Abstract
The relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is one that causes little problem in carpentry or car mechanics. There might be a difference between knowing why and knowing how, but its one that can be repaired easily enough by some reading, thinking or tool wielding. But changing a tire is not the same as changing the world, and things are more difficult in social science. What, after all, is it for? What can you do with it? The problem seems even more disabling for critical social science, and particularly for critical accounts of management and organization. I teach a module called ‘Critical Perspectives on Management’, and as one of my students told me in an essay the other day, ‘critical analysis of management can help organizations become more efficient’. I snorted initially, but it’s a fair enough point. If it’s not for that, if it doesn’t contribute to some sort of organizing somewhere, then just what is this knowledge for?
Both of these books claim to be closing the theory/practice gap, being performative, getting things done, and so on. Both are aimed at change, for an audience of students who want to learn about different ways to organize in the case of the former, and at employees who want their organizations to be different in the case of the latter. Perhaps, they might be the sort of books that might help my students understand what my module is about and allow me to teach more about forms of practice that actually produce alternative forms of organizing (instead of showing endless Google™ images of dead White men on my PowerPoint™ slides, as part of my University of Leicester School of Management™ ‘critical’ module, assessed by assignment and examination). I already have a lot of books on my anti-management reading list, so what can these two add?
Monika Kostera’s book isn’t about Occupy, and all its related social movements, but uses the metaphor of occupation as an entryist injunction to take back ‘management’ from those who wish to make it a discipline based on hierarchy and order. It’s a kind of squatting, though a gentle and polite one. The tone of the book is to celebrate all the things in heaven and earth that are not dreamt of in conventional managerialism and use them as imaginative springboards to different ways of thinking about management. Occupying management means making it ours, producing a form of knowledge that can be used by the 99%. Inspired partly by Zygmunt Bauman’s lucid worries about liquid modernity, Kostera begins with the utilitarian thinness of now, and of the loss of ideas about progress, of learning from the past, and of the mysteries of life. The latter is probably the most important way to explain this book, because she continually evokes, with her own photos and poems, a sense that bodies, emotions, and spirits can never be captured (but can be wilted) by the Klieg lights of the modern world.
The structure is interesting. Using the four big and dull words—planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling—Kostera decomposes them down into some surprising terms. So planning becomes about imagination, inspiration, and intuition; organizing about structure, space, and synchronicity; motivating is leadership, learning, and love; and controlling is ethos, ethics, and ecology. This is a nice trick, though I could have done without the alliteration, and it neatly demonstrates her attempt to inhabit management, to grow something different within it, rather than the easy outsider heroism of claiming to be ‘against’: Let’s manage ourselves out of the crisis—we all know how to do it—it is time to reclaim our knowledge, not in the interest of corporations, banks, the few rich of this world, but on our own terms … (p. 11)
Along the way, Kostera tells us her own stories about dreams, music, film, theater, art, all loosely related to the particular theme, salts and peppers them with academic references, and ends each chapter by asking questions to the reader: Think of something you would really want to achieve, something global and big like world peace, or local and small, like a neighbourhood book café. Imagine an organization that would deal with such a goal. Describe it. Prepare an action plan. (p. 28)
For me, the strongest parts of this book were the little stories about alternative organizations, most of them Polish, ‘Little Croc Kindergarten’, ‘The Willow Restaurant’, ‘The Co-operative Emma Hostel’, ‘The VegeMiasto Catering Business’, and ‘The BioBazar Market’. It was these that actually paid out the idea of exploring self-organization and self-management, and that suggested how some lives might be organized in different ways. All small, all practical, but somehow all the more powerful because of that. In other places, the book lost me altogether, becoming a sort of scrap book of ideas, loosely tied together by a faith in creativity, and a dislike of systems and predictability. There’s a strong current of European Romanticism in this book, a sense that we are born free but placed in chains and that art can be our salvation. These are admirable instincts, in an age of the spreadsheet, but they do leave a lot staked on a certain sort of pre-social humanism. So when Kostera asks the reader to ‘write a short poem’ or ‘look in the water as intensely as you can, for at least seven minutes’, I come over all stiff upper lip and need to remind myself that there are many ways to link the personal and the political.
Liam Barrington-Bush describes himself as a ‘grassroots activist disguised as an organizational change consultant’ (p. 262), and this book was crowd-funded, self-published, and has creative commons protection. It’s an example, in terms of the self-management of knowledge, of what Kostera writes about. A shame that her book will be generating profits for Informa plc, headquartered in Switzerland, to avoid tax, and with a revenue of £1.132 billion in 2013 Barrington-Bush’s book (apologies for further alliteration) is a ‘management book for people who don’t read management books’ (p. 1). He tells the reader that it is aimed at people who work, particularly those in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or the third sector, but have become disenchanted and now want to ‘nurture the innovation, passion and sense of personal connection that first brought us into this work’ (p. 2). Barrington-Bush thinks that organizations need anarchists like him because of professionalism, industrialism, and bureaucracy, forces that make organizations into places of conformism and misery. This is a handbook for your escape.
This is a very practical book, and its argument can be summed up as a contrast between the form of organization which the author sees as characteristic of ‘management’, and the sort of distributed democracy which he sees as inherent in social media and exemplified in Occupy. Using diagrams, stories about his own experiences, examples from UK Uncut to recuperated Argentinian factories, and a transatlantic low-punctuation style of self-help writing, he makes some darned good arguments about behaving differently in the workplace. He talks about how to make yourself consciously vulnerable to others, about unacknowledged forms of exclusion, about how you dress for work and what it says about your work, and the kind of acronyms you use in meetings. This spirals into ideas about open sourcing an organization’s intellectual property (unlikely to be adopted by Informa), the importance of failure, continual experimentation and the possibilities of worker ownership, flat pay structures, self-defined roles and consensus decision making. The staging that underpins the possibilities of anarchism in the boardroom is one that pits Theory Y against Theory X, social media against Taylorism, as Barrington-Bush acknowledges. Treat people like adults, cultivate trust, try to see things from the other person’s point of view. All of this is good advice, even if it sometimes sounds a little like any management consultant selling the soft stuff to some wide-eyed marks. The advice which starts with ‘tell someone you appreciate something they did because it might improve their day’ (p. 245) is nice enough, but hardly anarchist. Neither is the idea that organizations should be ‘more like people’ and less like machines, because European Romantics were asking for that from the late 18th century onward. Where this book gets radical, and perhaps anarchist, is in discussions of ownership and control, and of the consequences of current forms of organization. The questions he ends up asking are rather more pointed than Kostera’s: How many Lockheed Martin machinists would keep going to work every day, if they were also a part of the teams who had to clean up the bodies their bombs had helped to explode? How many Shell execs would continue extracting tar sands oil, if it was their family members developing rare cancers linked to the industry, or their own drinking water being poisoned? (p. 237)
Barrington-Bush—unlike Kostera—knows nothing of Critical Management Studies, and his engagements with ‘theory’ (anarchist or any other kind) are not going to get him a great mark on my critical course. That’s the sort of thing that you would expect a professional academic to say, even about some important books (Parker, 2002). But this is a thought-provoking and really worthwhile read. In part, this is because the author is so reflexive about his own doubts concerning what needs to change and how (p. 240), and also because of his perceptiveness about the sort of people and attitudes that contemporary organization so often produces. (Because it is always a good idea to thank people for something that they did.) So, thanks Liam. This is a creative and generous thing you have done, and I am happy that I paid you for a copy even though you didn’t make me. What I would like to see next is a clarity about just what you are against, because you don’t mention capitalism a lot, preferring the word ‘industrialism’, even though there are few nods toward Marx. This, I think, might allow you to clarify what you are for, which could be a localized post-capitalism, but in which case, you need to be clearer about who makes the servers and smartphones that allow the social media world to exist. (Let alone why Facebook and Twitter make so much money.) I’d also like to know whether all forms of professionalism are bad, and if so, whether we will have doctors and architects in future. Or perhaps even Professors, writing sniffy reviews like this one.
What brings these two books together is a strong sense of a world gone wrong, but also a conviction concerning the existence of an underlying well spring of humanity and creativity that needs to be recovered in order to make things right. It is as if an evil pin-striped goblin is squatting on the world’s chest, and exorcisms and exhortations will persuade it to go away and allow us to breathe once more. There is certainly much wrong with the world, and market managerialism has a lot do with it, but I am less convinced that there is a better nature lurking within us which will be released once the bad things have gone. Our politics is personal, and we should never ignore creativity and avoiding behaving like a machine, but we also need to think about some big Politics here too. I think that we are made by our organizations, our markets, our institutions, so if we want to be different, we need to make them differently too. Reinventing organizing means thinking about what we mean by economy and exchange in some very different ways (Erdal, 2011; Gibson-Graham, 2013; Parker et al., 2014; Wolf, 2012). Both Kostera and Barrington-Bush understand the need for change, and these are both books which deserve to be read and thought about. They also do begin to show how theory and practice might work together, so I’ll be putting them on the reading list. The problem is that neither are practical or performative enough about the big questions, about Political Economy, because I think that is what I and my students really need.