It’s time for Acting Up!

From agenda and on to action

Organization is not a journal for every academic concerned with organizations. As Calás and Smircich note, it is mostly for those that see some emancipatory potential in the work they do. If you like, it is for those who come to critical studies with what we might call ‘an agenda’. Seldom is it a revolutionary agenda. More often it is a tiny agenda. Something small or hidden. An itch that demands a scratch—micro-emancipation rather than transformation. It might be found in the particular way we ask questions (Who will benefit? Who stands to lose? What does power have to do with it? Whose interests does this knowledge serve?). It might be some nagging doubt about organizations or their leaders or some murky half-remembered event that suggested organizations to be devices of domination and subjection. Perhaps such agendas are born of a family story of resistance passed down the generations. Or perhaps it comes from a confronting encounter with a different class, culture, sexual, or gender identity that showed something of the dark side of organized life in all its scandalous exploitation and obvious subordination. But emancipatory concerns might also come from something more mundane: a travel, drug, or protest experience—something that briefly made strange the everyday political, economical, and social relations.

For some, this agenda is born of trauma. A violent workplace event, sexual harassment, a destructive confrontation with an incompetent, overbearing and destructive boss, a redundancy, personal grievance or brutal restructuring orchestrated by an ostensibly enlightened organization, like a union, a health organization, a consulting firm, a progressive professional body, or even, god-forbid, a university. Something where the taken-for-granted anchors of normal life just blew away, and the canopy was lifted for a bit.

A survey of members of the Critical Management Studies (CMS) division of the Academy of Management a few years back revealed that many came to postgraduate studies after a shortened career in the ‘conventional world’. They then joined the CMS division because it spoke to the ‘real politics’ of organizations as they had experienced them—something they felt other academic ‘tribes’ seemed to ignore. As such, the critical study of organizations seems to offer something of a narrow ledge on which to land—a reprieve for reflection and analysis. But the narrow ledge can create the problems. The ledge seems to become a balcony for many, and that little originating agenda gets consigned to occasional outings in papers and teaching performances.

Actually, for most academics, taking action is troubling—witness the heat in the recent performativity debates and the challenge of demonstrating ‘impact’. It is certainly much safer, easier, and more career confirming to write about the possibilities and potential of contending action, of critical performativity, than to undertake some. But at the same time are there also forces pointing us in more activist directions?

The United Kingdom’s research funding mechanism distributed 20% funds based on impact cases at the last evaluation round. As universities gear up for future exercises, they are advising faculty to make impact (beyond academia) central to research projects. Cambridge University told its academics in a report on the 2014 Research Evaluation Framework (REF) that impact should be built into research projects ‘from conception’ (Cambridge University, 2016: 2).

Of course, there is no reason at all to assume that if universities are led to the special funding pools, their tenured academics will go ahead and drink. But being led by the nose to water tells us much about how challenging having an impact beyond the classroom or the pages of journals can be. This is no surprise of course. The discourse of the university, as Lacan would suggest, creates academic subjects who are questioners, explainers, and writers. The actors, as we might say, take the other door and perform on a different stage.

Yet, others might argue that what academics do is a particular kind of action. Put grandly, they might say academics act with chisel and hammer, a sewing machine, or a paintbrush on the walls and curtains of the symbolic house of knowledge. This is certainly work. It takes time and energy. Forging a big and challenging question, hammering home a doubt, unstitching a discursive regime, weaving a new theoretical curtain, or pouring annoying theoretical sand into the gear box of knowledge can be tough going. But it is only one sort of action. Aren’t other tools also needed to realize the emancipatory potential of such work?

Beyond the critical study of organizations, universities more generally tend to regard ‘action’ as either the raw material for capture, experimentation or contemplation, or something that students do or something outsourced to others. And yet, ironically, central to this kind of domestication is the textualization of action into theory in, for example, the translation of feminist practice as Feminist Theory, of worker revolt into Industrial Relations Theory, or of colonial resistance into Post-Colonial Theory. As famed feminist Gloria Steinem neatly puts it, ‘Feminist theory came from feminist activism—it wasn’t the other way around’, (Kramer, 2015). One wonders then why, rather than wait for others to take action and for the university to harvest its theoretical fruits, why the university doesn’t leap from its observational balcony and take action itself. In some instances, the opportunities to leap from the balcony are (confrontingly) right before us.

Why Acting Up now?

The groundwork for the new Acting Up series was laid in two places at different times. It surfaced at the Editorial Board meeting of 2015 in Athens, Greece, in the midst of the political turmoil about the austerity policies. Talking about the heated protests in the city center far away in the air-conditioned buildings of the American [sic], College of Greece was an almost surreal experience. Several members of the Editorial Board joined the protest marches in the streets, practicing activism and politics. It sparked the will to create a new type of manuscript to be able to engage with politics and activism in the journal in a different and contemporary way.

The early seeds of the section go back a little earlier. During 2012–2013, as a raft of new open access journals began publishing, and the price gouging antics of certain journal publishers grabbed some headlines, Organization’s publisher, SAGE, asked the Editorial Board if a second open access Organization journal might be developed. It was suggested that the proposed journal, nicknamed ‘O2’, would publish activist writing, be directed at the wider activist community and might be project-orientated in such a way that it might build action, resources, and responses to key organizational challenges, for example, global warming, slave labor, and exploitation through debt. However, in the end, this idea was ditched. There was concern that a second journal would weaken the first and at the same time other outlets, such as The Conversation, were developing and doing a similar kind of job.

Acting Up already!

Of course there many examples of engaged and performative scholarship, particularly from feminist scholars, already published in Organization (Coleman and Rippin, 2000; Meyerson and Kolb, 2000). While some of this work originates in the familiar desire for research and teaching that contributes to alleviating ‘real’ world problems (Cole, 2009; Hakala and Ylijoki, 2001; Safri, 2015; Strumińska-Kutra, 2016), it also derives from various theoretical tributaries that assume a performative ontology (Barad, 2003; Gond et al., 2016). Put simply, such an approach regards research, not as a practice of attempting to represent the real world but as a set of actions that perform that world in new ways. A particularly useful illustrative example of this kind of work was presented as part of the CMS program at the 2015 Academy of Management meeting in Vancouver and has been published in Organization (Esper et al., 2017).

The conference session featured presentations on ‘critical performativity’, a term that has helped significantly in supporting discussion of activist–scholar engagement (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016; Gond et al., 2016). The session opened with a presentation that discussed the theoretical background and implications of ‘critical performativity’ as a concept. The speakers received a suitable and polite response. They were followed by two scholars who presented case studies of their work as activist scholars, and their research in support of activist scholarship. The first case looked at how academics had been involved in setting up and running an extensive network of cooperative incubators as part of university extension in Brazil (Leca et al., 2014). The research explored how scholars acted as promoters and resources in the incubation phases of worker cooperatives in deprived communities where the aim was to improve living conditions and support political emancipation. In the second project, the scholar had developed a suite of online courses aimed at women that carried the underlying aim of supporting women as they attempt to challenge or exit violent and oppressive domestic circumstances. When the presenters finished, the conference audience seemed energized, engaged, sharing in the enthusiasm for the projects. Questions flowed and only ended when the hosts insisted on closing off the event. The response to the presentations was stark. When the cases of academics actually ‘doing something’ were presented, there was a sense of relief and enthusiasm—a sense produced by a release of pressure built up by theoretical overproduction. If we take Organization’s pages as a barometer, there is certainly a sense that this pressure to ‘do something’ has been coming for some time.

As our archives show, engagements with politics and activism appear regularly in the journal’s pages. Articles debating feminist politics (for instance, Ferguson, 1994; Harding et al., 2013; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013; Thomas and Davies, 2005) and the politics of knowledge in universities (Gee, 1996; Parker, 2014; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011; Trowler, 2001; Willmott, 2011) have been around from the start of the journal in 1994, whereas papers on the politics of accountability (Zyglidopoulos and Fleming, 2011), corporate social responsibility (Costas and Kärreman, 2013), entrepreneurship (Kenny and Scriver, 2012), and climate politics (Nyberg and Wright, 2016) have come a bit later. Yet, a survey of business and management publications (Dunne et al., 2008) noted how they typically shy away from political issues such as war, famine, or poverty. What is more, they found that engagement with social and political issues in critically oriented journals, Organization included, was not impressive either.

Interestingly, the number of articles in Organization that talk explicitly about politics of different kinds is increasing over the last couple of years, resonating the current political turbulence in the world and an increased inclination of critical organization scholars to interpret this turbulence and examine its implications for organization theory and practice. The increased attention for politics may also stem from neoliberalism losing its hegemony, now that the supremacy of this theory of political economic practices is crumbling and it is questioned whether ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: 2–3).

Activism is not an uncharted territory either. Previous papers about civil society or social movements organizations have looked, for instance, at experiences of young activists in bureaucratized activist organizations (Hensby et al., 2012), at alternative constructions of leadership in horizontal, anarchist social groups (Sutherland et al., 2014), or at queer leadership among lesbian gay or bisexual school leaders (Courtney, 2014). Power dynamics in a transnational feminist organization (Bickham Mendez and Wolf, 2001), allowing non-human animal species voice and visibility in organization scholarship (Sayers, 2016) and a non-anthropocentric ethics in the face of ecological crisis (Gosling and Case, 2013), have also found their way to the pages of Organization. Such accounts of activism are often related to social identity categories, human rights, animal well-being, and/or the environment and climate change.

Against this backdrop of scholarly work on politics and activism, perhaps one might wonder why a new Acting Up section is needed. But as noted above, we are really looking in a different direction. The purpose and desire to question knowledge, relations of power, relations of meaning, and relations of value are retained. But rather than making politics or activism the target of research, where it is represented after a long spell of harvesting, analyzing, and balcony writing, we want to reverse this and put action before analysis. Can we not make the subject of our writing the actual intervening and facilitating? The four papers described in the following section, in different directions, make this shift.

Acting Up papers—what will they include?

What then might count as an ‘Acting Up’ paper? We do not really know and we want to keep it that way. We hope various genres of Acting Up paper will emerge from compelling examples. ‘Acting Up’ begins with practice, that’s the bottom line, but how it does this remains open. Perhaps the problem here is the familiar distinction between theory and practice, writing and action. Perhaps it would be more helpful to regard ‘acting up’, in the first instance, as writing through practices, writing with actions, writing with conduct and affectivities in a way that aims to produce, not journal articles, in the first instance, but organizings: relations, identities, signifiers, and connected meanings. We might regard acting then as writing coded differently and how such action is to be formally rendered as text as something to be decided later.

Or perhaps it would be helpful to first regard the purpose of Acting Up writing as a different kind of inquiry. Rather than an investigation into the truth of the matter derived from the text or actions of the research subject, such inquiry involves taking on the concerns, the issues, and the suffering of the others, so that they are in a position to change what they are struggling with or from. This is not to ditch writing or the publication game but to make it the second thought, a means of rendering, representing, and theorizing action with others.

It will be much easier to identify an Acting Up paper once written, and in this regard, the first four papers are excellent first movers. Acting Up papers might be reflections on interventions that attempt to upend organizational oppression, domination, or exploitation. Inge Bleijenbergh’s paper is a delightfully subtle and engaging presentation of just this kind of work. Her account discusses the use of research as a tool for challenging the subordination of woman academics in a number of Dutch universities. Acting Up papers might alternatively be interviews or accounts of the working with professional activists. Iain Munro’s interview with Edward Snowden’s lawyer is an example of this kind of Acting Up paper. Acting Up papers might also be opportunities to act through writing itself. Such papers might be creative writings that step around the sanitized academic voice, and offer less comfortable, more intimate, or confessional accounts of events, practices, and conditions. Through this, the papers themselves might be seen as actors, aiming to move, challenge, and provoke further action. Alison Pullen’s piece on writing as labiaplasty is such a piece.

Or, Acting Up papers might be efforts to set out a manifesto, a plan, or a program to tackle a problem or challenge. The co-authored paper on impact from Chris Wright, Carl Rhodes, and Alison Pullen is just such a contribution. These stunning first exemplars are just the beginning. We hope they start the ball rolling and encourage others to develop and submit pieces that report interventions, explore activist contributions, experiment with form, and embrace acting up in many, many different ways.