And a note on ‘some notes for anniversarifiers’

Abstract

This essay forms part of the 30th Special Issue of the journal and reflects on the role of the anniversarifier and reports on way of escaping the end of Organization to which it leads. Playful, ludic and irreverent this paper poses difficulties to the abstract, which should eventually be excised from the final publication.

And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part.

As You Like it (Act II Scene VII Line 139)

The role and status of the anniversarifier in organization was thrown into crisis with a seminal paper by Grey (2013) and to which we must return if we are to make amends for this 30th anniversary of Organization. An act of community building, of identity making, of status aspiration and self-indulgent congratulation, the anniversary is a complex ask and a complicated act of organization (Connerton, 1989; Cutcher et al., 2016; Walker, 2022). Not least in its 30th year, in the fifth Age of Man, after that of the soldier in Shakespeare’s As You Like it, “jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel.” Were we once jealous in honor and sudden and quick to quarrel? In our approaching middle age, have we become less combative and pugilistic in our conversations, more confident and mature in our differences, more tolerant of what we find asinine and stuplicitous in our colleagues’ work? To take stock of any possible progress we would do well to note first that anniversaries necessarily contain their own moments of crisis, of cynicism, parody, frivolity and excess, if not outright resistance. Some might even take the opportunity to bid adieu in a grand gesture of romantic exile. Beware of the anniversifier though; it is a genre that draws out rhetorical tricks and nuance that always inhabit and confound those who desire simple organization. However, we can take some assurance at this stage because those young pioneers of critical management studies who have been such avid readers of Organization over the years were always attracted to these dimensions of organizations, and with varying degrees of commitment to radicalism have advanced manifestos and a multitude of social activisms that embrace these practices (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Grey, 2005; Grey and Mitev, 1995; Jones and O'Doherty, 2005).

This note on some notes for anniversarifiers draws on recent research to suggest that despite appearances Grey (2013) does not yet managed to achieve a space of activism and remains vulnerable to appropriation by the useless erudition of a kind of ‘gay science’ (and the publication of another journal article). This necessarily leads to a rather apocalyptic or nihilist set of conclusions, as this paper will demonstrate. To escape these dangers, or to embrace them in ways that can generate a ceaseless fund of energy (which all organization needs), does require something more: to experiment with the exhaustion of self-knowing and comprehensibility, to pass through frivolity and parody, and to learn to speak from somewhere else. In this way we might also discover an otherness that marks organization and leaves readers wondering what the point of all this has been. I hope you can follow this because into this ludic and anxious space (and time) I think we might cultivate a more capacious grasp of organization that can admit the voice of a contemporary alien phenomenology – in the form of the “vampyroteuthis infernalis”, for example (Flusser et al., 2012), or craft that “quality of queerness” (Raffles, 2011) able to register the organizational significance of those butterflies who extend their proboscis to explore the raised anus of a rove beetle (Raffles, 2011 : 257–258). Where has the joy gone from our experiments and research? Why are there not more of our colleagues looking to draw on recent advances in biological anthropology to learn “how to interview a plant” (Hartigan, 2017). Well, I suspect fear. It will hopefully still surprise readers of this journal that most colleagues in the business school still prefer the self-degradation that comes with a genre of research practice that would rather taxonomize “dynamic stakeholder engagement strategies” (Gutierrez et al., 2022) than interview a plant. But who will follow us and embrace the end of Organization? Too much anniversifarying, and we might get stuck, bringing about another end of Organization.

It is 10 years now since Grey (2013) first warned of the dangers of anniversarifying. It will be recalled that he builds his argument from a multi- if not post-disciplinary space—which has always been the founding ambition of this journal as announced in its first editorial in volume 1, issue 1 (Burrell et al., 1994: 5–17). However, at the very moment of appearing to have established these points, there is a moment in the final paragraph where he writes in a way that many will suspect is confession: “And of course a degree of reflexivity is called for on the part of anniversarifiers themselves . . .” (Grey, 2013: 10). Despite his declared hostility to obscurantism in the writing practices of organization scholars (Grey and Sinclair, 2006), these remarks leave us wondering about the status of the text, at least as it has been composed up until that point. Has it not been sufficiently reflexive in leading up to this point? It is as if he fears he has forgotten himself up until that point. Perhaps he lost himself in enjoyment? Or, as if the invitation to contribute to the 20th anniversary special issue of the journal has not been sufficiently fulfilled, and the purpose of an anniversary ill-served. And yet we might at this point recall his opening sentence where he writes: “Recently I seem to be writing a lot of pieces for journal anniversaries” (Grey, 2013: 7). Is this not one of the more reflexive openings to a paper that the journal has ever published, worthy of the finest masters of this form - a Borges, a Calvino or Lem? Grey (2013) is seductively “meta” from outset, reflecting on the act of anniversarising from the get-go, a strategy which places the status of the entire text in crisis—should we ever have confidence that we can contain and know this remarkable text in any fullness or with any boundaries.

Despite these achievements we still must ask, 10 years after the last anniversary, can one anniversarifise if one spends the whole time reflecting on the act of anniversarising, and moreover, within the terms of a distinctive and idiosyncratic writing style that itself has no precedent? We risk a double jeopardy here. How are we to read this text without the anchor of a tradition in which to place its writing? We might of course ask this very question of the journal tout compris—as indeed the 1994 editorial sought to articulate. In this way Grey might be said to have fulfilled his role, and formal organization restored, or at least something like a formal organization has a chance of forming within the very pages so many have seen as antithetical to the whole spirit of formal organization (Du Gay and Vikkelsø, 2016). However, if Grey’s anniversarising is also originary – in that sense to which Derrida lent the term, where an act of originality is always an act of simultaneous madness – it must be largely unreadable and un-thought. To strike one as originary, the text performs an act that undoes the very basis (the traditions, the discipline, the custodians) upon which it can be known and read. Barely acknowledged in previous work, the role of commemoration and memorialization in organization could be said to have begun with these “notes for anniversarifiers” at the very same time that the paper marked an impossibility and formal closure of the anniversary. And how can we build on this text? Have we been living a zombie life for the past 10 years in this journal? With such double-crossed and self-crumbling foundations how can we add to it? Go beyond it 10 years later to mark the 30th anniversary of a journal?

Hence, I find myself in an interruption that mirrors that interruption caused by the skillful placement of the coordinating conjunction “And” used to commence that sentence in Grey which continues “of course a degree of reflexivity is called for on the part of the anniversarifiers themselves.” By means of this textual strategy, one is compelled to take note. And yet for the grammarian, the sentence is perfectly organized without this coordinating conjunction. Conventional grammar would instruct the writer to avoid its use. In fact, the addition of the superfluous “And” risks disorganizing the sentence, disturbing the flow from what went before to what comes after in the writing. I dare the reader to take a careful reading of that passage in Grey. Aboninable snowman! There is in fact no substantive link being made to an elaboration or connecting theme that eases the passage between the preceding sentence and the one beginning with “And.” The sentence that completes the previous paragraph invites us to “be reflexive about anniversaries as a social phenomena.” Far from needing a coordinating conjunction the sentence in the final paragraph is a continuation and extension of the theme established in the preceding sentence, but only if the “And” is erased. Such bravado then, this “And”! With the addition of this “And” the text manages to make the word hover or shake, fading in and out of focus, like a blur. An excessive moment or an ornamental flourish that both discharges and energizes at the same time. Was Grey secretly channeling Deleuze at this point?

In truth, the paper has not received the attention it deserves. Indeed, with only three citations it perhaps ranks as the most un-cited paper in the history of the journal. Nor has anyone picked up and developed the concept of an anniversarifier—not even Grey himself. This is a great shame and a profound loss to organization. Despite the infinite work of commemoration to which we have become accustomed, the special issues marking 25 years since Karl Weick did this or that, and that now prolific genre of redux and remixes that follow 20 years (or whatever) since the first publication of xyz, etc. Instead, Grey (2013) has wallowed in obscurity. One might have thought that Grey was essential to that most recent variation on this theme where editors invite authors to re-mix their own papers. Alas, there is no citation in this expansive literature. Willmott’s (2013) remix of his own most highly cited 1994 paper in the Journal of Management Studies for example, draws nothing from Grey (2013), but we might note that it seems to run aground as a consequence as he confesses that the remix might amount to little more than the “substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.” The swing between vanity and humility aside, the anniversarifier paper marks a strange moment in the journey of this journal and yet remains an essential and unsurpassable moment as we try to come to terms with another 10 years in this 30th anniversary of Organization.

Further clues to what is at stake here might be gleaned from the fact that Grey (2013) is in fact not an anniversary at all—or at least it is a strange temporal one at that. The paper was published in January 2013, in volume 20, issue 1. The very first edition of the journal was dated July 1994. The secret runes of arcane numerology have always been attractive to the founding editors of this journal (see Burrell, 1997) and yet we have not been good at publishing quantitative papers in the first 30 years or so of the journal. As a result there is perhaps a weak spot in our calculative abilities, but depending on how one measures it, Grey’s commemoration marks either 18 years and 6 months after the first issue of the journal, or halfway into its 19th year. But certainly not a solid round date. One might argue that the paper appears in volume 20. However, Grey and his fellow anniversarifiers would then be reflecting on 19 volumes of collective publication, a difficult prime number with esoteric qualities that does not lend itself easily to break-down and analysis. Moreover, the journal was by 2013 publishing six issues in each volume whereas in the 1990s it started with two issues per volume, rising to three and then eventually four. We may be accused of changing our definitions and measures more times than Thatcher’s government changed their measure of the money supply in the heyday of Monetarism in the 1980s. Building on the work of those exercised by objectivity and truth in numeracy we would have to conclude that we are a disorganized bunch here in this journal.

The obscurity of this commemorative moment poses problems to our sense that time passes in a straight line from the present to the past as we advance toward the future. This “vulgar” Aristotelian conception of time, as Heidegger called it, has been variously supplemented by a multitude of temporalities—from the circular to the dialectic, Being and Time, solar and lunar, to various processual versions popular in Copenhagen circles today. Benjamin’s infamous Jetztzeit (now time), tidal times, and the subversions of “banana time” discovered by Donald Roy, are also popular in some circles in Organization. Singularly, and in combination, these versions of time make any sense of a shared time difficult to establish. But here we are still preoccupied with marking the moment of an anniversary as a singular linear event, even though we are not sure when it should happen, or when it has happened. Where are we in time these days? Has the time of commemoration really lost all sense of meaning? We know not where we are “in” time, and as identity politics proliferates into an infinite array of “my stories,” few of us it seems share any sense of collective time. We also spend much of our time plugged into extensions of the internet, which is an infrastructure like that of the unconscious and knows no time. The ongoing discourse of globalization brings with it an awareness that with Arabic and Chinese calendars we are all out of sync these days (so close to daze in old English). If an agreement about time is one of the fundamentals of good organization, we are in a precipitous and dire situation – and a place where commemoration becomes impossible.

At this point the note we strike will begin to sound increasingly bleak as we continue to unravel the arcana of temporality in respect of anniversarising Organization. Some readers, for example, may remember the special issue dedicated to “Future Imaginings: Organizing in Response to Climate Change” published in the same volume as the commemerative edition (Wright et al., 2013). There can only have been a few at the time who would have been familiar with the ‘Anthropocene’, and it was still some time until Malm and others began to refine this geological temporal marker with a more precise explanatory terminology—the Capitalocene, the Planthropocene, and the Chuthulecene (Haraway, 2016). However, even the most superficial familiarity with the work of climate science makes one realize that the -cene “changes everything,” as Klein (2015) has written. Whilst it is widely deemed irresponsible and unproductive to admit apocalyptic scenarios, for large parts of the world life has already become unliveable and impossible. History does not provide much in the way of hope that we learn from history or that something reasonable will prevail. The various combinations of AI technology, climate change (global warming will see average daily peak temperatures of 35°C affecting 1.6 billion people by 2050), and allied geopolitical realignments (military struggles), are all highly suggestive that the human species is likely to become extinct or an elite, minority practice for most of those reading this anniversary note.

Closer to home, those with any more than 20 years’ experience in higher education know that modern ideals (whether enlightenment, Reason, civic responsibility, culture, state formation) that once prevailed in the university are all over. In these circumstances we can no longer reproduce our own discipline and so in the spirit of provocation one might take courage to declare: Organization is finished. To take just one line of thought that is needed to establish the veracity of this declaration, consider how the ability to read this anniversary requires some familiarity with a range of texts and authors, some cited, but some so engrained in the writing and taken-for-granted in the thinking of its author, that they cannot be made transparent. This means that only an ever-diminishing proportion of students and academics will be able to make much sense of this. I am not being wilfully obscure, clever or tricksy. Organization depends upon the kind of ruse attempted here, or at least the organization I think we are stuck in depends upon a flickering light of utopia that may have become momentarily visible here, contributing to organization and making the times tolerable. Unfortunately, I fear that most of the coming generation brought up in the business school, many already established now as research active faculty, will not have had the guidance, inclination or necessity to read Marx, Weber, Freud, or Durkheim. I must overcome this fear. There will, of course, be some who have read the feminist counter-traditions or the now classics of de-colonial literature, and maybe, even, simply for the purposes of being well-read or knowing what others might be working on.

Hence, there is hope even if our next generation of doctoral students might only have had one course in organization theory, set within an increasingly Taylorized mass production model where things like the 6 week “short fat” administratively convenient course are becoming the norm. Before becoming doctoral students, they may have shared a classroom with 120 other students on a master’s course where they had 6 weeks on Taylorism, bureaucracy, and human relations. They will also have written (or co-written with their supervisors) a doctoral proposal applying a concept from the arsenal of ready-made ideas published in the journals to test against a data set collected by following the protocols of established methodology. There is hope even if we do not see much of these doctoral students, given the fact that these days year 1 of a doctoral program is spent collecting credits on a compulsory standardized program of study, year 2 immersed in fieldwork or data collection, and year 3 consumed with the writing up of the thesis and submission of journal articles. Indeed, these are no longer ‘our’ students. The university now controls them for the purposes of training journal article writers and developing income generators. Students of this generation are no longer inculcated into nor serve an academic discipline. Indeed, few of their supervisors serve any other purpose than collecting another journal article, the article itself increasingly composed with the assistance of AI software and algorithms that calculate the exact position of an idea or concept in its “half-life” citation curve in order to establish whether it is worth speculating on or not.

If this note on a note finds few readers, papers published in the possible 40th anniversary of this journal will be written by a vastly more sophisticated version of ChatGPT. It will be read by citation scrape software. This is perhaps one outcome of certain logics at play right now that are leading us toward an a-disciplinary space. Unlike the great hope for multi- and trans-disciplinarity, to which this journal was dedicated and set sail in 1994, we will be back in Orwell’s 1984 hunkering in caves escaping the worst of the heat whilst scraping for sustenance in the funghi and microbial life we remember first reading about in a special issue of “vegetal life” in Organization. We will not remember the anniversarifiers. There is always hope.