Abstract
Introduction
There will have been a time when ‘Knights and Willmott’ require no introduction, at least for that introduction which serves to respond and do justice to their work in organization. Our introduction is only going to work to the extent to which this will have been read (at least) more than once: there will have been a time. Read slowly, read quickly, there will have been a time when contemporary organization theory makes sense. We are, perhaps, going to have to learn to read differently in this wake that is coming after ‘Knights and Willmott’ – on the shores of contemporary organization theory. For now, we must remain with preliminaries.
1. Con-temporary: meaning, with the times. 2. Organ-ization: a ceaseless ex-static activity bordering reason and absurdity in a space(ing) that beats to the time of a heart rate recovered from seizure and attack. 3. Theory: of all these components theory offers some reassurance and orientation; it seems to be the most preliminary in the work of Knights and Willmott. It is what strikes the casual reader first. Their writings seem to demand an exercise of Herculean scholarship simply to surmount the preparatory building blocks that form the constituent parts of what is synthesized as ‘Theory’ in their mature studies of organization, management, and work. It still remains for us to ask, however, ‘what’ is ‘their theory’, or, what theoretical contribution do they make?
This will be our test: introductions, responsibilities, justice. In organization and out of time, we will have risen and then fallen to this challenge to introduce and comprehend the importance of ‘Knights and Willmott’ in organization theory. For, you see, there really is no theory in ‘Knights and Willmott’. It is simply a double-barrel nomenclature, and as this chapter makes clear there is even no such thing as ‘Knights and Willmott’. To the extent that we can realize this insight we will have served the ethical demand and implication of their writings and in so doing helped introduce their work to the challenges of contemporary organization theory. On the other hand, there will be some who argue that there has been nothing but theory; at least, nothing much has changed for the managers and workers they have been studying over the past 30 years or so. In this sense their writing is in the realm of pure theory – abstract, difficult, and discursively rarefied, working to promote ideas, possibilities, and dreams for its readers, rather than to stimulate any practical action in the mundane world of capital and wage-labour.
In another sense, however, there is no theorizing (see O'Doherty, 2004). There is selection, derivation, presentation, and application of continental philosophy and critical theory, but there is, strictly speaking, no theorizing. God or Truth, as Theo, does not arise out of a reading of their work and nor do Knights and Willmott put the light of Theo to work in their writing (see Derrida, 1982a). Instead, there is a darkening that recalls the writings of Maurice Blanchot (1955), the dark ‘knights’, if you will, against which a certain will of the word cries out, that ‘mot’ (derived from the Latin mutt(um), meaning utterance) which the Webster's defines as ‘a pithy or witty remark’. Knights and Willmott. We are here beginning to exercise organization in the realm of catachrestic theory/invention through what Derrida calls the work of ‘signature effects’, and it is all we are going to be left with in/after introducing Knights and Willmott. There will have been a time when nothing so profound as the superficial is once again restored to the practice of organization/theory. It is a con-trick, a temporary one at that: call it con-temporary theory.
Agency, subjectivity, reflexivity
It would be folly to attempt to identify seminal papers that lay out the groundwork or theoretical project of Knights and Willmott. Not only is the question of a constant and consistent project highly dubious in the context of how we know knowledge develops (Foucault, 1972, 1980; Feyarabend, 1975; see also Latour, 1987), and particularly given the commitment to this implicit in their own research and pedagogy (see Knights and Willmott, 1999), but the sheer volume of their publication itself would condemn any effort at summary and synthesis to a partial and contingent impression. The idea that there is a deliberate or purposeful, unified project guiding and informing the work of Knights and Willmott would certainly be an irony given the efforts they have made to reflexively question and circumscribe the simplistic models of agency and causality in social relations.
Bearing this is mind we might, nonetheless, usefully recover the traces of this apprenticeship in four joint authored papers published in the 1980s: their 1982 and 1989 papers published in Sociology; the Praxis International essay on the work of Erich Fromm and the problem of freedom; and their Sociological Review paper of 1985, which addressed the question of ‘power and identity in theory and practice’. Knights and Willmott are, for many of their readers, associated with a form of theory in organization studies that emphasises the ‘subjective’ side of organization – that dimension of organization where social agents are busy interpreting, practically working, and reproducing the processes and content of organizational life. They will also be identified as ‘radical humanists’ in Burrell and Morgan's 1979 schema. In other words they interpret organization as a socially constructed and maintained dynamo of conflict and struggle that tends towards radical change, composing forces that periodically manifest as violent disruption in social relations. Their research is sensitive to the play of power and inequality in work organizations, forces that generate tension and conflict as inherent and chronic features of economic competition and capitalist work organization. This routine production of inequality finds expression across class, gender, age, racial and ethnic divisions. Indeed the capitalist mode of production tends to provide opportunities for those with inherited power and resource at the expense of those who find themselves with little economic or political capital. It rewards certain values and attributes at the expense of others and can be seen, therefore, as a mode of discipline that reduces the potentiality and richness of its ‘human’ labourers to a narrow and restricted set of qualities and skills. Creating further disparity out of inequality and inheritance, capitalist forms of economic competition are unfair and injust stoking up frustration and discontent amongst individuals and collectives who look towards emancipation and radical change as solutions to their problems.
The groundwork for this orientation to organization is prepared in these four papers under consideration where the key analytical and theoretical contribution made by Knights and Willmott is in the treatment they provide of how control and order is secured through an organizing of social relations characterized by such unfairness and inequality. Their explanation hinges on a radical and innovative reworking of the concept of ‘agency’ deployed in sociology and applied sociological studies of work and organization. Underpinning all four papers is the basic insight that human nature cannot be satisfactorily reduced to a biological or social determination. The predominant understanding in organization behaviour is one that still believes that individual and group action can be explained by inherent, mechanistic motivations. Identity, when it is considered at all, is assumed to remain fixed and enduring over time. As an explanatory variable it is predictable and determinate, and its isolation in categories or types is pursued in an effort to generate greater precision for the purposes of managerial prediction and control. Identity, itself, is often explained by relatively simple genetic and filiative heredity, or in more sophisticated sociopsychological analyses as a determinate outcome of some combination of nature and nurture. The influence of identity on behaviour at work is similarly delineated and defined in ways that assume it can be rendered consistent and predictable (see Huczynksi and Buchanan, 2001: 141–143).
Knights and Willmott help us to understand that whilst there is always a degree of determination, limit, and restriction, identity is more fluid and unstable, a medium and outcome of wider political-economic and social forces and deep ‘interior’ existential processes. Identity does not exist as some deterministic fait-accompli, but has to be actively worked at, created, and maintained by knowing, self-conscious social agents. For Knights and Willmott, agents are neither structurally determined nor abstract from the constraint of historically contingent patterns of social relations in an idealistic or voluntaristic realm of freedom and choice. To avoid this dualism of subject and agent Knights and Willmott tend to mobilise the term ‘subject’ and thereby index and reference a tradition of thinking in continental philosophy that helps students of organization work towards a delimitation of sociological dualisms. The ‘subject’ can easily be re-inscribed back into a dualism with a putative object, and, moreover, interpreted in ways that reify identity work. Many seeking to accommodate and incorporate the work of Knights and Willmott have, unfortunately, done precisely this, particularly where identity and its preoccupations are seen to form part of the pragmatic, rational and cognitive exercise of effort-reward bargaining (see Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 327–358; Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Thompson and McHugh, 2002: 334–354).
To delimit and circumvent the dualistic restrictions of sociological thinking Knights and Willmott develop an existential appreciation of identity and its struggles drawing on the work of Fromm, Freire, and Laing – whose roots go back to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. In their writings our relationship to the world is understood to be one that is problematic but ‘open’. Through exploration and interaction with others we are able to form and produce relatively stable but still essentially contingent meaning and identity out of this openness. In a basic ethnomethodology-inspired move we are made aware that as researchers of organization we share this routine practice with those members of organization we are studying. This insight also forms part of their challenge to the persistence of dualistic separation in management and organization studies, in this case between the object and subject in research. Their writings help us to see the ubiquity of these existential dimensions of being and to find ways of exploring those questions and struggles that form around this condition of being-in-the-world.
Although there is this basic openness to Being, Knights and Willmott develop their theoretical writings to show how man routinely flees from this openness because of what Fromm (1942) calls a ‘fear of freedom’. The experience of openness arises in part because of the unique and dual relation between our species-being and nature: we are both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of nature, partly its product, but also its producer. Nature can be shaped and adapted to serve human needs, it is not simply a brute external, necessary fact to which we are subordinated and habituated by instinct and routine. At the same time, this separation from nature and the lack of instinctual programming – that makes us more like an architect than a bee, provokes massive insecurity. We find ourselves thrown into this world without having been asked, and, being of nature, we can only ever be a transient phenomenon, ultimately subject to decay and death for which we can do nothing (Novak, 1970). In the wider scheme of things we remain a rather insignificant and irrelevant feature of the universe confronted as we are by its impenetrable and infinite expanse. Given this contingency and irrelevance we inevitably encounter a whole series of questions: what should we do with our freedom? How can meaning be found so that we might create purpose for our existence? To what ends do our productive efforts in labour serve?
Compounding this basic existential anxiety are those insecurities that arise from the condition of wage-labour under a capitalist mode of production whose contradictions and dynamics amplify the individualization and isolation of self-consciousness. Willmott (1990: 339) was later to summarize this analytical focus as an effort to ‘appreciate the intertwining and interdependence of the ‘historical’ and ‘existential’ dimensions of the dialectics of praxis’. Drawing on Fromm (1978), Knights and Willmott show how man is constituted historically: our goals, our values and ambitions, and, by extension, even our sense of what is a spontaneous, authentic, and free expression of self, are all historically relative. Human potentiality is protean and elastic and responds to historical conditions of possibility. The forces of capitalist production release man from his feudal fetters and mobilize tremendous energies, but in so doing remove the collective security and stability provided by the more inclusive and overarching pattern of social regulation that functioned in what E.P. Thompson (1968) called the ‘moral economy’, the premodern agricultural economy based on custom and practice. Here we encounter those familiar sociological motifs of suicide, anomie, and disenchantment, in the shift from the Gemeinschaft to the Gesellschaft of modernity (see also ten Bos, and Kaulingfreks, in this volume). At the risk of cliché, capital dissolves all that is solid into air. As subjects we are shaped and framed out of these historical discontinuities through a basic ‘social character structure’, which is an intermedium or historical blending of the socio-economic structure and the individual psychical structure (Willmott and Knights, 1982: 206).
In opening up this interjacent and dialectical space, Knights and Willmott begin to extricate their analysis from the dangers of an over-rigid, mechanistic dualism. Both the ‘socio-economic structure’ and the ‘individual psychical structure’ are in danger of producing artificial but reified heuristics, essentialist and timeless categories that purport to represent some inner essence of economy or the individual. Their reading of Marx, in combination with the reading of Fromm developed here, helps us to see the processual and dynamic force of capital in which structure and agency are inter-dependent and mutually imbricated forming something that Giddens (1976) would call the forces of ‘structuration’. There is no simple cause-effect in operation here; the agent is not the product of social conditions and nor are social conditions the solipsistic product of individuals or a collective distillation of social relations in action. As a medium and outcome of existential and historical conditions the social character structure is what motivates our every activity in the world. It provides that sense of self which appears to us to be the most intimate and inner core of our being, to which we seek always to return and by which we inevitably become captivated. Indeed it conditions and makes available our very reality and helps explain the virulence of ego and egoism as motivating forces in social action and behaviour. This is one of the basic but paradoxical ‘foundations’ in the development of a non-essentialist theorization of subjectivity and identity.
The key to understanding how Knights and Willmott develop their conception of subjectivity and identity, which prepares and leads onto their reflexive critique of theoretical reification, is to be found in this critique of the ego. Unlike Freud, both Knights and Willmott commit to the idea that there is something beyond the compromises achieved by ego strengthening through which frustration and disappointment will inevitably persist as normal features of modern life (Willmott and Knights, 1982: 217). The ego is understood to arise in response to the primordial awareness, or ‘shock’ of being, to which the most primitive reaction is an understanding of disjunction and separation between (what becomes split and stabilized into) ‘self’ and ‘others’. ‘Other’ is nature and fellow beings against which one recoils as they are made objects projected out into the horizon of perception – the first sensorial faculty that reinforces this distance and separation. One literally stands up and takes one's measure against this objectification and in so doing makes one-self subject, opening up the space of subjectivity (see Heidegger, 1977). Object and subject, then, mutually arise. The ego compensates and consolidates for this sense of isolation and abandonment by promoting self-consciousness in ways that compel man continually to seek gratification and reassurance that its being-subject is solid, real, and sustainable. Paradoxically, when individuals remain in the service of the ego through efforts to appease its anxiety/desire for confirmation, either by seeking reassurance from others, or domesticating the ‘outside’ (nature, earth, the chthonic), insecurity is increasingly aggravated by intimations or threats that the outside is not fully submissive or subdued. As individuals erect structures of order, routine, and control, and minister to the ego's appetite for a sense of solidity and durability, the slightest threat to this elaborate exo-skeletal defence is experienced as potentially catastrophic. The greater one's dependence on predictability and order, the more anxiety-raising becomes potential disturbance from the outside (Knights and Willmott, 1985: 26; 1989: 42–3, 49; Willmott, 1998). It is out of this basic existential experience that Knights and Willmott develop their four key concepts for the theoretical analysis of organization – power, inequality, insecurity and identity.
Power, identity, insecurity, inequality: beyond structuration – the outside
Power, inequality, identity and insecurity are all dialectically inter-related in their analysis (see Knights and Willmott, 1999), and are used as temporary, heuristic devices in order to invite and cultivate a greater degree of attentiveness to a wider and deeper ontology of Being characterised by process and flux. They are all media and outcome of one another. In this sense there is an effort to avoid reductive or deterministic explanation which, for Knights and Willmott, would only preserve a mechanistic framework or ‘grand narrative’ that tells us more about the insecurity and identity project of the academic writer or researcher.
The analytical move that is always made in their work is to track the contradictions and paradoxes that surface out of those basic dualisms constructed and projected by theoretical and lay-practitioner agents in social relations, dualisms that emerge in tandem with their efforts to consolidate ego. This interplay of construction, projection and ego-confirmation finds expression in organization and social relations through that interplay of power, inequality, identity and insecurity experienced by managers and employees of work organization. Organization becomes a complex web of tension and paradox mobilized by the contradictory movements of order and disorder, collection and dispersal, routinization and innovation/change. Every effort to routinize and consolidate work practices in order to express and/or secure the subject's desire for control (re)creates the conditions and the fear of its opposite – the break in routine, the re-emergence of the surprising or unforeseen, and the arrival of the new or the unknown. Driven by ego, subjects are vulnerable to the self-reinforcing paradoxes of their own ceaseless suffering: the greater one seeks to maintain and hold on to a firm identity the more acute becomes the fear and likelihood of its opposite – insecurity and confusion.
We cannot really then privilege subjectivity or identity as the analytical signature of their work, nor locate this interest in the micro-dimensions of social relations, a mistake that is often made in casual treatments of their writing. One cannot really understand identity without seeing it as media and outcome of insecurity which is heightened by capitalist competition and the inequalities it produces. Insecurity is related to power and inequality in ways that intensify the competitive desire for symbols of power and success, helping to reinforce and reproduce the workings of the ‘macro’ or political-economic systemic levels of organization. The macro is related to the micro, structure with agent (in the traditional language of sociology), existentialism with the historical, and the personal with the political. It would therefore be wrong to classify their research as an example of a form of ‘humanist’ organization theory, one that is preoccupied with agency, subjectivity or the interpretative, but which ignores the objective, the structural, and the ‘concrete reality’ of material struggle (see Edwards, 1990). This critique admits the dualism of subjectivity-objectivity or structure-agency, the transcendence or deconstruction of which is precisely the underlying motivation and target of their theoretical endeavour.
What they tend to privilege is the subjective ‘moment’ in this dialectical structuration of organization with its attendant reproduction of enduring patterns of power and inequality. We might best understand this privileging as a practical and political compromise designed to spotlight those spaces and times in organization where we can identify how structure and agent are mutually and inextricably intertwined – and, therefore, where change or intervention might be best targeted. Hence their continued interest in ‘labour process’ theory and analysis (Knights and Willmott, 1990). Organization does not pre-exist its practical accomplishment, nor does it have dynamics or laws that operate independent of the embodied practice and consciousness of subjects at work. Furthermore, power is relational and cannot be satisfactorily analysed as a ‘property’ in which it makes sense to think that some people are congenitally or structurally endowed with more power than others (Knights, 1983). Those routinely deemed to be in positions of power and autonomy are as dependent on ‘subordinates’ as subordinates are dependent upon their super-ordinates. Both are dialectically co-dependent, in contradiction and antagonism (Edwards, 1986), and both can be deemed to mutually conspire to perpetuate routines and addictions and the suffering this entails. Power is created and sustained through the on-going practical accomplishment of social actors operating inter- and intra-collectively, interacting in ways that maintain the ‘paramount’ version of social reality (see Berger and Luckmann, 1967) through which individuals are reified and pitted against one another for what is perceived to be scarce material resources.
It is vital to make these points if analysis is to avoid the mistake of reification and crude reductionism. The critique of ego clearly distinguishes their work from that of Giddens (see Knights, 1983: 56ff; Willmott, 1986; Knights and Willmott, 1985: 30–32), and in following this move we are forced to acknowledge the limitations of adopting ‘power, identity, insecurity and inequality’ as an alternative theoretical framework for organizational analysis. To understand the on-going reproduction of work organization, theoretical analyses need to appreciate how this structuration plays itself out somewhere between or outside of the conventional terms of sociological dualism. This is the ‘hidden’ and implicit logic, but nonetheless the more promising legacy of the work developed by Knights and Willmott and in its pursuit we will eventually be taken into realms of organization where ontology distorts and dissolves opening up a volatile and vertiginous ‘workspace’. Arriving at this dimension of organization we discover that the concepts of power, identity, insecurity and inequality are best understood as heuristics that adumbrate the basic processes of structuration in organization. They work by recalling and retaining the shadow of an absent-present that accompanies this analytical delineation of the ontological and operate like conceptual ladders needing to be thrown away once their steps have been mastered. This begins to take us to the root of their difference with Giddens and also most other ‘synthetic’ theoretical conceptualizations of work and organization, whether actor-network theory, Eliasian ‘figuration’ sociology (Layder, 1994: 114–124; see also Newton, 2001), or ‘morphogenesis’ (Archer, 1988).
This allows us to understand structuration as a process that is produced and reproduced through the illusions of identity and its attachments which form part of a wider meaning system and a social construction of reality. It is not so much that capital gets reproduced ‘behind the backs’ of its agents but rather that the surface of what they do perceive and value is mistakenly taken to be real. Our conventional categories of understanding and the dualisms of sociological method form one part of a complex maya of illusion, to which the scholar and the researcher are in danger of becoming similarly attached. Conceptual and theoretical apparatuses act to dim down the world of being (becoming) that is in processual flux between and outside object and subject (or structure and agent), a space of becoming for which moments of non-dualistic awareness temporarily give access and insight (see Willmott, 1994). With patience and practice, forms of research in organization can transgress the repressions and denials that exclude phenomena which do not fit within the categories and representational bias of a researcher's identity project and existential condition, a condition that is routinely sublimated as theory and methodology (O'Doherty, 2003). The awareness of the fragility and contingency of ego and identity permits some shift out of their tenacious hold as work organization and its paramount-reality spills out across our mundane categories and definitions. A certain phenomenal ‘vagrancy’ is then experienced as managers – with their retinue of everyday furnishings and artefacts, for example – seem to dissolve into a fluid flux of formation, to reappear, perhaps, as paranoid agents of capital, hirsute wild-men, or lascivious satyrs (see Burrell, 1997). Equally, working in or out of this space casts one into a highly volatile mode of being in research where organizational reality will begin to seem as if it responds to the ‘will’ of the researcher. If reality is reflexively maintained though a social construction of reality that reproduces the mediocrity of a lowest common denominator ego, then as one loses hold of ‘self’ – to drift in a region that Heidegger (1962) calls the tarrying alongside of everyday circumspective concern that is Dasein's everyday practical being-in-the-world of the ready-to-hand – we might expect that phenomena begin to fragment, split and dissolve into an unready-to-hand.
Re-embodying theory: spectral organization and metamorphosis
Interestingly, the impact of their teaching is to heighten the self-consciousness of the organization theorist, at least in the short term. The very quest for knowledge and theory is itself a reflection of a wider and deeper alienation, and in its analytical pursuit one exaggerates and soaks up some of the most extreme ‘pathologies’ of the modern condition. Driven by the potentially infinite regress that characterizes the search for the conditions of knowing and its conditions of possibility, their writing throws self back upon self, stimulating an awareness of how much of self is being projected into the putative object of study – namely management, work organization, or the labour process. In more familiar terms we know that every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. This has become a standard methodological move for many working in organization theory post Burrell and Morgan (1979). What Knights and Willmott make available for reflection is the existential dialectics of this projection.
It will be recalled that Knights and Willmott treat the aggrandisement of self-consciousness in modernity as a problematic media and outcome of the Gesellschaft. It lies at the heart of their critical impetus and explains the illusory nature of ego-self and the tenacious hold it maintains on being. It is therefore possible to suggest that theoretical work in organization analysis which draws upon Knights and Willmott, or indeed even seeks to study and explain ‘Knights and Willmott’, invites and then exaggerates the symptoms of modern alienation. Certainly if our ambition is to ‘bank’ a package of conceptual tools or to abstract and elaborate some complex and integrated theoretical architecture, we are likely to experience frustration and a certain subjugation of our capacity for praxis and organization-to-come. Worked out most fully in Willmott's (1977) doctoral thesis, this alienation – the product of which is an attachment to ego – serves to maintain a separation between self and others in ways that deny progressive and engaged ‘direct action’. The possibilities for creative organization are only made available as one comes to recognize the interdependency of social relations and the importance, and indeed inevitability (short of suicide or ‘madness’), of participation.
Knights and Willmott invite people to share this highly problematic space and in so doing make available the question whether ego-self is necessary. As long as we find ourselves still able to ask the question, of course, we have to say yes: the ego self is necessary. If part of what is ‘good’ involves connecting with people in ways that do not antagonise or confuse, then in a world, particularly the academic world, which values methodology and the ‘confession’ of the grounds for one's interpretation and analysis (see Foucault, 1981), one must learn to use existing conventions. Play the game, in other words. Hence, why irony, satire, pastiche, or cynicism, are so tempting and perhaps necessary, offering some respite of identification to navigate what Klossowski calls ‘the mute intensity of the tonality of the soul’ in confrontation with the ‘authorities of identity and reality’ (1997: xix, emphases in original). On the cusp of an hitherto un-thought and therefore inarticulable teaching, organization is all but lost as we stutter to explain … and … and … and … there (is) still organization-to-come. Organization theory, or theoretical construction and its endeavour, become little more than expediential exercises as a consequence of this experience but we have little else to explain or induct students into this realm of organization. Some might be tempted to say that they are then merely tools, an instrumental-technical practice that both Knights and Willmott have been so critical of in their analysis of management thinking and mainstream management studies. Yet, there is perhaps no contradiction here. The question is pedagogic and perhaps Socratic in nature.
In our modern period we can trace the suspicion about theory back to Nietzsche where it is seen as a form of existential displacement and sublimation based on a metaphorization of the most objectifying senses: sight and hearing. From the Greek theoria, from where we also derive the word theatre, theory is based on a viewing or seeing and connects back to the function and role of the official state ambassadors of the Greek city states, those theorists who report back from their foreign travels, who, in other words, bring back the other to the same (see O'Doherty, 2004). Theo, meaning God, also discloses the orthodox model of truth and eidos that governs theoretical initiative and which anchors discourse in the metaphysics of light, unveiling, the essential Platonic forms, the sun and revelation. Theo-rising, then, is literally the raising of a God. In its practice we participate in a certain unfolding of the physis that is, for Nietzsche, will-to-power. To see the guiding principles of our metaphysics, however, as metaphors, and if they are metaphors without a ‘proper’, or a literal referent, they are better thought as catachrestic – ‘the imposition of a sign on a sense not yet having a proper sign in the language’ (Derrida, 1982b: 270) – then theory is, at its ‘origin’, ordering and invention. It is typically, however, a quest for disembodied ordering and invention, one that is restricted and inhibited in proportion to the degree to which there is an ignorance or lack of awareness of its embodied origin.
By ignoring and abstracting from the rich and complex, shifting human sensorium, in deference to the reification of the cognitive and its dualistic logic, the ‘violence’ of its ordering is more extreme and exclusionary. Hence, the body is not allowed to ‘speak’ in theory – and it is deferred, as theory becomes a prosthetic displacement. Theory is a distillation or symptom of the body, a rationalization and form of organization or control that recoils back on our treatment of work organization understood in its wider, more empirical sense. It excludes what we might call the ‘chemical senses’, for example, offering a form of sensibility that would permit some kind of access (theory modelled on forms of thinking informed by taste, or smell; and ‘why not?’ asks Derrida, 1982b) back into the media and flux of a pre-dualistic awareness of organization. It is this space or time in/of organization (or better, the différance of space-becoming-time and time-becoming-space) in which Knights and Willmott discovered thinking begins, a ‘thinking’ that is spontaneous and open, intimately in tune with practice and compassion for suffering as it opens organization to the penumbra of disorganization. The self-concealment that reigns at the heart of disclosure, the shadow of ferment and restrained metamorphoses that is the condition of possibility and impossibility of organization and order (Cooper, 1986), arises in awareness at the same time that one realizes their inevitable complicity in the shaping and construction of organization. It is the opening from where our values and commitments are forged.
There is a tendency in Knights and Willmott, particularly in their formative groundwork to understand this space as an ontological transcendence that recovers a systemic-whole (Bateson, 1972), or an ontological fullness that places self (and) organization, subject (and) object, into a more universal cycle of birth, death and life, giving us a smooth, processual integration of parts and wholes. It is, in other words, dialectical, and what Derrida would call a ‘positive infinity’, which he mobilizes in his critique of Levinas (Derrida, 1978). Our departure, here, from Knights and Willmott, is in the attempt to uncover that space(ing) in organization that gives the condition of possibility and impossibility of the dialectic and permits the play of the ‘negative’ infinite. It is ‘here’ where we uncover the energy that gets the hermeneutic circle going. This is a more dangerous, heteroclite space, a Leibnizian space of interfolding and incompossible realities (Deleuze, 1993; chapter 5), a domain of agitated, fissile part-objects that flutter and disseminate from points of singularity in a space of molecular becoming.
Knights and Willmott, however, do encourage us to understand theory as metaphor, which is in effect a partial and evanescent objectile itself, a temporary vehicle (metaphor is literally transport, that which bears or carries translation) that invites research into the politics and praxis of organization, but which must be ultimately abandoned. In the process, self is also transformed and comes close to its own abandonment as ‘theory’ extends into and out of an expanded sensorial domain that is itself released into the wider currents of chthonic and telluric energy. We will call this the space/time of the ‘trickster’ (see Crapanzano, 1992), a space that is more spaceing than static. It is a vital and protean becoming, ex-static and out of time, a disquieting prospect for ego-centric theorists, but one through which organization theory might just find its survival and future(s). Extending, unfolding, and becoming, the elaboration of the senses forms part of our contemporary post-human transformation (see Serres, 1998), which is perhaps an urgent and inevitable task given the proliferation of new prosthetics of techno-science and the digital convergence that is threatening to make us merely ‘eyewash’ in the autopoietic loops of media networks (Kittler, 1999).
Disconnected from the arché and the controlling apparatus of presence, origin, and teleology, of Truth, signifier, and signified – that marks out what some call the ‘metaphysics of being’ (Chia, 1996) – catachrestic-theory becomes an originary production that gives licence to the idea that theory is not impoverished or at an end (contra Eagleton, 2003), nor inevitably repressive or disciplinary when rendered as a tool. The ends which theory serve become the site of contention and academic dispute. We then find some justification that theory needs to be artfully crafted and even disguised if it is going to perform as a pedagogic resource. If theory is to do its work the reader has to believe in these models and constructions. So there needs to be a degree of seduction in order to hold the tension that is the opening of learning, at least for a while. Betrayal, as we all know, forms an essential rite-of-passage in learning and apprenticeship.
Conclusion: arrival
We began this chapter by trying to exposit the difficulty of expositing the work of Knights and Willmott as there will have been a time when we lose sight of organization, theory, and even, perhaps, the very sense of contribution. If there is a legacy to organization theory it will be the bequest of this double bind: and we cannot help but to betray their work in any treatise or attempted explanation. And this gives chance (again) to organization. To find ways into their work incites a reflex that opens up and exposes self and its biography to the existential condition of being. In exploring their work readers (ad)venture themselves, to the point at which the dualisms of organization as an object of research, for a subject, dissolve into a wider, more general economy of organization. Here we not only begin to think organization is dangerous and volatile, disorganized by complex and fractious social relations at work and invested with the unpredictable energy of existential anxiety that compels ongoing management reparation to form complex cycles of order/disorder. Rather, we experience this as a more profound fragility at work in organization, one that emerges out of a ‘zero’ degree before ontology-epistemology that ignites and generates the social construction of reality. We become this phenomenon of organization, or we are returned to our inevitable participation – at least if we still want to understand organization (or if we remember to recall this objective, or still value it as an objective) – such that we can only understand organization to the extent to which we participate. There is no pure, disinterested, accurate rendition of organization. The way in which we participate, however, does become a ‘choice’, at least to a certain extent. In choosing we participate in changing the world of organization, although this choosing will condemn us to limits and compromise. We forsake understanding as a perfected, complete, or totalizing ambition, but in order to give up organization for the sake of organization (to-come). For here, their here-and-now, there is no-thing upon which to stand other than that which we invent or accept as a useful fiction.
We take leave of their writing suspended on the question of identity, that ‘identity’ which is claimed in the ‘and’ of Knights and Willmott, because there is in fact no ‘Knights and Willmott’. There will have been a time when we can ask – to what extent have they produced a theory of organization? How far is it even possible to say ‘the approach of Knights and Willmott’? Is it meaningful to seek to exposit or ‘represent’ ‘Knights and Willmott? And what kind of organization is there – or what is the degree of organization – in the authority of their joint authorship? What we are dealing with in ‘Knights and Willmott’ is our denial of the death of the author, that we still hang onto the idea that it makes sense to think (of) theory as an authored project, the product of which then takes its place amongst the pantheon of heroic theoretical inventors. Any genealogy of Knights and Willmott will clearly show that they do not exist. What we have are just the names, or ghosts, revenants of a two-fold adumbration of disappearance/appearance that comes from the limits of an existential quest that allows them to know identity is a self-defeating motor and preoccupation of those working in organization: for who could they be to know this, from where do they speak, with what author-ity or identity? It is this shared exile and différance that marks out a disjunctive tension, but it is a tension that we have discovered acts as a constitutive division, forming a generator of difference and repetition. Together and apart their writings proliferate, perhaps itself a sign of a desperate effort to flee this difference or to fill its mortal void. In this sense they trick time, they have managed to con-time … as all good theorists do – contemporary organization theory.