Introduction

Citation

Pelzer, P. and Letiche, H. (2009), "Introduction", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2009.29604baa.001

Introduction

Article Type: Editorial From: Society and Business Review, Volume 4, Issue 2

From motivation to Melville and back again: paths (not-)taken?

This issue of Society and Business Review (SBR) is about “the (un-)conscious of organising”. It grew out of workshop held by the UvH Utrecht in late 2007. Our intention was twofold. On the one hand, we wanted a gathering of scholars interested in combining theories and thoughts about organisation with other fields of knowledge. Interdisciplinary investigation capable of adding insight into the functioning of organisations and to create vivid discussion was welcome. The workshop atmosphere, apart from the usual large conferences, was intended to foster conversation. We announced that discussion of “fear, hope, betrayal, self, identity and choice” was welcome and reference to psychoanalytic thought was intended. And this points to our second goal: to generate work that productively uses insights from psychoanalysis as inspired by the work of Burkard Sievers. We took his retirement as an opportunity to invite colleagues from different backgrounds to reflect on the ways that they themselves have worked in the field of organisation studies. How do they react to the work of Sievers? How does he function as an example of the possibilities for research focussed on qualitative methods? How does his oeuvre point to the possibilities and effects of such a kind of research? If one is inspired by a similar kind of curiosity and the conviction that organisations are more than and different from just rational entities, what kinds of topics come to mind? When it is possible to take leave of taken-for-granted assumptions about organization and to look at them from a different perspective, what results do such research come to? As was to be expected, and as we intended, the outcome was quite diverse. We were grateful to see that the workshop justified a call for papers for this journal. Of course, these papers are not intended to provide an overview of what is possible. These papers provide examples and an idea of the potential richness of the field. If we allow ourselves to look beyond the traditional boundaries, we may well discover that the assumed limits have never been there, or have unnecessarily been assumed.

“From Motivation to Melville” is a title that needs explanation. The title combines the path of Sievers’ work and the paths that our authors have taken. The title reflects at the same time a common topic and the diversity of the results. “Motivation as a surrogate for meaning” (Sievers, 1994) is the title of Chapter 1 of Sievers’ book Work, Death, and Life Itself and it is in essence Sievers’ (1986) renowned paper “Beyond the surrogate of motivation”. In this paper, he described his bewilderment about the topic of motivation and its role in management literature. Motivation is a flawed, one-dimensional and misleading concept. Motivation theories favour causal explanations, reducing the complexity of social life in organisations, to provide managers with “pragmatic instruments” to influence behaviour (Sievers, 1994). What is left of motivation in contemporary organisations is an instrument, which is meant to increase efficiency. Siever’s assertions have far reaching consequences, or at least they should have. Motivation only becomes an issue when meaning either has disappeared or is lost from work. Increasing differentiation and fragmentation of work, fragments life as well. Something has been lost and into this void motivation theories have entered with an impoverished attempt to create (surrogate) meaning. Motivation becomes an excuse for meaning, which is incapable of filling the void. In a nutshell, this description of the crisis in meaning grounded in change(s) in work, which is made all the worse by ersatz theories of motivation, describes some of the assumptions shared by the authors gathered in this special issue. In their view, in how contemporary organisation and the management of organisations have been discussed, something profound has been lost. Research needs should critique theories and practices, which have in the silent reproduction of the existing, lost sight of humanity. And it should give orientation of how to regain an alternative view.

“Leadership as a perpetuation of immaturity”, is the title of another chapter of Sievers’ (1994) book. It describes his discontent with contemporary leadership research. After the preceding remarks on motivation, the reader should not be surprised by the radicality of Sievers’ remarks on this topic. That leadership should have something to do with the management of meaning is not surprising. But the connection Sievers makes to maturity and mortality has the potential to irritate the reader. To cut a rich argument desperately short, leadership can only unfold by adopting the simulacra of the immortal organisation. By identifying the organization as a “truth” lasting longer than the career of the manager, insight into one’s own mortality can be repressed. The working through of one’s own inner conflicts, which results in the awareness of meaning characteristic of a mature person, is blocked. Work, Death and Life Itself is a title that aptly summarises the book’s depth.

For a scholar in organizational studies to adopt Melville as his surrogate persona is quite remarkable. Melville’s magnum opus, Moby Dick is about the evil of ambition and what the masks of civilization hide. In it, Melville asserts that “all mortal greatness is but disease”. Melville celebrates human warmth and civility, and dreads their demise in commercial lust. He asserts that the human is being destroyed in the monomaniacal pursuit of the objectives and goals of power and success. The world is indifferent, blank and “white”. Human purposes are annihilated in the nothingness of the all-powerful void. Death, evil and destruction loom behind the veneer of civil life. Melville’s Captain Ahab is a controversial leader, to say the least. From his concern for motivation, maturity and mortality, Sievers arrives at Melville and Moby Dick.

We are especially glad that Burkard Sievers accepted the challenge to meet our request to finally write something about his rich but never yet finalised or published work on Melville, Moby Dick and the whaling industry. He has done so in a very personal way, which transcends the use of the novel for research goals or the justification of narrative elements in organizational studies. His “Way to Hermann Melville” and “Some thoughts and reflections from re-reading an unfinished book,” gives unusual and deeply perceptive insights into the writing process of the academic author. Besides, he describes the doubts of the author, if the paths he has taken are acceptable and convincing to others. Sievers’ paper serves as an encouragement for others to try to find their own paths.

In Melville’s fiction, normalcy is unmasked. What seems and what is are very different. Quotidian existence may try to deny the fraud and depravity of daily social relations, but seeing and experiencing will reveal the suffering and brutality of life. Melville published no prose during the last 35 years of his life. Can knowing and writing really be combined? Melville is the great skeptic of the social – in the contest of fright and love, fright may well be the victor. Sievers explores the contemporary tragedy of self-enclosed individualism, as did Melville in the nineteenth century. Several of the authors in this special number of SBR pursue these themes of civilization and violence, civility and despair, friendship and betrayal very much in the tradition of Melville and Sievers.

Two of the papers have in the last months become very timely contributions. And a third one, has our troubled times clearly as its background. The first two, highlight aspects of the present crisis in global financial markets. In the one, the behaviour of commodity traders is explored. And in the second, an alternative approach to risk management is investigated. And the third, contemplates the role of organisation studies in these very troubled times. Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Peter Pelzer take us to the heart of investment banking, to the individual trader and his or her relationship to the goods traded. Quoting from rich interview material, a bewildering attitude emerges and an ambivalent fascination of traders to whatever is traded. As with the marts, there is a clear link to the material world. It is coffee that the interviewees trade, and its corporeal quality – the beans’ smell, the roasting process, the warehouses visited in preparation for trading activities – appear and disappear from the account. But is it really so important for the traders to know about the physical qualities of the products they trade? Commodity trading, as in any other trading in investment banking, has become detached from the product. The vast majority of the deals are not based on any concrete commodities; they are completely virtual. Nobody dealing in these contracts is concerned in the actual delivery of the product(s). But the trading certainly has effects on the producers, their industry and the consumers. What the interviews demonstrate is that for the traders there is more at stake than just the hedging of risks. Trading is not just about diversifying business risk so that it becomes bearable for oneself or for an employer. There is in additional a need to explain the motivation for trading on the traders side. Their risk preferences may be very different from their employers’. The authors take inspiration from two very different domains with an illuminating result. The aesthetic concept of the sublime is used to highlight the risk preferences of traders via the metaphor of motor-biking. The comparison brings another dimension of trading, beyond profit and exchange, perceivable. Trading is not just business; it is sublime. And therefore trading is beyond rationality.

Monica Lee takes us into the world of a UK livestock market and, perhaps without having initially intended it, arrives in the very centre of the present debate on financial risk in globalised markets. The contrast could not be sharper. On the one hand, we are witness to a gigantic failure of risk management in the financial industry, an industry in which business is exclusively focused on the handling of risk. Banking is about promises to pay and banks must avoid that these promises cannot be fulfilled to exist. Risk management is essential to the needed trust, and is subject to an enormous amount of data collection and processing. This is a very rational and sophisticated process, which obviously nevertheless has failed. And it failed not for a single bank; it failed for most of the financial industry. Lee presents us an example from the “real” world, in contrast to the virtual world of international finance. Her case is about livestock and a livestock mart. This is overwhelmingly corporeal; it is about many animals, large ones, and the smell of the farms, or the noise of the animals. All of this contributes to the corporeal image of the business. Agriculture, of course, has become less and less important as a contributor to the overall gross national product. And fewer and fewer people are working in it, as economies develop. However, Lee perhaps has a lesson to tell us about the handling of risk. At the mart, commercial risk management and financial decision making are successfully guided by a careful consideration of rumour. Mart practices upset abstract notions of good business, but being successful they should get more recognition. So-called good business practices seem to of late to have been profoundly shattered by reality.

Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter discuss the development of organisation studies during the past 40 years. They commence their paper: “We live in troubled times and much of that trouble involves organisation(s)”. Organisation studies therefore needs to be at the centre of the discussion of the effects of organisation, and it should be able to contribute to a change in favour of the commonweal, instead of merely representing sectional interests. Despite the somewhat romantic and/or idealistic impression that this demand makes on us (or are the writers of this introduction too cynical?), their paper addresses a serious problem of appearance versus reality. We see exciting developments in organizational theory, especially in the development of new epistemologies, but also a deep lack of influence on practice. There may be no possible retreat into the ivory tower, but this alone does not make criticism effective, relevant or desirable. Jackson and Carter argue that organizational studies without political economy is ideological delusion. In our present crises in the financial industry and in sustainability, their call for a re-centring of research sounds more plausible than at any other time in many years.

A topic that has not received much attention in organisational research is betrayal. It is obviously part of the needed analysis of the darker side of organisation, wherein topics like the psychotic implications of life in organisations (“The psychotic university”, Sievers, 2008) and vengeance and revenge (Sievers and Mersky, 2006), are explored. Sievers’ empirical examination of these themes includes exploring the darker sides of organized existence via the group analyses of photographs in the social photo-matrix (Sievers, 2006). In the papers contained here, three authors ask “Do we begin – or does our ‘I’ begin – with betrayal?” Their (mini-)social matrix explores identity and betrayal. Robert French, Peter Case and Jonathan Gosling start their contribution in a very straightforward manner. Betrayal is the exception that is disloyal to the stable relationship. In betrayal our acceptance of behaviour stops and we are outraged in our feelings of rejection and the abuse of our trust. The authors’ analysis, in a way already subsumed in the opening statement, elaborates on a more fundamental and surprising relationship between friendship and betrayal. Discussing a concrete case, which was an experience of one of the authors, they suggest that betrayal may have a more fundamental foundation in relationship than is assumed in the everyday reasoning about it. Betrayal may be an inevitable part of human experience and friendship may not be the normal at all, but an occasional gift.

In what sense can one “Come Back Again” from the unmasking of sociability, immortality and sense-making? If one has seen the depths of despair and loneliness, and lived without illusions, can one return to academic writing and normal society? This is the question Melville (based on Shakespeare) poses and that Sievers addresses. The Weick-ian (Weick, 1995) celebration of sense-making as a rewarding social activity leading to success is hereby put to the test.

About the authors

Peter Pelzer Studied economics, with an emphasis on planning and organisation, and philosophy, in Wuppertal, Germany. He spent most of his professional life working in and for banks, currently as an independent consultant. He is also a visiting Reader at the University for Humanistics, Utrecht, The Netherlands. He wrote a book which explored the question what postmodern philosophers and aesthetic thinking can contribute to organisation theory. He is very much interested in understanding the processes he experiences during his projects beyond the textbook knowledge of organisation and management theory and publishes the results in journals like Culture and Organization, Human Relations, Organization Studies and others.

Hugo LeticheHumanitas and Research Professor of “Meaning in Organisation” at the University for Humanistics, Utrecht, The Netherlands, where he is the Director of the part-time PhD-programme. He is a member of the RUOS ethics and organisation Research institute at Bristol Business School. His latest book is Making Healthcare Care (2008). He has published, amongst others, in Organization, Organization Studies, Journal of Organisational Change Management, Culture and Organization, Revue Science de Gestions.

Peter Pelzer, Hugo Letiche