2002) were able to discover the processes of discursive identity formation in their interviews only by claiming that certain words or phrases 1) showed that the interviewees were ‘drawing upon’ particular discourses and 2) that the same words or phrases also signified that their identities had changed correspondingly. Contrary to the authors’ laudable intention to respect the authorship of their interviewees, moreover, this self-validating procedure also had the effect of symptomising their utterances. Clearly expressed worries about the pressures of work and the possibility of redundancy were interpreted as indications of an interplay between discourse and identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that the pressures to subject lay utterances to comparatively exotic interpretations of this kind are endemic to the situation of the academic researcher and that the tendency to locate agency in discourse may have its origins in the lived experience of academia.
Thomas, Robyn and Alison Linstead (2002) Losing the Plot? Middle Managers and Identity. Organization 9(1) 71-93"
Accounting, Organizations and Society, Jan 1, 1985
Abstract
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants... more Abstract
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants and other financial specialists relative to other professions. It is argued that a key to understanding this is the extent of the adoption of each profession’s characteristic strategy for controlling labour. Animated by a desire for collective mobility within the management hierarchies of large corporations, it is shown that engineers, accountants and personnel specialists have all sought to advance by developing, from their original specialised techniques, relatively comprehensive strategies for controlling labour. It is also argued that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the functionalism of many accounts of changes in the mode of control of the labour process which seek to explain later forms of control solely in terms of the problems encountered with earlier forms.
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Papers by Peter Armstrong
Existing attempts to do this do not appear to be wholly adequate and a new material behaviour model is proposed here. On the available evidence it appears to represent plasticity more accurately than previous models.
The extension of the proposed behaviour model to include time dependent effects is discussed briefly.
As a first-pass response to this state of affairs, this paper explores the interconnections and incompatibilities between the negative freedom of personal autonomy and the positive freedom of collective self-determination, concluding that each creates difficulties for the other. There follows a consideration of how far a concept of emancipation can be consistent with social inequality, observing that the relationship can vary from mere constraint (each places limits on the other) to near-synonymy (as when an oppressed group achieves the status of the general population).
The paper then proceeds to a consideration of social inequality. It is first noted that the tendency to think in terms of a map of the social order obscures the fact that social inequalities are produced by human action, albeit as a (largely) unintended consequence. The paper uses the case of growing inequalities in universities to argue that the connection between action and consequence might usefully be analysed by considering inequality as the output of a system whose internal relationships deflect human motives so as to produce inequality as an outcome. The final section of the paper uses David Lockwood’s distinction between social integration and system integration to defend this approach against the usual objections to functionalism.
Read in detail, Knights and Morgan’s paper turns out to be deficient in almost every respect. Their claim that strategic management needs to be understood as a discourse which ‘constitutes the subjectivities’ of its practitioners amounts to an innovative of terminology only, since there is no suggestion as to what kind of evidence might distinguish that process from the conventional acquisition of technique. Their proposed history of the origins of strategic management does not fit the historical record. Their claims to theoretical and methodological advances over previous major works in the field are not substantiated and depend in any case on serious misrepresentations of those works. They present a drastically one-sided account of Foucault’s views on power, the application of which to strategic management is claimed as one of their major innovations. The one positive and original thing they have to say about strategic management – that it confers psychological benefits on those who practice it (‘power effects’) – is supported neither by evidence nor convincing argument.
The analysis then proceeds to a 1995 paper by the same authors on the introduction of strategic approaches to IT and product management in a life insurance company. Interesting as a conventional narrative, the notable absence of ‘constituted subjectivities’, ‘power effects’ and, indeed, of any mention of Foucault in this study is primae facia evidence of the complete irrelevance of the ‘genealogical’ approach advocated in the 1991 paper. This conclusion is reinforced by two recent papers which claim to have provided empirical support for the original Foucaultian approach. Neither of them achieve anything of the kind.
The analysis concludes by suggesting that Knights and Morgan’s 1991 paper continues to be cited in despite of its evident shortcomings because of the feverish intellectual climate which now prevails within organizational studies. Under pressure to produce innovative work in fields dominated by established reputations, young researchers may be attracted to any intellectual direction which promises to subvert those reputations and so provide space for new models of academic distinction. This, it is suggested, is the true nature of Knights and Morgan’s achievement, and it is one which may account for the failure of the academic community to take due note of the deficiencies of their work. In this sense it may be symptomatic of a discipline in which standards of scholarship have been eroded in a frantic search for novelty.
On this view of the matter, the logical policy would be to work with the Health and Safety Executive’s ‘Myth-Buster’s Panel’ to challenge the mythos of rampant ‘elf ‘n safety’ perpetrated by certain elements of the UK media. Instead, government spokespersons have chosen to recycle the anecdotes on which this feeds in justification of the removal of actual regulations. This suggests that the supposed economic benefits of deregulation are not the real issue, that health and safety protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of the small state and an essentially Hayekian moral order.
The means by which disabling professionalism undermines its clients’ confidence in their own taste are illustrated by two vignettes, The first is from the collecting of art at the millionaire level and the second from interior decoration at the level of the suburban semi-detached. In both cases the outcome is an alienation of consumption in that the tastes expressed are not the clients’ own.
As a prolegomenon to this argument, the paper begins by arguing that the concept of alienation can be defended from its critics by redefining it as an impairment of the capacity for collective intentionality. Whereas consumption possesses a potential for collective intentionality, this is negated when it is objectified as the exchange value which Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’. In Distinction, however, Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital as deriving from the practices of an ‘aristocracy of culture’ is unconvincing. As an alternative it is suggested that cultural capital is the product of alliances between cultural producers, critics, educators and commercial interests. It is these agencies which employ the tactics of disabling professionalism in the commodification of taste and in doing so, are responsible for an alienation of consumption.
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves.
In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination.
The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed.
The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation.
The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications addressed to questions of identity bears witness to the continuing attractions of the concept(s) as a means of discovering theoretical significance in fieldwork data. As with all well-established research paradigms, ‘standing in the field’ has congealed into a form of social capital which depends for its value on the suppression of doubt concerning its presuppositions and procedures. This paper seeks to re-activate those doubts in the particular case of ‘soft identity’ theorised as the processual outcome of the play of discourse. In order to allow the approach a fair hearing, it is examined in situ, through a close-reading of a particularly competent and sophisticated example - Thomas and Linstead’s (2002) study of middle managers.
The major conclusion is that Thomas and Linstead (2002) were able to discover the processes of discursive identity formation in their interviews only by claiming that certain words or phrases 1) showed that the interviewees were ‘drawing upon’ particular discourses and 2) that the same words or phrases also signified that their identities had changed correspondingly. Contrary to the authors’ laudable intention to respect the authorship of their interviewees, moreover, this self-validating procedure also had the effect of symptomising their utterances. Clearly expressed worries about the pressures of work and the possibility of redundancy were interpreted as indications of an interplay between discourse and identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that the pressures to subject lay utterances to comparatively exotic interpretations of this kind are endemic to the situation of the academic researcher and that the tendency to locate agency in discourse may have its origins in the lived experience of academia.
Thomas, Robyn and Alison Linstead (2002) Losing the Plot? Middle Managers and Identity. Organization 9(1) 71-93"
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants and other financial specialists relative to other professions. It is argued that a key to understanding this is the extent of the adoption of each profession’s characteristic strategy for controlling labour. Animated by a desire for collective mobility within the management hierarchies of large corporations, it is shown that engineers, accountants and personnel specialists have all sought to advance by developing, from their original specialised techniques, relatively comprehensive strategies for controlling labour. It is also argued that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the functionalism of many accounts of changes in the mode of control of the labour process which seek to explain later forms of control solely in terms of the problems encountered with earlier forms.
Existing attempts to do this do not appear to be wholly adequate and a new material behaviour model is proposed here. On the available evidence it appears to represent plasticity more accurately than previous models.
The extension of the proposed behaviour model to include time dependent effects is discussed briefly.
As a first-pass response to this state of affairs, this paper explores the interconnections and incompatibilities between the negative freedom of personal autonomy and the positive freedom of collective self-determination, concluding that each creates difficulties for the other. There follows a consideration of how far a concept of emancipation can be consistent with social inequality, observing that the relationship can vary from mere constraint (each places limits on the other) to near-synonymy (as when an oppressed group achieves the status of the general population).
The paper then proceeds to a consideration of social inequality. It is first noted that the tendency to think in terms of a map of the social order obscures the fact that social inequalities are produced by human action, albeit as a (largely) unintended consequence. The paper uses the case of growing inequalities in universities to argue that the connection between action and consequence might usefully be analysed by considering inequality as the output of a system whose internal relationships deflect human motives so as to produce inequality as an outcome. The final section of the paper uses David Lockwood’s distinction between social integration and system integration to defend this approach against the usual objections to functionalism.
Read in detail, Knights and Morgan’s paper turns out to be deficient in almost every respect. Their claim that strategic management needs to be understood as a discourse which ‘constitutes the subjectivities’ of its practitioners amounts to an innovative of terminology only, since there is no suggestion as to what kind of evidence might distinguish that process from the conventional acquisition of technique. Their proposed history of the origins of strategic management does not fit the historical record. Their claims to theoretical and methodological advances over previous major works in the field are not substantiated and depend in any case on serious misrepresentations of those works. They present a drastically one-sided account of Foucault’s views on power, the application of which to strategic management is claimed as one of their major innovations. The one positive and original thing they have to say about strategic management – that it confers psychological benefits on those who practice it (‘power effects’) – is supported neither by evidence nor convincing argument.
The analysis then proceeds to a 1995 paper by the same authors on the introduction of strategic approaches to IT and product management in a life insurance company. Interesting as a conventional narrative, the notable absence of ‘constituted subjectivities’, ‘power effects’ and, indeed, of any mention of Foucault in this study is primae facia evidence of the complete irrelevance of the ‘genealogical’ approach advocated in the 1991 paper. This conclusion is reinforced by two recent papers which claim to have provided empirical support for the original Foucaultian approach. Neither of them achieve anything of the kind.
The analysis concludes by suggesting that Knights and Morgan’s 1991 paper continues to be cited in despite of its evident shortcomings because of the feverish intellectual climate which now prevails within organizational studies. Under pressure to produce innovative work in fields dominated by established reputations, young researchers may be attracted to any intellectual direction which promises to subvert those reputations and so provide space for new models of academic distinction. This, it is suggested, is the true nature of Knights and Morgan’s achievement, and it is one which may account for the failure of the academic community to take due note of the deficiencies of their work. In this sense it may be symptomatic of a discipline in which standards of scholarship have been eroded in a frantic search for novelty.
On this view of the matter, the logical policy would be to work with the Health and Safety Executive’s ‘Myth-Buster’s Panel’ to challenge the mythos of rampant ‘elf ‘n safety’ perpetrated by certain elements of the UK media. Instead, government spokespersons have chosen to recycle the anecdotes on which this feeds in justification of the removal of actual regulations. This suggests that the supposed economic benefits of deregulation are not the real issue, that health and safety protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of the small state and an essentially Hayekian moral order.
The means by which disabling professionalism undermines its clients’ confidence in their own taste are illustrated by two vignettes, The first is from the collecting of art at the millionaire level and the second from interior decoration at the level of the suburban semi-detached. In both cases the outcome is an alienation of consumption in that the tastes expressed are not the clients’ own.
As a prolegomenon to this argument, the paper begins by arguing that the concept of alienation can be defended from its critics by redefining it as an impairment of the capacity for collective intentionality. Whereas consumption possesses a potential for collective intentionality, this is negated when it is objectified as the exchange value which Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’. In Distinction, however, Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital as deriving from the practices of an ‘aristocracy of culture’ is unconvincing. As an alternative it is suggested that cultural capital is the product of alliances between cultural producers, critics, educators and commercial interests. It is these agencies which employ the tactics of disabling professionalism in the commodification of taste and in doing so, are responsible for an alienation of consumption.
Much of the labour process debate in the 35 years following the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has been preoccupied with its subjective dimension, an aspect deliberately neglected by Braverman since his priority was to clarify the objective situation of labour to which subjectivity might respond. In what is still the only volume carrying the title ‘Labour Process Theory’, David Knights and Hugh Willmott (both 1990) responded to this challenge by proposing a quasi-existential treatment of subjectivities which has proved of enduring influence, not only in the labour process debate itself but also in its offshoot sub-discipline of Critical Management Studies (Hassard, Hogan and Rowlinson, 2001). This paper argues that these interventions were not soundly based either in respect of the theoretical sources on which they drew or in the interpretations of empirical research which were adduced in their support. It is further argued that progress in understanding the subjective dimension of labour will depend not on the production of more sophisticated ‘externalising’ theories of subjectivity but on a reversion to an earlier tradition of industrial sociology which pays attention to, and respects, the interpretations of their own position in the social order by the workers themselves.
In essence both Knights and Willmott attribute an individualizing tendency to the capitalist social relations of production. This tendency, they maintain, sets in motion a quest for satisfactory and stable identities. In Knights’ version, this search in the case of ‘subordinate workers’ ends either in an a-political privatization or in a passive-aggressive machismo which, because of its inability to accept the legitimacy of ‘effeminate’ white collar and managerial work, is incapable either of an ‘attack’ on capitalism or of constructive co-operation within the labour process. For Willmott the individualizing tendencies of capitalism are held to react with an already-present ontological openness to produce an existential anxiety, the response to which is a ‘fetishism of identity’ founded on the illusions of psychological continuity and stability. In an attempt to shore up these illusions, individuals are said to seek out interpersonal and institutional setting which will confirm the identities in question. In the case of ‘subordinate workers’ the inadvertent result is to perpetuate the conditions of their own subordination.
The paper shows that this portrayal of the working class as locked in a psychic prison of its own making largely follows from certain choices of method rather than from anything in the matters to which these are applied. The first of these is a thoroughgoing methodological individualism, manifest in the dubious attribution of individualizing tendencies to capitalism and in the posit of an individualized response to the aforesaid openness of the human condition. The second is a radical social constructionism in which the subjective response to power is seen as somehow complicit in the constitution of power itself. The third is a persistent tendency to depict the possible responses to wage labour in terms of mutually exclusive alternatives: to suppose, for example, that pride in the identity of labourer is incompatible with a determination to challenge the conditions under which labour is performed.
The paper also examines the manner in which both authors have sought empirical support for these theorizations of subjectivity from some of the major ethnographic studies of the 20th century. Extending over several decades, these attempts, it is shown, feature misreadings of the case material and the straw-manning of the authors’ own interpretations of their data on a scale which entirely nullifies the claimed empirical confirmation.
The paper ends with the suggestion that a more constructive approach to the ‘missing subject’ of the labour process requires a return to - and updating of - an earlier and more reflexive tradition, in which workers are treated, not as the disoriented victims of some hypostasised individualization, but as industrial sociologists in their own right, with their own theories of the social order and of the potentials attached to their own place within it. These theories need to be treated not as static and individual ‘images of society’, but as culturally-produced framings which make sense of, and are modified by, the immediate experience of the labour process as it is acted upon by managers.
Despite criticisms of its ambiguities and obscurities an unabated flood of publications addressed to questions of identity bears witness to the continuing attractions of the concept(s) as a means of discovering theoretical significance in fieldwork data. As with all well-established research paradigms, ‘standing in the field’ has congealed into a form of social capital which depends for its value on the suppression of doubt concerning its presuppositions and procedures. This paper seeks to re-activate those doubts in the particular case of ‘soft identity’ theorised as the processual outcome of the play of discourse. In order to allow the approach a fair hearing, it is examined in situ, through a close-reading of a particularly competent and sophisticated example - Thomas and Linstead’s (2002) study of middle managers.
The major conclusion is that Thomas and Linstead (2002) were able to discover the processes of discursive identity formation in their interviews only by claiming that certain words or phrases 1) showed that the interviewees were ‘drawing upon’ particular discourses and 2) that the same words or phrases also signified that their identities had changed correspondingly. Contrary to the authors’ laudable intention to respect the authorship of their interviewees, moreover, this self-validating procedure also had the effect of symptomising their utterances. Clearly expressed worries about the pressures of work and the possibility of redundancy were interpreted as indications of an interplay between discourse and identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that the pressures to subject lay utterances to comparatively exotic interpretations of this kind are endemic to the situation of the academic researcher and that the tendency to locate agency in discourse may have its origins in the lived experience of academia.
Thomas, Robyn and Alison Linstead (2002) Losing the Plot? Middle Managers and Identity. Organization 9(1) 71-93"
This paper seeks to account for the prominence in management hierarchies of accountants and other financial specialists relative to other professions. It is argued that a key to understanding this is the extent of the adoption of each profession’s characteristic strategy for controlling labour. Animated by a desire for collective mobility within the management hierarchies of large corporations, it is shown that engineers, accountants and personnel specialists have all sought to advance by developing, from their original specialised techniques, relatively comprehensive strategies for controlling labour. It is also argued that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the functionalism of many accounts of changes in the mode of control of the labour process which seek to explain later forms of control solely in terms of the problems encountered with earlier forms.