Organizations and Popular Culture

Information, Representation and Transformation

Carl Rhodes, Simon Lilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135751159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout its history, popular mass-mediated culture has turned its attention to representing and interrogating organizational life. As early as Charlie Chaplin's cinematic classic Modern Times and as recently as the primetime television hit The Simpsons, we see cultural products that engage reflexively in coming to terms with the meaning of work, technology and workplace relations. It is only since the late 1990s, however, that those who research management and organizations have come to collectively dwell on the relationship between organizations and popular culture – a relationship where the cultural meanings of work are articulated in popular culture, and where popular culture challenges taken for granted knowledge about the structure and practice work. Key to this development has been the journal Culture and Organization – a journal that has been centre stage in creating new vistas through which the 'cultural studies of organization' can be explored.

This book brings together the journal's best contributions which specifically address how popular culture represents, informs and potentially transforms organizational practice. Featuring contributors from the UK, USA, Europe and Australia, this exciting anthology provides a comprehensive review of research in organization and popular culture.

Introduction: Studying Organizations Through Popular Culture

Carl Rhodes and Simon Lilley

The iconic 1936 film Modern Times sees Charlie Chaplin’s character the Little Tramp working on a factory assembly line. As the conveyor belt of the line whizzes in front of him he repeatedly screws nuts on to passing unidentifiable pieces of machinery. Spanner in hand, the drudgery and monotony of the work are portrayed starkly and coldly. But this is of course a comedy and Chaplin uses the industrialized and mechanized workplace to great humorous effect, most especially by showing how his character, supposedly also expected to enact his role in a machine like way, simply cannot perform these mechanical duties effectively. With slapstick conviction and satire driven pathos the man reduced to machine is trapped in a world of rationalized production technology that he must either yield to or be rejected by. And even when he seeks some solace from a lonely cigarette in the bathroom, in anticipation of modern surveillance technology, the factory boss’s face appears projected on the wall telling him to get back to work. Rationalized, mechanized and bureaucratized, the world of Chaplin’s factory requires, indeed demands, compliance and efficiency; neither of which the Little Tramp can offer. The machinery can’t really offer it either; especially in the form of an automatic feeding machine designed to enable the workers to eat at their work stations. This automation just sets the stage for a (food) fight between machine and worker. Scientific management never had it so good! Chaplin’s character is not the machine he is meant to be and the unbearable repetitiveness of the task coupled with his technical ineptitude finally drive him insane. Rampaging through the factory and being twisted out of shape by the machines, he finally loses his mind; the ultimate escape from the unrelenting infliction of rationality and the worship of efficiency.

Chaplin’s politically driven parody of modern factory work was a huge hit in its day and remains a cinema classic. It marks also the beginning of Chaplin’s use of cinema comedy for the purpose of social commentary, an approach culminating in 1942 with his spoof on Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator. With Modern Times clearly there was (and still is) an audience that finds Chaplin’s shenanigans hugely entertaining. What is also interesting is the way that the film mirrored, and potentially even informed, social concern over the dehumanizing and alienating effects of industrial production technologies. There is a certain cultural circularity at play here where the filmic representation draws on both cultural critique and popular sentiment while at the same time informing and even transforming them through their artistic rendition. In this case, as Lohof (2004) explains, the circumstances that Chaplin attacked with such pathos and satire were so ‘compelling and ubiquitous […that…] the subordination of the skilled artisan to the sophisticated mechanism, and the replacement of the unique item by the uniform product — became major leitmotifs in the history of the industrial revolution’ (p. 519). Chaplin’s film also serves as a vivid and emotionally sensitive illustration of some important sociological ideas and concerns that were circulating at the time. As Curtis (2009) suggests, for example, Modern Times ‘can be seen to visually illustrate what Weber noted — once Capitalism really took hold and the original Protestant ethic and spirit of Capitalism was lost (n.p)’. Void of any even secularized religious calling that might inform a work ethic suited to enduring factory labour, the Little Tramp’s life becomes unbearably meaningless — a meaninglessness that leads him to insanity. We can note too that Chaplin’s film was released more than 20 years before Weber’s work was translated and published in English. Further, as a ‘classic critique of the machine age’ we have a film that in some ways foreshadows Braverman’s (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital in its illustration and critique of factory life and the compliant, de-skilled and alienated workers that it demands and tries to produce (Tolich, 1992: 244).

Modern Times is a complex cultural product. The rapid developments in technology spawned in and after the industrial revolution made a whole new era of cultural production and transmission possible. No longer restricted to live performance, the advent of cinema, radio and the phonograph meant that cultural products could be produced for a mass audience each of whom could consume exactly the same performance at different times and in different places. In one sense the technological and industrial developments that afforded Chaplin the ability to make movies were the very same things that created the mass-production systems whose effects he was criticizing. Moreover the capitalist system within which such production is located is the same system that sells cinema for profit and that made Chaplin one of the most successful movie stars in history. It is clear from the outset that culture does not follow a single line of rationality. In this case what we have is a mass mediatised popular culture that uses capitalist industrial technologies in order to provide and widely disseminate a critique of capitalist industrialized technologies. For many the unforgiving irony of this is too much to bear, and dominant theoretical positions have long rested on the general blandness of popular culture, its inferiority to more lofty cultural pursuits, and even its capacity for social control and the reproduction of capitalist practice and ideology; the latter position most notoriously promoted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). For them popular culture presents a distorted perspective on the realities of capitalist cultural economic relations; a culture not only produced by the capitalist system, but also reinforcing of its ideology. Most especially this reinforcement is achieved, so the story goes, because it placates emancipatory impulses through the satisfaction of false needs and by distracting its consumers from the true grasp of socioeconomic realities.

The ‘culture industry’ as Adorno and Horkheimer dubbed it, was a mechanism of ‘mass deception’ that made cultural dopes of a people robbed of authentic cultural experience. With another irony, however, it would seem that Chaplin was suggesting a similar tendency as it relates to the production process; after all the workers in his factory are similarly reduced to mindless automatons drudging their time through the work day, else they are driven mad by non-conformism and the desire for individual expression. The issues we have been discussing are of central relevance to the themes this book, themes that revolve around the relationship between organizations and popular culture and the cultural contradictions embodied therein. We attest here that this is no straightforward relationship, nor one that befits simple generalizations no matter how critically well intended. What we do know, however, is that popular culture is an organized phenomenon orchestrated and enabled by technology and business. We also know that work and organizations, in their many guises, are regular and widespread subject matter for popular culture. Throughout its history popular mass-mediated culture has turned its attention to representing and interrogating organizational life whilst simultaneously nurturing itself from it. This can be traced back as early as Charlie Chaplin’s silent movies and as recently as the primetime television mega hit The Simpsons. From Chaplin’s factory to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant we see a reflexive engagement with coming to terms with the meaning of work, technology and workplace relations.

Since the 1990s there has been a groundswell of interest from researchers in management and organizations seeking to collectively dwell on the relationship between organizations and popular culture; a relationship where the cultural meanings of work are represented in popular culture and where popular culture comes to inform the meaning and practice of work itself. There had been, of course, some important earlier studies of the industrial and commercial arrangement that went into the production of popular culture (e.g. DiMaggio, 1977; Lawrence and Phillips, 2002) as well as considerations of how business activity is represented in literary novels (DeMott, 1989; Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux, 1994). Even as early as 1956 Whyte had considered how popular fiction could be used to read changes in popular belief — in his case how it related to the rise and fall of the protestant ethic. It has also been argued that Weber, whose work is central to the founding of organizations studies, ‘was rather less a classical management theorist and rather more a student of culture, practising what today we would call “cultural studies”’ (Clegg, 2005: 528). In a sense we can thus suggest that theoretical attention that has been placed on fictional works in organizational studies is more of a return to culture than a fresh departure; one that can be traced back at least to Marx’s use of classical mythology and then contemporary literature to examine the emergence of the factory system (Lilley and McKinlay, 2009). Despite such provenance, however, until recently what was largely left out in contemporary study of management and organizations was a consideration of the meaning and value of the films, songs, books, magazines and television programs made possible by industrial production and technology. This started to change in the 1990s as work began to appear in organization and management journals that edged towards consideration of popular culture in that way. Early examples included Ingersoll and Adams’ (1992) study of the dominance of technical rationality in children’s books and its implications for management, Corbett’s (1995) investigation into what science fiction films might tell us about organization and technology, Foreman and Thatchenkery’s (1996) consideration of the narrative structure of films about organizations, as well as Grice and Humphreys (1997) use of the Star Wars films as a motif and structure through which to interrogate the development of critical management studies.

A text that bolstered this emerging trend was the edited collection published by John Hassard and Ruth Holliday entitled Organization-Representation: Work and Organization in Popular Culture (1998). In that book the editors brought together a number of papers that collectively focused on the ways that work and organizations are represented in popular culture as well as the ways that these representations can in turn influence knowledge and practice. The work done by that book significantly shaped the off shoot of the discipline of Organization Studies that subsequently became focussed on the analysis of media representations of organizations. The book illustrated that the ways that work and organizations were represented in the popular media offered more striking, powerful, and dynamic insights than those representations that are found in academic work. The issue wasn’t necessarily about whether popular culture’s depictions of work where better or worse, or more or less accurate than those common to theory, but rather that they were different; and, moreover, it was this difference that offered a valuable source of knowledge. Core to this difference, Hassard and Holliday argued, was that rather than privileging a view of organizations as rational, unemotional and disembodied, popular culture showed organizational life as an everyday activity that was embodied, personal and affectual. Subsequent to the publication of Hassard and Holliday’s collection studies have been published that have explored themes as diverse as gender performativity at work in television comedy (Tyler and Cohen 2008); counter cultures to organization and their embedding in mundane cultural artefacts (Parker, 2006); carnivalesque organization critique in television animation (Rhodes, 2000); gender and embodiment in Hollywood cinema (Höpfl, 2003); work based utopianism in rock music (Rhodes, 2004); the production of collective memory in war films (Godfrey and Lilley, 2009); managerial machismo in popular films (Panayiotou, 2010) and critical management in science fiction (Parker, 1998). This points to but a handful of examples yet illustrates the variety of directions that the study of organizations and popular culture has taken. Also suggestive of the importance of these developments are the number of books and special issues of journals dedicated to the subject. This includes Parker, Higgins, Lightfoot and Smith’s (1999) Amazing Tales, Smith, Higgins, Parker and Lightfoot’s (2001) Science Fiction and Organization, Rhodes and Westwood’s (2008) Critical Representations of Work and Organization in Popular Culture, Bell’s (2008) Reading Management and Organization in Film, Rhodes and Parker’s (2008) Images of Organizations in Popular Culture and Parker’s (2011) Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture. ‘Popular Culture’ even features as an entry in The International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies (Rhodes, 2008).

As Philips had already argued in 1995, mainstream cinema, as a core form of popular culture, contains the narrative resources to study important but often overlooked organizational phenomena. Phillips pointed especially to issues such as racism, sexism, frustration at work and the human effects of layoffs. What Phillips also argued was that popular culture enabled researchers to appreciate and study cultural knowledge that was difficult to access through standard social scientific research methods and data sources. Supporting this, Czarniawska and Rhodes (2006) have argued that the value of popular culture to the study of organizations lies in the way it serves as a propaedeutic for management and organizational practice as well as furnishing a means through which such practice can be understood. What they highlight are the ways that the repertoires of ‘emplotment’ used in popular culture serve to distribute a set of dominant means through which people can interpret, understand and inform their working lives. They suggest that the abstract models and theories proffered by management theorists are much less powerful in actually informing or even transforming practice; detective stories or adventure movies seem to have done the job much better. As they speculate, white male baby boomer managers would appear to have been more influenced in their practice by John Wayne than Peter Drucker. While popular culture might provide modes of emplotment that inform practice, Czarniawska and Rhodes also argue that such culture additionally serves to draw attention to and undermine the taken-for-grantedness of such plots so as to offer the potential for critical and transformational readings of conventional management knowledge. Indeed this issue of the ways that the mass media can offer a ‘critique in culture’ rather than a ‘critique of culture’ (Rhodes, 2004) has become a dominant theme especially as it relates to the whether and how culture reinforces or resists organizational authority structures. A cornerstone of the study of organizations and popular culture that has been established is the relatively ambivalent relationship between the two. This does not suggest a lack of conclusiveness; more a willingness to engage with particular instantiations of culture at the expense of the cold comfort of generalization. Culture is no monolith and the expectation of a uni-directional and all encompassing explanation of the relationship between the different elements within it is, at best, naive and, at worst, politically and intellectually irresponsible. Popular culture can thus be approached in terms of how it contains within in a counter-culture to dominant organizational culture in some instances (Parker, 2006) as well as how it works to reproduce dominant and oppressive cultural norms in others (Coltrane and Adams, 1997).

Studies of popular culture are commonly understood as being outside of the ‘mainstream’ of research interests in management and organizations. Perhaps so, but it is also the case that organization studies more generally has long been understood as “a contested discursive terrain, within which there has always been (and continues to be) a variety of voices engaged in a political process of claims for recognition, acceptance and dominance” (Westwood and Clegg, 2003; 2). Moreover, the institutionalized heterodoxy that this infers has made for “an enormous expansion of organization theory […] simply by virtue of researchers turning to issues that were typically not discussed in the past” (Jones and Munro, 2005: 5). In such a context it is because of rather than despite contestation that studies of organizations and popular culture have, since the 1990s, become an established niche within organizations studies; the examples cited earlier attest to this. At least in part this is a legacy of the influence of ‘postmodernism’ as it came to mark various debates within and approaches to organization studies i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Permissions
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: Studying Organizations Through Popular Culture
• 2. Management She Wrote: Organization Studies and Detective Stories
• 3. 'We just make the pictures...?' How work is portrayed in children's feature length films
• 4. Military, masculinity and mediated representations: (con)fusing the real and the reel
• 5. 'I Love the Dough': Rap Lyrics as a Minor Economic Literature
• 6. Poetry in motion: protest songwriting as strategic resource (Portugal, circa 1974)
• 7. Making Sense of a Transnational Merger: Media Texts and the (Re)construction of Power Relations
• 8. Coffee and the Business of Pleasure: The Case of Harbucks vs. Mr. Tweek
• 9. Fiction and Humor in Transforming McDonald's Narrative Strategies
• 10. 'The performative surprise': parody, documentary and critique
• 11. Organisational Gothic
• 12. Commodification of utopia: The lotus eaters revisited
• 13. The man in the black hat
• Index