Unwilling theory: A response to Hughes’ ‘Looking Elsewhere’

Abstract

Jason Hughes’ paper ‘Looking Elsewhere: Howard S. Becker as Unwilling Organization Theorist’ offers a long overdue survey of Becker’s ideas. I hope it will spark renewed interest in the work of Becker among organization theorists.The essay certainly saves us all a lot of time as it ties together Becker’s terminology, theory and methods and contextualizes his work within recent trends in sociology and organization studies. However, while Hughes focuses on the potential of Becker’s ideas as a theory of organizations, in this commentary, I would like to focus on the other part of Becker—the ‘unwilling organization theorist’. What, I want to ask, can we learn from Becker’sunwillingness?

Making things personal

When we discuss an idea like unwillingness, we inevitably make things personal. This can be a difficult position for an academic researcher to occupy—to place ourselves in the analysis introduces ‘observer bias’ and risks us ‘going native’. Yet, Hughes emphasizes that, for Becker, looking elsewhere starts when we immerse ourselves in an individual phenomenon. This provides us with the analytical visibility that allows us to move from the personal to the social. Across his works, Becker repeatedly uses his own experiences to provide such visibility. He does so as a researcher, sociologist and musician.

I wrote my PhD around Becker’s writings—using his understanding of outsiders and cultural production to make sense of my own failed attempts to become a rock star. I was frequently met with puzzled looks when I described my research to organizational scholars. Even my supervisors suggested it was probably because I wasn’t very good at music. I carried on despite these setbacks because I had read Becker’s (1982) Art Worlds. There, Becker argues that if you want to understand how art is made and consumed, the first thing you need to do is look beyond the individual artist. Becker tells us that art is made through worlds—that is, complexly interdependent systems of people, things, routines, discourses and assumptions which coordinate and shape peoples’ activities into conventional working practice. The artist is no more important than a tube of paint, a sheet of music or a pair of ballet shoes. As Becker (2007) puts it,

if you don’t have people running the parking lot, the opera will be different, because it will affect how easy it is for people to attend, thus who and how many attend, this the sources and amount of revenue earned, thus how much can be spent on a production, and thus who can be hired and what can be bought. (p. 208)

Hughes explains in his essay that we can equate a world with an organization and conventions with organizing. In this way, Becker’s approach helps us to focus on the production of organizations as much as the organization of production (Cooper and Burrell, 1988). Indeed, going back to my own research, as I spoke to others I made music with, I began to see how we used certain ideas, images, references, working practices and assumptions to mark out the boundaries of our world. We were not just people doing things together. We were people, ideas and things doing things together. But were we an organization?

We were certainly not a bounded or formal organization like a university, health agency or a business. We recognized that there were ideas, working practices and so on that marked the boundary of our world. But precisely because we were unable to articulate them as a formal set, ourworld was not only stable, it was also flexible, experimental and open to challenging ideas. This, I argued, was what made us a creative organization (Cluley, 2012, 2013).

It is this point where I would add to Hughes’ interpretation of Becker’s ideas. As much as Becker helps us to see the organization around individual phenomena, his work also helps us to see that there are different kinds of organizations at work. An academic community, for instance, might claim it is innovative, but when we look at how it is organized, it may become clear that it relies on conventional working practices to shut out new perspectives. In this regard, a reviewer of the first version of this commentary stated that a ‘reflexive paragraph’ on my own engagement with Becker ‘rather than pages, will suffice’. In fact, the reviewer stated that my commentary piece should be written in ‘response to mode’. They assumed that I knew what this mode was and how to engage it. In basing a commentary on my personal experience, I had either ignored or was ignorant of the conventions of this world. It was as if I had written a piece of music for a piano with 89 keys.

But to be unwilling might mean being unconventional—so I’ve kept it in.

Unconventional theory

As much as individual phenomena or personal experiences help us to look elsewhere, it is, fundamentally, the unconventional which offers us analytic visibility. Becker (1986) himself points out that despite the espoused need for robust quantitative research methods in mainstream sociology, most enduring sociological ideas have come from alternative perspectives (including his own). Yet, as Becker illustrates in his interview with Jason Hughes, if we want to be unconventional, the world around us has to play its part.

Unconventional is, after all, a label placed on an act. It is not a characteristic immanent in the act. Here, Becker distinguishes between unconventional mavericks who break rules but are, ultimately, integrated back into a world and true outsiders who are never adopted into anyworld. Illustrating the latter, Becker (1982) discusses Harry Partch. Partch was a ‘hobo composer’ (Young, 2002: 74) who rejected every aspect of Western music as it was presented to him and designed and built his own instruments such as the harmonic cannon, the gourd tree and the diamond marimba. Partch (1975) even developed a new musical system according to his own theory of just intonation. But Partch needed to create more than new notes and instruments. He needed to create musicians who could play those notes, an audience who wanted to hear them and venues who would pay him for a performance. In short, he needed to create a new world. This was much more difficult. Public performances were rare and Partch struggled ‘to boost his always meagre (and sometimes non-existent) income’ (Marley, 2007: 45).

Partch and other outsiders show us just how conventional much supposed creativity actually is. Most musicians, no matter how innovative, work on instruments that were produced and designed by others to make sounds that fit into harmonic systems produced by many others over many years. Most accept the world as they find it. They write music for pianos with 88 keys.

We could follow this logic to complain about the formulaic nature of much academic research—a formulaic complaint if ever there were one. Partch’s refusal to play the role of the maverick should remind us all how institutionalized we are and should encourage to ask why we are often so willing to ‘play the game’. Yet, the theoretical lesson we inherit from Partch is slightly different. Partch might have struggled to eat but he had a lasting influence on social theory because Becker looked through him to develop new understandings of social life.

In this sense, looking elsewhere means we have to explore the unconventional. Conventions can limit both what we do and what we can see. If, for example, we accept the criteria of ‘managerial relevance’, we have a discourse through which unconventional work can be cast aside without further discussion. Perhaps this explains Becker’s concern with being understood through a managerial lens. Even ‘critical research’ can quickly shift from being research about management into research for management. As he explains in the interview,

the minute you say restructuring, or downsizing, you’re telling me: the important thing here is this part, right? There’s that stuff over there but this, this is what’s important. If I believe you, then I don’t look at many of the things that perhaps would be worth looking at.

Of course, we all have our pet peeves here, and it is impossible, reading Becker, to imagine a social world without some conventional working practices, but the point is that it might be worth opening up a discussion about the conventions we adhere to.

In defence of deviants

I agree with Hughes that from Becker we inherent a practical interest in reframing questions and a need to look at social interactions from elsewhere. But I think Hughes downplays another important lesson from Becker’s work. He teaches us more about the inherent politics of research than Hughes suggests. It is this lesson that, for me, ultimately helps us to understand why Becker describes himself as unwilling organization theorist.

The concern for finding different ways in is more than a theoretical issue. Revealing the hidden infrastructure of social interactions can be emancipatory. It can speak truth to power. But, as it relies on exposing those on the inside (with power) to those on the outside (without power), it can render the outside through the interests of the inside (cf. Latour, 1988). Becker most famously discusses this in ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ (1967). There, he argues that all social research is an inherently political act. We do not just look at somewhere, we look from somewhere. This shapes what we do when we get there. In his interview in this issue, he tells us, ‘You might say, “Well, we want a good neutral account of this, I am not taking sides.” I don’t know if such a thing exists’. It is ‘impossible’ to ‘look at everything’. As he says, ‘Every picture is an argument’. They all leave something out.

The things we chose not to look at are, then, just as important as the things we focus on. Again the unconventional is as important as the conventional. In this regard, it is interesting to read Becker’s ideas alongside Latour’s (2004) discussion in ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ Here, Latour explains that revealing the hidden infrastructure of social interactions such as demonstrating the social construction of scientific facts is not enough. Social facts can just as easily be used for regressive as progressive social forces. The understanding of science as a social construct can, for example, be used by climate change deniers to argue against the sustainability agenda. Latour (2004) calls such work ‘gullible criticism’ (p. 230) and encourages us to recognize that behind the apparent matters of fact it focuses on, there are always matters of concern. We have to question our questions, yes, but also how our questions get answered and our answers used.

This is one of the cornerstones of critical organization studies. The administrative techniques taught by business schools and justified through research conducted in those schools are matters of concern hiding within matters of fact. Recognizing whose concerns they are, and how they become facts, requires us to ask ourselves whose side are we on. Answering that question means more than identifying our paradigm, branding our work with what Latour (2004) calls the ‘trademark’ (p. 230) Made in Criticalland, saying we are against management, attending certain conferences or publishing in particular journals. There are no easy answers. It is difficult to look inside but stay outside.

A practical note

Is this, then, simply another call for innovative, critical or heterodox research at the expense of managerial, positivist, impactful research? I hope not. Understanding how conventions work and challenging them are two different things. To challenge conventions requires the kind of unwillingness that Harry Partch demonstrated. Personally, I’m unwilling to go to this extreme. I like a regular pay-check.

But I would like to understand how conventions work within organizations and organizational scholarship. Here, we can take something from Becker’s work and approach. We have many more choices available to us than we might think. When we choose our research site, analytic viewpoint and methods and articulate our findings, we can allow the academic world to make our choices for us—relying on conventional working practices because they are conventional—or we can question whether they really help us to understand organizations. For instance, if we understand the absence of building schematics and coloured pictures in journal papers as a consequence of the conventions of publishing, we might wonder whether a practical convention has shaped how we have understood organizations. It might explain the relative lack of attention paid to material and physical parts of organizations and the preference for discursive and textual accounts (which are easier to print).

Far from seeing this as tale about the oppressive nature of conventions, I think see this as an opportunity for exploration. It leaves me hopeful that there are still uncharted territories left for us to explore—things we haven’t looked at yet. For instance, there is a world of new methods and new sites of organization coming into view through digital technologies. These are new things to look at and to look with. Existing theories and methods might help guide us here, but they might only take us so far.

We should remember that just as a piece of music occasionally needs 89 keys, insightful research is often unconventional and important thinkers unwilling.