Abstract
The trip taken to Barbados by the Manchester band Happy Mondays has passed into legend. The supposed objective of the trip was to record their fourth album (ultimately released as Yes Please!), but trouble abounded, from road accidents, broken limbs and colossal substance misuse, the latter allegedly funded by the band selling furniture purloined from the recording studio. The failure of the sessions was reputed to be the final blow leading to the bankruptcy of their record label, the much-celebrated Factory Records. Perhaps, the trip had been doomed from the start. In an episode dramatised in the movie Twenty Four Hour Party People, lead singer Shaun Ryder accidentally destroyed his supply of the heroin replacement medication methadone in the course of some horseplay with an airport luggage trolley. Presumably, the atmosphere in the departure lounge soured rapidly.
The scene of this mishap was Manchester Airport, the setting for the prolonged ethnography that is the basis for Reconstructing Organization. The ethnographer, Damian O’Doherty, is the one of the most innovative, creative and consistently inspiring scholars of organisation to have emerged from, what is now, Alliance Manchester Business School. It is to be hoped that the appearance of this book does not augur that this institution is destined for the same fate as Factory Records. At one level, the story O’Doherty tells is of a project to build a premium departure lounge – a space where weary airline customers (the term is deliberate) can escape from the irritants of international travel, such as misbehaving musicians. The fact that the project team appeared to have little sense of what such escape might mean or who might be doing the escaping proves to be of little hindrance, since, as O’Doherty patiently shows, the user of the facility – the ‘lounger’ – was constructed alongside the built environment and retail outlets. More broadly, this is a story of the event of organisation, of how a world is brought into being with its own complex logic and criss-crossed relationships between loungers, MAG men, chairs, haircuts and an ageing ginger cat.
The central concept/conceit of the book is ‘loungification’, a polysemic term that denotes both the literal object of the project (a space in the process of becoming a lounge) and a specific mode of ordering that the author discerns as being enacted at the airport. The cultural politics that underpin cut-price visions of luxury and escape, both inside and outside work, are well known to organisational theorists and airline customers alike. The pathos of the fantasies at play in this cheap oasis of comfort at terminal 1 is perhaps summed up best in the horrified tone of the lounge staff member who updates the ethnographer on the ongoing problem of the theft of Royal Moulton soap dispensers from the toilets (p. 177). O’Doherty acutely observes that what might be seen as a marketing strategy aimed at further monetising the sweet spot between business and economy flying is actually a generalised programme of constituting new and fluid social objects. As he notes (p. 246), if Foucault alerted us to the way in which factories, schools, barracks and hospitals all came to resemble prisons as particular spaces of knowing and organising bodies, so we ought to be paying attention to the phenomenon where these same spaces now often resemble airport lounges.
Loungification is a term for a whole confluence of forces and strategies that together appear to take a form akin to a Jackson Pollack painting. A typical analytic move would be to index these forces to specific socio-historical transformations in work and consumption – ‘emotional labour’, ‘financialization of waiting times’ and ‘leisure as vocation’. Doubtless to the frustration of some readers, O’Doherty steadfastly refuses to do so (although in naming the senior male managers of Manchester Airport Group as ‘MAG men’ in homage to the AMC television series Mad Men, he does place the lounge within a genealogy of the marketisation of desire). The strategy pursued instead is to focus on a line that is marked out by a specific kind of movement, whether it is the progress through a Prince 2 project management chart or the perambulations of Olly the cat, who adopted/was adopted by staff at the airport. At one level, this is an instantiation of the well-known injunction by Bruno Labour to ‘follow the actors’. It is also simply just good ethnographic practice. But what O’Doherty does here is to interrogate the logic implied by these patterns of movement, the ways in which they realise particular worlds by distributing relations and provoking the co-ordination of actions as the line of movement unfolds. For example, a major shift in managerial relations and the ‘culture’ of the airport arises when Olly’s walks are cut short, which serves to redistribute relations between staff and makes a new cut between past and present corporate identity. Moreover, O’Doherty is able to show the way that lines connect and ramify from one another, creating new objects as they ravel and unravel. The process of ordering furniture, for instance, leads to decision points about style and material, which in turn requires imagining the kind of customers whose buttocks will be eased onto them.
This analytic work is assisted by O’Doherty’s discovery of the obscure etymological origins of the term ‘lounge’ as referring to a particularly insouciant style of walking adopted in Regency London. The ‘lounge’ is an affectation, a performative style of navigating space. O’Doherty relates this to the adoption of ‘management by walking around’ by senior male managers (it is the masculine culture of airport management that is of particular concern here). One becomes a ‘MAG man’ not necessarily by holding a position within the management structure, but by performing oneself into being – loungification here becomes synonymous with the physical weaving of power relations, the line drawn by the manager’s forays around the ‘shop floor’. The book then speaks to ongoing debate around the value of ‘performativity’ in its various formulations. What is added here is the sense that performances become stylised, that they acquire their own particular tics and markers which serve to make connections and realise worlds in specific ways. The ‘bob cut’ favoured as hairstyle by some lounge staff, for example, is, for O’Doherty, not merely a fashion statement, but an expression of a mode of ordering where a starkly defined curve is the means of gathering unruly elements together. The swish of the bob is a key symptom of loungification, one which O’Doherty begins to see written across the architecture of the whole city in its transformation from post-industrial to urban chic.
The reconstruction of organisation proposed here is one that moves a considerable distance from a conventional view of the political. O’Doherty offers instead a ‘politics of the bob’ or a ‘crinicultural analysis’ where what is done to hair is arguable as important as hierarchies or managerial controls. Following the ‘ontological politics’ developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars such as Annemarie Mol, O’Doherty treats power as the capacity to materialise worlds, such as airports as oases of lounging customers, and to negate or de-realise others. There is no prior depth, no hidden hand nor unseen forces at work here, just an ‘endless ontology of organization’ (p. 260) which is traced through the myriad materials and relations that inhere between people, chairs, cats and hair. Anticipating possible charges of point missing, O’Doherty declares that business and management studies will no doubt recognise none of this as relevant. Of the business created on the basis that lounging might be encouraged, there can be no doubt. Business studies will remain principally a parasitic practice and an embodiment of necrophilia if it finds no way of taking seriously what is happening on what we have called the ‘surface’ of organization. (p. 268)
What does ‘taking surface seriously’ then mean in practice? For the most part, it involves staying with the field. That the work reported here is ethnographic is important. O’Doherty sticks doggedly with the airport, documenting the trials of gaining access and his journey through the most seemingly obscure aspects of organisational life. As Fabian Muniesa points out in his helpful afterword, it is precisely this immersion in the ongoing critique of the organisation that allows the ethnographer to discern its (ontological) politics. O’Doherty takes time to listen to staff critique one another and the projects they are engaged, and follows these critiques as they become realised in material such as chair fabrics – ‘I’ve proposed leather’, Melanie tells us, and ‘We have proposed twelve for the lounge’ (p. 135). All the while he proceeds in an auto-critique, turning around on what it means to be recruited into the lounge project or to conceptualise its unfolding. Hence the need to develop a unique set of concepts to further articulate the surface: loungification, scattered attention, angular reasoning and so on. The analyst does not simply describe what they see but participates in a work of invention that becomes part of the surface, extends it further beyond the departure gate and into the broader world.
At times this endless travelling around the airport can feel a little suffocating, as though one were trapped in the political machinations of the tower block in JG Ballard’s High Rise (and if Ballard had ever turned his hand to organisational theory it might well have looked like this book). At times I wished the ethnographer had taken the day off and shown us a little more of the city served by the airport, because this is also a book about Manchester itself. One of the MAG men suggests that although the escape lounge is modelled on the Virgin Airways London lounge, what they should be aiming for is a slightly edgier Northern feel or ‘gritty Virgin’ (p. 129). The ‘angular reasoning’ which O’Doherty describes at work within the project team – the creation of novel objects from the juxtaposition of fragments – is also to be found in the accomplishments of Manchester luminaries such as Tony Wilson (co-founder of Factory Records), Martin Hannett (the notoriously unorthodox producer of bands such as Joy Division) and Bez (the maraca wielding dancer and spiritual core of Happy Mondays).
There is one curious moment where the text does open out. The ethnographer leaves the airport for a strange encounter in a tiny Swiss village with ‘Derek’, who is apparently responsible for the invention of customer service analysis and benchmarking across airports, which proves to be so central to the escape lounge project. The encounter feels oddly unreal (the footnotes hint at legal reasons why the text might necessarily appear to be so). Derek seems to inhabit what Foucault once termed a ‘heterotopia’, a space outside of quotidian, but which nevertheless seems to contain its logic and principles of ordering in microcosm. O’Doherty does not properly explain what the relationship is of this ‘other space’ to Manchester Airport, nor how he came to arrive there in the course of the ethnography. It would have added to the story told here to learn just how this outside came to be folded into the lounge, perhaps taking further direction from Robert Cooper’s speculations (this being the other Bob cut woven throughout the book).
With Reconstructing Organization, O’Doherty has shown one way out of the recursive self-reflexivity of Critical Management Studies, which the book repeated places on the side of the necrotic. Whether one wishes to read this text as demonstration of the value of ethnography for organisation studies, or as a theoretically elaborate diagnosis of a cultural-economic transformation, there is no doubt that it is an important and significant accomplishment. Ultimately, O’Doherty has gone beyond disciplinary reconstruction and mapped out a new style of thinking and engaging with organisations that are themselves in the process of continuous reconstitution, one which might allow us to keep apace with the actors rather than follow their footsteps.
