Abstract
One of the continual wailings of the workaday academic nowadays is that nobody ever reads anything we write. Journal articles are read by an average of 0.7 family pets, bloated companions and handbooks gather dust in the libraries of the world, and monographs sell fewer copies than they have pages. So when an academic tries to find an audience, by writing an attractive book with a clear pitch, we should begin with congratulations. That hot dog André Spicer is one of a very few “CMS” academics who has been successfully engaging with the media over the last few years, writing pieces for The Guardian, being a talking head on the TV and publishing books which are being read and discussed by a wider public (Alvesson and Spicer, 2016; Cederström and Spicer, 2015). Given that most of the people who discuss business and management on the media are idiots, lapdogs or the chronically smug, having André up there matters.
The title promises a swashbuckling read, and delivers that nicely. The book essentially reprises a long-standing CMS genre, the critique of the latest management buzz. Over the last 20 years culture, TQM, re-engineering, excellence, diversity, lean have all felt the sharp edge of the academic’s tongue, exposed as no more than ideology, discourse or the failing attempt to secure identities. In academic terms, that’s pretty much what this book delivers, though it sensibly keeps its referencing to endnotes, uses nice stories and is written in short sentences. I think that the intended reader is probably a middle manager who doesn’t produce bullshit, but is often encouraged to pass it on down. And I think they will enjoy what Spicer has to tell them.
The key source here is Harry Frankfurt’s (2006) lovely little book On Bullshit. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Frankfurt’s argument, which is essentially a rationalist railing against nonsensical language, is the distinction he makes between bullshit and lies. The liar, Frankfurt says, has a clear relationship with the truth, in that they consciously oppose it for their own reasons. The bullshitter has no relationship to truth, since they either don’t recognize it, or don’t believe it exists. Nowadays, we might call this “post-truth,” an adhesion between truth and power such that the two could never be detached, and everyone is assumed to be selling their own bullshit. Spicer stirs this unholy toilet bowl of PR, marketing, performance measures, CVs, jargon and mission statements with skill, nicely showing how we are drowning in this crap. It’s a book I would recommend to a general reader who wants an intelligent deflation of the hyper-bollocks that is contemporary managerial language.
And here comes the academic bullshit. Using Frankfurt has its consequences, because when Spicer uses Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, he is making a similar sort of distinction. Between the miasma of bullshit and something else, some other sort of relationship with truth, work, language and so on. This is a tricky cut of course, for an author well versed in the sophistications of post-whatever, but it leaks through in ideas about “real work” (pp. 17, 123), assumptions about what “we” really want at work (pp. 18–19), ‘what works and what does not’ (p. 120) and a background assumption that good decisions can be made with better information, that some ideas are better than others. Peeping out beyond the toilet bowl is reason, clarity and perhaps even an ideal speech situation—organizations with less bullshit.
Yet, in a way that won’t surprise any Marxists reading this review, Spicer avoids too many assumptions about capitalism, and the way that the search for profit drives both bullshit and lies. Instead, he tends to focus on ideas about power within the organization, the search for meaning, the seductions of language and so on. Even the Frankfurt school idea that capitalism structures epistemology is not really present here, because Spicer is really telling his readers about bad business practices, and hence conjuring good ones. Get rid of bullshit, or at least minimize it, and your business will be more efficient, less vulnerable, and able to concentrate on its core business more effectively. It’s Harry Frankfurt, but it’s not Frankfurt School.
The final chapter, the practical one, is sensible enough. Spicer celebrates various strategies of resistance and co-optation—laughter, the appropriation of bullshit, the avoidance of bullshit and the elimination of bullshit jobs. Bullshit needs to be tested against reality, rationality and meaningfulness. More interestingly, Spicer suggests that it is important to provide employees with job security and give them space to ask questions. This is implicated with providing alternative bases of self-confidence which allow questions to be asked, as well as organizational practices which make stupidity costly. These latter suggestions seem to me the most interesting ones, because they begin to open up the possibility that inoculation against bullshit also requires enhancing employee democracy and curtailing managerial privilege (Parker et al., 2014). A tricky thing to sell explicitly though, if the book is aimed at the middle manager.
Frankfurt’s distinction is a really persuasive one, but it comes undone under at least two conditions. One is a post-truth epistemology, in which all utterances and texts have no necessary relation to facts. If you believe something is truth, or lie, then it is. The other is a critical theoretical epistemology in which the very grounds for truth are systematically distorted by the nature of capitalism. In this scenario, we are incapable of distinguishing truth and lies, of escaping from ideology, though that possibility does exist in an alternate social order. So in both cases, it’s all bullshit, but the latter does contain the possibility (imaginary, ideal and so on) that a different sort of social order could open a different relation between people.
The reason I’m gibbering on about this is to establish the limits of Spicer’s critique, because he does find it difficult to establish a clear definition of bullshit. It seems to me that much language in organizations is somewhere between bullshit and lies, a gray area that combines self-delusion with Machiavellian attempts at misguidance, together with a sprinkling of fun facts. Many of his examples don’t quite work, or really stretch the definition he starts with, which suggests that Frankfurt’s distinction isn’t quite as watertight as it might seem. Sustainability, for example, which Spicer mentions as a fashionable initiative. Is that an example of bullshit? Or, can it become bullshit? Or is it a hook for some urgent changes that all organizations need to make? The problem is that bullshit, as Frankfurt and Spicer understand it, might be a function of the existing social order, not something that can be cleaned up by a dose of reason.
People often write about what frightens them most, and in Spicer’s case, as a professional engaged in self-confessed self-promotion (p. 76), he often writes about his work while maintaining a cynical distance from it. In the United Kingdom, in marketizing universities, he is surrounded by the same bullshit (98 passim). He worries that the university “is no longer doing research and teaching and the other things a university is supposed to do” (p. 100). This book, as well as being an important example of what we might call “public CMS” (a genre we need a lot more of), is also a cry of pain about the university. It’s a shame that, in so effectively producing a critical performance that is aimed at the middle manager, its potential radicalism gets buried too deeply.