There are some things that language does not quite describe.

Here’s an example. Over the last year I have been particularly interested to watch Britain bifurcate. The murky and oftentimes fuzzy lines of native/foreign, male/female, middle class/working class, political Left/Right,  have faded into the background of a simpler dichotomy.

In or Out.

Every politician’s Wikipedia page now features a note on how they voted in the Brexit referendum, some of them as prominently as their party affiliation. With the negotiations taking place at the time of writing, this means that every newspaper is covering Brexit, with various reactions and concerns being ever so clearly articulated and analyzed.

Amidst this coverage, one particular type of article, video or story stands out and there’s not really a term to describe it. “Ironic” doesn’t quite fit and “schadenfreude” isn’t altogether accurate.

Maybe it’s a Leave voter who owns a strawberry farm and suddenly realizes that most of his workforce is about to face a major obstacle getting into the country. Or, as is the case in one of the Guardian’s excellent shorts a Remain voter who doesn’t understand the way that her working class boyfriend (and his father) might feel that it’s time for some kind of change. Maybe it’s the Donald Trump supporter who is facing the prospect of losing her health insurance under the new administration’s reforms (indeed, a whole subreddit has formed to chronicle Trump voters who regret their decisions).

There is a certain humour to this that we can all appreciate and even laugh (hence the schadenfreude) but it is also one that we perhaps need to reconsider because it indicates a startling level of political polarization. That is to say, it indicates a fundamental inability to understand the thoughts, fears, hopes and desires of the other. Upon closer consideration we need a concept because the problem is not so simple as the implication of divisive politics or needing a word which can adequately capture the affective experience of engaging with a piece of news like this in order to explain why these stories have such appeal. We would need to fully develop a pedagogy of the concept in order to make sense of its entanglement within which these news items are taking place, i.e., how they emerge as a problem.

A colleague of my describes concepts as ideas adequate to the event of thought. I prefer the following two quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?:

“The concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come.”

“ A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality).”

Concepts are not merely modes of description for Deleuze and Guattari, they are heterogeneous, interrelated, evolving, and non-discursive relations to a given problem or set of problems. What the current trends in news present us with is a set of problems to which we have not yet adequately been able to respond. We need concepts, therefore, with which to think but, to return to my initial statement, we also need them to tell people that there is a problem.

This year’s CMS conference was defined more by the papers that were absent than those that were present.

This is not to say that there weren’t great papers, and consequently, very interesting and captivating discussion, particularly in the stream on Experimental Ethnography and the Future of Critique that I convened with my colleague, Oz Gore. It is also not to say that the conference was spoiled by the absence of figures like Martin Parker (notable because of his signature shirts), or of many of my Scandinavian colleagues who I assume are busy getting ready for EGOS in Copenhagen. Nor was it marred by the large number of missing presenters, though, more so than any conference that I have ever attended, it felt like every stream was short of a few presenters and had timetabling shifts to deal with those who were unaccounted for. It was not even the absence of discussion of what David Knights once called the “gladiatorial character of academic conferences” for there was no shortage of combative and aggressively competitive behaviour (both called out and left unobserved). Rather, it is to say that I was consistently surprised by the lack of an awareness of the core traditions of Critical Management Studies by the various presenters that I heard.

As one presenter delivered a paper on the quantitative metrics that were used to measure “employee engagement” without questioning the managerialist assumptions behind the concept, I wondered whether they had read the original edited volume on Critical Management Studies (or indeed any of the growing library of texts within the discipline). As I listened to an author speak avidly about the ways in which they had measured “toxic leadership” by survey I wondered whether they were familiar with Organization as a journal and the papers on Critical Leadership Studies published there. And as I sat through a discussion on what we could learn from Mary Parker Follett, I wondered how the author felt about the morally and ethically dubious nature of Follett’s tradition and whether or not this author knew of the emergence of CMS from Labour Process Theory and thus whether this author had an appreciation of how incongruous their work seemed with the spirit of CMS.

In asking myself these questions, I gained a new appreciation for disciplinarity.

As context, while doing my PhD I gave my supervisors a very hard time on issues around the question of disciplinarity; contending in various ways that the antiquated logic of discipline and the exclusionary disciplinary policing that they were involved in when they asked questions along the lines of “what does this contribute to organization studies?” or “In what ways does this work draw upon the extant traditions of Critical Management Studies?” had no place in the future of the academy. I saw discipline as a means for securing academic identity and reaffirming particular forms of subjectivity and thus, as an obstacle that needed to be undermined. As such, my entire thesis rails against the notion of discipline and proudly touts its post-disciplinary status.

How many crates should I then get to hold all of the hippos that appear as I listen to a presentation at a CMS conference and wonder what the “critical” aspects of their work are?

What saves me from hypocrisy, I think, is that while my work might deviate from the traditions of CMS, I can still claim awareness of what they are and engage with them in my pedagogic practice. This, however, is definitely something to reflect upon further.