Essai: on paragrammatic uses of organizational theory — a provocation

Organization Studies, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Yiannis Gabriel

In MBAs, the spirit of consumerism reigns supreme. The student is a customer and there is scarcely any pretence to the contrary (Sturdy and Gabriel 2000). Many of the theories to which s/he is exposed extol customer service, quality and consumer sovereignty (Du Gay and Salaman 1992; Knights and Morgan 1993; Gabriel and Lang 1995; Sturdy 1998), and s/he expects nothing less from those that deliver the service purchased. Thus, consumerism has forged a holy alliance of the manager and the consumer, an alliance that is now dominating culture, economy and politics, forged at the expense of the worker or employee. The manager has emerged as a cultural archetype in an age when the work ethic has been dislodged by a consumer ethic as the basis of each individual's moral and social outlook (Grey 1999). If Henry Ford was the manager who epitomized mass production, Walt Disney has posthumously become the emblematic figure of our time -- the manager re-defined from agent of control to orchestrator of mass fantasies. The manager is lionized as indeed is the consumer. An 'enterprise culture', dynamic, self-confident, attractive and mostly spurious, has become a dominant feature of our cultural landscapes.

Thus, the cult of the consumer has now become a major feature of the ideological and political order of the business enterprise, legitimating, justifying and supporting a wide range of management practices that would be regarded as intolerable had it not been for the belief that the customer is sovereign (Du Gay and Salaman 1992; Sturdy 1998; Gabriel 1999; Long 1999). Consumption has become an ever more important sphere of human existence, one in which meanings and identities are forged and communicated, in which fantasies and desires are acted out, and in which group allegiances and antagonisms are fashioned. As Bauman (1988, 1992, 1998) has forcibly argued, in postmodernity, a consumer ethic dislodges the work ethic of past times, acting as the organizing principle for individual perceptions of self and other, restoring pleasure as the key objective of action and casting the freedom of the capitalist marketplace as the absolute guarantee of individual freedom, fulfilment and autonomy.

If organizational theories can be seen essentially through the prism of consumption, it may be that they too find applications in practice in ways not unlike those of other commodities. Consumers, ranging from students and participants in management-training workshops to readers of management manuals, conference participants and viewers of training videos, to academics, researchers and teachers who casually glance at each other's published work or listen to each other's presentations, they all appropriate and make use of theories in their day-to-day practice. They make use of them in a myriad of different ways, yet in ways which, in essence, are similar to the uses they make of other commodities, such as motor cars, blue-jeans, books and television shows. The use of the concept of consumption to describe the dissemination and utilization of organizational theories does not contradict the view of scholars constituting communities of practice (Brown and Duguid 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991; Gherardi et al. 1998), since consumers too can be thought of as communities of practice, in as much as they share the same tastes, lifestyles and aesthetics (Bourdieu 1984; Gabriel and Lang 1995). In this sense, communities of practice are not dissimilar 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1983) or what Maffesoli (1995) describes as neo-tribes, using broadly similar theories, attributing broadly similar meanings to them, sharing totemic loves and hates and broadly recognizing themselves as communities.