Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking - Book Review

Organization Studies, July, 2003 by Martin Kornberger

Finally, fashion might have another, maybe even more important role in the world of management: it helps managers to cope with the demands and pressure that the world is imposing on them. In short, fashion offers a playful way of re- and deconstructing one's identity. Just imagine being a CEO: you have to live up to so many, often contradicting expectations, listening to many different groups and having many different faces. Fashion seems to be a better candidate in offering possibilities for identity construction, as ten Bos writes: 'More than rational theory does it [fashion] enable managers to become sensitive to their own roles in a turbulent and ever-changing environment which belies reason' (p.187).

The problem of this argument, however, could be seen in the oversimplified division of labour that ten Bos establishes between fashion, utopia and their role in management thinking. Put simply, management isn't the naive and straightforward embodiment of a utopian rationality, as ten Bos tends to argue. Management plays with rationality, it uses the mask of rationality (Meyer and Rowan 1977), just as a movie uses rationality to develop a coherent story -- but that does not make it an embodiment of rationality.

A second problem can be seen in the major argument of the book, that ambiguity of management is better 'captured by a fashionable outlook on management and organization than by a rational or utopian outlook' (p.187). Therein lies the main theoretical problem of ten Bos' s concept: what does it mean, 'to capture'? Is it to represent, to mirror, or to inform? When ten Bos argues that the scientific approach 'misrepresents' (p.198) managerial practice, does he mean that fashion represents it correctly? Of course, this would be an epistemological fallacy that ten Bos would not fancy; nonetheless, his argument points directly to this fallacy without noticing it.

Taking ten Bos's argument seriously, his core argument seems to dissolve itself in the end. Fashion could be subjected to the same paradoxical dilemma as deconstruction: just as deconstruction fashion is subversive, it needs a norm that it breaks, a border that it transgresses, an ideology that it undermines; but 'the minute it loses this critical role, or becomes a dominant power itself (as in so many academies), it becomes a tyrannical bore' (Jencks 1988: 18). Fashion is fun, critical and different, but as soon as it becomes a dominant power it becomes a tyrannical bore as well. And when ten Bos states 'Practitioners and theorists do not need an escape from fashion. Perhaps, they should become fashionable all the way down' (p. 201), he suggests that fashion is a better option than utopian thinking. But fashion as a mode of thinking, as a dominant power would lose all the qualities he admires. As a consequence of the critique of rationality, fashion would fade away as well.

Concluding, one could wonder, with and against ten Bos, if management's contemporary obsession with a utopian notion of order and rationalism isn't -- a fashion in itself.