Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

After Creativity (a fragment, full chapter forthcoming in a book I’m editing with Niina Koivunen)

Creativity, After the Ball
Can creativity keep its luster? In five or ten or fifteen years, will we still sing the same praises? The contemporary fascination for the concept, coupled with an almost religious belief in policy circles as to its magic powers – powers through which there mere reference to the ‘creative economy’ can instantly revive ailing regions and create bohemian utopias out of crumbling urban areas – has pushed the discussion into a well-known territory, that of buzzwords and hype. We have seen this show before, with the fad for Japanese management, with the notion that ‘quality’ would prove to be an organizational panacea, with the belief in knowledge as the sole engine of economic development. We have loved and later lost, been both bewitched and sorely disappointed. Concepts that once seemed to carry all the promise of a better day have later been put to rest, gone fallow. Creativity seems ominously well-positioned to take its place in this rather tattered hall of fame foregone. Still, creativity seems to be something else, something more powerful. The ever-returning, the hallowed, the Phoenix arising from its own ashes. Creativity is something more than a buzzword, even if it is used as one now. But exactly what more than a buzzword?
The key issue, for me and in this chapter, is the one of how the concept of creativity can remain meaningful in a situation where a number of well-meaning adherents have done their darndest to neuter it and turn it into a Disneyfied version of itself. Where creativity is meant to represent a force that continuously challenges and questions, a number of contemporary understandings have reduced it into little more than grist for the same old corporate mill or worse still, into a tool for policy-makers and EU-bureaucrats. This obviously is a question of power, i.e. how a concept can lose power by being subjected to hegemonic forces that domesticate it, and how we are to analyze the prevailing ideology of creativity, specifically if we are interested in how creativity as a conceptual field can develop in the future. Rather than holding on to the promise of creativity and our faith therein, we must see to the possibility of abandoning the concept if it loses its potential to bring radically new effects into our thinking.
Note that this is not meant as an attack on creativity, nor an attack on the notion of a creative economy. Rather it is an attempt to ask what needs to be done in order to save a successful concept from itself. By introducing notions of power, ideology and a form of conceptual resistance into the discussion I am not trying to claim that contemporary theories of creativity are irredeemably compromised or naïve, but instead posit a series of questions as to what creativity theory needs to overcome, what might supplant the creative economy, and what kind of critique is needed in order to keep up the promise and potential of creativity itself.

A Note on the Historiography of Creativity
The story of creativity has been a varied one. In the beginning, creativity came from the gods, imbued the chosen with an energy to do great things, yet in a way that made the creators merely a vessel within which the divine will could deposit creativity. Later, gods were taken out of the equation, and creativity was recast as a spark of humanity at its finest, the light of genius. Later still, creativity was the domain of everyman, could she just find it within herself. Today, creativity is presented as a permanent presence as well as a permanent lack. Media and the sciences present everything from gardening to biotech-engineering as positively infused with the creative possibilities, laud economies that utilize and reinforce the creative industries, and make heroes out of those who manage to best live up to the image of the true creative.
We can in this capsule history, as well as in creativity writing more generally, find an overarching theme where creativity is inextricably linked to progress, and where the different tropes through which creativity is presented serve as a narrative through which humanity continuously improves. We could question this optimist history by asking whether this march of progress can be proven or if it is a creation after the fact, but we shall here refrain from such analyses. The important thing is that the creative economy today is normally narrated as the pinnacle of a long development, where the agrarian was overtaken by the feudal, the industrial by the knowledge society, and now the creative economy stands tall as a conqueror, albeit in bohemian drag.
But whereas the history of creativity has been written as a saga of continuous victory, where every age has had its proper creative genius, this writing of our contemporary history shows something else. Now creativity is not just something that is lauded, but also something we fear we do not have enough of. In a grand modernist gesture we have proclaimed the end of creative history in order to posit ourselves in a post-industrial paranoia, where the triumph of the creatives has led to a situation where the economy is built on a permanent lack. Where the previous economic revolutions all built on the notion of more effective utilization of resources, and the possibility to replicate or otherwise create these, the discourse of the creative economy shares an odd resemblance with the politics of an agrarian economy, and odder still, a kinship with the thinking of the physiocrats. Where the latter argued that the limits to how much land there was would always dominate all other economic matters, the creatocrats are now locked in an anguish regarding whether any system has ‘enough’ creativity. We can find this new angst at its purest in the writings of Richard Florida (2002, 2006), where the creative class is portrayed as a truly limited resource which must be mollycoddled much like rare orchids, and which when mistreated will wilt, die, and leave behind a barren landscape.
This obsession with the lack, which has led to calls for tax breaks, better understanding among managers, a plethora of attempts to create creative hotbeds, also signal how the most fundamental aspect of writings on creativity is in fact their fear that the creativity will run out. The sometimes obsessive way in which e.g. management and organization studies has lauded creativity could then be read not so much as a glorification of a dimension of humanity, but a strict resource-based analysis of the world. Creativity has become a conceptual weapon in the econo-political sphere, where the fear of not having enough, of not being able to generate enough, in short, to not be able to amass and gather, drives this new logic in a way that we can recognize from the old analyses of capitalist accumulation.
So in our current age, where the creative industries are touted as the most dynamic, most rapidly growing sector of the economy, and where the creative economy itself is presented as a force unto its own, one could in the vein of Meghnad Desai (2002) or critical management studies more generally say that might be seeing an intensification of the capitalist process, a colonization and effectivization of an area previously less exploited. In such an analysis, the grim possibility of creativity being sucked dry becomes a possibility, pointing towards a particular kind of economic endtimes where every human endeavor finally becomes commodified, commercialized, and market-priced. If even opera can be counted into the machinery of the capitalist engine, what is there left to do but grease its wheels and despondently look towards the time when every single thing is perfectly monetized and marketized? Such a grim view might seem like the pessimistic condemnations of a particularly despondent post-marxist (in other words, like Theodor Adorno on a bad day), but it can also be seen as an antidote to the sometimes absurd claims that are made in the name of creativity and the potential of the creative economy.

On the Creative Nature of Creativity
In another context I, together with Christian De Cock (De Cock & Rehn 2008), have commented on the peculiar ontological position of creativity. While the concept might seem easy to grasp, even self-evident, the nature of creativity is such that it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to define. If creativity is about going beyond what it, this clearly creates a problem when trying to pin the concept down. Namely, if creativity is breaking out of pre-defined boxes, this same principle must logically apply to creativity too. Any definition of the concept would seem to be contradictory, as they all simultaneously say that creativity is the thing defined, and that creativity is about breaking with the prevailing (which would include the definition). In other words, creativity will logically always deconstruct itself. Any attempt to limit or define it will fall pray to the logical necessity of the definition not covering all the potential uses of the concept. This paradoxical nature is not a flaw, but as our thinking to a great extent is geared towards causal explanations, the openness of creativity to new forms of expression makes it exceptionally difficult to fit into a theoretical scheme with anything close to completeness. Instead, the amorphous nature of the concept will always escape totalizations.
Following this, we could ask if not the creative economy might not be best understood through the concept of decay, so that every move towards establishing a limited economy of the creative will by necessity empty out the very condition of its creation. The creative economy can, in a sense, only exist if and only if it is prepared for annihilation. Whatever creativity is inherent in the starting of an economic endeavor, this will become part of the normal, natural makeup thereof, thus slowly losing the energy that was the original driving force. This is of course something that we know well from the literature on entrepreneurship, but taken on a more general level this questions whether there can be such a thing as a stable foundation of the creative economy.
Every time we bring in a creative move into the structure of management, this will position it in a way that subtly moves away from creativity through the process of structuring/standardizing knowledge, introducing regimes of effectiveness and pricing, and commoditization. This argument should be well known from critical theory, but my use of it here can easily be misinterpreted. I am not arguing that the process through which creativity is brought to the market is unethical, amoral or inhuman, as the ethical aspect of the market economy do not interest me here. Rather, I am interested in how writings of creativity and management or the creative economy are in fact setting up knowledge regimes around creativity, and thus lessening it. As Michel Foucault (1980) pointed out, any form of knowledge contains within it a procedure of repression and control, and we must pay strict attention to structures of power/knowledge. Yet, in the discourse of creativity and economy such aspects are strangely absent, and if they come into fore it is usually to point out that there will be power-games between managers and ‘the creatives’, not that creativity in and of itself might contain power-dimensions. With regards to the previously mentioned implicit resource-view of creativity, this omission becomes doubly strange.
Another way to put this is to point out that the point “after creativity” alluded to in the title of this text can be read in at least two ways. It can be read in a limited fashion, one where the time after creativity would be one where creativity has run out, either due to exploitation or due to insufficient support and attention. This in a resource-based view. However, I want to contend that regardless of how one reaches this conclusion, such a reading is built on a limited view of creativity, the one referenced to in the issue regarding whether creativity can be defined or not. Another reading would emphasize that any word/concept will always become tainted by the ideological context(s) that amass around it, and in order to free ourselves (becoming creative) we need to go beyond the word itself. Staying wedded to a singular interpretation or singular theorization of a concept such as creativity will by logical necessity become highly un-creative, and it is in fact necessary to look for a point after or post- if the concept is to retain any meaning.
In yet other words, is it creative to assume that the creative economy is important? In an age where every single politician and bureaucrat is more than willing to embrace such a statement, would not the creative thing to do be to renounce the creative economy, to proclaim that creativity is no longer interesting? Obviously such moves are difficult to make, as we are caught up in webs of language and ideology, but the question is nevertheless intriguing.

[Continued in the book "Creativity and Contemporary Economy" that I'm editing with Niina Koivunen.]

I just updated my homepage with a forthcoming article, one I co-wrote with my friend and colleague Saara Taalas. It’s a meditation on leadership and ignorance, with the following abstract:

Here’s the PDF.

1.
How much should an academic create, in the form of written contributions, to be seen as a productive member of the community? This is a question that has fascinated me for some time now. Living, as I do, between and betwixt many different academic cultures, I have tried to figure out how the different ways to look upon productivity creates different mindsets and also differing views on what “good” is. This is also something that I’ve thought long and hard about due to the fact that it interests me on the level of identity, namely my own. In a Scandinavian perspective, I think I’m considered fairly productive, since I do have some stuff going on. In a British perspective, I think I would be seen as something of an oddity, as I’ve never been trained in the “RAE Rules OK”-mindset and thus produce a lot of stuff that does not fit the mold. In the US perspective I would probably be looking for a job.

Let’s start by thinking about numbers. How much should one produce, per year or per number of years, to be productive?

One target would be the one given by the Research Assessment Exercise, which basically states that as long as you have four pieces published in “good” journals during the last five or six years, you’re RAE-able and therefore OK. This would mean that one doesn’t have to publish that much, nor that often, and in fact one doesn’t even need to publish good stuff — as long as it gets into the proper journals. This might, just to throw a name on it, be called the “sniper approach”. As long as one hits the appropriate target, one bullet is enough.

Another target would be to take more of a “shotgun approach” and set a number of publications per year as a target. One doesn’t need to be that picky about where they come out, for if one writes enough something is bound to be good and/or get into the good journals. For this to work, one would need to set the figure fairly high, like ten per year, and put in a few rules regarding variety (not just working papers, need to follow through, and so on). All in all, it might create both an RAE-able result and a lot of added bonuses (or chaff).

An old target, in what we could call the “musket approach”, was that a proper academic should produce a serious book every 5, 10 or 20 years. As long as one was working on a magnum opus, one was productive. This approach is rare these days (although one can occasionally find it in the humanities), as it clearly places quality over short-term results. It is also perfect for no longer active academics to hide behind a promise.

Which approach one chooses depends on both one’s context and what one believes is good, proper and true in academia.

2.
I was raised in an academic culture which appreciated and valued books. In fact, I was actively discouraged to write journal articles, since these were seen as truncated and intellectually limiting. Instead I was taught that a PhD-thesis was supposed to be a solid book, and that one after having finished that should start writing another one. If one wanted to be a full professor, one should aim for three books — serious and solid ones. Journal articles, book chapters and working papers were all acceptable and even laudable by-products of the process of writing a book, but were not to be seen as goals in themselves. If putting together a journal article was taking time away from a book manuscript, one should always prioritize the book. In fact, the first time I got an article accepted (with revisions), my mentor told me to tell the journal to go fuck themselves: “Tell them you’re not changing a single comma, and that they can either publish as-is or go to hell.”

In other words, when it came to journals and publishing in them, I was pretty much on my own. However, as I had picked up that a lot of people thought that journal were important, so I started engaging with them. I never cared about whether they were “important” or where they were indexed or abstracted, and I really did not care about how they were ranked in the RAE. Instead, I sent stuff to journals I though seemed fun or who happened to have a suitable special issue. In fact, I preferred the smaller, newer, edgier to the big ones — I still do.

At the same time I actively tried to do a lot of other stuff. Book chapters were always a lot more fun to write than journal articles. The former felt like scholarship, the latter like homework. I loved little essays, working papers, and the likes. I experimented, with small-press publishing, with internet-stuff, with video. A lot of this is not taken seriously in that odd little parochial institution known as the RAE, nor is it considered right and proper in the American system. Thankfully, the Scandinavian system is a little less uptight.

3.
When I talk with British colleagues, the talk very often strays to the RAE, a subject of almost endless fascination to some of them. I find it interesting, obviously, but also an exercise in anthropological reflection. From my perspective, the RAE is a provincial phenomenon, interesting in the same way cultural matters tend to be, but definitively not a central issue. It is understandable only in context, and meaningless outside of it. It is also a fantastic way to contemplate cultural bias.

Take, for instance, the notion of the “international” journal, a central part of the RAE-system. The sobriquet international seems to be synonymous with “English”, and for some enchanted reason most “international” journals seem to be based either in Britain or the US. Although we Scandos have decided to amusedly accept the odd fact that quite a number of Brits and Americans seem to be fluent in only one language (making them linguistically a lot less advanced than my seven-year old daughter, who is fluent in two and learning a third), it seems a little unfair that this handicap should afford the English-speaking academics the advantage to proclaim their language the international one (particularly when it isn’t even close to being the biggest language in the world). The fact that this forces the majority of academics to write in a foreign language, and in addition have to accept that this is “international” really isn’t addressed enough. Even though I’m all for affirmative action in the workplace, I am not sure this should be extended to the linguistically challenged.

I write quite a lot in Swedish, and will continue to do so, as it happens to be my language of choice. I also write some in Finnish. A lot of my best material (well, “best” is a tricky term…) is in fact done in Swedish. Obviously, this is not RAE-able, because a gang of Brits can’t read it, but all in all it seems odd that in order to be taken “seriously” I’m supposed to write in a foreign language, lessen the quality of my research, and make my texts worse. Hooray for academia. Now, this would not bug me if one of all British academics would demand that they publish at least a few texts in a foreign language, but for some reason not even the critical management scholars feel that this is a form of imperialism they want to do something about. Actually, I don’t think you should be allowed to become a chair or a journal editor if you’re monolingual.

Well, whatever. What all this highlights is a fact that most people know and understand, but which really cannot be stated often enough. The systems of research appraisal we are gravitating towards, with RAE as an almost archetypal example, represent a travesty. They do not care a whit about research quality, and seem more than happy to lessen everything down to senseless metrics. Provincial ones, to boot.

4.
What bugs me most about the whole thing is that the assumption is that research does not need to be read. One can be proclaimed a productive scholar simply because one publishes things in the “right” places, and the basic thinking behind this is that one can judge quality simply by glancing at the title of a journal (one doesn’t even need to know the title of a paper to know it’s good). Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? The fact that all the top journals (call them A-journals or “five stars” or whatever) have published absolute crap, and that there thus is a great likelihood that stuff that is rewarded in the system is just that — crap.

Similarly, since nothing is read, a piece of brilliant scholarship, a truly fantastic piece of research can be disregarded just because it is published in the wrong manner. As doctoral students have pointed out through the ages, none of the true greats of science would have stood a chance in the current system. They wrote to be read, not to be assessed, and would thus be hard pressed to snatch and hold onto a lecturer’s position. Granted, the selection mechanism and wide distribution of journals do give these an edge of sorts, but the value of this edge has become insanely overrated.

Now, what I find absolutely horrendous and directly unethical is that all this denigrates the scholarly book, the research monograph. The way I was raised into academia, this was what you meant by research, and now a bunch of foreign bureaucrats with language problems are saying that this does not count? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Writing a journal article, to me, is mainly an exercise in typing. There are rote formulas to get a journal article done (well known such, looking at the shite that gets published), and it frankly bores me a lot of the time. A book, however, is another matter. A book takes time to craft, and the sheer length thereof forces one to work in an altogether different manner. I was taught by my Doktorvater the following: If you haven’t written a serious monograph, you shouldn’t be made a PhD. If you haven’t written two, you’re not a serious scholar. “—And never let one who hasn’t written three serious books become a professor! It cheapens the title.” And damn good advice it was too.

5.
We need to talk about productivity, but we also need to discuss what this means. Just ranting on about the RAE or the need for publishing more solves very little. Content must still stand for something. Books need to be respected. Monolingualism cannot be seen as a virtue. Stupidity must be challenged. And no rejection rate or citation index helps there.

(As co-editors of the second newsletter of the fictional museum museumuseu (founded by Brazilian artist Mabe Bethonico), Goldin+Senneby proposed a service to the museumuseu: A custom-made teambuilding event for the museum as an orgaization, based on Franz Kafka’s vision of the Great Nature Theatre (see Teambuilding in the Great Nature Theatre). Complementing this proposal G+S invited Swedish academic Alf Rehn to further contextualize the corporate event in relation to the control of time in post-industrial production.

Originally published in English and in Spanish in museumuseu newsletter #2, “There is time in the museum”, Medellín 2007.)

Tick-tock. Corporate entertainment always runs on schedule. The ritual demands it, and the organizers deploy an array of technologies to keep the enchantment in check. Step in, but do not deviate. It’s business, imagineered. For the uninitiated, few things will seem more alien and socially intimidating than the internal company event: the teambuilding day, the strategic initiative workshop, the motivational seminar. Their very structure is such that it invokes a feeling of terror. The pieces that put it together are mundane and everyday, but the construction is such that sensations of hidden meanings and of being Other come to fore. Due to this they are easy to lampoon, as our horror in the face of them requires us to portray them as silly or meaningless, but their power comes from the fact that they invoke a very specific brand of magic — curated corporate time, a museum of the controlled mind.

A corporate event — and I should know, having both performed at and studied quite a few such — is a ritual of community and sodality. But it is also a tightly coordinated thing, one where the ritual performance is kept in check with all the tools the corporation has acquired during its hundred year reign. It is, for lack of a better analogy, a curated exhibition of how the company controls time. Into the event the throngs are led, freed from the factory/office, and presented with a choreographed sequence of informational goods. An audience, yet at the same time an integral form of raw material for the event. This is the new “free time”, the new museum — a thing dedicated to the muses of our late capitalist age.

The Event is a treat, a way to build community, to form teams, to motivate and entertain. For it to function well, the participants need to enter it in an expectant and suitably grateful mood. As it breaks the monotony of work, it is often seen as a reward and as a sign of corporate magnanimity. At the same time, it is supposed to develop us, make us better, more efficient. In many ways, it is actually reminiscent of how we were told museums were good to us when we were children, and how even a dull museum would seem a treat to a kid trained to sit still in class. It is/was another time, a time that was given to us, a gift. But a gift with a price.

The time that is created in the corporate event is one where the participants are transformed into efficient consumers of a very specific array of images and narratives. If we look directly at the structure of these happenings, we can discern a set number of “works”, specific instances of performances in the corporate museum. Some are strictly liturgical — the top manager’s speech, the explanation of how the day is structured — whereas others form a more defined product — the motivational speech, the external expert, the community-building exercise. The liturgy is highly important. In the same way a curated exhibition is like a factory with it’s interconnected parts and flows through the curated space (modern factories allow for many ways in which production and product can pass through the system), a corporate event is a factory of time. The opening speech details the time, establishes that control is and always will be in the hand of the company that has so graciously given this free (but from what?) time to the employees. The CEO is brought out first, to show that what comes after serves at the pleasure of the company. The coffee-breaks, the moderators, the time-slots, all important devices to curate corporate time.

Most important, though, is the headliner. All corporate events worth their salt needs one. Preferably, this is someone important, someone famous, someone from the outside. He or she can be a rebel, or a star, or an author — it matters very little. As long as it is an outsider, and as long as he or she can be “different”. The more different, the better. The best possible case is a speaker who can lambast the corporation, proclaim that it needs to “change or die”, tell stories of other companies that are doing much better. Rebellious, rambunctious, radical — these are words the corporate curator likes in an event speaker. It might seem odd for someone not trained in the logic of the corporation why this is so. Why would one want to invite in a person who will criticize you? Simple. It is not the message, it is the time.

The curated time of the corporate event makes every rebel a tool for the underlying message: We are in control. The rebel who sneers from the podium does so only at the leisure of the event organizer, and functions as a way to show how the corporation can both graciously invite criticism and yet exhibit control over it. We are treated to a respite, yet aware that this time can and will be cut and ended, and that the productive process will go on. The teambuilding exercise may seem like a time to break free from the shackles of control, but it is a measured time, a break as scientifically created as the short pauses introduced by scientific management as productivity enhancers in the early years of the twentieth century.

To stage these events is a new form of curatorship, and one that has rarely been studied. It may seem a little simplistic, even somewhat slapdash, but the corporate event is very much in tune with the development of late capitalism. The focus has gone away from controlling productivity, and instead focuses on controlling identity. When we are treated to an “event”, we are given a time of our own, a space within which we can reaffirm the bonds of organizational community. But at the same time, this time is one where the most valuable thing of all is produced — fealty to the corporate time. Curating this time, staging it in such a way that dissent becomes part of the production, that play in the service of the company becomes an integral part of the experience, this is a skill-set and a crucial part of creating the new kinships. Corporate cultures are not created, they are curated. As is the time of the event, the corporate museum.

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.

Today, in the newspaper, I read that the Finnish forestry industry has devised an “innovation company” called Metsäklusteri Oy (the Forest Cluster Inc). This is supposed to double the value of the Finnish forestry-industry’s production and service functions by the year 2030, and make Finland’s forestry famous and productive and profitable and blah, blah, blah. Let me point out why this kind of news bugs me.

a) The bloody name to begin with. You’re starting an innovation company, and you couldn’t come up with anything more enticing than “The Forest Cluster”? Obviously, the name itself needn’t mean much (and I’m getting really annoyed at the current trend of babyfied names like Jaiku and Joomla and Gooh and so on), but a name as boring as this smacks of intense bureaucracy and decision-making by committee. Why not just call it “HeadInSand” and be frank about it?

b) Jesus Christ, they don’t even turn up on Google. They’re called Metsäklusteri, but turn up neither at www.metsaklusteri.com nor at www.metsaklusteri.fi – hooray for innovation strategy…

c) An innovation company that assumes that it’s business will be more or less the same in 25 years, am I the only one a little concerned? Obviously forestry will be important in 25 years, and I despise the snake-oil salesmen who pretend otherwise, but things can change a wee bit in 25 years. The assumption this company makes, that it can actually have a 25 year plan, is charming in a sense, but I doubt they’re thinking the way I am about this. Were this a anti-establishment move, a brave anti-position to overly cheerful innovation thinking, I’d like it. It could have a bit of punk, a bit of old-school Maoism about it, and I like that attitude. But I doubt this is how they’ve thought. This is innovation by keeping things the same, creativity by committee and tight reigns. Not good.

d) Oh, and everyone’s invites to the party. All the companies, all the government agencies, a bunch of universities – all part of the monolith. Yeah, throw in everyone’s entrenched opinions, make it a political muddle to begin with, and make sure that everything will by necessity be log-jammed by competing interests, that is just a perfect way to start up innovation in an industry.

I wonder, like Chandler from Friends, could they be any more clueless?