It has arguably been fifteen years since postmodernism entered organisation studies (Parker 1992b). Think for a moment of the significance of this. In 1992 we hardly had the internet and certainly not features like YouTube–Broadcast Yourself™ or Facebook.com. Mobile phones were too large to fit into a coat pocket, and did not include SMS text functions, no one had heard of viral marketing70, Germany had just been reunited, the Russian Federation revived, and
70 The first to write about viral marketing was media critic Douglas Rushkoff in his 1994 book Media Virus. The assumption is that if such an advertisement reaches a “susceptible" user, that user will become “infected” (i.e., sign up for an account) and can then go on to infect other
VI
satellite TV had just recently started to spread to all corners of the globe. It was, many would claim, a different world then, in terms of communicating, organising and living.
Yet, we might find that nothing much has really changed after “the postmodern condition” (Lyotard 1984). If “the key problem raised by postmodernists is the impossibility of having certain knowledge about “the Other” (person, organisation, culture, society)” (Parker 1995:553), why, then, are we still indulging in this debate? Why should we care, more than fifteen years after the demise of Althusser, Lacan and Foucault, to return to these writers as if they are still speaking to us?
What remains for us to think about and act upon in their writings? What is the relevance of their works for organisation studies and working life in contemporary organisations? Has not every possible interpretation of these thinkers been given?71 In order to get a grip of these questions, allow me to take one step back and re-consider the question posed when I developed my analytical strategy in Chapter V, a question that should be at the heart of any organisational enterprise, be it as manager, researcher or anyone else, but which is often associated with the discipline of philosophy. The question is: Who are we now?
In a number of articles in the journal Organisation Studies, the issue of postmodernism entering organisation studies was heavily discussed. Parker (1992b) initiated the debate and spurred a number of replies and papers on the issue (Carter 1995, Chia 1995, Clegg 1995, Jackson 1995, Parker 1992a, Parker 1995, Parker 1999, Tsoukas 1992) all addressing the effects and potential consequences of postmodernism to organisation studies. On his most critical edge Martin Parker ventures:
that postmodernism is a dangerous, and potentially disabling set of ideas for critical organisation theorists to adopt. This is because I believe that any emancipatory project is not well served by giving up entirely on notions of “truth” and “progress” (Parker 1995:553).
susceptible users. As long as each infected user sends mail to more than one susceptible user on average (i.e., the basic reproductive rate is greater than one), standards in epidemiology imply that the number of infected users will grow according to a logistic curve, whose initial segment appears exponential (source: Wikipedia, retrieved 28 November 2007).
71 I am here paraphrasing Todd May (2005) who asks the same kind of questions, yet only with Foucault.
Parker clearly believes the postmodern project to be one of emancipation, a concept we have already dealt with indirectly in the discussions earlier in this study; emancipation through ideology (Althusser), through psychoanalysis (Lacan), or through power relations (Foucault). And so, even if I were to limit myself to this account, these three writers should have something to say to studies of organisation. But before we engage further in their importance for studies of organisation, let us take a look at the debate on postmodernism, since it, as I have said, reveals a number of important points concerning the question of who are we now?
Any talk of a field or discipline (here postmodernist organisation studies) must, according to Parker (1992b:2), have an idea of what it means to be one, that is, a notion of boundary. Who belongs to the field, and who does not. Who does and who does not belong is simply rephrasing the question: who are we now? In Parkers terms, though, the question is divided into two: “How do we recognise a postmodern organisation?” and “Can we use a postmodern analysis to see organisations in a different way?” Similarly I have in this study I have been asking how do we recognise competence, and can we use an analysis of the subject as movement to see competence in a different way? Whereas Parker for a number of reasons is “unable to deliver a solution” (Parker 1992b:13) to the questions he raises, he does give a good account of the strands and underlying assumptions of the debate on postmodernism in organisation studies.
Parker (1992b) goes to great pains in making a distinction between what it means to be post-modern (a periodisation, “after” modernism, with a hyphen) and what it is like to being a postmodernist (a theoretical perspective, without a hyphen). From this distinction follows two discussions; one on what it means to be living in a (proclaimed postmodernist) world and one on what postmodernism (as a theoretical perspective) can contribute when we are to acquire knowledge of the world in which we are living.
My intent with posing the question of who are we now is not to make final ontological claims about the times in which we are living or whether our society is moving into a different epoch, just like I did not claim that the transistions I traced in Chapter III, the ideology of competence are the only ones probable. Rather I wish to explore what, if anything, the debate on postmodernism in studies of
organisation can contribute to my study, when ultimately discussing, what becomes of subjectivity when competence is actualised?
The real danger, according to Parker, is if postmodernism equals stereotyping, i.e.
that modernism should reserve for itself faith in reason, equated with progress and that this entails the world viewed as a system that comes increasingly under our control as we gain knowledge of it (Parker 1992b:3), while postmodernism should be the way of thinking which holds that the “out there” is completely constructed by our discursive conceptions of it. Language is crucial in constituting “reality”, and all our attempts to acquire true knowledge of the world should be seen for what they are – forms of discourse (Parker 1992b:3).
The implications of this divisionary thinking for the studies of organisation would be that either we strive for as much knowledge in order to gain power over organisations, so that we are ultimately able to design them72 or we acknowledge that controlling systems input and output are beyond our reach since employees and environment are mere constructs, thus interpretation becomes central and all we can do is to “expose the fragility of organisational life and the myth of its stability” (Parker 1992b:5). As becomes evident, the postmodernism debate raises the problem of representation. If the world is changing, so are we, or as Parker says: “If our culture is being transformed, then so may our organisations”
(1992b:2).
Is Foucault a postmodernist? Is Althusser, Lacan?
Where does this leave my study, do I side with the modernists, when I work with competence projects to change practice in public organisations or am I in tune with the postmodernists when, with Althusser, Lacan and Foucault, I assess accounts of non-essentialistic subjectivity? Posing the question like this would soon lead to other questions. How can I group three, yet French albeit so different writers under one “Subjectivity” umbrella; what kind of –ism would they belong to? Was Althusser a post-marxist? Was Lacan a post-Freudian structuralist? Was Foucault a post-Nietzschian post-structuralist? As Rösing ( 2005) and Harding ( 2007) has recently argued Lacan radically challenge the binarity in psychoanalysis and point to the fluidity, sliding differentiations and asymmetrical features of the signifier.
72 For a lucid example see for instance Mintzberg’s “Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organisations” (Mintzberg 1983).
And, if we ask Focault for instance, we soon learn that nothing is more futile than subscribing to any form of fixed programme:
What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can loose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write (Foucault 1972:17).
So far I have claimed this study to be non-disciplinary, even neo-disciplinary, and I indeed believe in the strength of multiple perspectives, and of the obscure small kind of empirical work, filled with energy and almost indiscernible73. This does of course not imply that I do not take into account the specifics of the subject of which I am writing (as we saw in Chapter V), or the historical conditions under which I conduct my study (as the account of competence I gave in Chapter III).
One of the reasons for making Foucault inform this study is precisely his sensitivity towards the fragility and contingency of history. Here I believe Todd May has an important point when reminding us why we should turn to great thinkers of previous times:
Nothing outside of a fragile and contingent history made us who we are.
That, as it will turn out, is at once our nature and our hope. As Foucault tells us, “There is an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn’t be better. My optimism would rather consist in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than with necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.” (Foucault quoted in May 2005:67).
73 Michel Foucault: “I had gone in search of these sorts of particles endowed with an energy all the greater for their being small and difficult to discern” (Foucault 2002c:161).
The key word here is “more”. By this Foucault clearly signals, that the question of progress that Parker invokes, is not a decisive matter of either-or, but a flexible matter of more or less. It should be noted that though Parker seems fully aware of this point, he still ventures against “self-avowed postmodernists and not poststructuralist writers such as Derrida or Foucault” (1995:554) and thus falls prey to the kind of categorising Foucault warns against. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain Parker’s point, that:
The organisational world is not like the natural world and cannot be kicked, tested or measured in an uncomplicated way. Yet to suggest that organisations exist only as shifting and indeterminate webs of meaning also seems counter-intuitive. (Parker 1995:556)
But it should be clear that neither Althusser or Lacan and certainly not Foucault would pose such a claim. To them discourse and materiality hang come together, and becomes together. So what are we to do with this insight more than fifteen years after the debate of postmodernism was started in “Organisation Studies”?
According to Parker we have to strike the right balance between sceptisism and realism or, as he puts it, it is a matter of striking the mean, carefully noting that:
There is simply no place, independent of us and our intentions, where
“evidence” can be found when we are studying organisations (Parker 1999:43).
And yet we have to remind ourselves that this relativism does not imply a dismissal of producing words, distinctions and judgments
I simply do not see how an interesting form of conversation could take place if it did not use dualisms, and hence make judgements. Of course, we should always be suspicious of our words, of our descriptions, but this does not somehow mean we can manage without them (Parker 1999:42).
But as I have just argued above we should distinguish (sic) between making distinctions with the intent of a) choosing either one or the other or b) using distinctions to assess fragile changeable circumstances with due respect to the necessities. Claiming to belong to this or that –ism is not as important for this study as it is to show how theories of subjectivity (postmodern or not) inform studies of organisation, all in the pursuit of being able to pose the question of who are we now? This is what we will turn to in the following.