When performativity fails: Implications for Critical Management Studies

Towards a performative Critical Management Studies?

Recent commentators have addressed questions like these by suggesting that CMS scholars must stop being so negative about the idea of working with managers to help bring about practical change. In their strident critique of Fournier and Grey (2000), Spicer et al. (2009) maintain that,

. . . a potential consequence of holding strong to the credo of anti-performativity is that CMS withdraws from attempts to engage with practitioners and mainstream management theorists who are at least partially concerned with issues of performativity . . . an anti-performative CMS satisfies itself with attempts to shock the mainstream out of its ideological slumber through intellectually ‘pissing in the street’. (Spicer et al., 2009: 542)

Critical scholars should instead become actively involved with everyday practitioners and engage with the language they use in an attempt to construct new realities and opportunities.

Following Spicer et al. (2009), Wickert and Schaefer (2014: 20) also implore the CMS community to have ‘greater impact on what managers actually do’. They are concerned that critical scholars fail to provide ‘knowledge for dealing with those aspects of managerial life that have been identified as problematic . . . and overlooks potential points of engagement with managers’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 5). Middle-managers in particular ought to be enlisted by CMS researchers because they are likely to be less aligned with organizational elites and potentially more sympathetic with frustrated subordinates to trigger progressive social change. For this reason too, Hartmann (2014: 626) argues the CMS community could also engage with managerial texts that are often dismissed in favour of critical theory, Marxism and feminism, in an attempt to subvert mainstream approaches and shift the discourse towards more emancipatory objectives instead. At least managerial texts provide a non-alienating ‘vocabulary to think progressively about alternatives without setting itself against the goals of organizations (i.e. it is not directly opposed to performative ends)’.

Critical and progressive performativity

To rectify the pitfalls of non-performativity, Spicer et al. (2009) posit ‘critical performativity’ as a practical alternative for CMS scholars. This model of impact can be achieved through an affirmative stance (getting close to the object of critique to reveal points of revision), an ethic of care (providing space for management’s viewpoint and collaborating with them to achieve emancipatory ends), pragmatism (being realistic about what can be achieved given structural constraints), engaging potentialities (leveraging points of possibility for changing managerial practices in an incremental rather than radical ‘revolutionary’ manner) and asserting a normative orientation (ideals for ‘good’ organizational practice).

Three implications of this approach are noteworthy. First, Spicer et al. (2009) move beyond Fournier and Grey’s (2000) Lyotardian conceptualization of performativity (i.e. input/output maximization) by drawing on other philosophical traditions that highlight how language/speech might count as social action (see Gond and Cabantous [2015] for an extended overview of this literature in the social sciences and philosophy). Austin (1963) and Butler’s (1990, 1993) notion of performative utterances (i.e. words that are also deeds) is considered especially important in this regard. Rather than functioning only as a secondary descriptor, language can also perform reality, as when a judge utters ‘I sentence you to . . .’ CMS researchers might thus create equitable organizational practices by intervening in management discourse and experimenting ‘with metaphors that might be floating around in the organization’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 547). Second, an ethic of affirmation and care implies that CMS ought to listen to management’s side of the story and engage in a ‘loving struggle’ (p. 548) with their language rather than simply criticize: ‘CMS needs to appreciate the contexts and constraints of management . . . from this follows some degree of respect and care’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 545). Third, CMS must be less ‘utopian’ in its emancipatory ambitions. Incremental and piecemeal change is more doable given the economic pressures managers confront in their daily routines and practices.

A similar set of reforms are outlined by Wickert and Schaefer (2014) in their notion of ‘progressive performativity’. The weakness of CMS for them is that it ‘provides only limited guidance on how (counterbalancing) values could be embedded into organizational practices and procedures in collaboration with, rather than in opposition to, managers’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 7, emphasis in original). They too advance a broader understanding of performativity related to language: ‘The performative element, we suggest, requires researchers to “activate” the language that managers use . . . In that way, CMS scholars may support managers to “talk into existence” new (counterbalancing) behaviours and practices’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 3). Two elements of progressive performativity follow from this proposition. First, through micro-level engagement CMS researchers can actively ally themselves with selected managers (preferably middle-managers) to raise awareness and identify alternative speech acts. Second, this may lead to reflexive conscientization, whereby scholars help create discursive spaces ‘in which managers are gently “nudged” to reflect on their actions and the organizational processes to which their actions relate . . . [it seeks to] raise the critical consciousness of managers’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 3).

This can only be credibly achieved, according to Wickert and Schaefer, if scholars put aside the classical emancipatory ideals of CMS since they discourage micro-collaborations with managers, introduce concepts that alienate practitioners and ultimately make progressive change seemingly impossible. Utopianism, in particular, according to Wickert and Schaefer, introduces ‘complex problems [that] fill people with anxiety and limit their capacity to think and act creatively’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 14). They recommend non-utopian and ‘small-win’ initiatives instead, ‘moving forward by actively working towards incremental, rather than radical transformation of unfavourable social conditions’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 9–10).

Successful and failed performativities

Critical and progressive performativity is inspired by a broader notion of performativity derived from philosophy and social theory that demonstrates how discourse not only describes reality but also shapes, moulds and sometimes determines it in the form of speech acts. The work of JL Austin and his book How to Do Things with Words (1963) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who theorizes gender/sexuality in this way, are cited as the main inspiration for this new approach to performativity. According to Austin, utterances like ‘I name this ship the Cutty Sark’ or ‘I sentence you to death’ are acts in and of themselves and therefore make reality. And for Butler (1993), gender and sexuality are neither essences nor constructions but ‘contingent outcomes of the manner in which they are performed and reiterated’ (Cochoy et al., 2010: 139). Thus, ‘performative acts are forms of authoritative speech; most performatives are statements that, in uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power’ (Butler, 1993: 225, cited in Spicer et al. 2009: 544). Spicer et al. (2009) interpret this insight to mean that ‘discourses create spaces where we are able to rework them . . . in the context of CMS, this would make performativity an attempt to actively intervene in discourses such as project management techniques, leadership, entrepreneurship’ (p. 544). Wickert and Schaefer (2014: 4) similarly draw on Austin and Butler to propose that the ‘effects of language provide opportunities to transform the prevailing organizational reality by gradually talking new practices into existence’.

Missing here, of course, are the strict precautions that both Austin and Butler highlight regarding the institutional and political circumstances necessary for rendering words into actions. Butler’s notion of performativity can be loosely described as the ability of language to not only refer to but also produce what it names. However, while language may have performative effects, Butler stresses the importance of not closing the gap between the performative and the referential. The agency of language is not the same as the agency of the subject because there are obvious conditional limitations for the speaking subject. Indeed, Butler recently (2010) lamented the immense amount of scholarship on discursive performativity that has unfortunately ignored this important point:

Let us remember that Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary performatives: the first characterize speech acts that bring about certain realities, as when judgements are pronounced by a court . . . the second characterizes those utterances from which effects follow only when certain other kinds of conditions are in place. A politician may claim that a ‘new day has arrived’ but that new day only has a chance of arriving if people take up the utterance and endeavour to make it happen. The utterance alone does not bring about the day. (Butler, 2010: 147–148)

Similarly, a middle manager charged with introducing zero-hours contracts, to continue with the example introduced earlier, achieves a successful or illocutionary speech act when she utters to an employee, ‘in the name of profit maximization your employment is now based on this new arrangement’. The words do something and carry a reality shaping authority, to the chagrin of the affected worker. Moreover, the speech also satisfies perlocutionary conditions because the utterance can only be performative on the basis of a broader institutional setting, in this case, neoliberal capitalism. But what if the manager instead declared, ‘this firm is no longer about profit-maximization but communal wellbeing and collective ownership of the means of production’? Following Butler, these words only have a chance of becoming a successful (perlocutionary) speech act if, as with the politician above, the firm’s shareholders and board of directors ‘take up the utterance and endeavour to make it happen’ (Butler, 2010: 148) because these actors shape the purpose of the institution. This could possibly happen. But realistically speaking, failure might also be likely since it would indicate a serious misreading of the perlocutionary conditions in play, not only rendering the speech act unsuccessful but also prompting shareholders to reconsider the middle-manager’s employment as an agent of their economic interests. Wickert and Schaefer (2014) are therefore entering problematic territory when they state:

Our overall proposition is that if negatively loaded language – for instance, circling around transaction cost economics . . . can lead to corresponding negatively perceived consequences, then it may equally work the other way around and create more reflexive and ethically informed managerial behavior. (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 9)

In light of Butler’s warning, transaction cost economics is (negatively) performative because of the perlocutionary support it has. Without similar supports, speech acts aiming for reflective and ethically informed practice will fail. This is why Butler argues that many speech acts are failed performatives (Butler, 1993: 16). The authority for speech to become action is contingent on the accumulation of a priori or reiterated practices. Austin is also clear on this point. Not anyone (say, the local plumber) can authoritatively state ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. There are structural preconditions that must be satisfied. Otherwise, attempts at illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts merely ‘misfire’ (Austin, 1963: 238). Moreover, for perlocutionary performativity in particular, such misfires then become the ‘rules of the game’, as Callon (2010: 165) suggests when describing how corporate capitalism constrains any meaningful action on climate change discourses.

The ‘perlocutionary bound’ Critical Management Studies researcher

We can now propose that underlying institutional and political conditions formed by past and reiterated speech acts will determine whether a CMS initiated performative utterance is illocutionary (immediately talking reality into existence), perlocutionary (creating reality on the basis of its relationship with the broader contextual setting) or a failure. This has a number of important implications when assessing the tenability of critical and progressive performativity for achieving meaningful change. Three stand out for us.

First, if CMS researchers are to gently nudge practitioners by resignifying the discourses and metaphors they use, then a certain degree of compromise will be inevitable in order for the utterance to avoid failing from the outset. Perhaps this is why Hartmann (2014: 619) suggests that the CMS community can only become performative if we ‘accept management and the corporation as legitimate starting points’. The question of compromise is important. As soon as the researcher observes the perlocutionary conditions governing the contextual situation they are intervening in (that includes managers, shareholders, the wider marketplace, etc.), it is not so much what can be said that is decisive. It is what cannot be said that worries us. One may presume that ‘big issues’ or macro-level topics concerning growing economic inequality, climate change, the managerial prerogative and so-forth would be ruled out from the start. As Callon (2010) observes in relation to climate change, there is a dividing line between market- and political-based solutions. While both have their own language, the dominance of market approaches (like carbon trading as opposed to a ban on coal-based power plants) reflects long standing and deeply rooted political systems that cannot simply be overcome by inserting the language of climate politics in managerial parlance.

But this silencing would not only apply to big issues like climate change. Certain speech restrictions would be expected at the micro-level too. For example, what could a CMS researcher legitimately broach apropos the aforementioned manager charged with introducing zero-hour contracts? Spicer et al. (2009) and Wickert and Schaefer (2014), for example, recommend we collaborate and appreciate the pressures s/he is experiencing. We have no problems with this. Unfortunately, however, this would almost certainly mean avoiding language that might question the desirability of profit-maximization, efficiency and so forth. How could it not given the context? Therefore, the emphasis that critical and progressive performativity place on anti-utopian discourse or linguistic ‘small-steps’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 552) and ‘incremental rather than radical transformation’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 9) must invariably advance a rather watered down version of CMS, which runs the risk of subordinating its mission to the institutional demands of the more powerful party.

Second, given the above observations, CMS researchers would need to construct or help others facilitate a perlocutionary environment that would allow micro-emancipatory speech acts to become meaningful deeds rather than failed performatives. We doubt they could do this alone or even with the assistance of middle managers, as the critical and progressive performativity model recommends. For sure, the suggestion that ‘(middle) managers could act as allies to critical researchers and agents of intra-organizational change’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 14, emphasis added) is conditional on these middle managers being (a) willing to defy their superiors and do things differently (presumably with encouragement from a performative-orientated CMS researcher) and (b) able to reorder the discursive environment so that, drawing on the earlier example, zero-hours contracts are deemed an unethical and unacceptable business practice. But would this middle manager really be prepared to put their job on the line after being encouraged by a junior university lecturer to ‘counterbalance their quest for efficiency’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 9)?

Realistically then, in collaborating with practitioners to help them ‘unleash their potential role as internal activists’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 3) CMS researchers would have to turn their attention to powerful governing parties who have the ability to realize meaningful change – in the zero-hours contract example, this would include shareholders, the board of directors, banking institutions who have provided loans to the firm, and senior managing directors. CMS would have to persuade these parties to do things differently. While the idea is refreshingly optimistic, we find it difficult to envisage in reality, especially concerning contentious issues such as animal rights, climate change, tax avoidance, etc. We are not sure, for example, that critical researchers are able to enter into dialogue with the managing director of a large enterprise employing exploitative contracts and ‘provide spaces in which managers are “nudged” gently to reflect upon their actions . . . [whereby] new practices can be “talked into existence”’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 14). Changes of this sort require more than a nudge and are probably beyond the power of the lone CMS researcher. Whistle blowing and direct action from external forces (e.g. governmental regulation, civil society groups, etc.) are more likely to enable such change. Moreover, the establishment of a favourable reiterative (or what Bulter [2010: 148] calls ‘ritualized’) perlocutionary context typically takes a good deal of time and resources. Do CMS scholars have them at their disposal given the institutional pressures and demands of their own work environments (i.e. the university)?

This brings us to the third worrying implication arising from the new performativity being recommended to the CMS community. If a speech act is neither illocutionary nor enjoys sympathetic perlocutionary conditions, then a major disconnect will emerge between the speaker/speech and practical organizational reality. As Butler (2010: 150) puts it:

Although the speech act conventionally works as a model for understanding performativity, the model of the speaking subject fails to provide an adequate way of understanding how performativity works. After all, there does not have to be a speaking subject or discrete act of enunciation for a discursive operation to wield its effects . . . if the analysis takes for granted that the speaking subject is the necessary grounds for performative agency . . . then the uses of performative analysis remain quite limited.

This insight is important for a number of reasons. Merely encouraging middle-managers to speak of social justice or environmental responsibility is not enough if the ancillary preconditions are not first met, as we argued above. Moreover, one might suspect that firms actively exploit this disconnect or ‘misfire’ between words and deeds so that certain utterances (e.g. ‘we are for labour rights’) become active excuses or alibis for not committing to the deed, as Callon (2010) points out in relation to inaction on climate change. This is likely in the case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns, which have been celebrated as a prime opportunity for CMS scholars to nudge corporate managers towards more progressive behaviour. However, CSR perhaps exemplifies what Butler (2010: 159) means when discussing how dominant economic institutions talk about themselves: ‘performativity not only fails, but it depends on failure’. What is espoused is not meant to become action. But Wickert and Schaefer (2014) still see a good deal of performative potential in CSR because researchers can employ its promises to convince managers to resignify their activities. With some gentle discursive nudging, managers who were once ‘antagonists of CSR may begin to identify with the language of their internal and external critics and translate it selectively into a version that they eventually apply in the form of new managerial practices’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 15). Unfortunately we are not told what these new managerial practices are or whether social and environmental welfare is actually enhanced as a result. But apparently that is not the point. Following Christensen et al. (2013), Wickert and Schaefer (2014: 10) believe that ‘even when the ambitions of becoming more socially responsible do not match managerial action, talking about these ambitions nonetheless helps articulate ideals, beliefs, values and frameworks’ that may (or may not) become performative over time.

Yet the systematic divide between CSR talk and the actual reality of business firms has consistently been noted in critical organization studies (see Banerjee, 2008, 2011b; Fleming and Jones, 2013). The central finding of the European Union’s largest ever CSR project, with a budget of € 2.6 million involving more than 5000 companies was this: ‘The aggregate CSR activities of European companies have not made a measurable positive contribution to achieving the economic, social and environmental goals of the European Union’ (CSR Impact Project, 2013). Unfortunately, this probably means the incremental ‘nudging’ of middle-managers will not be enough to counter the environmental impacts of big business. Indeed, the CSR examples that Wickert and Schaefer (2014: 3) describe as ‘transformational change’ might better be described as a performative misfire. For instance, they cite Wright and Nyberg’s (2012) study of corporate responses to climate change as evidence that managers use their influence to ‘promote a progressive agenda’. Wright and Nyberg (2012) found that the climate change agenda evoked both positive and negative emotions among sustainability managers. A variety of coping mechanisms were used to manage ensuing tensions. While the managers studied were influential in creating a ‘positive emotionology of climate change’ there was no real impact on reducing the organization’s carbon footprint: instead, the emotionality actually reinforced the business case of ‘brand health, brand strength, resource efficiency and energy efficiency’ (Wright and Nyberg, 2012: 1575). It is our contention that many corporate responses to climate change are an example of a failed performativity rather than a progressive performativity.

Activism within the business school and university

It is curious that arguments about how CMS should ‘get closer’ to managers do not extend to CMS scholars’ own institutions, namely the university. This silence about CMS’s relationship to its own institutional conditions is a significant oversight given the degradation of university employment over the last 10 years. According to Collini (2012), higher education establishments in the UK have been colonized by a ‘business analogy’ in which research and teaching careers are increasingly indexed to the functional needs of business (often defined in purposefully vague terms such as ‘impact’). In the US context, Martin (2011) observes the ‘technocratic takeover’ of universities, systematically restricting academic freedoms and generating a massive retinue of precarious instructors, leading some to re-label the university an ‘edufactory’ (see Edu-factory Collective, 2009). But resisting such technocracy is no easy task, as Parker (2014) emphasizes in his analysis of the restructuring of a European business school populated by a significant number of CMS scholars, who posed little resistance to a vastly unpopular, top-down and disempowering policy:

Given that this workplace was a university populated by responsibly autonomous professionals, and a particular group of these people were invested in these critical [i.e. CMS] traditions as well as being members of the relevant trade union, one might have assumed that this was a place in which resistance was more, not less, likely. Yet this does not seem to have been the case. (Parker, 2014: 290)

In light of these institutional conditions, there are a number of ways CMS scholars might ‘practise what they preach’ in their own institutions. For example, there has been growing discontent with ‘journal rankings’ and its restrictive influence on scholarship (see Dunne et al., 2008; Hussain, 2014; Willmott, 2011; Willmott and Mingers, 2013). Moves to counter this managerialization of academic labour include calls for open access publication platforms and ‘REF boycotts’. In addition, business schools and universities have become exploitative employers in their own right. The increased reliance on zero-hours contracts and insecure part-time employment practices among faculty, administrative support and maintenance workers is now rife (Chomsky, 2014). Would not a truly performative CMS focus on the employment context with which it is most closely connected?

Critical pedagogy

It is also interesting that the proponents of new performativity have little to say about management education as an emancipatory opportunity, especially when evoking pedagogy theorists like Freire (1970) to expound their ideas. Spicer et al. (2009) and Hartmann (2014) do not address the topic, and Wickert and Schaefer (2014) mention it only in passing towards the end of their article. However, CMS has conducted an extended debate on the role of management education (see Grey, 2002; Grey and Willmott, 2005). As Grey and Willmott (2005) observe, ‘since CMS departs from the mainstream’s scientistic conception of knowledge, it can offer a different approach to students of management . . . encouraging and enabling them to examine critically their established beliefs and practices’ (Grey and Willmott, 2005: 11). The rebuff that such knowledge is useless to the potential practitioner (e.g. Hartmann, 2014) risks belittling the aspirations of students. In an era of what appears to be endless economic crises, business students are increasingly interested in new ideas instead of those found in mainstream management tracts that are often considered ‘out of touch’ with real world business problems (Datar et al., 2010).

Is it feasible, however, to somehow imbue students with a more poignant ethical awareness of the business world, including the ‘dark side’ of managerialism? And how might this translate into appreciably altered managerial practices in the future? This is an immensely complex question, but one that must inherently remain non-performative, indeterminate and marked by the expectation of failure. As Weber (1946) presciently noted, the task of raising political awareness in the classroom cannot simply be an instrumental moment of indoctrination, whereby potentially ‘bad’ future managers are remoulded into ‘good’ future ones. Critical pedagogy instead seeks to engender spaces of intellectual openness and inquiry, demonstrating how certain management practices we take for granted are neither natural nor inevitable. It presents both negative and positive cases in a mutually informative exchange between students and instructors. For Grey (2002), this entails giving ‘voice to some of the messiness and suffering that characterizes management practices, even if this offends against the ideological missions of business schools . . . the notion of voice does not imply simply presenting students a litany of or tirade against the defects of global capitalism. Critical management education entails a shift both in what is taught and how it is taught’ (Grey, 2002: 505–506). With respect to the ‘how’ component, political questions concerning the conditions of learning (including student debt, the political economy of higher education and democratic participation) would undoubtedly be part of the pedagogical process (Ross, 2014).

For a ‘public Critical Management Studies’

We are surprised that new calls for performativity inordinately privilege managers as agents of change, rather than, say, social and environmental activists, the unemployed and precarious workforce, democratically elected union officials, etc. Rather than ‘lovingly struggle’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 548) with managers and treating them as the exclusive audience of CMS, we suggest that research ought to engage wider public forums. As we have argued, practitioners are often too enmeshed in the means-ends rationalities of their organizations to be effective change agents in the way new performativity advocates envisage. In many cases, some kind of external catalyst or pressure is required to enact reforms and progressive changes in organizations. For example, Nike did not clampdown on the use of child labour within its supply chains because its senior staff had an ethical epiphany. Instead, they reacted to public pressure, social movements and investigative research that placed the issue firmly on the political agenda among interested groups, especially consumers (Carty, 2002). Similarly, tobacco firms did not voluntarily include graphic health warnings on its packaging, which they aggressively contested. Anti-tobacco lobby groups pressured the state to act, backed by scientists with a strong concern for public health (Derthick, 2011).

We suggest that a potentially effective way to enact change in organizations is by developing a ‘public CMS’. Systematic research and its findings – which will often reveal an injustice and a possible alternative – could be disseminated to raise awareness and reflexive dialogue within the public imagination, policy makers and think tanks to enforce change upon organizations. For example, CMS might make an impact on policy issues through the use of research centres and institutes that collectively petition legislative and political power holders. This could involve entering ongoing debates (e.g. the financial crisis and banking behaviour) and interconnecting with social movements (e.g. the ‘no-dash-for-gas’ anti-fracking movement). The establishment of university-funded centres are useful in this respect because the knowledge they create is officially funded by the taxpayer. So, unlike privately financed think tanks and lobbying groups, there is, technically at least, an obligation to the voting public to make some use of this knowledge. CMS could leverage this tension between the ‘impact-obsessed’ neoliberal state and its frequently anti-public stance.

We foresee a ‘public CMS’ also engaged in awareness-raising initiatives by seeking to place important issues on the political agenda. In this respect, the broadcasting media is especially useful. As Burawoy (2005) argues, concerning what he calls ‘public sociology’ and Aronowitz (2012) the ‘public intellectual’, right-wing conservatives have long utilized the public media to prompt change (think here of Milton Friedman’s incredibly effective media roadshow in the late 1970s and early 1980s). But critics of the status quo are also acknowledging this potential. For example, in the USA, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff (2012) hosts a weekly radio programme called Economic Update, which has a large following. Of course, there is no guarantee that such public engagement will actually make a difference. Often it will not. But it may at least influence the tone of the debate and help open up new spaces for activist groups to pursue more radical alternatives.

Study and why we should not ‘down our books’

In their concluding statement concerning critical performativity, Spicer et al. (2009: 554–555) remind the reader that the concept does not mean ‘laying down our books and throwing ourselves in radical political struggle or “enlightened consultancy”’. But they do appear to be apprehensive that critical intellectuality (such as a Marxist reading of organizations) might foster an overly negative worldview. Instead, they exhort researchers to ‘shake off some of the weighty intellectual baggage that tends to make the critical project overdetermined, predictable and ungainly’ (Spicer et al., 2009: 549). In Alvesson and Spicer’s (2012) adaptation of critical performativity to leadership, they also suggest that too much critical theory casts organizations in an unhelpfully negative light. We are asked to temper that critical intellectuality so that leaders are no longer ‘associated with mainly “bad” things such as elitism, legitimation, domination and asymmetrical relations and constructions that privilege white, male, middle-class people’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012: 376). Hartmann goes further by arguing CMS should forget critical texts altogether since they ‘pay little heed to the conditions faced by practitioners or students, who either are or will be based in an organization where what might seem like normative arguments are unlikely to be accepted if isolated from instrumental concerns’ (Hartmann, 2014: 619).

In contrast, we suggest that if CMS is to make an impact, it needs to be highly committed to what ostensibly appears to be a non-performative activity; namely, a prolonged engagement with abstract, often difficult ideas and phenomenon: study. Without an informed and critical understanding of power, capitalism, gender, environmental issues, post-colonialism and other areas, when called upon to speak (by students, the media, the state, activists, etc.) we will have little ‘useful’ to say. Indeed, it is fascinating that precisely when we are being told to read airport management books rather than Foucault, economic elites are pouring substantial amounts of funding into think tanks to do just the opposite (but in the favour of the powerful): secluded, abstract and painstaking study of modern society (Medvetz, 2012).

There is nothing elitist or ivory tower-like in our recommendation, since knowledge, argumentation and conceptual sophistication is an important facet of basic everyday politics. It is imperative that we strive (even if perpetually failing) to gain a complex grasp of what is happening in the global political economy of organizations and what alternatives may be possible. Such knowledge does not come easy. It requires time, reading, revision, critical reflection, non-standard texts, debate; activities that from a technocratic perspective seem ‘useless’ and ‘irrelevant’ to real world managers. This is why today ‘the university is a kind of factory line’ (Harney and Moten, 2012) that often seeks to close down the time and resources required for study since it appears to be without direct instrumental applicability. This is exacerbated by the relentless injunction in neoliberal societies to act and do something. But as Zizek (2009: 6) points out, ‘there are some situations where the only truly “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of patient, critical analysis’.

Moreover, patient and meticulous study of this kind can sometimes have a significant impact in the ‘real world’ under propitious circumstances. For example, the French economist Thomas Piketty (2014) and colleagues spent years collating statistics and developing arguments about economic inequality in western economies. What might look like negative, abstract and irrelevant (to practitioners) knowledge has sparked a major debate on the topic of equality in the USA, the UK and elsewhere, affording Piketty access into the halls of power (e.g. the US government) to expound his views. It is hard to believe that performativity strategies of becoming ‘respectfully intimate’ with hedge-fund managers, policy makers and bankers, and softly nudging them to ‘do the right thing’ in relation to their wealth management strategies would have the kind of impact that Piketty’s book did. Similarly, Rachel Carson’s (1962) meticulous study of the devastating effects of deadly pesticides like DDT on the natural environment in the 1950s was, at the time, condemned as being irrelevant given the tremendous economic advances of the USA in agricultural production. The attention her book received was a significant factor in the creation of the environmental movement in the west, which lobbied hard to ban such pesticides. According to the champions of critical and progressive performativity, Carson should have instead ‘collaborated’ with chemical company managers, cultivating an ethic of mutual preservation and care. If that had happened, perhaps we would still be living in a world inundated with DDT.