Abstract
On a recent visit to the head offices of a UK-based multinational corporation (MNC), I was again confronted with the oddity of corporate Newspeak: mentions of their ‘standards of leadership’, talk of employees having a ‘bias for action’, an intern in a customer-facing role being described as a ‘blue-sky thinker’, a discussion of fostering ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and developing a ‘founder’s mentality’, and so on. I caught a glimpse of an ‘Acronym Glossary’ which new employees are given to help them parse this curious parlance.
At first, I dismissed all of this as simply more management jargon with which I was not yet familiar. However, standing in an open-office with brightly coloured decorations and comfortable couches dotted around, I became increasingly aware of a gap in my own theoretical and linguistic repertoire that made it difficult for me to articulate my scepticism towards the terms being deployed, to vocalize critique and concern for the relations of power and domination that I saw being effaced, and most importantly to invite debate and discussion about the utility and futility of the language games that were taking place around me. With his latest book, André Spicer addresses precisely this gap. Business Bullshit provides the reader with a robust terminological apparatus that enables them to succinctly describe the increasingly opaque ‘no-man’s language’ of business – a system of words and phrases intentionally designed to bear no relationship to truth by purposefully obscuring organizational function and reality: Bullshit. The conjured image of a reeking and fetid pile of excrement is particularly appropriate for describing the intellectually vacuous and perverse form of nonsense whose various manifestations we are all likely to have encountered in our study of the modern corporation.
Through five chapters, Spicer develops the reader’s appreciation for the emergence and proliferation of bullshit, tracing out a recent history of the various authors, academics and practitioners who’ve tried to call it out, including David Graeber, G.A. Cohen, Marina Warner, Harry Frankfurt, and Harper Reed. For Spicer, business bullshit seems most salient in the conversations about synergizing, benchmarking, core-competencies and thought leaders that are all too common in organizations but, more broadly, the varying typologies of bullshit pervade every part of business, including mission statements, the reasoning behind mergers and acquisitions, conference calls, and the overblown claims that populate resumes. Anywhere that one catches a whiff of some aspect of organizational life that has been inflated in importance to the point where its grandiosity no longer reflects a connection to reality, it is safe to call bullshit.
While previous work within organization studies has addressed itself to similar concerns, most prominently the work on management fads and fashions, the language of management ‘fashions’ or ‘jargon’ is inadequate for Spicer as it fails to call out the often detrimental effects of bullshit like the work of Charles Krone in wasting time and money at Pacific Bell or ‘Holacracy’ as a means of disguising bureaucratic control at Zappos. Bullshit wastes time and organizational resources, and more importantly, seems complicit in casting the worker in the contemporary corporation in the role of a ‘post-modern Sisyphus’ whose life is overrun by a never ending to-do list of pointless tasks; ‘bullshit jobs’ where even the people doing them know don’t think that they contribute anything meaningful to society.
Despite these negative effects, bullshit exists in organizations for a number of reasons. It provides an in-group language whose usage and mastery legitimates one’s status as a manager and thereby ameliorates anxiety about the task of managing and one’s competency at it. It exists as a way to spend time when one is at a ‘bullshit job’ (e.g. coming up with a new mission statement, filling out unnecessary forms). It functions as a form of social glue for members of the organization, through ‘team-building exercises’ and various other forms of ‘fun’. It can even be useful as a way of holding the attention of others (e.g. talking about ‘big data’ might be the only way to get funding to improve your organization’s IT infrastructure) or as a way to maintain one’s self-confidence in a brutal entrepreneurial climate.
Spicer’s encyclopaedia of bullshit will doubtlessly prove an invaluable resource for Business School pedagogy, whether in attempting to introduce MBA level practitioners to a healthy scepticism about the language that they deploy at work (as well as the consequences of it), or as a resource for the development of experiments in Critical Management Education (CME). As Spicer notes in his own ways, an analysis of the bullshit which pervades the world of organizations paints the practices of management education as little more than a mode of indoctrination into a language replete with meaningless drivel where students are taught to parse the incomprehensible jargon of ‘being agile’, ‘quality circles’ and the meaning of various acronyms like net present value (NPV), human resource development (HRD) and key performance indicator (KPI) but denied any meaningful access to the critical or existential resources with which the tradition of CME would seek to equip them. Indeed, Business Bullshit will prove an excellent resource for enabling students to develop an organization-focused version of what cultural critic Douglas Kellner calls ‘critical media literacy’, an awareness that the language used by corporations in order to represent particular forms of conduct, from ‘exceptional customer experience’ to ‘high quality service’ or ‘sustainable business strategy’, is part of a diverse and disparate series attempts to propagate bullshit.
Even if we are all propagators of our own varieties of bullshit, those used to the smell of the guileless, left-leaning humanism of the Critical Management Studies (CMS) variety will be hard-pressed to find much to challenge in Spicer’s chronicling of business bullshit. However, those unaccustomed might find the claims of bullshit representing a loss of ‘richness and vitality’ or ‘reality’ to be at least a little vague or sanctimonious. Indeed, despite Spicer’s careful attempts to outline ways of minimizing the production of bullshit, slowing down its exchange and stopping the celebration and legitimation of it, it is easy to see how someone whose job has historically been dependent upon bullshit might struggle to engage with Spicer’s position.
Despite this, what we must all take from Business Bullshit is the invocation to treat bullshit seriously as the defining pathology of our times and not merely dismiss it as I did or laugh at it or try to use it for our own ends. As Spicer so rightly observes, ‘the great task of the business bullshit spotter is simply to stay awake’ (p.29) – to resist the urge to gloss-over the vacuity of corporate nonsense and sustain a critical analysis of the often exploitative and irresponsible neoliberal discourses that it reproduces is to be complicit in the unmaking of a corporate landscape driven by various forms of bullshit. Perhaps such a cultivated ‘organizational scatology’ is an adequate response to the state of contemporary organizations, particularly in the age of kakistocracy.