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.

As of the 18th September 2017 I am no longer unemployed and stuck in a post-PhD hole. Instead, I am a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour/HRM at the University of Kent. While I’m still job insecure because I don’t know what I’m going to do next year when my contract ends, and somewhat petrified that I have to convene my first  module on managing contemporary HRM, I have a post at a University which is more than I expected to have a month ago.

Canterbury is an absolutely beautiful city that I’m still exploring and aside from my overly letigious landlord and a few HR hiccups, I’m relatively happy and settling in. I do however have to note something that happened in my first departmental meeting. At one point the former department head did a count of the number of three and four star papers in the room to assess whether the department was meeting university targets. While it was a mundane gesture in the context of the conversation (one about university targets and advertising the excellent research done by the department) to me it seemed to shift the atmosphere of the room from collegial to administrative and gave the entire meeting an uncomfortable tone that seemed slow to pass.

I thought that I understood the importance of publishing but really had no concept of how gripping “4* fever” was. I don’t think that I appreciated that it was a complex collective and personal identity project and not just a managerialist control measure (i.e., a loved torture and not an administrative box to tick). That is, that one might feel personal and collective pride for publishing in a 4* outlet and intense shame for having not done so (or not done so enough). I wonder if Hugh Willmott appreciated the full extent to which the publication becomes a fetish-object when he wrote about journal fetishism and its dangers? That is, that the 4* publication itself becomes an object imbued with supernatural and almost mystical powers (to save a job, to secure a pay rise, to gain departmental leverage) as well as being one associated with obsession and eroticized preoccupation- more 4*’s can save us.*

What most concerns me is what this does to my own publication aspirations. I still find myself drawn to journals which rank at either 2* or below or do not appear on the CABS list at all and concerned that these outlets seem increasingly less attractive. I find myself anxious that I do not have any 4* publications and thus I find myself troubled by both the immorality of the cultivation of that anxiety and the hypocrisy of capitulation as I try to pressure my co-author to get a paper into Organization Studies as soon as possible.

*I do wish to note for the record that my new department is far from publication obsessed and indeed, has been nothing but welcoming and supportive of me and my research.

I have been asked a great many questions about my work over the years, some banal, some based on misunderstanding, some (like those of my viva) exceptionally challenging in ways that forced me to rethink the project and the value that I placed upon it but I have  never been asked a question that I perceived to be so openly hostile to my work or my intellectual project. Instead of telling a rather senior member of staff at a distinguished UK university, who was on this occasion part of a panel interviewing me for a lectureship, that I found his question at best dismissive and at worst rude and prejudicial given the circumstances, I fumbled out an answer about the imparsability of conceptual entanglements which I do not believe convinced him for a second that my research was useful, interesting or engaging. That is, while for me, the idea that the means and motives, people and places of the shopping centre and largely unknowable and impossible to disentangle from webs of connection and concepts, is an essential idea, I don’t think for a moment that this “Socratic wisdom” was something he accepted as an answer to his abrasive question.

If I have been bold enough, I would have systematically deconstructed the assumptions that my work at the shopping centre could have “clear findings” separable from the “theory” with which I engaged and would have highlighted the paradox in him asserting that I need not provide a “simple” answer while still necessitating that Deleuze not be invoked. I find myself reflecting in disappointment that I did not respond to this question with a more disagreeable bent (I thought that if I had I would have reflected poorly on both my subdiscipline of CMS and my supervisor who had written me a great recommendation letter). I continue to reflect that if I had been offered that job, I would not have taken it simply because of how maligned I continue to feel by that question. I reflect further on how welcoming, particularly by contrast, Kent has been to me thus far and wonder at the shift in my thinking from “any port in the storm” to “you are not right for me”. I don’t know yet what this means for my work but I’ll continue to reflect on it.

I started as a writer for the eSports site CLICKON this week. I was astonished by how easy the process was. I sent in a cover letter and CV, they replied asking for a writing sample, I sent it in and they replied with passwords for the website and instructions for submitting my first article.

The work doesn’t pay particularly well, but it’s an engaging job and thus far my editor’s positive attitude makes it an appealing one. It strikes me, however, that there is an extreme irony in the fact that I’ve found employment in the video game that I play in order to distract myself from my academic work (which I’ve devoted the better part of the last 10 years to perfecting) before that academic work has been able to get me job.

One of the more interesting aspects of the CLICKON writing is the SEO (search engine optimization) metrics that are used to adjudge writing quality. My editor has advised that I disregard these but in looking them over, I cannot help but reflect upon the challenges of academic writing, balancing thoroughness and precision with aesthetic style and accessibility often seems an impossible task. Here I reflect upon a paper that I site often, Sinclair and Grey’s Writing Differently, a paper which urges critical scholars to think carefully about what kinds of writing practice they employ.

SEO metrics raise questions around what kind of different writing we want and how a regime/coded system might realize and measure it. In simple terms, SEO metrics offer up an indicator of how well a piece of writing can be judged by a search engine and, as such, how likely it is that the search engine in question will find it and present it to someone looking for information.

In writing an article for CLICKON the system generated the follow review of my writing.

I am still in the process of thinking through what this means and whether or not it will affect me in the long term but already I am cognizant of making my sentences shorter, using subheadings, and trying to communicate in simpler terms. However, it is all too often the case that we don’t or can’t notice the importance of a system in shaping our interactions with the world, in determining the possibilities of our thought, until its influence becomes malignant. There is also a critique to be developed here about surveillance and control that I may return to in the coming months.

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.

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.