Christian De Cock

TQM and BPR: Beyond the beyond myth

It is generally assumed in the popular management literature that the TQM (total quality management) and BPR (business process re-engineering) movements are the two latest expressions of an increasing sophistication in management techniques and principles. Following this logic it only is a matter of time before they will be superseded by yet another management innovation. This paper aims to explode this ‘beyond’ myth by exposing the underlying logic of TQM and BPR implementation patterns in two case companies. Empirical findings will be related back to critical approaches to the study of TQM and BPR. Concrete suggestions as to how to move beyond the quick fix managerial mode will be proposed. Our approach is intended to provide a counterweight to the unreflective discourse surrounding TQM and BPR by breaking open the naturalness of this discourse. It supplies a few landmarks for managers and researchers to take a step back, hesitate, and reflect on the phenomenon of planned organizational change.

Organization/Literature: Exploring the Seam

In this paper we develop a particular way of understanding literature and organization with the aim of drawing on and extending the relationship between the two. Hence our subtitle: exploring the seam. Although the use of literary concepts and theories within our discipline is now well established, the way in which such ideas are taken up often neglects debate and contestation by treating ‘literature’ as a relatively homogeneous field. By following some of the ardent debates relating to issues of representation, the relation between text and extra-textual reality, and literature’s disclosure of its status as fiction, we find a discussion of (social) organization at the heart of contemporary literary theory. It is the oscillation between literature and organization that structures this paper and gives us our argument: that ‘organization’ and ‘literature’ are mutually co-articulating and interdependent concepts and fields of enquiry.

Battle in the Boardroom: A Discursive Perspective

This article examines the centrality of discourse in achieving managerially relevant outcomes, with a focus on the in-situ performance context of corporate storytellers. The Ricœurian concept of speech act, capturing both the intentionality of organizational discourse and the social context of its production and reception, implicitly guided our research effort. The article has at its core a story of how senior organizational officers exploited the volatile circumstances of a public takeover in Singapore. By looking at the social construction of narratives in their many fragments we come to see how a key protagonist carves out a powerful position. The efficacy of his performances can be seen to be dependent upon the effective use of poetic tropes and the receptiveness of listeners to particular Chinese archetypal relationship-driven themes. In crafting our story we use multiple texts which were produced in and around two case organizations. As such we offer a carefully constructed collage, a mixture of production and reproduction, sticking closely to forms of communication that key organizational actors used to plan, enact and interpret their actions and those of others. Whilst our story offers insights to readers with an interest in organizational discourse, corporate governance and Asian management practices, we refrain from imposing an authoritarian interpretation that insists on identifying with the intentions of the authors.

Future imaginings: organizing in response to climate change:

Climate change has rapidly emerged as a major threat to our future. Indeed the increasingly dire projections of increasing global average temperatures and escalating extreme weather events highlight the existential challenge that climate change presents for humanity. In this editorial article we outline how climate change not only presents real, physical threats but also challenges the way we conceive of the broader economic, political and social order. We asked ourselves (and the contributors to this special issue) how we can imagine alternatives to our current path of ever escalating greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth? Through reference to the contributions that make up this special issue, we suggest that critically engaging with the concept of social, economic and political imaginaries can assist in tackling the conceptual and organizational challenges climate change poses. Only by questioning current sanitized and market-oriented interpretations of the environment, and embracing the catharsis and loss that climate change will bring, can we open up space for new future imaginings.

It Seems to Fill My Head with Ideas: A Few Thoughts on Postmodernism, TQM, and BPR

The main objective of this article is to explode the popular myth that the Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) constructs have not been properly understood or implemented. Elements of postmodern discourse are used to juggle with the meaning of TQM, BPR, and, at a later stage, with that of postmodernism itself. Problems traditionally identified as hampering TQM/BPR implementation can be thus dissolved. Both the arguments of TQM/BPR advocates and opponents will be shown to be necessarily incomplete. By taking the TQM/BPR constructs less seriously and offering an alternative to the totalizing discourse surrounding them, we may be able to unlock more of their potential.The main objective of this article is to explode the popular myth that the Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) constructs have not been properly understood or implemented. Elements of postmodern discourse are used to juggle with the meaning of TQM, BPR, and, at a later stage, with that of postmodernism itself. Problems traditionally identified as hampering TQM/BPR implementation can be thus dissolved. Both the arguments of TQM/BPR advocates and opponents will be shown to be necessarily incomplete. By taking the TQM/BPR constructs less seriously and offering an alternative to the totalizing discourse surrounding them, we may be able to unlock more of their potential.

Questioning Consensus, Cultivating Conflict

This article puts into question the preoccupation with consensus and convergence that seems to characterize the field of organization and management theory (OMT). Much effort has been directed to providing a model of unification legitimating the political containment of conflictual diversity. Even potentially controversial debates (such as the “paradigm wars”) have taken on a rather tired quality as academics tend to look for middle ground or are happy to retreat into private language games. This article suggests that we should move beyond bridging or containment strategies and strive for a true repoliticization of the field. This presupposes that we learn to value notions of conflict and struggle again, rather than muffling them by referring to a common so-called professionalism. In developing the argument, the article connects with the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, offering a challenge to integration and/or consensus and fragmentation and/or incommensurability discourses that seem so prevalent in the field today.

Financial phantasmagoria: corporate image-work in times of crisis

Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ‘image-work’ of financial institutions. Over the period January—December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the global financial crisis unfolded. In using the term ‘phantasmagoria’ we move beyond its colloquial sense of a set of strange images designed to dazzle towards the more technical connotation used by Rancière (2004) who suggested that words and images can offer a trace of an overall determining set-up if they are torn from their obviousness so they become phantasmagoric figures. The key phantasmagoric figure we identify here is that of the financial institution as timeless, immortal and unchanging; a coherent and autonomous entity amongst other actors. This notion of uniqueness belies the commonality of thinking which precipitated the global financial crisis as well as the limited capacity for control of financial institutions in relation to market events. It also functions as a powerful naturalizing force, making it hard to question certain aspects of the recent period of ‘capitalism in crisis’.

Everything you wanted to know about organization theory... but were afraid to ask Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek has produced a plethora of books over the past 15 years (at the rate of over one a year), many of which are all curiously alike, as he recycles compulsively a limited number of key themes. Yet, one never feels any sense of sterile repetition. In revisiting a topic, he often sheds new light on it, and so continues the conversation he seems to be having with himself. Žižek is not much interested in establishing a rational, sensible dialogue with his readers. Instead, he is a firm believer in clear-cut positions. His writing is invariably crisp, provocative, and devoid of any coyness. One of Žižek’s favourite one-liners is (paraphrasing Freud): ‘Why are you saying that you’re only giving a modest opinion when what you are giving is only a modest opinion’. Žižek doesn’t ‘do’ modesty. Žižek is also unconventional with the choice of philosophies he reads. Although all of his work goes through Lacanian concepts, he is not simply someone who fetishizes post-war French thought (as so many organization theorists do today). Instead, he uncompromisingly connects Lacanian categories to German idealist philosophy – the latter hardly being overly popular in organization theory. But the real uniqueness in Žižek’s writing lies in the fact that he effortlessly blends together ‘the ‘highest’ theory (Hegel, Lacan) and unrestrained enjoyment in the ‘lowest’ popular culture’ (Žižek, 2002a: 3), whilst casually (some would argue naively) moving from the psychoanalytic to the political and back again. Some might say: he’s all over the place. At first glance he seems to write for the browser: ‘They came up with the idea to do a CD-ROM, because I write in the same manner: click here, go there, use this fragment, that story or scene’ (Žižek, 2002b: 43). And indeed, the typical Žižekian unit of discourse is a wittily titled (eg, ‘the non-analysable Slovene’; ‘let the emperor have his clothes’) passage of between 5 and 15 pages, containing a dazzling cataract of demonstrations and examples from popular culture, for which a particular idea often seems a mere pretext. Wave upon wave of

New Sites/Sights: Exploring the White Spaces of Organization

Contemporary organization is increasingly understood as contingent and improvisational - and immersed in complex and shadowy realities where customary assumptions about the space and time of organization no longer hold. This Special Issue invites organization studies into an ambivalent space of sites/sights in organization, the double-play of this modest conceptual proposal necessary in order to open up the complex folding of the epistemological and the ontological in organization today. In this introduction we seek to establish and position a distinctive approach to what we claim to be ‘white spaces’ in organization. We show that any adequate treatment of these white spaces compels a significant breaching of the disciplinary norms of organization studies. Our argument derives from a consideration of a range of recently emerging concepts and analyses in the study of organization, all of which are suggestive of crisis and of emerging (anti-)forms of organization. This edition of Organization Studies publishes six papers and three originally commissioned book reviews that help advance this emerging problematic in organization, and which in their various ways extend our understanding of possible organizing futures.

A Rejoinder to and Reply from Weaver and Gioia: Of Giddens, Paradigms, and Philosophical Garb

vagueness in Weaver and Gioia’s interpretation of structuration theory which leads them to make assertions which do not altogether fit within the ontological framework with which Giddens provides us. In what follows we will explain why both metatheoretical pluralism and traditional forms of paradigmatic social enquiry are incompatible with a structurationist approach. In several instances we will use the structural-functionalist paradigm as an example. This does not mean that we