Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

I.
Luce Irigaray (1999, p. 13) has posed the issue in the following way:

Unless thought is born of a superabundance, an excess that overflows man? A creator of rarity because he wishes to constitute a world that would be proper to him? A world where he cares less to ensure his subsistence, to find satisfaction of his basic needs, to arrange a livable space, than to transform the whole into a universe of his own.

And further continued (ibid., p. 15):

A third meaning [of Cosmos], secretly linked to the other two, is: finery. Produced by man, the fire that he pours out from his heights, golden adornment. “Finery, like gold, is not there merely to shine of itself, but to make he who wears it, on whom it shines, himself shine.” [quoting Heidegger] Such is nature, transformed by man so he can inhabit it as its master, its king, its God.

The issue, here, is organization – that intentional arrangement of matter, material practices and immaterial relations in order to achieve both something of a process and some kind of a goal – and the necessity thereof. More precisely, the issue is whether organization is a necessary thing, a phenomena that exists because it has to. The other possibility, that organization in and of itself would be a luxury, a frippery, a bauble even, is rarely brought up and even more rarely taken seriously. Still, there is something to the Byzantine structure of even the simplest organization, something in the manifold that the concept contains, that makes one marvel at the very ostentation of it all.

A number of years ago a company employing about three hundred men, which had been manufacturing the same machine for ten to fifteen years, sent for us to report as to whether any gain could be made through the introduction of scientific management. Their shops had been run for many years under a good superintendent and with excellent foremen and workmen, on piece work. The whole establishment was, without doubt, in better physical condition than the average machine-shop in this country.
Taylor 1911/1998, p. 50

Whether they are advising clients on core strategy, developing their own skills, or contributing to their communities, our consultants bring their extraordinary talent and drive to every situation. We seek individuals with outstanding character, a sharp analytical mind, and the ability to work effectively with people at all levels in an organization.
McKinsey, Who We Are, 
http://www.mckinsey.com/aboutus/whoweare/index.asp

For a system praising efficiency, the order of organizing is peculiarly obsessed with having just that little bit extra, that redundant layer, that one step further beyond the logically necessary. Whereas the ethics of this system may talk fondly of doing more with less, and raising returns on investment, the fundamental logic from which organizing develops does not seem to be one of strict necessity and bare utility. In fact, when analyzed with the apparatus of cold, calculative rationality, the very idea of organizing seems to be a bit frivolous.

Take the quote from the McKinsey website. Now clearly, these consultants shouldn’t be bringing their “extraordinary talent and drive” to every situation, as that would be just foolish. And one wonders why the shops that stood to be developed by the right honorable Frederick Winslow Taylor had to be in such good condition. Can’t you just manage with less? Why all this excess energy, this redundant quality? In all likelihood, a management scholar (or a layman who’d bother to answer) would say that this has to do with things such as buffers, institutional arrangements, competitive advantage, or something similar. But this would miss the point. These arguments are good ways to explain the accouterments of organizations in a situation where several such exist in either cooperative or hostile relations to each other, but not particularly valuable when we start querying the general aspect of organizing. Whilst a system of buffers may be the logical thing when one tries to protect an organization against outside shocks (see Thompson 1967), and a chain of command makes sense when one has to look out for muddled management, these structural arrangements are always assumed to be attached to and hinge on some abstract necessary event that exist a priori. It is the nature of this event or proposition that we are querying.

If there is venality of jouissance, it is certainly not through poverty, but thanks to the greatest luxury and in order to increase that luxury.
Lyotard 1974/2004, p. 81

The child or the philosopher may rightly ask “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, and may even be accused of profundity. Yet the question “Why is there organizing?” seems like a mistake, muddled thinking, or worse. It seems that there lurks a self-evident necessity at the core of organizing, but at the same time, this something does not seem to respond well to questions. We shall call it the essential monster.

II.
The dividing line between the angelic and the monstrous isn’t always as clear as we imagine. Although angels are commonly associated with purity and light, and monsters with uncleanliness and darkness, there are similarities. Both exist in the realm of the fundamentally unknowable, and both represent liminal spaces of knowledge. The angel stands for total knowledge, the true name of Jahve, whilst monsters stand for that which exists between categories, as an impurity, as a hybrid. However, this does not mean that monsters and angels are completely dissimilar. Their way of being in-between may differ, as the angel’s liminality is less threatening and may even be seen as the path towards the final truth, but both guard the truth by patrolling limits.

Now, one of these is the limit of/to inquiry, and the essential monster is that which keeps us from asking further questions. This may be an angel acting as an intermediary, shielding us from the face of the all-seeing, or a monster lurking in the unclean nooks that are best left unstudied, but both exist in order to make questioning difficult or impossible. What the essential monster does is to establish a special kind of non-questioning, such as the acceptance of organizing and organizations. But why then call it a monster and not an angel? Such a protector might be seen as a purifying presence, the guardian angel of confused scholars, keeping these on the path of righteousness. It may be there for the best of reasons, out of love and care.

This essential monster, however, isn’t interested in guarding anything except the stability of organizing, the structure of structure. It is doubly hybrid, for it is an amalgamation not only of knowledge and ignorance, but also of disorganization and the love of order. It is not quite organized, for it rests on groundless assumptions and old mores. At the same time, it is born out of a fear of the chaotic, the love of the explanation that requires no explanation. Organizations just are.

III.
One common origin-myth of organizing refers to the necessity of co-operation for sheer survival, in effect arguing that neolithic man (or whichever antediluvian ancestor one wants to use as origin-point) started the first organization for necessary, rational and calculable reasons – something akin to a Neanderthal homo œconomicus. Some, like Paul Seabright, even refer to economic life as having a biological basis, and talk about the “natural history of economic life” (the subtitle of Seabright 2004).

Task-sharing takes place to a limited degree in all species that reproduce sexually […] but human beings’ capacity – unique in nature, as we have seen – to share tasks regularly and elaborately with others to whom they are unrelated has enabled them to exploit the presence of large numbers in a way unavailable to higher mammals.
Seabright 2004, p. 36

Here unique capacities lead, in full accordance with the precepts of strategic management, seamlessly to exploitation of an advantage. Simple as that. However, very little in these socio-biological explanations show why simple task-sharing (such as the all-time favorite example, sexual reproduction) would lead to advanced organizations. And although the Darwinian solve-all of “survival” is regularly brandished, this actually solves very little. The existence of an advantage may seem like enough of a reason to utilize it, but obviously this is not a logical necessity. Again, the essential monster, and the need to query it.

The possibly most important text ever in/for studies of economic phenomena is rarely, if ever, referenced in the field. Peculiarly, it is despite this not a rare or obscure text, quite the opposite. In October 1968, an article entitled “La première société d’abondance” appears in Les Temps Modernes. In 1972, a developed version of this essay is published as the first chapter of Stone Age Economics, and Marshall Sahlins’s “The Original Affluent Society” is with this out in its final form. It’s fundamentally radical message is belied by its 39 pages of seemingly effortless writing, and the easygoing style it adopts, but this essay still stands a preeminent and sublime critique of simplistic views of the economic. On the surface a comment on the study of hunters and gatherers, it manages to forcefully argue for a re-evaluation of what we mean by economic development, and what we mean by economy.

Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstance an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people’s material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The evolution of economy has known, then, two contradictory movements: enriching but at the same time impoverishing, appropriating in relation to nature but expropriating in relation to man.
Sahlins 1972, p. 36-37

Sahlins begins by discussing the notion that the original state of the human animal was defined by lack and want. Hunters and gatherers, and neolithic man generally, are simply assumed to lead lives where there is never enough of anything, where danger and hunger defines everyday life, and where every advantage has to be utilized. This, however, is a supposition that while nice in theory doesn’t hold in practice. The fact, says Sahlins, is that most evidence we have in fact suggests neolithic man led a fairly nice life, and that they on average worked far less than contemporary man. Their limited wants were, on the whole, easily fulfilled, and this without anything more than the most rudimentary task-sharing – and even this may have been an optional extra. In fact, Sahlins suggests that hunter-gatherers led lives defined primarily by idleness and naps, and that cultural development may not have been a question of necessity but of boredom.

Let us ponder this for a moment. According to Sahlins (cf. Gowdy 1998), neolithic man thus led a fairly nice and uncomplicated life. Four hours of daily work (or less) sustained his/her needs, and the rest was spent chatting, playing, having sex and napping. Now, obviously, some would see this as a utopian existence. Still, it is conceivable that some of these antediluvian layabouts got bored, and made up alternative amusement. Like organizing! As Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (1996) show in their study of chimpanzees, organizing among these normally takes place not due to any specific stimulus, but as a reaction to boredom. All of a sudden, a chimpanzee may start beating on the ground with some branches, screeching and jumping around. After a while, others will join in, until a critical mass is reached. This can then lead to a war-party, which will attack neighboring flocks of apes, killing and raping with some abandon. In such a manner, even our animal cousins can create at the very least a temporary organization, but not out of any rational reason or distinct necessity. Chimpanzees may enjoy these little forays into organized mayhem, but they do not form these bands out of any pressing need – unless breaking up the monotony of a peaceful and unproblematic existence is seen as a need. Obviously, this kind of diversion takes on many forms. Chimpanzees play, engage in frivolous sexual activity, fling dung at each other for fun, and so on. None of these have clear-cut evolutionary advantages, and as socio-biologists invent evermore fanciful explanations regarding such behavior, the great apes seem to find new ways to simply amuse themselves. Even hunting, which many reference as an origin-point of sorts for organized behavior, seems to be less than rational when observed among the chimpanzees:

My work at Gombe has shown that the energetic balance involved in hunting rarely tips in favor of a nutritional motive. Most members of the hunting party receive very little meat for their effort, and the number of chimp-hours expended on the hunt plus the long begging and sharing session that follows it can be enormously costly relative to the quantity of meat that is usually available. The most typical catch is a one-kilogram baby monkey, divided among up to twenty hunters. So chimpanzees engage in an energy-expensive behavior, and most fail to recoup their caloric investment.
Stanford 1999, p. 97-98

In other words, even the hunt is at least in part done for frivolous reasons, and is for the individual participant about as rational as playing roulette. Excessive, even. Yes, it might be sensible for the flock, and the persistence of such a habit can thus be described by evolutionary means, but the birth of the habit cannot. Instead, this seems to stem more from the possibility to choose and play, some leisure time and the sheer exuberant joy of engaging in such wild and wanton behavior. Still, the categories of fun, frivolity, excess and luxury are often lost on socio-biologists. But they are not much better understood among organization theorists. Returning to our neolithic ancestors, we can now ask whether the adoption of increasingly intricate task-sharing so praised by Seabright (2004) is a result of a necessity a priori, or in fact born out of the luxury of abundant leisure time? If we accept the works of Sahlins (1972) and Gowdy (1998) as at least possible conjectures, then the development of organizations would not have been started due to a need for such but due to their nature of being nonessential. They would, in such a reading, be something engaged in as a luxury.

IV.
That economy is luxury is not a novel conjecture. In fact, quite a few thinkers have postulated something similar. Chief among these we can find the notion of a general economy as theorized by idiosyncratic librarian and libertine Georges Bataille (1988). Here, waste and expenditure replace utility and frugality as the chief functions of an economic system, and Bataille actually argues that economy is in a sense doomed to waste, as any system that generates energy will have to deal with the issue of how to expend this. By taking a systems view of sorts, he manages to show how the important part of any economy is the way in which it chooses to use the excess it has created. Just as a natural system wastes energy, economy wastes the value it has produced.

However, the problem with Bataille’s economic writings is that they really do not create a theory of the general economy, merely a statement of its existence and that it can be ascertained across a number of social and cultural systems. Nor does he really work to explain where this glorious excess comes from. He seems to take the stand that economies just happen to be productive, and thus need to develop wasteful ways. In other words, the necessity of economy, and the efficiency thereof, seem to be necessary and self-evident to him. Or, this is at least one reading. Another possible reading, one that would keep more to the holistic view of Bataille – and one that would overlook certain troublesome passages in his works – would be one where the notion of a general economy is read as an economy of the general. In other words, Bataille may have tried to show that notions of economy need to think beyond the notion of economy, and see that waste and expenditure are the creators thereof, and not the other way around. Put somewhat less obscurely, we could read him as saying that it was waste and expenditure that created economies as we know them, and that the general economy is not the creator but the creation of excess.

This said, he does not explicate very well what this could mean, except by outlining a number of cases where this can be seen – and often by relying on pretty shaky, if not entirely made-up, anthropological evidence. The problem with Bataille is that although he outlines a wonderful argument, and does so with verve and style, he doesn’t really develop it. We are, at the end, left with the “general economy” as a handy shorthand for certain ideas of excess and its place in thinking economy, but not much guidance for furthering such thinking.

What I am suggesting here, namely that organizing itself can be viewed as excess and luxury, is clearly in line with Bataille’s thinking, particularly with a more general reading thereof. Still, my interest is not merely to point out the fact that organizing may be wasteful, or that they may be seen as reactions to excess. Rather, I am suggesting an understanding of organizing as excess in and of itself. Bataille’s seems to see economy as a system where excess is a necessary and important part, he doesn’t really engage with utility. In fact, one can well read him as stating that utility and needs, even the stalwart homo œconomicus, do exist – albeit as less important phenomena in the economy. What I am suggesting is more in line with the thinking of Claes Gustafsson (1994) – and to a great degree I build directly on his work – namely that utility and needs are constructions, and very peculiar constructions at that.

One of the most radical statements of Marshall Sahlins, one that is still contentious and sure to raise some ire, was that hunger and poverty in the world was a product of luxury, and not the other way around. His argument, in brief, was that neolithic man never experienced the kind of dearth modern man does, and that scarcity is a reaction and a product of the excesses that started when the original affluent society started getting into economic organizing. With development and progress came population growth, with population growth came more innovation and more economy, with economy came wealth but also penury and abusive use of natural resources. The latter part of the argument are well known, and foundational for most ecological thinking, but it may be that this is the least interesting observation. If all this organizing, all this economy, is in fact a product of a few early humans wanting to amuse themselves, we need to rethink much of organization theory too.

V.
Admittedly, the fields of organization theory, organizational behavior and management have incorporated many conceptualizations that would fit well with an idea of organizing as frippery. Still, this has almost always been done from an underdog-position, so that arguments regarding e.g. irrationality in decision-making has been posited in a way that makes understandings of calculative rationality a backdrop which the “new” understandings enrich. For instance, although only very few would protest the existence of play in organizations, and the corresponding possibility to use e.g. Huizinga (1938) or Caillois (1958) in order to develop our thinking of organizations, this is still done in a manner that suggests such phenomena to be additions, even marginal, to some original purpose of the organization. The excessive, the frivolous, the playful, all are thus seen as additional and thus logically (if not practically) non-essential to organizational existence. In this way, the primacy of modernist rationality is continuously upheld.

My suggestion here is not one of adding on to the critique of the rationality-cult in management science, nor to add yet another ornamental twist to the cathedral of postmodern organization theory. Rather, I wish to argue that the essential monster needs to be rethought, and that we need to return to thinking about the very foundations of organization theory. By asking if the monster really is there for a purpose, i.e. if there is a logical necessity for organizing, we can also start thinking about the things we ascribe to these, such as rationality and direction, in new ways.

For instance, such a question would problematize postmodern understandings of organization, for if one starts from the assumption that they have developed out of excess, what point is there to proving that this has continued? Also, it would suggest that notions such as Bob Cooper’s (1986) “organization/disorganization” are misguided, as the disorganization is all that there was to begin with. It would also serve to deflect the critique e.g. Wolfram Cox & Minahan (2005) have brought forth, namely that researchers of organization are merely engaged in decoration and frippery. What else could they do, when the thing they research is shown to be a lovely, baroque folly?

Still, such a rethinking would be most damning for so-called “mainstream” organization theory, as it would reduce the serious models and glib theories to mere icing on a frivolity. By taking away the essential monster of assuming organizations to have reasons that drive them and make their existence logically necessary, the irony of calling these attempts at modeling an edifice of rationality on top of the amusements of our playful ancestors might be shown in all its ridiculousness.

But most important of all, and the real reason for this text: It might make organization theory fun again, and strip it of its gloomy and po-faced self-importance. By taking the admittedly flippant stand that organizations simply cannot be explained through some original reason (a stand the natural sciences adopted early on and truly embraced with Darwin, incidentally), we could ditch the strive for a utopia of explanation and study what is rather than what we believe might have been purposed to be. And then something might truly have been won.

I.
During the last ten years, at a time which coincides with the start of a new millennium, there has in management and organization studies been an increased interest in notions such as ideology, hegemony and the likes, to the point where some have argued that the field itself is being torn asunder by the political rift apparent between those labeled “mainstream” and those labled “critical”. One perspective on this would be to refer to it as an “ideology war”, a battle regarding the purity of management studies, one where those supporting a status quo are set against those who would see the point of social science being the tearing away of ideological veils and the ushering in of a more emancipated age. The key issue of such a “war” is whether the field can make claims regarding scientific objectivity, or wheter it is always already tainted by ideology — and what this might mean, to the field and to the identity of those in it. These are important issues, for they strike at the very heart of the identity politics of management studies — is it a legitimate endeavor, is it worthy of the sobriquet “science”, and who is supposed to benefit from all this hue and cry?

As a way to discuss this, I will argue the following: Management studies is not merely ideological, but rather meta-ideological. This insofar as it functions as a praxis to uphold a set of preconceived, often moral notions regarding management, organization and the economic, and does so in a way that makes it believe its understandings of the world represent objective knowledge-production. In this sense, it is an ideological construct put in place to support and enhance another ideological construct, creating a situation where we are symbolically twice removed from any imaginable “objective state”. Rather than merely stating that management studies bolsters a set of moral understandings of the world, I want to claim that in order to be externally ideological it has been forced to adopt an unspoken and unconscious internal ideology, and thus create a kind of a “moralized world” that can be used for metapolitical ends. More specifically, I will deal with the process of moralization and moral delimitation as central to the modernist project of a management science, which has managed to create a limited set of knowledges within which this can then position itself as a natural and neutral mode of analysis. By adopting a critical stance to this moral world, I want to argue that one of the fundamental aspects of how management studies works is that it limits the world in a manner that reduces the same, thus fundamentally making the study of management an ideological practice of the Gramscian variety. This has an impact on the field both as a path of scientific inquiry and as an engagement with the world, and hinders the field both intellectually and pragmatically.

II.
What is a meta-ideology? Simply put, it is an ideology of an ideology, a set mental constructs established to protect and support other mental constructs. Although there are a multitude of ways in which one can define “ideology”, the one I engage with here is one where it is understood as the lessening of a world by limiting what is possible to say about it, i.e. ideology as a mental structure through which certain (or, possibly, all) social phenomena are established as a priori normal and/or natural. Such an interpretation would state that any- and everything cultural and social is ideologically embedded, and that the very practice of making meaning and sense has such a component. Ideology is thus not simply a concept we can throw about, hoping that it’ll stick to those with ideas that differ from ours, but an analytical category with which we can discuss any cultural or social structure. This, however, has been the problem of ideological analysis — it seems to say very little. Even though one can state that management as a practice is ideological, and be sure that this statement in all likelihood is objectively true, the same statement can be made with just as much legitimacy about farming, panhandling, child-rearing and any number of other social practices.

From a definitional perspective, there is no discernible difference between ideologies or ideological practices, as the concept simply states something about the properties of a phenomenon. We may find the ideology of conservative Christian fundamentalism abhorrent, and the ideology of women’s liberation by necessity good and just, but this does not make them more or less ideological. Rather, the sense of something being more of an ideology might be a question of a “distance scale” — the further away from our own mindset and preferences something is, the more likely it is we will condemn it as being “ideological”. But this is merely the case when we are discussing our personal preferences and ways in which groups can attempt to strengthen their own identity by disassociating themselves from others. If we are talking on an analytical level, all ideologies are in a sense equal. For the purposes of this essay this unfortunately means that statements regarding the ideological standing of management are often rather meaningless, as they merely point out that structures of social interaction has characteristics of structures of social interaction. In other words, it means very little to say that management is ideological, as it has to be. However, this does not mean that discussions regarding this are senseless, for there may well be other aspects that can be highlighted by such.

The obvious case is when such a claim is made in order to show that management is not a given and necessary structure for organizing, not even when organizing economy or economic behaviors. We may well imagine or even find productive forms of organizing where no management is evident, such as in self-organizing or anarchic systems, which implies that management is merely one possible systemic element in the coordination and organization of production and distribution of things. What discussions about ideology can highlight is that this has become positioned in such a way that we find it increasingly difficult to imagine alternatives to it, i.e. it has become naturalized in our society. The point of ideological critique, then, is to de-naturalize this, show that it is not a logically necessary structure. As an aside it should be pointed out that this has often been misinterpreted as being something undesirable, which is ludicrous — democracy is not logically necessary either, but this does not mean that one when pointing this out is clamoring for a totalitarian dictatorship or an anarchist commune. But illuminations regarding the contingent nature of management are not necessarily very helpful in mounting a more thorough critique. Although one can fairly easily show that one can imagine a case where management simply would not exist, this can be accepted and ignored at the same time. On the level of analysis, as separated from the level of inquiry, such proofs can look like just so much scholastics, and one can just simply state that a number of phenomena are socially constructed, but this makes them no less real.

Succinctly put, there have been two major threads or themes in the criticism against an ideological analysis of the field of management — and both have been broadly correct in their counter-attacks. One has focused on pointing out that the people calling management ideological are just as ideological themselves, and that they often assume that they automatically occupy the moral high ground. This goes some way towards defuse such claims (even though it does not invalidate them), but it is very efficient in presenting the case as one of warring camps, locked in their separate trenches. The other has focused on accepting the logic of the argument, but presenting it as a intellectual parlor-trick, a cute exercise in rhetoric and little more. This is a particularly stinging criticism, as many of those who try to break with the hegemony of management feel marginalized to begin with — neither workers nor captains of industry, uncomfortably positioned as academics or, in a few lucky cases, intellectuals. In the eyes of its enemies, a critical study of management is either biased and political or naïve and of no practical importance. This latter point is highly important, for it goes to the question what a critique of an ideology actually means.

One way to thoroughly criticize an ideology is to point out that there is a better (or “better”) world possible that the current ideology hinders or renders unthinkable. Even though such comparisons are obviously a matter of taste and preference, one can in every overthrow of an ideology find that the possibility for improving the world is a central aspect, even if we can argue about whether this succeeded or not. Now, even though one might have differing views on what constitutes improvement in the world, most people would agree that world is not perfect as it is, and that development and improvement is at least possible — after all, most ideologies contain very clear ideas about such. What ideological critique has been criticized for is thus not the strive for a better world, but the trajectory of such improvements and the means one should use to bring about such. For instance, critical management studies can be accused of being leftist and overly intellectual, and thus (according to some) wrong-headed, but it would seem an odd argument to say that one should not strive to improve upon the world — after all, this is what both parties are trying to do. But what has this to do with meta-ideology?

I use the term meta-ideology to describe cases where an ideology is hindered to develop by the existence of a supporting layer, that by attempting to hold to the ideological framework of its “host” creates a sort of malevolent parasitism. Metaphorically this could be likened to a parent who persistently gives a child everything it desires, leading to the child becoming spoilt, fat, and developing a stunted personality. The parent acts out of love, and is unable to see that fulfilling desires may not be the best thing for the child. The child desires what children desire — hamburgers, sweets and toys — and is in a sense blameless, even though she by having her desires fulfilled is denied the development of a more mature personality. This on the level of metaphor. What a meta-ideology does is that it, masquerading as objective analysis, neutralizes the possibility that an ideology starts developing in novel and innovative ways. In a sense this is similar to how Marx and Gramsci understood the “superstructure” of an ideology and might seem equivalent to what Althusser referred to as “ideological state apparatuses”. There is however a very important difference here. In these cases one assumes that the cultural secures and supports the overall ideology, so that the superstructural element is in fact beneficial to the prevailing ideology (even though we might be of the opinion that this is detrimental to humanity). Meta-ideology, as I define it, is in fact capable of supporting, but will at the same time subvert that which it assumedly assists, whereas the former concepts have normally been handled as conservative and embedded properties.

In other words, I contend that the field of management studies can be critiqued as being meta-ideological without this meaning that one takes a position in the question regarding the ideological status of market economy. To the contrary, such a critique may in fact point to the fact that the ideological practices of management studies is in fact detrimental to the development of capitalism and the free market, whilst being ideologically tainted and working against the emancipation of the masses. Such a critique is to me much more interesting than pointing out that ideologies exist and affect us.

III.
The meta-ideological nature of management studies might be best highlighted by pointing to ways in which the field creates artificial borders that limit our practical grasp of that which is studied. Specifically, we can when analyzing the field see that moralization reigns as one of the preeminent ideological practices therein, suggesting that it is through the moral limitation of epistemic fields we have been able to construct and define management studies. By this I mean that the specifically moral act of choosing what should and should not be included (and therefore deemed important) in management studies is a foundational act, one that has far-reaching consequences for the field as a whole. This can perhaps best be made evident by way of illustration or juxtaposition, and one of the best examples might be that of crime.

Obviously, all forms of crime are normally viewed as at least in part immoral. They involve the breaching of a number of codes of moral behavior, including but not limited to codes relating to rights to property and personal integrity. However, from an assumedly objective perspective there is no denying that e.g. organized crimes such as drug-dealing build on a number of organizing processes and also involve quite a lot of management. Also, it is quite apparent that crimes such as drug-dealing or prostitution create value, albeit not of the morally upstanding or necessarily desired variety. Still, interestingly but not unsurprisingly, the academic field of management studies has done very little in the way of grasping such non-traditional forms of business, and instead started from the moral (but less than logical) assumption that it should only deal with legal and morally upstanding forms of economic transactions. As a matter of course, almost all studies of management have been conducted in fields which can at the very least be thought of as “proper” – it is particularly interesting to note that although pornography is legal in most countries, and a huge business to boot, almost no serious studies of the management implication of this field have been conducted (the author has dabbled in this field, though never wrote up the research). Such examples highlight how management studies as a field has self-assigned legality (and similar moral precepts) as a form of disciplining and tempering function on its inquiries into the world, regulating itself through an externally assigned set of principles regulating the boundary between internal and external. The ideological implications of this is that management studies seems to try to create a purer, more hygienic version of that which it studies/serves, and through this present a hagiography of the world of contemporary market economy.

Consequently, it becomes difficult to uphold the idea of management studies as an objective field of knowledge, as it clearly limits and self-disciplines itself according to what can only (from within an analytic framework of economic behavior) be understood as an arbitrary set of outside rules. In such as mode, the study of management studies becomes an issue of outlining the different ways in which the field has decided to neuter and curb itself in order to better fit into the symbolic construct it assumes it must take to fit in and gain legitimacy from the ideology it feeds upon – ergo becoming a meta-ideology.

That a science can be tempered and circumscribed by the ideology it exists in is nothing new. Many of us know the sad story of how Lysenkoism became the state-sponsored agricultural science in the Soviet Union, and the repercussions this had. In the 1930’s to the mid-1960’s, Trofim Lysenko took the structures of Stalinism, and used them to position a specific brand of agricultural science as the one true way. Buffered and supported by the apparatuses of the state, he developed a campaign of “practical science” that fitted the Soviet doctrine well, and used this fit with the prevailing ideology to denounce genetics and what he proclaimed to be overly theoretical academic practices. Even though his science has been shown to be almost wholly nonsensical — excepting the practical agricultural know-how he simply co-opted from age-old farming practices — he was presented as a true hero of science, and amply rewarded. Academics voicing dissent to this dogma were often labeled as hostile and dangerous, and often ridiculed as irrelevant theory-mongers whereas Lysenko stood for a practical and meaningful science (although some people must have doubted some of the more outlandish claims of his followers — such as the claim that firs could be “conditioned” into pines). Of particular interest to management studies might be the way he always managed to stay ahead of his more academic colleagues. Rather than developing a system through experiments or theoretical analysis (perish the thought), he simply reacted to state-sponsored initiatives with practical-sounding if at times mindless suggestions, delivering this in perfect lock-step with the proposed changes in e.g. the organization of farming. As the state initiatives often came fast and hard, and Lysenko’s suggestions and new recipes came even faster, the academics who might have wanted to criticize him simply did not have the time to react before a new theory or model was already laid forth. Even though biologists might have been able to show that a practice was bogus, this took time, and at that point Lysenko had already moved on (and been “proved right” by state-controlled media). I would obviously not want to label anyone in management consultancy as a modern-day Lysenkoite, but one can in the rapid change of models, the marginalization of differing theoretical approaches, and in the strategic fit with the prevailing language and ideology see certain family resemblances to the problems affecting management studies. (As a short aside, one wonders if not certain aspects of entrepreneurship studies could be fruitfully compared to the Japhetic theory of language as developed by Nikolay Marr.)

So, could we describe Lysenkoism as a meta-ideology? In a sense, yes. It fitted well with the prevailing ideology it existed in, it both supported and was supported by the selfsame (in a kind of allelopathic but mutualist symbiosis), and it definitively caused the “host organism” harm — as it hindered the development of a less proletarian but more effective agricultural science. At the same time, it is difficult to view a specific brand of agricultural science as constituting an ideology in the more limited sense, although it clearly was ideological. It may have worked hard to exclude genetics from the field it protected, and done so partly out of ideological (and self-serving) reasons, but this may also be understood as a case of normal academic infighting — if an ideologically colored and perverted form thereof.

The astute reader has by now realized that I am in fact arguing that management studies as it exists today has a family resemblance to Lysenkoism. Such an egregious claim will no doubt offend quite a number of scholars in the field, but at the same time… Trofim Lysenko may have been a self-promotor, a fraud, and a careerist, but this does not take away from the fact that a lot of the precepts of the movement still ring true in the ears of many (particularly in the higher echelons of university administration): abstractly theoretical work was inferior to active intervention, science should be practical and give clear and actionable suggestions, one should pay attention to the needs of powerful institutions and constituencies, and entrepreneurial action should be rewarded. Lysenkoism was an action-oriented movement that wanted to break with what was seen as an outdated academic ideal and instead do practical work with societal impact — innovative, entrepreneurial and pragmatically relevant. Even though the words have changed (one fairly seldom hears a vice chancellor rail against the bourgeoisie these days), many of the underlying logics are alive and well in our universities, not to mention used as arguments by academics.

Such a claim can and will be understood in different ways. Some will think that I by this want to say that management scholars are charlatans — I do not. Others will see this as an attack on Critical Management Studies — it most definitively isn’t. Still again others will think that I am gunning for a more objectivist ideal in management studies — I might, but I think we disagree on the meaning of “objective”. What I am trying to show is that the flaws of management studies are born out of a desire to do and be good, and that herein lies the rub.

IV.
What is interesting about Lysenkoism is that it can be understood as a moral undertaking. Obviously one can in the processes in and around it find quite a lot of immoral and unethical behavior — lying, falsification of evidence, backstabbing, active and at times fatal harassment of those deemed ideologically impure. Still, people believed in the movement, and in the precepts of it, and in a situation of societal upheaval and frequent famines, the figure of a practical man denouncing empty theorizations and abstract academics must have been seen as a godsend. For quite a few people, it must have seemed true and just that somebody was speaking out, saying that the professors were not interested in anything except their cozy offices, and that we must focus on the serious, practical stuff that actually mattered. These are clearly moral claims, a version of a research ethic, and one that is often voiced even in our days. It is also important to note that Lysenko through this gained the support not only of the nomenklatura, but also of the peasants who seem to have appreciated his practice-centered approach.

But why did Lysenkoism fail? We can suggest several overlapping answers. The usual answer has focused on the fact that it was scientifically unsound. This it was, yet it managed to survive for over 30 years, during which time it hampered and hindered the development of Soviet biology and genetics immeasurably. A more revealing question might be: How did Lysenkoism survive? It is not enough to say that it survived because it was backed by the power elite, as this will necessarily be the case — in itself, this doesn’t tell us enough. Rather, it survived because it said what the powers that be wanted to hear, and because it played the role of a practically oriented, result-producing science perfectly. The only problem with it was that it did so in a field where you can actually verify claims, where crop yields can be measured and new hybrids of wheat can be tested. Its failures as a science thus caught up with it, but for a very long time it could survive on the basis of delivering what was important — a discourse that sounded legitimate. Lysenkoism was a meta-ideology because it both supported the ideology it was attached to and caused it harm. By feeding back the kind of agricultural science it knew the Stalinist regime would applaud and find suitable to the Party’s worldview, it damaged that which the ideology tried to build upon — economic progress under a communist regime. Lysenko promised to deliver miracles of efficiency, but miracles that were strictly aligned to the prevailing ideology.

Even if we believe in management studies, there are disconcerting similarities. In universities, management studies is often looked upon favorably by the powers that be, and often supported by both industry and the political system. In much of the field, the notion of “practically applicable results” is seen as the ideal, and speedy reaction to changing circumstances is lauded. Opposing stances — such as e.g. critical analyses of managerialism — are marginalized and ridiculed. Saying that one does not want to do the kind of work that would support management and the corporate world can, depending on the setting, get one ostracized or even threatened with sanctions. Studies in the “wrong” fields are sometimes ridiculed, sometimes merely ignored, but focusing too much on work that is deemed to be “outside” the field can get one censored. And in fact, when one looks at what is being done in the field, and the reasons behind the work, the field of management studies starts looking increasingly stunted and deformed.

V.
Consider the arms trade. The annual global expenditure on arms and military ordinance comes to an estimated one trillion USD, and this figure might be higher as the illicit arms trade is notoriously tricky to get good figures on. Whereas the Big Mac-index might be good to get a sense of price levels in market-friendly countries, one could argue that the AK47-index (i.e. one based on what a Kalshnikov would cost on the street) is in fact a much better global measure. The arms trade is huge, in many countries a highly important part of the economy, exceedingly profitable, and fully globalized. For all intents and purposes, it looks like the perfect field of study for someone interested in understanding business and management. Yet it is almost completely unstudied. Why?

My answer, which follows from the exposition so far, is that management studies simply does not care about fit with the stated empirical field, but instead focus on what fits the ideological framework and how further legitimacy can be created. Rather than actually study things from some kind of objective perspective, both the selection of research subjects and the general approach of the field is ideological to the core. We look at things which will make us seem more important, cooler, more serious, more with-it. In doing so, we often ignore both what actually happens in the business world, what is common and everyday, and (bizarrely) what makes money.

For instance: Why do management scholars prefer to study success, entrepreneurship, innovation, knowledge management and leadership rather than boredom, prostitution, curry houses, meeting behavior and coffee? All of these are existing phenomena in the field management studies claim to be interested in, and with the possible exception of prostitution, the latter are more common, less studied and less well understood. Whereas we have a lot of theories regarding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial organizations, we have almost no theories of boredom in organizations, even though most would argue that the latter is far more common. ‘Tis true that entrepreneurship is for the moment deigned to be more “important”, but such an assignation of importance is by necessity an ideological positioning. One might argue that entrepreneurship creates more jobs than boredom does (although one could claim the opposite — think of the amount of jobs that exist in media, fashion, toys, any industry that has developed in order to entertain us), but this is then only true of the phenomenon. In order for e.g. entrepreneurship research to be important in the same way, we would have to show that theories of entrepreneurship create jobs, something I doubt even the most enthusiastic proponent would bet her job on.

If the problem was merely related to epistemological minutiae, this might be excused, on the grounds that because there is an institutional pressure on management studies to focus on things deemed important. This wouldn’t solve the very real problem of a fundamental bias in the field, but all sciences make some concessions to outside pressures (e.g. physicists will also tweak their research problems towards things deemed socially important, as will researchers in medicine). However, there is a much more critical problem lurking behind this. The problems of the Lysenkoite program was not necessarily in what it did, but in what it ignored. Since Lysenko didn’t “get” genetics, any progress that could have been made by studying it was squashed, and the faithful tried to develop agriculture through the hit-and-miss processes deemed correct by the meta-ideology. Some parts of the latter actually worked, but in hindsight it is absolutely clear that the overall effect was disastrous.

Compare this to management studies today. The field studies things like proper, preferably big and successful companies, mostly in areas thought to be central right now. Burgeoning, successful fields such as the arms trade, pornography, illicit drugs, money laundering and smuggling are completely ignored, whereas things such as management consultancies and call centers (!?!) are studied almost ad absurdum. If it could be shown that e.g. strategic initiatives in the business of human trafficking (which, it should be noted, is among the most heinous businesses around) either do not exist or are inferior to other approaches, we might argue that there is little to no need for people in the field of strategic management to study it. Likewise, if it could be shown that the arms trade is of no real business interest, one could be excused for not paying much attention to it. But both these statements are highly suspect, and any statement regarding these businesses are largely guesswork.

In a manner not entirely dissimilar to how Lysenko ignored those areas of agriculture he found unseemly, management studies today ignores or marginalizes those things that do not fit in with the image one has of how management should look, as defined by the surrounding ideology. The movement that was supposed to counter this, critical management studies, has largely failed to do so as it is too preoccupied with battling the same ideological ghost, merely putting up a funhouse mirror in front of the pre-existing structures. Put somewhat differently, critical management studies is just as much part of the meta-ideology, particularly if it takes a counter-position rather than redefining the playing field. The critical thing here is realizing that the prevailing situation is actually creating several kinds of directed damage, a kind of lose-lose situation. Those who would argue for the management-friendly approach to management studies might grudgingly agree that there are things left unsaid, but insist that looking at the big picture, the field is doing society a valuable service. They are wrong, for what management studies feeds the corporate world today is a sanitized version of what the field believes “they” want. Those who take a critical stance are often on the side of angels as they try to extend the field, but often fail to realize that the current field is not merely limited or ideological, but constructed through a set of legitimizations that in fact work against that it claims to support. Merely appending a critical stance to this is not enough. Instead, one needs to rethink the very project of management studies, something which requires a series of critical engagements with its ideological foundations.

VI.
Another way to define what a meta-ideology is would be to say that it is a moral construct which tries to do good by another moral construct, and thus manages to do it injustice. Management studies tries to do good in the world, which is laudable. But any attempt to do good will build upon a view on morality, and as moral notions are ideologically embedded they always run the risk of limiting what is possible to say and do. For a long time, we kept women away from things such as business and management, as we believed nothing good could come out of this — for anyone. Moral notions can lead to unethical behavior, and they can hurt us. Morality unchecked leads to a world of absolutes — madonnas and whores, evil injuns and heroic cowboys, good entrepreneurs and nasty monopolists — and although this can help one to manage one’s world, it functions less well as a basis for inquiries into the world. Believing that there is a “way” to do management studies, and that straying will damage the field, is a moral idea and one that does far more damage thanks to its strive to do good.

As management studies has tried to copy the ideological framework of contemporary capitalism, and as critical management studies has mainly criticized this simulacra rather than engaged with the world from a novel position, the field is increasingly finding itself in a cul-de-sac. As those who would support the current state of the world cannot break with the framework within which they are placed they can do little to actually help the field they claim they are useful to, and those who criticize them are increasingly finding themselves fighting not a machine of managerialism but a sock puppet trying to look like a dragon. The mainstream are playing catch-up, and the critics are slinging mud at shadows. No wonder that both companies and the common man tend to find that management studies has little function outside education.

In order to break with this, we need to rethink the role of moralization and legitimacy in management studies. Rather than focus on how we, as scholars, want to be viewed I want to argue for a new kind of empiricism, one where the world is studied as it is rather than as the funding agencies or journal editors would like to see it presented. The world is a nasty, surprising, weird, funny, lovely place. In it children bicker over candy, companies make millions from sex toys, people fall in love and buy ridiculous gifts, and gun-runners sell refurbished MISR 7.62s. If we are to be actual scholars, we need to study all these things, not just the ones which fit with the needs of glossy university brochures or after-dinner speeches. We need to get dirty, and nasty, and weird — because the world is. If we can, even stranger things might happen. Suddenly, it might be critical management studies which presents usable and valuable results for multi-nationals, free from the limitations of “proper” management studies — a program that was actually intimated by Joseph Schumpeter many years ago. Mainstream management studies, on its part, might develop into something much more critical — freed from the shackles of being good boys and girls one might find even strategic management scholars can bring sexy back. Then, maybe, the field could become fun again. Who knows, it might even become meaningful.

Det är ett vårtecken så gott som något att begreppet “revolution” börjar göra sig mera påmint. Därför är det också med ett visst nöje man sitter och läser några av böckerna i anrika förlaget Versos nya serie Revolutions, om än så bara för att ånyo fira fantasin om vårens vindar. Denna nya serie verkar vid första anblicken som en postmodern marknadsförares feberdröm: Ta en serie gamla manifest av kända revolutionärer som Mao, Robespierre och Castro, och ge sedan ut dem med hippa nya förord av mediasexiga tänkare som Tariq Ali och Slavoj Žižek. Gör pärmen modern, så att en hipster kan ha den käckt liggande på soffbordet eller i handen på väg till lilla kaféet. Betona radikalismen och det “farliga” i projektet. Gläd dig åt att manifesten är gratis — varken Mao eller hans litterära exekutör (om han har en sådan) kan begära royalties på så gamla verk — och se pengarna rulla in. Det faktum att ett antal konservativa kommentatorer har attackerat projektet, på ett närmast apoplektiskt sätt, torde tjäna som ett extra säljargument. I en tid där det är svårt att hitta sätt att rejält reta upp sina föräldrars generation, vad är väl bättre än att kasta deras egna historia i ansiktet på dem? Radikalism, punk och modern företagsekonomi i skön harmoni. Kanske inte underligt att man ser på det hela med viss misstänksamhet.

Tar man den första volymen i denna nya serie, nyutgåvan av Mao Tse-Tungs On Practice and Contradiction, blir ett antal saker snabbt uppenbara. Ett, postmodern ironi och maoistisk estetik skapar en lätt omtumlande kombination. Pärmen är en orgie både i uppvärmd personkult, med Mao själv som en stigande sol, och i svårläst revolutionsromantik. Ett höjt automatgevär, Maos lilla röda i en uppsträckt hand, ett av tornen som symboliserar det nya, marknadsdrivna Shanghai (men avbildad i en stil som gör att den påminner om en minaret), allt samlas i en stil som kanske bäst kan beskrivas som “Pimp My Mao”. Exakt vad man skall säga om denna pärm – banal revolutionsromantik? ironisk kommentar till nutidens skrämselpropaganda? – blir svårt att avgöra. Två, kombinationen av så olika skribenter som Mao och Žižek gör läsaren lätt desorienterad. Den tidigare var aldrig en stor stilist, utan skriver på ett rätt stolpigt sätt, medan den senare är en konceptakrobat vars texter kan kännas direkt oläsliga av någon som inte är van vid hans lekfulla sätt att vrida på Hegels och Lacans begreppsapparaturer. Där Mao skriver som en övertygad pedant, ömsom mässande och tålmodigt förklarande, strävar Žižek till en radikal omtolkning av ett ibland surrealistiskt slag — som en den politiska filosofins Lewis Carroll. För sig har deras stil problem, av olika slag, men när de ställs mot varandra blir dessa mångfalt större. Det är nämligen oerhört lockande att i den här framlagda volymen läsa dem som stödande varandra, så att Žižeks filosofiska fyrverkeri visar ett oanat djup hos Mao, eller så att Maos sobrare stil ger Žižek en mera analytisk grund. Jag tror båda dessa läsningar är farliga och kontraproduktiva. Det är inte så att den ena förklarar den andra, och kan inte heller så vara. Žižek strävar inte till att visa “vad Mao menade”, utan snarare att visa hur man kan tänka kring en komplex politisk text i en komplex politisk situation. Mao, å sin sida, skulle med stor sannolikhet ha avskytt Žižeks psykoanalytiska läsningar, och hans distinkt heterodoxa politiska teorier. Vad boken visar är inte en ny harmoni, utan ett komplext snitt, en bruten linje. Men när man insett att boken de facto bygger på en motsättning och en konflikt — och inte bara en mellan två skribenter — blir den än svårare att läsa.

Så hur skall man förhålla sig till en dylik bok? Och framför allt, hur skall man förhålla sig till dess utgivning? Det är bortom allt tvivel att Mao inte var någon särdeles angenäm person, och hans revolution står som en av närhistoriens mörkaste fläckar. Hans välde dödade miljoner, krossade oersättliga kulturella och ekonomiska värden, och det var med Kinas stöd som en serie andra blodiga revolutioner utfördes. Varje tänkande människa kan konstatera att det fanns mycket oförlåtligt i Maos projekt, och att ingen revisionism i världen kan ändra detta faktum. Vissa skulle, med goda argument, säga att Mao i sig representerar något oförlåtligt, något som inte skall gömmas undan bakom filosofiska spetsfundigheter. En hel del kommentatorer har också hävdat att den barbari som låg bakom vissa (några skulle säga alla) av de socialistiska revolutionerna ännu inte har avhandlats färdigt, och att det romantiska skimmer som ännu finns över t.ex. Mao är en tänkandets skamfläck. Mycket riktigt har man också kommenterat att där ingen skulle kunna tänka sig att släpa fram en Mussolini eller en Franco som en pigg och ironisk symbol, så har samma självcensur inte drabbat mera vänstersinnade tänkare. Det framstår som tämligen klart att det vore svårt att publicera en bok med t.ex. Augusto Pinochets tal med ett förord av Dick Cheney, utan att detta skulle leda till en smärre internationell incident. Så hur kommer det sig att Mao fortfarande är mera salongsfähig?

Till en del kan detta bero på att de revolutionära manifesten trots allt tenderar ha ett intellektuellt djup. Inte nödvändigtvis så att de vore stringenta och utan motsägelser, men nog så att de ofta har försökt brottas med problematiken av att skapa en ny värld. Till detta kommer det faktum att revolutionen, som koncept, är något oerhört lockande. Vi lever trots allt i en värld där innovation, kreativitet och entreprenörskap hålls som de högsta av honnörsord, och visst är en hyfsad revolution något innovativt och skapande. Inte nödvändigtvis så att denna innovation är bra, eller ens moraliskt önskvärd, men nog så att revolutionärer alltid engagerat sig med “kreativ förstörelse”, något bl.a. entreprenörskapsforskningen alltid hållt som alfa och omega. Där mera konservativa tänkare alltid fokuserat mera på försiktig utveckling, har de revolutionära visat mera av ett tänkandets rock’n’roll — spelar ingen roll så länge det är fullt ös. Den andra volymen i Versos serie, Robespierres Virtue and Terror (även den med ett förord av Žižek), visar nästan upp en slags punk-estetik, där det mesta kunde accepteras i namnet av att man krossade något förljuget. Detta tilltalar folk. Där det konservativa tänkandet alltid lider av problemet att saker helt enkelt tar tid, har de revolutionära tänkarna kunnat visa upp mera av en entreprenörskapsanda. “—Ready, Fire, Aim!” ropar både Mao och Tom Peters, och i båda fallen är det svårt att hålla sig oengagerad. Vi får under inga som helst omständigheter se detta som att de grymheter som revolutioner alltid har fört med sig skulle kunna ursäktas med utopins löften. Dylik pragmatism har alltid varit en otäck plump i det revolutionära tänkandet, och också en som inte hanterats i tillräcklig mån. Men den tjusning som ligger bakom vår smygande kärlek för det radikala ska kanske inte heller underskattas.

Jag är därför lockad att läsa dessa böcker på ett sätt som står i linje med hur Žižek tenderar att resonera. Kanske ska vi inte se dem som vänster-romantik, eftersom vänstern alltid haft tillgång till dessa texter, och redan länge hanterat de frågor som finns i kärnan av dessa. Jag vill, som Žižek, vända på frågan, och istället hävda att introduktionen av dessa revolutions-romantiska böcker inte skall ses som att det gammal-socialistiska projektet lever och mår väl, utan tvärtom som att marknadsliberalismen undermedvetet tagit sig an Mao och Robespierre. Detta är säkerligen något som mången ryggar tillbaka inför, eftersom det verkar finnas en oöverbryggbar klyfta mellan dessa två tänkesätt — det utopistiskt socialistiska och det ny-liberala. Men samtidigt finns det en koppling, och en underliggande trend som knyter samman de två.

Marknadsliberalismens ideologi bygger på en ständig utveckling, och en tanke om att radikala innovationer kan omvandla både ekonomier och samhällen. Borgerliga allianser och nyliberala tankesmedjor talar varmt för hur den enskilde kan skapa vardagsrevolutioner, innovera sig fram till transnationella företag (som gör nationalstaten mindre viktig), via entreprenörskap omvandla sig själv, sin omgivning, sin region och sitt land. Där Mao, som Žižek en gång kallade “the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, sade att saker växte fram ur gevärspipan, säger vi idag att både fred, välstånd och det nya samhället växer fram ur affärsplanen. Både Mao och marknadsliberalerna hyllar kreativitet och gåpåar-anda, och båda föraktar byråkrater och bakåtsträvare. För alla sina missdåd lockade Mao med sig människor genom att säga att handling och nyskapande skulle ta oss till en ny, bättre värld. Revolutionen, av vilken typ den än vara månde, skulle göra livet bättre, framtiden ljusare, alla lyckligare. Mao var, for all intents and purposes, en varm förespråkare av innovation — så länge det var i linje med just hans tankar om detta. Denna tro på det nyas möjlighet, kombinerat med en övertro att innovationen är något definierat, något som lyder under den syn på världen man själv har, sammankopplar en mängd tänkare genom historien.

Ett av de grepp som gjort Žižek berömd är hans sätt att fråga vilket som det underliggande traumat är som skapar en specifik reaktion, som sedan kan vara en viss form av populärkultur eller en ny lag. Här kunde detta grepp tillämpas på honom själv, genom att ställa frågan: “Varför denna hyllning? Varför just nu?” Kanske är det så att Žižek i själva verket är en i allra högsta grad populär författare, som ger vissa specifika, “farliga” tänkare den intellektuella legitimitet som behövs för att t.ex. en börsmäklare eller en Timbro-anställd skall kunna tillfredställa sin åtrå efter något så opassande som Maos drastiska tro på revolutionens möjlighet? Kanske är Žižek framför allt en facilitator, en revolutionens marketeer, som ger oss det farliga i välpackade paket, som gjorda för att obekymrat tas in i dagens konsumtionssamhälle. Det han presenterar är revolutionen i fickformat, gjort sexig och tillgänglig, med rätt slags kredd och rätt slags yta. Något som t.o.m. skulle passa in i styrelserummet, där hela ledningsgruppen tillsammans kan läsa Mao för att fila på sin innovativa Kina-strategi…

Versos böcker skall därför kanske inte ses som ren romantik, utan snarare som ett symptom på en slags fetishism, där revolutionen inte längre är en politisk praktik, utan ett tecken på vår åtrå inför möjligheten att omvandla och radikalt omkullkasta. Samma kommentatorer som orgiastiskt hyllar innovatören som nutidens mest centrala intellektuella figur kan mycket väl tänkas bläddra i Maos text om revolutionens motsägelsefulla natur och behovet att hålla sig pragmatisk, och kanske är det så att Verso utan att fullt ha greppat det framför allt försörjer dem de säger sig kämpa emot med ett komplext tankegods, en slags paradoxal intellektuell pornografi — något man både kan starkt fördöma och i smyg upphetsas av. Med andra ord ska man kanske inte se denna revolutionens vår som ett tecken på att vänstern lever och mår väl, utan snarare som ett tecken på det motsatta. Det är motsägelsefulla böcker detta, ett slags kinesiska pussel, men också tecken på en tidsanda. I vår nutid som så ofta utropats som post-historisk är det ännu viktigare att inte glömma vår historia, men inte heller låtsas som om historien inte skulle vara i allra högsta grad både levande och ombytlig.

The fun thing about business studies (bear with me) is the fact that “no-one knows anything”. See for instance this great article in the New York Times (required reading). The reason publishing is such a great business to study is that we really cannot predict it. Sure, we can hook onto trends or try to create buzz, but in the end it is up to whether people like it or not — and that cannot be modeled. I recently talked to an interesting older gentleman who claimed that he had an algorithm that could predict whether a book should be published or not (he said he has the patent), and as far as I could tell this was on the basis of how original the book was. The problem I could think of with such an algorithm is that people are rather quirky in their behaviors, and that the notion of originality is rather wide. Was Harry Potter original? It is a rather simple story, really, and fairly little in the overall concept are particularly novel (for instance, similar themes can be found in Roal Dahl and Eva Ibbotson’s brilliant Which Witch?, not to mention in Terry Pratchett). In fact, I don’t think it was that original. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. But good is difficult to measure, and exists in our cultural mind — which is malleable. Sometimes we want something really novel and avantgarde, sometimes we want comfort food. Business studies studies the unknowable, at least in part. That’s why it remains interesting. Those who think it should be about finding out “correct things” or “what works” really don’t understand it all too well.

Man oh man. McQueen designing for Samsonite’s Black Label. I love the crocodile bag.

Sometimes I think that man really doesn’t need that much money. Then I come across something like Bown’s bags, and I realize I need to make enough money to be able to afford bags like this:

It might just be the fact that I’ve been giving lots of talks the last 48 hours, but this story almost made me cry: Executed man’s last request honored — Pizzas for the Homeless. I always thought philanthropy is more intellectually interesting, not to mention rewarding, than all this miserly talk about saving and cutting back.

Together with the inimitable Sam Warren I wrote a chapter on the problems of organizational aesthetics, and now the book has finally come out. Flyer attached.