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.