Settled knowledge practices,truncated imaginations

Abstract

Martin Parker recently auto-critiqued his book Against Management. Parker reflected on the book’s circulation, responded to some criticisms, and proposed a manifesto for a School of Organizing that must emphasize alternative organizational forms. I highlight the Eurocentric frame that permeates the book and the auto-critique. This Eurocentrism manifests as settled geographies, histories, and epistemic practices. Such knowledge practices truncate the possibilities of radically imagining alternatives to the contemporary crises of capitalism. I borrow Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s metaphor of foraging to briefly consider how subterranean struggles and solidaristic transgressions offer possibilities for alternative world-making.

It is easy to agree with Parker’s (2002) Against Management. This book examined intensifying corporatization, commodification, and managerialism at a time of neoliberal triumphalism. Parker critiqued the hollowness of business ethics and held the mirror up to Critical Management Studies academics. Finally, he neatly made a case for alternative organizations. The book appears easy, clean, and neat. Almost sterile.

Two decades later, Parker auto-critiqued Against Management, responded to some criticisms and proposed a manifesto for a School of Organizing. Again, Parker falls short on the same grounds. The book and the auto-critique appear too easy, too clean for the ruins of capitalism in which the majority live. I see images of burning mass pyres, wildfires from Turkey, Evia, California to Sydney, and the Konkan floods and wonder how will this School of Organizing clean, drain, and build anew from these waste lands and waters? I first respond to Against Management and the Autocritique. I then forage for possibilities amidst the ruins.

Eurocentrism

In Against Management, Parker confronts the role of managerialism in advancing an unviable “turbo-capitalist” project. Parker problematizes corporate capitalism, managerial capitalism, franchise capitalism, and so on. He concludes, “there are organizational alternatives to market managerialism and corporate domination. History does not have to end with global capitalism. . . .” In his auto-critique, Parker (2021: 3) reflects that this target of “market managerialism” in the book is ill-defined. I agree. Parker’s critique has shifting targets. However, my concern is not to evaluate the coherence or novelty of Parker’s critique of capitalism in the book. Rather, I focus on the one arc that does unite all the chapters in Against Management and the Autocritique—that of Eurocentrism.

Eurocentrism is a political project that assumes an exceptional nature of European history and an overarching universal validity of its knowledge practices, disciplines, and institutions (Amin, 1989). Eurocentric knowledge rationalizes and legitimizes European imperialism while effacing non-European knowledge sites and forms. Here, Europe is the mother of the “towering metaphor” of the “West” and Europe’s “extended shadow” includes other national polities such as the United States and Australia (Dabashi, 2019: 11). This Eurocentric frame permeates Against Management and the autocritique, circumscribing the texts Parker dialogs with and the conceptual categories at his disposal. Within journal space constraints, I highlight three prominent markers of Eurocentrism in Parkers’ texts, loosely demarcated as settled geographies, settled histories, and settled epistemic practices.

Settled geographies

Against Management swivels from Stoke-on-Trent to Colorado or Seattle, occasionally a dotted line on the map lands on Italy or Germany. Otherwise, Brazil, India, Mexico, the “Third World” are wedged between commas, as afterthoughts. For example, Parker (2002: 163) writes, “Seattle, Prague, Davos, Quebec, London, Genoa – places now tied together as examples of ‘anti-capitalist’ protests against the World Trade Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. . . .” Parker spotlights the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, dedicates a chapter to anti-corporate protests, but erases the Third World’s role. Yet, numerous protests and rebellions had surged for decades in the Third World contesting Western capitalism and its henchmen, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Consider the “IMF riots” or the bread riots in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. At least 150 such riots occurred between 1976 and 1982 (Prashad, 2012). Parker’s omissions have two material consequences.

First, such omissions reify the West as the Enlightened problem-solver (for problems it has largely created) while masking the non-West’s sustained dissent and efforts toward alternative futures. The non-West is then outside these world-historical events. Such Eurocentric knowledge practices create colonizing policy discourses that perpetuate inequities. Consider the damning effects of Eurocentric policies for public health crises (Richardson, 2020) and the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine apartheid. Second, such discursive practices refer to globalization, markets, and widening inequality but erase the uneven geographies that are a necessary and constitutive feature of this globalization. However, “globalization” and “markets” are placeholders for how finance capital extracts from the Global South (Prashad, 2012). Any serious analysis of globalization must attend to the uneven geographies of dispossession constitutive of capitalist accumulation. Then, and only then, can anti-capitalist futures be imagined.

Settled histories

Although Parker endorses interdisciplinarity and calls for a historical engagement, his attention to colonial histories is selective. Indeed, a Eurocentric perspective can make a break with its own history (Amin, 1989). For example, Parker (2002: 154) states, “The modern promise of progress through organization and technology has been thrown into severe doubt as we witness what corporations have become. . . .” Parker appears troubled by what “corporations have become.” This discursive slippage reveals how an Eurocentric understanding can gloss over corporations’ roles in colonial extraction. The Enlightenment project of modernity and progress was simultaneously constituted through a denial of freedom to others and the invasion, enslavement, and loot of South America, the Caribbeans, Africa, and Asia (Bhambra, 2021). This Eurocentric project deemed the colonized, the women, the indigenous, and the Black people as incapable of scientific knowledge or reason (Vergès, 2021). This perspective also occludes that what is considered European knowledge draws on intellectual resources from beyond its borders, including its colonies (Gopal, 2021). I am not merely highlighting that Parker’s texts neglect colonial histories. I am questioning the conceptual categories that constitute Parker’s critique. Here, concepts like modern, progress, freedom, democracy, and empowerment are devoid of the colonial and imperialist imperatives to wage wars, appropriate, incarcerate, conscript into debt, and enslave.

Notably, Against Management is not entirely silent on colonialism. Parker refers to corporate colonialism, managerial colonization, and science’s colonization of bodies. He points to a (selective) record of American imperialism and how rational bureaucracy and the modern organization were complicit in the holocaust. Yet, the book is curiously silent on British/European imperialism. This ellipsis becomes obvious when Parker (2002: 35) states, “I live in one of the most Coca-Colonized European states of all.” Such a colonial equivocation (cf. Tuck and Yang, 2012) elides references to European colonialism and the many forgotten holocausts and genocides in its colonies (see Patnaik, 2017 for a history of the Bengal famine). It is barbaric only when it happens on Western shores (Césaire, 1972; Fanon, 1963).

Settled epistemic practices

Parker’s (2002) diagnosis is that academics are not impactful in arresting this turbo-capitalism. He broadens his horizons to seek out filmmakers’ and activists’ representations. He urges critical management theorists to cross disciplinary boundaries and engage with “the world” (p. 128).

However, Parker almost exclusively refers to North American-West European writers and activists. One may consider this an oversight. Afterall, dominant discourses in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) are West-centric (Vijay and Varman, 2018). However, the journal Organization—one that Parker has crucially associated with since its first issue—has published writings from and on the periphery from its earliest issues (see Banerjee and Linstead, 2001 for a contemporaneous account of globalization). Further, Parker emphasizes that he was inspired by Klein’s (2001) No Logo. Yet, from the very first pages, Klein carefully maps garment workers in Jakarta, child labor in Manila and Sumatra, and numerous internationalist grassroots movements. One of Klein’s focal cases is Shell’s role in propping up a military dictatorship in Nigeria and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s anti-corporate activism. Klein quotes Saro-Wiwa’s brother, Owens Wiwa:

For centuries, corporations have declared huge profits from evil practices like the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, Apartheid and [from] dictatorships whose actions are genocidal. They have often gotten away with their loot. . .

These diverse geographies and histories of dissent or colonial corporate violence do not make their way to Parker’s text. These erasures are hardly redressed in the auto-critique, written when there are ascendant calls for decolonizing organization studies.

My concern here is not political correctness, facile pluralism, or representative citation practices—that is, ‘add and stir’ a dash of geography, pinch of history, and some postcolonial writers for color. Afterall, these can descend into tokenistic gestures that do not fundamentally transform knowledge. Rather, I am saying that a Eurocentric framework undermines our understanding of globalization as it intersects at the UK, where, for example, racialized feminized bodies fleeing the West’s ‘gratuitous wars’ (Roy, 2020: 65) or migrating from Shell’s wastelands now engage in precarious care work (cf. Care Collective, 2020).

Borrowing from Parker (2002: 125), my intent is not to charge an individual of “deliberate commission or omission, but to note that this is what academic labels and disciplines do.” That Against Management is well-cited perhaps affirms how Eurocentrism is internalized and transmitted within academic fields, including critical studies. As much as this article focuses on Against Management and the auto-critique, it is also a reflection of the hegemonic European-North American epistemologies that are the bedrock of MOS.

Coda

I add some necessary caveats here. First, we live in times where a buoyant finance capital disproportionately precaritizes, incarcerates, and kills racialized feminized bodies across the North-South divide (Gago, 2021). Second, the North/South or West/Rest are not hermetically-sealed cartographic categories. Further, elites in the postcolony have long mediated the colonizer and the colonized. Moreover, MOS scholars in the postcolonies predominantly import canonical Western theories or retreat into indigenous enclaves (Hamann et al., 2020). These cultural retreats to find irreducible traits are inversions of Eurocentrism—a negative complement (Amin, 1989). These enclaves, while appropriating discourse of decolonization, can create internal colonialisms and settler colonialisms around class, race, caste, tribes, and religion (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Such discourses feed into right-wing nationalist agendas that mobilize precarious lives by conveniently pointing to the Other (Muslims, immigrants, blacks, Dalits) while serving finance capital (Prashad, 2018).

My critique of the Eurocentrism that lines Parker’s texts is not to detract from the twin faces of finance capital and right-wing authoritarianism that constitute neoliberal capitalism today. Rather, this Eurocentrism reproduces the settled positions of the “comfortable classes of this world” and truncates the possibility of a radical imagination (Amin, 1989: 187). An anti-colonial episteme critically examines Eurocentrism and its inversions, contests internal and settler colonialisms, and aims for wider social transformations (Gopal, 2021). As Amin (1989: 185) wrote, “For the problem is not one of management, but resides in the objective necessity for a reform of the world system; failing this, the only way out is through the worst barbarity, the genocide of entire peoples or a worldwide conflagration.” The vast majority are living through this genocide and worldwide conflagration.

For organization

I agree with Parker (2002: 213) that “Alternatives can be built, and should be built. . . .” Borrowing from Tsing’s (2015) search for matsutake mushrooms in global commodity chains, I deploy the metaphor of foraging to consider what alternative organizing may look like amidst capitalist waste and ruins. This foraging leads me to the multiplicity of struggles from below—from Ni Una Menos, Black Lives Matter, Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, water protectors at Standing Rock, and the ongoing farmer’s movement in India. From sites of dispossession, people have risen and refused to disappear, forging solidarities to tend to the past present wounds of predatory accumulation and crafting possibilities through alternative forms of social organization. These forms of organizing recognize the invisibilized subterranean life that constructs our social and ecological infrastructures—housing, cleaning, caring, and other forms of social reproduction. This organizing transgresses and trespasses violent borders—disciplinary, spatial, and temporal—that make exploitation possible (cf. Vijay et al., 2021). This work of foraging with solidaristic transgressions through unsettled habitations may per chance translate into feminist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist world-making.