Managerial rhetoric and narrative legitimacies

Citation

Magala, S. (2010), "Managerial rhetoric and narrative legitimacies", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2010.02323bae.001

Managerial rhetoric and narrative legitimacies

Article Type: Post scriptum From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 23, Issue 2

The present post scriptum has been added by the undersigned upon receiving the last text, which differs from the previous ones in origins if not in theme and theoretical thrust. When I had approached Deirdre McCloskey and Barbara Czarniawska asking for their papers from Barcelona conference, it turned out that Barbara has already offered her paper to the Scandinavian Journal of Management and thus could not oblige. I did not call it a day but persisted, which got me nowhere with Deirdre[1], but somewhere with Barbara. She has namely suggested a paper which she had written with Gideon Kunda on organizational enculturation in infantocracies. I became quickly drawn by their argument, which is fascinating for someone who has always been interested in cynicism and the critique of cynical reason, in the dialectic of the corporate propaganda clashing with the slow discovery and gradual internalization of real ropes and hints lurking beneath the surface of managerial rituals.

As usual, the reconstructions of the “real life” case of a US “boot camp” or of a Swedish “company party” offer a guide to surprising willingness of mature adult individuals to accept their “infantilization” as liberation from pre-organized anxieties and fears. After all, Orwell’s Animal Farm might be prompted by Stalin’s thugs, but “1984” had more to do with his work for the British war propaganda. Victims of the Stalinist show trials in Moscow of the 1930s might have been infantilized into public acknowledgment of their non-existent crimes and sinister links with the most exotic spy networks. But victims of contemporary HRM indoctrination are not less infantile and absurd in their declarations of self-fulfillment and personal growth through harder work and more efficient exploitation of potential competitive advantages. Czarniawska and Kunda try to see these infantile disorders of mature employees through the mirror of three literary documents. The first is fairly obvious: entire oeuvre of Witold Gombrowicz, who died in the Summer of 1969, incidentally losing his chance of being awarded a Nobel Prize in literature (he was very close, second in line around 1969 I believe), is devoted to the “daemon of immaturity.” Czarniawska and Kunda select Gombrowicz’s first novel, Ferdydurke, published in 1937, but they could have equally well relied on later novels (especially Trans-Atlantic or Pornography), theatre plays (The Wedding or Operette) or even essays tout court (Diaries 1953-1969 are all disguised ongoing essay-streamings).

As Czarniawska and Kunda sum it up:

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  In Gombrowicz’s cosmology, socialization as formation – making people victims of Form – leads only to tragedy or to ridicule. An alternative is a preemptive espousal of paradoxes in place of attempts to solve them.

Awesome and true. This is what you get when humanist upbringing demands ethical table manners from social scientists. More Gombrowicz, less F.B. Skinner. More Nabokov, less E.O. Wilson. More Pynchon, less … oh, well, let us leave something to the imagination of our readers. The only objection I would have, could be directed at the introductory remark that Gombrowicz had to be retrieved from obscurity by recent reflection on “Modernity.” Well, he had been not so obscure since his return from Argentina to Europe and certainly not during his self-imposed “exile” in Vence (close to St Paul de Vence, Grasse, cote d’Azure and the rest of the mythological paradise for the European high arts). Thus, the modernist retrieval found him rather before “recently.” For instance, late Susan Sontag thought it necessary to include him in the portable Pantheon for a committed public intellectual, admiring him as a zealous administrator of his own legend, a skill she was no stranger to herself (“The head commands, or wishes to. The buttocks reign,” in: Where the Stress Falls. The essay on Gombrowicz dates back to 2000). Dominique Roux allowed him to engineer his greatness in post-existentialist cultural climates by conducting a supreme interview, quite reprintable in many languages. Last not least, the extraordinary Polish cultural center of the emigre literary monthly Kultura in Paris, which meant he had been speaking to his native audiences and to their emergent future elites above the fences of the communist cenzorship. Relative marginalization, perhaps. Obscurity, no.

The choice of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities[2] follows in the footsteps of Ferdydurke – because Ulrich is a result of an all too successful socialization into corporate citizenship (and thus neither can oppose the authority even if illegitimate, which makes him lukewarm as a potential rebel, nor can embrace it, if just and desirable, which makes him unstable as a fan and supporter). It is astonishing how little do we look into the most serious diagnoses of the “spiritual situation of our times” in order to understand what we agree to in our infantile organizational communications, with branding, logos, totems, primitive worship, scandalous sacrifices and other forms of la “pensee sauvage” in our formally educated brains. This is the world in which Plato would look for the CNN or Fox as the realms of true ideas, whose faint echo on millions of individual screens in dark and DJ sound-filled spaces somehow re-enact the idea that the dark Platonian caves will never allow hungry masses to emancipate themselves and to drink from the very eternal source of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality complete the Polish-Austrian-Italian trio, leading Czarniawska and Kunda to the conclusion that:

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  […] there are no cultures, there are only labels that we coin for pragmatic uses and in which we, and others, invest our real and symbolic resources.

A strong statement, and one well worth discussing. Let us.

Slawomir MagalaRotterdam, December 2009

Notes

Not quite. We had traded books – she’s got my Management of Meaning in Organizations, while I walked away with her Bourgeois Values (hers was a thicker volume, but mine was a more expensive book, so fair trade label is probably sustainable). However, no paper. Tough.

Incidentally, I owe my early contact with Musil’s wonderful four volumes about the Austro-Hungarian Kakania to the Cold War. All students of state socialist countries were supposed to spend half a day a week in a rather boring civilian defense class, where retired army officers told us what to do if a nuclear bomb explodes nearby. I managed to get through Musil, Proust, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and the autobiography of Bertrand Russel until we went to the shooting alley to practice shooting skills. Perhaps, we should reintroduce boring civilian defense to the contemporary curriculum? After all, David Foster Wallace suggested boredom as the ultimate remedy against addiction to ads and substances (in The Pale King about IRS office, which – as of the present writing – still has to be published).