Reading Management and Organization in Film

Citation

Page, M.L. (2012), "Reading Management and Organization in Film", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 128-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465641211223519

Emma Bell's book opens with a statement of intent – to explore how the subjects of “management” and “organization” are represented in film. Her rationale refers to the general role that visual media plays in society in determining the information we receive and the impressions we form; the ability of film to represent management and organisation at an emotional as well as an intellectual level, providing individuals with a way of making their own experiences meaningful. Of these the most important rationale stems from the role of film in producing systems of discourse which have helped to shape our collective perceptions of management and continue to form our experiences of organised work.

The book is divided into eight standalone chapters, beginning with an historical account of the organisation of the American film industry and continuing with an analysis of specific constructs of “organisation man”, “the worker” and representations of the gendered “other” within film genres. The analysis developed in each chapter is grounded in a wide range of specific films distinguished by genre and by the temporal and social contexts in which they were produced, and referenced to key constructs in organisation theory that they appear to replicate or support. The relationship between concepts drawn from organisation studies and management literature and readings of specific films is illustrated throughout in text boxes. This format is ideally designed to inspire and enable a selection of films for teaching as well as for research purposes. The conclusion ends with a restatement of the central proposition of the book – that film plays a role in producing systems of discourse which help to shape collective perceptions of management that continue to inform our experience of organized work. The case for this is made by exploring the coherence of certain themes such as “organisation man” and “the evil organization”, their recurrence across film texts and their relative endurance despite significant socio‐economic changes since filmmaking began. The appeal of these film texts is, Emma Bell suggests, based on their ability to create resonances with their audiences.

The central argument is set out in chapter one – “reading film, studying management”:

The approach taken treats film as a series of texts which can be read for meaning in a similar way to written texts like books and other phenomena including objects. This approach entails two assumptions: first, that embedded within texts are the interpretations of their creators and, second, that the meaning of a text is acquired through its relationship to other texts […] Thus each of the films in this book constructs a particular image of organization and management in which we situate ourselves using our cultural experience of this phenomenon (p. 13).

Following Berger (1972), Emma Bell argues that the process of seeing enables us to situate ourselves within a film – but also to be challenged to rethink the way we view images. This she argues is an important skill, enabling us to gain insight into how other audiences might situate themselves in relation to films that represent management and organisations, and enhance our ability to read films and interpret their social and cultural significance relative to our own organisational experience and the experience of others.

Various approaches to film analysis are considered and illustrated. Formal aesthetic analysis, concerned with the meanings that might be attributed to film as an art form, is offered as a resource from which we might draw to explore what films say about organisation and management. Genre and ideology, intertextuality, the role of the audience and deconstructive perspectives are introduced as approaches that inform the author's analysis. This leads into a review of reflectional and social constructivist ways of reading film, and an orientation to the approach developed in subsequent chapters of the book. Film is part of the process of social construction of management and organisation – and these activities are revised by social actors as they go about their lives, rather than objectively knowable. Films cannot show or tell what management and organisation is really like – making meaning of film involves a process of interpretation by the reader influenced by the context in which the particular reading takes place and by self‐identify. They can be a basis from which to develop greater reflexivity by questioning the meanings attached to management and organisation based on a more informed understanding of where they come from and how they are formed.

Chapter two considers how the organisation processes of film help to determine its form. It focuses on the institution of filmmaking, distribution and exhibition – the material contexts of its production and consumption. The argument is made that the tension between commercial and artistic interests is perceived by cultural workers to be fundamentally incompatible, and that this opposition not only shapes the way that they depict their own organisations in texts, but also their view of organisations more generally:

by positioning themselves and their activities as antithetical to the values of business creative workers construct management as distinct and separate and position manages as the enemy that undermines their creative efforts (p. 62).

However, she notes, the production of meaning about management and organisation in film is not the sole preserve of creative workers; film is the result of collaboration between managers as agents of capital and creative workers, each dependent on the other to transform ideas into cultural products, and binary opposition between cultural and economic capital in film can be overstated.

The tension between a binary oppositional view of management and organisation and an understanding of their interdependency is explored thematically in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3, “The invisible enemy”, considers negative representations of organisational life such as employees crushed by monotonous work routines, corporations as villains, organisations as uncaring and immoral, why such representations exist and what potential effects they may have on the way we think about management and organisation. The chapter analyses in detail how the signifiers of organisation in film “make explicit a vision of the organization as the enemy” and then moves on to consider the effects of these representations. Short analyses are offered of how films that date from the beginning of the film industry up to the present day can be read. Each analysis is referenced to and grounded in a brief review of key literature that adopts such a reading of organisational life. For example classic films such as Metropolis (1927) and Modern Times (1936) may be read as a commentary on the dehumanising effects of large‐scale industrial capitalism; films such as the Rogue Trader (2000) can be read as an illustration of psychoanalytically informed accounts of the psychotic or “mad” organisation, and others such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) as an exploration of how people who work for such organisations are induced to conform or comply with their demands and of how individuals with higher status actively participate. The chapter concludes with a suggestion following Zizek (2002), that the positioning of the organisation as enemy enables the actions of the organisation to be distanced from its members, and in particular the hero or “organisation man” who is the subject of chapter four.

Within each chapter the author engages the reader by weaving an epistemological argument into a detailed analysis of representations of organisation in film, the discursive categories produced and the epistemological assumptions on which they are based. These are identified as an objectivist position that asserts an organisational reality independent of the individuals who inhabit them, alongside a social constructivist understanding of social actors as active agents who shape the meaning of organisations through their own sense‐making practices. For example in the final chapter, Spectres oforganization the author turns to “dirty work” and the use of film to give voice to those who tend to be silenced through contemporary management practices: migratory workers, call centre operators, office temps, crop harvesters, food‐processing workers. She argues that film can be understood as a means of making the invisible visible, making the situation of “the silenced” more “real” to audiences, thus representing the negative human effects of global capital. Many of the films in this category are documentary, and this returns the reader to the central argument of the book: what we experience as the reality of the film is fiction, through which reality is constituted and structured.

What then I wondered might the implications of this argument be for how we read film and the significance we attribute to it now – how do we come to understand the reality of organisations through encountering them on the screen as a mediated version of reality?

I turn back to the earlier chapters, and resolved to test this through my own engagement with critical analyses of constructs with which I am relatively familiar: gender within discourses of organisation. “Organisation man” is introduced as a discursive category used to celebrate corporate managerial values and as a set of representations that continue to inform the way we think about work and the workplace today. These constructs are located in the socio‐economic context in which “management” was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, on the one hand celebrating and on the other introducing scepticism about the instrumental rationality of the human spirit. The construct further relies on establishing opposition between organisation man – manager and woman secretary.

The text turns to organisational literature on competing discourses of what a secretary is how representations of women in organisational roles such as clerical workers, secretaries, career women and office wives developed historically, how these are illustrated in film and analysed in research texts. In conclusion the discourses of organisation man and of organisation woman are considered to have remained relatively static, despite socio‐economic changes, confirming the desirability of certain organisational roles and the undesirability of others. In chapter 6, “representing the other”, representations of women in film are analysed in detail. In the films considered a relatively consistent set of characters are described, all in oppositional terms to the “organization man”. As Emma Bell suggests the similarity with the findings of feminist and organisation researchers such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter might lead to a conclusion that there is a close relation between representations and lived experience. What then is the direction of influence? Do films confirm culturally constructed differences making them seem natural and inevitable? Or do films carry contradictory meanings concerning gender relations in the workplace so that women who embody feminist principles can be represented alongside others that contest these meanings?

My mind turns to the television series Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007‐2010) to which I am a recent convert. In the series Don the successful “ad man” in 1960s Manhatten embodies both the glamour and fragility of hierarchical position power within the business environment. His female colleagues adopt different strategies for negotiating the gendered and sexualised complexity and contradictions of office politics. In doing so they are alternately supported by Don in disrupting gendered narratives and engage in power struggles in their own right. Don's emotional vulnerability is shown in his attraction to and inability to sustain a relationship with a female colleague who is clearly positioned as his professional and business equal – and who is an expert in the softer skills which he initially derided and then found indispensable to advertising – followed by his dumping of her in favour of an young ambitious secretary who flatters him. Mad Men was released after the book was published and offers an example of a film that provides scope for audience exploration of their own readings of experiences of gendered power within organisations and a critical engagement with organisational discourses.

Many recent television and film series that I enjoy watching are set in police or crime‐solving organisations, have female bosses or central characters in highly successful organisational roles whose success seems in some way dependent on their holding a different set of values or an outsider perception that affords them a set of insights unavailable to their male colleagues. Among these The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009) and the Danish TV series The Killing (2007) are cop movies in which the young female heroines outsmart the perpetrators of sexual violence and incompetent male colleagues and are both victims of corrupt organisation and holders of alternative values. Then I think about my fascination with Don Draper's (Mad Men) struggle to maintain his managerial “mask”, his fictional and highly edited account of his past, and disastrous mistakes when the mask of rationality slips in the workplace. As his relationships with female characters become less easy to compartmentalise as “not work”, the boundaries between “work” and “sex” and “home” and “emotional” intimacy become more permeable. In each of these films – and many others – it seems that the construct of organisation is made more permeable, by the reworking of gender within leadership roles. Central characters both reproduce and subvert traditional macho ways of leading and organising. In doing so they offer a rich resource for reflexivity about how we construct our own narratives of organisational living.

Do these television series influence how I view organisation and my place in it? Yes! I realise with a start, they legitimate the emotionally charged experience of being a member of an organisation, externalise the complex relational and gendered power dynamics of the workplace, and in offering a container and visual representation of these lived experiences they make ambivalence about “work” more bearable. As Emma Bell suggests there is a high degree of consistency between empirical studies of women's experience of organisations and management and their representation in film texts and this suggests widely shared and collectively understood experience. Film constitutes one site among many with which the struggle for meaning is located, moreover there are competing discourse within film texts, providing audiences with images that challenge as well as endorse.

Emma Bell in this book has sought to offer a resource through which a questioning engagement with the discourses they produce might be cultivated. The book does in my view offer a rich resource on two levels. First, by the scope, breadth and variety of films introduced and referenced to research literature on in film and critical organisation and management. Second, interwoven with this source material, the book makes the case for a social constructivist approach to reading film or any text, and illustrates this on an iterative basis in relation to the discourses themes and constructs of organisation and management that are presented. I thoroughly recommend this book as a resource for teaching what a social constructivist approach to management and organisation might mean, and as a contribution to the research field of visual inquiry within organisation studies.

About the author

Margaret Page teaches organization studies on a variety of undergraduate and post‐graduate programmes in the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of the West of England in Bristol. She is a university Learning and Teaching fellow and draws from inquiry‐based learning and the arts to develop methods for research, organizational learning and leadership development. Her professional background is in public services where she has worked in a variety of roles in management education, organization development consultancy, equalities promotion, and community development. Her special interest is in gender relations and women's equality, and she is currently researching the discourses and practices of gender equality promotion in UK public services.