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Interregnum and Critical Management Studies: The possible end of meaningful work
Abstract
We are now witnessing the first generation born into liquid modernity – the millennials – for whom being primarily called on by society as consumers and experiencing the deepened significance and logic of life as a lottery (Bauman and Mauro, 2016) is natural (yet uncomfortable). The main point made is that the first ‘solid’ (sic!) generation of liquid consumers that Bauman wrote so vividly about is set to embark on adult life and enter organizations en masse as managers and workers. It is argued that the entry of the millennials further intensifies the ongoing subsidiarization process that is already taking place in organizations and means that the individualization of collective organizational problems will be even more concealed and difficult to detect. In relation to the millennials entering organizations, it is further argued that it is essential that Critical Management Studies (CMS) takes heed of the challenges that the entry of the millennials carry with them. A Baumanian framework informs us that this can only be done by avoiding nostalgia – going back-to-the-future.
... Furthermore, researchers and scholars have also argued about the role of managerial and organizational conditions of today's neoliberal academic environment (Jensen, 2018). According to the literature, neoliberal ideology has pervaded all domains of life and types of organization, and even universities have become subsumed under neoliberal principles (Ergül & Coşar, 2017). ...
... First, we unravel how and to what extent the neoliberal academic environment reduces criteria for meaningful experience and how this condition can impact doctoral students' experiences, mental health, and career achievement. We introduce a literature review on the effects of neoliberal managerial practices in academia on doctoral students (Bosanquet et al., 2020;Jensen, 2018;Herschberg et al., 2018). Second, we present the methodology and describe the results of our investigation on how a sense of void and emptiness, i.e., meaningless work, impairs doctoral students' mental health and raises their intention to quit the PhD. ...
... In the meantime, doctoral students may strive for excellence and survive from peer competition and cost reductions (Brown, 2015). They may face difficulties in sustaining their wish for a meaningful experience, i.e., meaningful work, which may lead to a complementary experience of meaningless work, which in turn is a risk factor leading to mental illness symptoms occurring independently of supportive contexts and dispositions (Jensen, 2018;Smith & Ulus, 2020;Tett & Hamilton, 2021). ...
Aim/Purpose: This paper presents a quantitative investigation of the organizational factors predicting the attrition of doctoral students’ experience of meaning and how meaningful experience and meaningless work affect doctoral students’ mental health and achievements. Background: Today’s academic environment subsumes neoliberal principles of individualism, instrumentality, and competition. Such an environment can harm doctoral students’ meaningful experience. Universities’ market-driven practices, indeed, can lower doctoral students’ motivation and affect their mental health. Methodology: In this paper, we referred to empirical knowledge to identify the ways through which today’s academia erodes doctoral students’ meaningful experiences. We hypothesized that environmental sources of meaning (e.g., coherence, significance, purpose, and belonging) become subsumed under neoliberal principles of individualism, instrumentality, and competition. Lower levels of sources of meaning directly predict the experience of meaningless work, which is linked to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and intention to quit among doctoral students. We conducted a cross-sectional study on a sample of N = 204 doctoral students who volunteered to participate by completing a survey with self-reported measures. We analyzed data collected via structural equation modelling to test the associations among the variables. Contribution: The present paper represents one an attempt attempts to investigate doctoral students’ experience as subsumed to market-driven principles of the neoliberal ideology. Findings: Results of structural equation modelling show that higher levels of anxiety and depression symptoms and intention to quit are associated with the lack of external supporting factors (i.e., PhD support), the perception of broad-based managerial practices as meaningless and instrumental, and a general sense of emptiness at work (i.e., meaningless work). Ultimately, doctoral students may strive to have a meaningful experience in today’s academic environment. The experience of meaningless work leads to the risk of mental illness symptoms and quitting intention. Recommendations for Practitioners: This study suggests to practitioners to improve doctoral students’ well-being with multilevel interventions approach as well as including academic stakeholders to have broader practical implications. Recommendation for Researchers: For researchers, it is suggested to focus on the managerial and organizational conditions of the academic environment that influence the basis of doctoral students’ experience of doing a PhD. Impact on Society: This study affords society the importance of prioritizing the academic environment by looking at the meaning in work through the intersection of meaningful experience and meaningless work for doctoral students’ mental health and achievement. Future Research: Future research can consider the role of factors contributing to doctoral students’ meaningful experience by probing doctoral programs to understand students’ mental health and achievement.
... It was also suggested in the interviews that patient associations should choose their own representants in co-production. However, such processes were usually dismissed with the argument that some patients, such as young people, are often not involved in collective associations -like what is often suggested for the individualized millennials in general (Jensen 2018). Respondents also mentioned that communication technology was used as an opportunity to co-produce. ...
Co-production between public administrators and citizens has attracted renewed interest in recent years. Co-production is predominantly perceived as something desirable and is claimed to improve service efficiency and outcome and user satisfaction, at the same time as addressing democratic ideals. Drawing from interviews with public administrators and patients in a Swedish healthcare context, this paper seeks to nuance the often overly positive notion of co-production by understanding these micro-level practices as being embedded in a macro-level societal context. Theorizing the empirical material based on three features of contemporary society – individualization, marketization, and de-politicization – we argue that co-production risks placing a burden and responsibility on individual users and creating a (welfare)market in which better-off people are recruited and benefitted. In this sense, co-production may consolidate or reinforce inequalities. Through de-politicization, political issues may appear as value-free; however, as long as market-logics prevail, the welfare system and practices of co-production will, in some respects, be impotent to address crucial societal issues. Co-production as a collective practice targeting democratic standards is called for, rather than an efficiency focus, preferably by taking the recruitment of those in the greatest need seriously – scaffolded by a revitalized public service ethos of public administrators and their organizations.
... How can we theoretically understand this? One explanation is that in our case, the neoliberal university has succeeded in subsidiarizing and therefore also individualizing collective problems (Bauman, 2017), a modern form of organization that prevents collective will and actions from happening (Jensen, 2018). With Sartre (2004Sartre ( [1960), we could say that at this neoliberal university, academics act as a serial collective. ...
The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.
To understand the concerns about how humanity, writ large, may react to lessened availability of work, it may help to explore how and why work is meaningful to people, beyond subsistence and survival. This work involves the exploration of the academic literature for how and why work is meaningful, based on issues of human identities, self-actualization, self-expression, sociality, and other aspects. This work sets a baseline against which future substitutions for human needs-meeting may be achieved beyond work in a projected future.
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Globalization is a blind spot in stakeholder theory and this undermines its explanatory power and usefulness to managers in global corporations. In this paper we build on Edward Freeman and colleagues' attempts to construct divergent stories about how to create value for the corporation and its stakeholders when developing a stakeholder theory that is more sensitive to globalization. We achieve this by highlighting two particular challenges that globalization brings to stakeholder theory. The first challenge is to acknowledge new power relations (sub-political movements, new forms of bureaucracy and hierarchy) and the second is to acknowledge new dimensions of responsibility (a political responsibility). In the paper we relate our developments of stakeholder theory to two previously published case studies.
This paper relates Zygmunt Bauman's admonitions of the 'bureaucratic mentality' to business ethics. Although I am not in agreement with everything Bauman has to say,I will argue that business ethicists, consultants and others who claim to be able to do the moral thinking for others should take Bauman's worries about the moral autonomy of people working in our organizations very seriously. As long as business ethics does not enhance this moral autonomy but instead proffers a rationalized and rule-governed ethics, it may very well undermine the moral nature of people working in organizations.
‘Europe needs immigrants’—Massimo D'Alema, currently the President of the European Foundation for Progressist Studies, states bluntly in the 10th May Le Monde 2011—in direct dispute with ‘the two most active European pyromaniacs’, Berlusconi and Sarkozy. Calculation to support that postulate could hardly be simpler: there are today 333 millions of Europeans, but with the present (and still falling) average birthrate will shrink to 242 million in the next 40 years. To fill that gap, at least 30 million newcomers will be needed—otherwise our European economy will collapse together with our cherished standard of living. ‘Immigrants are an asset, not a danger’—D'Alema concludes. And so is the process of cultural mettisage (‘hybridization’), which the influx of newcomers is bound to trigger. Mixing of cultural inspirations is the source of enrichment and an engine of creativity—for European civilization as much as for any other. All the same, there is but a thin line separating enrichment from the loss of cultural identity; to prevent the cohabitation between autochthons and allochthons from eroding cultural heritages, it needs to be based therefore on respecting the principles underlying European ‘social contract’… The point is, by both sides!
What is passed by in the most deafening, numbing/incapacitating silence, is Tim Jackson's warning in his already 2-year-old book (Prosperity without Growth) that by the end of this century ‘our children and grandchildren will face a hostile climate, depleted resources, the destruction of habitats, the decimation of species, food scarcities, mass migration and almost inevitably war’. Our debt-driven and zealously abetted/assisted/boosted by that powers-that-be consumption ‘is unsustainable ecologically, problematic socially, and unstable economically’. Another of quite a few Jackson's chilling observation—that in a social setting like ours, where the richest fifth of the world gets 74% of the annual planetary income while the poorest fifth has to settle for 2%, the common ply of justifying the devastation perpetuated by the economic growth policies by the noble need to put paid to poverty cannot but be sheer hypocrisy and offence to reason—has been almost universally ignored by the most popular (and effective) channels of information; or relegated, at best, to the pages/times known to host and accommodate voices reconciled and habituated to their plight of crying in wilderness.
In The Guardian of 23 January 2010, Jeremy Leggett follows Jackson's hints and suggests that a lasting (as different from doomed or downright suicidal) prosperity needs to be sought ‘outside the conventional trappings of affluence’ (and, let me add, outside the vicious circle of stuff-and-energy use/misuse/abuse). It has to be sought inside relationships, families, neighborhoods, communities, meanings of life, and an admittedly misty/recondite area of ‘vocations in a functional society that places value on the future’. Jackson himself opens his case with a sober admission that the questioning of economic growth is deemed to be the act of ‘lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries’, risking/fearing/expecting not without reason to be to one or all three of those categories assigned by the apostles and addicts of grow-or-perish ideology.
Recent attempts to develop an embodied understanding of ethics in organizations have tended to mobilize a Levinasian and ‘im/possible’ ethics of recognition, which separates ethics and embodiment from politics and organization. We argue that this separation is unrealistic, unsustainable, and an unhelpful starting point for an embodied ethics of organizations. Instead of rescuing and modifying the ethics of recognition, we propose an embodied ethics of organizational life through Spinoza’s affective ethics. Neither a moral rule system nor an infinite duty to recognize the other, Spinoza offers a theory of the good, powerful and joyful life by asking what bodies can do. Rather than an unrestrained, irresponsible and individualistic quest for power and freedom, this suggests that we enhance our capacities to affect and be affected by relating to a variety of different bodies. We first scrutinize recent attempts to develop an ethics of recognition and embodiment in organization studies. We then explore key concepts and central arguments of Spinozian ethics. Finally, we discuss what a Spinozian ethics means for the theory and practice of embodied ethics in organizational life.
In this paper, it is argued that sustainable development is stuck in the myth of progress, wherein instrumental rationality, trust in good prognoses and the ethics of 'here' and 'now' are unwarily followed. With this assumption at hand, an alternative view on morality is developed where a morality of fear, a categorical imperative and two axioms, are developed. The conclusion is that if a Jonasian (Jonas, 1984) ethics is approved, then it is possible to pursue real alternatives to the current myth of progress and to judge those decisions that endanger human existence, or the idea of man, as immoral.
In this article, six demoralising processes in the context of the company are identified. These processes promote a realm
of ‘being-with’, in which outcomes of human interaction are evaluated on rational grounds, and on whether or not a particular
action accorded with stipulated ethical rules. Thereby the realm of ‘being-for’, in which individuals are supported to take
increased responsibility, is marginalized. The conclusion made is that not only do the demoralizing processes systematically
produce moral distance between humans, which weakens individual spontaneous outbursts of sympathy to take increased moral
responsibility, they also promise to release individuals from their moral ambivalence by declaring organised action morally
indifferent. Organisational action is, in other words, declared as adiaphoric – beyond good and evil.
Key wordsadiaphorisation-business ethics-demoralising processes-morality
This article seeks to defend and develop a stakeholder pragmatism advanced in some of the work by Edward Freeman and colleagues. By positioning stakeholder pragmatism more in line with the democratic and ethical base in American pragmatism (as developed by William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty), the article sets forth a fallibilistic stakeholder pragmatism that seeks to be more useful to companies by expanding the ways in which value is and can be created in a contingent world. A dialogue between a defence company and peace and arbitration society is used to illustrate the main plot of this article.
Genocide has been an enduring and profoundly disturbing feature of history. Yet, scholars of organization and management have approached it in a rather limited and marginal way. In this article, the authors propose that genocide far from constituting a tragic phenomenon at the margins of contemporary society raises questions that go to the heart of organization and management studies. In particular, they argue that genocide represents a challenge for organizational theorists in two regards—first, to unlock the organizational and managerial processes that make it possible, and, second, to investigate the extent to which these processes apply to non-genocidal situations. Four particular issues are drawn out as urgently calling for further research—first, the extent to which genocide should be treated as an ‘exceptional’ event; second, the study of different types of genocide involving different forms of management, organization and violence; third, probing into the issue of whether genocide represents a failure of morality or an instance of exaggerated zeal in applying morality; and fourth, the study of the ways ‘othering’ is acted out, both at the broad level of victims and perpetrators, but also in creating a wide range of subdivisions, different degrees of victimhood and collusion, different choices and dilemmas and different modes of identity construction.
Conceptualizations of organizational control have tended to emphasize its impersonal and behavioural features with scant regard for how meaning, culture or ideology are articulated by and implicated in structural configurations of control. Mintzberg's (1983) review of control structures, for example, identifies five means of coordination, each of which is concerned principally with such configurations. Yet, the coordinating and controlling of organizing practices is hardly restricted to the design and implementation of impersonal, generally bureaucratic, mechanisms, where issues of identity are less overtly addressed.
This paper identifies four sets of textual practices that researchers in the field of organization and management theory (OMT) have used in their attempts to be reflexive. We characterize them as multi-perspective, multi-voicing, positioning and destabilizing. We show how each set of practices can help to produce reflexive research, but also how each embodies limitations and paradoxes. Finally, we consider the interplay among these sets of practices to develop ideas for new avenues for reflexive practice by OMT researchers. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008.
Neoliberalism, stemming from the musings of the Mont Pelerin Society after the Second World War, meant a model of liberalization, commodification, individualism, the privatization of social policy as well as production, and – least appreciated – the systematic dismantling of institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity. From the late 1970s onwards, it meant the painful construction of a global market system, in which the globalization era was the disembedded phase of the Global Transformation, analogous to a similar phase in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. In both cases, the disembedded phase was dominated by financial capital, generating chronic insecurities and inequalities. But whereas Polanyi was analysing the construction of national markets, the Global Transformation is about the painful construction of a global market system.
One consequence has been the emergence of a global class structure superimposed on national structures. In order to move towards a re-embedded phase, it is essential to understand the character of the class fragmentation, and to conceptualize the emerging mass class-in-the-making, the precariat. This is a controversial concept, largely because traditional Marxists dispute its class character. However, it is analytically valuable to differentiate it, since it has distinctive relations of production, relations of distribution and relations to the state. It is still a class-in-the-making rather than a class-for-itself. But it is the new dangerous class because it is a force for transformation, rejecting both labourist social democracy and neoliberalism. It has a distinctive consciousness, although it is this that holds it back from being sufficiently a class-for-itself. It is still divided, being at war with itself. However, it has moved out of its primitive rebel phase, and in the city squares around the world is setting a new progressive agenda based on its insecurities and aspirations.
This paper discusses my new book, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014), which builds on key arguments from my 2011 book which introduced the Precariat as an emerging mass class, characterized by inequality and insecurity. A Precariat Charter discusses how rights - political, civil, social and economic - have been denied to the Precariat, and the importance of redefining our social contract around notions of associational freedom, agency and the commons. The ecological imperative is also discussed - something that was only hinted at in my 2011 book but has been widely discussed in relation to the Precariat by theorists and activists alike. By taking debates about the Precariat a step further, I further examine the kind of progressive politics that might form the vision of a Good Society in which such inequality, and the instability it produces is reduced.
When Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan wrote Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis, I doubt that they, or anyone else, would have anticipated the widespread impact or resultant contestation that their four-paradigm grid would have. Many grids had appeared before in sociology and after in organizational studies, but none have gained the almost hegemonic capacity to define the alternatives in organizational analysis. In my development below, I will privilege programmatic differentiations rooted in what I will develop as a dialogic perspective. What Burrell and Morgan called “functionalist” research will thus be implicitly represented as an “other.” In doing so, both the lines of division and the arguments that extend from this can be redrawn. “Functionalist” style work can be reclaimed as legitimate in specifiable ways as reunderstood from dialogic conceptions. Nondialogic research programs will not be seen as alternative routes to truth, but as specific discourses which, if freed from their claims of universality and/or completion, could provide important moments in the larger dialogue about organizational life. The test of my suggested differentiations is not whether they provide a better map, but whether they provide an interesting way to talk about what is happening in research programs.
In this article I examine the difference between concepts of culture contained in organizational studies and those in anthropology. The twentieth-century emergence of rationalized organizations poses an unmet challenge to anthropological theory. The unique cultural consequences of the organizational form are found in the cultures of command and authority, adaptation and resistance, alienation and inclusion that are found in every organization. These separate cultures interrogate each other and draw on cultural resources outside the organization. In the final section I examine some of the mechanisms with which organizations manage the ambiguities of boundaries and differentiation. Drawing on theories of rites of passage, personhood, gift-exchange, and totemism, I describe the quotidian practices of staffing, sales, and accounting as symbolic processes for managing ambiguity, [organization, culture, theory]
The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasises an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognise, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organised around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice.
The generational properties of organization theory are an increasing topic for analysis, usually in terms of what is addressed and how it is addressed. Some writers have alerted us to the importance of those social issues that are not addressed. Combining the idea of generational scholarship with the idea of those non-issues that remain unaddressed, this paper highlights how some of the events of the Second World War, which authorities agree was a generational defining and demarcating experience, have been neglected in organization theory. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the Holocaust. Strangely, this practical experiment in organizational design and practice seems to have elided almost all interest by organization theorists, whether functionalist or critical. The paper addresses this elision and draws on the work of Goffman, Foucault and Bauman to address the very material conditions of organizational power and raise some ethical issues about the commitments of organization scholars.
Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.
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