Taking a stand: The embodied,enacted and emplaced work of relational critique

Abstract

We reflect here on our experience as critical scholars in an academic organization when confronted with an expectation that we remain value-neutral about a political act which we, and many others, found reprehensible. Our experience relates to the Academy of Management response to the travel ban implemented by President Trump in January 2017 which denied US entry to citizens from seven Muslim majority countries. By exploring how the concept of ‘taking a stand’ was used by the Academy of Management leadership to try to silence politics, and the response that this generated within the critical management studies community, we draw attention to the impossibility of separating management scholarship from questions of ethics and politics. We highlight the gendered nature of struggles to be critical in uncritical spaces and draw attention to the importance of embodied, enacted and emplaced work as the basis for developing relational practices of critique.

Introduction

This article explores the political and ethical responsibilities of critical management studies (CMS) scholars in ‘uncritical’ (Willmott, 2013) academic organizations. It is an enduring concern within CMS that membership of uncritical academic organizations potentially undermines possibilities for pursuing critical agendas. This applies to employment in business schools (Adler, 2002; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011), holding managerial positions in universities (Parker, 2004), and belonging to professional academic associations (Burrell, 1993; Walsh and Weber, 2002). Here we reflect on our experiences as ‘official’ role holders in an academic organization that is an enduring focus of such concern – the US-based Academy of Management (AOM). ¹

The events that provoked this reflection began in January 2017 when US President Trump instituted an Executive Order putting in place a 90-day travel ban denying US entry to citizens from seven Muslim majority countries. This discriminatory political act meant management scholars from these countries were unable to attend the 2017 AOM conference in the United States. The ban thereby raised fundamental questions concerning the ethical and political values of the AOM in an era of populist politics. By analysing the organizational response to the ban, in this article, we seek to demonstrate the impossibility of separating politics and ethics from scholarship in the stated interests of maintaining scientific neutrality. Reflecting on what it means to take a stand as a form of embodied, enacted and emplaced work, we argue for a reflexive critical praxis that goes beyond a belief in the inherent righteousness of a critical position.

Our arguments build on Ashcraft’s (2017) notion of ‘inhabited criticism’. Ashcraft suggests that ‘politics start at the animated inhabitation of things’ (p. 46). In other words, rather than focusing critique on evaluating states of affairs or using this to ‘plan revolutions’, there is a need for ‘ordinary resistance’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 47). This involves developing new habits of suspending judgement as a way of opening up spaces to imagine ‘the very politics for which we yearn’ (p. 52). Inhabited criticism thus requires us to pause and reflect not only on the affective aspects of our own embodiment but also on how these subjective emotions may impact each other. ‘As agency slips from the sole grasp of the human, inhabited criticism beckons a post-human reflexivity curious about the politics of evolving things-in-relation’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 50). A search for complexity within the ordinary is therefore ‘steeped in relational attunement’ (p. 53) whereby we develop a respect for the uniqueness of the needs of all other person(s). This involves moving beyond the comfort of the CMS community and collaborating across boundaries. Ashcraft (2017) suggests that we should not ‘abandon the ordinary’ (p. 45) for therein lies some merit in the ‘mundane, covert, informal and emergent’ (p. 44). In the reflection that follows, we explore the implications of ‘inhabited criticism’ as ordinary resistance ² that is rooted in ‘sense-abilities’ (p. 51) which render the human vulnerable. This enables a move beyond critique as aggressive confrontation, to ask ‘what “we” will be born of the performance’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 49) of being CMS scholars in an uncritical academic organization?

Being an official role holder

The AOM has over 19,000 members from 126 countries, making it the largest (by membership) professional association of management scholars. It is a ‘member-driven association governed by a volunteer Board of Governors (the Board)’ with ‘25 divisions and interest groups’ of varying size. These groups are organized around specific intellectual agendas ‘governed by their own elected officers’ who ‘carry out much of the association’s work’. ³ The AOM Board, as the primary governing body, comprised ‘15 individuals, including the president, president elect, vice president and program chair, vice president elect and program chair elect, past president [and] nine representatives-at-large, all of whom are elected’ ⁴ role holders.

Much of the administrative work that enables the AOM to function is carried out by executive members within Divisions and Special Interest Groups. This includes a significant amount of academic ‘housekeeping’ which receives ‘little recognition within the process of academic career making or within the definition of academic excellence’ (Heijstra et al., 2016: 2). The constraints associated with these roles were highlighted following AOM President, Anita McGahan’s statement of response to Trump’s travel ban. An initial statement acknowledged the concerns of AOM members, stating,

… many are interpreting the Executive Order as a direct attack on scholarship; and some are worried about the implication for pluralism on all sides of this issue. A number of you have asked the AOM to condemn the order as antithetical to scholarly values, academic freedom, and democratic processes … Yet because of our very diversity, the AOM has long had a binding policy that restricts any officer from taking a stand on any political issue in the name of the AOM. ⁵

The rest of the statement provided practical advice to individuals affected by Trump’s travel ban but stopped short of any moral condemnation or ethical position. It concluded with a call to ‘double down on the scholarly agenda’ and find a ‘way forward together’ through ‘scholarly discussions and debate’. In so doing, the statement sought to separate scholarship from politics and ethics. This provoked fundamental questioning of our position as critical scholars in AOM. To comply with the statement would be to neglect our responsibility to ‘unveil, rediscover and reinvent’ ideologies and thereby to ‘acquiesce to oppression’ (Blomley, 1994: 29) and would contradict the CMS Division domain statement.

The CMS Division Executive consulted its members via an email survey, ⁶ using the comments of members to lobby the AOM leadership. The response of Division members to the AOM statement was characterized by disappointment and anger. Some called for an immediate boycott of the annual meeting. While we shared members’ concerns, we were troubled by the implications of a boycott. The success of social movements that challenge power relations and institutionalized oppression and exploitation relies on having ‘dwelling’ places, as a basis not only for community but also for cultivating embodied ethics (Ahmed, 2017; Diprose, 2013). While CMS gatherings are not immune from the power relations that characterize the embodied performance of academic life (Bell and King, 2010), they provide spaces for critical scholars to collectively inhabit. It seemed that those calling loudest for a conference boycott ⁷ were CMS scholars who had greater power, while early career critical scholars who occupy more precarious positions in the Academy (Prasad, 2013) occupied a more ambivalent stance.

After the AOM statement was released, the CMS executive drafted a statement to articulate the collective concerns and diversity of Division members. But after communicating our intention to release a statement to the AOM Chief Operating Officer, we were informed that the governance policy prevented us from making the statement public:

AOM Policy on Taking Political Stands

The Academy of Management does not take political stands. Officers and leaders are bound by this policy and may not make publicly stated political views in the name of the Academy or through use of Academy resources. ⁸

We were shocked when the Policy on Taking Political Stands (PTPS) was invoked in to prevent us from engaging in ‘campaigns in words and deeds against the corporate world’s malfeasance’ (Adler, 2002: 390). The PTPS drew a false distinction between our official roles and our critical scholarship. We were deeply disturbed by this, unable to respond to the travel ban and the institutionalized racism it enshrined in a way which was consistent with our scholarship. Far from being ‘intellectual activists’ (Collins, 2012), we felt extremely precarious, in the position of ‘imprisoned intellectuals’ (James, 2003: 5), occupying a space of ambivalence and contradiction in an organization that sought to separate duty from ethics and politics.

Promoting a disembodied ethics

The role of organizational governance, in constraining and suppressing political views, was emphasized in a further statement from the AOM Board: ⁹

The President must adhere to the policies and principles of the organization, even when she or he may disagree with them. This stance is also a central part of the AOM Board’s code of conduct. Furthermore, the AOM currently has no process by which the organization as a whole can develop and express a view.

This statement of rational-legal authority (Weber, 1930) reminded us of Bauman’s (1989) argument that morality may be neutralized, rather than enhanced, through the exercise of rule-governed ethics. In other words, it displaced wider goals of ethics and political justice and promoted a disembodied ethics (Bauman, 1991). Failure to conform to ‘the rule’ meant we risked being labelled disruptive and disobedient, but if we failed to resist, we would become alienated from our intellectual principles and moral impulses, as well as those who we sought to represent.

Other academic organizations responded differently to the travel ban, criticizing the disruption it caused and expressing moral outrage at the principles on which it was based. The American Anthropological Association called for the Order to be ‘rescinded immediately’ and ‘the hateful ignorance behind it’ to ‘be named’. ¹⁰ The American Sociological Association ¹¹ co-signed a statement produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science arguing against the travel ban and encouraged members to sign a petition and support demonstrations calling for its removal. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities ‘urge[d] the administration to reconsider its recent action’. The business education network AACSB International issued a statement stating that the organization upheld ‘a culture of mutual respect inclusive of all nationalities, countries of origin, languages, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, and cultural or other beliefs’ and conveying ‘solidarity’ with colleagues ‘across disciplines, countries, and ideologies’. ¹²

The explanation given for the AOM’s position related to the legal status of the organization as ‘a 501(c)3 organization’ which is ‘structured differently than other Associations that have other forms of non-profit status’. It was claimed the AOM has ‘a narrower scope for lobbying than … other forms of organization …’. The leadership went on to state that AOM had ‘a policy of no political stands at least twenty-five years ago, and possibly much longer’ meaning that,

[a]s far as we can discern, the AOM has never in its history issued a position on any matter in the public sphere, including, for example, the Vietnam War, the events of 9/11, or changes in European funding policies related to education.

501(c)3 status did not prevent the AOM from subsequently reviewing the PTPS when the AOM President moved to call ‘immediate, extraordinary meetings of the Executive Committee and the Board of Governors to approve a proposal to allow for a political stand when a political action threatens the Academy’s purpose, existence, or function as an organization’. ¹³ The AOM Executive later announced a revision to the PTPS to allow for the ‘possibility of an exception around a change in public policy that threatens the AOM as a whole organization’. ¹⁴ While this statement appeared to accede, in a very limited way, to the need for the organization to take a political stand in exceptional circumstances, definition of what constituted a threat to the organization’s ‘purpose, existence or function’ remained frustratingly opaque. Specifically, the decision on whether to allow the organization, via its officers, to take a political stand required prior approval, and required a ‘multi-step procedure of vetting’, the nature of which remained unclear. Thus, while these changes were intended to address the concerns about the AOM response to the travel ban, they risked being interpreted as a further obfuscation involving further bureaucratic rules and procedures.

The AOM leadership’s response to the travel ban positioned scholarship as beyond ethics by defining scholarship as politically neutral or apolitical, founded on ‘scholarly detachment from the subject studied … properly distanced from political debates about the purposes to which such research might be put’ (Bell and Wray-Bliss, 2009: 78). Such ‘dispassionate objectivity’ (James, 2003: 5) overlooks the fact that definitions of what constitutes ‘good’ scholarship in management and organizational research, including what constitutes ‘rigorous’ or ‘biased’ research, are framed by political interests (Becker, 1967) and founded on methodological practices that favour geopolitical, sociohistorical power imbalances (Bell et al., 2017). By claiming that evidence can be gathered, analysed and presented ‘objectively’, such a position obscures the ethical purpose of social scientific inquiry as fundamentally related to questions of meaning, value and justice (Zyphur and Pierides, 2017).

Standing up as embodied, enacted and emplaced critique

Turning attention towards our own community, it is important to re-examine critical scholarship in the context of populist politics. Standing up implies a form of practical activism that goes beyond ‘balcony writing’ (Prichard and Benschop, 2018: 102) or ‘armchair intellectual theorizing’ (Contu, 2017). To take a stand is to make a determined effort to resist or fight for something. It implies embodied, enacted presence in a specific place or space – holding one’s ground against opposing forces. In taking a stand, the body acts as a physical obstruction which disrupts established norms and provides a means of resistance. Taking a stand is associated with feminist organization, where it involves drawing attention to bodies that challenge the masculine norm and using them to disrupt and resist patriarchal cultures (Pullen and Vachhani, 2018; Tyler, 2018). The phrase thereby draws attention to the embodied, emplaced work which we suggest is fundamental to enacting CMS scholarship.

Reactions from CMS Division members to the AOM President’s statement were expressed via social media – Facebook, Twitter and email listservs. Commenters described her response as ‘lukewarm’, suggesting that she had failed to ‘show any empathy with those most directly affected’, was ‘banal, dismissive and tone deaf’ and ‘lacked any ethical or moral centre’. Some were personalized and aggressive, describing the President as ‘personally morally bankrupt’, ‘a coward’ and ‘inconsequential’. Within these online spaces, a small number of male voices tended to dominate. We sometimes found it difficult to ascertain whether expressions of disappointment and anger were directed towards the president of the AOM or the United States, as their common titles enabled identities to become blurred.

While the demographic composition of the CMS Division is the most international of any in AOM, based on geographical location of membership, this has not always been matched by gender diversity or equal access to positions of authority. The Division, along with the wider CMS community, has been criticized in the past for being predominantly white, male and Eurocentric (Tatli, 2012). Such critique focuses on the possibility that ‘CMS replicates the wide-ranging symbolic violence in academia by keeping silent about the exclusionary mechanisms which keep the CMS community homogeneous in terms of not only theoretical approaches but also the demographic make-up of its members’ (Tatli, 2012: 26). It is difficult to comment on whether the positioning of the AOM President via social media as ‘unfit’ for leadership (Bell and Sinclair, 2016) was related to gender. Yet, Poland (2016) suggests that the silencing of women through male dominance is a feature of academic online spaces. She further argues that to label such tactics of silencing and control as ‘trolling’ and to dismiss them as ‘irritating but ultimately harmless distractions and disruptions’ (2016: 25) fails to acknowledge the damaging effects of online abuse and harassment on women. Such practices are also symptomatic of a patriarchal culture through which men in positions of political and financial power, including Donald Trump, seek to control public conversation. ¹⁵ Online responses from CMS members caused us to become concerned that the social, gender and racial power relations that criticality advocates against were being reproduced within the CMS community.

A further chapter in this narrative concerns the embodied stand taken by the AOM President at the 2017 Annual AOM Meeting 6 months later. Her Presidential Address to members began,

I have come here this morning to talk with you not on behalf of the Academy, but as myself: as a New Yorker who left this country and has returned home; as a member of this Academy furious and heartbroken that some of our friends and colleagues six countries in the Middle East cannot be here. I am here in their names …

She went to emphasize the importance of freedom and the negative consequences that arise when the ‘freedom to discern the truth through science’ and the ‘freedom to speak that truth’ are constrained. The speech chimed with the concerns of critical scholarship by referring to the relationship between ‘privilege and oppression’ and the need to speak out about ‘bad management’ that is ‘exploitative and destructive and poisonous to freedom, prosperity, and the environment’ by exploiting ‘the vulnerable to enrich and empower a few’. She concluded,

As social scientists, we can lead the world in taking on inequities and discrimination and injustice and bad leadership and bad organizational practice … Let us secure and then speak the truth – in public and with the integrity of our scholarly processes at our backs – about the organizations on the street outside, and at our borders, and around the world, and in all the places that we go every day. Thank you very much. And now, please allow me to step into my role as President of this Academy.

As these quotes highlight, the President could only speak out against the Executive Order by discursively distancing and separating her political views from her organizational role. In terms of identity work, she was engaged in a complex and contradictory process of ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003: 1165). As President of the Academy, she appeared to be ‘locked in’ to a discourse (Beech et al., 2012: 41) that focused on her rule-governed responsibilities, at the expense of her intellectual and personal values. As Tsoukas (2018: 5) suggests, the AOM President’s ‘private preferences collided with perceived public responsibility’. He draws on behavioural ethics to argue that she was not suffering from ‘ethical blindness’, as this would imply that she was unaware of deviating from the values she holds, yet she continued to ‘rigidly’ apply a ‘bureaucratic frame’ that elevated the importance of ‘rules and rule following’. The Presidential Address marked the end of her term; it thereby enabled her to stand up and speak more openly and emotionally in a manner that demonstrated her ‘ethico-political awareness’ anchored in ‘captured experience’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 52). The speech provoked an emotional audience response and a standing ovation.

A further response from the AOM leadership to the CMS-led critique of the failure to take a stand was articulated over a year later, when the Division was praised in a 5-year review as a ‘key voice’ in this situation:

CMS provided essential advice and help in developing the AOM policy changes needed to enable AOM leadership to take a stand … as well as a process through which AOM members can call on the AOM leadership to make a statement. ¹⁶

While this could be interpreted as a hollow gesture, we suggest it highlights the potential effects of ‘persistent resistance’ (Collinson, 1994) in uncritical academic organizations, as the embodied, enacted and emplaced work of rendering senior people accountable by extracting information, monitoring practices and challenging decision-making processes. The explicit structures that exist in mainstream organizations like AOM provide the basis for challenging prevailing power asymmetries by enabling critical scholars to position themselves against them, rather than in a relationship of ‘resistance through distance’ (Collinson, 1994) characterized by ambivalence and acceptance. While bureaucratic structures have limitations, the explicit nature of these structures can provide a basis for challenging the exercise of power (Freeman, 1971).

Discussion

These events draw attention to the impossibility of maintaining a politically neutral position as a management scholar in an era of populist politics. The labelling of certain issues as ‘political’ and thus beyond the purview of scientific scholarship, while others are deemed apolitical, denies the influence of politics on all areas of management scholarship, irrespective of whether they are explicitly labelled as critical. The AOM took an uncritical, bureaucratic stance by ignoring the everyday significance and interdependency of ethical and political action – a position that critical scholars were well placed to critique. In so doing, the AOM failed to recognize that not taking a stand is itself a political action. While political situations arise in all times and places, the global rise of populist politics, and the need for coherent political responses to it, means management scholars are more likely to be asked whose side they are on (Becker, 1967).

Our experience also raises issues related to the role of social media in taking a stand. Online communication is situated in a liminal space at the intersection between public and private domains. Such communication enables encounters with ‘known strangers’ as embodied others and can provide a basis for a more personalized politics (McLean and Maalsen, 2013). However, virtual spaces can also displace political struggles in local and institutional settings, as enduring political solidarity is replaced by momentary spectacle. They can conceal ‘impotence’ by reducing ‘doing’ to ‘talking’ in a context where speech, opinion and participation become fetishized (Dean, 2009: 32–36). Such practices are driven by the participant’s own belief that their contribution means something and matters independently of whether it has any ‘actual impact or efficacy’ (Dean, 2009: 31). In reflecting on the use of social media as a form of resistance used by the CMS community and directed towards the AOM leadership, this was characterized by spectacular talking and was sometimes gendered and violent. Such speech acts are antithetical to CMS values.

Being critical entails self-reflexivity concerning our embeddedness in structures and relations of power such as AOM, and the role of critical scholars in maintaining or resisting them. Taking a stand is thus not a matter of ‘policing’, reinforcing dominant power relations in ways which are oriented towards maintaining the status quo. Rather, it is oriented to interrupting the dominant order in the interests of equality (Rhodes et al., 2018). Yet, the nature of such acts is inherently precarious, acknowledging social and corporeal interdependence and exposing fundamental vulnerability as the basis for developing an ethics of non-violence (Diprose, 2013). Returning to Ashcraft’s (2017) notion of inhabited criticism, it is important to reflect on what difference, if any, is made by critique and specifically whether ‘doing something’ is also ‘making something’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 49). Taking inspiration from the AOM President’s address, we suggest ‘making something’ through critique involves not only finding ‘sustenance in knowing (our) work can change lives’ but also freeing ourselves ‘to work only on things that are important in the world that have meaning for [us] personally’.

There are inherent tensions between scholarship and activism within the Academy (Adler et al., 2007). It has made us wonder whether, in the process of fighting for rights of the vulnerable, we threaten each other, and as a result, become a part of the oppressive forces we seek to overcome. Much of the discussion within CMS focussed on calling for a boycott of AOM meetings in solidarity with those affected by the travel ban. This response may be understood as grounded in a primary concern for the other person: being for the other (Levinas, 1985), that is, those directly affected by the ban. As Levinas argues, the other person is not simply ‘another of me’, but a unique and particular other. While the proposal to boycott the AOM meeting was a legitimate and potentially worthwhile possibility for many CMS members, this did not consider other others, including those who are bound by the need to ‘play the game’ (Butler and Spoelstra, 2014), which includes participation at academic conferences (Prasad, 2013). In their attempt to act for those directly impacted by the travel ban, CMS members’ concern for other others was ‘obscured, deferred or marginalized’ (Roberts, 2001: 9). In so doing, this demonstrated a concern for the self, its righteousness and preservation, rather than responsibility for all others (Rhodes et al., 2010).

Critical futures

Building on Ashcraft’s (2017) call for ‘inhabited criticism’, in this article, we have drawn attention to the embodied, enacted and emplaced work of taking a stand in uncritical academic organizations. Inhabited criticism involves feeling for yourself and for others, taking accountability for one’s actions, and being aware of one’s own positionality. It requires movement beyond a belief in the inherent righteousness of a critical position (Ford et al., 2010) towards critique as embodied, ‘inhabited’ (Ashcraft, 2017) practice. The concept of ‘taking a stand’ positions relational critique as the struggle for a space in which to be. This involves taking up space in uncritical academic organizations and seeking out opportunities for embodied action within them. Taking a stand is thus an embodied and enacted, as well as an intellectual, activity. By denying some individuals the possibility of taking a stand by preventing them from attending the 2017 AOM conference, as well as those who cannot attend at other times for example because of lack of funding, the travel ban drew attention to the intercorporeality that inheres to critical organization (Diprose, 2013).

These events also illustrate how criticality is enacted virtually, including via social media. Some of these encounters prompted us to question whether being there was instead a being for those impacted by the travel ban. In so doing, they drew attention to the possible tensions between presence as public performativity – performing the identity of a critical scholar – and practising quiet, relational care, as the identities of those who enact such performances can sometimes take precedence over for whom, it is claimed, the stand is taken. Universal quests for intellectual activism (Collins, 2012) can lead to the position of the other becoming obscured. While CMS is not ‘bound by an unwavering mass toward shared oppositional interests’ by taking on inhabited criticism, we may be better able to embrace pluriversal criticalities, ‘tuning in and amplifying our diverse and nonetheless mutual entanglements with the people and things around and beyond us’ (Ashcraft, 2017: 53).

Diprose (2013) suggests that the event of dwelling in corporeal interdependence with others provides the basis for development of political communities that are not based on recognition of sameness, but rather characterized by exposing uniqueness, through ‘a sense of self and of belonging with others and to places’ (Diprose, 2013: 198). We suggest that this work is fundamental to enacting critical selfhoods in uncritical spaces. By not being ‘at home’ in uncritical academic organizations, standing up and being present in spaces not intended for us, we suggest CMS scholars can become ‘space invaders’ (Ahmed, 2017; Puwar, 2004) who engage in ‘persistent’ resistance (Collinson, 1994) enacted through their bodies. The actions taken by the CMS Executive following the AOM’s response to the Order sought to make space for Division members to be heard in an uncritical academic organization. While this work was only limitedly successful, ‘taking a stand’ requires persistent, on-going engagement.

Some actions taken by CMS scholars reminded us that ‘our own professional community [was] host to practices that we would condemn in other contexts’ (Bell et al., 2015: 64). For us, critical scholarship is based on an ethic of care (Held, 2006) and involves not only intellectual interrogation but also forms of academic or political practice founded on development of trusting social relations, collegiate mutualism and a concern with the well-being of others, not only within CMS but across the Academy. It is therefore troubling that some CMS scholars engaged in personalized, aggressive attack of the AOM President via social media and email. While we are not suggesting that the organization’s (in)action should have been condoned, by placing oneself in the position of the AOM President, we argue that it is possible to be for and take a stand for another.

Taking a stand then is not an individual performative project. Rather, it involves collective effort, focuses on ethico-political issues and seeks to cultivate respectful and caring relations. By drawing attention to the risks of the performance of righteousness, we have focused on the embodied, enacted and emplaced work which we see as fundamental to being critical in a world of populist politics. Rather than being seduced by spectacular discourses, we suggest that ‘standing up’ is predicated on a ‘shared vulnerability’ (Diprose, 2013: 187), which is reliant upon critical scholars being situated in relations of corporeal interdependence with others. This includes moving away from the performance of being a critical management scholar, including by engaging in everyday organizational practices of making and taking up space in uncritical academic organizations where they do not feel at home. There may be a ‘fragility’ inherent in this dwelling (Diprose, 2013: 192), but it is only by affecting and being affected in such precarious situations that disembodied approaches to ethics may be challenged and more intercorporeal, relational practices of ethical critique can be cultivated in their place.