Abstract
One is so used to hearing critiques of capitalism that it comes as a surprise to open Tim Kuhn’s “What do corporations want? Communicative capitalism, corporate purpose, and a new theory of the firm” and find that Kuhn is outlining solutions within the capitalist corporate form.
Written in a concise, lucid, and elegant style, the book offers a perceptive exploration of how corporations articulate and pursue their goals vis-à-vis broader social and political discourses within the framework of communicative capitalism. Kuhn blends perspectives from new materialism, strategic management, and communication constitutes organization (CCO) to re-conceptualize the firm and its locus in late capitalism.
“What do corporations want?” confronts us with a key question: What if the organizations we ascribe purposes aren’t merely aggregations of individuals and their interests, but are far more complex, disorderly, and protean—and thus more interesting—than we have been led to believe? In pursuing this question, the author singles out a key problem in management and organization studies (MOS): When we talk about organizations we consider “the organization” to be an essence, an “it” that has a purpose. This indicates a tendency to subscribe to representational thinking that pushes one toward an unreflective attribution of agency to a collective. Kuhn observes that this error is surprisingly prevalent in MOS as there is an inclination to gloss over the messy complexity of organizing, including the possibility that companies may want many conflicting things at the same time.
In an unadorned yet effortlessly sophisticated way, the book offers us something both more abstract and more interesting: the central issue around which organizing occurs is the notion of purpose, and purpose is not considered to be a simple noun. Instead, Kuhn builds on science and technology studies to propose ontological multiplicity as a conceptual approach for understanding purpose, wherein not only managers but a wide range of objects, bodies, emotions, and sites are involved in the making of corporate purpose.
The book delves into “communicative capitalism,”—a term coined by Dean (2024) in political science—which reflects how capitalist relations and processes of accumulation are constantly being (re)created by communicative practices. Communication does not merely represent but rather creates economic life, be it in the constitution of money and prices, promotion and marketing, and economic narratives. To interrogate how a firm’s purposes emerge and how organizations are many things at once, shifting across time and context, Kuhn offers a variety of exciting case analyses from airlines to entrepreneurship incubators, B Corps, and crypto firms. And like any excellent book, Kuhn certainly knows how to keep his audience content: from the poetic elegance of Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses to the quirky slang of tech entrepreneurs, readers are taken on a fascinating journey.
Echoing a vibrant research stream in alternative organizing (e.g. Sage, 2024), Kuhn does not merely critique unjustified inequities created by capitalism but gives us intriguing ways to go beyond the status quo to generate productive alternatives. As an MOS researcher, I found myself brimming with enthusiasm by the time I reached the end. With each page turned, one gives into an inching feeling of hope and a possibly deeper understanding of how to productively engage with the “continuously shifting sands of capitalism” (p. 42).
Kuhn’s Communicative Theory of the Firm (CTF) seeks neither conceptual purity nor harmony but rather aims to pry open taken-for-granted matrices of problems and solutions by posing vexing ontological questions. At the same time, the book provides the needed élan for carving new futures, lessening the feelings of dread and inevitability elicited by communicative capitalism—don’t we all at first overlook the greenery in the corporate metallic prism on the cover?
In this way, “What do corporations want?” invites readers to pursue multiple research avenues for furthering a theory responsive to communicative capitalism by attending to the more than human forces (technologies, emotions, symbols, etc.) involved in organizing, grasping the organization’s fluidity and advancing practice as a key unit of analysis. Its focus marks a stark onto-epistemological shift from “theory-method complexes” (p. 41) that, alas, continue to dominate MOS and lead analysts to develop models that purport to align with the external “reality” they attempt to map. To avoid this issue and develop a communicative sensibility, the CTF provides new templates and vocabularies for examining firms.
The book’s message is that we need to move away from the restricted conception of communication (as message transmission) to understand its consequences. The book is important because it enriches our understanding of how the tenor of capitalism is shifting and it enables us to dissect its manifestations. Kuhn extends emerging scholarship on ascertaining the nature of capital and the locus of decision-making power—specifically, and critically, how these are fundamentally rooted in communicative practice.
This work also hints at a challenge identified by emerging research: the human mind is incapable of grasping multiplicity and complexity and MOS are in dire need of a more dynamic understanding of the trajectories continuously evolving in organizations (Hernes and Feuls, 2024). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s new materialism, Kuhn convincingly shows the importance of this point, demonstrating how the different activities marked by “assemblages” of objects, people, and discourses manifest in ways that elude managers’ control and lead to dis/organizing consequences such as brittle performative capabilities, hindered hierarchy and collective atomization.
The elaboration of the CTF is timely as MOS lack a theory of the firm that is stable enough to support the assignment of characteristics like value, and at the same time, flexible enough to account for its multiplicity of enactments across sites not controllable by those who think that are in charge. With the CTF, Kuhn strikes a much-needed balance and provides a new theory that accounts for the firm as being simultaneously “a chimera and actuality” (p. 41). This theory advances MOS in three ways: (1) it allows for the recognition of communicative capitalism not as a domineering ideology determining firms, but as a set of forces distributed through the practices constituting assemblages. This encourages scholars to examine practices from the inside, a stance that can also evince novel points of intervention; (2) it problematizes the boundaries and influence of the firm, and offers a route for understanding how new trajectories can result from novel connections without the implied agency of a preexisting firm; and (3) it offers new ways to clarify the contours of authority and trace its influence, conceptualizing it as a fluid force and a matter of both promises of value and claims to property.
Kuhn warns us that this text will get messy and esoteric, and he delivers. When colliding with the Deleuzoguattarian bestiarium of grotesque neologisms and hyper-complex analytical constructions some readers might experience vertigo (e.g. Fouweather and Bosma, 2021). While conceptual openness is important in MOS, the analytical challenges of the CTF are largely left to the readers. One could benefit from more guidance concerning how this conceptual apparatus lends itself to multi-sited analyses of contemporary firms. Such direction would be valuable given the rarity of reflections on how to conduct post-humanist intersectional research designs (Behizadeh, 2024). Of course, there is only so much one book can do. Yet Kuhn gives very little insight about positionality in relation to social categories that are intertwined with each other, and risks leaving analysts even more perplexed when having to sift through agential cuts.
Communicative capitalism might be with us for a while given that novel points of intervention are arising at a slower speed than its distributed forces. It is clear then that Kuhn’s book is a “must-read” for its power to help us think afresh about firms, their desires, and communicative capitalism. “What do corporations want?” promises to significantly influence MOS as a field, I think, as it offers a powerful call to action: to rip off the shackles of rigid theories of the firm, to embrace immanence and motion, and to see organizations as lateral, decentered, proliferating, and interconnected web of relations.
