Glass_Palaces_and_Glass_Cages

Spectacles of resistance and resistance of spectacles Presentation at the CRITICAL MANAGEMENT STUDIES RESEARCH WORKSHOP, Academy of Management pre-conference, ATLANTA, AUGUST 11-12, 2006 Yiannis Gabriel, Royal Holloway, University of London y.gabriel@rhul.ac.uk School of Management Royal Holloway University of London Egham Surrey TW20 0EX UK Tel. 44(0) 1784 414974 Max Weber’s metaphor of ‘the iron cage’ provided an abiding image of organizations during the high-noon of modernity. It captured the entrapping qualities of bureaucracies which sought to control everything through rational procedures, rules and processes. But these organizations, rigid, rational and predictable, are no longer sustainable, in our times of information capitalism, globalization, and consumer power. Instead of a pre-occupation with efficient production and rational administration, management today is increasingly turning to the consumer as the measure of all things, a consumer who seeks not merely the useful and the functional, but the magical, the fantastic and the alluring. Management of organizations thus finds itself increasingly preoccupied with the orchestration of collective fantasies and the venting of collective emotions through the power of symbols and images. Glass cages and glass palaces I argued earlier that the demise of Weber’s iron cage of rationality has exposed us neither to the freedom of a garden of earthly delights nor to the desolation of the law of the jungle (Gabriel, 2005). Instead, the new experiences of work and consumption in today’s organizations allow for greater ambivalence and nuance, for which I offered the metaphor of a glass cage and its double, a glass palace. As a material generating, distorting and disseminating images, glass seems uniquely able to evoke both the glitter and the fragility of organizations in late modernity. The metaphor of the glass cage suggests certain constraints, discontents and consolations quite distinct from those we encounter at the high noon of modernity. Shared features of the glass cage of work and the glass cage of consumption are an emphasis on display, an invisibility of constraints, a powerful illusion of choice, a glamorization of image and an ironic question-mark as to whether freedom lies inside or outside the glass. Above all, there is an ambiguity as to whether the glass is a medium of entrapment or a beautifying frame. In this presentation, I wish to explore further organizational controls and resistance in an era dominated by spectacles, images and pictures. Glass is the signature material of our times, just as steel was the signature material of industrial capitalism in its heyday. Glass starts its existence as a viscous and flexible fluid in order to solidify into transparent mass; thus, its defining property is optical rather than static -- its ability to allow light to pass through it, even as it reflects, distorts or refracts it. It is a substance which generates changing images, a substance whose mere presence leaves us in no doubt that what it encases is worthy of attention. Glass then evokes image and movement, just as readily as steel evokes structure and stability. Why glass cage' Camera lenses everywhere, ready to intrude into people’s privacy, open plan offices and glass buildings, a quasi-religious obsession with ‘transparency’, audits, reviews, appraisals, feedbacks, lists and league tables, these suggest that, the glass cage shares the chief quality of Foucault's Panopticon, that curious combination of Catholic obsession with the omnipotent eye of God and Protestant pre-occupation with clean efficiency. Like the Panopticon, the glass cage acts as a metaphor for the formidable machinery of contemporary surveillance, one which deploys all kinds of technologies, electronic, spatial, psychological and cultural. Appearances are paramount; image is what people are constantly judged by. But unlike the Panopticon and more like the ‘magician’ David Blaine and his Perspex boxes in full view of urban crowds, the glass cage also suggests that the modern employee is part of a cast exposed to the critical gaze of the customer with all the kicks, excitements and frustrations that this implies. It evokes vital elements of choice, exhibitionism and display which are entirely consistent with the narcissism of our times. The employee becomes part of the organizational brand on show, a brand whose glamorous image offers an instant face-lift to all who are part of it. Thus, exposure, with its thrills, horrors, and corresponding desires to protect privacy and create sheltered spaces, is the key to the experience in the glass cage, an experience not limited to employees, but to football managers, politicians and all other public figures when they euphemistically talk of the ‘goldfish bowl’ which magnifies the tiniest blemishes and exaggerates the smallest imperfections. The fragility of the glass cage also suggests a brand that is easily tarnished or contaminated by the activities of a few whistle-blowers or disenchanted employees. It is also liable to crack, break and collapse. Exposed as they are to the customer's critical gaze, employees find themselves in the position of children capable of embarrassing their parents in the presence of strangers. Thus, the very visibility of individuals inside the glass cage to the unforgiving gaze places certain limits to the overt controls that managers are able to exercise. They can hardly appear to scream abuse or exhortation to the employees. This glass cage then evokes the fundamental ambivalence in the nature of much contemporary work – an ambivalence between the anxiety of continuous exposure and the narcissistic self-satisfaction of being part of a winning team or brand. While formal rationality, and the rational deployment of resources, is the chief force behind Weber's iron cage, the glass cage emphasizes the importance of emotional displays and appearances. In particular, it highlights the emotional labour (the 'smile', the 'look') which has become part of the work of ever increasing segments of the workforce (Fineman, 1996, , 2000; Hochschild, 1983), an emotional labour that is not merely external (i.e. discovering emotional displays suitable for the requirements of different social situations) but also internal, that is in coping with conflicts, contradictions and ambivalences and keeping some sense of order in potentially chaotic emotional states. More recently, the concept of aesthetic labour has been proposed (Hancock & Tyler, 2000; Tyler & Taylor, 1998; Warhurst, Nickson, Witz, & Cullen, 2000; Wengrow, 2001; Witz, Warhurst, & Nickson, 2003) which does full justice to the idea that the bodies and movements of employees become part of a corporate aesthetic, itself a major creator of value in many industries. In all these ways, the glass cage, suggests both the rhetorical 'transparency' and 'openness' of the contemporary workplace, with its open plan offices, its glass facades and its huge atria, but also the fragility of contemporary control systems. Unlike an iron cage which frustrates all attempts at escape with its brutish and inflexible force, a glass cage is discreet, unobtrusive, at times even invisible – it seeks to hide the reality of entrapment rather than display it, always inviting the idea or the fantasy that it may be breached, even if at the cost of serious potential injury. The image of such a cage suggests that it may not be a cage at all, but a wrapping box, a glass palace, a container aimed at highlighting the uniqueness of what it contains rather than constraining or oppressing it. Glass then is a medium perfectly suited for a society of spectacle, just as steel was perfectly suited for a society of mechanism. Society of spectacle Writing at a time when most homes did not have a colour television and when computer screens and electronic games had not been invented, Guy Debord opened his situationist manifesto with: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation." (Debord, 1977, paragraph 1) Allowing for the obvious hyperbole and the parody of Marx, Debord’s premise seems to be even more appropriate today than in the 60s when it became the basis of his then fashionable situationist critique (See also Boorstin, 1962; Edelman, 1988; Elkins, 1998, 1999). Numerous theorists of consumption, including Bauman, Ritzer and Baudrillard, have since argued that spectacle has become the primary type of experience in late modernity, dominating almost every aspect of our public and private lives. Inspired by Bauman, Ritzer (1999), for instance, argued that spectacle has led to a re-enchantment of the world in late modernity’s cathedrals of consumption, such as shopping malls, glass buildings, tourist resorts, sports venues and theme parks, are all minutely planned and orchestrated shows, with spectators themselves becoming part of the display. Many, if not most, of our experiences in and out of our workplaces are visual experiences, on our television screen and computer monitors, on posters, newspapers and magazines, in our city streets and our homes. Spectacle saturates public and private spaces, offering “the promise of new, overwhelming, mind-boggling or spine-chilling, but always exhilarating experience” (Bauman, 1997, p. 181). A few theorists have noted that as our culture becomes more ocular-centric, i.e. dominated by spectacles and images appropriated and experienced through the eye, many of our theories have become ocular-phobic (Jay, 1993; Kavanagh, 2004). As academics, we mistrust the image, fearing that it seduces, it misleads and it induces passivity. Undoubtedly images can create their own regimes of truth, the hyper-real, that at times becomes more ‘real’ than reality (Baudrillard, 1988; Boorstin, 1962; Eco, 1986; Sontag, 1977). What has changed since the 1960s critique of the society of spectacle is that many theorists today offer a more nuanced evaluation. Image and spectacle are not seen as invariably inducing passivity and stupefaction. A society of spectacle is not a society of passive voyeurs, spending their lives getting fat in front of television sets. It is also a society of active exhibitionists, a society of celebrity shows but also reality TV and internet chat-rooms and discussion lists, a society of home delivered pizzas but also a society that rediscovers its appetite for public spaces, cafes, shopping malls, museums and piazzas. Spectacle is saturating public life and private experience, but its appropriation is complex and potentially subversive. As consumers in a society of spectacle, we are frequently seduced by image. But we also learn to mistrust image, to question, to probe it and to deface it. We develop skills to read and decode, question and ignore, frame and unframe, combine, dismiss, ignore and despoil images. Organizations in the glass era Numerous social theorists, working in the areas of organizations as well as consumer and cultural studies, have examined the new organizational forms and the controls they deploy. Along with many others, Sennett in his widely read book, The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1998), argued that the key feature of today’s Western organizations is flexibility – the demand that employees should be prepared to carry out an infinity of tasks, for short periods, with no guaranteed long-term employment. These new flexible work arrangements are fostered by a variety of factors. They include increased mobility of capital and jobs, the move from manufacturing to services and the ever-present customer ethos. Successful organizations increasingly turn out to be flexible ones, able to spot quickly niches and opportunities in the market and advance to take advantage of them. Flexibility is of the essence as companies must be able to redeploy resources rapidly, constantly stepping into new markets and new products and stepping out of existing ones. This short-term opportunistic outlook of companies today erodes the value of its employees’ loyalty as well as the value of fixed, non-transferrable skills. Instead it values a new range of transferable values that include presentation, social skills, flexibility and adaptability. Companies are willing to pay for these qualities at the expense of qualities like loyalty and competence in fixed routines. Employees, for their part, develop a short-term, opportunistic outlook which mirrors that of their employers, valuing quick gains, flexible work arrangements and keeping as many of their options open as possible. The missed opportunity represents the ultimate failure in this state of affairs. Constant job moves, preoccupation with image and the look of cvs, absence of commitments and sacrifices, these stand in opposition with traditional family values of duty, commitment, constancy and caring. Dependence comes to be seen as shameful, evidence of personal failure, in a society where individuals need no-one and are needed by no-one. Salesmanship, showmanship and acting are the essential virtues of the flexible individual, able to sail through today’s flexible organizations in a way that optimises benefits. This is what Sennet calls the chameleon-employee, the man or woman who can assume many different personas, playing many different parts and being able to discern which part is suitable for different opportunities. A deep anxiety and insecurity permeates today’s organizations. This, by itself is not new. Earlier generations of employees worried; they worried because of the vagaries of the labour markets, social injustice and lack of control over their fate. Today's employees, however, perceive themselves as having choices, which can make the difference between success and failure. "I make my own choices; I take full responsibility for moving around so much" (1998, p. 29) says one of Sennett’s interviewees says one of his protagonists, who seems to abhor dependency above all else. In a thought-provoking essay called "Collective myths and fantasies: The myth of the good life in California" (Smelser, 1984, , 1998), Smelser prefigures some of the arguments put forward by Sennett and others. What Smelser calls "the myth of California" has become a generic fantasy of our times. California, Smelser argues, represented a land where people ‘escape’, a land that stood for what is new, for gold, for plenty, and the good life. Like all myths, the myth of California is a collective fantasy. A key feature of this fantasy (in contrast to the rigors of the old country, neediness, ugliness and hard work) is that California is a place where success comes easy (Smelser, 1984, p. 117). In California, success is no longer the product of hard work, achievement and heroism as it was for the Puritans; instead, success is brought by the magic of 'being discovered', which involves luck, self-presentation, image and finding oneself at the right place at the right time. This recalls the 'chameleon-qualities' highlighted by Sennett, only in reverse – where the chameleon blends with its environment, the star, like gold in the eye of the prospector, shines persistently. This dilemma between displaying chameleon-like flexibility (willingness to play any part, to do any job, to work any patch) while also boasting unique star qualities, seems to define the predicament of the individual under the sway of the Hollywood myth. This argument is consistent with those put forward by organizational theorists studying workplace relations in sectors of the new economy, the media, entertainment industries, information technology and so forth. If the discontent of modernity was the sacrifice of freedom in alienating jobs, the core discontent of our time as described by Smelser, Sennett and others is the feeling of having choice but being unable to exercise them. This is frustration arising not from an absence of opportunities but from constantly having to look for them, and appearing to miss them when others succeed. It is as if the door of the cage is open, yet as soon as we cross it, we find ourselves in a new cage. New forms of control, and resistance In place of the controls that were associated with the modern bureaucracy and Taylorist production lines, many of today's organizations resort to far subtler, yet deeper, controls, controls that are pervasive and invasive, that do not merely constrain a person, but define a person. These include cultural and ideological controls (emphasizing the importance of customer service, quality and image; affirming the business enterprise as an arena for heroic or spiritual accomplishments etc.), structural controls (continuous measurements and benchmarking, flatter organizational hierarchies etc.), technological (electronic surveillance of unimaginable sophistication), spatial controls (open-plan offices, controlled accesses) and so forth. Following Foucault, we have become highly aware of discursive controls that operate through language, labelling, classification, and so forth, which are invisible, but unyielding. Finally, many of these controls rely on the disciplining gaze of the paying customer – the customer who, chooses, demands and criticizes, the customer who has assumed an ambiguous position as the disciplining agent of management, yet whose critical stare is internalized as a force of self-control and self-policing. The proliferation of such controls has undoubtedly coincided with the decline of modernist forms of work resistance, notably strikes and the whole area of organized and class-conscious recalcitrance that used to form the bread and butter of industrial relations. The proletarian of even thirty years ago has become a disappearing figure from today’s Western organizations, beaten not so much by legal and political measures (although these cannot be discounted) but more importantly by the flight of manufacturing capital to places of cheap labour, lax environmental regulation and political repression. Union membership has declined consistently along with organized collective action, as the proletarian is replaced by the chameleon worker, the worker who believes that they are in control of their destiny, making choices and being free to move from one glass cage to another. Yet, it would be wrong to view the decline of worker militancy as signalling the end of worker resistance. In spite of the formidable disciplinary mechanisms noted above, today's workplace creates its own possibilities of opposition, with employees displaying a bewildering range of responses which qualify, subvert, disregard or resist managerial calls for flexibility, commitment and quality. At certain times, employees may comply enthusiastically with some management initiative; at other times, compliance may be grudgingly or ritualistically. At times, fear and insecurity may dominate their responses, yet frequently they show ingenuity in supplanting and contesting management discourses, turning them into objects of amusement, cynicism or confrontation (Gabriel, 1999; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994; Sturdy, 1998). Thus even within today’s glass cages, employees create niches which are unmanaged and unmanageable; in these spaces, individuals can fashion identities which amount neither to conformity nor to rebellion, but are infinitely more complex and rich than those deriving from official organizational practices (Gabriel, 1995). This form of resistance is what Collinson (1994) has termed resistance through distance, a type of resistance that does not engage directly management controls but seeks to side-step them. A different form of resistance, particularly attuned to puncturing the mystique of the glass cage, is whistle-blowing. Whistle-blowing strikes at the heart of the glass cage organization, revealing its fragility and corruption. Not only is there substantial evidence that whistle-blowing is increasing (Miceli & Near, 1989; Near, 1995), but increasingly the political dimension of whistle-blowing is recognized. (Miethe, 1999; Perry, 1998; Rothschild & Miethe, 1994) Far from being from representing the desperate acts of a few disenchanted and irrational individuals, whistle-blowing is a widely recognized social phenomenon that keeps corporations on their guard, disciplining them, as much as they seek to discipline their members. Of course, many whistle-blowers may suffer for their actions though this is by no means automatic (Near and Miceli 1996 JMS add ref). Furthermore, following the Enron collapse and other corporate scandals, legislators have sought to encourage and protect whistle-blowing as a legitimate force controlling illegal and unethical organizational practices. Whistle-blowing is a form of resistance attuned to an era of spectacle. It is also a form of resistance that becomes a spectacle in its own right, as many well-publicised cases suggest. Whilstle-blowing like resistance through distance represent attempts whereby employees seek to find their voices in opposition to an organization’s dominant voices. Unlike traditional forms of resistance they tend to be individualistic, ephemeral and disorganized. Voice, it will be recalled is the second form of response to an organization observed by Hirschman (1970) in his well-known book. It is a response when loyalty ceases to be an option. Hirschman also identifies a third type of response, exit – leaving the organization. This, I suspect, has become one of the key forms of resistance in many of today’s organizations. Chameleon employees build no loyalty towards their employers and may see no point in challenging, questioning and raising their voices. When the going gets tough, they walk out. Many of them leave even before the going gets tough creating a veritable headache for many managers and keeping management academics busy with proclamations about the “war for talent”, “employee retention” and so forth. Exit assumes many forms. Some employees may leave one employer to move to another one, hoping to enjoy enhanced rewards and career opportunities; others may drift in and out of the world of organizations, working as free lancers, consultants or simply out of work, supported by spouses, parents or friends and downshifting (Schor, 1998) (Judi Marshall). Exit is a resistance strategy for employees that directly mirrors the consumerism of our times – the very force that sustains today’s glass cages. Consumers may not always operate as sovereign decision-makers but they always operate under the illusion of choice. And the ultimate consumer choice is the choice not to purchase an object or a service, not to patronize a particular organization, not to use a particular service (including many so-called free ones), without having to offer any explanations or account for his/her actions. Consumer disloyalty is the consumer’s unique ability to simply change his/her allegiances from one source to another at the merest whim. The same can be said about employee disloyalty – the willingness of the individual to just quit without having to account for their actions. This is a course routinely taken by employees working in bars, fast food restaurants, media and entertainment industries, the tourism sector, estate agents and many other fields of employment. It is now also adopted as a strategy by numerous academics, whose tenure in specific institutions is often short-lived. What used to be seen as a dual labour market, in which the permanent core of employees was privileged at the expense of the casual and precarious ones is now being reversed. A whole army of contingent employees, many of them possessing highly specialised but transferable skills prefer to work freelance, relying on recruitment agencies to match them for short periods of time with suitable employers, optimising their earning capacity and moving on whenever they have had enough. Kunda, Barley and Evans 2002, ILRR; Matusik and Hill AoMR 1998; Polivka A E 1996 Monthly Labor Review Manpower Inc. for example is an employment agency with over 4000 offices in 70 countries, servicing nearly half a million companies per year, including many small and medium size ones as well as most large multinationals. In its books, it has the cvs of 4 million temporary workers in every conceivable occupation. It is currently ranked 136 in the Fortune 500 with sales in excess of $16 billion. It represents the epitome of flexibility for employers and employees alike. Exit, then, in contrast to voice, represents a “take it or leave it” attitude, an attitude that does not seek to confront or challenge social reality but places the highest value on individual’s freedom to act as they please. Slaves, serfs and proletarians rarely enjoyed the opportunity of exit from their bonds. Today’s employee, like today’s consumer, lives from exit to exit. In this he/she resembles a tourist, this fast emerging archetypal figure of our age (Adkins, 1995; Bauman, 1996; Urry, 1990), the figure who refuses to commit him/herself to any particular destination after the manner of pilgrims, opting instead for a constant sequence of temporary destination with no final end in sight. What we arguing then is that as the iron cages of modernity are gradually displaced by the glass cages of our times, the consumer emerges as a crucial cultural archetype, driving production but also offering of model for action, thinking and imagining that has started to permeate other spheres of life. The principle of freedom of choice which implies absence of permanent ties and fixed habits is elevated to an almost universal value, obscuring many other values like fairness, equality or justice. The rise of the consumer has been achieved at the expense of another cultural archetype that dominated earlier periods, the citizen. The concept of citizen implies mutuality and control as well as a balance of rights and duties which is becoming less evident and maybe less attractive in our time. Citizens are active members of communities, whose voices are listened to, but also who prepared to defer to the will of the majority. Citizens have to argue their views and engage with the views of others. In as much as they can make choices, citizens have a sense of superior responsibility. Choosing as a citizen leads to a very different evaluation of alternatives than choosing as a consumer. Citizens look at political action as the key to ensuring a better and fairer quality of life. This is part of the democratic tradition that delivered a welfare system in many countries in the 20th century, where the state acted as the guarantor that core human needs, such as education and health, be met independently of ability to pay. This tradition still lingers in our public life but is currently eroding as citizens are supplanted by consumers who pay for the things they want and see happiness as the product of their own free choices. Exit is an option to consumers but not to citizens. Voice is a privilege of citizens but scarcely of consumers. 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