As part of my new Lectureship at Kent, I’ve been volunteered to mark a number of placement reports that undergraduate students write upon returning from a year in industry. Divided into sections like “Linking Theory to Practice” and “Reflections on Learning”, these reports are meant to ease students back into academic life after a year of working in corporations large and small, from large investment firms and famous automotive manufacturers to small start-ups and cafes. There are a number of things that I find to be troubling about these reports; number of things which have lingered with me after submitting my marks for moderation. I have boiled these down into concerns regarding the quality of scholarship and concern for the students themselves.

Regarding Scholarship: The first thing that I noted was that none of the projects offered up any kind of critical insight into the rhetorics of the modern corporation. I’ve written on this very blog about the fact that I felt like teaching students to think critically was not only an important “transferable skill” but a moral necessity of my job; a responsibility to curtail future financial crises, stop the usage of child-labour employing sweatshops, prevent environmental pollution, and in aggregate convince future managers that the crass exploitation of people and natural resources in order to create shareholder value was not only unethical and manifestly immoral but anathema to their civic and professional responsibilities. It is precisely this that made me find these reports so appalling. None could call into question a statement like “People are our greatest asset” or “we care about the environment”. None seemed able to reflect upon the fact that material on corporate websites should be treated as marketing propaganda and not a legitimate academic source. All blithely accepted the culture management regimes of the organizations that they were in and I am not sure if it is worse to believe that they didn’t but were too scared to represent their cynicism in an academic context.

Many of the projects were barely “academic” at all. Many were little more than “case-studies” for basic textbook concepts cribbed from Huczynski and Buchanan and the like (I note Clegg et al, is becoming more popular). Not only was there very little engagement with journal articles but there is no sign of any reflexivity, merely “I read about motivation in the textbook = I was motivated on the job to achieve my self-actualization needs.” While this should remind us of one of the well known problems of management research- that those we study all too often are aware of the tools that we might pursue to study them with- as I read a student’s account of how they learned about Peter Drucker’s “management by objectives” framework while at the organization that they were studying, and how they would proceed to use that same “theory” to understand the organization, I recognize that “theory” here is a sacrosanct artefact which is applied to the experience- either of life in the corporation or the same as viewed academically- and as such is beyond challenge, existing only to be applied. No aptitude for the exercise of critical judgement appears to have been cultivated.

In aggregate, this makes the reports read less like an affront to academic and scholastic values and more like a condemnation of the human condition. A compendium of excerpts from the diary entries could easily be called Excerpts from a Servile Mind or in the case of the one student who, through a typical undergraduate lack of research, said “Throughout its long history, Bosch has always been a company that has placed corporate social responsibility above all else.” Holocaust Denial and How to Profit from it: Corporate servitude on the road to genocide

Concern for the students: At some point, however, my despair at what I was reading turned to genuine upset and concern for the persons penning these narratives. While I could critique, in many cases, their lack of academic rigour or their research shortcoming; I found my analytical gaze frequently stymied by the harrowing personal reflections that often made up a part of the report. Students reflecting on stress during a merger, depressive episodes that made them feel “unmotivated to work”, anxiety over having to seek out a new placement midway through the year, instances of genuine pity and empathy in the face of an Other (having to change a customer large fees), indications of burnout and trauma etc. All of which are always legitimated and explained away as “part of the job”. I was reading recently about the horrors of the American occupation of Japan after WWII and was struck by the usage of the phrase: shikata ga nai or “it cannot be helped”. E.g. the bombing of Nagasaki was regrettable but it was a war and it could not be helped.” I see the same legitimation of suffering on a micro-level (and consequently with much less death) in these students. This normalization of a miserable organizational reality concerns me because I can foresee the awful futures that this legitimation produces.

Many diaries, also read like the most depressing diaries of a Kafka-esque bureaucrat, something cut out of the movie Brazil for being too bleak or some more subversive version of Orwell’s 1984 where instead of following Winston’s rebellion, we follow someone who is entirely indoctrinated into and unquestioning of party ideology: chronicling frustrations with traffic on the commute, which supermarket they frequent to buy lunch, what meetings they attended and what their role in these were, what procedures they learned about and when, which programs they learned to use and which colleagues they “got on with”: there was no sign of a human, a thinking and sentient person in many of them, merely an automaton going through the motions of an in-corporated life. I here invoke “incorporated” to reflect a complete colonization of self, a terrifying and complete capture of thought by the corporate apparatus that effaces the action of the capture so that students perceive their work as “critical” because it can contrast, say, two different models of culture. I felt an enormous swell of pity for these students when I realized this.

In sum, marking these assignments was an exceptionally edifying experience that I wanted to make note of. It reminds me of the importance of what I do.