‘The Leading Journal in the Field’:
Destabilizing Authority in the Social Sciences of Management

Peter Armstrong & Geoff Lightfoot (eds)

‘I am often told, “Don’t waste your time reading books, you’d be better off reading the leading journals in your field.” Unfortunately, the authors of this book have closely read some of those articles: examining arguments, with simple principles and words, plus a touch of irony – and a shared belief in ideas and debates. The suspicions that we all have in a part of our head appears in its ugly nakedness: what is this social game that authors in leading management journals play? What grants them their truth effects? This is a book that one should read the day one enters the academic field; and then regularly thereafter so as not to forget.’ Professor Jean-Luc Moriceau, Telecom Business School (France)

The standards of scholarship prevailing in the social sciences of management are indicative of an atrophy of the critical function. This results in a kind of tribalized authoritarianism, a dispersed oligarchy of the gatekeepers in which the congeniality of ideas and findings with their own have replaced judgments based on the quality of argument and evidence. The authors in this volume turn to the practice of practical criticism to destabilize authority in the social sciences of management, and to assert that it must be possible for criticism of scholarly outputs – particularly those of established authority-figures – to be heard and debated.

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Art and Contemporary Critical Practice:
Reinventing Institutional Critique

Gerald Raunig & Gene Ray (eds)

‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

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Critique of Creativity:
Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’

Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray and Ulf Wuggenig (eds)

Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of ‘intelligent design’, the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.

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Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi and Juhana Venäläinen (eds.)

The Nordic welfare states, despite their history of successful welfare generation, have recently experienced a penetration of capitalist market relations to ever new spheres of life. Also their failure to create ecologically sustainable welfare models has been undeniable.

Simultaneously, community economies have emerged as a source of ideas and practices on what ‘the economy’ fundamentally could signify. In their multiple manifestations, community economies are about enacting the economy differently, on a grassroots level.

Yet community economies have typically not been analysed as inspirations and challenges to the future of the welfare state. This is despite that, to some extent, they share the same ethos with Nordic welfare states, based on the values of universalism and decommodification.

This book presents a number of empirical case studies of community economies in the context of a Nordic welfare state to better understand the potential of community economies and the interaction and friction with state governance, and more generally the conditions in which community economies and Nordic welfare states can co-exist and cooperate.

Could a Nordic welfare state be an enabling platform for community economies to diffuse? And could community economies show the welfare states a future based on decommodification and respect of the ecological limits?

The authors of the book are Finnish academics with an activist leaning, representing a number of different academic disciplines.

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Ethics and Economy: After Levinas

Dag G. Aasland

‘Rather than succumbing to the easy temptation to blame business leaders for anything that went wrong in recent years, Aasland looks for the remnants of good in business as such. This leads him to ask the right questions: one should, for example, not ask why a leader did the wrong thing but why such a leader did not do it. A thought-provoking and hugely original essay is the outcome of this approach.’ René ten Bos, Radboud University, The Netherlands

While today many express astonishment at ‘ethical scandals’ in business, in this important new book Dag G. Aasland asks why, in capitalist economies, such scandals are not more common or even the norm. Taking his lead from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this book proposes a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the meaning of ethics and economy. This elegantly written text offers a clear statement of the importance of a Levinasian ethics of the Other for thinking through and beyond the limits and persistence of economic rationality. This book invites readers to step beyond the enclosure of business ethics and takes us beyond ‘business as usual’ but also beyond ‘ethics as usual’.

Dag G. Aasland is Professor of Economics and Head of the Department of Working Life and Innovation at the University of Agder, Norway. For the last few years his teaching and research has concentrated on ethics in business and management, especially from the perspective of the works of Levinas.

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Joy Forever:
The Political Economy of Social Creativity

Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Szreder (eds)

The book published by F/SUW in cooperation with MayFly Books gathers papers based on presentations at the conference Labour of the Multitudes? Political Economy of Social Creativity, organized in Warsaw in October 2011. It includes contributions by renowned thinkers and artists, including Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Massimiliano Tomba, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Martha Rosler, among many others.

The title Joy Forever refers to the false promise of a common happiness, constantly played out by the proponents of the creative class and creative economy – the very promise that since Romanticism has been ascribed to art itself, a vow which remains unfulfilled. The aim of F/SUW’s publication is to scrutinize the false promises of distributed creativity as an ideology of cognitive capitalism. The authors devote themselves to critical examination of the structural links between art, creativity, labour and the creation of value under contemporary relations of production. Some of them do not stop at a critical diagnosis but go further, reflecting upon potential alternatives to the status quo.

The book covers more than the issues of a narrowly understood art world, despite the fact that it pays a lot of attention to them. Art is conceived here as a social lab, where innovative ways of organizing of labour, socializing both for labour and through labour, as well as different types of production, speculation, generation and accumulation and appropriation of value are experimented with and tested.

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Lacan and Organization

Carl Cederström & Casper Hoedemaekers (eds)

The work of Jacques Lacan has become an influential source to most disciplines of the social sciences, and is now considered a standard reference in literary theory, cultural studies and political theory. While management and organization studies has traditionally been preoccupied with questions of making corporations more efficient and productive, it has also mobilized a strong and forceful critique of work, management and capitalism. It is primarily as a contribution to this tradition of critical scholarship that we can see the work of Lacan now emerging.

In this edited collection, a number of organizational scholars have made common cause with political theorists and psychoanalysts. Together they explore the many intersections of Lacan and organization. The contributions address a series of pertinent questions: What are the new templates for control in the workplace? How is subjectivity produced in contemporary organizations? And how can a Lacanian reading of contemporary work politics render new insights into resistance and ethics?

This edited collection includes contributions from Peter Fleming, Rickard Grassman, Jason Glynos, Campbell Jones, Carol Owens, André Spicer and Yannis Stavrakakis.

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Negations: Essays in Critical Theory

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse’s Negations is both a radical critique of capitalist modernity and a model of materialist dialectical thinking. In a series of essays, originally written in the period stretching from the 1930s to 1960s, Marcuse takes up the presupposed categories that have, and continue to, ground thought and action in our administered society: liberalism, industrialism, individualism, hedonism, aggression. This book is both a testament to a great thinker and a still vital strand of thought in the comprehension and critique of the modern organized world. It is essential reading for younger scholars and a radical reminder for those steeped in the tradition of a critical theory of society. With a brilliance of conception combined with an insistence on the material conditions of thought and action, this book speaks both to the particular contents engaged and to the fundamental grounds of any critique of organized modernity.

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New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty

Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”

Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.

Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.

This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.

“After the highpoint of the subversive decade 1968-1977, Italian autonomist Marxism and French theory of desire meet at the intersection of two different methodologies of subjectivation. Social recomposition of the working class and molecular proliferation of desire merge, and together open a new space for theory and for social action. While the ideologies of the twentieth century are falling, Toni Negri and Félix Guattari trace the lines of a new vision of autonomy.” – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Published in collaboration with Autonomedia and Minor Compositions.

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Monika Kostera

We have been led to believe that the commons met their tragic fate because they were outdated and ineffective as a way of organizing human economic and social activity. However, this story only makes sense if we adopt a severely truncated understanding of being human, shorn of insights from psychology, sociology, or ecology. This book proposes organizational ideas and practices born out of the archetype of the commons, as well as tools reclaimed, renewed, and recycled from the vast repository of modern management models. Capitalism is failing and we need to find a better way to organize ourselves, more humanely as well as in accordance with the ecosystem.

About the author

Monika Kostera is Professor Ordinaria in economics and the humanities at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and professor in organization and management at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She is the author or editor of many other books and articles. She has worked in Polish, Swedish and UK universities. Her current research interests include imagination, alternative organization and organizational ethnography. She is member of poets’ cooperative Erbacce Press, Liverpool.

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Toni Ruuska

Capitalism is ecologically irredeemable. It simply cannot be fixed. This is because capitalism is based on endless capital accumulation, entailing growth in material throughput, whereas the planet Earth is finite. From this conclusion of ecological Marxism, this book continues to theorise how capitalism is reproduced in the 21st century. It is argued that the logic of capital and production based on the profit motive, competition and productivity enhancements is not enough to reproduce capitalism, but a wide variety of national and transnational institutional arrangements, repressive and ideological state apparatuses are needed as well to secure and protect its continuation. One of the most important state institutions from this perspective is higher education. Higher education has an integral role not only in educating people to become part of the capitalist production, but also has a significant role in providing knowledge, innovations and other outputs for expansive capital accumulation. Based on neoliberal restructuring of contemporary higher education, it is claimed that one of the primary purposes of higher education is to reproduce capitalism, and because of this higher education is increasingly functioning on an ecologically unsustainable basis.

About the author

Toni Ruuska is a University Teacher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Economics and Management. This book is based on his doctoral dissertation.

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The Cynical Educator

Ansgar Allen

Ground down, disenchanted, but committed to education. Unable to quit, yet deploring everything education has become. We suffer a weakened and weakening cynicism. This cynicism exploits the last remaining educational commitments of an otherwise broken workforce, draining that workforce of its final pleasure: Revolt. Our cynicism is reactionary and conditional – exhausting where it might invigorate, rendering complicit, giving safe passage to bad temper – but can be reclaimed. We need more cynicism, not less. With The Cynical Educator a revived, militant Cynicism affronts us. Drawing on a long history of religious denial and philosophical intrigue, it brings our educational bad faith to the surface. It confronts the educated with the fruit of their conceit.

About the author

Ansgar Allen is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Sheffield and author of Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason.

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Richard Hall

“The Hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable.”

Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University has become hopeless, in two respects. First, it has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope. Second, it is unable to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the contradictions of capital. Thus, in its maintenance of business-as-usual, the University remains shaped as a tactical response to these contradictions.

The Hopeless University examines the structures/forms, cultures/pathologies and activities/methodologies of the University, in order to question what kind of higher learning we yearn for and deserve. In looking at the ways in which the University represents our entangled, intellectual existence, Richard Hall asks whether we might compost the structures, cultures and activities that engender hopelessness and helplessness. Might other modes of intellectual work and higher learning be possible?

In addressing this question, individuals and communities are invited to consider the potential for reimagining intellectual work as a movement of sensuous human activity in the world, and as a refusal of its commodification. As widespread social struggles against capitalism are revealed, we are reminded of our ability to make history. Thus, we must discuss how to reimagine and recycle intellectual work in society. We must discuss how to compost The Hopeless University as an indignant movement of dignity.

Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is a National Teaching Fellow and writes about life in higher education at: richard-hall.org.

You can read the book online below, download it for free (and donate a suggested £1 if you like), or purchase a paperback copy at your local bookstore or online.