From culture to corporate culture: A misuse of knowledge? Or, a norm?

Rommel A.Curaming

I am reviewing a book entitled Social Science and Knowledge in a Globalising World, which is edited by Zawawi Ibrahim, a professor of anthropology at Univesity of Brunei Darussalam. It was co-published by Malaysian Social Science Association (MSSA or PSSM) and the Malaysia-based Strategic Information and Research Development Centre (SIRD).  This collection of essays is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, the contributors in this volume include some of the most well-known, as well as emerging names, in Southeast Asian and cultural studies. The list includes  Benedict Anderson, Ien Ang, Anthony Reid, Chua Beng Huat, Viktor King, Hans-Dieter Evers,  Clive Kessler, Goh Beng Lan, Syed Muhd Khairudin and Maznah Mohamad, among others. Putting together contributions from such an impressive list of scholars is definitely not a small achievement. Second, the volume offers a wealth of insights on various aspects of globalization and, this is of more interest to me, the sociology, history and politics of knowledge production, consumption and distribution. In this post, I will ruminate on a few attention-grabbing issues raised in one of the articles in the volume.

I have found Clive Kessler’s perceptive chapter—“Globalisation: Familiar Issues but a New-Fangled Discourse”—refreshing and generative  of debates. By calling globalization a new-fangled discourse, Kessler hardly conceals his contempt for those who, in his view, create vociferous but almost vacuous pronouncements about the features or nature of globalization. He aligns himself with critics who believe globalization is not of recent origins and its deep historic roots need to be adequately appreciated to understand this multifaceted process. He warns that doing otherwise misleads well-meaning scholars and critics and thus miss not only its full import but, more importantly, its sinister undersides.

Kessler’s argument is more complex than what I can discuss in this space-constrained post. What I wish to reflect on is his explication of how and why Weber’s  ‘honourable’ concept of culture has been ‘debased’, ‘abused’ and ‘dumbed down,’ and morphed into corporate or organizational culture in the fields of management science or organization studies. In relation to my previous post, Kessler’s explication seems to be an excellent example of how knowledge which was conceived with good intent could be used otherwise. In his view, this represents a ‘slippage’ from the “theoretically sublime to the intellectually banal,” (p. 30) a regrettable misuse, so he claims, of one of the most vital and inspired concepts in the social sciences. He  deftly uses this case to lay the groundwork for a critique of, in his mind, the vulgarized or corporatized intellectual foundations of much of globalization discourses—a critique which, for its complexity and salience, is in itself worthy of a separate treatment.

For the purpose of exploring the knowledge/power analytics, what I’ve found striking in Kessler’s formulation is the sharp dichotomy he draws between two things. On the one hand,  he considers as “theoretically sublime” and “grandest, most capacious and expansive” the conceptualization of culture in the Weberian and other traditions in sociology and anthropology;  on the other hand, he deeply regrets the distortion or cynical appropriation in the management science or organizational studies. He bewails management scholars’ reversal of Weber’s intended severe critique of instrumental rationality (via a humanistic and historicized conception of culture) and make it serve, heaven forbid!, the bedrock of management science, where the bastardized notion of  culture (now called corporate culture) forms an essential part of the whole range of techniques of corporate control and value-modification in the service of profit and other market forces. In his mind, classical social theory conceives of culture in fairly neutral terms, as “an orientation, an ethos, a way of being human in world, that informs all (emphasis original) that we do and exerts its effects across the whole of our lives, all its domains, rather than being functionally specific and instrumentally harnessed to any single compartment…” The main source of Kessler’s misgivings appears to be the management scholars’ borrowing of the ‘sublime’ notion of culture that inadvertently edifies and dignifies corporate culture and hide or mystify its otherwise naked instrumentalist intent.

Against the backdrop of the fairly long tradition of a highly politicized conception of culture in various fields such as critical theory, sociology of knowledge, critical pedagogy, postcolonial theory and cultural studies (see for example Ien Ang’s chapter in this book), one may be easily struck by Kessler’s rather sanguine idea of what culture is. From the standpoint of these fields, culture can be anything but neutral; it cannot be plain descriptive. Examples are legion that show culture in this supposedly neutral term being used to justify gross inequality and ethnic or religious conflict or vindicate or dignify gruesome acts (e.g. widow-burning, child marriage, arranged marriage).This makes one wonder which is more menacing: the notion of corporate culture that almost everyone knows to be an agent of control, or the idea of culture that naturalizes a range of human behavior which may be considered unacceptable?  In fairness to Kessler, the conception of culture he highlighted is understandably strategic. In the context of his essay, he tries to demonstrate the vulgarization in the service of the market forces of the otherwise well-conceived and well-intent concepts in the social science as a parallel to what is happening in the discourse on globalization.

What I have found instructive in Kessler’s stance is two-fold:  first, it represents the fairly generic attitude among scholars in the more theoretically-informed disciplines. What seems to operate here is the  great theory-application divide, whereby scholars who work on the more theory-heavy stuff tend to look down on those who deal with the ‘applied’ aspects. Those in theoretical linguistics, for instance, assume intellectual high ground over those in applied linguistics; and those in the applied linguistics tend to reproduce the same hierarchical attitude towards, say, ESL teachers. Those who ‘do’  history patronize those who teach history; those in pure mathematics condescend those in applied mathematics like Statistics. The classic ‘those-who-think-over-those-who-do’ operates here, as the fate of technology and engineering (vis-à-vis basic sciences), applied anthropology, applied sociology, applied history (public history) and others indicate. I should note that there has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism that seeks to undercut this hierarchy, and in the expanding number of quarters the order has been successfully reversed, but in society and global scale in general, this remains not the case.

Second, and this is more salient, this attitude sets scholars to easily dismiss the so-called ‘misuse’, ‘abuse,’ ‘distortion’ or ‘vulgarization’ of knowledge as aberration, which any scholar worthy of this name ought to have avoided by using the ‘right’ theory, methods, interpretation and data. What this attitude obscures or occludes is the possibility that rather than an abnormality or aberration, what management scholars have done may in the fact be the norm. That is, what they did merely make explicit what people, scholars or not, regardless of the level of intellectual attainment, subtly or unmindfully do on a daily basis: interpret or utilize knowledge based on, in final analysis, their unconscious need or use for it, if not expressly driven by self-interest or altruism. I should note that this claim does not preclude objectivity, as pursuit of objectivity, as I will try to explain in a separate post, is hardly a disinterested position in itself.

I understand why Kessler, and many others, will easily dismiss the notion, say, of corporate culture as an unfortunate misuse or vulgarization of the ‘hollowed’ concept of culture. It seems more productive, however, to pay greater attention to the analytic pathways such ‘misuse’ opens up. By taking corporate culture not as a misuse qua misuse, but as just one among other possible ways of utilizing the concept, the focus of attention shifts away from whether knowledge claim is true or false, acceptable or not. Important as they are, such questions unduly confine the otherwise more wide-ranging issues to the realm of academic technicality and conceal in the process various things, including the hidden and self-serving interests of the scholarly class. Admittedly, this is a contentious point which I will discuss more about in a future blogpost.

In my mind, the questions of how knowledge is actually used, by whom, in what context, why, and with what actual and potential effects, are of greater importance. Focusing on these questions does not mean that veracity or truth is not significant; it only means that accuracy is hardly the only or most important thing about knowledge. What this shift in focus seeks to achieve is to help common people understand the nature of competing truths that often underlie knowledge claims. By paying more attention to these questions, we foreground the inherently double-edge nature of knowledge and thus put critical scholarship in a better position to protect and promote public interests.