Management’s collusion in poverty? Archetypes,conceits,and performative neophytism

Abstract

Mainstream management studies’ arm’s length engagement with poverty exemplifies its performative neophytism as field. It is enabled by its problematic archetypes of the poor and their poverty: (a) that the poor are deficient; and (b) conceptualizing poverty as distance. They make way for mainstream management studies’ conceits: (a) that it is separate from poverty and dispossession it causes, and (b) that it possesses the resources to ‘solve’ poverty. These conceits safeguard the field and legitimizes its scholars’ inventions and interventions, many of which evidence suggests do little for poverty alleviation. It is time for management studies to cease its performative neophytism.

Although not always self-evident or even acknowledged, the links between poverty and management are several and complex. In the industrialized ‘west’, for example, the rise of management – from the antebellum slavery in the cottonfields of the American South to poverty among industrial workers in the textile mills of Lancashire – has perpetuated, concentrated, or exacerbated poverty (see Cooke, 2003; Engels, 1845). Despite this, mainstream management studies has, for the most part, maintained a studied distance from poverty. ¹ Gated from impoverishment and its unpleasantness by mainstream management studies’ claim to technocratic neutrality (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), the field, by and large, contracted out poverty as a problem for charity, social policy, and politics. Moreover, longstanding critiques of its elite-class essence from writers as diverse as Burnham (1941) and Galbraith (1958, 2007) have not prevented mainstream management studies from offering ‘helpful’ – but always financially extractive and technocratically-distanced – interventions to somehow ‘solve’ poverty along the way.

This transformative promise of mainstream management studies to tackle poverty was laid out more clearly to the ex-colonized nations from the so-called third world. To us (or them, as its proponents would), management per se was the way out of poverty. It promised impoverished, discontented peasantry and distressed artisans the plenitude of modernization and interlinked industrialization, urbanization, democracy, and capitalism. As an instrument of Cold War geo-politics, the pursuit of management as an end in itself, fronted by US elites, foundations, and management scholars and consultants, promised prosperity and development (Cooke and Kumar, 2020) – even the end of poverty, altogether.

Notwithstanding the subsequent failure to end poverty, mainstream management studies’ suitably distanced inventions and interventions around poverty have continued apace. From bottom of pyramid, microfinance, and social entrepreneurship to philanthrocapitalism and increasingly esoteric instruments such as catastrophe and vaccine bonds as part of financialization, its scholars continue to promise to tackle poverty, by book or by crook (see e.g.: Bishop and Green, 2008; Bruton et al., 2013; Porter and Kramer, 2011; Prahalad, 2004). That their efforts have largely failed to end poverty is one thing; that they collude and continue to make promises otherwise without reflecting on the reasons for their failure – even in the face of evidence to the contrary (see King and Pucker, 2021 on the appeal for so-called win-win strategies) – is another; and are revealing of mainstream management studies claims to scholastic legitimacy to be fraudulent.

How might we understand mainstream management studies’ paradoxical inattention to poverty (at least within large swathes of the fieldo, while repeatedly claiming to possess the resources necessary to ‘solve’ poverty despite evidence suggesting otherwise? In this Speaking Out essay, we outline mainstream management studies’ archetypes and conceits in relation to poverty that enable its scholars to engage in what we label as performative neophytism – that is, with the enthusiasm of the newly converted, who have recently ‘discovered’ poverty, scholars in the field now set out to perform their duties to produce ‘world-leading’ and ‘cutting-edge’ scholarship. But they only do so at an arm’s length from the poor and their poverty; leaving us with theoretically sophisticated scholarship that is largely irrelevant to or disinterested in the impoverishment that corporations, other organizations, and their managers caused in the first place, and continue to, in many cases.

To outline the limited but problematic ways by which mainstream management studies thinks and writes about poverty, we discuss two archetypes (recognizing that no set of archetypes is exhaustive or complete): poverty as distance, and the poor as deficient. Our purpose in presenting the archetypes, here, is less to exhaustively review and synthesize a map of the essentialist yet reductive ways by which the field and its scholars engage with poverty and the poor. Instead, we set the archetypes to illustrate how and how little mainstream management studies engages with poverty. They work to restrict and define the terrain of the wider field’s engagement with poverty.

Repeating the archetypes enable mainstream management studies’ two conceits – as it has maintained for a century-and-a-half – that it is somehow separate from poverty, and not complicit in things ‘out there’; and that paradoxically, and despite evidence to the contrary, like some kind of universalist superpower, it possesses the necessary intellectual and practical resources to ‘solve’ poverty. In short, mainstream management studies remains gated from poverty; as poverty assumes importance sui generis for, inter alia, anthropology, development studies, geography, public administration and policy and sociology, but not to that of management studies. Leaving the field to continually, with supposed legitimacy, and performatively, devise new concepts, interventions, and strategies, a.k.a its performative neophytism.

Archetypes

The archetypes we name are normatively based on our own previous work. This is not unusual in management studies, although our acknowledgement thereof might be. Their derivation is both intuitive and informed: the latter inter alia, by extant reviews. In a review of entrepreneurial ‘solutions’ to poverty, for example, Sutter et al. (2019) identified a tripartite classification: remedial, reform, and revolutionary. In their classification, remedial approaches related to overcoming resource scarcity; a reformist approach focused on including those hitherto excluded; and finally, a revolutionary approach understood poverty as the outcome of structural causes, and which acknowledged that entrepreneurial solutions to poverty can be harmful to the poor. Unsurprisingly so and making our point, the last of their three perspectives had the fewest papers in their corpus. Although helpful, their focus is limited to entrepreneurship studies alone, while ours here is much broader. Moreover, we take difference with their characterization of scholarship critical of entrepreneurialism’s driving framework of ‘markets built on individualistic self-interest’ as revolutionary (Sutter et al., 2019: 198). It is not revolutionary to state the obvious, nor even to point as consequence to entrepreneurialism’s barely concealed neoconservatism.

Similarly, in a review of international business scholarship, Kolk et al. (2018) rely on a now familiar management studies multi-dimensional formulation of poverty to classify three ways by which international business engage with poverty: core firm activities with no explicit poverty reduction goal (FDI, GVCs); core firm activities focused on poverty alleviation (BoP, trade); and peripheral firm activities (CSR, nonmarket strategies). Although helpful, Kolk et al. (2018) place the firm at the centre of their analysis, leaving the theoretical heavy-lifting on conceptualizing the poor, their poverty, and its causes to the World Bank’s much-belated acknowledgement of poverty’s multidimensionality. While reviews such as these fail to present a more thorough-going analysis of the causes and conceptualization of poverty itself, they are insightful nonetheless in terms of what can be reasonably inferred and inform archetypes identified below.

Also informing the archetypes’ framing are the limited but influential engagements with poverty in ‘field-leading’ journals such as the various Academy of Management journals and the Journal of Management Studies (Mair et al., 2012; Suddaby et al., 2018; Wadhwani, 2018, etc.) among others.

Poverty as distance

‘One of our fieldwork informants in Bangladesh said, ‘How can I go to the market? I am a woman.”’.

- Mair et al. (2012: 819).

Within mainstream management studies, poverty is often conceptualized as distance: more often than not from markets, but also capital, technology, or even geographical distance. In this conceptualization, the primary purpose of the field is to somehow help the poor overcome the distance (for Maslow, this distance was even from the apex of his motivation hierarchy; Cooke et al., 2005.). This is hardly new or even limited to mainstream management studies as a field. From the mid-20th century era, development itself was often conceived of in terms of distance from the modern ideal, that is, a ‘lag’ or ‘deficit’ that the poor (people and countries) from the Global South needed to somehow overcome.

Following the logic of modernization, ‘traditional’ institutions, be they in the realm of economics, politics or culture, in so called third world countries were designated inferior and deemed unfit for the purposes of rapid modernization. In need of a wholesale modernization, the ‘west’ was presented as the exemplar on which so called third world countries could model their development (Seth et al., 1998). Within which, management studies (indeed management itself) was deemed crucial both in the cultural (e.g. attitude to work, motivation, discipline, etc.) and economic (e.g. role of private sector, amenable legal framework, minimal state involvement) modernization of the so called third world countries (Cooke and Dar, 2008; Srinivas, 2008). However, while other disciplines and fields have since developed a long-standing and sophisticated tradition of critique of such problematic archetypes, this is far from the case with management studies, as we go on to show.

Within mainstream management studies as a field, it leads to reform-based entrepreneurial solutions (in Sutter et al.’s, 2019, classification) that focus on including the hitherto excluded by shortening or helping the poor overcome distance. And so, the lack of access to a market among the poor – whether through sociocultural norms (as in the epigraph above) or due to institutional voids – becomes the primary obstacle that needs overcoming in order to build inclusive markets (Mair et al., 2012). Similarly, microfinance promises to help shorten the distance between the poor and institutionalized finance – from small scale loans whose use is often restricted to productive economic activity only, borrowing by mortgaging assets, savings, to ‘nudge’ banking that governs the financial behaviour of the poor – at their doorstep. It relies on managerial technologies of control, surveillance, and decision-making (including using digital algorithms now) to bridge the distance between the poor and capital. Accessing which, however, has had little impact on poverty; instead it has pushed the poor deeper into unsustainable debt (Hickel, 2015).

Despite the at best uneven, at worst impoverishing, outcomes of such private, business-led and managerial ‘solutions’, there are ever more initiatives for: (a) equipping the poor with digital technologies to access distant information (remember ICT4D, anyone? ² ); (b) building the capacities of the poor to access markets (producer companies, not co-operatives, we reside in business-schools remember); or (c) building ‘inclusive’ markets in order to enable the poor to reach the markets.

The problem with mainstream management studies’ desire to overcome distance and link or integrate the poor with global, increasingly financialized, volatile markets obscures the fact that it is often not the lack of access to markets that causes and perpetuates poverty, but integration with them.

There are several examples to hand.

In India’s Vidharbha in Maharashtra state, for example, even though initial reports cited cotton farmers’ indebtedness as the foremost cause of their suicides, the government’s own fact-finding team found that the immediate trigger was the withdrawal of monopoly procurement (Government of India, 2006). Assured procurement by the state ensured that the farmers received a minimum support price (MSP), a share in future profits if available, and a guaranteed sale. The risks of the agrarian economy, ecology, and market volatility, therefore, were absorbed by the state, leaving the farmer insulated from the vagaries of the markets and monsoons. Despite its many inefficiencies, monopoly procurement protected the farmers from price fluctuations: helped cover for increase in input costs, fall in commodity prices, and imbalances in supply and demand. Conversely, the withdrawal of MSP left the farmers vulnerable to markets. Unable to recover their input costs, the farmers fell into a cycle of spiralling indebtedness, ultimately leading to large numbers of suicides.

Despite the many failures of the markets, businesses, and management, the case for greater public investment in building infrastructure and services that would expand access is never made (that, we are told, constitutes socialism and is not an option worth considering).

Poor as deficient

In September, 2020, we came across a job advertisement for a postdoctoral research fellowship at Radboud University’s Nijmegen School of Management. The fellowship’s remit was to research ‘poor’s poor decisions and cognitive depletion’, to settle the ‘debate’ between two contrary views about the poor: that they were not particularly competent and lacked motivation to get out of their poverty; or that their life circumstances had impaired their cognitive capacity. Unsurprisingly, the advertisement was swiftly denounced publicly.

We include it here, less to add to the already available public criticisms on social media, but because it exemplifies an archetype of poor and poverty that prevails in mainstream management studies – that the poor are somehow deficient. Whether that deficiency is in their bodies (‘cognitive capacity’ as the project assumed) or their disposition (that ‘they’ are ‘incompetent’, ‘lazy’, ‘demotivated’, etc.), mainstream management studies has – much like development studies from an earlier generation had, but has since moved on – assumed that poverty is an outcome of some deficiency among the poor.

As abhorrent as such a view, leave alone a generalization, might be, it is commonplace. Indeed, it is present in management’s very origin story – in The Principles of Scientific Management (1912), F. W. Taylor infamously misrepresents Schmidt, the subject of his cash-for-effort experiment as a simpleton, when in reality he was anything but (Cooke, 2003; Wrege and Perroni, 1974). It tends to view the cause of poverty as somehow intrinsic to the poor, who are condemned therefore as deficient. Leaving the structural causes of poverty intact – accumulation by dispossession, extractive firms, deskilling, devaluation of their labour, etc. – the deficient poor, then, are expected to assume responsibility of overcoming their intrinsic deficiencies, or at best through help from benevolent firms and their managers as part of their corporate volunteering or social responsibility.

Similarly, in Sutter et al.’s (2019) telling, the deficiency has shaped ‘remedial’ entrepreneurial perspectives that aim at overcoming resource scarcity. It can also be found, most clearly, in Prahalad’s widely (wildly, even)-celebrated and rightly criticized bottom of pyramid approaches. Conceptualizing the poor as consumers (at least to begin with), bottom of pyramid approaches envisioned consumption as the solution to poverty; thus, enabling large MNCs to expand their markets by accessing the hitherto unreached customers, and so profiting.

Here, mainstream management scholars’ think of the poor as ‘protoconsumers’. The prefix proto is carefully considered as consumers (or the poor, to put it more precisely) in Prahalad’s imagination are ‘lumpen’ (for what else is a ‘bottom billion’ whose individual desires are not important because their individual purchasing power is limited). The products designed for them are often basic or ‘primitive’ (scaled down and scaled back versions of the products available and sold in the developed world). And finally, because we do not necessarily consider questions of consumer awareness or consumer rights particularly important; thus, consigning them to a proto-state. Poverty, according to mainstream management studies and its believers, is after all a primitive stage in socio-economic development, and following the second archetype, those trapped in it are deficient – so, not quite developed – as consumers.

The archetypes have made way for mainstream management studies’ conceits.

Conceits

Even when it does speak of the poor and their poverty, mainstream management studies almost always does so at an arm’s length distance. To illustrate, the 10 articles in the Academy of Management’s stable of journals mentioned previously (see footnote 1) that focus on poverty are concerned with questions of business models, institutional logics and voids, and principal-agent problems. The arm’s length distancing can be similarly found in the four articles separately identified in the keyword search for poor, which focus inter alia on narcissistic leadership and talent utilization of workers from poor backgrounds. Put another way, poverty is written about only ever as context.

This, then, enables the first conceit of mainstream management studies when it comes to poverty and the poor – that they are separate. For example, bottom of pyramid approaches, one of management studies’ most popular inventions for ‘solving’ poverty, rely on particular narratives of globalization that resurrect an artificial separation between the worlds of the affluent and the poor while deliberately glossing over their mutual interlinkages (Chatterjee, 2016). Enabled by its narrow and problematic archetypes that the poor are deficient (causes within) and that their poverty is merely a matter of distance (naturalized, as Adler et al., 2007 note; never mind the underlying structural causes), mainstream management studies’ supposed separation from poverty exculpates the field and its scholars from the poverty that surrounds us – an estimated 656 million people live below the ‘official’ poverty line (US$1.90 per day), with over 1.3 billion people living under multidimensional poverty (Mahler et al., 2022; UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 2020).

The second and related conceit of mainstream management studies is that it possesses the resources to ‘solve’ the problems of poverty. From the emergence of new intermediaries (microfinance institutions, social enterprises, etc.); the legitmization of unconventional institutions (Mair et al., 2012); bottom of pyramid type approaches to be adopted by firms large and small; to HRD-type capacity building, training, and up- or re-skilling of the poor (again, it is worth reminding that markets are not the problem); to microfinance’s credit and insurance schemes. Bottom of pyramid’s separation of two worlds (affluence and poverty), for example, enables its scholars to make the claim that they now possess the resources to integrate (or incorporate, maybe) the poor, who were supposedly living hitherto ‘outside of capitalism’ (Chatterjee, 2016: 647). Thus, notwithstanding the acknowledgement that the impact of businesses on poverty remains unclear (Kolk et al., 2018), mainstream management studies’ conceit and claims that it can ‘solve’ the problems of the poor abound.

Prodding us to delve into reasons why, one of the reviewers pointed out that mainstream management studies was not alone in claiming a ‘right’ to intervene. Other fields, similarly dominated by functionalism, positivism and instrumentalism such as engineering, public policy, health sciences, etc., also displayed such tendencies. While we might agree with their shared characterization of different fields, we single out mainstream management studies as a field, here. While many of the above fields might be driven by the search for technocratic ‘solutions’, none have invented and intervened on the scale and in ways mainstream management studies has, nor deployed the assemblage of archetypes and conceits we set out here, repeatedly, and notwithstanding their critical scrutiny by others.

The carefully cultivated conceits, and the archetypes on which they rest, enable the field’s performative neophytism, which we discuss next.

Performative neophytism

Safeguarded from the dispossession and impoverishment caused by corporations, management, and managerialism, and any criticisms thereof, enables mainstream management studies’ performative neophytism. It speaks of poverty and the poor, if at all, through its own narrow theoretical concerns and conceptual language – business models, bottom of pyramids, and social entrepreneurship to macro-level organizational issues of institutional voids, cross-sector collaboration and inter-organizational politics and micro-level issues of development managers’ identity, embodiment, agency, etc. Its performative neophytism permits mainstream management studies’ scholars to discuss anything and everything except the poor and their poverty itself, rendering the poor invisible and relegating their (not our) questions into the background. Even setting aside evidence to the contrary, time and time again.

To the extent that it prompted even that champion of ‘cross-sectoral solutions to global problems’, the Stanford Social Innovation Review to carry an article denouncing the dangerous allure of management’s win-win solutions (King and Pucker, 2021). Any challenges, if at all, are now restricted to the effectiveness of mainstream management studies’ solutions but never their intent. After all, how can solving the problems of the poor be anything but welcome. There is of course a moral contradiction here from the start: that if one believes one has the means to solve the problem of poverty, but does not devote oneself to solving it, one is de facto perpetuating it; and so, mainstream management studies have, cape and all, to the rescue of the poor.

Mainstream management studies’ performative neophytism serves a, perhaps more sinister, function. It works to elide and obscure, masterfully we might add, available alternatives. For example, redistribution: especially of land, money, technology, and intellectual property is completely set outside the field’s remit. From global business elites, superstar CEOs, management gurus, and scholars alike are vehement in their disregard for redistribution. ‘That, after all, is socialism’, they say! Not once, though, are we allowed to ask but what is wrong with it? From India’s rural employment guarantee to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, examples of cash transfer programmes abound; and notwithstanding some issues of local corruption and exclusions have, by and large, been effective in arresting starvation and poverty (see for e.g. Klonner and Oldiges, 2019; Saad-Filho, 2015). Likewise, land redistribution to ensure sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers in parts of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America will go a long way in ending the destitution, seasonal hunger, forced migration to urban centres in search of work, and indebtedness faced by the rural peasantry.

In a similar vein, we welcome the emergent scholarship on inequalities that has brought questions of fair wages, redistribution of value, and workers’ rights to the fore once more (Amis et al., 2020; Bapuji et al., 2018, 2020). We would encourage such scholarship to look outside and beyond organizational ‘boundaries’ to focus on the poor, a vast majority of whom exist – in the language of management studies – ‘outside’ capitalism and its organizations, the ‘permanently excluded’. For example, the global peasantry whose outright ignorance by management studies Burrell (2020) has poignantly called out.

As mainstream management studies’ performative neophytism emboldens and sediments the myth of the entrepreneurial and innovative private sector, to which we must all look in hope to solve our social, economic, political, and environmental crises (of which, poverty is our focus, here), it also obscures the crucial role of the public sector. After all, their successes and ‘solutions’ are, more often than not, built on state-funded public sector that has both led innovation and borne its risks and costs, while the private sector has profiteered (Mazzucato, 2013). Elsewhere, McGoey (2014) has outlined that state-led investment has been central to the ‘profitability’ of market-led public health innovations for the poor, that philanthrocapitalism claims entirely as its own. In short, it is the state and its investments and not businesses, philanthrocapitalists or their collective techno-managerialism that hold the potential to innovate, scale, and consolidate solutions out of the many crises that confront us. We need to stop falling prey to mainstream management studies’ outright lies and false promises.

Although our critique is more narrowly directed at mainstream management studies, but we believe parts of it are also relevant to the work of qualitative, supposedly critical scholars, including ourselves. We too, have chosen to write about individual agency, embodiment, identity, etc. as managers/leaders, and less so about the poor themselves and their poverty (e.g. Cooke, 2004). Again, this is not unexpected. Writing about the last quarter of the 20th c. US, the intellectual historian Rodgers (2012: 3) noted as much: ‘conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire’.

It is time we get serious – enough of management studies’ (mainstream or otherwise) pretence and its theoretical sophistry. After all, nearly 690 million people are now hungry, 60 million more than in 2014. Depressingly, the count of the hungry is expected to rise even further to 840 million by 2030 (FAO, 2020).