Abstract
Martin Parker is a key figure in management and organization studies who has long attracted me to the field. Recently, he also became a colleague as I moved to the University of Bristol Business School. The invitation to review this book coincided with an invitation to launch it, which creates a tension I hope to explore usefully here, even though the two genres are not necessarily compatible.
On the surface, The Organization of Things is a collection of enhanced and previously published essays spanning 2005–2022 and arranged according to theme: Assembly, Hierarchy, Visibility, Movement and Reorganization. In the spirit of philosophers Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin, the book provides a series of individually curated ‘curiosities’ as instructive commentary on the narrow range of objects normally prioritized for analysis in mainstream organization studies. At a deeper level, Parker seeks to understand how and why we find ourselves captivated by sublime objects, even when their celebration makes us complicit in a world of unjust and extractive profit.
The Organization of Things is a neat way of repackaging existing publications with a view to consolidating their peripheral concerns over time. For those who haven’t read each piece before, the format is efficient. Some may see it as a ‘greatest hits’, while others may see it as a bunch of B sides, preferring the more confrontational writing from previous books (e.g. Parker, 2018, or the brilliant Against Management from 2002, which obviously inspires my title). Either way, 15 chapters are perfectly sized for teaching purposes or some engrossing coffee breaks during semester.
There are three primary issues that the book’s format raised for me, around writing, method and legacy. I’ll take each in turn. First, there’s the writing. It’s one of the gifts for which Parker is widely admired. He conveys ideas like no other Business School professor, or professor, period. His creative and playful style, his notable asides, and his intellectual reach are compelling and infectious. The depth of knowledge generated for each subject distils vast historical periods and varied sources. Parker calls these essays ‘less directional pieces’ than other examples of his work because they don’t follow the expectations of academic performance in wide currency today. We’ll return to this point, as the insistence on marginalia is a technique that only partly works. Like many of us, Parker wrestles with his disciplinary location in organization studies. But these contortions fail to distract from the serious project motivating the book: to unseat the hierarchy of material concerns that the university (including its latest profit engine, the Business School) produces. For now, I’ll just note how well Parker demonstrates something often missing in contemporary academia, the notion that writing can be ‘an invitation for fun’ (x).
My second interest is method. The selections comprising each chapter include critical sites of modernity and economic progress, from the shipping container to the tower crane, zoos to art galleries, circuses to rockets. Each topic is enlightening and entertaining individually, but it seems important that Parker does not consider these case studies. The method is ‘more like a kind of immersion, one stimulated by no more than the idea that I wanted to write something about a particular object or phenomenon’ (7). For Parker, writing is ‘a form of exploration, a method of inquiry, a mode of research itself, and not something that happens after the real work has taken place’. He wants a way to appreciate objects and practices that ‘attract me emotionally but repel me intellectually’ (11).
This approach shows allegiance to the tradition of British Cultural Studies, which Parker admits, and is particularly apparent in chapters devoted to James Bond and the Gothic. In Cultural Studies, popular genres and narrative are a stage to explore capitalism’s recurring tensions, contradictions and evolutions over time. In these and other chapters, Parker’s Cultural Studies is defiantly textual: he draws from literary, biblical and ancient mythical references, industrial and archival documents, indeed seemingly infinite reservoirs of written material, film and screen culture. This is not ethnographic research of organizations as places or work sites, but a snapshot of the many aesthetic and political forces contributing to our apprehension of things.
The textual mode has many affordances, even while it limits the kinds of empirical claims that can be made. Avoiding the obstacles that come with formal fieldwork – negotiating access to a site, recruiting participants and gatekeepers, fulfilling ethics criteria and university protocols – allows for a more personal encounter, one that is more in the author’s control. When interviews with others do appear in the book, these are additional rather than central. The writer is in command of the material throughout.
In this sense, each object is also vulnerable to personal interpretation, which matters in some chapters more than others. Having lived through the media environment endured by Obama, and especially Hilary Clinton, I found the chapter on secret societies almost quaint. Thoughts on Masons, Klansmen and other elective guilds downplay a critical difference between electing secrecy and having it forced upon you for sheer survival – something queer readers will know well. Sedgwick (1990) famously showed how Western epistemology relied on equating sexuality with truth, summoning faith in exposure as a tool for oppression. While these concerns may be less significant in organizational life today, Sedgwick’s (2002) critique of ‘paranoid reading’ would be a useful addition to Parker’s account of secrecy, as well as Bratich’s (2008) prescient work on conspiracy.
In the chapter on skyscrapers, these vast physical structures carry more than symbolic weight, becoming a potent means of extracting maximum profit from land. In these musings I was reminded of philosopher Sloterdijk (2013), who writes about the vertical tension that marks the striving aspiration of the modern individual. The vertical file that Robertson (2021) analyses is another ideal pairing for this way of doing corporate history; files and their cabinets created order and organized knowledge in a very particular way for a century, with much of this work highly gendered. This is one chapter that shows its age. The speculative bubble and crash Softbank-supported WeWork catalyzed around office space, in addition to the post-pandemic fall out in urban real estate, mean that skyscrapers have lost popular and financial allure. After COVID, and the growing reliance on cloud computing, the skyscraper is being replaced by the data centre.
This brings me to the timing of this publication. Parker’s wilful investment in writing and textual method are important legacies to defend at the present juncture. From what I see in the Business School, and the broader context of AI entering the academy, such literary excursions are less likely or available to students and scholars joining the field today. Pressure to build publications based on ‘engagement’ and ‘impact’ raise questions about the audience that exists beyond organization studies. We might fairly ask: How accessible are the journals that publish these essays? How affordable is a Routledge paperback? Do these considerations matter for academics, if our aim is to unsettle the genres that organize and legitimize only some objects as worthy of study?
Parker’s writing is always in service of these larger arguments, and the urgency of expanding participation in what counts as organizing.
The stunning chapter on Angels is where Parker’s anarchist leanings come to the fore in a powerful indictment of hierarchical organization. ‘A steady job, shops with food in them, and a police force that enforces the law. This has its attractions’ (13), he writes. But like Lucifer, Parker finds the sacrifices that come with piety and obedience to be too great. Instead, ‘the precondition for freedom is a consciousness that things could be otherwise, that this form of organizing could be disorganized’ (112). He concludes the book with a call ‘to think and do organizing in different ways. We need to grow the cabinet of curiosities’ (275).
On this point, I offer one provocation. Entering the British academy from the colonies, I can’t help but see the cabinet as a problem. It’s a profoundly imperial and privatized mode of display. The urge to hunt and gather, arrange and cage, display and admire trophies of one’s excursions seems almost the epitome of an older order. It’s what white conquerors did when they stole and fetishized treasures from other lands and cultures, destroying the very conditions that would allow such alternative worlds to continue. Clearly, this is not Parker’s intent by mobilizing such metaphors. But noting the troubled history of the cabinet is part of the longer process of freeing our scholarship from cruel organizational legacies. Taken together, these essays allow us to reflect on the impulse to capture, cherish and admire, and perhaps instead to wonder: what worlds of solace, pleasure and collective agency might flourish if we more regularly leave things disorganized, and well alone?
