TSElosophers

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Month: March 2018

Ethical ascetic practices – or how to resist as an underdog?

29.03.2018 / / 2 Comments

TSElosophers’ meeting  on 23.3.2018. Albrecht Becker, Katja Einola, Eero Karhu, Kari Lukka, Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, Ekaterina Panina, Otto Rosendahl, Joonas Uotinen, Milla Wirén

Organizational Ethics and Foucault’s‘Art of Living’: Lessons from Social Movement Organizations, Iain Munro 2014

The article by Munro (2014) discusses Foucauldian ‘art of living’ in organizational practice, specifically in social movement organizations (SMOs). Art of living focuses on self-creation, which goes beyond “exploitative neoliberal mechanisms of identity formation” (Munro 2014, 1128). According to Munro, neoliberal discourse reduces the self to a machine that produces, including the production of satisfaction with consumption. SMOs often act to balance the excesses of neoliberalism, which means that the art of living is more pervasive in this context. Munro (2014, 1142) points out that “SMOs provide a rich source of possibility for the development of alternative ethical exercises as well as opening up tactical points of reversibility to dominant neoliberal forms of subjectivity”. SMOs mentioned in the article include Amnesty Intl, Greenpeace, Methodism, Quakerism, Occupy movement and Slow Food.

Munro discovers four organizational practices relating to ‘ethical askesis’: Bearing witness, direct action to create alternatives, care for self, and the use of pleasure. Bearing witness refers to finding ‘the truth’ and experiencing its injustice and oppression, e.g. Greenpeace sailing a boat to nuclear test zone. Direct action stresses the creation and enaction of alternatives. For example, having dumped a ton of dead fish in front of a pulp industry company (i.e. bearing witness with a public dimension), Greenpeace helped the pulp industry to gather actors together to create less chloride-intensive solutions for bleaching paper (Håkansson, Gadde, Snehota & Waluszewski 2009, 49–61). The practice of care for the self is founded upon self-denial and personal sacrifice. This practice is legitimized by comparing it to the suffering of people that SMO members are trying to help, e.g. the Occupy movement’s meager protesting conditions reflects solidarity for the less fortunate. Nevertheless, the ethical ascetic practices also include the uses of pleasure that contrasts with pervasive neo-liberalistic institutions, e.g. adhering to slow food instead of fast food traditions.

The discussion at the meeting of TSElophers dug deeper into the unit of analysis in the article: It seemed that the levels of the individual and of the organization (here SMO) were conflated towards the latter part of the article. It seemed that Munro metaphorically endowed the SMOs the role of Diogenes the cynic, in which case the revealed ascetic practices did indeed signal resistance towards the wider structures in which that agent is embedded. However, if we look at the individuals within the SMOs, the logic doesn’t hold, as the individuals within the SMOs do not resist their organizations (the SMOs), but conform in order for the SMO to do the resistance. That said, we also deemed that as the article leaned more towards a desire to trigger thoughts and discussions than towards an attempt to deliver crystallized conceptualizations, this blurring of the analytical levels – while it led the group to ponder some issues of academic rigour – did not significantly diminish the merits of the article in terms of identifying modes of resistance.

Munro posits that art of living requires self-mastery, which enables reversal of the relationship to an external power. According to Foucault (2005, 252; in Munro 2014, 1134–1135), ”there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than the relationship one has to oneself”. However, this asketic self-mastery is understood differently by Stoic and Cynic ethics. Stoics established a wider perspective, where askesis translates into mastering others through the mastery of oneself. Hence this type of askesis can arguably be connected to the development of capitalistic institutions. However, Cynics adopted an underdog perspective according to which self-mastery should be used ”as an act of permanent critique of the prevailing social order”. The Foucauldian concept of ethical askesis builds on the latter definition. In sum, the ethicality of askesis for Foucault concerns the practices that aim to transform institutionalized values.

This led the TSElosophers to ponder the potential modes of resistance we could engage in, if the structures resisted were to consist of, for instance, the publish-or-perish mentality often mentioned in our conversations. It was pointed out that criticizing can also be an act of validation, as both conforming to and criticizing the structures render them more visible and thereby increasingly ‘real’. Another way of rebelling against the structures is to disengage from the boundaries they suggest, by aligning ones actions towards other goals than the ones validated through conforming or criticizing. TSElosophers club in itself could be described as a form of direct action that supports alternative research approaches, stressing the meaningfulness of scholarly work beyond the boundaries of whether something is publishable or not.

However, art of living with non-mainstream approaches involves developing one’s abilities in caring for the self as securing just the basic income for living becomes more challenging. Engaging in acts of resistance from the (relative) security of a professorial position is different than resisting the structures from the position of a doctoral candidate dependent on grants. However, we all agreed that while the acts in themselves may differ, resisting – or at the very least, reflecting on one’s own ethical acts – is possible no matter the position.

In regards to for example our university, we also discussed that an ethical asketic could engage in ‘tests’ whether the institutionalized structures live up to their expressed and/or assumed ideals. For example, the expressed ideals of University of Turku are ethicality, criticality, creativity, openness and communality (University Strategy 2016–2020). While everyone recognizes that not all of these ideals are fulfilled, ethical asketism would highlight engaging into the development of alternative solutions – and possibly defending these with explicit references to the organization’s expressed ideals. The insights delivered by Munro in the article may provide ways to think about how to go about this in practice: How would the ethical askesis of bearing witness, direct action, caring for self and using pleasure look like when transformed into practices in our setting?

What we talk about when we talk about good scholarship

04.03.2018 / / 0 Comments

TSElosophers’ meeting on 27 February 2018. Katja Einola, Kari Lukka, Otto Rosendahl and Joonas Uotinen

The blog title above, inspired by the classic short story of Raymond Carver (…about love) and the book by Haruki Murakami (…about running) was at the heart of the discussion at the TSElosophers club’s meeting this time. Two working papers were on the table, coincidentally connected regarding their major worries and arguments: “Living in the publish-or-perish culture” by Albrecht Becker and Kari Lukka and “Willful ignorance in empirical organizational research” by Mats Alvesson, Katja Einola and Stephan Schaefer.

The key to the first mentioned paper is the distinction between two different kinds of research processes: one following the “true scholarship logic” and another driven by the “playing of the game logic”. The paper presents an interview based, abductively tuned analysis of how researchers of our time perceive the performance management regime around them and choose their strategies of leading their researcher life surrounded by that. Since the mapping of researchers’ strategies indicated a quite wide dispersion, the outcome of the analysis was somewhat relieving with a view of the general motivation of the study – the worry of the dominance of the harmful implications of the current instrumentalist tendencies in the academe on good scholarship. However, the study still indicates how the “playing of the game logic” is quite strongly supported by many recent institutions (like many kinds of rankings) and emerging local factors (like the strengthening performance measurement hype). Therefore, it is likely getting continuously more foothold and will need determined counter-agency to be sufficiently tamed down. This would be important particularly with a view of junior researchers, so that they would not only learn how to play the game to get published but rather to become good scholars. The role of local performance management systems and practices as well as the visionary agency of academic leaders is argued to be crucial herein.

The second paper discusses and analyzes the idea of willful ignorance in organization and management studies. The piece takes its inspiration in the German Enlightenment era scholar Friedrich Schiller’s inaugural lecture in 1789 as a professor of history in the university of Jena. This speech that was our topic of discussion at TSElosophers previous encounter, distinguishes between “philosophical minds” (who follow the scholarship logic) and “bread scholars” (who follow the game logic). The study specifically focuses on the relationship between empirical data and its analysis and understands willful ignorance as conscious efforts of scholars to repress doubts and ambiguities about their empirical data. Here, willful ignorance is not considered as a sheer lack of knowledge or the fabrication of data. The argument is that it moves between researchers´ inability to resolve ambiguities in their empirical material and a pronounced will not to follow up on these ambiguities and uncertainties with the more or less willful intention to not challenge oneself intellectually too much – and get a publication out instead. The study uses empirical examples and previous published research to demonstrate that there appears to be an inattention to source critique and an unreflective pursuit of formulaic methodologies and career paths in the field of organization and management studies. The research community as a whole needs to stand up to these tendencies to raise the level of quality of research and avoid willfully ignorant research practices from further contaminating the field.

The discussion at the meeting echoed the situation described in these two working papers: Many examples of researchers, research groups and communities having become tempted to follow “playing of the game” kind of logic and “Brotgelehrte” mind-set were brought forth. For instance, one of the club members recounted how his doctoral education was nearly entirely featured by the publication-induced “playing of the game logic”. Another member was frustrated about his experiences of becoming dismissed when he had tried to raise some out-of-the-box type of content issues to the discussion among his colleagues, since the mind-set was so strongly oriented towards just getting something publishable done in a straightforward manner.

One of the challenges of good scholarship comes from research ethics. While this is of course an eternal challenge, the increased dominance of the “playing of the game logic” may make some of the classic ethical challenges even more serious and bring to fore new issues in that regard. Willful ignorance is certainly an old challenge of researchers’ ethics, but it likely is ever more an issue in the academic environment featured by constant rush, gap-spotting research motivations, and straightforward seeking of publications. But it is particularly the rush towards performance results, plaguing the current academic work, that also leads to dismissal of research approaches that would take considerable time, like years-long ethnographic or interventionist field research even in situations where such approaches would be needed to be able to study some complicated research questions, involving the significance of subjective meanings, for instance.

There are also other challenges regarding how important topics and research questions can be explored and reported on in such ways that the interviewed or observed participants of research do not feel having become abused and are treated sufficiently anonymously. The club members yet agreed that the principle “all topics should be able, and allowed, to get explored in research” should be the first and highest guiding principle in research. Therefore, researchers need creative imagination to conduct and report on their research in such a way that the complex set of criteria of good research (importance of the research question, overall research quality, ethical issues…) are simultaneously tackled, without compromising any important aspect concerning the overall quality of the study.

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