Abstract
Airports have recently become a central preoccupation for scholars concerned with a range of issues in the social sciences and the wider academy focused around governance and the modern nation state, philosophy, political economy, economics, geography, society and community. There is, however, little critical scholarly interest in what can be learned about management and organisation from airports, which has meant that our discipline is ceding ground to unitarist and highly functional, prescriptive and practitioner-oriented literature. One of the most significant critical challenges to this managerial orthodoxy is the recent work of Griggs and Howarth who adopt the theoretical resources of Laclau and Mouffe to advance their thesis that a discourse built around ‘sustainable aviation’ is established within public policy in an attempt to develop ‘hegemonic’ consensus around airport expansion. Laclau and Mouffe have been a significant influence on organisation studies, but when applied empirically their work is discovered to embody contradictions and tensions that prove ultimately self-defeating for those interested in developing a ‘critical’ politics of organisation. We consider the possibilities for a more critical and politically engaged form of organisation analysis based upon what we call here an ‘interventionary ethnography’.
Airports and organisation
The recent burgeoning of scholarship devoted to airports and the implications of aviation expansion suggest that the airport has become a central preoccupation for those concerned with governance and the modern nation state (Adey, 2010; Chalfin, 2010; Griggs and Howarth, 2013; Salter, 2008; Schaberg, 2012; Serres, 1995). In the United Kingdom, economic data are routinely produced to show that airports contribute around £1.7 billion annually to the national ‘gross value–added’ measure of economic productive activity (Oxford Economic Forecasting, 2006). The CBI (2013) recently estimated that a ‘new direct daily flight with just eight of the world’s largest high-growth economies could be worth up to £1bn of new annual trade for UK business’ (p. 4). According to calculations widely circulated, Heathrow Airport alone contributes £11 billion a year to the economy and employs directly and indirectly around 100,000 people. Not only employers of vast numbers of employees, airports are understood to create important ‘multiplier effects’ that stimulate employment growth in allied and related sectors—particularly in construction, professional services, life sciences and aviation. As an engine of economic growth and employment, most mainstream economists have no doubts (Crafts, 2009; Starkie, 2013), and the recent appointment in the United Kingdom of the independent Airports Commission under the chairmanship of Sir Howard Davies is testament to this perceived economic importance. Inundated with data produced by models supported by the latest ‘Latin hypercube’ sampling methods and ‘Pseudo-Poisson Maximum Likelihood estimators’ (Airports Commission, 2013: 16, 37), the commission is unlikely to come to any other conclusion but that the expansion of aviation must be supported with an additional runway at Heathrow or Gatwick.
For others, the airport and the aviation industry are the fastest growing environmental polluters (carbon and nitrogen) contributing to global warming that according to many credible scientists (see Bows et al., 2008) is now estimated to increase by 4°C by the end of the century. According to Bows et al., UK aviation emissions will account for 70% of our permitted carbon budget by 2030 and this is based on what now appears to be a relatively conservative estimate of 28 million tonnes of carbon emissions. The recent 2013 UK aviation forecasts by the Department for Transport (DfT) contains more revised figures on emissions and states that UK aviation will actually emit 43.5 million tonnes of carbon (DfT, 2013: 89). Such changes will likely make the recent floods and ‘extreme climate events’ experienced in the UK (November 2013 to February 2014) appear like a gentle shake of a mantelpiece snow-globe. This stand-off between the economy and ecology has led to a certain paralysis in public policy, not only in the United Kingdom but also across Europe. Given the undoubted difficulties in managing some of these complexities, it is perhaps surprising that barring one or two exceptions (Knox et al., 2007, 2008) there is little critical scholarly interest in what can be learned about management and organisation from airports, but such neglect has the unfortunate consequence of ceding ground to unitarist and highly functional, prescriptive and practitioner-oriented literature (e.g. Graham, 2013) focused around journals such as the Journal of Air Transport Management, the International Journal of Aviation Management and the Journal of Airline and Airport Management.
To modernise or ecologise: wicked problems
One of the most significant critical challenges to this managerial orthodoxy is the recent work of Griggs and Howarth (2013) who seek to understand this paralysis in the terms of a ‘wicked problem’, drawing on the work of Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, particularly as this has been taken up in the more widely cited work of Donald Schön. Wicked problems, Griggs and Howarth explain, are those that cannot be resolved because they are objects of contention between parties of such opposing commitments, principles and politics that synthesis or resolution is impossible: either messy compromise is reached, in which neither party is satisfied, or policy becomes mired in paralysis and stalemate. Most significant for organisation studies, however, is the influence of the work of political theorist Ernesto Laclau on the research of Griggs and Howarth. Both schooled under his tutelage in the Department of Politics at Essex University, their book represents one of the most sustained empirical engagements with organisation informed by a strict and rigorous reading of Laclau. In collaboration with Chantal Mouffe, the work of Ernesto Laclau represents one of the most original advances beyond what was understood and applied of structuralism in the social sciences and has laid the foundation for a creative rethinking of new left political strategy based on what some still see as a highly contentious ‘post-foundational’ ontology (Laclau, 1990, 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Mouffe, 2000).
The influence of this writing on organisation studies is considerable and has inspired many avenues of research. There are those, for example, who have sought to apply Laclau and Mouffe to advance the study of resistance and struggle beyond the orthodoxies of more conventional sociological studies of the labour process (Böhm, 2006; Contu et al., 2013; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Spicer and Böhm, 2007; Spicer and Fleming, 2007; Spicer and Sewell, 2010; Van Bommel and Spicer, 2011). More broadly, Laclau and Mouffe have helped organisation studies escape a reductive and mechanistic conception of control and resistance in the workplace (Delbridge and Ezzamel, 2005; Müller, 2013; Willmott, 2005). Emerging debates in the study of entrepreneurship and leadership have also progressed through the study and application of their post-foundational discourse theory helping to establish a distinctive ‘critical leadership studies’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Fairhurst, 2005; Kelly, 2013; Kenny and Scriver, 2012; Levy and Scully, 2007; Peck et al., 2009). Studies of corporate strategy and organisational change have also been revitalised with a renewed attention to the complex politics of conflict and accommodation in organization. This has proved particularly helpful in explaining patterns of cross-cutting alliances and divisions that riddle individuals and groups (Bridgman, 2007; Jian, 2011; Levy and Egan, 2003; McClellan, 2011; Nyberg et al., 2013). Those interested in ‘communities of practice’ and professional identification have found much to work with in Laclau and Mouffe (Kuhn, 2009; Thomas and Hewitt, 2011; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009), and a promising conversation between critical theory, practice-based theorising and the ‘Montreal school’ studying the ‘communicative constitution of organisation’ has begun to open up in recent years enriched by many of their ideas and concepts (Contu and Willmott, 2006; Cooren et al., 2011; Mumby, 1997; Nicolini, 2007; Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013).
The work of Griggs and Howarth provides an important addition and amplification of much of this work. Based on over 10 years of primary fieldwork in the aviation industry, their work is in many ways a remarkable achievement, one that seeks to do something more than extract a couple of concepts from a text such as Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and—usually in the confines of a single journal article—apply them to a discrete problem in management or organisation. The burden of their work is devoted to exploring how the UK population has been mobilised into what they call a ‘hegemonic belief system’ around the economic and social benefits of air transport. With these interests, Griggs and Howarth have already attracted some interest among organisation scholars (Dellagnelo et al., 2014), and their publication provides an opportunity to interrogate what is promised and what can be delivered from this distinctive brand of post-Marxist theory.
Confusions, dislocations and inconsistencies
Griggs and Howarth deploy an extensive repertoire of concepts drawn from the corpus of Laclau and Mouffe, including ‘hegemony’, ‘floating signifiers’, ‘empty signifiers’, ‘nodal points’, ‘radical contingency’, ‘undecidability’, ‘constitutive outside’, ‘dislocation’, ‘antagonism’ and ‘fantasy’. Their thesis develops the argument that successive governments sought to establish an equation between aviation expansion and the national economy, economic growth, and social well-being. Central to the current predicament is the argument that liberalisation and deregulation in the 1980s helped expand passenger numbers but led to infrastructural capacity constraints that a series of commissions (Roskill, and now Davies) and White papers have sought to address. Using the discursive apparatus developed by Laclau and Mouffe, Griggs and Howarth show how two antagonistic political blocs formed during the expansionist drive of the last Labour government (1997–2009): ‘Airport Watch’ and ‘Freedom to Fly’. Both are shown to have emerged out of a contingent alliance of cross-cutting differences and tensions that defined their respective patterns of membership and support. As the thesis progresses, ‘sustainable aviation’ begins to appear as the critical and dominant rhetorical trope that aims to mediate and reconcile those who support and those who oppose airport expansion. Central to the development of this argument is the role of the term ‘empty signifier’ within the theoretical master-narrative of the Essex school of political discourse theory where ‘empty signifiers’ operate as ‘points of fixation that hold together multiple and even contradictory demands in a precarious unity’ (Griggs and Howarth, p. 21 citing Laclau, 1990, 1995; emphasis added). Borrowing heavily from their understanding of Foucault (through Laclau and Mouffe), Griggs and Howarth posit that ‘sustainable aviation’ is a signifier within a ‘discursive regime’ and by virtue of its ‘empty’ status acts as a complex absent/present structural fulcrum around which a discursive formation comes into being. In other words, discursive consensus is built around a precarious unity that facilitates the design and implementation of public policy. However, as we follow the narrative of Griggs and Howarth, we discover that ‘sustainable aviation’ cannot function as an empty signifier because it gets defined in so many different and contradictory ways; indeed, for many it is an absurd oxymoron. It therefore becomes a ‘floating signifier’ subject to multiply contested constructions deployed to help forge and consolidate the political activities of various interest groups.
The question we are inevitably drawn to ask is whether the investment of such theoretical sophistication is worth the pay-off? At times, the nuance between floating signifiers, nodal points, and empty signifiers, struggles to retain much clarity as it is deployed to extract and analyse data culled from a range of archival sources. In the exhaustive collection and treatment of this empirical material, the attentive reader may recall that nodal points are ‘privileged points of signification … that partially fix the meaning of practices’ (p. 21) and empty signifiers provide the ‘symbolic means’ to ‘represent these essentially incomplete orders’—these orders referring to the contingent and constructivist logic of ‘discursive formations’. However, it is easy to lose sight of these nuances and its overarching theoretical meta-narrative as the authors build their account by drawing on cabinet office papers, parliamentary briefing papers, Department for Transport official reports and House of Commons Library notes and Committee reports—an archive that when itemised in the reference section runs to nine pages of primary sources (pp. 334–342). While the wealth of empirical material is an impressive feat and helps generate a rich descriptive account of public policy and its political and social context, the reader will be excused for losing sight of the precise way in which this material maps onto the theoretical architecture of the book. Indeed, it is precisely this quest for a totalising and exhaustive empirical description that is perhaps most problematic, given the theoretical heritage from which the authors draw.
In many ways, the empirical description is a rather conventional account of how the machinations of parliamentary politics variously seek to persuade, build consensus and alliance while pursuing tactical ways in which opponents’ arguments can be weakened or discredited. There is certainly nothing here that would surprise the liberal pluralism of Robert Dahl’s political science, for example, albeit in Griggs and Howarth the theoretical discourse of Laclau periodically interrupts the empirical description to remind us that all this is really about nodal points, dislocation, radical contingency, and so on. The British population is said to be in thrall to the ambitions and dreams of an expanded aviation industry that promises economic growth, jobs and prosperity and so on, all of which is articulated and labelled within the armature of Lacanian-influenced theory about lack and fantasy. There is no primary enquiry into the terms of Lacanian analysis or any questioning of the credibility and rigour of the Lacanian system as it is positioned within the currents of post- and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis. Nor is there any engagement with those criticisms of Lacan developed in Derrida’s work or with the contributions made by various feminist critiques (i.e. Kristeva, Irigaray, Rose, Grosz). This is of course not the point of Griggs and Howarth’s project, and therefore in some ways an unfair criticism, but it reminds us that the indiscriminate abstraction and application of a concept from one ecology of intellectual practices into another courts considerable danger.
The term ‘dislocation’ deserves closer analysis because of its centrality to the post-foundational ontology of Laclau and Mouffe. This is an ontology in which capitalism and democracy are understood to lack any objectivity. Laclau (1990: 3–89) carefully derives this concept through an interrogation of the structuralist (or ‘post-structural’) logic of ‘difference’ as originally coined by Derrida in his reading of Saussure. As Laclau (1990) summarises, ‘every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an “outside” which both denies that identity and provides its conditions of possibility at the same time’ (p. 39). Within the constraints of this essay we cannot extend our analysis or more fully derive the precedents and implications of this insight, but to short-circuit some of these explications we can note that this is a fundamental principle or even ontological claim that operates at a number of inter-related and nested scales of political economy - from that of the relatively discrete question of subjectivity and ‘identity politics’ to the heights of a metaphysical speculation around the ‘limit of all objectivity’ (Laclau, 1990: 17). These characteristic post-structural moves place aporia at the centre of political activity that simultaneously deconstructs what Derrida would call the grammatological differentiation of epistemology and ontology. This means that for Laclau and Mouffe, capitalism is an ongoing and emerging ‘construction’ that means it can never attain structured or systemic completion—in Derridean terms, a metaphysics of presence, or, in the parlance of social science, structure or objectivity. Moreover, this also means that there is no automatic opposition or resistance to capital, no self-conscious rational agent of emancipation through which the dialectics of history bring forth the collective ownership of the means of production—a version of history that in extremis would eliminate any subject or agency. Instead, opposition and political identity need to be ‘articulated’—in the terms of this Gramscian discourse—and moreover articulated out of difference and antagonism. This means social agents are potentially and multiply ‘constituted’, or in more simple terms, pulled in a number of different and even contradictory directions.
What happens when one tries to empirically deploy these concepts? In the narrative constructed by Griggs and Howarth it is the phrase ‘dislocation’ which stands out, appearing at various junctures to explain aspects of the hegemonic regime that has formed around airport expansion. Yet, for Griggs and Howarth, dislocation becomes a rather commonplace if not mundane empirical ‘fact’, and one derived from a rather conventional and even, in some respects, ‘positivist’ methodology. In their discussion of how alliances were constructed across various anti-airport campaign groups, for example, they refer to the importance of ‘dislocatory experiences of local residents at public enquiries into expansion’ (p. 149). Elsewhere, they write that ‘the inexorable logic of aviation expansion was the source of widespread dislocation, which destabilised local communities’ (p. 98; emphasis added). There should of course be no ‘inexorable logic’ of history or otherwise in work that takes up the mantle of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. However, we are here focused on dislocation, and in these passages we see how a more commonplace understanding of ‘dislocation’ is being deployed, and one that does not necessarily register or index its ontological principle as developed by Laclau and Mouffe. Indeed, and more strictly, ‘experience’ is itself in the parlance always—already dislocated, in the sense that to forge experience (etymologically from ex-peril: to emerge, in other words, out of ‘danger’ (peril)) one has to submit to boundaries and exclusions, variously conscious and ‘unconscious’, in which all boundaries ‘defer’ and ‘differ’ material that is likely to return as alterity that will undermine and confuse what one had thought was experience. One such example might be the excluded ‘experiences’ of John Stewart, the figurehead of Heathrow Association of the Control of Aircraft Noise (HACAN), who it is reasonable to assume recognised a shared class and gender identity with senior members of Heathrow management. Maybe, for example, they play golf together; whatever, the point is that such ‘experiences’ would need to be negated if one is to develop an oppositional campaign in which it serves tactical advantage to portray Heathrow management as Machiavellian agents of capital interests, conniving and untrustworthy in their pursuit of a dangerous and fundamentally flawed expansion of aviation.
This is a mundane and itself rather flawed empirical illustration of dislocation, but it does serve to highlight the generative and multiple constructions that are possible out of the ‘structural’ aporia established by Laclau and Mouffe’s highly generative reading of Derrida. But there is an important principle here, and one that is ignored if one fails to correctly treat the role of aporia in Derrida’s thought. Most significant is the ‘work’ the concept performs on the user/analyst, a ‘performativity’ which means that the concept cannot simply be reduced to a tool of analysis deployed by a sovereign author. This is something that students of Derrida and Laclau and Mouffe in organisation studies (and other academic specialisms, more broadly) have struggled to appreciate, partly because of the lingering legacy of more humanist and traditional agency-centred conventions in the social sciences. Griggs and Howarth betray this failure most clearly when they draw the following kinds of interpretations and prescriptions: ‘Policy analysts should seek to deconstruct’ (p. 22; emphasis added). A more satisfactory engagement with deconstruction reveals a much more fundamental aporia at the heart of epistemological/ontological divisions. At times Derrida will trace this aporia into what he calls a ‘modern’ or ‘European’ discourse and even, on occasion, what he will call a ‘western’ metaphysics of presence inherited from the Platonic Greek traditions of ‘western philosophy’ (‘as if we really know what this “west” means’, would be Derrida’s typical caveat). One implication of this deconstruction is that there is no outside from which to ground even analytical foundation, no secure territory upon which political actors operate, nor for those seeking to perform analyses of these political actors. So, one does not deconstruct as an agent performing some action; instead, we have to, somehow, extend our habitual grammatical conceptions to consider something like an ‘it deconstructs’ - in which we as subjects are the outcome and not the cause of deconstruction. We can see how some of this has been picked up in Laclau, but to take seriously what has become known as ‘post-structuralism’ in British and American academia, one has to acknowledge the problematic distinction between a) ‘the empirical’, as an object of description or analysis, and b) theory, as a tool or resource that allows the researcher to conduct the analysis. Yet, Griggs and Howarth have unreflexively deployed Laclau and Mouffe, who themselves may not have been sufficiently reflexive in their working of Derridean motifs. Ultimately, a reliance on reflexivity will also prove problematic and of limited value, in part because it is a concept inherited from a phenomenological and humanist discourse that still largely retains the centrality of ‘the subject’.
Given the authorial sovereignty exercised by Griggs and Howarth, the discourse of dislocation, antagonism, undecidability and so on becomes programmatic and schematic—little more than productive tools of academic research and publication. This follows a common misunderstanding of Derrida. Divorced from the language of those they are studying, the authors elaborate a vast abstract discursive machine, the finer details of which give plenty of opportunity for colleagues to seek refinement and critique in the Critical Policy Studies journal or elsewhere. The distinction between theory and empirics, theoretician and practitioner, is of course specious. It is far more realistic and generous, even one might venture politically critical or radical, to admit that practitioners are always-already theoretical themselves and deploy a far greater degree of reflexivity in their world-making activities than the humble scholar who follows in their wake looking for evidence of the ‘nodal point’ or the ‘floating signifier’. This means that Griggs and Howarth end up in two worlds at once: a world of data, empirical evidence, interview notes and so on, and then the world of high theory as construed through Laclau and Mouffe. This means we risk simply replacing and adding another language game to that deployed in the worlds of other practitioners at work, in this case the worlds of aviation. In doing so, we thereby risk the construction of an autonomous and even solipsistic universe of academic publication.
This is a problem that is not unique to Laclau and Mouffe and those students who follow in their wake seeking application of their ideas. It is important to acknowledge that there has always been a tension between intellectual refinement through academic theory, and the vernacular language used by those who are the subjects (or objects?) of social scientific explanation and understanding. Unlike the more formal logic associated with the nomological and deductive methods of the natural sciences, however, the social sciences are distinctive. In part this distinctiveness arises out of a greater attention to the reflexive and relational features of theoretical development in the social sciences where a greater ‘two-way’ traffic between the explanans and the ad explanandum can be tolerated (Giddens, 1976). 1 For many, ‘praxis’ offers a way beyond this dualism and has been cited by some of the most influential texts as a method that best serves a commitment to emancipation or more modest versions of ‘micro-emancipation’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2012). The work of Gramsci, and particularly his conception of the ‘organic intellectual’, is noteworthy here and provides inspiration for many working in critical management studies (e.g. Elliott, 2003; Levy and Egan, 2003; Perriton and Reynolds, 2004).
Gramsci is of course central to the work of Laclau and Mouffe, and this prompts us to ask, again, what is the added value of the terms dislocation, antagonism, undecidability, floating signifier and so on? In other words, what is the quality of their praxis? In the two-and-a-half years of full-time ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the aviation industry, there was no one who explained themselves in terms of the ‘empty signifier’ or the ‘constitutive outside’ (O’Doherty, forthcoming). They might have done, had the ethnographer thought to give them the opportunity or had found a way to tap into this discourse, which might indeed have been interesting, even potentially politically disruptive—although this is doubtful—but it would have required at least a lecture on Laclau and Mouffe, if not full-time attendance on a course in post-Marxist political theory. This would certainly have provided the basis for securing my own identity as an academic of expertise knowledge, but it would not have been good ethnography or politically imaginative or radical, although I might have secured greater publication in academic journals and promotion up what remains of a career ladder in a British university. In contrast, it seems that Griggs and Howarth are still motivated to conduct a careful (scientific) noncommittal political analysis, one which might be said to be agnostic about the respective claims made on behalf of aviation experts, both those claiming that airport expansion will lead to miraculous economic benefits, and those who oppose development on the grounds of noise, climate change or global warming. Both sides are analysed within the terms of a dispassionate and technical analysis provided by the language of antagonism, dislocation and radical contingency.
There is a position of scholarly detachment sought here, which is typically applauded as the very essence of good ‘scientific’ research. Yet, one should be reminded that Laclau and Mouffe wanted to re-invigorate ‘strategies for the left’, to uncover and expose sites of articulation and politicisation for emancipatory struggle, something they call elsewhere in their oeuvre ‘radical democracy’. For many on the left, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was exciting because it seemed to extend the terrain upon which political struggle had to be imagined and exercised. Science, as it is deployed in ‘scientific socialism’, with its quest for determination, dialectical laws of economy, the history of class struggle and so on, is precisely the target of their critique in their efforts to recreate and extend the scope for agency, contingency and undecidability. This would of course prompt us to ask whether Griggs and Howarth produce a political analysis at all, or whether instead they produce a technical and scholarly value-free analysis. However, as we have seen, there is not even an effort to judge the respective claims of the various disputants based on an assessment of the credibility or reliability of the evidence available. The paradox is, however, that this reluctance is precisely the product of the kind of value commitment implied in the academic project.
If on the other hand we ‘follow the money’ as Lester Freamon would counsel in The Wire, we would inevitably be drawn to the conclusion that this Manchester University Press publication will help promote Political Theory at the University of Essex and Local Governance studies at DeMontfort University - and no doubt draw in additional readership and subscription for the Critical Policy Studies journal. In other words, it has political effects. No doubt these are both political projects that are likely to attract widespread support, but when one considers that the journal is published by Taylor and Francis—a none too reputable corporate conglomerate, and according to some extracting extortionate rent and profit from what many argue is the ‘free labour’ of academic endeavour (Harvie et al., 2012), while supported by government-underwritten student debt—a greater range of political complexity, antagonism and contradiction is revealed. More strictly then, we can say that this text is the product of an ‘undecidable’ value commitment suggestive of the possibility that Griggs and Howarth themselves have become the phenomenon—products, ironically, of the very same discourse they wish to deploy. This is surely the most ‘wicked problem’ of them all.
Texts and networks: towards an interventionary ethnography?
What are the possibilities for an escape from the snares of these tautologies that might help build what this section of a SAGE journal calls ‘connexions’ and thereby possibly contribute to a re-positioning of organisation studies within public debate and political relevance? Griggs and Howarth might well have written a book about ‘the politics’ of airport expansion, but to what extent does it speak politically, or rather to what extent can we acknowledge the politics of our practices in ways that allow us to speak politics better? Can we tackle politics by focusing on abstractions such as ‘floating signifier’, ‘nodal points’, ‘dislocation’ and ‘antagonism’? What political purpose do they serve? How successful are they in mobilising support? For what type of action? It seems to me that these are the types of questions one asks when thinking or acting politically. In response, one might argue that their text has helped mobilise support among researchers and doctoral students within the academy, enrolling a number of European intellectuals and promoting the Department of Politics at Essex. Preliminary to these questions, however, would be a commitment to attend more fully to the conditions of possibility that gave rise to the Laclau and Mouffe corpus, including the PSIN (the Argentinean Socialist Party of the National Left), Oxford University (people around the historian Eric Hobsbawm who helped sponsor Laclau), the new UK campus–based universities established in the 1960s, the editorial networks among new left publications in the UK, and so on. In other words, we start looking more locally at our own practices. Instead of the vast imperial sounding meta-narratives and conceptual architecture constructed from close textual and theoretical obsession, we might profit from a closer look at the immediate materials of our own practices.
In this respect, it is a little surprising that in a book ostensibly about airport expansion, Griggs and Howarth do not appear to have stepped inside an airport to consider the practices of those that make airports and make them work. An ethnographic approach to organisation studies, by contrast, encourages us to stay close to the speech and activities of others. By ‘following the actors’ as Latour (1986) commends, we might begin to attend to those reflexive features of social scientific enquiry wherein the everyday and mundane artefacts of organisation can be read as working through political practices of ‘articulation’. All texts, for example, seek to mediate and position borders and boundaries, enrolling allies, building context and positioning adversaries. In the wake of Clifford and Marcus (1986), it is difficult not to acknowledge these reflexive and constitutive features of ethnography, but more recent advances have sought to extend what has been called a ‘post-reflexive’ approach—associated with scholars such as Marilyn Strathern, Annelise Riles, and Bill Maurer, who in their different ways work with the consequences that follow when reflexivity is treated as something more than the exclusive preserve of the ethnographer. Developing ways of situating and engaging the ethnographer in relation to the reflexive practices of those they research, these forms of ethnography invite us to work with the mutually constitutive ‘performativity’ (drawing on Callon (2010) or MacKenzie (2006)) or ‘enactment’ (Mol, 2002) of realities, which at the same time opens up the play of what some recent studies have identified as the ‘virtual’ in organisation. For our purposes, this notion of a ‘virtual’ can be briefly summarised by citing Deleuze (1994: 208), for whom this is experience and phenomena that is ‘real but not actual, ideal but not abstract’. Hence, this ‘virtual’ dimension helps draw attention to those features of organisation that are not theoretically pre-determined or prefigured but which exceed our knowing and conceptual grasp in experiences that demand new subjective capacities and new thoughts, concepts, ideas and so on. Ethnographic texts are therefore best seen as negotiated or contested, emerging out of struggle between those various contending parties that can be ‘interested’ and mobilised by the work of ethnographic research. This further means that those borders and boundaries of textual practice, involving the enrolment of allies, the ‘building’ of context, and the positioning of adversaries, is a collective and contested enterprise. It offers a mode of enquiry that seeks to extract the unique conditions of possibility for ‘critical’ and ‘political’ action as they can be made available through the precise contours of ethnographic study, each time renewed according to the specific conditions of each field site. This often results in a textual artefact, an ethnographic report or writing that may appear politically tangential and obtuse. It is likely not to ‘fit’ into the all-too-familiar terms of pre-determined schemas and categories understood as ‘political’, for example, and should also avoid simple moral condemnation or the promotion of activities that advance a particular position or ideal within the checkerboard of party politics or ideologies. This involves a certain ‘breaching’ of the support network provided by the infrastructure of academic ‘production’, in which disciplinary associations or communities of practice circulate a repertoire of discursive terms maintained through conferences, journals, academic publishers, teaching modules, student reading lists and so on. The kind of ‘interventionary’ ethnography envisaged here also puts texts into circulation within host organisations and the more familiar spaces of academic production. If done successfully, such texts risk a certain provocation, at least to those committed to more familiar versions of political action. Extracting new ‘political objects’ (see Marres, 2012) from that which is made available empirically, and demanding new conceptions and possibilities for ‘the political’, such texts animate political practices.
Beyond the abstractions of this formal theorising, recent ethnographic research has sought to develop ways of working that avoid the deployment of an abstracted formal theory, or transcendental categories, and instead extract possibilities latent within a more immanent conception of sociality or organisation. Terms such as ‘political economy’, ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘capitalism’ are eschewed, and treated with extreme caution. Often deployed by writers to act as explanations, or circulated within a community of research or ‘thought collective’ in ways that rely upon a commensual indexicality, these terms operate as explanatory short-cuts that avoid the importance of description and, as Latour (2005) has written, brought in when the description of practices is underdeveloped or inadequate. Typically mobilised as containers or contexts, these terms tend to establish a fixed and rigid scale that nests the micro into the macro, and tend to subordinate the empirical and our observations of it. The challenge, then, is to develop a language or descriptive practice that can respect ‘the unique adequacy requirements of methods’ (Garfinkel, 2002) of each particular ethnographic enquiry. Empirical research is therefore not led by a priori concepts, but rather seeks to engage with that which is inchoate and emergent in organisation. Such an engagement with the empiricial will demand new concepts that, to avoid an undue reification and abstraction within the exclusive confines of academic journals and debates, must be coined through collaboration and negotiation with indigenous members of organisation. To meet the political ambitions of this approach, the ethnographer is looking for the ways in which something like ‘political economy’ or ‘society’ can be grasped in its ‘movement’, as it is extended or unfolded in unprecedented and singular ways, and as this is made available within the specific terms of engagement the ethnographer is able to establish within each field site(s) of enquiry. We are then better able to attend to the ways ‘political economy’ or society is ‘put to work’ in the practices of those we study, and in doing so recover the fuller range of capacities and repertoires embodied in what traditional sociology might call ‘agency’. Context is no longer fixed in this approach, but co-emergent alongside that which is putatively considered its inside or ‘text’. Structure can then be studied together with agent, the macro with the micro, and the environment and organisation, as these can be variously followed in the scale-making practices of agents.
Following the actors and materials of organisation in these ways makes possible a different kind of politics, one that might extend our appreciation of the multiple agencies and points of contestation that collectively compose the airport and the wider aviation ‘system’. Instead of political economy, and what we think we may know of it—with its established categories, positions and relations - we might find ways of extracting the unique ways in which the airport is a site where politics and economy is being ‘reassembled’ (cf. Latour, 2005). Once I had managed to rid myself of relying upon formal theory through which our experiences could be indexed into the preordained categories of organisation analysis, for example, I was forced to innovate in order to capture something of that which began to emerge as profoundly unsettling but also potentially new in terms of a politics of organisation. Increasingly aware of the reflexive and constitutive qualities of my activities, evident, for example, in the way members of organisation would relay their experiences in terms I had been partly responsible for constructing, I began to see the challenge of circulating concepts ‘hybridised’ through negotiation with members. In the intense and ongoing relationships forged during my own recent ethnographic research at an international airport in the United Kingdom, I was constantly under pressure to account for my research and to provide more formal feedback in addition to the inevitable to-and-fro of exchange and conversation through which ideas and understanding about the nature of airport organisation were tried and tested. Presentations to the senior executive management committee, for example, became opportunities to circulate concepts crafted to isolate and extract those practices of management that offered connections out of the immediate bureaucratic internal concerns of policy and ‘business as usual’ and into wider preoccupations with ‘society’ and ‘economy’.
In this respect, it proved helpful to think of management as engaged in the practice of ‘hospitality’ (O’Doherty, forthcoming), which helped draw together a whole series of heterogeneous elements in the airport—animals, the family cat (‘Olly, the family cat’—see O’Doherty, 2014), memorial gardens, security technologies, passengers and customers, the ‘stranger’, queues, waiting, border controls, departure lounges, ‘the business’ and ‘the shareholders’. Neither an exclusively academic or theoretical term, with none of the specialist intellectual genealogy required of the ‘floating signifier’, hospitality was able to do some work politically and organisationally. Executives found this interesting, but challenging and provocative, and also perhaps something they had come to expect from the ‘organisational anthropologist’, which had also served as a useful concept itself both for members of the organisations and for myself, enabling some latitude to cut across established lines of expertise and responsibility within the ranks of bureaucratic management. How hospitable had they been, for example, to the stranger, as represented in the figure of the organisational anthropologist, who at one point was declared to be ‘not really corporate’? At the same time, ‘you make it all sound so interesting’, one member of the management team confessed. The concept helped open up and split a difference between the engrained temptation to turn this back into a ‘business as usual’ in asking to what extent hospitality could be measured, compared or turned into a commercial proposition, while also opening up insight into a series of unplanned and emergent, non-instrumentalised relations of hospitality—those that had formed around the cat, for example (O’Doherty, 2014)? Instead of assuming management enacts an instrumental or utilitarian role that extends a ‘commodification’ of social relations - as assumed in much critical management studies - we might follow the way management struggles to define and mobilise that which can be made instrumental.
Conclusion
Despite its obvious merits, we have argued that the study of airports by Griggs and Howarth exposes some of the limitations of Laclau and Mouffe and largely fails to provide the conditions for a critical politics in organisation studies. Reinforcing a division between theory and practice rather than offering a creative synthesis or resolution to this dilemma between action and disinterested observation, their book reflects a series of missed connections in organisation analysis. We have briefly sketched an alternative devised out of a greater acknowledgement of the reflexive features of social scientific research. Through a form of concept creation crafted out of ethnographic study, we found that there was, in a sense, no ‘political economy’ at the airport; at the other end of the scale, there was no such thing as ‘the individual’, replaced in the ethnography by the concept of ‘MAG men’ (O’Doherty, forthcoming). There was paperwork recording meetings with representatives of the Department for Transport, for example, and old dusty archives of endlessly amended and revised rules and regulations issued by acronyms with letter headed paper indicating ‘DfT’ and ‘CAA’, discussion papers from the ‘Airports Commission’ and reports from bodies such as DG Mobility and Transport. Such artefacts and recorded inscriptions form part of a negotiated exercise in what we might call ‘push–pull’ relations between representatives of multiple bodies, each seeking self-definition and a sense of what action it is capable of as they simultaneously try to work out their relation with each other.
Finding ways of escaping our predominant disposition to think power hierarchically, as Foucault (1980) once enjoined, can be helped by the fabrication of concepts derived from the in media res of ethnography. Such enquiries then might help track political economy in the making, and thereby open up the drift of more lateral relations that cut across the top-down macro-micro, object-structure divisions of modern social theory. We briefly introduced the concept of ‘hospitality’ as an example of how we might participate in the enactment of a new politics of aviation, which offered some indication of how novel politicised objects might draw connexions that would otherwise remain off the radar in established political economy. Might there be a new nascent political imaginary immanent to the airport, one that invites new subject positions around ‘connexions’ between home and travel, animals as companion species, the politics of ‘sunshine and vacations’, gardens and domesticity? If so, the ethnographer then might help bring into being a different kind of ‘travelling society’.