Abstract
I monster
Life could be an experiment. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
In this book Torkild Thanem has attempted to develop a novel ontology by means of which we might better understand the concept of organization itself. He characterizes his approach as a ‘monstrous organization theory’. The book covers a wide range of subjects including scientific management, human relations, sense-making, actor-network theory (ANT), critical realism, identity politics, autonomous Marxism, the philosophical approaches of Spinoza, Nietzsche, DeLanda, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as topics as far ranging as genetic engineering, transgender, disability and the history of monsters. The narrative also makes reference to a range of literary and cinematic sources on monsters such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as the Alien trilogy, Freaks and Monsters Inc. At the beginning of this complex assemblage of ideas and topics, Thanem states clearly the aim of this work in ‘challenging the established opposition between monsters and organization, and claiming the monstrous as a powerful term that can be used to pursue radically different ways of living, working and organizing’ (p. vi). Broadly speaking these monstrous ways of living are ones that are currently considered to be in some way abnormal or excessive.
Thanem takes the unusual step of including much autobiographical material in his argument, on the basis that his own lifestyle might itself be considered monstrous and thus a fruitful empirical source. While doing this he highlights potential problems of his approach relating to narcissism and self-obsession. Nevertheless, when autobiographical material is drawn upon in the ensuing analysis, this was not without insight and it was related with sensitivity and a great deal of self-deprecatory wit.
Why monster?
It was only sickness that brought me to reason. (Nietzsche, Ecco Homo)
Thanem takes some time in explaining to the reader exactly why such a project might be considered important and, indeed, urgent to the community of scholars. In doing this he argues that ‘organizations and organization theorists often seek to kill and exclude anything – that is, anything monstrous – that threatens to disrupt their boundaries’ (pp. 3–4). Perhaps this is not such a grand claim to make in the light of existing historical studies of the development of science by the likes of Kuhn and Feyerarbend, which have already shown us the stringent efforts that scientists take to exclude and marginalize novel and disruptive ideas within their community. Kuhn, for instance, quotes the physicist Max Planck who stated that a necessary condition for new ideas to take root within the community is the death of the old guard (presumably from old age). Nevertheless, Thanem is making a broader claim, not only about the scientific community, but about the process of organization itself, which he notes is necessarily exclusive in some respect, and that this process of exclusion is a moralistic one, where what is excluded is stigmatized as being monstrous. Thanem draws on Nietzsche to explain that this process of exclusion and stigmatization does not purify the organization, but has the effect of transforming the organization into something monstrous.
Monstrous materiality
Essential: to start from the body and employ it as a guide. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power)
Materiality and physicality are key themes in Thanem’s monstrous organization theory. These themes are developed to great effect in his counter-history of organization theory, in which he carefully reveals the monstrous organizing forces at work in the emergence of the early management theories of Taylor and Mayo. This historical analysis concludes that, ‘Durkheim and his followers [e.g. Mayo and Parsons] effectively reduced human beings to cognitive beings without bodies’ (p. 28). These theorists heavily influenced the early research agenda of dominant institutions such as Harvard Business School, and as a consequence the concept of the body has been relegated to the position of just a metaphor for organization, and the materiality of bodies has since become a marginal aspect of organizational analysis. Instead the ‘malestream’ has focused on cognitivist aspects of organization as is clear in approaches as varied as contingency theories, strategic choice theories, neo-institutional theories, decision-making theories, sense-making theories, and so on. Thanem argues that this neglect of the materiality of organization has led to a tendency within organization theory to underplay the ‘internal differences in organizations’ which are a somewhat crucial aspect of being human. It is in place of these impoverished cognitivist approaches to organization that Thanem hopes to position his monstrous organization theory.
After outlining a remarkable counter-history of organization theory, the argument jumps abruptly to the subject of waste and its significance to the development of modern organization. Thus we move from a counter-history of organization theory to address the lesser-known aspects of the history of organization itself and its exploitation of monsters. Chapter 3 of the book outlines a fascinating study of how ‘monstrous and leaky matter’ becomes sanitized by organizations and may even be exploited for the purpose of human consumption. Thanem provides some great examples to illustrate his argument, such as the use of industrial quantities of horse urine by the pharmaceutical industry in the synthesis of estrogen for hormone replacement therapy. He identifies other monstrous aspects of everyday organizational life including the transgressive activities of modern CEOs, and the manufacture of transgenic organisms such as the Flavr Savr tomato, the ‘geep’, and OncomouseTM (a mouse engineered for the purposes of medical experiments testing cancer treatments). Central to his discussion of our exploitation of monsters is a commentary on the energy drink ‘Monster Energy’. This analysis provides a nice critique of the over-inflated rhetoric of the marketing campaigns for this drink and the ways in which the consumer is conceived in these campaigns in terms of being an addict. However, the analysis relies somewhat on the brand name ‘Monster Energy’ for its relevance to the overall argument, rather than highlighting its genuinely monstrous aspects. That said, this latter example fits very well with the other examples that Thanem draws on in this chapter as an example of the pharmaceutical endocolonization of the human body.
Monstrous bodies and monstrous becomings
There are innumerable healths of the body… (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
In chapter 4 Thanem provides a brief history of monsters and the different ways in which this notion has been understood over the centuries, drawing extensively from the works of Canguilhem, Foucault, Ansell-Pearson, and Deleuze and Guattari, among others. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘the rhizome’ is used as a means of developing a theory of monstrous organization. The rhizome is an assemblage constituted through transversal communication between disparate forces in some kind of symbiotic relationship. Drawing on Margulis’s work in evolutionary biology, Thanem shows that all forms of life derive from such symbiotic relationships. The forces of change are not only immanent and non-linear in nature – as has already been ably demonstrated in Chia’s (1999) commentary on rhizomic change – these forces are also monstrous. Creative involution is characterized by mutation rather than by some ideal of linear ‘progress’. In contrast to Chia’s use of the rhizome as a metaphor for organizational innovation, Thanem conceives of organizational innovation in terms of monstrous becomings, where the rhizome serves less as a metaphor and more as a materialist description of the mechanism of change itself. When conceived in terms of the rhizome, innovation appears to be monstrous. Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 47) themselves described the ‘animal rhizome’ as a monster. Thanem draws on a key example from Deleuze and Guattari’s work where they discuss the becoming-wasp of the orchid and the becoming-orchid of the wasp, a relationship in which the wasp literally serves as a part of the reproductive organs of the orchid. In the same way, Deleuze and Guattari observed that human beings are increasingly becoming the reproductive organs of machines, serving as ‘machine tickling aphids’ in the machinic assemblage of technological reproduction.
In many respects, Thanem’s analysis follows Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) contrast between the notion of ‘progress’ which takes place within an ordered ‘striated space’ and that of becoming which unfolds in a vortical smooth space. Organizational innovation is not ‘like jazz’, as prevailing wisdom might claim. It is more dangerous. As Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft once said of the evolution of Linux, it is a cancer. It concerns the evolution of MRSA and the spread of SARS as much as the invention of penicillin. It concerns the opening of the Cotton Club as much as the creation of jazz. Monstrous organization theory seeks to explore the margins of organizational life, embracing ‘the logic of otherness’, the logic of the malcontent, the addict, the queer and the transgender. This is monstrous organization and its ‘rhizomic transformations’.
‘Monstructing’ organization theory
Man is something that should be overcome. (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Chapter 5 involves a critical reappraisal of organizational ontology beyond existing constructionist and realist approaches, drawing heavily upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari and DeLanda. The argument begins with a detailed critique of existing work on ANT within organization studies and its ‘flat ontology’ wherein assemblages are constituted by networks of heterogenous ‘actants’ which admit both human and nonhuman forms of agency. Thanem is concerned that, despite some early work (e.g. Law, 1991), existing variants of ANT have paid insufficient attention to the monstrous and bodily aspects of organization and what he terms the ‘politics of marginality’ (p. 82). He also argues that ANT lacks criteria for deciding what to include in its analysis of assemblages. While DeLanda and critical realism avoid this problem, Thanem is critical of their separation between natural and social ontology. He turns instead to Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage of desire which is constituted by lines of deterritorialization, and explores this theme with a discussion of the assemblages created by disabled and transgendered people in organizations. This re-evaluation of organization theory continues into the following chapter on politics and ethics where Thanem explores some lines of flight that might be followed as a means of transforming the study of organization today. He develops a politics of marginality in part through his interrogation of issues relating to diversity, disability and transgender, but also by drawing upon Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude which highlights the symbiotic relations between new social movements, identity politics and class-based concerns. He then seeks to develop a monstrous ethics using Spinoza’s concept of the conatus and the active forces of the body, which is based upon ‘taking responsibility for enhancing not just…[our] own capacities but doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of other people’ (p. 124). Rather than being grounded in a list of disembodied rights, ethics is understood here as a fundamentally bodily activity grounded directly in practices and institutions that concerns enhancing our capacity to affect and be affected by others.
High praise has already been heaped upon this book by distinguished academics including Marta Calás, Daniel Hjorth and Carl Rhodes, and can be found on the back cover using keywords such as ‘important lessons’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘courage’ and ‘beautifully expressed’, and I shall now attempt to add further to this small heap of approving adjectives. One minor quibble I have is that I would like to have seen greater use of illustrative examples, with more detailed exploration of case material to explain the precise nature of the concepts being developed here, especially when important cases are used such as Monsanto’s corporate social responsibility. The book does not sit easily within the existing literature on organization theory and its very novelty makes its contribution difficult to position with respect to this literature. It clearly makes an important contribution to the existing work on actor-network theory, particularly in its development of an ethics of assemblage theory which is orientated around the politics of marginality. In some sense this book can also be understood as the start of a ‘schizoanalysis’ of organizations and organization theory. This is most apparent in its commentary on the mechanisms of division and social exclusion within organizations, or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘conjunctive synthesis’ by means of which a superior ‘us’ is separated from an inferior ‘them’. In its place Thanem places the monster as the nomadic subject par excellence. The book’s distinctive commentary on sexuality and transgender issues is also framed very much in terms of a ‘connective synthesis’ by means of which sexual identity is not confined to a given subject position (e.g. male or female), but proliferates beyond the possible subject positions of identity politics, where even wasps can become reproductive organs. The monster lacks nothing.