Peter Case

The Violent Rhetoric of Re-engineering: Management Consultancy on the Offensive

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) was a leading form of organizational restructuring from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This paper seeks to contextualize its development and account for its particularly bellicose language by reflecting on its historical antecedents in the west and its contemporary competitors in the east. We suggest that one way of reading BPR is as a form of ‘inverse colonization’ in which US managerial discourse both assimilated and revolted against the growing domination of Japanese thinking and practice. We conclude with some speculative comments on related causes of the rise of violent managerial rhetoric.

Remember Re‐engineering? The Rhetorical Appeal of a Managerial Salvation Device

This paper subjects a contemporary managerial doctrine, business process re‐engineering (BPR), to rhetorical scrutiny. Finding analytical inspiration from the writings of the American literary critic Kenneth Burke and adopting an anthropological attitude towards ‘history’, it seeks to demystify the appeal of BPR rhetoric as represented in various published and unpublished texts. The analysis makes extensive use of ‘sacred’ motifs in order to gain ‘perspective through incongruity’ and expose the secular motives at work in BPR literature. An analogy is drawn between ethnographic examples of ‘amnesia’ drawn from the authors study of a computer installation and ‘amnesia writ large’ through BPR. On the basis of this comparison, it is suggested that BPR can be read as offering cathartic absolution of the collective guilt associated with information technology mismanagement. Any ‘doubts’ that a managerial public may be harbouring are rhetorically harnessed by BPR protagonists in their attempts to acquire secular converts. The popularity of BPR may now be on the decline but there will be other similarly instrumental agendas to replace it in the future to which students of management need to be alert.

The spiritual organization: critical reflections on the instrumentality of workplace spirituality

This article offers a theoretical contribution to the current debate on workplace spirituality by: (a) providing a selective critical review of scholarship, research and corporate practices which treat workplace spirituality in performative terms, that is, as a resource or means to be manipulated instrumentally and appropriated for economic ends; (b) extending Etzioni’s analysis of complex organizations and proposing a new category, the “spiritual organization”, and; (c) positing three alternative positions with respect to workplace spirituality that follow from the preceding critique. The spiritual organization can be taken to represent the development of a trajectory of social technologies that have sought, incrementally, to control the bodies, minds, emotions and souls of employees. Alternatively, it might be employed to conceptualize the way in which employees use the workplace as a site for pursuing their own spiritualities (a reverse instrumentalism). Finally, we consider the possible incommensurability of “work organization” and “spirituality” discourses.

Business Process Reengineering Reappraised: The Politics and Technology of Forgetting

In this paper, we reappraise the phenomenon of business process reengineering through our own recent case study and survey findings, and through developing an interpretivist account of its appeal and content. A preliminary assessment questions what is actually being achieved under the label of BPR and the efficacy of the methodologies and tools available. We then argue that its claims to radicalism and novelty are exaggerated, provide an externalist account for part of its appeal, together with locating BPR as a form of utopian thought applied to work organizations. We then deepen the analysis by suggesting how its essentially political origins, aims and characteristics link inextricably with the high importance management commentators give to the role of information technology as a catalyst and consolidator of radical change in how work is organized and performed. A key concept throughout is that of deracination — the rooting out of the past. In the view that we develop, a significant impetus within BPR is toward a technology-supported deracination that requires a collective forgetting. This forms both an essential part of its appeal, but also creates a number of major difficulties for BPR as a set of actioned organizational practices.

Aesthetics, performativity and resistance in the narratives of a computer programming community

This article reports on an empirical study of a computer programmer community, focusing on online exchanges in which participants discuss the aesthetics of coding. Naturalistic data were collected during a 12-month period of non-participant observation of the software community in question. The authors estimate that approximately 200 participants are represented in the main dataset. Narrative data are presented under two interpretative rubrics: ‘programmer performatives’ and ‘commercial performativity’. We seek to demonstrate that there is the online equivalent of a great deal of intricate ‘face work’ that programmers do in their narrative exchanges. In expressing and conforming to a ‘hacker ethic’, programmer narratives simultaneously evince technical, ethical and aesthetic motives. There is frequent articulation of resistance and subversive intent expressed toward representatives of employers and employing organizations. Software engineers are acutely aware of the facets of organizational control and demands for performativity that they feel compromise their artistic endeavours. Programmers make sense of their condition ideologically both through their practical pursuit of coding ideals and by espousing a hacker ethic that legitimates their passionate engagement with coding tasks.

Wisdom of the Moment: Pre‐modern Perspectives on Organizational Action

Although wisdom might be considered a quaint concept in a post‐industrialised, instrumental and secular world, it deserves serious consideration. This is done primarily from a philosophical perspective and is intended to encourage the reintroduction of wisdom into educational and developmental programmes, especially for managers and leaders. Mindful of the potential naïvete of transplanting systems of thinking from one epoch to another, we nonetheless examine the relevance of pre‐modern thought to the post‐modern condition. This is done by radically reinterpreting classical Greek texts as Pierre Hadot has done to derive a meaning of “philosophy” and the place of wisdom in the ancient world. The concepts of wisdom, virtue and enacted ethics derived from this re‐interpretation are then applied to an ethnographic case study involving a senior executive. This study suggests that a Stoical “wisdom of the moment” philosophy may characterize contemporary leadership practice.

Understanding leadership in the environmental sciences

Leadership is often assumed, intuitively, to be an important driver of sustainable development. To understand how leadership is conceptualized and analyzed in the environmental sciences and to discover what this research says about leadership outcomes, we conducted a review of environmental leadership research over the last 10 years. We found that much of the environmental leadership literature focuses on a few key individuals and desirable leadership competencies. The literature also reports that leadership is one of the most important of a number of factors contributing to effective environmental governance. Only a subset of the literature highlights interacting sources of leadership, disaggregates leadership outcomes, or evaluates leadership processes in detail. We argue that the literature on environmental leadership is highly normative. Leadership is typically depicted as an unequivocal good, and its importance is often asserted rather than tested. We trace how leadership studies in the management sciences are evolving and argue that, taking into account the state of the art in environmental leadership research, more critical approaches to leadership research in environmental science can be developed.

From theoria to theory: Leadership without contemplation

This article explores the transition of the theological and philosophical concept of theoria—contemplation—to the modern notion of theory. Theory derives linguistically from theoria and retains a connection with knowledge. However, it has lost and, moreover, typically excludes theoria’s focus upon the direct experiential knowledge of the divine. In keeping with the thrust of this special issue, we focus on how the secularization of the theological concept of theoria defines in a profound manner the limits and possibilities of thinking and theorizing work and organization. We examine the nature of theoria and the transitions that have led to its metamorphosis. It is suggested that dominant forms of theorizing work and organization are typically performative (Lyotard, 1984). This is illustrated, somewhat ironically, through a review of Spiritual Leadership Theory, which appears to promote spiritual leadership without contemplation.

Attitudes of undergraduate business students toward sustainability issues

Purpose – This paper aims to report on findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study of undergraduate business students’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions concerning sustainability issues. Design/methodology/approach – To improve understanding of the potential effects of changes in the curriculum, business students enrolled during the academic year prior to a redesigned, sustainability-informed, curriculum were surveyed. Familiarity with key sustainability terms was tested using a semi-structured questionnaire applied across two campuses of James Cook University, Australia. Quantitative data were complemented by use of open-ended questions that yielded qualitative insight into a range of student knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and normative influences relating to sustainability and climate change. Findings – Findings reflect naive awareness of the potential impact of individual contributions to sustainability and environmental challenges. They reveal a tendency to regard major issues as beyond p...

Social dreaming and ecocentric ethics: sources of non-rational insight in the face of climate change catastrophe

The article considers the role of dreams as social, rather than individual, phenomena and suggests that as such they may serve as resources for ‘future imaginings’ with respect to potentially devastating consequences of climate change (and other transgressions of planetary boundaries). Adopting a socio-analytical perspective, it contemplates the possibility of a societal level ‘cosmology episode’ caused by catastrophic climate change; a critical point of rupture in the meaning-making process which leaves local rationalities in ruin. Drawing on a ‘representative anecdote’, the article finds allegorical parallels between the cultural collapse of a traditional indigenous culture and the impending threat of ecocrisis currently facing humanity. The possibilities of seeing and imagining offered by collective forms of dreaming are explored alongside development of a non-anthropocentric ethics. Our focus is on ways of sensing, thinking and talking about climate change that are less dependent on a rational conscious subject. The article thus enquires into what cultural means or resources might be available to (post)modern Western societies that, like the shamanic dream-vision of certain traditional cultures, might enable them to draw on non-anthropocentric sensibilities and organize responses to an impending cultural crisis. We conclude by offering Gordon Lawrence’s social dreaming matrix as one possible medium through which to imagine and see beyond climate change catastrophe.