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.
