Paradigms and cynical reason

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2016), "Paradigms and cynical reason", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 29 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-05-2016-0083

Paradigms and cynical reason

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 29, Issue 4.

An apocryphal story allegedly based in the bungalow parks for scientists working on “The Manhattan Project” during Second World War presents a rational researcher, who refuses to nail a horseshoe above the entrance to his quarters. When his colleagues spot him unexpectedly doing it out of the blue, they ask if he changed his mind and started to believe that a horseshoe nailed above the main entrance to his house brings luck. Not at all, is his prompt answer, but I was told that it works also for people who do not believe in it.

Philosophers and other media celebrities are quick to point it out in many other walks and talks of live. Let us take a Slavoj ŽiŽek, advertised as “a Hegelian Philosopher, a Lacanian Psychoanalyst, and a Political Activist” (and the International Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities). In his newest political pamphlet Against the Double Blackmail. Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with Neighbours he suggests that “culture” is emerging as the central category justifying our lifestyles:

What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house and even in public places every December?[…] Culture, in other words, is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously” (ŽiŽek, 2016, p. 59).

In a sense we are already witnessing this approach in religion, which is increasingly viewed as a collection of rituals to endow our daily experience with some semblance of higher significance, and in science, in which the authority of the researchers dissolved into the clash of paradigmatic civilizations and trench warfare in the academic institutions and scientific or scholarly media. When getting involved in Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities in the 1970s, I had noticed that the philosophers of science who had started it cleverly played the analytical tradition in the Polish humanities against the Marxist ideology imposed by the communist party. As a young post-doc I had read Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, followed the Popper-Kuhn debate, exchanged letters with Paul Feyerabend, met leftist Chomsky and conservative Searle, translated Sontag and Whitehead into Polish, talked to authors whose books I had been reading. Say, Habermas and Sloterdijk. The irony of the social sciences and the humanities is best illustrated by the two major works these German authors produced in the early 1980s. Habermas came up with his opus magnum Theory of Communicative Action, which presented the world of experienced life (the Lebenswelt) as a virgin Amazonian forest, which is systematically colonized by two major colonial powers trying to dominate our lives as we live them. Those two powerful conquerors of our liberties, the market and the state can be kept at bay only by vigilant liberal academics who groom the media intellectuals so that the latter maintain the domination-free dialogue, in which all the underdogs can be heard, not only the top dogs. Roughly at the same time, but with less academic media splash, another philosophical pamphlet in two volumes had been published in Germany, also by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main. Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason asked the question about the Moscow trials, in which the defendants admitted impossible and improbable crimes and asked to be ruthlessly executed for the sake of the communist state and for the sake of the propaganda show. The show, which they apparently agreed to continue, even if it meant that they had to become Stalin's cannon fodder. How was this possible? The answer was roughly similar to the one given by the abovementioned apocryphal researcher and by Slavoj ŽiŽek.

Is our academic community displaying cynicism vis à vis peer review, academic publishing, periodical purges of plagiarists and hypocritical overlooking of globally distributed inequalities? Probably not yet. Nitin Pangarkar discusses a framework for an effective crisis response, Chia-Yi Cheng and Jung-Nung Chang talk of job embedded-ness modulation, while Johanna Habib and Cathy Krohmer speak of balanced vs unbalanced routines. Business as usual?

Not quite. Sze-Ting Chen, Kai Yin Allison Haga and Cher MinFong focus on the effects of institutional legitimacy, social capital and government relationships. Their focus is symptomatic – if we are to understand cynicism in contemporary academic institutions, we have to understand a class struggle, which continues on the campus in spite of the peaceful drinking of latte before class. Usman Aslam, Muhammad Ilyas, Muhammad Imran and Ubaid-Ur-Rahman talk quite straightforwardly about detrimental effects of cynicism, and frankly speaking it is definitely a proper timing. Duarte, Bai, Jing and Guo write about drivers of organizational reorientations in planned economies (with a Chinese case of a third front company).

Taran Patel tries to promote paradigmatic cultural research, while Carole Lalonde and Marie-Hélène Gilbert speak of dramaturgical awareness of the consultants through the rhetoric and rituals of cooperation.

Paradigms do matter, their confrontation does matter. Political power struggles within the networks of academic institutions can intervene, but even our most cynical professional colleagues would agree that cynicism is no substitute for values we should uphold. Let us hope they would.