Organization and Identity (Routledge Studies in Business Organizations and Networks)

Organization and Identity Organization and Identity provides an exploration of identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and as a key concept in the social sciences, particularly focusing on how ideas about identity can be applied to organization and management studies. The contributors to this volume use and develop recent philosophical thought on the nature of identity to ask questions about the key social divisions of gender, class and nation, such as whether we are able to write our own identity stories or if we remain bound by social constraints and inequalities. The book fulfils three objectives: it confronts established notions and assumptions about identity and its relevance to organization and management; it looks critically and in detail at the performance of identity in different contexts; and it explores beyond current understandings of identity, asking whether identity itself is a concept which now only has a history. The chapters in this collection bring approaches from contemporary philosophy into the area of organization theory and critically assess their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion. Alison Pullen is Senior Lecturer in Critical Management and Director of the PhD programme in the Department of Management Studies at the University of York. She is the co-author of Thinking Organization (also with Stephen Linstead, Routledge 2005) and has published in several journals on issues including organizational change and poststructuralist feminism. Stephen Linstead is Professor of Critical Management and Head of the Critical Management Studies Group at the University of York. He was previously Director of Research, and Professor of Organizational Analysis, Durham Business School, University of Durham. He has published widely on organizational aesthetics, language, philosophy, qualitative methodology, gender and sexuality and is the author of Text/Work (Routledge 2003). He is an Academician at the Academy of the Social Sciences and co-edits the journal Culture and Organization.

Routledge studies in business organizations and networks 1 Democracy and Efficiency in the Economic Enterprise Edited by Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn 2 Towards a Competence Theory of the Firm Edited by Nicolai J.Foss and Christian Knudsen 3 Uncertainty and Economic Evolution Essays in honour of Armen A.Alchian Edited by John R.Lott Jr 4 The End of the Professions? The restructuring of professional work Edited by Jane Broadbent, Michael Dietrich and Jennifer Roberts 5 Shopfloor Matters Labor-management relations in twentieth-century American manufacturing David Fairris 6 The Organisation of the Firm International business perspectives Edited by Ram Mudambi and Martin Ricketts 7 Organizing Industrial Activities Across Firm Boundaries Anna Dubois 8 Economic Organisation, Capabilities and Coordination Edited by Nicolai Foss and Brian J.Loasby 9 The Changing Boundaries of the Firm Explaining evolving inter-firm relations Edited by Massimo G.Colombo 10 Authority and Control in Modern Industry Theoretical and empirical perspectives Edited by Paul L.Robertson

11 Interfirm Networks Organization and industrial competitiveness Edited by Anna Grandori 12 Privatization and Supply Chain Management Andrew Cox, Lisa Harris and David Parker 13 The Governance of Large Technical Systems Edited by Olivier Coutard 14 Stability and Change in High-Tech Enterprises Organisational practices and routines Neil Costello 15 The New Mutualism in Public Policy Johnston Birch all 16 An Econometric Analysis of the Real Estate Market and Investment Peijie Wang 17 Managing Buyer-Supplier Relations The winning edge through specification management Rajesh Nellore 18 Supply Chains, Markets and Power Mapping buyer and supplier power regimes Andrew Cox, Paul Ireland, Chris Lonsdale, Joe Sanderson and Glyn Watson 19 Managing Professional Identities Knowledge, performativity, and the ‘new’ professional Edited by Mike Dent and Stephen Whitehead 20 A Comparison of Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe and in the USA Solomon Karmel and Justin Bryon 21 Workaholism in Organizations Antecedents and consequences Ronald, J.Burke 22 The Construction Industry An international comparison Edited by Gerhard Bosch and Peter Philips 23 Economic Geography of Higher Education Knowledge, infrastructure and learning regions

Edited by Roel Rutten, Frans Boekema and Elsa Kuijpers 24 Economies of Network Industries Hans-Werner Gottinger 25 The Corporation Investment, mergers and growth Dennis C.Mueller 26 Industrial and Labour Market Policy and Performance Issues and perspectives Edited by Dan Coffey and Carole Thornley 27 Organization and Identity Edited by Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead 28 Thinking Organization Edited by Stephen Linstead and Alison Linstead 29 Information Warfare in Business Strategies of control and resistance in the network society Iain Munro 30 Business Clusters An international perspective Martin Perry 31 Markets in Fashion A phenomenological approach Patrik Aspers

Organization and Identity Edited by Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead selection and editorial matter; the contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-30008-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-35001-4 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-32231-6 (Print Edition)

Contents Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: organizing identity ALISON PULLEN AND STEPHEN LINSTEAD PART I Confronting identity: selves and others

2 Now where was I? Questioning assumptions of consistent identity NIC BEECH AND PETER MCINNES 3 Theorizing narrative identity: symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics DOUGLAS EZZY 4 Self and other in everyday existence: a mystery not a problem BOGDAN COSTEA AND LUCAS D.INTRONA 5 Living a story and storying a life: a narrative understanding of the distributed self DAVID SIMS PART II Performing identities: selves for others

6 Career as a project of the self and labour process discipline CHRISTOPHER GREY 7 Fetish failures: interrupting the subject and the other STEFFEN G.BÖHM 8 The mission statement as epideictic rhetoric: celebrating organisational identity PETER M.HAMILTON 9 Other work: a dividual enterprise PER BÄCKIUS

ix xiv 1

18

20 40 55 77

94

96 114 148 166

PART III After identity…?: selves in question

10 Beyond happy families: a critical re-evaluation of the control-resistanceidentity triangle YIANNIS GABRIEL 11 Casting the other to the ends of the Earth: marginal identity in organisation studies STEPHEN LINSTEAD, STEWART CLEGG AND GRAHAM SEWELL 12 Making global subjects: diasporic identity as a media event GOLDIE OSURI AND BOBBY BANERJEE 13 Fluid identities and ungendering the future STEPHEN LINSTEAD AND ALISON PULLEN 14 Identity aesthetics: asymmetry and the assault on order ROBERT GRAFTON-SMALL

181

183 204 223 242 270

Author index

278

Subject index

292

Contributors Per Bäckius teaches and researches at Gotland University and at Stockholm University School of Business. His main area of interest concerns the role of philosophy, art and figures of thought in business and economic life. He has been working on beggary, uncertainty, entertainment and the individual as important figures of thought for understanding human endeavour and he is currently completing a study on gambling. Bobby Banerjee is Professor of Strategic Management and Director of the PhD Program at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts as well as at the University of Wollongong where he headed the doctoral program, and RMIT University where he was Director of the Doctor of Business Administration program. His research interests are in the areas of sustainable development, corporate environmentalism, socio-cultural aspects of globalization, postcolonial theories and Indigenous ecology. He has published in several international journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Human Relations, Organization, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Advertising and Management Learning. Nic Beech is Professor of Management Studies at Strathclyde Graduate School of Business where he is also Director of Research. Nic’s current research is focused on the construction of individual and group identity at work and the problems and possibilities that arise from such constructions. His research has been published in journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies and the Journal of Applied Behavioural Science. Nic chairs the British Academy of Management Special Interest Group on Identity, is a senior editor of Organization Studies, and is co-author of three books on HRM and Management Learning. Steffen G.Böhm is Lecturer in Management and PhD Director in the Department of Accounting Finance and Management at the University of Essex. He holds degrees from Lancaster University and Warwick, where he obtained his PhD in 2003. A founding editor of the electronic journal, ephemera: critical dialogues on organization, his research interests encompass the political philosophy of organization, alternative organizational forms and futures, the organization of resistance and social movements, the critique of automobility and other contemporary transport regimes, and art and organization. A frequent contributor to conferences, he has organized or co-organized several international workshops or conference streams at such colloquia as the European Group for Organization Studies, the Art of Management and Critical Management Studies. The undecidable Stewart Clegg was nevertheless born in Bradford, England, and migrated to Australia in 1976, after completing a first degree at the University of Aston (1971) and a Doctorate at Bradford University (1974). Previously he has held positions at the University of St Andrews, Scotland; University of New England, NSW; University of Western Sydney, in all of which he was Professor and Head of

Department, and Griffith University, Brisbane, where he was Reader. He is Research Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he is the Director of ICAN (Innovative Collaborations, Alliances and Networks), a Key University Research Centre of the University of Technology. He also holds an appointment at the University of Aston Business School, UK, as well as currently being a Visiting Professor and International Fellow in Discourse and Management Theory, Centre of Comparative Social Studies, Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Visiting Professor of Organizational Change Management, Maastricht University Faculty of Business. He has written extensively on power and organizations. His most recent books are Trends in Japanese Management: Continuing Strengths, Current Problems and Changing Priorities, co-authored with Toyohiro Kono (London: Palgrave 2001) and the eight-volume collection on Central Currents in Organization Theory. Paradoxes of Management and Organizations (Amsterdam: Benjamins 2002) as well as, with Robert Westwood, Debating Organisation: Point/Counterpoint, (Oxford: Blackwell 2002). He has just completed Managing and Organizations: an Introduction to Theory and Practice (with Martin Kornberger and Tyrone Pitsis, London: Sage). He publishes regularly in leading journals such as the Academy of Management Education and Learning Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations and Administrative Science Quarterly, at only slightly greater length than this biography. Stewart Clegg, whilst agreeing that he was indeed and coincidentally originally born and educated in England and migrated to Australia in 1976, is at pains to point out that unlike Stewart Clegg (above) his 30year academic career was not always in management (also in humanities and sociology). He has also been a labourer on construction sites, worked in textile factories, been a shop assistant in a hardware store, an announcer on the radio, where he used to produce a couple of shows for Radio 4ZZZ in Brisbane, including The Jazz Program, and he has been a book series editor as well as a journal editor. Currently he also works at The University of Technology, Sydney, where he is a Professor of Management and shares the Directorship of ICAN Research and several international visiting posts with the other Stewart Clegg, but is a lot more interesting than he is. Bogdan Costea is a member of the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University’s Management School. His main research and teaching preoccupation is the constitution of new subject positions in Western management practices (such as, for example, how HRM reflects multiple modalities of appropriating and expropriating, producing and controlling subjectivity in late modern cultures). He is similarly interested in management education and its cultural origins, in particular, the world-historical narratives this form of education promotes and how. Douglas Ezzy took his PhD at the University of Tasmania where he is now a Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Australia. He is currently researching contemporary Witchcraft, and his research is driven by a fascination with how people find meaning and dignity in contemporary life. His publications include Narrating Unemployment (Ashgate 2001), Qualitative Analysis (Allen and Unwin/Routledge 2002) and the edited collection Practising the Witch’s Craft (Allen and Unwin 2003). He has also published articles and book chapters on contemporary spirituality, the meaning of work and unemployment, illness experiences, identity theory and research methodology.

Yiannis Gabriel is Professor in Organization Theory, at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are in organization theory (especially leadership, group dynamics and organizational culture), consumer studies, management learning and knowledge, storytelling, folklore and psychoanalysis. Gabriel is author of Freud and Society, Working Lives in Catering (both Rout ledge), Organizations in Depth (Sage) and Storytelling in Organizations (Oxford University Press) and co-author of Organizing and Organizations and The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and its Fragmentation and Experiencing Organizations (all Sage). He has recently edited the collection, Myths, Stories and Organizations, published by Oxford University Press in April 2004. Other publications include articles and book chapters on illness narratives, computer folklore, organizational nostalgia, chaos and complexity in organizations, fantasies of organizational members about their leaders, organizational insults and research methodology using stories and narratives. He has been Editor of Management Learning and Associate Editor of Human Relations. Robert Grafton-Small holds a CNAA doctorate on social aspects of consumption. Prematurely retired after posts in Marketing at Strathclyde and Organisational Symbolism at St Andrews, he has lately been an honorary professor at Keele University’s Department of Management. Now attached to the University of Leicester Management Centre, he maintains an active interest in original research, publishing regularly in several disciplines. Christopher Grey is Reader in Organization Theory at the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He gained his PhD at Manchester University and has previously held faculty posts at UMIST and Leeds University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Stockholm University, and Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning, an Executive Committee member of the Management Education and Development Division of the American Academy of Management and a Fellow of the ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Economic Performance. He was a member of the DfES’s National Educational Research Forum and chaired its task group on research quality. He is currently chair of the Management Research Advisory Forum to the National College of School Leadership. He has published widely in the fields of management, accounting, organization theory and sociology of organizations and his main research interests are in professional services, management education and learning, and the sociology of management and organizations. Peter M.Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in HRM at the University of Durham. His main research interest is a focus on the rhetoric of industrial relations and human resource management. He has degrees from the Universities of Glasgow, Manchester and London. Amongst others he has been published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Personnel Review, Journal of Management Studies and Organization. He thinks he longs to return to Stornoway! Lucas D.Introna is a Reader in Organisation, Technology, and Ethics at Lancaster University Management School. Previously he lectured in Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interest is a critical

orientation to the political and ethical aspects of information technology in organizations and society from a phenomenological perspective. He is co-editor of Ethics and Information Technology and a founding member of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT). Stephen Linstead is Director of Research and Professor of Organizational Analysis, Durham Business School, University of Durham. Recent books include The Aesthetics of Organization (Sage 2000 with Heather Höpfl), The Language of Organization (Sage 2001 with Robert Westwood), Text/Work (Routledge 2002) and Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (Sage 2004). An Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences, he currently co-convenes a Standing Working Group of the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS) on The Philosophy of Organization and coedits the journal Culture and Organization. He is currently working on qualitative methods projects; still sending his letters of application to Pop Idol; and until they relent and double the qualifying age (Double? Hmmmm, it would take a bit more than that! … Ed.), he whiles away his spare moments trying to communicate with geese and learning to know his place. Peter Mclnnes is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde’s Graduate School of Business, Glasgow, UK. Before taking up an academic post, Peter was a management accountant working in a variety of industries including aircraft manufacturing and food production. His current research focuses on the role of identity in organizations under conditions of change. His interests lie in identity’s role in organizational life, specifically the way that language usage shapes both perceptions and the lived experience of organization. Goldie Osuri is Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales and holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research involves interdisciplinary work in media, cultural and postcolonial studies on race, ethnicities and contemporary nationalisms. Alison Pullen is Senior Lecturer in Critical Management at the University of York having worked for the University of Durham at Durham Business School, and the Universities of Leicester and Essex. Alison’s research explores changes in managerial subjectivities, looking at issues of fluidity and the breaking down of binary categorizations in theory and practice, and gender and change. She remains confused about who Alison Linstead is and scared that she is becoming her mother. Unable to construct an interesting identity for the sake of this book, she will end about now, but she is also interested in other people’s narcissism and particularly how this is gendered. Graham Sewell is Associate Professor of Organization Studies and Human Resource Management in the Department of Management, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also a visiting professor in the Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He obtained his PhD in 1994 from Cardiff University, UK. Graham has published widely in the areas of workplace surveillance, teamwork, and business ethics. He is currently involved in two long-term research projects, one examining the use of evolutionary theory in management and organization studies and the other assessing the social and economic impact of “identity theft”. He lives in Melbourne with his wife Alison and his pet parrot, Schmooly.

David Sims is Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City University, London, and Associate Dean. He has an academic background in operational research and organizational behaviour, and completed his PhD at Bath University. His research interests are in the relationship between managerial living, thinking, learning and storying. He has applied these areas to topics as diverse as leadership, motivation of middle managers, agenda shaping, problem construction, consulting skills and mergers. He is currently struggling with the self-referential character of writing a short biography for a book on identity.

Acknowledgments We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce: The MidWest Sociological Society and the University of California Press for Chapter 3 which originally appeared as “Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism and Hermeneutics.” Sociological Quarterly, 39, 2:239–252, Spring 1998. The British Sociological Association for Chapter 6 which originally appeared as “Career as a project of the Self and Labor process discipline sociology.” 28, 2:479–497, May 1994. The Tavistock Institute for Chapter 10 which originally appeared as “Beyond happy families: a critical reevaluation of the control—resistanceidentity triangle.” Human Relations, 52, 2 179–203, 1999. An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 11 appeared as Clegg, S.R., Linstead, S.A. and Sewell, G., “Only Penguins: a Polemic on Organization Theory at the Edge of the World.” Organization Studies—Millennium Special Issue, 21, 0:103–117, 2000.

1 Introduction Organizing identity Alison Pullen and Stephen Linstead The study of identity has a long history in management and organization studies, with a background inter alia in the symbolic interactionism and studies of self-making of George Herbert Mead, the functionalism of Talcott Parsons, the development of role theory by Robert Merton, of dramaturgical sociology by Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of how social membership was achieved through talk. Focus on the organized dimensions of identity received particular emphasis during the 1980s with the rise of what has been called “corporate culturism”. Although some early contributions to this area recognized both the importance of identity as an explanatory concept as well as culture, and a handful acknowledged the importance of power and subjectivity in identity formation (Knights and Willmott 1985), these approaches tended to part company in the 1990s. “Organizational Identity” effectively replaced corporate culture as a focal topic and incorporated an outward-facing consideration of identity as brand, whilst consideration of issues of power and subjectivity became synonymous with a Foucauldian approach to such management issues as strategy and HRM (Hatch and Schultz 2002; Townley 1992). In sociology more broadly, in response to societal changes and increasing cultural diversity—globalization, the dawn of the e-society, the networked or virtual society and the information age, the mobility of labour and citizenship— identity has now become a more nuanced core topic stretching across a variety of subfields. This collection develops existing work on identity in organizations by incorporating philosophical contributions to the area which have hitherto been neglected. This book, then, has three objectives which correspond to its sections: first, to confront established notions and assumptions about identity and its relevance to organization and management studies; second, to look more closely and critically at the performance of identity in different contexts; third, to explore what is beyond current understandings of identity and whether identity itself is a concept which now has only a history. The contributors to this collection bring a wide range of approaches from current philosophizing into the area of organization theory, and critically assess their relevance and impact in a way which interrupts identity as a notion, and which means, we believe, that it can never be quite the same again. As we have noted, the work of the 1980s and early 1990s on corporate and organizational cultures has led to a concern with the concept of organizational identity, and there have been several recent attempts to work with the concept, particularly through the deployment of discourse and symbolic analysis (for example, a special issue

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of Academy of Management Review in 2000). This issue covered such aspects as identification, multiple organizational identities, organizational image and adaptive instability, identity and learning and stakeholder approaches. More recently, several additional seminal papers have been collected by Hatch and Schultz (2004) into a reader, covering classic contributions such as those of Mead and Goffman, important early contributions including Albert and Whetten’s first statement of the concept of organizational identity, Alvesson’s introduction of the idea of image, Ashforth and Mael’s introduction of the concept of identification from social identity theory and Dutton and Dukerich’s use of grounded theory. It also explores multiple identities, stability and change in identity, identity as narrative and discourse, identity threats and the question of identity audiences. In other areas, the effects of societal changes and organizational restructurings on the identities of managers have been examined (for example, Linstead and Thomas 2002; Thomas and Linstead 2002; see also Pullen A., (2005), for a comprehensive treatment of managerial identity), the changing nature of the idea of “career” (see Grey in this volume, and also McKinlay 2002) and the shift in significance from production to consumption have also been brought into a focus which addresses identity incidentally as a by-product of social fragmentation and simulation (du Gay 1995; du Gay et al. 2001; Ritzer 1999, 2004). At another level, literature on diversity has shown an interest in the formation of ideas of otherness including gender, the effects of globalization and multiculturalism and the emergence of postcolonial critiques (Banerjee and Linstead 2001; Calàs and Smircich 1996). During the same period, however, contemporary philosophy has also explored issues of identity and otherness, the creation and negotiation of selfhood, the relations among selves and others, and has challenged many of the existing basic assumptions, such as the essentially unitary nature of self, and traditional concepts such as the nature of class, which still underpin much of the mainstream work in organization and management studies on identity. Some of this has worked its way unevenly into management and organization such as work on the fragmented self (Cohen 1994; Friedman 1992; Hassard 1993; Hancock 1999; Kellner 1992; Linstead and Grafton Small 1992) as Hatch and Schultz note in their introduction. Although his important work is not included in the reader, Weick’s definition of sensemaking makes identity the ground of the sense-making process, and he illustrates this with a case study of the tensions between collective (industry/region) identity and organizational (firm) identity undertaken by Porac et al. (1989; see Weick 1995:76–82). Despite the fact that Weick deploys terminology that renders the self multiple, ambiguous, dynamic, an interpretive structure, where shifting interactions consti-tute shifting definitions of self, self as text, and that self is reflexive, mutable and adaptable (Weick 1995:20), his work should not be seen as a bridge into postmodernism, partly because of the essentially constructed nature of self and agency that his account preserves, and partly because of the unremitting positivity of concepts such as need which are seen to drive sense-making. Weick’s account remains psychological, and even where he draws heavily on philosophy, he seems only partially aware of the sources of his ideas—the section on retrospection cites Schutz, Pirsig and Hartshorne but the argument is pure, yet unacknowledged, Bergson, whose work was a known influence on these writers (Weick [1995:25] uses William James’ description of Bergson’s concept of duration rather than Bergson’s own account). Indeed, as we note below, Weick’s emphasis on the retrospective quality of sensemaking truncates the retrospective-

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prospective dimension of accounts which Garfinkel (1967) derives from Bergson via Schutz and which is essential to the understanding of the virtual in postmodern thought. Weick’s account of the “mirror” presents Cooley (1902) as its origin, yet again the account owes much to Hegel (Hancock and Tyler 2001) and would, in fact, have allowed a bridge, inter alia, to Kojéve, Lévinas and Derrida and their readings of the “Other”. There are other, more recent, influential concepts such as social capital (Adler and Kwon 2002; Nahapiet and Ghoshal 2002) which similarly await integration with theories of identity and organizing. It is one of the purposes of this book to open up this interpassage with philosophically informed accounts of identity, to enrich rather than displace existing work in the field, and offer some alternatives. In this chapter we will introduce the contributions to the book in terms of the tripartite structure of purpose we have outlined. But the overall approach of the book is not to look at levels of identity as such (such as individual, role, group, professional, organizational, community, regional, national), although these considerations will surface, but to consider identity as a process rather than a product—a process which involves societal factors, psychological factors, interaction, reflection, practice and performance. So, before we briefly outline the contributions to the book, we wish to present our attempt to map and integrate some of these different aspects of identity formation, taking a perspective that the lack of definitional convergence in the field is a fair reflection of the complexity of the concept, rather than a failing of analysis. The model we present goes beyond existing studies of managerial and organizational identities which regard those identities as changing but relatively stable, towards the recognition of identity construction as a form of first order accounting (Garfinkel 1967) characterized by paradox, fluidity, inconsistency and being constantly emergent. To appreciate and accommodate diversity, difference and the voice of subjects’ “equivocal positions” (Willmott 1997:1337), we suggest that identity construction is not a matter of resolving ambiguity and making clear-cut choices, but is often characterized by confusion and conflict within the individual as well as in the context. Identity formation in and around organizations is not only embedded in the demands of the present, but is constructed in terms of the conjunction of past and future, as an explanation of previous events as episodes in an unfolding narrative in a way that positions the constructor of the account advantageously for future episodes—indeed, may be a rehearsal for them. Identities can be seen as masks that are actively used, manipulated and created as resources for participation in the performance of an ongoing masquerade (Goffman 1959). Within this ongoing process are particular events which significantly affect the shaping of identity and may change its course dramatically. Our framework was originally developed from qualitative fieldwork with managers in the public and private sectors and draws, inter alia, on the work of Bergson, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. It discerns three areas of identity formation, which are interconnected and recursive rather than sequential, and which are infused by power relations and suffused by reflexivity. We outline the three areas, which we term identity capital, processes of subjective identity formation and identity performance (or identity events).

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Identity resources and identity capital Identity as a process rather than a product is, we note, following Lévinas, a result of a response to the Other, grounded in ontological insecurity and uncertainty. However, of what symbolic traces the generalized Other consists, when not embodied in specific interpersonal interactions, is often complex. Whenever identity processes occur, they draw on and relate to some contextual features which may be present, historical or based on a shared expectation of the future. These Derridean “traces” reaching forward and backward may be material, socio-economic, symbolic or discursive—identity will be a combination of all these phenomena, although not all may be given the same degree of attention. We can suggest that these “resources” could be regarded as identity capital, a concept which we believe goes further than the concept of social capital in terms of what it takes into account phenomenologically, but which preserves the idea that adheres to the use of capital as a term, in that it may accrue or deplete, increase or decrease in value, and be subject to symbolic trade-offs where influence, trust, credibility, honour and reputation are involved (Adler and Kwon 2002). We also wish to preserve the language sense of capital as a capital letter which embodies the naming function—certain properties of identity capital often act so strongly as to “name” an individual or body, to convey a set of attributes and expectations which may be either an advantage or disadvantage to the change or creation of new identity, so that capital may represent both burden and opportunity for leverage. The contextual field too is dynamic and identity capital may lose or increase value when shifted from one place to another—whether an individual changes organization, an organization attempts to operate in a different market, or both move to a new physical location. This is one of the emphases of the new social geography, that land-scapes relate to identityscapes, that selves are always in some sense geoselves, capable of deterritorialization (Pile and Thrift 1995; Sibley 1995). Identity also changes over time and in relation to prevailing interpretations of history, which was one reason why, in the 1980s, corporate culture investigators paid considerable attention to founding myths, and why IBM in recent years has invested part of its knowledge management capability into managing its own internal stories (Snowden 2000, 2001). The immediate history of power relations in an organization or community, historical and prevailing class or caste relations, and familial dynamics which may be partly cultural or ethnically shaped may all have influence. Castells (1997) argues that the dominant groups in a society may have the power to institute “legitimizing identities” in order to extend this domination and, in connection with this, Alvesson and Willmott (2002) identify forms of “identity regulation”. Additionally the relations which individuals have to technology or work processes and skills, including membership of professions, or nascent professions can also be an important identity resource, even outside the scope of work activities (Fineman 1983). Where individuals are concerned, physical attributes such as body, sex and race may play a part in the formation of identity alongside associated social constructions of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Also, at an individual level, one’s personal life-history and its ongoing (and intertextual) life-narrative form an interpretive structure and often provide a teleology into which identity resources can be drawn. This affects those aspects

Introduction

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of selection and deployment over which the individual has some exercise of agency. Finally, there is the active effect of individual and collective psychodynamic processes, such as projective identification or narcissism. Whilst the status of these processes as unconscious is problematic, we believe it is legitimate to regard such important, habitually deployed mechanisms as ego-defences as identity resources. They constitute a form of psychological skill or competence capital, which is effective even where it may be pathological.

Modes of subjective identity formation For Friedman (1992) narcissism or self-obsession is closely linked to the changing nature of identity formation in the shift from modernity to postmodernity. Kellner (1992) somewhat wrily observes that identity has always been experienced as a problem, and has not just recently been problematized by the postmodern, although the postmodern condition has accelerated and fragmented the processes of identity formation. For Kellner, what is left may be a disaster of instability, a totally “fragmented, disjointed life subject to the whims of [managerial] fashion”, or it may be a new set of opportunities for reconstructing the self. Friedman sees that postmodern narcissism accordingly cannot be one where the self-obsessed narcissist seeks support for their existence in any coherent or unified way, but in which the whimsicalities of that existence, seen almost as a game, conscript others into supporting or subordinate roles which shift as the rules of the game themselves shift. In considering how subject formation may be said to occur, then, we can identify five categories, or modes, grounded in power, knowledge and language through which the “game” may be said to pass. These are perhaps best conceived in terms of the five questions which they address. 1 Mode of Incorporation (the ways that individuals accommodate organizational goals in a climate of change and restructuring). The question here is how individuals align themselves with new organizational goals and objectives and accommodate visions which may be at odds with what they previously held or currently hold. These may range from enthusiastic embrace to attempts at avoidance. Examples included: vision/advocacy (seduction); acceptance; accommodation; consent; citizenship; legitimation; “knowledge management”, where what is acknowledged to be known is selective, and the unpalatable denied; and the “dual identity” system where contrasting and often opposing identities and values are simultaneously subscribed to. 2 Mode of Disciplined Subjectivity (how individuals fit themselves into gendered organizational social systems/discursive structures). The question here is how individuals identify with new systems with different requirements of them and different means of controlling and evaluating them as organizational members. Where the mode of incorporation deals with values and beliefs, this mode is more grounded in the praxis of membership and what sort of a member the subject becomes. Examples include: social subject/team player (surveillance); leading subject; political subject; professional subject; “acting subject” (performer of a role or roles). 3 Mode of Subjective Identity (the means by which individuals position, or see themselves positioned, within/identify with wider social discourses). The question here is how the individual weights organizational discourse to other wider discourses of which

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they may be a part. Here we are dealing with the subject in relation not just to the organization, but to who they see themselves being in the world, and the tensions, strains or opportunities that may ensue. Alvesson and Willmott (2002) discuss self-identity in a relevant but slightly more restricted way than we have in mind here. This is more about the “I” in Mead’s terms than the “me”. Examples include: personal; familial; professional/careerist; ethical; aesthetic, etc. 4 Mode of Resistance (how individuals resist, transgress and change established discursive structures or create new ones). Here the question is how individuals resist being colonized by discourses of which they do not approve or in which they do not believe, and how they resist having unacceptable identities inscribed upon them. Castells (1997:8) argues that collective resistance identities may be formed from common modes of resistance permeating a group or society. Examples, both individual and collective, include: political opposition; non-cooperation; subversion; symbolic/ discursive opposition; counter-seduction; transgressive reinscription; reflexive critique; dissent. 5 Mode of Autonomy (how individuals convert identity into agency and how praxis can thereby be enabled and realized). The final question is how individuals are able to create identities which they can use to establish some sovereign epistemological space that can become a resource for change and development. Examples include: political agency; emancipation; empowerment; networking and alliances; bricolage/improvisation; play; managing boundaries. The modes may be thought of as being involved in deploying masks, at a tactical level, whilst simultaneously cohering to form different dimensions of a larger mask. Different masks may consequently be employed within different modes of subject formation to achieve a common objective, or a specific combination of modes of subject formation may constitute one particular mask.

Identity performance and event Judith Butler (1990, 1993) develops the argument, in relation to gender, that we are not looking at “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts’ (1990:140). In her 1993 book, she extends this consideration to the ways in which bodies exceed the demands placed on them by discursive limits. But, in both books, identity is a social temporality which accomplishes its own origin—it is performative in that in functioning as a label for a set of behaviours and styles, it constructs those behaviours as the result of a substantial source of identity. As she puts it, “these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (1990:141). This approach has had only minor impact in organizational identity studies (her work is not cited once in the Hatch and Schultz reader), yet the distinction made between the expressive and the performative is crucial—in Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) model, they incorporate the expressive but not the performative. So the third part of our model deals with aspects of performativity, how identity, or its appearance of substance, may be generated from acts or series of acts, stylized in harmony with the modes of subjective identity formation we identified in the second part of the model.

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Narrative and story may become part of the performative dimensions of identity, as Sims in this volume argues, and as Czarniawska (1997) has previously outlined in the context of institutional theory. We have also hinted that identity performance may be enacted through the assumption of a succession of masks, as Foucault might have argued. Yet perhaps the most significant new concept in our model is one developed from Foucault by Gilles Deleuze—that of the Event. An Event is not simply something that happens, according to both Deleuze and Foucault—indeed we could distinguish between an event as something that happens and Événement. Événement is something that changes the way we experience the world, the way we think about it—after it happens, things can never be the same again. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was certainly Événement; in this volume, Osuri and Banerjee explore the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, and look closely at how Événement may be constructed. We sometimes hope in our identity performances to permanently change the way people think of us, to make our performance Événement, sometimes just to contribute to the chain of performative signification that Butler identifies. But caught up as we have to be in others events and chains of signification, we cannot rule out the possibility that someone else’s Événement may envelop us and change who we “are” forever. Finally, issues of agency and praxis come together in the consideration of identity politics, the paradigm case of which would be feminism. Again, Castells (1997:8) attempts to capture this dimension in terms of what he calls project identity where “social actors draw on the cultural materials available to them” (identity capital) to create new identities and bring about social change (which could also be organizational change where conditions are appropriate). Castells argues that, whereas legitimizing identities produce civil society and resistance identities produce community, project identities produce subjects. We disagree with his terminology in the latter two cases, as his use of the term “subject” appears to be more Hegelian and set against sovereignty at the level of the state rather than as a form of autonomy. But we wish to retain the notion of project identity as a form of purposeful collective identity performance which can achieve small and potentially large-scale social change. Our model then seeks to encompass a wider range of considerations of identity than attempted by previous approaches. We believe that identity is such an important concept that it requires thinking through from as many dimensions as possible, and a more thorough grasp of the treatment of identity in philosophy and sociology is needed than we presently have available before this can be said to have been achieved. We believe that we have a basis in our model for bringing together a variety of approaches not yet considered alongside each other, without seeking to subsume them to any functionalist teleology. We also believe that our explicit understanding of the nature of process, which sees the three elements as constantly inter-relational rather than sequential, acting amidst each other rather than upon each other, should help to prevent any such adoption of the model. Finally, we have to disagree with Hatch and Schultz’s view that early definitions of identity as essence can be fused with what they term “postmodernist definitions of identity as flux and multiplicity” (see Letiche 2004 for a telling critique of this sort of assumption, and our contribution in this volume for a discussion of multiplicities). In order to understand why this fusion cannot occur, we need to ground our identity explorations in a conscientious engagement with the philosophy and social philosophy of identity. This is what research in the field needs to do, and what this book hopes to begin.

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In beginning our confrontations with considerations of identity, Nic Beech and Peter Mclnnes argue that much managerial research and practice, for example in organizational culture, leadership and teamworking, does not problematize the conception of the self as having identity. Individuals are taken as simple entities whose actions and ideas can be researched and reported on as if their entity-ness was fairly stable and simple. Drawing on empirical research in a large media organization concerned with publishing, television and radio, and a large multi-national drinks production and distribution organization, both organizations undergoing change which impacted on people, processes and physical location, they develop a perspective of three types of identity. The first holds that individuals are singular and consistent, they have attributes that may change over time, but which are consistently located within the person, and boundaries between the person and others are clear and incontrovertible. The second holds that, for each person, there is a central unifying entity, which may be expressed and perceived differently in different social situations, but nonetheless has underlying identity. Different parts of the self are activated in different interactions. The third holds that an “individual” is a carte blanche for multi-authoring. Others are emphasized at least as much as the individual, and it is others who construct the nature of the individual. In the “weak” version of this type of perspective, the individual is recipient of characteristics imposed by others, or is, in a sense, a mirror which reflects the impressions of others. In the “stronger” versions, there is nothing but mirrors, which reflect other mirrors. They conclude by exploring two areas of impact—reflexive practice and methodology. If, in reflexive practice, we move away from type-one conceptions of identity, certain questions are raised about sustainability of concepts such as the individualism/collectivism distinction in organizational culture leadership and

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followership and the individual’s role in teamworking. A multi-perspective consideration reveals that role-based theories can misconstrue as permanent a version of self that is confined to a temporal and social environment. Beech and Mclnnes explore some of the impacts of raising these questions for practice. In regard to methodology, they raise questions of the appropriate object of investigation, whether the focus should be on individuals, groups, social environments, systems, interaction, a combination or some other “object”. Finally they reflect on the ontological and epistemological assumptions made by their “selves” in “their” chapter. In Chapter 3 we reproduce Douglas Ezzy’s classic paper, where he argues for a synthesis of George Herbert Mead’s conception of the temporal and intersubjective nature of the self with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic theory of narrative identity. Combining the insights of Ricoeur’s philosophical analysis with Mead’s socialpsychological orientation provides a subtle, sophisticated and potent explanation of selfidentity. He argues that a narrative conception of identity implies that subjectivity is neither a philosophical illusion nor an impermeable substance. Rather, a narrative identity provides a subjective sense of self-continuity as it symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the story a person tells about his or her life. The utility of this conception of identity is illustrated through a re-reading of Erving Goffman’s study of the experience of mental patients. This example underlines the social sources of the self-concept and the role of power and politics in the construction of narrative identities. The problem of self and other in the everyday is explored by Bogdan Costea and Lucas Introna in a consideration of diversity. They argue that, ever since diversity has been discovered by management circles as a new “problem”, literature on “diversity management” has continued to accumulate. Part ethical, part political and part functional, mainstream models for diversity management rely on concepts which uphold oversimplifications characteristic of almost any area of reflection which emerges in the realm of management. The complexity of diversity seems to escape the “problem—model-solution” framework of management literature. Rather, the more we think about diversity, the more its mystery deepens. This chapter discusses philosophical issues implied in thinking about the Other from the perspective of Heideggerian and Lévinasian existential phenomenology. This is a direct attempt to confront mutilating simplifications of diversity in management literature with two crucial contributions of twentieth-century philosophy. First, they critique attempts to rationalize diversity as a “problem” for management. All managerialist “solutions” represent an inevitable call upon Reason and upon a Science which could intervene in the process. They argue that these attempts to make Self—Other relationships manageable relies upon a rationalistic and homogenizing metaphysics—a gesture which defeats the very purpose of engaging with the deep meaning of the inquiry. Second, they re-immerse the discussion of diversity in the critiques of meta-physics developed by Heidegger and Lévinas as they are central to the aspiration of existential phenomenology to understand Otherness and to disclose the limits of transcendental metaphysics. Heidegger and Lévinas opened up the mystery of the Other in ways unavailable to traditional philosophical or scientific reasoning by attacking the unrealistic rationalist bases of essentialist t metaphysics of difference, focusing respectively on each side of the Self—Other relationship. Otherness always

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implies an ethical demand which comes prior to every category that Self may impose in order to know the Other. Two conclusions follow. The complexity of the issues involved in any reflection upon Otherness cannot be reduced to some mechanically derived categorial essence of “diversity”. If this is so, then the attempt to frame diversity as a social, organizational, ethical, political, economic or cultural “problem” is fundamentally flawed. Second, the relationship between self and other can be seen both for everyday existence and for philosophy as a central mystery (alongside others such as time, language, death, divinity, etc.). Thus to be irreducibly different from “others” is not a matter of any simple act of definition, nor is it an “ontological disease” of the species, and no appeal to Reason or Science can overcome the depth of silence required sometimes in order to begin thinking about human diversity. Otherness is encountered by the self somehow before it can reach categories which would entail the possibility of “managing” it—which, in effect, means its silencing. They argue for a radicalization of the notion of Other as that which questions the Self, thus silencing it in turn for a moment which lies beyond the grasp of categorial metaphysics, but which also offers us the continuous “disturbance” out of which the “self arises anew. In practice, this demands a continual opening up and putting into question of the grounds of such an encounter, maintaining the “problem” (to be solved) as an ever-deepening mystery (that has no solution), but because of this, excites and revitalizes the very meaning of such human encounters—Other in its otherness. David Sims explores the way in which people act as authors of their own lives, and the way that their lives, in turn, act to author them. This happens in three time frames, conceptually if not experientially separate. Retrospectively, people tell stories about their past in which they emplot themselves as the people they would like to be taken to be. Currently, they live out roles according to the places they want to take in their own and others’ stories. Prospectively, they are engaged in preparing and writing the next section of the personal story which is their life. We routinely expect each other to be able to produce a story about who we are, where we are developing and who we are becoming. We expect the same from ourselves. Stories are for ourselves, and for others, but also for what Sims, following Bruner, calls the Distributed Self which, he argues, is a very rich way of thinking about identity and about the stories that maintain it. My self, my identity, is not simply within my skull, or even within my body. It is in my organization, my place of work, my family, my friends. At different stages of our lives, our identities are differently distributed, and this can be a matter of amusement to others when we get bound up in things in which others have no interest—like train-spotting. Our identities may be distributed in our houses, our cars, our partners, our children, our communities, our sports clubs, our hobbies, or our political and religious affiliations. Within organizations, our identities may be entailed in our departments, our roles and status, our industries or our companies. The self, therefore, cannot be understood without knowing something about where it is distributed. Stories about lives need to be persuasive and, to do that, they need to display coherence, orderliness, interest and a range of levels of awareness. But storying is still a risky enterprise and threats are posed to the distributed self by defeat, disbelief, disinterest, disproof and losing the plot. In conclusion, Sims argues that life is multiply storied. We lead storied lives, and develop storytelling skills which then give us the stories that we proceed to live out. Our storytelling is always precarious, and our attempts

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to make our life in some way more permanent and less precarious lead us continuously into strategies to defend endangered stories. It therefore is not always easy to work out whose life we are leading. In Part II, having questioned the relation of self and other, we consider how “selves” may be performed for others. In Chapter 6, a reproduction of an influential paper, Christopher Grey draws together formative insights in labour process analysis, which highlighted the role of panoptic techniques of disciplinary power, and work which suggests that the project of self-management has become a defining feature of contemporary subjectivity. In particular, he argues that the discipline operationalized within the discursive and non-discursive practices of “career” should be treated as an aspect of this contemporary project of self-management. The pursuit of career is then seen to have the potential to transform techniques of disciplinary power into adjuncts of these projects of the self. These themes are explored through the presentation of case study material on the accounting labour process. Steffen G.Böhm turns his attention to the processes of consultancy, through consideration of Lacan’s idea of the “barred” or the “destructed” subject, the subject that is nothing, full of emptiness. Lacan’s subject has no identity itself, being defined by a lack that is filled by the Other. Such a destructed subject is Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the dandy who strolled through nineteenth-century Parisian arcades. The flâneur’s subjectivity is characterized by a special empathy with the commodity that lures him into an indexical “dream world” in which the most mundane things for sale can be enjoyed. Böhm uses the textual device of a series of interruptions to translate the image of the flâneur, who for Benjamin is the archetypical subject of nineteenth-century modernity, into today’s world of twenty-first-century “hypermodern(organ)ization”, whose main icon, and perhaps agent, he argues, is the management consultant. This interruptive “translation” is done by way of discussing the “goings-on” of commodity fetishism which is shown to be the main “phantasmagoric” fantasy, or ideology, of modernity. It is argued that the commodity enables the subject to identify with what is otherwise a failing Other—the commodity-Other fills the subject, as fragments shored against its ruin. But Böhm’s critique of commodity fetishism is, however, not presented as a call for a transparency of social relations. Drawing on the work of Zižek, Böhm demonstrates that this belief in transparency is already part of the “goings-on” of commodity fetishism. He argues in conclusion that there is no hope for transparency, progress or a full identity of the subject; instead, there is only hope for a failure of the relationship between subject and Other. It is precisely this failure which establishes the political importance of the question of the subject and the Other. Peter Hamilton explores the significance of rhetoric in managing the relationship between the organization and its various perceived others, and in establishing some public impression of organizational identity. Addressing the common criticism that organizational mission statements are mere rhetoric, Hamilton argues that this adopts too narrow a focus of what rhetoric is. Implied in both the many criticisms and definitions of mission statements is a view that they are in some way concerned with organizational identity. This concern with organizational identity, it is argued here, means that mission statements are inherently rhetorical, not in the sense of manipulation, obfuscation or bombast, but in the Aristotelian and Burkean sense of rhetoric’s concern with, respectively, persuasion and the generation of identification. The argument of the chapter

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is, therefore, that if an objective of mission statements is the generation or continuation of an organizational identity, it is dependent on rhetoric in attempting to do this. In that rhetorical sense, the mission statement may therefore be seen as performing organizational identity. On the basis of this argument, the rhetorical nature of mission statements is illustrated before going on to situate the rhetoric of mission statements within Aristotle’s epideictic genre. While Hamilton accounts for mission statements in the traditional sense of epideictic’s projection of honour and praise, he positions mission statements within a reappraised notion of the epideictic genre in relation to its role as ritual (and hence performance), focusing on ritual’s function in constituting and promoting community. This re-appraisal of epideictic as community promoting, it is argued, is closely related to the notion of organizational identity and the chapter argues that this is important to understanding the nature of the rhetoric of the mission statement. Hamilton shows that rhetoric matters and that, through appreciation of the rhetorical genre(s), we begin to understand how the discourse of organizational identity operates instrumentally, for example, through its various texts such as mission statements. They embody a representation of organizational image and identity which, in part, can only be understood through understanding the rhetorical processes at play within their attempts at persuasion/identification, whether our conception of rhetoric is unilateral or bilateral. Thus, whether a particular organization’s mission statement is unilaterally oriented towards a passive audience to which it is trying to do something to, or whether it is bilaterally oriented to an active audience in which it is trying to do something with, organizational identity is primarily a rhetorical process. Per Bäckius argues that as a paramount notion—a figure of thought—the individual has served as one of the founding figures in the construction and development of Western societies for at least the last five centuries. In the process, however, it has been under constant pressure and threat, in perpetual crisis, and hence under endless reconstruction. There seems to be no reason for disagreement on any of these instances, so what is the nature of the current crisis in which we hear calls for the concept of the individual to be rethought? As Deleuze put it: “a concept does not die simply when one wants it to, but only when new functions and new fields [of thought] discharge it”, Bäckius seeks out the functions and fields that make the concept of the individual feel too lonely, too much on its own, too individual. Contemporary imperatives of enterprise call for us to become enterprising individuals, i.e. individuals that have turned our selves into enterprises in a quest for self-expansion and fulfilment. They focus on what the self contains, on inner growth, on filling it up as if from within. As a container-entity, then, an individual hosts such “stuff” as personality, self, I, me, mind, soul, subjectivity, agency, creativity, motivation, (self)identity—but also split personality, divided and multiple selves. One should nourish and develop the former, battle or heal the latter and the assumption is that it can expand endlessly, that it will never burst—if the self grows, individuality follows. Current discourses and practices of enterprise produce, or command, an everexpanding individual with one sole occupation—the work of self-fulfilment. Bäckius argues for the possibility that an enterprising self, with the one sole work in progress, may hit the wall of its individual container; may hit the wall so hard, it bursts or cracks. And if the phenomenal individual, i.e. the individual human being, bursts, so will the concept. Bäckius takes two lines to rethinking the individual, of thinking it otherwise, of

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conceptualizing it in another fashion. One follows the enterprising individual in its daily dealings using Strindberg’s concept of other work which can never be completed; the second takes up Deleuze’s idea of the dividual, the informational other of the individual. With the use of various historical exemplars and Snark hunters, Bäckius works towards an other conception of the individual in enterprise: the dividual individual; divided in itself and in others. In Part III, which looks at what lines of thought and critique might be pursued out of a philosophically grounded engagement with identity, we reproduce Yiannis Gabriel’s trenchant dialogue between psychoanalysis and critical management studies against a background of the study of organizational culture. In this chapter, the author explores the nature of contemporary organizational controls, the extent to which they can be said to colonize employee subjectivity, and the types of resistance which they generate. Labour process, psychoanalytic, critical theory, and Foucauldian perspectives are juxtaposed and a number of similarities and divergences are noted. It is argued that many of these perspectives prematurely lament the end of employee recalcitrance and exaggerate the magnitude and totality of organizational controls, generating over-managed and overcontrolled images of individuals, organizations and societies. It is proposed that a rapprochement of psychoanalytic and labour process theory approaches can lead to an appreciation of unmanaged and unmanageable terrains in organizations, in which human agency may be rediscovered, neither as a classconscious proletariat nor as a transcendental subject, but as a struggling, feeling, thinking, suffering subject, one capable of obeying and disobeying, controlling and being controlled, losing and escaping control, defining and redefining control for itself and for others. Stephen Linstead, Stewart Clegg and Graham Sewell present a muchextended version of their millennial philosophical reflection on some of the conditions associated with having, or not having, the identity of “Australian” management scholar, in the field of Organization Studies (whilst being recognized in other respects as being Australian). Their argument is that, whilst recent critical accounts of diversity in organizations recognize that the concept of difference is used to classify, position and perpetuate in disadvantage those very groups that it should have advantaged, it is rarely if ever acknowledged that in Organization Studies itself this process has been occurring for the best part of a century. Embodying, bricolating and wrily performing their identity as they go, they take a reflexive and historical look at one aspect of this process—the position of the Australian scholar of organization from Elton Mayo onwards, and the way in which the particularities of being Australian have been silenced or marginalized—altercast and remaining cast out, even to the ends of the earth. They argue that, as being Australian has functioned symbolically for other cultures for decades, it might begin to do so for Organization Studies, to alert us to the ever-increasing centrist influence of North Atlantic Theory of Organizations (NATO), felt through career advancement, the allocation of research funds and the acceptance of papers in scholarly journals. They argue that this situation is more than just an Australian problem, and more than just a problem of identity. Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee take this globalized exploration of altercasting even further. Taking the representations and subsequent interpretations in the Australian media of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as their example, they argue that global identities, which produce global subjects on a

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collective scale, are staged through global media events. Drawing on ideas from Virilio, Wark and Appadurai to theorize these global media events, they further argue that such representations are racialized through the general conceptualization of “whiteness” which functions as a powerfully identifying, but entirely fictional, racial category, and also of the related idea of “diaspora”, through which apparently unconnected groups can draw on their current localities to generate myths of origin and achieve increased influence or advantage. After carefully outlining the background of their work in “whiteness studies”, they point out that theorizing whiteness within media representations as an embodied, historical construct that needs to be localized within specific racialized social formations, requires taking account of the national—local dynamics of its formation. Consequently, whiteness within the Australian media has to be theorized within the context of “white teleologies” (that is, assimilative scripts, narratives of the foundational status of the Anglo nation, and the attempted erasure of Indigenous ownership) as well as whiteness as lived realities and visualities. “Whiteness” as a form of identity capital in the Australian context was expressed and marked through the localization—or symbolic customization—of the global media event of September 11 by the sympathetic reinscriptions of governmental leaders and the mainstream media, and through their readings of this material they demonstrate the importance of recognizing the discursive and material relationship between the global and the local in the formation of collective identity. Having interrogated how the attacks came to be constructed in terms of transnational loyalty, a threat to whiteness via “democracy” and “freedom”, and how they were deployed politically, they argue in conclusion that, against the discursive imperatives of whiteness, perhaps even against existent forms of the nation-state, we may need to draw our translocal maps based on the notion of movements towards justice even as we continue to actively foreground and challenge the identity maps of diasporic teleologies. Stephen Linstead and Alison Pullen begin from the understanding that gendered thinking is not confined to explicit gender relations, but our understanding of social institutions is shaped by gender. Prevailing binary assumptions can be challenged at two levels—the biological level of sexed bodies and the social level of ascribed genders—and their chapter considers alternative approaches to binary thinking such as multiplicity and fluidity. They argue that, although approaches taken to thinking of gender in terms of fluidity have been informed usefully by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the implications of this work have not been fully realized at the level of ontology. Attempts to move beyond binary thinking in gender relations rest upon the conceptualization of multiplicity, but this is rarely addressed directly. In order to identify further directions for progress in thinking beyond binary gender relations, in this chapter they interrogate multiplicity and find three actual or possible types—multiplicities of the same, characteristic of feminist approaches which we critique through a reconceptualization of desire; multiplicities of the third, characterized by anthropological, transgender and queer theory approaches; and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, typified by the rhizomatics and fluid theorizing of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz and Olkowski. They propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire which, rather than compensating for a lack or pursuing the fulfilment of a wish, is characterized simply by its own exuberance, realized in proliferation. This, they argue, enables a meaningful connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, thought through in terms of

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gender identity as immanence, intensity and consistency. From this, they consider various possibilities of a future outside or beyond gender, emptied of gender (ungendered) or gendered to excess (genderful). They argue in conclusion that, although gender is no longer widely considered to be a property of individuals, the alternative of viewing it in terms of performativity, where it is the outcome of linguistic and social peformances (whether agentic or structural, conscious or unconscious), unnecessarily limits the possibilities of thinking multiplicity. Robert Grafton Small concludes by arguing that the very order which is so often seen as the object or core of organization in theory and practice is itself unnatural—and our bodies remind us of this on a daily basis. He examines our identity aesthetics, arguing that the symmetries of industrial aesthetics estrange us from the essential asymmetry of our own bodies, a dislocation we disguise with mass consumption and collective obesity, but never deny. These artificial uniformities are also coercive, themselves an attempt at organization and a target for assaults made shocking by their deliberate randomness. Imbalance, then, and the otherness of order are discussed as aspects of an aesthetic with which we seduce and belittle ourselves simultaneously, arranging our everyday worlds around an architecture of displacement and the inhabiting of inhibited space.

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Hancock, P. and Tyler, M. (2001) “Organizational subjectivity and the dialectic of selfconsciousness”. Organization, 8, 4:565–585. Hassard, J. (1993) “Postmodernism and organizational analysis: an overview”, in J.Hassard and M.Parker (eds) Postmodernism and Organizations. London: Sage. Hatch, M.J. and Schultz, M. (2002) “The dynamics of organizational identity”. Human Relations, 55:989–1018. Hatch, M.J. and Schultz, M. (eds) (2004) Organizational Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellner, D. (1992) “Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities”, in S.Lash and J.Friedman (eds) Modernity and Identity. Oxford: Blackwells. Knights, D. and Willmott, H.C. (1985) “Power and identity in theory and practice”. Sociological Review, 33, 1:22–46. Letiche, H. (2004) “Jean-Francois Lyotard”, in S.Linstead (ed.) Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought. London: Sage. Linstead, A. and Thomas, R. (2002) “What do you want from me? A poststructuralist feminist reading of middle managers’ identities”. Culture and Organization, 8, 1:1–20. Linstead, S. and Grafton Small, R. (1992) “On reading organizational culture”. Organization Studies, 13, 3:331–355. McKinlay, A. (2002) “‘Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career”. Organization, 9, 4:595– 614. Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (2002) “Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage”, in C.W.Choo and N.Bontis (eds) The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organizational Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds) (1995) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Trans-formation. London: Rout ledge. Porac, J., Thomas, H. and Baden-Fuller, C. (1989) “Competitive groups as cogni-tive communities: the case of Scottish knitwear manufacturers”. Journal of Management Studies, 26, 3:397–416. Pullen, A. (2005) Managing Identity. London: Palgrave. Ritzer, G. (1999) Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Ritzer, G. (2004) The Globalization of Nothing. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Sibley, D. (1995) Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge. Snowden, D J. (2000) “Story telling and other organic tools for chief learning officers and chief knowledge officers”, in D.Bonner (ed.) In Action: Leading Knowledge Management and Learning, ASTD (http://www.astd.org/). Snowden, D.J. (2001) “Narrative patterns—the perils and possibilities of using story in organisations”, in Knowledge Management, 4.10, Ark Group, July/August. Thomas, R. and Linstead, A. (2002) “Loosing the plot? Middle managers and identity”. Organization, 9, 1:71–93. Townley, B. (1992) Reframing Human Resource Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work. London: Sage. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage. Willmott, H. (1997) “Rethinking management and managerial work: capitalism, control and subjectivity”. Human Relations, 50, 11:1329–1359.

Part I Confronting identity: selves and others

2 Now where was I? Questioning assumptions of consistent identity Nic Beech and Peter Mclnnes

Introduction Identity-related issues have long been a feature of managerial practice and of writing aimed at practitioners. For example, managers have been exhorted to develop strong cultures in which people identify with organisational purpose (Deal and Kennedy 1982), develop leadership styles with which followers can identify (Semler 1993) and develop strong in-group ties in teams (Katzenbach and Smith 1993) such that there is peer group identification. The underlying presumption is that focused and unified identities will enable stronger performance and efficiency in the organisation. The critical literature which has developed alongside the managerialist literature has adopted an alternative perspective. There has been a focus on differentiated and fragmented cultures (Martin 1992), struggles within and between groups demonstrating tensions (Ezzamel et al. 2001) and a recognition of divisions and fractured unities (Parker 2000). However, this critical literature has not eliminated the attractiveness of the more unitary concept of the managerialist approach as this offers perceived certainties and answers to the demands for performance which are placed upon managers (Clark and Salaman 1998; Watson and Bargiela-Chiappini 1998). In this chapter, we will contrast alternative ways of ‘reading’ identity. The purpose of doing this is to be able to recognise the alternatives in practice and hence to be in a position to make choices about how one interacts in managerial situations. Our contention is that the uncritical ‘simple’ reading of identity misrepresents the complexity of social reality. Hence, although it may have the appearance of usefulness, in fact it lacks utility. Conversely, the more critical perspectives on identity may appear to be less pragmatic than the simple version, but we will argue that these are more useful in practice because they bring into question what, in many cases, may be fallacious assumptions. In this chapter we will discuss three different ‘modes of reading’ identity: the first conceives identity as singular and consistent; the second sees identity as a central unifying conception, which may be expressed and perceived differently in different social settings; and the third holds that an ‘individual’ is a carte blanche for multi-authoring, in which others are the primary source of the changeable nature of the self. Much of the practitioner-oriented literature fits with the first mode of reading, whilst the critical literature tends towards the latter two modes. We will briefly set out the three modes before discussing empirical illustrations of the use of these modes in organisational talk.

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Three modes of reading identity The first mode holds that individuals are singular and consistent. Attributes are acquired by the individual over time but are consistently located within the person who has clear and incontrovertible boundaries between themselves and others (Cattell 1965; Holland 1985). The assumption that individuals have singular and consistent identities can be seen embedded in a range of managerial practices and practice-oriented literature. For example, the process of employee selection can be regarded as identifying the personal traits of individuals and matching them to clear job criteria (Barrick et al. 2000; O’Reilly et al. 1991). Similarly, personal traits can be regarded as underpinning job performance (Gardner and Martinko 1996). Practitioneroriented responses to issues such as teamwork focus on the ‘natural’ roles of individuals (Belbin 1995) while the ‘emotional intelligence’ of leaders (Goleman 2002) is portrayed as a stable trait of individuals. Highperforming teams are regarded not only as having a common purpose, but also as managing group-membership identity: Team members must agree on… how continuing membership in the team is to be earned’ (Katzenbach and Smith 1993:115). Earning membership is about ‘feeling the spirit’. As Bolman and Deal put it: ‘More and more teams and organizations now realize that culture, soul and spirit are the well-springs of high performance’ (1995:261). Such approaches are ultimately about selecting people who fit with requirements and ensuring that they continue to display the appropriate identity features, such as traits, spirit and cultural acceptability. The presumption is that individuals can be defined by their attributes and characteristics and that these will pertain over time, hence enabling the organisational systems to function efficiently. Such an approach is attractive for a number of reasons. It implies that, in managing people, there are right and successful ways of operating: choosing the correct candidate, building a strong culture. It also implies that managerial action is worthwhile and is the source of effectiveness. The style of leadership adopted, for example, will be effective when it fits with the particular characterisations of the followers (Hersey and Blanchard 1982). More broadly, it has been argued that this way of thinking about people has strongly embedded, if not hegemonic, appeal in Western society (Gergen 1999). Indeed, the four aspects of individualism—freedom, action, rationality and self-motivation (Abercrombie et al. 1986)—underpin many of the defining features of Western civilisation. Democracy, for example, is based on the concept of free-willed individuals exercising the ability and right to choose. Under this conception, the individual is regarded as isolated, consistent and free from the influence of others. Processes that transgress this rational isolation carry broadly negative connotations (Asch 1955; Janis 1982; Milgram 1974) except where appropriated for organisational ends such as in leadership (Bass 1990). However, under other modes of reading identity, considerable doubt is cast on the assumptions and presumed consequences of the first mode. The second mode that we wish to discuss holds that each person takes on a variety of social roles in response to the social situation and yet, to a greater or lesser extent, there is a central ‘unifying’ conception of identity underlying this. Such an approach is perhaps, in its strong form, epitomised by writers in social identity theory for whom social identities (for example, group member, leader etc.) are distinct from the individual identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979), albeit in relation to it (Worchel and Coutant 2003). These social identities are adopted in response to the groups in which the individual

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participates through a process of self-categorisation (Hogg and Terry 2000). Such a view has clear consequences for theories such as leadership (Hains et al. 1997) where the influence of the group context becomes crucial to ‘good performance’ as a leader and yet still retains the concepts that the individual is the originator and guardian of this role as well as role performance remaining consistent across periods of time. So, for example, a group leader self-categorises themselves as such and maintains this identification in most circumstances. Still within Mode 2, but taking a different approach, Goffman (1959) argues for a metaphorically theatrical self where different aspects of the self are activated in different interactions. During interaction, actors draw on a pool of ‘scripted’ behaviour that preexists the actions of the individual. The actor draws upon a range of cues in deciding the appropriate role to play, responding not only to the role taken by the other, but to the physical setting of the performance and the costume of the other players. In the framing of the encounter, the role and script may be dominant in forming perceptions over any idiosyncrasy of the individual person (Goffman 1961). Idiosyncrasies are socialised out of the behavioural repertoire through feedback processes in which people learn to avoid behaviours, language and emotions that are inappropriate to the established norm (Shutz 1967). In this mode of reading, identity may vary both through individual volition and in response to circumstances and others. People are complicit in role and identity-taking as part of their meaning-making about themselves and others (Berger and Luckmann 1966). People derive self-meaning from their roles and the reciprocation of others playing complimentary roles (Truss et al. 1995). Within organisations, groups differentiated through hierarchical (Salaman 1979), cultural (Martin 1992), generational or occupational (Parker 2000) markers are commonly observed as discrete, but contested, territories. As people cross boundaries, for example from worker to manager, or from trainee to professional, they are seen as having different characteristics and abilities. This may be especially the case in networked organisations where people operate across traditional organisational boundaries and are required to be different when they cross the boundary (Williams 2002). The second mode contrasts with the first in emphasising dynamism in identity and the role of others and social circumstances in the dynamics. However, the dynamics are limited. There is a crucial element of sameness throughout the changes. Although an individual may take on different roles, and may gain new characteristics in new circumstances, it is still fundamentally the same individual. Hence, the identity of the individual operates as a unifying conception which may change to a degree, and which will be perceived differently by others in different social circumstances. The third mode holds that an ‘individual’ is a carte blanche for multi-authoring. Others are emphasised at least as much as the individual, and it is others who construct the nature of the individual. So, for example, in an organisational setting, the workers may construct a manager as a noninvolving leader, whereas the manager’s superiors construct him/her as overinvolving. In the ‘weak’ version of this type of perspective, the individual is the recipient of characteristics imposed by others, or is, in a sense, a mirror that reflects the impressions of others. In the ‘stronger’ versions, there is nothing but mirrors, which reflect other mirrors. Alvesson and Deetz (1999) advance the argument that the Western conception of man has always been a myth which functions to suppress internal Freudian conflicts and disguise the privileged rationality and control of the self. They argue that, in

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increasingly fragmented societies, identities projected onto people are increasingly dynamic and indeterminate. Identity here is less a process of an individual choice and more a process of fabricating identity as a cultural artefact (Linstead 1993) that is concerned with locating and fixing self in the language of the ‘other’ (Cooper 1989). These multiple points of identification are unlikely to culminate in a singular and consistent individual; rather, as Braidotti (1994) argues in respect of a woman’s identity, it is the site of contradictory and overlapping experiences of self, derived from (and through) a range of categories such as class, race, age, sexual orientation and others. To this list we may add the various roles that people are expected to act into such as mother, wife, daughter, breadwinner (Berger 1997) that carry both contradictions within-category and between-category. Equally, managers are subject to institutional and individual demands such that fixity of identity in the midst of overwhelming insecurity sees managers adopt discourses from discursive resources (Watson 1995) that enable them to differentiate and secure ‘themselves’ (Thomas and Linstead 2002). In this mode, the source of identity is both a project of the individual and those in a position to exercise power, whether in terms of introducing control systems (Alvesson and Wilmott 2002), or to effectively evade imposition of control (Ezzamelt et al. 2001). This mode of reading identity would hold that the first mode is a misrep-reservation. People may perceive themselves to be conscious, in-control agents, but they are subject to multifarious factors which move not only peceptions of them but them-selves. The way a person’s identity is enacted, not merely by themselves, but by others, becomes taken as real (Willmott 1993) and enters cyclical processes of social change and reinforcement (Beech and Huxham 2003). The self is out of control of the self and rather than being singular and unified, may contain difference and contradiction. Having set out the three modes of reading identity, we will illustrate their enactment in organisational talk drawing on data from two organisational settings.

Methodology We adopt an approach to narrative analysis that we regard as a subset of discourse analysis. Our approach is interpretative (Hardy 2001) and we are concerned with how talk in the study organisations constituted individual and group identities. The aim is to understand the social situation, in its complexity, through the multiple lines of narrative (Boje 2001) through which the actors in the situation, and we as researchers, make sense of and attribute meaning to events, the self and others. Data were gathered using a variety of techniques. Semi-structured interviews were conducted as focus groups with staff. The groups were selected by function and volunteers were sought to participate. Whilst this does lead to the potential for particular views to be privileged, the use of homogenous focus groups was intended to maximise the talk of participants to each other rather than to the researcher. The groups were asked to discuss what was going on at work, what changes they perceived and what they thought about them. Individual interviews were also conducted. These were typically with more senior staff who were unable or reluctant to join focus groups. The same areas of questioning were covered. Lastly, the researchers spent time in the organisations chatting informally with staff and observing the way that staff interacted. Most of the

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data used below come from transcriptions of the interview and focus group data, although some comes from casual conversation with staff. The data were transcribed and analysed using a process expounded by Silverman (1993). The stories were broken down into generalisable narrative structures (Propp 1975) which were the underlying themes and types of actor (Jeffcutt 1994). The actors had ‘spheres of action’ informing categorybound activities (Berger 1997) which were part of the identity of the actors. Within the narrative structures there was an ordering (sequence and choice between alternatives) of events and actions (Beech 2000). The analysis gave an indication of how different groups of actors perceived their own roles, identities and situations, and those of other actors. The narrative of change amongst the organisational change-makers is represented below as a series of points in the plot. Rather than trying to conflate these into a single monological account (Boje 2001), we have attempted to maintain the divisions and inconsistencies by presenting the different voices side-by-side in order to illustrate the co-present divergent appearances and realities (Beech and Cairns 2001). The two organisations selected for study were both going through significant change at the time. They were both merging with other organisations and this was useful in the current study as it had the potential to highlight issues of identity. Both organisations had new management teams who were trying to implement what they regarded as modern management practices, and in both settings there were various occupational groups. The first organisation was a public-sector local governmental organisation. The second was a private-sector media organisation. In the next section we seek to highlight some of the issues that arise with these alternative readings of identity by drawing on illustrative data from studies with the two organisations. SA organisation SA was a local government organisation which had restructured and had a new management team. The new team was seeking to introduce radical changes towards being more ‘business-like’ and to apply high-commitment workplace practices. Three narratives are presented on pages 29–32: new organisational leadership, closeto-leadership and far-from-leadership narratives. They are conveyed by a number of actors and sometimes actors move between narratives. For example, extracts from a focus group with senior managers are some-times in the leadership narrative and sometimes exhibit a slightly different perspective on the leadership discourse—in this case part of the close-to-leadership narrative. Cross-cutting ties and contradictions between the narratives can be seen by reading across the columns. The plot summaries of the narratives can be represented as follows. The new organisational leadership narrative starts with actors at the top of the hierarchy: the CEO and his directors. Their attitude is to value newness and devalue compromise (‘We’ll shove all the old baggage out the door’). They were concerned to be action-oriented rather than words-oriented. This was exemplified in the story of the directors having to confront the CEO, who despite feeling ‘slagged off had to act in accordance with the new ‘openness principle’. They characterised themselves as young, active and being ‘out there’ in touch with the workers.

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The close-to-leadership narrative starts off with some hesitancy. For example, the director who has to confront the CEO is somewhat fearful of the outcome. However, over time the perspective of this narrative is belief in the leadership narrative. In contrast, the far-from-leadership narrative starts in silence as they wait to see action from the new leaders. The event of the CEO being challenged Close-toNew Far-fromleadership organisational leadership narrative leadership narrative narrative CEO The way we Director of operate has got to Commercial improve…. We’ll Operations The CEO leads start off by telling by example…he the truth…we’re was on holiday not trained to trust each other or to and I was deputising. We share, but we’ve had a meeting said we’ll do it. Straight away which was highly critical we’ll behave this way. We’ll shove of him. I therefore got the all the old unpleasant job baggage out the of telling him door. We’ll come in fresh and we’ll [at the next meeting when operate in this new style. the CEO returned). Now I sat there, and I had a painful if one of the corporate directors was management team going to say a meeting two different story weeks ago when to what they they were told me, I was slagging me off, going to crucify for it’s not good them. I was so enough… I mean defensive. the openness is Everyone told actually not nice, [name of CEO] it’s actually quite the same thing. hurtful at times, but you know you’ve got to You could actually see his bounce ahead as a result. head going down… I said

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[name] don’t take that in a negative way. Take it positively because I would never have been able to say that in [name of previous organisation] …and he came back, and he changed the whole thing around and made it so positive. It was amazing.

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Roads workers We don’t see the management much…. I’ve never seen them out. They don’t come and say, ‘Oh, that’s a good job.’

Senior managers The merger we proposed

Close-to- New Far-fromleadership organisational leadership narrative leadership narrative narrative If you do a bad to the job they’ll come workforce up and say, was very ‘That’s a bad radical, very job.’ very radical, with social Director of They’re just workers Commercial folks making reporting to Operations decisions that’s housing never actually officers, who been out there would report working…. to social They’re making workers. It decisions that’s was quite actually radical… the ridiculous. workforce simply couldn’t take it, couldn’t take that leap. I can vouch for 90 Transport

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I would say we are ‘can do‘people.

Middle managers I can see change right from the top…[name of CEO] is trying for a more human relations, open sort of culture, and involving everyone from the bottom up.

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per cent of the workers good young They’ve got no managers…we bloody clue how got all these people because it works. we aggressively Management in marketed them…. here, there is The average age two ways of doing things: is 35 and these their way and are the right people. Perhaps the wrong way. they didn’t have That’s the track record or [management], the experience. remote to us. And that might We’re just a wee not have been a pleb bad thing. They somewhere. were dynamic managers. Catering workers You sometimes CEO I’m a very active get forgotten person, going out with things and about-visited because we are 150 facilities and not in the main body. depots and schools and Buildings things like that in workers the last year. …[I]t’s confused, nobody knows what’s happening any of the time, not even the gaffers know what is happening. Four or five phone calls from different gaffers and all want to know the same bloody thing… I don’t think anyone knows. Transport workers Listen, it doesn’t matter. He phones as well, I

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comes past the house,

Close-to- New leadership organisational narrative leadership narrative

Far-fromleadership narrative

‘[Name] I Middle could do with managers a hand in I think these here.’ No work groups problem. We are quite a are all good working boys thing…. I together, we’ll was able to help out our put my side working across to mates. I mean these people you’ll do it for who had nothing, just never had for giving a that pal a hand out. opportunity, unless they Senior managers Catering spoke to you. Everyone workers And again, appreciates it’s the Everyone because team that’s going to pulls together, you’re a get us there, not the everyone manager they individual…[name knows each wouldn’t other. of director of speak to commercial Transport you…but we operations] has workers sat there and asked us to develop We are the had an working groups only ones who informative between members are going to meeting in of management and lose anything both ways. the workforce…it’s out of it. They delegating, say, ‘You can empowerment. only win.’ They must think we come up the Clyde on a banana skin.

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If we can get a bin wagon out on the road for the next morning we will work on till we do it. I had two men and myself one night. Four o’clock in the morning to get a wagon out on the road. And we were grafting. Because management said it was ready, and it wasn’t ready. They knew it wasn’t ready, [researcher: They were expecting it the next morning?] Yes. [Researcher: what would have happened if you hadn’t got it done?] Oh, it would have been done no matter what. We would have worked till it was finished.

Close-to- New organisational Far-fromleadership leadership narrative leadership narrative narrative Senior managers

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It was inclined to be ‘us and them’, and that’s not how we wanted it, we were trying to build a team…but the workforce had some old-fashioned ideas or non-trusting ideas. They didn’t trust us, which was our fault at the end of the day, but we are trying to get them to build up a relationship.

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Catering workers The change hasn’t made any difference. We’re just doing the same as we have always done before.

by a director and responding positively was unseen in this narrative. The absence of management was noted, and they were regarded as divorced from reality: ‘they’ve never been out there working.’ In this narrative, there was more detailed commentary on the relationship between the identities. There was a strong sense of differentiation: ‘we’re just a wee pleb somewhere.’ There is also a sense of in-group identity: ‘we’re all working boys together’ and that, whatever the new management had done, little, if anything, had changed. MG company MG was a group of companies concerned with service provision in the media sector. The group had expanded rapidly, acquiring several businesses within a few years and were, at the time of the study, in the process of integrating their publishing division by moving them into a new, purpose-built building attached to the headquarters of the group. This was accompanied by a range of changes designed to deliver cost savings on the one hand and, on the other, to promote new cultural values of professionalism and togetherness under a new corporate brand. The narratives of the changes in MG featured two dominant group identities. One group was typified as ‘journalists’ who spoke of themselves as ‘professionals’ who were autonomous and creative. The other group was characterised as ‘management’ who were, in both their own narratives and those of the journalists, committed to creating a changeoriented, businessfocused culture. Management also see themselves as ‘professional’ but, for them, this represented being up-to-date with the latest managerial practices. What differed between the two groups were the connotations placed on this change orientation. In addition, there were others whose group identity was ambiguous. the management group have a bad reputation for being bottom line driven, both internally and externally. (Marketing staff member)

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For the journalists, this individual was part of the management, as marketing was implicated in the shift towards a new brand and level of ‘professionalism’ in the managerial sense of the word. However, this individual uses the term ‘management’ to refer to the top management of the group organisation and in so doing differentiated herself from the management. Similarly, for journalists, the category included divisions. Advertising staff were considered by editorial staff as something of a necessary evil: There has always been a latent power struggle between editorial and advertising as to who is earning the money. (Journalist) Yet the ‘professional staff, incorporating marketing and advertising staff, considered themselves part of the non-management group who did productive work. For example, an individual from the Advertising Department reacted strongly to comments by the Publishing Division’s Managing Director: ‘Accountants will say you could be processing a tin of beans…that was actually said…57 varieties.’ Whereas, in media and advertising, each product was crafted as unique by those involved in producing both editorial and advertising content. So, whilst both journalists and other ‘professional’ staff differentiated themselves from ‘management’, the identities of the social groups was ambiguous and tacitly disputed. The journalists would not accept all advertising staff as being like them, even though the advertising staff saw themselves as giving creative input to the product. The divisions between the two dominant identities were clearly demonstrated in the opposing assessments of the motives behind the range of acquisitions that the organisation had made in the recent past. Managers Journalists The company has The company has acquired businesses in acquired businesses order to build a national that appear under‘one stop shop’ for media utilised in order to purchasing and ‘sweat the assets’, production.

It is unsurprising then that the changes the company was making in relocation and rebranding were viewed with some suspicion. When asked about the rebranding of the group under the MG banner, one journalist commented: I think that’s something that as [evening paper] journalists, and I think I can say from the [morning paper] point of view as well, we don’t like that. It’s a journalist’s instinct to want to be very independent. (Journalist) However, the relocation was seen as the end of something familiar and the beginning of something ‘a lot less fun and a lot more business-like and a lot more controlled’ (journalist).

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Oh, I suppose we’re going to have to be a lot more tidy when we move. (Journalist) An issue of uniform ‘professionalism’ in the managerial sense of the word was mentioned by every one of the interviewees. There had been a recent adoption of a ‘chinos and polo shirt’ dress code by the management group. Various motives were proposed for this. Managers Professional Journalists staff Casual dress has been adopted to demonstrate that we are a relaxed and approachable organisation,

They were told at a meeting they called that they were too stiff and unapproachable.

Consultants told them to do it, but it’s not what you look like, it’s what you do that counts.

However, the attempt by management to be more like the ‘creative’ part of the organisation (in appearance at least) was also contrary to the values associated with the symbol of dress by some journalists. Wearing a shirt and tie is part of the persona you take on at work. If I wore casual clothes it would make me more relaxed, less professional. (Journalist) Even in the midst of these changes, there were different perceptions as to who could exercise power. Whilst journalists felt that they were done-unto by management, management felt that the journalists retained independence. Journalists Managers Every new owner wants to change things to: 1. Increase circulation and 2. Maximise profitability. That’s life.

The editor is God down there…The personality of the editor is the identity of the newspaper.

The independence of journalists was sustained by the control of production through the three daily editorial meetings in which decisions about content were made and from which management were excluded. The editorial meeting and the tightly scheduled deadlines for print runs meant that management’s first sight of an edition was after the paper had gone to print.

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Discussion We want to argue that not only is it possible for identities to be read in all three theoretical categories, but that this occurs simultaneously within the organisational settings. Mode 1: identity as singular and consistent The identities of individuals were commonly talked about in a Mode 1 fashion in SA. This was not, however, a relation between two equal isolated individuals; rather, management and workers remain in a standard relational pair (Silverman 1993) throughout each narrative. Although management want to involve workers, at times they (management) are ‘too radical’, and workers ‘couldn’t take that leap’. Although the group meetings are good, the workers retain some ‘old-fashioned’ attitudes. Workers are ‘working boys’ and ‘pals’, whereas management are ‘management’ and ‘gaffers’. The ‘worker’ population could be seen as a fractured-unity (Parker 2000) or a differentiated subculture (Martin 1992) with acknowledged divisions along functional and original workplace lines being evident as much as unstated ones along gender lines (catering and secretarial workers were exclusively female; transport, buildings, roads and stores workers were exclusively male). However, within the data there are many instances of both workers and managers talking about, and acting towards the other, as if that other had a singular and consistent identity. In this setting, one aspect of the strong attractiveness of the unitary reading of identity (Gergen 1999) is that it is highly desirable or necessary to be ‘not the other’. Workers must dissociate themselves from managers who are unproductive and out of touch. Managers must be different to workers as they cast themselves in the role of leaders which necessitates a group of differentiated ‘followers’ (Hersey and Blanchard 1982). Similarly, in MG, management and journalist identities also operate in a relational pairing. Managers narrated themselves as making rational and logical decisions free from context reflecting the economic and cultural trends. Whether in respect of the acquisition of different companies or in the choice of dressing more casually, the self is portrayed as clear, in-touch and engaged (Goleman 2002). Equally, the claim that it is a ‘journalist’s instinct to be very independent’ in order to provide objective, rational accounts of events, echoes the aspects of individualism identified by Abercrombie et al. (1986). For both of these groups, discussion of the other was conducted in Mode 1 terms. For example, journalists contrast their own sophistication and craft as newsmakers for specialised products, with management’s ‘57 varieties’ approach to publishing, which was seen as essentially an exercise in trying to ‘sweat the assets’ by making cuts in the editorial staff. For management, the singular journalist group were characterised as a recalcitrant group resistant to any attempt to make the product more marketable. In talking of the self and other, neither group acknowledged divisions in the groupings. Journalists, for example, regarded themselves as the news-makers who provided the content that sold newspapers (Karreman and Alvesson 2001), while the managerial group were attributed with making commercial decisions. However,

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‘journalists’ were a group that extended, at times, to those who were involved in advertising production work, even though the relationship between editorial and advertising was sometimes fraught. There were other notable divisions in this group with loyalty to masthead titles and comparisons between television and newspaper journalists revealing both commonality and difference. In both of these settings, the other (manager-worker in SA and managerjournalist in MG) was constructed as singular and consistent with identifiable and stereotypical traits (Cattell 1965). It constituted the opposition as a group whose traits and intentions ran counter to self-interest. Any attempt to cross such boundaries, for example through involvement or symbolic change, at best preserved the paired groups as distinct entities and, at worst, caused greater antagonism between the groups. This would increase the difficulty in cross-boundary working reported by Williams (2002). Mode 2: identity as a central ‘unifying’ conception expressed and perceived differently in different social settings In SA, within management, shifts in language and behaviour were reported. For example, in the difficult meeting, blame was suspended and people did tell the truth (as they saw it). This was a change from the traditional control-oriented management, but it was visible only to those who were already pre-disposed to a positive reading. Managers had taken a risk by joining this organisation rather than others, calculating that the new style of working would be realised, and would be worth potential sacrifices (e.g. opportunity costs, working for an organisation of lower apparent status than some alternatives). Given that managers had made these choices, their pre-dispositions to read discourse positively may have reflected cognitive/ emotional dissonance which could have arisen if they believed their choices to be faulty. Workers, however, were oblivious to the new ‘truthtelling and involvement’ style. Truth for them was rooted in action at the local level—and managers were invisible, lacked common sense and, at worst, were devious (‘They must think we come up the Clyde on a banana skin’). For some of the workers, there was a self-identity as ‘hard-working, hard doneby’. For them, there would be cognitive emotional dissonance in accepting that management were really behaving differently and treating them well, as it would be an attack on their identity. In short, the management identity was perceived as retaining a central entity-ness, but this was capable of absorbing (and reflecting) different identity projections from different groups (Alvesson and Willmot 2002). Equally, in MG, journalists evaluated the management decision to adopt a casual dress code as an instrumental move, instigated by consultants, designed to gain acceptance for corporate changes. For journalists, this symbolism simply was not backed by real action showing a change in approach, and management were simply play-acting. The journalists suspected the managers would change back into their suits, revert to type, as soon as someone from outside came to the offices or when they visited elsewhere. Yet, at least some journalists saw a ‘shirt and tie’ code as necessary to their own ‘real’ performance of the appropriate professional persona. So both groups were said to be playing parts (Goffman 1961); however, the part played by management was adjudged disingenuous (Carr 1998).

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What the change of dress code perhaps demonstrates is the influence of costume on the social relations within the organisation (Humphreys and Brown 2002). Managers were previously in a position of playing a cold and alien other who dressed and acted like accountants, against whom journalists could resist as professionals guarding their integrity. The ‘chino and polos’ approach saw the journalists attempting to play their part as a remote professional while the costume of the other indicated a more casual, human and reasonable opponent (Goffman 1959). Such a shift was clearly difficult to deal with as evidenced by the frequency of references to this in the interview transcripts. In a sense, managers had an identity of limited change agents, but this basic identity could be read, both by the self and others, in different ways depending on the audience and the social setting (Gergen 1999). Mode 3: identity as carte-blanche for multi-authoring In SA, for both sides there was expressed dysfunction with the persevering division between them—management being worse than useless for workers, and workers not being sufficiently on-board for management (Parker 2000). But, ironically, this dysfunction was highly functional. If managers really were involving, listening and displaying common sense, workers would have to acknowledge that they could not perform without managers, and that they (workers) were not the only ones who were keeping the place going. For managers, if workers really did get involved, develop ideas and solutions, and become more self-managing, there would be decreasing need for management. Without the need to change, the purpose and mission of new-style management would disappear. So, if they were successful in their aim, they would also cease to be necessary—so they had a vested interest in never reaching the goals that they genuinely believed in. In a sense, both groups had teleological identities. Management wanted to lead the organisation into the new world of high-involvement, high-quality service—driven by shared values. Workers aspired to a ‘myth of the golden past’ in which there was little or no interference from management, and everything worked out for the best. But if management ever reached their end-point there would be no need for management, it would be clear that they were not the action-people who made a difference, but were the non-value-adding administrators who were the antithesis of their self-image. And if workers ever reached their end-point, they would lose the culprits who provided their purpose—i.e. they would not have management’s mistakes to correct, management’s false promises to heroically deliver on, and be in the position of being the ones who really delivered effective action in the most difficult of circumstances. So both groups had teleological non-teleological urges within their narratives of the self and other (Beech 2000). Their narratives of ‘the other’ were vital to the sustenance of their narratives of the self, as without the other their own teleology dissolved, and so they could never acknowledge complete movement by the other. However, getting the other to move was their teleological narrative purpose and so the narratives would be self-defeating if they were ever to be achieved. Hence, there was a narrative necessity to always be on the journey and never arrive always becoming and never to become—because to become would be to unbecome (which would be very unbecoming!). So each group read little or no movement in the other, at the same time as attributing success to themselves—even

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though success in themselves would constitute change in the other. In other words, contradictions were absorbed in the readings of self and other. Ironically, these contradictions were highly functional for those seeking certainty and the removal of ambiguity. The relations between managers and journalists in MG also contained ambiguities. Managers were instrumental even in attempts to become more approachable and journalists were recalcitrant even in the midst of large-scale changes in titles and operations. Both sides claimed power over their own decisions and the way in which the newspapers were presented to the customer and yet both sides claimed to be powerless in the realm of the other. Members of management proclaimed the editor ‘God down there’ while, at the same time, replacing old editors with new and changing the logo of each of the group’s publications. Journalists, on the other hand, conceded commercial decisions to the owners of the titles whilst declaring journalistic independence a natural instinct. Although at one level there is apparent contradiction between business needs and journalistic independence, at a deep level there is synergy in that journalists need a paper in order to be ‘independent’ and the paper needs advertising revenue in order to survive. Here again the split is, at least in part, functional to the extent that the provocative views and speculative investigative work of the journalists who provide the content that attract (at least some of) the readership remains outside of the control of the management who may well be uncom-fortable if directly accountable for newspaper content. The journalist group on the other hand conceded the commercial whilst maintaining that their activity is what sells newspapers (Karreman and Alvesson 2001), complaining that restrictions on budgets and changes in newspaper traditions impinge on journalistic freedom. This allowed them to marginalise responsibility for handling the long-term decline of newspaper circulation figures and the rapid advance of technology to a managerial other. Both groups tolerated the changes made by the other whilst contesting the validity of their intrusion into their realm.

Closing comment This chapter has examined the usage of different modes of identity in the organisational arena. It began by examining theoretical perspectives on identity and suggested three modes of reading identity: identity as singular and consistent; as a ‘central’ unity with role taking; and finally as a carte blanche for multi-authoring, absorbing ambiguities and contradictions. Our study of identity in two organisations revealed that organisational narratives contain identities that can be, and are, read simultaneously in all three modes. In each mode, the other is as much part of the identity as the self. In the illustrations, the primary groups were arranged in relational (mainly oppositional) pairings. Both self and other were conceptualised as singular and consistent when spoken of directly. This made it easier to attribute cause and blame to the other as an identifiable group whilst maintaining a position that appeared rational, active and free. Purpose was projected onto the other, for example a desire to change the relationship with the other, or attempts to subvert the perceived aims of the other. However, the identities were also readable as partially or highly dispersed. If actors in the organisational setting had read the self and other in highly dispersed ways, this would

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have had an impact on their ability to act towards the other, as greater reflection and reflexivity would be required in advance of acting. For example, reading the identity of the other through a Mode 2 lens would highlight the situated nature of the performance of the other with a heavier emphasis given to the particular group memberships and social pressures under which they are operating. While a Mode 3 reading would raise awareness of the inconsistencies and ambiguities in the positions of both self and other such that the sustainability of the groups and oppositions become questionable. Such a change of emphasis is not perhaps without consequences. In Mode 2, and especially Mode 3, attribution of blame to the other becomes increasingly difficult. Where the other provided the function of a ‘target’ for projection, for example journalists projecting their lack of full independence onto the managers, if the target were to be removed, the subject would have to either face contradictions in their own identity or find other mechanisms of defence. These consequences could provide an impetus for those in such situations to reject Mode 2 and 3 readings. However, constraining perception to a Mode 1 reading is highly problematic. First, it is likely to misrepresent ‘the other’. In the cases above where a Mode 1 reading was applied to a group, typically the group being perceived would not see themselves in this way. Second, given this problem of misrepresentation, a Mode 1 reading is liable to be a very poor guide to action because it entails acting towards an identity of which the group does not have any self-awareness. Relating this to the managerialist literature, the issue is that managers are being exhorted to lead followers and manage cultures that are populated only by their own fantasies of ‘the other’. Third, a characterisation of Mode 1 readings is to down-play dynamism, particularly in the self. Often the perceived need is for the projected other to change to be in line with the desires of the self. Fourth, a Mode 1 reading is likely to underplay the significance of the social context and the various identities on the self. Assuming that others will read you as you read yourself is a dangerous assumption. Therefore, even though Modes 2 and 3 may appear to be less pragmatic than Mode 1 at first sight, we would argue that Mode 1 is the least useful. Modes 2 and 3 appear to be more effective at representing the ambiguities of social reality. Being able to read situations in this way is an important first step to a more reflective understanding of the impact one has on others, and of how both the self and others are in a dynamic identity-constructing relationship.

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Beech, N. (2000) ‘Narrative styles of managers and workers: a tale of star-crossed lovers’. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 36, 2:210–229. Beech, N. and Cairns, G. (2001) ‘Coping with change: the contribution of postdichotomous ontologies’. Human Relations, 54:1303–1324. Beech, N. and Huxham, C. (2003) ‘Cycles of identity formation in inter-organizational collaborations’. International Studies of Management and Organization, 33, 2: 7–21. Belbin, R.M. (1995) Team Roles at Work. London: Butterworth-Heinemann. Berger, A.A. (1997) Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Every day Life. London: Sage. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boje, D.M. (2001) Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage. Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E. (1995) Leading with Soul: Uncommon Journey of Spirit. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Carr, A. (1998) ‘Identity, compliance and dissent in organizations: a psychoanalytic perspective’. Organization, 5:81–99 Cattell, R.B. (1965) The Scientific Analysis of Personality. Harmonds worth: Penguin. Clark, T. and Salaman, G. (1998) ‘Telling tales: management gurus’ narratives and the construction of managerial identity’. Journal of Management Studies, 35, 2: 137–161. Cooper, R. (1989) ‘Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis 3: the contribution of Jacques Derrida’. Organization Studies, 10, 4:479–502. Deal, T.E. and Kennedy, A.A. (1982) Corporate Cultures. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Ezzamel, M., Willmott, H. and Worthington, F. (2001) ‘Power, control and resistance in “the factory that time forgot”’. Journal of Management Studies, 38:1053–1079. Gardner, W.L. and Martinko, M.J. (1996) ‘Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to study managers: a literature review and research agenda’. Journal of Management, 22:45–84. Gergen, K. (1999) An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday life. London: Allen Lane. Goffman, E. (1961) Encounters: Two Studies of Interaction. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Goleman, D. (2002) The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results. London: Time Warner Books. Hains, S.C., Hogg, M.A. and Duck, J.M. (1997) ‘Self-categorization and leadership: effects of group protypicality and leader stereotypicality’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23:1087–1100. Hardy, C. (2001), ‘Researching organizational discourse’. International Studies of Management and Organization, 31, 3:25–48. Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K.H. (1982) Management of Organizational Behaviour: Utilizing Human Resources, 4th edn. Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall. Hogg, M.A. and Terry, D.J. (2000) ‘Social identity and self-categorization processes in organisational contexts’. Academy of Management Review, 25:121–140. Holland, J.L. (1985) Making Vocational Choices, 2nd edn. New York: Prentice Hall. Humphreys, M. and Brown, A.D. (2002) ‘Dress and identity: a Turkish case study’. Journal of Management Studies, 39:927–952. Janis, I.L. (1982) Victims of Groupthink, 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jeffcutt, P. (1994) ‘The interpretation of organization: a contemporary analysis and critique’. Journal of Management Studies, 31:225–250. Karreman, D. and Alvesson, M. (2001) ‘Making newsmakers: conversational identity at work’. Organization Studies, 22:59–89. Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the HighPerformance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

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Linstead, S. (1993) ‘Deconstruction in the study of organizations’, in J.Hassard and M.Parker (eds) Postmodernism and Organisations. London: Sage. Martin, J. (1992) Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority. London: Tavistock Publications. O’Reilly, C.A., Chatman, J. and Caldwell, D.E. (1991) People and organizational culture: a profile comparison approach to assessing person-organization fit. Academy of Management Journal’, 34:487–516. Parker, M. (2000) Organizational Culture and Identity. London: Sage. Propp, V. (1975) Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Salaman, G. (1979) Work Organisations: Resistance and Control. London: Longman. Schutz, A. (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: North-Western University Press. Semler, R. (1993) Maverick: the Success Story Behind the Worlds Most Unusual Workplace. New York: Warner Books. Silverman, D. (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. London: Sage. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J.C. (1979) ‘The social identity theory of intergroup behaviour’, in W.G.Austin and S.Worchel (eds) The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Thomas, R. and Linstead, A. (2002) ‘Losing the plot? Middle managers and identity’. Organization, 9:71–93. Truss, C., Goffee, R. and Jones, G. (1995) ‘Segregated occupations and gender stereotyping: a study of secretarial work in Europe’. Human Relations, 48: 1331–1355. Watson, T.J. (1995) ‘Rhetoric, discourse and argument in organisational sense making: a reflexive tale’. Organization Studies, 16:805–821. Watson, T.J. and Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (1998) ‘Managerial sensemaking and occupational identities in Britain and Italy: the role of management magazines in the process of discursive construction’. Journal of Management Studies, 35, 3:285–301. Williams, P. (2002) ‘The competent boundary spanner’. Public Administration, 80, 1: 103–124. Willmott, H. (1993) ‘Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organizations’. Journal of Management Studies, 30, 4:515–552. Worchel, S. and Coutant, D. (2003) ‘It takes two to tango: relating group identity to individual identity within the framework of group development’, in M.A. Hogg and S.Tindale (eds) Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes. Maiden: Blackwell.

3 Theorizing narrative identity Symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics Douglas Ezzy This chapter argues for a synthesis of George Herbert Mead’s conception of the temporal and intersubjective nature of the self with Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic theory of narrative identity. Combining the insights of Ricoeur’s philosophical analysis with Mead’s socialpsychological orientation provides a subtle, sophisticated, and potent explanation of selfidentity. A narrative conception of identity implies that subjectivity is neither a philosophical illusion nor an impermeable substance. Rather, a narrative identity provides a subjective sense of self-continuity as it symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the story a person tells about his or her life. The utility of this conception of identity is illustrated through a re-reading of Erving Goffman’s study of the experience of mental patients (1976). This example underlines the social sources of the selfconcept and the role of power and politics in the construction of narrative identities. While there is a growing literature on the significance of narrative in psychology (Gergen and Gergen 1988; Sarbin 1986), history (White 1973), and philosophy (McIntyre 1981; Taylor 1989), narrative is still being taken up by sociology. As David Maines (1993:17) noted recently: “In its urgency to establish itself as a science, sociology missed the opportunity to nurture its narrative character that the Thomas and Znaniecki research represented.” However, Maines continues: “another moment now exists in an array of contradictions inherent in conventional sociological practices and the increasing acceptance and sophistication of narrative work in the human sciences.” This chapter argues specifically for the integration of narrative theory and a sociological conception of the self. Maines has argued for the general applicability of narrative to sociological phenomena (Maines 1993; Maines and Ulmer 1993). His brief comment on the specific relevance of narrative to the sociology of the self succinctly states the central argument of the present chapter: “I propose that the self-abstracted person, so clearly seen in adulthood, is one who has acquired a biography and thereby can tell his or her life story. A person thus is defined as a self-narrating organism” (Maines 1993:23). One of the most important consequences of a narrative conception of the self is that it incorporates temporality. Kathy Charmaz (1991:230) has observed that existing sociology typically locates the self in relationships but not in time. While there are a number of sociological studies of the self-concept that incorporate temporal dimensions (e.g. Glaser and Strauss 1971), George Herbert Mead’s work remains a watershed in identifying the significance of temporality for self-identity. I therefore begin by examining in detail Mead’s analysis of time and the self-concept. While most sociology has focused on Mead’s analysis of the self-concept to the exclusion of his theory of time, a re-reading of Mead suggests that temporality is integral to his conception of the

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development of consciousness. On the other hand, Paul Ricoeur (whose work is then discussed) begins with an analysis of the relationship between time and narrative. This leads into a consideration of narrative identity as a special case of his more general theory of time and narrative. Ricoeur provides a sophisticated philosophical background to his narrative conception of identity that both resolves some problems in Mead’s work and elegantly complements Mead’s sociological emphasis. The final part of the chapter rereads Erving Goffman’s (1976) analysis of the experience of the career of a mental patient. Goffman’s study clearly illustrates the utility of a narrative conception of identity, and it also provides the opportunity to indicate the implications of the work of some other narrative theorists. Specifically, Goffman’s work underlines the institutional sources of self-narratives.

G.H.Mead’s theory of time and subjectivity With some important exceptions (e.g. Charmaz 1991; Evans and Maines 1995; Maines et al. 1983), Anselm Strauss’s observation, made over three decades ago, remains valid: “Mead’s remarkable theory of time…has not been mined for its relevance to sociological concerns” (quoted in Maines et al. 1983:161). Mead’s theory of time (1959) tends to have been linked to philosophical concerns, while sociologists have focused mainly on Mead’s social psychology of the self (1934). This separation of Mead’s program has some basis in the different content of his published work, but it does violence to the more subtle implications of his thought. A narrative conception of identity provides a framework for the integration and extension of Mead’s conception of time and his social psychology of the self. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society (1934) contains only a few references to the relationship between time and the construction of a person’s self-concept. As Norbert Wiley (1994:43) has pointed out, there is a temporal dimension in Mead’s conception of the “I” and the “me” in that both the “I” and the “me” are discovered experientially in memory images of the things individuals have done in the past (Mead 1934:76). Wiley follows a suggestion from Vincent Colapietro to combine Mead’s I—Me dialogue with Charles Peirce’s I—You to form a trialogical me—I—you. This triad maps onto a temporal triad of past, present, future respectively. While there is an “intuitive attractiveness” (Wiley 1994:43) to Wiley’s model of the semiotic self that places Mead’s “me” in the past, Mead’s analysis of the relationship between temporality and the selfconcept is more complex. One section of The Philosophy of the Present (Mead 1959), clearly describes the significance of temporality for the self-concept. Mead begins with the familiar argument that consciousness arises when organisms include their own “organized attitudes” among the objects that shape their action. “Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism’s own responses enter as part of the objective field to which it reacts” (1959:73). Next he introduces his analysis of time: Now it is by these ideational processes that we get hold of the conditions of future conduct as these are found in the organized response which we have formed, and so construct our pasts in anticipation of that future. The

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individual who can thus get hold of them can further organize them through the selection of the stimulations which call them out and can thus build up his plan of action. (1959:76) The imagined “organized responses” that a person either remembers or anticipates, and then responds to, are integrally temporal. They refer to imagined responses in both the past and the future. Mead then draws a parallel between the mathematics of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the various, often conflicting, perspectives of reality that can exist in a person’s mind. To illustrate his point, he recounts the changed experience of the passage of events and time that occurs when “a man in a train passes from the system of the movement of his train to that of the movement of a neighbouring train” (Mead 1959:81). While the train cannot be both moving and stationary at the same time, the man experiences the train as both moving and stationary, and he can hold both these mutually exclusive situations in his mind at the same time, “passing from one to the other” (1959:81). The point of the illustration is that there is no fixed, preferred system of reference that defines reality. Rather, “let us instead accept passage as the character of reality, and recognize that in passage there is change in the structure of things, and that because of passage objects can occupy different systems” (1959:79). In the same way that, according to the theory of relativity, the measurements of an object depend on the spatio-temporal framework from which it is observed, the meaning a “minded organism” gives to a particular event depends on the spatio-temporal-social-interpretive framework from which it is interpreted. This illustration occurs immediately prior to another of Mead’s more familiar statements about the social nature of the self-concept. He uses the same image of “passing” between perspectives to describe taking the role of the other: The self by its reflexive form announces itself as a conscious organism which is what it is only so far as it can pass from its own system into those of others, and can thus, in passing, occupy both its own system and that into which it is passing… The organism, by occupying the attitudes of others, can occupy its own attitude in the role of the other. (1959:82–86) The idea of “taking the role of the other” is a development of Mead’s analysis of the ideational process of the construction of pasts and futures through anticipating and remembering one’s own responses and treating these as objects. In other words, Mead’s analysis of the formation of a self-concept through role-taking develops out of his analysis of the conscious experience of time. The “organism’s own responses” that become objects for the person are temporally located. Both memories of the past and anticipations of the future are symbolically organized and manipulated to provide a coherent self-concept that serves to direct current action. In the same way that a person passes from the present into their own remembered or anticipated actions, they also pass into the remembered or anticipated responses of others. The meanings of past and anticipated events change as a consequence of the reframing effects of role taking during the passage of interaction.

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The temporal nature of self-understandings has, of course, been central to the work of a number of symbolic interactionists. McCall and Simmons (1966:165), for example, discuss life plans or strategies for interaction and Strauss describes various types of trajectories (Glaser and Strauss 1968; Strauss 1969). However, Mead’s work suggests that the self-concept does not simply have a temporal aspect. Rather, temporality is integral to the self-concept in a more fundamental way. A full explanation of this point requires first a more careful consideration of the human experience of time. The next section reviews Mead’s discussion of the interpretation of past events in the present. This is followed by an examination of Ricoeur’s analysis of narrative as integrating fiction and history: a consideration of the relationship between the temporal flow of events and their interpretation in an argument for a narrative conception of identity.

G.H.Mead: events and their interpretation The past and, by implication, the future are continually reinterpreted because, according to Mead, the emergent present appears as continually novel and discontinuous with that past. As Arthur Murphy puts it in his original introduction to Mead’s Philosophy of the Present: Before the emergent has occurred, and at the moment of its occurrence, it does not follow from the past. That past relative to which it was novel cannot be made to contain it. But after it has occurred we endeavour to reconstruct experience in terms of it, we alter our interpretation and try to conceive a past from which the recalcitrant element does follow and thus to eliminate the discontinuous aspects of its present status. (Mead 1959: xvii) While the emergent events of the present appear as discontinuous, the reconstructed past appears as continuous and inevitable. Maines and his associates (1983:240) describe how, in Mead’s analysis of the experience of the knife-edge present, “the past…must be reconstituted in order for there to be continuity insofar as unexpected events create problems of ‘bridging contingent factors’”. Continuity in an account provides a unified interpretation of past, present, and future. As will be discussed below, Ricoeur’s theory of narrative emplotment explains how this continuity, or “concordance”, is achieved and why it is so necessary for the development of a sense of self-sameness or “identity”. Given the process of continual reinterpretation of the past, how are past events related to their interpretation in the present? David Mains and his associates (1983) provide a useful analysis of Mead’s conception of the relationship between mental images of the past-in-the-present and the “objective” events of the past. They describe four dimensions of the past in Mead’s formulation. These can be condensed into the two dimensions of the “objective” events of lived experience and their symbolic interpretation. First, Mead describes an “implied objective past”. That is to say, “some event had to have taken place in order to exist in present experience as a past event” (Maines et al. 1983:164). Linked to this implied objective past is the “social structural past” that refers to the conditioning effects of the past on the

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structures of experience of the present. Both these dimensions could be referred to as the events of lived experience. On the other hand, the past is symbolically reconstructed in the present. The past, Mead argues, conditions action by its reality in the present: “The past…is in the present; and, in what we call conscious experience, its presence is exhibited in memory, and in the historical apparatus which extends memory” (Mead 1959:17). Maines and his associates (1983:164) attempt to distinguish between the symbolically reconstructed past and “the mythical past” on the basis that mythical pasts refer to pasts that are “creations, rather than re-creations, because they are not empirically grounded. They are fictitious” (emphasis added). This distinction between an empirically grounded past and a fictitious one is more problematic than Maines and his associates suggest. Mead (1964) examines the relationship between past “objective realities” and their interpretation in the symbolically mediated past-in-the-present in The Philosophy of the Act. He notes that, however “obnoxious” it may appear, the pragmatist assumes “the only test of truth of what we have discovered [about the past] is our ability to so state the past that we can continue the conduct whose inhibition has set the problem to us” (1964:324). As Maines and his associates (1983:165) put it: “When Mead discussed the validity of pasts he referred not to their empirical verification, but rather to the continuity which secures their position in shared consciousness.” They then add: “However, they [the pasts] are empirical in their consequences because they can materially affect relationships.” According to Mead in the quotation above, the criterion that people use to assess the truth value of a statement about the past is its consequences for current conduct. That is to say, fiction is empirical because it can affect current actions, and history is empirically accurate to the extent that it facilitates current actions. These two criteria are not identical, but their similarity indicates that the difference between history and fiction is more complex than simply asserting that history is “empirically grounded” and fiction is not. This point is further elaborated in Ricoeur’s analysis of the relationship between history and fiction (discussed below). Mead’s temporal conception of the self-concept suggests two central issues that require further explanation. First, the distinction between history and fiction must be scrutinized. This requires a careful examination of the link between the objective events of lived experience and their symbolic interpretation. While the distinction between history and fiction is important, it is not as transparent as some approaches suggest. Second, the sources of the coherence or unity of the self-concept must be clarified. More specifically, a theory of the coherence of the self-concept must deal explicitly with the integrally temporal nature of the self-concept. That is to say, the unity of the self, however transient and changing, is a temporal unity that locates past and future in the present, through the act of role taking. Ricoeur’s theories of time and narrative, and of narrative identity, provide a sophisticated response to these issues.

Paul Ricoeur: narrative, events, and their interpretation Ricoeur’s analysis of time and narrative scrutinizes the difference between history and fiction. Ricoeur argues that fiction is quasi-historical and that history is quasi-fictive. History borrows from literature not only through using a similar compositional form.

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History also borrows the “representative function of the historical imagination. We learn to see a given series of events as tragic, as comic, and so on” (Ricoeur 1988:185). The place of fiction in history is to free, retrospectively, “certain possibilities that were not actualized in the historical past” (Ricoeur 1988:191). Although not referring directly to the role of fiction in interpretation, Mead (1970:241) made a similar point about the way in which the past is reinterpreted in light of the present and to facilitate future plans: The past which we construct from the standpoint of the new problem of today is based upon continuities which we discover in that which has arisen, and it serves us until the rising novelty of tomorrow necessitates a new history which interprets the new future. History borrows from fiction in the interpretive forms that allow the past to be reinterpreted in light of new experience that brings potentially contradictory information. Ricoeur argues that both historical action and interpretive imagination shape narratives. In Time and Narrative, he focuses on the way history and fiction borrow from each other. History can be distinguished from fiction by its claim to refer to the “real” past (Ricoeur 1988:5). However, without fictive imagination it is impossible to grasp the past. In the same way that the phenomenology of reading seeks a balance between the signals provided by the text and the synthetic activity of reading, Ricoeur argues for an interweaving of historical events and the imaginative or configurational act of narrating. Ricoeur’s analysis of narrative is broader than a semiotics of the text only concerned with the internal relationships within a text (Ricoeur 1992:301). Ricoeur (1984:53) describes his project as “hermeneutic” to indicate his concern with both the text’s internal workings and its relationship to the events of lived experience: “Hermeneutics…is concerned with reconstructing the entire arc of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works, authors, and readers.” That is to say, we cannot simply discover the world and ourselves through Cartesian reflexivity or through an analysis of language and its structure (Pucci 1992:209). Ricoeur (1984:78) argues instead for a “prior and more originary notion starting from our experience of being in the world and in time, and proceeding from this ontological condition towards its expression in language”. The historical lived experiences of “being in the world” prefigure and lead to the symbolic quasi-fictive narrative interpretation. Ricoeur does not deny the significance of language but explicitly analyzes the relationship between linguistic narratives and practical action. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics emphasizes the reality of lived experience, of acting in the world, as foundational to any attempt to understand the interpretive process. This bears some similarities to Mead’s pragmatist approach. In both cases, the central focus is the process of interpretation, examining how past and future are refigured in the present. However, Ricoeur’s philosophical framework is more sophisticated and addresses contemporary debates in philosophy and literary criticism. For Ricoeur (1984, 1985, 1988) the text, or narrative, has two “sides” that interface with the events of lived experience. Lived experience precedes a narrative, and narrative shapes practical action. The complete hermeneutic circle of narrative and action involves a three-fold process of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. The narrative imagination prefigures lived experience by providing a symbolic structure and temporal schema of action. These events are then configured into a story with a central theme or plot that “mediates

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between the individual events or incidents and the story taken as a whole” (Ricoeur 1984:65). This story, or text, then encounters lived experience again in the world of the listener or reader who refigures the story as it influences his or her choices about how to act in the world. The events of lived experience have a prenarrative quality. Life is a nascent story, life is “an activity and a passion in search of a narrative” (Ricoeur 1991:29). Similar to the shaping influence of the text, the quasinarrative of unexamined experience shapes the interpretive act of narration, although there are multiple possible interpretations. Lived experience, like a text, has no intrinsic meaning. Lives and texts are not configurations “out there”; rather, they become completed compositions in their reading. Interpretations are enabled and constrained by the text, but they are also anchored in the imaginative world of the reader. It is therefore a mistake to assume that lived experience is in some way separate from its narration—as if one were reality and the other fiction. Action is always symbolically mediated, with symbols acting as a quasi-text that allows conduct to be interpreted. A clear example of this is the way in which events become episodes as part of the plot of the story. Emplotment is the process that synthesizes experience in a narrative (Ricoeur 1991:21). Events, which just happen, are transformed into episodes that take their place in a unified singular story. Episodes do not just happen, they carry the story along. Events can appear discordant until they are integrated and made sense of in the story. Hence Ricoeur refers to a concordant discordance. Plot is the organizing theme of a narrative. It weaves together a complex set of events into a single story. A plot is not merely imposed but is produced by a complex moving back and forth between events and plot structure until both are fitted together. Further, emplotment endows the experience of time with meaning. This is the central point of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative.

Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity In volume 3 of Time and Narrative (1988) and in Oneself as Another (1992), Ricoeur uses his analysis of narrative to develop a conception of self-identity. The self, he argues, is discovered in its own narrational acts. For Ricoeur, following Martin Heidegger, selfhood (ipse) is ontologically distinct from identity (idem). Selfhood refers to the kind of entity that Heidegger (1962) calls Dasein, characterized by its ability to reflect upon itself. Identity, on the other hand, is a narrative construction that is the product of this reflective process. Here Ricoeur plays on the double meaning of “identity” as “self and “sameness”. Narrative identity constructs a sense of self-sameness, continuity and character in the plot of the story a person tells about himself or herself. The story becomes that person’s actual history (Ricoeur 1988:247). Mead’s distinction between the “I” and the “me” does not directly parallel Ricoeur’s distinction between selfhood (ipse) and identity (idem). Selfhood refers to the reflexive nature of the self as a whole, whereas the “I” refers to the prereflective “response of the organism to the attitudes of others” (Mead 1934:175). On the other hand, the “me” as “the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself [sic] assumes” (Mead 1934:175), has some similarities to Ricoeur’s concept of identity (idem); that is, the story one tells oneself, or others, about oneself. In contract to Heidegger, who

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underemphasized the importance of others for self-understanding (Kemp 1995), Ricoeur develops the ideas of Emmanuel Lévinas who argued that there is “no self without another who summons it to responsibility” (Ricoeur 1992:187). In other words, identity is not found at some deep center of our personality; rather, “it consists in being recognized by the Others as being the same I and the same person” (Pucci 1992:193). That is to say, Ricoeur’s analysis of identity is as integrally social as Mead’s conception of the “me”, but Ricoeur goes beyond Mead, describing the narrative structure that provides the selfconcept with a concordant, temporal unity. According to Ricoeur, identities are neither unchangeable substances nor linguistic illusions. The sense of self-continuity in identity is a product of narratives of selfconsistency through life’s changes. Narrating a life introduces a sense of connectedness and temporal unity to a person’s life (Dunne 1995:149). Narratives are integrally temporal because they configure the events of the past, present, and future into a narrative whole. While narratives can and do change, this does not mean that they cannot provide a sense of self-sameness that is substantial enough to justify talking about character as “a persistent unity of preferences, inclinations and motivations” (Pucci 1992:193). The term “narrative identity”, as Ricoeur (1991:32) uses it, suggests that “what we call subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substantiality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely the sort of identity which narrative composition alone can create through its dynamism”. Ricoeur captures the middle ground between a sovereign self that is invulnerable and impermeable to the influence of others and, on the other hand, a deconstructed self that emphasizes the linguistic sources of the self and the influence of context “to the point where it engulfs, if not annihilates, the self (Dunne 1995:140). The hermeneutics of the self, as Ricoeur (1992:23) puts it, is equidistant from the cogito exalted by René Descartes and forfeited by Frederich Nietzsche. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein (1994:690) have recently argued that in postmodern times, the self has not dissolved so much as changed its “experiential moorings” or “voicing”. They also attempt to identify a “middle ground” between modernism and postmodernism. They argue that, in postmodern times, the self is fluid but also substantial or “real”. The reality of the self is found in the interpretive practices producing the self that are grounded in local, “organizationally circumscribed discourses”. These interpretive practices provide the basis for an understanding of the self as more than pure illusion or philosophical smokescreen: Lives are narratively constructed, made coherent and meaningful, through the “biographical work” that links experiences into circumstantially compelling life courses… The process is artful, a complement to the play of difference, but is locally informed and organized. (Gubrium and Holstein 1994:687) This suggests two important points. First, some of the characteristics of the self as fluid and multiple have their sources in the empirical social organization of postmodern times. Second, while postmodernists have correctly pointed to the problems of a Cartesian selfsubstance or a Hegelian transcendental subject that informs many studies of the self, the rejection of these philosophical frameworks does not necessary lead to the conclusion that the idea of subjectivity was simply a philosophical mistake. A theory of narrative

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identity works out this second point in detail. Subjectivity is more than an illusion, it is “neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substantiality” (Ricoeur 1991:32). Narrative identity is coherent but fluid and changeable, historically grounded but “fictively” reinterpreted, constructed by an individual but constructed in interaction and dialogue with other people. In this way, the concept of a narrative identity clarifies the central issues both of the relationship between history and fiction and of the temporal nature of the self-concept, neither of which were fully worked out by Mead. Mead’s (1934) analysis of taking the role of the other can be seen as exploring the internalization of the intersubjective process of the creation of self-narratives. The internalized soliloquy (Athens 1994) anticipates and reinterprets through narrative. The self dialogues with phantom imagined others who inhabit our thoughts and whose perspective we use as we narrate our past, present, and anticipated experiences. It is common to develop new self-understandings as issues are “thought through”. Although nobody else may be physically present, new episodes in our life-narrative are recast in the presence of imagined others. To indicate the significance of soliloquies is not to deny the intersubjective nature of the creation of narrative identity. Soliloquies can be understood as internalized or imagined intersubjective encounters. Further, the importance of internalized others in influencing behavior explains the historical and enduring aspects of self-presentation. Lonnie Athens (1994) suggests it is the stability of the phantom others with whom we dialogue that sustains a stable sense of self, and not a Cartesian selfsubstance sometimes implied in the work of some symbolic interactionists. Narrative identities are necessarily processual because they describe lived time, which is ongoing. Narrative identities are very much inprocess and unfinished, continuously made and remade as episodes happen. As a consequence, self-narratives often appear confused and chaotic because of the disordered nature of life and because we cannot be sure how the story will end (Carr 1985). This does not mean they lack a plot, only that it is not simple, clear, or fully worked out. Similar to Herbert Blumer’s (1969) argument that the self is not a fixed structure or substance, but a process, Ricoeur (1984:48) emphasizes that narrative identities are not static structures, but the product of an ongoing integrative process. The next section illustrates this process through a rereading of Goffman’s Asylums (1916).

A reading of Goffman’s “inpatient phase” In his discussion of the “inpatient phase” in Asylums, Goffman (1976:139) suggests a “general point may be made about the moral career of inpatients which has bearing on many moral careers”. He then describes the general process of the construction of life stories, of which a mental patient’s story is a particular type. Goffman’s discussion provides a useful illustration of a number of theoretical points raised by a narrative conception of identity. Given the stage that any person has reached in a career, one typically finds that he [sic] constructs an image of his life course—past, present, and future—which selects, abstracts, and distorts in such a way as to provide him with a view of himself that he can usefully expound in current

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situations. Quite generally, the person’s line concerning self defensively brings him into appropriate alignment with the basic values of his society, and so may be called an “apologia”. (Goffman 1976:139) Goffman also describes an “apologia” or “line” as a “story”. The self-story that Goffman discusses is a form of narrative identity. In the same way that Mead emphasized the process of reinterpretation of the past to make sense of one’s actions in the present, Goffman underlines the way in which the past is reinterpreted for use in “current situations”. He also points to the influence of society’s “basic values” on the construction of the story. One way these basic values can be seen to operate is through culturally acceptable plots for constructing a self-story. Ricoeur also suggests that shared cultural symbols influence the development of narrative identities. He emphasizes the influence of “narratives handed down in our literary tradition” (1991:33). However, the form or plot of a self-narrative is influenced by a wide range of pre-existing narratives, including myths, films, past conversations, and, in Goffman’s analysis, patient notes and group therapy sessions, along with the “literary tradition”. Margaret Somers (1994:606) makes this point clearly: “We come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making.” That is to say, people are constrained by the limited repertoire of available and sanctioned stories that they can use to interpret their experience. While there are opportunities for identity to be a creative work of style (Polkinghorne 1988:15), most people tend to adopt the culturally given plots. Whether pre-existing narratives or their sources are referred to as “sedimented traditions” (Ricoeur 1985:18), “historical narrative structures” (Evans and Maines 1995:303), or “cultural repertoires” (Somers and Gibson 1994:73), these terms all point to the influence of “basic values” or culturally embedded narrative forms on the construction of the self-story. Goffman (1976:140) identifies two main types of self-story: If the person can manage to present a view of his [sic] current situation which shows the operation of favourable personal qualities in the past and a favourable destiny awaiting him, it may be called a success story. If the facts of a person’s past and present are extremely dismal, then about the best he can do is to show that he is not responsible for what has become of him, and the term sad tale is appropriate. Interestingly enough, the more the person’s past forces him out of apparent alignment with central moral values, the more often he seems compelled to tell his sad tale in any company in which he finds himself. This distinction parallels two of the basic narrative modes identified by Northrop Frye (1957) in his Anatomy of Criticism: “In the tragic modes, the hero is isolated from society In the comic [and romantic] modes, the hero is reincorporated into society” (Ricoeur 1985:16). Similarly, Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen (1988:25) differentiate between tragic narratives that describe a rapid downfall and the heroic romantic narratives where happiness is restored to the protagonist after a struggle. Frye’s analysis refers to the

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literary tradition, whereas Goffman’s story types are based on a sociological study of the forms of social experience. Ricoeur argues that the interpretive process involves the interpenetration of fiction and historical experience. This suggests the empirical question: to what extent are experiences involving separation from society, loss or a “dismal” past narrated as tragedies or in other ways? While Goffman’s “total institutions” leave little choice for patients in constructing their self-stories, other social contexts are less constricting. Goffman (1976:141) observes that patients in a mental hospital are continually reminded they are “mental patients” and they have failed in some “over-all way”: “The patient often responds to this situation by attempting to assert a sad tale proving that he is not ‘sick’, that the little trouble’ he did get into was really somebody else’s fault.” Coercion is often central to tragic narratives as a person attempts to remove personal responsibility for the current “dismal” situation (Langer 1991:176). From his field notes of “informal interaction with patients” Goffman (1976:141) then provides some empirical examples of stories given by the patients: I was going to night school to get a M.A. degree, and holding down a job in addition, and the load got too much for me. The others here are sick mentally but I’m suffering from a bad nervous system and that is what is giving me these phobias. I got here by mistake because of a diabetes diagnosis, and I’ll leave in a couple of days. In a number of other places in Goffman’s analysis, similar sets of stories are implied for particular phases of the moral career of the mental patient. Although Goffman (1976:125–129) does not provide any examples from field notes, stories about one’s self and relationships with others are clearly central to the experience of betrayal when the person begins entry into the career of a mental patient. Similarly, the manipulation of narrative identities is central to the group therapy sessions that Goffman describes. In these sessions, the therapist attempts to “disabuse” the patient of the above face-saving narratives and to “encourage an interpretation suggesting that it is he himself who is to blame and who must change” (Goffman 1976:149): Each time the staff deflates the patient’s claims, his [sic] sense of what a person ought to be and the rules of peer-group social intercourse press him to reconstruct his stories; and each time he does this, the custodial and psychiatric interests of the staff may lead them to discredit these tales again. (1976:149) Goffman’s examination of the force of the institutionally sanctioned narratives of the hospital staff indicates the role of power and politics in the narrative construction of identity. Wendy Evans and David Maines’s (1995:303) study of incest is similarly an examination of the “politics of storytelling”. They demonstrate that conventionalized plotlines used to interpret narratives of incest rendered many victims of incest silent

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because there was no plausible, culturally acceptable plot within which they could recount their experiences: “The authenticity of pasts in the social and cultural sense is provided by their narrative structures and, in particular, the dominant plot lines that define the cultural meanings of human action” (Evans and Maines 1995:320). Similarly, other studies have demonstrated how the shape of shared linguistic repertoires and acceptable narrative plots have served to silence and oppress women African domestics (Mkhonza 1995), and women as biographers in general (Reinharz 1994). Ricoeur (1992) explores the related issue of what constitutes a “good life” toward the end of Oneself as Another. As David Rasmussen (1995:166) puts it: “As narrative can thematize action, so it can be the bridge to ethical life.” Ricoeur (1992:187) argues that a self-narrative takes on meaning, and an evaluation as “good” or otherwise, through its relationship to the “other” who summons the self to responsibility. He (1992:172) further notes that “this dialogic structure, in its turn, remains incomplete outside of the reference to just institutions”. Although this aspect of Ricoeur’s thought requires further elaboration, it indicates that a theory of narrative identity also has socio-political implications. Toward the end of his chapter on the inpatient phase, Goffman (1976:154) observes that behind each self is an institutional system: The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connexion with the person by himself and those around him. A similar point has been made by narrative theorists drawing on the hermeneutics of suspicion (Sass 1988), so named because of a suspicion about the supposed transparency and intelligibility of consciousness. Louis Sass (1988:244) argues that self-knowledge is always only “approximate, tentative and indirect” and often influenced by “only partially specifiable themes and backgrounds that exist at various levels of implicit and explicit awareness”. That is to say, it is not simply the rhetoric of narrated identity that supports a sense of a unified self. Regular interaction with a network of others, the routines of everyday life, and the presence of physical props are also central to a person’s ability to maintain a consistent and satisfying narrative (Slogoski and Ginsburg 1989). Both Goffman’s analysis of the institutional sources of the self in the mental hospital and his later study of the maintenance of “face” (1967) underline this point. This re-reading of Goffman’s analysis of the inpatient phase has demonstrated the utility of a sociological conception of narrative identity. A narrative identity provides a sense of personal continuity through time grounded in social networks and larger institutions and institutionally located power in the construction and maintenance of narratives, including narrative identities. Linking Ricoeur’s literary and philosophical hermeneutics with an explicitly sociological emphasis on social organization and practices provides an incisive and insightful framework for the analysis of the construction, maintenance, and change of the self-concept.

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Conclusion Temporality is integral to Mead’s theory of the self, consciousness, and role-taking. The past and future are continually reconstituted, according to Mead, in the light of the “emergent” in the present. This reconstitutive process involves an interweaving of the objective events of the past, past’s effects on the present, and the symbolic reconstruction of the past in the present. That is to say, the “me” does not simply have a temporal aspect. The imagined responses constitutive of the role-taking process are either remembered or anticipated. The “me” that is constructed through this process is therefore integrally temporal. Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity describes this process more fully. According to Ricoeur, narratives about human pasts interweave historical events and the resources of fiction that provide the narrative plot within which events are interpreted. A sense of identity, or self-sameness, is constructed through the integrating quasi-fictive process of emplotment. The remembered and anticipated events of a person’s life become the person’s life story. Ricoeur’s framework is hermeneutic in that he describes the circle of interpretations in which the “objective” events of lived experience are configured in “subjective” narratives that, in turn, shape decisions about actions that are again refigured in narrative: “The alteration of telling and living is extended in time and…constitutes a causal chain of sorts” (Rosenwald 1992:273). While narrative identities are constructed intersubjectively, in interaction with others, they are also produced as part of an internal dialogue, or soliloquy. Further, narrative identities are sustained and transformed through the influence of social relationships as mediated by institutional structures. As Goffman’s analysis of the career of a mental patient underlines, the construction of self-stories is also an integrally political and power-laden process. A narrative conception of identity suggests a number of directions for future research. First, the centrality of the interpretative process that has always been integral to the pragmatist tradition is again highlighted. This focus stands in contrast to methodologies that assume interview texts unproblematically reflect reality and to orientations that disregard references to reality as epistemologically problematic. However, beyond the simple observation that different people interpret different events in different ways, research is directed toward the ongoing cyclical interaction between narration and action. Jacquelyn Wiersma’s (1992) interviews over several years with “Karen” clearly demonstrate the mutually influential nature of action and narration. More generally, a narrative approach would focus on how the interpretive resources that people bring to situations interact with the events they experience to shape the narrative that is then produced. The approach also highlights the links between research in the humanities and the social sciences. Ricoeur (1985) examines this issue in considerable detail, particularly in volume 2 of Time and Narrative. However, a more careful sociological consideration is still required. I have argued that self-identity is formed in a narrative. While a narrative configures lived experience, it is not determined by it. Narratives give lived experience a clearer, richer meaning. However, self-narratives are not free fictions: “Humanity, we have said with Marx, only makes its history in circumstances it has not made” (Ricoeur 1988:216). The plots of narrative identities are formed in a complex interaction between events, imagination, significant others, routines and habits, and the structure of the soliloquy that

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forms a person’s self-narrative. A combination of symbolic interactionist thought and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics provides an incisive theory of these processes.

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Rasmussen, D. (1995) “Rethinking subjectivity: narrative identity and the self. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21, 5/6:159–172. Reinharz, S. (1994). “Feminist biography”, in R.Josselson and A.Lieblich (eds) Exploring Identity and Gender: The Narrative Study of Lives, volume 2. London: Sage. Ricoeur, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, volume 1. Translated by K.McLaughlin and D.Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1985) Time and Narrative, volume 2. Translated by K.McLaughlin and D.Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1988) Time and Narrative, volume 3. Translated by K.Blarney and D.Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991) “Life in quest of narrative”. Translated by D.Wood, in D.Wood (ed.) On Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Translated by K.Blarney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenwald, G. (1992) “Conclusion: reflection on narrative self-understanding”, in G.Rosenwald and R.Ochberg (eds) Storied Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sarbin, T. (ed.) (1986) Narrative Psychology. New York: Praeger. Sass, L. (1988) “Hermeneutics and the concept of the human subject”, in S.Messer, L.Sass and R.Woolfolk (eds) Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Slogoski, B. and Ginsburg, G. (1989) “Ego identity and explanatory speech”, in J.Shorter and K.Gergen (eds) Texts of Identity. London: Sage. Somers, M. (1994) “The narrative constitution of identity”. Theory and Society, 23: 605–649. Somers, M. and Gibson, G. (1994) “Reclaiming the epistemological ‘Other’”, in C.Calhoun (ed.) Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell. Strauss, A. (1969) Mirrors and Masks. London: Martin Robertson. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, H. (1973) Metahistory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiersma, J. (1992) “Karen: the transforming story”, in G.Rosenwald and R.Ochberg (eds) Storied Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wiley, N. (1994) The Semiotic Self. Cambridge: Polity Press.

4 Self and other in everyday existence A mystery not a problem1 Bogdan Costea and Lucas D.Introna

Introduction Managing diversity has become an established feature of business textbooks, corporate literature, accrediting professional associations (such as the CIPD in the UK), NGOs (such as the Work Foundation) and management consultancy services. Diversity has been absorbed as a domain for managerial intervention in all types of organisation. Although it might vanish like other management fads, the very idea of diversity as an object of management is an indicator of more profound trends in contemporary management and culture. The notion that human difference ought to be actively governed reveals important aspects of our view about the fundamental relationship between self and other in the world. Despite being of interest for philosophical anthropology, diversity management does not lend itself to direct philosophical investigation simply because it is not in itself a philosophical elaboration. There are, however, substantive benefits in trying to develop a historical image of diversity management’s multilayered conceptual origins and implications which, in turn, might lend itself to a philosophical commentary. Our questions focus upon the specificity of diversity as a management object: what are its sphere and its determinations? What conceptual moves and re-alignments made human diversity a management theme? How is it constituted as an object of theoretical and practical rationalisations by management academics, consultants and organisations? This chapter combines elements of historical and cultural analysis of diversity management with aspects of philosophical critique derived from an existential phenomenological perspective. Philosophical interest in diversity management stems from the fact that its sources lie deeper within current assumptions about what it means to be human and unique in the world. A certain disorientation about the nature of existence seems to pervade Western cultures. It has become harder and harder to agree on what makes us all the same yet unique. Public discourses reflect this unease but not in a passive manner. Rather, every social sector is rendered open to new forms of contestation, appropriation and manipulation. Such is the case of diversity management as a substitute for emancipatory movements. Managerialism seems to seize instinctively every important sphere of social and cultural negotiation and exploit it as a resource for reaffirming the status quo. Diversity management is such a new arena of possibilities for capturing and reconfiguring the personal experience of self and other. At this level, the idea of a contrast between diversity management’s conception of self and other, and existence philosophy seemed to be a natural curiosity. In this chapter, philosophical ideas are used to interrogate concrete social practices and concerns and to investigate conceptual mechanisms of management ideology. The analysis has two parts.

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In the first, we discuss three different but related aspects of diversity management: its origins as a subversion of the equal opportunities agenda; its insertion into a familiar set of ideas which reassert the ‘right to manage’; and its use as another pretext for deploying already familiar technologies and ideologies of normalisation or homogenisation. In the second part, we contrast the reduction of human diversity in management with a perspective opened up by existential phenomenology. In particular, we draw on ideas from Heidegger and Lévinas to reflect on difference from radically different premises: human diversity understood as an ontological ‘given’ of existence, a reality ultimately unproblematic. Difference is a fundamental axis of the human way of being in the world, a source of mystery, of aporias and of tension—but it cannot be characterised as an inherent social or organisational ‘problem’, or as a source of ‘organisational pathology’ and disorder. Seen from this angle, the management of diversity assaults human difference. The manner of this assault is not new; it shares fundamental features with other subjectoriented managerial ideologies. The idea of diversity perpetuates key tendencies in management theorising: an abhorrence of open human possibilities; an equal abhorrence of views which take tension (in whatever form) to be central to human existence and a tendency to treat any form of tension as pathological; an abhorrence of relinquishing managerial agency combined with a tendency to disempower other organisational constituencies—and the list may continue. The concept of diversity in management opens up a specific window on wider current cultural currents. As a sui generis commentary on the relationship between self and other, diversity management can be associated with what Hannah Arendt called modern man’s ‘world alienation’. Her thesis is that the secularised modern individual has not come closer to this world, but is rather farther away from everything, alienated from the world rather than himself as Marx argues (Arendt 1958:254). The consequence of this ‘worldlessness’ is ‘an attempt to reduce all experiences, with the world as well as with other human beings, to experiences between man and himself (ibid.). The appropriation of the sense of ‘other’ by managerial ‘expertise’ is just another sign of world alienation rather than a liberating intervention by managers as key historical agents.

The management of diversity: origins, themes, perspectives The addition of diversity to the management agenda during the 1990s should not be a surprise. Managerial ideology in the 1980s and 1990s focused upon subject-oriented technologies: from culture, quality, participation, empowerment, teamwork, to individual and collective learning, on to innovation, knowledge, ethics and so on. They represent a tendency to incorporate more and more aspects of individual and collective life into the managerial prerogative. A new direction emerged in management: the expansion of managerial ideas into multiple areas of subjectivity which have become ‘disembedded from tradition and are open to capture and manipulation’ (Roberts 2001:18). The multiple expropriation of subjectivity has transformed managerial discourse into a new form of guardianship of identity, or at least of its current sources. This trend in the production of managerial ideas is so prevalent, in fact, that commentators such as Roberts (2001) argue that we are facing a new kind of appropriation of the world by managerialism. The

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‘managerial conversion’ of the world-image is leading to the emergence of a new fantasy managers have of themselves as established, proven, qualified ‘global leaders’. But, as Roberts argues, there are far deeper implications beneath this fantasy with regard to the emergence of a new myth of world history: In a globalised and, above all, in a managed world the expert suppression of contradiction…becomes feasible’ (Roberts 2001:17). Technically, this is precisely what management ideas have aimed at in the last 20 years: the possibility of corporate cultures without tension, of teams without tension, of flexibility without tension, of organisations ‘learning’ or innovating without tension, and so on. It is not therefore surprising that diversity itself would be perceived as a legitimate target for the suppression of the contradiction it inherently refers to, in the name of an even more ‘unitary organisation’.

The shift from ‘equal opportunities’ to ‘diversity management’ in the 1990s On the surface, it appears that diversity management emerged as a mere reoccupation of the place of anti-discrimination movements in the 1960s and 1970s. However, there is more to this ideological shift than meets the eye. The convenient appropriation of the equal opportunities agenda by management ideology via the category of ‘diversity’ allowed corporations to seize the emancipation agenda away from grassroots origins, as well as to claim high moral ground in the process (see, for example, Kandola and Fullerton (2001:6–18) who summarise this argument on behalf of management ideology). Diversity is thematised in management following the lines drawn by previous social struggles for equality. It has now become a substitute for the equal opportunities agenda in the workplace. But is the management of diversity with its emphasis on differences the same with the defence of rights to an equal social, political, economic and cultural playing field for all members of society? Emancipation from different forms of discrimination by race, gender, ethnic background, religion, age or sexual orientation in Western societies from the 1960s onward has been perceived as part of the natural evolution of universal understanding of human freedom as a social reality. To mark the historical extension of autonomy (or ‘freedom’) as a central value of Western cultures, new modalities of social engagement between traditionally unequal groups were required. The 1970s and 1980s were marked by political, legislative, economic and ideological processes aimed at redressing imbalances and creating new ways in which the basic freedom to enjoy equal opportunities for the pursuit of a meaningful personal life could be realised. But the most interesting aspect of equal opportunities is that it is an attempt to reduce differences between certain groups in the context of basic social arrangements. To this extent, the anti-discrimination movements aimed to prevent forms of differentiation between people, to homogenise and integrate rather than emphasise differences. This nuance was not, however, deciphered by those who saw diversity as an opportunity to re-assert the Thatcherite ‘right to manage’. The workplace was one of the central spaces in which emancipation movements manifested themselves. But the debate about difference and its place in the lives of organisational members took place in a haphazard, uncoordinated fashion and it

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unsurprisingly led to a contestation of roles in the process of establishing equality of opportunities. Employees and employers, minority members and their ‘others’ are still locked in a struggle to determine who has the right to mediate and own the process of emancipation. The question is whether this struggle is not subverted by ideas such as diversity management which mark the final step toward institutional occupation of this terrain. In other words, the original source of the struggle for equality, the oppressed, was replaced by managers who transformed the agenda of emancipation into that of diversity. This transformation can be interpreted as an appropriation of the emancipation agenda by the ‘oppressor’. Instead of workers claiming to own the struggle for equality, it is now management that claims to be actively pursuing the celebration of diversity for the benefit of the workforce. Yet, somehow, neither party seems to have been really aware of what was happening with the idea of difference as a premise for de-differentiation, for equality. This unawareness is in itself important and can be situated in the wider cultural atmosphere of the 1990s in which society became increasingly managerialistic in style and managed in practice. The demise of a collective sense of what ‘the workforce’ means (left by the New Right onslaught against the unions in the 1980s) renewed the space into which management could step. Moreover, a longer process of transformation of the modern consciousness came to bear a certain kind of fruit: the first generations of ‘total consumers’ (or ‘all-consuming selves’) entered the workplace. Young men and women whose consciousness is dominated by ideas about existence shaped almost exclusively by reference to consumption writ large (with all that it entails: a certain type of economic rationalisation of life, individualism, secularism, a conception of self-sacrifice as pathological, etc.—aspects very well described in Bruckner 2000) entered corporate organisations. The roots of this new individual consciousness are much deeper, however, extending from the secularisation of conceptions of life as a temporal occurrence, to the rise of a new sense of self as an almost entirely controllable project. This interpretation is congruent with the idea of ‘soft capitalism’ as the latest cultural phase of capitalism (see, for example, Heelas 2002; Thrift 1997; as well as, indirectly, Bruckner 2000). But the foundations of the modern reconceptualisation of the self cannot be understood in isolation from the more general context of modernity. Charles Taylor’s argument is that the modern self s ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ against traditional moral frameworks leads to a fragmentation of the ‘space for moral decisions’ without historical precedent (Taylor 1989:19–24). This modern moral space is one in which orientation has not just lost its traditional articulation, but it is ‘inarticulate’ par excellence (Taylor 1989:19–24). In this ‘inarticulate’ but viable moral space, it is possible to insert Roberts’ (2001) argument that modern subjectivity is open to capture and manipulation in an increasingly managed society. The framing of existence in terms of cycles of production and consumption opens a domain which is absorbed in various forms by the managerial process as the current matrix of cultural ordering, but also as the matrix which shapes the experience of self as a project whose reflection will be found in the spheres of consumption, enterprise and of an ‘expert-engineered’ individuality. New generations of ‘human resources’ are fertile ground for managerial ideas which appropriate more and more of subjectivity. The 1990s can be seen as a period in which management ideas underwent a shift from an earlier focus on the mass-production of standardised objects to a concern with mass-producing standardised subjects. If the

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original legitimation of management was its capacity to deliver unprecedented kinds of objects, its current basis seems to be the terrain of subjectivity and management’s capacity to mould it in previously unknown ways. This may explain to some extent the exponential proliferation of management ideas focused on reconfiguring and carving up subjectivity to suit the purpose of legitimising managerial interventions. Today, there are few aspects of subjectivity which have not been touched upon somehow by management. From motivation to culture, from participation to empowerment, from training and development to lifelong learning, from competence to knowledge, there are few management ideas which are not mainly oriented towards sectioning, resectioning and appropriating human subjectivity. A similar process occurred in relation to ‘equal opportunity’ policies as measures against discrimination in the workplace. Because, in itself, no policy could completely resolve multiple and complex historical crises such as those of inequality, the very emergence of a new problematic did create the opportunity for management to extend its reach into another aspect of subjectivity. This is due perhaps to a peculiar quality of management ideology: the ability to feed off any crisis and emerge re-legitimised and expanded in new areas of social and personal life (see Bruckner 2000:83). This is precisely what happened: ‘diversity’ has occupied the rhetorical space of ‘equal opportunities’, a phenomenon widely debated by, for instance, Liff and Wajcman (1996), Miller (1996), Webb (1997) and Kirton and Greene (2000). Therefore diversity management established its territory by taking over the axes of equal opportunity struggles: gender, race, religion, age, ethnic background sexual orientation. The amount of literature that contributes to this positioning is daunting: Roosevelt Thomas (1992), Stitch (1998), Thomas et al. (1999), Adler and Izraeli (1994), Cox (1994), Henderson (1994), Baytos (1995), Zemke et al. (2000), Fernandez and Davis (1998), Dickens and Dickens (1991), Sonnenschein and Bell (1999) and Kandola and Fullerton (2001). Whereas diversity management started off by denying equal opportunities’ depth and range, by contesting its agenda, it ends up drawing its main territory along precisely the same lines. This appears paradoxical, but it is not. Through diversity management, corporations seek to stabilise the issues of emancipation and discrimination, developing managerial schemas aimed to conciliate sources of political and legal tension which can be very costly in a litigious society. Another possible interpretation is that diversity management is an instinctive political gesture whose goal is to disconnect contentious issues from the idea of ‘struggle’ by assuming an active stance regarding the defence of employees’ welfare. Diversity and its rhetorical potential: the expansion of management’s sphere of influence The conceptual shift from equal opportunities to diversity management is not a simple change of terms. This move is neither mechanical nor static; it allows new substantive and sustained moves in both corporate ideology and practices. This section explores some of the horizons opened up by diversity management. The idea of managing diversity has generated a new rhetorical space for management to shape the sense of self via pseudo-understandings of the ‘other’. It allows the expansion of managerial intervention through collective categories of traditional equal

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opportunities (gender, race, ethnic background) into the more delicate sphere of individual uniqueness. This creates the possibility of yet more reconfigurations of subjectivity as well as offering reinforcements for subject positions established in the last decade: demands to integrate in organisational cultures, to assume responsibilities and to occupy specific subject positions in relation to others, to submit to therapeutic courses of personal development in order to increase harmony, etc. The terms ‘diversity’ and ‘management’ have certain key properties that enable them to overcome some of the limitations of ‘equal opportunities’. The latter implied an acceptance of a prior crisis (of inequality) and an associated acceptance of guilt for that crisis on behalf of institutions. It allowed the workforce (amongst other constituencies) to act in the name of its own causes. By contrast, management ideologies have an instinctive tendency to avoid vocabularies that imply accepting responsibility for crises. They also have a tendency to conceptualise the world of work as one in which managers are the active agents and the workforce a passive receptor of ‘enlightened’ practices. ‘Diversity management’ is a category that offers both an escape from the responsibility of the preemancipation era, as well as the possibility for a new and extended platform for managerial intervention. Diversity has also created the rhetorical basis for a positive projection of managerial intentions. Diversity is a word which no longer invokes crisis; diversity is part of life and management can show yet again how generous it is in ‘discovering’, understanding and celebrating another aspect of employees’ lives. Hence, diversity allows management ideologues to claim increased ethical legitimacy for their work of liberating individuality from constraining practices. The following excerpt from a speech entitled ‘We Cannot Rest’, given to students of the Maynard Institute in 1999, illustrates this point: How do we make sure that we have people on our staffs who understand different cultures, who can inspire soul searching, who can provide robust debate, who through their passionate pleas will force us to always think in terms of all segments of our communities and not just one or two? (Favre 1999) In Siemens’ ‘Guiding Principles for Promoting and Managing Diversity—2001’, we read: Diversity is an invaluable source of talent, creativity and experience. It comprises all the differences in culture, religion, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, age and social origin—in short, everything that makes the individual singular and unique within society. Diversity improves competitiveness by enlarging the potential for ideas and innovation. Diverse teams addressing problems from varied perspectives will be more productive and achieve better solutions. We will benefit from the potential of diversity not only in a global context, but also at all levels within countries, locations and teams. Diversity is a business imperative and part

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of our social responsibility as well. It must become an integral part of our corporate culture world-wide and thereby position Siemens as a global employer of choice. (Siemens Corporation 2001) This position is one of visionary breakthrough, of discovery, of a new start. Other ideologies too have been invested with hopes for future ‘salvation’. This explains in part the rapid adoption of diversity as a theme in strategy statements. Such examples are evidence of the general tendency in the managerial rhetoric accompanying the ‘discovery’ of diversity in the workplace. They show the use of diversity as proof of progress in management understanding, as well as making possible its insertion into already familiar ideologies of unitary corporations. An illustrative example is provided by Kandola and Fullerton’s volume, Diversity in Action, published by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the UK in 1994. The volume has been reprinted more than five times since its original publication. It displays typical rhetorical moves through which diversity management appropriates and then subverts the equal-opportunities axes. The volume begins with a chapter devoted precisely to this purpose: Our view is that diversity has to be reconsidered as something different from equal opportunities and not as merely a new label for an old concept. We also feel that the time is ripe for a reconsideration of the conventional approaches to equal opportunities. Equal opportunities, it is often said, is about change. It is rather ironic, therefore, to find that this slogan is not inherent in the concept of equal opportunities itself. The body of ideas representing conventional wisdom in equal opportunities has not changed in possibly the last 15 years. (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:11) In detailing the differences between diversity management and equal opportunities, the authors open up two avenues. On the one hand, they suggest that it is the role of management to appropriate the emancipation agenda: ‘Managing diversity, however, is seen as being the concern of all employees, especially managers, within an organisation’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:10). The traditional roles of emancipatory struggles are thus inverted: the ‘oppressed’ are gradually but tolerantly marginalised (whilst being also totalised), and managers made prime guardians and agents of emancipation. On the other hand, the use of traditional lines of engagement, such as gender, race and so on, is crucially expanded to incorporate individual subjectivity in general as a domain of concern for diversity management: ‘First, managing diversity is not just about concentrating on issues of discrimination, but about ensuring that all people maximise their potential and their contribution to the organisation’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:9). Such statements deliver at a stroke both an expansion of the managerial prerogative to the whole of the workforce as well as an uncompromising business legitimation and benchmark for the purposes of diversity management. The alignment of business and human purposes is a very familiar rhetorical move featuring heavily in the age of ‘unitary

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organisations’ aiming to establish a positive causal link between managerial intervention, business prosperity and the welfare of all employees. Even if it seems just a detail, this kind of statement belongs to the tendency mentioned by Roberts (2001) of the inherent direction of managerial ideology to sustain the possibility of a world in which all social contradictions have been suppressed. This kind of discourse has additional properties: it allows management to expand its reach beyond the simple implementation of anti-discrimination measures to a more active engagement with ‘individual uniqueness’. Diversity now extends to engage with the subject as both a social and an individual being. Diversity no longer confines management action to the particular categorisation of equal opportunities; it now aims to fill a much wider rhetorical space than equal opportunities could ever hope to. It allows management to reach intimate elements of personal experience and use them to reconfigure connections between employees and organisations. Interesting examples include the relationship made more and more between diversity and change: people are told that embracing diversity will enable the individual to embrace organisational change, too (see Siemens Corporation 2003). Equally important is the link made (unsurprisingly) between diversity, strategy and competitive advantage (see Fannie Mae 2003). Yet all these interventions and recontextualisations continue to draw their legitimation mainly from the emancipation movement by focusing on the so-called ‘minority groups’ established on the basis of gender, race, religion or ethnic background. This is only apparently paradoxical; it is, rather, a defence for a weak yet very aggressive managerial argument. Kandola and Fullerton synthesise these tendencies in their work. They specify that diversity management is more sophisticated than equal opportunities by contrasting the two as extremes of ideological continua. They use a convenient rhetorical tactic: a table that pitches one against the other as negative and positive poles of action. Diversity management has a ‘qualitative focus’, it ‘assumes pluralism’, it is ‘proactive’, it embraces ‘all differences’; equal opportunities occupies the opposite positions, with terminology that paints a negative, defensive stance: ‘quantitative’, ‘reactive’, etc. (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:13). These elements are unsurprising; they have featured in the rise and legitimation of other management models such as TQM, culture management or the learning organisation. But their predictability only proves the repeatable and established nature of mainstream managerial rhetoric. In its constitution as a legitimate basis for intervention, literature such as Kandola and Fullerton’s is actively producing new horizons for management by using diversity as a platform. For example, they argue that ‘managing diversity concentrates on movement within the organisation, the culture of the organisation, and the meeting of business objectives’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:9–10). Gradually, in rather few pages, the whole of the organisation is reconfigured as a space for intervention in the name of diversity management, and the latter is linked strongly to already established arguments and management objects such as culture, business needs, strategy, missions and visions, movement and change, communications. Indeed, Kandola and Fullerton do offer a technology for thinking about the social and rhetorical space of diversity management in which interventions are necessary. They propose an eight-part checklist for diversity management under the heading: ‘A validated strategic model’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:70). Characterised as valid and strategic, the model is thus prescribed as a territory for concerted intervention:

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While the eight elements…are outlined as separate components,… the model itself should not be seen as sequential. Rather, we would expect to see one or more of the elements being actioned at any one time throughout the organisation. (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:70) The eight elements of the ‘strategy web’ are predictable: ‘organisational vision, top management commitment, auditing and assessment of needs, clarity of objectives, clear accountability, effective communication, coordination of activity, evaluation’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:71). Equally familiar is the spatial metaphor used to connect these concepts: the image of a spider’s web is created by uniting the eight elements with parallel threads. As always, a spider’s web carries with it the (cultural) impression of a forceful conceptual whole from which thought cannot escape, to which it is forced to surrender and make it its reference framework, and whose guardian is always watching and ready to pounce. In themselves, the eight elements revisit and recycle old managerial terrain for a new purpose. In detailing how each element ought to be implemented, it demonstrates that diversity management reproduces technologies already familiar from previous currents such as the control of organisational cultures, improving communications, enlarging participation, or generating empowerment. The apparent simplicity and pragmatism of this model is as deceiving as any in the similar vein. And last, but not least, just as important is the social context of the text: the volume is linked to CIPD, which is an accrediting body for HRM professionals.

Diversity as source of tension, problems, and conflict requiring normalisation and control What kind of managerial action does a model like Kandola and Fullerton’s suggest ought to take place in the name of diversity? A cursory glance reveals how usual techniques of normalisation (or homogenisation) are recycled and reused in the process of ‘taming’ difference, of re-aligning the unique within the homogenous (the setting of categories, of rules, and active programming through training). The ‘technical’ aspects of diversity management display the inherent tendency in management to treat complex, intractable, open aspects of human existence as sources of tension and pathology. This tendency is hidden on the rhetorical surface by a tone of visionary celebration of human growth and potential offered in the general textual material accompanying techniques of intervention. But, underneath, these techniques betray the frailty of managerial understanding—or misunderstanding—of diversity. These tools give away something essential about the real sense of what diversity means for management and organisations: namely, that diversity is in fact a disruption of order, a source of problems. They provide sequences of training programmes and managerial interventions whose underlying aim is to re-normalise the workforce under a new ideological banner: ‘everybody is diverse, or unique—just like everybody else!’ Diversity management is actually an oxymoron: it aims to normalise heterogeneity.

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The assimilation of diversity into the sphere of organisational normality is based on a series of technologies of subjectivity that have been used in association with all the other managerial ‘discoveries’ of subjectivity over the last 20 years. The techniques associated with enlarging participation, empowerment, culture, teamwork, project or knowledge management, are re-inserted as part of diversity management. They represent management’s ‘basic instinct’: to continuously impose normality using (fashionable) images which claim the generosity of management discourses. But how can diversity be reconciled with normality? How can the irreducibly heterogeneous be homogenised? The very idea seems fatally flawed. A recent management textbook offers a candid glimpse of how this logical problem is not perceived by those who present the diversity management agenda: ‘Workforce diversity means that organisations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. But the term encompasses anyone who varies from the so-called norm (Robbins 2003:15, emphasis added). Sentences like this betray the defensive managerial nature of diversity management in action: its purpose is to actively maintain the ‘normality’ of production systems against the threat of increased heterogeneity. But the question is, who does not vary from the norm? How can ‘unique individual potential’ be celebrated if it is at the same time seen as a source of deviancy, a potential threat to normality? This paradoxical position does not seem to deter anybody, however, in the pursuit of a managerial solution to the so-called emergence of diversity. One possible way to understand this is to examine the kinds of calculative technologies prescribed as solutions to the problems raised by diversity in organisations. Kandola and Fullerton (2001) accompany each element in their model with checklists of actions and techniques for implementing diversity management criteria. These techniques are, in essence, modalities of stabilising diversity through specification, categorisation and rationalisation. Each technique requires a visible statement of intention on behalf of management (how it sees the solution to any potential problem generated by diversity) and a procedure of resolving it (from assessment of organisational needs, to allocation of resources, on to procedures of intervention and evaluation of results). Developing a schema for managerial action implies fixing the phenomenon in some controllable way through (a) certain modes of categorisation, crystallisation and rationalisation; and (b) evaluative techniques which specify the relationship between certain ‘real’ situations and an ideal state of normality. The elements of the model spell out some of these aspects of diversity management. The appropriation of categories such as race, gender, disability or ethnicity offer the limiting devices which create the territory in which diversity management applies. They are convenient for management (despite the confrontational debate through which they were appropriated). They make visible, they individualise an otherwise intractable dimension of human existence. Identity (and difference, of course) is defined along the most visible contours of the person: skin colour, biological sex or sexual preference, other medical—biological determinations (in the case of disabilities of all kinds—in which the mind is equally biologically defined). Difference becomes a matter of evaluating the ‘distance’ between any person and the (ideal) white, male, Anglo-Saxon measure of ‘normality’ or ‘majority’. Acknowledging someone’s ‘difference’ becomes a matter of reemphasising their condition as non-‘ideal’ and reiterating the prejudged evaluation of their ‘needs’. The language of ‘needs’ specific to each category of ‘other’ re-emerges as a typical move through which management can

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assert its active role as ‘needs definer/fulfiller’. Equally, the subject becomes the passive recipient of ‘fillings’. The causal mechanism which links these categories is articulated in the well-rehearsed language of ‘mutual benefits’ which attributes a direct link between business objectives and the freedom to express one’s specific ‘identity’ (as spelled out in the menu of categories available in the managerial vocabulary of ‘diversity’). Kandola and Fullerton offer an entire chapter, ‘The Benefits Mosaic’, focused precisely on this topic (2001:32– 53). In other words, management can legitimately pursue the aim to ‘guide organisations in their quest to “fully capitalise on the diversity of [their] workforce”’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:69). The idea that full capitalisation, full use of resources, was impaired by a lack of recognition of differences becomes the platform for a more profound message: that bringing to the surface the issues of discrimination will allow managers to take control of tense situations and ‘cure’ them in some systematic way. The categories of diversity management freeze and fix the elementary, lived experience of self and other through a menu of types of people (similar to psychometric typologies) with which a set of specific needs and possible actions is associated. This rationalisation is the usual mode through which management creates new normalised positions that subjects must occupy if they are to be considered and assisted. Unless subjects express their uniqueness within organised settings from the allotted category, they cannot be heard. It becomes easy to see that diversity management achieves its contrary effect: it creates new homogenising categorial frameworks and forces subjects to relinquish yet again their own positions and assume ways of being defined managerially. These managed categories of diversity form types and typologies in a similar way with personality types resulting from psychometrics. They are the repertoire through which organisational members are guided to identify and specify their positions as a ‘diverse workforce’. Corresponding to these rationalisations and classifications of otherness are technologies of diagnosis and therapy which will establish the desired states of a healthy system in which diversity is managed without tensions. Kandola and Fullerton offer recipes which span the entire and well-known range of such techniques. In the first instance there must be auditing of ‘culture, attitudes, systems and procedures’ (2001:70), and ‘assessment of needs’ in the name of ‘a managing diversity health check on the organisation’ (2001:77). The auditing should cover all aspects of HRM systems, but, perhaps more importantly, it should make visible people’s attitudes, profiles, etc. (2001:77–78). This creates a new demand that the person should open up for management purposes through opinion surveys, questionnaires, interviews and so on. This anatomy of the workforce is conducted at the personal level. Auditing and assessment are also established as legitimately continuous, they must be ‘ongoing’ and not confined to ‘a discrete first stage’. Thus subjectivity is made once more the target of monitoring and surveillance. Auditing as a diagnostic procedure is followed by therapeutic techniques which involve the creation and maintenance of new direction and modes of action to which forms of accountability are associated. Thus, diversity management is immersed again in the language of ‘clear objectives’, ‘clear accountability’, ‘effective communication’, ‘coordination of activity’ and ‘evaluation’ (Kandola and Fullerton 2001:79–87). More specifically, each of these desirable features

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of managerial intervention is couched in terms of vision, missions, guidelines, norms, training for ‘awareness’ and ‘skills’, feedback loops and so on. This language becomes practice in another sense, too: it becomes the basis of various trainings in which the person is to be made aware of the existence of ‘others’ whose profiles are spelled out and whose needs have to be respected. A new ordering of self with reference to its newly defined others is required of each organisational member. This is explicitly individualised around the category of ‘competence’. Chapter 7 of Kandola and Fullerton’s work is entitled ‘A Diversity Competence: the Role of the Individual’ (2001:96 ff.). The material is directed at managers who ought to improve their ‘diversity competence’. Their task is to work on themselves in ways that are specified in the text and that involve the entire sphere of ethical human interrelatedness. On several pages, Kandola and Fullerton list things that managers can do in this direction (2001:106–109). They involve self-examination, the personal examination of the other’s ‘ways’ (the idea is that managers ought to be ‘curious, getting to know their staff), the attempt to re-align oneself with the other by ‘seeing things from other people’s perspective’, ‘being honest with staff, self-challenging and accepting, and so on (ibid.). These techniques of the self are not new, and they are just as invasive and problematic in this case as they are in other ‘performative’ situations. But perhaps what is central is that the material speaks to managers and for managers. It aims to raise their awareness that minorities exist, such as women, ethnic ‘strangers’, etc., almost as if they were disturbing newcomers, additions to the world of work. Indeed, this is a striking realisation: diversity management places itself, in a significant part of its dedicated literature, precisely in this approach—as a discovery of a new phenomenon, as if women, Africans, Asians, disabled people, gays and lesbians only recently entered the workplace. Kandola and Fullerton speak for and about the difficulties of the white, dominant male, who almost owns the workplace and is now facing a new challenge. Perhaps this is the crucial feature of their text and of diversity management writ large, from which any interpretation of its value and place should begin. Different is, in this view, the person who is other than the white male (probably also Anglo-Saxon, straight, physically able, etc.) in a position of power. This defines the vectors of diversity management as a body of ideas and practices about ordering work organisations. This reaction discloses a tendency which is neither new, nor surprising: that heterogeneity, whilst celebrated on the cover of the glossy brochures of diversity programmes, can be dangerous and problematic, a ‘raw force’, a feature of humanity which has to be tamed in the name of keeping production systems functioning smoothly. It is as if human diversity (the simple, given feature of existence that we are selves in the world, understanding our being as different from others and yet as similar too) has just struck managerial ideologues as a phenomenon. Seen in this way, diversity management shows a very problematic face despite the best intentions of its promoters. Perhaps this paradoxically normalising and homogenising instinct of diversity management (so self-undermining in essence) is just another incarnation of a conceptual tendency which has characterised all the subjectoriented managerial ideologies of the 1980s and 1990s: that a free, liberated, emancipated subject is desirable ideologically, but it is to be treated managerially as a source of tension, conflict and problems. And behind this position lies perhaps one of the most important features of managerialist thought: that inherent, creative, life-giving tensions driving human systems of activity (in terms of

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cultures, collaborations, innovation, knowledge creation, learning, development, etc.) are not desirable, that they are a pathological manifestation of loss of harmony in social systems, or potential symptoms of dysfunctional social organisms. If natural tension in human systems is seen as a source of problems and conflicts, it becomes a convenient general site for management action. Management finds its locus precisely around this set of tensions or problems, and its aim is to eliminate them (to restore ‘normality’ to every problemsituation, to ‘stabilise’ the system, to stop its natural dynamic and replace it with an artificial flow, with an artificial rhythm, to reaffirm the authority of the norm, and to re-align the deviants). Perhaps most illustrative in this sense is Kandola and Fullerton’s final move: their penultimate chapter (2001:144–166) presents ‘A vision for the diversity-oriented organisation’. The manner of this presentation is in itself interesting. It employs a wellworn form, an acronym, which synthesises the space for managerial action in the name of a diversity-orientation. ‘MOSAIC’ stands for ‘Mission and values; Objective and fair processes; Skilled workforce: aware and fair; Active flexibility; Individual focus; Culture that empowers’ (2001:147). This representation of diversity management is very powerful despite the apparently ‘light’ touch of playfulness in style. As with any acronym, it is not light in rhetorical intent. It ‘locks’ the audience into a conceptual space which cannot be criticised or analysed without ruining the rhyme and reason of the model. Moreover, precisely because of its playfulness, it is a modality of infantilising the audience and thus depriving it of the peer position required for critique. MOSAIC functions like this too. It establishes and orders the territory for diversity management in a way which involves organisations and individuals in an almost inescapable ethical embrace, governed by managers and revolving around tolerance, recognition and, eventually, total harmony derived from the expert elimination of tensions. That management ideologies and technologies are predicated upon a total abhorrence of tension is not new. It may be argued that, in fact, all mainstream management theory and action features a basic instinctive reaction against tension. In the case of diversity, too, this reaction brings a fundamental incompatibility to the fore: diversity implies the unconditional recognition of heterogeneity, it implies tension as its predicate; it can only exist as a manifestation of tension as the source of existence rather than problems, as the very manifestation of existence’s nature. If tension is undesirable, then so is diversity.

An existential commentary on diversity What can a philosophical commentary offer in contrast to the conception of difference underlying diversity management? In summary, the lines of argument that can be used from the position of existential phenomenology can be seen as follows. First, the sense of being a self in the world with others is a’given’. It is a sense-giving dimension of humans’ self-understanding, and it is not a ‘problem’ in search of social ‘cure’. Second, the sense of a difference between self and other is a dynamic and, more precisely, a temporal phenomenon. Thus, it cannot be ‘stabilised’ in formal, rational categories, nor can anyone be trained into being a self in relation to others in the world; humans are existentially competent from birth according to existential phe-nomenologists such as Heidegger and Lévinas. Third, the feeling of difference discussed here is an open and

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aporetic elementary experience for every person in equal measure. Boundaries between one’s self and other selves are open; we often recognise their fluidity by realising how feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity with actual people we live with change in time. We are never able to specify in any final form what makes us unique but, at the same time, like any other human being—although we know that this is the case all the time. Yet, as finite beings, humans continuously aware of their unique existential horizons and always aware of other existential beings and their horizons. The given, dynamic, temporal, open and aporetic character of the experience of difference between self and other makes us assert that this phenomenon is mysterious rather than problematic. Therefore, we interpret its managerial problematisation as a violation of a territory of experience which cannot become the substance of anybody’s expertise. This part of the chapter offers a brief contrast between a certain version of existential philosophy and diversity management’s vocabulary of human difference. The main move is to explore ‘diversity’ using a radically different unit of analysis: that of the human as an existential ‘entity’. It aims to assist reflection about the experience of human difference by using some concepts from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), and from Lévinasian ethics. Heidegger allows us to reflect on the irreducible nature of the self s uniqueness but also of its irreducible boundedness with the ‘world’; Lévinas allows us to radicalise our conception of the Other as counterpoint to the experience of self.

Heidegger’s existentialia and the sense of being a self as Dasein Heidegger’s Being and Time can be read (sometimes) in the key of philosophical anthropology. It is a phenomenological analytic of everyday, elementary human existence as ‘Being-there’ (Dasein) and ‘Being-in-the-world’. In this chapter, we make almost mechanical use of this ‘anthropology’. (This would most certainly upset Heidegger himself, who cautioned against mechanistic appropriations of his philosophy.) On the other hand, this reading is perhaps justifiable inasmuch as it critiques a language of technological concepts (used by diversity management) through a language of ontological analysis—which was a move favoured by Heidegger in his attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional rationalism. The key category for Heidegger is that of ‘Da-sein’, used instead of the traditional ‘man’. By placing human existence in a specific ‘there’ of its being, Heidegger offers a fundamental initial ground for understanding uniqueness: to put it simplistically, each human’s ‘there’ is unique. The other important qualification of the human from Heidegger’s point of view is that Dasein is not ‘there’ in a space of other natural objects, but is in an existential—temporal domain of being. Dasein is in a temporal ‘thereness’ which Heidegger qualifies as our temporal stretching between birth and death. It becomes almost intuitive to realise that, if we see the human as ‘Dasein’ placed in the specific temporal horizon marked by its birth and death, then the idea of uniqueness becomes much clearer. The primacy afforded by Heidegger to time as foundational to Dasein’s existence is related to man’s ontological awareness of his own finitude. As an existential creature, Dasein lives in time, but also with time at the centre of its concerns (continuously felt as

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the horizon of personal finitude). Heidegger allows us to understand uniqueness further by specifying that birth, death and existence are not conceivable as abstractions, even when we philosophise about them. Rather, they always belong to concrete Daseins, they are categories which are only comprehensible as defining the ‘therenesses’ of actual people. No life or death is abstract, none is repeatable, each is unique. One thing that we can establish from a cursory reading of Heidegger’s existence philosophy is that human beings are irreducibly unique. But human beings share this condition as common ground. Each of us lives with the certainty, mystery and solitude of our temporal passing, culminating in the incommunicability of death. We have these things in common but our experience of them is only conceivable as unique to each of us: nobody’s birth and death is reducible to a common core shared with others; there is no ‘solid’ essence that we might exchange or rely upon. This leads Heidegger to suggest that ‘the Self cannot be conceived either as substance [in Aristotle’s sense] or as subject [in Descartes’ sense] but is grounded in existence’ (Heidegger 1962:381, our additions). Rather, for Heidegger, Dasein’s main existential ‘structure’ is care (Heidegger 1962, 1992:293–304). ‘Care is the term for the being of Dasein pure and simple’ (Heidegger 1992:294). The word ‘care’ is useful to indicate that in our everyday existence we grasp that our Dasein’s being is always at stake against the horizon of finitude. That is why everyday life is care for self-in-existence. Heidegger makes his most radical move at this particular juncture: Dasein’s care is temporal: ‘there is a puzzling character which is peculiar to care and, as we shall see, is nothing other than time (Heidegger 1992:295). But to leave things at this level of elaboration would mean that being human is a suspended condition, floating in worldlessness. Most certainly this was not Heidegger’s intention. Quite to the contrary, his philosophy is one which not only places the human firmly as part of the world, but he makes Dasein a ‘Being-in-the-world’ without any possibility of separation from it. By being in the world, Dasein exists between its existential, irreducibly unique ‘there’ and the fact that it is always also part of the world, thrown in it and, equally existentially, dispersed in the world through its relationships with others. Dasein is inescapably in-theworld, in an open but finite horizon of time, dispersed between work, rituals, institutions, organisations, values or roles in which it seeks support and, at the same time, is ‘alienated’, loses’ itself in the horizon of social groups. To be with others is not secondary to Dasein, it is not optional. Dasein’s existence is characterised by the elementary and uninterrupted co-presence of ‘self and ‘other’ in everyday experience. Moreover, otherness belongs to both the spatial and temporal dimensions of existence. Existentially, experiences of difference are not stable enough to lend themselves to explanation in structural terms because any partial, regional unit of analysis is dissolved in the complexity of phenomena themselves. That is why the categories of diversity management are manifestations of an impoverished understanding of difference and their rationalisation as management models and technologies becomes an obstacle for the realisation of what makes each person unique. The relationship between self and other in time and in the world shows, from an existential perspective, that the two ‘parties’ do not present themselves as clear separations but that they are rather more fluid in time. The same person can seem perfectly familiar and comprehensible today, yet tomorrow may bring misunderstandings and possible incompatibilities, and so on (perhaps, that is why love and hate are such dynamic phenomena).

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In Heidegger’s philosophy, there are numerous categories which describe the multiple possible ways of Dasein’s being in the world with others. Important for our purpose, however, are two more central aspects. The first is Heidegger’s insistence that, in its care for being, Dasein is fundamentally a hermeneutic creature, one which seeks to understand the meaning of its path through the world. It seeks to understand the three fundamental terms of its condition: world, finitude and individuation. The Dasein has, in Novalis’ terms, ‘an urge to be at home everywhere’, as the inescapable imperative of the human creature to try to overcome the limits of its own uniqueness, which at once individuates it and at the same time renders it irreducibly solitary in the world. The second aspect is that, in trying to understand, we seek to reflect on the world and to be reflected meaningfully by it. The main medium of reflection is, for Heidegger, language. Being in language is the way Heidegger sees Dasein in the world. In language, however, Dasein shares some of the foundation of its being with others. Language is common in some way to all, in it we are both ourselves (unique speakers), but also like others (users of this or that language). In understanding the world, we converse and live in a dynamic relationship with others and ourselves. Through meaning and language, throughout time, from dawn until dusk and on through the dream-world of the night, the ‘self is permanently in relationships with ‘others’: other people, other meanings, other practices, other institutions, objects or landscapes. Through all that, however, it retains a sense of its own unity. But this unity is variable too: as a self, the human interprets its existence and world, it learns’, ‘develops’, ‘acts’, ‘has agency’; it changes its self and the world around it. This is the horizon of everyday practices in the ‘real world’ of management and organisations. It is at this fundamental level that the ‘object’ of diversity management is situated. Seen in existential terms, to fix diversity in order to manage it is an impossibility, a direct violation of difference as an attribute of personal existence. Perhaps diversity management is a final and fundamental managerial assault on what makes up the sociality of organisations. In other words, if the experience of self and other, that simple yet foundational negotiation of meaning in everyday life, is expropriated by management technologies, then it is, arguably, a complete disabling of the ‘Da’ of Dasein, an invasion of the ‘place’ of being oneself with the ultimate result of rendering the self void of its being, of its capacity to have a uniqueness of any sort, a deprivation of the mere possibility of thinking about ‘freedom’. Moreover, in the MOSAIC model, for instance, diversity management is also a denial of a space where uniqueness could manifest itself. Taken to its (perhaps extreme) logical conclusion, diversity management might be interpreted from a Heideggerian perspective as an ultimate deployment of managerial technologies to deprive the Being-there of a ‘there’ and the Being-in-the-world of a ‘world’ (an historical space of existence). From the existential perspective very briefly explored here, it seems that even a cursory philosophical examination of the question of human difference shows it to be elementary to human life. It is a ‘given’ of human experience, not a ‘problem’; it is mysterious, but not pathological. To be ‘me’ is hardly conceivable without ‘you’, but the boundaries are alive, dynamic, up to you and me, unmanageable, and not in need of management inasmuch as life itself needs no management. From Heidegger’s perspective, diversity management might well seem to be management’s ultimate arrogance.

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Lévinas and the radicalisation of the quest for the Other When the self encounters the Other, the Other disrupts the self-evidentness of consciousness. The Cartesian self-certain self is put into question, immediately and absolutely. The encounter with the Other is immediately ethical. Ethics is prior to epistemology and ontology—it is, so Lévinas claims, first philosophy. For Lévinas (1991, 1996a, d), the ‘otherness’ of the Other is prior to any and all epistemic categories that consciousness may wish to evoke in trying to ‘make sense’ of the face of the other before me, here and now. For Lévinas, ethics is not a cognitive content, the outcome of some practical or moral reasoning process as proposed, for example, by Kant. Caputo (1993, 2000), following Lévinas, argues that moral reasoning comes too late—like a crowd after an accident arguing about what went wrong, who is to blame, what ought to have been done—so too with ethical theorists/theory. Rather, in the facticity of everyday life moral claims jump at us, as if from nowhere. The temporality and ‘location’ of the ethical claim is of a different kind to the temporality and ‘location’ of moral reasoning—it has an urgency that closes down all room for manoeuvre. The temporality and location of the ethical claim is in my Befindlichkeit—in my ‘finding myself already busy in the world of everyday going about’. Ethics happens when it happens. When I look up, take notice, I am already ‘in’ it—its captive, its hostage. How will I respond here and now, to this face before me? For Lévinas, ethics happens, or not, when the self-certain ego becomes disturbed, shaken, questioned, by the proximity, before the I, of the absolute Other, the absolute singular, the Infinite; the wholly—and holy—Other that takes me by surprise, overturns and overflows my categories, themes and concepts. The Other shatters their walls, makes their evident sense explode into non-sense. For Lévinas, the claim of conventional ethics (Ethics with a big ‘E’, as Caputo calls it) that we can know, the right thing to do, is to claim that the absolute singularity of the Other can become absorbed into, domesticated by, the categories of my consciousness. Once the Other, this singular face before me, has become an instance in my categories or themes, it can no longer disturb the selfevidentness of those categories. Nothing is more self-evident than my categories, and likewise with the singular now absorbed as an instance of them. As Jew, nigger, rich, poor, homeless, rapist, criminal, capitalist, idealist, realist (and every other category we care to name), the singular disturbing face disappears in the economy of the category. In the category, we can reason about rights, obligations, laws and principles, and yet ethics may never happen—actual faces are made redundant, are humiliated, scorned as they circulate in the economy of our categories. They fall through the cracks of our debates, arguments and counter-arguments, and yet we feel justified—we have our reasons; it was the right thing to do after all. To murder a category is easy, as history has shown us. In the categories of religion, nationalism and ethnicity are buried the lives of millions of others. This desire to call forth, to render present, to the gaze of consciousness, what ‘is’, has always been at the heart of Western thought. The imperative of Western consciousness, of Philosophy with a big ‘P’, is to draw the Other, the strange, always at the edges, into the light of the present—to expand the horizon of consciousness is its calling. In the expanding horizon of consciousness, the strange, the Other, is a ‘not-yet’, waiting to be

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domesticated by the revealing gaze of intentionality. Yet, the singular has always disturbed the systems of philosophy. As Caputo (1993:73) argues: The individual, according to the most classical axiomatic, is ineffable (individuum inefabile est). That is to announce with admirable rigor a breach in the surface of philosophy. It formulates a principle for what falls outside principles, a covering law for what law cannot cover, for a kind of out-law. It announces with all desirable clarity that the individual is both necessary and impossible…. For to understand metaphysics, which takes itself to be the science of what is real, one must understand that the only thing that is real, the individual—sola individua existunt—is the one thing of which it cannot speak. However, by saying that the singular is ‘ineffable’, we have already said too much. We have already brought it into our system of thought. We now have a location for it. It now no longer disturbs us, or surprises us. In some small but significant way, we have already domesticated it. This is the impossibility we face, this very face, here now, before me. It is wholly Other, in a way that never allows me to settle down into my system of thought. If this is so, how can the Other disturb the I without becoming the content of consciousness? Are we simply drifting aimlessly in the sea of consciousness, prisoner of our own categories, doomed never to encounter the Other as Other? If this is so, then we are indeed without hope. Then we are adrift in the endless consumptive force of dialectical consciousness; the world in our image, according to our categories—the other as a problem to be solved. No, Lévinas argues; we can encounter the other. But this is an encounter of wholly other kind—indeed it is holy. It is a profound rapture—nothing less than a visitation. Lévinas uses the example of the familiar event of a doorbell ringing to disturb my work, my thoughts, but when I open the door, there is nobody there. Was there nobody there? Did I imagine it? I have no memory, I cannot recall. The absolutely other—the infinity—does not move in the temporal horizon of being. Its presence ‘does not simply lead to the past but is the very passing toward a past more remote than any past and any future which still are set in my [ego] time…’ (Lévinas 1996b: 63). Just when I settle back into my thoughts, the doorbell rings again, and again, and again, but there is never some body there. The subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of re-presentation. The term obsession designates this relation that is irreducible to consciousness: ‘Obsession traverses consciousness contrariwise, inscribing itself there as something foreign, as disequilibrium, as delirium, undoing thematisation, eluding principle, origin, and will, all of which are affirmed in every gleam of consciousness’ (Lévinas 1996d: 80–81). It is this relationship of incessantly there but never present that Lévinas calls ‘proximity’, the relationship with the absolute stranger: Anarchically, proximity is a relationship with a singularity, without the mediation of any principle or ideality. It is the summoning of myself by the other (autrui), it is a responsibility toward those whom we do not even know. The relation of proximity does not amount to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple ‘representation’ of the neighbour. It is already a summons of extreme exigency, an obligation

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which is anachronistically prior to every engagement. An anteriority that is older than the a priori. (Lévinas 1996d:81) This proximity, this very nearness that is never there and which escapes my themes yet always disturbs me, prevents me from settling down in my thoughts, is signified in the face of the other. The face of the other is not merely the empirical face, yet the empirical face does serve as a signifier that signifies the always already ineffable of the singular confronting me. It is the placeholder that never settles down in any ‘place’ yet ceaselessly reminds me that I have already taken its ‘place in the sun’. The proximity of the other is the face’s meaning’, writes Lévinas (1996d: 82). As a face, the other becomes my neighbour—the one closest to me that demands my attention. Her face calls me, solicits me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility. The moment I catch a glimpse of her face, I become questioned—am I not occupying her place in the sun? Her face keeps me hostage in its total uncoveredness and nakedness, in the defencelessness of her eyes, the straightforwardness and absolute frankness of her gaze. Her face resists me. Not as a power that confronts me, but as a measure that puts me into question, immediately and absolutely. The indictment of the ego is ‘produced when I incline myself not before the facts, but before the other. In her face the other appears to me not as an obstacle, nor as a menace I evaluate, but as what measures me. For me to feel myself unjust I must measure myself against infinity’ (Lévinas 1996c:58). I stand accused, always already accused—without having done anything, I have always been accused. I must respond. Not out of my choosing, but prior to my freedom, prior to my choosing. All I can say is I—I as in ‘I am guilty’, ‘I am the murderer’ and ‘I am responsible’. I am for the other. This taking up of my responsibility Lévinas calls ‘substitution’. However, this ‘taking up’ is not an act; rather, it is an absolute passivity. In resolving not to be, ‘subjectivity undoes essence by substituting itself for the other’. I become a subject in the fullest sense of the word. My uniqueness, my autonomy, is the fact that no one can answer for me. Morality is not a moral choice by a free self-certain ego. It is, rather, in the encounter with the infinitely other that I can become questioned, I recall my guilt, and accept (by absolute passivity) my responsibility, be subject for the other—not an I-am but an I-am-for-the-other. My subjectivity always already refers to the Other as its source, its moral force. As Cohen (1986:5) argues: Moral force cannot be reduced to cognitive cogency, to acts of consciousness or will. One can always refuse its claim…and the capacity to rationalise such refusal is certainly without limit. Ethical necessity lies in a different sort of refusal, a refusal of concepts. It lies in the prethematic demands that are necessarily lost in the elaboration of themes. Ethical necessity lies in the social obligation prior to thematic thought, in the disturbance suffered by thematic thought…. This is not because ethics makes some truths better and others worse, but because it disrupts the entire project of knowing with a higher call, a more severe ‘condition’: responsibility.

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This is the mystery of the Other. The Other is Other only in its disturbing presence, its questioning of the self-evidentness of the I. In the management of diversity, we violate it but domesticate it through categories of gender, ethnicity, culture and the like. In diversity management, we remain in the economy of the category. In this economy our attempts to be just and fair will merely become resources in a more subtle and brutal politics—a politics in which the ‘otherness’ of the other becomes either silenced or set up as an ‘irrelevant’ contingency.

Concluding thoughts As closing thoughts, we develop two main ideas. First, the complexity of the issues involved in any reflection upon Otherness cannot be reduced to some mechanical essence of ‘diversity’; there can be no meaningful ‘model’ of diversity. If this is accepted, then the attempt to frame diversity as a social, organisational, ethical, political, economic or cultural ‘problem’ is fundamentally flawed. This stems from managerialism’s instinct to render its objects controllable. In this case, we find otherness rendered manageable as diversity which, in turn, can be inserted into already established vocabularies and practices of order. Attempting to re-engage with the question of Otherness through Heideggerian and Lévinasian ideas, we aimed to show the value of philosophical reflection. If the Other does not have a grammar that can be reduced to fixed, certain categories, then what is it? What Heidegger’s and Lévinas’s approaches have in common is a message of profound consequence: the relationship between self and other can be seen both for everyday existence and for philosophy as a central mystery (alongside others such as time, language, death, truth, goodness, beauty, divinity, etc.). Hence, to be irreducibly different from ‘others’ is not a matter of any simple act of definition, but it is not an ‘ontological disease’ of the species either. Perhaps otherness cannot be grasped conceptually in any other terms than as a fundamental mystery. Philosophy seems to lend itself to this act of reflection. When we are seeking an engagement with fundamental aspects of experience which refuse to become objects of science, we comprehend in that very realisation that their nature is of ‘something ultimate and extreme, [that] it constantly remains in the perilous neighbourhood of supreme uncertainty’ (Heidegger 1995:19). Hence, we argue that appealing to managerial rationalism cannot overcome the depth of silence required sometimes in order to begin thinking about otherness, diversity or difference. Seen in this light, perhaps the literature on diversity management has its origins elsewhere than in the honest effort to grasp it as a dimension of human practices; maybe it is only just another fad of managerialism in its epochal unfolding. On the contrary, we propose that Otherness is encountered by the self somehow before it can reach categories which entail the possibility of ‘managing’ it. The categorial treat-ment of the Other offered by mainstream managerial literature implies its silencing. Considered in this fashion, it is perhaps legitimate to interpret ‘diversity management’ as another manifestation of the ‘self-concealment of being’ in the managerial— technological age. It is perhaps, then, equally legitimate to echo Heidegger and Lévinas once more and claim that, in order for management reflection to engage with the

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questions of otherness, it must first ‘destroy’ (in Heidegger’s terms) literature on diversity management itself. In our turn, we argue for a radicalisation of the notion of Other as that which questions the Self, thus silencing it in turn for a moment which lies beyond the grasp of categorial metaphysics, but which also offers us the continuous ‘disturbance’ out of which the ‘self arises anew.

Note 1 A paraphrase on Gabriel Marcel’s title ‘Self-Realisation: A Mystery Not A Problem’ (published in Lachs 1981).

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5 Living a story and storying a life A narrative understanding of the distributed self David Sims

Preamble I have been working on a story for a long time now. The title is ‘David Sims’, and it is the story of my life, as I see it. It is going quite slowly because I keep rewriting the earlier chapters. I also keep adjusting my idea of what themes I am likely to pick up in the later chapters—the ones that I have not written or lived yet. Also, I am frankly in no hurry to get to the end of it. If I were to write down the story so far, it would become an autobiography. That is a less fluid concept, for two reasons. First, it is focused on the past. I tell stories about my past, but I am particularly interested in stories about the past that have something to say about my future. I expect to produce a degree of continuity and a degree of surprise in my future development of my story. Second, an autobiography’s readership expect a more singular and unitary self than they would find in the subject/author of my story. Every now and then I get stuck in some part of my story. At these times I have no strong ideas about what I want to see developing in the next chapter. Worse still, I may simply get bored with the story. The notion that we can get bored with our own story is much more frightening than losing the plot. Under these circumstances we may want to spice up the plot, to make something exciting happen, to engage in relatively melodramatic narrative devices, in order to gain some attention for our stories, and to be able to confirm for ourselves and anyone else that we think is listening that our life stories are interesting and worthwhile. This is the territory of the mid-life crisis. It is not one story. Parts of the story are to do with life in organizations. But the distributed self knows no organizational boundaries, and very few of our stories are either totally inside or totally outside our organizations. There are several different versions, not fully consistent, but, together, giving coherence (Linde 1993). And the subject/author of the story is not bounded by my skin. The self is more distributed than that. I hope that people talk about me in my absence. I hope that you will think about this chapter, and perhaps discuss it with others; that is part of my story for myself. I spend time and energy on distributing myself, on trying to write myself into others’ stories. I have children, and can easily become more interested in their stories than my own—except that it is not either/or. Their stories are in some way related to my own; my self is distributed. Like the builders of mediaeval cathedrals, we imagine our stories going on beyond our lifetimes. This might be over-optimistic for most of us, but the distributed selves of those cathedral builders are still visible in European cities.

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Introduction This chapter is about the way in which people act as authors of their own lives, and the way that their lives act to author them. This happens in three time frames, conceptually if not experientially separate. Retrospectively, people tell stories about their past in which they emplot themselves as the people they would like to be taken to be. Currently, they live out roles according to the places they want to take in their own and others’ stories. Prospectively, they are engaged in preparing and writing the next section of the personal story which is their life. I have been playing with this idea of the person as personal storyteller for some time. Indeed, it has become part of my own personal story; it is one of the accounts which I use to answer the question of colleagues, ‘What are you working on?’, which is academicspeak for, ‘Are you still alive or have you given up?’, or alternatively, Is there any story worth telling about you now?’ We expect each other to be able to produce a story about who we are, where we are developing and who we are becoming. We expect the same from ourselves. As Bruner puts it: Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who and what we are, what’s happened, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. (Bruner 2002) A story is not imagined and then subsequently told; like other actions (Weick 1984), it is imagined during narration: Stories thus reflect their sources and circumstances, but they also take shape through their active narration. (Holstein and Gubrium 2000:106) If I wish to be an object of any interest to anyone, including myself, I need to have my story in reasonably good order. I cannot expect to be remembered or recognized otherwise. This is because we are homo narrans narratur (Christie and Orton 1988), both storytellers and the products of storytelling. If our story is too diffuse for anyone to want to tell stories about us, we have lost our identity. This is not exactly the same as losing our selves. Cohen’s distinction (1994) is particularly helpful on this: the individual [is] essentially a basket of selves which come to the surface at different social moments as appropriate. The basket, the container of these selves, is the individual’s identity. (1994:11) Our stories need to be well crafted and well told to hold the attention of ourselves and others; there is plenty of competition for attention, both from others wanting attention for their storied lives, and from all kinds of fiction. Our stories are not always blatantly about ourselves—that would present a more egotistical view of us than we might choose. If I tell a story about a work colleague to other colleagues, I know that they will take the

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story as telling them at least as much and probably more about me than it tells them about the supposed subject. The stories we tell about others are as much about us as about their alleged subjects; thus our own story is inseparable from the stories we tell, even if they are not acknowledged as part of our story of our selves. This is what is meant by the term ‘storied lives’ (Ochberg 1994). His argument is that: life stories are a way of fashioning identity, in both the private and the public senses of that word. (1994:114) Ochberg suggests that explicit telling of one’s own story is rare: Most of us tell our stories on rare occasions: in court, or in an employment interview, or perhaps on a first date—and these hardly add up to a means of identity formation. (1994:116) He then comes to the explanation of the concept of ‘storied lives’: individuals do not merely tell stories, after the fact, about their experiences; instead they live out their affairs in storied forms. (1994:116) This chapter is about living out our affairs in storied forms. It follows in the tradition brought into the organizational literature by Boje (1991) and Gabriel (1991). There have since been many contributions to the theorizing of storytelling in organizations (Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; Czarniawska 1997; Gabriel 2000) and to the methodology of narrative analysis (Boje 2001; Currie and Brown 2003; Czarniawska 1998; Josselson and Lieblich 1999; McKee 1998). It is a tradition that relates to sensemaking, but is not the same. As I have put it elsewhere: Our stories of our lives are sensemaking devices (Weick 1995), but our relationship with our stories is less under our control and less utilitarian on our part than the ‘sensemaking’ tag might suggest. There is always a tingle of uncertainty which gives spice to our storied lives, an aleatoric element. The stories that we believe in are not completely plastic. As well as developing stories to understand what is happening to us, we make things happen to us and perceive events in particular ways in order to give a satisfying, interesting or convincing development to the plot that we are living out. (Sims 2003) In this chapter I argue that I am, to a significant extent, the stories that I tell about myself, although quite a lot can be discerned about my identity from the stories that I tell about others too. I shall consider first the audiences for our stories—are they told for ourselves or for others—and I shall explain why I believe we need a concept of the ‘distributed self

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to understand who we tell stories for. I shall then go on to look at some of the characteristics of the stories in which we reveal our identities. What are the consequences for our view of them if they are or are not coherent? Do they need to be orderly? Or is it more important that they are interesting? And how does the notion of telling an ‘interesting’ story relate to the way that people story their lives? I shall also talk about the essentially unaware nature of much of our storying. I shall then go on to look at some of the risks that are involved in storying our lives, at what threatens the distributed self. There is the risk that we may develop a plot in which our character suffers a defeat. There is the risk that our performance of our story may meet with disbelief or disinterest on the part of our audience. And there is a risk that the argument underlying our story may be disproved. Finally, there is a risk of losing the plot of our own stories, or alternatively simply getting bored with them.

Audiences for our self stories Self If the person is a personal storyteller, who is the audience for their stories? The first audience is the self. We tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. We conceive of a plot within which we locate ourselves, and play our part in acting out the plot. We rehearse stories in our imagination, and may be quite harsh critics. The version of the story originally rehearsed is very often rejected, leading us to change the story as we tell it to ourselves long before it is heard by any other audience. Indeed, it may never be heard by another audience; some of our internal storytelling is a process of self-making (Bruner 2001) which requires no external audience to have its effect. What is my evidence for suggesting that we develop and maintain identities by telling ourselves stories? Some of it is introspective; I engage in a process within myself which is best described as storytelling. At times I can see myself acting in ways which I can best understand by thinking about what story I was acting out at the time. I realize that I have accepted some characterization, and am living it out. I am engaged in a process which has me gripped and in which I am shaping, choosing words or gestures, keen to produce a narrative with the power to grasp and entertain. In short, I am doing all the things that I do when I am telling a story. The experience is very like the experience of storytelling. And all of this happens with no need for an audience. My evidence is not only introspective, however. I also know that others do this because their stories sometimes leak. I once shared a room with a relative who in his sleep kept saying, ‘So busy, so busy.’ A lot of his talk during waking hours also reinforced this image of wanting to be seen as being very busy, and I believe that what I was hearing when he was asleep was the internal sentence which generated busy stories (Ellis 1962). You can see people sitting up and preening themselves when they have said something very clever in a meeting, as they imagine the applause of their colleagues. You can see people thrusting out their chests, and making themselves look bigger, when they are in a part of their story where they may need to fight for their cause. Comedians make fun of this; for example, one of the British impressionist Rory Bremner’s impersonations of Tony Blair has Blair communicating with people through sentences which begin,

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‘Verily, verily, I say unto you…’. Here Bremner takes Blair’s frequent turn of phrase, ‘I say to you…’ and builds it up to suggest that Blair has a Messianic story of his own identity which is being revealed by the phrase. Much of the work of impressionists is founded on similar suggestions about what the words or mannerisms of public figures tell us about the personal stories those figures are living out. The self-story being enacted may also leak through the language being used. If someone says that they will ‘fight another department every inch of the way’, they are engaged in a quite different story from the one where they will ‘build bridges if at all possible’. Similarly, the hospital director who said that, if the surgeons working in her hospital did not come into line with her plans for scheduling the use of operating theatres, she would ‘chop their little fingers off (an especially violent image when used of a surgeon), she revealed something important about the kind of story she was living. Metaphors and stories are closely related here. We cannot build stories without metaphors, and we use metaphor as a shorthand to remind ourselves of the story that we are thinking of. So although language leads us into metaphor rather than into a story, it is usually not difficult to see the story in which someone is placing themselves by looking first at the metaphors used. For example, ‘falling in love’ is a metaphor which implies a particular, rather passive, view of how people come to be in love; it is a metaphor which encourages some kinds of stories at the expense of others, but it does not itself tell a story. Failing in love again’ is half way from a metaphor to a story because it tells us that it has happened before, though it leaves implicit to whom it has happened and with what consequences. John found that he was falling in love again, this time with Jane’ is a very brief story; it is what Gabriel (2000) would call a ‘proto-story’ because its plot is rudimentary and it has a beginning but no end. For Gabriel, a narrative is only a story if it has a sense of plot (Gabriel 2004) I also know that people tell themselves stories because others have also noted this. Kearney (2002:129) interestingly echoes Merleau-Ponty, saying: Every human existence is a life in search of a narrative. This is not simply because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion. It is also because each human life is always already an implicit story. Our very finitude constitutes us as beings who, to put it baldly, are born at the beginning and die at the end. We might of course dispute Kearney’s view of when the story ends; I have already suggested that cathedral builders’ stories do not end at death, and perhaps most of us are engaged in trying to develop stories that are not limited by our own mortality. Hardy (1968) puts the claim for living by narrative even more boldly: We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. (1968:5) Thus Hardy sees the roots of everything we do in narrative. As McIntyre (1981) comments:

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It is through hearing stories…that children learn, or mislearn, both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. (McIntyre 1981:54) In addition to such sources in the literature, I have tested this concept by suggesting to large numbers of people over the last two years that we live our lives as stories that we write for ourselves. The great majority express interest in the idea, talk about it for a while and are then happy to concur with it, which suggests to me that most people either recognize that they create such stories for themselves, or at least believe that others do so. A few individuals have denied that this makes any sense for them at all, and I am convinced that their listening and thinking has been careful enough that I would have to accept that there are people who do not story their lives for themselves. Others That we tell our stories to others risks being obvious. When we meet people, we exchange stories of ourselves, usually clearly laying out who we wish to be taken to be by them. These stories may have no obvious connection with the official or apparent purpose of our conversation. For example, the following comes from a representative of a major European car manufacturer, seeking consultancy help with organizational change in its research department. These fragments all come from the first half hour of a meeting with a potential consultant. I spent the last 6 years setting up a show place for the company, somewhere that families could come to with kids for the day out, and go away with an impression of us so that next time they would probably buy our car…. I was born in Rumania, we had to do our own sowing of seeds to get food, we were very poor…. I am back in headquarters now. I think they have decided that I am a little crazy. I am always the one to be asked to think something new, to think outside the box. People tell their stories, even if in fragmentary form, under the most unpromising circumstances. At its most extreme, we might think of this as ‘Ancient Mariner syndrome’; in many organizations there are people whose stories can be long and difficult to escape. Such people and their stories then become the subject matter of other people’s stories: ‘Have you introduced the new programmer to Rob yet? Make sure you get her a chair to sit on and a book to read when you do—she won’t get away until he’s told her all his best fairy tales.’ Indeed we may be quite uncomfortable with people who do not tell us their stories; what are they hiding? Normally self stories are traded; I’ll reveal something of significance about me but I expect you to return my trust by revealing something about yourself. We bond in organizations with a narrative version of mutually assured destruction. Any refusal to trade will be noted. We may suspect, if there are large gaps in someone’s life story, that there is something that we are deliberately not being told about,

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and this view often becomes explicit in an interviewing panel when considering a candidate who has gaps in their CV. The audience of others may play a very active role in our story shaping. Bruner (2001:34) uses an example from a family that he has studied intensively: They boast that there is nothing they cannot discuss around the Sunday dinner table when they come together. And that is the tribunal where they try out their changing versions for their self-image and their autobiographies. We do not simply tell stories to others. We also try out stories, see what reactions we get to particular ways of telling them, and give different stories to different audiences (Linde 1993). We may have a safe audience to try out particularly sensitive stories on before we take them to the wider public. Thus we might say to a partner, or to a particularly trusted colleague, ‘I think what I’ll do is that I’ll go and meet her in her office, and I’ll say. Or alternatively it might be a retrospective story along the lines of ‘Do you know what he did today? …’. In either case, the story may be tried out first, ideally, in the imagination, and then with a safe audience before it is told to a less comfortable and less trustworthy audience. At each stage of this rehearsal process, the story may be edited and ‘improved’ (Holstein and Gubrium 2000). The distributed self Perhaps this division between telling stories to self and telling stories to others has been a false dichotomy. Perhaps we do not so much tell stories about ourselves either to ourselves or to others, but to a distributed self. As Bruner says (2001:34–35): Self seems also to be inter-subjective or ‘distributed’ in the same way that one’s ‘knowledge’ is distributed beyond one’s head to include the friends and colleagues to whom one has access, the notes one has filed, the books on one’s shelves. Bruner acknowledges that this goes against the commitment of Western culture to a view of the person as individual. It is, however, a very rich way of thinking about identity and about the stories that maintain it. My self, my identity, is not simply within my skull, or even within my body. It is in my organization, my place of work, my family, my friends. At different stages of our lives, our identities are differently distributed, and this can be a matter of amusement to others. For example, many new grandparents seem incapable of disguising how much of their identity is bound up in their grandchildren, to the amusement and subsequent boredom of their friends. Our identities may be distributed in our houses, our cars, our partners, our children, our communities, our sports clubs, our hobbies, or our political and religious affiliations. Within organizations our identities may be entailed in our departments, our roles and status, our industries or our companies. To quote the chief executive of a medium-sized furniture importer:

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Well first and foremost I’m an engineer. That’s what I actually know about. And when I’m at a trade fair I like nothing better than talking to manufacturers about how a particular chair has been engineered, both the design and the manufacture. But these days I have to try and forget that, and think of myself more as a marketing man. I have to try and feel common cause with the rest of the furniture trade. And that’s not easy sometimes. The self cannot be understood without knowing something about where it is distributed. We all tell stories about the areas in which our distributed selves are situated, and it does not require much listening to people’s stories to be able to hear where they have invested their identity. As Bruner says: Don’t we, too, have to tell the event in order to find out whether, after all, ‘this is the kind of person I really mean to be’? (2002:73–74)

Characteristics of stories Coherence We come now to look at some of the characteristics of the ways we story our lives. First, we expect some coherence. Things must tie together. The episodes of a story must have some degree of fit. We accomplish this by characterizing our selves and others in such a way that we are all recognizable from one episode to another. The opposite of this is visible in some television soap operas with low production values, where characters behave in one episode in a way that is unconvincing if you can remember their behaviour in another episode. This goes further when we remember Linde’s point (1993) about coherence in life stories only being possible if we allow a degree of inconsistency. A character who is totally consistent between episodes is as unconvincing as one who seems to have forgotten the previous episode entirely. The first group are too onedimensional to command interest or belief, and the second group appear to lack anything which can make us surprised or unsurprised by their actions. For a life story to work, there have to be a number of turning points. By ‘turning points’ I mean those episodes in which, as if to underline the power of the agent’s intentional states, the narrator attributes a crucial change or stance in the protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, a thought. (Bruner 2001:31) The existence of a turning point is a characteristic of a story. If we tell of too many turning points in one story, we may lose coherence, the story may not tie together. Also if we tell of too many turning points on any one occasion it may sound as if the subject of the story exists only to turn. This is no longer a person, but a spindle.

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Orderliness We want our stories to be orderly, but it can be a struggle to make them so. We want to present a story which suggests control on our part, which shows that we have successfully made sense of what is happening to us. Particularly in a working environment, our jobs may depend on our being able to show some narrative thread running recognizably through the story. But as Eco says, ‘Life is certainly more like Ulysses than like The Three Musketeers—yet we are all the more inclined to think of it in terms of The Three Musketeers than in terms of Ulysses’ (Eco 1994:117–118). Brockmeier, quoting Eco, goes on to make the point that the way we think of our own stories, and especially when we look to the future and where our identities might take us next, is surprisingly conventional: ‘Since fiction’ Eco (1994, p.118) writes, ‘seems a more comfortable environment than life, we try to read life as if it were a piece of fiction’; and what’s more, I might add, we try to read life as if it were a piece of highly conventional and, thus, predictable fiction. (Brockmeier 2001:252) Brockmeier points out that lives are often given order by being shaped, and spoken of, as a journey, ‘as if the end (that is, the present of the narrative event) were the destination of one’s journey, an objective which from the very beginning had to be reached like Odysseus’ Ithaca’ (2001:251). This journey metaphor is quite extraordinarily widespread in life stories, with the implication for identity that people are conventionally expected to take on the character of a traveller. Kearney has a rather different take on this. He suggests that it may not be so much a desire for order or for appearing in control that leads to us turning what Blumer characterized as ‘the blooming, buzzing confusion of life’ into something much more tame. It may be that we can only remember those events in our stories which have been given an orderly shape: It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents of our history. (Kearney 2002:3) Storying is connected with memory (Hardy 1968), and we may only be able to remember those circumstances out of which we have managed to create a story (Sims 1999). The desire to find an orderly plot to what is going on is one of the ways in which our story might be seen as telling us rather than vice versa. It can also quite easily conflict with the next characteristic; a certain lack of order may give a story spice. The transformation described by Kearney above can go too far. ‘Haphazard happenings’ may be transformed into story, but the attempt to show that we are ‘full agents of our history’ may lead us to transform the happenings into such orderly stories that no one wants to listen to them. Interest

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For a story to be coherent and orderly is not enough. For a story to be told, heard and remembered, it also has to be interesting. When someone emplots themselves in a story, they are likely not to want to bore either their internal or their external audience. While there may be widely varying levels of skill for doing this, they would like to be part of a story which can hold its audience; after all, their distributed self is a part of that audience, and there is also something very disaffirming about seeing people stop listening to you. How do people develop stories that are interesting? I suggest that this is one of the reasons for our interest in fiction, biography, myths and newspaper accounts of others’ lives. We draw ideas for the development of our own stories from the stories of others. We take in a story, more or less consciously, about another character, whether fictional, historical, mythological or mediated by news reports, and place ourselves, in our imaginations, in their story. Having dwelt on the story imaginatively, we are then in a position to let it affect our lives (Watson 2003). Bruner suggests that there is a balance to be struck here between the canonical and the non-canonical, by which he means the respects in which we are like others in our culture and lead similar lives (canonical) and the respects in which we differ from the expectations (non-canonical). He says: The only requirement imposed by having to tell a life story (even when only invited to do so by a psychologist) is that one tell something ‘interesting’—which is to say a story that is at once recognizably canonical and recognizably noncanonical. What makes for something ‘interesting’ is invariably a ‘theory’ or ‘story’ that runs counter to expectancy or produces an outcome counter to expectancy. But expectancy, of course, is controlled by the implicit folk psychology that prevails in a culture. It is the case, then, that a story (to meet the criterion of tellability) must violate canonical expectancy, but do so in a way that is culturally comprehensible. That is to say, it must be a violation of the folkpsychologically canonical that is itself canonical—that is, the breach of convention must itself be conventional, like the cuckolded husband, the betrayed fair maiden, and so forth. (Bruner 2001:30) He makes a related point elsewhere about autonomy and commitment: A self-making narrative is something of a balancing act. It must, on the one hand, create a conviction of autonomy, that one has a will of one’s own, a certain freedom of choice, a degree of possibility. But it must also relate the self to a world of others—to friends and family, to institutions, to the past, to reference groups. But the commitment to others that is implicit in relating oneself to others of course limits our autonomy. We seem virtually unable to live without both, autonomy and commitment, and our lives strive to balance the two. So do the selfnarratives we tell ourselves. (Bruner 2002:78)

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So we are getting a picture of interest in a story as a matter of balance. If everything is new and surprising (noncanonical), we lose order. If nothing is new and surprising (everything is canonical), we lose interest. Similarly in the way the main character is emplotted in the story, too much autonomy and you have created an autistic hero, to whom listeners will find it difficult to relate. Too much commitment and your character loses all character. Levels of awareness All of this may sound like deliberate human choice, but how conscious is the process of telling our stories? It may be that we are at times quite aware of the storying activity by which we develop our lives, while at other times being quite unaware of it. How much can the good storyteller monitor themselves (Snyder 1987), and be aware that they are in storytelling mode? Stories may be most effective when the teller has lost any consciousness of themselves and is immersed in the story. Kearney describes this at a societal level, saying ‘each society constructs itself as a story but…it forgets that it has done so’ (2002:81). This takes us back to the idea that we discussed earlier, that our lives are always already storied. The storying has to be invisible, even to its perpetrator, or it prevents the story being convincing, even to the teller. This is true for all storying; if I am self-consciously telling a story, I am unlikely to be in it enough to carry my audience, unless by an act of deliberate deception (Stein 1998). The experience of being in the story is indicated by, for example, the pace of speech, the use of the present tense and other linguistic indicators. So are we aware of when we are storying our lives? When undergraduate students go on a work placement, they are often quite aware that they are dressing in a way which has previously been strange to them, getting up at a time of day with which they are unfamiliar, and speaking and behaving with a civility or occasionally servility which is new. Within a short time, they have forgotten about the accommodation they have made. The same seems to happen with storied lives. In parallel with the quotation from Kearney above, we construct stories, but quickly forget that we have done so. Threats to the distributed self Constructing one’s life story is a precarious enterprise, subject to a number of risks. Let us consider a very public piece of life construction, reality TV, and take the example of: … Sinisa Savija, the first person to be booted off the first reality TV show, Sweden’s Expedition Robinson, in 1997. A month after he was evicted, he killed himself…. They are going to cut away the good things I did,’ Savija told his wife when he got home, ‘and make me look a fool.’ (Jones 2003:18) Jones goes on to suggest that Savija was probably right, because it is difficult to portray people as being real, ordinary and interesting all at the same time. He says:

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It isn’t easy to depict, convincingly and sympathetically, people as complicated characters, with intricate interior lives, interacting with each other in interesting ways; only the best novelists and dramatists manage it. The housemates on Big Brother are performing themselves, without a script; for a cogent story to be made out of their relationships they have to be edited into types. (Jones 2003:18) Our view of our self will no doubt be limited, but it still allows for a much richer, more multiplex and more distributed self than reality TV can permit. Harré (2001) argues for three meanings of the word ‘self. Self 1 is used for the singular embodied self. As he puts it, The norms of our world require that there be one person per body, neither more nor less’ (Harré: 63). Self 2 is the self we reflect upon, including our self-concept. Self 3 is that which we manifest to others in a life episode, and it is this meaning that gives rise to such notions as multiple selves (Sturdy 1998; Suh 2002). For our purposes in this chapter, the identity that we are focusing on is tied up with both Self 1 and Self 2. I suggest that the self we reflect upon is less of a single, embodied self than has often been assumed. Narratives are the means by which we build satisfactory self concepts, and for this to happen we need to build into our narratives aspects of our self from outside our body; our friends and contacts, our qualifications, our departments and so on. Viewing the self as distributed makes a significant difference to the risks that we run with our narratives of self. I shall discuss five such risks: • defeat • disbelief • disinterest • disproof • losing the plot. The risk of defeat arises from the very nature of a story—that a plot is only interesting if there is a measure of risk involved. There appears to be a structure to sequences of lived action that is similar to the structure of a traditional plot. A plot, conventionally, is a way of organizing events into a rising crescendo of tension that reaches its peak in a climax and then resolves into a denouement. (Ochberg 1994:116) Part of storying your life is that you create a plot for it, and if the plot is to have any excitement and interest about it at all, it will entail the risk of defeat. I cannot suggest to others or myself that I am leading the life of a hero without risking the hero becoming seriously unstuck. When Richard Branson describes the risks involved in setting up the Virgin group (Branson 1988), the risks are not just to himself but also to those around him. Even more interestingly, Lee Iacocca talks about how family comes first for him (Iacocca 1984), a good example of the distributed self, before going on to tell us that he took a particularly demanding new job just as his wife was dying of cancer. Both of these people take risks to their distributed self which threaten the integrity of their stories.

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The second area of risk I want to discuss here is the risk that an audience will not believe your story. Individuals appear to address these plotlike sequences of action to various audiences. In turn, the identity of the protagonist/performer depends on the audience’s response. (Ochberg 1994:117) If you are performing your story to an audience, you run the risk that they may not believe the version of the story that you are telling. The version that President George W.Bush tells the world of his own story, which is that he is the strong leader of the fight of good against evil, is widely disbelieved. We might imagine that it would be very embarrassing to be caught in public with such a widely disbelieved story, and cannot understand why he does not seem more disturbed by the gulf between his espoused story and the way we see him. But previous presidents of the USA have run into difficulties with the distributed aspects of their story. So when the previous President Bush found that no one believed his promises on taxation he came out with the phrase, ‘Read my lips’, as a seemingly desperate attempt to get others to pay attention only to the embodied self, when public distrust had attached to several aspects of the distributed self. Similarly, when President Clinton was initially trying to talk his way out of the Monica Lewinsky affair, he repeatedly tried to get the press and public to believe his version by appearing on television and speaking firmly, as if the embodied self could distract all attention from other aspects of the distributed self. Even worse, though, is when the story is greeted with a complete lack of interest by the audience. You may be able to tolerate being loved or hated, but not being able to excite any interest with your story seems to question your very existence. This is one of the reasons why interest features so significantly in our criteria for a worthwhile story. It is very difficult for some people to get others in their organization interested in their stories. For example, John, a management academic, felt that he could not get his head of department interested in his research. He chose to work on this issue during an assertiveness course, and he was invited to tell the course members about his research. The story he told them was so flaccid that they all agreed that he was boring them. John had never thought of needing to tell an interesting story, but had assumed that his exciting ideas would speak for themselves. As soon as he took responsibility for telling an interesting story, his boss became interested. The difference between the stories he was telling was that, previously, his view had been, ‘I’m an interesting person, so my ideas must be interesting, so he will get excited.’ Now his story was much more explicit about how his research ideas related to his girlfriend’s work, how they stemmed from peculiar interactions in his childhood, and how they related to the city that he lived in. All of these are the kind of things which give stories context, and make them interesting, but they are also all to do with the distributed nature of John’s self. Giving context to our life stories leads us to talking about our distributed selves. The fourth area of risk to our storytelling is that the underlying argument of a story may be disproved or supplanted by another argument.

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By virtue of how the plot turns out and how the audience responds, life performances justify the idealized images that narrators hold of themselves. Here, too, is a connection between living a life and telling— or performing—a story. For a life, again like a story, is a kind of argument. It is a way of claiming that one construction of experience should be privileged and that some other, negative alternative should be dismissed. (Ochberg 1994:117) Underlying our storied lives is an argument that some things are important, others not. There is a construction of certain chains of causality as being believable while others are not. In short, there is a theory of the world which underlies the telling of any story, for example, that a particular action or outcome is worthwhile, and the risk is that someone does or says something—or notices you doing something—which undermines that theory. This risk is greater for the distributed self than it would be if the self were unitary, because there are more aspects of self that need to be accounted for by the underlying theory. Losing the plot Our final category of risk to stories is to do with lack of skill in constructing a story, and this is certainly harder to do when faced with the complexities of a distributed self. Some people are better than others at constructing stories. Some people have more lively imaginations, or are better at bridging the explanatory gaps between the imaginary and the observable. Some have better language skills with which to tell their stories, or better planning skills with which to develop their plots. Above all, some manage the narrative sweep, the sheer breadth of memory to convey a story with the richness of context to present their distributed self. Under these circumstances we may easily ‘lose the plot’. This is usually taken to mean that a person has forgotten why they became involved in a situation in the first place, and what they were hoping to get out of it. There are times in our life-narratives when we have forgotten what our storyline was. Sometimes this is a means—end substitution; we set off on a course of action in order to achieve something, but become engrossed in developing the skills for the course of action. We lose the main plot that we had planned, and busily write ourselves into what was only supposed to be a subplot. This is most likely to be because of the thick strand of stories about selves that we are coping with; my story of David the academic gets in the way of simultaneously running stories about David the good colleague and David the dad, let alone the stories about David the desperate DIY man. How many of these aspects of either distributed or multiple self can we maintain in our stories? There are always many plots being lived out at any time. Different parts of the distributed self compete for attention, through their competing plots. So it is not so much that we lose the plot as that we cannot possibly follow all our plots; in order to act, we have to lose some plots. We are engaged in a continual rewriting of our story which involves drawing some of our plots together in a way that gives us coherence and identity, at the same time as losing other plots.

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Bruner (2001:26) says, ‘Henry James was right when he said that adventures happen to people who know how to tell about them.’ The quality of a life story may have a lot to do with the telling rather than with that which is told, and this is true for the teller as for any other member of the audience. The skills of storytelling, whether to oneself or to others, is something which can be practised and worked upon. The result will be a change in the perceived quality of the stories being told, as in the case of John above. On occasions people just get very bored with their own story. They have heard it all before, nothing very interesting seems to be happening in it, and they cannot see how it is going to become more interesting. When the only stories in which you can find yourself seem irredeemably boring, you are in a state of classical anomie. The emotion comes to be one of a lack of motion, and the risk is that you just cannot be bothered to story your life any more. We may resolve this by becoming very interested in the story of some previously neglected aspect of our distributed selves, by picking up the plot for some other part of our distributed self. For example, we might resume interest in an old hobby.

Conclusion: the meaning of life We have considered some of the consequences of seeing lives as stories, and of believing that people develop life stories for themselves which they then proceed to live out. We have looked particularly at the nature of the distributed self as both audience and protagonist for these stories, at some of the characteristics which are to be found in the stories, and at some of the risks which beset the storyteller. We conclude that life is multiply storied. We lead storied lives, and develop storytelling skills which then give us the stories that we proceed to live out. Our storytelling is always precarious, and our attempts to make our life in some way more permanent and less precarious lead us continuously into strategies to defend endangered stories. Kearney (2002:136) says that the meaning of life is to be remembered in narrative. But we would like to have some choice as to how we are characterized in that narrative; we do not want to be remembered only in someone else’s possibly demonizing or denigrating narrative (Sims 2000). It has alternatively been suggested that the meaning of life is to write yourself into others’ stories (Edwards 2000). But our discussion suggests that this may be too simplistic. Our stories are intertwined with those of others, and stories, like selves, are distributed (Boje 1991). So we make guest appearances in others’ stories rather than writing ourselves into them, and our subsequent appearances in others’ narratives are not simply them remembering us, but are the continuing and developing telling of our stories, whether by us or by others. Thus part of our distributed selves lives in stories told by others in which we figure. My storied life is bound up with mutual appearances in the life stories of close friends and families, parents, colleagues etc. It may strike us as strange when mature adults are still visibly celebrating or denouncing their parents’ stories, for example if they are still angered by the way their parents categorized them in storytelling long after the death of those parents. But this is just a more blatant version of what we are all doing in our storied lives.

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The distributed character of the self makes the processes of living a story and storying a life much more involved than they would be if we lived in a world where there was one self per body. It means that we cannot control either the story or the life as much as we might wish. Distributed knowledge has proved a fruitful concept, bringing forward many new understandings of how understanding and knowing work in organizations. Distributed self has so far received less attention, and my contention in this chapter is that it is a concept that becomes more meaningful in a narrative context, and that is needed to understand the way that narrative lives are lived. Thinking of the self as distributed will require a lot more thinking and analysis to understand whose life I am leading.

References Boje, D.M. (1991) ‘The storytelling organization: a study of story performance in an office-supply firm’. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36:106–126. Boje, D.M. (2001) Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage. Branson, R. (1988) Losing My Virginity: the Autobiography. London: Virgin. Brockmeier, J. (2001) ‘From the end to the beginning: retrospective teleology in autobiography’, J.Brockmeier and D.Carbaugh (eds) Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brockmeier, J. and Carbaugh, D. (eds) (2001) Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bruner, J. (2001) ‘Self-making and world-making’, in J.Brockmeier and D.Carbaugh (eds) Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bruner, J. (2002) Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Christie, J.R.R. and Orton, F. (1988) ‘Writing a text on the life’. Art History, 11, 4: 543–563. Cohen, A. (1994) Self Consciousness: an Alternative Anthropology of Identity. London: Routledge. Currie, G. and Brown, A.D. (2003) ‘A narratological approach to understanding processes of organizing in a UK hospital’. Human Relations, 56, 5:563–586. Czarniawska, B. (1997) Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Czarniawska, B. (1998) A Narrative Approach to Organization Studies. London: Sage. Eco, U. (1994) Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edwards, L. (2000) A Narrative Journey to Understanding Self. Unpublished dissertation. School of Business and Management. London: Brunei. Ellis, A. (1962) Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. New York: Lyle Stuart. Gabriel, Y. (1991) ‘On organizational stories and myths: why it is easier to slay a dragon than to kill a myth’. International Sociology, 6, 4:427–442. Gabriel, Y. (2000) Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabriel, Y. (2004) ‘Narratives, stories and texts’, in D.Grant, C.Hardy, N. Phillips, L.Putnam and C.Oswick (eds) Handbook of Organizational Discourse. London: Sage. Hardy, B. (1968) ‘Towards a poetics of fiction: an approach through narrative’. Novel, 2:5–14. Harrè, R. (2001) ‘Metaphysics and narrative: singularities and multiplicities of self, in J.Brockmeier and D.Carbaugh (eds) Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Holstein, J.A. and Gubrium, J.F. (2000) The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Iacocca, L. (1984) An Autobiography. New York: Bantam. Jones, T. (2003) ‘Short cuts’. London Review of Books, 25:18. Josselson, R. and Lieblich, A. (eds) (1999) Making Meaning of Narratives: the Narrative Study of Lives. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Kearney, R. (2002) On Stories. London: Routledge. Linde, C. (1993) Life Stories. New York: Oxford University Press. McIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue. London: Duckworth. McKee, R. (1998) Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. London: Methuen. Ochberg, R. (1994) ‘Life stories and storied lives’, in A.Lieblich and R.Josselson (eds) Exploring Identity and Gender: the Narrative Study of Lives. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sims, D. (1999) ‘Organizational learning as the development of stories: canons, apocryphas and pious myths’, in M.Easterby-Smith, J.Burgoyne and L.Araujo (eds) Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization. London: Sage. Sims, D. (2000). ‘You bastard: a study of moral indignation in organizations’. 4th International Conference on Organizational Discourse. London: King’s College. Sims, D. (2003) ‘Between the millstones: a narrative account of the vulnerability of middle managers’ storying’. Human Relations, 56:1195–1211. Snyder, M. (1987) Public Appearances, Private Realities: the Psychology of Self-Monitoring. New York: Freeman. Stein, H.F. (1998) Euphemism, Spin, and the Crisis in Organizational Life. Westport: Quorum. Sturdy, A. (1998) ‘Customer care in a consumer society: smiling and sometimes meaning it?’, Organization, 5, 1:27–53. Suh, E.M. (2002) ‘Culture, identity consistency and subjective well-being’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 6:1378–1391. Watson, T. (2003) ‘Shy William and the Gaberlunzie girl’, in Y.Gabriel (ed.) Premodern Stories for Late Modernity: Narrative Tradition and Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weick, K.E. (1984) ‘Managerial thought in the context of action’, in S.Srivastva (ed.) The Executive Mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Weick, K.E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage.

Part II Performing identities Selves for others

6 Career as a project of the self and labour process discipline Christopher Grey This chapter draws together recent insights in labour process analysis, which highlight the role of panoptic techniques of disciplinary power, and work which suggests that the project of self-management has become a defining feature of contemporary subjectivity. In particular, it is argued that the discipline operationalised within the discursive and nondiscursive practices of ‘career’ should be treated as an aspect of this contemporary project of self-management. The pursuit of career is seen to have the potential to transform techniques of disciplinary power into adjuncts of these projects of the self. It explores the relationship between the use of techniques of surveillance. These issues are examined through the presentation of case study material on the accountancy labour process. In recent years it has become well established in the labour process literature and elsewhere that Foucauldian analysis provides valuable insights into the establishment of management control through surveillance and self-discipline (Knights and Collinson 1987; Miller and O’Leary 1987; Burrell 1988; Knights 1989; Dandeker 1990; Deetz 1992; Sakolsky 1992; Sewell and Wilkinson 1992). Much of this literature has been particularly concerned with the effect of the deployment of panoptic techniques in the workplace. The model of the panopticon draws attention to the use of techniques of surveillance that render visible, or potentially visible, the most minute details of individuals’ behaviour. Panoptic techniques can therefore serve as the basis for interventions into behaviour which is judged to be undesirable or unproductive. Perhaps more importantly, panoptic techniques can have the effect of creating self-disciplined behaviours amongst those subjected to surveillance. A second type of literature which is also inspired by Foucault is concerned not so much with the labour process as with the various ways in which governmentality operates on, in and through subjects (Burchell et al. 1991; Dean 1991). This insight is exemplified by Rose’s (1989a, b) analysis of the senses in which the individual becomes an entrepreneur of the self. Developing Foucault’s (1979) remarks on governmentality, Rose shows how, in contemporary times, the self is construed as a self-governing entity. This is the obverse side to the liberal democratic vision of politics and the individual, for such a vision implies a certain conception of the autonomous subject who is required to make choices and to take responsibility for action, thought and behaviour (Rose and Miller 1992). This self-governing subject is identified within, and to some extent produced through, webs of knowledge and expertise such as psychotherapy, social work and human relations theory. Accordingly:

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Individuals are to become, as it were, entrepreneurs of themselves, shaping their own lives through the choices they make among the forms of life open to them. (Rose 1989a:226) Rose expands his argument through consideration of a variety of sites within which the self-governed subject is produced. These sites include that of work, and Rose points out that Human Relations theory, and, even more, the ‘culture’ and ‘excellence’ prescriptions of management gurus, have resulted in a ‘psychologisation’ of the work organisation. Organisational culture is to be manipulated so as to be made consistent with ‘the personal projects of individual employees’ (Rose 1989a:113). In sum: The Citizen, in work as much as outside it, is engaged in a project to shape his or her life as an autonomous individual driven by motives of self-fulfilment. (Rose 1989a:115) Rose’s analysis of the self-management in the workplace is developed in the specific area of Human Resource Management (HRM) initiatives by Townley (1993). Drawing again on a Foucauldian framework, Townley depicts HRM as a power/knowledge regime which contributes to the construction of subjectivity through socialisation and surveillance (see also Fox 1989; Kerfoot and Knights 1992). This can entail a particular mobilisation of the self and the use of techniques of self-management, for example, in the case of ‘developmental’ appraisals that invite individuals to ‘confess’ and assess strengths and weaknesses in their performance. The implication of such a technique is the location of responsibility for monitoring and control within individual employees. Giddens (1991) is also concerned to demonstrate that the condition of ‘high modernity’ is associated with new modes of self-identity in which the self is construed as a project: The self is seen as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible. We are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves. (Giddens 1991:75) Giddens draws only incidentally upon Foucault, and does not draw upon the work of Rose, although, compared with the latter, Giddens offers less insight into the specific techniques through which the project of the self is conducted, and has little to say about its relationship to work. However, within the new project of self-management, (occupational) careers play a particular role since they offer a relatively well-defined scenario within which individuals may develop, express and create themselves. The concept of ‘career’ has been used in many different contexts in sociology (Evetts 1992 provides a critical assessment of these usages), but the present chapter is not in any sense a contribution to the literature on careers. Certainly the relationship of occupational careers to the development of identity (Banks et al. 1992) might be an important feature in understanding the career behaviours and motivations of particular individuals and groups. However, the present concern is not at all with the details of how and why careers

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are pursued. Instead, the focus is upon the concept of career as an organising or regulative principle. The usage of the term ‘career’ in this chapter is intended to denote the whole ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive practices associated with occupational careers (i.e. excluding such things as deviant careers or psychiatric careers). Thus the term ‘career’ collapses usages such as ‘the concept of career’, ‘the category of career’, ‘the practice of having a career’. Specifically, what is at issue is how career, as part of the project of the self, can constitute labour process discipline and surveillance in certain, and, supposedly benevolent, ways. Evidently, both workplace surveillance and the production of selfmanaging subjects may both be seen as variants of the Foucauldian theme of self-discipline. Since surveillance has as its aim the production of selfdiscipline, the project of selfmanagement is not a contradictory phenomenon. However, it does imply a distinctive modality of self-discipline, which is suggested by the term ‘project’. The importance of the notion of a project of self-management, and the importance of careers within that project, is the ascription of unity to various processes of self-discipline. The project of selfmanagement links home and work, leisure, dreams and day-dreams. Perhaps most significantly, it links past, present and future through the vector of the self.1 The unity implied within the project of the self enables a comment on Giddens’ (1981, 1984) criticism of Foucault. Giddens argues that Foucault’s concentration on ‘total’ institutions (in Goffman’s terminology) means that his conception of disciplinary power can have only a limited applicability to our daily lives which are not generally lived in such institutions. However, through a unified project of self-management, the self comes to bear upon itself in all settings and on all occasions. The project of self-management might be said to consist of the construction of our lives as total institutions.2 Within the project of self-management, career has a particular role to play since it is a powerful ‘technology’ in enabling the construction of, precisely, a project. Career links present, past and future through a series of stages, steps or progressions. Career offers a vehicle for the self to ‘become’. Obviously it would be quite possible to conceive of the self as a project without utilising the concept of career—for example, the project of achieving spiritual knowledge or psychoanalytic understanding. Equally, the project of the self is likely to encompass much more than career—for example, consumption may be a major component. Nevertheless, in societies where work, and especially hierarchically organised work, is important, career can offer one of the most obvious sites for realising the project of the self. This chapter utilises case study material on the accounting labour process in order to demonstrate how career relates to workplace surveillance and self-discipline. Within this labour process, there are many examples of the combination of techniques of hierarchical surveillance and normalising judgement which constitute disciplinary power—for example, assessments, appraisals and professional training examinations. These techniques, which are deployed within a culture of excellence and under a Human Resource Management programme which seeks to recruit and develop ‘excellence’, can be productive of self-disciplined forms of subjectivity. However, the present chapter is not so much concerned with this production of self-discipline as with the self-discipline which is produced through career. It is argued that some participants within the accounting labour process are animated by the pursuit of careers and that this entails a self-discipline which is present before entering work. Equally, the pursuit of career can

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involve the displacement of all other values, goals and relationships, and thus exceeds the work-place. For these people, work is not simply a job, and not just for those reasons of collegiate identification highlighted by the sociology of the professions (for an overview, see Dingwall and Lewis 1983). Instead, work is a part of the entrepreneurial project of the self: a place where the self may become that which it truly is or desires to be. It is this sense of a process of the achievement of self through work which is offered within organisations as career and which is expressed by individuals through career. This chapter is based upon a study of one of the large UK accounting firms, which will remain anonymous. The study involved semi-structured interviews conducted with approximately 100 staff, from new graduate recruits to partners. In addition, personnel files for all members of staff were studied. These files included documentation of recruitment, training, appraisal and promotion. Finally, a study of recruitment files on failed applicants were made, and interviews conducted with members of staff who had been dismissed by the firm. It will proceed by introducing some of the basic features of the organisation of the accounting labour process in order to contextualise the substantive sections of the chapter. Following this, there will be a section on graduate recruitment, which argues that processes of both construction and realisation of subjectivity can occur in such recruitment. In the next section, accountancy trainees are considered, with particular reference to the demand that such trainees display an enthusiastic attitude. This is explored in terms of a distinction between those who ‘internalise’ the demand for enthusiasm so that it becomes part of their subjectivity and those who are already constituted as subjects for whom the project of career animates the most mundane of tasks without any need for the inculcation of enthusiasm. This is followed by a section discussing rating and appraisal procedures, to illustrate the distinction between these as techniques of disciplinary power and as adjuncts to career development. Finally, a section on senior employees in the firm demonstrates how the discipline of career extends well beyond the workplace into all spheres of life. A concluding discussion suggests that, whilst panoptic techniques are an important element within the accountancy labour process (and, of course, other labour processes), they do not tell the whole story. The pursuit of career is a selfdiscipline which can only be operationalised within the labour process but which is not produced within, nor confined to, that labour process.

Accounting labour In order to appreciate the material that follows, it is necessary to consider the manner in which accounting labour is commonly organised. The large chartered accounting firms operate as partnerships which perform a diverse range of functions, of which auditing has traditionally been the most important. The firms also offer taxation planning, insolvency and consulting services, and, taken together, these have largely overtaken audit as sources of revenue. The firms are also frequently involved in takeover bids and privatisations. Despite this diverse set of activities, it is still the case that auditing represents the basic single operation of all the big firms, and it is also the most labour intensive. For this reason, each firm must constantly recruit a pool of auditing labour from graduates. These graduates are employed on training contracts which combine on-the-job training with tuition for professional examinations (see Power 1991). Although initial salaries are not

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the highest offered to graduates, the big firms attract high levels of applicants for training contracts because the long-term prospects for qualified accountants appear lucrative. At the same time, professional training is notoriously demanding, not because it is intellectually complex but because it requires the (passive) absorption of extremely large quantities of technical knowledge. The practical work, especially in the first two years, consists of the monotonous repetition of routine tasks. After two years of training, assuming satisfactory performance (which at this stage means principally examination performance), third-year trainees take responsibility for the day-to-day running of audits. They also sit their qualifying examinations. Given success in these, trainees emerge as qualified accountants who may stay with the same firm or may transfer to other practices or into industry. Those who stay are likely to spend another two years as seniors, with a few leaving as time goes by. After this, accountants may progress to management grades and, eventually, to partnership of the firm. The accounting practice is a pyramid, then, in that for every partner there are around ten trainees, five qualified accountants and perhaps three managers. It is also a pyramid in terms of the interest and variety of work tasks, with the audit trainees performing what is sometimes described in the unofficial argot of the firm as the ‘bean counting’.

New recruits The first contact between the firm and potential new recruits is through brochures and literature in students’ final year at university. All of the firms produce glossy brochures which emphasise the size and success of the firm and the exciting opportunities which await new recruits. The point of all this is not to encourage applications as such, since there are generally very high levels of applications to these firms. Rather, the point is to encourage the ‘best’ students both to apply and to favour the firm above its competitors if and when they hold a number of job offers. The presentation evenings given to students at the large universities have the same purpose. Whilst many of those attending the presentation will simply be ‘freeloading’ on the food and drink provided, and others will decide on different occupations, a good number will actually apply to the firm. For them, the presentation is not just an occasion when the firm presents, but also one in which they present themselves. The presentation allows students to seek to make an impression upon the personnel and technical staff of the firm. This will involve the more or less difficult attempt to appear mature, intelligent and tolerably well-informed about accounting and the firm. Following the presentation, the firm receives a large number of applications, some of which are rejected straight away. In general, students will only be offered interviews if they have good ‘A’ levels and a reasonable university record both academically and in terms of other activities and, especially, responsibilities. Students are, of course, well aware of this, and thus they will often seek to present themselves as having a much better record than is the case, at least with respect to non-academic activities which are relatively easy to falsify (although naturally this assertion is difficult to verify). On the other hand, students also accumulate genuine non-academic records partly, and often solely, in order to assist them in job applications. As at the presentation, students seek to present themselves at interviews in ways which match the perceived expectations of the

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firm. However, as the development of extra-curricular activities in anticipation of job application shows, the interview can also be seen as a part of a process which is not about the presentation of a false picture of self, so much as the continuing realisation of a project of the self: I approached job hunting very seriously in terms of thinking what I really wanted and what I had been working towards since I was about fourteen, probably. I wasn’t someone who just went to university because I didn’t know what I wanted. I always wanted a good career, that’s why I did Economics, because it would give me good career options, and I went very early to the careers office, at the start of my second year…[details different careers considered]…and of course I tried to make sure I didn’t work all the time because I knew that they [i.e. potential employers] want more than just a good academic record …so I did things like running the Golf team. It all shows that you can take responsibility for things. (New joiner) After the initial screening, applicants will be interviewed, usually on campus. This interview will be a fairly general affair, but one in which appearance, commitment, ability, interests and attitude will be carefully noted and recorded. If successful at this stage, the applicant will be invited to the office for a day of interviews and presentations, including an interview with a partner, which will lead to a job offer for a limited number. Again, each interview is documented. The successful applicants tend to be homogeneous in that they are over-whelmingly white, male,3 middle-class and young (21 or 22). As with Willis’s (1977) account of working-class education, a certain type of education provides the cultural knowledge which is both a pre-requisite and a product of the workplace (in this case: beer, football, Australia, fitting in, an ethos of ‘work hard, play hard’, lack of critical reflection). For this reason, degree subject is relatively unimportant to the firms. What matters is a certain type of ‘personality’ which will, in the short term, accept the demands of routine audit work in a team and, in the long term, be able to present well to clients and potential clients in management and partnership situations. Both, as Harper (1988) has noted, may be seen as matters of the presentation of self, learnt forms of social mutation. The selection procedure is an exercise in these abilities. However, at the same time, the selection procedure indicates that successful applicants are already constituted as certain sorts of subjects, whether ‘actually’ as they appear, or willing to present themselves as if they were. They have already, through their courses, their activities, their career research and advice, orientated themselves towards certain goals and projects: towards their careers. This is not necessarily to say that they have already orientated themselves to an accounting career—although around a quarter of new recruits have studied accounting at university4—and the resolution of their career projects and the accounting profession will be one of the effects of the early socialisation in which they take part.

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Enthusiastic trainees The transition from student ‘good blokeishness’ to audit trainee is not, in essence, difficult, precisely because of the selection procedure. For this reason, trainees are told on the first day to ‘be themselves’. Nevertheless, in the course of training, as well as acquiring technical skills, employees will be r expected to develop a professional manner. This includes matters of haircuts, beards and dress, with trainees being criticised for scruffiness and, even, for having overly garish ties. Women universally wore skirts rather than trousers, although specific instances of being instructed to do so were not found. Above all, trainees are expected to display enthusiasm and commitment at all times, regardless of the tediousness of the chores assigned to them: The thing about being committed, I’ve known people to be told that your attitude’s too laid back, you’ve got to be seen to be busy, you know, running about—even if you get the work done, it’s how you have to be seen…to please seniors and managers. I don’t know why. (Second-year trainee) Whilst this refers to informal warnings or comments to trainees, there is a detailed procedure for formal assessment via appraisals which follow the completion of each audit job. These are carried out by slightly more senior colleagues (for new trainees, then, appraisers will be trainees nearing qualification). The appraisal consists of the completion of a very detailed six-page form covering technical and professional (i.e. behavioural) performance on that particular audit job. For a new trainee, these will occur perhaps four times in the first year, because much of the time is spent on training courses—however, where these courses are residential, they are assessed in a similar manner. The demand that trainees appear enthusiastic and committed can make itself increasingly felt as the actual experience of auditing becomes progressively more disillusioning: I thought it would be interesting in my first two years, because all the recruitment ‘dos’ and brochures presented auditing as such a variety of tasks and clients and people. I thought it was going to be interesting, you know, an ever changing environment. The first two years you just spend ticking and bashing and doing the same old things. I found that a bit disillusioning…[so did others]…, you’re doing work for which you are overqualified, you know, you’ve got a degree and you’re sitting around looking for invoices. Somebody’s got to do it and you’ve got the cheapest chargeout rate. (Third-year trainee) In itself, this account of disillusionment is unsurprising. Basic auditing is a relatively low-skill operation and it is well known that auditing trainees experience it as irksome. What is much more interesting in terms of the formation of the subject is the way in

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which this disillusionment is frequently transformed or occluded within a discourse of professionalism. This may be seen to have two elements. The first is the Goffmanesque ‘presentation of self alluded to by Harper (1988), and gestured towards above, in which an enthusiastic and committed manner is adopted by trainees in order to satisfy what appear to be the whims of their managers. More importantly, for present purposes, is the extent to which this is not a matter of the manipulation of an appearance, but an attribute of the subject. This implies not the internalisation of the manipulation, but the production of appropriate forms of behaviour in self-disciplined fashion. In other words, whilst the expectations and sanctions of managers certainly operate to inculcate selfdisciplined modes of subjectivity amongst trainees, the trainees are already equipped with a form of self-discipline which pre-disposes them to that discipline and, on many occasions, obviates the need for it at all. Thus it may be contended that the formation of a self-disciplined work-force is only partly explained by reference to the presence of panoptic techniques of sequestration. These are certainly important, but they appear to function only, or at least most effectively, in the presence of other factors. In the present case, the pre-eminent factor is the willingness of subjects to discipline themselves via the operationalisation of the category ‘career’. For example, a first-year trainee questioned about the need to appear enthusiastic when performing tedious audit tasks, answered: I don’t mind it [the tasks] because it is a stepping stone, not just to being qualified but having a good career, so I’m enthusiastic anyway. Another first-year trainee said: I’m not saying it’s always interesting but I always know that I’m doing it for myself, in the end, because it’s getting me a qualification I can do anything with. So I don’t think ‘this is really boring’, I think ‘this is getting me to where I want to be’. Both of these explanations seem to indicate that a display of enthusiasm for mundane tasks is not necessarily an act, put on and/or internalised, for the benefit of managers.5 Instead, through an (individualised) conception of career, their mundaneness is transformed. Whilst this is partly a matter of an instrumental rationality which accepts the tedium of mundane tasks for a subsequent goal, and partly reflects the lack of critical ability noted earlier, there is more at stake. For, in being enthusiastic about their careers, these trainees incorporate the tasks into a project, and thereby invest them with a meaning which is productive of real enthusiasm. This connection between enthusiasm and career becomes even clearer after qualification, with the assumption of senior and managerial responsibilities. Questioned about the pressure put on trainees to appear enthusiastic, one manager said: Although at the time it can seem boring, you actually learn things which stand you in very good stead, the nuts and bolts. I mean if I see [a trainee] who is always bored, maybe to a certain extent I think ‘yes he’s a bright guy’ and I feel some sympathy, but really I think that he will not make a

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good auditor in the long run…you asked about enthusiasm and, yes, we will tell someone to seem enthusiastic because clients don’t want to pay for someone to stand around looking fed up, but to really do well in this firm I think you’ve got to really have an enthusiasm for it even at those early stages. Do you see what I’m getting at in answer to your question? Appearing enthusiastic is second best to actually being it because if you are actually enthusiastic it means that you can see you’re learning the nuts and bolts and you’re pleased to be doing so. Here an almost messianic vision of the auditor is articulated which accepts to a limited extent that enthusiasm may be simply an act, but celebrates the trainee whose commitment is such that enthusiasm for becoming an auditor suffuses even the most mundane of tasks and invests it with a transcending purpose. In the light of this, the existence of disciplinary techniques of hierarchical surveillance and normalising judgement, of which performance appraisal sheets are a clear example, take on new meanings. If we consider the monitoring of enthusiasm (treated as a leitmotif of professional conduct generally), then disciplinary techniques have a different meaning for the ‘enthusiastic’ trainee than for the ‘bored’ trainee. For the latter, the techniques have as their aim the production of enthusiasm, and they will often be successful in this regard. That is to say, subjects may be produced who not only appear to be enthusiastic but who even come to feel ‘really’ enthusiastic. Thus far, then, this could be seen as a straightforward Foucauldian conception of the production of subjectivity through the exercise of disciplinary power. However, for those trainees who are already enthused by their linkage of basic tasks with career development, the monitoring of their enthusiasm seems redundant. If this is compared to the panoptic prison, it is as if prisoners are being surveyed who have already, and for independent reasons, decided to be docile. Howsoever that may be, the role of disciplinary techniques in general is not, in fact, rendered redundant for enthusiastic trainees. First, of course, enthusiasm is only one part of the mode of behaviour expected of trainees. Much more importantly, it is the emphasis on career which is of particular interest, since this enables the re-interpretation of disciplinary techniques in the workplace. For trainees who conceptualise their lives (or their working lives) in terms of career, disciplinary techniques actually become understood as aids or adjuncts to career development. Thus the existence of job appraisals, for example, is not viewed as a means of management control but as an almost benevolent means for individuals to realise their own projects and aspirations, a point which will be developed in the following section.

Being rated The tendency to understand disciplinary techniques as if they had as their aim the promotion of an individual’s career is very pervasive. One individual was interviewed shortly after having been sacked by the firm. The circumstances of the sacking were particularly harsh in that the person in question was one of the very few to be employed on a work permit, and was sacked only two months before its expiry. In addition, the

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person had consistently been rated as performing in a satisfactory manner, with the potential for a long-term career with the firm: [The Personnel Manager] just phoned up and said I need to see you about your work permit… I thought they were going to extend it, but she just said that they were not looking to extend it, and I said why and she said because I didn’t have the potential to progress within the firm, so I said why did my ratings say that I did?… I think that in a way it’s a numbers game…at the end of the day they need four or five people each year. However, having identified the fact that sackings (called, in the firm’s unofficial jargon, ‘the cull’) were unrelated to performance, at least up to a point, in that it was a numbers game: I was not happy because I wasn’t told earlier that I wasn’t doing well. I mean, if they’d said this needs to improve it would have come, number one, as less of a shock and, number two, I could have done something about it before it was too late. This outlook is interesting for two reasons. First, because it reveals that the evaluation of lack of ability or potential is accepted, despite the fact that it came as a shock (and so, presumably, did not accord with the employee’s previous opinion). Second, it envisages the function of the personnel officer as primarily one of benevolent assistance. These two features taken together explain why the person concerned is aggrieved not primarily because of being sacked, nor because of the intensely disciplinary techniques of appraisal and rating. Instead, the complaint is, in effect, that the ratings had not been bad and had not identified those features which, apparently, led to sacking. Rating was expected to be of assistance in career development. This benevolent view of rating is general within the firm, in that it is portrayed as a means of helping each employee to maximise potential. This is taken to be simultaneously good for the firm and good for each individual. It is noteworthy that there is a strong suggestion within the rating system that successful performance allows the realisation of the true self. Thus, on the issue of enthusiasm, the bored employees are always described as ‘appearing unenthusiastic’; the unaggressive employees ‘appear to lack confidence’ and so on. On the other hand, enthusiasm and confidence are described as realities rather than appearances. The impression thereby created by the rating forms is that within each employee, regardless of appearance, there is a perfect auditor, waiting to be ‘realised’. The rating procedure is thus transformed. Instead of being constituted as an irksome, intrusive and threatening technique of management control, it becomes a benevolent process for the realisation of this perfection, a technique to assist individuals to become their true selves and to realise their aspirations. Even the act of sacking is reconstituted through the personnel department as ‘counselling out’, a supposedly mutual career decision for the employee to leave the firm. Nevertheless, this should not be overstated. While it is quite striking that such a conception of the rating system should still be held by someone treated as apparently shabbily as the person mentioned above,

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the situation is a little more complex. To understand this, it is necessary to understand in a little more detail the process known as ‘the cull’. The cull refers to a round of sackings (or ‘counsellings out’) and occurs at infrequent intervals depending on fluctuations in levels of business and staffing (for example, there may be no cull in any particular year if reasonable numbers have voluntarily left the firm for other employment). This generates considerable uncertainty and insecurity amongst employees (i.e. both trainees and qualified accountants) and especially amongst those at the end of their training contracts. As a result, an ingenious game is played between the employees and the personnel staff in which the former seek to identify those who are liable to be ‘culled’ whilst the latter try to disguise those liable to be ‘counselled out’. For the employees this involves ‘reading’ various signs, which include the status of jobs allocated to each individual, and the extent to which one is ‘noticed’ (i.e. spoken to) by senior managers and partners. Above all, the size of salary is seen as a ‘sign of grace’ (one is reminded of Weber’s account of Calvinism). Except in the first two years of training, differential salary levels are paid to employees in the same grade, reflecting the value the firm puts upon them. These salary levels are officially confidential, but quickly become known unofficially, since those at the higher end of each pay band are as boastful as those at the lower end are reticent. As for the personnel staff, they seek to maintain confidentiality about salaries, ratings, appraisals and job scheduling at least in part to seek to ensure that there is no falling off in the work rate of the less-favoured employees. The reading of signs is an attempt to ward off insecurity (although it clearly produces insecurity for many). Within this, for many employees, rating is seen as threatening: You know that, at the end of the day, too many satisfactory ratings aren’t going to be enough. (Newly qualified accountant) The wording of this is misleading, in that ‘satisfactory’ is seen within the firm as a mediocre rating, with ‘above average’ and ‘outstanding’ being sought after. On the other hand, ‘satisfactory’ ratings may be good enough if the cull is low. Those who are rated ‘below average’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ are highly unlikely to survive long. However, in practice such low ratings are rare, which explains the downgrading of ‘satisfactory’ ratings and also the puzzlement of the employee whose sacking occurred despite ‘satisfactory’ ratings, discussed earlier.6 It should be noted that, in each job appraisal, employees will be rated on eight attributes and receive an overall rating. All of these will have to be at least ‘satisfactory’ for almost all of the time if promotion is to be secured. In this firm, failure to secure annual promotion is followed very shortly (within days or weeks) by the sack. The tying together of ratings and prospects shows, then, that an appreciation of the role of ratings in management control is not entirely lost on those subjected to them. Nevertheless, given that such an absence is not feasible, the extent to which rating is viewed negatively is minimal (partly because of the fact that employees have little critical knowledge which would enable a critique) and always ambiguous:

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It’s a two-way process. Obviously they’ve got to make sure you’re doing your job properly but also it helps you to know where you’re going wrong or whatever. (Newly qualified accountant) Nevertheless, despite the claimed supportiveness and ‘liberalism’ of rating, in one very obvious respect it is not a two-way process. Despite the presence on the rating forms of a section for the employee’s comments about the job, this is very rarely used. Out of around 400 rating forms studied in the research, employees’ comments were recorded only twice. At least in terms of the official, written record, the employee’s voice is silent. The reason for this silence, when given the possibility of speaking is: ‘It wouldn’t be very good for your career’ (Newly qualified accountant). Again, then, career functions as a discipline. Within a process which is ambiguously perceived as both controlling and benevolent, career is the unifying feature. To resist control (by challenging ratings through the comments section) would be damaging to career; but, in any case, why challenge a process which is designed to help you to maximise your capabilities and thereby enhance your career? None of this should imply that the rating system is particularly popular within the firm. Indeed it is frequently perceived as unfair. However, the understanding of unfairness is not one of objection to control or exploitation, still less to sequestration. Instead, ratings are criticised for their ‘lack of objectivity’ which is seen to arise from ‘the human factor’: I think that often it’s just a matter of how you get on with your appraiser. It’s not objective at all. (Third-year trainee) This human factor, however, is seen as inevitable: With the best will in the world, there’s bound to be some bias in all this [i.e. appraisals and ratings], however many courses they send you on. It’s just human nature, isn’t it? (Junior manager) The lack of objectivity is not criticised on moral grounds: It’s not that I mind what someone says about me, even if it’s something I don’t agree with. It’s having it on your record and possibly holding back your career. (Third-year trainee) Once again, career seems to act as an organising principle which demarcates desirable and acceptable behaviour from the undesirable or unacceptable.

Going to the top

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The capacity to regard career as an organising principle of existence becomes progressively more obvious as employees rise up the professional hierarchy to manager and partner levels. Increasingly, it becomes necessary to sublimate one’s whole life to the development of career.7 Friends become transformed into ‘contacts’, and social activity becomes ‘networking’. Indeed, ambitious trainees may have had this orientation to social life since joining the firm and perhaps even before. However, it is with the assumption of managerial and even more senior positions that the network of contacts becomes of paramount importance, since they represent selling opportunities. Managers will seek to use their contacts to procure new business for the firm. The notion of professionalism means that such selling is not overt in the way that, for example, sales representative selling might be. In other words, professional selling occurs paradoxically within notionally ‘social’ or nonprofessional settings (Harper 1988). Typical examples include restaurants, dinner parties, golf clubs and the Round Table. The transformation of the non-work sphere into a specific aspect of professional career development is seen as crucial to success: It is important to keep up a network of contacts, even if at any particular time they aren’t in a position to do business with you. In fact, it’s all the better if you’ve been friendly for a few years before you actually start to do business. It’s no good suddenly finding you’re expected to be bringing in business and then phoning up someone you haven’t seen for years— they’re just going to feel you’re using them. (Manager) Of course, the instrumental process of keeping up friendships for the future is also a clear example of ‘using’ people, but when this point was put to the same manager, the rationale of career was again deployed: Look, obviously people know what is going on, but the point is it has to be reciprocal so that you can help each other’s careers at different times. For instance, there was a guy who used to work here and I helped him get a job with a client and now we get a lot of business through him. Now if you say was I using him when I helped him get that job then yes I was, but it didn’t do him any harm, did it?8 The implication, then, is that the instrumental orientation to social life is acceptable because it is reciprocal. However, it is clear that, even without such reciprocity, career development provides a sufficient motivation for cultivating contacts. Another manager pointed out that: If you’re going to have a career here beyond manager, you’ve got to use every opportunity to make contacts, so you’re never really away from the job in that sense. You always have to think, for instance, if you’re playing squash with someone, could we do some business? It’s the only way to get on because you’ll only make partner by bringing in the jobs.

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Thus career comes to be a pervasive concept which regulates all forms of social contact entered into by senior employees, both inside and outside the firm. Indeed, according to one of the partners interviewed, career is also a defining feature even of marriage: It’s important to have a well-packaged wife. It would be very hard to do this job if you were single. At the best, people would think you were chasing totty every Saturday night, and at the worst…9 Obviously the implication was that a single partner might be thought to be gay. The attributes of the ‘well-packaged wife’ were described in this way: It helps if she is a professional, because you [i.e. she] have to get on with other partners and clients. For instance [my wife] is a merchant banker, so obviously that’s going to be more useful than if someone just works [long pause] in a shop or something. Having said that, most partners’ wives are housewives, but that’s okay if they’re sociable. (Partner) Ignoring the overwhelming sexism, homophobia and elitism of these statements, the important point for present purposes is how the pursuit of career pervades even the most intimate forms of social relations. Whilst partners may not actually base marriage decisions upon career considerations, it is certainly the case that marriage is seen, at least in part, as an adjunct to career. It should also be noted that this outpouring was a response to a question about whether the demands on partner’s time made it difficult to sustain family life. The answer completely missed the point of the question by assuming that family life should be considered as an aid to career development. That this is so is underlined by the comments of a senior manager who had failed to be promoted to partnership. Questioned about the reasons for this failure, part of his answer touched on the same issue: I did feel that this might partly be, I’m not sure about this, but I did feel that in some ways my wife didn’t help. When they are considering you, you spend a lot of times having dinners with partners and so on, and often [my wife] couldn’t come for whatever reason, for instance, she was often ill at that time, or if she did come she found it difficult, I’m not blaming her, but…. But I’m not saying that is all there is to it. To be honest, I’ve never been sure what it takes to be a partner anyway. In view of the comments of the partner quoted earlier (who would have been one of those assessing the manager in question), it may certainly be inferred that the inability or unwillingness of the manager’s wife to act as an adjunct to his career moves was negatively evaluated. This underlines that the development of career in this professional environment entails considerably more than the efficient performance of work tasks. In the attempt to go to the top, it is necessary that every facet of the employee’s life be orchestrated through the single principle of career development and success. Thus, again, techniques of surveillance become bound up with the self-discipline of career. For,

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whilst, for example, sales performance of managers will be carefully monitored, it is the will to career success which informs the continual striving to sell. Indeed, if the firm were to rely simply upon techniques of sequestration to produce selling behaviour, it is highly unlikely that such high levels of effort to sell could be produced. Nor can the desire to reach the top be attributed solely to the (exceptionally) high earnings of partners— typically six-figure sums. For, paradoxically, the achievement of career success removes financial security to the extent that income becomes profitand performance-related.

Concluding discussion In this chapter, there have been many examples of disciplinary power—the combination of hierarchical surveillance and normalising judgement. Such examples include the process of recruitment interviews; the professional examination system; the deployment of rating and appraisal techniques; the assessment of sales performance; and the inspection of the suitability of wives. It is not intended to deny that disciplinary power is a potent feature of the organisation of the professional labour process and, as such, it is to be expected that certain forms of subjectivity will be encouraged and promoted. However, the importance of the concept of career lies in the fact that it transforms the nature and meaning of these exercises of disciplinary power. The pursuit of career success can commence very early—in the choice of university course or in the attainment of extra-curricular responsibilities whilst at university. Career provides a meaning and rationale for the otherwise disillusioning grind of accountancy training. In the interests of career, trainees may very early on seek to develop networks of contacts, and will certainly do so as they rise in the hierarchy of the firm. This self-discipline, this regulation of behaviour through the discourse of career, has the effect of transforming those instances of disciplinary power which might normally be thought of as regulative. For, again and again, the techniques of disciplinary power become constructed as benevolent aids to career development. This is particularly evident in the case of ratings and appraisal systems, which are often treated as if their sole aim was to assist individuals in the maximisation of career prospects. The successful development of an accountancy career entails that the individual’s whole life, including relations with friends and family, becomes an instrumental project that is to be managed and achieved. This is not at all to see careers as individual strategies. On the contrary, the existence of a career structure with promotions, sackings and incentives is predicated upon the assumption of individual career aspirations, whilst providing simultaneously a vehicle or vessel for those aspirations. It is only because of the many difficulties, challenges and hazards of the ‘career ladder’ that career is capable of being sustained as a meaningful project of the self. At the same time, the professionalised labour process could not be effectively created simply through the deployment of disciplinary power, without the harnessing of the self-discipline of career in ways that contribute to the success of the firm. In this sense, the self-discipline of career is to some extent the pre-condition of the accounting labour process and, presumably, of other professional labour processes. In the new subjectivity of the managed self, career is of prime importance. In contrast to the unintelligibility, chaos and paradoxical nature of social relations in general, career

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offers at least the potential for the management of the self through ‘steps on the ladder’ or ‘moves in the game’. If, as in the case of accountancy partners, this game comes to include all other forms of social relations then so much the better, since this renders the project of self-management ever more achievable. At the same time, this self-disciplined project of self-management through career is a more productive and economical form of management control than disciplinary power, with its costs and unintended consequences, could ever be.

Notes 1 A particular discursive practice of this vector of the self would be the curriculum vitae, discussed by Miller and Morgan (1993). Here the project of the self is represented and presented for scrutiny. The CV is a powerful technique for stating what one was, is and will be and for giving a narrative of the self. On the general issue of time in relation to the project of the self, Giddens (1991) gives more detail than Rose (1989a); Ewald (1991) explores the links between risk and mastery of the future. 2 See Burrell’s (1988) rather different response to Giddens which argues that, even if our lives are not lived in total institutions, the institutionalisation of our lives is total. 3 It is worth underlining these points. On ethnicity, less than 1 per cent of practice staff were from ethnic minority backgrounds, or from overseas. With respect to gender, around a quarter of new joiners were women, but were only 3 per cent at manager level, with none at partner level. Career paths within the firm were highly gendered in a number of quite complex ways. However, this is not the immediate concern, since what is at issue is the nature of career as a disciplinary organising principle. An exploration of the gendered effects of the operationalisation of this principle is certainly necessary, and is underway as a separate project. It did not seem to be the case that the men and women spoken to diverged in terms of articulating a concept of career as a project of self-management. However, it might be said that the concepts of ‘career’ and ‘project’ are definitionally gendered through their enmeshment within, arguably, ‘phallogocentric’ notions of control and progress. 4 It is interesting to note that there is considerable debate within the accountancy firms as to whether it is desirable to recruit accountancy graduates. It is felt that they will have too many pre-conceptions and too ‘theoretical’ an approach to accounting. Moreover, within the firm in question, such graduates had tended to perform less well in professional examinations which was felt to be a reflection of a tendency to complacency fostered by belief in the value of their degree. 5 Alternatively these comments did form part of an act—put on for my benefit. 6 In fact, this puzzlement may well indicate that the person in question was not very well assimilated into the office culture, otherwise the ‘satisfactory’ ratings received would have served as a warning. This lack of assimilation seems likely to have been part of the reason for the sacking—for example, the employee mentioned being ‘too quiet’ to fit in properly. 7 In these cases, the project of the self and career become interchangeable. However, in many cases, career is simply one part of the project of the self, as illustrated by the following remarks:

It’s all about ladders. I mean, not just work but getting married and having kids, or houses and cars and things like that. You’re always trying to make yourself get one stage further on. You have to have something to aim for, don’t you? (Qualified accountant)

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Or: The thing about working here is that you take a lot of responsibility and put in long hours but you’ve got to be balanced about it and make sure that you’re getting things in perspective like social life and family and so on. You could say it’s a management problem, that [laughs]— managing yourself, your own time, otherwise you’d hardly be living a proper life at all and by the time you retire you’ll suddenly realise you haven’t had the life you could have had. But it’s too late if you leave it ‘till then. For instance, there’s a manager here who boasts that his son saw him at home and said ‘who’s that strange man?’, now I think that’s pretty awful if it’s true. There’s no way I’m prepared to get myself into that kind of situation. (Manager)

Both of these remarks are nicely indicative of the notion of life as a project to be managed, as well as emphasising that career is only one aspect of such a project. It may also be noted that the manager referred to as boasting about being a stranger at home was presumably one for whom career and the project of self were identical. 8 In fact, it is worth noting that the possibility of colleagues becoming future clients informs a lot of behaviour in the practice, perhaps including the process of counselling out as an alternative to sacking. 9 Unlike the other interviews quoted in this chapter, this interview was not tape-recorded. Written notes were taken.

References Banks, M., Bates, I., Breakwell, G., Bynner, J., Emler, N., Jamieson, L. and Roberts, K. (1992) Careers and Identities. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect. Kernel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Burrell, G. (1988). ‘Modernism, post modernism and organizational analysis 2: the contribution of Michel Foucault’. Organization Studies, 9:221–235. Dandeker, C. (1990) Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dean, M. (1991) The Constitution of Poverty: Towards a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge. Deetz, S. (1992) ‘Disciplinary power and the corporation’, in M.Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds) Critical Management Studies. London: Sage. Dingwall, R. and Lewis, P. (eds) (1993) The Sociology Of The Professions. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Evetts, J. (1992) ‘Dimensions of career: avoiding reification in the analysis of change’. Sociology, 26:1–21.

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Ewald, F. (1991) ‘Insurance and risk’, in G.Burchell, C.Gordon and P.Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1979) ‘On Governmentality’. Ideology and Consciousness, 6:5–22. Fox, S. (1989) ‘The panopticon: from Bentham’s obsession to the revolution in management learning’. Human Relations, 42:717–739. Giddens, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harper, R. (1988) ‘The fate of idealism in accountancy’, presented at the Second Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Accounting Conference, 11–13 July, Manchester. Kerfoot, D. and Knights, D. (1993) ‘HRM and the gendered terrains of paternalism’, 8th Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. New York, March 1993. Knights, D. (1989) ‘Subjectivity, power and the labour process’, in D.Knights and H.Willmott (eds). Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan. Knights, D. and Collinson, D. (1987) ‘Disciplining the shopfloor: a comparison of the disciplinary effects of managerial psychology and financial accounting’. Accounting, Organisations and Society, 12:457–477. Miller, N. and Morgan, D. (1993) ‘Called to account. The CVAs autobiographical practice’. Sociology, 27:133–143. Miller, P. and O’Leary, T. (1987) ‘Accounting and the construction of the governable person’. Accounting, Organisations and Society, 12:235–265. Power, M. (1991) ‘Educating accountants: towards a critical ethnography’. Accounting Organisations and Society, 16:333–354. Rose, N. (1989a) Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1989b) ‘Governing the enterprising self, presented at the Values Of The Enterprise Culture Conference, Lancaster University. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992) ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’. British Journal of Sociology, 43:173–205. Sakolsky, R. (1992) ‘Disciplinary power and the labour process’, in A.Sturdy, D.Knights and H.Willmott (eds) Skill And Consent. London: Routledge. Sewell, G. and Wilkinson, B. (1992) ‘“Someone to watch over me”: surveillance, discipline and the just-in-time labour process’. Sociology, 26:271–289. Townley, B. (1993) ‘Foucault, power/knowledge and its relevance for HRM’. Academy Of Management Review, 18:518–545. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. New York: Quarto.

7 Fetish failures Interrupting the subject and the other1 Steffen G.Böhm

Introduction This chapter is concerned with the conceptualisation of $, which in Lacan’s algebra stands for the ‘barred’ or the ‘destructed’ subject, the subject that is nothing but full of emptiness. The Lacanian subject has no identity itself; instead it is defined by a lack that is filled by the Other. For Benjamin the flâneur, the dandy who strolled through nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, is such a ‘destructed subject’. The flâneurs subjectivity is characterised by a special empathy with the commodity that lures him into a’dream world’ in which the most mundane things for sale can be enjoyed. In what is a series of interruptions, the image of the flâneur, who for Benjamin is the archetypical subject of nineteenth-century modernity, is ‘translated’ into today’s world of twenty-firstcentury ‘hypermodern(organ)isation’, whose main icon, it could be argued, is the management consultant. This interruptive ‘translation’ is done by way of discussing the ‘goings-on’ of commodity fetishism which is shown to be the main ‘phantasmagoric’ fantasy, or ideology, of modernity. It is argued that the commodity enables the subject to identify with what is otherwise a failing Other—the commodity-Other fills the subject. This chapter’s critique of commodity fetishism is, however, not thought to be a call for a transparency of social relations. Quite the contrary, what is shown with Zižek is that precisely this belief in transparency is already part of the ‘goings-on’ of commodity fetishism. In the last part of this chapter, the question of hope is raised. It is argued that there is no hope for transparency, progress or a full identity of the subject; instead there is only hope for a failure of the relationship between subject and Other. It is precisely this failure which describes the political importance of the question of the subject and the Other. Kafka’s alien ‘swamp world’ For just as K.lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile toward him. It may

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Figure 7.1 The ‘modern’, the time of hell (Walter Benjamin); Parisian Arcade, Anonymous, nineteenth century. happen that a man wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into a vermin. The Alien [die Fremde, also ‘exile’, ‘foreign land’]—his alien—has gained control over him. (Benjamin 1977a:424; 1999a:122, translation modified)2

‘Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’ This is the opening line, the beginning, of Kafka’s novel, The Trial (In German, Der Prozess). What follows is an endless process3 of seemingly disjointed interventions by the court, the Other, which is represented by pompous buildings, the inspector and other state officials—but as a whole the Other remains

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invisible; that is, there is nobody who can explain to Joseph K. precisely why he has been arrested. ‘The Court wants nothing of you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go,’ he is told. Joseph K. lives in a constant fear of this Other that seems to have gained total control over his body. ‘I have experience…and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land’, notes Kafka (quoted by Benjamin 1977a:428; 1999a:126). His body ‘slips away from him’; it seems to disappear into what Benjamin calls Kafka’s modern ‘swamp world’ (Benjamin 1977a:428; 1999a:126): ‘the world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms’ (Benjamin 1977a:410; 1999a:109)—the world of early twentieth-century AustriaHungarian modernity with all its excesses of the bureaucratic state. But Kafka’s ‘swamp world’ is not only dark and dusty—it is also ‘beautiful’. One recalls, for example, the painter scene in The Trial: ‘Wouldn’t you like to see a picture or two that you might care to buy?’ After K. has agreed to purchase the picture, the painter immediately sees his chance and offers another one of his ‘beautiful’ creations: ‘Here is the companion picture.’ ‘You seem to like the subject.’ The painter fishes out another couple of canvases with exactly the same wild heathscape as a motif. In the end K. buys them all. Once the commodity, the Other, has sensed the possibility of a sale, it performs all sorts of ‘beautiful’, ‘wild dances’ in order to fill the subject’s apparent lack. Kafka is a subject that lives in an alien ‘swamp world’, a subject without home and nation.4 He is in exile; he lives in a foreign, alien land—but not just because he is a Jew who is not welcomed amongst the Czech and German population of Prague. He is not only a stranger in a foreign land, but also a stranger to himself. Adorno writes that Kafka’s ‘self lives solely through transformation into Otherness’ (1977a:275–276; 1967a:262). One could also say that Kafka is never himself, because he is constantly arrested by the Other: the court, the commodity, modernity as such—things that transform him into something else than himself. Kafka’s ‘heroes’ seem to always become animals or vermin. But Kafka is quite bemused about his situation, although, as Benjamin points out, this must be seen as a desperate, melancholic bemusing. Apparently Kafka frequently laughed out loud while reading out his own novels to his friends. ‘Kafka’s world’, writes Benjamin, ‘is a world theatre. For him, man is on stage from the very beginning’ (1977a:422; 1999a:121, translation modified). With his novels, Kafka creates his own theatre to stage the ‘swamp world’, or fantasy, as Zižek calls it. For him, Kafka’s literature is the ‘the mise en scène [staging] of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality’ (Žižek 1989:36). But this fantasy does not have a single centre, a clear point of symbolic reference. Thus Kafka’s work ‘is never something purely individual’ (Benjamin 1977a: 430; 1999a:127).5 This is to say that it is not a subjective experience that lets Kafka write—one cannot reduce his work to a psychological category. Instead, for Benjamin, only a collective, displaced enunciation can take responsibility for the ‘things’ Kafka writes about (Bensmaïa 1986:xii). In this sense Kafka’s work is not psychological in nature but historical; it provides a picture of the collective enunciation, the Other, that produces modern subjectivity in a particular historical constellation. First interruption: the (consultant’s) other scene Once upon a time there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. A brand new BMW

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screeches to a halt next to him. The driver, a young man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerrutti shoes, Oakley glasses, TAG wrist watch and a DKNY tie, gets out and asks the shepherd: ‘If I guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?’ The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sprawling field of sheep and says: ‘Okay.’ The young man parks the car, connects his notebook and wireless modem, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms, then prints a 150 page report on his high-tech mini printer. He then turns to the shepherd and says: ‘You have exactly 1,586 sheep here/ The shepherd answers: ‘That’s correct, you can have your sheep.’ The young man takes one of the animals and puts it in the back of his vehicle. The shepherd looks at him and asks: ‘Now, if I guess your profession, will you pay me back in kind?’ The young man answers: ‘Sure.’ The shepherd says: ‘You are a consultant.’ ‘Exactly! How did you know?’ asks the young man. ‘Very simple,’ answers the shepherd. ‘First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew. Third, you do not understand anything about my business…and I’d really like to have my dog back.’6

Kafka’s work can be seen, according to Benjamin (1999a:139), as ‘an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by …the experience of tradition…and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller.’7 However, Kafka cannot name this experience—he cannot find the ultimate name for the Other that makes him experience what he experiences. Thus for Benjamin, Kafka merely gestures towards the Other; his work is a gestus, an elliptical gesturing towards modes of modern enunciations, the modern ‘swamp world’, which constantly ‘destructs’ the subject (1977a:418; 1999a:116–117). When I speak here of ‘destruction’ I refer to two things: first, the term is used in relation to the Lacanian notion of $, or perhaps subject, the ‘barred subject’ (1977:292ff)—one could also say the ‘destructed subject’. This term refers to Lacan’s conception of the subject that is defined by lack—a lack that is filled by the symbolic regime, the Other. Thus, one could say that Kafka’s world is not made of subjects, but of objects, or Others—Kafka’s subjects always already become someThing else, they are in transformation, or translation, into Otherness. Second, yet not unrelated to the first point, ‘destruction’ refers to a philosophical movement, an engagement with a phenomenon. The phenomenon which is to be destructed in this chapter is that of the (modern) subject.8 Here destruction must not be understood as a negativity; it is not a getting rid, or an eradication, of the subject. Instead, destruction implies both a negative and positive movement; it is an interruption, a movement of putting a phenomenon into question in order to show its limits and open up new possibilities for its theorisation and practice. Destructing is gesturing. Gesturing does not annihilate established symbolic

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regimes; it is not simply trying to get rid of ‘the subject’. Instead it is an engagement that moves in between symbolic categories in order to find a passage beyond them. Such gesturing, Kafka’s gesturing, is labelled by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘minor literature’, which does not concern itself with individual symbolisations (the individual psyche, the father, the family). Instead ‘minor languages’ are always already political as they connect individual concerns (or the family triangle) to the Other, that is, wider social triangles— commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical (1986:17). Therefore, the project of a destruction of the subject can never just concern itself with the individual, but must be connected to the destruction of collective enunciations, the objective, the Other—that which produces subjectivity. This chapter, then, explores the possibilities for such a destruction of the subjective/objective. But again, what follows is not simply an annihilation, or eradication. Instead this chapter aims to destruct; that is, it aims to present a movement of interruptions that puts subject and object and their relationship into question. As we shall see, these interruptions are always already concerned with the political.

The allegorical walk: of the flâneur When Benjamin relates Kafka’s ‘swamp world’ to the ‘experience of the modern big-city dweller’ he indirectly connects Kafka’s literary gestures to the allegorical poetry of Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet whose works, such as Flowers of Evil (1993) and Spleen de Paris (1970), provided Benjamin with a rich source for his literary montage, The Arcades Project, which is to be understood as a destructive analysis of Parisian modernity. For Benjamin, there is a close affinity between Kafka’s and Baudelaire’s works. Both writers do not seem to have a home. They are strangers in their hometowns and strangers to themselves. For Benjamin, it is this estrangement that marks modern subjectivity—it is beautifully expressed in one of Baudelaire’s poems from the collection Paris Spleen: The Stranger

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?

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I love the clouds…the clouds that pass…up there…up there… the wonderful clouds! If this poem can perhaps serve as allegory for modern subjectivity as such, then there is something airy and fluid about it. The Baudelairean modern subject is a stranger who floats or passes through traditional symbolic triangles (e.g. family, nation). The modern subject can thus be seen as being homeless; it is always already somewhere else—in the clouds. This, however, does not mean that Baudelaire’s subject does not have any ties. His poetry does not describe a subject who floats in a vacuum, who is completely ‘free’ of any socio-symbolic relations. Instead Baudelaire’s subject can perhaps be seen as a ‘floating signifier’;9 a subject that is not simply determined by traditional symbolic triangles (the father, the mother, the nation) but by a host of different triangles that invade the body of the subject. Thus, at heart, Baudelaire’s modern subject is divided and destructed; it has lost its traditional symbolic reference points. The question is: what has replaced the traditional symbolic nodes? Put differently: why does The Stranger dream of the clouds; what’s in the clouds; what is (in) this Other? Second interruption:10 ‘Know thyself? No thanks! In everyday language we usually do not refer to the subject. Instead we talk of the ‘individual’, the ‘person’, the ‘body’, the ‘ego’. We talk of ‘you’, ‘me’ and ‘others’. In other words, in everyday life the subject is easily identifiable and its boundaries seem clearly visible—it represents itself as something unified. Most people will have heard of Freud’s ‘unconscious’ by now, but even this seems to be mostly seen as something that is going on ‘inside’ the body or mind. Such understanding of the subject is often mirrored by academic discourse, such as Organisation Studies, the field that theorises and practices the subject of organisation. Organisational psychology, leadership, human resource management, training and development, organisational learning,…—there is a long list of discourses that seem to have the management of the organisational member, as individual, firmly in their grasp. What they attempt to get to know, to analyse and to manage, that is, to make more efficient, is a subject that, first of all, seems to be seen as an organisational resource, as entity, as unified thing. ‘Know thyself—this seems to be the common strategy of the organisational analyst: know you, me, and others in order to manage better.11 What seems to be presupposed by such a view is that the analysis of the subject has to start with the individual, the ego. For Lacan, however, ‘the subject goes well beyond what is

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experienced “subjectively” by the individual’ (1977:55). For him, the subject cannot be presupposed; that is, it cannot be taken for granted that we can ever get to know ourselves. Thus, ‘the subject as such is uncertain’ (1998:188). For Lacan the social is not constructed by the interplay of subjective experiences of others (with a small ‘o’); that is, Lacan is not a social constructionist like Berger and Luckmann (1966). Instead the subject is ‘overdetermined’ by the symbolic order (words, meanings, narratives) that pre-exists. Lacan calls this symbolic order ‘the Other’ (with a capital ‘O’), which must be seen to be external to the subject. This Lacanian Other forms the subject’s identity: ‘The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject—it is the field of that living being in which subject has to appear’ (1998:203). In other words, for Lacan ‘the subject depends on the signifier’, which has to be located ‘in the field of the Other’ (1998:205). Thus the Lacanian subject is not a priori ‘full’—there is nothing to discover ‘inside’ the subject, through self-knowledge or any other psychological strategy. Instead the subject is defined by an a priori lack, or gap. This lack is constantly filled and refilled by the symbolic regimes of the Other. One could also say that the subject does not stand in opposition to the object, the Other; instead it can be seen as a ‘fold’ of the Other, to use a Deleuzian expression (1988:94ff). The implications of such theorisation of the subject are immense. It moves us away from the humanist essentialism that seems to be underlying most theoretical and everyday discourses. It links ‘the I to socially elaborated situations’ (Lacan 1977:5); that is, the I is not viewed as the grand constructor of sociality, but as product of this very sociality. Therefore for Lacan the question of the subject is always already one of alienation (1998:203ff). That is, because the subject is not ‘free’ of any ties, because it is produced by the Other, is comes into existence by way of an invasion of the Other’s symbolic meanings. But this invasion can never be a ‘full invasion’, an invasion that completely fills the subject’s lack. Put differently, although the subject can only exist through the symbols of the Other, this symbolisation can never capture the totality of the subject’s Real.12 Thus a full identity of the subject is impossible—there will always be a gap between the Other and the Real. Therefore Lacan does not speak of identity but of identification (see, for example, 1977:61ff). In other

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words, the subject constantly tries to construct a stable, unifying identity, either on the imaginary or symbolic level. But because this cannot be ever achieved fully, there will always be a lack. What we are therefore dealing with is not identity but ‘a series of identifications, failed identifications—or rather a play between identification and its failure’ (Stavrakakis 1999:29). Thus for Lacan the subject is constituted by a certain failure, the failure to fully identify with the Other, the symbolic order. One could also say that at the heart of the Lacanian subject is not harmony, the fully unified and biologically whole individual, but antagonism—there will always be a gap in the subject; the question of the subject will never be closed. It is precisely this antagonism that defines the political importance of the Lacanian theory of the subject.

For Benjamin, Baudelaire himself is The Stranger who walks through nineteenth-century Paris to look for the Other. This walker is the flâneur who takes a special place in Benjamin’s analytical exploration of Parisian modernity; for him the flâneur is the modern subject par excellence (see, for example, 1974a/1973; 1999c). The Parisian flâneur is an upper-middle-class, bourgeois man13 who walks in places where there are big crowds and ‘things’ to see—for example in shopping arcades, which began to appear in Paris at around 1850 (Benjamin 1999c). Benjamin sees Baudelaire as a poet-flâneursubject whose experience is characterised by the ‘shock-events’ of the modern city: commodities, advertising images, anonymous crowds. For Benjamin the flâneur has a deep empathy with these objects, these ‘things’: ‘The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity’ (1974a:558; 1973:55). As if the commodity had a soul, it tries to ‘nestle’ in the body-house of the flâneur: ‘Like a roving soul in search for a body’ the commodity ‘enters another person’ whenever it wishes (1974a:558; 1973:55). Benjamin writes that this luring sensuousness of the commodity ‘intoxicates’ the flâneur, the narcotic commodity lures him into a ‘dream world’ in which the most mundane things for sale can be enjoyed. For Benjamin, then, the flâneur is the modern subject par excellence because he is part of a class that is thoroughly destructed by the rise of modernity and capital in mid-nineteenth-century Paris: The very fact that their share could at best be enjoyment, but never power, made the period which history gave them a space for passing time. Anyone who sets out to while away time seeks enjoyment. It was selfevident, however, that the more this class wanted to have its enjoyment in this society, the more limited this enjoyment would be. The enjoyment promised to be less limited if this class found enjoyment of this society possible. If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment, it could not spurn empathizing with commodities. It had to enjoy this identification with all the pleasure and the uneasiness which derived from

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a presentiment of its own destiny as a class. Finally, it had to approach this destiny with a sensitivity that perceives charm even in damaged and decaying goods. (Benjamin 1974a:561; 1973:59) In Benjamin’s eyes, Baudelaire beautifully succeeded in enjoying this ‘damaged and decaying’ society, but only ‘as someone who had already half withdrawn from it’ (1974a:561; 1973:59). To be sure, with his poetry Baudelaire always ‘remained conscious of the horrible social reality’ that surrounded him, ‘but only in a way in which intoxicated people are “still” aware of reality’ (1974a:561; 1973:59). Baudelaire’s awareness of reality is one that has been produced through his identification with the commodityOther, with the symbolic structure of modern reality. It is this Other which fills his subject-space with ‘alien’ desires, desires that make him enjoy the ‘thing-like’ social reality. But he does not take it seriously; he turns the commodity spectacle into a theatre: every mundane aspect of the commodity world is turned into a source for enjoyment. This is Baudelaire’s attempt to construct his identity—an identification with a society that is at heart damaged, destructed. According to Benjamin, the flâneur’s theatrical enjoyment does not work through symbolisation but carnivalesque allegorisation. Etymologically ‘allegory’ can be translated as ‘other speech’ or as ‘speech of the Other’.14 In contrast to the symbol, which cannot exist without semiosis that discursively organises the signification system of the symbol, allegory does not depend on a fixed system as it signifies non-discursively and instead figurally, not through semiosis, but through mimesis15 (Lash 1999:103). ‘The allegorist pulls one element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function’ (Bürger 1984:69). In other words, allegory is essentially a non-systematic fragment; that is, allegorical meaning is created by extracting fragments out of their ‘original’ context—the original symbol is turned into an Other, a theatrical space. What allegory thus perhaps points to is ‘the Other speech’ of the Other. This is to say that allegory can be seen as that which unsettles the symbolic order, the Other, that which goes beyond it, the Real of the Other. Allegory is a historically conditioned category which, for Benjamin, appeared first in the Baroque. In his Trauerspiel book, i.e. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1974b/1977c), Benjamin counterposes the German Baroque Trauerspiel (‘tragic drama’ or ‘mourning play’) and ancient classic tragedy. The classic antiquity’s mythological cosmology signifies the continuity between natural, human and the divine; that is, classic tragedy is embedded in a relatively fixed symbolic system of divine gods through which nature is mimed. In the Baroque Trauerspiel this ‘natural divinity’ is lost and replaced by dead allegories. Classical, ancient symbols became ‘dead figures’. They only survived as allegories, for example, as demons and astrological signs (Buck-Morss 1989:165). Thus the Baroque, with its absolute power of Christianity, created meaning through the allegorical destruction of ancient mythological tradition. For Benjamin, the Trauerspiel was a spectacle of a culture that had gone through the apocalypse (Lash 1999), a culture that had seen the destruction of tradition through the construction of allegories, a culture that lived in ruins. Then, at the time of Benjamin’s writing, humanity stood again right in the middle of another apocalypse: the modern commodity had entered the theatrical stage. The commodity, writes Marx, ‘appears, at first sight, to be a trivial and easily understood

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thing. Our analysis shows that, in reality, it is a vexed and complicated thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (cited in Benjamin 1982:245; 1999c:181). One usually takes the commodity for granted; it appears to be an objective fact. But a closer inspection, an inspection that seemed to be Marx’s tremendous life project, the apparent objectivity and normality of the commodity turns out to be a monstrous spectrality (Derrida 1994), which consists in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves… It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (Marx 1976:164–165) Just as the allegories of the Baroque Trauerspiel destructed ancient symbolism of the tragedy by turning them into ruins, the commodity destructs existing social relations and conceals them as relations between dead things. ‘Allegory is the instrument (Armatur) of the modern’, writes Benjamin (1974c:682, my translation). What Benjamin implies here is that the commodity is today’s Trauerspiel, or theatrical mourning play: it destructs existing relations of social organisation by allegorising them. For him the Parisian Passage (arcade) is the place where modern allegories find their spatial expressions. What he was concerned with in his Arcades Project16 was the study of this early period of modernity in which the arcade—where the commodity is on display to be desired, gazed at, dreamed about, yielded into and occasionally also bought—became a temple of modern consumerism. For Benjamin, the Parisian Passage is quite literally the point of passage17 into modernity, into new historical territory, into the realm of the commodity. However, the glitzy, shiny world of the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade did not last forever. By the time of Benjamin’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s, the Passage had become the ‘graveyard’ of modernity, where everything from palm trees to photographs and feather dusters to pocket knives was on sale. In its decline, the arcade had transformed into a ‘flea-market’ for the ruins of modernity, the material excesses of industrial and technological revolutions. Once glorious, pompous and triumphant palaces of wealth, by the 1930s the Passagen had become what Benjamin called an ‘imagespace’ for the monstrous ‘achievements’ of humanity’s ‘progress’. The flâneur, Benjamin’s modern subject par excellence, is in the midst of the Passage, the historical passage into capital modernity. Benjamin sees the flâneur as an allegorist who works with a particular type of raw material: the commodity. He translates the commodity into allegorical material which provides him with a profane enjoyment. This translation is not a question of work or active transformation. It is passive, mimetic. The flâneur has a satanic Einfühlung, an empathy with commodities…. He is not the hero, but instead performs the hero; not through action, but satanically through Haltung (bearing, posture, style). The flâneur

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allegorizes commodities through transforming them into a drunken stream or rush. (Lash 1999:329–330) The image of the flâneur is originally tied to a specific time/space juncture: nineteenth century Paris, the capital of modernity, the place where early bourgeois capitalism moved into ‘modern high capitalism’ (Tester 1994). However, in the process of the destruction of the Parisian arcades, the flâneur too is destructed and transformed into other ‘modern heroes’, such as the ‘sandwich-man’.18 In other words, the flâneur-subject is not a stable entity; instead it can be seen as an empty space that is filled by the Other, by modernity’s symbolic order: the commodity, the market, urbanisation. With the accelerated commodification of life in the twentieth century, the flâneur’s subjectivity is transformed—from the strolling flâneur to the ‘entrepreneurial’ sandwich-man. The transformation of the flâneur can perhaps be compared to the metamorphoses of Kafka’s ‘modern heroes’ who always seem to become something else, an Other—animals, monsters, vermin. Third interruption: looking for the next client Today we do not seem to walk much any more; our movement is not restricted to the arcade or department store. Instead our movement has increasingly become ‘virtual’. Today we do not only walk through the city; ‘now speed moves into a different register: from the movement of people and material objects in space to the movement of images and signals at absolute speed’ (Lash 1999:289). This is Virilio’s new age of ‘polar inertia’ (1999a) and the ‘information bomb’ (1999b), a global ‘supermodernity’, as Augé calls it, where the arcade has transformed into a variety of non-places (1995): airports, highway service stations, hotels, amusement parks, shopping malls. This is also an age where Newtonian timespace gives way to electro-magnetic fields through which information and communication media move at the speed of light. Perhaps we can call it ‘hypermodern(organ)ization’ (Armitage 2001) in which we, as information and knowledge workers, surf the Internet, use mobile phones and send emails around the world in seconds. Perhaps the ‘hero’ of this ‘hypermodern(organ)ization’ is the management consultant.19 Is the management consultant not comparable to the flâneur in the sense that both have a special relationship with the commodity, they both turn the commodity into a fetish? Could both of them not be seen as the archetypical subjects of their respective eras? For Benjamin, the flâneur

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‘represents’ nineteenth-century Parisian modernity; the consultant could be seen as the ‘hero’20 of today’s global ‘knowledge economy’, today’s world-integrated capitalism. Like the flâneur, the management consultant has a special empathy with the commodity. The consulting subject could be seen as a walking commodity: the client pays her or him for the hour or the day—this is what the consultant has in common with the prostitute. The ‘flexible’, often self-employed consultant constantly has to ‘offer’ her- or himself on the market. In this sense, one is bought as a consultant just like the prostitute is picked up on the street corner. With the consultant and the prostitute, the commodity becomes alive; human body and commodity become one thing.21 As consultant or prostitute, one has to constantly look out for the next client; one has to sell one’s body-commodity in order to reproduce one’s labour power. Social relations are thus turned into relations between thing-like bodycommodities. The consultant’s subjectivity is ruled over by the commodity—something which s/he shares with the flâneur who is intoxicated by the commodity and thus enjoys the consumption of dead material. The posture and style of the flâneur can also be compared to the management consultant: both develop an empathy with the commodity by looking immaculate and dressed to be gazed at by the commodity. For the management consultant, the appearance is a defining selling point: the newest BMW sports limousine, the most expensive Rolex watch, technology gadgets, boats, houses—all is needed to sell a certain image. Like the flâneur, the management consultant also does not have a home in the strict sense. If the flâneurs home is the non-place of the arcade where the commodity is on display, the management consultant’s home is the global non-places of travel: one lives in downtown London, one goes to the airport to take a plane to Berlin (or wherever) where the client has its global business headquarters, one stays in a five-star hotel and returns to London for the weekend…on this journey the commodity is always with the consultant.

What the transformation of the flâneur points to is the Lacanian notion that the subject is not a stable, unified, even ‘full’ entity. Instead it is historically contingent; it is always already somewhere else; it is divided. Hence Lacan speaks of the ‘barred subject’, or $, a subject that does not seem to be constructed but destructed (1977:292ff). The ‘barred’ or ‘destructed subject’ is not ‘full’ of human life but instead an empty space, perhaps a non-

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place, which is filled by the Other, particularly the commodity (perhaps it is not a coincidence that $ signifies Lacan’s theory of the subject). It is the commodity-Other which turns the subject into a ‘lively’ thing, it theatrically animates it and organises its pleasures and enjoyments. In this sense the subject is always an Other, perhaps an animal or vermin, but not essentially ‘human’. But the subject still imagines to be a human. We will now have to explore in more detail how the modern subject’s imagination, its fantasy-world, works. The table and its fetish fantasies In a world where social relations have become thing-like, the things dress up for each other. This could be the claim. The flâneur dresses up to be seen by the crowd and the commodity on display in the Parisian arcades. The prostitute dresses up to attract the sexual attention of a client. The consultant dresses up to sell his/her body/knowledge/labour power to a company. The commodity has to look beautiful, animated and divine in order to find a buyer on the market. This brings to mind the image of the dancing table which Marx uses in the introductory paragraph of his discussion of commodity fetishism. At first sight, he writes, a ‘normal’ wooden table is an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. (1976:163) The point of Marx’s dancing table is to show how an ordinary thing, the table, acquires, once it has been turned into a commodity, an extra-sensuousness, perhaps an extrasublimity. Marx’s aesthetics of the commodity, however, is not something that is up to the subject, consumer or audience to interpret; the commodity’s beauty is an objectivity that is grounded in the very way the symbolic order is shaped in capital’s modernity. In other words, under capitalism, the commodity-table is a priori beautiful. As the commodity conceals social relations of production to make them appear as relations between things, the commodity is aestheticised, it acquires a sublime aura of objectivity. The table makes all sorts of wild dances not because someone subjectively imagines such a ‘grotesque idea’. No, such grotesqueness is structurally embedded in the Other as such. Marx uses the concept of fetishism to show how the objective grotesqueness of the table, that is, the systematic (mis)perception of relations between subjects (people, labour) as relations between objects (things, resources), works. It is worth quoting the passage, in which he introduces the concept, at length: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a

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social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. (Marx 1976:165) For Marx, then, commodity fetishism is the systematic substitution of relations between subjects by relations between objects. Take, for example, money: in everyday life we forget that money, an object, is the product of complex social relations; monetary value is the substitute for social value. We systematically fetishise money, which is an ordinary thing made out of paper or copper, as we (mis)perceive social relations as thing-like economic relations. Money thus becomes ‘beautiful’, a magical object, a fetish—the commodity, even though clearly a dead and empty thing, becomes ‘alive’; it makes all sorts of ‘wild dances’; it is worshipped and treated as a ‘natural’ Other. Why, then, does Marx ‘take flight into the misty realm of religion? Why does he use the term ‘fetishism’ to describe the ‘goings-on’ of the commodity? One can clearly sense a certain polemic and satirical intention in Marx’s writing on capitalist fetishism, which has been detected by a host of writers (for example, Mitchell 1986; Pietz 1993; Zižek 1989, 1997). Marx seems to like the idea of ridiculing the bourgeoisie and its vulgar economists who believe, just like ‘primitive’ African people, in magical objects, i.e. the ‘divine’ naturalness of the commodity. The term ‘fetishism’ was first used in an anthropological context to describe the ‘strange’ behaviour of African people who would worship certain magical objects.22 By comparing capital to ‘backward’ cultures, Marx thus seems to use the term to show the ‘primitivism’ of capital, to show its irrationality perhaps. One could say that this is the ‘negative’ interpretation of Marx’s usage of ‘fetishism’, an interpretation that portrays Marx as someone who would, somewhat ‘politically incorrectly’ today, ridicule cultural difference and Otherness. In contrast, a ‘positive’ interpretation would see Marx’s usage of the term ‘fetishism’ in relation to his serious lifelong interest in an analysis of the relationship between religion and

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economics. According to Pietz, Marx clearly chose ‘fetishism’ with care, as the term alludes to the juncture between individual ‘sensuous desire’ and historically specific social divisions of labour. In other words, ‘like fetishist cultures, civil society achieved its unity not by finding a principle of universality but endlessly weaving itself into a “system of needs”—a libidinal economy’ (1993:140–141). Capital’s specific libidinal economy’ finds its expression in the general form of the commodity. Marx argues that the formation of the commodity fetish takes place with the general form becoming a universal form, i.e. the social, libidinal practice becomes generally accepted custom or law—one could say that it becomes part of the symbolic order. But this order does not ‘fall from the sky’, as it were. This symbolic order, this Other, is produced, according to Taussig (1993), by way of a process in which the commodity allegorically mimes the social character of labour; that is, the sensuous contact of labour is copied to the commodity. In other words, the dead commodity, the Other, ‘swallows up’ the sensuous contact between people and thus acquires a sublime sensuousness itself. It is this extra-sensuousness of the commodity that Benjamin encounters when he analyses modern social relations in the Arcades Project. He sees the commodity jumping up and down and performing the wildest and newest dances. The commodity allegorically mimes the human to try to look like a human, to give the impression of having a soul. This process of allegorical mimesis finds its culmination in the prostitute, the commodity that is literally alive. Whereas for Benjamin the flâneur is the ‘modern hero’ par excellence in developing a close empathy with the commodity, in being exhilarated by the commodity, the prostitute is literally the personification of the commodity itself; she23 ‘is the becoming-human of allegory… In [her]…soulless, but still lust-offering body, allegory and commodity are married’ (1974d: 1151, my translation). The Benjaminian figure of the prostitute can thus be seen as the personification of the juncture between sexual and commodity fetishism, the juncture between psychoanalysis and Marxian politico-economic analysis. Fourth interruption: the other lack(s) In Organisation Studies, a field that theorises and practices the subject of organisation, it is not novel any more to announce ‘the death of the subject’ (Baack and Prasch 1997). In the past decade, various attempts have been made to ‘decentre the subject’, to strip the subject of all its purposeful agency, consciousness and intention. Cooper, for example, sees social agents as ‘“transmitting stations” that momentarily arrest the inarticulate flow in the speaking positions we conventionally call “I”, “me” and “you”’ (2001a: 188). That is, in Cooper’s view the autonomous agent gives way to a generalized ‘we’ where agents, computers, binary digits, signs, spaces mediate each other in a limbic, mutable space in which the boundary of an object is neither part of

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the enclosed object nor a part of the surrounding context…. ‘We’ are no longer knowing subjects but small transitory region(s) in a process of energetic metamorphosis. (Cooper 2001a: 194) In other words, Cooper’s ‘subjects’ are not subjects that live in a stable home; instead they are always already becoming something else—perhaps we can say that they live in the Other. Coming from a more psychoanalytic, that is Freudian, perspective,24 Carr and Zanetti (1999), too, show that the subject is dependent on the Other—they talk about the subject’s ‘seducement’ by the Other (1999:333). However, what these studies seem to have in common is a certain idealisation of the Other. For Cooper, the Other seems to be an unnameable ‘general collection and dispersion of parts and fragments which co-define each other in a mutable and transient assemblage of possibilities and relations’ (2001b:25). Although without a centre and fragmentary in nature, Cooper’s Other seems to be allencompassing, almost monolithic.25 For Carr and Zanetti, the Other is the ego-ideal, which in the work context might be the organisation-ideal—the symbolic structuring of an organisational context (organisational leadership, myth, stories; see also Gabriel 1995). Although Carr and Zanetti argue that ‘the organization ideal, similar to the ego ideal, is…a fantasy that is seldom achieved’ (1999:334), they are not at all specific about why the subject is not able to ever fully achieve an identification with this Other. Here I would like to suggest that what Carr and Zanetti, as well as Cooper, miss is the Lacanian point that not only the subject is defined by an a priori lack, but also the Other. For Lacan, the Other can never be a full, allencompassing Other, which can provide a full identity to the subject. He writes: Let me simply say that this is what leads me to object to any reference to totality in the individual, since it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his

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equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages. (1977:80) This is to say that precisely because the subject always lacks something, social collectivity, that is, objectivity reality, the Other, must also be defined by an a priori lack. But what is this ‘something’ that the subject and the Other lack? For Lacan this ‘something’ is jouissance, which could be translated as ‘enjoyment’, but it is not simply pleasure. For Lacan pleasure is produced by the symbolic order, the Other. Jouissance is beyond socially sanctioned pleasure (1998:184); it is located in the Real, that which is not symbolisable. Jouissance is therefore never fully attainable, it can never be assumed or incorporated into the Other. The Other is thus always lacking something. This lack occurs precisely at the point when it is attempted to symbolise the Real. As the Real and its jouissance are impossible to symbolise, there will always be a gap in any Other. One could also say that social objectivity is never fully objective; this objectivity is impossible. This is the aporia of the social. It is precisely this aporia which describes the political importance of Lacan’s work.

But what precisely defines this juncture between psychoanalysis and political economy? Sexual fetishism is, according to Freud, psychologically triggered by a trauma, the trauma that the female lacks a penis. This lack, according to Freud, is compensated by some other object, a symbolic substitute for the penis, an object that is invested with excessive energies. Thus, in the mind of the fetishist: the woman has a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute… We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. (Freud 2000:385; 1977:353) In other words, fetishism is triggered by a horror (castration) that leads to the substitution of a sexual object with an Other. This substitution occurs because the Other is lacking something (a sexual object, the penis). Therefore the subject’s attempt to accomplish a

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full identity by identifying with a supposedly ‘full’ Other is failing. Fantasy tries to fill this lack of the Other; it tries to provide a solution for the uncertainty that is produced by the gap between the subject’s need for identity and the failing of the Other to provide this full identity. Fantasy thus reduces anxiety and creates something like a harmonious picture which enables us to live without fear; it helps to obfuscate the true horror of reality (e.g. castration). Commodity fetishism is precisely such a fantasy; it is the response to a failing Other. The commodity is the object that the subject ‘adopts’ as a pet; it provides security, warmth and company. As the commodity fills the gap that is left behind by a failing Other, it enables the subject to identify again with the Other; the commodity substitutes the Other to become the Other. This is the basic process of capitalism’s ideological structuring of reality. Benjamin calls this ‘phantasmagoria’26—a world that is projected for us like a movie on a screen. The property appertaining to the commodity as fetish character attaches as well to the commodity-producing society—not as it is in itself, to be sure, but more as it represents itself and thinks to understand itself whenever it abstracts from the fact that it produces precisely commodities. The image that it produces of itself in this way, and that it customarily labels as its culture, corresponds to the concept of phantasmagoria … The latter is defined by Wiesengrund [Adorno] ‘as a consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object, insofar as the labor stored up in it comes to seem supernatural and sacred at the very moment when it can no longer recognized as labor’. (Benjamin 1982:822–823; 1999c:669) The commodity fetish is thus a fantastic illusion, a phantasmagoria, which serves the subject as tool to imagine the harmonious structuring of objective reality. But this is not a subjective illusion—it does not only work on the level of the imaginary. According to Marx, commodity fetishism must be seen as a systematic misrecognition; that is, commodity fetishism shapes the symbolic order, the Other, as such. Therefore, for Marx, this misrecognition is not a ‘false’ knowledge; there is no gap between the subject and the object here. The point is that commodity fetishism works as a power/knowledge regime, to use a Foucauldian expression, that produces everything that we might regard as knowledge. In other words, the commodity fetish, that has filled the gap of the lacking Other, shapes the subject and its imaginary-perceptual apparatus. But when we speak of the subject we do not have the conscious, active human being in mind. Instead we think of the flâneur, the prostitute, the consultant and the table—‘things’ that are animated by the Other, ‘things’ that traverse the boundary between human and non-human, between active and passive, alive and dead. Perhaps these ‘things’ are what Zižek calls the ‘objectively subjective’ (Zižek 1997:119). Thus, to come back to Marx’s table and its ‘grotesque ideas’, we could say: For this table, no less than the ego, is dependent on the signifier, namely on the word, which, bearing its function to the general, to the lectern of quarrelsome memory and to the Tronchin piece of noble pedigree, is

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responsible for the fact that it is not merely a piece of wood, worked in turn by the woodcutter, the joiner and the cabinet-maker, for reasons of commerce, combined with fashion, itself productive of needs that sustain its exchange value, providing it is not led too quickly to satisfy the least superfluous of those needs by the last use to which it will eventually be pure, namely, as firewood…. Furthermore, the significations to which the table refers are in no way less dignified than those of the ego, and the proof is that on occasion they envelop the ego itself. (Lacan 1977:132, translation modified)27 Therefore, Marx’s table, which at first sight seems to be an ordinary sensuous thing, acquires, once it has been turned into a commodity, a sublime extrasensuousness, because it now serves as a magical object within a broader system of libidinal needs. The table starts to dance and have ‘grotesque ideas’ because it fills the gap that is left behind by the lacking Other; it becomes the Other itself—it plays the role of God in the theatre play called modernity. The transparent void: of interpassivity When we attack commodity fetishism, that is, when we try to resist the ideological structure of today’s social relations, what exactly fuels this critique? What is its agency? As already mentioned, when Marx and Freud use the term ‘fetishism’, do they not imply a certain irrationality on behalf of the fetishist? Do they not attribute fetishism to ‘primitive’ behaviours of ‘less developed’ cultures or ‘unnormal’ human beings? Thus Žižuek asks whether in the very gesture of rejecting ideology (criticising the illusions and blindness of the ‘primitive’ Other, his veneration of false idols), the critique repeats the ideological gesture. It would be easy to level at Marx and Freud the criticism that their use of the term ‘fetishism’ also involves the same external gaze, and is thus no less ideological: does not Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism rely on the Utopian point of transparent social relations? (1997:99) We could also ask: is not the critique of fetishism based on a Utopian belief in the possibility of a harmony of social relations, the harmony between subject (individual) and object (society)? But Zižek realises, of course, that things are more complicated with Marx28 (and we have made some gestures above to show as to why this is). After all it was Marx who levelled a devastating critique at Utopian socialists, such as Owen, who would believe in the possibility for money, to stay with our example, to be a fully transparent medium between people. In Marx’s view, it is impossible to have money as some sort of neutral object—without the fetishistic inversion, as Zižek calls it (1997:101). In other words, money is only possible if people fetishise it as a magical object. Similarly one could say that it is not possible to have a perfectly working state-capitalist system in

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which everything can be organised by way of democratically negotiating between people. According to Marx, the fundamental assumption of Social Democracy is a Utopian belief. Yet today’s social relations seem to be characterised by exactly this fetishism—the fetishism of a Utopian belief in a harmonic transparency of social relations. How else can we interpret the celebration of notions of compromise, dialogue and democracy, which seem to dominate discourses in the media but also academia?29 Take Zižek’s (1997:102) example of the socalled ‘the making of…’ films or ‘fly on the wall’ documentaries on TV that are supposed to reveal to us how ‘real’ life behind the ‘official’ camera looks like. They give us the impression of being able to have full access to the organisation of social relations. In other words, today’s ideological process does not only work by fetishising the (magical) object itself—for example, the commodity that is advertised, or the political leader whose face appears on every TV channel—but also by ‘defacing’ (Taussig 1999) the magical object, by opening the ‘black box’ and showing the secrets behind the beautiful façade of things. Is today’s glass architecture not part of the same process of ‘defacement’? When Norman Foster puts a glass cupola on top of the Reichstag, from where ‘ordinary people’ can look directly into the chamber of the German parliament, or when the new General London Assembly is completely made out of glass to give us the impression of openness—is this architectural transparency not supposed to lure us into the belief of a transparency of government and ‘democratic’ society as such? Equally, is our shiny new electronic world of the Internet and mobile phone culture not based on a similar fetishism of transparency? Today we are made to believe that the Other is just a computer mouse click away: the Internet gives us access to all secrets of the world (one can even hack into the Pentagon apparently), mobile phones enable us to communicate everywhere with anybody (perhaps it is Habermas’ ultimate technological gadget to implement his theory of perfect communication)—this, at least, seems to be the talk. Whatever used to be unreachable, unbridgeable and unimaginable—our shiny new cyberworld seems to have the answer. Žižek (1997:127ff) thus asks: is not this New Age celebration of cyberspace an important new face of commodity fetishism, a fetishism that does not work by concealing relations but by supposedly making them transparent? This image of transparency is, however, not an invention of our so-called ‘postmodern’ world. Benjamin’s Parisian ‘phantasmagoria’, the arcades, the world of the strolling flâneur,30 was already made out of glass and mirrors. The arcade is a technology of the En-lightenment; as such its task was to tear down the rigid structures of society, open them up to let some light into the dark void of society. In this sense today’s cyberspace is a logical inheritor of the Parisian arcade. Fifth interruption: consulting the knowledge fetish The consultant is one of the main icons of our so-called global ‘knowledge economy’. We could suggest that s/he has become this icon by way of two fetishes working hand-in-hand. First, of course, the ‘standard’ Marxian commodity fetishism is at work, by which the consultant mistakes the commodity form for the social relations of production. The main commodity the consultant deals with is the knowledgecommodity, which appears both in a tacit

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(embodied) and explicit format. The tacit knowledge commodity is literally the body of the consultant who has to sell him- or her-self on the market—s/he is paid by the hour. Explicit knowledge commodities are the documents, presentations, reports, software programs and other technologies that the consultant deals with. For Nonaka and Takeuchi, the quintessential knowledge-creation process takes place when tacit knowledge is converted into explicit knowledge. In other words, our hunches, perceptions, mental models, beliefs, and experiences are converted to something that can be communicated and transmitted in formal and systematic language. (1995:230–231) Thus, for them it is only explicit knowledge that has real value as a commodity. Tacit and explicit knowledge are thus contrasted as being opposites.31 What we would like to suggest here is that what traverses these knowledge categories is the commodity. The knowledge commodity is both tacit and explicit; it finds its actualisation in the consultant’s body and his/her dealings with the knowledge market. The point of the Lacanian theory of the subject is that the Other (the commodity) traverses all boundaries between the objective and subjective, explicit and tacit. The consultant, as subjectivity, would not be possible without the commodity-Other; s/he desires and worships the commodity; s/he translates it ‘into the form of a drunken exhilaration’ (Lash 1999:329). However, this is not the only fetishism at work. As Zižek points out, commodity fetishism does not only work by concealing social relations but also by apparently making them more transparent. One could also say that knowledge fetishism is not only about worshipping the commodity, but also about worshipping an image of transparent social relations. Does the knowledge worker, the consultant, not believe that s/he is contributing to humanity’s progress, whether this is technological, economic, cultural or social progress? And is the notion of progress not inherently tied to an understanding that the social can be understood (knowledge), ‘enlightened’ and made transparent? It is exactly these images of progress that Benjamin sees to work closely together with the commodity fetish. In the

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flâneurs Parisian arcade, the Other does not only beautifully display the commodity but also sends sunlight through the glass ceiling.

The transparent world of cyberspace is often described as opening up new possibilities for interaction. But how is this interactivity to be understood? Who is doing the acting? Again, where does the agency of the Internet-surfer’ lie? Above we have already described the flâneur as someone who has a deep empathy with the Other, the commodity-Other. He is not an active participant of society, but someone who is concerned with his bearing, posture and style. He is passive in the sense that he allegorically mimes the spectral world of the Other. Are we not, to a large extent, similarly passive today? Although we live in a world of entrepreneurial ‘busy-ness’, of hyper-active interactivity, do we not often just mime the spectral fetish of the Other? Take the following Zižekian (1997:112) example: sitcoms or other shows on TV often have laughter ‘built into them’. That is, at a supposedly funny scene, suddenly the laughter of an invisible TV audience is presented to us. It is a laughter that makes us laugh or at least smile, although we might not find this scene funny at all, or might not understand the joke in the slightest. For Žižek, this is an example of the Other ‘doing it for us’—it laughs for us. What this means is that the subject does not actively do the laughing here; instead it does it passively—through the Other. Zižek calls this mimesis of the TV-laughter ‘interpassivity’, which in his view describes a lot of so-called interactivity today. The politically more valuable Žižekian example is the following one; he asks: ‘Is not the Western liberal academic’s obsession with the suffering in Bosnia the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering? One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing one’s academic career’ (1997:112). Does this ‘interpassive suffering’, or even ‘interpassive protest’, not also apply to the recent ‘Anti-Iraq-War’ phenomenon, especially in Western Europe? Is not part of this phenomenon that a lot of outraged Western intellectuals do their melancholic suffering through the Other, that is, their ideological fantasies about a non-violent, transparent society, while continuing with their middle-class existence far away from the violent realities of life? What this ‘interpassivity’ thus points to is the fetishism of an imagined transparency of social relations, which, as I have argued, works together with commodity fetishism to produce today’s ‘phantasmagoric’ social reality. This is to say that, instead of a rendering of the lack of the Other, that is, the fundamentally antagonistic nature of society, ‘we indulge in the notion of society as an organic Whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and cooperation’ (Žižek 1998:190). The point is that commodity fetishism works together with the fetishism of its ‘defacement’, the so-called critique of fetishism. Hopeful failures ‘I remember,’ Brod writes, ‘a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said. This

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reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”’ (Benjamin, quoting Brod 1977a:414; 1999a:112–113)

For Kafka, then, it seems that there is no hope for his subjects. Joseph K., for example, is never liberated from the court in a Hollywood-style ‘happy ending’. Thus it is probably not coincidental that most of his novels remained unfinished. As if he wanted to say: there is no ‘happy end’, there is no hope for us, there is no escape from the Other. What a failure! Failure? To do justice’, Benjamin writes, ‘to the figure of Kafka in its purity and peculiar beauty, one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.’ He continues: ‘One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervour with which Kafka emphasized his failure’ (1977a:445; 1999a:143). For Benjamin, then, Kafka is failing, his work is failing. But this failure is not to be thought of as an eradication of Kafka. Failure does not imply here that we should not read Kafka. Instead his failure is a gesture: a gesture towards the incompleteness of this world, the incompleteness of the question of the relationship between the subject and the Other. Kafka’s subjects always seem to become someone or something else; they live in a constant state of transformation into Otherness. They are thus failing as subjects, as subjects that are supposed to have a fixed identity. This ‘becoming’ shows that Kafka’s subjects are defined by lack; there always seems to be something missing. What is thus failing is the relationship between the subject and the Other. The subject can never quite identify with the Other; there always seems to be a lack in the other, which fails the subject’s attempt to fully identify with the Other. For Benjamin, it is precisely this failure which defines Kafka’s hope. Failure becomes fervour; failure becomes a way out; failure is hope. What is hopeful in Kafka’s failure is that the relationship between subject and Other is never made transparent. We never find out what the court or the castle is really all about. This invisibility of the Other frequently fuels, of course, all sorts of conspiracy theories: ‘who is at the controls of Empire?’; ‘who has masterminded 9/11?’; ‘who is behind the Western military-industrial complex?’ These and other questions are often raised precisely because the big Other is invisible and reality presents itself as a simulacrum, as a fragmented ‘swamp world.’ But there is no ‘one’, there is no one subject (or group of subjects) who controls this world. What we have tried to argue in this chapter is that we need to go beyond the ‘psychologism’ that is often practised in everyday life and implied by much of today’s academic discourse. There are no ‘individuals’ who are full of activity, purposefulness and consciousness. Instead what we call the ‘individual’ is an emptiness that is filled by the Other, the symbolic order. But this Other is not some sort of superstructure that blindly determines its base: there is no God. Instead the Other itself is defined by a lack. This is to say that the question of the symbolic order, of social collectivity, always remains open. Commodity fetishism is not the ‘final’ answer. Instead,

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society is always unfinished. According to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), society is fundamentally antagonistic. This is to say that the question(ing) of the relationship between the subject and the Other can never end, as if history could ever end. There is no end, and surely no ‘happy end’ to the ‘theatre play’ of society. All our attempts to finally stage the social ‘properly’ will fail. But equally, all we can do is to continually stage this theatre play. All of the modern ‘heroes’ discussed in this chapter are on stage of the world theatre: The law of this theatre is contained in a sentence tucked away in ‘A report to an Academy’: ‘I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason.’ Before the end of his trial, K. seems to have an intimation of these things. He suddenly turns to the two gentlemen wearing top hats who have come for him and asks them: ‘What theatre are you playing at?’ (Benjamin 1977a:423; 1999a:121) What ‘we’, the ‘subjectively objective’, can perhaps stage in these theatre plays are allegories of the symbolic order, ‘minor’ deviations of the ‘major’. This allegorical play is ephemeral, naive, absurd, excessive. Allegory does not point to the beauty of a whole but to the death, the ruins of the whole and its fragment. It therefore produces a new history from dead nature and thus transforms history into a different nature. What we thus could perhaps call for is a neo-Baroque that calls into question the established symbolic regimes of life in order to re-stage life, in order to change the subject. ‘These days’, says Deleuze, ‘it is no longer theological reason but human reason, Enlightenment reason, that is entering a crisis and breaking down. So in our attempts to preserve some part of it or reconstruct it, we are seeing a neoBaroque’ (1995:162). These neo-Baroque allegories could perhaps be called a ‘minor literature’, which ‘doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:16). Kafka is such a minority, such uniqueness, someone who does not stand outside language, but is able to continuously destruct the symbolic order from within and put the resulting fragments to work, organise them, as it were, into a unique, original, minor art form. Kafka is a failure. He died as a young man. But his failure is his and our hope. His theatrical body does not keep death at bay in a singular way, but instead develops a fantasy of death; it plays with death to be alive. This fantasy thus entails not so much the desire of an object, but the desire of power: the power to distance death by controlling its representations. The scope of this fantasy is global, for only through the fantasy of an allencompassing power of representation can the singularity of death appear to be brought under control. It is a fantasy in which the will triumphs over the world, transcending all distances, all obstacles; it is the triumph of mind over body, but perhaps even more, of media over matter. Only thus can death appear as something capable of being inflicted upon others at profit to oneself. (Weber 1997:104–105)

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Kafka has thus a ‘pure’ will to power. This will is not based on narcissistic anxiety or fatal guilt; he is not interested in his own image and its fate; he is not interested in his own subjectivity. This pure will is manifested by a ‘secret readiness’ of the subject to ‘kill’, that is, to destruct, the Other, and therefore to destruct himself.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the seventeenth EGOS Colloquium, ‘The Odyssey of Organizing’, Lyon, France, 5–7 July 2001. 2 In this chapter I have always used existing English translations of German texts, unless explicitly stated. In each reference the first page number relates to the German original, the second relates to the English translation. 3 The German word ‘Prozess’ means both ‘trial’ and ‘process’. 4 Compare Jonsson’s book, Subject Without Nation, which traces the history of modern identity in Robert Musil’s work, especially in The Man Without Qualities. Surely Joseph K., Kafka’s ‘hero’ of The Trial, could also be seen in the light of Ulrich, Musil’s ‘man without qualities’? 5 This is also what Deleuze and Guattari (1986:9) have in mind when they condemn the numerous psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations that Kafka’s work has been subjected to, especially his ‘Letter to the Father’. 6 This is an altered version of a joke that has frequented the Internet recently. 7 This quote is taken from a letter by Benjamin to his friend Gerhard Scholem, dated 12 June 1938, in which he critically engages with the first Kafka biography that was published by Kafka’s friend Max Brod in 1937 (see Benjamin 1999a). 8 There is not enough space here to discuss the philosophical concept of ‘destruction’ in all its details. Let me just briefly gesture towards Heidegger’s Being and Time, whose task was defined as ‘to destruct the traditional content of ancient ontology, which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question of Being’ (Heidegger 2001:22; 1962:44). For Heidegger, destruction ‘must not be understood negatively as involving the doing away with an ontological tradition. On the contrary, it seeks to indicate the positive possibilities of this tradition, which also means placing it within its limits’ (Heidegger 2001:22; 1962:44). Hence destruction does not simply mean to destroy something, as is usually assumed. On the contrary, destruction is a response to the Other that has not been questioned yet, that has been taken for granted; destruction shows the enabling boundaries of the Other and the way these have included and, more importantly, excluded possibilities. Destruction can thus be seen as an interruption of the way the world presents itself in subjects and objects. 9 The notion of the ‘floating signifier’ has been introduced by Laclau (see, for example, Laclau 1996:36–46; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler et al. 2000) to name the process of ‘filling in’ a signifier that is inherently unstable. The ‘subject’ is such a word that is ‘floating’, i.e. it is empty and calls to be filled. 10 If the ‘subject’ is inherently unstable, that is, if it is a ‘floating signifier’, it calls not only to be filled but also to be interrupted. Lacan’s theory of the subject can be seen to be such an interruption, or perhaps destruction. In his psychoanalytical practice Lacan is also said to have used the technique of interruption to ‘destruct’ his subjects (Bowie 1991). This ‘destruction’ is not an annihilation of his analytical subjects—Lacan did not kill them—but a questioning of their imaginary and symbolic narratives, a questioning that can deeply unsettle the world of a subject. But, according to Zižek, the point of analysis is not to confirm established narratives, but to realise that narratives as such emerge ‘in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism’ (1997:10–11). Thus, when a disturbed, unsettled subject comes to be analysed, the task of psychoanalysis is not, according to Lacan, to neatly put all the fragments together again to form a new (dreamy) narrative. Instead reality as such

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must be understood as contested, antagonistic terrain. In this sense, psychoanalysis is always already socio-political. 11 What I am roughly sketching out here is the argument put forward by Townley in her paper, ‘Know thyself (1995), which is partly repeated in Refraining Human Resources Management: Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work (1994). In Townley’s view it is our task to engage in an act of self-knowing, which is the process of giving meaning to the relations between oneself and the context in which one is evolving. According to her ‘“correct” knowledge is not beyond the individual’: the self can and must engage in a ‘practice of reflexivity and the development of a first-person standpoint’ (1995:284). 12 For Lacan, the Real (with a capital ‘R’) has nothing to do with reality. In fact, it is that which escapes the ‘normal’ symbolisation regime of reality. One could also say that the Real is the lack of the Other. The ‘Real’ is one of the three main categories Lacan uses to map human experience. The other two are the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’. For Lacan the imaginary plays the prime role in the construction of identity during the first 18 months of the infant. In what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan 1977:1–8), the subject acquires its first sense of unity and identity by encountering its own image—the infant thus constructs what Stavrakakis calls a ‘spatial imaginary identity’ (1999:17). Later on, however, this newly found unity is becoming more and more disrupted, as the lived experience does not correspond exactly with the imaginary. Thus one increasingly feels alienated by this image and searches for new ways to construct one’s identity. This is when the ‘symbolic’ enters the scene. One is now exposed to human language and a whole range of other signifying chains which one can identify with. For Lacan, reality is produced through a complex interplay between the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real. It is one of the tasks of this chapter to shed some light on this interplay. 13 The Parisian flâneur was indeed a man\a man in a full bourgeois wardrobe including a large hat, stick and cigar. To visualise the flâneur, see, for example, Parkurst Ferguson (1994). The sexual bias of Baudelaire and Benjamin has been challenged recently by feminist writers who argue that women, too, engage in flânerie; see, for example, Gleber (1999), Wolff (1985) and Wilson (1992). 14 This is confirmed by Weigel:

Virtually all explanations of allegory and allegorical method are in agreement over the etymological derivation from the Greek according to which ‘allegory’ is construed as ‘other speech’: allos other, agoreuein to speak (publicly). Some are more precise in their definitions of the relationship between ‘other’ and ‘speech’, translating allegory as ‘speaking other than publicly’: allah other than, agoreuein to speak in the agora or public assembly: allegory, then as ‘to speak other than comprehensibly to all’. (1996:96–97) 15 Mimesis is the act of imitating or copying some ‘thing’—turning it into an other; or, to follow Taussig, mimesis is ‘the ability to mime…, [it] is the capacity to other’ (1993:19). For Taussig, mimesis is a two-layered notion: a copying, or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous connection between imitator and imitated, subject and object. In other words, mimesis does not only involve a rational act of copying or imitating, but also a sensing of the Other, a ‘losing oneself in the Other’ (1993:66). In his short but dense essay, ‘On the mimetic faculty’ (1999b), Benjamin maintains that the mimetic faculty is more basic to cognition than the ability to speak, as conceptual language is already tied to some symbolic system. This ‘basic’ mimesis, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, resembles sensuous knowing as yielding, of mirroring the knower in the unknown, which they describe as: ‘to lose oneself in

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the environment instead of playing an active role; the tendency to let oneself go and sink back into nature. Freud called it the death instinct, Caillois “‘le mimétisme”’ (1979:227). For Benjamin, as well as Adorno and Horkheimer, this yielding, or the playful, creative, sensuous mimetic faculty, is suppressed in bourgeois modernity. This is not to say that mimesis has disappeared; on the contrary, it has mutated into different forms—mimesis has been re-organised under contemporary conditions of modernity. The flâneur can be seen to be in the middle of this re-organisation process of mimesis. 16 Benjamin’s Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) is a literary montage, which he constructed between 1927 and his death in 1940. If he had finished the project, it would have been nothing less, so he claimed, than a ‘materialist philosophy of history’. There is a very close resemblance between the Passagenwerk and his earlier Trauerspiel book. Both works attempt to provide a dialectical analysis of an established, almost trivial phenomenon, with the aim to show the historical conditioning of society and the interwoven nature of space and time. But what are the Parisian arcades? Benjamin notes in the opening pages of the Arcades Project:

These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. (1982:83; 1999c:31) 17 At this point we could note that the German ‘Passage’ does not only refer to the architectural meaning of ‘arcade’ but also the temporal—spatial meaning of ‘passage’, as movement across space and time into a new territory. The title of Benjamin’s book, Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), surely plays on these two meanings of Passage. In his Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) Benjamin sets out to develop analytical narratives about this passage of destruction and ground them in a historical materialism that uncovers the historical disruptions and continuities between the Baroque allegories of the Trauerspiel and the modern allegories of the commodity. Benjamin wants to question and destruct the profane beauty of the commodity and its spatial home, the arcades; he wants to decipher and destruct their petit-bourgeois aesthetics and, through his historical analysis, transform them into a new aesthetic experience. 18 Benjamin writes:

Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. The flâneur is the virtuoso of this empathy. He takes the concept of the marketability itself for a stroll. Just as his final ambit is the department store, his last incarnation is the sandwich-man. (1982:562; 1999c:448) 19 Here I use the name ‘management consultant’ as an ideal type subject that, in my view, can be seen to be ‘representative’ of today’s modern subjectivity as such. Just like the flâneur, who is the modern subject par excellence for Benjamin, I see the management consultant to be an image of today’s historical constellation. This ‘representation’ could, of course, be seen as problematic in many ways (not the least because I do not give any ‘empirical’ evidence here), but for me this is a speculation, a thought experiment. The subjectivity of the management consultant is also my speculative object in another recent paper, in which I juxtapose ethnographic images from the world of management consultants with Benjamin’s images of the flâneur, gambler, collector and prostitute, who can all be seen as ‘heroes’ of

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Parisian nineteenth-century modernity (Böhm 2002). The chapter at hand can thus be seen as an extension of this earlier paper. In Organisation Studies there has been a plethora of work on the consultant, most of which is nothing more than a blind celebration of the consultant as ‘hero’ of today’s ‘knowledge capitalism’. However, some attempts have been made to engage with the consulting world critically; these include perhaps: Ram (2000), Schuyt and Schuijt (1998), Letiche and van Hattem (2000), Glückler and Armbrüster (2003), Berglund and Werr (2000) and Fineman (2001). 20 The ‘heroic’ statue of the management consultant can, for example, be seen in business schools around the world. I have been teaching undergraduate students at Warwick Business School—for them consulting, and particularly management consulting, is clearly one of the most popular career choices or at least aspirations. The consultant is the idol of today’s working world; it is one of the main ‘drivers’ of the business of business education; it serves as the target, the object of desire, the fetish. Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Co., The Boston Consulting Group (to name but a few)—they all organise ‘career road shows’ from one business school to another. These companies are seen to be the ‘coolest’ places to work, although my impression is that not many students actually have the slightest idea about what it is like to work for them: long working hours, mundane IT programming, occupational stress—often these seem to be the symptoms of a consulting career. But the fantasy world of the management consultant is often too strong to resist. 21 In this regard, Marx writes: ‘Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer’ (statement in the 1844 Manuscripts, cited in Buck-Morss 1989:184, n147). 22 Anthropologically the term ‘fetish’ was first applied by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century—as feitiço—to idols and amulets, which were supposed to possess magical powers, and which were used by the natives for their religious worship. De Brosses (1760) was one of the first anthropologists who employed ‘fetishism’ as a general descriptive term and he claimed that Egyptian hieroglyphics were the signs of a fetishistic religion. Thus, according to the anthropological meaning of the term, the fetishist believes the fetish to be something supernatural; the fetish is seen to be an objective fact—natural, transcendental. Polhemus and Randall describe how the Portuguese must have felt upon their arrival in West Africa, where they first encountered the worship of fetishes:

How wide their eyes must have been, how confused their thoughts, as they first came into contact with ways of life untouched by Europe—an experience which today could only be matched by the arrival of extraterrestrials. So many things must have amazed them, but the one which history has focused upon is their fascination with the way the tribal peoples of West Africa believed that certain seemingly unmiraculous objects—a stone, a knotted string, an animal pelt, an amulet—possessed magical powers. (1994:39). 23 As already mentioned above, Benjamin’s somewhat stereotypical gender analysis could be seen as problematic. It is not my intention to simply reproduce it here. In fact my speculation about modern subjectivity aims to gesture, and it is not more than a gesturing, towards gender relations that cannot be clearly labelled as ‘masculine’ (flâneur) and ‘feminine’ (prostitute). My ‘modern hero’, the management consultant, must thus be seen as an asexual figure that combines the subjectivities of the flâneur and the prostitute. 24 At this point it might be worth noting that there has been a strange quietness in Organisation Studies about the work of Jacques Lacan. Whenever psycho-analysis is employed, one

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usually refers to Sigmund Freud’s work. I have come across only one significant paper that explores Lacan’s contribution to a theorisation of the organisational subject (cf. McSwite 1997). The sole focus on Freud has perhaps contributed to what can generally be seen as a certain ‘psychologism’ of psychoanalytic theories in Organisation Studies, which is similar to the above-mentioned psychologisation of Kafka’s work, for example. This is to say that what is often not achieved by psychoanalytic organisation theorists is the relation of the Oedipus triangle, ‘Mummy, Daddy, Me’, to wider economic, political and cultural triangles that make up the symbolic order of the Other. A lot of psychoanalytic writings in Organisation Studies (see, for example, Carr 1998; Carr and Zanetti 1999; Schwartz 1987) are therefore psychological and not political in nature. 25 Perhaps it is this monolithic Other which is also the target of writers such as Gabriel (1999) and Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) who have critiqued the recently popular so-called Foucauldian image of an all-encompassing, controlling Other that subjectivises fully and leaves no or only little room for resistance. 26 Cohen (1993) shows how the etymology of ‘phantasmagoria’ is linked to that of ‘allegory’, which becomes important in the light of my earlier discussion of Benjamin’s usage of allegory. Phantasmagoria comes from the Greek phantasma ‘ghost’ and agoreuein ‘to speak in public’, which makes the link to allegory obvious: ‘the public speech of the Other’. According to Cohen, Benjamin uses ‘phantasmagoria’ in his Arcades Project to show the universality of allegory, which was one of the main concepts in his Trauerspiel book. She writes:

Constructed from phantasma and agoreuein instead of allos and agoreuein, allegory substitutes ghosts for the allos signifying allegory’s transcendence. Consonant with this etymological transformation, Benjamin understands the nineteenth-century commodity landscape as one where no escape from the marketplace is possible. It is a space where the transcendence of the authentically supernatural [allegory] has turned to a demonic rooted in the process of market exchange [phantasmagoria]. (1993:236)

Following this, one could therefore say that what was once an excessive play in Baroque society (allegory) has become the ideological structuring device for social relations under capital (phantasmagoria). 27 I have slightly amended the translation and exchanged ‘desk’ with ‘table’ to make the obvious link between Lacan’s psychoanalytical to Marx’s politico-economic example. Is it a coincidence that Lacan refers to the same wooden ‘thing’ as Marx? 28 This, of course, does not mean that Marx is beyond any criticism. Benjamin, for example, is quite dissatisfied with Marx’s implied connection between a critique of commodity fetishism and historical progress. Benjamin instead wants to develop a historical materialism that would rid itself of the notion of progress (see, for example, 1974e/1999d). This is also how Benjamin’s usage of ‘phantasmagoria’ has to be understood, which he saw in contrast to Marx and Engels’ image of the camera obscura. The camera obscura works like any photo camera today. It mechanically reverses the objective world to produce a ‘false’ image; just like the human eye. Marx and Engels refer to the camera obscura in The German Ideology. ‘If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,

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this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process’ (1970:47). In contrast to this, Benjamin uses the image of phantasmagoria to show that capital’s ideology of commodity fetishism does not invert the ‘real’ world, like the camera obscura does, but reflects a world already ‘unreal’, already transformed, already different. Cohen writes about Benjamin’s reasons for adopting the phantasmagoria as the image of the ideological dream of society:

While like ‘historical vulgar naturalism’, the camera obscura mechanically reverses the world out there in the darkened chamber of thought, the magic lantern of the phantasmagoria inverts painted slides that are themselves artistic products. It thus does not project a reflection of the objective world but rather the objective world’s expression, its representation as it is mediated through imaginative subjective processes. (1993:240) 29 Is it not the case that one of today’s most popular social theory discourses, that of social constructionism a la Berger and Luckmann (1966), is based on this Utopian understanding of a harmony between individual and society, between subject and object? This is at least Adorno’s concern who, in the 1930s and 1940s, targeted a devastating critique at the sociological relativism of Mannheim who must be seen as an important intellectual fatherfigure for Berger and Luckmann. Adorno detects a clear ‘psychologism’ in Mannheim’s writing: that is, for Adorno, Mannheim concentrated his analysis on the individualistic façade of society, which blinded him from seeing the reduction of ‘individuals to mere agents of objective tendencies’ (Adorno 1977b:55; 1967b:41). This, Adorno claims, ‘is based on the somewhat transcendental presupposition of a harmony between society and the individual’ (Adorno 1977b:55; 1967b: 41). It is this liberal idealism of an uncontested harmony between what Benjamin calls the factuality of capitalist structures and the actuality of their subjective experience that describes the agenda of social constructionism. Its recent ‘success’ in many academic domains of enquiry is mirrored by its ‘practical’ application in society and politics at large: ‘New Labour’ and large parts of Western social democracy are based on a social constructionist view:

Such a levelling off of social struggles into modes of behaviour which can be defined formally and which are made abstract in advance allows uplifting proclamations concerning the future: ‘Yet another way remains open—it is that unified planning will come about through understanding, agreement, and compromise’. (Adorno 1977b:56; 1967b:42)

Understanding, agreement, compromising, knowledge sharing, talking—this is the usual rhetoric of today’s academic discourses: ‘Let’s all live together in a happy (politics free) family’ (see also Gabriel 1999). This seems to be the, admittedly overstated, Vision’ for writers who advocate a social constructionist view of knowledge. Everything seems to come down to individual techniques of knowledge construction; that is, subjective ways for individuals to negotiate their ‘worlding’ within intersubjective communities.

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30 This is why Benjamin writes about ‘the interpenetrating and superposed transparency of the world of the flâneur (1982:732; 1999c:546). 31 The main debate in Knowledge Management (KM) is about this relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge. It is said that ‘mainstream’ KM is about the codification and commodification of knowledge, whereas ‘soft’ KM claims to critique ‘mainstream’ KM by showing that knowledge is fundamentally a tacit, embodied form that cannot be easily managed and used for ‘rational’ goals. For an overview of the KM literature see, for example, Baumard (1998); Blackler (1995); Boisot (1998); Swan et al. (1999); and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). Our discussion here calls the opposition between the ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ KM approaches into question by gesturing towards the fetishisms they both rely upon (see also Böhm 2002).

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8 The mission statement as epideictic rhetoric Celebrating organisational identity Peter M.Hamilton

Introduction This chapter begins by discussing some of the many criticisms made against organisational mission statements, including arguments that they are ineffective and unrepresentative of organisational reality. Contained within such criticisms is often the charge that they are ‘mere rhetoric’, a criticism which the chapter goes on to argue adopts too narrow a focus of what rhetoric is. In discussing the criticisms that have been levelled against mission statements, it is argued that implied in both the many criticisms and definitions of mission statements is a view that they are in some way concerned with organisational identity. This concern with organisational identity, it is argued here, means that mission statements are inherently rhetorical, not in the sense of manipulation, obfuscation or bombast, but in the Aristotelian and Burkean sense of rhetoric’s concern with, respectively, persuasion and the generation of identification. The argument of the chapter is, therefore, that if an objective of mission statements is the generation or continuation of an organisational identity, it is dependent on rhetoric in attempting to do this. In that rhetorical sense, the mission statement may therefore be seen as performing organisational identity. On the basis of this argument, the rhetorical nature of mission statements is illustrated before going on to situate the rhetoric of mission statements within Aristotle’s epideictic genre. While we account for mission statements in the traditional sense of epideictic’s projection of honour and praise, we go on to position mission statements within a reappraised notion of the epideictic genre in relation to its role as ritual (and hence performance). The focus here is on ritual’s function in constituting and promoting community. In taking Keranan’s (2001) work on the Hippocratic Oath’s role as ritual, it is argued that this involves a process of identification and that the attempt at generating a medical identity is akin to what the writers/ originators of mission statements are in part attempting. This re-appraisal of epideictic as community promoting, it is argued, is closely related to the notion of organisational identity and the chapter argues that this is important to understanding the nature of the rhetoric of the mission statement.

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The mission statement as (a part of) organisational identity The mission statement is, of course, one of the most widely found managerial tools in contemporary organisations. For example, one survey found that 90 per cent of the organisations surveyed had used mission statements at some point during the previous five years (Krohe 1995, cited in Bartkus et al. 2000:23). Likewise, Rigby’s (1994) survey of 500 managers cited the mission statement as the most popular management tool deployed by these managers. More recently, Bart (2001) reports on Bain and Company’s 1998 and 1999 report on management tools and techniques. In 1998, mission statements were ranked number one, a position they had occupied for ten years. In 1999, they had slipped only one place to number two. The popularity of the mission statement extends well into the realms of academia. Thus, most UK universities have a mission statement, as do many academic journals, even those with a declared radical orientation (for example, the Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory, http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/mission_st.asp). The popularity of the mission statement leads one writer to argue that: The popularity and attraction which mission statements hold in the corporate echelons of the world’s leading companies stems from the fact that they are seen to help managers achieve those important, yet subtle goals, which are traditionally seen as both necessary and sufficient conditions for long term survival and market success. (Bart 2001:322) Against this background, a short questionnaire was distributed to a class of part-time MBA students. Amongst other things, the questionnaire asked the students to write down, in as many words as they wanted, what they considered to be the worth of mission statements. Not surprisingly there were a variety of views expressed: some considered that mission statements could be of value if the conditions were right; others thought them a waste of time; some were of the view that mission statements were important to organisations in ensuring that they kept to a stated purpose; while others considered that their mission statement neatly encapsulated their organisation’s raison d’être. However, it was the following statement which really caught my eye: I believe in the worth of a mission statement if the sentiments are backed up by real action and commitment to the spirit of the words used by the vast majority of people employed in a company and action is shared by the management. If the actions and thoughts of managers are different then a mission statement becomes RHETORIC only (capitals in the original). In the context of this chapter’s concern with the rhetoric of mission statements, I was drawn to the statement as a commonly heard refrain against mission statements, and one might add, many other managerial initiatives which have been considered by many as

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faddish and experienced some way short of the espoused aims, objectives or values of the initiative. The comment would seem to encapsulate many people’s views of mission statements as potentially worthy, but only if what they say is ‘backed up by real action’ on the part of everyone in the organisation. Implied in the first sentence of the above quotation is the view that all too often they can become words only. This not unusual response to mission statements is then made explicit in the second sentence through use of the capitalised word RHETORIC. This would seem to be signalling a disapproval of what mission statements can become if what they state is not perceived to be in line with what they do. Rhetoric here appears to be somehow empty or mere words (Simons 1990). This view of rhetoric certainly fits both a common usage of that term and a broader cynicism in relation to the merits of mission statements. Thus we can see the negative usage of the term rhetoric in Davies and Glaister’s statement that, ‘Critics have highlighted the rhetorical but unconvincing language of mission statements and have pointed out that an unreal statement may alienate rather than motivate employees’ (Davies and Glaister 1997:595). While these writers may be correct that negative or cynical reactions to mission statements may be a result of the top-down and nonparticipative nature of many British organisations’ mission statements, such usage of the term ‘rhetoric’ fits with a commonly negative use of the term in much of the literature on organisation. This is manifest in the widely used dualism of rhetoric and reality, often used in relation to claims of new and improved managerial initiatives. Hence we have the rhetoric and reality of performance management (Bowles and Coates 1993), the learning organisation (Reynolds and Ablett 1998), work-life balance (Frame and Hartog 2003), the HRM organisation (Sisson 1994), competencies and workplace learning (Garavan and McGuire 2001) and equal opportunities (Maddock 1995). The labelling of mission statements as ‘mere or empty rhetoric’ is only one of many criticisms made against them. For example, Bart writes that, ‘all too frequently the mission statement is itself a promise that appears to have been broken often before the ink is dried’ (1997:12). While Bart provides a list of reasons1 as to why this might be, scepticism towards mission statements may be symptomatic of the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ (Mullane 2002) nature of mission statements. Beyond scepticism, a more contemptuous view can be read, when Parker recounts his feelings during the introduction of a mission statement into a university he worked at: This mission statement was intended to articulate, and also perhaps create, a collectivity of interest and a common culture. Of course it failed. I did not recognise the organization that I worked for in that description. It was, at best, a waste of paper and at worst, a document that actually strengthened my distrust of local management. (Parker 2002:53) Whilst Parker is ‘against management’ and therefore critical of managerialism, even the well-known strategy guru and academic, Michael Porter, recently stated that:

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A lot of mission statements are completely useless. They are statements of broad principles that create a warm glow in the company, but they don’t guide competitive success. (Argyres and McGahan 2002:48) So mission statements have been argued to be potentially meaningless words serving only to fan employee scepticism towards the organisation or to have no impact on organisational success. While we would not dispute these readings of the worth of mission statements, we can also implicitly read in each of the above quotations from the student, Parker and Porter the view that a possible intent of mission statements is to generate or enhance organisational identity. Thus, the first sentence in the quotation from the MBA student suggesting a benefit of mission statements seems to be suggesting that they can be beneficial if everyone is working towards what they espouse. This seems to imply the possibility of generating a sense of organisational identity, as all seek to achieve organisational aims and objectives. Parker’s reference to a collectivity of interests and a common culture also appears to imply that mission statements might intend to develop a shared sense of identity across the organisation. Lastly, while Porter’s reference to a ‘warm glow’ might sound generally dismissive, a ‘warm glow’ may actually be a significant dimension or facet to generating a sense of organisational identity, indicating that the ‘warm glow’ of mission statements may be of greater importance than Porter appreciates. In a slightly more explicit manner, we can also read a concern with identity in many definitions of mission statements. A few examples illustrate this: •‘[A mission statement] sets out the purpose and general direction for the organization to follow, its guiding values and principles, and overall objectives’ (Mullins 2002:133). •‘[The mission statement] Defines the business that the organization is in against the values and expectations of the stakeholders’ (Lynch 2000:19). •‘[They are] written documents or key concepts stating the organization’s statement of purpose or general philosophy which is communicated to all employees’ (Townley 1994:616). •‘An organization’s mission can be described as its overarching raison d’être. It is the objective that subsumes all others beneath it’ (Campbell et al. 1999:14). •‘A mission statement is a generalised statement of the overriding purpose of an organization. It can be thought of as an expression of its raison d’être’ (Johnson and Scholes 2002:239). In referring to such as purpose, objectives, values, general philosophy, expectations and principles, the above definitions seem to relate to Joyce’s (1999) point that many mission statements consist inter alia of those assumptions which are viewed as crucial to an organisation’s identity. This linkage to organisational identity that we have drawn out as a function of mission statements can be seen explicitly when Leuthesser and Kohli write that, ‘Mission statements are seen as necessary in helping a company form its identity, purpose and direction’ (1997:59). In terms of examining the rhetoric of the mission statement and the link to organisational identity, we are concerned with questions relating inter alia to what an

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organisation stands for, is or wants to be (Cheney and Christensen 2001). In that sense, (organisational) identity may have a number of different meanings (Woodward 2003). For example, it may be about differences between one organisation and another, and the processes involved in the management of that difference. Important for the purposes of this chapter, Woodward also makes the point that Identity is marked through symbols’ (2003: ix; see also Cornelissen 2002; Gioia et al. 2002) and, while her discussion refers to the potency of such symbols as flags, we might also argue that mission statements play a similar, if less grand, role at the organisational level. So, as with flags, mission statements may be a means to project an organisational identity and, in that sense, are examples of what Hatch and Schultz (2002) refer to as an identity artefact. In seeing mission statements as identity artefacts, this also relates to Brown’s argument that organisational identity is bound up with an organisation’s ‘central, distinctive and enduring features’ (2001:116). In the context of this chapter, the specific focus is how mission statements seem to be set upon persuading us about the worth of the organisation’s main features. However, the discussion also relates to Hatch and Schultz’s (2002) model of the dynamics of organisational identity. That is, in the context of this chapter, Hatch and Schultz’ dichotomy of internal and external definitions of identity through, respectively, culture and image, can be redefined as issues relating to rhetoric, and within that an understanding of the interrelationship between the text and the audience(s).

Mission statement as rhetorical texts In viewing mission statements as having a concern with generating or maintaining an organisational identity, we argue that this means that mission statements are inevitably rhetorical texts. While we have already noted that rhetoric is often referred to in the organisation literature in a negative light, in this chapter we are concerned with rhetoric in its historical sense, as con-cerned with the process of symbolism. In that context, the chapter can be located within that growing body of work within organisation studies which has argued for the importance and centrality of language and rhetoric to the process of organisation (for example, Boden 1994; Case 1999; Grant et al. 1998; Hamilton 1997; Jackson 1999; Tietze et al. 2003; Watson 1995; Westwood and Linstead 2001). In terms of our concern with symbolism in its rhetorical form, we are concerned with how symbols are constructed and used as persuasive devices, for example to engender commitment, motivation, a belief in a set of values or, as in this chapter, an organisational identity. Here it is argued that, in the context of the student, Parker and Porter, the worth of mission statements, the development of a collectivity of interest and a common culture, and the creation of a ‘warm glow’, while concerned in part with generating an organisational identity, are dependant on rhetoric in terms of the attempt to achieve these objectives. The conceptualisation of rhetoric here is drawn from an amalgam of sources both classical and contemporary. From Aristotle, rhetoric is defined as ‘the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter’ (1991:69–70, original italics). Importantly in the context of examining the rhetoric of mission statements, Aristotle is clear that rhetoric does not accord with successful persuasion, but instead how persuasion is attempted; that

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is, what means the speaker (or text) uses to try to persuade an audience. Expanding this definition, and important to issues of organisational identity, rhetoric has also been defined by Burke (1969) as the process of identification. While this definition of rhetoric clearly expands upon the Aristotelian, it is also important given that, as Cohen writes, Identification is an ongoing process of establishing identity’ (1998:164). Finally, the definition by Foss et al. (1991) of rhetoric as conscious, purposeful human communication helps us to appreciate that much work might go into devising the words which make up a typical mission statement. It is not being suggested that these three examples exhaust all the definitions and meanings of rhetoric, but instead, in the context of analysing mission statements, they provide us with the means of understanding the rhetorical construction of mission statements. Mission statements are, therefore, attempts at generating audience identification through conscious, purposeful communication in the form of often quite short statements that set out an organisation’s (senior management’s?) sense of what ‘it’ thinks it is about. Mission statements, therefore, would appear to be, in Foss et al.’s (1991) terms, paradigm cases of rhetoric: the time and care which goes into the consideration of the language used, as well as their ‘public’ nature, suggesting just how paradigmatically rhetorical they are. While it is argued here that mission statements are predominantly cases of what Aristotle (1991) referred to as epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric, we can first of all illustrate their rhetorical purpose through considering a couple of cases. For example, Sainsbury, the UK retail organisation, has the following mission statement: Our mission is to be the customer’s first choice for food, delivering products of outstanding quality and great service at a competitive cost through working ‘faster, simpler and together’. (http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/about/strategy_update) It is probable that Sainsbury would have spent some time on refining this statement, and may well have gone through a number of draft statements before agreeing on the above choice of words. ‘Why those choice of words?’ we might therefore ask. They would certainly seem to fit the notion of rhetoric as situated in contingent settings (Herrick 2001); that is, settings in which things could be otherwise (Cunningham 1991). This ‘otherwise aspect’ might include customers choosing other stores or disputing the quality and competitiveness of the cost of their product. Sainsbury, therefore, use rhetoric in part to persuade that it is a store worth visiting. They seem to be saying to me that I should be choosing them as my food shop because their food is of a high quality and affordable. All this is made possible by the style of the words including the catchy use of assonance in the form of the repeated ‘er’s of ‘faster’, ‘simpler’ and ‘together’. I am not here suggesting that customers of Sainsbury read their mission statement before deciding whether to shop there. Instead, the mission statement’s rhetoric may, for example, be predominantly oriented towards the employees, to persuade them of the importance of how they work to deliver Sainsbury’s key business objectives. In Burkean terms, the rhetoric of their mission statement might, therefore, play an important role in generating a sense of identification with the organisation. It will also play an important role in the paradoxical duality of identification and division (Cohen 1998). That is, as Sainsbury

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might be attempting to persuade employees to identify with the organisation, it also in the process tries to create a division with other food retail organisations. From an altogether different sector and an ‘organisation’ with a quite different purpose to Sainsbury, we can also illustrate how mission statements are rhetorical texts through the example of the mission statement of the Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory (EJROT). While Sainsbury encapsulates ‘itself in twenty-nine words, EJROT does so in just over 200 words. However, as with Sainsbury, the EJROT mission statement functions no less as an instrumental discourse which is seemingly intent on persuading the reader to submit an article. The contingency of the setting and therefore the need for rhetoric stems from, amongst other things, a context of alternative journals which are available for academics to submit to. In such a context, to succeed EJROT presumably needs to persuade writers to submit to it and, to do this, it seems to use its mission statement to position itself within the populated setting of social science/organisation studies journals. To this end, the journal (in good rhetorical fashion) offers me reasons as to why I should want to submit to it. These include the following: the journal is eclectic in relation to both methodology and the issues/themes on which it accepts manuscripts; it does not charge any subscription fee; it seeks to develop nonexploitative organisations and managerial practices; it is focused on making, ‘a substantial contribution to radical organisation theory’; and, as a web-based journal, it will reach a wide audience.

The rhetorical genres In carrying out rhetorical analysis, we could focus on a number of different aspects of talk and text. These could include rhetoric in terms of arrangement, figuration, stylistics or argument (Simons 1989). However, instead of examining the rhetorical minutiae of argument, style or arrangement, the analysis focuses upon understanding the predominant rhetorical genre in which we can locate our understanding of the rhetoric of mission statements. The rhetorical genres were first discussed by Aristotle (1991) and, according to Schoeck, embrace ‘most, if not all, of the spheres of human public activity’ (1986:25). In Aristotle’s (1991) Art of Rhetoric, the rhetorical genres are described as of three kinds: the judicial or forensic; the deliberative or political; and the epideictic or ceremonial. Judicial rhetoric involved an audience judging past events and deciding on the justness of an action or event, for example, an individual’s guilt or innocence. Deliberative rhetoric is concerned with the future, and the audience judges on the expediency of a proposed course of action, such as a proposed government policy. Finally, epideictic rhetoric is focused on the present and the honour or dishonour of, for example, an individual. As Gross puts it, ‘their paradigms are the funeral oration and the philippic’ (1996:10). While the distinction between the three genres is largely down to what role the audience is playing (Kennedy 1994), the contingent nature of the issues upon which the audience decides is also significant. Thus, the rhetorical situation (Bitzer 1968) which the genres relate to is characterised, in part, by contingency or indeterminacy. That is, in the law courts, outcomes are based on judgments of an individual’s guilt or innocence, such as ‘on the balance of probabilities’ or ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. In the political arena, we frequently read of the difficulty an Executive might have in passing a bill through the

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Legislature. Lastly, in terms of epideictic rhetoric, while the life of a person such as Mother Theresa may elicit much praise, this is never necessarily the whole response, as is evident in Hitchen’s (1995) polemic. What characterises each of these situations as rhetorical is the possibility of controversy and the characteristic of uncertainty (Billig 1996). In organisational terms, we can illustrate the three genres through the processes of employment relations. That such processes are rhetorical follows from the indeterminacy and controversy which is typically a feature of employment relationships (Hamilton 2001). Thus, for example, pay negotiations might predominantly exhibit the features of the deliberative genre. The concern here is with the future, and those involved in the negotiation must decide on the appropriateness of a particular pay offer or demand. Likewise, the deliberative genre would seem to predominantly characterise such processes as joint consultation and the mobilisation of union members to engage in industrial action. As illustrations of the forensic genre we site locate disciplinary processes and practices, as one side seeks to defend themselves against the accusation of another. Other examples of this genre might include employee grievances and employment tribunals. Finally, while strategy and policy documents may be cases of the epideictic genre, we go on to argue that mission statements are too. In arguing this, it is not, however, to suggest they are only that. Instead, the three genres can overlap and the same organisational process may exhibit different rhetorical genres. For example, performance appraisal could be argued to be such a case in point. Thus, the broad organisational justification, in the form of policy documents etc., may be predominantly epideictic, while the actual appraisal interview is deliberative and forensic. That is, appraisal is usually considered to be either or both, judgemental and developmental in intent. The judgemental would seem a case of the judicial genre, while the developmental is that of the deliberative. However, although we are focusing only on the epideictic genre, as Kennedy claims: it is often useful to consider the dominant rhetorical genre of a work in determining the intent of the author and the effect upon the audience in the original social situation. (1997:45–46)

The epideictic genre According to Booth, it is sometimes said ‘that we live in an age of “display rhetoric” (or “demonstrative” or “epideictic rhetoric” as it appears in the older texts)’ (1974:155). This sentiment is one which links both the negative view of mission statements and epideictic rhetoric. We have already discussed the former. In terms of the latter, the negative view of epideictic rhetoric stems from the notion that epideictic speeches were largely considered to be speeches of display where the speaker was invited by the audience to display their eloquence (Condit 1985). In a slightly different manner, Carter (1991) and Hauser (1999) contend that, while the judicial and deliberative genres had a legitimising purpose, for example with upholding the laws, the epideictic could not be considered in a

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similar light. Hauser highlights the apparently murky nature of the epideictic genre when quoting the nineteenth-century rhetorician, Cope: The third branch is inferior to the two in preceding in extent, importance, and interest. It is the…demonstrative, showy, ostentatious, declamatory kind: so called because speeches of this sort are composed for ‘show’ or ‘exhibition,’ epideixis, and their object is to display the orator’s powers, and to amuse an audience…who are therefore theoroi rather than kritai, like spectators at a theatre, or a contest for a prize… rather than any serious interest or real issue at stake. (1867:121, quoted in Hauser 1999:10, italics in the original) This view of epideictic can be further seen in the traditional accounts of the nature of such rhetoric, whereby the discourse is concerned principally with pleasing or inspiring an audience. In these orations, honour or dishonour are the main focus, and the means to that end is praise or blame. This point is also picked up by Beale (1978) when recounting early discussions on the epideictic as focusing on the stylistic properties of an oration, as well as the issue of praise and blame. In that sense, the point that the epideictic is not principally concerned with persuasion can be seen in Perelman (1979) when recounting that the traditional account of the genre is not concerned with matters of debate. Therefore, in a traditional account of the epideictic, there should not be a Hitchen-style polemic against (the now beatified) Mother Theresa. To Corbett and Connors (1999:127), contemporary examples of epideictic rhetoric therefore include Fourth of July speeches, funeral eulogies, obituaries, election commercials, reference letters and complimentary introductions such as when a speaker is introduced by a Master of Ceremonies. Such speeches, unlike deliberative and judicial rhetoric, are not specifically suggesting a course of action that the audience should follow. However, given the ubiquity of such forms of discourse, ‘we must have a separate category for those discourses in which the primary object is to praise or depreciate the worth of an individual, a group of individuals, an institution, a nation etc.’ (Corbett and Connors 1999:127). Such a category of discourse is one way of understanding the rhetoric of mission statements. Thus, projecting honour through the means of praise seems to be common to many mission statements. For example, going back to our earlier examples, Sainsbury might not simply be stating that their mission ‘is to be’ the best, but that implicitly they are the best and this is carried through praiseworthy objectives of selling quality products at competitive prices. EJROT might likewise be read as engaging, at least implicitly, through praise in terms of its aims of a commitment to radicalism and eclecticism. Likewise, to use a different example, we see the use of praise and focus on honour and virtue in the mission statement of Abbey National: • To strengthen Abbey National’s market position in UK personal financial services. • To win and hold competitive advantage through superior customer service. • To continue to diversify profit streams away from our traditional mortgage and savings activities. • To remain a low cost operator. • To maintain strong management of risks. • To promote brand strength.

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• To develop synergies between our mutually supporting businesses. • To achieve above average growth in shareholder value over the long term by meeting the needs of our customers, our staff and all the other stakeholders in our business. Implicit in the Abbey National mission statement is a sense of praise which the organisation deserves because it is doing, or intending to do, those things which mean the business remains strong and profitable. Abbey National’s mission projects the company as virtuous through its focus on the achievements of the organisation. Praise is apparent in the way all the statements within the mission stress what are usually considered to be good qualities for any business to have. Abbey National might, therefore, be wanting us to assess them as of worth, given their own stress on them doing apparently ‘good’ things. The use of anaphora, through the repetition of the word ‘to’ at the start of each sentence, might also be a vehicle of this mission statement’s attempt to produce an emotional response which sees Abbey National as honourable in its objectives. Further, words and phrases such as ‘strengthen’, ‘win and hold’, ‘diversify’, ‘low cost’, ‘strong management’, ‘brand strength’, ‘synergies’, ‘growth’ and ‘meeting needs’, all seem to be directed towards making Abbey National appear honourable in their aims and objectives. In that sense, the rhetoric of mission statements might simply be understood by placing them within the context of the epideictic as predominantly display or exhibition, without linkage to encouraging a course of action. This might be summed up by the contention that ‘Most mission statements draw on the same lexicon, appealing to an emblematic repertoire of “quality”, “achievement”, “service”, “altruism”, “increased productivity”, “care for the local community”, “society”, and “client/consumer’s rights” and so on’ (Richman and Wright 1994:61). However, while understanding the rhetoric of mission statements through the traditional account of the epideictic helps us to appreciate the ceremonial and display orientation of mission statements, the rest of the chapter locates mission statements within a broader reappraisal of both the role and function of epideictic rhetoric.

Epideictic, identity and mission statements The reappraisal, and with it the growing admiration, of epideictic according to Carter stems from scholars in the field of rhetoric beginning ‘to recognize and appreciate the special kind of pragmatic value offered by epideictic rhetoric’ (1991:210). The specific value that Carter places on epideictic is in relation to its role as ritual. Where ritual is simply considered to be ‘stereotyped activity or behaviour’ (Collins Concise Dictionary 1988:1005), then mission statements would presumably be viewed as largely meaningless, with little discernible purpose. This may accord with our earlier discussion of how many people may view their organisation’s mission statement as a document of little or no value, existing only in some kind of mimetic fashion: devised and constructed because most other organisations have one. In this context of ritual, the mission statement could therefore be subsumed within the following: Ritual language is a fixed pattern of utterances, typically removed from the vernacular, which creates the occasion and serves a truth that is removed from everyday reality.

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(Carter 1991:212, italic in the original) This might well equate to the student’s earlier use of the term ‘rhetoric’, as fairly highblown, unfamiliar language which does not match everyday experience. However, Carter is clear that ritual is more than this and, in arguing for its value, discusses three main functions of ritual: First, ritual generates a kind of knowledge that is different from the knowledge generated by ordinary discourse. Second, ritual constitutes and promotes community. And third, ritual offers its participants guidance in conducting their lives. (1991:213) It is the second of these functions that we want to focus upon, given our concern with mission statements, epideictic and identity. However, while we will go on to show this within the context of mission statements, we can also see the importance of this sense of promoting community in Keranen’s (2001) argument that, within the Hippocratic Oath, epideictic serves a ritualistic function. Thus, it is argued that the Hippocratic Oath should be viewed as a case of epideictic rhetoric because of ‘its significance as a ritual designed to inaugurate new careers and bind members to its profession’ (Keranan 2001:60). The inauguration and binding of members to the profession can be read as a process of identification and thus an attempt to establish a medical identity. According to Keranen, the ritualistic function of the Hippocratic Oath can draw out strong responses of affection in its audience. In a similar vein, it might be argued that the originators of mission statements would like, or perhaps even seek, such a response from their intended audience. We may therefore be justified in amending Keranen’s words as follows:2 Leaving the specifics of its content aside for a moment, we see that the ideal it represents can evoke pride in the accomplishments of [management] and in the achievements of [the organization]. (2001:61) We can potentially read something similar in mission statements. While they may not have the apparent ethical underpinning of the Hippocratic Oath, mission statements can be seen to have a similar communal sense to them and, in ritualistic terms, do seem intent on binding the various organisational stakeholders through establishing a sense of community. Thus Pifco Holdings’s (1994) mission statement (reprinted in Thompson and McHugh 2002:9) can be seen in such a light whereby it is stated that:

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The group exists for the benefit of: Its shareholders—by giving them annual dividend growth and long term capital appreciation from the consistent achievement of increased profits. Its customers and consumers—by providing products which delight them and represent excellent value in terms of quality, design, performance, reliability and price, together with a first class service. Its employees—by giving them secure long term employment, a fair and equitable reward system (including performance-related bonuses, share incentives and share options for senior executives), personal career development and safe and pleasant working conditions. The community—by acting as a good corporate citizen by giving support to the less fortunate in society and by adopting environmentally sound policies both within the company and outside. In a sense, all rhetoric can be seen as being concerned with promoting community. Thus, as Perelman argues, Burkean identification involves the formation of a ‘community of minds’ (1979:7). However, the notion that epideictic plays a special role in promoting community is noted by Sullivan, when he argues that this is much less so in both judicial and deliberative rhetoric, given that these, unlike epideictic, ‘pit two sides against each other’ (1993:289). In that sense, deliberative and judicial rhetoric are not so concerned with the primary objective of establishing a community of minds, as opposed to communities of minds. Promoting a community of minds through epideictic rhetoric is illustrated in the example of Pifco Holdings, as we can read how they claim to ‘exist for the benefit of others. In Sahlin’s terms, the rhetoric of Pifco’s mission statement can be seen as community promoting, given that Pifco is claiming to be a whole of many parts, ‘which are thus comprehended as mutually determining’ (2001:47). This promotion of community can be seen in numerous mission statements. This might, for example, be through specific reference to community or through the use of such a proxy label as ‘stakeholders’. So, the mission statement of Oxford University’s Bodliean Library states that it wants to meet the needs of ‘the national and international community’ of scholars, as well as ‘foster good relationships with other University bodies, including the Colleges’. Abbey National want to ‘develop synergies between our mutually supporting businesses’. Part of the US Department of Agriculture’s mission is to ‘enhance [the] quality of life for the American people by supporting [the] production of agriculture’. Finally, the Co-operative Bank seeks to ‘develop a close affinity with organisations which promote fellowship between workers, customers, members and employers’ (quoted in Huczynski and Buchanan 2001:773). In each of these, community can be seen as the sharing of a local environment (Reilly 1999), whether the university, the business, or a geographical area, and can clearly be argued to be a potentially important source of identity. In claiming community to be a source of identity, and in the context that epideictic as a rhetorical genre promotes community, a significant feature of epideictic is the link to values. It is certainly here that we have tended to see the main arguments forwarded for the rehabilitation and significance of the epideictic genre, arguments which claim that

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epideictic should after all be viewed as having a concern with action. Thus, while praise and virtue was the traditional function of epideictic, Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca have argued that epideictic rhetoric plays a more important role than this and is significant through attempting to strengthen ‘the disposition of the audience toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds’ (1969:50). Likewise, while Kennedy (1997) acknowledges that praise or blame may be the means through which epideictic rhetoric operates, he argues that, in seeking to enhance beliefs, knowledge or understanding, it is therefore an important aspect of group cohesion. In making the case for group cohesion, or what we have referred to as ‘community’, epideictic rhetoric stresses those values that are considered of significance to the group or community’s well-being (Herrick 2001). In terms of identity, this is made explicit when Kennedy writes that: Such [epideictic] speeches console or inspire an audience by instilling or renewing values and beliefs and a sense of group identity. (1998:20) This sense of epideictic as focused on values and intent on developing a group (or organisational) identity can be seen in numerous mission statements, some of which project values which go well beyond the organisational boundary. For example, Matsushita stress the values of ‘innovation in manufacture to achieve harmony with the global environment’. The US Department of Agriculture are ‘working to reduce hunger in America and throughout the world’. Microsoft want ‘To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realise their full potential’. Finally, such globallyoriented values can be seen in Toyota’s aim that ‘seeks to create a more prosperous society through automotive manufacturing’. From a less globally-oriented set of values, WalMart’s three basic beliefs are ‘respect for the individual’, ‘service to our customers’ and to ‘strive for excellence’. Ford ‘respect and value everyone’s contribution’. Abbey National extol ‘superior customer service’. Barclays, inter alia, want to be ‘recognised as an innovative, customer-focused company that delivers superb products and services’. CadburySchweppes are ‘working together to create brands people love’. Finally, a hugely ambitious and heavily value-focused mission statement is that of GlaxoSmithKline, whose mission ‘is to improve the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer’. The values which these organisations claim to exhibit or be working towards combine with promoting community and thus a sense of identification. In Burkean (1969) terms, this process of attempted identification is concerned with achieving consubstantiality. To Burke, consubstantiality is an association whereby we choose to identify ourselves with properties or substances, such as physical objects, friends, beliefs or values. This choice of association means we separate ourselves from others, such that identification must be understood in the context of division. As Gill puts it, ‘What Burke means by this term [identification] is that rhetoric operates to remind individuals of their shared substance, which allows them to overlook division and to identify’ (1994:43). In the context of mission statements, the attempt to achieve identification, and hence consubstantiality, can be principally located within the epideictic genre, as the primary focus of mission statements is to celebrate the organisation and, in doing that, extol a number of values. These values are ones which the typical mission statement seems intent on using as a

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means to action geared towards the organisation successfully meeting its primary aims and objectives.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to show that mission statements are part of broader managerial attempts to generate an organisational identity. The chapter then went on to argue that this means they are inherently rhetorical texts. However, this was not to argue that mission statements should simply be discounted as mere words and unworthy of analysis. Whilst we do not argue against those who are contemptuous of mission statements, it is the argument of the chapter that their rhetoric is important for a number of reasons. Initially this simply stems from their ubiquity. That is to say, the fact that so many organisations have a mission statement (or something similar) and seem in many cases to spend a significant amount of time in constructing them, suggests that they are viewed, by their originators at least, as having a significance of some kind. Following that, as mission statements are typically pieces of public text, then arguing that they have a rhetorical function would seem self-evident. This then led to the question of what that rhetorical function is. While we can simply answer this by stating that mission statements are trying to persuade their audience that the organisation is good, honourable, etc., this does not address the issue of how they are attempting to achieve this. Instead, just as Keranan (2001) has argued that the most important function of the Hippocratic Oath is a ceremonial one, the argument here is that it is through identifying mission statements as examples of the epideictic genre that we begin to see how they operate as rhetorical texts. Thus, as rhetorical texts, they are trying to generate audi-ence identification with the organisation through promoting a sense of community by evoking various values which are often implied to be in the interests of that community, which therefore should be lived up to and followed. This is important to the generation and maintenance of organisational identity, in the sense that Albert et al. conflate identity and identification as ‘a subtext of many organisational behaviours’ (Albert et al. 2000:13). The previously noted actionoriented and performative aspects of epideictic is, therefore, important to understanding how mission statements may be significant to such processes. While an argument relating mission statements to persuasion and identification may seem banal, a further reason why mission statements are of interest relates to broader points about the epideictic genre. As Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca argue, epideictic is the only kind of oratory which immediately evokes literature, the only one that might be compared to the libretto of a cantata, the one which is in most danger of turning into declamation, of becoming rhetoric in the usual and pejorative sense of the word. (1969:51) This might be an important reason as to why the response to mission statements is as it so often is. In simplistic terms, the reference to literature might help us understand why they might be viewed as a fiction. In more significant terms, the reference to literature might explain the nature of the apparent richness of the language and imagery which is so often

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a feature of many mission statements. This richness of language and imagery, while fine in itself, may become the problem when, for example, employee experiences and perceptions of the organisation are out of step with this. In that context, given the connotation which the term ‘rhetoric’ often carries, then it is not surprising that mission statements end up being viewed in the declamatory, ostentatious and insubstantial sense of the word. Paradoxically, it may also be the case that those experiencing a positive organisational experience and who may, therefore, not be cynical towards their organisation’s mission statement, will not recognise that it is a rhetorical text intent on either generating or maintaining their identification. However, recognising that the mission statement has a rhetorical function can be argued to be important simply on the grounds that rhetoric is inescapable in the mission statement and central to the process of organisational identity. Understanding that texts such as mission statements have a rhetorical function at the very least puts us on alert that there are attempts around us to persuade us towards some course of action, belief and/or set of values. The pervasiveness of mission statements and, with that, understanding that they have a rhetorical function, can therefore help us respond critically to them, in the sense of understanding how they might be trying to work on us as instrumental discourse. Finally, in contributing to debates on organisational identity, the chapter has tried to show that rhetoric matters and that, through appreciation of the rhetorical genre(s), we begin to understand how the discourse of organisational identity operates instrumentally, for example through texts such as mission statements. However, in returning to the argument of Hatch and Schultz which ‘constructs organizational identity as an ongoing conversation or dance between organisational culture and organisational images’ (Hatch and Schultz 2002:981), this chapter argues that rhetoric is a key aspect to this. We see this in the examples of the mission statements which were discussed earlier. Thus, within these mission statements we can read attempts to persuade and generate identification with both internal and external audiences as to the organisation’s worth, given that many of these mission statements were focused on convincing a large number of stakeholders as to the organisation’s worthiness. Mission statements, as a part of the dance of organisational identity, give us an insight into an organisation’s construction of its identity, at the very least by reference to who is included as internal and external stakeholders (Mazza 1999). They also ‘embody a representation of organisational image and identity’ (Mazza 1999:86) which, in part, can only be understood through understanding the rhetorical processes at play within their attempts at persuasion/identification. This is so, whether our conception of rhetoric is unilateral or bilateral (Conley 1994). Thus, whether a particular organisation’s mission statement is unilaterally oriented towards a passive audience to which it is trying to do something to, or whether it is bilaterally oriented to an active audience in which it is trying to do something with, organisational identity is primarily a rhetorical process.

Notes 1 The reasons Bart gives include the development of unrealisable missions, a lack of clarity within the statements, dissatisfaction with their content, the mission not being correct for the organisation, a dissatisfaction with the development of the statement, a lack of behavioural influence, a lack of involvement in the statement’s development and an inappropriate use of mission statements.

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2 In square brackets, the word ‘medical’ in the original Keranan quotation has been swapped with the words ‘management’ and ‘the organisation’.

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9 Other work A dividual enterprise1 Per Bäckius Would it be possible to comprehend contemporary Western societies without the individual? How many institutions, laws and conventions would not appear utterly meaningless and senseless devoid of it? Doing away with the individual, ‘unthinking’ its concept, type and name—erasing the individual’s entire history—seems to counter reason and common sense. It would probably take the disposition of a madman, an alchemist’s imagination, and a pataphysical squint to carry out such a dubious enterprise. Were anyone, for all that, to succeed, we would most likely react with the same kind of loathing and dejection as the narrator in Poe’s story: This old man, I said at length, is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. (Poe 1996:262) He refused to be alone, refused to be, or become, individual. A most repulsive felony. Imagination dead? Imagine! But let’s not get led astray… In reply to the question, Who comes after the subject?, Deleuze made his point clear: there is no use in waiting for a ‘Who’ to come as a replacement for a particular concept. It is better to find or create the new functions that make the prevalent one inadequate, since ‘a concept does not die simply when one wants it to, but only when new functions and new fields [of thought] discharge it’ (Deleuze 1991:94). In this chapter I will try to respond to a call from Heller and Wellbery (1986) in which they stress the need to rethink the concept of the individual; or the need, even, to constantly rethink it. ‘The individual’ has served, they maintain, as a paramount feature in the construction and development of Western societies for the last five centuries.2 In the process, however, the individual has been under steady pressure, in perpetual crisis, and hence under incessant reconstruction.3 There seems to be no cause for disagreement on any of these instances, so what remain to be asked for are the functions and fields that pose the individual as a problem. And, if there is a crisis, it would of course be nothing but a crisis of thought itself. Hence, I will explore a potential rupture in thinking ‘the individual’. Within my own field of business and management studies, processes of individualisation commonly result in (as well as them being an effect of) a joint praise, where a clear distinction between academic inquiry and business consultancy is often hard to make. In this context, individualisation means empowerment and win—win

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situations. Workers and employees are to be empowered in the name and image of the entrepreneur, whereas consumers acquire their full potential by way of one-to-one relationships with companies. We are told that our societies bear the emblem of enterprise (Drucker 1993) and that we ourselves, accordingly, are first and foremost leading entrepreneurial lives (Peters 1999), attending, perhaps, a curriculum on the strategic development of individuals (Maccoby 1988). In these circumstances, I suggest, crisis dwells, covert, waylaying us in the realm of business ventures. Just the place for a Snark!4

First exemplar: a new individual September 1998. I had invited one of the major figures— an Icon5—of the booming e-business to share his experiences of project management with one of my classes at the School of Business. He arrived at the lecture hall a few minutes late, wired to his mobile phone and engaged in conversation. He disconnected and turned to the expectant audience. ‘Minor crisis at the company,’ he excused himself, ‘I’d better get back there within the hour, so let’s get started.’ In the following hour we learnt about his company (at that time perhaps Sweden’s most successful in their line of trade, at least in terms of increase in stock value, media attention and attractiveness to venture capital) and how they had managed to get ahead of competition. My business students were intrigued, as they usually are by stories from the real world. But since he did not speak much about projects, my own notebook stayed blank. That is, until he wrapped things up by stating his credo: What you must be fully aware of to make it in this trade is that we are now dealing with a new individual—a new consumer and a new employee. The new individuals do not take orders and mistrust authority. They are in charge of their own lives and make their own choices. They take crap from no one. You have to design your business as well as your organisation in accordance with their dispositions otherwise they will leave you. This is the most significant change we are witnessing today. If you were born after 1968 you are a part of all this, you are the new individuals. Unfortunately I am a bit too old for that myself, but I can tell that

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most of you are in the right age for understanding these changes—the right age for winners. Applause. As he left for headquarters and some crisis management, I started to realise I was old. Just a few years too old for making it.

When proclaiming the significance of ‘the individual’ there is, of course, not one but numerous concepts involved—a whole family of variable relationships (including the individual, individuality, subject, person, self, self-identity)—and hence a qualification is called for. ‘The individual’, old and new, is and has been functional and important in Western history above all as a figure of thought. Figures of thought are mediators, relays, navigators6 (not to be confused with categories of thought, whether universal or evolutionary, Kantian or Maussian). They operate in-between a plane of immanence of concepts and thought-out discourses, lines of argument, categorisations and classifications (Cicero knew this)—in other words, they make concepts operative. A figure of thought embodies a bundle of concepts, or, rather, conceptual personae; Marx’s ‘Revolutionary’ (the absolute becoming of the all-sided individual) and Mill’s ‘Untouchable’ (the consummation of the individual in elbow-room) go hand-in-hand in the same figure. Hence, the figure fits within Deleuze and Guattari’s formula: plane of immanence (the unthought or pre-philosophical plane)7—concepts—conceptual personae—/figure of thought/—plane of organisation (the outthought, enacted and institutionalised), all of which are related to an image,8 a vision of a world and a people inhabiting it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Like a plane of immanence, figures of thought are non-philosophical, but in a different sense. Figures are habitual. For instance, companies are generally organised as bureaucracies or as (intentionally) anti-bureaucratic enterprises—out of habit, solely out of habit. To put up with the very strength of this mediator, this habitual figure of the individual, seems to demand a different habit—that is, if one wants to set off on a survey or exploration at all—a ‘Faustrollian’ habit, perhaps. In his ‘neo-scientific novel’, Jarry (1996) has Dr Faustroll escape the law by embarking on a journey where he ‘simply moves on at will to another time and/or place’.9 The good Doctor’s vehicle is a boat— which is a sieve10—and he explains its supremacy for his crew of two (the lawman, now held hostage; and the navigator, an imaginary baboon called Bosse-de-Nage): ‘I am all the more convinced of the excellence of my calculations and of its insubmersibility in that, as is my invariable habit, we shall not be navigating on water, but on dry land’ (Jarry 1996:17). Faustroll’s impossible vessel is at the same time his plane of immanence. A sieve cannot float, yet it must and yet it does. Hence, he is led to create a new concept of the Journey. Or, rather, he revitalises the Lucretian concept of ‘clinamen’—the infinitesimal swerve, the drifting off-course—in Lord Kelvin’s persona. And, aided by this renewed concept of travelling, he is able to break away from the commanding figure of the Law, the Law of One mode of existence, of common sense, of One real world. Together, the small crew visit 14 islands in the vicinity of Paris, and each island is invented by Faustroll as to convey different affects and modes of existence. Such is his way of exploring and exploiting. Such is his envisioned world—‘he welcomes and

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explores all forms of existence’.11 And for a long time and out of invariable habit, he is guided by this peculiar figure of thought: pataphysics. Ha ha, said the baboon, and those were the only two human words that it knew. Ha ha, and nothing more. So, for the lightness of travelling, I have tried to make myself a suitable sieve-boat and to round up a series of different lands, or exemplars, in the neighbourhood of the figure under survey—and for each exemplar, a mode of life. And for a crew…Snark hunters, solely Snark hunters. A figure of thought may hold and combine more than one concept, but the former often ends up in combinations with its own kind as well. What Foucault (1994) demonstrates in The Order of Things is how the human sciences have been constituted and organised in accordance with its two prominent figures, Man and Individual (adding Society makes sociology). However, such arrangements are rarely peaceful or balanced. On the contrary, they are critical, they tend to break up, recombine, and create new fields for thought and practice. Figures of thought are effective and productive due to their certain vagueness, that is, their capacity to carry a mass of diverse, but adjacent, nondeterminant concepts. Thus, their applicability and range of efficacy is next to infinite, but they may at times cart too much, and tear apart from within.

Second exemplar: a figure of thought Peter Abelard—son of a knight, philosopher, theologian, logician, monk, husband and lover of Heloise—probably knew by heart what it meant to step out of tradition, to be faithful and yet one’s own master, in Medieval Christianity. At least, he prepared three components for a new conceptualisation of the individual (components: faith as own intention, faith in tension with Church, and in tension with kin) on such a presupposition (the unthought of his never completed concept, immanence).12 And as he presented his rational analyses of faith and ethics through the unavoidable mediating figure of his time, the Individual-before-God, ‘Heloise’—beloved, kin, conceptual persona—kept haunting his arguments, inserting an irresolvable, ‘pagan’, ambiguity into them. St Bernard disagreed on every point of Abelard’s rationale (it was not for man to reason with the Absolute), except on the centrality of ascertaining and strengthening a proper and true devotion for God’s individuals. Furthermore, he could not stand Abelard’s envisioned form of existence— the Lord’s earthly kingdom populated by pagan philosophers and lovers. For sure, Bernard was victorious in their fierce battle, whilst Peter had to face devastating disgrace and condemnation for sacrilege (which included the burning of his books and manuscripts). But at the same time this situation made visible a fissure in the dominant

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figure of thought; a significant moment in what Dumont (1985) has described as the transformation of the outworldly human being, God’s individual. For Dumont, Abelard’s heresy was consummated four centuries later with Calvin: what matters are beings in this world, the inworldly existence of individuals. For short: the Individual.

Icon didn’t devise the concept of the new individual. Rather, he postulated or declared the incidence of a certain phenomenon through an inevitable figure of thought (through a neo-liberalist filter, some would say, but figures mediate ideologies too). And by his rhetoric of novelty, the effect was of quantitative description. There have always been individuals, but the new individual is simply more individual than its precursors, and more distinctly chiselled than a fading generation of vague persons. Two recent and acknowledged scholarly studies contain attempts at conceptualising that which Icon merely stated. Castells (1996–1997) and Sennett (1998) both start out with the classic sociological pairing of Individual and Society, just to claim that today these notions and their interrelation need to be reconsidered. Society, from its empirical outlook, does not appear in ways we are accustomed to. They point, in a sense, to a bypassing of its survival units (family, local community, corporation, nation-state), and a dissolving of a social habitus (including approved modes of belonging and caring). Both share a conviction that the most fundamental and critical effect of a coming new social and economic order is a loss of common ground. Flexible capitalism and the rise of a network society are described as abiding a logic of uprooting, which substitutes ‘traditional’ human conditions of relatively stable and accepted value-systems for a ‘new’ inhuman business enterprise of creative destruction. For Sennett, this leads to a corrosion of character, while the consequence suggested by Castells is a void or gap between the Net and the Self; a void which is also a contested terrain, with Net and Self in bipolar opposition. On the one hand, flexibility and network, global flows of information and capital, supported by purely instrumental values and asocial functionality; and on the other grounding and self-work, a grappling for meaning and identity-building. Both maintain that the Net is a veritable executioner of legitimate and institutionalised identities, providing nothing in its place but the most extreme versions of exchangeability and individualisation—an uncommon ground, business as unusual. But when proceeding by the figures of Individual and Society, any crumbling away of the one must necessarily imply a simultaneous mouldering of the other. In the case of highly flexible and individualised network enterprises, the paradoxical effect is that individuals may become less so. For Castells this would occur in a withdrawal to self, to self-containment, as the common ground for the essentially social individuals diminishes or is bypassed through the Net. And as their scaffoldings in society rust away, Sennett’s individuals are drained even of self, constituting, as it were, a hollow people. More or less, then? Nietzsche: we are more than the individual. And less.

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Third exemplar: an enterprising individual Icon’s autobiography (Staël von Holstein 1999) was published about a year after his lecture at the School of Business, just before things were starting to get rough for Internet consultancy. The narrative of Nothing Can Stop Us Now!13 reveals as its subject something like a synthesis of Maccoby’s (1988) ideal types of Innovator and SelfDeveloper. Here work is nothing but a process of individualisation; a stepping out of tradition, commonality, the average; a becoming of the thriving entrepreneur. And its product: the new individual. In ‘business literature’ (i.e. management and marketing) such idea(l)s are commonplace today. Often futuristic (but the future is always already present) in claims and predicaments, these ideas ring the changes of a common theme: the branded individual (individualisation through positioning in a market-game of free agents: Peters 1999); the liberated individual (through symmetrical enterprising one-to-one: Peppers and Rogers 1993); and the creative, nomadic individual of ‘funky business’ (by means of denormalisation: Nordström and Ridderstråle 1999). Labour and consumption merge in the One work of becoming a totally fulfilled, whole individual—a distinguished entrepreneur of one’s own life. A life, that is, as enterprise (Rose 1990, 1998; Leinberger and Tucker 1991).14 Furthermore, self-work coincides with net-work since the envisioned world of the business present-futurists is tantamount to Castell’s Net—a world inhabited by hyper-functional Venturers’. But Nothing Can Stop Us Now! insists on something else as well, on another direction, another becoming, a different venture. The sole work of individualisation, of standing out, seems to be folded in a much less distinguishable, hazy occupation. In transcending the restraining and determinant conditions of social and professional inertia, Icon finds, or reinvents, himself in the open space of the Net. Broken loose. Free at last. Then there is another curb, limit, wall, partition. On a TV-documentary about the pros and cons of the Internet revolution, Icon hinted at it: ‘How do you keep up with the frantic pace of your business?’ the interviewer asked him. ‘With gastric ulcer, a permanent fear of heart attack, and a very understanding wife.’

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Just days after Icon had delivered his speech to my class, a friend of mine gave this stealthy limitation a more elaborate expression: I have the most tremendous job you can imagine. About a year ago I got appointed Head of R&D. It’s my dream. Great challenge. And great pay too. Very rewarding in every respect. You know, full autonomy, almost at least, and full responsibility of course. I was totally into it. Focused. I used to be low on self-esteem, as you may recall, but now I grew. I was the king of the world. Ha! I worked a hell of a lot of course, but not as much as others I know of. My family wasn’t too pleased with that part I can tell you, although they really enjoyed my being so inspired and cheerful. Well, a month ago I snapped. I hit the wall. I thought I’d caught a really serious flu, so a colleague drove me home. Next thing I know I’m at my parent’s place, in my old room, my old bed. I stayed there for more than a week. Just laying there, like a vegetable, a foetus. They fed me like a nestling. Eventually I got out of bed to see my doctor and a shrink too. ‘Burnout’, they said. What the fuck is that anyway? ‘You should have seen the signs, listened to your body.’ What were there to see or hear? Whatever it was I feel kind of cleansed. I’m reborn, not in a religious sense, but you know, like a new human being. Anyway, I’m back at work again, but I’m not going back there again. Easier said than done, I know. As has been pointed out, the question of when the individual was discovered,15 or when human beings found their individuality, is a controversial one. Was it in ancient Greece, early Christianity, amongst Medieval Schoolmen, or in the Italian Renaissance? Or is the individual, if anything, an invention, the latest creation (Nietzsche 1978), or the effect of disciplinary power (Foucault 1980)? Or is it, rather, non-localisable, outside history, an a priori of existence, a given entity? According to Luhmann, however, any further attempts at conceptualising or forming notions of the individual and its individuality are long since

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rendered futile. After Kant, he maintains, the individual has become appointed as a standard, both empirical and transcendental, as the subject of the world. Experiencing the world, the individual could claim to have a transcendental source of certainty within himself. He could set out to realize himself by realizing the world within himself […] The Individual as the subject? This cannot be surpassed. (Luhmann 1986:317–318) When the individual becomes subject there is nothing to add. And since the individual is, in a sense, unthinkable, the only ways to move forward are by its ideological offspring (individualism) or by its subjective relatives (the I the ‘Self). For the latter course one could, for example, assert that having individual experiences, and experiences of oneself as a ‘specific individual’ (Mead 1965), are presupposed occurrences—prephilosophical—in G.H. Mead’s thinking. They institute a plane of immanence on which Mead creates his concept of the self (the individuals of the plane and of the figure are still by no means identical). Although expressing it in a more radical vein, Nietzsche too found a dead-end for the individual after Kant. With the language, methods and interests of positive science, the rule of individual=subject ends in the numbed equation of individual=standard, average, type. Always recognis-able, identifiable, measurable, it becomes a lifeless quantity (Nietzsche 1997). Thus, when spoken in a ‘positive’ tongue, the individual is betrayed, bereft of its individuality, of life, and turned into a meagre type: ‘the individual’. To Nietzsche, an individual was something else, something more and less than a type: atypical, incomparable, immeasurable, excessive, incomprehensible. The courses of the two versions are entwined, though, as they outlive each other, live over and beyond without coinciding (Hamacher 1986). Yet we always run the risk of ‘treating ourselves like rigid, invariable, single individuals’ (Nietzsche 1986: §618). This is because the type makes the most commanding figure of thought, but as they grow ever more firm and authoritative, types also tend to become frail and infested with foibles. And just like Abelard found a weak spot in the Individual-beforeGod, Nietzsche too reached for a suitable battering ram. In morality’ [of life, not of universals or the transcendent], he writes, ‘man treats himself not as an “individuum”, but as a “dividuum”’ (Nietzsche 1986: §57). A dividual as individual: a division of the singular, dividing the division, individual dividual.16 This instance should not, in any case, be mistaken for Durkheim’s Homo Duplex, human being as duality—individual organism and socialised person.

Fourth exemplar: a dividual in other work Stevenson offers the most beautiful expression of dividual life in Henry Jekyll’s full statement of his case. I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that

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man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. (Stevenson 1994:70) Tormented by a conflict of social position and desire (duplexity), ‘he’ came, with the aid of a certain potion, upon the singular stature of Edward Hyde. ‘He, I say—I cannot say, I’ (Stevenson 1994:84) A dividual is ‘that point’ one may come upon, but not pass. Yet, it is the outstripping too. It is not a doubling, or a stabilising bipolarity, but an endless to divide. Limiting and passing. Points and lines. Wall and wrecking-ball. Stevenson wrought the Captain’s straitjacket, more and less. Just like Jekyll, the Captain of Strindberg’s play, The Father, is a man of many roles and positions: officer, husband, father, host, alchemist… As Strindberg’s drama unfolds, however, the span of positions diminishes, and all converge in a single focal point. A doubt of fatherhood turns into obsession as he engages in the One work of becoming father—father of daughters, of officers, of husbandry, of fathers. But, for him, the father-individual is a fatal becoming since its reversal is blocked. In the play’s finale he is captured, wholly individualised—rigid, single and invariable—in a straitjacket. Life abandons him, burntout, no more and no less than duplex. And there is no return or escape. This cutting-off of alternate routes comes forth in a previous scene when the Captain accuses his wife of obstructing his mineralogical studies of planet Jupiter. His wife, Laura, retorts: ‘I was acting from kindness. You were neglecting your duties for this work.’17 In Strindberg’s Swedish, though, the second sentence reads: ‘…du försummade din tjänst for det andra arbetet’—you were neglecting your duties for the other work. Translations divert, just as the Captain did. The respected officer had inclinations for some dubious enterprise now aborted. It was not the termination of studies, however, nor the straitjacket that effected a breakdown, but the work of becoming fully individual. Other work is not alchemy, not a desirable hobby, nor a duplication of work, or working extra. Other work is

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diversion and defocusing, work’s clinamen or off-course. A stray-work that cannot be done and yet is carried out constantly. A mass of work, out of which our habits have us say: now this is work, a fine piece of achievement, a stimulating hobby, a dull but good day’s practice, a pointless drag; but that (we can barely even say that) is something…else, elsewhere. A dividual in other work, then, is an imaginary navigator-baboon sitting on one’s shoulders, saying ha ha in any conceivable language. It is not laughter, ‘ha ha is a ditched gap in a wall at the end of a garden path, an armed pit or military well into which chrome steel bridges may collapse.’18 And all lines are open for becoming individual dividual. More and less a life.19 I look up, reach over my head, fumble, and stumble— where is my companion now? Cicero: Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.20

Is the individual unthinkable today, as Luhmann suggests? And are the only ways to proceed by the individual’s offspring and relatives? The latter route is the one taken by Rose (1990, 1998). He has set out to show how the twentieth century was converted into a century of the self. Aided, supported and directed by psychology (and other ‘psy’s’), humans have turned towards and become immersed in themselves.21 The business literature referred to above also plays a crucial part in this transformation, with the call of work-places and job centres being ‘Become whole, become what you want, become yourself: the individual is to become, as it were, an entrepreneur of itself (Rose 1998:158).22 We are, in a sense, obliged to be ourselves, or, rather, more than what we already are. And we should constantly work on our growth, choose it, burn for and be burnt by it (this is the proper meaning of being branded). But we are still in the guise of individuals, rather than selves. The new individuals are forever more than they used to be. They are not well-rounded but expansive. Current discourses and practices of enterprise produce, or command, an ever-expanding individual with one sole occupation—the work of perpetual self-fulfilment. And when proponents of a new economic order, a ‘new economy’, announce the return or liberation of the individual, they essentially point, not to its emancipation or reappearance (as if the individual had been missing, or had not been free enough), but to an image of the world: the Net populated by Entrepreneurs; the latter being an attempt at obliterating the worker and the consumer, its greatest danger. Will the individual as figure of thought hold for this image, with its exclusion of a duplex worker/consumer? Or will it crack (but how could anyone tell, since this figure’s mediating powers would have us deny such an occurrence for ages)? Are the Net and the Entrepreneur the functions that will fracture the individual by strengthening it (the typification of the atypical), and hence open up a passage for new planes, concepts, figures and envisioned worlds? Were there to be such a passage, it would certainly be a suitable working space for another craftsman: ‘the middle-man, the undertaker constantly

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grasping for the in-between-being, the intermezzo: the entrepreneur (from the Latin inter, between, and prehendere, to seize, grasp, capture)’ (Bay and Bäckius 2000:79). Consumer and worker might even partake in a cracking up from the inside, in committing a breach, as revitalised concepts or by a final rattle. ‘And now, horror of horrors! it is the “workman” himself who has become dangerous; the whole world is swarming with “dangerous individuals”, and behind them follows the danger of dangers—the individuum!’ (Nietzsche 1997: §173). The individuum…which for Nietzsche is also a dividuum, a stealthy, clandestine entre-preneur. Ha ha—wall and wrecking-ball.

Fifth exemplar: chance Neither individual nor self, just a gardener caring for plants, trees and flowers. Chance carries no papers, has no record and hence no typical existence. He changes at the speed of a dial on the remote control. He is the man on TV; the man on TV is he. In the Old Man’s garden, ‘Chance could start to wander, never knowing whether he was going forward or backward, unsure whether he was ahead or behind his previous steps.’23 But as the Old Man dies and Chance is forced to leave his house for the outside world, he too gets directions in life. Strolling behind and ahead of himself he is a moving potentiality, pure chance. And it so happens that a minor accident arrests his walk, and he ends up being cared for by a nobility of industry. The Rand’s name him (Chance, the gardener) Chauncey Gardiner—he is individualised. They admire and become overwhelmed by his gardening wisdom—he is attributed an innovatorself destined to revitalise the political scene by means of a vivid garden imagery. Chauncey appears as a saviour, a creative destructor of American politics, a fullyfledged entrepreneur in an inert economy, an astonishing TV-star. He is the ideal type of the Innovator/SelfDeveloper. Everybody wants him—he is the perfect individual. Branded, liberated and funky. But then there is a crisis. As some dark-suits gang up in running Chauncey for president, Chance becomes ‘bewildered. He reflected and saw the withered image of Chauncey Gardiner: it was cut by the stroke of a stick through a stagnant pool of rainwater. His own image was gone as well.’ He steps outside the enormous house of Rand’s and into their garden. ‘Not a thought lifted itself from Chance’s brain. Peace filled his chest.’ Calmly wandering ahead and behind.

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Chance too would be a crisis of the individual, a splinter in a well-known figure of thought. A rupture, and a healing, and a breaking. He is a dividual individual, an entrepreneur with a monkey on his shoulders, content with doing other work as well, ready to welcome and explore all forms of existence. Just like Faustroll. As the horrid hunt is coming to a close, the crew’s wavering voices disclose: For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this text was presented at the 17th EGOS Colloquium, Lyon, France, 5–7 July 2001. 2 Although, if we follow Morris’ (2000) arguments, we should perhaps add another 400 years to the individual’s historical importance; the question of when the individual was discovered has been much disputed and will, I’m sure, remain unsettled. 3 Cf.Meyer (1986). For Meyer, reconstruction seems to consist of further socialisation in case of ‘explosive’ individuals, and improved means of individualisation in case of an excessively subjugating society. 4 In Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, we learn that a Snark is easily recognisable, since all Snarks are Snarks, except some that are Boojurns. 5 Icon was also the name of his company. 6 Cf.Asplund (1979) and Nemerov (1978) for discussions on the workings of a figure of thought. 7 A plane of immanence cannot be thought yet must be thought: ‘thought as such begins to exhibit snarls, squeals, stammers; it talks in tongues and screams, which leads it to create, or to try to [create concepts]’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:55). 8 This is where Marx and Mill parted most distinctly. 9 Cf.Shattuck (1996: xi). 10 For quite some time I have had the impression that both Deleuze and Guattari were of a pataphysical bent, and it is worth noting that they describe a plane of immanence as a kind of sieve: ‘The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve’ (1994:42); and, further on, ‘every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting through the fogs that surround it, and in which the philosopher who laid it out is in danger of being the first to lose himself (ibid.: 51). The founder of pataphysics—the science of imaginary solutions—is, of course, Alfred Jarry. 11 Shattuck (1996: x). 12 On Abelard’s importance for the ‘discovery of the individual’, cf. Morris (2000) and Gurevitj (1997); his relationship with Heloise, Abelard (1974); and his writings on ethics, Luscombe (1971). 13 The title of his autobiography, my translation. 14 In a peculiar way this theme, well rehearsed and repeated, conjures up a typical version of Nietzsche’s atypical individual. 15 A supposedly Western individual, that is. 16 Cf. Deleuze (1995). In this text, Deleuze uses the term ‘dividual’ as analogous to Foucault’s individual; the latter being a power effect of discipline, the former of control. That is, in quite a different sense than what I am trying to convey here. 17 Strindberg (1991:56) translated by Meyer. 18 This is part of Dr Faustroll’s analysis of Bosse-de-Nage’s monosyllabic uttering (Jarry 1996:76). 19 It should come as no surprise that today there is a remedy on sale for dividuals. Individual or dividual, the choice is ours! Cf. Optimum Self, http://www.optimumself.com/individualarticle (visited 1 March 2002).

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20 ‘He departed, withdrew, rushed off, broke away.’ 21 The effect of this inwardness being what Lasch (1978) has called the culture of narcissism. The new individual could be described as a highly expansive version of Lasch’ narcissist. 22 Cf. Gordon (1986) for a very similar point on proper conduct, especially pp. 314–315. 23 All quotations for this exemplar are, of course, from Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.

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Mead, G.H. (1965) ‘The problem of society—how we Become Selves’, in A.Strauss (ed.) George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology, selected papers. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Meyer, J.W. (1986) ‘Myths of socialization and of personality’, in T.C.Heller, D.E. Wellberg and M.Sosna (eds) Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Morris, C. (2000) The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nemerov, H. (1978) Figures of Thought. Boston: David R.Godine Publisher. Nietzsche, F. (1978) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J.Hollingdale. London: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1986) Human, All Too Human: a Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1997) Daybreak, trans. R.J.Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nordström, K.A. and Ridderstråle, J. (1999) Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance. Stockholm: Bookhouse Publishing. Optimum Self (2002) www.optimumself.com/individualarticle (accessed 1 March 2002). Peppers, D. and Rogers, M. (1993) The One-to-One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time.New York:Doubleday. Peters, T. (1999) The Brand You 50: or, Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an ‘Employee’ into a Brand that Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion. New York: Knopf. Poe, E.A. (1996) ‘The man of the crowd’, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Rose, N. (1990) Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1998) Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Shattuck, R. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in A.Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. S.Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change. Staël von Holstein, J. (1999) Inget kan stoppa oss nu!—en ny generation tar over. Stockholm: Ekerlids Förlag. Stevenson, R.L. (1994) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Penguin. Strindberg, A. (1991) ‘The Father’, in August Strindberg Plays: One, trans. M.Meyer. London: Methuen Drama.

Part III After identity…? Selves in question

10 Beyond happy families A critical re-evaluation of the control—resistance— identity triangle Yiannis Gabriel

Introduction “All happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, at the start of Anna Karenina. Unhappy families? Is there such a thing in our times? Not if we are to believe corporate idiom, which, as Casey (1999) argues, has used the family as a spearhead in its disciplinary machinery. Discipline, control, in today’s corporations, does not reside in traditional bureaucratic regulations, let alone coercive domination of the employee. Instead, so the argument goes, corporate culture has emerged as an infinitely more subtle form of normative control, one that transforms each employee into a self-regulating, self-policing subject, one who is almost unable to achieve any political, critical, or moral detachment from his/her employer’s power practices. This subject is hardworking, flexible, and docile; it is a subject that breaks easily into a smile when meeting the organization’s customers, a subject that experiences guilt and shame with alacrity, but has no sense of justice or injustice. It is a subject that is constitutionally unable to turn his/her malaise and despair into resistance, a subject that has developed the utmost psychological, social, and material dependence on the corporation; it has become a nonsubject. Angie’s words (Casey 1999:167) linger in the reader’s memory: I have the golden handcuff sensation, that I’d like to leave but the security and benefits are such that I’m not sure I could adjust my lifestyle. But I’m continually re-evaluating my position with Hephaestus…. I used to be more like the typical Hephaestus person…task-oriented, judgmental, aggressive…but now I’m not like that… I don’t want to be too negative. But it’s hard for me… I get headaches, like, from this place. Sometimes I think this place is trying to kill me. Like several of her co-workers, Angie believes herself to be unique—unlike the “typical” Hephaestus employee. And, like several of her co-workers, Angie feels uneasy, guilty even, for criticizing the company to an outsider, an academic researcher. Keeping it all in the family—what better proof could there be that the corporation has turned itself into a family? At a simple level, one gets the impression that corporate culture, with its gurus,

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its buzzwords and its techniques, has realized the dream of old Human Relations. It has transformed the corporation into a proper normative community, a source of meaning and companionship, one ignorant of any political realities in capitalism or of any tedium and alienation at work. Instead of being cogs in vast impersonal machines (too inflexible and conflict-ridden to survive in these days of “extraordinary technological change and highly competitive global environments”), individuals have their proper place in it, just as in a family. This is a discourse of flexible, flat, caring organizations, organizations fit for our times. At a deeper level, of course, the controls of today’s corporation are seen as infinitely more subtle and going far deeper than those figured by Elton Mayo and his co-workers in the 1920s, reaching to the very core of each employee’s sense of selfhood and identity, defining his/her very being. A prodigious amount of academic research has been carried out on these new forms of corporate controls on individuals, their effectiveness, their costs; it is now easy to imagine that there is a unified discourse on control. At the cost of some simplification, the following traditions can be singled out: 1 Labor theorists, following the pioneering work of Braverman (1974), Burawoy (1979, 1983, 1985), and Edwards (1979), have been preoccupied with the changing nature of capitalist controls and the types of resistance and opposition they engender. Within this tradition, the divergence and even conflict of interests between those managing and those managed is a pre-linguistic, pre-ideological, pre-psychological given (e.g., Thompson 1990, 1993; Thompson and Ackroyd 1995). Some labor process theorists continue to view management “philosophies” and rhetorics of corporate culturalism as an ideological assault on workers. These are superimposed on underlying power relations, in the interest of mystification and obfuscation of the labor intensification brought about by new manufacturing technologies, like lean production, TQM, and JIT (e.g., Sewell and Wilkinson 1992a, b). Other labor process theorists have joined with one or more of the traditions below, viewing normative controls as primary rather than as superstructural controls. 2 Following the work of Michel Foucault, “poststructuralist” scholars are arguing that subjectivity is actually constructed at the workplace, through a multiplicity of management practices, including performance appraisals, corporate culture packages, structural reorganizations, labeling, classifications, and so forth. These theorists reject the ideological—political dichotomy, viewing power as inseparable from knowledge, residing in a variety of discursive practices (e.g., Barker 1993; Knights 1990, 1992; Knights and Vurdubakis 1994; Marsden 1993; Sakolsky 1992; Townley 1993). Some of the theorists working within this perspective view resistance as part of the power/knowledge complex, though others are prepared to view it, more conventionally, as self-conscious oppositional action, part of a reflexive constitution of individuals as subjects. 3 In organization studies, the “excellence literature” of the 1980s proclaimed a new range of cultural and ideological controls as the key to increased efficiency and success. Peters and Waterman described these controls as “loose-tight”—loose in that they shun bureaucratic overregulation, tight in that they aim at self-regulation through the internalization of a “strong culture” (1982). In response to this, a critical tradition has emerged (often drawing on the work of the Frankfurt School), denouncing what it sees as the iron fist of discipline and symbolic manipulation inside the velvet glove of

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empowerment, customer service, and quality (e.g., Deetz 1992; Ray 1985; Smircich 1983; Willmott 1987, 1993). Organizational theorists have generally sought to identify new forms of organizational controls, functioning both at the level of surveillance and at the level of symbolism, to assess their effectiveness and to study the ways in which they operate. 4 Emotion theorists, writing primarily from a social constructionist perspective, have been exploring the ways in which organizational controls reach the individual’s emotional life, colonizing his/her emotions in and out of work, and channeling these emotions toward the provision of customer service, quality, etc. (e.g., Fineman 1993; Fineman and Sturdy 1997; Grey 1996; Mumby and Putnam 1992; Putnam and Mumby 1993; Ritzer 1993). These theorists have envisaged emotion as a contestable terrain, a terrain in which deals, compromises, and conflicts unfold. Emotion has also been studied as a driving force in organizational politics, notably as a source of employee resistance (Fineman 1996; Fineman and Sturdy 1997; Gabriel 1997, 1998b). 5 Psychoanalytic writers have examined the unconscious meanings assumed by today’s organizational controls, as expressed in the emotional and fantasy lives of their members. They have examined the dependencies that these organizations generate, and the ways they control the behavior of their employees by becoming surrogates of parental and authority figures (Diamond 1993; Hirschhorn 1988, 1989; Kets de Vries 1988; Krantz 1989, 1990; Oglensky 1995; Zaleznik 1965) or by offering surrogate narcissistic gratifications (e.g., Carr 1997, 1998; Gabriel 1991a, b, 1993, 1995; Mason and Carr 1997; Schwartz 1985, 1987a, b, 1990). The psychological costs of organizational controls and the defensive and coping strategies adopted by employees are of central concern for writers in this tradition. 6 More recently, a way of studying organizational controls has emerged, drawing on those above, but also highlighting the point where employee meets consumer. It explores the constraints placed on employees through direct contact with customers (including “planted mystery shoppers”), but also the identity discontinuities resulting from the fact that individuals are simultaneously producers and consumers, serviceproviders, and service-buyers. (Du Gay 1996; Du Gay and Salaman 1992; Gabriel and Lang 1995; Knights and Morgan 1991, 1993; Ogbonna and Wilkinson 1990; Rosenthal et al. 1997; Sturdy 1998). Individuals construct their corporate as well as their private identities, but try to accommodate their experiences as producers or employees with those as consumers. At the interstices of these discourses lurks a certain problematic, a problematic of control, resistance, and identity as fashioned by contemporary maagement practices. The word “problematic” is entirely appropriate here; it denotes the sharing of some key assumptions and concepts which often go unchallenged, the recognition of certain core questions that attract much theoretical and empirical attention, the existence of various in-family disagreements and cross-family feuds, a sense among scholars of sharing the same language and understanding what is at stake. There are, within these discourses, a number of fatal sins, such as essentialism, dualism, and relativism, certain allowable shortcuts (“As X conclusively showed…”) and little conspiracies of silence surrounding taboo subjects which may not be touched (e.g., psychology and leadership among most labor process theorists, power among most psychoanalytic writers) or assumptions that may not be questioned. Thus, the pursuit of contemporary organizational controls and the

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attendant forms of resistance and subjectivity can be experienced at times as a safe haven within academic discourses where all is turbulence and even chaos. The scholar who ploughs this furrow has a reassuring feeling of “understanding” what is being argued, of being part of a sensical discourse, where positions are clearly defensible and contestable. In this chapter, I shall explore three of the main dimensions of this problematic—the nature of “contemporary workplace controls,” the relationship between organization and individual which includes both “embracement” and resistance to organizational controls, and the attendant modalities of employee identity—seeking to identify some continuities and discontinuities, assumptions and silences. In a few instances, I shall play devil’s advocate, in the hope of opening up positions that have tended to harden. My purpose is to suggest that the idea of “contemporary organizational controls” has become something of a unifying umbrella, concealing substantial differences between theoretical approaches, confusing different types of control and different ways of conceptualizing control, and, more importantly, obscuring those unmanaged and unmanageable dimensions of organizational life. I shall conclude by arguing that in spite of formidable controls operating at different levels within today’s corporations and affecting different employees in different ways, there are still places in these corporations where recalcitrant identities can be fashioned outside of or in opposition to organizational controls.

Postmodern organizations, postmodern controls Postmodernity looms large behind all discourses of contemporary organizational controls. This is not the place to examine the different meanings and uses of postmodernity (see Bergquist 1993; Carr 1996, 1997; Clegg 1990; Jeffcutt 1993; Hassard and Parker 1993; Parker 1992, 1995a; Schwartz 1995), beyond noting the underlying assumption that today’s organizations entail certain types of control which were not part of “modern” or “modernist” organizations. Some writers envisage a radical discontinuity between the controls exercised by today’s organizations and classical/modernist organizational controls, notably technical controls (such as assembly lines), administrative controls (such as bureaucratic rules, hierarchies, and timetables), and political/institutional controls (such as collective bargaining). Others envisage a cohabitation of old and new controls, or even an intensification of old controls with the assistance of new controls. Hephaestus, along with many other American organizations, introduced in the 1980s a two-pronged program of structural reorganization and cultural renewal, marking the arrival of new controls; these were superimposed onto the existing “system of formal disciplinary rules and procedures” (Casey 1999:172). Casey regards the introduction of controls as typical of what she calls “postindustrial change” (1999:175), though she guardedly views the accompanying responses and problems as “not necessarily generalizable or predictive” (1999:175). The arrival of these controls seems to have far more pervasive impact on the employees’ psychic and social life than the earlier formal controls. New controls appear in diverse forms, which generally fall in the following interrelated categories: • structural changes, notably, flatter hierarchies, flexible working practices, continuous bench-marking and measurement;

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• changes in manufacturing technologies, such as lean production, TQM, and JIT; • changes in surveillance technologies, including the widespread use of electronic camera surveillance, performance-monitoring technology, and electronic tagging, as well as systems which can expose a single individual as the source of an operational failure; • a concerted attempt by management to promote new sets of values, attitudes, and beliefs, through a symbolic manipulation of meanings, which privilege quality, service, excellence, teamwork, loyalty, and so on. Unlike Marxist scholars who tended to see normative controls as essentially “superstructural” mystifications of underlying forms of political control, normative and cultural controls feature in most current literature as primary controls in their own right, complementing and reinforcing other controls, which reside in organizational structure, manufacturing, and surveillance technologies. Thus, “new” controls are seen as mutually reinforcing. Cultural controls make surveillance practices acceptable or invisible— together, they lead to an intensification of effort (Parker and Slaughter 1993; Sewell and Wilkinson 1992a, b) and a choking of dissent (Casey 1996, 1999; Deetz 1992; Willmott 1993). These, in turn, lead to an exclusion or emasculation of trade unions and a longterm decline in collective resistance and opposition (Legge 1995; Purcell 1993). Employees come to regard their relationship with their employer in personal rather than collective terms, developing a new dependence which becomes constitutive of their identity and selfhood (Deetz 1992; Jermier et al. 1994; Knights 1990; Sturdy 1992; Willmott 1990). A chronic insecurity pervades workplaces, an insecurity different from that affecting the traditional working class (Blackwell and Seabrook 1985) in that the employee believes it to be within his/her power to “stay in the family,” through loyal, hard service, and unquestioned obedience. Unlike traditional working-class insecurity, which was experienced as the product of social injustice and the vagaries of the labor market, contemporary insecurity is the outcome of the individual employee’s self-doubt and emotional instability. Schwartz (1987a, b, 1990) and numerous other authors describe this type of control as “totalizing,” to denote the weakening of alternative allegiances, such as those owed to professional and occupational bodies, trade unions or social classes, and the suppression of overt displays of resistance and opposition. More importantly, totalizing control implies that today’s organizations have, or at least aim for, total control over their employees, their hearts and minds (i.e., their emotions and their ways of thinking) as well as of their bodies (the physical space which they occupy, their physical appearance, facial expressions, and bodily movements). These pervasive controls colonize the individual from within rather than from above or from outside; this is a widely held view which suggests that the controls of postmodernity are more invasive, pervasive, and insidious than those of earlier eras. Foucault’s reading of the panopticon (Foucault 1977, 1980), a vast mechanism of surveillance in which individuals police themselves since they can never be sure when the disciplinary gaze is focused on them, has had a considerable influence on scholarly understanding of contemporary controls (Sewell and Wilkinson 1992a; Townley 1993), though different authors have different conceptions of the level at which panoptic discipline functions. Schwartz has offered the following portrait of organizational totalitarianism: In organizational totalitarianism the organization, as defined by its leadership’s understanding of their own actions, is proclaimed to be the

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organizational ideal; and the organization’s power is used to impose this as the ego ideal for the organization’s participants. (1990:24) Schwartz views organizational totalitarianism as a narcissistic disorder and identifies a series of devastating consequences both for the organization and for the individual, ranging from organizational decay and a loss of a sense of reality to moral turpitude. In a justly famous article, Willmott (1993) has gone beyond this, arguing that totalitarianism is an intrinsic feature of contemporary organizations. Programs of cultural control, like those advocated by the “excellence theorists,” amount to a new form of totalitarianism, which closely mirrors the picture provided by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four; “Within organizations, programmes of corporate culturalism, human resource management and total quality management have sought to promote or strengthen a corporate ethos that demands loyalty from employees, silences or punishes those who question its creed” (Willmott 1993:519). Corporate totalitarianism is founded on a phoney choice with which it presents the individual, one expressed with utmost clarity by Peters and Waterman as “you either buy into the norms or you get out” (1982:528). Unlike earlier generations of workers, who had no delusions about the stark realities of the workplace, many of today’s workers imagine themselves exercising their freedom of choice over their employer as they do over goods in the marketplace. In so doing, they make themselves vulnerable to the organization’s totalitarian controls, which demand total suppression of dissent and criticism. An earlier generation of critical theorists, exemplified by Marcuse’s (1964) One Dimensional Man, had argued that capitalism as a whole exercises totalitarian controls over the masses, through the same appearance of choice, which in effect leads to a closure of critical consciousness and a paralysis of resistance. The totalizing quality of today’s organizational controls makes distinctions between different groups and types of employees almost redundant. It is remarkable how easily skill, occupational, class, national, and even gender distinctions fade into the background of today’s academic discourses, in which manufacturing workers, flight attendants, electronic engineers, supermarket cashiers, fast food workers, NASA, and Disneyland employees feature indiscriminately as subjects to the same or similar controls. Casey’s mixture of specialist scientists and manufacturing workers joins a cast of thousands populating contemporary academic discourses of control, resistance, and identity. It is interesting that managers themselves feature in many of these discourses in virtually the same way as other employees. Managers too are subject to organizations’ totalizing controls, they too are colonized from within, they too are invited to buy in or get out, they too are subject to panoptic surveillance (Du Gay 1996; Parker 1995b; Sewell and Wilkinson 1992a; Watson 1994; Zuboff 1988). Thus, paradoxically but crucially, organizations are viewed as systems of total control in which no one in particular need be in total control. The fascination of organizational controls as a defining feature of postmodernity has tended to obscure the possibility that different organizations employ different strategies of control or that, within a single organization, individuals are subject to different modes of control. It has also tended to obscure a fundamental difference between the ways that different discourses approach the concept of control. Normative controls, operating

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through emotional dependence and identification of the individual with the organization, and panoptic controls, operating through discursive and nondiscursive practices, are not just different types of control, but different ways of conceiving the meaning of control. The former conceives of control as a psychological process, whereby individual actions, thoughts, and feelings are knowingly or unknowingly restrained, molded, and guided by forces outside the individual. The latter, by contrast, conceives of control through mechanisms which reside in language (the naming, the listing, the classifying), in spatial and temporal arrangements (the location, the measurement, the timing), in arrangements working on the human body, and is profoundly antipsychological and anticulturalist. This conception of control views psychology itself, the idea of an emotional, thinking subject, as an effect of the very controlling mechanisms at hand. Within this discourse, the emotionalization of the subject is as much a feature of contemporary controls as the politicization of the Marxist class subject was the consequence of earlier capitalist controls. Confession, for instance, is convincingly presented by Casey as a form of emotional atonement which infantilizes the individual, creating a perpetual sense of guilt and dependence, and paralyzing his/her will to resist. Her analysis is consistent with psychological accounts of confession and its devastating effect on an individual’s selfesteem, like, for instance, that presented by Koestler in Darkness at Noon, in which loyal servants of the Soviet Revolution are psychologically broken and politically destroyed by being forced to confess to imaginary crimes. But a Foucauldian analysis would argue that the very fact that a “confession discourse” has become part of organizational practices (has “colonized” them) signals the presence of controls which construct the confessing subject as ‘employee’ and the employee as ‘confessing subject’ (Beech 1998; Casey 1999; Townley 1993). Even if an individual has nothing to confess, the transformation of the workplace into a confessional, with the implicit acceptance that there are right and wrong attitudes, appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, measurable performances, etc., and that the individual must continuously monitor him/herself against such standards, creates pliable, self-policing, self-disciplining individuals, who lack the words (or discursive resources) to oppose or shake-off the invasive tyranny of power/knowledge.

Control and subjectivity One of the most important innovations of the current discourses on organizational controls has been a multipronged attempt to show that these controls do not merely constrain the individual, but in a far-reaching way, mold his/her very sense of selfhood and identity. This molding goes quite beyond older arguments of “internalization” of social values and regulations by individuals and encompasses the totality of an individual’s emotional and sym-bolic life and his/her potential for self-directed action. A wide diversity of arguments has been proffered on how this molding takes place and at what level. None of these is as uncompromising as that proposed by Foucault, for whom the individual’s dependence is not a psychological, a cultural, or a symbolic one, but an ontological one. The individual is not merely dependent on power (including power in organizations); it is something that literally does not exist outside of power—it is the product, the effect of power:

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The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourse, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation, the individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle. (1980:98) While many claim to follow Foucault, few (Grey 1994a; Knights and Vurdubakis 1994; Townley 1993) have grasped the implications of this statement. The majority prefer instead to continue treating the individual as an entity that collides with power and resists it, as it pursues projects of selfhood and identity. Instead of viewing the subject as derivative of power, as a hard Foucauldian approach suggests, they view it as dependent on power. And in this, the dependence of today’s employee is presented as different from the dependence of earlier generations of serfs, journeymen, and workers—it is not the product of a personal bond of loyalty, nor the bond of a cash nexus fuelled by economic necessity, but a dependence mediated by the struggle for identity and selfhood. This assumption should be questioned, though it rarely is. For example, why is it that one never reads in accounts of control—resistance—identity how much money individuals earn? Is it reasonable to treat a hospital ancillary on subsistence wages as forming the same dependence on his/her employer as professionals or managers earning dizzying salaries and enjoying massive fringe benefits? What kind of theoretical perspective does it take to view money as something that plays no part in the way individuals construct their identity? And does the struggle for identity and selfhood affect individuals across ethnic and racial divides, gender, and age groups in the same way? It is a measure of the dominance of the control—resistance—identity problematic that rarely are these dimensions addressed as anything other than side issues. Instead, the corporation is approached as a universal family surrogate, colonizing the individual’s consciousness by offering its employees a deal which they simply cannot refuse. Parker (1995b) identified the pervasiveness of the concept of the family, among management and technical staff in “Vulcan,” a British manufacturer of domestic appliances, and identified some ways in which it infiltrated the individuals’ identities without obliterating differences between them. Casey’s research at “Hephaestus” presents a psychoanalytic variant of this argument. The key feature of this psychoanalytic argument is that organizations, experienced as families, offer an appeasement of the employees’ narcissistic strivings, their need to identify with an ideal which may then re-direct their libido toward the ego. Schwartz (1987a, b) first suggested that, in this way, individuals recreate in organizational contexts an early experience of fusion with the mother, one which protects them from anxiety and pain. As an isolated unit, the individual is narcissistically impoverished and liable to anxiety; as a member of a powerful, successful, and alluring organization, the individual becomes powerful, successful, and alluring, at least in his/her fantasy life. The organizational ideal thus becomes the basis of

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the individual ego-ideal, which sustains his/her narcissism. Sievers (1994) has argued that even immortality can be lent by the organization to an individual, via this mechanism—as members of an eternal organization, individuals can defy death, imagining themselves to be immortal. Identity, then, is the product of these idealized fantasies, which need not be consistent or remotely realistic, but are highly contingent on the individual’s sense of being part of the organization. The moment the individual is cast out of an organization, perfection, power, immortality, etc. collapse—the individual’s identity is shattered. Thus the individual is suspended in a state of permanent infantile dependence with far-reaching psychological consequences (Carr 1997; Lindholm 1988). Casey’s contribution lies in her skillful elaboration of the psychological costs of this dependence and of the grip which the family and team metaphors exercise over employees, precisely because they express this dependence in psychologically benevolent terms. The paradox would seem to be the co-existence of this discourse of family, caring, and growth with a discourse of discipline, hard work, confessions, self-surveillance, and, above all, potential dismissal. Families and, to a lesser extent, teams are not after all striving for efficiency, innovation, and profits; nor do they normally submit their members to continuous surveillance; nor do they routinely expel their members. Casey handles this paradox by drawing on the imagery of the team-manager as primal father, who ruthlessly disciplines his sons and keeps them in a state of constant uncertainty and fear. At an unconscious level, the family of the all-giving primal mother and the family of the feared primal father co-exist, mother and father offering alternative models for relations between followers and their leaders (see Gabriel 1997). At a conscious level, the rhetoric of “tough love” represents an attempt to resolve the same contradiction (Legge 1995), between a caring environment and one that disciplines and punishes. As Willmott has convincingly argued, the disciplinary implications of mass redundancies and downsizing has been to amplify the seduction of security (Willmott 1993:535) which the organization appears to offer the docile, loyal, and hardworking employee. Not only is it offering the idealized attributes noted by Schwartz and Sievers, but the organization seems to offer the individual freedom from insecurity, shelter from a hostile world outside and also a certain symbolic anchorage in a world where all is doubt and change. Highlighting the dangers, the doubts and the changes makes the deal offered by the organization more attractive, further entrapping the individual. Far from being untypical as she imagines herself, Angie, whose “golden handcuffs” comment was cited at the outset, epitomizes this entrapment. In this way, not only does the organization construct the employee, but the employee constructs the organization, as a formidable, powerful, and alluring entity, one that occupies the same unconscious space as that occupied by the family, dominated by those two sacral figures, the terrifying primal father and the omnibenevolent primal mother. Far from being an economic or political unit, the organization is experienced primarily as a symbolic universe, one that fulfils or frustrates desire, one that drives emotion.

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Ambivalence and the entrapped subject Psychoanalytic approaches, with their emphasis on the lifelong consequences of early childhood dependence have been in a strong position to theorize psychological dependence, in later life, as that promulgated by organizational controls (Baum 1987; Carr 1998; Diamond 1993; Hirschhorn 1988, 1989; Lindholm 1988; Mason and Carr 1997; Schwartz 1987a, 1990) or indeed by consumer culture (Gabriel and Lang 1995; Lasch 1980; Marcuse 1964). Yet, many nonpsychoanalytic theorists have also noted this dependence and examined its consequences (e.g., Parker 1995b; Smircich and Morgan 1982; Sturdy 1992; Watson 1994; Willmott 1993). In a recent work, Hochschild (1997) has argued that the corporation is currently providing individuals with an alternative home, a surrogate family which in some respects is preferable to the real one. Casey, like numerous other commentators, singles out ambivalence as the “most pervasive and manifest effect of the experience of working in the new culture” (1999:169). Ambivalence to Casey signifies a cognitive and emotional confusion against which the individual seeks to defend him/herself through repression of the negative, and further identification and idealization. Casey’s account accords with Freud’s (1926) later view, according to which ambivalence is something to be defended against rather than the outcome of the defense. Ambivalence is a widely discussed response to contemporary controls. In an article surveying the subordinates’ relations to their leaders, Oglensky argues that ambivalence is “perhaps the hallmark of authority relations” (1995:1042), not merely a result of contemporary totalizing controls. She argues that ambivalence is rooted in the experience of the oedipal situation, and its reappearance in later life “presses the subordinate to reject his or her own needfulness of the other, a position which is, at times, felt as infantilizing and binding and stirs up feelings of hatred and fantasies of rebellion” (1995:1042). The individual’s response to ambivalence, according to Oglensky, is to seek outlets for his/her aggression, through overt or covert acts of resistance, through sublimation into acceptable forms of opposition and negotiation, or through displacement onto unrelated objects or targets. Casey, by contrast, along with the majority of contemporary commentators, observed few signs of resistance, sublimation, or opposition (let alone rebellion)—instead, she found that the predominant way through which individuals dealt with ambivalence was a simultaneous increase in identification with the company and a whole host of fantasies of retreat and escape, which only exacerbate ambivalence; the company is family and prison at the same time. The opposite form of psychological defense against ambivalence is cynical detachment (Kunda 1992; Schwartz 1990; Thompson and Ackroyd 1995; Watson 1994; Willmott 1993), a form of psychological distancing in which the individual constructs his/her ideal, out of his/her ability to distance him/herself from the organization, which comes to represent all that is false, corrupt, and decadent, a genuine organizational malignant, instead of an organizational ideal (Gabriel 1997). Cynicism is based on the individual’s acknowledgment of an instrumental dependence on the organization and simultaneous denial of psychological attachment to it. Thus, the cynics’ core fantasy is the belief that they can remain “unpolluted,” untouched by the organization’s iniquities,

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even as they profit from its bounty. Like idealization and identification, cynicism and distancing disable the critical viewpoint from which a challenge to the organization may be raised—the former fully adopts the normative viewpoint of the organization, the latter denies that there is a normative viewpoint at all, finding solace in the amorality of “anything goes,” “dog eat dog,” and “each man for himself.”

Premature requiems for employee resistance Casey’s is one of the mounting number of voices suggesting that new organizational controls have all but squeezed labor resistance out of the workplace. Requiems for employee resistance, like hers, are sometimes part of more general farewells to the working class and traditional forms of worker rebelliousness and opposition centering on trade unions and political parties (Gorz 1982; Purcell 1993). In a skillful polemic, Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd (1995) have criticized current trends to discount or overlook employee recalcitrance on both theoretical and empirical grounds. They argue that most of today’s researchers visit workplaces already seduced by cultural corporatism, and are unable to identify employee misbehavior and resistance, because they have been blinded by the discourses of control and surveillance; they see control and surveillance everywhere because they have been conditioned to see surveillance and control everywhere. The argument can be given a Foucauldian twist: the researcher, wearing his/her security badge, equipped with his/her tape-recorders, interview schedules, name lists, and notebooks, all too easily becomes part of the panoptic machinery surveying/constructing the docile worker—the researcher’s gaze becomes inseparable from the disciplinary gaze. Even critical commentators like Sewell and Wilkinson (1992a), Deetz (1992), Willmott (1993), and Grey (1994b) can be read as implying that the invisibility of resistance marks the absence of resistance. Yet, an alternative argument is that new forms of control generate new forms of resistance, resistance which may go unnoticed if one goes about looking for it in the way that earlier sociologists did (e.g., Beynon 1975; Lupton 1963; Roy 1952, 1954). Looking for resistance among PhDs in electronic engineering, fast food employees, or even manual workers in postindustrial factories requires different observational and conceptual resources from those deployed for the study of workers in Fordist plants. This is what contributors to a volume edited by Jermier et al. (1994) have sought to do, exploring a formidable range of workplace oppositional strategies including sabotage, whistle-blowing, ritualism, bloody-mindedness, legal recourse, pilfering, output restriction, counter-ideologies, and refusal of discretion. Some of these practices, like sabotage, may seem to echo earlier types of worker recalcitrance (e.g., Beynon 1975), though the current surveillance techniques result in new variants—instead of throwing spanners in the works, employees can now undermine productive operations through failure to act when required, acting ritualistically, leaking information to the press, rumor-mongering, or whistle-blowing (Austrin 1994; LaNuez and Jermier 1994; Rothschild and Miethe 1994). Collinson (1994) explores two distinct modes of resistance: first, resistance through distance, in which workers emotionally create their own spaces— physical, emotional, and symbolic—within organizations, where they can exercise lacunae of control and refuse to accept responsibility for the running or the predicament

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of the company. This type of resistance is essentially defensive; it may ultimately be reappropriated by management controls. By contrast, resistance through persistence, illustrated by a case of an employee who, with the help of her union, successfully fought a case of sex discrimination against her, proved both more effective and more arduous. Collinson describes the radicalization of this individual in the course of generating the resources (especially the knowledge of procedures and records) which enabled her to resist management. While resistance became an integral part of her identity, Collinson observes that identity was not the motive but the outcome of her opposition. He proposes that: resistance is likely to be more effective when those involved are less concerned with the construction and protection of identity and more committed to the issues on which their opposition is based. (1994:57) Collinson’s argument is developed by Fineman and Sturdy (1997), who seek to introduce an emotional dimension to the understanding of resistance. Emotion becomes a mediator between an organization’s controlling practices and an individual’s or group’s resistance. Emotion can drive acts of overt rebellion and recalcitrance, such as whistle-blowing—in such cases, it is a sense of insult to the employee’s pride or sense of justice rather than the experience of oppressive controls which precipitates opposition (see also Gabriel 1998b). Alternatively, emotion may lead to passive resistance, such as psychological withdrawal, or resistance through distance, such as the improvised departures from organizational scripts. The act of resistance is more than an outcome of the contradictions of capitalism and control. The force and texture of a “challenge” is from feelings—such as hurt, affront, anger, or fear. And how the challenge is enacted depends upon the emotion rules within particular organizational settings. The display of anxiety, embarrassment, outrage, anger, guilt, pride, and other feelings are implicitly or explicitly shaped, prescribed, or proscribed with the organization labor contract (Fineman and Sturdy 1997:24). Fineman and Sturdy appropriately point out that we lack the research tools for studying such emotions, the extent to which they operate within emotion rules and the point at which these rules are challenged, redefined or fractured (see also Sturdy 1997). Psychoanalytic approaches are quite wellplaced to theorize the forms assumed by dissent at the workplace. In the first place, by interpreting conscious behavior as expressing unconscious desires, psychoanalysis allows for the co-existence of dissent and compliance. As Fineman and Gabriel (1996) have argued: People may be rebelling even as they appear to be conforming. Pupils who wear the regulation uniform may be conforming to the rules, but by leaving the top shirt button undone, they express their resistance to them. Compliance and resistance are not either/or responses. Orders may be obeyed willingly or unwillingly; they may equally be obeyed grudgingly, inaccurately, ritualistically or sarcastically. In all of these cases, compliance and resistance can coexist in the same form of behaviour. (1996:87)

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Second, by looking at mental life as dynamic and mobile, as Carr (1998) has argued, psychoanalytic approaches can examine “the possibility of dissent being triggered from one of the constellation of life themes, even though a psychostructure may suggest strong identification within the organization” (1998:92). The appearance of a compliant psychostructure by a group of employees, like those at Hephaestus, does not guarantee the absence of dissent, even if dissent assumes marginal, symbolic, or whimsical forms. Through a study of dreams reported by school principals in New South Wales and subsequent discussions of some of these dreams with the dreamers, Carr observed that these individuals are more likely to derive their sense of selfhood from the persecuted and/or rebellious self-images revealed in their dreams than from their social and political status as agents of social control.

Beyond the panopticon Foucault’s panopticon, combining as it does a Catholic obsession with the omnipresent eye of God and a Protestant preoccupation with clean efficiency, has exercised a powerful grip on analyses of contemporary organizational controls and the silencing of dissent. As a metaphor for the formidable machinery of contemporary surveillance, one which deploys all kinds of technologies—electronic, spatial, psychological, and cultural—it has undoubtedly helped numerous researchers in exploring the surreptitious and subtle ways in which different types of organizational controls function today. A number of valuable studies, including those by Sewell and Wilkinson (1992a, b). Grey (1994a, b), and Casey herself (1996, 1999), have managed to stare back into the disciplinary gaze, making visible what is invisible. At the same time, it has led to an obfuscation of oppositional strategies and dissent and a premature closure of the possibility of current and future resistance and opposition. As Thompson and Ackroyd have noted, we seem to “have now come full circle to the post-Braverman cry of whatever happened to worker resistance?” (1995:628). It may be that the pendulum will swing again, with researchers discovering new variants of opposition and dissent. In a once-famous article, Gouldner (1955) deplored what he viewed as the metaphysical pathos with which his contemporaries had embraced the finality of bureaucratic controls, the destruction of democracy, and the downfall of ideology. In comparison to the pervasiveness and subtlety of today’s controls, the controls critiqued by Gouldner now seem at once brutal and quaint. Yet, his argument on the metaphysical pathos surrounding control is as apt today as it was then. That our lives are controlled by diverse forces operating both on us and through us cannot be doubted. That our lives can be reduced to these forces in a totalitarian gloom runs against what history has to tell us. At times like the present, when, to use Thompson’s and Ackroyd’s paraphrase, all is quiet at the workplace front, employee dissent must be sought at the margins—at the margins of organizations, at the margins of discourse, at the margins of experience. These are the unmanaged spaces in organizations, spaces which for certain periods of time are beyond the surveying gaze of organizational controls (Gabriel 1995). To use the colonial analogy, these are spaces which are officially under colonial administration, and in which colonial rule is not directly challenged. Yet, in these spaces, all kinds of spontaneous, unsupervised activities take place, which although scrutinized by the disciplinary gaze,

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remain inscrutable and impenetrable. Often, as de Certeau (1984) has pointed out, these activities assume the form of unorthodox uses of established objects, or clever ruses, and private codes. The natives acquire the skills of communicating with each other in ways which are either invisible to the disciplinary gaze or meaningless. The stories which they tell each other are either incomprehensible as stories by the colonial administrators or they are frustratingly opaque. Of course, such spaces are soon brought back under control, only to be replaced by new ones. At times, this cat and mouse game turns into a guerrilla warfare, where tactical strikes and retreats are undertaken; victories and defeats are shortlived. At other times, engagement with the practices of power takes place through the medium of fantasy. Fantasy offers to individuals and groups a third way, one that amounts to neither conformity nor rebellion, but a symbolic refashioning of official organizational practices in the interest of pleasure, allowing a temporary supremacy of uncontrol over control and spontaneous emotion over the organization’s emotional scripts. While the unmanaged organization may be a marginal terrain much of the time, it is not unimportant as a terrain where identities are fashioned, tested, and transformed. Not all organizational fantasies belong to the unmanaged organization, of course—as Casey demonstrates very well, organizational controls seek to commandeer fantasy through officially sponsored fantasies; in the case of Hephaestus, none more important than those of family and team. Individuals are not immune to these fantasies, and in some cases, notably those referred to by Schwartz (1987a) as committed organizational participants and by Hopfl (1992) as organizational acolytes, their identities may be derivative of these corporate fantasies. Yet, as can be seen in the words of several of Casey’s respondents, the family and team metaphors can easily mutate into prison metaphors, where identity becomes dislocated from team or family member to prisoner or prison-guard. These can further change into confession metaphors (the subject as sinner), to machine metaphors (the subject as “tool of the corporation”), to battle metaphors (the subject as victim on the organizational battlefield or as hero) or to assault-course metaphors (the subject as psychological survivor of brutalizing experiences). Identities are never one-dimensional or fully integrated; many of their elements are not part of consciousness and can only find expressions in dreams or fantasies. Identities are composed of numerous often contradictory elements which co-exist in an individual’s unconscious (“I am loved” and “nobody appreciates me”; “my work is everything for me” and “my work is killing me”; “my co-workers are like members of my family” and “I don’t want to have anything to do with them outside the workplace”; “I do as I please” and “I am a prisoner”). Many commentators (e.g., Sturdy 1998; Willmott 1993), especially among those working in the area of consumption (e.g., Firat 1992; Suerdem and Sinan 1992; Venkatesh 1992), have noted the tendency of identities in our time to fragment or even to disintegrate. Even more importantly, identities are not autonomous psychic formations, but are continuously redefined in terms of individuals’ and groups’ ideals and hates, through a constant stream of identifications, projections, and introjections (see Carr 1998). A highly effective way of analyzing how identities are continuously constructed, how they become fragmented, and how they are reconstructed is through the study of stories in which individuals encode their identity, narratives which do not purport to merely report facts but poetically embellish facts for effect, allowing for a certain wishfulfillment. Stories do not present facts-as-information, but facts-as-experience, laden

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with symbolism and meaning, in which the storyteller expresses opinions, makes connections, displays feelings, and casts him/herself as a character in a meaningful narrative. Giddens (1991) has argued that, in our times, identity is a narrative identity, i.e., an identity we construct precisely through the stories we tell about ourselves, stories which are constantly changed through re-interpretation and re-invention. These narrative identities are reflexive in that the very telling of the story becomes storytelling material. Storytelling gives the teller a certain moral amnesty, a temporary reprieve from organizational controls and a relative autonomy for subjectivity. Doing research through stories can be enjoyable but is not easy, especially if the researcher is impatient in his/her search for hard data and information. It often requires that the researcher should abandon the stance of neutral observer and recorder and adopt the stance of good listener and even good storyteller, coconspirator on forbidden plots, and fellow-traveler on dangerous fantasies. Yet, it is in these plots and these fantasies that some of the oppositional discourses reside (until a time comes when they may be manifested in action); researchers who insist on guided tours of organizations will fail to notice them. Through the fantasies residing in stories, the colonized can laugh at themselves; they can also laugh at the colonizers. Through these fantasies, they can turn passivity into activity and meaninglessness into purpose. Finally, through these fantasies they can sustain a critical commentary on the symbols of the colonizers, discovering chinks in their armor and fashioning small pockets where alternative, less docile, more recalcitrant identities can function (see Gabriel 199la, b, 1995, 1998a, b). There are other ways in which recalcitrant identities may be pursued. It seems remarkable that, for all the current obsession with the panopticon, few organizational researchers are seriously studying the material and symbolic contests over the physical spaces of organizations. These include struggles regarding size, location, and quality of physical premises, equipment, and furniture; the personalization of individual and group workspaces (and the countertendency to reappropriate this space from employees through hot-desking and teleworking); and the creation of no-go areas for superiors through a variety of subordinate strategies. Another domain for studying recalcitrant identities would be the employees’ consumption patterns as members of organizations, in contrast to consumption in their private lives. This includes a wide range of activities, from the way employees spend their “lunchtime hour” to the ways they may use and abuse company accounts, corporate hospitality, and business travel, to the uniform and nonuniform types of dress they wear at work. These may seem marginal terrains within organizations, yet it is their very marginality that renders them less accessible to the controlling gaze.

Conclusions In this chapter, prompted by Casey’s research, I have examined contemporary organizational controls, as they feature in some current academic discourses. I have cautiously accepted the view that current controls are not merely an intensification of earlier controls, but in some respects novel, in the extent to which they seek to control the subject from the inside as well as from the outside. Surveillance technologies have become more sophisticated and their implications are more far-reaching. Yet, I suggested

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that there is a greater variety of controls than is appreciated and that these controls operate differently across different groups of employees. I then examined some accounts of the ways in which these controls generate a new type of subjectivity, one that is closely based on corporate values and is not disposed toward resistance or dissent; I argued that, although many writers seem to embrace the Foucauldian argument which views the subject as derivative of control, few follow through its implications. Instead, most authors adopt the view that the subject is molded by corporate controls but that it retains a measure of autonomy. The psychoanalytic argument hinging on the concepts of the ego-ideal and narcissism seems to offer one of the more convincing explanations of the ways in which organizational controls become embedded in the individual as well as the reasons why contemporary individuals are susceptible to these specific modes of control. I then examined the tendency to write off worker opposition or recalcitrance, and argued that it is premature to close the discourse on dissent, on the evidence of a limited number of empirical studies, conducted with conceptual and methodological equipment that obscures worker recalcitrance and opposition. I suggested that the importance of control may have been exaggerated and that organizations contain areas which are unmanaged and unmanageable. Overmanaged and overcontrolled images of societies, organizations, and individuals generated by much contemporary research seem to mirror the overmanaged and overcontrolled images embraced by contemporary management in the face of what seem like chaotic conditions of change and unpredictability. Postmodernism has invited us to mistrust many of the revered categories of the human sciences, including “self,” “body,” “society,” “family,” “organization,” and “choice,” revealing them to be linguistic mirages or constructs of convenience, indeed “stories.” Is it not time that we sought to deconstruct the concept of control itself? It seems to me that control can be viewed as a wishfulfilling fantasy, one especially soothing in times of unpredictability and trouble. The belief that everything is, can be, and must be predicted, planned for, and controlled can be seen as a presumptuous self-delusion, an instance of management hubris, an almost transparent fantasy of omnipotence which can afford much narcissistic satisfaction to managers but hardly accords with the precariousness and instability of today’s organizational life. Subordinates often collude with this hubris of management, endowing leaders and organizations with truly superhuman qualities, such as omnipotence, omniscience, and total composure. They too are likely to discover that such fantasies bear little relationship with organizational reality (Gabriel 1998c). In a paper called “A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis” (1917), Freud argued that psychoanalysis had inflicted a blow on human narcissism, by showing that our ego is not master in its own house. If Copernicus’ heliocentric theory shattered the view that the earth is the center of the universe and Darwin’s evolution destroyed the myth of our uniqueness among animals, psychoanalysis adds a third blow; our own soul is not a simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated and subordinated agents, a labyrinth of impulses striving independently of one another towards action, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts and of relations with the outer world, many of which are antagonistic to one another and incompatible. (1917:187)

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Faced with such a situation, the ego becomes, in another Freudian metaphor, like the rider who seeks to control a wild horse; the rider may stay in control, but may equally be overwhelmed. This does not mean that all control is illusory—this would be evidently absurd—but that control easily becomes an object of fantasy, especially in times of change and stress. In this way, we often exaggerate the extent to which we are in control of ourselves or to which others are in control of us. It is time to allow agency back into discourses of power at the workplace, not as a coherent transcendental subject, but as a struggling, interacting, feeling, thinking, and suffering subject, one capable of obeying and disobeying, controlling and being controlled, losing control and escaping control, defining and redefining control for itself and for others.

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Peters, T.S. and Waterman, R.H. (1982) In Search of Excellence. New York: Harper and Row. Purcell, J. (1993) “The end of institutional industrial relations.” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 31:6–23. Putnam, L.L, and Mumby, D.K. (1993) “Organizations, emotion and the myth of rationality,” in S.Fineman (ed.) Emotion in Organizations. London: Sage, pp. 36–57. Ray, C.A. (1985) “Corporate culture: the last frontier of control.” Journal of Management Studies, 25:287–297. Ritzer, G. (1993) The Mcdonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Rosenthal, R., Hill, S. and Peccei, R. (1997) “Checking out service: evaluating excellence, HRM and TQM in retailing.” Work, Employment and Society, 77: 481–504. Rothschild, J. and Miethe, T.D. (1994) “Whistleblowing as resistance in modern work organizations: the politics of revealing organizational deception and abuse,” in J.Jermier, W.Nord, and D.Knights (eds) Resistance and Power in Organizations. London: Routledge, pp. 252–273. Roy, D. (1952) “Quota restriction and goldbricking in a machine shop,” American Journal of Sociology, 57:427–442. Roy, D. (1954) “Efficiency and the ‘fix’: informal inter-group relations in piecework machine shops.” American Journal of Sociology, 60:255–266. Sakolsky, R. (1992) “Disciplinary power and the labour process,” in A.J.Sturdy, D. Knights, and H.Willmott (eds) Skill and Consent: Contemporary Studies in the Labour Process. London: Routledge. Schwartz, H.S. (1985) “The usefulness of myth and the myth of usefulness: a dilemma for the applied organizational scientist.” Journal of Management, 77, I: 31–42. Schwartz, H.S. (1987a) “Anti-social actions of committed organizational participants: an existential psychoanalytic perspective.” Organization Studies, 8, 4: 327–340. Schwartz, H.S. (1987b) “On the psychodynamics of organizational totalitarianism.” Journal of Management, 73, 1:45–54. Schwartz, H.S. (1990) Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. New York: University Press. Schwartz, H.S. (1995) “Review of Boje, D.M. and R.F.Dennehy (1993). Managing in the Postmodern World: America’s Revolution Against Exploitation.” Academy of Management Review, 20, 1:215–221. Sewell, G. and Wilkinson, B. (1992a) “Someone to watch over me: surveillance, discipline and the just-in-time labour process.” Sociology, 26, 2:271–289. Sewell, G. and Wilkinson, B. (1992b) “Empowerment or emasculation: shopfloor surveillance in a total quality organization,” in P.Blyton and R.Turnbull (eds) Reassessing Human Resource Management. London: Sage. Sievers, B. (1994) Work, Death, and Life Itself. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Smircich, L. (1983) “Concepts of culture and organizational analysis.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 28:339–358. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G. (1982) ‘Leadership: the management of meaning’. Journal of Applied Behavioural Studies, 18:257–273. Sturdy, A. (1992) “Clerical consent: ‘shifting’ work in the insurance office,” in A.J. Sturdy, D.Knights, and H.Willmott (eds) Skill and Consent: Contemporary Studies in the Labour Process. London: Routledge, pp. 115–149. Sturdy, A. (1997) “The consultancy process—an insecure business.” Journal of Management Studies, 34, 3:389–413. Sturdy, A. (1998) “Customer care in a consumer society: smiling and sometimes meaning it?” Organization, 5, 1:27–53. Suerdem, A. and Sinan, M. (1992) “What are you doing after the orgy? Or does the consumer really behave (well)?” Advances in Consumer Research, 79:207–212. Thompson, P. (1990) “Crawling from the wreckage: the labour process and the politics of production,” in D.Knights and H.Willmott (eds) Labour Process Theory. London: Macmillan.

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Thompson, P. (1993) “Postmodernism: fatal distraction,” in J.Hassard and M. Parker (eds) Postmodernism and Organizations. London: Sage, pp. 183–203. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, S. (1995) “All quiet on the workplace front? A critique of recent trends in British industrial sociology.” Sociology, 29, 4:615–633. Townley, B. (1993) “Foucault, power/knowledge and its relevance for human resource management.” Academy of Management Review, 78, 3:518–545. Venkatesh, A. (1992) “Postmodernism, consumer culture and the society of the spectacle.” Advances in Consumer Research, 79:199–202. Watson, T.J. (1994) “In Search of Management: Culture, Chaos and Control in Managerial Work.” London: Rout ledge. Willmott, H. (1987) “Studying managerial work: a critique and a proposal.” Journal of Management Studies, 24, 3:249–270. Willmott, H. (1990) “Subjectivity and the dialectics of praxis: opening up the core of labour process analysis,” in D.Knights and H.Willmott (eds) Labour Process Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 336–378. Willmott, H. (1993) “Strength is ignorance, slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organizations.” Journal of Management Studies, 30:515–552. Zaleznik, A. (1965) “The dynamics of subordinacy.” Harvard Business Review, May/June: 119– 131. Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine. Oxford: Heinemann.

11 Casting the other to the ends of the Earth Marginal identity in organisation studies1 Stephen Linstead, Stewart Clegg and Graham Sewell After us, there’s only penguins. (Anonymous Tasmanian bush philosopher, traditional)

Introduction This chapter is a reflection on some of the conditions associated with having or not having the identity of ‘Australian’ Management scholar in the Organisation Studies field (whilst being recognised in other respects as being Australian). Our argument is rooted in our irritation that, whilst recent critical accounts of diversity in organisations recognise that the concept of difference is used to classify, position and perpetuate in disadvantage those very groups that it should have advantaged, it is rarely if ever acknowledged that in Organisation Studies itself this process has been occurring for the best part of a century. This chapter takes a reflexive look at one aspect of this process—the position of the Australian scholar of organisation from Elton Mayo onwards, and the way in which being Australian has been silenced or marginalised—cast out, even to the ends of the Earth. We argue that, as being Australian has functioned symbolically for other cultures for decades, it might begin to do so for Organisation Studies, to alert us to the everincreasing centrist influence of North Atlantic Theory of Organisation (NATO), felt through career advancement, the allocation of research funds and the acceptance of papers in scholarly journals. This is more than just a problem of identity, and more than just an Australian problem.

The Australia syndrome Not too long ago, we three Aussies were sent the following unsolicited note from an ambitious colleague, recently arrived from the United States, to their head of department.2 Names have been changed to protect both the worthy and the unworthy. You might find it of use to know that my forthcoming Journal of Pelmanism article appears to be the only ‘A’ journal publication by any Australian pelmanism academic this year. There are only three ‘A’ (toprated) journals in pelmanism. I have reviewed the issues so far this year and no other Australian academics are among the authors.

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Also, as far as I have been able to find out, there has never before been an ‘A’ journal article carrying the University of Billabong name in any field of procrastination. If this is true, it would make my Journal of Pelmanism article the most prestigious publication (in terms of international recognition) in the history of the Department of Procrastination. We were intrigued by how easy it appeared to be to become Australian, and to leap to the top of the eucalyptus tree in a single kalellian bound by virtue of an article researched and completed in the United States without even cracking a tinny.3 (To be fair, the article did involve research in two countries, but there were four co-authors, which might have merited the demolition of a slab.) We were not only intrigued, but also perhaps more than a little ropeable, and perhaps slightly hurt by the suggestion that our own publications were less than fair dinkum. But we can spot a raw prawn, and after washing down a couple of Balmain Bugs from the barbie with a drop of the Rothbury Estate, waxing ruminant under the jacarandas and lemon-scented gum trees we hunted for tall poppies to chop down.4 Of course, why no other Australians published in this journal, which was edited and published in America and A-rated by Americans, could be a question, to our ethnocentric correspondent, of nothing other than quality. A recent demographic survey of the city in which the University of Billabong is situated revealed 88 different nationalities in a population of less than a quarter of a million. Multi-culturalism is a real issue here: managing diversity an active and daily agenda. In the room across the corridor from our pelmanist at the time of the incident above sat a colleague who had a handful of publications in English but a long list published out of Sarajevowhere many of his relatives still remained under artillery bombardment. A tiny doctoral student from Beijing (who has published two scholarly books in Mandarin) recently offered to help one of us (who is over 1.84 cms and 100kg) to move a heavy bookcase. She explained that during the Cultural Revolution her family had been rusticated. Working as a farm mechanic at the age of eight, she said, made her strong. Imperialism takes many forms.5 Yet as Bob Connell notes, even today, long after the trip to Europe, New York or LA was a mandatory prerequisite to any serious recognition, Australians remain impressed by an ‘international’ reputation, by ‘international’ publications. They do so, moreover, to a degree that exceeds ‘cultural cringe’ or our fondness for cutting down our own ‘tall poppies’—it is a product of a colonial heritage, the English language and of North American, or North Atlantic, intellectual hegemony. ‘International’ means, more precisely, North American and European: the imperial centres, not other colonies…. To publish in prestigious journals in North America or Europe you have to write like a North American or European, cite North American or European sources, situate yourself in North American or European debates. That is what the editors and referees demand. And why shouldn’t they? That is to say, to gain maximum prestige in Australia you need to see the world from the North Atlantic. (Connell 1991:70)

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Connell should know: these words were published whilst he was working in the University of California system, having himself undergone the metamorphosis of travel and relocation.6 To take a slightly different point of view on the same subject, some years ago Lord (Norman) Tebbit, the British politician, was involved in a debate on unemployment. Tebbit was famous for telling the unemployed to ‘get on their bikes’ and look for work, but his argument here was a critical one. He observed that unless the problem of long-term unemployment was tackled directly, by the time the economy recovered it would be too late for many of the workforce—they would have lost the skills they had, or else those skills would be outmoded. ‘For all the use they will be’ he said,’ they might as well be in Australia.’ Tebbit’s point was a telling one—the ‘Australia syndrome’ became synonymous with being out of touch and out of the game.7 This is still a real function.8 One of us learnt it when he failed the ‘cricket’ test that Tebbit set. At the time, the author in question was on an extended sojourn in European climes. He had been there almost 12 months, when, with winter’s chill deepening and the University elite’s trickery getting more treacherous, the desire to return from this corner of Tebbit’s land proved too strong. Tebbit once said, famously, that anyone living in England (actually the author in question was living in another part of the British Isles—which only exemplifies the extreme chauvinism of the good Lord’s remarks) who did not support the Test team at cricket had no place being there. Rather than cheer for the English Test Team, the author supported the Aussies—and if they weren’t playing, then whoever was trying to beat the Poms (given the comparative recent records of England and Australia, this also makes good sense down at the Tote). When news of his antipodean sympathies and barracking for colonials in general, and his associated estrangement from the host institutional culture leaked out, eventually reaching the super-egos who were, of course, in control, well that was enough to confirm the rough and ungentle ways that one would expect from he who was not ‘one of us’. The only thing to do with such an ungracious wretch as might decline a ‘glittering prize’, especially when they seemed perpetually destined for the ‘wooden spoon’, was to spew.9 And spew they did. In further evidence, one of us was told by a UK publisher that market research on a recently published edited volume had necessitated a revision because ‘there are too many Australians in it’, although the readers liked the content. It is interesting that under the cloak of anonymity, they didn’t even bother to dress ethnocentrism up as anything else! He has even more recently been referred to as a ‘young Australian gentleman’, despite the fact that he is, well…approaching his prime, shall we say, and unused to being accorded the appellation ‘gentleman’, one might also add. Patronising? Perhaps… Of course, everyone knows, don’t they, that all Australians (even the old ones) are young, brash, full of energy, unschooled, lacking in sophistication (even the rich ones) and—despite the fact that good qualities such as enthusiasm are occasionally conceded— have a lot to learn? What else can you expect from the only country to have lost a Prime Minister, Harold Holt, in a surfing accident?10 Maybe we’ll have a better image now that there’s a Nobel prize winner, Kary Mullis, who surfs, albeit more carefully. It really doesn’t bother us. We couldn’t give a rat’s arse,11 as we might say. Australians are used to performing a metaphorical function for both the Old World and the New. But are we really so far from the action that we’re not only past the touchline, we can barely get a seat in the stand? Whilst we don’t think so, we do think the issue deserves consideration.

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In what follows, we ask some questions about what it means to write organisation theory from the edge of a world defined by the North Atlantic Theory of Organisations (NATO). We ask what themes are emerging, what themes could or should emerge, what is legitimately distinctive about Australian thought, what relationship Australian Organisation Studies has to the North Atlantic mainstream and its internal critiques, how might local and global connect in a Euro-Austral-Asian society, and some questions about difference and relatedness. We think we live in a unique space: geographically, ontologically and, potentially at least, epistemologically. Geographically we are marginal to Europe, to Asia, to the Americas. Ontologically, as a continent of plurality and diversity, officially recognised as such through the postmodern mode of multiculturalism, much of our being is marginal to the mainstream of other existences. Epistemologically we are marginal, a place where all the signs may read the same, in the same language, as the empires of Now and Then12 but where the methods of making sense of them seem altogether more various (Osuri and Banerjee 2002). It is not unusual for it to be the farflung corners of empire that harbour resistance. And we think that being marginal is important for the field. Marginal through choice, not marginalised, unwittingly and by others, the mere objects of repression. To stand resolutely outside the identity of the mainstream bestows advantages and disadvantages. We think that much of what we do that is distinctive derives from this position. Writing organisation: a thumbnail dipped in tar13 One of the continuing projects of Western intellectual imperialism in the twentieth century has been to make the world ideologically safe for capitalisms. Capitalisms. Because there never was only one kind, from Manchester to Gunchester (Hobbs et al. 2002) the old Marxist diatribe against capitalism was always a bit of a furphy (see Clegg and Redding 1990).14 Clearly some capitalisms were better than others; preferably those that looked at least a little bit like the United States, though they didn’t have to: they could be based on military dictatorship, fascism, racial supremacism or gangsta capitalism—for instance, Batista’s Cuba or Yeltsin’s Russia.15 The United States and its allies staunchly supported all these types in the post-war era—even Saddam Hussein. That the world should be ideologically safe for capitalism—the American version at least—was not left to chance: little is in the ‘free’ market. Following the First World War, the major US charitable foundations—Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller—pursued an intellectual agenda of shaping social science in the United States and Europe.16 They provided funding to selected institutions that became centres of excellence—for example, the Harvard Business School—and provided travelling scholarships for academics and administrators to go to the United States to be trained. As part of this project of pacifying the ‘periphery’, one of the most influential ‘Australian’ social scientists of the century, Elton Mayo (although Britain could claim him too, as he was technically born a British subject, though of Irish ancestry), received much of his research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation (Smith 1998). Born and educated in South Australia, Mayo failed his medical exams at the University of Adelaide, travelling in Europe (where he failed his medical exams again at the University of Edinburgh) and Africa before returning to take a degree in philosophy (Trahair 1984). On reaching the United States in 1922, Mayo’s

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personal need to renounce his origins from beyond the intellectual pale seemed particularly urgent, although this is hardly surprising when you consider the attitude toward Australian academics at the time (then as now, perhaps). This was neatly summed up by Bronislaw Malinowski (himself an emigré from Poland, first to Britain then to the United States via fieldwork from an Australian base) who commented that, in Mayo, he had met the only truly scientific mind to come from an English-speaking country. Surprisingly, for Malinowski at least, he was to be found ‘at a backwater University in sub-tropical Australia’ (Malinowski, quoted in Smith 1998). This, of course, is a snide reference to the University of Queensland where Mayo was a lecturer in logic, ethics and philosophy, in which he became a full Professor before leaving Australia. At what is now the Garden’s Point Campus of Queensland University of Technology, in a bend of the Brisbane River, visitors may see the Elton Mayo building. Anyone reading a recent and extensive review of Mayo’s role in the Human Relations School (O’Connor 1999) would be hard pressed to glean that he had ever been anywhere near Australia, let alone the hot and sweaty bits. This is not too surprising, however, for once in the United States, Mayo never returned to his country of birth and intended to spend the whole of his retirement with his family in England (Smith 1998). After the Second World War, this US funding pattern extended to global dimensions, especially the prestigious London School of Economics which was a major beneficiary (Connell 1991). Here reliable minds such as von Hayek (1944) prepared the world for a purer capitalism than the ‘road to serfdom’ that emerged out of the Second World War experience of planning. US intelligence must have been aware that the LSE not only embraced iconoclastic orthodoxies in economics and social science, but also iconoclastic contra-orthodoxies, some of which proved highly attractive to de-colonising elites from the upper echelons of the detritus of the British Empire, refurbished as the ‘Commonwealth’. Conveniently opposite Bush House, the fame of its academics spread far and wide through their availability for commentary on the BBC World Service, broadcast everywhere the Empire was under attack. So there never was hegemony—there never is. However, for the most spectacular winner of the War, the United States, there was no such sense of soft socialism and funds went unequivocally to research that opposed or ignored it, proved it wrong or demonstrated its irrelevance. As Connell points out, the charitable funding process restructured intellectual agendas. Among the beneficiaries of this funding were functionalism in anthropology and sociology, behaviouralism in political science, human capital theory in economics, individual difference theory in psychology and education, and modernization theory generally. Cadres were created to implement the new agendas. Social scientists in the Third World were funded to go to the elite Universities in the US (and to a lesser extent in Britain) to be trained in these perspectives and techniques, and then were funded to apply them at home. The Ford Foundation became the largest source of social science research money in Latin America. Centres like the University of Ibadan and the University of East Africa were developed on US foundation money as local elite centres of social science. Two-thirds of the staff of the University of East Africa

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had been Rockefeller Foundation trainees or were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. (Connell 1991:71) This ideology spread a particular view of the world, of science and, of course, of normality.17 The emphasis on ‘excellence’ effectively suppressed selfcritique, which on anything other than technical matters was interpreted as a display of intellectual weakness. In those areas of the social sciences which came closest to the interests of business, this suppression of critique was most noticeable, and as we have seen, it remains so (Mills and Hatfield 1999; Westwood 2001). Mainstream journals frequently reject not only shoddy research, but also ideas that don’t fit the favoured paradigm. These might have various manifestations. They could include styles that don’t disguise the rhetorical status of their theorising; methods which don’t measure or which don’t depend on philosophically naive speculations concerning an alleged isomorphism between the world and the word, the material and the symbolic. Alternatively, they may be critiques that refuse to comfort the academic community with their readiness to be pigeon-holed or the tenacity of their commitment to critique—refusing to be a sitting target.18 Imperialism rejects those who don’t subscribe to its language game—the unintentionally ironical discourse of liberal democracy’, the ‘New World Order’ and the ‘End of History’.19 Meanwhile, those of us who remind Imperialism of its ugly consequences for most of the populations of the ‘real’ world are frequently denounced as ‘irrationalist’ in a manner that is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents through its ‘mental health’ system. A gentler and less choleric tack, recently taken in Organisation Studies, emphasises ‘appreciative inquiry’—what organisations do right and well, rather than all this carping. From this perspective, we might not be irrationalist, but we are certainly being unreasonable, and perhaps just a little unkind. More tea, Vicar? Of course, imperialism seeks to constitute its language games as fact, in order to disguise the horrors and degradations of their reality. In attempting to draw attention to the obfuscatory nature of this discourse, the pervasive and enveloping (and for some inescapable) fantasm of hyper-reality, post-modernism has emphatically debunked modernist claims to, or implications of, foundational truth. This radical epistemological position has, however, been wrongly interpreted as ontological anaesthesia and a political paralysis, which it equally emphatically is not. Rather, it is a moment for drawing breath before the existential commitment that its awareness necessitates. Imperialism is not just a language game. It is a violent, economic compulsion. It is institutional corruption on a massive scale. It is cultura imperialistica as our Brazilian friends refer to it. It is written on the racked bodies of child labour in the so-called ‘Third World’ (Banerjee and Linstead 2002). It is confirmed in the rituals of the orthodox churches and denied in the lives of those who are able to dance to alternate rhythms (Clegg 2000; Connell 1991:72; Fryer 2000). Mind you, if those inhabitants of Western liberal democracies who are still relatively comfortably off ever need reminding that their own position is increasingly precarious under global capitalism, then they need look no further than the treatment of people outside this unrepresentative minority (Gray 1998). The sky is darkening as the chickens of the international division of labour that started in the 1960s come home to roost, as economic convergence, in terms of working conditions at least, seems to be convergence around the lowest common denominator.

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Here in Oceania, the doomed wildlife of Mururoa Atoll and the missing ones of East Timor are our neighbours; the wreck of the Rainbow Warrior rests in a New Zealand harbour, an unavenged act of war by a foreign power on neutral soil. We need no further reminders that speaking against the assumptions of the powerful is not a win—win language game. Within Australia’s own borders also lives a huge community of the dispossessed—the aboriginal peoples or Koori20—for whom the traditional indices of social stress cannot begin to convey the extent of their exclusion from society. Yet for mainstream organisation theory, these issues and these people seem not to exist except as shadows on the wall thrown by the light of American experience. You think we exaggerate? Let us tender some evidence. The best-selling text Organisation Theory in Australia by Robbins and Barn well (1994) does not cite a single Australian journal (although mention is made of the Australian Financial Review and the Business Review Weekly—Australian analogues of the Financial Times and The Economist, respectively). Nowhere in this book are ‘Harvard psychologist’ Mayo’s Australian origins mentioned: it is as if he arrived at Harvard from Kansas—a blow-in, like a Wizard from Oz. Fred Emery’s work with Eric Trist is cited but socio-technical systems theory is hardly mentioned, any more than the Tavistock Institute, nor Emery’s antipodean origins (for which, see Dunphy and Griffiths 1998).21 The small numbers of non-Americans cited are usually contingency theorists—Donaldson is the only Australian to join the roll of honour. None of Donaldson’s critics, however, are similarly honoured, neither the Welsh Reed nor the Aussie Clegg, whose absolute omission from the chapter on power even his sturdiest adversaries might find puzzling (and he didn’t write this bit, honest!). Australian organisational thought literally seems not to exist—Australia is merely another field experiment in the global laboratory of universalising US management theory.22 Silenced voices have, however, found a way to become audible in other spheres. Now there is internal critique on the margins of the American mainstream, some of it finding a voice through the Critical Management Studies interest group within the Academy of Management.23 Indeed, such has been the impact of this group that a recent Editorial in the Academy of Management Journal threw down a ‘challenge’ to the ‘critters’, which argued that if they were to mature intellectually then AMJ would accept papers on the topics they felt were important, as long as they followed the methodologies which AMJ espoused (Eden 2003).24 Which is to the miss the point—if knowledge is power, then the methods by which that knowledge is produced must be politically contestable. Again, for the AMJ editors, the question only had one dimension—that old furphy quality. Critical management and Organisation Studies are much more significant (and more contested) in Europe through conferences like the annual Labour Process conference in the UK, the biennial Critical Management Studies Conference (CMS) and the international conferences of the Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism (SCOS), and in Australia through the biennial conferences of the Asia-Pacific Researchers in Organisation Studies (APROS). One of us has just been able to appoint a Reader in Critical Management Studies—and in a very old University at that. Also, despite the fragmentation of experience, the recognition of the elusive nature of difference that frustrates our efforts to fix and control the world, we can make and trace connections from the peripheries to the centres. Some commentators, for instance, have noted how the Handbook of Organization Studies (Clegg et al. 1996) not only created, but also

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legitimated, spaces and voices other than those of NATO—whilst using NATO to legitimate these.25 For example, analyses of gender that were developed by writers such as Connell (1991:73) that connect economic discrimination and gender discrimination, patriarchy and rationality, marriage and power, schooling and domestic violence, found an echo in the work of Calás and Smircich (1996). Environmentalists who have connected the movement of goods with the decimation of forests, the poisoning of rivers and lakes, and even the fall of governments, link with Egri and Pinfield’s (1996) contributions. Norbert Elias’s configurational sociology emphasises both the fluidity and instability of categories and their relationships within a field, echoed in Burrell (1996) who identified the need to move between conditions of fragmentation and wholeness in a precursor to the Pandemonium he was subsequently to create (Burrell 1997). The interconnectedness of human life and other forms of planetary life, which defies artificial geopolitical or conceptual boundaries, is obvious. Similarly, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s studies of scientific work trace the interpenetration of systems—political, financial, social, medical, biological and agricultural—with that of the laboratory. These studies (see especially Callon 1986) are a discernible influence on Clegg’s (1989) ‘circuits of power’ framework, which marked both the Handbook’s discussion of power (Hardy and Clegg 1996) and its ‘Representation’ (Clegg and Hardy 1996). It is neither possible nor desirable for Australian social science, and particularly Organisation Studies, to reject the mainstream per se, although it may find mainstream agendas irrelevant and unsatisfying. Its identity will certainly not be found within the mainstream. But it is far better to engage and try to change it. We need to find an appropriate mode of engagement without our concerns becoming derivative, although derivation seems to be the international shortcut to legitimation as Connell (1991:73) observed. Yet, in defence of derivatives, the America of Talcott Parsons was also that of Harold Garfinkel. The mean streets of the city of Gary Becker were also those of Howard Becker. Goffman and Burke were dampened by the same rains as Lawrence and Lorsch. Once Upon a Time in America, both Stephen Robbins and Harold Robbins analysed organisational politics and interpersonal conflict, although it took a middle-class Italian, Sergio Leone, to hold up the mirror to the self-perpetuating myth of the American Dream. Some of these pianissimo resonances could vibrate with more feeling in all of our work. Monolithic ideologies are rarely impregnable when one gets close enough to them to observe the cracks. The North Atlantic will always be implicated in what we do at multiple levels— institutional, emotional, biographical and culinary; it shapes our more subtle conceptual assumptions as well as our roughly hewn career ladders (Connell 1991:73). And yet we have to address that on our terms. One of the reasons that some of us have found ourselves in this part of the world and claiming being Australian as an identity is that it offers a refreshing escape from the claustrophobia of both the mainstream and of customary and patterned oppositions. We think of the First World versus the Third, the North versus the South, the Occident versus the Orient, or the Centre versus the Periphery. Here is where we find that room of our own within and between discourses, avoiding entrapment, let alone willing submission. We won’t offer ourselves up, but neither do we want to reject, but, rather, engage. Imperialism colonises those who get too close without opposing it vigorously on its own ground. Thus Australia is potentially a new discursive space as well as a new geographical location, and in both senses it offers

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new resources for those who wish to remain excitingly ambiguous, categorically transgressive, marginal and joyful abominations like the platypus.26 Equally important is that Australia is not a Terra Nullius upon which we can build an intellectual New Jerusalem untainted by the spectre of our own ignoble colonial past (Banerjee and Linstead 2002). On the contrary, recognising and confronting this past means that it is less likely that we shall ever be coopted by the mainstream; our celebration of difference remains vivid and vital rather than fading into the bland greyness of homogeneity.

Organisational dreaming—improvisations for an Antipodean voice From the picture we have painted, the reader may get the impression that Australian organisational researchers are all iconoclasts of some sort or another. Of course, this is far from the truth and most Australian scholars—either willingly or under sufferance—play the game of cultural imperialism, knuckling down and complying with the demands of the ‘A’ listed journals. All of us have played this game. There is no shame in bowing to this ‘fact of life’ although another unacknowledged ‘fact of life’ of course is that those who do play the game will never end up getting the recognition they deserve, their card being indelibly marked ‘Outsider’. Still, the ‘outsider’ has a celebrated provenance in sociology (Simmel, Becker), philosophy (Wilson, Sartre) and literature (Beckett, Camus), one whose affiliation we would not necessarily deny. We would argue that, up to a point, Australian Organisation Studies is able to capitalise strategically on its ‘outsider’ status, championing the causes of fellow dissenters in a loose alliance of intellectual Mensheviks. In the light of this ‘outsider’ discourse, it should hardly seem surprising that a former penal colony, trying to come to terms with its history as the ‘Fatal Shore’ (Hughes 1996), should embrace the work of Foucault so vigorously in its sociology, organisation theory and even its accountancy.27 The reaction that greeted the first presentation of what became a paper called ‘Radical Revisions’ (Clegg 1989) to an audience of American and European organisation theory notables in a Dutch kasteel in 1988 illustrates the riskiness of this strategy: ‘What did Foucault have to do with anything organisational?’ The response was an angry, puzzled awkwardness that rapidly turned to an evasion of the text, evasion of the author, evasion of the other-yet a rapid acceptance of the piece for publication in a ‘top’ organisation studies journal. How puzzling was this? Foucault attempted to theorise the body as a both a physical fact and a social artefact; to connect physical and intellectual processes through ‘discourse’; to recognise that pushing the physical to the farthest boundaries of ‘limit-experience’ was capable of changing the nature of rationality and thought. His labours underscored the extent to which categories that appear fixed and immutable are permeable, an invitation to transgression. The practices by which boundaries are constructed and domination achieved are one object of post-Foucauldian analysis; mapping flows of power in institutions is another; observing the microphysics of power is a third. In Australia, perhaps because of our disciplinary history, these concerns flowered fast and early and were already a mainstay of discussions at Griffith and Sydney Universities, at least, in the 1970s. The study of transgression and subversion is an outgrowth of Foucault’s work, one that has both material and intellectual aspects. Elizabeth Grosz (1994), in arguing for

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‘corporeal feminism’, theorises the feminine body through its physical flows and fluids. Mapping post-Cartesian rationality onto masculinism (Bordo 1986), Grosz argues for an alternative feminine intellectual practice. However, she resists any easily won oppositional categorisation of masculinity/femininity, distinguishing masculinities/femininities from the actions of real men and women. Connell (1994) also explores the bewildering varieties of masculinity. Although neither of these works is organisation theory, they theorise the ambivalence of a country where The Man from Snowy River and The Adventures of Priscilla—Queen of the Desert were filmed at the same time featuring the same actor; where Les Patterson and Les Girls are equally iconic; where Iron Men mingle with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras as major cultural and tourist events. Perhaps Australian organisation theory can take such conjunctures into an area identified by Harlow and Hearn (1995) as in need of development—the grounded theorising of gender and organisational culture at one and the same time? The measure of support which Foucault might give to the mutual shaping of bodies and minds takes our argument into the organisational context even further. The microphysics of ‘capillary power’ indicates that the flow is reversible, that transformative forces can emerge from the most seemingly trivial phenomena, and interlocking relationships can be dramatically changed by the power that flows through them. They do so not as a commodity but as a change in the relationship, a change in the circuits of interpenetrating systems (Bateson 1972). It might seem that we are arguing that the convict past, the creation and origin in disciplinary society made Australia fertile soil in which Foucault’s metaphorical seed might flourish. However, then, uniqueness of this place resides not just in its history, estranged, cruel and unusual as it was. There is also the sheer physicality of the Australian experience that is so pervasive—the glitz and sleaze of Kings Cross; the grandeur of Kings Canyon; the redness of the Queensland dust; the lucidity of the Perth sunlight; the aqua blue of Sydney Harbour and the sails of the Opera House (financed through a lottery); Melbourne’s bewilderingly fused aroma of freshly roasted Italian coffee, Vietnamese mint, Cantonese dim sum, Greek pastries and meat pies; the sparkle of everyday life, the grape-and-citrus tang of friendship ripening in the sun beneath the scented forest-oak—these are a few of our ‘favourite things’ around which we improvise life, art and science. They reverberate through our conceptual schemes (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1992). Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the concluding chapter of the Handbook of Organization Studies. Here Clegg and Hardy (1996) explicitly located themselves at the outset. Their obsessive sense of place, rather than being whimsical, as background noise as inconsequential as the whirring of the cicadas, was perhaps one of the most significant aspects of their being so, being there, being then. We must be aware of, and celebrate, difference and diversity in thought and experience if organisation theory is to prove equal to the challenge of Australian realities. Power, knowledge and language are central to this enterprise. Understanding silence must be its process. Indigenous forms of transgressive rationality, organisational dreaming, may prove its most valuable resource. As we write this, there is a review of the development of Australian jazz on TV that has beckoned us back from the verandah. One of the early movers on the Sydney jazz scene, centred on The Basement, left Australia in the 1960s to play in the USA. He claimed that despite the technical excellence of the musicianship in the US, the improvisation was highly structured—‘you were expected to

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know and use particular fills, set phrases, and you had to fit in. It took me a long time to learn the language, and eventually I had to come back because I felt so constrained.’ As we crack another tinny he goes on to discuss the vexed place of indigenous music in the jazz canon, arguing that, although increasingly incorporated into contemporary playing technique, and enjoying some commercial success, it is still not part of Australian musical consciousnesspartly because the music is still of such great symbolic importance to the ethnic originators. Only when experience touches musical consciousness will it surpass technique and emerge through improvisation. We almost tip the amber nectar in our eagerness to get that one onto the laptop. The story could serve as a metaphor for the relationship between Australian organisation theory and mainstream US organisation theory. Great technical virtuosity, but its explorations are so highly structured and formalised that they can become selfalienating—yet they enjoy widespread ‘popularity’. They are very difficult but not very dangerous. To borrow some terminology from Karl Weick, they display their discipline but not much imagination. Such theorising is not improvisation. You must follow the score. But Australian organisation theory still has the opportunity to come back home, to play the illegitimate fills, to transgress the genres, to make the forbidden links and reject the easy ones. There’s something to be said for launching into theorising without knowing quite what will happen (the realisation of difference) yet knowing that it will resolve (the inescapability of relatedness). Jazz, Theodor Adorno (1997) notwithstanding, is after all subversive of orthodoxies—and there’s every reason why organisation theory in Australia should become the same.28 Improvisation cannot take place without thought and feeling merging, seamless and inseparable. Australian organisation theory could make its own way by unlocking some of the categories of mainstream organisation theory, and by encountering doubt, uncertainty, variation and error in the physicality, temporality and fluidity of the processes of organisation. Unashamedly, that is our preference. Alternatively it could carry on doing business as usual, being an imperialistic puppet ‘translating’ American texts for local consumption. Or pretending it really is a province of mid-America at the bottom of the South Pacific. This way, if it plays its cards and its dollars right, it can also pick up some overseas credibility from time to time, like some intellectual banana republic satisfying the imperial hunger, not this time for exotic fruit, but for homage via its own narcissistic reflection. Doubtless much of it will try to do so. But is it always appreciated? Or is this a contest you can never win? It was a distinguished professor from one of the newer provincial British Universities—let us call it Wurzel Business School, again to protect the worthy and the unworthy—who gave the lie to this strategy. They remarked respectfully at a recent annual collective gathering of Australian and New Zealand management scholars that our scene seemed a tad orthodox, dull, even quiescent. Of course, such people should know: Australia must seem to be nowhere even compared to some place on the margins of the dreary outer suburbs of Middle England. Or was this meant as some strange irony, as a culturally self-deprecating remark? Perhaps— quiescence, like kitsch, is where you find it and no one has a monopoly on, or complete freedom from, either.

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Notes 1 The first version of this chapter was presented as a paper at a joint ISA (International Sociological Association) RC 17 (Research Committee 17: Sociology of Organisations) and APROS (Asia-Pacific Researchers in Organisation Studies) Conference in Mexico in a session convened by Jean-Francois Chanlat. Steve resuscitated it and we began to rework it for the 1999 ANZAM (Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management) Conference in Tasmania with the theme, ‘From the Edge’. Lest we thought we had a ready-made context, the Australian reviewers initially rejected it and it was not finally accepted, ironically, until the American stream convenor stepped in! A further reworking was presented at the EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) Colloquium in Helsinki in 2000, in the stream ‘Casting the Other’ convened by Barbara Czarniawska and Heather Höpfl, where we found that non-native English speakers in the Nordic countries had similar concerns to ours. A version was published—after an interestingly fractal review process (see note 4 below) in the ‘Millennium Crackers’ Special Edition of Organization Studies, 21, 0, 103–117 under the title ‘Only Penguins: A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World’. 2 We are all Australians, though born British, and though one of us is currently working in the UK. We consider that this makes a difference to our identity, and to our work—as the chapter argues. It makes us both more marginal—as ‘outsiders’ from whence we came—and less marginal—but with connections already established to a metropolis. 3 A number of what might be termed Australian technical terms, what Harold Garfinkel might style the ‘argot’ of doing ‘being Australian’, or colloquialisms, have been left untranslated to preserve local colour. Interested readers should consult The Macquarie Dictionary as the standard reference work or, failing access to this, consult Note 4. 4 OK so we can’t expect everybody to have a Macquarie Dictionary to hand, so here’s some help with the vernacular terms. ‘To crack a tinny’ is to open a cold can of beer—always antarctically cold, never warm. A ‘slab’ is a carton of 24 coldies, stubbies or tinnies—bottles or cans—of beer bought ice cold from the freeze room in the grog or bottle-shop (where one buys liquor to take away and drink off the licensed premises maybe at a BYO—Bring Your Own (grog) restaurant). Many such establishments have drive-through freezer rooms, and one may occasionally encounter a ‘block’ of 30 cans or bottles. To be ‘ropeable’ is to be very angry (an angry horse or ‘brumby’ being easier to lasso as it holds its head up and comes towards you), while if something is ‘fair dinkum’ it is ‘pretty bloody good’, to use a piece of vernacular that should travel OK. A ‘raw prawn’ is what one throws on the barbecue, but is also a synonym for being a fool (similar to being ‘half-baked’)—as in ‘don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate’—where the inflection should rise dramatically on the ‘mate’ to give the appropriate emphasis. Balmain Bugs are another shellfish found in the coastal waters of Australia: Sydneysiders know them by this name whilst Queenslanders would call them Moreton Bay Bugs. They are a delicious trilobite-like crustacean and highly prized as seafood. Rothbury Estate is the ideal accompaniment to a tasty dish of Bugs—an excellent Chardonnay from the Hunter Valley (one of the pre-eminent wine regions in Australia in New South Wales, a couple of hours north of Sydney in the hills at the back of Newcastle) and reputedly the favourite tipple of an ex-Premier of the State, who did much to popularise the varietal grape (Steve says his favourite is the Roxburgh Castle…so the kind of debate which Aussies love to pursue with endless empirical evidence rages joyously on). Popular culture has it that Australians are deeply suspicious and resentful of ‘Tall Poppies’ and have been since the earliest days of white occupation, settlement and colonisation. A ‘Tall Poppy’ is anyone who is held to be too sure of themselves, who stands out from the crowd, who puts on airs and graces, who might be mindful that Jack is not always as good as his Master, who might, indeed, be prepared to make any claims other than the egalitarian

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regarding social stratification. Hence, Tall Poppies are literally chopped downthat is, they are cut down to size, usually through deeply laconic, ironic and satirical humour. There is an exception, however, in the area of sporting achievement—it is acceptable to excel at sports and not to be a Tall Poppy if one retains a down-to-earth demeanour and integrity, in which case one might be accorded the status of ‘legend’ like a Don Bradman or a Rex Hunt. The explanation for the egalitarian quality of Australian life can be traced to a number of roots, including the traditional Irish-Catholic distaste for the airs and graces of the Anglican ascendancy—the ‘squattocracy’ or ‘Bunyip Aristocracy’ of the early days of settlement, as well as the traditions of mateship forged between people in a harsh and unforgiving environment, as well as a contempt for the conventions that were embedded in a society in which many of the settlers were from convict stock and others could claim the distinction of not being so. Incidentally, it is a matter of pride to claim descendancy from the people who arrived on the ‘First Fleet’ of convict ships that settled in Port Jackson, as Sydney was initially known by the settlers (Eora to the native Koori), especially if one is descended from one of the convicts who served their time and were freed. Unfortunately, none of us can claim this honour, although not being without ancestors on occasion detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Many of the convicts were undoubtedly petty thieves; others were, of course, the victims of circumstances of extreme poverty and sometimes bigotry and politics (such as members of the Scottish Corresponding Societies); there were a healthy number of Irish Nationalists and Trade Unionists (such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs) who were deported to some of the colonies that subsequently federated in 1901 to become the Commonwealth of Australia. For more fascinating detail of the ‘convict period’ up to 1868, consult Roberts Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. 5 It even surfaces in journals such as Organisation Studies from time to time. One of us wrote the following friendly response to an initial appreciation of an earlier draft of a paper on which this chapter is based, that was eventually published in OS:

I think you don’t really grasp what Australia is—there is no reason why you would—but seeing it through a Euro-centric lens does not help. It makes little sense to think of us as an extension of AngloSaxonism as we are today. Also, would we be somehow more authentic if we cited only Aussie writers? I don’t understand this. The point is that what some of us do here has sprung from a native soil watered by many post-colonial concerns—some of which are expressed by writers in many cultures. Through them, as well as through the rest of the OT world, we try to reflect on our life, our culture and our organizations. We pay homage where homage is due: it is important that we have our national pride. It is not Gallipoli, but it is important for Australians to know that Elton Mayo was sprung from settlers on this soil and that Fred Emery, lionized in parts of Europe, was one of us—if only because the rest of the world and even some of us, are not aware. Personally, it is important to me, if no-one else, that the world knows me as Australian: not a Brit, not a European, but an Aussie. That is what I choose to be, which does not mean that there isn’t a substantial legacy of being Brit, being European, but that the legacy is overlaid by something different and important at least for those of us who are so overlain. It finds expression in part in what I hope is a definite ‘larrikinism’—that is, distaste for pomposity, for pretentiousness and for cant. Some of that is native: but it has flowered

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and been hot-housed here, and some of that overlay has made the specificity of what we do, and what makes what we do distinctive, so that it is recognisable in the work. That our local sense doesn’t translate well doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is the oftunreflected cultural imperialism that assumes and presumes that we and the rest of the non-Anglo/US world are somehow already incorporated in the world of some place else’s assumptions—as if we had no need of assumptions of our own. Perhaps language is the problem—we have to speak through it and so seem subsumed by it, even as we try to give it our own sense of voice. 6 He has since returned and now works at the University of Technology, Sydney. 7 Paul Matters, the secretary of the South Coast Labour Council, reminded us of this allusion in his 1994 R.W.Kirby lecture on industrial relations, delivered at the University of Wollongong. 8 Just before he migrated to Australia, one of the authors was advised by a senior colleague at one of his former UK institutions that he was committing ‘professional suicide’. Another of the authors, who had been an economic migrant some years earlier, was also presumed to be committing such suicide by his erstwhile European colleagues. One wonders whether the same judgements—albeit made in some cases 25 or so years ago—would have been made of a colleague migrating to an English-speaking country elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere? Somehow, we doubt it. 9 A few more definitions of the vernacular: the Tote is the state run Totalisator—a chain of publicly owned betting shops in New South Wales, the board of which oversees all betting activity in the state. Other states have similar bodies. To ‘barrack’ is to support, often noisily, not to hassle or heckle, which is the negative sense of the term most common in the UK. To ‘spew’ means to be overly concerned, overly worried, to panic unnecessarily—not, as might be the case in the UK, to vomit. Another measure of the dimensions of the patrician approach of the establishment in this case is that the opposite is true of the more workingclass sport of soccer in Scotland, where the Scots openly and gleefully support anyone who is playing against England. 10 If you’re interested in such snippets, and especially their being realised with an affectionate sense of place and being, then undoubtedly the place to start is Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Australia (Connolly 1996). 11 A ‘rat’s arse’ is a rat’s arse or, for our US friends, ass. 12 Or indeed, of Empire itself (see Hardt and Negri 2000). 13 The subtitle is borrowed and here acknowledged from our exemplary fellowcountryman R.W.(Bob) Connell (1991). The title, Connell reminds us,

is a quotation from a famous outbreak of nostalgia for the bush, Banjo Paterson’s “Clancy of the Overflow”: And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected (And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar); ‘Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: ‘Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.’

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The ambivalence in Paterson’s celebrated defence of the bush is clear enough if you look for it. (Connell 1991:76; full poem appears in Paterson 1996) 14 A ‘furphy’ is a racket, a canard, a falsehood created in order to accrue advantage. Or an old steam tractor 15 Come to think of it, that looks a lot like the United States for most of the twentieth century. 16 There has recently grown considerable academic interest in researching the historical and contemporary activities of these charitable foundations in both the USA and Europe, particularly their influence of the globalisation of knowledge and the development of globalisation. A recent 2003 conference, organised by the Department of Government at the University of Manchester, UK, entitled The Foundations of Globalisation included papers by international academics on ‘Revisiting the Big 3 Foundations: Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller’ (Robert F. Arnove—Indiana); ‘Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Development of Global Knowledge Networks: the Exchange between Economic, Social and Cultural Capitals’ (Donald Fisher—University of British Columbia); ‘The Internationalisation of the Empirical Social Sciences by Rockefeller and Carnegie in the Period 1920–1940’ (Martin Bulmer—Surrey); ‘US Foundations’ Political and Intellectual Role and Influence in the Cold War: Indonesia, Latin America, and Africa’ (Inderjeet Parmar—Manchester); ‘Levelling the Playing Field for Democracy: US Philanthropy’s Gifts to Higher Education Around the World’ (Anne Vogel—Cambridge); ‘Foundations and the Dissemination of US Management Ideas’ (Bill Cooke—UMIST);‘Foundations and International Management Ideas’ (Thomas Cayet—European University Institute, Florence); and ‘The Rockefeller Foundation’s Efforts to “Americanize” French Science in the Late 1940s’ (John Krige—Georgia Tech.). 17 Alternative epistemological approaches to organisational ‘science’ are routinely dismissed as technically or ideologically biased by journal reviewers, for example—see the classic paper on journal ‘evaluation’ by McHugh et al. (1974) to which we could add a few of our own recent experiences (but that, of course, would be another chapter in itself). 18 One of the authors of this piece was advised in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom at a conference that he, unlike a co-author of a decade previously, at least looked like a radical organisation theorist. If one is to be known by one’s works, it seems to be the case that the works in question should invariably be glossed in the most one-dimensional way, as well as be the works of a decade previously. Suffice it to say that this was enough to send the author in question straight to a hairdresser for what proved to be the most unflattering crop of his tonsorial career. At least, it changed his appearance. Some years later, when he had returned to Australia, he met a ‘big-noted’ North American leadership theorist at a seminar at an institution in Sydney that aspires to academic leadership in the field of management. In the course of conversation, the author was greeted in these precise words: ‘I know you—you’re a Marxist, aren’t you?’ Well the author in question never was, in any formal sense, any more than he was a Weberian or a structuralist, but these labels are not such instant dismissals nor such ready reckoners, are they? Mind you, the bloke in question was, literally, a bit oneeyed. 19 Anybody who has kept even half an eye on geo-political events in the past 15 years—from the Persian Gulf, through the Balkans, via East Timor and Irian Jaya and back to the Persian Gulf again—might wryly make the observation that ‘History’ has barely started. 20 A term commonly used to show respect for this particular group of Australians by employing their language rather than that of the colonisers, which until recently afforded them a legal status only as fauna, equal to that of the kangaroo. The construction of ‘Aboriginality’ (the capitalisation is the only acceptable form) is understandably a bitterly disputed phenomenon. Koori, however, is hardly ideal as a term, as strictly speaking it refers only to those groups of tribes indigenous to south-eastern Australia. Other similar groups include the Murri, of

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northern Queensland; the Yangwa, of the Northern Territories; and the Ânûngû, of the Red Centre. 21 The Sustainable Corporation: Organizational Renewal in Australia is an excellent Australian book, charting the impact that the Organizational Renewal Movement, fired by Tavistock Institute social ideas, had in Australia particularly in the development of Industrial Democracy. Of all of the social theory perspectives of post-war organisation theory, industrial democracy is the one that has been least relevant in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the latter, one is tempted to say that this was because of the antipathy of the British Unions, in a Labourist mode, to the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy during the 1970s and the subsequent limiting of that movement by the politics of Thatcherism in the 1980s. In the United States, the notion of industrial democracy has never been seen as mainstream: it was associated largely with the descendants of the ‘Scandinavian’ states of the North mid-West, or with ESOP schemes. Consequently, sociotechnical theory has never been a major movement in the United States. 22 Clegg did write this bit:

I have called Australia home for over 25 years now, and virtually the entirety of my reasonably prolific output has been written and published from here. The exception in the career proves the rule. In the early 1990s I located myself briefly in Scotland in order to convert my intellectual capital from that of Australian Sociology Professor to that of a European Organisational Theorist so that I might return and assume a position in an Australian Business School. Achieving such a career destination was an even more remote possibility from a collocated Sociology department than from another hemisphere. But that is another story—albeit one that is, in part, a manifestation of the themes of this narrative. That, after virtually a whole career spent in Australia, I still see myself reviewed or written-up as a ‘European’ Organisation or Social Theorist, puzzles me greatly. What do I have to do to be taken for what I am? I think that I am a hybrid—in which I choose the Australian to be predominant—although having said that, one realises that claims to authorial privilege are suspect. 23 Critical management studies as a field seems to have a broad provenance but, even so, there are distinct differences across the Atlantic, which reproduce some of the dynamics of marginalisation we have identified between the North Atlantic and the Rest of the World. US critical management scholars are orientated to a North American literature which has sporadically critiqued management (and occasionally) Business School practice, and the exploitative application of knowledge, but has not (with few exceptions) characteristically drawn upon Marxian Theory, Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, Radical Weberianism, Postmodernism or any of the other predominantly European critiques of political economy and bourgeois psychology. It has tended to be critical of misapplications and unintended consequences of functionalism rather than of functionalist epistemology, for example. Indeed the first keynote that the Academy group held to mark its recognition as an interest group (the first step to incorporation into the mainstream) was given, perhaps surprisingly, by eminent Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who was able to claim that ‘we are all critical now’ in the wake of such scandals as Enron—a humanist critique of economic rationality which was underpinned by positivistic empirical psychology. In Europe and Australia, critical organisation studies was pioneered in the 1970s by Burrell and Morgan, Clegg and Dunkerley, Thompson, Littler and Salaman, Storey and Knights and Willmott. This migrated into critical management studies during the 1980s. Although the first explicitly critical

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management reader was produced in 1992 by Alvesson and Willmott, the first critical management textbook (Thompson and McHugh produced the first explicitly critical organisation studies textbook) was Australian—Fulop, Frith and Hay ward (1992) which is now in its third mode of transformation (Linstead et al. 2004) 24 The AMJ editorial repeats the cognitive psychologistic humanism we have remarked upon. It is perhaps ironically of note that AMJ has no dialogue section whereby scholars can comment on, respond to or critique papers published in the journal, by virtue of which they appear to become canonical. Indeed, and amazingly, in response to a paper one of us prepared for a different Academy journal, a reviewer commented that even to critique a paper published in AMJ was to ‘call the academic standards of that journal into question’— which was unthinkable! So although the editors ‘throw down a counter-challenge’ to CMS scholars in this editorial (rather than rise to the challenge of CMS on its own terms), the only allowable response is to rise to this counter-challenge in their terms or be ignored—the counter-challenge thus displaces the original challenge, and its auspices are placed beyond debate. 25 It may be noteworthy, or it may be coincidence, but the lead editor of this volume was commissioned by the publisher in question to create the volume while he was residing in Europe—rather than Australia. 26 This is more than metaphorical opportunism on our part. Mary Douglas (197 5a, b), in two important papers on the Lele of the Congo, points out the importance to them of the fertility cult of the pangolin, an ant-eater with fish-like scales which has four legs and lives both in water and in the trees, thus having the qualities of mammals (it bears single live young), fish, reptiles and birds. In most symbolic systems, anomalies are rejected, so to find such an undoubtedly anomalous creature celebrated is indeed unusual. But Douglas points out that the Lele themselves are anomalous—boundary-crossers, networkers, negotiators, able to form exchange relationships with several other tribes and having little experience of war. She concludes that response to anomaly is not universal but a by-product of the experience of social relations. Which is what we were saying, and why our lives should make us both different and celebrators of difference. If you haven’t the time to read Douglas’ original research, David Silverman (2000:83–85) has a nice summary. 27 Many Anglophone readers might be forgiven for thinking that Foucault, being undoubtedly France’s most pre-eminent and popular intellectual in the 20 years before his death, was considered to be mainstream by other areas of academic endeavour in his own country. Far from it: most French social scientists much more closely resemble their North American counterparts than they resemble Foucault. Recently, a famous French sociology professor who commissioned one of us to write an article on ‘power’ for an International Encyclopaedia expressed surprise that the abstract should feature Foucault’s contribution. Despite his celebrity status and media popularity in France during his later life, it doesn’t amount to much in his native tongue outside philosophy. Yet, believe it or not, Foucault’s work from Discipline and Punish on, especially, struck a responsive chord with Australian academics across many diverse disciplines. Sceptical readers might wish to consult The Foucault Legacy (O’Farrell 1997). 28 Again our point is unwittingly made for us by the book Organizational Improvisation (Kamoche et al. 2002) a book dominated by US rationalistic approaches, although none of its editors are American. Nevertheless, it is their contributions which display the most energetic attempts to rationalise and domesticate the wildness of improvisation (and the potential subversiveness of the jazz metaphor) into a theoretical framework which ignores non-US attempts to address the same phenomena. Indeed, although they explicitly discuss the concept of bricolage in organisations, they seem to be completely unaware of a whole chapter on the same subject in a classic European collection on organisational symbolism which pre-dates the literature upon which they draw most heavily (Linstead and GraftonSmall 1990).

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Hardy, C. and Clegg, S.R. (1996) ‘Some dare call it power’, in S.R.Clegg, C.Hardy and W.R.Nord (eds) Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage. Harlow, E. and Hearn, J. (1995) ‘Cultural constructions: contrasting theories of organizational culture and gender construction’. Gender, Work and Organization, 2, 4:180–191. Hobbs, D., Hadfield, P., Lister, S. and Winlow, S. (2002) Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-time Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, R. (1996) The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787– 1868. London: The Harvill Press. Kamoche, K.N., Pinha e Cunha, M. and Vieira da Cunha, J. (2002) Organizational Improvisation. London and New York: Routledge. Linstead, S.A. and Grafton Small, R. (1990) ‘Organizational Bricolage’, in B. Turner (ed.) Organizational Symbolism. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Linstead, S. and Grafton-Small, R. (1992) ‘On reading organizational culture’, Organization Studies, 13, 3:331–355. Linstead, S., Fulop, L. and Lilley, S. (2004) Management and Organization: a Critical Text. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Macquarie Dictionary (1985) Macquarie University, Sydney: The Macquarie Library. McHugh, P., Raffel, S., Foss, D.C. and Blum, A.F. (1974) On the Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mills, A.J. and Hatfield, J. (1999) ‘From imperialism to globalization: internationalization and the management text’, in S.R.Clegg, E.Ibarra-Colado and L. Bueno-Rodriguez (eds) Global Management: Universal Theories and Local Realities. London: Sage. O’Connor, E.S. (1999) ‘The politics of management thought: a case study of the Harvard Business School and the Human Relations School’. Academy of Management Review, 24, 1:117–131. O’Farrell, C. (ed.) (1997) Foucault: the Legacy. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology. Osuri, G. and Banerjee, S.B. (2002) ‘Organizing multiple spacetimes in a colonial context: indigeneity and White Australian nationalism at the Melbourne Museum’, in S.Linstead (ed.) Text/Work: the Representation of Organization and the Organization of Representation. London: Routledge. Paterson, Banjo (1996) ‘Clancy of the overflow’, in Andrew Barton (ed.) ‘Banjo’ Paters on: Selected Poems. Pymble, NSW: Angus and Robertson. Robbins, S.P. and Barnwell, N. (1998) Organization Theory in Australia: Concepts and Cases, 3rd edition. Sydney: Prentice Hall. Silverman, D. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Smith, J.H. (1998) ‘The enduring legacy of Elton Mayo’. Human Relations, 51, 3: 221–249. Thompson, P. and McHugh, D. (1984) Work Organizations: a Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan. Trahair, R.C.S. (1984) The Humanist Temper: the Life and Work of Elton Mayo. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. von Hayek, F.A. (1944) The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Westwood, R. (2001) ‘Appropriating the other in the discourses of comparative management’, in R.Westwood and S.Linstead (eds) The Language of Organization. London: Sage.

12 Making global subjects Diasporic identity as a media event Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee September 11. The simple naming of this date in those places which can be regarded as the modern ‘West’ now signifies a particular year (2001) and a particular event—the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by the deliberate collision of fully laden passenger jets commandeered by terrorist suicide bombers. So compelling is the image that two other associated crashes—one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in Pennsylvania (which was believed to be headed for the White House)—are often occluded in the memory and its representation. Yet the meaning of an ‘event’—a happening which changes the course of history and the way in which experience is thought—is never self-evident. Such meaning is a site of semiotic struggle, where identity is put in play, asserted and reasserted, constructed and reconstructed. Some events, such as the suicide bombing we have mentioned, are ‘global’ because they originate in activities, such as political terrorism, which set themselves on an international scale against the consequences of global imperialisms of various sorts and deploy technologies, such as international passenger jets or powerful but easily concealed explosives, which can or could reach into any corner of the globe and affect the lives of any of its citizens. Some are media events because they initially affect the lives of those who have access to or control of systems of dissemination of information such as radio, TV and the press. In the case of September 11, it was the US embeddedness in what Mackenzie Wark, following Paul Virilio, calls ‘global media vectors’ which shaped the conceptualisation and choreography of the attacks as global spectacle, global theatre. Once such an event happens, resources are deployed to lay claim to it, to define it, to possess it as a sign. The attackers may have given September 11 one meaning, but the US government (taking upon itself the voice of the victims) immediately set about a moral, political, military and economic definitional project which sought to inscribe it very differently. Yet the struggle which the US had to persuade other governments, even those representing its traditional allies, that its actions were warranted on behalf of the international collective rather than simply self-interest underlined the need for interpretive work to be undertaken within the diverse components of the ‘West’ to create a space for collective identification whilst affirming local and national identities. In this chapter we draw on two concepts developed in recent cultural studies— whiteness and diaspora—to illuminate this wider process of identity construction, manufacturing global subjects to organise the world and make it safe for further globalisation. We concentrate on making sense of the manifestations of this process in Australia because it offers a unique site to observe such struggles—it shares history with the UK and remains part of the Commonwealth; it shares a colonial background and part

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of the Pacific Ocean coastline with the USA; and yet it self-defines as a ‘multicultural nation in Asia’ which differentiates it from either. Despite, or perhaps because of, this self-definition, the immediate after-effects of the events of September 11 in Australia were unmistakably racialised in character. These included Muslim schoolgirls being thrown out of trams in Melbourne; the harassment of women wearing hijabs; arson attacks on mosques; the mainstream media grieving for the dead at the World Trade Center (a courtesy not extended to grieving for any other dead in the two subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and commemorations in the Australian media a year later— again usually reserved for events that fall within a national, calendrical time such as Australia Day or the Anniversary of Gallipoli (Anderson 1991). All these elements seem to be located in the racialised logic of distance and difference (Said 1994). Such a logic was operational in the binaries erected between ‘Western’ and ‘nonWestern’ subjects, ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ subjects, and between ‘whiteness’ and the specific othering of ‘Islamic’ subjects. Yet, rather than focus on the bombardment of racialised stereotypes of Muslims on the media (which were in abundance), which is often the preoccupation of most media theorists working on issues of race and ethnicity, we will concentrate on the manner in which ‘whiteness’ as a form of identity capital in the Australian context was expressed and marked through the localisation—or symbolic customisation-of a global media event by the sympathetic reinscriptions of governmental leaders and the mainstream media. In doing so, we will argue for the importance of recognising the discursive and material relationship between the global and the local in the formation of collective identity. Such a thesis, however, requires a cluster of questions associated with it to be unpacked. In an era of a ‘global’ expansion of media technologies, and the existence of Indigenous and multicultural populations in all settler states, how exactly are certain ‘global’ media events localised by governmental leaders and the mainstream media to produce transnational loyalties among populations that subscribe to the kinship of whiteness? How is whiteness expressed and marked as diasporic loyalty in concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘Western’ traditions? How is democracy articulated to express a ‘Western’ identity even as it functions unevenly within nations like Australia and the US in the context of ‘etherised’ populations? This range of questions opens up a space where varied trajectories of theoretical debates about the global and the local, whiteness and racialised identities, democracy and the ‘West’ meet at the juncture of reading the representation of a single global media event within an Australian location. And while it is certainly not easy to theorise all the component events of September 11 from this location, we ourselves are reflexively invested in this reading by virtue of our existence as racialised, ‘third-worlded’ subjects. This is not a ‘natural’ investment per se, but a discursive investment born out of a tracing of specific colonial histories and their legacies. This logic of distance and difference, we argue, has to be located within an Australian national-cultural and political formation and in its historical legacy of white Australia, which still appears to govern governmental and media discourses of global events. In conclusion, considering identity production more generally, we reject the currently popular idea of the glocal, with the apparent equalisation of power between the global and the local the term entails. Localisations take place within a field dominated by powerful and influential Western global media even

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though they are active in the reconstruction and possibly even the subversion of those events. In seeking to avoid either a simple opposition of local to global, or assimilation of the local to being an aspect of the global, we prefer to reconceptualise identity production as trans local. As such, global subjects may still produce identity which may stand against the discursive imperatives of whiteness or even against the existent form of a racialised global system of nation-states.

Whiteness studies and Australia In a 1751 essay, Benjamin Franklin argued that the demographic term ‘white’ referred only to those of Anglo-Saxon descent, literally the English and the Saxons, as Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes were too swarthy to be so considered (Moore and Fields 2002). Yet by 2002, two-thirds of the foreign-born residents of the USA selfdefined as white. Although between 1990 and 2000 the number of foreign-born residents had increased from 5 per cent to 9.1 per cent, the percentage of the total population identifying as white had shot up from 50.7 per cent to 67.9 per cent, far more than could be accounted for by any influx of white immigrants. Quite simply, more people were defining themselves as white, because it made a difference to their lives. The recent rise of Whiteness Studies is grounded in the attempt to critique the economic and political history which has produced this situation of privilege given to those defined legally and demarcated socially as white (Haggis et al. 1999).1 Following from this designation typically flowed rights and permissions: freedom from or subjection to slavery; what, if any, property could be owned; to whom one could be married; where one could be educated; enfranchisement; employment—even the ability to walk freely in certain public areas, parks or streets. Whiteness Studies recognises ‘whiteness’ as an ideological fiction which literally invents a white ‘race’ having supposedly special properties, qualities, characteristics or traits out of a variety of disparate ethnic groups with an argued common European ancestry. Whiteness Studies looks at how specific cultural practices (in art, music, literature, popular media and, more recently, academic theory) create and perpetuate the fiction of ‘whiteness’ with the suppression of alternate perspectives. A recent example of the exposure of the assumption of whiteness behind most classical management theory is Bill Cooke’s discussion of the continuing significance of slavery to the development of US capitalism well beyond the heyday of the plantations and Civil War emancipation (Cooke 2003). Such historical deconstructions of the privilege of whiteness also tend to expose the reality that all human groups are historical mixtures of different ethnicities and critique the notion of ‘race’ itself. ‘Whiteness Studies’, then, is a growing critique of how white skin preference has operated systematically, structurally and sometimes unconsciously to establish and preserve a position of dominance and privilege in colonial, post-colonial and, increasingly, global society, culture, politics and the economy. Whiteness Studies in Australia has emerged as a burgeoning field in the last decade. Scholars like Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000), Suvendrini Perera (1995, 1999; Perrera and Pugliese 1997), Ghassan Hage (1998), Joseph Pugliese (Perera and Pugliese 1997) and others have been refocusing the lens on whiteness as a discursive and embodied identity that remains unmarked and invisible in discourses of national identity in

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Australia, and in the drive to identify, legislate, police, study, survey and race those considered ‘other’ and non-white even during a period when multiculturalism is the rhetoric that is espoused. Suvendrini Perera, for instance, diagnoses white Australian identity as one that has been historically constituted on a ‘particular triangulated relation to the Aboriginal and the Asian: the Aboriginal as an internal presence to be denied and suppressed through genocidal and/or assimilationist practices; the Asian as a besieging other to be held at bay’ (Perera 1995:5–6). The first act of legislation of the Australian parliament in 1901, for instance, was the Immigration Restriction Act; this Act attempted to restrict migration based on racial categories, its main purpose to keep Australia white. This policy lasted until the early 1970s, and there were some pragmatic reasons for the decision taken by the Australian government to replace the White Australia policy with a policy of multiculturalism. According to one ex-Prime Minister, Paul Keating, Australian political leaders feared the kind of sanctions that the apartheid regime in South Africa faced,2 hence the decision to replace the White Australia policy with a policy of multiculturalism. This triangulated relationship between a non-white migrant other and an Indigenous other that constitutes an unmarked white identity is a key factor, we would argue, in contemporary Australian nationalism and internationalism. Or as Ruth Frankenberg in the context of US Whiteness Studies puts it, the ‘formation of specifically white subject positions has in fact been key, at times as cause and at times as effect, to the sociopolitical processes inherent in taking land and making nations’ (Frankenberg 1997:2). In the case of Australia, the theft of land from Indigenous peoples, and attempted dispossession through genocidal practices like massacres, or the attempts to ‘breed out the black’ through policies resulting in the stolen generations3 constitute a white Australian history and national identity. However, the constitution of this white identity remains largely disavowed in the contemporary cultural, media and public spheres despite the efforts of a number of activist-intellectuals mentioned above. This white identity, its constitutive factors based on racial difference, its racially-based solidarity with the USA and UK often remains unmarked in the work of major contemporary media theorists and scholars in Australia, let alone in disciplines such as organisation studies where reflexivity is even less the norm. The unmarked space of whiteness in media and social theory in Australia perpetuates the regime of marking race as the problem of the ‘other’ (e.g. stereotypes of Indigenous peoples or Arabs), thus disavowing the possibility of viewing media events as racialised and part of a problematic generated by the logic and operations of whiteness.

White Australian diasporas In the interests of marking whiteness as a teleology that is often mobilised internationally during contemporary global media events, we need to theorise the concept of white diasporas. White diasporas, we argue, have to be theorised differently to contemporary notions of diasporas as bodies of migrants and asylum seekers moving to the imperatives of contemporary conflicts, social, economic or political crises, or the specific desires for better lives—like the archetypal Jewish diaspora, characterised by displacement and dislocation. On the contrary, white diasporas such as the Irish or Scottish are characterised by replacement and relocation. In the first instance, since white diasporas

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are characterised by a history of ‘settlement’, they are, as Mahmood Mamdani argues, ‘made by conquest, not just immigration’ (interview in Ahluwalia 2001:63).4 In fact, the term ‘settler’ already operates as a reference to this history of settlement, and Mamdani is specifically talking about settler histories in African nation-states which took shape during and after the European colonial powers’—Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germanynotorious ‘scramble for Africa’ in the mid-nineteenth century. In Australia, this history of settlement through conquest attempted to proclaim ownership over geographical territory and citizenship, as well as authority in cultural discourses of Australianness. In other words, settler nationalism produced a racialised Australian, promoting an embodied ‘white’ way of life; but most importantly, settler nationalism attempted to name itself as specifically native. Ahluwalia suggests that this nativisation ‘went to the heart of the manner in which the continent was settled. The myth of terra nullius5 was dependent upon the non-recognition of the local population and the “indigenisation” of their white conquerers’ (Ahluwalia 2001:65). These racialised, nativised ideas of an Australian way of life attempted either to annihilate or assimilate Indigenous populations based on grounds of white racial purity, whilst simultaneously excluding and/or assimilating non-Anglo migrant populations (such as Southern or Eastern European and Asian groups). But the term ‘settler’, while it does highlight the link to Britain as a mother country even as it casts itself as ‘native’, does not appear to highlight the relationships that white discourses of Australianness might have to other ‘white’ nations such as the USA which have been founded on the basis of white supremacy. We argue that the use of the term ‘white’, formed as it was within the crucible of colonial histories and colonial relations of power in the pseudo-scientistic mappings of the family of man by European philosophers (McClintock 1995), needs to be marked in global media which refer to this larger community beyond the borders of the nation.6 We choose to highlight this relationship through the use of the term ‘white diasporas’ for two specific reasons. First, it enables us to resituate ‘settler’ ownership of the nation and a nativisation based on the attempted erasure of Indigenous populations as native. Second, it provides a space for the analysis of the diasporic relationships that are drawn upon in times of crisis, in times of traumatic global media events such as September 11 to create symbolic stabilisation. These relationships may not always be explicitly expressed or referred to, but they may be mobilised in specific circumstances where the legacies of colonial histories underpin differentiations based on race or culture to create ‘identity’. In this context, the legitimisation of references to ‘civilised and the uncivilised’ worlds, post September 11, by Western governmental leaders as well as the media, becomes logical as they refer to those colonial discourses situated within a white diasporic history. The colonial constitution of the terms ‘civilised’/‘uncivilised’ is not acknowledged, but their blatant reference to the division between nations considered white or Western and others that are not cannot but point to the colonial, racialised and Orientalist history of these terms—in which colonisation was civilisation. Hence, our use of the term ‘white diasporas’ attempts to describe this specific international formation. This is a discursive nexus where the ownership of Australia as a white, Western country is articulated through its privileged political, cultural and military alliances with the UK and the USA, as has been especially the case during the regime of the current Howard government. Here, there is an active production of its national space underwritten by a

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colonial representation of Indigeneity as located in the past and an avowed multiculturalism that is a tokenised alibi for its tolerance. This is a nation that claims a multicultural and postcolonial status even as it remains white supremacist in its international outlook. These notions of white supremacy, it must be noted, may be either of the more blatant ‘regressive’ kind (i.e., Pauline Hanson7 and notions of a white race in terms of biological and cultural superiority) or the ‘progressive’ kind (i.e. liberal notions of ‘Western culture’ and ‘democracy’, terms which sometimes function as a code for the spread of ‘civilising’ white enlightenment ideals). While these regressive and progressive notions of whiteness must be differentiated, what is of significance here is that the idea of whiteness itself remains a governing force in the construction of the kind of nation that Australia is and the political or cultural alliances it has with other ‘white’ nations. We must also qualify our use of the term ‘white diasporas’ here, following the theoretical debates within Whiteness Studies located in Australia. We are using the term ‘white’ in a specific sense, that which Perera calls the tele-ology of temporalising and spatialising the narratives of Australia’s history through a range of moves: it erases the time prior to colonization, casting it as unproductive, empty and meaningless time, and so legitimizing its own claim to the land; second it consolidates this claim to ownership by casting the Asian as the alien and invader figure, thus (re)usurping the place of the indigene; and, finally, it constructs a script of assimilation in which selected groups of other successive migrants are progressively racialised as white. (Perera 2000:17) In the above description of a white teleology of nation, whiteness functions as an embodied, ethnicised structure of power placed in the historicocultural context of the nation. Joseph Pugliese has underscored the importance of contextualising whiteness, rather than subscribing to Richard Dyer’s (1997) dehistoricised and de-ethnicised treatise on the visual and other constructions of whiteness which, he suggests, is remarkable for its atopicality and ‘an indifference to the critical differences of historically situated and discursively embodied subjects’ (Pugliese 2002:150). So, white diasporas, as we use the term, refers simultaneously to its teleology, embodiments that are raced, gendered and classed differentially, and its script for assimilation. In this sense, white diasporas are discursive as well as embodied. In the context of Australia, this white diasporic teleology actively produced a set of national-local media and governmental discourses in response to the global media event of September 11. So, the concept of the nation (its media, its diverse cultural and ethnic groups, its government) as actively generating a set of varied responses within its ‘local’ historical context (the context of a white diaspora), to what was considered a global media event is a point that remains and needs to be theorised. The questions we now want to address to begin this process are how is a ‘global’ media event produced as local and what are some of the theoretical negotiations and implications involved in reading a global media event as a local production?

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Localising global media events ‘Events’, McKenzie Wark, the media theorist suggests, ‘have no particular scale, duration, or topos’ (Wark 1994:21). Citing Foucault’s description of an event as ‘the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked “other”’ (Wark 1994:21), Wark suggests that this list would certainly cover most global media events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the first Gulf War. Following Foucault’s description, the attacks on the World Trade Center could be described as an event in the sense of ‘the reversal of a relationship of forces’ or ‘the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who once used it’ (Wark 1994:21). In other words, the attacks on the World Trade Center certainly could be seen as an event in terms of the attempt at the reversal of American military, political, economic and cultural domination on its home soil. But if the ‘event is a complex of vectors’,8 as Wark suggests, then the event itself cannot be read without the complex of vectors that it becomes. In other words, the event and ‘the volume and velocity of information the vector generates may bear no relation to the significance or the scale of the event’ (Wark 1994:22). It is worth noting here that this volume and velocity of information is related to the event in terms of power, and the manner in which power relations shape what becomes a significant, large-scale global event and what does not. By any calculation, the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were one of the biggest ever global events in terms of media vectors. Scholars have noted the massive bombardment of televised images across net-works and vast increases in newspaper circulations, as well as the use of the net to gain information, seek answers as to the ‘why’ of the event or share solidarities among diverse political views (Allan 2003; Mcnee 2002; Wilcox 2001). Our interest here in talking about September 11 as a global event, however, moves in a different direction. It has to do with reading the event and its narratives and discourses from a specific location. So, in this light, we want to move on to Wark’s reading of the reception/production of narratives during global media events. Wark’s main thesis appears to be that, since global media events are opposed to the everyday, they are ‘singular irruptions into the regular flow of media’ (Wark 1994: vii). These irruptions, Wark suggests, ultimately produce a situation where ‘the rationales of global media events revel in their weirdness at the point where noise overwhelms the codes and narrative strategies meant to exclude it’ (Wark 1994: viii). The purpose of paying attention to this noise, he says, is an attempt to ‘defamiliarize the seductive, sticky little stories that pour out of the media and pass through us, pawing at our consciousness, seeping into the pores of the unconscious mind’ (Wark 1994:23). So the theoretical implication of studying global media events is that they are literally the limit which in some sense confounds mainstream media vectors as they overrun themselves into hyperreality—the limit which may become the space where we can defamiliarise naturalised media narratives. While Wark’s argument is seductive in that global media events might provide a space to theorise about narratives that media vectors construct, we are not convinced that the theorisation of noise itself may provide a space where we can construct a ‘democratic counterintelligence’. Wark suggests that this counterintelligence ‘might mobilise in future events, the scale and significance and fear we can only imagine, but must imagine’ (Wark

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1994:23). Of course, Wark himself does not limit his analysis to this space of noise or madness. In fact, he suggests that a vector ‘grasps the dynamic, historical tendency of international media events, but it is not a concept limited to media technologies alone. It also provides a way of thinking about the other aspects of contemporary events’ (Wark 1994:13). In this sense, it is perhaps through a tracing and critical theorising of the manner in which global media events are ‘localised’ within the context of specific histories that we may be able to provide perhaps multiple ‘counter-intelligences’ from varied positionalities. One such example of a critical ‘counter-intelligence’ (in the context of commenting on representations of Vietnam in the Western media) is Trinh T.Minh Ha’s suggestion that, for the West, Vietnam could only signify the Vietnam War. Consequently, ‘Vietnam as a spectacle remains passionately an owned territory’ (Minh Ha 1991:101). This theorising of the passionate ownership of Vietnam as spectacle does not emerge out of the bombardment of images and narratives of Vietnam that might transmute into ‘noise’, it emerges out of a critical attention to Western binary narratives about Vietnam that could not conceive of her (Vietnam) in ‘the to-and-fro movement across the boundaries of procommunist/anti-communist opposition’. This position provides a point of departure for Minh Ha’s film, Sur Name Viet, Given Name Nam, in her tracing of gendered histories/mythologies of women from various backgrounds, various occupations, various political positions and their accounts not only of the war, but their contemporary lives in Vietnam. What we want to foreground is Minh Ha’s point—that the narratives of the Vietnam war, especially for the USA, were localised in a certain way even as they remained globally dominant in representational terms. While contemporary ‘global’ or, rather, Western media vectors are far more dominant in constructing global media events, our argument is that these events need to be read in the context in which they are produced locally. We would like to pause here and comment on the terms ‘global’ and ‘local’. We are well aware of the myriad sociological debates generated by Roland Robertson (1995) as to constructions of the local via the global and the importance of refashioning the two in the term ‘glocal’, which is perhaps more descriptive, even diagnostic, of our contemporary era. However, while we concur with Robertson’s theorisation of the ‘local’ as an aspect of the global rather than a counterpoint to it, we would like to retain a strategic binary division between the terms precisely because they appear to be descriptors of a specific kind of media domination in our time. This theori-sation of Western media domination does not disavow the possibilities of differential receptions of global media representations; however, it retains the sense that these differential receptions or localisations are negotiated within the field of global or, more specifically, Western media vectors. Wark defined the term ‘global’ in media vectoral terms as ‘some linkage between the sites at which they appear to happen and the sites where we remote sense them’ (Wark 1994: vii). This remote-sensing, however, is an active reproduction within the localised field that is the nation, within its historical, political and cultural contexts. In this sense, the local is not merely an aspect of the global or a localisation of the global, it is a defined space, a field of active production and reproduction of global media events.9 In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai theorises the local as an active space of production by reversing the anthropological binary between the Western subject as active

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and non-Western locality as passive. Locality, he suggests, is fragile, and is a property of social life (Appadurai 1996:182). In our discussion of localised’ Australian productions of September 11 as a global media event, we posit that the national becomes local precisely because of the production of the national—local as a property of ‘Australian’ social life and because of the engaged practices of representation, performance and action that Appadurai associates with the ‘neighbourhood’ in his discussion of the local. The nation-state might be discliplinary in its modes of localisation in opposition to the neighbourhood, but in times of crisis, the production of the local may be a collaborative project between the nation-state, mainstream medias and cultural groups within the nation. The relationship between nation-states and neighbourhoods is not always, though it can be, a relationship of producing compliant national citizens. Our suggestion here is that in times of global media events such as September 11, both mainstream media (especially print and television) and unmarked ‘white’ communities within the nationstate in collaboration with the government actively produced white diasporic narratives and discourses about translocal alignments between the USA and Australia as Western countries under attack for their democratic traditions. Our point here is not to silence those groups who actively voiced their dissent against these discourses, but to theorise how this event became a site at which national—local debates about the constitution of Australianness via border protection, and Australia’s affinity to the USA via a culturally imagined ‘West’ versus a culturally constructed Islam, and the grieving over white Australian and white American subjects in the name of grieving over humanity, were produced.

Producing white diasporas via September 11 So, how did the mobilisation of national-local discourses of a white diaspora re-produce the event of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? In Australia, one major discourse that was produced by governmental leaders in the mediascape was the framing of asylum seekers as potential terrorists. This was particularly profitable for the Howard government during the then-ongoing ‘Tampa crisis’,10 and the children overboard scandal.11 It was profitable because the subsequent election was won by the Howard government primarily on a ‘race’ card precisely because of the support of constituencies that accepted this discursive framing of asylum seekers. These events certainly attest to the use of September 11 to construct the threat of the other—in the person of asylum seekers arriving mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq—in order to mobilise localised national white diasporic defensiveness. In characterising asylum seekers as potential terrorists and a threat to Australian borders, newsmedia governmentality12 and the Howard government’s exercise of its power through the media successfully affiliated the image of racialised difference (desperate refugees) with the new image of terrorism, the twin furnaces in the sky. The blurred image of asylum seekers in life-jackets in the ocean that signified the children overboard scandal is, of course, now a famous one. It is famous not only because its circulation by the media might have helped the Howard government to win the election, but also famous for the scandal of the lie that it embodied—that this boatful of disempowered and desperate asylum seekers constituted an attack on Australia’s borders.

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This drew on a history of Australia’s paranoid nationalism concerning its white borders (Australia has far too much vulnerable coastline for a population of 18 million ever fully to protect), and while there were voices of dissent in the public sphere from leftist intellectuals and some left-wing media commentators, the bipartisan government ideas about border protection were predicated within the larger context of this white diasporic teleology. In her profound essay on the manner in which the racialised structure of the internment camp informs the logic of the modern nation-state, Suvendrini Perera discusses how Among the innocent victims of the 9/11 terror attacks are several thousand asylum seekers in the west, non-combatants painfully caught at the point where the ‘war on terrorism’ meets the ‘war at home.’ Indeed more than a point of intersection, the bodies of asylum seekers and refugees are the very media through which the war on terror is normalized into the war at home: through new forms of control and power it seeks to exercise over the bodies of asylum seekers, the war abroad becomes the war at home. (Perera 2002b:1) The war at home against asylum seekers has become an ongoing war in Australia, and the event of September 11 relicensed a certain racialised logic, predicated on the anxieties of a white teleology of nation, the anxieties of a white diaspora, to be realised once more in policy and practice. In the sphere of the print media, specifically in the ‘one year later’ commemorative editions of Australia’s only national newspaper (The Australian), there were numerous discourses that assumed this larger white diaspora through the genre of commemoration, through essays and editorials that interpreted the event of September 11 and grieved for the dead. There were at least ten Australians who died in the event, but while the death of Australians was a significant component in the edition, the commemoration was based on an invitation not only to mourn Australians, but to grieve for this larger global event and reflect on its meaning both for the USA and for Australia in the Australian context. Having lived in Australia for almost a decade and witnessed the print and television media’s calendrical expressions of grief in relation to specific national events, it has been interesting to identify the naturalised ways in which certain events have been commemorated, while other events disappear into the mists of national forgetting (pace Ernest Renan, the philologist who wrote on the importance of forgetting in the forging of nations). Elsewhere, we have discussed the manner in which the Port Arthur massacre was narrativised by the Australian print media as ‘the worst massacre’ in Australian history (Banerjee and Osuri 2000). This narrativisation, we argued, was based on a version of history which attempted to erase the histories of massacres of Indigenous peoples. In other words, it was a narrativisation based on a white teleology of Australian history. Similarly, the teleologies assumed in the commemoration of September 11 enabled specific kinds of headlines, statements in the essays and editorials that followed, and in the photographs that were published which we will discuss shortly. Theorising commemoration, Pierre Nora suggests that in the interwoven times of the nation-state and living collective memory, generational memory in our time isn’t necessarily that of direct experience: ‘commemoration now tends to be made of media

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events, tourism, promotions and entertainment; its medium is no longer the classroom or public square but television, museums, expositions, colloquia, and it takes place not in official ceremonies but in television spectaculars’ (Frow 1999). While this is certainly an accurate assessment in the case of September 11, it is much more descriptive to suggest that official ceremonies are staged through media events (as with the funeral of Princess Diana in the UK, where the two merged seamlessly). However, media events are larger than official ceremonies, and the vectors that made possible the volumes of information and emotionally charged images, sounds and commentaries went well beyond the scope of such ceremonies in shaping the tragic event as worthy of epic commemoration. Epic, because it was an assault against humanity, or ‘A Shock to History’ as The Weekend Australian, 7–8 September 2002, proclaimed in the headline to its commemorative edition. The headline, of course, begs the question, a shock to whose history? Its signification perhaps assumes the phrase world history. However, the phrase ‘world history’ can only be employed by those who subscribe to the Hegelian teleology of European history (or perhaps the teleology of white diasporas) as leading the world to its rational, ordered space, where the end of history or the end of ideological conflicts may be proclaimed, as Francis Fukuyama (1993) argues. In this naming, ‘A Shock to History’, what are erased are the histories of white, colonial domination specifically in the region that became New York. As one Native American commented in relation to the event of September 11, the mainland of the country we now call the USA has experienced genocidal shocks, not just terrorist strikes, in the context of Native American histories (personal communication). There have been other shocks to other histories around the world as well, many of them on or around the same date (Fisk 2002), but rather than list these shocks, our point here is to suggest the racialised ways in which the headline ‘A Shock to History’ operates. The attacks on the World Trade Center were a shock not just to Americans, but to people around the world because of the paradox they illustrated—the paradox of the vulnerability of the world’s only military superpower.13 But as such, the histories of colonial domination and their specific trajectories of attempted annihilation, dispossession and the fragmentation of peoples lives (as in the case of Indigenous peoples around the world as well as other colonised peoples) have been traumatic to the multiple histories of diverse peoples around the planet. And considering that we are still living in the legacy of that domination, that shock, that trauma as witnessed in the battles over map lines drawn by colonialists in the Middle East and elsewhere, the logic of naming the event of September 11 as a shock to history makes sense only in the logic of a white diasporic teleology—constituted on the proclamation of the victory of Western domination, via capitalism and liberal democracy, of the planet and its universalisation. The Weekend Australian’s commemorative edition contained a series of essays, a display of a photographic essay entitled Here is New York: a Democracy of Photographs, a spread on the technical information concerning how the suicide plane crashes were executed, and stories of the families of the Australian dead. It is significant that most of the photographs visually signify whiteness. There are, of course, scattered photographs of African Americans, but the enunciated narratives of family, the stories of people who died, most of these signify within a white visual embodiment even though diverse peoples died at the World Trade Center. The photographs and stories of the Australian dead, of course, localise the tragedy to an Australian context. Apart from the

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significations of whiteness, however, the political context of the exhibition of these photographs as propaganda, and the ways in which the text framing the photographs anchor them, provide a way of reading the manner in which these photographs function within a white teleology. In his essay, ‘Remembering September 11: photography as cultural diplomacy’, Liam Kennedy (2003) has looked at the use and circulation of the photographs of the event of September 11 by the United States Information Agency. His contention is that, while the meanings of the photographs themselves are unstable, dependent on the myriad ways in which they may signify epic narratives of heroism by everyday people in the face of grief and trauma, the use and circulation of these photographs by the United States Information Agency puts them in the key frame of propaganda—‘the political mandate of American cultural diplomacy to “tell America’s story to the world”’, and in doing so, construct it as a world story (Kennedy 2003:322). In fact the ‘propoganda impetus’ behind the exhibition, After September 11: Images from Ground Zero,14 Kennedy suggests, ‘is clear in much of the planning. The cities chosen for the exhibition have not been picked at random. While a number of European and South American capitals are included, the majority are cities in the Middle East and North Africa’ (Kennedy 2003:322). In other words, there was an invitation to the inhabitants of these city spaces to localise these photographs specifically in places where people might not seamlessly identify with the trauma, grief or heroism in the photographs. These are people who might have alternative narratives, other than the attack on democracy or humanity, whereby to read these photographs. In Nairobi, for instance, an ‘exhibit on the bombing of the US embassy in that city is displayed alongside the September 11 exhibition. In several cities, relatives of local people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center are being invited to exhibition openings’ (Kennedy 2003:323). But Kennedy notes that the exhibition was not successful everywhere it travelled. In Bangladesh, for instance, the exhibition triggered a protest against the Bangladeshi government’s support for the US-led coalition on the war on terrorism. Or as one demonstrator put it: What is outrageous is how the U.S. government is capitalizing on the tragedy (of September 11)…when the Israeli government is carrying out genocidal programs against the Palestinians. This Meyerowitz exhibition is obviously a ploy to elicit sympathy and as such is calculated. (Kennedy 2003:325) Kennedy’s argument does not suggest that the meanings of the circulation of the photographs are limited to the frame in which they are intended, especially by Charlotte Beers (Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs) who saw the exhibition as an ‘emotional supplement that adds a “visceral” dimension to representations and memories of the events of September 11’ (Kennedy 2003:317). Nor are they limited to the intentions of Patricia Harrison’s (Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs) words: it was necessary to ‘convey to foreign audiences the physical and human dimensions of the recovery effort, images that are less well known overseas than those of the destruction of September 11’ (Kennedy 2003:318). But reading The Weekend Australians photographic essay published in the commemorative

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edition in this context is to read it not only for the significations of grief, heroism and survival, but to pose some uncomfortable questions—questions that denaturalise the attempt to frame these images as a monumentalised shock to white history. It is interesting in the case of Australia that, while the After September 11 exhibition may have toured here, it might not have needed to. The collage of photographs that The Weekend Australian published may have worked as well for the imperatives of US cultural diplomacy. Furthermore, the photographs were captioned by quotes from US and Australian governmental and military leaders. These quotes serve to anchor the meanings of the photographs as do the essays that frame them. Only two commentaries read against the grain of the dominant meanings of September 11 provided by the commemorative edition. These essays, by Noam Chomsky and Arthur Schlesinger, are counterpoints to the rest of the essays, and their writings are well-known. But these are US-based commentaries; they do not produce alternative national—local discourses. A quote from Colin Powell stating, ‘we will not rest until the perpetrators have been brought to justice’ captions a large photograph of Americans fleeing one of the falling towers, and legitimates the war on terrorism in Australia and elsewhere (The Weekend Australian, p. 6). A quote by John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, states, ‘I feel distressed. I am unashamedly distressed as a human being about what is happening.’ This comment universalises the event as an attack on humanity (The Weekend Australian, p. 12). Paul Kelly, The Weekend Australians editor-at-large, echoes these universals in an essay which comments on the unthinkability of September 11 as ‘senseless slaughter, an act of war or a civilization fracture’ (Kelly 2002:2). Later in the essay, he moves on to suggest that America would be better served by the use of the event to forge internationalism, for ‘September 11 was both an attack upon America and an assault upon the universal values of tolerance, democracy, freedom and human rights that unite mankind’ (Kelly 2002:2). Kelly, of course, is drawing on the widespread use of the said attack on these universals, the attack on democracy, freedom and human rights, and it is worth commenting on the mobilisation of these terms in the context of September 11 and the way that these terms were drawn on in the Australian context. It is imperative to note the use of the term ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and the range of significations of these terms in national-local events post September 11. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai described ideoscapes as a ‘concatenations of images’, or ‘elements of the Enlightenment world view, which consist of a chain of ideas, terms, images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy’ (Appadurai 1996:36). Appadurai’s contention appears to be that while these terms were ‘constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere’ in the contexts of countries like the UK or the USA, the semantics of these terms and their translations are differentially coded in the non-European contexts in which these terms are asserted. In the global media event that September 11 became, we would suggest that the credibility of any internal coherence of these terms as used by Western political leaders, and the spread of the use of these terms in media vectors, demanded a gross naiveté. If anything, these terms were articulated as a loose concatenation of images affiliated to the narratives of good and evil which justified the political or military imperatives that these political leaders were interested in pursuing.

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But we are more interested here in drawing attention to the ways in which ideoscapes of democracy and freedom are proclaimed as universal values, but at the same time particularised as the very identity of ‘white’ Western countries. And in this sense, these ideoscapes are used to make differentiations between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ and effectively, discursively, draw on Orientalist boundaries of an ‘us’ and ‘them’. In Kelly’s article specifically, democracy and freedom are signified as universal but qualified as Western in continual opposition to an ‘Islamicism’. For instance, even though he identifies Bin Laden’s voice as that of an extremist, he cites Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the Muslim world as ‘convinced of the superiority of its culture and obsessed with the inferiority of its power’ (2002:2) without pointing to its gross generalisations. And though he cites diverse responses to September 11 from the ‘Islamic’ and ‘Arab’ world, there is no commentary on the diversity of the logics of these responses. The references to the Arab street, the ‘legions’ that might be mobilised by Bin Laden’s ideas, Al-Jazeera as the voice of self-determination as opposed to CNN’s insouciance, are figured as threats. There are no references in his essay on the history of the Middle East, and the accumulative histories of British and American colonial and contemporary political interventions which provide any explanation of why Al-Jazeera might be a voice of selfdetermination or for the complexity of the problems in the region. While Bin-Laden and the executors of the World Trade Center attack are figured as simultaneously medieval and modern, in that Bin-Laden is represented as a ‘fanatic from the caves’ and the hijackers of September 11 are pointed out to be ‘educated and middle-class’, the ‘West’ is embodied in its ‘universal’ values of democracy and freedom within the context of Western liberalism. As there are no explanations provided as to how the attacks on the World Trade Center were an attack on democracy or freedom, it is evident that, more than anything else, these terms provide a space, an identity, for the imagined unity and alliances between countries considered ‘Western’. In this sense, Kelly urges the importance of an internationalist outlook for the USA. It is important to emphasise here that, in colonial contexts, the struggle to fight for freedom, democracy and human rights against the very colonial powers that supposedly espoused these narratives and heralded themselves as enlightened subjects has trained generations of colonial discourse analysts (and we don’t mean just academics here, but activists and thinkers who have fought and continually engage in these struggles) to pay vigilant attention to the manner in which these terms are used. Most often, these terms have been used to consolidate the democratic rights and freedoms of those deemed Western subjects against the freedoms of nonWestern others. In other words, democracy was differentially, colonially and racially coded in the logic of European empires. In Australia, there has been a long history of expressing the rights of white Australians based on the violences and discriminations against Indigenous communities and a host of various ‘others’. In contemporary Australia, the protection of democracy and freedoms legitimises repressive anti-terror measures that have been specifically targeting Muslim and Arab Australians. Internationally, it has legitimised its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in its alliance with the USA without the ‘democratic’ consent of its citizens. So, the opposition between ‘democracy and Islamicism’ reveals a religious racialisation in its usage. In his indictment of Western liberalism, advocated by Guy Rundle (who staged an attack on the Australian government’s impending anti-terror legislation by appealing to a

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defence of the liberal political sphere’, stating ‘the darkest possibility’ that ‘some of us will end up in prison sooner than later’), Ben Hoh scathingly comments that Rundle does not take into account the raced surveillance techniques, profoundly anti-democratic, that impact on Arabs and Muslims in Australia as evidenced in the ASIO raids15 or the detention of asylum seekers,16 which prove that liberal democratic concepts of justice are already founded on the ability of the nation-state to create such ‘states of exception and naked control’ (2002). And it is imperative to assert that the so-called attacks on democracy and freedom in the case of the global media event of September 11 licensed a range of racialised repressive measures both in Australia and the USA (the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the attacks on Arab and Muslim households by ASIO [Australian Security and Intelligence Office] are evidence of this) even as democracy and freedom are heralded as the very identity of a white ‘Western’ imaginary. The photographic essay in The Weekend Australian asserts this identity, as it is subtitled, ‘a democracy of photographs’. What is absent from this reference to democracy are the possibilities of democracies of photographs of the dead in the Afghan and Iraq wars or the images of raced communities who face the brunt of anti-democratic policies of Western governmental regimes post September 11.

Remapping translocalities post September 11 In orienting this discussion to the manner in which the global media event of September 11 was localised so as to draw on discourses of whiteness, we want to acknowledge that, while this appeared to be the general condition of most mainstream media and governmental representations, there were other media texts that attempted to counter these white teleologies. SBS, perhaps, more than any other television station attempted to screen documentaries like Letter To America, Letter From America and others to provide a historical context to the events of September 11. Scholars like Stuart Allan (2003) have looked at the vast range of information that was accessible on the Internet which provided critical alternate readings of the event. But we have framed our discussion in this manner so as to describe the naturalisation of ‘white’ discourses of September 11 due to the massive volume of these discourses through mainstream media vectors. Following this discussion, we’d like to suggest a few theoretical implications for a post 9/11 political reality with which we are dealing. Tariq Ali has argued that the significance of the event of September 11 lies in how the world is being remapped according to the imperatives of the USA (2002). In this context, the Australian alliance with the USA in the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite massive opposition to these wars in Australia, indicates that the Australian government hopes to reap some benefits from this remapping. One of the effects of this remapping in the international sphere, for Australia, has been to consolidate a white teleology of nation domestically. White teleologies, as we suggested earlier in relation to Perera’s thesis, are drawn on the basis of erasing a time prior to colonisation, consolidating the claim to ownership by usurping the place of the indigene, casting ‘Asians’ as invaders, and constructing a script for assimilation. It is through the logic of these white teleologies that the Australian government has been able to continue its detention of asylum seekers,

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perform a racialised border protection and continue its ongoing targeting of Muslims and Arab Australians. In opposition to the notion of white diasporic teleologies that have been operating in the context of Australian localisation of the global media event of September 11, there is a need to propose an alternate map, a map which may assert translocal or transregional alliances which may be already available. In her recent work, Suvendrini Perera (2002b) attempts to rework this map by advocating the notion of ‘UnAustralians’, which discursively counters the paranoid nationalist values that phrases such as ‘ordinary, decent Australians’ invoke in their violence toward racialised bodies. If we consider the inhabitants of Australia to be multicultural, acknowledging the priority of Indigenous nations on this land, then our allegiances are multiple and diverse at the same time as they are aligned in the struggle against the kinds of racialisations that underpin the assertions of a white teleology. And perhaps this concept of ‘UnAustralianness’ is needed to reconceptualise our maps of belonging. Post September 11, many theorists have argued for the need for democratic alliances articulated across the borders of nation-states. Avtar Brah, for instance, theorises the space of the global as a ‘space for negotiating alternative transnational conceptions of the person as “holder of rights” that are distinct from the current notions of citizenship. It can be a place for all manner of cultural and political creativity’ (Brah 2002:42). Against the discursive imperatives of whiteness, perhaps even against existent forms of the nation-state, we may need to draw our translocal maps based on the notion of movements towards justice even as we continue to actively foreground and challenge the identity maps of diasporic teleologies.

Notes 1 A very useful introduction to Whiteness Studies, including an extensive bibliography, is provided by Gary Jay at this website Whiteness Studies: Deconstructing (the) Race, www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/ (accessed 20 July 2004). 2 Paul Keating mentioned the fear of being labelled an apartheid regime as a significant factor in Australia’s move toward multiculturalism in a documentary called The Rise and Fall of White Australia, aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s network in 2001 for the commemoration of Federation in Australia. 3 For a comprehensive account of the policies of assimilation through the practice of forcible removal of Aboriginal children and its genocidal impact on Indigenous families, culture and identities, read HREOC (1997) Bringing Them Home: a Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, HREOC: Sydney. 4 The African diaspora in North and South America and the Caribbean is no exception to this rule despite its stability, as it was a by-product of conquest and, until emancipation, was maintained by colonial force. 5 Neutral or unoccupied ground—the principle invoked by the British government to justify their colonisation of Australia in the eyes of international law. It denied the indigenous Aborigines any rights over their own territories and reduced them to the legal status of the kangaroo—judicial fauna. 6 It is important to note here, as many ethnicity studies theorists argue, the formation of whiteness in the USA as opposed to Australia and other settler countries is quite specific and differential in its effects (Ang 1995). 7 Pauline Hanson entered Australian politics as a member of parliament in 1996, blatantly drawing on debunked myths of racial superiority. She was defeated in a subsequent election.

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Her extreme-right views, which targeted non-Anglo migrants and Aborigines, have been termed ‘Hansonism’. 8 Drawing on Paul Virilio’s notion of the vector in terms of the development of technology, Wark describes the vector as ‘any trajectory along which bodies, information, or warheads can potentially pass’ (1994:11). A vector, in this sense, is a route, a line between any two or three points, a line that ultimately connects millions of people around the world to their telephones, radios, television sets, newspapers or the Internet. Vectors are broader than just media technologies and their velocity and volume of information as they are routes of the flows of power relations. In the case of ‘global’ events, however, media vectors have a particular significance. They are an ‘extensive, global net’ (Wark 1994: xi), able to move images and sounds across cultural and geographic borders. 9 In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai reverses the anthropological/ethnographical binary between the Western subject as active and non-Western locality as passive. Locality, he suggests, is fragile, and it is a ‘property of social life’ (1996:182). In this sense, the local is continually produced in active terms. 10 In August 2001, a Norwegian ship in Australian waters, the M.V.Tampa, rescued a boat of asylum seekers on their way to Australia. The Howard government refused to allow the ship to bring the refugees to Australia. When the Tampa entered Australian waters, SAS troops occupied the ship and subsequently the refugees were taken to Nauru. In order to prevent asylum seekers claiming refugee status on Australian territory, the government passed a border protection bill in late September 2001 which excised Australian islands from being considered Australian in the context of refugee claims. The asylum seekers aboard The Tampa were claimed to be ‘terrorist sleepers’ by Peter Reith (Perera 2002a), the then Defence Minister. 11 The children overboard scandal concerned the circulation of a videotape in October 2001 by the then Defence Minister Peter Reith which showed a blurred image of children in the ocean. The children were said to be thrown into the ocean by their parents in order to blackmail the Australian government into accepting the asylum seekers into Australia. The Howard government effectively won an election on the basis of its demonisation of these asylum seekers as ‘indecent’, unfit to become ‘decent’ Australians. A subsequent inquiry found that the children were, in fact, in the water because the boat they were in was sinking. 12 Goldie Osuri’s dissertation (2000) on television news in Australia and its representations of discourses of Indigeneity outlines the concept of newsmedia governmentality as a series of relations between the Australian nation-state, discourses of nationalism and the Australian newsmedia. The exercise of power in these relationships concerns the framing of racialised and cultural differences. In the case of Indigenous communities and the nation-state of Australia, the difference, raced as it was, was framed also as a spatiotemporal one, where Indigenous communities in their push for land rights were discursively represented as unproductive in terms of the capitalist imperatives of the nation-state. 13 And the irony, which Fisk notes, that the Hellfire missiles routinely used against Arab communities in the Middle East are manufactured by the Boeing company. 14 After September 11: Images from Ground Zero is a photographic exhibition made up of 27 images by the American photographer Joel Myerowitz. As Kennedy has pointed out, he was the only photographer ‘with unimpeded access to ground zero’, and the exhibition will ‘travel to more than 60 countries by the end of 2004’ (Kennedy 2003:315). 15 Currently, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization has been conducting a series of raids on the homes of Muslim and Arab Australians suspected of ‘terrorist’ sympathies or support. The application of the term ‘terrorist’ to a whole range of contexts where people might be fighting for freedom against oppressive regimes and the legacy of Orientalist attitudes has culminated in a situation where Muslim and Arab Australians as communities are being targeted by governmental raced surveillance techniques.

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16 Australia has had a policy of detaining asylum seekers in prison conditions for the last ten years. Many of the asylum seekers detained are from Iraq and Afghanistan; they were fleeing from the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

References Ahluwalia, P. (2001) ‘When does a settler become a native? Citizenship and identity in a settler society’. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 10, 1:63–73. Ali, T. (2002) ‘Interview: terror debate’, Dateline: International Current Affairs, SBS. Online, available at: www.sbs.com.au/dateline/transcript.php3? (accessed 12 September 2002). Allan, S. (2003) ‘Mediating citizenship: on-line journalism and the public sphere, new voices’. Society for International Development, 46, 1:30–40. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London, New York: Verso. Ang, I. (1995) ‘I’m a feminist but…“Other” women and postnational feminism’, in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds) Transitions: New Australian Feminisms. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Banerjee, S. and Osuri, G. (2000) ‘Silences of the media: whiting out Aboriginality in making news and making history’. Media, Culture & Society, 22, 3:263–284. Brah, A. (2002) ‘Global mobilities, local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination’. Feminist Review, 70:31–45. Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The denial of slavery in management studies’. journal of Manag-ement Studies, 40, 8, December: 1895–1918. Dyer, R. (1997) White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge. Fisk, R. (2002) ‘One year on: a view from the Middle East’. The Independent, 11 September. Frankenberg, R. (1997) Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Durham: Duke University Press. Frow, J. (1999) ‘In the penal colony’, Australian Humanities Review. Online, available at: www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April-1999/frow3.html (accessed 4 February 2000). Fukayama, F. (1993) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press. Haggis, J., Schech, S. and Fitzgerald, G. (1999) ‘Whiteness’, in Richard Nile (ed.) War and Other Catastrophies. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. Hoh, B. (2002) ‘We are all barbarians: racism, civility and the “War on Terror”’, borderlands: ejournal, 1, 1. Online, available at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.%20edu.au/vollnol_2002/hoh_barbarians.html (accessed 29 August 2002). Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997) Bringing Them Home: a Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Sydney, NSW: HREOC. Kelly, P. (2002) ‘A world goes to war’. Weekend Australian, 7–8 September, pp. 2–3. Kennedy, L. (2003) ‘Remembering September 11: photography as cultural diplomacy’. International Affairs, 79, 2:315–326. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge. McNee, F. (2002) ‘Something’s happened: fictional media as a coping mechanism’. Prometheus, 20, 3:281–287. Minh Ha, T.T. (1991) When the Moon Waxes Red. London: Routledge.

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Moore, S. and Fields, R. (2002) ‘The great “white” influx’. Los Angeles Times, July 31. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. Osuri, G. (2000) ‘Whiting out the news: governmentality, discourse and nation in newsmedia representations of the indigenous peoples of Australia’. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Perera, S. (1995) ‘Introduction: fatal (con)junctions’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.) Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities. Glen Waverly, VIC: Aristoc. Perera, S. (1999) ‘Whiteness and its discontents: notes on politics, gender, sex and food in the year of Hanson’. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 20, 2:183–198. Perera, S. (2000) ‘Futures imperfect’, in Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas (eds) alter/asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. Annadale, NSW: Pluto Press. Perera, S. (2002a) ‘A line in the sea’. Australian Humanities Review, 27. Online, available at: www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September2002/perera.html (accessed 13 June 2002). Perera, S. (2002b) ‘What is a camp…?’. borderlands: e-journal, 1, 1: Online, available at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/voll%20nol_2002/perera_camp.%20html (accessed 22 August 2002). Perera, S. and Pugliese, J. (1997) ‘Racial suicide: the re-licensing of racism in Australia’. Race & Class, 39, 2:1–19. Pugliese, J. (2002) ‘Race as category crisis: whiteness and the topical assignation of race’. Social Semiotics, 12, 2:149–168. Robertson, R. (1995) ‘Glocalisation: time—space and homogeneity—heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage. Said, E.W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Wark, M. (1994) Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wilcox, P. (2001) ‘Newspapers and the terrorism war: news priorities, public duty, and the bottom line’. Australian Journalism Review, 23, 2:7–20.

13 Fluid identities and ungendering the future Stephen Linstead and Alison Pullen Chuang Tsu and Hui Tzu had strolled onto the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed: ‘See how the minnows are darting about: That is the pleasure of fishes’. ‘You not being a fish yourself, said Hui Tsu, ‘how can you possibly know what consists the pleasure of fishes?’ ‘And you not being I’, retorted Chuang Tsu, ‘How can you know that I do not know?’ ‘If I, not being you, cannot know what you know’, urged Hui Tsu, ‘it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know in what consists the pleasure of fishes’. ‘Let us go back’, said Chuang Tsu ‘to your original question. ‘You asked me how I knew in what consists the pleasure of fishes. Your very question shows you knew that I knew. For you asked me how I knew. I knew from my own feelings on this bridge’. (Chuang Tsu, tr. Herbert Giles, Unwin, London. 1980:171; cited in Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso. 1996:89)

This passage illustrates for us the problem of knowing the other, what motivates the binary divisions between self and other and the crossing between them. The phenomenological consciousness is always a transitive consciousness—it takes an object and reaches out to it. In so doing it discovers itself in reflexivity. From this understanding in this chapter we develop a notion of gender as always constituted in relation to both boundaries and movement, because boundaries are always in need of construction, reconstruction and maintenance, and are always vulnerable to breach. With specific reference to organisation and organising processes, we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to argue that gender is a plane of immanence, intensity and consistency in that it always and constantly shifts and realigns. Understood in terms of an ontology of process and desire as proliferation, it may be seen as itself a productive force of becoming rather than an outcome of social practice and construction. We begin from the understanding that gendered thinking is not confined to explicit gender relations but our understanding of social institutions is shaped by gender. Prevailing binary assumptions can be challenged at two levels—the biological level of sexed bodies and the social level of ascribed genders, and we consider alternative

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approaches to binary thinking such as multiplicity and fluidity. In this chapter we argue that, although approaches taken to thinking gender in terms of fluidity have been informed usefully by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the implications of this work have not been fully realised at the level of ontology. Attempts to move beyond binary thinking in gender relations rest upon the conceptualisation of multiplicity, but this is rarely directly addressed. In order to identify further directions for progress in thinking beyond binary gender relations, in this chapter we interrogate multiplicity and find three actual or possible types—multiplicities of the same, characteristic of feminist approaches which we critique through a reconceptualisation of desire; multiplicities of the third, characterised by anthropological, transgender and queer theory approaches; and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, typified by the rhizomatics and fluid theorising of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz and Olkowski. We propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire, which rather than compensating for a lack or the pursuing the fulfilment of a wish, is characterised simply by its own exuberance, realised in proliferation. It is this that enables a meaningful connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, thought through in terms of gender identity as immanence, intensity and consistency. From this we argue that, although gender is no longer widely considered to be a property of individuals, the alternative of viewing it in terms of performativity, where it is the outcome of linguistic and social performances (whether agentic or structural, conscious or unconscious), unnecessarily limits the possibilities of thinking multiplicity.

Binary thinking and masculine thinking Gendered binary thinking in organisation studies underpins theory by an implicit or explicit notion of the body; and this body, however virtual, is a male body (Dale 2001; Linstead 2000; Tyler and Hancock 2001). It is, moreover, a particular form of male body, which seeks to conform to a stereotype of phallicised masculinity, which valorises certain real and imagined traits concerned in the main with rigour, control, self-control, discipline and power. This form of masculinity inscribes itself into organisation and organisation theory as both a form of knowledge, and a form of ignorance, in creating abject spaces where subordinated and suppressed qualities are consigned (Linstead 2000). These suppressed qualities have, historically in the West at least, been attributed to the feminine. Porosity, inconstancy, fluidity, mutability have all been used to construct an image of femininity which is suppressed yet remains dangerous to masculine order and control—or at least, that to which phallicised masculinity aspires. More recently, in Baudrillard, the abstract ‘feminine’ has been understood as that which, quite simply, cannot be fixed positively by any label, which eludes control, which itself is subliminal, and is beyond the borders of inscription (Brewis and Linstead 2000). Baudrillard identifies the feminine with that which cannot be fixed or fixed upon—that is, the feminine is always that which is and remains elusive, the essence of change. As such, the feminine is a response which may be adopted by males to create a fluid space in which they can avoid being inscribed in someone else’s rules, which is quite different from the strategies of feminists who seek to enter into such systems with a redefined sense of

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power in order to reinscribe themselves within the system’s new rules. Baudrillard comments: seduction and femininity are confounded, indeed confused. Masculinity has always been haunted by this sudden reversibility within the feminine. Seduction and femininity are ineluctable as the reverse side of sex, meaning and power… The strength of the feminine is that of seduction … A universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of structures and diacritical oppositions, but implies a seductive reversibility—a universe where the feminine is not what opposes the masculine, but what seduces the masculine. (1990:2–7) In contrast, feminism, and radical feminists in particular, have argued for the necessity of identifying a feminine ‘essence’, or project of bodily becoming, with which to contest the hegemony of the masculine in a dialectical confrontation. For them any conceptualisation of the feminine, whether as a property or a potential, must provide the resource for active resistance to the effective dominance of men in the social sphere. Baudrillard’s subversive conception of the feminine, whilst perceptive in acknowledging the importance of the inexpressible in human understanding, is an ontological rather than a sociological argument and bears no relation to the actual social situation of women, despite the other implications of his concept of seduction. In relation to organisation theory, there are two main consequences of regarding the feminine as characterised by fluidity and relationality. The first is the argument that women must and do adopt different strategies of managing and relating in organisations, whose merit needs to be recognised as effective and positive difference rather than negative deviation or error; and second, that organisational forms and practices typical of and embodying the feminine need to be created and recognised as an alternative to the traditional male embodied forms. This argument is often supported by the claim that the rapid changes and instabilities in the contemporary world increasingly demand such an alternative approach. Becoming feminine is here just a better way to manage in the modern world, a better way to embrace change than seeing it as a discontinuous process, which needs to be planned and monitored, where boundaries need to be breached, which is characterised by stages and the need for energisers that drive change to be identified by change agents, and which conforms in varying degrees to phallicised masculinity at the epistemological level. The binary remains in place, just a little refurbished. Recent studies in sexuality, with a compass as broad as anthropology, biological science and queer theory, have effectively problematised the gender divide which enables this suppression to the point that it is no longer tenable—even at the level where it is closest to a simple, physical biological distinction (Brewis et al. 1997). At the social level, there is extensive historical and anthropological evidence for the existence of third and fourth genders in social and cultural groups, recognising that the essential fluidity of gender and sexuality may be labelled in whatever ways a society finds useful; and, on the other, masculinity and femininity as labels refer to characteristics which may exist sideby-side and simultaneously in bodies which may be inscribed either male or female. Going further, the work of transsexual, bisexual and transgender theorists such as

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Bornstein (1994, 1998), Stone (1995), Burke (1996), Garber (1992, 1995), and poststructuralists such as Butler (1990, 1993, 1999), Grosz (1994), Weedon (1999) and Gatens (1996) have developed our understanding of the arbitrariness of the gender binary in practice. For Bornstein, where it was once common for transsexuals to cross the physical binary in the attempt to exchange one mistakenly assigned gender role for the other, the transsexual journey is more adequately characterised by a constantly shifting location in relation to several forms of inscription of identity, of which the reassignment of physical properties is just one. A fluid identity, incidentally, is one way to solve the boundaries. As a person’s identity keeps shifting, so do individual borders and boundaries. It’s hard to cross a boundary that keeps moving. (Bornstein 1994:52) Any and all of these identity inscriptions may change through time, space, discourse and interaction at a level as specific as the personal; sexual orientations and choices may be pragmatic, strategic, ephemeral or reversible, rather than definitive of such identity; and multiple identities may indeed, as Stone (1995) argues, be the human norm rather than a pathological form. Poststructuralism enables us not only to move away from unitary, stable categorisations of gendered identities, but also beyond representations of identity as multiplicity and diversity (see Kerfoot and Knights 1998; Linstead and Thomas 2002), towards a full recognition of the processual nature of individual subjectivities (Linstead and Brewis 2004). Yet, whilst we argue that approaches taken to thinking fluidity have been informed usefully by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the implications of this work have not been fully realised at the level of ontology. We propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire, which, rather than compensating for a lack or pursuing the fulfilment of a wish, is characterised simply by its own exuberance, realised in proliferation. It is this that enables a meaningful connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, thought through in terms of gender identity as immanence, intensity and consistency. As we have already noted, we argue that in moving from considering gender as a property of the individual to seeing it as the outcome of language games and other types of social performance takes too restricted a view of multiplicity. First, however, we consider how male and female bodies have themselves been historically constructed.

More of the same: male bodies, female bodies Phallicised masculinity The universal, in fact, explains nothing; it is the universal which needs to be explained. All the lines of variation that do not even have constant coordinates. The One, the All, the True, the object, the subject are not universals, but

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singular processes—of unification, totalisation, verification, objectivation, subjectification. (Deleuze 1992:162, quoted in Doel 1995:235)

Organisational body images—those embodied in structures, systems, power relations, decision-making, reasoning processes, artefacts and architecture-are not gender neutral. They are inescapably masculine. The historical connections between rationality and masculinity in the West have been well identified by Bordo (1986), Easlea (1981) and Lloyd (1984). From the time of the Greeks, men have been associated with dry ness, solidity, firmness and containment—the male body was a body of parts, of organs which were self-contained and connected in a machinic way, a body to be mastered and controlled (Foucault 1990) and sealed-up against penetration or invasion. The social body, with its specific forms of order, its hierarchies, its taboos and licences, its sacred places, its striated values and its disciplines, was literally written on the body (Brewis 1999, 2003; Hughes 2001, 2002; Warren and Brewis 2004). Different cultures view the body in different ways, which both reflect and determine approaches to social structure, such that a change in either can affect the other. Women’s bodies have been historically associated in the West with wetness and fluidity, with flux and change, with fecundity and uncontrollable cycles of nature, with mood swings and passion. Women through their changeability and association with fluidity have been perceived to be a threat to the order and stability which men struggled to achieve and maintain. Thus materially fluid, women were also socially mobile, and their movements had to be socially regulated by marriage rules and often complex kinship systems. Women also crossed disciplinary and moral boundaries—in fact, their capacity to render established boundaries permeable was what gave them such a powerful social significance—and, in moving across boundaries, they could introduce pollution of behaviours and ideas which could threaten the health of the social system just as physical disease threatened the body. One of the ontological problems faced by human societies is the ambiguous yet differentiated nature of men and women. Physical (sex) differences have been used as one dimension for defining such difference and on which to found social order as a response to it; ‘gender’ differences have been constructed as a means of extending physical differences into moral and social imperatives, and accordingly associations have developed of particular gender characteristics with specific social features (such as militarism) or even forms of thought (such as rationality). Although many of the submerged associations of gender in social arrangements have been surfaced by feminist literature, and recent work on the study of organisations has increasingly incorporated these insights, the implicit gendering of organisational thought has received rather less attention (Dale 2001). Emerging historical associations between forms of masculinity (themselves historically mutable) and certain core social concepts fundamental to organising, such as change and continuity, have led to a situation where predominant organisational forms reflect a particular form of masculinity which is especially concerned with power and control—phallicised masculinity.

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Bodies and boundaries of knowledge Men and women have had their social roles determined by biological factors for millennia. However, the precise nature and meaning of those bodily factors and processes has never been unequivocally fixed and has often proved difficult to define or even to describe accurately. The body does not speak for itself—it has always been a site of symbolic mapping and, though pliable, it is not infinitely so. The human body resists certain inscriptions—it will never be physically able to fly, for example—but it also does accept pros theses, from replacement organs to artificial extensions of our senses to a degree that we are still discovering (Grosz 1994:187–188). Gender is socially and historically mapped on to corporeal reality and they mutually define each other. However, bodies and gender are constructed in a context of power relations, and power is both sustained by bodies of knowledge and by bodies of that which we do not know or are not allowed to know—bodies of ignorance. In other words, in our efforts to create and socially construct knowledge, or knowledges of different parts of experience, we simultaneously create areas of exclusion, areas out of consideration, beyond the boundaries of attention and consciousness, which may be called ignorances. Ignorance is not a priori, like a primordial chaos from which order is wrested, but is willed into being along with knowledge, as every way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing. As both Derrida and Foucault argue with their different emphases, there is nothing innocent about this ignorance—that which does not fit into the ordering systems with which we define our knowledge is beyond the boundary, outside the margin, abject. The abject is, however, never entirely absent from our awareness; rather, it is always just out of the frame, not quite in focus, yet it is necessary to sustain that which is within the frame, as a supplement. As such, it remains an ever-present trouble, not entirely powerless, though suppressed, a problem against which thought within the frame needs to defend. Because of the ever-present threat of the abject, boundaries are important both to societies (and their organised institutions) and to bodies. The Ancient Greeks were particularly sensitive, as Carson (1990:135) argues, to the fact that every instance of contact between human beings is a crisis point—a moment of Violating a fixed boundary, transgressing a closed category where one does not belong’. Boundaries, both personal and extrapersonal, are an important guarantor of social order in civilised societies. Individuals who appear to be ‘especially lacking in the ability to control their own boundaries, or who possess special talents or opportunities for confounding the boundaries of others’ such as strangers, or guests, provoke fear and the rest of society reacts to control them (Carson 1990:135). Knowing ‘how to go on’ appropriately in a cultural context is a critical requirement for full recognition as a socially competent member of that culture. Historically, since the time of the Ancient Greeks, Western thought had explicitly or implicitly been shaped by the classical view that men embodied form whilst women embodied formlessness, yet form was always under threat, and required constant effort and self-control. Neither physical prowess nor skill in logical disputation came easily. Neither the strength of the corporeal body nor the robustness of bodies of knowledge were sustainable without vigilant policing. Change and mutability were problematic because, unless change proceeded carefully from the known, it could produce the

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monstrosity, the chimera—the mutated social arrangement or theory that worked against its own purpose. The threat of the other was not the threat of contest, or agon, but of pollution or subversion; that the corruption from outside would be met by a corresponding corruption from within. In the twentieth century, this awareness was acknowledged by both Sartre and Irigaray who drew attention to the socially symbolic significance of the viscous, which is customarily viewed with horror because of its stickiness, its clinging quality, its indeterminacy, its refusal to be unequivocally either solid or liquid. For Grosz and Irigaray, the viscous and fluid is implicitly associated with femininity because it is subordinated to the unified, the solid and the self-identical, in a social order which renders female sexuality similarly fluid, indeterminate and marginal. The fluid is a marginal state between liquid and solid, passing between them, continually ‘out of place’, borderline and dangerous. As such, it sets up a dialectic between subject and abject, keeping them in relationship to each other, albeit a shifting one. Extending this argument by analogy to social and organisational thought, the structural—functionalist implications are clear, as Dale also notes (Dale 2001). Women, needing to be kept away from possible pollution, stay at home in the relative domestic safety of the nurturing role; men play public roles which require them to contain themselves (emotionally and physically), conserving their strength for those occasions when they may need to exercise real power (Dale and Burrell 2000). Social mobility is discouraged, especially of women; within the organisations that they inhabit, men primarily seek to preserve themselves through self-control, drawing defensive boundaries and territorial demarcations, even glass ceilings, and then increase their strength through the conquest and domination of others. The presence of women in such organisations certainly presents a social problem, and threatens organisational stability, but it is a problem connected to a deeper sense of ontical unease. These strategies, then, could be seen to be part of men’s overall attempt to distance themselves, not just from actual women, but more from the sort of qualities that have been historically attributed to women across a range of cultures, but predominantly in the West—irrationality, uncontrollability, excess, disruption, expansiveness, effulgence, hysteria, lack of self-control. In a society which establishes and regulates heterosexual opposition, women are attributed the qualities which men most fear in themselves. Organisations inscribe these fears, literally, on the bodies of the people who work in them. The phallicised body and phallic organisation Modern organisations, then, mirror the concept of the phallicised male body. As the body is phallicised, with the panoply of senses subordinated to the sensations of the penis, and pleasure focused on penetration and ejaculation, sealed up and impermeable, so organisational thought was shaped. Thinking in terms of an external environment that had an effect on the organisation was surprisingly radical when contingency theory was first developed—attempting to think in a more postmodern mode which understands the environment to be either socially constructed and enacted, or always already present within the organisation, understood as an environmental ‘fold’, has proved even more problematic. As Grosz reflects:

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Perhaps it is not after all flow in itself that a certain phallicized masculinity abhors but the idea that flow moves or can move in a two-way or indeterminable direction that elicits horror, the possibility of being not only an active agent in the transmission of flow but a passive receptacle. (Grosz 1994:201) Grosz seems to capture at least some of the anxieties for traditional organisational thought in a metaphor of a male body that is permeable, that opens itself up, that transmits in a circuit, that responds as well as initiates, that is unsealed, that neither virilises nor reviles its masculinity. Activating this potential for real bodies, she argues, requires a rethinking not only of male sexual morphology, but a transformation in the structure of desire that underpins it. This would enable men sexually to take on passive positions, to explore different parts of their and others’ bodies, to explore different forms of pleasure, to ‘reclaim, reuse, reintensify, body parts, zones and functions that have been phallically disinvested’ (1994:201). This disinvestment may displace not just certain body parts, but even the body itself, which is significant for organisational thought. In Northern Europe, in contrast to the Southern European and Latin American construction of ‘machismo’ as a form of masculinity in which the body is central, phallic investment is made in forms of production, and the ensuing power which accrues to those who are able to control production processes in order to acquire a greater proportion of its surpluses for themselves. As Dale argues: Men have to subordinate some aspects of their masculinity—emotional, sexual, individual—to the demands of another masculine construction. This is production: the rational organization of resources and people. (2001:3–4) Desire, therefore, is channelled through capitalism into the restricted economy (Bataille 199la). Although in the new information and knowledge-based economies, this production is the production of signs rather than simply material artefacts (Lash and Urry 1993), the effect is the same—‘men in patriarchy castrate men, literally and symbolically, in the interests of phallocracy’ (Cockburn 1991:8, cited in Dale 2001:3). Strength and endurance in the physical subordination of the natural world—mother nature yielding up her treasures more and more efficiently under the division of labour—is reinvested, as it was in Bacon’s presentation of science, into the conceptual penetration of the natural world to yield up its secrets more and more efficiently through the labour of division, order and categorisation (Cooper 1998:33; Dale 2001:147). Bill Gates the entrepreneur is not, contrary to Wajcman’s (1998:110) argument, a phallic icon because he controls technology, but because he controls new knowledge processes which enable greater penetration of this unknown. As Dale (2001:127–135) argues, the anatomising urge, as a result of advances in surgical procedure and science that occurred from the seventeenth century onwards, became part of the core of the version of modern rationality which emerged most dramatically towards the end of the eighteenth century and persists in organisation theory today. Organisations and organising processes are dissected, divided, categorised and depicted—rendered visible—to reveal the secret truths of their working,

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the ‘one best way’ to organise the internal resources and conditions required to achieve the best adaptation to environmental circumstances. The cathectic reinscription of masculinity into these forms is not without its anxieties and consequent resistances, because male (phallogocentric) anxiety becomes not simply focused on erection and the ability to dominate another’s sexuality, nor solely on the ability to control another’s economic performativity, but also on the increasing inability to experience one’s own bodily intensities. Postmodern male ‘hysteria’, seen in attempts to exert increasing ideological, social and political control over a fragmenting world, is also an assertion of ‘the sovereignty of desire as lack over libidinal history, which is to say of spatialization over the body’ (Kroker and Kroker 1991: xi). In other words, phallic masculinity through institutional and organisational management works to put us in our place. Any attempt to assert desire as libidinous, emerging from an exuberant and irrepressible flow, a vital spirit, in Bergson’s terms, is as Dollimore (1991) writes, a trangressive reinscription involving a receding of significances which disrupts the prevailing order. Grosz argues, following Irigaray, that men have reduced the understanding of flows within the body to those by products of pleasure and reproduction that emerge as occasioned by circumstance. Again, given the functionalism of the earlier argument, this should be no surprise, yet it alerts us to a paradox that is of enormous importance. If the presence of bodily fluids is a sign that our life force is not entirely under our control, then this driving force must be a source of desire or motivation (it may be prudent to call this force itself desire). Yet the association of these fluids only with the restricted performatives of the life process, rather than the process itself, leads to the construction of desire as a drive to fill a lack, motivation as a need. This latter view, which underpins both Freudian and Lacanian approaches to desire and their derivatives, particularly those common in the field of organisational behaviour, enables social and organisational control to proceed along lines of structured and deferred reward and recompense, in which individuals labour for more of that which they do not have, and the limited provision of opportunity for advancement (which dissipates the organisational condition of lack). In order to motivate, a sense of lack must be inculcated, a specific need identified, and a proxy for the fulfilment of that need provided. Yet, if desire is the life force associated with bodily fluids, rather than their product only, desire itself is not lack, but excess; not need, but exuberance (Bataille 199la, b; Brewis and Linstead 2000). In fact, it is the very opposite of the motivational model entailed in adopting the masculinised view of the body. For Irigaray (1985:113), the object of desire (as understood within Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) is to transform the fluid into the solid—to turn the uncontrollable into the controlled, the nebulous into the defined, the unclear into the lucid, the flaccid penis into the turgid phallus, the fuzzy and floppy into something we can get hold of—the triumph of rationality itself. The symbolic and exuberant general economy which Bataille argues is the creative side of human nature, where gifts are freely given and energy freely spent, is turned into the calculative and restricted economy dominated by work, where gifts become transactions and energy is bought, sold and conserved in the service of production and accumulation. For Grosz, this emerges in the ways in which men attempt to deny what they see as elements of femininity in themselves, holding women either in contempt or reverence; their capacity to distance

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themselves from their passions, to be different persons in work life, social life, domestic life and sexual encounters; to regard their sex organs as autonomous; to distance themselves from intimacy whether through anonymity, promiscuity, voyeurism or the reification of bodily organs. Bodies here are understood in terms of universalities, binaries, individuations: they are centred, organised in terms of an overarching consciousness, rendered cohesive through intentionality and reflexivity, and made capable of combination in purposeful ways as part of a teleology which restores a greater oneness. Desire works through a recognition of incompleteness and drives towards this restoration through structure—it is no accident that Freud found it necessary to have a structural view of the imaginative terrain of the unconscious. Through the association of the feminine, and women themselves, with the ontological and physical condition of lack (of a penis), the processes of splitting, denial and subordination become inscribed in social and organisational practices and structures in a variety of ways which reproduce this condition as a lack of power (of the phallus). Let us now consider some feminist responses to the question of desire.

Multiplicities of the same: femininism and desire Feminism has made the enormous contribution of enabling the clear recognition of the ontological and social subordination noted above, but different varieties of feminism (see Brewis and Linstead 2004 for a succinct review) have, however, taken different perspectives on resistance to it; to its redress or reversal; to the means of achieving social change; and the acceptance or otherwise of gender identifications beyond the customary binary. Despite these differences, treatments of feminism in the organisation studies field have often been regarded as unproblematic and homogeneous. We would see feminist practice defined as ‘the claim to the material and symbolic recognition on the part of politically motivated women: the female feminist subject’ (Braidotti 1994:159), as problematic in that it reinforces the gender divide rather than challenging it by affirming sexual difference with sexual politics. Furthermore, feminism is often treated in a monolithic sense. Braidotti’s work is interesting in that, as a self-defined ‘feminist critic’, she explores the potential of postmodern writings for exploring political subjectivity and attempts to connect these ‘with the problems of knowledge and epistemological legitimation’ to explore ‘how to reconcile historicity, and therefore agency, with the political will to change’. However, Braidotti, akin to many other gender writers, falls short of resolving the obvious tensions between feminist determinism and postmodern relativism. In order to bring about change, Braidotti reminds us that there has to be the (unconscious) desire for the new, which, in turn…implies the construction of new desiring subjects…desire is what is at stake in the feminist project of elaborating alternative definitions of female subjectivity…women’s desire to become, not a specific model for their becoming. (1994:160)

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It is within this emancipatory mode of becoming, an ontological desire, that she finds possibilities for change—‘the desire to be, the tendency of the subject to be, the predisposition of the subject towards being’ (1994:160). Although Braidotti starts us moving towards a way of thinking difference by exploring potential usages of Deleuze and Guattari, her feminist politics leaves us unsettled, particularly with her level of analysis of the body as ‘neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material social conditions’ (1994:161), which is a key issue in the feminist struggle for the redefinition of subjectivity. Braidotti questions feminist materiality, offering a corporeal materiality influenced by Foucault and Deleuze which enables her to go beyond the subject ‘woman’ as a monolithic essence and appreciate the living concept ‘woman’ as a site of complex, multiple, contested experiences. Theorising subjectivity as sites of differences involves, after Deleuze, a vision of subjectivity as ‘an intensive, multiple and discontinuous process of interrelations…[which is] an antirelativistic, specific community of historically located, semiotic, material subjects, seeking connections and articulation in a manner that is neither ethnic nor gender-centred’ (Braidotti 1994:161). However, Deleuze’s vision of changing the very image we have of thinking—a radical postmodernism as Braidotti categorises it—does not fit with her feminist politics. At the heart of feminism and other philosophies of modernity lies an unresolved relationship toward both subjectivity and materialism. That said, Braidotti establishes some fluidity within the gender binary, although the identification of individual gendered identities as same—different does not offer an alternative strategy of resistance that destabilises the boundaries of the bipolar gender system. As Braidotti herself argues: the classical notion of the subject treats difference as a subset of the concept of identity as sameness, that is to say, adequation to a normative idea of a being that remains one and the same in all its varied qualifications and attributes. (1994:164) Our task therefore is to think of identity as a site of difference. Rethinking difference then involves, not establishing a reactive pole of a binary opposition but a multiplicity of possible differences—‘difference as the positivity of differences’ (Braidotti 1994:164). Deleuze’s work is used as part of a rejection of the principle of adequation to and identification with a phallogocentric image of thought. These ideas lie at the heart of the nomadic vision of subjectivity that takes into account experiences of oppression, exclusion and marginality. The emphasis on becoming therefore stands against the static (and inevitably oppressive) nature of being. The notion of rhizomes (which we discuss shortly), that some would argue is Deleuze’s leading figuration as a quest for new images of thought, facilitates our project of challenging gender binaries and is better suited to a nomadic, disjunctive self which evades oppression in avoiding ‘being’ in any static sense. But, although the possession or otherwise of a penis is no longer the prime determinant of subjectivity, the body stands for the radical materiality of the subject. Rethinking the subject therefore means rethinking the body. Deleuze and Guattari are thus concerned with the living process of subjective transformation and explore the shifts from the molar,

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reactive and sedentary to the molecular, active and nomadic. They therefore reject a realist ontology and an essentialist account of the body such as that found in feminism whilst affirming the body’s corporeality. It is this materialist approach which postfeminists find commensurable. Deleuze and Guattari deessentialise the body, sexuality and sexed identities to move beyond the dualistic oppositions that conjugate the monological discourses of phallogocentrism. Western thought, for Deleuze and Guattari, stressed how ‘Being is univocal, it is One, the Same, and it asserts its sameness through a series of hierarchically ordained differences’ (Braidotti 1994:164). The meshwork of rhizomatics promises a heterarchical difference irreducible to the sameness of repetition. The impasse here seems to be that Braidotti’s politicised desire works through a phenomenological subject—the becoming of woman is the working out of the becomings of individual desiring subjects, ‘the tendency of the subject to be, the predisposition of the subject towards being’ as we have noted earlier. Though compatible with the feminist desire for emancipation and new social possibilities for becoming woman, it is not consistent with the condition of rhizomatic subjects and nomadic selves who are, as Butler (1999) notes, not so much desiring subjects but subjects of and subject to desire— desire’s desire for the proliferation of desire (see also O’Shea 2002). Cooper (2001:26–27) discusses desire in a way that connects it more directly to identity and identity work. Cooper argues that human beings are themselves incomplete—the existence of others in alterity confirms this and that self-image can only persist if it is recovered from a remaking process involving human bodies, their parts and non-human part objects which are the basic raw material for the production and reproduction of society and culture. Desire is an energy which depends on dispersion and loss in order to be renewed—it reassembles identity by collection or recollection and simultaneously disperses self-identity (and re-cognises that dispersion) because, as we saw in our opening quotation, every moment of differentiation of self from other recognises a similarity self-in-other, an alterity that is not radical. Bersani and Dutoit (1994:75–76) argue that identity is constituted by repetition out of the ‘placeless relational mobility’ of dispersion, but also that ‘there is no moment of self-identification that is not also selfmultiplication or dispersal’. Desire, then, is an autonomous process of collection-dispersion, a play of convertibility from connection to connection, exchange to exchange, a desire for dispersion. Cooper (2001:27) notes that this form of desire is a desire for what Simmel calls the ‘play-form of association’. Where desire as lack, wish fulfilment or even discourse display the features of collection, seeking specificity, locatability, meaning and significance, this form of desire, which we have described as proliferation, seeks dispersion, the general and the transcendent. For Bataille (1991b), this dispersion may be sacrificial, orgiastic, transgressive or all three, a bid to assert individual sovereignty by evading the rules imposed by Sovereignty, the sovereign Other—whilst merging with a diffuse or collective other. But it is always grounded in corporeality. Similarly for Diprose (2002), interpreting Nietzsche by a more phenomenological route through Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas, this dispersion is a giving, a generosity which is fundamentally ethical, a reaching out to the other which embraces learning rather than domination. For Lévinas, the two modes of response to alterity are question or welcome which, when put together, reflexivity makes ethical. By arguing for desire as proliferation and dispersion, to underpin our reconsiderations of gender identity, desire as collection/lack does not disappear, as the two processes are irreducible and

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implicated in each other. Collection/lack circulates in mutuality in the diffuse space of dispersion/proliferation, bricolating the assemblages of identity within the meshworks of the rhizome. There are other, less ambiguous tensions with feminism which are more easily resolved. Grosz notes the feminist critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s gender blindness, that they ignore the ‘question of sexual difference, sexual specificity and autonomy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, cited in Grosz 1994:188). Whilst addressing and acknowledging in particular Irigaray’s charges that they are patriarchical and phallocentric, Grosz explores whether rhizomatics may nevertheless provide a way forward for feminism (see Grosz 1994:189–190). Deleuze and Guattari’s project to challenge binary logic[s] by exploring the notion of difference through employing processes of multiplicity and becoming—‘a becoming beyond the logic, constraints, and confines of being, and a multiplicity beyond the merely doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects’—may be incommensurable with some versions of feminism but has enormous potential in offering a new means of thinking, or unthinking, femininity and masculinity (Grosz 1994:192). Multiplicity in this vein is not a pluralised notion of identity, which we have seen employed by some poststructuralist feminists (see Linstead and Thomas 2002 for example), but ‘an ever-changing, nontotalisable collectivity, an assemblage defined, not by its abiding identity or principle of sameness over time, but through its capacity to undergo permutations and transformations, that is, its dimensionality’: Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connections with other multiplicities. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9) This notion of becoming is not, contradictory to some feminist concerns, without an understanding of micro-politics. Indeed, Grosz argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s political concerns are borrowed from feminist politics (even though the connection is rarely acknowledged) and rest with their affirmation of ‘localised, concrete, nonrepresentative struggles, struggles without leaders, without hierarchical organizations, without a clear-cut program or blue-print for social change, without definitive goals and ends’ (Grosz 1994:193). There are perhaps other sources for these views but, although the debate is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting briefly that Hardt and Negri (2000) attempt with some success to build a macro-politics of resistance out of such a sustained Deleuzian micropolitics of resistance through a community of multiplicity which they call multitude. To summarise, then, feminism has rejected those constructions of desire in which the feminine is constituted as a lack. However, attempts such as Braidotti’s to incorporate a more fluid conception of desire as multiplicity, which would break down the binary distinctions that perpetuate oppressive ontologies of desire, fail to go far enough in remaining grounded in desire as phenomenologically subjective. Grosz introduces a more faithful appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, and Olkowski (1999:57– 58), in a discussion of the contributions of Butler, Braidotti and Grosz, concludes with Grosz and Gatens that, despite quarrels over phenomenology, subjectivity, language and

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praxis, a selective use of Deleuze and Guattari is useful for feminism. She particularly considers of benefit the shift from psychoanalysis to semiotics; the style of thinking out from actual practices, pragmatics rather than metaphysics; the hierarchical critique of the binary; the breaking down of molar and massive social and political structures into microentities; the negativity with regard to the rejection of any overarching explanatory paradigm (‘minor’ thinking) and the positivity with regard to the necessary incorporation of bodies and desire. This approach leads us toward a view which constitutes gender as process, driven by formless desire beyond binaries and even beyond the multiple identities of individual subjects—multiplicities of the same, still in much feminism dominated by collection and recollection. In the next two sections we will consider alternative approaches to multiplicity—multiplicities of the Third, drawn from anthropological work and what might broadly be termed queer theory, and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, when we will return to look more closely at rhizomatics and nomadism.

Multiplicities of the Third: queering the pitch of desire Do we truly need a true sex? (Foucault 1980: vii)

To echo both Judith Butler and Robert Cooper, it is the performativity of the sexual labour of division that constitutes the gender binary, not the transparent recognition of the natural truths of physical bodies. The first means, therefore, of deconstructing the gender binary is to cross it, as it reveals the auspices and tactics of its construction in the process of recognising and responding to the transgression. Such a crossing can be done coupled with a physical transformation, assuming the body features of the other sex, but this, as we have already noted, may have the effect of reinforcing the binary divide by simply effecting a changing of places which leaves the lines of demarcation relatively uncontested. This approach is the one taken medically in the definition and treatment of gender dysphoria, where individuals are deemed to be in the ‘wrong’ body and nature’s mistake is corrected. Inverting the binary in sexual terms, by means of homosexual relations, again leaves the binary in place by occasioning realignments on either side of it but not across it, and this is more widely supported in any case by homosocial relations that have no necessary sexual objectives (Wajcman 1998:127). Indeed, for Bataille, homogeneity in all its aspects is the aim of the restricted economy, and homosocial relations are able to dominate the public sphere whilst heterosexual relations dominate the private only because of the double separation of public from private, and the objectified exchange-based restricted economy from the effusive and sensual general symbolic economy. Bisexuality, fluidity and organisation Bisexuality, where the binary is crossed and recrossed, may potentially be more subversive. Bisexuality has been presented as an embodiment or enactment of difference

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itself, connected to the view of difference not as expressed in static hierarchical social and institutional divisions, but as a constant process which is dynamic, multiplex and intersecting with potentially associated political values (Cixous 1998). Bisexuals, then, are constantly shifting, always different from themselves, and may be said—indeed commonly are assumed as in contributions to DeCecco and Shiveley (1983/1984)—to be fluid in their sexuality. Zita (1998:133) voices the criticism that, in postmodern sexual theory, ‘the body is often metaphorically coded as fluidity or liminality, replacing the discrete and stabilizing ontologies of modernism with an inchoate drift of possibilities’, and suggests that this discursive concentration often ignores the harsh realities of the binary divide in a world where queer sexual communities struggle to survive. Herdt (1999:163) nevertheless recognises its potential power to reorient our thinking, arguing that ‘the prominence of fluidity as a metaphor…raises new questions about the salience of bisexuality in…(our) culture’. Bisexuality then may be a more widespread and significant mode of experience than is culturally openly recognised—the fluidity metaphor may be one way of peeping into the closet and beginning to acknowledge one of the ‘bodies of ignorance’ which Sedgwick (1989) identifies. There are, however, some problems with this view. The term refers, as Herdt (1999) notes, to ‘that which is capable of flowing or is easily changed, not fixed or solid’. Movement between the poles of a binary, settling, however temporarily, on one then the other, reinforces the existence of the dualism whilst rendering it permeable. Herdt identifies four other areas in which the ascription of fluidity to bisexuality is contestable, or at least in need of clarification, and we could modify them here as means of interrogating the application of the metaphor to organisational processes along five dimensions: • Referentiality—specifically it is often unclear what is being labelled as fluid, i.e. what changes and in what ways. The term may refer to changes in (gender) role, (sexual) identity, choice of objectives or (sexual) objects, (erotic) techniques used in relations, exclusivity of relations, degree of intimacy in relations—it may therefore be at least behavioural, structural, social or attitudinal in scope and often simultaneously so. Whilst it usually refers to the reversible breaching or temporary dissolution of boundaries, the nature of those boundaries is often unclear or ill-specified. With bisexuality, the question of quite what counts as bisexual behaviour is often left open. • Life-cycle—the meaning and significance of a term may vary culturally with time and stage of development. Sexual experimentation, for example, which may be tolerated or expected during adolescence, may be regarded as problematic in middle-age. In some cultures, there may be periods where homosexual behaviour is normal according to the economic division of labour and sexual stratification, as in some Melanesian societies (Herdt 1999:163), or is regarded as a legitimate transitional passage between states (Firestein 1996:271). In organisations, fluidity of structure may be an asset in formative stages, or in certain functions, but disastrous in others. • Semiotics—just as the cultural system of signs and symbols used to code and contrast those features which are taken to be erotically stimulating variably affects the availability of sexual identity choices, so cultural semiotics may place restrictions on the options available to organisations in terms of realistic identities and the structures which are associated with them. To adapt Freud, symbolic value may be placed on the physical attributes of an organisation (indicators of its capabilities); the organisational

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culture (the image it wishes to project about itself internally and externally); and its product and service channels (the way it stimulates and attracts clients or customers). Where concepts such as fetishisation in sexuality indicate that certain features may become stimulating regardless of the nature of the object, this indicates that the spectrum of arousal may be much broader than is customarily recognised. Bisexuality may expand the erotic paradigm common in a culture (especially the West); similarly, fluidity in organisations may be regarded as being expansive of its customary interpretive, operational and moral—ethical paradigms, with little regard for incommensurability. • Self-identity—regarding bisexuality, this refers to the issue of comingout. Identifying as bisexual may entail rejection both by the heterosexual and homosexual communities—indeed, whether bisexuals regard themselves as a community at all may be at issue. Issues of the acceptability of polygamy, for example, may be part of this nexus and bisexuals are often socially and politically pressured to adopt an identity as either heterosexual or homosexual, but exercising their alternate option (Firestein 1996:271). Whilst there may be a high degree of fluidity of self-concepts in intimate encounters, as Herdt (1999:165) argues, ‘the Western abhorrence of anomaly, the blurring of boundaries or ignoring of oppositions’ places ontological pressures on social actors. Organisationally, these pressures on self-affirmation or self-disclosure may make it difficult for the establishment of certain identities which are not fixed or defined by existing organisational parameters and refuse to be placed by them, such as the emergent identities of virtual corporations, project-based organisations or cooperative networks. • Social networks—with bisexuality, the interplay of social and sexual interactions in a culture, such as homosociality and homosexuality, may be significant. Where gender roles are highly separated and antagonistic, homosociality is dominant, but whether and how this may translate into homosexual behaviour is largely unexplored. Organisationally we might expect that particular industries, for example, would display their own symbolic and communicative ecologies, with degrees of exclusivity of social and business contacts and interactions, and differential social capital. Fluidity here, then, would be affected by, if not dependent upon, the nature of access to and embeddedness in these networks. A final comment on bisexuality and fluidity here would be to observe that the creation of bisexuality as a third category of ‘both’ heterosexual and homosexual nevertheless preserves the binary structure, whilst appearing to subvert it. The dissolution of the two categories, as fluidity would ultimately imply, does not occur by the assumption of a third category which partakes of but does not contain or refuse, both. It remains within each category. Nevertheless, Firestein (1996:263) argues that it constitutes a ‘doorway’ through which a new paradigm for transforming existing disciplines becomes visible. In order to explore the possibilities of this, we need to examine the contribution of transsexual and transgender theorists.

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Transsex, transgender, transience and traversing gender In discussing Michel Foucault’s presentation of the case of Herculine Barbin, the tragic nineteenth-century transsexual (see also her appearance in Bornstein 1994), Ines Orobio de Castro observes: the truth is not revealed by the body’s anatomy nor by its inner structure, rather it is uncovered by tracking down the body’s most invisible depths, its personal identity…the person’s true sex comes to light by listening, not looking; the information about the person’s true sexual identity is delivered by ‘text’. His/her body is ‘overlooked’ i.e. it is already known to be normal and obvious. From the transexual’s story, however, emerges a body which is neither normal nor obvious but false. In a sense the body has become word, it emerges as a lie. So the establishment of the truth still makes no sense… Truth has to be made visible, insight has to be transformed into sight…in the sense not of a public sensation, but of a visible witness…the word becomes flesh, and the flesh serves the truth. (Orobio de Castro 1993:58) Although the medicalised gaze of the modern West has insisted on its discursive right to adjudicate upon the true sex of apparently anomalous individuals, and hence remove anomalies by fiat or surgical intervention, globally and historically the two-gender system has many exceptions. Bolin (1996; see also 1994) identifies as many as five major forms of global gender variance—hermaphrodite genders; berdache or two-spirit traditions; crossgendered roles; woman-marriage and boy-marriage; and institutionalised crossgender rituals. Bolin acknowledges that these types are only one of many possible typographical alternatives, but Herdt (1994:19–20) goes further, arguing that the existence of a third gender can also contain the possibility of many more genders and is ‘emblematic of other possible combinations that transcend dimorphism’, being thereby sufficient to disrupt the binary system. Indeed this additional space is what Garber (1992) calls simply ‘the Third’, which characterises any form of opposition to the vested interests of binary oppression. Whilst stopping well short of a meshwork, Herdt’s arguments move in the right direction and are worth further consideration. The existence of a binary or dyadic system always creates a situation of latent conflict, or what Gregory Bateson called ‘symmetrical schismogenesis’. But the entry of a third term creating Simmel’s ‘triad’ creates a new dynamic as ‘the dyad represents both the first social synthesis and unification, and the first separation and antithesis. The appearance of a third party indicates transition, conciliation, and abandonment of absolute contrast’ (Simmel, cited in Herdt 1994:19). Transition and abandonment of absolutes, however, do not come easily to those with an investment of whatever sort in one or other pole of the binary, and thus conciliation may be hard to achieve. However, one of the reasons for increasing interest in the existence of third and fourth genders in recent years has been the recognition, aided by poststructuralist analyses of language, that many historical reports of their existence or non-existence have forced these anthropological phenomena into the dominant binary interpretive framework and

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rendered behaviour which it found difficult to accommodate, abject and anomalous. For example, male berdaches (men who adopt women’s dress and do women’s work) have been reported in 150 native North American societies, and almost half of these groups also include a female version, both sufficiently developed to be regarded by Roscoe as third and fourth gender categories (Roscoe 1994). Yet, as Roscoe (1994:330) notes, from the earliest historical accounts down to present day ethnographies, what has been written ‘reflects more the influence of existing Western discourses on gender, sexuality and the Other than on what observers actually witnessed’. Where the berdaches were frequently characterised as being despised, cast out, excluded from male society, used and exploited yet scorned, this reflected the European author’s views rather than native judgements. Indeed, there is now over-whelming evidence that berdaches are social and historical subjects, exercising agency and choice in their social roles, who found certain advantages and privilege in adopting them. Indeed gender variation was only one dimension of berdache subjectivity, the others being economic performativity (productive specialisation in an area normally the preserve of the other gender—crafts and domestic work for male berdaches and war, hunting and leadership for females) and supernatural sanction (belief in them having authority or powers from external spiritual sources). This was often supported by them being credited with great productivity, talent and originality, being accorded special respect and honours, and even being feared for their super-natural powers. They were accepted and integrated members of their communities, not outcasts or figures of fun (except in the context of joking relationships, which early Western commentators misread). Roscoe argues that the existence of multiple genders beyond the binary system can only be adequately understood through what are, in effect, three dimensions of identity capital (Pullen and Linstead, this volume): • cultural analysis of meaning—how gender categories are conceptualised with respect to other categories of meaning such as kinship, economics, politics, religion, etc., and the values placed on them; • the analysis of systemic models of inequality—i.e. the sexual division of labour, circuits of political power, avenues of specialisation and social opportunity, positioning within systems of production/consumption; • historical analysis—of the ways in which ideas and practices that reinforce each other from a synchronic and systemic perspective undermine and destabilise each other over time, understood either dialectically or deconstructively. Additionally, they also argue that individual factors such as motivation and reflexive interpretations of social actors in events and occupying roles can be taken into account in the historical construction and availability of differing subject-positions. What is true for the berdache, then, appears to have some relevance for contemporary gender variations. Accordingly, gender can be characterised as a multidimensional category of personhood encompassing a distinct pattern of social and cultural differences. A wide range of social institutions and cultural beliefs find expression through gender categories, but this passage is reversible and gender characteristics are frequently reinscribed on the individual, social, epistemological and ontological levels. Physical sexes may be regarded as insufficient on their own to establish gender, or simply less important in the mix of social and individual, structural and agentic factors, which opens the way for conceptualisations of multiple genders. Emphatically the anthropological evidence

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suggests that the binary simply does not do justice to human experience, yet it powerfully constrains social life and possibility, often violently. As Zita (1998:133) argues: What is insufficient about these (binary) categories is their lived insufficiencies, not necessarily their intellectual cross-subsidies overly pondered in academic circles. While some postmodernism theory attempts to explore these everyday struggles, often these issues are way-sided by an intellectual fascination with fluidity as a critical and deconstructive device (emphasis added). We might read this with caution, given that Roscoe argues for the importance of poststructuralist analyses for sensitising anthropologists to critical dimensions, even nuances, of meaning which have been overlooked in earlier analyses, and which have enabled precisely the greater approximation of expression and experience in understanding the everyday life of the berdache. However, the point that the seductions of the mode of analysis can become so absorbing that its appropriateness for its object is forgotten, is important. But in the experience of one transsexual at least, the binary was never formative of experience: I know I’m not a man—about that much I’m very clear, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people’s rules about that sort of thing. The trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other—a world that doesn’t bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is… I’ve no idea what ‘a woman’ feels like. I never did feel like a girl or a woman; rather it was my unshakeable conviction that I was not a boy or a man. It was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender. (Bornstein 1994:8, 24) Bornstein indeed is scathing about the identity effects of the binary, arguing that focusing on inherent differences between men and women obscures the divisive nature of the system, and thus holds the system in place. If the system is removed, then the differences will fall away. However, as Califia argues (1997:247), whilst the vast majority of feminists would agree with Bornstein that social meanings have been assigned to phenotypical features that far exceed anything warranted by biology, differences are important. Differentially deciding what differences actually make a difference is where the epistemological breaks ground from the ontological, and collapsing the two simplistically merely creates a false, Utopian reconciliation. For Califia, alternative binaries are not a solution in themselves, as many of the systems proposed as replacements for gender ‘would be every bit as offensive and oppressive as the standards that are currently inflicted upon us—if they were administered in the same way as gender’ (Califia 1997:274). Nevertheless, the point remains that the binary system creates a false opposition, which inevitably elevates one of its poles to privilege and antagonises the other, and is more of a problem than any inherent differences between men and

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women, and can be taken without jettisoning the notion of difference, even if there is no agreement on what the third space should contain. Again, we can return to Deleuze and Guattari, who remind us that the (molar) binaries themselves are aggregates rather than unities. As such, they ‘cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature’, and become reciprocally dependent. Gender is power, knowledge, work, technology, art… as Deleuze and Guattari emphasise, ‘the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each other to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:213). Let us now look more closely at what such rhizomatic thinking entails and what it might contribute.

Multiplicities of difference and dispersion: rhizomatics and fluidity Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the working out of processes that organise opposes both the tree metaphor which is a visible emblem of linear, progressive, ordered systems and the root metaphor, which presumes a unity but, like the root itself, is latent or hidden and may present itself as if it were decentred or nonunified: Unlike the manifest unity of the tree, the unity of the root is more hidden; it evokes a kind of nostalgia for the lost past or an unanticipated future. (Grosz 1994:199) Unlike both of these images, rhizomatics are ‘an underground—but perfectly manifest— network of multiple branching roots and shoots, with no central axis, no unified point of origin, and no given direction of growth—a proliferating, somewhat chaotic, and diversified system of growths’ (Grosz 1994:199). De Landa (1999:120), preferring to eschew the continuity of the horticultural metaphor, calls them meshworks. As Deleuze and Guattari (1984) explain: The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple… It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which the One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather, directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle …from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object… and from which the One is always subtracted (n−1)… This is a critical point for the understanding of identity, because from this perspective identity is not endogenous to the individual or unit, a positive which is added to the collective, the organisation, the culture, the social group, the political party, the nation state, the sexual orientation, the gendered group or even the conversation which enhances and diversifies it. On the contrary, identity is already the result of a negative operation which extracts it from the mobile and multidimensional mesh in which it is embedded and is always less than its undifferentiated Other. They go on:

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Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions… The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots… The rhizome is an acentered, non-hierarchical, non-signifying system. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:21) Following Grosz’s typology (1994:199–200), we can summarise the characteristics of the rhizome as based on: • connections which bring together diverse fragments; • heterogeneity—multiple connections which are not only massified linkages but also microlinkages which bring together diverse domains, levels, dimensions, functions, effects, aims and objects; • multiplicity—which here does not mean a multiplicity of singularities, of ones, a repetition of the self-same, but a genuine proliferation of processes that are neither ones nor twos; • ruptures, breaks and discontinuities—any one of the rhizome’s connections is capable of being severed or disconnected, creating the possibility of the other and different connections; • and cartography—not a reproduction or tracing, model-making or paradigmconstruction, but map-making or experimentation. We would agree with Grosz that rhizomatics has some importance for feminism in the sense that it offers the possibility to critically evaluate the phallocentric discourses, knowledge and representations within which women are marginalised. However, rhizomatics applied to our project of challenging gender binaries and appreciating gender as fluidity has much greater potential. As a decentred set of linkages between things, relations, processes, intensities, speed or slowness and flows, we can read gender as a rhizome. This offers possibilities of the other, possibilities of change and transformation, and possibilities for freedom and emancipation that go beyond the constraints of biological sex and socially ascribed genders. This rests on an ontology of desire as a force which is immanent, endless, exuberant and rhizomatic, as distinct from desire as lack (Freud), or desire as wish (Lyotard), which is ‘motivated by the perceived lack of something useful, the absence of something which is needed, the urge to generate utility, improve upon our human environment’ (Brewis and Linstead 2000:175). This ontology of desire is therefore productive, the desire to give, to contribute, to become part of something creative—desire as excess, following Bataille (1991a, b). We noted earlier in our comments on feminist desire that the interconnection between an ontology of desire as lack and a phenomenological desiring subject, even when proliferated into a multiplicity of identities, might destabilise specific gender positions but tends to preserve the idea of boundary by retaining the subject-object dualism, and through reproducing multiple binaries, the binary itself. Rhizomatics requires a view of desire as active and affirmative—excremental (giving, spending, dispersing) rather than incremental (cumulating, accumulating and collecting). It therefore attempts to move us beyond the subject—object dualism, the subject’s desire for the ‘object (the other) but

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also the consciousness of the other’ or the desire of the other (Hegel, cited in Brewis and Linstead 2000:175). As such, desire, consistent with Cooper and Bersani and Dutoit, is the ontical urge to proliferate and to be varied. If we read desire as such a creative force into our theorising on gender, then the possibilities of challenging the gender binary become realisable within our social and cultural existence. Desire is a force that becomes gendered; as a force, desire moves through particular configurations of a rhizome and where it connects and stabilises, however temporarily, gender emerges as a plane of consistency, immanence and intensity—one which is changed and transformed through lines of flight as we shift and realign and improvise our gender constantly. But, as Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is arrested by the Body without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), so gender flows and intensities become arrested and inscribed. It is to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the Body without Organs that we now turn. The Body without Organs The body, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a ‘discontinuous, nontotalised series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities, and durations’ (Grosz 1994:193–194). Following Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with going beyond the confines of the mind/body dualism. The subject is not an ‘entity’, or a relation between mind (interior) and body (exterior). Instead the subject is understood in terms of a series of ‘flows, energies, movements, and capacities, a series of fragments or segments capable of being linked together in ways other than those that congeal it into an identity’ (Grosz 1994:198). They concentrate on the capabilities of bodies rather than by their genus and species or their organs and functions. To overcome the classical Cartesian mind/body dualism, Deleuze and Guattari develop Artaud’s conception of the Body without Organs (BwO) as: an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces. The body is a surface where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.) are inscribed: it is a linguistic construction that capitalises on energies of a heterogenous, discontinuous, and unconscious nature. (Braidotti 1994:169) The BwO refers to human, animal, textual, sociocultural and physical bodies. Rejecting a psychoanalytic conception of the body which is the ‘developmental union or aggregate of partial objects, organs, drives, and bits, each with their own significance and their own pleasures, which are through oedipalisation, brought into line with the body’s organic unity’ (Grosz 1994:201), instead the BwO is: the body disinvested of all fantasies, images, and projections, a body without a physical interior, without internal cohesion or latent significance…it is not a body evacuated of a psychic interiority, rather, it is a limit of a tendency to which all bodies aspire.’ Speak of it as an egg, a surface of intensities before it is stratified, organised, and hierarchised. It lacks depth or internal organization, and can instead be regarded as a flow, or the arresting of a flow, or intensities.

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(Grosz 1994:201, emphasis added) Deleuze and Guattari remark that it can be considered a sort of egg, a surface of intensities in pure tension but before it is stratified, ordered, organised, divided, hierarchised and invested with demography. It isn’t even autopoietic, as it lacks internal organisation, or any depth of structure, no underlying rationality, following no grammatical rules to give it structure and meaning. It is not just flow or intensity, but the arresting of such flow or intensity. The BwO does not reject organs and is not opposed to them at all—rather, it is opposed to organism but, more specifically, is opposed to the structure or organisation of the body in so far as it is stratified, regulated, ordered, and functional; in so far as it is subordinated to the exigencies of property and propriety. It is a body before and in excess of the coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organized, transcendent totalities, which constitute the unification of the subject and of signification…[it is] a limit; a tendency; a becoming that resists the processes of overcoding and organization according to three great strata or identities it opposes: the union of the organism, the unification of the subject, and the structure of significance. The BwO resists any equation with a notion of identity or property. (Grosz 1994:202) As Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘The BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body’ (1987:164), which therefore remains in radical materiality. Yet as one of us has noted elsewhere, drawing on Ecstavasia (1994:186) ‘the BwO is always deferred, always in Derrida’s terms in différance, an absent presence whose conditions and logic are based on fetishized fragments of other absent presences’ (Brewis and Linstead 2000:200). So the BwO is always also a body to come, never fully present or sufficient in and of itself. It isn’t a place, although it is like one; it isn’t a plane, although it has some of its qualities; it isn’t a scene, although it has the properties of a vista; it isn’t a fantasy, although fantasy is part of it. It is a field where desire is produced in new conjunctions, intensified through new nodalities and modalities, where desire is immanent, where becomings become (Grosz 1994:202–203). It is where, following Spinoza’s account of the human animal, we set our bodily characteristics free to pursue new becomings—they discuss becomingwoman and becoming-animal—of which the ultimate becoming is becoming imperceptible, pure full process. Identity as imperceptibility. This is the most controversial aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on becoming for feminism. So, in going beyond the limitations and constraints of the bipolar gender binary, we can bring our discussion of desire, rhizomatics and BwO together to suggest that if gender is a rhizome then the possibilities for gender fluidity at an ontological level are actual and real. Moreover, if gender is a productive process whose productivity is pure, i.e. it rests in the creativity of effulgent desire rather than being defined and delimited by the product it creates such as gender as a dramaturgical or linguistic performance (Benhabib 1999; Butler 1990, 1993), or a social construction or social

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practice (Gherardi 1995), then our view of gender identity even as conventional multiplicity needs revision. Gender fluidity is not merely movement across a binary boundary (which nevertheless leaves the boundary in place) or across several horizontal boundaries between multiple identities. Identity is motion, fluidity dissolves boundaries and carries them off in its flood. But before we develop the possibilities of this argument, we need to remember that dualistic views of gender have been challenged, not just ontologically, but anthropologically across cultures and across history. In the section, we considered how fluidity has already been constructed and introduced in existing nonbinary views of gender. If gender identity is considered in terms of this molecularity, it can be seen as a site within the field of becomings that goes beyond bisexuality and multiple genders; beyond the traversing of gender which may be reversible or irreversible at a physical level and may involve temporary or permanent relocations across the binary divide; beyond the gender performance in both language and action which characterises itself as gender transient. A truly nomadic gender identity transcends its roles and its transgressive realignments of molar unities as a becoming. It may take several lines of flight: it may, for example, become genderful—so expansive and inclusive in its myriad gender alignments that its cannot be aligned or consigned within gender limits; or it may become ungendered, where gender is dissipated and overlain by so many other alignments that it ceases to function as a category. In staying in motion, in change, in becoming other, it resists those inscriptions that fix and name it and thus allow it to be perceived as an identity—it becomes imperceptible. It is here that Deleuzian rhizomatics and Bornstein’s gender fluidity achieve commensurability. This is underscored by our earlier affirmation of an ontology of desire as creative exuberance, which fits with Bornstein’s (1994, 1998) ludic gender politics. The terrain for political praxis, which Bornstein and Califia debate, is shifted, with this ontological intervention, from the traditional view of gender as property or the performative view of gender as a product of linguistic or social performance to gender as itself a form of productivity. Gender is not the construction or outcome of a performance, but is immanent within those performances, making them productive of new molecular connections in the meshwork of identity.

Conclusion: from identity to imperceptibility This chapter has moved away from a view of gender as a social construction, but still considers it to be a social process, which is both organised and shapes our sense of social organisation, formal and informal. First of all, we considered how essentialist views of male and female bodies and their capabilities had historically informed both epistemologies and social arrangements, resulting in the widespread suppression of difference. We considered alternative ontologies of desire, conceived of as basic social motivation, identifying two basic forms of desire which might underpin processes of gender identity formation: desire as lack, wish or collection, and desire as force, proliferation or dispersion, arguing that it is the former that has dominated both social and academic formulations of gender, and of organisation, which has led to a privileging of conceptualisations of identity as unity, individuality, molarity and cohesion. We then considered a range of responses to biological essentialism which traverse these forms of

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desire to be different formulations of multiplicity: multiplicity of the same, which still rests on desire as lack and conceives identity as unifying, although it offers a weak social constructionist version of this unity by incorporating difference as varieties of available types of masculinity or femininity (interestingly Connell 1995 had five; Whitehead 2004 has 27); multiplicity of the Third (space), drawing on feminism and anthropology, where binaries are disrupted by practices and performances which switch position, presenting gender as a social and cultural practice; and multiplicity of difference and dispersion, where play becomes fully ludic and nomadic, and the boundaries of gender and identity as cohesive concepts are eroded, revealing them as aggregates. We then looked more closely at Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as a means of representing this multiplicity in action, empha-sising its character as comprising connections between fragments, constantly adding to their connectivity; the heterogeneity of these connections across diverse domains; multiplicity as a proliferation of processes rather than a multiplicity of singularities; the creative significance of rupture, breaks and new connections; and the rhizome as cartographic mapping rather than paradigmatic modelbuilding. Finally, we argued that the end of multiplicity—whether via genderful or ungendering strategies—is not gender identity but gender imperceptibility, as in either case no meaningful or stable means can be found to fix the ‘placeless relational mobility’. Gender identity, then, is in constant becoming, a constant journey which must start and end in the middle because ‘a rhizome has no beginning and no end: it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’. It has no beginning and end because ‘making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false conception of a voyage and movement’. Organisational linear models of change; hierarchies of authority; traditional notions of career, all illustrate in the everyday how this moribund metaphor of the journey continues to constrain us to pull back from relationality. But being in the middle is no easy option and affords no drop in energy; rather, it is the place where things pick up speed and action, like a river that undermines its banks and flows faster in the centre. The rhizome, like gender identity, is never still, always relational, always to come, always to connect—‘the rhizome is uniquely alliance…the rhizome is the conjunction’ (all quotes from Deleuze and Guattari 1987:25). Similarly, as Baudrillard sees it (1996:23), the challenge is to ‘keep open the otherness of forms, the disparity between terms; we must keep alive the forms of the irreducible’: where there are no options for incorporation or suppression, there can be only convertibility and relationality, a gender dynamics beyond opposition and dialectics.

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14 Identity aesthetics Asymmetry and the assault on order Robert Grafton-Small She had a theory that it was only under this provision life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organisation (she couldn’t help knowing her organisation was fine), should move in a realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic. It was almost as unnecessary to cultivate doubt of one’s self as to cultivate doubt of one’s best friend. (James 1998:68) There was earth inside them, and they dug. (Celan 1990:153)

One afternoon early in May, and early that afternoon, I see a wee chunky man coming down Sauchiehall Street as I walk the other way. He’s wearing a dark blue Hilfiger fleece with a flag-shaped logo across his paunch: TOMMY DESIGN. Bellied out, this looks so like TUMMY DESIGN, I wonder is he in on the joke as well as in it? The framing of the question is equally a question of framing for the aesthetics of industrial societies represent an ordering—orderings—of our common culture based on repetition and control, implicitly the means and the measure of mass production (Virilio 1998:72). As dandy Warhol (Finkelstein 1999: photos 84–85) explains, ‘never buy used clothing, it’s like wearing someone else’s personality!’ A parallel, perhaps, to the Andy anomaly: empty cans are meaningful… More broadly, the erosive Semiotics of communal consumption (Quinn 2002:50) have made a mundane arrangement of the dislocation built into Bauhaus structures and artefacts. By an irony of industrial proportions, what was originally intended as a visual, and visible, revolution, signifying a clear break with every established hierarchy of authority and taste (Libeskind 2001:21–22), has become a portent of globalisation, the international style Gropius (1965:90–91) never imagined: Efficient and well-oiled machinery of daily life [sic] cannot of course constitute an end in itself, but it at least forms a point of departure for the acquisition of a maximum of personal freedom and independence. An intellectual economy naturally takes longer to perfect than a material one, since it requires more knowledge and self-discipline.

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Koolhaas (1994:85), though, is cool, claiming culture nowadays is impossible to plot, and then doing just that, in Manhattan—more or less—where his mapping of the Modern world begins and ends. Here, too, on the site of Nieuw Amsterdam, our Dutchman founds the future (Koolhaas 1994:11). For Rem, the unsleeping city is an otherwise undreamt-of solution to the constraints of urban existence, the Apple of his eye a knowing balance between the enforced rigidities of grids and regular façades (Koolhaas 1994:97, 275), and an embodied understanding that every floor in every building be self-contained—free from all others (Koolhaas 1994:85, 106–107). This created, and creative, tension ensures an excess of meaning, the delirium of interpretation (Koolhaas 1994:238, 255) by which, like Eve, we taste and know the seductive claims of competing realities. The allure of the encoded aesthetic is overwhelming yet unexceptional; we use it to shape our perceptions of other countries, literally and metaphorically in the case of Klüver’s (1997:1) day with Picasso. It begins, as so many mysteries do, in a shooting: 24 photographs by Jean Cocteau, taken on the pavements of Paris during the First World War but when, exactly, and where? Although Billy’s concern is a thin thing, almost as transparent as the original exposures, I recognise, from my years of doing crosswords, the urge to place his past within the grids of calendar and map. The shadow of batch production—art made artefact—is familiar, too, enough to plot (Klüver 1997:7), then trace, every frame from Cocteau’s four rolls of six. Each of these pictures is its own story, one in a block where all the interiors are ultimately impenetrable. Whatever happened, for instance, to Pablo’s walking stick and the handle that didn’t (Klüver 1997:31)? The photgraphs themselves were chosen from thousands of contemporaries (Klüver 1997:1) through a form of back-projection. We know a few of the faces—Picasso, and Modigliani maybe—more for what they have come to represent than for any sense of their world at the time. In effect, a vision, a judgement of Paris made accessible to us nowadays, yet unimaginable when Jean focused on his friends amid the flux of their milieu. Clearly, Klüver has placed himself in the same perspective—the unlikely linearity of that 24shot sequence—as Cocteau and company, an implicitly flattering way of seeing, in keeping with the social and aesthetic hierarchies erected around Andy Warhol by Nat Finkelstein (1999). Another angle on the grid attempts to corner meaning from its streets. In an order only apparent posthumously, when they are published as a series, Jean’s jeux d’esprit introduce a ‘new realism to amateur photography by systematically documenting his day with Picasso’ (Klüver 1997:8). The fruit of heavy cropping then (Klüver 1997:58) and now, these snaps feed the same appetite for inclusion as New York’s omnivorous architecture (Koolhaas 1994:177), those buildings that defy the abyss by swallowing disorder. This Modernist Mecca has at its spiritual heart the secular Kaaba—yes, Pablo, a cube—of Malevich’s Black Square (1913/1923), conceived and painted (Simmen and Kohlhoff 1999:46, 50–51) as exactly that, against a background of white. For Kasimir, these contrasting colours represent ‘the feeling of rhythm’ and inner light, a ‘placing in the void’ beneath perspective. However, despite its revolutionary plan, his square is soon host to the familiar forms of interpretation, gaining length and breadth, height and depth, in the eyes of anyone raised on symmetry as we are. A considerable part of the shock from Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim building in Bilbao, for example, comes from its unending irregularity (Chollet 2001:93–94). No aspect of his

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singular structure will allow us to imagine the whole, except as itself. To this extent, the attack on the World Trade Center was deeply conservative in toppling both twins. Levelling one, to leave the other alone and vulnerable, might have been a more radical assault symbolically, with roots among the many crippled Afghanis left limbless by mines, maimed amid their own dead. Similarly, the surviving tower would no longer stand for some Wall Street Weltanschauung or reflect its founders’ narcissism, becoming instead the mirror image of their loss. Even Elvis felt incomplete without Jesse… These same dominant aesthetics—of grid and containment, order and exclusion— estrange us from the essential asymmetry of our own bodies, and any collective organisation, in practice. As individuals, we embody a dislocation, a mismatch with the stock sizes we approximate, that is disguised by consumption but never entirely lost—the Gap remains. In an inversion of Gehry, only bespoke gear will hide our irregularities behind a façade of apparent uniformity. Incidentally, and because I’m tailoring the text, comparable outlines are exposed, yet scarcely addressed, by Billy’s (Klüver 1997:18–41, 55) go at knocking the past into shape. Each of Cocteau’s negatives was hand-cut to suit its contents, while the overall collection is reproduced industrially, in a format fitted for commercial publishing. This quickening interplay between congestion and repetition (Koolhaas 1994:230) is amplified and undone with another series of standardised images: any colour you want, almost, so long as it is Warhol’s Suicide (Jumping Man) (1962). The vital elements are simple, sufficient—a solitary tower, where every window’s an opportunity of absence, and some would-be Icarus, escaping a structure which is populated with difference but still he doesn’t belong. In a tip of the tile to Kawabata (1985), no longer—never—a Master of the Universe, that Wolfe (1988:12) tone chimes,1 rather a momentary Master of Gone. The society shown here is more, though, than a downcast among castes, with the rich in their secure compounds and the rest securely confounded. The fall before us— skyscraper to scraped off the street—traces a lethal blurring between notions of containment and chaos as, astonishingly, Andy gives shape to Wittgenstein’s architecture (Flusser 1999:76–77): The building is set out. It consists of propositions. Every proposition presupposes all the preceding ones and is itself the presupposition of all the following propositions. Proposition by proposition, anyone who enters progresses through the prescribed rooms, and his step is supported by consistencies. Suddenly, with one proposition, one single proposition, the ground gives way beneath his feet. He falls head first onto the abyss.

A giant step for mankind This leap of imagination is also our Great Leap Forward, our plan to function outside the forms of Modernist aesthetics, a project to live beyond the projects (Tschumi 1994:7). From a murderous archetype, and suicide as an act of independence, our jumping-off point is the nexus of disjunctions between meaning and being, movement and space, objects and us. We are Daedalus now to Warhol’s waning man and must make landfall amid the disorder from which Manhattan has come to mean refuge (Koolhaas 1994:219).

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The implications of impurity—matter out of place, not without place—are apparent in Bilbao where the outer integrity of the Guggenheim moulds its inner fragmentation, and traditional patterns of exhibition are impossible in so much asymmetry. Anticipating art in space, we are forced to look again at Gehry’s void, artful in itself. The object of our gaze gapes back at us, reflecting the power of imbalance to unsettle imbalances of power. Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin-fuelled assaults on the Tokyo subway were hugely successful—shocking—after the event because the assailants seemed like any other Japanese (Murakami 2000:3–4, 306–307), yet were part of an organisation founded in mutual disgust at the coercive uniformities of their domestic culture. The very randomness of each poisoning fragmented entire communities of commuters, denying, for once, their collective responsibility to work with an emphasis on the personal, the intimate. The train you caught this morning to earn your living could cost you your life…. Remember, too, every tube is a tower in the making, and subways are to cities as high-speed lifts to skyscrapers. Balance, though, is not synonymous with symmetry. The competing aesthetic standards evoked by everyday notions of distaste and disorder are themselves subject to endless shifts of frame and focus. In a collection based on long exposure to Warhol’s Factory, photographer Nat Finkelstein (1999: credits) adjusts to the adjustment. His prints were criticised at the time for their unconventional grain and greyness, but not now, as even black-andwhite, it seems, cannot be judged in these terms. This incidental archive— an age of Andy to set against Klüver’s (1997) day with Picasso—also contains an accidental twin, a multiple in the manner of the man himself. Where a picture (Finkelstein 1999: photo 118) should be, of the Factory owner and company, we see the previous text repeated, a creation of duality that ruptures our order of reading, and our reading of order, as readily as would my duality undone at the World Trade Center. What began as a serial shooting ends in another: Valerie Solanis (Warhol and Hackett 1981:273–274). Our sense of her imminent assault has all the appeal of a horror film yet still we project her lethal weaponry onto a past in which Warhol, the man who drew Gun (1982), is first and always a target. Deranged or deadly different—does madness civilise?—the assassin has also imagined an aesthetic order, but one where her script is shot, a movie in the can, not canned in Cannes for being too dirty (Warhol and Hackett 1981:271). Equally, members of Aum Shinrikyo (Murakami 2000:305–306) insisted at their trial that, while they might regret the gas attacks and the loss of life on the Tokyo underground, their aim remains the Utopia they dreamt of then. More conventionally, Klüver (1997:1–5) has co-opted Cocteau’s episodic originals to create a fairy story. This delirium of interpretation is serialised for our benefit, an account of continuity and progress to set against those nameless latter-day dreads evoked by people who jump from high buildings or, like much of Aum (Murakami 2000:306–307), from high up their social scale. The leap of faith that propels others into these structures is recognisably an injection, a fatal overdose, yet still baffling, both more and less than we’d wish to admit. My own part in the excess of meaning is a confessional footnote, metatextually—maybe.

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With super size fries and a 32 oz Coke… The meaning of excess, however, is hardly a subtext in societies like ours; here, mass production meets unmet demand and surplus hangs over every consumer’s every choice. When obesity reaches epidemic proportions (Farley and Cohen 2002:14), and we are increasingly at odds with the grid of the body mass index (Bee 2002:39–40), the assault on order has clearly assumed a personal dimension. Fat is a fetishist issue no longer (Klein 1997:208–209), as chubby chasing catches up with the bulk of us. By inflating our frames, we stress our singularities, underlining our outlines individually and collectively (Klein 1997:67–68). Where once, in a Modern-spirited community, we’d expect it, the jumping man does not. He, too, is swallowed up instead. Growing numbers of ordinary people are overfed on foodstuffs which are themselves stuffed, with more and more calories in a single serving (Schlosser 2002:241) and each portion a disproportionate part of any possible need. Paradoxically, these products, burgers, colas, pizzas—not the Italian spelling for not the Italian pastry—are industrially regulated to be available the world over in standard forms.2 The mechanisation of their manufacture and delivery may be modelled after Gropius’ (1965:90–91) material economy, but his self-discipline is one additive that’s proved unpopular everywhere. The irredeemable other constrained by multiple occupancy (Koolhaas 1994:125) and displaced by Warhol’s multiples is now flesh of our flesh, swelling a rebellion against the machine aesthetic (Klein 1997:24). We are seduced, even so, by the seeming framelessness of self-determination and a taste for untailored clothes—getting into that Gehry gear—always baggy enough and stretchy to slip freely over the bodies we make of ourselves. Obesity, though, has a flavour of suicide, especially where I live, among those for whom an apple a week, or vegetables, would be a step in the right direction (Khan 2002:9), rather than a leap from the building. More widely, Westernised societies sicken on Andy’s ejecta and toxins delivered by tube, from Pizza Express to our arteries (Schlosser 2002:242) in the assertion of an atomistic organisation—our own identity. Increasingly, then, the aesthetics of difference—how much I resemble myself and not anybody else—appear an everyday alternative to established structures of similarity and the ways we count ourselves alike (Leach 1969:34–35). However, the shift from us to me is hardly a revolution; we are still cladding ourselves commercially, using mass-produced materials to produce mass, and to mask it. When ‘this season’s look’ is one of many in the malls and the marketplaces, variety and choice become aspects of our common culture, unremarkable except in their absence. While not a grid on Koolhaas’ (1994:289) lines, the resultant mesh is manifestly a means of control. After all, what is shapeshifting in its fleshier form if your public, your symbolic, self is expected to change? These projections—we’re each a party to Tschumi’s (1994:7) plot—are reflected in, and reflections of, the morphology of our cities. So suburbia imitates its inhabitants, by bulging happily over the green belt, and accepted ideas of space swell as well (Davis 1999:201–205). Landscapes which were once remote, physically and perceptually, are brought home to us by this architecture of expansion, and we are ill at ease with the outcome—unsettled by the unsettled—though we provoked it. Foxes, for instance,

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remain wild yet adapt to our arrival by learning to scavenge from our domestic excesses: the endless waste—those orders of disorder—and pets that stray too far. The other without—within—takes less familiar forms. These random incursions barely hint at the outbreaks we have come to dread, and from countryside usually thought of as tame. The farms that feed us are, in effect, surrogate factories and their overproduction of foot-and-mouth, say, or mad cow disease, means it’s not so rare now for the cooked to be raw also. Epicures and puffer fish apart, there’s a smack here, surely, of Aum Shinrikyo: what you eat today to stay alive may be the death of you. An aftershock reaches us, too, from the abyss between appearance and behaviour, opened up when Aum makes symmetry uncertain, a mask and a menace. This slippage is possible, and threatening, because we’re no longer sure of the jumping man’s identity, or where she’ll land. More disturbingly, these doubts about ourselves and how we live are produced and distributed by the trains and the fast food we commonly value for their constancy. When delirium—our cows’ and ours—appears at first to fit the grid, then buckles it from within, Rem’s (Koolhaas 1994:177) metropolitan paradox is itself contained, by endless ambiguity. These interplays of order and asymmetry—all analogues are created equal but some are more equal than others—give new meaning to the aesthetics of industrial culture, and we must inhabit the flux. Uncertainty, then, emerges as a characteristic of every consumer choice, implicit in our awareness and independent of any feature of what we are being offered. The collapse in international air travel that followed the felling of the World Trade Center—the twins’ symbolic sibling—was a reaction to perceptions of disorder—Bin Laden and doomladen—rather than an abreaction to the accepted symmetries of flight paths, planes and timetables. Now these holding patterns don’t, the airlines themselves face crash-landings, each organisation another Icarus in the making as its services and staff melt away. This outline shrinkage—survivors are whole still, only smaller—reflects the acceptance of community under assault by Aum. On the Tokyo subway and the New York skyline, individual losses of life, limb or living are the disproportionate cost of shared belonging. The brokers in the towers die for, and with, the structures they are part of, a Manhattan murder mystery Tschumi (1994:7) never imagined, a project others did. To their delight, no doubt, as much as our distress, there’s also an aesthetic aftershock, evident in the films and photographs that captured the day the way Cocteau (Klüver 1997:11–14) once took Paris. Is there a similar asymmetry, too, about how eye-witness accounts are organised—a visible emphasis on the visual? The Modern remains, the rubble of the World Trade Center a part of our common perception rather than apart. Gehry, we have seen, is site—not sight—specific, privileging difference over assumptions of order and the usually observed hierarchies. In each case, the other is itself other: an escape from form—the birdman of Andy’s trace— or a form of escape, with the Guggenheim excesses offering us a wealth, a delirium, of interpretation to get lost in. Given the gallery’s contents and a titanium cladding (Chollet 2001:94)—it’s housed in a wall of mirrors, we might even forget, for a moment, that the paradox of a structure built around dislocation was built on Foundation money. Does the idea of aesthetic imbalance as a counter to social imbalance appeal only to the unbalanced…? Normally not. Our ordinary appetites, for fast food around the clock and around the hips, are a simple matter of taste (Schlosser 2002:9). We enjoy the flavour so much, the

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consequences already have designer labels: Hilfiger for the fuller figure. Shapeless yet still contained, by brand names instead of cut or couture, we belong increasingly to communities of symbols, our dress codes redressed as spectacle. Stupendously fashionable himself (Jones 2002:8), Rem Koolhaas is also the architect of Prada’s new store in Lower Manhattan. Opened over an entire block—after closing the SoHo Guggenheim (Eshun 2002:54)!—this is entirely unlike the rest of Miuccia’s outlets, more an installation or a museum, with her own ambivalence on display (Jones 2002:8): It’s horrible when people are only interested in buying labels, because it doesn’t bring them the happiness they think it will. On the other hand shopping is a part of life, and part of a social exchange. It can be a much wider experience. But the store remains a store, Rem, a familiar form in any industrial culture, and if we do take what’s on offer—another stylish reworking of consumer aesthetics, or aesthetic consumption—we seduce and belittle ourselves simultaneously. The mesh of semiotics and social structure that makes Prada a meaningful purchase, putting status within our grasp, will in time, we know, expose us like Cocteau’s photographs (Klüver 1997:6–7), to a search for the next, the missing, image. This decay of significance is central to our shared experience, Miuccia, undermining even high-profile addresses in Lower Manhattan as surely as the grid secures them. Framing absence in a serial reading—the Klüver (1997:60) connection—applies a similar pattern to the city of signs. These symbolic understandings mean that we, too, can work the miracle of New York’s towers (Koolhaas 1994:125), inhabiting inhibited space in our own terms. We are equally at home with the constraints of industrial aesthetics: Warhol has made the multiple an art form, and scarcely affordable, among cultures of mass production, while Prada’s impact is one-side yet hardly unbalanced—Koolhaas, not Gehry. Our lives are organised, instead, around an everyday architecture of icons and artefacts, endlessly demolished and rebuilt within the symmetries of consumer excess, to displace an abyss of disorder. The other, though, is not denied. After Aum and the World Trade Center, we sense an imbalance, an order, maybe, of jumping men… Postscript: Elvis has just leapt the building… It’s Saturday evening and I’m at my favourite table in a local restaurant. The menu there never changes, which I like; the daily variation in vegetables I can cope with. Hoping it isn’t mushroom, I ask the waitress—waiter?—waitress: ‘What’s the ravioli?’ ‘Spinach and ricotta tortellini.’ ‘With a side salad, please.’

Notes 1 There’s an echo here, as well, of Wolfe Tone, the eighteenth-century Irish nationalist who killed himself rather than hang for his failure. Yasunari Kawabata also committed suicide, apparently without explanation.

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2 Fast food is an affront, on every front, to home cooking, and a dislocation like that described by Libeskind (2001:20–21).

References Bee, Peta (2002) ‘Is this man obese?’ The Sunday Times Style, 10 March: 39–40. Celan, Paul (1990) Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Chollet, Laurence B. (2001) The Essential Frank Gehry. New York: The Wonderland Press/Harry N.Abrams. Davis, Mike (1999) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. London: Picador/Macmillan. Eshun, Ekow (2002) ‘Buying this’. Blueprint, March, 193:52–56. Farley, Tom and Cohen, Deborah (2002) The Guardian/The Editor, 19 January: 14. Finkelstein, Nat (1999) Andy Warhol: the Factory Years 1964–1967. Edinburgh: Canongate. Flusser, Vilém (1999) The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design, tr. Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books. Gropius, Walter (1965) The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, tr. P.Morton Shand. London: Faber and Faber. James, Henry (1998) The Portrait of a Lady. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Dylan (2002) The Independent Review, 18 February: 8. Kawabata, Yasunari (1985) The Master of Go, tr. Edward G.Seidensticker. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Khan, Stephen (2002) The Observer, 12 May: 9. Klein, Richard (1997) Eat Fat. London: Picador/Macmillan. Klüver, Billy (1997) A Day with Picasso: Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Koolhaas, Rem (1994) Delirious New York. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Leach, Edmund (1969) Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. London: Jonathan Cape. Libeskind, Daniel (2001) The Space of Encounter. London: Thames & Hudson. Murakami, Haruki (2000) Underground: the Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, trs. Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel. London: The Harvill Press. Quinn, Malcolm (2002) ‘Throwaway lines’, Blueprint, February, 192:48–51. Schlosser, Eric (2002) Fast Food Nation. London: Penguin Books. Simmen, Jeannot and Kohlhoff, Kolja (1999) Kasimir Malevich, trs. Paul Aston with Goodfellow and Egan. Cologne: Könemann. Tschumi, Bernard (1994) The Manhattan Transcripts. London: Academy Editions. Virilio, Paul (1998) Open Sky, tr. Julie Rose London: Verso. Warhol, Andy and Hackett, Pat (1981) POP ism: the Warhol ‘60s. London: Hutchinson. Wolfe, Tom (1988) The Bonfire of the Vanities. London: Jonathan Cape.

Author index Abelard, P. 185, 193 Abercrombie, N. 24, 35, 40 Ablett, A. 164, 181 Ackroyd, S. 155, 157, 200, 210 Adler, N.J. 3, 4, 17 Adorno, T.W. 144, 153, 156, 157, 235, 241 Ahluwalia, P. 248, 249, 263 Albert, S. 2, 177, 178 Alder, P.S. 65, 83 Ali, T. 261, 263 Allan, S. 251, 260, 263 Allen, J. 18 Alvesson, M. 2, 5, 6, 17, 26, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 240 Anderson, B. 245, 263 Ang, I. 262, 263 Appadurai, A. 16, 253, 258, 262, 264 Ardent, H. 61, 83 Aristotle 13, 162, 167, 168, 178 Armbrüster, T. 154, 158 Asch, S.E. 25, 40 Ashforth, B.E. 2, 178 Asplund, J. 191, 193 Astrin, T. 211, 217 Athens, L. 52, 58 Auge, M. 157 Baack, D. 141, 157 Backuis, P. viii, 14, 15, 182, 191, 193 Baden, F.C. 19 Banerjee, S.B. viii, 2, 8, 15, 17, 226, 229, 232, 241, 243, 244, 264 Banks, M. 109, 125 Bargiela-Chiappini, F. 23, 42 Barker, J.R. 200, 217 Barnwell, N. 230, 243 Barrick, M.R. 24, 40 Bart, C. 162, 163, 164, 178 Bartkus, B. 162, 179 Bass, B.M. 25, 40 Bataille, G. 274, 275, 279, 289, 294 Bates, I. 125 Bateson, G. 233, 241 Baudelaire, C. 131, 132, 134, 135, 152, 157

Author index

279

Baudrillard, J. 266, 268, 294 Baum, H.S. 209, 217 Baumard, P. 157 Bay, T. 191, 193 Baytos, L.M. 65, 83 Beale, W.H. 171, 179 Becker, G. 231 Becker, H. 231, 232 Beckett, S. 232 Bee, P. 302, 306 Beech, N. vii, 10, 23, 27, 28, 38, 40, 206, 217 Belbin, R.M. 24, 41 Bell, A.H. 65, 84 Benhabib, S. 291, 294 Benjamin, W. 13, 127–31, 133–7, 141, 144, 146, 149–58 Bensmaia, R. 158 Berger, A.A. 26, 27, 41 Berger, P.L. 25, 41, 133, 156, 158 Berglund, J. 154, 158 Bergquist, W. 203, 217 Bergson, H. 3, 4, 275 Bersani, L. 279, 289, 294 Beynon, H. 211, 218 Billig, M. 169, 179 Bitzer, L. 169, 179 Blackler, F. 157, 158 Blackwell, T. 204, 217 Blanchard, K.H. 24, 35 Blum, A.F. 243 Blumer, H. 52 Boden, D. 167, 179 Böhm, S.G. viii, 12, 13, 127, 154, 157–9 Boisot, M.H. 157, 158 Boje, D. 27, 41, 88, 89, 102, 103 Bolin, A. 284, 294 Bolman, L.G. 24, 41 Booth, W. 170, 179 Bordo, S. 233, 241, 270, 294 Bornstein, K. 269, 284, 286, 292, 294 Bowie, M. 152, 158 Bowles, M.C. 164, 179 Brah, A. 261, 264 Braidotti, R. 26, 41, 276, 277, 278, 280, 290, 294 Branson, R. 99, 103 Braverman, H. 200, 218 Breakwell, G. 125 Brewis, J. 268, 269, 270, 275, 276, 289, 291, 294, 296 Brockmeier, J. 88, 95, 103 Brown, A.D. 37, 89, 103, 166, 179 Bruckner, P. 64, 83 Bruner, J. 12, 87, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101, 103 Buchanan, D. 175, 180

Author index

280

Buck-Morss, S. 135, 154, 158 Bulmer, H. 58 Burawoy, M. 200, 218 Burchell, G. 107, 125 Burger, P. 135, 158 Burke, K. 13, 162, 167, 174, 176, 179, 231 Burke, P. 269, 294 Burrell, G. 107, 124, 125, 231, 240, 241, 242, 273, 295 Butler, J. 7, 8, 17, 151, 158, 269, 278, 280, 281, 291, 294 Bynner, J. 125 Cairns, G. 28, 40 Calas, M. 2, 18, 242 Caldwell, D.E. 42 Califia, P. 287, 294 Callon, M. 231, 242 Campbell, D. 165, 179 Camus, A. 232 Caputo, J.D. 78, 79, 83 Carbaugh, D. 88, 103 Carr, A. 37, 41, 142, 155, 158, 159, 201, 203, 207, 209, 212, 214, 218, 220 Carr, D. 52, 58 Carroll, L 191, 193 Carson, A. 272, 294 Carter, M.F. 170, 172, 173, 179 Case, P. 167, 179 Casey, C. 199, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 213, 216, 218 Castells, M. 5, 6, 8, 18, 185, 187, 193 Cattell, R.B. 24, 36, 41 Celan, P. 297, 298, 306 Charmaz, K. 44, 58 Chatman, J. 42 Cheney, G. 166, 179 Chollet, L.B. 300, 304, 306 Christensen, L.T. 166, 179 Christie, J.R.R. 87, 103 Cixous, H. 281, 295 Clark, T. 23, 41 Clegg, S.R. viii, 15, 203, 218, 223, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 240, 242, 243 Coates, G. 164, 179 Cockburn, C. 274, 295 Cohen, A. 2, 18, 88, 103 Cohen, D. 302, 306 Cohen, J.R. 167, 168, 179 Cohen, M. 156, 158, 159 Cohen, R.A. 81, 83 Colapietro, V. 64 Collinson, D. 107, 126, 211, 218 Condit, C.M. 170 Conley, T. 178, 179 Connell, R.W. 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 238, 242, 293, 294

Author index

281

Connolly, B. 238, 242 Connors, J. 171, 179 Cooke, B. 247, 264 Cooley, C.H. 3, 18 Cooper, R. 26, 41, 141, 142, 158 Cope, E.M. 170, 171, 179 Corbett, E.P.J. 171, 179 Corley, K.G. 179 Cornelissen, J.P. 166, 179 Costea, B. vii, 10, 60 Coutant, D. 25, 42 Cox, T. 65, 83 Cunningham, D.S. 168, 179 Currie, G. 89 Czarniawska, B. 7, 18, 88, 89, 103, 235 Dale, K. 267, 271, 272, 273, 274, 294 Dandeker, C. 107, 125 Davies, M. 303, 306 Davies, S.W. 164, 179 Davis, J. 65, 83 Deal, T.E. 23, 24, 41 Dean, M. 107, 125 De Brosses, C. 154, 155, 158, 159 DeCecco, J.P. 281, 295 DeCerteau, M. 213, 218 Deetz, S. 26, 40, 107, 125, 201, 204, 218 DeLanda, M. 288, 295 Deleuze, G. 4, 7, 14, 16, 17, 131, 133, 150, 151, 158, 159, 182, 184, 192, 193, 266, 267, 269, 277, 278, 279, 280, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 295 Derrida, J. 3, 136, 158, 271, 291 Descartes, R. 51 Diamond, M.A. 201, 202, 209, 218 Dickens, F. 65, 83 Dickens, J.B. 65, 83 Dingwall, R. 110, 125 Diprose, R. 279 Doel, M. 270, 295 Dollimore, J. 275, 295 Douglas, M. 241, 242 Drucker, P. 182, 193 Duck, J.M. 41 Du Gay, P. 2, 18, 202, 205, 218 Dukerich, J. 2 Dumont, L. 185, 186, 193 Dunne, J. 51, 58 Dunphy, D. 230, 242 Durkheim, E. 189 Dutoit, M. 279, 289, 294 Dutton, J.E. 2, 178 Dyer, R. 250, 264

Author index

282

Easlea, B. 270, 295 Eco, U. 95, 103 Ecstavasia, A. 291, 295 Eden, D. 230, 242 Edwards, L. 102, 103 Edwards, R. 200, 218 Egri, C.P. 231, 242 Ellis, A. 90, 103 Emler, N. 125 Engels, F. 160 Eshun, E. 305, 306 Evans, W. 44, 53, 54, 58 Evetts, J. 109, 125 Ewald, F. 124, 125 Ezzamel, M. 23, 26, 41 Ezzy, D. vii, 10, 43 Fannie, M. 68, 83 Farley, T. 306 Favre, G. 68, 83 Fernandez, J.P. 56, 83 Fields, R. 246, 264 Fineman, S. 5, 154, 158, 210, 212, 218 Finkelstein, N. 298, 299, 301, 302, 306 Firat, A.F. 214, 218 Firestein, B.A. 282, 283, 295 Fisk, R. 256, 264 Fitzgerald, G. 264 Flusser, V. 301, 306 Foss, D.C. 243 Foss, K.A. 167, 179 Foss, S.K. 167, 179 Foucault, M. 4, 7, 108, 109, 125, 144, 185, 188, 193, 194, 200, 204, 207, 211, 216, 218, 233, 241, 270, 271, 281, 295 Fox, S. 108, 125 Frame, P. 164, 179 Frankenberg, R. 247, 248, 264 Freud, S. 142, 143, 145, 155, 158, 159, 209, 217, 218, 275 Friedman, J. 2, 5, 18 Frith, F. 240, 242 Frow, J. 255, 264 Frye, C.N. 54, 58 Fryer, P. 229, 242 Fukayama, F. 256, 264 Fullerton, J. 63, 65, 67–74, 84 Fulop, L. 240, 242, 243 Gabriel, Y. viii, 15, 88, 90, 91, 103, 142, 155, 157–9, 199, 201, 202, 207, 210, 212, 213, 215, 217– 19 Gabros, JJ. 84

Author index

283

Garavan, T.N. 164, 179 Garber, M. 269, 284, 295 Gardner, W.L. 24, 41 Garfunkel, H. 1, 3, 18, 231, 236 Gatens, M. 269, 295 Gergen, K. 24, 35, 37, 41, 43, 54, 58 Gergen, M. 24, 35, 37, 43, 54, 58 Gherardi, S. 291, 296 Ghoshal, S. 3, 18 Gibson, G. 53, 59 Giddens, A. 108, 109, 124, 125, 215, 219 Gill, A. 176, 179 Ginsburg, G. 56 Gioia, D. 166, 179 Glaister, K.W. 164, 167 Glasser, B. 44, 46, 58 Glassman, M. 179 Gleber, A. 152, 158 GlücklerJ. 154, 158 Goffee, R. 42 Goffman, E. 1, 2, 4, 10, 18, 25, 37, 41, 43, 44, 52–6, 58, 231 Goleman, D. 2, 4, 35, 41, 52–5 Gordon, C. 125, 193, 194 Gorz, A. 210, 219 Gouldner, A.E. 213, 219 Grafton-Small, R. viii, 2, 17, 18, 234, 241, 243, 297, 298 Grant, D. 180 Gray, J. 229, 242 Greene, A.M. 65, 84 Grey, C. viii, 2, 12, 107, 201, 207, 211, 213, 219 Griffiths, A. 230, 242 Gropius, W. 298, 302, 306 Grosz, E.A. 17, 169, 180, 233, 242, 267, 269, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 279, 280, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 296 Guattari, F. 4, 16, 17, 131, 150, 151, 158, 159, 184, 192, 193, 266, 267, 269, 270, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 295 Gubrium, J.F. 51, 58, 87, 93, 103 Habermas, J. 146 Hackett, P. 302, 306 Hadfield, P. 243 Hage, G. 247, 264 Haggis, J. 246, 264 Hains, S.C 25, 41 Hamacher, W. 189, 194 Hamilton, P.M. viii, 13, 14, 162, 167, 169, 180 Hampton, M. 294 Hancock, P. 2, 3, 18, 267, 296 Hanson, P. 262 Hardt, M. 238, 242, 280, 296 Hardy, B. 27, 91, 95, 103, 231, 234, 242

Author index

284

Hardy, C.M. 2, 7, 41, 243 Harlow, E. 233, 243 Harper, R. 113, 114, 120, 125 Harré, R. 98 Hartog, M. 164, 179 Hartsthorne, C. 3 Hassard, J. 2, 18, 203, 219 Hatch, M.J. 1, 2, 7, 8, 18, 166, 178, 180 Hatfield, J. 243 Hattem, R. 154 Haughland, S.N. 40 Hauser, G. 170, 180 Hayward, H. 240, 242 Hearn, J. 233, 243 Heelas, P. 64, 83 Hegel, G.F. 3 Heidegger, M. 10, 11, 50, 58, 61, 75–8, 82, 83, 151, 158, 159 Heller, T.C. 182, 194 Henderson, G. 65, 83 Henry, J. 306 Herdt, G. 281–4, 296 Herrick, J.A. 168, 175, 180 Hersey, P. 24, 35, 41 Hill, S. 40, 221 Hirschorn, L. 201, 209, 219 Hislop, D. 160 Hitchens, C. 169, 180 Hobbs, D. 227, 243 Hochschild, A.R. 209, 219 Hogg, M.A. 25, 41 Hoh, B. 260, 264 Holland, J.L. 24, 41 Holstein, J.A. 51, 58, 87, 93, 103 Hopfl, H. 214, 219, 235 Horkheimer, M. 153, 157 Houston, B. 179 Huczynski, A. 175, 180 Hughes, C. 270, 296 Hughes, R. 232, 237, 243 Humphreys, M. 37, 41 Huxham, C. 27, 40 Iacocca, L. 99, 104 Introna, L.D. vii, 10, 60 Irigaray, L. 272, 275, 296 Ithaka, O. 95 Izraeli, D.N. 65, 83 Jackson, B. 167, 180 James, H. 297, 298 Jamieson, L. 125

Author index

285

Janis, I.L. 25, 41 Jarry, A. 184, 193, 194 Jay, G. 262 Jeffcutt, P. 27, 41, 203, 219 Jenkins, W.A. 41 Jermier, J.M. 204, 211, 219, 220 Johnson, G. 16, 61, 80 Jones, D. 304, 305, 306 Jones, G. 42 Jones, T. 98, 104 Jonsson, S. 158, 159 Josselson, R. 89, 104 Joyce, P. 166, 180 Kafka, F. 127–31, 137, 148, 149, 151, 155, 158, 159 Kamoche, K.N. 241, 243 Kandola, R. 63, 65, 67–74, 84 Kant, I. 188 Karreman, D. 36, 39, 42 Katovich, M. 58 Katzenbach, J.R. 23, 24, 42 Kawabata, Y. 300, 306 Kearney, R. 91, 95–7, 102, 104 Keenoy, T. 180 Kellner, D. 2, 5, 18 Kelly, P. 258, 259, 264 Kemp, P. 51, 58 Kennedy, A.A. 23, 41 Kennedy, G. 169, 170, 175, 180 Kennedy, L. 256, 257, 263, 264 Keranan, L. 162, 173, 176, 178, 180 Kerfoot, D. 108, 125, 269, 296 Kets de Vries, M.F.R. 201, 219 Khan, S. 303, 306 Kirton, G. 65, 84 Klein, R. 302, 303, 306 Kluver, B. 299, 300, 301, 302, 304, 305, 306 Knights, D. 1, 18, 107, 108, 125, 126, 200, 202, 204, 207, 219, 220, 240, 269, 296 Koestler, A. 206 Kohlhoff, K. 300, 306 Kohli, C. 166, 180 Kojève, A. 3 Koolhas, R. 299, 300, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306 Kosinski, J. 194 Krantz, J. 201, 202 Krone, J. 162, 180 Kroker, A. 275, 296 Kroker, M. 275, 296 Kunda, G. 210, 220 Kwon, S. 3, 14, 17

Author index

286

Lacan, J. 12, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 142, 143, 145, 147, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159, 275 Lachs, J. 83, 84 Laclau, E. 150, 151, 158 LaNeuz, D. 211, 220 Lang, T. 202, 209, 219 Langer, L. 54, 58 Lasch, C. 209, 220 Lash, S. 135, 137, 147, 158, 159, 193, 194, 274, 296 Latour, B. 231 Leach, E. 303, 306 Legge, K. 204, 207, 220 Leinberger, P. 187, 194 Letiche, H. 8, 18, 154, 158, 159 Leuthesser, L. 166, 180 Lévinas, E. 3, 4, 11, 51, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84 Lewis, P. 110, 125 Libeskind, D. 298, 306 Lieblich, A. 89, 104 Liff, S. 65, 84 Lilley, S. 243 Linde, C. 86, 93, 94, 104 Lindholm, C. 207, 209, 220 Linstead, A. 19, 26, 42, 296 Linstead, S.A. i, v, vi, vii, viii, 2, 16, 17, 18, 26, 42, 167, 181, 223, 229, 232, 234, 240, 241, 243, 266, 267, 268, 269, 275, 276, 285, 289, 291, 294, 296 Lister, S. 243 Lloyd, G. 270, 296 Luckman, T. 25, 41, 133, 156, 158, 159 Luhmann, N. 25, 133, 156, 158, 159, 188, 194 Lupton, T. 211, 220 Luscombe, D.E. 193, 194 Lynch, R. 165, 180 McAffe, R.B. 179 McCall, G. 46, 58 McClintock, A. 249, 264 Maccoby, M. 183, 187, 194 McGahan, A.M. 165, 178 McGuire, D. 164, 179 McHugh, P. 174, 181, 239, 240, 243 Mclnnes, P. vii, 10, 23 McIntyre, A. 43, 58, 91, 104 McKee, R. 89, 104 McKinlay, A. 2, 18 McNee, F. 251, 264 McSwite, O.C. 155, 160 Maddock, S. 164, 180 Mae, F. 68, 83 Mael, F. 2 Maines, D. 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 58 Mannheim, K. 156

Author index

287

Marcel, G. 83 Marcuse, H. 205, 209, 220 Marsden, R. 200, 220 Martin, J. 23, 25, 35, 42 Martinko, M.J. 24, 41 Marx, K. 61, 136, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 154, 156, 160, 182, 192, 206 Mason, E.S. 201, 209, 220 Mayo, E. 15, 200, 223, 227, 237 Mazza, C. 178, 180 Mead, G.H. 1, 2, 6, 10, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 188, 194 Merleau-Ponty, M. 91 Merton, R. 1 Meyer, J.W. 191, 193, 194 Miethe, T.D. 211, 221 Milgram, S. 25, 42 Miller, D. 65, 84 Miller, N. 126 Miller, P. 107, 108, 124, 125, 126 Mills, A.J. 228, 243 Minh-Ha, T.T. 252, 264 Missac, P. 160 Mitchell, W.J.T. 140, 160 Mkhonza, S. 55, 58 Moore, S. 246, 264 Morgan, D. 124, 126, 202, 209, 220, 240 Morgan, G. 124, 221, 240 Morleau-Robinson, A. 200, 264 Morris, C. 191, 193, 194 Mouffe, C. 150, 151, 158 Mullane, J.V. 164, 180 Mullins, L. 165, 180 Mumby, D.K. 201, 220 Murakami, H. 301, 302, 306 Musil, R. 151, 160 Musson, G. 181 Nahapiet, J. 3, 18 Negri, A. 238, 280, 296 Nemerov, H. 191, 194 Newell, S. 160 Nietzsche, F. 51, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 279 Nonaka, I. 147, 157, 160 Nord, W.R. 219, 242 Nordström, K.A. 187, 194 Ochberg, R. 88, 99, 100, 104 O’Connor, E.S. 227, 243 O’Farrell, C. 241, 243 Ogbonna, E. 202, 220 Oglensky, B.D. 201, 209, 210, 220 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. 175, 177

Author index

288

O’Leary, T. 107, 126 Olkowski, D. 17, 267, 280, 296 O’Reilly, C.A. 24, 42 Orobio de Castro, I. 284, 296 Orton, F. 87, 103 O’Shea, A. 278, 296 Osuri, G. viii, 8, 15, 226, 243, 244, 263, 264 Oswick, C. 180 Parker, M. 23, 25, 35, 42, 164, 165, 167, 181, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 219, 220 Parkhurst-Fergusson, P. 152, 160 Parsons, T. 1 Paterson, B. 243 Patton, G.K. 40 Peccei, R. 221 Peppers, D. 187, 194 Perelman, C.H. 171, 174, 177, 181 Perera, S. 247, 250, 254, 261, 262, 264, 265 Peters, T.S. 182, 187, 194, 210, 205, 220 Pierce, C. 44 Pietz, W. 140, 141, 160 Pile, S. 5, 18 Pinfield, L.T. 231, 243 Pinha e Cunha, M. 243 Pirsig, R. 3 Poe, E.A. 182, 195 Polhemus, T. 160 Polkinghorne, D. 53, 58 Porac, J. 2, 19 Porter, M. 165, 167 Power, M. 111, 126 Prasch, T. 141, 157 Propp, V. 27, 42 Pryke, M. 18 Pucci, E. 49, 57, 58 Puglise, J. 247, 250, 265 Pullen, A. i, v, vi, vii, viii, 2, 16, 18, 266, 285 Purcel, J. 204, 210 Putnam, L.L. 201, 220 Quinn, M. 298, 306 Raffel, S. 243 Ram, M. 154, 160 Randall, H. 160 Rasmussen, D. 55, 59 Ray, C.A. 201, 221 Redding, S.G. 227, 242 Reilly, S. 175, 181 Reinhraz, S. 55, 59 Reynolds, R. 164, 181

Author index

289

Richman, J. 172, 181 Ricoeur, P. 10, 43, 44, 46, 48–57, 59 Ridderstrale, J. 187 Rigby, D.K. 162, 181 Ritzer, G. 2, 18, 201, 220 Roberts, K. 125 Roberts, R.H. 62, 64, 68, 84 Robertson, R. 252, 265 Robins, S.P. 70, 84, 230, 231, 243 Rogers, M. 187, 194 Roosevelt, T.R. 65, 84 Roscoe, W. 285, 286, 296 Rose, N. 107, 108, 124, 126, 187, 190, 195, 285 Rosenthal, R. 202, 221 Rosenwald, G. 57, 59 Rothschild, J. 211, 221 Roy, D. 211, 221 Sahlins, M. 181 Said, E.W. 245, 265 Sakolsky, R. 107, 126, 200, 221 Salaman, G. 23, 25, 41, 42, 202 Sarbin, T. 43, 59 Sartre, J.P. 232 Sass, L. 56, 59 Scarborough, H. 160 Schech, S. 264 Schlosser, E. 302, 303, 304, 306 Schoeck, R.J. 169, 181 Scholes, K. 166, 180 Schuijt, J.J.M. 154, 160 Schultz, M. 1, 2, 7, 8, 18, 166, 178, 179, 180 Schutz, A. 3, 25, 42 Schuyt, T.N.M. 154, 160 Schwartz, H.S. 155, 160, 201, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 214, 221 Scott, D.T. 84 Seabrook, J. 204, 218 Sedgwick, E.K. 282, 296 Semler, R. 23, 42 Sennett, R. 186, 195 Sewell, G. viii, 15, 107, 126, 200, 204, 205, 211, 221, 223 Shattuck, R. 191, 193, 195 Shiveley, M.G. 281, 295 Sibley, D. 5, 19 Sievers, B. 207, 221 Silverman, D. 27, 35, 42, 214, 243 Simmell, G. 232, 284 Simmen, J. 300, 306 Simmons, J. 46, 58 Simons, H.W. 164, 169, 181 Sims, D. vii, 11, 12, 86, 89, 96, 102, 104

Author index

290

Sinan, M. 214, 222 Sisson, K. 164, 181 Slaughter, J. 204, 220 Slogoski, B. 56, 59 Smircich, L. 2, 18, 201, 209, 221, 231, 242 Smith, D.K. 23, 24, 42 Smith, J.H. 227, 243 Snowden, D.J. 5, 19 Snyder, M. 97, 104 Somers, M. 53, 59 Sonnenschien, W. 65, 84 Stael Von Holstein, J. 187, 195 Stavrakakis, Y. 133, 152, 160 Stein, H.F. 97, 104 Stevenson, R.L. 198, 195 Stitch, A. 65, 84 Stone, A.R. 269, 296 Stonehouse, G. 179 Strauss, A. 44, 46, 58, 59 Strindberg, A. 14, 189, 190, 195 Sturdy, A. 98, 104, 201, 202, 204, 209, 212, 214, 218, 221 Suerdem, A. 214, 222 Sugrue, N. 58 Suh, E.M. 98, 104 Sullivan, D.L. 108 Swan, J. 157, 160 Tajfel, H. 25, 42 Takeuchi, H. 147, 157, 160 Taussig, M. 141, 146, 153, 160 Taylor, C. 43, 59, 64, 84 Terry, D.J. 25, 41 Tester, K. 137, 160 Thomas, H. 2, 19 Thomas, R. 2, 18, 19, 26, 42, 269, 279, 296 Thompson, P. 155, 157, 174, 181, 200, 210, 222, 240, 243 Thrift, N. 5, 18, 64, 84 Tietze, S. 167 Townley, B. 1, 19, 108, 126, 152, 160, 165, 181, 200, 204, 206, 207, 222 Trahir, R.C.S. 227, 243 Trapp, R. 179 Truss, C. 25, 42 Tschumi, B. 301, 303, 304, 306 Tucker, B. 187 Turner, B.S. 24, 40 Turner, J.C 25, 40, 42, 266 Tyler, M. 3, 18, 267, 296 Ulmer, J. 43, 58 Urry, J. 274, 296

Author index

291

Van Hattem, R. 158 Venkatesh, A. 2, 14, 222 Vieira da Cunha, J. 243 Virilio, P. 16, 137, 160, 262, 298, 306 Von Hayek, F.A. 243 Vurdubakis, T. 200, 207, 220 Wajcman, J. 65, 84, 274, 281, 296 Warhol, A. 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 306 Wark, M. 16, 251, 252, 253, 262, 265 Warren, S. 270, 296 Waterman, R.H. 201, 205, 220 Watson, T.J. 23, 26, 42, 96, 104, 167, 181, 205, 209, 210, 222 Webb, J. 65, 85 Weber, S. 118, 151, 160 Weedon, C. 269 Weick, K.E. 2, 3, 19, 87, 89, 104, 234 Weigel, S. 152, 153, 160 Wellbery, D.E. 182, 194 Werr, A. 154, 158 Westwood, R. 167, 181, 228, 243 Whetten, D.A. 2 White, H. 43, 59 Whitehead, S. 293 Wiersma, J. 57, 59 Wilcox, P. 251, 265 Wiley, N. 44, 45, 59 Wilkinson, B. 107, 126, 200, 202, 204, 205, 211, 220, 221 Williams, P. 26, 36, 42 Willis, P. 113, 126 Willmott, H.C. 1, 3, 5, 6, 17, 18, 19, 26, 27, 37, 40, 41, 42, 201, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214, 222, 240 Wilson, E. 160, 232 Winlow, S. 227, 243 Wolfe, I 300, 306 Wolff, J. 152, 161 Woodward, K. 166, 181 Worchel, S. 25, 42 Worthington, F. 41 Wright, P. 171, 181 Zaleznik, A. 201, 221 Zanetti, L.A. 142, 155, 158 Zemke, R. 65, 85 Zita, J.K. 281, 286 Žižek, S. 13, 127, 129, 140, 144–8, 152, 158, 161 Znaniecki, F. 43 Zuboff, S. 205, 222

Subject index activist-intellectuals 248 aesthetics 139 allegorical 131, 132, 135–7, 141, 148, 150–5 allegory 135, 152 anthropology 17, 60, 75, 140, 154, 228, 262, 267, 269, 280, 286, 292, 293 aporias 61 asymmetry 298, 301, 304 berdaches 285, 286 binary 16, 17, 266–8, 276–89, 292 biological 71, 133, 134, 231, 250, 267, 269, 271, 277–9 bisexual 278–83, 287, 292 boundary 266 capital 4, 139, 140, 155, 174, 228, 232, 240, 257, 285 capitalism 64, 71, 137, 139, 140, 144, 186, 200, 205, 206, 212, 226–9, 239, 247, 274 change xiii, 51, 67, 68, 183, 203, 209, 215, 216, 268, 270, 276, 277, 280, 282, 283, 303 collective 2, 10, 16, 17, 62, 63, 65, 129, 131, 142, 150, 164–7, 203, 204, 235, 244, 245, 279, 288, 302 colonial 213–15, 224, 232, 245–50, 256, 260 commodity 13, 127, 129, 134–50, 154–7 concept i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 14, 23, 25, 39, 53, 60, 61, 65, 67, 69, 73–5, 79, 86, 88, 89, 91, 101, 109, 110, 115, 118, 122, 124, 139, 144, 151, 165, 184–8, 191, 202, 206, 211, 216, 231, 234, 241, 245, 252, 268, 273, 274, 277, 282 conceptualisation 44, 64, 66, 127, 165, 167, 185, 186, 188, 244, 267, 268, 286 control 69, 116, 119, 205, 206, 210–13, 216, 217, 225, 230, 254 corporate 1, 2, 5, 32, 37, 62, 64–7, 163, 186, 199, 200, 202, 205, 209, 210, 214, 216 corporeal 277, 278 creative 17, 66 critical i, x, 164, 230, 240, culture i, ix, xi, xiii, 1, 9, 11, 23, 24, 26, 27, 23, 40, 53, 55, 60–4, 66, 68–70, 72, 73, 82, 93, 96, 108, 110, 113, 140, 141, 144–7, 155, 166, 178, 193, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 213, 223, 224, 232–8, 247–53, 256, 257, 262, 269–72, 282, 283, 285, 286, 289, 292, 293, 298, 301, 303, 305 democracy 24, 146, 213, 239, 250, 258, 259 demonstrative 170 desire 35, 39, 72, 79, 95, 96, 110, 135, 141, 150, 189, 190, 209, 266, 267, 269, 274, 275, 277–81, 289, 291, 292 determinism 277 diaspora 16, 244, 245, 248–50, 253–6, 261, 262 discipline 12, 107, 109–12, 115–17, 122–4, 170, 188, 193, 199, 203, 204, 206, 208, 211, 213, 214, 233, 253, 267, 270, 298, 302

Subject index

293

discourse 2, 6, 14, 26, 27, 36, 51, 60, 62, 68, 70, 123, 148, 149, 156, 168, 171, 173, 177, 184, 200, 202, 205–10, 213, 215, 216, 218, 229, discourse continued 232, 233, 245, 247–55, 258, 260, 261, 263, 279, 285, 289 discrimination 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 211, 231, 260 discursive 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 16, 107, 109, 124, 135, 206, 232, 245, 246, 249, 250, 259, 261, 281, 284 disempower 61 disperse 76 diversity 2, 3, 10, 11, 15, 60–3, 65–75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 111, 112, 207, 223, 224, 226, 234, 251, 256, 259, 261, 286, 288 dividual 182, 198, 190, 192, 193 dominant 5, 25, 33, 55, 60, 64, 73, 146, 170, 185, 199, 209, 233, 247, 251–3, 256, 258, 268, 273, 276, 280, 281, 286, 300 dramaturgical 1, 4, duality 164, 202, 282, 289, 290, 292, 302 dynamism 2, 5, 26, 40, 74, 75, 77, 78, 212, 281, 284 dysphoria 281 ecology ix, 283 emancipation 7, 61–3, 66–8, 191, 262, 289 empowerment 7, 62, 70, 74, 183 enunciation 129–31 epideitic 13, 162, 169–77 epistemology 7, 10, 57, 226, 239, 240, 268, 287, 292 ethics xiii, 11, 55, 62, 66, 72, 75, 78, 79, 81, 185, 227, 287 ethnic 5, 63, 65, 68, 71, 82, 124, 245, 247, 262 ethnocentric 226 ethnographical 285 ethnomethodology 1 existential 74–6 fantasy 62, 129, 150, 201, 214–17, 291 feminism i, 17, 155, 233, 267–70, 270–2, 277–80, 287, 289, 291, 293 fetish 13, 127, 137, 139–50, 154, 156, 157, 291 flow 142 fluidity xii, 3, 16, 17, 52, 75, 77, 86, 235, 266–72, 277, 281–3, 286, 287, 292 flux 8, 303 functionalist 275 gender i, xiii, 5, 6, 7, 16, 17, 34, 65, 66, 68, 71, 82, 155, 202, 205, 231, 233, 250, 252, 266–71, 276–8, 281, 282, 284–93 genocidal 248, 257 global ix, 1, 2, 15, 16, 66, 137, 138, 175, 200, 226, 227, 229, 238, 244–55, 259, 260, 261, 262, 284, 298 hegemony 24, 224, 228 hermenutic 10, 43, 49, 51, 56, 57, 77 heroism 54, 258 heterarchical 278 heterogeneous 70, 73, 288, 290, 293 heterosexual 273, 283

Subject index

294

hierarchy 110, 116, 120, 122, 203, 217, 270, 280, 288, 290, 293, 298 hippocratic 173, 176 homogenous 11, 27, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 113, 122, 232, 276, 281, 293 homosexual 122, 281–3 hypermodern(organ)isation 13, 127, 137 idealisation 13, 64, 68, 70, 73, 186 identity i, ix, xi, xiii, 1–10, 12–16, 21, 23–8, 30–4, 36–40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50–7, 71, 88–90, 98, 99, 105–9, 117, 119, 127, 132–5, 143, 144, 148–52, 162, 163, 165–8, 173–8, 186, 197, 200, 202, 204– 8, 211, 212, 214–16, 223, 226, 231, 236, 244–9, 257, 259, 266–70, 277–85, 288–93, 298, 303 imperialism 244 individual ix, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 24–6, 33, 34, 44, 45, 52, 61–8, 71–4, 79, 80, 88, 92, 93, 99, 107–9, 115–18, 123, 129, 131, 132, 134, 141, 143, 149, 156, 157, 171, 182–93, 201, 202, 205–12, 215, 216, 228, 270, 272, 274, 277, 278, 284, 286, 288, 289, 292, 302 industrial 149 institutional 7, 57, 66, 124 interaction 148 intersubjective 10, 43, 52, 57, 93, 157 knowledge 6, 62, 64, 70, 73, 93, 108–13, 119, 133, 137, 144, 147, 157, 173, 189, 201, 206, 211, 230, 267, 271–4, 276, 286, 287, 289, 298 leadership xii, xiv, 9, 10, 28–32, 132, 285 linguistic 6 management i, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 2, 5_7, 9–11, 13, 23, 24, 26, 27, 32–4, 36–8, 40, 54, 60–75, 77, 78, 82, 83, 100, 107–15, 118–24, 127, 132, 137, 138, 154, 157, 163–5, 171, 173, 178, 183, 184, 187, 200, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211, 216, 217, 224, 230, 238–40, 275 masculine 155, 233, 267–71, 274, 275, 279, 293 methodology i, x, 10, 29, 57, 88, 168, 216, 230 mission statements 13, 14, 162–78 modernity 5, 13, 108, 127, 129, 131–7, 145, 153, 205, 228, 253, 254 MOSAIC 74, 78 motivation xiv, 64, 121, 167, 275, 286 multiculture 2, 226, 245, 247, 249, 261, 262 multiplicity 8, 17, 52, 98, 101, 102, 200, 207, 217, 231, 267, 269, 270, 276–81, 286–8, 291, 293 mythical 47, 96, 135, 252 narcissism xiii, 5, 6, 151, 193, 201, 216, 217, 235 narrative xi, 2, 4, 7, 10, 16, 27–32, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46–57, 86, 88, 90, 91, 95, 97, 101–3, 133, 152, 187, 215, 240, 251, 252, 255, 257, 259 native 241 normalisation 61, 69, 71, 74, 136, 228 normative 199, 200, 203, 206, 210, 277 objectives 6, 10, 35, 45, 47, 48, 56, 57, 60, 69, 71, 72, 75, 95, 119, 120, 131, 136, 139–45, 150, 152, 162–8, 171, 172, 174, 176, 270, 281 ontological 10, 11, 17, 61, 76, 82, 151, 207, 226, 229, 266–71, 276–83, 286, 289, 292

Subject index

295

organisation i, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, 1–7, 9, 11–14, 23–34, 38, 39, 49, 50, 52, 60–74, 78, 86, 88, 92, 93, 100, 8, 110, 120, 122, 124, 132, 141, 151, 153, 155, 162–78, 183, 199–205, 208–17, 223, 226, 228, 231–40, 266–74, 280–2, 288–90, 298, 303 panoptic 12, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 204, 206, 211, 213, 215, paradigm 167, 228, 280, 283 paradox 65, 70, 73, 120, 122, 168, 177, 206, 208, 256, 303, 304 penetration 274 penis 273, 275, 278 performance 7, 8, 17, 24, 73, 270, 275, 281, 286 phallic 267, 269, 270, 273–5 phallogecentric 124, 275, 278, 279, 289 phantasmagoric 13, 127, 144, 148, 155, 156 phenomenology xii, 4, 11, 43, 49, 60, 61, 65, 71–7, 109, 130, 131, 148, 153, 156, 186, 233, 239, 241 philosophical i, ix, xiii, 1, 3, 8, 10, 11, 15, 43–52, 56, 60, 61, 74–9, 82, 130, 151, 153, 184, 185, 188, 193, 200, 223, 227, 228, 232, 241, 249 physical 9, 25, 49, 52, 56, 73, 40, 211, 215, 233, 235, 281, 282, 286, 290, 292 postmodernism 3, 5, 8, 51, 52, 146, 203, 204, 226, 229, 240, 273, 275–7 poststructure 200, 269, 279, 285, 286 power 1, 5, 6, 34, 55, 73, 94, 108, 111, 122, 123, 135, 144, 150, 152, 154, 155, 170, 188, 199, 201, 204, 206–9, 212, 216, 217, 229–33, 244, 246, 248–51, 262, 263, 267–71, 274, 281, 285, 300 psychoanalytical 15, 110, 141, 142, 151, 152, 155, 156, 201, 208, 209, 212, 216, 217, 275, 290 psychodynamic 5 psychological 3, 5, 43, 44, 96, 129, 132, 133, 151, 155, 190, 199, 200, 202, 206–13, 228, 230, 240 psychometric 72 racial 246 reflexive 4, 7, 10, 15, 46, 49, 108, 201, 215, 223, 246, 248, 266, 276, 279, 286 rhetoric 13, 14, 56, 65–70, 74, 157, 162–78, 208, 228 rhizome 17, 267, 270, 278–81, 287–94 ritual 174 seductive 251, 268 Self 1, 3, 6, 12, 14, 25–7, 36–8, 40, 43–53, 56, 60, 61, 72, 75–9, 82, 86, 89, 90, 93, 96–9, 101–3, 107–12, 117, 120, 123–5, 142, 184, 186, 187, 191, 206, 213, 228, 266, 267, 270–2, 278, 279, 283, 298 semiotic 45, 49, 244, 282, 298 September 11 244–6, 249–63 sexuality 71, 139 social i, ix, x, xii, xiii, 1–5, 7–11, 15–17, 23, 25–7, 30–2, 36, 39, 43–7, 52–6, 61–9, 73, 74, 78, 82, 97, 113, 120, 122, 127, 133–50, 155, 156, 170, 174, 182–7, 189, 192, 201, 203–6, 213, 216, 226– 33, 241, 247, 248, 253, 262, 267–76, 280–93, 300, 302, 305 sociology xi, xii, 18, 43, 44, 54, 56, 109, 110, 156, 211, 231, 235, 240, 241, 252, 268, 277 socio-symbolic 132 structural 53 subjective xi, xii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12–15, 44, 51, 52, 57, 62–7, 70–2, 81, 95, 107, 108, 110, 114–16, 122, 123, 127, 129, 131–3, 138, 144, 147_52, 155, 156, 188, 199, 201, 202, 206, 209, 215, 216, 225, 246, 253, 269, 270, 276, 277, 278, 280, 286

Subject index

teleology 5, 8, 16, 38, 248, 250, 254–6, 260, 261, 276 temporal 10, 44–51, 56, 64, 74–9, 153, 235, 250 terrorism 258 totalising 208, 209, 270, 290, 291 totalitarianism 135, 204, 205, 213 transgender 17, 283, 284 transgress 7 transparency 48, 56, 127, 145, 147–9 transsexual 269, 283, 284, 289 white 16, 245–50, 253–6, 259–62

296