Abstract
The Triumph of Emptiness brings to fruition over 25 years of research and writing in organization studies by an author who is perhaps among the most prominent exponents and indeed originators of critical management studies (CMS). This distinctive and influential ‘school’ of business and management studies has grown to prominence in the past quarter-century as the growth of business and management schools has swept through higher education in the UK and Europe. In part born out of debates with labour process analysis, critical management studies has, however, escaped the rather provincial and parochial preoccupations of those still wedded to labour process analysis, a school of research made up of Marxist, neo-Marxist and radical Weberians, and characterized by one protagonist in the debate, doubtless unfairly, as an ‘M6 corridor’ 1 of academics. By contrast, CMS has in recent years established a strong presence at the Academy of Management whose current chair (Paul Adler) is schooled in the foundational theories of CMS and has done much to extend its appeal in the United States.
Alvesson can make strong claims to have helped lay these foundations. His ground-breaking co-edited volume with Hugh Willmott in 1992 introduced CMS to a wide audience in business schools and beyond, showing the relevance of Frankfurt School Critical Theory to the understanding of mainstream management specialisms (accounting, marketing, strategy, HRM etc.). Making Sense of Management, also co-authored with Willmott (1996), built on this by carefully laying out the underlying key theoretical principles and inspirations of CMS. Rooted in the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas, and Marcuse et al., Alvesson and Willmott sought conversation, debate and hybridity with more contemporary and emerging currents of feminist and post-structural theory and, in their more recent edition (2012), have drawn more fully on critical race theory, and post-colonial and radical ‘green’ political theory. While post-2008 the mainstream curricula of the MBA continue to promulgate standard business models of growth, within a wider promotion of ‘business as usual’, only CMS can make credible claims to have offered a critical and alternative diagnosis of the now permanent economic crisis and state of exception. This is currently the cause of some discomfort among Deans of business schools, but in reading The Triumph of Emptiness they might achieve a better grasp of why their teaching programmes designed to assist the continued marketing of the business school as a place to train and credentialize corporate executives is dangerous and will ultimately fail socially, politically, culturally and environmentally.
The Triumph of Emptiness offers a powerful explanation of these dangers and failures, and has already attracted impressive reviews. The distinguished Cary Cooper has written that this is a ‘powerful book that makes you think and reflect about some of the key issues of our time. You couldn’t ask for more’. For someone with a background in fairly positivist research, and a former Head of School, this is a telling endorsement. George Ritzer has written that the book is ‘provocative, insightful, and highly ambitious’, and provides a powerful ‘indictment of consumption, work, and the organizations’. For Yiannis Gabriel this ‘is a book that breaks loose of the management publication ghetto and demands to be read by everyone’. Alvesson achieves this by way of an impassioned and unashamed polemic that builds on the key analytical insight that the prevailing logic of competition leads to a vicious and paradoxical, self-defeating circle of ‘zero sum games’ that encourages all manner of pretension, narcissism and what he calls ‘grandiosity’. This logic in turn promotes illusion tricks, images and ideals that further distract and impoverish individuals and their wider social relations. He devotes several chapters to a critique of consumption and its dissatisfactions before turning to the key villain in the piece, Higher Education, and particularly Business Schools, who are both deemed to be parasitic on these processes and implicated in their perpetuation. Nothing less than a wholesale, maybe revolutionary, transformation in the way we think and relate to one another is therefore required to escape this poverty.
With such insight and bravado one can only imagine the privilege it must be to teach in a department headed up by our author, where he has presumably done much to forge an alternative to the cynical, productivist and instrumental logics of orthodox management. Subsequent chapters address the rise of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations, the competition for power and influence among specialist management occupations that finds expression in the quest for professionalization and credentialization of what remain suspect and rather weak forms of knowledge and ‘expert’ practices (a further example of ‘grandiosity’ that ‘gilds the lily’). Alvesson then tackles the current fascination with a form of leadership whose images further fuel fantasies of grandiosity and ‘identity boosting’ that are, however, ultimately self-defeating (Alvesson doesn’t mention this, but it always seems to me that the Business School is missing a trick for, surely, by definition there must be a bigger market in teaching ‘followership’?). His concluding chapter brings together his material to outline the costs of grandiosity, namely the diminishment of quality, functional stupidity, and a ‘race to the bottom’.
All in all it’s a rather bleak story. And this may be its challenge, if not its weakness. How are we to persuade our undergraduates to read this? Indeed, how can we motivate our students to any form of scholarship these days? By the time they reach higher education, students have already been so shaped and disciplined by an increasingly intolerant ‘one-dimensional’ logic that we are probably wiser to consider ways of gently ‘undoing’ what it is they have amassed, rather than hit them over the head with a moral jeremiad against everything they know, and that we in the academy call ‘neo-liberal’ capitalism. Some will balk at the moral righteousness of some within Critical Management Studies, a danger anticipated by Alvesson and Willmott in their widely cited 1992 Academy of Management paper. CMS promises nothing less than ‘emancipation’ and at times assumes the moral and ethical high ground in which they, the enlightened, are truly the only ones emancipated. In this sense The Triumph of Emptiness is a classic big boy’s (or old man’s?) story offering a grand narrative of immense proportions informed by powerful theoretically derived and a priori concepts. And it thereby risks becoming reified and self-righteous, losing the reflexive and constructive quality of knowledge and the modesty and self-doubt associated with good scholarship. Alvesson is of course not unaware of this; and to coin a phrase from Nietzsche, he is not, by way of response, afraid of ironizing with a hammer. By contrast, in certain traditions of Buddhism (for which there is a strain in CMS), emptiness (Śūnyatā, via Nagarjuna in the Mahayana tradition) can be more productive and realized at a point of surrender and transition into what we can only describe within the limits of our grammatocentric metaphysics as a condition that somehow synthesizes and overcomes transcendence and immanence. These traditions also write that the finger which points is always accompanied by three fingers that point back at the accuser (try it at home, reader). No doubt the debate will rage as to whether The Triumph of Emptiness does anything more than exemplify its own titular rhetoric and irony or whether it contains the seeds of a more humble but coherent guide to self-transcendence and collective emancipation.