Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking - Book Review

Organization Studies, July, 2003 by Martin Kornberger

Rene ten Bos: Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking

2000, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. 225 pages.

Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking is one of those rare books that combine several virtues usually noticed in the field of management and organization theory through their absence: In fact, ten Bos's book, which is published by Benjamins in a small series edited by Stewart Clegg and Alfred Kieser, is highly readable and refreshing, covering a wide range of interesting issues such as strategy, leadership and culture. Above all, it is provocative: the central metaphors that structure the book are fashion and utopia, but the author turns the normal order of these concepts upside down. In short, as ten Bos humorously shows, fashion isn't serious management's evil little sister that leads scientific scholars and grave managers astray. Rather, utopian and modem rationality is management's fallacy, and fashion its cure.

Normally we are told that fashion is bad: it is contradictory, uncontrollably changing, stylish, superficial, seductive... put briefly: it is the opposite of scientific thinking, and especially of serious management thinking -- who would dare to doubt that management is grave -- it is a serious job, far from being in any way attached to the odd notion of fashion. Common sense condemns fashion with apparently obvious sentences such as the following: 'Managers who follow fashion are endangering the organizations they work for and the gurus and consultants who seduce them to do so are merely the sinister engines of an equally sinister capitalism' (ten Bos 2000: xii). Instead of joining this mainstream argument -- or better -- prejudice, ten Bos demonstrates, powerfully and ironically, that fashion is more than a mere superficial distraction. Management fashion is problematic, as he argues provocatively, 'but these problems are not related to management fashion's fashionability, but to what is not so fashionable in management fashion. To put it as clearly as I can, management fashion is problematic because it is not fashionable enough!' (p. xii). This is more than a provocation for the sake of provocation; ten Bos has reasons, good reasons, with which to elaborate this argument in the next 206 pages, using concepts such as strategy (chapter 2), leadership (3), culture (4), Weltfremdheit and escapism (5) and the ethos of work (6). The driving force behind this sophistically prepared terrain is the critique of the dominant mode of modem thinking in general and management theory in particular, in short, its bias towards utopia. Fashion, because it is a radically opposite concept to utopia, is a powerful tool with which to challenge and critique its presumptions and prejudices.

According to ten Bos, utopia is first and foremost scientific, serious, deep and rational. It is devoted to the creation of a better world in which all the evil and misery of the contemporary world vanishes and is replaced by peace, harmony and happiness. In doing so, it subordinates the individual to the collective; it is a-historic and de-contextualizes human beings; it is total and controls individuals in detail; and violence and power are unavoidable to keep everything under control and ward off foreign influences, to name but a few of ten Bos's main points of critique. Fashion with its emphasis on contradiction, non-sense, uncontrollability, superficiality and ambivalence, is, however, a countervailing tendency to this predominantly rationalistic and utopian mode of thinking. And the iridescent world of fashion is, in fact, much closer to the world of management than is rationalism and utopianism.

Fashion is first and foremost a metaphor that stands for everything that is volatile, plural, aesthetic, superficial, stylish, playful, ugly, superficial, uncontrollable, etc. These characteristics capture nicely what managerial work is all about, and as ten Bos suggests, management theory should therefore focus on such characteristics rather than on essentials, fixed truth, in-depth analyses, causality, purity control, and all the other watchwords of the scientific realm that are attached to the utopian project (p. xiii). Fashion might help managers to become more rational, it might seduce them to 'escape from the economic bottom line' (p.1 1) -- in other words, to engage with a 'technology of foolishness' (March 1988). Fashion is a means to criticize positivistic rationality, law-like generalizations, and hard empiricism. It provides us with a more aesthetic view of organization and management which, unlike rationalism 'and science... does not mistrust the senses, it refuses to get below the surface, it ref uses to dig deeper' (p.182). Fashion is a surface phenomenon, but this doesn't mean that it is meaningless. Rather, fashion is driven by differences that really make a difference. Fashion is constantly forced to distinguish itself from the latest fashion, to make a difference; even if it is only a small, apparently meaningless difference, it needs it to become fashionable. Fashion does not cope with repetition and mimicry. It invents the new, it is sensitive to the new, recognizing and realizing the slightest difference. This is but one link between fashion and management: both are driven and obsessed by the insatiable impulse for the invention of new differences. It is, in other words, the driving force behind change and transformation. The fallacy and danger of the utopian mode of thinking lies in that it seeks a future that itself has no future, a future in which time will cease to be a relevant factor, and movement, change, and becoming remain impossible, rather like David Byrne's description of 'heaven a s a place where nothing ever happens'. One slowly begins to doubt whether utopia is really the place where one wishes to be.