Redirecting Critique in Postmodern Organization Studies: The Perspective of Foucault

Abstract

Foucault's concepts of freedom and resistance are examined to determine how they may feed into theorizing the Kantian 'question of the present' for postmodern organizational analysis. This paper takes a measure of how reflexivity and creative self-representation materialize change in the ways critique is advanced in organization studies.

Descriptors: Foucault, genealogy, critical reflection, organization studies, postmodernism

Introduction

One of the cornerstones advancing postmodern organization analysis rests on theorizing how reflexivity, difference and change can be fed into reconstituting the ways in which organizational knowledge is produced (Cooper and Burrell 1988; Burrell 1994, 1996, 1997; Calas and Smircich 1999: 651, 665). Within organization studies, answers still have to be found to the following questions: What can we make of power/knowledge within organizational analysis today? What are the limits to which we are subject and how can we free ourselves? What is the possibility of change, how, when, and by whom? In other words, to paraphrase Foucault and Kant: 'what is the nature of our present?' (Foucault 1984b: 34-37). Foucault suggests that we may find the answers in the praxis of genealogy--a form of critical reflection, the cue for which Foucault has taken from Kant's Aude sapere: 'dare to know', 'have the courage, the audacity, to know'. Foucault's genealogy is what he calls a 'critical ontology of ourselves'. That is an inves tigation of how we have become what we are today, which both reveals the limits of what we are and raises the possibility of being otherwise than what we are (Thiele 1990: 907-909; Owen 1994: 141, 1999: 36-39; Ransom 1997: 145-153; Nilson 1998: 85-87).

In one of his later works, 'What is Enlightenment?' (1984b), Foucault re-examined this question, and Kant's response to it, published in the German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784. Foucault argues that Kant introduces a specific form of reflection of the present which one might call the attitude of modernity, namely, the 'reflection of "today" as difference in history' (1984b: 38). Practically, for organization theorists, a critical appraisal of our intellectual practices is something organizational theorists cannot avoid addressing further (Calas and Smircich 1999: 666). It is argued that we emulate Foucault's genealogical approach to conduct a critical reflection of organizational analysis, questioning the limits of subjectivation (Hacking 1986; Butler 1997; Tully 1999) or that form of subjectivity that free subjects have taken as 'a self-conscious part in the acquisition, learning and modification of the subject-specific competencies' (Tully 1999: 95).

Subjectivities or subject positions and the accompanying values, assumptions and aspirations created by the discourses of 'enterprise', 'excellence', 'learning organization', and 'corporate culture' are all manifestations of subjectivation. Extending Althusser (1971), discourses and their assumptions impose 'internal constraints' (Patton 1994) upon free subjects who 'recognize' and internalize 'interpellations' of aspects of some of these discourses (Althusser 1971). It is argued that organization theorists need to go beyond systematic critique to conduct genealogies of these discourses to discover 'how we have become what we are today' (Owen 1994) by 'moving away from it to become something else' (Ransom 1997).

Foucault's understanding of critique is based on an orientation in thinking that pertains to contest the limits to which we are subject through the 'agonic use of reason' (Owen 1999). Such a liminal thinking requires a new kind of criticism that is 'genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method' (Foucault 1984b: 46). To clarify this enigmatic proclamation Foucault continues as follows:

'Archaeological -- not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or all possible moral action, but will seek to treat instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.' (1984b: 46)

When this piece of Foucault's advice is translated into action for organization theorists, it means that organizational analysis has to be conceptualized as a resistance. Genealogical critique enables us to destabilize our present structures of recognition constitutive of our subjectivities and use creative self-representation to resist those internal conditions that limit the possibility of our individual autonomy.

Local resistance is qualitatively different from the diametric responses contained within the oppositional ethos prevalent in Habermas' critical theory. The two key concerns of Foucault, freedom and resistance, tie in with what I understand as the two principal tenets of postmodern organizational theorizing: first, reflexivity (critical ontology of ourselves), and second, change (transgression of the internal constraints of subjectivity and subjectivation). For Foucauldian freedom and resistance to become useful for organizational analysis, they need to be sharpened to achieve conceptual and technical clarity. The rest of this paper ruminates upon freedom and resistance to tease out elements for reconstituting a critical approach that inherits the defining characteristics of Foucault's genealogical ethos (Foucault 1984a). Criticisms levelled against Foucault by his critics will be clarified and redressed. I shall show the relevance of Foucault's ideas to organizational analysis by synthesizing the two overrid ing themes of freedom and resistance with the examination of the formation of subjectivities.