Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism

The Intellectual Conflict at the Heart of Business Endeavour

Bradley Bowden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319761794
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319761800
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

This work examines the rise of postmodernism in management scholarship and argues that the prevalence of postmodernist thought reflects a lack of understanding by management researchers of the core principles upon which Western business endeavour is based. The author highlights postmodernism's methodological and conceptual failings, such as disbelief in material progress and economic advancement, and its denial of generalizable laws to direct management research. In its place, the author proposes a return to traditional modernist principles in management research, based on scientific evidence. This ground breaking, timely work will spark debate and challenge previously accepted claims of postmodernism, a nice retort to the anti-business/anti-capitalist literature now prevalent in academia.

© The Author(s) 2018

Bradley BowdenWork, Wealth, and Postmodernismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76180-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Bradley Bowden¹

(1)

Griffith University, Brisbane City, QLD, Australia

End Abstract

The Roots and Nature of Modernity

The modern industrial world, which owes its existence to the intellectual revolution of the European Enlightenment and the economic transformation of the Industrial Revolution, has attracted many critics over the last quarter millennium: Rousseau, Nietzsche, the English Romantic poets, postmodernists. Its economic achievements, nevertheless, represent a fundamental alteration in the nature of human existence. Exponential increases in both population and wealth, whether measured in economy-wide or per-capita terms, were the most obvious signs of this transformation. After almost a millennium and a half of near stagnation, the per-capita wealth generated in the West grew by 20 per cent in the eighteenth century, 200 per cent in the nineteenth century, and 740 per cent in the twentieth century.¹

Mere statistics tend to disguise the liberating effect that industrial advance had on the lived experience of the great bulk of humanity. As Thomas Hobbes famously observed in 1651, the lives of people where there was “no place for industry” were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.² Before the advent of the railways, most people lived and died within a short walk of where they were born. Given the high expense of animal-drawn forms of land transport, most production was geared for local needs. When crops failed, people starved. In a world where candles and fire from the hearth were the only forms of night-time illumination, most people’s activities were dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. The absence of running water and effective sewerage meant that most people lived their lives in filth. As the British economic historian, J.H. Clapham, noted, in the seventeenth century, even kings did not wash, with Henry of Navarre confessing that they tended to “smell of their armpits”.³ In reflecting on the consequence of this, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the first and, in many ways, the greatest critic of the process of modernisation and industrialisation, acknowledged the toll that this caused in terms of death and suffering. Writing in Emile, his treatise on education which he completed in 1762, Rousseau remarked of the human experience: “Almost all of the first age is sickness and danger. Half the children born perish before the first year.”⁴ Unlike subsequent critics of modernity, however, Rousseau was too close to a “natural” existence to allow illusions as to what such a life entailed. Sickness and premature death, by winnowing out the weak and infirm, Rousseau argued, were contributors to social well-being. “A frail body”, he observed, “weakens the soul”.⁵ “Medicine”, by offering succour to the weak, merely revealed itself “an art more pernicious to men than all the ills it can cure”.⁶ It was, moreover, a crime against society to provide an education to “a sickly and ill-considered child”, as money spent on such an individual would merely result in “doubling society’s loss”.⁷

Modernisation through what we think of as the Industrial Revolution was due to the combination of four factors: the advance of reason and science through the European Enlightenment, the embrace of new principles of work and managerial organisation, the advance of social institutions that not only underpinned new workforce skills but which also acted as protectors of individual rights, and, finally, the adoption of new technologies. Of the four, the last—the adoption of new technologies—was in many ways the one of least importance. As late as 1830 the horse power of Britain’s stock of steam-powered engines remained minuscule. In Britain’s textile industry, the first to experience large-scale mechanisation, initial technological advance was confined to spinning. Even in 1835, Pollard noted, steam-powered weaving looms were “relatively rare”, leaving “large weaving sheds full of hand looms”.⁸ In the railways the victory of steam-powered locomotives over other forms of motive power was also slow and hesitant. Not until the opening of the Manchester to Liverpool railway in 1830 was the commercial viability of the new technology demonstrated. Even at this point the venture’s promoters initially considered fixed cables in lieu of locomotives.⁹

Photo 1.1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–78: French philosopher and political critic, Rousseau regarded industrialisation and increased modernity as presenting a fundamental threat to the human spirit. He willingly accepted pre-mature death of infants and adults alike in preference to the promises of medicine and science Courtesy: Artist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau’, 1753. Held at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)

If technological determinism (i.e. the idea that the adoption of new machines inevitably led to new economic forms) cannot explain the sudden eruption of the Industrial Revolution , our understanding is also hindered by simple reference to terms such as “entrepreneurship”, “capitalism”, or “management”. Murphy, Liao, and Welsch, for example, ascribe the explosion of per-capita wealth that occurred in “the West” to “the advent of entrepreneurship ”. Having made this claim, however, they then backtrack, pointing to the “success of entrepreneurship in ancient and medieval times”.¹⁰ This leaves us none the wiser as to what it was that made the effects of entrepreneurship so transformative in “the West” after 1760. Similar confusions are evident in both Morgen Witzel’s A History of Management Thought and Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest. In the former, Witzel concedes that modern management did “emerge” as a “discipline” in the nineteenth century, only to then argue that most preindustrial societies also boasted successful examples of “management”.¹¹ Ferguson, by contrast, readily advances the case for Western economic superiority, but—by referencing as explanation the political fragmentation “which propelled Europeans to seek opportunities … in distant lands”—fails to explain why the Industrial Revolution happened when it did.¹² A similar failing is evident in Karl Marx’s attribution of industrialisation to “capitalism”.¹³ As Fernand Braudel demonstrated in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, by the sixteenth century, “commercial capitalism”—characterised by sophisticated finance and banking systems, domination of long-distance trade routes, and control of luxury goods’ markets—clearly existed in an “already modern and indisputably effective form”.¹⁴ What was it that made “capitalism” shift from such indubitably profitable commercial activities to a more prosaic but ultimately more revolutionary existence as a factory owner and industrialist?

To understand both the nature of modernity and the factors that led to its initiation, it is useful to turn to a work written at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and which, perhaps more than any other, continues to shape our perceptions of wealth creation: Adam’s Smith The Wealth of Nations. In popular lore, Smith’s study is associated with the view that modern economies are primarily driven by the “invisible hand” of market competition. However, while Smith was an obvious fan of market competition, he never actually spoke—contrary to popular mythology—of “the invisible hand of the market”. Smith also identified “the division of labour” as the key driver of greater production and material wealth. It was on this latter point that, in 1776, Smith began his analysis in The Wealth of Nations, stating: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”¹⁵ As individuals, firms, and nations specialise in those areas in which they have—through the application of intellectual and physical capital—a “comparative advantage”, so it is that markets grow in both their size and competitive extent.

Evidently, Smith, in his discussions of the division of labour had something ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Back Matter