ReThinking management perspectives and impacts of cultural turns and beyond

A cultural turn in management and organization studies helps to highlight the ways in which many phenomena and processes of management and organizational practices and its meanings have

ReThinking

Management

Wendelin Küpers · Stephan Sonnenburg

Martin Zierold Editors

Perspectives and Impacts

of Cultural Turns and Beyond

Edited by

Andreas Müller

Stephan Sonnenburg

interpretive point of view The series intends to integrate different perspectives towards economy, culture and society Therefore, management and organizational activities are not seen as being isolated from their context, but rather as context- bound and dependent on their surrounding cultures, societies and economies Within these contexts, activities make sense through the allocation, the interpreta-tion and the negotiation of meanings Sense-making can be found in performative processes as well as the way social meaning is constructed through interactions The series seeks innovative approaches, both in formulating new research ques-tions and in developing adequate methodological research designs We welcome contributions from different interdisciplinary and collective ways of thinking and seeking knowledge which focus on the integration of “Management – Culture – Interpretation“.

Edited by

Prof Dr Andreas Müller

Prof Dr Stephan Sonnenburg

Karlsruhe, Germany

Martin Zierold

( Eds.)

ReThinking

Management

Perspectives and Impacts

of Cultural Turns and Beyond

Karlsruhe, Germany

Stephan Sonnenburg

Karlsruhe, Germany

Karlsruhe, Germany

Management – Culture – Interpretation

ISBN 978-3-658-16982-4 ISBN 978-3-658-16983-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-16983-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931559

Springer VS

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017

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Books are co-creations, and thus we would like to express our gratitude to some main contributors who made this publication possible: First, we wish to thank all the participants of the conference on ‘ReThinking Management: The Impact of Cultural Turns’ at Karlshochschule International University in 2014 for their inspiring presentations and insightful discussions In particular, we would like to thank our keynote speakers André Spicer from Cass Business School and Doris Bachmann-Medick from Gießen University It was a great honor and we really appreciate their astute contributions Second, we want to express our deepest gratitude to David Sixt for his inexhaustible and proficient support towards making the conference a success and this book possible Third, a special thank you goes to Laura Baker for her sensitive editing of the introduction Finally, we would like to say a big thank you to all the authors who helped in making

‘ReThinking Management’ possible We hope that the book will be of value to students, academics and practitioners alike

Wendelin Küpers, Stephan Sonnenburg and Martin Zierold

Editors

Introduction & Inspiration

ReThinking Management 11

Wendelin Küpers / Stephan Sonnenburg / Martin Zierold

Cultural Turns: A Matter of Management? 31

Doris Bachmann-Medick

Culture & Creativity

Management as ‘Purity Apostle’:

Markus F Peschl / Thomas Fundneider

Cultural Projects in 2030: A Performative Approach 97

Małgorzata Ćwikła

Transfer of Economic Concepts to Cultural Strategy – and Back? 115

Johan Kolsteeg

Are Artists the Better Managers? Perspectives on a Participatory

Understanding of Cultural Management 131

Siglinde Lang

Applications & Activities

The (Ante-)Narrative of G/growth in Management Consulting

as Liminal Sense-Making Strategy 151

Silke Schmidt

Graceful Degradation and the Knowledge Worker 171

Dirk Nicolas Wagner

ReThinking Studying Marketing 191

Björn Bohnenkamp

Sustainability in the Media Industries:

The Lack of Transparency and the “Sony Hack” 205

Christian Stiegler

On Belonging and Being Professional: In Pursuit of an Ethics

of Sharing in Project Teams 217

Manuela Nocker

Notes on Contributors 237

Introduction & Inspiration

Wendelin Küpers / Stephan Sonnenburg / Martin Zierold

Approaching ‘ReThinking Management’

It is time to re-think and to re-do! Our contemporary world of organizations and management; respectively, leadership as well as its socio-cultural embedment calls for a radical re-thinking (Bolden et al 2016; Birkinshaw 2012; Ladkin 2012; Mowles 2011) But what does it mean to re-think something in general, and to re-think management in particular? This introduction tries to outline some basic consideration and inspiration about the status and implication of re-thinking in relation to management, thereby to organizations and its embedding contexts Resonating with a pluralistic cultural orientation (cultural turns in sensu see Bachmann-Medick in this book), we then critically reflect problems of

a one-sided ‘culturalism’ Furthermore, we then move from a conceptual thinking to a more performative understanding of re-doing

re-‘ReThinking Management’ is the guiding principle of Karlshochschule International University and was also the motto or Leitmotif of a corresponding conference organized at this institution, from which the chapters of this book emerged Accordingly, practices of research and teaching at Karlshochschule – and at an increasing number of other places of education – are trying to move towards a re-thinking of management in terms of theory and practice

What does the re- of this re-thinking mean? Literarily, and as it is

common-ly conceived, re-thinking refers to think about something again, especialcommon-ly with a view to changing one's opinions, understandings, and doing etc There are, however, levels of meaning that go beyond the conventional that give depth to

re-thinking Next, then, what does and could this programmatic call and agenda

to re-think mean specifically? Finally, what does re-thinking management imply

for theory and practice of organizing, managing and living, individually and collectively?

To delve into these queries, we have deliberately set up this document with attention that follows from macro- to micro-questions although a certain amount

of fluidity is maintained In particular, the approach follows the inverse order of the questions above, so that the loops that make up the network of re-thinking are presented in concrete questions, queries, posits etc which also incorporates

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017

W Küpers et al (Hrsg.), ReThinking Management,

Management – Culture – Interpretation, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-16983-1_1

the nexus to the concept of re-doing The reason is to build a foundation of understanding As we have had scientific conversations to create new know-ledge, so we offer the readership perspectivity, an unfolding process, that we believe will help them to understand, arguments and evidence This movement allows access to a more comprehensive understanding by looking at words-concepts in an entirely new way and then integrating in-depth notions with the

prefix „re“ As usual in scientific work, the focus of the chapter is presented at

the end We hope that approaching the reader in a spirit of unfolding concepts, such as in a conversation with us, gives insight into why this knowledge and book are important

Seeds and roots of re-thought management

Re-thinking radically means going to the roots that is retrieving what management is doing on the whole But even deeper, we need to understand the seeds from which management is growing Seeds are important for radical re-thinking metaphorically and practically in two ways On the one hand roots grow from seeds, thus they are the underlying germ cells for them to grow; and on the other hand they mediate and lead to the unfolding and ‘growth’ of the trunks, branches, leaves and fruits of the ‘plant’ Accordingly, ideas developed by re-thinking management and the chapters of this book in particular can be interpreted as seeds In a way novel ideas and the contributions within this book are the embryo origins from where a re-thinking and a corresponding re-doing of management reach out to extract nourishment (Eikeland 2015: 381) Living seeds and roots nourish the strengths of the instituting unfolding and legitimacy

of different directions and institutional forms, work ‘subterraneously’, from below and within They need to be cultivated for developing more comprehen-sive and suitable understandings and (applicable) practices of what a re-thought management praxis mean in our times and sustainable futures to come

A critically reflexive process involves overlapping existential, related and relational concerns Correspondingly, reflexivity is a process that is affecting the whole way of lives of reflexive researchers (Cunliffe 2002; 2003; Etherington 2004) and their inter-relationships Cunliffe (2002: 28) describes reflexivity as “complexifying thinking or experience by exposing contradictions, doubts, dilemmas and im-possibilities ( )” Such reflexivity is not only an active

praxis-cognitive process, but includes also embodied and unconscious re-cursive

processes by which reflection is itself modified This reflexive orientation leads

to re-thinking a related quest and question: What are the conditions for the possibility and impossibility of a radically and effective different management

practice? We posit that the returning to practice and the performative redoing in

praxis holds a key to answer this question while at the same time summoning

how rethinking is connected to redoing To begin to answer these questions, we

explore the impact of culture and cultural turns

Cultural turns and the problem of culturalism

Cultural turns have been around for some time What started with the ‘linguistic

turn’ has itself turned into a paradigm of sorts, especially in humanities and

social sciences Accordingly, around 10 years ago, Jacobs and Spillman

described the cultural turn as "one of the most influential trends in the

humanities and social sciences in the last generation" (2005: 1) Where the

linguistic turn was drawing attention on the power of language in creating and

making sense of our social worlds, further key ‘cultural’ concepts have emerged

which are being employed to analyze texts and practices in various contexts,

such as ‘identity’, ‘memory’, ‘space’, ‘performance’ and more Doris

Bach-mann-Medick (and others) have subsumed these different-but-related concepts as

‘cultural turns’ Post-structuralist and post-modern critique of knowledge and

corresponding orientations showed how much shared discourses and culture

influence and permeate perception and enactment of realities Ever since,

attentiveness to and systematic consideration of culture (in its various theoretical

and practical conceptions) retains a distinctive feature of research undertaken,

especially in the humanities and social sciences, turning to various cultural forms

of analysis and interpretation

Existing culturalist approaches to management research

Various versions of cultural theory tend toward an ‘intellectualization’ of culture

by taking as a point of departure very specific entities: either mind or

consciousness as in the tradition of Western, post-Cartesian philosophy; or texts

and communicative action, i.e the use of symbols and language (Reckwitz 2002:

249-258) Reckwitz mapped culturalist approaches and theorizing, namely

mentalism, textualism, intersubjectivism, and compared them with practice

theory While mentalism is more cognitive-oriented and inside-focused, and

textualism highlights out-side-focus and structure, intersubjectivism is oriented

towards social processes and socio-cultural relationships as constitutive Based

on the cognitive turn, culturalist mentalism follows the (Cartesian) inwardness of

intellectualism and hyper-rationalism, mental qualities, and reflexivity, taking

human agency as a highly reflexive and formally rational enterprise of calculating or duty-obeying individuals Related to the original cultural turn,

culturalist textualism shows by contrast an anti-mentalist anti-subjectivist and

outwardness-orientation towards structure and discourse Partly connected to the

linguistic turn culturalist intersubjectivism focuses on language use, symbolic

transference of internalized meanings and rule-governed behavior They all differ in their understanding of the status and role of the body, minds, knowledge, discourse, structure/processes, and the agent

Compared to these families of culturalist theorizing and practice, the theoretical approach moves in between the inside and the outside modes, offering alternative framings (Reckwitz 2002) The latter one identifies the social

in the mind – since individuals are carried by and are carriers of practices –, but also in symbolic structures – since practices form more or less extra-subjective structures and patterns of action

Practice theorists foreground an understanding of shared knowledge as practical knowledge They are interested in concrete situations of life in which actors perform a common practice and thus create and maintain social orderliness: Situations become more significant than actors Accordingly,

“practice theory ‘decenters’ mind, texts and conversation Simultaneously, it shifts bodily movements, things, practical knowledge and routine to the center of its vocabulary” (Reckwitz 2002: 259) For ReThinking Management it is important to understand that culture is not just systemic, symbolic or linguistic, with the need for less mentalist approaches thus putting more concentration on those approaches that focus on embodied, socio-material and performative practices

A cultural turn in management and organization studies helps to highlight the ways in which many phenomena and processes of management and organizational practices and its meanings have a qualified cultural and per-formative character, rather than merely an economic one It helps to overcome the reductive understanding that phenomena and objects of economics and management are made up by ignoring or forgetting their cultural or social constitution This does not imply that management and social life in organization are reducible to a mere culturist reading of texts or text-like objects and contexts, whose signifying qualities are the only aspects that matter For example, issues

of management and its theory cannot be sufficiently studied by 'dumbing down' economic related analysis to the level of token references of a culturalizing discourse, which would make it uncritical of its object Therefore, the queries are: Does a cultural orientation dissolve or make indistinguishable the difference between culture and economy with their distinct logics and studies, and do we

need new differentials and a more difference-sensitive but integrative

under-standing between management and culture?

While we need to be critical with regard to hyperbolic claims of increased

‘culturalization’ in organizations and management, there is a need to consider

realities and possibilities for a further hybridization between culture and

management as well as other domains As a response to the sceptic critique that

culturalist accounts “claim too much or generalize too broadly” (di Maggio

1994: 27), we need concreteized exemplification and empirical case material to

substantiate what a re-thought management and organization culture (turn) mean

and imply

In any case, a turn to culture in management instigates a ‘reversal’ of

perception, by indicating the ways in which phenomena in management and

organizations are constituted, performed and enacted through cultural processes

The ‘setback forward’ refers also to the very discourses used to describe the

working of these processes and how to act upon them The courses and

discour-ses of macro- and micro-economic management and organizations are not simply

a matter of culturally embedded beliefs, values and symbols, but rather a form of

representational, operational, and technological i.e cultural practices These

practices constitute the domain within which phenomena, processes and action

of managing and organizing are (re-)formatted and (re-)framed as well as giving

new orientation and meanings As management and symbolic processes are more

than ever interlaced and ‘inter-articulated’, managerial practices and processes

are increasingly culturally affected and influenced, while culture is more and

more economically and managerially inflected (Lash and Urry 1994: 64) Along

with a ‘corporate cultism’ in relation to organizational culture (Neuberger and

Kompa, 1987) and to leadership (Tourish and Pinnington 2002), also a ‘corporate

culturism’ (Willmott 1993) needs to be analyzed and discussed critically

In both approaches, culture is used for controlling employees who have to

comply with the values of the corporate culture; thought control through uniform

definition of often imposed meanings By defining ‘autonomy’ as conformist

obedience to the core values of corporate culture, the meaning and imagined

possibility of freedom is tightly circumscribed This rhetorical usage is directly

paralleled by the objective of policing newspeak In Orwell's Oceania, 'freedom

is slavery' and 'ignorance is strength' Accordingly, in the world of corporate

culture, 'slavery is freedom' and 'strength is ignorance'

Reductive understandings and usages are in danger of an appropriation of

culture as exploitable resource and medium for vested interests and views about

culture in mainstream management theory and practice, manifesting an

instru-mentalization and ‘ideologization’ of culture as well as leading to problematic

‘cultural engineering’ All show a cultural imperialism of management

(Deutschmann 1989) Accordingly, “when we question whether or not ‘a cultural framework’ is a useful one, we need to ask more precisely, useful for whom and for what purpose?” (Smircich 1983: 354) This in turn leads to the need for re-thinking capitalism and its new absorbing spirit (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) with its ‘enrichment economy’ (Boltanski and Esquerre 2015) and neoliberal normalization (Newheiser 2016) that are appropriating and blunting critical voices, while establishing new ways of legitimating

The dark side of ‘cultural turns’ in management

As we have shown, cultural perspectives have already proven that they can open

up new perspectives both for researchers as well as practitioners of management However, somehow the term ‘culture’ and its many positive associations might also imply the risk to become uncritical or even nạve regarding the limits and downsides of the concept Reckwitz starts his seminal book ‘The Invention of Creativity’ with a staggering observation: If there is one wish, he says, which transcends the boundaries of what contemporary culture can imagine, it would be

the wish not to be creative (Reckwitz 2012: 9, our translation) This is striking as

some forty years ago, ‘creativity’ was a concept that belonged firmly to the margins of society and economy important for artists certainly or craftmen (women), and perhaps for researchers But the idea that anybody working in an office can and should be creative on a daily base and even more that we are expected to be creative in choosing our clothing or holiday destination is a relatively recent development

Reckwitz argues that, in this respect, Western societies as a whole have undertaken a ‘cultural turn’ The artists are no longer marginal figures of society, but they are a role model for many social fields, not only but probably most

obviously for the so called digital boheme In this context, it is important to

mention that especially the digital boheme is not based on the concept of the creative ‘lone ranger’ but on creative collaboration (Kurtzberg and Amabile 2001; Sawyer 2003; Sonnenburg 2004) The creative imperative is that

‘liberating it’ allows for a freedom of individual and collaborative expression which was unheard of in the grey, narrow-minded fifties of the 20th century But

it is not only the ideal of creativity that has been imported from the artistic and cultural realm to broader areas of society With it, we have imported artistic ways of working as well: short-term, project based, insecure, precarious and often poorly paid Are we better off with this ‘creative’ cultural turn of the economy? Probably yes and no Nigel Thrift would argue that this has not been the only cultural turn in the economy In his article ‘Capitalism’s Cultural Turn’

he argues that “the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities now has a

direct line into, and indeed is a part of, the cultural turn in capitalism” (Thrift

1999: 157)

Thrift shows how a new managerial discourse has developed, which draws

from academic knowledge of the humanities and social sciences for processing

questions like, how to find appealing metaphors for your business, how to use

stories to attract consumers, how to be socially responsible and ecologically

sustainable, how to manage your ‘human resources’ in order to make the most

out of their ‘cultural diversity’ etc This is a managerial discourse that is aware

not only of the linguistic turn, but also of the interpretative turn and of the

seminal importance of knowledge and meaning for economic success in

capitalism

All this confirms that we are witnessing the impact of cultural turns for

management And the implications and consequences have not only positive

sides as Thrift shows: “The near-hegemony of this new managerialist discourse

has three main consequences, each of them uncomfortable The first is that it has

what used to be called 'material consequences', effects that can be measured out

in terms of pain, heartbreak, and shattered lives (…) This new form of the

exercise of corporate power is not necessarily any 'nicer' than what has gone

before; for all the caring rhetoric, lean can just as easily be mean, and learning

can mean stomach-churning.” (Thrift 1999: 156) Thus, when we think of ways to

ReThink Management by employing the cultural turns, we should not be nạve in

thinking a ‘cultural turn’ can always bring changes for only the better We need

also to be aware of how capitalism and managerialism have already shown and

are continuing to show their capacity to embrace and appropriate cultural turns in

a way which actually might have made the lives of many people and

commu-nities worse

The ‘re-‘ of re-thinking

Let us now continue our quest by offering some critical perspectives on and

possible interpretations with regard to the ‘re-‘ of rethinking especially in

relation to management and a re-doing Basically, the ‘re-‘ is re-lating to

management and its concepts, issues and practices differently, rendering

relationships that are different and make a difference In other words, the

question will be: How to relate in a different way to the path we are on? It all

commences, once gain, by re-visiting and re-peating the question of what

management could be, re-iterating discourses on and courses of management

This implies not only re-cognising management as what it currently is (or seems

to be), but also how it might be per- and conceived differently Durand speaks

about ‘re-ensensing’ that starts with a reprise that is both reprendre, (to take again or to repeat), and a reprise, (to mend and to repair) Specifically, it entails

a new posture, a fresh way to engage differently with organizations we are linked

or affiliated to, as well as to resist organizational orders and injunctions and to re-arrange scattered fragments of meanings into a more sensible universe (Durand 2014: 131) Accordingly, re-thinking entails both an embodied perception and ‘embrained’ conception of differences, sensing and making sense

in other ways by +-turning forward Thus, primarily, thinking is a

re-turning move Re-thinking twitches with re-turning, that is paradoxically

‘re-turning forward’ to the Other(s), and the world and, thereby, differently to ourselves and practices

With regard to the topic of the mentioned conference, these ‘re-turn(s)’ move towards fundamental questions like: What kinds of management do we need; for which purposes and why? How does it work (or seriously play) and towards what purposes does managing function or serve, and to which not? What makes management ‘value-able’, yielding so called ‘added value’ and what is

considered of ‘value’ in this context? What would cultural and other turns of

management mean, if taken seriously and integrally in this manner and in conjunction with the questions and posits of this book?

‘Re-‘ as re-membering, re-vealing and re-integrating

Critically, the re-turn is also a re-membering, re-claiming and re-viving currents

and flows of what has been and is neglected, excluded, repressed or forgotten in

conventional main-+-male-streams of management thinking and practice This

primary re-collecting concerns also who managers and we are as well as what and how they and we do things In this sense, the turning to what is lost or not

present is an endeavor of re-vealing and providing re-statements and explications

of something that can already be found in what managing and organizing was in its historical origin or is actually or potentially inherent in its practices Re-thinking mediates a disclosure of forgotten or ignored truth but without regressively or retrogressively going back to vitalistic and organicist naiveties of pre-modern spheres of unity and non-differentiation Re-vealing means taking

away the ‘veal’, which in turn allows re-discovering what is concealed, thus

laying open to view what is needed today for rendering timely sustainable

actions With these forms of re-considering, the re- is also about re-connecting,

re-integrating, re-habilitating, and re-valuing in particular plus the senses,

affects, bodies, feelings, and further dimensions that are only reductively and

narrowly seen in instrumentalized modes Accordingly, this kind of re-turning is

one that is oriented toward the re-legated, which nevertheless, is present even in

its absence in re-lation to life-worldly realities of management, thus re-viving

qualities that are not accounted or accountable, but count!

‘Re-‘ as radical re-flection and critical re-flexivity

Re-thinking is about problematizing existing assumptions, motives and rational

values, rules, routines (practices) that guide not only knowledge production and

usages but also all activities in practice In particular, it is problematizing

activities and (standing) practices as embedded in modernist institutions

operating in unsustainable modes (treadmill of unsustainable growth) It calls for

questioning the given conditions and conditionings of management For this to

happen, re-thinking requires hermeneutically de- and re-constructing, and

critically re-flecting management as well as employing a radical re-flexivity

(Cunliffe 2004) While to re-flect suggests a mirror image that affords the

opportunity to engage in an observation or examination of our (or that of other)

ways of doing, re-flexivity suggests a complexification of thinking and

ex-perience, or thinking about experience The latter one implies not only to

observe, but also more comprehensively exposing or questioning our very ways

of thinking, feeling, relating and doing, including pattern of personal norms and

taken-for-granted assumptions What is implied is that, through questioning the

bases of our interpretations, reflexivity necessarily brings about change in the

process of reflection It is thereby recursive as re-cursion is re-turning ways of

being and becoming A radically re-flexive orientation to examining the research

process can yield resources for self-examination, in ways which provide

potential for a critical retrospective assessment of choices and/or as a guide to

future action Accordingly, ‘radical’ means going to the root by questioning,

problematizing, unsettling, disclosing and opening, rather than categorization,

complacency and closure (Cunliffe 2003) Politically, this entails re-flecting

about power relations and its ideological and institutional conditions (Alvesson

and Spicer 2012: 373) and one’s own and others’ involvement in the same

The ‘re-’ as re-viewing, re-fraction and re-jection

The re-thinking invites also exploring or re-viewing and re-visiting the margins

and the boundaries of canonical knowledge which is the doxa of the other in the

orthodoxy of conventional forms of thinking and doing management Following

a deconstructive analysis, re-thinking becomes attentive to what deviates from the norm and from the custom of traditional managing It makes expressively explicit what is left out or unsaid In addition to reflecting and reflexivity, a

mode of re-fraction is needed in order to subvert with a „marginal critique”

(Waldenfels 1985: 175), which moves at the margins and on the edges of day worlds, as poly-dimensional field (without an ideal or central reference point) Edges are places of thought of the un-thought and margins are those of the un-said, un-sayable in what is said, the non-done and non-doable in what is done, the un-ruled and un-familiar in the ruled and familiar Both refer to qualities of the non-very-day in the every-day-life plus the extra-ordinary in the midst of ordinary Such subversion is not about overriding boundaries or to gloss over or paper over cracks, but to tinker and toy with them „as the violently excluded takes revenge in its own ways, even be it by trivializing of the remaining“ (Waldenfels 1985: 176)

every-In this way and resonating with aesthetic and anti-aesthetical practices, the

turning of cultural turns is about re-jection of conventions which is an openness

for the ‘Other’ and foreign cultures attention to alternative experiences (Perniola

2007) Such a turn goes along with re-fusing and re-sisting managerialist and

un-sustainable positions; paradigmatically with regard to epistemology,

metho-dology, and ontology For instance, it is fraining from ification or

re-essentializing and particularly with regard to a dominant one-sided and

unreflected practicalism Such practicalism would, for example, merely adjust and re-tool forms of unsustainable organizing or managing uncritically, while it ignores being theoretically informed

Therefore, re-thinking is not turning our backs on theory, falling into an

‘actionalism’ that is merely interested in ‘doing something’ or just ‘changing things’ as some action-theory tend to prescribe Rather, it is turning our theoretical and critical gaze more intensively – more close up and for longer periods at a time – towards phenomena and practices of management and organizations This implies also looking at different things in different ways, turning our scope, and theoretical micro- or telescopes in different directions at different objects Such re-thinking may lead to forms of re-interpreting hermeneutically, which allows developing novel modes of understanding and

doing Re-thinking is thus turning away; breaking away and, thereby, turning

towards opening up a way! Consequently, the corresponding guiding question

for our time is: Where and when or how are management and its effects irrational and unwise that lead to injustice or human suffering, individually and socially, or are unproductive, unsustainable or destructive, ecologically and culturally?

‘Re-‘ as re-orientation, re-translation, re-negotiation and re-imagination

The outlined turns and moves towards radical flections, and subversive

fractions need to lead to an enacted orientation and this-worldly

re-incarnation! Thus, they are not just reactions, but prudently preparing and

pro-active ways of re-organising and re-en-acting differently For not getting stuck in

intellectualist or even retrogressive moves, the re- also calls for re-configuring

and re-translating or what can be called trans-re-lating, transformatively,1

Accordingly, we need to refine Lewin’s famous statement that “there is nothing

more practical than a good theory” (Lewin 1952: 169) by adding that even the

best theory and reflected re-thinking of management needs to be skilfully and

reflexively trans-re-lated into practice In this way the ‘re-‘ can contribute not only

to re-frame and re-form, but is also about poetic re-imaginations as part of the art

of inventing, designing, crafting or building tools and practices, and

re-gaining values, especially towards more responsive and responsible ways of

managing and possibilities for practical wisdom (Küpers 2014)

‘Re-‘ as re-turning to practice and performative re-doing in praxis

How can re-thinking be connected to re-doing? A one-sided re-thinking is in

danger to be merely remaining thinking that is confined to a form of

discursive-propositional knowledge and understanding, confined to a semantic space

realized in the medium of language How can forms of re-thinking and saying

one thinks differently become re-shaping relationships and material practices?

How does one ground and connect a re-thought understanding with a different

standing in reality, and a socio-ethico-political stand that re-configures and

transforms life-worlds practically?

One way is to entwine ReThinking Management with the emerging re-turn

to practice in relation to organization and leadership (Küpers 2013; Nicolini et

al 2003; Nicolini and Monteiro 2017; Schatzki et al 2001) and a corresponding

performative turn (see extending the section ‘applications and activities’)

Turning practically is not only broadening the horizon (Eikeland and Nicolini

2011), but also altering concrete hori-zones, in which we and people embody,

feel and live their everyday-life In other words, re-thinking needs to enter and

move in the field of embodied, materially and socially interwoven practices and

nexus of related activities Importantly, the social and material nature of

1 As discussed in the written conversation in form of letters on the webpage for this conference,

see http://rethinkingmanagement.org/re-rethinking-management-as-translation/

practices also makes them and its re-thinking inherently situated in a particular

moment in time, space, and history

For Schatzki (1996: 89), practice is a “temporary unfolded and spatially dispersed nexus of doing and saying” where the body and artifacts are sites of

understanding Accordingly, sense-based and re-thought practices of organizing

are made up of a collection of embodied orientations, feelings, thoughts, intentions, and activities related to equipment and tools as well as shared socio-

cultural milieus A re-doing approach is taking practices as source and media of

re-thought meanings (and also of reflection, language, and normativity) and as concretely meaning-making, order-producing, and reality-shaping activities Re-doing and practice-based studies and orientation do not investigate re-thinking

management practices as abstract entities but rather ‘praxeologises’ them

towards materially and bodily mediated re-doings in praxis Accordingly, the practicing of leader- and followership refers to actual (micro-)activities within a situated sphere of embodied praxis as the interconnection and embeddings of coordinated intentions, responses, actions, actors and institutions, forming a Gestalt-like ‘held-togetherness’ and conduct of life (Küpers 2017) As these practices are performed or are enacted by an embodied agency of performing, moving from or integrating re-thinking with re-doing requires the realization of a

performative turn and other turns (Küpers 2017)

Contributions to ReThinking Management

In the spirit of Bachmann-Medick (2009; 2015), we take it that ‘cultural turns’ – here related to management – are to be conceived in plural Following the general orientation of humanities and social sciences towards culturally relevant issues, the plural ‘cultural turns’ represent current moves or new orientations that cut across and go beyond cultural sciences Topics and concepts, such as, materiality, embodiment, space, performance, mediality, narration, and sense-making as well as translation or inter- and transculturality, have moved more and more into the forefront in the last few decades Our book on ReThinking Management pursues the main idea that management theory is not to be understood as a sub-discipline of economic sciences, but rather as a cross-disciplinary and critical field (of research and practice) with a decidedly cultural perspective

With the call for chapters for this book, we as the editors intended to invite researchers and practitioners from various disciplines and fields, who share the outlined understanding and perspectives They were called to present their ideas, models, theories or empirical findings or insights of different phenomena and

practices with regard to the topic of ReThinking Management In particular, we

were looking for contributions that

 understand the cultural perspective and cultural turns as a bridge between

management theory and practice,

 outline possibilities and experiences or cases of an entwined re-thinking and

‘re-doing’ of management, also understood itself as a ‘cultural technique’,

 open up boundaries between different (sub-)disciplines with the goal of

genuine cross-disciplinary contribution, (beyond culturalist and managerialist

orientations),

 pursue the goal of overcoming traditional ways of thinking with their

classical subject/object and other dichotomies for developing an

under-standing of management practice that is radically contextual and reflected

through a critical perspective

Furthermore, we wanted to receive contributions that respond to the following

non-exhaustible questions:

 What are the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions

or underpinnings that are needed to ground, integrate and use ReThinking

Management?

 What are limitations, problems and challenges in further cultural turnings of

management?

 How do aesthetic perceptions and appreciations or dis-appreciations impact

practices in management and organizations?

 Which artistic categories (e.g beauty, ugliness, sublime, distaste) and

genres are used most compellingly to describe and express the relationship

between phenomena of art, aesthetics, and organizational and managerial

phenomena?

 How can management be artful and aesthetically designed and, thereby,

contribute to culturally informed well-being and flourishing of culture as

well as practical wisdom, individually and collectively?

Introduction to cultural turns

Doris Bachmann-Medick’s work on Cultural Turns has been an inspiration both

for Karlshochschule International University as an institution as well as for this

publication As one of the protagonists of the endeavour to establish an

interdisciplinary ‘Study of Culture’, she is the author of the seminal monograph

Cultural Turns (2011; 2016) While it was primarily directed at scholars in

literary studies, history and other fields of humanities and social sciences, it also caught the attention in more distant fields such as (critical) management studies Focusing on approaches such as the linguistic, performative, spatial as well as postcolonial turn, Bachmann-Medick offers a systematic overview Importantly,

she demonstrates how each turn – rather than replacing older approaches –

supplements these and opens up new perspectives Bachmann-Medick provides a framework which has informed the design and enactment of the Master Program

in Management at Karlshochschule International University, as well as the concept for the ReThinking Management conference, where Doris Bachmann-Medick offered a keynote and this subsequent publication as a result

In her contribution to this book, ‘Cultural Turns: A Matter of

Manage-ment?’ she reflects on the different possible pathways how the study of culture

and the cultural turns can contribute to a more complex and richer understanding

of management as a social and cultural practice By doing so, she also proves that studying culture itself is called upon to address issues of management and economics more frequently than it has in the past Furthermore, her article can be seen as an attempt to provide one possible mapping of different paths which can lead to a stronger integration of management studies into the study of culture – and vice versa While some of the following chapters explicitly position themselves in relation to the cultural turns, we also included contributions which add further pathways and perspectives on this initial map

Culture & creativity

The following section of this book follows up on the notion of ‘management as culture’ and takes this idea into different possible directions A number of contributors develop their perspectives by analysing management in the realm of

‘culture’ in a more focussed, artistic understanding Some tackle one of the fundamental questions of arts management, analysing whether management concepts change when they are appropriated in contexts which do not primarily adhere to economic logic Others ask whether the traditional process of translation might even work the other way around, i.e through management concepts originating in the arts world which travel to the business realm But management as culture is not to be restricted to management in the arts world Following Reckwitz (2012; 2014), one might argue that the field of management itself has undergone a ‘creative turn’ and is now subject to a ‘creativity dispositif’ Thus, culture and creativity can be viewed as core concepts for

management in any social sphere – and this notion is also reflected in some of

the contributions in this section

Rooted in a cultural-anthropological perspective, Irma Rybnikova integrates

perspectives on fields ranging from sociology to philosophy in her treatment of

‘Management as Purity Apostle’ Contrary to essentialist and objectivistic

perspectives, she describes management as a culturally and historically

em-bedded practice As such it is closely entangled with the paradoxes of modernity

and ideas of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, where some forms of management can be

seen as constructed according to proto-religious stereotypes and myths Using

the metaphor of ‘apostle’, the links between management and a god-like idea of

purity in organizations are discussed critically This culturally powerful

orientation is exemplified by specific ‘purifying’ practices like employee

selec-tion, sense making or handling employee resistance, as by which management

tries to process sources of organizational impurity

Markus F Peschl and Thomas Fundneider also use a reflection on the

current state of modernity as a starting point for their approach on ReThinking

Management: In their chapter on ‘Uncertainty and Opportunity as Drivers for

Re-Thinking Management’, they argue that the increasingly hyper-complex

contemporary world calls for new approaches in management These would

embrace uncertainty and opportunity, rather than trying to control and ‘manage’

them Against this backdrop, they call for a fundamental change of

organiza-tional cultures if organizations are to be successful in the future Beyond

adapting to changes in the external environment, future-oriented organizations

need to engage in enabling cultural practices, including creating novelty, new

knowledge, and innovations as well as proactively designing and shaping niches

The following contribution is similarly concerned with the future of

management and organizations Taking inspiration from the performative turn

and using empirical material from a number of cultural institutions, Małgorzata

Ćwikła designs a possible future of ‘Cultural Projects in 2030’, which could

overcome current challenges and flaws With this chapter, she also proves that

arts and cultural management does not necessarily need to be a field that only

imports management fads from the business world Even more, it can also be an

inspiration for other fields of management In doing so, she also sets the tone for

the following two articles

With ‘Transfer of Economic Concepts to Cultural Strategy – and Back?’,

Johan Kolsteeg delivers a rich empirical study on the processes of translation

and shifts of meaning which occur when economic and managerial terms and

concepts are transferred into the field of cultural and creative organizations

Kolsteeg proves not only does it matter which concepts are being used, but also

how they are embedded in and related to meaning making in specific

pro-fessional contexts as well as which role the cultural practice of ‘communication

as constitutive’ of organizations ‘plays out’ for this

worlds from the other direction by asking: ‘Are Artists the Better Managers?’

Lang is concerned with the current cultural as well as political emphasis on notions of collaboration and sharing as well as their implications for manage-ment as a (potentially) participatory and circular process Closing this section of the book, she once more underlines that, in the light of culture and creativity, management can be re-thought and re-done in various ways By this, it is understood again as emerging as a decidedly different and cultural concept and practice

Applications and activities

Connected to the theoretical and conceptual shift in management studies is the question of how managerial phenomena and entities are shaped, reshaped and transformed in the light of ReThinking Management in practice Provocatively speaking, this is more than a connection as ReThinking Management does not have a raison d’être without ReDoing Management The object of contemporary management studies needs the differentiation between and inseparability of ReThinking and ReDoing as only this can lead to a comprehensive under-standing of management and its studies This view is fragile and challenging as the applied dimension of ReDoing Management has to be critically reflected to avoid commonly used mainstream ‘how-to recipes’ This tightrope walk succeeds if management is not regarded merely as an operational function, but as

a critical, yet creativity enhancing ‘institution’ as well as a ‘philosophy in practice’ (Alvesson et al 2009)

Although the category ‘Applications and Activities’ refers to a kaleidoscope

of practical topics from a multi-disciplinary angle, the selection is mindful of the danger of being too open-minded to include everything ending up in a mindless category For the purpose of this category and based on inferences by Bach-mann-Medick (2016: 73-101), we use performance (Turner 1982) and its

‘counterpart’ performativity (Austin 1962; Butler 1997; 2010) to explain ReDoing Management, whereby performativity is more the ‘doing’ and performance the ‘done’ (Denzin 2003: 4) It allows not only to understand per-forming as what precedes performance, but also involves participatory, embodied, enactive and experiential modes of be(com)ing and transformation Management is something being performed Performance and performativity are not primarily meant in the orthodox sense of theatrical performance (Fischer-

Lichte 2008; Schechner 2002) but as processes of meaning-making in practice

(Wickert and Schaefer 2015) Management cannot ‘exist’ separately from its

social and cultural realization in the form of performances and their material and

physical manifestations It is thus constantly recreated, reformed and

trans-formed in a performative sense by protagonists and their practices, either

creatively or co-creatively and situationally In a nutshell, management is a

cultural form whose magic is revealed in the moment This cultural form opens

up innovative possibilities regarding space, embodiment, materiality, visuality,

occurrence or transformation Furthermore, especially in the category

‘Applica-tions and Activities’, it includes forms of processual ac‘Applica-tions, like storytell-ing,

network-ing, hack-ing, study-ing, or shar-ing

Storytelling as a practical strategy plays a significant role in management

consulting Silke Schmidt identifies in her contribution ‘The (Ante-)Narrative of

G/growth in Management Consulting as Liminal Sense-Making Strategy’ growth

as the meta-narrative of consulting By critically re-thinking this narrative, she

argues for a retelling and replacing of the economic growth narrative by actively

pushing personal and not economic growth The urge for personal sense-making

growth in management consulting enables critical economic thinking and doing,

which is, in the long run, a prerequisite for innovation and sustainable economic

growth

In the realm of the Actor-Network-Theory, Dirk Nicolas Wagner discusses

in his contribution ‘Graceful Degradation and the Knowledge Worker’ the

relationship between knowledge workers and machines To do their jobs,

knowledge workers have to interact with machines to manage the increasing

information flood He observes a process of ungraceful degradation of

knowledge workers that leads to less attention and poorer decision-making and

introduces the concept of graceful degradation Knowledge workers require

machine assistance to manage gracefully attention and decision-making In other

words, they need technology to manage human problems previously induced by

technology which creates a new hybrid-based actors’ network

Media is undoubtedly one of the most creative industries that strongly

shapes our identities, values and social practices Ironically, only a few ‘big

players’ like Apple, Facebook, Google or Sony control the media market leading

to a lack of transparency and sustainability Christian Stiegler’s contribution

‘Sustainability in the Media Industries: The Lack of Transparency and the “Sony

Hack”’ analyses this lack in the case of a hack which happened to Sony He

points out a re-thinking of management strategies and especially a re-doing of

management behaviors in the media industries to be more transparent and

sustainable This is necessary for open creativity and innovation and avoidance

of enclavistic industrial performances which are not very supportive to society

ReThinking and ReDoing management starts with studying the ‘Re’ as

outlined before Björn Bohnenkamp focuses on marketing as a discipline and discusses in his contribution ‘ReThinking Studying Marketing’ a necessary turn

in teaching and studying marketing This is essential to avoid the traditional and superficial understanding that studying marketing means learning the right skills how to develop marketing campaigns The cultural turns, most of all the per-formative turn, can enrich marketing in terms of cultural context and a more critical perspective on doing marketing Knowing and interpreting different contexts is a basic prerequisite for critical marketing in theory and practice

Finally, sharing is a key activity for performances in management As

figured out in Manuela Nocker’s contribution ‘Belonging and Being

Professional: In Pursuit of an Ethics of Sharing in Project Teams’, a

per-formative perspective on project teams constructs social selves and identities in action She emphasizes that belonging and sharing do not appeal to external criteria but originate from enacted team experiences and on-going negotiations

A lived co-created ethics can stimulate the required learning of ‘how to be professional’ in the on-going team performance This gives rise to a project understanding that is less about the mere achievement of milestones and more about the unfolding process

Re-thinking as ongoing co-creation

We hope that this book provides a genuine forum that not only brings together but also forward what it means and implies to process a radical re-thinking and a corresponding re-doing of management as theory and practice, made concrete in research, teaching, and other engagements May the chapters of this book contribute for per- and trans-forming critically what a re-thought and re-done managing and organizing can offer and open up for In this way and connected to re-doing, the re-thinking is then not only a way of knowing, but of practical unfolding of being and becoming in praxis The praxis and practices of re-thinking and re-doing are not only needed today; but even more they are required

as a challenging task for a sustainable future to come Such undertaking entails the joint effort of many practitioners, including researchers, and inter- and transdisciplinary initiatives The thinking about and conferencing of the re-thinking that is manifested in this book, emerged out of co-creational practices of participants, authors as well as organizer and editors and are now offered to you

as readers for further re-thinking and re-doing

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per-Doris Bachmann-Medick

Abstract

In recent years cultural turns have had a considerable impact in the humanities

and social sciences How much potential can these turns unfold in inspiring (critical) management studies? Could they lead to a more concrete cultural framing of the field – by providing operative analytical categories and new spatial, performative, interpretive, iconic, translational, postcolonial etc approaches? But a reverse question can also be asked: To what extent can we

apply a managerial perspective on the cultural turns themselves? In which way

could they be considered as a matter of management?

By highlighting the role of cultural turns for management studies, my paper explores possible impacts of the cultural turns on a new understanding and

practice of management But in the end, it probes the limits of management by

asking: Are cultural turns themselves manageable at all?

Management in light of cultural turns 1

In analogy to Benedict Anderson’s famous words about the nation as an imagined community, one could say that management must be imagined before

it can exist and be practiced To imagine management as culturally textualized, symbolically conceptualized and collectively represented is not simply a matter of imagining an encompassing ‘cultural turn’ in management studies, including business and marketing (Ray and Sayer 1999; Gay and Pryke 2002: 1; Zotzmann 2010; Yaprak 2008).2 Rather, this imagining must take several cultural turns into account Within the last few years, cultural turns have had a considerable impact on the humanities and social sciences But can these turns also bring new impetus to management studies? To what extent can they lead to a more concrete and explicit cultural framing of these studies, not only by

con-1 I am grateful to Elizabeth Kovach for her help with the translation

2 One of the main initiators of the study of culture approach in business studies along a specific understanding of culture as mental software and programming has been Geert Hofstede (2010)

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017

W Küpers et al (Hrsg.), ReThinking Management,

Management – Culture – Interpretation, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-16983-1_2

drawing attention to new objects of investigation such as space, performativity, interpretation, images and translation, but also by developing them into analytical categories?

This article provides some suggestions on how to further reorient management studies by adopting a ‘cultural-turns perspective’ When it comes to cultural studies and the development of its turns, management studies has its limits Both management studies and cultural studies could profit from a reconceptualization of management This article proposes the consideration of management as an exploration of connectivities

I would like to stress from the outset that I am employing a theoretical perspective, after having established the concept of ‘cultural turns’ a few years ago (see Bachmann-Medick 2016) Cultural turns signify new theoretical orientations and analytical categories in the humanities and social sciences When applied to management studies, they have so far been considered epistemologically, as new conceptualizations What seems to still be missing is a discussion of their implementation with respect to management practice, for which cultural turns can provide valuable analytical tools They divide the increasingly complex field of managerial work into smaller components and enable the investigation of these components under specific foci – such as the spatial, the visual, the performative, the translational, or the interpretive dimensions of managerial work At issue are thus not new subjects or themes but rather new analytical lenses As such, the ‘turns perspective’ can also be applied

cultural-to hiscultural-torical examples

The interpretive turn

The engraving from the seventeenth century (Figure 1) shows a customer relationship in a London pharmacy It can be approached in light of

management-several turns To view this picture from the perspective of the ‘interpretive turn’

means to read it in terms of symbolic communication in economic relations As historians have discovered, the new set-up of a pharmacy shop with facilities and material furnishings was key for innovating and changing the traditional notion

of pharmaceutical products (Wallis 2008; Neu 2013) The new shop environment

and the polite handling of customers helped to turn familiar Hausmittel, such as

natural drugs, into new products of commodified medicine This historical example shows how – merely through a certain display of products and style of shop – economic and material goods can be re-valued as cultural goods loaded with meaning and symbolic value, thus provoking new collective emotional responses, propelling desires, wishes and hopes What we see in this seemingly

trivial representation is the contribution of a pharmacy shop to the “construction

of social identity through consumption” (Mahadevan 2009); thus pointing to the

formation of social and cultural meanings through processes of economic

exchange and consumption We can experience these powerful mechanisms at

work even more today in the context of, for instance, fan cultures or the clusters

of meaning in the production of lifestyles In any case, what we can observe here

is a change from a use-value-centered practice to sign-value-centered practice

through a new style of management

Figure 1: Frontispiece to Michel Morel: The expert doctors dispensatory,

London: N Brook 1657

This change can be analyzed with the semiotic tools of the interpretive turn,

which provides new insights into the interdependency of sense making and sign

production These tools can be usefully applied to processes of meaning

formation in the context of “interpretive marketing” (Moisander and Valtonen

2012) which involves using ethnographic insights for a deeper, culturally contextualized understanding of branding and processes of consumption They can also lead to new meaning- and narrativity-based conceptualizations of organizations in which organizations are not understood as mere repetitions of bureaucratic routines but also as semiotic formations This goes along with a new conceptualization of management as “symbolic action”3 The semiotic approach

of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz offers a source of inspiration in this context It helps us to decipher ‘culture as text’, to consider culture as a matter of narrative identity formation, meaning making and, last but not least, self-interpretation According to Geertz, cultures are systems of meaning and always contain their own interpretations, for instance by making their specific affective cohesion visible.4 Applied to organization studies, this suggests that we read

“organizations as texts” (Linstead 2003: 1) and apply textual analysis to organization studies to gain self-reflexive insights into inner symbolic structures and meaning-making processes (Linstead 2003: 2) We thus should no longer bind organizational culture to the idea of fixed and essential units and instead see

it as involved in an open-ended web of shared meanings as well as plural interpretations and textual relations (see Altehenger et al 2011)

The role of narratives and emic interpretations is of central importance when considering issues of cross-cultural management Let us take as a case study the narrative practices of ChipTech, a German tech firm that outsources work to India By conducting fieldwork, Jasmin Mahadevan (2009) has found that elaborate narrative practices seem to be productive tools for mediating the self-conceptions of engineers and managers in this firm Narratives function as integrative tools that form an indispensable precondition for critically reflecting upon the categorizations of “‘We’ and ‘the Other’” As Mahadevan (2009) states,

“My main argument is that it is of prime importance for the field of intercultural communication to fully understand (narrative – DBM) sense-making in organizations before trying to influence unknown emic categorizations of the other through predefined etic categories of ‘We’ and ‘the Other’.” It seems that what is needed here and elsewhere is an ‘interpretive manager’ who listens, talks and interacts instead of mainly analyzes In another study, Richard Lester claims that a manager “needs to act less like an engineer and more like the leader of a jazz combo” (Lester et al 1998: 89), practicing various changing roles and improvisation skills in a web of meanings and tunes instead of staying caught in

a fixed structure of economic dichotomies and laws ‘Jazzing’ management leads

us directly to the performative turn

The performative turn

The financial speculations and simulacra that characterized the recent financial

crises have been shaped by a kind of performativity that constituted rather than

merely represented (economic) realities This mechanism of performative

constitution is also effected by models that economists use to analyze markets, as

such models ultimately play a role in creating these markets (see the stimulating

volume MacKenzie et al 2007) Such processes and analytical insights have

certainly fostered the rise of a ‘performative turn’ in the analysis of economy as

well as of business, marketing and management.5 But how can we understand

organizational and management studies as a ‘performative project’? This is a

frequently asked question (Spicer et al 2009: 537)

Critical management studies has developed a notion of ‘critical

performativity’ that is applied to “active and subversive intervention into

managerial discourses and practices” (Spicer et al 2009: 538) This position

implies radical resistance to the conventional notion of performance as efficiency

and optimization between input and output (Spicer et al 2009: 541) It instead

investigates language use and rhetoric as central elements:

“The performative element, we suggest, requires researchers to ‘activate’ the

language that managers use (see Austin, 1963) In this way, CMS scholars may

support managers to ‘talk into existence’ new behaviours or practices ( ) Here,

language is understood as a medium that affects how people interpret their reality,

how they assess things as important or unimportant, and how they feel and behave.”

(Wickert and Schaefer 2015: 109)

This position on language use shifts attention away from large corporations and

towards small-scale sites By slicing larger problems into smaller manageable

units, the performative (and emancipatory) potential of inscription and

re-interpretation can be brought to the fore This practice tries to enable and realize

“small wins” (Wickert and Schaefer 2015: 120) instead of big changes and thus

aims at a kind of “micro-emancipation” (Spicer et al 2009: 553) by providing

spaces for initiative and self-determination beyond overarching managerial

5 Muniesa (2014), on the ‘performative turn’ esp 7-16; on a comprehensive overview of the

approaches to “provoke a performative turn in OMT (organization and management theory –

DBM)”, see Gond et al http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijmr.12074/pdf

(online-Version July 2015: 1-24), here 2

domination and control Furthermore, by establishing a specific rhetoric of social responsibility (Wickert and Schaefer 2015: 109) – like a speech act – a step-by-step transformation of behavior as well as new managerial practices could be achieved However, this rhetorical strategy might only be a first step, as changes

in language use and rhetorical practices alone do not necessarily lead to changes

in behavior Additional strategies have also become the focus of the performative reorientation of management, such as narrativity, storytelling and the use of metaphors Some have begun to speak of a ‘narrative turn’ in management, management studies and organization and marketing theory.6 A much stronger

‘political theory of organizational performativity’ has also been added to this perspective.7 It emphasizes that performativity is more than a subject’s intentional expression through language use The subject itself – as Judith Butler (2006: 25) claims by referring to the performative construction of gender – is constituted through repeated performances and iterations Thus not merely language use but also the constitution of the subject within organizations (through discourses, institutions, and markets) and their changeability should be the focus of critical performativity in management studies

Another path that has been opened by the performative turn in the study of culture has concentrated, on the one hand, on theatre studies and the force of theatrical expression in acting, which has offered creative inspiration for the application of theatrical improvisation in brand communication.8 On the other hand, the performative turn in the study of culture has directed attention to the ritual, staging and dramatic aspects of human action as in the work of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, one of the main figures in ritual and performance theory This latter focus emphasizes an important performative tool: the notion

of liminality as a condition for innovation ‘Liminality’ denotes an important phase in transition rituals In anthropology it is considered to be the source of groundbreaking cultural innovations Management studies could certainly profit from this concept In fact, it has been taken up in management studies, by, for instance, Barbara Czarniawska, who understands performativity explicitly as a non-consensual, liminal practice and, accordingly, has suggested that one understands leadership as “a stage performance” in the face of an “organizational drama” (Czarniawska 1997; Czarniawska and Mazza 2003: 269: “consulting as a

6 See, among others, Czarniawska (2004); Fenton and Langley (2011); Keulen and Kroeze (2012); Mein et al (2014)

7 See Cabantous et al (2015: 1-2); on the limits of the power of language in critical performativity and the necessity to include a “wider political analysis of organizations”, see Fleming and Banerjee (2015: 7)

8 See the stimulating essay on the importance of improvisional performance (including storytelling) for brand communication in social media, even claiming an “improvisational turn”, Singh and Sonnenburg (2012: 195)

condition of liminality”) The drama metaphor used here includes the notion of

conflicts and tensions with an open ending, a notion specifically elaborated by

Victor Turner (1982) in his concept of “social drama”

The notion of liminality could also be central for management studies in

another sense When it is explicitly claimed, for instance, that the performative/

performativity ‘turn’ is effective in management and organizational studies9 – for

example, in a new view of routines as sources of change and stability (Gond et

al 2015: 16-17) – one could also refer to Turner’s concept of liminality and look

for ‘in-between’ liminal spaces Such spaces bring actors into boundary

situations that trigger moments of creative thinking and emergence Consider the

event of a business dinner (Sturdy et al 2006): It suspends the organizational

routine, blurs the boundaries between work/leisure, official/private spheres,

which provides a liminal space for informal discussion of business Business

dinners can potentially create productive and innovative spaces between work

and home, business and pleasure

From organizational and management studies through to tourism studies, we

find an important change in the understanding of agency that has contributed to

the performative turn in the study of culture: the “shift from the gaze to the body

, from authenticity to performativity , and from representations to everyday

habits and practices” (Valtonen and Viejola 2011: 176; Harwood and

El-Manstrly 2005) Beyond this new focus on embodiments, we are still faced with

representations, with visual power and the gaze Performativity often entails a

high degree of visualization This leads us to another turn: the iconic turn

9 Diedrich et al (2013); Gond et al (2015) on the attempt “to provoke a performative turn in

OMT” here 2-3, see also 20-21

The iconic turn

Figure 2: Ford's ad featuring Silvio Berlusconi and tied up women

(online source)

We are constantly exposed to powerful iconic messages, especially in the economy of global brands and their iconic self-assertion Let us consider the highly provocative recent example of the Ford car company’s controversial ad in India (Figure 2), which made use of Silvio Berlusconi’s image and visual scenarios that insinuated rape, thereby alluding to the scandalous incidents of rape in contemporary India.10 The ad features the cynical slogan “Leave Your Worries Behind” Image management seems to be one of the most important issues in our media-driven age, given the importance of visual communication and the demonstrative and mimetic effects of images The management of images has been realized mainly in the contexts of marketing, brand images and corporate images It is connected to the ‘interpretive turn’ in management, which registers the importance of visuality in cultural systems of meaning (Schroeder 2002: 5) It entails paying specific attention to the meaning-making capacities of

10 See, for example, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/03/24/ford-indian-car-ad-rape_n_ 2944574.html? (16 March 2016)

photography and the visual dimensions of travel, tourism, the World Wide Web

and advertising It is no coincidence, and proof of her truely trans-disciplinary

work, that Barbara Maria Stafford (2012), one of the proponents of a

pictorial/iconic turn in the humanities, has extended her art-historical expertise

into the field of digital “behavioral tracking” of the visual traces of consumers A

critical point of her visual analyses is a main aspect of the visual communication

in the economy of consumerism itself – namely, the phenomenon of product

images having more presence than the products themselves (Schroeder 2002:

14-15) But what we definitely need, beyond this, is increased iconic responsibility

The iconic turn in the humanities clearly supports this aim Images are taken

as media of cognition through which one can question the image-believing

defaults in our understanding of reality Exploring the image and the visual as

analytical categories enables us to uncover the ways in which images manipulate

reality In addition, we can critically scrutinize the assumption that images are

media of immediacy, showing and evidence Even invisible, unseen, overlooked

and marginalized ways of seeing as well as techniques of gaze, surveillance and

control can be brought to the fore by new attention to the visual dimension of

management and organizations as is presented, for instance, in a

phenomeno-logical analysis by Wendelin Küpers (2014)

Given “the growing recognition of the visual turn in management research

as a counterweight to the linguistic turn” (Bell and Davison 2013: 167)11, one

could indeed say that what had been an under-estimated aspect of visuality in

management studies has the potential to compete with the currently dominating

linguistic turn But has the discovery of an iconic dimension of management

already developed a new analytical category (by the way, this question has to be

posed in relation to every turn)? I would say yes, as long as the visual lens is

acknowledged as reaching beyond pictorial and visual objects Attention to the

visual as an analytical category opens up new areas for management studies that

could explore emotionality, embodiment and corporate branding This new

critical mode of ‘visual thinking’ can also illuminate a general phenomenon:

Images are connected to experiences of embodiment and emotionality and reach

directly and deeply into our memories They can also be used for representing

work experiences via photography, for “visual autoethnography” (Bell and

Davison 2013: 174), and for highlighting and analyzing tourist experiences Of

course, one must always remain aware of the danger of falling into the trap of

“the myth of transparency” (Bell and Davison 2013: 175) by mistaking pictures

for immediate windows into reality

11 Especially informative is the Teaching and Learning Guide attached to this article; also Bell et

al (2014: 2): the “visual turn in organizational analysis”

But what does it then mean for management studies to make use of such culturally sceptical image critique? It motivates us to reflect upon societal visual regimes, to acknowledge the cultural formation of visual perception as well as the regimes and taboos of the gaze, which go along with social and gender-specific forms of visibility and non-visibility which are certainly co-constituted

by advertisement and marketing Such critical image reflection seems to be especially relevant in reflections of the tourist gaze (see the interdisciplinary volume by Crouch and Lübbren 2003) Here, too, management studies should not merely rely on ‘naked’ seeing but should rather take discursively predeter-mined ways of seeing into account: “Seeing is what the human eye does Gazing refers to the ‘discursive determinations’, of socially constructed seeing or ‘scopic regimes’” (Urry and Larsen 2011: 1-2) It is precisely this activation of culturally and socially established visual regimes and their specific power structures that should be considered in management studies One cannot flee from the task of reflecting upon the close entanglement of consumer icons and images of violence

in (Indian) reality This dimension of power and power inequalities in images and icons leads directly to the postcolonial turn

The postcolonial turn

Figure 3: Yolanda Domínguez: “Fashion Victims“, Installation Madrid 2013

(online source)

This disturbing installation by Spanish artist Yolanda Domínguez in front of a

Mango fashion store in Madrid is entitled “Fashion Victims” (Figure 3) The

woman depicted is not the main victim of exhaustive shopping and consumption

The real ‘victims of fashion’ are the textile workers from Bangladesh More than

1,000 workers died in the horrible collapse of a garment factory on April 24,

2013, the same year of this installation The Spanish brands Mango and Zara, as

well as H&M, were directly involved in this catastrophe of neocolonial

capitalism The installation makes this involvement visible to the European

world It thematizes the exploitation of third-world workers by Western textile

companies These workers have risked their lives for a ‘Hungerlohn’ We cannot

close our eyes to the continuation of colonial exploitation and the unequal

division of work resulting from continued power asymmetries Reflection of this

issue from the perspective of the postcolonial turn reaches even deeper: It opens

up a critical stance to hierarchical binaries in general as well as the continuation

of neocolonial relations and asymmetries between the markets of the first and

third worlds In this sense, the postcolonial turn is more than merely a new

aspect or perspective in management studies As a recent manifesto has claimed,

it aims to fundamentally reconceptualize the entire field (Westwood and Jack

2007: 247; 2010)

On an epistemological level, looking through the postcolonial lens reveals

that even the concepts of business, management and development as such cannot

be considered as congruent amongst Western and non-Western societies The

universalizing claims of Western forms and practices of management in this light

seem highly problematic and contested They should be ‘provincialized’ in

reference to the proposal by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (Westwood and Jack

2007: 248) and relativized by other knowledge systems, as the above-mentioned

manifesto claims In this sense a postcolonial perspective aims to open up “a

space for knowledge systems that have been repressed, marginalized or silenced

by the colonizing propensities of the West’s discourses, knowledge systems and

institutions” (Westwood and Jack 2007: 254) This postcolonial commitment

certainly can have an important impact on the practice of management studies, as

it exposes the universalization of the Western knowledge systems that has

occurred throughout the history of colonialism This development cannot simply

be blotted out, as it has been a decisive factor that impacts colonial and

neo-colonial encounters in organizational processes (see Frenkel and Shenhav 2006;

Prasad 2003; Banerjee and Prasad 2008) It accounts for the entanglement of

Western, capitalist profit-making and the ongoing exploitation of human

resources in the countries of the Global South A stronger inclusion of

non-Western forms of management and indigenous research practices could perhaps

pave the way to a more balanced but, at the same time, difference-oriented,