Teaching students to be sceptical of the facades that organizations effect is one of the most important things that I did in the last year.

Lecturers in Business Schools across the world are straddled with a profound challenge: trying to prevent the next financial crisis, the next Enron or the next Volkswagen scandal by teaching students to think about the broader impact of their decisions as managers and reflect upon the civic responsibilities of the profession.

Over the last academic year, I worked as a part of a course that asked first-year students on an undergraduate degree program in Management to do two presentations on contemporary corporations. In the first, students were asked to present generally on specific key concepts attached to the company of their choice (“managing”, “hierarchy”, “values” etc.). The result was unexpected. Sure, many students had opted to discuss firms with “ethical” practices like the Body Shop or John Lewis. With “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) being the buzzword on everyone’s lips and “sustainable business” being the new management consultancy du jour, this was unsurprising. That is to say, with many firms eager to show an increasingly concerned public that they are doing their part to draw the planet away from global ecological collapse, it was to be expected (though still commendable) that these prospective managers would be reflecting upon the civic commitments and societal accountability of their profession.

What was surprising, however, was that my students trusted corporations to report truthfully on their ethical and sustainable practices. From their presentations, it became clear that it did not occur to many of the students that material posted by a corporation on the internet might count as marketing material that sought, among other things, to improve one’s perception of the corporation’s brand. To me as an academic who studies organizations, it is easy to take for granted that someone would doubt or be suspicious of what an organization puts in press releases or posts on its online spaces. I understand this to be a façade managed by Public Relations and marketing teams, one that represents a non-existent reality of “social responsibility”. Thus, I was simply astonished that the majority of students had not even considered that a corporation might not be the best judge of how “ethical” their business practices were or that corporations might not be trustworthy enough to self-report their environmental impact.

The second presentation, in which students were challenged to make a decision about whether to take money from an angel investor and either expand factories in the UK or outsource to Cambodia (where labour and manufacturing cost were lower), confirmed my suspicions that something was wrong here. Many students found themselves thinking about fiduciary responsibilities ahead of concerns about the carbon footprint of shipping; about profits over potentially poor labour standards. A majority opted to outsource and in their presentations they gave the same tired rhetoric that we’ve all heard from corporations time and time again. Statements like “we care about the environment”, or “our employees are our number one asset”, following which they would discuss how Cambodia’s lower minimum wage would mean increased profits for their firm. That is to say, now they were the ones presenting a façade of CSR.

When pressed in a Q&A, many folded and could not speak about the paradoxical ideas at work here. The best presentations ended up being those that tried to argue that they would try to “build sustainability into their actions”, for example using a material made only in Cambodia (e.g. Kapok fabric) or that they would see investing in local communities as a priority, but the majority had no answer. “Socially responsible” was simply another adjective that they could deploy to describe their brand; one that carried no real moral and ethical weight and signified no more concern for the well-being of humanity than any other descriptor. What was interesting here is that the same could be said for those who opted to stay in the UK, that is, that they invariably tried to paint the act of staying in a positive light, as though the corporation should be rewarded for not exploiting minimum wage labour in Cambodia, even where it was clear that they intended to pay no more than minimum wage to their UK workers.

The second presentation proved to be a watershed moment and many left the course reflecting critically upon the decisions that they had made, the morally dubious ways in which they had tried to justify them and, moreover, the façades that they are convinced to participate in as consumers. That is to say, we as members of the public know that modern corporation has a negative impact upon the environment, but how many of us stop to genuinely consider whether what is being said by firms in their online spaces? How many of us critically reflect upon the image of the “ethical corporation” and how this gets used as an empty marketing tactic?

This gets me to the heart of the matter. What scholar Douglas Kellner calls“Critical media literacy” is thus not just another academic fad or preoccupation; it is an essential component of survival in contemporary society. Getting students to the point where they no longer blithely accept corporate rhetoric and repeat empty statements which constitute trite attempts at virtue signalling is crucial for precisely the reason of avoiding the crises and ethical compromises for which these rhetorics serve as a cover.

None of this is to say that there are not “ethical firms” or that all of my students are morally bankrupt. Rather, it is to suggest that most Management students need help to reflect upon the various ways in which corporations represent ethics so that they may not only become more savvy consumers but more importantly, may take up the challenge to think about what makes a “good” manager and why the profession itself has been historically compelled towards scandal. Indeed, if at least a few of them left the course thinking about, in light of increasing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and our general impact upon the planet, how to genuinely conduct business sustainably and responsibly, then as as a teacher, I can’t really ask for more than that.

(Special thanks to Dean Pierides at the University of Manchester for designing the course discussed here)

My work in context

In the same way that the evolving discipline of “management” started looking to Psychology as early as the 20’s and 30’s or considering Sociology in the 60’s and 70’s (forgive the ad hoc chronology), in the 1990’s; largely spurred on by the work of scholars like David Knights, Hugh Willmott, Gibson Burrell, Robert Cooper, Mats Alvesson, John Hassard, Steve Linstead, Robert Chia, Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter etc.; Organization Studies began turning to philosophy and furthering its engagements with critical theory in order to address problems which it faced within the modern corporation interalia power, identity, anxiety, forms of discrimination, disciplinary regimes of control in the organization, politicking, expanding managerialism, and the marketization and deregulation of the 1980’s etc. etc. To oversimplify, these scholars were concerned to “bring the discipline up-to-date” as it were, with developments within the last 100 years of philosophy and critical theory including postmodern and poststructural philosophy (Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan and in particular Foucault) as well as existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir) and the products of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas, Marcuse, Fromm etc.), drawing inspiration and offering critique, with the best research in this area giving something back to the theory with which it sought to engage (whether conceptual innovation or case study etc.). This is a project that is still taking place today: keeping organization studies at pace with developments in philosophy (see work being done right now around object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism) as well as the rest of the social sciences (see work around organizational ethnography and the ontological turn) even as much as the converse is true. This is where my work is located: in the context of a renaissance of concern with and for the work of French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.
Why philosophy?

In general terms, my interest in philosophy stems from and is underpinned by a singular question: “How can I engage with some of the most visionary and insightful thinkers of the last century in order to improve my understanding of the world and the organizations that populate it?” Once you understand that this is the core of my intellectual project, everything else that I am interested in becomes fairly self-explanatory.

It explains why I am preoccupied with Critical Management Studies and its interest in understanding the ways in which power, discipline and control shape our experiences of the contemporary corporation or the ways in which management is taught in the contemporary business school and how this is inextricably complicit in the production of every major social and moral atrocity over the last 100 years. It explains why for my doctoral work, I became interested in research methods, that is, in the question of how we can understand something as large and complex as a shopping centre (my research question was simply: “What is a shopping centre?”) holding implicitly thus that the ways in which we think about a shopping centre (as a place to buy things, as a place of collective gathering, as a landlord with tenants, as a private space that masquerades as a public one), are always inadequate to the complexity of the lived experience of the space which shapes behaviour, perception and the possibilities of thought in ways that are impossible to disentangle from the social milieu- and further, that the ways in which we research it are not adequate to the understanding and appreciation of this complexity. Hence it is necessary to reconsider some of the metaphysical preconditions of research (specifically ethnography) to understand how we might begin to think about in ways that can appreciate and develop this complexity.

My current projects take a similar line, considering for example, how our understanding of management guru literature or organizational history can be enriched through the consideration of Deleuze’s work, even as much as the converse is true.

Why is critical management studies important?

Reflecting recently on how to explain the importance of critical management studies to a Masters student, I came up with the following and thought it good to record such a definition to remind myself of it in future:

What do the Nazi “Final Solution”, the financial crisis of 07/08, the rise of Donald Trump and other populist leaders, sweatshops and the continued usage of child labour, the increasing dependence of the population upon antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, anthropogenic climate change and rising levels of stress and workaholism all have in common?

They are all directly attributable to the ways in which management is taught and thought of within the contemporary Business School. While several scholars (Martin Parker comes to mind) have articulated this critique better than I can, suffice it to say that we all spend so much time in, around and under the purview of corporations that it is easy to forget that they are organized and managed by the very principles that the Business School teaches and develops. To not address these concerns is to be complicit in their production. There is no moral grey area here as far as I am concerned. Either one is provoking Business School students to think critically about the human and social effects of what we teach: bureaucracy, managerialism, the blind culture of unthinkingly accepting market solutions as positive, profit at any cost, managing culture, leadership, the management of “human resources”- or one becomes directly responsible when a graduate of your university advises their company to evade taxes and ignore their civic responsibilities, off-shores production to a factory with a deplorable history human rights abuses, dumps chemicals into the ocean, falls prey to a con-artist or guru posing as a transformational leader or manipulates and abuses employees via zero-hour contracts and culture management schemes. This is what we have taught students to do or legitimate through the Business School’s ideology, or failed to teach them not to do, and yet we respond with surprise and scandal when they do it. This is why CMS is important to me, because of the pedagogical responsibility to ensure that the next generation of managers can fulfil their roles with a strong critical and moral compass that can respond with circumspect judgement to the things that the modern corporation might ask of them.

There is a black hole at the end of a PhD of which perilously little is said.

I wasn’t always the best or brightest student but around the age of sixteen I got my act together and started producing work that put me at the top of my class. From that point on I got used to a reality wherein academic success was a norm. Straight “A’s” in the Caribbean equivalent of GCSE’s, three more A’s at A-Levels, a first-class Bsc, a Distinction for my MA along with an award for academic excellence and finally an excellent review of my PhD thesis by two distinguished scholars who had only a few minor corrections to suggest. This represents over a decade of studying; including quiet nights spent alone and reading, early mornings at the library, skipping meals and social events, 80+ hours of work per week; all in an attempt to achieve something called academic excellence.

When I finished my PhD I started applying for lectureships in my field. Cognizant of the fact that my publications are still in the pipeline I focused on relatively junior faculty positions like Assistant Professorships, Teaching or Research Fellows; the kind that don’t mandate having a completed PhD. It never occurred to me that being clever or being a good teacher would not be enough to get a post.

The first few rejection letters hit like a truck.

Fast forward six months and Universities that I have applied to and been rejected without being invited for an interview include: Bristol University, University of the West of England, Birmingham City University, University of Surrey, Queen Mary University, University of the West of Scotland, Bath Spa University, Cardiff University, Lancaster University, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Bath, Swansea University, University of St Andrews, University of Lincoln, University of Leicester (this one hurt more than the others), University College Dublin, Maynooth University, Leeds Trinity University, York St John University, University of Leeds, Anglia Ruskin University. Quite an impressive list and one that I imagine I will be adding to before I find a post.

Needless to say, I was not prepared for the extent and scope of rejection and had cause to reflect recently on my time as a PhD and whether or not anything in the last few years of my life had prepared me for this.

We acknowledge the psychological stresses of doing a PhD and that there are more people doing PhD’s than there are academic posts available for them (i.e., competition is fierce) but perhaps we still aren’t doing enough to prepare academics-in-training for the realities of the job world; particularly that they might be facing, for the first time in their adult lives, failure. Just talking about it is a huge step. Johannes Haushofer’s “CV of failures” is a great example of this and reading it recently made me feel decidedly less awful about my situation.

However, I strikes me how problematic it is that this is the naturalized and generally accepted reality of academic life. Some advice for post-PhD’s from a leading jobsite is particularly chilling: “Being successful at this stage of your career is all about having the drive to push forward even during times when you may be struggling financially or when permanent, secure jobs are not available.”

Is this really all that we can offer our brightest scholars? A disposable future?