What's unsaid

Organizations, or any collection of humans on some sort of shared expedition, are narrated.  People tell stories about themselves and the whole or collective in which they see themselves.  It is made up of words. When chosen, the words draw boundaries and distinctions.  The word can't capture everything, so something is left out.  You can contest the word and try to replace it with another. Then what was in the center is now left aside.  You can add words, but modifying the noun or verb changes it to something different. No story captures it all. 

You carry meaning, you carry significance, you carry experience. They reside with you as something with weight. That weight which is carried is not a word or a collection of words.  Words don't have weight. 

I absolutely accept that paying close attention to words will give you a way of understanding an organization, it's people, and their experience together. It is a huge part of what we owe each other in organizations, in other words a huge part of what ought to be the ethic of organization, rather than obedience or submersion of the self. Discursive work is something concrete you can do, even if other aspects of the environment seem closed to influence and formation. But all those words still miss something. 

That brings us to the idea of embodied experience and embodied cognition.  Celia Harquail has written about this.  I just got to an article she did in 2010 with Adelaide Wilcox King on the role of embodied cognition in forming or construing organizational identity. Their work starts with personal observation about how physical impressions of a workplace conflicted with verbally transmitted narratives of organizational identity and opened the door to a different understanding. Harquail and King are able to articulate the new understanding of the organization in words, but they are after something that escapes words: "an important part of knowledge remains ineffable, residing in our bodies, perpetually escaping our ability to articulate it fully in words, yet still forming a significant part of our understanding."  

From a Lacanian perspective, McSwite describes the body in terms of the register of the Real, the register of understanding that is "unpredictable, beyond conscious apprehension." This is the realm of jouissance. "This is the autonomous body, the body of experience and expression not containable in the categories of the symbolic order and consciousness. Seeking expression from it, allowing it to write, opens the possibility for bringing into consideration aspects of experience normally left outside the narrow considerations of rational or strictly conscious deliberation."

Catlaw's see the potentially transformative quality of networks residing in the potential for people to tap into "immanent, constructive, creative forces" in which people share material--codes--to create, invent and collaborate "in producing a world in common."  This is opposed to harnessing the relationships between people to construct a "transcendent constituted power (the People)." In a turn that surprised me, Catlaw turns from code-sharing, which can be seen as primarily verbal to the physical and embodied realm. In discussing how affect is also shared, he draws from psychoneuroepidemiology: "Brennan lucidly details how affects are “dumped” or projected from one person to another via airborne molecules that penetrate the body’s permeable membrane and alter hormone levels."

For me, a hard question is what to do with this embodied, immanent, ineffable layer of experience. If you are writing about it, you have to translate it into words.  And you are back to the loss of fidelity to experience we talked about above.  Perhaps you can do something with pictures.  I've been interested in Social Network Analysis, which makes some of its points my plotting connections, but I've been unclear about how you weigh and compare effects--do you translate what you see into words, or are their visual moves. 

As a practitioner, it is going to be easier to incorporate this understanding.  One can structure experiences that allow people to express themselves and their experience non-verbally.  As I said in an earlier post, recognizing the huge risk of doing something trivial that has the effect of insulting participants.  There is also a practice of tuning in to one's own sensations.  I had a therapist once who asked me when I talked about experience to tell him the physical sensations I had associated with these thoughts or experiences.  I was terrible at it, but I am sure I could have developed more ability to tune into that. 

Harquail and King identity four modalities of embodied cognition--bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, temporal-aural, and emotional. When I opened the GIX building, we designed it on an open floor plan, something that appealed to me.  After a short time in the space, it was clear that the staff were reacting differently to the level of noise and distraction.  They were having different embodied cognition on the visual-spatial and temporal-aural levels.  We were able to surface this in discussion, and made adjustments in desk placement that mitigated the effect for the people for whom the visual-sonic environment detracted from their experience.  I could have allowed myself to slow down, tune into the sound environment, and perhaps anticipate the potential for disruption.   Or connect observations of the space with other signals like a staff member wearing headphones while working.  Again, this seems to be a skill one could cultivate. 

Catlaw (2009)  “Governance and networks at the limits of representation” American Review of Public Administration 39

Harquail and King (2010). “Construing organizational identity: the role of embodied cognition” Organization Studies 31

McSwite, O. C. (2001). Reflections on the Role of Embodiment in Discourse. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 23(2), 243–250.

Quotes from McSwite on the virtue of discourse

I tweeted this, but I want to capture it here--just a couple of quotes from O.C. McSwite. 

"We can say, though, that good is generated through discourse, through grounding action in shared symbolic texts. Because the symbolic order can produce no final definitions or answers, discourse, or the process of talking about the issues and questions involved in action, is the only possibility. If we realize and accept this, as a psychoanalytic perspective enables us to do, then the inevitable indefiniteness of systems of discourse—such as any ethical system one wants to name—becomes acceptable."  (The Problem of Evil, 2006)

"The question, then, is how to bring the vast resources of the unconscious mind--and it is the source of the fundamentally new, to which I referred earlier--into play in our conscious discourse. This cannot be done, for logical reasons that seem to me to be rather obvious, through any conscious act. It has to happen implicitly. All we can do consciously is open a venue for it, and this is done by constituting relationships among people in discourse that maintains a certain amount of psychological space."  (On the Discourse Movement--A Self Interview, 2000)

Images of accounting

I've spent much of my career arguing that accounting and budgeting are different things that require different skills, but out in the wild the two fields converge much of the time.  People run the two ideas together into one thing. A lot of budget directors are trained as accountants, and the budget office frequently sits with the vice president for finance, along with the controller and pure accounting shops.  And it looks like if you want research that deals with the technical details of budgeting, a bunch is in scholarship on accounting. 

Czarniawska cited a bunch of interesting things on accounting in Narrating the Organization. One of these was an article by Richard Boland, who applies Gareth Morgan's images of organizations to accounting.  Images like organization as machine, organism and brain apply pretty directly to accounting as a system for organizing financial information. Organization as culture works well too--accounting information always tells a story, which is the realm of culture.  In my classes on nonprofit financial management, I try to teach students how to read financial audits to draw out a story of the organization in the numbers and in the notes--not just the one the issuers of the audit are trying to tell, but the story that comes out by connecting elements across categories and years that can tell a different story.  

Morgan's schema then offers organization as: political systems; psychic prison; flux and transformation; and instruments of domination. In all of these cases, the primary thing the image tells you about accounting is how upholds existing hierarchical power relationships within the organization and an undemocratic status quo. The accounting system is "the written record of false consciousness induced by participation in modern organizations" and it can "silence economic representation from those political positions outside the main power structure." 

It is hard to argue with these characterizations of accounting.  It is nothing if not conservative and regulatory. Its structures depend utterly on hierarchy.

Stepping next door into budgeting, it is still easiest to see the status quo preserving qualities of budgets. Budgets are built up (or rolled out) hierarchically.  Control over the most important planning parameters is a jealously guarded prerogative of specialists, and control over the budget is a mode of power within the organization and over others in the organization.  

Boland's application of these concepts to accounting seems to leave little room for accounting to take on a positive role.  But then it seems strange than any aspect of an organization would exist only as a negative force. Here's where it makes sense to step next door to budgeting.  Budgeting can silence representation, and does all the time, but it also has fairly reasonable ways to open up representation. One can open up space in the budget process that gives more people in the organization a chance to voice their concerns, needs and perspectives.  It is one of my hypotheses that as demands for equity-based budgets and budgeting become more insistent, people will realize that the response is not just to put money in different places, but that much rides on how decisions are made and how people participate in the conversation.  If the organization is created through conversations, the character of the conversations matters deeply. 

This is not easy work--the pressures on the budget process usually have the result that gestures towards participation get limited to hollow tokenism.  If you really open up to the many perspectives in an organization, the polyvocality can become overwhelming.  I have been in the position of inviting people to bring to the table all of their narratives about their programs and their passions in the budget process, but was honest about hard it would be to absorb all of that, give it full voice, and integrate it. But I think you have to try to do this if you want to depart significantly from mindlessly reinforcing power structures.  Dealing with embedded structural racism is going to add urgency to change the terms of participation and to figuring out a way to deal with these information challenges. 

As a starting point, the frameworks or organizational images of political system, psychic prison, and domination point out problems we spend a lot of energy suppressing. The simple exercise of imagining how you might do something "not negative" gets the mind running in interesting directions.  Even for true accounting, I think there are speculative forms and adjustments that could make accounting more democratizing.  Even liberating?  I'm not sure.   

Richard J. Boland, Jr. (1989)  "Beyond the objectivist and the subjectivist: learning to read accounting as text." Accounting, Organizations and Society 14:5/6, 591-604

Gareth Morgan ((1986)  Images of Organization

Organizational Playtime

It does pay to read to the end of the book.  I was prepared to dismiss In the Shadow of Organization by Robert Denhardt as not in the end very useful for me.  It was written in 1981, which I think would make it an early entry in the field of critical organizational theory, but there were things that frustrated me about it all through.  It concerns the devil's bargain of organizational life in modern society--necessary for survival, but at the cost of surrendering individual autonomy and creativity for the logic, or ethic, of organization, a model dominated by submission to the imperatives of the organization for control and survival.  Denhardt writes about how the rational model of organizational life denies individual human meaning, rationalizes existing patterns of domination, and asks for the abandonment of personal values. 

I was frustrated because I was looking for something more on what he imagines by meaning and autonomy.  In some cases, he reverts to a static sense of self-identity, and the core material on meanings consists of a long discussion of personality types.

But in the last chapter he introduces the idea of play, that interaction within the organization would consist both of work and play. Denhardt immediately moves to a balancing of rigor and "inventiveness," but would also involved activity directed at goals that contribute to organizational preservation with "purposeless" activity designed to affirm and provide space for the individual.  

There are many things play can mean, and I think that is OK.  Denhardt defined it as "free and spontaneous activity limited only by individual imagination" (p 124).  Sure, but play can also involve games that have rules, or which require skill, or which have goals, scores, and winners or losers. (To quote Black Stone Cherry, "If you a play a game, somebody's gonna lose" as something that distinguishes Kentucky.)  

Play refers to games, but it also refers to playing an instrument.  Similar points there.  One form of playing music is that you achieve mastery of an instrument and play, without mistakes, technically difficult music spelled out in a score.  In other cases, you play a song you wrote.  Or you improvise in jazz, but that has rules, competition, and technique.  However, there are forms of playing music that don't require that.  In improvisational music, and by this I mean what some would call non-generic improvisation, the sort of thing cultivated by Pauline Oliveros and the many people influenced by her and her idea of Deep Listening.  In this case, you can play no matter what your technical level.  The music-making encounter opens space for everyone to participate and contribute. There may be loose games or rules set up to get things going, but it's not required. 

Deep Listening and free improvisation encounters require a form of social agreement.  The process will be disrupted if someone wants to show off--to dominate others via mastery.  The process is also disrupted if one is over-deferential, and participants need to have an entry point that helps with that--one time I was in a workshop with members of the fringe music community in Houston with the revered saxophonist and improviser Evan Parker.  We were in awe, and everyone waited for him to lead.  No one wanted to make a mistake or disrupt--a mistake could be putting down something trite, or trying too hard to impress. Parker has great technique, and I wouldn't want to "show off" by circular breathing in front of someone who has mastered that.  It was frustrating, I expect for him as well as us. The whole point of this process is to allow for disruptions (like Czarniawska's interruptions) and there are not mistakes.  But power creeps in easily.  

One interesting thing about play is that it is not necessarily or primarily verbal. Denhardt's discussion of phenomenology includes this quote from Hwa Yol Jung: "Meaning involves experiencing that is preconceptual, presymbolic and preverbal (that is, something felt)" (p 103).  I have been on the lookout for where the preverbal enters into the discussion of organizational experience.  I've felt that there is a preverbal quality to sense-formation and am on the lookout for scholars who have worked on this.  Every time I see something that references images, my ears pick up but a lot of times that is still about verbal descriptions.  

In order to unleash individual consciousness and autonomy, one could imagine engaging in non-verbal forms of interaction, like doing a Deep Listening exercise--it's a lot like a form of meditation.  It also seems highly likely that this will seem hackneyed and trite, like doing morning calisthenics in emulation of Japanese corporate practices.  Sometime that devolved immediately into self-satire. 

One last thought on play.  One way of seeing the liminal experience of a consulting project is that it is a recess from the usual routine, and introduces some freedom into the work experience.  The consulting project can be a sort of play time.  This is in essence the critique of some projects--what productive output comes from them.  But framed up in terms of balancing the ethic of individual autonomy and the ethic of organization, can it be OK for it to be play time?  

Robert Denhardt. 1981. In the Shadow of Organization. University of Kansas Press.       

Rituals of renewal in administrative life

One problem I have with management theory is the emphasis on change.  The highest values are to promote and manage change.  As I've said, this reflects a perpetual sense of crisis that goes back to the 60s at least--first the crisis of corporate legitimacy prompted by the counter-culture, then stagflation and the oil crisis, deindustrialization, and so forth. As I've said before, I entered business school in an environment shaped by anxiety over competition with Japan, and our perceptions of what this was going to require of us culturally. And there is the point that change is constant.  But here's the thing.  In actually working on budgets, a great deal of what you are doing is making sure that funding continues for the things the organization and the people in it are doing today. 

This is coming from reading Barbara Czarniawska's Narrating the Organization.  Earlier this week I wrote about an article she and Mazza did on consulting as part of a ritual, and I've been trying that on for size.  There are certainly ritualistic elements, and it has some qualities of creating a separate space outside of normal routines for everybody. But in a lot of cases in my work, and what I see of others, the process does not have the clear structure that one associates with a ritual.  It does not always end with the presentation of a report, in fact less so all the time.  The end of the process is ambiguous, and in a lot of cases the consulting work merges more with the everyday work.  

Czarniawska talks about rituals here as well, this time in the budget process. There is a lot in a lot of budget processes that absolutely has a ritualistic character. Actions that are repeated each year, words repeated. But so often, as Czarniawska points out, "a sad ritual without much suspense" (p 136).  People wish the budget process was the time when new resources would come, opening the door to new activities and a transformation of the institution, but across higher ed, the story is generally resource constraint, outside of the top economic tier of institutions in a highly polarized system.   

A lot of the time, I find myself zeroing in on one very specific phrase.  Probably not a great strength in the way I consume material.  But here it is.  She's not talking about budgets per se, but in a discussion of interruptions and frictions in organizational narratives--part of a discussion about how important paradoxes are as sources of innovation. "...interruptions and 'frictions' both hamper and assist change and renewal" (p 172).  Change is everywhere, but maybe what I am missing in management theory and elsewhere is renewal.  

For a budget, most of what you are doing has to do with renewal. You are determining the extent to which you can continue funding to allow the people doing what they are doing to keep doing it.  You are renewing your programs for another year.  And this is a good thing.  Students want to know that they will have access to more or less the same courses the students in the class before had last year.  They want to know advisors and support services will be available. Employees want to know that they will get paid.  And so on ad nauseum. Count up every dollar in a budget--almost every dollar will be associated with keeping something going.  A huge goal for people up and down the process is to renew as much as possible.  

Right now budget processes are usually built in a way where a successful outcome would seem to be celebrating and supporting new things. A process that largely consists of continuation seems pointless. It lacks suspense.  The ritual fails to achieve transformation. 

Could you get an organization organized around rituals of renewal?  It seems like we don't do a lot of that in our culture.  The other day, I arrived late at a big gathering, and I saw my wife talking to the awesome person who married us (who campaigns against the death penalty).  I suggested we should renew our vows, we had everything we needed--my wife, the minister, and a bunch of friends.  I'm sure this was not as clever as I thought, and I think I just got an eye roll from my wife.  But I think it is also true that such renewal rituals are few and far between, although I might be overlooking something subtle and embedded. 

Any attempt to introduce rituals of renewal into the budget process could go wrong in so many ways. I don't know if rituals like this can be constructed or that they evolve, from conversations in an action net, to borrow from Czarniawska.  I can imagine moving budgeting in different directions by opening the conversations in ways that admit more polyvocality (I think this is one of the big requirements for equity-based budgeting). Right now budget conversations are most often about trying to achieve univocality, and carry strongly authoritarian elements even at the hands of people who see themselves as community-oriented. 

But I can imagine a world in which the budgeting process is one of the ways people in the organization talk to one another about what it is they do, and celebrate how much they are able to keep going, how they as a group have sustained this service for yet another year.  Perhaps you would take a longer look back, and reflect on how long it has been going on.  

As someone who lives with a precarious and variable income stream, it is great to know that things will go on for another year. "Oh death, won't you spare me over for another year"--yes, this is a morbid song, but part of its beauty is capturing gratitude for getting to continue. People and organizations are not immortal.    

The church is built around rituals that repeat continuously and frequently. These rituals can be cast as change that happens over and over--that the host is transformed at each celebration of communion, that in confession we are reminded that grace is continuous, and God continuously transforms the broken human substance with divine redemption. But most of this can also be seen as renewal and continuation to equal effect.  

Barbara Czarniawska. 1997. Narrating the Organization. Chicago.

Delaying tactics or traps

Much of my academic work arises from how I find the process through which organizations arrive at a decision truly mystifying.  The models of decision making present decisions as events that occur, but in my experience in higher education, those decision points are hard to find.  Part of this is because many decisions emerge, and at some point you realize they are there. It is sort of like the process of becoming an adult.  My 19-year-old stepson declared himself to be an adult on the day he turned 18, which is technically true, but we all recognize adulthood is a work in progress.  At some point we will look around and realize that he is no longer a kid in any meaningful way.  But there will not be a single point at which that occurs.  We may end up with a family story that we understand to represent the passage, and if we were a different culture there might be a formal ritual.  

Part of getting a decision made depends on enough people in the right positions aligning around a course of action, treating it as a desirable or inevitable pursuit.  That alignment is always highly inexact.  You can make the case that it would be better always to act more quickly.  It's a Nietzschean idea--the organization's existence only comes from action, from doing something.  It has no subjecthood outside of its actions. 

The benefits of an action bias seem to depend on what the action is.  If the action idea is to start firing people, there's a problem.  But caution about action has detriments.  Last summer I was asked to support an initiative to grant additional aid to foreign students who could not travel to the US as an incentive to go ahead and enroll for remote classes.  I wasn't exactly the decision-maker, but it would go no where if I did not decide it was OK.  

When the idea was presented, I immediately experienced a lot of equivocality--multiple points of view came up almost simultaneously.  Would the grants have any effect, or would we just be giving back tuition to people who would have enrolled anyway? The threat from reduced foreign students was severe and clear, we needed to do something?  Underspending in other areas might over it.  Would the underspent funds we better used in other ways?  All of these voices were equally present.  What ensued was a process to get more voices from others to help emphasize one or the other, to mitigate risks, and build a political base for the decision.  All of this took a few weeks,

One huge question on this decision was the extent to which the benefit of it was diminished by the delay.  The person who presented the plan had brought it early, before some of the threats were as clear and during a time when other sorts of decisions were the focus.  He was a colleague I trust and respect, and if there were anyone who could persuade me to jump on something almost immediately, it would be him. Even with that being true, I drew this process out. Now there is no way to determine what would have happened if we had moved more immediately.

In a large university, I find the decision as it played out more typical than quick moves to action.  While many people bemoan that tendency, breaking this pattern might on balance lead to so many frivolous and damaging actions as to undermine the survivability of the organization. I would like to see experimental conditions set up by building organizational space in which different rules could apply.  I need to give some thought to that, because I think there are going to be cases where colleges are trying to do that and establishing units or programs in a more rapid prototype organizational mode. 

Some notes on ethics of autonomy

When I was just getting started in management, it was the era of Total Quality Management and transformational leadership. Much emphasis was placed on leaders who crafted a clear vision for the firm that everyone working there understood and got in line with.  There were stories of 5 vision points on a card that everyone was expected to memorize--and internalize--and the test was whether you could stop anyone in the place, ask them about the vision and they would recite it back.  I never worked for a place where it seemed anything like that simple.  More often in higher education, people agonized over a lack of vision, and the statements offered as vision seemed to have little effective force. 

My friends outside of large organization life (or inside it) saw such things as thought control.  It sounds distinctly like brainwashing. In fact, people insist on having their own ideas about things, and my question has increasingly been why not cultivate autonomy.  It rings of humanity.  

A quick counter-argument comes from large, instrumental organizations that wield power for some result.  The result is important, and constraint on the use of power is also important.  One example would be an army.  With autonomy, you'd have a chaos of people with guns running around taking matters into their own hands.  That needs to be under control.  Of course, there is a radical pacifist stance (someone like John Day, author of A Persistent Peace) who would make the case that the answer is to dare to imagine abandoning state violence. 

OK, so what about the production of a complicated modern necessity like a car or an apartment building, which requires sophisticated marriages of human labor and capital equipment, complicated supply chains, and the literal power to run machines.  Can't see getting any of that done without regimentation and compliance. As with the armed forces, there is room to question the basic premise, that these are necessities and that they are worth the tradeoffs they entail.  Even if you make the case against cars, or for different kinds of shelter, you are still left with problems of production at scale--a train system is as complicated to produce as cars, even bicycles require factories and roads. Unless you are willing to argue for return to a form of pre-modern existence.  

The way to understand this may be as ethics.  The ethics of freedom--how much freedom is ethically sustainable. At what point do you owe it to others to coordinate your actions with others. And the ethics of compliance--could we could do more to enlist active acceptance of regimentation, and greater recognition of the gift that each member of the organization bestows on the collective by agreeing to comply.  Can we incorporate more elements of contingency, so each individual is more active in making agreement, and in assessing the benefits of the trade offs.  Are rituals of renewal needed?   

Consulting and liminality

A somewhat consistent refrain in my family life has been "this is David, my [fill in the blank for relationship]--he's a consultant, we have no idea what he does."  I've never been able to help much with this.  My wife has decided she has figured it out, that I get paid to annoy people. That is based on the fact that I sometimes exhibit behaviors that are considered to be "consultanty" and these are annoying.  "Consulting--don't try this at home."

Most writing about organizations talks about people who have what seem like more definable jobs. When the consulting profession, whatever it is, receives notice, it's never good.  So it was appealing to find Czarniawska and Mazza's article "Consulting as a Liminal Space" which treats consulting as a reasonably legitimate activity which actually has interesting characteristics that have implications beyond this peculiar, unexplainable activity.  

Czarniawska and Mazza look at consulting as a ritual activity that creates a liminal space within the organization in which people leave their set roles, enter a space where their roles are "temporarily undefined" and then reconfigure the organization and their roles into a presumably changed new state.  They note that in a lot of cases, the purpose of a consulting project is to get people or an organization back on track. A lot of projects may in fact be rituals not of transformation, but of renewal.  

The consultants themselves are in the liminal space on a more or less continuous base. Czarniawska and Mazza finger some of the characteristics of occupying that space--issues of autonomy (consultants need to reflect the will of clients), an external locus of control, and fragility of self-esteem.  They also capture how it can be energizing for the staff at the client--they get to leave their normal routines, and often find themselves being asked to think more expansively and creatively than is always possible in the course of their normal workday.  From the client side, the time on a consulting project can seem like a sort of holiday, even if it almost always is something that must be done in addition to regular duties. 

People who do consulting on a steady basis--not as an episode between "real jobs"--are choosing to stay in the liminal space, or find themselves stuck there, and that this is becoming a more frequent state for professionals in a world of gig labor.  The decline in stable workplaces has been noted and lamented, but these authors see it more ambivalently. "These studies found the liminal condition both exhilarating and frustrating, as workers were torn between the promise of freedom given by a (liminal) space, and the promise of stability given by a place" (286).  I was writing recently to a colleague, and in the context of an exchange about some current insecurities, I noted that long ago I made a choice for freedom and independence. I hope that on balance this has been to my benefit psychically.  It is very hard to be sure. 

Czarniawaska, B. and C. Mazza. 2003. "Consulting as a liminal space."  Human Relations, 56:3, 267-290.       

The eye in Fanon

Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is a provocation. It strains at the boundaries of form, moving between psychological analysis, literary criticism, and dramatic narrative. It confronts the reader with the experience of racism and colonialism.  In its core, it makes me realize I read it as a white man, and imagine a white man as the reader Fanon is addressing--his very point is that deeply embedded within culture and history and human psychology are assumptions about who reads, who thinks, and who receives information.  Those structures are so pervasive, that I imagine Fanon shaking the bars of these psychic iron cages as the only hope of inciting people to break out of them. 

Fanon has been high on my list of things to read because it seems like he will take you into a core of seeing race and culture differently, and from there shaking loose even more restrictions.

One generative thread is the idea of being seen.  Fanon wants black people to be able to see themselves as themselves, not defined in a disadvantaged way relative to whiteness.  "The black man would like to be forgotten, so as to gather his force, his authentic force" (p 163)--I understand being forgotten to mean be forgotten as the way blackness was in counterpoise to whiteness, as a being defined by being "exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white" (p 178).  This requires an "eye" that serves a "correcting mirror" which enables us to "correct cultural mistakes." It reminds me of the eyes in Olson, and like Olson, Fanon sees the risk in universals: "How come I have barely opened my eyes they had blind-folded, and they already want to drown me in the universal?...We need to touch with our finger all the wounds that score our black livery." (p 163-164). 

Once alerted to the problem of black-ness, enlightened white society might suggest a quick fix--let's just get past race.  Fanon says not so fast.  There's a first step,"disalienation"--you've got to find a way for black people (and others as you extend this to other forms of domination) to come into possession of themselves and create themselves.  

For all Fanon's visceral confrontation of a white, colonial reader, he's very idealistic. "May the subjugation of man by man--that is to say, of me by another--cease.  May I be allowed to discover and desire man wherever he may be" (p 206).  I'm not sure I know what disalienation looks like, and I would hazard to say that it is not discernable from the outside--I can't say here is an occasion where a black person experiences disalienation--won't it be grounded in very specific, subjective experience.  I like to think that some of what is called Afro-futurism contains disalienating elements.  It seems to be present as I go through the history of the AACM so carefully recounted by George Lewis.  It is easily an act of imposition by me.  But that disalienation will be important to find as a more general phenomenon. 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks translation Richard Philcox (Editions de Seuil 1952/Grove 2008) 

The abstract job and organizational alternatives

Late in the Thatcher era, there were reports that her campaign argument was There Is No Alternative--TINA. At this point I hear Thatcher in Gillian Anderson's personification on The Crown rather than a direct memory. TINA referred to .  opponents for PM--I can't remember if Labor was running Tony Benn in those days.  It also meant her policies of privatization, public sector reductions, working class privation.  It was also the era of Francis Fukuyama's End of History.  All absurd.

I run into TINA problems in thinking about alternatives to the constraints of hierarchy, rigid resource allocations, and limited, ossified strategic requirements.  Part of my task is to look for alternatives.  I don't expect to find them in a fully operative form, but expect to find the kernel of an idea, or brief moment when alternatives took form, like some higher end element.  

One reason (among many) to look at Feminist Theory, and scholars from non-hegemonic contexts, is to see what alternative forms they may have developed.  As Joan Acker put it in a 1990 article, "an important feminist project is to make large-scale organizations more democratic and more supportive of humane goals" (p 140).  The point about "large-scale" is particularly important.  Alternate forms exist for small scale organizations, but life in today's world requires the output of large-scale organizations.  I have yet to be convinced that breaking society down into small scale units which consistently result in people having basic needs provided.  

In 1990, Acker wasn't able to point to great examples: "Part of the feminist project was to create nonhierarchical, egalitarian organizations that would demonstrate the possibilities of nonpatriarchal ways of working. Although many feminist organizations survived, few retained this radical-democratic form. Others succumbed to the same sorts of pressures that have undermined other utopian experiments with alternative work forms, yet analyses of feminist efforts to create alternative organizations were not followed by debates about the feasibility of non-patriarchal, nonhierarchical organization or the relationship of organizations and gender." (p 141)  It's a reminder of the era of idealistic experiments that took place, and points to one strategy, which is to go back and revisit that history.  Duberman's Black Mountain--documenting one of those great experiments of the past--sits on my shelf staring at me--not accusingly, but more like my dog, who is perpetually asking "what are we going to do next?"

Acker's not cynical about what we can do--she cites Kathy Ferguson's The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (1984): "Ferguson argues further that feminist discourse, rooted in women's experiences of caring and nurturing outside bureaucracy's control, provides a ground for opposition to bureaucracy and for the development of alternative ways of organizing." (p 144)  

Now I've got to get up to date on these experiments and ideas. 

One key idea for Acker is that the masculine gendered organization excises worker's private lives, which deny things like child-bearing and rearing in favor of an abstract worker.  There is something appealing to the idea of work that is embedded in communities, where people would be recognized for all aspects of their life. A co-op as a rule. The risk is that of the small town, the loss of privacy.  In the wrong hands of authority, a work place that attempts to address the "other imperatives of existence" (p 149) would heighten oppression.   

Acker envisions theory that leads to transformation of organizations "in ways that dissolve the concept of the abstract job and restore the absent female body" (p 154).  As a thought experiment, I'd like to look at that sentence if you stop before the last clause.  What if you "dissolve the abstract job" and instead build organizations around the individuals?  The abstract job is a foundation of "proper" management.  The job not the person. But of course, in the real world, organizations build jobs around people all the time, for many reasons, most of which are considered suspect.  For one example, Affirmative Action asks that organizations define jobs on the basis of objective criteria that make any job accessible to a pool of applicants who will compete based on merit.

A person-based approach to building an organization would try to find a home for particular people, say finding work for every person in a community. This is most conceivable in a smallish community.  You could make a point of crafting work for specific people who differ from the characteristics of the people currently in the organization.  This method for building organizations would entail lots of issues that probably make it unworkable, but it does suggest more tolerance for shaping jobs to people who are already within an organization, and may require very different job classification and compensation structures. 

Acker, Joan. (1990). Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Gender & Society, 4(2), 139–158. 

Duberman, M. B. (1972). Black Mountain: An exploration in community ([1st ed.].). Dutton.

Ferguson, K. E. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Temple University Press.   

What's so bad about Pandora's Box?

Kimberle Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" from 1989 is sometimes identified as the ur-text of Critical Race Theory. Obviously people writing critically about race goes back further, but a classmate this winter made the point that one should read this.  The core idea, there in the title, is intersectionality.  Crenshaw's a legal scholar, which gives her a particular focus on how discrimination is defined when the chips are down in a legal proceeding.  And there she saw a consistent pattern of one-dimensional analysis in which one could make a claim of race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both. Which had the effect of emphasizing the experience of the most privileged group within the discriminated group--white women and black men.  She argues that justice requires that you start from the least privileged subgroup, and build up law and social practice from there.  

A lot of analysis and problem-solving involves simplifying things, reducing the dimensions.  In my current project, developed a conceptual framework on a three dimensions, but then focused on two dimensions, making the case that these are the key dimensional relationships we want to address in this context in this project.  But the third dimension of the context remains, and truth be told, it influences how you really want to think about the two dimensions I focused on.  Crenshaw pushes against that simplification and seeks to "embrace the complexities of compoundedness" (p 166). 

One of the decisions she cites (DeGraffenreid v General Motors) explicitly raises the specter of this compoundedness: "'The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box'" (p 142). Pandora's Box. It is always a problem. It is an instant end to an argument.  Too much complexity, or just too much period.  What if you turn the tables.  Pandora's Box is just fine.  It represents the richness of experience.  What if the task is to live in a world overfilling with all that is released.  Well, actually not released.  It's always there.  My two-dimensional and three-dimensional axes just tame it momentarily. 

Obviously, one needs these simplifications in order to even have coherent language, let alone make a decision or take an action.  But what if one's attitude is that the fine axial dimensions of analysis are a temporary step out of the flurry of Pandoran reality, into which you need to step back in, to experience more and learn more. As I've started thinking about CRT, as you deal with the issues of justice and restoration that it entails, the exciting part is how it blows open the rigidity of any categorization and universalization.  The compounds keep permutating. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:1, 139-167

   

Harvey on Neo-Liberalism

Neo-liberalism is a term that kept coming up last year.  Often it seemed like an overly simple explanation or accusation.  The AAUP criticized PSU administrative actions as driven by neo-liberal ideology, which didn't seem like a particularly accurate explanation (some of the issues had to do with very rigid embedded financial arrangements for administration that were decidedly non-responsive to anything like a market signal), and didn't help much in identifying what should be done. I've pretty well lived through neo-liberalism, watching market-based approaches to government come in during the Carter years in the Washington bureaucracy where my father and neighbors worked, and then living through each step of its progress. Still, I figured I should spend some time to think about some more, hence a run through David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).  

The fundamental idea is that market mechanisms are better than planning, therefore the government should turn over everything it can to the private sector, relax regulation on capital, businesses, and resource exploitation, permit frictionless capital flows between nations, and promote the freest trade possible. Its leading figures were Thatcher and Reagan, followed by many others in the US, UK and elsewhere. 

All of my working career has occurred during this period, so I take much of it for granted as just representing the system we live in. My job is typically to help institutions figure out how to do the best for themselves and their stakeholders under these conditions.  I don't see great opportunities for a single institution to decide it is going to play by different rules, although this is precisely why I want to come up with models that are not premised on resource growth. 

I have to admit, I'm soft on markets.  I think they have their place--and not a small place--and they have been with us a very long time.  The alternatives in history--say a feudal system of mutual economic obligations--are not better. 

The last 40 years have unquestionably seen government force services into market-based mechanisms where they don't work .  For example, by and large we don't set up markets for the armed forces, but where we've moved towards private contractors it moves quickly into criminality. We haven't had great success with market systems for a road system--even in the Seattle area, surge pricing for highway tolls has been a huge flop. Few of the conditions for a competitive market could be met in these area.  Healthcare sucks as market-based as we are--consumers/citizens can't effectively shop.  

Garbage pickup may work OK under a market.  When I was a kid, the sanitation crews were full-time government jobs, and you recognized the guys on the trucks jumping off to empty the cans into the truck.  Now garbage service is outsourced to private contractors with much more capital intensive operations--specialized trucks with long arms pick up standardized receptacles, humans rarely touch the cans. Let's assume it is cheaper.  While the loss of solid government jobs is harmful to the community, I'm not sure it makes sense for society to dedicate more resources than necessary to this function. 

With universities, there is a market.  No one really is interested in monolithic government provision of education--we have lots of diversity, even within the public university sector, and a valuable private non-profit sector exists and is still seen as having value. So greater market emphasis in public sector higher ed creates new challenges, but doesn't result in pure dysfunction the way it does say in prisons.  

One interesting thing this year is that we did not talk or read much about class.  Harvey talks about class, and the need for "a rejuvenated class politics," but his concept of class seems more positional than functional--he makes reference to multiple classes, who seem defined by where they fall in an income distribution.  There are also references to the "ruling class" but I did not see a definition of that.  I see class as being defined by a specific relationship to political power and the means of production and wealth generation.  In this case, the ruling class would be those people who by virtue of wealth and other factors are in a position to wield power and control the economy, and there would be a small number of other classes defined by their relationship to those factors and to the ruling class--one formulation is working class, subsumed class (or classes), and perhaps an utterly dispossessed group. One of my assignments for myself for this summer is to get to a book that has been on my shelf a long time, Resnick and Wolff's Knowledge and Class (1987), which I've always understood addresses just these sort of definitions.   

Harvey talks about Neoliberalism being a departure from Embedded Liberalism, but I don't see him treating the period pre-1976 as a golden era. These regimes were the ones that brought you nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and were the object of Marcuse's critique.  In my sector, higher education, there does seem to be some interest in going back to an old way, in which most of the costs of public education were picked up by state appropriations, and public institutions were assigned defined geographic and programmatic areas, insulated from competition.  Some movement towards de-privatizing public higher ed funding might be possible--Biden seems to want to go there, but I'm not sure he will get anything past Congress. It doesn't seem like a clock you can turn back. So I think you go forward with competition and markets, but perhaps different configurations of the entities in the market and different regulation of the markets. 

The 2005 pub date of the book comes out a few ways.  Some of his predictions about the weakness of the neo-liberal order don't seem to have some to pass--China for one continues to be able to adapt and stay one step ahead of its structural issues.  But what is the timeline required? The problem of tech monopolies was not as visible then.  Today, in these hugely important sectors, more competition not less would be good.  And I don't think I want to see government confiscation of social networks--you could argue you've seen that in China. He actually does a good job of identifying the inclination of neo-liberalism towards authoritarianism--the tendency was visible enough in Bush and Cheney and the doctrine of the unitary executive--but now that has emerged full-formed, and like any authoritarian regime it is not married to a specific ideology or economic program. 

My biggest question about neo-liberalism is the extent to which it represents a break from what preceded.  It can represent a continuation of a strongly free-market polity that goes back a 100 years or more.  But there was a change in the regime of consumption--to use Regulation school terminology--from the Fordist period dedicated to increasing the wealth and consumption power of workers in the West, to the end of that and a regime more geared towards diminishing the living standards of workers. In terms of Skowronek's political time, there is a regime change with Reagan, raising the question of the extent to which we are dealing with political or economic changes.  Yes, they are connected, but they are different.  

Organizational Miasma

I couldn't resist an article in organization studies that has "miasma" in the title: "Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma" by Yiannis Gabriel, who is affiliated with the University of Bath School of Management, which also has Andrew Brown on faculty.  I wonder if I can find a way to hang out there at some point.    

Miasma is used here in terms of psychoanalysis, in which it describes "a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual."  Gabriel's organizational miasma infects all those who work in an organization.  He bases the development of this idea on a case study of an organization that has gone through a sudden and disruptive transformation that threw out an established organization narrative, culture and people in favor of something meant to modernize the organization and make it more competitive. One thing I like about Gabriel's stated approach is that he wants to use trauma to develop observations about what might be considered more normal conditions, in tune with an approach to psychoanalysis in which normal behavior contains within it elements shared with psychotic behavior, and studying extreme behavior provides insights on understanding everyday behavior.  I believe the issues of depression and dispossession are very common, and not limited to organizations that have engaged in spectacular attacks on the previous order, or which have particularly mismanaged changes. 

It is also the case that a cult of change controls much management thinking.  Management and organization theory seem to presuppose the need for transformation of organizations, and elevate "transformative" leadership to the highest rank. I've lived with this most of my career in management, having entered business school in years dominated by anxiety over competition from Japan.  That anxiety has led to successor anxieties reliably. 

The characteristics of miasma are devaluing and objectifying the individual (employees and customers), absence of will to resist, self-criticism, devaluing the past, absence of stories and narratives about the past, feelings of inadequacy and uncleanness. (Gabriel p 1142).  He describes it as a disease that  "undermines people’s faith in their gods, their institutions and their identity" (p 1148).

Why is this happening--at the crux Gabriel draws from the work of the next person I need to add to my list to check out, Howard Stein, one of whose books is Nothing personal, just business: A guided journey into organizational darkness (Quorum 2001). He fingers the problem as misplaced faith in organizations as source of immortality, and people sacrifice themselves psychically.  "But the gods of the bottom line are implacable. They demand human sacrifices...the religion of the bottom line acknowledges no permanent authority, no human is too important to be dispensed with when his or her usefulness is over. This creates an ethos of survivalism – a constant anxiety over each individual’s and each organization’s ability to survive in what is construed as an environment of endless terrors and turbulence" (Gabriel 1143). 

Gabriel sees some origins in the neo-liberal shift of the 80s, but I think it goes back further--like Sandberg and Catlaw, I'll point to the secularization of religious values as an effective but problematic underpinning of capitalism as per Weber. I'm working on Harvey's book on neo-liberalism and will write on that soon.  I think that from a British perspective, the 80s are more clearly a watershed than in the US, where the move towards more social responsibility is something of a departure from old norms. 

One thing that is interesting is that if you are in fact a dinosaur and still engaged with traditional religion, you hardly see your organization as representing immortality.  In a denomination like Presbyterian, the existential threat is just over the horizon.  It is hard to imagine the denomination existing in 50 years, and one wonders what will happen to its values and ideas for what they are worth. Instead, it engages you a project of resistance, and asks that you commit yourself to actively build identity and institutions, and a place for God--physically, organizationally, socially, and politically. 

The description above about an environment of "endless terrors and turbulence"--that's the starting point for Marcuse, but now cast not in terms of nuclear annihilation, but a more pervasive and pernicious terror that is nearly the explicit content of the generally understood employment contract. 

The Quantified Self

In her work, my professor Billie Sandberg often raises issues around quantification and measurement in organizational context as an ideological act that merits critique, one of the key markers of a neo-liberal regime.  I need to spend some more time with her writing on it, and with theories of neo-liberalism that she draws on, because I hesitate on the points on quantification.  I think of quantification as being useful, worth doing in all sorts of contexts, and that quantification per se is ideologically neutral.  Even a radical or revolutionary initiative would want to draw on quantifiable measures for analysis, forecasting, and assessment. Knowing that I need to spend some time with this, an article she did with Thomas Catlaw on the Quantified Self rose high on my reading list.

In my experience, the most common form of this movement is in health and wellness data.  Think Fitbits, mindfulness apps like Headspace, or the Noom weight loss app. They all collect data about you, shoot it to the cloud, and repackage it in ways designed to help you achieve some goal—fitness, mindfulness, etc.  In many cases, the apps incorporate gamification—prizes and awards for achieving milestones—and a social dimension.  I tend to think of this movement as being a cult limited to coastal tech communities, but I have to admit I’ve been using an app called Strava to measure my walks and runs, and I’m connected on it with a few friends in California.  I’m not immune.

Sandberg and Catlaw analyze this movement in terms of “practices of the self, which constitute the modalities by which the self acts on the self” and as a contemporary form of historical practices of “self-care” designed to prepare elites for governing. The collection and use of information about the self to manage the self reflects a pervasive value of entrepreneurship—the individual takes themselves on a product to be developed, optimized and improved. Their research involves analyzing a number of video logs posted on the Quantified Self website (Homepage - Quantified Self) to identify the goal of the self-government activity, the ethical substance (the target of their efforts),  the means through which that subjectification occurs, and the methods.  One significant observation is that while the tools collect physical data, the purpose of the contributors is generally to gain greater control over their minds.  The vlogs also bring out that this is a very solitary pursuit, directed towards control of the self, for the self.

Sandberg and Catlaw are interested in public administration and governance, and come to this work as part of their study of the influence and ideology of technology and use of influence in government, but one of the really interesting things about the paper is that they are identifying precursors to a potential direction in governance.  “Though these highly personalized practices do not (yet) purposefully crowd-source data back into the cloud for state-driven big-data analytics, we see subjects who are beginning the process of self-governing suitable for precisely such governmental practice.”  At this stage in their work they leave open the possibility that these practices may provide opportunities for liberation, for “wresting our own mundane, biological beings from the relentlessness of the neoliberal market,” but the skepticism is apparent, and there’s some earlier work they did on the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive that I haven’t read yet that may provide more evidence of current or imminent use of these tools.  When I think of the Trump Administration, it seems more likely that that group would have delegated this work of information-control and manipulating self regulation to private sector ancillaries.  Which is consistent with privatizing trends that Billie addresses in her work.

One section of the paper makes a fascinating aside to Weber and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of Weber’s major arguments was that religious asceticism provided a foundation for a secular, utilitarian value that elevated labor and self-sacrifice, through which a person developed themselves into an effective economic subject.  I found it very useful to see the line drawn between that concept and Foucault’s ideas about creation of the subject and self-discipline, and then for Catlaw and Sandberg to show how these contemporary practices continue and extend these foundational Western practices. Technology it would seem keeps making our society capable of becoming more intensely what it already is.

Thomas J. Catlaw & Billie Sandberg (2018) The Quantified Self and the Evolution of Neoliberal Self-Government: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2017.1420743