as an organization not guided by any resemblance and limitation, meaning that organizations should avoid reproducing themselves by hiring the reflections of their mirrors. On a similar note, an organization should not limit itself to any specific gender, ethnicity or education. We could baptize such kind of organizing as an ageless, sexless or just a classless constellation. Equally important is the question of courage when asking for stories. How much will the organization allow their employees to say uncensored and simultaneously avoid the typical positive collage of statements? It is important that the employee can speak freely without jeopardizing his job. Not that any organization should criticize itself, but it should not create a fata morgana either. Furthermore, it is important that the organization not only let the minority tell their story, i.e. women and non-Danes in NNE; on the contrary, the stories should open up for a possible variety and mixture of age, ethnicity, and sex in the future to come. It is not only a matter of ethnicity and gender; rather it is a matter of difference in thought. An organization could easily recruit many non-Danes if only they would think like us, which has nothing to do with respect of differences. As Foucault mentions in his important essay, What Is an Author?: “What difference does it make who is speaking?”140 The point of interest is: what are the modes of existence present in the discourse? It is a matter of listening to what is always and already present and illustrating how it works, what it can produce and what it opens up for. Any different story is a useful and interesting story, something that might teach us something new.
evaluates the situation. The rhetorician succeeds when he creates a bond around himself as being both the speaker and the listener. In other words, the rhetorician must listen in order to speak; he must have fingerspitz gefühl for the situation. Rhetorician, therefore, is a strategy of how to speak, in order to be heard in a way that will make the listener believe in the story told and act in a certain way. Aristotle puts it this way: “The next issue we have to speak about is the linguistic formulation (lexis). It is not enough to know what to say; it is also necessary to formulate it the right way. The role that the particular character of the speech gets is major.”142 It is statements like these that have caused rhetoric so many problems, not because Aristotle distinguished between form and content.
Rather because he favoured the first in this book. Conversely, Aristotle also emphasized that rhetoric is persuasion towards an act or end, which makes rhetoric an instrumental social praxis. If the rhetorician can convince the listeners to act in a certain way, then this act is – as long as what the rhetorician knows and shows is right - for the common good of the polis. Aristotle defines rhetoric as a techne, an artistic-crafts-manlike skill often related to a master whose actions will unfold in praxis.
Plato, however, did not believe that rhetoric was such a techne.
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Plato rejected rhetoric as an art form, or even as a subject (techne). In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato lets his alter ego Socrates demonstrate his superiority in the argumentation about rhetoric with the sophist, who uses rhetoric on the Greek Agora. In Gorgias Socrates defines rhetoric as “an agent of the kind of persuasion which is designed to produce conviction, but not to educate people, about matters of right and wrong” (454e-455a). It is a matter of being justice and injustice. What is justice?
According to Plato, knowledge has always existed in the soul and therefore the soul is immortal. The soul existed before it took shape in human beings. What the soul strives for is “the pure, the always being and immortal and that, which always remains in the same state...” (Faidon, 79B). For Plato the truth is an uncovering of the truth already located in the soul, i.e., anamnesis, the process of going back to the object of truth: the soul. Only the devoted philosopher can achieve such insights, one must refrain from bodily pleasures and not waste time in gathering power and wealth, etc. Plato writes: “Those who strive for the knowledge in truth, understands that before philosophy undertook education of their soul, it was imprisoned in the body and inextricably related with it; it was forced to observe the being of beings through the body like through the prison bars…it was wrapped in the dark of ignorance” (Faidon, 82B). The soul is imprisoned in the body. In order to liberate the soul
and uncover the knowledge within, one must guide it; this is the reason why it is imperative for Plato that the polis educates its population. Thus, rhetoric might produce confidence and belief but not necessarily knowledge, according to Plato. Knowledge is a justified true belief, e.g. one who can believe his perceptions in the world of phenomena, but only when such a belief is justified in correspondence with the constant concepts of the Platonic Ideas. Justice has nothing to do with equilibrium such as having the same wage or any other kind of comparison. Instead, justice refers to whether a person acts and moves right in accordance with the person’s potential.
The problem with such assumptions, in my opinion, is that rhetoric becomes a tool which can be used strategically by articulating different moods or tempers. For Plato rhetoric is flatter because it does not acknowledge the unalterable ideas. Instead it makes people believe falsely (I would add that rhetoric also is flatter or a scam when it appears to articulate a specific transcendental end because such end cannot be given beforehand. It is produced). Plato defines rhetoric as a “persuasion designed to produce conviction.”143 This minor digression illustrates that rhetoric in its classical form has affinities with seduction as we know it from Don Juan. Both operate with a well-defined goal or unity.
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In opposition, an organization as an open network is a grouping without unity. The workforce comes together in the process of organizing, on the basis of what they have in common, but without becoming one. The workforces should, in my opinion, never subordinate their singularities or negate their differences.
Let us take an example:
Each year the Danish newspaper Ingeniøren [The Engineer] brings about a survey about the image-parameters measuring what engineers want and look for when applying for a job. The results, which are almost identical for most business cooperation’s, are:
1. challenging and developing work assignments;
2. the culture or ethos in the organization;
3. influence and independence;
4. the management;
5. the ability to attract, develop, and retain qualified labor; and 6. wage.
Those parameters can blind an organization. “The survey indicates that the young professionals favor balance between working life and private life. Perhaps we should emphasize this in our ads? I think we should”144 After reading these results, many organizations will feel an urge to benchmark with its competitors or change some of their ads, but this might not be the right solution. It is difficult to benchmark and compare results, especially when many of the parameters are qualitative, e.g., questions like: What is challenging and developing work? What is an optimal culture? What is good management?145 The organization wants confirmation and will most likely get it, when asking its competitors to benchmark (who are feeling just as insecure). Furthermore, we might add that benchmarking is for that insecure organization, who accepts being second best. Instead of asking their competitors, the organizations should ask their own workforce, and here I do not mean the yearly or quarterly (quarterly is overdoing it) internal survey that is already a normal procedure for almost every organization today. Michel Serres points out that knowledge “is not seeing, it is entering into contact, directly, with things;” with the workforce.146 Let us remain in the tone of Serres and emphasize that the candidate is no longer in the distance, he is nearby, tangible. The answer to how the organization attracts candidates already caresses the organization through the process of organizing.
Many organizations falsely believe that doing a survey measuring the level of satisfaction of the workforce actually creates satisfaction; it would be similar to take one’s temperature and think that that alone would make you feel better. The surveys are diagnoses. They illustrate symptoms, but they do not produce the treatment. “The most important part of a survey is the dialogue afterwards held by HR with the department. Unfortunately many managers don’t find the time for this feedback leaving the employees rather confused,” an HR consultant says.147 When inventing questions for a survey one must be attentive to the fact that the answers are based on an aggregate, i.e., satisfaction that does not necessarily have to do with one of the 6 parameters mentioned above, which still have to be individually interpreted. In many organizations the parameters are intimately connected: a challenging organization would develop a special culture with independence, and independence can only appear in an organization with a certain kind of management, etc. If the management is good, then most likely the culture is too. If the management cannot attract the right assignments and
customers, then the work assignment would limit the organizational development, which would lead to an unpleasant culture. In short, it has much to do with the organizing process, although we might call it culture, influence, etc.
Furthermore the image-parameters tend to become a kind of metaphysical fundament for an unchanging continuance of what the organization is already doing. This can be a problem if it causes the management to neglect the various forms of resistance that happen within the social activity elsewhere. In this sense, the organization can unwillingly or willingly produce pure flatter when they try to attract candidates, just as the candidate might flatter the organization in a job interview.
Instead of this game of appearance the organization should acknowledge that the poesis and praxis are unified. Labor becomes a social innovation. For instance, the worker wants challenging assignments where the worker can express his singularity in a way that traverses the traditional divisions of private and cooperative life. Recall the adjectives, proud and happy, which the workforce used to articulate what they had in common with NNE, or what NNE did to them.
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One way an organization might be able to treat itself would be through the creation of an open forum, for a variety of comments, different opinions, questions and ideas. A forum where nothing would be censored, such as the letter forums we know from newspapers but without an editor dictating what is of main (read: public or unifying) interest. This would break down the classical hierarchies when everyone could share ideas equally. The idea is that every bitterness, joy, irritation, insecurity, success, and despair should be shared. Today most organizations only publish the successes, even when we are speaking about internal communication in the form of newsletters, intraweb and so forth. Identifying a success pattern can be helpful and good for the morale, but if the organization only tells the good stories, it will create a wrong and devastating myth about itself.
Who is to decide what is better or worse? In George Orwell’s book 1984 the “Inner Party” creates a newspeak to facilitate the process of thought control with mottos like: “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery.” With an open forum the leadership of the organizations could monthly comment on the issues or simple participate in the process as well. The interest of the organization would be dictated by the workforce and not the leadership, albeit they can choose to address the issues as pleased.
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During the hectic year 2003, where NNE had to dismiss approximately 100 people, NNE opened a similar forum on the intraweb. An employee says: “Following the debate tells me that I’m not the only one in misery. What are we doing, where are we heading? Even the managers seem groggy.”148 Such a forum could also be useful in less hectic periods just to trim the tip of the iceberg. The need hereof indicates that a survey alone does not help at all. The funny thing about opening a debate forum after the dismissals, or when they ask for specification when doing a survey, is that the organization implicitly implies that: when something is wrong it is surprising and therefore we need to know how this happened. Similar, when something is good they do not ask for responses, as if the reason hereof is obvious. The management might believe that it is certain issues that are of importance for the good culture, although it might have been something else. One should never presuppose the reason for either a good or a bad result.
The problem with organizational surveys is that either does the management know the position/
state of the workforce and is left without knowledge about its movement, or the management knows the movement of the workforce but does not know its position/state. It is called indeterminate temporality, which is the relation between the synchronic (position) and the diachronic (movement).
The management will often outline the position of the organization, and sometimes the workforce will be in movement somewhere else. The organization is a potpourri combined by many different forces, which at times can make leadership an art.
Another problem with organizational surveys is that the organization already presupposes the areas of importance. The health of the organization is reduced to five or six specific topics. The challenge for the leaders is to master the art of listening to the organizational potpourri. If one listens, then one would know what to say (Aristotle). A survey could be the extended ear in the organization, but one should be careful not to turn the ear in only one direction. One should be open for the unexpected and unknown. Only this way something new will be produced or something forgotten be resurrected.
The truth is that the whole discourse about labor and what the workforce needs and wants has turned organizations into lemmings. Labor has its own order of discourse, much defined by the vocabulary of HRM. Perhaps the organization should open up for something else or a more specific understanding of what a good culture actually means. “We do not find the center, and we are
inclined to abandon it. We lean to the right, to the left, to get away from it. Are we afraid of it?”149 Serres writes as a comment to the lack of belief. If the organization would believe in its own future – a future which does not necessarily turn out the way the parameters predict – then it would be a practical application of the organization’s habits. No organization knows what the future brings, but following its own belief based on its own habits such as respect for differences in thought, developing work and an open culture could be a way to anticipate it. The organization should not follow those habits because the parameters (or Plato) tell it to, but because of a belief in those habits.
Does the organization have the courage to swim against the mainstream? NNE, for instance, should pay less attention to the many analyses, and just tell the world what they do and how, in their own language. It is not a science. Organizations should find the courage to tell what they are doing because doing that alone would make a tremendous difference. Despite all the rhetoric spices it seems that the most extravagant and seductive an organization can do is to tell the truth which is constantly being produced in the process of organizing.
Telling the truth implies, according to Plato, knowledge about what the truth might be, but here I differ from the old master and his idea about rediscovering the truth of the soul. The organization is not an unalterable constancy and it should not waste its time interpreting what all the surveys mean as if it were the philosopher stone. Instead the organization should produce something new out of the encounter between the workforce, its customers and stakeholders. After all, there is no better reason to work than to discover an intellectual and bodily desire to create something new through encounters with others.150
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The point of orientation comes from an unlocatable center, which is everywhere, elsewhere. Who would build his house in the middle of a current, asks Michel Serres and answers: “No institution, no system, no science, no language, no gesture of thoughts is founded on this mobile place – which is the ultimate foundation and founds nothing.”151 The organization is born through the rhythm of various encounters; unlike Plato, it cannot seek an unchangeable goal.
Let us turn to Plato once more. In several passages Socrates describes his understanding of desire as a lack. In Gorgias Socrates states: “Is it not true, when someone says that those who desire nothing, are happy?” (492, e) and continues: “Do I need to pose further questions or do you agree with me that any lack, and any desire is unpleasant?” (496, d), he continues: “I call it flatter for both soul and body... where one is to devote towards lust without any consideration for good and evil” (Gorgias:
501, c). Only he, who does not desire, the harmonic and moderate man, can in Socrates’ opinion be happy. Desire is irrational, it rules one’s reasoning to do right because it carries one towards pleasure. The one who constantly desires is to be compared with a broken jar, no matter how much water you fill in the broken jar it will always desire more because it’s leaking. A person who desires is a licentious person who for eternity will live in misery, lives the life of a thief (Gorgias: 507, e).
The problem with Socrates’ assumptions are that we mistake the more for the less, we behave as though non-being existed before being, disorder before order, and the possible before existence.
Bergson claims that the more is mistaken from the less, since we think in terms of more and less, i.e.
more order or being contra less chaos or non-being. “Each time that we think in terms of more or less, we have already disregarded the difference in kind between the two orders…The idea of disorder emerges from a general idea of order as badly analyzed composite, etc.”152 If we relate this to Socrates, then one is either happy or not. Not being happy would be like going back to chaos from a state of order, although there are different kinds of happiness. If we think about differences in degree, where there are differences in kind, then problems emerge. “Only intuition can produce and activate it, because it rediscovers difference in kind beneath the difference in degree, and conveys the intelligence the criteria that enable it to distinguish between true and false problems.”153 Bergson suggests the notion of intuition as a method of division dealing with the pure difference, which can only be a difference in kind as only tendencies differ in kind. In other words: what kind of happiness does Socrates refer to? What kind of satisfaction does the organizational survey measure?
Does it distinguish between different kinds of happiness, satisfaction? What does labor do when it is developing? The answer is that different people find different assignments more or less satisfactory.
According to Plato, a person cannot be happy and simultaneously desire something because desire has its offspring from lack. What we have witnessed in this chapter is that rhetoric can create a lust as a feeling of lacking something, by seducing the listener through words in two ways: either as unjustly seducing people to make them think that they lack something, or by telling lies for the sake of own winning. In this chapter I have tried to outline elements of this assumption. I agree with
Plato that rhetoric is flatter but I do not agree with his idea that knowledge is given or transcendental. Rather knowledge is produced and it is through this production that new kinds of innovation and creativity emerge. Also this illustrates the difference between Don Juan, who believes knowledge or his purpose is given, which is contrary to Jonas Wergeland, who produces knowledge through his encounters with previously famous persons. In the next passage I will describe how desire is production, not lack.