Theory After Postmodern Condition

Theory after the PostmodernCondition

Campbell JonesUniversity of Leicester, UK

Abstract. In the context of an apparent crisis of grand narratives andcontinuing reference to the postmodern condition, this article considersaspects of the development of theory in organization studies over the pastdecade and offers some reflections on prospects for the future. Theseissues are presented via a reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Post-modern Condition and the way that this book has been received inorganization studies. This ‘paralogical’ reading contests a number ofwidespread assumptions in organization studies about Lyotard andFrench theory, and provides the opening for a discussion of the future oftheory in organization studies. This involves asking questions about (1)the consumption of theory in organization studies; (2) the concepts incurrency in organization studies today; and (3) the shifting divisions oforganization studies. Key words. agonistics, critical/critique, ethics,judgement/judging, knowledge, legitimation, morality, paralogy, perfor-mativity

‘Today, life is fast. It vaporizes morals. Futility suits the postmodern, forwords as well as things. But that doesn’t keep us from asking questions:how to live, and why? The answers are deferred. As they always are, ofcourse. But this time, there is a semblance of knowing: that life is goingevery which way. But do we know this? We represent it to ourselves rather.Every which way of life is flaunted, exhibited, enjoyed for the love ofvariety. The moral of morals would be that of “aesthetic” pleasure. Here,

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then, are fifteen notes on postmodern aestheticization. And against it!You’re not done living because you chalk it up to artifice.’

Jean-François Lyotard, from the preface to Moralites Postmodernes(English translation: Lyotard, 1997: vii)

I have been asked to write something that reflects on the state oforganization studies in the light of developments over the past decadeand make projective comments about the next decade. The general frameis one of ‘W(h)ither Organization Studies?’ which poses questions of theviability (wither?) and the direction (whither?) of organization studies.Faced with this, I should admit that I am struck by something peculiarlyanachronistic about this question. It might be that I haven’t been gettingout enough, but most of the work that I read and most of the people withwhom I talk these days are rather suspicious of presupposing a ‘totality’,that is, a unity that is attributed to things such as an organization, asociety, a discourse or a person. Indeed, it might be that over the pastdecade those doing organization studies have become increasingly suspi-cious of assuming integration, unity and wholeness. To frame it posi-tively, and a little grandly, in recent years organization studies hasbecome increasingly attuned to complexity, discontinuity, conflict, resist-ance and difference.

This kind of story will be familiar to those who have followed the‘paradigm debates’ of recent years. When, ten years ago, Jeffrey Pfeffer(1993) laid out his concerns that organization studies did not consist of aharmonious whole, this involved a certain recognition of a pluralizationof organization studies. He wasn’t happy about this state of affairs, ofcourse, but on the level of description he shares much with Mike Reed’s(1992, 1999) description of a shift from an earlier state of ‘orthodoxconsensus’ towards a state of ‘pluralistic diversity’, that resulted from theunravelling of the hegemony of structural contingency theory and aconcomitant destabilization of ‘organization studies’ from the late 1960son. It is almost as if Pfeffer and Reed tell pretty much the same story, evenif one is happy about it and the other is not. Because whether one felt thatthis was a space of a new freedom or a disastrous return to Babel, by theend of the 1990s it seems almost ‘agreed’ that there are a variety ofparadigms or discourses on organization, and that organization studies isno longer the stable unity that it might have been in the past (see, forexample Burrell, 1999; Deetz, 1996; Hassard and Kelemen, 2002; Kele-men and Hassard, 2003; Westwood and Clegg, 2003). If anything, the newconsensus about organization studies seems to be that there is no con-sensus.

In such a context, and presented with a request to comment on ‘thestate of organization studies’ I found myself wondering if there was eithersomething wrong with me or if the editors of Organization had suddenlytaken a U-turn from the claims about heterodoxy and diversity withwhich they had launched the journal (Burrell et al., 1994). The state of

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organization studies seemed to be one in which the very idea of anintegrated organization studies had been called into doubt, yet the editorsof the journal were asking me to talk about this fragmented and unstableobject. Perhaps I have fallen into their trap and have come up with thepluralist description of organization studies that they were after all along.Or maybe this is just a roundabout way of saying that I’m not sure if thequestion ‘w(h)ither organization studies?’ is particularly meaningful.

Rather than taking these difficulties as absolute limits, I propose to takethem as a starting point from which to pose some questions about theapparent ‘crisis of grand narratives’ to which I have already beenalluding. It is clear that concepts such as narrative, and various otherconcepts such as language games and discourse have had a significantimpact on organization studies in recent years (Astley and Zammuto,1992; Boje, 2001; Grant et al., 1998). Indeed, I have already evoked adistinction between small narratives and grand narratives to describe thepluralization of organization studies. But in this article, rather thanstopping with the story about the decline of grand narratives and theproliferation of small narratives, I will try to examine some of theseconcepts in a little more detail. To put it simply, this could be seen as acritical reading of the new grand narrative of the withering of grandnarratives. I pose these questions about small and grand narratives bylooking at the way that these concepts are introduced by Jean-FrançoisLyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition and the way that they havemade their way into organization studies. This will provide a launchingpad for a discussion of the movement of concepts and the state of theoryin organization studies and will suggest, perhaps, some things aboutorganization studies ‘in general’.

Critical StrategiesLyotard’s The Postmodern Condition probably requires little by way ofintroduction. His ‘report on knowledge’ was commissioned by theGovernment of Quebec and published in French in 1979 and in Englishin 1984, and propelled him onto the international scene. When ThePostmodern Condition appeared Lyotard was already a well establishedphilosopher and activist, having published a surprisingly diverse numberof books on phenomenology, politics and art, and an infamous critique ofMarx and Freud (Lyotard, 1991a, 1993b, 1990a, 1993a). Afterwards hepublished works on language and injustice, time, Heidegger, Kant’saesthetics, Augustine, and justice (Lyotard, 1988, 1991b, 1990b, 1994,2000; Lyotard and Thebaud, 1985) and a series of articles on variousaspects of the postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1992, 1997, 1999).

The Postmodern Condition is a short book, and on the face of it appearsto be simpler and more ‘sociological’ than much of Lyotard’s other work.But this should not lead us to think that it is a straightforward text or thatwe are entitled to read it in a straightforward way. Indeed, there are a

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number of aspects of this text that suggest that it is far from easy. To beginwith, there are numerous problems with the meaning of this word‘postmodern’ which, as Neils Brugger (2001) has carefully documented,means quite different things throughout Lyotard’s various works. Further,Lyotard uses it in quite a different way from other thinkers, and hence inThe Postmodern Condition the postmodern condition is not specified asan epoch, or an epistemology, a style of architecture, art or culture, or anorganizational form. Rather, here the postmodern condition refers toan apparent ‘crisis of narratives’ that had emerged in the years before thebook was published. Lyotard opens with this explanation:

The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highlydeveloped societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern todescribe that condition. The word is in current use on the Americancontinent among sociologists and critics; it designates the state of ourculture following the transformations which, since the end of the nine-teenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and thearts. The present study will place these transformations in the context ofthe crisis of narratives. (1984: xxiii)

The difficulties of Lyotard’s text are not restricted to movements of themeaning of ‘the postmodern’. In particular it is important to be carefulabout the way that the text shifts between descriptive and prescriptivestatements, to the point that it is often very hard to tell if Lyotard issimply describing the postmodern condition or if he is commending orcondemning it. Lyotard’s text oscillates between the first and the secondperson, sometimes stating what ‘we’ think and sometimes what ‘he’thinks. Such oscillations present a major difficulty, and if ignored mightlead one to think that Lyotard simply endorses the postmodern conditionthat he describes. In order to address this problem, we should recall thestress that Lyotard puts on the difference of what ‘is’ from what ‘ought tobe’ and with this the language games of denotation and prescription. Inthis Lyotard is very traditional: ‘that which ought to be cannot beconcluded from that which is, the “ought” from the “is” . . . betweenstatements that narrate and describe something and statements thatprescribe something, there is always some talking to be done’ (in Lyotardand Thebaud, 1985: 17).

In the light of the difficulties of the meaning of the postmodern and theslippage between description and prescription, it is unsurprising thatThe Postmodern Condition has been read in a number of quite differentways. In organization studies this has led some to be quite suspicious ofthe way that Lyotard’s book has been read. Catherine Casey, for example,suggests that ‘Little, if any of Lyotard’s work (other than secondaryreadings of The Postmodern Condition) has been directly influential inthe field of organization studies’ (2002: 124). While this is an importantreminder about the partiality of readings of Lyotard in organizationstudies, Casey nevertheless fails to do justice to the large number ofwriters who have, both directly and indirectly, been influenced by


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Lyotard’s work, several of whom I will discuss in this article. Butmoreover, Casey offers us little by way of an alternative to the state ofaffairs that she diagnoses, preferring to criticize rather than intervene in away that would indicate a different direction. Rather than just criticizingthe way that Lyotard has been received, my goal in this article will be toindicate something of what might be a ‘better’ path.

An alternative critical strategy to Casey’s is suggested in the approachtaken by Hugo Letiche. In a criticism that echoes Casey’s, Letiche arguesthat:

Neither attention to, nor much knowledge of, Lyotard’s philosophicalthought has been evident in the postmodernism debate in organizationaltheory. A perusal of the literature reveals many citations of the PostmodernCondition, but a marked lack of references to the rest of Lyotard’s work.(Letiche, forthcoming)

As we will see, for Lyotard the goal of thought is not continuity or theresolution of thinking into a complacent consensus, but is grounded in anotion of inventiveness and difference. In the light of this, Letiche offersan alternative and inventive reading of Lyotard that challenges organiza-tion studies to rethink itself and its relation to The Postmodern Condi-tion. In this article I will try to extend Letiche’s analysis, not by turning tothe wider body of Lyotard’s work, as Letiche does, but by proposing tolook again at The Postmodern Condition. Where Letiche proposes to lookelsewhere in Lyotard’s work to find an alternative reading of Lyotard, Iwill suggest that the basis for an alternative reading of Lyotard can befound in The Postmodern Condition.

The Postmodern ConditionHaving established the object of his study as the condition of knowledgein the most highly developed societies and that this will be placed in thecontext of the crisis of narratives, the second paragraph of Lyotard’sintroduction reads as follows:

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yard-stick of science, the majority of them turned out to be fables. But to theextent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities andseeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It thenproduces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, adiscourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate anyscience that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kindmaking an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics ofSpirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational orworking subject, or the creation of wealth. (1984: xxiii)

Lyotard is not concerned simply with narratives, but with the way thatnarratives justify or legitimate themselves in order to take on the status ofsomething more than mere stories. This concern with the legitimationof narratives signals a clear relation to Jurgen Habermas’s Legitimation


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Crisis, which appeared six years before The Postmodern Condition and isa major point of contention for Lyotard’s analysis of the crisis of narra-tives. The back cover of the English paperback of The PostmodernCondition simply states that ‘His book is about what Jurgen Habermas hascalled “legitimation”. How do we legitimate the criteria for sorting truestatements from false?’ The centrality of this concern with legitimation isimportant because it draws attention to questions about the reading ofThe Postmodern Condition in organization studies. Strangely, organiza-tion studies has tended to pay very little attention to Lyotard’s concernwith legitimation, which is odd given that organization studies emergedout of the shadow of Max Weber and that the legitimation of domi-nation was one of Weber’s central concerns (see, for example, Weber,1978, ch. 3).

This reiterates the questions of the partiality of readings of ThePostmodern Condition in organization studies that were raised by Caseyand Letiche. Similar questions can be found by turning to Lyotard’sdiscussion of legitimation. He specifies a science as modern if it legit-imates itself through recourse to a ‘metadiscourse’ that appeals to a‘grand narrative’. Lyotard is clear that there are a number of grandnarratives that modern science has appealed to and in the opening pageof The Postmodern Condition he lists five. Elsewhere we find this list ina slightly different form. For example, in The Postmodern Explained toChildren, he writes:

The thought and action of the 19th and 20th centuries are governed by anIdea (in the Kantian sense): the Idea of emancipation. It is of course framedin quite different ways, depending upon what we call the philosophies ofhistory, the grand narratives which attempt to organize this mass of events:the Christian narrative of the redemption of original sin through love; theAufklarer [Enlightenment] narrative of emancipation from ignorance andservitude through knowledge and egalitarianism; the speculative narrativeof the realisation of the universal Idea through the dialectic of the concrete;the Marxist narrative of emancipation from exploitation and alienationthrough the socialisation of work; and the capitalist narrative of emancipa-tion from poverty through industrial development. (Lyotard, 1992: 36)

With both of these lists Lyotard appears to be both pluralist and unitarist.That is to say, there are several grand narratives that have legitimatedmodern science but they all share a common kernel. They all legitimateknowledge in a similar, if not the same way. Still, although for Lyotardthere is no single grand narrative that is more grand than any other, thispluralism seldom accompanies the Lyotard encountered in organizationstudies. For example, Clegg and Hardy (1999: 2) find that Marxism is ‘themaster narrative par excellence’ and Linstead (2001: 218) suggests thatLyotard’s ‘chief target’ is Hegel. Hassard claims that Lyotard rejects both‘those reductionist narratives derived from Marx and Hegel’ (1993: 9).These readings assume that one (or two) of these grand narratives is moregrand than the others. This probably says less about Lyotard than it does


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about the preferences of writers in organization studies, and in doing sosays something interesting about the state of theory in organizationstudies. A similar manipulation of Lyotard can also be found in the waythat certain ostensible pluralists leave some of Lyotard’s grand narrativesoutside their field of critical vision. For example, Stephen Cummings,apparently explaining Lyotard, provides examples of metanarrativeswhich ‘include Marxism, Hegelianism, the model of scientific rational-ism, Christianity, a Freudian emphasis on the dominance of the uncon-scious mind, or collective codes of behaviour’ (2000: 213). Despite thefact that Lyotard consistently identifies the capitalist grand narrative,Cummings somehow manages to leave this one out of his list. This isstrange, because although organization studies is largely concerned withproductive organization in advanced capitalist economies, very oftenLyotard is represented in such a way as it might appear that he hasnothing to say about the grand narratives that have legitimated theaccumulation of capital.

This might prompt one to look a little closer at Lyotard’s position ongrand narratives and the way that this has been represented in organiza-tion studies. It might be tempting, and many have used him for thispurpose, to think that when he describes a shift, in recent years, whichresults in the delegitimation of grand narratives, that Lyotard thinks thatthis is a good thing. Famously, Lyotard remarks: ‘Simplifying to theextreme, I define postmodern as incredulity to metanarratives’ (1984:xxiv). But is this incredulity Lyotard’s or is it something in the world thathe is describing? Here we face problems about the standpoint thatLyotard takes in his text. Although he defines the postmodern in terms of‘incredulity to metanarratives’, it is not at all clear if this is a descriptionof how metanarratives are treated in a society like ours or if he is arguingthat we should be incredulous to metanarratives. This equivocation runsthroughout his text, as Brugger (2001) notes. More often than not Lyotardrefers to what ‘most people’ think, or something similar. So, for examplehe writes that ‘In contemporary society and culture . . . The grandnarrative has lost its credibility’ (1984: 37) and that ‘Most people havelost their nostalgia for the lost narrative’ (1984: 41). Whether accurate ornot, this is a description of a social fact. Whether Lyotard personallyagrees with what he describes is a difficult question.

Here we could look further into questions of legitimation. It is impor-tant to note that Lyotard does not imagine that legitimation is no longer aproblem in this postmodern condition. Far from it. Lyotard is under noillusion that questions of judgement would ever disappear. Indeed, this isthe question that he presents to us: ‘Where, after the metanarratives, canlegitimacy reside?’ (1984: xxiv–xxv). In organization studies the answerto the question of where legitimacy can reside after metanarratives hasoften been very simple: all that we now have is a plurality of competingdiscourses, none of which has any priority over any other. On thisreading, Lyotard is taken to represent an argument about the plurality of


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language games. For example, for Calas and Smircich ‘the end of meta-narratives emphasizes how the totalizing discourses of previous times,with promises of all-encompassing theories for each discipline . . . havegiven way to fragmentary illuminations and local understandings’ (1997:xviii–xix; see also Calas and Smircich, 1999; Kilduff and Mehra, 1997).This version of the postmodern condition reaches its peak in the hands ofHassard, according to whom:

Lyotard’s epistemology is a language-game approach in which knowledgeis based on nothing more than a number of diverse discourses, each withits own rules and structures. In Lyotard’s view, each language-game isdefined by its own particular knowledge criteria. Importantly, no onediscourse is privileged. The postmodern epistemology concerns knowl-edge of localized understandings and acceptance of a plurality of diverselanguage forms. Thus postmodernism sees the fragmentation of grandnarratives and the discrediting of all meta-narratives. (1993: 9)

Interestingly, this fits with the kinds of things that were being said inorganization studies before the discovery of Lyotard. In particular itechoes Kuhn’s (1970) work on paradigms, or more accurately, the specificinflection that this was given by Burrell and Morgan in their SociologicalParadigms and Organisational Analysis (1979). In this book, whichargued against the hegemony of ‘functionalist’ organizational studies andfor work coming from alternative positions (what they called ‘inter-pretive’, ‘radical humanist’ and ‘radical structuralist’ paradigms) therewas a clear concern with totalization of organization studies around asingle set of assumptions about science and society. In this context, andin the context of the debates about ‘paradigm incommensurability’ thatensued, Lyotard had a part to play. He was used to plug the gap indefences of pluralism by what amounted to the imposition of the force oflaw—this time in the way that he could act as legitimating force in thecase for pluralism, and in the way that he was presented, it seemed thatthe forces of history were on the side of the pluralists. When Lyotardappeared on the scene, this great French philosopher who had written animportant book on the state of knowledge in the postmodern condition, itappeared that any resistance to pluralism would be very quickly sweptaway by the pressure of French intellectual power and the irresistiblesea-change that he predicted in which grand narratives were a thing ofthe past, and that this is a good thing too.

The problem with this is that it ignores a major part of Lyotard’sargument, insofar as Lyotard does not dissolve legitimation into tastepreference, and also because Lyotard does not unequivocally celebratethe delegitimation of grand narratives that he has described. In thepostmodern condition, a set of new legitimation criteria present them-selves for consideration, and it is these new criteria that are Lyotard’sconcern. Brugger summarizes Lyotard’s argument in this way:

[I]n this postmodern epoch three other possibly legitimating criteria appearwithin science: performativity, which governs de facto (the technical


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criteria, from which everything is administered in input/output matrices inwhich the elements in a process are claimed to be commensurable andin which the aim is to increase efficiency); consensus, which is achievedby open discussion, a criterion for which Habermas is made the spokes-person; and paralogy (disagreement, incommensurableness, innovative-ness), which Lyotard himself wishes to promote. (2001: 79)

For Lyotard the question is not one of a contest between the grandnarratives and these new criteria. The grand narratives are no longerconvincing. The contest is therefore among these three new criteria. Thecritical aspect of The Postmodern Condition is that Lyotard is not at allhappy with the choice that has been made, or how that choice has beenmade. To put it bluntly, in the postmodern age, the decision hasbeen made by, and in favour of, capitalism and techno-science. Hisconcern with this should be clear when he remarks dryly that thepostmodern capitalist system ‘can count severity among its advantages’(1984: 62). This system transforms all notions of rights and justice intoquestions of calculations of efficiency. In this world, ‘Rights do not flowfrom hardship, but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improvesthe system’s performance’ (1984: 63). Hence Lyotard’s description of ‘thesystem’ as ‘a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumani-zing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity’(1984: 63). In this actually existing dystopia, legitimacy becomes a coldquestion of efficiency.

The decision makers . . . attempt to manage the clouds of sociality accord-ing to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that theirelements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. Theyallocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and ofscientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on itsoptimizing the system’s performance–efficiency. The application of thiscriterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain levelof terror, whether soft or hard. (1984: xxiv)

Along with this, the suggestion that ‘The decision maker’s arrogance,which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in theexercise of terror’ (1984: 64) should make it clear that Lyotard is no fan ofperformativity. Having identified performativity as one of the bases oflegitimation after the grand narratives, and the dominant base at present,Lyotard describes the rise of performativity. Doing so, Lyotard is keen toexpose the relationships between knowledge and power and to see howthese relationships are changing today. In a phrase reminiscent of Fou-cault, he writes ‘knowledge and power are simply two sides of the samequestion: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs tobe decided?’ (Lyotard, 1984: 9). Lyotard identifies a movement from thetime of Descartes, who realized that scientific research requires financialinvestment, to the modern age when it is now a commonplace that themanagement of scientific knowledge fuels financial success. In the proc-ess we see the rise of an ‘equation between wealth, efficiency, and the


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truth’ (1984: 45). Over the course of the past three centuries we thereforewitness the rise of what Lyotard describes as a ‘generalized spirit ofperformativity’ (1984: 45), that reaches its peak in the most developedeconomies of today. In relation to the new bases of legitimation inconsensus and paralogy, there is little contest.

Performativity criteria are established in relation to both the produc-tion and the transmission of knowledge. These come together in theuniversity, something of which Lyotard is highly critical. In this system,‘The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist stu-dent, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer “Is ittrue?” but “What use is it?” ’ (1984: 51).

In the context of delegitimation, universities and the institutions of higherlearning are called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals—so manydoctors, so many teachers in a given discipline, so many engineers, somany administrators, etc. The transmission of knowledge is no longerdesigned to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards itsemancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptablyfulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions.(1984: 48)

Against this generalized spirit of performativity, Lyotard poses a questionor ‘metaquestion’ that condenses his objection to performativity. Here,importantly, he turns back to concepts of legitimacy. While performa-tivity merely asks of knowledge ‘what is it worth?’, Lyotard turns thelogic of performativity back onto itself and asks ‘What is your “what is itworth” worth?’ (1984: 54).

For Lyotard, performativity involves a system logic that reduces ques-tions of justice to questions of efficiency and has no interest in theunknown because it falls outside the system as currently constituted.Against this he ‘sketches the outline of a politics that would respect boththe desire for justice and the desire for the unknown’ (1984: 67). Thisinvolves turning away from performativity and towards the other pos-sible legitimating criteria, consensus and paralogy. Lyotard argues thatconsensus, the criteria preferred by Habermas, is inadequate (1984: 60). Itrests on a belief that it is possible to find a metalanguage that couldtranslate all of the ‘heteromorphous classes of utterance’ into oneanother, and the assumption that it is possible for all speakers inscientific games to agree about this meta-language and that consensus isthe goal of science (1984: 65). Against this, Lyotard argues that ‘con-sensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on thecontrary is paralogy’ (1984: 65–6).

Lyotard defines paralogy, at its most simple, as ‘the search for insta-bilities’ (1984: 53ff.). Paralogy is not a confirmation of what is known, ofcumulative additions to already existing knowledge. ‘It produces not theknown, but the unknown’ (1984: 60). In this it is akin to what Foucaulthas called ‘problematisation’, in which the goal of criticism is not a newconsensus but is one of ‘making facile gesture difficult’ (1988: 155), and is


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reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) insistence that the point ofphilosophy, or one might simply say of ‘theory’, is that of creatingconcepts. This understanding of creativity of thought clearly owes some-thing to Bachelard and Canguilhem, who conceived of science as innova-tion, instituting an ‘epistemological break’ from common understanding,but it also bears traces of a very classical demand of the difference ofwhat is from what could be. For Lyotard the goal of thought is not one ofmerely stating what is, which is a denotative language game. It alsoinvolves a prescriptive language game, a game of ethics, justice andpolitics. Hence Lyotard’s conclusion, despite his suspicions aboutconsensus, that ‘justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect’(1984: 66).

DiscussionPerhaps I have gone into too much detail discussing Lyotard’s book, eventhough this still does feel a rather rushed condensation of a somewhatdetailed argument. I have gone into this detail not in order to ‘introduce’Lyotard’s book (it is too late for that) but to show how it can be read in away that departs from the reading that has dominated in organizationstudies. In particular I wanted to show that while it is possible to readLyotard as simply another liberal pluralist, there is much more to hiswork. Besides these specific issues, I would like to use this reading ofreception of The Postmodern Condition to open a broader discussionof the state of theory in organization studies. Although I do not want tosuggest that The Postmodern Condition is indicative of trends in organi-zation studies ‘in general’, I might use it as a starting point to offer somereflections on (1) the consumption of theory in organization studies; (2)the concepts in currency in organization studies today; and (3) theshifting divisions of organization studies.

ConsumptionIn recent years several writers have emphasised the role of consumptionof theory in organization studies. Notably, Hassard and Kelemen (2002)suggest a shift from an emphasis on the production of knowledge towardsan emphasis on the consumption of knowledge in a process which, theysuggest, involves the possibility of unpredictable uses of theory. Like-wise, Gabriel stresses that ‘organizational theories are not used passively,in general, but in a creative, opportunistic and individualistic way’(2002: 133). As Perry puts it, ‘Theory not only travels to unexpecteddestinations; it may also be put to unexpected uses’ (1995: 36). I havemyself been interested in the way that theories have been consumed inorganization studies, and in the unexpected uses to which varioustheorists have been put in organization studies. I have tried to work someof this out in relation to the consumption of Foucault and Derrida inorganization studies (see Jones, 2002 and forthcoming). In this I certainly


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concur with Bohm (2002: 336), who defends theory from Parker’s (2002)recent anti-theoretical gibes, and would argue, contra Parker, that it is nottheory as such that is the problem but the way that theory has beenpractised and institutionalized in organization studies.

In an important recent paper, Stephen Linstead (2002) presents ‘organi-zational kitsch’ as an aesthetic style that involves a kind of auto-parodicpretence, a self-conscious farce that is no less effective for being ridicu-lous. While the avant-garde ‘seeks new ways of expressing the inex-pressible’, kitsch involves ‘new ways of expressing that which has beenexpressed so many times that it is instantly recognizable’ (p. 658). Hence,‘kitsch is reassuring’ (p. 661) because it ‘involves the easy satisfaction ofexpectations [and] takes the disturbing and makes it comforting’ (p. 660).Linstead presents the garden gnome, a cheap object of mass productionthat captures this self-conscious farce and is also an unthreatening imageof happiness—to laugh at a garden gnome would be churlish andunfriendly, so it is better to smirk knowingly. In organization theory,Linstead finds a perfect analogy in Peters and Waterman’s In Search ofExcellence (1982), in which he identifies a pattern of ‘easy avuncularity,intellectually undemanding presentations of theory in a digestible way—and the authors, though they don’t appear to realize it, are mounting adefence, not of applied theory, but of theoretical kitsch’ (Linstead, 2002:674). Hence Linstead’s conclusion that ‘In Search of Excellence is thegarden gnome of contemporary organization theory’ (2002: 674).

If there is anything to add to Linstead’s discussion of organizationalkitsch, then it is perhaps to widen the scope of its application. While thedesignation of ‘kitsch’ certainly sheds light on contemporary organiza-tion theory, I am not sure that this is restricted to figures such as Petersand Waterman. It seems to me that organizational kitsch is very muchpart and parcel of not just ‘the mainstream’ but also of much that presentsitself as ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern’ organization studies, and we haveseen this clearly in readings of The Postmodern Condition. When enlis-ted simply to make an argument for pluralism, one might wonder ifLyotard has not been effectively disarmed, in a way that makes him sayold things in a reassuring way. The point, if a little simple, should beclear: in organization studies, In Search of Excellence is not the onlygarden gnome.

This raises questions about the way that theory has been donein organization studies and the way that theory has been imported intoorganization studies. Hence the common complaint these days thattheory in organization studies has been done ‘at a distance’. This happensthrough secondary readings, in which many of the theorists who havebeen imported into organization studies in recent years have made theirway in through what appears to be little more than cartoon-book intro-ductions. It is almost as if ‘theory’ is done somewhere safely outsideorganization studies, and the best we can do is to raid these other sources(badly, much of the time). Another way that theory is done at a distance


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is through a particular set of expectations with regard to the citation oftheory and theorists. Very often, ‘doing theory’ involves little more thanlisting citations in parentheses, regardless of the relation between what issaid and the book that is mentioned. We have seen the consequences ofreading Lyotard at a distance, and it says something rather sad aboutthe state of theory in organization studies when this is not a marginalpractice but is standard operating procedure in many of the ‘top’journals.

Against these tendencies, we might ask today whether it is possible toimagine a different place and status of theory in which organizationstudies was not merely a recipient of theory from afar, and if we mightfind ways of doing theory that involved less distance from the sourcesdiscussed. I am under no illusion that changing these practices would beeasy. But if theory is to be more than ‘armchair’ speculation (anothername for bad theory that is often given to theory in general) then thereneeds to be not only a will but also the space to do this. Of course, a greatdeal militates against taking time for reading today, from the compressionof PhD programmes to the pressures of teaching and administrativedemands and the demand to ‘publish or perish’. I am writing this articleunder these very pressures, and feel them keenly myself.

Interestingly, questions of time, of taking time and of making time aremajor concerns for Lyotard, and one of the problems he has withperformativity is that it leaves no space for activities such as reading,thinking, reflecting—in short, ‘theory’—that require, and appear to waste,time. Lyotard stresses the need to resist these pressures, and invites us torespect the critical intellectual functions that are demanded by knowl-edge and justice. These have always been at risk and today face over-whelming threats. If nothing else then it might be this kind of memory ofthe critical function that demands a continuing interrogation of ourcurrent situation. This interrogation requires theoretical, and philosoph-ical, activity that is not compromised by the demand for satisfying andreassuring answers, whether these are supplied by popular ideology or bycritical orthodoxy.

ConceptsThis presents questions about the concepts that are in currency inorganization studies today. Lyotard has been used as a reference pointin discussions of a version of postmodernism that implies, among otherthings, paradigm pluralism. In the process many other things that Lyotardhas to say about the contemporary organized world have fallen by thewayside. This is important not only because it does injustice to Lyotard’sthought, but because of the way that it is complicit with a more generaldenial in organization studies of a set of concepts that includes justice,judgement, ethics, politics and capitalism. By contrast with the situationin organization studies, in numerous discussions of Lyotard’s work thepolitical and ethical dimension of his work are basic starting points (see


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Bennington, 1988; Curtis, 2001; Raffel, 1992; Readings, 1991; Rojek andTurner, 1998; Silverman, 2002; Williams, 1998, 2000). For example, inone recent introduction to Lyotard’s work, Malpas writes:

Questions of politics, justice and freedom lie at the centre of Lyotard’swriting. Whether he is discussing a work of art, a literary text, theologicalarguments or even the end of the universe, his focus always falls upon thesocial and ethical issues that they evoke. Lyotard is primarily a politicalphilosopher concerned with the ways in which our lives are organised andcontrolled by the societies we inhabit. (2003: 2)

To be generous, this lack of attention in organization studies to Lyotard’sconcerns with ethics, justice and politics might be explained in terms oftranslation. For example, Au juste is translated as Just Gaming andMoralites postmodernes as Postmodern Fables, and in both cases the‘just’ and ‘morality’ seem to get translated out. But more than this there isa question of emphasis in relation to the reading of Lyotard in organiza-tion studies. Even with a title such as Just Gaming, the point is that it isthe gaming rather than a concern for the just that has captured theattention. Elsewhere (Jones, 2003) I have drawn attention to the place ofethics, responsibility and justice in Derrida’s recent work, and the waythat this has been largely ignored by those in organization studies whohave expressed an interest in Derrida. Despite the continuing importanceof ethics, justice and politics to Derrida and Lyotard, these are generallynot the things that they been known for when they have been importedinto organization studies.

This is an act of ‘translation’ far more profound than is explicable interms of differences of national language. It is indicative of the conceptsthat are currently in vogue in organization studies, and this is notrestricted to being a problem of a hegemonic ‘mainstream’. It relates toquestions of theoretical fashion and, perhaps, a hesitancy among even themost apparently radical in organization studies to even speak of thingssuch as justice. A couple of years ago I addressed this concern to anumber of well known scholars from across organization studies ata roundtable discussion at the EGOS conference in Lyon (see Boje et al.,2001), and to be quite honest I was rather disappointed by the unwilling-ness of these established figures to address these issues. Rather than takeseriously the fact that many of the post-structural theorists who havebeen influential in recent years were both theoretically sophisticated andpolitically imaginative, most of these critical scholars of organizationpreferred to retrench into exactly the political quietism that I had tried tocall into question.

This says something about how theory has been done in recent years inorganization studies. It might lead one to argue that organization studies‘in general’ has a tendency for the kitsch, for using theorists in a way thatis imitative of the past rather than radically different. Here again wemight take from Lyotard a hope for difference, for the possibility ofthinking differently. And this applies to the thinking that we do about the


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world, but here clearly also applies to the way that I am reading Lyotard.Reading not simply to reproduce but to change. To offer alternatives. Tomake way for what might be.

DivisionsIf offering alternatives applies to reading of theory, then we might wellbegin with an alternative reading of Lyotard. Very often, Lyotard has beenaccommodated by slotting him in as a ‘postmodern’ theorist, a tendencythat can be traced from Cooper and Burrell (1988) to Hancock and Tyler(2001), and beyond. Far too often, whether for purposes of conceptualsimplification or not, there has been a tendency to posit a sharp and cleardivision between the modern and the postmodern, and to positionLyotard on the side of the latter (for particularly telling cases of this see,for example, Power, 1990; Burrell, 1994; Chia, 1995). Perhaps today anew Lyotard could emerge from reconsidering the continuities betweenLyotard and the tradition of critical thought. This might begin by con-necting Lyotard’s concern with performativity in relation to the concernsover the instrumentalization of reason described by Max Weber and thebetrayal of the Enlightenment criticized by members of the FrankfurtSchool (Adorno, 1974; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1969; Horkheimer, 1947;Marcuse, 1964). Of course, much has been made of the differencesbetween Lyotard and Jurgen Habermas, the heir apparent to the FrankfurtSchool. We might recall also the positive relation between Lyotard’scritique of performativity and the critique of instrumentality in Haber-mas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1987) from which Lyotard bor-rows one possible formulation of the commodification of knowledge interms of the way that knowledge is no longer an end in itself and hencehas lost its ‘use value’ (Lyotard, 1984: 5, and note 16).

Drawing attention to these continuities between Lyotard and a Weber-ian or Frankfurt version of concern with instrumental rationality is not tosay that there is nothing new in Lyotard’s critique. Indeed, Lyotard’swork, while not ‘historical’, is alert to the historicity of knowledge, andthere are some clear developments and departures in the way that hearticulates his critique of instrumental rationality. He is concerned withthe possibilities for critique in an age in which many do not takeanything seriously. He is not only concerned with conformity to totaliz-ing ideologies, but further with the political consequences of the appar-ent non-conformism that characterizes contemporary liberaldemocracies. In this way there are productive continuities, not with‘postmodernism’ but with the kind of critical account of the postmoderncondition that can be found in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of CynicalReason (1987) and Slavoj Zizek’s account of ‘post-ideological ideology’(1989, 1994).

The point of this is that describing Lyotard as postmodern brings withit at least two problems. First, it runs the risk of losing sight of the waythat Lyotard is concerned with outlining a critique of the postmodern


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condition. Second, it is in danger of denying the important continuitiesbetween Lyotard and modern critical thought, from the Greeks to Kant,Freud and Wittgenstein, phenomenology and Levinas, Weber and theFrankfurt School through to contemporary critical theory. In this all toopopular labelling as ‘postmodernist’, Lyotard has certainly been mademanageable, but the cost of this has been to lose much, if not most, ofwhat he says that is interesting. This is again profoundly ironic, giventhat this is the very dynamic that Lyotard identifies, and objects to, in somuch of his writing. Perhaps the only way to try to do justice to Lyotard,to put this in the language of The Differend, would be to observe thiswrong, to testify to these silences and to find a way of linking phrases insuch a way that Lyotard could be displaced. To put this more simply, itwould be to say that for Lyotard the goal of critical thought is to introducea difference, to open up a field of agonistics. Agonistics is not a post-modern invention, which Lyotard clearly signals by attributing it toHeraclitus, the dialectic of the sophists and the early tragedians (1984:84, n.35). It is, for Lyotard, little more than the task of thinking, and ofcriticism. This is perhaps what we need to do to, or for, Lyotard.

ConclusionIt might be tempting to conclude here, with this largely negative vision ofthe way that Lyotard has been read in organization studies and a largelynegative vision of the state of theory in organization studies. But ratherthan concluding on this bitter note, I would like to spend a little moretime in order to complicate the image that I have been painting. Againstthe suggestion that Lyotard has simply been consumed by organizationstudies, I might move towards a conclusion by speaking of some excep-tions to the tendencies that I have been sketching out here. This might domore justice to the variety of ways that Lyotard has been worked with inorganization studies and might also go some way towards a displacementof Lyotard, by showing that this displacement is already happening.Hence, in addition to the displacement that has already been performedby my ‘paralogical’ reading of the reception of The Postmodern Conditionin organization studies, this is a gesture towards a further emphasis onparalogy, towards making Lyotard a little more contestable.

Among the exceptions to the reading of Lyotard as pluralist, notable isthe work of Pippa Carter and Norman Jackson, who have drawn on TheDifferend, Lyotard’s (1988) account of the role of language in ‘victim-ology’, to look at the role of language in silencing particular victims.Turning to The Differend, which Lyotard considered his most importantbook and is arguably his most philosophically profound work, Carter andJackson work with Lyotard’s elaboration of an understanding of languagethat extends the conception of language games articulated in The Post-modern Condition. They draw on two of Lyotard’s examples of victims(the survivor of Auschwitz and the figure of labour in the relation


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between labour and capital), to shed light on the linguistic closures andsilencing that accompany the language of management gurus (Jacksonand Carter, 1998: 156–7; see also, for example, Lyotard, 1988: 9–10). In‘Negation and Impotence’ they take the concept of the differend toarticulate a vision of linguistic contestation that goes well beyond theliberal pluralism that characterizes many readings of Lyotard and stressesthe place of language in silencing and victimization (Carter and Jackson,1996). Equally, Pelzer (2002) has drawn on The Differend in relation tothe silencing of native Americans in history, in the film Dead Man, and inorganizational change management. All of these turn to aspects of Lyo-tard’s work that have been largely neglected in organization studies anduse this to shed critical light on the politics of the language of organiza-tion.

A similar recognition of Lyotard as a critical theorist can be found inother places in organization studies. In the first of two ‘classic reviews’ ofThe Postmodern Condition published in Organization in 1997, Kallinikos(1997) uses Lyotard to outline a critical vision of the state of research andknowledge in the postmodern condition. In his ‘classic review’ Jacques(1997) takes The Postmodern Condition as a starting point from which tooffer a scathing criticism of the limitations and restrictions that areimposed on thought by contemporary organization studies. Czarniawska(2001) similarly takes the idea of progress by paralogy from The Post-modern Condition to outline ten productive paradoxes for organizationtheory. And Linstead (1994) turns to The Inhuman (Lyotard, 1991b) toattack the protocols of social science and organization studies that hidethe dangerous and unclean, what he calls the ‘underside of organization’(Linstead, forthcoming).

In addition to these uses of various works by Lyotard that display atendency quite different from that of simply using The PostmodernCondition to defend paradigm pluralism, we might look at two furtherexamples of writers who have used Lyotard in organization studies. Bothof these are exemplary in that they do not only turn to Lyotard asconventionally understood, but transform accepted understandings ofLyotard and in doing so actively displace Lyotard. The first of these is apaper by Rolland Munro (2001) that extracts from The PostmodernCondition a conception of communication and information. Drawingattention to the place of cybernetics in The Postmodern Condition,Munro uses Lyotard in order to understand the ‘language of information’and the place of exteriorization and circulation of knowledge and theplace of computer networks and language in such processes. In additionto recovering these aspects of The Postmodern Condition, Munro’s essayis exemplary in the way that it both uses and transforms Lyotard in theprocess, drawing attention to aspects of The Postmodern Condition thathave not registered in organization studies.

A second example of a displacement of Lyotard can be found in twoimportant papers by Hugo Letiche (1992 and forthcoming). Reviewing


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Lyotard’s work for organization studies, Letiche insists on a broaderreading of Lyotard that goes beyond The Postmodern Condition and thatsets this book in the context of his larger work. Letiche draws outLyotard’s concern with justice, a theme that we worked with earlier inrelation to questions of judgement and legitimation in The PostmodernCondition. Letiche stresses the political character of Lyotard and the waythat ‘Lyotard has been occupied, throughout his career, with the theme ofjustice’ (Letiche, forthcoming). Letiche offers a powerful critique of theparadigm pluralism argued for by Schultz and Hatch (1996), arguing that‘The cutting and pasting of genres (paradigms) that Schultz and Hatch arecalling for goes against the whole thrust of Lyotard’s language philos-ophy’ (Letiche, forthcoming). Perhaps more important than theserenewed emphases and critical interventions against the way that Lyotardhas been read, Letiche actively transforms Lyotard and calls on others toengage more seriously with his ideas and their consequences, a responsi-bility that he lays at the feet of both Lyotard’s critics and his ostensibleproponents.

These displacements of Lyotard might disrupt the conclusions I ven-tured earlier about the simple consumption of theory in organizationstudies. This is the risk of paralogy. It is disconfirming and opens tocontestability, agonistics. Paralogy and agonistics here expose the con-tested and contestable character of theory. Far from this putting us in aspace of futility, this forces us to confront the difficulty of arguments andthe continuous need for revision. This is to bring to light the role ofrepression and silencing, and the work of theory in continually undoingthat repression. This is perhaps one thing we could learn from Lyotardtoday. In organization studies, and not only there, theory has often playedthe part of silencing, through the machinery of ignorance that is moti-vated by performativity and the complacency encouraged by a consensusthat is happy enough to repeat what is acceptable in the community.

I do not want to conclude with some kind of blanket advertisement forLyotard. I have no hope that I might be able to pull back the curtain andfind a figure who has all of the answers that we need for the future. Thefuture of theory for organization studies rests as little with Lyotard as itdoes with any other heroic figure. A criticism of Lyotard is as necessaryas is his introduction, although neither of these was really my goal here.But if anything, an alternative conclusion would be that Lyotard, andmany others that we think we might have finished with, are there for thetaking by organization studies. This is to say that there are many spacesfor theory, and much that theory needs to do. Returning to works such asthose of Lyotard, and of many others, may still contain surprises. Ratherthan forgetting a book like The Postmodern Condition, perhaps today amore radical gesture would be to remember it, in the strong sense ofremembering that also involves ‘dismemberment’ or a ‘displacement’.Perhaps this is the task of theory. Theory not as reflection or as explana-tion but as exploration of what might be possible. This is not a reflection


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only on what is but is also a reflection on what might be. This involves arenewal of notions such as contestation, paralogy and agonistics, fromLyotard and beyond. Too often pluralism leads to a dull consensus orbecomes an instrument for denial of the claims of others. By contrast,paralogy implies the refusal of such closure, and the perpetual opening ofspaces of contestation. Which is to say that without the critical functionof theory in the name of a forever open future, we have nothing butrepetition, which for many is total silence. For Lyotard this means terror,and even if today this is the harsh reality of organized life, it does notmean that this is necessary. Nor does it mean that this is just.

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NotesMy thanks to Steffen Bohm, Peter Fleming, Shayne Grice, Andre Spicer and theparticipants at seminars at the University of Leicester and the University of Yorkfor their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Campbell Jones teaches critical theory and business ethics at the University of Leicester.He co-edits a journal called ephemera: critical dialogues on organization (www.ephemeraweb.org). Address: Management Centre, University of Leicester, Uni-versity Road, Leicester LE7 1RH, United Kingdom. [email: [email protected]]


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