Abstract
Quite a lot has been written about ‘culture’ and ‘organization’. Some of this began with people beginning to think about ‘organizational culture’ in the 1970s, but the ideas rapidly leaked beyond the container of the work organization. Anthropology, cultural geography, cultural sociology and (of course) cultural studies had been making the culture word into something of a totem for thinking that evidenced a concern with language, symbolism and everyday practice. It wasn’t surprising that by the 1990s those concerned with organization studies began to start writing about this stuff too in journals like this one and Culture and Organization. There have been some great books too. Emma Bell (2008) has written about films which show representations of management and organization; Marek Korczynski (2014) has done the same with pop music in and about work, and a few books have been written on humour at and about work (Plester, 2016; Westwood and Rhodes, 2007). To this we could add edited books on organizations and popular culture (Hassard and Holliday, 1998; Rhodes and Lilley, 2012, Rhodes and Westwood, 2008).
Much of this work could be characterized as styled as ‘X and organization’, with a plot arc that begins with some unlikely topic that might not find a home in the business school and then triumphantly demonstrates just how much work and organization can be found in whatever it is. I love this stuff, and have spent quite a lot of time doing it myself but, if you set aside the attractiveness of reading documents of the fascinations of these authors, there are some conceptual difficulties lurking. The problem is that the concepts ‘organization’ and ‘culture’, if understood generally, cover pretty much all social phenomena. This means that describing something as ‘organized’, or as ‘cultural’, adds very little information. Everything is both, if they are defined generously, but more of that later.
The book under review has been a long time in the making, one of the milestones being a workshop at Warwick Business School in 2008 which led to an Organization special issue in (Hancock and Rehn 2011). It reflects Philip Hancock’s enduring fascination with everyday life and its relation to work and organization and has led to his attendance at Santa School, trips to Lapland and interviews with people who make their money decorating shopping centres and selling food and drink to pissed punters at xmas. It’s also a history of marketing, of the growth of the culture industries and global supply chains, the ideology of the family and its gendered practices of care, and the endless ways in which ‘magic’ can be turned into money. Even queuing for Santa’s grotto can be made ‘happy’ if it is given the Christmas treatment (100).
It’s a fascinating book, and though primarily focussed on UK examples, manages to connect the invented tradition of the turkey on the dinner table to the Chinese factories producing ornaments which are containerized and sold across the global north. One delightful story tells of Chinese tourists visiting a high end department store in London to buy some of the trinkets that signify the northern European xmas by using images of robins, gas lamps and pine trees, probably not unaware that most of what they purchased was being manufactured in their home country in cities like Yiwu in Zhejiang (57, 68, 116). Christmas is now made in China, leaves its detritus all over the planet and its climate impact is now melting the snow around Santa’s home (196).
Nonetheless, Hancock is beguiled by the idea of xmas, by the promise of goodwill, the idea of community that it rests upon. He clearly understands the many ways in which this febrile celebration of consumption is bad for people and planet but wants to preserve the possibility that lurks inside the gift. For this he turns to the endlessly mysterious figure of Ernst Bloch (1959), a Frankfurt School adjacent thinker who in his gigantic Principle of Hope (1959, but begun in the 1930s) explores the idea that there is something radical lurking beneath much popular imagination, the ‘not-yet’ which holds a hope for something better (Parker, 2019). Like 1970s cultural studies, his argument is one that attempts to excavate utopianism, an ‘ethics of Christmas’, from the accretions of plastic wrapped junk and preserve the idea that a more authentic communitas lies beneath. Hancock wants to hang on to the idea that xmas is grounded in ‘notions of reciprocity and the obligation we have to care for and support one other, recognising our mutual independence and (. . .) vulnerability’ (210). For a confirmed Scrooge like myself, this is a challenging idea because I really do hate Xmas. Nonetheless, perhaps it’s an argument that prevents me from falling into the trap of accusing everyone else of suffering from false consciousness, while I am one of the few who really understands the gift wrapped horror.
I like this book, but there is something troubling me about the ‘and organization’ argument that it relies on. The separation between ‘culture’ (as the stuff of the humanities and social sciences) and ‘economy’ (as a concept which belongs in economics departments and business schools) is a fragile one, and has led to much work from various people in geography, sociology and so on attempting to mend the breach (see Amin and Thrift, 2004 for a summary). From organization studies we have tended to see a parallel move, though one more concerned to take cultural materials (pop songs, films and so on) and use them as forms of commentary on work and organization. This is often great stuff, but it usually avoids the sort of strong claim that Hancock sometimes relies upon, that culture is organization, or that all culture is organized. So what is at stake here?
It seems to me that suggesting that Christmas is an example of work and global economics is not quite the same as saying that the turkey and trimmings meal with crackers is an example of organization. The concept ‘organization’ is doing different things in those examples, first as a specific term referring to economic life, second as a way of drawing attention to the grammar of social practices. The former relies on a separation that allows us to say that ‘culture’ is often a commentary on ‘economy’, whilst the latter makes ‘organization’ (and related concepts such as classification, ordering and so on) central to understanding the arrangement and patterning of the world we humans have made. In that sense the ‘work and economy’ sense of organization is a subset of the ‘social order’ sense of organization.
Why does this matter? Well, I think it matters because it allows us to be clearer about the sort of arguments we are making to connect ‘organizing’ and ‘culture’. Some of these are moves which are aimed at dissolving the boundary that separates economy from lived experience, ‘re-embedding’ the former within the latter as Polanyi (1944) might have it. It also means insisting that the business school belongs in the social and cultural sciences because the economic base never simply determines the ideological superstructure, as if the meaning of a gift was merely exchange. Culture both shapes and is shaped by economy, as Hancock shows well. However, a broader conception of social organization would be less concerned with these disciplinary turf wars, instead asserting that understanding ‘organizing’ is foundational to any account of how humans order their worlds. It becomes a concept that can pull us outside the parcelling of the business school, and towards explorations that offer some understanding of how order and disorder are made.
Hancock’s book involves a bit of both of these, but I think it would have been stronger if it had moved more assuredly between them. Sometimes it feels like a book aimed at the Culture and Organization crowd, and a very nice crowd they are too, but the bits that really excited me were when the accounts of capitalism and its labour processes nudged up against ideas about the engineering of magic, claims about human flourishing and the good life, or structural accounts of myth and its relation to universal human experience. It’s at this point that it seemed to be moving away from the grubby confines of Santa’s grotto, and towards saying something more enduring about the usefulness of the concept ‘organization’ for understanding the human and non-human in some really productive ways. Organization studies is often a parochial affair, but accounts of the organization of culture could be so much more expansive, providing the grounds for exploring what sort of patterns and arrangements might provide hope for our careless species. Whether these should be found in accounts which are labelled as belonging in organization studies is another matter, and I’ll leave that one for the traffic wardens to decide.
