The Management of Meaning in Organizations

Finding a hidden ‘plot’ in history has tempted artists, scientists, scholars, philosophers, politicians, ideologues and religious leaders. Hegel tried to glimpse the cunning of Spirit manifesting itself through the material events of the history of human societies. Poets and religious leaders wanted to become — acknowledged or unacknowledged — legislators of mankind. Many of them tried to fathom secret ways, trace underground passages or envision ‘invisible hands’. Many of them borrowed metaphors from one another. T.S. Eliot might have been making an erudite reference to G.W.F. Hegel’s famous observation on the cunning of reason in history, when speaking of ‘cunning passages’. Hegel, the philosopher, referred to the irony of historical fate, which has mounted ‘reason’ on a horse. Historical events gave a gifted general of the French revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, imperial power to spread revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood at the point of the bayonets of his victorious armies. His Blitzkriegs were cruel to monarchies and kind to republics. Ironic twists of fate suggesting unseen deals between personal ambitions and public causes have been noted in metaphors used by numerous scientists and philosophers.

We have managed to arrive at the question of the past of meaning without having given a definition of ‘the meaning of meaning’.¹ However, the introduction to the cultural and historical background of contemporary management of meaning (as outlined in the previous chapter) had to precede a more analytical approach. Otherwise two important points would have been compromised. Cold War influences would have been reduced to third-rate stage props in a drama populated by rational knowledge producers and those producers themselves would have become ghosts in an organizational machine defined piecemeal. Management of meaning would have been defined at the outset. Its definition would have been tacitly chosen as a preferred mode of creating/inventing or discovering/detecting a meaning. Following an introduction which places our discussion in a historical context, we can proceed forewarned that the meaning of meaning is itself a hotly debated issue. How do we go about it? First, we have to keep in mind that social locations or contexts — which provide the ‘scaffolding’ for meaning under construction — can move and change:

Part of what gives cultural practice its potency is the ability of actors to play upon the multiple meanings of symbols — thereby redefining situations in ways that they believe will favor their purposes. Creative cultural action commonly entails the purposeful or spontaneous importation of meanings from one social location or context to another.

(Sewell, 2005, p. 168)

The return of the religious pattern of sensemaking into mainstream public debate in western societies has been widely noted by philosophers of culture and acknowledged by the media. All major institutional religions have seen increases in membership, and the prognoses of secularization as the inevitable aftermath of modernization and the growth of material welfare have been quietly shelved. This may be the result of the promise of stepping ‘outside’ material life, which religion — as opposed to science, scholarship, philosophy and ideology — offers, while humanist scholars deem it impossible: ‘Perhaps it is impossible to generalize intelligently about human life, because in order to do so we would have to step outside it’ (Eagleton, 2007, p. 138).

We have considered three cases — the debate over intelligent design, arguments over the disposal of an oil rig platform and the existence of gender insensitivity among academic professionals — as exemplars of the recent history of the management of meaning. In the case of intelligent design we discussed an attempt to ‘legalize’ the return of religion into mainstream socialization (educational curricula). In the case of the Brent Spar oil platform we saw a premonition of things to come in a changing multimedia landscape, in which the power of images and mobilizing messages far exceeds the power of rational and balanced analysis. Last not least, we saw in the case of gender insensitivity within professional bureaucracies the manifestation of systematic inequality managed by discreet exclusion. We concluded that our intellectual inheritance (the past tense of meaning) includes:

The arrival of a critical turn in the contemporary sciences of management was not unexpected and prompted one of the established gurus of the managerial sciences, Henry Mintzberg, to proclaim that MBA programmes were dead. Based on narrowly dogmatic but institutionally privileged (it is tempting to label them ‘barren’) paradigms and irrelevant research, they were less than useful for future managers. So said Mintzberg during the Academy of Management annual conference in Honolulu in 2005. A critical attitude towards mainstream managerial sciences has subsequently become a permanent feature of the AoM publications.¹ By reconstructing critical incidents in the recent history of research communities we can track some of the individuals, ideas, events and processes that provided the scaffolding for this critical turn. For example, we might ask, when did the first get-together of researchers who later shaped critical management studies take place? When were the basic ideas that led to this meeting first articulated? Flows of ideas and the emergence of schools and research topics are still easier to track through the memoirs of retired researchers and by following their informal chats than through openly accessible information sources on research communities and their outputs.

Can comparative studies of fundamental transformations in such domains of culture as science, art and religion help us recognize the contours of changes to come? Can the patterned clusters of change processes perhaps best be described as ‘socio-cultural revolutions’ and as ‘socio-cultural transformations’? Or should they be seen as series of clandestine plots and underground deals between various domains of culture and society? Since the development of mobile individualized connectivity and the emergence of telecommunicational infrastructure, we can also speak of a qualitative leap forward in the ‘theatricalization’ of daily life. Even a relatively marginal public order disturbance at an open-air rock festival or an outbreak of aggressive behaviour by football fans at a regional game can immediately be amplified and presented in the media as a major threat from sinister‘angry mobs’. Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin had to look for the shape of the future among middle-class flâneurs in the well-lit and crowded centres of Paris or Berlin — our contemporaries have instant access to illuminated virtual passages, linkedIns, wikipedias and ‘second lives’. It might be said that our contemporaries have transcended the selected spaces and ‘illuminated passages’ of concrete, palpable, material cities functioning as metropolises for social imaginaries (Paris, Berlin, London, New York). We have moved into a multidimensional space of online arrangements, simcities and instant utopias. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a French avant-garde dramatist, Alfred Jarry, wrote a grotesque and absurd comedy Ubu Roi which opens with the information that the ‘Action takes place in Poland, which is nowhere.’¹ If it were written today, it could open with ‘Action takes place in virtual space, which is nowhere.’

Public debates, for instance the ongoing discussions on global warming, make it increasingly clear that fundamental social choices cannot be indefinitely postponed. Let us hope that our decisions will not be distorted by our fears (‘black spring’) or media demonizing (‘angry mobs’). These choices will influence all human individuals and it is essential that all people understand what the choices mean and that they are empowered actually to express their opinions. Turning the population of the planet into an assembly of informed citizens is certainly not going to be easy, but leaving things in the hands of incidental populists is hardly an option.

Even though the recording and preservation of arguments tend to be biased in the direction of the articulations of the powerful and the well schooled, many of the most interesting accounts of arguments from the past involve members of disadvantaged groups.

(Sen, 2005, p. xiii)