On jet planes, Foucault and all that

I was off to the U.K. for some heavy-duty scientific work with some heavy-duty colleagues. Leaving on Sunday on a business trip is a melancholic exercise. We live in an area where lots of businesspeople live nearby, and I always get this cold feeling when the taxis take the business men and women away from their families on Sunday evening.

Anyway, this was what I did this time. I was looking forward to a couple of days of uninterrupted thinking with some really smart people. John Sillince, Henri Schildt and I had a just received a revision request from a tough journal and we needed to devise a strategy on how to deal with it. John hosted the meeting in Glasgow. To top that off, I had a meeting at Oxford with Richard Whittington, to work on our paper on how managers become strategists, presented at EGOS 2007.



On the plane, I read a new paper on strategy as discourse by Ezzamel & Willmott, published in a recent issue of Organization Studies. As this is more or less my core field of interest, an article in a good journal is always an event.

I had tried to give this paper one of my usual "ten minute glances" at work and had failed miserably. As I got the sense that the text might reveal its secrets only under closer scrutiny, I had booked some "quality time" at the airplane for this purpose.



I was right. The paper had no discernible tables, figures or other summarizing instruments that you usually find reviewers insisting on at good management journals. The contribution was written in narrative form, in a sense not similar to Foucault, Ezzamel & Willmott's main theoretical inspiration. Many of my colleagues find Foucault difficult. I think the reason may be that you cannot glance at it and find neat definitions and summaries for concepts often attributed to him like "panoptic gaze" or "disciplinary power". You have to read the whole narrative to make sense of what he is saying. The whole narrative, on the other hand, is often very compelling, insightful and witty, i.e., great fun to read. I discovered this by accident when I took Discipline and Punish with me to a family holiday on the Azores and had a great time reading it. Later on, I have found many of the ideas useful in my work. After that, I don't approach Foucault as a "difficult author" but as a treat. It is just that you have to book enough time to read one of his works to be able to appreciate it.

Anyway, about Ezzamel & Willmott. I found their introduction to Foucault's contribution to Organization Studies in the paper's theory section quite compelling. For the reasons mentioned above, Foucault is not the easiest author to introduce. I made a mental note about wanting to explore further what Foucault meant by "systems", a concept used by social theorists across the board (and abhorred by others).

The results section also contains a number of compelling examples about power/knowledge nexus Foucault is widely known of promoting. I found myself quoting the paper in my presentation at Strathclyde, as one example about Stichco's new CEO promoting a way of working based on "fact, not anecdote".

On pp. 210-221, Ezzamel and Willmott note that:

"We have acknowledged the impossibility of providing any definitively or conclusively authoritative representation of the ‘reality’ of (our) narrative(’s) construction. Ultimately, a narrative’s plausibility and contribution depends upon the (power/knowledge) relation of its readers’ interpretive amenability to its discursive invitation. Does the narrative resonate with the reader’s socially organized concerns? Is it met with indifference? Or does it arouse their hostility? It is the power-invested sense of solidity or self-evidence of the discursive interpretation or translation of accounts that conditions their reception as compelling, confusing, contentious or contemptible."

Well, did the paper resonate with me? Yes and no. While I was certainly sympathetic to the approach taken in the paper, and the paper gave rise to a number of thought processes, I was not completely sure about the final argument that the paper was making about discourse and strategy work. For me, the paper was another example about how discursive practices give rise to particular social realities, if a compelling one. I was missing a particular, specific finding about strategy work that I could take with me. It was a good remainder about the value of alternative analyses on strategy work, as the authors note on pp.

"It is to be expected that Foucauldian analysis will be found wanting by researchers working in traditions where it is assumed or expected that analysis should self-evidently serve, or be positively consequential for, a research agenda which, not exceptionally, is presumed or compliantly conceded to be the only worthwhile agenda. It is perhaps only when the limits and precariousness of knowledge claims are appreciated — along with their political and ethical responsibilities— that the relevance and value of alternative forms of analysis becomes contemplatible. Indeed, it has been suggested that appreciating the contribution of alternative forms of analysis that are directly attentive and responsive to ‘the crisis of representation’ (Calas and Smircich 1999: 650) then becomes a necessity, not a pointless diversion."

This is a good point and well put. Strategic management is rich with all sorts of discourses, seeking hegemony. After all, it is the strategy scholars who stay in best hotels.



I also gave myself the pleasure of marveling at landscape photos, which is something that I often to while traveling. I had brought with me the landscape photography masterclass book Developing Vision and Style, brought to us by a Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite, David Ward and their students. The book, in addition to representing a collection of sublime photos, also contained an interesting debate on issues such as: "should I aim for an identifiable style in my work." The struggle for consistency in creating an identifiable style without becoming predictable is something that faces, not such artists, but also us organizational scientists in their work. We struggle for a "voice" but do not wish to get stuck, repeating the same message over and over again.

For instance, if one goes to website hosting the works of such master photographers as Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite or David Ward, one sees that after a while, there are identifiable aspects to the artists' images. But every new image contains something unpredictable, and is a new challenge to the beholder.