Abstract
The project of identifying voices from the South, and transforming the discipline of organization studies through such engagement, raises important questions of how to assess and categorize disciplinary knowledge adequately for such a purpose. This article discusses two quests for authenticity in the context of Indian management studies, based in claims of epistemic relevance and performative efficacy. In both instances there appears a conscious effort to hear voices of the south. But is it sufficient to adequately re-order management knowledge to the demands of a locale, to make it more authentic?
What ensures the relevance of a body of knowledge to a locale? And in that sense can seeking and hearing voices from the south be sufficient to adequately re-order management knowledge to the demands of a locale?
The article is arranged as follows. Section 1 discusses authenticity in terms of enduring questions of relevance of management knowledge to multiple locations. Section 2 presents a locale-specific quest for authenticity in management knowledge, the search for Indian management. Section 3 offers a reflexive account of a yoga camp where managerial efficacy is linked to Hindu texts. A discussion of these two examples follows, in section 4, which argues for more critical attention to allied projects in philosophy and postcolonial theory, that shed light on the search for authenticity. The conclusion suggests that requires more critical sensitivity to how the authentic is negotiated in management studies theorizing subalternity.
Authenticity in management knowledge
To ask what makes a body of knowledge such as management studies authentic can seem strange. Matters of authenticity are directed usually towards personal experience more than questions of knowledge production. 1 However one aspect of authenticity that has received some attention in organization studies is of the discipline’s relevance to locales of the south. Debates in cross cultural management and international management have ranged on the extent management knowledge is universal in applicability, whether it ‘fits’ all the locations where it is studied and practiced. Similarly, in certain of these locations, a question has endured, is the knowledge acquired relevant to local needs? One response has been to critique the universalist ambitions of organization studies, to seek theories of organization studies from outside its historical western centres to re-contextualize organization studies, ground the field’s disciplinary knowledge in an institutional and historical context (Kipping and Bjarnar, 1998; Kipping et al., 2004; Srinivas, 2008).
Questions of the authentic in terms of locale-relevance, were in fact raised quite early in the field’s history. Harbison and Myers (1959) famously declared ‘there is a general logic of management development which has applicability both to advanced and industrializing countries in the modern world’ (p. 117). But within a decade a group of Indian scholars (almost all based in the United States) were studying the limits to this ‘applicability’. What of management knowledge was universal (Prasad and Negandhi, 1968; Negandhi, 1968)? The preface to their published volume, by the first Indian Chief Executive of Hindustan Levers, Prakash Tandon, noted that management was more important than any natural resource a country could possess. Working out what of management was universal, and therefore possible to import, and what of it was necessarily local, to be developed indigenously, could make a great difference to economic growth (Tandon, 1984).
From the 1960s onward as American theories of management spread to a variety of international audiences, researchers searched for management practices rooted within a national locale, distinct from Western influences. This led for instance to claims of African (Ahiauzu, 1986) or Arab management (Ali, 1995), challenging a post-war metropolitan wave of universalist management education (Marsden, 1994). By the 1990s universalist assumptions were being sharply questioned (Osigweh, 1989), with Western management knowledge described as parochial (Boyacigiller and Adler, 1991) and ethnocentric (Hofstede, 1994). More recently notions of indigenous management practice have been renewed, (not without irony) through studies of indigenous communities. Henry and Pene (2001) declare an authentic Maori management ethic. Whiteman and Cooper’s (2000) ethnography describes local management practices in First Nation communities, while Banerjee and Linstead (2004) question the motivations of such a representation of local knowledge. One consequence has been a turn to postcolonial studies to assess such claims (Jack et al., 2011; Özkazanç-Pan, 2008).
Across these theorizations a particular juxtaposition has endured, of universal management knowledge counterposed to local management knowledge. The latter resists ‘top-down’, ‘outside-in’ epistemic processes emanating from a central influential Western core. In such theorizations authentic management exists within the site of knowledge reception, in a periphery, awaiting discovery, resisting the epistemic hegemony of the core.
But is it so? Can authentic management knowledge in the south be distinguished so clearly from western management knowledge? And what does this effort to locate the authentic tell us about other questions of identity?
There are two distinct claims made in regards to management knowledge in the south in terms of such assertions. One is a claim of epistemic relevance (what is deemed management knowledge and how relevant is it to a particular locale?). Another is a claim of performative efficacy (how should managers behave in a particular locale?). The rest of this article describes two examples of the search for authentic management knowledge in terms of these claims. The examples are disparate—the first reviews a research stream on Indian management, and is presented in the impersonal third person conventional to research writing. The second is a reflexive account of management representations in a yoga camp, and written in the first person. But common to both examples is the search for the authentic, as an epistemic project and for performative efficacy, respectively.
To assess these epistemic and performative claims, after presenting both examples, I turn to two notable projects that have considered questions of identity and subjectivity in the context of South Asia, in terms of philosophy and history.
Epistemic relevance and Indian management
India is unusual in its early state-led effort to disseminate management knowledge. Its second five-year plan of 1956 attained impressive industrial growth: ‘the index of industrial production (1950 = 100) stood at 200 in 1960 and at 280 in 1964’ (Rothermund, 1988: 136). Such investment required massive increase of trained personnel (Chandavarkar, 1994; Rothermund, 1992). For this purpose the government of India, in collaboration with American Business schools established two Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Calcutta in 1959, Ahmedabad in 1960, some of the earliest in the south. During their first decade both IIMs received significant US support. Ford Foundation grants totaled nearly $5 million until 1970 (Hill et al., 1973; Rosen, 1985: 95; Staples, 1992). The grants were mostly for direct transfer of academic knowledge through one-way faculty visits by academics, notably from the Sloan School of Business and the Harvard Business School. Academics on these visits helped train Indian faculty (95), establish curricula and systems of teaching, hiring and tenure. They also co-taught some classes with Indian faculty (Srinivas, 2002, 2008).
In the first decade of the IIMs, the emphasis was to transfer US management knowledge for use in India. Local businesses required personnel able to use the latest techniques to assess costs, production processes, and motivate the workforce. Also needed was a new work ethic, based on merit and commitment to performance, not favouritism, clan/caste ties, or Indian customs deemed inappropriate for industrial work. The IIMs were ‘intended to change existing value systems’ to ‘weigh the claims of tradition against those of change’ (Hill et al., 1973: 131; Chowdhry, 1977).
Through the succeeding two decades while the Indian economy struggled with flagging growth rates, unproductive public enterprises, rising deficits, and inefficient monopolies (Bardhan, 1984; Ray, 1999; Rothermund, 1992), the relevance of such imported management knowledge was often called into question. The public at times associated management education (and its exemplar the IIMs) with the country’s economic woes (Rajagopalan, 1992). Kumar (1982) argued management schools were not interested in contributing to India’s economic growth, only to generate unaccountable elites in oligopolies.
The public imagination was partly concerned with the foreign provenance of the IIMs. Was their education relevant to Indian realities? Organizational problems confronted by managers, from corruption, labour pressures, to blandishments of founding families, were linked to the foreigness of management education, evident even in demeanor and clothing. Rangnekar (1969: 32) argued that with independence a generation of Indians were being ‘pushed into managerial positions without getting any time to understand the managerial requirements [and very] often the superficial aspects e.g. dress, accent, golf, liquor, etc., were taken as the essential managerial requirements’. While ‘in the protected market in the post-independence era, these managers flourished’ economic recession was now revealing ‘the straw inside the grey flannel suit’. Singh (1970) argued that management in India must adapt to social realities such as centralized decision-making, a smaller trained work force, and very little access to senior personnel. Rangnekar (1973: 17) questioned whether in fact professional management existed in India at all. The Indian managerial class was widely perceived as a ‘pampered and parasitic group’. The overarching conclusion was that the management knowledge disseminated by the IIMs was foreign, not relevant to Indian realities (Khandwalla, 1988; Srinivasan, 1989; Tripathi, 1988). ‘The Indian manager today, educated either in the west or on western management literature attempts to manage and administer the Indian industrial structure on western principles. This, he finds, does not work under Indian conditions’ (Virmani and Guptan, 1991: 17; Srinivas, 2008).
How then to make management knowledge more Indian, better serve national needs? As the Japanese economy grew in global influence through the 1980s, some noted that it had developed management knowledge and practices more suited to its culture (Srinivasan, 1989). The route to authentic management therefore became a ‘revival’ of cultural traditions, a conscious insertion of Indian culture into management concepts. Two prominent efforts to mark the authentic in management knowledge in this manner were from scholars in the founding IIMs, Chakraborty (1991), Garg (1995) and Garg and Parikh (1993).
Garg (1995) and Garg and Parikh (1993) argued that the process of modernity in India had created a severe psychic conflict in managers. Since Indian society had a ‘traditional, agrarian ethos which provided continuity [the] subsequent encounter with the Western ethos [had] generated discontinuity in living processes’ (Garg, 1995: 13), a clash between identity and lifestyle. Managerial lifestyle was shaped by the value systems of post-independent educational systems, particularly their commitment to science and technology. But identity remained rooted in traditional familial and kin institutions (pp. 16, 22). Management research and education had to heal the breach. Similarly Sinha (1990) argued that Western value systems persuaded Indian employees to internalize a task-oriented leadership style. But they were also socialized to family, religion, caste and clan values that contradicted task-imperatives. An indigenous leadership style, of the ‘nurturant task leader’, could resolve this clash, of a leader sensitive to interpersonal needs, channeling it toward organizational goals.
Garg (1995) and Sinha (1990) used psychological constructs, stressing value conflicts. In contrast Chakraborty (1991, 1995, 2003) focused on Hindu philosophy. He asserted the need to resist Western values through coherent spiritual values that defined Indian identity, regardless of religion or caste. But the ability of Indians to assert such values had been seriously weakened by the experience of colonialism, particularly the desire to imitate the West to achieve what it had achieved. ‘Whatever an affluent or technologically advanced society might say or do must be right and good; whatever might have been enshrined and institutionalized in an old but living culture, if it is economically poor or technologically backward, must be wrong and bad; therefore the path to the lost paradise lies in imitating the former and disowning the latter’ (Chakraborty, 1991: 24–25). Instead organizational leaders and employees should place greater attention on strengthening Indian identity. This would not be possible through the social psychological precepts of Western science, ill attuned to Indian psycho-cultural characteristics. It would require instead a study of Hindu philosophy, putting their values into practice. For instance through a ‘spirit-centred model of leadership’ based on historical leaders like Asoka the Great, Emperor Akbar, as well as contemporary business leaders like J.N. Tata (Chakraborty, 2003: 75–77). In a similar manner Gupta (2002) urged greater attention to family and the sacred in Indian organizational life in an effort to integrate Indian culture with western management knowledge. An important shift in these authors was away from a sole focus on knowledge and epistemic questions. Instead their attention became a dual one, both on knowledge and identity, on what was suitable Indian management knowledge as well as on how Indian managers should behave. In fact, as the second example will show, such questions of cultural authenticity have been important in establishing the parameters of subjectivity within formalized settings.
Since India’s post 1990 economic liberalization, as its economy has become closely connected to the global marketplace, it would be expected that calls for discovering and nurturing Indian management would decline. However such calls have remained. A recent book The India way (Cappelli et al., 2010) written by professors based at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that a unique model of strategy and leadership underpins India’s economic growth post-liberalization. It ‘comprises a mix of organizational capabilities, managerial practices and distinctive aspects of company cultures that set Indian enterprises apart from firms in other countries’ (p. 5). The model’s elements include holistic engagement with employees, improvising and adaptability, and infusing organizations with a sense of mission. At the level of generality the India way offers little material to define the practices of Indian corporations as sufficiently unique in comparison to their US or Chinese counterparts. But as an aspiration it is significant that the effort here remains to somehow wrest the knowledge base of organization studies, and the professional identity of Indian managers, away from a history of US led dissemination and back to a domestic ascription. In sharp contrast to Chakraborty however, this effort is no longer moored in exclusive claims of tradition or religion. Rather it is now tethered to hybrid economic practice. Indian corporations are simply better because they are better at making money. As a senior manager explains it, for the Indian manager ‘his y-axis is Anglo-American, and his action vector; his x-axis is in the Indian ethos’ (p. 10).
Meanwhile popular self-help books in India continue to note the need to indianize western management ideas, so that they fit the psychological make-up of Indians. The self-styled management guru Arindam Chaudhuri (2001), Honorary Dean of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) exclaims ‘yes you can count your chickens before they hatch if you have the determination, the ability to work successfully with people and the flexible attitude of Theory I management with you’ (Chaudhuri, 2001: 191). ‘Theory I management’ is a set of contingent leadership styles for character types described in Hindu scriptures, that Chaudhuri believes are representative of Indian employees. ‘There was the tamas or pleasure-loving type, who could be led only by domination; the rajas, ambitious but greedy, who needed a combination of encouragement and control; and the sattva, who was brilliant and talented and needed to be left alone. ‘Leadership is about changing your colors like a chameleon to suit the situation’, Arindam said, citing Krishna, the androgynous, slippery god, as the role model for the ideal CEO. Labourers and blue-collar workers were tamasic, young management trainees rajasic, and highly skilled professionals like research scientists were sattvic. He had reinvented the caste system in two hours’ (Deb, 2010: 79). 2
Across this project of authenticity, admirable though it is to attempt a challenge to dominant Eurocentric influences, the search for Indian management has remained nativist and instrumental. This is a nativist search. Identifying the authentic requires establishing a specific zone of the cultural, where particular versions of the subcontinent’s histories, traditions and cultures (in the vocabulary of social psychology, spiritual philosophy and market growth respectively), are asserted and justified as most representative. Very little attention is devoted to divergent views of such histories, traditions and cultures. This has also been an instrumental effort. The search to locate Indian management has not been one where the rationale offered is to critique past bases of identity, whether in terms of class formation, capitalist history, gender and so forth. Rather the rationale has been managerial, to enhance capitalist organizational growth through renewed attention to aspects of employee performance. Authentic Indian management once located will enable greater organizational effectiveness, enhanced work morale. The striking convergence across these different theorists, of finding an original cultural identity somehow free and freed of the West, is also one where such an originary identity can be productively tapped for goal achievement, in fact through methods based on western management knowledge.
The overall effort remains one to maintain the existing social balance in labour and capital, to retain prevalent social inequalities within the project of management in India. The emphasis on Hindu texts naturalizes labour exploitation and severe hierarchies, blurs status and salary differences. In short such emphasis on spirituality has an effect on how power is recognized or not. There remains a consistent silence on the diversity of Hinduisms, and of faiths within India, while conflating religious faith with ethical praxis. The effort to reject or distance oneself from western management here is reduced to a unitary understanding of faith with an emphasis on principles over reflection.
But there are also some divergences. The recent effort to celebrate the ‘India way’ marks one such departure. The context of India in the 2000s has changed from one where indifferent economic performance had to be explained to the opposite, of strong economic growth, with the imperative being one of tracing the role of management knowledge in such growth. As a result these authors argue for the existence of a uniquely Indian management practice, implicitly better able to exploit labour, conserve capital, maintain authority, decentralize selectively. But the content of this practice is not one based on spiritual exhortations. Rather the emphasis is cost conservation, corporate paternalism and an ability to pragmatically adapt. A rosy picture is offered of management and India, as a self-conscious nationalist project that contributes to western capitalism, management and neo-liberal political practice, all now rejuvenated by Indian management. There is a striking absence of discussion on the history of corporate capital and management studies in India, or on the steep inequality in India’s growth (Bardhan, 2010). Significantly part of this change has been in the expectations of ‘middle-class, well-to-do Indians, (that) they were supposed to be modern and managerial… devoted to efficiency, given to the making of money and the enjoyment of consumer goods while retaining a touch of traditional spice’ (Deb, 2010: 77).
Performative efficacy and a yoga camp
I turn now to my second example, a reflective account of a yoga camp. Where the earlier example presented research on the epistemic relevance of management knowledge in India, this example presents an interpretive account of the performative efficacy expected from management knowledge in terms of establishing apt ways of being. My attention here is on how management knowledge is discussed at the yoga camp, particularly the way in which claims of its performative efficacy are imbricated within particular representations of Hinduism. 3 Incongruous as it may seem, yoga camps in India such as of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and of the Art of Living are important sites for self-formation, and frequented by youths seeking to understand the capacities required to establish managerial careers.
In summer 2003 I was invited to be a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore, to teach software engineers in their Post Graduate Program in Software Management (PGSM). One day in the midst of my teaching schedule I emailed the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The ISKCON is a globalized religious sect based in one of the traditions of Hinduism. My parents had visited their temple in the city and recommended its yoga camp to me.
I received a quick reply, suggesting I call. A clipped voice asked ‘what is your purpose in attending this camp?’. ‘To learn about my culture’, I confessed. Having lived abroad for a few years, I thought this would be a good moment to understand my heritage. Yes there was another reason as well—I sought spiritual peace.
The man at the phone exclaimed, ‘This is not uncommon. It is our mentality. I will send you some literature immediately’. He concluded the phone call by saying with seriousness ‘you will receive a garland by the mail. Make sure to chant Om while turning its beads’. In two days I received a parcel. It contained a book and a prayer garland, encased in Styrofoam pellets for protection.
Friday afternoon a week later I headed to the temple’s yoga camp. It was held inside the ISKCON temple complex, in one of its rooms. A gaunt man stood in a dhoti, his brow with a vivid prayer mark, next to a lectern and a projector screen, a slide pointer in his hand. Between him and the entrance door about 50 young men sat on the floor, listening. (As I would learn later they were mostly students, eager for advice on entering a stable managerial career). The man introduced himself as a graduate from one of the IIMs. First he had worked in a multinational but dissatisfied with his life he turned to the ISKCON for fulfillment. Now he worked with them ‘to advance the work of Prabhupad’. 4 He gestured to the screen. ‘We have for you a presentation on the basic principles of yoga and Krishna consciousness. Using the advanced software of power-point we will prove to you how the basic principles of the Vedas are at the heart of your power. You wish to know how to improve yourself? Learn the Vedas, prepare yourself mentally. You wish to know how to get a job, how to earn a good living, please your parents? I say to you, repeat the Vedas to yourself’. Turning he switched on the laptop and started the presentation, slides with bullet points, a pithy declaration under each, illustrating the principles of Krishna consciousness. With the slides were images. Smiling men, women, babies, families. But the families shown were mostly white people. Around me the room was filled with Indians. What did they feel seeing such images? Even the images of the Hindu Gods were white. Krishna, a dark God, lost color here, suffused in a radiant glow.
The presentation emphasized aspects that would feature in any motivational talk—values, discipline, success, ‘excellence’. But to achieve these goals would require ‘spiritual intelligence’, following the principles of Krishna consciousness. An effort was also made to acknowledge science, technology and complex organizations. The powerpoint images included people working in offices, but also of the planet, the space shuttle, a mushroom cloud. The solar system stretched outward not only to Pluto but to an image of Krishna, nestled in a corner of the screen smiling. For this particular slide the presenter declared ‘consider the marvels we have discovered as humans. We have gone to the moon, created machines that can go outside our solar system’. He added ‘do you think this would have been possible if we had not been gifted with a divine presence? How could we mere humans have attained such heights without assistance? Our race has been on Earth for five millennia. And yet we achieved all this in one century. How is that possible if not for the divine presence?’ The message offered was in truth that the gifts of technology were themselves due to divinity. The qualities associated with science were themselves now linked to the presence of God.
Someone in the audience now asked ‘sir but what about the dinosaurs? You say human beings have been on Earth for five millennia? But did not the dinosaurs walk on the Earth at that time? Are you saying they walked side by side?’. The presenter smiled. ‘But how do you know the dinosaurs existed at that time? Where is the proof?’. The boy mentioned fossils. Swiftly the presenter debunked it—fossils did not prove human beings were not in existence at the same time as dinosaurs. I now raised my hand and asked, rather innocently, ‘So you don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of natural selection?’. The presenter looked towards me. ‘That is a good question. But you said it correctly it is “theory” and that is all. Has it been proven?’. Around me whispers were heard, faces turned, the boy who posed the question looked skeptical. The presenter’s response had brought out a disjuncture between what was perceived as ‘true knowledge’ here, the ISKCON’s presentation of science and the common-sense understanding of the audience.
Yet in terms of work, jobs, careers, the professional world of the manager, expectations on both sides seemed well matched. Yes you can make it, the presenter seemed to say, but you will need religious grit to do it. And he could be taken seriously when saying this, after all he was an IIM graduate.
We were now shown a slide with three large words: IQ, EQ and SQ. Human beings required three forms of intelligence: the intelligence used in daily tasks, emotional intelligence and, most crucially, spiritual intelligence. And it was this latter intelligence that would help us succeed, we were told. Eager questions ensued.
‘Sir how will spiritual intelligence help us succeed?’ ‘Sir do we start with IQ and then go to EQ or do they happen simultaneously?’
The questioners like any other youth, anxious about the future, were eager to unlock the secrets to make it. They were there in the hope that the yoga camp would help them work out a career, a steady job, handle the difficulties of their lives. They spoke an English different from that of the presenter, more diffident, halting. When I later chatted with them their talk revolved around a desire to join an elite business school or get a good job. One young man was about to graduate from the Bangalore branch of the nation wide business school franchise, the Indian Institute of Planning and Management. He spoke in awed tones of its Honorary Dean Arindam Chaudhuri but complained about the high tuition, and worried at the costs incurred by his father for his education. After graduating he wanted a ‘good job’ but did not have more clarity than that. In fact he was open to doing another MBA if he could get admission in one of the elite IIMs.
When the session concluded, someone asked plaintively, ‘Sir how will God ensure we get a good job?’ The presenter’s response ‘take the prayer garland in your hand and keep repeating Om’ satisfied no one. Nor his frequent exhortation to ‘turn to Prabhupad’ for guidance. They wanted jobs or admission to an elite management school. They sought solutions, and looked towards the ISKCON to help them.
I had come to the temple in the hope of understanding yoga or at least my religious heritage. But instead I felt re-conditioned into a familiar world—power point slides and bullets, business schools and corporate jobs. Even the effort to clarify arcane knowledge into pithy declarations, render such declarations instrumental for material success reminded me of corporate seminars and business schools. Was there a sense of the authentic here that I could mark out in the advice offered, label it recognizably Hindu, ‘true’? And if I did so would it be equally authentic to these young men attending the camp for reassurance and life skills? Could I understand what brought them here to this particular brand of Global Hinduism, to a sort of coal brought back to Newcastle, so to speak?
The ISKCON yoga camp I attended had nothing to say about yoga. Rather it sought to be a site to display authenticity, to bring Hindu values back to disenchanted and confused youth, and demonstrate the efficacy of such values for a productive life. The structure of the camp reminds us of the ISKCON’s superior abilities to mobilize global modernity: presentation technology, emphasis on science and technology, use of English (not the majority language in the audience) and jargon, images of white folks, presenters’ elite MBA status. These aspects are presented in a language that blends religious tenets with productive prowess. Thus om om om allows one to get corporate jobs, satellites exist because God allows them to, and so forth. The audience is overwhelmingly those with limited access to such referents of modernity, those who do not speak good English, without admission to elite schools, lack corporate jobs but seek them. In these ways the yoga camp offers faith of a sort, capable of offering jobs, yoked to a selective vocabulary of Hindu texts.
My reflection has shown the structure of the orientation program and the (at times) surreal juxtaposition of technology (satellites) and spirituality (om). But what does it say of management knowledge? Let me turn to three aspects indicative in this aspect. It is important to note the significance placed by the presenter of his own IIM education. In doing so he sought to establish his credentials as a professional. But he goes on to disown the IIMs and explain how he has moved away from their available career paths, because they do not offer meaning and satisfaction. He uses this site of management knowledge (the IIMs) to establish a referent for an alternative, what the yoga camp offers, training in a form of efficacy that speaks more closely to the lived social life of the participants. Also the structure of the yoga workshop is quite similar to a management retreat, in its use of powerpoint slides, bullet points (on the basics of Krishna consciousness), and the slide pointer. The overall purpose is to present the ideas of the ISKCON in a format recognizable as modern. The casual mixing of technology (satellites and the ubiquitous computer) is part of this effort, to demonstrate how the ISKCON was offering a particular version of Hinduism that furthered modern enterprise. Finally it is worth noting that the underlying premise of the workshop was that its participants prepare for the Indian corporate world, learn how to succeed in it. This professional milieu of managerial efficacy is brought out in the reminders of the facilitator that to succeed would require different forms of intelligence (EQ, IQ and SQ) all needed in corporate contexts to succeed. In these ways management knowledge in this yoga camp is represented in terms of personal efficacy via God, based in markers of instrumental rationality such as the powerpoint slides, and the use of jargonistic language. The search for a stable managerial career is conflated, in the yoga camp, with a search for spiritual identity.
Across both examples we have a search for authentic management knowledge. The first, an epistemic claim of authenticy, shows consistent nativist and instrumental themes. In the second, a performative claim, conflates personal efficacy with spiritual identity. The following section assesses these claims, critiquing them from two notable research projects that have studied questions of authenticity in terms of South Asian philosophy and history.
Critiques of authenticity
A discussion of the authentic gestures to a huge and intimidating set of studies across the humanities. In this section I engage with a coherent set of thinkers known for their particular stands on authenticity, largely with reference to South Asia, to assess the epistemic and performative claims just presented.
A discussion of the authentic, in a broad sense, is important to a variety of contemporary philosophers, located in the Western and Classical Indian traditions. For instance Charles Taylor (1992) argues for an ethics of authenticity, concerned with the loss of meaning in contemporary social life. Radical individualism, instrumental rationality and the decline of a public sphere, each signal a historical shift away from understanding the sources of the self to one of celebrating the individual. In contrast Taylor urges renewed attention to the dialogical bases of the self, to how we seek support from those around us in our effort to develop the ethics of authenticity. In such an effort, authenticity is expressive freedom (Smith, 2002: 154), sustained through dialogical commitment.
A cluster of studies of classical Indian philosophy (Larson, 1997; Phillips, 1997; Raghuramaraju, 2006) bring out another concern with the search for the authentic self, the ‘attachment to a self that’s not to be found’ (Ganeri, 2007: 2). The view here, found in classical Indian philosophical schools such as the Hindu Advaita Vedanta, and the Buddhist Madhyamaka, is that the self we inhabit furthers an illusion that the world we inhabit is real. In this sense our selfhood generates error, concealing the truth of how our pleasures are in reality pains and suffering, obscuring avenues for lives that we could lead better. Some of these avenues are familiar enough to most observers of Hindu and Buddhist practices and indeed of other forms of spiritual ascetism—an eschewal of worldiness, forsaking the temptation of luxuries, acknowledging the finitude of existence.
Now what is remarkable about the two examples presented earlier is how disinterested they are in precisely these concerns of the self. If the knowledge sought is the true nature of management within India, it certainly has little to say about the Indian. Instead even the modest engagement with Hindu philosophy by Chakraborty, or the yoga camp’s presentation of Hinduism, become an opportunity to generate a modular self adapted to the imperatives of organizational life. Rather than an eschewal of worldiness it is precisely an immersion in the worldly life that is sought in these efforts. They remain based within the imperatives of instrumental rationality. Nor do the shrill juxtapositions sought between foreign and nativist knowledge allow for the expressive dialogical reflections suggested by Taylor (1992).
A second critique is from the perspective of postcolonial scholarship on the history of subjectivity within the subcontinent. An important thinker in this regard is Ashis Nandy (1983, 1995). Nandy has argued that the impact of colonialism profoundly changed the identity of people in the subcontinent. However, not in terms of an inner essence that withstood outer forces, nor where outer forces eliminated the inner essence, but rather, one of mutual re-definition. The intimate enemy describes how on both sides of the colonial divide a search for identity was generated. For instance the identity claims of the British shifted to hyper-masculine registers as the colonial process progressed. Similarly the Savage Freud describes the career of Girindrasekhar Bose, an early Indian pschoanalyst, who established the Indian Psychoanalytic Institute in 1922. Nandy’s purpose in this essay is to demonstrate how psycho-analytic concepts were translated to an Indian context. Again there is a necessary interchange between culturally distinct ideas, making it challenging to establish an originary essence. The search for authentic identity in India is enmeshed with the impact of colonialism (Deshpande, 2003). Indeed the authentic emerges through a negotiation with what is deemed alien.
One implication of Nandy’s ideas is that any effort to locate authentic management knowledge in terms of epistemic relevance and performative efficacy is seriously misplaced. India’s colonial past, the roots of its government, legislation, social codes, and cultural expectations in the experience of first being a British colony, and then an independent nation-state, complicate easy interpretations of management knowledge in such terms. All forms of knowledge will be hybrid formations, where even management knowledge that is recognizably Western is shared in a way unique to the Indian context. For these reasons the search for an alternative to western knowledge ‘cannot take the west as its reference’ (Sardar, 2000: 214). Rather it will have to emerge from the hybrid experiences within the peripheries and cores of the colonizing process.
Both these critiques cohere around a viewpoint that treats the search for authenticity as more credible and lasting than a stable claim of authenticity in itself. That is, a search for the authentic (the real, the genuine, the true and so forth) is a search for meaning, and has agential weight. But any fixed discovery of the authentic cannot be easily sustained. These critiques therefore show the limitations of a search for authentic management knowledge. From a philosophical route, these two quests engage neither with contemporary nor classical views of authentic identity. From a historical route there is only modest discussion of the impact of colonialism on self-formation and systems of knowledge.
Therefore the approach to authenticity described in these two examples remains in reality an aspirational effort, an artifact of expectation. It is such aspirations that allow a search for Indian management practice to conflate claims of efficacy, with spiritual peace and national growth, as in Chakraborty. Or to conflate a whitened version of Hinduism with the qualities required for a managerial career, as in the ISKCON yoga camp.
Conclusions
…traditions are live and not passive things stuck in a closet. (Edward Said, 1998/2002) And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ithacas mean. (C. P. Cavafy, 1911/2007)
Across the examples discussed in this article, the search for epistemic relevance in Indian management, and performative efficacy in a yoga camp, the referent remains the West, in terms of management knowledge and markers of modernity, science and technology. It is from within such a position that claims are made for authenticity. Such claims enact further a relational balance of superiority. The final paragraph of The India way, a book claiming the uniqueness of Indian organizational practice, illustrates this relation well:
The most important lesson from the India way might therefore be the light it shines on the American way, at the moment arguably the dominant model for business. The India way demonstrates the power of collective calling over private purpose, of transcendent value over shareholder value. These ideas are hardly unknown in the United States and indeed were common a generation ago. In the wake of the greatest collapse of American business confidence in more than seventy-five years, the time may be ripe for US company leaders to move back to the future. (Cappelli et al., 2010: 207)
Remarkable in this quote is not only the cringe-inducing tall claims made of Indian capital. It is especially that the referent and beneficiary for these unsubstantiated advances of Indian management remains US capital. In this manner these searches for authenticity only further reinforce a prevalent feeling of inferiority, retaining Western knowledge as the referent.
A further danger in an uncritical search for voices of the south is that such efforts reify, presuming somehow a coherent understanding of what makes such a locale as the south the south, authentic in terms of management knowledge. What is at issue is in fact to bring to light the manner in which the authentic actually emerges. What Said (1998/2002) declared about traditions, that ‘they are recollections, they are customary practices, collective memory, they are all kinds of things, but they are certainly not the simple pure thing to which people return and get comfort in’ (p. 14), is an argument for a critical understanding of how authenticity is generated and how such understanding shifts over time. The implication of an uncritical evocation of the authentic, whether for religious and cultural extremists seeking closure, secular intellectuals seeking resistance to ‘modernity’ and the ‘West’, or indeed to my younger self speeding across Bangalore for spiritual comfort one Friday, is clear—beware of what you seek without reflection. The south has many voices and its borders with the north shift constantly.
In this sense the authentic is a fugitive place that disappears once we find it, for the true question is not where is the authentic within knowledge, but rather why do we need to find it? And the answer to this question may be as follows: ‘we have to find it because otherwise we will not know for sure who we are’. Rather than a state of authenticity, what is at issue therefore is a pragmatics of identity. The question is less the assessment of the authenticity of knowledge on the basis of locale and more the study of how quests for identity prefigure questions of the authenticity of knowledge.
That day, recovering from the yoga camp I realized that the authentic was nowhere, because the search for it was ultimately inward, about self-creation. And that authenticity is everywhere. Like Cavafy’s search for Ithaca, it is constitutive, a quest that ideally never reaches its end, but helps identify, reflexively, the limits of what we wish to know, and be.