Modernism, postmodernism,

management and organization theory

Stewart Clegg Martin Kornberger1

(stewart.clegg@uts.edu.au) (martin.kornberger@uts.edu.au)
Professor Visiting Scholar

School of Management School of Management

University of Technology, University of Technology,
Sydney (UTS) Sydney (UTS)
PO Box 123 PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007 Broadway NSW 2007
Australia Australia

1
Martin would like to thank the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their financial support.

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Modernism, postmodernism, management and organization
theory

Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger

Modernism, postmodernism, management and organization theory

Postmodernism cannot be described without referring to the modernist project.

Martin Parker has argued that it is important to focus discussion of postmodernism on

that modernist project it eschews:

Modernism is described as having elevated a faith in reason to a level at which it

becomes equated with progress. The world is seen as a system which comes
increasingly under human control as our knowledge of it increases. The common
terms for this kind of belief system are positivsm, empiricism and science. All share
a faith in the power of the mind to understand nature; that which is 'out there'. [...at
the core of versions of modernism] is a rationalism that is unchallengeable and a
faith that it is ultimately possible to communicate the results of enquiry to other
rational beings. In contrast, the postmodernist suggests that this is a form of
intellectual imperialism that ignores the fundamental uncontrollability of meaning.
The 'out there' is constructed by our discursive conceptions of it and these
conceptions are collectively sustained and continually renegotiated in the process of
making sense. The consequence of this is that we are advised to stop attempting to
'systematize', 'define' or impose a logic on events and instead to recognize the
limitations of all our projects. The role of language in constituting 'reality' is
therefore central, and all our attempts to discover truth should be seen for what they
are – forms of discourse (Parker: 1992: 3).

Postmodernism is nothing more than being critical about modernist assumptions –

that is exactly the definition of Kant’s (1924) project of critique: showing the

limitations of all our human efforts and projects. Hassard (1996: 51), for instance,

tells us "In a postmodern approach to knowledge, we must also possess the ability to

be critical or suspicious of our own intellectual assumptions." Parker (1992: 10), 200

years after Kant, similarly states that postmodernism "could be of no obvious practical

use to organizers since it would be aimed at illustrating the limits of their projects."

2
(italics added). Thus, postmodernism can never be thought of outside of modernism; it

is not an alternative project or paradigm. Immanuel Kant (1924: xviii) argued in his

“Critique of Pure Reason” that “At present, as all methods, according to the general

persuasion, have been tried in vain, there reigns nought but weariness and complete

indifferentism – the mother of chaos and night in the scientific world, but at the same

time the source of, or at least the prelude to, the re-creation and reinstallation of a

science, when it has fallen into confusion, obscurity, and disuse from ill-directed

effort.” Ironically, Kant, one of the key authors of modernity, was already on to the

moaning and groaning about nihilism, indifferentism and lack of direction. At the

same time, he emphasises the potential power that lies in this apparently chaotic state

– chaos and night are the source of scientific renewal and innovation. This ambiguity

of chaos and disorder and the transgression of the boundaries lie at the heart of

modernism; this driving force in the core of modernism is what we nowadays

fashionably call, for want of a better term, postmodernism.

The fallacy of many postmodern approaches to management and organization theory

lies in their being understood as anti-modernist, as an alternative paradigm, as a new

camp, from the beginning. In the next section we are going to point out the fatal logic

behind this imagination, which, over the past 15 years has organized the discourse

between modernist and postmodernist scholars. Rereading Burrell and Cooper’s

(1988) and Burrell’s (1998) texts on postmodernism, and especially Foucault2, we can

highlight the problematic implications of their account, which has influenced and

structured most of the avalanche of postmodernist texts that followed.

2
Ironically, Foucault himself never used the label postmodernism – in an interview he was asked about the
meaning of the term, and he replied: “What are we calling post-modernity? I am not up to date. … I do not
understand what kind of problem is common to the people we call post-modern …”(Foucault, 1990: 33-34)

3
Burrell and Cooper define the "battle positions which have been drawn up on both

sides" (1988: 91) and they argue that "two radically different systems of thought and

logic are at work in the modernist-postmodernist confrontation." (110; italics added)3.

They conceptualise postmodern thinking as alternative or in opposition to modernity.

This defining, limiting, boundary drawing, categorizing, ordering is a very modern

undertaking in itself and leads to what Atkin and Hassard (1996) have described as

“intellectual self-imprisonment”. As Burrell (1998: 27) stated in his Foucault article,

he dreams of a “vision to be developed in fruitful and controversial ways by those

interested in opening up our discipline and our organizations.” Burrell (1998: 22)

wants to concentrate on the “positive aspects of Foucault’s work” instead of

contributing to an orthodox and canonical Foucault-interpretation. This is a very

Foucauldian idea in itself, suggesting that, as Foucault has done unto Nietzsche, so are

we able to do unto Foucault, in the same terms as Foucault wrote when he said that

“The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform

it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators say that I am being unfaithful to

Nietzsche that it is of absolutely no interest” (Foucault, quoted in Burrell 1998: 22) 4.

But, as Burrell uses Foucault, he slips more and more into an opposite position and

ends up announcing Foucault to be the anti-hero for our times5. Foucault becomes an

3
Of course, this language inspired by war metaphors is very modern in itself – see Burrell 1994: 2 where he speaks
of "the possibility of a defence for organization theory in the face of the gathering attack now being assembled by
those in the sway of postmodernism." It entered into modernist discourse on power when Machiavelli turned his
back on the moral posturing of Catholic theologians to become an anthropologist of power in the Medici palace.
4
See Foucault’s idea of a criticism that “would not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea
to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and
scatter it. It would multiply, not judgements, but signs of existence … Perhaps it would invent them sometimes –
all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep, I’d like a criticism of
scintillating leaps of the imagination. I would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of
possible storms.” (1990: 326)
5
The same can be observed in Chia’s book, when he states at the very beginning of the book, that a deconstructive
approach offers “inexhaustible opportunities for gaining fresh insights into the ontological character of social
organizing processes“ (1996: 10); by page 18 he sounds a little more careful: “Deconstructive analyses, therefore
can claim to have potentially radical institutional and organizational implication even though these implications are
often difficult to pinpoint and incalculable in terms of their long term effects”, and on page 192, at the end, he
confesses that “The value of deconstruction lies in what is denied..”

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“antimodernist”, the author of a “pessimistic” “antiscience” (Burrell: 1988: 27) 6.

Though Burrell started with the intention of elaborating the positive aspects of

Foucault, he found himself, very quickly, in a “Foucauldian cage” (Ray and Reed

1994: 189; see Kornberger and Weiskopf 2001) of his own making. Here is Burrell

constructing his cage:

Reality, and our discourse about reality, are both ever more closely confining. Thus
we are imprisoned by our knowledge and made freer by our ignorance. Only to the
extent that we stop talking about types of organizations do we succeed in not
reproducing the disciplinary society . . . According to Foucault, since all of us
belong to organizations and all organizations are alike and take the prison as their
model, we are all imprisoned (Burrell 1998: 27; 22).

As at least one critic commented, if Burrell thinks there is little difference between

being incarcerated and tenured, he should get out more often and maybe do some

prison-visits. Burrell establishes a Foucauldianism, a Foucauldian paradigm, which is

basically anti-modern. And it is exactly this categorization that has evoked critique of

the postmodern approach. Parker (1992: 28 and 37) posed a salient question when he

asked

why the journey is worth beginning on . . . (Burrell’s) . . . terms. In other words,

what can critical studies of organization achieve from a Foucauldian starting point –
apart from the creation of new discursive ‘iron cages’? … It seems as if the very
language of poststructuralism prevents someone from being able to see anything
other than self-surveilling subjects who imprison themselves in various kinds of
panopticons.

Postmodernism is perceived as a pure “celebration of rejection” (Feldman 1998: 63),

it is "celebrating the impossibility of the enlightenment emancipatory project."

(Parker 1995: 598), and postmodern organizational analyses “indeed appear to be

successful in inhibiting theory-building" (Hassard 1993: 19). Postmodernism leads to

a position of “anything goes” (Parker 1999: 39), it is “fundamentally capricious,

individualistic and ultimately nihilistic” (Willmott 1994: 115). Summing up the

6
See also Burrell’s “anti-organization theory” (1997) or Marsden and Townley’s “contra-organization science”
(1996: 666)

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antipositivism of this stream, we can allow the always sensitive words of Donaldson

to speak for us: "This doctrine, that all intellectual matters are inherently ambiguous

and all statements meaningless, is a high point, or better a low point, of twentieth-

century irrationalism, pessimism and fatalism.“ (1994: 197). Two years earlier he put

it in similar terms:

Antipositivism in organization theory leads to a fascination with the shadow and not
the substance . . . There is no mention of taking concrete steps like cutting costs,
liquidating inventories, making a sales drive, etc. . . American industry would be in
distress if it had been following this prescriptive advice . . . The consequences of
adoption of the antipositivist program are far from benign for organization theory.
This subject becomes the one in business school curricula in which students are told
any problem can be licked by dreaming up sufficiently ambiguous set of words to
bedazzle the stakeholders – Voodoo Management or Management by Mumbo Jumbo.
(1992: 464)

Beyond this battle we see that, as soon as postmodernist authors try to describe

postmodernism in positive terms, it starts, suspiciously, to resemble modernism

–“Postmodernism, therefore, decentres the human agent from its self-elevated

position of narcissistic 'rationality' and shows it to be an essentially observer

community which constructs interpretations of the world, these interpretations having

no absolute or universal status” but only “representations in this sense, [they] are our

realities and the only ones we can ever have”, suggests Chia (1996: 102, quoting

Burrell and Cooper). What we perceive as world “out there” are "essentially

projections of the observer community representing their thinking about the world

rather than the world itself." (Chia 1996: 103). As Parker (1995: 554) says ironically

“you do not need the postmodern label to be humble about your truth claims –

versions of modernism will do fine."

It is this "intellectual self-imprisonment" which in postmodernism leads radical

organization theorists to become ensnared by the very concepts they sought to reject.

Being “captured”, as it were, within “the chain of supplementary inscriptions of the

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dominant discourse” they cannot “escape the grasp of conventional explanation"

(Atkin and Hassard 1996: 127). We can exemplify this problematic with the work of

Chia who, while he regards the "process of organizational analysis as being

essentially an intellectual journey without destination" (1996: 20; italics added),

structures his book around the images of "Downstream" and "Upstream thinking" –

could one imagine a clearer direction than downstream and upstream? In fact,

upstream and downstream are far from delineating a journey without destination so

much as being a way of finding the tidal current in the mainstream. Only by

characterizing (or caricaturing) a “down” as modernism is he is capable of speaking

of an “up” as postmodernism. He remains captive in the categories he tries to subvert

– the normal fate of radical young ragged trousered philanthropists who try to

enlighten the uninterested.

It is easy to become boxed in by modernism and postmodernism. Imagine two

orthogonal axes defining a theoretically possible surface. Label the outer poles of the

first, 'modernism' and 'postmodernism'; label the outer poles of the other 'modernist'

and 'postmodernist'. Ascribe qualities to each pole. The modernism/postmodernism

pole specifies a realm of social practice while the modernity/postmodernity pole

specifies a realm of social theory. Within social theory specialized interpretations of

social practices, including theorizing, are constructed.

Modernist theory, the upper left hand quadrant, has typically been characterized by

the construction of unitary, grand theory, characterized by master terms for analysis,

such as the 'class struggle', the triumph of 'market forces', or the necessity of 'system

differentiation'. These have been some of the predominant fictions of recent times.

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Postmodernist theory, by contrast, in the space of the lower right hand quadrant, offers

quite distinct, much more plural and contingent fictions, in which recurrent themes are

grounded less in the story ‘intended’ by the author and rather more in intertextual

practices of ironic reflexivity and self-referentiality, as the author seeks to displace the

possibilities of being over-written by the narrative codes and conventions which are at

work. Possibilities excluded by modernism, the sound of ‘other’ voices, of

marginalized or repressed phenomena are celebrated. Difference is the key concern:

the familiar requires rapid de-construction and re-invention. All belief in the truth-

value of those apparent realities sustained by conventional interpretation must be

questioned. One should celebrate the ambiguities attendant upon the constant re-

invention of what apparently is into what may be.

The relationship between modernist theory and modern practice is straightforward and

familiar within the field of management and organization theory. Relationships

between phenomena such as the adoption of a particular 'formal organization

structure' and the achievement of ‘economic efficiency’ are represented in terms of a

palpable reality secured and objectively bounded by assumptions that are both

unutterably unrealistic and unreflexive. Perhaps this objectivism is both the cost and

the benefit of the achievement?

The space of postmodern practice and the theory of postmodernity is different again.

Some literary examples may help us find our way. One thinks of the kind of novel

that constantly trips up the sense that the reader, using conventional, ‘natural’

narrative devices, may be making of the text. An example might be Italo Calvino’s

(1981) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Here there is great doubt about

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representational practices: about the reality of things ever being captured in dominant

categories of understanding, a suspicion of the essentialism of these categories. The

critical task of postmodernity is one in which the interpretations generated by

dominant conventions should be interrogated, deconstructed and other, excluded,

possibilities of interpretation playfully explored for the sake of difference.

It is possible, even in an area as seemingly pragmatic as management and

organization theory, to adopt a playful exploration of the polymorphous possibilities

afforded by the postmodern canvass. A postmodernist social theoretical

understanding of putatively postmodern social phenomena would thus be one in

which possibilities of interpretation were explored for the pure pleasures of their text,

in terms of irony, repetition and variation. Burrell (1997) tries to achieve this sort of

thing, although in a more mannered way, with his literary conceit of Pandemonium.

Back to the boxes, if we were to enter the lower left hand quadrant, we would find

Burrell’s erstwhile stablemate, Gareth Morgan (1986). A resolutely modern

phenomena, formal organizations, is treated in a postmodern theoretical gloss as

capable of being seen as several things simultaneously, depending upon the metaphors

in play. There is no discontinuity to the phenomena: it is just that different ways of

seeing constitute it differently.

Beyond the boxes beloved by analysts (see Clegg, 1996), postmodernism is not a

camp or a paradigm so much as it is a critique of the taken for granted, in order to

open up new possibilities of things being different (Townley 1994: 28). With Cálas

and Smircich, we can acknowledge that genealogies will not result in better theories if

9
judged under instrumental premises (1999: 657). Deconstruction, they say, "is an

analytical strategy that permits us to question the limits that may have been imposed

upon discourses of knowledge, and opens the possibility of enacting other, different

discourses . . . different worlds in ambivalent spaces which are not yet inside or

outside the organizational texts" (Cálas and Smircich, 1991: 569)

We can show this with the example of deconstruction. In order to be consistent with

itself it should not remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic

discourse. Rather, it should aspire to something more consequential, to change things

and to intervene in an efficient, responsible, though always, of course, mediated way.

It should do so not only in the profession but also in the world more generally, not to

change things in the rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically

controlled intervention but in the sense of maximum intensification of a

transformation in progress (Derrida, 1992: 8). As Derrida suggests, deconstruction

analyses and compares seemingly self-evident and natural conceptual pairs, to show

their institutionalisation and history. Only by making the taken-for-granted

problematic can thinking be freed by reflexion rather than retracing (Derrida, 1986b).

As he put it, “Who would have counted on only the energies in dis- or de-? No work

results from a simple displacement or dislocation. Therefore invention is needed . . .”

(Derrida, 1986a: 65; italics added).

As Jencks (1988: 18) states, deconstruction is subversive, it needs a norm that it

breaks, a border that it transgresses, an ideology that it undermines; but in “the minute

it loses this critical role, or becomes a dominant power itself (as in so many

academies), it becomes a tyrannical bore.” This might be true as well for all the

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attempts in management and organization theory to establish a Foucauldianism and

follow Foucault’s analysis orthodoxically.

Rethinking postmodernism: reflexivization

Postmodernism is a moment in the unfolding of our history – it is neither a territory

that could be defended (think again of Burrell’s battle positions) nor a paradigm that

functions as a container. As Lyotard (1993) says, postmodernism is not the end of

modernism, but its birth, its constant coming into being. Cooper, Fox and Martinez

(1992: 8) get it right when they say that “Lyotard's brand of postmodernism is not a

rejection of modernism; it is an attempt to rethink the modernist project.”

Postmodernism “complements” rather than opposes modernism. Even as it resists

modernism in critiques of its performative qualities it has interact with it.

Postmodernism feeds parasitically on modernism. Postmodernism is a

complexification, a hybridisation and sublation of the modern – not its antithesis

(Jencks 1992: 12). Thus, “Postmodernism is thus not in any simply sense an 'era'

which can be said to come 'after' modernism. Instead, postmodernism is parasitical

upon the very conceptual categories promulgated by modernism which it seeks to

criticize. It is not a substitute 'paradigm' through which organization theory should be

articulated" (Chia 1996: 7; italics added)

Lyotard echoed a similar theme much later when he wrote that postmodernism means

not the end of modernism but the opposite: Postmodernity is implicated in modernity,

and modernity is constantly big with its postmodernity (Lyotard, 1993) Hence,

postmodernism is implicated in modernism, it is the very moment when modernism

folds itself back upon its own presumption, whenever it questions itself and takes

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distance, in opposition to the currently dominating concepts and practices in order to

invent them creatively anew. Postmodernism is the “obligatory point of passage” of

modernity, the moment of its permanent birth and re-birth.

One consequence of the role that reflexive postmodernism plays is to make

modernism a congenitally failing operation, one that constantly undermines, subverts,

or deconstructs its own foundation. In fact, postmodernism existed long before the

term postmodernism was invented – and maybe it existed more subversively and

powerfully before it was labelled. We elaborate this concept of postmodernism

through two very interesting, though marginalized, figures, in the critique of

representation: Machiavelli and Caravaggio.

The Edge: Struggles over Modernity

We have defined postmodernism as a moment that occurs at that edge of creativity

when, whatever practices are taken to be modern, are in the process of redefining

themselves as something other, something in opposition, to those practices that are

currently dominant. Hence, it is not so much a movement as a moment, not so much

an era but a process in which something clearly known and understood is becoming

something else not yet clearly known, not yet clearly understood. It is a moment of

paradox defined by “the simultaneous presence of contradictory, even mutually

exclusive elements” (Cameron & Quinn, 1988: 2).

As such a paradoxical state of becoming rather than a predictable state of being it can

arise wherever whatever kind of modernity has been normalised. Which begs the

question, of course – what is modernity? Well, without being too paradoxical,

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modernity is a state of being with little sense of paradox, small space for irony, and

precious little space for reflection. It is one where the struggle for hegemony is

dominant in its confusions and contestations, as the old orders refuse to die and the

new orders struggle to be born.

There have been many such occasions in modernity’s constant redefinition of itself.

Many authorities settle on the 18th Century as the critical moment of ‘revolution’ in

America, France and elsewhere, which ushered in the dawn of modernity; still others,

inspired by the historian Wallerstein (1974), would look back to that long sixteenth

century in which the modern world took shape. It was a period in which the east-west

Mediterranean axis of the centre of modernity was tilted geographically and became

inclined north-south on the European Atlantic seaboard, when Catholicism lost its

edge to Protestantism, when even the bloody Inquisition could not secure truth. At the

core, as ever, was a struggle to control meaning and profits, centred on Western

Europe’s hitherto most impressive organizational innovation, the Holy Roman

Catholic Church.

The Church had incorporated many of the major organizational innovations that had

been innovated by earlier religious figures and orders (Kieser, 198X): it had ranks,

titles, and uniforms; it had authority; it had control of vast wealth and estates and

palaces and other real estate, but, perhaps, most especially, it also had power through

control of the means of production of knowledge and the expression of dissent. The

Inquisition and the Confessional were its twin instruments. With these the normalcy

of Catholic modernity, in which the planets revolved around the earth, cherubs floated

around representations of biblical figures while angels ascended, and the world was

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created in six days and nights of hard labour, all this was reproduced in its central

representational form – religious art. It provided opportunities for spectacular

representations: huge amounts of pain, burning, institutionalised torture, execution

and individual torment. But it was also premised on a huge bureaucracy of repression

and control, that by the turn of the sixteenth century, was enacted through a

meticulous legality, one observed with care and great concern for the appropriateness

of its own baroque procedures, as a kind of theatre of the absurd made normal (Robb,

1999: 247-8, citing Mereu, 1979). And above all, these baroque procedures were

organizational. This modernity was not something just there: it had been willed into

being, disciplined into existence, and ceaselessly reproduced by a myriad of small

dogmas, inconsequential acts, and nicely observed ceremonies, representations and

trade, as well as the odd occasional acts of spectacular violence and theatre. All of

these comprised the first truly modern multinational organization – the Roman

Church – albeit as it was under siege from other organizational forms that were to

reshape its modernity into one observers of a later modernity were to deem,

appropriately, as more rational: the Reformation (Weber 1976).

From this edge in modernity’s history, two prototypically postmodern figures

recommend themselves from the margins of its power/knowledge relations, because

each rethought the possibilities of fundamental ways of seeing modernity. One, a

writer and political advisor, straddles the beginning of that long sixteenth century

while the other, a painter, flourished briefly and brilliantly towards its end.

Why a painter and a political philosopher? Because each ushered in a wholly new way

of seeing, the implications of which were to reverberate through the subsequent

14
centuries, re-imagining what had once seemed baroquely normal through a literal

realism that shocked the moral codes and conventions of representational practice as it

was then understood. Of course, they were not alone – they were indeed symptomatic

of a general shift in the zeitgeist that included other figures such as da Vinci and

Gallileo, but they worked more committedly at the margins of representational

possibility, of showing how it was possible to be a human being and a political being,

than anyone else. And in doing so they defined radical possibilities for another kind

of modernity – they were truly post-modern. Each introduced fundamentally new

ways of seeing that changed what it meant to be modern for ever: at the moment they

were being postmodern, in the themes that they worked, they prefigured the critical

tensions of the new modernity – between the artful representational contrivance of

the natural as an essential politics (Caravaggio) and the essential politics attaching to

the practical problems of power involved in organization (Machiavelli). Both of these

central issues – how to represent nature and how to organize power – were to be

settled with another edge in twentieth century modernity and its management, an edge

that sought to negate and obscure the essential politics attached to the earliest modern

proposal.

Machiavelli

Nicco Machiavelli was born in Florence, at a time when the peninsula was in political

upheaval. Italy was divided between four dominant city-states, and each of these was

continually at the mercy of the stronger foreign governments of Europe, especially the

French and the Spanish. The wealthy Medici family had ruled Florence since 1434, a

rule that was temporarily broken by a reform movement, begun in 1494, when the

young Machiavelli became an important diplomat. With the help of Spanish troops the

15
Medici family regained power in 1512 and Machiavelli was tortured and removed

from public life.

Machiavelli's greatest work was The Prince, written in 1513 and published after his

death in 1532. The work immediately provoked controversy and was soon condemned

by Pope Clement VIII. Its main theme is that rulers should retain absolute control and

should use any means to accomplish this end. The Prince can be read today as a work

comprising advice of great realpolitik for successful organization (in the case he

addresses, as a principality), rather than it being recommendation of moral precepts –

which had characterised previous writings on the subject of power and rule. He

describes those "virtues" a Prince – or an effective chief executive officer – should

possess. He concludes that some of these will lead to CEO destruction, whereas some

"vices" will allow CEOs to survive. Indeed, the virtues that we commonly praise

might lead to the downfall of a CEO and an organization. For instance, he argues that

a CEO will be thought to be a more effective leader if they are severe when punishing

people rather than merciful. Severity affects only a few, but it deters acts that many

might otherwise aspire to. Thus, it is better for a CEO to be feared than to be loved

although, above all, he should avoid being hated, and should know how to be

deceitful in order to win admiration.

Bailey (1977: 8) defines politics as 'the art of bringing unacceptable myths into, and

preserving one's own myths from derision'. Such an explicitly political conception of

myth (and a conception of politics as discursive) resonates with themes that abound in

Machiavelli. Indeed, much of The Discourses (Machiavelli 1970) can be read as a

sustained attempt to undermine existing myths of honourable conduct and to create

16
instead a model of precepts framed by the myth of strategy: to act expediently with

respect to means in order to be honourable to the ends one should serve. In

Machiavelli, the concern with strategy leads him to view reality as an arena in which

strategically mindful princes may secure order (Machiavelli 1958). The focus is on

strategies, deals, negotiation, fraud and conflict in which myths concerning moral

action become game-players resources rather than a topic framing what the game

should be.

Machiavelli's cynical, rationalist and realist stress is on interpreting extant games,

rather than on legislating their form, on following the moves actually made. For

Machiavelli power is to be conceived as pure expediency and strategy rather than as

pure instrumentality. Machiavelli describes an ethnographic research method for

uncovering the rules of the games that consequently get played out.

Machiavelli was cast adrift from state service by the changing nature of political

adventurism and division in Medici Florence. Thus, he wrote his work not as a trusted

legislator from a position of intellectual, scientific and political certainty, but as an

uncertain explorer for a power that refused him employment. Against the backdrop of

turmoil in Italian politics Machiavelli forged a new interpretation of power in which

one of its most significant aspects 'was that it was unrelated to a systematic

philosophy' (Wolin 1960: 211). This interpretation holds, despite, one may note, the

many attempts to provide such a philosophy on the part of subsequent observers. [See

Crick (1958) for a brief and elegant account of these].

The characteristics of Machiavelli's new interpretation of power derived their sense

17
from the political world in which he lived and studied: a world of flux, discontinuity,

intrigue and illusion, a world in which 'everyone is equipped to see, few can

understand' [cited in Wolin (1960: 212)]. Illusion is less to be legislated out of

existence by a scientific declaration of 'right method' but is rather more to be

interpreted as to its effectivity in the political armoury of strategic actors such as the

prince: 'the new science was more in the nature of a body of knowledge adjusted to a

world of movement, rather than one aimed at freezing it' (Wolin 1960: 213). Such

movement could not be totally controlled because too much of it was contingent.

Knowledge alone could not hope to grasp this contingency but the combination of

power and knowledge might enable some strategic understanding.

Machiavelli's 'aim was political mastery not political sculpture' as Wolin (1960: 216)

so nicely phrases it. Knowledge of the strategies and techniques of political mastery,

of power, were achieved through what Callon and his colleagues have termed a

'thoroughgoing determination to follow the actors wherever they go, to uncover what

they might prefer to keep concealed, and to avoid being misled by myths' (Callon et

al, 1986: 5). In this interpretation what is of importance is Machiavelli's method and

his insistence on studying strategies of power whatever and wherever they may be

rather than being restricted by any a priori mechanical or causal conceptions.

What Machiavelli offers in The Prince is a rich descriptive ethnography of power

conceived in terms of its strategies. Towards these strategies he takes no moral

stance: they are neither good nor bad, they are strategies whose only purpose is their

effectivity. They flow from no principle of sovereignty; they serve no principle of

sovereignty; they reproduce no principle of sovereignty. Machiavelli does not serve

18
power: he merely describes its strategies as he sees it at work within the arena of the

palace. Power does not belong to anyone nor to any place; it is not something that

princes necessarily have. It is simply the effectivity of strategies for achieving for one

a greater scope for action than for others implicated by one's strategies. Power is not

any thing nor is it necessarily inherent in any one; it is a tenuously produced and

reproduced effectivity contingent upon the strategic competencies and skills of actors

who would be powerful. From the shadows of the palace Machiavelli observes and

describes power at play. It is this stress on description, on interpretation, on the

translation of power, that signals Machiavelli's distinctiveness. His focus is on power

in situ, in the specific arena of the palace with its many locales, rather than as a

generalizing concept for awing the world or for making it seem awesome, in marked

contrast to Hobbes (1962). It is in the very prosaic refusal of any grand theory or

meta-narrative, above all, that Machiavelli's distinctiveness resides. Power is

embedded in many diverse forms of practice within the arena constituted by the

palace; such practices may be methodically interpreted as to their strategicality but

cannot be assumed to be effective simply by virtue of their author.

The sub-title of Wolin's (1960) chapter on Machiavelli is 'politics and the economy of

violence'. At the core of Machiavelli's concern with power is 'the primordial fact that

the hard core of power is violence and to exercise power is often to bring violence to

bear on someone else's person or possessions' (Wolin 1960: 220). Strategy, to be

effective, must know when to be cruel and when to withdraw: in other words it must

practice an economy of violence, sparingly, appropriately and creatively. An effective

economy of violence required careful consideration of its military forms, knowledge

of the means required to translate armed bodies into disciplined organized power.

19
Most especially, it should exercise such power sparingly: wreaking violence as a

political strategy which is followed too often or too easily serves to demonstrate the

real structural weakness of a power which has to intervene so ferociously. Securing

consent may be a more effective form of translating power into strategic action than

always having to coerce recalcitrant bodies. Or it may not. On some occasions, at

least, violence may be judged more effective.

Where consent may be secured Machiavelli does not believe that it will be

generalized, the application of some universal or essential fiat across all spheres of

action. Part of the flux of life inheres in its radical discontinuities: different forms of

life display their own rationalities rather than the invisible hand of any architectonic

reason. (Smith and Marx both admitted of such an essential principle. Of course they

differed on what they believed its effects and prime movers to be). Strategy, effective

as knowledge of power in one sphere, may have no effectivity at all in another form of

life. Machiavelli reproduces a moral treatise on the use of organizational power as a

political economy of violence, vastly at odds with the moral texts admired by the

Church of the day. In this respect Machiavelli, like Caravaggio, was an outlaw in

terms of the contemporary morality and moral codes.

Caravaggio
Michelangelo Caravaggio7 (1573-1610) was the most revolutionary artist of his time,

because he abandoned the rules that had guided a century of artists before him. They

had idealized human and religious experience, according to strict precepts embedded

7
Whom Robb (1999), his most recent (and most provocative) biographer, names M – the initial of his
given name – as there is some confusion about his proper name, although it is conventionally accorded
to have been Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Caravaggio being the name of the place that he came
from.

20
in religious dogma concerning the appropriate nature of representation. This dogma

represented one side of what Robb (1999: 2) refers to as “ideological cold war that’d

split the late sixteenth century Europe as deeply as any political divide has riven the

old continent in the twentieth.” It was the side of bureaucracy, official faith, the Holy

Roman Church of Catholic spiritual and temporal power. The cold war was against

the protestant reformation sparked further north by Martin Luther, against which Italy

was on a war footing that:

Asserted the catholic church’s claim to total control of Italians’ minds and bodies . . .
Coercion and persuasion were its twin prongs. The inquisition was the stick, a vast
repressive machinery that worked through informants and secret courts to meet
ideological deviance with humiliation, prison, torture and burning alive. Art was the
carrot, and was enlisted to serve the purposes of the church militant by channelling
the imagination’s energies into the runnels of catholic doctrine (Robb, 1999: 3).

Between 1588 and 1592 Caravaggio went to Rome and worked as an assistant to

painters of lesser skill. About 1595 he began to sell his paintings through a dealer. The

dealer brought Caravaggio to the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte. Through

the cardinal, Caravaggio was commissioned, at age 24, to paint for the church of San

Luigi dei Francesi. In its Contarelli Chapel Caravaggio's realistic naturalism first fully

appeared in three scenes he created of the life of St. Matthew. The works caused

public outcry, however, because of their realistic and dramatic nature. They broke,

dramatically, with the representational codes of their time, by using what we would

now call naturalism and, instead of stylised religious conventions, ordinary,

‘shameful’ people as models from life.

Earlier, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, one of the centuries greatest minds

posed the crucial question of whether painting was an art or a science – the question

with which Leonardo had opened his Book of painting, a work that remained

21
unpublished until 1651, long after Caravaggio had died. For Leonardo, the answer

was evident: painting was a science.

The art of seeing – and representing truly what you saw was the heart of
understanding the material world. And art and science were joined in that perception.
The eyes had once been the windows of the soul. With Leonardo they became man’s
window on the universe (Robb, 1999: 72)

It was a robust assertion of splendid empiricism, one with which, Robb (1999)

suggests, Caravaggio may well have been familiar, both from viewing Leonardo’s art

as well as reading an unpublished version of the text in the house of one his patrons. It

certainly informed his art. With Caravaggio art was firmly oriented to a realist,

naturalist and scientific mode of representation as opposed to the stylised canon on

offer in the standard for the iconography of catholic chamber of horrors – “Nailed

hands, rolling eyes, exposed breasts, floating veils, bleeding wounds and cherubs’

heads on wings’ – for the next four centuries, as Robb (1999: 326) put it. But what

was crucial is the technique it took to achieve this new realist effect, a technique

“peculiarly true” to his “subjective way of seeing” (Robb, 1999: 5). Caravaggio,

created art that was more like science that went

straight to shocking and delightful life itself, unmediated by any shaping intelligence.
The appearance, of course, misleads. In a time when art was prisoner first of ideas
and then of ideology, M undertook a singlehanded and singleminded exploration of
what it was to see the reality of things and people. He did it with a rigour that, like
the work of Leonardo a hundred years before him, meant as much to the origin of
modern science as it did to modern art – more so in a way, since what Leonardo
wrote about in art only became real in M’s hands. M rendered the optics of the way
we see so truly that four hundred years later his newly cleaned paintings startle like
brilliant photos of another age. These images came out of an attention to the real that
ignored the careful geometries of renaissance art as scrupulously as it excluded the
dogmas of religion. No other painter ever caught a living bodily presence as M did.
(Robb 1999: 5)

How Caravaggio attained this way of seeing is, in itself a fascinating story, as Robb’s

(1999) account makes clear, but it cannot concern us here. There is insufficient space

to chronicle the shifts in his technique, working ever faster, more minimalistically, as

the circumstances of his life and times pressed in on his work. What is significant is

22
the triumph of realism against the baroque modernity then installed as normalcy. And

it was the same with Machiavelli: his utterly realistic accounts of the strategies and

tactics of power, the military analogies, the ethnographies from the palace margins,

these are what are so striking in Machiavelli.

We have never been modern

Thus wrote Bruno Latour (1993) in a book that sits unacknowledged by most at the

centre of his oeuvre. And if we have never been modern we cannot even think about

being postmodern in the sense in which it is often represented – as a going beyond.

The point that he makes is that the conventions framing representation that we have

taken into the era that we call modern display their roots all too clearly.

If Machiavelli and Caravaggio’s achievement was to practice modernity, their

problem was that the context in which they did so could not accept this practice: it had

no way of settling disagreements other than through tradition or force. Elsewhere, in

England, Hobbes and Boyle were promulgating an arena in which contest over

modernity and meaning could occur in practice and not be subject to resolution by

either force or tradition. For Boyle, the creation of a technology that would allow

observation of phenomenal events of his sovereign design, by others than merely

himself, was the to be the theme for the new dawn of modernity. Hobbes, by contrast,

sought to legislate a situation in which sovereignty in the Body Politic puts an end to

disputation over anything much other than the proof an argument conducted as if on

the lines of a discourse among geometers or mathematicians. While Hobbes sought to

render the political meaning of modernity timeless, for Boyle it became contingent

upon matters of fact as decided by artfully contrived experimentation that allows

23
‘nature’ to be a messenger. Hobbes sought to exclude experimental science from the

discourse of political science and Boyle sought to exclude politics from the discourse

of experimental science. It was a double denial that has become the basis for some of

the great fictions of modernity: subjected/subjective citizen, the sovereign state and

order, on the one hand; the evident fact, the laboratory design and the objective

witness-as-subject, on the other. Science and Politics, the representation of objects and

the representation of subjects, thereafter diverge in a modern fiction.

Boyle argued that only experimentally produced matters of fact could constitute the

foundations of proper natural philosophical knowledge. Shapin and Schafer (1985:

22) demonstrate that the experimental production of matters of fact that Boyle

valorised rested upon the acceptance of social and discursive conventions and

depended upon the production and protection of a special form of social organization.

The experimental programme was, in Wittgenstein's (1968) phrases, a "language-

game" and a "form of life." Accepting or rejecting that programme amounted to the

acceptance or rejection of the form of life that Boyle and his colleagues proposed.

Hence, neither the acceptance of the experimental programme nor the epistemological

status of the matter of fact is as self-evident as they might appear:

In the conventions of the intellectual world we now inhabit there is no item of

knowledge so solid as a matter of fact. We may revise our ways of making sense of
matters of fact and we may adjust their place in our overall maps of knowledge. Our
theories, hypotheses, and our metaphysical systems may be jettisoned, but matters of
fact stand undeniable and permanent. We do, to be sure, reject particular matters of
fact, but the manner of our doing so adds solidity to the category of the fact. A
discarded theory remains a theory; there are "good" theories and "bad" theories-
theories currently regarded as true by everyone and theories that no one any longer
believes to be true. However, when we reject a matter of fact, we take away its
entitlement to the designation: it never was a matter of fact at all.

There is nothing so given as a matter of fact. In common speech, as in the philosophy

of science, the solidity and permanence of matters of fact reside in the absence of
human agency in their coming to be. Human agents make theories and
interpretations, and human agents therefore may unmake them. But matters of fact
are regarded as the very "mirror of nature."' . . . [W]hat nature makes no man may

24
 dispute. To identify the role of human agency in the making of an item of knowledge
is to identify the possibility of its being otherwise. To shift the agency onto natural
reality is to stipulate the grounds for universal and irrevocable assent.

Robert Boyle sought to secure assent by way of the experimentally generated matter
of fact . . . English experimentalists of the mid-seventeenth century and afterwards
increasingly took the view that all that could be expected of physical knowledge was
"probability," thus breaking down the radical distinction between "knowledge" and
"opinion." Physical hypotheses were provisional and revisable; assent to them was
not obligatory, as it was to mathematical demonstrations; and physical science was,
to varying degrees, removed from the realm of the demonstrative. The probabilistic
conception of physical knowledge was not regarded by its proponents as a
regrettable retreat from more ambitious goals; it was celebrated as a wise rejection of
a failed project. By the adoption of a probabilistic view of knowledge one could
attain to an appropriate certainty and aim to secure legitimate assent to knowledge
claims. The quest for necessary and universal assent to physical propositions was
seen as inappropriate and illegitimate. It belonged to a "dogmatic" enterprise, and
dogmatism was seen not only as a failure but as dangerous to genuine knowledge . . .
In the root metaphor of the mechanical philosophy, nature was like a clock: man
could be certain of the hour shown by its hands, of natural effects, but the
mechanism by which those effects were really produced, the clockwork, might be
various (Shapin and Schafer, 1985: 22).

As Shapin and Schafer (1985: 22-3) demonstrate, Matters of fact depended on a

unique empirical experience, its unique meaning, and the communication to others

that the grounds for the belief one had in its unique meaning were adequate. Multiple

repetitions and witnesses of the unique event were required. “If that experience could

be extended to many, and in principle to all men, then the result could be constituted

as a matter of fact. In this way, the matter of fact is to be seen as both an

epistemological and a social category.” Boyle's experimental programme utilized a

material technology embedded in the construction and operation of the air pump,

which rendered the unique event possible. The power of the air pump as a new

scientific instrument resided in its capacity to enhance perception and to constitute

new perceptual objects. (It was not very reliable in doing this, however; additionally,

it was enormously expensive – the “cyclotron” of its day, as Shapin and Schafer

(1985) suggest.) Inventing a machine that could create unique events hitherto

unexperienced was in itself insufficient; it was also necessary to let others know what

had been uniquely produced so that they might come to the same understanding. For

25
this a literary technology was required by means of which the phenomena produced

by the pump could be published for those not able directly to witness the event.

Finally, there had to be a social technology invented that incorporated the conventions

experimental philosophers should use to consider knowledge-claims.

Hobbes disagreed with the program that Boyle promulgated. As he pointed out, the

laboratory was a very restricted public space. Instead, he promulgated a rationalist

program for knowledge based upon the principles of geometry: a type of science

fiction similar to more modern neo-classical economics, in that it worked from prime

assumptions through to conclusions consistent with the assumptions made. Hobbes'

(1968) importance, however, lies not in his scientific claims or his practical

administrative, organizational or managerial effects, but in his articulation of key

conceptual tenets of modernity as power. Henceforward, power was to be constituted

primarily as an essentially modern, mechanical concept. Hobbes sought to found a

science in which power was a key concept. In this respect he was, in Bauman's

(1987) terms, a legislator of the very role of legislator:

whereas sense and memory are but knowledge of fact, which is a thing past and
irrevocable; science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon
another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else
when we will, or the like another time; because when we see how any thing comes about,
upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, we
see how to make it produce the like effects (Hobbes, 1962: 45).

Hobbes was the baroque master of the clockwork: the scholar who rendered an

implacably causal view of the world as the centrepiece of its analysis and power.

Power was, above all causal, for Hobbes, and if you couldn’t see a causal connection

at work then you couldn’t see power. Indeed, Hobbes was the modernist master par

excellence, for in his wake, a whole intellectual industry grew up, imposing causal

26
parameters on the modern world, reaching from Hobbes, through Locke and Hume, to

contemporary political and organization science. As the foundations of these were laid

down by masters such as March and Simon (1952) and their successors, the track

within which they worked were already set by Hobbes’ fateful encounter with

clockwork and mechanics. They rendered a mechanical, causal universe, an imperfect

machine, a difficult causality, but nonetheless, still recognisably a machine. And, as

we know from Morgan (1986) the ‘machine’ metaphor is the dominant metaphor of

modern organization theory and practice, and causality, in all its contemporary

fascination with log linear regression and other stylistic conventions, is the

metaphysical essence that animates prime movement. In organization theory there is

now a huge and disciplined industry of normal science that, in its stylistic

conventions, as imposed by the ‘best’ journals, is a new form of baroque

representation, striving to secure modern knowledge on scientific footings, either the

experimental ones secured so laboriously by Boyle or the rationalist ones secured by

Hobbes. The division between experiment and reason, as these two figures conceived

it, articulated all that was at stake in being modern when the conceits of modernity

first appeared.

But, as Latour says, we have never been modern: the modern fictions of Hobbes and

Boyle have never been wholly established because the separation of the pure social

force of reason and the pure natural mechanism that collective assent allowed, has

never been achieved in its purity: paradoxical dangers irrupt to profane the pure

spaces. The fiction of the Leviathan – the all-ordering sovereign state (which later

becomes transmogrified into the order of organization in general) – and the fiction of

Nature – that field of pure being whose truth can be outed by the well-designed

27
experiment and the well-tempered experimentalist – cannot be contained. They leak

and leach into each other. Nature’s laws are unknowable without human organization:

from primitive pumps to sophisticated electrospectographs, that which belongs

putatively to Nature can only utter its message where human agency contrives that it

is able to do so. Simultaneously, ingenious scientists absolve themselves of

responsibility for the message received, except through residual categories of ‘error’.

A set of philosophical language games became constructed around the great divide.

Nature’s laws must be divined; no Nature’s laws are socially constructed; Society is

not a construct but a law like set of unfreedoms constraining free agency and awaiting

discovery; Nature and Society are ontologically distinct; Nature is Society; Society is

Nature – and so on, in an endless parlour game for undergraduates. These games

constitute what modernity became.

But not everyone played the game.

Not everyone was confined within either the institutions of Society or the institutions

of Nature nor did everyone seek to impose their institutions on those of the other. For

instance, anthropologists, at least when researching pre-modern societies, did not. In

America, ethnomethodologists such as Garfinkel (1967) did not. In France, Boltanski

and Thévenot (1991) did not any more than did Latour (1987), or, in Denmark, the

master-ethnographer, Flyvbjerg (1998). Instead, rather like the ethnomethodologists or

the anthropologists (and Caravaggio and Machiavelli) they made the game the object

of study: they sought to observe, to describe, to follow the actors in their everyday life

rather than that imagined for them in the protocols of High Church, High Science or

28
High Society. They sought to understand the game, not by appeal to its transcendent

laws or immanent possibilities but through observation and analysis of the ways in

which the actors themselves construct immanence, construct transcendence, the way

that they do the work of making stable those networks that lace together, leach into,

and profane the pristine spaces that the epistemologically pure scions of social

construction and natural law would keep unsullied. Hence, the pure world of

Modernity – in the spheres of the Social and the Natural – has never existed. We have

never been Modern. Instead, we have inhabited a series of dualisms: on the one hand,

‘hard’ nature determined ‘soft’ society and on the other, ‘hard’ society determined

soft’ nature: naturalism versus constructionism.

However, in one field, (anticipated by both the realism of Machiavelli and

Caravaggio), these dualisms were rethought – by anthropology. Each provides a kind

of anthropology of their experience: Caravaggio’s representations of real people and

their dirty foibles, even within the baroque conventions that funding required;

Machiavelli’s real politics and its moral disdain for the prattle, chicanery and duplicity

of the Church.

Once anthropology broke free from its Victorian essentialist assumptions, whereby

“savages” existed merely to elevate “civilization”, and, instead, sought to describe and

represent things as they appeared to be in terms of their own forms of life, then it

became postmodern – because it no longer spoke from the position of privilege

accorded the knowledge, norms and mores of here and now – wherever, whatever,

that here and now appeared to be. Latour recommends such an anthropology, one that

treats all its objects of analysis equally, whether conventionally pre-modern or

29
modern; whether conventionally of nature or society, or something impure and in-

between, something hybrid, such as organization. Critical to this exercise is the

abandonment of a priori error – the baggage of epistemological breaks, paradigm

shifts and incommensurabilities. Error must be explained in the same terms as non-

error or whatever passes for truth. (In organizational terms, we should not explain

failure as a limited category different from success.) Analysis must be symmetrical:

the same procedures and protocols are to be reserved for the human and the non-

human (in Caravaggio’s case the human and the divine, or in Machiavelli’s case, the

good and the bad). The privileging of either the human or the natural is to reproduce,

a priori, all the dualisms to be deconstructed. Far better to sketch out the methods that

communities use to make their constructs: the organization theorists, the strategists,

the behaviourists and so on. Sketch what they actually do.

Knowledge and power

Science is politics pursued by other means – so it matters not if that which is studied

belongs to Society or to Nature. Indeed, it will probably belong to both

simultaneously – matters of organization design, for instance, are as naturalistic and

as sociable as matters of software design, bridge design or any other form of design.

Or as aesthetic, plausible, and replicable: their realization depends neither on natural

law or social construction but on the stabilization of those circuits of power that

produce them, how they are configured, how effortlessly they circulate, and what

resistance they meet (Clegg, 1989). The nature of things or their social construction is

nothing other than whatever it is that their circuitry embeds them as being: stable

bureaucracies, networks, family enterprises or virtual connections – the outcome

depends on what the actors – people, things and hybrids – do and achieve. That they

30
do this despite our categorical inability to see them doing it most of the time is what

Latour means when he says we have never been modern. We have never achieved the

realization in practice of those categorical distinctions that modernity was to be built

on.

If we have never been modern then what could be the postmodern in management? If

we think of postmodernity at all today as something real, something tangible, then we

think of the drift from modernity, a set of ideas, values and institutions firmly

anchored by an organizing reason, to postmodernity, as implying a dissolution of

these scientific and cultural forms. The reflexivity demanded by this transformation

comes more easily to sciences less determinate and more ambiguous about their

knowledge than those that remain deeply attached to the possibility of objective, that

is context-free, truths, or which can think only of that which is socially fabricated.

For reflexive sciences, rationality is always situational rather than transcendent. And

because it is always contextually situational it is always implicated with power. No

context stands outside power. If it were the case, then it would exist nowhere, outside

of understanding, outside of possibility, outside of sense. As Foucault (1977: 27-28)

says “power produces knowledge . . . power and knowledge directly imply one

another . . . there is no power relation without the creative constitution of a field of

knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same

time power relations.” In such a view rationalities and powers are fused. Different

power actors will operate in and through different rationalities. The different

rationalities will have their different rules for producing sense – at the more formal

31
outer limits – for producing truth. In fact, sense and truth cannot be separated from the

ensemble of rules that constitute them – and their obverse – as such.

To adopt a discursive analysis of rationality is to see what people say as the means

whereby rationality and power become interwoven. People may be in a position to say

anything, given the infinity of discourse, but they rarely surprise the well-grounded

analyst with their discursive moves. Which is not to say that language games are

predictable – although sometimes they are – but to suggest that they are explicable.

We can understand and constitute the senses that are being made as well as the

conditions of existence and underlying tacit assumptions that make such sense

possible. And in this way we can begin to understand the different forms of agency

that find expression in organizational contexts, where the players make sense of rules

that they actively construct and deconstruct in the context of their action.

Rather than being law-like phenomena, rules are always constituted locally, in

context, by the actors themselves, rather than being the objective instantiation of a

general principle or law. Contextualism implies that whatever regularities occur

empirically will always be situational. Researchers need to understand that these are

not likely to be the result of either remote laws operating behind the backs of the

actors concerned nor are they likely to be the result of an idiosyncratic researchers

interpretation of the scene in question. To the extent that the researcher has researched

the situational ethics of the context at hand then they will have a sound grasp of the

socially and historically conditioned context within which sense is made. With these

understandings researchers can avoid the relativism that they are sometimes charged

with: their understandings will be framed within deeply embedded foundations that

32
the actors find normal and acceptable to use. In matters of interpretation there is

always room for disagreement and it is no different for the organization researcher.

One interpretation is rarely as good as another. Some will always be more plausible in

terms of the contexts within which they are produced and received.

For phenomena in an object realm, the matter at hand can have no understanding of

itself. But actors always populate organizations and they always have an

understanding both of each other and those artefacts that they constitute (and which

sometimes constitute them – for instance, a machine operator) and with which they

interact. Thus, organizations are always more subject-realms than merely object

realms, albeit that as objects of reflection, they can be subjected to object-like

treatment and routines. But this does not inescapably secure their nature as something

ontologically just so. Of course, there is no shortage of theories in organization

studies that presume to offer abstract context independent concepts. Contingency

theories, institutional theories, population ecologies, transaction cost analysis, and so

on. But on close examination, these theories always betray the origins of their context

dependent assumptions. It could not be otherwise. These assumptions may be more or

less tacit or more or less reflexive but their context cannot be excluded because such

context always defines the relevancy of the phenomena that any theory addresses.

None of these considerations, constituting a plain realism that neither a Caravaggio

nor a Machiavelli would find amiss – the real actors always spoke in their work –

count for much in the contemporary power games of organization theory. (For

instance, Pfeffer (1993) has highlighted the value of normal science and paradigm

consensus, as defining conditions for better, more modern organization theory,

33
suggesting that it will produce greater scholarly reputations and better resource

allocations.)

While the nature of reality is unequivocally real – it is ‘out there’ – our ways of

knowing it as such are somewhat more contestable. While we have highly elaborated

codes for making sense of phenomena – such as the methods of empirical science –

we should recognise these for the codes they are. They are sophisticated ways of

narrating the stories that matter to us as scientists and people, of giving them

credence, of passing them on in the world. Reality cannot be represented in some

propositionally pure form that is untouched by the context of meaning in which it is

embedded. That Hobbes saw and described the phenomena of power in causal terms,

using metaphors of springs, flywheels, and force, and was subsequently well received

for having done so, was not surprising in a world newly impressed by the writings of

Newton. Everywhere scholars sought out signs that would enable them to unravel the

mechanical nature of the universe and of being in it. In speaking in the scholarly

language of his day Hobbes bequeathed a view that could not encapsulate action at a

distance, that could not conceptualise how the standing conditions for any action

might constitute the mechanics of its outcome, and could not cope with the power of

abstracted representations – its own included. But he laid down a framework for

causal analysis as an analysis of the mechanical relations between things that has

framed positivist analysis since.

From positivism to language games

Perhaps the best way of understanding the rules for scientific analysis that constitute

approaches such as positivism is to see them as discursive strategies rooted in a

34
particular view of the world as a world of mechanical and causal relations between

objects that are amenable to inspection of signs of their existence through the

reception of sense data. Not just any sense data will do but that which is privileged,

discursively and representationally, by the science in question.

Experience ordered though our sense data may cause us to hold certain views of the

matter in question but it cannot tell us which views we should be considering in the

first place. The insight is old. Weber (1948: 143) quoted Tolstoy in a speech to

students at Munich University in 1918 to this effect:

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question
important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live? That science does not give
an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which
science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of some use to the
one who puts the question correctly.8

One consequence of positivism in organization studies has been to obscure this most

basic question. It has created an epistemic context in which such a question cannot

even be considered. Instead, ethics are something else outside the questions one asks

of reality as a scholar: that certain causal regularities may be empirically observed of

a phenomena does not enable one to ask why these regularities and not some others?

How, for instance, is authority achieved as a set of patterned preferences whose

prevalence demonstrates its facticity? At the outset, organization studies never asked

such questions concerning power in organizations – it simply took it for granted.

Hence, having no conception of power other than as A getting B to do something that

B would not otherwise do, it was able to ignore all the important ethical questions.

8
This reflects the insight of Wittgenstein’s (1922) early philosophy: “[T]he truth of the thoughts communicated
here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials
been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work . . . consists in the fact that it
shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.”

35
Such as, why should ownership and control of a phenomenon such as capital have

dominance over other things? How does such domination become authority?

Increasingly, in fields of endeavour such as management and organization theory, the

world construed in modern terms has been seen as an arena capable of analysis in

terms of underlying mechanisms the phenomenal signs of which can be registered in

sense data. What is important is to construct the machinery of sense data collection

and analysis in such a way as to enable these mechanisms to be visible. In effect, what

this amounts to is the installation of a very particular language game as the dominant

orthodoxy for doing research. That this is the case is most evident on those rare

occasions of moral exhortation, when the politics of the dominant orthodoxy are

revealed for all to see. Jeffrey Pfeffer (1993) provides us with one such occasion.

Pfeffer calls for moral rearmament in organization theory that will suppress internal

conflict concerning methods and epistemologies. Such conflicts he regards as

dangerous, corrosive of moral authority, and destructive of professional reputation and

discipline. Order is what is required. On the contrary, we would argue – intellectual

communities – just as political communities – that suppress conflict do so at

considerable risk to their vitality. As Flyvbjerg (2001: 108) suggests “suppressing

conflict is suppressing freedom, because the privilege to engage in conflict and power

struggle is part of freedom. He goes on to suggest that ‘perhaps social and political

theories that ignore or marginalize conflicts are potentially oppressive, too.”

Organization theory, in as much as it would only allow for debate on its own terms –

the Pfeffer option – would be repressive, oppressive and antithetical to the spirit of an

36
intellectually open society, a baroque institution of institutionalised terror and

confessional (the tenure review decision – “No, that is not a top-tier journal and it is

not on the prescribed list of journals in which one should publish.” The Departmental

Index has replaced the Papal Index.) It is conflict that sustains openness and without

such conflict the genuine democracy that is essential to the articulation of reason is

lacking. Reason resides not so much in what is said, as Habermas (1971) argues, as in

the formal conditions that constitute the conditions within which what is said can be

expressed. The more democratic a discourse the more legitimate will be the

inevitable conflicts of interest that arise and the less there will be barriers to their

expression. And there is every reason for democratic discourse as the basis of science:

if there are barriers to expression, if certain styles of work are demonised or

disdained, then there is no open society. Sterility, banality, orthodoxy – this is what

ensues when debate is stifled in the name of order. In political science it is called

totalitarianism. It is what happens when power overwhelms imagination – especially

the imagination of those out with of power, whose imagination could rewrite history.

One of the advantages of Foucault’s approach to power is that it “integrates rationality

and power, knowledge and power, reason and power, truth and power” (Flyvbjerg,

2001: 124). Power is the axis. Power frees imagination and power writes history

(Foucault, 1977). Without power, poverty, disease, and despair is what faces the

human condition. Only power – the capacity to make a difference to existing

conditions of existence in ways that are significant for the actors concerned – can free

imagination. Otherwise it rots in the gutters of history. Power writes history. That the

histories we inherit have overwhelmingly been those of the dominant actors strutting

their stuff in the various stages of the human comedy – the men, the whites, the

colonialists, the rich, the powerful, the educated – is hardly surprising. Life on the

37
margins, in service, bondage or slavery of one kind or another, rarely affords room,

time, or tools for intense reflection. As Foucault (1977: 27) suggests, “we should

abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only

where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside

its injunctions, its demands and its interests.” On the contrary, as he goes on to

suggest, power produces knowledge, they are directly implicated in each other.

Reflexivity is essential to understanding this relation, suggests Foucault. We need to

be able to see how power actually functions in context. Elsewhere, in the context of a

discussion of the significance of reflexivity, a general and guiding theoretical point

has been elaborated:

Those theoretical positions able to account, reflexively, for their own theorizing, as
well as whatever it is that they are theorizing about, will be clearest about their own
identity, and the extent to which it is partial or formed in dialogue with other
positions. The recognition of the ‘other’ is crucial: self-regarding behaviour in the
absence of the recognition of the and by others is of no value in itself. On these
criteria it is not the alleged ‘disinterestedness’ of a position that makes it worthwhile,
but the degree of reflexivity that it exhibits in relation to the conditions of its own
existence. Severing the conversational elements that nurtured the theory in the first
place and which link it t practice makes it harder to attain this reflexivity. Thus we
argue for the grounding of theoretical claims in local and specific circumstances
rather than their radical and rapid translation out of them. In an organizational world
that is part of the social, which is inscribed with the materiality of words, and the
indeterminacy of meaning, such conversational stretch is essential. Otherwise the
paradigm closes, conversational practice becomes monologue, and reflexivity
declines accordingly (Clegg and Hardy, 1996: 701).

Reflexive analysis is never innocent of context – that is its beauty and strength. It

situates itself on the boundaries between the seemingly possible and the impossible

with the desire to shift these boundaries. Such a position is the ideal place from which

to think differently in order to act differently, as Flyvbjerg (2001: 127) puts it.

It is from such a position that one is best able to use power in the service of

imagination and the making of history.

38
Towards a conclusion

We have concentrated on the difference between modern and postmodern – whatever

these terms may mean, they only get (in)formed and shaped by their opposite.

Whatever nowadays is fashionably called postmodernism was always at the very heart

of modernism. Thus, with Lyotard we can understand postmodernism as “modernism

in a nascent state” (Lyotard 1992), a constant movement back to the very underlying

preconditions of modern thought, as in Derrida’s (1976) analyses of Rousseau or

Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical projects (Foucault, 1971; 1977), or indeed,

our own reference to Caravaggio and Machiavelli.

Modernism could thus be described as business that constantly transgresses its

boundaries – that is what Marx found fascinating with capitalism – its ability to make

everything solid melt into air. The urge for growth, for transgression, for incessant

questioning of established order(s), for violating existing rules and deferring the

boundaries: this is the interplay between modernism and postmodernism – a shifting

movement between apparently stable categories. Another word for this interplay is

reflexivity: the questioning of the taken for granted, of the established in order to see,

think and finally act differently.

We know where the taken for grantedness of management came from – it was a

triumph of American engineering, especially but not singularly in Taylor. Taylor’s

(1911) relentless cataloguing and reforming of the minutiae of everyday work started

management and organization theory on its path of analysing and ordering

organization. From this beginning management theorists attempted to produce

knowledge about organization as a phenomenon. With the so-called postmodern turn

39
in organization theory, these questions have been folded back upon themselves.

Postmodernism is driven by the insight that our understanding and our knowledge are

organized in a certain way, and that a change in the organization of our theories

changes our ways of world-making, and thus the reality we care to see (Jeffcutt

1993).9 Hugh Willmott called this process “reflexivization” (1998: 217), which

circumscribes the “turning back of organization theory upon itself” (Chia 1996: 7).

Strategically, what is created is as often or not, a textual reflexivity, addressing “the

logical and rhetorical strategies deployed in the production of organizational texts and

their consequent effects on our understanding of organization . . . which enable certain

theories of organization to gain credibility within particular research communities"

(Chia 1996: vii). Cooper also shares a similar point of view:

It is in this sense that the statements of that discourse which we call ‘organization
theory’ are supplementary, for they present the ‘organization of organization’, that is
to say, that as texts on organization they are themselves ‘organized’ according to
certain normalized criteria (often called scientific and/or academic) so that it
becomes impossible to disentangle the content of organization studies from the
theory or methodology that frames it (Cooper, 1990: 196).

Postmodern organization theory, rather than generate “analyses of organization that

assume its objects to exist 'out there', waiting to be captured by the tools of the social

scientist” (Willmott, 1998: 214), seeks reflexive understanding of the ways in which

the analysis of organization depends on the organization of analysis. This

reflexivization marks the point at which on our thinking constantly oscillates between

two poles: on the one hand the modern attempt to understand, think, theorize and

manage organizations and on the other hand the postmodern effort to question the

organization, its preconditions, the hidden assumptions of our understandings,

thoughts, theories and management practices. In other terms, we observe a huge

9
“It becomes a question of analysing, let us say, the production of organization rather than the organization of
production” (Burrell and Cooper, 1988: 106).

40
feedback process, which Nietzsche described as nihilism. In previous centuries it

made sense for this to resistance to the will to truth, the demanding urge for truth, to

be against organized Catholicism – viz. the Reformation – because it was the Catholic

Church which most terribly and markedly constituted our souls so that it could impose

itself on that which it had created, most dramatically by inquisition, more mundanely

through confession. That is why Caravaggio and Machiavelli – as prototypical

modernists – were already postmodern before they were even modern, before there

even was modernity. But it is not Spiritual Power that we need to resist today so

much as its other, refracted darkly through the lenses of Luther and Calvin. Modern

rationality, the tyranny of the means rather than the tyranny of ends, is what holds us

in its thrall today.

That reflexivity whose origins we chose to find in Caravaggio and Machiavelli, over

hundreds of years, has started to be directed towards itself as it questions the will to

truth: what is the truth of our will to truth? What is the driving force behind our

obsession to speak the truth? The will to truth becomes self-reflexive, it self-critically

questions its own origin with the means through which it was developed. The result is

well known: behind the will the truth, there is, and has always been, the will to power

(Nietzsche, 1968; Foucault 1977). And that is why postmodernism is turned now, not

just to spiritual power but also the material and temporal power of modern

organizations and what passes for their rationality. And that is why resistance must

start with the texts because this is where that ‘reason’ is reproduced.

To be ‘post’ modern in management and organization theory today is to oppose and

work outside of the prevailing baroque orthodoxy, at the margins and to try and see

41
things not through the dominant codes of representation which, like all such codes,

can only become stylistics devices – but to see things freshly, with a new eye, just like

Caravaggio and Machiavelli, and thus to see a new ‘reality’ by reflexively questioning

everything that makes that dominant way of seeing possible (Blum, 1974). As

Alvesson (this collection) suggests, acute ethnographies, the tool of the

anthropologist, are one way to achieve this; Foucault suggests that, perhaps, one

cannot avoid philosophy in undertaking such an enterprise.

The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions,
one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is
philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the
changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise,
to do something else, to become other than what one is – that, too, is philosophy
(Foucault, 1990: 328).

The subversive, deconstructive movement is immanent and inherent to the modernist

project. It took over 400 years for Hobbes’ clockwork to be dismantled by Foucault

(while drawing inspiration from Machiavelli’s earlier work). Postmodernist

questioning needs neither to critique from the outside nor find any other transcendent

causes or reasons for its practice. Rather, the modernist project evokes its own

critique, it inescapably gives rise to the very forces that both built the modernist

project and, at certain point of its development (not to say “progress”), may

undermine and reconstruct it.

Kafka (1970) once said that our business today, instead of building the tower of

Babel, is to “dig the shaft of Babel” – to critically examine where we are standing,

from where we would build. In fact, Foucault defined his project as “digging

underneath our feet – that characterizes contemporary thinking”. Or, as Nietzsche said

in his ‘Daybreak”, we are all moles. Such constant and critical questioning delineates

not so much a search for answers but rather the generation of more questions,

42
uncertainties, narratives that generate questions. With Law (1994: 249), we agree

“there is no organization outside the uncertain process by which it chronically

produces itself. And, furthermore, that there is no possibility of a final account of the

organization, a grand narrative that would order or tell of the character of the

organization." Outside of these stories, knowledge rarely develops evenly and

smoothly but thrives on “the edge of intellectual anarchism" (Knights and Morgan

1994: 133; italics added). This is the edge we touched on earlier – the edge where

Machiavelli and Caravaggio were standing, transgressing the taken for granted in

order to act and think differently. No matter whether we call his process postmodern

or not – it is the constant companion of our Western history, and, like a shadow, it

follows us, even as the apparently stable melts into air.

Foucault wrote about the function of diagnosis and critique of nature, saying

[I]t does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead – by
following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why and how that-
which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always
be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space
of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible
transformation. … it is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making
it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is. . … What
reason perceives as its necessity, or rather, what different forms of rationality offer as
their necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to have history, and the network
of contingencies from which it emerges can be trace back. Which is not to say,
however, that these forms of rationality were irrational. It means that they reside on a
base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been
made, they can be unmade, as long as we know it was that they were made
(Foucault, 1990: 36 and 37)

Why should organization theory be an appropriate sphere from which to conduct

some interrogation today? Why should postmodernism migrate from art and

architecture to this far shore of technical rationality? The answer is simple. If we

want to challenge the nature of everyday rationality today then we have to challenge

organizations that appeal to nature to justify their practices: their centralization, their

43
hierarchy, their disciplinary practices. Installed as the ontological necessity of a

science of nature which takes as its object the functionalised necessity of modern

organizations, and then reproduces these, endlessly, in its writings, analysis, recipes,

and the recriminations of those of a less naturalist bent, organization theorists of this

ilk serve a modern inquisition, a modern confessional, where the human will to

achieve creativity is disciplined, contained, and occasionally excommunicated, and

the “people who go into the workforce . . . are stifled by hierarchical institutions that

prevent people from reaching their potential” as Coutts (2002: 37) put it.

Today, while the churches are virtually empty, despite those many millions

imprisoned in their beliefs since birth by the choices of their fathers and mothers,

everyday mundane organizations, in which we are obliged to make a living, have

taken on their role. In a secular age spiritual power passes to the new churches of

commerce. These continue to exist and be reproduced as those modern organizations,

whose infinite metaphorical variety, as iron cages, as psychic prisons, as penitentiaries

of discipline and domination, as soft machines of consenting control, is easily

rendered into the stuff of normal organization theory and its contingencies

(Donaldson, 1999). Against these normalising tendencies, we seek vitality in

ethnographies that sabotage the normalised and panglossian view that the

organizations we get are the best we could have because they are the only way to be

and that anything else would be an offence against nature (Clegg, 1997). Thus,

postmodernism is, finally, at this moment, an offence against (this [mis]conception of)

nature. Equally, it stands opposed to the outer limits of constructivism. Some see this

as nihilism – a tearing down for no reason.

44
The alleged nihilism of postmodern organization theory directly descends from

Nietzsche’s diagnosis. It is experienced as a weakening of the field: the postmodern

“stream of work takes at its subject the activities of organizational scholars, rather

than organizations” (McKinlay and Mone 1998: 185). As they go on to say “the

phenomenon being studied dominates the horizon more completely, so why waste

time focusing on anything else?” The plea is made in the context of a text that

expresses its admiration for the real that it summons into being much as Hobbes

regarded clockwork – less an artful invention and more an overwhelming facticity for

thinking the world – or as Boyle regarded his air pump – a real, if occasionally

fallible, machinery, for authorizing nature’s message.

Finally, it is such ‘facticity’ that we believe the post modern can illuminate.

45
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