Description
On The Name Of Social Entrepreneurship Business School Teaching, Research, And Development Aid
On the Name of Social Entrepreneurship: Business School
Teaching, Research, and Development Aid
Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde eines Doktors der Philosophie
vorgelegt der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät
der Universität Basel
von
Pascal Dey
von
Marsens, Kanton Fribourg
Zürich, 2008
2
Genehmigt von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, auf
Antrag von Prof. Dr. Urs Stäheli (Universität Basel) und Prof. PhD Chris Steyaert
(Universität St. Gallen)
Basel, den 15. November 2007 Der Dekan
Prof. Dr. Ueli Mäder
3
Reaching out in a gesture of giving:
For a gift to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or dept.
Jacques Derrida (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, p. 12)
4
***
To Margrit & Walter
Kerry
5
***
– Contents –
Overture
Acknowledgements 9
… In a “Nutshell” 15
A Brief Note on Reading 45
Part I
‘The Construction of Social Entrepreneurship in and through 53
Research and Business School Teaching’
Prolegomenon I 58
1 Excellence and the Enterprising Academic: Social Entrepreneurship in 75
Business School Education
Prolegomenon II 152
2 The Rhetoric of Social Entrepreneurship: Paralogy and New 161
Language Games in Academic Discourse
Part II
‘Development Work: New Entrepreneurialism?’ 203
3 ‘Social, or Economic, That’s the Question … ’ – On Discursive 206
Ambivalence and Hybridity in Development Talk of NGO Practitioners
6
Part III
‘Lines of Flight’ 372
4 Deterritorializing Discourse Analysis or: For Discourse Analysis 376
… with a ‘Brief’ Detour
5 Deconstructive Reflexivity in the Business School without Conditions 454
6 Power, Discourse and Resistance: From Aesthetical Practice 496
… to Politics of Difference
Prolegomenon III 533
7 ‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? – The Becoming 556
Social of Social Entrepreneurship
Epilogue: On the End … and the Future 612
Curriculum Vitae 616
7
8
Overture
***
9
***
Acknowledgements
To open a thesis by asking what it means to acknowledge might appear extravagant, especially if
taking into account that the acknowledgment section represents a commonplace and hence an
ostensibly mandatory gesture, thus forming an inherent part of publishing a book. Be that as it
may, when I tried to express, that is, acknowledge, my gratitude, debt and love to people who in
various ways were involved in the production of this thesis, I was faced with a number of
paradoxes. I am keen to address them here in order to disclose, first, what fueled my ambivalence
and, second, how to deal with my hesitations. More precisely, if one agrees that the process of
acknowledging marks the moment when one admits one’s debt to identifiable others, it can be
argued that one enters, whether willingly or hesitantly, the sphere of instrumental exchange, that
is, the economy of give and take. One might choose to sidestep this heterodox discussion and
simply follow prevailing conventions. Yet, considering that the present thesis seeks to juxtapose
and elaborate on conditional and unconditional ways of being/becoming, and, most importantly,
to claim a space for social entrepreneurship beyond a reciprocal/economic logic, it seems all the
more appropriate to reflect briefly on the act of acknowledging and point to the ‘trap’ this might
entail. To this end, it is helpful to make reference to Derrida’s (1992) claim that the gift, to be
worth its name, disallows ‘reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt’ (p. 12). It follows
from Derrida’s statement that the gift is a fragile affair, since it all too easily gets transformed
into a mere economic transaction based on a reciprocal logic. One’s acknowledgment, in my
assessment, entails an analogous risk, since it is likely to represent a mere testimonio, that is, an
expression of debt to others as well as an implicit hope for a ‘write-off’ on the part of one’s
‘obligees’. In view of the fact that both giving and acknowledging are mostly seen as noble
gestures and/or as deeply ingrained habits of social exchange (Mauss, 1990), it is vital to note that
most gifts demand recompense, else one would overtly violate the economic circle of give-and-
take, of give-and-acknowledge. Thus, what I deem problematic in this context is that
10
acknowledging stresses a condition of reciprocity in which the acknowledger tries to clear his/her
debt by a gesture of submission. Derrida’s (2001) work on forgiveness allegorically reminds us
that acknowledging all too hastily gets transformed into a retrospective act where one turns
towards the past to actualize and repeat one’s self-accusation or insurmountable debt.
Whereas I have no ambition to obscure the fact that the ‘time of a thesis’ demands from
the ones we appreciate and love patience, forgiveness as well as material, intellectual and
emotional support, this alone is not good enough a reason for me to continue ‘as usual’. What I
want to stress here is that acknowledging is a paradoxical act, an act that, as postulated elsewhere
by Derrida (1992), requires a moment of madness. Probing the question of how to proceed if one
whishes to express one’s affinity and experience of intimacy and closeness with others without
getting trapped in a state of material or symbolic encumbrance, I would like to construe the
process of acknowledging as an unconditional event. Accordingly, the kind of acknowledgment I
am envisaging here relates less to the kind of pseudo-gift Derrida (cf. 1992; 1995; 2001) has
investigated and scrutinized in several of his works. Provided that acknowledging can either be
endowed with a calculative logic that induces a continuous process of give and take or be
conceptualized as an unconditional act that demands no recompense, it is more than obvious that
it is the latter exegesis that conveys the promise of neutralizing the hierarchical relationship
between the giver and the receiver. I therefore aspire to use this section to relate to my friends,
1
both in the professional and private realm, in a way that expresses gratitude beyond the limits of
calculative reasoning. To this end, it is once more helpful to call to mind that Derrida (1995)
claimed that a gift that deserves its name must not appear as such or else it would be destroyed by
anything that stimulates recompense. Derrida’s claim implies that even a simple ‘thank you’,
which acknowledges the presence of a gift while demanding something in return (in other words,
quid pro quo), induces the receiver to re-establish a state of economic equivalence by reason of
which the gift is annulled (Derrida, 1989). Indeed, simple solutions are not in sight. However, this
is not the time for resignation, and I would like to follow Derrida’s (1992) advise that even
though genuine giving might be impossible we must nevertheless enter the circle of economy so
1
The question of the boundary of friendship, that is, who counts as friend and who does not, is indeed a complex
one. Derrida (1997) provided an insightful account on the issue of friendship by scrutinizing the Aristotelian idea that
one cannot be the friend of many people because friendship needs time to develop trust. Opposing this view Derrida
was skeptical about limiting the number of friends and instead suggests that friendship should not be based on
calculations (which represent the central premise of trust), because as soon as one brings up the issue of calculation,
friendship is no longer driven by a concern for the other, but by one’s own concerns and needs (Jones, 2003).
11
as to induce ‘a simple movement of faith in the face of that which exceeds the limits of
experience, knowledge, science, economy’ (p. 30). Consequently, to counteract the
‘transcendental illusion’ of giving, I will put forward some passing comments which all
acknowledge the most oblique and elusive gifts such as time,
2
passion and pleasure, which I have
received and experienced over the last years and which leveraged and facilitated my reading,
thinking and writing.
To be sure, it is highly unlikely that this book would have been written without the aid,
support, advice and love of particular people (and, of course, the use and impetus of certain
technological devices; Law & Hassard, 1999).
3
Although it is clear that it will be impossible, for
reasons of space and memory, to mention all those I am fortunate enough to be acquainted with, I
would like to mention that in my private life (a term which has indeed lost some of its face value
over the years) there have been friends who have been surprisingly tolerant and forgiving
considering that I virtually became a missing link in their social network. Though isolation
represents an issue that is often construed by scholars as a pre-eminent aspect of free thinking,
4
it
is equally clear that the act of disappearance is not particularly helpful for maintaining
relationships. Irrespective of the fact that I cannot reverse the estrangement the last few years
might have brought about, I nevertheless anticipate and embrace the possibility of future
encounters.
Ideas travel, as Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) claimed, and sometimes one has to leave
one’s desk and make a journey to encounter them. In the case of my thesis it was very useful to
visit the University of Loughborough (UK) in order to meet and exchange ideas with some of the
forerunners of psychological discourse analysis. My gratitude, therefore, first goes to the Swiss
Federal Science Foundation which provided me with a scholarship enabling me to take an
2
Time, as we are told by Derrida (1992), is the only gift which truly deserves the name: ‘(t)he gift is not a gift, the
gift only gives to the extent it gives time … There where there is gift, there is time’ (p. 41; emphasis in original). In
other words, time, being insomuch taken for granted that it is hardly discernable as a gift, cannot be given or received
in any strict sense, which is, however, the precise reason why Derrida construed it as the materialization of his idea
of the genuine gift.
3
It would be exaggerated to claim that I have written this thesis alone, since I often made the experience that the
texts I read flow through me and onto the paper or, more precisely, onto the computer screen. I therefore found my
own experience echoed in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ contention that ‘I don’t have the feeling that I write my books, I have
the feeling that my books get written through me’ (quoted in Wiseman & Groves, 2000, p. 173).
4
For instance, Kafka asserted that one cannot possibly be too isolated while writing, whereas Nietzsche argued that
the free spirit must not be chained down by pragmatic demands, but rather detached from them; otherwise the spirit
would not be ready for temperate judgment or independent thought.
12
extended journey into novel geographical and intellectual territories. My special thanks go to
Adrian Bangerter who brought me in contact with DARG (Discourse and Rhetoric Group) at
Loughborough and to my official host in England, David Middleton, who provided me with a
safe space for experimenting and playing with novel ideas. A big thank-you also to Johanna
Motzkau with whom I shared a flat and, most importantly, whose kindness and friendship has
been precious to me, not only with regard to my thesis but my stay at large.
At the end of a thesis it appears easy, not to say that one is likely, to evaluate one’s
previous ordeals from the relaxed position of the ‘finisher’ and thus proclaim that ‘it wasn’t that
hard, after all.’ Yet, I do not wish to deny that this thesis gave me a hard time. What I found hard,
however, was not primarily the long working hours, but making the transition from a hasty,
perfunctory mode of thinking/writing to a passionate, modest, and thorough scholarly modus
operandi. With this in mind, I am grateful to my supervisor, Chris Steyaert, who, in his unique
way, taught me to approach my work intimately, calmly and with passion and desire, and who
encouraged me in my work during times when things were not going that smoothly. I would also
like to express my gratitude to my home institution, the Research Institute for Organizational
Psychology at the University of St. Gallen, which, due to its unique climate of thorough thinking
and mutual exchange, has provided me with a space for personal transformation. My particular
‘Merci’ goes out to Dörte Resch of whom I will keep fond memories not only because she read
and commented on every single page of my thesis and provided me with valuable suggestions,
but also because she has been a close companion in both good and bad moments and also because
her humor has been an immeasurable source of inspiration and appreciation.
In view of the fact that this thesis did not have an institutional host at the time of its
completion, I would like to thank Urs Stäheli for providing me with a ‘landing place’ at the
University of Basel and for serving as a supervisor of this text.
Arguably, one’s writing, in order to develop, needs commentary not only on the level of
semantics, logic or argumentation, but equally so on an orthographic and grammatical level.
Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to Oliver Bleskie who has proofread my thesis,
thereby improving its linguistic quality, and who, incidentally, provided me with some invaluable
lessons in proper English.
Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my parents, Margrit and Walter, who have made all things
(not just this thesis) possible. Last on this list but close to my heart is Kerry who has been
13
carrying the burden of this thesis and who has supported me with her silent tolerance,
unconditional warmth and divine vibrancy.
14
References
Czarniawska, B. & Joerges, B. (1996). Travel of Ideas. In B. Czarniawska & G. Sevón (eds.),
Translating Organizational Change. Berlin, New York: deGruyter.
Derrida, J. (1989). Memoires: for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, S. Culler & P. Kamuf. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992). Given Time: Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1997). Politics of Friendship, transl. G. Collins. London: Verso.
Derrida, J. (2001). On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley & M. Hughes.
London: Routledge.
Jones, C. (2003). As if Business Ethics were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ … Organization, 10,
223 – 248.
Law, J. & Hassard, J. (eds.) (1999). Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
Mauss, M. (1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.
D. Halls. London: Routledge.
Wiseman, B. & Groves, J. (2000). Introducing Levi Straus and Structural Anthropology. London:
Icon Books.
15
***
… In a “Nutshell”
The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of
writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the
disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and … against difference in general.
(Derrida, 1976, p. 18)
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life
is ultimately decisive. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 272; emphasis in original)
Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus state at the beginning of their
commendable ‘Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the
Cultivation of Solidarity’ that ‘(t)his book does not present a theory of entrepreneurship, … nor is
it a manual that will tell you how to succeed in these domains’ (1997, p. 1). While this
announcement can be interpreted as a wholesale understatement in the best of British tradition,
such an enunciation has an appealing feel to it as it defies the provision of a normative and
prescriptive account of the subject matter. In addition, it also refrains from putting forward any
grandiose and assertive claim as to how the world is and/or how it should be changed for the
better (cf. Foucault, 1988). If looked at from that vantage point, Spinosa and his co-authors by no
means appear capricious. Instead, their aim appears to be that of preparing the reader to ‘develop
sensitivities, not knowledge’ (p. 39). What my own argument pursued over the following chapters
has in common with this statement is an interest in disclosing particular ways of ‘history making’,
that is, how certain discourses have changed the way we conceive of and think about certain
particularities of our social reality. At the centre of my interest, then, are both the dominant and
the yet marginal (or unthought-of) significations of the sign ‘social entrepreneurship’. The
investigation of what could be denoted as the ‘meaning-making’ (Bordwell, 1989) and the ‘social
(re)production’ (Jameson, 1984) of social entrepreneurship thus endeavors to address three
16
different contexts, that is, business school teaching, academic research and development aid, in
order to highlight that the concept’s meaning is relative, that is, an episteme which is the result of
a moving substrate of force relations (Foucault, 1978). By implication, social entrepreneurship is
conceived as a social creation (as opposed to a natural entity; cf. Berger & Luckman, 1966) and
as being intertwined with local and global states of power. The question that is raised in different
contexts in this thesis is what conditions of possibility enabled the emergence and popularization
of social entrepreneurship and how we could extend and/or alter those prevailing ‘regimes of
truth’ (Foucault, 1977). On the face of it, my line of argument is simultaneously concerned with
investigating the status quo of social entrepreneurship or, more precisely, how the status quo has
come about, and how it has been legitimated and consolidated. An attempt is then made to
present novel ways of thinking about the subject matter. To gain a deeper understanding of the
overall architecture of my thesis, it is first of all necessary to highlight the rationale behind its
tripartition. Accordingly, I will first discuss the structure of and the interrelation between the
three sub-parts of the thesis and thereafter delineate in some detail the content of the seven
individual chapters.
*
In order to give a fuller picture of this thesis as a whole and to shed some light on the underlying
logic of its segmentation, I would like to refer, even at this early stage, to one of the figureheads
of postmodern theory: Jean-Francois Lyotard (cf. Smith, 2006). Direct reference to Lyotard’s
writing on knowledge will help to circumscribe the general trajectory of the first two parts of this
thesis and, most importantly, to pinpoint where these sections exhibit points of differentiation,
contestation and tension. While Lyotard’s writings will repeatedly be invoked throughout my
thesis, it is most notably his ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ (first
published in French in 1979 and translated into English in 1984) which is deemed helpful for
establishing the differences between the first two parts. To start with, I would like to use
Lyotard’s distinction between so-called grand narratives (or metanarratives) and small
narratives in order to show that it is the former kind of knowledge which will become the
analytic focus of the first part of this thesis. Bearing in mind that the first part of the thesis is
predominantly concerned with the scientific construction of social entrepreneurship, it is
indispensable to introduce some terms on the pragmatics of scientific knowledge and on how
social entrepreneurship is established as one of the more recent grand narratives of science.
17
Accordingly, it needs mention that (modern) science strives for grand narratives in the sense that
it demands that ‘one language game, denotation, be retained and all others excluded’ (Lyotard,
1984, p. 25). Science, following Lyotard, thus operates in a way as to establish grand narratives
which appear to have universal validity because they claim transcendental significance and
postulate singular codes of truth. As such, they purport to give a heightened sense of how things
really are. In contrast to narrative knowledge (i.e. small narratives) which constructs truth as a
local, that is, historically and culturally contingent, affair, the aim of science, however concealed
it may be at times, is always to produce a kind of knowledge that expresses or represents reality
the way it is supposed to be. Obviously, scientific knowledge takes truth-value as the criterion
which is in turn used to corroborate its very acceptability. Given that the truth-value is invoked to
decide on the pertinence or impertinence of knowledge, it is hardly surprising that scholars take
great efforts to set their statements and claims apart from or, even above of, a type of traditional
or practical knowledge which manifests itself in so-called small narratives (Lyotard, 1984).
With respect to the issue of social entrepreneurship, it is my objective to reveal how
business school scholars (i.e. both researchers and teachers) go about providing ‘proof’ of what
they say and how they rhetorically establish accounts of social entrepreneurship that refute
alternative or opposing views concerning the same questions. Arguing that the sign ‘social
entrepreneurship’ has taken the academic world by storm, my primary analytic interest will be to
point up the commonness or, better, commonsense with which the proper name (cf. Derrida,
1995) of social entrepreneurship is bestowed through respectively business school teaching
(Chapter 1) and research (Chapter 2). This said, it is equally important to note that these two sites
of scientific knowledge production are not assumed to operate independently. Quite the contrary,
it is assumed that business school teaching and research work as complementary ‘partners’ which
mutually verify and reproduce each other’s claims. The presumptions that a certain degree of
complicity is always present between research and teaching and that teaching (and education at
large) is the bridge between scientific institutions and society both served as my rationale for
presenting the two chapters that deal with these issues in the first part of the thesis. In addition,
this decision is also based on the recognition that science, with its arrogating statements in the
name of truth, progress, and the (betterment of the) human cause, is one of the most powerful
instances of knowledge production. Given this brief reminder of both the operation and aspiration
of knowledge in the context of science, I would further like to point out that part I works on the
assumption that the game and knowledge of science is held in high esteem not only by the small
18
circle of insiders but equally so in public discourse. In accordance with Lyotard’s contention that
science is one of the most widely approved strata of knowledge production, it is the first part
which posits that academia is a discursive site that contains enough legitimacy and rhetoric power
to naturalize and delimit our understanding of social entrepreneurship. Notwithstanding its
superior status vis-à-vis small narratives, I will approach the scientific knowledge of social
entrepreneurship as a social achievement that, by implication, lends itself to a thorough
examination of the cultural logic that lies behind or, better, in this name and thus also lends itself
to new interpretations. Defying the denotative (i.e. determining) pretension of scientific
knowledge, I will not try to judge the truth-value and status of academics’ narratives of social
entrepreneurship but, instead, use Foucault’s insightful work on discourse so as to emphasize that
knowledge or truth must not be taken for granted and to ask ‘(w)hat are the relations we have to
truth through scientific knowledge, to those “truth games” which are so important in civilization
and in which we are both subject and objects?’ (Foucault, 1988b, p. 15). Talking this statement as
my starting point, I will elaborate on how social entrepreneurship has been established as an
utterly positive and irritatingly univocal ‘regime of truth’ in order to raise some awareness that
the meaning of social entrepreneurship is orchestrated and, by implication, limited in its
potentially infinite semantic. Since I have an interest in inquiring beyond the prima facie
impression of ‘social entrepreneurship’, the objective of the first part closely resembles Hegel’s
(1967) assertion that ‘(w)hat is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that
it is “familiar”’ (p. 94; quoted in Derrida, 1976, p. xiii). Putting aside what is generally taken as
the ‘familiar’ essence of the name ‘social entrepreneurship’, I will ask ‘what does one mean by
this name?’ and ‘what happens when we deploy this name?’ Acting on the assumption that the
sign ‘social entrepreneurship’ is never completely fixed or fixable and that it is therefore,
however impalpably, the object of constant play(fullness) and, by implication, subject to ‘double
readings’ (Critchley, 1999; 2005), I aspire to lay open its most dominant exegesis and some of the
name’s outstanding peculiarities. Highlighting some of the most salient fragments of social
entrepreneurship teaching and research shall thus help to gain a deeper understanding of the type
of spaces and voices that are used to express the term and practice of social entrepreneurship. The
territories in which it is shaped, charted and circulated are also explored, as are the limitations
and totalitarian threats related therewith. It will then be asked by what discourses people are
hailed, and what subject positions and hence forms of life become imaginable, or, conversely, are
avoided. For instance, large parts of our understanding of social entrepreneurship have been
19
uncritically inherited or imitated from the general program of entrepreneurship research (cf.
Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). In line with this insight, I will try to show that the expression of social
entrepreneurship re-constructs a whole range of individual and corporate actors as economic
entities (e.g. bureaucracies, nation states or non-governmental organizations). While trying to
gain new understandings, any final definition of social entrepreneurship will be suspended for the
sake of multiplication, equivocity and continuous movement. Therefore, the first part of the thesis
in no sense suggests another finality, delivering an ostensibly better truth of social
entrepreneurship. Instead, the aim is to show how social entrepreneurship could be extended
beyond its current delimitation. The issue of difference will thereby be taken on board by
suggesting, for instance, a new agenda of teaching (e.g. ethics, politics, etc.) and research (e.g.
paralogy).
Referring to ‘the middle of things’, it is first of all necessary to mention that the second
part of the thesis is made up of a single (though extended) chapter that seeks to establish a
counter-image of social entrepreneurship which deviates from the blatantly optimistic
representation being pursued and disseminated through academic knowledge. In this context, the
epithet ‘counter’ is not simply to be read as the materialization of difference but, crucially, as a
move towards multiplication and resistance. To comprehend that resistance is not necessarily an
act of overt antagonism or insistent provocation and struggle, it is once more helpful to remind
ourselves of Lyotard’s (1984) polarity between grand and small narratives which I have used as
an overarching point of differentiation between part I and II. In particular, where it is assumed
that academia, that is, research and teaching, operates so as to impart knowledge of a universal
and even transcendental nature, it is within the local context of interviews with development NGO
(non-governmental organization) practitioners that a knowledge of a different kind shall be
revealed: knowledge that exhibits ‘paradox’ and which thereby establishes its own rules in the
game of reasoning. Lyotard’s cunning scheme, then, allows one to distinguish between the sort of
academic knowledge that claims transcendental validity and a type of practical knowledge that is
said to be locally emergent and, therefore, locally valid. I would add that the tension I sense
between part I and II is not only due to a different scope or area of validity, but also due to a
different degree of consensus and complexity, or complexification. Again, such a dichotomy can
easily be misinterpreted as saying that academic knowledge is imprecise, over-simplified or else
deficient, whereas the knowledge used and reproduced by NGO practitioners is more, precise, apt
20
or even true. This impression, is, however, inaccurate, since it is neither my aim to (dis)qualify
knowledge on account of its truth value – i.e. to decide whether or not it mirrors reality in any
precise sense (Potter, 1996) – nor to foster a state of psychological nihilism in which one
suddenly realizes that the scientific knowledge of social entrepreneurship ‘aims at nothing and
achieves nothing’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 12; emphasis in original). Rather, my objective is to
pinpoint the different levels of complexity as well as ethical sensitivities which come to the fore
in both scientific and practical knowledge. It should have become clear by now that the task at
hand is not to simply replace one episteme by another. More to the point, the second part is
devoted to destabilizing the grand narrative of social entrepreneurship as channeled by the
academic community and to emphasizing that ‘(s)ocial pragmatics [of small narratives] does not
have the “simplicity” of scientific pragmatics [of grand narratives]’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 65). By the
same token, I will point at the radical vulnerability and limitation of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ in order to nurture a sensitivity that things, at closer inspection, might come to
look less consensual and more complicated, more paradoxical, aporetic (Derrida, 1978) or hybrid.
The point to be stressed then is that even though the pervasive orthodoxy of performativity
(Lyotard, 1984) seems to support the reduction of complexity and the provision of easy
suggestions and practicable solutions, it is the discursive investigation in the second part which
stimulates a backlash in order to embrace the idea that complexity is needed if we would like to
get a hold on the fragile, subtle and paralogical phenomenon of ‘social entrepreneurship’.
Regarding content, it shall suffice here to mention that, given that business school teaching and
research provide us with a rather uncritical or at least univocally positive and contestably
unreflected image of social entrepreneurship, the second part restrains the images which pretend,
for instance, that social entrepreneurship can be seen as the promise and potential panacea for
global redemption. I will thereby show that those working in the so-called social realm
(Baudrillard, 1983) reveal an extremely complex and variegated signification of their very social
work, and impart a kind of local truth that makes scientific knowledge appear in a different light.
In a nutshell, (since more details will be given below), I would like to set the discourse of
practitioners apart from the grand narratives of academics by showing that the former in no way
trade on the kind of utopian dreams one currently finds in those self-satisfied management
textbooks or glossy MBA programs as discussed in part I. Though practitioners’ discourse does
not seem to echo the voice of utopia, I will, however, interpret the ambivalence and paradox
which comes to the fore therein as a sign of genuine responsibility.
21
The last part of the thesis, which consists of four chapters, seeks to engage in a number of
‘transverse communications’ with the preceding two parts. Being most directly inspired by
philosophy, the last part will be introduced under the heading ‘lines of flight’ (cf. Deleuze &
Guattari’s, 1987). As the title suggests, I will take up, extend and reflect on some of the central
claims which have been addressed and elaborated before. To put things simply, one could say that
this last part speaks the language of liberation. Liberation is thereby not so much envisaged as
the obliteration of given strata, but rather as the causation of radical opening-ups of closed or else
repressive structures. Picking out and accentuating the main points established on beforehand, I
will address methodological, epistemological and ontological questions related to discourse
analysis (Chapter 3), business school curricula (Chapter 1), Foucault’s work on power and
knowledge (Chapters 1 & 3) as well as to the signification of the epithet ‘social’ of social
entrepreneurship (Chapters 1, 2, 3). The chapters, which could also be called essays (Adorno,
1988), presented in the last part thus present intertextual linkages with the previous two parts
insofar as they try to take up and critically reflect on the identified canon and to enliven the field
by stimulating experimental and radical movements which have not been considered as yet
(Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003). Although the rapprochement of instability and difference proceeds
along different theoretical concepts and analytic procedures, the common denominator of these
writings is that they all seek to become intensely familiar with the given scholarly fields (or
strata; cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) in order to then discover available possibilities of change. In
other words, the overarching aim of the third part is to stimulate tactical reinscriptions (de
Certeau, 1984) of prevailing meanings so as to decamp for a future that is not as yet imaginable
from the mainstream perspective. In accordance with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I envision this
part as a break-up where we are called to set out and ‘(f)ind our black holes and white walls,
know them, know our faces; it is the only way we will be able to dismantle them and draw our
lines of flight’ (p. 188; slightly modified).
The second, more subtle and hidden agenda of the last part has to do with the established
theoretical and conceptual foci. Despite the fact that the entire thesis draws inspiration from what
is often called, for pragmatic (i.e. economic) reasons, poststructuralist or postmodern theory, it is
in particular the last part which strays into philosophy in order to subject the questions at hand to
new perspectives. The theoretical and political momentousness and symbolic weight that such a
choice entails is related to the fact that these works have often been discredited for their lack of
22
any immediate public significance. Probably best remembered (since most effective) in this
connection is Alan Sokal’s (cf. Sokal & Bricmont, 1998) critique, not to say parody, of
postmodern approaches in which he mocks postmodern jargon and deliberately misrepresents
relativism so as to cause considerable and sustained damage. Though the task of redemption or
rehabilitation will remain rather implicit in the third part, I will reclaim my subject matter
through selected works by, for instance, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari in
order to exemplify that the elusive tradition called poststructuralism does not equal indeterminacy
or stasis (Critchley, 1999). It will also be shown that with their works those scholars can add
unprecedented ethico-political, aesthetic, emancipatory and affirmative perspectives and thereby
make the canon more plurivocal.
*
Whereas the previous overview has taken what could be called a meta-perspective to provide a
rough sketch of the thesis’ structure and flow, I would now like to present a more fine-grained
outline of both the contents and objectives of the individual chapters. Chapter 1 of the thesis
pursues an investigation of social entrepreneurship in the context of business school teaching.
The central concern of this chapter is not to reveal the precise origin of social entrepreneurship
(cf. Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983), that is, its ‘date of birth’, but rather to gain some awareness of
the historical conditions and relations of power and knowledge which enabled the emergence of
social entrepreneurship courses in the first place. Social entrepreneurship is thus conceived of and
addressed as a discursive achievement which is contingent upon the context and history of its
formulation and, therefore, due to a continued process of cultural circulation. In line with this
conception, I will address what institutional arrangements actually brought forward and
articulated the respective notion and what political consequences are related thereto. In
accordance with Foucault’s (e.g. 1983) genealogical method, the investigation aspires to
disentangle the various disciplinary technologies which, differently though collectively, produce
(and constrain) social entrepreneurship as an academic topic. The question addressed therein is,
inter alia, ‘how are power and knowledge intertwined so as to impart a particular representation
of social entrepreneurship?’ As a first step towards this end, I will reflect on the avowed crises of
the business school (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005) in the light of Lyotard’s (1984) still timely notion
of ‘performativity’ in order to assert that knowledge today is orchestrated in an effort to increase
the relative power (or, to use an economic expression, competitive advantage) of given
23
institutions (or nation states). The elaboration of performativity will then lead me to conclude that
the understanding and practice of teaching and learning has changed quite dramatically over the
last decades which is revealed, for instance, by the fact that business school teaching today leans
more and more towards a consumerist attitude to learning (Mintzberg, 2004). Positing that the
current modus operandi of business schools is moving appallingly close to what some have
coined the McUniversity (e.g. Parker, 2002), and that measurement procedures and quality
accreditations have become the acknowledged accolade of good practice, I will outline the
consequences thereof not only for business school curricula but also for individual business
school teachers. The point to be made there is that the ideal image of business school teachers
increasingly approximates the stereotype of the heroic entrepreneur. Based on this insight, I will
claim that entrepreneurship has become a forceful benchmark both for the conduct of
organizations and, increasingly, for the ‘conduct of conduct’, that is, the government of individual
selves (Rose, 1999). Citing selected works on governmentality by Foucault (e.g. 1988b; 1991), I
will argue that the enterprising academic (in the context of contemporary business schools) is
prompted to work on behalf of him/herself in such a manner as to act both more enthusiastically
and innovatively. This sort of ‘self-engineering’, as I will contend, is conceived as a necessary
regime for leveraging the attractiveness, i.e. entertainment factor, of business classes and,
consequently, for warranting the saleability of this knowledge on the education market. Coming
full circle with the issue of social entrepreneurship, I will then subject the relatively recent
phenomenon of social entrepreneurship teaching to critical analysis. That is, I will investigate if
and how social entrepreneurship courses are affected by the performativity mantra, the main
focus being on the question whether or not those courses can be seen as just another management
fashion (Abrahamson, 1996). In so doing, I will discuss how the economic imperative of business
school teaching fuels the ‘thinning out’ of social entrepreneurship, that is, the production of
knowledge which omits both thorough theory and intellectual reflection and, consequently,
provides uninspiring entertainment instead. By the same token, it will be suggested that business
school teaching has drawn an image of social entrepreneurship that zealously emphasizes the
talent, persistence and rare genius of individuals and which thereby nurtures the expectation that
it is the responsible citizen who can stimulate, by mere will and moral dedication, the re-
enchantment of organizations and societies. In trying to disclose some of the most blatant
shortcomings of this representation, I will discuss that current teaching on social entrepreneurship
turns a blind eye to both its political grounding and (genuine) ethical possibilities. In line with
24
this state of affairs, the last part of the first chapter will look for novel approaches. In particular,
the articulation of social entrepreneurship in political discourse as well as the relational
understanding of the social aspect of entrepreneurship will be subjected to close scrutiny. Bearing
in mind that social entrepreneurship is not only presented as a successful change agent but, and at
times even more so, as the embodiment of ethics, I will repudiate this representation by showing
that ethics is never accomplished in a definitive sense, that ethics is not exhaustible by
programmable inscriptions in organizations’ code of conduct, that ethical behavior and ideals are
always at risk of being corrupted by pragmatic demands and economic imperatives, and that
(ethical) aporias are the irrevocable and central aspect of genuine responsibility. While I will
juxtapose Derrida’s (and Levinas’) philosophy to the ethical issue of social entrepreneurship to
make my point, it is my aim to introduce a reflective loop which, though necessarily raising more
questions than providing easy answers, underscores the necessity for modesty, patience and the
sensitive recognition of the intimate encounter with the Other (capital letter; cf. Levinas, 2001) in
social entrepreneurship. Thus it is my firm hope that we can exchange the current fast-food
teaching of social entrepreneurship with a kind of teaching diet (in the form of official curricula),
that, though arguably harder to digest, will give our mental faculties more to chew on in the long
run.
In Chapter 2, I will provide a deconstructive reading of academic social entrepreneurship
texts. Departing from the premise that researchers enjoy a status of experts in society, the
assumptions underlying the respective studies and theoretical manifestos must be analyzed
closely. As will become clear, I do not address scholars’ writing as neutral and value free
utterances of an objectively assessable reality but as rhetorical accounts that express individual
preferences, interests and/or expressions of lived ideologies (Billig et al., 1988). Conceiving of
rhetoric as an artful practice rather than deceptive talk, I will argue that academic texts such as
journal articles, Internet publications, and book chapters univocally propagate the view that social
entrepreneurship is a very good and useful thing. On the face of it, my deconstructive reading
aims at unsettling the taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions of those texts and the
rhetorical dynamic they convey. By implication, I envision the deconstructive reading as an
endeavor being nurtured by a curiosity towards the commonplace (and therefore precariously
ideological) preconceptions of what social entrepreneurship supposedly is. Given that analytic
deconstruction represents a means for de-naturalizing commonsense, I will introduce it as a
25
pertinent strategy for both pointing at the occasionally subliminal ambivalences entailed in the
concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ and for doing away with the assumption of ostensibly stable
boundaries and meaning. As mentioned before, the theoretical assumptions guiding the analysis
are related to the field of discourse and rhetoric and will be elaborated at the beginning of the
chapter. I will discuss, for instance, that scientific texts, though being mostly taken as instances of
logical consistence, trade on a too-often ignored rhetorical force. Consequently, the texts I will
analyze in this investigation are presumed to work rhetorically so as to support a certain
structuring of human experience, and to establish a certain impression of truth. Furthermore, I
will, in the spirit of Spivak (1988), delineate academics’ rhetoric as a moment of strategic (yet
infinitely undecidable) stabilization of fluid and floating concepts. By implication, I will tackle
the inherent consensus of academic writing as the stabilization of something essentially unstable
and chaotic. And since it is assumed that chaos and instability can never be subordinated to full
control, I will align my analysis with Derrida, the grandfather of deconstruction, who indicated
that this ontological condition is at once a risk and a chance, since continual stability would mean
the end of politics (cf. Mouffe, 1996). Given this state of reasoning, it should come as no surprise
that this second chapter is not so much concerned with delivering a theory or concepts in the
sense of non-transient truth, but with sensing how things are made to appear as factual matters
which are therefore incontestable and beyond doubt. My analysis shall support the reader in
comprehending that ‘social entrepreneurship’ within academic texts becomes objectified in a
particular manner that makes the matter appear so ‘obvious’ that it does not arouse much
curiosity and/or debate. Where this ‘invisibility’ or matter-of-factness of the reality of social
entrepreneurship is assumed of endowing our mindscape with truth-value, I am not only
interested in providing a reflection of the discourses and implicit assumptions that ‘penetrate’ the
respective texts but equally so in investigating what is left out, that is, in identifying the
‘deliberate absences’ (Law, 2004) of academics’ textual performances. These absences, as I will
argue, are the cornerstones for a different understanding of social entrepreneurship since they
contain those aspects of meaning which, by definition, are suppressed or else pushed into
oblivion. In other words and as expressed by Derrida (1981), one could say that my reading aims
at releasing the centrifugal forces of meaning so as to enable ‘the irruptive emergence of a new
“concept”, a concept that can no longer be, and could be, included in the previous regime’
(Derrida, 1981, p. 42; quoted in Jones, 2005, p. 373). To create the condition of possibility for
novel movements, I will stress that the available academic texts reveal, apart from other things, a
26
clear tendency to limit social entrepreneurship to the logic of business and economics. In contrast
thereto, I will bring forward a vision of social entrepreneurship that capitalizes on an alternative
perspective and which no longer appears exclusively unclouded and optimistic but equally ironic
and antagonistic. Generally expressed, I will seek to blur boundaries, and to question the limits of
what one currently coins as scholarly social entrepreneurship texts in order to make some
tentative suggestions for the enrichment of the research agenda of social entrepreneurship. As a
first step towards that end, I will elaborate on the idea that the linguistic style or genre we employ
in our research undertakings ineluctably influences what topics we select and how we discern our
subject matters. Style, as we are reminded by Richardson (1994), is thus established as the key for
alternative epistemes since ‘by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic
and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable’ (p. 516). On the basis of the idea that
theory and writing style are closely aligned, I will suggest a multiplication of literary styles and
genres in respect to social entrepreneurship. In so doing, I will identify the possibilities of
‘breaching’ (van Maanen, 1995), that is, the application of styles of writing which violate
conventional textual practices in the respectable field of ‘science’. Having identified these
possibilities, I will contend that we need to take these measures for exploring new aspects of
social entrepreneurship. In addition thereto, I will propose a proliferation of deconstructive
readings by showing that overturning the mainstream of social entrepreneurship requires
continuous efforts or, following Spivak (1990), ‘a practical politics of the open end’ (p. 105).
Provided that academic writing on social entrepreneurship clearly resembles the early canon of
entrepreneurship research, I will suggest a careful re-reading of some more recent and so-called
minor texts of that latter field. My objective here is to show that entrepreneurship research has on
offer some commendable ideas regarding the aneconomic and non-business grounding of social
entrepreneurship. In the spirit of a semantic opening, I will propose different texts on
entrepreneurship which advocate multiparadigmatic and multidisciplinary experimentation. In the
last paragraph of this chapter, I will underscore that entrepreneurship, despite the epithet ‘social’,
has not overcome economic discourse as yet. Seeking a ‘way out’, I will draw upon Derrida’s
(e.g. 1999) work on aporia and responsibility in order to conjure up an image of social
entrepreneurship which considers that to become social, entrepreneurship must exceed the limits
of performativity and must step outside the circle of economic input-output relations.
*
27
Departing from the observation that social entrepreneurship is either represented as a
management fashion (Chapter 1) or portrayed as a mimicry of the grand narrative of early-day
entrepreneurship research (Chapter 2), it is in Chapter 3 that I will inquire if and how the issue of
(social) entrepreneurship has been received in the realm of development aid. To establish this
nexus, I will first reflect on some of the most salient significations of development aid from the
post-WWII era to the present day. The aim of this endeavor is to show that development aid has
continuously changed its basic premises whereas it has been particularly over last five to ten
years that the orthodoxy of entrepreneurship has gained recognition in the discourse of policy
makers, research scholars and international organizations such as the UN and the World Bank,
etc. Provided that the center of gravity of the third chapter comes to rest on the discursive
investigation of the NGO (non-governmental organization) sector, I will use the first part of this
chapter to shed some light on the position and status development NGOs have inherited in the
overarching development apparatus. In doing so, I will show that the global legitimacy of
(development) NGOs (vis-à-vis the state and the private sector) has changed quite dramatically
over the last five decades and that those institutions have witnessed distinct historical transitions
due to which they have either become the centers of grandiose, not to say unrealistic, expectations
and credit or, conversely, been represented as agents that do more harm than good. The discourse
on development NGOs in our present day is now based upon notions such as ‘results-based
management’, ‘inputs’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ or ‘internal and external accounting’ (cf.
Murphy, 2000). Departing from this observation, I will posit that these language games reveal the
intrusion of the ideology of ‘new managerialism’ (Desai & Imrie, 1998). The reflection of this
move or rupture is relevant insofar as it highlights that development NGOs are more and more
seen from the perspective of management. As a result, traditional rationalities (Foucault, 2000)
increasingly lose status and credibility.
Given that the second part of this chapter will investigate the language games and
identities of NGO practitioners through a discourse analytic approach (Potter & Wetherell,
1987), I will provide a brief elaboration on the poststructural understanding of language (Deetz,
2003) that will form the basis of the subsequent analysis. On that basis, I will establish a
conceptual link between discourse and identity in order to explain that, within a constructionist
paradigm (Burr, 1995), the self is not conceived as a stable, atomistic entity but as a specific
discursive and hence relational achievement (Potter, 1996). Thus defying an atomistic view that
denotes identity as a stable entity, I will put in place a rationale that stresses the performative
28
aspect of identity. The notion of subject position will thus be invoked to underscore the discursive
understanding of identity and to make intelligible that practitioners’ subjectivity is contingent on
the discourse of the very same people. It follows that my discourse analysis aims at embracing the
specific discourses practitioners refer to when rendering their daily work meaningful as well as
the subject positions that are enabled in and through their linguistic engagements. More precisely,
I will investigate how practitioners express who (i.e. populations or countries) is granted support
through development initiatives, and who is refused the subject position of ‘beneficiary’; by what
rationalities development work is legitimated; and what kinds of relationships are depicted
towards the other (e.g. help recipients) of development work (e.g. cooperation, control, etc.). In
giving voice to the people working in the social realm of development and humanitarian work, I
am keen, as briefly mentioned before, to inquire if and how the discourse of (social)
entrepreneurship, and ‘new managerialism’ has come to penetrate practitioners’ sensemaking. To
put this in a slightly different manner, one could say that the discourse analysis addresses the
question whether the grand narrative of donor organizations, philanthropies, national
development agencies and supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund reverberate in practitioners’ identity constructions or if those same
people engage in ‘textual poaching’ (de Certeau, 1984) as a result of which they establish
identities which are in obvious contrast to, and therefore subversive of, the strategic discourse of
economics and managerialism. Departing from the assumption that practitioners’ talk allows for
the appropriation and re-appropriation of strategic discourse, my analysis remains attentive
towards the possibility that the circulation of social entrepreneurship discourse through academic
scholars does not necessarily have an influence on NGO practitioners. This makes it necessary to
study the signifying practices by which practitioners develop their unique ‘wandering lines’, that
is, their own cultural logic or local knowledge (Lyotard, 1984). In accordance with de Certeau’s
(1984) notion of ‘trajectory’, my analysis is thus mainly concerned with inquiring the ‘ruses of
other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they
develop’ (p. xviii).
On the face of it, bearing an interest in the power implications of practitioners’ self- and
other-constructions and the tactical enunciation of development aid, my analysis quite obviously
trades on a critical orientation. The attribute ‘critical’ is thereby first and foremost revealed in
conjunction with the question whether, as some have argued (e.g. Parker, 2002b), NGOs (and
their employees) simply pursue the neo-liberal political and economic order or if those same
29
people and organizations represent development aid as a mainly social undertaking. Keeping in
mind that the polarity between social and economic frames of reasoning captures the essential
research question of the third chapter, it is important to make inferences concerning the kind of
diversity and difference being respectively dis- or enabled through practitioners’ talk. On a
further note, I will seek to explore the power implications entailed in discourse by asking, for
instance, if practitioners within their utterances reify the separation between the ‘First’ and the
‘Third World’, and if the emphasis upon seemingly positive or at least neutral concepts such as
(technical) cooperation, empowerment and assistance could possibly foster the impression of a
non-existent parity between the parties involved.
Anticipating that the discourse analysis will reveal three distinguishable repertoires (that
is, benevolence, professionalism and entrepreneurship repertoire), I will use Bhabha’s (1994)
concept of ‘hybridity’ to illustrate that the expression or performance of identity rests on
immanent instability, variance and multiplicity and, by implication, that practitioners’ talk is
characterized by tensions between the disparity (and irreconcilability) of cultural heritages (Pratt,
1992). The notion of ‘hybridity’ is thereby deemed apposite for demonstrating that the liminal
space of development aid defies the formulation of a fixed binary between the social and the
economic realm. In the discussion of the split of cultural discourse due to the discursive
ambivalence that ‘emerges in the contest of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the
performative’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 148) I will further use this observation to state that practitioners
act as ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary [economic or
social] presence’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145). This implies, apart from other things, that the
determinate dominance of the economic over the social (or vice versa) is undermined. As such, it
will become palpable that it is the ‘contact zone’ between the social and the economic which
establishes a so-called ‘third space of enunciation’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37) in which social and
economic rationalities co-exist without any of the two views gaining the (permanent) upper hand.
Starting with the observation that practitioners’ discourse is characterized by a constant
intermingling of social and economic arguments, I will interpret this amalgamation as a reflection
of the ethical undecidability of genuinely responsible, i.e. ethical, practice. Contrasting my
findings with the ‘easy-handed’ or ‘manically optimistic’ image on social entrepreneurship as
imparted in the business school context (cf. Chapters 1 & 2), I will further discuss that
practitioners’ representations of social practice are arguably more modest and paradoxical. In
30
view thereof, complexity and hybridity will be hailed as the libratory potential that becomes
possible at the immanent fissures of discourse.
*
The third part of the thesis is introduced by Chapter 4 in which I will pursue a reflection of the
methodological and theoretical underpinnings of discourse analysis. Inspired by method
textbooks and theoretical elaborations of discourse and motivated through my practical
experience in Chapter 3, I will embark upon a close analysis of some of the rhetorical
particularities and theoretical inconsistencies which in my view must be urgently addresses. In
that sense, this investigation is deemed critical to the extent that it seeks to draw a dividing line
between the current practice of discourse analysis, i.e. major discourse analysis, and an
unprecedented or prospective type of analysis, i.e. the minor exegesis of the former. Although the
chapter holds a general stake in discourse analysis, I will, for the most part, illustrate my
arguments through the work produced in Loughborough and Manchester (both in the UK) under
the heading ‘psychological discourse analysis’. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first
part, I will use the spearheads of psychological discourse analysis to exemplify the rhetorical
practices by virtue of which discourse scholars try to establish their subject matter as a superior
methodological practice. In addressing both aesthetical and theoretical puzzles of the discursive
camp, I will first shed light upon those texts which signify discourse analysis as method and
thereby present it as a kind of knowledge that can be acquired by a list of do’s and don’ts.
Contending that this rationality hinges on a consumerist view of learning, I will also point out
that we find in textbooks on discourse analysis an intriguing amount of ‘identical repetition’
(Cunningham, 2005), that is, a form of argumentation that persuades by sheer force of routinized
celebration. Subjecting this rhetoric to the magnifying glass, I will show, among other things,
how it gives discourse analysis an impressive gloss and a positive ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin,
2001) by means of pretending that it works like an ‘automat’ that carries the researcher,
effortlessly and safely, to his/her destination. Rejecting the assumption that discourse analysis can
ever operate in this manner since there are no short-cuts to thorough scientific inquiry, it will be
argued that the ‘ordeal’ of thinking must remain a necessary aspect of research and that discourse
analysis always requires passion, patience and practice. This elaboration will lead to the
conclusion that the selected method books on discourse analysis are of little help (or even
misleading) for the nascent scholar because they only seem to make empty promises such as the
31
idea of ‘mechanical replacement’ (Appelbaum, 1995). In addition, I will provide a shattering
insight, namely that method books only work for those who already have some experience, not to
say expertise, in conducting the type of research dealt with in such books (cf. Roth, 2005).
Whereas the first part of this chapter is at the same time entertaining and unsettling, the
tone of the second part is, in line with its subject matter, utterly serious: this second part makes an
attempt at dismantling the arguably most severe problem of discourse analysis, i.e. the use of
hardened language. Contending that this sort of language works upon conventions that tend to
produce rather dry and expressively impoverished texts, I will posit that the outstanding danger in
this connection is their referential function, that is, the assumption that language is able to
represent things in their ostensible ‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Comparing the current state of
discourse analysis with Barthes’ (1967) notion of ‘zero-degree’ style, the point I will make is that
the linguistic convention of discourse analysis is supposedly insensitive to the temporality of
local signification and, as implied therein, the incremental undecidability of meaning.
Consequently, I will identify a crisis of discourse analysis. At the core of this crisis is the
recognition that there is a paradox between what discourse analysts say about language and how
they use language. Though acknowledging that representation necessarily stimulates a distinction
between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993) and that it thus reduces the immanent undecidability
of social reality, I will illustrate that the field of discourse analysis has come to hinge on a
particularly hardened form of language that purports to represent, more or less accurately, an
objective reality. Though this undeniably goes against the grain of discourse theory, I will show
that the field has made ‘techno-talk’ (e.g. in rhetorical or conversation analysis) or a ‘journalist
genre’ (e.g. in analysis of interpretive repertoires and Foucault-inspired discourse analysis) its
modus operandi. Both these types of language styles, however, have a strong propensity to neatly
order, structure and control the variability and playfulness of language. In response to this
development, it will be argued that language does not necessarily have to be hardened and that
language games can be distinguished according to their relative ‘coefficient of terriorialization’
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), and that it is for this reason that some stylistic games more than
others are deemed apt for highlighting the performative aspect of language. To provide an
alternative, I will reach out for forms of representation that do not try to impart denotative
meaning and which appear auspicious for grasping the ontological condition of difference and for
rejecting unity for the sake of plurivocality. I will then go on to argue that the discursive camp
should not use forms of representation which tend to fold the manifold onto a flat plane (Cooper,
32
1990). To illustrate this point, I will seek to appropriate discourse analysis so that it can
accommodate a more indeterminate, inexact language (van Maanen, 1995), that is, a language
that assigns sufficient space to ambivalence and ambiguity. To this end, I will celebrate the tenets
implied in the use of allegories and metaphors and especially explain how these figures give rise
to indirect expression, i.e. non-literal and associative representation. In an effort to extend the
space for play and experimentation, I will advocate the invention of neologisms which are
projected as instances which ‘disorder’ language in a way that enables novel and unforeseen
connections and that prescribe active and necessarily engaged readings. Additionally, invoking
Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ as an illustrative example of energetic and intense writing,
it will be contended that discourse analysis could gain much by opting for a kind of writing that
seeks to release, instead of manage, difference. In concluding, I will claim that the nascent
scholar of discourse analysis might find most inspiration for conducting his/her own research not
by consulting method textbooks but by ‘intensive readings’ (Deleuze, 1995) of available
discourse analysis as well as more experimental textual performances. Intensity will be ensured
through an ethos of reading which is envisioned as a necessary (though not sufficient)
precondition for learning how a particular piece of text works or ‘flows’, and for deriving
inspiration for one’s own work. Intensive readings are thus established as the condition of
possibility for gaining an understanding or, rather, sense of the (inimitable) aesthetic, creative and
idiosyncratic features of discourse analysis.
Chapter 5 draws on some of the implications derived from my investigation of business
school teaching in Chapter 3. In particular, I will use this chapter to discuss the extension of
consumerist and performative business school curricula. I will then advocate deconstruction as a
promising practice or philosophical ‘tool’ for radicalizing the business school of tomorrow.
Whereas ‘radicalize’ can easily be associated with the complete overthrow of the given heritage
of business education, I would rather like to propose deconstruction as a (critical though
affirmative) reflective practice. To be able to do so, however, I will first say a few words on the
signification of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflection’ in the context of qualitative research so as to show
that prevailing denotations have little value for the kind of ‘critical management education’ (cf.
Grey, 2004) that I would like to propose. Thus turning away from the introspective journeys or
emotional self-disclosures undertaken in the name of reflective practice, I will elaborate on a sort
of reflectivity that can complement the analytic and technical skills that business students usually
33
acquire in the course of their training (Mintzberg, 2004). The central concern there is to foster a
kind of self-reflective learning which enables business students to remain attentive and critical
towards the root assumptions of their own ‘staple diet’, i.e. the ostensibly impersonal, objective
and ideology-free business knowledge produced by the McUniversity. Contending that
deconstruction is ‘up for the job’, I will, however, try to avoid drowning in euphoria and, instead,
reflect on Derrida’s deconstruction from the very perspective of his critics. In trying to provide
the reader with a balanced and multi-voiced appraisal of deconstruction, I will first bring to the
foreground that deconstruction can never be represented as a private or even disinterested
enterprise, as some renowned scholars have claimed (e.g. Rorty, 1995, 1998). Additionally,
having establishing an image of deconstruction that undoes some of the negativity that the subject
has been endowed with by its critics, will then allow me to use some of the most insightful texts
of Derrida (e.g. 1981; 1995) in order to emphasize that he never envisioned deconstruction as a
means for tearing apart, that is, destructing the argumentative flaws and logical fallacies within
the writing of others. Recognizing that deconstruction has nothing in common with hostile
antagonism, I will emphasize that Derrida’s objective has been to reveal, through an intimate
process of close readings, the binary oppositions implied within texts, and to enable the
affirmative destabilization and consecutive reformulation of the respective concepts. While
discussing that Derrida has been open to the criticism that deconstruction advocates nihilism and
provides nothing of public value (Critchley, 1999), I will show, in the spirit of an opposition
gesture, that he repeatedly and unmistakably claimed that deconstruction ‘can always serve to
keep the masters of discourse busy: the experts, professionals of rhetoric, logic, or philosophy
who might otherwise be applying their energy elsewhere’ (Derrida, 2004b, p. 144). Hence,
highlighting the often radically negative reception of deconstruction, my brief discussion of
Derrida shall on the one hand give deconstruction its merited (yet often refused) credit while
simultaneously providing deconstruction with an entry point to the business school of tomorrow.
If such a thing as a revival of deconstruction is at all requisite, my brief detour to Derrida’s critics
will serve as a reminder that deconstruction has been (and at times still is) wrongly accused of
apathy, and that deconstruction should instead be employed and received as an instance of
reflective intervention.
After clearing the ground, so to speak, I will argue that we should follow in Derrida’s
(2001) footsteps so as to appreciate that the business school (or the university more generally)
should, unconditionally, ‘remain an ultimate place of critical resistance – and more than critical –
34
to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation. When I say ‘more than critical’, I have in
mind the term ‘deconstructive’ (2001, p. 235). Though it is beyond doubt that the implementation
of deconstructive reflexivity into the business school as elsewhere (Derrida, 2001b) is everything
but an easy task and often on the brink of failure, I will claim that such a place of resistance is
urgently needed especially if taking into account the consumerist mentality of business education
and the performativity mantra of business schools I scrutinize in Chapter 1. Contending that we
cannot miss out on the opportunity of affirmative and passionate inventiveness (Derrida, 1992)
and that deconstruction is indispensable in view of the limits (or limitedness) of the contemporary
business school, I will paint a picture of how such a transition could unfold. While agreeing with
Derrida (2001) that the idea of unconditionality is irrevocably related with the possibility that one
will be ‘forced to give up and capitulate without condition’ (p. 236), I will contend that a
reflexive business school, worthy of its name, would need to go hand in hand with ‘an
unconditional right to ask critical questions not only to the history of man, but the history even of
the notion of critique, to the form and the authority of the question, to the interrogative form of
thought’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 235). Thus advocating a kind of reflection that allows one to ask
whatever can be asked or what normally is repressed, I envision deconstruction as a major step
towards the critical inspection of business schools’ own history and their often concealed axioms.
Endeavoring to identify some of business school’s blind spots, what I would like to suggest as a
faculty of critical and deconstructive reflection within business school curricula is thus
simultaneously related to the appeal of enabling business/management students and scholars to
excel (de Beer, 1998), that is, to go beyond (ex) the confines of prevailing knowledge (cell), and
to foster sensitivity to the ethical ramifications of business practice (Ghoshal, 2005). Assuming
that the (re-) invention of the unconditional university presupposes the unsettlement of certainties
and the establishment of novel rules, it is on the grounds of deconstructive reflection that I will
propose a path for undercutting the ‘sacred’ and for staging a passage towards another future.
Given that most theories of discourse brood over the issue of individual and/or collective
agency, and keeping in mind that the discourse analysis presented in Chapter 3 implies asking, for
instance, whether discourse determines (in the strict sense) people’s identity or if people are free
to chose and draw upon certain discourses and narrative conventions instead of others, it is in
Chapter 6 that I will provide an extended discussion of the interrelation between power,
subjectivity and discourse, or, in other words, of the possibility of self-determination and
35
resistance. Whereas the overall aim of this chapter is certainly that of highlighting that agency
and individual resistance are always practiced within (and not against or outside) the limits of
power, I will begin the discussion by outlining that the agency-structure debate in organization
studies has established a scheme of understanding in which Foucault’s work on knowledge and
power (which serves as a central source of inspiration for the present thesis; e.g. Chapters 1 to 3)
is habitually used as the typical example of discourse determinism (e.g. Alvesson & Karreman,
2000). I will then show that one finds another, contrarian stream of organization studies which
seems to overstretch or exaggerate the possibilities of (discursive) agency in that they posit that
individuals can use or choose discourse freely (e.g. Grant, Hardy, Oswick & Putnam, 2004). My
main objective, then, is to present a more balanced picture of Foucault and to stress that his work
does, despite all odds, comprise a number of insightful arguments on the possibilities and limits
of personal agency. Since this investigation is triggered by the recognition that Foucault is often
wrongfully reduced to some of his most salient assertions on discourse (e.g. his statements that
discourses are ‘the practices that systematically form the object of which they speak’; Foucault,
1974, p. 49) and power (e.g. individuals are both the ‘effect and object of power’; Foucault, 1984,
p. 204), I would like to loosen part of these tight couplings. However, not trying to merge the
notion of ‘agency’ with the image of the rational and autonomous persona who is able to resist
the normalizing force of discourse, I will provide a reading of agency that acknowledges both the
positive and enabling aspects of power and which highlights the creative features of resistance.
Using selected texts by Foucault to argue that resistance and freedom are made possible through
deliberate thinking and reflection as well as through the aesthetic treatment of the self, I will
subsequently draw on de Certeau’s (1984) work on the practice of everyday life in order to
introduce a theory that envisions identity (and resistance) as the effect of creative consumption.
The credit I will give de Certeau’s writings is that he argued, contrary to Foucault, that resistance
is not necessarily a conscious, self-reflective process and that strategic discourse is never fully
able to determine people’s identity, in the sense of ‘muscular discourse’ (Alvesson & Karreman,
2000), since people are always in the position of disrupting the code of the dominant cultural
economy in the very process of tactical re-interpretation. Hence, every strategic discourse that
seeks to determine how things must be done or should be, as I will contend, can always be
countermanded by means of people’s everyday sensemaking. Following de Certeau’s lines of
reasoning, I will further stress that people’s identities are not only to be conceived of as positions
made possible through discourse but as the effect of creative stylizations. In view of the fact that
36
the first part of this chapter addresses the issue of resistance from the perspective of the
individual, it is in the second part that I will discuss how these ideas can be translated to the
collective level so as to envision a society that puts multiplicity and difference at the service of
justice. Seeking help from philosophy, I will first use Serres’ (1995) notion of ‘noise’ and the
‘possible’ to underscore that to enable change one needs to develop a springboard for difference,
multiplicity and alterity. Consequently, I will seek to establish a politics of difference that allows
for a sensitive treatment of difference. Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) will be drawn on
in that respect to introduce a leitmotiv that conveys the promise of a difference-based politics:
paganism. Being conceptualized as a principle that countermands the overriding force and
hegemonic tendency of metanarratives, I will commend paganism as a non-authoritative code
that enables justice by means of releasing difference, that is, by maximizing ‘as much as possible
the multiplication of small narratives’ (Lyotard, 1985, p. 59). These deliberations will
subsequently be employed to conclude that individual self-determination as well as societal
justice are always due to the attentive sensing and appreciation of possibilities of difference and
the restless and artistic re-appropriation of given and invention of new language games.
Chapter 7, which brings the thesis to its conclusion, is dedicated to the inscription of a
gesture that occurs in the name of the social of social entrepreneurship. In line with Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of pausing (cf. Elias, 2003), this chapter is intended as a pause, as a break with
what has preceded it and as the instantiation of a final fragment. In the spirit of a closing
reflection, I will condense the central arguments in a single chapter and try to extend and
radicalize those claims which I deem most essential for a fruitful re-interpretation of the issues
being dealt with. In doing so, I will mainly qualify the status of the ‘social’ in social
entrepreneurship and thereby ask, as Steyaert and Hjorth (2006b) did before, whether the social is
only an ‘epitheton ornans’ of entrepreneurship or, on the contrary, the expression of a genuine
care for the other. Though critical voices could object that this chapter merely exploits previous
arguments of this thesis, I contend that this is requested in view of the still narrow and one-sided
signification of social entrepreneurship. After a brief summary – in which I will put particular
stress upon those academic writings which depict social entrepreneurship as a technical, and thus
commandable and programmable knowledge and upon the discourse analysis in the third Chapter
which has taught us that the ‘social’ is a paradoxical and hybrid construction and not simply a
positive denotation – I will establish an intertextual link so as to locate the emergence of social
37
entrepreneurship against the broader surge towards ethics. Invoking conceptual narratives on, for
instance, ‘social responsibility’, ‘social economy’, ‘sustainability’, etc., I will assert that together
with ‘social entrepreneurship’ these concepts are conceivable as a response to recent corporate
scandals and to the public distrust in political powers and the business community. However, in
opposition to such terms as ‘sustainability’ which has, due to its inflationary and instrumental
use, lost large parts of its public credibility, I will contend that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is as yet still accepted as a fruitful copula between profit seeking and social
deed (Seelos & Mair, 2005). In order to make clear that this view is not necessarily conducive to
endowing social entrepreneurship with a social identity nor for doing away with the
performativity cliché (Lyotard, 1984), I will elaborate that the economic grounding and primacy
of social entrepreneurship is sustained even by writings which make explicit reference to one or
another social signifier. Positing that it is currently en vogue to set social enterprises apart from
their business counterparts by stating that the former are predominantly concerned with the
increase of social, not financial capital (e.g. Johnson, 2003), I will show that social capital is in
no way more social (or less economic) than financial capital since both concepts undeniably
depart from a transactional logic. In trying to problematize the utterly functional and reciprocal
signification of social entrepreneurship through ‘social capital’, I will discuss that social capital
thrives on the premise of ‘do ut des’, that is, I give in order that you give in return, which shows
that the logic of economic circulation is still deeply ingrained. Whereas I will conclude that this
sort of signification of social entrepreneurship lacks the kind of surprise, imagination and
invention Derrida (e.g. 1989; 2004) was keen to advocate elsewhere since it merely replicates
economic mechanisms in the social sphere, I will then demonstrate that we must not forget to
envision the social as an intimate encounter with the other’s otherness. A brief reiteration of
Derrida’s exploration of aporia, undecidability and responsibility thus closes the textual circle of
my thoughts on social entrepreneurship. Derrida’s treatises are thereby treated as a prescriptive
gesture, so to speak, which is deemed apposite as a guiding principle for probing into ‘genuine’
social entrepreneurship. Making reference to Derrida is, then, envisaged as a first step into a
(hopefully) more spacious search for sources of knowledge and concepts that will allow us to
grasp the social as a becoming process that truly escapes the premises of economic reason, that is,
the economic circle of inputs and outputs. This process can then also operate independently of the
pragmatic limitations of the market. By the same token, I will investigate if unconditional social
action or unconditional relations may become possible at all given the pragmatic limitations and
38
politico-ethical demands of everyday life. Irrespective of the possible criticism that Derrida’s
deliberations on non-reciprocal, unconditional exchange appear highly utopian (i.e. naïve, since
they seem impossible; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005), I will discuss, on behalf of
development aid, what it means to act or help without conditions, that is, beyond economic
calculation and what the associated problems or rather impossibilities are in this context. It must
hence be acknowledged that genuine social entrepreneurship is unattainable since it cannot be
permitted or ‘algorithmically deduced from incontestable … precepts’ (Critchley & Kearney,
2001, xii). I will therefore show that the social role of entrepreneurship is, or should we say must
remain, an event of pure ‘madness’ that is to be reflected on both as a complex, elusive and fear-
provoking process (i.e. an endeavor that is necessarily accompanied by fear and trembling) as
well as an ideal thought that provides hope, courage and motivation and which thus invites us to
further pursue our social deeds. As modest as this will become, this chapter marks a final attempt
to decouple social entrepreneurship from the ‘clutches’ of the current canon, and tries to provide
a possible answer or at least an educational concept for thinking about the limits and possibility
of social entrepreneurship ‘that deserves the name’ (as Derrida used to say, e.g. 2001).
*
The epilogue presents an assemblage of ideas on the end which hail the future through
consecutive openings, and … and … and …
39
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***
A Brief Note on Reading
Before beginning a text, through the title or the nouns of the title, and through the library source
of the title, the reader is already conditioning her/himself to the limits of the term
discussed, to the particular incarnation the term will have in the context of a particular
discursive genre, and hence a fixed idea of what the term is, and what knowledges or
discussion it will produce – for the moment and only within that text.
(MacCormack, 2005)
As with any title, the title of this thesis ‘On the Name of Social Entrepreneurship: Business
School Teaching, Research and Development Practice’ might, as MacCormack’s (2005) claim
suggests, prompt particular associations and expectations as to what is to follow. Given the title
of the thesis and taking into account that I have just provided an overview of the ensuing
chapters, one might thus assume that this predefines, in a condensed yet precise manner, the very
meaning of the forthcoming body of signs. While this might at times be the case, to believe that
the title of this thesis contains its meaning en miniature might nevertheless be misleading insofar
as it alludes to an exhaustive part-whole relationship or, to put it differently, plain translatability.
To counteract the possibility of such associations, however, it is first of all helpful to refer to
Foucault’s (1974) claim that ‘(t)he frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the
first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form it is
caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within
a network’ (p. 23). Most relevant in connection with the present commentary is Foucault’s
assertion that all writing, despite its apparent closeness, is an act of openness and unforeseeable
linkages. In as much as I conceive of the above title as what one could call ‘mystic’, I have to
offer at least two alternative ways of dealing with the secret contained therein. The first option
would be to provide the reader with a guide that enables him/her to decode the text in conformity
with my identified intention (which, of course, has partly been revealed through the previous
46
chapter). In contrast, the second option would be to completely leave the ‘sensemaking’ process
to the reader and make him/her impart whatever he/she considers intelligible or interesting. I
concede that both options simultaneously impose limits and open up possibilities. It must also be
borne in mind that some explicit background information has already been presented and that this
will facilitate the process of decoding (or at any rate anticipation) of meaning. I would therefore
like to devote some thought on the implications of commentary in order then to discuss what it
means to read (imaginatively and intensively).
To render comprehensible the rationale of the previous chapter with the benefit of
hindsight, I would like to point out that these preparatory instructions were presented in an effort
to avoid a situation where this thesis becomes the exclusive domain of the insider. That said,
however, it is equally clear that the risk of ‘patronizing’ the reader by means of foreclosing his or
her own interpretations is always present. This issue of over-codification, which Meier Sørensen
(2001) has taken to the extreme in his commendable account, therefore looms large, and it must
be conceded that one all too easily leaves the question of the reader open so as to turn him/her
into a ‘user, in the same way as a lawn mower tends to mow the lawn regardless of who is
moving it. The death of the author seems to have been followed by the death of the reader, in the
same way as one now is able to invest in lawn mowers that mow the lawn without the need for an
external mover, a user or any human steering capacity whatsoever’ (p. 369). Leaving aside the
witty allegory of Meier Sørensen, the point I want to clarify here is that the present thesis cannot
do without the reader since it is by no means self-contained and semantically sealed, that is, the
thesis is unlike a machine that operates in the absence of a human agent. On the contrary, the
thesis needs to be actively endowed with meaning, since the word in language, as Bakhtin (1981)
reminds us, becomes ‘one’s own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his
own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive
intention’ (p. 293). It is important to keep in mind that the previous chapter was consciously
designed so as not to act as a ‘Bedienungsanleitung’, an operating manual, so to speak, which
tells, in a univocal sense, what the text is meant to say. In consequence, I would now like to
discuss the operation and some of the intertextual possibilities of the present thesis. What I would
like to highlight in particular is the issue of repetition as well as of chronological and non-
chronological reading.
Regarding the former issue, it is worth noting that the different chapters, ceaselessly and
from different scholarly angles, repeat the cornerstone issues and ideas (e.g. social
47
entrepreneurship, undecidability, identity, hybridity, etc.). As a result, they work as reciprocative
iterations which, in combination, are envisioned to provoke a heightened sense of ‘together while
different’. In accordance with Lyotard’s (1985) telling observation that ‘narratives get repeated
but are never identical’ (p. 33), I would like to point out that the effect of repetition is not to be
mistaken as the representation of a linearly structured stream of reasoning or of recurring
mimicry. Instead it must be taken as a celebration of excess, that is, the accentuation of the
seemingly supplementary aspect of the text. To express this objective in Meier Sørensen’s (2001)
terms, I would like to make the thesis thrive on repetitions ‘with a difference’ (p. 367) whereas
this ‘difference must be shown differing’ (p. 368). Contending that repetition always brings
forward difference (and not sameness; cf. Deleuze, 1994), it is equally clear that the constant re-
inscription of particular claims and arguments might create the impression that this thesis
produces redundancy (‘more to the point please!’). It is therefore important to keep in mind that
the rhetoric of repetition is at the service of calling into question some of the prevailing
conventions of what is dubbed ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1970). As mentioned before, any search
for final ends or for the new grand theory, model, or metanarrative which tells how things are de
facto, and which, consequentially, would reassure us in the ‘age of dispersion and specialization
where “hope” is lacking’ (Foucault, 2004, p. xiv) is dismissed. What will instead be put forward
is an assemblage of texts that, by their various interweavements, performatively try to make use
of the ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976) entailed in language, and thereby create new lines of flight for
the subject matters at hand. Accordingly, it must be mentioned that this thesis approaches its
topic(s) through a multi-disciplinary approach which reveals an interest in such diverse
disciplines as psychology, the arts, philosophy, sociology (of knowledge), history, and cultural
studies, etc. Though such a broad orientation might appear confusing if one takes into account
that I have been educated in the field of psychology and that the official branch of knowledge into
which this thesis falls is organizational psychology, it is precisely through the multiplication of
perspectives that the often concealed or ignored ambivalence and polysemia of social reality shall
be revealed. In other words, the adoption of these multiple perspectives will be present
throughout the thesis as a source of potential enchantment and as a means for enlivening and
enabling the immanent diversity of meaning. Anticipating that some of the poststructural
language conventions and terminologies could raise suspicion, to say the least, I would also like
to clarify that, despite the seemingly non-academic form of enunciation (that is, if looked at from
the perspective of the academic canon), there is some undeniable seriousness ‘at play’ in this
48
study. Though this exculpation might not be needed, I will nevertheless mention that the
seriousness of this thesis is epitomized in the following exemplary concerns: the disclosure of the
narrow horizon of business school teaching and research on social entrepreneurship; the quasi-
univocal inclination towards economic theory and managerial calculations of social
entrepreneurship scholars; the discursive delimitation implied in prevailing representations of
social entrepreneurship; and the tactical and theoretical spaces for reclaiming a different kind of
social entrepreneurship.
Regarding the second issue, reading, I find it indispensable to iterate that the ensuing
elaborations do not simply produce a whole, that is, a corpus of texts being held together by an
overarching logic and singular stream of reasoning. Instead, this thesis consists of a ‘loose
coupling’ of chapters, or sub-texts, which are interrelated (if such a term is at all apposite)
through the rhetorical use of repetition. As mentioned before through the voice of Foucault
(1974), the thesis is conceivable as an assemblage of chapters which are both interrelated (with
other chapters as well as other texts outside of the thesis; cf. Kristeva, 1980) and stand-alone (yet
not in an autonomous way). By extension, as is the case with many other books, my thesis can be
read in a variety of ways: from the beginning to the end (linearly), from the end to the beginning
(reverse linearly), in random order or by following the various hints and cross-references. And
since I deliberately refrain from devising a preferential style or chronology of reading for the
present thesis, I would like to put particular stress on the observation that the individual chapters
are written in a stand-alone fashion. That is, each chapter, though being related to other chapters
in this assemblage of texts, provides a stand-alone argument which is underscored not least in that
each chapter is followed by its own reference list. Given this state of affairs, each chapter is
presumed to provide a partial argument of the thesis while their focus and makeup allows one to
pursue a focused investigation of a selected aspect of the whole or, alternatively, a ‘classical
reading’ from beginning to end. Importantly, in the sense of a holographic design (e.g. Morgan,
1997), the thesis is crafted in such a way that the overarching argument is often reflected within
the single chapters and, conversely, that each chapter exhibits traces that relate the individual
pieces to the text as a whole. As mentioned before, redundancy is not simply unavoidable in such
an approach but, rather, deliberately established to ensure that the overarching predication of the
thesis is appositely solidified. To make visible the traces between or intertextuality of the
individual chapters, I have chosen to support the reader in revealing the argumentative
connections by providing the relevant cross-references to other chapters in brackets. In the spirit
49
of a last word, it must be remembered that this ‘book’ does not require a chronological unfolding
of meaning, and that there is no mandatory or even best path to be taken. Although the previous
introduction as well as the present notes more or less straightforwardly express what I had in
mind while writing this thesis, I nevertheless prefer to leave the last choice to the reader. Après
vous, then!
50
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C.
Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.
Foucault, M. (1974). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2004). Preface to Anti-Oedipus. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane. London:
Continuum.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L. S.
Roudiez, transl. T. Gora, A. Jardine & L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, J. F. & Thébaud, J. L. (1985). Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
MacCormack, P. (2005). Pleasure, Perversion and Death: Three Lines of Flight for the Viewing
Body, retrieved from http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-
mat/MacCormack/PPDcontents.htm.
Meier Sørensen, B. (2001). Assemblage Notes, or, A Comment on the Factory of Things.
Ephemera, 4, 367 – 373.
Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
51
52
***
Part I
53
‘The Construction of Social Entrepreneurship in and through Research
and Business School Teaching’
***
Language has a social origin … This means that its main function is industrial, commercial and
military, always social. It fixes reality as it names it according to the needs of society.
(Lecercle, 2002, p. 21)
All government depends on a particular mode of ‘representation’: the elaboration of a language
for depicting the domain in question that claims both to grasp the nature of that reality
represented, and literally to represent it in a form amenable to political deliberation,
argument and scheming. (Rose, 1990, p. 80)
Before delving into the analysis of how ‘social entrepreneurship’ is constructed in research and
business school teaching, it must be mentioned that the ensuing two chapters depart from a
discursive ‘paradigm’ which emphasizes the constitutive role of language. This means that social
reality is invariably the result of human interaction whereas language (comprising both speech
and writing) occupies a pivotal position. It follows that neither academic texts nor teaching on
social entrepreneurship are assumed to provide us with true stories. Instead, they provide stories
that are, by social convention, acknowledged as being true (Foucault, 2001). This distinction is
important since it implies that stories produced by the academic community are envisaged as
being due to particular ‘power-based reality constructions’ (Morgan, 1986). Whereas this notion
of power might give the impression that the following investigations pursue an ‘ideology
critique’ (e.g. Alvesson & Willmottt, 1991), it must be stressed that the objective of the present
study is not to judge the knowledge of social entrepreneurship according to its truthfulness but to
gain an understanding of knowledge which emphasizes that there is ‘no universal understanding
that is beyond history and society’ (Rabinow, 1984, p. 5). Defying the modernist emancipation
54
trajectory as implied, for instance, in the Frankfurt School or (neo-) Marxism, it must be
mentioned that the importance of studying social entrepreneurship in the process of its
signification is based on the fundamental insight that meaning is never (completely) stable and
unchangeable. Secondly, treating social entrepreneurship not as a given entity but as a social
achievement and, by implication, as being subject to ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976) makes it
possible to shift the emphasis away from issues of truth and rightfulness and, on the contrary, to
delineate that meaning is always ‘tied up’ with particular social circumstances, relations and
interpretive practices.
This said, I would like to shed some light upon the subject matter of the following two
chapters. On the face of it, the gospel of ‘social entrepreneurship’ resounds on a global scale and
seems to attract enormous interest in academia, the media as well as in policy-making. However,
the chorus is not as variegated as one might expect. Far from being characterized by a multitude
or even a cacophony of meanings (which is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’), most representations of
social entrepreneurship – irrespective of their subtle equivocation – are typically based on two
sets of denominators: economic calculation and business managerialism. The image of social
entrepreneurship as ‘economism’ (Down, 1994) or ‘managerialism’ (Enteman, 1993), both of
which reduce all social matters to the economic level or else pretend that social institutions are
primarily a function of best-management practices, are truly virulent. Being virulent, by
definition, implies that both managerial and economic significations are spread at an increasing
rate and as such are assumed to cause harm by way of limiting our imagination of how social
entrepreneurship relates with, for instance, communities, societies or the globe more generally. It
could be objected that my polemic turns a blind eye to those laudable accounts that have put
forward creative enunciations of social entrepreneurship while evading the mainstream premises
of political and business/economic discourse (cf. Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). Despite these possible
allegations, it can confidently be asserted that the issue of social entrepreneurship – from the time
of its inception down to the present-day jargon of academics, politicians, journalists, best-selling
writers, etc. – has become increasingly narrow in focus. To provide an understanding of the
boundedness of the meaning of social entrepreneurship and to display (and speculate about) some
of the wider implications of this obtuseness, the following two chapters will unfold the ruling
metaphors and grounding premises coming to the fore in both business school education and
academic writing. While business school teaching and academic research represent only two
aspects of a potentially infinite number of contexts in which social entrepreneurship is dealt with,
55
it is important to keep in mind that the defining, not to say restricting, efforts of those contexts are
– maybe with the exception of politics – most influential when it comes to informing public
opinion and practicing (non-profit and non-governmental) managers. Accordingly, illuminating
the appropriation of social entrepreneurship in (business) research and teaching is deemed
apposite as there are clear signs that those endeavors had (and still have) a
normalizing/naturalizing effect for the understanding of policy makers, politicians,
philanthropies, foundations, etc. In other words, as both academic teaching and research seems to
feed back, at least to some extent, into the political-economic system (where it gets to affect
donor decisions on the part of foundations and philanthropies, the formulation of public policy
statements by politicians, or practices of non-governmental and non-profit organizations), it is not
only justifiable but high time to subject the construction of social entrepreneurship to close
scrutiny. In view of the high popularity of social entrepreneurship in the academic context, where
the matter is foremost promoted as a ‘cure-all balm’ and where it is applied with a large dose of
change potential for the better, it is through the first two chapters that I seek to inquire whether
we shall pursue this optimistic if not downright utopian line of argument or, conversely, if a more
modest and critical stance is called for. While working from a critical vantage point which aspires
to uncover the root assumptions and grounding discourses of teaching and research, both chapters
will make suggestions as to how to overcome the prevailing eulogies of social entrepreneurship
while also exploring so far unrecognized possibilities. However, as will become clear throughout
the ensuing chapters, the two fundamental questions ‘what is the social of social
entrepreneurship?’ and ‘to what ends is its social commitment appropriated?’ have, until today,
remained either elusive or else have been dramatically mystified. On the basis of the realization
that the field of social entrepreneurship performs a partial mimesis of precedent discourses on
entrepreneurship I will conclude that the epithet ‘social’ does not as yet seem to make any
difference. The contention that the prevailing discourse on social entrepreneurship calls for an
extension of the given legacy will thus be corroborated through ontological and ethical
arguments. The argument being pursued in the first two chapters, namely that social
entrepreneurship is both the object of political investments and an incremental part of struggles
and relations of force and domination, will subsequently serve as the starting point of Chapter 7
where I seek to gain a novel understanding of the social of social entrepreneurship. Since I prefer
not to give away the ‘secret’ of what is to follow, it will suffice to say at this point that the
56
‘becoming social’ of entrepreneurship will be approached by virtue of an ethical imperative
towards difference and towards the incorruptible otherness of the other.
57
References
Alvesson, M. & Willmottt, H. (1991). Making Sense of Management: A Critical Analysis.
London: Sage.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.
Down, B. (1994). Marxist History and Schooling: Beyond Economism. Issues in Educational
Research, 4, 1 – 17, retrieved from http://education.curtin.edu.au/iier/iier4/down.html.
Enteman, W. (1993). Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology. Wisconsin: The
University of Wisconsin Press.
Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless Speech, ed. J. Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Lecercle, J. J. (2002). Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave McMillan.
Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. London: Sage.
Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
Rose, N. (1990). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.
Steyaert, C. & Hjorth, D. (eds.) (2006). Entrepreneurship as Social Change: A Third Movements
in Entrepreneurship Book. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
58
Prolegomenon I
5
A) Introduction
Provided that one’s writing is always historically contingent, a transient truth, so to
speak, and thus not least related to one’s temporary mood swings and affects, one’s
instantaneous state of mind and, probably most notably, one’s overall level of reading or
scholarship, it is plausible that many of the things one puts down on paper at a given
moment in time must not necessarily correspond with what one thinks, believes and
writes at a latter instance. A transition of opinion(s), which Foucault (1996) depicted as
the right, even duty, of all writers,
6
is precisely what I went through while re-reading the
following chapter briefly before handing in my thesis.
7
Hence, in light of a simultaneous
sense of estrangement and of having ‘moved on’ (cf. Deleuze, 1995) – which was
engendered, though in different ways, through my further reading/writing experiences –
I would like to prepare the ground for Chapter 1 by telling a brief story of how – i.e. on the
basis of what objectives and intentions – my analysis of business school teaching on social
entrepreneurship initially evolved, and which parts of Chapter 1 I deem in need of
(potential) prospective revisions.
While setting out to reflect on and thus take issue with selected methodological
choices and theoretical/conceptual appropriations, it shall remain clear at all times that I
have no stake in disqualification, i.e. rendering futile the first chapter of my thesis by
confessing that it – if looked at retrospectively – actually ran into a blind alley. Quite the
contrary, notwithstanding the fact that I have come to write this chapter more than two
years ago, and though this process has fostered an aparallel evolution between the book
5
Notice that the fonts in the prolegomena which precede Chapters 1, 2 and 7 were changed from Times New
Roman to American Typewriter. It is by way of this minor graphic alteration that I want to indicate that the
three prolegomena form a sort of inter-text that does stand outside of the general argument of the present
thesis (above or below? This is to be decided by the reader). Not least since being written after the event, as it
were, and as a response to one of my supervisors, I prefer the prolegomena to be read as posterior
commentaries that can either be read before or after reading the individual chapters or be skipped
altogether.
6
In fact, Foucault (1996) made it clear that instead of continuing to write the same things over and over
again the creed of his writing practice was that he was given the opportunity to get transformed as a person.
He thus granted himself the right to divert from previous contentions and convictions with the ultimate aim
of engaging a new type of knowledge ‘so as to modify not only the thought of others but one’s own as well’ (p.
461). Deviations of the sort one can identify in Foucault’s writing are thus less signs of inconsistency but
rather traces that reveal how his scholarly mode of inquiry transformed his knowledge on a given subject
matter as a whole. Hence, ‘I write a book only because I still don’t know exactly what to think about this thing
I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and what I think … I am an experimenter in
the sense that I write in order to transform my self and in order not to think the same thing as before’
(Foucault, 2001, pp. 239 – 240).
7
Quite frankly, it was actually one of my supervisors who advised me to reconsider some of the points I am
about to address in the context of this prolegomenon.
59
and its supposed author, I suggest that the following remarks ought to be conceived as
multiplying flows which lay open some of the many ways in which Chapter 1 could (not
should or must!) have been written. In order to make this a bit more concrete, the
reflections that form the body of this short prolegomenon begin from the consideration
that a chapter such as the following, though in one way or another forming a segmented
and structured plane, always conveys the possibility of both methodological and
theoretical appropriation(s), and hence the possibility to apply existing concepts and
analytic schemas to novel ends. With this as a backdrop, I will now first get to anticipate
the overarching objective of the first part of Chapter 1 in order then to discuss some of its
‘left-outs’, thereby also discussing some ways in which those absences could be tackled in
the course of a fictional (since non-existing) re-write.
B) Reflections as Regards Part I of Chapter 1
To say it without detour and in all brevity: the overall aim of the first part of Chapter 1
was to put forward a story on how social entrepreneurship emerged out of or was enabled
by an apparatus in which business schools came to play a crucial role. Part I was chiefly
departing from the assumption that instead of first inquiring the meaning of the concept
‘social entrepreneurship’ it would make much more sense to get an idea of the implicit
horizon of understanding of the very context which actually brought the concept into the
world. Therefore, the essential idea was to illuminate the sort of rationality that comes to
work both in business schools and their ‘affiliated’ (both proximal and distal) institutions
as well as in the behavior of the people working in these contexts. It is precisely in this
way that I sought to show, among other things, how the canonical ‘truths’ upon which the
business school comes to operate form the soil for a particular reading of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ as well as for a particular treatment (read exploitation) of that
knowledge in conjunction with, for instance, education or consulting services.
It is probably already obvious by now that the broadness and complexity of this
task made it necessary to sub-divide the whole enterprise into ‘manageable’ analytic
chunks. I hence decided to first highlight the rituals of quality in the business school (e.g.
business magazine rankings, accreditation procedures, research assessments) so as to
elaborate on how they institute a dividing line that distinguishes between respectively
proper and improper standards of knowledge as well as between approved and
disapproved means and modes of education. That is, I tried to show how these rituals are
informed by a particular set of epistemic rules that determine the sort of knowledge,
teaching and education being allowed or disqualified in the space of
60
business/management education (and thereby in particular in the realm of MBA
teaching).
The second ambition, then, was to pinpoint how the abovementioned strategy of
intelligibility gets to place the business school teacher under the explicit obligation to
carry out certain acts while at the same time making other deeds less welcome and, by
extension, likely. Yet, there is, as I try to show, not only such an explicit and rule-based
mode of government at play in the realm of business school teaching (and research). The
second mode of government which is brought to light is much more elusive, discrete and,
for that very reason, effective if compared to its more disciplinary or control-based
counterpart. To illustrate the concrete operation of power on the part of the subject and
thus to discuss how human beings turn themselves into particular subjects, I chose to
make direct reference to Foucault’s (e.g. 1991) inquiry of governmentality which to me
appeared as a valuable connection for emphasizing how people working/teaching in
business schools actually go about applying the form of reasoning about the proper
conduct of teaching in the context of their own ‘creation’ (or, to stay in Foucault’s
terminology, subjectification), thus literally exercising power through an apparent
process of internalized control. The coincidence of these two distinct, though
nevertheless compatible, operations of power, as I try to argue, is what makes the
business school setting particularly interesting because it shows, among other things,
that this very stratum combines the more disciplinary or, more correctly, control-based
modes of power
8
(cf. Deleuze, 1995) with those forms of power which render people
subjects by engaging them in the volitional and seemingly autonomous subjugation to
certain sets of implicit knowledge.
After discussing the parallel existence of hierarchical, and at times disciplinary
technologies of government such as, for instance, student evaluations, quality monitoring
and assessment measurements, etc.
9
and those technologies relying on the ‘conduct of
8
Keep in mind that this notion should be used cautiously in the sense that it refers less to total surveillance
through ‘total institutions’ (cf. Foucault, 1984, p. 380) but to a sort of control that works through
modulations effectuated by particular codes such as, for instance, constant competition or continuous
assessment.
9
Be aware that the notion of ‘disciplinary’ seems to ignore Deleuze’s (1995) eloquent claim that we have in
fact left the disciplinary society behind and moved over to the age of control. To be sure, although I have
mainly favored the term ‘discipline’ over that of ‘control’ I still hope that the reader will be able to recognize
and comprehend the sort of practices, which according to Deleuze would have to be termed ‘practices of
control’, I tried to emphasize in my inquiry. Thus, instead of continuing this conceptual elaboration, I prefer
to refer to Wittgenstein’s (1953) seminal statement that the meaning of a word (such as ‘discipline’ or
‘control’) is never abstract but related to how it is used in a particular language game (consequently, read the
following chapter).
61
conduct’ (Foucault, 1980) and which incite particular types of being (such as the
enterprising academic) through intrinsic self-forming activities, I tried to conflate these
insights in a third analytic step so as to inquire or, frankly speaking, speculate about how
these two disparate practices or sets of technologies together, though in their own
particular ways, act as a precondition for the rise of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’. On the face of it, this inquiry does not intend to come to terms with
the root or origin of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’, and only marginally with the
meaning of the term (which is the pivotal objective of Chapter 2 and the partial ambition
of part II of Chapter 1). Instead, my purpose was to pinpoint how the concept evolved
from particular historical conditions and from contingent, local, yet ‘universally’
accepted ‘truths’, and, by implication, as both object and subject of particular formations
of knowledge and power.
It is at this point that I want to close this brief overview of the first chapter’s
trajectory by making it clear that interpretation, if conceived from the perspective I have
just outlined, is less about hermeneutic dissection (i.e. digging into the deep layers of
meaning) than about disclosing the energies and organizational connections (read
apparatus or dispositif) that materialize and run through the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’. With this in mind, I opt to turn the steering-wheel around so as to
discuss some of the difficulties which (might) arise from using or making reference to
concepts and ideas imparted by someone as elaborate and widely received as Michel
Foucault.
“Shortcomings”
10
The danger inherent in any direct reference to Foucault is that such a link might easily
raise the adept’s eyebrow since one is always and immediately prone of missing the
‘stray area’ (read precise signification) of the latter’s theorizing. Though I do not intend
to immerse myself into a lengthy exculpation, I still want to pick out and discuss a couple
of points of my analysis which might engender a partial antinomy if juxtaposed with
Foucault’s theorizing. I will thus proceed along a three-part structure so as to shed light
on “shortcomings” revealed in relation to a) the use of the concepts of ‘genealogy’,
10
I have used the term shortcomings here to express that Chapter 2 has de facto fallen short in allowing for
and considering a significant number of Foucault’s eloquent insights as regards, for instance, the operation of
discourse, micropolitics, the analytic foundation of his genealogy or the significance individuals and
institutions come to play in his theorizing. On the other hand, however, I have put the term in quotation
marks which indicates that there are still good reasons to believe that the analysis of Chapter 1 is feasible the
way it is currently presented. I will hence vindicate my analysis from complete annihilation by inserting a
series of counter-arguments.
62
‘governmentality’ and ‘subjectivation’ b) the (potential over)emphasis on individuals and
institutions and c) the polemical tone revealed in the first part of Chapter 1. All points
are elaborated in brief and, as will become clear soon hereafter, by way of providing both
arguments and counter-arguments. It is in this way the following discussion will try to
embrace points that militate both in favor and disfavor of my use of Foucault.
a) Genealogy, Governmentality and Subjectivation Betrayed?
In light of the fact that the first part of Chapter 1 refers to Foucault’s genealogical
investigations, a first point to be mentioned here refers to the question if the analysis was
set up aptly for coming to terms with or for understanding the connection between power
and knowledge as revealed in connection with business school teaching. In more concrete
terms, in view of the motto of Foucault’s genealogical inquiries, which implies that by
taking the right distance towards one’s subject area things become profoundly visible, I
instantly started asking myself whether I was really in a position to make claims about
business schools’ teaching (on social entrepreneurship), about the sort of epistemic
formations business school teachers base their teaching on or about the particular
relations of power and knowledge which render business school teachers particular
subjects. Quite frankly, though I have been working in a business school for more than
five years (where even gaining a cursory idea of MBA teaching) I have not once attended
any classes on social entrepreneurship. It is thus at least doubtful whether endeavoring
to understand business school’s ‘social practices from within’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983,
p. 103) can be based on secondary information alone. Moreover, considering the
determination that genealogical investigations (à la Foucault) always seek to reveal the
‘surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow,
1983, p. 106) with the ultimate aim of identifying ‘the details and accidents that
accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 80), there is no way around conceding
that my own analysis has brought about a, to say it without hesitation, overly one-sided
and smoothed image of the business school’(s mode of production). As a matter of fact, I
have no problem acknowledging that my analytic material (i.e. texts on social
entrepreneurship written by approved business school teachers and available analyses of
business school teaching and research) had the effect of bringing to light only few, and
thereby only the most obvious and/or general, ways in which power and knowledge are
connected in the realm of business schools. Though I never tried to universalize what I
say, thus fostering the impression that my (transcendental) way of describing things is
63
actually the ‘right way’, I accept the potential objection that my analysis conjures up a
unitary spirit of the business school, pretending that this context is grounded on a
singular form of conscience that henceforth engenders a unity of objects and subjects.
11
This actually brings us to the second (yet related) issue: the inquiry of
governmentality and subjectivation. What to me is lacking in the picture being drawn in
the first part of Chapter 1 is that it does not account for Foucault’s (2001) eloquent claim
that processes of government cannot be described on the basis of a uniform or
homogeneous space. In other words, it must be objected that my analysis, respectively
the distance from which it has been conducted, has left little space for the recognition
that government(ality) is a ‘diverse, heterogeneous and dynamic topology of power in
which complexes of problems continuously emerge’ (Dillon, 2006, p. 2). What I am saying
here is that my inquiry, rather than incorporating the above points, departs form the
assumption or, more precisely, encourages the impression that the business school is the
de facto space of enterprising subjectivity and, most fundamentally, that the production
of this particular form of being is due to more or less uniform modes of (self-
)measurement, adjustment/refinement and limitation. This is, however, truly not the
case and it is probably closer to the ‘truth’ that the enterprising academic forms, in a
peculiar way, the very epitome of liberal governmentality and, by implication, a (pure)
form of subjectivation which one might only rarely find in ‘reality’. If we hence believe
that governmentality is primarily about the ‘history of truth telling processes’ (Foucault,
2004, p. 36; quoted in Dillon, 2006, p. 3), then it is anything but debatable that every
inquiry of governmentality requires a certain vigilance towards the fragility, ephemeral
dynamics and, by extension, heterogeneity inherent in all micro-physically organized
regimes of truth. Moreover, the study of governmentality makes it necessary that the
analyst pays apt attention to the microphysics (of power) and thus to the question of how
power is exercised on the body/subject in a strategic way.
In light of Foucault’s (1977) seminal identification that power, since not being a
property of a given person (cf. also point b)), ‘is exercised rather than possessed’ (p. 26),
one is further called upon to arrange one’s analysis so that it is able to pinpoint, for
instance, how the microphysics of power are connected to practices of self-creation. It is
11
On the face of it, if one were to neutralize the impression of ostensible unity one would (in the future) have
to delve into a more micro, quasi-ethnographic inquiry of business school’s social practices and rituals of
power. Active participation (in the form of, for instance, participant observation) in classes on social
entrepreneurship and in business school life in general, as I believe, could have been helpful to gain a ‘deeper’
insight into the manifold (relational) ways in which people (read business school teachers) apply the truth of
the day in the conduct of their work and selves.
64
only in this way that one’s analysis would pay apt heed to the singularity and
aesthetic/ethical aspect of all being, and hence allow insights into how people learn to live
with (i.e. fold and re-fold) the constraints and the contingencies which form part of their
(working) lives. Keeping all this at the back of our minds, it is self-explanatory that
questions such as how individuals are rendered enterprising subjects through the
operation of prevailing discourses and, as I discuss theoretically in Chapter 6, how those
same individuals might practice ‘resistance’ within the boundaries inflicted by power-
knowledge were not properly addressed in my analysis. Since it is evident that my
analysis has not given adequate weight to Deleuze’s (1995) insightful comment that
subjectification has not only to do with constituting subjects but with creating
alternative, different ways of existing, it goes without saying that the architecture and
data selection of the first part of Chapter 1 fails in taking into account that power is not,
or only in very rare moments, something horribly repressive for the individual but
rather something that always leaves space for transgressive moves (Foucault, 1998).
This is to say that my analysis has undoubtedly lost contact, so to speak, with Foucault’s
statement that power is definitively not a set of general and autonomous rules which
govern human conduct but rather a particular and ever-changing set of relations.
Obviously then, my analysis does not provide an answer to the question of how people in
business schools actually bend the line of power-knowledge so to live with it instead of
falling into an unlivable void.
After having put forward a collage of points of critique, I would immediately like to
insert two counter-arguments to the aforementioned points. Firstly, having just made
reference to Foucault’s writing on micropolitics and on aesthetics of existence, which
both provide useful theoretical/methodological perspectives for inquiring and
comprehending the rendering of individuality or style of being, I hasten to add that
depicting the technologies of subjectivation in rather broad and general terms holds a
heuristic value for understanding the principle operation of interpellation in business
school teaching (and research). That is, despite the fact that Foucault’s genealogies are
interested in detecting discontinuities and breaks in discourse and thus precisely about
being specific rather than general, I opt to point at another text by Foucault (2003)
where he made it clear that his work on the power-knowledge nexus (read genealogy)
never asks the question of the individual person, since its purpose is ‘not to modify any
given phenomenon as such, or to modify any given individual in so far as he is an
individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level of their generality’ (p. 246). This
65
quote cannot possibly be overestimated especially because it emphasizes that the more
dispersed forms of power, i.e. those chiefly relying not on the brute application of force
but on distinct intelligible mechanisms, presuppose a kind of inquiry that seeks to gain a
general understanding of a given context’s stimulative nature or imperative. By
extension, the advantage of being schematic rather than differentiated is that a general
sketch allows for making assertions about a particular site of social production (read the
business school) in its entirety. To be sure, a general (read macro) and a specific (read
micro) inquiry of business school’s interpellative force do not form two mutually
exclusive vantage points, since there is always the possibility to use the principle
understanding of business school’s ‘vector space’ for reflecting on how specific regimes of
truth actually translate into the determination of subjects or how people actually go
about border-crossing discourse’ horizon of understanding (Tamboukou, 2003). What I
would like to stress here, however, is that understanding how people working/teaching in
business schools de facto go about governing themselves or how they, based on their
critical reflection and judgment (Foucault, 1988), go about defining what is good for
them in order to grant themselves an aesthetic mode of existence would presuppose an
entirely different investigation.
Secondly, I briefly want to take up the previous reservation that the enterprising
academic should be conceived of as the type of subjectivity which is most characteristic
of a pure and rather homogeneous (read rare, even unrealistic) form of liberal
governmentality. That is, having said that the business school reveals two modes of
government (one more based on discipline/control and the other based on the ‘conduct of
conduct’), where each forming a rather coherent sets of practices, this goes well together
with Foucault’s (2004) rendition that modes of governmentality such as that of
liberalism are, though heterogeneous after all, made up of a set of systems which are in
themselves quite coherent. Indeed, the heterogeneity of any system of thought and
subjectivation, according to Foucault (2004), is overcome by a strategic connection of its
parts: ‘The logic of strategy is the logic of the connection of the heterogeneous and it is
not, repeat not, the logic of the homogenisation of things which are contradictory’ (p. 44;
quoted in Dillon, 2006, p. 4). What all this implies, then, is that the two forms of
government I described above integrate a diverse set of practices through a strategic
game that gives the entire endeavor of the business school both purpose and direction.
Hence, construing the enterprising academic as the effect of more or less ‘systematized,
regulated and reflected modes of power’ (Lemke, 2000, p. 5) makes it comprehensible
66
that heterogeneous sets of practices or forms of governing can in fact produce rather
uniform subject positions (as well as rather uniform goals of business school teaching
and the means to achieve them).
b) Over-emphasizing Meaning and Institutions
As tangentially discussed before, re-reading part I of Chapter 1 shows that its analysis
might have downplayed the relational aspect of power, i.e. the role of discursive
practices, and instead favored the inquiry of the meaning of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ (a focus which is actually reserved for the second part of the following
chapter; cf. also Chapter 2) as well as the particular role of institutional arrangements
and individual utterances. Though we must remain vigilant towards the fact that
Foucault himself, for instance in his ‘Madness and Civilization’, identified certain
institutional arrangements (i.e. the general hospital) which he linked to the will of
particular authorities such as societal classes (i.e. the monarchical and bourgeois order),
he made it clear in some of his interviews that neither institutions nor individual actors
made up the core of his interest but the ways in which certain rationalities pervade them.
The (genealogical) analyst should, according to Foucault (1977), necessarily de-
individualize and de-institutionalize his/her thought since government and discipline
(for that matter) ‘may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it
is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or ‘anatomy’ of
power, a technology’ (p. 215). Consequently, I believe that there are paragraphs in the
first part of Chapter 1 where the discussed actors (both individuals and institutions) are
endowed with too much motivational authority and agency as a result of which the
analysis is rendered more ‘structuralist’, entitative and causal than I would like to have
it. On the other hand, however, we must repeat not only that Foucault at times put quite
considerable stress upon specific institutions (Baker, 2007) but also keep in mind that he
explicitly invited analysis that inquire how particular organizations are ‘created to
freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a
certain number of persons get an advantage’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 12). By implication,
Foucault’s claim does support the kind of studies which try to pinpoint the restrictive
force of certain institutions (such as the business schools) and which try to bring to light
how certain forms of being are disallowed by prevailing knowledge. On the other hand,
this alone does not make redundant those inquires that seek to demonstrate the
67
contrary, i.e. that even seemingly dominant/dominating institutions do not only exercise
power in a manner that creates identifiable profiteers and losers and that even though
individuals are in one way or another under the spell of institutional orders they are
nevertheless able to limit, change or develop the relations of power-knowledge of which
they are part. Yet again, this would require a totally different study.
c) Polemical Tone
All this being said, I still believe that the biggest inconsistency revealed in the following
inquiry relates to the evaluative accent of my writing. With ‘evaluative’ I here do not
refer to judgments regarding the rightfulness or truthfulness of my analysis but rather to
the polemic and ironic tone which pervades some of its parts. Indeed, it is probably not
least due to the frequent references to the business school polemic (e.g. Jones &
O’Doherty, 2005) that readers might have come to the conclusion that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ forms a discursive object that should best be obliterated.
12
And though
I sincerely believe that it is at times useful to accentuate, even exaggerate, (academic)
truth claims or even ‘resort to the blows of the hammer’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 30) in order
to prepare the ground for subsequent re-interpretations, it is with the benefit of hindsight
that I have come to the realization that polemics and irony, though helpful for
counteracting the chronic annoyance engendered through factual statements (cf.
Sloterdijk, 2006; in conversation with Heinrichs), should be applied cautiously.
13
Having
chiefly used the first part of Chapter 1 to pinpoint the limiting operation of the apparatus
from which the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ originates, it is not least due to the
polemical tone that part I has insufficiently emphasized the inherently productive and
creative aspects of power. It is hence beyond question that the polemical tone resulted in
signifying power ‘as a constraining act of violence that represses individuals, forcing
them to do something or preventing them from doing some other thing’ (Foucault, 1988,
p. 11) and not as something which might engender effects that are in fact ‘positive,
valuable, interesting, and so on’ (p. 12). And I can only add that I today wished that my
12
The deviation from Foucault’s style of inquiry becomes manifest in that he reminded us that it was not his
objective to tell people what is good or bad (for them; cf. Foucault, 1996).
13
Caution is, as I believe, mandatory since irony forms a rhetorical trope that works effectively only if
applied in ‘small doses’. Moreover, polemics and irony should be used cautiously in that they might be
spuriously taken to imply that one is in a position to provide a new formula for the optimal exercise of power
or even to impart the best signification of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’.
68
analysis had been more modest and prudent and less interested in ‘constructing a
mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 13).
Keeping in mind all these clarifications, I am keen to repeat that the reader must
not be seduced into believing that I was trying to prove that education provided at
business schools forms a big chunk of nonsense. My aim was rather to show that it
consistently leaves out or at least marginalizes certain (educational) practices and forms
of understanding, i.e. everything which does not comply with the logic of performativity.
Hence, though my analysis has taken into consideration Foucault’s doctrine that the
process of interpretation should proceed without making claims about the truthfulness of
a given discourse (such as the human sciences or, while we’re at it, management and
economics), I regret both that my analysis has not sufficiently delineated the truth
regimes produced in and/or referred to in the context of business school teaching as
elements in a strategy and that it might have fostered the (false) impression of business
school teaching being a stultifying language game. It is from the present perspective that
I would probably pay more heed not only to Foucault’s (1988) inspiring statement that
one should refuse to accept as granted the things which are proposed to us but also to his
idea that one’s analysis should always be informed by curiosity and a principle of
innovation (by means of which one would be able to reflect those things that have yet not
been imagined).
With respect to the present argument it is important to mention that I have tried to
redeem the unjustifiably furious tone of the first chapter by sketching out a more
balanced and less destructive view in Chapter 4. Chapter 4, which relies heavily on the
writing of Derrida, abstains from addressing the business school on the basis of polemics
and instead tries to give apt weight to the necessarily dilemmatic dynamic between the
performativity creed (which I somewhat relentlessly tried to oppose in Chapter 1) and
the idea of unconditionality (which I introduce as a powerful force for balancing the
economic/managerial rationality of business school and university teaching/research).
Since I do not want to anticipate the punch line of Chapter 4 prematurely, it shall suffice
here to mention that this chapter gets to reveal my shift of opinion on the subject of
performativity. Additionally, Chapter 4 gets to show that I have come to the conviction
that it makes a lot of sense to deal with the issue less on the basis of downright critique
(i.e. direct opposition or resistance) than through a mode of thinking that allows for
highlighting both the radical incompletion and constitutive undecidability as well as the
constructive ambivalences that come to the fore at the abyss between textual,
69
institutional, cultural, social and economic structures.
14
Such a view, in my assessment,
is helpful for displacing any oppositional, dialectic logic (Dillon, 2006) in that it goes as
far a rendering anxiety, even madness, customary and potentially creative aspects of
responsible teaching/researching. It is thus not until the later part of my thesis that I
have come to work upon the assumption that the business school (as well as the
university at large) does not suggest a coordinated forward movement (either in a
positive or in a negative direction). Rather, I came to believe that the business school
should, according to Derrida’s (1992) seminal ‘Mochlos’, be imagined less as a institution
in total equilibrium than as a humble figure which gains precarious balance only by
levering left against right.
15
Clarification
Nota bene that the fury, if this is at all the right term, revealed in the first part of Chapter
1 did not come out of the blue. Having myself worked in the business school for several
years and having experienced on a day-to-day basis the frontiers of this context’s
epistemological practices, I felt equipped for writing about some of the limiting practices
that have come into focus within recent years (though I also admit that my
(over)involvement with the subject area of my thesis might have led me astray). Though
I do not want to extend this story any further (which, of course, would form a feasible
option), it is surely obvious by now that certain interesting questions (and maybe
answers) are foreclosed due to the particular ‘nature’ of my analysis. Yet, those aspects
being left out or ignored in my analysis – e.g. the potentially infinite field of relations that
forms the ‘soil’ of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ – are by no means to be qualified
as being of no importance. Indeed, the analysis in the first part of Chapter 1 should be
seen as a preliminary beginning that takes place between unfinished abutments and thus
as something which should above all enable novel beginnings. To render this claim more
substantive, I will now briefly discuss respectively the danger and fallacy of Foucauldian
discipleship.
14
Cf. also Dey & Steyaert (2007) for a more elaborate inquiry of the conflicting, yet productive,
characteristics of business school teaching.
15
Notice that ‘left’ and ‘right’ here do not coincide with political categories but rather pinpoint a body off-
balanced due to its unclear or, more precisely, shaking grounding.
70
To this end, I would like to be very extreme by way of exception. That is, I am quite
aware that the way I use Foucault is wrong, in the scholarly sense of the term, since any
adept Foucauldian could easily say of what I claim is not strictly in line with some, or
even any, of Foucault’s writings. I know very well that what I have done from the adept’s
point of view is single-minded, exaggerated, since I have, for instance, ignored some
contradictory, yet crucial, factors in conjunction with the multiplicity of the business
school’s modus operandi (cf. above). Having said this, I immediately want to make it
unmistakable that although the above reflections a), b) and c) might be perceived as
omissions or fallacies of my analysis, thus operating as negativities or disqualifications,
this impression is justifiable only if one believes that Foucault has in fact created an
analytic schema (read template) which is independent of the subject matter being
investigated and, by implication, which can be applied in a recipe-style manner: point 1 …
then 2 … then 3 … finit. Yet, this is, in my assessment, not possible and I believe that
those who have read (everything or part of) Foucault’s oeuvre might agree that he
constantly developed further his analytic method for getting to terms with the historical
knowledge or forms of rationality related with phenomena such as, for instance, the
penal system, the treatment and management of the insane or ancient ethics.
16
The point
I find noteworthy here is that reading Foucault shows that his opus does in no way form a
unity that provides clear-cut methodological and conceptual instructions.
17
It is essential
to point out that Foucault’s thought ‘always developed through crises and abrupt shifts’
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 83) and that Foucault (1996) himself mentioned, though in a different
context, that ‘the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous’ since as soon as ‘a program
is presented, it becomes a law and there’s a prohibition against inventing’ (p. 312), since
this can be read as suggesting that any direct reference to Foucault should never lead to
a copy-cat exercise and even less so to some odd cultism. It is at his point that I opt to
relate to Foucault’s (1974) tool-box metaphor,
18
which implies that instead of becoming
his disciple one should become a user of his concepts. In other words, as long as one
temporarily accepts the assumption that one is always free to abolish ideas, even
16
Cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) who have provided a comprehensive treatise of the shifting emphasis in
Foucault’s analytic endeavors.
17
That there is not just one Foucault and hence not only one proper way of using Foucault is obvious both
from the observation that inconsistencies were an inherent part of Foucault’s work and from Dreyfus and
Rabinow’s (1983) remark that Foucault’s work never developed in the manner of Kuhnian (1970) paradigm
shifts in that he referred to and used older and newer theoretical ideas and interpretive schemas within a
single investigation.
18
In the words of Foucault (1974): ‘I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage
through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area ... I would like the little volume
that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a
conscientious objector. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers’ (pp. 523 – 524).
71
convictions, one was still holding in high esteem the same morning, as it were, then one
can read the incompatibilities in Foucault’s work as a formal invocation to play with and,
maybe even develop further, his sprinkling thought. It needs to be repeated right away
that the first part of Chapter 1, although there being an immanent risk that it might not
get us anywhere (and thus not work for anyone), is to be read as prompting consecutive
questions regarding the historical problems (and future directions) of business school
teaching.
19
By the same token, I am keen to add that I might have been acting cowardly
in the sense that I have been ‘hiding’ behind the label ‘Foucault’ too frequently. Thus, if
there is something which I regret apart from the polemical tone of Chapter 1 it is
probably that it epitomizes too much discipleship (Baker, 2007) and that I did not
experiment enough with Foucault’s thoughts.
However, I wish to say, in analogy with Foucault (1988), that I refuse ‘to consider
an alleged conformity or non-conformity with Marxism [or indeed with Foucault] as a
deciding factor for accepting or repudiating what I say’ (p. 12). Thus, when the objective
of a text such as, for instance, that imparted under the heading ‘Chapter 1’ is no longer
what it says or, if you will, means but what it actually does, i.e. producing certain effects
and intensities, all this, though not making the whole academic enterprise any easier,
comes down to actually making Foucault significant for one’s own work, one’s own
becoming and, inasmuch one dares to make such a strong statement, for the perception
or exegesis of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ at large. Quite frankly: I am rather
happy that I am as yet not able to assess whether Chapter 1 will actually allow for new
magnitudes, determinations and dimensions of scholarship or if it will have no
consequence and effect whatsoever apart from my own little pleasures, since this
knowledge would indeed be intimidating.
20
19
Framing Chapter 1 in such open terms allows for a comparison with Deleuze (1995) who said that using
someone else’s work is never solely a matter of comprehension or intellectual understanding but of intensity
and resonance: ‘Never interpret; experience, experiment’ (p. 87).
20
Notice that Foucault (1996), while commenting on the truth effect of his books (which he exemplified on
the basis of his prison investigations), said that he could imagine being accused of reductionism: ‘I have tried
to underline trends in the history of prisons. “Only one trend”, people could say. “So that’s not exactly true”’
(p. 301). The main declaration of this brief fiction, according to Foucault, is that it is many times not so
important whether a certain statement effectively pertains to truth, since the really important question is
whether something being said has an effect on the construction of that particular reality.
72
C) Reflection as Regards Part II of Chapter 1
As for the second part of Chapter 1,
21
the single point which needs extra attention relates
to the idea of ‘fashion’. In concrete terms, the point to be emphasized is that the idea of
‘fashion’, less than being a measure for mocking the realm of business school teaching,
was invoked for addressing the (genealogical) question of how the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is referred to and used and, most importantly, what larger role its
‘truth’ gets to play inside and outside the realm of the business school. In other words,
where the primary aim of the first part of Chapter 1 is to delineate the concept as a
(partial) ‘effect’ of academia, it is the second part which chiefly tries to explain, based on
the idea of ‘fashion’, why it has gained that much currency. I hence use the term ‘fashion’
as a concept which to me appears apt for establishing a link with the stream of research
which has investigated and thus tried to explain the rise, growth curve, life cycle and
demise of particular truth regimes related to the management consultancy industry.
Importantly, provided that the notion of ‘fashion’ has at times taken on a negative
connotation in everyday talk, this in turn could foster the impression that the second
part of Chapter 1 actually tries to downgrade the value of the term or even pretend that
it conveys no meaning whatsoever. Yet, ‘fashion’ the way it is used by Abrahamson
(1991; 1996) and others is a concept that is truly less evaluative than descriptive.
Consequently, inquiring the conditions of possibility which enabled the rise of the concept
‘social entrepreneurship’ in the first place is literally about acknowledging the productive
aspect and constructive momentum of power.
21
Where one of the primary aims of the following chapter, as I already mentioned before, was to illuminate
the fields of force which bring about the ‘truth’ of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ and which render
business school teachers particular objects and subjects of discourse, it probably hardly needs to be
mentioned that the second part is kin neither to genealogy nor to archeology.
73
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1
***
Excellence and the Enterprising Academic: Social Entrepreneurship in
Business School Education
The question … now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher
education is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 51)
… the modern totalitarian threat resides in those versions of managerialism which seek to
achieve by ostensibly administrative means what earlier forms of totalitarianism sought to
achieve by political and military means as well, namely a state of programmed order,
active obedience and remorseless efficiency. (Nellis, 1999, p. 338)
Synopsis
According to Lyotard’s (1984) eloquent treatise of knowledge, both research and higher
education are no longer at the service of societal emancipation as envisioned by the ideal of
humanitarian education. Instead, their task has become to fortify and extend the existing power
relations of the state. Being subjugated to the authority of the state, universities thus need, in
providing education, to align their activities along the logic of ‘end-orientation’. This further
implies that the production and dissemination of knowledge is legitimized by how well it sells.
After a brief critical investigation of (business school) education, I will discuss how far the
emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in contemporary business schools can be conceived
76
as a logical consequence of the ‘performativity’ mantra. This mantra, as I will discuss, has shifted
the focus of MBA
22
programs from the spiritual and moral training of the nation to the
entertainment of students. In addition, it now boosts the reputation of business schools through,
for instance, media rankings and accreditations. In delineating the cumulative ‘war for students’
and by highlighting the seemingly inevitable proliferation of the ‘customer satisfaction culture’, I
will argue that prevailing business education has appropriated social entrepreneurship for reasons
of competition and differentiation. On that basis, it will become clear that in the wake of
performativity, business school teachers have been turned into enterprising subjects: they are
expected to subordinate their innovativeness and creativity to the overall economic viability and
prestige of their business school. Given the resulting commoditization of social entrepreneurship,
I will elaborate that the phenomenon quite clearly exhibits features of yet another management
fashion. This chapter is thus to be read as the retrieval, or, put differently, the ‘novel repetition’
(Critchley, 1999) of particular societal alterations (which have occurred in the course of the past
five decades or so) in that it aims to criticize the status quo of business education. In the spirit of
Foucault’s ‘genealogical method’ (cf. Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982), historical ruptures and
struggles of knowledge are invoked to foster awareness that the current state of business
education provides us with ample reasons to be concerned. Taking this insight as my starting
point, I will highlight some of the most pressing omissions and fallacies of prevailing
enunciations of social entrepreneurship. A challenging account of the (mis)representation of
social entrepreneurship as either mere business conduct or an allegedly moral agent will
subsequently provide the basis for an outline of the as yet unrecognized political underpinnings of
social entrepreneurship as well as the neglect of its genuine ethical possibilities. A close analysis
of the basic premises of contemporary university and business school education will ultimately
lead to tentative suggestions regarding the future direction of MBA teaching on social
entrepreneurship, and, more specifically, allow me to release social entrepreneurship from its
obsession with ethical (pseudo) perfection and best-business practice.
22
Master of Business Administration
77
PART I
I believe that the institution that is perhaps the most crucial in both the formation and
maintenance of democratic communities (through the creation of subject interpellated
through the liberal values and norms of the modern nation) is the institution that is often
the least studied in academia: the institution of education. (Mitchell, 2003, p. 389;
emphasis in original)
The true crisis of the European sciences … is felt in the absence of distress: ‘crisis, what crisis?’
(Critchley, 1999, p. 130)
Introduction
The business school is said to be in crises (cf. Jones & O’Doherty, 2005; Nord, 2005; Shepherd,
2005). The prevailing educational premises have come under scrutiny over the last two decades
(Cheit, 1985; Porter & McKibbin, 1988; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Rynes, Trank, Lawson & Ilies,
2003; Grey, 2004). Whereas the imputations are variegated, some of the most prominent
arguments contend that university business schools have come to resemble factories too closely
(Höpfl, 2005), that they impart bad management theories (Ghoshal, 2005) and that discourses on
knowledge and learning produced in the ivory tower of business school education have no utility
for practicing managers (Mintzberg, 2004). Taking these arguments as its starting point, the main
focus of the present chapter is a discussion of the impasse of contemporary MBA education
against the backdrop of the ‘performativity’ principle which, according to Lyotard (1984), has
come to determine the direction in which most developed societies are moving. By shedding light
on the ‘customer culture’ imperative which now impinges on higher education, it will be
investigated how academics are increasingly subjected to an entrepreneurial code of conduct
where they are impelled to demonstrate qualities such as innovation, pro-activeness and a
passionate style of teaching. On the basis of this analysis, the first part of this chapter primarily
aspires to illuminate the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in MBA programs as a
means for providing the credentials for business schools’ existence and for increasing both their
competitive edge and profitability.
78
The Crisis of the Business School
It was at the beginning of the 19
th
century that Wilhelm von Humboldt (1964), one of the
founding fathers of German humanism and the modern education system, declared that the
university should be oriented toward ‘the spiritual and moral training of the nation’ (p. 126).
It is revealed in von Humboldt’s deliberations that the university was envisaged as having a
responsibility to society and, in particular, that it was one of its principle duties to equip
young people ‘with a critical stance toward simple truths and the dangerous narrow-
mindedness of hegemony’ (Warren, 2005, p. 79). However, in contemporary, that is post-
industrial society, the question of legitimization is no longer informed by idealist and
humanist visions or ideals. On the contrary, there is sound evidence that the critical function
of universities has given way to managerial ideals of productivity, cost effectiveness and
efficiency. While Said (1994) has pointed to the dangers of this sort of corporate and
performative thinking so as to claim that it undermines the kind of skepticism expected from
intellectuals in universities, we are further reminded by Lyotard (1984) that ‘in the discourse
of today’s financial backers … the only credible goal is power’ (p. 46). Lyotard explained at
length that science will increasingly be subjected to the ‘productive power’ of the nation
state. He also adumbrated more than two decades ago how the goal of teaching and indeed
the production and dissemination of knowledge through education institutes at large, will be
evaluated according to whether or not it contributes ‘to the best performativity of the social
system’ (p. 48). As cogently argued by Mitchell (2003), ‘schooling was not just about the
creation of a literate population or a trained workforce, but was implicated more generally in
the creation of a particular kind of state subject – one schooled in the norms and proper codes
of behavior related to national citizenship’ (p. 291). Given that schooling can be said to be at
the service of ‘bourgeois hegemony’ (Curtis, 1988), it barely needs extensive elaborations to
concede that the professional legitimacy of academics has witnessed a fundamental shift
according to which scholars’ duty is no longer to warrant the moral development of society
but to subordinate themselves to the goals and demands of the industry and the preservation
of the nation’s status quo. Within his seminal ‘Postmodern Condition’ Lyotard (1984) made
the point that this ‘trend’ began somewhere in the late 1950s. In its early phase, its operative
79
logic entailed that knowledge thenceforth must be legitimated by how performative it was,
that means, how effectively it worked to minimize the various required inputs for the task
and to maximize the desired outputs. It was in this context that Lyotard coined the notion of
‘performativity’
23
to circumscribe the very condition in which knowledge is deemed valuable
or invaluable according to its specific input-output ratio. Under conditions of performativity,
the state, corporations and education institutions are all called upon to exchange the idealist
and humanist narratives of legitimation for an economic calculus.
Taking Lyotard’s views a step further, the task of universities is no longer to inform
and thereby emancipate the state and society, but to secure (nation) states’ position in the
global competition. As Lyotard insightfully foretold, ‘the question of knowledge is now more
than ever a question of government’ (p. 9). This situation entails an increasing tendency of
the state, and in particular its disciplinary bodies, to delimit the scope and content of science
and education. Being caught between the administrative demands of the state on the one
hand and the competition of the market on the other (cf. Peters, 2004), universities are no
longer expected to create ideals, but to provide (practical) skills that improve the system’s
overall performance. The type of knowledge currently commissioned by state authorities and
implemented by institutions of both basic and higher education is increasingly related to
‘applications’ and ‘services’, and notably the profit the resultant codified technologies are
expected to generate.
Lyotard’s undoubtedly momentous prediction is rendered even more exciting, not to
say daunting, in view of the fact that most of his foresights have turned into reality (cf.
Roberts, 1998). It is therefore hardly imaginable that the shift towards ‘performativity’ in the
post-industrial era will be reversible at short notice. After all, performativity, once
established, self-referentially reinforces its own existence: ‘since performativity increases the
ability to produce proof, it also increases the ability to be right’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 46).
Lyotard shrewdly observed that the technical structure of the state, and all other institutions
which have come to operate upon the performativity ideal, give rise to a sort of education
that hinges on profitability and cost effectiveness, and which is thereby premised on
(marketable) skills, rather than ideals.
23
Note the remarkable difference between Lyotard’s exegesis and Judith Butler’s (1994) Derrida- and Foucault-
inspired understanding of performativity as the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed.
80
Given the above arguments derived from Lyotard’s treatise of knowledge, it is hardly
surprising that scholars of higher education (e.g. Illich, 1973; Derrida, 2001) as well as current
MBA students have deplored that (business school) education has ceased to be an ‘end in itself’
and that its whole value is reduced to the provision of a (pro forma) qualification for the job
market (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). Höpfl (2005), in explaining the logic which currently seems to
guide the conduct of business students, has stated that ‘(w)hen students are paying for what they
get, they want courses which will guarantee them an income, enable them to pay off their student
loans, provide them with prosperous futures’ (p. 62). As if this weren’t disenchanting enough,
O’Doherty and Jones (2005) are even more daunting in their appraisal since they argued that the
primary goal of business schools is to extort ‘fees from the middle and upper classes so that it can
stamp their offspring with a passport into corporate sleaze, mortgage slavery, burn-out, stress,
overwork and repression’ (p. 1). It was more than thirty years ago that Ivan Illich (1973)
elucidated that education is misdirected since the ‘the pupil is “schooled” to confuse teaching
with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with
the ability to say something new’ (p. 2). Similarly, contemporary business education has been
accused of reducing learning to a consumerist enterprise which ultimately conveys little practical
and intellectual utility for its students. Thus Collins (1996) as well as Rynes et al. (2003) have
contended that while education in general has witnessed an instrumentalization of learning, it is
business students in particular who tend to see education exclusively as a stepping stone to
lucrative careers. Feldman (2005), in paraphrasing Mintzberg’s (2004) argument in his seminal
‘Managers, not MBAs’, pointed out that new entrants to business schools have ‘neither the “zest
for business” nor the “will to manage”. That is, they are neither intellectually interested in the
dynamics of business nor are they particularly interested in the act of managing. Rather, they are
interested in getting rich or having power and see business school as the shortest and easiest route
to those ends’ (p. 218). Hence, while MBA education seems to have lost its credibility as a means
for learning and personal development, business students are increasingly perceived as selecting
MBA programs on the basis of pragmatic questions such as whether they provide good job
opportunities, the prospect of an adequate post-MBA salary and whether those programs provide
adequate opportunities for establishing alumni networks (cf. Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). These are
indeed heavy charges. However, it would be unjust and reductionist to blame the current impasse
of MBA education on business students alone. In contrast to those voices that deplore the laziness
and disinterest of contemporary business students, the following investigation aspires to show
81
that the very type of student that has become the cause of complaints on the part of university and
business school staff members must be seen as the education system’s own creation. O’Doherty
and Jones (2005) clarified matters by delineating that ‘(b)usiness schools offer up an uninspired
carcass of crap and then blame students for not being interested, for being cynical and
‘instrumental’ (p. 4). We are thus reminded that the entire system of business education revolves
around the notion of ‘services’. Teleologically speaking, this means that the MBA title ‘makes
the holder more desirable to future employers’, since the ethos of the respective programs is ‘built
around the ontology of desire as lack driving a wish to be different’ (Linstead, 2005, p. 32). To
put the instrumental behavior of business students into perspective and to make intelligible the
rising frustration of business school staff, I would like to provide some illustrative examples in
order to document more thoroughly how the landslide move towards ‘performativity’ has
materialized in the realm of university (business school) research and teaching.
Practice – Theory Divide
It is important to note that where the demarcation line between practice and theory within the
realm of university education has – generally speaking – favored theory and abstract and/or
critical reflection over practical utility, there has been a ‘crack’ (Zizek, 1993) in the
interpretation of higher education. This ‘crack’ is expressed through far-reaching efforts to
increase the practical value and relevance of knowledge. Arguably, the shift from theory to
practice prompts knowledge producers to construe their teaching and research accordingly.
For instance, the increased allocation of research funding to the sciences (e.g. life-sciences,
bio-chemistry, physics, etc.) and technology departments (e.g. computer sciences,
engineering) makes it clear that research, in order to receive funding, needs a certain
likelihood of generating at least some returns on investment. Accordingly, Lyotard (1984)
has contended that ‘(c)apitalism solves the scientific problem of research funding in its own
way: directly by financing research departments in private companies, in which demands for
performativity and recommercialization orient research first and foremost toward
technological “applications”’ (p. 45). The flipside of Lyotard’s statement entails that
departments which do not contain marketable research units, for instance liberal arts colleges
(cf. Dees & Elias, 1998), find it increasingly difficult to legitimize their non-profitable
82
endeavors. At the teaching level there is already (and there will increasingly be) a bifurcation
between those subjects that are deemed ‘useful’, that is, that promise practical application in
the world, and those which are not, that is, that are taken to cultivate knowledge for its own
sake (Derrida, 2004). This ‘marketization of education’ (Roberts, 1998) has gained ground
over the last twenty years (at least), so that it has become part of higher (or tertiary)
education’s common-sense principles that knowledge must ultimately serve as a productive
force within the system while ‘the other – the critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind – by
reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims would resist any such “recuperation”’
(Lyotard, 1984, p. 14). It becomes clear from Lyotard’s objection that the ‘democratic
university’, meaning the university which works on the premises of humanist ideals, faces
mounting problems in proving the credentials for performativity. The disciplinary effect of
performativity entails, among other things, that tertiary education reinterprets its practices so
as to accentuate knowledge which appears, first, relevant for ‘real-life issues’ and second,
which provides students with a certain amount of comfort or entertainment value (cf. below).
As Böhm and Meier Sørensen have made clear with respect to the realm of organization
studies, ‘research has to be relevant for today’s business practices; writing practices have to
fit into clear assessment criteria; books can only be published if they are made practicable for
business students – Organization Studies has become obsessed with the domain of common
sense, the practical, the easily digestible’ (p. 8). Whereas Böhm and Meier Sørensen have
identified a tendency to judge research and education on the basis of whether or not it can be
applied in a practical context, Derrida (2004) has coined the term ‘end-orientation’
24
to
express the tendency of research and teaching to give ‘rise to institutional constructions
regulated by … technical schemas’ (p. 59). Lyotard (1984), on the other hand, most
felicitously showed that what is reflected in the distinction between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’
departments and degrees is that knowledge at the time of his investigation was judged in
accordance with the question ‘can it be sold?’ This observation quite clearly illustrates that
the practice-theory dichotomy is sustained through an economic calculus which, as I believe,
manifests itself most visibly in the conduct of business school education and especially in the
commoditization of knowledge. Concerning the latter, we are reminded by Lyotard that the
commoditization of business school education, that is, the transformation of education into a
24
A term which, according to Derrida (2004), has become especially widely used in France.
83
‘good for sale’ (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998), has been made possible by means of
hailing the logic of a the market. It is thus against the backdrop of ‘performativity’ that the
contemporary ‘McDonaldization’ of (business school) education becomes comprehensible
(cf. Hayes & Wynyard, 2002). For it is the concept of ‘performativity’ which predetermines
that knowledge and decision-making is for the most part no longer based on abstract
principles, but on how effective it is at achieving desired outcomes (however, this aspect of
business education has been seriously questioned by Pfeffer and Fong (2002)). Another
criterion apart from how effective education is at achieving desired outcomes is how much
return can be obtained through (selling) knowledge (there is at least some consensus that
both MBA students (Connolly, 2003) and business schools (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002) obtain
significant salary rises and yields respectively). The criterion of performativity is now
outspokenly and as a matter of course invoked by the authorities of business schools to
justify their refusal or admission of certain courses and programs. Importantly, courses in
social entrepreneurship are no exception in that respect but on the contrary a particularly
cunning example illustrating the ‘mercantilization’ of business education. Nevertheless,
before I shed some light on the state of affairs of social entrepreneurship teaching, I will, in
the ensuing section, first show how, that is through what practices and regulations, the
performativity criterion is introduced to business education and how it affects teaching,
research and the position of academics in the hierarchy of educational institutions.
Research Assessments, Accreditations & Business Magazine Rankings
To make intelligible the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses, it is apposite to first
illustrate the competitive structures and disciplinary practices which were put in place to increase
business schools’ performativity. At the most fundamental level, it can be discerned that
governments as well as management experts have, over the last three decades, been looking for
novel ways to increase the commitment of educators. Since the market has become the ideal
model for educational arrangements (at least in post-industrial societies; cf. Atkinson-Grosjean,
1998), academic bureaucrats no longer seem to arouse suspicion when they talk about ‘inputs’,
‘outputs’ or ‘throughputs’ (Roberts, 1998). While the discourses of efficiency and consumerism
have continuously overflowed into the university (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998) and,
84
over time, become naturalized as part of the common-sense approach of modern education
systems, it is noticeable that this shift has gone hand in hand with the appeal that institutions of
higher education must be rendered accountable for what they do. Though the demand for
accountability is in itself not particularly new, since it was already put forward by university
students in the 1960s (a demand that ultimately lead, inter alia, to an increased student
involvement in decision-making processes; cf. Krahn & Silzer, 1996), accountability in our
present day is predominantly interpreted by politicians and the public as the exigency of
universities to legitimate their purpose and to disclose facts and figure so that their performance
can be quantified. In the wake of university accountability not only vis-à-vis students but, equally
importantly, taxpayers, funding bodies and affiliated businesses, institutes of higher education
have witnessed the implementation of a plethora of performance indicators all of which have
been deemed quintessential for the administrative apparatus and, though more vague and subtle,
for the control of teachers and researchers. Having stimulated the emergence of the ‘service
university’
25
(Newson & Buchbinder, 1988), performance indicators were thus introduced to
render university staff calculable and, consequently, knowable and governable. In that respect, it
is the attribute ‘governable’ in particular which implies that despite overtly claiming that
accountability is foremost concerned with quality, it is pivotal to understand that those practices
are a pervasive means to inscribe a particular norm with which people are presumed to comply.
Once in place, Foucault (1984) contended, ‘(i)t is easy to understand how the power of the norm
functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the
norm introduces as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of
individual differences’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 197). If this argument is taken to its extreme, the
imposition of a norm, be it through research assessments, accreditations or business magazine
rankings, becomes a ‘principle of coercion’ since it gives way to ‘a surveillance that makes it
possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 197). Given the influx of those
‘novel’ education and research imperatives, we shall take a closer look at some of the more
prominent ‘management control technologies’ in higher education. Close analysis of these control
mechanisms will then allow us to explain their influence on teachers and researchers as
individuals and, consequently, to comprehend how these technologies have come to determine
the overall direction of research and teaching (on social entrepreneurship).
25
Derrida (2004) talked of the ‘civil servant-philosopher’ to express how philosophers at state universities are
increasingly perceived as servants of the state.
85
A) Research Assessments
A relatively recent control mechanism of research is the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
which has been implemented in the UK and subsequently in Australia and New Zealand
(Middleton, 2005). It makes university funding dependent on the quantity and quality of its
researchers’ outputs. Ostensibly aiming at ‘performance-based research funding’, the RAEs
aspire to measure and rank the collective ‘research outputs’ of institutions and fields of inquiry.
In line with this aim, the primary purpose of the RAE has been to produce ratings of institutions’
research quality which are subsequently used as a basis to determine the amount of funding the
respective institutions ‘deserve’. Though the importance of research for the overall reputation of
business schools has diminished over the last two decades (cf. below), it is beyond doubt that the
RAE has become a disciplinary instrument for providing or withdrawing research funds. The
logic behind performance-based funding is that higher education institutions must provide insight
into their research activities so that they can then be assessed through a specialist panel of peers.
The RAE, then, makes visible the performativity of academics. Besides Parker (2002) who, in his
deliberations on the ‘McUniversity’, stated that ‘visibility and classification are winning the day’
(p. 141), it is Foucault (1984) in particular who made clear that ‘(i)n discipline, it is the subjects
who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It
is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined
individual in his subjection’ (p. 199). Keeping in mind that Foucault’s (1977) elaboration on the
issue of visibility was envisaged through the ‘panopticum’ of Bentham’s prison architecture plan
of 1791, one must concede that the RAE, in as much as it measures performance on an annual
rather than a continuous basis, provides a less strict regime of control. Nonetheless, as the RAE
aims at a final point at which past performances are made transparent, it can be posited that such
examinations are ‘at the center of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object
of power, as effect and object of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204). In view of this novel sort
of visibility, critical voices have objected that the RAE stigmatizes academic staff, since the
results of the assessments (including the names of assessed academics and lists of their research
outputs) are made public after the completion of the procedure. Ranking the assessed research
institutions from 1 (no national excellence in research) to 5* (international research excellence)
has thus stimulated the closure of certain departments which, according the criteria of the RAE,
did not qualify as ‘excellent’. To be sure, the RAE has ruined the career of numerous academics
86
and, most importantly, has been responsible for ‘job losses, discriminatory practices, widespread
demoralization of staff, the narrowing of research opportunities through the over-concentration of
funding and the undermining of the relationship between teaching and research, with a
consequent reduction in the quality of higher education available to students’ (The Higher
Education Union, April, 2005). At the level of individual academics, the RAE has been said to
stimulate a competitive mindset which manifests itself, inter alia, in increased endeavors to
‘restructure’ the research practice of individuals so as to maximize RAE output. What further
comes to light with respect to the RAE is that business school staff is increasingly preoccupied
with reviewing and processing feedback, and monitoring its own behavior which, quite
obviously, takes up an enormous amount of academics’ time and energy. Even more alarming are
observations to the effect that the interminable quality exercises, which in a rather peculiar way
resemble the operational logic of manufacturing, produce a set of standards that, in conjunction
with education, have conspicuously little practical significance (Höpfl, 2005). It therefore comes
as little surprise that critics of such assessment exercises have warned that the RAE and similar
procedures distort and disrupt the education system and devalue the professional contribution of
staff to both teaching and research.
B) Accreditation Procedures
Even though research evaluations and their direct interlinkage with funding practice have so far
been limited to a rather small number of countries, it is nevertheless possible that such
disciplinary mechanisms will become more widespread in the near future. Be that as it may,
accreditation procedures as well as business school rankings in the media have become even
more influential in terms of the national and global status of business schools, over the last say 20
if not more. While there is some controversy regarding the utility and reliability of accreditation
institutions such as AACSB
26
or EQUIS
27
(which are deemed the two most influential and hence
credible accreditation bodies; cf. Fuller, 2005), they have nevertheless turned into some sort of
sine qua non for the viability of business schools. As a result, accreditations from renowned
institutions are seen to separate the good from the bad, that is, those whose existence is justified
from those who have no right to exist. However, to receive an accreditation, for example from
AACSB, business schools are obliged to put in place a committee structure which monitors and
26
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business
27
European Quality Improvement System
87
assesses faculty resources, makes recommendations for essential faculty recruitments and
maintains the skills of the faculty. AACSB is thus not only a mere logo which can be marketed to
prospective business students, though this is an undeniably important part of the game. Even
more importantly, it acts as a distinct exercise of unification which, by means of close
examination and by putting pressure on the performance standards for faculty and department
chairs (Bejou, 2005), encourages competition between faculty staff. As Höpfl (2005) rightly
pointed out, ‘the university Business School is not a seat of learning and does not pretend to be. It
is a factory run on Tayloristic principles of standardisation, measurement and control’ (p. 65).
The ostensible aim of accreditations of business schools is, then to quantify their quality (and thus
enable informed judgments on the part of students). It must be recognized , however, that these
procedures are equally concerned with the perpetuation of a ‘one-meets-all’ rationale whereby a
single set of (minimum) standards is claimed to be sufficient to account for the diversity of
contexts in which business and management is taught. This means that the (concealed) emphasis
on conformity and consensus of accreditations is, strictly speaking, tantamount to a concerted
effort to streamline business schools and, most importantly, to pretend that there are identifiable
universal values which must be globally imposed on business schools. Although the world has
witnessed a rapid growth of alternative accreditations which are said to comprise values other
than those advanced by, for instance, the US-based AACSB (e.g. ASFOR
28
in Italy, AAEDE
29
in
Spain, AMBA
30
in the UK and the EFMD
31
for Europe), there have been serious limitations to
those efforts. In particular, given that (leading) business schools are fighting an increasingly
fierce ‘war for students’, it has been essential that they not only content themselves with local
accreditations but that they also adorn themselves with accreditations that are recognized
worldwide. From an economic viewpoint, accreditations are indispensable despite their dubious
effect on the quality of education provided by business schools.
C) Business Magazine Ranking
Accreditations have, since the time of their inception, been presented as a means for
distinguishing the ‘serious’ from the ‘less serious’ (cf. Wedlin, 2000). However, as an ever
greater number of business schools have acquired those prestigious ‘labels’, it has become
28
Associazione per la Formazione alle Direzione Aziendale
29
Associacion Espanola de Representantes de Escuelas de Dirreccion de Empresas
30
Association of MBAs in the UK
31
European Foundation for Management Development
88
increasingly difficult to sustain the objective of differentiation. It is in this context that Stensaker
(2005) has pointed out that accreditations no longer seem appropriate for sustaining their intrinsic
goal, that is, drawing a demarcation line between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. As a result of this
situation, business magazines have tried to fill the void by providing annual rankings of business
schools which aim at evaluating quality more thoroughly. The standards which have been
imposed on business schools through evaluations of business magazines such as, for instance,
‘Business Week’, ‘Financial Times’, ‘The Wall Street Journal’, ‘The Economist’
32
, as well as
‘U.S. News & World Report’ (Task Force of AACSB, 2005) therefore rest on hierarchical
classifications, that is, rankings. The underlying premise of those rankings is that they expose
business schools to a preordained set of criteria. The aim of this set of criteria is to enable
prospective students, that is, customers, to evaluate the quality of those institutions and to make
informed (investment) decisions. Importantly, while accreditation procedures simply allow for a
dichotomous assessment of business schools (that is, you are either ‘in’ or ‘out’), the rankings of
business magazines present discriminations that are more fine-grained.
While those ‘best of’ lists have been popularized since the late 1980s, they are today
appreciated by business schools as invaluable sales tools. As with accreditations, it has been
lamented that ranking practices of business magazines contain limitations, for instance in that
they aspire to express quality through a single number. Despite existing disapproval, the public
attention those rankings continuously receive means that business schools cannot afford not to
participate in the ‘rat race for fame’. However, as each ranking procedure has its own
methodology and thereby grounds its evaluation upon a unique set of data, it is conceivable that
business schools ‘have had to hire additional staff to respond to the increasing number of media
requests for data’. After all, this increased demand for data requires ‘an extraordinary amount of
time preparing data for media surveys’ (Task Force of AACSB, 2005, p. 7). Besides the
inestimable amount of time taken up by ranking exercises, one must also acknowledge that those
procedures are not simply meant to measure quality but that they inevitably transform the way
academics do their work and conduct themselves as professionals. Implementing a seemingly
endless stream of measurement procedures means that academic staff has to record, account for
32
It is worth noting in this context that two top business schools (Harvard, Boston and Wharton, Pennsylvania)
refrained from publishing their data in the ‘Economist’ in the year 2005. Both schools justified their decision by
saying that their staff were overworked and that magazine rankings in any case do not accurately reflect the quality
of individual business schools. Given the formative influence of media rankings, it will be of pivotal importance if
other business schools follow their example.
89
and improve their behavior at all times. Thus a clear emphasis on the factor of ‘governmentality’
(Foucault, 1991) marks the situation of business school staff. This means that business school
staff are subjected (and subject themselves) to a mounting set of numerical measurement
procedures which are, arguably, not only concerned with quality, but likewise with the
satisfaction of external stakeholders. Additionally, it is important to notice that, in contrast to the
stress on conformity of accreditations, rankings by business magazines tend to advocate
differences. While generally heating up the performativity hyperbole of business schools, those
rankings specifically advocate ‘unique selling propositions’ to be perpetuated by business
schools’ curricula and academic staff. The aim of these propositions is to give proof of the
qualities that make them outstanding and hence valuable in the global marketplace. Since I will
argue further down that courses on social entrepreneurship can be seen as an offshoot of this
differentiation imperative, we will now shift our attention to a discussion of how discourses of
quality and excellence – which are the common denominator of research assessments,
accreditation procedures as well as business magazine rankings – have increasingly informed
contemporary business teaching.
The Quality and Excellence Dispositif
While procedures and mechanisms stimulated through accreditation bodies such as AACSB,
EQUIS or business magazine rankings occur, prima facie, to ensure high standards of quality
(Frazer, 1997), critical minds have made clear that, contrary to their intended representation of
quality, those ‘badges’ in fact stand ‘not for what is on offer but more tragically for what has been
lost’ (Höpfl, 2005, p. 66). Despite all odds, it is remarkable that the regulation, not to say
disciplinary action affecting university staff through the micro practices of accreditation
procedures, teaching and research assessments exercises was originally stimulated through
supranational organizations such as the EU and the OECD. Following Stensaker (2005), quality
seems to have become the prevailing ‘metanarrative’ both in the private and public sector
(Czarniawska & Sevon, 1996) where it even appears to have replaced effectiveness as the central
organizational principle of higher education (Cameron & Whetten, 1996). A cursory glance
suggests that the notion of quality has been interpreted in quite different ways whereas the variety
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of its significations
33
seems to be less a sign of weakness than a reason for its strength and
pervasiveness. Being a rather elusive concept, ‘quality’ thus lends itself to a broad range of
contexts and practices. For instance, quality is inaugurated in practice through techniques such as,
to mention only three of the most popular management mechanisms, re-engineering, downsizing
or total quality management (e.g. Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1996). With regards to higher
education, Frazer (1997) pointed out that accreditations, evaluations, as well as assessments and
audits must be taken as indications of the ever more pervasive quality mantra. Reminded by
Harvey and Green (1993) that stakeholders of higher education perceive quality in quite different
ways (e.g. quality as exceptional, quality as perfection, quality as fitness for purpose, quality as
value for money or quality as transformation; cf. Stensaker, 2005), business schools have
habitually come to display quality through reference to ‘excellence’ (cf. above: research
assessment exercise). Though quality and excellence at times are used interchangeably, it is in
particular the latter term which is inherited from business jargon (e.g. Miller & Rose, 1990). The
notion of excellence is conceived of as a distinct ‘epochalism’ (du Gay, 2003), meaning a term
that works to establish a dichotomous frame which in turn distinguishes between good and bad.
‘Epochalist theorists’ such as Peters and Waterman (1982) have, following du Gay (2002),
provided a ‘periodizing schema’ which is at once able to make the changes they outline appear as
unavoidable and to subject practicing managers to a new set of images and roles. Their best-
selling book ‘In Search of Excellence’ – which was published in almost every country of the
world and of which about 4.5 million copies were sold in the USA alone by 1999 (cf. Hyatt,
1999) – has thus transformed the perception of what qualifies as proper management and what
doesn’t. Given that the excellence discourse simultaneously relies on the dynamic of fear (for
those who fail to achieve ‘excellence’) and enthusiasm (which is granted to practitioners of
‘excellence’), it must be emphasized that the excellence discourse long ago trespassed the
boundaries of profit enterprises. Apart from profit enterprises, it now also influences the conduct
of, for instance, public administration, health management and, of course, education. The
dispersion of the excellence discourse beyond the context of its initial application, that is,
business, is a logical consequence of the fact that such epochalist schemas rely on ‘the
extrapolation from one set of predicates to the set of all possible predicates, upon the
globalization of a local phenomenon, in which the one-sidedness of a specific problematic
33
For instance, Barley and Kunda (1992) have shown that quality represents a peculiar mix between classic scientific
management and the human relation school of thought.
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becomes the universality of a general problem’ (Turner, 1992, p. 12). In effect, the excellence
discourse creates an utterly polarized image in which the excellent conduct of business,
bureaucracies, and institutions of education inevitably leads to success whereas non-excellence is
said to end in failure.
Importantly, following a Foucauldian (1972) stream of reasoning, discourses of quality
and excellence, have been able to systematically form the objects (and subjects) of which they are
meant to speak. That means, discourses on quality and excellence represent the subject (and
object) of teaching in such ways that it becomes amenable to management or governance. In as
much as the quality discourse renders visible the performance of educators through quality
measures, the formerly ‘opaque classroom’ (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 11) is now
subject to external control. As Foucault contended in that respect, the various assessment
procedures have ‘lowered the threshold of describable individuality [of the academic], and made
of this description a means of control and a method of domination’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 203). This
implies that discourses of quality and excellence have been interwoven in a network of
institutions, programs and practices which collectively form a distinct apparatus, or dispositif
(Foucault, 1980; 1988), that is, a system of relations between ‘discourses, institutions,
architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 194). This system of
relations on the one hand informs and delineates codes of conduct while on the other hand
inducing subjects in business schools to act in accordance with that code. With respect to higher
education, teachers are re-imagined through a vocabulary which highlights ‘consumer culture’
(du Gay, 1996) and ‘entrepreneurialism’ (Hatcher, 2001). In doing so, this vocabulary also
stimulates the re-fashioning of conventional forms of teaching and teachers. Provided that people
(must) identify themselves with the totality of linguistic and extra-linguistic elements of the
excellence or quality dispositif, it follows that they are urged to work upon themselves in
particular ways (while the dispositif simultaneously provides the norm for detecting and
sanctifying potential deviances). The excellence discourse in higher education thus stresses self-
governing subjects (Rose, 1991), that is, academics who receive external feedback, ostensibly as
a source for personal development and improvement. ‘Governmentality’, a term popularized
through the work of Foucault (1991), is apposite to analyze how the ‘being’ of contemporary
academics is informed by discourses of excellence or, in other words, how techniques and
devices such as accreditation procedures and research and teaching assessments shape people’s
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beliefs and, consequently, identities. The concept of governmentality was, bluntly speaking,
introduced to circumscribe how the modern sovereign state and the contemporary autonomous
individual co-determine each other’s emergence (Lemke, 2000). Possibly its most important tenet
has been that it helped differentiate between processes of domination and power. While
domination has been said to center on an identifiable power-holder who subjugates others to
his/her own will, the concept of governmentality implies that power works through people’s self
control, that is, through self-subjectification. Following Lemke (2000), government(ality) refers
to ‘systemized, regulated and reflected modes of power (a “technology”) that go beyond the
spontaneous exercise of power over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a
“rationality”) which defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve’ (p. 5). Bearing
in mind that governmentality marks an instance in which people call upon a previously approved
‘rationality’ or ‘regime of truth’ in order to shape their behavior and self accordingly, we are
reminded by Lindstrom (2005) that a large number of business schools envision accreditations as
a powerful device for inducing faculty and staff to think about and improve the quality of their
work. On account thereof, one could object that excellence discourse necessitates a critique of the
way universities have been managed in recent days as it contains distinct prescriptions for
tackling ‘global competition’ in higher education through entrepreneurialism. To put this in a
slightly different way, excellence discourse must be critically reflected with regard to its
formative momentousness and specifically in terms of how it comes to delineate academics’
work-related identities through managerial terms. The focus of criticism here is that the
excellence dispositif governs the subject of education in such way that he or she is forced to
actively intervene upon his or her own conduct. Foucault (1980) coined the notion of ‘conduct of
conduct’ to show how people actively shape, guide or affect the conduct of their own lives. The
peculiarity of this sort of self-disciplining behavior is that it is to not be understood as a
regulative order imposed from the exterior upon the individual. Quite contrarily, the excellence
dispositif can only be said to work the moment the respective goals and norms are active in the
‘interior’ of each and every business school teacher, that is, if the dispositif makes those people
judge themselves according to pre-ordained norms of quality. Miller and Rose (1990) have
lucidly explained how the excellence discourse capitalizes on ‘the psychological striving of
individuals for autonomy and creativity’ (p. 26). Thus it becomes obvious that external
manipulation and disciplinary measures on the part of the organization where the individual
works become obsolete, since people willingly submit to ‘the search of the firm for excellence
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and success’ (p. 26). Accordingly, governmentality through the excellence discourse is
imaginable as being grounded in a dynamic by reason of which people govern themselves
without discerning that they are subjected to a new ‘organic ideology’ (du Gay, 1996, p. 67). It is
further remarkable that this tendency towards leveraging the ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’ of
subjects in higher education is hardly seen as a cause for concern since excellence discourse
unmistakably stipulates that individuals must invest in and work upon themselves in order to
secure their own future. The theoretical merit of governmentality is that it enables one to perceive
quality exercises of whatever sort not only as ‘technical’ procedures or ideological rhetoric, but,
more fundamentally, as a political and economic project seeking to create a social reality that
appears as inevitable. On the basis of our investigation, then, we can decipher in higher education
a peculiar form of (performative) governmentality through which academics as well as business
schools at large are submitted to a set of rationalities which were previously uncommon in this
specific setting. Additionally, what is of crucial importance with respect to business school
education is that the dispositif of excellence, which represents the normative foundation of
competition, simultaneously stimulates and sustains practices that are primarily guided by student
satisfaction scores. As such, the excellence dispositif operates in such a way as to introduce,
sustain and perpetuate outstanding quality through practices which at once suggest and control
apposite behaviors on the part of academics. Bearing that in mind, I will show in the following
section how university (business school) staff, by means of student evaluation tests and the
introduction of a ‘customer culture’, are called upon to govern themselves so as to achieve better
feedback scores and, more generally, to warrant teaching excellence.
Keeping the Customer Satisfied
Given, as mentioned before, the ubiquitous practice of accreditations and media rankings of
business schools, it must be emphasized that both those regulatory bodies base their evaluations
on the criterion of student satisfaction. The assessment of business schools by ‘The Economist’,,
for example, shows that student satisfaction evaluations make up 8.75% of business school’s total
valuation (compared with, for instance, 10% for the potential to network and 20% for post-MBA
salary raises). To give another illustration, ‘Business Week’ in its rankings relies exclusively on
statements by recruiters and graduates whereas peer-evaluations of academics are no longer part
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of the ranking process. ‘Business Week’ talks of ‘customers’ and ‘customer satisfaction’ thus
inadvertently highlighting their ‘mantra [that] “the customer is always right”’ (Gruber et al.,
2001, p. 37).
34
As the Task Force of AACSB International has made clear in this context, ‘(a)s
market power in education has shifted from providers to consumers … the external focus of
rankings [of business magazines] has increased in importance over accreditation’ (2005, p. 9).
However, business school ranking weren’t always so closely aligned with the opinions of
graduates. Before the introduction of customer satisfaction measures,
35
quality assessments by the
‘Business Week’ were largely based on the general reputation of business schools and their staff.
The consequence that peer-reviews of academics’ research (Dill, 1992) had a far grater influence
upon the final rating of a respective business school. Yet, the power to define quality was
gradually turned over to the customer as it was sensed that thorough research does not necessarily
translate into good teaching (cf. Gruber et al., 2001). Obviously, such a shift in the ranking
practice of business newspapers has far-reaching implications for business school teaching. It
must be stressed in this context that the demand to treat students as customers is not limited to the
business school segment. Rather, the logic of ‘customer relationship management’ pervades the
discourse of education on a global scale. That said, ‘customer relationship management’
originated in the discipline of management where it was seen as a device for improving and
systematizing customer relations and, by implication, for creating value for the company. The
logic whereby the (business) student must be taken care of from the time of his/her entry (if not
indeed recruitment) until his/her completion of graduate or even post-graduate courses (which
might contain, inter alia, career planning/placement/life transition; cf. Bejou, 2005) clearly shows
that only a happy student will remain loyal to his/her alma mater. Höpfl (2005) reveals the
attitude of this new kind of business school student in the following statement: ‘(t)hey have been
captured by the promises of higher education, been transformed into customers and have come to
an entirely consumerist view of what education can offer them. They pay for their education so
they should be able to decide the curriculum, the scope of the subject, the content of their courses,
the quality of their lecturers’ (p. 62). Sustaining student loyalty, construed as good satisfaction
assessments, and, in the long run, post-graduate donations, has thus become a key factor for
34
There is a noteworthy exception to the customer focus in business schools as is shown by their selection
procedures. Since the rankings of, for instance, ‘Business Week’ rely on the competitive entry requirements of
business schools, this means that business schools are forced to ‘recruit more and more MBA students aggressively
so they can turn down more and more of those applicants. The rankings depend on applicants having high GMAT
scores, so class size has been shrinking in order to lop off students with low GMAT scores’ (Feldman, 2005, p. 217).
35
‘Business Week’, for instance, introduced customer satisfaction information into their ranking procedures in 1988.
95
warranting both institutions’ prestige and economic viability. It is thus imperative to recognize
that the ‘dilution’ and ‘trivialization’ of management education as currently identified by
Mintzberg and others (cf. below) is closely related to the introduction of student feedback
measures. To gain an understanding of how business schools have adopted student evaluations as
a cunning regulative measure and how they function as a ‘cultural technology’ for re-shaping
teaching practices and teachers’ subjectivities, we will now turn our attention to the disciplinary
momentum of so-called SETs (student evaluation test).
D) Student Evaluations
In the wake of the eulogy of excellence and quality, reflections on teaching have been prompted
as a means for holding staff responsible for their performance. Student evaluation tests or SETs
have thus become a device for demonstrating teaching excellence through a series of items which
have been deemed apposite for the task at hand. Though it has been pointed out that SETs are not
fully capable of embracing teaching quality (e.g. Saroyan & Amundsen, 2001), they have
nevertheless been popularized upon recognition that they are an effective means for controlling a
large population at relatively low costs. As we are reminded by Saroyan and Amundsen (2001),
‘(t)he facility with which they [student course ratings] are administered has probably contributed
greatly to their widespread use’ (p. 349). Following Foucault’s (1995) ‘Discipline and Punish’,
we can see that the logic that underlies SETs complies with the disciplinary techniques of the
state apparatus since ‘it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering
of human multiplicities’ (p. 218). Being applied, for instance, in 94% of Canadian universities
(Saroyan & Donald, 1994), it becomes blatantly obvious that teaching and its effectiveness is
most commonly investigated through SET procedures. As mentioned, the popularity of SETs can
be explained if we take into account that its disciplinary logic perfectly obeys to the
performativity principle of optimal input-output ratios. Given that SETs need to be simple,
efficient and cost-effective, we are reminded by Foucault (1995) that, in order to be judged as
legitimate, disciplines (which in Foucault (1995) are related to state power) need to obey to three
particular criteria: ‘firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost
(economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low
exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the
effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible,
without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this “economic” growth of power with the output
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of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in
short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system’ (pp. 218 –
219). It thus appears fair to say that SETs fulfill Foucault’s criteria in every respect, that is, in
terms of ‘low expenditure’, ‘little resistance’, ‘power’ and ‘docility’. SETs have thus been
recognized, first of all, as a means to assess teaching excellence and, second, as a constitutive
force for defining and for rendering amenable to control both teaching and teachers. That is, SETs
are not only an influential and easy-to-handle assessment tool but also a device for constructing a
particular image of teaching which henceforth governs the conduct of teaching in addition to
determining teachers’ subject positions. Accordingly, in as much as SETs are based on the
assumption that feedback to lecturers makes them ‘work harder and invest more time to prepare
their courses’ (Kluge & Lindstrom, 2005, p. 15), they are closely connected to the excellence
discourse which makes efficiency the ‘moral absolute’ (Fenwick, 2001) and performative skills
the currency of business school teachers. Again, this immediately reminds us of Foucault’s
(1991) treatise of governmentality where he posited that the key issue of governmentality was to
convert people to the logic of economics, that is, the best and most efficient way of managing
their lives.
Hence, having shown that both internal and external assessments of business schools
attach great importance to student satisfaction, it is further implied through the ‘clientocracy’
(Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 6) inherent to SETs that knowledge, to become
marketable, needs to have a certain entertainment value. SETs have been receptive to this demand
which manifests itself in teachers’ ‘enthusiasm’ and their ability ‘to stimulate students’ interest’
(Abrami, 1989; Murray et al., 1990). Arguably, in an era when students have been turned into
customers (Lauer, 2002), it has become increasingly difficult for business school staff to avoid
the temptation (or covenant) of making ‘student satisfaction’ the aim of their teaching by
providing their students, among other things, with easily comprehensible content (cf. below).
Sosteric et al. (1998) have indeed shown how student evaluations affect teaching, when they
point out that ‘(c)oncerned about survey feedback, and not wanting to create dissatisfied student-
consumers, some teachers (especially those not protected by tenure) shift away from critical
pedagogy and free experimentation towards classroom teaching that is low risk, more
conservative, and more entertaining’ (p. 12). Business education thus becomes ‘the consumption
of non-threatening entertainment, which, at its best, puts pedagogical control into the hands of the
students … and, at its worst, demands that offensive (dare we say challenging) academic material
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be expurgated from course lest it offend sensibilities. Merit, hard work, and actually getting
students to learn something become less important to staff than pleasing students’ (Sosteric,
Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 12). If the so-called ‘Dr. Fox Effect’, that is, the recognition that
teachers’ expressiveness and enthusiasm is positively correlated with student evaluations (e.g.
Marsh & Roche, 1997) is added to the equation, it becomes clear that teaching is not exclusively
about content (which would be a naïve view in any case) but also a matter of ‘performing arts’.
Mintzberg (2004) has deplored in this context that contemporary management education has been
transformed into an act of entertainment in which learning is replaced by laughter (cf. Feldman,
2005). It follows that business school teachers are subjected, or, more precisely, must subject
themselves, to a distinct act of emotional engineering: they are expected to calculate and shade
their behavior so as to splash enthusiasm in the classroom. Consequently, as one today finds a
vast number of university business schools which make the tenures, careers and salaries of their
staff contingent upon their performance, one can immediately see why emotional engagement and
enthusiasm are invoked as indicators for deciding whether university teachers are adequately
equipped for their jobs. Where emotional engagement, enthusiasm or passion has been
operationalized as ‘heightened engagement when communicating, selling ideas, selling courses in
the marketplace and even when disciplining staff and students’ (Hatcher, 2001, pp. 3 – 4), there
can be no question that these developments reflect the influx of entrepreneurial values into
education. In particular, the capacity to invest ‘emotional capital’ needs to be analyzed in the light
of entrepreneurialism and the widespread interest in enthusiasm, creativity and self-motivation
that it entails.
Both research evaluations and business school rankings have, then, spurred disciplinary
mechanisms: university staff is put under closer surveillance than their students. It appears that
the way SETs stress emotional labor can best be understood on the basis of Foucault’s (1988)
notion of ‘technologies of the self’. First of all though, we must realize that who we think we are
as business school academics is contingent on who or what we are ‘presumed, supposed, or
required to be in terms of the “official identities” (subject positions) constructed for us in
documents and policies – position descriptions, employment contracts, etc.’ (Middleton, 2004, p.
4). In other words, business school teachers who base their practices on the excellence discourse
simultaneously enter a process of constant ‘examination that places individuals in a relation of
surveillance’ and also ‘engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’
(Foucault, 1995, p. 189). Arguably, the ‘logic of excellence’ (du Gay, 1996) brings with it an
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image of an ever more competitive global market in which one can only survive on the basis of
an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Regarding this entrepreneurial spirit, it is its implied active
participation and proactiveness in particular which is pivotal for understanding why enthusiasm
has been rendered a central feature of excellent teaching. With reference to Thompson’s (1998)
book ‘Passion at Work’, Hatcher (2001) made clear that emotional communication has become
‘the right way to … achieve excellence at work’ (p. 11). The governance of business school’s
teaching faculty thus works through the subject’s emotional self-reengineering which is,
following Foucault (1988), a distinct ‘technology of the self’. Foucault claimed that it is through
the practices of modern life that subjects are produced. In opposition to the widely held view that
the modern subject objectifies and dominates the world through technology (Dreyfus, 2002),
Foucault argued that, conversely, it is the subject that is constituted by the technologies of power
and of the self (Foucault, 1988c). ‘Technologies of the self’ was, then, a term coined by Foucault
(1988) to denote the various ‘operations of their [subjects’] own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being that people make either by themselves or with the help of others in
order to transform themselves’ and to reach a ‘state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality’ (p. 18; quoted in Besley, 2005). The notion of ‘technology’ makes it clear that to
achieve quality or excellence in business schools it is not sufficient to reflect a general attitude.
Quality is something that requires constant work, and this work must be done at the level of the
individual academic. The notion of ‘technologies of the self’ thus suggests that quality implies
labor of the self where business school teachers are forced to commune with themselves, to
reflect on their practices, and to correct them according to the basic principles of rational conduct.
However, what is remarkable is that the technologies of the self that are activated through the
excellence discourse rely on a vocabulary which makes the government(ality) of the self less than
obvious. In other words, the excellence discourse operates upon the premise that those who are
able and willing to adopt an ‘enterprising spirit’ will become ‘virtuous, resourceful and
‘empowered’ human beings’ (du Gay, 1996, p. 68). It therefore becomes clear that the
government of business school teachers is not so much an act of overt ‘coercion’ or ‘domination’
(cf. Chapters 3 & 6) but rather one of subtle ‘seduction’ and ‘manipulation’ (cf. Rose, 1991). The
excellence discourse has thus accorded more importance to the individual academic and
specifically to their focus on themselves. As reflected through the technologies of the self that
arise from the excellence discourse, contemporary business schools are not simply concerned
with strengthening their centralized authority. Since quality is stressed through an intensification
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of academics’ relation with themselves (e.g. emotional self-engineering), power is practiced not
(only) through external authority but, rather, through the knowledge of the self and the
(corrective) practices that this entails. It follows that even though academics are called upon to
establish a particular truth regime for themselves and to act in accordance thereto, this regime is
not necessarily conceived of as forced self-disciplining measures. Since technologies of the self
more often than not are envisaged as a duty of the privileged, this regime is on the contrary often
seen as a means to ensure personal freedom. Given that Harrer (2005) convincingly argued that
the technologies of the self (which are employed in a self-conscious and overtly willing way)
operate by the same principles as the disciplinary mechanisms, one must concede that ‘both
phenomena are equally subordinate to a common species, which is “subjectivation” in general’
(p. 83).
36
Subjects of business schools or higher education more generally who adopt an
‘enterprising spirit’ thus willingly work on themselves without necessarily perceiving the
pressure of external control or domination. In accordance thereto, the ‘technologies of the self’
arising from the excellence discourse give rise to the development of a lifestyle which maximizes
the worth of people’s existence to themselves while on the other hand concealing that they
simultaneously maximize the performance of the respective business school in which they work.
As du Gay (1996) makes clear with reference to Kanter (1990), ‘(s)elf management’ is the key
here: ‘how to handle yourself to your own best advantage’ (p. 69). Putting this in a slightly
different way, we can see that, through their connection with excellence discourse, measurement
procedures such as SETs are transformed from ‘an irksome, intrusive and threatening technique
of management control’ into ‘a benevolent … technique to assist individuals to become their true
selves and to realise their aspirations’ (Grey, 1994, p. 489; quoted in Sosteric, Gismondi &
Ratkovic, 1998, p. 12).
Being reminded by Foucault (1988b) that ‘technologies of the self’ create ‘useful, docile,
practical citizens’ (cf. Besley, 2005, p. 77), it becomes clear that the capacity to invest ‘emotional
labor’ is not a neutral event but, rather, a process by which academics’ identities are shaped in
distinct ways. As Hatcher (2001) points out, ‘(t)his ethical comportment of how to be properly
emotional (indeed passionately so) is a form of collateral that has to be managed and drawn on
constantly’ (p. 4). In other words, SETs and the excellence dispositif of which they are an
intrinsic part prescribe that the academic conducts his/her ‘body management aesthetics’ in such
36
Based on this observation, Harrer (2005) concluded that ‘Foucault’s account of the “fabrication” of subjects
through disciplinary power carries over into his late work on ethical self-constitution’ (p. 84).
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ways as to constantly work on behalf of one’s communicative skills and entrepreneurial guise.
The rationale on which ‘emotional labor’ capitalizes forecasts that the enterprising activities of
the self establish a direct link with teaching excellence. Again, the idea of emotional
transformation is a central concept within the excellence dispositif. It is on account of the views
perpetuated by such management gurus such as Peters and Waterman (1982) that people have
come to believe that only constant self-monitoring, testing and transforming will warrant
organizational (and individual) success. As this elaboration has shown, the vocabulary of
entrepreneurship, accountability, enthusiasm, etc. has had a remarkable effect on the
understanding of the academic in recent years. It has been said, for instance, that the
‘entrepreneuring academic’ has rendered obsolete or illegitimate alternative sets of subject
positions in the context of higher education. Following Hatcher (2001), we hear that ‘(t)he
governance of academics through the mobilisation of their desire to succeed reduces their
Otherness as outsider voices of critique and distance. It makes the space of the academy more
ordered, as emotion itself falls within the bounds of order and where it becomes merely another
form of disposable capital’ (p. 18). Arguably, where passion and enthusiasm are subordinated to
the (economic) goals of the university (business school) and/or state powers, one could argue at
great length that such a view conveys just another expression of Lyotard’s (1984) performativity
principle. Since we will return to this issue in due course, I will first investigate, through the
recent criticism of MBA teaching by Mintzberg and others, how the dogma of ‘the customer is
always king’ ignites a peculiar instrumentalization and simplification of knowledge.
Fast-food Knowledge
To illustrate how the entertainment imperative feeds back into the ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault,
1984) produced by academics and to highlight that the clutches of ‘customer orientation’ not only
affect teaching but also research, it is helpful to turn our attention to a recent call for papers by
the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education. In their call for contributions on the
issue of entrepreneurship education the editors put forward an appeal for papers which express
their arguments in no more than 1000 words. The reason for this condensation given was that
brief contributions would allow students to save time and to cover more cases/topics on
entrepreneurship. As the editors made clear, ‘(w)e want to publish lecture articles that explain any
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key concept of entrepreneurship (narrowly or broadly defined) in a straightforward, clear and to
the point manner. Too often textbooks and review articles include too much obvious material and
drift off the core learning points. In this special issue of the IJEE we want to publish short case
studies that can be used by students after 10 minutes of reading.’ What is revealed herein is a
consumerist attitude at its worst. The reduction of meaning into ever smaller packages, not to say
truisms, ignores the fact that social reality is infinitely complex, and that to grasp the complexities
of (social) entrepreneurship it is necessary to engage with imaginative (and at times difficult)
theories and to conduct detailed empirical investigations. However, the expectations of MBA
students and the limits imposed by evaluation procedures both make it increasingly difficult to
teach courses which are based on the assumption that education requires thorough scholarship. To
resist the specifications and demands of the control mechanisms of the excellence discourse again
is a difficult, if not indeed impossible task. For instance, refusing to entertain students entails the
risk of receiving bad evaluations and, by extension, the risk of being disciplined through punitive
measures (e.g. salary cuts, lay-offs, etc.). Overtly calling into question the excellence discourse
by taking a critical stance against, for instance, the various assessment exercises is, according to
Sosteric, Gismondi and Ratkovic (1998) even more dangerous: ‘(d)are challenge efficiency
calculations and you risk being marginalized or branded a Luddite educator unconcerned with
quality, unaware of the new economic contingencies, or incapable of reason and common sense’
(p. 15).
It must have become clear by now that the combination of accreditation procedures,
newspaper rankings and the new conception of students as consumers with all the emotional
engineering of business school staff that this entails has given rise to a particular sort of
education. In particular, the exigency to ‘keep the customers satisfied’ and to indulge the student
with a cozy experience is often achieved by warranting that nobody flunks their course (which
would be a serious source of student uneasiness) and/or by giving students good grades (which
has been proven to correlate with course evaluations; cf. ‘grade leniency’: Marsh & Roche, 1997;
1999; 2000; Gillmore & Greenwald, 1999; McKeachie, 1999). The customer focus in business
school education has thus given prominence to some kind of Hollywood education, that is,
education based on slack entertainment which demands little effort from what can be termed its
spectators. As Höpfl (2005) has expressed this new type of education thus: ‘(e)verything is
straightforward, linear, in neat text boxes, supported by simple examples: an orderly world which
is easily digestible’ (p. 67). Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that critics of
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academic conduct have come to deplore that business schools constitute ‘a malign influence in
American life’ (O’Connor, 1999, p. 121; quoted in O’Connor, 2006). Hence, while the excellence
discourse in management education has lead to an ever increasing ‘streamlining’ of knowledge
and to a noticeable shift of learning objectives, it has been objected in particular that student
evaluations promote faculty competition which subsequently seems to distract all participants
from the learning mission of higher education (e.g. Martin, 1998). However, the debate which has
revolved around Mintzberg’s (2004) frontal attack on business school education has stimulated a
number of cunning food metaphors that illuminate the shortcomings of business education. These
food metaphors shall now be explored in some depth.
Whereas the criticism of MBA programs is not a new phenomenon in itself (cf. Leavitt,
1989; Lataif, 1992; Mintzberg, 1992; Mitroff & Churchman, 1992), Mintzberg’s (2004) book
‘Managers not MBAs’ in particular advances the view that management education has been
turned into ‘a buffet table from which managers and their organizations can choose – a little bit of
this and a little bit of that, or else a plate piled high with one or two dishes’ (Meister, 1994, p. 19;
quoted in Feldman, 2005, p. 219). The conceptualization of knowledge to which Mintzberg
objects in his work very closely resembles the fast-food kitchen. This resemblance is the result of
the ongoing instrumentalization, not to say McDonaldization (Hayes & Wynyard, 2002) of
knowledge at universities and other educational institutions. Feldman (2005) opined that
knowledge on the MBA-menu is far too often limited to an analytically served dish with an
emphasis on ‘fat-reduced’ facts, ‘snacks’ with best practices, ‘sweetened’ toolboxes and ‘instant’
recipes. At the end of the lesson, ‘takeaways’ are summarized to fill up each student’s lunch
boxes. As Feldman (2005) further contended, ‘MBA faculty members frequently hear from their
administrators [that] they have to “feed the beast”’ (p. 217). Given these allegations and taking
into account the entertainment imperative discussed above, it is conceivable that business schools
increasingly mistake teaching with ‘feeding’ in the sense that they provide their students with
fast-food-like knowledge, reductionist best-practices and unreflected and de-contextualized
analytical skills. These practices quite obviously encourage a certain passivity and inertness on
the part of the student as is shown, for example, in a type of teaching which acts on the
assumption that business students must sit back and ‘be mesmerized by the performance at the
front, better still, on the screen. From this they may walk away dazzled, only to wonder the next
day what that was all about’ (Mintzberg, 2004, p. 208). It must be emphasized that the idea of
knowledge as fast food is not just an ironic metaphor, as it also contains a political critique. After
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all, the so-called McDonaldization of higher education implies that universities and business
schools are controlled by the market and that teaching is more and more converted into a McJob
(Hayes & Wynyard, 2002). Given the negative future prospects foretold by Hayes and Wynyard,
it must at least be asked whether or not business schools are able to provide anything else than
superficial contact and education. In citing Vail (1989), Mintzberg (2004) made the point that
‘thinning out’ education through the ‘entertainment factor’ must be perceived as a threat to the
quality of business school teaching: ‘I would say that as we have sought to make our graphics
more “professional” and our “platform skills” more stylish, we have had to trivialize content. I
wonder if participants realize the shallowness of the content they’re getting in the midst of all this
glitzy instrumentation’ (Mintzberg, 2004, p. 208).
The food allegory makes it clear that the focus of learning in business schools has shifted
quite dramatically from imaginative production and critical reflection (Grey, 2004) or, to put it
bluntly, the consumption of commoditized knowledge. As mentioned above, such a
commoditization of knowledge as well as the implied simplification of learning has only become
possible by calling into question the value of what could be termed pure theory. The primary
focus of business school education has become the provision of ostensibly practical ‘tools’ which
the student can grasp ‘en passant’, that is, effortlessly and without going through the ordeal of
intellectual examination. It is against the backdrop of the new role of students as customers that
the decaying status and level of education becomes comprehensible. And while fast-food
knowledge might appear appealing at first, it unquestionably has negative effects in the long run,
that is, both teachers and students ultimately lose out. However, as mentioned before, taking into
account Lyotard’s deliberations on performativity, it becomes conceivable that knowledge within
the university is served ‘à la carte’ in order to improve students’ skills and chances on the job
market. Though there are those who point out that business schools are not particularly well
attuned to that task (e.g. Ghoshal, 2005), it is nonetheless fair to say that the transmission of
knowledge tries to comply with a logic whereby students must be enabled to acquire new
language games which in turn make possible an entitlement to competence and expertise (Pfeffer
& Fong, 2002). As briefly explained above, since knowledge is motivated by state power,
conventional didactics (of which critical reflection used to be an intrinsic feature) ceases to be of
relevance. Importantly, just roughly 30 years after Lyotard’s apocalyptic prediction, it appears
that the discourse of excellence has become so taken for granted that alternative ways of
university conduct have been largely abandoned. As Atkinson-Grosjean (1998), for instance,
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showed in her pilot study of a western Canadian university, there has been little if any objection
to the introduction of ever more sophisticated measurement procedures. Sosteric, Gismondi and
Ratkovic (1998) have come to the similar conclusion that ‘(c)omplicity in this performance
indicator exercise could be the Trojan Horse that imports new political ideologies into
universities through seemingly value-neutral techniques’ (p. 7). By and large, it seems naïve to
believe that business schools will in due time transpose their current rationale of effortless
consumption into one of creative deliberation. In times where Hollywood movies still dominate
the cinema scene not only in North America, but equally so in Europe and Asia (Kim, 2004) and
where the growth of fast-food chains is directly related to the affluence of particular societies (cf.
Euromonitor International, http://www.euromonitor.com), we have at least indirect indications
that the de-intellectualization of business school education will further proliferate thereby turning
students’ ‘consumerist attitude’ (Riesman, 1980) into a legitimate end of higher education.
Having illustrated the omnipresent straightjacket of the ‘customer orientation’ or
McDonaldization, we appear well advised to counteract the trend to dispense with theory and
intellectual inspection at the expense of slack entertainment. On the basis of Ghoshal’s (2005)
critique of prevailing management theories, I prefer to stress that good teaching is probably less a
question of whether or not theory is present, but rather whether or not the right kinds of theories
are used in teaching. Before turning to the second part of this investigation where the question of
what constitutes ‘good theories’ and how they could stimulate our understanding of social
entrepreneurship will be explored, I will first show what impact the entrepreneurial conduct of
business schools and their competitive mindset has for social entrepreneurship courses.
The Enterprising Academic and the Emergence of Social Entrepreneurship Courses
Following Lyotard’s (1984) ‘Postmodern Condition’ it has been shown above that knowledge in
post-industrial societies is increasingly submitted to the competitive ambitions of nation states.
Besides that, it is imperative to recognize that business schools also see their education curricula
as a means to increase their own competitive power. Taking into account, for instance, that
business schools are increasingly submitted to a proliferating set of controls where both teaching
and research are judged against their performance and where both positions and courses are
created or discontinued according to the return they generate (Feldman, 2005), it is revealed that
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knowledge needs to be produced for the purpose of increasing business schools’ competitive
edge. Since the rhetoric of ‘choice’ has come to the fore in discourses of contemporary education,
students are now seen as rational consumers who seek out ‘the best value for their educational
dollar’ (Roberts, 1998, p. 7). By the same token, educational institutions must perform and
compete to the maximum extent possible in order to sustain their viability. The exigency to
perform and compete is thus an immanent feature of entrepreneurship discourse which not only
pervades the conduct of bureaucratic leaders (e.g. du Gay, 2004) but also has a strong impact on
educational institutions world-wide (e.g. Davies, 1997). In other words, the argument of global
competition is used in entrepreneurship discourse as a reason for re-shaping educators in such a
way as to tackle their work tasks in the same way business managers are said to approach their
responsibilities and challenges. It is not surprising that the excellence dispositif demands that
subjects of higher education operate entrepreneurially in order to sell ‘themselves and their
programmes effectively in order to keep enrolments and revenues at healthy levels’ (Roberts,
1998, p. 7). Also entailed in the entrepreneurial code of conduct is that educators must produce
innovative teaching approaches, both in terms of style and content. In her treatise of the
‘enterprising academic’, Hatcher (2001) argued that the influx of entrepreneurial premises makes
educational institutions ‘look more like corporations and enterprises than collegia and
bureaucracies’ (p. 2). While it has been mentioned that the demands of the entrepreneurial
imperative are manifold, it follows from Hatcher’s insightful study that the quintessential factor
for survival, for business schools as well as for the individuals working therein, is the capacity to
innovate. As Hatcher (2001) contended, ‘(t)he educator has thus become a new player in selling
his services, such as … innovative vocational courses, to his clients’ (p. 5). Again, the
governance technique of the excellence dispositif seeks to create a sort of academic who is at the
same time loyal and tractable and an enterprising innovator who aspires to continuously reinvent
him/herself and the environment to benefit his/her business school. Regarding the style of
teaching, I have already pointed out that the enterprising academic is expected to have teaching
skills which are able to enthuse and entertain the student so as to elicit good course evaluations
and, most importantly, to ensure that the accolade of teaching excellence is granted to the
business school as a whole. Hence, while the excellence dispositif prescribes innovative
behaviors, and, consequently, provides academics with an entrepreneurial identity, the act of
embracing entrepreneurship discourse not only affects the style of teaching but also its very
content. Whereas we have recognized, particularly through the discussion of Mintzberg
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‘Managers, not MBAs’, that the content of business school teaching is intellectually condensed in
order to provide students with easily digestible ‘fast food’ knowledge, it must be emphasized that
innovation also finds expression through the establishment of new courses. In responding to the
need to innovate, business school teachers thus increasingly try to complement their curricula
with utterly new, that is, trendy material. Irrespective of their specific content, courses on social
entrepreneurship are first and foremost conceivable as distinguishing signs or, to use a business
jargon expression, ‘unique selling propositions’ of business schools. It follows that those courses
always operate on the basis of business schools’ superordinate objectives, that is, performativity.
Arguably, academic bodies’ ceaseless efforts to behave entrepreneurially and hence to constantly
innovate education curricula shows that the function of social entrepreneurship courses is
ultimately to oil business schools’ ‘capitalist machine’ (Warren, 2005, p. 79). Since courses in
finance, accounting, marketing and human resource management form the core of business
education around the globe, they are quite obviously not suitable criteria for distinguishing
business schools from each other. What is needed to attract the attention of prospective business
students are thus courses which radiate the kind of passion represented by fashion (Abrahamson,
1996; Birnbaum, 2000). Fads and fashions, as we are told by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996),
are important means for implementing and spreading innovations in organizations or at least for
eliciting the impression that ‘something is going on’. Additionally, ‘funky business jargon’
(Webster, 2002), that is, language games which are inspired by the latest management fashion, is
a forceful shorthand for showing that one thrives on cutting-edge principles and concepts. As
O’Connor (2006) rightly contended with respect to social entrepreneurship, it is noticeable that
the matter has been treated predominantly in ‘elite business schools’ which are most responsive
to the fact that they need to ‘keep up with the latest trends’.
While we shall investigate more thoroughly in the second part of this chapter whether or
not social entrepreneurship trades on the rhetorical force of management fashions, it is worth
pointing out at the outset that courses on social entrepreneurship in the context of business school
education have mushroomed within the last decade (Bornstein, 2004; O’Connor, 2006; Steyaert
& Hjorth, 2006). More often than not, universities and business schools have cooperated with
external partners such as philanthropists, business ventures and others which have proven
indispensable for the set-up of these courses. O’Connor (2006) has revealed in this context that
business schools have received remarkable material support from external sources which
supported them in propping up their public reputation. To illustrate these developments,
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Bornstein (2004) has shown how Leslie Crutchfield from Harvard Business School launched the
Ashoka
37
Accelerator for Social Entrepreneurship which aspired to ‘help fellows scale up their
organizations and achieve major impact’ (p. 257). Another example of a successful joint venture
put forward by Bornstein is the Center of Social Entrepreneurship in Sao Paulo which was set up
by a Brazilian sociologist, Ashoka and the Sao Paulo office of McKinsey & Company. Most
importantly, while external support has been conceived of as a prerequisite for establishing social
entrepreneurship courses or centers,
38
it has been revealed that once such courses have been put
into place they tend to become a self-reinforcing agent for business schools’ reputation
(O’Connor, 2006). As a result, the aspect which most business schools in their case studies of
teaching have focused on are courses in social entrepreneurship that represent initiatives aimed at
alleviating social problems in the community (Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2004; cf. also part two
of this chapter). However, if the issues of ‘profitability’ and ‘innovation’ is taken into account,
the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in MBA programs needs to be understood as a
means for differentiation and for imposing a competitive advantage. At the forefront of the ‘social
entrepreneurship movement’ are those business schools which have traditionally been viewed as
being in the vanguard of global competition. Even a cursory glance at the MBA landscape reveals
that social entrepreneurship courses were first introduced by US Ivy League business schools
such as Fuqua (Duke), Harvard Business School, Haas School of Business (Berkeley), Columbia
Business School, Stanford, and the Stern School of Business (New York). More recently, such
courses have also become part of the teaching programs of top-class business schools in Europe
(e.g. London Business School; Said Business School, Oxford; Judge Business School,
Cambridge; IESE Business School, Barcelona and Madrid). What is revealed, quite
paradoxically, is that while business schools are forced to create ‘unique selling propositions’ in
order to set themselves apart from their competitors, the definitions of social entrepreneurship
upon which their programs operate are pretty similar. It is noticeable in this connection that the
meaning of social entrepreneurship largely derives from the adherence to a small number of
academic texts. This said, it is the work of Gregory Dees (e.g. 1998; 1998b; 2001 with Emerson
& Economy) in particular which has been well received both inside (e.g. Stanford Graduate
School of Business, Fuqua, Haas School of Business; London Business School; Columbia
37
A social entrepreneurship advocacy organization founded by former McKinsey consultant Bill Drayton.
38
It is symptomatic that many social entrepreneurship centers hosted at prestigious business schools either receive
funding from business corporations or are even run in cooperation with external business stakeholders.
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Business School) and outside (e.g. Ashoka Foundation, Changemakers, Future Shifters, Social
Edge) the context of business school education. Therefore, while the semantic space occupied by
the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ seems to be somewhat limited (cf. below), it is conceivable that
its collocations are strengthened through institutional arrangements between education programs
at universities or university-affiliated institutes and business schools, non-profit organizations,
philanthropies and foundations as well as traditional profit enterprises. On the basis of programs
and courses for practitioners such as information platforms (e.g. ‘A World Connected’ at George
Mason University) and scholarship competitions (e.g. Global Social Entrepreneurship
Competition at the University of Washington Business School or National Social Venture
Competition, a cooperation between the University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of
Business, Columbia Business School, and the Goldman Sachs Foundation) a dispositif (cf. above)
is put in place which then shapes, channels and controls the articulation of social entrepreneurship
in certain ways. As O’Connor (2006) cogently argued in her investigation of the emergence of
social entrepreneurship, there have been, particularly in the Silicon Valley, networks of venture
capitalists, philanthropists and for-profit enterprises which have paved the way for seeing that
social issues must be addressed through economic initiatives. Bearing in mind the network of
institutions and scholars that are responsible for the creation of the image of social
entrepreneurship, it is hardly surprising that the matter has first and foremost been conceptualized
through the lens of business. It is evident that the heterogeneity of the elements of the dispositif
makes it impossible for the formulation of social entrepreneurship to occur in a harmonious,
univocal concert. Far from being monolithic and uniform, the discourses produced and
disseminated by the dispositif will inevitably be characterized by variation. Nevertheless, the
dispositif of excellence operates so as to ‘condense’ social entrepreneurship into an essentially
economic and/or heroic agent. This further implies that, despite all odds, the dispositif works on
behalf of an identifiable project, namely that of leveraging lingering national economies or nation
states. Before highlighting the particular meaning(s) imposed on social entrepreneurship through
business school teaching, we must take into consideration that business school-affiliated
institutions have a remarkable influence on the imagery produced in and disseminated through
business schools. For instance, Harvard has received a USD 10 million donation from the
Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation to fund students who adopt a businesslike approach to social
science disciplines (cf. O’Connor, 2006). In addition, the ever mounting number of social venture
competitions are mostly initiated through co-operations between business schools on the one
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hand and venture capitalists, investment banks or for-profit enterprises on the other. These
examples clearly show that the interpretation of social entrepreneurship constitutes a collective
endeavor which brings together a plethora of interests and motives. Despite the diversity of
stakeholders involved in the expression of social entrepreneurship, it will be shown in the next
section that the most prominent outlook produced by the dispositif is managerial in nature. In the
light of the impact of business and management on social entrepreneurship as well as the
mentioned narrowness which characterizes it, I would like to stress some of the most popular
interpretations of the subject as well as the most conspicuous omissions in order to then discuss
the state of current business school education. It must be recognized that the signification of
social entrepreneurship through business school teaching can be fully understood only if one
actively participated in the various courses offered. As such a participatory approach was beyond
the limits of the present investigation, I will base my argument on claims of academic scholars
who have a proven record in both teaching and research (e.g. Gregory Dees who is currently a
recognized teacher at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a former teacher/(adjunct)
professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School and
Yale School of Management). One might object that this strategy operates purely by induction:
one part of the ‘picture’ is investigated, and the observations are then elevated to the status of a
general appraisal. However, given that the available academic literature on social
entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2) is largely based on ‘anecdotal evidence or case studies’ (Mair &
Marti, 2006), it seems likely that scholars who publish on social entrepreneurship also use their
insights and theoretical assumptions in their teaching. To complement this type of source, the
second analytic focus will be on practitioner guidebooks on social entrepreneurship (e.g. Dees,
Emerson & Economy, 2001; 2002
39
; Bornstein, 2004) which are equally considered as sources of
‘inspiration’ for business students. Both kinds of textual material are ultimately conceived as
worthwhile venues for (indirectly) tackling the meaning of social entrepreneurship as currently
spread in and through business school education. Taking the ‘trendsetters’ of social
entrepreneurship as our point of departure, we shall use these insights to claim that the entire
39
It is noteworthy that both books by Dees, Emerson and Economy are deployed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation to further ‘encourage entrepreneurship across America and improve the education of children and youth’
(cf. http://www.kauffman.org/). This provides further evidence how publications of business scholars contribute to
the signification of social entrepreneurship not only within the relatively narrow boundaries of the academe but
equally get to effectuate the understanding of the matter on a broader societal scale.
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issue is presented in an all too smooth and antiseptic manner, and, secondly, that it therefore
makes sense to complexify the given legacy of social entrepreneurship teaching.
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PART II
Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse
which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable
one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the
techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those
who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1984, p. 73)
The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship
Gregory Dees’ (1998) article ‘The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship’ was most to the point
and unapologetic in codifying the particularities of social entrepreneurship. Given that Dees’
article has been popularized far beyond the boundaries of business schools gives some indication
that such a definitional and clarifying endeavor was greatly welcomed by both the scientific and
practitioner community. Dees can thus be seen as a one of the rare ‘winners’ in the performativity
game as he was, following Lyotard (1984), able to capitalize on a new language game. Coaldrake
(2000) has concluded in this connection that entrepreneurial behaviors of academics, which are
reflected in Dees’ introduction of the neologism ‘social entrepreneurship’, are increasingly
rewarded by universities with ‘status, resources as well as financial benefits’ (cf. Hatcher, 2001,
p. 17). However, as has been shown above the increased competition between business schools
and the ever rising importance to keep MBA students satisfied has meant that business schools
have spearheaded (and thereby confined) the meaning of social entrepreneurship in a manner
which commoditized the issue so as to render social entrepreneurship teachable as part of
(elective) MBA courses (Robinson & Lo, 2005). Evidently, the demand to choose types of
knowledge that lend themselves to some kind of performance (be it through practical applications
or mere entertainment) has influenced the representation of our subject matter. Accordingly, it
seems important to throw some light on the sort of understanding generated at university business
schools. In trying to do so, it becomes immediately apparent (from publications by business
school scholars) that social entrepreneurship is typically conceived as a unanimously positive
moral and economic force in contemporary societies (cf. also Chapters 2 & 7). As such, it is seen
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capable of providing answers to the issue of the ever accelerating speed of human conduct as well
as the innovativeness required for successful problem solving (du Gay, 2004). Additionally, most
images of social entrepreneurship presented in academic publications hinge on the (societal
and/or economic) role of the individual social entrepreneur and his (sic) super-natural abilities
and perseverance, in bringing about social innovation, change and progress. While these
deliberations only paint a very provisional picture of social entrepreneurship, I will elaborate in
more detail the most pervasive, if not peculiar, representations of social entrepreneurship that
come to the fore in conjunction with business school education. This examination will then serve
as the starting point for rethinking MBA curricula for social entrepreneurship.
A) Business Primacy
Arguably, it would be somewhat naïve to expect that MBA courses in social entrepreneurship
defied their own intellectual foundations. In other words, it is hardly surprising that business
scholars present social entrepreneurship under the guise of social marketing, strategic human
resource management, organizational learning and leadership (cf. Christie & Honig, 2006). By
implication, social entrepreneurship as it is currently depicted in business schools appears
untouchable and hyperbolically heroic as it is envisioned against the backdrop of the
commonsense ideal of best-business practice. However, the various images endorse a particular
genre (Czarniawska, 1999) which makes social enterprises and social entrepreneurs appear in a
glamorous light (cf. Bornstein, 2004; Roberts & Woods, 2005). Or, as O’Connor (2006)
concluded, social entrepreneurship ‘is rhetorically dramatic and ideologically expansive.’ This
means that whereas the glamorous portrayal of social entrepreneurship reveals parallels with the
literature on entrepreneurship (e.g. Nicholson & Anderson, 2005; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006), it
must be emphasized that the imagery of social entrepreneurship also shows clear indications of
management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996). As such, we shall take a look at the diffusion of
management, or managerial ideas (Enteman, 1993) with respect to social entrepreneurship in
order to judge whether the various business school truisms qualify as fashions and, where this is
the case, investigate how the utter persuasiveness of those ideas works.
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Productivized
To start with, having edited the two compilations ‘Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social
Entrepreneurs’ (2001) and ‘Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs: Enhancing the Performance
of Your Enterprising Nonprofit’ (2002), Dees, Emerson and Economy have provided two
guidebooks both of which aspire to equip nonprofit practitioners with knowledge that enables
them to become more effective as social entrepreneurs. The authors leave no doubt that the
success of social entrepreneurship is contingent on the application of sound business practices.
Presenting numerous chapters on subjects such as ‘competitive strategy’, ‘mission’, ‘human
resource management’, ‘investor-relations’, ‘innovation’, and ‘customer relationship
management’, etc. it becomes clear that the two books are conceived as distinct toolkits which
thrive on state-of-the-art management concepts. For instance, as we are told by Dees and
colleagues, ‘
ow it is time for social sector leaders to use every tool [from the business
community] available to them and to apply those tools to further the organization’s mission, serve
its customers, and build community’ (2002, p. ix). Despite the fact that the authors acknowledge
that the profit sector might equally profit from insights from the social sector, the jargon used in
the above utterances, e.g. ‘mission’, ‘customers, ‘leaders’ or ‘tools’, makes it unmistakably clear
that their writing is based on the premise that it is high time to transform the logic of the social
sector in such way as to make it more ‘managerial’. The notion ‘productivized’ being used in the
above heading thus underscores that the idea of social entrepreneurship is sold as a commodity to
be purchased in the market. Looked at from this vantage point, it becomes even more evident that
the concept of social entrepreneurship is transformed from a more or less concrete idea into a set
of tools which is transmittable to a wider audience. Social entrepreneurship in Dees, Emerson and
Economy’s account emerges as a management fashion since it is turned into a product, that is,
commoditized, for reasons of economic success (Roberts, 1998). Toolkits on social
entrepreneurship provided online by consultancies such as the Authenticity Consulting LLC, the
Nonprofit Resource Center (http://oncampus.richmond.edu/connect/
nonprofit/finance/finance-soc_entrep.html) or social entrepreneurship advocacies such as Ashoka
objectify and generalize the way in which social entrepreneurship is to be conducted. Taking the
latter case, Ashoka, whose objective is ‘(1) to identify the general patterns that explained how
hundreds of fellows had succeeded in their fields, (2) select from those patters the few that, once
understood, could open up major new avenues for those working in the same fields; and (3)
spread those principles across the fellowship and the field’s practitioners’ (Bornstein, 2004, p.
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258), we can see that the organization aspires to productivize its knowledge and to provide its
‘customers’ with a set of easily comprehensible routines and suggestions that appear applicable to
any type of organizational context.
Progressive
Within its ‘emplotment’ (Polkinghorne, 1991) in discourse by instructors such as Dees and
colleagues, social entrepreneurship as business practice is geared towards a redemption of the
instable economic and social situation of local communities as well as entire nation states and
their economies. In other words, social entrepreneurship within the account of Dees et al. is part
of a ‘progressive narrative’ (Gergen & Gergen, 1988) where a particular evaluative position is
taken to improve over the course of the plot. Given that people follow the actions and initiatives
prescribed in textbooks and manuals of social entrepreneurs, those publications promise that,
despite ordeals and upcoming obstacles (Dees and Economy (2001), social entrepreneurs
‘implement their ventures with total commitment. They seldom give up, even when confronted by
obstacles that seem insurmountable’; p. 6). The message conveyed in those textbook is that, as
long as one follows the code of social entrepreneurship, it is possible to re-establish a state of
equilibrium. This romanticism is equally popular with respect to entrepreneurship discourse
(Gordon, 1991) where it is said that only by acquiring key management capacities will
entrepreneurs ever be able to solve their problems. Hence, despite its complexity,
entrepreneurship discourse postulates that the ‘flabbiness’ of the third sector can be overcome
provided that traditional third-sector practices are exchanged or at least supplemented with those
of ‘business excellence’. Toolkits such as those by Dees and colleagues thus thrive on
management ideas which herald (social and economic) betterment by means of juxtaposing the
bad, that is, obsolete set of behaviors with the good, that is, the managerial techniques which give
way to improvement for a better future.
Dramatized
As with entrepreneurship discourse (du Gay, 1996), the necessity for a social entrepreneurial
reorganization of communities and the third sector is made feasible by outlining momentous
changes that disrupt and de-legitimate everything which does not meet the ultimate criterion of
profitability. Listening, for instance, to Dees and Economy (2001) we are taught that ‘(t)he social
sector has undergone massive change over the past several decades. Gone are the days of
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charitable relief – cash handouts and subsidies that do more to create dependencies in program
participants than to prepare them to take in the world themselves. Gone, too, are the days of easy
money from government and foundation grants, for which results and accountability were rarely
required or reinforced … Together, these trends are creating major changes in how societies
around the world are dealing with providing public goods and services. They are leading to … a
call for more entrepreneurial spirit in the social sector’ (pp. 12 – 13). On the basis of Dees and
Economy’s apocalyptic vision, it becomes conceivable that the popularity of fashionable outlines
of social entrepreneurship are to a large extent based on two dramaturgical operations: first, they
tend to dramatize the negative consequences entailed by non-conformance; second, they
exaggerate the positive effects of the proposed best-management practices.
Theorized
The observations on dramatization fit in well with du Gay’s (1996) elaboration of the logic of
entrepreneurship discourse. Du Gay showed how an epochalist scheme is invoked to render
problematic everything that does not contain mandatory principles of innovation and excellence.
By extension, credence is given to social entrepreneurship toolkits by means of basing the
suggested best-practices on the equation ‘business competence = success’. Two root assumptions
for the foundations of the books by Dees et al. are particularly noteworthy. First, to become
successful all ‘nonprofit leaders need to be entrepreneurs’ (Dees & Economy, 2001, p. 1); second,
a sound entrepreneur must be ‘innovative, opportunity-oriented, resourceful, value-creating’ (p.
4). This means that the pervasiveness of this claim derives from the fact that hinges on
‘universalistic ideas of a rationalistic sort’ (Meyer, 1996, p. 247). In the toolkits edited by Dees
and colleagues (2001; 2002), the various authors highlight the importance of the precise
‘definition of the mission’, the implementation of ‘performance measures’ and the writing of
‘business plans’. In addition, they also emphasize the significance of the calculation of ‘risks’ and
the ‘mastering of innovation’. The suggestions of Dees et al. are therefore based on the
assumption that only by meticulously planning and accounting for one’s social entrepreneurial
endeavor will successes become feasible. Knowledge of social entrepreneurship is thereby
theorized: it is conceptualized as a universal means to a universal problem (Stensaker, 2005).
Though to be marketable it is not necessary for the offered suggestions to be very advanced
(which they rarely are), it is a prerequisite of management fashions that they can be abstracted
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(i.e. theorized) from practice, and, by implication, generalized irrespective of the size, culture,
technology, sector, etc. (cf. Meyer, 1996) of the particular social enterprise.
Socially Authorized
Knowledge which is socially authorized is lent weight either by virtue of powerful external
stakeholders or by means of persuasive illustrations through, for instance, case studies.
Concerning the former, it has already been explained how social entrepreneurship is supported
both conceptually and financially by institutions that are external to the realm of business schools.
Given this state of affairs, it is noticeable that the corporate world which has links with
universities and business schools as well as the philanthropies cooperating with them are first and
foremost interested in ‘hands-on approaches’ which present social entrepreneurship in the form of
tangible knowledge. Toolkits and best-practice approaches are both in line with this objective as
they pretend to offer a set of solutions to identified problems. As regards the social authorization
through persuasive illustrations we can see that research conducted at business schools often
makes reference to celebrated ‘cases’ (cf. Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2005; Mair & Marti, 2006).
With respect to prominent practitioners’ books, there is David Bornstein’s (2004) ‘How to
Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas’ which presents the success
stories of social entrepreneurs all around the globe. What is conspicuous is that Bornstein’s book
only provides stories of utterly successful initiatives. And though not all his illustrations enjoy
world-wide recognition he nevertheless underscores his argument through people such as Bill
Drayton who is the founder of the well-known Ashoka Foundation which today campaigns for
the promotion of social entrepreneurship on a global scale. Although there is no shortage of
problems and obstacles to social entrepreneurs in those kinds of narratives, those stories require a
plot that radiates an aura of success in order to become socially authorized. It is therefore hardly
surprising that Bornstein’s (1996) eulogy of the Grameen bank (Bangladesh) has been appraised
by both academics and practitioners as it has provided a scheme of social entrepreneurship which,
until today, has successfully been launched in 1,619 branches in 57,100 villages in Bangladesh
with a total staff of 14,822 employees. Indeed, these are the kinds of stories which accelerate the
reader’s pulse while at the same time almost ruling out the possibility that other social enterprises
might be less successful.
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Individualized
Portrayals of social entrepreneurship not only tend to tell success-stories but they have an equally
strong tendency to present those successes as the result of individual efforts. This individualized
mode of arguing, following Hjorth and Bjerke (2006), can be seen as a result of the strong
emphasis on individualism in American culture (cf. Chapter 2). It is therefore hardly surprising
that we find fewer articles by non-US academics that limit the focus of social entrepreneurship to
the individual social entrepreneur. However, as Roling (2002) made clear in his outline of the
entrepreneurship pedigree of social entrepreneurs, ‘not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur,
but research shows that individuals who have certain attitudes and behaviors … have the best
chance of success as entrepreneurs’ (p. 301). Roling explained which abilities and capacities
make a successful social entrepreneur (e.g. commitment and determination, leadership,
opportunity obsession, tolerance of risk, self-reliance). However, it must be stressed that only by
visualizing social entrepreneurship as an attractive opportunity for the individual do those
entrepreneurial characteristics gain value and appeal. Dees and Economy (2001) contended that
‘any leader in the nonprofit sector knows [that] the job of running a nonprofit has become
increasingly difficult’ (p. 1). Therefore, an entrepreneurial propensity becomes not only appealing
but downright mandatory. In other words, once one has identified a context that makes the
identified entrepreneurial attributes requisite, not to say life-sustaining, for organizations, it
becomes clear why these attributes are deemed pivotal at the level of the single person as well.
It will be the aim of the following chapter to investigate in depth the shortcomings and
ramifications of the images produced and perpetuated by academic writings. Nevertheless, we
must not ignore even at this point that conceiving social entrepreneurship by means of
fashionable management ideas and, by implication, as an affair solely concerned with sound
business practice does not only turn a blind eye to any value in traditional third-sector
organizations but also subverts our sense of community, citizenship and the welfare state (cf.
Levitas, 2000). As those concepts are increasingly replaced by a managerial terminology
involving expressions such as ‘contractualization of society’ (Peters, 2001), ‘user charges’ or
‘prudentialism’ (O’Malley, 1996), it can be argued that the downside of managerial fads and
fashions in business education is that they stimulate the adoption of concepts and practices which
may well be inappropriate and harmful with respect to the objective of social entrepreneurship. In
the ensuing paragraph, we will therefore argue that current rationales of social entrepreneurship
produced in the context of business school education not only eschew its political ramifications
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but, more importantly, ignore that social entrepreneurship is probably first and foremost to be
understood as the distinct creation of New Labor (or Third Way) and neo-liberal politics in
western societies.
B) Ignoring Politics
The analysis of representations of entrepreneurship in the media by Nicholson and Alistair (2005)
shows some bias in as much as it portrays the actors of entrepreneurship as ‘dynamic wolfish
charmers’, ‘supernatural gurus’, ‘successful skyrockets’ or ‘corrupters’. Nevertheless, it is the
signification of entrepreneurship as ‘community saviors’ in particular which finds expression in
business school’s portrayal of social entrepreneurship. The historical shift towards performativity
has promoted social entrepreneurship as a hybrid between profit and non-profit practices and
values (e.g. Social Enterprise Alliance; cf. http://www.se-alliance.org). However, while social
enterprises are, somewhat romantically, seen as panaceas for social progress (cf. Chapters 2 & 7),
it must be pointed out that a comparable function used to be granted to non-profit (NPOs) or non-
governmental organizations (NGOs; cf. Chapter 3). Yet, while those organizations have been
perceived as an important regulative body at the interface between politics and business, it is
social enterprises in particular that are seen as operating beyond the ‘straitjacket of politics’. In
contrast to NGOs or NPOs (both of which have been highly political, or politicized, subjects),
social entrepreneurship seems well suited to present competition and the free market as a natural
fact while on the other hand, though perfunctorily, demanding standards of moral conduct. Social
entrepreneurship, being taught at business schools as genuine business principles, has thus
created an image of a seemingly autonomous, de-politicized force in contemporary (western)
societies. The omission of social entrepreneurship’s political trajectory and contingency is
comprehensible once we take into account that politics does not comply, or only partially
complies, with the performativity principle. The image underlying social entrepreneurship in the
eyes of business scholars must thus be recognized in its ability to exclude aspects – of which
politics is just one – that do not subscribe to the principles of performativity. I would like to make
the point that the view of business scholars having ‘depoliticized’ social entrepreneurship is
tenable only if we turn a blind eye to particular political debates (which have taken place
foremost in the UK). To start with, Bornstein (2004) presented a general argument to the effect
that ‘(t)here may be few individuals in the twentieth century who played a greater role
determining the course of European politics’ (p. 94). Restricting ourselves to a European
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perspective, we shall now turn our attention to New Labour’s Third Way politics in Britain, in
order to show that, in contrast to business school teaching and research, social entrepreneurship is
invariably linked to public and political discourse. On the face of it, Third Way thinkers since the
late 1990s have delineated new ways for regenerating society. Casciani (2003) described those
programs as being rather simple: ‘(s)ociety has problems. Neither government nor business had
shown they could fix them. Perhaps it was time to invest in people at the coalface.’ Irrespective of
Casciani’s vitriolic statement, it is worth noting that social entrepreneurship has been central to
New Labour politics in distinguishing it from ideas of the New Right and Old Labour (Levitas,
2000). For instance, turning to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, we get to hear that ‘the renewal
of community is the answer to the challenges of a changing world’ (Blair, 2000). As Levitas
(2000) has further made clear, the notion of ‘community’ has been pivotal in the ‘master plan’ of
New Labour since it introduced the vocabulary of social relationship, social interaction and
solidarity which was henceforth used as the solution vis-à-vis the perceived threats of the new
world order. Whereas the New Right was premised on neo-conservatism which took the state as
its central regulative authority, New Labour tended to naturalize the phenomenon of globalization
so as to argue for the importance of community action. As becomes clear through a cursory
glance at New Labour politics, social entrepreneurship is used as an irredeemable rhetorical
element for the outline of a new state order. In particular, the New Right seemed to advocate both
a strong state and the disciplinary effect of economic coercion, while Old Labour hinged on
concepts of state intervention, social democracy or public ownership. In contrast, Blair’s New
Labour distanced itself from both these views by stressing the importance of shared
responsibility. Blair (1995) was quoted in the British magazine ‘Guardian’ as saying that
‘(p)eople don’t want an overbearing state. But they do not want to live in a social vacuum either.
It is in the search for this different, reconstructed, relationship between individual and society that
ideas about “community” are to be found. “Community” implies a recognition of interdependence
but not overweening government power. It accepts that we are better able to meet the forces of
change and insecurity through working together.’ While having deliberately chosen an extract
from Blair’s speech that does not explicitly touch on the issue of social entrepreneurship, his
deliberations on ‘community’ make utterly clear that he envisions a new relationship between the
private realm and the state whereby he sees ‘community’ as an alternative to both ‘the
untrammeled free market (of neo-liberalism) and the strong state (of social democracy)’ (Levitas,
2000, p. 191). Blair (2004) thus gives social entrepreneurship a specific position within his
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community vision which he explicitly advocated at a Labour Party conference: ‘(a)nd we who
understand, that freedom for the individual, for every individual, whatever their starting point in
life, is best achieved through a just society and a strong community. In an opportunity society, as
opposed to the old welfare state, government does not dictate; it empowers. It makes the
individual – patient, parent, law-abiding citizen, job-seeker – the driver of the system, not the
state. It sets free the huge talent of our public servants and social entrepreneurs whose ability is
often thwarted by outdated rules and government bureaucracy. It changes how government
works, to open up the means of delivery to every resource, public, private and voluntary, that can
deliver opportunity based on need not wealth.’ It becomes obvious through the above claim by
Blair that his Third Way politics puts great emphasis on the ‘third sector’ and (individual) social
entrepreneurs who are envisioned as responsible citizens that carry out duties which were
formerly incumbent upon the state. Blair’s Third Way thus rejects the profuse individualism as
advocated by the New Right and replaces it with the notion of ‘responsibility’ (Ahmad &
Browsing, 2003). ‘Responsibility’, which is clearly analyzed in this political context in the work
of du Gay (1996), is invoked in Third Way politics to create ‘communities in which individuals
are given opportunities but accept their obligations … and where we understand that … the well
developed individual, capable of playing a strong and vibrant part in society, is likely to arise best
from a strong and vibrant community’ (Blair, 1994). Within this view, responsibility is relocated
from the state to the individual citizen, whereas social enterprises are seen as adopting roles
formerly occupied by the (welfare) state. Since it will be discussed in the next chapter that the
‘de-responsibilizing’ of the state invariably occurs at the expense of social enterprises and the
individual citizen, it shall suffice to point out here that Blair’s New Labour sidesteps questions
such as ‘what differences or conflicts of interest are sacrificed to the rationale of mutual
responsibility?’ Additionally, by suppressing the visibility of the state, New Labour politics also
tends to obscure the fact that social enterprises and individual citizens become more liable and
accountable than state authorities. Rather than the state bearing the costs of, for instance, welfare,
these are thrust back onto individuals. At the same time, social entrepreneurs are appointed to fill
the gap left by either the business sector or the state.
In sum, we can see, first, that political and business discourse conceptualize social
entrepreneurship in markedly different ways. Second, the investigation of Third Way politics is
conceivable as a means to understand how political discourse operates to pull responsibility away
from nation states while simultaneously increasing the obligation of citizens. More generally
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expressed, social entrepreneurship within political discourse fulfills the function of mopping up
the ill effects of business and hence of compensating for the deficiencies of the state. Perceived to
operate at the interface of civil society, the state and business, social entrepreneurship quite
distinctively appears as the epitome of individual self-realization on the one hand and collective
responsibility on the other. Arguably, while New Labour politics aspires to establish a new
‘contract between those who exercise power and those who are obliged to be its subjects’ (Rose,
2000, pp. 1397 – 1398), it becomes clear that social entrepreneurship falls into the latter category.
Working under the premise of economic advancement, social stability and justice, social
enterprises are simultaneously expected to conduct their activities so as to maximize the health
and welfare of their community. Furthermore, Third Way politics redefines the act of governing
individuals and groups of citizens in such a way as to promote the development of moral,
responsible and obedient subjects. Viewed in this light, the language of community and civility
replaces the notion of ‘society’. As a result, the welfare state turns into an ‘enabling state’ which
is no longer required to address all of society’s social needs. There can be no question that social
entrepreneurship is accorded a political space where its objective is to account for the
insufficiencies and shortcomings of the actors with which it interacts. Social entrepreneurship
thus becomes an ethical field that transforms its elements (i.e. the state, citizens, and business)
into durable relations (Rose, 2000). Discourse of Third Way politics is thus responsible for
granting social enterprises an identity which is based on social and ethical (as opposed to, for
instance, economic) values and obligations. This view quite distinctively breaks with the
individualized and solitarian image of social entrepreneurship presented by business scholars.
However, this is neither to say that business school curricula must adopt the views of Tony Blair
or Anthony Giddens (the former Dean of the London School of Economics and strategic adviser
of Tony Blair in his Third Way politics) nor that there is a single best political perspective which
must be adopted in business education. Rather, what is implied through the illustration of social
entrepreneurship’s political lineage is that the images produced in and through business schools
lack any sensibility for the societal and political foundations of the subject. I therefore claim that
we cannot afford to miss the opportunity to learn how political discourse appropriates social
entrepreneurship in particular ways and thus to apprehend how the subject of social
entrepreneurship reflects particular historical and cultural contingencies. Third Way or New
Labour politics has, then, only been invoked to illustrate how political discourse can give rise to a
number of issues and problems which are not (yet) treated with respect to business school
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teaching (and research; cf. Chapter 2). Although one will never be able to identify the final ‘truth’
about social entrepreneurship, it makes sense to endeavor to understand the historical
circumstances that lead to its emergence as the ‘result of struggles and relations of force and
domination’ (Tamboukou, 2003, p. 9). Fostering such a genealogical sensitivity to politics can
probably complement the dominant delineation of social entrepreneurship in business school
education by highlighting, for instance, issues such as democracy, social mobilization, building
and sustaining peace, community, citizenship, etc, subjects on which business schools to this day
do not seem to have much to offer. Yet, it would be untenable to simply reject those issues on the
basis of the observation that ‘these are not our core competencies’. That said, it seems a good idea
to enrich business school curricula in such ways as to account for the political ‘nature’ of social
entrepreneurship, or, more precisely, for the way in which political discourse has shaped our
understanding of social entrepreneurship. Such an approach would further imply that we call into
question the prevailing self-evidences of social entrepreneurship (in business school teaching). It
would also probe how our commonsensical understanding of social entrepreneurship, its function
in society and its connection with and responsibility to other stakeholders has been constructed in
the past and stabilized in the present. Such an undertaking would indeed be unsettling as it
shatters the kind of simplistic certainties upon which business school education currently seems
to thrive. However, given that the scrutiny of common sense is a prerequisite for detaching
ourselves from our limiting ‘truths’, it is only by asking genealogical questions that we are able to
ask ‘what is the meaning of social entrepreneurship?’ and thereby facilitate its very ‘liberation’
(cf. Foucault, 1990).
The above account of Third Way politics has argued for a critical and more reflective
stance in business schools (cf. Chapter 5) which implies extending the parameters of its
educational curricula on social entrepreneurship. Yet, it must be mentioned that it does not suffice
to complement business school education with a political perspective but that it is equally exigent
to keep a vigilant eye on the ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship. Waddock (2003) has made
the general point that business schools and students tend to treat issues of ‘responsibility’,
‘integrity’ or ‘ethics’ rather sketchily since they are deemed to be of secondary importance in
terms of success in the job market. While this might be one reason why ethical, social and moral
issues of social entrepreneurship have attracted only scant attention, it is of even greater interest
to disentangle how these issues are appropriated to fit into the performativity hyperbole and,
secondly, to problematize the dwindling importance of ethics and suggest an understanding of
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ethics that exposes us to differences, and (hopefully) inspires us to conceive social
entrepreneurship in a novel manner.
C) Ignoring the Relationality of Ethics
While Lyotard (1984) disdained the performativity principle on account of its exclusion of non-
economic values such as, for instance, ethics and justice, it appears that prevailing articulations of
social entrepreneurship are grappling both with the demands of performativity and the need to
account for moral causes and deeds. Concerning the latter, it is O’Connor (2006) who has shown
that social entrepreneurship has come to trade ‘on the latest round of scandals, including …
eroding public confidence in business as an institution, businesspeople as citizens, and …
capitalism and capitalists.’ In the wake of recent corporate scandals (cf. Bartunek, 2002), social
entrepreneurship has come to represent an ostensible new ethical code which seems apposite for
teaching auspicious business skills while simultaneously conveying the impression to mitigate the
devastating and adverse effects of traditional business enterprises. In other words, while business
people are generally perceived as being ‘morally insufficient’ (e.g. Parker, 2002) and given that
for-profit entrepreneurs have been strongly criticized for significant ‘ethical lapses’ (Hannafey,
2003), it is the figure of the social entrepreneur who emerges as an antidote to humankind’s
ethical deficiencies. However, I would like to delineate in the following section that popular
depictions of the social and ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship appropriate the subject
matter as a ‘hooray-word’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) which reassures us that social
entrepreneurs are in fact ‘doing the right thing’. As will become clear, the sort of ethics, moral
and social intentions, virtues and deeds which are said to characterize social entrepreneurship
seem to justify an utterly positive view of the phenomenon. Although these images do quite a
remarkable job at convincing us that we have good reasons to perceive social entrepreneurship in
an unclouded and optimistic manner, I will show, first, that there are fallacies inherent in those
views of ethics and the social and, second, that there are (philosophical) perspectives on offer
which could complement our understanding of social entrepreneurship in valuable ways. More
specifically, I will begin the following section by elaborating on how ethics is defined in
conjunction with social entrepreneurship as either a set of prescribable (best) practices, a
calculable practice or the sum of the intentions, motives or virtues of social entrepreneurs. From
this starting point, I would like to offer a perspective of ethics which is sensitive towards the
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(genuine) relational aspects of social entrepreneurship and which pays adequate attention to the
endless difficulty and dilemmatic nature of ethical endeavors.
Best Ethical Practices
Although Dees, Emerson and Economy (2001; 2002) do not talk about ethics in their textbooks,
there is a chapter by Dees and Economy (2001) were the authors claim that the main objective of
social entrepreneurs ‘is to make the world a better place’ (p. 4). Whereas Dees and Economy only
indirectly allude to the ethical underpinnings of social entrepreneurship, the Center for the
Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (Fuqua School of Business, Duke) in particular has
promoted business ethics in the field of social entrepreneurship. The focus of the center has been
to ‘ensure that standards of professionalism are reflected at every stage of social enterprise
business planning and development’ (CASEconnection newsletter, 2005). Being heavily
influenced by the work of Gregory Dees (especially in terms of underscoring the primacy of
social enterprises’ social mission), the ethical guiding principles of integrity formulated by the
Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and its Social Enterprise Ethics Initiative,
demand that ‘social enterprises must always place their nonprofit mission and values first’ (cf.
http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/centers/case/articles/ 0805/documents/nesstcommit.pdf). While this
perspective quite obviously bears the footprints of Gregory Dees’s (e.g. 1998) work, it is
remarkable that ethical codes of conduct have become quite popular in the context of US
universities and non-profit centers. Taking the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations
as an example, we can see that this advocacy organization provides a code of ethics which
prescribes a set of core values such as honesty, integrity, fairness, respect, etc. As is the case with
the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Fuqua, the Maryland Association
puts forward ‘standards for excellence’. These standards comprise a set of guiding principles that
are deemed imperative to help the various internal and external stakeholders assess the ethical
commitment of organizations and to provide them with benchmarks allowing them to determine
whether or not the particular organization acts responsibly towards its direct stakeholders and the
general public. Replicated in seven other states in the US, the main function of these ‘standards
for excellence’ seems to be to raise the public credence and trustworthiness of nonprofit
organizations and social enterprises.
‘So far so good’, one might say. Yet, there are two major limitations to such ‘best ethical
practices’ which cannot be left unnoticed. Taking into account, first of all, that the North Carolina
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Center for Nonprofits (which has derived its ethical code from the Maryland Association of
Nonprofit Organizations) applies its ‘standards for excellence’ to bolster ‘public confidence’, it
becomes abundantly clear that those endeavors are less concerned with genuine ethics than with
the public standing and prestige of the organizations concerned. In other words, by offering
certification programs which seek to ‘prove’ that social enterprises adhere to ethical standards,
the focus is directed towards providing those organizations with a calculable and, therefore,
strategic advantage. As Jones (2003) reminds us, such ‘efforts to make ethics, responsibility and
philanthropy ‘strategic’, appear problematic, to say the least’ (p. 235). By implication, this
strategic conceptualization of ethics must be challenged, according to Jones, as it is does not
contain any interest for the Other (capital letter), but simply stimulates a distinct expression of
self-interest. To be worthy of its name, ethics must overcome strategic calculations and the
pursuit of self-interests and, instead, be unmistakably concerned with otherness and difference.
However, before delving into the ‘ethics of difference’, we must address a second
problematic issue that emerges through a delineation of the social or ethical aspect of social
entrepreneurship by means of a set of prescriptive rules. The untenability of those sorts of
accounts lies in the fact that they transform ethics into a distinct technology. The dubiety related
to such a ‘technologization’ of ethics is that it seeks solutions that try to reduce a dauntingly
difficult situation to a seemingly easy task. In other words, while such codes reduce complexity
and give the impression that mastery is attained, it must be emphasized that Derrida (e.g. 1993)
asserted that dilemmas, or ‘aporias’ to use Derrida’s own term, are the prerequisite of any
behavior that seeks to qualify as ethical. It follows that if a decision does not contain a certain
amount of insecurity and a sense of ‘not knowing where to go’ (Derrida, 1993, p. 12), one would
not be able to talk about responsible behavior in the strict sense of the term. Since codes of ethics
tend to avoid the dilemmatic dimension of social entrepreneurship, the imagery becomes
ideological as it masks the existing interpersonal relationships and conflicts and the paradoxes
which are at the heart of all social entrepreneurial endeavors. Arguably, while such best-practice
approaches or excellence standards are popular on account of their ostensible practicality and
usefulness, it must be recognized that turning ethics into a code makes it a ‘textbook knowledge
for puppets, not knowledge that you gain by thinking for yourself’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005, p. 8). As Jones and colleagues further conclude, ‘we mostly live a pale narrow version of
ethics, an ethics of codes and rules’ (p. 78), a view which ought to be taken seriously with respect
to our understanding of social entrepreneurship. Hence, if one takes into account that ethics is
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radically different from technologies which are governed by unchanging rules and that ethical
issues, on the other hand, are infinitely complex (wherefore they require thorough and continuous
reflection), it becomes at least questionable whether ethical ‘codes of conduct’ are of any help for
understanding the ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship. However, this is not the end of the
story, as social entrepreneurship scholars have offered additional arguments in connection with
ethics and social commitment. We will therefore turn our attention to those accounts which
portray social entrepreneurial endeavors against the backdrop of their social consequences.
Social Consequences of Social Entrepreneurship
Regarding the ethical dimension of social entrepreneurship, it was Bornstein (2004) who most
dauntlessly asserted that social enterprises must ‘make people happier and the environment more
respected’ while additionally warranting that such enterprises gave ‘hope for a better future’ (p.
239). In opposition to Bornstein’s praise, we shall now question whether it is ultimately the
image of social entrepreneurship as superior moral agent is ultimately a tenable one. Given this
objective, it appears useful to briefly discuss the social entrepreneurship toolkits proposed by
Dees, Emerson and Economy (2001; 2002) in order to get a sense of how social entrepreneurship
is construed by means of its social consequences. What is striking in the first place is that both
volumes by Dees and colleagues make no explicit use of the term ‘ethics’. Instead, the authors
prefer to talk about values. They juxtapose the financial values of the for-profit sector with the
ostensibly endemic ones of the non-profit sector and notably social enterprises. Thus Dees and
colleagues envisage the specific value of social enterprises with reference to ‘social impact’. The
authors contend in this context that ‘it is no longer sufficient for nonprofits simply to assert their
value in absence of evidence’. Rather, they ‘have to demonstrate value through measurable social
impact’ (2002, p. 162). The ideal of such ‘evidence-based’ values goes hand in hand with the
business perspective of social entrepreneurship mentioned above, since both approaches
emphasize that social entrepreneurial practices – to be rendered controllable and to be deemed
valuable – must be translatable into a quantifiable code. Social entrepreneurship, as described by
Dees et al. (2001), derives, not to say earns, its social credentials by means of creating
(calculable) ‘social value’ and, consequently, by virtue of being accountable to the various
constituencies being served. Yet, one could argue against this logic by saying that it restricts
social endeavors to those kinds of actions which are salient and apposite for numerical
transformation. Additionally, and this is a point we shall investigate in more detail further down,
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to envisage the social sphere in the context of ‘cost and benefit’ analysis and ‘mission fulfillment’
implies that actions for the good of the community must be subject to criteria of efficiency.
Talking about ethics or social commitment, one must bear in mind that the ‘performance
indictors’ Dees and colleagues are keen to pass off as values, are in fact a distinct management
technique which is deployed as an accountability tool vis-à-vis one’s internal audiences such as
‘staff, board, and clients’ as well as external stakeholders, that is, ‘investors, policymakers,
media, competitors’ (Dees, Emerson & Economy, 2002, p. 163). In the context of the ethics of
social entrepreneurship, however, it is at least doubtful whether this sort of portrayal can serve as
a source of inspiration. For instance, perpetuating an image of ‘social impact’ which thrives on
the ideal of ‘performance’ (Dees, Emerson & Economy, 2002; cf. p. 164) quite peculiarly installs
a scheme which ignores a less instrumental view of social commitment and ethical principles. If
social engagement becomes a technical goal, ethics is transformed into a ‘moral science’
(Bentham, 2001) where the only legitimate values are those which are grounded in facts. As
Jones, Parker and ten Bos (2005) illuminated on the basis of the work of William Petty, the
endeavor to grasp the social world in quantitative terms reflects a ‘Victorian obsession with
numbers’ (p. 36). To be sure, such a transactional image of social entrepreneurship, that is, a
scheme which expresses interpersonal relationships and effects numerically, is likely to face
significant ‘conflicts with the basic principles of ethics that persons should never be treated as a
means to an end but must be treated as ends in themselves’ (Hannafey, 2003, pp. 103 – 104). That
said, we seem well advised to recall the arguments of Jones and colleagues (2005) who contended
that accounts which attempt ‘to make ethics ‘scientific’ and ‘logical’ do not actually get us very
far’ (p. 38). Hence, while it must have become clear by now that social entrepreneurship scholars
or teachers have not as yet been able to adequately address the ethics of social entrepreneurship, I
would like to venture a bit deeper into how ethics and morality are distinctively intertwined with
social entrepreneurs’ intentions.
Social Entrepreneurs’ Intentions and Motives
In many depictions of social entrepreneurship the whole issue is interwoven into a romantic
narrative plot (Frye, 1957) where social entrepreneurs’ ethical deeds are portrayed as being
constantly challenged or threatened by temptations as well as by the ordeals and obstacles of
everyday life. Within this imagery, the protagonist, that is the single social entrepreneur, always
seems to struggle to sustain his/her ideal of ethical conduct and to act in accordance with the
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‘ethical fiber’ (Drayton, 2002; Bornstein, 2004) with which social entrepreneurs are said to be
endowed. For instance, Bornstein (2004), while adopting an ethical outlook of social
entrepreneurs, contended that ‘(i)t is meaningless to talk about social entrepreneurship without
considering the ethical quality of their motivation: the why. In the end, business and social
entrepreneurs are very much the same animals. They think about problems the same way. They
ask the same types of questions. The difference is not in temperament or ability, but in the nature
of their visions’ (p. 239). This individualistic view is not uncommon, for we find in
entrepreneurship research images which envisage ethics as being principally a matter of the
degree of moral reasoning (Teal & Carroll, 1999), the awareness of moral dilemmas (Dees &
Starr, 1992) or the strength of ethical intentions (Katharina, 2004) at the level of the individual.
However, whereas such issues still only seem to play a marginal role in treatments of
entrepreneurship, it appears fair to claim that the individual component of ethics is put centre
stage in many representations of social entrepreneurship. Thus Bornstein (2004) claimed that ‘(a)t
some moment in their lives, social entrepreneurs get it into their heads that it is up to them to
solve a particular problem’ (p. 240). What is further reflected in Bornstein’s subsequent
deliberations is a Kantian (e.g. 1989) regime according to which the highest good of the ethical
person is good will. In consequence, it is only in the presence of a rational and autonomous
individual that one can speak of morally sovereign action. In opposition to, for instance,
utilitarianism which judges ethics in terms of the effects caused by a certain action, the Kantian
‘categorical imperative’ postulates moral laws not on the basis of external conditions or effects
but, rather, on the good (and rational) intentions of the person (cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005). The unchanging nature of ethical intentions as expressed in Kant’s categorical imperative
is reflected in a contribution to the strategic toolkit of Dees, Emerson and Economy (2002) where
Roling claimed that ‘(w)hile the services you provide to your clients may change over the years,
what should never change are the values that guide the leadership of your organization and the
relationships with your staff and clients’ (p. 309). Although there is, unsurprisingly, no explicit
reference to Kant, Roling’s statement nevertheless reveals that values, to be worthy of the name,
need to be practiced without any ifs or buts. While strong moral principles seem pivotal in all
realms of human conduct, I contend that it is not unproblematic to conceptualize ethics solely as a
matter of autonomous moral reasoning. The reason why such a perspective is problematic is that
such an analysis of ethical questions ignores both the wider social context in which ethical
decisions are taken and the social consequences of particular actions. In other words, an exclusive
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focus on social entrepreneurs’ intentions excludes the social contingency of ethical deeds, as it
avoids the crucial question ‘what are the larger effects (both positive and negative) of social
entrepreneurs?’ In contrast, the only legitimate question following a Kantian analysis of ethics is
‘why are social entrepreneurs doing this or that?’ The blind spots of such a perspective are
abundantly clear: cases of managers spring to mind who, having caused severe damage, claimed
that they had acted on the noblest of intentions. It thus seems all too easy to pretend that one’s
actions are based on a sense of duty and ethical responsibility when in fact decisions are taken for
entirely selfish or otherwise unethical reasons. It is therefore all the more important to reflect
upon the ethical implications of one’s decisions and constructively to think about the tensions and
limitations at the nexus between one’s intentions and the pragmatic demands of one’s actions.
While acknowledging the constraints of social entrepreneurial endeavors, it must nevertheless be
emphasized that ethical decisions are never taken in a social vacuum. It is therefore advisable to
avoid those perspectives that conceive of ethics as primarily a matter of autonomous free will.
The Virtuous Social Entrepreneur
While the previous discussion outlined how certain images of social entrepreneurship exclude the
social dimension of ethics, there are still other interpretations which seem (at least at first sight) to
take into account that ethical decision are always embedded in a social context. For instance,
Bornstein (2004) objected in that respect that good intentions are not enough for social
entrepreneurship to qualify as ethical: ‘(t)he mind is not enough. The key question here is: Do
you deeply trust this person [i.e. the social entrepreneur]?’ (p. 123). Bornstein further asserted
that ‘(t)he trustworthiness of the social entrepreneur – their integrity – is one of their most
important assets. People sense that – and if they don’t trust you, they won’t follow you’ (p. 124).
It is important to note here that, contrary to Kant’s moral intentions, trust or trustworthiness
represent moral virtues. This emphasis on trust implies that ethical questions are not independent
of the particular context in which they are posed and that what might be seen as right and ethical,
in one situation may be deemed wrong and unethical in another. In connection with social
entrepreneurship it is quite common to draw up long lists of the essential virtues of social
entrepreneurs. For instance, Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie (2003) claimed that ‘(s)ocial
enterprises have a spiritual or virtue dimension very often missing from or only latent in
commercial enterprises’ (p. 82). In line with this view, the authors conceptualized social
entrepreneurship in terms of ‘integrity, compassion, empathy and honesty’ (p. 83). Though there
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are variations regarding the significance of individual virtues, they are usually presented as
personal dispositions or aptitudes which manifest themselves in the way people get along with
others, be it individual people or social communities. For instance, advocacy organizations such
as Ashoka as well as academic scholars (e.g. Mair & Marti, 2006) and journalists (e.g.
Leadbeater, 1997) all emphasize trust as a key feature of social entrepreneurship. Thus the root
premises of trust proposed in Bornstein’s (2004) account is that we must be able to establish a
sort of relationship in which the other party behaves according to our own expectations and to
respond to our deeds in equal measure. To say that a person is ‘trustworthy’ therefore implies that
one has gained confidence in the other since one has tamed their thoughts and habits to the point
where they become a calculable and dependable extension of the self. Importantly, the moment
we demand, however subtly, that the other must reciprocate our trust, it is implied that consensus
and a balanced exchange become the operating logic. Jones (2003) objected to this sort of ethical
perspective claiming that ‘(b)y conceiving of ethics in terms of relations to Others, we see the
way that calculation of personal advantage has an instrumental concern for the Other and, in
failing in one’s responsibilities for the Other, one is not simply unethical but is outside the
domain of the ethical’ (Jones, 2003, p. 236). Viewed through the perspective of trust, the other is
therefore not valued for reasons of its intrinsic worth but instead for increasing one’s own well-
being, providing pleasure or ensuring one’s own survival. Indeed, this is a particularly common
image of social engagement or exchange and one which has been called into question, for
instance, in Derrida’s (1999) ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’. In this work, Derrida made
clear that the moment one thinks of an encounter as based on a pre-ordained script that restricts
the unfolding of otherness it becomes problematic to talk of genuine hospitality. In his
unconditional exegesis of hospitality, Derrida (1997b) outlined a relation towards the other which
must avoid assimilation, acculturation, appropriation and which needs to be ‘re-invented at every
second’ (p. 8). Ethics was subsequently to play a particularly important role in the work of
Levinas (2001). He asserted that the issue of ethics could not be understood as turning the other
into the same. I would therefore like to introduce some of the key philosophical arguments of
Levinas (and Derrida). Their perspective not only suggests that social commitment is central to
responsible behavior but it also celebrates social difference and otherness as the key elements of
‘ethics’.
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An Ethical Theory Based on Embracing Difference
It has been mentioned that prevailing accounts of the social dimension of entrepreneurship more
often than not expose the ethics of social entrepreneurship as instrumental and calculative. The
main reason given for this degeneration of ethics is that it is used to prop up the moral standing
and credibility of a particular institution. Such accounts are not uncommon in connection with
for-profit businesses which use, for instance, concepts such as ‘social responsibility’ and
‘corporate citizenship’ to invoke a rhetoric of ‘doing right’ (cf. RARE, 2004; cf. also Chapter 7).
With respect to social entrepreneurship there are some illustrative examples such as the Schwab
Foundation (Klaus Schwab is the founder of the annual World Economic Forum) or the Goldman
Sachs Foundation (a foundation dedicated to social causes which is owned by one of the world’s
largest private banks) which have jumped on the bandwagon of social entrepreneurship to conceal
or make up for some of their ethically dubious actions. Although this assertion is arguably harsh,
it is extremely important to point out that the social or ethical claims of social entrepreneurship,
even if its economic logic is expressed only indirectly, cannot be said to represent genuine ethics.
In other words, prevailing images of the social of entrepreneurship are deficient not only because
they adhere to a logic of ‘measurability’ but also because a calculative rationale precludes any
possibility for imagining an unconditional kind of social exchange. In addition, such pragmatic
conceptualizations can never accommodate the dilemmatic nature of social entrepreneurship.
As our discussion of best-practice approaches to ethics has shown, a well-defined code of
ethics is clearly desirable. However, jotting down one’s guiding principles on a blank piece of
paper or showing them off on the company’s homepage is hardly enough to ensure the real
ethical value of social entrepreneurial endeavors. After all, ethics is not something that easily
lends itself to practical ‘management’ or categorical definitions. Ethics is paradoxical in that it
relies on the dilemmas and aporias of everyday life (Billig et al., 1988; Derrida, 1993). It is
probably due to its paradoxical nature that many social entrepreneurship scholars and teachers
shy away from the ethical complexity of such tasks as balancing the economic and social factors
of corporate actions. Additionally, Dees and Elias (1998) only mentioned in passing that ethics is
always at risk of failing and of having to surrender to the pragmatic demands of everyday
circumstances (Derrida, 1997). Ethics is therefore not something that can easily be planned in
advance. Rather than being perceived as an end or outcome, it must be embraced as a deliberate
process which will never reach a definitive and positive end. Furthermore, we have seen that
ethics is usually discussed in relation to a single social entrepreneur as well as his or her
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intentions and (pseudo-) dilemmas. It must be recognized, however, that ethical behavior is not a
solitary affair as it is not practiced in social isolation. Therefore, is not reducible to the intentional
states of individuals. Within the following paragraphs, I would like to outline some preliminary
suggestions for overcoming this individualized interpretation of ethics in the context of social
entrepreneurship.
Bearing in mind that this will be the primary task of the last chapter of this thesis, I would
already like to introduce at this stage a perspective which highlights ethics as a celebration of
difference. Both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have been at the forefront of this
endeavor and though their work will be analyzed more thoroughly later, it is useful to point out in
this connection that both philosophers are extremely helpful for debunking the image of social
commitment and ethical values as discussed above. While Jones (2003) pointed out that Levinas
has been mostly ignored with respect to (business) ethics, the work of Levinas (2001) is
particularly useful for conceptualizing the genuinely relational aspects of ethics. In Levinas’
(2001) work, ethics is presented as openness towards the ‘Other’ (capital letter). This ethical
concept is antithetical to those views that try to reduce ethics to an equation or a code. Levinas
used the term ‘Other’ to introduce an understanding of ethics which undermines the arguments
put forward by western philosophers who tended to convert the other into the same. As is the case
with the notion of trust discussed above in relation with the virtuous social entrepreneur, the
‘other’ (without capital letter) is often discerned in theories of ethics simply as someone who
shares common characteristics, interests and, by implication, conveys the promise of a fulfilling,
not to say lucrative, exchange. In contrast, ‘Other’ or ‘Otherness’ is detached from a calculative
understanding of social exchange. Thus Levinas (2001) claimed that only relations in which
people are treated as ‘Other’, that is, if they are accepted in their genuine alterity, can justifiably
be called ‘ethical’.
Arguably, ethics conceived as the unconditional openness towards the other (cf. Derrida,
1997) makes great demands on those who try to fully embrace its principles. As such a view
refrains from appropriating the other to our own desires and wants (cf. above: the virtuous social
entrepreneur) and, instead, demands that we accept the other’s otherness, some might argue that
this is either unpractical or utopian or both. I would object to the advocates of ethical pragmatism
that we should be invariably suspicious of simplistic accounts of ethics and the social aspect of
social entrepreneurship, as they seem to suggest that we should, whenever possible, take a moral
shortcut. Although such approaches have proven popular and pervasive not only with respect to
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social entrepreneurship, I have tried to rebut such technical and naively optimistic views of ethics
by presenting a perspective that concedes that ethics implies struggle, intermittent confusion and
which acknowledges that its practice must be free of any transactional, that is, economic,
calculus. Given the complexity of the ethics of social entrepreneurship, it is all the more
important to invoke Levinas’ (2001) distinction between ‘other’ and ‘Other’. This distinction will
serve to remind us that ethics is not only about social relations but, even more importantly, about
celebrating difference and alterity.
On the Future of Social Entrepreneurship Teaching
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the
same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. (Foucault,
1984, p. 343)
Our somewhat extreme picture of the current state of social entrepreneurship education has
shown that it is due to the proliferation of teaching assessments and the demand for student
satisfaction by virtue of entertainment and emotional investment that business school staff
perceive their task to be that of making their MBA students feel good. Neither the issue of ethical
values nor the experimentation with novel ideas, creative epistemologies or pedagogies are
regarded as having much, if any, operational value for the system as a whole. Teaching social
entrepreneurship in business school courses thus takes place in an intellectual environment that
defines the subject matter as (and reduces it to) a set of functionalist ‘best-practice recipes’. This
is not to say that prevailing social entrepreneurship courses do not comprise values at all. Rather,
the problematic aspect of the performativity principle is that anything which does not contain the
promise of economic returns is not given any credence. Financial benefits are thus the only
legitimate and credible justification for social entrepreneurship teaching. It is implied that issues
of politics or ethics are either absent from business school curricula or they are made to conform
with the performativity principle. Given this overt reliance on economic theory, it is questionable
if and to what extent it makes sense to cite successful initiatives such as that of Grameen Bank
which gained recognition worldwide in order to promote the values of social entrepreneurship.
Whereas there is an abundance of illustrative examples of social entrepreneurship, there seems to
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be a tendency to equal ‘big’ and ‘successful’ with ‘rightful’ and hence ‘good’. Or, following
Nietzsche (1984), ‘it is success that gives to a deed the full, honest luster of a good conscience;
failure lays the shadow of an uneasy conscience upon the most estimable action’ (p. 57). The first
problem with taking into account only a small fraction of organizations which deserve the label
‘social enterprise’ is that such isolated cases are not necessarily representative of the larger
picture. Second, there seems to be a tendency to romanticize social entrepreneurship through
examples which have gained prolonged world-wide recognition because they were awarded
prizes (such as, for instance, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship granted by the Said
Business School, Oxford University; or the Social Entrepreneur of the Year awarded by the
Schwab Foundation in Geneva) or through publications which enthusiastically celebrate such
achievements (e.g. Mair & Marti, 2006). Third, putting forward normative models on the basis of
proven and successful social enterprises may well distract from the immanent complexity and
dilemmatic nature of social entrepreneurship. The problem is thereby related to what Bornstein
(2004) called ‘blueprint copying’, by which he meant ‘knowledge that can be transmitted from
one society to another’ (p. 259). On the face of it, Bornstein’s ‘micro-credit blueprint’, which he
tried to deduce from the Grameen Bank case, contains a sort of technical knowledge that is
markedly different from the locally emergent knowledge of social enterprises which is less reliant
on technical expertise and which, by implication, must be discerned as being culturally and
historically specific. Fourth, since glorifying representations of social entrepreneurship have a
strong tendency to overemphasize the leadership qualities of individuals (Weerawardena & Mort,
2006), they are unlikely to pay sufficient attention to the wider context and structural obstacles
such as social inequality, culturally established patterns of deception or corruption.
Therefore, if we were to agree with those critics who have asserted that business school
education has little influence on practical business activities, there would be no reason to bemoan
the misguided representations of social entrepreneurship since they would cause little or no
‘harm’ in any case. Yet, since I prefer to believe that management education does ‘work’ (cf.
Gioia, 2002), we must raise the question whether business students are actually subjected to the
right kind of ‘diet’? According to Waddock’s (2003) general appraisal of management education,
the answer quite clearly would be ‘no’ (cf. p. 9). With respect to social entrepreneurship, I would
contend that what is so far missing from portrayals, case studies and anecdotal reports are probing
discussions of the complexity of social impact. The relational paradoxes and dilemmas coming to
the fore in the pragmatic context of everyday practice and the political and ethical complexities of
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social entrepreneurial endeavors in general do usually not receive much attention either. Since I
oppose those management scholars who try to condense social entrepreneurship into a set of
carefree best-practices, I feel that we need to complexify the subject as a whole. Notably, we need
to focus on issues which until now appear all too uncontroversial if not indeed unrecognized
altogether. A critical orientation is thus necessary in order to investigate who is authorized to
define what social entrepreneurship is and, consequently, what sorts of representations are
naturalized through business school teaching. In addition, while I do advocate a type of pedagogy
that enables students to draw up balance sheets and calculate break-even points, business
education must also enable students to conceptualize the social and moral obligations of (social)
enterprises and foster awareness of the social context in which economic activities occur. That
said, we must refrain from teaching business students that social entrepreneurs are ethical/moral
actors by definition (or, alternatively, on account of one of the prestigious awards or prizes they
have received). To put this in a slightly different way, complexifying social entrepreneurship
teaching would, inter alia, imply that we pay heed not only to the subject’s shiny surface
aesthetics but, rather, that we also introduce a critical stance which pays adequate attention to
questions of politics, inequality, exploitation, class segregation, gender, racism, and ethics. Such a
reflective (and arguably more holistic) MBA program would have to foster sensitivity towards its
own root assumptions (cf. Chapter 5), meaning that both staff and students of business schools
become cognizant that social entrepreneurship does not necessarily have to be seen as a positive
phenomenon. Instead, it should be recognized that social entrepreneurship is as likely to cause
social benefits as it is to bring about harm and decay (cf. Hannafey, 2003). With this in mind, I
would like to draw the focus away from the (moral) intentions of the individual social
entrepreneur in order to acknowledge the relational nature of ethics. It is important not to shy
away from issues such as self interest, conflict and power (both negative and positive; cf. Chapter
6), even though these issues may do considerable damage to the immaculate image of the social
entrepreneur as perpetuated by business education. If we thus decide to follow Levinas’ argument
that ethics is first and foremost a social affair and a matter of acknowledging alterity, this implies
that business school curricula need to embrace social entrepreneurship in all its shadings, both
good and bad. Such a view also takes into account that social entrepreneurship is not practiced in
a vacuum but is invariably embedded in concrete and distinct political, economic, and cultural
settings. That said, we should base our understanding of social entrepreneurship on a concept of
ethics that interprets the epithet ‘social’ as the relational condition which determines whether a
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particular social enterprise can be called either ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. In summary, the ethical
underpinnings of a broadened curriculum for social entrepreneurship would not only necessitate a
more rigorous treatment of ethics as well as an acknowledgement of its intrinsically relational
nature. Rather, providing business students with ideas that stimulate an understanding of
difference, alterity and complexity and emphasizing ethical debates as much as analytic skills and
functional expertise can in themselves be seen as ethical acts.
Concluding Comments
The previous investigation has shown that MBA programs all over the globe are increasingly
under pressure to legitimize their educational efforts by virtue of accreditation institutes, business
magazine rankings and by innovating their curricula in order to provide their students with so-
called state-of-the-art teaching. The increased supply of (elective) social entrepreneurship courses
in western MBA programs should not distract from the fact that most of them resemble each
other rather closely. It is in this context that Atkinson-Grosjean (1998) stated: ‘ot only can we
observe the increasing penetration of the university by the market, and the resulting homologies
of structure, but also an increasing sameness in the response by universities to the penetration’ (p.
8; emphasis in original). Bearing in mind that the performativity mantra tends to erode the variety
of different courses on social entrepreneurship in business school teaching, it remains a matter of
speculation whether those courses will continue to attract students’ interest or whether they
vanish from business school curricula like a management fad (Birnbaum, 2000). It is conceivable
that the life cycle of social entrepreneurship in business school education will largely depend on
its marketability. This would mean that time alone would show whether such courses remain
ephemeral or whether they become an integral part of global management education.
I have tried, though in an utterly tentative manner, to make the point that social
entrepreneurship courses, programs and competitions are an important aspect of educational
institutions’ attempts to score points of differentiation and secure competitive advantages.
Although they are undoubtedly instrumentalized for reasons of performativity, this is, as I see it,
not the worst problem of social entrepreneurship education. What is more alarming is that the
reduction of our understanding of social entrepreneurship to a universal panacea for social, and
economic problems even on a global scale tends to sidestep the undeniable complexity of social
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entrepreneurial endeavors. While social entrepreneurship is almost unanimously represented as an
important aspect of the global politico-economic agenda (Levitas, 2000), I have argued that its
variegated ramifications have not yet been adequately investigated. I thus contend that it is due to
the truisms and fallacies disseminated through ‘fat-reduced’ toolkits (e.g. Dees, Emerson &
Economy, 2001) as well as one-sided definitions – which either give primacy to the social (e.g.
Dees, 1998) or entrepreneurial (e.g. Drayton, 2002) aspect of social entrepreneurship – that the
essential aspect of social entrepreneurship is usually overlooked. I have, throughout this chapter,
deliberatively chosen a provocative rhetoric which presents a somewhat extreme point of view in
order to stimulate, hopefully, an extension of prevailing business school teaching on social
entrepreneurship. Given that education (from Latin edu-care) signifies to ‘pull out’ or ‘lead forth’
(cf. O’Doherty & Jones, 2005), it is high time to overcome the current limitations in our
understanding of social entrepreneurship and acknowledge the large unused potential of academic
discourse. I have therefore tried to adumbrate a pedagogy which pays due attention to both the
positive and negative political, ethical, societal and individual effects of social entrepreneurship.
Whereas its positive aspects are acknowledged but almost invariably romanticized, negative
accounts are conspicuously absent from the current discourse. On the flipside of the coin, my
arguments call on researchers and teachers to resist the strong temptation of serving business
students ‘fast-food’ menus and providing them with a ‘McEthics’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005) view of social entrepreneurship. Arguably, rejecting easy solutions leave one with an
uneasy feeling at first, as it raises the disconcerting question ‘what to do?’ On the other hand,
since the world (of social entrepreneurs) is complex, easy solutions are by definition ideologically
misleading. It is therefore my firm conviction that a broadened understanding of social
entrepreneurship which is free of pretensions can make a valuable contribution as it raises
awareness of ethical possibilities and limitations as well as the social and political dimension of
such endeavors. Having tried to debunk down of the starry-eyed views of social entrepreneurship,
it appears that only a genuinely multi-disciplinary, imaginative and unpretentious
‘grammatology’ (Derrida, 1976) will render possible a more variegated understanding of social
entrepreneurship.
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Outlook
While the above analysis of the excellence dispositif in business school education has put
particular emphasis on the interlinkage of the discursive and non-discursive entities which
collectively produce a particular meaning of social entrepreneurship, the following chapter will
probe more deeply into issues of text, discourse and meaning. In particular, it will be asked in
what ways and through what discourses social entrepreneurship finds expression in academic
writing. While such scholarly texts are, by convention, addressed to an academic audience (rather
than to business students), it will be of utmost interest to investigate the differences and
similarities between the rhetoric of scholarly texts and the performative interpretation of social
entrepreneurship in the realm of university business schools. Since I regard both the ethics of
social entrepreneurship (which, as shown above, has not yet received adequate attention in
business school education) and the need for a critical pedagogy and emancipation of business
schools teaching and research as extremely important, an entire chapter will be devoted to each
one of these issues in the third part of the thesis (cf. Chapters 5 & 7).
139
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Prolegomenon II
It probably hardly needs to be mentioned that a discourse, conceived of here as a social
process,
40
on a given topic does very rarely produce univocal, smooth and uncontested
meaning(s) – probably with the exception of those rare social constellations ‘in which a
certain class or group exercises power over others’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 416; emphasis
added). If we take a step further so as to acknowledge that signs such as ‘social
entrepreneurship’ are almost unavoidably subject to plural and diversifying readings,
which is due to the fact that they are always related to diverse and ever-changing fields
of force or, following Derrida (1982), contexts, it directly follows from this that every
‘thing’ has as many meanings as it is capable of ‘upsurping’ (cf. Deleuze, 1995). If all this
holds true, which I believe is the case, then Chapter 2 is literally running into serious
problems. Why that? Because its analysis reveals a level of univocity, unambiguousness
and one-sidedness which is untypical, maybe even untenable, for any sort of text being
announced respectively as a deconstructive reading or rhetorical analysis.
To tell the ‘truth’, re-reading Chapter 2 revealed that its analysis largely ignored
the previously mentioned ‘axiom’, namely that even the most dominant, read molar
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983), meaning of any given discourse (such as that on ‘social
entrepreneurship’) necessarily comprises its exceptions, breaks or ruptures. Maybe as a
result of my alienation I endeavored to find an answer to the question why things turned
out the way they actually did. Inexperience, ‘juvenile’ over-involvement or a series of bad
scholarly days were ‘tested’ as potential explanations, though none actually added value
to the task at hand. After some additional musing, which frankly speaking did not make
the overall appearance of the analysis more appealing, I still believe that there are
reasonable answers, three to be precise, to the question as to why my analysis produces
the impression that the meaning of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ – as derived from
the analyzed textual material – forms a certain unity that lacks, by logical extension,
discursive cracks (i.e. exceptions) and discontinuities.
40
For a more detailed treatise of the subject matter consult Chapter 3.
153
On the Lack of Discontinuities and Discursive Cracks in the Analysis of ‘Social
Entrepreneurship’ … A, B, C
As noted before, I have identified three reasons for the textual effect, i.e. lack of
discontinuities and discursive cracks, which I would briefly like to discuss a priori to the
actual beginning of Chapter 2. Before doing so, however, I would first like to mention that
looking at Chapter 2 from a temporal distance of several years made me consider
entirely excluding it from the thesis. The presence of this prolegomenon makes it
obvious, however, that I have decided otherwise. The main reason for this turnaround
was that I considered Chapter 2 an essential ‘jigsaw piece’ of my thesis in that its main
arguments are repeatedly referred to and/or extended in the subsequent chapters. That
is to say that Chapter 2 operates as a springboard of the thesis in the sense that it gets
used, even needed, for comparing the academic discourse on ‘social entrepreneurship’
with practitioners’ enunciations and narratives (cf. part II of the thesis) or for sketching
out theoretical, philosophical extensions of the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ (cf.
part III of the thesis). Consequently, though Chapter 2 provides a somehow wobbly and
undeniably inelegant, not to say unsophisticated, foundation both for hollowing out the
whole mass of meaning of ‘social entrepreneurship’ and for stimulating a gradual
movement of existing configurations or systems of discourse (as revealed, for instance,
in the protruding arguments in Chapter 7), it is precisely at this point that I would like to
put the breaks on, so to speak, and go over to shed some light upon the three textual
dynamics which, as I believe, were constitutive for the aforementioned regression.
A)nalytic Reduction
The first textual dynamic which engenders the apparent streamlining of the following
analysis is actually characteristic of all forms of analysis. Its dynamic is generic to the
extent that it occurs in all analytic endeavors that operate by means of transforming a
given body of work toward a simple(r) element or structure. Consequently, the
impression that there is a certain unity in the investigated textual material should be
construed as the result of the analysis’ regressive horizon; a horizon which seeks to
identify resemblances, read patterns, both within and between the different texts. Such a
process, obviously, puts particular stress on the similarities of selected texts (or data at
large), not on their inherent deviances and differences. Analytic endeavors’ regressive
tendency seems somewhat unavoidable since their abstractions as well as the (quasi-
)transcendent viewpoints which are derived thereof necessarily (have to) override or
hold at bay multiplicity (Deleuze, 1995).
154
The operation and force of this dynamic might become more obvious if compared
with the sort of reading practice, i.e. deconstruction, which does explicitly not try to be
analysis. Deconstruction is not analysis precisely due to the fact that this lexical
signification implies a form of definitive freezing of meaning which, according to Derrida
(1991), conceals that this term (i.e. analysis) is in itself deconstructible or even must be
deconstructed; hence, all ‘sentences of the type “deconstruction is X” or “deconstruction
is not X” a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false’ (p. 275).
Since this connection with Derrida might have been more confusion than helpful for
pinpointing the core difference between analysis and deconstruction, I would like to
make my point even more palpable on the basis of one of many possible examples, i.e.
Foucault’s circumscription of his archeological analytic practice. Indeed, it is Foucault
(1996) who came to say, in conjunction with his seminal ‘The Order of Things’, that ‘[a]ll
these practices, then, these institutions and theories, I take at the level of traces … The
problem is to find common traits between these traces of orders different enough to
constitute what logicians call classes, aestheticians call forms, men of science call
structures, and which are the invariants common to a certain number of traces’ (p. 14).
Juxtaposing the two quotes by Derrida and Foucault, two related observations
immediately become evident: first, that even though my analysis was clearly not
archeological, in Foucault’s sense of the term, it performed a comparable operation with
the textual material on social entrepreneurship in that it was likewise interested in
‘resemblance, sameness, and identity’ (ibid.). And second, even though Chapter 2
contains a reference to Derrida’s deconstruction, this assertion cannot be reasonably
sustained, and thereby not only because we have just said that the definition of
‘deconstruction’ is notoriously difficult, even impossible (Derrida, 1985).
Provided that there is no inherent value in a nostalgic backward-look (since one
cannot possibly turn back the clock, i.e. undo or reverse the analysis of Chapter 2), I
would like to spend some thought on how I would approach the literature on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ if receiving a ‘second chance’. It is in this connection that I would like
to point at Deleuze (1994) who claimed that each event (thus also every text) performs a
repetition, yet a repetition that has nothing in common with mimesis (i.e. the accurate
mirroring or doubling of reality) but with the eternal return of difference. The point to be
stressed, then, is that each singular text cannot be read out of context and cannot be
ignored in terms of its particularities and hence of its own difference, a point which
Derrida (1985), among others, insistently argued for in conjunction with
‘deconstruction’. It is not least due to this specification that I today prefer, if this
155
comparison is at all helpful, quality (i.e. intensive or double readings of singular texts)
over quantity (i.e. broadband analysis, summaries, reviews, etc. of a large body of
writing). Consequently, although there is no reason to believe that each text is unique in
the etymological sense of the term (i.e. ‘forming the only one of its kind’), I strongly
sympathize with Derrida’s contention that one is probably more faithful towards the
work (and life) of a writer if one would pick out a tiny part of it and analyze it in all detail
and thoroughness instead of making claims about the meaning of an oeuvre as a whole.
41
In the context of the present commentary this is to say that I very much believe that any
analysis, and therefore also the one imparted in Chapter 2, treats the analytic material
as if it formed a quasi-natural unity and thus performs an act of ignorance, even violence,
with respect to the inherent inimitability of every single text. If I thus had both the
choice and courage to dear a novel beginning, I would probably proceed by way of picking
out a particularly ‘rich’ and/or genuinely enjoyable text which I would try to read,
critically yet affirmatively, with the ultimate aim of dismantling its structure; yet not in
order to regress to some simple(r) element (which would be the task of analysis,
summary, overview, etc.) but to enable new views of the subject matter.
With this in mind, I also sense a lot of intuitive value in Foucault’s (1996) ‘Masked
Philosopher’ in which he proposes the ‘year without author’, i.e. a year in which each
publication would be published nameless (i.e. without the signature of the author) so that
the reader would have to deal with a completely anonymous production. Foucault’s plea,
in my assessment, can, even should, be extended to render a given discourse (such as
that on ‘social entrepreneurship’) not only author-less but also disconnected from fixed
disciplinary affiliations, seemingly essential scholarly traditions and, by extension, from
the censorship of academic enunciation at large. It is in this way, as I believe, that apt
attention would be given to the idiosyncratic, singular spirit of any given text and hence
its little (im)perfections and possibly good qualities. Lastly, approaching each and every
text in its own right would also avoid conceiving them as a mere ‘derivative’ of a
particular academic discipline or trains of scholarship (such as, for instance, economics
or management).
41
Derrida, in the context of a video-recorded conference (cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch
v=80a7sA4NcTI), made this point in conjunction with the work of Martin Heidegger, claiming that
biographers, by making statements about what Heidegger’s work meant in toto, are the most dangerous
figures in the publishing industry. This is due to the fact that they have the undisputed authority to say the
‘truth’, once and for all, about someone else’s writing and life. The danger, as Derrida made clear, is that
biographers’ commentaries can fix and stabilize a particular image of an author(‘s opus) for centuries.
156
Despite all these reservations, which have shown that Chapter 2 is furthest away
from my current way of looking at academic affairs (i.e. scholarly ethos of close reading
and affirmation), I do not want to support the impression that analyses are altogether
bad and must therefore be dispelled from the academic map. I thus want to restore some
of the second chapter’s value by saying that its analytic practice, irrespective of all
inconsistencies and fallacies, has disclosed that the textual traces of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ form a domain of thinking that is – more or less – univocal. If one
would thus be able to momentarily blind out the analysis’ lack of elegance and its over-
reliance on humor and irony, it would indeed become arguable that it undertakes a move
that is both timely and urgent. Although I have no stake in further palliating matters, I
want to leave this first point behind by saying that, insofar as one wants to make
statements about an identified body of writing in its entireness and to initiate a quest for
novel meaning configurations, there is often no other option than to ‘unwrinkle’ texts’
flections and edges and, by extension, to fold them, somewhat violently, onto an
apparently smooth surface or plane.
B)latant Scarcity of Available Literature
A second reason for the apparent sense of homogeneity and unity effectuated by my
analysis is that there was, at least at the time of my investigation,
42
anything but an
abundance of academic material on the subject matter and, by extension, a rather low
breadth and variability of perspectives. Although this situation today (i.e. during the
second part of 2007) has changed quite dramatically in that new theoretical perspectives
and disciplines have engaged themselves in the inquiry, both theoretical and empirical,
of social entrepreneurship (cf. also Steyaert & Dey, 2006), one can reasonably claim that
the field not so long ago presented itself as a, to put it cautiously, not very diversified
field of academic inquiry. It was hence quasi as a result of the prevailing conditions of
(academic) (im)possibility that the whole issue of ‘social entrepreneurship’ was
represented as a problem-solving exercise. Becoming more concrete about the scholarly
horizon of the nascent writing on ‘social entrepreneurship’, it can be noted that the field
was chiefly under the influence of business/management and/or economic rationalities.
The textual homogeneity for which I have been criticized thus goes back, at least partly,
to a logic that conceives of problems only as points of transition towards solutions, and
42
Note that the first draft of Chapter 2 dates back to the first half of 2004. Though the final version of the
chapter contains an update of the literature, this too does not solve the ‘problem’ that the writing on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is rapidly proliferating (hence, you’re always outmode the next day).
157
that pretends that there are universal solutions to a broad range of what we could call,
for pragmatic reasons, real-life problems. Proceeding by way of analogy (established by
direct reference to Sloterdijk’s (1993) recommendable ‘Weltfremdheit’ (i.e.
unearthliness)), one can say that the early literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’ was
propounding the logic that ‘the world hurts – which has its reason; the moment the
reasons are identified the whole thing can be re-enchanted’.
43
Though this claim too
represents a culmination of the ‘actually’ then-available academic literature, it does not
seem exaggerated if one claims that the analysis’ textual homogeneity was not
exclusively effectuated by my analytic procedure (cf. above) and not even slightly
related to the betrayal of Foucault’s (1996) (archeology-based) ethos which prescribes
that the writer – in the course of his/her analysis – ‘ought to read everything, study
everything’ (p. 14),
44
but also and not least by the evidently narrow space of academic
writing.
C)unning Hyperbole
What I deem most important, and this is not to be read as a lame excuse, in consideration
of the impression of homogeneity and unity being produced by the lack of discontinuities
and discursive cracks in the analyzed textual material, is that I have intentionally
acuminated the analysis in order to reinforce its expressiveness.
45
That is, provided that
my thesis sought to establish a contrast between the academic literature on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ and the evidently more variegated and complex discourses
46
identified in the realm of practice (cf. Chapter 3), it is intuitively comprehensible that
such an ambition made it necessary to occasionally exaggerate up to the point of
emphasizing, even overdrawing, certain aspects of the textual material while
simultaneously ignoring other aspects which would have drawn a more multifaceted
picture of the subject area. Notwithstanding the fact that my analysis gets to rest on a
process of selective extrapolation – which highlights certain textual features while
downplaying others – I believe that such an accentuation marks a legitimate means for
43
In the German original: ‘Die Welt tut weh – das muss Gründe haben; sobald man diese kennt, kann man das
Ganze in Ordnung singen’ (p. 220).
44
Admittedly, reading everything in the case of social entrepreneurship was, due to the scarcity of the
available literature, not that much of a challenge (yet, it is not impossible that I have missed one or another
article).
45
One finds a good, and arguably more eloquent, example of this acumination in Derrida’s (1976) practice of
canceling or crossing out (i.e. writing ‘under erasure’), by dint of which he sought to acknowledge the
(potential) value of a given concept while instantly noting that prevailing understanding exhibit serious
inadequacies and omissions.
46
Note that ‘variegated’ and ‘complex’ chiefly refer to the existence of aporias, paradoxes and ruptures in the
utterances of the interviewed development NGO practitioners.
158
denaturalizing a given (body of) text/thought and, by implication, for preparing the
ground for novel openings.
47
Consequently and in view of Sloterdijk’s (2006; in
conversation with Heinrichs) provocative statement that thinking equals exaggerating,
48
it is crucial to understand, though probably self-evident by now, that my own practice of
‘accentuation’ has nothing in common with the precise, mechanical repetition of the
original text(s). Rather, ‘accentuation’ in conjunction with Chapter 2 pertains to the sort
of repetition which seeks to stimulate difference by dint of, for instance, a good portion of
humor and a twist of irony. Irony and humor, therefore, primarily work to create a
certain distance between the immediately recognizable face of a text (its face-value, for
that matter) and its double (i.e. its analysis). To bring to fruition a text’s double, as I
believe, always requires a mode of (novel or imaginative) repetition that highlights both
the concrete sub-texts within a particular text (e.g. its artistic rhetoric as well as its
underlying, both implicit and explicit, scholarly ‘truths’; e.g. the narrative of proper
management) and the potential, but yet not established, inter-texts of neighboring zones
(e.g. the plot(s) of philosophy). In my assessment, it is only by dint of building a bridge
with adjoining stories that one is enabled to sketch out extensions or, more precisely,
transformations of the ‘original’.
49
As should be clear by now, my objective has no affinity
with any wholesale rejection of the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’
(although my ironic tone might have fostered this illusion) but with cultivating a
sensitivity that what we know and what we can say today about ‘social entrepreneurship’
envelopes only a small fraction of the potentially infinite ways in which the matter can be
referred to and constructed. Indeed, it precisely at this point that we should ask
ourselves whether it would not make more sense, even be essential, to allow for new
connections with realms of knowledge, conceived in the broadest sense of the term, other
than that of business/management or economics, so as to ‘exploit’ the yet untapped
possibilities inherent to, for instance, the arts, humanities, literature, or cinema.
Though it is to be expected that one will, in the course of academic action, turn out
not only the best but also the worst of possibilities, this is, as I believe, the ultimate price
to be paid for creating understandings of ‘social entrepreneurship’ which are to this date
censored by a mode of thinking that demands that the world (of the social entrepreneur)
47
It must remain clear, however, that I do not want to glamorize my analysis since I am truly aware of its
inherent voids. Consequently, what I am saying here relates more to the potential value of
accentuation/exaggeration than to the specific merit of my analysis.
48
In original: ‘denken heisst überreagieren’ (p. 32).
49
With this I do not intend to say that one’s interpretation or reading should move beyond the initial text in
any definitive sense – read ‘we’re done with you and moved on’ – but to probe its limitations by dint of a
continuing process of de- and reconstruction.
159
must be scientifically addressed, i.e. in a way that brings us as close as possible to the
actual kernel of objective truth. If one aspires to counter-actualize this mode of thinking,
there is, in my opinion, much heuristic value in referring to Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
who advise us – in a different, yet compoundable, context – to create maps (of ‘social
entrepreneurship’, for that matter) that constantly change shape due to their
experimentation with the real. By way of closing remark, let me suggest, once more and
for the last time, that we should not hesitate to risk the creation of Lyotardian paralogies,
absurdities, even non-sense,
50
since these performances of deviance seem to indicate the
way to genuine creativity, nothing more and nothing less. Yet, since my analysis in
Chapter 2 has only been partially, if at all, successful in this regard, there is still a lot of
work ahead.
51
50
The logic behind this plea should remind us that one is well advised to shake up or make stutter all
transcendent truths (so too the one on ‘social entrepreneurship’), since it is them who arrest movement by
positing unity (of value, meaning, mode of being, etc.) over multiplicity.
51
To make this unmistakable, deconstructive work is never over since it is, as I argue in Chapter 2 (with
reference to Derrida), an infinite task; hence, even more work ahead.
160
References
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972 – 1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R.
Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Derrida, J. (1985). Derrida and Difference, ed. D. Wood & R. Bernasconi. Warwick:
Parousia Press.
Derrida, J. (1991). Letter to a Japanese Friend, In Between the Blinds, ed. P. Kamuf.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Foucault, M. (1996). Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961 – 1984, ed. S. Lotringer,
trans. L. Hochroth & J. Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e).
Sloterdijk, P. (1993). Weltfremdheit. Frankfuhrt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. & Heinrichs, H. J. (2006). Die Sonne und der Tod. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp.
Steyaert, C. & Dey, P. (2006). Keeping (Social) Entrepreneurship Hybrid: Towards a
Dangerous Research Agenda? RENT XX: Research in Entrepreneurship and Small
Business, November 23 – 24, Brussels, Belgium.
161
2
***
The Rhetoric of Social Entrepreneurship: Paralogy and New Language
Games in Academic Discourse
52
The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he
carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-
evident … to reexamine … institutions … to participate in the formation of a political will.
(Foucault, 1985, pp. 8 – 9)
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of
institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a
manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through
them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them. (Foucault, 1971)
In light of the previous chapter, which investigated the emergence of social entrepreneurship in
the context of university business school teaching, I would like to point out that the following
investigation of academic discourse presupposes a decisive transition. Looking back, we can say
that the question hitherto addressed has been ‘according to what rules and technologies (of
52
Please note that a previous version of this article has been published in Steyaert and Hjorth (2006).
162
discipline and subjectivation) is the ‘truth’ of social entrepreneurship created and sustained in
conjunction with business school teaching?’ Although the meaning, or, to use Foucault’s
terminology, the ‘regime of truth’ of social entrepreneurship produced in and through business
schools has been a matter of central concern, it hardly needs to be mentioned that the analytic
emphasis was not exclusively related to the question ‘what sort of meaning is produced?’ At
times, the analysis focused even more strongly on the question of how this knowledge of social
entrepreneurship is controlled, sustained and disseminated through the excellence dispositif.
Therefore, if one acknowledges that truth and the context of its production are inextricably
related, we have, hopefully, gained a sense of how images of social entrepreneurship are conjured
up with particular disciplinary practices and hence come to see that those images require
continuous political and economic incitement. In other words, the pivotal insight of our
investigation of business school teaching, when looked at from a Foucauldian (1984) vantage
point, has been that the image of social entrepreneurship ‘is centred on the form of scientific
discourse and the institutions which produce it’ (p. 73). It is at this juncture, however, that the
difference between the previous and the following chapter is revealed: rather than emphasizing
how disciplines and technologies function to bring about and normalize a particular image of
social entrepreneurship, the present chapter will take as its starting point a different theoretical
angle, namely the objectification (i.e. ‘scientific classification’; cf. Rabinow, 1984) of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ through social scientific discourse. The emphasis of this investigation, then, is
not so much on how (i.e. through what practices, regulations, events, etc.) the meaning of social
entrepreneurship is generated but rather on the particular meaning of social entrepreneurship that
is produced in academic writing. More precisely, on the basis of a deconstructive reading of the
canon of social entrepreneurship, the following analysis aims to elaborate on how (i.e. by dint of
what rhetoric) the linguistic conventions of academic discourse convert the subject matter into a
positive object.
163
Introduction
… every human activity is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a
‘miracle’. (Nietzsche, 1984, xxi)
Before I will begin with the deconstructive reading of scholarly texts, we must recall and repeat
that social entrepreneurship narratives being broadcast on television and published in newspapers,
practitioner books and scientific journals represent one of the very latest ‘fashion trends’ (cf.
Chapter 1) and a commonplace that has penetrated researchers’, politicians’, and journalists’
discourse in equal measure. Thus, taking academic writing on social entrepreneurship as the focus
of the present analysis, this immediately reveals an interest in a nascent, but proliferating, field of
investigation and a domain of research which has yet not experienced much contestation but all
the more enthusiasm. As Gentile (2002) claimed, the term ‘social entrepreneur’ over the
preceding 15 years has been used in more than 950 articles of widely read US business journals.
75% of those texts have thereby been published during the last three years of Gentile’s research
(1998 – 2001). From a cursory glance at the available academic literature, it is noticeable that
social entrepreneurship gets grounded in such diverse realms as developmental aid work (Fowler,
2000), the voluntary and community sector in the United Kingdom (Pharoah & Scott, 2002), the
development of economic communities within the United States (Wallace, 1999), the enrichment
of women’s work in Sweden (Pestoff, 2000), the promotion of health services in Europe (Catford,
1998, de Leeuw, 1999), non-profit organizations (Mort et al., 2003) and the welfare system more
generally (Thompson, 2002). Be that as it may, my main concern here is that the corpus of
academic texts produced a unanimously positive image of the subject matter.
53
Given, for
instance, that many texts stress the univocally positive effects of social enterprises, while
providing selective illustrations of their ‘heroic deeds’ such as empowerment (Pestoff, 2000),
social transformation (Alvord et al., 2002), regeneration (Thompson, 2002), creation of social
benefits (Fowler, 2000), increase of social capital (Leadbeater, 1997), or community economic
development (Wallace, 1999), I was initially charmed into believing that there was no other
option than holding the matter in awe. Hereon I started to deliberate why and how social
entrepreneurship was granted such a self-evidently good image? Doggedly refusing to join the
53
Notice that Ahl (2002) has discussed similar effects in relation to texts on entrepreneurship. See also Jones and
Spicer (2005) who provide a readable genealogy of the positive valuation of the entrepreneur.
164
approving choir of academics who endlessly rehearsed their hymn of praise, I opted for what I
here call an ‘abnormal path of science’;
54
a stream of reasoning which puts centre stage the
question how texts ‘seduce’ the reader into one possible interpretation of a situation over a
(theoretically) infinite set of alternative possibilities (Westwood & Clegg, 2003). Given the
paramount plausibility, trustworthiness and assumed objectivity ascribed to academic statements
(Feyerabend, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996), I deem essential a study that
puts prime emphasis upon the ways in which the scholarly community has appropriated the term
‘social entrepreneurship’, and how those constructions create particular presences while causing
both manifest and elusive absences (cf. Law, 2004). In the adept’s mind this might have a
familiar ring. Granted, the position that I am aspiring to here is that academic discourse
55
rests on
skillfully crafted rhetoric, nothing more, nothing less. So, whether you (not WE, because I truly
enjoy this vista) ‘like it or not, we live in a rhetorical world’ (van Maanen, 1995, p. 687).
Discourse and Rhetoric
Admittedly, pinpointing academics’ utterances as rhetoric might appear as a denouncement.
However, such an impression is comprehensible only if taking rhetoric to represent that which is
not true, as something which stands in opposition to reality, and which aims at seducing
compliance and consent (Carter & Jackson, 2004).
56
In contrast to this latter view, my own
interest in rhetoric is grounded on the assumption that language is genuinely constitutive and
performative. In that way, language is not something that simply reflects or communicates a
particular realm of reality which objectively exists beyond the sign. Rather, while dismissing that
words might demonstrably mean what they say, that they are ‘literally literal’ (Eagleton, 1983),
using language invariably means engaging in rhetoric as the immanent process through which we
produce the very realities of which we speak. As we get reminded by van Maanen, ‘(t)heory is a
54
Taken to represent the opposite of what gets referred to as ‘normal science’ (e.g. Case, 2003), that is, positivist and
post-positivist science (Burrell & Morgan, 1979).
55
The term ‘discourse’ is used here to pinpoint socially organized frameworks of meaning that define categories and
specify domains of what can be said and done. Consequently, discourse delineates the constitutive force of reality as
it simultaneously frames how a topic can be expressed in acceptable and intelligible ways and, on the flipside of it,
‘rules out’, i.e. limits and restricts what can be said of a particular issue (Hall, 2001).
56
As pointed out by Symon (2000), a common subtitle for academic publications is ‘rhetoric versus reality’, where
rhetoric is seen to be inaccurate and even manipulative, i.e. the opposite of a truthful, honest account.
165
matter of words, not worlds; of maps, not territories; of representations, not realities’ (van
Maanen, 1995, p. 134). By implication, all discourse – irrespective of being deemed scientific or
not – contains rhetoric as that aspect of language which serves the purpose of convincing the
audience of its truthfulness.
57
To depict this in a slightly different manner, while the formal study
of rhetoric was undertaken in ancient Greece to educate people in the art of public presentation (a
view which is still well recognized), e.g. forensic (legal) speech making, political oratory, and
ceremonial discourse, rhetoric equally comprised, though at a later historical stage, the ability to
write eloquently and in a convincing manner. Hence, irrespective of the observation that
‘rhetoric’ today more often than not gets related to the idea of ‘double talk’, we shall depart from
an understanding of rhetoric which highlights the matter as a theoretical as well as a practical
means for gaining an understanding of how language, or better discourse, gets to shape our
understanding of reality. In line with Lyotard (with Thébaud, 1985), I hence put myself into the
position of the rhetorician, that is, the person seeking ‘to produce effects upon the other [which is
you], effects that the other does not control’ (p. 4).
Objectives
Concurring with Barthes (1967) that no language can ever be ‘non-rhetorical’, I spotted an
opportunity to illuminate the current enunciation of social entrepreneurship in academic texts, and
to delineate how science gets to persuade the audience of the sincerity of its utterances (Watson,
2000).
58
As Michel Foucault (1984) pinpointed, interpretations represent a ‘violent or
surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning’, but
which tries to ‘impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different
game, and to subject it to secondary rules’ (p. 86). By extension thereof, the ensuing investigation
(cf. Appendix for the list of texts being selected for analysis) will pay prime attention to how
texts being deemed ‘academic’ are organized so as to rhetorically ward off potential counter-
57
Cf. Callon, Law and Rip (1986) who contend that the publication of scientific text is both a goal of scientific
activity and a means to build actor-networks for persuading and enrolling others.
58
Notice that the conventions which scientific texts follow and the stylistic devices which they use make its
rhetorical underpinning less than obvious. However, it is exactly that which is displayed as a non-rhetorical style,
which by itself represents the rhetorical device that deflects its own dynamic.
166
arguments (Billig, 1987; 1989). For the present purpose, I strongly identify rhetoric with
Derrida’s (1976) deconstructive endeavor in that rhetorical analysis irrevocably entails a
sensitivity for the indeterminacy of the sign ‘social entrepreneurship’. In other words, by virtue of
highlighting the rhetorical dynamic of the respective texts, I will try to invoke a space for the
tactical other of social entrepreneurship, i.e. ‘the residue of indeterminacy which escapes the
system’ (Sipiora & Atwill, 1990, p. 3). Obviously, instead of grounding social entrepreneurship
within a specific theoretical or methodological space, my analysis seeks to evoke a productive
crisis, or a ‘rupture’ to use Derrida’s (1966) wording, in which novel cultural interpretations may
become possible. To lay open social entrepreneurship texts’ rhetorical dynamic, that is, to expose
the binary systems which warrant stability, and to problematize the field’s consensus will thus
(hopefully) become a transparent strategy for making language the object of its own scrutiny.
Following Derrida (1992), it is important to note that this deconstructive reading is not
necessarily an exclusively negative act (Critchley, 1999), but rather a response to, and affirmation
of, political struggles against systems pledged to presence (cf. also Chapter 5). As such, the
process of dismantling or, more precisely, deconstructing the rhetoric of scholarly texts on social
entrepreneurship serves the aim of laying bare the instability of these texts, and to set in motion
some creative playfulness. The last part of this chapter is therefore devoted to making suggestions
for the prospective research agenda of social entrepreneurship. Regarding the enrichment of the
prevailing ‘regimes of truth’, if not to say truisms, I will argue for a proliferation of
deconstructive analysis as well as for the endorsement of new representational practices. New
groundings of social entrepreneurship will further be advocated with regress to Lyotard’s (1984)
work on paralogy (i.e. movements which go beyond or against common reason) as well as to
Derrida’s (1995; 1997; 1999) writing on aporia (i.e. paradoxes) and undecidability.
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Re-Reading Social Entrepreneurship Texts
Let me begin the present reading with a representative extract from Wallace (1999) in which we
are provided with a narrative of social enterprises and the population they are presumed to help.
These businesses [social purpose enterprises] serve as a necessary bridge into the mainstream
business community for their target populations. Educationally and economically
disadvantaged populations with sporadic employment histories do not benefit
automatically from opened doors to the job market. What non-profit organizations have
discovered over time is that many of them lack the very basic skills of how to act and/or
contribute to a work environment. (Wallace, 1999, p. 164)
On the face of it, we get to hear that social entrepreneurs have spotted that an underprivileged
population lacks the necessary skills for traditional employment opportunities, and that social
entrepreneurs exhibit the very resources needed to align this population with the mainstream
business community. At closer inspection, it is revealed that the excerpt from Wallace’s text
operates upon the construction of two subjects: social purpose entrepreneurs envisioned through a
particular affiliation with mainstream business, and an inchoate population of educationally and
economically disadvantaged people. The latter subject is denoted as ‘underprivileged’ on the
ground of its lack of the ‘very basic skills’ which are necessary to contribute to the workplace (as
determined by mainstream business). The relationship between the two subjects is specified
through the notion of ‘target’ which implies uni-directional influence, that is, social entrepreneurs
define the target at which they finally ‘shoot’ their actions and initiatives. Obviously, while the
underprivileged group is marked by a lack of specific, and thereby highly relevant (in that it
hands those populations to the mainstream business community) resources, it is implied that
social purpose entrepreneurs possess those valuable characteristics by virtue of which they are
able to ‘bridge’ the specified populations from an inferior (i.e. underprivileged) state to a superior
state (being defined alongside the characteristics of mainstream business).
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The Metaphor of Medical Treatment
So far so good. But how then does Wallace’s statement appear so agreeable? Peculiarly enough,
iteration-by-iteration I got to recognize that the text was allegorically related respectively to the
discourse of (western) medical treatment (Parker, 1992) and development (Frank, 1997).
Summoning the former metaphor, we get to see a physician (social purpose enterprise)
representing an all-knowing, incontestable authority, who is infallible in diagnosing (discovering)
his (yes, the doctor is male, but more of that later) patient’s (underprivileged populations)
pathologies (lack of the very basic skills requested for the work environment). Further implied
through the medical metaphor is the notion that the physician is able to mitigate the identified
problems while the patient gets envisioned as passively entrapped within his/her pathological
state. Hence, while the doctor is assumed to have the requisite medical skills to cure (bridge into
the mainstream business community) his/her patient, this discourse of medical treatment equally
prescribes that those same patients blindly give themselves into the healing hands of the
‘redeemer’.
One-sidedness and Dependence
As western medical treatment, and specifically its notion of aid, is quasi naturalized through the
image of a needy patient vis-à-vis a skilful help professional, it comes as no surprise that reading
the respective social entrepreneurship texts (for the first time) did not arouse much suspicion.
After all, what would one consider a solid basis for challenging that health is a good thing worth
striving for, or that providing help to subjects facing severe problems applies to higher human
standards? However, by applying the analogy of medical treatment, it becomes utterly apparent
that social entrepreneurship is premised on an unequal distribution of knowledge. In specific,
through the creation of an expert subject (i.e. the social enterprise), and an uninformed and thus
helpless subject (i.e. the underprivileged people), the text works to construct a power-knowledge
nexus which produces a strategic relationship of dependence between the two subjects.
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By
stressing the dependence and inertness of patients and by means of depicting their pathology as
an incontestable matter of fact, the implicit medical discourse, by association, renders
underprivileged populations passive and thus malleable.
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Though Foucault (1980) has scrutinized the notion of ideology on the grounds of its presupposition of truth,
ideology gets employed here to describe a form of relationship that entails hierarchical ramifications.
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Accountability and Blame
While constructing patients as dependent subjects, medical discourse simultaneously works
through a disciplinary stance:
The need is to innovatively develop new forms of social capital which, in turn, will help empower
disadvantaged people and encourage them to take greater responsibility for, and control
over, their lives. (Thompson et al., 2002, p. 329)
Following Thompson et al.’s prospect, it gets delineated that social entrepreneurs provide the
medical help needed to leverage (empower) the inferior state of patients, up to the point that
patients are finally made accountable to maintain (take greater responsibility for, and control
over, their lives) their own health. By the same token, help professionals are envisioned as
restoring the health of their patients while the sustenance of patients’ health lies within their own
responsibility. On the flipside of this image, people who do not take care of their health are
contestable for acting irresponsible. To be clear on that, wouldn’t it appear somehow heterodox to
elide the doctor’s advice of minding one’s health by leading a restful life? Yet, taking into
consideration that patients, i.e. social enterprises, within certain texts (which will be elaborated
more thoroughly further down) are held accountable for deviating from the prevailing market
ideology, things might start to change their shading.
Entitlement
In academic writings on social entrepreneurship it has become somewhat canonical that business
practices (must) serve as criteria for devising social enterprises’ governance and for assessing
their very performance. However, what is conspicuous, at least for me, is that those texts radiate
decisive univocity. The setting beyond dispute the idea that social enterprises should adhere to the
market logic is achieved within those texts through a particular process of entitlement. As pointed
out by Potter (1996), knowledge is culturally and historically linked to categories of actors in a
variety of different ways. Certain categories of actors are thereby entitled to know certain things
which, in effect, gives their statements particular credence and pertinence. In other words, given
that actors are entitled to possess a specific kind of knowledge or skill, it follows that their
narratives are warranted pervasiveness and rhetorical intelligibility. Invoking the metaphor of
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medical treatment, we thus get to see that the help professional is assumed to perform his cure
without hindrance, as he knows what health is and how health is to be restored and sustained.
Hence, by virtue of envisioning an all-knowing curer who is entitled to heal (in that he has the
apposite knowledge) and by conceding to him good health (because he is presumed to govern his
own health accordingly), it gets increasingly difficult to envision that the prescription of these
practices actually marks a reduction of available treatment opportunities and thus a distinct form
of governmentality (Foucault, 1979). However, wise to our text on social entrepreneurship, we
get to see that the ascription of expertise is worked up through the dichotomy of knowing – not-
knowing. Whereas social enterprises get depicted as possessing indispensable knowledge, namely
knowledge which warrants their successful conduct along the lines of mainstream business, those
organizations are unquestionably deemed appropriate for their respective positions and tasks.
Progressive Development
A pervasive observation within many articles on social entrepreneurship relates to the strong
focus those texts lay on anticipated endpoints. To underscore the important posture of social
enterprises and to provide those textual structures a stable centre (Derrida, 1966), such texts
operate through the establishment of valued standards towards which social enterprises direct
their respective underprivileged populations and help beneficiaries. Conveying the spell of
teleological development, it is implied that patients – once they receive appropriate treatment –
will evolve in a regular, that is, progressively improving manner. By such accounts, the reader is
taught that to achieve a progressive (i.e. healthier) state it suffices to expose the patient to the
meticulous interventions of help professionals. Healing, respectively the process of development,
requires no effort on the part of the patient which implies that teleology is contained in the action
of the help professional! Importantly, the ideological consequences of this imagery derive from
the conflation of social entrepreneurship and mainstream economy. Whereas I have no principle
reservation against this respective interconnection, it is the exclusiveness of this truth regime
which requires critical heeding. Hence, invoking the image according to which everything gets
better once exposed to social enterprises, and taking into account that this dynamic gets sustained
by virtue of sweeping eulogies, that is, stories filled with praise and commendation, it is equally
important to envision that we have ‘sacrificed’ a more variegated picture at the cost of stories
which univocally provide confidence and hope. However, wouldn’t it be all too subversive to call
into question an image which warrants such a bright future?
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The Demise of our Present
Besides legitimizing social enterprises through the celebration of their (to conjure up a forceful
metaphor) God-like acts of redemption, other texts foster a need for social enterprises by virtue of
constantly reiterating the putative demise of our current (welfare) system (e.g. Wallace, 1999). In
other words, by perpetually emphasizing that the status quo, in its infernal guise, is no option,
those texts achieve to foster a conviction that things have to change immediately. In heralding
that the status quo is no longer tenable, this view works pervasively to call into question practices
of, for instance, non-profit, voluntary, bureaucratic and governmental organizations, in that those
organizations are made responsible for our crumbling present. In other words, the univocal appeal
for increased efficiency, effectiveness and amplified professionalism in the public and non-profit
realms are made easily acceptable while being interwoven into a narrative that features these
latter organizations as the very reason for our contemporary miseries.
External Pressures
While what du Gay has termed ‘modernization hyperbole’ (du Gay, 2004) makes us believe that
everything in place has to change; this belief is buttressed with respect to social entrepreneurship
in the ubiquitously perpetuated story that the environment is turbulent and volatile and shaped by
a virtual explosion of complexity.
The pace of change continues to accelerate globally and traditional attempts to extrapolate from
the past are no longer valid. (Catford, 1998, p. 95)
This pervasive ‘futurology’ (Cheney et al., 2004) being revealed in Catford’s story predicates that
only those will survive (and possibly prosper) who exhibit the aptitude of constant adaptation. Let
me illustrate these claims through Mort et al.:
Within the increasingly competitive market social enterprises are viewed as entities competing
with their commercial counterparts and other social enterprises for survival and growth.
Similar to commercial enterprises, NFPs [non-for profits] are compelled to adopt
innovative ways of perceiving and delivering superior value to their clients. (Mort et al.,
2003, p. 85)
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What follows from Mort et al.’s extract is an image that displays a seemingly unchallengeable
outside pressure that stems from increased commercial competition. By extension, the image
spurs a need to adopt practices traditionally carried out by commercial enterprises. The discourse
of economic competition thus gets to justify increased efficiency, customer orientation, corporate
accountability, and so on which seem attainable only through a sound business focus. For
instance, ‘deinstitutionalization’ is depicted in certain texts (Wallace, 1999) as a reified (i.e. a
material and therefore not man made phenomenon) and irrevocable (obscuring the alterability of
the phenomenon) force that presupposes economically orientated practices. Remarkably, the
belief in the irredeemability of outside pressures is sustained in apprehending them as results of
cosmic laws. In other words, being envisioned as a material reality, we get to believe that those
pressures are beyond human terms and therefore unchangeable.
Globalization as the Prescription of Economic Activity
As business-related terms such as re-engineering, financial accountability, cost cutting, new
public management, and so forth constitute an incremental part of our every-day vocabulary, their
use (even in relation to issues that formerly operated devoid of such premises) does not make us
flinch. On the contrary, while such claims have become part and parcel of lived ideology (Billig
et al., 1988), it is somehow commonsense to prescribe, for instance, economic efficiency, smooth
management and organizational effectiveness. As suggested in conjunction with the futurology of
social entrepreneurship, a Darwinian notion of the environment is being used to support a
business mode of conduct in an evolutionary process of natural selection. Envisioning
globalization as a ubiquitous process that presupposes constant competition evokes a threat that
can only be counteracted by means of sound business practices. Hence, in many social
entrepreneurship texts ‘globalization’ gets coined as a ‘god-term’ (Cheney et al., 2004) which is
primarily related to (and thereby prescribes) economic activity (Parker, 2004). Consequently,
once we get to comprehend social entrepreneurship as an inseparable aspect of the globalized
world, the respective globalization – economy nexus works arouse an urge to comply with an
economic mode of conduct.
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Business – Non-Business Binary
While the conflation of globalization and economic activity is unquestionably pivotal for
encouraging social entrepreneurship, other texts emphasize the relevance of profit-related
practices in social enterprises through a critique of traditional public or third sector organizations.
Through the installation of a bureaucracy – social enterprise binary these texts rhetorically
achieve the overthrow of the belief in practices genuinely applied in public, non-profit or non-
governmental organizations.
Because a bureaucracy practices a high degree of specialization in its tasks (on the assumption
that specialization results in efficiency), it can only respond to problems, procedures, and
solutions in piecemeal and/or uncoordinated fashion. (Wallace, 1999, p. 158)
As follows from Wallace, bureaucracies are not pertinent for meeting public expectations, which
implies that these organizations need to be premised on contemporary liberal norms of market-
driven responsibilities. While the installation of a Darwinian image of the environment works to
condition a belief that social enterprises strive above all to survive, it is implied that those
organizations must overcome the natural inclination of the uninspired and lethargic bureaucrat.
Hence, ascribing to (social) entrepreneurial organizations the potential to overcome prevailing
calamities (by means of, for instance, their flexibility and innovativeness) works to outdate
Wallace’s ‘bureaucratic organizations.’ In this ‘epochal schema’ (du Gay, 2004) ‘bureaucracy’ or
‘administration’ is reduced to a simple and abstract set of negativities contrasted with an equally
simple and abstracted, but positively coded, set of ‘entrepreneurial’ principles. Accordingly, the
image of non-entrepreneurial organizations appears univocally disadvantageous whereupon there
is virtually no alternative to ‘enterprising’ unless institutions and persons aim to seek their own
fates. Ultimately, how could anyone be for bureaucracy or otherwise non-entrepreneurial forms
of organizing if they simply get to represent dysfunctional, outdated and inefficient leftovers?
Universal Claim for Economic Activity
As elaborated above, the discourse of (social) enterprise is normative as it enjoins the conduct of
organizations previously seen as non-commercial, including the conduct of government agencies,
voluntary organizations, social-purpose enterprises and individuals. A notable number of texts
thereby rely upon the proposition that bureaucracies must be aligned to meet the demands of the
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market, to empower consumers and to create vitalized leaders at the helm of new agencies. While
such claims might appear far-fetched, it is revealed on the background of the metaphor of medical
treatment that these statements are nonetheless pervasive. As the metaphor of medical treatment
highlights the universal way of healing, it follows that this treatment is apposite for all living
beings. Taking for granted that all people equally strive for a healthy life, prescriptions being
staged under the spell of ‘health’ appear benign and beyond question. However, let us be
reminded that health within social entrepreneurship texts gets to represent the ability to pursue a
job and make money.
… working and earning are not merely yardsticks by which to measure ‘improvements’ … rather
they are a precondition for these improvements … an underlying principle is that bearing
part of the enterprise’s risk produces therapeutic effects because it is therapeutic to be
able to make mistakes, to learn by trial and error, to run the risk of change. (De
Leonardis & Mauri, 1992, p. 53)
As revealed in De Leonardis and Mauri’s utterance, working and earning are literally
circumscribed as therapeutic, meaning that those activities are at the service of patients’ health.
Blatantly obvious, working and earning therefore become quintessential activities in that they
teach underprivileged people a vital lesson for successful living.
Measurability and Technical Rationality
While the penetration of social entrepreneurship texts through business discourse becomes easily
acceptable, we have to bear in mind that our agreement, witting or unwitting, requires strong
persuasive buttresses. What finally gets to appear as natural and inevitable thus relies on constant
reiteration. Additionally, to bolster the respective claims against potential critique one needs to
enrich one’s argumentation with easily retrievable commonsense, that is, lived ideology (Billig et
al., 1988). A common rhetorical strategy for immunizing one’s accounts thus materializes in
allusion to instrumental rationality. For instance, within its appropriation by Thompson et al.
(2002), social entrepreneurship is portrayed as a foremost rational and technical activity which
can be measured and therefore predicted. The notion of ‘operationalise’, for instance, represents
social entrepreneurship as a calculable undertaking. What is revealed in such accounts is a kind of
‘hyper-realization’ (Casey, 2004) that works to emphasize the merits of technical rationality in
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the realm of the third or non-profit sector. The persuasiveness of this particular view is granted by
delineating social entrepreneurship as a programmable and therefore rather easy undertaking (at
least as long as sound business practices are employed), while simultaneously creating the
impression that social entrepreneurship operates smoothly, completely devoid of political
struggles.
Science
While the invocation of technical rationality as such is already sweeping, some texts on social
entrepreneurship additionally strengthen their rhetorical power through recourse to science.
Although ideas are powerful, people often place too much emphasis on the initial flash of
brilliance … , the bigger challenge is converting an initially appealing idea into a
worthwhile opportunity. This step combines rigorous analysis with creative adjustment as
social entrepreneurs test and refine ideas through a mixture of action and research.
(Guclu et al., 2002, p. 6)
Research within the extract by Guclu and colleagues gets depicted as a crucial aspect of the social
entrepreneurial endeavor. In deeming technological knowledge scientific, and relying on the
assumption that science unanimously is (and does) good, there are no sound reasons presented
why people working in the third or non-profit sector should reject such a code. Due to the
paramount credibility of science (in the western mindset), such texts seek to legitimize the
rational calculus of business while simultaneously sidestepping potential criticism of that
respective image. Consequently, once social entrepreneurs are delineated as possessing the
relevant ‘scientific’ body of knowledge, these texts are bestowed with a certain cachet of
incontestability. And, by implication, any form of knowledge that fails to exhibit the relevant
scientific credentials gets judged as worthless. While operating upon the assumption that sound
scientific practices lend themselves to evaluation (which stipulates quantitative rather than
qualitative parameters), such texts create an urge to provide objectively measurable results in the
form of, for example, changed social impacts and outcomes (Johnson, 2000). In effect, such
rigorous endeavors of measurement and categorization, as has been shown by Foucault (1988),
equally get to represent a process through which objects are rendered amenable to regulation.
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Normalization of Business Practices
What follows from equating social entrepreneurship with quantitatively measurable activities
(such as number of beneficiaries provided with a job) is that practices and effects of social
enterprises which do not materialize in numbers are either rendered invisible or are treated as
deviant and thus inferior. This process of normalization – abnormalization is thereby installed
through working up a contrast structure which deems particular activities respectively appropriate
or inappropriate. Applied to our subject matter, this gets to mean that charging social
entrepreneurship of not using quantitative evaluation and scientifically validated practices,
business discourse operates to depict traditional voluntary, non-profit and social sector practices
as ‘flabby’ and ‘amateurish’ (Grenier, 2002). Taking, for example, the statement by Thompson et
al. to exemplify our point:
… many typical volunteers will need training in up-to-date information technology skills for some
of the needs and tasks involved. (Thompson et al., 2000, p. 336)
As we get to see through the extract of Thompson et al., knowledge of IT is a specific skill which
can be acquired through education. The attribute of ‘typical’ thus points out that subjects working
in the social realm normally do not have the requested knowledge (or at least do not exhibit the
state of the art knowledge). In Thompson et al.’s universe, successful work without the requisite
knowledge is bound to fail. To demonstrate the necessity of business modes of conduct, the text
has to render those other, i.e. abnormal, practices problematic. The randomness and
uncontrollability of such non-business practices has no place in a Tayloristic vision (Morgan,
1997) of social entrepreneurship. As they seem to threaten the survival of those organizations,
they get to represent hostile elements that must be destroyed: business practices are privileged,
the other practices are denigrated; business is what counts, non-business is the unimportant other,
i.e. that which needs compulsive appropriation to management. Hence, the normal – abnormal
binary calls upon an all-or-nothing logic where you are either for or against business practices.
However, it might not be wise to proceed aloof of sound measurement as one would undoubtedly
fall prey to the disarrangement of unfunded speculation!
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Beyond Profit
As elaborated above, a normal – abnormal division is interwoven into business discourse so as to
undermine the appropriateness of social enterprises being premised on non-business practices.
There are other texts, however, that install a premium position of social enterprises through
notions of ‘good intention’, ‘moral need’, ‘contributing to society’, ‘social purpose’, ‘common
good’, or even ‘passion’, ‘love’, ‘honesty’, ‘empathy’. Following Pearce we get to hear that …
… , their [social enterprises’] common characteristics involve activities centered around a
‘social purpose’, the regeneration or expansion of local economic activity, collective
advancement of the common good rather than solely commercial or private profit.
(Pearce, 1994)
Texts such as the one by Pearce are rhetorically premised upon a social – non-social divide.
While the non-social prospect gets envisioned through monetary issues most frequently
exemplified through business entrepreneurs, social enterprises are assumed to account for both
social and non-social activities and duties. To understand how this seemingly paradoxical
combination of features can work without appearing self-contradictory or paradoxical, it is worth
looking at Catford (1998) who points out that …
… social and economic entrepreneurs share the same focus on vision and opportunity and the
same ability to convince and empower others to help them turn these visions into a reality.
In social entrepreneurs, however, these characteristics are coupled with a strong desire
for social justice. (Catford, 1998, p. 96)
As becomes comprehensible through the extract by Catford, the business-related aspects of social
entrepreneurs get depicted in the sense of an add-on criterion. While social entrepreneurs are
portrayed as not only exhibiting sound business skills but as additionally embracing social aims,
the pursuit of what I here call ‘non-social activities’ does not seem to collide with their adherence
to moral convictions. Remarkably, this particular rhetorical twist seems to reconcile our basic
either-or contradiction by means of exchanging it with an inclusionary as-well-as logic. Whereas
social enterprises simultaneously are envisioned to carry out profit seeking activities and to retain
their social mission (e.g. Pomerantz, 2003), those texts seek to set such organizations aside from
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those that are characterized by an exclusive, and thereby morally flawed, aim of making money.
Hence, as we get to see in the extract below from Dees’ (1998) text, it is not monetary activity per
se which gets devalued but rather the respective purpose (money, profit, etc.) conveyed in those
accounts.
… social entrepreneurs involved in for-profit activities see profit as a means to an end, while
economic entrepreneurs see profit as an end in itself. (Dees, 1998)
Through the distinction between means and ends Dees’s text aims to bypass inscribing monetary
activities an inferior ethical value. Within the above utterance, profit is presented as containing no
inherent and pre-existing value. Instead, profit derives its value in conjunction with social
entrepreneurship by getting envisioned as a device for achieving particular moral ends. Profit-
seeking according to the text, can be social as long as social entrepreneurs resist the temptation of
using it for selfish ends (Guclu et al., 2002). What gets revealed herein is a utilitaristic principle
which works to distinguish social entrepreneurs from ordinary entrepreneurs, business people,
etc., despite the fact that all are doing the same thing: earning money. However, by means of its
utilitarian ‘superstructure’, such texts suggest a superiority of social entrepreneurs that makes us
so effectively believe that their work, regardless of potentially negative ramifications, gets to
serve higher purposes. Overtly criticizing such images would thus not only call into question the
appropriateness of social enterprises’ moral standards but would equally scrutinize their ideal of
our common good.
Supernatural Individual
Working up the impression of exclusiveness through an argument of superior morality is one
rhetorical strategy. Another rhetoric strategy creates a similar effect by drawing out a picture of
social entrepreneurship on the basis of a singular individual characterized by supernatural talents.
For example, as elaborated by de Leeuw, social entrepreneurs comprise multiple talents,
including the ability …
… to analyse, to envision, to communicate, to empathize, to enthuse, to advocate, to mediate, to
enable and to empower a wide range of disparate individuals and organizations. (de
Leeuw, 1999, p. 261)
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Taking into consideration the commonalities this extract shares with other texts, it concludes, to
put it bluntly, that social entrepreneurship is largely envisioned through a single person,
respectively his/her particularities. By virtue of the accumulated depiction of such traits and
aptitudes an image of social entrepreneurs is created that at one and the same time highlights their
power of foresight, their facility for organization and administration, their unusual energy, as well
as their more general (but nonetheless valuable) leadership properties. Hence, to gain an
understanding of how this effect is achieved through the use of language, let us take a look at the
following statement by Thompson et al.:
In and amongst [social entrepreneurs] will be some non-enterprising people simply committed to
doing good (Thompson et al., 2000, p. 336)
Following this, it is not suffice for successful social entrepreneurs to possess good intentions (as
entailed in the morally inclined discourse discussed above). In particular, the addition of ‘simply’
fosters the impression that the intention of doing good is not only insufficient, but that the
intention to do good may even be the most facile part of the whole endeavor. The motive of doing
well seems so self-evident and pre-ordained that it does not request any further consideration.
Others may be sound leaders of some particular venture or organisation, but, lacking vision and
charisma, they will never behave in a truly entrepreneurial manner. Such leaders may, for
example, lack the courage to take the risks (an issue of temperament) to create growth.
(Thompson et al., 2000, p. 332)
Within this extract it becomes even more evident how the individualistic enunciation of social
entrepreneurs delimits the subject matter from ‘sound leaders’. By invoking ‘temperament’ it is
implied that social entrepreneurship is deemed possible only through the possession of certain
innate capabilities. Contained therein is the idea that the success of social entrepreneurs is bound
to pre-determined (i.e. genetically defined) capacities. Hence, ascribing to social entrepreneurs
prestigious attributes such as ‘charisma’ or ‘the courage to take risks’ (both qualities which are
conceived as being in short supply) makes it a matter of rare individuals, of ‘champions’ that
sustain their social mission despite upcoming obstacles. In effect, the image of the heroic
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individual makes us believe that social entrepreneurs are ‘sovereign and self-determining beings’
(Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996), and, owing to their grandiose successes, we get to see that social
entrepreneurs are in fact indispensable for rebalancing the maladjustment of current societies.
Maleness
Having pointed out that the individualist discourse works by endowing social entrepreneurs with
extraordinary personality traits, it will be shown in the ensuing paragraph that certain texts
operate upon a gender bias which favors a male perception.
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Social entrepreneurs display innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking propensity in their key
decision making. (Mort et al., 2003, p. 82)
Examining this statement by Mort et al., we first find a seemingly uncontentious notion of ‘risk
taking’ and ‘proactiveness’. While taking into consideration characteristics being employed in
other texts such as ‘tolerance for insecurity’, ‘independence, ‘determination’, ‘self-confidence’,
’logic’, etc., it becomes increasingly evident that we are entrenched in a stereotypically male
narrative. Despite the fact that the gender of social entrepreneurs is mostly not made explicit,
such texts, through the employment of male-associated personality traits, nevertheless succeed in
erecting an impression of maleness. The male identity script thereby achieves, seemingly
unproblematically, to accentuate male characteristics as a prerequisite for successful social
entrepreneurship. Examined from an ideological vantage point, individualist discourse leads to a
gendered division of social entrepreneurs, whereby discourse works to naturalize male qualities
and to advocate a demand for free spirit, detachment and rationality. Evidently, the hierarchy
works at the expense of those practices and values traditionally attributed to the female domain
such as housework, childbirth, child-care, etc. Such texts, by implication, operate to convince us
that these latter qualities obviously do not generate any entrepreneurial spark.
Following from these observations, it seems pertinent to claim that models of social
entrepreneurship that are based on an individualist discourse are normative and exclusive in that
they marginalize individuals, such as women or ordinary people, who do not comply with the
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Notice that one finds in the realm of critical entrepreneurship research an abundance of texts highlighting that the
entrepreneur gets established as essentially more masculine than feminine (e.g. Holquist & Sundin, 1988;
Mirchandani; 1999).
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default standards. Accordingly, these particular images contribute to and reinforce the conviction
that the sidelined subjects, that is, the anonymous others, have psychological and gender
characteristics which inhibit social entrepreneurial development.
Looming Stalemate?
We live in this ‘reality’ and this ‘reality’ lives with/in us; but so ‘obvious’ is this reality that it
does not arouse much curiosity and/or debate. (Prasad, 1997, p. 91)
On the face of it, the discourses examined in the previous deconstructive reading mimic research
that has been conducted in the realm of management, marketing, entrepreneurship, and
organization science more generally. Contrary to my rhetorical allegation that what I said is
important and worth heeding, I thus anticipate being accused of having served old wine in new
bottles. However, it is important to recognize that this sense of déjà vu – including its
(potentially) associated boredom – is equally to be taken as a revealing reflection of the status
quo of social entrepreneurship research. In fact, the prevailing ‘objectification of discourse’
(Daston, 1992), in my opinion, provides no reason for staging a party. Giving the nascent state of
social entrepreneurship research, I feel even more compelled to pose a question regarding the
ceaseless perpetuation of management and economic discourses and to instigate new
representations, language games and criteria for our future research. However, there can be no
question here of offering exhaustive and definitive suggestions for advancing the field of social
entrepreneurship. What I would like to propose, however fragmentary and allusive, as a ‘way out’
in the ensuing paragraphs follows three distinct, though closely related lines of arguing: first, I
will stake out a space for additional reflective, and more specifically deconstructive, studies.
Second, some recent developments in entrepreneurship research will be highlighted as potential
sources for social entrepreneurship’s semantic multiplication. And third, I will hail a paralogical
grounding of social entrepreneurship through the employment of styles of writing so far
unfamiliar to scholarly representation.
182
Infinite Deconstructive Practice
61
Departing from the assumption that the ‘invisibility’ of our commonsense rhetorically endows
our mindscape with truth-value, my investigation was set up to illustrate how and in what ways
social entrepreneurship becomes ‘black boxed’ (Law, 1994), or disguised in its undecidable
complexity. My deconstructive reading was therefore put forward to dismantle the black boxes
that render social entrepreneurship incontestable, and, therefore, to disrupt some of discourse’s
shiny surface aesthetics. In other words, to see the ordinary with a fresh vision, we first have to
make it ‘extraordinary’ and ‘free ourselves of normalized ways of thinking that blind us to the
strangeness of the familiar’ (Cooper & Morgan, 1988, p. 101). In line with Derrida (2001) who
claims for deconstruction a central position in the ‘university of tomorrow’, I would like to spur
us to see deconstructive and/or rhetorical readings
62
not as something to be avoided or eliminated,
but as tactical devices which bear the potential to bring forward a vision of social
entrepreneurship that no longer dispenses unclouded optimism but that equally radiates ironic
antagonism. As critical readings overturn texts’ taken-for-granted meanings and thereby initiate a
de-objectification of social entrepreneurship we get to create an empty space (Steyaert, 2002), or
a discursive springboard, on the basis of which we get to see the ‘human possibilities’ of social
entrepreneurship instead of its ‘settled certainties’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 26).
63
As deconstruction can never be achieved in any definitive sense (cf. Chapter 5), it would
be a fallacy to believe that prevailing social entrepreneurship texts, and their underlying premises
have been dismantled and overcome. Instead, I concede that we are far from beyond the present
ideologies, which we probably never will be, and that what is needed is a ‘practical politics of the
open end’ (Spivak, 1990, p. 105), that is, the relentless and persistent undoing of the taken for
granted and the oblivious supplement upon which they are based. Following Derrida, ‘we must
join forces to exert pressure and organize ripostes, and we must do so on an international scale
and according to new modalities, though always while analyzing and discussing the very
foundations of our responsibility, its discourses, its heritage, and its axioms’ (Derrida, 2003, p.
61
Notice that this argument will be extended and appropriated to the context of the business school in Chapter 5.
62
In a readable interview, Gayatri Spivak outlines the interrelatedness of these two analytic endeavors (cf. Sipiora &
Atwill, 1990).
63
Apparently, critical discursive readings get to fulfill a political and ethical function in social entrepreneurship
research in that they, by dismantling unexamined assumptions and by making accepted concepts strange, enable
‘human beings to transcend the conventional and create new approaches and policies’ (Gusfield, 1976, p. 32).
183
126). Deconstructive practice can, against all denunciation, do justice
64
since it effectuates a
decoupling from our scholarly heritage and especially its concealed political consequences
65
(Derrida, 1966). Such analysis, I contend, cannot be postponed with regard to social
entrepreneurship as it enables an irrevocable concern for indeterminacy, and, by implication, for
resistance to what Derrida termed ‘exhaustive accounts’. Yet, only if we take upon us this
painstaking, and infinite, task might there emerge a chance to change the rules of prevailing
language games and thus to reformulate a new grounding for social entrepreneurship. Hence, as I
conceive of deconstruction as a pivotal measure for countermanding not only prevailing
interpretations of entrepreneurship but also as a reflective means in business/management
education, the reader will find in the third part of the thesis a chapter which elaborates how
Derrida, respectively his deconstructive inheritance, could make a valuable contribution for the
‘de-McDonaldization’ of the business school of the future (cf. Chapter 1).
Inheriting the Other Entrepreneurship
Having mentioned the impression of déjà vu being elicited through the above deconstructive
reading, we are foremost reminded of our legacy in respect to entrepreneurship research. Despite
having come somewhat disenchanted by the observation that the sign ‘social’ is appropriated in a
way that it gets to allude to progressive development and technical rationality or to expert
knowledge and individualism, I would nevertheless, or even more so, like to conjure up some
anachronistic movements in entrepreneurship research. To this end, I opt to confront the current
impasse of social entrepreneurship writing by recommending especially, but not exclusively, a
careful reading of the texts by Steyaert and Katz (2004) as well as Hjorth and Steyaert (2003)
who have formulated both cogent treatises of the field’s foreclosure as well as lines of flight for
subverting the prevailing discourse. Concerning the issue of foreclosure, Hjorth (2005), Hjorth
and Steyaert (2003), Steyaert (2000), Steyaert and Katz (2004) thoroughly pinpoint that academic
texts reveal a clear bias towards construing entrepreneurship on the background of management
theory and business administration. In that respect, I feel much sympathy with Hjorth’s (2003)
64
Since Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ (1992), which Dews (1995) has codified as his ‘ethical turn’, Derrida related his
deconstructive strategy to issues of, for instance, justice and law. Through a cogent deconstruction of prevailing legal
systems, Derrida at the same time decoupled justice from law while introducing a undeconstructible ideal of justice
which is not founded on violence. In opposition to existing legal systems, genuine justice, as Derrida pinpoints, is the
very movement of deconstruction.
65
By means of deconstructing the binary oppositions, which hold together a respective structure, one simultaneously
destabilizes the entire structure or, following Derrida, puts its elements into play.
184
estimate that the dominant representations of entrepreneurship mark a clear limit to our
understanding of entrepreneurship as social creativity. Through Hjorth (2005) we further get
reminded that by envisioning entrepreneurship as well as the entrepreneur as events of ‘controlled
creativity’ and ‘economic managerialism’, metaphors of ludens (playing), narrans (storytelling),
and traditionalis (tradition) are crudely put aside. Regarding this kind of thematic enrichment, the
two texts by Steyaert and Katz (2004) and Hjorth and Steyaert (2003) provide us with additional
inspirations concerning how, in other words through what perspectives and in what dimensions,
the matter of social entrepreneurship prospectively could, or better should be conceptualized.
However, as with deconstruction, the task of semantic opening and multiplication (which
all of the above articles instigate) is never completed but needs untiring repetition not only in
relation to entrepreneurship (where it only has started) but equally well regarding the matter of
social entrepreneurship. It is thus imperative to remind ourselves that we have to insert a question
regarding what social entrepreneurship, and especially the epithet ‘social’ is, respectively ought
to be. While this latter issue will be treated further down, I deem important to emphasize that
Steyaert, Hjorth and Katz all contribute to unhitching entrepreneurship from its performative
enunciation. In particular, by prescribing multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic
experimentation, and in calling for comprehending entrepreneurship in its everydayness,
playfulness, as well as political, cultural, ecological and societal accentuation, the authors make a
pivotal plea for paralogical groundings, i.e. opportunities for innovative enunciations (Brugger,
2001) where interpretations beyond homo economicus and technical rationality become possible.
To claim new groundings of social entrepreneurship, it is thus not only necessary to instill new
contents and theoretical trajectories
66
but also to reflect upon new forms of expressions and
representation. Instead of legitimizing knowledge of social entrepreneurship according to whether
it can be commoditized and thus made saleable,
67
we must seek criteria that intensify our
relationship to the difference that is distinctive about social entrepreneurship. These possibilities
shall be elaborated in the following sections.
66
As this would in itself not warrant the circumvention of performativity.
67
Which is one of the prevailing objectives of contemporary business schools.
185
Paralogy and Style
Derrida (1976) has coined the term ‘logocentrism’ to depict philosophy’s insolence in explaining
what words and concepts really mean. The assumption that meaning can be grasped by
philosophical discourse unsullied by the imprecision of metaphors is, following Derrida, naive, as
the signifiers of language systems cannot refer to any transcendental signified. In line with
Derrida’s elaboration of the state of philosophy, Czarniawska (2004) has equally made clear that
our heritage as organization scholars not only hinders us from seeing fiction, narratives of the
self, performance science, polyvocal texts, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire,
visual presentations, and mixed genres (Hardy & Clegg, 1997) as legitimate forms of knowledge
but above all demands that the questions of knowledge status and legitimization remains
unexamined. Hence, the selective admission of scientific discourse, or the invocation of absolute
conditions of discourse, deny difference and multiplicity in respect to academic enunciation. Such
a delimitation of ways of thinking and talking is, according to Lyotard (1984), fascist
68
as it
enables the exemption of alternative narratives.
69
Given the totalizing inclination of prevailing
metanarratives, what seems needed are new criteria for judging knowledge. Regarding the
appraisal of the status quo of social entrepreneurship it is again Lyotard who makes us aware that
a large degree of scientific knowledge is legitimated either by invoking truth (in the form of
metanarratives) or performativity. In contrast to those hegemonic codes, Lyotard puts forward an
ontological position which stresses that the world is composed of events which give rise to
multiple interpretations (or small narratives
70
). In his attempt to formulate an alternative
legitimizing principle Lyotard puts forward ‘paralogy’
71
as the kind of movement that seeks new
meaning in excluded language games. Lyotard’s paralogy thus undermines the determinism
aspired to by the two former principles and instead incites a search for instabilities and anomalies
yet recognized.
72
Heeding paralogy’s concern for pluralism and diversity, it is of central
importance and utterly timely to consider the issue of style and its interrelation with knowledge of
social entrepreneurship. In other words, to advocate the polysemia of the signifier social
68
In ‘The Differend’ Lyotard (1988) took a forceful stance by illustrating the terror of hegemonic forms of speech on
behalf of Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jews.
69
Michel Serres (1997) is equally scathing in his appraisal of the state of research, describing current university
curricula – and especially their enforcing of conformity, rules and norms – as intellectual terrorism which despise
creativity and invention.
70
In Lyotard’s (1984) view the little narratives (must) become the ‘quintessential form of imaginative invention,
most particularly in science’ (p. 60).
71
Which is not to be mistaken as ‘false reasoning’.
72
Paralogical groundings, following Lyotard, warrant justice by way of counteracting excluded language games.
186
entrepreneurship and to detain its performative legitimization, I would like to search for
paralogical groundings through writing styles that feature a sensitivity towards the uniqueness of
social entrepreneurial endeavors and thereby sidestep the exclusionary ‘terror’ of univocal
readings.
As outlined by Game and Metcalfe (1996), the practice of writing is actively involved in
the production (and not just with mimicking representation) of knowledge as a result of which
(academic) writing becomes an act of cultural production. It follows from Game and Metcalfe’s
observation that how we are expected to write irrevocably affects what we can write about.
Consequently, it might be helpful to temporarily sidestep the distinction between science and
non-science and instead instigate a discussion of style and representational practice. Hence, while
the kinds of language or discourse we employ in making sense of social entrepreneurship are not
reducible to one another (Lyotard, 1988) we get to see that by writing in different ways, each
style can bring to the fore a fresh perspective on the phenomenon being studied. While I have
tried to liberate us from the myth that there exists such a thing as ‘getting it right’ (Barthes,
1986), I would like to advocate the introduction of ‘breaching’ (van Maanen, 1995), or
experimentation with style in order to learn about social entrepreneurship what is unknowable,
unimaginable, using prescribed writing formats. In accordance therewith, we are called upon to
transcend existing boundaries between disciplinary fortresses and to invent new connections for
the sake of understanding social entrepreneurship differently. Grounding the prospective writing
of social entrepreneurship in such a ‘third place’ (Huyghe, 1993) will inspire ‘experimenting’
with varieties of writing which employ language not only to inform but equally to surprise and to
evoke (Lacan, 1977); a language which, by virtue of its tropes, arouses ‘imaginative play’
(Bruner, 1986, p. 4). In the sense of a rhetorical refolding, the function of new styles and
rhetorical tropes is to open the field of social entrepreneurship towards the range of possibilities
that a text can refer to. Having located in the field of social entrepreneurship a need for ‘cool’
73
texts (Linstead, 2003), i.e. texts that ‘recruit the reader’s imagination – that enlist him in the
performance of meaning under the guidance of the texts’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 25), I hope for stories
73
‘Hot’ and ‘cool’ are taken to refer to the level of definition of a particular media performance. It is thereby the cool
performance, i.e. the soft, shadowy, blurred, and interchangeable, which evokes (and requires) more involvement on
behalf of the audience.
187
of social entrepreneurship which appeal to thinking outside of rational order and prescriptive
rhetoric, and which make us hear the ‘noise’
74
that might generate novel understandings.
Aporia, Undecidability and Ethics
75
As the previous deconstructive reading has revealed, staging the neologism ‘social
entrepreneurship’ does not necessarily mean that one has bypassed economic discourse. On the
contrary, the ostensible shift towards the social dimension of entrepreneurship might arguably
conceal how deeply inscribed exchange relations still are. Quite ironically, while social
entrepreneurship is heralded as a moral actor and social benefactor, I have pinpointed that its
economic calculus nevertheless reverberates, in fact quite fiercely. In keen contrast to this,
paralogy signifies not only a break with established theories and modes of representation but
simultaneously incepts a political move by enabling difference in the face of discourse’s
‘economic energy’ (Steyaert & Katz, 2004, p. 188). Parology’s avowed focus on instabilities and
the unknown thus directs Lyotard’s endeavor away from prescriptive, calculative, or consensual
knowledge to the point of immanent instabilities. If we take serious Lyotard’s call to investigate
incommensurabilities, undecidables, conditions of incomplete information, and paradoxes, I
irrevocably sense revealing associations with Jacques Derrida. In reverting to Derrida, it is
therefore of particular importance to see that Derrida, within his latter work, has shifted ground
onto the terrain of ethics. In what has been hailed as a turn towards ethics (cf. Dews, 1995),
76
Derrida interrogated the aporetic, i.e. paradoxical nature of issues such as democracy, law,
friendship, hospitality, the gift, etc. Derrida has thereby conjured up a sensitivity towards the
undecidable nature of particular situations, to their ‘experience of the impossible’ (Jones, 2003b,
p. 229).
77
In conjunction with social entrepreneurship, the previous deconstructive reading has
revealed that a fair number of texts operate with an economic logic. Furthermore, epitomized
through the quest for technical knowledge and best business practices, those texts prescribe the
74
For Serres (1995), noise is the medium for creative ambiguity. Whereas the concept at first glance might appear in
the sense of an interruption it can, following Serres, actually lead to a new order.
75
Notice that an extended elaboration of the social/ethical aspect of entrepreneurship will be imparted in the last part
of the thesis (cf. Chapter 7).
76
However, as Jones (2003b) warns us, it is not the case that Derrida made deconstruction ethical, but that he
(deconstructively) reflected on the meaning of notions as, for instance, ‘justice’ and ‘law’.
77
What I have tried to show with respect to social entrepreneurship is that however ‘logocentric’ a particular sign
might appear, close inspection will irrevocable reveal its paradoxical grounding by virtue of which its solid standing
gets undermined.
188
conduct of social entrepreneurship in a programmable and predictable manner. By implication,
social entrepreneurship becomes an endeavor that relies on the application of pre-ordained rules.
Yet, as Derrida contends, such programmable applications of rules do not require a decision and
thus do not represent an act of responsibility. Derrida made clear that ‘there would be no
decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and thus no
responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 66). It is thus
through Derrida that we get to see that the notion of undecidability accentuates the infinite task of
responsibility and, by implication thereof, that prevailing images of social entrepreneurship
ignore the point that a decision which didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not
be a free decision. Obviously, the notion of undecidability is diametrically opposed to the idea of
performativity and pre-ordained rules in that it indicates that a decision is a ‘moment of madness’
that must move beyond rationality and calculative reasoning.
78
By extension to social
entrepreneurship, we are thus reminded that a decision, to be a decision, must transgress the
economic or otherwise calculative rationale, and thereby stretch out to that which is outside of the
subject’s control. Arguably, a conceptualization which takes seriously the aporetic feature of
responsibility, namely that ‘ethics and politics … start with an undecidability’ (Derrida, 1999, p.
66), does not lend itself to the formulation of ready-made rules. In somewhat stark opposition to
the mainstream writing on social entrepreneurship and taking recourse to Derrida’s ingenious
‘Politics of Friendship’ (1997), we are thus impelled to concede that to be(come) social, social
entrepreneurship must be able to exceed the economic, respectively performative circles of input-
output relations.
If we are willing to envision social entrepreneurship in relation to societal and cultural
creation, the question is what we conceive of as moral or ethical and what kind of relations we
thereby endorse, for instance, between social entrepreneurs and its other (i.e. the silent majority
of help recipients, jobless, handicapped, underprivileged, or beneficiaries more generally). While
ethics, responsibility and justice have largely escaped the attention of organization studies (cf.
Jones, 2003; 2003b), I would like to conjure up these perspectives for our prospective writing on
the matter of social entrepreneurship. Derrida’s deliberations thereby seem apposite in respect to
social entrepreneurship as the matter has been envisioned by a sizeable number of scholars as a
moral or social deed (e.g. Pearce, 1994; Catford, 1998; Dees, 1998; Guclu et al., 2002; Thompson
78
As circumscribed in relation to ‘The Gift of Death’ (Derrida, 1995), a decision irrevocably requires a courageous
‘leap of faith’ beyond the facts at hand.
189
et al., 2002). Derrida, I believe, is indispensable when it comes to deliberating about justice and
ethics beyond the boundaries of (performative) prescriptions. First of all, it is implied through
Derrida that the moment social entrepreneurship becomes performative about ethics, that is, a
matter of strategic rules, the focus shifts from respecting the other to caring about oneself. It
follows therefore that ethics cannot be commanded a priori (in the sense of ‘before the act’) and
once and for all. Instead, justice and ethics need to be judged in the moments of their inception,
that is, against the background of a specific event between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’. The ethics of
social entrepreneurship thus always has to be created anew, becoming social. Hence, in order to
decouple social entrepreneurship from its conditional, performative exegesis, it appears vital to
imagine social entrepreneurship as an act that is addressed to the other, devoid of any conditional
reciprocity looming in the background. Whereas the clutches of economic calculation
undoubtedly still exert a strong hold on academics’ perceptions of social entrepreneurship, I
nevertheless hope that Derrida’s cogent deliberations can lead us to envision the ‘social’ not as an
instrumental, i.e. calculable, epithet of entrepreneurship, but as the expression of genuine
openness towards otherness. On account of this, the ‘social’ of social entrepreneurship shall be
elevated above the level of a ‘supplement’ (Derrida, 1976), or nice little ‘extra’ of
entrepreneurship through which they (retroactively) legitimize their practices, to become an
unconditional hailing of difference, regardless of potentially negative consequences that might
derive there from.
Postscript
When a scientist describes something that no one has ever seen, the description may pass for
purely fictional, and it is in a way, since the reality meant by the discourse will come into
being only if names are attached to effects, and these effects exist only inasmuch as new
discourses can be grafted onto them. Well, this … changes the world. (Lyotard &
Thébaud, 1985, p. 51)
In light of the previous investigation, a last question remains; namely whether or not practicing
social entrepreneurs will be affected by academic discourse. It is undoubted that discourse can
have an influence on the conduct or the ‘conduct of conduct’ of people (Foucault, 1991), and as I
190
have mentioned before, the pervasiveness of a specific discourse chiefly rests on its material and
non-material inscriptions into everyday practices. However, in view of the claim that the impetus
of discourse is directly related with its degree of codification and naturalization, it would
nevertheless be otiose to postulate a linear and hierarchical influence between the academic
discourse of social entrepreneurship and its use by practitioners of social enterprises. Having said
that, our initial question remains important, since it reflects the general discussion of whether or
not theory has any bearing on practice. Thus, to gain a sense of how academic writing might
inform the conduct of social entrepreneurs and/or enterprises, it first seems helpful to recall that
the translation from ‘theory’ to ‘practice’
79
is largely contingent on the degree of knowledge’s
rationalization (Lemke, 2002). According to Foucault (1991b), one ‘isn’t assessing things in
terms of an absolute against which they could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect
forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in
practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it’s true that
‘practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality’ (p. 79). It follows from this that if
texts on social entrepreneurship are supposed to work (i.e. have an effect on practitioners),
practitioners must construe them as ‘rational’ (Lemke, 2002). In other words, academic
knowledge of social entrepreneurship can only be extended beyond the confines of its production
and implemented in the realm of practice if it becomes part of a ‘general politics’ of truth
(Foucault, 1980). Foucault (1984), among others, made clear that the legitimization of knowledge
as truth is notably a function of ‘a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation,
distribution, circulation, and operation of statements’ (p. 74). It is therefore essential to recall that
the system of education in general and universities in particular hold a pivotal position in
determining what is widely perceived as right or wrong (Lyotard, 1984; cf. also Chapter 1). In
view of Foucault’s (1984) assertion that truth ‘is centred on the form of scientific discourse and
the institutions which produce it’ (p. 73), this in turn permits the surmise that business schools
might at least have some voice in (co-) determining the ‘agenda’ of practicing social
entrepreneurs. That is, if we bear in mind one of the main findings of Chapter 1, namely that
academic scholars work in concert with political bodies, foundations, philanthropies, businesses,
etc. to establish particular representations of social entrepreneurship, and if we are willing to
accept that these representations might have a distinct bearing on the rationalities which inform
79
A distinction which is evidently problematic and which I will partly scrutinize with reference to Derrida’s
deconstructive work (cf. Chapter 5).
191
the realm of practice, it can at least be speculated that academic discourses of social
entrepreneurship will to some extent influence practitioners’ everyday conduct. Again, this is not
to say that we can draw definitive conclusions regarding whether and to what extent social
entrepreneurs are subjected to particular (i.e. academically produced) codes of (self-) regulation.
If such a link between theory and practice is assumed, however, there are good reasons to concur
with Foucault (1984) who made clear that the ‘essential political problem for the intellectual is
not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own
scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of
constituting a new politics of truth’ (p. 74). Although I perfectly agree that it is necessary to
constantly question the political, economic and institutional regimes which produce the truth of
social entrepreneurship and, more fundamentally, to critically reflect on the truth regimes
produced by academia, I would like to point out that it is the explicit objective of Chapter 7 to
perform this task and hence to produce a different, i.e. non-economic, understanding of social
entrepreneurship. Before doing so, however, I will, in the next chapter, discuss in more detail
whether there is some continuity between the kinds of knowledge we have discussed in the
context of academic writing and the interpretive practices of people working in the sphere of
social practice. Since I deem this question relevant not just in theoretical terms, I will carry out a
discourse analysis of the speech patterns employed by practitioners working in the realm of Third
World development so as to grapple with the question of whether or not academic discourses of
social entrepreneurship are reflected in their stories.
192
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202
***
Part II
203
‘Development Work: New Entrepreneurialism?’
***
We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses,
and to the task of hearing what has already been said. (Foucault, 1973, p. xvi)
Given that the previous two chapters have focused on social entrepreneurship or, more
precisely, on its signification in business school teaching and research, it might appear
somewhat odd or at least surprising to announce an investigation of Swiss non-governmental
organizations (hereon referred to as NGO) and development aid. This transition, however, is
not as counter-intuitive as it might appear at first sight and I would like to provide a brief
commentary and outlook upfront so as to illuminate how this chapter relates the topics of
development aid and entrepreneurship. It must be mentioned at the outset that the ensuing
discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk is in fact centered around an interest in (social)
entrepreneurship insofar as it endeavors to show – on the basis of a brief genealogical sketch
of the ‘development aid complex’
80
– that entrepreneurship has become the latest code, if not
slogan (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), for thinking about development aid and most notably for
envisaging means for leveraging stagnating economies in Third World countries (Ranking,
2001). This insight is both revealing and relevant since it prompts the question whether the
discourse of entrepreneurship, as currently promoted through policy papers and speeches of,
for instance, the World Bank and the United Nations, has already gained access to the realm
of development NGOs. It can be reasonably claimed that development aid currently finds
itself in a condition of ‘interregnum’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004) where the status of its agents
(e.g. World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, southern and northern
NGOs, national development agencies, etc.) has become the object of negotiation. The point
to be stressed, therefore, is that – despite the utter complexity and elusiveness of these recent
80
A neologism which I created in accordance with Rose’s (1985) notion of ‘psy-complex’, that is, the psychology
complex.
204
changes – there is an identifiable trend to envisage development NGOs through the lexis of
business and management. Hence, whereas entrepreneurship discourse can as yet only be
construed as a rather juvenile, minor sign in the governance of Third World development, it
is nonetheless conspicuous that notions such as ‘results-based management’, ‘inputs’,
‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ (cf. Murphy, 2000) have crept into the doxa of development
NGOs which reveals, among other things, that the idea of so-called ‘new managerialism’ is
gaining ground. Notwithstanding the observation that infrastructural development has relied
on economic premises for a long time (i.e. since its formulation in post-WWII politics), the
current ‘new public management revolution’ (Desai & Imrie, 1998) is nevertheless to be seen
as rather momentous, since it is characterized by a decisively new understanding of
development aid and work-based subjectivity. It is therefore beyond doubt that the move
towards ‘managerialism’, or ‘enterprise culture’ (du Gay, 1996; cf. also 1991; 1994; 2000;
2000b; 2003; 2004), is endemic for development work, and one must not forget that
comparable shifts have already been described with respect to, for instance, the third (non-
profit) sector (Rose, 2000) or in relation to public administration (Miller & Rose, 1990; du
Gay, 2003; cf. also Chapter 2). However, if one accepts that these ‘regimes of truth’ have
been unprecedented in the governance or governmentality (Foucault, 1991; cf. also Chapters
1 & 6) of Third World development, it becomes legitimate, if not urgent, to raise the question
of ‘interpellation’ (Althusser, 1971) so as to ask whether NGO practitioners are forced to
adopt the principles of sound management to both their work and their ‘self-narration’
(Gergen, 1994). Although the following investigation does not propose to claim that ‘new
managerialism’ possesses the power to determine, in a strict sense, the production of work-
based subjectivity (Jones & Spicer, 2005; Perren & Jennings, 2005), it must nevertheless be
anticipated that these novel rationalities herald an epoch-based re-fashioning of development
aid and most notably of what it means to be an NGO practitioner. With this in mind, the
following investigation brings together entrepreneurship and development aid in order to ask
whether NGO practitioners are prone to adopt the logics of economic conduct (Murphy,
2000) and thereby come to further its cause ‘through their own volition’ (cf. du Gay, 1996).
205
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206
3
***
‘Social, or Economic, That’s the Question … ’
On Discursive Ambivalence and Hybridity in Development Talk of NGO
Practitioners
Synopsis
… to attempt explanations without reference to the meanings and values held by actors, and
without regard to their underpinning symbolic codes, is to provide a very thin account of
reality. (Freeman & Rustin, 1999, p 18)
Importantly, the question delineated before, that is, ‘has entrepreneurship discourse already
become an accepted ‘regime of truth’ in the realm of Swiss development NGOs?’, is only
one in a series of issues that will be addressed through the discursive investigation of
practitioners’ talk. Given that this inquiry is not ‘only’ concerned with entrepreneurship, it is
through the present synopsis that I will disclose the ‘deeper’ layers of the present chapter. As
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tangentially alluded to before, the ensuing discourse analyses approach the issue of
contemporary development work in the context of Swiss NGOs. Based on a sample of thirty
interviews with practitioners from twelve Swiss developmental NGOs, the primary objective
is to inquire how people talk about Third World development or, in concrete terms, how they
employ language so as to form particular versions of the subject matter. Based on the
fundamental assumption that language is constitutive, the investigation departs from a
discursive understanding of social reality where language is not treated as a mirror of reality
(which tells us, in a precise sense, how things really are; Potter, 1996), but as a social
practice by means of which reality is actively created. By analogy with Foucault’s (1972)
contention that ‘discourse forms the objects of which its speaks’ (p. 49), the question probed
through Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) discourse analytic account is what linguistic resources
NGO practitioners have at their disposal for rendering development intelligible and
persuasive and how they use language to present themselves as reasonable and moral human
beings. Assuming that NGO practitioner’s conceptualization of their professional activities
does not occur in a vacuum but rather relies on and refers to a rich and volatile history
(Nietzsche, 1986), the investigation will first shed some light on the project of ‘development
aid’ or, more precisely, on its most salient ‘truths’. The logic behind this history of the
discursive construction of development aid (from the time of its inception in post-WWII
politics until the present day) is that only by gaining a, however preliminary, understanding
of the shifts and ruptures that have taken place with respect to development aid’s
commonsensical assumptions and premises will it be possible to construe NGO practitioners’
ephemeral everyday realities (Berger & Luckman, 1966) against the more stabilized and
reified forms of historically, culturally, politically, etc. conditioned knowledge. As a first
step towards this end, I will approach the question ‘from behind’, that is, by illustrating the
critical reception of Third World development through postcolonial theory. Whereas my
analytical focus is on critical appraisals of development discourse (e.g. Sachs, 1992; Escobar,
1995), the aim will be to scrutinize the widely held belief (among postcolonial scholars) that
the ‘development complex’ is to be seen as a sovereign (western) institution that exerts its
influence through the application of hierarchical power. The elaboration thereby aims,
among other things, to debunk as untenable both the ‘colonial metaphor’, i.e. the assertion by
postcolonial scholars that post-WWII politics represents the mere continuation of colonial
order by novel means, and the assumption that development aid is exclusively dictated and
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enforced by western (i.e. mainly US) institutions. To clear the ground, so to speak, I will cite
selected works of Foucault (e.g. 1978) so as to argue that the oppositional rhetoric of
postcolonial development literature, by virtue of which the West is constantly pitted against
‘the rest’, should be replaced with a perspective that takes into consideration, first, that
development aid relies on both northern and southern agents and institutional arrangements
and, second, that power is not possessed by any identifiable institution (or person). In
concrete terms, using Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ to make the point, I will argue that
the development apparatus works through a bio-political, rather than a sovereign, modality of
power which relies not on the application of sheer force and domination, but rather on the
mobilization of subjects, institutions and nation states. This mobilization in turn enables the
collective optimization of living conditions in the Third World (Brigg, 2002).
On the face of it, the ensuing genealogy highlights the bio-political modus operandi
of the development apparatus in order to show how development discourse has emerged
from and constantly been complemented by a heterogeneous collective of institutions.
Moreover, in accordance with Sachs’ (1992) contention that the term ‘development’ is to be
seen as an ‘amoeba-like concept’, the genealogy also aims at delineating both the continuity
as well as the changes of the meaning of ‘development’. Focusing upon the construction of
development through, for instance, US presidential lectures, United Nations declarations,
World Bank policy statements, etc., the chief aim will be to illuminate the strategic
enunciation (de Certeau, 1984) of development aid. That is to say that I will partly restrict the
analytic focus of the first part of the chapter to political (and, to some lesser degree,
academic) discourse so as to highlight the ‘epistemic community’ (Haas, 1989) which has
been said to exercise a panoptic function within the development apparatus (Brigg, 2002).
Although the overall objective of this investigation is to bring to the forefront that
development discourse has witnessed dramatic changes, or ‘ruptures’ to use Derrida’s (1966)
terms, this chapter also tries to highlight that development, after an initial period of utter
optimism, has periodically and increasingly been problematized in terms of its declared
objective: the mitigation of poverty and the counteracting of the inequality between the north
and the south, between the so-called First and the Third World (Escobar, 1995). I will thus
begin my elaboration by first illuminating how the idea of development has been construed
in relation to conceptual narratives (Somers, 1994) such as, for instance, ‘basic human needs’
approaches, structural adjustment theories, as well as sustainable development or
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globalization discourse. The objective, then, is to show that the different discourses on
development, despite engendering different meanings of the subject matter, did not actually
replace each other, but rather refined and extended existing rationalities, and hence
broadened the horizon and scope of the development apparatus. Accordingly, I will argue
that the recurring critique and problematization of development aid did not bring about its
general (or partial) demise, but instead stimulated a continuous appropriation and re-
negotiation of the field’s canon. Thus shedding light on both the continuities and
discontinuities of the different development rationalities, my prime emphasis will be to
uncover the role economic theory has played in development discourse and, most
importantly, how the ‘market’ has been positioned in the different ‘truth regimes’ vis-à-vis
the social and ecological realm.
In a second step, I will elaborate on the moral, political and economic space NGOs
have come to occupy in the broader development apparatus. I will endeavor to show that the
general problematization of the development discourse has stimulated, though with some
delay, a ‘crisis of legitimization’ of development NGOs. To illustrate how the highs and lows
(or, to put it bluntly, rise and fall) of development NGOs have come about, I will claim that
the heyday of development NGOs during the 1980s until the mid-1990s was intimately
related with Thatcherism and in particular with the conviction that, first, NGOs were better
able to address the needs of Third World subjects and countries than government
organizations and, second, that these institutions were more flexible and efficient than
government-lead aid initiatives. In reflecting on the initial popularity and recent discredit of
NGOs, I will show that both the positive and negative evaluation of NGOs is inextricably
related to the juxtaposition of the third or voluntary sector with the state. In concrete terms,
whereas the early years of development aid were dominated by the belief that northern
governments must act as prime service providers in Third World countries, NGOs were
envisaged as essential substitutes of the state during the oil crisis in the 1970s and the parallel
rise of neo-liberalism (Kajese, 1987). This shift, as I will discuss, not only led to a broader
acceptance of the voluntary sector and hence to a virtual explosion of development NGOs,
but also engendered the contention that development must not be seen as a nationally but as a
globally managed project. A last shift, which occurred somewhere towards the middle of the
1990s, led to a situation where development NGOs were faced with mounting challenges.
This crisis of legitimization, as I will argue, has thus for the most part been the result of the
210
charge that NGOs neither fostered global economic participation and emancipation of the
southern hemisphere nor made an effective contribution to mitigating poverty. In view of the
problematization of development NGOs in both political and social terms, I will argue that
the partial loss of their former credibility is hardly surprising. On the other hand, the general
view of NGOs has also stimulated a variety of initiatives and discussions which aimed, in
one way or another, at regaining some of the initial acceptance and prestige. For instance, I
will claim that the problematization of development NGOs has given rise to the logic that
these organizations, in order to sustain their own survival, must fundamentally change their
traditional ways of acting and thinking. Managerial terms such as ‘internal’ and ‘external
accountability’ are thus construed as indications that the (development) NGO sector
currently engages in a monumental refashioning of its modus operandi and its ‘raison d’être’.
The point to be made, then, is that the critique of development aid is not exclusively to be
seen as a negative event, but as an opportunity for new types of development aid and for new
ways of performing work-related identities. This investigation will, however, also retain a
critical focus, trying to bring to light that the current re-engineering of development aid is for
the most part to be seen as a postulation of a more business-like approach to development
aid. Positing that the boundaries between the third sector, the state and the private sector
have been increasingly blurred over the last decades (not least in the course of the re-
conceptualization of the voluntary sector), I will further note that it is due to the convergence
with the private sector in particular that NGOs have been construed as business- and market-
sensitive subjects (Petras, 1997). In line with this observation, I will argue that NGOs, partly
because of reduced public spending since the late 1990s, have only recently come to probe
the merits and tenets of entrepreneurial principles (Brugmann, 2005). I will therefore argue
that entrepreneurship discourse, on a political level, has been used, if not exploited, to
reinstall part of the former credibility and euphoria of the third sector in general and
development aid in particular. I will then use this proposition as a basis for the discursive
investigation of this chapter by asking whether this political discourse (and in particular the
slogan of entrepreneurialism and managerialsim) does in fact echo in practitioners’ talk.
To give a brief sketch of the basic insight of the ensuing discourse analysis: the
discursive investigation of NGO practitioners will reveal three recurring argumentative
threads or interpretive repertoires (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). There is, on the one hand, the
benevolence repertoire which construes development from the perspective of help recipients,
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thus mainly emphasizing the positive features of aid such as participation and self-
determination. There is, secondly, the professionalism repertoire which, in relying on a
supposedly neutral and decisively rationalistic language game, portrays development largely
as a matter of economic viability and, by implication, as securing the flow of donations
through sound and efficient (management) practices. Thirdly, there is the (as yet marginal)
entrepreneurship repertoire which highlights development from the intra-organizational
perspective and thereby represents it in terms of growth, competition, risk taking, and
organizational survival. Based on analytical and practical considerations, the three repertoires
will first be presented and discussed sequentially in order to give apt weight to the
differences between the three argumentative threads. In concrete terms, I will pinpoint the
differences by showing that development aid is constructed either as a form of care for the
other (i.e. the indigenous people or, to put it bluntly, those to be developed), as the necessity
to account for and satisfy the demands of donors, or as an insecure, yet self-fulfilling,
endeavor to secure the long-term financial sources on which the organization is based. In a
second analytical step I will illuminate the connections and overlaps between the three
repertoires. The main objective here will be to emphasize the similarities between
practitioners’ talk and, more fundamentally, to argue that all three repertoires, though
through different evaluative descriptions (Speer & Potter, 2000), carry the traces of social
and economic premises and enunciations. I will hence come full circle with the initial
research question – ‘what sort of lived ideologies come to the fore in practitioners’ talk and
to what extent do these linguistic practices endorse a hegemonic picture of development in
which representations are dominated by economic and/or business discourse?’ – and finally
conclude that none of the three repertoires is pure, so to speak. The reason why all three
repertoires are impure is that discourse analysis defies judgment of them along a simple
dialectic between the social and the economic, since all three argumentative threads always
exhibit both aspects of development aid. Bhabha’s notion of a ‘third space of enunciation’
(1994) will be invoked to illustrate that the ambivalence identified in practitioners’ talk is not
a specific reason for concern, but the indication of the permeability and temporary stability
of all meaning. The additional point to be made is that the analysis rejects the view that
practitioners tend to conceptualize development in terms of hegemonic (i.e. economic)
categories and instead endorses the ambivalence of the identified repertoires as an indication
of the moral space, i.e. ‘aporia’ (Derrida, 1993), of development aid. Based on the contention
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that the undecidability of development makes impossible any unproblematic decision for
either one position (i.e. the social or economic), I will elaborate on how this state of affairs
affects the identity performances of NGO practitioners. I will argue that the ‘non-decision’
being revealed in practitioners’ self-narrations makes any enduring dominance of economic
over social subject positions, or vice versa, defeasible. In view of the constant oscillation
between economic and social enunciations, I will make reference to Bhabha’s (1994)
understanding of ‘hybridity’ which allows for an understanding of identity in which the
exclusionary perspective of ‘either this or that’ (i.e. one can either be an economic or a social
person) is rejected in favor of the more inclusive and dialogic view of ‘and … and … and …
’. By implication, I will argue that in conceiving of practitioners’ subject positions as hybrids
it becomes possible to see NGO practitioners’ identity performances as political instances in
which opposing views are mobilized so as to entertain difference without assuming any one
position to gain the definitive ‘upper hand’.
The ‘Truth’ of Development
„Truth” … is subject to constant economic and political incitement … it is the object, under
diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption … it is produced and transmitted
under the control … of a few great political and economic apparatuses … it is the issue of
a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (Foucault,
1984, p. 73)
… everything has evolved, there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus
historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.
(Nietzsche, 1986, pp. 14 – 15; emphasis in original)
The present inquiry of the development ‘complex’ is closely related to both Foucault’s (2001)
notion of ‘history of ideas’ and ‘history of thought’. Given that the history of ideas is occupied
with tracing a given concept or episteme (i.e. development) ‘from its birth, through its
development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context’ (Foucault, 2001, p.
74), I will first shed some light on the early days of development aid so as to gain a, however
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cursory, understanding of how development emerged as an accepted truth, how (and why) it was
transformed over the years and what understanding of development currently prevails. The
history of ideas – i.e. the understanding of an idea, of its alteration and its cultural and historical
contingencies – thus presupposes establishing an understanding of the historical embedding of an
idea such as development. To be sure, the history of ideas cannot posit a ‘precise’ chronological
punctuation of a given regime of truth, saying when and where exactly a given idea came into
being. Instead, its value lies in exhibiting the historical and cultural particularities which created
the conditions making it possible for a given idea to gain broad acceptance and prosper. Foucault
(2001) emphasized that the history of ideas was primarily concerned with the context of ideas or,
more precisely, with rendering a given term or idea intelligible by relating it with the context (i.e.
with ‘other ideas’ (p. 74) of its enunciation. In line with this insight, the ensuing section will
briefly elaborate on the significance of ‘context’ for the subsequent investigation of development
aid and of NGO practitioners’ talk.
The second objective of the following genealogy of development, which is closely related
with the history of ideas, is to discuss the subject matter against the backdrop of Foucault’s
notion of ‘history of thought’. The history of thought, as Foucault (2001) reminds us, is primarily
interested in showing how a previously unproblematic field of experience is suddenly
transformed into a problem, i.e. how it is problematized. The history of thought is thus relevant in
the present context as it enables one to see that the evaluative accent of development aid has
changed quite dramatically over the last decades and that development aid, particularly over the
last decade, has lost a considerable amount of its initial credibility, not to say appeal. Based on
the observation that development today provokes ambivalent reactions in as much as it is
increasingly construed – equally by the general public, foundations, and political actors, etc. – as
a cause for suspicion and doubt, I will then relate this proposition to the realm of development
NGOs. On the basis of this connection, I will finally claim that the general problematization of
development has stimulated, though with some delay, a legitimacy crisis for the voluntary sector.
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On Context (of Development)
Words, even if we take them as magic, refer only to other words, to the end of it. (Bloom, 2004, p.
7; emphasis in original)
… one cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent
… whose content … could have taken place outside of language … There is nothing
outside of text. (Derrida, 1976, p. 158)
At its worst, ‘context’ is deployed as a merely polemical, critical tool. In this usage, it is roughly
equivalent to ‘what I have noticed about your topic that you didn’t write about’.
(Schegloff, 1992, p. 215)
In general terms, context seems to be an important issue in many streams of research. With regard
to discourse analysis, Wetherell (2001), for instance, asked in the concluding chapter of
‘Discourse Theory and Practice’: ‘(h)ow much background [context] information do we need to
analyze any particular piece of discourse … ?’ (p. 387). This is indeed an important question, a
question to which I would like to give further thought in order to do justice to the variety and
ambivalence of interpretations of context and also to establish a textual understanding of context
for the present investigation. In terms of ‘context’, it is perhaps hardly surprising that qualitative
and in particular interpretive researchers keep emphasizing the necessity to interpret or read one’s
‘findings’ against the background of the context in which the study has been carried out. For
instance, Fairclough and Wodak (1997) proclaimed that ‘(d)iscourse is not produced without
context and cannot be understood without taking context into consideration’ (p. 277). But why
exactly is context such an important issue? Using Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) work to put
forward an answer to this question, we are reminded that, since all language sequences are
embedded in and inextricably linked to a particular linguistic heritage, an understanding of the
specific context of one’s study is indispensable for grasping the meaning of a particular, local
utterance. The concern for context, so it seems, for the most part derives from seeing context as
the stock of commonsense (or simply ideology) which provides people with the language (games)
for making sense of social reality. The formula of this logic goes thus: to understand the meaning
of words and utterances used in concrete situations or texts presupposes gaining a sense of what
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these signs mean on a more general or inter-subjective level. To elevate this inquiry to the
signification of ‘context’ in the social sciences, I would like to point out that the term is laden
with a variety of meanings ranging from global social structure to local conversation or co-text
(cf. Meinhof & Richardson, 1994). The point I want to make here, however, is a different one,
namely that the idea of context engenders a number of tricky questions with regard to the issue of
stability. That is, the idea of context leads to the question at what level of abstraction context (i.e.
commonsense) actually interferes with local sensemaking practices and, second, if context has a
stable or even deterministic influence on local conversations or whether its influence is at its
weakest and most ephemeral. Schegloff (1992), in an attempt to overcome some of these
theoretical puzzles, introduced the distinction between what he called ‘distal context’ (which
includes features such as social class, ethnic composition, the institutions from which discourse
emanate, etc.) and ‘proximal context’ (which refers to immediate, locale interactions).
Essentially, it is Schegloff’s notion of ‘distal context’ which construes the extra-interactional or
extra-relational aspects of human conduct as more or less stable and enduring entities, whereas
the notion of ‘proximal context’ was used to account for relational and thus transient aspects of
conversations. Related to these notions is Schegloff’s understanding of distal and proximal
context which suggests that one can draw a strict (analytic and ontological) division between the
local use of language within a given conversation and the approved truths of a given society
(which are supposed to be (quasi-) independent of concrete speech situations). What is relevant
with respect to discourse analysis is that Schegloff, though not denying that distal context might
have a (constitutive and restrictive) influence on people’s everyday sensemaking, proclaimed that
distal context was not relevant for discourse (i.e. conversation) analysis, or only insofar as it was
used in the proximal context of people’s concrete discursive practice. That is to say that Schegloff
used his distinction between distal and proximal context to conclude that discourse analysts
should not refer to commonsense unless it becomes explicit in the analytic material. As a first
step towards the type of understanding of context I want to employ for the following discourse
analysis, I will claim that the perspective suggested by Schegloff needs to be rejected, since it
tends to endorse an empiricist view of discourse analysis (Billig, 1999) which – by construing
distal context as an ostensibly stable, even factual, entity – invariably ignores the epistemological
issues of context (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998). My point hence is that a separation between distal
and proximal context is futile to the extent that it obscures that any simple distinction between
talk/text and things which are external to talk/text (i.e. objective reality) can only be sustained
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while working on behalf of a realist ontology. Moreover, Schegloff’s distinction between
proximal and distal context seems less than helpful for my own purpose, not least because it is
deemed to collapse once it is accepted that distal and proximal contexts are always co-implied
and in a relation of constant interaction. As a result, it becomes more helpful to conceptualize
context quite simply as a ‘vast argumentative texture through which people construct their reality’
(Laclau, 1993, p. 341). If we thus decide to reject Schegloff’s dichotomy, it is important to
become more concrete in terms of our understanding of context which shall inform both the
following analysis of development discourse and the discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’
talk. To this end, I would like to make reference to Derrida’s (1976) seminal statement that there
is nothing outside of text
81
which chiefly implies that there is no use in appealing to some
transcendental source of meaning (since there is none). On the basis of this insight, I am keen to
claim that text and context should be seen as two sides of the same coin, so to speak, because they
both belong to the structured system of social relations through which shared meaning is
disseminated. It is thus implied that context is not to be mistaken as ‘mimesis’ (cf. Derrida, 1981,
p. 171), that is, the simple materialization of a pre-eminent social structure. Instead, it is to be
conceived of as a multi-discursive event that provides the linguistic means for local conversations
while simultaneously being legitimated (i.e. made to appear objective) through them (Berger &
Luckman, 1966). It is evident, then, that context, if looked at from a language-based (in lieu of
Schegloff’s realist) perspective, becomes the stock of truths of a particular historical/cultural
space which is continuously used and transformed in its everyday use. As indicated by the Latin
‘con’ of ‘context’, meaning together (two or more), it is further implied that a given conversation
or text that is subjected to (discourse) analysis must not be treated as an encapsulated and self-
sufficient entity, but as a speech performance which is inextricably related to other texts (hence
con-texts). If text and context are, as implied by Derrida (1976), projected onto the same
ontological level, it becomes conceivable that context can be seen as particularly (though
temporarily) stabilized systems of meaning
82
which are simultaneously concrete in that they are
embedded in concrete utterances or texts. On the other hand, such texts can also be interpreted as
quasi-autonomous, since they exist beyond the individual text that composes them. It follows
81
In French: il n’y a pas de hors-texte = there is no outside-the-text (cf. Derrida, 1976, p. 158).
82
Alvesson and Karreman (2000) have introduced the distinction between micro and macro-level discourse analysis
to stress that there are identifiable differences in terms of the relative stability of meaning. Essentially, the notion of
macro-discourse denotes institutionalized forms of knowledge which are to some degree independent of local
conversations. The authors, however, partly overlook that the stability of meaning is only temporary and that local
conversations can both reify (and thus stablize) meaning but also stimulate its (subtle) alteration.
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from this that to understand the context of the ensuing discourse analysis presupposes an inquiry
into the inter-texts or discourses which both enable and limit what can be thought and said about
development. In consequence, if context is defined as accepted (since stabilized) forms of
discourse that engender a sense of order and predictability in an otherwise ‘amorphous, fluxing
and undifferentiated reality’ (Hardy, 2004, p. 514), it becomes essential to ask ‘what are the
macro-level discourses which (have) penetrate(d) the realm of development work?’ This question
is relevant insofar as it will allow us to connect the subsequent discourse analysis of NGO
practitioners’ talk with the kind of commonsense that our (language) culture supplies for talking
about development or, more precisely, for constructing a specific account thereof. That is, only if
one gains an understanding of the macro-level discourses of development will it be possible to
make inferences about how commonsense or ‘lived ideology’ (Billig, 1988) is used and
appropriated by practitioners in concrete conversations and, by implication, how practitioners are
bound to make choices
83
in light of the pragmatic demands of a given speech situation. The
subsequent genealogical inquiry is thus pivotal not only for gaining a sense of how ‘development’
evolves in a particular historical and cultural ‘climate’, or as a result or effect of a given
‘Zeitgeist’, but also as a basis for a fruitful reflection on how the grand truths of development are
re-performed and appropriated in the local narratives of NGO practitioners.
83
Potter and Wetherell (1987), within their micro-level analysis of language use in everyday conversations,
emphasize human agency by stating that people are able to change the course of their self and world constructions by
virtue of opting for or against particular interpretive repertoires. This view stands in sharp contrast to those, mainly
Foucault-inspired, discourse analyses which see discourse in a more deterministic way (cf. Chapter 6).
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The Discourse of Development
… to realize that truth is a function of discourse is to realize that the conditions of truth are
precisely rather than relatively contingent on current forms of discourse. (Hook, 2001, p.
525; emphasis in original)
The will to exercise … control in society and history has also discovered a way to clothe,
disguise, rarefy and wrap itself systematically in the language of … discipline, rationality,
utilitarian value, and knowledge. And this language in its naturalness, authority,
professionalism, assertiveness and antitheoretical directness is … discourse. (Said, 1983,
p. 216)
The brief outline presented above of a textual understanding of context maintained that any given
discourse analysis must retain a parallel focus on text (i.e. the respective local conversations) and
context (i.e. public narratives which accompany or surround a given conversation; cf. Somers,
1994). I would now like to become more concrete with regard to the context of development so as
to highlight some of the most prominent macro-level discourses incorporated by the
‘development aid complex’. In my assessment, it is essential to start this inquiry with a few words
on the critical reception of development through (discursive) postcolonial theory.
Reflection of Postcolonial Development Theory
Given that the meaning and value development aid is currently endowed with is not determined
by practitioners’ immediate consciousness but ‘by the various reality-making scripts one inherits
or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural/linguistic condition’ (Shapiro, 2001, p. 318), this
investigation of how development is rendered meaningful in contemporary Swiss NGOs calls for
an analysis of the (con)texts of previous apprehensions or evaluative descriptions. That said, it
needs to be noted that the investigation of (Third World) development as discourse, that is, as a
body of thinking about the reasons of unequal opportunities such as poverty and the means for
their alleviation, has only recently become a scholarly endeavor. Moreover, the critical route of
discursive investigations, which emerged somewhere in the 1980s, has been particularly inspired
by Foucauldian thought. This hint is relevant insofar as development discourse, in the course of
such Foucauldian investigations, has more often than not been rendered an object of critique (cf.
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Tucker, 1999), not least because it was regarded as a central mechanism for sustaining (instead of
overthrowing) the hierarchical fold between the West (which is usually portrayed as the
developed part of the globe) and the rest (which is construed as the bulk of the undeveloped
world; cf. below). In a nutshell, the prime premise and conclusion of an identifiable number of
postcolonial, Foucault-inspired works is that the discourse of development engenders a
segregation between the north and the south (Abrahamson, 2000) and, most fundamentally,
enables the control and exploitation of Europe’s former colonies. Whereas the colonization
hypothesis put forward by postcolonial scholars will be granted some elaborative space further
down, I would first like to shed some light on Said’s (1978) seminal ‘Orientalism’; first, because
it draws its inspiration, at least partly, from Foucault’s work on power and knowledge and,
second, because it worked as a kind of benchmark for many subsequent works of postcolonial
discourse analysis.
Put highly reductively, Said’s (1978) treatise pursued a critique of the academic field of
oriental studies in prestigious European universities. Oriental studies – which refers to a
heterogeneous field of disciplines such as, for instance, philology, linguistics, ethnography,
cultural studies, etc. – had, following Said, labeled all Orientalists as ‘constitutive others’ by
virtue of which Europe was provided with a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority.
Moreover, Said claimed that the discourse of Orientalism served political ends in that Orientalist
scholarship provided the means by which Europeans were enabled to take over (physically and/or
intellectually) Oriental territories. After all, Orientalism was construed not only as a direct
expression of Euro-centrism but also as a pectoral rhetoric which operated at the service of a
subtle imperialist agenda. To use Said’s (1978) own terms, ‘Orientalism’ was an ‘act of
geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and
finally brought under control’ (p. 10). Given that ‘Orientalism’ has been translated into some 36
languages and has thus been read all over the world, what is most relevant in the present context
is that Said’s work has served as an important anchorage for many postcolonial studies on
development,
84
and in particular for studies concerned with the discursive investigation of its
representation and hence its meaning. Although Said’s treatise of Orientalism does not primarily
focus on in the issue of development, one of its most notable effects was that it spurred an interest
84
It must be noted here that Said’s level of sophistication has hardly been matched in the realm of postcolonial
studies on development and that latter investigations (with some notable exceptions) have been more straightforward
and unapologetic in bedeviling the identified Western epistemes.
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in the (representational) dividing practices through which the world is segregated, in a
hierarchical sense, into ‘our’ part and ‘their’ part. Said’s assertion that Orientalist scholarship had
produced a false image
85
of Arabs, Islamic culture, Moslems, etc. has willingly been taken up and
appropriated by postcolonial scholars which is evident from statements that denote that western
representations of its Other
86
– be that the Orient (as in Said’s work) or other geo-political spaces
in Africa, Asia or Latin America – produce essentialist and thus seemingly unchangeable (i.e.
hegemonic) hierarchical relations.
87
In the style of Said, postcolonial investigations of
development discourse basically claimed that the images produced by the Euro-American
machine of representation were based on a set of (false, stereotypical or otherwise untenable)
attributes which, generally speaking, portrayed its other in an uniformly pretentious way, thereby
appointing it a social space which was isolated from the mainstream of human progress as
produced by the western sciences, arts, commerce, etc. To become more concrete, it is insightful
to turn to Abrahamson (2000) who, among others, posited that development discourse engenders
a split between the North and South while pretending that this division marks an ‘neutral or
accurate transcription of reality’ (p. 139). Accordingly, it has been argued that the notion of
‘development’ represents an episteme which entails a structuring moment that appoints the
majority of people living in the South and East, i.e. the geo-political space which in the early
1950s was dubbed the ‘Third World’ (Escobar, 1995), an inferior position for reasons of certain
particularities such as ‘inadequate nutrition’, ‘diseases’, ‘primitive and stagnant economic life’ or
‘lack of scientific and technical knowledge’. Hence, postcolonial discourse analyses, especially
those carried out in the 1990s, held the view that development discourse acts hegemonically as it
provides the coordinates which determine the ‘ways of practicing development as well as
speaking and talking about it’ (Grillo, 1997, p. 12). As Escobar (1992) suggested, the ‘Third
World reality is inscribed with precision and persistence by the discourses and practices of
economists, planners, nutritionists, demographers and the like, making it difficult for people to
define their own interests in their own terms – in many cases actually disabling them to do so’ (p.
25).
85
A conclusion which is clearly more Marxist than Foucauldian.
86
The study of the representation of the West’s other has often been carried out through the prism of Western
sciences, be it anthropology, philosophy or economics.
87
It was Briggs (2002) who suggested that the normative judgments put forward by postcolonial and post-
development scholars are somewhat antithetic to the work and assumptions of Foucault. For this reason, it would be
somewhat misleading to assume that a Foucauldian analysis enables a qualification of development as either ‘good’
or ‘bad’.
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Extrapolating these claims to sketch out an initial estimate, we can say that discourse
analysis carried out by postcolonial or post-development scholars have propelled the idea that the
‘West’ is geo-politically involved in warranting itself an all-seeing, all-knowing viewpoint as a
result of which it sustains itself a ‘universal space’ (Ashcroft, 2001). If looked at from this
perspective, it further becomes conceivable that such accounts work on the premise that
development comprises a Euro-/American-centric bias while simultaneously rendering obsolete
or at least marginal alternative, notably, indigenous epistemes (Ferguson, 1990). For instance,
Escobar (1995), making reference to Althusser’s notion of ‘ideology’, pointed out that the global
language of development and underdevelopment meant that ‘only certain things could be said and
imagined’ (p. 39). Departing from the delimiting effects of development discourse, Escobar
(1995) claimed that the making of the ‘Third World’ and the historical formation of development
aid in the aftermath of WWII was made possible through a representational apparatus in which a
minority set the global (economic) agenda. In line with these assertions, Esteva (1992) claimed
that US president Truman’s denotation of development in his inaugural speech (cf. below)
caused, almost within minutes, two billion people to be transformed into a silent majority of
underdeveloped people. By implication, projects carried out in the name of development have
more often than not been approached by postcolonial scholars as negative events which do not
empower the addressed (i.e. underdeveloped people, populations or territories) but, quite to the
contrary, increase the penetration of western ‘truth regimes’ into the social body of the Third
World. Indeed, this canon holds that development tends to actively produce poor populations. At
best, development aid sustains rather than alleviates poverty and social inequalities. Even worse,
now that the Second World seems to have vanished from the political landscape (or at least seems
to have lost some of its initial visibility) the void between the First and Third World is said to
have increased, supposedly granting the First World an ever more comfortable (since expansive)
stance (Trinh, 1989).
Bearing in mind that there is an identifiable propensity in postcolonial theory, and most
notably in Foucault-inspired discourse analysis, to depict development as a downright negative
event, there are two important propositions which need to be addressed; namely that development
is said to perpetuate the historical trajectory of the colonial or imperial era and, second, that
development is to be seen as a purposeful and intentional project that is exclusively determined or
guided by the West. In what follows, I would like to elaborate on the theoretical and conceptual
underpinnings of these two premises. On that basis I will then argue that Foucault’s (1978) work
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on bio-power (rather than his work on sovereign power), permits an arguably more positive
interpretation of development.
Colonial Metaphor
In the context of ‘colonialism’ I would first like to point out that Said’s (1978) ‘Orientalism’ was
not simply a Foucauldian investigation of the relation between knowledge and power but, most
importantly, a treatise on European domination. Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’, as Said
explained, was useful for his conclusion since it enabled him to describe how particular
representations of Europe’s other worked both as a means for understanding the ‘Orient’ and as a
strategic instrument for controlling, manipulating and dominating the non-European part of the
globe. Hence, in light of Said’s suggestion that Orientalism remained an indefatigable cultural
and political force in the western representation of Palestines, Arabs, Muslims, etc. (Rubin,
2006), it becomes clear that he was making use not only of Foucault’s work on discourse, power
and knowledge, but that he enriched his inquiry with some versions of Freudian and Marxist
theory. What I want to pinpoint here is that only by carrying out a fusion between Foucault’s
work and, for instance, Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ was Said able to claim that western
epistemes helped (re)produce European imperialism. That is, since Foucault’s (1984) work does
not lend itself to an ideological critique (cf. Chapter 6) for passing judgment or criticism of
western knowledge it was necessary for Said to modify and extend Foucault’s work on
knowledge and power. To be sure, Said acknowledged that European knowledge is not
implemented and disseminated by a sovereign application of force. It is discernable, however,
that he, as well as many of his successors, tried to exemplify how the persistent Euro-centric
prejudice against Arab-Islamic people stimulated the colonial expansion of European powers. To
grasp the profundity of this assertion, it is helpful to turn to Bhabha (1990) who, in his eloquent
treatise of colonial discourse, mentioned, for instance, that its objective was ‘to construe the
colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify
conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’ (p. 75). Bearing in mind that
Said attributed an imperial mindset to European science, stating that it enabled the colonial
domination of the Orient, it is important to note that this idea has been further developed by many
postcolonial scholars who claim that development discourse (as epitomized after Europe’s
imperial era) operates in a manner comparable to that of colonial discourse (e.g. Mohanty, 1991;
Banerjee, 2000). It is through, for instance, Escobar (1995) that we can see that this view departs
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from the assumption that ‘the development discourse is governed by the same principles [as
colonial discourse]; it has created an extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge
about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World’ (p. 9). Escobar’s notion of ‘power over’
in the above statement is revealing, since it entails that the exercise of power, both in the colonial
and the post-WWII era, takes the form of domination. By the same token, Cooper (1991)
cogently argued, in the context of his analysis of development projects in Africa, that there was
an evident connection between the decline of the European colonial order and the rise of
development projects. More precisely, Cooper went on to conclude that development is to be seen
as a distinct attempt to reinvigorate the (lost) empire on behalf of an avowedly well-intended
venture, meaning that development has become a means to sustain the previous domination of
Europe’s colonies. A similar proposition was made by Banerjee and Linstead (2004) who claim
that the postcolonial era continues ‘to be informed by colonial thought’ (p. 222). Be that as it
may, the point I want to make here is that this stream of postcolonial theory has obscured the
possibility of a difference between the operation of power during and after the colonial era. I
therefore contend that the aforementioned studies of development are based on a selective and at
times simplified appropriation of Foucault’s work, orchestrating the topic in such a manner as to
posit that development is a kind of knowledge that ‘allows any intervention to be sanctified in the
name of a higher goal. Therefore, even enemies feel united under the same banner’ (Sachs,
1992b, p. 4). Evidently then, Foucault’s cogent treatise on the interrelation between or co-
implication of knowledge and power has been interpreted, if not exploited, in such a way that it is
seemingly possible to claim that development aid supports the sustenance of colonial domination
by novel means. The colonial metaphor thus implies that development depends on the sovereign
application of power, which in turn entails that the West uses development to introduce ‘brutal
and violent transformation’ which is invariably ‘associated with colonial domination in the rest of
the world’ (Esteva, 1992, p. 17). I will address the view that development is to be seen as a
cunning means for perpetuating the trajectory of colonialism and contend that it overemphasizes
the amount of sovereign power entailed in the development dispositif and in particular the
(deterministic) power attributed to western development institutions such as the World Bank
(Briggs, 2002) later in this chapter. However, first I want to object to another peculiarity often
found in postcolonial literature, namely the claim that development is chiefly to be regarded as an
intentional endeavor which is dominated exclusively by identifiable western agents.
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The Agency of the ‘West’
To call to mind the profound misrepresentation of development’s agentic nature, it is
particularly worth reiterating the assertion that ‘(d)evelopment has relied exclusively on one
knowledge system, namely the modern Western one. The dominance of this knowledge
system has dictated the marginalization and disqualification of non-Western knowledge
systems’ (Escobar, 1995, p. 13). Likewise, Prasad (1997) contended that ‘(v)irtually all
branches of European knowledge and science have grown with the confident conviction that
the world is knowable only through those categories of knowledge that have been developed
in Europe – indeed, that the world may even exist only in and through such categories of
European Modernity’ (p. 94). Be that as it may, what is of central importance in the present
context is not primarily related to the claim that development discourse endorses (a limited
number of) Euro-centric subject positions. Rather, the crux is that discourse is treated by
certain postcolonial scholars as if it were a natural entity which can be intentionally deployed
by identifiable western actors with the objective of assimilating the indigenous other in a
strategic way (de Certeau, 1984) or, as Smith (1999) proclaimed, to exploit the Other ‘based
on the positional superiority and advantages gained under imperialism’ (p. 89). Most
illustrative in this context is Sachs’ (1992b) suggestion that ‘(f)ollowing the breakdown of
European colonial powers, the United States found an opportunity to give worldwide
dimensions to the mission their founding fathers had bequeathed to them: to be the ‘beacon
on the hill’. They launched the idea of development with a call to every nation to follow in
their footsteps’ (p. 1). It is obvious that Sachs’ view rests upon the assumption that it is the
West which dictates the global agenda-setting and thus also determines how the non-western
space is to be both construed and managed. Yet, Bhabha (1990), in objecting to Said’s
‘Orientalism’, was suspicious about this agentic exegesis of western knowledge, claiming
that there is a danger in Said’s treatise because it suggests that ‘power is possessed entirely
by the colonizer, given its intentionality and unidirectionality’ (p. 77). Importantly, the same
critique applies even more to postcolonial writers such as Sachs, Escobar and others who
have used Foucault’s investigations to highlight the ostensibly dominatory pretense of
western development bodies. The proposition that development is characterized by a ‘will to
power’, i.e. that it aspires to subdue the non-western world according to its own volition, is
reflected, for instance, in Gronemeyer’s (1992) contention that ‘help is offered for reasons of
the helper’s [i.e. the West’s] own national security, for the purpose of maintaining its own
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prosperity, and for the sake of moral obligation, to convey to others the good that has come
to a nation in the course of history’ (p. 62; emphasis in original). Development, it seems, is
stripped off all well-intended objectives and ambitions, because it is said to be exclusively
grounded upon western self-interests. In consequence, organizations such as the World Bank
(initially called International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) are appointed to the role of serving the demands and
interests of the West. I contend that his conception of development as a means for expanding
Euro-American power and, as Gronemeyer (1992) reminds us, as a ‘bulwark against
communism’, is one-sided but (although misleading) nevertheless rhetorically effective
(Briggs, 2002), since it identifies an enemy (i.e. ‘the master’; cf. Esteva, 1992) who can be
held accountable for the calamities and failures of development projects. However, I do not
wish to judge development along the lines of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but rather offer a different
conceptualization of power which, in my opinion, seems more appropriate for both
considering development’s multidimensionality and complexity and for taking into account
the fact that many Third World governments and individuals have actively and willingly
participated in development.
Bio-Power and the Development Dispositif
It follows from our previous inquiry that certain postcolonial writings depart from the
assumption that development is for the most part a discursive formation that systematically
or even intentionally forms, normalizes and thus controls the objects of which it is presumed
to speak (e.g. Latouche, 1996). This view needs to be analyzed more closely. It must first be
emphasized, however, that the colonial metaphor and the premise of agency of western
development actors are not problematic per se. Rather, they become problematic if one takes
into account that both of these propositions were sketched out under the heading of
Foucauldian (discourse) analysis. For instance, Sachs’ (1992) ‘Development Dictionary’,
whose subtitle (i.e. ‘A Guide to Knowledge as Power’) makes explicit its (ostensible) kinship
with Foucault’s work, comprises contributions of several authors which are characterized
more by their decrying of Eurocentrism than by a Foucauldian analysis of the operation of
power through development. As is the case with Escobar (1995), Sachs’ ‘Dictionary’
establishes a kind of oppositional rhetoric (between the West and the rest) which, in my
assessment, clearly betrays Foucault’s eloquent elaborations of the operation of power. Both
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Lehman (1997) and Nederveen Pieterse (2000) addressed this casual use of Foucault in post-
development studies. For instance, Lehman (1997) argued that Escobar’s (1995) use of
Foucault seems to be limited to adopting a particular sort of style, frequent mention of his
name and numerous quotations from his work. Along the same lines, Brigg (2002) suggested
that parts of post-development literature seem to have lost the profundity of Foucault’s work
and, by deploying inappropriate hyperbolic rhetorical devices, fundamentally obscure the
latter’s understanding of the operation of power.
The first point to be made is that if one makes explicit use of Foucault’s work on
power, it is untenable to claim that development is a purely western endeavor in which
identifiable subjects dominate others in a straightforward, sovereign way. In other words, if
one applies a Foucauldian perspective to development, it is more helpful and apt to construe
development as a growing collective of agents, both in the southern and northern
hemisphere, which works through a complex series of links between discursive and non-
discursive practices ultimately stipulating the strategic priorities of development as well as
the norm that defines the threshold between developed and underdeveloped subjects,
populations and nation states. Thus, instead of seeing development as just a negative dividing
practice between the West and the rest or as a panoply of interventions that engender the
creation of the developed and the underdeveloped, the First and the Third World,
development can reasonably be portrayed in a more affirmative manner. Such an appraisal,
however, would require that one rejects the (exclusively) negative and repressive view of
power as well as the assumption that development is grounded on intentional actions of
actors which possess power. Briggs’ (2002) investigation is helpful in this context, since it
emphasizes both the productive modality of power (cf. also Chapter 6) while stressing the
need to reflect upon development initiatives from the perspective of Foucault’s notion of
‘bio-power’. It is therefore necessary to counteract the univocally negative and evaluative
conceptualization of development as established by certain postcolonial or post-development
scholars, since it only accounts for one side of the story. To be sure, development is more
than the simple materialization of western domination, because it has made new aspects of
global life feasible and, by inventing new categories and techniques for its own measurement
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and control, made new areas of existence practicable. It thus follows that power is not a
merely negative, repressive event, but a constitutive for novel subjectivities.
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In general terms, Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ is most appropriate for highlighting the
positive, constitutive aspect of power (without denying its restrictive force). It is helpful to note
that Foucault (1978) made a distinction between sovereign power and bio-power. Where Foucault
associated the former kind of power with the reign of the King or monarch who is in the position
of exercising the right to ‘take life or let live’ (p. 136; emphasis in original), it is clear that the
figure of the monarch and the sort of power he exerts is indicative of the mechanism of colonial
rule. Foucault’s notion of ‘sovereign power’ is thus compatible with the imperial era since,
colonies were taken in the name of the monarch and colonial rule was executed with a sense of
ownership. However, I want to stress that such a conceptualization of power cannot be applied to
the post-WWII era. As Briggs (2002) suggested, there is a need for elaboration as to if and how
bio-power can fill this void. To start with, the notion of ‘bio-power’, as Foucault (1983b) reminds
us, relates to ‘a way of acting upon an acting subject or subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of action’ (p. 220). In opposition to the sovereign conceptualization of power which
highlights the hierarchical execution of force, bio-power entails not so much the idea of
domination but the bringing out and enabling of forces. That is, instead of using force to
accomplish one’s aim, bio-power emphasizes the mobilization and leverage of collective forces.
This shift in Foucault’s thinking is significant in the present context, since it enables one to see
that the period of colonialism and the post-WWII period can be distinguished with regard to their
operation of power. Whereas the colonial period, to put it bluntly, can be characterized as
operating through an identifiable master who sustained his power through the application of
restrictive measures (e.g. punishment), it was during the early post-WWII period that previous
colonial officials together with anti-colonial leaders began to advocate the mutual welfare of both
the former colonies and the former empire. Again, the pivot of this endeavor was mobilization,
meaning that individuals, institutions as well as nation states in both the north and the south were
induced to increase global prosperity by participating in the development project. In this way, it is
even more obvious that the colonial metaphor as well as the premise of western domination
ignore that development has come into operation through the mobilization of interests and
objectives of northern and southern actors. It is evident, then, that the concept of bio-power
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Although Foucault never denied the possibility of domination and repression, he claimed that those two
phenomena represent extreme and limited versions of the operation of power (Foucault, 1987).
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exhibits that development is a global and not only a western project. It thus follows that
development cannot simply be evaluated as univocally ‘bad’ (as some of the above-mentioned
scholars have suggested). Rather, Foucault’s work on bio-power endorses the conceptualization
of development as a ‘complex strategic situation’ (Briggs, 2002) that, by drawing upon mutually
supporting procedures of power and knowledge, seeks to manage (not dominate) the world in a
calculated way and hence to optimize people’s living condition on a global scale. In sum, the
central tenet of Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ is that it enables a view of development which
retains its benevolent trajectory without obscuring the fact that it can produce a wide range of
negative outcomes. In addition, the introduction of bio-power to the field of postcolonial studies
leads to criticism of any simplified notion of western domination and reveals that both the
definition and operation of development have always been a collective undertaking with the aim
to constitute a field of differentiation (i.e. development versus underdevelopment) through which
individuals and nation states are acted upon or act upon themselves in relation to a given norm.
Hence, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the operation of development as well as
to discard the repressive conceptualization of power as endorsed by the colonial metaphor, I
would like to elaborate briefly on Foucault’s conceptualization of the dispositif (cf. also Chapter
1). The concept of ‘dispositif’ (Foucault, 1980) is revealing with regard to the present argument,
since it implies that development is contingent on a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and
non-discursive elements. Moreover, the idea of the dispositif allows a conception of how the
world in the late 1940s (cf. below) witnessed an unprecedented combination of local and global
projects, financial flows, philosophical and scientific propositions, governmental, non-
governmental and supra-national initiatives which, despite their essential differences, were all
dedicated to development (Briggs, 2002). Although this assemblage of actors has been loosely
coupled and despite the undeniable existence of tensions between the different rationalities which
governed its conduct, it may be argued that over the last five decades the development dispositif
has witnessed dramatic (quantitative) growth. In opposition to, for instance, Esteva (1992) who
suggested that development has notably been determined by UN agencies or the World Bank, I
would like to stress that the idea of dispositif implies that development is not exercised by but
rather via those organizations. In other words, Foucault’s understanding of dispositif makes it
impossible to simply attribute the operation of development to a collective of (western)
organizations. Instead, denoting development as a dispositif endorses a view in which local grass-
root organizations as well as global organizational arrangements in the southern as well as in the
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northern hemisphere form part of the same project. To be sure, the dispositif is in no way to be
seen as a stabilized and closed collective. Rather, the development dispositif is permeable in that
it constantly includes new (and excludes old) objectives and new modes of operation. Although
some actors of the dispositif are (or have become) arguably more powerful than others in
determining the truth of development, it must remain clear that development (i.e. the specification
of problems and the means for their solution) is a collective endeavor that requires continuous
negotiation and an ongoing refinement of techniques of information, measurement and control.
By implication, the institutionalization of development is by no means a process that has
exclusively been controlled by the West. Rather, it is a process that has been taking place at all
levels, ‘from the international organizations and national planning agencies in the Third World to
local development agencies, community development committees, private voluntary agencies,
and non-governmental organizations’ (Escobar, 1995, p. 46). That is to say that the definition of
development, i.e. the normalization of the binary between ‘development’ and
‘underdevelopment’, is contingent on a broad institutional framework and therefore continuously
contested. Departing from the assumption that the negotiation of development has gone hand in
hand with dramatic semiotic changes, I will elaborate on some of the more salient changes in the
meaning of development in the section below. Apart from illustrating how development has been
refined and at times completely reformulated, the main objective is to provide some historical
insight into how ‘development’ has been created and altered as a field of practice and thought by
tracing the discourse of development from the late 1940s until the present.
The Development of ‘Development’
Investigating development from a discursive standpoint, it is important to note that discourse
is construed as a process of meaning making which is ‘limiting our thinking at the same time
[making] thinking possible’ (McCloskey, 1985, p. 252). In addition, I would like to stress
that development is to be seen as an equivocal concept forming part of a multi-discursive
and, by implication, contested field of practice. As Staudt (1991) contended, there are
hundreds of definitions of development. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint
a singular understanding of the term. Given the polysemia (and elusiveness) of development,
it is hardly surprising that, as Esteva (1992) claimed, very few signs are as feeble and as
fragile as development discourse. This is however not to say that development discourse is or
has become an impotent or even ‘dead’ rationality (Illich, 1992). Quite the contrary,
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development discourse is an incremental part of a ‘machine’ (Ferguson, 1990), that is, of the
dispositif which has, as discussed above, gradually enlarged its scope and, most importantly,
extended its own legitimacy in defining the conventions and norms of both the physical and
economic conditions and teleology of world affairs. Provided that the ‘development
machine’ exhibits a proven flexibility in accounting for and adapting to both internal tensions
and external critique, it is evident that the meaning of development is subject to constant
negotiation. This means that the meaning of development has witnessed distinct alterations
encompassing the entire knowledge of what development is/was and through whom
development is/was to be governed and implemented in practice. Thus, conceiving of
‘development’ as an ‘amoeba-like concept’, i.e. a concept which is ‘shapeless but
ineradicable’ (Sachs, 1992, p. 4), I find it helpful to shed some light upon past and
contemporary ‘regimes of truth’ and representational practices which govern(ed) the sphere
of development. Following Crush’s (1995) assertion that development discourse, ‘despite
enormous continuity over time, also changes its language, strategies and practices’ (p. 7), I
will highlight some of the discontinuities and ruptures (Tamboukou, 2003) that have
occurred in the exegesis of development in the period between the late 1940s and the present.
By addressing the construction of meaning, the inquiry will focus on the question of what
historical discontinuities are revealed in the episteme of development or, in other words,
‘how history [gave] shape to different sorts of discourse’ (Watts, 1995, p. 56). Although such
an endeavor can only be partial, the main objective is to clarify that although development
discourse initially relied on an economic logic (i.e. development economics) it has, not least
due to its problematization during the 1980s, been complemented and endorsed with social
(and ecological) rationalities. In other words, it will become clear through the following
elaboration that the relative significance and pervasiveness of economics (vis-à-vis social
and ecological rationalities) as well as its significations (e.g. development, sustainable or
neo-liberal economics) have changed quite dramatically. Although it can be reasonably
argued that development has been conceptualized from different (institutional, hierarchical
and geographical) perspectives (e.g. Esteva, 1995), I will limit the focus of my investigation
to (western) presidential speeches, official government declarations, policy statements by
development agencies, and strategy papers of the UN, World Bank and IMF.
Notwithstanding the fact that this selection limits the understanding of development to a
particular locus of enunciation, it seems nevertheless apt to gain an understanding of the truth
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regimes being produced by the ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1989) which, according to
Briggs (2002), operate as leaders and trainers of development and therefore exercise a (quasi-
) panoptic function in the development dispositif.
To be sure, trying to trace development discourse does not necessarily imply that
there is a single identifiable moment (i.e. origin; cf. Foucault, 1984) in which ‘development’
came about for the first time (Cowen & Shenton, 1995). However, having already mentioned
that, as implied in Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and bio-power, there is a notable
difference between the imperial (i.e. colonial) and the post-WWII (i.e. post-colonial) era, I
would like to add here that there is a certain consensus that the proliferation of development
discourse is inextricably related to post-WWII politics (e.g. Sachs, 1992; Escobar, 1995) and
in particular to the establishment of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF in the mid to late
1940s. Essentially, the representation of development is on the one hand to be construed as a
collective effort (cf. above). On the other hand, development is also to be seen as a distinct
exercise in measuring and controlling the subjects in both the First and the Third World.
Thus, in order to understand how ‘development’ has been signified as a matter of global
concern and to gain a sense of how the language game of development came about and got
transformed, we shall first have a look at both Harry Truman’s seminal inaugural address in
1949 as well as at some of the reactions which followed. To be clear, although Truman’s
inaugural address on January 20, 1949 was praised by many as a genuine humanist
undertaking, since it explicitly targeted the mitigation of mankind’s ‘misery’ (Briggs, 2002),
this does not mean that development did not exist before. As Esteva (1992) convincingly
argued, notions of ‘development’ or ‘underdevelopment’ were already an integral part of
political discourse throughout the first part of the 1940s when they started to emerge in
‘technical books or United Nations documents’ (p. 7). Nevertheless, Truman’s speech must
be regarded as an outstanding event, firstly, because it was received on a global scale and
under the emblem of US politics and, secondly, because it was readily absorbed and re-
distributed through subsequent development initiatives. Truman’s speech was literally
transformed into a grand narrative of development which is evident (at least partly) by the
fact that it has frequently been referred to as the springboard for construing development as a
futurological, global program. As Watts (1995) reminds us, ‘President Truman’s programme
… helped produce an unprecedented explosion of international institutions, professions,
organizations and disciplines whose raison d’être was the lodestar of development’ (p. 55;
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emphasis in original). With this in mind, it seems instructive to provide a rather extensive
extract from Truman’s speech so as to reveal some of the root assumptions which gave both
shape to the still elusive concept of ‘development’ and direction to many subsequent
development-related discussions and initiatives.
… we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and
industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their
food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and
stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous
areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve
suffering of these people. The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the
development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can
afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources
in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible. I believe that we
should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical
knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life. And, in
cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing
development. Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own
efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more
mechanical power to lighten their burdens. We invite other countries to pool their
technological resources in this undertaking. Their contributions will be warmly
welcomed. This should be a cooperative enterprise in which all nations work together
through the United Nations and its specialized agencies whenever practicable. It must be
a worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and freedom. With the
cooperation of business, private capital, agriculture, and labor in this country, this
program can greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations and can raise
substantially their standards of living … The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign
profit – has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based
on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. All countries, including our own, will greatly
benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world's human and natural
resources. Experience shows that our commerce with other countries expands as they
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progress industrially and economically. Greater production is the key to prosperity and
peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of
modern scientific and technical knowledge. Only by helping the least fortunate of its
members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that
is the right of all people. (Truman Library, retrieved from http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=1030; emphasis added)
Before I address the signification of development, we must recall that the first (and to a lesser
extent the second) decade of development in the post-WWII era was characterized by a fair
amount of optimism. Truman as well as his early successors thus endorsed the moral appeal of
development, fostering, as Gronemeyer (1992) mentions, confidence and a ‘revolutionary
dynamic’ of these undertakings. As is evident from Truman’s speech, the notion of
‘development’ heralded a new era in the ‘management of world affairs’ (Sachs, 1992) which was
predominantly grounded on the assumption that access to ‘scientific and technical knowledge’
would warrant ‘greater production‘ and, thus, provide ‘underdeveloped areas’ with a ‘better life’,
i.e. ‘peace, plenty, and freedom’. In view of the above extract, it need not be mentioned that
Truman’s speech paved the way for a kind of development which relied first and foremost on the
merits of economic growth while envisaging technology and science as the appropriate means for
achieving determined ends. The most commonplace rationale of the early days of development
was thus ‘development economics’ which comprised, among other things, the idea of natural
progression, that is, the idea of ‘some ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ movement through a succession of
different modes of subsistence’ (Meek, 1976, p. 255; quoted in Cowen & Shenton, 1995, p. 31).
Being essentially influenced by (Scottish) Enlightenment and particularly by the work of Adam
Smith (cf. Cowen & Shenton, 1995), development economics served as the new discipline for
framing the political/economic situation in terms of growth, welfare and needs (Watts, 1995). The
discourse of development, in its early signification, established a division through economic
parameters as a result of which it was possible to distinguish between the developed world and
the world to be developed. In view of the broad, that is, global space the development dispositif
tried to account for, it is evident that such a project called for unprecedented hierarchical
observations and examinations. Development was thus structured through developmentalist social
sciences and economics and pursued by agencies from local government research operations up
to country-level investigations commissioned by the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc. Illich (1992)
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stated that it was particularly the UN which began to operationalize poverty according to an
agreed-upon ‘acceptable minimum standard’. This division, which was notably based on per
capita production of material goods (and later on per capita income),
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was not only used to
‘hold’ the rich apart from the poor but, importantly, was conceived as the basis on which to
construct a Third, Second and Third World. This three-fold partition, following Escobar (1995),
was projected onto the geo-political map so as to determine the amount of mass poverty in Asia,
Africa and Latin America. As poverty was conceived both as an untenable social problem as well
as a threat to global stability, it became the consensual objective of development to create a
condition which would allow all countries worldwide to be lifted to the (economic) level of the
First World. As mentioned before, the proposition that the First World should act as the global
benchmark or ‘yardstick’ (Sachs, 1992c) has often been criticized by postcolonial scholars (e.g.
Sachs, 1990; Rahnema, 1991). However, what is more relevant in the present context is that
poverty was perceived as a global issue only during the 1940s (Rahnema, 1992b; Sachs, 1992c).
It was hence only because of the reflection of poverty in economic theory that people were able to
think and talk about themselves and others as either rich or poor, as developed or
underdeveloped. In this way the notion of ‘poverty’ was used to perceive people not according to
what they were or wanted to be, but rather according to a pre-ordained image of lack
90
(a view
which was sternly objected by advocates of the later ‘basic human needs’ approach; cf. below).
Be that as it may, conceiving of development as (historically and culturally) situated knowledge,
it must be understood that its meaning was subject to constant negotiations and re-appropriations.
In this context, it is important to note, first, that the signification of development through
(development) economics has been challenged right from the start (e.g. Kothari, 1988) and,
second, that development discourse has witnessed both minor and major reshuffles as a result of
which the concept has diverged ever more from its initial focus on Enlightenment-based
development theory. As Watts (1995) reminds us in this context, ‘(d)uring the 1960s and 1970s
there was a broad shift from markets to state-centered alternatives with minor attention to the role
of civil society. The 1980s brought debt, retrenchment and austerity; short-term crisis
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It must be borne in mind that despite the variety of measures that have been applied by the development apparatus,
the Gross National Product per capita became the quasi-consensual measure for determining the degree of
respectively development and underdevelopment.
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The parallels with psychoanalysis (which seeks to denote desire as lack) seem obvious here (cf. Deleuze &
Guattari, 2004), since both approaches aspire to translate human conditions into conditions of lack which then render
those very people or populations deficient, unsatisfactory, belated or otherwise needy of correction.
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management, stabilization and the so-called neo-liberal counter-revolution in development
theory’ (p. 58). Given Watts’ telling statement, it seems useful to reiterate that after an initial
phase of unclouded optimism, the appropriateness of development as a means for mitigating
poverty has been increasingly questioned. For instance, as Murphy (2000) contended, the concept
of ‘development’ is coming ‘under fierce scrutiny, [and] its most basic premises and tenets [are]
fundamentally challenged from all points on the political spectrum, whether the far right, the hard
left, or the liberal centre’ (p. 330). What is particularly relevant for the argument at hand is that
both the recognition and problematization of persistent and aggravating poverty initiated a shift
towards a different understanding of development. Although the arguments against the
development project have, unsurprisingly, been manifold, there are two recurring positions in the
accounts of development critics. The first route of reasoning, as briefly mentioned before, is
grounded on an economic logic which holds that development has constantly failed in reducing
global poverty or in increasing people’s living conditions (Sachs, 1992c). The second and
interrelated argument is that the prevailing (economic) discourse of development was too narrow,
thus limiting both the understanding of development and the Third World subjects. As regards the
argument of economic failure, it was particularly during the 1970s and 1980s that people and
institutions from within and outside the development apparatus became resistant to the idea that
‘(g)reater production is key to prosperity and peace’ (from Truman’s inaugural speech; quoted in
Sachs, 1992c). I contend that it was increasingly acknowledged that the kinship between social
progress and economic growth was not leading to any significant progress. For instance, in 1973,
Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank, summarized the state of affairs by claiming
that ‘(d)espite a decade of unprecedented increase in the gross national product … the poorest
segments of the population have received relatively little benefit’. Yet, it is important to note that
the broad-scale criticism of development in no way led to its decline or even its end. On the
contrary, development was enlarged as a field of application even during a period in which it
witnessed stern objection. This process was made possible by complementing it with novel
rationalities and practices. Considering the proliferation of meanings attached to development in
conjunction with the problematization of early developmentalism, it is of particular interest to
note that the logic of development experienced a slow shift from development economics to
social (and to a lesser extent environmental) issues. While early development discourse used to
envisage poverty alleviation through the perspective of ‘economic development’ – meaning that
economic means were applied to social ends – from the mid-1960s onwards it was increasingly
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accepted that poverty alleviation initiatives must also comprise social (and ecological) measures
and parameters. In concrete terms, in 1962 the Economic and Social Council of the UN endorsed
the integration of the economic and social aspects of development in order to address and broaden
the reductionistic equation of development with economic development. Suchlike suggestions did
not least find acceptance through the recognition that previous significations of development fell
short of their objectives and even led to an aggravation of identified problems and calamities. In
view of the observation that ‘rapid [economic] growth had been accompanied by increasing
inequalities’ (Esteva, 1992, p. 13), it was suggested that social development be seen as ‘a
precondition for economic growth’ (UNRISD, 1979). Essentially, this reinterpretation of
development has notably been stimulated by economists who were critical of prevailing
development theory and practice. The world thus witnessed the rise of the ‘basic human needs’
approach (Illich, 1992). The main premise of this approach was that the prevailing dogma of
development (i.e. economic poverty alleviation) was not apt for grasping and overcoming the
differences (i.e. needs, desires, etc.) between human beings. On the face of it, the discussion of
basic human needs, which represents a general critique of the homogenizing force of
development economics, sought to pinpoint the evident univocity entailed in the binary between
‘developed – underdeveloped’. As reflected, for instance, in McNamara’s contention that ‘to
eradicate absolute poverty by the end of the century’ would imply ‘the elimination of
malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction of infant mortality and the raising of life-expectancy
standards to those of the developed nations’, the basic human needs approach tried to address
poverty and, by implication, development from the standpoint of quality of life. Furthermore, it
sought to overcome the disappointment associated with the mere stimulation of economic growth
(Sachs, 1992c). In other words, the basic human needs approach, which was implemented in the
southern hemisphere from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s (Escobar, 1992b), was inextricably
linked with the ambition of counteracting the early developmentalist agenda which was said to
ignore that poverty represented ‘a multi-faceted human predicament’ (Rahnema, 1992b, p. 161).
Following Escobar (1995b), the idea of basic human needs was ‘based on a liberal human rights
discourse’ (p. 225) which tried to stimulate a sensitivity for people’s everyday experiences. While
this shift, as briefly mentioned above, was interpreted by some as a first step towards the
‘becoming social’ of development, there were others who argued that the basic human needs
approach did not offer an alternative to economic theory, since it was in fact operating as a
(subtle) advocate thereof. For instance, Lutz and Lux (1988) construed ‘basic human needs’ as
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the materialization of a ‘new economic order’. The authors proclaimed that the economy had
slipped back into the logic of basic human needs in that it was simultaneously seen as the source
or cause of needs and the means for their satisfaction. In other words, Lutz and Lux’s asserted
that basic human needs had created a new order which was grounded on an image of humanity
whose ‘basic needs have been met, thanks to a new kind of economy that recognizes their
existence’ (Illich, 1992, p. 97). Arguably, the discourse of needs has been appropriated in the
context of development aid so as to account for the economic idea of resource scarcity. Evidently
then, this has had the noticeable (and important) effect of rendering economics the ‘ontological
status of being human’ (ibid.). This observation cannot possibly be overemphasized here since it
not only reveals how the genuinely benevolent (and, of course political) project of development
has capitalized on the assumption of economic theory, but also that the discourse of development,
despite the different meanings it has incorporated over the years, has invariably retained an
economic primacy. The discourse of needs is thus exemplary in showing how a particular
historical condition, that is, the era of ‘poverty-oriented’ programs (cf. Escobar, 1992b), has
adapted the dominant rationale of development to changing conditions and demands. Again,
‘basic human needs’ is not to be understood as a subversive act or even as a conspiracy (cf.
Storey, 2000) with the ultimate aim of obscuring development’s colonial trajectory, but as an
expression of the development apparatus’ flexibility in accounting for and adapting to changing
(internal and external) circumstances. Hence, in opposition to Escobar (1992b), who alleged that
the basic human needs approach was a scheme designed by ‘a handful of US and UK
universities’ (p. 138) with the objective of sustaining and furthering First World elites, I find it
more helpful to look at the matter as a mutual refinement of development objectives aimed at
realigning these new objectives to various types of existing policies. In accordance with
Foucault’s idea of ‘bio-politics’, the basic human needs approach is to be construed as an
adjustment of the phenomena of development to economic processes and political critique. This
adjustment, however, is not primarily aimed at fortifying the dominance of the First World over
the Third, but at furthering the cause of development (i.e. human progress) as a whole. Provided
that basic human needs approaches operate to safeguard man’s life and survival, it must also be
borne in mind that they reflect social existence through economic, social and, of course, biologic
parameters. This said, I will now shed some light on three distinct rationalities of development,
that is, structural adjustment, sustainable development and the discourse of globalization. The
primary aim is to illustrate how these three development logics interrelated (or even explained)
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the social realm through an economic logic. Following Berthoud’s (1992) assertion that ‘the
market appears as an implicit assumption in virtually all development theory and policy’ (p. 71), I
will focus upon how the logics of structural adjustment, sustainable development and
globalization position the market vis-à-vis the social sphere of development.
It was during the 1980s that the field witnessed both a decreasing interest in development
economics and a rapid proliferation of neo-liberal economics (Escobar, 1995). These reforms
were most manifest in structural adjustment papers (published by both the World Bank and the
IMF) which stressed, among other things, the need for monetary controls, the privatization of
public enterprises and government services, the reduction of imports and, most importantly, the
opening to world markets. Evidently, then, one of the central assumptions of structural
adjustment policies was that (political and) economic structures would determine the wealth of a
given society. Structural adjustment policies were hence applied in the context of development
aid as a mainly technical matter, that is, as a ‘mere refinement of an existing, natural system’
(Murphy, 2000, p. 333). The concept of structural adjustment, which was not only introduced in
developing but also in industrialized nations, was quite evidently based on the logic that the
market, rather than the state, was to be seen as the engine of societal and national prosperity. In
other words, the notion of ‘structural adjustment’ was introduced to Third World aid as a panacea
to all sorts of economic and social problems, based on the premise that anything which might
seem to have a bearing on economic life must be assessed in terms of its consequences for either
promoting or inhibiting the pursuit of economic prosperity. After all, structural adjustment
policies, which for the most part coincided with the New Right politics in Europe and the US,
were characterized by a belief in the regenerative force of the market or, more precisely, in the
merits of the ‘global market’. While adjustment policies endorsed that the state must be reduced
to the promotion of basic services such as health care and education, these programs further
capitalized on the idea that the regulative force of global economics would ensure the well-being
of communities as a whole. Despite the fact that scholars later objected to the concept of
structural adjustment, claiming that it caused ‘deep economic and social disparity’ (Murphy,
2000, p. 334) or even ‘superexploitation’ (Escobar, 1995), I want to stress here that this
rationality was offered as a ‘grand narrative’ (Lyotard, 1984) of development which alleged that a
single system would be sufficient for governing world affairs. While obviously ignoring the
particularities of and differences between nations, ethnic groups and cultures, the idea of
structural adjustment, quite remarkably, also conflated the distinction between the market as a
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means and the market as an end. Structural adjustment, so it seems, reveals the totalization of the
market logic which in turn endorses, among other things, the view that the social realm must be
understood as a ‘by-product’ or a ‘confounding variable’ of the de-regulated market. By
implication, the notion of ‘structural adjustment’ was not only an attempt to introduce ‘market
mechanisms and principles on a global scale’ (Berthoud, 1992, p. 70), but an ideology by dint of
which material well-being was seen not just as a cultural ideal but as a universal value with which
both human beings and institutions were supposed to identify.
Calling to mind that structural adjustment programs were criticized as a destructive
character in the history of development (e.g. Buttel, Hawkins & Power, 1990), it is hardly
surprising that the 1980s (i.e. the heyday of structural adjustment) were at times referred to as
‘the lost decades for development’ (Rist, 1990; Watts, 1995). In consequence, it can reasonably
be argued that the introduction of ‘sustainable development’ represented a more or less direct
response to the historical ‘lesson’ of adjustment politics. While rejecting Crush’s (1995) ironic
remark that ‘(d)evelopment discourse has a remarkable capacity for forgiving its own mistakes’
(p. 16), I contend that sustainable development can be seen as the introduction of a new language
game which seemed to account for structural adjustment policies’ ignorance of social issues. In
general terms, the notion of ‘sustainable development’ put centre stage the issue of global
survival, emphasizing the need to harmonize the relationship between the economic, ecological
and social aspects of human conduct. It was Escobar (1995) who aptly observed that sustainable
development discourse was regulated by an ‘economy of visibility’, meaning that it was operating
on the basis of a re-shaped system of rules and regulations that apprehended the objective of
development in a novel fashion. Hence, as revealed in both UNICEF’s (1987) telling critique
titled ‘Adjustment with a Human Face’ and in the ‘Human Development Report’ (HDR) which
was published for the first time in 1990 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP),
the epithet ‘sustainable’ was primarily a supplementation of the development discourse, adding a
set of non-economic parameters. On the face of it, the idea of sustainable development exhibited
some overlap with the previous basic human needs approach in that both traditions stressed that
the ultimate test of development would not be the absolute increase in per capita income (which
was of course the ‘litmus test’ applied in early development economics; cf. above), but rather
whether or not the living conditions of people were improved as a whole. People’s living
conditions were thus chiefly determined and measured by means of the HDI which, according to
the UNDP homepage (cf. http://www.hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005), is ‘a summary
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composite index that measures a country’s average achievements in three basic aspects of human
development: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Longevity is measured by
life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and
the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by
GDP per capita.’ Admittedly, the HDI, which evidently holds a central position in contemporary
development aid, is only one of innumerable statistical measures applied in the development
apparatus. However, what is particular about the HDI is that it has been put in place to reveal the
extent of ‘under-development’ through both economic and non-economic parameters. The
introduction of the HDI therefore indicates that during the ‘era of sustainability’ various new
concepts such as equity, participation, pluralism, human rights and partnership were introduced to
the language game of development (Eyoh & Sandbrook, 2001). This had the noticeable effect of
emphasizing that ‘people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the
development of a country, not economic growth’ (UNDP, 2005). As Escobar (1995) mentioned in
this context, sustainable development discourse redistributed many concerns of previous
development endeavors such as, for instance, ‘basic needs, population, resources, technology,
institutional cooperation, food security’ (p. 195). While the meta-level aim of sustainability was
to enable social justice or human development, these ideals were for the most part implemented
on the level of ‘field work’ through participatory approaches. Participatory development
techniques were chiefly premised on the assumption that involving indigenous people into
development decisions would make it possible to counteract the usual ‘top-down’ approaches to
development (Christens & Speer, 2006) by a more just modus operandi. Yet, I would like to point
out that the objective of power sharing, which was obviously understood as a springboard for
empowerment, justice, and equality, is in no way to be seen as a counter-argument to the
economic logic of previous development rationalities, since it basically sustained the teleology of
economic growth. In other words, although participatory approaches have often been credited for
overcoming some of the fallacies of economic development initiatives, it must be borne in mind
that these approaches were in fact introduced as new means for ‘smoothing’ the obstacles
encountered in hierarchically commissioned forms of development. Thus, if one accepts that
participatory approaches have been implemented to increase the acceptance and commitment of
the people involved in development and hence to reduce ‘transaction costs’ (Christens & Speer,
2006), the idea of sustainability cannot be understood as the materialization of a humanist
endeavor. Rather, sustainability stresses the importance of striking a balance between the social,
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economic and ecological aspects of a given enterprise, affirming the general merits and necessity
of economic growth. This is however not to say that participatory development is necessarily a
bad thing, as some have claimed (e.g. Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004), but that
it was introduced as a strategy for evening out, at least to some extent, the hierarchy between
western development organizations and the indigenous people. Moreover, it is important to
mention that despite the fact that sustainable development paved the way for new ways of
thinking and talking about development, it did not simply displace previous discourses on
development. Rather, the discourse of sustainable development, as briefly mentioned before,
partly adopted previous epistemes, thus reproducing and extending some of the central aspects of
earlier economism and developmentalism. Despite its avowed social trajectory, sustainable
development is primarily to be understood as a (at that time) ‘new development strategy’ (Watts,
1995) which had much in common with (pragmatic) neo-liberal discourse. By emphasizing the
scarcity of natural resources and, most importantly, by looking for the most efficient forms of
using resources (without threatening the survival of humanity and nature), sustainable
development affirmed and even contributed to the legitimization of neo-liberal ideas. In view of
the fact that sustainable development was both ideologically and chronologically in close
proximity with neo-liberal orthodoxies, I will briefly discuss the discourse of globalization and in
particular its decisively different interpretation of the global market place.
Departing from the view that the 1980s were characterized by a certain perplexity and
inertia which was not least created by the recognition of an increase in poverty in the Third World
as well as the void between the northern and the southern hemisphere, I would like to illustrate
that the second half of the 1990s witnessed the rise of a new ethos: ‘redevelopment’. By and
large, the idea of redevelopment exhibited a general concern for market mechanisms,
emphasizing both the dynamics and inevitability of globalization (cf. Chapter 2). This shift,
which was largely advocated by the New Right or conservative movement in the late 1980s (cf.
Berthoud, 1992), was based on the belief that the market would be able to solve the world’s
development problems. As the market was already a central feature of the structural adjustment
policies of the 1980s (cf. above), it is safe to argue that it became even more important during the
1990s. Moreover, whereas the idea of structural adjustment was overtly positive about the
transformative power of the market (since the market was seen as a cure-all for global
calamities), it is important to note that the globalization discourse construed the market not
primarily as a positive but as an inevitable mechanism, making it ‘difficult to limit its expansion’
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(Berthoud, 1992, p. 79). In other words, the main difference between structural adjustment
policies of the 1980s and development aid as conceived at the turn of the Millennium is that the
former period was marked by an atmosphere of departure (in the positive sense) revealing a
teleology of redemption. The latter signification of development, on the other hand, was chiefly
characterized by an alarmist genre, portraying the global context in which development
organizations operate as massively uncertain, unstable and largely unpredictable. Du Gay (2003)
claimed that globalization discourse was heralding the potential end of everything, forecasting
some form of economic and cultural decline (cf. also du Gay, 1994; 1996; 2000). By establishing
an image of an accelerating and hyper-competitive environment, globalization discourse
proclaimed that if development organizations (as well as of Third World subjects) wished to
survive (much less than to flourish) they would have to learn to assimilate themselves and change
in a drastic way. It is thus clear that the discourse of globalization questioned the success of
current forms of organizational life. That is to say that only those (development) organizations
which were seen to be able to adapt to immediate and continuous change were said to stand a
chance of survival; the rest was doomed to perish (cf. Chapter 2). Again, although the ideas of
structural adjustment and globalization are partly compatible, at least to the extent that both are
based on the premise that the world is dominated by market forces, the difference between the
two views is evident in their treatment of the valuation of the market. Whereas the idea of
structural adjustment retains an optimistic view of the market (even stressing its emancipatory
possibilities), the discourse of globalization works upon the imperative of ‘this or die’ (Lyotard,
1993) which – by construing the market as both the springboard of all things as well as a
destructive force – endows market forces with a more ambivalent connotation. A further
difference between the two perspectives is that the idea of structural adjustment is more or less
‘ignorant’ of the private realm (since it devotes all attention to the investigation and adjustment of
political-economic structures) whereas the discourse of globalization is explicit about the need to
re-engineer the public (and not only the business or political) space of human conduct. The issue
of individual ‘responsibilization’ and of responsible citizenship will be discussed below in
relation to the entrepreneurship discourse. Therefore, I will first reiterate, condense and interrelate
my main observations.
It must be stressed that the signification and valuation of development has changed quite
dramatically over the last decades. Furthermore, it is undoubted that the idea of development,
since the Truman era, has been advocating the merits of economic growth. The different
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discourses on development have therefore not simply replaced each other but created, at times
subtle, shifts and alterations of its meaning. For instance, one can argue that the notion of
‘economic growth’ has always been inherent in development. However, this connection has also
become a matter of overt contestation The first critical voices appeared in the late 1960s, and it is
safe to claim that the problematization of development aid coincided with the rise of ‘basic
human needs’ approaches in the 1970s and ‘sustainable development’ in the early 1990s. More
recently, from the mid-1990s to the present, the idea of economic growth has witnessed a
significant re-interpretation through globalization discourse. That is, denoting economic growth
as the central means for securing both individual well-being and the prosperity of communities at
large has made economic growth appear in a more positive light. Essentially, the globalization
discourse has also had a significant influence on the role of the state in development endeavors.
Whereas until the end of the 1970s the state was believed to fulfill the ‘Benthamite function of
realizing the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ (Berthoud, 1992, p. 73), we can see that
the discourse of globalization has replaced the primacy of the state by the primacy of the market
which is seen as an autonomous mechanism for promoting development. To be sure, this shift of
emphasis was already stimulated by liberal economic models as introduced through the structural
adjustments programs in the early 1980s. As mentioned before, structural adjustment programs
were occupied with popularizing the view that global poverty can only be reduced by
transforming southern national economies according to the model of their industrialized counter-
part. Yet, although the notion of the ‘market’ after the repeated failures of structural adjustment
policies lost some of its appeal, this did not lead to its general replacement. Far from it, one can
observe that the idea of ‘market friendly development’ remains popular which is evident, for
instance, in the World Bank’s ‘World Development Report’ published in 1991. The report
stressed, among other things, the merits of the advance of the free market in Eastern Europe.
However, there is an important difference between the eulogy of the market in structural
adjustment policies and its treatment in today’s development programs. In concrete terms, the
idea of structural adjustment highlighted the almost infinite positive possibilities of the de-
regulated market. In present development concepts, on the other hand, one also finds some hints
at the role of ‘responsibility’. The issue of responsibility, so it seems, addresses the notion that
economic structures cannot do (i.e. be successful) without the active participation and
engagement of institutions and individuals. Responsibility thus implies that both the success and
failures of development endeavors are contingent on the concrete engagement of economic actors
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in both the south and the north. Moreover, the idea of responsibility acts as an imperative,
demanding that people must account for and take care of their own well-being and livelihood. In
other words, in contrast to sustainable development, which saw responsibility as a general duty to
maintain global resources for subsequent generations, responsibility in the context of
globalization discourse is concerned with holding particular actors (i.e. the indigenous people,
developing nations) liable for their own development and progress, i.e. for their fate. Based on the
observation that the notion of ‘responsibility’ is primarily used to construe responsible (i.e. self-
governing) citizens (both individual and corporate), I will now elaborate on how the discourse of
globalization has deployed the idea of entrepreneurship to stimulate a distinctively novel form of
governmentality.
The ‘hegemonic models of development’ (Gellert, 2005, p. 1345) as advocated by the
‘Washington Consensus’ and the World Bank and IMF are said to have shifted the rationality of
Third World politics toward neo-liberalism. It is evident that the discourse of globalization has
played a crucial role in transforming the rationale for managing national economies. While, as
established before, the discourse of globalization maintained an emphasis on economic growth
through structural adjustment programs, it became more explicit about the acceptable and
legitimate ways of carrying out development endeavors. That is, development discourse in the
1990s relied on notions of ‘responsibilization’ which, in the sense of Foucauldian
governmentality (cf. also Chapter 1), provided a blueprint for the ideal way of individual and
institutional conduct. To put it bluntly, responsibilization advocated an active participation of the
(southern) actors involved in development initiatives and, more precisely, that both individuals
and institutions in the south should take (part of) their fortune in their own hands (Brigg, 2001).
The point I want to emphasize here is that entrepreneurship has served as the benchmark for
visualizing the ideal of the self-directed, pro-active and responsible subject. The ideality of
entrepreneurship with respect to the leveraging of local communities in the Third World is
revealed in a speech held in 1996 by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn who
claimed that ‘microcredit programs have brought the vibrancy of the market economy to the
poorest villages and people of the world. This business approach to the alleviation of poverty has
allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity’ (quoted in Brigg,
2001). Evidently then, the notion of ‘enterprise’ has come to occupy a crucial role in the re-
interpretation of development. It not only contains a critique of ‘big government’ (cf. du Gay,
1997; 2003) but also, and more fundamentally, suggests a solution to the problems posed by
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‘globalization’ by proposing a new set of ideals and principles for conceiving of and acting upon
organizational and personal conduct. The notion of enterprise thus provides the ultimate means to
control or, more precisely, govern Third World actors not through overt force but through their
own volition (du Gay, 1996). Essentially, the idea of entrepreneurship and enterprise has for the
most part been conceptualized and implemented in the context of microcredit programs which are
seen as a fertile means for governing (Third) world affairs and for ‘structuring relationships with
the poor’ (van Pischke et al., 1993, p. 5). Moreover, what is revealed by this business approach to
poverty is that entrepreneurship endorses a particular social identity for the indigenous people.
Whereas the notion of ‘entrepreneurship’ construes the indigenous people as self-maximizing
entrepreneurs, Ranking (2001) mentioned that the discourse of entrepreneurship has somewhat
become the new dogma of contemporary development endeavors. To illustrate Ranking’s
proposition: in a UN report entitled ‘Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for
the Poor’ (March 1, 2004), Secretary-General Kofi Annan
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promoted entrepreneurship as a
means for developing the private sector in developing nations, claiming that economic growth
must be seen as the key for southern national economies. As is the case with the GSB initiative
(Growing Sustainable Business) created by the UNDP, the report reveals that the idea of
entrepreneurship is premised on the assumption that private sector initiatives – by enabling
concrete business investments and linkages – bring market driven solutions to the sphere of
poverty alleviation. Arguably, one could claim that history repeats itself (cf. our above argument
on the structural adjustment policies). What is more important in the present context, however, is
to take good note of the argument that entrepreneurial initiatives by private individuals,
corporations and communities are the right means for alleviating poverty by means of economic
growth, job creation and by bringing cheaper products and services to the market. This argument
reveals the dream-like hopes that are currently attached to entrepreneurship in both academic and
political discourse. The logic that entrepreneurship represents the single best, not to say only, way
to improve and better the world is very much reminiscent of the narrow or at least over-optimistic
view propounded in scientific (social) entrepreneurship literature (e.g. Jones & Keogh, 2006). cf.
also Chapter 2). The pervasiveness of entrepreneurship discourse is indeed striking and it seems
tenable to follow Rankin’s (2001) suggestion that a ‘consensus has recently emerged among
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Annan’s speech was related with the UNDP’s (United Nations Development Programme) Commission on the
Private Sector and Development.
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scholars and practitioners of development that microcredit – in the form of small loans for the
purposes of promoting small-scale enterprise – can provide a veritable panacea of poverty world-
wide’ (p. 18). If looked at from the perspective of private donors and the business sector, the
persuasiveness of the entrepreneurship dogma, following Fernando (1997), quite clearly derives
from the assumption that microcredit initiatives lead to a ‘win-win’-approach of development
where investors gain profits and the poor gain access to resources that allow them to assert
themselves in the market. Yet, there is also a backside to this approach to poverty alleviation.
Microcredit programs, in promoting entrepreneurial subjectivity over other forms of being,
appear to depoliticize poverty through an individualistic approach to its alleviation (Brigg, 2001).
In light of the complexity of the liberal and neo-liberal signification of development, it appears
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish whether Ranking’s (2001) claim that micro-
enterprises have become the consensual model for poverty alleviation applies to the entire
development dispositif or if the avowed consensus relates only to policy statements from such
organizations as the UN (cf. above) or the World Bank. Since this is an important issue, I will try
to shed some light on the interrelation between development discourse and development NGOs,
notably addressing the question if and how the discourse of entrepreneurship has been received
by the (northern) development NGO community.
Non-Governmental Organizations and Development
Calling to mind that the institutional focus of the following discursive investigation will be
on northern or, more precisely, Swiss NGOs, it is important to ask ‘what is the standing and
status of development NGOs’ in the broader project of development?’ In this context it is
important to recall that development discourse is promoted, to use Ferguson’s (1990) phrase,
by a ‘machine’ which is global in its reach and which consists of ‘departments and
bureaucracies in colonial and post-colonial states throughout the world, western aid agencies,
multilateral organizations, the sprawling global network of NGOs, experts and private
consultants, private sector organizations such as banks and companies … and the plethora of
development studies and programmes in institutes of learning worldwide’ (Crush, 1995, p.
6). However, whereas the idea of development was prospering right from the start of post-
WWII politics, it was only at some stage during the1980s that development NGOs gained
global momentum (Rahnema, 1992). The missionary organizations and war charities
established after the demise of colonial rule were gradually transformed into development
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NGOs (cf. Manji & O’Coill, 2002). Yet, their status remained rather marginal, since it was
still generally accepted that development was primarily (and often exclusively) the duty of
the nation state. Despite NGOs’ early allegiance to the idea of development, it was suggested
by organizations such as the UN and the World Bank that development was primarily the
task of the state. As a consequence, NGOs were only able to carry out projects in those
peripheral areas the state was disinclined to reach. The broad acceptance of development
NGOs, as Manji and O’Coill (2002) illustrate, was not achieved before the rise of the neo-
liberal project (as expressed through structural adjustment policies in the South and promoted
in the North in the Reagan and Thatcher era; cf. above) in conjunction with the oil crises of
the 1970s. That is, whereas the oil crises resulted in the creation of a finance capital glut, it
was the accompanied global recession which led to a situation in which developing countries
were called upon to take loans for their own development. Furthermore, it was through the
introduction of neo-liberal discourse – premised upon the idea of a minimalist state and a de-
regulated market – that people accepted that services previously provided by the state could
be more effectively dealt with by private and non-governmental organizations. One of the
most notable outcomes of this shift was that NGOs were at once conceived of as
indispensable substitutes of the state (Kajese, 1987). As Murphy (2000) rightly observed, the
withdrawal of the state from its role as the promoter and protector of development was
accompanied by a parallel reallocation of responsibility in the direction of the NGO sector.
This restructuring led to an unprecedented distribution of funds to NGOs which is evident by
the fact that in the early 1970s less than 2% of NGOs’ income came from official donors,
whereas the figure by the mid-1990s had risen up to 30% (Manji & O’Coill, 2002), or by the
fact that, as revealed in a recent World Bank (2001) report, from 1970 to 1985 total
development disbursed by international NGOs increased ten-fold. In concrete numbers, it has
been estimated that in 1992 international NGOs channeled over 7.6 billion USD of aid to
developing countries whereby it is assumed that over 15 percent of total overseas
development aid was carried out by NGOs’. Given the literal explosion of state-
commissioned development funding, it is hardly surprising that development NGOs in
western countries virtually mushroomed and that, notwithstanding the notoriously
incomplete statistics, there are as today more than 5000 international NGOs working in the
field of development (Martens, 2003). McMichael (1996) thus contended that the
reorientation of development in the 1970s and the rapid growth of the NGO sector
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constituted a shift from conceiving of development as a nationally (i.e. state-) managed to a
globally managed project. Along the same lines Watts (1995), mentioned that the
‘fascination with non-governmental organizations’ provided an opportunity to design new
configurations of state, markets and civil organizations, ‘unencumbered by outmoded or
ideological notions of central planning’ (p. 58).
It is undeniably important to comprehend that governments increasingly co-opted NGOs
to a repackaged program of development. In my assessment, it is even more important to
highlight the promises, not to say dreams, which were attached to that very process and
particularly how these expectations influenced the status and legitimacy of development NGOs. It
must be noted that the neo-liberal dogma of the 1980s influenced the status and legitimacy of
development NGOs through two distinct but interrelated assumptions: first, that NGOs were
quicker, more flexible and more efficient in dealing with calamities in the Third World and,
second, that NGOs were better able to address the demands of developing populations and to
implement genuinely participatory approaches. Regarding the former assumption Welch (2000),
for instance, suggested that NGOs ‘are quicker than governments to respond to new demands and
opportunities’ and ‘when adequately funded, can outperform government in the delivery of many
public services … and are better than governments at dealing with problems that grow slowly and
effect society through the cumulative effect on individuals’ (p. 626). Essentially, what is
conspicuous here is that the rise of development NGOs coincided with the problematization of
development from within and outside the community. This is, however, not particularly
surprising, since this coincidence merely shows how development NGOs emerged out of a state
of interregnum (Hardt & Negri, 2004) during the 1980s as the ostensible redeemers or, following
Cross (1997), the ‘cure-all wonder drug’ of the development deadlock. Regarding the expectation
that NGOs were better able than the state to stimulate participatory approaches, Rahnema (1992)
convincingly argued that NGOs were represented as ‘change agents’ and positioned as a
‘substitute for the professional expert hired by a development project’ and, therefore, as an
intermediary that was thought of replacing ‘the alien authority of the outsider with a ‘co-actor’
whose role was to intervene, primarily, as a catalyst in an endogenous process of self-
regeneration’ (p. 123). To put it bluntly, NGOs were chiefly seen as being more just than state
authorities, not least because it was assumed that they were operating without any claims to
domination. Development NGOs, so it seems, were thus given a special status ‘on the ground
that, being non-governmental organizations, they could avoid many of the pitfalls of development
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projects implemented by bureaucratized government agencies’ (Rahnema, 1992, p. 124). It was
thus believed, as Jennings (1995) claimed, that ‘NGOs have a comparative advantage over the
private sector and government in relation to sustainable poverty alleviation arising out of their
access to the poor, their relations with intended beneficiaries, and their organizational freedom’
(p. 26). With this in mind, it is clear that the positive valuation of NGOs did not primarily derive
from their proven record of success, but from the grandiose, not to say unrealistic, hope that they
would be able to solve the ideological conflicts and hierarchical inequalities of previous
development endeavors. Whereas the rise of development NGOs was inextricably related to neo-
liberal ideas of the free market, it is important to note that this shift also entailed the argument
that NGOs, since acting in the interests of the poor and not of the elites (Cross, 1997), were
directly opposed to neo-liberal orthodoxies as well as to the corruption and mismanagement of
the state. That is to say that ‘in their roles as advocates NGOs are seen to provide a
counterbalance to public sector power and an ‘independent’ voice to challenge policy issues’
(Mayhew, 2005, p. 728). As Mayhew’s statement clearly reveals, the avowed emancipatory
potential of NGOs became the key point for both their legitimacy and status, since it was assumed
that they were more trustworthy and ethical in their pursuit of development. Moreover,
development NGOs were construed as a political counter-force to both the state and the market
(Brigg, 2001), meaning that they were celebrated as ‘the modern panacea of development … that
is prescribed for any number of social ills: Poverty, disempowerment, unsustainability, … ,
authoritanism’ (Cross, 1997). Based on the above observations it is possible to make a tentative
estimate of when the global heydays of development NGOs started and when they came to an
end. Put highly reductively, we can say that development NGOs were predominantly praised for
their effective and efficient pursuit of development (Jennings, 1995) as well as for their ostensibly
noble ideas (i.e. protest and lobbying for the poor; cf. Scharnagel, 2002) between 1985 and 1995.
This means that the ‘golden age’ of development NGOs (Fugure, 2001) roughly took place
between McNamaras’ period as World Bank director (when the Bank turned from government-
led to NGO-led development) and sometime during the 1990s, when the World Bank and the
IMF exalted business and the private sector as the engines of (economic) development.
I therefore claim that the euphoria about development NGOs has at least partly abated
since the mid to late 1990s. To be sure, the reasons why development NGOs are no longer seen as
democratizers of development (Clark, 1991), sources of alternative development (Drabek, 1987)
or vehicles of popular participation (Farrington & Bebbington, 1993) are manifold. However, it is
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evident that the problematization of development NGOs was related to the argument that they
were neither effective in ameliorating poverty (Atack, 1999), nor especially accountable (and thus
responsible) to both Third World subjects and donor agencies. In consequence, to claim that
development NGOs were fundamentally challenged seems apposite in that history shows how ‘an
unproblematic field of experience became a problem, raised discussions and debate, incited new
reactions, and induced crises in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions’
(Foucault, 2001, p. 74; slightly modified). In line with this assertion, I first want to note that the
alleged failures of development NGOs have become ever more eminent in discussions both inside
and outside the NGO community. That is to say that the notion that development NGOs were less
bureaucratic than governmental bodies and thus quicker and more flexible in addressing urgent
calamities has gradually given way to the perspective that the initial enthusiasm about NGOs was
simply grounded on the disillusionment caused by governments’ own failure to meet donor
objectives (Green & Matthias, 1997). The initial status as ‘darlings’ of development aid (Fugure,
2001) has thus been replaced or at least supplemented by the view that NGOs are dilettantish
(Scharnagel, 2002). Following Edwards and Hulme (1995), a considerable part of the recent
literature has argued that NGO’s effectiveness as agents of development has been exaggerated or
merely assumed rather than demonstrated. In view of the alleged underperformance of
development NGOs, the question has been raised whether those organizations can legitimately
speak for the poor (e.g. Shikwati, 2002). This brings us to a second, interrelated issue which has
been at the forefront of recent debates: NGO accountability. It is important to mention that this
issue has been raised in recent years, at least partly due to NGO’s more prominent role in the
‘new policy agenda’ (Edwards & Hulme, 2002). Although the esteem for NGOs has not fully
disappeared, there is, according to Karajkov (2005), a rising number of critical voices that claim
that NGOs represent the ‘world’s largest unregulated industry … that is to say, they often operate
without minimum standards, are insufficiently transparent … and are accountable to no one but
themselves.’ Evidently then, the notion of accountability, despite its various meanings, has more
often than not been used to stress that NGOs must provide proof of their proper allocation of
money (vis-à-vis donors) and of the apt representation of their constituencies (i.e. partners or
beneficiaries in the Third World; cf. Edwards & Hulme, 1995). It is interesting in this connection
to see that the issue of accountability was advocated by both governments – with whom NGOs
were said to be in a relation characterized by a ‘mixture of conflict, competition, cooperation and
cooptation’ (Gordenker & Weiss, 1995, p. 551) – and the private sector where the objection was
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that NGOs were not as yet able to properly document their work (and hence their worth).
Accordingly, it is fair to say that ‘results-based management’, which largely rests on corporate
standards such as ‘inputs’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ (Murphy, 2000), has been literally
imposed on development NGOs by the pressure exerted by private and public founders. Given the
novel demands and claims development NGOs have been confronted with, it can reasonably be
stated that they have been subjected (or have subjected themselves) to a change of identity. As a
result of this change of identity, NGOs are no longer seen primarily as engines of social
transformation. Instead, they are now construed on the basis of such notions as specialization,
professionalism or result-orientation (Uphoff, 1996). In blunt terms, development NGOs, both in
the north and the south, today find themselves in a ‘crisis of legitimization’. This crises, however,
is not only due to the increased pressures to become accountable to their private and
governmental donors and the stagnating (or even decreasing) amount of financial support granted
(cf. below). For it is equally the case that conflicting values and incompatible assumptions about
the agenda of NGOs have led to a situation where these organizations were forced to adopt a
novel approach to their identity politics. This situation is aptly expressed by Holloway (1999)
who claimed that ‘(w)hile people inside the NGO world still think of themselves as occupying the
moral high ground, the reality now is that few people in the South outside the NGO world think
of NGOs like that’. It therefore seems safe to claim that both in terms of their reputation and
legitimacy the status of (development) NGOs has deteriorated considerably at least since the mid-
1990s. Whereas both the imperative of accountability as well as the related allegation that NGOs
were ineffective in alleviating global poverty have created the precondition for a more business-
like approach to development, this novel conceptualization of development simultaneously
reveals an intensified convergence between development NGOs, the state and the private sector.
In other words, while NGOs occupied, until the 1970s, a political and often tension-ridden space
between nation states (i.e. governments) on the one hand and the market (MwMakumbe, 1998) on
the other, there is evidence that NGOs today usually operate less in opposition than in partnership
with the business community (e.g. Cowe, 2004). Recognizing these developments, Brigg (2001)
proclaimed that it is no longer tenable to construe development NGOs as emancipatory actors,
working against the grain of neo-liberal orthodoxies. Instead, so it is claimed, development NGOs
have ‘fallen pray’ to neo-liberal orthodoxies and the globalization hyperbole (e.g. Crush, 1995;
Escobar, 1995). As a result of their subscription to such mainstream ideologies, it would be more
apt to portray NGOs as ostensibly ‘nonpolitical technologies’ which have come to trade on
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viewpoints which are compatible with both the market and the state. This critique thus holds that
development NGOs, during the rise of global neo-liberalism, became accustomed to the logic of
the market which is conceived of on the basis of the ‘worldwide interpenetration of markets
commonly referred to as ‘globalization’ (Ranking, 2001, p. 21). The reinterpretation of
development along the rationale of globalization and the market has, unsurprisingly, also come to
blur the traditional boundaries between the private sector
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and civil society.
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As Brugman
(2005) made clear in this context, NGOs and the private realm are in a phase of convergence
which manifests itself in that ‘NGOs and communities are now more enterprising, while business
is more socially innovative. This convergence opens opportunities for breakthroughs in
development practice that have evaded the international community for decades. If the trend
holds, it will have important implications for international development initiatives.’ Stated
differently, while NGOs were initially appointed to a sector which, by definition, was positioned
in opposition to the state, it is obvious that the present field of force has granted those
organizations a position which transcends conventional boundaries. Moreover, development
NGOs were initially appointment as the voice of the poor and as an indispensable force vis-à-vis
the state (Marschall, 2002). It therefore hardly needs to be mentioned that this signification has
been fundamentally scrutinized, not least as a consequence of the allegation that development
NGOs have adopted a language which is less ‘anti-state’ (in an ideological sense). At the same
time, it is conspicuous that this discourse is considerably more open to the philosophy of marked-
led globalization. It is thus no secret that development NGOs, as Petras (1997) asserted, have
come to foster the neo-liberal idea of responsibility for social problems and the importance of
private resources to solve these problems. In addition, Murphey (2000) mentioned that many
NGOs have ‘succumbed to the view that globalization in its present form is inevitable and
irreversible, and have accommodated to it by trading their essential values for technical
professionalism, often imported from the private sector’ (p. 330). After all, in the aftermath of the
heydays of NGOs (cf. above), when these organizations met with increasing prejudice as
politically flawed and utterly slow because of their participative and democratic procedures, neo-
liberal orthodoxies of the market and globalized production and consumption started to penetrate
the domain of NGOs. On the face of it, this transformation from a political counter-force against
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To be sure, the private sector has been the moving target of NGO criticism.
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NGOs are part of the broader spectrum of civil society organizations (e.g. trade unions, professional associations,
religious groups, the media, etc).
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(right-wing dominated) governments or the state (e.g. Sassen, 1998) to an efficient, powerful, and
business-sensitive agent complying with norms of accountability, project and financial
controlling, lean production and best (management) practices has not remained unnoticed by
critical minds. Unsurprisingly, critics concluded that development NGOs had become the
‘community face’ of neo-liberalism. As such, they were seen as intimately related with those ‘at
the top’, complementing their destructive work through local (Third World) projects (Petras,
1997). Murphy (2000) expressed these developments thus: ‘(r)ather than challenging the way the
world is, the tendency is to accept and adapt to – and therefore reinforce – the way the world is’
(p. 343). As echoed in both Petras’ and Murphy’s claim, development NGOs are said to have
accepted the seeming inevitability of globalization which, on the other hand, seems to have
engendered a certain loss of their cultural sensitivity and political autonomy. Development
NGOs, so it seems, are confronted with the double task of proving their market sensitivity
without simply dismissing their traditional ‘raison d’être’. That is to say that development NGOs,
who have evidently lost large parts of their authority to speak for the subaltern (Shikwati, 2002;
cf. also Spivak, 1988), have turned to business (Merchet, 2002) in order to both increase and
justify their effectiveness (both in terms of money raised and spent, and their various initiatives,
projects and campaigns). Essentially, what I am saying here is that development NGOs –
somehow as a result of their increased participation and cooperation with neo-liberal
governments and, more recently, with the private sector – are today judged according to a set of
parameters within which received standards of market-friendly practices and proper business
conduct are gaining more and more weight. Along the same lines, Desai and Imrie (1998)
suggested that in development NGOs a ‘new public management revolution’ and the rise of a
veritable ‘auditing culture’ is taking place. This insight has led them to the conclusion that this
new culture at the same time marks the expression of a ‘new managerialism’. It is evident that
these auditing practices, due to their primary (and at times exclusive) focus on procedural
efficiency and on cost cutting, entail a serious loss: they diminish the ability of development
NGO to carry out valuable work in the sphere of developing nations (e.g. Clarke et al., 2000;
O’Neill, 2002). Although the recent confusion and uncertainty with regard to the tasks and
responsibilities of development NGOs can undeniably be seen as an important issue, the point
which interests me here is that recent cuts in state-commissioned development expenditure have
literally driven NGOs to adopt entrepreneurial practices in order to open up new financial
channels.
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To gain a proper understanding of how development NGOs have come to incorporate
entrepreneurial values and practices, it first needs to be recalled that the legitimacy of these
organizations today is largely discussed in terms of financial parameters such as, for instance, the
ratio between fundraising (i.e. revenues) and administration (i.e. expenditure; cf. Slim, 2002).
These assessment criteria, which, in my assessment, have been established over the last 10 to 15
years, are inextricably linked with the contention that the biggest challenge of contemporary
development NGOs is their financial sustenance (e.g. Alymkulova & Seipulnik, 2005;
Rmasheuskaya, 2005). Brugmann (2005) convincingly argued that it was in the course of reduced
public spending that many NGOs were forced to engage in entrepreneurial efforts for subsistence.
Construing the shift towards entrepreneurship as the result of changed economic circumstances,
Davis (1997) further specified that many NGOs have come to adopt the entrepreneurial principles
of the private sector not simply out of mounting frustration with the current funding situation but
also out of a desire to avoid donor control. NGO leaders, according to Davis, now see themselves
as a new breed of ‘entrepreneurs’ who strive to create a larger, more sustainable, pool of
resources for NGO initiatives. Going beyond traditional donor-grantee relationships, NGO
leaders have created a new organizational ‘hybrid’ which is non-profit in purpose and for-profit
in approach (Dees, 1998; 1998b; cf. also Chapters 2 & 7). In line with this observation, it has
been suggested that these new NGO entrepreneurs have developed unique strategies for creating
sustainable funds by means of creative and sometimes lucrative ‘self-financing’ enterprises. Self-
financing activities thus encompass mission-related as well as non-related for-profit ventures both
of which, however, involve resource-generating activities that provide new financial sources for
development NGOs. In light of Brugmann’s (2005) contention that scarcer funds explained the
growth of the microcredit sector in South Asia, the agricultural cooperatives in Africa and the
solid waste micro-enterprises in Latin America, it becomes arguable that the rationality of
entrepreneurship is not only used by academic or political agents in their re-interpretations of
development (cf. above). Rather, such arguments are also deployed and reiterated in the realm of
development NGOs, that is, in the sphere of practice. For instance, Fazle Abed, the founder of
BRAC (probably the world’s largest development NGO, providing education, health services,
microcredit and livelihood creation programs for a significant part of the population of
Bangladesh) on the occasion of his resignation as director of BRAC expressed his conviction that
if ‘the next leadership continues in the same entrepreneurial fashion, the organization will survive
and flourish.’ Abed, while referring to BRAC’s entrepreneurial culture, went on to state that
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‘(t)he way we operate is very entrepreneurial, we question everything, we’re continually learning
to do things better. I hope that we will have the same culture in the organization when I am no
longer there’ (cf. http://www.allavida.org/alliance/mar05e.html). Similarly, Muhammad Yunus,
the founder of the Grameen Bank (a large-scale microcredit initiative founded in Bangladesh; cf.
Chapters 1 & 7) argued that development initiatives should concur with the logic of ‘social
business entrepreneurship’ (cf. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/Listofawards.html). To be
sure, Yunus, a professor in economics, has been critical of those economic theories which
proclaim that people contribute to society and the world in the best possible manner by simply
concentrating on securing maximum benefits for themselves: ‘(w)hen you get your maximum,
everybody else will get their maximum’ (cf. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/
socialbusinessentrepreneurs.htm). However, though arguing against the naïve ideal of an
unregulated market, Yunus nevertheless posited that the market is not only responsible for the
creation of social problems but equally a valuable source for leveraging social welfare. Yunus
thus said: ‘(i)t is time to move away from the narrow interpretation of capitalism and broaden the
concept of market by giving full recognition to SBEs [social business enterprises]. Once this is
done SBEs can flood the market and make the market work for social goals as efficiently as it
does for personal goals … Let’s get serious about social business entrepreneurs. They can
brighten up this gloomy world.’ What is reflected in Yunus’ praise of social business
entrepreneurs is that his vision is compatible with neo-liberal orthodoxies as discussed above.
Moreover, Yunus statement seems to rest on the somehow paradoxical assumption that the
(unregulated) market and capitalism at large are not only the cause of wide-scale poverty, global
inequality, etc. but simultaneously the means to solve them. To put it bluntly, there is no reason
to change the dominant economic order, since social problems are, following Yunus, perfectly
acceptable given the mechanisms of the market. Be that as it may, enunciations as those by Abed
and Yunus aptly illustrate that the development project has adopted a language game that gives
development NGOs a very different face. Moreover, the language game implicit in both of the
above accounts clearly shows that development NGOs are nowadays represented by means of a
terminology derived from the private sector. The point to be emphasized, then, is that it was not
that long ago that this logic worked as the precise opposite of the code of conduct of NGOs and
NPOs (non-profit organization). This observation thus makes it important to briefly elaborate on
the rhetorical function inherent in the new term of development (NGOs). To this end, I would like
to draw an analogy with du Gay’s (1997) eloquent treatise on ‘globalization discourse’ so as to
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argue that the current emphasis on entrepreneurship (and management at large) operates to revive
some of the enthusiasm which was lost as a result of the continued shortcomings of NGOs in
alleviating global poverty. That is to say that entrepreneurship effectively works as the new
‘hurray-word’ which has the noticeable function of redeeming the lost faith in development aid.
Having said this, we must not ignore that there might be a certain irony in re-envisaging
development NGOs through the repertoire of entrepreneurship and/or managerialism, since this
shift of emphasis might simply try to conceal the links with an abortive past (cf. Cook, 2003).
This immediately brings us back to the subsequent investigation of NGO practitioners by means
of which I want to inquire, among other things, how, that is, on behalf of what interpretive
repertoires (i.e. argumentative threads) people who are actively involved in development aid
initiatives perceive or, more precisely, construe their everyday experiences. While the general
aim of the following investigation is to gain a deeper sense of the meanings conveyed by
practicing development aid actors, the concrete question to be asked, then, is if and to what extent
the lexis of the private sector has come to penetrate the everyday life of NGO practitioners. In
consequence, it will become important to investigate whether the accounts presented by
development aid practitioners rest on a homogeneous and hence univocal set of rationalities or
whether a sense of opposition and struggle is at the heart of their discourse. In other words, we
will have to establish whether a virtual battle between competing language games (i.e. economic
versus non-economic ‘truths’) that attests to the constant coming and dying of meaning (Bakhtin,
1981) can be detected in their utterances. In the next section, I will thus specify the objectives as
well as the research questions addressed through the ensuing discourse analysis which will be
followed by a discussion of the analysis’ methodological procedure and the paradigmatic and
analytic premises that inform the investigation as a whole.
Objectives
As discussed above, there seems to be a problem inherent in postcolonial writing: some scholars
have claimed that development discourse operates hegemonically thus making it almost
impossible to conceive of development outside the western mode of (economic) thinking and
talking. To be sure, hegemony is different from any form of strict determinism since it does not
presume that discourse is attached to a sort of power that seeks to stabilize a particular view of
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reality (Berger & Luckman, 1966; cf. also Chapter 6). Yet, the idea of hegemony, the way it is
deployed in the aforementioned investigations, refers to the limiting effects of discourse, thereby
suggesting that Euro-American ideologies are pervasive in that they exert a significant influence
on people’s everyday knowledge. Although I have tried to put the hegemonic view of discourse
into perspective by showing that it would be exaggerated to claim, first, that development simply
pursues the colonial trajectory of western imperialism by novel means and, second, that the
discourse of development is actively engineered by identifiable western organizations, I
nevertheless want to point out that neo-liberal orthodoxies today undeniably interfere with
development aid both at the macro and the micro-level. This means that there is a certain
consensus regarding the importance of market-based activities which is supported, for instance,
by strategic or political development narratives. This consensus is, furthermore, evident from the
way development is currently carried out in practice by development NGOs. If we thus
acknowledge that the images of development and development NGOs have changed dramatically
over the last couple of decades, it is worth reiterating that the boundary which separates sound
from improper development (NGOs) today is increasingly determined by its closeness or distance
from the market logic. As shown above, the realm of development is at pains to overcome the
identified failures of previous endeavors and, more fundamentally, to re-establish (part of) its
public acceptance and political legitimacy. This explains why I will approach the narratives of
NGO practitioners as linguistic performances through which they rhetorically try to legitimate
their everyday endeavors. Thus construing the narratives of practitioners narratives as both the
expression and re-performance of distinct identity politics, I am particularly interested in
establishing how development aid, as well as its inherent subjects and objects, are discursively
constructed in the context of a highly contested and ambivalent terrain of knowledge. In light of
my previous proposition that development consists of a variegated set of epistemes (some being
arguably more pervasive and dominant than others), this raises the further question whether this
ambivalence reverberates in the narratives of NGO practitioners or whether they manage (or opt)
to put forward a more harmonious account of development. Stated differently, my analysis aims
at investigating if the interpretive repertoires practitioners deploy for constructing their
development narratives are characterized by a more or less singular logic, i.e. homology,
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or if,
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Importantly, the notion of ‘homology’ is not meant to convey an image of discourse as a closed system of meaning
(cf. also Chapter 6). Rather, homology is used here to signify the sort of situation in which discourse proceeds
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conversely, their talk reveals a certain amount of argumentative difference, tension and
incommensurability, i.e. heterology. Since to my knowledge, no comparable investigations
exist,
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it becomes clear that my discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk will proceed in an
exploratory and inductive fashion. My investigation will, then, venture to gain a broad sense of
the variability (and limits) contained in narratives about development aid. The question what
discourses are deemed apposite – given the moral, political and pragmatic circumstances of the
various conversations
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– for delineating development thus raises wider issues regarding the
canonical and hence consensually accepted ways of thinking and talking about the subject matter.
Though this inquiry proceeds in an inductive manner as explained above, one can
nevertheless formulate propositions regarding the sort of discourses that are most likely
encountered. That is, if we concur with the available literature that the field of development has
experienced a remarkable influx of business and management ‘truths’, it seems safe to claim that
those ‘truths’ will have a bearing on practitioners’ constructions of development. In concrete
terms, it appears that the unclouded celebration of the development project became obsolete a
long time ago and that development has increasingly been subjected to neo-liberal orthodoxies
(Storey, 2000) as a result of which it now embraces the ostensible merits of ‘technical
professionalism’ (Murphy, 2000), ‘management’ (Cook, 2004) and ‘business-like approaches’
(Dart, 2004). It would therefore hardly be surprising if practitioners’ narratives would reveal a
certain propensity to portray development in terms of management and business, as an essential
part of the globalization hyperbole (du Gay, 2003), or simply as a reiteration of neo-liberal theory
(Storey, 2000). By implication, if there was to be a homology in practitioners’ narratives this
would, in my opinion, most likely be expressed through one or the other of the above truth
regimes. To be sure, one cannot say with confidence what particular terms the lexis of
practitioners will comprise and what forms of ‘development realities’ will be created as a result of
those terms. In any case, I want to point out that there is a somewhat more general objective
without tension and contestation, that is, where one finds a certain consensus regarding the particularities of
development.
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Essentially, the notion of ‘comparable investigations’ is construed here in a rather narrow sense, meaning that I am
alluding to potential investigations conducted in the context of Swiss development NGOs.
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The specific interview situation (i.e. the dyad between a particular practitioner and me as the representative of an
internationally renowned business school) must necessarily be regarded as having an inhibiting influence on certain
ways of talking about development and, conversely, an enabling effect on others. That is, the particular expectations,
demands, aims, etc. carried into a concrete conversation invariably affect the construction of people’s narratives (cf.
below).
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behind my discursive investigation of NGO practitioners. That is, my investigation chiefly seeks
to find an answer to the question whether development is mainly construed as an economic and/or
managerial undertaking (as follows from the previous arguments) or whether practitioners’
accounts also leave some space for social significations of the subject matter. The operation of
managerial discourse enlarges the scope of the ‘economic reality’ of development. This
enlargement would entail, for instance, the redefinition of NGO practitioners as ‘economic man’
(cf. Gordon, 1987). It therefore seems both apt and urgent to determine whether practitioners go
about re-imagining development as a form of economic action and, most fundamentally, to
estimate the relative pervasiveness of economic over social narrations (or vice versa). Rejecting a
deterministic view of discourse
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as implied, for instance, in Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000)
notion of ‘muscular discourse’ (cf. Chapter 6), it becomes clear that issues of ‘appropriation’ and
‘choice’ (e.g. Smith, 1988) will be pivotal in the ensuing discourse analysis. Since it is not
assumed that discourse is something which people consciously invoke and mechanically deploy
in their talk, it follows that practitioners are able to either (creatively) re-employ or reject
managerial and business discourses (cf. Brinkerhoff & Coston, 1999). Whereas the issue of
resistance, or, more precisely, the interrelation between power and knowledge on the one hand
and individual self-determination on the other will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 6, it
shall suffice here to emphasize that mega-discourses (i.e. grand narratives) of development are
not passively received by NGO practitioners. Instead, these discourses must be conceived of as
particularly stabilized forms of knowledge and hence as the ‘archetypes’ of local conversations
(Davies & Harré, 1990). It must remain clear, however, such discourses are re-appropriated (i.e.
endowed with novel meaning) in the course of social action, i.e. in the concrete conversations
between practitioners and interviewers. With this in mind, the question to be addressed, then, is
how practitioners creatively interweave, re-inscribe and reject the different ‘development truths’
to accommodate the demands of the interview situation.
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A deterministic view would imply, among other things, that discourses are seen as a strait-jacket (Savolainen,
2004) that compels agents to speak in certain ways in all situations.
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Research Questions
At the most abstract level, the discursive investigation is grounded on the assumption that the
broader problematization (i.e. crisis of legitimization) of both development aid and development
NGOs over the last two decades will have a more or less direct effect on the conceptualizations of
local NGO practitioners. Furthermore, given that development aid is a highly political or
politicized undertaking and that the meaning of development is always contingent on lived (i.e.
everyday) ideologies (Billig et al., 1988; Billig, 1993), it becomes conceivable that the discursive
construction of development is in no way an unproblematic venture. Instead, it must be seen as an
intricate endeavor which presupposes that practitioners take into account, first, that certain
rationalities are more pervasive or legitimate than others and, second, that certain rationalities are
either obsolete or not persuasive in the context of a specific interview episode. Hence, trying to
gain a clearer picture of how practitioners make use and engage with their linguistic heritage and
of how some regimes of truth are deemed more acceptable (as well as available) than others for
rendering intelligible contemporary development aid, it becomes clear that the analysis is
primarily interested in shedding light upon both the interpretive repertoires and the ideological
dilemmas being revealed in the narration of development. By implication, the narratives of
practitioners will be approached as rhetorical acts on the basis of which they legitimate their
everyday practices or development aid at large. In this context, the issue of rhetoric largely
concurs with the question of how practitioners deal with dominant development orthodoxies, that
is, how they either accept or repudiate certain rationalities with the ultimate objective of
establishing particular representation of development aid. Our interest in practitioners’ rhetoric
goes further than that, since it will also be asked how the respective discourses ‘feed back’ into
people’s subject positions (i.e. identities). As the issue of practitioners’ identity will be dealt with
further down, I first want to become more concrete about the analytic focus of the ensuing
discourse analysis. Accordingly, we can note that the investigation will put particular emphasis
upon the question if and to what extent practitioners ground their narratives on the orthodoxies of
the ‘market’, on ‘development economics’, and on ‘managerialism’, etc. (Murphy, 2000) as is the
case, for instance, with the adjustment policies of the World Bank (Storey, 2000). I will therefore
try to make an estimate of the relative prevalence of managerial and economic discourse and in
particular of the local pervasiveness of entrepreneurship discourse. That is to say I will provide an
answer to the question if, as some have claimed (e.g. Desai & Imrie, 1998; Gellert, 2005),
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economic and/or managerial rationalities occupy a (quasi-) hegemonic position within
development talk. While the issue of hegemony indicates the general direction of the discursive
investigation, I am also interested to bring to light the more marginal narratives of practitioners so
as to both illuminate the variety engendered through the construction of development and to
render visible the different subject positions or discursive identities made possible by the various
truth regimes. Importantly then, the discursive investigation has a double focus since it not
merely asks how particular truth regimes lead to particular subject positions on the part of
practitioners, but also how those same discursive events form the identities of the other of
development, that is, of help recipients and indigenous people at large.
Method
Language as Discourse
The above sections investigated the history of development from a discursive perspective so as to
highlight some of the more objectified ‘truths’ which gave both direction and significance to a
global project that was reinforced by a large (and ever increasing) collective of geographically
dispersed actors. In contrast, the present method section focuses on the concept of ‘discourse’.
The aim here is to adumbrate the use of discourse in the context of the subsequent investigation
of practitioners’ talk and to delineate how discourse will be approached on a methodological
level. As a first step towards this end, we can claim that the previous discussion of development
discourse has been significant to the extent that it has rendered visible (part of) the cultural
heritage and everyday ideologies (Billig, 1993) which are apparently available to practitioners for
their identity performances and for their accounts of development. In line with this assertion,
discourse is not to be seen as a set of pre-existing, static linguistic devices but rather as a ‘form of
social practice’ (Fairclough 1989, p. 20). The French distinction between ‘la langue’ (which
defines language as a closed system of rules) and ‘la parole’ (i.e. spoken language), initially
introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, is helpful to make the point that discourse is not
determined by a system of conventions (i.e. langue) which precedes meaning and which is
therefore independent of human talk or interaction. To be sure, language becomes
psychologically and socially relevant only through its specific use (i.e. parole), that is, through
discourse. In consequence, this later view takes into account, first, that language cannot be
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defined through a code of a-contextual, that is, ‘transformational grammars’ (Chomsky, 1955)
and, second, that language is to be construed in terms of action rather than representation
(Wittgenstein, 1953). This in turn implies that meaning does not reside in particular words,
respectively in a particular relation between a signifier and a signified, but in the way a word is
used in a concrete speech situation. What I am claiming here is that language is to be reflected
from an ‘immanentist’ view (Davies & Harré, 1990) which emphasizes that if one wants to
analyze meaning one has to study the use of language in concrete conversations. Moreover,
meaning needs to be investigated by reference to whatever has happened (i.e. been said) before
and by reference to the personal and cultural resources speakers draw upon to construct
‘presences’ (Law, 2004). If we therefore accept that language is more often than not perceived,
both in scientific inquiries and in an everyday context, as chiefly a communicative device whose
function is to represent an ostensibly existing reality,
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it becomes clear that the distinction
between discourse and the linguistic (Saussure, 1959) or cognitivist understanding of language
(cf. Edwards, 1997) is everything but trivial. Construing and studying language as discourse, that
is, as social practice, renders untenable the assumption that language can provide a precise
account of social reality (Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Gergen & Gergen, 2000; cf. also Chapter 4) or
that it can serve as a path to people’s internal states, implicit intentions and attitudes (e.g.
Edwards, 2006). As Potter and Wetherell (1987) remind us in that context, the basic tenet of
discourse (analysis) is that one is supposed to approach language or social texts in their own right
and not as a secondary route to things ‘beyond the text’. I would like to add, then, that the notion
of ‘discourse’ provides ample scope for the recognition that all language is relational (Hosking &
Bouwen, 2000) and, by implication, that all meaning is, though to various degrees, local-
historical and local-cultural (van der Haar & Hosking, 2004). Therefore, if we conceive of
language as discourse, this still requires us to become explicit as to what level of abstraction I
will study social practice in the following discourse analysis. Thinking, for instance, about Austin
(1962) and Searle’s (1969) investigation of ‘speech acts’ – in which they have come to highlight
the functional aspect of language use (i.e. how people use language to establish accusations,
blames, orders, etc.) – it is evident that the notion of ‘social practice’ takes on a meaning different
from that engendered by the Foucauldian understanding of discourse we have briefly alluded to
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Postmodern theorists have pointed out that the communicative/representational function of language is so
canonical that it is all too easily taken for granted (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).
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before. In consequence, the following section delineates the social psychological tradition of
discourse analysis which I will invoke in my investigation as well as the theoretical and
methodological implications derived therefrom.
Discourse Analysis
It hardly needs mention that the term ‘discourse analysis’ has become an umbrella term which
comprises a heterogeneous collective of theoretical and empirical works (Bishop & Yardley,
2004). For instance, discourse analysis today is related with such diverse traditions as, for
instance, speech act theory as delineated by Austin and Searle, sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumpertz &
Hymes, 1972), social psychology (e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987), the sociology of science (e.g.
Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984), poststructuralism (e.g. Foucault, 1973), etc. (for a broader overview cf.
van Dijk, 1985). Although this list could be extended almost ad infinitum, I would instead like to
clarify the specific tradition on which the present investigation is based. It is noteworthy, first of
all, that the following analysis is largely inspired by psychological discourse analysis as
developed in the mid-1980s by Potter and Wetherell (1987; cf. also Potter, Stringer & Wetherell,
1984; Wetherell, 1986; Potter, 1987). Whereas Potter and Wetherell talked of an ‘interpretive
repertoire’ instead of ‘discourse’, this difference in wording was intended since it made possible a
separation from Foucauldian-inspired analysis which studied discourse as a regulated system (or
set of statements) that was relatively independent from specific, local conversations (e.g. Parker,
1989). In attempting to avert the reification of discourse (cf. Chapter 4), Potter and Wetherell and
their colleagues have come to define interpretive repertoires as a broadly discernable cluster of
terms, descriptions, commonplaces and figures of speech (e.g. metaphors) which are often
clustered around vivid images. In Edley’s (2001) terms: interpretive repertoires are ‘the building
blocks of conversation, a range of linguistic resources that can be drawn upon and utilized in the
course of everyday social interaction’ (p. 198). Similarly, Edley and Wetherell (1997) have
pointed out that ‘interpretive repertoires’ refer to people’s habitual, culturally shaped lines of
arguing, which thus comprises a set of recurring themes, commonplaces and tropes. Potter et al.
(2002) have added to this that the ‘idea of a repertoire, analogous to the repertoire of moves of a
ballet dancer, say, encompasses the way that different moves (terms, tropes, metaphors) from the
repertoire may be invoked according to their suitability to an immediate context’ (p. 169). It is
evident from these definitions that there is a certain tendency to construe people as active,
purposeful users of discourse. However, the theory of interpretive repertoires explicitly states that
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people are not fully autonomous in their choice of language. That is, departing from the
assumption that such a thing as a ‘private language’ does not exist (Wittgenstein, 1953), the
theory of interpretive repertoires holds that when people talk they do not create their own
language, but instead use terms that are made available by the cultural, historical and ideological
circumstances (i.e. context) of their conversation or talk. The theory of interpretive repertoires
acknowledges that it would be naïve to assume that the options inherent to language are equal,
since it is clearly the case that some constructions or formulations are more readily available (and
thus more likely to be used) than others. It seems therefore all the more important to recall that
the analysis of interpretive repertoires points at Wittgenstein’s claim that language is to be seen as
a toolbox (cf. Potter, 2001) and, more fundamentally, that the meaning of a word is invariably
contingent on ‘its use in the language’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, # 43). Although the theory of
interpretive repertoires holds that language needs to be studied in concrete conversations, it must
additionally be borne in mind that it also takes into account the more macro-level discourses, that
is, context (cf. above). Potter, Wetherell and others claimed that the analysis of interpretive
repertoires pays heed to both the macro (i.e. the institutional level of signification) and the micro
level of discourse (i.e. the social exchange in concrete local conversation). In consequence, this
double focus cannot possibly be overestimated, especially if one takes into account that most
analytic schemes have an exclusive focus on either the micro or the macro aspect of discourse. It
follows, then, that the analysis of interpretive repertoires blurs the somewhat artificial distinction
between micro and macro-level discourse analysis. That is the scheme proposed by Potter,
Wetherell and colleagues partially runs counter to Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000) assertion that
the two analytic levels cannot be investigated within a single empirical study. Moreover,
Wetherell (1998) and Billig (1999), on the occasion of a very intensive confrontation with
Schegloff (1999) on the issue of critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis,
convincingly argued that if one puts an exclusive emphasis on conversation, i.e. on language in
use, one immediately runs the risk of marginalizing or simply ignoring the broader social and
cultural textures which enable the given conversation in the first place (cf. especially Wetherell,
1998). Hence, both Billig and Wetherell, though concurring with large parts of Schegloff’s work,
pointed out that Schegloff’s conversation analysis exhibits a tendency to neglect the broader
anchorage of the local argumentative threads. It was Billig who claimed that the (exclusive)
interest in detail of conversation analysis works at the expense of the broader and at times more
important social and political issues that need attention. Hence, instead of choosing a single
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analytic perspective (i.e. micro, meso, macro), the approach taken by Potter and Wetherell (1987)
explicitly comprises the local use and appropriation of language in conversations and texts as
well as its societal nexus. To be sure, their analysis of interpretive repertoires at times comes
close to the detailed and fine-grained accounts one knows from conversation analysis. However,
Potter and Wetherell’s analytic scheme nevertheless stands in opposition to conversation analysis,
since it departs from the assumption that speech always takes place within certain cultural
boundaries and that as such it can only be understood in the context of the relevant language
game. It is revealing in this context to turn to Edley (2001) who defined interpretive repertoires as
‘repositories of meaning’ which makes it even clearer that repertoires (at least to a certain degree)
transcend concrete conversations. After all, the notion of ‘interpretive repertoires’ delineates a
hybrid analytic schema which contains elements of both conversation analysis, with its distinct
emphasis of fine-grained interaction sequences (Schegloff, 2000), and (critical) discourse analysis
(e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Fairclough, 1993). With this in mind, I would like to point out
that my own discursive investigation will follow Edley and Wetherell’s (1997) plea to study
discourse in ways that ‘draw more eclectically on both styles of work and which study the way in
which people are simultaneously the master and slave of discourse’ (p. 206). In my view, the
main consequence of such ‘boundary-crossing’ is that it simultaneously enables one to gain a
sense of the conversation’s societal context – i.e. the more or less stabilized forms of inter-texts
or discourses which operate as the textual background for interpreting practitioners’ talk – and a
sense of how these are deployed and intersect in NGO practitioner’s interpretive activities (Edley
& Wetherell, 1997; 1999) within concrete speech situations. I will, then, use the analytic frame
provided by Potter, Wetherell et al. and in particular the notion of ‘interpretive repertoire’ to
explore the configurations of meaning which unfold or become possible at the interface between
the utterances of an individual and their broader discourse.
Subject Positions and Ideological Dilemmas
As shown in the above analysis discourse has a constitutive (and not just a communicative or
representational) function. In addition, it needs to be recalled that discourse does not simply
enable the construction (different versions) of development but also provides the linguistic means
for people’s identity performances. Hence, identity, if looked at from a discursive perspective, is
chiefly to be construed as the discursively created space of subjectivity. If Derrida’s (1999)
contention that ‘(t)here can be no acontextual definition of human being’ (p. 82) is accepted, it
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follows that the issue of identity is less about stability and essence but about difference and
becoming. The way I conceive it in the context of my analysis, identity is about the production of
subject positions in the course of language use. Identity, then, becomes a power-effect (Foucault,
1972) as well as a truth effect, which further implies that identity is not fixed in relation to a ‘pre-
existent essential centre’ (Bahnisch, 2002, p. 16) but contestable and constructed and
reconstructed through discourses. By implication, people do not enter discourse as pre-formed
entities. Instead, they are constituted as subjects through discourse. Whatever a person can think
of herself or himself (and others) as a subject will always be in terms of language provided to him
or her by a specific culture. Discourse thus becomes ‘the condition of possibility of constituting
unity and totality at the same time that it provides their essential limits’ (Mouffe, 1996, p. 254).
This means that subject positions are the ‘identities’ that a specific repertoire offers or ‘persuades
the speaker to accept’ (Tuominen, 2004). It is abundantly clear then that the notion of ‘subject
position’ stands in opposition to the idea of personhood and most notably to the idea of the
atomistic individual as pursued through large parts of psychological research (Potter, 1996). The
concept of ‘subject position’ thus concurs with Nietzsche’s (1986) assertion that everything one
(or, more precisely, the philosopher) says ‘about man is basically no more than a statement about
man within a very limited time span’ (p. 14; emphasis in original). Moreover, the concept ‘subject
position’ is helpful to the extent that it accounts for the discontinuity in personal identity. That is,
it explains that one and the same biological person can, as a result of his or her narrations, take on
a multiplicity of selves (Harré, 1982). A further tenet I would like to pinpoint here is that the
notion of ‘subject position’ implies that once a person has taken on a given subject position he or
she will inevitably perceive or, more fundamentally, understand the world from the vantage point
of that position (Davies & Harré, 1990). It follows from this that my analysis of NGO
practitioners’ talk will inquire, first, how people, through the use of interpretive repertoires, take
up particular subject positions and, second, how the practitioners change their positions over the
course of the interviews. As briefly mentioned above, besides asking what subject positions are
available to practitioners I will also assess to what extent practitioners’ talk has a bearing on the
position of the indigenous other, i.e. those addressed by development aid.
If we acknowledge that discourse, conceived of as social practice, can create incompatible
versions of development (and, by implication, incompatible subject positions for the self and the
other), this makes it necessary to investigate not only where and why tensions occur within or
between discourses but also how NGO practitioners deal with their various dilemmas. In
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consequence, Billig et al’s (1988) concept of ‘ideological dilemmas’ represents a promising
starting point for reflecting on how the simultaneous existence of conflicting interpretive
repertoires causes a situation in which practitioners are called upon to account for the various
tensions. In concrete terms, the following discourse analysis endeavors to highlight the
ideological dilemmas revealed in the self-narrations of practitioners and constructions of
development and, most fundamentally, to shed light on how practitioners deal with these
dilemmas. Having said this, I will now illuminate the concrete analytical focus of my discourse
analysis as well as its basic methodical principles.
Analytical Emphasis and Procedure
The following analysis of interpretative repertoires will thus be based upon two generic
principles. First, I will endeavor to extract recurring argumentative threads from practitioners’
talk in order to ‘bundle’ them into abstracted patters, that is, interpretive repertoires. The
abstraction of interpretative repertoire from the interview material is thus grounded on the
principle of exhaustion, meaning that the interview transcripts will be subjected to iterative
readings which will be continued up to the point where there is no further indication of alternative
repertoires. To work exhaustively is thus not to suggest that the three repertoires I will discuss
below cover the entire range of linguistic utterances of the thirty interviews. Rather, the analysis
of interpretive repertoires is exhaustive in the sense that I will disrupt my inquiry once it has
become unlikely to obtain additional information or, more precisely, different argumentative
threads in relation to the research question at hand: ‘how is development constructed through
practitioners’ talk?’
Whereas the first principle, abstraction, is chiefly aimed at identifying the sameness within
and the differences between the respective repertoires, the second principle, i.e. variation, seeks to
emphasize the differences within the particular repertoires (Potter et al., 2002). Based on our
previous claim that interpretive repertoires are abstractions from social practice in context, we
can now specify that the principle of variation is mainly about inquiring how people alter their
talk in the context of the pragmatic demands of concrete speech situations. Stated differently,
focusing on variability means gaining an understanding of the different ways a particular
interpretive repertoire is deployed in social action. The principle of variation, then, is not about
the identification of contradictions in the arguments of practitioners (cf. Potter & Mulkay, 1985;
Wetherell & Potter, 1988). Rather, locating variation is an eminent task of discourse analysis,
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since it is by understanding the different ways in which interpretive repertoires are deployed that
one can make inferences about the functional orientation of language (use). More precisely, the
variation revealed in practitioners’ talk will be used or interpreted in a functional manner so as to
show how particular utterances fulfill particular social functions in a given conversational
episode. Hence, the investigation of variation will allow us to see how people’s constructions of
development as well as their identity performances change within one and the same interpretive
repertoire and to discuss how these shifts become intelligible out of the flow of the respective
conversation. The study of variation will thus enable us to show how practitioners adjust their
responses and accounts (of development) to the ‘desideratum’ of the conversational context.
I have said above that the analysis quite generally ventures to identify the use (or creation)
of interpretive repertoires in social practice (cf. Potter & Wetherell, 1990) and to define the
subject positions revealed in practitioners’ narratives. It must be added here that the analysis
comprises a second-order reflection. As mentioned before, I will extend the analysis beyond the
immediate interview situation (or, more precisely, beyond the transcribed interviews) so as to
discuss how practitioners’ accounts relate to the broader ‘macro-discourses’ (Alvesson &
Karreman, 2000) or ‘capital-D-discourses’ (Gee, 1990). Given that words and utterances acquire
meaning within specific contexts (cf. Chapter 5) or, following Billig (1987), carry an ideological
history, it seems reasonable to discuss not only practitioners’ concrete utterances and/or the
immediate context of the interviews but to also include the more institutionalized regimes of truth
which make signification possible in the first place. Essentially, the aim of this undertaking is,
first, to locate practitioners’ utterances with respect to their historical and cultural heritage (cf.
above) and, second, to reflect on the rationalities revealed in practitioners’ narratives in terms of
their wider ideological significance and pervasiveness.
The Interview as Performative Space
Taking a reflective stance towards the interviews I have conducted in the context of the present
investigation, it goes without saying that the specific interview situation between NGO
practitioners and me as the researcher of a renowned Swiss business school can hardly be
described as a neutral, that is, value-free encounter. Instead, it makes sense to construe these
particular encounters as performative spaces in which particular expectations, biases, stereotypes,
assumptions, etc. will guide or at least inform the crafting of practitioners’ narrative plots. In
view of our previous contention that discourse is largely about the institutionalized use of
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language (Davies & Harré, 1990), it immediately needs to be added that the particularities of the
interview situation, i.e. its dominant conventions, norms as well as implicit assumptions, will
inevitably limit what can reasonably be said. It follows, then, that we must conceive of
practitioners’ narratives as accounts of persuasion, i.e. a type of rhetoric (Billig, 1996), which is
directly addressed to the specific interview partner with the objective of engendering a particular
impression. Evidently then, we are called upon to address practitioners’ accounts of development
as distinct examples of legitimization by means of which they make sense of an infinitely
complex and contested social reality vis-à-vis and in cooperation with a concrete conversation
partner (Shotter, 1993).
Furthermore, I would like to proclaim, as conversation analysts have done before, that the
interviewer not only facilitate the emergence of narratives but also interrupts, inhibits, supports or
even suggests certain statements or answers. On the face of it, the interviewer, if looked at from
this vantage point, is not so much a neutral and objective bystander but a co-constructor
(Ganguly, 1992) of the respective account of development. Although I do not want to downplay
the influence of myself as interviewer in the co-determination of the narrative plot, my analysis of
interpretive repertoires will retain a primary focus on the utterances of the practitioners
interviewed, meaning that I will deliberately keep my own speech acts at the margins, so to
speak, and make them explicit only if this helps to gain a better understanding of the analysis at
large. As regards the concrete structure of the interviews, it can be noted that they were all semi-
structured, i.e. I initially only introduced the central theme of the interview (i.e. development).
During the course of the interview, I tried to keep practitioners’ narratives within limits, so to
speak, so as to ensure that the conversations would center on the actual research question.
Although the thirty interviews
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were informal in nature, taking from 30 minutes to nearly two
hours, I have used an interview ‘guide’ to define a relative limit regarding what could be dealt
with in the course of the conversations. In view of the fact that the focus of my investigation
would of necessity favor particular perspectives and stories over others, I nevertheless tried to
ensure as much variability and difference as possible by only interfering in practitioners’
narratives if they significantly deviated from my initial research interest. In concrete terms, I
opened the interviews with a brief overview of my thesis project, before asking interviewees to
express ‘in their own words’ how and why they had decided to work in the realm of development
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All interviews, with one exception, were conducted at the offices of the NGO.
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aid. Once practitioners started to give their accounts of development I restricted my own role to
stimulating practitioners’ narrations and to make sure that they would not (significantly) go
beyond the issue at hand. Essentially, my explicit involvement in the co-narration of development
was contingent on interviewees’ narrative competence (Wortham, 2001), that is, on their ability
to provide deliberate and detailed accounts of the subject matter.
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Whenever possible, I tried to
stay in the background and allow practitioners, within the given limits, to determine the direction
of their narratives and hence to keep the upper hand in organizing the plot of the story.
Description of Practitioners and Organizations
It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of the organizations and the interviewees who
have participated in this investigation, since it was agreed that both organizational and individual
identities would be kept anonymous in my analysis. This measure does not engender a loss of
information, since the condition of anonymity does not interfere with the objective and the
research question of the following discourse analysis. However, to give the reader a general
feeling for the investigation’s context, I would like to provide some background information on
the practitioners who participated in this investigation as well as the organizations they
represented. It can thus be noted, first, that the sample comprises thirty practitioners working for
twelve different development organizations. All interviews were carried out in the period from
early 2003 to late 2004. It is important to mention that, in order to ensure an adequate amount of
difference and variability in practitioners’ stories, the investigation includes a maximum of three
participants per organization. With two exceptions,
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all organizations are accredited by ZEWO,
an independent Swiss foundation which provides a seal of approval for national nonprofit
organizations. Importantly, though it is difficult, if not impossible, to subsume the great variety of
the twelve organizations under one single term,
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I have nevertheless decided to use the general
label ‘development NGOs’. This denotation seems justifiable because all organizations have been
involved in international social aid (be that relief work, ecological, economic or sustainable
development, human rights, migration, medical and educational support, etc.) in countries in the
southern hemisphere and, second, because most organizations had a non-profit focus (as
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As Billig (1996) reminds us in this context, accounts of social reality can either be effective or poor, depending on
the narrator’s skillfulness in storytelling, arguing and rhetoric.
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These two organizations were hybrids that combined fundraising and income-creating practice.
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The descriptions ranged from (German) concepts such as ‘Hilfswerk’, ‘Sozialwerk’, ‘gemeinnützige
Organisation’, ‘Hilfsorganisation’, etc. to more global (English) terms such as non-governmental or non-profit
organization.
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prescribed by the ZEWO certificate) and were not established or regulated by national
governments. In terms of size, it shall suffice to mention that the sample comprised both small
and mid-sized organizations, meaning that some organizations were run by one or only a few
persons while two organizations in particular had over one hundred employees (consisting of both
paid staff and volunteers).
Regarding the practitioners who participated in the present investigation, it is necessary to
state that the selection was based on the principle of diversity. This is reflected, for instance, in
the different educational backgrounds which covers a wide range of educational levels from
primary and secondary school education to qualifications in administration, social work,
accounting, business (i.e. marketing), psychology, ethnology, ecology, natural sciences, and
theology, etc. Furthermore, the selection was designed to include people from different
hierarchical levels which again is evident in the interviewees’ occupational positions which range
from office (full-time and part-time) administrators, project administrators and assistants, head of
projects/nations, volunteers, to directors, managers as well as founders of NGOs. Whereas gender
was almost equally distributed in the sample, i.e. 14 women and 16 men, the age of participants
ranged from a 20-year-old volunteer to a retired woman who, after a successful career in the
private sector, had decided to begin a second (part-time) career in development aid. It remains to
say that I will both try to support and enliven the following discourse analysis of practitioners’
development talk by providing further details on both the interviewees and the organizations they
work for.
Analysis
Three-part lists (i.e. arguments which rely on the rhetorical structure of ‘first, … , second … , and
third, … ’), according to Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), fulfill a range of rhetorical functions in
(above all) western everyday interaction. In my own assessment, it is most important to note that
such lists convey an important predication, namely that one has more on offer than just singular
instances or arguments (Potter, 1996). In view of the fact that the following discourse analysis
will rely on a three-part structure, introducing three recurring argumentative threads (i.e.
interpretive repertoires) which are abstracted from practitioners’ talk, the coincidence of this
tripartite structure is, despite its rhetorical effectiveness, to be savored with a winking eye.
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Having said this, I would like to tread into more serious waters and begin the analysis of the
interview transcripts. In a first step I will introduce three interpretive repertoires, each construing
development aid from a different perspective and endowing development aid with a perceptibly
different evaluative accent. Although I will explicate the general operation of the three repertoires
in order to illuminate their argumentative dynamic, some of the most striking parts of
practitioners’ ‘rhetorical business’ (Antaki & Wetherell, 1999) will be illustrated on the basis of
concrete extracts. In addition, the analysis will contextualize practitioners’ talk against the
backdrop of the previous genealogy of development discourse in an effort to identify the
historical and cultural derivation of speakers’ ‘lived ideologies’ (Billig et al., 1988). In this way,
we will see that practitioners’ talk is not just the simple re-production of ‘muscular discourse’
(Alvesson & Karreman, 2000), but the local ‘embodiment and articulation of ideology’ (Cohen &
Musson, 2000, p. 34). It must remain clear that, given the composition and the research question
of the following discourse analysis, the illustrations presented do not exhaust the semantic variety
of the meaning generated by practitioners. Rather, the illustrations are selected on the basis of
their explanatory power, meaning that I will provide excerpts which are typical of the interpretive
repertoire in focus. Obviously then, the objective of the following illustrations is to make
palpable how development aid literally emanates from practitioners’ narratives.
The Benevolence Repertoire: ‘Arguing for the Indigenous Other’
What I call benevolence repertoire here covers those argumentative/rhetorical accounts
which express the project of development as an act of charitableness, of true goodness of the
mind or simply a responsible act which exhibits a central concern for the indigenous other.
Working on the basis of notions such as ‘helping’, ‘supporting’ or ‘identification’, the
benevolence repertoire for the most part argues for the social aspirations as well as the
positive social ramifications of development endeavors. Although it will be shown further
down that the social aspects of development aid take center stage in the benevolence
repertoire, I already want to point out at this stage that development aid is not only delineated
as unidirectional Third World intervention, support, advocacy or patronage but, most
importantly, as a pivotal source of practitioners’ motivation and self-fulfillment. In
consequence, the benevolence repertoire at one and the same time embraces a stream of
reasoning that emphasizes typical help-related activities and a second stream which
highlights development aid as a mutually beneficial and rewarding encounter between the
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indigenous other and the practitioner. Whereas the ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin, 2001) of the
benevolence repertoire, by virtue of its constructive finality, is largely positive, I will point
out that practitioners’ arguments often revolve around issues such as social relations and
exchanges or, as in the case of the following illustration,
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around terms such as ‘man’ and
‘human fate’.
P1: … and that’s why it probably worked out in my case … because the factor ‘man’ was
pivotal, that is, the connection with human fate …
The point I want to stress here is that the benevolence repertoire, not least due to its almost
exclusively positive conceptualization of development, largely ignores the potential existence
of power imbalances between the helpers and the help recipients and instead suggests a
relationship between equals. Essentially, the cause of development, as I will show, is
construed not only as an act of giving voice to the other (i.e. advocacy and self-
determination; cf. below), but notably as one that is sensitive to the needs, desires or
experiences of help recipients or southern partner NGOs. It would undoubtedly be inaccurate
to claim that the benevolence repertoire is a homogeneous collective of argumentative
threads. Rather, it must be seen as a variegated set of rhetorical twists which even comprise
deviant case formulations (Edley, 2001), i.e. argumentations which run counter to the general
thread of reasoning of the benevolence repertoire. In line with this insight, the analysis will
emphasize not only what is said but also what is omitted in practitioners’ talk. The aim is to
reveal the richness and variability of practitioners’ rhetorical accounts and to delineate how
they corroborate the positive trajectory of development through the flexible and creative
establishment of presences and absences (van den Berg, 2003; Law, 2004). To begin with, I
will show that the benevolence repertoire primarily stresses the emancipatory potential of
development aid by making reference to, for instance, equality, partnership, self-
determination, participation, and so on. In a second step, I will illustrate that the benevolence
repertoire not only constructs development aid as a social venture, since it often establishes a
concomitance of social and economic rationalities. The point I will emphasize in this
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Note that the majority of the interviews were held in either German or Swiss German. All interviews were thus
transcribed and analyzed in the original language. I subsequently translated only those passages into English which I
deemed particularly suitable for illustrating the main points of my analysis. It is obvious that some of the subtlety of
the original conversations is of necessity lost in translation.
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connection is that the benevolence repertoire, by stressing the importance of sustainability,
creates a balance between the social and economic aspect of development as a result of
which none of the two sides is presumed to have a relative advantage over the other. This
will then be followed by an inquiry into the discursive positioning of practitioners and the
indigenous people by the benevolence repertoire with the objective of shedding light on the
subject positions which are made visible through discourse.
In light of the fact that the benevolence repertoire heavily relies on the logic of
equality, I will critically reflect that the idea of equality, which, though sanctified in ‘the
name of a higher goal’ (Sachs, 1992b, p. 4), invariably presupposes a condition of sameness.
By implication, this condition of sameness has the notable effect of retaining a discursive
imbalance between the helper and the help recipient. In the course of this analysis, I will
illustrate that there is an ideological dilemma inherent in the benevolence repertoire which
comes to the forefront when practitioners mobilize and bring into opposition the
incompatible issues of autonomy (of the indigenous people) and hierarchical command (by
practitioners or their NGOs). In my illustration of how practitioners deal with this dilemma,
the leading question will be how they are able to sustain the positive evaluative accent of
development aid and how practitioners achieve to safeguard their accounts against the
impression of being authoritative and of dominating the agenda of development projects. To
begin with, I will now show that the benevolence repertoire exhibits an intriguing tendency
to justify development through concrete initiatives and not, as one might expect, through the
articulation of downright ideological orthodoxies.
In the Name of the Other: Arguing on the Basis of Concrete Initiatives
A first point which needs to be mentioned here pertains to the observation that the narratives of
practitioners often construe development through concrete initiatives instead of, for instance,
prevailing development orthodoxies
104
(Morris, 2002). That is to say the benevolence repertoire
in the majority of cases defined development with reference to local initiatives such as, for
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Admittedly, it could be argued that this focus coincides with the particular questions of the interviewer or his
supportive/limiting gestures and interruptions. However, since the leading questions implied a discernible interest in
the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) of practitioners, that is, the overarching rationalities on which their
commitment to development aid is based, it is even more surprising, to say the least, that interviewees chose to base
their narratives on concrete ‘field experiences’.
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instance, the foundation of a school, a women’s sanctuary, an emergency relief initiative or, as in
the following extract, an Aids orphan program.
P7: … we have been active in X [name of country] since T [date] (hmm)
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… we have been
working with primary schools in different areas aaahm and then Aids emerged aahm on a global
scale (hm) and the Aids problem actually started in P [name of continent] and in X precisely in the
area where we have been working right from the start (hm) and that’s where the communities and
schools have asked us to support Aids orphans or those kind of children (hm) and that’s why we
started to work with children (hm) …
The fact that development is ‘storied’ (Bruner, 2003) through concrete initiatives is anything but
trivial, especially if one takes into consideration that the interview guideline explicitly aimed at
gaining insight into practitioners’ use of development aid orthodoxies. Although I am not seeking
to impute that practitioners deliberately sidestepped the central subject of the interview, it is
important to bear in mind that the elision of universal doxas invariably fulfills a concrete social
function within the particular interview context. I would thus like to note that the deliberate
absence (Law, 2004) of orthodoxies is a textual phenomenon (Lachmann, 1991) which notably
functions to portray development aid as a de-politicized, non-ideological activity. To put it
bluntly, delineating development, more or less exclusively, on the basis of essential grassroots
initiatives engenders what Shapiro (2001) called ‘textual forgetting’ through which speakers are
able to avoid the potential pitfalls related to the direct articulation of all-encompassing
development ideologies (cf. also Hall, 1997). Importantly, this is not to say that practitioners
‘really’ believe that development is not political or that they do not believe in some kind of
development orthodoxy. What one can claim, however, is that practitioners, by promulgating
development through local initiatives, avoid ideological discussions and hence protect their
accounts against critical comments from the part of the interviewer. A second effect which is
noteworthy in this context relates to the rhetorical function of detail: in light of the observation
that many narratives imparted lengthy and detailed accounts of development projects, such
reference to concrete details fulfills at least two rhetorical functions. First, detailed accounts
foster the impression of facticity, i.e. that the speaker’s account is based on facts (i.e. the truth),
and, second, they elevate the speaker to the status of a direct witness of the facts he or she is
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Note that the comments in parenthesis refer to the interviewer’s utterances.
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talking about. It is abundantly clear that both of these rhetorical effects of detailed descriptions
are closely related, since they simultaneously establish a given account as truthful and make the
speaker who utters the account appear as a credible person. Hence, to illustrate this proposition
and to show how the ‘descriptive density’ of a given account has a bearing on both its
experienced truthfulness and the legitimacy of the speaker, the following passage illustrates how
the speaker, by enriching his account with detailed descriptions of his experience, at one and the
same time makes his story credible and establishes himself as an authentic narrator and an expert
in development aid.
P11: … we then went over to F [name of region] … I then realized that we could start an exchange
… meaning that we could learn from each other … when I started to talk about this idea with
experts I realized that this sort of exchange would be much more effective … we then went to P
and Q and later to R and S [names of different countries] and realized that one could show how
neighboring cultures use their resources in a different way …
What is conspicuous in the first place is that the speaker’s narrative heavily relies on references to
geographical locations (i.e. countries). If looked at from a rhetorical perspective, it probably
hardly needs to be mentioned that such rich detail contributes to the impression that the speaker
tells the truth, since he claims first-hand experience of the phenomena he is talking about (Potter,
1996). In this way, detailed descriptions, as exemplarily expressed in the above extract, indicate
that the speaker has actually ‘been there’, since he is able to describe aspects of a given scene
which are available only through direct exposure or experience. It follows from this that detailed
descriptions – which in the case of the benevolence repertoire are typically take the form of
elaborate accounts of geographical locations as well as ethnic or minority groups – quite
obviously establish the speaker as a reliable witness. Evidently then, the category entitlement
(Sacks, 1974) of witnesses is relevant to the extent that it lends credibility to a particular utterance
and, most importantly, legitimates the person to speak in the name of truth (Foucault, 2001). In
line with this observation, the status of a direct witness functions in the context of the
benevolence repertoire in that it construes practitioners as knowing people and, even more
essential, as people who are ‘close to the field’ (Kapuscinski, 2006). To be sure, the impression of
being ‘close to the field’ is, rhetorically speaking, not particularly relevant in itself. However, this
attribution becomes significant to the extent that it legitimates practitioners to speak in the name
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of the other (Bendell, 2005), i.e. help recipients or southern NGOs. The underlying logic of this
plot, as briefly mentioned before, is that development aid requires closeness to the other, since it
is the closeness with the other that determines one’s knowledge of the others’ problems, needs,
demands, etc. and hence one’s legitimacy to speak and act in their name. It must be noted here
that the benevolence repertoire does not only construct the relation between practitioners and the
people with whom they work or, more precisely, whom they are supposed to help through a
continuum of proximity or closeness. In the following paragraph I will illuminate that the
benevolence repertoire not only endorses close relations between practitioners and help recipients
and/or southern NGO partners, but also equal and equated relationships between the parties
involved in development.
The Relationality of Development: Identification, Trust and Equality
I have chosen the term ‘relationality’ in the present context to indicate those conversational
episodes in which accounts of development aid rest on notions such as ‘partner’,
‘partnership’, ‘identification’, ‘cooperation’, ‘equal(s)’, ‘equality’ or ‘trust’. The common
denominator of these different relational concepts is that they all function to depict the other
as someone who is supposed to be on an equal standing with the practitioners. Moreover,
these signifiers are often interwoven in such a way as to construe good and trustful
relationship between practitioners and their indigenous other as the sine qua non of
(successful) development endeavors. The subsequent paragraph illustrates how the
benevolence repertoire deploys the notion of ‘identification’ to establish a particularly close
relationship between the partners of development aid.
P7: … and that’s also how we have worked in Y [name of country] … we … this partner already
had some projects in the border area to Z [name of country] where many children and girls come
from and where they easily become victims of slave traders (hm) und aaa … after having come in
contact with this person or this organization we decided to make those children in Y our target
group (hm) that’s when we began to commit and identify ourselves with this target group and also
to start other projects …
On the face of it, the basic requirement for being benevolent, that is, for being close to the
indigenous other or, to use the speaker’s own term, the ‘target group’ is that one commits
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oneself to and identifies oneself with the other. In addition, ‘time’ and ‘previous experience’
are denoted as central determinants of ‘identification’. This brief extract thus reveals that
‘identification’ and ‘commitment’ provide a fundamental sense of obligation which slowly
evolves over time and, most fundamentally, only becomes possible through a series of
cautious (but successful) exchanges between the partners. Moreover, it is revealed in the
above account that the cooperation with a novel partner is justified through his
(organization’s) previous experience. Although the issue of risk remains obscure in the above
transcript, it is at least implied, since the decision to ‘strongly identify with this target group’
is directly related to the claim that the partner has successfully carried out comparable
projects beforehand. Previous experiences and successes, so it seems, are represented as
central parameters for cooperating and working with the indigenous people (i.e. help
recipients and southern NGOs). To bring to light that trust is often construed as an eminent
condition of development aid, I would like to refer to the next two extracts where the notion
of ‘trust’ is explicitly invoked.
P1: … yes … I believe that in my case that’s [trust] very important. I mean because Q [name of
country] is a country with lots of risks … that’s why I have to completely trust my counterpart …
otherwise I wouldn’t feel good …
P18: … I think … I think we will get along quite well in this situation if we find trustworthy
people and if we are simultaneously able to relate with the people on site … then we won’t fail in
that respect [i.e. the implementation of a particular project] …
What is particularly noteworthy in the first extract is that trust is presented as a sort of
counter-agent for neutralizing the ostensible risk of development aid. More precisely, the
speaker sees trust as an indispensable aspect of his work which gives him a sense of security
(‘feel good’) in a declaredly dangerous environment. Similarly, the second extract reveals
that the issue of trust is related to the indigenous other (i.e. ‘trustworthy people’ and ‘people
on site’). Whereas the first speaker in the course of his narrative several times claims that it is
imperative that all people with whom his organization cooperates must be trustworthy, the
speaker of the second extract makes it clear that his organizations’ projects, provided that
trust has been established, ‘won’t fail in that respect’. In terms of the differences between the
two accounts, we can note that the first account attaches importance to trust by pointing at
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potentially negative consequences (i.e. risk, bad feelings), whereas the latter citation
delineates trust with reference to the (potentially) positive effects for the organization (i.e.
success). Notwithstanding these differences, it is undisputable that both accounts conceive of
trust not just as an important feature of development aid, but as an indispensable prerequisite
for all development aid projects. Bearing in mind that identification and trust both allude to
close relations between practitioners and their indigenous other, it is equally clear that these
close ties do not in themselves give any indications as to whether the benevolence repertoire
endorses hierarchical or equal relationships. Thus, to grapple with the question of how the
benevolence repertoire construes development as an interaction or exchange between people
of equal status and standing, I would like to point at the following extract where the issue of
equality becomes explicit.
P21: … for instance … our approach in development work is based on the premise that one is
among equals [i.e. like-minded people] (hm) …
Although the speaker chiefly claims that his organization works upon the premise of
equality, it is noteworthy that he also makes clear in the course of the interview that
‘participation’ does not only require ‘humility’ but also a considerable amount of ‘caution’.
In line with what has been said before in connection with the issue of trust, we can see that
the speaker advocates a condition of sameness (i.e. ‘being among equals’) which, according
to the narrator, invariably requires both time and circumspection. It follows from this that the
benevolence repertoire, despite its generally positive appraisal of development aid, highlights
that development is by no means to be perceived as a straightforward, quick or even easy
undertaking. What is even more conspicuous in the present context is that the benevolence
repertoire turns equality and sameness into a preeminent success factor of development
ventures. The fact that equality is often construed as a central aspect of development aid is
illustrated through the following extract in which the practitioner describes that he dismissed
a former employee following his realization that he did not treat the indigenous women as
‘equal partners’.
P1: … for instance I dismissed the first teacher we employed after two weeks because I realized
that he didn’t accept the women [i.e. employees] as equal partners …
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Moreover, what is striking in the following extract is that equality is denoted as a critical
success factor of development, that is, as a feature which determines the success or failure of
development initiatives (‘otherwise it won’t turn out right’; cf. below).
P15: … I think we’re dealing with a lot of interrelated levels which we have to mobilize … and
that’s why it has to become our primary goal to bring all people to the same human level, yes …
otherwise it won’t turn out right …
What is particularly revealing in this second extract is that equality is described not as a pre-
existing condition of sameness but rather as a condition which has to be actively fostered. In
other words, equality is represented as a result of the elevation of the indigenous other so as
to bring them to the ‘same human level’. Although the fallacy inherent in the idea of
sameness will be discussed more thoroughly further down, I would like to reiterate here that
such a signification implies that the condition of human sameness between practitioners and
the indigenous other does not exist but, most fundamentally, that such a condition must
actively be created. Evidently then, equality is not in the first place a matter of mutual
respect and esteem but a critical success factor of development initiatives which must be
deliberately established and sustained. It is clear that this understanding of equality is based
chiefly on the assumption that difference can or must be reduced to an ‘economy of the
same’ (Hillis Miller, 2001, p. 69). Nevertheless, we should not overlook the fact that the
benevolence repertoire does not primarily present development as an act of assimilating the
indigenous other to practitioners’ demands and aims, for it also depicts development as an
intrinsic source of (individual and mutual) fulfillment. It appears, then, that practitioners
denote participation not only as a means to other ends (i.e. success) but they also deploy the
notion of ‘participation’ to portray development as a passionate undertaking which allows for
both individual and collective satisfaction.
P21: … for instance I’m dealing with people … there are those stories which I get to hear on a
daily basis and which aaaa also enliven my life … I … I gain a lot [i.e. emotionally] from those
people …
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The practitioner in the above extract was induced by the interviewer to describe what he sees as
the most relevant aspects of development work. In response, he emphasized that his encounters
with the indigenous people and in particular the stories he hears from them ‘enliven’ his life (‘I
gain a lot from those people’). The practitioner thus makes clear in the course of the interview
that development is not a uni-directional undertaking, since he mentions that the ‘gratifications’
of participatory development are shared by the practitioner and the indigenous other. Having said
this, we need to recall once more that the idea of participation operates on the basis of an ideal of
consensus and mutual merit and yield. Though this pattern is not identifiable in all narratives
which make use of the benevolence repertoire, I would nevertheless like to point out that the
notion of ‘participation’ is often simultaneously used to emphasize the positive social effects that
equality-based relations have on the indigenous other and the intrinsic satisfaction such
encounters give to practitioners. That is, on the one hand ‘participation’ is defined as an ethical
and responsible measure through which the indigenous other is given voice and agency. On the
other hand it is presented as a mode of social exchange which is profoundly fulfilling for western
practitioners.
P18: … on the human level it is more congenial to encounter people if you meet them on the same
level and when they sense that we give them something and that the chemistry is right, simply
human …
This extract is revealing since it shows that in the benevolence repertoire equality is not only
construed in a functional, instrumental manner, i.e. conceiving of equality as a means to higher
ends (e.g. the success of a given development initiative; cf. above). Since equality is presented as
being ‘more congenial’ and ‘human’, it is implied that equality is seen as an end in itself. To be
sure, the construction of equality-based participation as an activity which requires time, humility
and caution (cf. above) is indeed compatible with the perspective that development is a mutually
rewarding and self-fulfilling activity. That is, the benevolence repertoire identifies a
chronological order according to which participation is said to initially require, among other
things, time and a careful establishment of trust. Once trust is established, however, participation
becomes the cause of collective satisfaction and success. In this way, equality-based participation
is constructed as a progressive development which entails a threshold (i.e. trust) that must be met;
otherwise one will not be able to reap its positive rewards.
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P13: … we work together and everyone is investing heavily into the idea … and that’s only
possible if one has the feeling that everyone has good intentions … I think that is my main
concern; that’s probably something which is emphasized more in F [name of continent] compared
with N [name of practitioner’s home country] I also live with those people … or … and respect …
mutual respect is crucial …
The practitioner is explicit about his contention that good intentions and ‘mutual respect’ are
‘crucial’. It is simultaneously revealed that he attributes these features to the foreign context
in which he works and not to the country (i.e. Switzerland) where his organization is based.
It became even more obvious in the course of the interview that the practitioner used this
distinction to highlight that certain virtues and values (which have either disappeared or
never existed in Switzerland in the first place) are (still) held in high esteem in the
development area (i.e. the southern hemisphere). What follows, then, is that the practitioner,
by exclusively attributing such qualities as ‘respect’ and ‘good intentions’ to the south,
construes development aid or, more precisely, the exchange with the indigenous other, as a
unique opportunity for making fulfilling experiences, i.e. experiences which are not or no
longer possible in the speaker’s country of origin. With this in mind, I would like to point out
that this argumentative pattern has been common in practitioners’ accounts in general and
that there were quite a few instances where narrators emphasized the appeal of their foreign
work context. For instance, a split was often identified between tradition (which was
localized in the south) and the rather negative effects of cultural globalization (which were
attributed to the north; cf. also Giddens, 1990). This split in turn had the notable effect of
stressing the intrinsic merits of development work. Having shown that the benevolence
repertoire at one and the same time delineates development aid as a passionate care for the
other and as a joyful, mutually fulfilling endeavor, I also want to point at a noteworthy
deviance from this general pattern: one practitioner argued that development is or should be
guided by egoistic considerations.
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Deviant Case Formulation
There was one notable exception in my interview material, a ‘misfit’, so to speak. One of the
practitioners argued that working in a foreign culture and with indigenous people is de facto
not only driven by egoistic motives but, more radically, that egoism is necessary to be(come)
successful in the first place.
P25: … I mean aaa one shouldn’t be a person who likes to help …
P25: … it’s an egoistic act … one is doing these things for oneself I think I wouldn’t have
survived the initial phase without this egoistic element … at the beginning there was only … it
didn’t look like things would work out …
To put things into perspective: even though the mention of egoism might seem to be in
downright opposition to the general tenor of the benevolence repertoire, it must be pointed
out that both extracts come from a larger passage in which the practitioner talks about the
difficulties he was facing at the outset of one of his projects. With this in mind, it becomes
arguable that ‘egoism’, the way it is used in the above utterance, signifies psychological
egoism (i.e. the realization that one’s subjective world or social reality can only be
experienced and explained from one’s own position) rather than an ethical form of egoism
(i.e. that one ought to promote the self above all other values and perspectives; cf. Baier,
1990). It follows from this that egoism, though seemingly implying that ‘one is doing things
for oneself’, primarily relates to the recognition that one must not lose sight of one’s own
intentions, ideals, goals, etc. By implication, egoism is defined as a protective measure for
ensuring one’s survival, i.e. a necessary ‘defense mechanism’ which enables the practitioner
to pursue his work in an ostensibly insecure environment.
Taken together, we can state that the benevolence repertoire generally highlights
development aid as an encounter between people of equal status. However, though
participation is largely depicted as a matter of collective and individual fulfillment, it is
noteworthy that the benevolence repertoire also comprises arguments that highlight
development aid’s emancipatory possibilities for the indigenous people. To illustrate this, the
following section will throw some light on how the issue of ‘self-determination’ is construed
both as a practical activity and as the ultimate finality of development aid.
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Self-Determination
A) The Problematization of the Development Canon
While the issue of ‘self-determination’ inhabits a central position in the argumentation of the
benevolence repertoire, a significant proportion of narratives made use of an antagonistic rhetoric
so as to position ‘self-determination’ as a counter-measure to the ostensible inaptness of
canonical development aid.
P2: … yes WELL I’ve … aaa I’ve traveled a lot (hm) and have visited people who working in
[development] projects and I’ve never actually been satisfied with how problems were usually
approached and how things were done …
What is striking in this brief extract is that the speaker expresses his negative estimate of
canonical development projects through an extreme case formulation (Edwards & Potter, 1992),
claiming that he was never satisfied with how things were dealt with. However, to legitimate such
an assertion makes it necessary that he positions himself as a person who is able to provide an
accurate estimate of development aid. This self-positioning is achieved by claiming that the
speaker has ‘traveled a lot’ and by underscoring that his experiences encompass a broad and
sound overview of the field of development aid. Rhetorically speaking, representing oneself as a
development expert is not an indication of a general loss of reality but an indispensable
precondition for credibly depicting canonical development projects as flawed and inadequate. In
other words, portraying oneself as an expert of development is a necessary prerequisite if one
wants to proclaim, as the above speaker does, that mainstream development projects are generally
(and not occasionally) unsatisfactory.
P13: … I’ve also seen a project in which Swiss medical education was provided in the K [name of
mountain region] … but for the people themselves … aaa I mean for the indigenous doctors that
wasn’t right (hm) yes I wasn’t particularly happy and thought that a different principle should
have been adopted …
Within this extract, it is even easier to see how the argument points at the difficulties relating to
the implementation of western knowledge (i.e. ‘Swiss medical education) in the context of a
southern country. The speaker thus rhetorically accentuates the inaptness of this course of action
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by claiming that his view was actually shared by the ‘indigenous doctors’. It becomes obvious,
then, that the speaker grounds his estimate on a broader consensus (Horton-Salway, 2000),
meaning that in his account the interviewee lends weight to his claim of the inaptness of
mainstream development projects by pointing out that his evaluation was shared by help
recipients. While this discursive establishment of consensus gives the speaker’s account greater
factual significance and credibility, it is important to add that this consensus simultaneously
prepares the ground for the qualified introduction of a novel logic (i.e. ‘a different principle
should have been adopted’). Before analyzing how practitioners argue for the utility of self-
determination, I first want to cite another typical example through which mainstream
development is rendered problematic in that it is portrayed as inadequate for solving identified
problems.
P2: … there are those projects which aim too far and that’s when they need consulting support
(hmhm) these consulting services are very expensive and more often than not concerns an affair
that is not very well adjusted [to local circumstances] … there are those people who come into a
foreign culture (hm) and who provide consulting services there … and then they leave again just
when [the indigenous] people learn how things would work … and that’s why the projects don’t
work and [the indigenous] people do what they are told until the consultant is gone …
Note two things. First, the speaker clarifies that development aid is often insensitive to
‘foreign culture’ which is revealed in the passage where he refers to projects which ‘aim too
far’, making the indigenous people dependent on western ‘consulting services’. Whereas the
account holds both that western consulting services are too expensive (in the long run) and
that it does not allow enough time for the indigenous other to ‘learn how things would work’,
there is a second striking point which needs to be noticed. That is, the above account
suggests that mainstream development projects create a relationship of dependence between
the western development organization and the indigenous people. This claim is rhetorically
useful for the argument being made, as it suggests that canonical development projects must
be rejected in light of the fact that they create harmful dependencies. It is clear, then, that the
basic argumentative structure of the speaker’s account is grounded on the premise that
development aid, in order to have a reasonable chance of success, invariably needs to be
‘customized’, i.e. aligned to the specificities of local culture. A further point to note is that
the speaker’s rendition conveys an ‘impression of illegitimacy’ (Wetherell, 2003, p. 19), as it
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uses the concept of ‘customization’ to establish a hierarchical distinction between the
development canon, i.e. those projects which are insensitive to cultural particularities, and
the positively connoted projects which are said to acknowledge the importance of cultural
differences. Although these brief illustrations hardly exhaust the many ways in which the
canon of development is problematized and hence de-legitimated, it is important to point out
that the benevolence repertoire chiefly operates to take issue with the hierarchical
relationship between the western organizations and the indigenous as established and
sustained by mainstream development projects. The rhetorical function of the
problematization of canonical development projects is that it endorses an alternative
relationality such as, for instance, equality. At this juncture, I want to shed some light on how
self-determination is established through practitioners’ talk and particularly how the
benevolence repertoire suggests not only that the indigenous people must be granted
autonomy but that the indigenous people are to be seen as an important (though mostly
neglected or ignored) source of knowledge.
B) The Encounter with the Other: Mutual Learning, Liberation & Stepping Back
Along the lines of what has already been said, I would like to point out that the practitioner
speaking in the following extract mentions that he was involved in the ‘self-determination
movement’
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more than two decades ago, which led him to conclude that those principles would
be applicable not only in the context of his country of origin but also in the realm of development
aid as a whole. The following extract is an account of how the speaker came to the conviction that
self-determination should become an integral part of development aid.
P2: … that’s when we realized that we should go there [i.e. to the development organizations] to
tell people what they should do (hm) and how they should do it so that they would not make the
same mistakes we had already made (hm) they [traditional development projects] have not been
able to establish a work relationship between equals (hm) I mean where one mutually accepts each
other …
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That is, in German: Selbstbestimmungs-Bewegung.
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P2: … what is interesting in terms of aa aa knowledge-transfer is that people decide for
themselves what they can do (hm) … In those countries [in which the speaker’s organization is
engaged] it [the projects] should have something to do with liberation … I mean development has
also something to do with liberation (hm) … in that way people could decide for themselves what
they would like to chose and what could fit into their culture (hm) that is why it is quite
sustainable … on the other hand we can also learn from the Third World (hm) those people also
have knowledge … at times it is not so well distributed in those countries which is why we have
sought for ways to tackle those problems …
Two aspects of these extracts are particularly noteworthy. First, it is evident from the first extract
that the narrator represents the idea of self-determination as a valuable means for preventing
unequal relationships. The practitioner states elsewhere that he has embraced the tenets of self-
determination through his previous work experience. In the above extract he identifies a
particular moment (‘that’s when we realized … ’) in which he realized that he should promote his
insights in development aid circles. Somehow in contrast to most other descriptions of self-
determination, the above account is optimistic about the potential of self-determination. However,
the second extract reveals that self-determination is endowed with two slightly different
valuations. In the first part of the description, the speaker conjoins self-determination with the
idea of ‘liberation’ which has the notable effect of signifying self-determination as an act which
grants the indigenous people the authority to ‘decide for themselves’. The speaker thus explicates
that self-determination, since exhibiting a sensitivity to the indigenous culture or difference at
large, would render development aid ‘quite sustainable’. The second legitimization of self-
determination is grounded on the argument that development is to become a mutual venture
because it is only in this way that one can reap the rewards of mutual learning. By implication,
development is not only construed as a source of either mutual or individual fulfillment (as
discussed in relation with participation; cf. above) but, most fundamentally, as a valuable means
for learning. On the face of it, stressing the (individual and collective) learning opportunities
inherent in self-determination, it follows that development in the benevolence repertoire is not
simply represented as an end in itself but as a means towards other ends (i.e. the liberation of the
indigenous people on the one hand and learning on the other). In view of the observation that the
benevolence repertoire alternately denotes development as means or ends, I want to point out that
the legitimization of development aid is not exclusively based on social arguments (e.g.
participation, self-determination, etc.) but inclusive of economic logics.
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P2: … and that’s where one could start learning from each other … in that way we could ensure
that there would be almost no feeling of competition … that’s why they would be willing to share
their knowledge and tell people how they dealt with things and that would be very cost efficient …
Whereas the general argument holds that ‘self-determination’ is a worthwhile procedure, since it
would enable overcoming the usual ‘failures’ of conventional development aid, it is obvious from
the above extract that self-determination is legitimated on the basis of an economic argument. In
concrete terms, whereas the speaker in the first part of the extract merely implies the economic
merits of self-determination, claiming that knowledge-sharing between equals would prevent a
sense of competition, he later adds that knowledge-sharing has the further advantage of being
‘cost efficient’. This observation is significant in that it illustrates that the benevolence repertoire
is not only grounded on arguments which stress the social aspect of development aid, but also on
arguments which integrate an economic logic. Before I examine the notion that the benevolence
repertoire typically comprises the argument that development aid is chiefly concerned with
sustainability, i.e. striking a balance between social ambitions and economic demands, I want to
discuss the following two extracts which reveal a further peculiarity of self-determination.
P24: … my experience … my own personal experience … and that’s where we all differ … has
shown that I’d better keep out of my organization in D [name of country] … where I made some
striking experiences. That’s unusual …
P24: … I don’t do that [get into daily business] … that’s where I’ve appointed someone [i.e. an
indigenous partner] whom I have selected and coached to the point where he was able to do things
by himself …
What must be stressed in these two extracts, which have both been taken from the same
interview, is the observation that the speaker emphasizes that he chose not to interfere into the
day-to-day business of his southern partner organization. Thus given the fact that both of these
extracts are taken from a passage where the practitioner deliberates the basic requirements of
sustainability, it is possible to deduce that the speaker sees his ‘withdrawal’ from the local
activities in the south as a necessary step for being successful in development aid. These brief
illustrations reveal that the benevolence repertoire emphasizes the notion that the process of self-
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determination requires a physical and geographical separation between the western practitioner
(organizations) and the indigenous people in the south. In general terms, the benevolence
repertoire advocates that the NGO practitioner remains in the background (e.g. in the position of a
‘coach’) so as to ensure that the indigenous people (and southern NGOs) are given full autonomy
in taking decisions. Although the above speaker elsewhere alluded to the difficulties which might
occur if one withdraws from the daily practice in the south, it is evident from the interviews that
the benevolence repertoire conceives of ‘stepping back’ as an indispensable condition of
development aid initiatives.
Taken together, the investigation of practitioners’ talk has brought to light some of the
recurring conversational structures through which practitioners introduce the notion of ‘self-
determination’ and in particular how they exemplify their positions by making reference to
concrete projects. I have pointed out that the benevolence repertoire construes development aid as
an activity that mainly allows for empowering, i.e. ‘liberating’ relationships. We have also seen
that there is an oppositional rhetoric in practitioners’ accounts of development, meaning that they
problematize conventional development projects in order to stress that development (‘the way it
is usually practiced’) has an inbuilt vulnerability to failure. The notion of ‘self-determination’ is
thus often introduced as a pragmatic solution to the typical failures of traditional development
and specifically deployed to endorse a more sustainable form of development aid. I find it
worthwhile to emphasize that self-determination is not only legitimated by making reference to
its social merits (i.e. ‘liberation’ or ‘autonomy’), but also by the argument that suchlike
undertakings create economic advantages. With this in mind, I want to intensify this excursion
into the issue of sustainability and investigate how speakers intermingle social and economic
arguments in order to establish an image of development aid which operates through a
conversational structure of simultaneity.
C) Economic Argumentation & Sustainability
The first point to be reiterated here is that the present repertoire, despite being labeled
‘benevolence’, is inclusive of economic arguments. Hence, although the previous discussion has
led to the conclusion that the benevolence repertoire construes development aid as a worthwhile
social endeavor, it cannot simply be denoted as ‘social’, since it also contains argumentative
threads which are not social stricto sensu. I therefore claim that, although the benevolence
repertoire primarily construes development aid as an act of caring for the indigenous other, as the
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establishment of equality, etc., we must recognize that the benevolence repertoire also
accommodates an economic rationality. To illustrate this point, I would like to introduce the next
excerpt which shows how development aid incorporates the notion of ‘efficiency’.
P2: … as soon as those projects [in the south] produce results we demand efficiency so that those
projects become self-sufficient (hm) … this spring I was in L [name of country] and P [name of
country] and in both cases it was obvious that their main interest was to increase the status of
[name of product] (hm) and that’s where people start to confuse the goals … the producer is a
poor guy who needs a good price … the one who sells it is a poor guy who needs a good price too
and then they also demand that employees are given the best social security and then they ask the
NGO to pay for the deficit … I’m sorry but (hm) that may be good for the reputation of the
product but I know that one can also work economically in those countries … we don’t just give
anything … we provide an initial financing … but thereafter we give nothing more …
This telling passage shows how the speaker establishes a distinct limit of western support,
claiming that the southern NGO must take (economic) responsibility for its activities. That is, the
speaker first depicts the financial requests from his southern partner NGO. He then makes it
unmistakably clear that development projects need to become financially sustainable (‘self-
sufficient’) in the long run. Claiming that he knows that development can ‘work efficiently’, it
becomes obvious that the speaker somewhat mocks his indigenous partner who is asking for
continued financial support. While the extract reveals that the practitioner perceives the demands
of the southern NGO as somewhat insatiable and thus exaggerated, stating, in addition, that it
must not be the case that the northern NGO carries the (financial) burden of development aid
alone, it is also important to note that the speaker introduces a conversational marker (‘I’m
sorry’) which allows him to limit the generosity of his organization (‘we don’t just give anything
… we provide an initial financing but thereafter we give nothing more’). The point I want to
make here is that the speaker does not see ‘efficiency’ as a problem or as a general restriction of
development work. Quite the contrary, ‘efficiency’ is represented as an intrinsic and thus
uncontestable aspect of development practice. In addition, it is revealing to note that the above
account, by stressing the importance of sound (financial) resource allocation and efficiency,
establishes the co-ordinates which designate the proper conduct of development aid. However, in
light of the speaker’s claim that the partners in the south are confusing ‘the goals’, it must be
borne in mind that he does not presume a general primacy of ‘efficiency’ or ‘financial self-
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sufficiency’. Instead, the speaker’s remarks reveal the assumption that the social and economic
aspects of development aid need both be addressed (although separately). In view of Derrida’s
(1981) eloquent claim that within a binary one term always ‘governs the other … or has the upper
hand’ (p. 41), it is in this case, however, not decidable whether it is the social or the economic
argument which has the ‘upper hand’ in the speaker’s account. In other words, while we have
seen that issues such as equality and participation are central in the benevolence repertoire, it can
be deduced from the extract above that ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ are put on an equal
footing with the social parameters of development aid. Whereas the benevolence repertoire
appears to establish a concomitance of social and economic arguments, the following extract
contains an argument that is more clearly based on an economic logic.
P16: … one produces just anything … for example jumpers in a traditional way or whatever (hm);
and then one tries to sell those things on the basis of the ideal of solidarity … that’s no use (hm) I
mean from our perspective … one has to open oneself to new concepts (hmhm) and not only look
at the social aspects …
The most important point to note about this extract is that the speaker puts forward a fictional
illustration of development projects which in his opinion are doomed to failure. While the speaker
downplays or even discredits the ‘ideal of solidarity’, he makes the point that social aspirations
(i.e. ‘social aspects) are not sufficient to warrant the success of development aid projects. What I
want to highlight in this context is that the speaker’s account is based on a ‘periodizing scheme’
(du Gay, 2003), meaning that it juxtaposes two ways of carrying out development aid: one is
based on the ideal of solidarity and insensitive to the requirements and demands of the market
and the other ‘opens up’ to managerial concepts such as ‘market analysis’ and ‘marketing’ (which
the interviewee addresses in another part of the interview). In light of the speaker’s contention
that one cannot ‘only look at the social aspects’, it is obvious that he favors the latter scheme of
conduct, since it is presumed to not only take into account the social but also the economic
aspects of development aid.
P2: … there has to be an economically viable way aaa a feasible way of making the project
sustainable (hm) we surely provide the projects with an initial financing … if we see a market
(hm) but thereafter it needs to work in a sustainable way …
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Whereas the previous extract has put particular stress on the economic requirements of
development aid, we can see that the extract above indicates how the social and economic aspects
of development are ‘harmonized’. That is, somewhat in contrast to the previous extract in which
the speaker downplays and even ridicules the importance of the ‘social aspect’ of development, in
the above extract both issues are given apt recognition. The speaker’s use of ‘sustainable’ thus
reveals that economic viability, although construed as an important feature, is not envisaged as
the sole or dominant parameter of successful development aid. This ‘harmonization’ of the social
and economic aspects of development is typical to the extent that the notion of ‘sustainability’ is
deployed in the benevolence repertoire to undermine the hierarchical polarity between the two
poles. Therefore, the benevolence repertoire is endowed with a double logic, so to speak, which
holds that development aid simultaneously needs to pay attention to social and economic
viability. This condition of simultaneity is revealing, since it makes it clear that the economic
argument does not introduce an oxymoron to the benevolence repertoires. Hence, the influx of
economic arguments does not cause an incompatibility because the benevolence repertoire is able
to incorporate, by dint of deploying the concept ‘sustainability’, the two oppositional rationalities
by presuming a general compatibility of social and economic parameters. Again, assuming an
equalized relationship between the social and economic aspects of development aid, the
benevolence repertoire does neither exclude economic topics nor grant them a privileged position.
In other words, this condition of simultaneity implies that the benevolence repertoire does not
simply reduce the social (i.e. self-determination, liberation, etc.) to the economic (e.g. Becker,
1976; cf. also Chapter 7), but rather establishes an imperative of ‘as well as’. If looked at from
that perspective, it is clear that the benevolence repertoire, although acknowledging that the
simultaneous dealing with social and economic issues is a difficult task, presumes that it is
possible to establish a condition in which the oppositional demands are equilibrated. In
consequence, portraying development as both social and economic, the benevolence repertoire
imparts an image of development which combines the two goals of ‘doing good’ (i.e. being
social) and ‘doing well’ (i.e. being successful). Looked at in this way, the encounters between
NGO practitioners and the indigenous other (i.e. both help recipient and southern NGO partner)
are not just construed as a source of mutual fulfillment (cf. above) but also as a unique
opportunity to create a ‘win-win’ situation. To be sure, win-win refers chiefly to construing
human relations in development aid not only on a social basis, but also through achieving
economic gains or advantages. It is essential to point out that the benevolence repertoire does not
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conceive of economic merits (‘doing well’) as a crude self-maximizing effort by certain
individuals, but as a collective maximization of economic value for all the parties involved in
development aid. This said, I will now discuss the subject positions which arise from the
benevolence repertoire.
Subject Positions
Needless to say, people do not enter discourse pre-formed (Hollway, 1984). Identity, the way it is
conceived through the theory of discourse, is in one way or another created by prevailing
discourses, i.e. the stock of available commonsense or ‘lived ideology’ (Billig et al., 1988).
Therefore, identity is to be seen as the ‘location’ of the self within a particular conversation or,
put differently, as the subject positions made relevant and rendered available by specific ways of
talking (Edley, 2001). In order to pinpoint the more obvious subject positions revealed in the
benevolence repertoire, it must be noted that the practitioners’ narratives typically puts the self
(i.e. practitioners) and the other (e.g. ‘target group’ or southern partner NGO) on an equal
footing. It is also important to note that the benevolence repertoire is in opposition to those
scholars which assert that western images of the other often rely on deprecatory attributes (e.g.
Prasad, 1997). That is, with its focus on issues such as relational fairness and autonomy, the
benevolence repertoire construes NGO practitioners as supportive, upright and non-dominant
human beings. Moreover, the discourse analysis also indicates that the benevolence repertoire not
simply construes practitioners as people which are driven by a motif of help, empowerment or
liberation, but as people who appreciate the encounters with indigenous people in the south,
because such encounters are deemed to be rewarding. That is to say that practitioners are
constructed as people who construe their care for the indigenous other as both a means (to other
ends; e.g. the betterment of the indigenous people’s living conditions) and as an end in itself. In
view of the observation that the benevolence repertoire puts particular emphasis on issues of, for
instance, equality, participation and self-determination, it is further implied that practitioners
often see their efforts or their organizations in a very positive light, highlighting the malevolent
status of mainstream development aid practice. A further effect of the benevolence repertoire is
that it portrays NGO practitioners as circumspect and cautious people who simultaneously have
an eye on both the social (e.g. trust, equality, etc.) and economic issues (e.g. financial self-
sufficiency, efficiency, etc.) of development aid. In the following section, I will first summarize
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the central features of the benevolence repertoire and then address its inherently dilemmatic
aspects.
Overall Reflection
If we agree that there is a difference between upward accountability (which entails
development NGOs’ liability vis-à-vis their funding bodies) and downward accountability
(which for the most part comprises the proper advocacy and responsible treatment of help/aid
recipients; cf. Ontrac, 2001), it is clear that the benevolence repertoire primarily reflects
development aid on the basis of the latter concept. The legitimacy of development aid is
therefore not exclusively constructed by making reference to particular benevolent acts (e.g.
food or infrastructure programs, medical care, etc.) and their (social and/or economic)
impact, but also, or predominantly, by emphasizing the inclusiveness and equality of their
practices. Obviously then, this emphasis brings to light the concern for participation as seen,
for instance, in strategic discourses of funding bodies, the World Bank and IMF as well as in
deliberations of the NGO community as carried out during the 1990s (cf. above). Although I
have claimed that practitioners rarely enunciate prima facie ideologies, I want to stress that
the benevolence repertoire can be qualified as ideological. This claim, in my assessment, is
tenable, particularly if one takes into account that the benevolence repertoire is inextricably
linked to the discourse of sustainable development and most notably to the idea of ‘bottom-
up’ leverage and empowerment (Christens & Speer, 2006). This is, however, not to say that
practitioners simply mimic, i.e. imitate the canon of sustainable development or
participation. Instead, practitioners use the available ‘intellectual ideologies’ (Billig et al.,
1988) and incorporate them into their sensemaking so as to come up with a legitimate story
of development. Departing from the observation that the benevolence repertoire primarily
endorses the establishment of equal relationships between western practitioners and
organizations and the indigenous people and southern NGOs, I would like to shed a critical
light on practitioners’ remarks about equality and reveal that speakers sometimes call into
question – even directly and explicitly – the feasibility of being equal(s).
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A) Equality as Fairness or Sameness
I have mentioned before that the interviews brought to light how practitioners in their
narratives deploy development orthodoxies such as partnership, self-determination, etc.
Apart from that, it is important to reiterate here that these rationalities gained global
momentum after the massive failures of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s
(Svensson & Dollar, 1998). It must thus be borne in mind that it was in particular the idea of
self-determination which ‘capitalized’ on or emerged from the recognition that the conflation
of development and economic rejuvenation of the Third World had only limited success and
at times even caused serious damage (Haggard & Kaufman, 1992). Be that as it may, what I
want to point out here is that the benevolence repertoire holds that the relation between
practitioners and the indigenous other must be characterized by equality. As the analysis has
shown, practitioners traditionally perceive equality as a principle of fair treatment and hence
as a measure of justice. By implication, equality, as denoted in practitioners’ talk, represents
a value statement concerning how the indigenous other (i.e. help recipients and southern
NGOs) ought to be treated. Since equality has been described as both a means and as an end
to development, it is hardly surprising that the term is primarily used to pinpoint a positive
and laudable phenomenon. However, although the value of equality has been justified in
practitioners’ talk by reference to notions such as ‘liberation’ or ‘self-determination’, one
must not forget that equality is inextricably connected to a condition of sameness. With this
in mind, I am keen to clarify the difference between the view which construes equality as a
sign of justice and fairness and the view which denotes equality as a condition of ontological
sameness. To put it bluntly, the essential difference between these two views is that the
former heralds a value statement whereas the latter assumes the possibility of turning people
into equals. As Lummis (1992) eloquently claimed regarding the latter view, ‘(e)quality as
sameness … is an allegation of fact; it postulates common characteristics in people’ (p. 38).
It follows from this that denoting equality as sameness entails a political stance, since it
implies a standard according to which people can, not to say must, be defined. To be sure,
although the benevolence repertoire assumes that a condition of formal sameness can be
achieved, it is clear that the interviews gave no indication as to how the standard of equality
is defined, or who is legitimated to define the standard. That is, my analysis gives no
indication as to whether or not practitioners’ narratives engender a standard which subjugates
development aid to the dominant paradigm of the western modernity (Latouche, 1992). I thus
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refrain from alleging (as some postcolonial scholars have done before) that the supposedly
noble idea of equality is a de facto means for homogenizing differences and hence for
eradicating the alterity of the indigenous other. Although it is clear that there remains a
speculative possibility that the assumption of sameness reifies unequal power relations
between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, it is more important in the present context to emphasize
that practitioners have themselves problematized or at least questioned development aid.
Hence, whereas self-determination, partnership or equality have predominantly been
reflected as positive signs, the benevolence repertoire also comprises arguments which
emphasize the dilemmatic features of these concepts. In order to clarify this point I want give
some brief illustrations which illuminate how practitioners delineate development aid as an
ambivalent endeavor and particularly how they (rhetorically) deal with ideological dilemmas
in their accounts.
B) Confessions & the Ambivalence of Development Aid
What is conspicuous is that the benevolence repertoire, despite establishing a positive
valuation of development aid, does not radiate the unclouded optimism which prevailed in
the early days of Third World development (Sbert, 1992). Although it remains an issue of
speculation why practitioners refrain from representing development as a universal panacea,
I find it most revealing to investigate how ambivalence is both constructed and resolved by
dint of practitioners’ social practice. Thus, I would like to illustrate two rhetorical strategies
which practitioners commonly used to account for the ostensible fallacies of development
aid. The first extract alludes to those rhetorical strategies which address the ambivalence of
development aid in an explicit manner.
P29: … our aim is to give children and adolescents a chance (hmm) ‘help for self-help’ … that’s
of course something you get to hear quite often but it is still helpful … helping them so that they
can lead an independent life (hm) …
The conversational structure of the above extract comes close to what Antaki and Wetherell
(1999) have denoted ‘show concession’. The concept of ‘show concession’ relates to the
observation that the speaker, after delineating the overall objective of a concrete
development project (‘help for self-help’), imparts, after a brief pause, a confirmation in
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which she acknowledges that this position is prone to disconfirmation (‘that’s of course
something you get to hear quite often’). Evidently then, the concept of ‘show concession’
entails that the speaker explicitly acknowledges that her claim can reasonably be challenged.
However, the interesting point is that the speaker does not leave it at that, because she
immediately reprises the original statement so as to clarify that the proposition is still valid
(‘it is still helpful’). According to Antaki and Wetherell (1999), such ‘show concessions’
represent an apt rhetoric for bolstering an original contestable proposition against challenge.
Moreover, confessions as the above are revealing to the extent that they bring to light that
practitioners do not simply impart pre-established sets of cultural/political assumptions of
development in a straightforward manner, but use contestable intellectual ideologies in order
to render their accounts meaningful and persuasive. In my assessment, the single most
important tenet deriving from Antaki and Wetherell (1999) is that development orthodoxies,
within one and the same interview, can be problematized as well as used to construe
development aid as a positive instance. Concessions, so it seems, exhibit the inherent
ambivalence of a given term (e.g. ‘help for self-help’) as well as the rhetorical effectiveness
of ambivalence in the context of local sensemaking.
C) Ideological Dilemma: Autonomy versus Command
Although we have noted that the benevolence repertoire assumes that the social and economic
aspects of development aid can be balanced and, by implication, that these two foci do not lead to
an ideological dilemma, it is noteworthy that certain interviews did in fact comprise an
ideological dilemma, namely between the oppositional positions of equality and command.
P2: … to what extent do our demands reflect a kind of Euro-centrism which has a negative bearing
on our partner organizations … meaning that one would have no or less respect … I mean one
always remains friendly (hm) but it [development work] works on the basis of the principle ‘who
pays commands’ or … as we say ‘who pays gives friendly orders’ (P2 laughs) … I mean they
receive money if they then do what we want them to do (hm hm) and that’s precisely what we are
most concerned about …
On the face of it, the speaker in the above extract asserts that it is impossible to (completely)
adjust the contrasting requirements of equality and command. Although the narrator reveals that
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he is aware of the risk of ‘Euro-centrism’, he goes on to trivialize this risk by means of an ironic
statement (‘as we say ‘who pays gives friendly orders’’) which is followed by laughter. What is
revealing, in my opinion, is that the speaker, in delineating the dilemma through an ostensibly
consensual platitude (‘who pays gives friendly orders’), first downplays the gravity of the
dilemma (by pretending that it is a rather marginal threat), while he simultaneously acknowledges
that the risk of domination cannot be resolved in an easy way. While the narrator mentions that
‘one always remains friendly (hm) but it works on the basis of the principle ‘who pays
commands’, he also indicates that the friendly tone must not conceal that it is invariably the party
that provides the money (i.e. the northern NGO) which will ultimately set the agenda. Essentially,
as the speaker denotes this ruling convention as a general ‘principle’ (and not simply as his own
individual problem), he makes it clear that the dilemma is treated as a more or less accepted
matter of fact. The point according to rhetoric theory is that this impression of general
truthfulness or ‘out-thereness’ (Law, 2004) is instrumental in discharging the speaker from
liability, that is, from being held responsible for the given dilemma (or for not being able to solve
it). However, irrespective of the effectiveness of this rhetoric, we must not overlook that the
speaker’s account does not try to solve the general dilemma between the oppositional demands.
For instance, the passage where the speaker contends ‘and that’s precisely what we are most
concerned about … ’ indicates that he suggests a tentative ‘solution’ to the identified ambivalence
(cf. Edley, 2001). The ‘solution’, however, remains partial since it does not disband the
oppositional demands of equality/self-determination and unidirectional command. This treatment
of the problem, in my assessment, cannot be overestimated, since it illustrates how accounts of
development sometimes retain the tension between two oppositional positions, meaning that the
dilemma is not resolved by rhetorical means (van den Berg, 2003). At this juncture, I want to
introduce two more extracts which reveal how practitioners, although contending that their NGO
also has a voice in determining the respective development projects, establish a view in which the
southern NGOs are granted an autonomous position.
P8: … we actually do not coordinate those projects they [the southern NGOs] have to do this by
themselves … we only say yes or no … our power lies only in saying yes or no …
P2: … we do not alter their projects I mean one only says things like the projects need to work
economically because otherwise it would not work (hm) … BUT they do it …
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What is conspicuous in both accounts is that practitioners use the plural form. Talking about ‘we’
instead of ‘I’ has, as briefly discussed before, the notable effect of giving the impression that the
utterance does not relate to the speaker’s idiosyncratic experience or belief, but rather to a
broader consensus. Moreover, in the first extract the speaker stresses that they do not ‘coordinate’
the development projects. Although the speaker does not conceal the fact that the northern NGO
has the ultimate vote in ‘saying yes or no’, she tries to downplay the scope of her (organization’s)
influence by repeating that ‘saying yes or no’ is the ‘only’ power they actually have. The speaker,
so it seems, seeks to establish a view in which the influence of the northern NGO is rendered
negligible. In order to understand how this impression is constructed, it is illuminative to turn to
the second extract in which the speaker is explicitly asked how he deals with the tension between
self-determination and autocracy. The speaker replies by imparting a three-part proposition in
which he first disqualifies the tension (‘we do not alter their projects’) which is followed by a
preliminary confession and a final mentioning of the initial suggestion. What is of particular
interest here is that in the second part of his proposition, the speaker indirectly acknowledges that
he is aware of the tension (‘I mean one only says things like the projects need to work
economically’). This concession is then followed by a brief pause and a firm and decisive ‘BUT’.
So whereas the concession works to acknowledge that the imbalance of development cannot
easily be done away with, the use of ‘BUT’ primarily functions as a link between the first
statement (‘we do not alter their projects’) and the concluding argument (‘they do it’). Although
the general function of the disclaimer (‘BUT’) is to re-establish an ostensibly unproblematic
condition, it must remain clear that the speaker at the same time maintains his proposition that
‘the projects need to work economically because otherwise it would not work’ which again
implies that he does not dispose of the dilemma once and for all. These two brief extracts give
some indication that the benevolence repertoire is subject to an ideological dilemma resulting
from the mobilization of the two issues of autonomy and command. Irrespective of the
observation that speakers tend to downplay the profundity of this incompatibility, the point I want
to emphasize here is that most accounts do not solve the tension by rhetorical means and thus
endow development with a dilemmatic stance. While it is important to keep in mind that this
identification will become a central aspect in the concluding reflection, I will now shed some
light on a second interpretive repertoire which has been abstracted from practitioners’
development talk.
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The Professionalism Repertoire: ‘Accounting to Donors’
The professionalism repertoire, to put things simply, constructs a social landscape that is for the
most part ‘populated’ by two actors: the NGO and its donors. Moreover, development aid is
primarily construed by the professionalism repertoire as a matter of fundraising and external
accounting. In the course of our excursion into the operation of the professionalism repertoire, I
will illustrate how practitioners establish a position through which development aid is rendered a
rational and apathetic venture. As will further be discussed, the professionalism repertoire
represents development aid as being contingent on professional soundness, thus wreaking the
visionary trajectory of managerial discourse (du Gay, Salaman & Rees, 1996). Disclosing
speakers’ ostensibly neutral language, I will show that this language game is rhetorically effective
in transforming development aid into a depoliticized event. In consequence, the argument I will
establish is that in the professionalism repertoire issues such as efficiency, transparency,
reliableness, etc. take center stage. On the other hand, the professionalism repertoire largely
marginalizes the value of manifestly help-related deeds or ethical/altruistic virtues. I will illustrate
that the professionalism repertoire, despite its administrative/managerial focus, is not exhausted
by economic rationalities. I will also show that it attributes to practitioners characteristic traits
such as ‘liability’, ‘reasonableness’ and ‘sincerity’, meaning that the professionalism repertoire
chiefly renders NGO practitioners deliberate, down-to-earth people who dispassionately carry out
their duties. I will then pinpoint a typical ideological dilemma of the professionalism repertoire
which results from the simultaneous mobilization of the converse issues of donor interests and
free expression. This analysis aims at highlighting how practitioners grapple with contradicting
commonplaces as well as at showing how they go about in problematizing the potential
instrumentalization of their development practice. In line with the elaboration of the benevolence
repertoire, I will reveal that the tension triggered by the dilemma is mostly dealt with in a
rational, argumentative manner.
The Virtue of Professionalism
Generally speaking, the professionalism repertoire works upon a register of words,
statements and metaphors which in one way or another relate to the ideal of business
excellence. Yet, professionalism is not a rendition of managerialism as entailed in the
dominant discourse of organizational reform (du Gay, 1996). Rather, this repertoire is chiefly
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about endorsing the merits of administrative or bureaucratic culture. In consequence, the
professionalism repertoire values an ethos of sincerity and dependability without arrogating
the sort of proactive, entrepreneurial mindset advocated by managerialist ideals (Alvesson &
Willmottt, 1996) which include, for instance, total quality management, business process
reengineering or transformational leadership (Boje, 1991). The idea of professionalism is
thus anything but the sort of ‘businessing’ that has been popularized in conjunction with the
‘entrepreneurial new wave management’ (du Gay, 2000b). To be sure, the professionalism
repertoire radiates little enthusiasm and thrill. And although it deploys the lexis of
management (e.g. ‘efficiency’ or ‘effectiveness’), the professionalism repertoire does not
conceive of development as a ‘hurrah word’ (Chapman, 1996) that heralds a brighter future.
In order to illustrate this general overview, I now want to examine some of the more
exemplary statements made by NGO professionals. The first extract below is an account of
an ex-trustee of an international enterprise who, after her retirement, has started to work part-
time for a development NGO. The extract is taken from a larger passage in which the speaker
explains why she has chosen to work for a development NGO.
P7: … to be honest I have to tell you that when they called me [her friends] and suggested that I
work in an NGO I first said ‘no, for God’s sake’ I will never do this (hm) and … Mr. X [the
director of the NGO] was very convincing and his documentation was so perfect that even my
husband and my three sons who all have a university education said I should give it a try …
While the speaker expresses her general suspicion towards NGOs (which she elsewhere
disqualifies on the ground of their ostensible flabbiness), she presents the ‘documentation’ of the
NGO as the turning point in her decision making process. Emphasizing that the director of the
NGO was ‘convincing’ and that the documentation ‘was so perfect’, she also mentions that her
family and particularly her three sons, ‘who all have a university education’, persuaded her to
‘give it a try’. Although this extract already conveys a tentative sense of the value system the
speaker applies in assessing the aptness or inaptness of organizations, in the following passage
the particularities of her evaluative descriptions become even more evident.
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P7: … I mean I first look at the figures … everything else is only of secondary interest to me (hm)
and if the figures … are plausible and transparent through and through then one can do something
… (hm) that’s how it started …
This claim shows that the speaker used the documentation (i.e. annual report, annual account,
balance sheet, etc.) of the NGO to decide if she should take or reject the job. The logic put
forward by the speaker is that as long as the ‘figures’ are right (‘plausible and transparent’),
she will consider taking the job. What is further revealed in this statement is that the speaker
employs a general ‘dividing practice’ (cf. Rabinow, 1984) which designates what bears
significance and what doesn’t. More precisely, in view of the fact that the practitioner
sketches out a polarity between ‘the figures’ (which are deemed relevant) and ‘everything
else’ (which is ‘of secondary interest’), it is immediately evident that the social aspect of
development aid falls into the latter category. It is perspicuous here that the speakers’
provocative statement that everything apart from the figures is only of secondary interest to
her represents a disputable proposition (Antaki & Wetherell, 1999). The interviewer actually
continues the conversation by a confrontation (Hutchby, 1996), asking the practitioner if the
core mission of the NGO doesn’t matter to her (‘what do you think about the approach of
your organization … could you also imagine working for an organization which is
committed to ecological projects?’). She first replies by reiterating her initial position (‘that’s
not relevant to me’). However, in the course of the same sentence she re-frames her account
by adding that her decision was also based on the question whether ‘people [i.e. the director
of the NGO] are trustworthy’ or not. In the following extract we get some further indication
of how the speaker gets to revise her initial statement (i.e. ‘everything else [apart from the
figures] is only of secondary interest to me’).
P7: … I don’t really have time for that [get informed about the projects of her NGO] …
What this brief statement reveals is that the speaker’s account experiences a subtle shift. That
is, whereas the speaker at the outset of the interview expresses her downright disinterest in
the non-financial parameters and hence the social objectives of her organization, the above
extract constitutes an excuse (‘I don’t really have time for that’) which allows her to mitigate
the looming impression of being undedicated about and uncommitted to the purpose and
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objectives of her NGO. Admittedly, this illustration is exceptional in the sense that there are
few other examples in which the split between the economic (i.e. the figures) and the non-
economic features of development work are pinpointed in a relatively explicit manner. Be
that as it may, what I want to emphasize in the present context it that the professionalism
repertoire establishes a rather narrow understanding of professionalism which is
predominantly related to some form of administrative practice. Speakers thus often refer to
their professional role to emphasize their work-related duties (e.g. ‘my time is fully occupied
with bookkeeping’), which in turn legitimates them to remain ‘ignorant’ of the ‘social side’
of their NGOs (cf. also Talja, 2004). The professionalism repertoire is thus primarily used to
sketch out accounts which highlight the importance of doing a ‘good job’ in the respective
area of competence without necessarily having to take into account the other (social) aspects
of the NGO. Practitioners’ accounts are thus typically narrated from an administrative and/or
managerial vantage point. The norms according to which competency and professionalism
are defined concur with these rationalities. As revealed in the previous illustration, ‘the
figures’ are the single most important symbol of the professional repertoire even though
practitioners also use other issues to establish the primacy of financial governance. It is thus
not surprising that issues such as ‘efficiency’ form a preeminent part of the professionalism
repertoire. However, in contrast to the benevolence repertoire where efficiency is employed
in conjunction with sustainable development, the professionalism repertoire renders
efficiency a general a-priori of development aid. That is to say that efficiency is not just
denoted as an important aspect among others (i.e. the ecological and social sphere of
development), but as containing an intrinsic value in itself. The extract below shows how the
speaker deploys the notion of ‘efficiency’ to respond to the interviewer’s question of what he
thinks makes his organization distinguishable from others.
P9: … what distinguishes us from others is our efficiency (hm) …
While the practitioner selects a managerial parameter, i.e. ‘efficiency’, to illustrate the superiority
of his NGO, the next extract makes it even clearer that the practitioner construes ‘efficiency’ as a
sine qua non of development aid.
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P9: … then we also try to be responsible in terms of our costs (hm) that means that we are social
in terms of the wages we pay (hm) although social security is good … I had to ask myself what
our actual aim was (hm) … that’s why we demand a certain amount of efficiency … in our small
enterprise we have no space for social welfare cases [or social dropouts] …
The speaker states that his organization is ‘responsible’ and ‘social’, which he illustrates by
reference to his organization’s fair ‘wages’ and adequate ‘social security’. What is of
particular interest, then, is that the speaker emphasizes that his employees have to be efficient
or else they will have to leave (‘we have no space for social welfare cases’). This statement is
exemplary of the professionalism repertoire, since it shows how ‘efficiency’ is construed as
the central parameter of sound day-to-day development practice. Essentially, the accounts
above reveal what Billig (1987) calls an ‘ideological tradition’, meaning that they engender a
distinction between admissible and inadmissible development organizations, i.e. between
those which are professional (e.g. efficient, transparent and financially sound) and those
which do not exhibit such qualities. Furthermore, what I find striking is that the image of
admissible NGOs largely depends on the establishment of distinct absences. That is, the
professionalism repertoire rarely disqualifies
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non-professional organizations (i.e.
inefficient NGOs), but renders them inferior by reiterating (and thereby making manifest) the
central importance of efficiency. Although, prima facie, the professionalism repertoire
appears to be more affirmative than the benevolence repertoire (since it does not rely on an
antagonistic rhetoric), it must be borne in mind that the continued emphasis of positively
connoted features of development such as efficiency has a comparably exclusive effect, since
it engenders a hierarchy between apt and inapt development organizations.
Whereas the point so far has been that the professionalism repertoire establishes a
gold standard of sound development practice which is inextricably connected to topics such
as efficiency, transparency and reliableness, I will now illuminate how these issues are
deployed in descriptions of fundraising practices and donations. The objective is to gain an
understanding of how these topics are established as the pivot of development aid and how
speakers legitimate state-based funding as an indication of quality, rather than an indication
of the limitation of an NGO’s autonomy.
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Note that the benevolence repertoire relies on an antagonistic rhetoric through which it disqualifies ‘mainstream’
development aid organizations and practices.
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Fundraising, Donations & State Participation
In this first extract, which has been taken from a passage in which the speaker describes his
fundraising activities, we see how the speaker represents donations as the preeminent concern of
his organization.
P26: … yes that’s [donations] … something which keeps us busy (hmmm) and it is important …
we have to make sure that we open new sources of financing … that is … our donations … we
used to have a lot of private donors much more some fifteen years ago than we have today (hmm)
and because of obsolescence we have lost a lot of those donors and we are at pains to find new
ones … we are thinking of how to do that … aam …
The practitioner begins his description by emphasizing the hardship and deterioration of
fundraising. He later establishes a periodizing schema (du Gay, 2003) which allows him to
distinguish between a previous ‘epoch’ (‘some fifteen years ago’), when the organization’s
financial situation was more relaxed (‘we used to have a lot of private donors’), and the
present (‘today’), which introduces a rupture with tradition (‘we have lost of lot of those
donors’). It is evident, then, that the practitioner problematizes the present by claiming that
his organization needs to change its previous fundraising practice (‘we are at pains to find
new ones’). On the face of it, the speaker does not only underscore the general significance
of donations, but simultaneously reveals that it is yet not clear how he will tackle the
declining number of donors (‘we are thinking of how to do that’).
P2: … there are other organizations which have a lot of good ideas but which have little
knowledge of aaa … for instance how to attract donations I mean how one has to act in this
respect …
In contrast to the previous extract which emphasizes the problematic issue of donors, it is
revealed through the above statement that the speaker deploys the issue of fundraising to
establish a descriptive basis for distinguishing development NGOs. In concrete terms, the
speaker uses the issue of fundraising to refer to NGOs which do not have the requisite
‘knowledge’ to ‘attract donations’. Fundraising, by implication, is rendered a practical
knowledge which a development organization may either have or not have. Needless to say,
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provided that donations are typically represented by the professionalism repertoire as the sine
qua non of development aid, it is evident that having or not having the relevant knowledge is
seen as crucial for the survival of any development organization.
P7: … it’s [the work in development NGOs] simply DIFFERENT no … it is not possible to
compare this [development NGO] to aaah a normal organization … it’s simply different in that
one has to attract funds and I’m starting to get involved myself there … that’s not comparable with
a … with a commercial firm for instance (hm) it’s something different …
In line with the previous extract, the above passage makes it clear that fundraising is depicted
as a feature of NGOs which allows for a separation from what the interviewee calls ‘normal
organization’ or ‘commercial firm’. Whereas the extract reveals that the speaker primarily
accentuates the differences between the two forms of organization, she simultaneously
construes fundraising as the primary means for sustaining the financial viability of NGOs.
This observation is significant to the extent that it shows that the professionalism repertoire
emphasizes donations as the prime, if not exclusive, source for financing NGOs. Whereas the
above extract delineates fundraising as a rather unproblematic, although crucial, everyday
task of development NGOs, the following statement makes it clear that fundraising is thought
to be a more delicate affair.
P11: … we will address the question of how we actually justify our administrative expenditures
(hm) that is … are we able to justify our spending vis-à-vis our donors? …
What is striking in the first place is that the speaker introduces the issue of upward accountability
(i.e. the NGO’s accountability ‘vis-à-vis our donors’) by posing a question. This indicates that he
represents the matter as an unresolved issue. Problematizing the current donor situation of NGOs
is thus symptomatic of the professionalism repertoire, since practitioners typically portray the
issue of securing donations as the single most pressing problem of NGO governance. What I want
to point out in addition to that is that speakers often pick out external accounting as a central
theme of contemporary development aid. In concrete terms, it is interesting to see that when
practitioners talk about the common subject of state-based funding, they usually contend that
state funding neither undermines the NGO’s autonomy nor its core objectives. However, before
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shedding light on the construction of state-based funding, it is essential to note that the
professionalism repertoire comprises variegated depictions of fundraising. Thus the issue is
presented as either an ordeal, a constant bottleneck or a self-evident, neutral activity of NGO
governance. Irrespective of these differences, it is noticeable that practitioners’ arguments are
characterized by a certain unison regarding the belief that state funding and hence state influence
does not pose a problem for the conduct of development work. This signification of state-based
funding requires two further comments. First, it makes it clear that the professionalism repertoire
does not adopt a critical perspective towards the possibility that state participation undermines,
for instance, NGOs’ autonomy (e.g. Murphy, 2000; Roy, 2004). The professionalism repertoire,
instead of construing state participation as a threat to NGOs’ overall autonomy, represents the
issue simply as a value-neutral financial source. Second, the professionalism repertoire does not
only conceive of state funding as one financial source among others (and thus as a indefeasible
undertaking), but at times even perceives government participation as an indication of the good
quality of NGOs and/or their projects.
P19: … that [state funding] means that a given project is serious that’s what it means (hm) or if
you are financed by DEZA
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then you know that you’ve sketched out a serious project because
they invariably evaluate them (hm) …
P8: … yes … DEZA provides us with guidelines … it is the Federal Assembly who defines those
guidelines … and the DEZA follows the suggestions of the Federal Assembly (hm) … we don’t
encounter conflict because we just hand in our project and aah they evaluate the projects according
to whether they comply with the guidelines, and if the appraisal is positive we receive the funds
and they won’t say ‘if you don’t change this then we won’t finance you’ … that’s not the case und
I believe in development work there are no such conflicts of interest (hm) …
As revealed in the first extract, government funding by the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (DEZA) is twice depicted as a parameter which attests to the ‘seriousness’ of the
NGO’s projects. The preeminent point of the second extract, in my opinion, relates to the
speaker’s assertion that government funding does not cause ‘conflict’. The speaker construes the
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DEZA in German stands for: Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit des Eidgenössichen Departements
für auswärtige Angelegenheiten. The standard English translation is: Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation.
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NGO’s cooperation with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation as an unpretentious
undertaking, thus creating the impression that government funding is chiefly about meeting
objective, pre-ordained standards and procedures. Meticulously delineating the application
process, the speaker’s account is centered around the concept of ‘guidelines’. These guidelines, as
it were, neutralize the possibility that DEZA participation might engender ‘conflicts of interest’.
In the following extract it becomes even more obvious that collaboration with government bodies
is not portrayed as a threat to the NGO’s independence and autonomy but as a unique opportunity
to work with an experienced partner.
P19: … yes I would also say that it [the involvement of the DEZA] is a sign of quality since they
have a lot of experience and they also evaluate those projects … they have done an evaluation of a
project in B [name of country] and they said it was good because it achieved its goals and also the
group … that help was provided as planned (hmm) aam … it happens that they ask certain
questions and they … they want to change certain aspects of the project … but I think … I think
that’s all right (hm) at times the suggestions are very good (hm) productive …
What I want to emphasize here is that the speaker identifies the approval by the DEZA as ‘a
sign of quality’. The DEZA is thereby presented as worthwhile and helpful partner, since it
sometimes makes ‘good suggestions’. The speaker thus construes the DEZA as an expert
system which has the requisite ‘experience’ to objectively evaluate the NGO’s project. In
addition, the speaker acknowledges that the DEZA has an influence on their projects (‘it
happens that they ask certain questions’). However, the speaker also makes it clear in the
course of his utterance that he evaluates the suggestions by the DEZA in a positive manner as
he describes them as being ‘very good’ and ‘productive’. In light of the observation that the
professionalism repertoire depicts government funding and participation as a valuable form
of collaboration, I would like to refer back to the first part of this chapter where it was
mentioned that NGOs were initially construed, by definition, as (political) agents which were
independent of both the market and the state (e.g. Brigg, 2001; Mayhew, 2005). That is to
say that development NGOs initially derived their legitimacy from their autonomous (and
sometimes even anti-state) position and from their independence from the business sector
and from government policies. It appears safe to claim, then, that development NGOs were
commonly reflected in terms of their critical position towards government-commissioned
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projects (e.g. Meyer, 1992; Cross, 1997). However, it is obvious from the analysis of
practitioners’ narratives that the professionalism repertoire does not identify a conflicting, let
alone antagonistic, position between development NGOs and the state. Far from it, the
professionalism repertoire paints a social landscape in which the cooperation between NGOs
and governments is represented as ostensibly neutral and even laudable. Having said this, the
focus of the following illustration will rest on how practitioners describe their interactions
with donors. Since my overall aim is to show how development aid is conceived through
accounts of external accounting, I will emphasize in particular that speakers typically
represent the media as a vital means for visualizing (and thus ‘selling’) NGOs’ projects vis-à-
vis their donors.
The Relationship between Development Aid and the Media
This first extract represents a valuable entry point to grapple with how development and the
media are related in practitioners’ narratives. The speaker here explains how his organization uses
media reports to inform donors about new projects.
P2: … we report on what we’re doing [i.e. project work] or there are newspapers which print an
article about us or we publish a special edition in order to show ‘look they have reported on our
projects or written about us’ (hm) or if a newspaper has written about our projects … that’s how
we get our money …
What is revealed in this first extract is that the speaker describes how newspaper articles which
report on his organization are instrumentalized (‘look they have reported on our project or written
about us’) in the sense that they are used to raise donors’ awareness of what the NGO is doing
and what it has achieved. The ultimate aim of providing donors with media reports is, according
to the speaker, to secure further support (‘that’s how we get our money’). It appears, then, that
media publications are explicitly transformed into communicative devices and, more
fundamentally, into a means of justification. In the following extract another practitioner explains
how her organization regularly links its projects with topical issues disseminated by the media.
P8: … we use topical issues and link them (hm) link them with our project (hm) for instance in our
children project in L [name of country] or our education program in O [name of country] (hm) …
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This brief description has been selected from a larger passage in which the speaker proclaims that
it is important to align one’s development projects with topical Third World problems. In the
following extract she further explains that her organization tries to make a connection between
prominent themes of the media and the organization’s latest development projects in order to
increase the likelihood of receiving donations.
P8: … I mean the development of projects and resource mobilization are inseparable … yes
(hmm) one has to relate those things and if one relates them well one can be successful …
In another part of the interview the speaker claims that the success (i.e. donations) of her
NGO is linked with its ability to establish a link between its projects and (media-generated)
public concerns. In the above extract, she goes even further when she claims that the
‘development of projects’ and funding (i.e. ‘resource mobilization’) necessarily go together.
With her statement that ‘one has to relate those things’ in order to be ‘successful’ the speaker
thus asserts that one cannot be successful without connecting development work with topical
issues. These short illustrations are undoubtedly exemplary in that they show how the
professionalism repertoire emphasizes that the current donor situation of development NGOs
makes it necessary to deliberately reap, not to say exploit, the topical development concerns.
It appears, therefore, that the professionalism repertoire generally holds that NGOs, in order
to strike an attentive chord with potential donors, need to align their projects with ‘hot topics’
of development. This means that the image NGOs communicate to their donors is invariably
subject to a decisively western bias. In view of these observations, it is hardly surprising that
the instrumentalization of development aid induced by upward accountability and/or donor
communication has already become subject to criticism. For instance, Francis (2002) argued
that western media reports do not aptly account for or represent the pressing issues of the
Third World (i.e. Africa). Similarly, Chomsky (2000) claimed that the western media are
largely ignorant of the ‘people without rights’. Steiner-Khamsi’s (1998) argument is even
more relevant in the present context, since she pointed out that NGOs’ disproportionate focus
on donors is harmful to the extent that it often leads to an instrumentally one-sided and
selective representation of development affairs. Overemphasizing the interests of donors thus
leads, according to Steiner-Khamsi, to a negligence of the interests, desires and problems of
people in the Third World. Following Touraine (1988), such an over-emphasis on the
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perspective of donors is often accompanied with a focus on ephemeral media topics which
frequently induces NGOs to subscribe to ‘a logic of efficacy, which leads them to submit to
the influence of political actors’ (Touraine, 1988, p. 136). Although this criticism goes
beyond my immediate analytic material (i.e. the interviews), I nevertheless want to
emphasize that the professionalism repertoire largely points at the instrumental use of media
reports and is thus rather ignorant of the drawbacks and problematic aspects related to the
opportunistic use of topical issues discussed in the media. However, there is a notable
exception to that rule and I will show in the following section that the professionalism
repertoire contains an ideological dilemma which is expressed in utterances to the effect that
donor relations form an obstacle to free expression.
Ideological Dilemma: The Tightrope Act of Free Expression
The ideological dilemma I would like to delineate here is revealed in utterances which
simultaneously invoke the issues of upward accountability and free expression. It has already
been mentioned that the professionalism repertoire stresses the importance of fundraising and
donor relations. The following extract illustrates how donors can impose a limit on NGOs’ ability
to impart political statements.
P2: … aaa today that’s different yes (hm) it is at times possible to make a political statement
which some might not like (hm) or (hm) we have a private donor and we have churches and cities
(hm) normal communities we have Third World shops and we now have the DEZA (hm) … it is
important that none of those donors becomes too big I mean that our dependency becomes too big
(hm) so that one still can be straightforward and blunt (hm) if that is requested (hm) that’s really
important (laughter) (hm) and aa … if that [the share of the donor] exceeds 20 or 30 percent (hm)
from a single donor (hm) if one tells them why one does things in a certain way then they mostly
understand …
It becomes clear from this extract that the speaker presents the dilemma between the demands of
donors and the possibility of sketching out a ‘political statement’ in an explicit manner (Billig et
al., 1988). In other words, the speaker addresses the incompatibility of his own account in a
reflexive and argumentative fashion. What is striking, in addition, is that the interviewee offers
two solutions to the contradiction in his account. First, he emphasizes that the freedom to make a
‘political statement’ makes it necessary to ensure that none of ‘those donors becomes too big’.
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This implies that ‘dependency’ mainly refers to situations in which a single source has gained too
much (financial) influence on the NGO. Since it is presumed in the above account that political
statements might induce donors to withdraw their financial support, it becomes clear that the
speaker tries to counteract this threat by making sure that none of the donors provides more than
‘20 or 30 percent’ of the finances. The second solution suggested by the speaker relates to his
claim that even though one’s political statements might upset certain donors, there is always the
chance to mitigate overt disagreements (‘if one tells them why one does things in a certain way
then they mostly understand … ’). This argument is further developed in the following extract
which comes from another interview.
P4: … we normally try to address the problems we have we try to negotiate … in a language
which makes people understand our point (hm) not with some fuzzy buzzwords (hm) … today I
approach a problem much more skillfully than some years ago when I was still more eye-catching
(hm) today I inform them [the donors] in more detail about the pros and cons …
This extract shows that the speaker tries to tackle the dilemma arising from the opposition
between the issue of donor agreement and free expression through a rationalistic account (‘today
I approach a problem much more skillfully’). Moreover, the speaker’s conviction that donors can
be persuaded even if they hold different beliefs is noteworthy. The speaker claims that donors can
be brought into accordance with the NGO’s convictions if they are addressed ‘in a language
which makes people understand our point … not with some fuzzy buzzwords’. Donors are thus
construed as agents amenable to logic argumentation and who, by implication, can be persuaded
through a rational weighing up of ‘pros and cons’. These brief illustrations are undoubtedly
representative in the sense that they exhibit how the ideological dilemma of the professionalism
repertoire formulates solutions. As with the benevolence repertoire, it becomes obvious that the
dilemma arising from the oppositional demands of donor relations and the free expression of the
NGO’s standpoint is not fully solved in practitioners’ accounts. Although the tensions in
practitioners’ accounts remain active in both the benevolence and the professionalism repertoire,
it must be noted that there is a subtle difference between the two in that the professionalism
repertoire is optimistic that the dilemma can be solved: it suggests that the incongruencies in the
agenda of NGOs and donors can be reconciled on the basis of a rational negotiation between the
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two parties. I will now elaborate further on the subject positions aided and abetted by the
professionalism repertoire.
Subject Positions
In general terms, the professionalism repertoire construes practitioners as deliberate and at
times opportunistic problem-solvers whose ultimate aim is to satisfy the interests and
demands of their donors. It follows from the previous inquiry that practitioners are more
often than not represented as administrators or functional specialists. What I find most
revealing in this respect is that these subject positions lack the positive evaluative accent
inherent in the discourse of ‘new managerialism’ (Murphy, 2000) or ‘enterprise discourse’
(du Gay & Salaman, 1992). This lack becomes understandable, however, if one takes into
account that the professionalism repertoire primarily functions to represent NGO
practitioners as competent employees who work in accordance with given conventions and
pre-established standards. This repertoire therefore leaves little room for the high-flying
ambitions or visionary idea(l)s provided by the ‘funky business jargon’ (Webster, 2002).
Thus the professionalism repertoire, instead of representing development work as, for
instance, an important source of ‘individual liberty and self-fulfillment’ (du Gay, 2000b, p.
64), perceives sound competence as an indispensable precondition for the work of
development NGOs. In consequence, the professionalism repertoire portrays (ideal)
practitioners not necessarily as visionary, self-sacrificing managers or hard-working,
inventive entrepreneurs, but instead as responsible and reliable employees who more than
anything else care about their immediate responsibilities in their various fields of
competence.
Overall Reflection
The previous illustrations have made it clear that the professionalism repertoire is characterized
by a strong focus on donors. More than anything, this focus reveals the significance of donors or
donor relations as well as of the administrative (and managerial) activities at NGOs’
headquarters. Bearing in mind that the professionalism repertoire is quite frequently invoked in
practitioners’ accounts, I would like to put this observation into perspective. It is therefore
necessary to first point out that the prevalence of the professionalism repertoire can be explained
if one takes into account the occupations of the interviewees. In view of the fact that the majority
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of the practitioners which participated in this investigation occupied administrative positions, it is
hardly surprising that development aid work was frequently described with reference to
administrative and managerial savvy. Thus it becomes arguable that the professionalism
repertoire brings to the forefront the accent of the speaker’s professions. In accordance with
Bakhtin’s (1981) claim that ‘all words … are populated by intentions’ and that ‘(e)ach word
tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (p. 293), it
becomes arguable that the professionalism repertoire is strongly informed by the professional
jargon of administrators and/or functional specialists. On the other hand, however, the
professionalism repertoire also gives some indication of the broader transformation of
development aid which chiefly took place over the last decade. One could thus state that the
professionalism repertoire partly reflects the logic of ‘new managerialism’ (Murphy, 2000),
stressing the importance, not to say dogma, of result-based NGO conduct. Bearing in mind the
claim made at the outset of this chapter, namely that the ethos of pragmatic administration is
clearly on the rise in the field of development NGOs, it seems likely that the professionalism
repertoire will gain further ground in the future. However, since such statements are merely
speculative, I would like to come back to the discourse analysis and reiterate that the
professionalism repertoire, while stressing the importance of clearly defined hierarchies and
occupational duties, had the notable effect of limiting the liability of NGO practitioners. To gain a
tentative sense of how this is achieved through practitioners’ discourse, I would like to insert a
revealing statement made by one interviewee.
P14: … the only thing which he [the director of the NGO] asks me about is when he wants to
make payments and that’s when I can say yes or no (hm) … other than that we have no big
influence on the decisions of the NGO (hm) …
Essentially, what is revealed in this extract is that the speaker claims that the overall
responsibility of the NGO lies with others (i.e. the director). Although one could reasonably claim
that this utterance entails an accusation of the director of the NGO who does not or only
marginally involve employees in his decisions, it is obvious from the discourse analysis at large
that the professionalism repertoire primarily functions to confine the responsibility of
practitioners and, most fundamentally, to limit practitioners’ liabilities to their realm of
specialization. Stated otherwise, in blatant contrast to the discourse of enterprise culture which
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transfers organizational responsibilities to individual employees, the professionalism repertoire
gives rise to an opposite trend, since employees are seen to be responsible only for their
immediate field of activity. By implication, everything which seems to exceed practitioners’
immediate knowledge or expertise is not perceived as their business, so to speak.
A further point I would like to emphasize here relates to the observation that the
professionalism repertoire leaves little, if any, space for the presentation of the indigenous other.
This limited presentation of the indigenous other can be accounted for if one takes into
consideration the organizational structure of most development NGOs. In concrete terms, the
majority of the organizations which were included in this investigation were sub-contracting
southern NGOs to implement their development projects in the southern hemisphere. In addition,
the northern NGOs were predominantly occupied with fundraising as well as with strategizing
and with assessing, selecting and monitoring development projects in the south. If the nature of
the activities of NGOs is taken into account, it becomes clear that the perspective(s) of the
indigenous other might have been less available to practitioners than would appear to be the case
at first sight. However, what I deem even more relevant in the present context is that practitioners
– even when explicitly asked by the interviewer whether the obvious distance between the
northern headquarters and the people working and living in the south caused problems – more
often than not noted that distance was not an issue. This suggestion is partly supported by
description in which practitioners emphasized the possibilities of the new media, stating, for
instance, that their organizations gained sufficient knowledge of their development projects via
‘e-mails’ or ‘newsletters’ of their southern partner NGOs.
P26: … it is of course better if one can go there [to the countries where the projects are carried
out] from time to time … but of course those partner organizations have so-called newsletters and
aaam and if one has been there before then one is well able to imagine what is going on in the field
… and then we have e-mail contact on a daily basis if there is something (hm) …
On the face of it, this extract provides us with a preliminary sense of how the professionalism
repertoire leads practitioners to make an ostensibly unproblematic separation between the
activities carried out in the northern NGO and the activities carried out ‘in the field’. Although
the speaker acknowledges that ‘it is of course better if one can go there from time to time’, being
on site is not deemed a necessary precondition of (successful) development aid. After all, the
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interviewee explains that ‘those partner organizations have so-called newsletters’, and these
media are said to be sufficient to gain an approximate image of how things (i.e. projects) are
evolving. In contrast to the benevolence repertoire which sees being ‘close to the field’ as
imperative, then, the professionalism repertoire retains its emphasis on external accounting (i.e.
being ‘close to the donors’). In addition, it is essential to recall that the professionalism repertoire
portrays development aid through an ostensibly neutral language or what we could call a ‘linear
style of reporting’. As Maybin (2001) pointed out in this connection, such a linear style creates
the impression of the neutrality and rationality of the speaker. The professionalism repertoire thus
notably reveals its linear style through the use of topics such as efficiency, quality and financial
soundness. With this in mind, I would like to emphasize that what makes the professionalism
repertoire most distinct is precisely that it turns development into a largely reasonable, rational,
and apolitical undertaking. This observation is relevant not least because it allows a revealing
comparison with the last repertoire which I will now present.
The Entrepreneurship Repertoire: ‘Arguing from the Perspective of NGOs’
Note in passing that the present interpretive repertoire which I denominate ‘entrepreneurship’
is marginal if compared, in quantitative terms, with the two other argumentative threads. In
other words, the entrepreneurship repertoire is less frequently invoked in practitioners’
accounts of development. However, this state of affairs is not surprising if one takes into
account that all NGOs included in the present study depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on
donations. We can therefore only speculate on whether the entrepreneurship repertoire or, to
use Bakhtin’s (1981) term, the ‘professional jargon’ of entrepreneurship would have been
more prominent if the sample had contained more non-profit/profit hybrids (Dees, 1998) or
social enterprises (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001). That said, this presumption is indirectly
supported in that the following illustrations of the entrepreneurship repertoire are largely (yet
not exclusively) derived from interviews with founders of NGOs or from practitioners in
earned-income ventures (Dees, 1998b).
A first point worth making here is that the entrepreneurship repertoire speaks from an
institutionally designated position, i.e. from the position of practitioners’ NGOs. In contrast
to the benevolence repertoire which puts particular stress on the perspective of the
indigenous other and the professionalism repertoire which revolves around donors, the NGO
itself takes center stage in the entrepreneurship repertoire. Essentially, the entrepreneurship
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repertoire permits a response to the initial research question, namely ‘do practitioners’
narratives contain argumentative threads which, in one way or another, arise from the
entrepreneurship discourse?’ Although it seams safe, at least prima facie, to respond: ‘yes,
there are indications that practitioners ground their accounts on the entrepreneurship
discourse’, I would like to draw attention to some of the peculiarities of this argumentative
thread. First of all, it is important to clarify that the entrepreneurship discourse has little in
common with the ‘enterprise discourse’ (du Gay, Salaman & Rees, 1996) which is more
directly related with the slogan of business or organizational excellence as fervently
advocated by, for instance, Peters and Waterman’s (1982) seminal ‘In Search for Excellence’
(cf. du Gay, 2000b) and with the introduction of private sector management rationalities and
practices to public-sector organizations (e.g. Burchell 1993; du Gay 2000). Although the
entrepreneurship repertoire does, then, reveal an overlap with the discourse of enterprise and
entrepreneurialism, since all three rationalities promulgate the significance of market
mechanisms (Dooling, 2002), there are also significant differences (cf. also Hjorth &
Steyaert, 2003). I must therefore point out that the entrepreneurship repertoire constructs a
type of narrative in which the protagonist, i.e. the entrepreneur, holds a central position. In
this narrative, the entrepreneur is construed as a person who has both the requisite skills and
knowledge to deal with the ordeals of everyday challenges. In that sense, the
entrepreneurship repertoire construes development aid as an endeavor that is contingent on
individual savvy and persistence. These qualities quite evidently reveal a story-line we know
both from the literature on academic entrepreneurship and from popular culture (Steyaert &
Hjorth, 2006). Although the entrepreneurship repertoire emphasizes the importance of
professional virtues, which are mainly mentioned in connection with topics such as
‘networking’, ‘growth’, etc., it does not construe development aid, as does the
professionalism repertoire, as an apathetic and neutral endeavor. Quite the contrary, the
entrepreneurship repertoire portrays development as an intrinsically emotional venture, that
is, an activity requiring deep involvement, passion, persistence and even endurance and
hardship. Consequently, the entrepreneurship repertoire, rather than pretending that
development is simply about adhering to pre-ordained management procedures (cf.
professionalism repertoire), chiefly emphasizes the difficulties, risks and insecurities
associated with development aid. However, though this argumentative thread renders
development an endeavor which is always on the brink of failure, it nevertheless suggests a
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sense of mastery and personal agency. It needs to be added that although the
entrepreneurship repertoire is characterized by a positive, even optimistic, tone – which is
not self-evident in light of its continuous reference to obstacles and risks – it nevertheless
reveals a notable tension, which is largely tied up with the issue of ‘austerity’. While the
issues of ‘hardship’ and ‘austerity’ for the most part refer to long working hours, fatigue,
uncertain career opportunities, etc., I will restrict the following illustration to the ideological
dilemma arising from descriptions of financial hardship and low income. The point I want to
make is that speakers typically try to displace the dilemma by either putting selective
emphasis on the positive sides of their work (while deliberately leaving out the negative
aspects) or by counteracting negative estimates by weighing up the pros and cons of their
work. In addition, it will be argued that the entrepreneurship discourse construes
development aid practitioners as exceptionally single-minded people. The subject positions
engendered by the entrepreneurship repertoire, as I will show, are thus less related to
individual success (though success remains an important issue) but to the possibility of free
decision, individual autonomy, personal enjoyment and pleasure. Although the
entrepreneurship discourse portrays practitioners as exceptional people (cf. also McClelland,
1987), I will also show that it does not emphasize the heroic character of the entrepreneur
(Green et al., 1999) who, in the best sense of homo economicus, simply tries to maximize his
self-interests (Rose, 2000). Consequently, in opposition to the image of the overbearing, free-
wheeling entrepreneur who ruthlessly exploits business opportunities with the ultimate
objective of increasing his personal wealth, the entrepreneurship repertoire sees development
practitioners primarily as responsible, decent and cordial citizens. In view of my initial
assertion that ‘entrepreneurship’ might become an ever more prominent episteme in
development talk (cf. Ranking, 2001; Brigg, 2002), I will now elaborate on the particularities
of the entrepreneurship repertoire and show, among other things, how the various
significations divert from the managerial ‘entrepreneurship-becoming-enterprising’ mantra
(Hjorth, Johannisson & Steyaert, 2003, p. 95).
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Networking & Diversification
To explain the operation of the entrepreneurship repertoire, I will illustrate the central arguments
put forward in practitioners’ accounts. Hence, a first point which needs attention is that the
entrepreneurship repertoire emphasizes the importance of relational ties and in particular the
significance of networking, i.e. making contacts and exchanging ideas with other NGO
practitioners.
P19: … during the founding phase I had a few contacts from other NGOs with whom I was able to
discuss things which also helped (hm) … these were people with whom I was able to have
discussions and whom I could ask things …
What must be noted here is that the speaker asserts that ‘leading discussions’ and ‘asking
questions’ has ‘helped’, meaning that these conversations enabled him to sharpen and channel his
ideas. The extract thus reveals that his contacts were particularly important at the beginning
(‘founding phase) of his endeavor. This brief example is thus illuminative to the extent that it
shows how the entrepreneurship repertoire construes development projects as being subject to
contacts with other NGO practitioners (or entrepreneurs). It follows from this that development
projects do not (only) arise from the creativity and imagination of the individual practitioner, but
rather from mutual exchanges. This rendition clearly stands in opposition to the image of the
enterprising individual (du Gay, 2000) characterized by single-minded imaginativeness and
innovativeness. Hence, whereas the entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly claims that development
aid or, more precisely, practitioners’ ideas, projects, visions, etc. cannot prosper without the
exchange with and support from others, this view is actually similar to Schumpeter’s (1991)
contention that the entrepreneurial function is not necessarily embodied in a (single) person but
can be ‘filled co-operatively’ (p. 261; quoted in Hjorth, Johannisson & Steyaert, 2003, p. 100).
Following Schumpeter’s eloquent statement that ‘(i)n many cases, therefore, it is difficult or even
impossible to name an individual that acts as “the entrepreneur”’ (ibid.), it is essential to bear in
mind that the entrepreneurship repertoire offers a view in which development aid is represented
largely as the result of both individual and collective efforts. Although this observation is relevant
in its own right, I would additionally like to point out that this interpretation is also striking
because it implies that other NGOs are primarily seen as sources of inspiration and not as
potential competitors. It is evident, then, that the entrepreneurship repertoire deviates from the
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idea that competition is the primary ‘engine’ of quality, innovation and success at large, since
there is literally not a single case which emphasizes that development NGOs have to outperform
their rivals. This observation, in my assessment, cannot be overestimated because it brings to
light that the entrepreneurship repertoire does not construe the sharing of ideas, expertise, etc.
with other people who are involved in the same ‘industry’ as a dangerous or risky event. While
mainstream business theory holds that enterprises must always be ahead of their competitors and
hence protect their ideas, i.e. tangible knowledge, from potential rivals who might exploit them
for their own ends, it is evident from my analysis that knowledge sharing has never been
described as a potential threat to NGOs’ survival. Quite the contrary, the entrepreneurship
repertoire typically adopts a perspective in which the NGO community is mutually supportive
and that discretion or secrecy are either not necessary or even frowned upon. In line with this
observation, development NGOs have more often than not been described as part of a permeable
and transparent community in which knowledge and experiences are (or should be) willingly
shared. Yet, this is not to suggest that speakers simply described the NGO community as a
harmonious field of practice. Instead, practitioners also emphasized the necessity of ‘being
different’, a view which will be briefly illustrated on the basis of the following extract.
P8: … most NGOs are open and have a lot of good ideas … that has never been the problem … I
mean we [the speaker’s organization] are distinct in terms of our idea (hm) the NGO right next
door for instance only provides aid in one country and in one region … others only focus on a few
countries that’s why I think … in our case … our idea can be applied everywhere …
Two aspects need particular attention here. First, the speaker confirms our previous observation,
namely that the field of development aid is typically construed by the entrepreneurship repertoire
as a transparent (‘open’) community. In the second part of the citation we the speaker emphasizes
the significance of differences which is notably revealed in his assertion that ‘we are distinct in
terms of our idea’. It is further disclosed in this extract that the attribute ‘distinct’ is explicated
with reference to other NGOs whose ideas and projects are portrayed as being overly constricted
or narrow in focus (i.e. ‘only provides aid in one country and in one region’). The speaker thus
highlights the difference between his organization and the ‘others’ by stating that ‘our idea can be
applied everywhere’. On the face of it, what comes to light here is the double-sidedness of the
entrepreneurship repertoire, meaning that it advocates activities such as knowledge sharing,
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mutual support and openness while at the same time emphasizing the importance of being
different or distinct. Although one might guess that these seemingly antagonistic positions render
the discourse used by practitioners ambivalent, it must be borne in mind that such an appraisal is
not supported by my analysis. The entrepreneurship repertoire, then, typically stresses that the
positive effects of sharing ideas and knowledge outweigh its (potentially) negative effects. This
makes it clear that the entrepreneurship repertoire maintains that it is possible to be different
while sharing ideas and that doing so does not necessarily create problems or tensions.
Identification of Problem and Opportunity
A central aspect of the entrepreneurship repertoire is revealed in descriptions where speakers
highlight development aid as subject to a sequence which first entails the sensing of a problem
and, in a second step, the identification of opportunities and/or the development of solutions. To
begin with, the following shows how the speaker goes about problematizing the status quo of a
particular industry, arguing that the way the industry currently works will inevitably lead to the
extinction of certain species.
P23: … in J [name of country] and K [name of country] the situation is such that already half of
the K [name of animal species] has been extinct (hmm) because you tend to kill the K with
conventional methods (hm) … they [the indigenous people] don’t realize that yet because the
rising prices compensate for their gradually declining yields … but one day things will come to an
end (hmm) and (hm) then they won’t have anything anymore (hm) …
In the first extract, the speaker puts forward a problem statement in which he pinpoints the
detrimental effect of the status quo of the industry (‘one day things will come to an end’). The
speaker’s argument is thus ‘epochal’ (du Gay, 2003) in the sense that it construes the status quo
as a condition which will necessarily come to a (devastating) end. On the other hand, the
speaker’s epochal narrative, by denoting the current state as problematic, also entails the
possibility of novel opportunities. To illustrate how the problematization and the identification of
novel opportunities often coincide, I would like to have a look at the following extract.
P23: … and we wanted to show that this [sustainable production] also works on a small scale …
and then we built a production site and when we had our first yield we built the second (hm) the
third and the forth (hm), until an entire village was lifted above the poverty threshold (hm) …
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In this extract, the speaker uses his previous problematization of the industry to highlight the
opportunities which opened up for his organization. In general terms, it is noticeable that the
speaker’s narrative delineates the deficient status quo of the industry as a unique opportunity to
create something new. In line with this presentation of the industry, the speaker construes
development aid as the task of identifying, to use a term used by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus
(1997), the ‘anomalies’ revealed within the current parameters of the industry. The practitioner in
the above case thus singles out unsustainable production or the exploitative practices of the
industry as the anomaly which needs to be changed. While it became obvious from the first
extract that the speaker delineated the modus operandi (i.e. exploitative practices) of the industry
as the source of an inevitable disaster, the second extract contains a description of how he tackled
the anomaly through the introduction of an alternative scheme of practice (i.e. sustainable
production). To underscore the aptness of his choice, the speaker explains how the
implementation of his novel rationality brought about a profoundly positive socio-economic
change (‘an entire village was lifted above the poverty threshold’). This type of representation is
typical of the entrepreneurship repertoire: it shows how practitioners initially formulate a
problem, then describe an anomaly, and finally present a solution. As is the case in the above
citation, this solution is usually deemed effective not only for overcoming the identified anomaly
but also for enabling new (and better) living conditions. We must not forget that the previous
account delineates change assessed by means of an economic parameter (i.e. ‘poverty threshold’),
and I will tackle this issue further down. Before that, we must first turn our attention to the issue
of risk-taking.
Risk-Taking
McClelland (1987), among others, explored the attributes which characterize the typical
entrepreneur and concluded that risk-taking was one of his preeminent attributes. It needs to be
mentioned that in connection with the entrepreneurship repertoire risk-taking, unlike the issue of
austerity, for example, was not often made an explicit task in practitioners’ narratives. Although
the notion of ‘risk-taking’ hardly mentioned explicitly, however, it was striking that speakers
often expressed the issue in an indirect manner. For instance, the fact that practitioners commonly
talk of ‘insecure outcomes’ and ‘open futures’, explains why risk and hence risk-taking is
portrayed as part of development aid. It appears, therefore, that risk-taking is related not so much
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with the personality of the heroic entrepreneur (Fletcher, 2003) but rather with the general
conditions of development aid. In the entrepreneurship repertoire, then, risk-taking is for the most
part construed as a logical consequence and/or inevitable necessity of the uncertain environment
in which development aid takes place. In consequence, the entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly
refrained from depicting risk-taking as a unique feature of individual savvy. However, the
following extract represents an atypical case (Tuominen, 2004), since it quite obviously portrays
risk-taking as an attribute inherent in the practitioner.
P2: … and it was me who leveraged this and aa it took half a year of preparation to set up the
organization (hm) … and then I put out a brochure with an attached letter which I distributed x
[i.e. number of brochures] times … taking full risk and trying out what was be possible (hm) … of
course I had some assistants …
The speaker’s narrative presented in the above citation is based on a first-person account
(Genette, 1980). This means, among other things, that the speaker conflates the perspective of the
narrator and that of the person who appears in the plot, thus making himself the protagonist of his
own story. Since such a first-person account is rhetorically effective in highlighting the inner
motives and upright attitude of the speaker (Potter, 1996), it seems worthwhile to have a closer
look at the particularities of the speaker’s account. The speaker first mentions that it took him
some time (‘half of year of preparation’) to prepare the launch of his idea. This is then followed
by a description of him distributing a large number of brochures. The interviewee concludes with
an evaluative statement (‘taking full risk’). Although the speaker downplays the risk of his
initiative by qualifying his statement (‘of course I had some assistants’; cf. also Anaki &
Wetherell, 1999), he suggests that the outcome of his venture was essentially unforeseeable
(‘trying out what was possible’). This uncertain outcome reveals that the speaker qualifies his
endeavor as risky. To be clear on this, although this brief illustration is not fully representative for
the entrepreneurship repertoire in that it emphasis the readiness of an individual to take risks and
indeed deploys the term ‘risk-taking’, it nonetheless shows that the entrepreneurship repertoire
does not exclude the dangerous aspect of development aid. Hence, in contrast to the benevolence
repertoire which talks about the risk of development against the backdrop of ‘trust’ and the
professionalism repertoire which largely ignores the dangerous, risky aspects of development, it
is fundamental to see that the entrepreneurship repertoire is most straight-forward in admitting
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that the development projects are at times on the brink of failing. Whereas issues of risk or risk-
taking were mostly described as features which affect the fate of practitioners’ NGOs, we will
show that issues such as hardship and austerity are more directly associated with the
practitioners’ personal destiny.
Hardship & Austerity
Notions of ‘hardship’ and ‘austerity’ have been most frequently used in accounts propounded by
founders of NGOs, these issues typically being discussed in connection with the financial
situation of the speaker. Although hardship and austerity also featured prominently in narratives
which depicted practitioners’ ‘work load’, ‘stress’, ‘family problems’ or ‘time constraints’, I
would like to point at the following extract in which the issues of financial hardship and austerity
are described in relation to the initial start-up phase of the venture.
P2: … and then right from the beginning we were able to secure around x Swiss Franks during the
first year (hm) that has been was too much to give up and (laughter) too little to make a living … I
was working full steam meaning that I didn’t pay myself a salary and went to work as a C [job
category] … still it’s been a thorny way (hm) …
To begin with, this telling extract portrays development aid as an exceptionally tough endeavor
which is only just bearable. Claiming that the early days were characterized by immense financial
hardship (‘too much to give up and (laughter) too little to make a living’), the speaker also
emphasizes that he did everything in his power to sustain the survival of his organization (‘I was
working full stream’; ‘I didn’t pay myself a salary and went to work as a C’). This observation is
significant, since it presents practitioners as self-managing individuals (Fenwick & Hutton, 2000)
who take their destiny into their own hand. In general, the entrepreneurship repertoire establishes
the sort of subjectivity which is characterized by individual endurance and perseverance in the
face of impending failure (cf. Chell et al., 1991). However, what is particularly conspicuous in
the entrepreneurship repertoire is that it does not simply construe individual hardship as the
necessary precondition of success, but as people’s sacrifice to attain both autonomy and an
individualistic life-style. Since I will become more specific about this issue further down, I will
now illuminate two other particularities of the entrepreneurship repertoire: resource allocation
and innovation.
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Resource Allocation and Innovation
The notion of financial resource allocation is a fundamental issue in the entrepreneurship
repertoire where it is mostly deployed to emphasize the importance of investing one’s
(financial) resources to maximize the organizations’ yields or returns. Resource allocation, is,
then, presented as a preeminent activity for sustaining NGO’s overall survival, as
compellingly expressed in the following extract.
P30: … the big organizations are … they need to learn not to start their projects with too much
money and that [indigenous] people do things for themselves (hm) taking X [name of big NGO]
for example … they used to come in with y dollar (hm) they practically offered the same service
we did only that we were able to offer it at z dollar (hm) and they simply raised the wages and
then they also said that they needed computers out in the bush … and then they needed a generator
to produce electricity for the computer and because nobody had ever worked with a computer they
also need a volunteer … it didn’t take long until the project collapsed … and we practically saved
the whole thing and now it’s working again … the bigger the organization the more unconcerned
they are about spending donations …
I have chosen to cite this lengthy extract because it aptly shows that dealing with scarce financial
resources is construed as one of the most important aspects of successful development aid. In
addition, I find this detailed and rich account of the immanent fallacies of development aid
particularly revealing. Most illuminating, in my opinion, is the way the speaker uses the dramatic
case of an unsuccessful venture to underscore that in order for development practices to be
successful – as illustrated on the basis of his own NGO – it is necessary to think very carefully
about how to spend the available financial resources. Moreover, what I deem most relevant in the
present context is that the speaker not only emphasizes that development NGOs are not supposed
to squander their money, but that the practitioner implicitly points at the advantages of (his)
small-size organization(s). In this way, the speaker’s comparison between his own and a large,
bureaucratic NGO (which is depicted as being overly ‘unconcerned’ about spending donations)
not only questions the ability of large NGOs’ to provide adequate support for the indigenous
people, but simultaneously illustrates Schumacher’s (1973) doctrine of ‘small is beautiful’, i.e.
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the idea that large size is or can be detrimental to the provision of adequate development.
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What
is even more revealing, however, is that the entrepreneurship repertoire associates smallness with
innovativeness, as illustrated by the following extract.
P30: … there are a lot of good … organizations which do not need that much money because they
largely depend on people’s innovativeness (hm) as a result … they only need a bit of money to
start the process (hm) … and then they only need between x and y Swiss Franks …
The single most telling observation here is that the speaker claims that small NGOs do not need
the same amount of money as large organizations, since they (over-) compensate for this lack by
dint of innovation. This claim is revealing because it shows how the entrepreneurship repertoire
stresses that development aid is not primarily about running big development projects, but rather
about ensuring a sustainable future for these projects by means of both far-seeing resource
allocation and innovative practice. It is important to point out that only two practitioners
explicitly talked about innovation. Having said this, I would now like to illustrate that even
though the entrepreneurship repertoire repeatedly emphasizes the potential and advantages of
small, innovative NGOs, it simultaneously proclaims that it is essential for NGOs to grow.
Growth
It must be mentioned right at the outset of this illustration that in the entrepreneurship repertoire,
the issue of growth is less pronounced than, for instance, the issue of (financial) resource
allocation. It must nevertheless be noted that the entrepreneurship repertoire represents growth as
a quintessential aspect of NGO conduct. It is undoubted that practitioners’ descriptions of
smallness on the one hand and growth on the other at least in some respects exclude each other.
In the following extract, the speaker explains how his organization could grow (i.e. increase
donations), if it received more public attention.
P6: … in our case it [growth] is still possible and there are still many people who don’t know us
… that’s why we have an opportunity to grow (hm) the more people know us … some will like
what we’re doing (hm) we actually grow every year (hm) …
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Note in passing that Schumpeter stressed the distinct implications his doctrine has for global poverty alleviation in
that it prescribes an orientation toward regional development strategies instead of global exports.
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Although it is arguable that this extract does not fully impart the business myth ‘grow or perish’,
it is nonetheless observable that we are provided with an account in which the practitioner
describes his NGO’s growth potential in positive terms. Growth is thus described by the speaker
as being contingent on the ability to increase the NGO’s popularity. The interviewee clarifies at
the end of his statement his organization is already quite successful (‘we actually grow every
year’). Essentially, the issue of growth (i.e. the increase of donations) creates a paradox in the
entrepreneurship repertoire, since it directly violates practitioners’ assertion that the NGO
community works without competition. That is, practitioners are in agreement that the amount of
available donations in Switzerland has either remained stable or even decreased over the last few
years. It directly follows that an increase in the donations allocated to one NGO will necessarily
happen at the expense of other NGOs. Since growth is invariably based on higher donations at the
expense of other NGOs, descriptions of growth are thus paradoxical. Indeed, it is conspicuous
that practitioners either do not talk about, downplay or even deny the existence of competition
between the NGOs. However, the most important point to be made here is that the obvious
paradox between practitioners’ descriptions of growth on the one hand and the non-existence of
competition on the other does not lead to ideological dilemmas. The reasons for this is that
speakers, within their accounts, succeed in keeping these incompatible issues apart. Having said
this, it immediately needs to be added that one does in fact find some statements that reveal an
ideological dilemma, and I would like to discuss these in the following section. I have, then,
pointed out that descriptions of practitioners’ hardship take center stage in the entrepreneurship
repertoire. I will now elaborate on how such descriptions create a considerable amount of tension
within practitioners’ narratives.
Ideological Dilemma: Personal and Financial Sacrifice
In general terms, the ideological dilemma of the entrepreneurship repertoire is most
pronounced in those passages where practitioners stress the personal and financial sacrifices
which are presented as an intrinsic part of their work. The central dilemma of the
entrepreneurship repertoire can thus be summarized as follows: on the one hand, the
entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly presents the realm of development aid in a positive light,
emphasizing, for instance, unique opportunities for self-realization, passion, autonomy, etc.
On the other hand, however, practitioners’ descriptions of private and financial hardship risks
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contradict this positive portrayal in that they present their work as a source of, for instance,
(self-imposed) hardship or frustration. This evident tension between two diametrically
opposed evaluative descriptions makes strongly suggests that practitioners are called upon to
counteract the potential devaluation of their work (lives). Two rhetorical strategies can be
identified in practitioners’ accounts. The first strategy which practitioners typically employ
unfolds along a two-step sequence. The speakers first sketch the downsides of their work.
They then either quality the gravity of their initial claims or they state that the aspect of
development which they identified as a problem has only little influence on their work as a
whole. The second, more fine-grained, rhetorical strategy is revealed in utterances where
speakers problematize development aid by construing it as an uncertain or unthrifty sphere of
activity. This problematization is then followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of their
work so as to reestablish, so to speak, a positive evaluation of their work.
P2: … of course we earn less than a U [job category] (hmhm), but that doesn’t bother me much
(hm) I mean (hm) I’m able to make a living and I can have a better life than some time ago (hm)
really it used to be a struggle (hm) to get through life (hm) just to get through somehow (hm) …
This extract gives a tentative idea of this second rhetoric strategy. In another part of the interview,
the practitioner gives a detailed description of his near-bankruptcy some twenty years ago. In the
above extract, he takes up the issue of financial destitution (‘… of course we earn less than a U
[job category]’). He then makes it clear that he actually doesn’t attach too much importance to his
financial situation (‘that doesn’t bother me much’). The evaluative structure coming to the
forefront in the first part of this utterance, then, is still typical of the first rhetorical strategy I have
briefly alluded to before. It becomes clear further down the line, however, that the speaker is not
yet finished with the evaluation of his current work situation. He continues by clarifying that ‘I
can have a better life than some time ago’. It thus becomes obvious that he draws a comparison
with his past in order to come up with a relatively positive estimate of the present. In that way,
the speaker uses a progressive narrative which allows him to claim that compared with the past
when it ‘really […] used to be a struggle’, his present life is infinitely better. Despite the brevity
of this illustration, it is fair to say overall that this latter rhetorical account can be seen as typical
of those practitioners who set up their own development organization.
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Subject Positions
There is a striking aspect to the subject positions arising from the entrepreneurship
repertoire: although terms such as ‘self-made man’, ‘perseverance’ or ‘risk-taking’ are used
frequently, the term ‘entrepreneur’ is rarely employed. It could be argued that the image of
the entrepreneur has negative connotations in the realm of development aid and that it is
therefore not used by practitioners because such a negative term would not fit their self-
narration. Although this explanation makes perfect sense, I must point out that I am not able
to substantiate such an assertion. I would nevertheless like to point out that what is
conspicuous in the first place is that practitioners’ narratives make clear that entrepreneurial
subject positions are not dependent upon the explicit use of the concept ‘entrepreneurship’.
By implication, the representation of entrepreneurs can nonetheless, though indirectly, be
established by interweaving particular attributes into a story. Whereas the investigation at
large has shown that practitioners do not simply adopt the ‘muscular discourse’ (cf. Alvesson
& Karreman, 2000) of entrepreneurship, it also has illustrated that speakers are ‘bound to
make choices’ (Edley, 2001, p. 190) so as to appropriate the available stock of commonsense
arguments. It is only by appropriating lived ideologies in the context of concrete narratives
that practitioners are able to ‘maneuver and negotiate their own understanding within their
own particular worlds’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p. 44). In other words, the observation that
practitioners do not use the sign ‘entrepreneur’ to denote their identities does not necessarily
lead to the conclusion that they consciously reject such a signification. Rather, I see this state
of affairs as an indication that the sign ‘entrepreneur’ does not, for whatever reasons, appear
useful for making sense of practitioners’ concrete circumstances and experiences. Although
one could speculate, as I briefly did above, that the concept ‘entrepreneur’ has (or would
have) been unhelpful in practitioners’ sensemaking (Weick, 1993), I am more interested in
discussing what sort of identities speakers’ narratives have actually created. It has been
mentioned elsewhere that the individual entrepreneur is often described as a heroic, self-
determined figure (Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996; cf. Chapter 2). However, it became clear in
the course of the analysis that such an image is not revealed in practitioners’ narratives. What
has been revealed, however, is that the entrepreneurship repertoire provides a discursive
space in which the person is not seen as a larger-than-life figure but as a hard-working, at
times creative and, most importantly, independent and single-minded person. In addition, it
has been shown that the subject position encouraged by the entrepreneurship repertoire has
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suggested an image of actors who ‘sacrifice’ a normal life for a career which gives them
autonomy and individual self-fulfillment (cf. du Gay, 2000b). Hence, though the
entrepreneurship repertoire does not envisage the practitioner as an above-average character,
it became clear through the discursive investigation that the work they pursue turns them into
outstanding and special people and, most fundamentally, into people who are supposed to go
‘against the grain’ (cf. also Foss, 2004). It is important to note, then, that going against the
grain is not so much seen as a characteristic of notorious people, but as the sort of behavior
(rather than a personality trait) which is essential for carrying out successful development
aid. To be clear on this, although the entrepreneurship repertoire gives rise to subject
positions which tend to portray practitioners as people who lead unconventional lives, it does
not follow from this that they are represented as isolated mavericks. Quite the contrary,
though the entrepreneurship repertoire paints an image of practitioners as persons who lead
unconventional lives it simultaneously represents them as responsible and caring citizens
who are fully engaged with and committed to their immediate environment or life context.
Overall Reflection
As discussed in the first part of this chapter, the 1980s were called the ‘decade of enterprise’.
This shows, among other things, that collectivist ideas and particularly the idea of state
control and the image of the state as public service provider were replaced by the orthodoxy
of individualism (Rose, 2000). Entrepreneurship, which gained massive currency in
‘everyday as well as more academic contexts’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p. 33), has thus not
only been propounded by both rightist and leftist parties as a means for the economic
regeneration of local economies, but also through more recent Third World development
policies (Ranking, 2001). Given the objective and research question of the present
investigation, it is worth recalling here that my discourse analysis of practitioners’ talk was
not so much aiming at inquiring how ‘enterprise culture’ (du Gay & Salaman, 1992) is
endorsed on a strategic level by, for instance, the UN and World Bank. Rather, the aim of my
study was to establish if and how the idea of entrepreneurship is mobilized through the social
practices (i.e. discourses) of NGO practitioners. The analysis has brought to light that the
entrepreneurship repertoire construes development from the perspective of the NGO and in
particular (but not exclusively) from the perspective of individual practitioners. In opposition
to the benevolence repertoire which largely revolves around the indigenous people and in
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contrast to the professionalism repertoire which makes donor agencies its focus, we have
shown that the entrepreneurship tends to generate narratives which focus on the experiences
of the single practitioner, and his or her organization. The discourse analysis presented here
thus suggests, among other things, that speakers typically tell their stories by making
reference to events and deeds which are exemplary for entrepreneurial conduct. This
estimation seems justifiable if one recalls that practitioners’ narratives often present an image
of the hard-working, persistent, innovative and business-sensitive practitioner who is not
only strong enough to deal with the ordeals of everyday development work but who even
finds both pleasure and fulfillment in pursuing a life which is construed as considerably
deviating from the norm. I would like to recall here that it is conspicuous that concepts such
as ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘enterprising’ have hardly ever been deployed. Given the analytic focus
of this investigation, the reason for this absence will remain the object of speculation.
However, to put things bluntly, we can claim that, notwithstanding the manifest absence of
the concept of ‘entrepreneur’, speakers’ accounts undoubtedly reflect the prototypical story
of the enterprising person who works under uncertain (market) conditions (Fletcher, 2003).
Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that the outcomes and effects of entrepreneurial
development endeavors have more often than not been illustrated with reference to economic
parameters (e.g. the rise of the living standard of indigenous people). The point worth
making here is that such accounts are based on a distinctively economic logic, thus
conceiving of development aid as the task of (re)allocating resources so as to maximize
economic value. However, this is not to say that the entrepreneurship repertoire is completely
ignorant of the social ramifications of development endeavors. Rather, the entrepreneurship
repertoire reveals that the social aspect of development (e.g. equality, participation,
inclusion, etc.; cf., once more, the benevolence repertoire) is mostly envisaged in terms of an
economic logic. The following extract, for instance, illustrate this state of affairs. The
narrator here contends that the risks inherent in development aid make it necessary to think
about one’s decisions very carefully.
P7: … that it aaa a that they [the indigenous] don’t sustain the projects because suddenly they gain
some wealth (hm) if they become rich I mean rich in quotation marks but compared to their
previous situation they do become rich (hm) then they ask what they shall do with the money and
it can happen that they sell things again or (hm) …
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The speaker in this extract construes sudden economic wealth as a potential threat to the
overall viability of development projects. The point to be stressed here is that money and
economic wealth are depicted as both a blessing and an evil. In contrast to the school of
entrepreneurship literature which claims that entrepreneurship is chiefly about economic
value creation (e.g. Schumpeter, 1934), the above account emphasizes that wealth can easily
produce a boomerang-effect, since people tend to be corrupted by the sudden availability of
money. It is crucial to point out that the entrepreneurship repertoire construes development
aid (including its problematic aspects) by adopting an economic perspective. As a result,
both success and failure are judged in terms of criteria such as, for example, employment,
income creation and economic sustainability.
P2: … a lot of people finally aa … can earn a living by means of collecting newspapers … (hm) and I
took that idea and went to Y [name of local organization] … I then showed them a sample (hm) and
they said ‘yes’ provided that it wouldn’t be more expensive than in D [name of country] …
Two things immediately are striking in this extract. First, the speaker justifies his project on the
basis of an economic rationale, stating that his project would allow ‘a lot of people’ to ‘earn a
living’. Second, this economic logic is pursued in the second part of the statement where the
speaker describes how his partner organization (‘Y’) approved his project upon the recognition
that it could be realized at a reasonable cost (‘and they said ‘yes’ provided that it wouldn’t be
more expensive than in D’). The entrepreneurship repertoire undoubtedly has a tendency to
describe and justify development aid on the basis of an economic logic. This tendency can be
partly explained, if one takes into account that this economic logic has been mainly (though not
exclusively) revealed in narratives by practitioners who work in NGOs that rely on income-
creating strategies (cf. Dees, 1998; 1998b). I would like to close this reflection by suggesting, on
the basis of my interview material, that the image of entrepreneurial conduct has gained access to
the field of development NGOs. The broader implications of this observation, particularly in
relation to the overall research question of my investigation, will now become the subject of my
final reflections.
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Summary & Meta-Reflection
In general terms, we can say that the discursive analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk has revealed
three recurring argumentative patterns which for which the labels ‘benevolence’,
‘professionalism’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ repertoire were used. Irrespective of the fact that there
were significant differences in the frequency of their use – the benevolence repertoire being the
most prominent and the entrepreneurship repertoire the most marginal scheme of reasoning – it is
worth noting that the analysis of practitioners’ talk brought to light three broadly distinguishable
argumentative threads which each engendered both a different evaluative description of
development as well as different subject positions.
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Thus the benevolence repertoire established
a particular focus on the perspective of help recipients, mainly stressing the mutually rewarding
and/or emancipatory aspect of development. In contrast, the professionalism repertoire stressed
the importance of donor relations. Finally, the entrepreneurship repertoire largely threw into relief
both the difficulties and self-affirmation related with the conduct of one’s own development
organization. Although the distinction between these three foci is not as clear-cut as the previous
analysis might have suggested (cf. below), it is still safe to claim that each repertoire conveyed a
distinctly different aspect of development. Hence, apart from illuminating that practitioners work
on the basis of different rationalities, I would like to draw attention to a further outcome, namely
that the discursive investigation allowed one to see, however provisionally, how development aid
and personal identity are revealed through discursive performances, that is, through the use of
language within local conversations. In other words, whereas discourses analysis is generally
premised on the assumption that discourse is to be seen as a multi-faceted process through which
meaning is progressively and dynamically achieved (Davies & Harré, 1990), I used my analysis
to illustrate how different versions of development and personal subjectivities are actively
constructed. Therefore, analyzing how practitioners use language to establish their work context
(i.e. development) and hence position themselves as reasonable and socially legitimate people,
immediately implies that practitioners’ utterances are not to be construed as the straightforward
emptying out of pre-ordained attitudes (Speer & Potter, 2000), but rather as social practices
110
In light of my interpretive involvement in the analysis, i.e. my implicit position as a ‘sculptor’ (Barthes, 1968),
and taking into account the geo-political context of this investigation, it probably hardly needs to be mentioned that
alternative readings and/or other emphasis of practitioners’ narratives would have been possible (cf. Hook, 2001).
The aim of this clarification is not to introduce a new problem, but simply to emphasize that discourse analysis and
interpretation at large are always subject to or, to use a more affirmative term, amenable to multiple readings,
polysemia and/or ‘libidinal drifts’ (more on that later).
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which makes identity and social reality possible in the first place (Berger & Luckman, 1966). By
the same token, since meaning is not innate to our social world but a local and transient social
accomplishment as explained above, we can further note that the identified interpretive
repertoires and subject positions can neither be envisaged as transcendental expressions of, for
instance, practitioners’ attitudes or identities (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996; Edwards,
1997) nor as simple identifications with pre-ordained (intellectual) ideologies (Billig et al., 1988).
Rather, the identified argumentative threads as well as the social realities and identities they
engender are inextricably linked with the context (i.e. interview) in which they are uttered. In this
way, the meaning making of practitioners is to be seen as fundamentally instable, i.e. in-
transcendental.
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It is at this juncture that I would like to recall once more that practitioners’ talk
is inevitably shaped by the available stock of cultural knowledge. This is important to the extent
that it puts the previous analysis into a historical perspective, meaning that the conversational
resources practitioners deploy in their accounts define a culturally ‘limited’ account of
development work. To put it bluntly, practitioners’ accounts of development are basically ‘no
more’ than the prevailing understanding of the subject matter during a very specific historical,
cultural and political time span. This proposition is well in accordance with Lyotard’s (1984)
treatise on ‘small narratives’: after all, my analysis did not aim at providing a holistic account (i.e.
‘grand narrative’) of what development really is or of the typical psyche or original personality of
development aid practitioners. Quite the contrary, the aim of my discursive investigation was
more modest than that, since it merely tried to bring to the forefront that the ‘truth’ of
development and the ‘being’ of practitioners is invariably contingent on the exercise of ‘choices’
(Newton, 1994).
In the remainder of this chapter, I will now relate the repertoires which I have abstracted
from practitioners’ narratives back to the initial research question with the ultimate objective of
qualifying the issue of hegemony. The question, then, is whether or not practitioners’ talk reveals
a singular, monologic rationality (i.e. economic or business discourse). My general point will be
that the analysis does not suggest that practitioners simply mimic economic discourse. To
demonstrate this estimation, I will emphasize that the three repertoires exhibit a certain amount of
overlap which in turn will lead me to conclude that practitioners’ talk is often aporetic, oscillating
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The particular interview setting of my investigation quite likely endorsed particular constructions of development
and thus favored certain identity performances over others (Davies & Harré, 1990).
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between the social and economic aspects of development aid so as to express (through the use of
language) the oppositions and tensions at the heart of signification. Somewhat in contradiction to
discursive psychology which often construes discourse as a more or less closed system of
meaning, I will claim that practitioners’ talk at times establishes what Bhabha (1994) called a
‘third space of enunciation’, i.e. a linguistic space which allows for the simultaneous existence of
different and even contradictory meanings. On the basis of this insight, the final part of the
chapter will reflect once more on practitioners’ identity performances so as to illustrate through
the concept of ‘hybridity’ that identity performances are never complete, since they always slip
definitive identity inscriptions. I will close the chapter by pointing out that practitioners’
arguments entail ‘interstitial passages’ which enable the non-hierarchical co-existence of different
meanings and, most fundamentally, the parallel existence of multiple identities.
The Question of Hegemony
A lived hegemony is always a process … It is a realised complex of experiences, relationships
and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits … It is also continually
resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. (Williams, 1977, p.
112)
The previous discourse analysis addressed the fundamental question whether practitioners’ talk
brings to the fore a hegemonic picture of development, i.e. representations of development aid
that universalize and essentialize economic or business discourse. On the basis of this analysis, it
appears reasonable to claim that the findings only partly, if at all, support such a view. As shown
above, the interviews exhibited three distinguishable repertoires which each embraces
distinguishable evaluative descriptions. It is clear, therefore, that we cannot claim having revealed
a all-encompassing homology within the interviews (Lyotard, 1993) nor can we assert that
discourse works hegemonically in the sense of rendering invisible alternative schemes of thinking
or, as Leys (1990, p. 127) reminds us, of having ‘no serious rivals’. What the analysis does
reveal, however, is that practitioners’ talk is variegated in the sense that difference (or
‘différance’; cf. Derrida, 1976) and not sameness represents the organizing principle of speakers’
language use. This result clearly stands in opposition to Murphy (2000) who asserted, among
others, that contemporary NGO managers ‘aggressively – sometimes ruthlessly’ (p. 33) adopt the
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ethos of ‘result-based management’. More precisely, my investigation has sketched out a picture
of development which is more ‘in tune’ with Grillo’s contention that within development ‘there
have always been a multiplicity of voices … even if some are more powerful than others’ (Grillo,
1997, p. 22). What this implies is that the present analysis to some extent stands in opposition to
those (postcolonial) studies which delineate development work as being victimized or even
annexed by neo-liberal or neo-conservative discourse and which furthermore proclaim that
managerialism has been imposed as the ineluctable imperative of development NGOs (e.g.
Uphoff, 1996). In this way, it can be concluded that the analysis gives some indication of the
grounded impossibility of a complete Gramscian hegemony or of a novel form of semantic
colonialism (Brigg, 2002) through neo-liberal orthodoxy or managerialism. In addition, I want to
point out that the analysis brings to the forefront that the respective repertoires at times stand in
competition with each other. The signification of development, as a result of competing
rationalities, turns out to be a multi-faceted social process through which meaning is constantly
created, contested and hence re-created (Kress & Hodge, 1985). Although I have pointed out that
practitioners, within one and the same interview, tend to shift from one argumentative position to
another, it is equally important to note that the different repertoires and their related subject
positions often either contradict themselves or they contradict other possible repertoires and
subject positions. Thus NGO practitioners do not provide us with a univocal view of development
aid, but instead put forward representations (plural) that suggest a terrain of contested meaning.
Looked at in this way, the construction(s) of development and the subject positions entailed
therein are not the result of a linear, non-contradictory narrative plotting, but rather the
cumulative fragments of contested history (Davies & Harré, 1990). Yet, though I am keen to
emphasize the ostensible paradoxes in practitioners’ talk, this observation is less to be read as the
identification of practitioners’ contradictoriness (in the negative sense) than as a sign of the
eminent flexibility of language and, by implication, of the constant ‘floating’ of meaning (Potter,
1998). Davies and Harré’s (1990) notion of ‘fragment’ is useful here, since it takes into account
the transient, locally emergent condition of all conversations and the flux-like ontology of
identity. In addition, having proclaimed at the beginning of this chapter that development has at
all times been a contested terrain and that there were always a variety of discourses which
struggled for recognition, it is rather unsurprising that practitioners’ talk also revealed a certain
amount of contradiction. Moreover, taking into consideration that most practitioners worked in
small-size NGOs where they often performed a variety of managerial, operational and
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administrative tasks,
112
it is even more understandable why practitioners often sketched out
argumentative positions differing from each other. Yet again, this observation is not to be
trivialized, since it shows not only that practitioners deploy and intermingle different interpretive
repertoires to render their accounts of development persuasive, but also that their use of multiple
repertoires and, the ‘colliding/competing/overlapping of discourse’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p.
35) represents the generic principle of all knowing and thinking (Billig, 1987; Billig et al., 1988).
Having claimed that the analysis of practitioners’ talk makes a downright hegemonic (i.e.
economic or managerial) view of development defeasible or at least questionable, we must
simultaneously recall that none of the identified repertoires completely steps outside of the
economic language game. More precisely, the analysis has clearly shown that the images of
development are characterized by ambivalence, meaning that the representations of development
as well as the constructions of selves are neither in complete accordance with neo-liberal
orthodoxy or managerialism nor completely outside of their theoretical parameters, so to speak.
To qualify practitioners’ discourses as ambivalent seems justifiable, especially if one takes into
account that all three interpretive repertoires, though to different degrees, emphasized the social
and economic features of development. This state of affairs, then, further implies that it is literally
impossible to explain, in an exhaustive way, either one of the three interpretives through the
dogma of economic managerialism or through the social rationality of development (e.g.
empowerment, self-determination, participation, etc.). Thus departing from the observation that
the different interpretive repertoires are ambivalent in that they mobilize both social and
economic frames of reasoning, the next section takes this idea one step further. That is, I will
illustrate that the repertoires often conflate social and economic arguments which I will then
construe as the creation of a situation of undecidability which chiefly expresses the irresolvable
oppositions and tensions at the heart of contemporary aid.
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As briefly alluded to in the method section, it was not uncommon for NGOs to be run by one single or only a few
persons.
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The Connectivity of Discourse and the Moment of Aporia
In der Welt ist es sehr selten mit dem Entweder-Oder getan. [The world is very seldom composed
in terms of either-or] (Goethe, 2004, p. 43)
The central aim of the previous analysis was to abstract from the thirty interviews, in the best
sense of Denzin and Lincoln’s (1998) notion of ‘bricolage’, the three most significant, frequent
and distinct interpretive repertoires. I would now also like to point out that these three interpretive
repertoires – irrespective of their notable differences – revealed a fair amount of overlap
regarding the terms, concepts or codes deployed. For instance, ‘efficiency’ was used by all three
repertoires, as were notions associated with noble deeds (e.g. doing good, helping, emancipating)
and social intentions and aspirations (e.g. morality, responsibility, etc.). Although I am convinced
that it is important to highlight the overlap between the three interpretive repertoires, this again is
not meant to say that they work on the basis of the same logic and even less that the three
repertoires propound the same meaning of development. Hence, while it is undoubted that the
meaning and evaluative accent of notions such as ‘efficiency’ are inextricably linked with the
specific repertoire in which the term is uttered (cf. Chapter 4), it is even more striking that the
interviews exhibit what Briadotti (1994) called a ‘traffic jam of meanings’ (p. 16). Essentially, the
idea that meanings always collide directly implies that discourse is never a closed system (Potter,
Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002), i.e. an independent system of significations, but rather an
ongoing sensemaking process which necessarily integrates alternative and at times opposing
argumentative positions. For instance, it has been mentioned that the benevolence repertoire,
which primarily construes development as an act of helping and caring for the indigenous other,
has periodically emphasized the economic fundamentals of development work. The
professionalism repertoire, which most notably emphasized the centrality of donor relations while
maintaining that one must adhere to the principles of sound administration, also comprised a set
of arguments which either stressed the good intentions of practitioners or the social objectives of
development endeavors. The entrepreneurship repertoire, which conceptualized development
mainly from the perspective of practitioners’ NGOs, simultaneously made allusions to prevailing
business practices (e.g. cost-benefit analysis) while at the same time pointing out that
development aid presupposes social ideals on the part of the practitioners. If, then, one
acknowledges that all three repertoires are ambiguous, it immediately becomes arguable that
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neither repertoire is only based either on a social or economic rationality. For instance, in view of
the observations that the benevolence repertoire does not only highlight the social features of
development and that the professionalism repertoire does not only cover economic and
managerial aspects of development, it seems safe to claim that the three repertoires oscillate
between the two semantic meta-frames. That is to say, following Hall (1997), that meaning is not
stable but floats. Although both the analytic procedure and the process of representation of my
discourse analysis ineluctably reduced the complexity of meaning (creation), it must nevertheless
be emphasized that we cannot determine stricto sensu that any of the three repertoires is either
social or economic. Having said this, the previous discourse analysis seems to indicate that any
version of development practitioners put forward is always subject to hesitations and constant re-
appraisals. Moreover, the meaning of development and work-based subjectivity needs to be
conceived as being contingent on an ongoing, iterative process of signification. In other words,
though the present investigation obviates the possibility of saying that the repertoires define
development exclusively as a social or as an economic issue, I find it revealing that the three
repertoires often contain both perspectives at the same time (cf. Hall, 1997). This finding thus
makes it clear that the ambivalence in practitioners’ accounts of development renders final
‘either-or’ conclusions untenable and, instead, suggests a logic of ‘as well as’. For instance, the
benevolence repertoire, which for the most part highlights the social deeds and ambitions of
development, typically also comprises arguments which interlace the social trajectory of
development with the pragmatic demands, not to say imperatives, of economics. In this way, the
benevolence repertoire renders development an endeavor that presupposes a sensitivity for both
social and economic affairs. To give a further example: the professionalism repertoire, which for
the most part upholds the primacy of the economic realm, comprises a number of disclaimers
which construe development as an inherently social affair. To put things bluntly, one could say
that within the benevolence repertoire a primarily social plot is interspersed with economic
arguments whereas the professionalism repertoire is primarily characterized by an economic (or,
more precisely, managerial) logic which, however, is repeatedly spiced up with a social stream of
reason. Invoking philosophy to qualify this observation, it becomes arguable that practitioners’
discourse reveals the aporia of development (cf. Chapter 2), meaning that the discursive accounts
of development retain a certain amount of undecidability while simultaneously prompting ‘an
irresolvable contradiction, a tension between demands that pull us in two directions’ (Jones,
2003, p. 228). The condition of undecidability thus renders (part of) practitioners’ discourse an
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eminently unstable endeavor. Yet it is important to note that the notion of ‘aporia’ does not imply
that we are simply dealing with a mere contradiction in practitioners’ talk. Nor do the
ambivalence and the contradictions in practitioners’ talk directly indicate that meanings need ‘to
be understood in their interactional particulars’ (Speer & Potter, 2000, p. 563). Although both
these points are relevant in their own right, the notion of ‘aporia’ neither represents vagueness nor
contradiction (cf. Jones, 2003), but chiefly implies a recognition that any given discourse may
contain two (or more) meanings as a result of which the person is drawn into two directions,
‘oscillating between [different] possibilities’ of meaning (Derrida, 1988, p. 148). Derrida (1995)
further claimed that aporia denotes experiences in which something is ‘neither simply this nor
simply that, this and that being contradictory, one must have both this and that and go from this to
that’ (p. 65; emphasis in original). Given this observation, it hardly needs to be mentioned that
practitioners’ talk is subject to a comparable dynamic due to which development becomes
‘neither simply this nor simply that’. The previous analysis of ideological dilemmas chiefly
delineated how practitioners typically oscillate between social and economic arguments. In line
with this analysis, the idea of aporia acknowledges that experience (and meaning) is not reducible
to ‘either this or that’. At a more fundamental level, aporia defines paradox as a moment of
undecidability (Derrida, 1995). In obvious contrast to the route of (postcolonial) literature which
claims that development NGOs are inclined to integrate managerial savvy (Murphy, 2000) since
this significantly reduces not only their immediate problems (e.g. fundraising, internal and
external accountability, etc.) but also makes their lives easier as a whole, practitioners’ narratives
present an arguably more complex image of development. In blunt terms, we can state that the
aporia revealed in practitioners’ talk gives expression to the oppositions and tensions at the heart
of development aid. Looked at in this way, practitioners’ aporias aptly illustrate how people
struggle when trying to integrate two (or more) irreconcilable demands. Two things must be
noted here. First, the claim that aporia is the expression of negativity would immediately lead to a
loss in the profundity of the concept, since it would ignore that tensions and paradoxes are a
preeminent aspect of a genuinely responsible commitment (Derrida, 1999). Nor is aporia to be
construed as the materialization of the problems development aid practitioners’ experience within
their daily work, i.e. in the sphere outside of language. Rather, aporia is to be seen as conflict
resulting from the very use of language. In other words, it is the clash of meaning engendered
through individual utterances. In consequence, aporia leads to the recognition that certain
experiences or issues defy easy solutions, since it does not permit an unproblematic decision for
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either one position (i.e. social or economic). Aporia, then, is chiefly about letting meaning (and
decision) ‘hang in the air’, so to speak, while nevertheless engaging with the irresolvable tensions
and paradoxes of development aid.
Above, I have re-appropriated Derrida’s idea of aporia to make the point that development
aid practitioners’ talk exceeds the possibility of a simple dialectic between ‘either this or that’. In
the following paragraph I will briefly elaborate on the issue of ideological dilemmas so as to
discuss, among other things, that practitioners’ talk directly calls into question a purely functional
understanding of language. Invoking Bhabha (1994) to make my point, I will notably use his
concept of ‘third space of enunciation’. This concept fosters a view of language in which
contradictory meanings stand side by side, mobilized yet unresolved.
‘Ideological Dilemmas’ and the Permeable Boundaries of Discourse
The I … has no contours, it is the blankness of all colors and all nuances, it is open and
translucent welcome of a multiplicity of thoughts … (Serres, 1995, p. 31)
Returning to the issue of ideological dilemmas, the first point I want to make stands in obvious
contrast to the canon of discursive psychology and particularly the assumption that language is
necessarily functional in the sense that ‘(w)hat is picked out in talk depends on the orientation
and interests of the speaker’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002, p.162). In this way, I want
to take issue with the assertion that utterances can always be decoded according to the ‘social
intention’ of the person who did the talking (Davies & Harré, 1990). Discursive psychology
certainly acknowledges that (subject and object) positionings in discourse (Smith, 1988) are not
intentional in any determinate sense. However, discursive psychology holds, at least implicitly,
that discourse is based upon clear-cut boundaries and that people within conversations use
language according to their immediate needs. Discursive psychology therefore exhibits a
tendency to envisage interpretive repertoires as linguistic devices which are ‘invoked according
to their suitability to an immediate context’ (Potter at al., 2002, p. 169). Needless to say,
interpretive repertoires are commonly construed as ‘flexible resources that are artfully and
knowingly invoked by people’ (ibid.). Although it is undoubted that many scholars working on
the basis of Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) scheme of discourse analysis are aware that it is
untenable to denote discourse as an ‘unrealistically closed system’ (Potter et al., 2002, p. 170), it
342
can nevertheless be objected that the theory of interpretive repertoires departs from the
assumption that conversations are either (socially) intentional or at least functional. By the same
token, rhetorical analysis operates on the premise that people jostle with contrary themes in order
to position them in a culturally commensurate way. Billig (1987, 2001) clarified that this jostling
is part and parcel of arguing and thinking and that such linguistic ‘maneuvers’ are most frequent
(since rhetorically effective) when people have to deal with ideological topics. It is implied, then,
that contrary themes of commonsense, i.e. ‘lived ideology’ are used in order to either justify or
criticize particular views.
113
While ideology is said to provide ‘the resources for thinking about
ordinary life’ (Verkuyten, 2003, p. 141), it is always seen to be performative to the extent that it
provides people with the means for accounting and rendering persuasive their talk. What is
revealed here is that psychological discourse analysis as well as rhetorical analysis both suggest
that people use language to solve the dilemmas inherent in their talk and hence to ‘obscure’ that
their accounts are based on a tense relationship between contradictory repertoires. Stated
otherwise, speakers are assumed to flexibly create the impression of an uncontroversial account
(e.g. Billig, 1991; Edley & Wetherell, 1997; Edley, 2001). The point to be made, then, is that
certain dilemmas, irrespective of the social convention of non-contradiction (Davies & Harré,
1990), remain acute or active since they are not and cannot be solved by rhetorical means. I have
already mentioned that the investigation of NGO practitioners has revealed that development is
typically constructed through the continuous intermingling of socially, economically, and
managerially inclined argumentative threads. It must be added that what is most striking about
this intermingling is that none of the repertoires eventually gains the definitive ‘upper hand’
(Derrida, 1981). We could argue, then, that practitioners’ narratives establish a dialogue between
those repertoires that articulate the social ramifications and merits of development work and those
that highlight its managerial practices and economic premises. To be clear on this, conventional
rhetorical analysis asserts that people, when dealing with ideological dilemmas, always favor one
particular perspective or position. However, the present investigation seems more in accordance
with van de Berg’s (2003) observation that not all dilemmas are solved through the use of
language, since there are cases in which people constantly ‘switch between incompatible
repertoires’ (p. 135). In opposition to van de Berg’s contention that the oscillation between
113
Racist talk has become a preferred topic for illustrating how people use interpretive resources to position
themselves as either racist or anti-racist.
343
repertoires is intelligible if one takes into account ‘the issue at hand in the conversation’ (ibid.), I
would claim that the interviews revealed a particular overlap of repertoires (cf. above). Therefore
it would seem wrong to sustain the idea that the repertoires are separated through clear and stable
boundaries. What this means, among other things, is that practitioners’ talk does not allow for a
strict separation of repertoires and even less for a judgment of the preferableness of repertoires,
i.e. which one of the contradictory repertoires is favored by the practitioner. Although I have
presented the three repertoires separately (which, of course, fosters the impression of
distinctness), it must remain clear that this analytic distinction between ‘this and not this’
(Lyotard, 1993; cf. Chapter 4) has primarily been performed for reasons of clarity. This said, I
want to point out that the ideological dilemmas stimulated by the mobilization of the social and
the economic arguments of development aid have often remained acute and unresolved which,
however, ‘cannot “in itself” be conscious’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 36). To apply a concept of Bhabha
(1994) to this observation, we can say that practitioners use language in a way that creates a ‘third
space of enunciation’
114
in which the mobilization of contradictory positions, irresolvable
antagonisms and ambivalences create a condition in which multiple ‘in-between’ meaning(s)
become possible. More precisely, following Bhabha’s claim that the ‘third space of enunciation’
notably emphasizes that discourse entails the possibility of co-existent meanings, it is evident that
this view challenges the assumption that people, when dealing with controversial themes,
ultimately and necessarily favor a single perspective or argumentative position. Thus while
Bhabha’s concept of a ‘third space of enunciation’ acknowledges the irresolvable antagonisms of
discourse, it also takes into account that the production of meaning is at times subject to the
intermingling of detrimentally opposed positions. I therefore suggest that the single most
important tenet of Bhabha’s ‘third space’ concept is that it does not construe discourse as a
system of simple binary antagonisms. Rather, ‘third space of enunciation’ chiefly implies that
constructions of development are often ‘neither one nor the other’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 25). On the
face of it, the idea of ‘third space’, conceived as the semantic space being engendered through the
‘clash’ of opposing views, leads to a downright rejection of discursive psychology’s proposition
that people necessarily ‘produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction’ (ibid.). Again,
in opposition to certain uses of rhetorical analysis, Bhabha’s ‘third space’ engenders a viewpoint
114
Bhabha used the notion of ‘third space’ to show that any cultural identity in the ‘contact zone’ of intercultural
relations is constructed in a hybrid space. ‘Third space’, by implication, does not suggest a mere exchange between
cultures but that living in the ‘in-between’ produces entirely new cultural forms.
344
from which it becomes arguable that practitioners’ talk retains difference. Moreover, the notion of
a ‘third space’ entails that the construction of development is enhanced rather than undermined
by the synchronous activation of conflicting (lived) ideologies.
It is obvious that this way of thinking about the use of language allows a dialogic
understanding of communication
115
which acknowledges that multiple meanings can be generated
in any one saying. In the following section I will briefly elaborate on how this proposition relates
to practitioners’ subjectivity.
Hybridity and Subject Positions
The self is the One who is not dominated … but to be One is to be an illusion … to be other is to
be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. (Haraway, 1991, p. 177)
A first point I would like to address here relates to Davies and Harré’s (1990) claim that though
people can have many coherent selves in a single story, they nevertheless seek to act rationally.
Consequently, they tend to remedy, resolve or simply ignore contradictions. This observation,
while concurring with the central premises of discursive psychology, is undeniably revealing, and
I have no interest in either rejecting the idea that multiple selves are made possible through
discourse or in scrutinizing Davies and Harré’s view that social conventions induce people to act
as consistent, rational beings.
116
After all, Davies and Harré quite reasonably proclaim that one
would undermine the convention of logic and coherence if a person at the same time stated that
he or she was going to Boston and New York. I have already mentioned that the permeable
boundaries between the single interpretive repertoires make it impossible to judge whether the
single repertoires emphasizes only the social or economic features of development. That is to say,
then, that practitioners’ discourse does contain a certain degree of inconsistency (though not on
the level of logic) to the extent that it renders futile any estimate of development in terms of the
social-economic dualism. With respect to the construction of practitioners’ subjectivity, this
observation requires at least two rectifications. First, contradictions do not point at a
115
It is noteworthy that Bhabha’s (1994) ‘The Location of Culture’ was inspired by Bakhtin’s work on dialogic
imagination.
116
As Harré and Secord (1973) remind us, since any conversation is invariably experienced from at least two
separate positions, there are good reasons to believe that any easy assumption of shared meaning is militated or at
least defeasible (cf. also Pearce, 1989).
345
dysfunctional order of reason, but provide the essential basis for thinking not only about the
world but also about the self (Billig, 1987). Second, contradictions create a third space of
enunciation which, by mobilizing two or more semantic frames of reference, enables the
performance of selves on the basis of difference. Having said this, I would like to show how the
undecidability or flux (Hall, 1997) revealed in practitioners’ discourse has a bearing on subject
positions. To this end, I would once more like to refer to Homi Bhabha (1994) who sketched out
the notion of ‘hybridity’ to argue that culture never pertains to strict boundaries. Cultures,
according to Bhabha, always intermingle with each other, meaning that the contact zone of
culture invariably becomes a space of transgression (Foucault, 1998; cf. Chapter, 6) in which new
ways of being are made possible. As with Bhabha’s ‘third space’ concept, hybridity points out the
political immediacy of cultural contact, since it implies that people are always and necessarily
subject to change. According to Lucas (1997), the ‘third space’ represents a ‘zone of mediation
and activity that seeks to subvert’, since it mobilizes contradictory, opposing views to release
difference and enable an ‘in-between-zone’ where ‘no political ideologies could claim
transcendent or metaphysical authorities for themselves’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 148). Needless to say,
as the ‘third space’ establishes a split between oppositional lived ideologies this has, of course,
important implications for the discursive construction of subjectivity. In concrete terms, in view
of my previous assertion that practitioners’ interpretive repertoires are ambivalent, it follows that
the performance of self is to be seen as a process that makes the social and the economic ‘come
alive’ within single utterances. By extension, the performance of subjectivity engenders hybrids
as practitioners within their talk constantly move back and forth along the avowed opposition
between the social and the economic. Hence, Bhabha’s eloquent treatise implies that social and
economic streams of arguments perpetually cross over up to the point where practitioners’ selves
are never simply one ‘thing’ or another. That is, instead of being incompatible antagonisms (i.e.
social versus economic man), the two frames of reference are conjoined in the ‘in-between-zone’
so as to create unprecedented forms of self (and other). Essentially, hybrid selves are enabled by
the social condition of articulation, i.e. through ‘the temporal caesura, which is also the
historically transformative moment, when a lagged space opens up in-between the intersubjective
reality of signs … and the historical development of the subject in the order of social symbols’
(Bhabha, 1994, p. 242; slightly modified). In consequence, conceiving of practitioners’ subject
positions as hybrids means, among other things, that the construction of selves is carried out
within the terms provided by lived ideology (rather than in opposition to them; cf. Chapter 6).
346
This clarification is important since it indicates that to become other, people do not necessarily
need to step outside the given commonsense. Hence, instead of striving for a novel language,
people are able to effectuate a split between inherited forms of knowledge and ‘the true’ (Bhabha,
1994, p. 22). Change of the self is hence always achieved within the parameters of the given
semantic order. Obviously then, it is the concept of ‘hybridity’ that shows how language works
dialogically so as to omit monologic discourse. When the avowed polarity between the social and
the economic is exploited, the ‘third space of enunciation’ on the one hand ‘estranges any
immediate access to an originary identity’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2). On the other hand, the ‘third
space of enunciation’ opens up an ‘interstitial passage between fixed identifications’ which, in
turn, creates ‘the possibility of a … hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or
imposed hierarchy’ (p. 4). Hybridity, so it seems, is chiefly about invention precisely because it
disrupts homogenizing claims of culture, economy, etc. and because it engenders ‘borderline
existences’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 218) and the ‘creation of agency through incommensurable (not
simply multiple) [subject] positions’ (p. 231).
Inter-textual Reference and Outlook
In my assessment, it is not exaggerated to claim that ‘agency’ has for a long time been a ‘hot
topic’ in the realm of discourse theory. This is evident from the observation that scholars
keep trying to grapple with the question of whether people determine their selves in a
purposeful and deliberate manner or whether they are more to be seen as the mere ‘by-
product’ of discourse. The question of agency is thereby notably discussed in relation or,
more precisely, in opposition to Foucault’s work in which discourse is described as the social
practice that forms the objects of which is speaks (cf. Berard, 1999). Since the previous
discourse analysis shed light on the subject positions contained in or made possible through
the three interpretive repertoires, it is clear that the analytic focus has not been put on how
practitioners’ define, in a sovereign manner, their individuality, but rather how the three
repertoires each engender different kinds of subjectivity. In view of my previous assertion
that discourses or interpretive repertoires provide the means through which we ‘constitute
ourselves as subjects of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 237), we must further note that the
analysis presumed that discourse, and not practitioners, bring about particular subject
347
positions. I would therefore like to point out that my analysis of practitioners’ discursive
practices does not necessarily imply that practitioners were simply determined by discourse.
Instead, I have tried to illustrate that practitioners’ use of language creates a ‘discursive
space’ that ‘categorizes the individual, marks him out by his own individuality, attaches him
to his identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have
to recognize in him’ (Foucault, 1982b, p. 212). Admittedly, this view might still appear to
put too much stress on the force of discourse. I have tried to emphasize that discourse is not
predominantly a repressive force but equally a phenomenon that makes things possible (i.e.
‘real’) in the first place. Consequently, it is clear that Foucault’s investigation of discourse,
power and knowledge as well as his successors’ work on the interrelation between discourse
and subjectivity (e.g. Rose, 1985; 1990; Hollway, 1991; Knights & Morgan, 1991; Newton,
1994) have chiefly been appropriated to construe discourse as a quasi-autonomous
phenomenon that constitutes passive subjects (Berard, 1999). This observation, in my
opinion, makes it necessary to conduct a separate investigation of Foucault’s less known
work in which he identified the human agency of individuals through the notion of ‘aesthetic
of existence’ (Foucault, 1990; 1990b). Chapter 6 will therefore discuss how Foucault related
discourse, power and knowledge to the issue of individual self-determination and resistance.
Before turning to Foucault’s ‘aesthetic of existence’, however, I will reflect on the current
state of discourse analysis and discourse theory in the following chapter. This investigation will
thus first take issue with those accounts which primarily denote discourse analysis as a method. I
will argue that any attempt to equate discourse analysis with method immediately necessitates a
technical perspective of method which, as I will discuss, makes impossible (rather than possible)
valuable research. Claiming that it is misleading to demand ever more sophisticated and thorough
guides and recipes for conducting discursive research, I will reject those accounts which delineate
discourse analysis as an ‘automat’ or ‘robot’ (Lyotard, 1993) pretending to lead us more or less
safely and directly to our ‘research destination’ (Law, 2004). After an evidently polemical treatise
of discourse analysis, I will venture into more serious territory in order to point out that in their
analysis discourse scholars often deploy a type of language which engenders a split between the
constative and performative aspect of language (Derrida, 1992), i.e. between what language says
and what it does. Straying into philosophy, I will make use of selected works by Lyotard,
Deleuze, Barthes and others to present a minor use of discourse analysis, that is, a form of
348
discourse analysis which acknowledges the instability inherent in language and which hence
enables connotative, polysemic interpretations.
349
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***
Part III
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‘Lines of Flight’
***
… , the dominant notion of a “text”, of what I still call a “text”, for strategic reasons, in part – is
a “text” that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed
in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly
to something other than itself, to other differential traces. (Derrida, 2004, p. 69)
The future is the way we react to what is happening, it is the way we transform a movement, a
doubt into truth. If we want to be masters of our future, we must fundamentally pose the
question of what today is. (trans. from Foucault, 1994, p. 434)
To be sure, critique or, more precisely, genealogical and deconstructive reflection of the sort
introduced in the first part of this thesis is incommensurable with, even antithetical to the idea of
textual closure conceived as the process which brings something to a conclusion by finishing a
matter in order to go on and embark on a fresh undertaking. Notwithstanding the possibility that
the ironic tone used in Chapter 2 might have added to the impression that a body of thought was
‘closed’ and ‘overcome’, it must be borne in mind that critique – the way it is defined for the
purpose of this investigation – is fully grasped only if one acknowledges its affirmative
trajectory. Departing from Derrida’s use of the French word ‘clôture’ we can thus gain an
understanding of closure as the dislocation of a text from within the text, meaning that one always
has to remain within the tradition one seeks to overcome. As deployed by Derrida, closure or
‘clôture’ is signified not (only) as a technical term that relates to a finite totality but as a code that
engages with the deconstruction of ‘Euro-American metaphysics’ (Law, 2004), i.e. the
identification and reversion of definitive textual closures. In accordance with Derrida’s ‘clôtural’
readings, which thrive on the tension of ‘belonging and the breakthrough’ (Critchley, 1999, p.
70), the following chapters try to work creatively in and from (and hence not against) the
structured field of the given heritage. It needs to be mentioned, then, that the following
elaborations on the name of respectively method (and in particular discourse analysis; Chapter 4),
373
the business school to come (Chapter 5), the interrelation between discourse, subjectivity and
resistance (Chapter 6) as well as the sociality of social entrepreneurship (Chapter 7) all herald an
ultimate concern for re-searching. Re-search, understood in the present context as searching
‘again’, thus means to search for ‘the second time’ and, by implication, searching for what might
have ‘been lost or forgotten’ on the way (Weiskopf, 2002). The ensuing re-search(es) hence start
from the middle of things or, following Deleuze (1988), from asking ‘what can I see, and what
can I say today?’ (p. 119) in order then to endeavor to find possibilities yet not realized. This
interpretation of research contains a concern for the future (quite apart from the interest of
‘normal science’ (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992) in prediction and universal predication) in that ‘the
imagination of possible futures (and future possibilities) is a source of new experiments and
different possible ways of thinking and acting’ (March, 1995, p. 435). Again, none of the
following chapters tries to impart knowledge of a precise nature since precision, as we know and
will elaborate further, is a double-edged sword that tends to fix, freeze and suppress certain
language games (Lyotard, 1988). The subsequent chapters thus deal with the kind of knowledge
that is ‘indistinct’ and ‘slippery’ (Law, 2004) and as such avoids any semiotic ‘imperialism’. In
line with the nature of their subject matters, the objective of these chapters is more modest or at
least different from Enlightenment determinism, since they are ‘connected to the idea of … that
which is subject to doubt and uncertainty, that which might be’ (Cooper, 1993, p. 288). In
consequence, the trajectory of these texts is less imaginable as a straight line than as ‘lines of
flight’ (plural) calling for consecutive openings. Importantly, lines of flight is the allegory I
borrow (and appropriate) from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in order to envisage a sort of writing
that works by virtue of intensification (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003) and by means of releasing the
opportunities contained or suppressed in their respective hyper-organized fields of inquiry. Lines
of flight are therefore conceivable, among other things, as a politico-ethical process of
multiplication which defies a view of resistance and critique as emanating from outside of (or
even against) power in the form of, for instance, ‘the critical philosopher in his ‘safe seat’’
(Lyotard, 1993, p. xxvii). Instead, lines of flight are part and parcel of any system (of power);
they are virtually everywhere, as Fleming (2002) tells us. This said, the objective of the following
chapters is to bring to the forefront the or, rather, some of the lines of flight inherent in
academia’s intellectual purism and thus to deterritorialize established meanings and fixed
perspectives. Allegorically speaking: against the logic of the migrant who flees from a hostile
space to settle down, that is, re-territorialize in another, I prefer, in accordance with Deleuze and
374
Guattari (1987), not to evade the given heritage altogether but to engage with it, to dismantle it in
order to ‘make new connections’ (p. 15).
375
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4
***
Deterritorializing Discourse Analysis
or
For Discourse Analysis … with a ‘Brief’ Detour
Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off. (Nietzsche,
1968, p. 30)
… it is the road towards libidinal currency that must be opened up by force. (Lyotard, 1993, p.
42; emphasis in original)
‘Premonition’
If we opted to begin in an affirmative fashion we could claim that the present essay seeks to
investigate the potential merits of discourse analysis. As the term ‘potential’ suggests, however,
we
117
have chosen to provide a reading of discourse analysis
118
that does not seek to re-perform
the eulogy as manifest, for instance, in Potter and Wetherell (1987), Edwards (1997) or Parker
117
To increase the persuasiveness and argumentative force of this chapter, I have opted to use the plural ‘we’. I hence
follow Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) eloquent (and witty) claim that since each of us is several, one is already quite
a crowd. Moreover, I prefer to say ‘we’ to partly make myself unrecognizable and hence to reach a point where it ‘is
no longer of any importance whether one says I’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3).
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Notwithstanding the fact that ‘discourse analysis’ appears in the title of this chapter, it is most notably grounded
upon those discursive accounts which had their origins in (discourse) psychology.
377
(2002) but which establishes a sense that there are both aesthetical and theoretical puzzles that
need to be addressed. In our opinion, what pushes open and, in one way or another, marks a
hindrance to the ‘blossom’ of discourse analysis is related to two peculiarities: the
territorialization of discourse analysis as method and the use of an over-codifying, ‘hardened’
language.
Addressing issues in succession, the gaze will first be turned towards readings of
discourse analysis which portray the subject matter as a distinct method. Whereas it is quite
possible that discourse analysis is not only a (or even the) method beyond others but also, and
probably even more so, a philosophical position or, as argued by Parker (2000), a paradigmatic
stance characterized by ‘a sensitivity to language’, we shall establish that though most texts on
discourse analysis acknowledge this double condition, there is a prospering tradition which
reduces the matter down to a toolkit approach with a set of do’s and don’ts. What seems to
dampen or de-energize the potential of discourse analysis is that it is perpetually envisaged as a
sort of technological knowledge that lends itself to a consumerist mode of learning, i.e. a sort of
episteme that one can order and provide like a neatly composed meal. Seeking to provide an
answer as to why this conceptualization escapes the austere gaze of the critic, it will be argued
that the field has been successful in protecting and even extending its territory by virtue of an
intriguing amount of ‘identical repetition’ (Cunningham, 2005). This assertion will be
underscored by showing that there is a striking overlap in the wording and structure of such texts.
On the basis of the observation that this mechanic mimicry has, until now, remained a fairly
unreflected affair, it will be posited that this blind-spot is strategic: it makes it impossible to
discern rigid rhetorical conventions as social creations that are due to cunning routinization and
standardization. Moreover, it makes it difficult to see that discourse analysis could actually be
practiced in a different way.
Given that its sophisticated though mimicking rhetoric warrants the field an impressive
gloss and a positive ‘evaluative accent’; Maybin, 2001), it is conspicuous that this quality at the
same time promises to provide the scholar with an ‘automat’, a support device that takes the user
more or less quickly and safely to his or her research destination. As will be discussed, the
method automat holds great promise for redemption in that it pretends to provide the researcher
with an easy way through research and, provided that the prevailing doxa
119
is followed, granting
119
Doxa is opinion, that which everyone knows or, in the case of discourse analysis, everybody should know and
apply.
378
him or her a safe seat in academia. Given this situation, it is questionable whether the equation of
discourse analysis and method (i.e. automat) is of any help in educating the nascent scholar (in
his or her desperate quest for answers), since it obscures the fact that discourse analysis is an
inherently creative process that defies any hastiness and, instead, demands passion, patience and
practice, that is, time. Accordingly, what is problematized in the present essay is that the
establishment of discourse analysis as a method does not in itself enable us to craft a text worth
reading, that is, a text that elicits pleasure and that reveals novel insights.
120
It will be highlighted
that discourse analysis is not only a method that enables the inquiry of language but that its
language conventions and habits of enunciation themselves represent the very limit of its
expressivity and imaginativeness. Therefore, the first part of the ensuing text works as a
springboard for the discovery that there might be much merit in illuminating and undoing some
of the ‘hinterland’ of method (Law, 2004). Calling for some modesty, serenity and affirmation in
the rhetoric of discourse analysis, we will equally try to increase its readability and appeal or, to
use a term coined by Barthes (1974), the ‘writerliness’ of discourse analysis. Consequently,
opting for a transgression of standards of enunciation, we would like to establish a minor form of
discourse analysis.
Following the first part of the investigation, which aspires to stimulate both thought and
amusement, the ‘secondo piatto’ – which is the main course rather than the dessert – will
approach the question of passion ‘from behind’ so as to draw attention not to what causes
pleasure but what causes displeasure in reading discourse analysis. We will hence argue that the
‘machinery of representation’ (Wetherell, 2001) of discourse analysis rests on a collective of
language conventions that tend to produce rather dry and expressively impoverished texts.
Seeking inspiration from philosophical writers we will analyze selected writings by, for instance,
Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze to show that language and
representation often coincide with ‘territorialization’, that is, the grasping of things in their
‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Contending that all analytic abstraction (though to different
degrees) requires a distinction between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993), it will be argued that
contemporary discourse analysis is particularly occupied with the definite ordering, structuring
and control of meaning. Departing from the premise that language (and interpretation) is
120
Note that some scholars have pointed out that these two steps, analysis and writing, cannot be separated
(particularly in qualitative research) and that writing must of necessity be seen as both an analytic and a creative
activity (e.g. Richardson, 1994; van Maanen, 1995).
379
simultaneously the limit and possibility of difference (Lecercle, 2002), it will be reflected that
certain types of discourse analysis make use of a language or lexis characterized by a ‘referential
function’. This means that such texts create the impression of representing, more or less
accurately, (an ontologically existing) reality. In a nutshell, where the field of discourse analysis
supports either ‘techno-talk’ (e.g. in rhetorical or conversation analysis) or a ‘journalist genre’
(e.g. in analysis of interpretive repertoires and, to a lesser extent, in analysis of discourse à la
Foucault), it will be argued, on the basis of Barthes’ (1967) notion of the ‘zero-degree’ style, that
such writings hinge on a ‘hardened’ or ‘violent’ language. This type of language is supposedly
insensitive to the temporality of local signification and hence to the undecidability inherent in
meaning (Derrida, 1976). Deliberately inflating the mechanical aspect of discourse analysis, we
will show that there is an implied ‘incompossibility’ (Lyotard, 1993) between what discourse
analysts say about language and how they use language. On the basis of this insight, it will be
possible to see that discourse analysis at times runs counter to its own declaration, namely that we
should venture beyond a functionalistic, mimetic understanding of language and instead provide
new means for tackling the ‘crises of representation’ (Gill, 1998). Though ‘crisis’ remains an
issue, it will not constitute the main focus of the second part of this inquiry. Instead, it will be
posited that the current tradition of discourse analysis needs to give appropriate recognition to
difference (instead of promoting means to ‘manage’ it). It appears, then, that Latour (1997) had a
point when he asserted that words and worlds necessarily go together. On the basis of this insight,
we will suspend the propositional model of language, i.e. the zero-degree style, in order to argue
that discourse analysis should – in the spirit of a tension or ‘tensor’ (Lyotard, 1993) – learn to
appreciate and adopt a more indeterminate, inexact language (van Maanen, 1995), that is, a
language that can accommodate the ambivalence and ambiguity of meaning. To this end, John
Law’s (2004) treatise of the ‘mess in social science research’ is invoked to argue for an
allegoric/metaphoric language that gives rise to indirect expression, non-literal, associative
representation or, to follow in Lyotard’s (1988) footsteps, a preoccupation with the
‘unpresentable’. In the same vein, it will be discussed why the ‘order words’ (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987) discourse analysts seem eager to use should be ‘softened’, ‘made strange’ or
caused to ‘stammer’ (as Bogue (2005) convincingly argued). Furthermore, a space for play and
experimentation is proposed through the use and invention of neologisms which are supposed to
‘disorder’ language in a way that enables novel and unforeseen connections and that prescribe
active and necessarily engaged readings. Assuming that, to enliven discourse analysis, we might
380
not get very far with the current ‘system’, Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ will be invoked
to illustrate an irritatingly intense, though arguably inspirational, writing. One of the laudable
effects of this type of writing is, to use a term borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari (1986), the
increase of language’s relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’. Thus, in seeking to propose a
language which is ‘hospitable’ to the unthinkable, to silences or ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976,
1982), we will establish, in the sense of a pedagogical gesture, that the nascent scholar might find
most inspiration for conducting his or her own discourse analysis not by consulting method
textbooks but by ‘intensive’ (instead of ‘perverse’) readings (Deleuze, 1995) of available
examples of discourse analysis as well as more experimental, or dare we say energetic, textual
performances. Intensive readings, conceived as readings that pose the question if and how a
particular piece of text works or ‘flows’ (Deleuze, 1995) and, especially, if it works for me as a
reader, will be introduced. It will be shown that such intensive readings are a vital precondition
for an adequate appreciation of the aesthetic and creative aspect of discourse analysis and for the
elimination of the parameters which currently seem to keep parts of the field territorialized, i.e. in
a state of stasis.
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Disclaimer
It must be made clear at the outset that it is not possible to account for the entire range and richness of the field of
discourse analysis. While remaining partial in its grasp and scope, this investigation (particularly the first part) has a
clear bias in favor of texts falling into the broad category of psychology. Additionally, while the arguments presented
collectively reject discourse analysis in its current manifestation, it must be emphasized that we genuinely enjoyed
most of the literature on discourse analysis. This said, what is to come tries to follow the spirit of Derrida who
claimed that his ‘double readings’
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(Critchley, 2005) of the works of others represented an act of genuine ‘love’,
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since he only engaged with authors he felt sympathetic with or attracted to (cf. Protevi, 2004). We emphasize that we
hold the texts used for the present investigation in high esteem and that we agree with their supposition that discourse
analysis marks a project which must necessarily be sustained. Nevertheless, we see no merit in the present text
degenerating into a hypocritical backslapping exercise.
121
A term Critchley favored over what he saw as the all too often misrepresented and generally overused notion of
‘deconstruction’ (cf. also Chapter 5).
122
Derrida wrote: ‘I am very fond of everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from
the deconstructive point of view are texts I like, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for
reading’ (p. 87; quoted in Attridge, 1992, p. 5).
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A First Territory: Discourse Analysis as Method
Interlude I: On Hegemony
Each discourse … is to some degree a jargon … a language of control. (Said, 1983, p. 219)
… all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 32)
To start with a general statement, it seems safe to claim that method is not everybody’s cup of
tea. If we go one step further, or simply follow Rehn’s (1999) suggestion, we could even state
that methods are blatantly ‘ugly’ and that ‘method’, at least the dominant interpretation thereof,
contains the force to render research unreadable. We freely admit that we were occasionally
tempted to proclaim that the discussion on method should not only not be criticized but simply
ignored altogether. By the same token, we felt much sympathy with Rehn (2002) who confessed
that the idea of method actually frightened him. Whoever has been confronted with the issue of
method(ology) in a public context will probably be reminded of some personal experience by
Rehn’s narrative in which he, wittily though tellingly, pointed out that ‘(c)onferences are the
worst. There people you hardly trust enough to watch your coat seem perfectly at ease with
asking personal question such as ‘What’s your methodological standpoint then?’ without feeling
the least bit intrusive. And when I answer ‘Don’t really have one. I don’t like methodology!’ they
laugh nervously and say something about the coffee’ (p. 44). As Rehn’s description shows in an
exemplary way, the question of method cannot be sidestepped, irrespective of how hard we try,
since the ghosts we are keen to put into oblivion will keep haunting us. Given this state of affairs,
we appear well advised to muster the courage to address the issue proactively and notably to
question whether method, in its canonical signification, holds potential benefits for (whatever sort
of) research. First of all, it must be pointed out that both ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ have
acquired an autonomous position in academic discourse. Academic psychology, which in some
ways can be seen as the intellectual backbone of this thesis’s author(s), in particular has
traditionally been characterized by a propensity to derive its identity from method rather than
content (cf. Rose, 1985). Whereas Rose’s cogent appraisal could still be said to be purely
‘descriptive’, it is Roth (2005) who did not shy away formulating evaluative positions on the
basis of which he mentioned, among other things, that ‘(m)ethodology is a fetishism, an
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ideology’ (quoted from abstract). Rehn (2002), who set in motion a comparably un-apoplectic
‘grand attack’ on method, posited that both method and methodology are not simply a fashionable
practicality but that they must be construed as a moral economy, some kind of ‘methodism’
(Rehn, 2002). Whereas these genuinely unmediated appraisals might carry some heuristic value,
or at least some entertainment value, they, in our assessment, give little indication as to why
method and impassioning research are only partially, if at all, ‘compossible’ (Lyotard, 1993). Yet,
while this essay aims to analyze the identified antagonism between method and research from
different angles, the point to be made at this early stage is that certain methods more than others
are prone to territorialize, that is, to inhabit or annex the space of research. Importantly, it is in
this context that Law (2004) stated that the problem of method is not axiomatic, but closely
related to ‘the hegemonic and dominatory pretensions of certain versions or accounts’ (p. 4;
emphasis in original). If we are willing to accept that Law’s assertion, which was made in
connection with social science research, has some ‘truth value’, it is worth pointing out that the
notion of ‘dominatory pretensions’ is appropriate for describing the aspirations of certain forms
of discourse analysis. To illustrate matters on the grounds of psychology, we can say that it is not
uncommon to encounter statements purporting that ‘discourse is a radical new perspective’ which
has ‘implications for all socio-psychological topics’ (Potter & Wetherell, 2001, p. 198). To
extend this illustration to the social sciences, we can turn to van de Berg et al. (2003b) who
advocated discourse analysis on the following grounds: ‘(i)t has been estimated that over 90% of
social research is based on interview data … Social research, whatever discipline or approach
taken, relies heavily on interviewing people about their experiences, opinions, hopes, fears,
reactions, and expectations … It is highly appropriate, therefore, that the methods and theories of
discourse analysis are applied to this practice’ (p. 3). Being eager to avoid some kind of
synecdoche by using a small number of examples (two, to be precise) to infer the qualities of the
phenomenon as a whole, it is nonetheless noticeable that Potter and Wetherell’s use of the word
‘all’ (“implications for all socio-psychological topics”, cf. above) sets in train an image of
discourse analysis that does not construe discourse analysis as one good way (among others) of
gaining a sense of social reality, but arguably as the best and, though this remains implicit for the
most part, the only way to conduct social science research. What we are saying here is that the
statement or, to use an expression derived from their own repertoire, ‘strong view’ (e.g.
Wetherell, 2003) of Potter and Wetherell or van de Berg et al. is not to be taken as a singular
event, an ‘eloper’ so to speak. Rather, we proclaim that there is a greater movement that seeks to
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establish discourse analysis as a sine qua non in social science research. It may seem that
‘hegemony’ or even ‘imperialism’ are terms that might be a bit farfetched for the characterization
the expansive tendencies of discourse. There are, however, sound reasons to believe that
discourse analysis has a strong impact on all topics considered for research, so much so that such
topics are forced to yield to its logic. To illustrate our point, we shall turn to Wetherell, Yates and
Taylor (2001b) who explained that ‘(s)ocial science research uses a range of approaches.
Common ones include, for instance, the survey such as an opinion-poll survey or a questionnaire,
along with the sophisticated statistical techniques which produce at the end of the process,
percentages, bar charts, tables, numbers and reliable and significant data. What are being
transformed, however, are people’s discursive actions … The same point can be made about the
conduct of controlled experiments in disciplines such as psychology while other research
techniques, such as the interview, are even more clearly about operations on people’s discourse’
(p. 4). Importantly, the totalizing tendency expressed in the account of Wetherell and colleagues
is often amplified in the rhetoric of scholars in that discourse analysis is endowed with attributes
such as ‘new’ or ‘progressive’ (cf. Parker, 2002d). Whereas it is intuitively comprehensible that
these attributes give discourse analysis a positive ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin, 2001), it is at least
questionable whether they are suitable for representing the subject’s current status. For instance,
Banister et al. (1994) mentioned that ‘(d)iscourse analysis in psychology is now a well-
established method’ (p. 94), whereas Parker (2005) recently pointed out that some forms of
discourse analysis have acquired a quasi-mainstream position in psychology. In consequence, it
might appear peculiar at first glance that discourse analysis is still considered by some as a ‘new’
or ‘progressive’ methodology. If we instead subject those claims to the rhetorical microscope
(Billig, 1988), the question becomes not if such utterances are right or wrong but rather what
functions they fulfill and what effects they have. Consequently, though it could easily be argued
that discourse analysis is not, stricto sensu, ‘radical’ (Parker, 2005) or ‘new’ (Potter & Wetherell,
1987), it is far more interesting to see that discourse analysis is presented as a superior
methodological position on account of a juxtaposition of discourse analysis with a ‘simulacrum’
(conceived as an invented hyperreality) that contains a simplified and derogatory notion of what
is called ‘positivist’, ‘traditional’, ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal’ science. The ‘exploitation’ of
discourse analysis’ ‘other’ becomes blatantly obvious in the field of psychology where scholars
have been utterly diligent in reappraising psychology’s subject matters from the vantage point of
discourse theory in order to claim that this latter perspective is superior. In concrete terms,
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‘classical’ topics of psychology such as attitudes (e.g. Billig, 1987; Condor, 1987; Smith, 1987),
gender (e.g. Billig et al., 1988; Walkerdine, 1988; Hollway, 1989), memory (e.g. Edwards &
Middleton, 1986; 1988) and racism (e.g. van Dijk, 1984; Wetherell & Potter, 1986; 1992) have
been rendered amenable to discourse analysis. However, this extension has never been envisaged
as a complementation of the prevailing stock of analytic perspectives, but instead as the
introduction of a novel paradigm which is said to carry enough weight to ‘ascend the throne’. It
appears, then, that the rhetoric employed by discourse scholars is characterized by a ‘molar
segmented line’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 217). This line makes a distinction between,
among other things, proper research (i.e. discourse analysis) and secondary, naïve or simply
moronic research (i.e. the mainstream). It must further be emphasized that this opposition is quite
obviously based on the assumption that the mainstream poses a threat to the ostensibly marginal
tradition of discourse analysis (Abrams & Hogg, 2002). For instance, looking at Parker’s (2002)
portrayal of psychology, we hear that ‘(d)iscourse analysis radicalizes the turn to language in
social psychology, but must also attempt to survive in a still powerful traditional climate of
experimentalism in the discipline … This tradition has been divided … between those stubbornly
clinging to orthodox (mainly trivial) experimental studies … or ostensibly more radical
intergroup experimental studies’ (pp. 182 – 183). Besides its downright tendentious tone, what is
particularly conspicuous in Parker’ account is that such rhetorical denunciations of the
mainstream (i.e. experimental studies) retain a certain amount of elusiveness. It is this
elusiveness, however, which makes it possible, first, to condense positivism into an anonymous,
though purportedly homogeneous, collection of qualitatively inferior research endeavors and,
second, to call for the abandonment of a positivist approach to research. Thus, the rhetoric of
‘newness’ and ‘progression’ as well as the hierarchical dichotomy established on the basis of
these attributes are strategic in the sense that the perpetual emphasis on the shortcomings of
positivism or tradition not only aims at uncovering its limitations but, importantly, at bringing
about a larger ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn, 1970) in social science research. It should be mentioned in
passing that certain discourse scholars (and particularly those working under the aegis of
psychology departments) have come to advance an image of research which leaves scarce space
and little sympathy for anything that is not discursive or has not at least taken the ‘linguistic turn’.
Bearing this in mind, it seems all the more important to call for some modesty and aloofness.
Abrams and Hogg’s (2002) are certainly justified in claiming that discursive practices, though a
central aspect of human conduct, should not be aggrandized to the point of saying that ‘all
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reproductive practices are discursive’ (p. 174). Therefore, while discourse analysis is imaginable
as a ‘powerful addition’ to the available stock of analytic procedures, it can hardly be seen as the
only path of research. As eloquently expressed by Abrams and Hogg, ‘(w)e agree that the
theoretical and methodological developments within discourse analysis are valuable for
understanding society, but see no reason to jettison the whole of social psychology [or social
science quite generally] on that account’ (p. 179).
We have now presented discourse analysis in the wider context of its pretension to power
and shown, in line with Law (2004), the urgency of the need to practice methods without an
accompanying claim for (overall) validity. However, there is more to the story than that. The
point we will now address is that discourse analysis is not only characterized by a ‘will to power’
but that it operates upon an intriguingly stable code of argumentation. In the following paragraph
it will thus be brought to light that the field of discourse analysis shows a considerable amount of
overlap with regard to both the wording and structure of its arguments and that it has come to
cultivate what we would like to coin ‘identical repetition’ in an astoundingly large number of
different works and contributions.
Interlude II: Identical Repetition
… nothing dulls the mind as thoroughly as hearing familiar words and slogans. (Feyerabend,
1975, p. xiv)
Our current tiredness results from the invention of the same and from the possible, from the
invention that is always possible. (Derrida, 1992b, p. 341)
It must be acknowledged that discourse analysis and discourse theory have provided the social
sciences with a worthwhile and, to use the field’s own jargon, ‘radical new perspective’ (Potter &
Wetherell, 2001, p. 198) for inquiring and understanding language, communication, speech and
so forth. Despite this ‘radical new perspective’, it needs to be emphasized that the field
(particularly the branch that has emerged from social psychology; cf. Parker, 1992; 2002; Potter,
Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002) is now marked by a large amount of what we call ‘identical
repetition’ (Cunningham, 2005), that is, the kind of repetition that reduces differences in terms of
logical coherence and stylistic expression to a minimum. Wetherell, Taylor and Yates (2001), for
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example, argued that (psychological) discourse analysis is developed further by researchers who
add to and extend its very boundaries.
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In contrast to this view, we argue that far from revealing
variability and innovation, the rhetorical strategies expressed in texts on discourse analysis as
well as texts which delineate discourse analysis as a method are marked by an amazing degree of
stability and consistency. What is important, first of all, is that the caricature of positivism, as
explained above, not only represents a forceful rhetoric but also a habitually and relentlessly re-
performed canon which aspires to depict or rather establish discourse analysis as a superior
method. When reflecting on the plethora of texts on discourse analysis emerging from a wide
variety of different disciplines, one gains the impression that it is standard practice to begin a text
on discourse analysis by highlighting the backwardness and deficient status of positivist research.
What happens as a result of the continuous repetition of such statements is that the superiority of
discourse analytic methodology is increasingly reified and thus rendered into a commonplace
which readers (and notably nascent scholars) then take for granted. It is important to notice,
however, that ‘identical repetition’ is a feature which cannot only be detected in the introductory
part of method texts. Instead, identical repetition is an issue that pervades such texts as a whole.
That is to say that whereas the introductory part more often than not makes use of an alarmist
discourse – proclaiming that mainstream research practices and academic tradition at large is in
crisis which in turn can or must be tackled by discourse analysis (cf. above) – , the middle body
of those same texts provides little (if any) illustrations as to how discourse analysis actually
works. Though the middle part of such texts remains rather elusive, they arguably act as a bridge
between the crisis evoked at the beginning and the solution presented at the end. Therefore,
whereas the middle part, the part which is conventionally reserved for illustrating how discourse
analysis works (or should be conducted) becomes almost invisible (or at least secondary
compared with the expansiveness of the alarmist discourse with which these texts are opened), it
is again the last part which makes use of a celebratory, assertive and immodest tone. Somewhat in
opposition to the darkish rhetoric of the opening section, the closing part conveys a more
conciliatory tone that heralds the catharsis of the initial crisis. The conspicuous feature of this
tripartite structure is that it inverts conventional dramaturgy: the climax comes at the beginning
and the end of the plot, whereas the middle part contents itself with a rather demurring tone and a
flippantly hasty advancement. Yet, bearing in mind what psychologists say about the ‘primacy’
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Note that this claim by Wetherell et al. relates to theoretical, methodological alterations being effectuated by
scholars using and applying discourse analysis.
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and ‘recency effect’ (cf. Stroebe et al., 2001), namely that people have a strong propensity to
remember best the beginnings and endings of messages, it becomes clear that this dramaturgy is
well chosen since it ‘exploits’ the readers’ memory capacities locating the ideological message
within these two spaces. Notwithstanding their cunningness, we might like to question whether
these kinds of texts produce any effect other than telling the nascent scholar (or whoever finds
pleasure in reading those texts) that discourse analysis is a good thing to pursue. Although we
will talk a bit more on the promise of method textbooks further down, we can already say on the
basis of our inquiry that the rhetorical delineation and elevation of discourse analysis seems to be
based on a system incorporating a three-part dramaturgy: alarmist discourse at the outset, scarce
illustration of discourse analytic procedures in the middle and, finally, a clause of redemption,
that is, a catharsis which summarizes and underscores the tenets of the discourse analytic scheme
and thus ostensibly puts the crisis to rest. This sort of textual structure, as we discussed, is
naturalized through identical repetition up to the point where it is no longer discernable as a
rhetorical strategy. Bearing in mind that those texts give the scholar little indication of how
discourse analysis works and even less scope for conducting his or her own discourse analysis,
they are on the other hand remarkably successful in fortifying the gloss of the discursive tradition.
Given the dissemination of this identical textual structure across a variety of scholarly
disciplines, it appears that the discursive camp has created a pattern of linguistic behavior which
the following generation will be tempted to adopt. The important point here is that the
prominence and high status of discourse analysis has not emerged in a ‘natural way’ or (only) by
way of its analytic and paradigmatic superiority but, instead, as a result of the in some ways
logical effect of an utterly cunning and effective rhetoric. There is thus a parallel with Feyerabend
(1975) who contended elsewhere that where ‘arguments do seem to have an effect, this is more
often due to their physical repetition than to their semantic content’ (p. 15; emphasis in original).
Accordingly, it is precisely on the basis of the recognition of the rhetorical device of mimicry and
identical repetition that we can identify a difficulty or a sort of dysfunction which needs to be
subjected to close scrutiny. Expressing the state of affairs with the words of Deleuze (1995),
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we could claim that the protagonists of discourse analysis are conceivable as ‘imitators [who]
imitate one another, and that’s how they proliferate and give the impression that they’re
improving on their model, because they know how it’s done, they know the answers’ (p. 128).
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Deleuze was, of course, not addressing discourse analysis but talking about the crisis in contemporary literature.
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While identical repetition quite clearly serves the function of routinizing and standardizing the
way in which discourse analysis is presented, it must be emphasized that the higher the degree of
standardization becomes the more the underlying rhetorical conventions are taken for granted.
Given this function, identical repetition reaches a point where it becomes inconceivable that the
rigid rhetoric of crises and catharsis might in actual fact be a social creation and, by implication,
that discourse analysis could be presented and even practiced in a different manner. Mimicry or
identical repetition can thus be seen as strategic devices which conceal the fact that prevailing
conventions are not ‘carved out of stone’, so to speak, and that prevailing discursive practices are
most clearly linked to the exercise of power (though not in a sovereign sense; cf. Chapters 3 & 6).
It could be argued, therefore, that the repetition of discursive practices is meticulously controlled
by social procedures of prohibition (Foucault, 1981) through, for instance, journal reviews,
publishing houses, conferences and PhD gatherings (cf. Potter, Edwards & Ashmore, 2002).
Since the publishing machine and its restrictive regulative will be discussed further down, it will
suffice to say here that the value of repetition is revealed in its persuasive power: it convinces the
reader that discourse analysis is a worthwhile project which is even granted a privileged position
in the political economy of method. The essential point we are leading up to is that we must
become aware that identical repetition is a social construct and that the field of discourse analysis
by no means has to re-perform its ostensible radicalness, newness and superiority over and over
again. Instead, it could proceed in a more affirmative fashion. Indeed, invention is needed in view
of the current situation. It is Derrida (1992b) who expressed the connection between repetition
and invention with particular eloquence: ‘(i)nvention begins by being susceptible to repetition,
exploitation, reinscription’ (p. 316; emphasis in original). Before adumbrating what an inventive
discourse analysis could look like, it must not be forgotten, however, that discourse analysis is a
forceful institution, i.e. there are relations of power within which it comes into existence and
regulations and practices which sustain its very being (cf. below).
Prevailing introductory texts on discourse analysis, then, provide little help for scholars
endeavoring to carry out a discursive investigation. In addition to that, there is another peculiarity
that becomes apparent, namely that the dramaturgy explained above has become an intrinsic part
of empirical analysis. Being published in books (e.g. Burman & Parker, 1993) and journals (e.g.
Burman, 2005), the ‘war rhetoric’ identified above has crossed over from introductory texts on
method to empirical analysis. It is true that there are noticeable differences between the various
scholarly disciplines, and it would be exaggerated to claim that identical repetition has become
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the hegemonic modus operandi of empirical analysis of discourse. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that the process of identical repetition has gained ground in empirical investigations. Given this
state of affairs, it is necessary, in our assessment, to address those studies which remind us of a
‘copy and paste’ exercise where only the subject matter is changed while the underlying general
line of antagonistic, hyperbolic arguments are left in place. Although one could convincingly
object that the dogma of performativity (which implies that the only stable value in academia is
output; cf. Lyotard, 1984, and also Chapter 1) aids and abets identical repetition, we find that this
is not a good enough counter-argument. Given that what the apparatus of discourse analysis
produces is, contrary to its own assertions, far from novel, revolutionary, and at times not even
especially imaginative, we contend instead that prevailing dramaturgy must be reversed, if not
abandoned altogether. In particular, we would like to see texts that give sufficient attention and
space to concrete textual discursive investigations while at the same time retaining a tone of
modesty and adopting a kind of rhetoric that refrains from the type of expansive claims discussed
above.
As explained above, the process of identical repetition has a propensity to naturalize a
certain image of discourse analysis. Moreover, this process proposes a set of rigid rhetorical
conventions which make it difficult to think that such repetitive texts could be more affirmative in
nature. On the basis of these observations, we would like to use this avowed crisis as a starting
point for addressing the question of how to enliven discourse analysis. Before doing so, however,
the following interlude will show that there are texts ‘out there’ which seek to establish discourse
analysis as a mainly technical endeavor, that is, as a method that provides scholars with an
analytic and intellectual shortcut in their research. What is labeled an ‘automat’ in the following
discussion thus seeks to highlight that the equation of discourse analysis and method rests upon a
set of promises which, in various ways, create the impression that method will relieve the scholar
from the ‘ordeal’ of thinking.
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Interlude III: The Promise of the Automat
… the danger of method is that it gives over to mechanical replacement. (Appelbaum, 1995, p.
89)
… method is not just a more or less complicated set of procedures or rules, but rather a bundled
hinterland. (Law, 2004, p. 45)
It is implied in what has been said before that discourse analysis represents a ‘growth industry’ as
is manifest, for instance, in the ‘veritable explosion’ (Hook, 2001, p. 521) of discourse analytic
practices in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Although it has been
mentioned before that discourse analysis is arguably more than just a method, it sometimes
(particularly in introductions to discourse analysis and general method handbooks) becomes
indistinguishable from simplistic lists of do’s and don’ts (e.g. Parker & Burman, 1993; Hardt-
Mautner, 1995; Richardson, 1996; Antaki et al., 2002). One might conclude that such an appraisal
is unproblematic and that there are even good reasons for it, since method clearly facilitates
research in some ways. However, not everything that looks neat and unpretentious is good per se,
wherefore we shall delve a bit deeper into the issue of method in order to ask whether we should
believe its promises or whether this image has more to do with day-dreaming than serious,
scholarly research. What needs attention in the first place is that most scholars acknowledge that
discourse analysis is not only a method but that it represents a general ‘sensitivity to language’
(Parker, 2000). By implication, we also need to recognize that discourse analysis cannot be
exhaustively characterized, let alone imparted, by a set of rules. However, though many texts
acknowledge that discourse analysis cannot be reduced to method, they often proceed to provide
the kind of recipes which were said to be untenable in the introductions of the same texts. It
would, of course, be preposterous to allege that those people suffer from mental disintegration.
Rather, this rhetorical split is made possible by means of an inserted ‘disclaimer’ (Hewitt &
Stokes, 1975), that is, a verbal device that mitigates or obscures an obvious inconsistency. In
concrete terms, texts which ultimately delineate discourse analysis through a number of ‘steps’
(Parker, 1992) or which limit it to a ‘set of tools’ (Wetherell, Taylor & Yates, 2001) more often
than not initially discuss the irreducibility of discourse analysis to method. To comprehend the
rhetorical function of this inconsistency or paradox, it is helpful to shed some light on particular
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investigations of racist discourse (e.g. Billig, 1991; Wetherell & Potter, 1992) in which the
operation of disclaimers has been thoroughly analyzed. More specifically, it has been shown by
Billig, Wetherell and Potter’s investigations that people tend to present contrary themes within
one interview or conversation which contain, for example, both racist and anti-racist utterances.
The function of disclaimers in relation to racist talk is to disclose one’s awareness of the
inappropriateness of racist statements and, by extension, to immunize the text against imputations
of downright racism. Whereas Billig (2001) has convincingly pointed out that the counter-posing
of contrary themes is particularly effective in the context of ideological messages (such as racist
talk), it is in the context of method that disclaimers appear to be a necessary precondition to avoid
giving any impression of reductionism. Thus it is by clarifying at the outset that discourse
analysis is more than a mere method that scholars create the precondition for introducing a
‘but’
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that subsequently makes possible the description of discourse analysis as a technological
knowledge that still complies with ‘science propre’ (Meier Sørensen, 2003; emphasis in original).
In addition to the fact that disclaimers enable discourse scholars to protect themselves
from potential criticism, it is also worth pointing out that texts incorporating such disclaimers
thrive on a technical understanding of method. This brings us to the point that the equation of
discourse analysis and method, as passed down to us particularly by the second and third
generation of discourse scholars,
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tends to work upon the assumption (or concealed ‘hinterland’;
cf. Law, 2004) that the world is accessible through a set of fairly specific and determinate
processes. The above quote by Appelbaum (1995) to the effect that method tends to encourage
mechanical replacement relates to this view of method. That is, Appelbaum’s notion of
‘mechanical replacement’ can be seen as tantamount to the image of the automat, the machine
that works in a quasi-autonomous manner and thereby renders redundant any deep commitment
or involvement on the part of the researcher. To gain a deeper understanding of the prominence of
this interpretation, which is not least reflected through the bestselling status of method books, it is
helpful to understand that the idea of method is invariably intertwined with the expectation of
rigor, precision, certainty or even redemption, that is, a set of (untenable) promises which
predicate that one will be enabled to master one’s subject matter of research through a series of
(however elusive) recipes. In as much as the image of discourse analysis as method rests on this
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Cf. Billig (1988) or van Dijk (1988) for an extended elaboration on the rhetorical function of ‘but’.
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In contrast, the founding fathers of discourse analysis were predominantly occupied with conducting analysis or,
more precisely, with deliberating about the ontological and epistemological particularities of discourse.
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set of promises, it can be understood as a ‘moral discourse’ (Rehn, 2002, p. 44) which, by turning
the process of research into a rather easy endeavor, satisfies scholars’ ‘craving for intellectual
security in the form of clarity’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 18). Arguing along the same lines, Law
(2004), who ridiculed the promise of ‘method talk’ in the social sciences, has shown that recipe-
style accounts give rise to the hope of guiding ‘us more or less quickly and securely to our
destination’ (p. 10) in that they function ‘as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible
way with reality’ (p. 11). Following this train of thought, it appears that method works as a ‘fig
leaf’ because it suggests that one is only doing fine if one strictly adheres to the proper
conventions. To push the argument even further, imageries of discourse analysis as method seem
to thrive on the somewhat, psycho-analytically speaking, ‘anal’ desire for control in as much as
scholars seem to find pleasure in ostensible containment. That is to say, the closed body of
method books on discourse analysis gives rise to ‘enjoyment’ through its allegedly programmatic
perfection (first this, then that … and Bob’s your uncle) and the avowed possibility of simple
replication (which is ostensibly made possible by presenting method as a transcendental form of
knowledge; cf. above), so much so that fidelity becomes a viable option.
Having claimed that method works to safeguard the analyst (Abrams & Hogg, 2002), at
least temporarily, we would now like to draw an allegoric comparison with Monty Python’s
famous ‘The Meaning of Life’. Arguably, this comparison is overstretched and it might even be
objected that such a juxtaposition is completely unjust(ifiable). However, given that the present
interlude has no intention of obscuring its polemic energy, the sequence below illustrates how the
presentation of discourse analysis as method works by virtue of sustaining a strong focus on its
technicalities. By the same token, it distracts from the fact that the automat is not in itself able to
put forward any ready-made analysis, let alone solution. To receive a fair idea of the cheerfulness
inherent in the idea of the automat the equivalent of which is the machine that goes ‘ping’ in
Monty Python’s ‘Miracle of Birth’ and also to provide some entertainment, a lengthy excerpt is to
follow.
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MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE (1983)
Part I: The Miracle of Birth
OBSTETRICIAN: So, it’s a bit bare in here today, isn’t it?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Yes.
OBSTETRICIAN: Yes. More apparatus, please, nurse: the E.E.G., the B.P.
monitor, and the A.V.V.
NURSE #1: Yes. Certainly, Doctor.
DOCTOR SPENSER: And, uh, get the machine that goes ‘ping’.
OBSTETRICIAN: And get the most expensive machines, in case the administrator
comes.
[clunk]
[exciting music]
That’s it. Bring in the other machines. Right over here.
DOCTOR SPENSER: [whistling]
OBSTETRICIAN: That’s it. Just behind me.
[music stops]
Lovely. Lovely. Jolly good. That’s better. That’s much, much better.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Yeahhh, that’s more like it.
OBSTETRICIAN: Eehhh. Still something missing, though.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Hm?
OBSTETRICIAN: Hmmm. Mmmmm.
[snap]
OBSTETRICIAN and DOCTOR SPENSER: Patient!
OBSTETRICIAN: Yes.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Where’s the patient?
OBSTETRICIAN: Anyone seen the patient?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Patient?
NURSE #1: Aah! Here she is.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Bring it over here.
[clank]
Mind the machines!
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NURSE #1: Sorry, Doctor Spenser.
OBSTETRICIAN: Come along!
DOCTOR SPENSER: Come along.
NURSE #1: Jump up there. Up!
MRS. MOORE: Ehh.
OBSTETRICIAN: Hallo. Now, don’t you worry.
DOCTOR SPENSER: We’ll soon have you cured.
OBSTETRICIAN: Leave it all to us. You’ll never know what hit you.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Good-bye!
OBSTETRICIAN: Good-bye.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Drips up!
OBSTETRICIAN: Injections!
DOCTOR SPENSER: Can I put the tube in the baby’s head?
OBSTETRICIAN: Only if I can do the episiotomy.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Okay.
OBSTETRICIAN: Okay. Uh, legs up! Doctor, come in. Come on in, all of you.
That’s it. Jolly good.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Come along.
OBSTETRICIAN: Come along. Spread round there. Uh, who are you?
MR. MOORE: I’m the husband.
OBSTETRICIAN: I’m sorry. Only people involved are allowed in here. All
right.
MRS. MOORE: What do I do?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Mhm. Yes?
MRS. MOORE: What do I do?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Nothing, dear. You’re not qualified!
OBSTETRICIAN: Leave it to us!
MRS. MOORE: What’s that for?
OBSTETRICIAN: That's the machine that goes ‘ping’.
[ping]
You see? That means your baby is still alive!
DOCTOR SPENSER: And that’s the most expensive machine in the whole hospital!
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OBSTETRICIAN: Yes, it cost over three quarters of a million pounds.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Aren’t you lucky?!
NURSE #2: The administrator is here, doctor.
OBSTETRICIAN: Switch everything on!
[exciting music]
[ping]
MR. PYCROFT: Morning, gentlemen.
RANDOM: Morning.
MR. PYCROFT: Morning, gentlemen.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Morning!
OBSTETRICIAN: Morning, Mr. Pycroft.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Morning, Mr. Pycroft.
MR. PYCROFT: Oh, very impressive. Very impressive. And what are you doing
this morning?
[music stops]
OBSTETRICIAN: It’s a birth.
MR. PYCROFT: Aahh. What sort of thing is that?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Well, that’s when we take a new baby out of a lady’s tummy.
MR. PYCROFT: Wonderful what we can do nowadays.
[ping]
Aah! I see you have the machine that goes ‘ping’. This is my favourite.
You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way,
it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.
[applause]
Thank you. Thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
Bearing in mind that the above extract has been chosen to extend or express in extremis how
discourse analysis is enamored with technicality, it is beyond doubt that such a simile cannot do
full justice to the complexities and equivocality of discourse analysis. Nevertheless, the excerpt
from Monty Python’s ‘The Miracle of Birth’ in our view aptly captures the cunningness of the
field’s celebratory tone. As revealed in the exchange between the different doctors, the focus of
their discussion rests on the machine, its expensiveness and inherent (though elusive) potential.
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Celebrating the machine that goes ping (‘Lovely. Lovely. Jolly good.’), the doctor even overlooks
the patient whereas Mr. Pycroft (the hospital administrator) who joins the gathering a bit later
discloses that he is actually uninformed of the task at hand (‘And what are you doing this
morning?’). As tangentially discussed in the first two interludes, ‘celebrating’ discourse analysis
directs attention away from the actual analysis or story. As a result, ‘method talk’ is of little help
when it comes to giving instructions on how to actually carry out a particular discourse analysis.
However impressive a given automat (or the machine that goes ‘ping’) may seem, we must
remain sensitive to the fact that any over-reliance on method leads to an empty enterprise or, to
put it bluntly, a ‘self-impoverished con game’ (Simpkins, 1995). Addressing those who intend to
embark on discursive investigations themselves, we must emphasize that the mere celebration of
the ‘machine that goes ping’ may not get them very far.
In summary, depictions of discourse analysis as method work on behalf or, rather, give
rise to deliberate absences which ultimately create the impression that one is warranted a safe seat
in academia. Granted, if we refrained from doubting that method in no way secures a ‘healthy
research life’ (Law, 2004), we could leave it at that and turn to some other issue. However, this
option does not appear appealing enough to us. We therefore prefer to reiterate that simply
making a connection between discourse analysis and method involves some risks. For this reason,
we insist on addressing method as a problem rather than a solution. In particular, whereas
‘recipes’ of discourse analysis are undoubtedly useful in as much as they convey a sense of
assurance and temporary serenity, they also pretend that one will be able to produce enthralling
‘results’. The present investigation thus aims to show that method, in its canonical interpretation,
is only partly attuned to the production of ‘writerly’ texts (Barthes, 1974; cf. below). On the basis
of the above explanations, we will now illustrate that any prolonged quest for the proper
‘automat’ is not only an arduous task but that it is simply misleading, since it ignores, or, worse
still, renders invisible that thorough discourse analysis is always contingent on creativity and, as
will be discussed further down, on reading.
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Interlude IV: Blindfold Method
… there is no method … there is yourself, and you are highly idiosyncratic. (Salusinszky, 1987, p.
67)
… each one is imbued with a quality of uniqueness, of here-and-nowness, while at the same time
owing that quality to the cultural and linguistic crossroads that constitute it … (Derrida,
1992, p. 370)
Writing is irresponsible, perhaps because it flies inevitably towards the multiple rather than
homing in on the one (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 8)
Regarding the field of discursive psychology, which is the underlying topic of the ensuing
section, it has been Parker (2000) in particular who claimed that ‘researchers new to discourse
analysis often face problems because many ‘introductions to discourse analysis’ describe
discourse only from a limited linguistic or sociological point of view.’ Even though it is beyond
question that Parker’s appraisal is well articulated, it seems reasonable to add that the confusion
of ‘researchers new to discourse analysis’ is not only due to the theoretical omissions in the
introductory texts but, as implied in our previous elaborations, also the result of the
transformation of discourse analysis into a prescriptive code. To further deepen this argument we
shall now turn our attention to a particularly insightful book in which a collective of researchers
has been ‘invited to analyze the same textual data’ (van de Berg et al., 2003b, p. 6). Having
brought together a group of scholars consisting of conversation analysts, ethnomethodologists,
cognitive linguists, Goffmanians, critical sociolinguists, discursive psychologists and
Foucauldians (cf. p. 2) to analyze the transcripts of three research interviews, the identified
objective of the book was to ‘facilitate the comparison of different approaches to discourse
analysis’ (p. 7). The editors contended that this ‘exercise’ was valuable in terms of comparing
‘different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches’ and for enabling ‘dialogue and
communication’ (p. 2) between these different perspectives. Although we have no problem in
conceding that the compilation is valuable in as much as it provides a glimpse ‘behind the
curtain’, it must nevertheless be stressed that the book by van de Berg et al. works on the basis of
a fundamental omission, namely that method marks the binding link between the interview
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transcript and the analysis and the overall function of the final text. Although the editors
acknowledge that ‘(t)he analysis of … interviews is seldom straightforward’ (van de Berg, 2003b,
p. 7), it is worth pointing out that this ‘challenge’, as they call it, cannot be reduced to
methodological distinctiveness and differences. Given, for instance, the limitless possibilities of
data selection and omission, and textual structuring and phrasing – i.e. the ‘violent taming’ of text
– , it is intuitively compelling that writing is at least partly idiosyncratic or, to use Lyotard’s word
(cf. above quote), ‘irresponsible’. While the notion of ‘idiosyncrasy’ as advanced by Salusinszky
(1987) quite clearly pinpoints the problematic nature of method fetishism, this is, of course, not to
be mistaken as an awkward attempt of re-inaugurating the authentic author, who we believe to be
‘dead’ (Barthes, 1977; cf. also Chapter 5). Rather, the problem with such approaches is that they
try to relate differences in analysis and texts to method and methodology in a more or less linear
manner while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the, to use a strong word, ‘mannerisms’
inherent in the singularity of writing.
Although it must remain clear that the possibilities of speaking, thinking and writing are
limited by commonsense or lived ideology (Billig et al., 1988), we would like to posit here that
since research is always preoccupied with re-working and re-bundling its material and notably its
texts, method textbooks in particular seem unable to account for creative and idiosyncratic
processes as well as for the ‘analyst’s intuitions’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002), even
though such intuitions are part and parcel of every discourse analysis. Moreover, whereas
precision (of method) raises the expectation that discourse analysis will enable the scholar to
move towards the hidden nucleus at the ‘heart of signification’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 67), it must
remain clear that however meticulously a particular work is crafted, alternative interpretations or
‘findings’ are always imaginable. While we contend that the infinite possibility of reading and
writing does not pose a problem here, this shows us that discourse analysis cannot be precise and
must not even try to be so because such intended precision only obscures the space creativity
occupies in the process of interpretation and writing (Abrams & Hogg, 2002). Since it has been
asserted that this essay is riddled with its own idiosyncrasies, the issue of idiosyncrasies in
general needs to be reflected as a pivotal aspect of the argument being pursued here. In particular,
idiosyncrasies – being of necessity excluded from discussions on method since they do not lend
themselves to the format of repeatable rules – must no longer be ignored or treated as a threat to
the certainty of the avowed rigor and precision of the discourse analytic method. Instead, they
should be hailed as the binding link between the scientific method and artful practice. To put
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some flesh on the skeleton of this assertion, we will give two brief illustrations, one more
proximal and the other more distal to discourse analysis.
It is beyond question that the field of discourse analysis is deeply ‘indebted’ to the
arguably insightful and meticulous works of Michel Foucault. What is noteworthy, and most
important for the argument at hand, is that Foucault never formulated a strict set of rules for
analyzing discourse (Berard, 1999). It appears, however, that this task has been taken on all the
more willingly by the innumerable epigones that succeeded the ‘grand master’.
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Whereas there
are clear indications that Foucault inspired innumerable copycats who were eager to standardize
his at times opaque analytic procedures, they seemed only partially successful in producing texts
that can match up or even come close to their model. Although the issue of style will be treated
more thoroughly further down, this nevertheless seems a good moment to quote a passage from
the work of a candid admirer of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1995). Commenting on Foucault’s
work, Deleuze dubbed him a ‘great stylist’ and argued that Foucault’s ‘(c)oncepts take on with
him a rhythmic quality, or as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of
his books, a contrapuntal one. His syntax [i.e. style] builds up the shimmerings and scintillations
of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding up and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of
its utterances’ (p. 101). Although Deleuze’s affectionate reflection of Foucault’s style does not
seem to require further commentary (since there is little to be added), it is useful in the context of
the present argument, since it exemplifies most clearly that the notion of ‘Foucauldian discourse
analysis’ (Diaz-Bone, 2003) might be a misleading denotation, at least to the extent that one is led
to believe that Foucault’s work or syntax lends itself to simple duplication. This said, we do not
deny that there are writings that have borrowed and appropriated Foucault’s legacy in an
inspiring way so as to produce novel insights and understandings (e.g. Said, 1978; Ferguson,
1990; du Gay, 1996; Rose, 1999). Notwithstanding this brief and selective list of exemplary
Foucault scholars, it is nevertheless conceivable that their investigations are persuasive not
because they rely on some identifiable ‘golden standard’ but because they carry the work of
Foucault to novel grounds or territories where they subject it to a different modus operandi.
Another example – though, as mentioned above, one less directly connected with
discourse analysis – which seems recommendable for exemplifying the futility and inadequacy of
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On the subject of Foucault’s disciples, Fuller (2005) stated: ‘I have no problem with Foucault … , only with [his]
epigones, clones and affiliated drones’ (p. 69). The problem Fuller identified with regard to the misrepresentation of
Foucault’s work is that ‘(o)nce you’ve learned to think like … Michel Foucault … , you never need to think for
yourself again’ (p. 68).
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method leads us to Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘deconstruction’.
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Arguably one of the best
known circumscriptions of deconstruction appears in an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine
and Guy Scarpetta where Derrida (1981) delineated, in a surprisingly straightforward way, that
‘in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-
à-vis, but a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other … or has the upper hand.
To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment’ (p. 41;
emphasis in original). Although Derrida subsequently emphasized in the same interview that
deconstruction is not a means for ‘neutralizing’ hierarchical oppositions and although he
repeatedly pointed out that deconstruction invites no easy solutions and that deconstruction is not
a simple ‘this, and then that’, it is undeniable that deconstruction has invaded everyday life as is
shown not least in the way the concept is used, not to say abused, in newspaper reviews and at
dinner parties. In the context of academia, deconstruction has come to dominate innumerable
scientific publications and PhD theses, and it is conspicuous that many of these texts have
adopted deconstruction as a method that can be applied in a more or less convenient, linear way.
Given this state of affairs, it is noteworthy that Derrida, in many of his texts and interviews,
resisted the demand for a definition of deconstruction.
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Moreover, he was both persistent and
unyielding in pointing out that any attempt at generating a fixed meaning would run counter to
the project of deconstruction as it would imply that it contained an identifiable essence, a kernel
that makes deconstruction amenable to the ‘respectful doubling of commentary’ (Derrida, 1976,
p. 158). Norris (1982) pointed at the very centre of this fallacy when he mentioned that ‘(t)o
present deconstruction as if it were a method, a system or a settled body of ideas would be to
falsify its nature and lay oneself open to charges of reductive misunderstanding’ (p. 1). Taken
together, deconstruction, though appealing to ‘mechanical precision and methodological
repeatability’ (Attridge, 1992, p. 21), cannot and must not be perceived as a method because it
lacks the possibility of being repeated irrespective of the particular context in which it is practiced
and the specific text it seeks to address. This argument could be extended to the point that
deconstruction is not even a model for analysis since analysis always pertains to reduction, an
activity which is clearly antithetical to Derrida’s ‘double readings’ (Critchley, 1999) which
always retained a sense of ambiguity, plurality, and complexity. However, we would like to
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That said, it must not be forgotten that Derrida’s thoughts on language and meaning had and still have a
considerable influence on discourse analysis (e.g. Schapiro, 2001; Potter, Edwards & Ashmore, 2002).
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It must be emphasized that ‘Positions’ (1981) is of the rare cases where Derrida came close to a temporary
stabilization of the term; at least that is how this text has often been perceived.
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pursue the arguments presented in this essay in a different direction. Despite the existence of a
surfeit of accounts which are admittedly insightful and which bring the reader close(r) to
Derrida’s utterly demanding deconstructive readings (e.g. Jones, 2003; 2004b), it must be
recognized that the sheer complexity of Derrida’s artful interweaving and (re)alignment of texts
and intertexts, his inimitable turns, hesitations and unexpected ‘exhalations’ all evade the
possibility of imposing the fixed strictures of method. Jones (2004b) convincingly warned that
accounts which conceptualize deconstruction exclusively through a series of steps which must be
followed if a piece of good research is to be produced fail to ‘take into account the
epistemological, ontological, political and ethical aspect of deconstruction’ (p. 41). We would
add that Derrida’s meticulous, artful, and infinitely sensitive and intimate texts cannot possibly be
captured and prescribed through method, through the ‘robot’ which conveys the promise of
replicating the ‘grand seigneur’ in a time and energy-saving manner.
Going back to discourse analysis after a brief digression on Foucault and Derrida, it must
be borne in mind that a book such as that put forward by van de Berg and colleagues (2003)
which compares the analysis of the same text by different researchers (cf. above) is virtually
incapable of demonstrating how a text comes into being, let alone the system whereby it conveys
its different layers of meaning. Van de Berg’s study is even more unsuitable for providing a
‘machine’, an automat for copying the ‘masters’. Since ‘reflection’ is a term that seems quasi
annexed by qualitative researchers (cf. also Chapter 5), it becomes clear that reflection and
reflexivity in the field of discourse analysis often goes no further than saying that writing is not a
‘mop-up activity’ (van Maanen, 1995) or that nobody can ‘tell us how to write a paper that others
will find interesting’ (Barley, 2006, p. 16). However, given that every copy or identical repetition
undoubtedly loses some of the original’s initial force, it can be asserted that conceiving of
discourse analysis as method leads to a general rarefaction or thinning of the potential
expressiveness of discourse analysis.
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What then is the value of construing discourse analysis as
method, or is there any at all? Departing from the current practice of discourse analysis (rather
than from what discourse analysis could become, since this is yet to happen), it is Roth (2005)
who has put forward the most compelling demonstration that method books only work for those
who have already acquired a certain proficiency in carrying out this sort of research. In line with
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The observation that discourse analysis is thinning out in terms of its expressiveness is my own conclusion. It is,
however, indebted to the comparisons between texts put forward by the founding fathers and mothers of discourse
analysis and those published by subsequent scholars.
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our own understanding, Roth has objected that what makes it impossible to translate method into
actual research is that method textbooks, despite their avowed ‘hands-on’ and ‘real-life’
significance, tend to ignore the complexity of research and, most importantly, to obscure the fact
that doing research presupposes a ‘practical understanding of the doing’. Method books,
following Roth, should therefore carry a sticker as the one shown below in order to warn junior
researchers that they should be wary of expecting anything of worth.
Irrespective of the observation that method textbooks on discourse analysis seem to sell well (and
we do not begrudge the success to either the authors or the publishing houses), the previous
interludes have tried to show that method, while seeking to make us believe that it brings us
‘closer’ to (the truth of) our subject matter (cf. Parker, 2002d), tends to thwart the aesthetic appeal
of research, its readability and, to venture even further, its ‘sublime’ character. Having
adumbrated the limits of method, the following elaborations will point at some of the more
striking peculiarities in the language use of discourse scholars, before talking about and for the
future of discourse analysis. To show these peculiarities, the following reading of discourse
analysis takes the liberty of analyzing the subject by paying attention to the language use of the
discursive camp with the risk of ‘contaminating’ the textual purism
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identified within discourse
analysis. Ultimately reaching the conclusion that discourse analysis has developed a language that
is detrimental to the study of ephemeral phenomena and unsuitable to reflect the undecidability of
meaning, we shall embark upon a theoretical reflection on selected works of Barthes, Lyotard,
Deleuze and others. The aim of this reflection is, first, to challenge discourse analysts’
‘minimalist desideratum’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxi) of writing and, second, to propose a tradition of
writing which does not try to bring style to zero through a language that sidesteps creative
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The notion of ‘textual purism’ relates to Lyotard’s (1988) assertion that philosophy retains a ‘naïve ideal’ in as
much as it seeks to attain a ‘zero degree style’ (cf. Grant, 1993).
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enunciation (e.g. neologisms, metaphors, allegories, etc.), but which rather relies on and
advocates the positive force of intensity and perpetual displacement of meaning.
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A Second Territory: Hardened Language … and some ‘Lines of Flight’
We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge
from our ignorance and transforms one into the other. Only in this manner are we
resolved to write. (Deleuze, 1994, p. xx)
The investigation so far has tried to create an imagery in which the discursive camp is portrayed
as a ‘machinery of representation’ (Wetherell, 2001) that has established and come to hinge on a
rigid set of conventions and a dramaturgy that comes to the forefront not only in texts that depict
discourse analysis as method (e.g. Wetherell et al., 2001) but equally so in empirical
investigations of conversation, language use, speech, etc. What has been taken as a point worth
problematizing, and as a point which calls for prospective invention (Derrida, 1992b), has been
related to those accounts which try to promote discourse analysis as a superior methodological
and epistemological approach by virtue of its promise that it can provide the golden standards and
even shortcuts for good research. In contrast, the following section deals not so much with the
confusion of discourse analysis with method, but with the particular language use coming to the
fore within empirical discourse analysis. To this end, we will first approach language as an
intrinsically paradoxical instrument so as to show that it is at one and the same time the limit and
possibility of representation. Large parts of the argumentative space will thus be occupied by the
observation that discourse analysis works upon a sort of language that creates the impression of
ostensible accuracy and certainty, and thereby establishes discourse analysis as a means for
‘getting things right’, that is, for capturing the essence of discourse.
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Language and Representation
The operator of disintensification is exclusion: either this, or not-this. Not both. Every concept is
therefore concomitant with negation, exteriorization. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 13)
Through words … we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they
are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. (Nietzsche,
1986, p. 306)
As the above comments should have made clear, the notion of ‘discourse analysis’ is
everything but univocal. Rather, it works as an umbrella term for research conducted in, for
instance, the realm of sociolinguistics, speech act, social psychology and so on (for an
overview cf. van Dijk, 1985). However, what is noteworthy in the first place is that discourse
analysis necessarily causes reduction. That is to say that discourse analysis or the analysis of
interpretive repertoires proceeds by way of abstracting repeatable, ideal-type patterns from
people’s talk, conversations, etc. For instance, Potter, Wetherell, Gill and Edwards (2002)
have circumscribed the analytic reduction of their approach thereby making clear that
‘interpretive repertoires … are abstractions from practices in context’ (p. 165; emphasis in
original). To put this in a slightly different manner, in seeking to highlight repeatable patters,
that is, the ‘sameness’ in the argumentative threads people use in concrete interactions
(Potter & Wetherell, 1987), as well as more abstract (i.e. de-contextualized) forms of
discourse (Parker, 2002c), it becomes clear that discourse analysis in the first instance
stresses the identification of sameness (and only in the second instance differences
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or
expectations) in the language use of the analyzed subjects. Though we would not go as far as
Parker (2002d) who contended that certain forms of discourse analysis (i.e. conversation
analysis) hinge on ‘the fantasy of being able to abstract and replicate behavioral regularities’
(p. 9), it is beyond doubt that discourse analysis necessarily turns a blind eye to the
elusiveness and uniqueness of linguistic patterns or, as Derrida expressed it, ‘the play of the
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Difference and variation is, of course an inherent feature of any analysis of interpretive repertoires. After all, the
analyst is foremost interested in displaying how particular utterances take on and change their function according to a
given speech context (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984). However, this orientation mainly focuses on abstraction since
analysis of interpretive repertoires always proceeds by highlighting variation against the background of repeatable
patterns.
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structure’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 352; emphasis in original) contained in people’s argumentative
plotting or discourse. With this in mind, in becomes arguable that certain forms of discourse
analysis operate on the premise of an identifiable centre in which play is reduced to a
minimum. However, this suppression of the play of the structure needs to be understood as
an inevitable effect of analytic abstraction which in turn increases the intelligibility and
hence readability of discourse analysis since its effect is that of ‘reassuring certitude’
(Derrida, 2002; cf. also above). This sort of analytic reduction also obscures the fact that the
boundaries between and within repertoires are in fact permeable and that discourse,
conversation, talk, etc. are always more elusive, paradoxical and ephemeral than is suggested
in (most) discursive investigations (cf. Chapter 3). Although there are notable accounts
which have dealt with the danger of presenting discourse (and interpretive repertoires) as an
‘unrealistically closed system’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002, p. 170), i.e. a quasi-
autonomous entity, it must remain clear that the suitability of such argumentative
‘concessions’ is rather limited when it comes to overcoming the reductionism, not to say
simplification, entailed in discourse analysis.
It has, then, been shown (in connection with Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’; cf. above)
that analysis always entails reduction. In consequence, the focus of the present argument is
not so much on the analytic and theoretical disintensification of difference and play inherent
in discourse analysis but, instead, on the kind of reduction and disintensification effectuated
by the language use of discourse analysis. Hence, to gain a sense of the difference between
the analytic reduction introduced before and the language-based reduction of discourse
analysis we will investigate below, we first need to illuminate the conditions under which
language renders ‘différance’ invisible or absent and, in extremis, establishes a mimetic view
of reality, that is, a view in which language is said to correspond with reality. In order to
show this difference between analytic and linguistic reduction, we shall argue that language,
by establishing a distinction between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993), has an inbuilt
propensity to define, structure and, by implication, control meaning. One of Lyotard’s main
arguments was that language, in its aspiration to represent reality in a precise manner,
mediates an ostensibly given truth and, on account thereof, tends to immobilize the subject
with which it deals. A similar argument is advanced by Bogue (2005) who posited that
‘(l)anguage’s primary function is … to enforce a social order by categorizing, organizing,
structuring and coding the world’ (p. 111). While both Lyotard and Bogue’s assertions imply
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that language necessarily entails reduction, it is important to understand that this tendency is
not evenly spread out, so to speak, and that different languages (or language games) can be
distinguished according to their relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’ (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1986). Conceding that the degree of (de)territorialization of language is a relative
matter, it becomes comprehensible that certain languages more than others channel the
difference or polysemia inherent in signs or, in other words, subordinate difference to
identity and to sameness (McMahon, 2005). This clarification is requisite for the argument at
hand since it reminds us that not all languages demobilize and dampen the energy of writing
and that not all languages transform meaning into an ostensibly stable form, reducing its
‘material puissance, its opacity’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxi).
To give our argument presented so far a proper name, we will henceforth describe the
disintensifying, territorializing language as ‘hardened’. Importantly, this ‘hardened’ language
is in close proximity with Deleuze’ (1994) notion of the ‘dogmatic idea of thought’, that is,
the kind of commonsense thinking which mediates things by means of stable presentations
and representations. It must therefore be borne in mind that one of the central attributes of
‘hardened’ language is its denotative ambition, meaning that it ‘aspires’ to draw a straight
line between the sign and the signified. In other words, hardened language creates the
impression that there is a linear connection between a given word and some avowed external
reality to which the former refers. That is to say that this type of language leaves little, if any,
space for acknowledging the floating and ephemeral nature of meaning. Therefore, what we
are positing here is that hardened language establishes a ‘referential function’, that is, an
‘alliance with truth’ (May, 2005) which has as one of its most noticeable effects that it refers
to something lying outside of the text, i.e. the phenomenal world or reality. In other words, it
presumes to grasp things in their very ‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Unsurprisingly, in this
particular mode of language, a statement is judged according to its correspondence with
truth. As regards the question of what features of hardened language warrant this referential
function, it is first of all helpful to point at the ‘minimalist desideratum’ (Grant, 1993, p. xxi)
of hardened language, a subject that has been discussed most thoroughly in relation to its
ideal of ‘degree zero style’ (Barthes, 1967; Grant, 1993). Although the issue of style and in
particular its ‘zero degree’ materialization will be discussed in more detail further down, we
can state on the basis of our previous elaboration that there are languages which tend to
establish identity (or sameness; cf. Deleuze, 1994), whereas others tend to enable a space for
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difference. Departing from the assumption that these two extremes are part of the same
continuum, it is the former pole and its ideal of identity or stability in particular which
represents the operations of hardened language. It appears, then, that hardened language, as a
result of its avowed neutrality and objectivity, disables polysemia while at the same time
creating the impression of saying, in a matter-of-fact way, how things are.
What, then, makes our thoughts on language significant and pressing for the realm of
discourse analysis? As has been shown, hardened language promotes, by means of
‘colourless writing’ (Barthes, 1976, p. 76), order and thereby establishes a peculiar
‘equation’ between text and reality. On the basis of this insight, we argue that many
discourse analytical texts accommodate, or are at any rate amenable to, this simplistic
convention. To refine this general claim we must point out that the field is characterized by a
general tendency: the more specialized the level of discourse analysis the higher the degree
of hardened language. Although it is beyond question that this detected tendency marks a
gross simplification, we nevertheless feel that a distinction between macro- and micro-
analytic discourse analysis, as suggested by Parker (2002c), is very useful, since it allows us
to see that there are noticeable differences between the language use of Foucault-inspired
works and those studies interested in ‘local conversations’ or ‘language in use’ (including,
for instance, linguistic pragmatics, rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodologically rooted
conversation analysis; cf. Keller, 2005). The difference we are eager to trace here is one
between what we would like to express through the two concepts of ‘journalist genre’ and
‘techno-talk’. Dealing with the two issues in succession, it is first of all noteworthy that the
notion of a ‘journalist genre’, the peculiarity we assign to Foucauldian work, is related to
Barthes’ (1967) contention that journalistic writing is ‘amodal’, meaning that it pertains to
supposedly neutral utterances. The effect of this genre, as briefly alluded to above, is that it
mediates its subject matter through a disengaged and neutral ‘tone’ and, as an effect thereof,
emphasizes the denotative, i.e. factual, aspect of its statements. To put this observation in
another way, the ‘journalist genre’ denotes a code according to which a given utterance must
be interpreted in the way we would read a dictionary: definitional and literal. To challenge
one the most celebrated exponents of contemporary (critical) discursive psychology, Ian
Parker, we would like to make direct reference to Abrams and Hogg (2002) who have argued
that ‘although discourse can be regarded as the social process par excellence, it is portrayed
by Parker as abstracted, reified and unconnected with individual or social psychological
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processes’ (p. 173; emphasis in original). The concern of Abrams and Hogg cannot be
overestimated since it emphasizes that the ‘journalist jargon’ of discourse analysis tends to
perpetuate ‘idealized data’ (Parker, 2002b), that is, to depict discourse as if it had a real
essence and generally treat it as if it were a real thing that is ‘out there’ and that, by
implication, lends itself to proper analysis. To put it bluntly, ‘journalist jargon’ approaches as
closely as possible a ‘type of communication in which nothing is significant except cognitive
[denotative] meaning’ (Leech, 1969, p. 40).
Whereas ‘techno-talk’, the feature we detect in micro-level discourse analysis, also
advocates denotative meaning, it is also characterized by a code of writing or representation
that is even more strained or ‘digital’ (Wilden, 1987) than what is revealed in Foucault-
inspired schemes of analysis. That is, the analytic conventions and representational practices
used in micro-language and micro-conversation analysis are arguably more powerful in
creating the impression that its statements amount to purely literal, factual and universally
valid meanings which are, then, said to be free from ideology or, to use Billig’s (1999)
cogent phrase, ‘rhetorically neutral’. Although we could pursue these deliberations ad
infinitum, it will suffice to say that both micro and macro-level discourse analysis establish a
relationship with truth. This effect is achieved and sustained in particular by discourse
analysis’s propensity to focus on the denotative meaning of statements. Following Barthes’
(1967), we can see that the ‘indicative mood’, which is an inherent feature of both the
‘journalist genre’ and ‘techno-talk’, marks the pivot for the referential function of language.
In terms of the differences between the two genres, it could be argued that Foucauldian
discourse analysis often retains some ‘writerliness’ (Barthes, 1974; cf. below) in that it
enables polysemic connotations by stimulating, if not presupposing, the reader’s imagination
and engagement with the text. In contrast, micro-analytic frames of discourse analysis are
more ‘effective’ in bringing the play of the sign down to zero thereby stressing that only one,
namely the literal meaning, is on offer. To gain an understanding of this referential function
of ‘techno-talk’, it is helpful to turn to Billig (1999) who contended that conversation
analytic studies have established a ‘highly technical vocabulary’ (p. 546). As Billig
eloquently argued, conversation analysis, irrespective of its claims that it studies language ‘in
its own terms’, is written in a specialized discourse that ultimately rests on a ‘realist tale’.
The ‘realist tale’ Billig identified is the direct result of the use of technical terms which give
the impression of describing ‘objective realities in an unproblematic way’ (ibid.). It appears
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that what Billig had in mind while writing about ‘technical terms’ is reasonably close to our
previous notion of ‘techno-talk’. In addition to that, Billig’s cogent treatise is even more
useful to highlight how ‘techno-talk’ makes possible the referential function of conversation
analysis. For this reason, we would like to briefly discuss Billig’s witty mimicry of
conversation analysts. In particular, Billig points out that conversation analysts, by making
repeated use of technical terms, are supposedly able to underscore the neutrality and
rightfulness or, better, truthfulness of their interpretations. After all, they can always ‘point to
a transcribed text and say ‘Look, there is a preference structure’, as surely as a realist can
kick the table as proof of that object’s existence’ (p. 547). Billig’s take on conversation
analysis is truly convincing and we see much merit in his attempt to put the ‘realist tale’ into
perspective by stating: ‘(l)ike all theoretical perspectives, CA [conversation analysis] deploys
terms which might be called ‘foundational’. These are not terms which are linked to specific
pieces of data, but terms which enable the pointing and the linkages to be made’ (p. 548). As
reflected by terms such as ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, etc., conversation analysis seems to install a
language game which tries to render the constitutive and performative features of writing and
texts in general invisible or which ‘attempts to conceal all traces of itself as a factory’
(Barthes, 1974, p. 244) while simultaneously emphasizing that conversation analysis does
nothing else but present what is ‘de facto’ occurring in people’s conversations.
To summarize the statements on the status quo of discourse analysis, we propose that
both micro and macro-discourse analysis, by way of a language use that purports to denote
how things literally are, treat their subject matter in a way that ignores that all ‘everyday
human activities do not just appear vague and indefinite because we are still as yet ignorant
of their true underlying nature, but that they are really vague’ (Shotter, 1990, p. 9).
Importantly, if we believe Deleuze’s (1994) claim that ‘difference is behind everything, but
behind difference there is nothing’ (p. 57), it becomes conceivable that Shotter’s assertion
that ‘everyday human activities’ are ‘vague’ does not in itself pose a general problem for
discursive investigations. The issue of vagueness, however, becomes a problem as soon as
we are dealing with hardened language or a dogmatic image of thought that leaves no space
for the very recognition of difference. Given our previous elaboration, it is beyond doubt that
neither micro- nor macro-discourse analytic procedures are especially well attuned to
account, by way of their linguistic performances, for the inherent vagueness and difference
of language and conversation. Though Parker (2002b) and Potter, Wetherell, Gill and
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Edwards (2002) have come to accuse each other of reifying discourse,
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and hence of
pretending that discourse is a stable phenomenon, it must be emphasized that neither
tradition, as discussed above, wins the day, since both sides are prone to depict their subject
matter as if it was real. To reiterate our above claim, it is conversation analysis’ ‘highly
technological vocabulary’ (Parker, 2002b), its ‘techno-talk’ as well as discourse analysis’
‘journalistic genre’ in particular that effectuates and sustains the impression of ‘out-
thereness’ (Law, 2004), that is, the metaphysical assumption of a world that seams to turn
‘towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 67).
Hence, notwithstanding the differences between these somewhat artificially separated
‘traditions’ and though we concede that there are types of discourse analysis which would
undoubtedly escape the objections of our critical reflection, we must nevertheless point out
that their common denominator is the establishment of a ‘static complexity’ (Chia, 1998): a
language that dampens the energies of conversations, talk or texts by turning undecidabilities
and difference into stable ‘structures’.
The paradox or irony here is that discourse analysts more often than not argue for the
flux-like features of language as well as its constitutive and performative aspects (cf.
Wetherell, Yates & Taylor, 2001). Nevertheless, their own linguistic performances mostly
have the opposite effect of bolstering the impression that discourse is a definite ‘being’
(Chia, 1996). As the broader ramifications of this paradox will be addressed further down, it
is important to remember that the richness and difference of social reality escapes both the
‘techno-talk’ and ‘journalistic genre’ as discussed above. In every interpretation (of discourse
as elsewhere) there is always some ‘left over’, some excess, something ‘more to our world’
(May, 2005) which remains unrecognized, unaccounted for or deliberately ignored. Law
(2004), who has used the notion of ‘Otherness’ to frame his observation that all methods
hinge on deliberate omissions (i.e. absences), made clear that ‘events and processes are not
simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp [which is the
perspective discourse scholars are keen to promote] … Rather, they are also complex
because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them (p. 6; emphasis in original). It
follows from the explanations above that the types of discourse analysis discussed so far are
mostly ignorant of the complexity of ‘events’ and ‘processes’ and that they establish a
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This accusation entails, on a second level of abstraction, that the two camps have criticized each other for not
being able to account for difference and to give apt recognition to the relational ontology of truth.
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perspective which seems suitable for grasping discourse in its essence. Derrida (1976),
among others, was skeptical of such denotative, quasi or pseudo-precise endeavors since he
saw them, due to their avowed reference to the ‘real world’, as prescribing meaning in an
authoritative way. By implication, any type of hardened language values truth as mimesis.
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As a result, texts are no longer ‘creators’ but ‘transcribers’ which offer, as Derrida (1981) put
it, ‘the presumed possibility of a discourse about what is’ (p. 191). Given that certain
discourse scholars (e.g. Parker, 1989) would probably support Derrida’s claim, it is rather
peculiar that the field has become accustomed to a hardened language and a dogmatic view
of thought whose idea of mimicry or correspondence ‘is profoundly alien to the sense of
writing’ since it seeks to protect writing ‘against its aphoristic energy, and … against
difference in general’ (Derrida, 1976, p. 18). The observation that hardened language
stimulates a mimetic view of representation shall subsequently set in motion a quest for
language practices or, more precisely, a type of language politics that refrains from
concealing, taming or hiding away the energy and difference which are an integral part
resulting from the fundamental undecidability of writing. Before adumbrating what we
would like to coin ‘minor’ discourse analysis, we will, in the next section, investigate what
we conceive of as the pivotal paradox of what we would call ‘major’ discourse analysis: its
split between the constative and the performative aspect of language. On the basis of the
observation that language (as well as interpretation and representation) is simultaneously the
limit and possibility of difference (Lecercle, 2002), we shall ‘exploit’ this claim so as to find
means for emphasizing the possibilities of language over and above its limits.
Against Representation?
Certainties have no style. (Cioran; quoted in Elias, 2003)
The previous discussion of language and the observation of discourse analysts’ propensity to use
a ‘hardened language’ – which pretends to, demurring and in a factual manner, grasp the kernel
of meaning – has shown that the prevailing language conventions (i.e. ‘journalist genre’ and
‘techno talk’) effectuate a disparity between what discourse analysts say about language and how
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Deleuze and Quattari (1987) overtly challenge mimicry by stating that it ‘is a very bad concept, since it relies on
binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature’ (p. 11).
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they actually use it. Highlighting this claim from a slightly different angle, it could be argued that
the field of discourse analysis both establishes and works on behalf of a peculiar paradox, namely
upon a split between content and style, between the constative and performative aspect of
language (Derrida, 1992b). To speak of a crisis here seems justifiable, especially if one takes into
account that discourse scholars perpetually stress that they have actually solved the ‘crisis of
representation’. The notion of crisis, in our assessment, thus needs to be related to the observation
that discourse scholars use language in a way that emphasizes a correspondence with the
phenomenal world. In other words, the point which worries us here is that once we consider the
possibility that language ‘bleeds internally, so that no category is as stable as it appears’ (May,
2005, p. 76), one is called upon using a language that accommodates this element of ‘more than’
without retaining a dogmatic image of thought. To be sure, in using a hardened language, the
discursive camp still seems to be in good company, at least one finds a fair amount of ‘post-’
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scholars who have ostensibly taken the ‘linguistic turn’ whereas still retaining a what we would
label ‘modernist language’ (van Maanen, 1995), a language, as we have discussed, that pretends
that things can be accurately grasped in their ‘thisness’. As Deleuze (1994) reminds us in this
connection, the dogmatic way of thinking is a central feature of our (Western) heritage; it is ‘our’
thought which is traceable back to Aristotle. Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that
the code of hardened language is instilled in all of us (though to various degrees) by the dogmatic
image of thought and its representational view of language. If we follow Deleuze’s musing
further, it becomes arguable that the dogmatic image of thought has a comforting function, since
in as much as it coordinates and ‘manages’ difference, it provides us with a reassuring view of an
ostensibly stable world. Hardened language, then, coordinates difference and thus assures us that
there is a ‘match between what is inside me and what is outside me’ (May, 2005, p. 77). In sum,
the use of hardened language is not particularly new and if taking, for instance, the realm of art to
make our point, it becomes clear that our previous critique of the referential function of hardened
language was already voiced some decades ago. The arguments of, for instance, Sontag (1967)
illustrate our claim. She argued that interpretation ‘is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of
“meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)’ (p.
7). Following Sontag’s provocative and still topical essay, it is beyond doubt that her claims bear
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E.g. post-modern, post-structuralist, post-colonial, etc.
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some resemblance to Lyotard’s (1993) treatise of the disintensifying effect of representation. In
addition, it is implied in Sontag’s critique that the restless search for (proper) meaning, which was
identified above as the main focus of discourse analysis, is conjoined with the dogmatic image of
thought and in particular with its ideal of mimetic correspondence. However, the simple
observation that hardened language or, more precisely, interpretation is not endemic for the field
of discourse analysis is not in itself an augmentation for the latter’s status quo. Setting out for
novel lines of flight, one is – if following Sontag’s treatise of interpretation – temped to conclude
that we might be forced to dismiss representation altogether. Arguably, such a conclusion is
downright rhetorical, and since this essay aims to speak for discourse analysis, it must become
obvious that the detour taken above was necessary to show that certain, though not all, languages
are violent in their supposed inhibition of play. As Lyotard (1993) made clear in this connection,
one always has at one’s disposal at least two choices of writing: the choice between the
‘intelligent sign’ (which emphasizes definitive or, say, denotative meaning) or the ‘tensor sign’
(which allows for plurivocality and for associations with the unpresentable). Since we will pay
more attention to Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ in order to show how language can be used to
create the space for energies and multivoicedness, it suffices to conclude here that the preferred
mode of representation of the discursive camp is ‘intelligent’, meaning that the field’s ‘minimalist
desideratum’ of ‘zero degree style’ demands static and desiccated performances. What needs to
be borne in mind in this context is that discourse analysts are not ignorant of the performative
aspect of language. This becomes apparent not least through statements to the effect that the
‘distinction between ‘the argument’ and the ‘style of its presentation’ (Potter, Edwards &
Ashmore, 2002, p. 76) is somewhat artificial. There is, however, a problem with the kind of
‘commentary’ Potter et al. have put forward: this problem relates not to what the authors say (we
totally agree) but how they say it. In concrete terms, the problem is that in claiming that style and
content invariably go together, the authors still base their claim on a hardened language, a
language which is anything but performative. In other words, it is not enough to claim that one is
aware of the double condition of language by rejecting the dividing line between content and
style because there is always the danger that the representational function of language slips back
into our musing; not through what we have tried to represent, but through the medium through
which we try to represent it. This means that as long as the premise that style and content are
always intermingled is addressed in a rationalistic, that is, constative fashion and not by way of a
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given text’s linguistic performance, it is not possible to overcome the void between content and
style.
This said, we have reached the core of our problem, the bottom of our concern with
discourse analysis’ (ab)use of language. But this is not all. The contention that the realm of
discourse analysis both effectuates and rests upon a split between content and style represents
only a first step towards a new understanding and practice of discourse analysis. In order to be
able to educate the field, conceived of in the sense of ‘pulling out’ (cf. O’Doherty & Jones, 2005),
we would like to transform the insights gained above into a kind of language politics that
deterritorializes the ideal of correspondence of hardened language and substitutes its dogmatic
image of thought with an image of language that is hospitable to difference rather than identity.
Having outlined the trajectory of the ensuing investigation, it is first of all insightful to turn to
Deleuze and Guattari (1986) who, in their reading of Kafka, made clear that in the ‘minor usage
of language’
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there is no strict separation between form and content. Our previous contention
that certain languages are more suitable than others to account for difference and for the
undecidability of social reality shall thus be read as some kind of reassurance and shall support us
in establishing a minor form of discourse analysis. Consequently, our primary concern is to
advocate a use of language that acknowledges the inseparableness of the constative and
performative aspect of language and which takes into account that there are languages which are
sensitive to difference without relapsing into the categories of the dogmatic image of thought and,
importantly, which includes a sense of narrative aesthetics.
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To set in train such a minor
discourse analysis which aspires to bridge the identified separation between content and style and
consequently makes language resonate with the irrecuperable energy inherent in the ‘ontology of
difference’, a ‘third way of writing’ (Barthes, 1967), that is, a writing that attaches greater
importance to value than fact, appears both indispensable and appealing. To this end, we shall
turn to Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ which in our view is of considerable heuristic
value for making the transition from a hardened to a more fluid or, to use Deleuze’s expression,
‘liquid or gaseous’ writing (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133).
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The difference between the major and minor use of language, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that the
former pertains to univocality, to an authoritative voice whereas writers making use of minor language try to efface
themselves and articulate collective voices.
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In ‘Against Interpretation’ Sontag proposed an ‘erotic of art’ which is supposed to replace the ‘hermeneutics of
art’. Chia and Morgan (1996), in responding to Sontag’s proposition, have delineated the commonalities between the
erotic nature of art and postmodern sensibility, as both are regarded as concepts reclaiming sensation at the expense
of interpretation.
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For Libidinal Interpretation
An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a
disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it disregards properties. (Derrida, 1992b, p.
312)
Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid,
geometric. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133)
Suppose that there is a possibility that there is more to our world or, rather, discourse, than can be
grasped through hardened language. Additionally, suppose that discourse can in no way be
expressed fully using the referential function of major discourse analysis, since it results in a
dogmatic image of thought. And, finally, suppose that it is not identity or sameness which
captures what things are but, instead, that difference marks the ontology of things (Deleuze,
1994). If we are willing to stretch our imagination in this direction, we might come to sense that it
is not necessary to abandon language or representation prematurely (as suggested by the
provocative essay of Sontag; cf. above) but that we must perform some ‘illegality’ (Derrida,
1992b), since this way we can violate given conventions and reach out for a minor use of
language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) which acknowledges that no category is stable or, even
better, ‘that the idea of a “category” does not capture what is going on in language’ (May, 2005,
p. 76). To aid us on our way towards a language that takes into account that there is chaos or
‘noise’ (Serres, 1995) inherent in both the world and language and which, by means of that
acknowledgement, evades the dogmatic image of thought, we are keen to invoke a highly
intensive linguistic performance: Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’. The work deviates so
greatly from commonsense writing that it effectuates a rupture with the mimetic ideal of hardened
language. To be sure, one should not mistakenly conclude that we want to use ‘Libidinal
Economy’ as a counter example to major discourse analysis in order to create a kind of new
Utopia (capital letter; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) signposting a straight path into the
future (as if there were only one possible future). As this is not our objective, it must remain clear
that what can be gained from Lyotard’s performance in ‘Libidinal Economy’ is ‘un sens
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directionell (mais non directif)’
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(Damisch, 1975, p. 461). This being said, the text of Lyotard,
which is neither a discourse analysis nor an analysis or critique thereof, is employed to give rise
to a kind of writing which achieves a convergence or, dare we say, harmony between its
argument and the medium through which it is expressed. By implication, the following
expositions, examples, demonstrations simultaneously represent the rejection of the canonical
sense of discourse analysis and the advocation, in its place, of a novel, distal use of language
which is characterized by an ‘energizing gusto’ (Simpkins, 1995). This ‘energizing gusto’ thereby
seeks to transgress hardened language’s propensity to project difference onto a flat plane
(Cooper, 1990) and suggests a kind of language that does not ‘only’ talk of ambivalence,
undecidability and intensities but also performs them.
To begin our reflection on ‘Libidinal Economy’, it is first of all worth noting that
Lyotard’s (1993) self-styled ‘book of evilness’ has often been described as inaccessible for the
reason of its at times bewildering combination of styles and tropes. These were said (by
philosophers) to make it appear more like a piece of avant-garde text than a text on/of philosophy.
However, there is more to Lyotard’s writing than just a moment of madness. To gain a sense of
the argument Lyotard pursued, it is first of all worth noting that though he distinguished between
the infinite energy of libidinal intensities and the disintensifying dispositif of representation, he
came to emphasize that these two phenomena, intensity and representation, often coincide. As
Lyotard (1993) claimed in that respect …
… every intensity, scorching or remote, is always this and not-this, not at all through the effect of
castration, of repression, of ambivalence, of tragedy due to the great Zero, but because
intensity pertains to an asynthetic movement, more or less complex, but in any event so
rapid that the surface engendered by it is, at each of its points, at the same time this and
not-this. (pp. 14 – 15; emphasis in original)
Hence, whereas Lyotard’s performance begins by ‘accusing’ representation of taming or
exploiting energies, by means of its distinction between ‘this and not-this’, he also came to clarify
that representation is not per se a bad thing and that there is no reason to favor libidinal intensities
over immobilizing structures (i.e. representation), because intensities are always dependent on
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That is, a sense of direction without being directive.
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systems/representations.
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As Lyotard suggested, intensities – to become visible, intelligible,
thinkable – must be subjected to representation. The two phenomena must hence not be
conceived as antagonistic forces, but rather as mutually determining ‘partners’. With this in mind,
the problem Lyotard was addressing in ‘Libidinal Economy’ was not the disintensifying effect of
representation in general but the aspiration of certain structures to represent their subject in a
hegemonic way. This point harmonizes well with our previous observation that not all languages
are hardened and that languages (or language games) can be distinguished in terms of their
relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’. Be that as it may, for the purpose of the present
argument it is necessary to note that because the only way libidinal energies can exist, that is,
become comprehendible, is within structures of representation, any flight into an ‘extra-
representational’ space would only be of partial value. As Lyotard saw no utility in advocating a
space beyond representation, he turned to the issue of language in order to consider whether
intensities could be embodied by a particular shape, i.e. style (Simpkins, 1995) According to
Lyotard (1993), style was the key for inhibiting or releasing intensities, an opinion which is
expressed most eloquently in the subsequent quote:
The book, through its text, is like the skin of a body … the exclusions of possible syntaxes and
semantics that constitute style produce on the skin of language the same effects of
intensification, of charge and drainage as can be obtained from certain fleshy surfaces
through the austere rigour of an erotic dispositif. (p. 75; emphasis in original)
To put Lyotard’s unique delineation of style in a slightly different way, one is enabled to see
that the exclusion and reduction of style effectuates the impression of ‘austere rigour’ as
already discussed above in relation to hardened language. Given the contingency between
intensities and style, Lyotard came to favor structures which do not (completely) exploit, that
is, stabilize libidinal energies and which instead allow energies to flow, to materialize or,
better, to exceed the ‘intelligent sign’, i.e. denotative meaning. What is noteworthy here is
that Lyotard was keen not only to stress polysemia (i.e. multiple meanings, as suggested by,
for instance, Sontag or Barthes) but to advocate a language that gives rise to the
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Since representation is the medium through which intensities are allowed to materialize.
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unpresentable or ‘intensities in exodus’ (p. 49). As we are reminded by Lyotard, the notion of
intensity comprises not …
… just the wise polysemia found in the most anodyne of statements, it is the incandescence of a
piece of the body which can have no further assignations, for it invests both the for and
against, and furthermore, it is the transmission of this unthinkable burning to other
libidinal regions … (p. 58)
To exemplify further what Lyotard had to say on libidinal energies, we need to delve into a
brief passage were he was pondering on Klowowski’s (1965) ‘Les Lois de l’Hospitale’. The
selected argument thereby relates to the story’s protagonist, Roberte, where Lyotard gets to
show how her name works as a so-called ‘tensor sign’, as a sign that defies definite
signification and, instead, opens up to multiple becomings, that is, intensities.
… where the name of Roberte is like a disjunctive bar turning at high speed around some point or
other – the gaze, the vullvar slit, the gloved thumb, an intonation – and displacing itself in
an aleatory fashion on the segment which forms this bar. If Roberte is a tensor, it is not
because she is both a slut and a thinker, but because she exceeds, jenseits, both these
assignations in the vertigo … (p. 54; emphasis in original)
Speaking about convention, or rather its violation, we could say, without hesitation, that
Lyotard’s form of writing is somewhat deviant from what one would expect from a work of
philosophy. To put it in a blunt and reductionistic manner, Lyotard set out to emphasize that the
difference inherent to Roberte’s life makes proper meaning (which is, following Lyotard, the
function of the ‘intelligent sign’) impossible wherefore she cannot be reduced to a single, or even
double identity (i.e. the slut and/or the thinker). That is, the immanent intensity and difference in
Roberte leads to a point where there is no longer a clear center or identifiable point that defines
her being. Therefore the name ‘Roberte’ necessarily defies any attempt at definite signification.
‘Turning at high speed’ indicates that the ‘disjunctive bar’ (i.e. the ‘operator of
disintensification’) is impeded in its ability to designate, to signify, to distinguish between ‘this’
and ‘not-this’. As a result of this ‘Roberte’ becomes a ‘tensor sign’ thereby evading the
possibility of saying ‘she’s this or that … or both’. Conceiving of ‘Roberte’ as a tensor thus
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effectuates a paradox in that it keeps the disparate elements of ‘Roberte’ in a state of convergence
that neither reduces one to the other nor keeps them completely apart; Roberte is difference,
intensity in ‘pure culture’ since she is or, more precisely, becomes many things at once without
there being a possibility to separate or localize her elements at any given moment.
Bearing in mind what has been said before on the main argument or content of ‘Libidinal
Economy’, one must be wary not to relapse into a simple signifying exercise, a commentary that
stipulates what Lyotard’s text denotes and what it doesn’t. In other words, where the point so far
has been that Lyotard’s treatise, respectively ‘theoretical manifesto’ (Simpkins, 1995), comprises
a set of arguments on the disintensifying effect of representation, and on the intensifying moment
of the ‘tensor sign’, it is, given the objective of this illustration, more important to see that
‘Libidinal Economy’ is not just a rational, philosophical argument but, and maybe even more so,
a performance that sought to ‘free up’ the identified rigidities by force of the ‘spectacle’, the
‘theatric’. Hence, Lyotard’s style contains an amount of force that is far greater, far more
dangerous than what is contained in language’s constative feature, its argument. In delineating
Lyotard’s mode of enunciation, Sicard (1975) most decisively hit the nail on its head by
contending that ‘Libidinal Economy’ effectuated ‘déplacement, fuite dans le style, fuite de style,
style de fuite’ (pp. 220 – 221; emphasis in original). The invention entailed in Lyotard’s ‘style de
fuite’ thus leads to an essential instability of language where the performative and constative
features of language intermingle in rapid oscillation, leading one to question the separation
between content and style. Lyotard’s (1993) style, and not solely his argument, turns ‘Libidinal
Economy’ into a political project. Indeed, he himself contended that ‘our politics is of flight …
like our style’ (p. ix). Style, as the ‘second-level order of signification’ (Lambert, 2003, p. 125),
gains political momentum here in that its sets language in motion to enable unforeseen lines of
flight. This being said, it must be understood that Lyotard’s seemingly endless sentences, turns
and puns, neologisms, allegories and rich metaphors were part of a code through which he tried to
liberate himself from the confines of traditional writing. Style, as we have contended, had become
Lyotard’s tool for breaching the rigid confines of writing. For this reason, it becomes necessary to
look into how he managed to set textual energies in motion. To this end, it is first of all
noteworthy that the issue of style entails a complex relation with language; Deleuze (1995), for
example, claimed that style ‘is a foreign language within language’ (p. 133). In the following
lines we will thus try to reflect on Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, in a more or less cursory
fashion, using Deleuze’s (1995) understanding of style as ‘a set of variations in language, a
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modulation, and a straining of one’s whole language’ (p. 140). Since we find particularly
appealing the view that style is the aspect which makes language strange, we would further like to
deliberate on how to endow the hardened language of discourse analysis with style that works, as
a kind of parasitical mechanism, against the denotative character of its referential function.
Hence, in what follows, we shall throw some light on Lyotard’s stylistics
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in order to ‘exploit’
those insights for our minor discourse analysis.
Expansive Writing
Before making any further comments on style, it is necessary to mention that Lyotard’s
‘Libidinal Economy’ has stimulated a remarkable amount of commentary, and it even seems
fair to claim that his style has prompted more objections than his actual argument. For
instance, Simpkins (1995) described Lyotard’s writing as a ‘sprawling, aggressive …
polyphonic abstractly lyrical, non-scientific’ (p. 3) mode of enunciation, a mode which
highlights the limits of semiotics through a textual performance, a ‘libidinal drift’. Lyotard
(1988b), while reflecting on ‘Libidinal Economy’, depicted the matter as being ‘a piece of
shamelessness, immodesty, and provocation’ (p. 14) which makes equally clear that these
characterizations relate not primarily to his actual argument but to the way it has been
written, its style. What Lyotard (1998b) himself depicted as a ‘parodic, dandyesque writing’
(p. 30; emphasis in original) has thereby been at the service of experimenting with language,
at the contact-zone of meaning and energy. Indeed, he elsewhere put forward the metaphor of
‘dance’ to create an image of ‘spectacular semiotics’ which is ‘at the same time a sign which
produces meaning through difference and opposition [representing ‘this’ and ‘not this’], and
a sign producing intensity through force and singularity’ (Lyotard, 1980, p. 54).
Notwithstanding the fact that Lyotard repeatedly construed ‘Libidinal Economy’ as an
exception to his other works, it must remain clear that this book has probably been, not least
because of its ‘dandyesque writing’, more powerful in emphasizing that the primary function
of language is not necessarily ‘to be intelligible’ but, rather, to ‘set in motion’ (Lyotard,
1980, p. 50). The first instance of textual experimentation we would like to bring to light
here relates to ‘Libidinal Economy’s’ long sentences. Lyotard’s translator, Iain Hamilton
Grant, commented with regard to that matter that he was confronted with the decision to
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Stylistics or style perhaps seems unfortunately pretentious; however, they appear as the most convenient
alternative for the task at hand.
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either write in ‘comprehensible English’ or to retain the ‘rhythms and distortions of the
original’ (p. ix). Mercifully, Grant opted for the later option, claiming that to sustain the
text’s ‘tempo-rhythmic structures’ and its breathtaking ‘momentum’ there was actually no
other option than to keep as ‘close’ as possible to Lyotard’s textual escapism. The point to be
made here is that Lyotard’s long sentences were not only intensive (in a quantitative sense)
but extensive in the sense that they comprised a plethora of clauses, associations, detours,
puns, hesitations and ruptures, which make language exceed the possibility of simple
denotation. Lyotard’s long or, perhaps even, ‘wild’ sentences undermine the possibility of
hasty reading. In contrast with the way we might read the newspaper during a train-ride or a
magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, Lyotard’s language prescribes deceleration, and a
close and attentive reflection on the artfulness of his creation, his performance. Lyotard’s
writing must therefore be encountered with passion and not (only) with the aspiration to
decipher what his text means in a ‘cognitive’ sense (Leech, 1969), since it remains beyond
the confines of possibility to catch or grasp the nucleus of definite meaning. Where
‘Libidinal Economy’ works beyond sense or, better, beyond the literal sense, Lyotard’s
sentences are, as briefly mentioned before, conceivable as ‘fugitives’, as ‘styles of flight’. It
is thus noticeable that Lyotard’s long sentences, being endowed with recurring but
unforeseeable turns and puns, evade the image of a single, stable, homonymous structure of
language and, instead, give rise to open readings and interpretations where the reader is
invited ‘to discover something for himself’ (Leech, 1969, p. v; emphasis in original). Without
wanting to claim that Lyotard’s writing is totally inventive (in the progressive sense of
Derrida, 1992b), it nevertheless becomes clear that ‘Libidinal Economy’ exploits the
available stock of rule-governed resources so as to put forward ‘inventive propositions’
which determine ‘the extent to which it will be able to engage the listener’s desire’ (Derrida,
1992b, p. 315). What we can deduce from Lyotard’s admittedly daring scripting (daring not
only because it bewilders given writing conventions of philosophy but also because it uses an
intriguingly unflinching, conspiratorial language and, at times, a wording one would consider
better suited to some dimmed bar in the red-light district) is that many things are best
expressed or, better, only expressible or made comprehensible through an expansive,
excessively intense scripting. This way it retains a sense of undecidability and, by
implication, recruits the reader’s curiosity by leaving it open to him or her what one draws
from it. This state of affairs quite clearly reflects Barthes’ (1974) distinction between
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‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts through which he pointed at the merits of polysemous
readings. In concrete terms, he delineated readerly texts as producing social reality through
‘standard representation and dominant signifying practice’ (p. 24) and juxtaposed this
canonical form of writing with its writerly counterpart which was said to share no interest in
reducing the ‘infinite play of the world’ (Barthes, 1974, p. 5). Within his polarity, Barthes
took the instance of the ‘writerly’ text as a counter-force to the static complexity entailed in
the ‘readerly’ text. A central feature of writerly performances, following Barthes (Barthes,
1974), is that they discover ‘multiplicity instead of consistency’ and signify ‘flux instead of
stable meaning’ (p. 246). Barthes’ dichotomy is helpful for seeing that language, as in the
case of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, can be employed creatively not only so that it is used
in an original way but so that it suggests possibilities beyond those that the literal meaning
can offer. To say that Lyotard’s extensive and intensive plotting ignites into a writerly
performance thus implies that it does not stipulate pre-ordained meaning but, instead, works
to release ‘the floating chain of signifieds’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 39). Consequently, writing
always ‘forces a choice upon the writer’ (Barthes, 1967, p. 84) and we can surmise in
Lyotard’s case that he has opted for a code that quite noticeably performs some ‘illegality’ in
the sense of crossing given conventions. In order to establish a greater understanding of
writerly texts, texts that, to reformulate the matter in Barthes’ (1977) own words, create a
‘multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash’ (p. 146), it is important to understand that suchlike texts hinge on a minor use of
language which, in the process of enabling multiple meanings, allows for novel lines of
flight. This minor use of language becomes the epitome of deterriorialization since it
detaches language from its clearly delineated, regularly gridded territory of rules and
regulations (cf. Bogue, 2005). Bearing in mind our complaint that the field of discourse
analysis is characterized by an intriguingly stabilized set of conventions, we are eager to
reach out for a minor exegesis of discourse analysis, a discourse analysis that experiments
with language and thereby simulates invention by ignoring canonical models.
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Anexact Expression
While trying to bestow the field with movement, with style, we are keen to stress that the ‘play
with language’ is ‘an essential prerequisite of the … act of understanding’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p.
17). Having delineated that hardened language, by virtue of its ostensible accuracy, unmistakably
works to conceal or disintensify the play of the structure, it is helpful to glimpse at van Maanen
(1995) who concluded: ‘it seems to me that the more we try to be precise and exact, the less we
are able to say and that the harder we try to follow a rigorous … system, the more we are tempted
to fill it out with uninspired observation … This state of affairs recommends that we put our
theories forward with an awareness of a haunting irony: To be determinate, we must be
indeterminate’ (p. 139). To pursue van Maanen’s line of argument, we intend to discuss John
Law’s (2004) treatise of social scientific research in which he suggested, eloquently and
persuasively, that ‘perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigor, and find
ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight’ (p.
3). Both van Maanen and Law render the deterriorialization of language an important issue of
(social) science and, instead of treating hardened language as an insurmountable matter of fact,
prompt us to appreciate the increase of discourse analysis’ writerliness through the appreciation
of the ‘unready’, that which constantly escapes language’s attempt of ‘grasping’ and ‘holding
tight’. To this end, we must, to say it without hesitation, ‘learn to live with the uncertain,
undetermined and undeterminable – that is when we emotionally and aesthetically appreciate the
unready’ (Weiskopf, 1999, p. 16). Whereas writerliness still implies that discourse analysis
imparts (connotative) meanings (plural), we are called to withdraw from the temptation of
producing the or one, that is, denotative meaning. The polyphony we are advocating here can thus
be achieved by means of delineating the subject matter in contradictory ways, whereby not trying
to reduce it to one or the other interpretation (Sontag, 2001).
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To let meaning ‘hang in the air’,
so to speak, is a worthwhile trope for withdrawing from definitive closure and for stimulating a
peaceful coexistence of alternative interpretations. Furthermore, it is helpful to see that Sontag
(2001), in her sensitive and hearty treatise of Barthes’ work, bestowed this practice with an
aesthetic dimension. Importantly, while Sontag’s account on aesthetic practice was written
against the backdrop of Barthes’ work – which quite noticeably blurs the boundary between
literature and science – we are eager to proclaim that suchlike deliberations must not necessarily
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Cf. also van Maanen (1995) who has taken Karl Weick’s work to depict how the insertion of contradictory views
and statements works to restrain from definitive, closed significations.
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be kept separate from the realm of social science research and, to be ‘precise’, from the field of
discourse analysis. Where Law (2004) has contended that ‘ovels are ends in themselves, worth
reading in their own right. Academic writings are means to other ends’ (p. 11), we are keen to
insert a question mark as to whether Law’s assertion necessarily has to be the case and instead
follow May’s (2005) inspiration who mentioned that ‘(i)t is not only literature that can think
difference. Science can do it too’ (p. 86). Conceiving of aesthetics as practice that allows the
multiple to thrive, this thought becomes a fertile means for making discourse analysis minor,
positioning it outside the prevailing ‘discourse of a moral science’ (Rehn, 2002, p. 45). However,
it must remain pressing that anexact writing is not only an instance of aesthetic practice but also a
rhetorical trope that pays apt heed to the indeterminate, elusive ‘nature’ of discourse, its
processual ‘nature’. Inexactness, being an immanent feature of Lyotard’s and other scholar’s
writing, gives them ‘the benefit of the doubt’ (Leech, 1969, p. 205) and thus increases the force of
enunciation by virtue of retaining an awareness that, as we have been told by Law, things are not
necessarily graspable in their essence, but that they can ‘only’ be sensed in their becoming.
Language that retains a sense of paradox, of inexactness thus escapes the grasp of the dogmatic
idea of thought and, instead of emphasizing the centre or essence of being, gets to stipulate a
logic of ‘and … and … and … ’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25). In other words, the kind of
inexactness exhibited in Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ makes possible to read two or more
meanings simultaneously into a given text without any marked incongruity.
Hence, it is clear that, to increase the writerliness of discourse analysis, we need to
intervene with some force in order to estrange, respectively make strange the current code of
discourse analysis. Deleuze’ (1997) notion of ‘stuttering’ is illuminative in that respect since it
illustrates how language is pushed to its limit in order to cause a particular enunciation to become
more subtle, experimental or ‘molecular’ (Lambert, 2003). Stuttering thus becomes the state or,
better, process we are aiming at in order to reach language’s end, that is, the space where
language is no longer ‘defined by what is says, even by what makes it a signifying thing, but by
what causes it to move, to flow and to explode – desire’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 133).
Where Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction quite clearly implies that invention in the form of
writerliness necessitates a destabilization of language, we would like to pursue Deleuze’s (1997)
cunning musing on the need for disequilibrium: ‘(c)an we make progress if we do not enter into
regions far from equilibrium? Physics attests to this. Keynes made advances in political economy
because he related it to a situation of a ‘boom’, and no longer equilibrium. This is the only way to
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introduce desire into the corresponding field. Must language then be put into a state of boom,
close to a crash?’ (p. 109; emphasis in original). What we can deduce from Deleuze is that to be
enabled to make the transition from the equilibrium of readerly to the disequilibrium of writerly
discourse analysis, language must be released from the ‘trap’ of its very own making. Since
writerliness would not be possible using a language that pertains to a ‘homogeneous system’, we
are willing to follow Deleuze (1995) who longed for a language that is ‘unstable, always
heterogeneous, in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass,
come to pass, a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what
was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed’ (p. 141). To
quote Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we are enabled to reflect that Lyotard’s textual performance,
respectively the inexactness entailed therein, is not a matter for lament since ‘in order to
designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is
a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way
an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way’ (p. 20).
Given these telling remarks by Deleuze and Guattari, what remains to be said was expressed most
eloquently by Ullmann (1964): ‘(t)he best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps’ so that
something that is not entailed in denotative meaning ‘can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in’ (p.
99).
Neologism
What comes to the fore if we remind ourselves of Lyotard’s musing on the ‘tensor sign’ is,
among other things, an intriguingly rich use of neologisms. Neologism, or the invention of new
‘words’ places the reader in a position of actively questioning firmly held theoretical and
conceptual investments and conventions. In the case of Lyotard’s work, the reader finds that the
tensor sign not only renders a text polysemous, that is, a source of variegated interpretations, but
that it turns the text into an act of undecidability, a performance that exceeds the boundaries of
proper meaning. Whereas one might object that the use of novel words is simply employed for
reasons of ‘trendyness’, a criticism which was uttered not least in relation to Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) ‘Thousand Plateaus’, Deleuze (1995) himself took up the charge by saying
‘(t)hat’s not just malicious, it’s stupid. A concept sometimes needs a new word to express it’ (p.
32). We are happy to acquiesce with Deleuze’ ‘rectification’. That is, we believe that his claim
undoubtedly applies not only to ‘Thousand Plateaus’ but to the invention of words in any
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pragmatic or conceptual language game. Irrespective of the speaker being a poet, a journalist, a
copywriter or a scientist, neologism implies possibilities that exceed those expressible in the
current available stock of language. Neologisms, following Deleuze, give way to the
‘unexpected’ and, by means of breaking with commonsense, necessarily make the reader think.
Moreover, through their violation of tradition, it becomes clear that neologisms create an
asymmetry between language and reality and thus scrutinize the representational function of
language. To say that neologisms are mere expressions of mannerism and that everything could
be expressed through canonical language (games) ignores the fact that neologism gives rise to a
view that is by default hostile to the doxa or commonsense entailed in our accustomed language.
Neologisms catch the eye of the reader as they make language strange to him or her (though there
are, of course, relative differences in their degree of strangeness). The condition under which
language becomes strange has been depicted by Deleuze (1997) as follows: ‘(w)hen a language is
so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or to stammer … then language in its entirety
reaches the limit’ (p. 113). Again, to grasp the force of neologism it is worth recognizing that it
disrupts the symmetrical relationship between language and the world, as implied in hardened
language. Given this state of affairs, it seems intuitively compelling to ask why the semantic
deviation effectuated by neologism is seen by some as a kind of inspired nonsense. However, if
nonsense is understood in terms of being beyond the literal-minded logic of the mathematician, it
is clearly a view we could acquiesce with in the present context. Furthermore, what we would
like to take from this for the establishment of a minor discourse analysis is that, contrary to those
who have asserted that neologisms are vain or at least not requisite, neologism enable ‘concept-
making’ in that each newly coined word ‘implies the wish to recognize a concept or property
which the language can so far only express by phrasal or clausal description’ (Leech, 1969, p.
44). As such, neologism overspills language because it introduces not only a new word but a
newly formulated idea. Overspilling thus marks the moment of possibility since neologism inserts
into language multiple disjunctions, always doing more than a single sign can say. As a
consequence thereof, neologism moves us towards a new, that is, a more agile image of thought
that reaches out towards what it cannot conceive and gestures at what it cannot grasp. Be that as it
may, to suggest that neologism is a ‘violation’ of lexical rule would be somewhat misleading and
we would like to say that is seems more correct to stipulate that it extends or bends existing rules
in such a way as to effectuate greater generality. Having established that neologism introduces a
noticeable strangeness to language, we would now like to turn to the issue of metaphoric and
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allegoric expression which is an incremental part of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ and thereby
another fertile means for lifting language beyond its customary use.
Metaphoric and Allegoric Writing
Having posited that discourse analysis ‘zero degree’ style represents an obstacle, first, for
releasing or, better, enabling polysemous interpretations and, second, for sensing the
unpresentable, and having established anexact writings as a means for producing writerly
performances, we will here turn to the two (interrelated) tropes of allegory and metaphor in order
to reflect on how they relate with polysemia, meaning that exceeds the literal. To this end, we
must first of all mention that symbolic language is habitually connected with the genre of
literature (Derrida, 1992) whereas, on the other hand, it is kept outside the sphere of science.
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As mentioned in our discussion of Sontag (2001), this separation is of course somewhat artificial
and there have been writers such as Said (1994) who claimed that ‘(a)ll [academic] writing is
writing and delivers figural language, be they in the codes of (imitation), metaphor, allegory, or
irony’ (p. 3). Said’s point is well put and there have been others who have equally emphasized
that no language is purely literal but that language, however technical or hardened, is irrevocably
haunted by figural speech (e.g. van Maanen, 1995). However, provided that literature marks a
genre that is specifically renowned for figural speech (though there are, of course, notable
differences within the category ‘literature’), it comes as little surprise that scholars have often
sought to enliven science of whatever discipline through literature or art. Taking, for instance,
Feyerabend (1975) to make our point, we discover that he believed that science (and history)
require a new philosophy, new figures, and so he proposed: ‘(a)nd wouldn’t poets … be of great
help in finding such a language?’ (p. xii). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) were equally enthusiastic
about artists since they appreciated their creative use of language or representation. As Albrecht-
Crane (2005) pinpointed, Deleuze was ‘fascinated with writers and their creation of new
connections and strange, new expressions, both in terms of form and content’ (p. 127). What
comes to the fore here is that literature is not only welcomed by scholars for reason of its
aesthetical appeal (which is surely an end in itself; cf. Law, 2004) but, and at times even more so,
because it enables new expressions and forms of knowing which would not have been possible
through the hardened language of mainstream science. As eloquently expressed by Attridge
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For instance, Leech (1969) has pointed out that metaphor is the most important element of poetic language
whereas some have gone as far as claiming that it is the only thing that really matters in poetry.
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(1992), ‘(t)here is one linguistic practice in which we habitually celebrate the unique, instead of
finding it a hindrance, … , in which we welcome being obliged to read the text again (in a
repetition which is always different) in order to apprehend its power or its value: the practice we
call literature’ (pp. 14 – 15). Given the striking amount of ‘identical repetition’ in discourse
analysis’ language ‘toolbox’ (cf. above), the ideality of literature (Derrida, 1992), which is in
some ways diametrically opposed to hardened language, shall become the crux of our argument.
For we would like to use literature’s figurative mode of enunciation to deliberate on how it
stimulates a convergence between the denotative and connotative aspect of language. Though this
is unavoidably at the expense of the content of a particular expression, in our desire to direct the
focus at how things are expressed, i.e. style,
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we are eager to turn to Law’s (2004) cogent
elaboration of allegories and metaphors. Before starting our discussion, it must first of all be
acknowledged that discourse analyses, working upon whatever level of hardened language,
contain powerful means for creating realities, images and expressions. Yet, the concern that
haunts hardened or major discourse analysis is that it seems, as we have contended, utterly
limited in accounting for non-coherence or the ‘paradoxical’ (Feyerabend, 1975). Given this
constraint, we shall come to speak of the merits of metaphorical and allegorical expressions in
order to see how these tropes make possible the emergence of a minor discourse analysis.
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This
said, it is first of all noteworthy that allegory and metaphor are both conceivable as linguistic
enactments which highlight the performative aspect of language (in opposition to its constative
feature; cf. Derrida, 1992b). Whereas both tropes work through symbolism which uses one
(seemingly unrelated) subject or object to represent another, there is somewhat of a difference
entailed regarding their level of abstraction: unlike metaphors which work upon more or less
short figures or images, allegories are often called ‘continued metaphors’ since they extend their
representation over the course of an entire plot, be that a story, a poem or a novel. For reasons of
simplicity we could thus stipulate the difference by claiming that allegory is an extended version
of metaphor. It thus becomes clear that both metaphor and allegory are dealing with expressions
of what would irrevocably remain absent in the form of literal writing. In other words, allegory
and metaphor work by means of expansion since they make ‘manifest what is otherwise invisible.
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Though this shift is to be understood in a relative sense.
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Coming to talk of metaphoric and allegoric expression undoubtedly represents a selection since there would be
other rhetorical tropes which could be summoned here. However, given that metaphor and allegory are considered as
both pivotal aspects of literary practice and helpful devices for deterriorializing the hardened language of discourse
analysis, we believe that this selection is apt to make our point.
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It extends the fields of visibility, and crafts new realities’ (Law, 2004, p. 90). As in the case of
neologism, metaphor and allegory are instances of deterriorialization, since they establish
meaning in a way that rejects the referential function as established by hardened language. The
linguistic deviation caused by figural speech leaves a gap in the comprehension of a particular
text. As such, metaphor and allegory work upon or, better, require association and
imaginativeness on the part of the reader. That is, to fill the gap entailed through symbolic
speech, reader are required to use their imagination to enable themselves to perceive or, better,
establish some deeper connections with the ‘second stage’ (Leech, 1969), that is, connotative
meaning. Hence, unlike (hardened) representation, what is put forward through metaphor and
allegory does not pretend to speak for itself, for reality, but calls for the reader’s own
interpretation. To quote Leech (1969) on the matter, metaphor (and, to some lesser extent,
allegory) ‘depend on the leap the imagination is prepared to take in order to render meaningful
what is apparently absurd’ (p. 131). Being in close proximity with Barthes’ circumscription of
‘writerliness’, the merit we can appoint to allegoric and metaphoric expression is that it includes
ambiguity and ambivalence since it does not ‘only’ allow for multiple interpretations but makes
clear, by means of its overt non-literal imagery, that no interpretation can be original or definite.
To express the issue in Law’s (2004) terms, ‘(a)llegory is necessarily … about piling different
realities up on top of one another. It is about the apprehension of non-coherent multiplicity. It is
about split vision’ (p. 98; emphasis in original). To reiterate the importance of these ideas for our
argument: metaphor and allegory make language strange not only by making texts writerly, that
is, by hailing the reader’s engagement and imagination but, importantly, by emphasizing the
contingency of meaning more generally. Though the intelligibility of metaphors and allegories
rely upon the cultural foundation of commonsense, there are no reasons to believe that all
members of a particular culture would come to share the same understanding. Both metaphor and
allegory necessitate phenomenological experience wherefore they are always bestowed with a
personal touch or shading. As such, we can say that metaphor and allegory do not represent ‘l’art
pour l’art’, a kind of aesthetic practice that operates for its own sake (which, by the way, is not
necessarily a condemnable thing). Rather, these figurative tropes are requisite means to do away
with the ‘realist tale’ we have identified operating within canonical discourse analysis. To
inaugurate a minor use of discourse analysis, we thus invite metaphoric and allegoric writing to
increase – for the sake of a more expansive, non-literal style – the textual appeal of representation
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and, additionally, to allow for novel lines of flight which would not have been possible through a
straightforward, precise and seemingly neutral mode of enunciation.
Reverberations
… we’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us
suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 17).
… there are books (and articles) of the rhizomatic type, and books (and articles) of the root-type,
that is, there are texts clinging to centrality, definitions, representations, and there are
texts exploring molecular flows, shizzes, breaks. Texts drawing maps. (Meier Sørensen,
2001, p. 368; emphasis in original).
… the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always
detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and
its own line of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21),
Notwithstanding the observation that Lyotard and those others who have come to breach existing
conventions were often declared mad, paranoid or simply non-academic/philosophical, we
nonetheless hope that our discussion of ‘Libidinal Economy’ has some value in demonstrating
that discourse analysis could grossly profit, almost unconditionally, from making writing so
pliable and flexible that it would no longer allude to fixities (of discourse), but spur the
recognition that meaning is always ‘performed in the flesh and blood of words’ (Lyotard, 1988b,
p. 13). In our search for a minor discourse analysis in which language is brought close to a
‘boom’ or a ‘crash’, that is, discourse analysis that treats text as a flow, not a code (Stivale, 2005),
we have seen that style becomes the pivot for novel openings. What we had in mind when talking
about style has thereby in no way been related with philosophy’s ideal of ‘zero-degree’ (Grant,
1993) but with a style that is so intense that it ‘amounts to innovation’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 131).
The tenet we have tried to stress through our ‘detour’ to Lyotard and others is that the realm of
discourse analysis seems well advised to stop searching for the true, stop searching for ever more
sophisticated methods and, instead, seek to establish ways of writing that are attuned to account
433
for or pay tribute to the ‘ontology of difference’ (Deleuze, 1994). Therefore, we have suggested
that major discourse analysis’ obsession with tree-like structures/writings which inspire ‘a sad
image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented
higher unity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 16) be brought to an end. To formulate our aspiration
in a more affirmative fashion, we have tried to advocate a minor discourse analysis whose
organizing principle reminds us more of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ‘rhizome’, where
language is not used primarily to segment but to enable ‘lines of flight, movements of
deterriorialization and destratification’ (p. 3). When looked at from this point of view, if one
thinks of language as a code of rules which one can either follow or break, it is beyond question
that our argument has come to favor the latter tactic.
Yet, whereas some of our deliberations might have fostered the impression that we favor
the demise of discourse analysis or the creation of something greater than it, it is less the case that
we are ‘against’ discourse analysis in general, but that we favor the demise of the particular
understanding of discourse analysis we have become accustomed to, that is, the territorialized
form of discourse analysis we have coined ‘journalist genre’ and ‘techno-talk’. Both forms, in our
opinion, have never ‘reached an understanding of multiplicity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 5).
The reason we have come to make reference to Lyotard’s intensive linguistic performance is that
it demonstrates, among other things, that writing and style are matters of choice (at least partially)
and that language can be employed to establish ‘unison’ between content and style, between the
performative and constative aspect of language. The point we have been eager to push here is that
a heritage, however persuasive it might appear, is never a passive given but requires an active
process of interpretation and appropriation (cf. Jones, 2002). Pursuing the inspiration we derived
from Lyotard, we wanted to state that at the heart of discourse analysis there is a game to play
which sets out for ‘powerlessness’, searching for forms of textual organizations where ‘(t)here
would be no message in our bottle, only a few energies, whose transmission and transformation
was left and was desired to be unpredictable’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 255). Although our argument
quite obviously strayed into philosophy, it has been reaching out for a kind of representational
practice that gives or can give direction to a field in crisis which so far has exhibited a clear
propensity towards univocal interpretations and, therefore, has constantly fallen short of the
expectation it has evoked (namely, that it is able to tackle the ‘crises of representation’ or the
fallacy of the ‘mirror metaphor’ of language; e.g. Potter, 1996b). In our musing on style, our
elaboration of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, in particular, its immanently intensive, i.e. ‘poetic
434
language’ (Leech, 1969) has brought to light that the field of discourse analysis has opted for
what we could, following Sapir (1921), call a ‘low-voltage use of language’. Bearing in mind that
Sapir has compared language with an electric dynamo that has the ability, when running full
‘steam’, to power an elevator, one could contend that language in discourse analysis, as it is used
presently, seems only to have enough power for, say, a reading lamp. Arguably, this comparison
is somewhat hyperbolic; however, the point to be made is that we would like to instill in the field
of discourse analysis what Sapir termed ‘high-voltage use of language’. It is within such a
‘hypersemanticized’ use of language (Weinreich, 1963) that we have identified a potential for not
only incorporating performativity but also for extending the scope or elasticity of connotative
meaning up to the point where language’s hegemonic ‘appeal’ for denoting univocal meaning is
called into question.
Hence, having envisaged the ‘future’ of discourse analysis as being both contingent on
resistance and dependent on an active inheritance of a different kind, there is no way to avoid
conceding that in order to permit ‘new things’ the lifting of some forms of (self-) censorship
would be required. We thus contend that the current purism and concealed censorship of
discourse analysis needs to ‘to break out of prohibitions’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 36). Importantly,
there is a danger here of oversimplifying, of reducing, of defining artificial boundaries, since one
could take these arguments as prescribing ‘this or die’ (Lyotard, 1993). If we had granted some
credibility to Grant’s (1993) assertion that ‘critique desires that the situation be stabilized’ (p.
xxvii), the premonition at the beginning of this essay might have been nonessential since we had
no interest in re-territorializing discourse analysis or defining a finite ‘Gestalt’ for it, but rather in
enabling novel openings which could breach the over-coded ‘shibboleth’ of discourse analysis.
With this in mind, relating style and discourse analysis enables us to derive a new ‘science of
writing’ where the ‘new’ is not meant to kill the ‘old’. Instead, the new, that is: libidinal,
deterritorialized or minor writing, is supposed to work in a different manner in that it does not
aspire to provide a novel set of rules, a method-like grid for keeping separate the good from the
bad. This minor writing aspires to movement and perpetual displacement which elicits the image
of ‘an eternal turning rather than a splitting’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxx). In other words, while
critique ‘by default’ seeks for a better situation, a reterriorialization, so to speak, our discussion of
the ideality of literature has been motivated not by the aim of drawing new borders but by the aim
of stimulating a condition of possibility where borders between discourse analysis and literature
are softened and ‘exploited’ for the sake of joyful play. The condition of possibility we have
435
sought to establish thus works less through the prescription of ‘you must!’ than through the
approval of ‘you ought’. On the face of it, such a (non-totalitarian) instruction defies definitive
prescriptions (as entailed in some of the method handbooks elaborated above), while,
nevertheless, seeking the ‘exploration of the possible’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985). In the
following paragraph we will now discuss the implications which can be surmised for the
education of the nascent scholar. In so doing, we shall consider the idea that once we have
reached (or at least aimed for) a state ‘after method’ (Law, 2004) we will need a novel scaffold to
direct or, better, give direction to those who want to conduct a discourse analysis.
An Ethos of Reading
There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made … As an assemblage,
a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages … (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 4).
The only question is how anything works, with its intensities, flows, processes, partial objects –
non of which mean anything. (Guattari in Deleuze, 1995, p. 22; emphasis in original)
As a first step towards our minor discourse analysis we have been rejecting the assumption that
the matter is amenable to the automat, to the ‘robot’ (Lyotard, 1993), i.e. to the kind of method
which promises a way around the ordeal of research. Where we have seen that certain expositions
of method operate in the sense of Pandora’s box (which hosts hope as its last evil; cf. also
Chapter 6), we have been relentless in arguing that some hopes need to be questioned and in
particular that the hope that method offers a ‘short-circuit’ by means of which we can accelerate
our writing (which is, of course, an essential imperative in today’s ‘McUniversity’; cf. Parker,
2002b). As was not least implied in the deliberations in the first part of this essay, one can
hypothesize that the scholar new to discourse analysis, the apprentice (which we might remain
throughout our entire life) of discourse analysis might be ‘born in a desert’ if he/she sees
him/herself restricted to method textbooks. Consequently, we must bear in mind that method
neither gives nor saves time wherefore it needs to be accepted that discourse analysis is and will
remain ‘labor-intensive’ (Gill, 1993). Thus, we must say ‘adieu’ to the idea(l) of ‘mechanical
436
replacement’ (Appelbaum, 1995); what is on offer at this moment of potential resignation is
Law’s (2004) plea in which he exhorted us ‘(t)o live more in and through slow method, or
vulnerable method, or quiet method’ (p. 11). Discourse analysis, we suggest, can step into the
space outlined by Law (without occupying it in a dominant, territorializing sense, of course). As
implied in Law’s notion of ‘slowness’, we would like to add that good research, good discourse
analysis goes hand in hand with reading. The sort of reading we have in mind might yet be
considered a disincentive since it would involve a slowing-down; though a slowing down in the
name of passion, patience and persistence, a reading that prompts a reflection on what it means to
‘work well’. In the spirit of a pedagogical gesture, we suggest a ‘reading in love’ (Deleuze, 1995,
p. 9), that is, a reading that does not allow for rushing, for cursory, vertical browsing, for
possession. This sort of reading implies an escape from the ‘desert’ associated with method books
and, given Guattari’s (in Deleuze, 1995) cogent comment that ‘(t)he only question is how
anything works’ (p. 22), it becomes conceivable that we have crossed the point where it would
still be appropriate to claim that discourse analysis is a matter of adhering to the proper principles
and standards of method. Since we can no longer ‘hide’ behind the argument of having followed
the canon of method, we advise those working within the field of discourse analysis to set about
an ‘intensive reading’, a reading that asks a particular piece of text ‘whether it works, and how it
works, and who it works for’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 22). The escapism entailed in Deleuze thus
requires, among other things, readings that cross the strict boundary of the respective text at hand
and, thereby, get ‘in contact with what’s outside the book [e.g. intertexts], … as a series of
experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing
the book in pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything’ (Deleuze, 1995,
pp. 8 – 9). Given Deleuze’ (1995) felicitous claim that within a particular reading either
‘something comes through or it doesn’t’ (p. 8), we are keen to suggest that the nascent scholar
might find most inspiration for conducting discourse analysis not by enmeshing him/herself into
method textbooks but by reading, affirmatively though critically, the related work of other
discourse scholars as well as more experimental textual performances (such as, for instance, that
by Lyotard) which might provide novel insights for intensifying our modes of enunciation. This
is not to say that discourse analysis has to be done anew or reinvented each time we opt to carry
out a discursive investigation. There are those who have preceded us, who have swum in this
water before, so to speak, wherefore it would be pitiful if we simply ignored their (potential)
heritage. Importantly, the notion of heritage or inheriting is not exhausted by or restricted to those
437
discursive investigations which are prior to our own. Rather, as our reflection on Lyotard’s
‘Libidinal Economy’ has made intelligible, much of what might enliven future discourse analysis,
discourse analysis ‘to come’ might reside outside the sphere of the discursive camp. As a
consequence thereof, discourse scholars and scholars of other fields, be that philosophy,
literature, or any discipline – whether academic or non-academic – might all provide help in
getting us into the water, teaching us some strokes and guiding us through the water so that we
may learn to swim. Though we must not learn to swim in isolation, we must not forget that,
contrary to the promise of method, there will undoubtedly come the day were we ‘must push off
from the shore and conjugate things for ourselves’ (May, p. 112).
Postscript: Passing Comments on the Limits of Possible Writing
… philosophers share the intellectual’s innate distrust of what I call monumentalism, that is, the
idea that you can overpower an opponent by the sheer force, be it political, economic or
simply verbal – the number of long words and twisted sentences amassed on a page.
(Fuller, 2005, pp. 92 – 93; emphasis in original)
Perhaps, rather than saying that anything can happen, it would be more accurate to say that
anything can happen, given the right conditions. (May, 2005, p. 116; emphasis in original)
As Shotter (1997) eloquently pinpointed, contemporary intellectual debate is limited through
explicit strictures which is revealed not least in that academics …
… must function within a culture of domination, of hierarchy, a Cartesian culture of mastery and
possession, and we experience a certain anxiety when we begin to speak out against it, to
“speak the truth to power.” As such, it tends to disorient us, to distract us from the words
we need, we find ourselves saying what we know will be acceptable, rewarded; it is an
anxiety that tends differentially, to silence us, we tend to speak of some things but not
others, in certain styles but not others. (p. 18)
438
As implied by our previous deliberations, the use of literary styling signals to the reader that
the account does not function as a map of the world (and, indeed, that the mapping or
mimesis metaphor is flawed altogether; cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), but as an interpretive
activity addressed to a community of interlocutors. For many qualitative researchers, such
writing is especially appealing because it offers a greater expressive range and an
opportunity to reach audiences outside the academy. However, though we have mentioned
repeatedly that style is a matter of choice, we must not obscure the fact that choice is a
relative matter and, as follows from Shotter’s above statement, that the range of the
acceptable might in fact be much narrower than we might wish it to be. In addition to this,
Latour (1987) has delineated that ‘(t)here is something still worse, however, than being either
criticized or dismantled by careless readers: it is being ignored. Since the status of a claim
depends on later users’ insertions, what if there are no later users whatsoever? This is the
point that people who never come close to the fabrication of science have the greatest
difficulty in grasping. They imagine that all scientific articles are equal and arrayed in lines
like soldiers, to be carefully inspected one by one. However, most papers are never read at
all. No matter what a paper did to the former literature, if no one else does anything with it,
then it is as if it never existed at all’ (p. 40). As elaborated before on the background of
Lyotard’s deviant (an odd term, indeed) stylization, it seems all too easy to dismiss or ignore
a text by saying that it is difficult, appalling, or simply non-scientific.
145
Provided that certain
ways of writing are favored over others thus raises the question ‘(h)ow can anyone who
“publishes” today accept to leave out of the picture … or rather in the non-published, the
whole complex functioning of the editorial machine: its mechanisms of selection, control,
sanctioning, recruitment, internal promotion, elimination, censorship, and so on?’ (Derrida,
1995, p. 29). The publishing machine is to blame, of course. Yet, blame is maybe not an
option here since it is conceivable that publishers all too well know ‘which side their bread is
buttered on’ (Jones & Böhm, 2004, p. 2). Power or, more precisely, domination (Foucault,
1996) is an issue here, since as van Maanen (1995) convincingly pointed out, it is a common
tactic of elite groups of all sorts to refuse to discuss, and to label as uninteresting or vulgar,
issues that are uncomfortable for them. Though it seems reasonable to say that such moves
are unjustifiable or at least unfair, the problem of deviance nevertheless imposes limits on the
145
Note in passing, Fuller (2004) mentioned that continental philosophy is ‘valued more for the idiosyncratic mood
set by their prose than the specificity of their message’ (p. 67).
439
intensification of language we have suggested before. On the face of it, ‘zero degree’ writing
is actively sustained by the academic apparatus, since it is beyond doubt that there are
networks within the professional and educational marketing and management world that
potentially exercise influence over curricular norms, textbook content and publishers’ agenda
(Hackley, 2003). To put things bluntly, ‘everyone seeks to flee … in the direction of the
system and its binary ideal’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 29). Provided that once the ‘system’ has
achieved a ‘critical mass’ it has the power to buttress its code of conduct in a self-reinforcing
manner (c.f. Lyotard, 1984), there is little, if any, reason to question that prevailing writing
conventions will work through exclusion. Therefore we must not lose sight of the fact that
the dominant regulations of ‘proper stylization’ will make it difficult for writings which
resist definitive coding and which try to give rise to ‘flows, revolutionary active lines of
flight, lines of absolute decoding’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 22). As Phillips and Hardy (2002)
rightly observed, scholars of discourse analysis ‘face the ongoing struggle of convincing
reviewers and editors that their studies are conducted satisfactorily and their papers written
appropriately’ (p. 79). Talking about the necessity to render one’s analysis ‘satisfactorily’ or
‘appropriately’ should cause a certain uneasiness, since it makes it clear that the ‘tree’, the
structure which treats text as a box of signifiers, is not only looming heavily but is actively
sustained and fortified in the sphere of academic work. In accordance with this, the
publishing industry appears to seek for, to say it without reservation, total control where
everything beyond the mainstream contains little political legitimacy or economic
justification. To shed some light on the large-scale (economic) successes and best-selling
status of method textbooks, it appears that the minor discourse analysis must surrender even
before having fought its first battle. ‘How to escape convention?’ is a difficult question and
one which certainly defies any easy solutions. Withdrawing from the possibility of
converging with the tree-admirers (e.g. Phillips & Hardy, 2002), there is, in principle, still
the option to follow the suit of those who have chosen to sidestep the disciplinary influence
of the publishing industry by means of staging their own textual production. Taking the
realm of organization studies to underscore our point, one finds in the open-access journal
‘Ephemera’
146
or in the independent publishing houses ‘Dvalin’ or ‘Mayflybooks’
147
a type
146
‘Ephemera’ has been staged in 2001 and since then published a plethora of passionate ideas on various topics
relating to, for instance, novel philosophical and theoretical terrains, radical political thoughts and critical treatises on
the closure incepted by essentialist writings.
440
of format which accounts for the fact that it ‘is increasingly hard to publish works grounded
in research and in radical interrogation of the present’ (cf. homepage ‘Mayflybooks’) and
which has taken to heart the experimentation with ideas, concepts, argumentation and jargon.
As contained, for instance, on the homepage of ‘Dvalin’, these sorts of ventures are said to
work ‘as an experiment in alternative forms of academic publishing’ where it ‘tries to
combine non-traditional means and arguments with excellence in execution.’ With this in
mind, it must be added that these open-access platforms render amenable a passionate,
intriguing and undeniably inspiring collection of works which, if published through
traditional channels, would have cost a small fortune, to say the least. All these projects
exhibit a political trend in that they seek to bypass the publishing industry which, to quote
‘Mayflybooks’, ‘is no longer in public hands and hence fails to represent any public.’ In
using the internet to distribute downloadable PDF-files while additionally selling cheap
paperback prints (instead of the more expensive hard-cover books which, following Jones
(2004), run the risk of collecting dust in the library), both ‘Dvalin’ and ‘Mayflybooks’ get to
represent genuine non-profit endeavors which emphasize work that is ‘politically relevant
and aesthetically engaging’ (cf. homepage ‘Mayflybooks’) and thereby devote all efforts to
making those works available to a wide audience. Hence, it is most important here to
remember that such initiatives have given voice to a sort of text, argument or writing format
that else would have run the risk of being entitled ‘ferocious’ or ‘evil’ (cf. Jones &
O’Doherty, 2005) and, by implication, would have been silenced or suppressed.
‘Mayflybooks’, for instance, has taken explicit note of this threat while setting out to engage
with works that are ‘currently excluded by the publishing industries, either because of their
progressive politics or their apparent lack of a mass market.’ What we would have missed if
these publications would have been kept back, retained on some anonymous hard-disks,
escapes the possibility of imagination. To enable a ‘reading in love’, as suggested above, it
remains to recommend that you visit the following links (http://www.ephemeraweb.org,
http://www.mayflybooks.org or www.dvalin.org) and make your first strokes …
147
Run by Alf Rehn, respectively Steffen Böhm and Campell Jones.
441
Outlook
Given that the first chapter of the thesis was devoted to emphasizing the ‘McDonaldization’
of business school education, and, in particular the kind of censorship and non-legitimation
which constituted and sustained this condition of possibility in the first place, Chapter 5
which follows endeavors to put forward some deliberations on how to broaden and enliven
the business curricula by dint of a reflexive stance. The introduction of Derrida’s
deconstructive practice – a code which alludes not to the ostensibly fancy French Methodism
into which Derrida’s critics have turned ‘deconstruction’, but rather to the art of double-
reading as discussed by Critchley (2005) – to an institution which hitherto has been
particularly de-politicized and blinded regarding its own knowledge production, premises
and unquestioned root assumptions could thus be conceived as a profoundly oppositional
gesture that aspires to negotiate a discursive space where the dominant assumptions of
business schools reach their limit and thereby create a space for ‘the advent of something
entirely new’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 89).
442
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5
***
Deconstructive Reflexivity in the Business
School without Conditions
The only attitude (the only politics-judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would
absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an
essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming
questioning. (Derrida, 1995, p. 239)
As we dismiss traditional science’s claim of objectivity and truth we don’t have to play God,
writing as ‘disembodied omniscient narrators’. (Richardson, 1994, p. 518)
Synopsis
The present chapter, to put it in general terms, deals with the concept of ‘reflexivity’ and its
potential to radicalize the business school. Positing that notions of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflection’ in
their ubiquitous use have taken on various shadings, I will open the chapter by highlighting those
interpretations which envision (and thereby prescribe) reflexivity as a kind of practice that seeks
to disclose the author’s intentions, assumptions, ideologies, etc., so as to render a particular piece
of writing, that is to say its meaning, more accessible. Illustrating this argument from a
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perspective of qualitative research, I will reveal that the function of this exegesis of reflexivity is
to portray the author’s purposeful persona, thereby exhibiting his/her linear, agentic and
hierarchical relationship with the text. The author is thus envisaged as being in charge of its
meaning. The aim of this chapter, then, is to scrutinize this image of reflexivity by calling into
question if such ‘confessional tales’ make (qualitative) research more authentic or credible. To
this end, I will pinpoint some of the basic root assumptions of this stream of reason and suggest
an alternative meaning of reflexivity, one that focuses on the act of reading and the text itself,
rather than on the author. In so doing, I will first introduce excerpts of Derrida’s work on
literature as well as Barthes’ and Foucault’s investigations of the author (function) in order to
problematize the conception that the intelligibility of a particular utterance or text presupposes
laying bare the (ideological) grounding and/or intentional state of its author. Therefore, by
seeking to dissociate the link between text and author as reproduced by proponents of qualitative
research and by accentuating both the significance of the text’s context as well as of its readers, I
will advocate ‘reflexivity’ as deconstructive practice. In trying to work out the potential tenets of
deconstruction concerning the business school, a brief detour will be taken to portray the kind of
criticism deconstruction has been subjected to. It will be shown, for instance, that Derrida’s
deconstructive work has elicited suspicion and severe opposition both in and outside the context
of academic philosophy. In discussing some of the best established and most infamous
misperceptions of Derrida and his deconstructive work, it will be revealed that his work has often
been portrayed as a purely theoretical or private endeavor which is irrelevant to public or ‘real-
life’ issues or simply as a condemnable, disinterested and thus nihilistic intellectual exercise.
Given the often ignorant, or at least obscure, treatment of deconstruction (Critchley, 1999), I will
point out, among other things, that deconstruction and (antagonistic) criticism, i.e. destruction,
embody different objectives (Patton & Protevi, 2003) and that the two spheres of textual analysis
must therefore be apprehended in terms of their dissimilarity. With this in mind, I will ‘revitalize’
deconstruction as an affirmative act that acknowledges and respects the work under analysis.
Furthermore, I will depict some of the ethical ‘aspirations’ (Jones, 2003) and hitherto neglected
(political) potentials of deconstruction (Patton, 2003) in order to envision the subject matter as a
radical means for ‘deschooling’ (Illich, 1973) the contemporary business school (from within).
Positing that the ‘age of deconstruction’ has already dawned in the humanities (Nealon, 2003) but
only marginally influenced business schools, this treatise will then climax in the
conceptualization of the business school without conditions in which deconstruction will become
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the epitome of free expression and responsible reflection. Claiming a space for deconstruction in
the business school of the future, I will elaborate on the (possible) position and function of
deconstruction in educational curricula and its relationship with mainstream theory.
Reflexivity as Confessional Tales: The Case of Qualitative Research
Researchers ought to be self-reflective, and declare their interests and agenda … (Ogbor, 2000,
p. 268)
… nothing is so much deception as this inner world which we observe with the famous “inner
sense”. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 264)
‘(Self) reflection’, as the term is used in qualitative research (e.g. Woolgar, 1988; Denzin &
Lincoln, 2003), more often than not necessitates that one must start or finish a piece of empirical
work by disclosing one’s relationship with the research topic, one’s moral credentials, one’s
ideological standpoint, one’s affections or reservations towards the subject matter. Such
endeavors seem to be based on the assumption that a scientific text, in order to be
comprehensible, requires commentary (on the author) since it always means more than it
apparently says (Hartman, 2004). In order to illustrate how reflection is denoted as a practice
through which the author is prompted to lay bare his/her implicit assumptions and to reveal
his/her impetus on the subject matter, it is helpful to refer to King (2004) who claimed that
‘(r)esearchers must reflect on the nature of their involvement just as they consider the meaning of
their participants’ contributions’ (p. 20). King thereby suggested that we, i.e. qualitative
researchers, have to put our ‘presuppositions down in writing at the start of the study’ and that we
need to keep ‘a diary in which you record your own feelings’ (p. 20). Moreover, as revealed in
Parker’s (2002) outline of critical (qualitative) psychology, reflexive endeavors should proceed
by way of including ‘an account of the moral-political standpoint of the researcher’ (p. 4).
Despite the brevity of this outline, we are provided with a preliminary insight into one of the
central premises of reflexivity as pursued by qualitative researchers, which is to make explicit the
author’s taken-for-granted assumptions and his/her (ideological) influence in the research process
so as to make his or her interpretations accessible to (and appraisable and revisable for) a wider
457
audience. Importantly, reflexivity is perceived in such approaches not only as a means for making
transparent the researcher’s otherwise opaque sense-making practices, but as a moral imperative
of ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’ (cf. Mackenzie Davey & Liefooghe, 2004, p. 181). Mackenzie Davey
and Liefooghe (2004) thus remind us that as ‘researchers we position ourselves as speaking for
the oppressed’ which, according to the authors, is simultaneously accompanied by the ‘danger of
misrepresentation’ (p. 182). In this way, reflexivity is used to counteract the risk to ‘get
things/people wrong’. In other words, reflexivity is a means for undoing or at least mitigating
potential misrepresentations of the research matter as well as for restoring looming power
imbalances between the researcher and the research object (Alvesson & Deetz, 2003). Arguably,
the issue of ‘getting it right’, that is, grasping the truth of the research object, represents a central
concern in this understanding of reflexivity and I am looking forward to suggest some of
Derrida’s works which challenge the contention that one should make the author/writer liable for
establishing the truth. However, before doing so and before suggesting another exegesis of
reflexivity for the future business school, I would like to expand on the topic of qualitative
research and point out that it is autoethnography which most firmly embraces the conception that
there is a constant possibility of deflecting the other’s (i.e. the subject matter of research) view,
since we do not know it properly (cf. also Derrida, 2005) and, by implication, that we should
‘study only our own experiences’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003b, p. 51). Contending that (qualitative)
researchers should look ‘inward’ in order to expose their ‘vulnerable selves’, autoethnographical
studies have paved the way for a perspective in which interpretation is not merely conceived of as
a cognitive and/or perspectivist undertaking (Fay, 1996) but as a process that simultaneously
comprises ‘emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2003, p.
209). By privileging personal/private experience and the introspective skills of the researcher
over the experience of others, autoethnographers have come to thrive on the assumption that
meaning becomes less speculative and diluted and hence more true.
One might object that it is at least questionable whether these kinds of ego-centric
inspection bring us any closer to the truth (cf. also Chapter 4) and whether this sort of self-
disclosure and ‘declarations of love’ displayed in certain reflective (auto)ethnographies (e.g.
Behar & Gordon, 1995; Kulick & Wilson, 1995) are simply a matter of taste. I am thus keen to
assert that such confessional tales and introspective journeys contain no value for the task at
hand: to establish a kind of business school that is reflective of its own root assumptions and that
counteracts the consumerist attitude towards learning (cf. Chapter 1). To clear the ground, I
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would like to stipulate that the ‘confessional tales’ I have identified in relation to qualitative
research disclose their value, if there is any, only in conjunction with the immunization of
research against potential counter-attacks. That is, revealing one’s innermost feelings and
passions, and by laying bare one’s own immersion in the topic, it would evidently infringe upon
social conventions to criticize scholars’ writing. Be that as it may, I would like to ignore the kind
of reverence being implied in the above accounts and leave the sort of reflexivity that focuses
exclusively or predominantly on the perspective of the author open to debate. Since the above
understanding of reflexivity is counterproductive for the argument I am developing below, I opt
to go against the grain of this perspective, and in particular against its obvious concern with
hermeneutic depth. In this context, it is helpful to have a glimpse at Derrida’s (1976) telling
observation that ‘commentary’ [on writing], of whatever level of sophistication and depth, ‘has
always only protected, it has never opened, a reading’ (p. 158; emphasis in original). If we thus
follow Derrida in his dislike of, or shall we say distrust in commentary, little intellectual effort is
needed to argue that neither passionate hyperboles nor endless descriptions of intimate details as
contained in these sorts of (self-) reflective endeavor eliminate the fact that some of these
writings have little more to offer than the author’s emotional spillage or pathos. Being aware of
my impertinence in making such a statement, I consciously chose to be as blunt (and merciless)
as possible in order to underscore that the issue of reflexivity in (qualitative) research, though
undeniably important, is all too often seen as a means of rhetorical self-defense or textual
‘impregnation’. Whilst it must remain clear that the issue of self-defense is diametrically opposed
to the sort of deconstructive reflexivity (cf. also Chapter 2) I will establish below, it is important
to reiterate, then, that the problematic aspect of the above-mentioned undertakings is foremost
revealed through the premise that by putting forward personal confessions of one’s relation with
the subject matter (e.g. sexual deviance, serial killers … social entrepreneurs) one becomes, first,
more credible as an author, since one is assumed to know how the other feels, thinks, acts, etc.
and, second, legitimated to talk in the name of truth (Foucault, 2001). Whereas such writings
arrogate that one is able to look behind or inside the author’s psychological apparatus in order to
unmask and neutralize the elusive operation of his/her ideologies, I contend that the time is ripe to
envision the task of reflexivity as one that does not put the author in the center of attention. The
hermeneutic rhetoric which, as I have briefly mentioned above, is most visibly comprised in
autoethnographical research (Ellis & Bochner, 2003), is thus not pertinent in conjunction with the
sort of deconstructive reflexivity I will promote in this chapter, because there is no such thing as
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personal consciousness, intention, or even truth one can legitimately refer to. Provided that the
idea of reflexivity in qualitative research is more often than not conjoined with the disclosure of
one’s intentions, hidden agenda, introspective insights or intra-psychic experience, I chose to
qualify this thought as futile, thereby raising the question whether this sort of (self-) reflexivity
has not degenerated into a ‘ritualistic hurdle that one must jump over … ?’ (Ainsworth & Hardy,
2004, p. 168). In order to scrutinize the appropriateness of reflexivity as a form of
confessionalism and to challenge the significance being assigned to the author’s intentions, I will
now turn to selected texts of Derrida whose works I deem most pertinent for dismantling the logic
of reflexive confessionalism.
As a first step, we get to see that Derrida (1995b), in his ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’,
pinpointed that literature makes ‘the author an author who is not responsible’ (p. 28), that is, an
author who is not forced to account for the truth and, therefore, can preserve his/her secret.
Arguably, such a perspective is quite counter-intuitive with respect to both ‘normal science’
(Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992) and public discourse, since one normally assumes that a secret is
discoverable. Derrida, opposing this view, made it unmistakably clear that a true secret can never
be revealed. Derrida therefore contradicted the kind of qualitative research described above which
always seeks to lay bare the secret (i.e. intentions and ideologies) of the author. As we are
reminded by Derrida that the secret (of literature) must be retained because it is the very secret of
a text which ‘impassions’ us, we can translate this claim to our subject matter and argue that one
must refrain from commenting on the author’s intentions, ideologies, etc. and, consequently, on
what a given author wants to express through his/her text. With this in mind, it becomes blatantly
clear that, although one can never know with certainty whether or not there is a secret at all, the
fact that something remains open coincides with the ‘chance of saying everything without
touching upon the secret’ (Derrida, 1995b, p. 23). Extending Derrida’s notion of the secret to the
issue of reflexivity (and representation more generally), it becomes clear that the meaning of a
text, irrespective of it being labeled as ‘literature’ or ‘science’, cannot be fully revealed, least of
all by ‘persecuting’ the author’s intentional or psychological state. Following Derrida’s claim that
meaning must retain a certain elusiveness, there is a second aspect that needs to be considered
more closely, namely that the invocation of the author’s intentional state is often carried out in the
name of transparency or, to put it more subtly, truth. I would therefore like to highlight that the
pervasive idea of the author or the demonstration of his/her ‘entanglement’ with the subject
matter, is linked to the canonical understanding of science and particularly to the assumption that
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research can be separated from fictional, non-realist writings. In other words, pretending that
there is a natural dividing line between literature, which is deemed dubious, and so-called serious
speech acts (cf. Hillis Miller, 2001),
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it is qualitative research (which belongs to the latter
category) which holds that a given text could not get along without its author. In view of this
assumption, the idea of reflexivity as established in qualitative research denotes that author and
text necessarily go together, further assuming that access to or insight into the former would
enable the de-codification of the latter. Notwithstanding its pervasiveness, this view is not as self-
evident as it might first appear and we seem well advised to spend some thought on the
possibility of a non-authored exegesis of reflexivity and the possible merits which would derive
from the dissociation of text and author. In view of this objective, it is Derrida (e.g. 1992b,
1992c) who convincingly argued that an
utterance (or speech act) can be iterated in diverse,
that is, universal contexts, whereby it is primarily the context of a given utterance, rather than the
speaker’s intention, that stipulates meaning. In concrete terms, Derrida (1985) asserted that, ‘the
effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth’, to the intended meanings of its
presumed author’ (p. 29; quoted in Halion, 1989). This claim cannot be overemphasized, because
it undermines both the idea that the truth of a particular text can definitively be disclosed as well
as the general primacy of the speaker/author. Regarding the former issue, Derrida mentioned that
it is in particular literature which exceeds the possibility of truth, since it emphasizes the
immanent undecidability of meaning and the elusive relationship between a given text and its
author/writer. For instance, ‘(s)omething of literature will have begun when it is not possible to
decide whether … I am indeed speaking of something (of the thing itself, this one, for itself) or if
I am given an example, an example of something or an example of the fact that I can speak of
something, of my way of speaking of something, of the possibility of speaking in general of
something in general, or again of writing these words, etc.’ (Derrida, 1992c, pp. 33 – 34). What
this reveals is that the recognition that literature retains a secret concerning the question if a
specific utterance represents either truth or fictional imagination. Derrida (1992c) further claimed
the following with respect to the position of the writer of literature: ‘(s)uppose that I say ‘I’, that I
write in the first person or that I write a text, as they say ‘autobiographically’. No one will be able
seriously to contradict me if I claim … that I am not writing an ‘autobiographical’ text but a text
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As Austin contended, literature is ‘parasitical’ on normal speech acts as it is ‘non-serious’ and ‘non-felicitous’.
Specifically, literature, which, following Austin, does not contain any ‘real’ traces in history or identifiable people,
therefore becomes the anti-thesis to his understanding of speech act as it acts ‘non-seriously’, i.e. without reference
to particular (i.e. real) places and people.
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on autobiography of which this very text is an example. No one will seriously be able to
contradict me if I say … that I am not writing about myself but on ‘I’, in any I at all, or on the I in
general, by giving an example: I am only an example, or I am exemplary’ (p. 34; emphasis in
original). On the face of it, literature, as Derrida pointed out, entails every possible relationship
between author and the text. Therefore, the question as to who the ‘I’ truly is or is not remains
non-answerable. It is thus revealed in Derrida’s elaboration on literature that text always exceeds
the limits of true meaning. Essentially, it is important to note that this premise applies not only to
literature (cf. Derrida, 2005) but to all (serious) writing in general (cf. Derrida, 1982). That is to
say that scientific research must equally address the question if it is at all appropriate to ask
whether and how the author has signed his/her text so as to denote (a) particular meaning(s).
Hence, if we are attentive to the implications derived so far, it is important to note that Derrida, in
blatant contrast to John Austin (cf. Derrida, 1988) who asserted that normal speech acts depend
upon a proper context, pointed out that the context in which one might make a normal (i.e. happy)
speech act, cannot be determined, because the intentional origin of speech acts (i.e. the speaker or
writer) cannot control his/her utterances in such a way as to make them unambiguous, happy or
normal. In other words, following Derrida (1977), ‘o context can entirely enclose it [the
intention of the writer]. Nor any code’ (p. 189). With this in mind, it hardly needs mention that
Derrida advocated the detachment of writing/text and context by pointing at the issue of
‘iterability’, meaning that a piece of written (or spoken) text can be removed from its original
context (be that a book, letter or local communication) and placed or ‘cited’, to use Derrida’s
wording, in another context, where the utterance is bestowed with an entirely new meaning.
Derrida (1982) thus used the notion of ‘iterability’ to emphasize the innumerable possibilities of
interpretation as well as to disrupt the ‘authority of the code as a finite system of rules; [and to
propose] at the same time, the radical destruction of any context as a protocol of code’ (p. 9).
Arguably, the lines of flight here are many. Be that as it may, I would particularly like to mention
that what Derrida’s observations teach us regarding the issue of reflexivity is that although the
writer may have had particular intentions with his/her writing, it is at the very moment of
inscription (or reading) that the writing passes into a space beyond the specific context in which it
was produced. By implication, writing causes a rupture which is completely unintended or
uncontrollable by the writer, since, in the process of the text’s dissemination (Derrida, 1981), it
dislocates the text from its initial context. Provided that any written word is principally
polysemous because it can be cited in an infinite number of other (con)texts, it is conceivable that
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writing creates ‘a space of absent referents and undetermined signifiers’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 9).
Iterability, i.e. the infinite possibility of decontextualization and recontextualization, thus reveals
that writing is irresponsible and undecidable, because it operates outside the control of its very
author. Importantly, provided that utterances (or, more generally, texts) can be repeated in various
contexts, this is not meant to say that iterability is equivalent to a simple repetition of an utterance
in the sense of a self-contained and stable (meaning) unit. What I want to recall, instead, is that
the meaning of an utterance is determined and modified in its very context. It is therefore
imperative to bear in mind that ‘(f)or a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be
readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has
written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is
dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention
or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be
written ‘in his name’’ (Derrida, 1977, p. 180). This extract, which I have chosen for scrutinizing
the link between reflexivity and confessionalism (of the author) as established by the tradition of
qualitative research referred to above, makes clear that a text and an author cannot necessarily be
envisioned as figures and creations that share a synchronous history and a parallel development.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contended in that respect, ‘there is an aparallel evolution of the
book and the world’ (p. 11). In consequence, I advocate that those occupied with the task of
reflexivity should be less concerned with the intentions of an author (that is, following Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘the world’) and instead devote more attention and passion to the text (which, in the
case of Deleuze and Guattari, would be the ‘book’). Favoring a Derridean view of the author as
someone who ‘is not responsible to anyone, not even to himself, for whatever the persons or the
characters of his work, thus of what he is supposed to have written himself, say and do’ (Derrida,
1995b, p. 28), I hope to have provided some reasons not to believe that author and text work like
a tandem, sharing, by virtue of intention, a common trajectory.
In view of Derrida’s (1982) assertion that a particular text ‘continues to produce effects
independently of his [the author’s] presence and of the present actuality of his intentions, indeed
even after his death, his absence’ (1982, p. 5), I would once more like to relate these insights to
the kind of reflexivity identified in conjunction with qualitative research. In doing so, it is first of
all helpful to remember that the exegesis of reflexivity as confessionalism provides us with a
picture that quite peculiarly operates upon the concept of an author who is thought of being in
control of his/her text and therefore responsible and accountable for his/her argument. However,
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the kind of irresponsibility Derrida prescribed stands in harsh contrast to this view, since it
implies that it must be opportune to say everything as well as to refrain from saying anything at
all. Provided that this freedom of expression will subsequently be established as a central feature
of the unconditional university, I want to pursue this thought and search for a kind of reflexivity
that does not take into account the author and his/her intentions, that is, which retains the author’s
secret. At the same time, I aim at contrasting qualitative scholars’ pseudo-reflective
confessionalism with an image of reflexivity that advocates a concern for text and context (both
conceived in the sense of Derrida). Whereas Derrida’s eloquent elaboration on iterability
emphasizes the relative primacy of context (vis-à-vis the author), I will now expand on the
argument that the author cannot possibly be envisaged as a determining instance by outlining,
first, the function of the author in a text, respectively the primary attention the author has received
in the sphere of (scientific) writing, and, second, by underscoring the often neglected impetus of
the reader in the process of signification.
The Elision of the Author & Reflexivity as Deconstructive Practice
To displace what is given can only be the result of a shock: we must shake up the balanced mass
of words, pierce the layer, disturb the linked order of the sentences, break the structures
of the language. (Barthes, 1986, p. 213)
What matter who’s speaking? (Foucault, 1977, p. 138)
Although I have myself felt sympathetic and passionate towards my research matter(s), and
despite the fact that I was at times overwhelmed (in a positive as well as in the negative sense) in
the course of writing this thesis, I believe that it is crucial to ask ourselves how strong the
standing or denotative force (cf. Chapter 4) of the researcher can become. Given that the writer,
or ‘sculpturer’, to use Barthes’ (1968) wording, occupies a favorable position both in terms of the
so-called ‘classificatory function’ (Foucault, 1984) as well as regarding the interweaving of
textual fragments and the determination or ‘signing’ (Derrida, 1977) of the final plot, questions of
multivoicedness, polysemia, and, by implication, politics and ethics must be looked at critically.
While I would like to refrain from perceiving the writer as a fully rational, purposeful and agentic
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entity but also as a function of discourse, we are reminded by Foucault (1977) that reference to or
the signature of an author operates to establish a sense of the text’s ‘origin’ and, thereby, to
emphasize the property of thought as well as the rightfulness and scientific basis of a given work.
In Foucault’s (1984) words: ‘the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional
principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one
impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of fiction’ (p. 119). In accordance with both Foucault’s claim that the author
functions so as to elicit the impression of ‘origin’ and of ‘belonging’ and with what has been said
before in terms of iterability, there are many others, among them literary critics such as Susan
Sontag and Roland Barthes,
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who have pointed out that in order for a text to be understood it
need not contain background information on the author.
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However, as probably all of us have
experienced in the context of art work, being exposed to a painting or a piece of music, one often
resorts to pre-ordained interpretations, especially if the experience or confrontation does not
strike any responsive cord in us. By analogy, being either confused or untouched by a textual
performance often elicits the question ‘What did the author mean?’ Despite the contention that it
is a quasi-natural reflex to turn to the author in order to solve the enigma of demanding writings, I
want to emphasize, in accordance with Foucault (1977), that the author does not necessarily
stipulate the meaning of a given text (cf. above) but that it is writing that establishes the subject
position of the author. Indeed, this argument is provocative, since it directly inverts the canonical
assumption that the author is an essential a-priori and thus orchestrates his/her text, or, more
specifically, its meaning. Provided that this view entails that writing does not describe a linear
succession from author to text, it is through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of ‘aparallel
evolution’ that one senses that the author and the text in fact display different histories and
movements. In other words, the author cannot possibly be related to the text, as there is no stable
and coherent essence in either of those instances that would grant such a coalescence. In
consequence, author and text are asynchronous bodies because the author, following the process
of his/her writing, will pursue or experience developments or lines of flights that are
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Arguably, to depict Sontag and Barthes exclusively as literary critics constitutes a gross reduction of their work,
disregarding their contributions to semiotics, literature, aesthetics, art, etc.
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Foucault (1996) thus tried to decouple the ‘kinship’ between author and text by claiming: ‘I will propose a game:
the year without names. For one year books will be published without the author’s name. The critics will have to
manage with an entirely anonymous production … The author must be an unknown marginal’ (pp. 302 & 304)
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unpredictable from the vantage point of the presence, making him/her a stranger to his/her own
writing. Given the intertextual features and connections (Kristeva, 1980) contained in any given
text, it is beyond doubt that there can be no fixed position or relation between the author, reader,
text and outer text. Such connections are deemed instable, floating, ever-emerging, that is, in a
constant process of ‘différance’. This makes it clear that meaning is transient and, therefore, only
available as a trace that is locally fixed at the moment of singular interpretation. Having come to
the end of an arguably demanding train of thought, we can summarize our observations by noting
that the meaning of a text is not codified in the body of words and sentences, and even less so in
the intention the author. What has so far been left out of the equation, however, is the position of
the reader with respect to a text’s meaning. It is at this moment of potential confusion that we are
reminded by Barthes’ (1977) ‘Death of the Author’ that a text’s meaning is undeniably related to
the performance of the reader. In particular, a text ‘solicits of the reader not simply the reception
but the active, independent, autonomous construction of meaning’ (Landow, 1992, p. 71). Given
that each text, following Kristeva (1980), exhibits intertextual ‘commitments’, it follows that any
sign can be meaningful in different ways and that the meaning given to a text by the writer can
grossly diverge from that of the reader. As Barthes (1977) eloquently pinpointed, ‘the text is not a
line of words but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash’ (p. 146). Or, as Roth (2001) contended, ‘what is important to understand [is that
in] interpretation [it] is … less the author who signs a text and more the reader who cosigns it’ (p.
8). Dismissing, as both Barthes and Roth do, the idea of a linear and hierarchical relationship
between author and text, and leaving out the primacy of the person who does the scripting
(compared to all the intertextual connections of a text),
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we have good reasons to attach more
value to both the reader and the act of reading. By extension, I would like to turn back to the issue
of ‘reflexivity’ in relation to the process of (critical or radical) reading. In doing so, I will make
use of the inspiration derived from the considerations above in order to enliven the business
school ‘to come’ by advocating a responsibility to re-read our own interpretations and
(unreflected) premises from a critical (yet affirmative; cf. below) vantage point. Departing from
the assumption that a given text is bestowed with meaning through cultural commonsense and
ideology (Billig, 1987; cf. also Chapter 3), I will locate the potential contribution of reflexivity by
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With respect to the intertextual connections of a text, Foucault (1974) pointed out that ‘(t)he frontiers of a book
are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its
autonomous form it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node
within a network’ (p. 23).
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laying bare the available discourses we employ in our theoretical reasoning as well as by
identifying the metaphors that penetrate our scholarly texts.
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It is helpful to shed some light on
the constitutive moment of (critical) reading in order to understand not only how we as readers
bestow a particular text with meaning but also to reflect upon how deconstructive reading can
effectuate the transformation of the status quo by means of novel understandings (Patton, 2003).
The issue of reading will thus become the conceptual vantage point of the subsequent
investigation. It is important to note that I do not have in mind the sort of modernist reading that
envisages reading via a free-standing subject (i.e. reader) who simply appropriates, i.e. consumes,
knowledge, but the sort of reflective, i.e. deconstructive, reading which heralds transgressive
possibilities (cf. Chapter 6) and thus opens up ‘to the absolute future of what is coming’ (Derrida,
1994, p. 90). I believe that the reason why there is a relative lack of this sort of deconstructive
reflexivity in ‘normal science’ (Case, 2003) is because researchers are not willing to go beyond
their taken-for-granted assumptions, ideas and norms which circulate in their writings and which
warrant them both a professional identity and a decent life (Fuller, 2005). However, this is surely
not good enough an argument to disregard deconstruction and to sustain the trajectory of the
McUniversity (Parker, 2002b; cf. also Chapter 1). Hence, notwithstanding the fact that leaving
the ‘mainstream’ of research and teaching untouched would avert much conflict and tension, I
contend that deconstruction can and must become a major issue in the future business school,
since it fosters a certain sensitivity towards one’s own writing or analytical practices, one’s
preferred discourse, rhetoric, or representational practices, and the context or historical and
cultural heritage which is inevitably reflected in one’s writing. Seeking to establish an ‘age of
deconstruction’ (Nealon, 2003) in the context of business schools, I would like to follow
Weiskopf and Willmott’s (1997) appeal to address ‘as reflexively as possible, how particular
representations come to be privileged and solidified’ (p. 7). I would also like to stress the need to
throw light on the philosophical underpinnings of our academic work as well as the ethical space
being enabled or disabled therein. It is therefore helpful, first of all, to spend some words on what
deconstruction is and what it is not,
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and what can be achieved through the practices of
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Note in passing that poststructural scholars have conceded that their writing is by no means ideologically neutral.
Rather, as language is never neutral (Barthes, 1967), it is ideology which must gain a key position in our critical
research agendas. However, as ideology is an inescapable part of the social science, its reflection and deconstruction
might be one possible way of breaking out of the problems involved in the premature closure of new and
unconventional ideas.
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As briefly mentioned in Chapter 4, Derrida himself warned his audience of the dangers of strictly defining what
deconstruction is, since deconstruction is not to be transformed into a prescriptive code.
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deconstruction, i.e. what deconstruction has to offer and what it cannot achieve (cf. also Chapters
2 & 4). As a first step towards this end, I seek to illuminate how Derrida and his deconstructive
work have been appraised and tampered with by his critics. Approaching the issue of
deconstruction through the backdoor, so to speak, I deem it important to make a brief detour to
Derrida’s critics so as to counteract some of the more insistent misrepresentations of
deconstruction and to reveal, step by step, its genuine potential for the business school ‘to come’.
Reflection on Derrida’s Critics
They are angry at my texts more than anything else, and I think it is because of the way I write –
not the content, or the thesis. They say that I do not obey the usual rules of rhetoric,
grammar, demonstration, and argumentation; but, of course, if they were simply not
interested, they would not be angry. As it is, they start to get involved but feel that it’s not
that easy, that to read my texts they have to change the rules, to read differently, if only at
another rhythm. (Derrida, 2003, p. 17)
The magnitude of criticism Derrida was subjected to is indirectly reflected in his appreciation of
Gilles Deleuze whom he estimated by virtue of the fact (though, of course, not exclusively) that
he was one of the few contemporary philosophers who never publicly raised his voice against him
(Nealon, 2003).
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Although it is beyond doubt that Derrida appreciated Deleuze not only for his,
say, mute complicity but also, and probably even more so, because he felt a ‘flustering, really
flustering, experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity concerning the “theses”’
(Derrida, 2001c, p. 192). This does not obscure the fact that Derrida’s work has witnessed
immense resistance
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which finds expression not least in the many interviews in which he was
invited to account for (and at times defend) his work, that is, reveal the secret of his
deconstructive work. While the list of critics includes such prominent figures as Habermas,
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Another philosopher which falls into this ‘category’ is Levinas with whom Derrida shared a considerable amount
of ideas (Levinas somewhat preceding Derrida in chronological terms) and whom he appreciated in a surprisingly
unconditional manner (cf. Critchley, 1999).
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Probably one of the best-remembered public objections was the “Cambridge Affair” of 1992 in which a small
number of Cambridge scholars initiated a campaign against the awarding of an honorary degree to Derrida. Several
months of agitation led to letters of objection being printed in the national and international press. Derrida
nevertheless received the award in the same year.
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Foucault, Austin, Searle, Wolin, Sheehan and Eagleton, it was in particular the latter three
opponents who (successfully since effectively) accused deconstruction of being relativist in an
utmost dangerous fashion. Although one might object that such reductionism is blatantly wrong
and that the critics in fact refused to engage with Derrida’s lucid and rigorous work (Borradori,
2003), I would like to make reference to one of the more recent and straightforward adversaries
of deconstruction, neo-Marxist Terry Eagleton, in order to give some examples of the grounds of
relativist nuisance. In concrete terms, Eagleton in ‘After Theory’ (2003) made no secret of his
dislike of Derrida’s (deconstructive) work (while he openly appreciated other proponents of the
‘French school’ such as, for instance, Michel Foucault). What seems to have fueled Eagleton’s
dislike, which is evident in the fact that he somewhat ironically portrayed Derrida as being
enamored with words and their seemingly endless possibilities, is Derrida’s close reading of
texts. It may be argued that Eagleton’s criticism regarding the rigorousness with which Derrida
treated individual texts is unfair, and I believe that Derrida’s apparent ‘love’ of writing and
literature (Hillis Miller, 2001) should be seen as a rare act of genuine scholarship. Refraining
from defending Derrida by laying bare the shortcomings of Eagleton’s argumentation, it is all the
more important to note that Eagleton asserted that postmodern theory (including Derrida’s work)
is outdated because it has proven to be inappropriate for guiding and giving direction to
humankind.
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This claim has been made by others before, causing widespread repercussions. To
gain a deeper understanding of what argumentative threads harmed Derrida’s deconstructive
work, it is important to bear in mind that Eagleton (2003) accused and dismissed postmodern
theory by conjuring up an ostensible loss of ‘totalities, universal values, grand historical
narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge’ (p.
13). Although this is an appalling misinterpretation of deconstructive practice, and postmodern
theory in general, it is clear that Eagleton’s cynical allegation that postmodern scholars have little
to say concerning public/political issues – such as, for instance, the Israel-Palestine altercation –
has partly found favor with both popular culture and certain spheres of the academia. Being
spread by people who are legitimized in speaking the truth (Foucault, 2001), it is beyond doubt
that the idea of postmodernism as a relativist endeavor, a point which Eagleton used as a running
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In his appraisal, Eagleton dismissed the arguments of Althusser, Kristeva, Habermas, Barthes and others, many of
whom have explicitly and actively resisted the prefix ‘postmodernism’ (cf. Learnmonth (2005).
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argument against Derrida,
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has become a sort of pervasive truism that must be taken seriously.
Essentially, seriousness and a sense of alertness are indicated because even the most farfetched
allegations can have appallingly ‘real’ effects. As is the case with Alan Sokal’s (cf. Sokal &
Bricmont, 1998) criticism, or let us say parody of postmodern approaches,
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we find in Eagleton
and likeminded scholars the kind of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988) which, although not relating to
the actual work of Derrida, operate autonomously and with great force, creating a blatantly
negative image of deconstruction. On the assumption that ‘the simulacrum [of Derrida’s
deconstruction] is true’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 166), I will exemplify in Chapter 7 (on behalf of
social entrepreneurship) that Derrida was by no means an advocate of the stream of
postmodernism with a ‘leaning toward relativism’ (Borradori, 2003, p. 17) and that it would
simply be false to believe that his deconstructive practice was not apt for appraising and, in a
wider sense, for addressing ‘real-life’ issues such as justice, responsibility or, to put it bluntly,
ethics. Although I have decided to save this rehabilitation for later, I nevertheless whish to give
voice to Derrida and consider what he had in mind when talking about deconstruction. With this
in mind, I feel particularly compelled to make a number of brief comments on the somewhat
misleading equation of deconstruction with destruction, which in turn will bring us to the point of
appraising the value of deconstruction in terms of radicalizing the business school of tomorrow.
If we agree that Derrida has not always been an easy read, which of course makes it even more
tempting to dismiss his work for lack of ‘clarity and rigor’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 419; cf. also quote
at the beginning of this paragraph), the point to be stressed then is that Derrida’s deviant style
(Lambert, 2003) tells us, among other things, that to deepen our commitment to a future of a
different kind and to open ourselves to the hitherto unthinkable kind of business education, we
actually have to appreciate invention and learn to ‘change the rules’ (Derrida, 1995b) in order to
radicalize the kind of writing (as well as research and teaching) and, by implication, learning
being currently imparted by contemporary business schools.
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Derrida (1999) himself actively denied being a relativist although his deliberations have remained somewhat
‘unheard’.
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Although the counter-reactions to Sokal’s mocking of postmodern jargon (and its misuse of the natural sciences)
and misrepresentation of relativism were immense, the status of what is referred to as ‘postmodernism’ has
nevertheless experienced tremendous and sustainable damage.
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Deconstruction versus Criticism
We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. (Foucault, 1984, p. 45)
The intellect cannot criticize itself … because in order to criticize the intellect we should have to
be a higher being with “absolute knowledge”. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 263)
Deconstruction, as Habermas (1987) claimed, represents a practice that is on the one hand
subversive (since it disrupts prevailing commonsense) but which, on the other hand, provides
nothing to replace that which it has destroyed. Furthermore, as Derrida himself declared that he
did not think that ‘deconstruction ‘offers’ anything as deconstruction’
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(1999, p. 74), we have
seemingly arrived at what could most apoplectically be denoted as the surrender of deconstructive
practice in the face of its own inaptness. However, in trying to stimulate a more affirmative view
of deconstruction,
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we must first of all establish how deconstruction relates to critique.
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Critique, on the face of it, can be discerned as a variegated and at times elusive task, as it means
different things to different people. For instance, critique is most notably related to Kant’s writing
‘Critique of Pure Reason’, in which criticism is envisaged as a third way between dogmatism
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and skepticism.
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The task of critique, according to Kant, is to dismantle common sense, since
common sense is conceived of as being dogmatic. Further developed and appropriated by, for
instance, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, the concept of ‘criticism’ – to become a
workable feature of this analysis – itself requires critical consideration. A first problem related to
the Kantian notion of ‘criticism’ is that the writer or researcher who tries to dismantle common
sense is in fact never fully able to sidestep the common sense of his/her historical/cultural
heritage. Hence, provided that the critic always practices his/her criticism within, and not outside
of, the respective sphere of common sense, Jones (2001) reminds us that there is always ‘some
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Meaning that deconstruction did not simply exchange one truth regime with another.
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That is the kind of view being promoted in certain organization studies (e.g. Chia, 1996).
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To be sure, Derrida evinced his connection with Heidegger in that his work, at times, relates to the latter's German
word ‘Destruktion’. It is noteworthy that Heidegger’s ‘Destruction’ equally heralds positive possibilities or,
according to Böhm and Jones (2001), ‘show the enabling boundaries of excluded possibilities’ (p. 316; emphasis in
original).
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Which is the overriding rejection of the relativity of knowledge.
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Scepticism represents the oppositional strand to dogmatism, which is most fundamentally revealed in the
(over)emphasis of the relativity of human knowledge.
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kind of co-implication of critical reason with common sense’ (cf. Boje et al., 2001, p. 303). The
second problem that has been raised time and again in conjunction with critical reasoning is that
such endeavors themselves are likely to become dogmatic in that they simply replace one
ideology with another. It must therefore be conceded that critical thought has a certain tendency
to overrule the prevailing common sense with a new, equally dogmatic, metanarrative. In view of
the observation that critique or critical thought is linked to its historical and cultural heritage and
while keeping in mind that critical thought runs the risk of exchanging one dogma with another, it
is deconstruction which offers a perspective that is receptive or, better, reflective of the cultural
and historical ‘embeddings’ of (critical) writing, and which simultaneously defers the ‘classic
emancipatory ideal’ (Derrida, 1994) of critical thinking in favor of a textual reflexivity which
dismantles commonsensical representations not from the vantage point of an exterior ‘slasher’,
i.e. destructor,
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but from the very inside of the text (cf. Jones, 2005). The polarity between
inside and outside as pinpointed by Foucault (cf. above quote) is important to the extent that it
concurs with Derrida (e.g. 1981) who has shown, in a convincing manner, that in whatever form
of critical reflection there is never a complete outside or complete outsider. Instead, Derrida’s
deconstructive work has demonstrated that the seemingly exteriorized other, i.e. the supplement
(Derrida, 1976), is always co-implied in the metaphysical system which establishes a particular
centre, the inside. To use Derrida’s (1981) own wording in order to envision this dynamic:
‘closure is constantly being traversed by the forces, and worked by the exteriority, that it
represses’ (p. 5), which means that inside and outside are mutually constitutive and, though often
concealed, one (concept, word, sign, etc.) cannot be thought of without the existence of the other.
The above point makes it even clearer that Derrida’s work is not so much interested in exposing
and enabling the interests or alienated needs of the people which are underlying or suppressed by
a specific argument or ideology (even though some scholars use it in this way), but in studying
the history and interpretations of a given concept and, furthermore, in laying open both the
dominant (i.e. the centre) and the marginal or neglected exegesis of the concept (i.e. the deliberate
absence; Law, 2004). Consequently, it is imperative to remind ourselves that deconstructive
endeavors are not targeted at identifying flaws in the argumentation of the text (which would be
the the objective of logic) or at unraveling the narrator’s deflected self-interests (which forms part
of rhetoric). As mentioned earlier (cf. Chapter 2), deconstruction represents a ‘movement’ which
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Or by a philosopher who practices his/her critique with ‘a hammer’ (Nietzsche, 2004).
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seeks to disclose the binaries with which a logocentric text operates and, secondly and more
importantly, to destabilize the ostensible inconvertibility of these binaries in order to highlight
‘the ever-present possibility of invention, reconfiguration or transformation in our existing,
historically conditioned and contingent ways of understanding’ (Patton, 2003, p. 18). Therefore,
what sets Derrida’s deconstructive work apart from many other critical approaches is that
deconstruction operates without any reference to the material world (e.g.: ‘that is how the world
is’, ‘that is how the world ought to be’) or to the strata outside of the text. Instead, the focus of
Derrida’s endeavor is directed at the text, and the textual practices which bring forward realities.
Bearing in mind that the present chapter seeks to inquire the question of reflexivity in relation to
the business school of tomorrow, I would like to use this constructionist understanding of critical
thinking so as to suggest a kind of reflexivity which makes it possible to work out the essential
undecidability of meaning at the expense of text’s metaphysical groundings, not to say certainties.
What such a textual understanding of critique implies with regard to the task at hand is that
(business) scholars need to read not (only) in the library, but also need ‘to read events, to analyze
the situation, to criticize the media, to listen to the rhetoric of the demagogues, that’s close
reading, and it is required more today than ever’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 67). To be sure, the critical
space being enabled through deconstruction must be seen as an instance of ‘problematization’
which seeks to counteract premature or facile closures (Jones, 2003). Accordingly, in opposition
to the antagonistic exegesis of critique (which aims at replacing one ideology with another), it is
through deconstruction that the two poles of a given concept or idea are presented as irreducible
and irreplaceable, and ‘it is between these two poles … that decisions and responsibilities are to
be taken’ (Derrida, 2001d, p. 45). By implication, deconstruction has no stake in simply
overthrowing the hierarchy entailed in every linguistic opposite, but rather tries to highlight how
the superior and the inferior position of a hierarchy interrelate and to ‘provide new means of
description and therefore new ways of understanding and acting upon the world’ (Patton, 2003, p.
16). The point to be emphasized and repeated here is that Derrida in his deconstructive work has
mostly offered a redescription of existing concepts (e.g. hospitality, giving, cosmopolitanism,
friendship, democracy, etc.), pointing out that there is often a distinction between a conditioned,
calculative or conditional and an unconditional form of the concept. In doing so Derrida did not
naively advocate the latter, hierarchically inferior, exegesis of the concept but tried to show how
one must learn to operate at the interface of or at the void between these two polarities. As in
Chapter 7, where I will try to work out the so-called possible-impossible space of social
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entrepreneurship, I will outline the concept of the unconditional business school and discuss its
irrevocable paradox and literal impossibility in the last part of the present chapter.
Having deliberately put forward an ambivalent portrayal of deconstruction which alludes
both to resistance and complicity, to disengagement and engagement (Egéa-Kuehne, 2005), it is
this ‘double-bind’ which elicits the question if deconstruction can be recommended as a radical
practice or, to be more precise, as a practice for radicalizing the business school. To be sure, if
our understanding of ‘radical’ in this context is synonymous with downright opposition, it is
more than questionable whether deconstruction is the right ‘tactic’. Notwithstanding this brief
rhetorical juncture, it is in the following paragraph that I will argue that deconstruction can
nevertheless be conceived as a radical practice which – by instigating change and movement –
exerts its transgressive force from within the respective tradition, thereby making possible an
involved and affirmative commitment, rather than suspicious exteriority.
Deconstruction as Textual Affirmation and Radical Practice
Metaphysics contains its parasite within itself, as the “unhealable” which it tries, unsuccessfully,
to cure. It attempts to cover over the unhealable by annihilating the nothingness hidden
within itself. (Hillis Miller, 2004, p. 186)
In view of Derrida’s assumption that language is made up of competing discourses and therefore
constitutes a site of exploration and struggle (Weedon, 1987), it follows from this that
deconstruction be understood as an attempt at highlighting the dynamic of (logocentric or
metaphysical) language with the objective of rendering visible both its more evident, canonical as
well as its concealed or deflected poles. As has become apparent in the above paragraph,
departing from such an understanding of language makes it difficult, if not impossible, to qualify
deconstruction as a ‘classical’, i.e. Kantian, form of criticism. Hence, it is equally fair to say that
the notion of ‘deconstruction’ has been conceived by many who have made reference to Derrida,
both affirmatively and critically, as an act of ‘tearing apart’. It is thus important to reiterate that
Derrida (1976) contended that the objective of deconstructive practice is not to ‘destroy structures
from the outside’ (p. 24) but to highlight what has always been inside the text, though elided and
rendered subliminal. This rectification is important to the extent that it reminds us that
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deconstruction is not so much concerned with a detached exterior (Lyotard, 1993; cf. above), but
with the accentuation of a text from the inside, that is, from the structure of the text itself.
According to Spivak (1993), the early English translator of Derrida’s work (cf. ‘Of
Grammatology’, 1976) and one of the leading scholars of feminist and postcolonial theory,
deconstruction is to be seen as unaccusing while ‘situationally productive through dismantling’
(Spivak, 1993, p. 146; cf. also Jones, 2005). While Spivak (1999) highlighted deconstruction as
the epitome of critical intimacy (rather than critical distance), there are other scholars who
refrained from using the epithet ‘critical’ altogether so as to underscore its often ignored
affirmative characteristics (Critchley, 1999; Cohen, 2001; Patton, 2003). Be that as it may, as
deconstruction is envisioned as a form of reading practice, i.e. ‘double reading’ (Critchley, 1999),
by virtue of which a text conveys something other than what is canonically implied, it is exactly
this moment of différance which constitutes not only a departure from or a change of the present
but also an affirmation of what is already self-evident. Deconstruction, as Nealon (2003)
observed, is hence ‘not a demonstration of lack, negativity or neutralization … but is rather the
positive or affirmative force of context breaking’ (p. 163; emphasis in original). It is thus evident
that deconstruction forms part of the canon of presence, reminding us that in order to open up to
new meanings and representational strata we first need to learn the protocols of the prevailing
heritage.
Arguably, Derrida has rarely been related to political radicalism (Patton, 2003), and in
order to use his deconstructive work to radicalize the business school of the future, some
thorough deliberations will be necessary. As a first step it is important to note that the meaning of
‘radical’ can be interpreted in many ways. My understanding of the term thus hinges upon
academic responsibility and faith, as well as an ethos of reading (cf. also Chapter 4). Although I
concede that the kind of radical practice I have in mind is not completely alien to the university
(Fuller, 2005), it nevertheless seems tenable to apply and revitalize the kind of rigorous reading
Derrida pursued in his work, simultaneously highlighting its increasing marginalization in
contemporary institutions of higher education (Parker, 2002b). This pledge seems all the more
appropriate in view of both the observation that business school teaching has come to treat
knowledge as a commodity (cf. Chapter 1) and that Derrida’s critics dismissed and obscured his
work by means of dubious rationalities which might partly explain why the ‘age of
deconstruction’ (Nealon, 2003) has never taken place in business education. Looked at from this
perspective, deconstruction becomes radical not in the sense of pursuing militant opposition, but
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of allowing for tolerance and openness towards the invention of meaning and a future of a
different kind. Taking into consideration that Derrida deconstructed only those texts he genuinely
loved (Protevi, 2004), there is clearly a lesson to learn, particularly in view of the fact that
scholarship, conceived as a careful and passionate encounter with other’s work, requires both
time and tolerance. Furthermore, bearing in mind that ‘it is not implausible to believe that those
who have dismissed Derrida have done so on the basis of secondary texts or on a superficial
reading of a limited amount of his work’ (Learmonth, 2004, p. 11), it becomes all the more clear
that the notion of ‘radical’ takes on an entirely passionate connotation that does not emphasize
war but mutual respect and creative (though heterodox) questioning.
Yet, before we turn to deconstruction in the context of the business school without
conditions, I would like to spend some words on if and how deconstruction relates to matters or
questions of public concern, and in particular to politics (and ethics), in order to address some of
the most relentless and persistent allegations against Derrida.
The Politico-Ethical Space of Deconstruction
Some souls believe themselves to have found in Deconstruction – as if there were one, and only
one – a modern form of immorality, of amorality, or of irresponsibility. (Derrida, 1995b,
p. 15)
Even if I would not wish to inscribe the discourse of emancipation into a teleology, a
metaphysics, an eschatology, or even a classical messianism, I none the less believe that
there is no ethico-political decision or gesture without what I would call a ‘Yes’ to
emancipation. (Derrida, 1996, p. 82)
While allegations against deconstruction have taken on different shadings, it is particularly Rorty
(1989; 1995), who is at one and the same time a fervent admirer of Derrida and one of his most
merciless critics, influencing the view of Derrida as a ‘private ironist’ and that of deconstruction,
more than anything else, as an intellectual endeavor with little, if any, public significance.
165
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Derrida responded to Rorty’s appraisal of deconstruction by rejecting the private/public distinction. While Rorty
had limited the utility of deconstruction to the private affairs (as a means of ‘self-creation’ and ‘overcoming’, cf.
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Rorty, among others, thus contended that ‘Derrida’s only relevance to the quest for social justice
is that, like the Romantic poets before them, they make more vivid and concrete our sense of
what human life might be like in a democratic utopia’ (Rorty, 1998, p. 310; quoted in Peters,
2004, p. 48). The central premise of Rorty’s arguably provocative statement is that deconstruction
pays no heed whatsoever to public, and by extension, to ethical or political matters. Although
there is a fair number of publications which stress the ethical implications of Derrida’s work
(Jones, 2003; cf. also Chapters 1 & 7) and its political ramifications (e.g. Patton & Protevi, 2003),
it must be borne in mind that Rorty’s (mis)representation of Derrida’s trajectory has established
itself in a persistent manner in the academia. It thus comes as no surprise that, as a result of the
increasing criticism (e.g. Boje, 2001; de Vries, 2001), Derrida and in particular deconstruction are
viewed with a significant degree of suspicion when it comes to issues such as (both individual
and collective) emancipation (e.g. Gabriel, 2001), politics (Patton, 2003) or ethics (Anderson-
Irwin, 2001). However, as is made clear in Chapter 1 as well as below, Derrida’s later work has
been hailed as a (re)turn to issues of politics and ethics, as it is concerned with such topics as
hospitality, justice, friendship, giving or democracy. Considering that these works, which Derrida
mainly produced from the early 1990s onwards, explicitly deal with political and ethical
questions,
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it is even more surprising that deconstruction is still mainly conceptualized and
interpreted in line with Rorty’s rationale, which means that politics and ethics are not taken into
account. To undo part of this dissociation, it is helpful to turn once more to Spivak (1990) who
contended that deconstruction, despite being central to all political endeavors, is itself not able to
found a political program. Given that this statement bestows political significance upon
deconstruction while putting into perspective (not to say downplaying) its potential political
impetus or potentiality, we need to remember that Spivak envisaged deconstruction as an
important, even indispensable enrichment of all political undertakings, because ‘deconstruction
can make founded political programs more useful by making their in-built problems more visible’
(Spivak, 1993, p. 121). As implied in Spivak’s insightful comment, deconstruction is a strategic
move which renders possible the (re)negotiation of whatever program, claim or text. To be sure,
Derrida (1992) dealt with political matters in a most decisive manner in ‘Force of Law’ where he
contended, against the canon, that it is not the law which ensures justice but deconstruction;
Peters, 2004, p. 49), Derrida maintained that his work (in particular his more literary texts) is actually a performative
problematization of the public/private binary.
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Note that Derrida’s earlier work also contains political and ethical implications though this link is more oblique if
compared to his latter writings.
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deconstruction, according to Derrida, is the ultimate instance of justice. This is indeed a
provocative statement. However, in his elaboration on the relationship between justice and the
law Derrida convincingly argued that most juridical systems are, considering their inherent
violence, not tenable as models of justice, since they enforce the rationality of the state apparatus
upon the people instead of pursuing the establishment of a just society. Contrary to the idea that
law and justice form a tandem, Derrida claimed that a juridical system must, in the name of
justice, be subjected to deconstruction. This reveals that Derrida’s deconstructive reading creates
a tension between the law and justice and, by implication, helps to establish a novel, that is, pure
image of justice (Derrida, 1992). As with Spivak who maintained that deconstruction and politics
(must) necessarily go together, Derrida’s appraisal of the jurical system makes it clear that
deconstruction cannot possibly be qualified as a nihilistic or private exercise but as both a
thorough investigation of commonsensical assumptions and a springboard for a so-called justice
‘to come’ (Derrida, 2002), understood as a politico-ethical space opened for a future of a different
kind. Admittedly, the political and/or ethical implications of Derrida’s work could be elaborated
more extensively, addressing a variety of other concepts such as democracy, hospitality, the gift,
cosmopolitanism etc. However, it is not my aim here to depict Derrida as a scholar of ethics or
politics, and even less so to simply equate deconstruction with ethics or politics (cf. Critchley,
1999). Nevertheless, I would like to repeat that deconstruction does, despite all the criticism
mentioned before, carry value for public affairs and societal change. By implication, departing
from the assumption that deconstruction could mitigate the crisis in contemporary business
schools (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005; cf. also Chapter 1), I would now like to turn to deconstruction
in business school curricula.
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Deschooling the Business School or ‘Including’ Deconstruction in Academic Curricula
The liberty of the question … must be stated and protected. (Derrida, 2005, p. 99; emphasis in
original)
The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he
carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-
evident … to reexamine rules and institutions … to participate in the formation of a
political will. (Foucault, 1985, pp. 8 – 9)
Having outlined some of the merits and potential tenets of deconstructive practice, and having
addressed, however briefly and tentatively, some of the most unproductive or hindering
misconceptions of deconstruction, I have advocated a perception of deconstruction as a
momentous reflective practice that could have far-reaching (ethico-political) implications for
academic (business) curricula. It is important to note, then, that the extension of contemporary
business school curricula is not an easy and effortless undertaking, since there is always a danger
of turning deconstruction into a feeble pro-forma exercise that does not unfold the sort of
potential I have just pinpointed. However, despite having high hopes in deconstruction, it would
be naive to assume that deconstruction is the key to a progressive future (May, 2005). In other
words, although deconstruction can lead to a positive extension of business school curricula, the
idea of progress implied in such an extension has little in common with a quest for universal
values or appallingly easy remedies, but with a ‘desperate eagerness to imagine it [the presence],
to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in
what it is’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 41). Hence, in accordance Foucault’s (1984) contention that
‘critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of
reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may
be hoped’ (p. 38; cf. also above quote), I would like to examine how deconstruction can provide a
reflective perspective to (business) education. In order to do so, it is helpful to invoke Ivan
Illich’s (1973) criticism of education systems before proposing a kind of learning which protects
people from being restricted to the kind of logocentric systems as well as determined, pre-
ordained meanings which Derrida (e.g. 1976, 1988) continuously challenged. Hence, Illich
(1973), in line with the argument pursued in Chapter 1, contended in his cogent treatise
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‘Deschooling Society’ that the ‘ethos’ of society needs ‘deschooling’, meaning that it should be
decoupled from prevailing ideas of development and education which, according to Illich, are
perceived by educational professionals as commodities. The problem as pinpointed by Illich is
that schools and universities, as two of the most influential institutions in designing education
curricula, are allowed to monopolize both the production and distribution of education. Illich’s
critique is based on the observation that schooling, i.e. the production and dissemination of
knowledge, draws society into a trap by way of eliciting the impression that knowledge is
‘hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock’ and,
most notably, that ‘knowledge is a thing rather than an activity’ (Gajardo, 1994, p. 715).
Similarly, Derrida (2004) repeatedly expressed his suspicion that the demand for a convention of
academic coherence actually runs counter to a genuine understanding of social affairs. One of the
main problems of the current state of the university, according to Derrida, is revealed in the fact
that knowledge is regarded as clearly structured (for us as researchers) in the ‘external world’
(Cooper, 1989, p. 481) so that the scholars’ sole task is to find means to grasp it and, on a second
note, to sell it. It is with his claim to ‘university responsibility’ that Derrida (2004) most clearly
counteracted the growing tendency of universities to gear their research towards programmable,
calculable and profitable goals. In light of Illich’s contention mentioned above, we must not
forget that the kind of knowledge currently taught in education institutions is still conceived as
being amassable and measurable, and, by implication, that the possession of knowledge operates
as a parameter for a person’s status within society. Derrida (2004) thus convincingly argued that
in teaching there is already (and will increasingly be) a bifurcation between those grades which
are deemed ‘useful’, that is, have practical application in the world, and those which are not, i.e.
those aimed at cultivating critical thought and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What
both Illich and Derrida stressed is that education (or schooling) is increasingly aligned to practical
ends (i.e. ‘profitable applications’ or ‘technical schemas’; cf. Derrida, 2004, p. 59), whereby
knowledge is not qualified in terms of its ability to enable critical thought and to educate
responsible citizens, but instead in terms of its economic utility. While Lyotard (1984), among
others, objected that higher education has increasingly been subjected to the demands of the
market (and state; cf. Chapter 1), it is again Illich who argued that such state- and business-
commissioned education would have the noticeable effect of restricting creativity.
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While
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French philosopher Michel Serres (1993) has similarly pointed at the lack of creative thinking in the academe,
claiming that ‘(e)ducation today produces scientists who, generally speaking, are ignorant outside their own fields,
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applying his critique to other areas such as medical treatment, it is in ‘Tools for Conviviality’
(1975) that Illich suggested measures against the adverse effects of institutionalism. Illich’s
humanist approach is most manifest in his claim that there could be ‘a desirable future’, allowing
people to choose ‘a life of action over a life of consumption’ (Illich, 1973, p. 57). Coming full
circle with Derrida’s vision of the future of the university, it must first of all be clarified that,
unlike Illich’s utopia, he is not concerned with humanist development. Although Derrida’s
‘blueprint’ of a better society is partly the topic of Chapter 7, it is important to note once more
that his elaborations defy the overthrow and simple replacement of our heritage. Furthermore, in
order to illustrate how deconstruction can serve the university as a basis for ethical conduct, I
would like to reflect briefly on the potential contribution of deconstructive practice to a
deschooled society and to an education system which overcomes the deficiencies identified by
both Illich and Lyotard. To be more precise, I would like to consider if and how Derrida’s
deconstructive practice might lead to an improvement of university curricula by raising students’
as well as scholars’ reflective and creative competence.
Foucault, Serres, Derrida and Lyotard all offer helpful ideas both for understanding the
status quo of educational institutions and for encouraging the (radical) extensions or
deterritorialization (cf. Chapter 4) of prevailing strata. For instance, Michel Serres (1995, in
conversation with Bruno Latour) claimed that the kind of scientific methods
168
being taught at our
universities are premised upon the idea that reality is predictable and therefore subject to
repetition. The notion of method thus hinges on the objective of mastery and closure, both of
which do not acknowledge the immanent instability and undecidability of social reality. Inventive
methods or anti-methods (Harari & Bell, 1982, p. xxxvi) have therefore been stipulated by Serres
as a means for discovering new connections between and creative translations of existing
theories. It is implied in Serres (1995) that to embrace difference and multiplicity (instead of
fortified certainties) one needs to think beyond determined frames of meaning, i.e. metaphysical
systems. In order to establish a parallel between Serres’ call for inventive methods and
deconstruction, it is important to emphasize that both schemes are based on the assumption that in
order to embrace difference, one needs to appropriate and transform that which is provided to us
by conventional forms of research or teaching. Importantly, thinking ‘outside the box’
169
is the
and cultured people who know nothing about science’ (p. 2).
168
Note that deconstruction does not fall into the category of ‘method’ (cf. Chapter 4).
169
Which is explicitly addressed by Serres and implicitly contained in Derrida’s work.
481
merit associated with deconstructive readings. Although scholars like Eagleton (2003) have tried
to ridicule Derrida’s seeming amorousness with text, it is precisely this very solidarity and
relentless endurance with text – be it literary or non-literary (e.g. scientific), philosophical or non-
philosophical – which reveals its other, its supplement so as to delineate the matter (i.e. concept)
in a refreshingly new way. In the light of this positive appraisal of deconstruction, we must not
forget that the increasing administrative requirements of business school staff, the mounting
number of enrolled business students and the required load of supervision might render our quest
too demanding. Be that as it may, I contend that our work load and the performativity demands
are not good enough reasons for sustaining the ‘mercantilization’ of knowledge as currently
performed in many institutions of tertiary education (Lyotard, 1984). On the contrary, I believe
that it is mandatory to offer reflective courses which enable students to step into a critical
dialogue with the epistemological and ontological vindications of mainstream (business)
knowledge they are provided with. I thus contend that deconstructive reflexivity might allow
people to make informed judgments regarding the mostly unrecognized rationalities or
commonsense assumptions one lives by. As briefly mentioned before in conjunction with the
inside – outside polarity, deconstruction has the additional advantage that it does not simply resist
available theories, models or concepts but, rather, seeks to shake up those theories, models and
concepts which arrogate singular truth. Stated otherwise, deconstruction may be seen as a
reflexive loop, extending those latter kinds of theories by first destabilizing what is taken as self-
evident and by showing that there are always alternative views. It is precisely this kind of critical,
reflexive dialogue with mainstream ideas which, I believe, has the potential to emphasize how
‘particular representations come to be privileged and solidified’ (Weiskopf & Willmott, 1997, p.
7), thereby revealing that our predominant way of education could easily lead to our own
‘zombification’
170
(Murray, 2005). In consequence, if we were to conceive Derrida as a theorist,
his main contribution would most probably be that he showed that theories must always be on
guard against themselves because the dynamic of language always renders them unstable
(Couzens Hoy, 1993). Thus it may be argued that we must (imperative!) pursue and consolidate
deconstructive endeavors in the business school ‘to come’ so as to exceed whatever exhibits signs
of logocentric closure. Importantly though, talking about the need to reflect upon credited
concepts, theories, models, or, to put it bluntly, commonsense cannot conceal that deconstructive
170
Murray (2005) employed the metaphor of ‘zombification’ to circumscribe how traditional management education
prepares students for their roles in retail companies such as Tesco and Walmart.
482
practice itself is an infinite task, impossible since never finished (cf. also Chapter 2). Bearing in
mind that deconstruction never works exhaustively or is never completed in a definite sense, it is
Spivak (1990) who mentioned the ‘practical politics of the open end’ so as to clarify that
deconstruction does not incite a grand ideological change, a grand ‘surgical operation’ (p. 105).
Rather, change of whatever magnitude, following Spivak, requires persistent deconstructive
reflection (cf. again Chapter 2). One thing we learn from Spivak is the recognition that
deconstruction can or even must become an inseparable part of prevailing theories. Furthermore,
Spivak reminds us that theory and deconstructive reflexivity need to engage in a constructive
dialogue – in the sense of Serres’ (1993) notion of ‘cross-fertilization’ – as a result of which
novel opportunities can emerge. Consequently, the tenet of both Derrida and Spivak is that the
other must not be conceived as standing outside the centre of prevailing truth, but that the other is
irrevocably linked to the centre for the purpose of the latter’s legitimization. Since deconstruction
is thought to unravel the connections between the metaphysical centre (of commonsense) and its
other (i.e. minor discourse), it also marks the starting point for calling into question the ‘very
foundation of the centre’ (Jones, 2005, p. 390). If we thus succeed in imagining deconstruction as
a confederate of (organization or business) theory and if we cherish the fact that deconstruction
instigates theoretical and conceptual movements, we have at our disposal good reasons to make
deconstruction an inseparable part of our university curricula. What we would gain besides
introducing a rupture with the towering centers of what Derrida called ‘exhaustive accounts’ is a
unique possibility to reclaim a space where meaning may ‘act out’ infinite play. In the following
section, I will provide a more specific account of how I perceive the establishment of the future
business school, i.e. the business school without conditions.
483
The (Radical) Business School without Conditions
The place of resistance has to be found, that is, you do not have the university as a place of
resistance. (Derrida, 2001b, p. 255)
The point … is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a
practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. (Foucault, 1984, p. 45)
As implied previously, deconstructive practice – if conceived from the perspective of its
affirmative trajectory – appears somewhat incommensurate with the attribute ‘radical’, at least as
long as we understand this term in the sense of an antagonistic exteriority. Yet, deconstruction
can, not to say must, become radical if it is employed to reduce the ‘‘critical distance’ to zero’
(Böhm & Spoelstra, 2004, p. 99). It follows from this latter exegesis that deconstruction contains
a radical element as it is, contrary to the criticism of Eagleton and others, both a theoretical
discourse and practical venture. Derrida, in his elaboration of the ‘University without Conditions’
addressed the accusation that deconstruction is ‘merely’ theoretical and neutral by contending
that deconstructive endeavors do in fact have a tendency towards ‘practical and performative
transformations’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 241). Notwithstanding the contention that one could easily
provide evidence of deconstruction’s practical merits and tenets (cf. in particular Derrida, 1992d;
1995c; 1999; 2001d; 2002), it is questionable whether those kinds of investigations have been
given sufficient attention in curricula of business schools or acknowledged adequately by
academia in general (Nealon, 2003). Arguably, the question of ‘how much deconstruction is
needed’ is a difficult one. Yet, as far as business school education is concerned, particularly in
view of the sort of knowledge it imparts and the understanding of learning it departs from (cf.
Chapter 1), it appears safe to conclude that ‘THERE’S CLEARLY NOT ENOUGH’. While since
the early 1980s a fair number of advocates of deconstruction have found their way into the field
of organization theory or organization studies (for an overview cf. Jones, 2004), it seems that
their gospel is only taking a back seat in business school teaching. Hence, despite the many
transformations that have been and still are taking place in business schools as regards critical
484
reflection, particularly in the UK,
171
there are also indications that contemporary business school
education still falls short of critical perspectives (French & Grey, 1996; Grey, 2004; Choo, 2005)
and that those who try to implement such a trajectory are often faced with fierce opposition
(Hagen, Miller & Johnson, 2003; Gillberg et al., 2005). In opposition to the criticism of
‘adversaries’ and despite the fear that deconstruction’s standing in university curricula will be one
marked by discomfort, I will introduce some of Derrida’s suggestions on the space of
deconstruction in the university so as to provide a – however preliminary – vision of the (radical)
business school ‘to come’.
As discussed in Chapter 1, it appears that, at least since the middle of the last century,
knowledge derived from research and disseminated through teaching has increasingly been
qualified against the backdrop of performativity (Lyotard, 1984). As a result, the pressure to
make knowledge saleable, as I pointed out before, has also penetrated contemporary business
school education (Parker, 2002b). Given that this economic imperative has created enormous
changes in terms of professional identity, the governance of academics as well as the generic
understanding of ‘Bildung’ (i.e. education and learning), it is hardly surprising that some people
have proclaimed that the modern university is captured in a perpetual crisis (Peters, 2004) or that
the business school is in a state of emergency (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005). Derrida (2001), in his
treatise ‘The University without Condition’, identified a new responsibility and formulated a new
‘raison d’être’ of the university and its professions which was no longer regulated according to
the logic of supply and demand and which defied the purely technical and instrumental ideal of
competence. Derrida thereby suggested means for dissociating the university from its current
‘end-orientation’ and for establishing an unconditional space for critical resistance, a space
which, by analogy, instigates an departure from the kind of fast-food teaching currently offered at
university business schools. In order to comprehend what the notion of ‘unconditionality’, i.e. the
condition where everything can be said or retained without being held responsible (cf. above)
implies, it is helpful to bear in mind that Derrida established deconstruction as a central
obligation of the future university and as an ultimate instance of resistance. Thus, extending
Derrida’s (2001) elaboration to the task at hand, it can be argued that the business school should
become ‘an ultimate place of critical resistance – and more than critical – to all the powers of
171
To the extent that my outsider-perspective allows such an appraisal, the UK is assumed to host a number of
business schools such as Leicester, Lancaster, Keele, Manchester, Warwick, etc. which overtly commit themselves to
a critical (the term may of course be interpreted in various ways) curriculum.
485
dogmatic and unjust appropriation. When I say ‘more than critical’, I have in mind
‘deconstructive’ (so why not just say it directly and without wasting time?)’ (Derrida, 2001, p.
235). Indeed, Derrida’s manifesto is strong and ‘does not waste any time’. Admittedly, it appears,
at first glance, that his statement relates to overt resistance and thus opposition (which would be
in obvious contrast to what has been said before). However, this is not necessarily the case, since
Derrida, in the same text, clarified that the statement is ‘referring to the right to deconstruction as
an unconditional right to ask critical questions not only to the history of the concept of man, but
to the history even of the notion of critique, to the form and the authority of the question, to the
interrogative form of thought’ (p. 236). In accordance with what was said at the beginning of this
chapter, the above quote clarifies that critical resistance is an affirmative gesture to the extent that
it relates more to critical questioning as well as the unconditional freedom of speech than to overt
antagonism. It is important, then, not to overlook that the freedom Derrida had in mind while
formulating his vision of the university without conditions quite obviously exceeds what is
generally discussed in terms of academic freedom or academic autonomy (Parker, 2002b). In
particular, the unconditional freedom in Derrida’s university ‘to come’ represents not only a
disentanglement from the economic strictures of the performativity mantra but a ‘declarative
engagement, an appeal in the form of a profession of faith: faith in the university … of tomorrow’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 233). Provided that this form of freedom emphasizes an obligation on the part
of the university and its professionals (i.e. professors) to address its own blind spots and
concealed agenda, it is an unconditional right to demand ‘that the university itself should at the
same time reflect, invent and pose, whether it does so through its law faculties or in the new
Humanities capable of working on these questions of right and of law – in other words, and again
why not say it without detour – the Humanities capable of taking on the tasks of deconstruction,
beginning with the deconstruction of their own history and their own axioms’ (p. 235). Moreover,
it is important to note that Derrida formulated his vision in relation to the university because he
wanted to distinguish ‘the university from all research institutions that are in the service of
economic goals and interests of all sorts, without being granted in principle the independence of
the university’ (p. 236). Thus, it is likely that business schools would fall into the category of
‘institutions that are in the service of economic goals and interests’. What I am saying here is that
the introduction of deconstruction to the business school is a heterodox endeavor, likely to collide
with (and maybe shatter) the prevailing economic orthodoxies. As briefly mentioned before,
performativity or, to use Derrida’s words, economic goals and interests, may always restrict
486
deconstructive reflection. Derrida, on various occasions, pointed out that we must not shy away
from asking if the university contains the requisite freedom (or, say, time, patience, and money)
to x-ray its own axioms. At the same time, Derrida has been utterly clear in his appraisal that the
unconditional university (or the Humanities
172
) is always in danger of being occupied by or
becoming hostage to the logic of profitability. This reservation cannot be overemphasized, since
it puts into perspective all exaggerated expectations and hopes, reminding us that we must
continuously ask: ‘can the university (and if so, how?) affirm an unconditional independence, can
it claim a sort of sovereignty, without ever risking the worst – namely … being forced to give up
and capitulate without condition, to let itself be taken over and bought at any price?’ (Derrida,
2001, p. 237). Indeed, Derrida’s question will (and must) remain open or undecidable, so to
speak, and it is only time that will show if the business school of tomorrow will be able to raise
the necessary ‘force of resistance’ to sustain its unconditionality. We are thus reminded once
again that the introduction of deconstructive reflexivity to the future business school will demand
persistent efforts where ‘ou have each time to invent the place of resistance’ (Derrida, 2001b,
p. 255). At the same time, it must also remain clear that, despite all obstacles and hardship, the
affirmative and passionate inventiveness (Derrida, 1992b) implied in deconstructive reflexivity
may be even more required within the limits (or limitedness) of the business school than in
Derrida’s humanities.
In this chapter I have established that deconstruction is not merely a speculative or
theoretical operation but may serve as a contribution towards conceiving a possible future for the
business school ‘to come’. Notwithstanding the fact that deconstructive reflexivity cannot be
planned and commanded from the drawing board, so to speak, and that we must accept that ‘what
arrives arrives’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 247), I have tried to emphasize the positive features of
deconstruction and show, among other things, that deconstruction heralds potentialities for both
theory and practice. By example of Derrida’s engagement with the ‘university without condition’,
but also his engagement with, for instance, the war on Iraq or September 11 (Borradori, 2003), I
have suggested a perspective of deconstruction that reveals both its commitment to practical and
theoretical criticism and its potential to stimulate an audacious transformation of mundane affairs
(cf. Derrida, 1992). It should be clear by now that Derrida’s account of the ‘university without
condition’ cannot and must not be understood in a ‘realistic’ sense, because it is impossible to
172
Which Derrida (2001) justifies by way of pointing out that the Humanities have historically been linked ‘to the
question of man, to a concept of that which is proper to man’ (p. 234)
487
possess infallible methods that will ensure the success of such a concept of university education
and lead us directly to a brighter future. To be sure, the business school ‘to come’ in itself is an
impossibility (and necessarily has to remain impossible) and thus has the structure of a promise
rather than that of a determinate ideal against which particular acts may be measured or towards
which our present arrangement of higher education might be said to progress. The epithet ‘to
come’, by implication, functions as a name for the future understood in such a way that it is not to
be identified with any reality script of the present, but rather with a future that will never be
actualized or imagined from the order of the present. In that sense, the business school ‘to come’
stands for a perpetually open, yet to be determined future or, as Derrida (2002b) argued in
another context, the ‘to come’ denotes a ‘space opened in order for there to be an event, … , so
that the coming be that of the other’ (p. 182). With this in mind, I suggest that we perceive
Derrida’s vision as an utopia (small letter; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) and appreciate that
it is exactly the interruptive force of Derrida’s writing, his ‘as if’, which incites our imagination
and reinforces the perpetuation of his work in our scholarly endeavors. Concluding this chapter
with the words of Derrida, it is important to bear in mind that ‘this limit of the impossible, the
‘perhaps’, and the ‘if’, this is the place where the university is exposed to reality, to the forces
from without (be they cultural, ideological, political, economic, or other). … On this border, it
[the university] must therefore negotiate and organise its resistance and take its responsibility’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 247). In view of the fact that Derrida would still have had a lot to say about
deconstruction and its place in and beyond the university of tomorrow, I would like to pay tribute
to Derrida by suggesting a careful and patient re-reading of his work, so as to multiply and iterate
his ideas and appropriate them for our own radical trajectory. Reading and rereading, conceived
of as a ‘task of change and affirmation’ (Jones, 2005) and ‘ethics’ (Hillis Miller, 1987), can be
seen as the valuable inheritance from Derrida. But considering that ‘(i)nheritance is never a given,
it is always a task’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 54; emphasis in original), it is not sufficient to claim that
Derrida’s work is important for envisaging the future of the business school. Essentially, we must
address the burning questions of what we would like to inherit from Derrida and, importantly,
how we would like to use his work in remodeling the future business school. Obviously then,
inheriting Derrida’s work implies ‘active interpretation’ (Jones, 2002, p. 226; emphasis in
original). Suffice it to say: ‘Return to the books!’
488
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6
***
Power, Discourse and Resistance: From Aesthetical Practice … to
Politics of Difference
There are other possible worlds, I know other possible meanings, we can invent other forms of
time. (Serres, 1995, p. 25)
It is certainly true that the inscription of alterity within the self can allow for a new relation to
ethics, but does that necessarily entail the more general case … that the persisting split of
the subject is the condition of freedom? (Bhabha, 1994, p. 240; slightly modified)
Intertextual Associations
To contextualize the present theoretical elaboration on the interrelationship between power,
discourse and resistance, we need to comprehend that this chapter is inspired by some of the
implications derived from the investigation of practitioners’ talk in Chapter 3. In particular, the
issue which the discursive investigation of practitioners’ talk urges us to address, to put things
bluntly, is that of personal agency and the possibility of individual self-determination. Bearing in
mind that the discourse analysis in Chapter 3 departed from the assumption that subjectivity or
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identity are not natural essences of people, but positions made possible by the use of language (cf.
Foucault, 1984), it is all too likely that one conceives of discourse as a deterministic
phenomenon. That is to say that there is a certain danger of misperceiving discourse a constitutive
force which stipulates and restricts personal subjectivities wherefore leaving no space for
individual freedom, if not to say autonomy. In the light of the fact that the view of discourse as
the material grounding of personal subjectivity is canonically related to Foucault’s work on
power and knowledge, I would like to scrutinize the grounds for this relationship in order then to
stress that Foucault himself produced a number of writings which defy a deterministic
conceptualization of discourse. Pinpointing, for instance, that Foucault envisaged identity
performances as creative practices and as a potentiality of individual transgression, I will try to
broaden the current horizon of Foucault’s heritage and hence extend the still narrow reception of
Foucault as a discursive determinist. Essentially, this investigation is deemed relevant and timely
since it puts into perspective not only the findings outlined in Chapter 3, but also our deliberation
on the excellence and entrepreneurship discourse as pursued in relation to the governmentality of
contemporary business schools (cf. Chapter 1). Though I will not relate back to those chapters in
the course of the present investigation, the readers are nonetheless invited to call to mind the main
arguments of these previous inquires and thus to reflect on the interrelation between discourse
and identity implied within them.
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Introduction
To start with an image …
Als Pandora das Fass öffnete und die Übel, welche Zeus hineingelegt hatte, in die Welt der
Menschen ausgeflogen waren, blieb – von allen unbemerkt ein letztes Übel zurück – die
Hoffnung. Seit dieser Zeit betrachten die Menschen das Fass und seinen Inhalt, die
Hoffnung, irrigerweise als Schatz, als grösstes Glücksgut. Dabei haben wir vergessen,
dass Zeus den Menschen wünschte, sie möchten sich weiterhin quälen lassen. Die
Hoffnung ist das übelste der Übel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert. (Yalom,
1994, p. 105).
When Pandora opened the casket and made the evils Zeus had put inside disperse into the world
of man, a last evil remained – unrecognized by anyone – hope. Since that time people
spuriously have regarded the casket and its content, hope, as a treasure, as a blessing of
the greatest kind. In doing so they have forgotten that Zeus had wished that mankind
would let itself be further agonized. Hope is the most evil of evils since it prolongs the
agony of the people. (Yalom, 1993; own translation)
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By virtue of the extract from Yalom’s ‘Als Nietzsche Weinte (1994) (‘When Nietzsche Wept’,
1993
174
) we are allegorically reminded that mankind and – to further extend the allegory for our
own purposes – particularly those entitled critical theorists, have been driven by the hope for
(individual and collective) emancipation and freedom which so far seem encapsulated and locked
away in Pandora’s box. This state of unsatisfied or unsatisfiable hope seems solidified by those of
us (i.e. organization scholars) who have embarked upon Foucault’s work on power/knowledge to
delineate a rather ‘dark’ picture of emancipation, claiming that discourse operates as a
deterministic scheme of the people. More precisely, (critical) organization scholars (e.g. Alvesson
& Karreman, 2000) alongside certain postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, 1978; Escobar, 1995) have
come to interpret discourse (à la Foucault) as a constitutive momentum, meaning that discourse is
said to exert its influence by hailing or ‘interpellating’ (cf. Althusser, 1977) subjects and to make
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Notice that Yalom derived this story from Nietzsche’s (1984) ‘Human, All Too Human’ (cf. p. 58).
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Which deals with a fictional encounter between Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, and the psychiatrist Josef
Breuer.
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them act according to the respective rationality, that is, regime of truth. For instance, Phillips and
Hardy (2002) have claimed that ‘Foucauldian-informed work often focuses on unmasking the
privileges inherent in particular discourses and emphasizes its constraining effects, often leading
to studies of how grand or “mega” discourses shape social reality and constrain actors’ (p. 21).
Foucault – within Phillips and Hardy (2002) – is thus, unsurprisingly, allocated to the critical pole
of their grid where his analytic scheme is said to lay bare the ‘dynamics of power, knowledge,
and ideology that surround discursive processes’ (p. 20). Turning our gaze once more to the two
utterances by Phillips and Hardy, an image of power is revealed that is, first, conjoined with the
concept ‘ideology’ and, by implication thereof, presumed to ‘constrain actors’. It is beyond
question that such a view operates by means of construing power as an instance which commands
or prescribes particular subject positions and which grants the person limited, if any, liberty in
defining their own being (or becoming). Hence, Foucault’s work on discipline (from which
Phillips and Hardy seem to derive their appraisal of ‘critical’) has provided us with a perspective
that enables us to see how certain documentary and measurement techniques have turned
individuals into cases, that is, made them visible, measurable and, most fundamentally, rendered
them amenable to control (cf. Chapter 1). Given this state of affairs, Foucault clearly contributed
to the understanding of how certain procedures and technologies constituted the individual both
as ‘effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204). Be
that as it may, there are two particular misreadings, or maybe better, one-sided delineations of
Foucault in organization studies which need to be addressed here: first, that Foucault’s work
entailed a critique of ideology and, second, that his understanding of discourse departed from the
univocal assumption that the power-knowledge nexus granted people no possibility for self-
determination. The generic proposition we will get to establish here is that Foucault cannot
possibly be represented as an ideology critic or as a discourse determinist. Moreover, despite the
fact that Foucault’s work (in organization science) has canonically been portrayed from the
perspective of the normalizing force of discourse (cf. Knights & Willmottt, 1989; Alvesson &
Willmottt, 1996; Phillips & Hardy, 2002), we must realize that he has unjustifiably been denied
the credit for contributing to our understanding of individual resistance. It thus appears on the
face of it that both of the above interpretations of Foucault are flawed to the extent that they
conceal that Foucault neither talked of (and at times even resisted the notion of) ideology (or)
critique and that he in fact provided a rich and convincing array of arguments on how subjects
stipulate individualized (though not autonomous) identities. As a consequence of this, and whilst
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taking seriously Foucault’s eloquent and persuasive commentaries on the matter of power, the
notion of ideology critique seems misleading, since he never acted as a spokesman of how to
proceed in order to reach a brighter future (which is arguably the emancipatory ideal of ideology
critique). As Rabinow clarified in that context, Foucault ‘does not take it upon himself to speak in
the voice of Reason, Justice, Progress, Objectively Better Positions, or even Futility’ (Foucault,
1984, p. 23). It hence follows from this that Foucault’s work does not appear apposite to resurrect
humanism since it refrains from the temptation to exchange an identified discourse, say, ideology,
with a perspective that is more apposite for humankind’s betterment. Foucault’s genealogical
work should therefore not be read as eliciting nostalgia by means of highlighting what has been
lost on the way from past to present. Instead, Foucault advocated a perspective which entailed
that ‘(t)he individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an “ideological” [quotation marks!]
representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power
that we have called “discipline”’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204).
Regarding the issue of power and critique, which Phillips and Hardy quite obviously
construe as the tenet of Foucault’s work, it is exigent that Foucault (1982) himself posited that
‘the goal of my work during the last twenty years has not been to analyze the phenomena of
power, nor to elaborate on the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to
create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’
(p. 208). Given this premise it is at least questionable if Dick’s (2004) claim that ‘(c)ritical
discourse analysis [i.e. Foucault inspired discourse analysis] assumes that the constructions
individuals make operate not only to ‘make sense’, but also to reproduce or challenge ideological
systems of belief that exist in society at large’ (p. 203) are applicable to Foucault’s analytic
trajectory, since it evokes associations between power (and ideology) and adulterated truth,
respectively ‘false consciousness’.
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We must therefore bear in mind that Foucault, by eliding
the idea of ideology and by emphasizing disciplines (respectively the interrelation between power
and knowledge/truth), established a perspective which ceased to depict the effects of power in
negative terms and which illuminated how social practices fuelled the normalization of certain
‘regimes of truth’. Given this state of affairs, it is worth noticing that Foucault (1984) made
unmistakably clear that we must refrain from envisioning power in terms such as ‘it “excludes”, it
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The notion of ‘false consciousness’ has been coined by Karl Marx to delineate meaning and social relations that
are misrepresented (i.e. false) through ideology and which deflect the ‘true’ social condition of the people. Ideology
critique is thus occupied with releasing people from the grips of the ruling class’s ideology and bringing them closer
to their ‘true’ demands and needs.
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“represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the
knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’ (p. 205).
Acknowledging that Foucault enlivened power as a positive phenomenon (without ever
denying its restrictive force), this brings us to the second shortcoming of organization scholars:
resistance. In line with this observation, we must first take into account that Foucault’s writing
within organization science for the most part has been denied the chance to be interpreted as
speaking of individual self-determination. For instance, in view of those scholars who claimed
that Foucault’s work construes discourse as a ‘muscular’ phenomenon (cf. Alvesson & Karreman,
2000), it becomes conceivable that discourse is primarily envisaged as a constitutive force
(Fournier, 1998) that appears to prescribe univocal and hierarchical control (for a critique of
Foucauldian organization studies cf. also Newton, 1998; Reed, 1998; 2000; Fournier & Gray,
1999; Gabriel, 1999). It is thus hardly surprising that some of those organization scholars who
have appropriated Foucault as an advocate of discursive determinism
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have simultaneously used
this hyperbolic interpretation of Foucault to stipulate a counter-position in which they came to
stress, among other things, that actors are, more or less willingly and freely, able to use discourse
in order to bring about desired ends (cf. Phillips & Hardy, 1997; Hardy, Palmer & Phillips, 2000;
Grant, Hardy, Oswick, Phillips & Putnam, 2004). Yet, whereas the above perspective prima facie
seems to redeem the image of discourse as a deterministic force, it can be argued that it tends to
overstretch the possibilities of (discursive) agency while simultaneously downplaying the
ordering force of discourse. More important, however, is the observation that the polarity
between ‘muscular discourse’ (which is the pole to which organization scholars usually have
appointed Foucault), which views subjectivity as a direct effect of discourse (Weedon, 1987), and
‘discourse autonomy’ (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000), where discourse is only loosely coupled
with people’s subject position, is deemed to collapse once we take into account that Foucault’s
various works, or heritage at large, cannot possibly be allocated to only one side. Stated
otherwise, while Foucault’s work undoubtedly exhibits an interest in the normalizing effects of
discourse, he elaborated equally on the issues of self-determination and resistance in ways that
clearly undermine the possibility to discern him (only) as a maintainer of a totalizing vision of
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For a highly commendable treatise of Foucault’s critics, consult Berard (1999) who has pointed out that scholars
ranging from Rorty, Giddens, Habermas, Jameson, etc. have falsely entitled Foucault as a ‘neo-conservative’ or
simply a ‘fatalist’. Especially insightful in that respect is Giddens’ (1987) appraisal: ‘(t)he individuals who appear in
Foucault’s analyses seem impotent to determine their own destinies’ (p. 214).
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discourse. That is to say that the richness of and variation in Foucault’s work does not justify
reducing him to a single theoretical/analytical position. I am therefore keen to refer to Berard
(1999) who has addressed Foucault’s critics, that is, those who have turned him into a discourse
determinist, in positing that ‘neither Foucault’s theory of power nor his theory of subjectivity
allow for the charges of neo-conservatism and fatalism’ (p. 210). In consequence, what is
required here is to stage a research, that is, a novel search of Foucault’s inheritance in order to
scrutinize the simplistic entitlement of ‘discursive determinist’. Along these lines, the present
chapter aspires to stage an extended discussion of the relation between discourse, power and
subjectivity. Particular emphasis will thereby be put on the interrelation between power and the
space for self-determination or, more precisely, on the issue of individual resistance as it emerges
through Foucault’s (later) work on the aesthetics of the subject, that is, the ‘aesthetics of
existence’. The genuine objective therein is to address the respective questions by invoking some
of Foucault’s ‘minor’ writings which, to my knowledge, seem less prominent in organization
studies. Importantly, rather than reading Foucault univocally as a scholar of autonomous
resistance (which is not tenable anyway), I opt to provide an image of Foucault’s work which
emphasizes that resistance and power are irrevocably co-implied and which, therefore, shall help
to counter-balance, if not reject, those accounts which one-sidedly delineate Foucault as a
discursive determinist. While selected texts by Foucault will be deployed to display how
resistance and individual freedom are made possible through processes of deliberate thinking and
reflection as well as through the aesthetic treatment of the self, we will subsequently turn to de
Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ which gives us at our disposal a scheme for understanding that
‘strategic’ discourse must not necessarily be counteracted by means of conscious deliberation but,
wittingly or unwittingly, by means of creative consumption. Departing from de Certeau’s
imaginative theorizing, we will stimulate a perspective which discerns resistance less as a matter
of purposeful action and agency than as a process by means of which an over-codified, say,
dominant discourse is appropriated through people’s everyday sensemaking (and practices).
Acknowledging that both Foucault and de Certeau’s profound elaborations give rise to an image
of resistance that takes place inside the system of the dominant code (and not outside of it), we
will invoke the allegory of the ‘host’ and the ‘parasite’ in order to illustrate that power and
subjectivity are invariably co-implied in a symbiotic (and not antagonistic) relationship. On the
strength of this discussion, we shall establish a rationale which conceptualizes the issue of
resistance as a matter of nurturing both the possible (Serres, 1995) and difference (Lyotard &
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Thébaud, 1985) and, by implication, as the instance of ultimate justice and responsibility.
Emphasizing, through Lyotard and others, that difference is always at risk of being marginalized
or ignored by means of totalizing discourse (i.e. grand narratives), we shall introduce Lyotard’s
(1984; 1985) concept of ‘paganism’ in order to substantiate the issue of difference and alterity as
a mutual political and ethical event. Moreover, using Lyotard’s work on paganism to outline a
‘politics of difference’, we shall deploy these insights to stimulate an understanding of individual
and collective resistance as the artistic process of ‘enabling difference’.
L’Autre Foucault
Arguably, resistance is an issue of public concern which has been centre stage on the agenda of
critical (organization) research at all times. The renewed emphasis on resistance in organization
studies is thereby predominantly entertained as a matter of direct (and often collective) opposition
and confrontational practice. Within this particular exegesis, Foucault’s work has been granted a
position that is mostly perceived as containing two particular images of power (and resistance):
first, and most prominently, there are those who have enlisted Foucault’s work to subscribe to a
perspective of power as ‘overt control’; a perspective in which individual resistance is hardly an
issue or simply impossible (cf. above). Second, there are those scholars who have invoked
writings of Foucault that construe resistance on the level of the ethical body in a non-absolutist
state. Yet, it would seem misleading to ask which of these two routes of scholarly work is right,
not to say better, since this would necessarily imply that there is one proper way to conjoin
Foucault’s work with the issue of resistance. It is hence not least since Jones’ (2002) insightful
treatise of Foucault’s inheritance in organization studies that we are called upon to acknowledge
that it is not apposite to discern Foucault as a singularity. In accordance therewith, McKinley and
Starkey (1998) have been particularly perplexed by how Foucault’s work has been perceived, that
is, constrained in organization studies. In specific terms, they went on to object that ‘(w)e need to
contest the reading of Foucault’s work as little more than an elaboration of Weber’s “iron cage”
argument in which modern society and modernism are deconstructed as various expressions of a
common theme – the generalization of panoptical or conformist forces in a unitary process of
rationalization and normalization, as a result of which we all inhabit carceral archipelagos of one
form or another’ (p. 233). As discussed above, it must be realized that there is an abundance of
504
organization scholars who have opted to read Foucault’s work in a one-dimensional way, that is,
as a unified frame of reasoning where power is taken (using McKinley and Starkey’s wording) to
discipline people through ‘panoptical or conformist forces’. Stated otherwise, organization
scholars commonly read Foucault’s work as a one-fold (i.e. as yielding one meaning), and it is
precisely due to this particular interpretation that we are limited in our understanding of power as
a force which, following Weiskopf (2002), creates ‘(t)he “captive” individual – that is the
“caged”, imprisoned, enslaved, locked up, confined, individuals has been the dominant theme in
this discourse’ (p. 82).
It must be added here that there is another tendency by virtue of which Foucault’s work is
represented as a split, and hence interpreted as a two-fold, so to speak.
177
That is, the contribution
of Foucault has quite readily been separated into an earlier phase, consisting of his work on
genealogy and archaeology, and his latter work on transgression and ethics, respectively the
aesthetics of existence. This distinction, however, marks a gross simplification of Foucault’s
work, and though it can be interpreted as a matter of economic pragmatism it is nevertheless
worthy of suspicion. To gain a sense of why we need to overcome this dual imagery, it ought to
be mentioned that the respective divide has been naturalized by, for instance, scholars contending
that Foucault’s earlier work stimulated the ‘death of the subject’ while his latter work seemed to
signify the subject’s re-inauguration, if not redemption. Yet, such a claim is not only problematic
because it, rather than highlighting Foucault’s equivocal and diverse agenda, simplifies the
entirety of Foucault’s work into a two-track agenda, but because it is simply untenable to
delineate his ‘later’ work as signifying a recurrence of the autonomous, self-directing individual.
Hence, what has been interpreted as the instance of Foucault’s ‘homecoming’ to the autonomous
subject for the most part relates to those texts in which he developed the idea of ‘aesthetics of
existence’ (cf. Foucault, 1985; 1990; 1990b). To give a hint of how scholars came to locate a
rupture or even a change of mind in Foucault’s work, we shall invoke a passage of a particular
working session previously published in ‘Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics’: ‘With Plato’s
Alcibiades,
178
it’s very clear: you have to take care of yourself because you have to rule the city.
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Notice that Negri (2006) claimed that it was until the publication of ‘Dits et Ecrits’ that Foucault’s work on the
processes of subjectivation and the aesthetics of self and of political care was more or less ignored. Negri thus
asserted that this led scholars to distinguish two routes of Foucauldian analysis: Up to the end of the 60s the
archaeology of knowledge and in the 70s the inquires into the relations between knowledge and power (cf. p. 76).
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Alcibiades was a philosophical successor of Socrates. Plato in ‘Alcibiades I’ put forward a dialogue between
Socrates and youthful Alcibiades where the former confronted the latter in his ambition to pursue a political career.
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But taking care of yourself for its own sake starts with the Epicureans
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… everybody has to take
care of himself. Greek ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of aesthetics of
existence’ (1984, p. 348; emphasis in original). Although passages such as the above, where
Foucault came to highlight ‘personal choice’ in Greek ethics, were interpreted as marking a
radical break with his previous work, it was Deleuze (1988) who argued, both cogently and
convincingly, that there is neither reason to believe that Foucault’s earlier work was concerned
with (discursive) determinism nor that he later came to talk of an autonomous self (which stands
in opposition to the forces of power). As he clarified matters, ‘Foucault’s fundamental idea is that
of a dimension of subjectivity derived form power and knowledge without being dependent on
them’ (p. 101). Accordingly, the pivotal point of Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’ is that the
subject, who is not autonomous, makes creative use of the ‘forces’ by which he/she is
surrounded. Thus, given that authors such as, for instance, Bernstein (1992) or Allen (2000) have,
in accordance with Deleuze, pinpointed that such a thing as the ‘death of the subject’ has never
been explicitly inscribed in Foucault’s work, it follows from this that it would simply be
untenable to claim a return to the subject. This again makes it necessary to turn to those texts of
Foucault through which he explicated how people (can) exert ‘resistance’ through the micro-
practices of everyday conduct. To this end, we must first recollect that the influences of
normalizing power, which are conceived of as ‘producing’ or ‘fabricating’ subjects, are not meant
(only) as negative phenomena (cf. above) but equally as positive phenomena of production.
Nonetheless, it was Foucault (1988) who conceded that some of his work contained ‘too much on
the technology of domination and power’ (p. 19). To be sure, he further clarified that the ‘power
of the disciplinary type’, which had occupied a broad space in his earlier works, had to be put into
perspective, since what he had said about discipline was not to be taken as saying that this
marked the only imaginable manifestation of power: ‘it is clear that it [disciplinary power] does
not adequately represent all power relations and all possibilities of power relations. Power is not
discipline; discipline is a possible procedure of power’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 380). By the same
token, Foucault set out to supplement the ‘technologies of domination’ – which were said to
create ‘docile bodies’ by means of processes of objectification, classification and normalization
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The Epicureans, the school of philosophy founded on the teachings of the Greek Epicurus (342 B.C. – 270 B.C),
recognized as valid only that knowledge which originates and stops in the senses. All other cognition is only the
result of sensations and combinations of many sensations. With respect to pleasure, the Epicureans recognized that it
is the beginning and need of the ‘blessed life’. As a consequence thereof, they took pleasure as a standard by which
they judged every choice and avoidance and made it the guiding principle of a good (that is, painless) life.
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(cf. Foucault, 1997) – with a view of power which granted the individual, as it were, agentic
possibilities. Within the following sub-chapter we shall therefore outline how Foucault came to
envisage resistance as a process of individual ‘self-determination’.
Resistance as Aesthetics of Existence and Problematization: Michel Foucault
In talking about resistance it is first of all interesting to see that Foucault’s (1984) notion of
‘personal choice’ (p. 248) and ‘self-forming activity’ (p. 355) were wrongfully interpreted by
certain scholars as activities which granted people an ‘authentic life’, that is, a life in which we
can ‘be truly our true self’ (p. 351). Besley (2005) eloquently argued (in relation with Foucault’s
(1978) ‘The History of Sexuality, Vol. I’) that it is a ‘common assumption of western culture’ to
assume that ‘if one tells the ‘truth’ about one’s sexuality, this deepest truth about the self will
become apparent and then one can live an authentic life’ (p. 79). In opposition to this rationale,
Foucault related the notion of ‘authenticity’ to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre so as to display the
fallacy implied in presuming a life that is (or can be) in touch with one’s true inner self. Foucault
thereby scrutinized Sartre’s notion of ‘authenticity’ by positing: ‘I think that the only acceptable
practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of
creativity – and not of authenticity’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 351). It must be clear by now that such a
thing as ‘true self’ was alien to Foucault’s thinking and that he dismissed the logic of ‘ideology’
for the same reason, namely that it presupposed a hidden self or essence of truth which has been
‘concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression’ (Foucault, 1997, p.
282). This shift of emphasis is profound since it determines the idea of agency not as a retreat to
an impeded self, but as a creative process of self-regulation. The idea of resistance we can ascribe
to Foucault’s writing on creativity is therefore incommensurable with those views which
proclaimed that he delineated individuals as ‘self-determining agents capable of challenging and
resisting the structures of domination in modern society’ (McNay, 1992, p 4). The difference
which falls into place here is one between resistance from the inside versus resistance as
occurring from the outside. Regarding the former, it is Harrer (2005) who insightfully commented
that ‘Foucault … seems always to have thought of the moral self-constitution as a derivative of,
or a complement to, the constitution of subject through normalizing power and subjugation’ (p.
78). The point thereby has been, following Weedon (1987), that Foucault’s theorizing on the
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subject envisaged the matter as being socially constructed through discursive practices while at
the same time being able to reflect upon these discursive relations that constitute it. The question,
then, is how we must understand resistance in this context and, most fundamentally, what
Foucault had in mind while talking about ‘choice’. This brings us to the issue of thinking and in
particular its potential to create what Foucault coined ‘freedom’. To begin with, resistance,
meaning the ability to chose from the options underlying the variegated set of (contradictory)
subject positions and social practices, materializes in the very moment the thinking subject is able
‘to step back from this way of acting or reacting, … to question it as to its meaning, its
conditions, and its goals’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 388). Stepping back as well as questioning are thus
construed by Foucault as the means by which a subject achieves a state of freedom, that is, a
condition in which self-determination becomes possible. Or, to use Foucault’s (1997) terms,
‘(t)hought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself
from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem … We should permanently
question the experience in which we find ourselves’ (p. 117). It must be reiterated in this context
that Foucault did not problematize disciplinary rules and habits per se. Rather, he pinpointed that
an unreflected way of thinking undermines our own freedom. What Jones, Parker and ten Bos
(2005) derive from Foucault’s deliberations is that to attain freedom you must ‘distance yourself
from your own ingrained habits, from your own relationship with rules and, indeed, from way
you generally think and from how you generally act’ (p. 135). Freedom, that is, the possibility to
problematize and distance oneself from one’s own habitual mode of (self-) conduct, is thus
conjoined by Foucault with ethics. To gain an understanding of how he managed to establish this
nexus, it is first of all helpful to listen to Foucault’s (1991) genuinely rhetorical question: ‘what is
ethics if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?’ (p. 4). On the face of it,
freedom as achieved through deliberate thinking aspires, following Foucault (1984), to transform
‘the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse
practical solutions. It is problematization that responds to these difficulties, but by doing
something quite other than expressing them or manifesting them: in connection with them it
develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will
constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to’ (p. 389). In consequence, what is
needed to achieve (individual) freedom by means of problematization is ‘a demanding, prudent,
“experimental” attitude’ which enables the individual to confront what one is thinking and saying
with what one is doing, with what one is’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 374). Given the practical task of
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‘problematization’, we must again recognize that ethics as ‘aesthetics of the self’ is in close
proximity with the logic of ‘technologies of the self’. The profundity of this claim thereby derives
from the observation that technologies of the self are commonly invoked (by organization
scholars) to explain how people are ‘subjectivated’, that is, turned into subjects of a particular
kind (cf. Chapter 1). However, the technologies of the self are broadened by Foucault (1984) to
encompass not only how people are turned into subjects, but how people act upon themselves in
an ethical manner. Problematization and deliberate thinking (which together comprise the point of
departure of individual freedom) are thus always at the service of finding ways to act upon
oneself in a new manner, a manner which is beneficial for the individual. Foucault (1984) thus
mentioned in this context that ‘this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into
problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response’ (p. 389) is always to
be embraced in its prospective outlook, its potential to change the future of individual conduct.
As Foucault (1988) contended in one of his later interviews, self-determination is made possible
by ‘excavating our own culture in order to open a free space for innovation and creativity’ (p.
163). Thinking and problematization are thus not (only) conceivable as (individual) intellectual
exercises, but as pragmatic, local and creative deeds that bring forward a future of a different
kind. Deleuze (1988) thus made clear on that account that ‘thought thinks its own history (the
past), but [it needs] to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to, think
differently (the future)’ (p. 119). Again, it is most important here to see that Foucault construed
freedom, that is, the process upon which individuals grant themselves another future by means of
personal choice, as a process which entailed on the one hand problematization and, on the other
hand, creativity (and aesthetics). The notion of creativity, so it seems, has became a cornerstone
in Foucault’s writing. For instance, he came to say that ‘(f)rom the idea that the self is not given
to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work
of art’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 351). Essentially, in invoking art, Foucault did not refer to a decisive
ideality of how the subject must be ‘modeled’, a prescriptive art, so to speak. Instead, the art or
‘aesthetics of existence’ comes to represent the sensibility of people regarding what happens
around them, a reflectivity or rationality as alluded to above, which is grounded in the capacity to
perceive and, thus, to chose. In other words, ‘(s)uch an aesthetics of existence … implies the
development of an ability to judge, having the flexibility to change and have various options and
criteria, for reconstructing oneself’ (Tamboukou, 2003, p. 176). Importantly, Foucault’s
‘aesthetics of existence’ is largely inspired by the demand of creating a style for one’s life. After
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all, Foucault (1984) insightfully commented, ‘(w)hat strikes me is the fact that in our society, art
has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is
something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t
everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not
our life?’ (pp. 350 – 351). In follows from this that Foucault has conceived of art or artistic
practice as the central source of emancipation, since it has been taken as the event through which
people define and re-define their limits, the boundaries that define their very being. As alluded to
before in the context of Foucault’s treatise of thought and freedom (and ethics), artistic practices
are taken as a transgressive force (cf. below) by means of which the individual is enabled to
investigate his/her life (in the present) in order to act to enhance it. It must have become clear by
now the ‘aesthetics of existence’ portrays a way of self-making that is on the one hand
empowering but which on the other hand cannot be envisaged as happening in full opposition to
or outside of power. With this in mind, it is in the following paragraph that we shall elaborate on
how Foucault envisaged subjectivity as being practiced or performed within (and not against) the
interstice of power.
Resistance as Transgression: Michel Foucault … Again
But subjectivation to what? To common sense which, turning away from mad flux and anarchic
difference, knows how, everywhere and always in the same manner, to recognize what is
identical; common sense extracts the generality of an object while it simultaneously
establishes the universality of the knowing subject through a pact of goodwill. But what if
we gave free rein to ill will? What if thought freed itself from common sense and decided
to function only in its extreme singularity? (Foucault, 1970, p. 901)
Not least since Foucault’s (1990) ‘Care of the Self’ we have come to see that a key question to
ask is not only how discourse constructs the respective subjects of which it allegedly speaks, but
also how discourse is absorbed by each individual whom that technology addresses (respectively
interpellates; cf. Althusser, 1977). In other words, the shift of focus we have discerned in
Foucault’s work is one from the production of subjects to the consumption by subjects. Though
less known than his work of disciplining and governmentality (cf. Chapter 1), it must be
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recognized that Foucault provided a rationale for understanding the issue of resistance (as ‘care of
the self’ and ‘aesthetics of existence’) through the consumption and appropriation of discourses at
the local level. As Tamboukou (2003) has made clear with respect to the topical realm of feminist
theorizing, ‘it is at the ‘margins of hegemonic discourses’ that women’s practices of self-
representation have emerged, thereby creating ruptures in the tradition of writing the self, and
offering instances of ‘becoming other’’ (p. 26). ‘Becoming other’ is a central figure for
understanding that resistance is not a phenomenon that resurrects the given, respectively a lost
centre or past, but a phenomenon that stimulates a border-crossing move, that is, a move into
novel territories and ways of being. Within his treatise of Bataille, Foucault (1977b) put forward
the concept of ‘transgression’ which fundamentally undermined the dialectic relationship
between power or domination on the one hand and resistance or dissent on the other. The
particularity of transgression derives from imagining resistance not from the perspective of an
identified telos (e.g. liberation or emancipation), but from seeing it as an endogenous experience
of the individual. As with ‘problematization’ where the individual turns the ‘given into a
question’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 389), transgression occurs within the ‘present conditions and limits’
of power (Simons, 1995). In light of Foucault’s (1978) contention that ‘(w)here there is power
there is also resistance, and yet or consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power’ (p. 95), it becomes arguable that the perception of power and resistance as
oppositional, that is, dialectic forces, is to be overcome. By implication, the process of
transgression envisages the phenomena of power and resistance as belonging to ‘the same family,
pieced together by desire and the limit’ (Fleming, 2002, p. 200). It hence follows from Fleming’s
claim that the concept of transgression couteracts the opposition between inside and outside by
means of installing a vision of constant play. As Foucault (1977b) pinpointed with respect
thereto, ‘(t)ransgression, … is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the
lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather,
their relationship takes the form of a spiral that no simple infraction can exhaust’ (pp. 73 – 74).
As briefly mentioned in the context of Foucault’s rejection of Sartre, processes of transgression
contain not the defense of a boundary between a genuine (but threatened) self and an alienating
subjectivity imposed by an outside force but, rather, a practice of difference that brings about a
kind of forward motion (which stands in opposition to the backward motion being revealed in
conjunction with the dialectical view of power – resistance) which enables a novel (ethical)
becoming. Arguably, Foucault’s elaboration on transgression cannot possibly be overemphasized,
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since it has stimulated a shift from the metaphor of resistance as opposition (e.g. defense,
guarding, etc.) to one which highlights movement (e.g. traversing, crossing, permeating, etc.).
Construing the relationship between resistance and power by means of an image that operates
according to the dynamic of the parasite (cf. below), that is, ‘working from within’, it is through
the following paragaraph that we will get to see that this view is integral to de Certeau’s theory of
tactics and strategies. This being said, we shall discuss, through de Certeau, how discourse, power
and resistance intersect and how these processes relate with the issue of consumption.
Resistance as Consumption: Michel de Certeau
Through the preceding discussion we have come to understand that Foucault’s wrongfully
received power-knowledge nexus and the alleged discursive determinism which accompanies it
could be taken as a reason for disenchanted renouncement. To counteract a view of discourse that
is associated with agentive impotence, the previous deliberations have provided a view of
resistance, that is, transgression, which is conceived of as relying upon and absorbing the
condition of power which it seeks to escape. Provided that resistance can occur within the
confines of power (and must not necessarily be practices outside of it) and taking into account
that power ultimately creates the (unstable) condition of its own resistance, we shall turn over to
Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ in order to continue and develop this
line of argument. In opposition to Foucault’s work on the ‘aesthetics of existence’, it is
noteworthy that de Certeau’s work highlights resistance of pre-ordained meaning not primarily as
a matter of purposeful action (e.g. thinking), but as the alteration of signs/discourse through
people’s everyday practices. It is hence worth noting in this context that the theorizing of
resistance does neither end nor begin with the work of Foucault, and that there are philosophical
perspectives beyond (or besides) Foucault which also theorize (tactical) resistance as a process
which is inherent to the system of dominant (i.e. strategic) meaning. Though we are grateful for
Foucault’s work which has helped us in understanding that resistance must not necessarily take
the form of class struggle or otherwise collective antagonism, it is in particular de Certeau who
has spurred a view that interprets resistance as a distinct process of re-appropriation (re-
interpretation) which implies (as with Foucault’s work on transgression) that challenging existing
power relations does not require overthrowing them. De Certeau must therefore be approached as
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having been part of a larger philosophical ‘collective’ or ‘movement’ of which other proponents
such as Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault are, to my knowledge, the most luminous
(cf. Ahearne, 1995). When juxtaposing Foucault’s notion of ‘aesthetics of existence’ with de
Certeau’s tactical resistance, it must be borne in mind that the latter sort of resistance is thought
of less as a process of active and conscious deliberation or thinking as of (creative) consumption.
Individual consumption is thus envisaged by de Certeau as the process by virtue of which the
individual carries out a number of transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy
in which he/she finds him/her-self. Speaking of consumption thus entails that the individual is
always situated within a dominant economic order (of production) which aspires to ‘capitalize
acquired advantages, to prepare future expansion, and thus to give oneself a certain independence
with respect to the variability of circumstances’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 36). To gain a sense of how
de Certeau envisaged tactics and everyday practices as an immanent feature of resistance against
a dominant economic order, it is first of all imperative to understand that he placed the individual
in a ‘calculus of force-relationships’ (de Certeau, 1994, p. 380) that tried to master time and space
so as to turn them into ‘readable spaces’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 36). While the term ‘readable
spaces’ is construed by de Certeau (1984) as the codification of space that ‘makes possible a
panoptic practice’ (p. 36; emphasis in original), it becomes evident that he took Foucault’s
(1977) ‘Discipline and Punish’ as a starting point to search for ‘limits … to the proliferating
mechanisms of ‘discipline’ diagnosed by Foucault’ (Ahearne, 1995, p. 147). This is not to say,
however, that de Certeau’s work on everyday practice was anti-Foucault, but that he took
Foucault’s exegesis of power as discipline to investigate how individuals were able to disrupt the
code of the dominant cultural economy and, consequently, how forms of alterity were enabled
within the given limits. In part, de Certeau’s work on everyday practices has been compatible
with Foucault’s notion of discipline to the extent that it presumed that people are located in a
predominated system of production that is characterized by ‘quasi-invisibility’ (1984, p. 31). The
introduction of ‘everyday practices’ on the other hand was aimed at investigating how people or,
better, ‘users’ operated within a particular strategic space, that is, a force-relationship in order to
appropriate the dominant cultural economy to their own interests and their own rules. Bearing in
mind the dynamic of disciplinary power which is said to transform individuals into cases, it is de
Certeau who has introduced the distinction between production and consumption in order to raise
the awareness that, however restrictive a given system of production might be, it is at the micro-
level of individual appropriation that the person is enabled ‘to manipulate events in order to turn
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them into opportunities’ (de Certeau, 1994, p. 480). To be sure, de Certeau’s idea of consumption
is not too far off from Foucault’s elaboration on ‘aesthetics of existence’, since both grant the
individual a space for creative/aesthetic self-determination. Yet, the means by which self-
determination is attained are markedly different. As mentioned before, it is Foucault who has
related personal freedom with reflective thinking while de Certeau took consumption (or
everyday practice) as the instance of individual resistance. Consumption, following de Certeau
(1994), is thus ‘devious, dispersed and insinuates itself everywhere’ whereas it must remain clear
that resistance manifests itself not ‘through its own products, but rather through its ways of using
the products’ (p. 475). To comprehend if resistance is taking place or not, de Certeau (1984)
advised us that ‘we must first analyze its [strategic meaning] manipulation by users who are not
its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the
image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization’ (p. xiii). Having
delineated everyday practices as well as consumption as ‘victories of the weak over the strong’
(de Certeau, 1994, p. 481), it is noteworthy that consumption marks a tactical exercise by virtue
of which individuals put forward ‘sentences’ that were unpredicted, if not undesired, by the
functionalized space of the dominant economy. Tactical resistance is thus to be understood as a
process of appropriation, of creative re-interpretation as a result of which official meaning is
subverted. Putting himself in opposition to Foucault’s rationale in ‘Discipline and Punish’, de
Certeau made clear that discipline is resisted at every moment by people’s ‘makeshift creativity’
(Levine, 1998). While one could argue that de Certeau was rash in accusing Foucault of not
taking into account the possibility of resistance (especially while taking into account the work
being discussed above), he must at the same time be held in high esteem for his insightful
comments on resistance as creative re-interpretation. Consumption as the process of ‘hidden
production’ thus provides the individual with agency that is circumscribed as the process of
creative utilization of meaning. Within this frame of reasoning, individuals become the
‘bricoleurs’ of their own future, that is, the ‘poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their
own path in the jungle of functionalist rationality’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xviii). With regard to
tactics, it is in particular due to individuals’ signifying practices, the ‘making do’ of new
meaning, that novel wandering lines become possible which trace ‘out the ruses of the other
interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems’ (de Certeau, 1994,
p. 480). Resistance in this perspective is centrally aligned with language (respectively reading)
where it is through concrete speech acts, that is, the use of language by an identifiable speaker,
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that language is appropriated to people’s own ends. De Certeau himself put forward the example
of indigenous minorities to exemplify how they used the official language (of the colonizer) to
‘metaphorize’ its dominant order.
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In making the dominant language function in another register
it is thus possible for the speaker to insert his/her own messages, accents and, thus, to define
his/her own history and future. Arguably, de Certeau has been keen to pinpoint a kind of
resistance that is contingent on reading (interpreting). He thereby highlighted the importance of
reading by showing that reading never simply reproduces the initial (or dominant) meaning.
Rather, the process of reading invariably contains an appropriation of meaning, that is, every
strategic text is always exposed to a reading subject which implies that this individual (being the
‘host’ of a plethora of other texts) can read/interpret the text in several ways, and, ultimately, to
his/her own advantage. By implication, reading becomes pure creativity as well as a kind of
(metaphoric) dreaming which both aspire to put the ‘individual elsewhere, where they are not, in
another world’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 173). To read behind and other than the strategic orthodoxy
is, following de Certeau (1984), a ‘silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers … who
maintain their own views in private and without the knowledge of the “masters”’ (p. 172). As
with Foucault, this space of relative autonomy must be actively created within the given socio-
economic field of force. However, as becomes clear through the above statements, so-called ‘re-
employments’ of meaning are not so much a matter of deliberately setting oneself apart from the
‘knowledge of the “masters”’ as calling into question the discourses by which one is interpellated.
Rather, ‘re-employments’ are (almost) inevitable since there is always an abundance of novel
associations one can derive through the process of reading (cf. Chapter 5). To put this in a slightly
different way, given the rich array of (potential) intertextual combinations which pervade each
singular text, it is conceivable that the reader always gets to invent ‘in texts something different
from what they [the writers] “intended”. He detaches them from their origin, now lost or merely
incidental. He combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized
by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 169). This
being said, it becomes clear that de Certeau’s elaboration on reading exhibits some proximity to
Derrida’s (1981) notion of ‘différance’ as the ‘unfolding of difference’ (p. 10). In both instances
difference is discerned as an irrevocable, though at times concealed, part of the strategic
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In postcolonial studies there are frequent notions of ‘mimicry’ which is taken as the process by which colonized
subjects employ the language of the colonizer in ways that produces a ‘blurred copy’ which ‘locates a crack in the
certainty of colonial dominance’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tifffin, 2000, p. 139).
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apparatus or metaphysical system (or text). Differences are thus already at people’s disposal
while it is only through their creative reading, if not discovery, that novel connections/meanings
are made possible. In accordance with Foucault’s notion of ‘transgression’, reading
(interpretation) activates a movement whose direction, following de Certeau, is ‘incidental’. As
metaphorically expressed by de Certeau, ‘readers are travelers; they pass through lands belonging
to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write’ (p. 174). Again,
de Certeau’s depiction of reading as a voyage into foreign lands is compatible with Foucault’s
notion of transgression as a movement forward, a movement towards new becomings. Yet, while
difference is the point in question in both approaches, it is in particular through de Certeau that
we come to see that difference or resistance is not only implied in every orthodox signification,
but that it is, due to the fissures in the structure of enclosure, almost inevitable. Importantly, the
aesthetics and ethics entailed in de Certeau’s account is that the individual is granted a space
other than that contained by certified forms of writing while it must be acknowledged, following
Ahearne (1995), that ‘the individual … does not hold his or her own truth, but may develop a
differential truth by responding to a series of solicitations and disruptions which come from
‘outside’’ (p. 192). Hence, de Certeau provides us with a cogent model to understand how alterity
is created throughout the process of creative consumption which in turn depends and thrives on
the delimiting structure of enclosure. Within the ensuing lines we shall go on to ‘metaphorize’
this relation between power and subjectivity in order to establish an image which highlights the
constructive relationship between the two phenomena.
Resistance as Parasitic ‘Collaboration’
As with Foucault’s concept of transgression, de Certeau’s tactics are equally conceivable as an
ensemble of ‘ruses and devices’ that use the dominant cultural logic or the prevailing strategic
code in a manner that opens up a sphere of relative autonomy. Tactics are hence borne within
power and feed off the spatial complex of an assemblage of domination that provides ‘some time’
(tactics unfold in time through processes of ‘making do’) to establish a modestly subversive
enclave (de Certeau, 1984). Both the notion of tactics and transgression provide a frame for
understanding how identities or subjectivities are constructed in and through a given field of
force. Most explicitly comprised in Foucault’s elaborations on transgression is that the
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construction of subjectivity marks a process of releasing one-self, that is, letting go of one’s
stable (and confined) identity in order to transcend existing limitations, the border, such as to
become other. Arguably, thinking about identity construction as aesthetic practice must not
constitute an imaginary terrain of harmonious enunciation, but one which equally emphasizes
negotiation and, by implication, social conflict and tensions (Bakhtin, 1981). On the face of it,
while Foucault and de Certeau’s theories outline how dominant discourse can be sidestepped
(transgressed) without actually leaving it, such an image of resistance works less through a
metaphor of either escape or opposition but of ‘parasite politics’ (van Loon, 2000). The parasite
represents an elusive concept and one which is more often than not taken as a negative
phenomenon or form of encounter. However, the image of the parasite is also productive because
it allows a perspective of power, resistance and subjectivity that affirms difference, not sameness.
To attain such ends, we must first bear in mind that the parasite emphasizes the permeability and
openness of the body and thereby undermines the rationale of the subject being a self-enclosed,
stand-alone unity. Moreover, the image of the parasite provides us with a perspective for
envisaging a constructive/productive interrelatedness between power and the subject. Generally
speaking, it seems commonsense to presume that the host feeds the parasite and that the
relationship between the two is unidirectional (and predominantly harmful). However, such a
view relies on an image of the parasite in the sense of, for instance, an infectious disease such as a
virus. Within such a frame the host not only feeds the parasite but also has its overall vitality
threatened. The parasite, in its obvious reading as a virus or as the ivy which twines around the
tree, entails an image of (destructive) opposition where, by extension to the issue at hand, the
individual is subjected to the forces that surround him/her. What I want to bring to the forefront
here is that within the dialectics of power and subjectivity it is the former which represents a
threat or risk to the latter. Thus, if we remind ourselves of the elaborations of Foucault and de
Certeau, it no longer appears compelling to rely on an understanding of parasite as virus. In
consequence, we must address the question of whether the parasite and the host must necessarily
be represented through an antagonistic picture. Provided, for instance, that the virus can lead a
semi-autonomous existence in relation to the host (van Loon, 2000), the notion of symbiosis and
the creation of new life forms seems pertinent to delineate our topic. In specific terms, if we are
willing to work with an image of ‘semi-autonomy’, this enables us to render intelligible, first, that
power and subjectivity are co-implied (Foucault, 1984) and, second, that these processes intersect
at a juncture or transgressive zone where new forms (of identity) are made possible. This view of
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the parasite, so it seems, merits further investigation since it emphasizes the ‘symbiotic’
(quotation marks!) relation between power and subjectivity. This being said, I would like to join
forces with Hillis Miller (2004) who raised the illuminative question: ‘can host and parasite live
happily together … ?’ (p. 177). This question marks an instance which should make us pause and
reflect as to whether ‘happiness’ is really at stake with respect to power and resistance and,
importantly, which of the two phenomena be conceived as the parasite, and conversely the host?
In talking of happiness, it is necessary to mention that ‘parasite’ marks a term which by definition
derives its meaning through the presence of its counterpart, the host. As mentioned before,
‘parasite’ is canonically interpreted in the sense of ‘harmful’ or ‘unfavorable’. Yet, the prefix
‘para’ (deriving from Greek), as Hillis Miller eloquently pinpointed, is associated with terms such
as ‘beside’, ‘to the side of’, ‘alongside’, etc. It can be argued, then, that these terms are more
closely aligned with the idea of Hillis Miller’s ‘happiness’ than with the agonistic picture of
Weber’s ‘iron cage’ that has been considered in conjunction with Foucault’s work on disciplinary
technologies. Yet, happiness as (univocal) positivity relates most cunningly to the possibility of
tactical transformation as delineated by de Certeau, while it seems less apposite to depict the
‘self-forming activity’ (i.e. transgression) as outlined by Foucault (1984). Evidently then, we
shall have another look at Hillis Miller’s work in order to comprehend that it is not necessary to
depict the relationship between power and subjectivity as either ‘happy’ or ‘antagonistic’, but that
it is in fact possible to insert a logic of ‘as-well-as’. Hence, in his treatise of (Derridean)
deconstruction (cf. Chapter 5), Hillis Miller (2004) pinpointed that ‘para’ actually represented ‘a
double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, … interiority and exteriority,
something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously
this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it’ (p. 179). The ambiguity
evoked in Hillis Miller’s image of ‘para’ is important for scrutinizing the contention that parasite
and host, and hence power and the individual, are marked off by a distinct and terminal line. In
accordance with Foucault’s musing on transgression, Hillis Miller’s rationale of ambivalence
enables us to conceive resistance as not so much a matter of defense or (self) protection. Rather,
instead of seeing resistance as a means to reach a certain telos, transgression shall be seen as the
process by which the individual crosses a line and enters novel territories. If one thinks in terms
of ‘inside and outside’, the individual is neither to be envisaged as being fully subjected to power
nor as fully escaping its influence. The image of the host and the parasite implies that power (and
its effect) cannot be allocated to only one party, and this we would endorse . Hillis Miller’s hint
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to ‘proximity and distance’ thereby denotes that the individual, respectively his/her subject
position, is constantly shifting and thereby subject to constant re-negotiation. As with the parasite
and the host, identity and power are always co-implied in such a way that the relation is not one
of polarity but, rather, of constant and contested movement. Power in itself, by implication, is not
only parasitical (in the sense of the ‘iron cage’) but equally the host, the affirmative instance of
possibility which provides the means for the individual’s aesthetic self-creation. Again, this
ambivalent reading of the allegory of parasite and host does not provide a picture of resistance
that escapes power. There is, however, no (reason for) escape anyway, since the in-between zone
of power and subjectivity defies a dialectical synthesis, an inside that is distinguishable from the
outside. As such, neither prefabricated meanings, that is, the strategic structure of enclosure, nor
the individual that finds himself or herself in its stretch will gain the upper hand in any definitive
sense. As indicated through Foucault’s notion of ‘spiral’, it becomes clear that there is no clear
and stable hierarchy contained in the relationship between power and subjectivity and that the
ambivalence between the two events must be conceived as both affirmative and threatening.
Where it has hitherto been discussed that difference is always part and parcel of every field of
force, we shall now come to talk about Michel Serres so as to address the idea that novel
becomings, that is, ‘the possible’, must not be ‘passively’ awaited, but actively nurtured.
Resistance as (the Sensitive Treatment of) the Possible: Michel Serres
By virtue of depicting Foucault and de Certeau’s theories as ‘parasitical resistance’ it has become
clear that the assumption of hegemonic or dominant discourse cannot possibly be sustained. Both
perspectives have so far made clear, in their unique ways, that the relation between power and the
subject (i.e. the ostensible object of domination) cannot be represented through the metaphor of
the ‘iron cage’ as outlined by Max Weber (cf. Weiskopf, 2002). Instead of conceiving the two
ostensible poles as separated by a boundary that keeps apart the inside from the outside, both
‘transgression’ and ‘tactics’ thrive on an image of the boundary as a ‘source of paradox and
contradiction’ (Cooper, 1990, p. 168). This boundary zone, or ‘strategic zone’ (Deleuze, 1988), is
thus the place where the subject is respectively tactically or aesthetically enabled to re-formulate
relations to self and other. Having emphasized that resistance is always inherent to power, it must
be borne in mind that both tactics and transgression might suggest an instance of resistance that is
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a bit too positive and masterful. This being said, we are well advised to refrain from the
temptation of using the parasite metaphor as an explanatory structure that foretells, in a universal
sense (Lyotard, 1984), that individuals by necessity work upon themselves in an aesthetical
manner. Hence, envisaging the boundary as a dynamic field where becoming other is made
possible, we must concede that it is always possible that the potentialities of a particular situation
are not or cannot be realized. Becoming other is thus premised on the (deliberate and active)
release of difference or the ‘multiple’ (to use Serres’ (1995) wording) which is always underlying
the (impression of the) unit. However, as ‘(w)e are fascinated by the unit’ and given the fact that
‘only a unity seems rational to us’ (Serres, 1995, p. 2), one might reasonably surmise that the
allowance of difference and alterity marks not only a creative but also a daring act of ‘letting one-
self in’. Arguably, such a transgression is not everybody’s cup of tea, so to speak, and it can be
anticipated that some people more than others are able to perceive and embrace the ‘background
noise’ which is the irrevocable ground of all becoming. Mankind, according to Serres, has
eradicated its sensitivity for discerning the surrounding noise from which all things are derived.
As such, Serres told us that we have become blinded towards the fact that ‘Being’ is inherently
fragile and, importantly, that it does not represent the ontological condition of man, but only a
brief respite from the noise from which it emerges. Again, noise is infinite possibility, but it is
more often than not feared or ignored altogether. Serres (1995) used the metaphor of ‘sea noise’
to illustrate that ‘(s)o many mariners never saw anything in the noise of the sea; only felt
nauseous, organisms teeming with the sound and the fury, like the heaving gray itself’ (p. 15;
emphasis in original). Noise, though alien or alienating to most of us, is ‘the set of possible
things’ whereas Serres (1995) further reminds us that ‘(w)e cannot predict what will be born from
it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there’ (p. 22; emphasis in original). Somewhat in
contrast to both Foucault and de Certeau’s writing, Serres made clear that the possibilities
inherent to noise are maybe further away than we might expect or want to accept. Provided that,
for instance, lack of artistic style or restrictive forces can prevent the actualizing of potentialities,
it needs to be acknowledged that there are instances which are more rigorous in suppressing the
empowerment of certain people and thereby especially those who are not associated with
mainstream thought. As Serres (1995) contended, ‘the possible is only there if there are keepers,
precisely, only if there are shepherds to tend their flocks on the highlands, only if there are
watchers’ (p. 24). Clearly, despite the noise, the innumerable and irreducible difference always
being present, the possible presupposes a sensitive treatment and openness towards the marginal
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and unknown. Serres thereby made undoubtedly clear that politics does not seem up for the task
of nurturing the possible, since ‘(p)olitics pares down the possible in order to remain stable and
maintain sanity; economy, religion, the army, … , and the administration of our day which
synthesizes them, have the function and a passion to reduce multiplicities, to reduce possibilities,
to work at the confluences’ (p. 24). Provided that we allocate some rightfulness to Serres’ claim,
we have good reasons to search for a code or event which can warrant an adequate treatment of
multiplicity, diversity and alterity. Serres is doubtlessly most univocal in his assertion that the
philosopher (respectively philosophy) must be, or better become, the spearhead for unveiling the
possibilities of the multiple. Following Serres (1995), ‘(t)he philosopher is no longer right or
rational, he protests neither essence nor truth. It is the function of the politician to be right and
rational, it is the function of the scientist to be right and rational; there are plenty of functionaries
of the truth as it is, without adding more, the philosopher does not wrap himself up in truth as in
breastplate or shield, he does not sing nor does he pray to allay nocturnal fears, he wants to let the
possible roam free. Hope is in these margins, and freedom’ (p. 23). As Serres (1995) further
contended, it is the philosopher who must brood ‘over the possible as if it were a fragile newborn
babe, like a bouquet of times, like a multi-branched candelabrum, like a living network of veins
and fibrils, he harkens to the noises and the ringing of changes’ (p. 25). The understanding of the
philosopher and philosophy as the guard of the possible goes well together with Derrida’s musing
on the position and function of philosophy and the humanities more generally (cf. Chapter 5) in
the university of tomorrow (Derrida, 2001, 2001b). It thereby seems intuitively compelling in
both Serres’ and Derrida’s accounts that philosophy comprises a vision for a different future, a
future to come, so to speak. Hence, given these elusive possibilities, we must endeavor to
understand what philosophy or, better, philosophizing means and how these insights can be
translated and implemented so as to enable aesthetical and ethical subjectivities. This brings us to
the issue of looking for how philosophy can give rise to ‘another society’ which is likely to
increase difference and alterity and which is affirmative towards the noise which, as Serres
reminds us, is always around the corner. In other words, what is needed if we acknowledge that
difference must be actively sought and sensitively treated are visions which are pertinent to turn
noise into a (ethical) idea(l). Speaking of ‘idea’ or ‘ideal’ thereby marks a strategic choice which
aspires to sidestep the danger of wiping out the dogma, that is, totalizing discourse of a unified
society by simply replacing it with another. Bearing in mind that we should refrain from putting
forward a prescriptive code of difference and alterity (e.g.: ‘difference must be this and not
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that!’), what then comes to mind for averting another hegemonic terror (Lyotard, 1984) or
metaphysical closure (Derrida, 1978) is Lyotard’s (controversially discussed) concept of
‘paganism’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985). Paganism shall therefore be deployed in the subsequent
paragraph to outline the (potential) political context and ethical obligation of power and
resistance in order then to use these insights for envisaging a just or at least more just society.
Resistance as Politics of Difference: Jean-Francois Lyotard
Where after the meta-narratives, can legitimacy reside? (Lyotard, 1984, pp. xxiv – xxv)
In ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze (1994) introduced, in an utterly persuasive way, the
importance of a philosophy of difference by describing how difference may be internal to the
nature of every Idea (capital letter) or, to be more specific, how every Idea may have multiple
elements which may be differentiated. Deleuze thereby explained that difference and repetition
have a reality which is independent of concepts of sameness, identity, resemblance, similarity, or
equivalence. In accordance thereto, Serres’ (1995) deliberations underscore Deleuze’ assertions
in that he said that ‘(w)e’ve long ago given up the hope for unitary knowledge; there’s
exceedingly little appearance of us living, thinking, or existing as a collectivity, under one law,
indivisible’ (p. 3). Importantly, pure difference is not a factor of negativity (even though we tend
to discern it as such; cf. Serres, 1995), or a negation of sameness and unity, but the possibility of
affirming the actuality of the Idea and, by extension, of becoming other as well as justice.
Speaking in the name of justice, we come full circle with Lyotard’s deliberations on paganism
and difference in order to delineate that the inscription and sustenance of difference
simultaneously represents a political task and an ethical event. As with Foucault who contended
that while the main interest of his later work was the (genealogical) investigation of sexuality (cf.
1978; 1985; 1990) politics was always co-implied, we shall now turn our gaze to Lyotard who
has given rise to a genuinely political project which, importantly, must also be emphasized both
in its moral/ethical outlook as well as regarding its commensurability with resistance. Marking
out Lyotard as one of the most important spearheads of the ‘politics of difference’ (Smart, 1993),
we shall begin this discussion by pointing out that there seems to be a certain fallacy of mimetic
form in many current debates on ‘our future’. In other words, many contemporary ‘futurologies’
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seek to comprehend (or critique) the ‘newness’ of globalization’s gigantism or its speed of
communication (du Gay, 1996) by resorting to an inverted measure emphasizing the ‘local’ in
opposition to the ‘global’ or contesting hierarchical state power by virtue of celebrating the power
‘from below’, such as, for instance, the multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2000; 2004). Summoning
Lyotard’s concept of ‘paganism’ thus characterizes an attempt to propose that any notion of
minority, conceived as an insurgent political will or a resistant cultural force, is never simply a
matter of numbers, that is, a quantitative stipulation of respectively relative predominance or
inferiority (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, pp. 93 – 100). Instead, a minority is a moral or ethical
stance that seeks representation and/or recognition not in order to overthrow the dominant code,
but to establish a fairer and fuller political and cultural representation through making a claim for
individual and social agency. This is the agential claim Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985)
proposed in his ‘politics of difference’ where he pointed out that ‘(e)very one of us belongs to
several minorities, and what is very important, none of them prevails. It is only then that we can
say that the society is just’ (p. 95). Hence, within his treatise of the just society, that is, ‘Just
Gaming’, Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) made clear that the only state of justice that
truly deserves its name is one in which no minority is enabled to dominate the others. However,
since it is conceivable that certain language games will necessarily become excessive, that is,
‘wanting to have too much of it’ (p. 99), a request is made that ways be found for ensuring the
multiplicity of language games as the ultimate momentum of justice. In line with this observation,
we shall try to sketch out a passable horizon of justice by relating to Lyotard’s concept of
‘paganism’.
When we talk of paganism we must not mistakenly interpret its political trajectory as a
modernist prescription of the just (or ethical) society (i.e. a prescription how a society must be).
Lyotard has often been accused precisely because people have misread his concept of paganism
as referring to a new ideology which pertains to ultimate truth. Be that as it may, Lyotard himself
warned against seeing paganism as prescriptive moral imperative with pre-ordained criteria: ‘I
judge. But if I am asked by what criteria do I judge, I will have no answer to give. Because if I
did have criteria, if I had a possible answer to your question, it would mean that there is actually a
possible consensus on these criteria’ (p. 15). To enable difference by a politics that defies
consensus, Lyotard opted to signify paganism as a judgment that works without or beyond pre-
established criteria that can ostensibly be deduced from the ultimate truth (respectively from
consensus). ‘Without criteria’ is thus the endemic characteristic of paganism which marks an
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ethical (i.e. just) gesture by virtue of denoting non-restriction and non-totalitarian discourse.
However, ‘without criteria’ is not the condition of ‘anything goes’; rather, it entails, following
Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), that ‘(t)he ability to judge does not hand upon the
observance of criteria. The form that it will take … is not only an ability to judge; it is a power to
invent criteria’ (p. 17). Jean-Loup Thébaud, the interviewer of Lyotard in ‘Just Gaming’ (1985),
mused at length on the question of whether or not paganism gets to rely on fixed criteria and,
therefore, must be envisaged, despite Lyotard’s insistent defense, as a classical modernist ideal
that directs or, more precisely, prescribes the way into the future. Yet, within their intellectual
(s)wordplay, Lyotard made unmistakably clear that only if one takes paganism to represent a
‘mimesis of an essence of justice’ (p. 19; i.e. a predefined criterion) could one transform
paganism into a modernist project. With this in mind, we must further recall that Lyotard’s
paganism or pagan politics is indeed prescriptive (though ‘case by case’ and not in the sense of
transcendental truth; cf. p. 28) while it is said to differ from modernist undertakings in that it,
first, represents justice as an ‘idea’ rather than a ‘determining concept’ and, second, that it cannot
be derived from denotative statements, that is, from the model of truth.
This being said, we shall now turn our gaze to the issue of power and subjectivity so as to
claim that it must remain clear at all times that paganism is not a nostalgic condition which
‘implies the representation of something that of course is absent, a lost origin, something that
must be restored to a society in which it is lacking’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 20). Quite the
contrary, paganism thrives upon an idea which is notably different from any clear-cut definition
or moral imperative of justice (cf. Chapter 1). Paganism thus differs from those denotative
statements which prescribe a particular (content of) truth. Essentially, the Idea (capital letter)
Lyotard had in mind is in close proximity with Foucault (1984) who contended that ‘the
questions I am trying to ask are not determined by a pre-established political outlook and do not
tend toward the realization of some definite political project’ (p. 375). Lyotard (cf. Lyotard &
Thébaud, 1985) has thus rejected endeavors such as Marxism upon recognizing that its rationale
contains ‘the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it
is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw just prescriptions from
a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”’ (p. 23). What is revealed here is a familiarity
with Foucault’s scrutiny of ‘ideology’. That is to say that the analogy between the two authors
revolves in their rejection or dissociation of the connection between truth and justice. In other
words, what enables the association of Foucault and Lyotard (or the other way around) is the
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observation that both scholars do not believe in an ultimate state of truth from which one could
deduce prescriptions or codes for a just society, and thereby for a better future. While Foucault
directed his attention towards locating ethics or ethical possibilities at the micro-level of
individual self-determination, Lyotard on the other hand reached out to grasp the possibility of
macro-level freedom and to formulate an idea of justice and the just society which gets along
without prescriptive laws. Moreover, he delineated that what he took to represent the idea of
paganism was different from those accounts which conceived the matter as being due to
individual autonomy and self-determination. This is not to say that Lyotard was speaking against
Foucault’s notion of ‘aesthetics of existence’ since he objected in particular (and only) to those
accounts which presumed that there exists a possibility to operate outside the realm of power, that
is, autonomously (a view which Foucault likewise denied; cf. above). However, there seems to be
a difference between Lyotard and Foucault which pertains to the social context in which justice,
and thereby, freedom are discussed. Thus, while the ‘aesthetics of existence’ came to represent
individual resistance, it was Lyotard’s concept of ‘paganism’ which envisaged justice as a
collective endeavor. To attain a state or condition of justice within society one is hence constantly
called upon to question if a specific utterance or language game manages to become hegemonic,
that is, if it is granted the position of singular power. While every language game can in principal
be or become prescriptive, Lyotard made a necessary distinction between ‘instruction’ and
‘slogan’ where it is the former which exhibits a sensitivity towards context and, thus difference,
while the latter pertains to a metaphysical logic of unity and thus contains the potential for
hegemony. Deploying Lyotard’s (1985) own elaborations we get to hear that ‘(a)n instruction is
precisely an indication of what is appropriate to do in a specific pragmatic context … They are
always local. If the context disappears, the instructions no longer have any meaning. They are not
slogans, then. A slogan belongs to a general strategy. And a general strategy presupposes a
permanent context’ (p. 55). While paganism entails local and temporary prescriptions whereas
defying universal value as contained in slogans, it stimulates, on a larger note, an image (i.e. Idea)
of a society that trades on a diverse set of pragmatic instructions that cannot, following Lyotard,
be transformed into a meta-discourse or grand narrative. One can derive from this that a society
which hails pagan politics is held together by ‘(m)essages regulated by different types of
“compass”, and thus positioning several ways of turning reality out. This social universe is
formed by a plurality of games without any one of them being able to claim that it can say all the
others’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 58). It follows from this that pagan politics is a distinct
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‘politics of difference’ (Smart, 1993) which works on the obligation of enabling difference, that
is, ‘maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives’ (p. 59), while installing
dissensus (and not consensus) as its operational principle. The grounding of such a politics is
revealed in the enabling of language games yet to be recognized and derives its legitimacy from
the very fact that it conveys a sensitivity and tolerance for complete otherness, or what Lyotard
(1988) himself coined as the ‘unpresentable’ or the ‘differend’. This being said, it is conceivable
that resistance is not so much a process of overt opposition but, rather, represents the sort of
political/ethical event by means of which the various language games of a particular pragmatic
context are rendered visible and possible. Bringing all possible voices to the fore or at least
raising the likelihood of their enunciation without granting a single perspective a metaphysical
stance, is, following Lyotard, the condition of justice. To be able to deserve the name, paganism
needs to be on its guard against turning a (local) prescription into a ‘slogan’ wherefore the prime
obligation of paganism is ‘to leave prescriptions hanging, that is, they are not derived from an
ontology’ (p. 59). Resistance as justice, though aspiring to a finality (i.e. the multiplication of
language games), is not to be found in the finitude of territoriality, but in the ‘infinity of
becoming’ (e.g. van Loon, 2000). By the same token, resistance equally marks the moment of
close listening, as the instance which gives rise to language games which have no origin or, stated
otherwise, which are not derivable from metaphysical ‘postulates’. The just society thus operates
through the ‘ought’ (and not the ‘must’), meaning that it takes a transition from a ‘descriptive
game whose goal is knowledge of the given, to a descriptive game (by Ideas) of the exploration
of the possible’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 59). Coming full circle with Foucault, who has
signified ethics as people’s self-actualization through aesthetic practice, one can note that the
making of a (not the) just society is equally conceivable as an artistic process. The image of
resistance as art is thus amenable to a logic in which making difference becomes the ultimate
concern of justice. To be sure, art is the ‘code’ Lyotard invoked to make clear that the antithesis
to paganism are those people who accept the signified as saying the truth. Art, in contrast thereto,
pertains to innovativeness which becomes most obvious in that paganism is envisaged by Lyotard
(cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) as the ‘move from one game to another, and in each of these
.
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The specter, according to Derrida (1994), is ‘a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body … It
becomes … some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other.
For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right
away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter . . . One does not know
[whether] it is living or if it is dead. Here is — or rather there is, over there, an unnameable or almost
unnameable thing’ (p. 6).
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games (in the optimal situation) they try to figure out new moves. And even better, they try to
invent new games’ (p. 61). Arguably, art and artistic paganism are taken as the epitome of
resistance or, following Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), ‘liberation’ (cf. p. 62), which
aspires, first and foremost, to prevent a particular language game from attaining definitive
significance and legitimacy. The just society, which takes into account that people’s freedom is
all too easily overrun, must be on its guards to make sure ‘that no minority is to prevail upon any
other’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 96). As such, the just society equally comes to depend on
the artistic invention of new language games as well as on the perpetual deconstruction of those
which aggrandize and strain dominance. In the spirit of Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985),
‘(l)et us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name’ (p. 82).
Outlook
While Chapter 5 has aspired to formulate an instance of critical reflection on the grounds of
Derrida’s ‘university without condition’, Serres’ appeal to see the philosopher as the nurturer of
difference (cf. above) can principally be extended to all realms of human life; provided that they
dare to speak in the name of excess, pleasure, passion and complete otherness. Lyotard’s politics
of difference is, or may become, at once the political economy of the multitude and of otherness,
and the concrete responsibility of the non-performative code. While it has been said that the
humanities are ‘useless’ since they provide nothing which can be directly used or otherwise sold
(Sommer, 2005), I have tried to express my contention that it is the unveiling of difference and
the setting into motion of centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981) and libidinal energies (Lyotard,
1993) which marks the ethico-political momentum of its very disciplines. Having delineated,
through Lyotard’s ‘paganism’, the interrelatedness between difference and justice, I will now
‘exploit’ the idea of justice-as-otherness in conjunction with a (novel) reformulation of the epithet
‘social’ of entrepreneurship. Thus, it will be argued that current formulations of social
entrepreneurship miss out on the critical and/or utopian momentum or madness (Derrida, 2004)
which makes it is ever more urgent to address these shortcomings as a philosophical task. This
being said, it will be Derrida in particular who will be granted a pivotal position in re-envisaging
social entrepreneurship through an ethics of alterity and complete otherness. Derrida’s work shall
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thus for the most part serve as a springboard for shifting the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’
beyond its performative signification and for giving rise to the recognition that the social realm
and complete otherness belong, principally speaking, to the same family, so to speak. To provide
an argumentative foundation for these very ideas (which might otherwise appear all too common
sense or, even worse, ‘impracticable’), I will first go about showing that the social aspect of
entrepreneurship, and the space ethics is appointed therein, is far removed from an idea of the
‘social’ which truly deserves the name. By emphasizing that the bulk of current interpretations of
social entrepreneurship is diametrically opposed to an ‘ethics of difference’ and by showing that
dominant conceptualization still favor an individualistic, and hence a-social perspective of the
subject matter, I will re-read social entrepreneurship as an event of perpetual ‘becoming social’.
528
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Prolegomenon III
What happens when the other is absent in the structure of the world? Only the brutal
opposition of sky and earth reigns with an insupportable light and an obscure
abyss. (Deleuze, 1984, p. 56)
Scholars such as, for instance, Giorgio Agamben (in his seminal ‘Homo Sacer’; 1998)
have come to say that the 20
th
century is characterized by an almost incredible loss of
ethics; a loss which has made possible many devastating events, where centuries of
genocides represent only the tip of the iceberg. Yet, it would probably be misleading to
depict the 20
th
century as a darkish era which we have luckily left behind, especially
because it has been convincingly argued – by Derrida and others – that the past always
creates its specters
182
which are constantly, yet elusively, actualized in the present: ‘by
definition, they [the specters] pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they
trick consciousness and skip generations’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 36; emphasis in original). In
the present context this implies that ethics was never dead, neither during the 20
th
century nor today. Whichever way we look at Derrida’s thought-provoking quote, it is
beyond all question that even the most (self-declared) avant-garde writer claiming the
end of ethics will necessarily remain with one leg in the past, so to speak, since he/she
will always be haunted by those specters that informed their writing in the first place. Or,
to substantiate this assertion through Derrida’s body of thought, all texts (thus also
those on the end of ethics) circumscribe historical embodiments which ‘are forever
haunted by those specters that informed the thinking of the writer, the spirit of the text
which touches the embodied ghosts of its readers, and the legacy it creates’ (Miller,
2004, p. 11). All this means, then, that even though some have declared the end of ethics
(which seems to be only one out a myriad of avowed ‘endings’ stimulated by the
‘apocalyptic tone in philosophy’; Derrida, 1994, p. 16) there are, so it seems, ghostly
ethical presences which chronically haunt contemporary texts on that very matter.
Instead of an era of dead ethics it rather seems to be the case that both ethical ideas and
ideals resurrect – even in times where the political rhetoric on the state of exception, risk
and apocalypse seems to make redundant, even ridiculous, any affirmative, far-reaching
futurology – through seemingly distal, unrelated concepts (Sloterdijk, 2006; in
conversation with Heinrichs).
534
Coming full circle with Chapter 7, I would like to make it clear that its objective
was precisely to show that ethics is not and cannot be completely obliterated, however
hard one tries, because it is, despite eventual temporary disappearances, literally re-born
in unprecedented and unpredictable semantic ‘containers’ (such as, for instance, ‘social
entrepreneurship’). More to the point still, Derrida’s treatise on specters, ghosts and
revenants, which provided the inspiration for Chapter 7 in the first place, brought to the
fore the question as to how certain managerial concepts and/or neologisms (and thereby
in particular ‘social entrepreneurship) recapture a somehow nebulous ethical spirit.
While addressing this question, I tried to establish a ‘spectropoetics’
183
which seeks to
illuminate the ways in which certain managerial concepts, and above all ‘social
entrepreneurship’, are replete with hopes and positive forward-looking expectations and
to discuss that it is in particular ‘social entrepreneurship’ which conveys a certain
exegesis of ‘ethics’ (notice the quotation mark). Expressed differently, provided that
people have come to say that our (historical) knowledge is exempt from ethics, I opted to
use the subject matter of this thesis, i.e. ‘social entrepreneurship’, to argue for the
contrary: that the presence or, better, the representation of ‘social entrepreneurship’
exhibits ethical traces which already seemed long passé, i.e. rendered a concern from
previous times and hence no longer significant for our present (academic) lives.
184
Yet, showing that managerial concepts such as ‘social entrepreneurship’ are
haunted by at times hardly traceable social/ethical rationalities was ‘only’ a preparatory
maneuver for a double reading of the subject matter; hence a reading whose ultimate aim
was to first disarrange ‘social entrepreneurship’ from its customary territory in order
then to re-arrange or re-territorialize the whole issue of the ‘social’ alongside an
inspirational (my assessment) understanding of relational ethics (cf. below). This
preparatory step, on the face of it, has been necessary for revealing the paradox of ‘social
entrepreneurship’, which is to say that I tried to bring to the fore that the concept
embodies an aporia in that the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) is nothing else but a re-
vitalization of rationalistic, economic and individualistic thought. It is in this way that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) does not pertain to the etymological meaning of the
183
Essentially, Derrida’s spectropoetics has no stake in (not even a hope for) discovering the root of ethical
thought. That is, spectropoetics reveals Derrida’s (1994) anti-ontological position and his appeal for analytic
secrecy, i.e. for that which cannot possibly be grasped by the essentialist philosopher: ‘One cannot clearly see
this “thing” [the spectre, ghost, revenant] (that is not a thing) in flesh and blood, precisely name it in
language or completely know it in knowledge’ (Chen & Lai, 2007, p. 234).
184
To make this clear right from the beginning: Derrida’s work on hauntology, specters and ghosts is not so
much interested in pinpointing the return of the past but rather about the fact that the origin was already
spectral. We live in a paradoxical time, as Derrida (1994) argues in his ‘Specters of Marx’, where the past is
present, and the present is saturated with the past.
535
term (i.e. mingling) as a result of which it can tell us nothing new about an essential
component of man’s ‘good life’ and, as I try to show on the basis of Derrida’s work, about
what in means to be responsible and ethical in the relational space. What I hence tried to
object to through this first analytic step is that it is, at least at second sight/thought,
evident that the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ does in no way form a cout de pied or
counter-force to the avowed loss of ethics, an assertion which I try to substantiate by
showing that ‘social entrepreneurship’ embodies a logic that is probably best described as
schematic, meaning that it adheres to the modus operandi of technical applications, thus
including, among other things, calculable inputs, algorithmic processes and predictable
outcomes.
Admittedly, since such a casual outline might easily appear too nebulous, and
notoriously imprecise (at least if measured along the standards of academic rigor), I
would like to get more concrete by pinpointing the operation of the aforementioned
pseudo-ethics as revealed in the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’. The
reasons why I have chosen to carry out this task on the basis of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ are both self-evident and well-reasoned. That is, the selection is self-
evident in light of the fact that ‘social entrepreneurship’, or better the academic
literature thereof, forms the swivel of my thesis. More importantly though, it is
conceptually grounded on the assumption that ‘social entrepreneurship’ envelopes both
the high hopes of the entrepreneurship literature of the 1980s (Steyaert & Dey, 2006) as
well as the socio-ecological concerns that have materialized somewhere towards the end
of the 1990s. This particular coincidence, as I discuss more thoroughly in the following
chapter, has the noticeable effect of concealing that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’, though prima facie dealing with the avowed other or supplement of
economic calculation, rationality and predictability, is de facto grounded on an image of
thought that renders these components its crucial parts.
It is thus through a quasi-Deleuzian (cf. Deleuze & Parnet, 1987) gesture that I try
to destabilize this particularly rigid logic by demonstrating, inter alia, that the exegesis
of ‘social entrepreneurship’ gets to favor order over disorder, predictability over chance,
knowledge over secrecy, parsimony over excess, etc. One could say, then, that I use the
following chapter to start a journey into the muddy waters of management and
organization theory, i.e. into those realms of theory and practice which, according to
Rehn and O’Doherty (2007), form the outside of economic calculation and efficiency. This
journey gains both intensity and direction by way of a comparison in which I juxtapose
536
the economic/managerial underpinning of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) with a view
derived from what I prefer to coin ‘relational ethics’; a view initially formulated by
Emmanuel Levinas (yet, Levinas uses the term ‘ethics as first philosophy’) and taken up
and rendered popular through the later work of Jacques Derrida. To be very schematic, I
would say that I used the work of Derrida to emphasize that an ethical reading of the
‘social’ presupposes a response to the Other (i.e. the epitome of alterity and difference
which cannot possibly be rendered an object of the self or, to use Levinas’ own wording,
an ontology), yet a response that cannot be deducted from fixed rules of ethics. Though
this might come across as an oddity or a typical philosophical (read useless) mental
exercise, I deem this elaboration necessary for highlighting the most essential and
blatant fallacy of the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’, namely that it
constantly pretends that the ‘social’ can be reduced to a unified, well-defined and hence
identifiable entity: the individual. One of my main points is that the ‘social’ should be
conceived of as taking place in interaction with others (hence the notion of ‘relation-
ship’), be that people with a face (i.e. those people one really encounters) or the nameless
mass of others who demand and deserve our (responsible) response.
On a larger scope, the intention underlying this move is not only to grant Levinas’
Other a more important role with respect to what it means to be or, more precisely,
become social/ethical but to simultaneously inscribe a certain passivity into
ethical/social deeds. That is, where many, if not most, models of (pro-)social and even
ethical behavior presuppose a person’s willful ability and/or autonomy, I try to
undermine this rationalistic, cognitivistic and individualistic presumption by delineating
ethics as the sort of relationality that is chiefly characterized by radical passivity, i.e. a
kind of passivity which is not only passive to anything outside the person (e.g. the other;
lower case letter) but also to itself, meaning that the given person passively awaits
his/her own becoming-other (or becoming-social, for that matter). My main point,
therefore, is that an ethical reading of the ‘social’ should portray the matter as
encompassing metamorphosing movements and not merely some abstract intellectual
and/or volitional individual exercise.
It needs particular mention that I have formulated the whole relational ethics on
the basis of an apparent imperative: i.e. ‘you must do this or that!’ This might come
across as a paradox, especially if one thinks about the passivity I have just now been
stressing. Yet, the imperative only engenders a paradox if relational ethics is conceived
as a normative code, hence as a code that prescribes and determines fixed pattern of
thinking/acting, and that deals with ultimate judgments of good and right. This, however,
537
is truly not the case because although my treatise of relational ethics is evidently
grounded upon an imperative it refers to an exigency that simultaneously comprises a
powerful invitation to otherness and a space for its very problematization. Accordingly, it
envisions the whole ethical enterprise not as a finality or teleology that delineates a finite
type of being but as a kind of movement that is probably best depicted as a process of
becoming-social; a process driven by the question ‘how to become social?’, whereas not
demanding any conclusion,
185
once and for all. Though this should already be evident by
now, I still want to point out that my exegesis of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship)
envisions the process of becoming as a movement that has nothing in common with the
sort of heroism posited by the academic literature. Hence, rather than rendering the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) a deed of the few and the exceptional I try to construe it as
belonging entirely to the everyday world. Becoming ‘social’ is hence less a question of
turning towards some predetermined other (yet this is clearly part of the whole
endeavor) but of opening up to or becoming capable of the radical practice of ‘loosing
oneself’. In a peculiar sense, this experience points at an ongoing practice of
experimentation, a practice which at the same time can turn out the most dangerous,
appalling and, on the other hand, most fulfilling and divine events imaginable. It is,
therefore, only if one leaves behind the sort of thinking that relies on the distinction of
‘either-or’ and ‘good-bad’ that one is truly able to embrace a logic of immanence, a logic
which affirms that ethics is not about ‘well-thought’ judgment but about the task of
learning to live with otherness, that is, to ‘learn to live finally’ (Derrida, 1994). Obviously
then, sketching the ‘social’ as an event (in-between essences) is what I seek to bring to
the discussion of ‘social entrepreneurship’.
On the Sociological Inquiry of the ‘Social’
It is, however, only at this juncture that we are getting to the actual core of this
prolegomenon, i.e. to the question of ‘how does my ethical exegesis of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) respectively correspond or deviate from the ‘standard’ sociological
inquiry of the subject matter?’ This question, which was raised by one of my supervisors,
is relevant not least because of the fact that my thesis has been submitted at a sociology
department (of the University of Basel). Consequently, it is in the remainder of this
prolegomenon that I endeavor to trace the components that make sociological inquiries
185
Remember: Conclusion equals standstill as a result of which it gets to function as the precondition of an
ontology of being and thus of all truths.
538
(of the ‘social’) unique, or at least to speculate about the largest denominator(s) of
suchlike studies. If all this is at stake, we will probably hardly get around briefly talking
about a) the ‘history’ of sociology and its accustomed understanding of Wissenschaft as
well as b) the overlaps and points of divergence between sociology and the academic
discipline which I have chiefly summoned up in Chapter 7: philosophy. This, as I hope,
will enable us to envision the potential merits of my Derrida-inspired reading of the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
To begin with a):
186
it is hardly a secret that today’s ‘mainstream’ sociology is still
(at least partially) influenced by the scientific approach of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, an approach which was working upon the conviction that social
phenomena should be approached in the same way as physical and biological sciences
dealt with their subject matters. This approach, which is often referred to as positivism
and which has later been transformed into post-positivism, was largely inspired by the
writing of, among others, Auguste Comte, who is widely regarded as the first academic
using the term ‘sociology’ (which is also the preeminent reason why he is often referred
to as sociology’s founding father). Comte’s positivism thus holds that sociology cannot
proceed otherwise than to accept that the only authentic and hence admissible
knowledge is scientific knowledge and, most fundamentally, that this particular form of
knowledge can only be gained from the positive affirmation of theories and the strict
application of pre-determined scientific methods. It is with this stipulation that Comte
came to replace metaphysics in the history of thought with scientific method, thus
stressing, inter alia, the circular dependence between observation and theory in the
quest for truth. Though it is evident that contemporary sociology is anything but
annexed by the (post-)positivist paradigm and that these two perspectives have lost
(part of) their dominant position (where the etymology of dominance being ‘master of the
house’), it clearly holds true that sociology is seen my many, if not most, as a science that
pertains to particular scientific methods. Indeed, this conviction goes back as far as to
sociology’s early days where figures such a Durkheim claimed that to qualify as scientific
one must adhere to a method that is proven not only to illustrate but also to prove
hypothesis. Almost needless to say, then, that many introductory books to sociology still
hold the view that sociology-as-science is chiefly characterized by a ‘commitment to
186
Note that I will carry out this task by inserting as little references as possible. I thereby want to avoid the
impression that I have read everything (of importance) with respect to sociology, that I have a sound
understanding and overview of its scholarly endeavors and that I am hence able to make informed judgments
about sociology’s history, its preferred paradigmatic stance, etc. Concurring with Plato I here like to say:
‘This I know – that I know nothing.’
539
using observations of the real world over time in trying to develop explanations that are
even better than the ones we already have’ (Powers, 2004, p. 6; emphasis in original).
187
Put bluntly, it is not least as a result of Comte’s three-stage development model of
society (which rendered science the highest form of truth-telling, and thus superior to
theology and metaphysics) that academic sociology was established as a science and as a
‘queen science’ as that (Powers, 2004). Furthermore, it is interesting to see that
sociology, respectively Comte’s development model (theology ! metaphysics ! science),
performed a cunning segregation of academia in that sociology was set apart from (read
above) other disciplines, thereby not only leaving behind other social sciences like
psychology
188
but also physical and biological spheres of inquiry.
189
This was by no means
an easy endeavor since it required both a rhetorically sound argumentation
190
and the
putting in place of ‘border controls’ which register trespassers and deserters.
191
Be that
as it may, though it would clearly be inspiring to sketch out a treatise of the exclusionary
practices of academic sociology or, on the other hand, show how sociology in its coming of
age became more hospitable towards a multi-paradigmatic stance (where each new
paradigm bringing along its unique assumptions with respect to the nature of the social
world (i.e. ontology), to the question of how knowledge of the social world should/could be
acquired (i.e. epistemology) or to the particular procedures or set of procedures being apt
for inquiring social reality (i.e. methodology)), I am even more interested to gain a
preliminary understanding of how sociology’s understanding of science translates to the
inquiry of the ‘social’.
Provided that this question invites further elaboration, it seems important to
migrate to point b) so as to say that sociology, in the course of endowing itself with a
recognizable face and a strong academic status, had to stipulate a certain understanding
of its purpose and focus. Sociology’s abovementioned boundary-activities came at a
187
This being said, it should not be ignored that sociology does in fact embrace approaches which do not apply
to any strict definition of science. An insightful comment can be found in Powers (2004) who, while praising
the merits and tenets of scientific sociology (which to him is to be conceived as a real science), mentions that
perspectives that are critical of science (which Powers summarizes under the umbrella term
‘postmodernism’) work as ‘a healthy reminder that we need to take our call to science very seriously … so
that we can work effectively for a sustainable future offering opportunity for everyone’ (p. 40).
188
Importantly, academic psychology carried out a couple of comparable moves for giving itself a legible face.
189
Note in passing that it was particularly due to Weber’s import of interpretivism into the realm of academic
sociology that an even more notable void was engendered between the social and the natural sciences.
190
For instance, Comte’s rhetoric of the superiority of sociology was based on, among other things, the
assumption that his discipline formed the most complex inquiry of worldly facts and that it embraced almost
all domains of human conduct (e.g. criminal justice, religion, business, civics, etc.).
191
To make this clear right from the beginning, academic psychology – which worked as my own academic
hotbed – is not at all more open or inclusive than academic sociology; indeed probably even more restricted
and restrictive.
540
certain cost, meaning that it had to give itself clearly noticeable contours and, by
implication, loosen some of the affiliations with neighbor disciplines (e.g. philosophy).
Hence, in order to identify key differences between sociology’s and philosophy’s scholarly
modus operandi and raison d’être, it needs to be mentioned that the two disciplines were
not so long ago compared/comparable in terms of their objectives and subject area. That
is, Popper (1966), among others, convincingly argued that whereas ordinary people take
their daily struggles and life at large for granted, it is the task of sociologists (and social
scientists in general) as well as philosophers to survey things from a higher plane. This
conjunctive meta-perspective or -task, however, changed dramatically with the rise of
empirical (read scientific) sociology which had the effect, quasi over night, of effacing
(ancient) philosophers such as, for instance, Plato, Socrates or Heraclites from the
semantic field of ‘sociology’.
192
As an example one may mention Plato who was initially
celebrated by Popper (1966) as a great sociologist (Popper’s wording) who – in
conjunction with, for instance, his ‘Republic’ and ‘Law’ – provided wealthy and detailed
observations of the beginnings of society, of tribal patriarchy and of the typical periods
through which social life develops, but later rendered an intuitive rather than a strictly
scientific inquirer, and thus a scholarly figure that clearly did not stand the test of the
modern understanding of ‘scientist’. That is to say, then, that reference to a particular
understanding of knowledge creation and to a set of pre-ordained procedures of
knowledge gathering/production led to a clear-cut distinction between those actors
(only) interested in or enamored with wisdom or abstract knowledge (i.e. philosophers)
from those relying on methods for effecting a precise, read real, understanding of worldly
matters. Notwithstanding the observation that today’s understanding of science, i.e. a
‘body of regular or methodological observations or propositions … concerning any subject
or speculation’, was still applied to circumscribe the trajectory of philosophy during the
17
th
and 18
th
century – which attests to the previous inseparability of science (and hence
academic sociology) and philosophy – , it must not be overlooked that only the more bold
and expansive thinkers would still comply that the ancient Greeks belong, stricto sensu,
to the narrow circle of sociology since they did clearly not depend on the requisite body of
techniques (read tekhne) for investigating social phenomena and for acquiring new
knowledge as depicted, for instance, in theories of logical positivism or empiricism. To be
sure, Plato is not the first and certainly not the only Greek philosopher who could
192
This assertion is only partly true, however, particularly in light of those voices (e.g. Lepenies, 1985) which
have convincingly argued that sociology has in fact a double identity since it has always been caught between
science and the humanities.
541
potentially be labeled ‘sociologist’ (provided, of course, that one would apply an
alternative exegesis of science) in light of their inquiry of social phenomena and matters.
Yet, even though one could continue this discussion by arguing that the Sophists
represent the first great school of thinkers dedicated to social causes (i.e. man’s social
environment) or even by claiming that one should return to Greek philosophy if one
would ‘really’ want to learn something about society, this is a task others are
undoubtedly better equipped for and a task which would actually distract us from coming
to terms with the sociological inquiry of the ‘social’. Therefore, it is in the next paragraph
that I want to enter more illustrative terrains by providing a brief sketch of the
sociological treatment of the ‘social’.
Before delving into the typical, if this is at all an apt qualification, sociological
inquiry of the ‘social’, I would first like to narrate a brief story on the etymological
foundation of the term ‘sociology’. While keeping in mind that sociology is derived from
the two terms ‘socius’, meaning companion, and the preface ‘logy’, which pertains to
‘science’ (respectively knowledge), it becomes evident that sociology, by definition,
represents (itself as) the scholarly guardian of the ‘social’. Yet, sociology has never
restricted the signification of the ‘socius’ or, for that matter, the ‘social’ to ‘companion’ as
can easily be shown with reference to the plethora of topics addressed by sociological
inquires, ranging from A like ‘absolute poverty’ to Z like ‘zero population growth’ (also
note that Wikipedia (sic) lists far over 100 sociological topics beginning with the prefix
‘social’; the list thus starts with ‘social action’ and ends with ‘social trend’). Consequently,
instead of envisioning the prefix ‘socius’ as a univocal, unambiguous term it should
rather be construed as a plurivocal signifier. In light of the, metaphorically speaking,
back-breaking number of topics explored by sociology, it becomes obvious that it is
literally impossible to summarize, in a finite and terminal manner, how sociology as a
discipline goes about inquiring the ‘social’ and what sorts of ‘truths’ it imparts in the
course of its practice. This is precisely the reason why I have chosen a way often taken by
cognitive linguistics, meaning that I opted to work metonymously so as to use a single
characteristic (read concept) of sociology to map the more complex and stratified field of
academic sociology as a whole. Such a metonymous simplification, in my assessment,
seems reasonable for once not least since everyday man, out of reasons of intelligibility
and intellectual thriftiness, commonly use a single or simple entity to identify or explain
a more complex one.
542
Though it is self-evident that a metonymous illustration necessarily runs the risk
of over-reducing, not to say overruling, the complexities of existing works and, by
implication, to slick down sociology’s inherent complexity, I nevertheless believe that
this procedure has some intuitive value for working out the contrast between the
philosophical trajectory of Chapter 7 and sociology’s customary inquiry of the ‘social’. I
hence opt to carry out the illustration in conjunction with the concept of ‘social class’,
thus referring to a societal phenomenon which I never really understood or, more
precisely, which never had any ‘penetrating power’ for my sense of self or sense of
belonging to a particular part of society. Since this is probably not a good enough reason
for justifying my selection I would like to add that ‘social class’ is not only a central topic
of sociological inquires but simultaneously an apt concept for illustrating a field of
inquiry that has been reflected from different paradigmatic and theoretical angles. In
this way, ‘social class’ allows shedding (a bit of) light on how scientific sociological
journeys proceed, i.e. how they bring to the study of their subject matter particular,
theoretically-based and/or empirically-grounded, root assumptions or paradigms which
in turn influence the sort of ‘truths’ being imparted.
Beginning this brief overview with Marx (the economist-turned-sociologist), what
immediately attracts attention is his notion of ‘means of production’, a concept which he
conceived of as preceding and shaping the whole range of societal phenomena (including,
for instance, religion or forms of government). In light of Marx’ assumption that
respectively the availability or lack of certain (read economic) resources would
determine people’s class membership, it becomes obvious that he came to practice a
blatant economic determinism. In concrete terms, Marx’ idea of class, as being defined in
terms of social relationship to means of production, led him to the conclusion that society
or, for that matter, capitalism could be sub-divided into workers (i.e. proletarians) and
capitalists (i.e. the bourgeoisie). Accordingly, Marx was departing from the consideration
that capitalist societies are divided/dividable along the question of ‘who is hiring whom?’
His understanding of class, by implication, has nothing to do with people’s subjective
experience of belonging to a larger community or to a particular stratum of society.
Rather, Marx’ comprehension of class pertains to the identification that there is an
objective difference between those individuals or groups who control (means of)
production and those who in fact produce or provide the goods and services of a given
society. This being said, I hasten to add that Marx still believed that people who sold their
labor in return for (unfair) wages were sharing common interests in that they were
543
equally suppressed (read alienated) by, for instance, the wage conditions and the lack of
decision-making authority being imposed by the capitalist system. Nevertheless, class
interest and sense of membership are, according to Marx, rather elusive and implicit as a
result of which it becomes the task of the intellectual/scholar to raise people’s
consciousness regarding both their collective alienation and their ‘belonging-together’
(read ‘workers of the world, unite!’).
Though parts of Marx’ work exhibit an overt fondness for capitalism (which is
evident from his seminal ‘Capital’ where he mentioned that capitalism represented the de
facto condition of material abundance for all members of society as well as from his claim
that competition among producers would encourage cost-saving, innovation, etc.), he
also predicted that capitalism would engender dangerous and increasing inequalities
(read class division) between the rich (i.e. those in charge of the means of production)
and the poor (i.e. those selling their labor power on the market). Indeed, capitalism was
on the long run supposed to sow the seeds of its own demise. Marx hence came to fancy
the idea that capitalism (read exploitative class-system) would once be overrun by
socialism in the course of world-wide proletarian revolutions which again would later be
transformed into a society devoid of classes (read communism). In summing up, it can be
said that probably one of Marx’ most noteworthy contributions to the realm of academic
sociology goes back to his claim that economic classes are sustained by the glaring
exploitation of the proletarians by the capitalists, a point which he framed in, for
instance, his labor theory of value. Almost needless to say that Marx’ theorizing on class
faced fierce criticism, and that there were many scholars (neo-, post- and anti-Marxists
alike) who came to challenge his objectivist interpretation of class structure. It is in this
context that I would like to lead over to Max Weber who put forward a view of class that
scrutinized the idea that man’s economic position in society would determine people’s
social status as well as their political opportunities or life chances at large.
Weber (by the way, another alleged economist-turned-sociologist), who was
reportedly suspicious of Marx’s simplistic depiction of social class (read economic
reductionism), extended the whole concept of class by suggesting that though different
classes existed in every society there were good reasons to believe that people’s social
status and political affiliation also come into play in the process of their class-ification.
Weber can thus be seen as having extended, even bypassed, Marx’s understanding of
class in that he paid attention not only to the hard-core fundamentals of the social sphere
(i.e. people’s relation to the market or access to means of production) but also to those
factors which he deemed equally essential to and characteristic of humankind, e.g.
544
people’s manner of speech, level of education or leisure activities. One of the crucial
points in Weber’s theorizing was that it rendered class boundaries much more permeable
than Marx’,
193
thus assuming that people’s life style (which includes, yet is not limited to,
the abovementioned ‘soft factors’) would determine their life chances by means of
respectively including or excluding them from certain social spheres. It is with regress to
his distinction between class, power (or party) and status that Weber convincingly
argued that people’s societal rank depends on the particular place in which they find
themselves. Consequently, where there might be some societies in which Marx’ dictum
that material abundance determines people’s class membership applies perfectly well,
there might again be others in which party affiliation is more relevant for people’s social
position.
194
It truly comes as no surprise that scholars frequently come to juxtapose
Marx’ economic determinism with Weber’s approach (which is commonly referred to as
‘cultural’), thus often depicting Weber as the first sociologist who put values center stage
and who thereby counteracted Marx’ assumption that values represent mere by-
products of capitalism’s ruling-class strategy for controlling the masses.
Before entering into the discussion of where the study of Marx and Weber (as well
as sociology in general) – notwithstanding all difference – actually find common ground, I
would like to mention another scholar who had a notable effect on the reception of class:
Pierre Bourdieu. Admittedly, mentioning Bourdieu in relation with the sociological
inquiry of social class represents a partial antilogy since he is not in the first instance
known as a scholar of social class. Yet, first things first. Bourdieu was breaching the
available stock of academic knowledge (though not without taking into account (parts of)
the work of his precursors (e.g. Durkheim, Mannheim, Marx, Weber, Mauss, etc.)) by
incorporating extra-sociological works (such as phenomenology
195
) to provide a whole
set of new concepts (such as, for instance, ‘habitus’, ‘field’ or ‘cultural, social and
symbolic capital’) which he deemed apt for overcoming part of the dualistic, oppositional
thinking of sociology and the social sciences at large.
196
For instance, rather than
193
Yet, it must not be overlooked that Marx believed that classes are not static and that they are constantly
produced and reproduced through the production process. Moreover, Marx also held the view that class-
systems can be changed or even abolished (as he discussed, for instance, in conjunction with communism).
194
Weber thereby marks an early expectation to the objectivist scientific horizon of, for instance, Marx and
Durkheim, which is obvious from the fact that his epistemological focus was notably antipositivist, i.e.
interpretive and/or humanistic.
195
That is, Bourdieu was particularly influenced by, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s as well as Husserl’s
phenomenology which both played a significant role in his formulation of the concept of ‘habitus’.
196
Note in passing that I have intentionally opted to make direct reference to Bourdieu to show that social
class, though forming a crucially important research topic of sociology, has today passed its peak. This
qualification, in my opinion, receives additional support from those voices arguing that social class does in
545
pursuing the study of societies according to the deterministic schema of social class,
Bourdieu sought to find an explanation to the question of how people were influenced by
their social circumstances or conditions and vice versa (thus scrutinizing the then
prevailing distinction between objectivism and subjectivism). Essentially, Bourdieu was
keen to show that although people are always influenced (yet not fully codified) by the
social space (read field) they inhabit, they too have an influence upon that very social
space in that they actively incorporated (read embodied) the set of perceptual schemas
of the field which in turn enabled them to enact and gradually change symbolic orders. In
other words, Bourdieu chiefly imparted the concept of ‘field’ to claim that social actors
are not mere objects of any given super-structure. Rather, field, according to Bourdieu,
represents the arena of social struggle where people become active agents in the
appropriation of capital. Most importantly though, Bourdieu did not concur with Marx’
economic exegesis of capital but instead set out to extend the whole idea of capital by
adding the concepts of social capital (i.e. the potential value of interpersonal relations or
membership in a group), cultural capital (i.e. particular forms of estimated skills,
knowledge and education) and symbolic capital (i.e. prestige and honor). It is in this way
that he came to argue that people acquire a certain position in society by accumulating
different forms of capital. It almost goes without saying that Bourdieu came to reject the
assumption that people’s position in society is determined by a, however defined, social
class.
197
In fact, he set out to envision people as being part of a multidimensional social
space; a space being defined by the amount of desirable resources (read capital) they
possess.
Being once more very reductive (and repetitive), one can say that Bourdieu is
particularly credited for having raised the sensitivity that people are not uni-
directionally influenced by the social space (read field) they inhabit. There exists,
according to Bourdieu, a two-way relationship between the individual and his/her social
space in that the individual gets to embody the implicit rules of the space whereas
simultaneously enacting and thus both reaffirming and altering the structure of the
social space.
198
And, he taught us that we (read sociologists) must dispel the opposition
fact have a rather minor impact on people’s sense of self and that there are other components that hold much
bigger significance for people’s very individuality or identity.
197
Yet, it must remain clear that Bourdieu also showed that certain societal groups in postindustrial society
(and thereby most notably its more elite layers) were able to sustain their privileged position across
generations. It is in this way that he partly got to disapprove the idea that modern society grants its member
equal opportunities.
198
Bourdieu’s theorizing assumed a recursive relationship between the field (i.e. people’s social space) and
people’s habitus (i.e. their acquired way of perceiving, thinking and acting). That is, while a field is thought of
546
between objectivist theories which explain social class with reference to groups that can
be separated by margins objectively drawn in reality and subjectivist models of
understanding which explain class with reference to people’s strategies through which
they actually class others as well as themselves. The (only) alternative, following
Bourdieau, would hence be to simultaneously study class in its being (i.e. the objective,
material existence of structure) as well as its being-perceived (i.e. individual
‘consumption’).
Instead of continuing this sketchy overview with, for instance, the by all means
inspirational critique of the concept of ‘social class’ or by way of listing some of the
alternative theories of societal subdivision, I now prefer to briefly discuss the
overarching viewpoint of the abovementioned perspectives. On the face of it, what is
revealed as the common denominator in this brief excursus is that the concept of ‘social
class’ is used to refer to the hierarchical ordering or segregation of individuals and
groups in any given society or community. Though there are noteworthy differences in
how the matter is conceptualized (including, for instance, the view that class should be
construed as subjective location of people/groups in social structures (of inequality), as
the objective position of people/groups within a given distribution, as the relational
explanation of people’s life chances or as a root of (economic) exploitation and/or
oppression), it is always the case that the construct is used for pinpointing, explaining or
predicting how individuals are organized as members of particular sub-groups of society.
Importantly, though we are talking about commonalities here it should not be
overlooked that a distinction can be drawn between the analytic and empirical writings
on social class, where ‘analytic’, to put it reductively, referring to inquires by, for
instance, Marx and Weber, and ‘empirical’ to approaches which use, for instance,
statistical means to derive statements about how particular socio-economic parameters
(e.g. wealth, income, education, etc.) hand together with concrete social outcomes.
199
Moreover, what chiefly comes to the fore in the abovementioned approaches is that the
sociological treatment of social class is quite variegated in that certain scholars envisage
the matter as a social fact, as Durkheim instructed us to do,
200
meaning that the subject
as being constituted by the people participating in it, the concept of ‘habitus’ implies that the field always
transposes its objective structures into the subjective realm of people’s action and thought.
199
Note that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but can also be combined.
200
As a matter of fact, Durkheim did not argue that societal phenomena such as suicide are to be understood
as social facts. What he reminded others to do is to treat such phenomena as if they were social facts. It is
hence partly wrong to position Durkheim as an ontological realist.
547
matter is taken to exist prior to and hence independent of scientific inquiries, a view
shared by Marx and others, or alternatively as a particular social action that must be
approached through an interpretive account in order to arrive at the subjective meaning
attached by individuals (read Verstehen), which points at Weber’s investigation. Yet,
notwithstanding Giddens’ contention that sociology developed into multiple directions,
implying, for instance, that contemporary sociology embraces both nominalist and realist
accounts of reality in its quest for meaning, it must remain clear at all times that it is due
to the overarching premise of sociology being a scientific endeavor that the differences in
theoretical and methodological approaches do ultimately not pose any significant
paradox. What hence unites sociology’s seemingly incompatible jumble of arguments on
the particularities and determinants of social class is that most, if not all, accounts
embrace the idea that the subject matter can be brought back to empirical observations
and/or scientific theories which then allow making statements about society as a whole
or about particular societal phenomena of a given society. By implication, whether social
class is taken to represent those avowedly objective parameters identified by, for
instance, Marx which allow for a clear-cut distinction between hierarchically higher and
lower ranked social layers or those more subjective and elusive factors, as revealed in,
for instance, Weber’s treatise of the social estimation of honor, it is intuitively convincing
that all of these accounts try to empirically identify and/or analytically/theoretically
conceptualize, though on the basis of different paradigmatic assumptions and
methodological procedures, the very essence (realist or nominalist alike) or being of the
phenomenon ‘social class’ (or of those phenomena which are deemed essential for
people’s position in a particular social space, as revealed in Bourdieu’s concept of
‘habitus’ or ‘field’).
Indeed, it requires only a small intellectual leap to see that the study of social class
resembles the quest for (either eternal/transcendent or temporary/local) truth and that
it is assumed that it will sooner or later become possible to formulate a cartography of
the social world as it really is.
201
It is at this point that we have, in my opinion, collected a
sound-enough overview of the typical (though probably not very topical) sociological
201
Admittedly, pretending that the sociological inquiry of class holds the unequivocal view that the matter
must be construed as an objectively existing and thus accurately measurable fact would already reveal a
certain ignorance vis-à-vis Weber’s interpretive analysis of the subject area. Moreover, such an assertion
would grossly overlook that sociology has moved on in many ways, which is evident, for instance, from those
voices which have claimed that the concept ‘social class’ should be approached by a social definitionist (and
not a social factist) approach, since it would only be in this way that one could come to terms not with how
people are defined by the structure of which they are part but how people act as active creators of their own
social reality.
548
treatise of social class or at least an overview which is instrumental for discussing the
particular fold engendered by philosophy in relation to the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
Why Philosophy … Why Not?
Having cursorily illustrated how sociology goes about probing the truth of social
phenomena against the backdrop of the concept ‘social class’, I am keen to once more
emphasize that sociology (conceived here as a manifest academic discipline), though
initially heavily influenced by philosophy,
202
was pretty soon after its official convocation
by figures such as, for instance, Comte or Durkheim
203
‘liberated’ from the latter’s
influence.
204
That is to say, in other words, that the two spheres of academic reasoning
today rely on more or less distinct modes of inquiry and it does not even appear
exaggerated to say that the two strands of social inquiry practice a certain (more or less
visible) hostility towards each other. For instance, pointing at Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1995) claim that ‘philosophy has encountered many new rivals … especially sociology’
(p. 10), I want to make it clear that it is despite, or precisely because of today’s marginal
standing of philosophy in the realm of academic sociology (not to speak of management)
that I felt compelled to use philosophy for probing the ethical possibilities of the ‘social’
(of entrepreneurship). In concrete terms and to substantiate what has been said above, I
sensed that philosophy in general and Derrida’s works on relational ethics in particular
could provide an additional or, to express the matter in socio-economic terms, ‘surplus
value’
205
for counter-acting the empiricist horizon of Big Science. Yet again, using
philosophy in the vicinity of a concept (i.e. the ‘social') so thoroughly policed by academic
sociology immediately raises the question of whether philosophy (which today forms
202
To be humorous for once: this claim is justifiable in light of the fact that early-day sociology often
originated out of philosophy departments (like, for instance, in the case of Adorno who was a double
ordinaries of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt or of Althusser who was a professor of philosophy in
Paris).
203
Obviously, the task of determining the temporal beginning of sociology is anything but a banal exercise
because its periodization can be carried out in quite different ways, e.g. by way of tracing the first official
chair in sociology (which seems to date the emergence of sociology back to Small in the US or to Durkheim in
Europe), by way of the first use of the label ‘sociology’ (which would render either Blackmar or Comte
sociology’s founding figure) or by way of the institutionalized and systematic study of social phenomena
(which would make any endeavor to trace sociology’s ‘origin’ infinitely difficult, not to say impossible).
204
Note that Foucault (1996) pointed out that philosophy today does not exist any more, ‘not that it has
disappeared, but it has been disseminated into a great number of diverse activities … today philosophy is
every activity that makes a new object appear for knowledge or practice’ (p. 29). I thus would also like to
point at Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) inspirational claim that ‘o long as there is a time and a place for
creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be
indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is call something else’ (p. 9).
205
Note that the original meaning of the concept of ‘surplus value’ (or ‘added value’) dates from Marx’ labor
theory of value which chiefly pinpoints capitalism’s primary mode of exploitation.
549
respectively the virtual outside of sociology or sociology’s other
206
) is at all admissible for
the task at hand?
To be sure, my previous metonymy was not least inspired by the conviction that
there are no sound arguments why the ‘social’ cannot be dealt with by non-sociological
disciplines. Metonymy, since providing only a partial representation or, more precisely,
extrapolation of an indisputably complex field of inquiry, implies right away that I was
never interested in earning the credentials of a sociologist by putting forward an
exhaustive account of the ‘social’ (frankly speaking, I never had the chance to do so).
Hence, where I have neither the intention nor the requisite knowledge to prove to the
(sociologically-inclined) reader that I have grasped the sociological study of the ‘social’ in
its entirety, I also believe that one is not only entitled to speak about the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) provided that one has read everything on the subject matter. This is
to ask, according to Deleuze (1995): ‘why shouldn’t I invent some way, however fantastic
and contrived, of talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I’m
qualified to talk like this?’ (p. 12).
207
On the face of it, all this comes down to claiming
that it sometimes makes sense not to expect the best argument (as defined by the
prevailing knowledge of the day and by the guardian(s) of ‘truth’) but to be open to views
which would even qualify as being naive (i.e. if measured along the ruling standards of
academic excellence) so as to allow for a kind of art brut (Deleuze, 1995), hence a form of
enunciation which is probably not the most profound but maybe a bit less guilty about
and, if I dare to say this, creative in doing ‘science’.
Now that I have literally cleared my throat, I feel better able to pinpoint the
difference between Chapter 7 and the sociological inquiry of the ‘social’ by saying that the
former does indeed not try to say how the social universe actually is and even less so how
it should be (in view of how it looks today).
208
Instead, Chapter 7 tries to envision the
void between how the ‘social’ is (usually construed) and how it could be(come). In
concrete terms, an ethical reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) essentially
206
This claim is reasonable only to the extent that figures frequently associated, for whatever reasons, with
philosophy get related to ‘alternative’ métiers (e.g. Marx with economics and/or sociology but not
philosophy; Foucault with history and/or sociology but not philosophy; Adorno with music theory and/or
sociology but not philosophy; Mauss with ethnology and/or sociology but not philosophy; Zizek with Lacanian
psychoanalysis and/or sociology but not philosophy; Mead with social psychology and/or sociology but not
philosophy; or Baudrillard with cultural criticism and/or sociology but not philosophy).
207
Notwithstanding the sheer annoyance reverberating in Deleuze’s quote, I find his statement worth
thinking of as it undermines the authority of all archivists or gatekeepers of knowledge, be that the doctor
who disallows the patient’s interpretation of his/her malady or the seasoned scholar who advices the young
disciple not to speak and/or write before he/she has read everything imparted by the particular epistemic
community.
208
Note that this would be a task literally catered to the Frankfurt School.
550
attempts to show that responsible relationality is always something else than what
people actually do. Indeed, one could even go as far as saying that relational ethics
exploits the hiatus engendered through sociology in that it tries to venture beyond what
people de facto do in the relational space or what position they inhabit in that very space
so as to bring to the fore what might become imaginable once we leave behind the truth-
seeking image of thought (read commonsense or empirico-scientific reason). In this way,
Chapter 7 is trying to speculate about, even confabulate, yet not thought of alternatives
and futures of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
To be very repetitive, it must not be overlooked that Chapter 7 goes beyond the
horizon of the possible or true in that it rather tries to come up with the depiction of a
possible, yet never fully achievable, future (of the ‘social’). The notion of ‘perhaps’ thus
literally runs through my conceptualization of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship),
presaging what is ‘to come’ without, however, assigning a predictive quality to the
possible. With this in mind, I am eager to construe philosophy as a line of flight for
counter-acting the empirist conversion that there are too many real reasons not to
believe in any possible change of social matters and, by implication, that the only
legitimate endeavor of science would be to content it-self with understanding the social
world in terms of its many manifestations (yet not its inherent possibilities). Taking
refuge in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) inspirational treatise of philosophy, one is put
into a position to claim that the possible world of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) ‘is not
real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that exists only in its
expression’ (p. 17). On the face of it, shuttling between the possible and the speculative
Chapter 7 gets to embrace the idea of the ‘inconceivable’, i.e. ‘a way of replacing the logic
of necessity … with a relationship to the future, to what is coming, to what could come to
us under the modality of the maybe’ (Derrida & Düttman, 1997, p. 3). Importantly, this
conceptual shift, which could be depicted as inducing a state of exception in the available
interpretations of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’, was not inspired by the idea of
overthrowing the given heritage (of sociology,
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economics, management) but of
fostering new mediations with those texts which have hitherto taken a dominant position
in our understanding of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship). To emphasize that I have no
stake whatsoever in downgrading the sociological or, more precisely, economic (and
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Note that I am actually acuminating this assertion to its maximum in that I intentionally turn a blind eye
towards those streams of sociological research which, on the basis of critical interpretations, try to describe
the contours of a more appealing future social reality, thus going beyond mere evidence and, by implication,
beyond the rather stern horizon of ‘scientific’ sociology.
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managerial/business) reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship), it is in the next
section that I will elaborate on the potential, yet hitherto idle, points of inspiration (read
synergies) that could possibly evolve from the encounter of neighboring disciplines.
On Potential Synergies
All the above being said, I want to make this prolegomenon unambiguous by repeating
that there is nothing generally wrong with, for instance, an economic exegesis of the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship). That is, my Derrida-inspired reading of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) is not anti-economic in terms of purpose but rather interested in
supplementing the major literature with a minor reading that has the ultimate aim of
extending the field’s prevailing horizon of understanding. My ‘experiment’ in Chapter 7
is, if this adjective is at all admissible, entrepreneurial in the sense that it seeks to spot
an opportunity for complementing both the algorithmic perspective of ethics and the
empirical view of the ‘social’ with a perspective which gives apt weight to the secrecy and
riskiness entailed in all forms of relationality and alterity. I thus genuinely believe that a
philosophical or, more precisely, a Derridean reflection is instrumental in stressing that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) should not be seen as a relational homeostasis based on
harmonious, mutual consent but as a process of endless struggle with intermitted and
extended periods of aporias (i.e. a sense of ‘not knowing where to go’; cf. Derrida, 1993).
Though it is indisputable that relational ethics comes into play exactly at the very
moment where management and economic theory already thought it had tamed the
contender of reason, utility and frugality, all this, however, does not imply that
approaches and ideas imparted by scholars of sociology, economics, business or
management must be eradicated or constrained. Accordingly, Derrida’s work operates
not as a broom that sweeps away academic sociology or its affiliated disciplines but as a
door-opener to sociology’s unsought territories and hence as an urgent reminder that
learning to act responsibly, i.e. practice ethics, means learning to cope with the madness
of the ‘social’ and accepting that there is no absolute advise regarding how to carry out
those deeds. Derrida’s philosophy, at least in my opinion, is best able to characterize the
process of becoming-social as well as to stress that ethics cannot be managed but must be
risked and endured and, as follows thereof, that it necessarily remains excessive, i.e.
beyond bare necessities and the puritan logic of utility.
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In that sense, reflecting the
210
I deem this connection with excess appropriate, especially while taking into account Rehn and O’Doherty’s
(2007) insightful claim that excess ‘takes many forms; unpredictable and explosive in its manifestations it
always pops up just when we thought we had tamed its wild and protean force’ (p. 108). This brief quote, in
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‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) through relational ethics does not bring about an exegesis
that complies with a preordained system of thinking/acting but rather one that deems
essential all arcane activities. It is only by highlighting those aspects of relationality
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which cannot be subjected to rational calculation, managerial control and foresight that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) can be grasped with respect to its utmost heterogeneity
and paradoxically.
Inasmuch I was persuasive in telling the reader that Chapter 7 does not intend to
simply establish and advertise yet another hierarchical division, a fold determining a
clearly distinguishable inside and outside (e.g. philosophy versus sociology), then the
way is clear for adding that the following chapter practices critique not through overt
antagonism but through a kind of ‘heterogenesis’ that aims at establishing links with
neighboring zones (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), and thus at releasing the plurivocity
currently buried, or at least neglected and obscured, in the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
On the face of it, rather than arguing that Derrida’s work can bring about a more
inspiring, not to say true, understanding of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship), the point to
be stressed is that it is both timely and urgent to confront the blatant Totality and
Universality revealed in the available literature with a skeptical, yet vital, gesture.
Hence, rigorous attention to disciplines outside the threshold of sociology or business and
management science is demanded since, to put it bluntly, the field of the outside offers
springboards for multiplying hitherto strictly patrolled and shielded sites of enunciation.
Such a multiplying gesture has as its central objective the differentiation or, to use a
Deleuzian term, the becoming-other of the available stock of thinking (cf. Ott, 2005). To
be sure, philosophy, if conceived of in the above way, does in no way represent a terminal
territory or finality, as it were, for denoting the meaning of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship). Rather, philosophy and in particular Derrida’s ‘ethical’ works,
represent one of the many possible ways in which one can describe the social stratum as
an inherently ethical undertaking and as a highly demanding, risky and infinite event. I
would hence like to emphasize that philosophy, the way I opted to use it, is always more
of a conceptual accelerator (or a Lyotardian (1993) ‘tensor sign’; cf. also Chapter 4) that
seeks to invite experimentation and hence put in motion the stagnancy produced by
transcendental interpretations. As should be clear by now, the theoretical event staged
my assessment, highlights the dangerous (since uncontrollable) aspect of the ‘social’, thus indicating that it
is, among other things, a threatening, anxiety-provoking encounter with otherness.
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Importantly, the concept ‘relationality’ does not only embrace positively charged patterns of inter-
personality as implied through the etymology of ‘social’ (i.e. fellowship, companionship, etc.) but also its
‘negative doubles’, e.g. competition, betrayal, chicanery, etc.
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in Chapter 7 should not be understood as a means for providing definitive solutions to
identified problems of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) – read economic reductionism
and/or managerial platitudes – , but rather as a means for renewing the relevant
questions and to intensify dialogue in general. Philosophy, as I believe, has been
appropriate for this particular task, not least since philosophy is, as follows from Deleuze
and Guattari (1994), about becoming and, therefore, about creating something new. By
implication, there might be some wisdom in Deleuze’s (1989) eloquent claim that ‘there
is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence’ (pp. 146 – 147;
quoted in Semetsky, 2006, p. 5).
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7
***
‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? – The Becoming
Social of Social Entrepreneurship
There is no politics if there is not at the very center of society … a questioning of existing
institutions, a project to improve them, to make them more just. This means that all
politics implies prescriptions of doing something else than what is. (Lyotard & Thébau,
1985, p. 23)
The question of institutions we need to create is a crucial issue, but one I cannot give an answer
to. (Foucault, quoted in Simpson, 2004, p. 1)
Synopsis
In this last chapter I will bring together, condense and draw conclusions from the thesis’ central
arguments on social entrepreneurship. The general aim in so doing is to qualify the status of the
‘social’ in social entrepreneurship. More precisely, I wish to ask whether the ‘social’ is only an
‘epitheton ornans’ of entrepreneurship (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006), or rather the expression of a
genuine concern for alterity. The title – ‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? –
foreshadows the chapter’s drive to look beyond what is conventionally taken to be ‘social’ in
entrepreneurship and to scrutinize the views of pseudo-ethics or -morality which currently seem
to elate academics; it simultaneously dwells on the possibility of extending the current stock of
academic knowledge by dint of an unconditional, that is to say pure, reading of the ‘social’.
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The chapter is structured as follows: the first part comprises a summary of the main points
of the first two chapters. After discussing that the available academic literature exhibits a
propensity to denote social entrepreneurship either as a moral hyperbole or as an object of
managerial and economic reason, I will further contextualize these interpretations by making two
assertions: on the one hand, they epitomize a broader trend towards ethics, most notably revealed
by the increased popularity of social and ethical questions in the context of business and
management (studies); on the other hand, they exhibit traces of the grand scheme of economics
which pretends to be able to explain (and thereby reduce) all aspects of social life through the
algorithm of give-and-take. Rejecting both routes of thinking in consideration of the fact that they
fail to pay heed to the intimate and fragile experience of otherness, I will for the most part take
issue with those writings which, while ostensibly speaking of the social feature of
entrepreneurship, bestow the subject matter with a transactional, and hence profoundly non-
social, perspective. Invoking texts on ‘social capital’ to ground my critique in the realm of
academic writing, I will illustrate that social capital is in no way more social (or less economic)
than financial capital, since both concepts undeniably depart from a transactional logic; thus,
social capital, as I will discuss, delineates a pale and narrow view of the social aspect of
entrepreneurship. Beginning with the observation that academic work on social entrepreneurship
as yet simply perpetuates the logic of reciprocal ‘do et des’, the second part will counteract this
univocity by establishing an uneconomic, that is, unconditional, perspective of the ‘social’. Next,
to render palpable the difference between conditional and unconditional forms of social action, I
will use the case of development aid to introduce three attributes which allow such a distinction.
To this end, I will first propose that an unconditional reading of the ‘social’ entails a side-
stepping of the circle of economic calculation while at the same time suggesting a vision of the
‘social’ as an intimate encounter with the other’s otherness, that is, an encounter which sees the
other not as a mere alter ego but as a sovereign source of meaning. Second, I will depart from
Derrida’s claim that the call of the other and one’s responsibility to heed it is infinite and
therefore impossible to satisfy. Hence I will attest that the ‘social’, rather than being a fixed or
fixable essence of being, is to be conceived as a process of continuous becoming. In contending
that the ‘social’ takes place or, to put it bluntly, ‘happens’ (Caputo, 1993) in the course of the
encounter between self and other, I will bring to the forefront that every social gesture towards an
identifiable person or group (i.e. help in the particular case of development aid) invariably
implies neglecting all those others who call us and who expect a response. Yet, I will argue that
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the recognition that the ‘social’ will always fall short or be inadequate, due to the impossibility of
giving attention to all the innumerable others who await our response, is not the end of
responsibility. Rather, Derrida’s paradoxical contention that one can never be responsible
enough, will not be misrepresented as a sign of resignation, but as a plea to intensify one’s
efforts; to keep the social sphere ‘going’ by conceding that becoming social requires hard work,
inescapable suffering and true modesty. Third, given that unconditionality sketches out a space
beyond calculation and beyond instruction, I will discuss that the encounter with otherness
prescribes a journey into unknown territories from which the ‘traveler(s)’ return(s) changed. In
addition to that, I will argue that the pure ‘social’ becomes an insecure, even risky, endeavor
without which, however, invention in the form of mutual transformation would not be possible.
Since my propounding of unconditionality in the realm of development aid might contribute to
the false impression that I am somehow naively ignoring economic and other pragmatic demands
of everyday life (in development work as well as elsewhere), I will use the third part of the
present chapter to clarify that conditional and unconditional aspects of social entrepreneurship,
though being irreducible to one another, cannot be separated stricto sensu. I will hence pinpoint
the hybridity of social entrepreneurship so as to claim that suchlike endeavors always take place
in an economically and pragmatically structured environment. The concept ‘hybridity’, on the
other hand, will be used to show that social entrepreneurial undertakings, in order to qualify as
social, must leave room at the border of their activities for excess, that is, for what is
unprogrammable and incalculable by economic and managerial reason. In opposition to the
current academic literature on social entrepreneurship which sees hybridity as a rather
unproblematic ‘marriage’ of profit- and non-profit technologies, I will argue for a conception of
hybridity as an area of tension which necessitates a constant negotiation between the
unconditional and conditional, between the economic and the uneconomic aspect of social
entrepreneurship. To conclude, I will grapple with the fact that my Derridean musing on the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) allows for anything but the formulation of simple codes or
programs and thus provides no easy solutions. In so doing, I will probe both the value and
limitations of Derrida’s ideas for the establishment of a minor social entrepreneurship.
Delineating unconditional social entrepreneurship as both an auxesis and as a nonenforceable
utopia, I will finish the chapter by claiming that social entrepreneurship becomes a matter of
constant movement which oscillates between the irreducible and undeconstructible responsibility
towards the other and the ever-present possibility of complete failure, that is, the aporia of the
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other ‘coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything, or killing
everyone’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 71).
Retrospection and Contextualization
… there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear
completely. And it is … because they are historical that history can very easily suppress
them. (Barthes, 1972, p. 120)
Social entrepreneurship is arguably one of the fastest-spreading buzzwords inside as well as
outside the academic context, and a term which more often than not attracts interest from a broad
range of fields. Virtually non-existent in the 1980s, social entrepreneurship has become a
steadily-growing part of the academic repertoire since the early 1990s, where predominantly it is
used to herald the demise of government-controlled economies and the rise of the ideology of the
responsible and pro-active citizen (Roper & Cheney, 2005; cf. also Chapter 1). Though it is
notable that social entrepreneurship first had its ‘coming out’ in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is
evident that the ‘virus’ these days has crossed geographic boundaries. Nevertheless, to say that
social entrepreneurship is a buzzword being deployed on a global scale might be to exaggerate
and thus it is perhaps better to assert that it is a concept which is still relative to certain situations
or contexts. As such, it is mostly represented (in academia as well as in politics, by venture
philanthropies or business competitions) as either an economic actor or as a moral hyperbole.
What is most conspicuous in the context of academic writing is that the economic and the social
sphere of social entrepreneurship are either artificially held apart or else brought together in a
seemingly unproblematic manner. As a result, the fact that the social and the economic realm are
partly incompatible and that the encounter of these two realms, due to their (partly) incongruous
presumptions and practices, is most likely to engender ideological clashes and conflicts, is rarely
discussed. Before we take issue with this omission and attempt to address it by putting forward a
hybrid conceptualization of social entrepreneurship, I would first like to stress that the current
semantic construal of social entrepreneurship does not necessarily imply that we have to dispose
of this still nascent sign. Instead, as I have tried to make clear over the course of this thesis, it is
important that one must not assume that social entrepreneurship needs to be limited by the
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frontiers of economic, managerial or pseudo-ethical reason. Hence, to disabuse us of the illusion
that social entrepreneurship is as straightforward and unproblematic as the available literature
would have it, I would like to provide a brief summary of the thesis’ discussion hitherto in order
then to contextualize the most eminent meanings of social entrepreneurship on a broader scale.
Summary
The central argument of the first two chapters emphasized that social entrepreneurship is on the
one hand an under-researched concept while on the other hand remarkably stabilized by
economic and managerial discourse (Hjorth & Bjerke, 2006). In accordance with Johnson’s
(2000) overview of the social entrepreneurship literature, I have tried to illuminate that many
scholars define the core of social entrepreneurship by means of its relationship with business
expertise and market-based skills. In this way, they rhetorically bolster their accounts through the
premise that these attributes are needed insofar as one wants to increase organizational
effectiveness and foster long-term sustainability (Reis, 1999). Whereas both Chapter 1 and 2 have
tried to propound novel conceptual groundings that challenge or at least complement the
ostensibly practical, efficient or pseudo-ethical perspectives that are being established in the
business school context, my primary aim was to reveal that prevailing representations quite
evidently ignore the aporetic features of social entrepreneurship. In the course of this
investigation I have made reference to Derrida so as to show that responsible or ethical behavior
requires that there is a decision between (at least) two determinate positions. More precisely, the
ethics of social entrepreneurship is always closely related with the tension(s), or ‘fear and
trembling’
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to use Derrida’s (1995) words, which result(s) from the ever present possibility that
one may take the wrong decision, and hence not respond to and/or wrong a particular person or
group. Essentially, the main point I wanted to bring to light in Chapter 1 was that the social
aspect of entrepreneurship is quite commonly elaborated on in relation to the individual
entrepreneur, a fact which entails a conspicuous paradox, since the social, qua definition,
represents the relational space between people. Thus having highlighted and scrutinized those
accounts which reduce social and ethical questions to the motives, intentions and virtues of the
singular social entrepreneur, my main concern was to show that an individualized view of ethics
invariably ignores the fact that the ethics of social entrepreneur takes place, that is, ‘happens’
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Notice that Derrida borrowed this expression from Kierkegaard’s (2006) investigation of the Old Testament
where Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.
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(Caputo, 1993), in the encounter between people and in view of difference and otherness at large
(Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005). A central point of my critique was that the ethics of social
entrepreneurship is often delineated as something exceptional to human nature. I have thereby
tried to show that this sort of account elevates the figure of the social entrepreneur above the
more mundane and profane instincts and motifs of mankind. Such a view, in my assessment,
remains questionable for at least two reasons. First, it is questionable because it pretends that
ethics takes place outside the everyday practices of the people and, second, because it leads to the
expectation that ethics is reserved only for very exceptional people. In the course of my
deconstructive reading of academic writings in Chapter 2, I have come to argue that the dominant
significations of social entrepreneurship lack any ‘respect for the singularity or the call of the
other’ (Derrida, 1985, p. 71; quoted in Critchley, 1999, p. 18). Therefore, it would be untenable to
say that social entrepreneurship as yet belongs to the domain of alterity-based ethics as defined by
Levinas and Derrida. In an attempt to counteract further hagiographies (that is, the study of the
saints) of social entrepreneurs, I claimed that prospective research should account for present
omissions and in particular highlight the social (not individual) paradoxes and dilemmas social
entrepreneurs are confronted with in the course of their everyday conduct. Taken together, the
common denominator in the argumentation of Chapters 1 and 2 was that the available literature
fails, first, to grasp the relational aspect of social entrepreneurship and, second, tries to solve
ethical questions by formulating rigid best-ethical codes or programs. In concrete terms, I made
reference to Derrida’s (and Levinas’) work so as to decouple questions of ethics from the belief in
an objective moral order. Derrida’s work thus suggested a conception of ethics as a relational
process that is for the most part concerned with the intimate encounter between the ‘I’ and the
‘Other’. Advocating a sort of ethics that pays heed to the singularity of the call from the other,
this simultaneously comprised a critique of those accounts which tried to inscribe ethics into
codes or which sought to address such issues through management-based problem-solving skills.
I thereby argued that conceiving ethics from the perspective of ‘techn!’, and hence reducing
questions of ethics to a quest for ‘rules and practices that allow an action to achieve its ends’
(Foucault, 1988, p. 15), engenders a view of the ‘social’ that lends itself to scrutiny. In concrete
terms, a technical perspective of the ‘social’ is accompanied with at least two equivocal
implications. First, confronting social questions of entrepreneurship with a technical rationality
invariably construes the subject matter as a problem or an obstacle that needs to be resolved by
the best-(management)-practices available (Abrahamson, 1991). In other words, the notion of
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techn! is related with a view that postulates seeing the social as a hierarchically inferior sphere
(vis-à-vis, for instance, the rational world of business; cf. Resch, 2006) and/or as a entity that is
either to be governed, to be mobilized, or simply to be changed (Newman, 2004). Related to this
is the second implication, namely that the notion of techn!, since it postulates the application of
efficient means to important ends and endorses the formulation of problem-solving scripts,
always engenders ignorance of the singularity of social undertakings. On the face of it, since
techn! implies rendering the social amenable to transcendental management procedures, it is
evident that this becomes possible, not to say rational, only if one gets to reduce the complexity
and uniqueness of social entrepreneurial endeavors. Evidently then, a technical scheme of the
social of entrepreneurship, in my opinion, greatly hinders a full understanding of the sign. Such a
conception is inadequate not merely as a deficient reality and/or as an object of management
control, but also for gaining an understanding of the incremental complexity as well as the
controversial and paradoxical features of social entrepreneurship.
In view of the, as yet, narrow representation of social entrepreneurship, what led me to
investigate the sensemaking practices of NGO practitioners in Chapter 3 was related to the
conviction that we should not content ourselves with the image of social entrepreneurship as the
universal model (i.e. grand narrative) of global (economic and moral) betterment. Though, as I
have repeatedly indicated, this thesis has no interest in proclaiming an ‘iron-clad explanation for
everything’ (Faber, 2004, p. xiv), it has surely tried to pinpoint the instability of the meaning of
‘social entrepreneurship’, and to show that its truth is undoubtedly the effect of particular
relations of power-knowledge. To illustrate that there is no metaphysical, conceptual or
philosophical system that can satisfy the desire for identifying the substratum of social
entrepreneurship, I have juxtaposed the dogmatic representation of the ‘social’ in business school
teaching and research (being elaborated in Chapters 1 and 2) with the narratives of development
NGO practitioners (in Chapter 3) so as to reveal the ‘social’s’ immanent polysemia. Most
fundamentally, the point I tried to make in the context of Chapter 3 was that the discourses of
NGO practitioners exhibit the complexity and paradoxical features of social endeavors, and
thereby neither share the euphoric tone of academic writings nor support the univocally positive
denotation of social entrepreneurship. To be sure, notwithstanding the differences entailed in part
I and II, this thesis has no interest in simply ridiculing the signification of social entrepreneurship
in the business school context (though Chapter 2 might have led to such an impression) and
replacing it by the perspective of the ‘social’ which is imparted by NGO practitioners. Rather,
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having pinpointed the differences between parts I and II, my overall aim was to argue that instead
of homogenizing a monologic understanding of the ‘social’ through a kind of protectionist
attitude, we should multiply ‘the paths and the possibility of comings and goings’ (Foucault,
1996b, p. 305) so as to foreclose the possibility that a singular rationality gains the definitive
upper hand. Hence, though I consider this thesis as a critical contribution to the available stock of
academic work, ‘critical’ is not intended as an indication that behind the concept of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ there is only mythology, or nothing at all, but in conjunction with the
conclusion that the meaning of social entrepreneurship always depends ‘on our knowledge, ideas,
theories, techniques, social relations and economical processes’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 406).
Though our departure from the assumption that discourse is always due to identifiable
political, social and economic force relations began in the first part of this thesis, it is within the
following lines that I want to continue along this route so as to contextualize the emergence of
social entrepreneurship in relation to the broader trend towards ethics. I will therefore employ the
ensuing paragraph to construe the discourse of social entrepreneurship as a response to recent
corporate scandals and as part of a broader public ‘campaign’ to appeal to the social and ethical
responsibilities of economic actors. The objective thereby is, first, to show that the neologism
‘social entrepreneurship’ is well in line with other social significations of economic concepts such
as ‘social economy’, ‘social sustainability’, ‘social capital’, etc. and therefore part of a current
pendulousness towards re-inscribing the social/ethical into the economy. Second, I will show that
this ostensibly social movement is conceivable as a subtle disguise of economic reasoning. In
other words, I will illuminate that social entrepreneurship, the way it gets described in scholarly
work, is only prima facie an epitome of social action, since it can be shown, through close
inspection, that the logic of economic circulation is still deeply ingrained.
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The Resurgence of the Social through Ethics
We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the
institutions that frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich
relational world would be very complex to manage … In effect, we live in a legal, social,
and institutional world where the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely
simplified, and extremely poor. (Foucault, 1982; quoted in Halperin, 1995, pp. 81 – 82)
In general terms, one can say that the meaning of social entrepreneurship can only properly be
grasped if one takes into consideration the broader linguistic context in which the concept is
uttered, since it is the linguistic heritage which provides the ‘rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1984, p.
205) which determine and enable what can be said or thought at a given moment in time (cf.
Chapters 3, 5 & 6). In agreement with Nietzsche (1984) who convincingly argued that it would be
misleading to investigate present-day man in order to deduct eternal truths about the state and
condition of mankind in general, because ‘everything the philosopher asserts about man is
basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span’ (p. 14; emphasis in
original), we can say that social entrepreneurship is similarly conceivable as a social construction
which is contingent upon the available truth regimes of our present historical period. The
genealogy of social entrepreneurship in Chapter 1 has been a first step in that direction, since it
has revealed that the concept can be construed as one of the latest corollaries of the
performativity game which currently seems to operate as the ruling dogma of business school
teaching. A factor which has only been marginally treated in the context of this thesis, however,
is that social entrepreneurship is not the exclusive invention of university business schools, but
well in line with a broader ‘campaign’ to make society (including the corporate, non-profit as
well as the public realm) more equitable and just. Though this may sound trivial (since self-
evident), I would like to reiterate that social entrepreneurship can be seen (at least partly) as a
response to those voices which have propagated that the social and the political realm are losing
ground vis-à-vis the economic. Though it is hardly tenable to call this trend epoch-making (cf.
Foucault, 1984), it is perhaps not too grand a demand to spend some time considering how the
‘social’ has gained increased recognition in conjunction with the issue of ethics. To begin this
journey, we can claim that ethics, conceived in its broadest sense, is a recurring issue which is at
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times full of hype and at others seemingly passé.
213
As with science, technology, politics, etc.,
there are moments where ethics is said to provide the answer to almost everything; these are
followed, often in brief succession, by times where the matter contains no legitimacy and
credibility at all. On the face of it, there is ample evidence that we find ourselves in a period of
high tide where questions of ethics are raised in many spheres of social life, not just in the context
of business (school teaching and research). Yet, what interests me here is the particular kind of
rationality which has come to proclaim the importance of ethics in conjunction with economic
reason and practice. Though a simple answer is out of the question, I would like to propose that
part of the popularity of the topic seems explicable through the strain of thought which predicates
that our capitalist systems lack any sense of humanity. To simplify matters, we can claim that
ethics has been introduced as a kind of antidote to a dystopian scheme of economic globalization
which holds, among other things, that individuals or humanity at large are exclusively assessed
according to their productive power (du Gay, 2003). In view of both the critique and the fear that
economic governance makes value analogous to economic value, whereby invariably disallowing
the ostensibly true human nature to flourish, it becomes intelligible why ethics is hailed as a
promising undertaking for counteracting looming hegemony, not to say de-humanization. In
addition, there are reasons to believe that (business) ethics owes part of its current popularity to
recent corporate scandals which quite evidently raised the public sensitivity towards the
destructive potential of economic conduct. As Waddock (2003) convincingly argued in that
context, ‘if the corporate scandals of the early 2000s accomplished nothing else, they focused
attention on the integrity and ethics of companies and their leaders, or, more accurately, on the
apparent lack thereof’ (p. 2). The demand for a more ethical economy, so it seems, has become a
hotly debated issue. On the level of corporations, one can see that this demand is correlated with
the rise of concepts such as ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘social economy’, ‘corporate
citizenship’, ‘sustainability’, etc., which all proclaim a more equitable, just or circumspect
treatment of the firms’ immediate stakeholders or ecological environment. For instance, given
that the corporate social responsibility (hereon CSR) movement endorses that firms are obligated
213
Though largely discredited by positivism in the earlier part of the 20
th
century and the various strands of anti-
humanist critique in the latter part, ethics has today returned as a key term in all kinds of discussions. Public
discourse, especially in the US, seems virtually obsessed with ethics. Long a minor sub-field in philosophy, ethics,
especially medical and business ethics, has become a savvy professional niche; and in the wake of post-structuralism,
ethics has made a return to critical discourse. Unsurprisingly, then, there has been a lot of concerned meta-theoretical
reflection about the meaning of this ‘turn to ethics’ (Walden, 2004).
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to ‘give something back’, it seems justifiable to state that such endeavors, at least at the outset,
were largely concerned with bringing ethical questions back into the sphere of market-based
activities. Though the CSR movement reflects the societal demand to hold corporations and their
leaders to higher standards of conduct (Epstein & Hanson, 2006) or, to put it bluntly, to impose
limits on the selfishness and greed of economic actors (Daianu & Vranceanu, 2005), it is
undeniable that such programs have often served corporations as a fig leaf for proceeding as
usual. Waddock (2003), among others, claimed that, given the recent wave of corporate scandals
and the accompanied public plea to make corporations with greater integrity that were more
accountable and ethical, actual business practice shows that woefully little has actually happened.
Though I have no interest in judging whether or not corporations do in fact walk their ethical talk,
it must be borne in mind that concepts such as CSR often lose their public status precisely
because they are perceived by the people as a mere instrument for sustaining corporations’
overall reputation. It probably comes as little surprise that such concepts are often viewed by their
critics as empty shams which try to obscure the fact that the economic well-being of companies,
and not that of its broader community or ecology, is still the primary emphasis of economic
conduct. Taking into account those voices which claim that ideas such as ‘corporate social
responsibility actually mask a euphemism for … corporations whose hidden agenda includes the
‘servicing’ of global capitalism’ (cf. Murray, 2005; slightly modified), what I want to emphasize
here is that the corporeal use, that is, instrumentalisation, of these concepts has a direct effect on
their life course. In other words, in view of the corporate exploitation of CSR, it becomes
palpable that its appropriation as a rhetorical strategy has – despite its ongoing employment
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–
spurred the demise of its credibility in public opinion and the lowering of its ‘chance of survival’
quite generally. In consequence, we can say that concepts such as CSR obey the rule of
management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996), which is not least supported by the observation that
the concept, after a period of unclouded optimism, seems to have transgressed the climax of its
popularity. At this juncture, we may return to the idea of social entrepreneurship so as to claim
that it is utterly evident that the neologism still finds itself in a period of proliferation. Provided
that the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ exhibits characteristics that are typical for management
fashions (cf. Chapter 1), one can speculate about its life cycle, that is, if and when it will witness
214
Notice that the issue of (corporate) social responsibility is still a ‘hot’ issue in the academe and thereby most
notable in the context of (business) ethics.
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a fate comparable to that of CSR. First in considering the similarities between concepts like CSR
and social entrepreneurship, we can say that social entrepreneurship has been introduced as a
concept that is supposed to fill the moral vacuum engendered by economized global conduct (and
by the impotence of the third or social sector), since it, following O’Connor (2006), ‘responds
morally to the latest round of [corporate] scandals’. Yet, whether social entrepreneurship will be
institutionalized not only as an academic topic, but also as a managerial practice or technology, or
whether it instead remains a transient fashion can only be decided in the future. More important
in the current context, however, is a second observation, namely that social entrepreneurship is
not, or only marginally, taken to represent a corrective measure for confining the potentially
hostile effects of economic governance. That is, in opposition to CSR which is evidently
considered a ‘brake mechanism’ or corrective to an otherwise free-wheeling economy, social
entrepreneurship is frequently conceived as an entity which combines the best parts of the
economic and the social realm. Represented as the copula between profit seeking and social deed
(e.g. Seelos & Mair, 2005), social entrepreneurship is thus by no means a critical discourse,
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but
rather a sign, or ‘hurray word’, which highlights the possible synergies of social and economic
undertakings. Be that as it may, what needs to be reiterated at this juncture is that ‘social
entrepreneurship’ represents an articulation of two ‘incompossible’ concepts (Lyotard, 1993) or,
following Roper and Cheney (2005), ‘a combination of two concepts that do not naturally fit
together and yet which seeks acceptance as common sense’. It is the lack of a natural fit that
renders the term open to resistance and challenge’ (p. 102). Roper and Cheney’s observation
brings to the forefront a general problem of social entrepreneurship research, namely that the
term, despite its broad range of interpretations, obscures the fact that the seemingly
unproblematic ‘marriage’ of economic calculation and social vision presupposes turning a blind
eye towards the tensions and conflicts which might be engendered by such a merging. In other
words, whether one pretends that the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship have an
equal standing or instead favors the social aspect over the economic or vice versa, all these
different significations of social entrepreneurship seem to ignore the dilemmas which emanate
from conjoining the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship and hence fail to grasp the
hybrid possibilities and impossibilities of the concept (cf. below). With this in mind, it is essential
to see that prevailing images of social entrepreneurship, while endorsing an overly simplified
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Though there are a number of noteworthy expecations (e.g. Evers, 2006; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006b).
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relation between the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship, ‘violate’ the characteristics
that constitute the uneconomic or social aspect of social entrepreneurship. In short, the pseudo-
hybridization of social entrepreneurship entails, among other things, that the ‘social’ is
encapsulated in the logic of the ‘dual bottom line’ (Canadian Centre for Social Entrepreneurship,
2001) meaning that it in no way can operate outside the mechanism of the market. This state of
affairs has been discussed in some detail in Chapter 1, but I would now like to take issue with the
economization of the ‘social’ against the backdrop of writings which employ the concept ‘social
capital’ to explain the (social) cause of social entrepreneurship. What is to be emphasized, then, is
that the social feature of entrepreneurship is mainly envisaged by dint of a transactional logic (i.e.
‘I give to you in order that you give me something in return’) as a result of which it becomes
untenable to talk of the ‘social’ in the etymological sense of the word.
Social Capital or the Calculation of the Social
Money has become the grand test of virtue. (Orwell, 1940, p. 155)
The simple canonical formula of this [capitalist] genre is: I will let you have this, if you in return
can let me have that. (Lyotard, 1992, p. 58)
In view of its as yet young pedigree in the context of academia, it is somehow surprising how
much thought has already been devoted to the question what social entrepreneurship is (Dees,
1998) or in what direction is should develop (e.g. Mair, Seelos & Borwanker, 2005). What is less
surprising, though, is that this quest has for the most part led to the conclusion that ‘the greatest
challenge in understanding social entrepreneurship lies in defining the boundaries of what we
mean by social’ (Mair & Marti, 2006, p. 38; emphasis in original). Hjorth and Bjerke (2006) have
thereby convincingly argued that available texts on social entrepreneurship more often than not
conceive the social ‘as something to be fixed (re-described as forms of economic and subject to
management knowledge)’. I would like to add here that the conventionalism of management
knowledge is on the one hand supported by the avowed ‘flabbiness’ of the third or public sector
(Grenier, 2002) and on the other hand legitimated through the belief in the seemingly unlimited
merits of managerial professionalism such as ‘real world problem-solving creativity’ (Bornstein,
2004), ‘tactical thrust’ (Catford, 1998), etc. To intensify our excursion into the economization of
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the ‘social’, it first needs to be mentioned that what I call economization is unequally pronounced
in the current literature; though some texts reveal their economic legacy at first sight, there are
others in which economic reason is introduced in a more elusive fashion. To start with a more
blatant example: in an article on BBC News Online Wilson
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(2003) came to estimate that
‘social enterprise creates an average of five jobs (a small proportion create more than 20). They
calculate that for every £10,000 it takes to train a recruit, the return to the community is
£100,000.’ In view of Wilson’s contention that social entrepreneurship for the most part
represents a forceful economic actor, one might argue that such statements mimic the mainstream
literature on business or profit entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2), and in particular the route of
research which delineates the matter as an engine of economic prosperity (Hjorth & Steyaert,
2003). Where the allegation that social entrepreneurship is simply ‘old wine in new bottles’
seems to lurk around the corner, I have shown in Chapter 2 that certain scholars counteract this
‘threat’ by asserting that social entrepreneurship is distinguishable from its business opponent,
since it treats profit as a means rather than an end (Schuyler, 1998). Into virtually the same
category of rhetoric fall those writings which seek to position social entrepreneurship outside the
range of economics by claiming that the subject matter not only seeks to increase financial
capital, but equally physical, human, cultural or social capital (e.g. Johnson, 2003; Roper &
Cheney, 2005). To take issue with the perhaps most rigorously discussed form of capital in the
context of social entrepreneurship, I would like to elaborate on the idea of social capital, and
thereby bring to light how this concept capitalizes on ego-centric, calculative and hence non-
social root assumptions.
After all, one can notice that the concept ‘social capital’ has been employed by scholars to
reflect on and explain the issue of social entrepreneurship for a very short time (e.g. Thompson et
al.; 2000; Thompson, 2002; Mair et al., 2005; Stryjan, 2006). What is problematic about social
capital is that it seems to be used by analogy with economic capital, as social capital is argued to
have similar (though less measurable) effects. On the face of it, the notion of capital, be that
cultural, social or financial (Bourdieu, 1986), today seems to be construed as ‘something of a
cure-all’ (Portes, 1998, p. 1). To gain a deeper sense of (the problematic of) social capital, it is
helpful to summon a lengthy quote by Putnam (2000), who takes credit for popularizing the idea
of social capital in the context of research, so as to recall that ‘(w)hereas physical capital refers to
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Alastair Wilson is the development director of the SSE (School for Social Entrepreneurship) based in London.
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physical objects and human capital refers to the properties of individuals, social capital refers to
connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some
have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that
civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a sense network of reciprocal social relations’ (p.
19). Where Putnam’s telling statement identifies the points of difference between social, human
and physical capital, it also proclaims that social capital most notably pronounces the utility of
reciprocity and trust. Provided that this alone does not yet mark a reason for concern, I would like
to add that social capital, by highlighting that ‘trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and
behaviours … bind the members of human networks and communities’ (Cohen & Prusak 2001, p.
4), operates so as to relate people’s social relations with the notion of ‘economic growth’. More
precisely, whereas there is nothing in general to object to in conjunction with common values and
rituals of social exchange, one must not overlook that these attributes are subject to an
instrumental logic, since they derive their value in relation to the increase of the overall cohesion
and, most fundamentally, the productive capacity of an identified social unit (or ‘human networks
and communities’ to use Cohen and Prusak’s terms). Stated otherwise, though words such as
reciprocity, trust and solidarity might lead to the impression that the concept ‘social capital’ takes
issue with the overall communal well-being, it is in fact rendered a leveraging force of
communities, since ‘(w)here people are trusting and trustworthy, … , everyday business and
social transactions are less costly’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 288). Thus following Putnam’s (2000)
metaphoric description that ‘social capital greases the wheels that allow communities to advance
smoothly’ (p. 289), it becomes even more evident that the ‘social’ ceases to comprise any
intrinsic value, but gets transformed into a ‘means to other ends’.
In view of the observation that social capital is chiefly grounded on the two ‘pillars’ trust
and reciprocity, I would like to elaborate on these concepts a bit more thoroughly. Regarding the
issue of trust, it is Bill Drayton – who is said to have created the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ –
who pinpointed the ethical aspect of social entrepreneurship in conjunction with trust. Trust,
following Drayton (2002), thereby represents an invariable prerequisite for enabling or
maximizing the social value of social entrepreneurship. There is, it seems, nothing to criticize
here, given that trust is for the most part viewed as an ingredient of intimate and mutually
beneficial relations. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that trust is often delineated as a basic (and at
times endemic) characteristic of the social or private sphere – where it is said to make redundant
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contractual agreements which determine, de jure, what can be done, must be done, or must not be
done – , I would like to point out that trust is anything but a sign of selflessness. Taking, for
instance, friendship, to punctuate this assertion, I would like to make reference to Aristotle (1984)
who mentioned that friends are those people whom we are willing to care for and whom we trust.
Given that friendship is subject to desire, tension, conflict, or risk, it becomes clear that trust
works both as a ‘barometer’ for assessing and as a corrective for counteracting the risk of
potential deception. In addition, and as briefly discussed in the context of equality in Chapter 3, it
is fundamental to point out that the idea of trust hinges on an economy of the same (Hillis Miller,
2001). That is, Aristotle’s understanding of friends and friendship presumes that it is possible, not
to say required, to establish trustful relationships with one’s others in which one treats the others
as one would treat oneself. By extension, friendship is not so much a matter of accepting the
others for reason of their otherness. Instead, since being based on the assumption that one’s others
are principally similar to us (or can be assimilated to our own will), it becomes traceable that
(Aristotelian) friendship represents an expression of self-interest, since the others are invariably
bound to increase our own wellbeing, pleasure and safety. After all, where trust becomes the
reassuring belief that the other would act according to one’s own presumptions and needs and
where the other gets to reveal his or her value only when acting in accordance with oneself, it is
hardly pertinent to talk of a social, not to say ethical, relationship, but rather of a ‘utility-based
friendship’ (Aristotle, 1984; cf. also Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005).
As far as this brief inquiry has shown that the issue of trust, at least the way it gets used in
the context of ‘social capital’, not only endorses assimilation and a condition of similarity but,
more fundamentally, gets to reduce the differences between the I and the other to the egoistic
demands of a singular person (or group), there is, in my assessment, another point that needs to
be addressed, namely the relationship between reciprocity (of trust), ethics and economy. To this
end, I would like to recall that the risk immanent within close relations is said to presuppose trust
as a kind of antidote for shielding off potentially destructive behavior. Trust, so it seems, appears
to warrant that people will act in accordance with what could be denoted as ethical conduct.
However, to achieve such an Aristotelian relationship of mutual trust it is necessary that people
constantly reciprocate the trust they experience from others. In Solymossy and Masters’ (2002)
terms: ‘(w)hen the trust and emotional involvement of one actor for another are not reciprocated
fully by the other, the resulting asymmetry increases the potential for unethical behaviour’ (p.
234). On the face of it, what is revealed through Solymossy and Masters’ assertion is that the
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grand test of ethical behavior comes to rest on the question of whether or not there is symmetry
between giving and receiving. Trust and ethics, in Solymossy and Masters’ view, are hence
correlated in the sense that the violation of reciprocal trust is said to increase the likelihood of
unethical behavior. This brings us to the point of asking whether this necessarily has to be the
case and, most importantly, whether such a correlation does not lead us further away from the
objective of grasping the ethical grounding of social entrepreneurship. This evidently rhetorical
question is based on the observation that Solymossy and Masters’ perspective of ethics as well as
the concept ‘social capital’ both trade on a transactional logic that presupposes that the other
needs to reciprocate one’s deeds in, whenever possible, equal measure. This logic thereby very
much reminds us of the Latin principle ‘do et des’
217
(I give in order that you (also) give
218
)
which represents one of the pivotal maxims in judicial contract law. However, even more
fundamental in the present context of social entrepreneurship is the observation that ‘do et des’,
precisely because it describes the modus operandi of (contract) law, denotes a space beyond the
‘social’ or ethics. In analogy with Derrida’s (1992) investigation of Marcel Mauss’ (1990) ‘The
Gift’, we can say that social interactions which are based on a transactional logic violate the
original meaning of the ‘social’. More precisely, to understand the a-social peculiarity of ‘do et
des’, we must bear in mind that Derrida exposed the irony of Mauss’ work on the gift and giving
by claiming that ‘The Gift’ – which is an anthropological investigation of gift cycles in so-called
archaic societies – uses the lexis of the market and exchange, and thus speaks of anything but the
gift. What led Derrida to this conclusion was that Mauss’ treatise of the gift apparently ‘deals
with economy, exchange, contract (do et des), it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and
countergift – in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the annulment of the
gift’ (Derrida, 1992b, p. 24; emphasis in original; cf. also ‘… In a “Nutshell”’). The point that
must be emphasized here is that the perspective of the gift being established by Mauss, or the
representation of the ‘social’ as entailed in the concept ‘social capital’, do not only ignore that not
all social actions have an immediate purpose, function or rationale (Jones & Spicer, 2005), but
that the transactional logic of ‘do et des’ engenders re-formulating the ‘social’ as part of the
economic. Essentially, to make intelligible that ‘do et des’, irrespective of its broad popularity,
does not necessarily announce the end of wisdom, I will get to refer to Derrida’s work on
217
Notice that ‘do et des’ and ‘do ut des’ are often used interchangeably.
218
Besides ‘do ut des’, (Swiss) contract law also refers to canons such as ‘do ut facias’ (I give in order that you act),
‘facio ut des’ (I act in order that you give), or ‘facio ut facias’ (I act in order that you also act).
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unconditionality further down so as to establish a perspective of social entrepreneurship which is
not based on the assumption, first, that the other needs to behave in accordance with one’s own
desires and will and, second, which concedes that the ‘social’, to qualify as such, must be
construed outside the circle of reciprocity and economic calculation. Before doing so, however, I
would like to make the point that an unconditional exegesis of social entrepreneurship is quite
heterodox (i.e. outside mainstream knowledge), especially if one takes into account that we find
ourselves in a time where the everyday events of the so-called social sphere are commonly
expressed (not only by economists) as an incremental part of the economic realm.
To underscore the contention that the current meaning of social entrepreneurship bears
witness to the broader ‘economization of the universe’, I would first like to make reference to
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, arguably one of the most eminent representatives of the
aforementioned ‘tradition’, who has re-formulated a broad range of social and societal
phenomena such as immigration, racial discrimination, education, drug policies, social welfare,
religion, etc. through economic theory (c.f. Becker & Becker, 1996). Maybe one of his most
daring (and unsettling) endeavors was to explain human ‘courtship’ through the rational of cost-
benefit analysis. Becker’s investigations have, somewhat unsurprisingly, become the object of
harsh criticism. However, the world-view of homo economicus still seems to reap broad appeal
since it appears to provide an intuitively convincing model for making sense of worldly affairs
(Hirsch, Michaels & Friedman, 1990). To illustrate the pervasiveness of economic explanations,
it is helpful to take a step further and address, for instance, the issue of altruism. What is
remarkable in the context of economic reasoning is that altruism has been denoted as a concept
which cannot be distinguished, stricto sensu, from egoism since both sorts of behaviors can be
explained by the logic of ‘personal utility function’ which implies that altruism as well as egoism
basically ‘represent a distinct value to the actor’ (Swedberg, 2006). Turning our gaze to (social)
psychology to deepen this argument, we get reminded that the likelihood of altruistic behavior
depends on the relational bond between the helper and the help recipient, meaning that the closer
the relational ties between the helper and the beneficiary, the higher is the chance of pro-social
behavior. The notion of ‘reciprocal altruism’ (Trivers, 1971; Stroebe, Hewstone & Stephenson,
1996) is thus most apposite for revealing the economic interpretation of pro-social behavior, since
it entails that people pander to others foremost if the ‘costs of helping’ are small and the ‘profit
for the recipient’ is maximized. Furthermore, ‘reciprocal altruism’ implies that help is all the
more likely if the helper assumes that the beneficiary will prospectively be able to reciprocate the
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help, which is most notably the case when both parties have already cultivated a confiding
relationship. This again brings us back to the issue of trust, and particularly to the conclusion that
altruistic behavior is contingent upon the helper’s assumption that the help recipient will
prospectively act in a comparable manner (or would at least have acted in a manner comparable
to that of the helper). Economic theory thus forecasts that as far as people do not hold this
conviction, there will be little chance of pro-social behavior. By implication, economic
representations of pro-social behavior posit that people act as ‘homo reciprocans’ (Andreoni,
1988; 1995) who meticulously calculate their behavior according to the chance of recompense.
Indeed, there appears some truth value in Serres’ (2000) contention that ‘not long ago,
certain people posited economics as the infrastructure of history’ (p. 102). However, though I do
not believe that the high tide of economics is yet over and despite the literal impossibility of
invalidating, in a comparably rationalistic manner, the quasi-axiomatic explanation of economic
theory, it nevertheless lies with us to ask: if it is possible to express all social phenomena through
economic theory, why then shouldn’t we happily embrace the work of Becker and others which
seem to provide a ‘Theory for Everything’ (Lawson, 2004)? Ironic though it may seem, I would
like to answer the question by saying that the danger of economic explanations derives, as
discussed before, from its capacity to overrule alternative forms of human conduct. The logic of
economic calculation thus seems to herald the emergence (if not existence) of a hegemonic
metanarrative in the best sense of Lyotard’s ‘Postmodern Condition’ (1984; cf. also Chapter 1).
However, if economic theory could truly explain the totality of the human cause in general and
social entrepreneurship in specific, why worry? In accordance with Jones, Parker and ten Bos’
(2005) treatise of business ethics, in which they ask ‘if money is all that matters, then where do
people fit in? If profit is the only goal, then why worry about good and bad?’ (p. 131), I would
like to reflect on and put into question the self-contented attempts of economists who try to
express all aspects of humanity through the rational calculation of input-output ratios or, to put it
bluntly, the dogma of ‘cold quantification’ (Jones & Spicer, 2005). In view of the present
argument, it needs to be borne in mind that explanations of social entrepreneurship through social
capital would endorse forgetting everything that cannot be grasped in economic or transactional
terms, such as, for instance, that which is ‘unaccountable and new, experimental, impulsive, … ,
pleasurable, … , passionate, … ’ (Kaulingfreks, 2005, p. 40). In consequence, there seems much
value in Cohen and Prusak’s (2001) account, since the authors have raised their fingers in
warning to say that ‘not everything of value should be called ‘capital’. There is a deep danger of
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skewing our consideration of social phenomena and goods towards the economic. The notion of
capital brings with it a whole set of discourses and inevitably links it … to capitalism’ (p. 9). To
be sure, I have no problem in conceding that social capital is a worthwhile concept for
representing the reciprocal relations in a given community and to show how trust, solidarity and
mutual obligations relate with a given community’s (economic) prosperity. Yet, social capital
seems less apt for tackling the genuinely social aspect of entrepreneurship at large. With this in
mind, it seems legitimate to ask whether the metaphor of capital ‘can do anything for the human,
cultural, or social’ and if this metaphor can provide anything else but the impression of bringing
‘precision to the discussion and adds weight and importance to these otherwise easy-to-brush-off
aspects of human life (those traditionally located outside the sphere of capital)’ (Hjorth & Bjerke,
2006).
Provided that the as yet scarce publications on social entrepreneurship exhibit a
remarkable interest in the issue of social capital (cf. journal articles (e.g. Thompson et al., 2000;
Thompson, 2002), research reports (e.g. Smallbone et al., 2001), books (e.g. Baker, 2000) or
advocacy networks (e.g. Community Action Network, London)), it was my intention to show that
this concept is arguably futile for understanding the genuinely social, not to say ethical, aspect of
social entrepreneurship. To render this assertion even more palpable, and to establish a space
beyond the pervasive logic of ‘do et des’ so as to give voice to my contention that there is
something more to life than Becker’s economic blueprint, I would now like to illustrate the
tension between conditional and unconditional forms of social exchange and thereby elaborate on
its practical implications in the context of development aid.
On (Un)Conditional Social Action in the Context of Development Aid
In view of my critical reading of social capital, which has sought to illuminate the concept’s
subtle, yet pervasive, economic logic, it is within the current paragraph that I want to establish a
more affirmative trajectory of the ‘social’ through Derrida’s notion of ‘unconditionality’ (cf. also
Chapter 5). The arguments on conditional and unconditional social action will thereby be
established and reflected in the context of development aid. To be sure, development aid has been
chosen as the contextual backdrop of this illustration not just because it has already served as the
analytic focus in Chapter 3, but also because development aid lends itself to inquiring into the
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area of conflict engendered by the ‘collision’ of social and economic rationalities. Whereas the
above paragraph was dedicated to highlighting the pseudo-ethical and economic over-codification
of social entrepreneurship, I would like to start this investigation by claiming that the realm of
development aid has experienced a similar fate. Given that this argument has already been
developed in Chapter 3, it shall suffice here to recall that development aid, in the early post-
WWII years, was endowed, if not overcharged, with the utopian hope of raising the Third World
onto the level of true humanity (Gronemeyer, 1992) and thus with the idea of harmonizing global
inequalities. In so far as the influx and impact of economic and managerial discourse is
concerned, I have mentioned in Chapter 3 that economic rationalities have underpinned Third
World aid ever since. Yet, what has been most conspicuous is that best-management approaches
to development (NGOs) became presentable roughly within the last 10 to 15 years. Having
asserted that the lexis of management has essentially construed development NGOs as business-
and market-sensitive actors, I have interpreted this recent rupture as a somewhat logical
consequence of the realization that development aid initiatives have constantly fallen short of
their identified goals. In other words, the development aid project in general and the institutions
of the development apparatus in specific have increasingly been problematized as adequate
means for tackling inequalities (or economic differences) between the so-called First and Third
World. Yet, in view of the fact that development aid within the last decades has witnessed far-
reaching suspicion and criticism, these allegations did not only transform the matter into a
malleable project, but also heralded the need for a fundamental modification of its modus
operandi hitherto. In Foucauldian terms, the problematization of development aid at once became
the condition of possibility for complementing or substituting existing (e.g. philanthropic or
humanistic) rationalities with a more market-sensitive code of conduct. By implication, the
problematization of development aid made possible new social realities and hence new subject
positions (Foucault, 1984; cf. also Chapter 6). However, though a managerial governance of
development aid can be conceived as a positive instance that enables new forms of (business and
social) life, I have discussed in Chapter 3 that ‘new managerialism’ also displaces or suppresses
rationalities which do not fit into its ‘equation’. For instance, while announcing a break with the
past in the name of a better future, managerial logics quite evidently operate upon what
Gronemeyer (1992) called ‘optimization imperative’, which transmits the message that all people
involved in development aid must forget their past so as to give way to a more business-sensitive
outlook. That this rationale is both expansive and one-sided, since it exclusively highlights the
577
rationalistic and calculative aspects of development aid while claiming transcendental
applicableness, probably needs no further elaboration. What needs further consideration,
however, is that the discourse of managerialism conceals that there has been and still is
something in development aid that exceeds mere calculated social exchange. To counteract the
hegemonic representation of development through managerial and/or economic discourse (Grillo,
1997; Brigg, 2001), I would now like to establish an unconditional reading of development aid.
Since I would like to illustrate the issue of unconditionality in the context of development NGOs,
it is helpful to once again recall that these organizations are envisaged more and more from the
vantage point of (social) entrepreneurship as a result of which they are primarily construed as
effective and efficient economic actors (cf. above Wilson, 2003). This tendency also becomes
evident in those academic writings which use economic initiatives such as the Grameen Bank to
delineate the (social) cause of social entrepreneurship and, most fundamentally, to advocate the
positive capacity of economic activities in the context of development aid (Ostasiewski, 2005).
Notwithstanding the recognition that such endeavors run the risk of establishing a totalizing
scheme for naturalizing a neo-liberal model of social entrepreneurship (Roper & Cheney, 2005),
which quite evidently ignores the nuances and differences that make up the singularity of social
entrepreneurial events (cf. Chapter 1), my aim here is to take issue with the observation that such
an economic conceptualization of development aid endorses a conditional mode of exchange.
More precisely, the cardinal question which derives from an economic conceptualization of
development aid is whether or not such endeavors will lead to predetermined goals or, as in the
case of the Grameen Bank, if recipients of help will be able to repay their loans.
219
Arguably, this
claim is simplistic, since it denies that the everyday conduct of development aid necessarily
exhibits more complexity and tensions than what is imparted from systems of ‘tactical morality
and strategic rationalism’ (Walden, 2002). Yet, I nevertheless believe that it is not exaggerated to
claim that contemporary development aid not only has a propensity to appropriate the southern
hemisphere to the lifestyle of consumption associated with the West (Rahnema & Bawtree,
1997), but, to put it bluntly, has an immanent tendency to transform gestures of help and aid into
conditional acts of (economic and/or contractual) exchange. In line with this observation, one can
argue that development aid – which at first sight seems to deal with laudable deeds such as help,
care or philanthropy – is nowadays for the most part occupied with endowing aid with a
219
Notice that the Grameen Bank, despite its broad acceptance, has also been criticized because of its disciplining
operation (Brigg, 2001) or in view of its negative social spill-over effects (Develtere & Huybrechts, 2005).
578
transactional logic that demands, for instance, that beneficiaries must act according to the giver’s
premises and practices, and thus have to comply with preordained standards of good
management. By implication, it becomes intelligible that development aid is far removed from
the ancient ideal of Misericordia, that is, the ‘rueful sympathy’ that comes from the heart
(Gronemeyer, 1992).
220
In opposition to the Samaritan, which Gronemeyer used as a conceptual
persona to exemplify how those involved in the early days of development aid used to give
‘without regard to the person in need, the situation, the probability of success, or even the
possibility of injury to the person offering aid’ (Gronemeyer, 1992, p. 53), development aid
organizations today most notably seem concerned with institutionalizing and professionalizing
their decision-making, evaluation and accounting procedures so as to enhance their prospect of
success. The downside of this focus, so it seems, is that decisions are frequently taken with regard
to the chances of (economic) success and less subject to, for instance, people’s immediate needs.
On the face of it, claiming that contemporary development aid has dismissed traditional
conceptions of help and thereby transformed help and aid into an exercise of economic discipline
might indeed be read as the expression of heavy-hearted sorrow in the face of vanishing virtues
and values. To long for a past that is no longer ours, however, would be a futile undertaking since
there is no possibility to turn back the clock (Foucault, 1984). Rather than a misty-eyed view of
the past, I would like to establish a perspective of unconditional development aid in which acts of
giving and helping are carried out beyond seemingly precise predictions of future success and
without the expectation of immediate recompense, payback or return. Hence, bearing in mind that
development aid or Third World aid today has come to rely upon the ostensible precision of cost-
benefit analysis (which reveals, among other things, the ‘maxim of do ut des’; Gronemeyer, 1992,
p. 56; emphasis in original), there is nevertheless reason to believe that development aid can be
extended beyond its current economic conceptualization. In consequence, speaking of a space
beyond economy, that is, a space of unconditionality, brings us to those works of Derrida where
he performed a double reading of concepts such as friendship, hospitality, the gift, etc. (c.f.
Chapters 1 & 2). It is thereby important to recall that the common denominator of these
conceptual genealogies is that they all probed the double condition or ‘double imperative’ of the
respective concepts (Critchley & Kearney, 2004), whereby pinpointing the difference entailed
between unconditional and conditional interpretations of a given term. Though Derrida, to my
220
Which represents, quite evidently, a blatantly romantic image of development aid.
579
knowledge, never became explicit about development aid (organizations),
221
I believe that the
inquiry hitherto and the thesis at large have shown that the topic does in fact lend itself to a
comparable double reading. To be sure, where an unconditional reading of aid and help will
engender a picture that is notably different from its conditional signification, I will now try to
give form to the idea of unconditionality by discussing the main attributes which characterize a
genuine or pure exegesis of help and aid, that is, the ethics of otherness, the ever-becoming of the
‘social’ and the risk of invention.
Ethics: The Encounter with Otherness
… where there is no other, the scene of the other, like that of politics and of society, has
disappeared. (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 210)
If we start from the contention that conditional development aid, i.e. development aid the way it
is currently practiced on a global scale, is for the most part grounded on the premise of rational
thought and economic reason (cf. Chapter 3), it surely remains clear that not just any relation of
help truly deserves the name. In concrete terms, to talk of help, in Derrida’s sense of the word,
would make it untenable to rely on algorithmic or formalized (decision- and calculation-)
procedures (Anderson-Irwin, 2001) because they invariably favor similarity over difference and,
most fundamentally, ignore the existence and value of alterity. Derrida’s (1978) investigation of
‘arche-violence’ singles out this latter problem, emphasizing that there is always a danger in
discourse (i.e. ‘articulartion’) to treat the other not as other, but as a mere alter ego (i.e. second
self). That is to say that arche-violence delineates the possibility that people are prone to construe
the other – as a result of their immanent egoistic, perspective-bound mode of thinking – ‘as
properly a direct object of one’s own action, so that things are said or done to the other as object,
rather than given or presented to the other as a Face’ (Parrish, 2004, p. 4). The problem of arche-
violence is hence quite obviously revealed in the tradition of postcolonial criticism which
proclaims that discourses of help or development aid are to be regarded as violent, since they
appear to reduce the indigenous other to a mere extension of the (western) helper’s own being or
social reality (Escobar, 1992). On the other hand, being or acting non-violently in the sphere of
221
Yet, notice that Derrida (2000b) discussed the role of non-governmental organizations in the context of his
investigation of the ‘New International’.
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development aid
222
implies conceding that the others not only have a right for existence, health,
education, etc., but, most fundamentally, a right for their own truth. After all, non-violence means
accepting the others ‘in their sovereign sources of meaning’ (Parrish, 2004, p. 19). In line with
this observation, the paradox of responsible behavior, following Derrida, means that there is
always a question of being responsible before a singular other, and thereby of accepting the other
as an independent creator of meaning. Letting the other be other and thereby acknowledging that
the other is ‘irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 125;
emphasis in original) manifests the basic condition of non-violence and, by implication, justice.
Derrida (1995) thereby insisted that this type of aporia is ‘too often ignored by the “knights of
responsibility” who presume responsibility and ethics in all aspects of life is quite easily
established’ (Reynolds, 2001) and who pretend that they are ethical by the simple fact that they
act in a dutiful way. Yet, mere dutiful action seems to lead in the wrong direction, since the law
or the generality of duty, as Derrida (1995) reminds us, ignores the difficulties and paradoxes
involved in genuinely responsible events. In concrete terms, acting out of duty means acting on
the orders of a relational script which tells us, in a more or less precise way, what is appropriate
in a given social situation, and thus seemingly relieves us from the ordeal of responsible
deliberation and action. Stated otherwise, dutiful acts do not take into account that responsibility
necessarily touches the ‘inner-most parts of me’ and must hence go ‘right down to my soul, down
to the bone’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 54). It is precisely this recognition which led Derrida conclude that
duty delineates a sort of relationship with otherness which is not only unethical, but even
unfriendly. This is indeed a shattering assessment, but Derrida (1995) convincingly argued that it
would ‘be unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty. It would be no better to respond to an
invitation or to a friend in conformity with duty, pflichtmässig … It is insufficient to say that the
“ought” … of friendship, like that of politeness, must not be on the order of duty. … As soon as it
yields to the necessity of applying the generality of a prescription to a single case, the gesture of
friendship or of politeness would itself be destroyed’ (p. 8; emphasis in original). Essentially, the
conclusion of Derrida’s elaboration on pro-forma friendship, dutifulness or politeness is that all
friendships (and, by implication, all affirmative social encounters) which are grounded on a duty,
on a set of principles from which we derive rules for our everyday deeds (i.e. prescriptions) are
222
Notice that certain postcolonial scholars have come to endorse a ‘post-development’ era (Escobar, 1992b; 1995)
which emphasizes, among other things, the need to re-frame development as an event that does not represent the
southern hemisphere as a mere extension or even as an inferior supplement to the industrialized or ‘civilized’ North.
581
hollowed by a ‘rhetoric of responsibility’, since ‘(b)y speaking of responsible discourse on
responsibility, we are implying already that discourse itself must submit to the norms or to the
law of which it speaks’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 9; emphasis in original).
In view of the fact that codes or programs of responsibility or duty, by force of
reductionism, always perform a certain insensitivity vis-à-vis the particularity of the singular
other, it is anything but surprising that the logic of give and take, or do et des (cf. also Derrida,
1992, p. 24), is in no way compatible with the idea of the (unconditional) ‘social’, at least insofar
as the ‘social’ is held to describe the space where alterity is encountered and enabled. I would
hence like to begin this excursion into unconditional development aid by invoking a quote by
Derrida (1992) in which he rhetorically asked ‘(d)oes it not suffice in fact to describe
scientifically the objective exchange of values with usurious supplement, in short, the logic of
credit, of interest rates, and of repayment due dates?’ (p. 42). It follows on from this that it is
fundamental, first of all, not to accept prevailing ways of exchange as expressions of social
relations and hence to take issue with conditional help and aid, since the sort of exchange (or
giving in the case of Derrida’s inquiry) which exclusively deals with or takes place in the sphere
of economy, exchange, contract, reciprocity, trust, etc. immediately leads to the annulment of the
‘social’. By analogy with Derrida’s (1999) eloquent treatise on hospitality, one could say that if
one inscribes the ‘social’ into a circle (of exchange) which presupposes that the recipient must
reciprocate the deed of the helper, then one is no longer talking of social action but of conditional
social exchange. In consequence, to prevent the ‘social’ becoming absorbed by economic reason
(Baudrillard, 1983), it becomes arguable that unconditional development aid would have to
exceed the pragmatic demands of everyday life. To be sure, the (economic) demands of
development aid cannot simply be ignored (cf. below), and yet there is still in development aid
something beyond the ritualism of economic calculation. More precisely still, though ‘there are,
of course, rituals and coded gestures … there is also a moment of absolute singularity which is
processed with the heart’ (Simmons et al., 2001, p. 26). In terms of development aid, the
singularity Derrida refers to in his work on ethics implies that one should evaluate the calls from
the others (who require our help) case by case and not by simply applying a pre-ordained set of
decision procedures. In a most hyperbolic sense, to help unconditionally means paying attention
to the fact that each call from the other deserves, if not requires, our notice and thus our efforts.
So if we had to formulate a tentative or ephemeral (not general) principle of help, this would most
likely embody ‘a law which tells or invites us, or gives us the order or injunction to welcome
582
anyone, any other one, without checking at the order who he or she is, what his or her nationality
is, it’s a way of being open to whoever comes’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 8). What I particularly want to
emphasize here is that – despite the fact that economic conceptualizations of development aid
have become an incremental and pervasive part of contemporary thinking – the right to alterity
and one’s responsibility to the other(s) remain irreducible, that is, undeconstructible. Importantly,
the implications of Derrida’s work for the realm of development aid are (at least) double and
thereby subtly contradictory. On the one hand, the concept ‘unconditionality’ does away with any
de-contextualized, abstract understanding of help and instead makes help a concrete event which
receives a face, so to speak, in that it pinpoints the singularity of the concrete other. On the other
hand, it follows from Derrida’s notion of ‘essential’ or ‘absolute otherness’ that unconditional
help or aid endorses a particular excess of responsibility; whereby excess does not refer to an
exaggerated kindness or a mere sense of duty (cf. above), but to a sort of responsibility which is
too broad and open for being ‘enclosed’ in prescriptive codes. The apparent paradox is thus
revealed in that unconditional help points at the concrete experience of otherness, while at the
same time stipulating that pure help cannot be experienced or presented (i.e. rendered the object
of static representation) in any definitive sense. For any help that upholds its ‘right’ to be
considered unconditional inevitably must remain elusive, even imperceptible. In other words, if
help were recognized by the beneficiary as an act of benevolence it would inevitably fall into an
economy, a reciprocity of mutual benefit and hence cease to be true help, but a mere ‘help of
utility’, as it were. This said, we are back at the beginning once again: any relation of help that
passes through a living present is an appropriation, a domestication, which destroys alterity. But
yet again, it must be my care for the other, I must be the one committed to the concrete other, the
one who calls me and announces his or her distress, emergency, Notfall. This is, on the face of it,
the aporia of otherness. In the concluding part of this chapter I am eager to consider in greater
depth the double condition of responsible social action, in general, and minor social
entrepreneurship, in particular. Thus I intend to posit, among other things, that the aporia and
apparent impossibility of responsibility is not the end-point of help, but its essential force of
leverage. After all, to reap the profundity of Derrida’s thought, I would like to reiterate that
unconditional help is antithetic or parasitical to conditional help in the sense that it not only
establishes an image of help that operates ‘without asking for a document, a name, a context, or a
passport’, but, following Derrida, overruns, exceeds and exposes the ‘performative force’
(Derrida, 2001) of all calculative social action. In this way, unconditional help denotes, even
583
prescribes, opening our relation to the other and hence postulates offering the other all that we
have; that is, unconditional help endorses ‘to open my space, my home – my house, my language,
my culture, my nation, my state, and myself’ (Derrida, 1997b, p. 7). By extension, Derrida’s
delineation of absolute hospitality makes it clear that to talk about unconditional help implies to
disengage with predictions and managerial forecasts and to accept that ‘what arrives arrives’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 247). In view of the observation that excess – conceived as the surplus of
responsibility which exceeds, at every moment, the calculative economy of development aid and
its drive to predict, and thus control, future events in a precise manner – represents the grounding
of unconditional help, it is within the next paragraph that I will reveal how the excess of
responsibility, that is, excessive responsibility, gets to engender a ‘becoming’-perspective of help.
Becoming Social: The Infinite (Since Insatisfiable) Call from the Other
I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without
sacrificing the other other, the other others. (Derrida, 1995, p. 68)
Though I have illustrated the ‘purity’ of development aid against the backdrop of unconditional
help and aid, this is not, however, meant to say that we have attained the high ground of a novel
‘moralism’. Quite the contrary. Though unconditionality emphasizes an event of pure affection
and hence a relation towards the other which must avoid assimilation, acculturation or
appropriation, this further entails a relational space that needs to be ‘re-invented at every second’
(Derrida, 1997b, p. 8). In specific terms, since unconditionality does not impart any set of social
conditions, however rudimentary, to structure the relationship between one person and another, it
does not necessarily give reason for euphoria, such as we might expect had we attained a moral
high ground. Rather, the ‘nature’ of unconditionality implicates that the ordeal of deciding whom
to help and how is never accomplished, and never should end lest the ‘social’ be fixed as the
totalized essence of good conscience. It follows from Derrida’s claim, first, that the social space
cannot be controlled and that we must not try to have done with it since the social is not a
‘surpassable moment’ (Derrida, 1997a, p. 59) and, second, that the question of the ‘social’ is an
infinite task. The ‘social’, so it seems, is infinite (and thus always in a condition of becoming),
and not only because there are infinite aporias, or because these aporias are grounded in an
infinity of social conditions which cannot possibly be mastered (i.e. rendered the object of
584
formalized economic structures). Rather, the infinite task of responsibility relates to the
recognition that responsibility is grounded in aporias that make justice an experience of the
‘crucible of undecidability’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001) and hence of the impossible. Importantly
then, the impossibility of unconditional help derives not merely from man’s impulse towards
unity (Nietzsche, 1968), as previously discussed in the context of Derrida’s inquiry of arche-
violence, but also from the fact that every social gesture (be that help, aid, etc.) towards a
particular person invariably ignores all the others which are not explicitly addressed by one’s
deed. Unconditional responsibility is thus a paradoxical condition in the sense that it is literally
impossible to satisfy all those others – both near and distant, both identifiable and anonymous –
which call us and await a response. Despite the contention that the idea of unconditional help
emphasizes the singular encounter with the other, absolute responsibility always exceeds the dyad
of the I and some concrete other, since it, following Derrida (1997b), is not purely a responsibility
for someone or something, but a ‘calling and an answering [to] the other, infinite and beyond
being’ (pp. 36 – 37). The aporia of absolute or unconditional responsibility, which, as Derrida
(1995) reminds us, invariably evokes fear and makes one tremble (cf. below), is therefore not
only the condition of responsibility, but the recognition that the encounter with otherness should
not be normalized (i.e. made amenable to norms and disciplinary mechanisms), but should remain
‘exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 32). By
implication, the attribute ‘responsible’ does not single out an essence of being and thus does not
describe a personality characteristic one can possess in an abstract sense. Rather, responsibility is
only ‘alive’ when it happens, that is, when it takes place in the singular event of responsibility
(Caputo, 1993). To become responsible, social or ethical implies acknowledging the immanent
risk and impossibility of complete openness to the other. The call from the ‘absolutely Other’
223
is such that the request that is made of me by the other, by the simple fact that he or she speaks to
me, is a request that is insoluble and thus can (and must) never be finished. Responsibility, by
logical extension, is simultaneously endless and inevitably doomed to fail, since one cannot
possibly be responsible to all to whom one should be responsible. As I will necessarily and at
every moment betray ‘my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the
billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my
223
Notice that Derrida (1995) often uses the example of God to illustrate the call from the ‘absolutely Other’ and its
implied responsibility in ‘the absence (apousia) of the master’ (pp. 56 – 57; emphasis in original).
585
fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 69), it is beyond
doubt that unconditional help might appear as a mere illusion. And yet, it does not follow from
Derrida’s (1995) ostensible dystopia that one’s decision to respond to one person and not to
another ‘remains finally unjustifiable’ (p. 71) that one is absolved from acting responsibly.
Instead, despite the fact that ‘(m)aking a decision requires that one’s energies and resources are
channeled in certain directions and not others’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001), one must, following
Caputo (1993), enter the field of obligation and keep the idea of complete otherness as a
corrective to remain aware of the particular others to whom one is also obliged. Far from
invoking a sense of stagnation, the recognition of the aporia of infinite responsibility renders even
more urgent the demand for justice, responsibility and ethics. In other words, ‘the distance of the
other does not lead to a lack of responsibility, or to a non-response, turning away, or
complacency. One must act even when the act is bound to fall short, to be inadequate, even sinful
in the sense that one cannot do right by every other’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001).
Returning to the issue of development aid, we can see that doing good, that is, helping and
aiding, does in no way presuppose the image of some heroic individual or organization and even
less requires bestowing help with a determinate meaning. To be sure, a ‘becoming’ view of
development aid highlights the small, the fragile and the accidental, and thus alludes to all those
development initiatives and projects which might never show up on television or newspaper
reports and which will never receive a reward or price, since they are still heterogeneous,
contradictory, unformed or, more precisely, in the process of constant forming and reforming.
The leverage of such an ephemeral, juvenile form of development aid is hence less a matter of
propaganda, political action or overt protesting. Instead, such a minor form of help stimulates
change by inducing processes of becoming-other as well as by undermining stable power
relations and ‘activating lines of continuous variation in ways that have previously been restricted
and blocked’ (Bogue, 2005, p. 114). The potential for positive social change is hence not limited
due to minor development aid’s non-essentialist status, since a minor form of help might arguably
prove more receptive and sensitive to differences and local identity politics (which both seem at
risk of being overrun by the strategic master-plan of development aid). In view of Reynolds’
(2004) contention that becoming just, social or responsible means ‘to keep the future open and
permanently revisable’, we can add that a ‘becoming’ view of development is well in line with
Derrida’s (2004b) claim that ‘it is these weak who will prove to be strongest in the end and who
represent the future … ’ To put it bluntly, the weakest, the minor, do not conceive development
586
aid as the ‘reassuring object or the logical or theoretical consequence of assured knowledge
(euphoric, without paradox, without aporia, free of contradiction, without undecidabilities to
decide’ (Derrida, 2000). Instead, minor development encourages becoming-other precisely
because it acknowledges the uniqueness of the other’s voice and because it exceeds the economy
of debt and repayment while construing failure not as an indication of poor planning or
management, but as the ever-present possibility of constant movement, that is, becoming-other.
Minor development aid thus enables, if not invents, a ‘people to come’ by promoting ‘new
possibilities for the future formation of an active, self-determining collectivity’ (Bogue, 2005, p.
114). Evidently, it delineates an alternative path to help compared to the (major) development
machine (cf. Chapter 3) which seems to run ‘without us, without responsibility, without decision,
at bottom without ethics’ (Derrida, 2000). In short, minor development aid delineates a plane of
immanence,
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to use Deleuze’s (2001) term, which exhibits no concern for fixing values, for
predetermining aims and objectives or for establishing stable structures or hierarchies, but for
enabling a ceaselessly open future that cannot be envisioned by available categories or by a
dogmatic mode of thinking (Deleuze, 1994). Thus given that a ‘becoming’ perspective of help or
development aid pays primary heed not to what is (i.e. being), but to what might become possible
at the fissures of presence (Law, 2004), it is within the following paragraph that I want to discuss
in some detail the embodied side of invention and how such a view embraces Derrida’s treatise of
non-knowledge and the secret.
Invention: Fear and Trembling in the Face of the Secret
Wandering includes the risk of error and distraction. Where are you going? I don’t know. Where
are you coming from? I try not to remember. Through where do you pass? Everywhere
and through as many places as possible … (Serres, 2000, p. 98)
What I want to bring to the forefront here is that unconditional development does not ‘merely’
stimulate a space of absolute otherness, but at the same time stresses the inventive and
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In terms of ethics, immanence implies disavowing any reference to judgments of good and evil, right and wrong,
and hence does away with a transcendental model of ethics. A Deleuzian ethics instead stresses the abstract methods
of immanent evaluation which again is compatible with Derrida’s idea of the absolute singularity of responsible
endeavors.
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transformative possibilities of responsible social action. I would like to begin this inquiry with a
brief excursus so as to claim that novelty and innovation are central concerns in today’s studies
on management. Meier Sørensen (2006) thus convincingly extracted the two dominant routes to
innovation, stating that there is one stream of research which emphasizes the role of fantasy,
brainstorming and free interaction, and another that puts centre stage the role of knowledge
sharing and organizational form. In short, innovation, as Meier Sørensen tells us with reference to
Boeddrich (2004), is either seen as the somehow accidental effect of an unstructured, chaotic
environment or, alternatively, construed as the product of meticulously organized knowledge.
Since the first stream of thought, that is, the ‘fantasy route to innovation’, will be briefly
addressed in the concluding part of this chapter, I would here like to take issue with the
commonplace assumption that one (i.e. managers) can, by dint of managerial procedures and
technologies, ‘squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of
innovation and invention’ (Thrift, 2006, p. 281; emphasis in original).
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This view, in my
assessment, falls short in acknowledging that innovation is invariably an embodied practice and
the result of an encounter with otherness which presupposes a certain non-knowledge and the
retention of the other’s secret. To lend apt weight to this assertion I will henceforth talk about
invention instead of innovation. Thus, let me start my investigation of Derrida’s notion of ‘non-
knowledge’ by claiming that the encounter with otherness is a fundamentally insecure, if not
dangerous (Steyaert & Dey, 2006), event because one never knows in advance whether such an
endeavor will turn out a success or whether it will lead to a complete disaster. The notion of
‘invention’ thus takes into account that a ‘becoming’ perspective of development aid does not see
novelty (i.e. the invention of a people and a future to come) as something (literally some thing)
that can be delineated by some utopian social order (cf. below), but rather as a ‘risk-laden
instigation of a movement toward an unknowable future’ (Bogue, 2005, p. 117). This view is in
fundamental contrast to both common sense and management research which share the belief that
novelty presupposes disclosing the secret. Invention, in Derrida’s (1989) understanding, stresses
that the encounter with absolute otherness, and the unconditional responsibility of help and aid,
implies, even necessitates, secrecy. Essentially, the encounter with otherness retains a sense of the
surprise or the secret, since it gives weight to that which is not controllable in terms of time
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Notice that this functionalist understanding of innovation and novelty is well in line with the dominant stream of
entrepreneurship research, where innovation is typically (but not exclusively) discussed in the context of ‘opportunity
seeking’, ‘creative destruction’ or ‘(economic) value creation’.
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(when the other will arrive) or effect (what will happen in the encounter with otherness). In other
words, Derrida’s (1995) claim that ‘(s)ecrecy is essential to the exercise of this absolute
responsibility as sacrificial responsibility’ (p. 67) alludes to an encounter which cannot be
planned (prior to the event), wherefore being/becoming absolutely social endorses opening
oneself towards the other, without hesitation and reservation and without any clear anticipation of
possible consequences (cf. above). Furthermore, following Derrida’s (1995) claim that
responsibility ‘needs to be … unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be
absolutely responsible’ (p. 61), it becomes arguable that to have its own meaning, unconditional
help ‘must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is the madness of the
impossible’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 45). The undeconstructible ‘social’ is hence the subject matter of
pure and unconditional affirmation and, most essentially, something unimaginable and
inconceivable by the current standards of imagining and representation. Unconditionality, so it
seems, implies getting rid of the analytic link between the ‘social’ and ‘economic or political
structures’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 350), since it is only by leaving meaning open or at least elusive
that the ‘social’ gets to escape being inscribed into economic codes of conduct and ideals of good
governance. One gets to see, then, that to be truly social means not only that ‘(t)he “economy of
sacrifice” must lead … to a “sacrifice of economy”’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001), but, in a paradoxical
manner, that one needs to be ‘prepared to be unprepared’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 70) and to accept that
‘what arrives arrives’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 247). On the face of it, where Derrida’s treatise of non-
knowledge and the secret singles out a space beyond economy, it must simultaneously be borne
in mind that it points at the possibility of invention, where ‘inventiveness can consist only in
opening, in un-closeting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage
toward the other’ (Derrida, 1989, p. 60). Moving beyond knowledge thus means unlocking new
areas of sensation and, following Albrecht-Crane (2005), ‘new colours, noises, rhythms, odours,
textures, longings, desires, practices, feelings, beliefs, gestures and knowledges’, thus giving rise
to ‘new ways to appreciate life and new ways to live’ (p. 140). Derrida’s (1989) thought-
provoking claim that ‘the only possible invention is invention of the impossible’ (p. 60) carries
this argument even further, as it implies that invention which simply extrapolates the new from
the given does in fact invent nothing (hence pseudo-invention). True invention, in contrast,
always ‘presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract’ (Derrida, 1992b, p.
312) and hence emphasizes the production of new events which are neither enforceable nor
programmable (Hillis Miller, 2001). It probably hardly needs mention that invention à la Derrida
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does not mimic the route of innovation literature which denotes novelty as the product of
thoroughly planned knowledge-sharing technologies (Meier Sørensen, 2006). After all, the
invention of a different future (Reynolds, 2004) only becomes possible if the secret of non-
knowledge remains untouched or remains ‘irreducible to presence or to presentation’ (Derrida,
1995, p. 65).
There is still another aspect which sets the present understanding of invention apart from
the current literature on innovation: the embodiment of invention. To be sure, Derrida’s work not
only emphasizes the undeconstructible right of alterity and difference, but also provides a view
which construes invention and novelty as events that invariably and necessarily affect our bodily
senses. That is, invention always happens ‘through a crisis in which the body trembles’ (Meier
Sørensen, 2006, p. 135). Derrida’s (1995) beautiful treatise of Kierkegaard’s notion of
‘mysterium tremendum’ is most illustrative of the embodied aspect of invention because it
highlights that the encounter with absolute otherness represents an experience where ‘we neither
know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret. We are afraid of the
fear, we anguish over the anguish, and we tremble’ (p. 54). Fear and trembling, as Derrida (1995)
explained elsewhere, indicate that the encounter with the other or absolute otherness exceeds ‘my
seeing and my knowing’ (p. 54) and thus denote the experience of anticipated (yet unimaginable
and uncontrollable) change. Fear and trembling, signifying the ‘irrepressible shaking’ of the body
(Derrida, 1995, p 53), is nothing else than the embodied, sensual response in the face of an
unknown future and, most fundamentally, the always present possibility of failure (i.e. the chance
to take the wrong or irresponsible decision). It follows, then, that the experience of fear and
trembling is at the same time the precondition of genuine invention and the springboard for
personal transformation or becoming-other. As with Deleuze’s (1994) metaphor of swimming,
fear and trembling signifies movement and ‘means composing the singular points of one’s own
body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also
propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world’ (p. 15). The encounter with otherness,
so it seems, stimulates transformation in the sense that one’s encounter with the other will
invariably lead one (or both) changed. Or, as Meier Sørensen’s (2006) convincingly argued in
that context, the event which makes one fear and tremble is ‘where new and unforeseen
connections … become possible’ (p. 135; slightly modified).
In view of the argument that invention is not simply insecure (in the face of unknown and
uncontrollable risks), but necessarily has to be so (since else there would be no way to talk about
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a future ‘worth living for’), we can intensify this claim by positing that unconditional help entails
that a decision vis-à-vis the secrecy (of absolute otherness) requires a ‘moment of madness’. Yet
again, ‘madness’ neither refers to the risk-taking propensity of some dare-devilish personality –
as proclaimed, for instance, by current entrepreneurship literature (cf. Chapter 2) – nor to an odd
kind of pathology which seems to characterize social man. Instead, invention is mad because it
must necessarily exceed available (technical or economic) rationalities and calculative reasoning
and hence presupposes a courageous ‘leap of faith’ beyond the facts at hand. Madness, on the
face of it, is the only valid category to accommodate the idea that the possibility of invention is
invariably related with a journey into unknown waters, so to speak. Where madness alludes to the
risk and the uncertain future being associated with one’s encounter with otherness, it is implicated
that this encounter heralds a transformative experience where both self and other are
fundamentally affected (i.e. shaken in their foundation). Derrida’s notion of madness must
therefore not lead to the false conclusion that invention, conceived as the establishment of new
ways of living, signifies a miraculous gift, but rather that it presupposes both uncomplaining and
restless work (Serres, 2000). To lend weight to the assertion that the ‘social’ must always remain
both urgent and concrete, it is in the ensuing conclusion that I will come full circle with the
current topic, social entrepreneurship. I will thereby allow for the observation that all social
events subsist in both the past and the future, in and beyond economy, in order then to elaborate
on the role of critical thinking in conjunction with the utopian trajectory of minor social
entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
… the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naiveté
of our ideals, and while we thought that we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may
not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 22)
Lyotard (1988), among others, has written about the importance of doing away with the
ostensible consistency and transcendental explanatory power of grand narratives; at the same
time, he made clear that one should not shy away from the complexity and paradoxes entailed in
small narratives of social reality. This chapter had a comparable aim as I tried to juxtapose the
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limitedness of a performative (i.e. conditional) interpretation of the ‘social’ with the profound
complexity inherent to a pure understanding of the concept. However, this critical engagement
with the commonplace use of the ‘social’ in such concepts like ‘social capital’ or ‘development
aid’ had a broader significance because it adumbrated, by analogy, that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’, in its stage of ‘infancy’, has more often than not been prescribed and
instrumentalized by virtue of managerial reason and thereby all too often been construed as ‘a
task of modernizing one’s thought and language’ (Evers, 2006, p. 7). After all, this Derridean
elaboration is anything but indicative of a new master plan of the ‘social’ of entrepreneurship.
Nor does the juxtaposition of conditional and unconditional ways of being or, more precisely,
becoming propagate the establishment of a post-economic era, as suggested by certain
postcolonial scholars (e.g. Escobar, 1995). Instead, unconditionality denotes an artistic (and
invariably risky) balancing act at the interface between social and economic rationalities. To
hence make palpable the realization that Derrida’s ideas do not endorse the obliteration of
economy, but rather conceive the opposition between unconditionality and economy as a fertile
(though burdensome) tension and a leveraging force for responsible social action, I will now
delineate a hybrid modus operandi of social entrepreneurship and, thereafter, discuss if and to
what extent this conceptualization lends itself to the formulation of utopia.
Hybridity: The Perpetual Negotiation of Incommensurate Differences
There is no way of stepping outside the Law entirely; there is no alternative order beyond and
separate from the circuits of power [e.g. economy] within which must operate. (Bogue,
2005, p. 116)
The question over supremacy between the social and the economic aspect of social
entrepreneurship has undoubtedly concerned scholars since the concept entered the sphere of
academia. Anderson et al.’s (2006) elaboration most plainly illustrates this concern, especially the
part where the authors ask: ‘how dominant must the social mission be? Must social goals be the
only aims of the operation, or is some intention to make profits admitted as well?’ As discussed
in Chapter 1, it is not uncommon to encounter texts on social entrepreneurship which proclaim a
‘relative priority’ of ‘social versus economic wealth creation’ (Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2005,
p. 434), or vice versa (Drayton, 2006; Goff, 2006). I have thereby briefly argued in the
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concluding part of Chapter 3 that these sorts of enunciations either capitalize on the simplistic
assumption that the ‘social’ and ‘economic’ are strictly distinct spheres or that they can be
harmonized in a more or less effortless manner. Though it is beyond doubt that the enquiry into
the relationship between the ‘social’ and ‘economic’ raises an important issue, I also contend that
the questions asked by Anderson et al. lead us in the wrong direction. That is to say that seeking a
solution to the question ‘how much is enough’ appears futile, since it implies that the ‘social’ and
‘economic’ are measurable attributes and thus amenable to the kind of knowledge which allows
for managerial governance. Having rejected Anderson et al.’s attempt of fixing the ‘social’ of
entrepreneurship, it appears important to endorse an account which throws a different light on the
blend of the ‘social’ and ‘economic’.
Summoning Derrida to begin this quest, we are reminded that the two orders of the
unconditional (i.e. absolute responsibility, friendship, hospitality, etc.) and the conditional (i.e.
economy, law, etc.) are in a relation of contradiction where they remain both irreducible to one
another and yet indissociable. In obvious opposition to the view endorsed by Anderson et al.
(2006) – which seems to suggest that the ratio between the social and the economic can be
determined from the drawing table, so to speak – Derrida’s work implies that the social and
economic sphere of whatever event always belong together and, second, that there is no
possibility of reducing (or appropriating) one domain to the other. By implication, this view, so it
seems, advocates a hybrid conceptualization of social entrepreneurship which takes into account
that the social always impinges on the economic and the economic invariably penetrates the
social realm while neither side is supposed to gain the definitive upper hand (cf. Chapter 3).
There is, however, a constraint inherent in the present use of the term ‘hybridity’, namely that
social entrepreneurship scholars have already construed it as a chiefly innate and stable essence
of organizations. In other words, business and management scholars more often than not use the
concept ‘hybridity’ to circumscribe a static relation between the social and economic aspects of
organizations and thereby pretend that hybridity represents an attribute a given organization can
either possess or not possess. It is important to notice here that there are two slightly different
ways in which such an essentialist perspective of hybridity is established. In a nutshell, there are
first those writings which proclaim that hybridity can be determined through a continuum that
spans a polarity between unambiguous sectors (i.e. business, government) on the one hand and
hybrids (i.e. non-profits, voluntary organizations) on the other. This view holds that organizations
can be described through their position on the continuum, meaning that one can say with
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precision if a given organization is ‘pure’ or hybrid, that is, if it operates on a single set of
practices and logics or if it instead comprises elements of both poles (Billis, 2003). The point
worth adding is that the continuum is employed not just to denote the amount of pureness or
hybridity respectively,
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but, most fundamentally, to employ this knowledge so as to reflect on
how to better manage the given organization and on how to make it more effective (Austin et al.,
2003). On the face of it, the continuum in the first route to hybridity is primarily conceived as a
diagnostic tool which allows one to define proportionate measures for consciously managing the
dynamic fit among the respective elements (Crossan, Bell & Ibbotson, 2005). The second route to
hybridity is basically grounded on the notion of ‘blurring boundaries’.
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In specific terms, this
understanding of hybridity is based on the premise that the conduct of contemporary non-profits
and non-governmental organizations cannot be subsumed under or explained by traditional
schemata of profit- or not-for-profit management. In contrast to the previous view which
presupposes the existence of a spectrum of social and economic indicators, ‘blurring boundaries’
refers to the proposition that the ‘third sector should be seen as an intermediate area with quite
open borders and grey zones’ (Evers, 2006, p. 8). Though this view quite evidently disqualifies
the assumption of distinct organizations or sectors, it is particularly noteworthy that the notion of
‘blurring boundaries’ does not proclaim an equal valuation of for- and non-profit logics and
practices, since it more often than not endorses that the non-profit and/or non-governmental
sectors need to be reshaped, for the sake of their own survival, by virtue of a (business)
entrepreneurial spirit (Evers, 2006). In other words, hybridity, as currently used in conjunction
with ‘blurring boundaries’, is not taken to denote the mutual influence or even co-implication of
social and economic parameters, but as the conscious re-engineering of non-profit and/or non-
governmental organizations according to the logic of the business sector (Crossan, Bell &
Ibbotson, 2005).
What is left out in both of these approaches is, among other things, that hybridity can be
pinpointed as a transient, ephemeral phenomenon; i.e. as a process rather than as a stable essence.
I would like to repudiate this omission by contending that hybridity should be used to delineate
the excessive dynamic of all social action and hence to emphasize that both the strict separation
between economic calculation and social action as well as the idea of managerial governance of
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A distinction which quite obviously implies an unequal hierarchy (Derrida, 1981).
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Notice that ‘blurred boundaries’ stands in opposition to the notion of ‘dual bottom line’ being discussed in the
context of social capital. Essentially, where the former concept endorses the annulment of boundaries, it is the latter
perspective which proclaims that the distinction between the economic and social sphere still persists.
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hybridity are probably more to be seen as theoretical exercises than as true pragmatic, not to say
prudent, possibilities. Moreover, hybridity, in my assessment, should be used to delineate that the
‘social’ is part of a rich and pluralistic (not only economic, but also political, cultural, etc.; cf.
Pile & Thrift, 2001) heritage and presence (Evers, 2006) and, most fundamentally, that these
incommensurable aspects are in constant dialogue or, more precisely, in a relation of perpetual
contestation. It follows from this that though Derrida’s idea of ‘unconditionality’ at first sight
appears to denote a space beyond economy, hybridity, the way I use it in the present argument,
does not mean to ignore the pragmatic demands of social entrepreneurial endeavors nor to ‘brush
off’ the given legacy by dint of Schumpeterian (1975) creative destruction. In light of the
previous inquiry into development in which I came to highlight the inventive side of
unconditionality and proclaimed that such a mode of conduct endorses the view that one should
accept ‘the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing
everything, or killing everyone’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 71) – so that it ultimately remains uncertain
whether the other is a ‘good person, or may be the devil’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 70) – , it must remain
undoubted that this is not to be read as a revolutionary manifesto which exhibits no interest, not
to say respect, for the economics and pragmatics of social entrepreneurship. Quite the contrary,
the understanding of hybridity which derives from Derrida’s (2004) work holds, first, that the
‘social’ is in various parts and to different degrees economically embedded (and vice versa) and,
second, that social entrepreneurship is always ‘torn’ between unconditionality and conditionality
or, to use Derrida’s own terms, must balance ‘a ‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision’ (p. 51) with the
pragmatic reality of the concrete situation. In consequence, I favor a process view over the static
view discussed above because such a perspective takes into account that hybridity, due to its
dynamic and transience, is a source of instability which requires constant negotiation. To be sure,
a processual understanding of hybridity does not pretend that the tensions between the different
logics can be managed (i.e. controlled), but rather reveals that the incompossibility of economic
and social practices and rationalities demands that one constantly and persistently takes issue with
the possibility that one of the two foci might gain a relative priority over the other (Lyotard,
1992). In addition, hybridity emphasizes the complex and paradoxical relationship between the
social and the economic aspect of social entrepreneurial conduct, stressing both that
unconditional social entrepreneurial endeavors necessarily take place in concrete historically,
culturally and economically structured environments and, by implication, that one must
necessarily negotiate ‘between the unconditional and conditional, between the absolute and the
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relative, between the universal and the particular’ (Critchley & Kearney, 2004p. xi). Hence, in
accordance with Derrida’s conclusion that ‘(t)he undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the
tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign
to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still … to give itself up to the impossible decision,
while taking account of law and rules’ (Derrida, 1999b, p. 66), one can further say that the
contradictions engendered through a hybrid modus operandi are not meant to paralyze social
action, but, far from it, to enable it. This contention cannot possibly be overemphasized because it
implies that though ‘(o)ne is never sure of making the just choice’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 56), one
nevertheless needs to step into the circle of economy and try to act responsibly despite the ever-
present risk, if not certainty, of failure (cf. above). In consequence, the undecidability of the pure
‘social’ as well as the indefinite nature and the impossibility of responsibility are to be conceived
as (or should become) the leverage of all social action. In view of the impossibility of
unconditionality, both economically and practically speaking, it is precisely the tension between
the economic and the uneconomic part of social entrepreneurship which delineates a hyperbolic
sense of the ‘social’ which is the only standard ‘which ought to haunt every judgment of good
conscience’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001). By implication, this interpretation of hybridity is quite
evidently opposed to the current academic literature on social entrepreneurship which delineates
the issue as a rather unproblematic ‘marriage’ of profit- and non-profit technologies or as a matter
of rational choice. Hybridity, in my assessment, should instead be read as an open, infinite
endeavor which is both riddled and driven by practical and ideological tensions. Again, these
tensions in turn make it necessary that the contradictions are negotiated. This, however, does not
mean that they need to be solved in a managerial sense. That is to say that the contradictions
between the unconditional and conditional, between the economic and the uneconomic aspect of
social entrepreneurship must remain in communication with each other, while nevertheless
keeping them endlessly diverging (Poxon & Stivale, 2005).
My argument for a concept of ‘hybridity’ which implies that social entrepreneurial
undertakings must leave room at the border of their activities for excess, that is, for what is
unprogrammable and incalculable by economic and managerial reason, might lead critical minds
now to argue that this Derridean elaboration of mine has merely capitalized on the appeal (and
force) of fantasy. Yet, there is no basis for such an assertion, since Derrida’s work quite clearly
implies that social, ethical, responsible (or whatever term seems apt to circumscribe the encounter
with absolute otherness) deeds are intimately connected with immediate urgencies and hence
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concrete events. In the rest of this chapter I will elaborate in what ways this Derridean musing
respectively relates to or diverges from the idea of utopia.
Social Entrepreneurship as Utopia, Perhaps …
… we must revitalize thinking as a critical process; again let thinking throw life into a crisis.
(Meier Sørensen, 2006, p. 137)
Arguably, the contribution of organizations to the social order in today’s society is a modern
truism. Having addressed this question, however preliminarily, in relation to social
entrepreneurship and through selected works of Derrida, I have so far tried to reveal the
immanent difficulty and contingency of all social action. It is thus possible that the implications
and demands which derive from an unconditional reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship)
might appear expansive (since impossible), and there are virtually a thousand reasons why this
elaboration could be discredited in view of its ostensibly utopian trajectory. To address this
looming appraisal, I will close this chapter by elaborating on the implications of a minor reading
of social entrepreneurship and in particular on how these ideas either diverge from or can be
adjusted to the idea of utopia.
The pivotal question in this context is how to bring together (though not harmonize) the aim
of doing good as well as the idea of positive change and transformation without simultaneously
reifying the image of the individualistic, personally achieving person or society (Best & Kellner,
1991). In terms of the individualized representation of social entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2),
one could hence truly object that Derrida’s work does not at all stand in opposition to the current
academic literature, because it seems to construe social entrepreneurship as a messiah-like
person. This is, however, not a completely wrong impression, since Derrida in fact came to talk
about messianicity
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in several of his works (and interviews) where he revealed, among other
things, the Jewish roots of his thought (Anderson-Irwin, 2001). Yet, I would like to contend that
the present inquiry had no part in affirming the individualized representation of social
entrepreneurship we have inherited from academic literature, since it did not try to re-perform the
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The notion of ‘messianicity without messianism’, that is, messianism without religion (Derrida, 2004b), reaffirms
the distinction between the philosophical messianic and the various historical messianisms (Reynolds, 2004) and thus
bears witness to the ever-becomingness and temporality of responsible, unconditional events.
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hopes and dreams of science, especially the route of thinking which establishes the subject matter
as the materialization of hyper-ethical man. That is to say that messianicity does not refer to
individualism and even less so to the passive, or even obedient and idle, awaiting of our
redeemer. To be sure, messianicity is explicitly not utopianism because it refers neither to
daydreaming nor to the mesmerizing idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing individual entrepreneur. It
must additionally be borne in mind that the notion of ‘minor social entrepreneurship’ I will use in
this closing paragraph does not mean to throw out the baby with the bathwater (where bathwater
signifies such virtues as social change and invention, or simply the stimulation of a better future).
Instead, the notion of ‘minor’ retains a focus on change, since it dictates immediate and concrete
urgencies (Derrida, 2000) and calls upon us to take concrete action so as to actively strive for a
different future. Conceiving minor social entrepreneurship from the perspective of messianicity
thus pinpoints, following Derrida (1994), ‘the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that
is, to the most irreducible heterogeneous otherness. Nothing is more ‘realistic’ or ‘immediate’
than this messianic apprehension, straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is
coming’ (p. 248). It should be clear, then, that my previous double reading of the ‘social’ had no
obsession with actively ‘engineering the space of innovation’ (Thrift, 2006, p. 282), but rather
with working out how social change relates with a people and a future ‘to come’. This claim is
significant to the extent that it emphasizes that change always presupposes hard work whereby it
at the same time cannot be enforced. As paradoxical as this may sound, ‘waiting without waiting’
is precisely the modest, yet persistent, preparation of minor social entrepreneurship ‘for someone
or something’ that, in order to happen or ‘arrive, must exceed and surprise every determinate
anticipation’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 250).
In view of the above conclusion that the ‘social’ cannot be reconciled with any sense of
certainty, one (i.e. those who favor unequivocal specifications to human action) might raise the
question of whether this investigation gives any reason for optimism. Worse still, given that this
investigation has done away with the assumption of logocentrism (Derrida, 1976), that is, the
metaphysical belief that social entrepreneurship is an identifiable Being that holds the key for
social problem solving, one might argue that we have lost all that we yearn for: ‘the belief in
goodness, in virtuous men and actions’ (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 40). We could even maximize
potential frustration by proclaiming that since Derrida’s work does not offer easy solutions, i.e.
the sort of solutions that render knowledge performative (cf. Chapter 1), we have reached the
bottom of the valley, that is, nihilism. Though such a conclusion might indeed obtrude at this
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point, at least from those who expected that this investigation would provide the sort of recipe-
book approach we are used to obtaining from management guidebooks, my argument shall bring
to the forefront the positive consequences of my conclusion. Foremost among these is that we can
release ourselves from the ‘hammer blow of historical knowledge’ (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 42) and in
particular from the kind of truth which tells us that attributes such as ‘good’ or ‘social’ are
inherent, qua definition or due to prevailing metaphysical assumptions, to social
entrepreneurship. I hence prefer to use the epithet ‘minor’ to point out the abolishment of the
assumption that social entrepreneurship is simply about the provision of solutions (e.g. solutions
to the breakdown of western welfare systems; solutions for overcoming poverty, malnutrition,
unemployment or for closing the void between the Third and the First World) and, most
fundamentally, of the assumption that the search for overall solutions (i.e. grand narratives) is to
be regarded as the finality of all thought. In accordance with Deleuze’s (1994) observation that
‘(w)e are led to believe that the activity of thinking … begins only with the search for solutions’
(p. 158), I would like to conclude that instead of seeing social entrepreneurship (exclusively) as a
‘do-gooder’ that seeks the grand ‘solution to everything’ (cf. Drayton, 2006) there are good
reasons to construe the matter as opening up fields of discussion ‘in which there are many
possible solutions, each of which captures something, but not everything, put before us by the
problem’ (May, 2005, p. 83). This shift of emphasis, in my assessment, best accommodates both
Nietzsche’s (1984) contention that there are no ‘aeternae veritates’
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and hence no eternal
solutions, as well as Derrida’s (2000) suspicion against the certitude of performative systems
which keep searching for simple answers by asking ‘what for? To what benefit?’ After all, ‘a task
whose solution is by the same token the object of knowledge, a task which a simple recognition
would render accessible, would this still be a task?’ (Derrida, 2000).
With this in mind, I would like to conceive of utopia in the present context as being about
the construction of a social space outside existing parameters. It becomes intelligible, then, that
critical thinking becomes an incremental part of such a conceptualization of utopia. In other
words, instead of seeing social change as either an ‘an accidental gift from the gods’ (Meier
Sørensen, 2006, p. 135) or as the result of a sovereign, solution-driven entrepreneur, we could
claim that it is critical reason and even pessimism which characterizes the modus operandi of a
minor social entrepreneurship. Essentially, critical thinking here points less at the contemplative,
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Ethernal truths (cf. p. 19)
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detached critique than at the active, entrepreneurial experimenting with the limits of what can be
thought and at the probing of the limits of what can be articulated and what can be done. This
claim leads us to Derrida’s (1995) contention that though the idea of responsibility, the duty of
decision ‘are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia’ (p. 68), we must not miss out
on the transformative horizon of this dynamic because paradox, scandal, and aporia are
themselves nothing other than ‘the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limits’ (ibid.). It is at
this juncture that we can probably sense the echo of Foucault’s thought. In specific terms, if we
would like to give shape to minor social entrepreneurship through a conceptual persona that
expresses the kind of ethos that we have tried to adumbrate in the course of this investigation, one
could say that this figure is less a creative destructor than a deconstructive creator (Steyaert &
Dey, 2006) which (not who, since this again would hint at a distinct idea of human nature)
endeavors to make ‘harder those acts which are now too easy … as soon as people begin to no
longer be able to think things the way they have been thinking them, transformation becomes at
the same time very urgent, very difficult and entirely possible’ (Foucault, 2000, pp. 160 – 161;
slightly modified). In consequence, minor social entrepreneurship retains the possibility of social
change, yet transformation is not achieved by some overbearing, overconfident, (arche-) violent
individual, but by the perpetual deconstruction of prevailing truisms about what it means to help,
to aid, to do good or simply to be social. This trajectory is indeed Nietzschean, at least to the
extent that it endorses putting into question canonical ideas of the ‘social’ of entrepreneurship.
And though some might ask whether we ‘(a)re we all capable of having our self-evidences
continually undermined, … living a life of ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’?’ (Berard, 1999, p.
222), such critical activism, in my view, is still far more positive and valuable than believing in
some super-natural being that will be able to clean up the mess of our world. More than that, I
would like to claim that pessimism is a positive activity, since it enables one to see that current
conceptualization of social entrepreneurship actually distracts us from comprehending that the
state of urgency which is implied in contemporary atrocities, inequalities, oppressions, etc. is
related with the immediate importance of concrete social events. Minor social entrepreneurship,
by extension, points at the genuine and undeconstructible responsibility of all man, and not just of
a class of people who are taken to be ‘all too social’. Hence, there are reasons to believe that
pessimism does not border on the negative, but draws our attention to the as yet rather unsocial
trajectory of social entrepreneurship. I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2 that prevailing
representations of social entrepreneurship gain their legitimacy by proclaiming absolute value(s),
600
which stand in obvious contrast to man’s ‘smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of
becoming and passing’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 9). I see much value in encountering these works
with suspicion so as to construe social entrepreneurship as a collective, mutual task. I would
argue that having been critical about the current signification of social entrepreneurship does not
necessarily signify a ‘blasphemy’, but a responsible examination of those representations which
subordinate social entrepreneurship to the simplified doxa that (super)man can establish
(individually or collectively) a world and life in which we can live most happily. Though this
may sound like an oxymoron, it is fundamental to understand that this inquiry (and the thesis at
large) has tried to raise the moral stakes of social entrepreneurship, since it exemplified that the
more a code like ‘social entrepreneurship’ tends to gleam in the name of ‘ethics’, ‘responsibility’
or ‘morality’, the more there are reasons to use the ‘condition of the question’ (Derrida, 2000b) so
as to emphasize the complex, paradoxical and equivocal aspect of the subject matter. To be sure,
it is only by scrutinizing the idea of social entrepreneurship being a God-like creature, or social
entrepreneurship representing a purely logical, rational endeavor which proceeds – by dint of
management knowledge and technologies – smoothly, effortlessly and without aporia, that we are
enabled to see that these dominant views deeply betray a genuine understanding of what it means
to be(come) social. Since there is no value, and not even rationality, in seeking shelter and
security behind programs, prescriptions and codes of good governance or ethics, it is due to a
minor reading of social entrepreneurship that we can comprehend that it is only by being
skeptical towards our beloved commonplaces that one can truly embrace the possibility of
moving beyond present limits to our individual and collective imagination (Patton, 2003).
In concluding, I would like to recall that minor social entrepreneurship has nothing in
common with the imagining of an impossibly ideal society (as in the case of Third Way Politics;
cf. Chapter 1) and still less with those writings which use utopia as a concept which is not even
intended to be realized (e.g. Morus, 1992). Rather, minor social entrepreneurship emphasizes that
social change is something one is literally pushed into because of the realization that one can no
longer pursue the parameters of the present. Utopia, to put it bluntly, means identifying and
overcoming the deadlock of the current legacy. I would hence like to conceive of social
entrepreneurship as an event of social action that takes issue with the limitations of the status quo
and which enacts new forms of living and thinking. Essentially, this sort of event, while allowing
for becoming-other, neither relies on the brute force of human will nor on the pervasiveness of
strategic enunciations (de Certeau, 1984), but always operates, if not balances, at the nexus
601
between ‘belonging and the breakthrough’ (Critchley, 1999, p. 70). Evidently then, a minor social
entrepreneurship points not at Utopia (capital letter), but at the many small, local and ephemeral
utopias which are made possible by noticing concrete anomalies and disharmonies (Spinosa,
Flores & Dreyfus, 1997) and by setting in motion a process of constant play through which
dominant ways of thinking and acting are thrown into a crises and through which new things are
made happen (Meier Sørensen, 2006). In short, minor social entrepreneurship embraces and
thrives on ‘the ever-present possibility of invention, reconfiguration or transformation in our
existing, historically conditioned and contingent ways of understanding’ (Patton, 2003, p. 18).
To bring to the forefront the profound value of ephemeral and transient knowledge as well
as work out the tenet inherent to Derrida’s notion of non-knowledge and the secret, it is within
the following epilogue that I will get to talk of the end (of this thesis) and the future to come so as
to remind us that uncertainty, undecidability and those aporias which make (and necessarily must
make) us fear and tremble are parts of every responsible prospect. It remains to say, then, that
though the elaboration above has attempted to dissociate the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’
from the idea of sovereignty and particularly from the image of the sovereign social entrepreneur,
it is clear that the response to this plea (however appealing it might be) does not seem to be
around the corner, so to speak. However, though minor social entrepreneurship might be still
construed by some as a dream of thought, ‘this madness is perhaps not so mad’ (Derrida, 2004, p.
60).
602
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***
Epilogue: On the End … and the Future
I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period … it is not anything to get
back to. (Foucault, 1984, p. 347)
Today, perhaps because we are too familiar with at least the existence, if not the operation, of
machines for programming invention, we dream of reinventing invention on the far side of
the programmed matrices. For is a programmed invention still an invention? Is it an event
through which the future (l’avenir) comes to us? … the only possible invention is
invention of the impossible. (Derrida, 1989, pp. 46 & 60)
A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future. (Derrida, 1995, p. 387)
Reaching the physical end of a book, its last page, implicates that one condenses, synthesizes,
wraps up and concludes. In the ‘end’, as convention tells us, everything is said (and done). The
author is allowed (self-contently or even proudly) to exempt him/her-self from his/her
responsibility. Such a view of the ‘end’, however, is largely reminiscent of the metaphor of the
root (book; Meier Sørensen, 2001). Once the end of either the root or the branch has been
reached, there is no other option than to pause or to turn back (along the same trace). Thus the
notion of ‘tracing’, which represents the immanent logic of the tree, endorses either a halt or the
reproduction of ‘the same’. Moreover, the root-type book is based on a linear logic which
envisions the book as a unity, that is, as the ‘One as subject or object’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 8). The middle of a book (or tree) is therefore simply the passage which points at a teleological
end-point; it gets reduced to a Derridean ‘supplement’. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
one ‘will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a
signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject – anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to
fascist concretions’ (p. 9). Though all books invariably come to an (physical) end, it must be
borne in mind that the root or the tree undoubtedly impart a partial image. We must hence not shy
613
away from conceding that ‘(t)he end doesn’t mean there’s nothing any more. The problem, there
as elsewhere, is what comes after the end … For everything is achieved, there is nothing to be
found at the end any more; everything is already here – that is to say, beyond the end’
(Baudrillard, 1988, p. 202). To be sure, the ‘One’, that is, the ostensible unity of the book (which
materializes most notably at the ‘end’), is nothing less than a cultural creation or, more precisely,
the result of over-codification: it ‘appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity
by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8).
But if things were so easy why are we musing over ‘(h)ow to end something? If only we knew,
our struggle would have come to completion some time ago’ (Jones & Surman, 2002, p. 190).
Perceiving a certain uneasiness vis-à-vis the image of the tree – not least because it proclaims that
there is, following Baudrillard, ‘nothing to be found’ because ‘everything is already here’,
stretched out in front of us, line by line – should we not hold back and tame our temptation to
construe the book as an enclosed totality of meaning? Should we not dispense with the root-type
view of the book where the end signals a closure, however provisional this may be?
Keeping silent, as Derrida (1995b) contended, would already constitute a modality of
possible speaking/responding which leaves it to the reader how and to what ends the (secret of
the) end gets appointed. The end thus opens up to the future, once (and only when) we suspend
language, that is, ‘a particular determinate language’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 135) which corresponds
with a conception of reality that is ‘univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a
word, communicable’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 1). To iterate and emphasize this position: in order to
enable an opening towards the future there seems no other option than to abandon, as Deleuze
and Guattari advocate, the tree metaphor which engenders an ultimate end, and instead opt for an
insecure and unprogrammable future ‘to come’ (Derrida, 1999). On the face of it, such a future
cannot possibly be commanded from a ‘General’ (to use the term with which Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) delineate the ‘dictatorship theorem’ which hinges on the principle of direction
and unity). In order to let (not make) the future happen, it is essential to employ the principle of
the rhizome and, by implication, a language that allows for multiple entryways ‘along the lines of
an other writing’ (Derrida, 1981, p. 53; emphasis in original). ‘To come’ is or, more precisely,
continuously becomes the condition which evades all possibility of a priori planning and pure
reasoning; on the contrary, it unfolds as a decent (though intractable), never ending and thus open
movement. ‘To come’ simultaneously induces a moment of utopia, conceived as that which is
missing (Levitas, 2000), but might never be attained (Derrida, 2001), and infinite hopefulness and
614
faith. The condition of ‘to come’ must therefore be set apart from those endeavors which try to
force the future ‘to come’. This said, we have reached the point where the ‘to come’ signals the
invention of the impossible, meaning that ‘you can never know beforehand what will happen or
whether anything at all will happen’ (Hillis Miller, 2001, p. 69). Looked at in this way, ‘to come’
always includes the possibility that nothing will happen at all or that the end does not contain, in
any sense, the possibility of a different future. Given this moment of undecidability at the
(physical) end of this thesis, the only category which seems legitimate and which does justice to
our aporia of knowing-not knowing how to proceed (Jones, 2003) is the ‘perhaps’. Thus by
having hope in the future whilst resisting the temptation both to enforce a particular end (as the
root-type book would have it) or to proclaim the Future (capital letter) by way of just another
teleology (Foucault, 1984), it is the ‘perhaps’ which provides a third, forth, fifth … way, i.e. ‘and
… and … and … ’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25), thereby paying tribute to (and thriving on)
the unknown, the secret, without postulating a singular direction. The secret inherent in the
‘perhaps’ is thus not the ‘violence of the rest that is yet to come, the pure horror of the silent
specters that cannot be named’ (Fuglsang & Böhm, 2003, p. 357); instead, the ‘perhaps’ denotes a
positive instance, since it trades on the mysterious secret which, despite being beyond our reach
and control, enlists our imagination and desire. Conceived in this way, the secret of the future
evokes our passion since ‘it is the call of this secret … which points back to the other or to
something else, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 29).
The idea of the ‘perhaps’ thus appears as the only responsible conception of the event(s) ‘to
come’ since it invites us to embrace it with unconditional openness while encouraging us to …
… love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’.
Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming
of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose
possibilization must prevail over the impossible. For a possible that would only be
possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance,
would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak,
life-assured. This would be a programme or a causality, a development, a process without
an event. The possibilization of the impossible possible must remain at one and the same
time as undecidable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself.
(Derrida, 1997, p. 29)
615
References
Baudrillard (1988). Is the Rectum a Grave? In D. Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural
Activism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1981). Positions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (1989). Psyche: Inventions of the Other, trans. C. Porter. In L. Water & W. Godzich
(eds.), Reading de Man Readings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). Points: Interviews 1974 – 1994, trans. P. Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Derrida, J. (1995b). Passions: An Oblique Offering. In On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J. Leavey
& I. McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1997). Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins. London: Verso.
Derrida, J. (1999). Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In
R. Kearney & M. Dooley (eds.), Questioning Ethics. London: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (2000). Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond,
trans. R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2001). A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida. In L. Simmons & H. Worth
(eds.), Derrida Downunder. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press Limited.
Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fuglsang, M. & Böhm, S. (2003). The Rest is Silence: A Remark on the Micro-Fascism of
Critique. Ephemera: Critical Dialogues on Organization, 3, 356 – 361.
Hillis Miller, J. (2001). Derrida and Literature. In T. Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the
Humanities: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, C. (2003). As if Business Ethics were Possible, ‘Within such Limits’ … Organization, 10,
223 – 248.
Jones, C. & Surman, E. (2002). After Organization Studies. Ephemera: Critical Dialogues on
Organization, 2, 186 – 192.
Levitas, R. (2000). Community, Utopia and New Labour. Local Economy, 15, 188 – 197.
Meier Sørensen, B. (2001). Assemblage Notes, or, A Comment on the Factory of Things.
Ephemera: Critical Dialogues on Organization, 4, 367 – 373.
616
***
Curriculum Vitae
Ich, Pascal Dey, geboren am 12. April 1973 in Brugg (Kanton Aargau) mit Heimatort Marsens
(Kanton Fribourg), habe den ersten Teil meiner obligatorischen Schulzeit in Boll (Kanton Bern)
verbracht, wo ich sowohl die Primarschule wie auch die ersten zwei Jahre der Sekundarschule (5.
– 6. Klasse) besucht habe. Anschliessend absolvierte ich das 7. und 8. obligatorische Schuljahr
zwischen 1986 bis 1988 im Untergymnasium in Bolligen, bevor ich von 1988 bis 1993 das
Gymnasium Bern Kirchenfeld besuchte. Im Jahr 1993 erlangte ich ebenda die Wirtschaftsmatura
(Typus E).
Nach dem Militärdienst und einem Zwischenjahr habe ich von Oktober 1994 bis März 2001
Psychologie an der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Bern studiert. Im
Hauptfach studierte ich Klinische Psychologie (Lizentiat und Abschlussprüfung je Note 6), im
ersten Nebenfach Sozialpsychologie (Abschlussprüfung Note 6) und im zweiten Nebenfach
Psychopathologie (Abschlussprüfung Note 6).
Im Anschluss an eine Management-Trainee Ausbildung bei SBB Cargo in Basel wechselte ich an
den Lehrstuhl für Organisationspsychologie der Universität St. Gallen (HSG), wo ich zwischen
2002 und 2007 als Assistent tätig war. Mein Doktoratsstudium absolvierte ich an der Universität
Basel, wo ich am 15. November 2007 im Fach Soziologie die mündliche Prüfung abgelegt habe
(Abschlussprüfung Note „insigni cum laude“).
Zum Zeitpunkt des Drucks der Dissertation arbeitete ich als Unternehmensberater der Universität
St. Gallen.
doc_800628054.pdf
On The Name Of Social Entrepreneurship Business School Teaching, Research, And Development Aid
On the Name of Social Entrepreneurship: Business School
Teaching, Research, and Development Aid
Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde eines Doktors der Philosophie
vorgelegt der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät
der Universität Basel
von
Pascal Dey
von
Marsens, Kanton Fribourg
Zürich, 2008
2
Genehmigt von der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, auf
Antrag von Prof. Dr. Urs Stäheli (Universität Basel) und Prof. PhD Chris Steyaert
(Universität St. Gallen)
Basel, den 15. November 2007 Der Dekan
Prof. Dr. Ueli Mäder
3
Reaching out in a gesture of giving:
For a gift to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or dept.
Jacques Derrida (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, p. 12)
4
***
To Margrit & Walter
Kerry
5
***
– Contents –
Overture
Acknowledgements 9
… In a “Nutshell” 15
A Brief Note on Reading 45
Part I
‘The Construction of Social Entrepreneurship in and through 53
Research and Business School Teaching’
Prolegomenon I 58
1 Excellence and the Enterprising Academic: Social Entrepreneurship in 75
Business School Education
Prolegomenon II 152
2 The Rhetoric of Social Entrepreneurship: Paralogy and New 161
Language Games in Academic Discourse
Part II
‘Development Work: New Entrepreneurialism?’ 203
3 ‘Social, or Economic, That’s the Question … ’ – On Discursive 206
Ambivalence and Hybridity in Development Talk of NGO Practitioners
6
Part III
‘Lines of Flight’ 372
4 Deterritorializing Discourse Analysis or: For Discourse Analysis 376
… with a ‘Brief’ Detour
5 Deconstructive Reflexivity in the Business School without Conditions 454
6 Power, Discourse and Resistance: From Aesthetical Practice 496
… to Politics of Difference
Prolegomenon III 533
7 ‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? – The Becoming 556
Social of Social Entrepreneurship
Epilogue: On the End … and the Future 612
Curriculum Vitae 616
7
8
Overture
***
9
***
Acknowledgements
To open a thesis by asking what it means to acknowledge might appear extravagant, especially if
taking into account that the acknowledgment section represents a commonplace and hence an
ostensibly mandatory gesture, thus forming an inherent part of publishing a book. Be that as it
may, when I tried to express, that is, acknowledge, my gratitude, debt and love to people who in
various ways were involved in the production of this thesis, I was faced with a number of
paradoxes. I am keen to address them here in order to disclose, first, what fueled my ambivalence
and, second, how to deal with my hesitations. More precisely, if one agrees that the process of
acknowledging marks the moment when one admits one’s debt to identifiable others, it can be
argued that one enters, whether willingly or hesitantly, the sphere of instrumental exchange, that
is, the economy of give and take. One might choose to sidestep this heterodox discussion and
simply follow prevailing conventions. Yet, considering that the present thesis seeks to juxtapose
and elaborate on conditional and unconditional ways of being/becoming, and, most importantly,
to claim a space for social entrepreneurship beyond a reciprocal/economic logic, it seems all the
more appropriate to reflect briefly on the act of acknowledging and point to the ‘trap’ this might
entail. To this end, it is helpful to make reference to Derrida’s (1992) claim that the gift, to be
worth its name, disallows ‘reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt’ (p. 12). It follows
from Derrida’s statement that the gift is a fragile affair, since it all too easily gets transformed
into a mere economic transaction based on a reciprocal logic. One’s acknowledgment, in my
assessment, entails an analogous risk, since it is likely to represent a mere testimonio, that is, an
expression of debt to others as well as an implicit hope for a ‘write-off’ on the part of one’s
‘obligees’. In view of the fact that both giving and acknowledging are mostly seen as noble
gestures and/or as deeply ingrained habits of social exchange (Mauss, 1990), it is vital to note that
most gifts demand recompense, else one would overtly violate the economic circle of give-and-
take, of give-and-acknowledge. Thus, what I deem problematic in this context is that
10
acknowledging stresses a condition of reciprocity in which the acknowledger tries to clear his/her
debt by a gesture of submission. Derrida’s (2001) work on forgiveness allegorically reminds us
that acknowledging all too hastily gets transformed into a retrospective act where one turns
towards the past to actualize and repeat one’s self-accusation or insurmountable debt.
Whereas I have no ambition to obscure the fact that the ‘time of a thesis’ demands from
the ones we appreciate and love patience, forgiveness as well as material, intellectual and
emotional support, this alone is not good enough a reason for me to continue ‘as usual’. What I
want to stress here is that acknowledging is a paradoxical act, an act that, as postulated elsewhere
by Derrida (1992), requires a moment of madness. Probing the question of how to proceed if one
whishes to express one’s affinity and experience of intimacy and closeness with others without
getting trapped in a state of material or symbolic encumbrance, I would like to construe the
process of acknowledging as an unconditional event. Accordingly, the kind of acknowledgment I
am envisaging here relates less to the kind of pseudo-gift Derrida (cf. 1992; 1995; 2001) has
investigated and scrutinized in several of his works. Provided that acknowledging can either be
endowed with a calculative logic that induces a continuous process of give and take or be
conceptualized as an unconditional act that demands no recompense, it is more than obvious that
it is the latter exegesis that conveys the promise of neutralizing the hierarchical relationship
between the giver and the receiver. I therefore aspire to use this section to relate to my friends,
1
both in the professional and private realm, in a way that expresses gratitude beyond the limits of
calculative reasoning. To this end, it is once more helpful to call to mind that Derrida (1995)
claimed that a gift that deserves its name must not appear as such or else it would be destroyed by
anything that stimulates recompense. Derrida’s claim implies that even a simple ‘thank you’,
which acknowledges the presence of a gift while demanding something in return (in other words,
quid pro quo), induces the receiver to re-establish a state of economic equivalence by reason of
which the gift is annulled (Derrida, 1989). Indeed, simple solutions are not in sight. However, this
is not the time for resignation, and I would like to follow Derrida’s (1992) advise that even
though genuine giving might be impossible we must nevertheless enter the circle of economy so
1
The question of the boundary of friendship, that is, who counts as friend and who does not, is indeed a complex
one. Derrida (1997) provided an insightful account on the issue of friendship by scrutinizing the Aristotelian idea that
one cannot be the friend of many people because friendship needs time to develop trust. Opposing this view Derrida
was skeptical about limiting the number of friends and instead suggests that friendship should not be based on
calculations (which represent the central premise of trust), because as soon as one brings up the issue of calculation,
friendship is no longer driven by a concern for the other, but by one’s own concerns and needs (Jones, 2003).
11
as to induce ‘a simple movement of faith in the face of that which exceeds the limits of
experience, knowledge, science, economy’ (p. 30). Consequently, to counteract the
‘transcendental illusion’ of giving, I will put forward some passing comments which all
acknowledge the most oblique and elusive gifts such as time,
2
passion and pleasure, which I have
received and experienced over the last years and which leveraged and facilitated my reading,
thinking and writing.
To be sure, it is highly unlikely that this book would have been written without the aid,
support, advice and love of particular people (and, of course, the use and impetus of certain
technological devices; Law & Hassard, 1999).
3
Although it is clear that it will be impossible, for
reasons of space and memory, to mention all those I am fortunate enough to be acquainted with, I
would like to mention that in my private life (a term which has indeed lost some of its face value
over the years) there have been friends who have been surprisingly tolerant and forgiving
considering that I virtually became a missing link in their social network. Though isolation
represents an issue that is often construed by scholars as a pre-eminent aspect of free thinking,
4
it
is equally clear that the act of disappearance is not particularly helpful for maintaining
relationships. Irrespective of the fact that I cannot reverse the estrangement the last few years
might have brought about, I nevertheless anticipate and embrace the possibility of future
encounters.
Ideas travel, as Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) claimed, and sometimes one has to leave
one’s desk and make a journey to encounter them. In the case of my thesis it was very useful to
visit the University of Loughborough (UK) in order to meet and exchange ideas with some of the
forerunners of psychological discourse analysis. My gratitude, therefore, first goes to the Swiss
Federal Science Foundation which provided me with a scholarship enabling me to take an
2
Time, as we are told by Derrida (1992), is the only gift which truly deserves the name: ‘(t)he gift is not a gift, the
gift only gives to the extent it gives time … There where there is gift, there is time’ (p. 41; emphasis in original). In
other words, time, being insomuch taken for granted that it is hardly discernable as a gift, cannot be given or received
in any strict sense, which is, however, the precise reason why Derrida construed it as the materialization of his idea
of the genuine gift.
3
It would be exaggerated to claim that I have written this thesis alone, since I often made the experience that the
texts I read flow through me and onto the paper or, more precisely, onto the computer screen. I therefore found my
own experience echoed in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ contention that ‘I don’t have the feeling that I write my books, I have
the feeling that my books get written through me’ (quoted in Wiseman & Groves, 2000, p. 173).
4
For instance, Kafka asserted that one cannot possibly be too isolated while writing, whereas Nietzsche argued that
the free spirit must not be chained down by pragmatic demands, but rather detached from them; otherwise the spirit
would not be ready for temperate judgment or independent thought.
12
extended journey into novel geographical and intellectual territories. My special thanks go to
Adrian Bangerter who brought me in contact with DARG (Discourse and Rhetoric Group) at
Loughborough and to my official host in England, David Middleton, who provided me with a
safe space for experimenting and playing with novel ideas. A big thank-you also to Johanna
Motzkau with whom I shared a flat and, most importantly, whose kindness and friendship has
been precious to me, not only with regard to my thesis but my stay at large.
At the end of a thesis it appears easy, not to say that one is likely, to evaluate one’s
previous ordeals from the relaxed position of the ‘finisher’ and thus proclaim that ‘it wasn’t that
hard, after all.’ Yet, I do not wish to deny that this thesis gave me a hard time. What I found hard,
however, was not primarily the long working hours, but making the transition from a hasty,
perfunctory mode of thinking/writing to a passionate, modest, and thorough scholarly modus
operandi. With this in mind, I am grateful to my supervisor, Chris Steyaert, who, in his unique
way, taught me to approach my work intimately, calmly and with passion and desire, and who
encouraged me in my work during times when things were not going that smoothly. I would also
like to express my gratitude to my home institution, the Research Institute for Organizational
Psychology at the University of St. Gallen, which, due to its unique climate of thorough thinking
and mutual exchange, has provided me with a space for personal transformation. My particular
‘Merci’ goes out to Dörte Resch of whom I will keep fond memories not only because she read
and commented on every single page of my thesis and provided me with valuable suggestions,
but also because she has been a close companion in both good and bad moments and also because
her humor has been an immeasurable source of inspiration and appreciation.
In view of the fact that this thesis did not have an institutional host at the time of its
completion, I would like to thank Urs Stäheli for providing me with a ‘landing place’ at the
University of Basel and for serving as a supervisor of this text.
Arguably, one’s writing, in order to develop, needs commentary not only on the level of
semantics, logic or argumentation, but equally so on an orthographic and grammatical level.
Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to Oliver Bleskie who has proofread my thesis,
thereby improving its linguistic quality, and who, incidentally, provided me with some invaluable
lessons in proper English.
Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my parents, Margrit and Walter, who have made all things
(not just this thesis) possible. Last on this list but close to my heart is Kerry who has been
13
carrying the burden of this thesis and who has supported me with her silent tolerance,
unconditional warmth and divine vibrancy.
14
References
Czarniawska, B. & Joerges, B. (1996). Travel of Ideas. In B. Czarniawska & G. Sevón (eds.),
Translating Organizational Change. Berlin, New York: deGruyter.
Derrida, J. (1989). Memoires: for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, S. Culler & P. Kamuf. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992). Given Time: Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1997). Politics of Friendship, transl. G. Collins. London: Verso.
Derrida, J. (2001). On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley & M. Hughes.
London: Routledge.
Jones, C. (2003). As if Business Ethics were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ … Organization, 10,
223 – 248.
Law, J. & Hassard, J. (eds.) (1999). Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing.
Mauss, M. (1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.
D. Halls. London: Routledge.
Wiseman, B. & Groves, J. (2000). Introducing Levi Straus and Structural Anthropology. London:
Icon Books.
15
***
… In a “Nutshell”
The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of
writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the
disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and … against difference in general.
(Derrida, 1976, p. 18)
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life
is ultimately decisive. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 272; emphasis in original)
Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus state at the beginning of their
commendable ‘Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the
Cultivation of Solidarity’ that ‘(t)his book does not present a theory of entrepreneurship, … nor is
it a manual that will tell you how to succeed in these domains’ (1997, p. 1). While this
announcement can be interpreted as a wholesale understatement in the best of British tradition,
such an enunciation has an appealing feel to it as it defies the provision of a normative and
prescriptive account of the subject matter. In addition, it also refrains from putting forward any
grandiose and assertive claim as to how the world is and/or how it should be changed for the
better (cf. Foucault, 1988). If looked at from that vantage point, Spinosa and his co-authors by no
means appear capricious. Instead, their aim appears to be that of preparing the reader to ‘develop
sensitivities, not knowledge’ (p. 39). What my own argument pursued over the following chapters
has in common with this statement is an interest in disclosing particular ways of ‘history making’,
that is, how certain discourses have changed the way we conceive of and think about certain
particularities of our social reality. At the centre of my interest, then, are both the dominant and
the yet marginal (or unthought-of) significations of the sign ‘social entrepreneurship’. The
investigation of what could be denoted as the ‘meaning-making’ (Bordwell, 1989) and the ‘social
(re)production’ (Jameson, 1984) of social entrepreneurship thus endeavors to address three
16
different contexts, that is, business school teaching, academic research and development aid, in
order to highlight that the concept’s meaning is relative, that is, an episteme which is the result of
a moving substrate of force relations (Foucault, 1978). By implication, social entrepreneurship is
conceived as a social creation (as opposed to a natural entity; cf. Berger & Luckman, 1966) and
as being intertwined with local and global states of power. The question that is raised in different
contexts in this thesis is what conditions of possibility enabled the emergence and popularization
of social entrepreneurship and how we could extend and/or alter those prevailing ‘regimes of
truth’ (Foucault, 1977). On the face of it, my line of argument is simultaneously concerned with
investigating the status quo of social entrepreneurship or, more precisely, how the status quo has
come about, and how it has been legitimated and consolidated. An attempt is then made to
present novel ways of thinking about the subject matter. To gain a deeper understanding of the
overall architecture of my thesis, it is first of all necessary to highlight the rationale behind its
tripartition. Accordingly, I will first discuss the structure of and the interrelation between the
three sub-parts of the thesis and thereafter delineate in some detail the content of the seven
individual chapters.
*
In order to give a fuller picture of this thesis as a whole and to shed some light on the underlying
logic of its segmentation, I would like to refer, even at this early stage, to one of the figureheads
of postmodern theory: Jean-Francois Lyotard (cf. Smith, 2006). Direct reference to Lyotard’s
writing on knowledge will help to circumscribe the general trajectory of the first two parts of this
thesis and, most importantly, to pinpoint where these sections exhibit points of differentiation,
contestation and tension. While Lyotard’s writings will repeatedly be invoked throughout my
thesis, it is most notably his ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ (first
published in French in 1979 and translated into English in 1984) which is deemed helpful for
establishing the differences between the first two parts. To start with, I would like to use
Lyotard’s distinction between so-called grand narratives (or metanarratives) and small
narratives in order to show that it is the former kind of knowledge which will become the
analytic focus of the first part of this thesis. Bearing in mind that the first part of the thesis is
predominantly concerned with the scientific construction of social entrepreneurship, it is
indispensable to introduce some terms on the pragmatics of scientific knowledge and on how
social entrepreneurship is established as one of the more recent grand narratives of science.
17
Accordingly, it needs mention that (modern) science strives for grand narratives in the sense that
it demands that ‘one language game, denotation, be retained and all others excluded’ (Lyotard,
1984, p. 25). Science, following Lyotard, thus operates in a way as to establish grand narratives
which appear to have universal validity because they claim transcendental significance and
postulate singular codes of truth. As such, they purport to give a heightened sense of how things
really are. In contrast to narrative knowledge (i.e. small narratives) which constructs truth as a
local, that is, historically and culturally contingent, affair, the aim of science, however concealed
it may be at times, is always to produce a kind of knowledge that expresses or represents reality
the way it is supposed to be. Obviously, scientific knowledge takes truth-value as the criterion
which is in turn used to corroborate its very acceptability. Given that the truth-value is invoked to
decide on the pertinence or impertinence of knowledge, it is hardly surprising that scholars take
great efforts to set their statements and claims apart from or, even above of, a type of traditional
or practical knowledge which manifests itself in so-called small narratives (Lyotard, 1984).
With respect to the issue of social entrepreneurship, it is my objective to reveal how
business school scholars (i.e. both researchers and teachers) go about providing ‘proof’ of what
they say and how they rhetorically establish accounts of social entrepreneurship that refute
alternative or opposing views concerning the same questions. Arguing that the sign ‘social
entrepreneurship’ has taken the academic world by storm, my primary analytic interest will be to
point up the commonness or, better, commonsense with which the proper name (cf. Derrida,
1995) of social entrepreneurship is bestowed through respectively business school teaching
(Chapter 1) and research (Chapter 2). This said, it is equally important to note that these two sites
of scientific knowledge production are not assumed to operate independently. Quite the contrary,
it is assumed that business school teaching and research work as complementary ‘partners’ which
mutually verify and reproduce each other’s claims. The presumptions that a certain degree of
complicity is always present between research and teaching and that teaching (and education at
large) is the bridge between scientific institutions and society both served as my rationale for
presenting the two chapters that deal with these issues in the first part of the thesis. In addition,
this decision is also based on the recognition that science, with its arrogating statements in the
name of truth, progress, and the (betterment of the) human cause, is one of the most powerful
instances of knowledge production. Given this brief reminder of both the operation and aspiration
of knowledge in the context of science, I would further like to point out that part I works on the
assumption that the game and knowledge of science is held in high esteem not only by the small
18
circle of insiders but equally so in public discourse. In accordance with Lyotard’s contention that
science is one of the most widely approved strata of knowledge production, it is the first part
which posits that academia is a discursive site that contains enough legitimacy and rhetoric power
to naturalize and delimit our understanding of social entrepreneurship. Notwithstanding its
superior status vis-à-vis small narratives, I will approach the scientific knowledge of social
entrepreneurship as a social achievement that, by implication, lends itself to a thorough
examination of the cultural logic that lies behind or, better, in this name and thus also lends itself
to new interpretations. Defying the denotative (i.e. determining) pretension of scientific
knowledge, I will not try to judge the truth-value and status of academics’ narratives of social
entrepreneurship but, instead, use Foucault’s insightful work on discourse so as to emphasize that
knowledge or truth must not be taken for granted and to ask ‘(w)hat are the relations we have to
truth through scientific knowledge, to those “truth games” which are so important in civilization
and in which we are both subject and objects?’ (Foucault, 1988b, p. 15). Talking this statement as
my starting point, I will elaborate on how social entrepreneurship has been established as an
utterly positive and irritatingly univocal ‘regime of truth’ in order to raise some awareness that
the meaning of social entrepreneurship is orchestrated and, by implication, limited in its
potentially infinite semantic. Since I have an interest in inquiring beyond the prima facie
impression of ‘social entrepreneurship’, the objective of the first part closely resembles Hegel’s
(1967) assertion that ‘(w)hat is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that
it is “familiar”’ (p. 94; quoted in Derrida, 1976, p. xiii). Putting aside what is generally taken as
the ‘familiar’ essence of the name ‘social entrepreneurship’, I will ask ‘what does one mean by
this name?’ and ‘what happens when we deploy this name?’ Acting on the assumption that the
sign ‘social entrepreneurship’ is never completely fixed or fixable and that it is therefore,
however impalpably, the object of constant play(fullness) and, by implication, subject to ‘double
readings’ (Critchley, 1999; 2005), I aspire to lay open its most dominant exegesis and some of the
name’s outstanding peculiarities. Highlighting some of the most salient fragments of social
entrepreneurship teaching and research shall thus help to gain a deeper understanding of the type
of spaces and voices that are used to express the term and practice of social entrepreneurship. The
territories in which it is shaped, charted and circulated are also explored, as are the limitations
and totalitarian threats related therewith. It will then be asked by what discourses people are
hailed, and what subject positions and hence forms of life become imaginable, or, conversely, are
avoided. For instance, large parts of our understanding of social entrepreneurship have been
19
uncritically inherited or imitated from the general program of entrepreneurship research (cf.
Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). In line with this insight, I will try to show that the expression of social
entrepreneurship re-constructs a whole range of individual and corporate actors as economic
entities (e.g. bureaucracies, nation states or non-governmental organizations). While trying to
gain new understandings, any final definition of social entrepreneurship will be suspended for the
sake of multiplication, equivocity and continuous movement. Therefore, the first part of the thesis
in no sense suggests another finality, delivering an ostensibly better truth of social
entrepreneurship. Instead, the aim is to show how social entrepreneurship could be extended
beyond its current delimitation. The issue of difference will thereby be taken on board by
suggesting, for instance, a new agenda of teaching (e.g. ethics, politics, etc.) and research (e.g.
paralogy).
Referring to ‘the middle of things’, it is first of all necessary to mention that the second
part of the thesis is made up of a single (though extended) chapter that seeks to establish a
counter-image of social entrepreneurship which deviates from the blatantly optimistic
representation being pursued and disseminated through academic knowledge. In this context, the
epithet ‘counter’ is not simply to be read as the materialization of difference but, crucially, as a
move towards multiplication and resistance. To comprehend that resistance is not necessarily an
act of overt antagonism or insistent provocation and struggle, it is once more helpful to remind
ourselves of Lyotard’s (1984) polarity between grand and small narratives which I have used as
an overarching point of differentiation between part I and II. In particular, where it is assumed
that academia, that is, research and teaching, operates so as to impart knowledge of a universal
and even transcendental nature, it is within the local context of interviews with development NGO
(non-governmental organization) practitioners that a knowledge of a different kind shall be
revealed: knowledge that exhibits ‘paradox’ and which thereby establishes its own rules in the
game of reasoning. Lyotard’s cunning scheme, then, allows one to distinguish between the sort of
academic knowledge that claims transcendental validity and a type of practical knowledge that is
said to be locally emergent and, therefore, locally valid. I would add that the tension I sense
between part I and II is not only due to a different scope or area of validity, but also due to a
different degree of consensus and complexity, or complexification. Again, such a dichotomy can
easily be misinterpreted as saying that academic knowledge is imprecise, over-simplified or else
deficient, whereas the knowledge used and reproduced by NGO practitioners is more, precise, apt
20
or even true. This impression, is, however, inaccurate, since it is neither my aim to (dis)qualify
knowledge on account of its truth value – i.e. to decide whether or not it mirrors reality in any
precise sense (Potter, 1996) – nor to foster a state of psychological nihilism in which one
suddenly realizes that the scientific knowledge of social entrepreneurship ‘aims at nothing and
achieves nothing’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 12; emphasis in original). Rather, my objective is to
pinpoint the different levels of complexity as well as ethical sensitivities which come to the fore
in both scientific and practical knowledge. It should have become clear by now that the task at
hand is not to simply replace one episteme by another. More to the point, the second part is
devoted to destabilizing the grand narrative of social entrepreneurship as channeled by the
academic community and to emphasizing that ‘(s)ocial pragmatics [of small narratives] does not
have the “simplicity” of scientific pragmatics [of grand narratives]’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 65). By the
same token, I will point at the radical vulnerability and limitation of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ in order to nurture a sensitivity that things, at closer inspection, might come to
look less consensual and more complicated, more paradoxical, aporetic (Derrida, 1978) or hybrid.
The point to be stressed then is that even though the pervasive orthodoxy of performativity
(Lyotard, 1984) seems to support the reduction of complexity and the provision of easy
suggestions and practicable solutions, it is the discursive investigation in the second part which
stimulates a backlash in order to embrace the idea that complexity is needed if we would like to
get a hold on the fragile, subtle and paralogical phenomenon of ‘social entrepreneurship’.
Regarding content, it shall suffice here to mention that, given that business school teaching and
research provide us with a rather uncritical or at least univocally positive and contestably
unreflected image of social entrepreneurship, the second part restrains the images which pretend,
for instance, that social entrepreneurship can be seen as the promise and potential panacea for
global redemption. I will thereby show that those working in the so-called social realm
(Baudrillard, 1983) reveal an extremely complex and variegated signification of their very social
work, and impart a kind of local truth that makes scientific knowledge appear in a different light.
In a nutshell, (since more details will be given below), I would like to set the discourse of
practitioners apart from the grand narratives of academics by showing that the former in no way
trade on the kind of utopian dreams one currently finds in those self-satisfied management
textbooks or glossy MBA programs as discussed in part I. Though practitioners’ discourse does
not seem to echo the voice of utopia, I will, however, interpret the ambivalence and paradox
which comes to the fore therein as a sign of genuine responsibility.
21
The last part of the thesis, which consists of four chapters, seeks to engage in a number of
‘transverse communications’ with the preceding two parts. Being most directly inspired by
philosophy, the last part will be introduced under the heading ‘lines of flight’ (cf. Deleuze &
Guattari’s, 1987). As the title suggests, I will take up, extend and reflect on some of the central
claims which have been addressed and elaborated before. To put things simply, one could say that
this last part speaks the language of liberation. Liberation is thereby not so much envisaged as
the obliteration of given strata, but rather as the causation of radical opening-ups of closed or else
repressive structures. Picking out and accentuating the main points established on beforehand, I
will address methodological, epistemological and ontological questions related to discourse
analysis (Chapter 3), business school curricula (Chapter 1), Foucault’s work on power and
knowledge (Chapters 1 & 3) as well as to the signification of the epithet ‘social’ of social
entrepreneurship (Chapters 1, 2, 3). The chapters, which could also be called essays (Adorno,
1988), presented in the last part thus present intertextual linkages with the previous two parts
insofar as they try to take up and critically reflect on the identified canon and to enliven the field
by stimulating experimental and radical movements which have not been considered as yet
(Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003). Although the rapprochement of instability and difference proceeds
along different theoretical concepts and analytic procedures, the common denominator of these
writings is that they all seek to become intensely familiar with the given scholarly fields (or
strata; cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) in order to then discover available possibilities of change. In
other words, the overarching aim of the third part is to stimulate tactical reinscriptions (de
Certeau, 1984) of prevailing meanings so as to decamp for a future that is not as yet imaginable
from the mainstream perspective. In accordance with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I envision this
part as a break-up where we are called to set out and ‘(f)ind our black holes and white walls,
know them, know our faces; it is the only way we will be able to dismantle them and draw our
lines of flight’ (p. 188; slightly modified).
The second, more subtle and hidden agenda of the last part has to do with the established
theoretical and conceptual foci. Despite the fact that the entire thesis draws inspiration from what
is often called, for pragmatic (i.e. economic) reasons, poststructuralist or postmodern theory, it is
in particular the last part which strays into philosophy in order to subject the questions at hand to
new perspectives. The theoretical and political momentousness and symbolic weight that such a
choice entails is related to the fact that these works have often been discredited for their lack of
22
any immediate public significance. Probably best remembered (since most effective) in this
connection is Alan Sokal’s (cf. Sokal & Bricmont, 1998) critique, not to say parody, of
postmodern approaches in which he mocks postmodern jargon and deliberately misrepresents
relativism so as to cause considerable and sustained damage. Though the task of redemption or
rehabilitation will remain rather implicit in the third part, I will reclaim my subject matter
through selected works by, for instance, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari in
order to exemplify that the elusive tradition called poststructuralism does not equal indeterminacy
or stasis (Critchley, 1999). It will also be shown that with their works those scholars can add
unprecedented ethico-political, aesthetic, emancipatory and affirmative perspectives and thereby
make the canon more plurivocal.
*
Whereas the previous overview has taken what could be called a meta-perspective to provide a
rough sketch of the thesis’ structure and flow, I would now like to present a more fine-grained
outline of both the contents and objectives of the individual chapters. Chapter 1 of the thesis
pursues an investigation of social entrepreneurship in the context of business school teaching.
The central concern of this chapter is not to reveal the precise origin of social entrepreneurship
(cf. Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983), that is, its ‘date of birth’, but rather to gain some awareness of
the historical conditions and relations of power and knowledge which enabled the emergence of
social entrepreneurship courses in the first place. Social entrepreneurship is thus conceived of and
addressed as a discursive achievement which is contingent upon the context and history of its
formulation and, therefore, due to a continued process of cultural circulation. In line with this
conception, I will address what institutional arrangements actually brought forward and
articulated the respective notion and what political consequences are related thereto. In
accordance with Foucault’s (e.g. 1983) genealogical method, the investigation aspires to
disentangle the various disciplinary technologies which, differently though collectively, produce
(and constrain) social entrepreneurship as an academic topic. The question addressed therein is,
inter alia, ‘how are power and knowledge intertwined so as to impart a particular representation
of social entrepreneurship?’ As a first step towards this end, I will reflect on the avowed crises of
the business school (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005) in the light of Lyotard’s (1984) still timely notion
of ‘performativity’ in order to assert that knowledge today is orchestrated in an effort to increase
the relative power (or, to use an economic expression, competitive advantage) of given
23
institutions (or nation states). The elaboration of performativity will then lead me to conclude that
the understanding and practice of teaching and learning has changed quite dramatically over the
last decades which is revealed, for instance, by the fact that business school teaching today leans
more and more towards a consumerist attitude to learning (Mintzberg, 2004). Positing that the
current modus operandi of business schools is moving appallingly close to what some have
coined the McUniversity (e.g. Parker, 2002), and that measurement procedures and quality
accreditations have become the acknowledged accolade of good practice, I will outline the
consequences thereof not only for business school curricula but also for individual business
school teachers. The point to be made there is that the ideal image of business school teachers
increasingly approximates the stereotype of the heroic entrepreneur. Based on this insight, I will
claim that entrepreneurship has become a forceful benchmark both for the conduct of
organizations and, increasingly, for the ‘conduct of conduct’, that is, the government of individual
selves (Rose, 1999). Citing selected works on governmentality by Foucault (e.g. 1988b; 1991), I
will argue that the enterprising academic (in the context of contemporary business schools) is
prompted to work on behalf of him/herself in such a manner as to act both more enthusiastically
and innovatively. This sort of ‘self-engineering’, as I will contend, is conceived as a necessary
regime for leveraging the attractiveness, i.e. entertainment factor, of business classes and,
consequently, for warranting the saleability of this knowledge on the education market. Coming
full circle with the issue of social entrepreneurship, I will then subject the relatively recent
phenomenon of social entrepreneurship teaching to critical analysis. That is, I will investigate if
and how social entrepreneurship courses are affected by the performativity mantra, the main
focus being on the question whether or not those courses can be seen as just another management
fashion (Abrahamson, 1996). In so doing, I will discuss how the economic imperative of business
school teaching fuels the ‘thinning out’ of social entrepreneurship, that is, the production of
knowledge which omits both thorough theory and intellectual reflection and, consequently,
provides uninspiring entertainment instead. By the same token, it will be suggested that business
school teaching has drawn an image of social entrepreneurship that zealously emphasizes the
talent, persistence and rare genius of individuals and which thereby nurtures the expectation that
it is the responsible citizen who can stimulate, by mere will and moral dedication, the re-
enchantment of organizations and societies. In trying to disclose some of the most blatant
shortcomings of this representation, I will discuss that current teaching on social entrepreneurship
turns a blind eye to both its political grounding and (genuine) ethical possibilities. In line with
24
this state of affairs, the last part of the first chapter will look for novel approaches. In particular,
the articulation of social entrepreneurship in political discourse as well as the relational
understanding of the social aspect of entrepreneurship will be subjected to close scrutiny. Bearing
in mind that social entrepreneurship is not only presented as a successful change agent but, and at
times even more so, as the embodiment of ethics, I will repudiate this representation by showing
that ethics is never accomplished in a definitive sense, that ethics is not exhaustible by
programmable inscriptions in organizations’ code of conduct, that ethical behavior and ideals are
always at risk of being corrupted by pragmatic demands and economic imperatives, and that
(ethical) aporias are the irrevocable and central aspect of genuine responsibility. While I will
juxtapose Derrida’s (and Levinas’) philosophy to the ethical issue of social entrepreneurship to
make my point, it is my aim to introduce a reflective loop which, though necessarily raising more
questions than providing easy answers, underscores the necessity for modesty, patience and the
sensitive recognition of the intimate encounter with the Other (capital letter; cf. Levinas, 2001) in
social entrepreneurship. Thus it is my firm hope that we can exchange the current fast-food
teaching of social entrepreneurship with a kind of teaching diet (in the form of official curricula),
that, though arguably harder to digest, will give our mental faculties more to chew on in the long
run.
In Chapter 2, I will provide a deconstructive reading of academic social entrepreneurship
texts. Departing from the premise that researchers enjoy a status of experts in society, the
assumptions underlying the respective studies and theoretical manifestos must be analyzed
closely. As will become clear, I do not address scholars’ writing as neutral and value free
utterances of an objectively assessable reality but as rhetorical accounts that express individual
preferences, interests and/or expressions of lived ideologies (Billig et al., 1988). Conceiving of
rhetoric as an artful practice rather than deceptive talk, I will argue that academic texts such as
journal articles, Internet publications, and book chapters univocally propagate the view that social
entrepreneurship is a very good and useful thing. On the face of it, my deconstructive reading
aims at unsettling the taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions of those texts and the
rhetorical dynamic they convey. By implication, I envision the deconstructive reading as an
endeavor being nurtured by a curiosity towards the commonplace (and therefore precariously
ideological) preconceptions of what social entrepreneurship supposedly is. Given that analytic
deconstruction represents a means for de-naturalizing commonsense, I will introduce it as a
25
pertinent strategy for both pointing at the occasionally subliminal ambivalences entailed in the
concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ and for doing away with the assumption of ostensibly stable
boundaries and meaning. As mentioned before, the theoretical assumptions guiding the analysis
are related to the field of discourse and rhetoric and will be elaborated at the beginning of the
chapter. I will discuss, for instance, that scientific texts, though being mostly taken as instances of
logical consistence, trade on a too-often ignored rhetorical force. Consequently, the texts I will
analyze in this investigation are presumed to work rhetorically so as to support a certain
structuring of human experience, and to establish a certain impression of truth. Furthermore, I
will, in the spirit of Spivak (1988), delineate academics’ rhetoric as a moment of strategic (yet
infinitely undecidable) stabilization of fluid and floating concepts. By implication, I will tackle
the inherent consensus of academic writing as the stabilization of something essentially unstable
and chaotic. And since it is assumed that chaos and instability can never be subordinated to full
control, I will align my analysis with Derrida, the grandfather of deconstruction, who indicated
that this ontological condition is at once a risk and a chance, since continual stability would mean
the end of politics (cf. Mouffe, 1996). Given this state of reasoning, it should come as no surprise
that this second chapter is not so much concerned with delivering a theory or concepts in the
sense of non-transient truth, but with sensing how things are made to appear as factual matters
which are therefore incontestable and beyond doubt. My analysis shall support the reader in
comprehending that ‘social entrepreneurship’ within academic texts becomes objectified in a
particular manner that makes the matter appear so ‘obvious’ that it does not arouse much
curiosity and/or debate. Where this ‘invisibility’ or matter-of-factness of the reality of social
entrepreneurship is assumed of endowing our mindscape with truth-value, I am not only
interested in providing a reflection of the discourses and implicit assumptions that ‘penetrate’ the
respective texts but equally so in investigating what is left out, that is, in identifying the
‘deliberate absences’ (Law, 2004) of academics’ textual performances. These absences, as I will
argue, are the cornerstones for a different understanding of social entrepreneurship since they
contain those aspects of meaning which, by definition, are suppressed or else pushed into
oblivion. In other words and as expressed by Derrida (1981), one could say that my reading aims
at releasing the centrifugal forces of meaning so as to enable ‘the irruptive emergence of a new
“concept”, a concept that can no longer be, and could be, included in the previous regime’
(Derrida, 1981, p. 42; quoted in Jones, 2005, p. 373). To create the condition of possibility for
novel movements, I will stress that the available academic texts reveal, apart from other things, a
26
clear tendency to limit social entrepreneurship to the logic of business and economics. In contrast
thereto, I will bring forward a vision of social entrepreneurship that capitalizes on an alternative
perspective and which no longer appears exclusively unclouded and optimistic but equally ironic
and antagonistic. Generally expressed, I will seek to blur boundaries, and to question the limits of
what one currently coins as scholarly social entrepreneurship texts in order to make some
tentative suggestions for the enrichment of the research agenda of social entrepreneurship. As a
first step towards that end, I will elaborate on the idea that the linguistic style or genre we employ
in our research undertakings ineluctably influences what topics we select and how we discern our
subject matters. Style, as we are reminded by Richardson (1994), is thus established as the key for
alternative epistemes since ‘by writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic
and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable’ (p. 516). On the basis of the idea that
theory and writing style are closely aligned, I will suggest a multiplication of literary styles and
genres in respect to social entrepreneurship. In so doing, I will identify the possibilities of
‘breaching’ (van Maanen, 1995), that is, the application of styles of writing which violate
conventional textual practices in the respectable field of ‘science’. Having identified these
possibilities, I will contend that we need to take these measures for exploring new aspects of
social entrepreneurship. In addition thereto, I will propose a proliferation of deconstructive
readings by showing that overturning the mainstream of social entrepreneurship requires
continuous efforts or, following Spivak (1990), ‘a practical politics of the open end’ (p. 105).
Provided that academic writing on social entrepreneurship clearly resembles the early canon of
entrepreneurship research, I will suggest a careful re-reading of some more recent and so-called
minor texts of that latter field. My objective here is to show that entrepreneurship research has on
offer some commendable ideas regarding the aneconomic and non-business grounding of social
entrepreneurship. In the spirit of a semantic opening, I will propose different texts on
entrepreneurship which advocate multiparadigmatic and multidisciplinary experimentation. In the
last paragraph of this chapter, I will underscore that entrepreneurship, despite the epithet ‘social’,
has not overcome economic discourse as yet. Seeking a ‘way out’, I will draw upon Derrida’s
(e.g. 1999) work on aporia and responsibility in order to conjure up an image of social
entrepreneurship which considers that to become social, entrepreneurship must exceed the limits
of performativity and must step outside the circle of economic input-output relations.
*
27
Departing from the observation that social entrepreneurship is either represented as a
management fashion (Chapter 1) or portrayed as a mimicry of the grand narrative of early-day
entrepreneurship research (Chapter 2), it is in Chapter 3 that I will inquire if and how the issue of
(social) entrepreneurship has been received in the realm of development aid. To establish this
nexus, I will first reflect on some of the most salient significations of development aid from the
post-WWII era to the present day. The aim of this endeavor is to show that development aid has
continuously changed its basic premises whereas it has been particularly over last five to ten
years that the orthodoxy of entrepreneurship has gained recognition in the discourse of policy
makers, research scholars and international organizations such as the UN and the World Bank,
etc. Provided that the center of gravity of the third chapter comes to rest on the discursive
investigation of the NGO (non-governmental organization) sector, I will use the first part of this
chapter to shed some light on the position and status development NGOs have inherited in the
overarching development apparatus. In doing so, I will show that the global legitimacy of
(development) NGOs (vis-à-vis the state and the private sector) has changed quite dramatically
over the last five decades and that those institutions have witnessed distinct historical transitions
due to which they have either become the centers of grandiose, not to say unrealistic, expectations
and credit or, conversely, been represented as agents that do more harm than good. The discourse
on development NGOs in our present day is now based upon notions such as ‘results-based
management’, ‘inputs’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ or ‘internal and external accounting’ (cf.
Murphy, 2000). Departing from this observation, I will posit that these language games reveal the
intrusion of the ideology of ‘new managerialism’ (Desai & Imrie, 1998). The reflection of this
move or rupture is relevant insofar as it highlights that development NGOs are more and more
seen from the perspective of management. As a result, traditional rationalities (Foucault, 2000)
increasingly lose status and credibility.
Given that the second part of this chapter will investigate the language games and
identities of NGO practitioners through a discourse analytic approach (Potter & Wetherell,
1987), I will provide a brief elaboration on the poststructural understanding of language (Deetz,
2003) that will form the basis of the subsequent analysis. On that basis, I will establish a
conceptual link between discourse and identity in order to explain that, within a constructionist
paradigm (Burr, 1995), the self is not conceived as a stable, atomistic entity but as a specific
discursive and hence relational achievement (Potter, 1996). Thus defying an atomistic view that
denotes identity as a stable entity, I will put in place a rationale that stresses the performative
28
aspect of identity. The notion of subject position will thus be invoked to underscore the discursive
understanding of identity and to make intelligible that practitioners’ subjectivity is contingent on
the discourse of the very same people. It follows that my discourse analysis aims at embracing the
specific discourses practitioners refer to when rendering their daily work meaningful as well as
the subject positions that are enabled in and through their linguistic engagements. More precisely,
I will investigate how practitioners express who (i.e. populations or countries) is granted support
through development initiatives, and who is refused the subject position of ‘beneficiary’; by what
rationalities development work is legitimated; and what kinds of relationships are depicted
towards the other (e.g. help recipients) of development work (e.g. cooperation, control, etc.). In
giving voice to the people working in the social realm of development and humanitarian work, I
am keen, as briefly mentioned before, to inquire if and how the discourse of (social)
entrepreneurship, and ‘new managerialism’ has come to penetrate practitioners’ sensemaking. To
put this in a slightly different manner, one could say that the discourse analysis addresses the
question whether the grand narrative of donor organizations, philanthropies, national
development agencies and supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund reverberate in practitioners’ identity constructions or if those same
people engage in ‘textual poaching’ (de Certeau, 1984) as a result of which they establish
identities which are in obvious contrast to, and therefore subversive of, the strategic discourse of
economics and managerialism. Departing from the assumption that practitioners’ talk allows for
the appropriation and re-appropriation of strategic discourse, my analysis remains attentive
towards the possibility that the circulation of social entrepreneurship discourse through academic
scholars does not necessarily have an influence on NGO practitioners. This makes it necessary to
study the signifying practices by which practitioners develop their unique ‘wandering lines’, that
is, their own cultural logic or local knowledge (Lyotard, 1984). In accordance with de Certeau’s
(1984) notion of ‘trajectory’, my analysis is thus mainly concerned with inquiring the ‘ruses of
other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they
develop’ (p. xviii).
On the face of it, bearing an interest in the power implications of practitioners’ self- and
other-constructions and the tactical enunciation of development aid, my analysis quite obviously
trades on a critical orientation. The attribute ‘critical’ is thereby first and foremost revealed in
conjunction with the question whether, as some have argued (e.g. Parker, 2002b), NGOs (and
their employees) simply pursue the neo-liberal political and economic order or if those same
29
people and organizations represent development aid as a mainly social undertaking. Keeping in
mind that the polarity between social and economic frames of reasoning captures the essential
research question of the third chapter, it is important to make inferences concerning the kind of
diversity and difference being respectively dis- or enabled through practitioners’ talk. On a
further note, I will seek to explore the power implications entailed in discourse by asking, for
instance, if practitioners within their utterances reify the separation between the ‘First’ and the
‘Third World’, and if the emphasis upon seemingly positive or at least neutral concepts such as
(technical) cooperation, empowerment and assistance could possibly foster the impression of a
non-existent parity between the parties involved.
Anticipating that the discourse analysis will reveal three distinguishable repertoires (that
is, benevolence, professionalism and entrepreneurship repertoire), I will use Bhabha’s (1994)
concept of ‘hybridity’ to illustrate that the expression or performance of identity rests on
immanent instability, variance and multiplicity and, by implication, that practitioners’ talk is
characterized by tensions between the disparity (and irreconcilability) of cultural heritages (Pratt,
1992). The notion of ‘hybridity’ is thereby deemed apposite for demonstrating that the liminal
space of development aid defies the formulation of a fixed binary between the social and the
economic realm. In the discussion of the split of cultural discourse due to the discursive
ambivalence that ‘emerges in the contest of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the
performative’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 148) I will further use this observation to state that practitioners
act as ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary [economic or
social] presence’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145). This implies, apart from other things, that the
determinate dominance of the economic over the social (or vice versa) is undermined. As such, it
will become palpable that it is the ‘contact zone’ between the social and the economic which
establishes a so-called ‘third space of enunciation’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37) in which social and
economic rationalities co-exist without any of the two views gaining the (permanent) upper hand.
Starting with the observation that practitioners’ discourse is characterized by a constant
intermingling of social and economic arguments, I will interpret this amalgamation as a reflection
of the ethical undecidability of genuinely responsible, i.e. ethical, practice. Contrasting my
findings with the ‘easy-handed’ or ‘manically optimistic’ image on social entrepreneurship as
imparted in the business school context (cf. Chapters 1 & 2), I will further discuss that
practitioners’ representations of social practice are arguably more modest and paradoxical. In
30
view thereof, complexity and hybridity will be hailed as the libratory potential that becomes
possible at the immanent fissures of discourse.
*
The third part of the thesis is introduced by Chapter 4 in which I will pursue a reflection of the
methodological and theoretical underpinnings of discourse analysis. Inspired by method
textbooks and theoretical elaborations of discourse and motivated through my practical
experience in Chapter 3, I will embark upon a close analysis of some of the rhetorical
particularities and theoretical inconsistencies which in my view must be urgently addresses. In
that sense, this investigation is deemed critical to the extent that it seeks to draw a dividing line
between the current practice of discourse analysis, i.e. major discourse analysis, and an
unprecedented or prospective type of analysis, i.e. the minor exegesis of the former. Although the
chapter holds a general stake in discourse analysis, I will, for the most part, illustrate my
arguments through the work produced in Loughborough and Manchester (both in the UK) under
the heading ‘psychological discourse analysis’. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first
part, I will use the spearheads of psychological discourse analysis to exemplify the rhetorical
practices by virtue of which discourse scholars try to establish their subject matter as a superior
methodological practice. In addressing both aesthetical and theoretical puzzles of the discursive
camp, I will first shed light upon those texts which signify discourse analysis as method and
thereby present it as a kind of knowledge that can be acquired by a list of do’s and don’ts.
Contending that this rationality hinges on a consumerist view of learning, I will also point out
that we find in textbooks on discourse analysis an intriguing amount of ‘identical repetition’
(Cunningham, 2005), that is, a form of argumentation that persuades by sheer force of routinized
celebration. Subjecting this rhetoric to the magnifying glass, I will show, among other things,
how it gives discourse analysis an impressive gloss and a positive ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin,
2001) by means of pretending that it works like an ‘automat’ that carries the researcher,
effortlessly and safely, to his/her destination. Rejecting the assumption that discourse analysis can
ever operate in this manner since there are no short-cuts to thorough scientific inquiry, it will be
argued that the ‘ordeal’ of thinking must remain a necessary aspect of research and that discourse
analysis always requires passion, patience and practice. This elaboration will lead to the
conclusion that the selected method books on discourse analysis are of little help (or even
misleading) for the nascent scholar because they only seem to make empty promises such as the
31
idea of ‘mechanical replacement’ (Appelbaum, 1995). In addition, I will provide a shattering
insight, namely that method books only work for those who already have some experience, not to
say expertise, in conducting the type of research dealt with in such books (cf. Roth, 2005).
Whereas the first part of this chapter is at the same time entertaining and unsettling, the
tone of the second part is, in line with its subject matter, utterly serious: this second part makes an
attempt at dismantling the arguably most severe problem of discourse analysis, i.e. the use of
hardened language. Contending that this sort of language works upon conventions that tend to
produce rather dry and expressively impoverished texts, I will posit that the outstanding danger in
this connection is their referential function, that is, the assumption that language is able to
represent things in their ostensible ‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Comparing the current state of
discourse analysis with Barthes’ (1967) notion of ‘zero-degree’ style, the point I will make is that
the linguistic convention of discourse analysis is supposedly insensitive to the temporality of
local signification and, as implied therein, the incremental undecidability of meaning.
Consequently, I will identify a crisis of discourse analysis. At the core of this crisis is the
recognition that there is a paradox between what discourse analysts say about language and how
they use language. Though acknowledging that representation necessarily stimulates a distinction
between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993) and that it thus reduces the immanent undecidability
of social reality, I will illustrate that the field of discourse analysis has come to hinge on a
particularly hardened form of language that purports to represent, more or less accurately, an
objective reality. Though this undeniably goes against the grain of discourse theory, I will show
that the field has made ‘techno-talk’ (e.g. in rhetorical or conversation analysis) or a ‘journalist
genre’ (e.g. in analysis of interpretive repertoires and Foucault-inspired discourse analysis) its
modus operandi. Both these types of language styles, however, have a strong propensity to neatly
order, structure and control the variability and playfulness of language. In response to this
development, it will be argued that language does not necessarily have to be hardened and that
language games can be distinguished according to their relative ‘coefficient of terriorialization’
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), and that it is for this reason that some stylistic games more than
others are deemed apt for highlighting the performative aspect of language. To provide an
alternative, I will reach out for forms of representation that do not try to impart denotative
meaning and which appear auspicious for grasping the ontological condition of difference and for
rejecting unity for the sake of plurivocality. I will then go on to argue that the discursive camp
should not use forms of representation which tend to fold the manifold onto a flat plane (Cooper,
32
1990). To illustrate this point, I will seek to appropriate discourse analysis so that it can
accommodate a more indeterminate, inexact language (van Maanen, 1995), that is, a language
that assigns sufficient space to ambivalence and ambiguity. To this end, I will celebrate the tenets
implied in the use of allegories and metaphors and especially explain how these figures give rise
to indirect expression, i.e. non-literal and associative representation. In an effort to extend the
space for play and experimentation, I will advocate the invention of neologisms which are
projected as instances which ‘disorder’ language in a way that enables novel and unforeseen
connections and that prescribe active and necessarily engaged readings. Additionally, invoking
Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ as an illustrative example of energetic and intense writing,
it will be contended that discourse analysis could gain much by opting for a kind of writing that
seeks to release, instead of manage, difference. In concluding, I will claim that the nascent
scholar of discourse analysis might find most inspiration for conducting his/her own research not
by consulting method textbooks but by ‘intensive readings’ (Deleuze, 1995) of available
discourse analysis as well as more experimental textual performances. Intensity will be ensured
through an ethos of reading which is envisioned as a necessary (though not sufficient)
precondition for learning how a particular piece of text works or ‘flows’, and for deriving
inspiration for one’s own work. Intensive readings are thus established as the condition of
possibility for gaining an understanding or, rather, sense of the (inimitable) aesthetic, creative and
idiosyncratic features of discourse analysis.
Chapter 5 draws on some of the implications derived from my investigation of business
school teaching in Chapter 3. In particular, I will use this chapter to discuss the extension of
consumerist and performative business school curricula. I will then advocate deconstruction as a
promising practice or philosophical ‘tool’ for radicalizing the business school of tomorrow.
Whereas ‘radicalize’ can easily be associated with the complete overthrow of the given heritage
of business education, I would rather like to propose deconstruction as a (critical though
affirmative) reflective practice. To be able to do so, however, I will first say a few words on the
signification of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflection’ in the context of qualitative research so as to show
that prevailing denotations have little value for the kind of ‘critical management education’ (cf.
Grey, 2004) that I would like to propose. Thus turning away from the introspective journeys or
emotional self-disclosures undertaken in the name of reflective practice, I will elaborate on a sort
of reflectivity that can complement the analytic and technical skills that business students usually
33
acquire in the course of their training (Mintzberg, 2004). The central concern there is to foster a
kind of self-reflective learning which enables business students to remain attentive and critical
towards the root assumptions of their own ‘staple diet’, i.e. the ostensibly impersonal, objective
and ideology-free business knowledge produced by the McUniversity. Contending that
deconstruction is ‘up for the job’, I will, however, try to avoid drowning in euphoria and, instead,
reflect on Derrida’s deconstruction from the very perspective of his critics. In trying to provide
the reader with a balanced and multi-voiced appraisal of deconstruction, I will first bring to the
foreground that deconstruction can never be represented as a private or even disinterested
enterprise, as some renowned scholars have claimed (e.g. Rorty, 1995, 1998). Additionally,
having establishing an image of deconstruction that undoes some of the negativity that the subject
has been endowed with by its critics, will then allow me to use some of the most insightful texts
of Derrida (e.g. 1981; 1995) in order to emphasize that he never envisioned deconstruction as a
means for tearing apart, that is, destructing the argumentative flaws and logical fallacies within
the writing of others. Recognizing that deconstruction has nothing in common with hostile
antagonism, I will emphasize that Derrida’s objective has been to reveal, through an intimate
process of close readings, the binary oppositions implied within texts, and to enable the
affirmative destabilization and consecutive reformulation of the respective concepts. While
discussing that Derrida has been open to the criticism that deconstruction advocates nihilism and
provides nothing of public value (Critchley, 1999), I will show, in the spirit of an opposition
gesture, that he repeatedly and unmistakably claimed that deconstruction ‘can always serve to
keep the masters of discourse busy: the experts, professionals of rhetoric, logic, or philosophy
who might otherwise be applying their energy elsewhere’ (Derrida, 2004b, p. 144). Hence,
highlighting the often radically negative reception of deconstruction, my brief discussion of
Derrida shall on the one hand give deconstruction its merited (yet often refused) credit while
simultaneously providing deconstruction with an entry point to the business school of tomorrow.
If such a thing as a revival of deconstruction is at all requisite, my brief detour to Derrida’s critics
will serve as a reminder that deconstruction has been (and at times still is) wrongly accused of
apathy, and that deconstruction should instead be employed and received as an instance of
reflective intervention.
After clearing the ground, so to speak, I will argue that we should follow in Derrida’s
(2001) footsteps so as to appreciate that the business school (or the university more generally)
should, unconditionally, ‘remain an ultimate place of critical resistance – and more than critical –
34
to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation. When I say ‘more than critical’, I have in
mind the term ‘deconstructive’ (2001, p. 235). Though it is beyond doubt that the implementation
of deconstructive reflexivity into the business school as elsewhere (Derrida, 2001b) is everything
but an easy task and often on the brink of failure, I will claim that such a place of resistance is
urgently needed especially if taking into account the consumerist mentality of business education
and the performativity mantra of business schools I scrutinize in Chapter 1. Contending that we
cannot miss out on the opportunity of affirmative and passionate inventiveness (Derrida, 1992)
and that deconstruction is indispensable in view of the limits (or limitedness) of the contemporary
business school, I will paint a picture of how such a transition could unfold. While agreeing with
Derrida (2001) that the idea of unconditionality is irrevocably related with the possibility that one
will be ‘forced to give up and capitulate without condition’ (p. 236), I will contend that a
reflexive business school, worthy of its name, would need to go hand in hand with ‘an
unconditional right to ask critical questions not only to the history of man, but the history even of
the notion of critique, to the form and the authority of the question, to the interrogative form of
thought’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 235). Thus advocating a kind of reflection that allows one to ask
whatever can be asked or what normally is repressed, I envision deconstruction as a major step
towards the critical inspection of business schools’ own history and their often concealed axioms.
Endeavoring to identify some of business school’s blind spots, what I would like to suggest as a
faculty of critical and deconstructive reflection within business school curricula is thus
simultaneously related to the appeal of enabling business/management students and scholars to
excel (de Beer, 1998), that is, to go beyond (ex) the confines of prevailing knowledge (cell), and
to foster sensitivity to the ethical ramifications of business practice (Ghoshal, 2005). Assuming
that the (re-) invention of the unconditional university presupposes the unsettlement of certainties
and the establishment of novel rules, it is on the grounds of deconstructive reflection that I will
propose a path for undercutting the ‘sacred’ and for staging a passage towards another future.
Given that most theories of discourse brood over the issue of individual and/or collective
agency, and keeping in mind that the discourse analysis presented in Chapter 3 implies asking, for
instance, whether discourse determines (in the strict sense) people’s identity or if people are free
to chose and draw upon certain discourses and narrative conventions instead of others, it is in
Chapter 6 that I will provide an extended discussion of the interrelation between power,
subjectivity and discourse, or, in other words, of the possibility of self-determination and
35
resistance. Whereas the overall aim of this chapter is certainly that of highlighting that agency
and individual resistance are always practiced within (and not against or outside) the limits of
power, I will begin the discussion by outlining that the agency-structure debate in organization
studies has established a scheme of understanding in which Foucault’s work on knowledge and
power (which serves as a central source of inspiration for the present thesis; e.g. Chapters 1 to 3)
is habitually used as the typical example of discourse determinism (e.g. Alvesson & Karreman,
2000). I will then show that one finds another, contrarian stream of organization studies which
seems to overstretch or exaggerate the possibilities of (discursive) agency in that they posit that
individuals can use or choose discourse freely (e.g. Grant, Hardy, Oswick & Putnam, 2004). My
main objective, then, is to present a more balanced picture of Foucault and to stress that his work
does, despite all odds, comprise a number of insightful arguments on the possibilities and limits
of personal agency. Since this investigation is triggered by the recognition that Foucault is often
wrongfully reduced to some of his most salient assertions on discourse (e.g. his statements that
discourses are ‘the practices that systematically form the object of which they speak’; Foucault,
1974, p. 49) and power (e.g. individuals are both the ‘effect and object of power’; Foucault, 1984,
p. 204), I would like to loosen part of these tight couplings. However, not trying to merge the
notion of ‘agency’ with the image of the rational and autonomous persona who is able to resist
the normalizing force of discourse, I will provide a reading of agency that acknowledges both the
positive and enabling aspects of power and which highlights the creative features of resistance.
Using selected texts by Foucault to argue that resistance and freedom are made possible through
deliberate thinking and reflection as well as through the aesthetic treatment of the self, I will
subsequently draw on de Certeau’s (1984) work on the practice of everyday life in order to
introduce a theory that envisions identity (and resistance) as the effect of creative consumption.
The credit I will give de Certeau’s writings is that he argued, contrary to Foucault, that resistance
is not necessarily a conscious, self-reflective process and that strategic discourse is never fully
able to determine people’s identity, in the sense of ‘muscular discourse’ (Alvesson & Karreman,
2000), since people are always in the position of disrupting the code of the dominant cultural
economy in the very process of tactical re-interpretation. Hence, every strategic discourse that
seeks to determine how things must be done or should be, as I will contend, can always be
countermanded by means of people’s everyday sensemaking. Following de Certeau’s lines of
reasoning, I will further stress that people’s identities are not only to be conceived of as positions
made possible through discourse but as the effect of creative stylizations. In view of the fact that
36
the first part of this chapter addresses the issue of resistance from the perspective of the
individual, it is in the second part that I will discuss how these ideas can be translated to the
collective level so as to envision a society that puts multiplicity and difference at the service of
justice. Seeking help from philosophy, I will first use Serres’ (1995) notion of ‘noise’ and the
‘possible’ to underscore that to enable change one needs to develop a springboard for difference,
multiplicity and alterity. Consequently, I will seek to establish a politics of difference that allows
for a sensitive treatment of difference. Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) will be drawn on
in that respect to introduce a leitmotiv that conveys the promise of a difference-based politics:
paganism. Being conceptualized as a principle that countermands the overriding force and
hegemonic tendency of metanarratives, I will commend paganism as a non-authoritative code
that enables justice by means of releasing difference, that is, by maximizing ‘as much as possible
the multiplication of small narratives’ (Lyotard, 1985, p. 59). These deliberations will
subsequently be employed to conclude that individual self-determination as well as societal
justice are always due to the attentive sensing and appreciation of possibilities of difference and
the restless and artistic re-appropriation of given and invention of new language games.
Chapter 7, which brings the thesis to its conclusion, is dedicated to the inscription of a
gesture that occurs in the name of the social of social entrepreneurship. In line with Giorgio
Agamben’s notion of pausing (cf. Elias, 2003), this chapter is intended as a pause, as a break with
what has preceded it and as the instantiation of a final fragment. In the spirit of a closing
reflection, I will condense the central arguments in a single chapter and try to extend and
radicalize those claims which I deem most essential for a fruitful re-interpretation of the issues
being dealt with. In doing so, I will mainly qualify the status of the ‘social’ in social
entrepreneurship and thereby ask, as Steyaert and Hjorth (2006b) did before, whether the social is
only an ‘epitheton ornans’ of entrepreneurship or, on the contrary, the expression of a genuine
care for the other. Though critical voices could object that this chapter merely exploits previous
arguments of this thesis, I contend that this is requested in view of the still narrow and one-sided
signification of social entrepreneurship. After a brief summary – in which I will put particular
stress upon those academic writings which depict social entrepreneurship as a technical, and thus
commandable and programmable knowledge and upon the discourse analysis in the third Chapter
which has taught us that the ‘social’ is a paradoxical and hybrid construction and not simply a
positive denotation – I will establish an intertextual link so as to locate the emergence of social
37
entrepreneurship against the broader surge towards ethics. Invoking conceptual narratives on, for
instance, ‘social responsibility’, ‘social economy’, ‘sustainability’, etc., I will assert that together
with ‘social entrepreneurship’ these concepts are conceivable as a response to recent corporate
scandals and to the public distrust in political powers and the business community. However, in
opposition to such terms as ‘sustainability’ which has, due to its inflationary and instrumental
use, lost large parts of its public credibility, I will contend that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is as yet still accepted as a fruitful copula between profit seeking and social
deed (Seelos & Mair, 2005). In order to make clear that this view is not necessarily conducive to
endowing social entrepreneurship with a social identity nor for doing away with the
performativity cliché (Lyotard, 1984), I will elaborate that the economic grounding and primacy
of social entrepreneurship is sustained even by writings which make explicit reference to one or
another social signifier. Positing that it is currently en vogue to set social enterprises apart from
their business counterparts by stating that the former are predominantly concerned with the
increase of social, not financial capital (e.g. Johnson, 2003), I will show that social capital is in
no way more social (or less economic) than financial capital since both concepts undeniably
depart from a transactional logic. In trying to problematize the utterly functional and reciprocal
signification of social entrepreneurship through ‘social capital’, I will discuss that social capital
thrives on the premise of ‘do ut des’, that is, I give in order that you give in return, which shows
that the logic of economic circulation is still deeply ingrained. Whereas I will conclude that this
sort of signification of social entrepreneurship lacks the kind of surprise, imagination and
invention Derrida (e.g. 1989; 2004) was keen to advocate elsewhere since it merely replicates
economic mechanisms in the social sphere, I will then demonstrate that we must not forget to
envision the social as an intimate encounter with the other’s otherness. A brief reiteration of
Derrida’s exploration of aporia, undecidability and responsibility thus closes the textual circle of
my thoughts on social entrepreneurship. Derrida’s treatises are thereby treated as a prescriptive
gesture, so to speak, which is deemed apposite as a guiding principle for probing into ‘genuine’
social entrepreneurship. Making reference to Derrida is, then, envisaged as a first step into a
(hopefully) more spacious search for sources of knowledge and concepts that will allow us to
grasp the social as a becoming process that truly escapes the premises of economic reason, that is,
the economic circle of inputs and outputs. This process can then also operate independently of the
pragmatic limitations of the market. By the same token, I will investigate if unconditional social
action or unconditional relations may become possible at all given the pragmatic limitations and
38
politico-ethical demands of everyday life. Irrespective of the possible criticism that Derrida’s
deliberations on non-reciprocal, unconditional exchange appear highly utopian (i.e. naïve, since
they seem impossible; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005), I will discuss, on behalf of
development aid, what it means to act or help without conditions, that is, beyond economic
calculation and what the associated problems or rather impossibilities are in this context. It must
hence be acknowledged that genuine social entrepreneurship is unattainable since it cannot be
permitted or ‘algorithmically deduced from incontestable … precepts’ (Critchley & Kearney,
2001, xii). I will therefore show that the social role of entrepreneurship is, or should we say must
remain, an event of pure ‘madness’ that is to be reflected on both as a complex, elusive and fear-
provoking process (i.e. an endeavor that is necessarily accompanied by fear and trembling) as
well as an ideal thought that provides hope, courage and motivation and which thus invites us to
further pursue our social deeds. As modest as this will become, this chapter marks a final attempt
to decouple social entrepreneurship from the ‘clutches’ of the current canon, and tries to provide
a possible answer or at least an educational concept for thinking about the limits and possibility
of social entrepreneurship ‘that deserves the name’ (as Derrida used to say, e.g. 2001).
*
The epilogue presents an assemblage of ideas on the end which hail the future through
consecutive openings, and … and … and …
39
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45
***
A Brief Note on Reading
Before beginning a text, through the title or the nouns of the title, and through the library source
of the title, the reader is already conditioning her/himself to the limits of the term
discussed, to the particular incarnation the term will have in the context of a particular
discursive genre, and hence a fixed idea of what the term is, and what knowledges or
discussion it will produce – for the moment and only within that text.
(MacCormack, 2005)
As with any title, the title of this thesis ‘On the Name of Social Entrepreneurship: Business
School Teaching, Research and Development Practice’ might, as MacCormack’s (2005) claim
suggests, prompt particular associations and expectations as to what is to follow. Given the title
of the thesis and taking into account that I have just provided an overview of the ensuing
chapters, one might thus assume that this predefines, in a condensed yet precise manner, the very
meaning of the forthcoming body of signs. While this might at times be the case, to believe that
the title of this thesis contains its meaning en miniature might nevertheless be misleading insofar
as it alludes to an exhaustive part-whole relationship or, to put it differently, plain translatability.
To counteract the possibility of such associations, however, it is first of all helpful to refer to
Foucault’s (1974) claim that ‘(t)he frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the
first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form it is
caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within
a network’ (p. 23). Most relevant in connection with the present commentary is Foucault’s
assertion that all writing, despite its apparent closeness, is an act of openness and unforeseeable
linkages. In as much as I conceive of the above title as what one could call ‘mystic’, I have to
offer at least two alternative ways of dealing with the secret contained therein. The first option
would be to provide the reader with a guide that enables him/her to decode the text in conformity
with my identified intention (which, of course, has partly been revealed through the previous
46
chapter). In contrast, the second option would be to completely leave the ‘sensemaking’ process
to the reader and make him/her impart whatever he/she considers intelligible or interesting. I
concede that both options simultaneously impose limits and open up possibilities. It must also be
borne in mind that some explicit background information has already been presented and that this
will facilitate the process of decoding (or at any rate anticipation) of meaning. I would therefore
like to devote some thought on the implications of commentary in order then to discuss what it
means to read (imaginatively and intensively).
To render comprehensible the rationale of the previous chapter with the benefit of
hindsight, I would like to point out that these preparatory instructions were presented in an effort
to avoid a situation where this thesis becomes the exclusive domain of the insider. That said,
however, it is equally clear that the risk of ‘patronizing’ the reader by means of foreclosing his or
her own interpretations is always present. This issue of over-codification, which Meier Sørensen
(2001) has taken to the extreme in his commendable account, therefore looms large, and it must
be conceded that one all too easily leaves the question of the reader open so as to turn him/her
into a ‘user, in the same way as a lawn mower tends to mow the lawn regardless of who is
moving it. The death of the author seems to have been followed by the death of the reader, in the
same way as one now is able to invest in lawn mowers that mow the lawn without the need for an
external mover, a user or any human steering capacity whatsoever’ (p. 369). Leaving aside the
witty allegory of Meier Sørensen, the point I want to clarify here is that the present thesis cannot
do without the reader since it is by no means self-contained and semantically sealed, that is, the
thesis is unlike a machine that operates in the absence of a human agent. On the contrary, the
thesis needs to be actively endowed with meaning, since the word in language, as Bakhtin (1981)
reminds us, becomes ‘one’s own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his
own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive
intention’ (p. 293). It is important to keep in mind that the previous chapter was consciously
designed so as not to act as a ‘Bedienungsanleitung’, an operating manual, so to speak, which
tells, in a univocal sense, what the text is meant to say. In consequence, I would now like to
discuss the operation and some of the intertextual possibilities of the present thesis. What I would
like to highlight in particular is the issue of repetition as well as of chronological and non-
chronological reading.
Regarding the former issue, it is worth noting that the different chapters, ceaselessly and
from different scholarly angles, repeat the cornerstone issues and ideas (e.g. social
47
entrepreneurship, undecidability, identity, hybridity, etc.). As a result, they work as reciprocative
iterations which, in combination, are envisioned to provoke a heightened sense of ‘together while
different’. In accordance with Lyotard’s (1985) telling observation that ‘narratives get repeated
but are never identical’ (p. 33), I would like to point out that the effect of repetition is not to be
mistaken as the representation of a linearly structured stream of reasoning or of recurring
mimicry. Instead it must be taken as a celebration of excess, that is, the accentuation of the
seemingly supplementary aspect of the text. To express this objective in Meier Sørensen’s (2001)
terms, I would like to make the thesis thrive on repetitions ‘with a difference’ (p. 367) whereas
this ‘difference must be shown differing’ (p. 368). Contending that repetition always brings
forward difference (and not sameness; cf. Deleuze, 1994), it is equally clear that the constant re-
inscription of particular claims and arguments might create the impression that this thesis
produces redundancy (‘more to the point please!’). It is therefore important to keep in mind that
the rhetoric of repetition is at the service of calling into question some of the prevailing
conventions of what is dubbed ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1970). As mentioned before, any search
for final ends or for the new grand theory, model, or metanarrative which tells how things are de
facto, and which, consequentially, would reassure us in the ‘age of dispersion and specialization
where “hope” is lacking’ (Foucault, 2004, p. xiv) is dismissed. What will instead be put forward
is an assemblage of texts that, by their various interweavements, performatively try to make use
of the ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976) entailed in language, and thereby create new lines of flight for
the subject matters at hand. Accordingly, it must be mentioned that this thesis approaches its
topic(s) through a multi-disciplinary approach which reveals an interest in such diverse
disciplines as psychology, the arts, philosophy, sociology (of knowledge), history, and cultural
studies, etc. Though such a broad orientation might appear confusing if one takes into account
that I have been educated in the field of psychology and that the official branch of knowledge into
which this thesis falls is organizational psychology, it is precisely through the multiplication of
perspectives that the often concealed or ignored ambivalence and polysemia of social reality shall
be revealed. In other words, the adoption of these multiple perspectives will be present
throughout the thesis as a source of potential enchantment and as a means for enlivening and
enabling the immanent diversity of meaning. Anticipating that some of the poststructural
language conventions and terminologies could raise suspicion, to say the least, I would also like
to clarify that, despite the seemingly non-academic form of enunciation (that is, if looked at from
the perspective of the academic canon), there is some undeniable seriousness ‘at play’ in this
48
study. Though this exculpation might not be needed, I will nevertheless mention that the
seriousness of this thesis is epitomized in the following exemplary concerns: the disclosure of the
narrow horizon of business school teaching and research on social entrepreneurship; the quasi-
univocal inclination towards economic theory and managerial calculations of social
entrepreneurship scholars; the discursive delimitation implied in prevailing representations of
social entrepreneurship; and the tactical and theoretical spaces for reclaiming a different kind of
social entrepreneurship.
Regarding the second issue, reading, I find it indispensable to iterate that the ensuing
elaborations do not simply produce a whole, that is, a corpus of texts being held together by an
overarching logic and singular stream of reasoning. Instead, this thesis consists of a ‘loose
coupling’ of chapters, or sub-texts, which are interrelated (if such a term is at all apposite)
through the rhetorical use of repetition. As mentioned before through the voice of Foucault
(1974), the thesis is conceivable as an assemblage of chapters which are both interrelated (with
other chapters as well as other texts outside of the thesis; cf. Kristeva, 1980) and stand-alone (yet
not in an autonomous way). By extension, as is the case with many other books, my thesis can be
read in a variety of ways: from the beginning to the end (linearly), from the end to the beginning
(reverse linearly), in random order or by following the various hints and cross-references. And
since I deliberately refrain from devising a preferential style or chronology of reading for the
present thesis, I would like to put particular stress on the observation that the individual chapters
are written in a stand-alone fashion. That is, each chapter, though being related to other chapters
in this assemblage of texts, provides a stand-alone argument which is underscored not least in that
each chapter is followed by its own reference list. Given this state of affairs, each chapter is
presumed to provide a partial argument of the thesis while their focus and makeup allows one to
pursue a focused investigation of a selected aspect of the whole or, alternatively, a ‘classical
reading’ from beginning to end. Importantly, in the sense of a holographic design (e.g. Morgan,
1997), the thesis is crafted in such a way that the overarching argument is often reflected within
the single chapters and, conversely, that each chapter exhibits traces that relate the individual
pieces to the text as a whole. As mentioned before, redundancy is not simply unavoidable in such
an approach but, rather, deliberately established to ensure that the overarching predication of the
thesis is appositely solidified. To make visible the traces between or intertextuality of the
individual chapters, I have chosen to support the reader in revealing the argumentative
connections by providing the relevant cross-references to other chapters in brackets. In the spirit
49
of a last word, it must be remembered that this ‘book’ does not require a chronological unfolding
of meaning, and that there is no mandatory or even best path to be taken. Although the previous
introduction as well as the present notes more or less straightforwardly express what I had in
mind while writing this thesis, I nevertheless prefer to leave the last choice to the reader. Après
vous, then!
50
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C.
Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.
Foucault, M. (1974). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2004). Preface to Anti-Oedipus. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane. London:
Continuum.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L. S.
Roudiez, transl. T. Gora, A. Jardine & L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, J. F. & Thébaud, J. L. (1985). Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
MacCormack, P. (2005). Pleasure, Perversion and Death: Three Lines of Flight for the Viewing
Body, retrieved from http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-
mat/MacCormack/PPDcontents.htm.
Meier Sørensen, B. (2001). Assemblage Notes, or, A Comment on the Factory of Things.
Ephemera, 4, 367 – 373.
Morgan, G. (1997). Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
51
52
***
Part I
53
‘The Construction of Social Entrepreneurship in and through Research
and Business School Teaching’
***
Language has a social origin … This means that its main function is industrial, commercial and
military, always social. It fixes reality as it names it according to the needs of society.
(Lecercle, 2002, p. 21)
All government depends on a particular mode of ‘representation’: the elaboration of a language
for depicting the domain in question that claims both to grasp the nature of that reality
represented, and literally to represent it in a form amenable to political deliberation,
argument and scheming. (Rose, 1990, p. 80)
Before delving into the analysis of how ‘social entrepreneurship’ is constructed in research and
business school teaching, it must be mentioned that the ensuing two chapters depart from a
discursive ‘paradigm’ which emphasizes the constitutive role of language. This means that social
reality is invariably the result of human interaction whereas language (comprising both speech
and writing) occupies a pivotal position. It follows that neither academic texts nor teaching on
social entrepreneurship are assumed to provide us with true stories. Instead, they provide stories
that are, by social convention, acknowledged as being true (Foucault, 2001). This distinction is
important since it implies that stories produced by the academic community are envisaged as
being due to particular ‘power-based reality constructions’ (Morgan, 1986). Whereas this notion
of power might give the impression that the following investigations pursue an ‘ideology
critique’ (e.g. Alvesson & Willmottt, 1991), it must be stressed that the objective of the present
study is not to judge the knowledge of social entrepreneurship according to its truthfulness but to
gain an understanding of knowledge which emphasizes that there is ‘no universal understanding
that is beyond history and society’ (Rabinow, 1984, p. 5). Defying the modernist emancipation
54
trajectory as implied, for instance, in the Frankfurt School or (neo-) Marxism, it must be
mentioned that the importance of studying social entrepreneurship in the process of its
signification is based on the fundamental insight that meaning is never (completely) stable and
unchangeable. Secondly, treating social entrepreneurship not as a given entity but as a social
achievement and, by implication, as being subject to ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976) makes it
possible to shift the emphasis away from issues of truth and rightfulness and, on the contrary, to
delineate that meaning is always ‘tied up’ with particular social circumstances, relations and
interpretive practices.
This said, I would like to shed some light upon the subject matter of the following two
chapters. On the face of it, the gospel of ‘social entrepreneurship’ resounds on a global scale and
seems to attract enormous interest in academia, the media as well as in policy-making. However,
the chorus is not as variegated as one might expect. Far from being characterized by a multitude
or even a cacophony of meanings (which is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’), most representations of
social entrepreneurship – irrespective of their subtle equivocation – are typically based on two
sets of denominators: economic calculation and business managerialism. The image of social
entrepreneurship as ‘economism’ (Down, 1994) or ‘managerialism’ (Enteman, 1993), both of
which reduce all social matters to the economic level or else pretend that social institutions are
primarily a function of best-management practices, are truly virulent. Being virulent, by
definition, implies that both managerial and economic significations are spread at an increasing
rate and as such are assumed to cause harm by way of limiting our imagination of how social
entrepreneurship relates with, for instance, communities, societies or the globe more generally. It
could be objected that my polemic turns a blind eye to those laudable accounts that have put
forward creative enunciations of social entrepreneurship while evading the mainstream premises
of political and business/economic discourse (cf. Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). Despite these possible
allegations, it can confidently be asserted that the issue of social entrepreneurship – from the time
of its inception down to the present-day jargon of academics, politicians, journalists, best-selling
writers, etc. – has become increasingly narrow in focus. To provide an understanding of the
boundedness of the meaning of social entrepreneurship and to display (and speculate about) some
of the wider implications of this obtuseness, the following two chapters will unfold the ruling
metaphors and grounding premises coming to the fore in both business school education and
academic writing. While business school teaching and academic research represent only two
aspects of a potentially infinite number of contexts in which social entrepreneurship is dealt with,
55
it is important to keep in mind that the defining, not to say restricting, efforts of those contexts are
– maybe with the exception of politics – most influential when it comes to informing public
opinion and practicing (non-profit and non-governmental) managers. Accordingly, illuminating
the appropriation of social entrepreneurship in (business) research and teaching is deemed
apposite as there are clear signs that those endeavors had (and still have) a
normalizing/naturalizing effect for the understanding of policy makers, politicians,
philanthropies, foundations, etc. In other words, as both academic teaching and research seems to
feed back, at least to some extent, into the political-economic system (where it gets to affect
donor decisions on the part of foundations and philanthropies, the formulation of public policy
statements by politicians, or practices of non-governmental and non-profit organizations), it is not
only justifiable but high time to subject the construction of social entrepreneurship to close
scrutiny. In view of the high popularity of social entrepreneurship in the academic context, where
the matter is foremost promoted as a ‘cure-all balm’ and where it is applied with a large dose of
change potential for the better, it is through the first two chapters that I seek to inquire whether
we shall pursue this optimistic if not downright utopian line of argument or, conversely, if a more
modest and critical stance is called for. While working from a critical vantage point which aspires
to uncover the root assumptions and grounding discourses of teaching and research, both chapters
will make suggestions as to how to overcome the prevailing eulogies of social entrepreneurship
while also exploring so far unrecognized possibilities. However, as will become clear throughout
the ensuing chapters, the two fundamental questions ‘what is the social of social
entrepreneurship?’ and ‘to what ends is its social commitment appropriated?’ have, until today,
remained either elusive or else have been dramatically mystified. On the basis of the realization
that the field of social entrepreneurship performs a partial mimesis of precedent discourses on
entrepreneurship I will conclude that the epithet ‘social’ does not as yet seem to make any
difference. The contention that the prevailing discourse on social entrepreneurship calls for an
extension of the given legacy will thus be corroborated through ontological and ethical
arguments. The argument being pursued in the first two chapters, namely that social
entrepreneurship is both the object of political investments and an incremental part of struggles
and relations of force and domination, will subsequently serve as the starting point of Chapter 7
where I seek to gain a novel understanding of the social of social entrepreneurship. Since I prefer
not to give away the ‘secret’ of what is to follow, it will suffice to say at this point that the
56
‘becoming social’ of entrepreneurship will be approached by virtue of an ethical imperative
towards difference and towards the incorruptible otherness of the other.
57
References
Alvesson, M. & Willmottt, H. (1991). Making Sense of Management: A Critical Analysis.
London: Sage.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press.
Down, B. (1994). Marxist History and Schooling: Beyond Economism. Issues in Educational
Research, 4, 1 – 17, retrieved from http://education.curtin.edu.au/iier/iier4/down.html.
Enteman, W. (1993). Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology. Wisconsin: The
University of Wisconsin Press.
Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless Speech, ed. J. Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Lecercle, J. J. (2002). Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave McMillan.
Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. London: Sage.
Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
Rose, N. (1990). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.
Steyaert, C. & Hjorth, D. (eds.) (2006). Entrepreneurship as Social Change: A Third Movements
in Entrepreneurship Book. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
58
Prolegomenon I
5
A) Introduction
Provided that one’s writing is always historically contingent, a transient truth, so to
speak, and thus not least related to one’s temporary mood swings and affects, one’s
instantaneous state of mind and, probably most notably, one’s overall level of reading or
scholarship, it is plausible that many of the things one puts down on paper at a given
moment in time must not necessarily correspond with what one thinks, believes and
writes at a latter instance. A transition of opinion(s), which Foucault (1996) depicted as
the right, even duty, of all writers,
6
is precisely what I went through while re-reading the
following chapter briefly before handing in my thesis.
7
Hence, in light of a simultaneous
sense of estrangement and of having ‘moved on’ (cf. Deleuze, 1995) – which was
engendered, though in different ways, through my further reading/writing experiences –
I would like to prepare the ground for Chapter 1 by telling a brief story of how – i.e. on the
basis of what objectives and intentions – my analysis of business school teaching on social
entrepreneurship initially evolved, and which parts of Chapter 1 I deem in need of
(potential) prospective revisions.
While setting out to reflect on and thus take issue with selected methodological
choices and theoretical/conceptual appropriations, it shall remain clear at all times that I
have no stake in disqualification, i.e. rendering futile the first chapter of my thesis by
confessing that it – if looked at retrospectively – actually ran into a blind alley. Quite the
contrary, notwithstanding the fact that I have come to write this chapter more than two
years ago, and though this process has fostered an aparallel evolution between the book
5
Notice that the fonts in the prolegomena which precede Chapters 1, 2 and 7 were changed from Times New
Roman to American Typewriter. It is by way of this minor graphic alteration that I want to indicate that the
three prolegomena form a sort of inter-text that does stand outside of the general argument of the present
thesis (above or below? This is to be decided by the reader). Not least since being written after the event, as it
were, and as a response to one of my supervisors, I prefer the prolegomena to be read as posterior
commentaries that can either be read before or after reading the individual chapters or be skipped
altogether.
6
In fact, Foucault (1996) made it clear that instead of continuing to write the same things over and over
again the creed of his writing practice was that he was given the opportunity to get transformed as a person.
He thus granted himself the right to divert from previous contentions and convictions with the ultimate aim
of engaging a new type of knowledge ‘so as to modify not only the thought of others but one’s own as well’ (p.
461). Deviations of the sort one can identify in Foucault’s writing are thus less signs of inconsistency but
rather traces that reveal how his scholarly mode of inquiry transformed his knowledge on a given subject
matter as a whole. Hence, ‘I write a book only because I still don’t know exactly what to think about this thing
I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and what I think … I am an experimenter in
the sense that I write in order to transform my self and in order not to think the same thing as before’
(Foucault, 2001, pp. 239 – 240).
7
Quite frankly, it was actually one of my supervisors who advised me to reconsider some of the points I am
about to address in the context of this prolegomenon.
59
and its supposed author, I suggest that the following remarks ought to be conceived as
multiplying flows which lay open some of the many ways in which Chapter 1 could (not
should or must!) have been written. In order to make this a bit more concrete, the
reflections that form the body of this short prolegomenon begin from the consideration
that a chapter such as the following, though in one way or another forming a segmented
and structured plane, always conveys the possibility of both methodological and
theoretical appropriation(s), and hence the possibility to apply existing concepts and
analytic schemas to novel ends. With this as a backdrop, I will now first get to anticipate
the overarching objective of the first part of Chapter 1 in order then to discuss some of its
‘left-outs’, thereby also discussing some ways in which those absences could be tackled in
the course of a fictional (since non-existing) re-write.
B) Reflections as Regards Part I of Chapter 1
To say it without detour and in all brevity: the overall aim of the first part of Chapter 1
was to put forward a story on how social entrepreneurship emerged out of or was enabled
by an apparatus in which business schools came to play a crucial role. Part I was chiefly
departing from the assumption that instead of first inquiring the meaning of the concept
‘social entrepreneurship’ it would make much more sense to get an idea of the implicit
horizon of understanding of the very context which actually brought the concept into the
world. Therefore, the essential idea was to illuminate the sort of rationality that comes to
work both in business schools and their ‘affiliated’ (both proximal and distal) institutions
as well as in the behavior of the people working in these contexts. It is precisely in this
way that I sought to show, among other things, how the canonical ‘truths’ upon which the
business school comes to operate form the soil for a particular reading of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ as well as for a particular treatment (read exploitation) of that
knowledge in conjunction with, for instance, education or consulting services.
It is probably already obvious by now that the broadness and complexity of this
task made it necessary to sub-divide the whole enterprise into ‘manageable’ analytic
chunks. I hence decided to first highlight the rituals of quality in the business school (e.g.
business magazine rankings, accreditation procedures, research assessments) so as to
elaborate on how they institute a dividing line that distinguishes between respectively
proper and improper standards of knowledge as well as between approved and
disapproved means and modes of education. That is, I tried to show how these rituals are
informed by a particular set of epistemic rules that determine the sort of knowledge,
teaching and education being allowed or disqualified in the space of
60
business/management education (and thereby in particular in the realm of MBA
teaching).
The second ambition, then, was to pinpoint how the abovementioned strategy of
intelligibility gets to place the business school teacher under the explicit obligation to
carry out certain acts while at the same time making other deeds less welcome and, by
extension, likely. Yet, there is, as I try to show, not only such an explicit and rule-based
mode of government at play in the realm of business school teaching (and research). The
second mode of government which is brought to light is much more elusive, discrete and,
for that very reason, effective if compared to its more disciplinary or control-based
counterpart. To illustrate the concrete operation of power on the part of the subject and
thus to discuss how human beings turn themselves into particular subjects, I chose to
make direct reference to Foucault’s (e.g. 1991) inquiry of governmentality which to me
appeared as a valuable connection for emphasizing how people working/teaching in
business schools actually go about applying the form of reasoning about the proper
conduct of teaching in the context of their own ‘creation’ (or, to stay in Foucault’s
terminology, subjectification), thus literally exercising power through an apparent
process of internalized control. The coincidence of these two distinct, though
nevertheless compatible, operations of power, as I try to argue, is what makes the
business school setting particularly interesting because it shows, among other things,
that this very stratum combines the more disciplinary or, more correctly, control-based
modes of power
8
(cf. Deleuze, 1995) with those forms of power which render people
subjects by engaging them in the volitional and seemingly autonomous subjugation to
certain sets of implicit knowledge.
After discussing the parallel existence of hierarchical, and at times disciplinary
technologies of government such as, for instance, student evaluations, quality monitoring
and assessment measurements, etc.
9
and those technologies relying on the ‘conduct of
8
Keep in mind that this notion should be used cautiously in the sense that it refers less to total surveillance
through ‘total institutions’ (cf. Foucault, 1984, p. 380) but to a sort of control that works through
modulations effectuated by particular codes such as, for instance, constant competition or continuous
assessment.
9
Be aware that the notion of ‘disciplinary’ seems to ignore Deleuze’s (1995) eloquent claim that we have in
fact left the disciplinary society behind and moved over to the age of control. To be sure, although I have
mainly favored the term ‘discipline’ over that of ‘control’ I still hope that the reader will be able to recognize
and comprehend the sort of practices, which according to Deleuze would have to be termed ‘practices of
control’, I tried to emphasize in my inquiry. Thus, instead of continuing this conceptual elaboration, I prefer
to refer to Wittgenstein’s (1953) seminal statement that the meaning of a word (such as ‘discipline’ or
‘control’) is never abstract but related to how it is used in a particular language game (consequently, read the
following chapter).
61
conduct’ (Foucault, 1980) and which incite particular types of being (such as the
enterprising academic) through intrinsic self-forming activities, I tried to conflate these
insights in a third analytic step so as to inquire or, frankly speaking, speculate about how
these two disparate practices or sets of technologies together, though in their own
particular ways, act as a precondition for the rise of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’. On the face of it, this inquiry does not intend to come to terms with
the root or origin of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’, and only marginally with the
meaning of the term (which is the pivotal objective of Chapter 2 and the partial ambition
of part II of Chapter 1). Instead, my purpose was to pinpoint how the concept evolved
from particular historical conditions and from contingent, local, yet ‘universally’
accepted ‘truths’, and, by implication, as both object and subject of particular formations
of knowledge and power.
It is at this point that I want to close this brief overview of the first chapter’s
trajectory by making it clear that interpretation, if conceived from the perspective I have
just outlined, is less about hermeneutic dissection (i.e. digging into the deep layers of
meaning) than about disclosing the energies and organizational connections (read
apparatus or dispositif) that materialize and run through the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’. With this in mind, I opt to turn the steering-wheel around so as to
discuss some of the difficulties which (might) arise from using or making reference to
concepts and ideas imparted by someone as elaborate and widely received as Michel
Foucault.
“Shortcomings”
10
The danger inherent in any direct reference to Foucault is that such a link might easily
raise the adept’s eyebrow since one is always and immediately prone of missing the
‘stray area’ (read precise signification) of the latter’s theorizing. Though I do not intend
to immerse myself into a lengthy exculpation, I still want to pick out and discuss a couple
of points of my analysis which might engender a partial antinomy if juxtaposed with
Foucault’s theorizing. I will thus proceed along a three-part structure so as to shed light
on “shortcomings” revealed in relation to a) the use of the concepts of ‘genealogy’,
10
I have used the term shortcomings here to express that Chapter 2 has de facto fallen short in allowing for
and considering a significant number of Foucault’s eloquent insights as regards, for instance, the operation of
discourse, micropolitics, the analytic foundation of his genealogy or the significance individuals and
institutions come to play in his theorizing. On the other hand, however, I have put the term in quotation
marks which indicates that there are still good reasons to believe that the analysis of Chapter 1 is feasible the
way it is currently presented. I will hence vindicate my analysis from complete annihilation by inserting a
series of counter-arguments.
62
‘governmentality’ and ‘subjectivation’ b) the (potential over)emphasis on individuals and
institutions and c) the polemical tone revealed in the first part of Chapter 1. All points
are elaborated in brief and, as will become clear soon hereafter, by way of providing both
arguments and counter-arguments. It is in this way the following discussion will try to
embrace points that militate both in favor and disfavor of my use of Foucault.
a) Genealogy, Governmentality and Subjectivation Betrayed?
In light of the fact that the first part of Chapter 1 refers to Foucault’s genealogical
investigations, a first point to be mentioned here refers to the question if the analysis was
set up aptly for coming to terms with or for understanding the connection between power
and knowledge as revealed in connection with business school teaching. In more concrete
terms, in view of the motto of Foucault’s genealogical inquiries, which implies that by
taking the right distance towards one’s subject area things become profoundly visible, I
instantly started asking myself whether I was really in a position to make claims about
business schools’ teaching (on social entrepreneurship), about the sort of epistemic
formations business school teachers base their teaching on or about the particular
relations of power and knowledge which render business school teachers particular
subjects. Quite frankly, though I have been working in a business school for more than
five years (where even gaining a cursory idea of MBA teaching) I have not once attended
any classes on social entrepreneurship. It is thus at least doubtful whether endeavoring
to understand business school’s ‘social practices from within’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983,
p. 103) can be based on secondary information alone. Moreover, considering the
determination that genealogical investigations (à la Foucault) always seek to reveal the
‘surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow,
1983, p. 106) with the ultimate aim of identifying ‘the details and accidents that
accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 80), there is no way around conceding
that my own analysis has brought about a, to say it without hesitation, overly one-sided
and smoothed image of the business school’(s mode of production). As a matter of fact, I
have no problem acknowledging that my analytic material (i.e. texts on social
entrepreneurship written by approved business school teachers and available analyses of
business school teaching and research) had the effect of bringing to light only few, and
thereby only the most obvious and/or general, ways in which power and knowledge are
connected in the realm of business schools. Though I never tried to universalize what I
say, thus fostering the impression that my (transcendental) way of describing things is
63
actually the ‘right way’, I accept the potential objection that my analysis conjures up a
unitary spirit of the business school, pretending that this context is grounded on a
singular form of conscience that henceforth engenders a unity of objects and subjects.
11
This actually brings us to the second (yet related) issue: the inquiry of
governmentality and subjectivation. What to me is lacking in the picture being drawn in
the first part of Chapter 1 is that it does not account for Foucault’s (2001) eloquent claim
that processes of government cannot be described on the basis of a uniform or
homogeneous space. In other words, it must be objected that my analysis, respectively
the distance from which it has been conducted, has left little space for the recognition
that government(ality) is a ‘diverse, heterogeneous and dynamic topology of power in
which complexes of problems continuously emerge’ (Dillon, 2006, p. 2). What I am saying
here is that my inquiry, rather than incorporating the above points, departs form the
assumption or, more precisely, encourages the impression that the business school is the
de facto space of enterprising subjectivity and, most fundamentally, that the production
of this particular form of being is due to more or less uniform modes of (self-
)measurement, adjustment/refinement and limitation. This is, however, truly not the
case and it is probably closer to the ‘truth’ that the enterprising academic forms, in a
peculiar way, the very epitome of liberal governmentality and, by implication, a (pure)
form of subjectivation which one might only rarely find in ‘reality’. If we hence believe
that governmentality is primarily about the ‘history of truth telling processes’ (Foucault,
2004, p. 36; quoted in Dillon, 2006, p. 3), then it is anything but debatable that every
inquiry of governmentality requires a certain vigilance towards the fragility, ephemeral
dynamics and, by extension, heterogeneity inherent in all micro-physically organized
regimes of truth. Moreover, the study of governmentality makes it necessary that the
analyst pays apt attention to the microphysics (of power) and thus to the question of how
power is exercised on the body/subject in a strategic way.
In light of Foucault’s (1977) seminal identification that power, since not being a
property of a given person (cf. also point b)), ‘is exercised rather than possessed’ (p. 26),
one is further called upon to arrange one’s analysis so that it is able to pinpoint, for
instance, how the microphysics of power are connected to practices of self-creation. It is
11
On the face of it, if one were to neutralize the impression of ostensible unity one would (in the future) have
to delve into a more micro, quasi-ethnographic inquiry of business school’s social practices and rituals of
power. Active participation (in the form of, for instance, participant observation) in classes on social
entrepreneurship and in business school life in general, as I believe, could have been helpful to gain a ‘deeper’
insight into the manifold (relational) ways in which people (read business school teachers) apply the truth of
the day in the conduct of their work and selves.
64
only in this way that one’s analysis would pay apt heed to the singularity and
aesthetic/ethical aspect of all being, and hence allow insights into how people learn to live
with (i.e. fold and re-fold) the constraints and the contingencies which form part of their
(working) lives. Keeping all this at the back of our minds, it is self-explanatory that
questions such as how individuals are rendered enterprising subjects through the
operation of prevailing discourses and, as I discuss theoretically in Chapter 6, how those
same individuals might practice ‘resistance’ within the boundaries inflicted by power-
knowledge were not properly addressed in my analysis. Since it is evident that my
analysis has not given adequate weight to Deleuze’s (1995) insightful comment that
subjectification has not only to do with constituting subjects but with creating
alternative, different ways of existing, it goes without saying that the architecture and
data selection of the first part of Chapter 1 fails in taking into account that power is not,
or only in very rare moments, something horribly repressive for the individual but
rather something that always leaves space for transgressive moves (Foucault, 1998).
This is to say that my analysis has undoubtedly lost contact, so to speak, with Foucault’s
statement that power is definitively not a set of general and autonomous rules which
govern human conduct but rather a particular and ever-changing set of relations.
Obviously then, my analysis does not provide an answer to the question of how people in
business schools actually bend the line of power-knowledge so to live with it instead of
falling into an unlivable void.
After having put forward a collage of points of critique, I would immediately like to
insert two counter-arguments to the aforementioned points. Firstly, having just made
reference to Foucault’s writing on micropolitics and on aesthetics of existence, which
both provide useful theoretical/methodological perspectives for inquiring and
comprehending the rendering of individuality or style of being, I hasten to add that
depicting the technologies of subjectivation in rather broad and general terms holds a
heuristic value for understanding the principle operation of interpellation in business
school teaching (and research). That is, despite the fact that Foucault’s genealogies are
interested in detecting discontinuities and breaks in discourse and thus precisely about
being specific rather than general, I opt to point at another text by Foucault (2003)
where he made it clear that his work on the power-knowledge nexus (read genealogy)
never asks the question of the individual person, since its purpose is ‘not to modify any
given phenomenon as such, or to modify any given individual in so far as he is an
individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level of their generality’ (p. 246). This
65
quote cannot possibly be overestimated especially because it emphasizes that the more
dispersed forms of power, i.e. those chiefly relying not on the brute application of force
but on distinct intelligible mechanisms, presuppose a kind of inquiry that seeks to gain a
general understanding of a given context’s stimulative nature or imperative. By
extension, the advantage of being schematic rather than differentiated is that a general
sketch allows for making assertions about a particular site of social production (read the
business school) in its entirety. To be sure, a general (read macro) and a specific (read
micro) inquiry of business school’s interpellative force do not form two mutually
exclusive vantage points, since there is always the possibility to use the principle
understanding of business school’s ‘vector space’ for reflecting on how specific regimes of
truth actually translate into the determination of subjects or how people actually go
about border-crossing discourse’ horizon of understanding (Tamboukou, 2003). What I
would like to stress here, however, is that understanding how people working/teaching in
business schools de facto go about governing themselves or how they, based on their
critical reflection and judgment (Foucault, 1988), go about defining what is good for
them in order to grant themselves an aesthetic mode of existence would presuppose an
entirely different investigation.
Secondly, I briefly want to take up the previous reservation that the enterprising
academic should be conceived of as the type of subjectivity which is most characteristic
of a pure and rather homogeneous (read rare, even unrealistic) form of liberal
governmentality. That is, having said that the business school reveals two modes of
government (one more based on discipline/control and the other based on the ‘conduct of
conduct’), where each forming a rather coherent sets of practices, this goes well together
with Foucault’s (2004) rendition that modes of governmentality such as that of
liberalism are, though heterogeneous after all, made up of a set of systems which are in
themselves quite coherent. Indeed, the heterogeneity of any system of thought and
subjectivation, according to Foucault (2004), is overcome by a strategic connection of its
parts: ‘The logic of strategy is the logic of the connection of the heterogeneous and it is
not, repeat not, the logic of the homogenisation of things which are contradictory’ (p. 44;
quoted in Dillon, 2006, p. 4). What all this implies, then, is that the two forms of
government I described above integrate a diverse set of practices through a strategic
game that gives the entire endeavor of the business school both purpose and direction.
Hence, construing the enterprising academic as the effect of more or less ‘systematized,
regulated and reflected modes of power’ (Lemke, 2000, p. 5) makes it comprehensible
66
that heterogeneous sets of practices or forms of governing can in fact produce rather
uniform subject positions (as well as rather uniform goals of business school teaching
and the means to achieve them).
b) Over-emphasizing Meaning and Institutions
As tangentially discussed before, re-reading part I of Chapter 1 shows that its analysis
might have downplayed the relational aspect of power, i.e. the role of discursive
practices, and instead favored the inquiry of the meaning of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ (a focus which is actually reserved for the second part of the following
chapter; cf. also Chapter 2) as well as the particular role of institutional arrangements
and individual utterances. Though we must remain vigilant towards the fact that
Foucault himself, for instance in his ‘Madness and Civilization’, identified certain
institutional arrangements (i.e. the general hospital) which he linked to the will of
particular authorities such as societal classes (i.e. the monarchical and bourgeois order),
he made it clear in some of his interviews that neither institutions nor individual actors
made up the core of his interest but the ways in which certain rationalities pervade them.
The (genealogical) analyst should, according to Foucault (1977), necessarily de-
individualize and de-institutionalize his/her thought since government and discipline
(for that matter) ‘may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it
is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or ‘anatomy’ of
power, a technology’ (p. 215). Consequently, I believe that there are paragraphs in the
first part of Chapter 1 where the discussed actors (both individuals and institutions) are
endowed with too much motivational authority and agency as a result of which the
analysis is rendered more ‘structuralist’, entitative and causal than I would like to have
it. On the other hand, however, we must repeat not only that Foucault at times put quite
considerable stress upon specific institutions (Baker, 2007) but also keep in mind that he
explicitly invited analysis that inquire how particular organizations are ‘created to
freeze the relations of power, hold those relations in a state of asymmetry, so that a
certain number of persons get an advantage’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 12). By implication,
Foucault’s claim does support the kind of studies which try to pinpoint the restrictive
force of certain institutions (such as the business schools) and which try to bring to light
how certain forms of being are disallowed by prevailing knowledge. On the other hand,
this alone does not make redundant those inquires that seek to demonstrate the
67
contrary, i.e. that even seemingly dominant/dominating institutions do not only exercise
power in a manner that creates identifiable profiteers and losers and that even though
individuals are in one way or another under the spell of institutional orders they are
nevertheless able to limit, change or develop the relations of power-knowledge of which
they are part. Yet again, this would require a totally different study.
c) Polemical Tone
All this being said, I still believe that the biggest inconsistency revealed in the following
inquiry relates to the evaluative accent of my writing. With ‘evaluative’ I here do not
refer to judgments regarding the rightfulness or truthfulness of my analysis but rather to
the polemic and ironic tone which pervades some of its parts. Indeed, it is probably not
least due to the frequent references to the business school polemic (e.g. Jones &
O’Doherty, 2005) that readers might have come to the conclusion that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ forms a discursive object that should best be obliterated.
12
And though
I sincerely believe that it is at times useful to accentuate, even exaggerate, (academic)
truth claims or even ‘resort to the blows of the hammer’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 30) in order
to prepare the ground for subsequent re-interpretations, it is with the benefit of hindsight
that I have come to the realization that polemics and irony, though helpful for
counteracting the chronic annoyance engendered through factual statements (cf.
Sloterdijk, 2006; in conversation with Heinrichs), should be applied cautiously.
13
Having
chiefly used the first part of Chapter 1 to pinpoint the limiting operation of the apparatus
from which the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ originates, it is not least due to the
polemical tone that part I has insufficiently emphasized the inherently productive and
creative aspects of power. It is hence beyond question that the polemical tone resulted in
signifying power ‘as a constraining act of violence that represses individuals, forcing
them to do something or preventing them from doing some other thing’ (Foucault, 1988,
p. 11) and not as something which might engender effects that are in fact ‘positive,
valuable, interesting, and so on’ (p. 12). And I can only add that I today wished that my
12
The deviation from Foucault’s style of inquiry becomes manifest in that he reminded us that it was not his
objective to tell people what is good or bad (for them; cf. Foucault, 1996).
13
Caution is, as I believe, mandatory since irony forms a rhetorical trope that works effectively only if
applied in ‘small doses’. Moreover, polemics and irony should be used cautiously in that they might be
spuriously taken to imply that one is in a position to provide a new formula for the optimal exercise of power
or even to impart the best signification of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’.
68
analysis had been more modest and prudent and less interested in ‘constructing a
mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse’ (Foucault, 1988, p. 13).
Keeping in mind all these clarifications, I am keen to repeat that the reader must
not be seduced into believing that I was trying to prove that education provided at
business schools forms a big chunk of nonsense. My aim was rather to show that it
consistently leaves out or at least marginalizes certain (educational) practices and forms
of understanding, i.e. everything which does not comply with the logic of performativity.
Hence, though my analysis has taken into consideration Foucault’s doctrine that the
process of interpretation should proceed without making claims about the truthfulness of
a given discourse (such as the human sciences or, while we’re at it, management and
economics), I regret both that my analysis has not sufficiently delineated the truth
regimes produced in and/or referred to in the context of business school teaching as
elements in a strategy and that it might have fostered the (false) impression of business
school teaching being a stultifying language game. It is from the present perspective that
I would probably pay more heed not only to Foucault’s (1988) inspiring statement that
one should refuse to accept as granted the things which are proposed to us but also to his
idea that one’s analysis should always be informed by curiosity and a principle of
innovation (by means of which one would be able to reflect those things that have yet not
been imagined).
With respect to the present argument it is important to mention that I have tried to
redeem the unjustifiably furious tone of the first chapter by sketching out a more
balanced and less destructive view in Chapter 4. Chapter 4, which relies heavily on the
writing of Derrida, abstains from addressing the business school on the basis of polemics
and instead tries to give apt weight to the necessarily dilemmatic dynamic between the
performativity creed (which I somewhat relentlessly tried to oppose in Chapter 1) and
the idea of unconditionality (which I introduce as a powerful force for balancing the
economic/managerial rationality of business school and university teaching/research).
Since I do not want to anticipate the punch line of Chapter 4 prematurely, it shall suffice
here to mention that this chapter gets to reveal my shift of opinion on the subject of
performativity. Additionally, Chapter 4 gets to show that I have come to the conviction
that it makes a lot of sense to deal with the issue less on the basis of downright critique
(i.e. direct opposition or resistance) than through a mode of thinking that allows for
highlighting both the radical incompletion and constitutive undecidability as well as the
constructive ambivalences that come to the fore at the abyss between textual,
69
institutional, cultural, social and economic structures.
14
Such a view, in my assessment,
is helpful for displacing any oppositional, dialectic logic (Dillon, 2006) in that it goes as
far a rendering anxiety, even madness, customary and potentially creative aspects of
responsible teaching/researching. It is thus not until the later part of my thesis that I
have come to work upon the assumption that the business school (as well as the
university at large) does not suggest a coordinated forward movement (either in a
positive or in a negative direction). Rather, I came to believe that the business school
should, according to Derrida’s (1992) seminal ‘Mochlos’, be imagined less as a institution
in total equilibrium than as a humble figure which gains precarious balance only by
levering left against right.
15
Clarification
Nota bene that the fury, if this is at all the right term, revealed in the first part of Chapter
1 did not come out of the blue. Having myself worked in the business school for several
years and having experienced on a day-to-day basis the frontiers of this context’s
epistemological practices, I felt equipped for writing about some of the limiting practices
that have come into focus within recent years (though I also admit that my
(over)involvement with the subject area of my thesis might have led me astray). Though
I do not want to extend this story any further (which, of course, would form a feasible
option), it is surely obvious by now that certain interesting questions (and maybe
answers) are foreclosed due to the particular ‘nature’ of my analysis. Yet, those aspects
being left out or ignored in my analysis – e.g. the potentially infinite field of relations that
forms the ‘soil’ of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ – are by no means to be qualified
as being of no importance. Indeed, the analysis in the first part of Chapter 1 should be
seen as a preliminary beginning that takes place between unfinished abutments and thus
as something which should above all enable novel beginnings. To render this claim more
substantive, I will now briefly discuss respectively the danger and fallacy of Foucauldian
discipleship.
14
Cf. also Dey & Steyaert (2007) for a more elaborate inquiry of the conflicting, yet productive,
characteristics of business school teaching.
15
Notice that ‘left’ and ‘right’ here do not coincide with political categories but rather pinpoint a body off-
balanced due to its unclear or, more precisely, shaking grounding.
70
To this end, I would like to be very extreme by way of exception. That is, I am quite
aware that the way I use Foucault is wrong, in the scholarly sense of the term, since any
adept Foucauldian could easily say of what I claim is not strictly in line with some, or
even any, of Foucault’s writings. I know very well that what I have done from the adept’s
point of view is single-minded, exaggerated, since I have, for instance, ignored some
contradictory, yet crucial, factors in conjunction with the multiplicity of the business
school’s modus operandi (cf. above). Having said this, I immediately want to make it
unmistakable that although the above reflections a), b) and c) might be perceived as
omissions or fallacies of my analysis, thus operating as negativities or disqualifications,
this impression is justifiable only if one believes that Foucault has in fact created an
analytic schema (read template) which is independent of the subject matter being
investigated and, by implication, which can be applied in a recipe-style manner: point 1 …
then 2 … then 3 … finit. Yet, this is, in my assessment, not possible and I believe that
those who have read (everything or part of) Foucault’s oeuvre might agree that he
constantly developed further his analytic method for getting to terms with the historical
knowledge or forms of rationality related with phenomena such as, for instance, the
penal system, the treatment and management of the insane or ancient ethics.
16
The point
I find noteworthy here is that reading Foucault shows that his opus does in no way form a
unity that provides clear-cut methodological and conceptual instructions.
17
It is essential
to point out that Foucault’s thought ‘always developed through crises and abrupt shifts’
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 83) and that Foucault (1996) himself mentioned, though in a different
context, that ‘the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous’ since as soon as ‘a program
is presented, it becomes a law and there’s a prohibition against inventing’ (p. 312), since
this can be read as suggesting that any direct reference to Foucault should never lead to
a copy-cat exercise and even less so to some odd cultism. It is at his point that I opt to
relate to Foucault’s (1974) tool-box metaphor,
18
which implies that instead of becoming
his disciple one should become a user of his concepts. In other words, as long as one
temporarily accepts the assumption that one is always free to abolish ideas, even
16
Cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) who have provided a comprehensive treatise of the shifting emphasis in
Foucault’s analytic endeavors.
17
That there is not just one Foucault and hence not only one proper way of using Foucault is obvious both
from the observation that inconsistencies were an inherent part of Foucault’s work and from Dreyfus and
Rabinow’s (1983) remark that Foucault’s work never developed in the manner of Kuhnian (1970) paradigm
shifts in that he referred to and used older and newer theoretical ideas and interpretive schemas within a
single investigation.
18
In the words of Foucault (1974): ‘I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage
through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area ... I would like the little volume
that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a
conscientious objector. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers’ (pp. 523 – 524).
71
convictions, one was still holding in high esteem the same morning, as it were, then one
can read the incompatibilities in Foucault’s work as a formal invocation to play with and,
maybe even develop further, his sprinkling thought. It needs to be repeated right away
that the first part of Chapter 1, although there being an immanent risk that it might not
get us anywhere (and thus not work for anyone), is to be read as prompting consecutive
questions regarding the historical problems (and future directions) of business school
teaching.
19
By the same token, I am keen to add that I might have been acting cowardly
in the sense that I have been ‘hiding’ behind the label ‘Foucault’ too frequently. Thus, if
there is something which I regret apart from the polemical tone of Chapter 1 it is
probably that it epitomizes too much discipleship (Baker, 2007) and that I did not
experiment enough with Foucault’s thoughts.
However, I wish to say, in analogy with Foucault (1988), that I refuse ‘to consider
an alleged conformity or non-conformity with Marxism [or indeed with Foucault] as a
deciding factor for accepting or repudiating what I say’ (p. 12). Thus, when the objective
of a text such as, for instance, that imparted under the heading ‘Chapter 1’ is no longer
what it says or, if you will, means but what it actually does, i.e. producing certain effects
and intensities, all this, though not making the whole academic enterprise any easier,
comes down to actually making Foucault significant for one’s own work, one’s own
becoming and, inasmuch one dares to make such a strong statement, for the perception
or exegesis of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ at large. Quite frankly: I am rather
happy that I am as yet not able to assess whether Chapter 1 will actually allow for new
magnitudes, determinations and dimensions of scholarship or if it will have no
consequence and effect whatsoever apart from my own little pleasures, since this
knowledge would indeed be intimidating.
20
19
Framing Chapter 1 in such open terms allows for a comparison with Deleuze (1995) who said that using
someone else’s work is never solely a matter of comprehension or intellectual understanding but of intensity
and resonance: ‘Never interpret; experience, experiment’ (p. 87).
20
Notice that Foucault (1996), while commenting on the truth effect of his books (which he exemplified on
the basis of his prison investigations), said that he could imagine being accused of reductionism: ‘I have tried
to underline trends in the history of prisons. “Only one trend”, people could say. “So that’s not exactly true”’
(p. 301). The main declaration of this brief fiction, according to Foucault, is that it is many times not so
important whether a certain statement effectively pertains to truth, since the really important question is
whether something being said has an effect on the construction of that particular reality.
72
C) Reflection as Regards Part II of Chapter 1
As for the second part of Chapter 1,
21
the single point which needs extra attention relates
to the idea of ‘fashion’. In concrete terms, the point to be emphasized is that the idea of
‘fashion’, less than being a measure for mocking the realm of business school teaching,
was invoked for addressing the (genealogical) question of how the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is referred to and used and, most importantly, what larger role its
‘truth’ gets to play inside and outside the realm of the business school. In other words,
where the primary aim of the first part of Chapter 1 is to delineate the concept as a
(partial) ‘effect’ of academia, it is the second part which chiefly tries to explain, based on
the idea of ‘fashion’, why it has gained that much currency. I hence use the term ‘fashion’
as a concept which to me appears apt for establishing a link with the stream of research
which has investigated and thus tried to explain the rise, growth curve, life cycle and
demise of particular truth regimes related to the management consultancy industry.
Importantly, provided that the notion of ‘fashion’ has at times taken on a negative
connotation in everyday talk, this in turn could foster the impression that the second
part of Chapter 1 actually tries to downgrade the value of the term or even pretend that
it conveys no meaning whatsoever. Yet, ‘fashion’ the way it is used by Abrahamson
(1991; 1996) and others is a concept that is truly less evaluative than descriptive.
Consequently, inquiring the conditions of possibility which enabled the rise of the concept
‘social entrepreneurship’ in the first place is literally about acknowledging the productive
aspect and constructive momentum of power.
21
Where one of the primary aims of the following chapter, as I already mentioned before, was to illuminate
the fields of force which bring about the ‘truth’ of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ and which render
business school teachers particular objects and subjects of discourse, it probably hardly needs to be
mentioned that the second part is kin neither to genealogy nor to archeology.
73
References
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Innovations. Academy of Management Review, 16, 586 – 612.
Abrahamson, E. (1996). Management Fashion. Academy of Management Review, 21,
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Baker, B. (2007). Normalizing Foucault? A Rhizomatic Approach to Plateaus in
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Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be Defended. New York: Picador.
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Jones, C. & O’Doherty, D. (2005). Organize! Manifestos for the Business School of
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Blackwell.
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1
***
Excellence and the Enterprising Academic: Social Entrepreneurship in
Business School Education
The question … now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher
education is no longer “Is it true?” but “What use is it?” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 51)
… the modern totalitarian threat resides in those versions of managerialism which seek to
achieve by ostensibly administrative means what earlier forms of totalitarianism sought to
achieve by political and military means as well, namely a state of programmed order,
active obedience and remorseless efficiency. (Nellis, 1999, p. 338)
Synopsis
According to Lyotard’s (1984) eloquent treatise of knowledge, both research and higher
education are no longer at the service of societal emancipation as envisioned by the ideal of
humanitarian education. Instead, their task has become to fortify and extend the existing power
relations of the state. Being subjugated to the authority of the state, universities thus need, in
providing education, to align their activities along the logic of ‘end-orientation’. This further
implies that the production and dissemination of knowledge is legitimized by how well it sells.
After a brief critical investigation of (business school) education, I will discuss how far the
emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in contemporary business schools can be conceived
76
as a logical consequence of the ‘performativity’ mantra. This mantra, as I will discuss, has shifted
the focus of MBA
22
programs from the spiritual and moral training of the nation to the
entertainment of students. In addition, it now boosts the reputation of business schools through,
for instance, media rankings and accreditations. In delineating the cumulative ‘war for students’
and by highlighting the seemingly inevitable proliferation of the ‘customer satisfaction culture’, I
will argue that prevailing business education has appropriated social entrepreneurship for reasons
of competition and differentiation. On that basis, it will become clear that in the wake of
performativity, business school teachers have been turned into enterprising subjects: they are
expected to subordinate their innovativeness and creativity to the overall economic viability and
prestige of their business school. Given the resulting commoditization of social entrepreneurship,
I will elaborate that the phenomenon quite clearly exhibits features of yet another management
fashion. This chapter is thus to be read as the retrieval, or, put differently, the ‘novel repetition’
(Critchley, 1999) of particular societal alterations (which have occurred in the course of the past
five decades or so) in that it aims to criticize the status quo of business education. In the spirit of
Foucault’s ‘genealogical method’ (cf. Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982), historical ruptures and
struggles of knowledge are invoked to foster awareness that the current state of business
education provides us with ample reasons to be concerned. Taking this insight as my starting
point, I will highlight some of the most pressing omissions and fallacies of prevailing
enunciations of social entrepreneurship. A challenging account of the (mis)representation of
social entrepreneurship as either mere business conduct or an allegedly moral agent will
subsequently provide the basis for an outline of the as yet unrecognized political underpinnings of
social entrepreneurship as well as the neglect of its genuine ethical possibilities. A close analysis
of the basic premises of contemporary university and business school education will ultimately
lead to tentative suggestions regarding the future direction of MBA teaching on social
entrepreneurship, and, more specifically, allow me to release social entrepreneurship from its
obsession with ethical (pseudo) perfection and best-business practice.
22
Master of Business Administration
77
PART I
I believe that the institution that is perhaps the most crucial in both the formation and
maintenance of democratic communities (through the creation of subject interpellated
through the liberal values and norms of the modern nation) is the institution that is often
the least studied in academia: the institution of education. (Mitchell, 2003, p. 389;
emphasis in original)
The true crisis of the European sciences … is felt in the absence of distress: ‘crisis, what crisis?’
(Critchley, 1999, p. 130)
Introduction
The business school is said to be in crises (cf. Jones & O’Doherty, 2005; Nord, 2005; Shepherd,
2005). The prevailing educational premises have come under scrutiny over the last two decades
(Cheit, 1985; Porter & McKibbin, 1988; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Rynes, Trank, Lawson & Ilies,
2003; Grey, 2004). Whereas the imputations are variegated, some of the most prominent
arguments contend that university business schools have come to resemble factories too closely
(Höpfl, 2005), that they impart bad management theories (Ghoshal, 2005) and that discourses on
knowledge and learning produced in the ivory tower of business school education have no utility
for practicing managers (Mintzberg, 2004). Taking these arguments as its starting point, the main
focus of the present chapter is a discussion of the impasse of contemporary MBA education
against the backdrop of the ‘performativity’ principle which, according to Lyotard (1984), has
come to determine the direction in which most developed societies are moving. By shedding light
on the ‘customer culture’ imperative which now impinges on higher education, it will be
investigated how academics are increasingly subjected to an entrepreneurial code of conduct
where they are impelled to demonstrate qualities such as innovation, pro-activeness and a
passionate style of teaching. On the basis of this analysis, the first part of this chapter primarily
aspires to illuminate the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in MBA programs as a
means for providing the credentials for business schools’ existence and for increasing both their
competitive edge and profitability.
78
The Crisis of the Business School
It was at the beginning of the 19
th
century that Wilhelm von Humboldt (1964), one of the
founding fathers of German humanism and the modern education system, declared that the
university should be oriented toward ‘the spiritual and moral training of the nation’ (p. 126).
It is revealed in von Humboldt’s deliberations that the university was envisaged as having a
responsibility to society and, in particular, that it was one of its principle duties to equip
young people ‘with a critical stance toward simple truths and the dangerous narrow-
mindedness of hegemony’ (Warren, 2005, p. 79). However, in contemporary, that is post-
industrial society, the question of legitimization is no longer informed by idealist and
humanist visions or ideals. On the contrary, there is sound evidence that the critical function
of universities has given way to managerial ideals of productivity, cost effectiveness and
efficiency. While Said (1994) has pointed to the dangers of this sort of corporate and
performative thinking so as to claim that it undermines the kind of skepticism expected from
intellectuals in universities, we are further reminded by Lyotard (1984) that ‘in the discourse
of today’s financial backers … the only credible goal is power’ (p. 46). Lyotard explained at
length that science will increasingly be subjected to the ‘productive power’ of the nation
state. He also adumbrated more than two decades ago how the goal of teaching and indeed
the production and dissemination of knowledge through education institutes at large, will be
evaluated according to whether or not it contributes ‘to the best performativity of the social
system’ (p. 48). As cogently argued by Mitchell (2003), ‘schooling was not just about the
creation of a literate population or a trained workforce, but was implicated more generally in
the creation of a particular kind of state subject – one schooled in the norms and proper codes
of behavior related to national citizenship’ (p. 291). Given that schooling can be said to be at
the service of ‘bourgeois hegemony’ (Curtis, 1988), it barely needs extensive elaborations to
concede that the professional legitimacy of academics has witnessed a fundamental shift
according to which scholars’ duty is no longer to warrant the moral development of society
but to subordinate themselves to the goals and demands of the industry and the preservation
of the nation’s status quo. Within his seminal ‘Postmodern Condition’ Lyotard (1984) made
the point that this ‘trend’ began somewhere in the late 1950s. In its early phase, its operative
79
logic entailed that knowledge thenceforth must be legitimated by how performative it was,
that means, how effectively it worked to minimize the various required inputs for the task
and to maximize the desired outputs. It was in this context that Lyotard coined the notion of
‘performativity’
23
to circumscribe the very condition in which knowledge is deemed valuable
or invaluable according to its specific input-output ratio. Under conditions of performativity,
the state, corporations and education institutions are all called upon to exchange the idealist
and humanist narratives of legitimation for an economic calculus.
Taking Lyotard’s views a step further, the task of universities is no longer to inform
and thereby emancipate the state and society, but to secure (nation) states’ position in the
global competition. As Lyotard insightfully foretold, ‘the question of knowledge is now more
than ever a question of government’ (p. 9). This situation entails an increasing tendency of
the state, and in particular its disciplinary bodies, to delimit the scope and content of science
and education. Being caught between the administrative demands of the state on the one
hand and the competition of the market on the other (cf. Peters, 2004), universities are no
longer expected to create ideals, but to provide (practical) skills that improve the system’s
overall performance. The type of knowledge currently commissioned by state authorities and
implemented by institutions of both basic and higher education is increasingly related to
‘applications’ and ‘services’, and notably the profit the resultant codified technologies are
expected to generate.
Lyotard’s undoubtedly momentous prediction is rendered even more exciting, not to
say daunting, in view of the fact that most of his foresights have turned into reality (cf.
Roberts, 1998). It is therefore hardly imaginable that the shift towards ‘performativity’ in the
post-industrial era will be reversible at short notice. After all, performativity, once
established, self-referentially reinforces its own existence: ‘since performativity increases the
ability to produce proof, it also increases the ability to be right’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 46).
Lyotard shrewdly observed that the technical structure of the state, and all other institutions
which have come to operate upon the performativity ideal, give rise to a sort of education
that hinges on profitability and cost effectiveness, and which is thereby premised on
(marketable) skills, rather than ideals.
23
Note the remarkable difference between Lyotard’s exegesis and Judith Butler’s (1994) Derrida- and Foucault-
inspired understanding of performativity as the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed.
80
Given the above arguments derived from Lyotard’s treatise of knowledge, it is hardly
surprising that scholars of higher education (e.g. Illich, 1973; Derrida, 2001) as well as current
MBA students have deplored that (business school) education has ceased to be an ‘end in itself’
and that its whole value is reduced to the provision of a (pro forma) qualification for the job
market (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). Höpfl (2005), in explaining the logic which currently seems to
guide the conduct of business students, has stated that ‘(w)hen students are paying for what they
get, they want courses which will guarantee them an income, enable them to pay off their student
loans, provide them with prosperous futures’ (p. 62). As if this weren’t disenchanting enough,
O’Doherty and Jones (2005) are even more daunting in their appraisal since they argued that the
primary goal of business schools is to extort ‘fees from the middle and upper classes so that it can
stamp their offspring with a passport into corporate sleaze, mortgage slavery, burn-out, stress,
overwork and repression’ (p. 1). It was more than thirty years ago that Ivan Illich (1973)
elucidated that education is misdirected since the ‘the pupil is “schooled” to confuse teaching
with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with
the ability to say something new’ (p. 2). Similarly, contemporary business education has been
accused of reducing learning to a consumerist enterprise which ultimately conveys little practical
and intellectual utility for its students. Thus Collins (1996) as well as Rynes et al. (2003) have
contended that while education in general has witnessed an instrumentalization of learning, it is
business students in particular who tend to see education exclusively as a stepping stone to
lucrative careers. Feldman (2005), in paraphrasing Mintzberg’s (2004) argument in his seminal
‘Managers, not MBAs’, pointed out that new entrants to business schools have ‘neither the “zest
for business” nor the “will to manage”. That is, they are neither intellectually interested in the
dynamics of business nor are they particularly interested in the act of managing. Rather, they are
interested in getting rich or having power and see business school as the shortest and easiest route
to those ends’ (p. 218). Hence, while MBA education seems to have lost its credibility as a means
for learning and personal development, business students are increasingly perceived as selecting
MBA programs on the basis of pragmatic questions such as whether they provide good job
opportunities, the prospect of an adequate post-MBA salary and whether those programs provide
adequate opportunities for establishing alumni networks (cf. Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). These are
indeed heavy charges. However, it would be unjust and reductionist to blame the current impasse
of MBA education on business students alone. In contrast to those voices that deplore the laziness
and disinterest of contemporary business students, the following investigation aspires to show
81
that the very type of student that has become the cause of complaints on the part of university and
business school staff members must be seen as the education system’s own creation. O’Doherty
and Jones (2005) clarified matters by delineating that ‘(b)usiness schools offer up an uninspired
carcass of crap and then blame students for not being interested, for being cynical and
‘instrumental’ (p. 4). We are thus reminded that the entire system of business education revolves
around the notion of ‘services’. Teleologically speaking, this means that the MBA title ‘makes
the holder more desirable to future employers’, since the ethos of the respective programs is ‘built
around the ontology of desire as lack driving a wish to be different’ (Linstead, 2005, p. 32). To
put the instrumental behavior of business students into perspective and to make intelligible the
rising frustration of business school staff, I would like to provide some illustrative examples in
order to document more thoroughly how the landslide move towards ‘performativity’ has
materialized in the realm of university (business school) research and teaching.
Practice – Theory Divide
It is important to note that where the demarcation line between practice and theory within the
realm of university education has – generally speaking – favored theory and abstract and/or
critical reflection over practical utility, there has been a ‘crack’ (Zizek, 1993) in the
interpretation of higher education. This ‘crack’ is expressed through far-reaching efforts to
increase the practical value and relevance of knowledge. Arguably, the shift from theory to
practice prompts knowledge producers to construe their teaching and research accordingly.
For instance, the increased allocation of research funding to the sciences (e.g. life-sciences,
bio-chemistry, physics, etc.) and technology departments (e.g. computer sciences,
engineering) makes it clear that research, in order to receive funding, needs a certain
likelihood of generating at least some returns on investment. Accordingly, Lyotard (1984)
has contended that ‘(c)apitalism solves the scientific problem of research funding in its own
way: directly by financing research departments in private companies, in which demands for
performativity and recommercialization orient research first and foremost toward
technological “applications”’ (p. 45). The flipside of Lyotard’s statement entails that
departments which do not contain marketable research units, for instance liberal arts colleges
(cf. Dees & Elias, 1998), find it increasingly difficult to legitimize their non-profitable
82
endeavors. At the teaching level there is already (and there will increasingly be) a bifurcation
between those subjects that are deemed ‘useful’, that is, that promise practical application in
the world, and those which are not, that is, that are taken to cultivate knowledge for its own
sake (Derrida, 2004). This ‘marketization of education’ (Roberts, 1998) has gained ground
over the last twenty years (at least), so that it has become part of higher (or tertiary)
education’s common-sense principles that knowledge must ultimately serve as a productive
force within the system while ‘the other – the critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind – by
reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims would resist any such “recuperation”’
(Lyotard, 1984, p. 14). It becomes clear from Lyotard’s objection that the ‘democratic
university’, meaning the university which works on the premises of humanist ideals, faces
mounting problems in proving the credentials for performativity. The disciplinary effect of
performativity entails, among other things, that tertiary education reinterprets its practices so
as to accentuate knowledge which appears, first, relevant for ‘real-life issues’ and second,
which provides students with a certain amount of comfort or entertainment value (cf. below).
As Böhm and Meier Sørensen have made clear with respect to the realm of organization
studies, ‘research has to be relevant for today’s business practices; writing practices have to
fit into clear assessment criteria; books can only be published if they are made practicable for
business students – Organization Studies has become obsessed with the domain of common
sense, the practical, the easily digestible’ (p. 8). Whereas Böhm and Meier Sørensen have
identified a tendency to judge research and education on the basis of whether or not it can be
applied in a practical context, Derrida (2004) has coined the term ‘end-orientation’
24
to
express the tendency of research and teaching to give ‘rise to institutional constructions
regulated by … technical schemas’ (p. 59). Lyotard (1984), on the other hand, most
felicitously showed that what is reflected in the distinction between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’
departments and degrees is that knowledge at the time of his investigation was judged in
accordance with the question ‘can it be sold?’ This observation quite clearly illustrates that
the practice-theory dichotomy is sustained through an economic calculus which, as I believe,
manifests itself most visibly in the conduct of business school education and especially in the
commoditization of knowledge. Concerning the latter, we are reminded by Lyotard that the
commoditization of business school education, that is, the transformation of education into a
24
A term which, according to Derrida (2004), has become especially widely used in France.
83
‘good for sale’ (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998), has been made possible by means of
hailing the logic of a the market. It is thus against the backdrop of ‘performativity’ that the
contemporary ‘McDonaldization’ of (business school) education becomes comprehensible
(cf. Hayes & Wynyard, 2002). For it is the concept of ‘performativity’ which predetermines
that knowledge and decision-making is for the most part no longer based on abstract
principles, but on how effective it is at achieving desired outcomes (however, this aspect of
business education has been seriously questioned by Pfeffer and Fong (2002)). Another
criterion apart from how effective education is at achieving desired outcomes is how much
return can be obtained through (selling) knowledge (there is at least some consensus that
both MBA students (Connolly, 2003) and business schools (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002) obtain
significant salary rises and yields respectively). The criterion of performativity is now
outspokenly and as a matter of course invoked by the authorities of business schools to
justify their refusal or admission of certain courses and programs. Importantly, courses in
social entrepreneurship are no exception in that respect but on the contrary a particularly
cunning example illustrating the ‘mercantilization’ of business education. Nevertheless,
before I shed some light on the state of affairs of social entrepreneurship teaching, I will, in
the ensuing section, first show how, that is through what practices and regulations, the
performativity criterion is introduced to business education and how it affects teaching,
research and the position of academics in the hierarchy of educational institutions.
Research Assessments, Accreditations & Business Magazine Rankings
To make intelligible the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses, it is apposite to first
illustrate the competitive structures and disciplinary practices which were put in place to increase
business schools’ performativity. At the most fundamental level, it can be discerned that
governments as well as management experts have, over the last three decades, been looking for
novel ways to increase the commitment of educators. Since the market has become the ideal
model for educational arrangements (at least in post-industrial societies; cf. Atkinson-Grosjean,
1998), academic bureaucrats no longer seem to arouse suspicion when they talk about ‘inputs’,
‘outputs’ or ‘throughputs’ (Roberts, 1998). While the discourses of efficiency and consumerism
have continuously overflowed into the university (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998) and,
84
over time, become naturalized as part of the common-sense approach of modern education
systems, it is noticeable that this shift has gone hand in hand with the appeal that institutions of
higher education must be rendered accountable for what they do. Though the demand for
accountability is in itself not particularly new, since it was already put forward by university
students in the 1960s (a demand that ultimately lead, inter alia, to an increased student
involvement in decision-making processes; cf. Krahn & Silzer, 1996), accountability in our
present day is predominantly interpreted by politicians and the public as the exigency of
universities to legitimate their purpose and to disclose facts and figure so that their performance
can be quantified. In the wake of university accountability not only vis-à-vis students but, equally
importantly, taxpayers, funding bodies and affiliated businesses, institutes of higher education
have witnessed the implementation of a plethora of performance indicators all of which have
been deemed quintessential for the administrative apparatus and, though more vague and subtle,
for the control of teachers and researchers. Having stimulated the emergence of the ‘service
university’
25
(Newson & Buchbinder, 1988), performance indicators were thus introduced to
render university staff calculable and, consequently, knowable and governable. In that respect, it
is the attribute ‘governable’ in particular which implies that despite overtly claiming that
accountability is foremost concerned with quality, it is pivotal to understand that those practices
are a pervasive means to inscribe a particular norm with which people are presumed to comply.
Once in place, Foucault (1984) contended, ‘(i)t is easy to understand how the power of the norm
functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the
norm introduces as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of
individual differences’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 197). If this argument is taken to its extreme, the
imposition of a norm, be it through research assessments, accreditations or business magazine
rankings, becomes a ‘principle of coercion’ since it gives way to ‘a surveillance that makes it
possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 197). Given the influx of those
‘novel’ education and research imperatives, we shall take a closer look at some of the more
prominent ‘management control technologies’ in higher education. Close analysis of these control
mechanisms will then allow us to explain their influence on teachers and researchers as
individuals and, consequently, to comprehend how these technologies have come to determine
the overall direction of research and teaching (on social entrepreneurship).
25
Derrida (2004) talked of the ‘civil servant-philosopher’ to express how philosophers at state universities are
increasingly perceived as servants of the state.
85
A) Research Assessments
A relatively recent control mechanism of research is the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
which has been implemented in the UK and subsequently in Australia and New Zealand
(Middleton, 2005). It makes university funding dependent on the quantity and quality of its
researchers’ outputs. Ostensibly aiming at ‘performance-based research funding’, the RAEs
aspire to measure and rank the collective ‘research outputs’ of institutions and fields of inquiry.
In line with this aim, the primary purpose of the RAE has been to produce ratings of institutions’
research quality which are subsequently used as a basis to determine the amount of funding the
respective institutions ‘deserve’. Though the importance of research for the overall reputation of
business schools has diminished over the last two decades (cf. below), it is beyond doubt that the
RAE has become a disciplinary instrument for providing or withdrawing research funds. The
logic behind performance-based funding is that higher education institutions must provide insight
into their research activities so that they can then be assessed through a specialist panel of peers.
The RAE, then, makes visible the performativity of academics. Besides Parker (2002) who, in his
deliberations on the ‘McUniversity’, stated that ‘visibility and classification are winning the day’
(p. 141), it is Foucault (1984) in particular who made clear that ‘(i)n discipline, it is the subjects
who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It
is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined
individual in his subjection’ (p. 199). Keeping in mind that Foucault’s (1977) elaboration on the
issue of visibility was envisaged through the ‘panopticum’ of Bentham’s prison architecture plan
of 1791, one must concede that the RAE, in as much as it measures performance on an annual
rather than a continuous basis, provides a less strict regime of control. Nonetheless, as the RAE
aims at a final point at which past performances are made transparent, it can be posited that such
examinations are ‘at the center of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object
of power, as effect and object of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204). In view of this novel sort
of visibility, critical voices have objected that the RAE stigmatizes academic staff, since the
results of the assessments (including the names of assessed academics and lists of their research
outputs) are made public after the completion of the procedure. Ranking the assessed research
institutions from 1 (no national excellence in research) to 5* (international research excellence)
has thus stimulated the closure of certain departments which, according the criteria of the RAE,
did not qualify as ‘excellent’. To be sure, the RAE has ruined the career of numerous academics
86
and, most importantly, has been responsible for ‘job losses, discriminatory practices, widespread
demoralization of staff, the narrowing of research opportunities through the over-concentration of
funding and the undermining of the relationship between teaching and research, with a
consequent reduction in the quality of higher education available to students’ (The Higher
Education Union, April, 2005). At the level of individual academics, the RAE has been said to
stimulate a competitive mindset which manifests itself, inter alia, in increased endeavors to
‘restructure’ the research practice of individuals so as to maximize RAE output. What further
comes to light with respect to the RAE is that business school staff is increasingly preoccupied
with reviewing and processing feedback, and monitoring its own behavior which, quite
obviously, takes up an enormous amount of academics’ time and energy. Even more alarming are
observations to the effect that the interminable quality exercises, which in a rather peculiar way
resemble the operational logic of manufacturing, produce a set of standards that, in conjunction
with education, have conspicuously little practical significance (Höpfl, 2005). It therefore comes
as little surprise that critics of such assessment exercises have warned that the RAE and similar
procedures distort and disrupt the education system and devalue the professional contribution of
staff to both teaching and research.
B) Accreditation Procedures
Even though research evaluations and their direct interlinkage with funding practice have so far
been limited to a rather small number of countries, it is nevertheless possible that such
disciplinary mechanisms will become more widespread in the near future. Be that as it may,
accreditation procedures as well as business school rankings in the media have become even
more influential in terms of the national and global status of business schools, over the last say 20
if not more. While there is some controversy regarding the utility and reliability of accreditation
institutions such as AACSB
26
or EQUIS
27
(which are deemed the two most influential and hence
credible accreditation bodies; cf. Fuller, 2005), they have nevertheless turned into some sort of
sine qua non for the viability of business schools. As a result, accreditations from renowned
institutions are seen to separate the good from the bad, that is, those whose existence is justified
from those who have no right to exist. However, to receive an accreditation, for example from
AACSB, business schools are obliged to put in place a committee structure which monitors and
26
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business
27
European Quality Improvement System
87
assesses faculty resources, makes recommendations for essential faculty recruitments and
maintains the skills of the faculty. AACSB is thus not only a mere logo which can be marketed to
prospective business students, though this is an undeniably important part of the game. Even
more importantly, it acts as a distinct exercise of unification which, by means of close
examination and by putting pressure on the performance standards for faculty and department
chairs (Bejou, 2005), encourages competition between faculty staff. As Höpfl (2005) rightly
pointed out, ‘the university Business School is not a seat of learning and does not pretend to be. It
is a factory run on Tayloristic principles of standardisation, measurement and control’ (p. 65).
The ostensible aim of accreditations of business schools is, then to quantify their quality (and thus
enable informed judgments on the part of students). It must be recognized , however, that these
procedures are equally concerned with the perpetuation of a ‘one-meets-all’ rationale whereby a
single set of (minimum) standards is claimed to be sufficient to account for the diversity of
contexts in which business and management is taught. This means that the (concealed) emphasis
on conformity and consensus of accreditations is, strictly speaking, tantamount to a concerted
effort to streamline business schools and, most importantly, to pretend that there are identifiable
universal values which must be globally imposed on business schools. Although the world has
witnessed a rapid growth of alternative accreditations which are said to comprise values other
than those advanced by, for instance, the US-based AACSB (e.g. ASFOR
28
in Italy, AAEDE
29
in
Spain, AMBA
30
in the UK and the EFMD
31
for Europe), there have been serious limitations to
those efforts. In particular, given that (leading) business schools are fighting an increasingly
fierce ‘war for students’, it has been essential that they not only content themselves with local
accreditations but that they also adorn themselves with accreditations that are recognized
worldwide. From an economic viewpoint, accreditations are indispensable despite their dubious
effect on the quality of education provided by business schools.
C) Business Magazine Ranking
Accreditations have, since the time of their inception, been presented as a means for
distinguishing the ‘serious’ from the ‘less serious’ (cf. Wedlin, 2000). However, as an ever
greater number of business schools have acquired those prestigious ‘labels’, it has become
28
Associazione per la Formazione alle Direzione Aziendale
29
Associacion Espanola de Representantes de Escuelas de Dirreccion de Empresas
30
Association of MBAs in the UK
31
European Foundation for Management Development
88
increasingly difficult to sustain the objective of differentiation. It is in this context that Stensaker
(2005) has pointed out that accreditations no longer seem appropriate for sustaining their intrinsic
goal, that is, drawing a demarcation line between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. As a result of this
situation, business magazines have tried to fill the void by providing annual rankings of business
schools which aim at evaluating quality more thoroughly. The standards which have been
imposed on business schools through evaluations of business magazines such as, for instance,
‘Business Week’, ‘Financial Times’, ‘The Wall Street Journal’, ‘The Economist’
32
, as well as
‘U.S. News & World Report’ (Task Force of AACSB, 2005) therefore rest on hierarchical
classifications, that is, rankings. The underlying premise of those rankings is that they expose
business schools to a preordained set of criteria. The aim of this set of criteria is to enable
prospective students, that is, customers, to evaluate the quality of those institutions and to make
informed (investment) decisions. Importantly, while accreditation procedures simply allow for a
dichotomous assessment of business schools (that is, you are either ‘in’ or ‘out’), the rankings of
business magazines present discriminations that are more fine-grained.
While those ‘best of’ lists have been popularized since the late 1980s, they are today
appreciated by business schools as invaluable sales tools. As with accreditations, it has been
lamented that ranking practices of business magazines contain limitations, for instance in that
they aspire to express quality through a single number. Despite existing disapproval, the public
attention those rankings continuously receive means that business schools cannot afford not to
participate in the ‘rat race for fame’. However, as each ranking procedure has its own
methodology and thereby grounds its evaluation upon a unique set of data, it is conceivable that
business schools ‘have had to hire additional staff to respond to the increasing number of media
requests for data’. After all, this increased demand for data requires ‘an extraordinary amount of
time preparing data for media surveys’ (Task Force of AACSB, 2005, p. 7). Besides the
inestimable amount of time taken up by ranking exercises, one must also acknowledge that those
procedures are not simply meant to measure quality but that they inevitably transform the way
academics do their work and conduct themselves as professionals. Implementing a seemingly
endless stream of measurement procedures means that academic staff has to record, account for
32
It is worth noting in this context that two top business schools (Harvard, Boston and Wharton, Pennsylvania)
refrained from publishing their data in the ‘Economist’ in the year 2005. Both schools justified their decision by
saying that their staff were overworked and that magazine rankings in any case do not accurately reflect the quality
of individual business schools. Given the formative influence of media rankings, it will be of pivotal importance if
other business schools follow their example.
89
and improve their behavior at all times. Thus a clear emphasis on the factor of ‘governmentality’
(Foucault, 1991) marks the situation of business school staff. This means that business school
staff are subjected (and subject themselves) to a mounting set of numerical measurement
procedures which are, arguably, not only concerned with quality, but likewise with the
satisfaction of external stakeholders. Additionally, it is important to notice that, in contrast to the
stress on conformity of accreditations, rankings by business magazines tend to advocate
differences. While generally heating up the performativity hyperbole of business schools, those
rankings specifically advocate ‘unique selling propositions’ to be perpetuated by business
schools’ curricula and academic staff. The aim of these propositions is to give proof of the
qualities that make them outstanding and hence valuable in the global marketplace. Since I will
argue further down that courses on social entrepreneurship can be seen as an offshoot of this
differentiation imperative, we will now shift our attention to a discussion of how discourses of
quality and excellence – which are the common denominator of research assessments,
accreditation procedures as well as business magazine rankings – have increasingly informed
contemporary business teaching.
The Quality and Excellence Dispositif
While procedures and mechanisms stimulated through accreditation bodies such as AACSB,
EQUIS or business magazine rankings occur, prima facie, to ensure high standards of quality
(Frazer, 1997), critical minds have made clear that, contrary to their intended representation of
quality, those ‘badges’ in fact stand ‘not for what is on offer but more tragically for what has been
lost’ (Höpfl, 2005, p. 66). Despite all odds, it is remarkable that the regulation, not to say
disciplinary action affecting university staff through the micro practices of accreditation
procedures, teaching and research assessments exercises was originally stimulated through
supranational organizations such as the EU and the OECD. Following Stensaker (2005), quality
seems to have become the prevailing ‘metanarrative’ both in the private and public sector
(Czarniawska & Sevon, 1996) where it even appears to have replaced effectiveness as the central
organizational principle of higher education (Cameron & Whetten, 1996). A cursory glance
suggests that the notion of quality has been interpreted in quite different ways whereas the variety
90
of its significations
33
seems to be less a sign of weakness than a reason for its strength and
pervasiveness. Being a rather elusive concept, ‘quality’ thus lends itself to a broad range of
contexts and practices. For instance, quality is inaugurated in practice through techniques such as,
to mention only three of the most popular management mechanisms, re-engineering, downsizing
or total quality management (e.g. Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1996). With regards to higher
education, Frazer (1997) pointed out that accreditations, evaluations, as well as assessments and
audits must be taken as indications of the ever more pervasive quality mantra. Reminded by
Harvey and Green (1993) that stakeholders of higher education perceive quality in quite different
ways (e.g. quality as exceptional, quality as perfection, quality as fitness for purpose, quality as
value for money or quality as transformation; cf. Stensaker, 2005), business schools have
habitually come to display quality through reference to ‘excellence’ (cf. above: research
assessment exercise). Though quality and excellence at times are used interchangeably, it is in
particular the latter term which is inherited from business jargon (e.g. Miller & Rose, 1990). The
notion of excellence is conceived of as a distinct ‘epochalism’ (du Gay, 2003), meaning a term
that works to establish a dichotomous frame which in turn distinguishes between good and bad.
‘Epochalist theorists’ such as Peters and Waterman (1982) have, following du Gay (2002),
provided a ‘periodizing schema’ which is at once able to make the changes they outline appear as
unavoidable and to subject practicing managers to a new set of images and roles. Their best-
selling book ‘In Search of Excellence’ – which was published in almost every country of the
world and of which about 4.5 million copies were sold in the USA alone by 1999 (cf. Hyatt,
1999) – has thus transformed the perception of what qualifies as proper management and what
doesn’t. Given that the excellence discourse simultaneously relies on the dynamic of fear (for
those who fail to achieve ‘excellence’) and enthusiasm (which is granted to practitioners of
‘excellence’), it must be emphasized that the excellence discourse long ago trespassed the
boundaries of profit enterprises. Apart from profit enterprises, it now also influences the conduct
of, for instance, public administration, health management and, of course, education. The
dispersion of the excellence discourse beyond the context of its initial application, that is,
business, is a logical consequence of the fact that such epochalist schemas rely on ‘the
extrapolation from one set of predicates to the set of all possible predicates, upon the
globalization of a local phenomenon, in which the one-sidedness of a specific problematic
33
For instance, Barley and Kunda (1992) have shown that quality represents a peculiar mix between classic scientific
management and the human relation school of thought.
91
becomes the universality of a general problem’ (Turner, 1992, p. 12). In effect, the excellence
discourse creates an utterly polarized image in which the excellent conduct of business,
bureaucracies, and institutions of education inevitably leads to success whereas non-excellence is
said to end in failure.
Importantly, following a Foucauldian (1972) stream of reasoning, discourses of quality
and excellence, have been able to systematically form the objects (and subjects) of which they are
meant to speak. That means, discourses on quality and excellence represent the subject (and
object) of teaching in such ways that it becomes amenable to management or governance. In as
much as the quality discourse renders visible the performance of educators through quality
measures, the formerly ‘opaque classroom’ (Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 11) is now
subject to external control. As Foucault contended in that respect, the various assessment
procedures have ‘lowered the threshold of describable individuality [of the academic], and made
of this description a means of control and a method of domination’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 203). This
implies that discourses of quality and excellence have been interwoven in a network of
institutions, programs and practices which collectively form a distinct apparatus, or dispositif
(Foucault, 1980; 1988), that is, a system of relations between ‘discourses, institutions,
architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 194). This system of
relations on the one hand informs and delineates codes of conduct while on the other hand
inducing subjects in business schools to act in accordance with that code. With respect to higher
education, teachers are re-imagined through a vocabulary which highlights ‘consumer culture’
(du Gay, 1996) and ‘entrepreneurialism’ (Hatcher, 2001). In doing so, this vocabulary also
stimulates the re-fashioning of conventional forms of teaching and teachers. Provided that people
(must) identify themselves with the totality of linguistic and extra-linguistic elements of the
excellence or quality dispositif, it follows that they are urged to work upon themselves in
particular ways (while the dispositif simultaneously provides the norm for detecting and
sanctifying potential deviances). The excellence discourse in higher education thus stresses self-
governing subjects (Rose, 1991), that is, academics who receive external feedback, ostensibly as
a source for personal development and improvement. ‘Governmentality’, a term popularized
through the work of Foucault (1991), is apposite to analyze how the ‘being’ of contemporary
academics is informed by discourses of excellence or, in other words, how techniques and
devices such as accreditation procedures and research and teaching assessments shape people’s
92
beliefs and, consequently, identities. The concept of governmentality was, bluntly speaking,
introduced to circumscribe how the modern sovereign state and the contemporary autonomous
individual co-determine each other’s emergence (Lemke, 2000). Possibly its most important tenet
has been that it helped differentiate between processes of domination and power. While
domination has been said to center on an identifiable power-holder who subjugates others to
his/her own will, the concept of governmentality implies that power works through people’s self
control, that is, through self-subjectification. Following Lemke (2000), government(ality) refers
to ‘systemized, regulated and reflected modes of power (a “technology”) that go beyond the
spontaneous exercise of power over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a
“rationality”) which defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve’ (p. 5). Bearing
in mind that governmentality marks an instance in which people call upon a previously approved
‘rationality’ or ‘regime of truth’ in order to shape their behavior and self accordingly, we are
reminded by Lindstrom (2005) that a large number of business schools envision accreditations as
a powerful device for inducing faculty and staff to think about and improve the quality of their
work. On account thereof, one could object that excellence discourse necessitates a critique of the
way universities have been managed in recent days as it contains distinct prescriptions for
tackling ‘global competition’ in higher education through entrepreneurialism. To put this in a
slightly different way, excellence discourse must be critically reflected with regard to its
formative momentousness and specifically in terms of how it comes to delineate academics’
work-related identities through managerial terms. The focus of criticism here is that the
excellence dispositif governs the subject of education in such way that he or she is forced to
actively intervene upon his or her own conduct. Foucault (1980) coined the notion of ‘conduct of
conduct’ to show how people actively shape, guide or affect the conduct of their own lives. The
peculiarity of this sort of self-disciplining behavior is that it is to not be understood as a
regulative order imposed from the exterior upon the individual. Quite contrarily, the excellence
dispositif can only be said to work the moment the respective goals and norms are active in the
‘interior’ of each and every business school teacher, that is, if the dispositif makes those people
judge themselves according to pre-ordained norms of quality. Miller and Rose (1990) have
lucidly explained how the excellence discourse capitalizes on ‘the psychological striving of
individuals for autonomy and creativity’ (p. 26). Thus it becomes obvious that external
manipulation and disciplinary measures on the part of the organization where the individual
works become obsolete, since people willingly submit to ‘the search of the firm for excellence
93
and success’ (p. 26). Accordingly, governmentality through the excellence discourse is
imaginable as being grounded in a dynamic by reason of which people govern themselves
without discerning that they are subjected to a new ‘organic ideology’ (du Gay, 1996, p. 67). It is
further remarkable that this tendency towards leveraging the ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’ of
subjects in higher education is hardly seen as a cause for concern since excellence discourse
unmistakably stipulates that individuals must invest in and work upon themselves in order to
secure their own future. The theoretical merit of governmentality is that it enables one to perceive
quality exercises of whatever sort not only as ‘technical’ procedures or ideological rhetoric, but,
more fundamentally, as a political and economic project seeking to create a social reality that
appears as inevitable. On the basis of our investigation, then, we can decipher in higher education
a peculiar form of (performative) governmentality through which academics as well as business
schools at large are submitted to a set of rationalities which were previously uncommon in this
specific setting. Additionally, what is of crucial importance with respect to business school
education is that the dispositif of excellence, which represents the normative foundation of
competition, simultaneously stimulates and sustains practices that are primarily guided by student
satisfaction scores. As such, the excellence dispositif operates in such a way as to introduce,
sustain and perpetuate outstanding quality through practices which at once suggest and control
apposite behaviors on the part of academics. Bearing that in mind, I will show in the following
section how university (business school) staff, by means of student evaluation tests and the
introduction of a ‘customer culture’, are called upon to govern themselves so as to achieve better
feedback scores and, more generally, to warrant teaching excellence.
Keeping the Customer Satisfied
Given, as mentioned before, the ubiquitous practice of accreditations and media rankings of
business schools, it must be emphasized that both those regulatory bodies base their evaluations
on the criterion of student satisfaction. The assessment of business schools by ‘The Economist’,,
for example, shows that student satisfaction evaluations make up 8.75% of business school’s total
valuation (compared with, for instance, 10% for the potential to network and 20% for post-MBA
salary raises). To give another illustration, ‘Business Week’ in its rankings relies exclusively on
statements by recruiters and graduates whereas peer-evaluations of academics are no longer part
94
of the ranking process. ‘Business Week’ talks of ‘customers’ and ‘customer satisfaction’ thus
inadvertently highlighting their ‘mantra [that] “the customer is always right”’ (Gruber et al.,
2001, p. 37).
34
As the Task Force of AACSB International has made clear in this context, ‘(a)s
market power in education has shifted from providers to consumers … the external focus of
rankings [of business magazines] has increased in importance over accreditation’ (2005, p. 9).
However, business school ranking weren’t always so closely aligned with the opinions of
graduates. Before the introduction of customer satisfaction measures,
35
quality assessments by the
‘Business Week’ were largely based on the general reputation of business schools and their staff.
The consequence that peer-reviews of academics’ research (Dill, 1992) had a far grater influence
upon the final rating of a respective business school. Yet, the power to define quality was
gradually turned over to the customer as it was sensed that thorough research does not necessarily
translate into good teaching (cf. Gruber et al., 2001). Obviously, such a shift in the ranking
practice of business newspapers has far-reaching implications for business school teaching. It
must be stressed in this context that the demand to treat students as customers is not limited to the
business school segment. Rather, the logic of ‘customer relationship management’ pervades the
discourse of education on a global scale. That said, ‘customer relationship management’
originated in the discipline of management where it was seen as a device for improving and
systematizing customer relations and, by implication, for creating value for the company. The
logic whereby the (business) student must be taken care of from the time of his/her entry (if not
indeed recruitment) until his/her completion of graduate or even post-graduate courses (which
might contain, inter alia, career planning/placement/life transition; cf. Bejou, 2005) clearly shows
that only a happy student will remain loyal to his/her alma mater. Höpfl (2005) reveals the
attitude of this new kind of business school student in the following statement: ‘(t)hey have been
captured by the promises of higher education, been transformed into customers and have come to
an entirely consumerist view of what education can offer them. They pay for their education so
they should be able to decide the curriculum, the scope of the subject, the content of their courses,
the quality of their lecturers’ (p. 62). Sustaining student loyalty, construed as good satisfaction
assessments, and, in the long run, post-graduate donations, has thus become a key factor for
34
There is a noteworthy exception to the customer focus in business schools as is shown by their selection
procedures. Since the rankings of, for instance, ‘Business Week’ rely on the competitive entry requirements of
business schools, this means that business schools are forced to ‘recruit more and more MBA students aggressively
so they can turn down more and more of those applicants. The rankings depend on applicants having high GMAT
scores, so class size has been shrinking in order to lop off students with low GMAT scores’ (Feldman, 2005, p. 217).
35
‘Business Week’, for instance, introduced customer satisfaction information into their ranking procedures in 1988.
95
warranting both institutions’ prestige and economic viability. It is thus imperative to recognize
that the ‘dilution’ and ‘trivialization’ of management education as currently identified by
Mintzberg and others (cf. below) is closely related to the introduction of student feedback
measures. To gain an understanding of how business schools have adopted student evaluations as
a cunning regulative measure and how they function as a ‘cultural technology’ for re-shaping
teaching practices and teachers’ subjectivities, we will now turn our attention to the disciplinary
momentum of so-called SETs (student evaluation test).
D) Student Evaluations
In the wake of the eulogy of excellence and quality, reflections on teaching have been prompted
as a means for holding staff responsible for their performance. Student evaluation tests or SETs
have thus become a device for demonstrating teaching excellence through a series of items which
have been deemed apposite for the task at hand. Though it has been pointed out that SETs are not
fully capable of embracing teaching quality (e.g. Saroyan & Amundsen, 2001), they have
nevertheless been popularized upon recognition that they are an effective means for controlling a
large population at relatively low costs. As we are reminded by Saroyan and Amundsen (2001),
‘(t)he facility with which they [student course ratings] are administered has probably contributed
greatly to their widespread use’ (p. 349). Following Foucault’s (1995) ‘Discipline and Punish’,
we can see that the logic that underlies SETs complies with the disciplinary techniques of the
state apparatus since ‘it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering
of human multiplicities’ (p. 218). Being applied, for instance, in 94% of Canadian universities
(Saroyan & Donald, 1994), it becomes blatantly obvious that teaching and its effectiveness is
most commonly investigated through SET procedures. As mentioned, the popularity of SETs can
be explained if we take into account that its disciplinary logic perfectly obeys to the
performativity principle of optimal input-output ratios. Given that SETs need to be simple,
efficient and cost-effective, we are reminded by Foucault (1995) that, in order to be judged as
legitimate, disciplines (which in Foucault (1995) are related to state power) need to obey to three
particular criteria: ‘firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost
(economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low
exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the
effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible,
without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this “economic” growth of power with the output
96
of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in
short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system’ (pp. 218 –
219). It thus appears fair to say that SETs fulfill Foucault’s criteria in every respect, that is, in
terms of ‘low expenditure’, ‘little resistance’, ‘power’ and ‘docility’. SETs have thus been
recognized, first of all, as a means to assess teaching excellence and, second, as a constitutive
force for defining and for rendering amenable to control both teaching and teachers. That is, SETs
are not only an influential and easy-to-handle assessment tool but also a device for constructing a
particular image of teaching which henceforth governs the conduct of teaching in addition to
determining teachers’ subject positions. Accordingly, in as much as SETs are based on the
assumption that feedback to lecturers makes them ‘work harder and invest more time to prepare
their courses’ (Kluge & Lindstrom, 2005, p. 15), they are closely connected to the excellence
discourse which makes efficiency the ‘moral absolute’ (Fenwick, 2001) and performative skills
the currency of business school teachers. Again, this immediately reminds us of Foucault’s
(1991) treatise of governmentality where he posited that the key issue of governmentality was to
convert people to the logic of economics, that is, the best and most efficient way of managing
their lives.
Hence, having shown that both internal and external assessments of business schools
attach great importance to student satisfaction, it is further implied through the ‘clientocracy’
(Sosteric, Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 6) inherent to SETs that knowledge, to become
marketable, needs to have a certain entertainment value. SETs have been receptive to this demand
which manifests itself in teachers’ ‘enthusiasm’ and their ability ‘to stimulate students’ interest’
(Abrami, 1989; Murray et al., 1990). Arguably, in an era when students have been turned into
customers (Lauer, 2002), it has become increasingly difficult for business school staff to avoid
the temptation (or covenant) of making ‘student satisfaction’ the aim of their teaching by
providing their students, among other things, with easily comprehensible content (cf. below).
Sosteric et al. (1998) have indeed shown how student evaluations affect teaching, when they
point out that ‘(c)oncerned about survey feedback, and not wanting to create dissatisfied student-
consumers, some teachers (especially those not protected by tenure) shift away from critical
pedagogy and free experimentation towards classroom teaching that is low risk, more
conservative, and more entertaining’ (p. 12). Business education thus becomes ‘the consumption
of non-threatening entertainment, which, at its best, puts pedagogical control into the hands of the
students … and, at its worst, demands that offensive (dare we say challenging) academic material
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be expurgated from course lest it offend sensibilities. Merit, hard work, and actually getting
students to learn something become less important to staff than pleasing students’ (Sosteric,
Gismondi & Ratkovic, 1998, p. 12). If the so-called ‘Dr. Fox Effect’, that is, the recognition that
teachers’ expressiveness and enthusiasm is positively correlated with student evaluations (e.g.
Marsh & Roche, 1997) is added to the equation, it becomes clear that teaching is not exclusively
about content (which would be a naïve view in any case) but also a matter of ‘performing arts’.
Mintzberg (2004) has deplored in this context that contemporary management education has been
transformed into an act of entertainment in which learning is replaced by laughter (cf. Feldman,
2005). It follows that business school teachers are subjected, or, more precisely, must subject
themselves, to a distinct act of emotional engineering: they are expected to calculate and shade
their behavior so as to splash enthusiasm in the classroom. Consequently, as one today finds a
vast number of university business schools which make the tenures, careers and salaries of their
staff contingent upon their performance, one can immediately see why emotional engagement and
enthusiasm are invoked as indicators for deciding whether university teachers are adequately
equipped for their jobs. Where emotional engagement, enthusiasm or passion has been
operationalized as ‘heightened engagement when communicating, selling ideas, selling courses in
the marketplace and even when disciplining staff and students’ (Hatcher, 2001, pp. 3 – 4), there
can be no question that these developments reflect the influx of entrepreneurial values into
education. In particular, the capacity to invest ‘emotional capital’ needs to be analyzed in the light
of entrepreneurialism and the widespread interest in enthusiasm, creativity and self-motivation
that it entails.
Both research evaluations and business school rankings have, then, spurred disciplinary
mechanisms: university staff is put under closer surveillance than their students. It appears that
the way SETs stress emotional labor can best be understood on the basis of Foucault’s (1988)
notion of ‘technologies of the self’. First of all though, we must realize that who we think we are
as business school academics is contingent on who or what we are ‘presumed, supposed, or
required to be in terms of the “official identities” (subject positions) constructed for us in
documents and policies – position descriptions, employment contracts, etc.’ (Middleton, 2004, p.
4). In other words, business school teachers who base their practices on the excellence discourse
simultaneously enter a process of constant ‘examination that places individuals in a relation of
surveillance’ and also ‘engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’
(Foucault, 1995, p. 189). Arguably, the ‘logic of excellence’ (du Gay, 1996) brings with it an
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image of an ever more competitive global market in which one can only survive on the basis of
an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Regarding this entrepreneurial spirit, it is its implied active
participation and proactiveness in particular which is pivotal for understanding why enthusiasm
has been rendered a central feature of excellent teaching. With reference to Thompson’s (1998)
book ‘Passion at Work’, Hatcher (2001) made clear that emotional communication has become
‘the right way to … achieve excellence at work’ (p. 11). The governance of business school’s
teaching faculty thus works through the subject’s emotional self-reengineering which is,
following Foucault (1988), a distinct ‘technology of the self’. Foucault claimed that it is through
the practices of modern life that subjects are produced. In opposition to the widely held view that
the modern subject objectifies and dominates the world through technology (Dreyfus, 2002),
Foucault argued that, conversely, it is the subject that is constituted by the technologies of power
and of the self (Foucault, 1988c). ‘Technologies of the self’ was, then, a term coined by Foucault
(1988) to denote the various ‘operations of their [subjects’] own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being that people make either by themselves or with the help of others in
order to transform themselves’ and to reach a ‘state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality’ (p. 18; quoted in Besley, 2005). The notion of ‘technology’ makes it clear that to
achieve quality or excellence in business schools it is not sufficient to reflect a general attitude.
Quality is something that requires constant work, and this work must be done at the level of the
individual academic. The notion of ‘technologies of the self’ thus suggests that quality implies
labor of the self where business school teachers are forced to commune with themselves, to
reflect on their practices, and to correct them according to the basic principles of rational conduct.
However, what is remarkable is that the technologies of the self that are activated through the
excellence discourse rely on a vocabulary which makes the government(ality) of the self less than
obvious. In other words, the excellence discourse operates upon the premise that those who are
able and willing to adopt an ‘enterprising spirit’ will become ‘virtuous, resourceful and
‘empowered’ human beings’ (du Gay, 1996, p. 68). It therefore becomes clear that the
government of business school teachers is not so much an act of overt ‘coercion’ or ‘domination’
(cf. Chapters 3 & 6) but rather one of subtle ‘seduction’ and ‘manipulation’ (cf. Rose, 1991). The
excellence discourse has thus accorded more importance to the individual academic and
specifically to their focus on themselves. As reflected through the technologies of the self that
arise from the excellence discourse, contemporary business schools are not simply concerned
with strengthening their centralized authority. Since quality is stressed through an intensification
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of academics’ relation with themselves (e.g. emotional self-engineering), power is practiced not
(only) through external authority but, rather, through the knowledge of the self and the
(corrective) practices that this entails. It follows that even though academics are called upon to
establish a particular truth regime for themselves and to act in accordance thereto, this regime is
not necessarily conceived of as forced self-disciplining measures. Since technologies of the self
more often than not are envisaged as a duty of the privileged, this regime is on the contrary often
seen as a means to ensure personal freedom. Given that Harrer (2005) convincingly argued that
the technologies of the self (which are employed in a self-conscious and overtly willing way)
operate by the same principles as the disciplinary mechanisms, one must concede that ‘both
phenomena are equally subordinate to a common species, which is “subjectivation” in general’
(p. 83).
36
Subjects of business schools or higher education more generally who adopt an
‘enterprising spirit’ thus willingly work on themselves without necessarily perceiving the
pressure of external control or domination. In accordance thereto, the ‘technologies of the self’
arising from the excellence discourse give rise to the development of a lifestyle which maximizes
the worth of people’s existence to themselves while on the other hand concealing that they
simultaneously maximize the performance of the respective business school in which they work.
As du Gay (1996) makes clear with reference to Kanter (1990), ‘(s)elf management’ is the key
here: ‘how to handle yourself to your own best advantage’ (p. 69). Putting this in a slightly
different way, we can see that, through their connection with excellence discourse, measurement
procedures such as SETs are transformed from ‘an irksome, intrusive and threatening technique
of management control’ into ‘a benevolent … technique to assist individuals to become their true
selves and to realise their aspirations’ (Grey, 1994, p. 489; quoted in Sosteric, Gismondi &
Ratkovic, 1998, p. 12).
Being reminded by Foucault (1988b) that ‘technologies of the self’ create ‘useful, docile,
practical citizens’ (cf. Besley, 2005, p. 77), it becomes clear that the capacity to invest ‘emotional
labor’ is not a neutral event but, rather, a process by which academics’ identities are shaped in
distinct ways. As Hatcher (2001) points out, ‘(t)his ethical comportment of how to be properly
emotional (indeed passionately so) is a form of collateral that has to be managed and drawn on
constantly’ (p. 4). In other words, SETs and the excellence dispositif of which they are an
intrinsic part prescribe that the academic conducts his/her ‘body management aesthetics’ in such
36
Based on this observation, Harrer (2005) concluded that ‘Foucault’s account of the “fabrication” of subjects
through disciplinary power carries over into his late work on ethical self-constitution’ (p. 84).
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ways as to constantly work on behalf of one’s communicative skills and entrepreneurial guise.
The rationale on which ‘emotional labor’ capitalizes forecasts that the enterprising activities of
the self establish a direct link with teaching excellence. Again, the idea of emotional
transformation is a central concept within the excellence dispositif. It is on account of the views
perpetuated by such management gurus such as Peters and Waterman (1982) that people have
come to believe that only constant self-monitoring, testing and transforming will warrant
organizational (and individual) success. As this elaboration has shown, the vocabulary of
entrepreneurship, accountability, enthusiasm, etc. has had a remarkable effect on the
understanding of the academic in recent years. It has been said, for instance, that the
‘entrepreneuring academic’ has rendered obsolete or illegitimate alternative sets of subject
positions in the context of higher education. Following Hatcher (2001), we hear that ‘(t)he
governance of academics through the mobilisation of their desire to succeed reduces their
Otherness as outsider voices of critique and distance. It makes the space of the academy more
ordered, as emotion itself falls within the bounds of order and where it becomes merely another
form of disposable capital’ (p. 18). Arguably, where passion and enthusiasm are subordinated to
the (economic) goals of the university (business school) and/or state powers, one could argue at
great length that such a view conveys just another expression of Lyotard’s (1984) performativity
principle. Since we will return to this issue in due course, I will first investigate, through the
recent criticism of MBA teaching by Mintzberg and others, how the dogma of ‘the customer is
always king’ ignites a peculiar instrumentalization and simplification of knowledge.
Fast-food Knowledge
To illustrate how the entertainment imperative feeds back into the ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault,
1984) produced by academics and to highlight that the clutches of ‘customer orientation’ not only
affect teaching but also research, it is helpful to turn our attention to a recent call for papers by
the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education. In their call for contributions on the
issue of entrepreneurship education the editors put forward an appeal for papers which express
their arguments in no more than 1000 words. The reason for this condensation given was that
brief contributions would allow students to save time and to cover more cases/topics on
entrepreneurship. As the editors made clear, ‘(w)e want to publish lecture articles that explain any
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key concept of entrepreneurship (narrowly or broadly defined) in a straightforward, clear and to
the point manner. Too often textbooks and review articles include too much obvious material and
drift off the core learning points. In this special issue of the IJEE we want to publish short case
studies that can be used by students after 10 minutes of reading.’ What is revealed herein is a
consumerist attitude at its worst. The reduction of meaning into ever smaller packages, not to say
truisms, ignores the fact that social reality is infinitely complex, and that to grasp the complexities
of (social) entrepreneurship it is necessary to engage with imaginative (and at times difficult)
theories and to conduct detailed empirical investigations. However, the expectations of MBA
students and the limits imposed by evaluation procedures both make it increasingly difficult to
teach courses which are based on the assumption that education requires thorough scholarship. To
resist the specifications and demands of the control mechanisms of the excellence discourse again
is a difficult, if not indeed impossible task. For instance, refusing to entertain students entails the
risk of receiving bad evaluations and, by extension, the risk of being disciplined through punitive
measures (e.g. salary cuts, lay-offs, etc.). Overtly calling into question the excellence discourse
by taking a critical stance against, for instance, the various assessment exercises is, according to
Sosteric, Gismondi and Ratkovic (1998) even more dangerous: ‘(d)are challenge efficiency
calculations and you risk being marginalized or branded a Luddite educator unconcerned with
quality, unaware of the new economic contingencies, or incapable of reason and common sense’
(p. 15).
It must have become clear by now that the combination of accreditation procedures,
newspaper rankings and the new conception of students as consumers with all the emotional
engineering of business school staff that this entails has given rise to a particular sort of
education. In particular, the exigency to ‘keep the customers satisfied’ and to indulge the student
with a cozy experience is often achieved by warranting that nobody flunks their course (which
would be a serious source of student uneasiness) and/or by giving students good grades (which
has been proven to correlate with course evaluations; cf. ‘grade leniency’: Marsh & Roche, 1997;
1999; 2000; Gillmore & Greenwald, 1999; McKeachie, 1999). The customer focus in business
school education has thus given prominence to some kind of Hollywood education, that is,
education based on slack entertainment which demands little effort from what can be termed its
spectators. As Höpfl (2005) has expressed this new type of education thus: ‘(e)verything is
straightforward, linear, in neat text boxes, supported by simple examples: an orderly world which
is easily digestible’ (p. 67). Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that critics of
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academic conduct have come to deplore that business schools constitute ‘a malign influence in
American life’ (O’Connor, 1999, p. 121; quoted in O’Connor, 2006). Hence, while the excellence
discourse in management education has lead to an ever increasing ‘streamlining’ of knowledge
and to a noticeable shift of learning objectives, it has been objected in particular that student
evaluations promote faculty competition which subsequently seems to distract all participants
from the learning mission of higher education (e.g. Martin, 1998). However, the debate which has
revolved around Mintzberg’s (2004) frontal attack on business school education has stimulated a
number of cunning food metaphors that illuminate the shortcomings of business education. These
food metaphors shall now be explored in some depth.
Whereas the criticism of MBA programs is not a new phenomenon in itself (cf. Leavitt,
1989; Lataif, 1992; Mintzberg, 1992; Mitroff & Churchman, 1992), Mintzberg’s (2004) book
‘Managers not MBAs’ in particular advances the view that management education has been
turned into ‘a buffet table from which managers and their organizations can choose – a little bit of
this and a little bit of that, or else a plate piled high with one or two dishes’ (Meister, 1994, p. 19;
quoted in Feldman, 2005, p. 219). The conceptualization of knowledge to which Mintzberg
objects in his work very closely resembles the fast-food kitchen. This resemblance is the result of
the ongoing instrumentalization, not to say McDonaldization (Hayes & Wynyard, 2002) of
knowledge at universities and other educational institutions. Feldman (2005) opined that
knowledge on the MBA-menu is far too often limited to an analytically served dish with an
emphasis on ‘fat-reduced’ facts, ‘snacks’ with best practices, ‘sweetened’ toolboxes and ‘instant’
recipes. At the end of the lesson, ‘takeaways’ are summarized to fill up each student’s lunch
boxes. As Feldman (2005) further contended, ‘MBA faculty members frequently hear from their
administrators [that] they have to “feed the beast”’ (p. 217). Given these allegations and taking
into account the entertainment imperative discussed above, it is conceivable that business schools
increasingly mistake teaching with ‘feeding’ in the sense that they provide their students with
fast-food-like knowledge, reductionist best-practices and unreflected and de-contextualized
analytical skills. These practices quite obviously encourage a certain passivity and inertness on
the part of the student as is shown, for example, in a type of teaching which acts on the
assumption that business students must sit back and ‘be mesmerized by the performance at the
front, better still, on the screen. From this they may walk away dazzled, only to wonder the next
day what that was all about’ (Mintzberg, 2004, p. 208). It must be emphasized that the idea of
knowledge as fast food is not just an ironic metaphor, as it also contains a political critique. After
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all, the so-called McDonaldization of higher education implies that universities and business
schools are controlled by the market and that teaching is more and more converted into a McJob
(Hayes & Wynyard, 2002). Given the negative future prospects foretold by Hayes and Wynyard,
it must at least be asked whether or not business schools are able to provide anything else than
superficial contact and education. In citing Vail (1989), Mintzberg (2004) made the point that
‘thinning out’ education through the ‘entertainment factor’ must be perceived as a threat to the
quality of business school teaching: ‘I would say that as we have sought to make our graphics
more “professional” and our “platform skills” more stylish, we have had to trivialize content. I
wonder if participants realize the shallowness of the content they’re getting in the midst of all this
glitzy instrumentation’ (Mintzberg, 2004, p. 208).
The food allegory makes it clear that the focus of learning in business schools has shifted
quite dramatically from imaginative production and critical reflection (Grey, 2004) or, to put it
bluntly, the consumption of commoditized knowledge. As mentioned above, such a
commoditization of knowledge as well as the implied simplification of learning has only become
possible by calling into question the value of what could be termed pure theory. The primary
focus of business school education has become the provision of ostensibly practical ‘tools’ which
the student can grasp ‘en passant’, that is, effortlessly and without going through the ordeal of
intellectual examination. It is against the backdrop of the new role of students as customers that
the decaying status and level of education becomes comprehensible. And while fast-food
knowledge might appear appealing at first, it unquestionably has negative effects in the long run,
that is, both teachers and students ultimately lose out. However, as mentioned before, taking into
account Lyotard’s deliberations on performativity, it becomes conceivable that knowledge within
the university is served ‘à la carte’ in order to improve students’ skills and chances on the job
market. Though there are those who point out that business schools are not particularly well
attuned to that task (e.g. Ghoshal, 2005), it is nonetheless fair to say that the transmission of
knowledge tries to comply with a logic whereby students must be enabled to acquire new
language games which in turn make possible an entitlement to competence and expertise (Pfeffer
& Fong, 2002). As briefly explained above, since knowledge is motivated by state power,
conventional didactics (of which critical reflection used to be an intrinsic feature) ceases to be of
relevance. Importantly, just roughly 30 years after Lyotard’s apocalyptic prediction, it appears
that the discourse of excellence has become so taken for granted that alternative ways of
university conduct have been largely abandoned. As Atkinson-Grosjean (1998), for instance,
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showed in her pilot study of a western Canadian university, there has been little if any objection
to the introduction of ever more sophisticated measurement procedures. Sosteric, Gismondi and
Ratkovic (1998) have come to the similar conclusion that ‘(c)omplicity in this performance
indicator exercise could be the Trojan Horse that imports new political ideologies into
universities through seemingly value-neutral techniques’ (p. 7). By and large, it seems naïve to
believe that business schools will in due time transpose their current rationale of effortless
consumption into one of creative deliberation. In times where Hollywood movies still dominate
the cinema scene not only in North America, but equally so in Europe and Asia (Kim, 2004) and
where the growth of fast-food chains is directly related to the affluence of particular societies (cf.
Euromonitor International, http://www.euromonitor.com), we have at least indirect indications
that the de-intellectualization of business school education will further proliferate thereby turning
students’ ‘consumerist attitude’ (Riesman, 1980) into a legitimate end of higher education.
Having illustrated the omnipresent straightjacket of the ‘customer orientation’ or
McDonaldization, we appear well advised to counteract the trend to dispense with theory and
intellectual inspection at the expense of slack entertainment. On the basis of Ghoshal’s (2005)
critique of prevailing management theories, I prefer to stress that good teaching is probably less a
question of whether or not theory is present, but rather whether or not the right kinds of theories
are used in teaching. Before turning to the second part of this investigation where the question of
what constitutes ‘good theories’ and how they could stimulate our understanding of social
entrepreneurship will be explored, I will first show what impact the entrepreneurial conduct of
business schools and their competitive mindset has for social entrepreneurship courses.
The Enterprising Academic and the Emergence of Social Entrepreneurship Courses
Following Lyotard’s (1984) ‘Postmodern Condition’ it has been shown above that knowledge in
post-industrial societies is increasingly submitted to the competitive ambitions of nation states.
Besides that, it is imperative to recognize that business schools also see their education curricula
as a means to increase their own competitive power. Taking into account, for instance, that
business schools are increasingly submitted to a proliferating set of controls where both teaching
and research are judged against their performance and where both positions and courses are
created or discontinued according to the return they generate (Feldman, 2005), it is revealed that
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knowledge needs to be produced for the purpose of increasing business schools’ competitive
edge. Since the rhetoric of ‘choice’ has come to the fore in discourses of contemporary education,
students are now seen as rational consumers who seek out ‘the best value for their educational
dollar’ (Roberts, 1998, p. 7). By the same token, educational institutions must perform and
compete to the maximum extent possible in order to sustain their viability. The exigency to
perform and compete is thus an immanent feature of entrepreneurship discourse which not only
pervades the conduct of bureaucratic leaders (e.g. du Gay, 2004) but also has a strong impact on
educational institutions world-wide (e.g. Davies, 1997). In other words, the argument of global
competition is used in entrepreneurship discourse as a reason for re-shaping educators in such a
way as to tackle their work tasks in the same way business managers are said to approach their
responsibilities and challenges. It is not surprising that the excellence dispositif demands that
subjects of higher education operate entrepreneurially in order to sell ‘themselves and their
programmes effectively in order to keep enrolments and revenues at healthy levels’ (Roberts,
1998, p. 7). Also entailed in the entrepreneurial code of conduct is that educators must produce
innovative teaching approaches, both in terms of style and content. In her treatise of the
‘enterprising academic’, Hatcher (2001) argued that the influx of entrepreneurial premises makes
educational institutions ‘look more like corporations and enterprises than collegia and
bureaucracies’ (p. 2). While it has been mentioned that the demands of the entrepreneurial
imperative are manifold, it follows from Hatcher’s insightful study that the quintessential factor
for survival, for business schools as well as for the individuals working therein, is the capacity to
innovate. As Hatcher (2001) contended, ‘(t)he educator has thus become a new player in selling
his services, such as … innovative vocational courses, to his clients’ (p. 5). Again, the
governance technique of the excellence dispositif seeks to create a sort of academic who is at the
same time loyal and tractable and an enterprising innovator who aspires to continuously reinvent
him/herself and the environment to benefit his/her business school. Regarding the style of
teaching, I have already pointed out that the enterprising academic is expected to have teaching
skills which are able to enthuse and entertain the student so as to elicit good course evaluations
and, most importantly, to ensure that the accolade of teaching excellence is granted to the
business school as a whole. Hence, while the excellence dispositif prescribes innovative
behaviors, and, consequently, provides academics with an entrepreneurial identity, the act of
embracing entrepreneurship discourse not only affects the style of teaching but also its very
content. Whereas we have recognized, particularly through the discussion of Mintzberg
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‘Managers, not MBAs’, that the content of business school teaching is intellectually condensed in
order to provide students with easily digestible ‘fast food’ knowledge, it must be emphasized that
innovation also finds expression through the establishment of new courses. In responding to the
need to innovate, business school teachers thus increasingly try to complement their curricula
with utterly new, that is, trendy material. Irrespective of their specific content, courses on social
entrepreneurship are first and foremost conceivable as distinguishing signs or, to use a business
jargon expression, ‘unique selling propositions’ of business schools. It follows that those courses
always operate on the basis of business schools’ superordinate objectives, that is, performativity.
Arguably, academic bodies’ ceaseless efforts to behave entrepreneurially and hence to constantly
innovate education curricula shows that the function of social entrepreneurship courses is
ultimately to oil business schools’ ‘capitalist machine’ (Warren, 2005, p. 79). Since courses in
finance, accounting, marketing and human resource management form the core of business
education around the globe, they are quite obviously not suitable criteria for distinguishing
business schools from each other. What is needed to attract the attention of prospective business
students are thus courses which radiate the kind of passion represented by fashion (Abrahamson,
1996; Birnbaum, 2000). Fads and fashions, as we are told by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996),
are important means for implementing and spreading innovations in organizations or at least for
eliciting the impression that ‘something is going on’. Additionally, ‘funky business jargon’
(Webster, 2002), that is, language games which are inspired by the latest management fashion, is
a forceful shorthand for showing that one thrives on cutting-edge principles and concepts. As
O’Connor (2006) rightly contended with respect to social entrepreneurship, it is noticeable that
the matter has been treated predominantly in ‘elite business schools’ which are most responsive
to the fact that they need to ‘keep up with the latest trends’.
While we shall investigate more thoroughly in the second part of this chapter whether or
not social entrepreneurship trades on the rhetorical force of management fashions, it is worth
pointing out at the outset that courses on social entrepreneurship in the context of business school
education have mushroomed within the last decade (Bornstein, 2004; O’Connor, 2006; Steyaert
& Hjorth, 2006). More often than not, universities and business schools have cooperated with
external partners such as philanthropists, business ventures and others which have proven
indispensable for the set-up of these courses. O’Connor (2006) has revealed in this context that
business schools have received remarkable material support from external sources which
supported them in propping up their public reputation. To illustrate these developments,
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Bornstein (2004) has shown how Leslie Crutchfield from Harvard Business School launched the
Ashoka
37
Accelerator for Social Entrepreneurship which aspired to ‘help fellows scale up their
organizations and achieve major impact’ (p. 257). Another example of a successful joint venture
put forward by Bornstein is the Center of Social Entrepreneurship in Sao Paulo which was set up
by a Brazilian sociologist, Ashoka and the Sao Paulo office of McKinsey & Company. Most
importantly, while external support has been conceived of as a prerequisite for establishing social
entrepreneurship courses or centers,
38
it has been revealed that once such courses have been put
into place they tend to become a self-reinforcing agent for business schools’ reputation
(O’Connor, 2006). As a result, the aspect which most business schools in their case studies of
teaching have focused on are courses in social entrepreneurship that represent initiatives aimed at
alleviating social problems in the community (Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2004; cf. also part two
of this chapter). However, if the issues of ‘profitability’ and ‘innovation’ is taken into account,
the emergence of social entrepreneurship courses in MBA programs needs to be understood as a
means for differentiation and for imposing a competitive advantage. At the forefront of the ‘social
entrepreneurship movement’ are those business schools which have traditionally been viewed as
being in the vanguard of global competition. Even a cursory glance at the MBA landscape reveals
that social entrepreneurship courses were first introduced by US Ivy League business schools
such as Fuqua (Duke), Harvard Business School, Haas School of Business (Berkeley), Columbia
Business School, Stanford, and the Stern School of Business (New York). More recently, such
courses have also become part of the teaching programs of top-class business schools in Europe
(e.g. London Business School; Said Business School, Oxford; Judge Business School,
Cambridge; IESE Business School, Barcelona and Madrid). What is revealed, quite
paradoxically, is that while business schools are forced to create ‘unique selling propositions’ in
order to set themselves apart from their competitors, the definitions of social entrepreneurship
upon which their programs operate are pretty similar. It is noticeable in this connection that the
meaning of social entrepreneurship largely derives from the adherence to a small number of
academic texts. This said, it is the work of Gregory Dees (e.g. 1998; 1998b; 2001 with Emerson
& Economy) in particular which has been well received both inside (e.g. Stanford Graduate
School of Business, Fuqua, Haas School of Business; London Business School; Columbia
37
A social entrepreneurship advocacy organization founded by former McKinsey consultant Bill Drayton.
38
It is symptomatic that many social entrepreneurship centers hosted at prestigious business schools either receive
funding from business corporations or are even run in cooperation with external business stakeholders.
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Business School) and outside (e.g. Ashoka Foundation, Changemakers, Future Shifters, Social
Edge) the context of business school education. Therefore, while the semantic space occupied by
the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ seems to be somewhat limited (cf. below), it is conceivable that
its collocations are strengthened through institutional arrangements between education programs
at universities or university-affiliated institutes and business schools, non-profit organizations,
philanthropies and foundations as well as traditional profit enterprises. On the basis of programs
and courses for practitioners such as information platforms (e.g. ‘A World Connected’ at George
Mason University) and scholarship competitions (e.g. Global Social Entrepreneurship
Competition at the University of Washington Business School or National Social Venture
Competition, a cooperation between the University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of
Business, Columbia Business School, and the Goldman Sachs Foundation) a dispositif (cf. above)
is put in place which then shapes, channels and controls the articulation of social entrepreneurship
in certain ways. As O’Connor (2006) cogently argued in her investigation of the emergence of
social entrepreneurship, there have been, particularly in the Silicon Valley, networks of venture
capitalists, philanthropists and for-profit enterprises which have paved the way for seeing that
social issues must be addressed through economic initiatives. Bearing in mind the network of
institutions and scholars that are responsible for the creation of the image of social
entrepreneurship, it is hardly surprising that the matter has first and foremost been conceptualized
through the lens of business. It is evident that the heterogeneity of the elements of the dispositif
makes it impossible for the formulation of social entrepreneurship to occur in a harmonious,
univocal concert. Far from being monolithic and uniform, the discourses produced and
disseminated by the dispositif will inevitably be characterized by variation. Nevertheless, the
dispositif of excellence operates so as to ‘condense’ social entrepreneurship into an essentially
economic and/or heroic agent. This further implies that, despite all odds, the dispositif works on
behalf of an identifiable project, namely that of leveraging lingering national economies or nation
states. Before highlighting the particular meaning(s) imposed on social entrepreneurship through
business school teaching, we must take into consideration that business school-affiliated
institutions have a remarkable influence on the imagery produced in and disseminated through
business schools. For instance, Harvard has received a USD 10 million donation from the
Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation to fund students who adopt a businesslike approach to social
science disciplines (cf. O’Connor, 2006). In addition, the ever mounting number of social venture
competitions are mostly initiated through co-operations between business schools on the one
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hand and venture capitalists, investment banks or for-profit enterprises on the other. These
examples clearly show that the interpretation of social entrepreneurship constitutes a collective
endeavor which brings together a plethora of interests and motives. Despite the diversity of
stakeholders involved in the expression of social entrepreneurship, it will be shown in the next
section that the most prominent outlook produced by the dispositif is managerial in nature. In the
light of the impact of business and management on social entrepreneurship as well as the
mentioned narrowness which characterizes it, I would like to stress some of the most popular
interpretations of the subject as well as the most conspicuous omissions in order to then discuss
the state of current business school education. It must be recognized that the signification of
social entrepreneurship through business school teaching can be fully understood only if one
actively participated in the various courses offered. As such a participatory approach was beyond
the limits of the present investigation, I will base my argument on claims of academic scholars
who have a proven record in both teaching and research (e.g. Gregory Dees who is currently a
recognized teacher at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a former teacher/(adjunct)
professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School and
Yale School of Management). One might object that this strategy operates purely by induction:
one part of the ‘picture’ is investigated, and the observations are then elevated to the status of a
general appraisal. However, given that the available academic literature on social
entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2) is largely based on ‘anecdotal evidence or case studies’ (Mair &
Marti, 2006), it seems likely that scholars who publish on social entrepreneurship also use their
insights and theoretical assumptions in their teaching. To complement this type of source, the
second analytic focus will be on practitioner guidebooks on social entrepreneurship (e.g. Dees,
Emerson & Economy, 2001; 2002
39
; Bornstein, 2004) which are equally considered as sources of
‘inspiration’ for business students. Both kinds of textual material are ultimately conceived as
worthwhile venues for (indirectly) tackling the meaning of social entrepreneurship as currently
spread in and through business school education. Taking the ‘trendsetters’ of social
entrepreneurship as our point of departure, we shall use these insights to claim that the entire
39
It is noteworthy that both books by Dees, Emerson and Economy are deployed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation to further ‘encourage entrepreneurship across America and improve the education of children and youth’
(cf. http://www.kauffman.org/). This provides further evidence how publications of business scholars contribute to
the signification of social entrepreneurship not only within the relatively narrow boundaries of the academe but
equally get to effectuate the understanding of the matter on a broader societal scale.
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issue is presented in an all too smooth and antiseptic manner, and, secondly, that it therefore
makes sense to complexify the given legacy of social entrepreneurship teaching.
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PART II
Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse
which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable
one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the
techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those
who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1984, p. 73)
The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship
Gregory Dees’ (1998) article ‘The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship’ was most to the point
and unapologetic in codifying the particularities of social entrepreneurship. Given that Dees’
article has been popularized far beyond the boundaries of business schools gives some indication
that such a definitional and clarifying endeavor was greatly welcomed by both the scientific and
practitioner community. Dees can thus be seen as a one of the rare ‘winners’ in the performativity
game as he was, following Lyotard (1984), able to capitalize on a new language game. Coaldrake
(2000) has concluded in this connection that entrepreneurial behaviors of academics, which are
reflected in Dees’ introduction of the neologism ‘social entrepreneurship’, are increasingly
rewarded by universities with ‘status, resources as well as financial benefits’ (cf. Hatcher, 2001,
p. 17). However, as has been shown above the increased competition between business schools
and the ever rising importance to keep MBA students satisfied has meant that business schools
have spearheaded (and thereby confined) the meaning of social entrepreneurship in a manner
which commoditized the issue so as to render social entrepreneurship teachable as part of
(elective) MBA courses (Robinson & Lo, 2005). Evidently, the demand to choose types of
knowledge that lend themselves to some kind of performance (be it through practical applications
or mere entertainment) has influenced the representation of our subject matter. Accordingly, it
seems important to throw some light on the sort of understanding generated at university business
schools. In trying to do so, it becomes immediately apparent (from publications by business
school scholars) that social entrepreneurship is typically conceived as a unanimously positive
moral and economic force in contemporary societies (cf. also Chapters 2 & 7). As such, it is seen
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capable of providing answers to the issue of the ever accelerating speed of human conduct as well
as the innovativeness required for successful problem solving (du Gay, 2004). Additionally, most
images of social entrepreneurship presented in academic publications hinge on the (societal
and/or economic) role of the individual social entrepreneur and his (sic) super-natural abilities
and perseverance, in bringing about social innovation, change and progress. While these
deliberations only paint a very provisional picture of social entrepreneurship, I will elaborate in
more detail the most pervasive, if not peculiar, representations of social entrepreneurship that
come to the fore in conjunction with business school education. This examination will then serve
as the starting point for rethinking MBA curricula for social entrepreneurship.
A) Business Primacy
Arguably, it would be somewhat naïve to expect that MBA courses in social entrepreneurship
defied their own intellectual foundations. In other words, it is hardly surprising that business
scholars present social entrepreneurship under the guise of social marketing, strategic human
resource management, organizational learning and leadership (cf. Christie & Honig, 2006). By
implication, social entrepreneurship as it is currently depicted in business schools appears
untouchable and hyperbolically heroic as it is envisioned against the backdrop of the
commonsense ideal of best-business practice. However, the various images endorse a particular
genre (Czarniawska, 1999) which makes social enterprises and social entrepreneurs appear in a
glamorous light (cf. Bornstein, 2004; Roberts & Woods, 2005). Or, as O’Connor (2006)
concluded, social entrepreneurship ‘is rhetorically dramatic and ideologically expansive.’ This
means that whereas the glamorous portrayal of social entrepreneurship reveals parallels with the
literature on entrepreneurship (e.g. Nicholson & Anderson, 2005; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006), it
must be emphasized that the imagery of social entrepreneurship also shows clear indications of
management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996). As such, we shall take a look at the diffusion of
management, or managerial ideas (Enteman, 1993) with respect to social entrepreneurship in
order to judge whether the various business school truisms qualify as fashions and, where this is
the case, investigate how the utter persuasiveness of those ideas works.
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Productivized
To start with, having edited the two compilations ‘Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social
Entrepreneurs’ (2001) and ‘Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs: Enhancing the Performance
of Your Enterprising Nonprofit’ (2002), Dees, Emerson and Economy have provided two
guidebooks both of which aspire to equip nonprofit practitioners with knowledge that enables
them to become more effective as social entrepreneurs. The authors leave no doubt that the
success of social entrepreneurship is contingent on the application of sound business practices.
Presenting numerous chapters on subjects such as ‘competitive strategy’, ‘mission’, ‘human
resource management’, ‘investor-relations’, ‘innovation’, and ‘customer relationship
management’, etc. it becomes clear that the two books are conceived as distinct toolkits which
thrive on state-of-the-art management concepts. For instance, as we are told by Dees and
colleagues, ‘
ow it is time for social sector leaders to use every tool [from the business community] available to them and to apply those tools to further the organization’s mission, serve
its customers, and build community’ (2002, p. ix). Despite the fact that the authors acknowledge
that the profit sector might equally profit from insights from the social sector, the jargon used in
the above utterances, e.g. ‘mission’, ‘customers, ‘leaders’ or ‘tools’, makes it unmistakably clear
that their writing is based on the premise that it is high time to transform the logic of the social
sector in such way as to make it more ‘managerial’. The notion ‘productivized’ being used in the
above heading thus underscores that the idea of social entrepreneurship is sold as a commodity to
be purchased in the market. Looked at from this vantage point, it becomes even more evident that
the concept of social entrepreneurship is transformed from a more or less concrete idea into a set
of tools which is transmittable to a wider audience. Social entrepreneurship in Dees, Emerson and
Economy’s account emerges as a management fashion since it is turned into a product, that is,
commoditized, for reasons of economic success (Roberts, 1998). Toolkits on social
entrepreneurship provided online by consultancies such as the Authenticity Consulting LLC, the
Nonprofit Resource Center (http://oncampus.richmond.edu/connect/
nonprofit/finance/finance-soc_entrep.html) or social entrepreneurship advocacies such as Ashoka
objectify and generalize the way in which social entrepreneurship is to be conducted. Taking the
latter case, Ashoka, whose objective is ‘(1) to identify the general patterns that explained how
hundreds of fellows had succeeded in their fields, (2) select from those patters the few that, once
understood, could open up major new avenues for those working in the same fields; and (3)
spread those principles across the fellowship and the field’s practitioners’ (Bornstein, 2004, p.
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258), we can see that the organization aspires to productivize its knowledge and to provide its
‘customers’ with a set of easily comprehensible routines and suggestions that appear applicable to
any type of organizational context.
Progressive
Within its ‘emplotment’ (Polkinghorne, 1991) in discourse by instructors such as Dees and
colleagues, social entrepreneurship as business practice is geared towards a redemption of the
instable economic and social situation of local communities as well as entire nation states and
their economies. In other words, social entrepreneurship within the account of Dees et al. is part
of a ‘progressive narrative’ (Gergen & Gergen, 1988) where a particular evaluative position is
taken to improve over the course of the plot. Given that people follow the actions and initiatives
prescribed in textbooks and manuals of social entrepreneurs, those publications promise that,
despite ordeals and upcoming obstacles (Dees and Economy (2001), social entrepreneurs
‘implement their ventures with total commitment. They seldom give up, even when confronted by
obstacles that seem insurmountable’; p. 6). The message conveyed in those textbook is that, as
long as one follows the code of social entrepreneurship, it is possible to re-establish a state of
equilibrium. This romanticism is equally popular with respect to entrepreneurship discourse
(Gordon, 1991) where it is said that only by acquiring key management capacities will
entrepreneurs ever be able to solve their problems. Hence, despite its complexity,
entrepreneurship discourse postulates that the ‘flabbiness’ of the third sector can be overcome
provided that traditional third-sector practices are exchanged or at least supplemented with those
of ‘business excellence’. Toolkits such as those by Dees and colleagues thus thrive on
management ideas which herald (social and economic) betterment by means of juxtaposing the
bad, that is, obsolete set of behaviors with the good, that is, the managerial techniques which give
way to improvement for a better future.
Dramatized
As with entrepreneurship discourse (du Gay, 1996), the necessity for a social entrepreneurial
reorganization of communities and the third sector is made feasible by outlining momentous
changes that disrupt and de-legitimate everything which does not meet the ultimate criterion of
profitability. Listening, for instance, to Dees and Economy (2001) we are taught that ‘(t)he social
sector has undergone massive change over the past several decades. Gone are the days of
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charitable relief – cash handouts and subsidies that do more to create dependencies in program
participants than to prepare them to take in the world themselves. Gone, too, are the days of easy
money from government and foundation grants, for which results and accountability were rarely
required or reinforced … Together, these trends are creating major changes in how societies
around the world are dealing with providing public goods and services. They are leading to … a
call for more entrepreneurial spirit in the social sector’ (pp. 12 – 13). On the basis of Dees and
Economy’s apocalyptic vision, it becomes conceivable that the popularity of fashionable outlines
of social entrepreneurship are to a large extent based on two dramaturgical operations: first, they
tend to dramatize the negative consequences entailed by non-conformance; second, they
exaggerate the positive effects of the proposed best-management practices.
Theorized
The observations on dramatization fit in well with du Gay’s (1996) elaboration of the logic of
entrepreneurship discourse. Du Gay showed how an epochalist scheme is invoked to render
problematic everything that does not contain mandatory principles of innovation and excellence.
By extension, credence is given to social entrepreneurship toolkits by means of basing the
suggested best-practices on the equation ‘business competence = success’. Two root assumptions
for the foundations of the books by Dees et al. are particularly noteworthy. First, to become
successful all ‘nonprofit leaders need to be entrepreneurs’ (Dees & Economy, 2001, p. 1); second,
a sound entrepreneur must be ‘innovative, opportunity-oriented, resourceful, value-creating’ (p.
4). This means that the pervasiveness of this claim derives from the fact that hinges on
‘universalistic ideas of a rationalistic sort’ (Meyer, 1996, p. 247). In the toolkits edited by Dees
and colleagues (2001; 2002), the various authors highlight the importance of the precise
‘definition of the mission’, the implementation of ‘performance measures’ and the writing of
‘business plans’. In addition, they also emphasize the significance of the calculation of ‘risks’ and
the ‘mastering of innovation’. The suggestions of Dees et al. are therefore based on the
assumption that only by meticulously planning and accounting for one’s social entrepreneurial
endeavor will successes become feasible. Knowledge of social entrepreneurship is thereby
theorized: it is conceptualized as a universal means to a universal problem (Stensaker, 2005).
Though to be marketable it is not necessary for the offered suggestions to be very advanced
(which they rarely are), it is a prerequisite of management fashions that they can be abstracted
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(i.e. theorized) from practice, and, by implication, generalized irrespective of the size, culture,
technology, sector, etc. (cf. Meyer, 1996) of the particular social enterprise.
Socially Authorized
Knowledge which is socially authorized is lent weight either by virtue of powerful external
stakeholders or by means of persuasive illustrations through, for instance, case studies.
Concerning the former, it has already been explained how social entrepreneurship is supported
both conceptually and financially by institutions that are external to the realm of business schools.
Given this state of affairs, it is noticeable that the corporate world which has links with
universities and business schools as well as the philanthropies cooperating with them are first and
foremost interested in ‘hands-on approaches’ which present social entrepreneurship in the form of
tangible knowledge. Toolkits and best-practice approaches are both in line with this objective as
they pretend to offer a set of solutions to identified problems. As regards the social authorization
through persuasive illustrations we can see that research conducted at business schools often
makes reference to celebrated ‘cases’ (cf. Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2005; Mair & Marti, 2006).
With respect to prominent practitioners’ books, there is David Bornstein’s (2004) ‘How to
Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas’ which presents the success
stories of social entrepreneurs all around the globe. What is conspicuous is that Bornstein’s book
only provides stories of utterly successful initiatives. And though not all his illustrations enjoy
world-wide recognition he nevertheless underscores his argument through people such as Bill
Drayton who is the founder of the well-known Ashoka Foundation which today campaigns for
the promotion of social entrepreneurship on a global scale. Although there is no shortage of
problems and obstacles to social entrepreneurs in those kinds of narratives, those stories require a
plot that radiates an aura of success in order to become socially authorized. It is therefore hardly
surprising that Bornstein’s (1996) eulogy of the Grameen bank (Bangladesh) has been appraised
by both academics and practitioners as it has provided a scheme of social entrepreneurship which,
until today, has successfully been launched in 1,619 branches in 57,100 villages in Bangladesh
with a total staff of 14,822 employees. Indeed, these are the kinds of stories which accelerate the
reader’s pulse while at the same time almost ruling out the possibility that other social enterprises
might be less successful.
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Individualized
Portrayals of social entrepreneurship not only tend to tell success-stories but they have an equally
strong tendency to present those successes as the result of individual efforts. This individualized
mode of arguing, following Hjorth and Bjerke (2006), can be seen as a result of the strong
emphasis on individualism in American culture (cf. Chapter 2). It is therefore hardly surprising
that we find fewer articles by non-US academics that limit the focus of social entrepreneurship to
the individual social entrepreneur. However, as Roling (2002) made clear in his outline of the
entrepreneurship pedigree of social entrepreneurs, ‘not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur,
but research shows that individuals who have certain attitudes and behaviors … have the best
chance of success as entrepreneurs’ (p. 301). Roling explained which abilities and capacities
make a successful social entrepreneur (e.g. commitment and determination, leadership,
opportunity obsession, tolerance of risk, self-reliance). However, it must be stressed that only by
visualizing social entrepreneurship as an attractive opportunity for the individual do those
entrepreneurial characteristics gain value and appeal. Dees and Economy (2001) contended that
‘any leader in the nonprofit sector knows [that] the job of running a nonprofit has become
increasingly difficult’ (p. 1). Therefore, an entrepreneurial propensity becomes not only appealing
but downright mandatory. In other words, once one has identified a context that makes the
identified entrepreneurial attributes requisite, not to say life-sustaining, for organizations, it
becomes clear why these attributes are deemed pivotal at the level of the single person as well.
It will be the aim of the following chapter to investigate in depth the shortcomings and
ramifications of the images produced and perpetuated by academic writings. Nevertheless, we
must not ignore even at this point that conceiving social entrepreneurship by means of
fashionable management ideas and, by implication, as an affair solely concerned with sound
business practice does not only turn a blind eye to any value in traditional third-sector
organizations but also subverts our sense of community, citizenship and the welfare state (cf.
Levitas, 2000). As those concepts are increasingly replaced by a managerial terminology
involving expressions such as ‘contractualization of society’ (Peters, 2001), ‘user charges’ or
‘prudentialism’ (O’Malley, 1996), it can be argued that the downside of managerial fads and
fashions in business education is that they stimulate the adoption of concepts and practices which
may well be inappropriate and harmful with respect to the objective of social entrepreneurship. In
the ensuing paragraph, we will therefore argue that current rationales of social entrepreneurship
produced in the context of business school education not only eschew its political ramifications
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but, more importantly, ignore that social entrepreneurship is probably first and foremost to be
understood as the distinct creation of New Labor (or Third Way) and neo-liberal politics in
western societies.
B) Ignoring Politics
The analysis of representations of entrepreneurship in the media by Nicholson and Alistair (2005)
shows some bias in as much as it portrays the actors of entrepreneurship as ‘dynamic wolfish
charmers’, ‘supernatural gurus’, ‘successful skyrockets’ or ‘corrupters’. Nevertheless, it is the
signification of entrepreneurship as ‘community saviors’ in particular which finds expression in
business school’s portrayal of social entrepreneurship. The historical shift towards performativity
has promoted social entrepreneurship as a hybrid between profit and non-profit practices and
values (e.g. Social Enterprise Alliance; cf. http://www.se-alliance.org). However, while social
enterprises are, somewhat romantically, seen as panaceas for social progress (cf. Chapters 2 & 7),
it must be pointed out that a comparable function used to be granted to non-profit (NPOs) or non-
governmental organizations (NGOs; cf. Chapter 3). Yet, while those organizations have been
perceived as an important regulative body at the interface between politics and business, it is
social enterprises in particular that are seen as operating beyond the ‘straitjacket of politics’. In
contrast to NGOs or NPOs (both of which have been highly political, or politicized, subjects),
social entrepreneurship seems well suited to present competition and the free market as a natural
fact while on the other hand, though perfunctorily, demanding standards of moral conduct. Social
entrepreneurship, being taught at business schools as genuine business principles, has thus
created an image of a seemingly autonomous, de-politicized force in contemporary (western)
societies. The omission of social entrepreneurship’s political trajectory and contingency is
comprehensible once we take into account that politics does not comply, or only partially
complies, with the performativity principle. The image underlying social entrepreneurship in the
eyes of business scholars must thus be recognized in its ability to exclude aspects – of which
politics is just one – that do not subscribe to the principles of performativity. I would like to make
the point that the view of business scholars having ‘depoliticized’ social entrepreneurship is
tenable only if we turn a blind eye to particular political debates (which have taken place
foremost in the UK). To start with, Bornstein (2004) presented a general argument to the effect
that ‘(t)here may be few individuals in the twentieth century who played a greater role
determining the course of European politics’ (p. 94). Restricting ourselves to a European
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perspective, we shall now turn our attention to New Labour’s Third Way politics in Britain, in
order to show that, in contrast to business school teaching and research, social entrepreneurship is
invariably linked to public and political discourse. On the face of it, Third Way thinkers since the
late 1990s have delineated new ways for regenerating society. Casciani (2003) described those
programs as being rather simple: ‘(s)ociety has problems. Neither government nor business had
shown they could fix them. Perhaps it was time to invest in people at the coalface.’ Irrespective of
Casciani’s vitriolic statement, it is worth noting that social entrepreneurship has been central to
New Labour politics in distinguishing it from ideas of the New Right and Old Labour (Levitas,
2000). For instance, turning to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, we get to hear that ‘the renewal
of community is the answer to the challenges of a changing world’ (Blair, 2000). As Levitas
(2000) has further made clear, the notion of ‘community’ has been pivotal in the ‘master plan’ of
New Labour since it introduced the vocabulary of social relationship, social interaction and
solidarity which was henceforth used as the solution vis-à-vis the perceived threats of the new
world order. Whereas the New Right was premised on neo-conservatism which took the state as
its central regulative authority, New Labour tended to naturalize the phenomenon of globalization
so as to argue for the importance of community action. As becomes clear through a cursory
glance at New Labour politics, social entrepreneurship is used as an irredeemable rhetorical
element for the outline of a new state order. In particular, the New Right seemed to advocate both
a strong state and the disciplinary effect of economic coercion, while Old Labour hinged on
concepts of state intervention, social democracy or public ownership. In contrast, Blair’s New
Labour distanced itself from both these views by stressing the importance of shared
responsibility. Blair (1995) was quoted in the British magazine ‘Guardian’ as saying that
‘(p)eople don’t want an overbearing state. But they do not want to live in a social vacuum either.
It is in the search for this different, reconstructed, relationship between individual and society that
ideas about “community” are to be found. “Community” implies a recognition of interdependence
but not overweening government power. It accepts that we are better able to meet the forces of
change and insecurity through working together.’ While having deliberately chosen an extract
from Blair’s speech that does not explicitly touch on the issue of social entrepreneurship, his
deliberations on ‘community’ make utterly clear that he envisions a new relationship between the
private realm and the state whereby he sees ‘community’ as an alternative to both ‘the
untrammeled free market (of neo-liberalism) and the strong state (of social democracy)’ (Levitas,
2000, p. 191). Blair (2004) thus gives social entrepreneurship a specific position within his
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community vision which he explicitly advocated at a Labour Party conference: ‘(a)nd we who
understand, that freedom for the individual, for every individual, whatever their starting point in
life, is best achieved through a just society and a strong community. In an opportunity society, as
opposed to the old welfare state, government does not dictate; it empowers. It makes the
individual – patient, parent, law-abiding citizen, job-seeker – the driver of the system, not the
state. It sets free the huge talent of our public servants and social entrepreneurs whose ability is
often thwarted by outdated rules and government bureaucracy. It changes how government
works, to open up the means of delivery to every resource, public, private and voluntary, that can
deliver opportunity based on need not wealth.’ It becomes obvious through the above claim by
Blair that his Third Way politics puts great emphasis on the ‘third sector’ and (individual) social
entrepreneurs who are envisioned as responsible citizens that carry out duties which were
formerly incumbent upon the state. Blair’s Third Way thus rejects the profuse individualism as
advocated by the New Right and replaces it with the notion of ‘responsibility’ (Ahmad &
Browsing, 2003). ‘Responsibility’, which is clearly analyzed in this political context in the work
of du Gay (1996), is invoked in Third Way politics to create ‘communities in which individuals
are given opportunities but accept their obligations … and where we understand that … the well
developed individual, capable of playing a strong and vibrant part in society, is likely to arise best
from a strong and vibrant community’ (Blair, 1994). Within this view, responsibility is relocated
from the state to the individual citizen, whereas social enterprises are seen as adopting roles
formerly occupied by the (welfare) state. Since it will be discussed in the next chapter that the
‘de-responsibilizing’ of the state invariably occurs at the expense of social enterprises and the
individual citizen, it shall suffice to point out here that Blair’s New Labour sidesteps questions
such as ‘what differences or conflicts of interest are sacrificed to the rationale of mutual
responsibility?’ Additionally, by suppressing the visibility of the state, New Labour politics also
tends to obscure the fact that social enterprises and individual citizens become more liable and
accountable than state authorities. Rather than the state bearing the costs of, for instance, welfare,
these are thrust back onto individuals. At the same time, social entrepreneurs are appointed to fill
the gap left by either the business sector or the state.
In sum, we can see, first, that political and business discourse conceptualize social
entrepreneurship in markedly different ways. Second, the investigation of Third Way politics is
conceivable as a means to understand how political discourse operates to pull responsibility away
from nation states while simultaneously increasing the obligation of citizens. More generally
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expressed, social entrepreneurship within political discourse fulfills the function of mopping up
the ill effects of business and hence of compensating for the deficiencies of the state. Perceived to
operate at the interface of civil society, the state and business, social entrepreneurship quite
distinctively appears as the epitome of individual self-realization on the one hand and collective
responsibility on the other. Arguably, while New Labour politics aspires to establish a new
‘contract between those who exercise power and those who are obliged to be its subjects’ (Rose,
2000, pp. 1397 – 1398), it becomes clear that social entrepreneurship falls into the latter category.
Working under the premise of economic advancement, social stability and justice, social
enterprises are simultaneously expected to conduct their activities so as to maximize the health
and welfare of their community. Furthermore, Third Way politics redefines the act of governing
individuals and groups of citizens in such a way as to promote the development of moral,
responsible and obedient subjects. Viewed in this light, the language of community and civility
replaces the notion of ‘society’. As a result, the welfare state turns into an ‘enabling state’ which
is no longer required to address all of society’s social needs. There can be no question that social
entrepreneurship is accorded a political space where its objective is to account for the
insufficiencies and shortcomings of the actors with which it interacts. Social entrepreneurship
thus becomes an ethical field that transforms its elements (i.e. the state, citizens, and business)
into durable relations (Rose, 2000). Discourse of Third Way politics is thus responsible for
granting social enterprises an identity which is based on social and ethical (as opposed to, for
instance, economic) values and obligations. This view quite distinctively breaks with the
individualized and solitarian image of social entrepreneurship presented by business scholars.
However, this is neither to say that business school curricula must adopt the views of Tony Blair
or Anthony Giddens (the former Dean of the London School of Economics and strategic adviser
of Tony Blair in his Third Way politics) nor that there is a single best political perspective which
must be adopted in business education. Rather, what is implied through the illustration of social
entrepreneurship’s political lineage is that the images produced in and through business schools
lack any sensibility for the societal and political foundations of the subject. I therefore claim that
we cannot afford to miss the opportunity to learn how political discourse appropriates social
entrepreneurship in particular ways and thus to apprehend how the subject of social
entrepreneurship reflects particular historical and cultural contingencies. Third Way or New
Labour politics has, then, only been invoked to illustrate how political discourse can give rise to a
number of issues and problems which are not (yet) treated with respect to business school
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teaching (and research; cf. Chapter 2). Although one will never be able to identify the final ‘truth’
about social entrepreneurship, it makes sense to endeavor to understand the historical
circumstances that lead to its emergence as the ‘result of struggles and relations of force and
domination’ (Tamboukou, 2003, p. 9). Fostering such a genealogical sensitivity to politics can
probably complement the dominant delineation of social entrepreneurship in business school
education by highlighting, for instance, issues such as democracy, social mobilization, building
and sustaining peace, community, citizenship, etc, subjects on which business schools to this day
do not seem to have much to offer. Yet, it would be untenable to simply reject those issues on the
basis of the observation that ‘these are not our core competencies’. That said, it seems a good idea
to enrich business school curricula in such ways as to account for the political ‘nature’ of social
entrepreneurship, or, more precisely, for the way in which political discourse has shaped our
understanding of social entrepreneurship. Such an approach would further imply that we call into
question the prevailing self-evidences of social entrepreneurship (in business school teaching). It
would also probe how our commonsensical understanding of social entrepreneurship, its function
in society and its connection with and responsibility to other stakeholders has been constructed in
the past and stabilized in the present. Such an undertaking would indeed be unsettling as it
shatters the kind of simplistic certainties upon which business school education currently seems
to thrive. However, given that the scrutiny of common sense is a prerequisite for detaching
ourselves from our limiting ‘truths’, it is only by asking genealogical questions that we are able to
ask ‘what is the meaning of social entrepreneurship?’ and thereby facilitate its very ‘liberation’
(cf. Foucault, 1990).
The above account of Third Way politics has argued for a critical and more reflective
stance in business schools (cf. Chapter 5) which implies extending the parameters of its
educational curricula on social entrepreneurship. Yet, it must be mentioned that it does not suffice
to complement business school education with a political perspective but that it is equally exigent
to keep a vigilant eye on the ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship. Waddock (2003) has made
the general point that business schools and students tend to treat issues of ‘responsibility’,
‘integrity’ or ‘ethics’ rather sketchily since they are deemed to be of secondary importance in
terms of success in the job market. While this might be one reason why ethical, social and moral
issues of social entrepreneurship have attracted only scant attention, it is of even greater interest
to disentangle how these issues are appropriated to fit into the performativity hyperbole and,
secondly, to problematize the dwindling importance of ethics and suggest an understanding of
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ethics that exposes us to differences, and (hopefully) inspires us to conceive social
entrepreneurship in a novel manner.
C) Ignoring the Relationality of Ethics
While Lyotard (1984) disdained the performativity principle on account of its exclusion of non-
economic values such as, for instance, ethics and justice, it appears that prevailing articulations of
social entrepreneurship are grappling both with the demands of performativity and the need to
account for moral causes and deeds. Concerning the latter, it is O’Connor (2006) who has shown
that social entrepreneurship has come to trade ‘on the latest round of scandals, including …
eroding public confidence in business as an institution, businesspeople as citizens, and …
capitalism and capitalists.’ In the wake of recent corporate scandals (cf. Bartunek, 2002), social
entrepreneurship has come to represent an ostensible new ethical code which seems apposite for
teaching auspicious business skills while simultaneously conveying the impression to mitigate the
devastating and adverse effects of traditional business enterprises. In other words, while business
people are generally perceived as being ‘morally insufficient’ (e.g. Parker, 2002) and given that
for-profit entrepreneurs have been strongly criticized for significant ‘ethical lapses’ (Hannafey,
2003), it is the figure of the social entrepreneur who emerges as an antidote to humankind’s
ethical deficiencies. However, I would like to delineate in the following section that popular
depictions of the social and ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship appropriate the subject
matter as a ‘hooray-word’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) which reassures us that social
entrepreneurs are in fact ‘doing the right thing’. As will become clear, the sort of ethics, moral
and social intentions, virtues and deeds which are said to characterize social entrepreneurship
seem to justify an utterly positive view of the phenomenon. Although these images do quite a
remarkable job at convincing us that we have good reasons to perceive social entrepreneurship in
an unclouded and optimistic manner, I will show, first, that there are fallacies inherent in those
views of ethics and the social and, second, that there are (philosophical) perspectives on offer
which could complement our understanding of social entrepreneurship in valuable ways. More
specifically, I will begin the following section by elaborating on how ethics is defined in
conjunction with social entrepreneurship as either a set of prescribable (best) practices, a
calculable practice or the sum of the intentions, motives or virtues of social entrepreneurs. From
this starting point, I would like to offer a perspective of ethics which is sensitive towards the
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(genuine) relational aspects of social entrepreneurship and which pays adequate attention to the
endless difficulty and dilemmatic nature of ethical endeavors.
Best Ethical Practices
Although Dees, Emerson and Economy (2001; 2002) do not talk about ethics in their textbooks,
there is a chapter by Dees and Economy (2001) were the authors claim that the main objective of
social entrepreneurs ‘is to make the world a better place’ (p. 4). Whereas Dees and Economy only
indirectly allude to the ethical underpinnings of social entrepreneurship, the Center for the
Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (Fuqua School of Business, Duke) in particular has
promoted business ethics in the field of social entrepreneurship. The focus of the center has been
to ‘ensure that standards of professionalism are reflected at every stage of social enterprise
business planning and development’ (CASEconnection newsletter, 2005). Being heavily
influenced by the work of Gregory Dees (especially in terms of underscoring the primacy of
social enterprises’ social mission), the ethical guiding principles of integrity formulated by the
Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and its Social Enterprise Ethics Initiative,
demand that ‘social enterprises must always place their nonprofit mission and values first’ (cf.
http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/centers/case/articles/ 0805/documents/nesstcommit.pdf). While this
perspective quite obviously bears the footprints of Gregory Dees’s (e.g. 1998) work, it is
remarkable that ethical codes of conduct have become quite popular in the context of US
universities and non-profit centers. Taking the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations
as an example, we can see that this advocacy organization provides a code of ethics which
prescribes a set of core values such as honesty, integrity, fairness, respect, etc. As is the case with
the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Fuqua, the Maryland Association
puts forward ‘standards for excellence’. These standards comprise a set of guiding principles that
are deemed imperative to help the various internal and external stakeholders assess the ethical
commitment of organizations and to provide them with benchmarks allowing them to determine
whether or not the particular organization acts responsibly towards its direct stakeholders and the
general public. Replicated in seven other states in the US, the main function of these ‘standards
for excellence’ seems to be to raise the public credence and trustworthiness of nonprofit
organizations and social enterprises.
‘So far so good’, one might say. Yet, there are two major limitations to such ‘best ethical
practices’ which cannot be left unnoticed. Taking into account, first of all, that the North Carolina
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Center for Nonprofits (which has derived its ethical code from the Maryland Association of
Nonprofit Organizations) applies its ‘standards for excellence’ to bolster ‘public confidence’, it
becomes abundantly clear that those endeavors are less concerned with genuine ethics than with
the public standing and prestige of the organizations concerned. In other words, by offering
certification programs which seek to ‘prove’ that social enterprises adhere to ethical standards,
the focus is directed towards providing those organizations with a calculable and, therefore,
strategic advantage. As Jones (2003) reminds us, such ‘efforts to make ethics, responsibility and
philanthropy ‘strategic’, appear problematic, to say the least’ (p. 235). By implication, this
strategic conceptualization of ethics must be challenged, according to Jones, as it is does not
contain any interest for the Other (capital letter), but simply stimulates a distinct expression of
self-interest. To be worthy of its name, ethics must overcome strategic calculations and the
pursuit of self-interests and, instead, be unmistakably concerned with otherness and difference.
However, before delving into the ‘ethics of difference’, we must address a second
problematic issue that emerges through a delineation of the social or ethical aspect of social
entrepreneurship by means of a set of prescriptive rules. The untenability of those sorts of
accounts lies in the fact that they transform ethics into a distinct technology. The dubiety related
to such a ‘technologization’ of ethics is that it seeks solutions that try to reduce a dauntingly
difficult situation to a seemingly easy task. In other words, while such codes reduce complexity
and give the impression that mastery is attained, it must be emphasized that Derrida (e.g. 1993)
asserted that dilemmas, or ‘aporias’ to use Derrida’s own term, are the prerequisite of any
behavior that seeks to qualify as ethical. It follows that if a decision does not contain a certain
amount of insecurity and a sense of ‘not knowing where to go’ (Derrida, 1993, p. 12), one would
not be able to talk about responsible behavior in the strict sense of the term. Since codes of ethics
tend to avoid the dilemmatic dimension of social entrepreneurship, the imagery becomes
ideological as it masks the existing interpersonal relationships and conflicts and the paradoxes
which are at the heart of all social entrepreneurial endeavors. Arguably, while such best-practice
approaches or excellence standards are popular on account of their ostensible practicality and
usefulness, it must be recognized that turning ethics into a code makes it a ‘textbook knowledge
for puppets, not knowledge that you gain by thinking for yourself’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005, p. 8). As Jones and colleagues further conclude, ‘we mostly live a pale narrow version of
ethics, an ethics of codes and rules’ (p. 78), a view which ought to be taken seriously with respect
to our understanding of social entrepreneurship. Hence, if one takes into account that ethics is
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radically different from technologies which are governed by unchanging rules and that ethical
issues, on the other hand, are infinitely complex (wherefore they require thorough and continuous
reflection), it becomes at least questionable whether ethical ‘codes of conduct’ are of any help for
understanding the ethical aspects of social entrepreneurship. However, this is not the end of the
story, as social entrepreneurship scholars have offered additional arguments in connection with
ethics and social commitment. We will therefore turn our attention to those accounts which
portray social entrepreneurial endeavors against the backdrop of their social consequences.
Social Consequences of Social Entrepreneurship
Regarding the ethical dimension of social entrepreneurship, it was Bornstein (2004) who most
dauntlessly asserted that social enterprises must ‘make people happier and the environment more
respected’ while additionally warranting that such enterprises gave ‘hope for a better future’ (p.
239). In opposition to Bornstein’s praise, we shall now question whether it is ultimately the
image of social entrepreneurship as superior moral agent is ultimately a tenable one. Given this
objective, it appears useful to briefly discuss the social entrepreneurship toolkits proposed by
Dees, Emerson and Economy (2001; 2002) in order to get a sense of how social entrepreneurship
is construed by means of its social consequences. What is striking in the first place is that both
volumes by Dees and colleagues make no explicit use of the term ‘ethics’. Instead, the authors
prefer to talk about values. They juxtapose the financial values of the for-profit sector with the
ostensibly endemic ones of the non-profit sector and notably social enterprises. Thus Dees and
colleagues envisage the specific value of social enterprises with reference to ‘social impact’. The
authors contend in this context that ‘it is no longer sufficient for nonprofits simply to assert their
value in absence of evidence’. Rather, they ‘have to demonstrate value through measurable social
impact’ (2002, p. 162). The ideal of such ‘evidence-based’ values goes hand in hand with the
business perspective of social entrepreneurship mentioned above, since both approaches
emphasize that social entrepreneurial practices – to be rendered controllable and to be deemed
valuable – must be translatable into a quantifiable code. Social entrepreneurship, as described by
Dees et al. (2001), derives, not to say earns, its social credentials by means of creating
(calculable) ‘social value’ and, consequently, by virtue of being accountable to the various
constituencies being served. Yet, one could argue against this logic by saying that it restricts
social endeavors to those kinds of actions which are salient and apposite for numerical
transformation. Additionally, and this is a point we shall investigate in more detail further down,
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to envisage the social sphere in the context of ‘cost and benefit’ analysis and ‘mission fulfillment’
implies that actions for the good of the community must be subject to criteria of efficiency.
Talking about ethics or social commitment, one must bear in mind that the ‘performance
indictors’ Dees and colleagues are keen to pass off as values, are in fact a distinct management
technique which is deployed as an accountability tool vis-à-vis one’s internal audiences such as
‘staff, board, and clients’ as well as external stakeholders, that is, ‘investors, policymakers,
media, competitors’ (Dees, Emerson & Economy, 2002, p. 163). In the context of the ethics of
social entrepreneurship, however, it is at least doubtful whether this sort of portrayal can serve as
a source of inspiration. For instance, perpetuating an image of ‘social impact’ which thrives on
the ideal of ‘performance’ (Dees, Emerson & Economy, 2002; cf. p. 164) quite peculiarly installs
a scheme which ignores a less instrumental view of social commitment and ethical principles. If
social engagement becomes a technical goal, ethics is transformed into a ‘moral science’
(Bentham, 2001) where the only legitimate values are those which are grounded in facts. As
Jones, Parker and ten Bos (2005) illuminated on the basis of the work of William Petty, the
endeavor to grasp the social world in quantitative terms reflects a ‘Victorian obsession with
numbers’ (p. 36). To be sure, such a transactional image of social entrepreneurship, that is, a
scheme which expresses interpersonal relationships and effects numerically, is likely to face
significant ‘conflicts with the basic principles of ethics that persons should never be treated as a
means to an end but must be treated as ends in themselves’ (Hannafey, 2003, pp. 103 – 104). That
said, we seem well advised to recall the arguments of Jones and colleagues (2005) who contended
that accounts which attempt ‘to make ethics ‘scientific’ and ‘logical’ do not actually get us very
far’ (p. 38). Hence, while it must have become clear by now that social entrepreneurship scholars
or teachers have not as yet been able to adequately address the ethics of social entrepreneurship, I
would like to venture a bit deeper into how ethics and morality are distinctively intertwined with
social entrepreneurs’ intentions.
Social Entrepreneurs’ Intentions and Motives
In many depictions of social entrepreneurship the whole issue is interwoven into a romantic
narrative plot (Frye, 1957) where social entrepreneurs’ ethical deeds are portrayed as being
constantly challenged or threatened by temptations as well as by the ordeals and obstacles of
everyday life. Within this imagery, the protagonist, that is the single social entrepreneur, always
seems to struggle to sustain his/her ideal of ethical conduct and to act in accordance with the
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‘ethical fiber’ (Drayton, 2002; Bornstein, 2004) with which social entrepreneurs are said to be
endowed. For instance, Bornstein (2004), while adopting an ethical outlook of social
entrepreneurs, contended that ‘(i)t is meaningless to talk about social entrepreneurship without
considering the ethical quality of their motivation: the why. In the end, business and social
entrepreneurs are very much the same animals. They think about problems the same way. They
ask the same types of questions. The difference is not in temperament or ability, but in the nature
of their visions’ (p. 239). This individualistic view is not uncommon, for we find in
entrepreneurship research images which envisage ethics as being principally a matter of the
degree of moral reasoning (Teal & Carroll, 1999), the awareness of moral dilemmas (Dees &
Starr, 1992) or the strength of ethical intentions (Katharina, 2004) at the level of the individual.
However, whereas such issues still only seem to play a marginal role in treatments of
entrepreneurship, it appears fair to claim that the individual component of ethics is put centre
stage in many representations of social entrepreneurship. Thus Bornstein (2004) claimed that ‘(a)t
some moment in their lives, social entrepreneurs get it into their heads that it is up to them to
solve a particular problem’ (p. 240). What is further reflected in Bornstein’s subsequent
deliberations is a Kantian (e.g. 1989) regime according to which the highest good of the ethical
person is good will. In consequence, it is only in the presence of a rational and autonomous
individual that one can speak of morally sovereign action. In opposition to, for instance,
utilitarianism which judges ethics in terms of the effects caused by a certain action, the Kantian
‘categorical imperative’ postulates moral laws not on the basis of external conditions or effects
but, rather, on the good (and rational) intentions of the person (cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005). The unchanging nature of ethical intentions as expressed in Kant’s categorical imperative
is reflected in a contribution to the strategic toolkit of Dees, Emerson and Economy (2002) where
Roling claimed that ‘(w)hile the services you provide to your clients may change over the years,
what should never change are the values that guide the leadership of your organization and the
relationships with your staff and clients’ (p. 309). Although there is, unsurprisingly, no explicit
reference to Kant, Roling’s statement nevertheless reveals that values, to be worthy of the name,
need to be practiced without any ifs or buts. While strong moral principles seem pivotal in all
realms of human conduct, I contend that it is not unproblematic to conceptualize ethics solely as a
matter of autonomous moral reasoning. The reason why such a perspective is problematic is that
such an analysis of ethical questions ignores both the wider social context in which ethical
decisions are taken and the social consequences of particular actions. In other words, an exclusive
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focus on social entrepreneurs’ intentions excludes the social contingency of ethical deeds, as it
avoids the crucial question ‘what are the larger effects (both positive and negative) of social
entrepreneurs?’ In contrast, the only legitimate question following a Kantian analysis of ethics is
‘why are social entrepreneurs doing this or that?’ The blind spots of such a perspective are
abundantly clear: cases of managers spring to mind who, having caused severe damage, claimed
that they had acted on the noblest of intentions. It thus seems all too easy to pretend that one’s
actions are based on a sense of duty and ethical responsibility when in fact decisions are taken for
entirely selfish or otherwise unethical reasons. It is therefore all the more important to reflect
upon the ethical implications of one’s decisions and constructively to think about the tensions and
limitations at the nexus between one’s intentions and the pragmatic demands of one’s actions.
While acknowledging the constraints of social entrepreneurial endeavors, it must nevertheless be
emphasized that ethical decisions are never taken in a social vacuum. It is therefore advisable to
avoid those perspectives that conceive of ethics as primarily a matter of autonomous free will.
The Virtuous Social Entrepreneur
While the previous discussion outlined how certain images of social entrepreneurship exclude the
social dimension of ethics, there are still other interpretations which seem (at least at first sight) to
take into account that ethical decision are always embedded in a social context. For instance,
Bornstein (2004) objected in that respect that good intentions are not enough for social
entrepreneurship to qualify as ethical: ‘(t)he mind is not enough. The key question here is: Do
you deeply trust this person [i.e. the social entrepreneur]?’ (p. 123). Bornstein further asserted
that ‘(t)he trustworthiness of the social entrepreneur – their integrity – is one of their most
important assets. People sense that – and if they don’t trust you, they won’t follow you’ (p. 124).
It is important to note here that, contrary to Kant’s moral intentions, trust or trustworthiness
represent moral virtues. This emphasis on trust implies that ethical questions are not independent
of the particular context in which they are posed and that what might be seen as right and ethical,
in one situation may be deemed wrong and unethical in another. In connection with social
entrepreneurship it is quite common to draw up long lists of the essential virtues of social
entrepreneurs. For instance, Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie (2003) claimed that ‘(s)ocial
enterprises have a spiritual or virtue dimension very often missing from or only latent in
commercial enterprises’ (p. 82). In line with this view, the authors conceptualized social
entrepreneurship in terms of ‘integrity, compassion, empathy and honesty’ (p. 83). Though there
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are variations regarding the significance of individual virtues, they are usually presented as
personal dispositions or aptitudes which manifest themselves in the way people get along with
others, be it individual people or social communities. For instance, advocacy organizations such
as Ashoka as well as academic scholars (e.g. Mair & Marti, 2006) and journalists (e.g.
Leadbeater, 1997) all emphasize trust as a key feature of social entrepreneurship. Thus the root
premises of trust proposed in Bornstein’s (2004) account is that we must be able to establish a
sort of relationship in which the other party behaves according to our own expectations and to
respond to our deeds in equal measure. To say that a person is ‘trustworthy’ therefore implies that
one has gained confidence in the other since one has tamed their thoughts and habits to the point
where they become a calculable and dependable extension of the self. Importantly, the moment
we demand, however subtly, that the other must reciprocate our trust, it is implied that consensus
and a balanced exchange become the operating logic. Jones (2003) objected to this sort of ethical
perspective claiming that ‘(b)y conceiving of ethics in terms of relations to Others, we see the
way that calculation of personal advantage has an instrumental concern for the Other and, in
failing in one’s responsibilities for the Other, one is not simply unethical but is outside the
domain of the ethical’ (Jones, 2003, p. 236). Viewed through the perspective of trust, the other is
therefore not valued for reasons of its intrinsic worth but instead for increasing one’s own well-
being, providing pleasure or ensuring one’s own survival. Indeed, this is a particularly common
image of social engagement or exchange and one which has been called into question, for
instance, in Derrida’s (1999) ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’. In this work, Derrida made
clear that the moment one thinks of an encounter as based on a pre-ordained script that restricts
the unfolding of otherness it becomes problematic to talk of genuine hospitality. In his
unconditional exegesis of hospitality, Derrida (1997b) outlined a relation towards the other which
must avoid assimilation, acculturation, appropriation and which needs to be ‘re-invented at every
second’ (p. 8). Ethics was subsequently to play a particularly important role in the work of
Levinas (2001). He asserted that the issue of ethics could not be understood as turning the other
into the same. I would therefore like to introduce some of the key philosophical arguments of
Levinas (and Derrida). Their perspective not only suggests that social commitment is central to
responsible behavior but it also celebrates social difference and otherness as the key elements of
‘ethics’.
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An Ethical Theory Based on Embracing Difference
It has been mentioned that prevailing accounts of the social dimension of entrepreneurship more
often than not expose the ethics of social entrepreneurship as instrumental and calculative. The
main reason given for this degeneration of ethics is that it is used to prop up the moral standing
and credibility of a particular institution. Such accounts are not uncommon in connection with
for-profit businesses which use, for instance, concepts such as ‘social responsibility’ and
‘corporate citizenship’ to invoke a rhetoric of ‘doing right’ (cf. RARE, 2004; cf. also Chapter 7).
With respect to social entrepreneurship there are some illustrative examples such as the Schwab
Foundation (Klaus Schwab is the founder of the annual World Economic Forum) or the Goldman
Sachs Foundation (a foundation dedicated to social causes which is owned by one of the world’s
largest private banks) which have jumped on the bandwagon of social entrepreneurship to conceal
or make up for some of their ethically dubious actions. Although this assertion is arguably harsh,
it is extremely important to point out that the social or ethical claims of social entrepreneurship,
even if its economic logic is expressed only indirectly, cannot be said to represent genuine ethics.
In other words, prevailing images of the social of entrepreneurship are deficient not only because
they adhere to a logic of ‘measurability’ but also because a calculative rationale precludes any
possibility for imagining an unconditional kind of social exchange. In addition, such pragmatic
conceptualizations can never accommodate the dilemmatic nature of social entrepreneurship.
As our discussion of best-practice approaches to ethics has shown, a well-defined code of
ethics is clearly desirable. However, jotting down one’s guiding principles on a blank piece of
paper or showing them off on the company’s homepage is hardly enough to ensure the real
ethical value of social entrepreneurial endeavors. After all, ethics is not something that easily
lends itself to practical ‘management’ or categorical definitions. Ethics is paradoxical in that it
relies on the dilemmas and aporias of everyday life (Billig et al., 1988; Derrida, 1993). It is
probably due to its paradoxical nature that many social entrepreneurship scholars and teachers
shy away from the ethical complexity of such tasks as balancing the economic and social factors
of corporate actions. Additionally, Dees and Elias (1998) only mentioned in passing that ethics is
always at risk of failing and of having to surrender to the pragmatic demands of everyday
circumstances (Derrida, 1997). Ethics is therefore not something that can easily be planned in
advance. Rather than being perceived as an end or outcome, it must be embraced as a deliberate
process which will never reach a definitive and positive end. Furthermore, we have seen that
ethics is usually discussed in relation to a single social entrepreneur as well as his or her
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intentions and (pseudo-) dilemmas. It must be recognized, however, that ethical behavior is not a
solitary affair as it is not practiced in social isolation. Therefore, is not reducible to the intentional
states of individuals. Within the following paragraphs, I would like to outline some preliminary
suggestions for overcoming this individualized interpretation of ethics in the context of social
entrepreneurship.
Bearing in mind that this will be the primary task of the last chapter of this thesis, I would
already like to introduce at this stage a perspective which highlights ethics as a celebration of
difference. Both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have been at the forefront of this
endeavor and though their work will be analyzed more thoroughly later, it is useful to point out in
this connection that both philosophers are extremely helpful for debunking the image of social
commitment and ethical values as discussed above. While Jones (2003) pointed out that Levinas
has been mostly ignored with respect to (business) ethics, the work of Levinas (2001) is
particularly useful for conceptualizing the genuinely relational aspects of ethics. In Levinas’
(2001) work, ethics is presented as openness towards the ‘Other’ (capital letter). This ethical
concept is antithetical to those views that try to reduce ethics to an equation or a code. Levinas
used the term ‘Other’ to introduce an understanding of ethics which undermines the arguments
put forward by western philosophers who tended to convert the other into the same. As is the case
with the notion of trust discussed above in relation with the virtuous social entrepreneur, the
‘other’ (without capital letter) is often discerned in theories of ethics simply as someone who
shares common characteristics, interests and, by implication, conveys the promise of a fulfilling,
not to say lucrative, exchange. In contrast, ‘Other’ or ‘Otherness’ is detached from a calculative
understanding of social exchange. Thus Levinas (2001) claimed that only relations in which
people are treated as ‘Other’, that is, if they are accepted in their genuine alterity, can justifiably
be called ‘ethical’.
Arguably, ethics conceived as the unconditional openness towards the other (cf. Derrida,
1997) makes great demands on those who try to fully embrace its principles. As such a view
refrains from appropriating the other to our own desires and wants (cf. above: the virtuous social
entrepreneur) and, instead, demands that we accept the other’s otherness, some might argue that
this is either unpractical or utopian or both. I would object to the advocates of ethical pragmatism
that we should be invariably suspicious of simplistic accounts of ethics and the social aspect of
social entrepreneurship, as they seem to suggest that we should, whenever possible, take a moral
shortcut. Although such approaches have proven popular and pervasive not only with respect to
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social entrepreneurship, I have tried to rebut such technical and naively optimistic views of ethics
by presenting a perspective that concedes that ethics implies struggle, intermittent confusion and
which acknowledges that its practice must be free of any transactional, that is, economic,
calculus. Given the complexity of the ethics of social entrepreneurship, it is all the more
important to invoke Levinas’ (2001) distinction between ‘other’ and ‘Other’. This distinction will
serve to remind us that ethics is not only about social relations but, even more importantly, about
celebrating difference and alterity.
On the Future of Social Entrepreneurship Teaching
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the
same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. (Foucault,
1984, p. 343)
Our somewhat extreme picture of the current state of social entrepreneurship education has
shown that it is due to the proliferation of teaching assessments and the demand for student
satisfaction by virtue of entertainment and emotional investment that business school staff
perceive their task to be that of making their MBA students feel good. Neither the issue of ethical
values nor the experimentation with novel ideas, creative epistemologies or pedagogies are
regarded as having much, if any, operational value for the system as a whole. Teaching social
entrepreneurship in business school courses thus takes place in an intellectual environment that
defines the subject matter as (and reduces it to) a set of functionalist ‘best-practice recipes’. This
is not to say that prevailing social entrepreneurship courses do not comprise values at all. Rather,
the problematic aspect of the performativity principle is that anything which does not contain the
promise of economic returns is not given any credence. Financial benefits are thus the only
legitimate and credible justification for social entrepreneurship teaching. It is implied that issues
of politics or ethics are either absent from business school curricula or they are made to conform
with the performativity principle. Given this overt reliance on economic theory, it is questionable
if and to what extent it makes sense to cite successful initiatives such as that of Grameen Bank
which gained recognition worldwide in order to promote the values of social entrepreneurship.
Whereas there is an abundance of illustrative examples of social entrepreneurship, there seems to
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be a tendency to equal ‘big’ and ‘successful’ with ‘rightful’ and hence ‘good’. Or, following
Nietzsche (1984), ‘it is success that gives to a deed the full, honest luster of a good conscience;
failure lays the shadow of an uneasy conscience upon the most estimable action’ (p. 57). The first
problem with taking into account only a small fraction of organizations which deserve the label
‘social enterprise’ is that such isolated cases are not necessarily representative of the larger
picture. Second, there seems to be a tendency to romanticize social entrepreneurship through
examples which have gained prolonged world-wide recognition because they were awarded
prizes (such as, for instance, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship granted by the Said
Business School, Oxford University; or the Social Entrepreneur of the Year awarded by the
Schwab Foundation in Geneva) or through publications which enthusiastically celebrate such
achievements (e.g. Mair & Marti, 2006). Third, putting forward normative models on the basis of
proven and successful social enterprises may well distract from the immanent complexity and
dilemmatic nature of social entrepreneurship. The problem is thereby related to what Bornstein
(2004) called ‘blueprint copying’, by which he meant ‘knowledge that can be transmitted from
one society to another’ (p. 259). On the face of it, Bornstein’s ‘micro-credit blueprint’, which he
tried to deduce from the Grameen Bank case, contains a sort of technical knowledge that is
markedly different from the locally emergent knowledge of social enterprises which is less reliant
on technical expertise and which, by implication, must be discerned as being culturally and
historically specific. Fourth, since glorifying representations of social entrepreneurship have a
strong tendency to overemphasize the leadership qualities of individuals (Weerawardena & Mort,
2006), they are unlikely to pay sufficient attention to the wider context and structural obstacles
such as social inequality, culturally established patterns of deception or corruption.
Therefore, if we were to agree with those critics who have asserted that business school
education has little influence on practical business activities, there would be no reason to bemoan
the misguided representations of social entrepreneurship since they would cause little or no
‘harm’ in any case. Yet, since I prefer to believe that management education does ‘work’ (cf.
Gioia, 2002), we must raise the question whether business students are actually subjected to the
right kind of ‘diet’? According to Waddock’s (2003) general appraisal of management education,
the answer quite clearly would be ‘no’ (cf. p. 9). With respect to social entrepreneurship, I would
contend that what is so far missing from portrayals, case studies and anecdotal reports are probing
discussions of the complexity of social impact. The relational paradoxes and dilemmas coming to
the fore in the pragmatic context of everyday practice and the political and ethical complexities of
135
social entrepreneurial endeavors in general do usually not receive much attention either. Since I
oppose those management scholars who try to condense social entrepreneurship into a set of
carefree best-practices, I feel that we need to complexify the subject as a whole. Notably, we need
to focus on issues which until now appear all too uncontroversial if not indeed unrecognized
altogether. A critical orientation is thus necessary in order to investigate who is authorized to
define what social entrepreneurship is and, consequently, what sorts of representations are
naturalized through business school teaching. In addition, while I do advocate a type of pedagogy
that enables students to draw up balance sheets and calculate break-even points, business
education must also enable students to conceptualize the social and moral obligations of (social)
enterprises and foster awareness of the social context in which economic activities occur. That
said, we must refrain from teaching business students that social entrepreneurs are ethical/moral
actors by definition (or, alternatively, on account of one of the prestigious awards or prizes they
have received). To put this in a slightly different way, complexifying social entrepreneurship
teaching would, inter alia, imply that we pay heed not only to the subject’s shiny surface
aesthetics but, rather, that we also introduce a critical stance which pays adequate attention to
questions of politics, inequality, exploitation, class segregation, gender, racism, and ethics. Such a
reflective (and arguably more holistic) MBA program would have to foster sensitivity towards its
own root assumptions (cf. Chapter 5), meaning that both staff and students of business schools
become cognizant that social entrepreneurship does not necessarily have to be seen as a positive
phenomenon. Instead, it should be recognized that social entrepreneurship is as likely to cause
social benefits as it is to bring about harm and decay (cf. Hannafey, 2003). With this in mind, I
would like to draw the focus away from the (moral) intentions of the individual social
entrepreneur in order to acknowledge the relational nature of ethics. It is important not to shy
away from issues such as self interest, conflict and power (both negative and positive; cf. Chapter
6), even though these issues may do considerable damage to the immaculate image of the social
entrepreneur as perpetuated by business education. If we thus decide to follow Levinas’ argument
that ethics is first and foremost a social affair and a matter of acknowledging alterity, this implies
that business school curricula need to embrace social entrepreneurship in all its shadings, both
good and bad. Such a view also takes into account that social entrepreneurship is not practiced in
a vacuum but is invariably embedded in concrete and distinct political, economic, and cultural
settings. That said, we should base our understanding of social entrepreneurship on a concept of
ethics that interprets the epithet ‘social’ as the relational condition which determines whether a
136
particular social enterprise can be called either ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. In summary, the ethical
underpinnings of a broadened curriculum for social entrepreneurship would not only necessitate a
more rigorous treatment of ethics as well as an acknowledgement of its intrinsically relational
nature. Rather, providing business students with ideas that stimulate an understanding of
difference, alterity and complexity and emphasizing ethical debates as much as analytic skills and
functional expertise can in themselves be seen as ethical acts.
Concluding Comments
The previous investigation has shown that MBA programs all over the globe are increasingly
under pressure to legitimize their educational efforts by virtue of accreditation institutes, business
magazine rankings and by innovating their curricula in order to provide their students with so-
called state-of-the-art teaching. The increased supply of (elective) social entrepreneurship courses
in western MBA programs should not distract from the fact that most of them resemble each
other rather closely. It is in this context that Atkinson-Grosjean (1998) stated: ‘
ot only can we observe the increasing penetration of the university by the market, and the resulting homologies
of structure, but also an increasing sameness in the response by universities to the penetration’ (p.
8; emphasis in original). Bearing in mind that the performativity mantra tends to erode the variety
of different courses on social entrepreneurship in business school teaching, it remains a matter of
speculation whether those courses will continue to attract students’ interest or whether they
vanish from business school curricula like a management fad (Birnbaum, 2000). It is conceivable
that the life cycle of social entrepreneurship in business school education will largely depend on
its marketability. This would mean that time alone would show whether such courses remain
ephemeral or whether they become an integral part of global management education.
I have tried, though in an utterly tentative manner, to make the point that social
entrepreneurship courses, programs and competitions are an important aspect of educational
institutions’ attempts to score points of differentiation and secure competitive advantages.
Although they are undoubtedly instrumentalized for reasons of performativity, this is, as I see it,
not the worst problem of social entrepreneurship education. What is more alarming is that the
reduction of our understanding of social entrepreneurship to a universal panacea for social, and
economic problems even on a global scale tends to sidestep the undeniable complexity of social
137
entrepreneurial endeavors. While social entrepreneurship is almost unanimously represented as an
important aspect of the global politico-economic agenda (Levitas, 2000), I have argued that its
variegated ramifications have not yet been adequately investigated. I thus contend that it is due to
the truisms and fallacies disseminated through ‘fat-reduced’ toolkits (e.g. Dees, Emerson &
Economy, 2001) as well as one-sided definitions – which either give primacy to the social (e.g.
Dees, 1998) or entrepreneurial (e.g. Drayton, 2002) aspect of social entrepreneurship – that the
essential aspect of social entrepreneurship is usually overlooked. I have, throughout this chapter,
deliberatively chosen a provocative rhetoric which presents a somewhat extreme point of view in
order to stimulate, hopefully, an extension of prevailing business school teaching on social
entrepreneurship. Given that education (from Latin edu-care) signifies to ‘pull out’ or ‘lead forth’
(cf. O’Doherty & Jones, 2005), it is high time to overcome the current limitations in our
understanding of social entrepreneurship and acknowledge the large unused potential of academic
discourse. I have therefore tried to adumbrate a pedagogy which pays due attention to both the
positive and negative political, ethical, societal and individual effects of social entrepreneurship.
Whereas its positive aspects are acknowledged but almost invariably romanticized, negative
accounts are conspicuously absent from the current discourse. On the flipside of the coin, my
arguments call on researchers and teachers to resist the strong temptation of serving business
students ‘fast-food’ menus and providing them with a ‘McEthics’ (Jones, Parker & ten Bos,
2005) view of social entrepreneurship. Arguably, rejecting easy solutions leave one with an
uneasy feeling at first, as it raises the disconcerting question ‘what to do?’ On the other hand,
since the world (of social entrepreneurs) is complex, easy solutions are by definition ideologically
misleading. It is therefore my firm conviction that a broadened understanding of social
entrepreneurship which is free of pretensions can make a valuable contribution as it raises
awareness of ethical possibilities and limitations as well as the social and political dimension of
such endeavors. Having tried to debunk down of the starry-eyed views of social entrepreneurship,
it appears that only a genuinely multi-disciplinary, imaginative and unpretentious
‘grammatology’ (Derrida, 1976) will render possible a more variegated understanding of social
entrepreneurship.
138
Outlook
While the above analysis of the excellence dispositif in business school education has put
particular emphasis on the interlinkage of the discursive and non-discursive entities which
collectively produce a particular meaning of social entrepreneurship, the following chapter will
probe more deeply into issues of text, discourse and meaning. In particular, it will be asked in
what ways and through what discourses social entrepreneurship finds expression in academic
writing. While such scholarly texts are, by convention, addressed to an academic audience (rather
than to business students), it will be of utmost interest to investigate the differences and
similarities between the rhetoric of scholarly texts and the performative interpretation of social
entrepreneurship in the realm of university business schools. Since I regard both the ethics of
social entrepreneurship (which, as shown above, has not yet received adequate attention in
business school education) and the need for a critical pedagogy and emancipation of business
schools teaching and research as extremely important, an entire chapter will be devoted to each
one of these issues in the third part of the thesis (cf. Chapters 5 & 7).
139
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Prolegomenon II
It probably hardly needs to be mentioned that a discourse, conceived of here as a social
process,
40
on a given topic does very rarely produce univocal, smooth and uncontested
meaning(s) – probably with the exception of those rare social constellations ‘in which a
certain class or group exercises power over others’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 416; emphasis
added). If we take a step further so as to acknowledge that signs such as ‘social
entrepreneurship’ are almost unavoidably subject to plural and diversifying readings,
which is due to the fact that they are always related to diverse and ever-changing fields
of force or, following Derrida (1982), contexts, it directly follows from this that every
‘thing’ has as many meanings as it is capable of ‘upsurping’ (cf. Deleuze, 1995). If all this
holds true, which I believe is the case, then Chapter 2 is literally running into serious
problems. Why that? Because its analysis reveals a level of univocity, unambiguousness
and one-sidedness which is untypical, maybe even untenable, for any sort of text being
announced respectively as a deconstructive reading or rhetorical analysis.
To tell the ‘truth’, re-reading Chapter 2 revealed that its analysis largely ignored
the previously mentioned ‘axiom’, namely that even the most dominant, read molar
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983), meaning of any given discourse (such as that on ‘social
entrepreneurship’) necessarily comprises its exceptions, breaks or ruptures. Maybe as a
result of my alienation I endeavored to find an answer to the question why things turned
out the way they actually did. Inexperience, ‘juvenile’ over-involvement or a series of bad
scholarly days were ‘tested’ as potential explanations, though none actually added value
to the task at hand. After some additional musing, which frankly speaking did not make
the overall appearance of the analysis more appealing, I still believe that there are
reasonable answers, three to be precise, to the question as to why my analysis produces
the impression that the meaning of the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ – as derived from
the analyzed textual material – forms a certain unity that lacks, by logical extension,
discursive cracks (i.e. exceptions) and discontinuities.
40
For a more detailed treatise of the subject matter consult Chapter 3.
153
On the Lack of Discontinuities and Discursive Cracks in the Analysis of ‘Social
Entrepreneurship’ … A, B, C
As noted before, I have identified three reasons for the textual effect, i.e. lack of
discontinuities and discursive cracks, which I would briefly like to discuss a priori to the
actual beginning of Chapter 2. Before doing so, however, I would first like to mention that
looking at Chapter 2 from a temporal distance of several years made me consider
entirely excluding it from the thesis. The presence of this prolegomenon makes it
obvious, however, that I have decided otherwise. The main reason for this turnaround
was that I considered Chapter 2 an essential ‘jigsaw piece’ of my thesis in that its main
arguments are repeatedly referred to and/or extended in the subsequent chapters. That
is to say that Chapter 2 operates as a springboard of the thesis in the sense that it gets
used, even needed, for comparing the academic discourse on ‘social entrepreneurship’
with practitioners’ enunciations and narratives (cf. part II of the thesis) or for sketching
out theoretical, philosophical extensions of the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ (cf.
part III of the thesis). Consequently, though Chapter 2 provides a somehow wobbly and
undeniably inelegant, not to say unsophisticated, foundation both for hollowing out the
whole mass of meaning of ‘social entrepreneurship’ and for stimulating a gradual
movement of existing configurations or systems of discourse (as revealed, for instance,
in the protruding arguments in Chapter 7), it is precisely at this point that I would like to
put the breaks on, so to speak, and go over to shed some light upon the three textual
dynamics which, as I believe, were constitutive for the aforementioned regression.
A)nalytic Reduction
The first textual dynamic which engenders the apparent streamlining of the following
analysis is actually characteristic of all forms of analysis. Its dynamic is generic to the
extent that it occurs in all analytic endeavors that operate by means of transforming a
given body of work toward a simple(r) element or structure. Consequently, the
impression that there is a certain unity in the investigated textual material should be
construed as the result of the analysis’ regressive horizon; a horizon which seeks to
identify resemblances, read patterns, both within and between the different texts. Such a
process, obviously, puts particular stress on the similarities of selected texts (or data at
large), not on their inherent deviances and differences. Analytic endeavors’ regressive
tendency seems somewhat unavoidable since their abstractions as well as the (quasi-
)transcendent viewpoints which are derived thereof necessarily (have to) override or
hold at bay multiplicity (Deleuze, 1995).
154
The operation and force of this dynamic might become more obvious if compared
with the sort of reading practice, i.e. deconstruction, which does explicitly not try to be
analysis. Deconstruction is not analysis precisely due to the fact that this lexical
signification implies a form of definitive freezing of meaning which, according to Derrida
(1991), conceals that this term (i.e. analysis) is in itself deconstructible or even must be
deconstructed; hence, all ‘sentences of the type “deconstruction is X” or “deconstruction
is not X” a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false’ (p. 275).
Since this connection with Derrida might have been more confusion than helpful for
pinpointing the core difference between analysis and deconstruction, I would like to
make my point even more palpable on the basis of one of many possible examples, i.e.
Foucault’s circumscription of his archeological analytic practice. Indeed, it is Foucault
(1996) who came to say, in conjunction with his seminal ‘The Order of Things’, that ‘[a]ll
these practices, then, these institutions and theories, I take at the level of traces … The
problem is to find common traits between these traces of orders different enough to
constitute what logicians call classes, aestheticians call forms, men of science call
structures, and which are the invariants common to a certain number of traces’ (p. 14).
Juxtaposing the two quotes by Derrida and Foucault, two related observations
immediately become evident: first, that even though my analysis was clearly not
archeological, in Foucault’s sense of the term, it performed a comparable operation with
the textual material on social entrepreneurship in that it was likewise interested in
‘resemblance, sameness, and identity’ (ibid.). And second, even though Chapter 2
contains a reference to Derrida’s deconstruction, this assertion cannot be reasonably
sustained, and thereby not only because we have just said that the definition of
‘deconstruction’ is notoriously difficult, even impossible (Derrida, 1985).
Provided that there is no inherent value in a nostalgic backward-look (since one
cannot possibly turn back the clock, i.e. undo or reverse the analysis of Chapter 2), I
would like to spend some thought on how I would approach the literature on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ if receiving a ‘second chance’. It is in this connection that I would like
to point at Deleuze (1994) who claimed that each event (thus also every text) performs a
repetition, yet a repetition that has nothing in common with mimesis (i.e. the accurate
mirroring or doubling of reality) but with the eternal return of difference. The point to be
stressed, then, is that each singular text cannot be read out of context and cannot be
ignored in terms of its particularities and hence of its own difference, a point which
Derrida (1985), among others, insistently argued for in conjunction with
‘deconstruction’. It is not least due to this specification that I today prefer, if this
155
comparison is at all helpful, quality (i.e. intensive or double readings of singular texts)
over quantity (i.e. broadband analysis, summaries, reviews, etc. of a large body of
writing). Consequently, although there is no reason to believe that each text is unique in
the etymological sense of the term (i.e. ‘forming the only one of its kind’), I strongly
sympathize with Derrida’s contention that one is probably more faithful towards the
work (and life) of a writer if one would pick out a tiny part of it and analyze it in all detail
and thoroughness instead of making claims about the meaning of an oeuvre as a whole.
41
In the context of the present commentary this is to say that I very much believe that any
analysis, and therefore also the one imparted in Chapter 2, treats the analytic material
as if it formed a quasi-natural unity and thus performs an act of ignorance, even violence,
with respect to the inherent inimitability of every single text. If I thus had both the
choice and courage to dear a novel beginning, I would probably proceed by way of picking
out a particularly ‘rich’ and/or genuinely enjoyable text which I would try to read,
critically yet affirmatively, with the ultimate aim of dismantling its structure; yet not in
order to regress to some simple(r) element (which would be the task of analysis,
summary, overview, etc.) but to enable new views of the subject matter.
With this in mind, I also sense a lot of intuitive value in Foucault’s (1996) ‘Masked
Philosopher’ in which he proposes the ‘year without author’, i.e. a year in which each
publication would be published nameless (i.e. without the signature of the author) so that
the reader would have to deal with a completely anonymous production. Foucault’s plea,
in my assessment, can, even should, be extended to render a given discourse (such as
that on ‘social entrepreneurship’) not only author-less but also disconnected from fixed
disciplinary affiliations, seemingly essential scholarly traditions and, by extension, from
the censorship of academic enunciation at large. It is in this way, as I believe, that apt
attention would be given to the idiosyncratic, singular spirit of any given text and hence
its little (im)perfections and possibly good qualities. Lastly, approaching each and every
text in its own right would also avoid conceiving them as a mere ‘derivative’ of a
particular academic discipline or trains of scholarship (such as, for instance, economics
or management).
41
Derrida, in the context of a video-recorded conference (cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch
v=80a7sA4NcTI), made this point in conjunction with the work of Martin Heidegger, claiming that
biographers, by making statements about what Heidegger’s work meant in toto, are the most dangerous
figures in the publishing industry. This is due to the fact that they have the undisputed authority to say the
‘truth’, once and for all, about someone else’s writing and life. The danger, as Derrida made clear, is that
biographers’ commentaries can fix and stabilize a particular image of an author(‘s opus) for centuries.
156
Despite all these reservations, which have shown that Chapter 2 is furthest away
from my current way of looking at academic affairs (i.e. scholarly ethos of close reading
and affirmation), I do not want to support the impression that analyses are altogether
bad and must therefore be dispelled from the academic map. I thus want to restore some
of the second chapter’s value by saying that its analytic practice, irrespective of all
inconsistencies and fallacies, has disclosed that the textual traces of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ form a domain of thinking that is – more or less – univocal. If one
would thus be able to momentarily blind out the analysis’ lack of elegance and its over-
reliance on humor and irony, it would indeed become arguable that it undertakes a move
that is both timely and urgent. Although I have no stake in further palliating matters, I
want to leave this first point behind by saying that, insofar as one wants to make
statements about an identified body of writing in its entireness and to initiate a quest for
novel meaning configurations, there is often no other option than to ‘unwrinkle’ texts’
flections and edges and, by extension, to fold them, somewhat violently, onto an
apparently smooth surface or plane.
B)latant Scarcity of Available Literature
A second reason for the apparent sense of homogeneity and unity effectuated by my
analysis is that there was, at least at the time of my investigation,
42
anything but an
abundance of academic material on the subject matter and, by extension, a rather low
breadth and variability of perspectives. Although this situation today (i.e. during the
second part of 2007) has changed quite dramatically in that new theoretical perspectives
and disciplines have engaged themselves in the inquiry, both theoretical and empirical,
of social entrepreneurship (cf. also Steyaert & Dey, 2006), one can reasonably claim that
the field not so long ago presented itself as a, to put it cautiously, not very diversified
field of academic inquiry. It was hence quasi as a result of the prevailing conditions of
(academic) (im)possibility that the whole issue of ‘social entrepreneurship’ was
represented as a problem-solving exercise. Becoming more concrete about the scholarly
horizon of the nascent writing on ‘social entrepreneurship’, it can be noted that the field
was chiefly under the influence of business/management and/or economic rationalities.
The textual homogeneity for which I have been criticized thus goes back, at least partly,
to a logic that conceives of problems only as points of transition towards solutions, and
42
Note that the first draft of Chapter 2 dates back to the first half of 2004. Though the final version of the
chapter contains an update of the literature, this too does not solve the ‘problem’ that the writing on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ is rapidly proliferating (hence, you’re always outmode the next day).
157
that pretends that there are universal solutions to a broad range of what we could call,
for pragmatic reasons, real-life problems. Proceeding by way of analogy (established by
direct reference to Sloterdijk’s (1993) recommendable ‘Weltfremdheit’ (i.e.
unearthliness)), one can say that the early literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’ was
propounding the logic that ‘the world hurts – which has its reason; the moment the
reasons are identified the whole thing can be re-enchanted’.
43
Though this claim too
represents a culmination of the ‘actually’ then-available academic literature, it does not
seem exaggerated if one claims that the analysis’ textual homogeneity was not
exclusively effectuated by my analytic procedure (cf. above) and not even slightly
related to the betrayal of Foucault’s (1996) (archeology-based) ethos which prescribes
that the writer – in the course of his/her analysis – ‘ought to read everything, study
everything’ (p. 14),
44
but also and not least by the evidently narrow space of academic
writing.
C)unning Hyperbole
What I deem most important, and this is not to be read as a lame excuse, in consideration
of the impression of homogeneity and unity being produced by the lack of discontinuities
and discursive cracks in the analyzed textual material, is that I have intentionally
acuminated the analysis in order to reinforce its expressiveness.
45
That is, provided that
my thesis sought to establish a contrast between the academic literature on ‘social
entrepreneurship’ and the evidently more variegated and complex discourses
46
identified in the realm of practice (cf. Chapter 3), it is intuitively comprehensible that
such an ambition made it necessary to occasionally exaggerate up to the point of
emphasizing, even overdrawing, certain aspects of the textual material while
simultaneously ignoring other aspects which would have drawn a more multifaceted
picture of the subject area. Notwithstanding the fact that my analysis gets to rest on a
process of selective extrapolation – which highlights certain textual features while
downplaying others – I believe that such an accentuation marks a legitimate means for
43
In the German original: ‘Die Welt tut weh – das muss Gründe haben; sobald man diese kennt, kann man das
Ganze in Ordnung singen’ (p. 220).
44
Admittedly, reading everything in the case of social entrepreneurship was, due to the scarcity of the
available literature, not that much of a challenge (yet, it is not impossible that I have missed one or another
article).
45
One finds a good, and arguably more eloquent, example of this acumination in Derrida’s (1976) practice of
canceling or crossing out (i.e. writing ‘under erasure’), by dint of which he sought to acknowledge the
(potential) value of a given concept while instantly noting that prevailing understanding exhibit serious
inadequacies and omissions.
46
Note that ‘variegated’ and ‘complex’ chiefly refer to the existence of aporias, paradoxes and ruptures in the
utterances of the interviewed development NGO practitioners.
158
denaturalizing a given (body of) text/thought and, by implication, for preparing the
ground for novel openings.
47
Consequently and in view of Sloterdijk’s (2006; in
conversation with Heinrichs) provocative statement that thinking equals exaggerating,
48
it is crucial to understand, though probably self-evident by now, that my own practice of
‘accentuation’ has nothing in common with the precise, mechanical repetition of the
original text(s). Rather, ‘accentuation’ in conjunction with Chapter 2 pertains to the sort
of repetition which seeks to stimulate difference by dint of, for instance, a good portion of
humor and a twist of irony. Irony and humor, therefore, primarily work to create a
certain distance between the immediately recognizable face of a text (its face-value, for
that matter) and its double (i.e. its analysis). To bring to fruition a text’s double, as I
believe, always requires a mode of (novel or imaginative) repetition that highlights both
the concrete sub-texts within a particular text (e.g. its artistic rhetoric as well as its
underlying, both implicit and explicit, scholarly ‘truths’; e.g. the narrative of proper
management) and the potential, but yet not established, inter-texts of neighboring zones
(e.g. the plot(s) of philosophy). In my assessment, it is only by dint of building a bridge
with adjoining stories that one is enabled to sketch out extensions or, more precisely,
transformations of the ‘original’.
49
As should be clear by now, my objective has no affinity
with any wholesale rejection of the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’
(although my ironic tone might have fostered this illusion) but with cultivating a
sensitivity that what we know and what we can say today about ‘social entrepreneurship’
envelopes only a small fraction of the potentially infinite ways in which the matter can be
referred to and constructed. Indeed, it precisely at this point that we should ask
ourselves whether it would not make more sense, even be essential, to allow for new
connections with realms of knowledge, conceived in the broadest sense of the term, other
than that of business/management or economics, so as to ‘exploit’ the yet untapped
possibilities inherent to, for instance, the arts, humanities, literature, or cinema.
Though it is to be expected that one will, in the course of academic action, turn out
not only the best but also the worst of possibilities, this is, as I believe, the ultimate price
to be paid for creating understandings of ‘social entrepreneurship’ which are to this date
censored by a mode of thinking that demands that the world (of the social entrepreneur)
47
It must remain clear, however, that I do not want to glamorize my analysis since I am truly aware of its
inherent voids. Consequently, what I am saying here relates more to the potential value of
accentuation/exaggeration than to the specific merit of my analysis.
48
In original: ‘denken heisst überreagieren’ (p. 32).
49
With this I do not intend to say that one’s interpretation or reading should move beyond the initial text in
any definitive sense – read ‘we’re done with you and moved on’ – but to probe its limitations by dint of a
continuing process of de- and reconstruction.
159
must be scientifically addressed, i.e. in a way that brings us as close as possible to the
actual kernel of objective truth. If one aspires to counter-actualize this mode of thinking,
there is, in my opinion, much heuristic value in referring to Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
who advise us – in a different, yet compoundable, context – to create maps (of ‘social
entrepreneurship’, for that matter) that constantly change shape due to their
experimentation with the real. By way of closing remark, let me suggest, once more and
for the last time, that we should not hesitate to risk the creation of Lyotardian paralogies,
absurdities, even non-sense,
50
since these performances of deviance seem to indicate the
way to genuine creativity, nothing more and nothing less. Yet, since my analysis in
Chapter 2 has only been partially, if at all, successful in this regard, there is still a lot of
work ahead.
51
50
The logic behind this plea should remind us that one is well advised to shake up or make stutter all
transcendent truths (so too the one on ‘social entrepreneurship’), since it is them who arrest movement by
positing unity (of value, meaning, mode of being, etc.) over multiplicity.
51
To make this unmistakable, deconstructive work is never over since it is, as I argue in Chapter 2 (with
reference to Derrida), an infinite task; hence, even more work ahead.
160
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Parousia Press.
Derrida, J. (1991). Letter to a Japanese Friend, In Between the Blinds, ed. P. Kamuf.
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Foucault, M. (1996). Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961 – 1984, ed. S. Lotringer,
trans. L. Hochroth & J. Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e).
Sloterdijk, P. (1993). Weltfremdheit. Frankfuhrt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. & Heinrichs, H. J. (2006). Die Sonne und der Tod. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp.
Steyaert, C. & Dey, P. (2006). Keeping (Social) Entrepreneurship Hybrid: Towards a
Dangerous Research Agenda? RENT XX: Research in Entrepreneurship and Small
Business, November 23 – 24, Brussels, Belgium.
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2
***
The Rhetoric of Social Entrepreneurship: Paralogy and New Language
Games in Academic Discourse
52
The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he
carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-
evident … to reexamine … institutions … to participate in the formation of a political will.
(Foucault, 1985, pp. 8 – 9)
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of
institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a
manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through
them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them. (Foucault, 1971)
In light of the previous chapter, which investigated the emergence of social entrepreneurship in
the context of university business school teaching, I would like to point out that the following
investigation of academic discourse presupposes a decisive transition. Looking back, we can say
that the question hitherto addressed has been ‘according to what rules and technologies (of
52
Please note that a previous version of this article has been published in Steyaert and Hjorth (2006).
162
discipline and subjectivation) is the ‘truth’ of social entrepreneurship created and sustained in
conjunction with business school teaching?’ Although the meaning, or, to use Foucault’s
terminology, the ‘regime of truth’ of social entrepreneurship produced in and through business
schools has been a matter of central concern, it hardly needs to be mentioned that the analytic
emphasis was not exclusively related to the question ‘what sort of meaning is produced?’ At
times, the analysis focused even more strongly on the question of how this knowledge of social
entrepreneurship is controlled, sustained and disseminated through the excellence dispositif.
Therefore, if one acknowledges that truth and the context of its production are inextricably
related, we have, hopefully, gained a sense of how images of social entrepreneurship are conjured
up with particular disciplinary practices and hence come to see that those images require
continuous political and economic incitement. In other words, the pivotal insight of our
investigation of business school teaching, when looked at from a Foucauldian (1984) vantage
point, has been that the image of social entrepreneurship ‘is centred on the form of scientific
discourse and the institutions which produce it’ (p. 73). It is at this juncture, however, that the
difference between the previous and the following chapter is revealed: rather than emphasizing
how disciplines and technologies function to bring about and normalize a particular image of
social entrepreneurship, the present chapter will take as its starting point a different theoretical
angle, namely the objectification (i.e. ‘scientific classification’; cf. Rabinow, 1984) of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ through social scientific discourse. The emphasis of this investigation, then, is
not so much on how (i.e. through what practices, regulations, events, etc.) the meaning of social
entrepreneurship is generated but rather on the particular meaning of social entrepreneurship that
is produced in academic writing. More precisely, on the basis of a deconstructive reading of the
canon of social entrepreneurship, the following analysis aims to elaborate on how (i.e. by dint of
what rhetoric) the linguistic conventions of academic discourse convert the subject matter into a
positive object.
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Introduction
… every human activity is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a
‘miracle’. (Nietzsche, 1984, xxi)
Before I will begin with the deconstructive reading of scholarly texts, we must recall and repeat
that social entrepreneurship narratives being broadcast on television and published in newspapers,
practitioner books and scientific journals represent one of the very latest ‘fashion trends’ (cf.
Chapter 1) and a commonplace that has penetrated researchers’, politicians’, and journalists’
discourse in equal measure. Thus, taking academic writing on social entrepreneurship as the focus
of the present analysis, this immediately reveals an interest in a nascent, but proliferating, field of
investigation and a domain of research which has yet not experienced much contestation but all
the more enthusiasm. As Gentile (2002) claimed, the term ‘social entrepreneur’ over the
preceding 15 years has been used in more than 950 articles of widely read US business journals.
75% of those texts have thereby been published during the last three years of Gentile’s research
(1998 – 2001). From a cursory glance at the available academic literature, it is noticeable that
social entrepreneurship gets grounded in such diverse realms as developmental aid work (Fowler,
2000), the voluntary and community sector in the United Kingdom (Pharoah & Scott, 2002), the
development of economic communities within the United States (Wallace, 1999), the enrichment
of women’s work in Sweden (Pestoff, 2000), the promotion of health services in Europe (Catford,
1998, de Leeuw, 1999), non-profit organizations (Mort et al., 2003) and the welfare system more
generally (Thompson, 2002). Be that as it may, my main concern here is that the corpus of
academic texts produced a unanimously positive image of the subject matter.
53
Given, for
instance, that many texts stress the univocally positive effects of social enterprises, while
providing selective illustrations of their ‘heroic deeds’ such as empowerment (Pestoff, 2000),
social transformation (Alvord et al., 2002), regeneration (Thompson, 2002), creation of social
benefits (Fowler, 2000), increase of social capital (Leadbeater, 1997), or community economic
development (Wallace, 1999), I was initially charmed into believing that there was no other
option than holding the matter in awe. Hereon I started to deliberate why and how social
entrepreneurship was granted such a self-evidently good image? Doggedly refusing to join the
53
Notice that Ahl (2002) has discussed similar effects in relation to texts on entrepreneurship. See also Jones and
Spicer (2005) who provide a readable genealogy of the positive valuation of the entrepreneur.
164
approving choir of academics who endlessly rehearsed their hymn of praise, I opted for what I
here call an ‘abnormal path of science’;
54
a stream of reasoning which puts centre stage the
question how texts ‘seduce’ the reader into one possible interpretation of a situation over a
(theoretically) infinite set of alternative possibilities (Westwood & Clegg, 2003). Given the
paramount plausibility, trustworthiness and assumed objectivity ascribed to academic statements
(Feyerabend, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996), I deem essential a study that
puts prime emphasis upon the ways in which the scholarly community has appropriated the term
‘social entrepreneurship’, and how those constructions create particular presences while causing
both manifest and elusive absences (cf. Law, 2004). In the adept’s mind this might have a
familiar ring. Granted, the position that I am aspiring to here is that academic discourse
55
rests on
skillfully crafted rhetoric, nothing more, nothing less. So, whether you (not WE, because I truly
enjoy this vista) ‘like it or not, we live in a rhetorical world’ (van Maanen, 1995, p. 687).
Discourse and Rhetoric
Admittedly, pinpointing academics’ utterances as rhetoric might appear as a denouncement.
However, such an impression is comprehensible only if taking rhetoric to represent that which is
not true, as something which stands in opposition to reality, and which aims at seducing
compliance and consent (Carter & Jackson, 2004).
56
In contrast to this latter view, my own
interest in rhetoric is grounded on the assumption that language is genuinely constitutive and
performative. In that way, language is not something that simply reflects or communicates a
particular realm of reality which objectively exists beyond the sign. Rather, while dismissing that
words might demonstrably mean what they say, that they are ‘literally literal’ (Eagleton, 1983),
using language invariably means engaging in rhetoric as the immanent process through which we
produce the very realities of which we speak. As we get reminded by van Maanen, ‘(t)heory is a
54
Taken to represent the opposite of what gets referred to as ‘normal science’ (e.g. Case, 2003), that is, positivist and
post-positivist science (Burrell & Morgan, 1979).
55
The term ‘discourse’ is used here to pinpoint socially organized frameworks of meaning that define categories and
specify domains of what can be said and done. Consequently, discourse delineates the constitutive force of reality as
it simultaneously frames how a topic can be expressed in acceptable and intelligible ways and, on the flipside of it,
‘rules out’, i.e. limits and restricts what can be said of a particular issue (Hall, 2001).
56
As pointed out by Symon (2000), a common subtitle for academic publications is ‘rhetoric versus reality’, where
rhetoric is seen to be inaccurate and even manipulative, i.e. the opposite of a truthful, honest account.
165
matter of words, not worlds; of maps, not territories; of representations, not realities’ (van
Maanen, 1995, p. 134). By implication, all discourse – irrespective of being deemed scientific or
not – contains rhetoric as that aspect of language which serves the purpose of convincing the
audience of its truthfulness.
57
To depict this in a slightly different manner, while the formal study
of rhetoric was undertaken in ancient Greece to educate people in the art of public presentation (a
view which is still well recognized), e.g. forensic (legal) speech making, political oratory, and
ceremonial discourse, rhetoric equally comprised, though at a later historical stage, the ability to
write eloquently and in a convincing manner. Hence, irrespective of the observation that
‘rhetoric’ today more often than not gets related to the idea of ‘double talk’, we shall depart from
an understanding of rhetoric which highlights the matter as a theoretical as well as a practical
means for gaining an understanding of how language, or better discourse, gets to shape our
understanding of reality. In line with Lyotard (with Thébaud, 1985), I hence put myself into the
position of the rhetorician, that is, the person seeking ‘to produce effects upon the other [which is
you], effects that the other does not control’ (p. 4).
Objectives
Concurring with Barthes (1967) that no language can ever be ‘non-rhetorical’, I spotted an
opportunity to illuminate the current enunciation of social entrepreneurship in academic texts, and
to delineate how science gets to persuade the audience of the sincerity of its utterances (Watson,
2000).
58
As Michel Foucault (1984) pinpointed, interpretations represent a ‘violent or
surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning’, but
which tries to ‘impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different
game, and to subject it to secondary rules’ (p. 86). By extension thereof, the ensuing investigation
(cf. Appendix for the list of texts being selected for analysis) will pay prime attention to how
texts being deemed ‘academic’ are organized so as to rhetorically ward off potential counter-
57
Cf. Callon, Law and Rip (1986) who contend that the publication of scientific text is both a goal of scientific
activity and a means to build actor-networks for persuading and enrolling others.
58
Notice that the conventions which scientific texts follow and the stylistic devices which they use make its
rhetorical underpinning less than obvious. However, it is exactly that which is displayed as a non-rhetorical style,
which by itself represents the rhetorical device that deflects its own dynamic.
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arguments (Billig, 1987; 1989). For the present purpose, I strongly identify rhetoric with
Derrida’s (1976) deconstructive endeavor in that rhetorical analysis irrevocably entails a
sensitivity for the indeterminacy of the sign ‘social entrepreneurship’. In other words, by virtue of
highlighting the rhetorical dynamic of the respective texts, I will try to invoke a space for the
tactical other of social entrepreneurship, i.e. ‘the residue of indeterminacy which escapes the
system’ (Sipiora & Atwill, 1990, p. 3). Obviously, instead of grounding social entrepreneurship
within a specific theoretical or methodological space, my analysis seeks to evoke a productive
crisis, or a ‘rupture’ to use Derrida’s (1966) wording, in which novel cultural interpretations may
become possible. To lay open social entrepreneurship texts’ rhetorical dynamic, that is, to expose
the binary systems which warrant stability, and to problematize the field’s consensus will thus
(hopefully) become a transparent strategy for making language the object of its own scrutiny.
Following Derrida (1992), it is important to note that this deconstructive reading is not
necessarily an exclusively negative act (Critchley, 1999), but rather a response to, and affirmation
of, political struggles against systems pledged to presence (cf. also Chapter 5). As such, the
process of dismantling or, more precisely, deconstructing the rhetoric of scholarly texts on social
entrepreneurship serves the aim of laying bare the instability of these texts, and to set in motion
some creative playfulness. The last part of this chapter is therefore devoted to making suggestions
for the prospective research agenda of social entrepreneurship. Regarding the enrichment of the
prevailing ‘regimes of truth’, if not to say truisms, I will argue for a proliferation of
deconstructive analysis as well as for the endorsement of new representational practices. New
groundings of social entrepreneurship will further be advocated with regress to Lyotard’s (1984)
work on paralogy (i.e. movements which go beyond or against common reason) as well as to
Derrida’s (1995; 1997; 1999) writing on aporia (i.e. paradoxes) and undecidability.
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Re-Reading Social Entrepreneurship Texts
Let me begin the present reading with a representative extract from Wallace (1999) in which we
are provided with a narrative of social enterprises and the population they are presumed to help.
These businesses [social purpose enterprises] serve as a necessary bridge into the mainstream
business community for their target populations. Educationally and economically
disadvantaged populations with sporadic employment histories do not benefit
automatically from opened doors to the job market. What non-profit organizations have
discovered over time is that many of them lack the very basic skills of how to act and/or
contribute to a work environment. (Wallace, 1999, p. 164)
On the face of it, we get to hear that social entrepreneurs have spotted that an underprivileged
population lacks the necessary skills for traditional employment opportunities, and that social
entrepreneurs exhibit the very resources needed to align this population with the mainstream
business community. At closer inspection, it is revealed that the excerpt from Wallace’s text
operates upon the construction of two subjects: social purpose entrepreneurs envisioned through a
particular affiliation with mainstream business, and an inchoate population of educationally and
economically disadvantaged people. The latter subject is denoted as ‘underprivileged’ on the
ground of its lack of the ‘very basic skills’ which are necessary to contribute to the workplace (as
determined by mainstream business). The relationship between the two subjects is specified
through the notion of ‘target’ which implies uni-directional influence, that is, social entrepreneurs
define the target at which they finally ‘shoot’ their actions and initiatives. Obviously, while the
underprivileged group is marked by a lack of specific, and thereby highly relevant (in that it
hands those populations to the mainstream business community) resources, it is implied that
social purpose entrepreneurs possess those valuable characteristics by virtue of which they are
able to ‘bridge’ the specified populations from an inferior (i.e. underprivileged) state to a superior
state (being defined alongside the characteristics of mainstream business).
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The Metaphor of Medical Treatment
So far so good. But how then does Wallace’s statement appear so agreeable? Peculiarly enough,
iteration-by-iteration I got to recognize that the text was allegorically related respectively to the
discourse of (western) medical treatment (Parker, 1992) and development (Frank, 1997).
Summoning the former metaphor, we get to see a physician (social purpose enterprise)
representing an all-knowing, incontestable authority, who is infallible in diagnosing (discovering)
his (yes, the doctor is male, but more of that later) patient’s (underprivileged populations)
pathologies (lack of the very basic skills requested for the work environment). Further implied
through the medical metaphor is the notion that the physician is able to mitigate the identified
problems while the patient gets envisioned as passively entrapped within his/her pathological
state. Hence, while the doctor is assumed to have the requisite medical skills to cure (bridge into
the mainstream business community) his/her patient, this discourse of medical treatment equally
prescribes that those same patients blindly give themselves into the healing hands of the
‘redeemer’.
One-sidedness and Dependence
As western medical treatment, and specifically its notion of aid, is quasi naturalized through the
image of a needy patient vis-à-vis a skilful help professional, it comes as no surprise that reading
the respective social entrepreneurship texts (for the first time) did not arouse much suspicion.
After all, what would one consider a solid basis for challenging that health is a good thing worth
striving for, or that providing help to subjects facing severe problems applies to higher human
standards? However, by applying the analogy of medical treatment, it becomes utterly apparent
that social entrepreneurship is premised on an unequal distribution of knowledge. In specific,
through the creation of an expert subject (i.e. the social enterprise), and an uninformed and thus
helpless subject (i.e. the underprivileged people), the text works to construct a power-knowledge
nexus which produces a strategic relationship of dependence between the two subjects.
59
By
stressing the dependence and inertness of patients and by means of depicting their pathology as
an incontestable matter of fact, the implicit medical discourse, by association, renders
underprivileged populations passive and thus malleable.
59
Though Foucault (1980) has scrutinized the notion of ideology on the grounds of its presupposition of truth,
ideology gets employed here to describe a form of relationship that entails hierarchical ramifications.
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Accountability and Blame
While constructing patients as dependent subjects, medical discourse simultaneously works
through a disciplinary stance:
The need is to innovatively develop new forms of social capital which, in turn, will help empower
disadvantaged people and encourage them to take greater responsibility for, and control
over, their lives. (Thompson et al., 2002, p. 329)
Following Thompson et al.’s prospect, it gets delineated that social entrepreneurs provide the
medical help needed to leverage (empower) the inferior state of patients, up to the point that
patients are finally made accountable to maintain (take greater responsibility for, and control
over, their lives) their own health. By the same token, help professionals are envisioned as
restoring the health of their patients while the sustenance of patients’ health lies within their own
responsibility. On the flipside of this image, people who do not take care of their health are
contestable for acting irresponsible. To be clear on that, wouldn’t it appear somehow heterodox to
elide the doctor’s advice of minding one’s health by leading a restful life? Yet, taking into
consideration that patients, i.e. social enterprises, within certain texts (which will be elaborated
more thoroughly further down) are held accountable for deviating from the prevailing market
ideology, things might start to change their shading.
Entitlement
In academic writings on social entrepreneurship it has become somewhat canonical that business
practices (must) serve as criteria for devising social enterprises’ governance and for assessing
their very performance. However, what is conspicuous, at least for me, is that those texts radiate
decisive univocity. The setting beyond dispute the idea that social enterprises should adhere to the
market logic is achieved within those texts through a particular process of entitlement. As pointed
out by Potter (1996), knowledge is culturally and historically linked to categories of actors in a
variety of different ways. Certain categories of actors are thereby entitled to know certain things
which, in effect, gives their statements particular credence and pertinence. In other words, given
that actors are entitled to possess a specific kind of knowledge or skill, it follows that their
narratives are warranted pervasiveness and rhetorical intelligibility. Invoking the metaphor of
170
medical treatment, we thus get to see that the help professional is assumed to perform his cure
without hindrance, as he knows what health is and how health is to be restored and sustained.
Hence, by virtue of envisioning an all-knowing curer who is entitled to heal (in that he has the
apposite knowledge) and by conceding to him good health (because he is presumed to govern his
own health accordingly), it gets increasingly difficult to envision that the prescription of these
practices actually marks a reduction of available treatment opportunities and thus a distinct form
of governmentality (Foucault, 1979). However, wise to our text on social entrepreneurship, we
get to see that the ascription of expertise is worked up through the dichotomy of knowing – not-
knowing. Whereas social enterprises get depicted as possessing indispensable knowledge, namely
knowledge which warrants their successful conduct along the lines of mainstream business, those
organizations are unquestionably deemed appropriate for their respective positions and tasks.
Progressive Development
A pervasive observation within many articles on social entrepreneurship relates to the strong
focus those texts lay on anticipated endpoints. To underscore the important posture of social
enterprises and to provide those textual structures a stable centre (Derrida, 1966), such texts
operate through the establishment of valued standards towards which social enterprises direct
their respective underprivileged populations and help beneficiaries. Conveying the spell of
teleological development, it is implied that patients – once they receive appropriate treatment –
will evolve in a regular, that is, progressively improving manner. By such accounts, the reader is
taught that to achieve a progressive (i.e. healthier) state it suffices to expose the patient to the
meticulous interventions of help professionals. Healing, respectively the process of development,
requires no effort on the part of the patient which implies that teleology is contained in the action
of the help professional! Importantly, the ideological consequences of this imagery derive from
the conflation of social entrepreneurship and mainstream economy. Whereas I have no principle
reservation against this respective interconnection, it is the exclusiveness of this truth regime
which requires critical heeding. Hence, invoking the image according to which everything gets
better once exposed to social enterprises, and taking into account that this dynamic gets sustained
by virtue of sweeping eulogies, that is, stories filled with praise and commendation, it is equally
important to envision that we have ‘sacrificed’ a more variegated picture at the cost of stories
which univocally provide confidence and hope. However, wouldn’t it be all too subversive to call
into question an image which warrants such a bright future?
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The Demise of our Present
Besides legitimizing social enterprises through the celebration of their (to conjure up a forceful
metaphor) God-like acts of redemption, other texts foster a need for social enterprises by virtue of
constantly reiterating the putative demise of our current (welfare) system (e.g. Wallace, 1999). In
other words, by perpetually emphasizing that the status quo, in its infernal guise, is no option,
those texts achieve to foster a conviction that things have to change immediately. In heralding
that the status quo is no longer tenable, this view works pervasively to call into question practices
of, for instance, non-profit, voluntary, bureaucratic and governmental organizations, in that those
organizations are made responsible for our crumbling present. In other words, the univocal appeal
for increased efficiency, effectiveness and amplified professionalism in the public and non-profit
realms are made easily acceptable while being interwoven into a narrative that features these
latter organizations as the very reason for our contemporary miseries.
External Pressures
While what du Gay has termed ‘modernization hyperbole’ (du Gay, 2004) makes us believe that
everything in place has to change; this belief is buttressed with respect to social entrepreneurship
in the ubiquitously perpetuated story that the environment is turbulent and volatile and shaped by
a virtual explosion of complexity.
The pace of change continues to accelerate globally and traditional attempts to extrapolate from
the past are no longer valid. (Catford, 1998, p. 95)
This pervasive ‘futurology’ (Cheney et al., 2004) being revealed in Catford’s story predicates that
only those will survive (and possibly prosper) who exhibit the aptitude of constant adaptation. Let
me illustrate these claims through Mort et al.:
Within the increasingly competitive market social enterprises are viewed as entities competing
with their commercial counterparts and other social enterprises for survival and growth.
Similar to commercial enterprises, NFPs [non-for profits] are compelled to adopt
innovative ways of perceiving and delivering superior value to their clients. (Mort et al.,
2003, p. 85)
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What follows from Mort et al.’s extract is an image that displays a seemingly unchallengeable
outside pressure that stems from increased commercial competition. By extension, the image
spurs a need to adopt practices traditionally carried out by commercial enterprises. The discourse
of economic competition thus gets to justify increased efficiency, customer orientation, corporate
accountability, and so on which seem attainable only through a sound business focus. For
instance, ‘deinstitutionalization’ is depicted in certain texts (Wallace, 1999) as a reified (i.e. a
material and therefore not man made phenomenon) and irrevocable (obscuring the alterability of
the phenomenon) force that presupposes economically orientated practices. Remarkably, the
belief in the irredeemability of outside pressures is sustained in apprehending them as results of
cosmic laws. In other words, being envisioned as a material reality, we get to believe that those
pressures are beyond human terms and therefore unchangeable.
Globalization as the Prescription of Economic Activity
As business-related terms such as re-engineering, financial accountability, cost cutting, new
public management, and so forth constitute an incremental part of our every-day vocabulary, their
use (even in relation to issues that formerly operated devoid of such premises) does not make us
flinch. On the contrary, while such claims have become part and parcel of lived ideology (Billig
et al., 1988), it is somehow commonsense to prescribe, for instance, economic efficiency, smooth
management and organizational effectiveness. As suggested in conjunction with the futurology of
social entrepreneurship, a Darwinian notion of the environment is being used to support a
business mode of conduct in an evolutionary process of natural selection. Envisioning
globalization as a ubiquitous process that presupposes constant competition evokes a threat that
can only be counteracted by means of sound business practices. Hence, in many social
entrepreneurship texts ‘globalization’ gets coined as a ‘god-term’ (Cheney et al., 2004) which is
primarily related to (and thereby prescribes) economic activity (Parker, 2004). Consequently,
once we get to comprehend social entrepreneurship as an inseparable aspect of the globalized
world, the respective globalization – economy nexus works arouse an urge to comply with an
economic mode of conduct.
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Business – Non-Business Binary
While the conflation of globalization and economic activity is unquestionably pivotal for
encouraging social entrepreneurship, other texts emphasize the relevance of profit-related
practices in social enterprises through a critique of traditional public or third sector organizations.
Through the installation of a bureaucracy – social enterprise binary these texts rhetorically
achieve the overthrow of the belief in practices genuinely applied in public, non-profit or non-
governmental organizations.
Because a bureaucracy practices a high degree of specialization in its tasks (on the assumption
that specialization results in efficiency), it can only respond to problems, procedures, and
solutions in piecemeal and/or uncoordinated fashion. (Wallace, 1999, p. 158)
As follows from Wallace, bureaucracies are not pertinent for meeting public expectations, which
implies that these organizations need to be premised on contemporary liberal norms of market-
driven responsibilities. While the installation of a Darwinian image of the environment works to
condition a belief that social enterprises strive above all to survive, it is implied that those
organizations must overcome the natural inclination of the uninspired and lethargic bureaucrat.
Hence, ascribing to (social) entrepreneurial organizations the potential to overcome prevailing
calamities (by means of, for instance, their flexibility and innovativeness) works to outdate
Wallace’s ‘bureaucratic organizations.’ In this ‘epochal schema’ (du Gay, 2004) ‘bureaucracy’ or
‘administration’ is reduced to a simple and abstract set of negativities contrasted with an equally
simple and abstracted, but positively coded, set of ‘entrepreneurial’ principles. Accordingly, the
image of non-entrepreneurial organizations appears univocally disadvantageous whereupon there
is virtually no alternative to ‘enterprising’ unless institutions and persons aim to seek their own
fates. Ultimately, how could anyone be for bureaucracy or otherwise non-entrepreneurial forms
of organizing if they simply get to represent dysfunctional, outdated and inefficient leftovers?
Universal Claim for Economic Activity
As elaborated above, the discourse of (social) enterprise is normative as it enjoins the conduct of
organizations previously seen as non-commercial, including the conduct of government agencies,
voluntary organizations, social-purpose enterprises and individuals. A notable number of texts
thereby rely upon the proposition that bureaucracies must be aligned to meet the demands of the
174
market, to empower consumers and to create vitalized leaders at the helm of new agencies. While
such claims might appear far-fetched, it is revealed on the background of the metaphor of medical
treatment that these statements are nonetheless pervasive. As the metaphor of medical treatment
highlights the universal way of healing, it follows that this treatment is apposite for all living
beings. Taking for granted that all people equally strive for a healthy life, prescriptions being
staged under the spell of ‘health’ appear benign and beyond question. However, let us be
reminded that health within social entrepreneurship texts gets to represent the ability to pursue a
job and make money.
… working and earning are not merely yardsticks by which to measure ‘improvements’ … rather
they are a precondition for these improvements … an underlying principle is that bearing
part of the enterprise’s risk produces therapeutic effects because it is therapeutic to be
able to make mistakes, to learn by trial and error, to run the risk of change. (De
Leonardis & Mauri, 1992, p. 53)
As revealed in De Leonardis and Mauri’s utterance, working and earning are literally
circumscribed as therapeutic, meaning that those activities are at the service of patients’ health.
Blatantly obvious, working and earning therefore become quintessential activities in that they
teach underprivileged people a vital lesson for successful living.
Measurability and Technical Rationality
While the penetration of social entrepreneurship texts through business discourse becomes easily
acceptable, we have to bear in mind that our agreement, witting or unwitting, requires strong
persuasive buttresses. What finally gets to appear as natural and inevitable thus relies on constant
reiteration. Additionally, to bolster the respective claims against potential critique one needs to
enrich one’s argumentation with easily retrievable commonsense, that is, lived ideology (Billig et
al., 1988). A common rhetorical strategy for immunizing one’s accounts thus materializes in
allusion to instrumental rationality. For instance, within its appropriation by Thompson et al.
(2002), social entrepreneurship is portrayed as a foremost rational and technical activity which
can be measured and therefore predicted. The notion of ‘operationalise’, for instance, represents
social entrepreneurship as a calculable undertaking. What is revealed in such accounts is a kind of
‘hyper-realization’ (Casey, 2004) that works to emphasize the merits of technical rationality in
175
the realm of the third or non-profit sector. The persuasiveness of this particular view is granted by
delineating social entrepreneurship as a programmable and therefore rather easy undertaking (at
least as long as sound business practices are employed), while simultaneously creating the
impression that social entrepreneurship operates smoothly, completely devoid of political
struggles.
Science
While the invocation of technical rationality as such is already sweeping, some texts on social
entrepreneurship additionally strengthen their rhetorical power through recourse to science.
Although ideas are powerful, people often place too much emphasis on the initial flash of
brilliance … , the bigger challenge is converting an initially appealing idea into a
worthwhile opportunity. This step combines rigorous analysis with creative adjustment as
social entrepreneurs test and refine ideas through a mixture of action and research.
(Guclu et al., 2002, p. 6)
Research within the extract by Guclu and colleagues gets depicted as a crucial aspect of the social
entrepreneurial endeavor. In deeming technological knowledge scientific, and relying on the
assumption that science unanimously is (and does) good, there are no sound reasons presented
why people working in the third or non-profit sector should reject such a code. Due to the
paramount credibility of science (in the western mindset), such texts seek to legitimize the
rational calculus of business while simultaneously sidestepping potential criticism of that
respective image. Consequently, once social entrepreneurs are delineated as possessing the
relevant ‘scientific’ body of knowledge, these texts are bestowed with a certain cachet of
incontestability. And, by implication, any form of knowledge that fails to exhibit the relevant
scientific credentials gets judged as worthless. While operating upon the assumption that sound
scientific practices lend themselves to evaluation (which stipulates quantitative rather than
qualitative parameters), such texts create an urge to provide objectively measurable results in the
form of, for example, changed social impacts and outcomes (Johnson, 2000). In effect, such
rigorous endeavors of measurement and categorization, as has been shown by Foucault (1988),
equally get to represent a process through which objects are rendered amenable to regulation.
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Normalization of Business Practices
What follows from equating social entrepreneurship with quantitatively measurable activities
(such as number of beneficiaries provided with a job) is that practices and effects of social
enterprises which do not materialize in numbers are either rendered invisible or are treated as
deviant and thus inferior. This process of normalization – abnormalization is thereby installed
through working up a contrast structure which deems particular activities respectively appropriate
or inappropriate. Applied to our subject matter, this gets to mean that charging social
entrepreneurship of not using quantitative evaluation and scientifically validated practices,
business discourse operates to depict traditional voluntary, non-profit and social sector practices
as ‘flabby’ and ‘amateurish’ (Grenier, 2002). Taking, for example, the statement by Thompson et
al. to exemplify our point:
… many typical volunteers will need training in up-to-date information technology skills for some
of the needs and tasks involved. (Thompson et al., 2000, p. 336)
As we get to see through the extract of Thompson et al., knowledge of IT is a specific skill which
can be acquired through education. The attribute of ‘typical’ thus points out that subjects working
in the social realm normally do not have the requested knowledge (or at least do not exhibit the
state of the art knowledge). In Thompson et al.’s universe, successful work without the requisite
knowledge is bound to fail. To demonstrate the necessity of business modes of conduct, the text
has to render those other, i.e. abnormal, practices problematic. The randomness and
uncontrollability of such non-business practices has no place in a Tayloristic vision (Morgan,
1997) of social entrepreneurship. As they seem to threaten the survival of those organizations,
they get to represent hostile elements that must be destroyed: business practices are privileged,
the other practices are denigrated; business is what counts, non-business is the unimportant other,
i.e. that which needs compulsive appropriation to management. Hence, the normal – abnormal
binary calls upon an all-or-nothing logic where you are either for or against business practices.
However, it might not be wise to proceed aloof of sound measurement as one would undoubtedly
fall prey to the disarrangement of unfunded speculation!
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Beyond Profit
As elaborated above, a normal – abnormal division is interwoven into business discourse so as to
undermine the appropriateness of social enterprises being premised on non-business practices.
There are other texts, however, that install a premium position of social enterprises through
notions of ‘good intention’, ‘moral need’, ‘contributing to society’, ‘social purpose’, ‘common
good’, or even ‘passion’, ‘love’, ‘honesty’, ‘empathy’. Following Pearce we get to hear that …
… , their [social enterprises’] common characteristics involve activities centered around a
‘social purpose’, the regeneration or expansion of local economic activity, collective
advancement of the common good rather than solely commercial or private profit.
(Pearce, 1994)
Texts such as the one by Pearce are rhetorically premised upon a social – non-social divide.
While the non-social prospect gets envisioned through monetary issues most frequently
exemplified through business entrepreneurs, social enterprises are assumed to account for both
social and non-social activities and duties. To understand how this seemingly paradoxical
combination of features can work without appearing self-contradictory or paradoxical, it is worth
looking at Catford (1998) who points out that …
… social and economic entrepreneurs share the same focus on vision and opportunity and the
same ability to convince and empower others to help them turn these visions into a reality.
In social entrepreneurs, however, these characteristics are coupled with a strong desire
for social justice. (Catford, 1998, p. 96)
As becomes comprehensible through the extract by Catford, the business-related aspects of social
entrepreneurs get depicted in the sense of an add-on criterion. While social entrepreneurs are
portrayed as not only exhibiting sound business skills but as additionally embracing social aims,
the pursuit of what I here call ‘non-social activities’ does not seem to collide with their adherence
to moral convictions. Remarkably, this particular rhetorical twist seems to reconcile our basic
either-or contradiction by means of exchanging it with an inclusionary as-well-as logic. Whereas
social enterprises simultaneously are envisioned to carry out profit seeking activities and to retain
their social mission (e.g. Pomerantz, 2003), those texts seek to set such organizations aside from
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those that are characterized by an exclusive, and thereby morally flawed, aim of making money.
Hence, as we get to see in the extract below from Dees’ (1998) text, it is not monetary activity per
se which gets devalued but rather the respective purpose (money, profit, etc.) conveyed in those
accounts.
… social entrepreneurs involved in for-profit activities see profit as a means to an end, while
economic entrepreneurs see profit as an end in itself. (Dees, 1998)
Through the distinction between means and ends Dees’s text aims to bypass inscribing monetary
activities an inferior ethical value. Within the above utterance, profit is presented as containing no
inherent and pre-existing value. Instead, profit derives its value in conjunction with social
entrepreneurship by getting envisioned as a device for achieving particular moral ends. Profit-
seeking according to the text, can be social as long as social entrepreneurs resist the temptation of
using it for selfish ends (Guclu et al., 2002). What gets revealed herein is a utilitaristic principle
which works to distinguish social entrepreneurs from ordinary entrepreneurs, business people,
etc., despite the fact that all are doing the same thing: earning money. However, by means of its
utilitarian ‘superstructure’, such texts suggest a superiority of social entrepreneurs that makes us
so effectively believe that their work, regardless of potentially negative ramifications, gets to
serve higher purposes. Overtly criticizing such images would thus not only call into question the
appropriateness of social enterprises’ moral standards but would equally scrutinize their ideal of
our common good.
Supernatural Individual
Working up the impression of exclusiveness through an argument of superior morality is one
rhetorical strategy. Another rhetoric strategy creates a similar effect by drawing out a picture of
social entrepreneurship on the basis of a singular individual characterized by supernatural talents.
For example, as elaborated by de Leeuw, social entrepreneurs comprise multiple talents,
including the ability …
… to analyse, to envision, to communicate, to empathize, to enthuse, to advocate, to mediate, to
enable and to empower a wide range of disparate individuals and organizations. (de
Leeuw, 1999, p. 261)
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Taking into consideration the commonalities this extract shares with other texts, it concludes, to
put it bluntly, that social entrepreneurship is largely envisioned through a single person,
respectively his/her particularities. By virtue of the accumulated depiction of such traits and
aptitudes an image of social entrepreneurs is created that at one and the same time highlights their
power of foresight, their facility for organization and administration, their unusual energy, as well
as their more general (but nonetheless valuable) leadership properties. Hence, to gain an
understanding of how this effect is achieved through the use of language, let us take a look at the
following statement by Thompson et al.:
In and amongst [social entrepreneurs] will be some non-enterprising people simply committed to
doing good (Thompson et al., 2000, p. 336)
Following this, it is not suffice for successful social entrepreneurs to possess good intentions (as
entailed in the morally inclined discourse discussed above). In particular, the addition of ‘simply’
fosters the impression that the intention of doing good is not only insufficient, but that the
intention to do good may even be the most facile part of the whole endeavor. The motive of doing
well seems so self-evident and pre-ordained that it does not request any further consideration.
Others may be sound leaders of some particular venture or organisation, but, lacking vision and
charisma, they will never behave in a truly entrepreneurial manner. Such leaders may, for
example, lack the courage to take the risks (an issue of temperament) to create growth.
(Thompson et al., 2000, p. 332)
Within this extract it becomes even more evident how the individualistic enunciation of social
entrepreneurs delimits the subject matter from ‘sound leaders’. By invoking ‘temperament’ it is
implied that social entrepreneurship is deemed possible only through the possession of certain
innate capabilities. Contained therein is the idea that the success of social entrepreneurs is bound
to pre-determined (i.e. genetically defined) capacities. Hence, ascribing to social entrepreneurs
prestigious attributes such as ‘charisma’ or ‘the courage to take risks’ (both qualities which are
conceived as being in short supply) makes it a matter of rare individuals, of ‘champions’ that
sustain their social mission despite upcoming obstacles. In effect, the image of the heroic
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individual makes us believe that social entrepreneurs are ‘sovereign and self-determining beings’
(Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996), and, owing to their grandiose successes, we get to see that social
entrepreneurs are in fact indispensable for rebalancing the maladjustment of current societies.
Maleness
Having pointed out that the individualist discourse works by endowing social entrepreneurs with
extraordinary personality traits, it will be shown in the ensuing paragraph that certain texts
operate upon a gender bias which favors a male perception.
60
Social entrepreneurs display innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking propensity in their key
decision making. (Mort et al., 2003, p. 82)
Examining this statement by Mort et al., we first find a seemingly uncontentious notion of ‘risk
taking’ and ‘proactiveness’. While taking into consideration characteristics being employed in
other texts such as ‘tolerance for insecurity’, ‘independence, ‘determination’, ‘self-confidence’,
’logic’, etc., it becomes increasingly evident that we are entrenched in a stereotypically male
narrative. Despite the fact that the gender of social entrepreneurs is mostly not made explicit,
such texts, through the employment of male-associated personality traits, nevertheless succeed in
erecting an impression of maleness. The male identity script thereby achieves, seemingly
unproblematically, to accentuate male characteristics as a prerequisite for successful social
entrepreneurship. Examined from an ideological vantage point, individualist discourse leads to a
gendered division of social entrepreneurs, whereby discourse works to naturalize male qualities
and to advocate a demand for free spirit, detachment and rationality. Evidently, the hierarchy
works at the expense of those practices and values traditionally attributed to the female domain
such as housework, childbirth, child-care, etc. Such texts, by implication, operate to convince us
that these latter qualities obviously do not generate any entrepreneurial spark.
Following from these observations, it seems pertinent to claim that models of social
entrepreneurship that are based on an individualist discourse are normative and exclusive in that
they marginalize individuals, such as women or ordinary people, who do not comply with the
60
Notice that one finds in the realm of critical entrepreneurship research an abundance of texts highlighting that the
entrepreneur gets established as essentially more masculine than feminine (e.g. Holquist & Sundin, 1988;
Mirchandani; 1999).
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default standards. Accordingly, these particular images contribute to and reinforce the conviction
that the sidelined subjects, that is, the anonymous others, have psychological and gender
characteristics which inhibit social entrepreneurial development.
Looming Stalemate?
We live in this ‘reality’ and this ‘reality’ lives with/in us; but so ‘obvious’ is this reality that it
does not arouse much curiosity and/or debate. (Prasad, 1997, p. 91)
On the face of it, the discourses examined in the previous deconstructive reading mimic research
that has been conducted in the realm of management, marketing, entrepreneurship, and
organization science more generally. Contrary to my rhetorical allegation that what I said is
important and worth heeding, I thus anticipate being accused of having served old wine in new
bottles. However, it is important to recognize that this sense of déjà vu – including its
(potentially) associated boredom – is equally to be taken as a revealing reflection of the status
quo of social entrepreneurship research. In fact, the prevailing ‘objectification of discourse’
(Daston, 1992), in my opinion, provides no reason for staging a party. Giving the nascent state of
social entrepreneurship research, I feel even more compelled to pose a question regarding the
ceaseless perpetuation of management and economic discourses and to instigate new
representations, language games and criteria for our future research. However, there can be no
question here of offering exhaustive and definitive suggestions for advancing the field of social
entrepreneurship. What I would like to propose, however fragmentary and allusive, as a ‘way out’
in the ensuing paragraphs follows three distinct, though closely related lines of arguing: first, I
will stake out a space for additional reflective, and more specifically deconstructive, studies.
Second, some recent developments in entrepreneurship research will be highlighted as potential
sources for social entrepreneurship’s semantic multiplication. And third, I will hail a paralogical
grounding of social entrepreneurship through the employment of styles of writing so far
unfamiliar to scholarly representation.
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Infinite Deconstructive Practice
61
Departing from the assumption that the ‘invisibility’ of our commonsense rhetorically endows
our mindscape with truth-value, my investigation was set up to illustrate how and in what ways
social entrepreneurship becomes ‘black boxed’ (Law, 1994), or disguised in its undecidable
complexity. My deconstructive reading was therefore put forward to dismantle the black boxes
that render social entrepreneurship incontestable, and, therefore, to disrupt some of discourse’s
shiny surface aesthetics. In other words, to see the ordinary with a fresh vision, we first have to
make it ‘extraordinary’ and ‘free ourselves of normalized ways of thinking that blind us to the
strangeness of the familiar’ (Cooper & Morgan, 1988, p. 101). In line with Derrida (2001) who
claims for deconstruction a central position in the ‘university of tomorrow’, I would like to spur
us to see deconstructive and/or rhetorical readings
62
not as something to be avoided or eliminated,
but as tactical devices which bear the potential to bring forward a vision of social
entrepreneurship that no longer dispenses unclouded optimism but that equally radiates ironic
antagonism. As critical readings overturn texts’ taken-for-granted meanings and thereby initiate a
de-objectification of social entrepreneurship we get to create an empty space (Steyaert, 2002), or
a discursive springboard, on the basis of which we get to see the ‘human possibilities’ of social
entrepreneurship instead of its ‘settled certainties’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 26).
63
As deconstruction can never be achieved in any definitive sense (cf. Chapter 5), it would
be a fallacy to believe that prevailing social entrepreneurship texts, and their underlying premises
have been dismantled and overcome. Instead, I concede that we are far from beyond the present
ideologies, which we probably never will be, and that what is needed is a ‘practical politics of the
open end’ (Spivak, 1990, p. 105), that is, the relentless and persistent undoing of the taken for
granted and the oblivious supplement upon which they are based. Following Derrida, ‘we must
join forces to exert pressure and organize ripostes, and we must do so on an international scale
and according to new modalities, though always while analyzing and discussing the very
foundations of our responsibility, its discourses, its heritage, and its axioms’ (Derrida, 2003, p.
61
Notice that this argument will be extended and appropriated to the context of the business school in Chapter 5.
62
In a readable interview, Gayatri Spivak outlines the interrelatedness of these two analytic endeavors (cf. Sipiora &
Atwill, 1990).
63
Apparently, critical discursive readings get to fulfill a political and ethical function in social entrepreneurship
research in that they, by dismantling unexamined assumptions and by making accepted concepts strange, enable
‘human beings to transcend the conventional and create new approaches and policies’ (Gusfield, 1976, p. 32).
183
126). Deconstructive practice can, against all denunciation, do justice
64
since it effectuates a
decoupling from our scholarly heritage and especially its concealed political consequences
65
(Derrida, 1966). Such analysis, I contend, cannot be postponed with regard to social
entrepreneurship as it enables an irrevocable concern for indeterminacy, and, by implication, for
resistance to what Derrida termed ‘exhaustive accounts’. Yet, only if we take upon us this
painstaking, and infinite, task might there emerge a chance to change the rules of prevailing
language games and thus to reformulate a new grounding for social entrepreneurship. Hence, as I
conceive of deconstruction as a pivotal measure for countermanding not only prevailing
interpretations of entrepreneurship but also as a reflective means in business/management
education, the reader will find in the third part of the thesis a chapter which elaborates how
Derrida, respectively his deconstructive inheritance, could make a valuable contribution for the
‘de-McDonaldization’ of the business school of the future (cf. Chapter 1).
Inheriting the Other Entrepreneurship
Having mentioned the impression of déjà vu being elicited through the above deconstructive
reading, we are foremost reminded of our legacy in respect to entrepreneurship research. Despite
having come somewhat disenchanted by the observation that the sign ‘social’ is appropriated in a
way that it gets to allude to progressive development and technical rationality or to expert
knowledge and individualism, I would nevertheless, or even more so, like to conjure up some
anachronistic movements in entrepreneurship research. To this end, I opt to confront the current
impasse of social entrepreneurship writing by recommending especially, but not exclusively, a
careful reading of the texts by Steyaert and Katz (2004) as well as Hjorth and Steyaert (2003)
who have formulated both cogent treatises of the field’s foreclosure as well as lines of flight for
subverting the prevailing discourse. Concerning the issue of foreclosure, Hjorth (2005), Hjorth
and Steyaert (2003), Steyaert (2000), Steyaert and Katz (2004) thoroughly pinpoint that academic
texts reveal a clear bias towards construing entrepreneurship on the background of management
theory and business administration. In that respect, I feel much sympathy with Hjorth’s (2003)
64
Since Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ (1992), which Dews (1995) has codified as his ‘ethical turn’, Derrida related his
deconstructive strategy to issues of, for instance, justice and law. Through a cogent deconstruction of prevailing legal
systems, Derrida at the same time decoupled justice from law while introducing a undeconstructible ideal of justice
which is not founded on violence. In opposition to existing legal systems, genuine justice, as Derrida pinpoints, is the
very movement of deconstruction.
65
By means of deconstructing the binary oppositions, which hold together a respective structure, one simultaneously
destabilizes the entire structure or, following Derrida, puts its elements into play.
184
estimate that the dominant representations of entrepreneurship mark a clear limit to our
understanding of entrepreneurship as social creativity. Through Hjorth (2005) we further get
reminded that by envisioning entrepreneurship as well as the entrepreneur as events of ‘controlled
creativity’ and ‘economic managerialism’, metaphors of ludens (playing), narrans (storytelling),
and traditionalis (tradition) are crudely put aside. Regarding this kind of thematic enrichment, the
two texts by Steyaert and Katz (2004) and Hjorth and Steyaert (2003) provide us with additional
inspirations concerning how, in other words through what perspectives and in what dimensions,
the matter of social entrepreneurship prospectively could, or better should be conceptualized.
However, as with deconstruction, the task of semantic opening and multiplication (which
all of the above articles instigate) is never completed but needs untiring repetition not only in
relation to entrepreneurship (where it only has started) but equally well regarding the matter of
social entrepreneurship. It is thus imperative to remind ourselves that we have to insert a question
regarding what social entrepreneurship, and especially the epithet ‘social’ is, respectively ought
to be. While this latter issue will be treated further down, I deem important to emphasize that
Steyaert, Hjorth and Katz all contribute to unhitching entrepreneurship from its performative
enunciation. In particular, by prescribing multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic
experimentation, and in calling for comprehending entrepreneurship in its everydayness,
playfulness, as well as political, cultural, ecological and societal accentuation, the authors make a
pivotal plea for paralogical groundings, i.e. opportunities for innovative enunciations (Brugger,
2001) where interpretations beyond homo economicus and technical rationality become possible.
To claim new groundings of social entrepreneurship, it is thus not only necessary to instill new
contents and theoretical trajectories
66
but also to reflect upon new forms of expressions and
representation. Instead of legitimizing knowledge of social entrepreneurship according to whether
it can be commoditized and thus made saleable,
67
we must seek criteria that intensify our
relationship to the difference that is distinctive about social entrepreneurship. These possibilities
shall be elaborated in the following sections.
66
As this would in itself not warrant the circumvention of performativity.
67
Which is one of the prevailing objectives of contemporary business schools.
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Paralogy and Style
Derrida (1976) has coined the term ‘logocentrism’ to depict philosophy’s insolence in explaining
what words and concepts really mean. The assumption that meaning can be grasped by
philosophical discourse unsullied by the imprecision of metaphors is, following Derrida, naive, as
the signifiers of language systems cannot refer to any transcendental signified. In line with
Derrida’s elaboration of the state of philosophy, Czarniawska (2004) has equally made clear that
our heritage as organization scholars not only hinders us from seeing fiction, narratives of the
self, performance science, polyvocal texts, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire,
visual presentations, and mixed genres (Hardy & Clegg, 1997) as legitimate forms of knowledge
but above all demands that the questions of knowledge status and legitimization remains
unexamined. Hence, the selective admission of scientific discourse, or the invocation of absolute
conditions of discourse, deny difference and multiplicity in respect to academic enunciation. Such
a delimitation of ways of thinking and talking is, according to Lyotard (1984), fascist
68
as it
enables the exemption of alternative narratives.
69
Given the totalizing inclination of prevailing
metanarratives, what seems needed are new criteria for judging knowledge. Regarding the
appraisal of the status quo of social entrepreneurship it is again Lyotard who makes us aware that
a large degree of scientific knowledge is legitimated either by invoking truth (in the form of
metanarratives) or performativity. In contrast to those hegemonic codes, Lyotard puts forward an
ontological position which stresses that the world is composed of events which give rise to
multiple interpretations (or small narratives
70
). In his attempt to formulate an alternative
legitimizing principle Lyotard puts forward ‘paralogy’
71
as the kind of movement that seeks new
meaning in excluded language games. Lyotard’s paralogy thus undermines the determinism
aspired to by the two former principles and instead incites a search for instabilities and anomalies
yet recognized.
72
Heeding paralogy’s concern for pluralism and diversity, it is of central
importance and utterly timely to consider the issue of style and its interrelation with knowledge of
social entrepreneurship. In other words, to advocate the polysemia of the signifier social
68
In ‘The Differend’ Lyotard (1988) took a forceful stance by illustrating the terror of hegemonic forms of speech on
behalf of Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jews.
69
Michel Serres (1997) is equally scathing in his appraisal of the state of research, describing current university
curricula – and especially their enforcing of conformity, rules and norms – as intellectual terrorism which despise
creativity and invention.
70
In Lyotard’s (1984) view the little narratives (must) become the ‘quintessential form of imaginative invention,
most particularly in science’ (p. 60).
71
Which is not to be mistaken as ‘false reasoning’.
72
Paralogical groundings, following Lyotard, warrant justice by way of counteracting excluded language games.
186
entrepreneurship and to detain its performative legitimization, I would like to search for
paralogical groundings through writing styles that feature a sensitivity towards the uniqueness of
social entrepreneurial endeavors and thereby sidestep the exclusionary ‘terror’ of univocal
readings.
As outlined by Game and Metcalfe (1996), the practice of writing is actively involved in
the production (and not just with mimicking representation) of knowledge as a result of which
(academic) writing becomes an act of cultural production. It follows from Game and Metcalfe’s
observation that how we are expected to write irrevocably affects what we can write about.
Consequently, it might be helpful to temporarily sidestep the distinction between science and
non-science and instead instigate a discussion of style and representational practice. Hence, while
the kinds of language or discourse we employ in making sense of social entrepreneurship are not
reducible to one another (Lyotard, 1988) we get to see that by writing in different ways, each
style can bring to the fore a fresh perspective on the phenomenon being studied. While I have
tried to liberate us from the myth that there exists such a thing as ‘getting it right’ (Barthes,
1986), I would like to advocate the introduction of ‘breaching’ (van Maanen, 1995), or
experimentation with style in order to learn about social entrepreneurship what is unknowable,
unimaginable, using prescribed writing formats. In accordance therewith, we are called upon to
transcend existing boundaries between disciplinary fortresses and to invent new connections for
the sake of understanding social entrepreneurship differently. Grounding the prospective writing
of social entrepreneurship in such a ‘third place’ (Huyghe, 1993) will inspire ‘experimenting’
with varieties of writing which employ language not only to inform but equally to surprise and to
evoke (Lacan, 1977); a language which, by virtue of its tropes, arouses ‘imaginative play’
(Bruner, 1986, p. 4). In the sense of a rhetorical refolding, the function of new styles and
rhetorical tropes is to open the field of social entrepreneurship towards the range of possibilities
that a text can refer to. Having located in the field of social entrepreneurship a need for ‘cool’
73
texts (Linstead, 2003), i.e. texts that ‘recruit the reader’s imagination – that enlist him in the
performance of meaning under the guidance of the texts’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 25), I hope for stories
73
‘Hot’ and ‘cool’ are taken to refer to the level of definition of a particular media performance. It is thereby the cool
performance, i.e. the soft, shadowy, blurred, and interchangeable, which evokes (and requires) more involvement on
behalf of the audience.
187
of social entrepreneurship which appeal to thinking outside of rational order and prescriptive
rhetoric, and which make us hear the ‘noise’
74
that might generate novel understandings.
Aporia, Undecidability and Ethics
75
As the previous deconstructive reading has revealed, staging the neologism ‘social
entrepreneurship’ does not necessarily mean that one has bypassed economic discourse. On the
contrary, the ostensible shift towards the social dimension of entrepreneurship might arguably
conceal how deeply inscribed exchange relations still are. Quite ironically, while social
entrepreneurship is heralded as a moral actor and social benefactor, I have pinpointed that its
economic calculus nevertheless reverberates, in fact quite fiercely. In keen contrast to this,
paralogy signifies not only a break with established theories and modes of representation but
simultaneously incepts a political move by enabling difference in the face of discourse’s
‘economic energy’ (Steyaert & Katz, 2004, p. 188). Parology’s avowed focus on instabilities and
the unknown thus directs Lyotard’s endeavor away from prescriptive, calculative, or consensual
knowledge to the point of immanent instabilities. If we take serious Lyotard’s call to investigate
incommensurabilities, undecidables, conditions of incomplete information, and paradoxes, I
irrevocably sense revealing associations with Jacques Derrida. In reverting to Derrida, it is
therefore of particular importance to see that Derrida, within his latter work, has shifted ground
onto the terrain of ethics. In what has been hailed as a turn towards ethics (cf. Dews, 1995),
76
Derrida interrogated the aporetic, i.e. paradoxical nature of issues such as democracy, law,
friendship, hospitality, the gift, etc. Derrida has thereby conjured up a sensitivity towards the
undecidable nature of particular situations, to their ‘experience of the impossible’ (Jones, 2003b,
p. 229).
77
In conjunction with social entrepreneurship, the previous deconstructive reading has
revealed that a fair number of texts operate with an economic logic. Furthermore, epitomized
through the quest for technical knowledge and best business practices, those texts prescribe the
74
For Serres (1995), noise is the medium for creative ambiguity. Whereas the concept at first glance might appear in
the sense of an interruption it can, following Serres, actually lead to a new order.
75
Notice that an extended elaboration of the social/ethical aspect of entrepreneurship will be imparted in the last part
of the thesis (cf. Chapter 7).
76
However, as Jones (2003b) warns us, it is not the case that Derrida made deconstruction ethical, but that he
(deconstructively) reflected on the meaning of notions as, for instance, ‘justice’ and ‘law’.
77
What I have tried to show with respect to social entrepreneurship is that however ‘logocentric’ a particular sign
might appear, close inspection will irrevocable reveal its paradoxical grounding by virtue of which its solid standing
gets undermined.
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conduct of social entrepreneurship in a programmable and predictable manner. By implication,
social entrepreneurship becomes an endeavor that relies on the application of pre-ordained rules.
Yet, as Derrida contends, such programmable applications of rules do not require a decision and
thus do not represent an act of responsibility. Derrida made clear that ‘there would be no
decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and thus no
responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 66). It is thus
through Derrida that we get to see that the notion of undecidability accentuates the infinite task of
responsibility and, by implication thereof, that prevailing images of social entrepreneurship
ignore the point that a decision which didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not
be a free decision. Obviously, the notion of undecidability is diametrically opposed to the idea of
performativity and pre-ordained rules in that it indicates that a decision is a ‘moment of madness’
that must move beyond rationality and calculative reasoning.
78
By extension to social
entrepreneurship, we are thus reminded that a decision, to be a decision, must transgress the
economic or otherwise calculative rationale, and thereby stretch out to that which is outside of the
subject’s control. Arguably, a conceptualization which takes seriously the aporetic feature of
responsibility, namely that ‘ethics and politics … start with an undecidability’ (Derrida, 1999, p.
66), does not lend itself to the formulation of ready-made rules. In somewhat stark opposition to
the mainstream writing on social entrepreneurship and taking recourse to Derrida’s ingenious
‘Politics of Friendship’ (1997), we are thus impelled to concede that to be(come) social, social
entrepreneurship must be able to exceed the economic, respectively performative circles of input-
output relations.
If we are willing to envision social entrepreneurship in relation to societal and cultural
creation, the question is what we conceive of as moral or ethical and what kind of relations we
thereby endorse, for instance, between social entrepreneurs and its other (i.e. the silent majority
of help recipients, jobless, handicapped, underprivileged, or beneficiaries more generally). While
ethics, responsibility and justice have largely escaped the attention of organization studies (cf.
Jones, 2003; 2003b), I would like to conjure up these perspectives for our prospective writing on
the matter of social entrepreneurship. Derrida’s deliberations thereby seem apposite in respect to
social entrepreneurship as the matter has been envisioned by a sizeable number of scholars as a
moral or social deed (e.g. Pearce, 1994; Catford, 1998; Dees, 1998; Guclu et al., 2002; Thompson
78
As circumscribed in relation to ‘The Gift of Death’ (Derrida, 1995), a decision irrevocably requires a courageous
‘leap of faith’ beyond the facts at hand.
189
et al., 2002). Derrida, I believe, is indispensable when it comes to deliberating about justice and
ethics beyond the boundaries of (performative) prescriptions. First of all, it is implied through
Derrida that the moment social entrepreneurship becomes performative about ethics, that is, a
matter of strategic rules, the focus shifts from respecting the other to caring about oneself. It
follows therefore that ethics cannot be commanded a priori (in the sense of ‘before the act’) and
once and for all. Instead, justice and ethics need to be judged in the moments of their inception,
that is, against the background of a specific event between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’. The ethics of
social entrepreneurship thus always has to be created anew, becoming social. Hence, in order to
decouple social entrepreneurship from its conditional, performative exegesis, it appears vital to
imagine social entrepreneurship as an act that is addressed to the other, devoid of any conditional
reciprocity looming in the background. Whereas the clutches of economic calculation
undoubtedly still exert a strong hold on academics’ perceptions of social entrepreneurship, I
nevertheless hope that Derrida’s cogent deliberations can lead us to envision the ‘social’ not as an
instrumental, i.e. calculable, epithet of entrepreneurship, but as the expression of genuine
openness towards otherness. On account of this, the ‘social’ of social entrepreneurship shall be
elevated above the level of a ‘supplement’ (Derrida, 1976), or nice little ‘extra’ of
entrepreneurship through which they (retroactively) legitimize their practices, to become an
unconditional hailing of difference, regardless of potentially negative consequences that might
derive there from.
Postscript
When a scientist describes something that no one has ever seen, the description may pass for
purely fictional, and it is in a way, since the reality meant by the discourse will come into
being only if names are attached to effects, and these effects exist only inasmuch as new
discourses can be grafted onto them. Well, this … changes the world. (Lyotard &
Thébaud, 1985, p. 51)
In light of the previous investigation, a last question remains; namely whether or not practicing
social entrepreneurs will be affected by academic discourse. It is undoubted that discourse can
have an influence on the conduct or the ‘conduct of conduct’ of people (Foucault, 1991), and as I
190
have mentioned before, the pervasiveness of a specific discourse chiefly rests on its material and
non-material inscriptions into everyday practices. However, in view of the claim that the impetus
of discourse is directly related with its degree of codification and naturalization, it would
nevertheless be otiose to postulate a linear and hierarchical influence between the academic
discourse of social entrepreneurship and its use by practitioners of social enterprises. Having said
that, our initial question remains important, since it reflects the general discussion of whether or
not theory has any bearing on practice. Thus, to gain a sense of how academic writing might
inform the conduct of social entrepreneurs and/or enterprises, it first seems helpful to recall that
the translation from ‘theory’ to ‘practice’
79
is largely contingent on the degree of knowledge’s
rationalization (Lemke, 2002). According to Foucault (1991b), one ‘isn’t assessing things in
terms of an absolute against which they could be evaluated as constituting more or less perfect
forms of rationality, but rather examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in
practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them, because it’s true that
‘practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality’ (p. 79). It follows from this that if
texts on social entrepreneurship are supposed to work (i.e. have an effect on practitioners),
practitioners must construe them as ‘rational’ (Lemke, 2002). In other words, academic
knowledge of social entrepreneurship can only be extended beyond the confines of its production
and implemented in the realm of practice if it becomes part of a ‘general politics’ of truth
(Foucault, 1980). Foucault (1984), among others, made clear that the legitimization of knowledge
as truth is notably a function of ‘a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation,
distribution, circulation, and operation of statements’ (p. 74). It is therefore essential to recall that
the system of education in general and universities in particular hold a pivotal position in
determining what is widely perceived as right or wrong (Lyotard, 1984; cf. also Chapter 1). In
view of Foucault’s (1984) assertion that truth ‘is centred on the form of scientific discourse and
the institutions which produce it’ (p. 73), this in turn permits the surmise that business schools
might at least have some voice in (co-) determining the ‘agenda’ of practicing social
entrepreneurs. That is, if we bear in mind one of the main findings of Chapter 1, namely that
academic scholars work in concert with political bodies, foundations, philanthropies, businesses,
etc. to establish particular representations of social entrepreneurship, and if we are willing to
accept that these representations might have a distinct bearing on the rationalities which inform
79
A distinction which is evidently problematic and which I will partly scrutinize with reference to Derrida’s
deconstructive work (cf. Chapter 5).
191
the realm of practice, it can at least be speculated that academic discourses of social
entrepreneurship will to some extent influence practitioners’ everyday conduct. Again, this is not
to say that we can draw definitive conclusions regarding whether and to what extent social
entrepreneurs are subjected to particular (i.e. academically produced) codes of (self-) regulation.
If such a link between theory and practice is assumed, however, there are good reasons to concur
with Foucault (1984) who made clear that the ‘essential political problem for the intellectual is
not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own
scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of
constituting a new politics of truth’ (p. 74). Although I perfectly agree that it is necessary to
constantly question the political, economic and institutional regimes which produce the truth of
social entrepreneurship and, more fundamentally, to critically reflect on the truth regimes
produced by academia, I would like to point out that it is the explicit objective of Chapter 7 to
perform this task and hence to produce a different, i.e. non-economic, understanding of social
entrepreneurship. Before doing so, however, I will, in the next chapter, discuss in more detail
whether there is some continuity between the kinds of knowledge we have discussed in the
context of academic writing and the interpretive practices of people working in the sphere of
social practice. Since I deem this question relevant not just in theoretical terms, I will carry out a
discourse analysis of the speech patterns employed by practitioners working in the realm of Third
World development so as to grapple with the question of whether or not academic discourses of
social entrepreneurship are reflected in their stories.
192
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202
***
Part II
203
‘Development Work: New Entrepreneurialism?’
***
We are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses,
and to the task of hearing what has already been said. (Foucault, 1973, p. xvi)
Given that the previous two chapters have focused on social entrepreneurship or, more
precisely, on its signification in business school teaching and research, it might appear
somewhat odd or at least surprising to announce an investigation of Swiss non-governmental
organizations (hereon referred to as NGO) and development aid. This transition, however, is
not as counter-intuitive as it might appear at first sight and I would like to provide a brief
commentary and outlook upfront so as to illuminate how this chapter relates the topics of
development aid and entrepreneurship. It must be mentioned at the outset that the ensuing
discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk is in fact centered around an interest in (social)
entrepreneurship insofar as it endeavors to show – on the basis of a brief genealogical sketch
of the ‘development aid complex’
80
– that entrepreneurship has become the latest code, if not
slogan (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), for thinking about development aid and most notably for
envisaging means for leveraging stagnating economies in Third World countries (Ranking,
2001). This insight is both revealing and relevant since it prompts the question whether the
discourse of entrepreneurship, as currently promoted through policy papers and speeches of,
for instance, the World Bank and the United Nations, has already gained access to the realm
of development NGOs. It can be reasonably claimed that development aid currently finds
itself in a condition of ‘interregnum’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004) where the status of its agents
(e.g. World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, southern and northern
NGOs, national development agencies, etc.) has become the object of negotiation. The point
to be stressed, therefore, is that – despite the utter complexity and elusiveness of these recent
80
A neologism which I created in accordance with Rose’s (1985) notion of ‘psy-complex’, that is, the psychology
complex.
204
changes – there is an identifiable trend to envisage development NGOs through the lexis of
business and management. Hence, whereas entrepreneurship discourse can as yet only be
construed as a rather juvenile, minor sign in the governance of Third World development, it
is nonetheless conspicuous that notions such as ‘results-based management’, ‘inputs’,
‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ (cf. Murphy, 2000) have crept into the doxa of development
NGOs which reveals, among other things, that the idea of so-called ‘new managerialism’ is
gaining ground. Notwithstanding the observation that infrastructural development has relied
on economic premises for a long time (i.e. since its formulation in post-WWII politics), the
current ‘new public management revolution’ (Desai & Imrie, 1998) is nevertheless to be seen
as rather momentous, since it is characterized by a decisively new understanding of
development aid and work-based subjectivity. It is therefore beyond doubt that the move
towards ‘managerialism’, or ‘enterprise culture’ (du Gay, 1996; cf. also 1991; 1994; 2000;
2000b; 2003; 2004), is endemic for development work, and one must not forget that
comparable shifts have already been described with respect to, for instance, the third (non-
profit) sector (Rose, 2000) or in relation to public administration (Miller & Rose, 1990; du
Gay, 2003; cf. also Chapter 2). However, if one accepts that these ‘regimes of truth’ have
been unprecedented in the governance or governmentality (Foucault, 1991; cf. also Chapters
1 & 6) of Third World development, it becomes legitimate, if not urgent, to raise the question
of ‘interpellation’ (Althusser, 1971) so as to ask whether NGO practitioners are forced to
adopt the principles of sound management to both their work and their ‘self-narration’
(Gergen, 1994). Although the following investigation does not propose to claim that ‘new
managerialism’ possesses the power to determine, in a strict sense, the production of work-
based subjectivity (Jones & Spicer, 2005; Perren & Jennings, 2005), it must nevertheless be
anticipated that these novel rationalities herald an epoch-based re-fashioning of development
aid and most notably of what it means to be an NGO practitioner. With this in mind, the
following investigation brings together entrepreneurship and development aid in order to ask
whether NGO practitioners are prone to adopt the logics of economic conduct (Murphy,
2000) and thereby come to further its cause ‘through their own volition’ (cf. du Gay, 1996).
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References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster. London:
Monthly Review.
Derrida, J. (1966). Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. In Writing
and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge.
du Gay, P. (1991). Enterprise Culture and the Ideology of Excellence. New Formations, 13, 45 –
61.
du Gay, P. (1994). Making up Managers: Bureaucracy, Enterprise and the Liberal Art of
Separation. British Journal of Sociology, 45, 655 – 74.
du Gay, P. (1996) Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
du Gay, P. (2000). Enterprise and Its Futures: A Response to Fournier and Grey. Organization, 7,
165 – 183.
du Gay, P. (2000b). In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics. London: Sage.
du Gay, P. (2003). The Tyranny of the Epochal: Change, Epochalism and Organizational Reform.
Organization, 10, 663 – 684.
du Gay, P. (2004). Against “Enterprise” (but not against “enterprise”, for that would make no
sense). Organization, 11, 37 – 57.
Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M.
S. Smith. London: Tavistock.
Jones, C. & Spicer, A. (2005). The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship. Organization, 12, 223 –
246.
Lyotard, J. F. & Thébaud, J. L. (1985). Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Perren, L. & Jennings, P. L. (2005). Government Discourses on Entrepreneurship: Issues of
Legitimization, Subjugation, and Power. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 29, 173
– 184.
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3
***
‘Social, or Economic, That’s the Question … ’
On Discursive Ambivalence and Hybridity in Development Talk of NGO
Practitioners
Synopsis
… to attempt explanations without reference to the meanings and values held by actors, and
without regard to their underpinning symbolic codes, is to provide a very thin account of
reality. (Freeman & Rustin, 1999, p 18)
Importantly, the question delineated before, that is, ‘has entrepreneurship discourse already
become an accepted ‘regime of truth’ in the realm of Swiss development NGOs?’, is only
one in a series of issues that will be addressed through the discursive investigation of
practitioners’ talk. Given that this inquiry is not ‘only’ concerned with entrepreneurship, it is
through the present synopsis that I will disclose the ‘deeper’ layers of the present chapter. As
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tangentially alluded to before, the ensuing discourse analyses approach the issue of
contemporary development work in the context of Swiss NGOs. Based on a sample of thirty
interviews with practitioners from twelve Swiss developmental NGOs, the primary objective
is to inquire how people talk about Third World development or, in concrete terms, how they
employ language so as to form particular versions of the subject matter. Based on the
fundamental assumption that language is constitutive, the investigation departs from a
discursive understanding of social reality where language is not treated as a mirror of reality
(which tells us, in a precise sense, how things really are; Potter, 1996), but as a social
practice by means of which reality is actively created. By analogy with Foucault’s (1972)
contention that ‘discourse forms the objects of which its speaks’ (p. 49), the question probed
through Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) discourse analytic account is what linguistic resources
NGO practitioners have at their disposal for rendering development intelligible and
persuasive and how they use language to present themselves as reasonable and moral human
beings. Assuming that NGO practitioner’s conceptualization of their professional activities
does not occur in a vacuum but rather relies on and refers to a rich and volatile history
(Nietzsche, 1986), the investigation will first shed some light on the project of ‘development
aid’ or, more precisely, on its most salient ‘truths’. The logic behind this history of the
discursive construction of development aid (from the time of its inception in post-WWII
politics until the present day) is that only by gaining a, however preliminary, understanding
of the shifts and ruptures that have taken place with respect to development aid’s
commonsensical assumptions and premises will it be possible to construe NGO practitioners’
ephemeral everyday realities (Berger & Luckman, 1966) against the more stabilized and
reified forms of historically, culturally, politically, etc. conditioned knowledge. As a first
step towards this end, I will approach the question ‘from behind’, that is, by illustrating the
critical reception of Third World development through postcolonial theory. Whereas my
analytical focus is on critical appraisals of development discourse (e.g. Sachs, 1992; Escobar,
1995), the aim will be to scrutinize the widely held belief (among postcolonial scholars) that
the ‘development complex’ is to be seen as a sovereign (western) institution that exerts its
influence through the application of hierarchical power. The elaboration thereby aims,
among other things, to debunk as untenable both the ‘colonial metaphor’, i.e. the assertion by
postcolonial scholars that post-WWII politics represents the mere continuation of colonial
order by novel means, and the assumption that development aid is exclusively dictated and
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enforced by western (i.e. mainly US) institutions. To clear the ground, so to speak, I will cite
selected works of Foucault (e.g. 1978) so as to argue that the oppositional rhetoric of
postcolonial development literature, by virtue of which the West is constantly pitted against
‘the rest’, should be replaced with a perspective that takes into consideration, first, that
development aid relies on both northern and southern agents and institutional arrangements
and, second, that power is not possessed by any identifiable institution (or person). In
concrete terms, using Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ to make the point, I will argue that
the development apparatus works through a bio-political, rather than a sovereign, modality of
power which relies not on the application of sheer force and domination, but rather on the
mobilization of subjects, institutions and nation states. This mobilization in turn enables the
collective optimization of living conditions in the Third World (Brigg, 2002).
On the face of it, the ensuing genealogy highlights the bio-political modus operandi
of the development apparatus in order to show how development discourse has emerged
from and constantly been complemented by a heterogeneous collective of institutions.
Moreover, in accordance with Sachs’ (1992) contention that the term ‘development’ is to be
seen as an ‘amoeba-like concept’, the genealogy also aims at delineating both the continuity
as well as the changes of the meaning of ‘development’. Focusing upon the construction of
development through, for instance, US presidential lectures, United Nations declarations,
World Bank policy statements, etc., the chief aim will be to illuminate the strategic
enunciation (de Certeau, 1984) of development aid. That is to say that I will partly restrict the
analytic focus of the first part of the chapter to political (and, to some lesser degree,
academic) discourse so as to highlight the ‘epistemic community’ (Haas, 1989) which has
been said to exercise a panoptic function within the development apparatus (Brigg, 2002).
Although the overall objective of this investigation is to bring to the forefront that
development discourse has witnessed dramatic changes, or ‘ruptures’ to use Derrida’s (1966)
terms, this chapter also tries to highlight that development, after an initial period of utter
optimism, has periodically and increasingly been problematized in terms of its declared
objective: the mitigation of poverty and the counteracting of the inequality between the north
and the south, between the so-called First and the Third World (Escobar, 1995). I will thus
begin my elaboration by first illuminating how the idea of development has been construed
in relation to conceptual narratives (Somers, 1994) such as, for instance, ‘basic human needs’
approaches, structural adjustment theories, as well as sustainable development or
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globalization discourse. The objective, then, is to show that the different discourses on
development, despite engendering different meanings of the subject matter, did not actually
replace each other, but rather refined and extended existing rationalities, and hence
broadened the horizon and scope of the development apparatus. Accordingly, I will argue
that the recurring critique and problematization of development aid did not bring about its
general (or partial) demise, but instead stimulated a continuous appropriation and re-
negotiation of the field’s canon. Thus shedding light on both the continuities and
discontinuities of the different development rationalities, my prime emphasis will be to
uncover the role economic theory has played in development discourse and, most
importantly, how the ‘market’ has been positioned in the different ‘truth regimes’ vis-à-vis
the social and ecological realm.
In a second step, I will elaborate on the moral, political and economic space NGOs
have come to occupy in the broader development apparatus. I will endeavor to show that the
general problematization of the development discourse has stimulated, though with some
delay, a ‘crisis of legitimization’ of development NGOs. To illustrate how the highs and lows
(or, to put it bluntly, rise and fall) of development NGOs have come about, I will claim that
the heyday of development NGOs during the 1980s until the mid-1990s was intimately
related with Thatcherism and in particular with the conviction that, first, NGOs were better
able to address the needs of Third World subjects and countries than government
organizations and, second, that these institutions were more flexible and efficient than
government-lead aid initiatives. In reflecting on the initial popularity and recent discredit of
NGOs, I will show that both the positive and negative evaluation of NGOs is inextricably
related to the juxtaposition of the third or voluntary sector with the state. In concrete terms,
whereas the early years of development aid were dominated by the belief that northern
governments must act as prime service providers in Third World countries, NGOs were
envisaged as essential substitutes of the state during the oil crisis in the 1970s and the parallel
rise of neo-liberalism (Kajese, 1987). This shift, as I will discuss, not only led to a broader
acceptance of the voluntary sector and hence to a virtual explosion of development NGOs,
but also engendered the contention that development must not be seen as a nationally but as a
globally managed project. A last shift, which occurred somewhere towards the middle of the
1990s, led to a situation where development NGOs were faced with mounting challenges.
This crisis of legitimization, as I will argue, has thus for the most part been the result of the
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charge that NGOs neither fostered global economic participation and emancipation of the
southern hemisphere nor made an effective contribution to mitigating poverty. In view of the
problematization of development NGOs in both political and social terms, I will argue that
the partial loss of their former credibility is hardly surprising. On the other hand, the general
view of NGOs has also stimulated a variety of initiatives and discussions which aimed, in
one way or another, at regaining some of the initial acceptance and prestige. For instance, I
will claim that the problematization of development NGOs has given rise to the logic that
these organizations, in order to sustain their own survival, must fundamentally change their
traditional ways of acting and thinking. Managerial terms such as ‘internal’ and ‘external
accountability’ are thus construed as indications that the (development) NGO sector
currently engages in a monumental refashioning of its modus operandi and its ‘raison d’être’.
The point to be made, then, is that the critique of development aid is not exclusively to be
seen as a negative event, but as an opportunity for new types of development aid and for new
ways of performing work-related identities. This investigation will, however, also retain a
critical focus, trying to bring to light that the current re-engineering of development aid is for
the most part to be seen as a postulation of a more business-like approach to development
aid. Positing that the boundaries between the third sector, the state and the private sector
have been increasingly blurred over the last decades (not least in the course of the re-
conceptualization of the voluntary sector), I will further note that it is due to the convergence
with the private sector in particular that NGOs have been construed as business- and market-
sensitive subjects (Petras, 1997). In line with this observation, I will argue that NGOs, partly
because of reduced public spending since the late 1990s, have only recently come to probe
the merits and tenets of entrepreneurial principles (Brugmann, 2005). I will therefore argue
that entrepreneurship discourse, on a political level, has been used, if not exploited, to
reinstall part of the former credibility and euphoria of the third sector in general and
development aid in particular. I will then use this proposition as a basis for the discursive
investigation of this chapter by asking whether this political discourse (and in particular the
slogan of entrepreneurialism and managerialsim) does in fact echo in practitioners’ talk.
To give a brief sketch of the basic insight of the ensuing discourse analysis: the
discursive investigation of NGO practitioners will reveal three recurring argumentative
threads or interpretive repertoires (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). There is, on the one hand, the
benevolence repertoire which construes development from the perspective of help recipients,
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thus mainly emphasizing the positive features of aid such as participation and self-
determination. There is, secondly, the professionalism repertoire which, in relying on a
supposedly neutral and decisively rationalistic language game, portrays development largely
as a matter of economic viability and, by implication, as securing the flow of donations
through sound and efficient (management) practices. Thirdly, there is the (as yet marginal)
entrepreneurship repertoire which highlights development from the intra-organizational
perspective and thereby represents it in terms of growth, competition, risk taking, and
organizational survival. Based on analytical and practical considerations, the three repertoires
will first be presented and discussed sequentially in order to give apt weight to the
differences between the three argumentative threads. In concrete terms, I will pinpoint the
differences by showing that development aid is constructed either as a form of care for the
other (i.e. the indigenous people or, to put it bluntly, those to be developed), as the necessity
to account for and satisfy the demands of donors, or as an insecure, yet self-fulfilling,
endeavor to secure the long-term financial sources on which the organization is based. In a
second analytical step I will illuminate the connections and overlaps between the three
repertoires. The main objective here will be to emphasize the similarities between
practitioners’ talk and, more fundamentally, to argue that all three repertoires, though
through different evaluative descriptions (Speer & Potter, 2000), carry the traces of social
and economic premises and enunciations. I will hence come full circle with the initial
research question – ‘what sort of lived ideologies come to the fore in practitioners’ talk and
to what extent do these linguistic practices endorse a hegemonic picture of development in
which representations are dominated by economic and/or business discourse?’ – and finally
conclude that none of the three repertoires is pure, so to speak. The reason why all three
repertoires are impure is that discourse analysis defies judgment of them along a simple
dialectic between the social and the economic, since all three argumentative threads always
exhibit both aspects of development aid. Bhabha’s notion of a ‘third space of enunciation’
(1994) will be invoked to illustrate that the ambivalence identified in practitioners’ talk is not
a specific reason for concern, but the indication of the permeability and temporary stability
of all meaning. The additional point to be made is that the analysis rejects the view that
practitioners tend to conceptualize development in terms of hegemonic (i.e. economic)
categories and instead endorses the ambivalence of the identified repertoires as an indication
of the moral space, i.e. ‘aporia’ (Derrida, 1993), of development aid. Based on the contention
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that the undecidability of development makes impossible any unproblematic decision for
either one position (i.e. the social or economic), I will elaborate on how this state of affairs
affects the identity performances of NGO practitioners. I will argue that the ‘non-decision’
being revealed in practitioners’ self-narrations makes any enduring dominance of economic
over social subject positions, or vice versa, defeasible. In view of the constant oscillation
between economic and social enunciations, I will make reference to Bhabha’s (1994)
understanding of ‘hybridity’ which allows for an understanding of identity in which the
exclusionary perspective of ‘either this or that’ (i.e. one can either be an economic or a social
person) is rejected in favor of the more inclusive and dialogic view of ‘and … and … and …
’. By implication, I will argue that in conceiving of practitioners’ subject positions as hybrids
it becomes possible to see NGO practitioners’ identity performances as political instances in
which opposing views are mobilized so as to entertain difference without assuming any one
position to gain the definitive ‘upper hand’.
The ‘Truth’ of Development
„Truth” … is subject to constant economic and political incitement … it is the object, under
diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption … it is produced and transmitted
under the control … of a few great political and economic apparatuses … it is the issue of
a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (Foucault,
1984, p. 73)
… everything has evolved, there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus
historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.
(Nietzsche, 1986, pp. 14 – 15; emphasis in original)
The present inquiry of the development ‘complex’ is closely related to both Foucault’s (2001)
notion of ‘history of ideas’ and ‘history of thought’. Given that the history of ideas is occupied
with tracing a given concept or episteme (i.e. development) ‘from its birth, through its
development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context’ (Foucault, 2001, p.
74), I will first shed some light on the early days of development aid so as to gain a, however
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cursory, understanding of how development emerged as an accepted truth, how (and why) it was
transformed over the years and what understanding of development currently prevails. The
history of ideas – i.e. the understanding of an idea, of its alteration and its cultural and historical
contingencies – thus presupposes establishing an understanding of the historical embedding of an
idea such as development. To be sure, the history of ideas cannot posit a ‘precise’ chronological
punctuation of a given regime of truth, saying when and where exactly a given idea came into
being. Instead, its value lies in exhibiting the historical and cultural particularities which created
the conditions making it possible for a given idea to gain broad acceptance and prosper. Foucault
(2001) emphasized that the history of ideas was primarily concerned with the context of ideas or,
more precisely, with rendering a given term or idea intelligible by relating it with the context (i.e.
with ‘other ideas’ (p. 74) of its enunciation. In line with this insight, the ensuing section will
briefly elaborate on the significance of ‘context’ for the subsequent investigation of development
aid and of NGO practitioners’ talk.
The second objective of the following genealogy of development, which is closely related
with the history of ideas, is to discuss the subject matter against the backdrop of Foucault’s
notion of ‘history of thought’. The history of thought, as Foucault (2001) reminds us, is primarily
interested in showing how a previously unproblematic field of experience is suddenly
transformed into a problem, i.e. how it is problematized. The history of thought is thus relevant in
the present context as it enables one to see that the evaluative accent of development aid has
changed quite dramatically over the last decades and that development aid, particularly over the
last decade, has lost a considerable amount of its initial credibility, not to say appeal. Based on
the observation that development today provokes ambivalent reactions in as much as it is
increasingly construed – equally by the general public, foundations, and political actors, etc. – as
a cause for suspicion and doubt, I will then relate this proposition to the realm of development
NGOs. On the basis of this connection, I will finally claim that the general problematization of
development has stimulated, though with some delay, a legitimacy crisis for the voluntary sector.
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On Context (of Development)
Words, even if we take them as magic, refer only to other words, to the end of it. (Bloom, 2004, p.
7; emphasis in original)
… one cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent
… whose content … could have taken place outside of language … There is nothing
outside of text. (Derrida, 1976, p. 158)
At its worst, ‘context’ is deployed as a merely polemical, critical tool. In this usage, it is roughly
equivalent to ‘what I have noticed about your topic that you didn’t write about’.
(Schegloff, 1992, p. 215)
In general terms, context seems to be an important issue in many streams of research. With regard
to discourse analysis, Wetherell (2001), for instance, asked in the concluding chapter of
‘Discourse Theory and Practice’: ‘(h)ow much background [context] information do we need to
analyze any particular piece of discourse … ?’ (p. 387). This is indeed an important question, a
question to which I would like to give further thought in order to do justice to the variety and
ambivalence of interpretations of context and also to establish a textual understanding of context
for the present investigation. In terms of ‘context’, it is perhaps hardly surprising that qualitative
and in particular interpretive researchers keep emphasizing the necessity to interpret or read one’s
‘findings’ against the background of the context in which the study has been carried out. For
instance, Fairclough and Wodak (1997) proclaimed that ‘(d)iscourse is not produced without
context and cannot be understood without taking context into consideration’ (p. 277). But why
exactly is context such an important issue? Using Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) work to put
forward an answer to this question, we are reminded that, since all language sequences are
embedded in and inextricably linked to a particular linguistic heritage, an understanding of the
specific context of one’s study is indispensable for grasping the meaning of a particular, local
utterance. The concern for context, so it seems, for the most part derives from seeing context as
the stock of commonsense (or simply ideology) which provides people with the language (games)
for making sense of social reality. The formula of this logic goes thus: to understand the meaning
of words and utterances used in concrete situations or texts presupposes gaining a sense of what
215
these signs mean on a more general or inter-subjective level. To elevate this inquiry to the
signification of ‘context’ in the social sciences, I would like to point out that the term is laden
with a variety of meanings ranging from global social structure to local conversation or co-text
(cf. Meinhof & Richardson, 1994). The point I want to make here, however, is a different one,
namely that the idea of context engenders a number of tricky questions with regard to the issue of
stability. That is, the idea of context leads to the question at what level of abstraction context (i.e.
commonsense) actually interferes with local sensemaking practices and, second, if context has a
stable or even deterministic influence on local conversations or whether its influence is at its
weakest and most ephemeral. Schegloff (1992), in an attempt to overcome some of these
theoretical puzzles, introduced the distinction between what he called ‘distal context’ (which
includes features such as social class, ethnic composition, the institutions from which discourse
emanate, etc.) and ‘proximal context’ (which refers to immediate, locale interactions).
Essentially, it is Schegloff’s notion of ‘distal context’ which construes the extra-interactional or
extra-relational aspects of human conduct as more or less stable and enduring entities, whereas
the notion of ‘proximal context’ was used to account for relational and thus transient aspects of
conversations. Related to these notions is Schegloff’s understanding of distal and proximal
context which suggests that one can draw a strict (analytic and ontological) division between the
local use of language within a given conversation and the approved truths of a given society
(which are supposed to be (quasi-) independent of concrete speech situations). What is relevant
with respect to discourse analysis is that Schegloff, though not denying that distal context might
have a (constitutive and restrictive) influence on people’s everyday sensemaking, proclaimed that
distal context was not relevant for discourse (i.e. conversation) analysis, or only insofar as it was
used in the proximal context of people’s concrete discursive practice. That is to say that Schegloff
used his distinction between distal and proximal context to conclude that discourse analysts
should not refer to commonsense unless it becomes explicit in the analytic material. As a first
step towards the type of understanding of context I want to employ for the following discourse
analysis, I will claim that the perspective suggested by Schegloff needs to be rejected, since it
tends to endorse an empiricist view of discourse analysis (Billig, 1999) which – by construing
distal context as an ostensibly stable, even factual, entity – invariably ignores the epistemological
issues of context (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998). My point hence is that a separation between distal
and proximal context is futile to the extent that it obscures that any simple distinction between
talk/text and things which are external to talk/text (i.e. objective reality) can only be sustained
216
while working on behalf of a realist ontology. Moreover, Schegloff’s distinction between
proximal and distal context seems less than helpful for my own purpose, not least because it is
deemed to collapse once it is accepted that distal and proximal contexts are always co-implied
and in a relation of constant interaction. As a result, it becomes more helpful to conceptualize
context quite simply as a ‘vast argumentative texture through which people construct their reality’
(Laclau, 1993, p. 341). If we thus decide to reject Schegloff’s dichotomy, it is important to
become more concrete in terms of our understanding of context which shall inform both the
following analysis of development discourse and the discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’
talk. To this end, I would like to make reference to Derrida’s (1976) seminal statement that there
is nothing outside of text
81
which chiefly implies that there is no use in appealing to some
transcendental source of meaning (since there is none). On the basis of this insight, I am keen to
claim that text and context should be seen as two sides of the same coin, so to speak, because they
both belong to the structured system of social relations through which shared meaning is
disseminated. It is thus implied that context is not to be mistaken as ‘mimesis’ (cf. Derrida, 1981,
p. 171), that is, the simple materialization of a pre-eminent social structure. Instead, it is to be
conceived of as a multi-discursive event that provides the linguistic means for local conversations
while simultaneously being legitimated (i.e. made to appear objective) through them (Berger &
Luckman, 1966). It is evident, then, that context, if looked at from a language-based (in lieu of
Schegloff’s realist) perspective, becomes the stock of truths of a particular historical/cultural
space which is continuously used and transformed in its everyday use. As indicated by the Latin
‘con’ of ‘context’, meaning together (two or more), it is further implied that a given conversation
or text that is subjected to (discourse) analysis must not be treated as an encapsulated and self-
sufficient entity, but as a speech performance which is inextricably related to other texts (hence
con-texts). If text and context are, as implied by Derrida (1976), projected onto the same
ontological level, it becomes conceivable that context can be seen as particularly (though
temporarily) stabilized systems of meaning
82
which are simultaneously concrete in that they are
embedded in concrete utterances or texts. On the other hand, such texts can also be interpreted as
quasi-autonomous, since they exist beyond the individual text that composes them. It follows
81
In French: il n’y a pas de hors-texte = there is no outside-the-text (cf. Derrida, 1976, p. 158).
82
Alvesson and Karreman (2000) have introduced the distinction between micro and macro-level discourse analysis
to stress that there are identifiable differences in terms of the relative stability of meaning. Essentially, the notion of
macro-discourse denotes institutionalized forms of knowledge which are to some degree independent of local
conversations. The authors, however, partly overlook that the stability of meaning is only temporary and that local
conversations can both reify (and thus stablize) meaning but also stimulate its (subtle) alteration.
217
from this that to understand the context of the ensuing discourse analysis presupposes an inquiry
into the inter-texts or discourses which both enable and limit what can be thought and said about
development. In consequence, if context is defined as accepted (since stabilized) forms of
discourse that engender a sense of order and predictability in an otherwise ‘amorphous, fluxing
and undifferentiated reality’ (Hardy, 2004, p. 514), it becomes essential to ask ‘what are the
macro-level discourses which (have) penetrate(d) the realm of development work?’ This question
is relevant insofar as it will allow us to connect the subsequent discourse analysis of NGO
practitioners’ talk with the kind of commonsense that our (language) culture supplies for talking
about development or, more precisely, for constructing a specific account thereof. That is, only if
one gains an understanding of the macro-level discourses of development will it be possible to
make inferences about how commonsense or ‘lived ideology’ (Billig, 1988) is used and
appropriated by practitioners in concrete conversations and, by implication, how practitioners are
bound to make choices
83
in light of the pragmatic demands of a given speech situation. The
subsequent genealogical inquiry is thus pivotal not only for gaining a sense of how ‘development’
evolves in a particular historical and cultural ‘climate’, or as a result or effect of a given
‘Zeitgeist’, but also as a basis for a fruitful reflection on how the grand truths of development are
re-performed and appropriated in the local narratives of NGO practitioners.
83
Potter and Wetherell (1987), within their micro-level analysis of language use in everyday conversations,
emphasize human agency by stating that people are able to change the course of their self and world constructions by
virtue of opting for or against particular interpretive repertoires. This view stands in sharp contrast to those, mainly
Foucault-inspired, discourse analyses which see discourse in a more deterministic way (cf. Chapter 6).
218
The Discourse of Development
… to realize that truth is a function of discourse is to realize that the conditions of truth are
precisely rather than relatively contingent on current forms of discourse. (Hook, 2001, p.
525; emphasis in original)
The will to exercise … control in society and history has also discovered a way to clothe,
disguise, rarefy and wrap itself systematically in the language of … discipline, rationality,
utilitarian value, and knowledge. And this language in its naturalness, authority,
professionalism, assertiveness and antitheoretical directness is … discourse. (Said, 1983,
p. 216)
The brief outline presented above of a textual understanding of context maintained that any given
discourse analysis must retain a parallel focus on text (i.e. the respective local conversations) and
context (i.e. public narratives which accompany or surround a given conversation; cf. Somers,
1994). I would now like to become more concrete with regard to the context of development so as
to highlight some of the most prominent macro-level discourses incorporated by the
‘development aid complex’. In my assessment, it is essential to start this inquiry with a few words
on the critical reception of development through (discursive) postcolonial theory.
Reflection of Postcolonial Development Theory
Given that the meaning and value development aid is currently endowed with is not determined
by practitioners’ immediate consciousness but ‘by the various reality-making scripts one inherits
or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural/linguistic condition’ (Shapiro, 2001, p. 318), this
investigation of how development is rendered meaningful in contemporary Swiss NGOs calls for
an analysis of the (con)texts of previous apprehensions or evaluative descriptions. That said, it
needs to be noted that the investigation of (Third World) development as discourse, that is, as a
body of thinking about the reasons of unequal opportunities such as poverty and the means for
their alleviation, has only recently become a scholarly endeavor. Moreover, the critical route of
discursive investigations, which emerged somewhere in the 1980s, has been particularly inspired
by Foucauldian thought. This hint is relevant insofar as development discourse, in the course of
such Foucauldian investigations, has more often than not been rendered an object of critique (cf.
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Tucker, 1999), not least because it was regarded as a central mechanism for sustaining (instead of
overthrowing) the hierarchical fold between the West (which is usually portrayed as the
developed part of the globe) and the rest (which is construed as the bulk of the undeveloped
world; cf. below). In a nutshell, the prime premise and conclusion of an identifiable number of
postcolonial, Foucault-inspired works is that the discourse of development engenders a
segregation between the north and the south (Abrahamson, 2000) and, most fundamentally,
enables the control and exploitation of Europe’s former colonies. Whereas the colonization
hypothesis put forward by postcolonial scholars will be granted some elaborative space further
down, I would first like to shed some light on Said’s (1978) seminal ‘Orientalism’; first, because
it draws its inspiration, at least partly, from Foucault’s work on power and knowledge and,
second, because it worked as a kind of benchmark for many subsequent works of postcolonial
discourse analysis.
Put highly reductively, Said’s (1978) treatise pursued a critique of the academic field of
oriental studies in prestigious European universities. Oriental studies – which refers to a
heterogeneous field of disciplines such as, for instance, philology, linguistics, ethnography,
cultural studies, etc. – had, following Said, labeled all Orientalists as ‘constitutive others’ by
virtue of which Europe was provided with a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority.
Moreover, Said claimed that the discourse of Orientalism served political ends in that Orientalist
scholarship provided the means by which Europeans were enabled to take over (physically and/or
intellectually) Oriental territories. After all, Orientalism was construed not only as a direct
expression of Euro-centrism but also as a pectoral rhetoric which operated at the service of a
subtle imperialist agenda. To use Said’s (1978) own terms, ‘Orientalism’ was an ‘act of
geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and
finally brought under control’ (p. 10). Given that ‘Orientalism’ has been translated into some 36
languages and has thus been read all over the world, what is most relevant in the present context
is that Said’s work has served as an important anchorage for many postcolonial studies on
development,
84
and in particular for studies concerned with the discursive investigation of its
representation and hence its meaning. Although Said’s treatise of Orientalism does not primarily
focus on in the issue of development, one of its most notable effects was that it spurred an interest
84
It must be noted here that Said’s level of sophistication has hardly been matched in the realm of postcolonial
studies on development and that latter investigations (with some notable exceptions) have been more straightforward
and unapologetic in bedeviling the identified Western epistemes.
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in the (representational) dividing practices through which the world is segregated, in a
hierarchical sense, into ‘our’ part and ‘their’ part. Said’s assertion that Orientalist scholarship had
produced a false image
85
of Arabs, Islamic culture, Moslems, etc. has willingly been taken up and
appropriated by postcolonial scholars which is evident from statements that denote that western
representations of its Other
86
– be that the Orient (as in Said’s work) or other geo-political spaces
in Africa, Asia or Latin America – produce essentialist and thus seemingly unchangeable (i.e.
hegemonic) hierarchical relations.
87
In the style of Said, postcolonial investigations of
development discourse basically claimed that the images produced by the Euro-American
machine of representation were based on a set of (false, stereotypical or otherwise untenable)
attributes which, generally speaking, portrayed its other in an uniformly pretentious way, thereby
appointing it a social space which was isolated from the mainstream of human progress as
produced by the western sciences, arts, commerce, etc. To become more concrete, it is insightful
to turn to Abrahamson (2000) who, among others, posited that development discourse engenders
a split between the North and South while pretending that this division marks an ‘neutral or
accurate transcription of reality’ (p. 139). Accordingly, it has been argued that the notion of
‘development’ represents an episteme which entails a structuring moment that appoints the
majority of people living in the South and East, i.e. the geo-political space which in the early
1950s was dubbed the ‘Third World’ (Escobar, 1995), an inferior position for reasons of certain
particularities such as ‘inadequate nutrition’, ‘diseases’, ‘primitive and stagnant economic life’ or
‘lack of scientific and technical knowledge’. Hence, postcolonial discourse analyses, especially
those carried out in the 1990s, held the view that development discourse acts hegemonically as it
provides the coordinates which determine the ‘ways of practicing development as well as
speaking and talking about it’ (Grillo, 1997, p. 12). As Escobar (1992) suggested, the ‘Third
World reality is inscribed with precision and persistence by the discourses and practices of
economists, planners, nutritionists, demographers and the like, making it difficult for people to
define their own interests in their own terms – in many cases actually disabling them to do so’ (p.
25).
85
A conclusion which is clearly more Marxist than Foucauldian.
86
The study of the representation of the West’s other has often been carried out through the prism of Western
sciences, be it anthropology, philosophy or economics.
87
It was Briggs (2002) who suggested that the normative judgments put forward by postcolonial and post-
development scholars are somewhat antithetic to the work and assumptions of Foucault. For this reason, it would be
somewhat misleading to assume that a Foucauldian analysis enables a qualification of development as either ‘good’
or ‘bad’.
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Extrapolating these claims to sketch out an initial estimate, we can say that discourse
analysis carried out by postcolonial or post-development scholars have propelled the idea that the
‘West’ is geo-politically involved in warranting itself an all-seeing, all-knowing viewpoint as a
result of which it sustains itself a ‘universal space’ (Ashcroft, 2001). If looked at from this
perspective, it further becomes conceivable that such accounts work on the premise that
development comprises a Euro-/American-centric bias while simultaneously rendering obsolete
or at least marginal alternative, notably, indigenous epistemes (Ferguson, 1990). For instance,
Escobar (1995), making reference to Althusser’s notion of ‘ideology’, pointed out that the global
language of development and underdevelopment meant that ‘only certain things could be said and
imagined’ (p. 39). Departing from the delimiting effects of development discourse, Escobar
(1995) claimed that the making of the ‘Third World’ and the historical formation of development
aid in the aftermath of WWII was made possible through a representational apparatus in which a
minority set the global (economic) agenda. In line with these assertions, Esteva (1992) claimed
that US president Truman’s denotation of development in his inaugural speech (cf. below)
caused, almost within minutes, two billion people to be transformed into a silent majority of
underdeveloped people. By implication, projects carried out in the name of development have
more often than not been approached by postcolonial scholars as negative events which do not
empower the addressed (i.e. underdeveloped people, populations or territories) but, quite to the
contrary, increase the penetration of western ‘truth regimes’ into the social body of the Third
World. Indeed, this canon holds that development tends to actively produce poor populations. At
best, development aid sustains rather than alleviates poverty and social inequalities. Even worse,
now that the Second World seems to have vanished from the political landscape (or at least seems
to have lost some of its initial visibility) the void between the First and Third World is said to
have increased, supposedly granting the First World an ever more comfortable (since expansive)
stance (Trinh, 1989).
Bearing in mind that there is an identifiable propensity in postcolonial theory, and most
notably in Foucault-inspired discourse analysis, to depict development as a downright negative
event, there are two important propositions which need to be addressed; namely that development
is said to perpetuate the historical trajectory of the colonial or imperial era and, second, that
development is to be seen as a purposeful and intentional project that is exclusively determined or
guided by the West. In what follows, I would like to elaborate on the theoretical and conceptual
underpinnings of these two premises. On that basis I will then argue that Foucault’s (1978) work
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on bio-power (rather than his work on sovereign power), permits an arguably more positive
interpretation of development.
Colonial Metaphor
In the context of ‘colonialism’ I would first like to point out that Said’s (1978) ‘Orientalism’ was
not simply a Foucauldian investigation of the relation between knowledge and power but, most
importantly, a treatise on European domination. Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’, as Said
explained, was useful for his conclusion since it enabled him to describe how particular
representations of Europe’s other worked both as a means for understanding the ‘Orient’ and as a
strategic instrument for controlling, manipulating and dominating the non-European part of the
globe. Hence, in light of Said’s suggestion that Orientalism remained an indefatigable cultural
and political force in the western representation of Palestines, Arabs, Muslims, etc. (Rubin,
2006), it becomes clear that he was making use not only of Foucault’s work on discourse, power
and knowledge, but that he enriched his inquiry with some versions of Freudian and Marxist
theory. What I want to pinpoint here is that only by carrying out a fusion between Foucault’s
work and, for instance, Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ was Said able to claim that western
epistemes helped (re)produce European imperialism. That is, since Foucault’s (1984) work does
not lend itself to an ideological critique (cf. Chapter 6) for passing judgment or criticism of
western knowledge it was necessary for Said to modify and extend Foucault’s work on
knowledge and power. To be sure, Said acknowledged that European knowledge is not
implemented and disseminated by a sovereign application of force. It is discernable, however,
that he, as well as many of his successors, tried to exemplify how the persistent Euro-centric
prejudice against Arab-Islamic people stimulated the colonial expansion of European powers. To
grasp the profundity of this assertion, it is helpful to turn to Bhabha (1990) who, in his eloquent
treatise of colonial discourse, mentioned, for instance, that its objective was ‘to construe the
colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify
conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’ (p. 75). Bearing in mind that
Said attributed an imperial mindset to European science, stating that it enabled the colonial
domination of the Orient, it is important to note that this idea has been further developed by many
postcolonial scholars who claim that development discourse (as epitomized after Europe’s
imperial era) operates in a manner comparable to that of colonial discourse (e.g. Mohanty, 1991;
Banerjee, 2000). It is through, for instance, Escobar (1995) that we can see that this view departs
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from the assumption that ‘the development discourse is governed by the same principles [as
colonial discourse]; it has created an extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge
about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World’ (p. 9). Escobar’s notion of ‘power over’
in the above statement is revealing, since it entails that the exercise of power, both in the colonial
and the post-WWII era, takes the form of domination. By the same token, Cooper (1991)
cogently argued, in the context of his analysis of development projects in Africa, that there was
an evident connection between the decline of the European colonial order and the rise of
development projects. More precisely, Cooper went on to conclude that development is to be seen
as a distinct attempt to reinvigorate the (lost) empire on behalf of an avowedly well-intended
venture, meaning that development has become a means to sustain the previous domination of
Europe’s colonies. A similar proposition was made by Banerjee and Linstead (2004) who claim
that the postcolonial era continues ‘to be informed by colonial thought’ (p. 222). Be that as it
may, the point I want to make here is that this stream of postcolonial theory has obscured the
possibility of a difference between the operation of power during and after the colonial era. I
therefore contend that the aforementioned studies of development are based on a selective and at
times simplified appropriation of Foucault’s work, orchestrating the topic in such a manner as to
posit that development is a kind of knowledge that ‘allows any intervention to be sanctified in the
name of a higher goal. Therefore, even enemies feel united under the same banner’ (Sachs,
1992b, p. 4). Evidently then, Foucault’s cogent treatise on the interrelation between or co-
implication of knowledge and power has been interpreted, if not exploited, in such a way that it is
seemingly possible to claim that development aid supports the sustenance of colonial domination
by novel means. The colonial metaphor thus implies that development depends on the sovereign
application of power, which in turn entails that the West uses development to introduce ‘brutal
and violent transformation’ which is invariably ‘associated with colonial domination in the rest of
the world’ (Esteva, 1992, p. 17). I will address the view that development is to be seen as a
cunning means for perpetuating the trajectory of colonialism and contend that it overemphasizes
the amount of sovereign power entailed in the development dispositif and in particular the
(deterministic) power attributed to western development institutions such as the World Bank
(Briggs, 2002) later in this chapter. However, first I want to object to another peculiarity often
found in postcolonial literature, namely the claim that development is chiefly to be regarded as an
intentional endeavor which is dominated exclusively by identifiable western agents.
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The Agency of the ‘West’
To call to mind the profound misrepresentation of development’s agentic nature, it is
particularly worth reiterating the assertion that ‘(d)evelopment has relied exclusively on one
knowledge system, namely the modern Western one. The dominance of this knowledge
system has dictated the marginalization and disqualification of non-Western knowledge
systems’ (Escobar, 1995, p. 13). Likewise, Prasad (1997) contended that ‘(v)irtually all
branches of European knowledge and science have grown with the confident conviction that
the world is knowable only through those categories of knowledge that have been developed
in Europe – indeed, that the world may even exist only in and through such categories of
European Modernity’ (p. 94). Be that as it may, what is of central importance in the present
context is not primarily related to the claim that development discourse endorses (a limited
number of) Euro-centric subject positions. Rather, the crux is that discourse is treated by
certain postcolonial scholars as if it were a natural entity which can be intentionally deployed
by identifiable western actors with the objective of assimilating the indigenous other in a
strategic way (de Certeau, 1984) or, as Smith (1999) proclaimed, to exploit the Other ‘based
on the positional superiority and advantages gained under imperialism’ (p. 89). Most
illustrative in this context is Sachs’ (1992b) suggestion that ‘(f)ollowing the breakdown of
European colonial powers, the United States found an opportunity to give worldwide
dimensions to the mission their founding fathers had bequeathed to them: to be the ‘beacon
on the hill’. They launched the idea of development with a call to every nation to follow in
their footsteps’ (p. 1). It is obvious that Sachs’ view rests upon the assumption that it is the
West which dictates the global agenda-setting and thus also determines how the non-western
space is to be both construed and managed. Yet, Bhabha (1990), in objecting to Said’s
‘Orientalism’, was suspicious about this agentic exegesis of western knowledge, claiming
that there is a danger in Said’s treatise because it suggests that ‘power is possessed entirely
by the colonizer, given its intentionality and unidirectionality’ (p. 77). Importantly, the same
critique applies even more to postcolonial writers such as Sachs, Escobar and others who
have used Foucault’s investigations to highlight the ostensibly dominatory pretense of
western development bodies. The proposition that development is characterized by a ‘will to
power’, i.e. that it aspires to subdue the non-western world according to its own volition, is
reflected, for instance, in Gronemeyer’s (1992) contention that ‘help is offered for reasons of
the helper’s [i.e. the West’s] own national security, for the purpose of maintaining its own
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prosperity, and for the sake of moral obligation, to convey to others the good that has come
to a nation in the course of history’ (p. 62; emphasis in original). Development, it seems, is
stripped off all well-intended objectives and ambitions, because it is said to be exclusively
grounded upon western self-interests. In consequence, organizations such as the World Bank
(initially called International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) are appointed to the role of serving the demands and
interests of the West. I contend that his conception of development as a means for expanding
Euro-American power and, as Gronemeyer (1992) reminds us, as a ‘bulwark against
communism’, is one-sided but (although misleading) nevertheless rhetorically effective
(Briggs, 2002), since it identifies an enemy (i.e. ‘the master’; cf. Esteva, 1992) who can be
held accountable for the calamities and failures of development projects. However, I do not
wish to judge development along the lines of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but rather offer a different
conceptualization of power which, in my opinion, seems more appropriate for both
considering development’s multidimensionality and complexity and for taking into account
the fact that many Third World governments and individuals have actively and willingly
participated in development.
Bio-Power and the Development Dispositif
It follows from our previous inquiry that certain postcolonial writings depart from the
assumption that development is for the most part a discursive formation that systematically
or even intentionally forms, normalizes and thus controls the objects of which it is presumed
to speak (e.g. Latouche, 1996). This view needs to be analyzed more closely. It must first be
emphasized, however, that the colonial metaphor and the premise of agency of western
development actors are not problematic per se. Rather, they become problematic if one takes
into account that both of these propositions were sketched out under the heading of
Foucauldian (discourse) analysis. For instance, Sachs’ (1992) ‘Development Dictionary’,
whose subtitle (i.e. ‘A Guide to Knowledge as Power’) makes explicit its (ostensible) kinship
with Foucault’s work, comprises contributions of several authors which are characterized
more by their decrying of Eurocentrism than by a Foucauldian analysis of the operation of
power through development. As is the case with Escobar (1995), Sachs’ ‘Dictionary’
establishes a kind of oppositional rhetoric (between the West and the rest) which, in my
assessment, clearly betrays Foucault’s eloquent elaborations of the operation of power. Both
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Lehman (1997) and Nederveen Pieterse (2000) addressed this casual use of Foucault in post-
development studies. For instance, Lehman (1997) argued that Escobar’s (1995) use of
Foucault seems to be limited to adopting a particular sort of style, frequent mention of his
name and numerous quotations from his work. Along the same lines, Brigg (2002) suggested
that parts of post-development literature seem to have lost the profundity of Foucault’s work
and, by deploying inappropriate hyperbolic rhetorical devices, fundamentally obscure the
latter’s understanding of the operation of power.
The first point to be made is that if one makes explicit use of Foucault’s work on
power, it is untenable to claim that development is a purely western endeavor in which
identifiable subjects dominate others in a straightforward, sovereign way. In other words, if
one applies a Foucauldian perspective to development, it is more helpful and apt to construe
development as a growing collective of agents, both in the southern and northern
hemisphere, which works through a complex series of links between discursive and non-
discursive practices ultimately stipulating the strategic priorities of development as well as
the norm that defines the threshold between developed and underdeveloped subjects,
populations and nation states. Thus, instead of seeing development as just a negative dividing
practice between the West and the rest or as a panoply of interventions that engender the
creation of the developed and the underdeveloped, the First and the Third World,
development can reasonably be portrayed in a more affirmative manner. Such an appraisal,
however, would require that one rejects the (exclusively) negative and repressive view of
power as well as the assumption that development is grounded on intentional actions of
actors which possess power. Briggs’ (2002) investigation is helpful in this context, since it
emphasizes both the productive modality of power (cf. also Chapter 6) while stressing the
need to reflect upon development initiatives from the perspective of Foucault’s notion of
‘bio-power’. It is therefore necessary to counteract the univocally negative and evaluative
conceptualization of development as established by certain postcolonial or post-development
scholars, since it only accounts for one side of the story. To be sure, development is more
than the simple materialization of western domination, because it has made new aspects of
global life feasible and, by inventing new categories and techniques for its own measurement
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and control, made new areas of existence practicable. It thus follows that power is not a
merely negative, repressive event, but a constitutive for novel subjectivities.
88
In general terms, Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ is most appropriate for highlighting the
positive, constitutive aspect of power (without denying its restrictive force). It is helpful to note
that Foucault (1978) made a distinction between sovereign power and bio-power. Where Foucault
associated the former kind of power with the reign of the King or monarch who is in the position
of exercising the right to ‘take life or let live’ (p. 136; emphasis in original), it is clear that the
figure of the monarch and the sort of power he exerts is indicative of the mechanism of colonial
rule. Foucault’s notion of ‘sovereign power’ is thus compatible with the imperial era since,
colonies were taken in the name of the monarch and colonial rule was executed with a sense of
ownership. However, I want to stress that such a conceptualization of power cannot be applied to
the post-WWII era. As Briggs (2002) suggested, there is a need for elaboration as to if and how
bio-power can fill this void. To start with, the notion of ‘bio-power’, as Foucault (1983b) reminds
us, relates to ‘a way of acting upon an acting subject or subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of action’ (p. 220). In opposition to the sovereign conceptualization of power which
highlights the hierarchical execution of force, bio-power entails not so much the idea of
domination but the bringing out and enabling of forces. That is, instead of using force to
accomplish one’s aim, bio-power emphasizes the mobilization and leverage of collective forces.
This shift in Foucault’s thinking is significant in the present context, since it enables one to see
that the period of colonialism and the post-WWII period can be distinguished with regard to their
operation of power. Whereas the colonial period, to put it bluntly, can be characterized as
operating through an identifiable master who sustained his power through the application of
restrictive measures (e.g. punishment), it was during the early post-WWII period that previous
colonial officials together with anti-colonial leaders began to advocate the mutual welfare of both
the former colonies and the former empire. Again, the pivot of this endeavor was mobilization,
meaning that individuals, institutions as well as nation states in both the north and the south were
induced to increase global prosperity by participating in the development project. In this way, it is
even more obvious that the colonial metaphor as well as the premise of western domination
ignore that development has come into operation through the mobilization of interests and
objectives of northern and southern actors. It is evident, then, that the concept of bio-power
88
Although Foucault never denied the possibility of domination and repression, he claimed that those two
phenomena represent extreme and limited versions of the operation of power (Foucault, 1987).
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exhibits that development is a global and not only a western project. It thus follows that
development cannot simply be evaluated as univocally ‘bad’ (as some of the above-mentioned
scholars have suggested). Rather, Foucault’s work on bio-power endorses the conceptualization
of development as a ‘complex strategic situation’ (Briggs, 2002) that, by drawing upon mutually
supporting procedures of power and knowledge, seeks to manage (not dominate) the world in a
calculated way and hence to optimize people’s living condition on a global scale. In sum, the
central tenet of Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ is that it enables a view of development which
retains its benevolent trajectory without obscuring the fact that it can produce a wide range of
negative outcomes. In addition, the introduction of bio-power to the field of postcolonial studies
leads to criticism of any simplified notion of western domination and reveals that both the
definition and operation of development have always been a collective undertaking with the aim
to constitute a field of differentiation (i.e. development versus underdevelopment) through which
individuals and nation states are acted upon or act upon themselves in relation to a given norm.
Hence, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the operation of development as well as
to discard the repressive conceptualization of power as endorsed by the colonial metaphor, I
would like to elaborate briefly on Foucault’s conceptualization of the dispositif (cf. also Chapter
1). The concept of ‘dispositif’ (Foucault, 1980) is revealing with regard to the present argument,
since it implies that development is contingent on a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and
non-discursive elements. Moreover, the idea of the dispositif allows a conception of how the
world in the late 1940s (cf. below) witnessed an unprecedented combination of local and global
projects, financial flows, philosophical and scientific propositions, governmental, non-
governmental and supra-national initiatives which, despite their essential differences, were all
dedicated to development (Briggs, 2002). Although this assemblage of actors has been loosely
coupled and despite the undeniable existence of tensions between the different rationalities which
governed its conduct, it may be argued that over the last five decades the development dispositif
has witnessed dramatic (quantitative) growth. In opposition to, for instance, Esteva (1992) who
suggested that development has notably been determined by UN agencies or the World Bank, I
would like to stress that the idea of dispositif implies that development is not exercised by but
rather via those organizations. In other words, Foucault’s understanding of dispositif makes it
impossible to simply attribute the operation of development to a collective of (western)
organizations. Instead, denoting development as a dispositif endorses a view in which local grass-
root organizations as well as global organizational arrangements in the southern as well as in the
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northern hemisphere form part of the same project. To be sure, the dispositif is in no way to be
seen as a stabilized and closed collective. Rather, the development dispositif is permeable in that
it constantly includes new (and excludes old) objectives and new modes of operation. Although
some actors of the dispositif are (or have become) arguably more powerful than others in
determining the truth of development, it must remain clear that development (i.e. the specification
of problems and the means for their solution) is a collective endeavor that requires continuous
negotiation and an ongoing refinement of techniques of information, measurement and control.
By implication, the institutionalization of development is by no means a process that has
exclusively been controlled by the West. Rather, it is a process that has been taking place at all
levels, ‘from the international organizations and national planning agencies in the Third World to
local development agencies, community development committees, private voluntary agencies,
and non-governmental organizations’ (Escobar, 1995, p. 46). That is to say that the definition of
development, i.e. the normalization of the binary between ‘development’ and
‘underdevelopment’, is contingent on a broad institutional framework and therefore continuously
contested. Departing from the assumption that the negotiation of development has gone hand in
hand with dramatic semiotic changes, I will elaborate on some of the more salient changes in the
meaning of development in the section below. Apart from illustrating how development has been
refined and at times completely reformulated, the main objective is to provide some historical
insight into how ‘development’ has been created and altered as a field of practice and thought by
tracing the discourse of development from the late 1940s until the present.
The Development of ‘Development’
Investigating development from a discursive standpoint, it is important to note that discourse
is construed as a process of meaning making which is ‘limiting our thinking at the same time
[making] thinking possible’ (McCloskey, 1985, p. 252). In addition, I would like to stress
that development is to be seen as an equivocal concept forming part of a multi-discursive
and, by implication, contested field of practice. As Staudt (1991) contended, there are
hundreds of definitions of development. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint
a singular understanding of the term. Given the polysemia (and elusiveness) of development,
it is hardly surprising that, as Esteva (1992) claimed, very few signs are as feeble and as
fragile as development discourse. This is however not to say that development discourse is or
has become an impotent or even ‘dead’ rationality (Illich, 1992). Quite the contrary,
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development discourse is an incremental part of a ‘machine’ (Ferguson, 1990), that is, of the
dispositif which has, as discussed above, gradually enlarged its scope and, most importantly,
extended its own legitimacy in defining the conventions and norms of both the physical and
economic conditions and teleology of world affairs. Provided that the ‘development
machine’ exhibits a proven flexibility in accounting for and adapting to both internal tensions
and external critique, it is evident that the meaning of development is subject to constant
negotiation. This means that the meaning of development has witnessed distinct alterations
encompassing the entire knowledge of what development is/was and through whom
development is/was to be governed and implemented in practice. Thus, conceiving of
‘development’ as an ‘amoeba-like concept’, i.e. a concept which is ‘shapeless but
ineradicable’ (Sachs, 1992, p. 4), I find it helpful to shed some light upon past and
contemporary ‘regimes of truth’ and representational practices which govern(ed) the sphere
of development. Following Crush’s (1995) assertion that development discourse, ‘despite
enormous continuity over time, also changes its language, strategies and practices’ (p. 7), I
will highlight some of the discontinuities and ruptures (Tamboukou, 2003) that have
occurred in the exegesis of development in the period between the late 1940s and the present.
By addressing the construction of meaning, the inquiry will focus on the question of what
historical discontinuities are revealed in the episteme of development or, in other words,
‘how history [gave] shape to different sorts of discourse’ (Watts, 1995, p. 56). Although such
an endeavor can only be partial, the main objective is to clarify that although development
discourse initially relied on an economic logic (i.e. development economics) it has, not least
due to its problematization during the 1980s, been complemented and endorsed with social
(and ecological) rationalities. In other words, it will become clear through the following
elaboration that the relative significance and pervasiveness of economics (vis-à-vis social
and ecological rationalities) as well as its significations (e.g. development, sustainable or
neo-liberal economics) have changed quite dramatically. Although it can be reasonably
argued that development has been conceptualized from different (institutional, hierarchical
and geographical) perspectives (e.g. Esteva, 1995), I will limit the focus of my investigation
to (western) presidential speeches, official government declarations, policy statements by
development agencies, and strategy papers of the UN, World Bank and IMF.
Notwithstanding the fact that this selection limits the understanding of development to a
particular locus of enunciation, it seems nevertheless apt to gain an understanding of the truth
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regimes being produced by the ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1989) which, according to
Briggs (2002), operate as leaders and trainers of development and therefore exercise a (quasi-
) panoptic function in the development dispositif.
To be sure, trying to trace development discourse does not necessarily imply that
there is a single identifiable moment (i.e. origin; cf. Foucault, 1984) in which ‘development’
came about for the first time (Cowen & Shenton, 1995). However, having already mentioned
that, as implied in Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and bio-power, there is a notable
difference between the imperial (i.e. colonial) and the post-WWII (i.e. post-colonial) era, I
would like to add here that there is a certain consensus that the proliferation of development
discourse is inextricably related to post-WWII politics (e.g. Sachs, 1992; Escobar, 1995) and
in particular to the establishment of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF in the mid to late
1940s. Essentially, the representation of development is on the one hand to be construed as a
collective effort (cf. above). On the other hand, development is also to be seen as a distinct
exercise in measuring and controlling the subjects in both the First and the Third World.
Thus, in order to understand how ‘development’ has been signified as a matter of global
concern and to gain a sense of how the language game of development came about and got
transformed, we shall first have a look at both Harry Truman’s seminal inaugural address in
1949 as well as at some of the reactions which followed. To be clear, although Truman’s
inaugural address on January 20, 1949 was praised by many as a genuine humanist
undertaking, since it explicitly targeted the mitigation of mankind’s ‘misery’ (Briggs, 2002),
this does not mean that development did not exist before. As Esteva (1992) convincingly
argued, notions of ‘development’ or ‘underdevelopment’ were already an integral part of
political discourse throughout the first part of the 1940s when they started to emerge in
‘technical books or United Nations documents’ (p. 7). Nevertheless, Truman’s speech must
be regarded as an outstanding event, firstly, because it was received on a global scale and
under the emblem of US politics and, secondly, because it was readily absorbed and re-
distributed through subsequent development initiatives. Truman’s speech was literally
transformed into a grand narrative of development which is evident (at least partly) by the
fact that it has frequently been referred to as the springboard for construing development as a
futurological, global program. As Watts (1995) reminds us, ‘President Truman’s programme
… helped produce an unprecedented explosion of international institutions, professions,
organizations and disciplines whose raison d’être was the lodestar of development’ (p. 55;
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emphasis in original). With this in mind, it seems instructive to provide a rather extensive
extract from Truman’s speech so as to reveal some of the root assumptions which gave both
shape to the still elusive concept of ‘development’ and direction to many subsequent
development-related discussions and initiatives.
… we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and
industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their
food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and
stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous
areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve
suffering of these people. The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the
development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can
afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources
in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible. I believe that we
should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical
knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life. And, in
cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing
development. Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own
efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more
mechanical power to lighten their burdens. We invite other countries to pool their
technological resources in this undertaking. Their contributions will be warmly
welcomed. This should be a cooperative enterprise in which all nations work together
through the United Nations and its specialized agencies whenever practicable. It must be
a worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and freedom. With the
cooperation of business, private capital, agriculture, and labor in this country, this
program can greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations and can raise
substantially their standards of living … The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign
profit – has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based
on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. All countries, including our own, will greatly
benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world's human and natural
resources. Experience shows that our commerce with other countries expands as they
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progress industrially and economically. Greater production is the key to prosperity and
peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of
modern scientific and technical knowledge. Only by helping the least fortunate of its
members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that
is the right of all people. (Truman Library, retrieved from http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=1030; emphasis added)
Before I address the signification of development, we must recall that the first (and to a lesser
extent the second) decade of development in the post-WWII era was characterized by a fair
amount of optimism. Truman as well as his early successors thus endorsed the moral appeal of
development, fostering, as Gronemeyer (1992) mentions, confidence and a ‘revolutionary
dynamic’ of these undertakings. As is evident from Truman’s speech, the notion of
‘development’ heralded a new era in the ‘management of world affairs’ (Sachs, 1992) which was
predominantly grounded on the assumption that access to ‘scientific and technical knowledge’
would warrant ‘greater production‘ and, thus, provide ‘underdeveloped areas’ with a ‘better life’,
i.e. ‘peace, plenty, and freedom’. In view of the above extract, it need not be mentioned that
Truman’s speech paved the way for a kind of development which relied first and foremost on the
merits of economic growth while envisaging technology and science as the appropriate means for
achieving determined ends. The most commonplace rationale of the early days of development
was thus ‘development economics’ which comprised, among other things, the idea of natural
progression, that is, the idea of ‘some ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ movement through a succession of
different modes of subsistence’ (Meek, 1976, p. 255; quoted in Cowen & Shenton, 1995, p. 31).
Being essentially influenced by (Scottish) Enlightenment and particularly by the work of Adam
Smith (cf. Cowen & Shenton, 1995), development economics served as the new discipline for
framing the political/economic situation in terms of growth, welfare and needs (Watts, 1995). The
discourse of development, in its early signification, established a division through economic
parameters as a result of which it was possible to distinguish between the developed world and
the world to be developed. In view of the broad, that is, global space the development dispositif
tried to account for, it is evident that such a project called for unprecedented hierarchical
observations and examinations. Development was thus structured through developmentalist social
sciences and economics and pursued by agencies from local government research operations up
to country-level investigations commissioned by the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc. Illich (1992)
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stated that it was particularly the UN which began to operationalize poverty according to an
agreed-upon ‘acceptable minimum standard’. This division, which was notably based on per
capita production of material goods (and later on per capita income),
89
was not only used to
‘hold’ the rich apart from the poor but, importantly, was conceived as the basis on which to
construct a Third, Second and Third World. This three-fold partition, following Escobar (1995),
was projected onto the geo-political map so as to determine the amount of mass poverty in Asia,
Africa and Latin America. As poverty was conceived both as an untenable social problem as well
as a threat to global stability, it became the consensual objective of development to create a
condition which would allow all countries worldwide to be lifted to the (economic) level of the
First World. As mentioned before, the proposition that the First World should act as the global
benchmark or ‘yardstick’ (Sachs, 1992c) has often been criticized by postcolonial scholars (e.g.
Sachs, 1990; Rahnema, 1991). However, what is more relevant in the present context is that
poverty was perceived as a global issue only during the 1940s (Rahnema, 1992b; Sachs, 1992c).
It was hence only because of the reflection of poverty in economic theory that people were able to
think and talk about themselves and others as either rich or poor, as developed or
underdeveloped. In this way the notion of ‘poverty’ was used to perceive people not according to
what they were or wanted to be, but rather according to a pre-ordained image of lack
90
(a view
which was sternly objected by advocates of the later ‘basic human needs’ approach; cf. below).
Be that as it may, conceiving of development as (historically and culturally) situated knowledge,
it must be understood that its meaning was subject to constant negotiations and re-appropriations.
In this context, it is important to note, first, that the signification of development through
(development) economics has been challenged right from the start (e.g. Kothari, 1988) and,
second, that development discourse has witnessed both minor and major reshuffles as a result of
which the concept has diverged ever more from its initial focus on Enlightenment-based
development theory. As Watts (1995) reminds us in this context, ‘(d)uring the 1960s and 1970s
there was a broad shift from markets to state-centered alternatives with minor attention to the role
of civil society. The 1980s brought debt, retrenchment and austerity; short-term crisis
89
It must be borne in mind that despite the variety of measures that have been applied by the development apparatus,
the Gross National Product per capita became the quasi-consensual measure for determining the degree of
respectively development and underdevelopment.
90
The parallels with psychoanalysis (which seeks to denote desire as lack) seem obvious here (cf. Deleuze &
Guattari, 2004), since both approaches aspire to translate human conditions into conditions of lack which then render
those very people or populations deficient, unsatisfactory, belated or otherwise needy of correction.
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management, stabilization and the so-called neo-liberal counter-revolution in development
theory’ (p. 58). Given Watts’ telling statement, it seems useful to reiterate that after an initial
phase of unclouded optimism, the appropriateness of development as a means for mitigating
poverty has been increasingly questioned. For instance, as Murphy (2000) contended, the concept
of ‘development’ is coming ‘under fierce scrutiny, [and] its most basic premises and tenets [are]
fundamentally challenged from all points on the political spectrum, whether the far right, the hard
left, or the liberal centre’ (p. 330). What is particularly relevant for the argument at hand is that
both the recognition and problematization of persistent and aggravating poverty initiated a shift
towards a different understanding of development. Although the arguments against the
development project have, unsurprisingly, been manifold, there are two recurring positions in the
accounts of development critics. The first route of reasoning, as briefly mentioned before, is
grounded on an economic logic which holds that development has constantly failed in reducing
global poverty or in increasing people’s living conditions (Sachs, 1992c). The second and
interrelated argument is that the prevailing (economic) discourse of development was too narrow,
thus limiting both the understanding of development and the Third World subjects. As regards the
argument of economic failure, it was particularly during the 1970s and 1980s that people and
institutions from within and outside the development apparatus became resistant to the idea that
‘(g)reater production is key to prosperity and peace’ (from Truman’s inaugural speech; quoted in
Sachs, 1992c). I contend that it was increasingly acknowledged that the kinship between social
progress and economic growth was not leading to any significant progress. For instance, in 1973,
Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank, summarized the state of affairs by claiming
that ‘(d)espite a decade of unprecedented increase in the gross national product … the poorest
segments of the population have received relatively little benefit’. Yet, it is important to note that
the broad-scale criticism of development in no way led to its decline or even its end. On the
contrary, development was enlarged as a field of application even during a period in which it
witnessed stern objection. This process was made possible by complementing it with novel
rationalities and practices. Considering the proliferation of meanings attached to development in
conjunction with the problematization of early developmentalism, it is of particular interest to
note that the logic of development experienced a slow shift from development economics to
social (and to a lesser extent environmental) issues. While early development discourse used to
envisage poverty alleviation through the perspective of ‘economic development’ – meaning that
economic means were applied to social ends – from the mid-1960s onwards it was increasingly
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accepted that poverty alleviation initiatives must also comprise social (and ecological) measures
and parameters. In concrete terms, in 1962 the Economic and Social Council of the UN endorsed
the integration of the economic and social aspects of development in order to address and broaden
the reductionistic equation of development with economic development. Suchlike suggestions did
not least find acceptance through the recognition that previous significations of development fell
short of their objectives and even led to an aggravation of identified problems and calamities. In
view of the observation that ‘rapid [economic] growth had been accompanied by increasing
inequalities’ (Esteva, 1992, p. 13), it was suggested that social development be seen as ‘a
precondition for economic growth’ (UNRISD, 1979). Essentially, this reinterpretation of
development has notably been stimulated by economists who were critical of prevailing
development theory and practice. The world thus witnessed the rise of the ‘basic human needs’
approach (Illich, 1992). The main premise of this approach was that the prevailing dogma of
development (i.e. economic poverty alleviation) was not apt for grasping and overcoming the
differences (i.e. needs, desires, etc.) between human beings. On the face of it, the discussion of
basic human needs, which represents a general critique of the homogenizing force of
development economics, sought to pinpoint the evident univocity entailed in the binary between
‘developed – underdeveloped’. As reflected, for instance, in McNamara’s contention that ‘to
eradicate absolute poverty by the end of the century’ would imply ‘the elimination of
malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction of infant mortality and the raising of life-expectancy
standards to those of the developed nations’, the basic human needs approach tried to address
poverty and, by implication, development from the standpoint of quality of life. Furthermore, it
sought to overcome the disappointment associated with the mere stimulation of economic growth
(Sachs, 1992c). In other words, the basic human needs approach, which was implemented in the
southern hemisphere from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s (Escobar, 1992b), was inextricably
linked with the ambition of counteracting the early developmentalist agenda which was said to
ignore that poverty represented ‘a multi-faceted human predicament’ (Rahnema, 1992b, p. 161).
Following Escobar (1995b), the idea of basic human needs was ‘based on a liberal human rights
discourse’ (p. 225) which tried to stimulate a sensitivity for people’s everyday experiences. While
this shift, as briefly mentioned above, was interpreted by some as a first step towards the
‘becoming social’ of development, there were others who argued that the basic human needs
approach did not offer an alternative to economic theory, since it was in fact operating as a
(subtle) advocate thereof. For instance, Lutz and Lux (1988) construed ‘basic human needs’ as
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the materialization of a ‘new economic order’. The authors proclaimed that the economy had
slipped back into the logic of basic human needs in that it was simultaneously seen as the source
or cause of needs and the means for their satisfaction. In other words, Lutz and Lux’s asserted
that basic human needs had created a new order which was grounded on an image of humanity
whose ‘basic needs have been met, thanks to a new kind of economy that recognizes their
existence’ (Illich, 1992, p. 97). Arguably, the discourse of needs has been appropriated in the
context of development aid so as to account for the economic idea of resource scarcity. Evidently
then, this has had the noticeable (and important) effect of rendering economics the ‘ontological
status of being human’ (ibid.). This observation cannot possibly be overemphasized here since it
not only reveals how the genuinely benevolent (and, of course political) project of development
has capitalized on the assumption of economic theory, but also that the discourse of development,
despite the different meanings it has incorporated over the years, has invariably retained an
economic primacy. The discourse of needs is thus exemplary in showing how a particular
historical condition, that is, the era of ‘poverty-oriented’ programs (cf. Escobar, 1992b), has
adapted the dominant rationale of development to changing conditions and demands. Again,
‘basic human needs’ is not to be understood as a subversive act or even as a conspiracy (cf.
Storey, 2000) with the ultimate aim of obscuring development’s colonial trajectory, but as an
expression of the development apparatus’ flexibility in accounting for and adapting to changing
(internal and external) circumstances. Hence, in opposition to Escobar (1992b), who alleged that
the basic human needs approach was a scheme designed by ‘a handful of US and UK
universities’ (p. 138) with the objective of sustaining and furthering First World elites, I find it
more helpful to look at the matter as a mutual refinement of development objectives aimed at
realigning these new objectives to various types of existing policies. In accordance with
Foucault’s idea of ‘bio-politics’, the basic human needs approach is to be construed as an
adjustment of the phenomena of development to economic processes and political critique. This
adjustment, however, is not primarily aimed at fortifying the dominance of the First World over
the Third, but at furthering the cause of development (i.e. human progress) as a whole. Provided
that basic human needs approaches operate to safeguard man’s life and survival, it must also be
borne in mind that they reflect social existence through economic, social and, of course, biologic
parameters. This said, I will now shed some light on three distinct rationalities of development,
that is, structural adjustment, sustainable development and the discourse of globalization. The
primary aim is to illustrate how these three development logics interrelated (or even explained)
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the social realm through an economic logic. Following Berthoud’s (1992) assertion that ‘the
market appears as an implicit assumption in virtually all development theory and policy’ (p. 71), I
will focus upon how the logics of structural adjustment, sustainable development and
globalization position the market vis-à-vis the social sphere of development.
It was during the 1980s that the field witnessed both a decreasing interest in development
economics and a rapid proliferation of neo-liberal economics (Escobar, 1995). These reforms
were most manifest in structural adjustment papers (published by both the World Bank and the
IMF) which stressed, among other things, the need for monetary controls, the privatization of
public enterprises and government services, the reduction of imports and, most importantly, the
opening to world markets. Evidently, then, one of the central assumptions of structural
adjustment policies was that (political and) economic structures would determine the wealth of a
given society. Structural adjustment policies were hence applied in the context of development
aid as a mainly technical matter, that is, as a ‘mere refinement of an existing, natural system’
(Murphy, 2000, p. 333). The concept of structural adjustment, which was not only introduced in
developing but also in industrialized nations, was quite evidently based on the logic that the
market, rather than the state, was to be seen as the engine of societal and national prosperity. In
other words, the notion of ‘structural adjustment’ was introduced to Third World aid as a panacea
to all sorts of economic and social problems, based on the premise that anything which might
seem to have a bearing on economic life must be assessed in terms of its consequences for either
promoting or inhibiting the pursuit of economic prosperity. After all, structural adjustment
policies, which for the most part coincided with the New Right politics in Europe and the US,
were characterized by a belief in the regenerative force of the market or, more precisely, in the
merits of the ‘global market’. While adjustment policies endorsed that the state must be reduced
to the promotion of basic services such as health care and education, these programs further
capitalized on the idea that the regulative force of global economics would ensure the well-being
of communities as a whole. Despite the fact that scholars later objected to the concept of
structural adjustment, claiming that it caused ‘deep economic and social disparity’ (Murphy,
2000, p. 334) or even ‘superexploitation’ (Escobar, 1995), I want to stress here that this
rationality was offered as a ‘grand narrative’ (Lyotard, 1984) of development which alleged that a
single system would be sufficient for governing world affairs. While obviously ignoring the
particularities of and differences between nations, ethnic groups and cultures, the idea of
structural adjustment, quite remarkably, also conflated the distinction between the market as a
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means and the market as an end. Structural adjustment, so it seems, reveals the totalization of the
market logic which in turn endorses, among other things, the view that the social realm must be
understood as a ‘by-product’ or a ‘confounding variable’ of the de-regulated market. By
implication, the notion of ‘structural adjustment’ was not only an attempt to introduce ‘market
mechanisms and principles on a global scale’ (Berthoud, 1992, p. 70), but an ideology by dint of
which material well-being was seen not just as a cultural ideal but as a universal value with which
both human beings and institutions were supposed to identify.
Calling to mind that structural adjustment programs were criticized as a destructive
character in the history of development (e.g. Buttel, Hawkins & Power, 1990), it is hardly
surprising that the 1980s (i.e. the heyday of structural adjustment) were at times referred to as
‘the lost decades for development’ (Rist, 1990; Watts, 1995). In consequence, it can reasonably
be argued that the introduction of ‘sustainable development’ represented a more or less direct
response to the historical ‘lesson’ of adjustment politics. While rejecting Crush’s (1995) ironic
remark that ‘(d)evelopment discourse has a remarkable capacity for forgiving its own mistakes’
(p. 16), I contend that sustainable development can be seen as the introduction of a new language
game which seemed to account for structural adjustment policies’ ignorance of social issues. In
general terms, the notion of ‘sustainable development’ put centre stage the issue of global
survival, emphasizing the need to harmonize the relationship between the economic, ecological
and social aspects of human conduct. It was Escobar (1995) who aptly observed that sustainable
development discourse was regulated by an ‘economy of visibility’, meaning that it was operating
on the basis of a re-shaped system of rules and regulations that apprehended the objective of
development in a novel fashion. Hence, as revealed in both UNICEF’s (1987) telling critique
titled ‘Adjustment with a Human Face’ and in the ‘Human Development Report’ (HDR) which
was published for the first time in 1990 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP),
the epithet ‘sustainable’ was primarily a supplementation of the development discourse, adding a
set of non-economic parameters. On the face of it, the idea of sustainable development exhibited
some overlap with the previous basic human needs approach in that both traditions stressed that
the ultimate test of development would not be the absolute increase in per capita income (which
was of course the ‘litmus test’ applied in early development economics; cf. above), but rather
whether or not the living conditions of people were improved as a whole. People’s living
conditions were thus chiefly determined and measured by means of the HDI which, according to
the UNDP homepage (cf. http://www.hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005), is ‘a summary
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composite index that measures a country’s average achievements in three basic aspects of human
development: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Longevity is measured by
life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and
the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by
GDP per capita.’ Admittedly, the HDI, which evidently holds a central position in contemporary
development aid, is only one of innumerable statistical measures applied in the development
apparatus. However, what is particular about the HDI is that it has been put in place to reveal the
extent of ‘under-development’ through both economic and non-economic parameters. The
introduction of the HDI therefore indicates that during the ‘era of sustainability’ various new
concepts such as equity, participation, pluralism, human rights and partnership were introduced to
the language game of development (Eyoh & Sandbrook, 2001). This had the noticeable effect of
emphasizing that ‘people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the
development of a country, not economic growth’ (UNDP, 2005). As Escobar (1995) mentioned in
this context, sustainable development discourse redistributed many concerns of previous
development endeavors such as, for instance, ‘basic needs, population, resources, technology,
institutional cooperation, food security’ (p. 195). While the meta-level aim of sustainability was
to enable social justice or human development, these ideals were for the most part implemented
on the level of ‘field work’ through participatory approaches. Participatory development
techniques were chiefly premised on the assumption that involving indigenous people into
development decisions would make it possible to counteract the usual ‘top-down’ approaches to
development (Christens & Speer, 2006) by a more just modus operandi. Yet, I would like to point
out that the objective of power sharing, which was obviously understood as a springboard for
empowerment, justice, and equality, is in no way to be seen as a counter-argument to the
economic logic of previous development rationalities, since it basically sustained the teleology of
economic growth. In other words, although participatory approaches have often been credited for
overcoming some of the fallacies of economic development initiatives, it must be borne in mind
that these approaches were in fact introduced as new means for ‘smoothing’ the obstacles
encountered in hierarchically commissioned forms of development. Thus, if one accepts that
participatory approaches have been implemented to increase the acceptance and commitment of
the people involved in development and hence to reduce ‘transaction costs’ (Christens & Speer,
2006), the idea of sustainability cannot be understood as the materialization of a humanist
endeavor. Rather, sustainability stresses the importance of striking a balance between the social,
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economic and ecological aspects of a given enterprise, affirming the general merits and necessity
of economic growth. This is however not to say that participatory development is necessarily a
bad thing, as some have claimed (e.g. Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004), but that
it was introduced as a strategy for evening out, at least to some extent, the hierarchy between
western development organizations and the indigenous people. Moreover, it is important to
mention that despite the fact that sustainable development paved the way for new ways of
thinking and talking about development, it did not simply displace previous discourses on
development. Rather, the discourse of sustainable development, as briefly mentioned before,
partly adopted previous epistemes, thus reproducing and extending some of the central aspects of
earlier economism and developmentalism. Despite its avowed social trajectory, sustainable
development is primarily to be understood as a (at that time) ‘new development strategy’ (Watts,
1995) which had much in common with (pragmatic) neo-liberal discourse. By emphasizing the
scarcity of natural resources and, most importantly, by looking for the most efficient forms of
using resources (without threatening the survival of humanity and nature), sustainable
development affirmed and even contributed to the legitimization of neo-liberal ideas. In view of
the fact that sustainable development was both ideologically and chronologically in close
proximity with neo-liberal orthodoxies, I will briefly discuss the discourse of globalization and in
particular its decisively different interpretation of the global market place.
Departing from the view that the 1980s were characterized by a certain perplexity and
inertia which was not least created by the recognition of an increase in poverty in the Third World
as well as the void between the northern and the southern hemisphere, I would like to illustrate
that the second half of the 1990s witnessed the rise of a new ethos: ‘redevelopment’. By and
large, the idea of redevelopment exhibited a general concern for market mechanisms,
emphasizing both the dynamics and inevitability of globalization (cf. Chapter 2). This shift,
which was largely advocated by the New Right or conservative movement in the late 1980s (cf.
Berthoud, 1992), was based on the belief that the market would be able to solve the world’s
development problems. As the market was already a central feature of the structural adjustment
policies of the 1980s (cf. above), it is safe to argue that it became even more important during the
1990s. Moreover, whereas the idea of structural adjustment was overtly positive about the
transformative power of the market (since the market was seen as a cure-all for global
calamities), it is important to note that the globalization discourse construed the market not
primarily as a positive but as an inevitable mechanism, making it ‘difficult to limit its expansion’
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(Berthoud, 1992, p. 79). In other words, the main difference between structural adjustment
policies of the 1980s and development aid as conceived at the turn of the Millennium is that the
former period was marked by an atmosphere of departure (in the positive sense) revealing a
teleology of redemption. The latter signification of development, on the other hand, was chiefly
characterized by an alarmist genre, portraying the global context in which development
organizations operate as massively uncertain, unstable and largely unpredictable. Du Gay (2003)
claimed that globalization discourse was heralding the potential end of everything, forecasting
some form of economic and cultural decline (cf. also du Gay, 1994; 1996; 2000). By establishing
an image of an accelerating and hyper-competitive environment, globalization discourse
proclaimed that if development organizations (as well as of Third World subjects) wished to
survive (much less than to flourish) they would have to learn to assimilate themselves and change
in a drastic way. It is thus clear that the discourse of globalization questioned the success of
current forms of organizational life. That is to say that only those (development) organizations
which were seen to be able to adapt to immediate and continuous change were said to stand a
chance of survival; the rest was doomed to perish (cf. Chapter 2). Again, although the ideas of
structural adjustment and globalization are partly compatible, at least to the extent that both are
based on the premise that the world is dominated by market forces, the difference between the
two views is evident in their treatment of the valuation of the market. Whereas the idea of
structural adjustment retains an optimistic view of the market (even stressing its emancipatory
possibilities), the discourse of globalization works upon the imperative of ‘this or die’ (Lyotard,
1993) which – by construing the market as both the springboard of all things as well as a
destructive force – endows market forces with a more ambivalent connotation. A further
difference between the two perspectives is that the idea of structural adjustment is more or less
‘ignorant’ of the private realm (since it devotes all attention to the investigation and adjustment of
political-economic structures) whereas the discourse of globalization is explicit about the need to
re-engineer the public (and not only the business or political) space of human conduct. The issue
of individual ‘responsibilization’ and of responsible citizenship will be discussed below in
relation to the entrepreneurship discourse. Therefore, I will first reiterate, condense and interrelate
my main observations.
It must be stressed that the signification and valuation of development has changed quite
dramatically over the last decades. Furthermore, it is undoubted that the idea of development,
since the Truman era, has been advocating the merits of economic growth. The different
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discourses on development have therefore not simply replaced each other but created, at times
subtle, shifts and alterations of its meaning. For instance, one can argue that the notion of
‘economic growth’ has always been inherent in development. However, this connection has also
become a matter of overt contestation The first critical voices appeared in the late 1960s, and it is
safe to claim that the problematization of development aid coincided with the rise of ‘basic
human needs’ approaches in the 1970s and ‘sustainable development’ in the early 1990s. More
recently, from the mid-1990s to the present, the idea of economic growth has witnessed a
significant re-interpretation through globalization discourse. That is, denoting economic growth
as the central means for securing both individual well-being and the prosperity of communities at
large has made economic growth appear in a more positive light. Essentially, the globalization
discourse has also had a significant influence on the role of the state in development endeavors.
Whereas until the end of the 1970s the state was believed to fulfill the ‘Benthamite function of
realizing the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ (Berthoud, 1992, p. 73), we can see that
the discourse of globalization has replaced the primacy of the state by the primacy of the market
which is seen as an autonomous mechanism for promoting development. To be sure, this shift of
emphasis was already stimulated by liberal economic models as introduced through the structural
adjustments programs in the early 1980s. As mentioned before, structural adjustment programs
were occupied with popularizing the view that global poverty can only be reduced by
transforming southern national economies according to the model of their industrialized counter-
part. Yet, although the notion of the ‘market’ after the repeated failures of structural adjustment
policies lost some of its appeal, this did not lead to its general replacement. Far from it, one can
observe that the idea of ‘market friendly development’ remains popular which is evident, for
instance, in the World Bank’s ‘World Development Report’ published in 1991. The report
stressed, among other things, the merits of the advance of the free market in Eastern Europe.
However, there is an important difference between the eulogy of the market in structural
adjustment policies and its treatment in today’s development programs. In concrete terms, the
idea of structural adjustment highlighted the almost infinite positive possibilities of the de-
regulated market. In present development concepts, on the other hand, one also finds some hints
at the role of ‘responsibility’. The issue of responsibility, so it seems, addresses the notion that
economic structures cannot do (i.e. be successful) without the active participation and
engagement of institutions and individuals. Responsibility thus implies that both the success and
failures of development endeavors are contingent on the concrete engagement of economic actors
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in both the south and the north. Moreover, the idea of responsibility acts as an imperative,
demanding that people must account for and take care of their own well-being and livelihood. In
other words, in contrast to sustainable development, which saw responsibility as a general duty to
maintain global resources for subsequent generations, responsibility in the context of
globalization discourse is concerned with holding particular actors (i.e. the indigenous people,
developing nations) liable for their own development and progress, i.e. for their fate. Based on the
observation that the notion of ‘responsibility’ is primarily used to construe responsible (i.e. self-
governing) citizens (both individual and corporate), I will now elaborate on how the discourse of
globalization has deployed the idea of entrepreneurship to stimulate a distinctively novel form of
governmentality.
The ‘hegemonic models of development’ (Gellert, 2005, p. 1345) as advocated by the
‘Washington Consensus’ and the World Bank and IMF are said to have shifted the rationality of
Third World politics toward neo-liberalism. It is evident that the discourse of globalization has
played a crucial role in transforming the rationale for managing national economies. While, as
established before, the discourse of globalization maintained an emphasis on economic growth
through structural adjustment programs, it became more explicit about the acceptable and
legitimate ways of carrying out development endeavors. That is, development discourse in the
1990s relied on notions of ‘responsibilization’ which, in the sense of Foucauldian
governmentality (cf. also Chapter 1), provided a blueprint for the ideal way of individual and
institutional conduct. To put it bluntly, responsibilization advocated an active participation of the
(southern) actors involved in development initiatives and, more precisely, that both individuals
and institutions in the south should take (part of) their fortune in their own hands (Brigg, 2001).
The point I want to emphasize here is that entrepreneurship has served as the benchmark for
visualizing the ideal of the self-directed, pro-active and responsible subject. The ideality of
entrepreneurship with respect to the leveraging of local communities in the Third World is
revealed in a speech held in 1996 by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn who
claimed that ‘microcredit programs have brought the vibrancy of the market economy to the
poorest villages and people of the world. This business approach to the alleviation of poverty has
allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity’ (quoted in Brigg,
2001). Evidently then, the notion of ‘enterprise’ has come to occupy a crucial role in the re-
interpretation of development. It not only contains a critique of ‘big government’ (cf. du Gay,
1997; 2003) but also, and more fundamentally, suggests a solution to the problems posed by
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‘globalization’ by proposing a new set of ideals and principles for conceiving of and acting upon
organizational and personal conduct. The notion of enterprise thus provides the ultimate means to
control or, more precisely, govern Third World actors not through overt force but through their
own volition (du Gay, 1996). Essentially, the idea of entrepreneurship and enterprise has for the
most part been conceptualized and implemented in the context of microcredit programs which are
seen as a fertile means for governing (Third) world affairs and for ‘structuring relationships with
the poor’ (van Pischke et al., 1993, p. 5). Moreover, what is revealed by this business approach to
poverty is that entrepreneurship endorses a particular social identity for the indigenous people.
Whereas the notion of ‘entrepreneurship’ construes the indigenous people as self-maximizing
entrepreneurs, Ranking (2001) mentioned that the discourse of entrepreneurship has somewhat
become the new dogma of contemporary development endeavors. To illustrate Ranking’s
proposition: in a UN report entitled ‘Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for
the Poor’ (March 1, 2004), Secretary-General Kofi Annan
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promoted entrepreneurship as a
means for developing the private sector in developing nations, claiming that economic growth
must be seen as the key for southern national economies. As is the case with the GSB initiative
(Growing Sustainable Business) created by the UNDP, the report reveals that the idea of
entrepreneurship is premised on the assumption that private sector initiatives – by enabling
concrete business investments and linkages – bring market driven solutions to the sphere of
poverty alleviation. Arguably, one could claim that history repeats itself (cf. our above argument
on the structural adjustment policies). What is more important in the present context, however, is
to take good note of the argument that entrepreneurial initiatives by private individuals,
corporations and communities are the right means for alleviating poverty by means of economic
growth, job creation and by bringing cheaper products and services to the market. This argument
reveals the dream-like hopes that are currently attached to entrepreneurship in both academic and
political discourse. The logic that entrepreneurship represents the single best, not to say only, way
to improve and better the world is very much reminiscent of the narrow or at least over-optimistic
view propounded in scientific (social) entrepreneurship literature (e.g. Jones & Keogh, 2006). cf.
also Chapter 2). The pervasiveness of entrepreneurship discourse is indeed striking and it seems
tenable to follow Rankin’s (2001) suggestion that a ‘consensus has recently emerged among
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Annan’s speech was related with the UNDP’s (United Nations Development Programme) Commission on the
Private Sector and Development.
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scholars and practitioners of development that microcredit – in the form of small loans for the
purposes of promoting small-scale enterprise – can provide a veritable panacea of poverty world-
wide’ (p. 18). If looked at from the perspective of private donors and the business sector, the
persuasiveness of the entrepreneurship dogma, following Fernando (1997), quite clearly derives
from the assumption that microcredit initiatives lead to a ‘win-win’-approach of development
where investors gain profits and the poor gain access to resources that allow them to assert
themselves in the market. Yet, there is also a backside to this approach to poverty alleviation.
Microcredit programs, in promoting entrepreneurial subjectivity over other forms of being,
appear to depoliticize poverty through an individualistic approach to its alleviation (Brigg, 2001).
In light of the complexity of the liberal and neo-liberal signification of development, it appears
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish whether Ranking’s (2001) claim that micro-
enterprises have become the consensual model for poverty alleviation applies to the entire
development dispositif or if the avowed consensus relates only to policy statements from such
organizations as the UN (cf. above) or the World Bank. Since this is an important issue, I will try
to shed some light on the interrelation between development discourse and development NGOs,
notably addressing the question if and how the discourse of entrepreneurship has been received
by the (northern) development NGO community.
Non-Governmental Organizations and Development
Calling to mind that the institutional focus of the following discursive investigation will be
on northern or, more precisely, Swiss NGOs, it is important to ask ‘what is the standing and
status of development NGOs’ in the broader project of development?’ In this context it is
important to recall that development discourse is promoted, to use Ferguson’s (1990) phrase,
by a ‘machine’ which is global in its reach and which consists of ‘departments and
bureaucracies in colonial and post-colonial states throughout the world, western aid agencies,
multilateral organizations, the sprawling global network of NGOs, experts and private
consultants, private sector organizations such as banks and companies … and the plethora of
development studies and programmes in institutes of learning worldwide’ (Crush, 1995, p.
6). However, whereas the idea of development was prospering right from the start of post-
WWII politics, it was only at some stage during the1980s that development NGOs gained
global momentum (Rahnema, 1992). The missionary organizations and war charities
established after the demise of colonial rule were gradually transformed into development
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NGOs (cf. Manji & O’Coill, 2002). Yet, their status remained rather marginal, since it was
still generally accepted that development was primarily (and often exclusively) the duty of
the nation state. Despite NGOs’ early allegiance to the idea of development, it was suggested
by organizations such as the UN and the World Bank that development was primarily the
task of the state. As a consequence, NGOs were only able to carry out projects in those
peripheral areas the state was disinclined to reach. The broad acceptance of development
NGOs, as Manji and O’Coill (2002) illustrate, was not achieved before the rise of the neo-
liberal project (as expressed through structural adjustment policies in the South and promoted
in the North in the Reagan and Thatcher era; cf. above) in conjunction with the oil crises of
the 1970s. That is, whereas the oil crises resulted in the creation of a finance capital glut, it
was the accompanied global recession which led to a situation in which developing countries
were called upon to take loans for their own development. Furthermore, it was through the
introduction of neo-liberal discourse – premised upon the idea of a minimalist state and a de-
regulated market – that people accepted that services previously provided by the state could
be more effectively dealt with by private and non-governmental organizations. One of the
most notable outcomes of this shift was that NGOs were at once conceived of as
indispensable substitutes of the state (Kajese, 1987). As Murphy (2000) rightly observed, the
withdrawal of the state from its role as the promoter and protector of development was
accompanied by a parallel reallocation of responsibility in the direction of the NGO sector.
This restructuring led to an unprecedented distribution of funds to NGOs which is evident by
the fact that in the early 1970s less than 2% of NGOs’ income came from official donors,
whereas the figure by the mid-1990s had risen up to 30% (Manji & O’Coill, 2002), or by the
fact that, as revealed in a recent World Bank (2001) report, from 1970 to 1985 total
development disbursed by international NGOs increased ten-fold. In concrete numbers, it has
been estimated that in 1992 international NGOs channeled over 7.6 billion USD of aid to
developing countries whereby it is assumed that over 15 percent of total overseas
development aid was carried out by NGOs’. Given the literal explosion of state-
commissioned development funding, it is hardly surprising that development NGOs in
western countries virtually mushroomed and that, notwithstanding the notoriously
incomplete statistics, there are as today more than 5000 international NGOs working in the
field of development (Martens, 2003). McMichael (1996) thus contended that the
reorientation of development in the 1970s and the rapid growth of the NGO sector
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constituted a shift from conceiving of development as a nationally (i.e. state-) managed to a
globally managed project. Along the same lines Watts (1995), mentioned that the
‘fascination with non-governmental organizations’ provided an opportunity to design new
configurations of state, markets and civil organizations, ‘unencumbered by outmoded or
ideological notions of central planning’ (p. 58).
It is undeniably important to comprehend that governments increasingly co-opted NGOs
to a repackaged program of development. In my assessment, it is even more important to
highlight the promises, not to say dreams, which were attached to that very process and
particularly how these expectations influenced the status and legitimacy of development NGOs. It
must be noted that the neo-liberal dogma of the 1980s influenced the status and legitimacy of
development NGOs through two distinct but interrelated assumptions: first, that NGOs were
quicker, more flexible and more efficient in dealing with calamities in the Third World and,
second, that NGOs were better able to address the demands of developing populations and to
implement genuinely participatory approaches. Regarding the former assumption Welch (2000),
for instance, suggested that NGOs ‘are quicker than governments to respond to new demands and
opportunities’ and ‘when adequately funded, can outperform government in the delivery of many
public services … and are better than governments at dealing with problems that grow slowly and
effect society through the cumulative effect on individuals’ (p. 626). Essentially, what is
conspicuous here is that the rise of development NGOs coincided with the problematization of
development from within and outside the community. This is, however, not particularly
surprising, since this coincidence merely shows how development NGOs emerged out of a state
of interregnum (Hardt & Negri, 2004) during the 1980s as the ostensible redeemers or, following
Cross (1997), the ‘cure-all wonder drug’ of the development deadlock. Regarding the expectation
that NGOs were better able than the state to stimulate participatory approaches, Rahnema (1992)
convincingly argued that NGOs were represented as ‘change agents’ and positioned as a
‘substitute for the professional expert hired by a development project’ and, therefore, as an
intermediary that was thought of replacing ‘the alien authority of the outsider with a ‘co-actor’
whose role was to intervene, primarily, as a catalyst in an endogenous process of self-
regeneration’ (p. 123). To put it bluntly, NGOs were chiefly seen as being more just than state
authorities, not least because it was assumed that they were operating without any claims to
domination. Development NGOs, so it seems, were thus given a special status ‘on the ground
that, being non-governmental organizations, they could avoid many of the pitfalls of development
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projects implemented by bureaucratized government agencies’ (Rahnema, 1992, p. 124). It was
thus believed, as Jennings (1995) claimed, that ‘NGOs have a comparative advantage over the
private sector and government in relation to sustainable poverty alleviation arising out of their
access to the poor, their relations with intended beneficiaries, and their organizational freedom’
(p. 26). With this in mind, it is clear that the positive valuation of NGOs did not primarily derive
from their proven record of success, but from the grandiose, not to say unrealistic, hope that they
would be able to solve the ideological conflicts and hierarchical inequalities of previous
development endeavors. Whereas the rise of development NGOs was inextricably related to neo-
liberal ideas of the free market, it is important to note that this shift also entailed the argument
that NGOs, since acting in the interests of the poor and not of the elites (Cross, 1997), were
directly opposed to neo-liberal orthodoxies as well as to the corruption and mismanagement of
the state. That is to say that ‘in their roles as advocates NGOs are seen to provide a
counterbalance to public sector power and an ‘independent’ voice to challenge policy issues’
(Mayhew, 2005, p. 728). As Mayhew’s statement clearly reveals, the avowed emancipatory
potential of NGOs became the key point for both their legitimacy and status, since it was assumed
that they were more trustworthy and ethical in their pursuit of development. Moreover,
development NGOs were construed as a political counter-force to both the state and the market
(Brigg, 2001), meaning that they were celebrated as ‘the modern panacea of development … that
is prescribed for any number of social ills: Poverty, disempowerment, unsustainability, … ,
authoritanism’ (Cross, 1997). Based on the above observations it is possible to make a tentative
estimate of when the global heydays of development NGOs started and when they came to an
end. Put highly reductively, we can say that development NGOs were predominantly praised for
their effective and efficient pursuit of development (Jennings, 1995) as well as for their ostensibly
noble ideas (i.e. protest and lobbying for the poor; cf. Scharnagel, 2002) between 1985 and 1995.
This means that the ‘golden age’ of development NGOs (Fugure, 2001) roughly took place
between McNamaras’ period as World Bank director (when the Bank turned from government-
led to NGO-led development) and sometime during the 1990s, when the World Bank and the
IMF exalted business and the private sector as the engines of (economic) development.
I therefore claim that the euphoria about development NGOs has at least partly abated
since the mid to late 1990s. To be sure, the reasons why development NGOs are no longer seen as
democratizers of development (Clark, 1991), sources of alternative development (Drabek, 1987)
or vehicles of popular participation (Farrington & Bebbington, 1993) are manifold. However, it is
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evident that the problematization of development NGOs was related to the argument that they
were neither effective in ameliorating poverty (Atack, 1999), nor especially accountable (and thus
responsible) to both Third World subjects and donor agencies. In consequence, to claim that
development NGOs were fundamentally challenged seems apposite in that history shows how ‘an
unproblematic field of experience became a problem, raised discussions and debate, incited new
reactions, and induced crises in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions’
(Foucault, 2001, p. 74; slightly modified). In line with this assertion, I first want to note that the
alleged failures of development NGOs have become ever more eminent in discussions both inside
and outside the NGO community. That is to say that the notion that development NGOs were less
bureaucratic than governmental bodies and thus quicker and more flexible in addressing urgent
calamities has gradually given way to the perspective that the initial enthusiasm about NGOs was
simply grounded on the disillusionment caused by governments’ own failure to meet donor
objectives (Green & Matthias, 1997). The initial status as ‘darlings’ of development aid (Fugure,
2001) has thus been replaced or at least supplemented by the view that NGOs are dilettantish
(Scharnagel, 2002). Following Edwards and Hulme (1995), a considerable part of the recent
literature has argued that NGO’s effectiveness as agents of development has been exaggerated or
merely assumed rather than demonstrated. In view of the alleged underperformance of
development NGOs, the question has been raised whether those organizations can legitimately
speak for the poor (e.g. Shikwati, 2002). This brings us to a second, interrelated issue which has
been at the forefront of recent debates: NGO accountability. It is important to mention that this
issue has been raised in recent years, at least partly due to NGO’s more prominent role in the
‘new policy agenda’ (Edwards & Hulme, 2002). Although the esteem for NGOs has not fully
disappeared, there is, according to Karajkov (2005), a rising number of critical voices that claim
that NGOs represent the ‘world’s largest unregulated industry … that is to say, they often operate
without minimum standards, are insufficiently transparent … and are accountable to no one but
themselves.’ Evidently then, the notion of accountability, despite its various meanings, has more
often than not been used to stress that NGOs must provide proof of their proper allocation of
money (vis-à-vis donors) and of the apt representation of their constituencies (i.e. partners or
beneficiaries in the Third World; cf. Edwards & Hulme, 1995). It is interesting in this connection
to see that the issue of accountability was advocated by both governments – with whom NGOs
were said to be in a relation characterized by a ‘mixture of conflict, competition, cooperation and
cooptation’ (Gordenker & Weiss, 1995, p. 551) – and the private sector where the objection was
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that NGOs were not as yet able to properly document their work (and hence their worth).
Accordingly, it is fair to say that ‘results-based management’, which largely rests on corporate
standards such as ‘inputs’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘indicators’ (Murphy, 2000), has been literally
imposed on development NGOs by the pressure exerted by private and public founders. Given the
novel demands and claims development NGOs have been confronted with, it can reasonably be
stated that they have been subjected (or have subjected themselves) to a change of identity. As a
result of this change of identity, NGOs are no longer seen primarily as engines of social
transformation. Instead, they are now construed on the basis of such notions as specialization,
professionalism or result-orientation (Uphoff, 1996). In blunt terms, development NGOs, both in
the north and the south, today find themselves in a ‘crisis of legitimization’. This crises, however,
is not only due to the increased pressures to become accountable to their private and
governmental donors and the stagnating (or even decreasing) amount of financial support granted
(cf. below). For it is equally the case that conflicting values and incompatible assumptions about
the agenda of NGOs have led to a situation where these organizations were forced to adopt a
novel approach to their identity politics. This situation is aptly expressed by Holloway (1999)
who claimed that ‘(w)hile people inside the NGO world still think of themselves as occupying the
moral high ground, the reality now is that few people in the South outside the NGO world think
of NGOs like that’. It therefore seems safe to claim that both in terms of their reputation and
legitimacy the status of (development) NGOs has deteriorated considerably at least since the mid-
1990s. Whereas both the imperative of accountability as well as the related allegation that NGOs
were ineffective in alleviating global poverty have created the precondition for a more business-
like approach to development, this novel conceptualization of development simultaneously
reveals an intensified convergence between development NGOs, the state and the private sector.
In other words, while NGOs occupied, until the 1970s, a political and often tension-ridden space
between nation states (i.e. governments) on the one hand and the market (MwMakumbe, 1998) on
the other, there is evidence that NGOs today usually operate less in opposition than in partnership
with the business community (e.g. Cowe, 2004). Recognizing these developments, Brigg (2001)
proclaimed that it is no longer tenable to construe development NGOs as emancipatory actors,
working against the grain of neo-liberal orthodoxies. Instead, so it is claimed, development NGOs
have ‘fallen pray’ to neo-liberal orthodoxies and the globalization hyperbole (e.g. Crush, 1995;
Escobar, 1995). As a result of their subscription to such mainstream ideologies, it would be more
apt to portray NGOs as ostensibly ‘nonpolitical technologies’ which have come to trade on
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viewpoints which are compatible with both the market and the state. This critique thus holds that
development NGOs, during the rise of global neo-liberalism, became accustomed to the logic of
the market which is conceived of on the basis of the ‘worldwide interpenetration of markets
commonly referred to as ‘globalization’ (Ranking, 2001, p. 21). The reinterpretation of
development along the rationale of globalization and the market has, unsurprisingly, also come to
blur the traditional boundaries between the private sector
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and civil society.
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As Brugman
(2005) made clear in this context, NGOs and the private realm are in a phase of convergence
which manifests itself in that ‘NGOs and communities are now more enterprising, while business
is more socially innovative. This convergence opens opportunities for breakthroughs in
development practice that have evaded the international community for decades. If the trend
holds, it will have important implications for international development initiatives.’ Stated
differently, while NGOs were initially appointed to a sector which, by definition, was positioned
in opposition to the state, it is obvious that the present field of force has granted those
organizations a position which transcends conventional boundaries. Moreover, development
NGOs were initially appointment as the voice of the poor and as an indispensable force vis-à-vis
the state (Marschall, 2002). It therefore hardly needs to be mentioned that this signification has
been fundamentally scrutinized, not least as a consequence of the allegation that development
NGOs have adopted a language which is less ‘anti-state’ (in an ideological sense). At the same
time, it is conspicuous that this discourse is considerably more open to the philosophy of marked-
led globalization. It is thus no secret that development NGOs, as Petras (1997) asserted, have
come to foster the neo-liberal idea of responsibility for social problems and the importance of
private resources to solve these problems. In addition, Murphey (2000) mentioned that many
NGOs have ‘succumbed to the view that globalization in its present form is inevitable and
irreversible, and have accommodated to it by trading their essential values for technical
professionalism, often imported from the private sector’ (p. 330). After all, in the aftermath of the
heydays of NGOs (cf. above), when these organizations met with increasing prejudice as
politically flawed and utterly slow because of their participative and democratic procedures, neo-
liberal orthodoxies of the market and globalized production and consumption started to penetrate
the domain of NGOs. On the face of it, this transformation from a political counter-force against
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To be sure, the private sector has been the moving target of NGO criticism.
93
NGOs are part of the broader spectrum of civil society organizations (e.g. trade unions, professional associations,
religious groups, the media, etc).
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(right-wing dominated) governments or the state (e.g. Sassen, 1998) to an efficient, powerful, and
business-sensitive agent complying with norms of accountability, project and financial
controlling, lean production and best (management) practices has not remained unnoticed by
critical minds. Unsurprisingly, critics concluded that development NGOs had become the
‘community face’ of neo-liberalism. As such, they were seen as intimately related with those ‘at
the top’, complementing their destructive work through local (Third World) projects (Petras,
1997). Murphy (2000) expressed these developments thus: ‘(r)ather than challenging the way the
world is, the tendency is to accept and adapt to – and therefore reinforce – the way the world is’
(p. 343). As echoed in both Petras’ and Murphy’s claim, development NGOs are said to have
accepted the seeming inevitability of globalization which, on the other hand, seems to have
engendered a certain loss of their cultural sensitivity and political autonomy. Development
NGOs, so it seems, are confronted with the double task of proving their market sensitivity
without simply dismissing their traditional ‘raison d’être’. That is to say that development NGOs,
who have evidently lost large parts of their authority to speak for the subaltern (Shikwati, 2002;
cf. also Spivak, 1988), have turned to business (Merchet, 2002) in order to both increase and
justify their effectiveness (both in terms of money raised and spent, and their various initiatives,
projects and campaigns). Essentially, what I am saying here is that development NGOs –
somehow as a result of their increased participation and cooperation with neo-liberal
governments and, more recently, with the private sector – are today judged according to a set of
parameters within which received standards of market-friendly practices and proper business
conduct are gaining more and more weight. Along the same lines, Desai and Imrie (1998)
suggested that in development NGOs a ‘new public management revolution’ and the rise of a
veritable ‘auditing culture’ is taking place. This insight has led them to the conclusion that this
new culture at the same time marks the expression of a ‘new managerialism’. It is evident that
these auditing practices, due to their primary (and at times exclusive) focus on procedural
efficiency and on cost cutting, entail a serious loss: they diminish the ability of development
NGO to carry out valuable work in the sphere of developing nations (e.g. Clarke et al., 2000;
O’Neill, 2002). Although the recent confusion and uncertainty with regard to the tasks and
responsibilities of development NGOs can undeniably be seen as an important issue, the point
which interests me here is that recent cuts in state-commissioned development expenditure have
literally driven NGOs to adopt entrepreneurial practices in order to open up new financial
channels.
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To gain a proper understanding of how development NGOs have come to incorporate
entrepreneurial values and practices, it first needs to be recalled that the legitimacy of these
organizations today is largely discussed in terms of financial parameters such as, for instance, the
ratio between fundraising (i.e. revenues) and administration (i.e. expenditure; cf. Slim, 2002).
These assessment criteria, which, in my assessment, have been established over the last 10 to 15
years, are inextricably linked with the contention that the biggest challenge of contemporary
development NGOs is their financial sustenance (e.g. Alymkulova & Seipulnik, 2005;
Rmasheuskaya, 2005). Brugmann (2005) convincingly argued that it was in the course of reduced
public spending that many NGOs were forced to engage in entrepreneurial efforts for subsistence.
Construing the shift towards entrepreneurship as the result of changed economic circumstances,
Davis (1997) further specified that many NGOs have come to adopt the entrepreneurial principles
of the private sector not simply out of mounting frustration with the current funding situation but
also out of a desire to avoid donor control. NGO leaders, according to Davis, now see themselves
as a new breed of ‘entrepreneurs’ who strive to create a larger, more sustainable, pool of
resources for NGO initiatives. Going beyond traditional donor-grantee relationships, NGO
leaders have created a new organizational ‘hybrid’ which is non-profit in purpose and for-profit
in approach (Dees, 1998; 1998b; cf. also Chapters 2 & 7). In line with this observation, it has
been suggested that these new NGO entrepreneurs have developed unique strategies for creating
sustainable funds by means of creative and sometimes lucrative ‘self-financing’ enterprises. Self-
financing activities thus encompass mission-related as well as non-related for-profit ventures both
of which, however, involve resource-generating activities that provide new financial sources for
development NGOs. In light of Brugmann’s (2005) contention that scarcer funds explained the
growth of the microcredit sector in South Asia, the agricultural cooperatives in Africa and the
solid waste micro-enterprises in Latin America, it becomes arguable that the rationality of
entrepreneurship is not only used by academic or political agents in their re-interpretations of
development (cf. above). Rather, such arguments are also deployed and reiterated in the realm of
development NGOs, that is, in the sphere of practice. For instance, Fazle Abed, the founder of
BRAC (probably the world’s largest development NGO, providing education, health services,
microcredit and livelihood creation programs for a significant part of the population of
Bangladesh) on the occasion of his resignation as director of BRAC expressed his conviction that
if ‘the next leadership continues in the same entrepreneurial fashion, the organization will survive
and flourish.’ Abed, while referring to BRAC’s entrepreneurial culture, went on to state that
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‘(t)he way we operate is very entrepreneurial, we question everything, we’re continually learning
to do things better. I hope that we will have the same culture in the organization when I am no
longer there’ (cf. http://www.allavida.org/alliance/mar05e.html). Similarly, Muhammad Yunus,
the founder of the Grameen Bank (a large-scale microcredit initiative founded in Bangladesh; cf.
Chapters 1 & 7) argued that development initiatives should concur with the logic of ‘social
business entrepreneurship’ (cf. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/Listofawards.html). To be
sure, Yunus, a professor in economics, has been critical of those economic theories which
proclaim that people contribute to society and the world in the best possible manner by simply
concentrating on securing maximum benefits for themselves: ‘(w)hen you get your maximum,
everybody else will get their maximum’ (cf. http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/
socialbusinessentrepreneurs.htm). However, though arguing against the naïve ideal of an
unregulated market, Yunus nevertheless posited that the market is not only responsible for the
creation of social problems but equally a valuable source for leveraging social welfare. Yunus
thus said: ‘(i)t is time to move away from the narrow interpretation of capitalism and broaden the
concept of market by giving full recognition to SBEs [social business enterprises]. Once this is
done SBEs can flood the market and make the market work for social goals as efficiently as it
does for personal goals … Let’s get serious about social business entrepreneurs. They can
brighten up this gloomy world.’ What is reflected in Yunus’ praise of social business
entrepreneurs is that his vision is compatible with neo-liberal orthodoxies as discussed above.
Moreover, Yunus statement seems to rest on the somehow paradoxical assumption that the
(unregulated) market and capitalism at large are not only the cause of wide-scale poverty, global
inequality, etc. but simultaneously the means to solve them. To put it bluntly, there is no reason
to change the dominant economic order, since social problems are, following Yunus, perfectly
acceptable given the mechanisms of the market. Be that as it may, enunciations as those by Abed
and Yunus aptly illustrate that the development project has adopted a language game that gives
development NGOs a very different face. Moreover, the language game implicit in both of the
above accounts clearly shows that development NGOs are nowadays represented by means of a
terminology derived from the private sector. The point to be emphasized, then, is that it was not
that long ago that this logic worked as the precise opposite of the code of conduct of NGOs and
NPOs (non-profit organization). This observation thus makes it important to briefly elaborate on
the rhetorical function inherent in the new term of development (NGOs). To this end, I would like
to draw an analogy with du Gay’s (1997) eloquent treatise on ‘globalization discourse’ so as to
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argue that the current emphasis on entrepreneurship (and management at large) operates to revive
some of the enthusiasm which was lost as a result of the continued shortcomings of NGOs in
alleviating global poverty. That is to say that entrepreneurship effectively works as the new
‘hurray-word’ which has the noticeable function of redeeming the lost faith in development aid.
Having said this, we must not ignore that there might be a certain irony in re-envisaging
development NGOs through the repertoire of entrepreneurship and/or managerialism, since this
shift of emphasis might simply try to conceal the links with an abortive past (cf. Cook, 2003).
This immediately brings us back to the subsequent investigation of NGO practitioners by means
of which I want to inquire, among other things, how, that is, on behalf of what interpretive
repertoires (i.e. argumentative threads) people who are actively involved in development aid
initiatives perceive or, more precisely, construe their everyday experiences. While the general
aim of the following investigation is to gain a deeper sense of the meanings conveyed by
practicing development aid actors, the concrete question to be asked, then, is if and to what extent
the lexis of the private sector has come to penetrate the everyday life of NGO practitioners. In
consequence, it will become important to investigate whether the accounts presented by
development aid practitioners rest on a homogeneous and hence univocal set of rationalities or
whether a sense of opposition and struggle is at the heart of their discourse. In other words, we
will have to establish whether a virtual battle between competing language games (i.e. economic
versus non-economic ‘truths’) that attests to the constant coming and dying of meaning (Bakhtin,
1981) can be detected in their utterances. In the next section, I will thus specify the objectives as
well as the research questions addressed through the ensuing discourse analysis which will be
followed by a discussion of the analysis’ methodological procedure and the paradigmatic and
analytic premises that inform the investigation as a whole.
Objectives
As discussed above, there seems to be a problem inherent in postcolonial writing: some scholars
have claimed that development discourse operates hegemonically thus making it almost
impossible to conceive of development outside the western mode of (economic) thinking and
talking. To be sure, hegemony is different from any form of strict determinism since it does not
presume that discourse is attached to a sort of power that seeks to stabilize a particular view of
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reality (Berger & Luckman, 1966; cf. also Chapter 6). Yet, the idea of hegemony, the way it is
deployed in the aforementioned investigations, refers to the limiting effects of discourse, thereby
suggesting that Euro-American ideologies are pervasive in that they exert a significant influence
on people’s everyday knowledge. Although I have tried to put the hegemonic view of discourse
into perspective by showing that it would be exaggerated to claim, first, that development simply
pursues the colonial trajectory of western imperialism by novel means and, second, that the
discourse of development is actively engineered by identifiable western organizations, I
nevertheless want to point out that neo-liberal orthodoxies today undeniably interfere with
development aid both at the macro and the micro-level. This means that there is a certain
consensus regarding the importance of market-based activities which is supported, for instance,
by strategic or political development narratives. This consensus is, furthermore, evident from the
way development is currently carried out in practice by development NGOs. If we thus
acknowledge that the images of development and development NGOs have changed dramatically
over the last couple of decades, it is worth reiterating that the boundary which separates sound
from improper development (NGOs) today is increasingly determined by its closeness or distance
from the market logic. As shown above, the realm of development is at pains to overcome the
identified failures of previous endeavors and, more fundamentally, to re-establish (part of) its
public acceptance and political legitimacy. This explains why I will approach the narratives of
NGO practitioners as linguistic performances through which they rhetorically try to legitimate
their everyday endeavors. Thus construing the narratives of practitioners narratives as both the
expression and re-performance of distinct identity politics, I am particularly interested in
establishing how development aid, as well as its inherent subjects and objects, are discursively
constructed in the context of a highly contested and ambivalent terrain of knowledge. In light of
my previous proposition that development consists of a variegated set of epistemes (some being
arguably more pervasive and dominant than others), this raises the further question whether this
ambivalence reverberates in the narratives of NGO practitioners or whether they manage (or opt)
to put forward a more harmonious account of development. Stated differently, my analysis aims
at investigating if the interpretive repertoires practitioners deploy for constructing their
development narratives are characterized by a more or less singular logic, i.e. homology,
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or if,
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Importantly, the notion of ‘homology’ is not meant to convey an image of discourse as a closed system of meaning
(cf. also Chapter 6). Rather, homology is used here to signify the sort of situation in which discourse proceeds
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conversely, their talk reveals a certain amount of argumentative difference, tension and
incommensurability, i.e. heterology. Since to my knowledge, no comparable investigations
exist,
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it becomes clear that my discourse analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk will proceed in an
exploratory and inductive fashion. My investigation will, then, venture to gain a broad sense of
the variability (and limits) contained in narratives about development aid. The question what
discourses are deemed apposite – given the moral, political and pragmatic circumstances of the
various conversations
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– for delineating development thus raises wider issues regarding the
canonical and hence consensually accepted ways of thinking and talking about the subject matter.
Though this inquiry proceeds in an inductive manner as explained above, one can
nevertheless formulate propositions regarding the sort of discourses that are most likely
encountered. That is, if we concur with the available literature that the field of development has
experienced a remarkable influx of business and management ‘truths’, it seems safe to claim that
those ‘truths’ will have a bearing on practitioners’ constructions of development. In concrete
terms, it appears that the unclouded celebration of the development project became obsolete a
long time ago and that development has increasingly been subjected to neo-liberal orthodoxies
(Storey, 2000) as a result of which it now embraces the ostensible merits of ‘technical
professionalism’ (Murphy, 2000), ‘management’ (Cook, 2004) and ‘business-like approaches’
(Dart, 2004). It would therefore hardly be surprising if practitioners’ narratives would reveal a
certain propensity to portray development in terms of management and business, as an essential
part of the globalization hyperbole (du Gay, 2003), or simply as a reiteration of neo-liberal theory
(Storey, 2000). By implication, if there was to be a homology in practitioners’ narratives this
would, in my opinion, most likely be expressed through one or the other of the above truth
regimes. To be sure, one cannot say with confidence what particular terms the lexis of
practitioners will comprise and what forms of ‘development realities’ will be created as a result of
those terms. In any case, I want to point out that there is a somewhat more general objective
without tension and contestation, that is, where one finds a certain consensus regarding the particularities of
development.
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Essentially, the notion of ‘comparable investigations’ is construed here in a rather narrow sense, meaning that I am
alluding to potential investigations conducted in the context of Swiss development NGOs.
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The specific interview situation (i.e. the dyad between a particular practitioner and me as the representative of an
internationally renowned business school) must necessarily be regarded as having an inhibiting influence on certain
ways of talking about development and, conversely, an enabling effect on others. That is, the particular expectations,
demands, aims, etc. carried into a concrete conversation invariably affect the construction of people’s narratives (cf.
below).
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behind my discursive investigation of NGO practitioners. That is, my investigation chiefly seeks
to find an answer to the question whether development is mainly construed as an economic and/or
managerial undertaking (as follows from the previous arguments) or whether practitioners’
accounts also leave some space for social significations of the subject matter. The operation of
managerial discourse enlarges the scope of the ‘economic reality’ of development. This
enlargement would entail, for instance, the redefinition of NGO practitioners as ‘economic man’
(cf. Gordon, 1987). It therefore seems both apt and urgent to determine whether practitioners go
about re-imagining development as a form of economic action and, most fundamentally, to
estimate the relative pervasiveness of economic over social narrations (or vice versa). Rejecting a
deterministic view of discourse
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as implied, for instance, in Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000)
notion of ‘muscular discourse’ (cf. Chapter 6), it becomes clear that issues of ‘appropriation’ and
‘choice’ (e.g. Smith, 1988) will be pivotal in the ensuing discourse analysis. Since it is not
assumed that discourse is something which people consciously invoke and mechanically deploy
in their talk, it follows that practitioners are able to either (creatively) re-employ or reject
managerial and business discourses (cf. Brinkerhoff & Coston, 1999). Whereas the issue of
resistance, or, more precisely, the interrelation between power and knowledge on the one hand
and individual self-determination on the other will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 6, it
shall suffice here to emphasize that mega-discourses (i.e. grand narratives) of development are
not passively received by NGO practitioners. Instead, these discourses must be conceived of as
particularly stabilized forms of knowledge and hence as the ‘archetypes’ of local conversations
(Davies & Harré, 1990). It must remain clear, however, such discourses are re-appropriated (i.e.
endowed with novel meaning) in the course of social action, i.e. in the concrete conversations
between practitioners and interviewers. With this in mind, the question to be addressed, then, is
how practitioners creatively interweave, re-inscribe and reject the different ‘development truths’
to accommodate the demands of the interview situation.
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A deterministic view would imply, among other things, that discourses are seen as a strait-jacket (Savolainen,
2004) that compels agents to speak in certain ways in all situations.
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Research Questions
At the most abstract level, the discursive investigation is grounded on the assumption that the
broader problematization (i.e. crisis of legitimization) of both development aid and development
NGOs over the last two decades will have a more or less direct effect on the conceptualizations of
local NGO practitioners. Furthermore, given that development aid is a highly political or
politicized undertaking and that the meaning of development is always contingent on lived (i.e.
everyday) ideologies (Billig et al., 1988; Billig, 1993), it becomes conceivable that the discursive
construction of development is in no way an unproblematic venture. Instead, it must be seen as an
intricate endeavor which presupposes that practitioners take into account, first, that certain
rationalities are more pervasive or legitimate than others and, second, that certain rationalities are
either obsolete or not persuasive in the context of a specific interview episode. Hence, trying to
gain a clearer picture of how practitioners make use and engage with their linguistic heritage and
of how some regimes of truth are deemed more acceptable (as well as available) than others for
rendering intelligible contemporary development aid, it becomes clear that the analysis is
primarily interested in shedding light upon both the interpretive repertoires and the ideological
dilemmas being revealed in the narration of development. By implication, the narratives of
practitioners will be approached as rhetorical acts on the basis of which they legitimate their
everyday practices or development aid at large. In this context, the issue of rhetoric largely
concurs with the question of how practitioners deal with dominant development orthodoxies, that
is, how they either accept or repudiate certain rationalities with the ultimate objective of
establishing particular representation of development aid. Our interest in practitioners’ rhetoric
goes further than that, since it will also be asked how the respective discourses ‘feed back’ into
people’s subject positions (i.e. identities). As the issue of practitioners’ identity will be dealt with
further down, I first want to become more concrete about the analytic focus of the ensuing
discourse analysis. Accordingly, we can note that the investigation will put particular emphasis
upon the question if and to what extent practitioners ground their narratives on the orthodoxies of
the ‘market’, on ‘development economics’, and on ‘managerialism’, etc. (Murphy, 2000) as is the
case, for instance, with the adjustment policies of the World Bank (Storey, 2000). I will therefore
try to make an estimate of the relative prevalence of managerial and economic discourse and in
particular of the local pervasiveness of entrepreneurship discourse. That is to say I will provide an
answer to the question if, as some have claimed (e.g. Desai & Imrie, 1998; Gellert, 2005),
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economic and/or managerial rationalities occupy a (quasi-) hegemonic position within
development talk. While the issue of hegemony indicates the general direction of the discursive
investigation, I am also interested to bring to light the more marginal narratives of practitioners so
as to both illuminate the variety engendered through the construction of development and to
render visible the different subject positions or discursive identities made possible by the various
truth regimes. Importantly then, the discursive investigation has a double focus since it not
merely asks how particular truth regimes lead to particular subject positions on the part of
practitioners, but also how those same discursive events form the identities of the other of
development, that is, of help recipients and indigenous people at large.
Method
Language as Discourse
The above sections investigated the history of development from a discursive perspective so as to
highlight some of the more objectified ‘truths’ which gave both direction and significance to a
global project that was reinforced by a large (and ever increasing) collective of geographically
dispersed actors. In contrast, the present method section focuses on the concept of ‘discourse’.
The aim here is to adumbrate the use of discourse in the context of the subsequent investigation
of practitioners’ talk and to delineate how discourse will be approached on a methodological
level. As a first step towards this end, we can claim that the previous discussion of development
discourse has been significant to the extent that it has rendered visible (part of) the cultural
heritage and everyday ideologies (Billig, 1993) which are apparently available to practitioners for
their identity performances and for their accounts of development. In line with this assertion,
discourse is not to be seen as a set of pre-existing, static linguistic devices but rather as a ‘form of
social practice’ (Fairclough 1989, p. 20). The French distinction between ‘la langue’ (which
defines language as a closed system of rules) and ‘la parole’ (i.e. spoken language), initially
introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, is helpful to make the point that discourse is not
determined by a system of conventions (i.e. langue) which precedes meaning and which is
therefore independent of human talk or interaction. To be sure, language becomes
psychologically and socially relevant only through its specific use (i.e. parole), that is, through
discourse. In consequence, this later view takes into account, first, that language cannot be
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defined through a code of a-contextual, that is, ‘transformational grammars’ (Chomsky, 1955)
and, second, that language is to be construed in terms of action rather than representation
(Wittgenstein, 1953). This in turn implies that meaning does not reside in particular words,
respectively in a particular relation between a signifier and a signified, but in the way a word is
used in a concrete speech situation. What I am claiming here is that language is to be reflected
from an ‘immanentist’ view (Davies & Harré, 1990) which emphasizes that if one wants to
analyze meaning one has to study the use of language in concrete conversations. Moreover,
meaning needs to be investigated by reference to whatever has happened (i.e. been said) before
and by reference to the personal and cultural resources speakers draw upon to construct
‘presences’ (Law, 2004). If we therefore accept that language is more often than not perceived,
both in scientific inquiries and in an everyday context, as chiefly a communicative device whose
function is to represent an ostensibly existing reality,
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it becomes clear that the distinction
between discourse and the linguistic (Saussure, 1959) or cognitivist understanding of language
(cf. Edwards, 1997) is everything but trivial. Construing and studying language as discourse, that
is, as social practice, renders untenable the assumption that language can provide a precise
account of social reality (Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Gergen & Gergen, 2000; cf. also Chapter 4) or
that it can serve as a path to people’s internal states, implicit intentions and attitudes (e.g.
Edwards, 2006). As Potter and Wetherell (1987) remind us in that context, the basic tenet of
discourse (analysis) is that one is supposed to approach language or social texts in their own right
and not as a secondary route to things ‘beyond the text’. I would like to add, then, that the notion
of ‘discourse’ provides ample scope for the recognition that all language is relational (Hosking &
Bouwen, 2000) and, by implication, that all meaning is, though to various degrees, local-
historical and local-cultural (van der Haar & Hosking, 2004). Therefore, if we conceive of
language as discourse, this still requires us to become explicit as to what level of abstraction I
will study social practice in the following discourse analysis. Thinking, for instance, about Austin
(1962) and Searle’s (1969) investigation of ‘speech acts’ – in which they have come to highlight
the functional aspect of language use (i.e. how people use language to establish accusations,
blames, orders, etc.) – it is evident that the notion of ‘social practice’ takes on a meaning different
from that engendered by the Foucauldian understanding of discourse we have briefly alluded to
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Postmodern theorists have pointed out that the communicative/representational function of language is so
canonical that it is all too easily taken for granted (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).
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before. In consequence, the following section delineates the social psychological tradition of
discourse analysis which I will invoke in my investigation as well as the theoretical and
methodological implications derived therefrom.
Discourse Analysis
It hardly needs mention that the term ‘discourse analysis’ has become an umbrella term which
comprises a heterogeneous collective of theoretical and empirical works (Bishop & Yardley,
2004). For instance, discourse analysis today is related with such diverse traditions as, for
instance, speech act theory as delineated by Austin and Searle, sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumpertz &
Hymes, 1972), social psychology (e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987), the sociology of science (e.g.
Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984), poststructuralism (e.g. Foucault, 1973), etc. (for a broader overview cf.
van Dijk, 1985). Although this list could be extended almost ad infinitum, I would instead like to
clarify the specific tradition on which the present investigation is based. It is noteworthy, first of
all, that the following analysis is largely inspired by psychological discourse analysis as
developed in the mid-1980s by Potter and Wetherell (1987; cf. also Potter, Stringer & Wetherell,
1984; Wetherell, 1986; Potter, 1987). Whereas Potter and Wetherell talked of an ‘interpretive
repertoire’ instead of ‘discourse’, this difference in wording was intended since it made possible a
separation from Foucauldian-inspired analysis which studied discourse as a regulated system (or
set of statements) that was relatively independent from specific, local conversations (e.g. Parker,
1989). In attempting to avert the reification of discourse (cf. Chapter 4), Potter and Wetherell and
their colleagues have come to define interpretive repertoires as a broadly discernable cluster of
terms, descriptions, commonplaces and figures of speech (e.g. metaphors) which are often
clustered around vivid images. In Edley’s (2001) terms: interpretive repertoires are ‘the building
blocks of conversation, a range of linguistic resources that can be drawn upon and utilized in the
course of everyday social interaction’ (p. 198). Similarly, Edley and Wetherell (1997) have
pointed out that ‘interpretive repertoires’ refer to people’s habitual, culturally shaped lines of
arguing, which thus comprises a set of recurring themes, commonplaces and tropes. Potter et al.
(2002) have added to this that the ‘idea of a repertoire, analogous to the repertoire of moves of a
ballet dancer, say, encompasses the way that different moves (terms, tropes, metaphors) from the
repertoire may be invoked according to their suitability to an immediate context’ (p. 169). It is
evident from these definitions that there is a certain tendency to construe people as active,
purposeful users of discourse. However, the theory of interpretive repertoires explicitly states that
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people are not fully autonomous in their choice of language. That is, departing from the
assumption that such a thing as a ‘private language’ does not exist (Wittgenstein, 1953), the
theory of interpretive repertoires holds that when people talk they do not create their own
language, but instead use terms that are made available by the cultural, historical and ideological
circumstances (i.e. context) of their conversation or talk. The theory of interpretive repertoires
acknowledges that it would be naïve to assume that the options inherent to language are equal,
since it is clearly the case that some constructions or formulations are more readily available (and
thus more likely to be used) than others. It seems therefore all the more important to recall that
the analysis of interpretive repertoires points at Wittgenstein’s claim that language is to be seen as
a toolbox (cf. Potter, 2001) and, more fundamentally, that the meaning of a word is invariably
contingent on ‘its use in the language’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, # 43). Although the theory of
interpretive repertoires holds that language needs to be studied in concrete conversations, it must
additionally be borne in mind that it also takes into account the more macro-level discourses, that
is, context (cf. above). Potter, Wetherell and others claimed that the analysis of interpretive
repertoires pays heed to both the macro (i.e. the institutional level of signification) and the micro
level of discourse (i.e. the social exchange in concrete local conversation). In consequence, this
double focus cannot possibly be overestimated, especially if one takes into account that most
analytic schemes have an exclusive focus on either the micro or the macro aspect of discourse. It
follows, then, that the analysis of interpretive repertoires blurs the somewhat artificial distinction
between micro and macro-level discourse analysis. That is the scheme proposed by Potter,
Wetherell and colleagues partially runs counter to Alvesson and Karreman’s (2000) assertion that
the two analytic levels cannot be investigated within a single empirical study. Moreover,
Wetherell (1998) and Billig (1999), on the occasion of a very intensive confrontation with
Schegloff (1999) on the issue of critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis,
convincingly argued that if one puts an exclusive emphasis on conversation, i.e. on language in
use, one immediately runs the risk of marginalizing or simply ignoring the broader social and
cultural textures which enable the given conversation in the first place (cf. especially Wetherell,
1998). Hence, both Billig and Wetherell, though concurring with large parts of Schegloff’s work,
pointed out that Schegloff’s conversation analysis exhibits a tendency to neglect the broader
anchorage of the local argumentative threads. It was Billig who claimed that the (exclusive)
interest in detail of conversation analysis works at the expense of the broader and at times more
important social and political issues that need attention. Hence, instead of choosing a single
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analytic perspective (i.e. micro, meso, macro), the approach taken by Potter and Wetherell (1987)
explicitly comprises the local use and appropriation of language in conversations and texts as
well as its societal nexus. To be sure, their analysis of interpretive repertoires at times comes
close to the detailed and fine-grained accounts one knows from conversation analysis. However,
Potter and Wetherell’s analytic scheme nevertheless stands in opposition to conversation analysis,
since it departs from the assumption that speech always takes place within certain cultural
boundaries and that as such it can only be understood in the context of the relevant language
game. It is revealing in this context to turn to Edley (2001) who defined interpretive repertoires as
‘repositories of meaning’ which makes it even clearer that repertoires (at least to a certain degree)
transcend concrete conversations. After all, the notion of ‘interpretive repertoires’ delineates a
hybrid analytic schema which contains elements of both conversation analysis, with its distinct
emphasis of fine-grained interaction sequences (Schegloff, 2000), and (critical) discourse analysis
(e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Fairclough, 1993). With this in mind, I would like to point out
that my own discursive investigation will follow Edley and Wetherell’s (1997) plea to study
discourse in ways that ‘draw more eclectically on both styles of work and which study the way in
which people are simultaneously the master and slave of discourse’ (p. 206). In my view, the
main consequence of such ‘boundary-crossing’ is that it simultaneously enables one to gain a
sense of the conversation’s societal context – i.e. the more or less stabilized forms of inter-texts
or discourses which operate as the textual background for interpreting practitioners’ talk – and a
sense of how these are deployed and intersect in NGO practitioner’s interpretive activities (Edley
& Wetherell, 1997; 1999) within concrete speech situations. I will, then, use the analytic frame
provided by Potter, Wetherell et al. and in particular the notion of ‘interpretive repertoire’ to
explore the configurations of meaning which unfold or become possible at the interface between
the utterances of an individual and their broader discourse.
Subject Positions and Ideological Dilemmas
As shown in the above analysis discourse has a constitutive (and not just a communicative or
representational) function. In addition, it needs to be recalled that discourse does not simply
enable the construction (different versions) of development but also provides the linguistic means
for people’s identity performances. Hence, identity, if looked at from a discursive perspective, is
chiefly to be construed as the discursively created space of subjectivity. If Derrida’s (1999)
contention that ‘(t)here can be no acontextual definition of human being’ (p. 82) is accepted, it
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follows that the issue of identity is less about stability and essence but about difference and
becoming. The way I conceive it in the context of my analysis, identity is about the production of
subject positions in the course of language use. Identity, then, becomes a power-effect (Foucault,
1972) as well as a truth effect, which further implies that identity is not fixed in relation to a ‘pre-
existent essential centre’ (Bahnisch, 2002, p. 16) but contestable and constructed and
reconstructed through discourses. By implication, people do not enter discourse as pre-formed
entities. Instead, they are constituted as subjects through discourse. Whatever a person can think
of herself or himself (and others) as a subject will always be in terms of language provided to him
or her by a specific culture. Discourse thus becomes ‘the condition of possibility of constituting
unity and totality at the same time that it provides their essential limits’ (Mouffe, 1996, p. 254).
This means that subject positions are the ‘identities’ that a specific repertoire offers or ‘persuades
the speaker to accept’ (Tuominen, 2004). It is abundantly clear then that the notion of ‘subject
position’ stands in opposition to the idea of personhood and most notably to the idea of the
atomistic individual as pursued through large parts of psychological research (Potter, 1996). The
concept of ‘subject position’ thus concurs with Nietzsche’s (1986) assertion that everything one
(or, more precisely, the philosopher) says ‘about man is basically no more than a statement about
man within a very limited time span’ (p. 14; emphasis in original). Moreover, the concept ‘subject
position’ is helpful to the extent that it accounts for the discontinuity in personal identity. That is,
it explains that one and the same biological person can, as a result of his or her narrations, take on
a multiplicity of selves (Harré, 1982). A further tenet I would like to pinpoint here is that the
notion of ‘subject position’ implies that once a person has taken on a given subject position he or
she will inevitably perceive or, more fundamentally, understand the world from the vantage point
of that position (Davies & Harré, 1990). It follows from this that my analysis of NGO
practitioners’ talk will inquire, first, how people, through the use of interpretive repertoires, take
up particular subject positions and, second, how the practitioners change their positions over the
course of the interviews. As briefly mentioned above, besides asking what subject positions are
available to practitioners I will also assess to what extent practitioners’ talk has a bearing on the
position of the indigenous other, i.e. those addressed by development aid.
If we acknowledge that discourse, conceived of as social practice, can create incompatible
versions of development (and, by implication, incompatible subject positions for the self and the
other), this makes it necessary to investigate not only where and why tensions occur within or
between discourses but also how NGO practitioners deal with their various dilemmas. In
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consequence, Billig et al’s (1988) concept of ‘ideological dilemmas’ represents a promising
starting point for reflecting on how the simultaneous existence of conflicting interpretive
repertoires causes a situation in which practitioners are called upon to account for the various
tensions. In concrete terms, the following discourse analysis endeavors to highlight the
ideological dilemmas revealed in the self-narrations of practitioners and constructions of
development and, most fundamentally, to shed light on how practitioners deal with these
dilemmas. Having said this, I will now illuminate the concrete analytical focus of my discourse
analysis as well as its basic methodical principles.
Analytical Emphasis and Procedure
The following analysis of interpretative repertoires will thus be based upon two generic
principles. First, I will endeavor to extract recurring argumentative threads from practitioners’
talk in order to ‘bundle’ them into abstracted patters, that is, interpretive repertoires. The
abstraction of interpretative repertoire from the interview material is thus grounded on the
principle of exhaustion, meaning that the interview transcripts will be subjected to iterative
readings which will be continued up to the point where there is no further indication of alternative
repertoires. To work exhaustively is thus not to suggest that the three repertoires I will discuss
below cover the entire range of linguistic utterances of the thirty interviews. Rather, the analysis
of interpretive repertoires is exhaustive in the sense that I will disrupt my inquiry once it has
become unlikely to obtain additional information or, more precisely, different argumentative
threads in relation to the research question at hand: ‘how is development constructed through
practitioners’ talk?’
Whereas the first principle, abstraction, is chiefly aimed at identifying the sameness within
and the differences between the respective repertoires, the second principle, i.e. variation, seeks to
emphasize the differences within the particular repertoires (Potter et al., 2002). Based on our
previous claim that interpretive repertoires are abstractions from social practice in context, we
can now specify that the principle of variation is mainly about inquiring how people alter their
talk in the context of the pragmatic demands of concrete speech situations. Stated differently,
focusing on variability means gaining an understanding of the different ways a particular
interpretive repertoire is deployed in social action. The principle of variation, then, is not about
the identification of contradictions in the arguments of practitioners (cf. Potter & Mulkay, 1985;
Wetherell & Potter, 1988). Rather, locating variation is an eminent task of discourse analysis,
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since it is by understanding the different ways in which interpretive repertoires are deployed that
one can make inferences about the functional orientation of language (use). More precisely, the
variation revealed in practitioners’ talk will be used or interpreted in a functional manner so as to
show how particular utterances fulfill particular social functions in a given conversational
episode. Hence, the investigation of variation will allow us to see how people’s constructions of
development as well as their identity performances change within one and the same interpretive
repertoire and to discuss how these shifts become intelligible out of the flow of the respective
conversation. The study of variation will thus enable us to show how practitioners adjust their
responses and accounts (of development) to the ‘desideratum’ of the conversational context.
I have said above that the analysis quite generally ventures to identify the use (or creation)
of interpretive repertoires in social practice (cf. Potter & Wetherell, 1990) and to define the
subject positions revealed in practitioners’ narratives. It must be added here that the analysis
comprises a second-order reflection. As mentioned before, I will extend the analysis beyond the
immediate interview situation (or, more precisely, beyond the transcribed interviews) so as to
discuss how practitioners’ accounts relate to the broader ‘macro-discourses’ (Alvesson &
Karreman, 2000) or ‘capital-D-discourses’ (Gee, 1990). Given that words and utterances acquire
meaning within specific contexts (cf. Chapter 5) or, following Billig (1987), carry an ideological
history, it seems reasonable to discuss not only practitioners’ concrete utterances and/or the
immediate context of the interviews but to also include the more institutionalized regimes of truth
which make signification possible in the first place. Essentially, the aim of this undertaking is,
first, to locate practitioners’ utterances with respect to their historical and cultural heritage (cf.
above) and, second, to reflect on the rationalities revealed in practitioners’ narratives in terms of
their wider ideological significance and pervasiveness.
The Interview as Performative Space
Taking a reflective stance towards the interviews I have conducted in the context of the present
investigation, it goes without saying that the specific interview situation between NGO
practitioners and me as the researcher of a renowned Swiss business school can hardly be
described as a neutral, that is, value-free encounter. Instead, it makes sense to construe these
particular encounters as performative spaces in which particular expectations, biases, stereotypes,
assumptions, etc. will guide or at least inform the crafting of practitioners’ narrative plots. In
view of our previous contention that discourse is largely about the institutionalized use of
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language (Davies & Harré, 1990), it immediately needs to be added that the particularities of the
interview situation, i.e. its dominant conventions, norms as well as implicit assumptions, will
inevitably limit what can reasonably be said. It follows, then, that we must conceive of
practitioners’ narratives as accounts of persuasion, i.e. a type of rhetoric (Billig, 1996), which is
directly addressed to the specific interview partner with the objective of engendering a particular
impression. Evidently then, we are called upon to address practitioners’ accounts of development
as distinct examples of legitimization by means of which they make sense of an infinitely
complex and contested social reality vis-à-vis and in cooperation with a concrete conversation
partner (Shotter, 1993).
Furthermore, I would like to proclaim, as conversation analysts have done before, that the
interviewer not only facilitate the emergence of narratives but also interrupts, inhibits, supports or
even suggests certain statements or answers. On the face of it, the interviewer, if looked at from
this vantage point, is not so much a neutral and objective bystander but a co-constructor
(Ganguly, 1992) of the respective account of development. Although I do not want to downplay
the influence of myself as interviewer in the co-determination of the narrative plot, my analysis of
interpretive repertoires will retain a primary focus on the utterances of the practitioners
interviewed, meaning that I will deliberately keep my own speech acts at the margins, so to
speak, and make them explicit only if this helps to gain a better understanding of the analysis at
large. As regards the concrete structure of the interviews, it can be noted that they were all semi-
structured, i.e. I initially only introduced the central theme of the interview (i.e. development).
During the course of the interview, I tried to keep practitioners’ narratives within limits, so to
speak, so as to ensure that the conversations would center on the actual research question.
Although the thirty interviews
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were informal in nature, taking from 30 minutes to nearly two
hours, I have used an interview ‘guide’ to define a relative limit regarding what could be dealt
with in the course of the conversations. In view of the fact that the focus of my investigation
would of necessity favor particular perspectives and stories over others, I nevertheless tried to
ensure as much variability and difference as possible by only interfering in practitioners’
narratives if they significantly deviated from my initial research interest. In concrete terms, I
opened the interviews with a brief overview of my thesis project, before asking interviewees to
express ‘in their own words’ how and why they had decided to work in the realm of development
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All interviews, with one exception, were conducted at the offices of the NGO.
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aid. Once practitioners started to give their accounts of development I restricted my own role to
stimulating practitioners’ narrations and to make sure that they would not (significantly) go
beyond the issue at hand. Essentially, my explicit involvement in the co-narration of development
was contingent on interviewees’ narrative competence (Wortham, 2001), that is, on their ability
to provide deliberate and detailed accounts of the subject matter.
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Whenever possible, I tried to
stay in the background and allow practitioners, within the given limits, to determine the direction
of their narratives and hence to keep the upper hand in organizing the plot of the story.
Description of Practitioners and Organizations
It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of the organizations and the interviewees who
have participated in this investigation, since it was agreed that both organizational and individual
identities would be kept anonymous in my analysis. This measure does not engender a loss of
information, since the condition of anonymity does not interfere with the objective and the
research question of the following discourse analysis. However, to give the reader a general
feeling for the investigation’s context, I would like to provide some background information on
the practitioners who participated in this investigation as well as the organizations they
represented. It can thus be noted, first, that the sample comprises thirty practitioners working for
twelve different development organizations. All interviews were carried out in the period from
early 2003 to late 2004. It is important to mention that, in order to ensure an adequate amount of
difference and variability in practitioners’ stories, the investigation includes a maximum of three
participants per organization. With two exceptions,
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all organizations are accredited by ZEWO,
an independent Swiss foundation which provides a seal of approval for national nonprofit
organizations. Importantly, though it is difficult, if not impossible, to subsume the great variety of
the twelve organizations under one single term,
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I have nevertheless decided to use the general
label ‘development NGOs’. This denotation seems justifiable because all organizations have been
involved in international social aid (be that relief work, ecological, economic or sustainable
development, human rights, migration, medical and educational support, etc.) in countries in the
southern hemisphere and, second, because most organizations had a non-profit focus (as
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As Billig (1996) reminds us in this context, accounts of social reality can either be effective or poor, depending on
the narrator’s skillfulness in storytelling, arguing and rhetoric.
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These two organizations were hybrids that combined fundraising and income-creating practice.
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The descriptions ranged from (German) concepts such as ‘Hilfswerk’, ‘Sozialwerk’, ‘gemeinnützige
Organisation’, ‘Hilfsorganisation’, etc. to more global (English) terms such as non-governmental or non-profit
organization.
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prescribed by the ZEWO certificate) and were not established or regulated by national
governments. In terms of size, it shall suffice to mention that the sample comprised both small
and mid-sized organizations, meaning that some organizations were run by one or only a few
persons while two organizations in particular had over one hundred employees (consisting of both
paid staff and volunteers).
Regarding the practitioners who participated in the present investigation, it is necessary to
state that the selection was based on the principle of diversity. This is reflected, for instance, in
the different educational backgrounds which covers a wide range of educational levels from
primary and secondary school education to qualifications in administration, social work,
accounting, business (i.e. marketing), psychology, ethnology, ecology, natural sciences, and
theology, etc. Furthermore, the selection was designed to include people from different
hierarchical levels which again is evident in the interviewees’ occupational positions which range
from office (full-time and part-time) administrators, project administrators and assistants, head of
projects/nations, volunteers, to directors, managers as well as founders of NGOs. Whereas gender
was almost equally distributed in the sample, i.e. 14 women and 16 men, the age of participants
ranged from a 20-year-old volunteer to a retired woman who, after a successful career in the
private sector, had decided to begin a second (part-time) career in development aid. It remains to
say that I will both try to support and enliven the following discourse analysis of practitioners’
development talk by providing further details on both the interviewees and the organizations they
work for.
Analysis
Three-part lists (i.e. arguments which rely on the rhetorical structure of ‘first, … , second … , and
third, … ’), according to Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), fulfill a range of rhetorical functions in
(above all) western everyday interaction. In my own assessment, it is most important to note that
such lists convey an important predication, namely that one has more on offer than just singular
instances or arguments (Potter, 1996). In view of the fact that the following discourse analysis
will rely on a three-part structure, introducing three recurring argumentative threads (i.e.
interpretive repertoires) which are abstracted from practitioners’ talk, the coincidence of this
tripartite structure is, despite its rhetorical effectiveness, to be savored with a winking eye.
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Having said this, I would like to tread into more serious waters and begin the analysis of the
interview transcripts. In a first step I will introduce three interpretive repertoires, each construing
development aid from a different perspective and endowing development aid with a perceptibly
different evaluative accent. Although I will explicate the general operation of the three repertoires
in order to illuminate their argumentative dynamic, some of the most striking parts of
practitioners’ ‘rhetorical business’ (Antaki & Wetherell, 1999) will be illustrated on the basis of
concrete extracts. In addition, the analysis will contextualize practitioners’ talk against the
backdrop of the previous genealogy of development discourse in an effort to identify the
historical and cultural derivation of speakers’ ‘lived ideologies’ (Billig et al., 1988). In this way,
we will see that practitioners’ talk is not just the simple re-production of ‘muscular discourse’
(Alvesson & Karreman, 2000), but the local ‘embodiment and articulation of ideology’ (Cohen &
Musson, 2000, p. 34). It must remain clear that, given the composition and the research question
of the following discourse analysis, the illustrations presented do not exhaust the semantic variety
of the meaning generated by practitioners. Rather, the illustrations are selected on the basis of
their explanatory power, meaning that I will provide excerpts which are typical of the interpretive
repertoire in focus. Obviously then, the objective of the following illustrations is to make
palpable how development aid literally emanates from practitioners’ narratives.
The Benevolence Repertoire: ‘Arguing for the Indigenous Other’
What I call benevolence repertoire here covers those argumentative/rhetorical accounts
which express the project of development as an act of charitableness, of true goodness of the
mind or simply a responsible act which exhibits a central concern for the indigenous other.
Working on the basis of notions such as ‘helping’, ‘supporting’ or ‘identification’, the
benevolence repertoire for the most part argues for the social aspirations as well as the
positive social ramifications of development endeavors. Although it will be shown further
down that the social aspects of development aid take center stage in the benevolence
repertoire, I already want to point out at this stage that development aid is not only delineated
as unidirectional Third World intervention, support, advocacy or patronage but, most
importantly, as a pivotal source of practitioners’ motivation and self-fulfillment. In
consequence, the benevolence repertoire at one and the same time embraces a stream of
reasoning that emphasizes typical help-related activities and a second stream which
highlights development aid as a mutually beneficial and rewarding encounter between the
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indigenous other and the practitioner. Whereas the ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin, 2001) of the
benevolence repertoire, by virtue of its constructive finality, is largely positive, I will point
out that practitioners’ arguments often revolve around issues such as social relations and
exchanges or, as in the case of the following illustration,
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around terms such as ‘man’ and
‘human fate’.
P1: … and that’s why it probably worked out in my case … because the factor ‘man’ was
pivotal, that is, the connection with human fate …
The point I want to stress here is that the benevolence repertoire, not least due to its almost
exclusively positive conceptualization of development, largely ignores the potential existence
of power imbalances between the helpers and the help recipients and instead suggests a
relationship between equals. Essentially, the cause of development, as I will show, is
construed not only as an act of giving voice to the other (i.e. advocacy and self-
determination; cf. below), but notably as one that is sensitive to the needs, desires or
experiences of help recipients or southern partner NGOs. It would undoubtedly be inaccurate
to claim that the benevolence repertoire is a homogeneous collective of argumentative
threads. Rather, it must be seen as a variegated set of rhetorical twists which even comprise
deviant case formulations (Edley, 2001), i.e. argumentations which run counter to the general
thread of reasoning of the benevolence repertoire. In line with this insight, the analysis will
emphasize not only what is said but also what is omitted in practitioners’ talk. The aim is to
reveal the richness and variability of practitioners’ rhetorical accounts and to delineate how
they corroborate the positive trajectory of development through the flexible and creative
establishment of presences and absences (van den Berg, 2003; Law, 2004). To begin with, I
will show that the benevolence repertoire primarily stresses the emancipatory potential of
development aid by making reference to, for instance, equality, partnership, self-
determination, participation, and so on. In a second step, I will illustrate that the benevolence
repertoire not only constructs development aid as a social venture, since it often establishes a
concomitance of social and economic rationalities. The point I will emphasize in this
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Note that the majority of the interviews were held in either German or Swiss German. All interviews were thus
transcribed and analyzed in the original language. I subsequently translated only those passages into English which I
deemed particularly suitable for illustrating the main points of my analysis. It is obvious that some of the subtlety of
the original conversations is of necessity lost in translation.
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connection is that the benevolence repertoire, by stressing the importance of sustainability,
creates a balance between the social and economic aspect of development as a result of
which none of the two sides is presumed to have a relative advantage over the other. This
will then be followed by an inquiry into the discursive positioning of practitioners and the
indigenous people by the benevolence repertoire with the objective of shedding light on the
subject positions which are made visible through discourse.
In light of the fact that the benevolence repertoire heavily relies on the logic of
equality, I will critically reflect that the idea of equality, which, though sanctified in ‘the
name of a higher goal’ (Sachs, 1992b, p. 4), invariably presupposes a condition of sameness.
By implication, this condition of sameness has the notable effect of retaining a discursive
imbalance between the helper and the help recipient. In the course of this analysis, I will
illustrate that there is an ideological dilemma inherent in the benevolence repertoire which
comes to the forefront when practitioners mobilize and bring into opposition the
incompatible issues of autonomy (of the indigenous people) and hierarchical command (by
practitioners or their NGOs). In my illustration of how practitioners deal with this dilemma,
the leading question will be how they are able to sustain the positive evaluative accent of
development aid and how practitioners achieve to safeguard their accounts against the
impression of being authoritative and of dominating the agenda of development projects. To
begin with, I will now show that the benevolence repertoire exhibits an intriguing tendency
to justify development through concrete initiatives and not, as one might expect, through the
articulation of downright ideological orthodoxies.
In the Name of the Other: Arguing on the Basis of Concrete Initiatives
A first point which needs to be mentioned here pertains to the observation that the narratives of
practitioners often construe development through concrete initiatives instead of, for instance,
prevailing development orthodoxies
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(Morris, 2002). That is to say the benevolence repertoire
in the majority of cases defined development with reference to local initiatives such as, for
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Admittedly, it could be argued that this focus coincides with the particular questions of the interviewer or his
supportive/limiting gestures and interruptions. However, since the leading questions implied a discernible interest in
the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard, 1984) of practitioners, that is, the overarching rationalities on which their
commitment to development aid is based, it is even more surprising, to say the least, that interviewees chose to base
their narratives on concrete ‘field experiences’.
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instance, the foundation of a school, a women’s sanctuary, an emergency relief initiative or, as in
the following extract, an Aids orphan program.
P7: … we have been active in X [name of country] since T [date] (hmm)
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… we have been
working with primary schools in different areas aaahm and then Aids emerged aahm on a global
scale (hm) and the Aids problem actually started in P [name of continent] and in X precisely in the
area where we have been working right from the start (hm) and that’s where the communities and
schools have asked us to support Aids orphans or those kind of children (hm) and that’s why we
started to work with children (hm) …
The fact that development is ‘storied’ (Bruner, 2003) through concrete initiatives is anything but
trivial, especially if one takes into consideration that the interview guideline explicitly aimed at
gaining insight into practitioners’ use of development aid orthodoxies. Although I am not seeking
to impute that practitioners deliberately sidestepped the central subject of the interview, it is
important to bear in mind that the elision of universal doxas invariably fulfills a concrete social
function within the particular interview context. I would thus like to note that the deliberate
absence (Law, 2004) of orthodoxies is a textual phenomenon (Lachmann, 1991) which notably
functions to portray development aid as a de-politicized, non-ideological activity. To put it
bluntly, delineating development, more or less exclusively, on the basis of essential grassroots
initiatives engenders what Shapiro (2001) called ‘textual forgetting’ through which speakers are
able to avoid the potential pitfalls related to the direct articulation of all-encompassing
development ideologies (cf. also Hall, 1997). Importantly, this is not to say that practitioners
‘really’ believe that development is not political or that they do not believe in some kind of
development orthodoxy. What one can claim, however, is that practitioners, by promulgating
development through local initiatives, avoid ideological discussions and hence protect their
accounts against critical comments from the part of the interviewer. A second effect which is
noteworthy in this context relates to the rhetorical function of detail: in light of the observation
that many narratives imparted lengthy and detailed accounts of development projects, such
reference to concrete details fulfills at least two rhetorical functions. First, detailed accounts
foster the impression of facticity, i.e. that the speaker’s account is based on facts (i.e. the truth),
and, second, they elevate the speaker to the status of a direct witness of the facts he or she is
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Note that the comments in parenthesis refer to the interviewer’s utterances.
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talking about. It is abundantly clear that both of these rhetorical effects of detailed descriptions
are closely related, since they simultaneously establish a given account as truthful and make the
speaker who utters the account appear as a credible person. Hence, to illustrate this proposition
and to show how the ‘descriptive density’ of a given account has a bearing on both its
experienced truthfulness and the legitimacy of the speaker, the following passage illustrates how
the speaker, by enriching his account with detailed descriptions of his experience, at one and the
same time makes his story credible and establishes himself as an authentic narrator and an expert
in development aid.
P11: … we then went over to F [name of region] … I then realized that we could start an exchange
… meaning that we could learn from each other … when I started to talk about this idea with
experts I realized that this sort of exchange would be much more effective … we then went to P
and Q and later to R and S [names of different countries] and realized that one could show how
neighboring cultures use their resources in a different way …
What is conspicuous in the first place is that the speaker’s narrative heavily relies on references to
geographical locations (i.e. countries). If looked at from a rhetorical perspective, it probably
hardly needs to be mentioned that such rich detail contributes to the impression that the speaker
tells the truth, since he claims first-hand experience of the phenomena he is talking about (Potter,
1996). In this way, detailed descriptions, as exemplarily expressed in the above extract, indicate
that the speaker has actually ‘been there’, since he is able to describe aspects of a given scene
which are available only through direct exposure or experience. It follows from this that detailed
descriptions – which in the case of the benevolence repertoire are typically take the form of
elaborate accounts of geographical locations as well as ethnic or minority groups – quite
obviously establish the speaker as a reliable witness. Evidently then, the category entitlement
(Sacks, 1974) of witnesses is relevant to the extent that it lends credibility to a particular utterance
and, most importantly, legitimates the person to speak in the name of truth (Foucault, 2001). In
line with this observation, the status of a direct witness functions in the context of the
benevolence repertoire in that it construes practitioners as knowing people and, even more
essential, as people who are ‘close to the field’ (Kapuscinski, 2006). To be sure, the impression of
being ‘close to the field’ is, rhetorically speaking, not particularly relevant in itself. However, this
attribution becomes significant to the extent that it legitimates practitioners to speak in the name
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of the other (Bendell, 2005), i.e. help recipients or southern NGOs. The underlying logic of this
plot, as briefly mentioned before, is that development aid requires closeness to the other, since it
is the closeness with the other that determines one’s knowledge of the others’ problems, needs,
demands, etc. and hence one’s legitimacy to speak and act in their name. It must be noted here
that the benevolence repertoire does not only construct the relation between practitioners and the
people with whom they work or, more precisely, whom they are supposed to help through a
continuum of proximity or closeness. In the following paragraph I will illuminate that the
benevolence repertoire not only endorses close relations between practitioners and help recipients
and/or southern NGO partners, but also equal and equated relationships between the parties
involved in development.
The Relationality of Development: Identification, Trust and Equality
I have chosen the term ‘relationality’ in the present context to indicate those conversational
episodes in which accounts of development aid rest on notions such as ‘partner’,
‘partnership’, ‘identification’, ‘cooperation’, ‘equal(s)’, ‘equality’ or ‘trust’. The common
denominator of these different relational concepts is that they all function to depict the other
as someone who is supposed to be on an equal standing with the practitioners. Moreover,
these signifiers are often interwoven in such a way as to construe good and trustful
relationship between practitioners and their indigenous other as the sine qua non of
(successful) development endeavors. The subsequent paragraph illustrates how the
benevolence repertoire deploys the notion of ‘identification’ to establish a particularly close
relationship between the partners of development aid.
P7: … and that’s also how we have worked in Y [name of country] … we … this partner already
had some projects in the border area to Z [name of country] where many children and girls come
from and where they easily become victims of slave traders (hm) und aaa … after having come in
contact with this person or this organization we decided to make those children in Y our target
group (hm) that’s when we began to commit and identify ourselves with this target group and also
to start other projects …
On the face of it, the basic requirement for being benevolent, that is, for being close to the
indigenous other or, to use the speaker’s own term, the ‘target group’ is that one commits
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oneself to and identifies oneself with the other. In addition, ‘time’ and ‘previous experience’
are denoted as central determinants of ‘identification’. This brief extract thus reveals that
‘identification’ and ‘commitment’ provide a fundamental sense of obligation which slowly
evolves over time and, most fundamentally, only becomes possible through a series of
cautious (but successful) exchanges between the partners. Moreover, it is revealed in the
above account that the cooperation with a novel partner is justified through his
(organization’s) previous experience. Although the issue of risk remains obscure in the above
transcript, it is at least implied, since the decision to ‘strongly identify with this target group’
is directly related to the claim that the partner has successfully carried out comparable
projects beforehand. Previous experiences and successes, so it seems, are represented as
central parameters for cooperating and working with the indigenous people (i.e. help
recipients and southern NGOs). To bring to light that trust is often construed as an eminent
condition of development aid, I would like to refer to the next two extracts where the notion
of ‘trust’ is explicitly invoked.
P1: … yes … I believe that in my case that’s [trust] very important. I mean because Q [name of
country] is a country with lots of risks … that’s why I have to completely trust my counterpart …
otherwise I wouldn’t feel good …
P18: … I think … I think we will get along quite well in this situation if we find trustworthy
people and if we are simultaneously able to relate with the people on site … then we won’t fail in
that respect [i.e. the implementation of a particular project] …
What is particularly noteworthy in the first extract is that trust is presented as a sort of
counter-agent for neutralizing the ostensible risk of development aid. More precisely, the
speaker sees trust as an indispensable aspect of his work which gives him a sense of security
(‘feel good’) in a declaredly dangerous environment. Similarly, the second extract reveals
that the issue of trust is related to the indigenous other (i.e. ‘trustworthy people’ and ‘people
on site’). Whereas the first speaker in the course of his narrative several times claims that it is
imperative that all people with whom his organization cooperates must be trustworthy, the
speaker of the second extract makes it clear that his organizations’ projects, provided that
trust has been established, ‘won’t fail in that respect’. In terms of the differences between the
two accounts, we can note that the first account attaches importance to trust by pointing at
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potentially negative consequences (i.e. risk, bad feelings), whereas the latter citation
delineates trust with reference to the (potentially) positive effects for the organization (i.e.
success). Notwithstanding these differences, it is undisputable that both accounts conceive of
trust not just as an important feature of development aid, but as an indispensable prerequisite
for all development aid projects. Bearing in mind that identification and trust both allude to
close relations between practitioners and their indigenous other, it is equally clear that these
close ties do not in themselves give any indications as to whether the benevolence repertoire
endorses hierarchical or equal relationships. Thus, to grapple with the question of how the
benevolence repertoire construes development as an interaction or exchange between people
of equal status and standing, I would like to point at the following extract where the issue of
equality becomes explicit.
P21: … for instance … our approach in development work is based on the premise that one is
among equals [i.e. like-minded people] (hm) …
Although the speaker chiefly claims that his organization works upon the premise of
equality, it is noteworthy that he also makes clear in the course of the interview that
‘participation’ does not only require ‘humility’ but also a considerable amount of ‘caution’.
In line with what has been said before in connection with the issue of trust, we can see that
the speaker advocates a condition of sameness (i.e. ‘being among equals’) which, according
to the narrator, invariably requires both time and circumspection. It follows from this that the
benevolence repertoire, despite its generally positive appraisal of development aid, highlights
that development is by no means to be perceived as a straightforward, quick or even easy
undertaking. What is even more conspicuous in the present context is that the benevolence
repertoire turns equality and sameness into a preeminent success factor of development
ventures. The fact that equality is often construed as a central aspect of development aid is
illustrated through the following extract in which the practitioner describes that he dismissed
a former employee following his realization that he did not treat the indigenous women as
‘equal partners’.
P1: … for instance I dismissed the first teacher we employed after two weeks because I realized
that he didn’t accept the women [i.e. employees] as equal partners …
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Moreover, what is striking in the following extract is that equality is denoted as a critical
success factor of development, that is, as a feature which determines the success or failure of
development initiatives (‘otherwise it won’t turn out right’; cf. below).
P15: … I think we’re dealing with a lot of interrelated levels which we have to mobilize … and
that’s why it has to become our primary goal to bring all people to the same human level, yes …
otherwise it won’t turn out right …
What is particularly revealing in this second extract is that equality is described not as a pre-
existing condition of sameness but rather as a condition which has to be actively fostered. In
other words, equality is represented as a result of the elevation of the indigenous other so as
to bring them to the ‘same human level’. Although the fallacy inherent in the idea of
sameness will be discussed more thoroughly further down, I would like to reiterate here that
such a signification implies that the condition of human sameness between practitioners and
the indigenous other does not exist but, most fundamentally, that such a condition must
actively be created. Evidently then, equality is not in the first place a matter of mutual
respect and esteem but a critical success factor of development initiatives which must be
deliberately established and sustained. It is clear that this understanding of equality is based
chiefly on the assumption that difference can or must be reduced to an ‘economy of the
same’ (Hillis Miller, 2001, p. 69). Nevertheless, we should not overlook the fact that the
benevolence repertoire does not primarily present development as an act of assimilating the
indigenous other to practitioners’ demands and aims, for it also depicts development as an
intrinsic source of (individual and mutual) fulfillment. It appears, then, that practitioners
denote participation not only as a means to other ends (i.e. success) but they also deploy the
notion of ‘participation’ to portray development as a passionate undertaking which allows for
both individual and collective satisfaction.
P21: … for instance I’m dealing with people … there are those stories which I get to hear on a
daily basis and which aaaa also enliven my life … I … I gain a lot [i.e. emotionally] from those
people …
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The practitioner in the above extract was induced by the interviewer to describe what he sees as
the most relevant aspects of development work. In response, he emphasized that his encounters
with the indigenous people and in particular the stories he hears from them ‘enliven’ his life (‘I
gain a lot from those people’). The practitioner thus makes clear in the course of the interview
that development is not a uni-directional undertaking, since he mentions that the ‘gratifications’
of participatory development are shared by the practitioner and the indigenous other. Having said
this, we need to recall once more that the idea of participation operates on the basis of an ideal of
consensus and mutual merit and yield. Though this pattern is not identifiable in all narratives
which make use of the benevolence repertoire, I would nevertheless like to point out that the
notion of ‘participation’ is often simultaneously used to emphasize the positive social effects that
equality-based relations have on the indigenous other and the intrinsic satisfaction such
encounters give to practitioners. That is, on the one hand ‘participation’ is defined as an ethical
and responsible measure through which the indigenous other is given voice and agency. On the
other hand it is presented as a mode of social exchange which is profoundly fulfilling for western
practitioners.
P18: … on the human level it is more congenial to encounter people if you meet them on the same
level and when they sense that we give them something and that the chemistry is right, simply
human …
This extract is revealing since it shows that in the benevolence repertoire equality is not only
construed in a functional, instrumental manner, i.e. conceiving of equality as a means to higher
ends (e.g. the success of a given development initiative; cf. above). Since equality is presented as
being ‘more congenial’ and ‘human’, it is implied that equality is seen as an end in itself. To be
sure, the construction of equality-based participation as an activity which requires time, humility
and caution (cf. above) is indeed compatible with the perspective that development is a mutually
rewarding and self-fulfilling activity. That is, the benevolence repertoire identifies a
chronological order according to which participation is said to initially require, among other
things, time and a careful establishment of trust. Once trust is established, however, participation
becomes the cause of collective satisfaction and success. In this way, equality-based participation
is constructed as a progressive development which entails a threshold (i.e. trust) that must be met;
otherwise one will not be able to reap its positive rewards.
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P13: … we work together and everyone is investing heavily into the idea … and that’s only
possible if one has the feeling that everyone has good intentions … I think that is my main
concern; that’s probably something which is emphasized more in F [name of continent] compared
with N [name of practitioner’s home country] I also live with those people … or … and respect …
mutual respect is crucial …
The practitioner is explicit about his contention that good intentions and ‘mutual respect’ are
‘crucial’. It is simultaneously revealed that he attributes these features to the foreign context
in which he works and not to the country (i.e. Switzerland) where his organization is based.
It became even more obvious in the course of the interview that the practitioner used this
distinction to highlight that certain virtues and values (which have either disappeared or
never existed in Switzerland in the first place) are (still) held in high esteem in the
development area (i.e. the southern hemisphere). What follows, then, is that the practitioner,
by exclusively attributing such qualities as ‘respect’ and ‘good intentions’ to the south,
construes development aid or, more precisely, the exchange with the indigenous other, as a
unique opportunity for making fulfilling experiences, i.e. experiences which are not or no
longer possible in the speaker’s country of origin. With this in mind, I would like to point out
that this argumentative pattern has been common in practitioners’ accounts in general and
that there were quite a few instances where narrators emphasized the appeal of their foreign
work context. For instance, a split was often identified between tradition (which was
localized in the south) and the rather negative effects of cultural globalization (which were
attributed to the north; cf. also Giddens, 1990). This split in turn had the notable effect of
stressing the intrinsic merits of development work. Having shown that the benevolence
repertoire at one and the same time delineates development aid as a passionate care for the
other and as a joyful, mutually fulfilling endeavor, I also want to point at a noteworthy
deviance from this general pattern: one practitioner argued that development is or should be
guided by egoistic considerations.
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Deviant Case Formulation
There was one notable exception in my interview material, a ‘misfit’, so to speak. One of the
practitioners argued that working in a foreign culture and with indigenous people is de facto
not only driven by egoistic motives but, more radically, that egoism is necessary to be(come)
successful in the first place.
P25: … I mean aaa one shouldn’t be a person who likes to help …
P25: … it’s an egoistic act … one is doing these things for oneself I think I wouldn’t have
survived the initial phase without this egoistic element … at the beginning there was only … it
didn’t look like things would work out …
To put things into perspective: even though the mention of egoism might seem to be in
downright opposition to the general tenor of the benevolence repertoire, it must be pointed
out that both extracts come from a larger passage in which the practitioner talks about the
difficulties he was facing at the outset of one of his projects. With this in mind, it becomes
arguable that ‘egoism’, the way it is used in the above utterance, signifies psychological
egoism (i.e. the realization that one’s subjective world or social reality can only be
experienced and explained from one’s own position) rather than an ethical form of egoism
(i.e. that one ought to promote the self above all other values and perspectives; cf. Baier,
1990). It follows from this that egoism, though seemingly implying that ‘one is doing things
for oneself’, primarily relates to the recognition that one must not lose sight of one’s own
intentions, ideals, goals, etc. By implication, egoism is defined as a protective measure for
ensuring one’s survival, i.e. a necessary ‘defense mechanism’ which enables the practitioner
to pursue his work in an ostensibly insecure environment.
Taken together, we can state that the benevolence repertoire generally highlights
development aid as an encounter between people of equal status. However, though
participation is largely depicted as a matter of collective and individual fulfillment, it is
noteworthy that the benevolence repertoire also comprises arguments that highlight
development aid’s emancipatory possibilities for the indigenous people. To illustrate this, the
following section will throw some light on how the issue of ‘self-determination’ is construed
both as a practical activity and as the ultimate finality of development aid.
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Self-Determination
A) The Problematization of the Development Canon
While the issue of ‘self-determination’ inhabits a central position in the argumentation of the
benevolence repertoire, a significant proportion of narratives made use of an antagonistic rhetoric
so as to position ‘self-determination’ as a counter-measure to the ostensible inaptness of
canonical development aid.
P2: … yes WELL I’ve … aaa I’ve traveled a lot (hm) and have visited people who working in
[development] projects and I’ve never actually been satisfied with how problems were usually
approached and how things were done …
What is striking in this brief extract is that the speaker expresses his negative estimate of
canonical development projects through an extreme case formulation (Edwards & Potter, 1992),
claiming that he was never satisfied with how things were dealt with. However, to legitimate such
an assertion makes it necessary that he positions himself as a person who is able to provide an
accurate estimate of development aid. This self-positioning is achieved by claiming that the
speaker has ‘traveled a lot’ and by underscoring that his experiences encompass a broad and
sound overview of the field of development aid. Rhetorically speaking, representing oneself as a
development expert is not an indication of a general loss of reality but an indispensable
precondition for credibly depicting canonical development projects as flawed and inadequate. In
other words, portraying oneself as an expert of development is a necessary prerequisite if one
wants to proclaim, as the above speaker does, that mainstream development projects are generally
(and not occasionally) unsatisfactory.
P13: … I’ve also seen a project in which Swiss medical education was provided in the K [name of
mountain region] … but for the people themselves … aaa I mean for the indigenous doctors that
wasn’t right (hm) yes I wasn’t particularly happy and thought that a different principle should
have been adopted …
Within this extract, it is even easier to see how the argument points at the difficulties relating to
the implementation of western knowledge (i.e. ‘Swiss medical education) in the context of a
southern country. The speaker thus rhetorically accentuates the inaptness of this course of action
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by claiming that his view was actually shared by the ‘indigenous doctors’. It becomes obvious,
then, that the speaker grounds his estimate on a broader consensus (Horton-Salway, 2000),
meaning that in his account the interviewee lends weight to his claim of the inaptness of
mainstream development projects by pointing out that his evaluation was shared by help
recipients. While this discursive establishment of consensus gives the speaker’s account greater
factual significance and credibility, it is important to add that this consensus simultaneously
prepares the ground for the qualified introduction of a novel logic (i.e. ‘a different principle
should have been adopted’). Before analyzing how practitioners argue for the utility of self-
determination, I first want to cite another typical example through which mainstream
development is rendered problematic in that it is portrayed as inadequate for solving identified
problems.
P2: … there are those projects which aim too far and that’s when they need consulting support
(hmhm) these consulting services are very expensive and more often than not concerns an affair
that is not very well adjusted [to local circumstances] … there are those people who come into a
foreign culture (hm) and who provide consulting services there … and then they leave again just
when [the indigenous] people learn how things would work … and that’s why the projects don’t
work and [the indigenous] people do what they are told until the consultant is gone …
Note two things. First, the speaker clarifies that development aid is often insensitive to
‘foreign culture’ which is revealed in the passage where he refers to projects which ‘aim too
far’, making the indigenous people dependent on western ‘consulting services’. Whereas the
account holds both that western consulting services are too expensive (in the long run) and
that it does not allow enough time for the indigenous other to ‘learn how things would work’,
there is a second striking point which needs to be noticed. That is, the above account
suggests that mainstream development projects create a relationship of dependence between
the western development organization and the indigenous people. This claim is rhetorically
useful for the argument being made, as it suggests that canonical development projects must
be rejected in light of the fact that they create harmful dependencies. It is clear, then, that the
basic argumentative structure of the speaker’s account is grounded on the premise that
development aid, in order to have a reasonable chance of success, invariably needs to be
‘customized’, i.e. aligned to the specificities of local culture. A further point to note is that
the speaker’s rendition conveys an ‘impression of illegitimacy’ (Wetherell, 2003, p. 19), as it
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uses the concept of ‘customization’ to establish a hierarchical distinction between the
development canon, i.e. those projects which are insensitive to cultural particularities, and
the positively connoted projects which are said to acknowledge the importance of cultural
differences. Although these brief illustrations hardly exhaust the many ways in which the
canon of development is problematized and hence de-legitimated, it is important to point out
that the benevolence repertoire chiefly operates to take issue with the hierarchical
relationship between the western organizations and the indigenous as established and
sustained by mainstream development projects. The rhetorical function of the
problematization of canonical development projects is that it endorses an alternative
relationality such as, for instance, equality. At this juncture, I want to shed some light on how
self-determination is established through practitioners’ talk and particularly how the
benevolence repertoire suggests not only that the indigenous people must be granted
autonomy but that the indigenous people are to be seen as an important (though mostly
neglected or ignored) source of knowledge.
B) The Encounter with the Other: Mutual Learning, Liberation & Stepping Back
Along the lines of what has already been said, I would like to point out that the practitioner
speaking in the following extract mentions that he was involved in the ‘self-determination
movement’
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more than two decades ago, which led him to conclude that those principles would
be applicable not only in the context of his country of origin but also in the realm of development
aid as a whole. The following extract is an account of how the speaker came to the conviction that
self-determination should become an integral part of development aid.
P2: … that’s when we realized that we should go there [i.e. to the development organizations] to
tell people what they should do (hm) and how they should do it so that they would not make the
same mistakes we had already made (hm) they [traditional development projects] have not been
able to establish a work relationship between equals (hm) I mean where one mutually accepts each
other …
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That is, in German: Selbstbestimmungs-Bewegung.
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P2: … what is interesting in terms of aa aa knowledge-transfer is that people decide for
themselves what they can do (hm) … In those countries [in which the speaker’s organization is
engaged] it [the projects] should have something to do with liberation … I mean development has
also something to do with liberation (hm) … in that way people could decide for themselves what
they would like to chose and what could fit into their culture (hm) that is why it is quite
sustainable … on the other hand we can also learn from the Third World (hm) those people also
have knowledge … at times it is not so well distributed in those countries which is why we have
sought for ways to tackle those problems …
Two aspects of these extracts are particularly noteworthy. First, it is evident from the first extract
that the narrator represents the idea of self-determination as a valuable means for preventing
unequal relationships. The practitioner states elsewhere that he has embraced the tenets of self-
determination through his previous work experience. In the above extract he identifies a
particular moment (‘that’s when we realized … ’) in which he realized that he should promote his
insights in development aid circles. Somehow in contrast to most other descriptions of self-
determination, the above account is optimistic about the potential of self-determination. However,
the second extract reveals that self-determination is endowed with two slightly different
valuations. In the first part of the description, the speaker conjoins self-determination with the
idea of ‘liberation’ which has the notable effect of signifying self-determination as an act which
grants the indigenous people the authority to ‘decide for themselves’. The speaker thus explicates
that self-determination, since exhibiting a sensitivity to the indigenous culture or difference at
large, would render development aid ‘quite sustainable’. The second legitimization of self-
determination is grounded on the argument that development is to become a mutual venture
because it is only in this way that one can reap the rewards of mutual learning. By implication,
development is not only construed as a source of either mutual or individual fulfillment (as
discussed in relation with participation; cf. above) but, most fundamentally, as a valuable means
for learning. On the face of it, stressing the (individual and collective) learning opportunities
inherent in self-determination, it follows that development in the benevolence repertoire is not
simply represented as an end in itself but as a means towards other ends (i.e. the liberation of the
indigenous people on the one hand and learning on the other). In view of the observation that the
benevolence repertoire alternately denotes development as means or ends, I want to point out that
the legitimization of development aid is not exclusively based on social arguments (e.g.
participation, self-determination, etc.) but inclusive of economic logics.
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P2: … and that’s where one could start learning from each other … in that way we could ensure
that there would be almost no feeling of competition … that’s why they would be willing to share
their knowledge and tell people how they dealt with things and that would be very cost efficient …
Whereas the general argument holds that ‘self-determination’ is a worthwhile procedure, since it
would enable overcoming the usual ‘failures’ of conventional development aid, it is obvious from
the above extract that self-determination is legitimated on the basis of an economic argument. In
concrete terms, whereas the speaker in the first part of the extract merely implies the economic
merits of self-determination, claiming that knowledge-sharing between equals would prevent a
sense of competition, he later adds that knowledge-sharing has the further advantage of being
‘cost efficient’. This observation is significant in that it illustrates that the benevolence repertoire
is not only grounded on arguments which stress the social aspect of development aid, but also on
arguments which integrate an economic logic. Before I examine the notion that the benevolence
repertoire typically comprises the argument that development aid is chiefly concerned with
sustainability, i.e. striking a balance between social ambitions and economic demands, I want to
discuss the following two extracts which reveal a further peculiarity of self-determination.
P24: … my experience … my own personal experience … and that’s where we all differ … has
shown that I’d better keep out of my organization in D [name of country] … where I made some
striking experiences. That’s unusual …
P24: … I don’t do that [get into daily business] … that’s where I’ve appointed someone [i.e. an
indigenous partner] whom I have selected and coached to the point where he was able to do things
by himself …
What must be stressed in these two extracts, which have both been taken from the same
interview, is the observation that the speaker emphasizes that he chose not to interfere into the
day-to-day business of his southern partner organization. Thus given the fact that both of these
extracts are taken from a passage where the practitioner deliberates the basic requirements of
sustainability, it is possible to deduce that the speaker sees his ‘withdrawal’ from the local
activities in the south as a necessary step for being successful in development aid. These brief
illustrations reveal that the benevolence repertoire emphasizes the notion that the process of self-
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determination requires a physical and geographical separation between the western practitioner
(organizations) and the indigenous people in the south. In general terms, the benevolence
repertoire advocates that the NGO practitioner remains in the background (e.g. in the position of a
‘coach’) so as to ensure that the indigenous people (and southern NGOs) are given full autonomy
in taking decisions. Although the above speaker elsewhere alluded to the difficulties which might
occur if one withdraws from the daily practice in the south, it is evident from the interviews that
the benevolence repertoire conceives of ‘stepping back’ as an indispensable condition of
development aid initiatives.
Taken together, the investigation of practitioners’ talk has brought to light some of the
recurring conversational structures through which practitioners introduce the notion of ‘self-
determination’ and in particular how they exemplify their positions by making reference to
concrete projects. I have pointed out that the benevolence repertoire construes development aid as
an activity that mainly allows for empowering, i.e. ‘liberating’ relationships. We have also seen
that there is an oppositional rhetoric in practitioners’ accounts of development, meaning that they
problematize conventional development projects in order to stress that development (‘the way it
is usually practiced’) has an inbuilt vulnerability to failure. The notion of ‘self-determination’ is
thus often introduced as a pragmatic solution to the typical failures of traditional development
and specifically deployed to endorse a more sustainable form of development aid. I find it
worthwhile to emphasize that self-determination is not only legitimated by making reference to
its social merits (i.e. ‘liberation’ or ‘autonomy’), but also by the argument that suchlike
undertakings create economic advantages. With this in mind, I want to intensify this excursion
into the issue of sustainability and investigate how speakers intermingle social and economic
arguments in order to establish an image of development aid which operates through a
conversational structure of simultaneity.
C) Economic Argumentation & Sustainability
The first point to be reiterated here is that the present repertoire, despite being labeled
‘benevolence’, is inclusive of economic arguments. Hence, although the previous discussion has
led to the conclusion that the benevolence repertoire construes development aid as a worthwhile
social endeavor, it cannot simply be denoted as ‘social’, since it also contains argumentative
threads which are not social stricto sensu. I therefore claim that, although the benevolence
repertoire primarily construes development aid as an act of caring for the indigenous other, as the
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establishment of equality, etc., we must recognize that the benevolence repertoire also
accommodates an economic rationality. To illustrate this point, I would like to introduce the next
excerpt which shows how development aid incorporates the notion of ‘efficiency’.
P2: … as soon as those projects [in the south] produce results we demand efficiency so that those
projects become self-sufficient (hm) … this spring I was in L [name of country] and P [name of
country] and in both cases it was obvious that their main interest was to increase the status of
[name of product] (hm) and that’s where people start to confuse the goals … the producer is a
poor guy who needs a good price … the one who sells it is a poor guy who needs a good price too
and then they also demand that employees are given the best social security and then they ask the
NGO to pay for the deficit … I’m sorry but (hm) that may be good for the reputation of the
product but I know that one can also work economically in those countries … we don’t just give
anything … we provide an initial financing … but thereafter we give nothing more …
This telling passage shows how the speaker establishes a distinct limit of western support,
claiming that the southern NGO must take (economic) responsibility for its activities. That is, the
speaker first depicts the financial requests from his southern partner NGO. He then makes it
unmistakably clear that development projects need to become financially sustainable (‘self-
sufficient’) in the long run. Claiming that he knows that development can ‘work efficiently’, it
becomes obvious that the speaker somewhat mocks his indigenous partner who is asking for
continued financial support. While the extract reveals that the practitioner perceives the demands
of the southern NGO as somewhat insatiable and thus exaggerated, stating, in addition, that it
must not be the case that the northern NGO carries the (financial) burden of development aid
alone, it is also important to note that the speaker introduces a conversational marker (‘I’m
sorry’) which allows him to limit the generosity of his organization (‘we don’t just give anything
… we provide an initial financing but thereafter we give nothing more’). The point I want to
make here is that the speaker does not see ‘efficiency’ as a problem or as a general restriction of
development work. Quite the contrary, ‘efficiency’ is represented as an intrinsic and thus
uncontestable aspect of development practice. In addition, it is revealing to note that the above
account, by stressing the importance of sound (financial) resource allocation and efficiency,
establishes the co-ordinates which designate the proper conduct of development aid. However, in
light of the speaker’s claim that the partners in the south are confusing ‘the goals’, it must be
borne in mind that he does not presume a general primacy of ‘efficiency’ or ‘financial self-
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sufficiency’. Instead, the speaker’s remarks reveal the assumption that the social and economic
aspects of development aid need both be addressed (although separately). In view of Derrida’s
(1981) eloquent claim that within a binary one term always ‘governs the other … or has the upper
hand’ (p. 41), it is in this case, however, not decidable whether it is the social or the economic
argument which has the ‘upper hand’ in the speaker’s account. In other words, while we have
seen that issues such as equality and participation are central in the benevolence repertoire, it can
be deduced from the extract above that ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ are put on an equal
footing with the social parameters of development aid. Whereas the benevolence repertoire
appears to establish a concomitance of social and economic arguments, the following extract
contains an argument that is more clearly based on an economic logic.
P16: … one produces just anything … for example jumpers in a traditional way or whatever (hm);
and then one tries to sell those things on the basis of the ideal of solidarity … that’s no use (hm) I
mean from our perspective … one has to open oneself to new concepts (hmhm) and not only look
at the social aspects …
The most important point to note about this extract is that the speaker puts forward a fictional
illustration of development projects which in his opinion are doomed to failure. While the speaker
downplays or even discredits the ‘ideal of solidarity’, he makes the point that social aspirations
(i.e. ‘social aspects) are not sufficient to warrant the success of development aid projects. What I
want to highlight in this context is that the speaker’s account is based on a ‘periodizing scheme’
(du Gay, 2003), meaning that it juxtaposes two ways of carrying out development aid: one is
based on the ideal of solidarity and insensitive to the requirements and demands of the market
and the other ‘opens up’ to managerial concepts such as ‘market analysis’ and ‘marketing’ (which
the interviewee addresses in another part of the interview). In light of the speaker’s contention
that one cannot ‘only look at the social aspects’, it is obvious that he favors the latter scheme of
conduct, since it is presumed to not only take into account the social but also the economic
aspects of development aid.
P2: … there has to be an economically viable way aaa a feasible way of making the project
sustainable (hm) we surely provide the projects with an initial financing … if we see a market
(hm) but thereafter it needs to work in a sustainable way …
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Whereas the previous extract has put particular stress on the economic requirements of
development aid, we can see that the extract above indicates how the social and economic aspects
of development are ‘harmonized’. That is, somewhat in contrast to the previous extract in which
the speaker downplays and even ridicules the importance of the ‘social aspect’ of development, in
the above extract both issues are given apt recognition. The speaker’s use of ‘sustainable’ thus
reveals that economic viability, although construed as an important feature, is not envisaged as
the sole or dominant parameter of successful development aid. This ‘harmonization’ of the social
and economic aspects of development is typical to the extent that the notion of ‘sustainability’ is
deployed in the benevolence repertoire to undermine the hierarchical polarity between the two
poles. Therefore, the benevolence repertoire is endowed with a double logic, so to speak, which
holds that development aid simultaneously needs to pay attention to social and economic
viability. This condition of simultaneity is revealing, since it makes it clear that the economic
argument does not introduce an oxymoron to the benevolence repertoires. Hence, the influx of
economic arguments does not cause an incompatibility because the benevolence repertoire is able
to incorporate, by dint of deploying the concept ‘sustainability’, the two oppositional rationalities
by presuming a general compatibility of social and economic parameters. Again, assuming an
equalized relationship between the social and economic aspects of development aid, the
benevolence repertoire does neither exclude economic topics nor grant them a privileged position.
In other words, this condition of simultaneity implies that the benevolence repertoire does not
simply reduce the social (i.e. self-determination, liberation, etc.) to the economic (e.g. Becker,
1976; cf. also Chapter 7), but rather establishes an imperative of ‘as well as’. If looked at from
that perspective, it is clear that the benevolence repertoire, although acknowledging that the
simultaneous dealing with social and economic issues is a difficult task, presumes that it is
possible to establish a condition in which the oppositional demands are equilibrated. In
consequence, portraying development as both social and economic, the benevolence repertoire
imparts an image of development which combines the two goals of ‘doing good’ (i.e. being
social) and ‘doing well’ (i.e. being successful). Looked at in this way, the encounters between
NGO practitioners and the indigenous other (i.e. both help recipient and southern NGO partner)
are not just construed as a source of mutual fulfillment (cf. above) but also as a unique
opportunity to create a ‘win-win’ situation. To be sure, win-win refers chiefly to construing
human relations in development aid not only on a social basis, but also through achieving
economic gains or advantages. It is essential to point out that the benevolence repertoire does not
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conceive of economic merits (‘doing well’) as a crude self-maximizing effort by certain
individuals, but as a collective maximization of economic value for all the parties involved in
development aid. This said, I will now discuss the subject positions which arise from the
benevolence repertoire.
Subject Positions
Needless to say, people do not enter discourse pre-formed (Hollway, 1984). Identity, the way it is
conceived through the theory of discourse, is in one way or another created by prevailing
discourses, i.e. the stock of available commonsense or ‘lived ideology’ (Billig et al., 1988).
Therefore, identity is to be seen as the ‘location’ of the self within a particular conversation or,
put differently, as the subject positions made relevant and rendered available by specific ways of
talking (Edley, 2001). In order to pinpoint the more obvious subject positions revealed in the
benevolence repertoire, it must be noted that the practitioners’ narratives typically puts the self
(i.e. practitioners) and the other (e.g. ‘target group’ or southern partner NGO) on an equal
footing. It is also important to note that the benevolence repertoire is in opposition to those
scholars which assert that western images of the other often rely on deprecatory attributes (e.g.
Prasad, 1997). That is, with its focus on issues such as relational fairness and autonomy, the
benevolence repertoire construes NGO practitioners as supportive, upright and non-dominant
human beings. Moreover, the discourse analysis also indicates that the benevolence repertoire not
simply construes practitioners as people which are driven by a motif of help, empowerment or
liberation, but as people who appreciate the encounters with indigenous people in the south,
because such encounters are deemed to be rewarding. That is to say that practitioners are
constructed as people who construe their care for the indigenous other as both a means (to other
ends; e.g. the betterment of the indigenous people’s living conditions) and as an end in itself. In
view of the observation that the benevolence repertoire puts particular emphasis on issues of, for
instance, equality, participation and self-determination, it is further implied that practitioners
often see their efforts or their organizations in a very positive light, highlighting the malevolent
status of mainstream development aid practice. A further effect of the benevolence repertoire is
that it portrays NGO practitioners as circumspect and cautious people who simultaneously have
an eye on both the social (e.g. trust, equality, etc.) and economic issues (e.g. financial self-
sufficiency, efficiency, etc.) of development aid. In the following section, I will first summarize
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the central features of the benevolence repertoire and then address its inherently dilemmatic
aspects.
Overall Reflection
If we agree that there is a difference between upward accountability (which entails
development NGOs’ liability vis-à-vis their funding bodies) and downward accountability
(which for the most part comprises the proper advocacy and responsible treatment of help/aid
recipients; cf. Ontrac, 2001), it is clear that the benevolence repertoire primarily reflects
development aid on the basis of the latter concept. The legitimacy of development aid is
therefore not exclusively constructed by making reference to particular benevolent acts (e.g.
food or infrastructure programs, medical care, etc.) and their (social and/or economic)
impact, but also, or predominantly, by emphasizing the inclusiveness and equality of their
practices. Obviously then, this emphasis brings to light the concern for participation as seen,
for instance, in strategic discourses of funding bodies, the World Bank and IMF as well as in
deliberations of the NGO community as carried out during the 1990s (cf. above). Although I
have claimed that practitioners rarely enunciate prima facie ideologies, I want to stress that
the benevolence repertoire can be qualified as ideological. This claim, in my assessment, is
tenable, particularly if one takes into account that the benevolence repertoire is inextricably
linked to the discourse of sustainable development and most notably to the idea of ‘bottom-
up’ leverage and empowerment (Christens & Speer, 2006). This is, however, not to say that
practitioners simply mimic, i.e. imitate the canon of sustainable development or
participation. Instead, practitioners use the available ‘intellectual ideologies’ (Billig et al.,
1988) and incorporate them into their sensemaking so as to come up with a legitimate story
of development. Departing from the observation that the benevolence repertoire primarily
endorses the establishment of equal relationships between western practitioners and
organizations and the indigenous people and southern NGOs, I would like to shed a critical
light on practitioners’ remarks about equality and reveal that speakers sometimes call into
question – even directly and explicitly – the feasibility of being equal(s).
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A) Equality as Fairness or Sameness
I have mentioned before that the interviews brought to light how practitioners in their
narratives deploy development orthodoxies such as partnership, self-determination, etc.
Apart from that, it is important to reiterate here that these rationalities gained global
momentum after the massive failures of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s
(Svensson & Dollar, 1998). It must thus be borne in mind that it was in particular the idea of
self-determination which ‘capitalized’ on or emerged from the recognition that the conflation
of development and economic rejuvenation of the Third World had only limited success and
at times even caused serious damage (Haggard & Kaufman, 1992). Be that as it may, what I
want to point out here is that the benevolence repertoire holds that the relation between
practitioners and the indigenous other must be characterized by equality. As the analysis has
shown, practitioners traditionally perceive equality as a principle of fair treatment and hence
as a measure of justice. By implication, equality, as denoted in practitioners’ talk, represents
a value statement concerning how the indigenous other (i.e. help recipients and southern
NGOs) ought to be treated. Since equality has been described as both a means and as an end
to development, it is hardly surprising that the term is primarily used to pinpoint a positive
and laudable phenomenon. However, although the value of equality has been justified in
practitioners’ talk by reference to notions such as ‘liberation’ or ‘self-determination’, one
must not forget that equality is inextricably connected to a condition of sameness. With this
in mind, I am keen to clarify the difference between the view which construes equality as a
sign of justice and fairness and the view which denotes equality as a condition of ontological
sameness. To put it bluntly, the essential difference between these two views is that the
former heralds a value statement whereas the latter assumes the possibility of turning people
into equals. As Lummis (1992) eloquently claimed regarding the latter view, ‘(e)quality as
sameness … is an allegation of fact; it postulates common characteristics in people’ (p. 38).
It follows from this that denoting equality as sameness entails a political stance, since it
implies a standard according to which people can, not to say must, be defined. To be sure,
although the benevolence repertoire assumes that a condition of formal sameness can be
achieved, it is clear that the interviews gave no indication as to how the standard of equality
is defined, or who is legitimated to define the standard. That is, my analysis gives no
indication as to whether or not practitioners’ narratives engender a standard which subjugates
development aid to the dominant paradigm of the western modernity (Latouche, 1992). I thus
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refrain from alleging (as some postcolonial scholars have done before) that the supposedly
noble idea of equality is a de facto means for homogenizing differences and hence for
eradicating the alterity of the indigenous other. Although it is clear that there remains a
speculative possibility that the assumption of sameness reifies unequal power relations
between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’, it is more important in the present context to emphasize
that practitioners have themselves problematized or at least questioned development aid.
Hence, whereas self-determination, partnership or equality have predominantly been
reflected as positive signs, the benevolence repertoire also comprises arguments which
emphasize the dilemmatic features of these concepts. In order to clarify this point I want give
some brief illustrations which illuminate how practitioners delineate development aid as an
ambivalent endeavor and particularly how they (rhetorically) deal with ideological dilemmas
in their accounts.
B) Confessions & the Ambivalence of Development Aid
What is conspicuous is that the benevolence repertoire, despite establishing a positive
valuation of development aid, does not radiate the unclouded optimism which prevailed in
the early days of Third World development (Sbert, 1992). Although it remains an issue of
speculation why practitioners refrain from representing development as a universal panacea,
I find it most revealing to investigate how ambivalence is both constructed and resolved by
dint of practitioners’ social practice. Thus, I would like to illustrate two rhetorical strategies
which practitioners commonly used to account for the ostensible fallacies of development
aid. The first extract alludes to those rhetorical strategies which address the ambivalence of
development aid in an explicit manner.
P29: … our aim is to give children and adolescents a chance (hmm) ‘help for self-help’ … that’s
of course something you get to hear quite often but it is still helpful … helping them so that they
can lead an independent life (hm) …
The conversational structure of the above extract comes close to what Antaki and Wetherell
(1999) have denoted ‘show concession’. The concept of ‘show concession’ relates to the
observation that the speaker, after delineating the overall objective of a concrete
development project (‘help for self-help’), imparts, after a brief pause, a confirmation in
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which she acknowledges that this position is prone to disconfirmation (‘that’s of course
something you get to hear quite often’). Evidently then, the concept of ‘show concession’
entails that the speaker explicitly acknowledges that her claim can reasonably be challenged.
However, the interesting point is that the speaker does not leave it at that, because she
immediately reprises the original statement so as to clarify that the proposition is still valid
(‘it is still helpful’). According to Antaki and Wetherell (1999), such ‘show concessions’
represent an apt rhetoric for bolstering an original contestable proposition against challenge.
Moreover, confessions as the above are revealing to the extent that they bring to light that
practitioners do not simply impart pre-established sets of cultural/political assumptions of
development in a straightforward manner, but use contestable intellectual ideologies in order
to render their accounts meaningful and persuasive. In my assessment, the single most
important tenet deriving from Antaki and Wetherell (1999) is that development orthodoxies,
within one and the same interview, can be problematized as well as used to construe
development aid as a positive instance. Concessions, so it seems, exhibit the inherent
ambivalence of a given term (e.g. ‘help for self-help’) as well as the rhetorical effectiveness
of ambivalence in the context of local sensemaking.
C) Ideological Dilemma: Autonomy versus Command
Although we have noted that the benevolence repertoire assumes that the social and economic
aspects of development aid can be balanced and, by implication, that these two foci do not lead to
an ideological dilemma, it is noteworthy that certain interviews did in fact comprise an
ideological dilemma, namely between the oppositional positions of equality and command.
P2: … to what extent do our demands reflect a kind of Euro-centrism which has a negative bearing
on our partner organizations … meaning that one would have no or less respect … I mean one
always remains friendly (hm) but it [development work] works on the basis of the principle ‘who
pays commands’ or … as we say ‘who pays gives friendly orders’ (P2 laughs) … I mean they
receive money if they then do what we want them to do (hm hm) and that’s precisely what we are
most concerned about …
On the face of it, the speaker in the above extract asserts that it is impossible to (completely)
adjust the contrasting requirements of equality and command. Although the narrator reveals that
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he is aware of the risk of ‘Euro-centrism’, he goes on to trivialize this risk by means of an ironic
statement (‘as we say ‘who pays gives friendly orders’’) which is followed by laughter. What is
revealing, in my opinion, is that the speaker, in delineating the dilemma through an ostensibly
consensual platitude (‘who pays gives friendly orders’), first downplays the gravity of the
dilemma (by pretending that it is a rather marginal threat), while he simultaneously acknowledges
that the risk of domination cannot be resolved in an easy way. While the narrator mentions that
‘one always remains friendly (hm) but it works on the basis of the principle ‘who pays
commands’, he also indicates that the friendly tone must not conceal that it is invariably the party
that provides the money (i.e. the northern NGO) which will ultimately set the agenda. Essentially,
as the speaker denotes this ruling convention as a general ‘principle’ (and not simply as his own
individual problem), he makes it clear that the dilemma is treated as a more or less accepted
matter of fact. The point according to rhetoric theory is that this impression of general
truthfulness or ‘out-thereness’ (Law, 2004) is instrumental in discharging the speaker from
liability, that is, from being held responsible for the given dilemma (or for not being able to solve
it). However, irrespective of the effectiveness of this rhetoric, we must not overlook that the
speaker’s account does not try to solve the general dilemma between the oppositional demands.
For instance, the passage where the speaker contends ‘and that’s precisely what we are most
concerned about … ’ indicates that he suggests a tentative ‘solution’ to the identified ambivalence
(cf. Edley, 2001). The ‘solution’, however, remains partial since it does not disband the
oppositional demands of equality/self-determination and unidirectional command. This treatment
of the problem, in my assessment, cannot be overestimated, since it illustrates how accounts of
development sometimes retain the tension between two oppositional positions, meaning that the
dilemma is not resolved by rhetorical means (van den Berg, 2003). At this juncture, I want to
introduce two more extracts which reveal how practitioners, although contending that their NGO
also has a voice in determining the respective development projects, establish a view in which the
southern NGOs are granted an autonomous position.
P8: … we actually do not coordinate those projects they [the southern NGOs] have to do this by
themselves … we only say yes or no … our power lies only in saying yes or no …
P2: … we do not alter their projects I mean one only says things like the projects need to work
economically because otherwise it would not work (hm) … BUT they do it …
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What is conspicuous in both accounts is that practitioners use the plural form. Talking about ‘we’
instead of ‘I’ has, as briefly discussed before, the notable effect of giving the impression that the
utterance does not relate to the speaker’s idiosyncratic experience or belief, but rather to a
broader consensus. Moreover, in the first extract the speaker stresses that they do not ‘coordinate’
the development projects. Although the speaker does not conceal the fact that the northern NGO
has the ultimate vote in ‘saying yes or no’, she tries to downplay the scope of her (organization’s)
influence by repeating that ‘saying yes or no’ is the ‘only’ power they actually have. The speaker,
so it seems, seeks to establish a view in which the influence of the northern NGO is rendered
negligible. In order to understand how this impression is constructed, it is illuminative to turn to
the second extract in which the speaker is explicitly asked how he deals with the tension between
self-determination and autocracy. The speaker replies by imparting a three-part proposition in
which he first disqualifies the tension (‘we do not alter their projects’) which is followed by a
preliminary confession and a final mentioning of the initial suggestion. What is of particular
interest here is that in the second part of his proposition, the speaker indirectly acknowledges that
he is aware of the tension (‘I mean one only says things like the projects need to work
economically’). This concession is then followed by a brief pause and a firm and decisive ‘BUT’.
So whereas the concession works to acknowledge that the imbalance of development cannot
easily be done away with, the use of ‘BUT’ primarily functions as a link between the first
statement (‘we do not alter their projects’) and the concluding argument (‘they do it’). Although
the general function of the disclaimer (‘BUT’) is to re-establish an ostensibly unproblematic
condition, it must remain clear that the speaker at the same time maintains his proposition that
‘the projects need to work economically because otherwise it would not work’ which again
implies that he does not dispose of the dilemma once and for all. These two brief extracts give
some indication that the benevolence repertoire is subject to an ideological dilemma resulting
from the mobilization of the two issues of autonomy and command. Irrespective of the
observation that speakers tend to downplay the profundity of this incompatibility, the point I want
to emphasize here is that most accounts do not solve the tension by rhetorical means and thus
endow development with a dilemmatic stance. While it is important to keep in mind that this
identification will become a central aspect in the concluding reflection, I will now shed some
light on a second interpretive repertoire which has been abstracted from practitioners’
development talk.
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The Professionalism Repertoire: ‘Accounting to Donors’
The professionalism repertoire, to put things simply, constructs a social landscape that is for the
most part ‘populated’ by two actors: the NGO and its donors. Moreover, development aid is
primarily construed by the professionalism repertoire as a matter of fundraising and external
accounting. In the course of our excursion into the operation of the professionalism repertoire, I
will illustrate how practitioners establish a position through which development aid is rendered a
rational and apathetic venture. As will further be discussed, the professionalism repertoire
represents development aid as being contingent on professional soundness, thus wreaking the
visionary trajectory of managerial discourse (du Gay, Salaman & Rees, 1996). Disclosing
speakers’ ostensibly neutral language, I will show that this language game is rhetorically effective
in transforming development aid into a depoliticized event. In consequence, the argument I will
establish is that in the professionalism repertoire issues such as efficiency, transparency,
reliableness, etc. take center stage. On the other hand, the professionalism repertoire largely
marginalizes the value of manifestly help-related deeds or ethical/altruistic virtues. I will illustrate
that the professionalism repertoire, despite its administrative/managerial focus, is not exhausted
by economic rationalities. I will also show that it attributes to practitioners characteristic traits
such as ‘liability’, ‘reasonableness’ and ‘sincerity’, meaning that the professionalism repertoire
chiefly renders NGO practitioners deliberate, down-to-earth people who dispassionately carry out
their duties. I will then pinpoint a typical ideological dilemma of the professionalism repertoire
which results from the simultaneous mobilization of the converse issues of donor interests and
free expression. This analysis aims at highlighting how practitioners grapple with contradicting
commonplaces as well as at showing how they go about in problematizing the potential
instrumentalization of their development practice. In line with the elaboration of the benevolence
repertoire, I will reveal that the tension triggered by the dilemma is mostly dealt with in a
rational, argumentative manner.
The Virtue of Professionalism
Generally speaking, the professionalism repertoire works upon a register of words,
statements and metaphors which in one way or another relate to the ideal of business
excellence. Yet, professionalism is not a rendition of managerialism as entailed in the
dominant discourse of organizational reform (du Gay, 1996). Rather, this repertoire is chiefly
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about endorsing the merits of administrative or bureaucratic culture. In consequence, the
professionalism repertoire values an ethos of sincerity and dependability without arrogating
the sort of proactive, entrepreneurial mindset advocated by managerialist ideals (Alvesson &
Willmottt, 1996) which include, for instance, total quality management, business process
reengineering or transformational leadership (Boje, 1991). The idea of professionalism is
thus anything but the sort of ‘businessing’ that has been popularized in conjunction with the
‘entrepreneurial new wave management’ (du Gay, 2000b). To be sure, the professionalism
repertoire radiates little enthusiasm and thrill. And although it deploys the lexis of
management (e.g. ‘efficiency’ or ‘effectiveness’), the professionalism repertoire does not
conceive of development as a ‘hurrah word’ (Chapman, 1996) that heralds a brighter future.
In order to illustrate this general overview, I now want to examine some of the more
exemplary statements made by NGO professionals. The first extract below is an account of
an ex-trustee of an international enterprise who, after her retirement, has started to work part-
time for a development NGO. The extract is taken from a larger passage in which the speaker
explains why she has chosen to work for a development NGO.
P7: … to be honest I have to tell you that when they called me [her friends] and suggested that I
work in an NGO I first said ‘no, for God’s sake’ I will never do this (hm) and … Mr. X [the
director of the NGO] was very convincing and his documentation was so perfect that even my
husband and my three sons who all have a university education said I should give it a try …
While the speaker expresses her general suspicion towards NGOs (which she elsewhere
disqualifies on the ground of their ostensible flabbiness), she presents the ‘documentation’ of the
NGO as the turning point in her decision making process. Emphasizing that the director of the
NGO was ‘convincing’ and that the documentation ‘was so perfect’, she also mentions that her
family and particularly her three sons, ‘who all have a university education’, persuaded her to
‘give it a try’. Although this extract already conveys a tentative sense of the value system the
speaker applies in assessing the aptness or inaptness of organizations, in the following passage
the particularities of her evaluative descriptions become even more evident.
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P7: … I mean I first look at the figures … everything else is only of secondary interest to me (hm)
and if the figures … are plausible and transparent through and through then one can do something
… (hm) that’s how it started …
This claim shows that the speaker used the documentation (i.e. annual report, annual account,
balance sheet, etc.) of the NGO to decide if she should take or reject the job. The logic put
forward by the speaker is that as long as the ‘figures’ are right (‘plausible and transparent’),
she will consider taking the job. What is further revealed in this statement is that the speaker
employs a general ‘dividing practice’ (cf. Rabinow, 1984) which designates what bears
significance and what doesn’t. More precisely, in view of the fact that the practitioner
sketches out a polarity between ‘the figures’ (which are deemed relevant) and ‘everything
else’ (which is ‘of secondary interest’), it is immediately evident that the social aspect of
development aid falls into the latter category. It is perspicuous here that the speakers’
provocative statement that everything apart from the figures is only of secondary interest to
her represents a disputable proposition (Antaki & Wetherell, 1999). The interviewer actually
continues the conversation by a confrontation (Hutchby, 1996), asking the practitioner if the
core mission of the NGO doesn’t matter to her (‘what do you think about the approach of
your organization … could you also imagine working for an organization which is
committed to ecological projects?’). She first replies by reiterating her initial position (‘that’s
not relevant to me’). However, in the course of the same sentence she re-frames her account
by adding that her decision was also based on the question whether ‘people [i.e. the director
of the NGO] are trustworthy’ or not. In the following extract we get some further indication
of how the speaker gets to revise her initial statement (i.e. ‘everything else [apart from the
figures] is only of secondary interest to me’).
P7: … I don’t really have time for that [get informed about the projects of her NGO] …
What this brief statement reveals is that the speaker’s account experiences a subtle shift. That
is, whereas the speaker at the outset of the interview expresses her downright disinterest in
the non-financial parameters and hence the social objectives of her organization, the above
extract constitutes an excuse (‘I don’t really have time for that’) which allows her to mitigate
the looming impression of being undedicated about and uncommitted to the purpose and
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objectives of her NGO. Admittedly, this illustration is exceptional in the sense that there are
few other examples in which the split between the economic (i.e. the figures) and the non-
economic features of development work are pinpointed in a relatively explicit manner. Be
that as it may, what I want to emphasize in the present context it that the professionalism
repertoire establishes a rather narrow understanding of professionalism which is
predominantly related to some form of administrative practice. Speakers thus often refer to
their professional role to emphasize their work-related duties (e.g. ‘my time is fully occupied
with bookkeeping’), which in turn legitimates them to remain ‘ignorant’ of the ‘social side’
of their NGOs (cf. also Talja, 2004). The professionalism repertoire is thus primarily used to
sketch out accounts which highlight the importance of doing a ‘good job’ in the respective
area of competence without necessarily having to take into account the other (social) aspects
of the NGO. Practitioners’ accounts are thus typically narrated from an administrative and/or
managerial vantage point. The norms according to which competency and professionalism
are defined concur with these rationalities. As revealed in the previous illustration, ‘the
figures’ are the single most important symbol of the professional repertoire even though
practitioners also use other issues to establish the primacy of financial governance. It is thus
not surprising that issues such as ‘efficiency’ form a preeminent part of the professionalism
repertoire. However, in contrast to the benevolence repertoire where efficiency is employed
in conjunction with sustainable development, the professionalism repertoire renders
efficiency a general a-priori of development aid. That is to say that efficiency is not just
denoted as an important aspect among others (i.e. the ecological and social sphere of
development), but as containing an intrinsic value in itself. The extract below shows how the
speaker deploys the notion of ‘efficiency’ to respond to the interviewer’s question of what he
thinks makes his organization distinguishable from others.
P9: … what distinguishes us from others is our efficiency (hm) …
While the practitioner selects a managerial parameter, i.e. ‘efficiency’, to illustrate the superiority
of his NGO, the next extract makes it even clearer that the practitioner construes ‘efficiency’ as a
sine qua non of development aid.
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P9: … then we also try to be responsible in terms of our costs (hm) that means that we are social
in terms of the wages we pay (hm) although social security is good … I had to ask myself what
our actual aim was (hm) … that’s why we demand a certain amount of efficiency … in our small
enterprise we have no space for social welfare cases [or social dropouts] …
The speaker states that his organization is ‘responsible’ and ‘social’, which he illustrates by
reference to his organization’s fair ‘wages’ and adequate ‘social security’. What is of
particular interest, then, is that the speaker emphasizes that his employees have to be efficient
or else they will have to leave (‘we have no space for social welfare cases’). This statement is
exemplary of the professionalism repertoire, since it shows how ‘efficiency’ is construed as
the central parameter of sound day-to-day development practice. Essentially, the accounts
above reveal what Billig (1987) calls an ‘ideological tradition’, meaning that they engender a
distinction between admissible and inadmissible development organizations, i.e. between
those which are professional (e.g. efficient, transparent and financially sound) and those
which do not exhibit such qualities. Furthermore, what I find striking is that the image of
admissible NGOs largely depends on the establishment of distinct absences. That is, the
professionalism repertoire rarely disqualifies
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non-professional organizations (i.e.
inefficient NGOs), but renders them inferior by reiterating (and thereby making manifest) the
central importance of efficiency. Although, prima facie, the professionalism repertoire
appears to be more affirmative than the benevolence repertoire (since it does not rely on an
antagonistic rhetoric), it must be borne in mind that the continued emphasis of positively
connoted features of development such as efficiency has a comparably exclusive effect, since
it engenders a hierarchy between apt and inapt development organizations.
Whereas the point so far has been that the professionalism repertoire establishes a
gold standard of sound development practice which is inextricably connected to topics such
as efficiency, transparency and reliableness, I will now illuminate how these issues are
deployed in descriptions of fundraising practices and donations. The objective is to gain an
understanding of how these topics are established as the pivot of development aid and how
speakers legitimate state-based funding as an indication of quality, rather than an indication
of the limitation of an NGO’s autonomy.
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Note that the benevolence repertoire relies on an antagonistic rhetoric through which it disqualifies ‘mainstream’
development aid organizations and practices.
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Fundraising, Donations & State Participation
In this first extract, which has been taken from a passage in which the speaker describes his
fundraising activities, we see how the speaker represents donations as the preeminent concern of
his organization.
P26: … yes that’s [donations] … something which keeps us busy (hmmm) and it is important …
we have to make sure that we open new sources of financing … that is … our donations … we
used to have a lot of private donors much more some fifteen years ago than we have today (hmm)
and because of obsolescence we have lost a lot of those donors and we are at pains to find new
ones … we are thinking of how to do that … aam …
The practitioner begins his description by emphasizing the hardship and deterioration of
fundraising. He later establishes a periodizing schema (du Gay, 2003) which allows him to
distinguish between a previous ‘epoch’ (‘some fifteen years ago’), when the organization’s
financial situation was more relaxed (‘we used to have a lot of private donors’), and the
present (‘today’), which introduces a rupture with tradition (‘we have lost of lot of those
donors’). It is evident, then, that the practitioner problematizes the present by claiming that
his organization needs to change its previous fundraising practice (‘we are at pains to find
new ones’). On the face of it, the speaker does not only underscore the general significance
of donations, but simultaneously reveals that it is yet not clear how he will tackle the
declining number of donors (‘we are thinking of how to do that’).
P2: … there are other organizations which have a lot of good ideas but which have little
knowledge of aaa … for instance how to attract donations I mean how one has to act in this
respect …
In contrast to the previous extract which emphasizes the problematic issue of donors, it is
revealed through the above statement that the speaker deploys the issue of fundraising to
establish a descriptive basis for distinguishing development NGOs. In concrete terms, the
speaker uses the issue of fundraising to refer to NGOs which do not have the requisite
‘knowledge’ to ‘attract donations’. Fundraising, by implication, is rendered a practical
knowledge which a development organization may either have or not have. Needless to say,
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provided that donations are typically represented by the professionalism repertoire as the sine
qua non of development aid, it is evident that having or not having the relevant knowledge is
seen as crucial for the survival of any development organization.
P7: … it’s [the work in development NGOs] simply DIFFERENT no … it is not possible to
compare this [development NGO] to aaah a normal organization … it’s simply different in that
one has to attract funds and I’m starting to get involved myself there … that’s not comparable with
a … with a commercial firm for instance (hm) it’s something different …
In line with the previous extract, the above passage makes it clear that fundraising is depicted
as a feature of NGOs which allows for a separation from what the interviewee calls ‘normal
organization’ or ‘commercial firm’. Whereas the extract reveals that the speaker primarily
accentuates the differences between the two forms of organization, she simultaneously
construes fundraising as the primary means for sustaining the financial viability of NGOs.
This observation is significant to the extent that it shows that the professionalism repertoire
emphasizes donations as the prime, if not exclusive, source for financing NGOs. Whereas the
above extract delineates fundraising as a rather unproblematic, although crucial, everyday
task of development NGOs, the following statement makes it clear that fundraising is thought
to be a more delicate affair.
P11: … we will address the question of how we actually justify our administrative expenditures
(hm) that is … are we able to justify our spending vis-à-vis our donors? …
What is striking in the first place is that the speaker introduces the issue of upward accountability
(i.e. the NGO’s accountability ‘vis-à-vis our donors’) by posing a question. This indicates that he
represents the matter as an unresolved issue. Problematizing the current donor situation of NGOs
is thus symptomatic of the professionalism repertoire, since practitioners typically portray the
issue of securing donations as the single most pressing problem of NGO governance. What I want
to point out in addition to that is that speakers often pick out external accounting as a central
theme of contemporary development aid. In concrete terms, it is interesting to see that when
practitioners talk about the common subject of state-based funding, they usually contend that
state funding neither undermines the NGO’s autonomy nor its core objectives. However, before
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shedding light on the construction of state-based funding, it is essential to note that the
professionalism repertoire comprises variegated depictions of fundraising. Thus the issue is
presented as either an ordeal, a constant bottleneck or a self-evident, neutral activity of NGO
governance. Irrespective of these differences, it is noticeable that practitioners’ arguments are
characterized by a certain unison regarding the belief that state funding and hence state influence
does not pose a problem for the conduct of development work. This signification of state-based
funding requires two further comments. First, it makes it clear that the professionalism repertoire
does not adopt a critical perspective towards the possibility that state participation undermines,
for instance, NGOs’ autonomy (e.g. Murphy, 2000; Roy, 2004). The professionalism repertoire,
instead of construing state participation as a threat to NGOs’ overall autonomy, represents the
issue simply as a value-neutral financial source. Second, the professionalism repertoire does not
only conceive of state funding as one financial source among others (and thus as a indefeasible
undertaking), but at times even perceives government participation as an indication of the good
quality of NGOs and/or their projects.
P19: … that [state funding] means that a given project is serious that’s what it means (hm) or if
you are financed by DEZA
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then you know that you’ve sketched out a serious project because
they invariably evaluate them (hm) …
P8: … yes … DEZA provides us with guidelines … it is the Federal Assembly who defines those
guidelines … and the DEZA follows the suggestions of the Federal Assembly (hm) … we don’t
encounter conflict because we just hand in our project and aah they evaluate the projects according
to whether they comply with the guidelines, and if the appraisal is positive we receive the funds
and they won’t say ‘if you don’t change this then we won’t finance you’ … that’s not the case und
I believe in development work there are no such conflicts of interest (hm) …
As revealed in the first extract, government funding by the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (DEZA) is twice depicted as a parameter which attests to the ‘seriousness’ of the
NGO’s projects. The preeminent point of the second extract, in my opinion, relates to the
speaker’s assertion that government funding does not cause ‘conflict’. The speaker construes the
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DEZA in German stands for: Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit des Eidgenössichen Departements
für auswärtige Angelegenheiten. The standard English translation is: Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation.
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NGO’s cooperation with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation as an unpretentious
undertaking, thus creating the impression that government funding is chiefly about meeting
objective, pre-ordained standards and procedures. Meticulously delineating the application
process, the speaker’s account is centered around the concept of ‘guidelines’. These guidelines, as
it were, neutralize the possibility that DEZA participation might engender ‘conflicts of interest’.
In the following extract it becomes even more obvious that collaboration with government bodies
is not portrayed as a threat to the NGO’s independence and autonomy but as a unique opportunity
to work with an experienced partner.
P19: … yes I would also say that it [the involvement of the DEZA] is a sign of quality since they
have a lot of experience and they also evaluate those projects … they have done an evaluation of a
project in B [name of country] and they said it was good because it achieved its goals and also the
group … that help was provided as planned (hmm) aam … it happens that they ask certain
questions and they … they want to change certain aspects of the project … but I think … I think
that’s all right (hm) at times the suggestions are very good (hm) productive …
What I want to emphasize here is that the speaker identifies the approval by the DEZA as ‘a
sign of quality’. The DEZA is thereby presented as worthwhile and helpful partner, since it
sometimes makes ‘good suggestions’. The speaker thus construes the DEZA as an expert
system which has the requisite ‘experience’ to objectively evaluate the NGO’s project. In
addition, the speaker acknowledges that the DEZA has an influence on their projects (‘it
happens that they ask certain questions’). However, the speaker also makes it clear in the
course of his utterance that he evaluates the suggestions by the DEZA in a positive manner as
he describes them as being ‘very good’ and ‘productive’. In light of the observation that the
professionalism repertoire depicts government funding and participation as a valuable form
of collaboration, I would like to refer back to the first part of this chapter where it was
mentioned that NGOs were initially construed, by definition, as (political) agents which were
independent of both the market and the state (e.g. Brigg, 2001; Mayhew, 2005). That is to
say that development NGOs initially derived their legitimacy from their autonomous (and
sometimes even anti-state) position and from their independence from the business sector
and from government policies. It appears safe to claim, then, that development NGOs were
commonly reflected in terms of their critical position towards government-commissioned
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projects (e.g. Meyer, 1992; Cross, 1997). However, it is obvious from the analysis of
practitioners’ narratives that the professionalism repertoire does not identify a conflicting, let
alone antagonistic, position between development NGOs and the state. Far from it, the
professionalism repertoire paints a social landscape in which the cooperation between NGOs
and governments is represented as ostensibly neutral and even laudable. Having said this, the
focus of the following illustration will rest on how practitioners describe their interactions
with donors. Since my overall aim is to show how development aid is conceived through
accounts of external accounting, I will emphasize in particular that speakers typically
represent the media as a vital means for visualizing (and thus ‘selling’) NGOs’ projects vis-à-
vis their donors.
The Relationship between Development Aid and the Media
This first extract represents a valuable entry point to grapple with how development and the
media are related in practitioners’ narratives. The speaker here explains how his organization uses
media reports to inform donors about new projects.
P2: … we report on what we’re doing [i.e. project work] or there are newspapers which print an
article about us or we publish a special edition in order to show ‘look they have reported on our
projects or written about us’ (hm) or if a newspaper has written about our projects … that’s how
we get our money …
What is revealed in this first extract is that the speaker describes how newspaper articles which
report on his organization are instrumentalized (‘look they have reported on our project or written
about us’) in the sense that they are used to raise donors’ awareness of what the NGO is doing
and what it has achieved. The ultimate aim of providing donors with media reports is, according
to the speaker, to secure further support (‘that’s how we get our money’). It appears, then, that
media publications are explicitly transformed into communicative devices and, more
fundamentally, into a means of justification. In the following extract another practitioner explains
how her organization regularly links its projects with topical issues disseminated by the media.
P8: … we use topical issues and link them (hm) link them with our project (hm) for instance in our
children project in L [name of country] or our education program in O [name of country] (hm) …
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This brief description has been selected from a larger passage in which the speaker proclaims that
it is important to align one’s development projects with topical Third World problems. In the
following extract she further explains that her organization tries to make a connection between
prominent themes of the media and the organization’s latest development projects in order to
increase the likelihood of receiving donations.
P8: … I mean the development of projects and resource mobilization are inseparable … yes
(hmm) one has to relate those things and if one relates them well one can be successful …
In another part of the interview the speaker claims that the success (i.e. donations) of her
NGO is linked with its ability to establish a link between its projects and (media-generated)
public concerns. In the above extract, she goes even further when she claims that the
‘development of projects’ and funding (i.e. ‘resource mobilization’) necessarily go together.
With her statement that ‘one has to relate those things’ in order to be ‘successful’ the speaker
thus asserts that one cannot be successful without connecting development work with topical
issues. These short illustrations are undoubtedly exemplary in that they show how the
professionalism repertoire emphasizes that the current donor situation of development NGOs
makes it necessary to deliberately reap, not to say exploit, the topical development concerns.
It appears, therefore, that the professionalism repertoire generally holds that NGOs, in order
to strike an attentive chord with potential donors, need to align their projects with ‘hot topics’
of development. This means that the image NGOs communicate to their donors is invariably
subject to a decisively western bias. In view of these observations, it is hardly surprising that
the instrumentalization of development aid induced by upward accountability and/or donor
communication has already become subject to criticism. For instance, Francis (2002) argued
that western media reports do not aptly account for or represent the pressing issues of the
Third World (i.e. Africa). Similarly, Chomsky (2000) claimed that the western media are
largely ignorant of the ‘people without rights’. Steiner-Khamsi’s (1998) argument is even
more relevant in the present context, since she pointed out that NGOs’ disproportionate focus
on donors is harmful to the extent that it often leads to an instrumentally one-sided and
selective representation of development affairs. Overemphasizing the interests of donors thus
leads, according to Steiner-Khamsi, to a negligence of the interests, desires and problems of
people in the Third World. Following Touraine (1988), such an over-emphasis on the
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perspective of donors is often accompanied with a focus on ephemeral media topics which
frequently induces NGOs to subscribe to ‘a logic of efficacy, which leads them to submit to
the influence of political actors’ (Touraine, 1988, p. 136). Although this criticism goes
beyond my immediate analytic material (i.e. the interviews), I nevertheless want to
emphasize that the professionalism repertoire largely points at the instrumental use of media
reports and is thus rather ignorant of the drawbacks and problematic aspects related to the
opportunistic use of topical issues discussed in the media. However, there is a notable
exception to that rule and I will show in the following section that the professionalism
repertoire contains an ideological dilemma which is expressed in utterances to the effect that
donor relations form an obstacle to free expression.
Ideological Dilemma: The Tightrope Act of Free Expression
The ideological dilemma I would like to delineate here is revealed in utterances which
simultaneously invoke the issues of upward accountability and free expression. It has already
been mentioned that the professionalism repertoire stresses the importance of fundraising and
donor relations. The following extract illustrates how donors can impose a limit on NGOs’ ability
to impart political statements.
P2: … aaa today that’s different yes (hm) it is at times possible to make a political statement
which some might not like (hm) or (hm) we have a private donor and we have churches and cities
(hm) normal communities we have Third World shops and we now have the DEZA (hm) … it is
important that none of those donors becomes too big I mean that our dependency becomes too big
(hm) so that one still can be straightforward and blunt (hm) if that is requested (hm) that’s really
important (laughter) (hm) and aa … if that [the share of the donor] exceeds 20 or 30 percent (hm)
from a single donor (hm) if one tells them why one does things in a certain way then they mostly
understand …
It becomes clear from this extract that the speaker presents the dilemma between the demands of
donors and the possibility of sketching out a ‘political statement’ in an explicit manner (Billig et
al., 1988). In other words, the speaker addresses the incompatibility of his own account in a
reflexive and argumentative fashion. What is striking, in addition, is that the interviewee offers
two solutions to the contradiction in his account. First, he emphasizes that the freedom to make a
‘political statement’ makes it necessary to ensure that none of ‘those donors becomes too big’.
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This implies that ‘dependency’ mainly refers to situations in which a single source has gained too
much (financial) influence on the NGO. Since it is presumed in the above account that political
statements might induce donors to withdraw their financial support, it becomes clear that the
speaker tries to counteract this threat by making sure that none of the donors provides more than
‘20 or 30 percent’ of the finances. The second solution suggested by the speaker relates to his
claim that even though one’s political statements might upset certain donors, there is always the
chance to mitigate overt disagreements (‘if one tells them why one does things in a certain way
then they mostly understand … ’). This argument is further developed in the following extract
which comes from another interview.
P4: … we normally try to address the problems we have we try to negotiate … in a language
which makes people understand our point (hm) not with some fuzzy buzzwords (hm) … today I
approach a problem much more skillfully than some years ago when I was still more eye-catching
(hm) today I inform them [the donors] in more detail about the pros and cons …
This extract shows that the speaker tries to tackle the dilemma arising from the opposition
between the issue of donor agreement and free expression through a rationalistic account (‘today
I approach a problem much more skillfully’). Moreover, the speaker’s conviction that donors can
be persuaded even if they hold different beliefs is noteworthy. The speaker claims that donors can
be brought into accordance with the NGO’s convictions if they are addressed ‘in a language
which makes people understand our point … not with some fuzzy buzzwords’. Donors are thus
construed as agents amenable to logic argumentation and who, by implication, can be persuaded
through a rational weighing up of ‘pros and cons’. These brief illustrations are undoubtedly
representative in the sense that they exhibit how the ideological dilemma of the professionalism
repertoire formulates solutions. As with the benevolence repertoire, it becomes obvious that the
dilemma arising from the oppositional demands of donor relations and the free expression of the
NGO’s standpoint is not fully solved in practitioners’ accounts. Although the tensions in
practitioners’ accounts remain active in both the benevolence and the professionalism repertoire,
it must be noted that there is a subtle difference between the two in that the professionalism
repertoire is optimistic that the dilemma can be solved: it suggests that the incongruencies in the
agenda of NGOs and donors can be reconciled on the basis of a rational negotiation between the
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two parties. I will now elaborate further on the subject positions aided and abetted by the
professionalism repertoire.
Subject Positions
In general terms, the professionalism repertoire construes practitioners as deliberate and at
times opportunistic problem-solvers whose ultimate aim is to satisfy the interests and
demands of their donors. It follows from the previous inquiry that practitioners are more
often than not represented as administrators or functional specialists. What I find most
revealing in this respect is that these subject positions lack the positive evaluative accent
inherent in the discourse of ‘new managerialism’ (Murphy, 2000) or ‘enterprise discourse’
(du Gay & Salaman, 1992). This lack becomes understandable, however, if one takes into
account that the professionalism repertoire primarily functions to represent NGO
practitioners as competent employees who work in accordance with given conventions and
pre-established standards. This repertoire therefore leaves little room for the high-flying
ambitions or visionary idea(l)s provided by the ‘funky business jargon’ (Webster, 2002).
Thus the professionalism repertoire, instead of representing development work as, for
instance, an important source of ‘individual liberty and self-fulfillment’ (du Gay, 2000b, p.
64), perceives sound competence as an indispensable precondition for the work of
development NGOs. In consequence, the professionalism repertoire portrays (ideal)
practitioners not necessarily as visionary, self-sacrificing managers or hard-working,
inventive entrepreneurs, but instead as responsible and reliable employees who more than
anything else care about their immediate responsibilities in their various fields of
competence.
Overall Reflection
The previous illustrations have made it clear that the professionalism repertoire is characterized
by a strong focus on donors. More than anything, this focus reveals the significance of donors or
donor relations as well as of the administrative (and managerial) activities at NGOs’
headquarters. Bearing in mind that the professionalism repertoire is quite frequently invoked in
practitioners’ accounts, I would like to put this observation into perspective. It is therefore
necessary to first point out that the prevalence of the professionalism repertoire can be explained
if one takes into account the occupations of the interviewees. In view of the fact that the majority
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of the practitioners which participated in this investigation occupied administrative positions, it is
hardly surprising that development aid work was frequently described with reference to
administrative and managerial savvy. Thus it becomes arguable that the professionalism
repertoire brings to the forefront the accent of the speaker’s professions. In accordance with
Bakhtin’s (1981) claim that ‘all words … are populated by intentions’ and that ‘(e)ach word
tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (p. 293), it
becomes arguable that the professionalism repertoire is strongly informed by the professional
jargon of administrators and/or functional specialists. On the other hand, however, the
professionalism repertoire also gives some indication of the broader transformation of
development aid which chiefly took place over the last decade. One could thus state that the
professionalism repertoire partly reflects the logic of ‘new managerialism’ (Murphy, 2000),
stressing the importance, not to say dogma, of result-based NGO conduct. Bearing in mind the
claim made at the outset of this chapter, namely that the ethos of pragmatic administration is
clearly on the rise in the field of development NGOs, it seems likely that the professionalism
repertoire will gain further ground in the future. However, since such statements are merely
speculative, I would like to come back to the discourse analysis and reiterate that the
professionalism repertoire, while stressing the importance of clearly defined hierarchies and
occupational duties, had the notable effect of limiting the liability of NGO practitioners. To gain a
tentative sense of how this is achieved through practitioners’ discourse, I would like to insert a
revealing statement made by one interviewee.
P14: … the only thing which he [the director of the NGO] asks me about is when he wants to
make payments and that’s when I can say yes or no (hm) … other than that we have no big
influence on the decisions of the NGO (hm) …
Essentially, what is revealed in this extract is that the speaker claims that the overall
responsibility of the NGO lies with others (i.e. the director). Although one could reasonably claim
that this utterance entails an accusation of the director of the NGO who does not or only
marginally involve employees in his decisions, it is obvious from the discourse analysis at large
that the professionalism repertoire primarily functions to confine the responsibility of
practitioners and, most fundamentally, to limit practitioners’ liabilities to their realm of
specialization. Stated otherwise, in blatant contrast to the discourse of enterprise culture which
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transfers organizational responsibilities to individual employees, the professionalism repertoire
gives rise to an opposite trend, since employees are seen to be responsible only for their
immediate field of activity. By implication, everything which seems to exceed practitioners’
immediate knowledge or expertise is not perceived as their business, so to speak.
A further point I would like to emphasize here relates to the observation that the
professionalism repertoire leaves little, if any, space for the presentation of the indigenous other.
This limited presentation of the indigenous other can be accounted for if one takes into
consideration the organizational structure of most development NGOs. In concrete terms, the
majority of the organizations which were included in this investigation were sub-contracting
southern NGOs to implement their development projects in the southern hemisphere. In addition,
the northern NGOs were predominantly occupied with fundraising as well as with strategizing
and with assessing, selecting and monitoring development projects in the south. If the nature of
the activities of NGOs is taken into account, it becomes clear that the perspective(s) of the
indigenous other might have been less available to practitioners than would appear to be the case
at first sight. However, what I deem even more relevant in the present context is that practitioners
– even when explicitly asked by the interviewer whether the obvious distance between the
northern headquarters and the people working and living in the south caused problems – more
often than not noted that distance was not an issue. This suggestion is partly supported by
description in which practitioners emphasized the possibilities of the new media, stating, for
instance, that their organizations gained sufficient knowledge of their development projects via
‘e-mails’ or ‘newsletters’ of their southern partner NGOs.
P26: … it is of course better if one can go there [to the countries where the projects are carried
out] from time to time … but of course those partner organizations have so-called newsletters and
aaam and if one has been there before then one is well able to imagine what is going on in the field
… and then we have e-mail contact on a daily basis if there is something (hm) …
On the face of it, this extract provides us with a preliminary sense of how the professionalism
repertoire leads practitioners to make an ostensibly unproblematic separation between the
activities carried out in the northern NGO and the activities carried out ‘in the field’. Although
the speaker acknowledges that ‘it is of course better if one can go there from time to time’, being
on site is not deemed a necessary precondition of (successful) development aid. After all, the
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interviewee explains that ‘those partner organizations have so-called newsletters’, and these
media are said to be sufficient to gain an approximate image of how things (i.e. projects) are
evolving. In contrast to the benevolence repertoire which sees being ‘close to the field’ as
imperative, then, the professionalism repertoire retains its emphasis on external accounting (i.e.
being ‘close to the donors’). In addition, it is essential to recall that the professionalism repertoire
portrays development aid through an ostensibly neutral language or what we could call a ‘linear
style of reporting’. As Maybin (2001) pointed out in this connection, such a linear style creates
the impression of the neutrality and rationality of the speaker. The professionalism repertoire thus
notably reveals its linear style through the use of topics such as efficiency, quality and financial
soundness. With this in mind, I would like to emphasize that what makes the professionalism
repertoire most distinct is precisely that it turns development into a largely reasonable, rational,
and apolitical undertaking. This observation is relevant not least because it allows a revealing
comparison with the last repertoire which I will now present.
The Entrepreneurship Repertoire: ‘Arguing from the Perspective of NGOs’
Note in passing that the present interpretive repertoire which I denominate ‘entrepreneurship’
is marginal if compared, in quantitative terms, with the two other argumentative threads. In
other words, the entrepreneurship repertoire is less frequently invoked in practitioners’
accounts of development. However, this state of affairs is not surprising if one takes into
account that all NGOs included in the present study depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on
donations. We can therefore only speculate on whether the entrepreneurship repertoire or, to
use Bakhtin’s (1981) term, the ‘professional jargon’ of entrepreneurship would have been
more prominent if the sample had contained more non-profit/profit hybrids (Dees, 1998) or
social enterprises (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001). That said, this presumption is indirectly
supported in that the following illustrations of the entrepreneurship repertoire are largely (yet
not exclusively) derived from interviews with founders of NGOs or from practitioners in
earned-income ventures (Dees, 1998b).
A first point worth making here is that the entrepreneurship repertoire speaks from an
institutionally designated position, i.e. from the position of practitioners’ NGOs. In contrast
to the benevolence repertoire which puts particular stress on the perspective of the
indigenous other and the professionalism repertoire which revolves around donors, the NGO
itself takes center stage in the entrepreneurship repertoire. Essentially, the entrepreneurship
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repertoire permits a response to the initial research question, namely ‘do practitioners’
narratives contain argumentative threads which, in one way or another, arise from the
entrepreneurship discourse?’ Although it seams safe, at least prima facie, to respond: ‘yes,
there are indications that practitioners ground their accounts on the entrepreneurship
discourse’, I would like to draw attention to some of the peculiarities of this argumentative
thread. First of all, it is important to clarify that the entrepreneurship discourse has little in
common with the ‘enterprise discourse’ (du Gay, Salaman & Rees, 1996) which is more
directly related with the slogan of business or organizational excellence as fervently
advocated by, for instance, Peters and Waterman’s (1982) seminal ‘In Search for Excellence’
(cf. du Gay, 2000b) and with the introduction of private sector management rationalities and
practices to public-sector organizations (e.g. Burchell 1993; du Gay 2000). Although the
entrepreneurship repertoire does, then, reveal an overlap with the discourse of enterprise and
entrepreneurialism, since all three rationalities promulgate the significance of market
mechanisms (Dooling, 2002), there are also significant differences (cf. also Hjorth &
Steyaert, 2003). I must therefore point out that the entrepreneurship repertoire constructs a
type of narrative in which the protagonist, i.e. the entrepreneur, holds a central position. In
this narrative, the entrepreneur is construed as a person who has both the requisite skills and
knowledge to deal with the ordeals of everyday challenges. In that sense, the
entrepreneurship repertoire construes development aid as an endeavor that is contingent on
individual savvy and persistence. These qualities quite evidently reveal a story-line we know
both from the literature on academic entrepreneurship and from popular culture (Steyaert &
Hjorth, 2006). Although the entrepreneurship repertoire emphasizes the importance of
professional virtues, which are mainly mentioned in connection with topics such as
‘networking’, ‘growth’, etc., it does not construe development aid, as does the
professionalism repertoire, as an apathetic and neutral endeavor. Quite the contrary, the
entrepreneurship repertoire portrays development as an intrinsically emotional venture, that
is, an activity requiring deep involvement, passion, persistence and even endurance and
hardship. Consequently, the entrepreneurship repertoire, rather than pretending that
development is simply about adhering to pre-ordained management procedures (cf.
professionalism repertoire), chiefly emphasizes the difficulties, risks and insecurities
associated with development aid. However, though this argumentative thread renders
development an endeavor which is always on the brink of failure, it nevertheless suggests a
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sense of mastery and personal agency. It needs to be added that although the
entrepreneurship repertoire is characterized by a positive, even optimistic, tone – which is
not self-evident in light of its continuous reference to obstacles and risks – it nevertheless
reveals a notable tension, which is largely tied up with the issue of ‘austerity’. While the
issues of ‘hardship’ and ‘austerity’ for the most part refer to long working hours, fatigue,
uncertain career opportunities, etc., I will restrict the following illustration to the ideological
dilemma arising from descriptions of financial hardship and low income. The point I want to
make is that speakers typically try to displace the dilemma by either putting selective
emphasis on the positive sides of their work (while deliberately leaving out the negative
aspects) or by counteracting negative estimates by weighing up the pros and cons of their
work. In addition, it will be argued that the entrepreneurship discourse construes
development aid practitioners as exceptionally single-minded people. The subject positions
engendered by the entrepreneurship repertoire, as I will show, are thus less related to
individual success (though success remains an important issue) but to the possibility of free
decision, individual autonomy, personal enjoyment and pleasure. Although the
entrepreneurship discourse portrays practitioners as exceptional people (cf. also McClelland,
1987), I will also show that it does not emphasize the heroic character of the entrepreneur
(Green et al., 1999) who, in the best sense of homo economicus, simply tries to maximize his
self-interests (Rose, 2000). Consequently, in opposition to the image of the overbearing, free-
wheeling entrepreneur who ruthlessly exploits business opportunities with the ultimate
objective of increasing his personal wealth, the entrepreneurship repertoire sees development
practitioners primarily as responsible, decent and cordial citizens. In view of my initial
assertion that ‘entrepreneurship’ might become an ever more prominent episteme in
development talk (cf. Ranking, 2001; Brigg, 2002), I will now elaborate on the particularities
of the entrepreneurship repertoire and show, among other things, how the various
significations divert from the managerial ‘entrepreneurship-becoming-enterprising’ mantra
(Hjorth, Johannisson & Steyaert, 2003, p. 95).
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Networking & Diversification
To explain the operation of the entrepreneurship repertoire, I will illustrate the central arguments
put forward in practitioners’ accounts. Hence, a first point which needs attention is that the
entrepreneurship repertoire emphasizes the importance of relational ties and in particular the
significance of networking, i.e. making contacts and exchanging ideas with other NGO
practitioners.
P19: … during the founding phase I had a few contacts from other NGOs with whom I was able to
discuss things which also helped (hm) … these were people with whom I was able to have
discussions and whom I could ask things …
What must be noted here is that the speaker asserts that ‘leading discussions’ and ‘asking
questions’ has ‘helped’, meaning that these conversations enabled him to sharpen and channel his
ideas. The extract thus reveals that his contacts were particularly important at the beginning
(‘founding phase) of his endeavor. This brief example is thus illuminative to the extent that it
shows how the entrepreneurship repertoire construes development projects as being subject to
contacts with other NGO practitioners (or entrepreneurs). It follows from this that development
projects do not (only) arise from the creativity and imagination of the individual practitioner, but
rather from mutual exchanges. This rendition clearly stands in opposition to the image of the
enterprising individual (du Gay, 2000) characterized by single-minded imaginativeness and
innovativeness. Hence, whereas the entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly claims that development
aid or, more precisely, practitioners’ ideas, projects, visions, etc. cannot prosper without the
exchange with and support from others, this view is actually similar to Schumpeter’s (1991)
contention that the entrepreneurial function is not necessarily embodied in a (single) person but
can be ‘filled co-operatively’ (p. 261; quoted in Hjorth, Johannisson & Steyaert, 2003, p. 100).
Following Schumpeter’s eloquent statement that ‘(i)n many cases, therefore, it is difficult or even
impossible to name an individual that acts as “the entrepreneur”’ (ibid.), it is essential to bear in
mind that the entrepreneurship repertoire offers a view in which development aid is represented
largely as the result of both individual and collective efforts. Although this observation is relevant
in its own right, I would additionally like to point out that this interpretation is also striking
because it implies that other NGOs are primarily seen as sources of inspiration and not as
potential competitors. It is evident, then, that the entrepreneurship repertoire deviates from the
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idea that competition is the primary ‘engine’ of quality, innovation and success at large, since
there is literally not a single case which emphasizes that development NGOs have to outperform
their rivals. This observation, in my assessment, cannot be overestimated because it brings to
light that the entrepreneurship repertoire does not construe the sharing of ideas, expertise, etc.
with other people who are involved in the same ‘industry’ as a dangerous or risky event. While
mainstream business theory holds that enterprises must always be ahead of their competitors and
hence protect their ideas, i.e. tangible knowledge, from potential rivals who might exploit them
for their own ends, it is evident from my analysis that knowledge sharing has never been
described as a potential threat to NGOs’ survival. Quite the contrary, the entrepreneurship
repertoire typically adopts a perspective in which the NGO community is mutually supportive
and that discretion or secrecy are either not necessary or even frowned upon. In line with this
observation, development NGOs have more often than not been described as part of a permeable
and transparent community in which knowledge and experiences are (or should be) willingly
shared. Yet, this is not to suggest that speakers simply described the NGO community as a
harmonious field of practice. Instead, practitioners also emphasized the necessity of ‘being
different’, a view which will be briefly illustrated on the basis of the following extract.
P8: … most NGOs are open and have a lot of good ideas … that has never been the problem … I
mean we [the speaker’s organization] are distinct in terms of our idea (hm) the NGO right next
door for instance only provides aid in one country and in one region … others only focus on a few
countries that’s why I think … in our case … our idea can be applied everywhere …
Two aspects need particular attention here. First, the speaker confirms our previous observation,
namely that the field of development aid is typically construed by the entrepreneurship repertoire
as a transparent (‘open’) community. In the second part of the citation we the speaker emphasizes
the significance of differences which is notably revealed in his assertion that ‘we are distinct in
terms of our idea’. It is further disclosed in this extract that the attribute ‘distinct’ is explicated
with reference to other NGOs whose ideas and projects are portrayed as being overly constricted
or narrow in focus (i.e. ‘only provides aid in one country and in one region’). The speaker thus
highlights the difference between his organization and the ‘others’ by stating that ‘our idea can be
applied everywhere’. On the face of it, what comes to light here is the double-sidedness of the
entrepreneurship repertoire, meaning that it advocates activities such as knowledge sharing,
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mutual support and openness while at the same time emphasizing the importance of being
different or distinct. Although one might guess that these seemingly antagonistic positions render
the discourse used by practitioners ambivalent, it must be borne in mind that such an appraisal is
not supported by my analysis. The entrepreneurship repertoire, then, typically stresses that the
positive effects of sharing ideas and knowledge outweigh its (potentially) negative effects. This
makes it clear that the entrepreneurship repertoire maintains that it is possible to be different
while sharing ideas and that doing so does not necessarily create problems or tensions.
Identification of Problem and Opportunity
A central aspect of the entrepreneurship repertoire is revealed in descriptions where speakers
highlight development aid as subject to a sequence which first entails the sensing of a problem
and, in a second step, the identification of opportunities and/or the development of solutions. To
begin with, the following shows how the speaker goes about problematizing the status quo of a
particular industry, arguing that the way the industry currently works will inevitably lead to the
extinction of certain species.
P23: … in J [name of country] and K [name of country] the situation is such that already half of
the K [name of animal species] has been extinct (hmm) because you tend to kill the K with
conventional methods (hm) … they [the indigenous people] don’t realize that yet because the
rising prices compensate for their gradually declining yields … but one day things will come to an
end (hmm) and (hm) then they won’t have anything anymore (hm) …
In the first extract, the speaker puts forward a problem statement in which he pinpoints the
detrimental effect of the status quo of the industry (‘one day things will come to an end’). The
speaker’s argument is thus ‘epochal’ (du Gay, 2003) in the sense that it construes the status quo
as a condition which will necessarily come to a (devastating) end. On the other hand, the
speaker’s epochal narrative, by denoting the current state as problematic, also entails the
possibility of novel opportunities. To illustrate how the problematization and the identification of
novel opportunities often coincide, I would like to have a look at the following extract.
P23: … and we wanted to show that this [sustainable production] also works on a small scale …
and then we built a production site and when we had our first yield we built the second (hm) the
third and the forth (hm), until an entire village was lifted above the poverty threshold (hm) …
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In this extract, the speaker uses his previous problematization of the industry to highlight the
opportunities which opened up for his organization. In general terms, it is noticeable that the
speaker’s narrative delineates the deficient status quo of the industry as a unique opportunity to
create something new. In line with this presentation of the industry, the speaker construes
development aid as the task of identifying, to use a term used by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus
(1997), the ‘anomalies’ revealed within the current parameters of the industry. The practitioner in
the above case thus singles out unsustainable production or the exploitative practices of the
industry as the anomaly which needs to be changed. While it became obvious from the first
extract that the speaker delineated the modus operandi (i.e. exploitative practices) of the industry
as the source of an inevitable disaster, the second extract contains a description of how he tackled
the anomaly through the introduction of an alternative scheme of practice (i.e. sustainable
production). To underscore the aptness of his choice, the speaker explains how the
implementation of his novel rationality brought about a profoundly positive socio-economic
change (‘an entire village was lifted above the poverty threshold’). This type of representation is
typical of the entrepreneurship repertoire: it shows how practitioners initially formulate a
problem, then describe an anomaly, and finally present a solution. As is the case in the above
citation, this solution is usually deemed effective not only for overcoming the identified anomaly
but also for enabling new (and better) living conditions. We must not forget that the previous
account delineates change assessed by means of an economic parameter (i.e. ‘poverty threshold’),
and I will tackle this issue further down. Before that, we must first turn our attention to the issue
of risk-taking.
Risk-Taking
McClelland (1987), among others, explored the attributes which characterize the typical
entrepreneur and concluded that risk-taking was one of his preeminent attributes. It needs to be
mentioned that in connection with the entrepreneurship repertoire risk-taking, unlike the issue of
austerity, for example, was not often made an explicit task in practitioners’ narratives. Although
the notion of ‘risk-taking’ hardly mentioned explicitly, however, it was striking that speakers
often expressed the issue in an indirect manner. For instance, the fact that practitioners commonly
talk of ‘insecure outcomes’ and ‘open futures’, explains why risk and hence risk-taking is
portrayed as part of development aid. It appears, therefore, that risk-taking is related not so much
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with the personality of the heroic entrepreneur (Fletcher, 2003) but rather with the general
conditions of development aid. In the entrepreneurship repertoire, then, risk-taking is for the most
part construed as a logical consequence and/or inevitable necessity of the uncertain environment
in which development aid takes place. In consequence, the entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly
refrained from depicting risk-taking as a unique feature of individual savvy. However, the
following extract represents an atypical case (Tuominen, 2004), since it quite obviously portrays
risk-taking as an attribute inherent in the practitioner.
P2: … and it was me who leveraged this and aa it took half a year of preparation to set up the
organization (hm) … and then I put out a brochure with an attached letter which I distributed x
[i.e. number of brochures] times … taking full risk and trying out what was be possible (hm) … of
course I had some assistants …
The speaker’s narrative presented in the above citation is based on a first-person account
(Genette, 1980). This means, among other things, that the speaker conflates the perspective of the
narrator and that of the person who appears in the plot, thus making himself the protagonist of his
own story. Since such a first-person account is rhetorically effective in highlighting the inner
motives and upright attitude of the speaker (Potter, 1996), it seems worthwhile to have a closer
look at the particularities of the speaker’s account. The speaker first mentions that it took him
some time (‘half of year of preparation’) to prepare the launch of his idea. This is then followed
by a description of him distributing a large number of brochures. The interviewee concludes with
an evaluative statement (‘taking full risk’). Although the speaker downplays the risk of his
initiative by qualifying his statement (‘of course I had some assistants’; cf. also Anaki &
Wetherell, 1999), he suggests that the outcome of his venture was essentially unforeseeable
(‘trying out what was possible’). This uncertain outcome reveals that the speaker qualifies his
endeavor as risky. To be clear on this, although this brief illustration is not fully representative for
the entrepreneurship repertoire in that it emphasis the readiness of an individual to take risks and
indeed deploys the term ‘risk-taking’, it nonetheless shows that the entrepreneurship repertoire
does not exclude the dangerous aspect of development aid. Hence, in contrast to the benevolence
repertoire which talks about the risk of development against the backdrop of ‘trust’ and the
professionalism repertoire which largely ignores the dangerous, risky aspects of development, it
is fundamental to see that the entrepreneurship repertoire is most straight-forward in admitting
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that the development projects are at times on the brink of failing. Whereas issues of risk or risk-
taking were mostly described as features which affect the fate of practitioners’ NGOs, we will
show that issues such as hardship and austerity are more directly associated with the
practitioners’ personal destiny.
Hardship & Austerity
Notions of ‘hardship’ and ‘austerity’ have been most frequently used in accounts propounded by
founders of NGOs, these issues typically being discussed in connection with the financial
situation of the speaker. Although hardship and austerity also featured prominently in narratives
which depicted practitioners’ ‘work load’, ‘stress’, ‘family problems’ or ‘time constraints’, I
would like to point at the following extract in which the issues of financial hardship and austerity
are described in relation to the initial start-up phase of the venture.
P2: … and then right from the beginning we were able to secure around x Swiss Franks during the
first year (hm) that has been was too much to give up and (laughter) too little to make a living … I
was working full steam meaning that I didn’t pay myself a salary and went to work as a C [job
category] … still it’s been a thorny way (hm) …
To begin with, this telling extract portrays development aid as an exceptionally tough endeavor
which is only just bearable. Claiming that the early days were characterized by immense financial
hardship (‘too much to give up and (laughter) too little to make a living’), the speaker also
emphasizes that he did everything in his power to sustain the survival of his organization (‘I was
working full stream’; ‘I didn’t pay myself a salary and went to work as a C’). This observation is
significant, since it presents practitioners as self-managing individuals (Fenwick & Hutton, 2000)
who take their destiny into their own hand. In general, the entrepreneurship repertoire establishes
the sort of subjectivity which is characterized by individual endurance and perseverance in the
face of impending failure (cf. Chell et al., 1991). However, what is particularly conspicuous in
the entrepreneurship repertoire is that it does not simply construe individual hardship as the
necessary precondition of success, but as people’s sacrifice to attain both autonomy and an
individualistic life-style. Since I will become more specific about this issue further down, I will
now illuminate two other particularities of the entrepreneurship repertoire: resource allocation
and innovation.
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Resource Allocation and Innovation
The notion of financial resource allocation is a fundamental issue in the entrepreneurship
repertoire where it is mostly deployed to emphasize the importance of investing one’s
(financial) resources to maximize the organizations’ yields or returns. Resource allocation, is,
then, presented as a preeminent activity for sustaining NGO’s overall survival, as
compellingly expressed in the following extract.
P30: … the big organizations are … they need to learn not to start their projects with too much
money and that [indigenous] people do things for themselves (hm) taking X [name of big NGO]
for example … they used to come in with y dollar (hm) they practically offered the same service
we did only that we were able to offer it at z dollar (hm) and they simply raised the wages and
then they also said that they needed computers out in the bush … and then they needed a generator
to produce electricity for the computer and because nobody had ever worked with a computer they
also need a volunteer … it didn’t take long until the project collapsed … and we practically saved
the whole thing and now it’s working again … the bigger the organization the more unconcerned
they are about spending donations …
I have chosen to cite this lengthy extract because it aptly shows that dealing with scarce financial
resources is construed as one of the most important aspects of successful development aid. In
addition, I find this detailed and rich account of the immanent fallacies of development aid
particularly revealing. Most illuminating, in my opinion, is the way the speaker uses the dramatic
case of an unsuccessful venture to underscore that in order for development practices to be
successful – as illustrated on the basis of his own NGO – it is necessary to think very carefully
about how to spend the available financial resources. Moreover, what I deem most relevant in the
present context is that the speaker not only emphasizes that development NGOs are not supposed
to squander their money, but that the practitioner implicitly points at the advantages of (his)
small-size organization(s). In this way, the speaker’s comparison between his own and a large,
bureaucratic NGO (which is depicted as being overly ‘unconcerned’ about spending donations)
not only questions the ability of large NGOs’ to provide adequate support for the indigenous
people, but simultaneously illustrates Schumacher’s (1973) doctrine of ‘small is beautiful’, i.e.
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the idea that large size is or can be detrimental to the provision of adequate development.
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What
is even more revealing, however, is that the entrepreneurship repertoire associates smallness with
innovativeness, as illustrated by the following extract.
P30: … there are a lot of good … organizations which do not need that much money because they
largely depend on people’s innovativeness (hm) as a result … they only need a bit of money to
start the process (hm) … and then they only need between x and y Swiss Franks …
The single most telling observation here is that the speaker claims that small NGOs do not need
the same amount of money as large organizations, since they (over-) compensate for this lack by
dint of innovation. This claim is revealing because it shows how the entrepreneurship repertoire
stresses that development aid is not primarily about running big development projects, but rather
about ensuring a sustainable future for these projects by means of both far-seeing resource
allocation and innovative practice. It is important to point out that only two practitioners
explicitly talked about innovation. Having said this, I would now like to illustrate that even
though the entrepreneurship repertoire repeatedly emphasizes the potential and advantages of
small, innovative NGOs, it simultaneously proclaims that it is essential for NGOs to grow.
Growth
It must be mentioned right at the outset of this illustration that in the entrepreneurship repertoire,
the issue of growth is less pronounced than, for instance, the issue of (financial) resource
allocation. It must nevertheless be noted that the entrepreneurship repertoire represents growth as
a quintessential aspect of NGO conduct. It is undoubted that practitioners’ descriptions of
smallness on the one hand and growth on the other at least in some respects exclude each other.
In the following extract, the speaker explains how his organization could grow (i.e. increase
donations), if it received more public attention.
P6: … in our case it [growth] is still possible and there are still many people who don’t know us
… that’s why we have an opportunity to grow (hm) the more people know us … some will like
what we’re doing (hm) we actually grow every year (hm) …
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Note in passing that Schumpeter stressed the distinct implications his doctrine has for global poverty alleviation in
that it prescribes an orientation toward regional development strategies instead of global exports.
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Although it is arguable that this extract does not fully impart the business myth ‘grow or perish’,
it is nonetheless observable that we are provided with an account in which the practitioner
describes his NGO’s growth potential in positive terms. Growth is thus described by the speaker
as being contingent on the ability to increase the NGO’s popularity. The interviewee clarifies at
the end of his statement his organization is already quite successful (‘we actually grow every
year’). Essentially, the issue of growth (i.e. the increase of donations) creates a paradox in the
entrepreneurship repertoire, since it directly violates practitioners’ assertion that the NGO
community works without competition. That is, practitioners are in agreement that the amount of
available donations in Switzerland has either remained stable or even decreased over the last few
years. It directly follows that an increase in the donations allocated to one NGO will necessarily
happen at the expense of other NGOs. Since growth is invariably based on higher donations at the
expense of other NGOs, descriptions of growth are thus paradoxical. Indeed, it is conspicuous
that practitioners either do not talk about, downplay or even deny the existence of competition
between the NGOs. However, the most important point to be made here is that the obvious
paradox between practitioners’ descriptions of growth on the one hand and the non-existence of
competition on the other does not lead to ideological dilemmas. The reasons for this is that
speakers, within their accounts, succeed in keeping these incompatible issues apart. Having said
this, it immediately needs to be added that one does in fact find some statements that reveal an
ideological dilemma, and I would like to discuss these in the following section. I have, then,
pointed out that descriptions of practitioners’ hardship take center stage in the entrepreneurship
repertoire. I will now elaborate on how such descriptions create a considerable amount of tension
within practitioners’ narratives.
Ideological Dilemma: Personal and Financial Sacrifice
In general terms, the ideological dilemma of the entrepreneurship repertoire is most
pronounced in those passages where practitioners stress the personal and financial sacrifices
which are presented as an intrinsic part of their work. The central dilemma of the
entrepreneurship repertoire can thus be summarized as follows: on the one hand, the
entrepreneurship repertoire chiefly presents the realm of development aid in a positive light,
emphasizing, for instance, unique opportunities for self-realization, passion, autonomy, etc.
On the other hand, however, practitioners’ descriptions of private and financial hardship risks
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contradict this positive portrayal in that they present their work as a source of, for instance,
(self-imposed) hardship or frustration. This evident tension between two diametrically
opposed evaluative descriptions makes strongly suggests that practitioners are called upon to
counteract the potential devaluation of their work (lives). Two rhetorical strategies can be
identified in practitioners’ accounts. The first strategy which practitioners typically employ
unfolds along a two-step sequence. The speakers first sketch the downsides of their work.
They then either quality the gravity of their initial claims or they state that the aspect of
development which they identified as a problem has only little influence on their work as a
whole. The second, more fine-grained, rhetorical strategy is revealed in utterances where
speakers problematize development aid by construing it as an uncertain or unthrifty sphere of
activity. This problematization is then followed by a discussion of the pros and cons of their
work so as to reestablish, so to speak, a positive evaluation of their work.
P2: … of course we earn less than a U [job category] (hmhm), but that doesn’t bother me much
(hm) I mean (hm) I’m able to make a living and I can have a better life than some time ago (hm)
really it used to be a struggle (hm) to get through life (hm) just to get through somehow (hm) …
This extract gives a tentative idea of this second rhetoric strategy. In another part of the interview,
the practitioner gives a detailed description of his near-bankruptcy some twenty years ago. In the
above extract, he takes up the issue of financial destitution (‘… of course we earn less than a U
[job category]’). He then makes it clear that he actually doesn’t attach too much importance to his
financial situation (‘that doesn’t bother me much’). The evaluative structure coming to the
forefront in the first part of this utterance, then, is still typical of the first rhetorical strategy I have
briefly alluded to before. It becomes clear further down the line, however, that the speaker is not
yet finished with the evaluation of his current work situation. He continues by clarifying that ‘I
can have a better life than some time ago’. It thus becomes obvious that he draws a comparison
with his past in order to come up with a relatively positive estimate of the present. In that way,
the speaker uses a progressive narrative which allows him to claim that compared with the past
when it ‘really […] used to be a struggle’, his present life is infinitely better. Despite the brevity
of this illustration, it is fair to say overall that this latter rhetorical account can be seen as typical
of those practitioners who set up their own development organization.
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Subject Positions
There is a striking aspect to the subject positions arising from the entrepreneurship
repertoire: although terms such as ‘self-made man’, ‘perseverance’ or ‘risk-taking’ are used
frequently, the term ‘entrepreneur’ is rarely employed. It could be argued that the image of
the entrepreneur has negative connotations in the realm of development aid and that it is
therefore not used by practitioners because such a negative term would not fit their self-
narration. Although this explanation makes perfect sense, I must point out that I am not able
to substantiate such an assertion. I would nevertheless like to point out that what is
conspicuous in the first place is that practitioners’ narratives make clear that entrepreneurial
subject positions are not dependent upon the explicit use of the concept ‘entrepreneurship’.
By implication, the representation of entrepreneurs can nonetheless, though indirectly, be
established by interweaving particular attributes into a story. Whereas the investigation at
large has shown that practitioners do not simply adopt the ‘muscular discourse’ (cf. Alvesson
& Karreman, 2000) of entrepreneurship, it also has illustrated that speakers are ‘bound to
make choices’ (Edley, 2001, p. 190) so as to appropriate the available stock of commonsense
arguments. It is only by appropriating lived ideologies in the context of concrete narratives
that practitioners are able to ‘maneuver and negotiate their own understanding within their
own particular worlds’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p. 44). In other words, the observation that
practitioners do not use the sign ‘entrepreneur’ to denote their identities does not necessarily
lead to the conclusion that they consciously reject such a signification. Rather, I see this state
of affairs as an indication that the sign ‘entrepreneur’ does not, for whatever reasons, appear
useful for making sense of practitioners’ concrete circumstances and experiences. Although
one could speculate, as I briefly did above, that the concept ‘entrepreneur’ has (or would
have) been unhelpful in practitioners’ sensemaking (Weick, 1993), I am more interested in
discussing what sort of identities speakers’ narratives have actually created. It has been
mentioned elsewhere that the individual entrepreneur is often described as a heroic, self-
determined figure (Alvesson & Willmottt, 1996; cf. Chapter 2). However, it became clear in
the course of the analysis that such an image is not revealed in practitioners’ narratives. What
has been revealed, however, is that the entrepreneurship repertoire provides a discursive
space in which the person is not seen as a larger-than-life figure but as a hard-working, at
times creative and, most importantly, independent and single-minded person. In addition, it
has been shown that the subject position encouraged by the entrepreneurship repertoire has
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suggested an image of actors who ‘sacrifice’ a normal life for a career which gives them
autonomy and individual self-fulfillment (cf. du Gay, 2000b). Hence, though the
entrepreneurship repertoire does not envisage the practitioner as an above-average character,
it became clear through the discursive investigation that the work they pursue turns them into
outstanding and special people and, most fundamentally, into people who are supposed to go
‘against the grain’ (cf. also Foss, 2004). It is important to note, then, that going against the
grain is not so much seen as a characteristic of notorious people, but as the sort of behavior
(rather than a personality trait) which is essential for carrying out successful development
aid. To be clear on this, although the entrepreneurship repertoire gives rise to subject
positions which tend to portray practitioners as people who lead unconventional lives, it does
not follow from this that they are represented as isolated mavericks. Quite the contrary,
though the entrepreneurship repertoire paints an image of practitioners as persons who lead
unconventional lives it simultaneously represents them as responsible and caring citizens
who are fully engaged with and committed to their immediate environment or life context.
Overall Reflection
As discussed in the first part of this chapter, the 1980s were called the ‘decade of enterprise’.
This shows, among other things, that collectivist ideas and particularly the idea of state
control and the image of the state as public service provider were replaced by the orthodoxy
of individualism (Rose, 2000). Entrepreneurship, which gained massive currency in
‘everyday as well as more academic contexts’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p. 33), has thus not
only been propounded by both rightist and leftist parties as a means for the economic
regeneration of local economies, but also through more recent Third World development
policies (Ranking, 2001). Given the objective and research question of the present
investigation, it is worth recalling here that my discourse analysis of practitioners’ talk was
not so much aiming at inquiring how ‘enterprise culture’ (du Gay & Salaman, 1992) is
endorsed on a strategic level by, for instance, the UN and World Bank. Rather, the aim of my
study was to establish if and how the idea of entrepreneurship is mobilized through the social
practices (i.e. discourses) of NGO practitioners. The analysis has brought to light that the
entrepreneurship repertoire construes development from the perspective of the NGO and in
particular (but not exclusively) from the perspective of individual practitioners. In opposition
to the benevolence repertoire which largely revolves around the indigenous people and in
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contrast to the professionalism repertoire which makes donor agencies its focus, we have
shown that the entrepreneurship tends to generate narratives which focus on the experiences
of the single practitioner, and his or her organization. The discourse analysis presented here
thus suggests, among other things, that speakers typically tell their stories by making
reference to events and deeds which are exemplary for entrepreneurial conduct. This
estimation seems justifiable if one recalls that practitioners’ narratives often present an image
of the hard-working, persistent, innovative and business-sensitive practitioner who is not
only strong enough to deal with the ordeals of everyday development work but who even
finds both pleasure and fulfillment in pursuing a life which is construed as considerably
deviating from the norm. I would like to recall here that it is conspicuous that concepts such
as ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘enterprising’ have hardly ever been deployed. Given the analytic focus
of this investigation, the reason for this absence will remain the object of speculation.
However, to put things bluntly, we can claim that, notwithstanding the manifest absence of
the concept of ‘entrepreneur’, speakers’ accounts undoubtedly reflect the prototypical story
of the enterprising person who works under uncertain (market) conditions (Fletcher, 2003).
Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that the outcomes and effects of entrepreneurial
development endeavors have more often than not been illustrated with reference to economic
parameters (e.g. the rise of the living standard of indigenous people). The point worth
making here is that such accounts are based on a distinctively economic logic, thus
conceiving of development aid as the task of (re)allocating resources so as to maximize
economic value. However, this is not to say that the entrepreneurship repertoire is completely
ignorant of the social ramifications of development endeavors. Rather, the entrepreneurship
repertoire reveals that the social aspect of development (e.g. equality, participation,
inclusion, etc.; cf., once more, the benevolence repertoire) is mostly envisaged in terms of an
economic logic. The following extract, for instance, illustrate this state of affairs. The
narrator here contends that the risks inherent in development aid make it necessary to think
about one’s decisions very carefully.
P7: … that it aaa a that they [the indigenous] don’t sustain the projects because suddenly they gain
some wealth (hm) if they become rich I mean rich in quotation marks but compared to their
previous situation they do become rich (hm) then they ask what they shall do with the money and
it can happen that they sell things again or (hm) …
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The speaker in this extract construes sudden economic wealth as a potential threat to the
overall viability of development projects. The point to be stressed here is that money and
economic wealth are depicted as both a blessing and an evil. In contrast to the school of
entrepreneurship literature which claims that entrepreneurship is chiefly about economic
value creation (e.g. Schumpeter, 1934), the above account emphasizes that wealth can easily
produce a boomerang-effect, since people tend to be corrupted by the sudden availability of
money. It is crucial to point out that the entrepreneurship repertoire construes development
aid (including its problematic aspects) by adopting an economic perspective. As a result,
both success and failure are judged in terms of criteria such as, for example, employment,
income creation and economic sustainability.
P2: … a lot of people finally aa … can earn a living by means of collecting newspapers … (hm) and I
took that idea and went to Y [name of local organization] … I then showed them a sample (hm) and
they said ‘yes’ provided that it wouldn’t be more expensive than in D [name of country] …
Two things immediately are striking in this extract. First, the speaker justifies his project on the
basis of an economic rationale, stating that his project would allow ‘a lot of people’ to ‘earn a
living’. Second, this economic logic is pursued in the second part of the statement where the
speaker describes how his partner organization (‘Y’) approved his project upon the recognition
that it could be realized at a reasonable cost (‘and they said ‘yes’ provided that it wouldn’t be
more expensive than in D’). The entrepreneurship repertoire undoubtedly has a tendency to
describe and justify development aid on the basis of an economic logic. This tendency can be
partly explained, if one takes into account that this economic logic has been mainly (though not
exclusively) revealed in narratives by practitioners who work in NGOs that rely on income-
creating strategies (cf. Dees, 1998; 1998b). I would like to close this reflection by suggesting, on
the basis of my interview material, that the image of entrepreneurial conduct has gained access to
the field of development NGOs. The broader implications of this observation, particularly in
relation to the overall research question of my investigation, will now become the subject of my
final reflections.
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Summary & Meta-Reflection
In general terms, we can say that the discursive analysis of NGO practitioners’ talk has revealed
three recurring argumentative patterns which for which the labels ‘benevolence’,
‘professionalism’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ repertoire were used. Irrespective of the fact that there
were significant differences in the frequency of their use – the benevolence repertoire being the
most prominent and the entrepreneurship repertoire the most marginal scheme of reasoning – it is
worth noting that the analysis of practitioners’ talk brought to light three broadly distinguishable
argumentative threads which each engendered both a different evaluative description of
development as well as different subject positions.
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Thus the benevolence repertoire established
a particular focus on the perspective of help recipients, mainly stressing the mutually rewarding
and/or emancipatory aspect of development. In contrast, the professionalism repertoire stressed
the importance of donor relations. Finally, the entrepreneurship repertoire largely threw into relief
both the difficulties and self-affirmation related with the conduct of one’s own development
organization. Although the distinction between these three foci is not as clear-cut as the previous
analysis might have suggested (cf. below), it is still safe to claim that each repertoire conveyed a
distinctly different aspect of development. Hence, apart from illuminating that practitioners work
on the basis of different rationalities, I would like to draw attention to a further outcome, namely
that the discursive investigation allowed one to see, however provisionally, how development aid
and personal identity are revealed through discursive performances, that is, through the use of
language within local conversations. In other words, whereas discourses analysis is generally
premised on the assumption that discourse is to be seen as a multi-faceted process through which
meaning is progressively and dynamically achieved (Davies & Harré, 1990), I used my analysis
to illustrate how different versions of development and personal subjectivities are actively
constructed. Therefore, analyzing how practitioners use language to establish their work context
(i.e. development) and hence position themselves as reasonable and socially legitimate people,
immediately implies that practitioners’ utterances are not to be construed as the straightforward
emptying out of pre-ordained attitudes (Speer & Potter, 2000), but rather as social practices
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In light of my interpretive involvement in the analysis, i.e. my implicit position as a ‘sculptor’ (Barthes, 1968),
and taking into account the geo-political context of this investigation, it probably hardly needs to be mentioned that
alternative readings and/or other emphasis of practitioners’ narratives would have been possible (cf. Hook, 2001).
The aim of this clarification is not to introduce a new problem, but simply to emphasize that discourse analysis and
interpretation at large are always subject to or, to use a more affirmative term, amenable to multiple readings,
polysemia and/or ‘libidinal drifts’ (more on that later).
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which makes identity and social reality possible in the first place (Berger & Luckman, 1966). By
the same token, since meaning is not innate to our social world but a local and transient social
accomplishment as explained above, we can further note that the identified interpretive
repertoires and subject positions can neither be envisaged as transcendental expressions of, for
instance, practitioners’ attitudes or identities (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996; Edwards,
1997) nor as simple identifications with pre-ordained (intellectual) ideologies (Billig et al., 1988).
Rather, the identified argumentative threads as well as the social realities and identities they
engender are inextricably linked with the context (i.e. interview) in which they are uttered. In this
way, the meaning making of practitioners is to be seen as fundamentally instable, i.e. in-
transcendental.
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It is at this juncture that I would like to recall once more that practitioners’ talk
is inevitably shaped by the available stock of cultural knowledge. This is important to the extent
that it puts the previous analysis into a historical perspective, meaning that the conversational
resources practitioners deploy in their accounts define a culturally ‘limited’ account of
development work. To put it bluntly, practitioners’ accounts of development are basically ‘no
more’ than the prevailing understanding of the subject matter during a very specific historical,
cultural and political time span. This proposition is well in accordance with Lyotard’s (1984)
treatise on ‘small narratives’: after all, my analysis did not aim at providing a holistic account (i.e.
‘grand narrative’) of what development really is or of the typical psyche or original personality of
development aid practitioners. Quite the contrary, the aim of my discursive investigation was
more modest than that, since it merely tried to bring to the forefront that the ‘truth’ of
development and the ‘being’ of practitioners is invariably contingent on the exercise of ‘choices’
(Newton, 1994).
In the remainder of this chapter, I will now relate the repertoires which I have abstracted
from practitioners’ narratives back to the initial research question with the ultimate objective of
qualifying the issue of hegemony. The question, then, is whether or not practitioners’ talk reveals
a singular, monologic rationality (i.e. economic or business discourse). My general point will be
that the analysis does not suggest that practitioners simply mimic economic discourse. To
demonstrate this estimation, I will emphasize that the three repertoires exhibit a certain amount of
overlap which in turn will lead me to conclude that practitioners’ talk is often aporetic, oscillating
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The particular interview setting of my investigation quite likely endorsed particular constructions of development
and thus favored certain identity performances over others (Davies & Harré, 1990).
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between the social and economic aspects of development aid so as to express (through the use of
language) the oppositions and tensions at the heart of signification. Somewhat in contradiction to
discursive psychology which often construes discourse as a more or less closed system of
meaning, I will claim that practitioners’ talk at times establishes what Bhabha (1994) called a
‘third space of enunciation’, i.e. a linguistic space which allows for the simultaneous existence of
different and even contradictory meanings. On the basis of this insight, the final part of the
chapter will reflect once more on practitioners’ identity performances so as to illustrate through
the concept of ‘hybridity’ that identity performances are never complete, since they always slip
definitive identity inscriptions. I will close the chapter by pointing out that practitioners’
arguments entail ‘interstitial passages’ which enable the non-hierarchical co-existence of different
meanings and, most fundamentally, the parallel existence of multiple identities.
The Question of Hegemony
A lived hegemony is always a process … It is a realised complex of experiences, relationships
and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits … It is also continually
resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. (Williams, 1977, p.
112)
The previous discourse analysis addressed the fundamental question whether practitioners’ talk
brings to the fore a hegemonic picture of development, i.e. representations of development aid
that universalize and essentialize economic or business discourse. On the basis of this analysis, it
appears reasonable to claim that the findings only partly, if at all, support such a view. As shown
above, the interviews exhibited three distinguishable repertoires which each embraces
distinguishable evaluative descriptions. It is clear, therefore, that we cannot claim having revealed
a all-encompassing homology within the interviews (Lyotard, 1993) nor can we assert that
discourse works hegemonically in the sense of rendering invisible alternative schemes of thinking
or, as Leys (1990, p. 127) reminds us, of having ‘no serious rivals’. What the analysis does
reveal, however, is that practitioners’ talk is variegated in the sense that difference (or
‘différance’; cf. Derrida, 1976) and not sameness represents the organizing principle of speakers’
language use. This result clearly stands in opposition to Murphy (2000) who asserted, among
others, that contemporary NGO managers ‘aggressively – sometimes ruthlessly’ (p. 33) adopt the
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ethos of ‘result-based management’. More precisely, my investigation has sketched out a picture
of development which is more ‘in tune’ with Grillo’s contention that within development ‘there
have always been a multiplicity of voices … even if some are more powerful than others’ (Grillo,
1997, p. 22). What this implies is that the present analysis to some extent stands in opposition to
those (postcolonial) studies which delineate development work as being victimized or even
annexed by neo-liberal or neo-conservative discourse and which furthermore proclaim that
managerialism has been imposed as the ineluctable imperative of development NGOs (e.g.
Uphoff, 1996). In this way, it can be concluded that the analysis gives some indication of the
grounded impossibility of a complete Gramscian hegemony or of a novel form of semantic
colonialism (Brigg, 2002) through neo-liberal orthodoxy or managerialism. In addition, I want to
point out that the analysis brings to the forefront that the respective repertoires at times stand in
competition with each other. The signification of development, as a result of competing
rationalities, turns out to be a multi-faceted social process through which meaning is constantly
created, contested and hence re-created (Kress & Hodge, 1985). Although I have pointed out that
practitioners, within one and the same interview, tend to shift from one argumentative position to
another, it is equally important to note that the different repertoires and their related subject
positions often either contradict themselves or they contradict other possible repertoires and
subject positions. Thus NGO practitioners do not provide us with a univocal view of development
aid, but instead put forward representations (plural) that suggest a terrain of contested meaning.
Looked at in this way, the construction(s) of development and the subject positions entailed
therein are not the result of a linear, non-contradictory narrative plotting, but rather the
cumulative fragments of contested history (Davies & Harré, 1990). Yet, though I am keen to
emphasize the ostensible paradoxes in practitioners’ talk, this observation is less to be read as the
identification of practitioners’ contradictoriness (in the negative sense) than as a sign of the
eminent flexibility of language and, by implication, of the constant ‘floating’ of meaning (Potter,
1998). Davies and Harré’s (1990) notion of ‘fragment’ is useful here, since it takes into account
the transient, locally emergent condition of all conversations and the flux-like ontology of
identity. In addition, having proclaimed at the beginning of this chapter that development has at
all times been a contested terrain and that there were always a variety of discourses which
struggled for recognition, it is rather unsurprising that practitioners’ talk also revealed a certain
amount of contradiction. Moreover, taking into consideration that most practitioners worked in
small-size NGOs where they often performed a variety of managerial, operational and
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administrative tasks,
112
it is even more understandable why practitioners often sketched out
argumentative positions differing from each other. Yet again, this observation is not to be
trivialized, since it shows not only that practitioners deploy and intermingle different interpretive
repertoires to render their accounts of development persuasive, but also that their use of multiple
repertoires and, the ‘colliding/competing/overlapping of discourse’ (Cohen & Musson, 2000, p.
35) represents the generic principle of all knowing and thinking (Billig, 1987; Billig et al., 1988).
Having claimed that the analysis of practitioners’ talk makes a downright hegemonic (i.e.
economic or managerial) view of development defeasible or at least questionable, we must
simultaneously recall that none of the identified repertoires completely steps outside of the
economic language game. More precisely, the analysis has clearly shown that the images of
development are characterized by ambivalence, meaning that the representations of development
as well as the constructions of selves are neither in complete accordance with neo-liberal
orthodoxy or managerialism nor completely outside of their theoretical parameters, so to speak.
To qualify practitioners’ discourses as ambivalent seems justifiable, especially if one takes into
account that all three interpretive repertoires, though to different degrees, emphasized the social
and economic features of development. This state of affairs, then, further implies that it is literally
impossible to explain, in an exhaustive way, either one of the three interpretives through the
dogma of economic managerialism or through the social rationality of development (e.g.
empowerment, self-determination, participation, etc.). Thus departing from the observation that
the different interpretive repertoires are ambivalent in that they mobilize both social and
economic frames of reasoning, the next section takes this idea one step further. That is, I will
illustrate that the repertoires often conflate social and economic arguments which I will then
construe as the creation of a situation of undecidability which chiefly expresses the irresolvable
oppositions and tensions at the heart of contemporary aid.
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As briefly alluded to in the method section, it was not uncommon for NGOs to be run by one single or only a few
persons.
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The Connectivity of Discourse and the Moment of Aporia
In der Welt ist es sehr selten mit dem Entweder-Oder getan. [The world is very seldom composed
in terms of either-or] (Goethe, 2004, p. 43)
The central aim of the previous analysis was to abstract from the thirty interviews, in the best
sense of Denzin and Lincoln’s (1998) notion of ‘bricolage’, the three most significant, frequent
and distinct interpretive repertoires. I would now also like to point out that these three interpretive
repertoires – irrespective of their notable differences – revealed a fair amount of overlap
regarding the terms, concepts or codes deployed. For instance, ‘efficiency’ was used by all three
repertoires, as were notions associated with noble deeds (e.g. doing good, helping, emancipating)
and social intentions and aspirations (e.g. morality, responsibility, etc.). Although I am convinced
that it is important to highlight the overlap between the three interpretive repertoires, this again is
not meant to say that they work on the basis of the same logic and even less that the three
repertoires propound the same meaning of development. Hence, while it is undoubted that the
meaning and evaluative accent of notions such as ‘efficiency’ are inextricably linked with the
specific repertoire in which the term is uttered (cf. Chapter 4), it is even more striking that the
interviews exhibit what Briadotti (1994) called a ‘traffic jam of meanings’ (p. 16). Essentially, the
idea that meanings always collide directly implies that discourse is never a closed system (Potter,
Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002), i.e. an independent system of significations, but rather an
ongoing sensemaking process which necessarily integrates alternative and at times opposing
argumentative positions. For instance, it has been mentioned that the benevolence repertoire,
which primarily construes development as an act of helping and caring for the indigenous other,
has periodically emphasized the economic fundamentals of development work. The
professionalism repertoire, which most notably emphasized the centrality of donor relations while
maintaining that one must adhere to the principles of sound administration, also comprised a set
of arguments which either stressed the good intentions of practitioners or the social objectives of
development endeavors. The entrepreneurship repertoire, which conceptualized development
mainly from the perspective of practitioners’ NGOs, simultaneously made allusions to prevailing
business practices (e.g. cost-benefit analysis) while at the same time pointing out that
development aid presupposes social ideals on the part of the practitioners. If, then, one
acknowledges that all three repertoires are ambiguous, it immediately becomes arguable that
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neither repertoire is only based either on a social or economic rationality. For instance, in view of
the observations that the benevolence repertoire does not only highlight the social features of
development and that the professionalism repertoire does not only cover economic and
managerial aspects of development, it seems safe to claim that the three repertoires oscillate
between the two semantic meta-frames. That is to say, following Hall (1997), that meaning is not
stable but floats. Although both the analytic procedure and the process of representation of my
discourse analysis ineluctably reduced the complexity of meaning (creation), it must nevertheless
be emphasized that we cannot determine stricto sensu that any of the three repertoires is either
social or economic. Having said this, the previous discourse analysis seems to indicate that any
version of development practitioners put forward is always subject to hesitations and constant re-
appraisals. Moreover, the meaning of development and work-based subjectivity needs to be
conceived as being contingent on an ongoing, iterative process of signification. In other words,
though the present investigation obviates the possibility of saying that the repertoires define
development exclusively as a social or as an economic issue, I find it revealing that the three
repertoires often contain both perspectives at the same time (cf. Hall, 1997). This finding thus
makes it clear that the ambivalence in practitioners’ accounts of development renders final
‘either-or’ conclusions untenable and, instead, suggests a logic of ‘as well as’. For instance, the
benevolence repertoire, which for the most part highlights the social deeds and ambitions of
development, typically also comprises arguments which interlace the social trajectory of
development with the pragmatic demands, not to say imperatives, of economics. In this way, the
benevolence repertoire renders development an endeavor that presupposes a sensitivity for both
social and economic affairs. To give a further example: the professionalism repertoire, which for
the most part upholds the primacy of the economic realm, comprises a number of disclaimers
which construe development as an inherently social affair. To put things bluntly, one could say
that within the benevolence repertoire a primarily social plot is interspersed with economic
arguments whereas the professionalism repertoire is primarily characterized by an economic (or,
more precisely, managerial) logic which, however, is repeatedly spiced up with a social stream of
reason. Invoking philosophy to qualify this observation, it becomes arguable that practitioners’
discourse reveals the aporia of development (cf. Chapter 2), meaning that the discursive accounts
of development retain a certain amount of undecidability while simultaneously prompting ‘an
irresolvable contradiction, a tension between demands that pull us in two directions’ (Jones,
2003, p. 228). The condition of undecidability thus renders (part of) practitioners’ discourse an
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eminently unstable endeavor. Yet it is important to note that the notion of ‘aporia’ does not imply
that we are simply dealing with a mere contradiction in practitioners’ talk. Nor do the
ambivalence and the contradictions in practitioners’ talk directly indicate that meanings need ‘to
be understood in their interactional particulars’ (Speer & Potter, 2000, p. 563). Although both
these points are relevant in their own right, the notion of ‘aporia’ neither represents vagueness nor
contradiction (cf. Jones, 2003), but chiefly implies a recognition that any given discourse may
contain two (or more) meanings as a result of which the person is drawn into two directions,
‘oscillating between [different] possibilities’ of meaning (Derrida, 1988, p. 148). Derrida (1995)
further claimed that aporia denotes experiences in which something is ‘neither simply this nor
simply that, this and that being contradictory, one must have both this and that and go from this to
that’ (p. 65; emphasis in original). Given this observation, it hardly needs to be mentioned that
practitioners’ talk is subject to a comparable dynamic due to which development becomes
‘neither simply this nor simply that’. The previous analysis of ideological dilemmas chiefly
delineated how practitioners typically oscillate between social and economic arguments. In line
with this analysis, the idea of aporia acknowledges that experience (and meaning) is not reducible
to ‘either this or that’. At a more fundamental level, aporia defines paradox as a moment of
undecidability (Derrida, 1995). In obvious contrast to the route of (postcolonial) literature which
claims that development NGOs are inclined to integrate managerial savvy (Murphy, 2000) since
this significantly reduces not only their immediate problems (e.g. fundraising, internal and
external accountability, etc.) but also makes their lives easier as a whole, practitioners’ narratives
present an arguably more complex image of development. In blunt terms, we can state that the
aporia revealed in practitioners’ talk gives expression to the oppositions and tensions at the heart
of development aid. Looked at in this way, practitioners’ aporias aptly illustrate how people
struggle when trying to integrate two (or more) irreconcilable demands. Two things must be
noted here. First, the claim that aporia is the expression of negativity would immediately lead to a
loss in the profundity of the concept, since it would ignore that tensions and paradoxes are a
preeminent aspect of a genuinely responsible commitment (Derrida, 1999). Nor is aporia to be
construed as the materialization of the problems development aid practitioners’ experience within
their daily work, i.e. in the sphere outside of language. Rather, aporia is to be seen as conflict
resulting from the very use of language. In other words, it is the clash of meaning engendered
through individual utterances. In consequence, aporia leads to the recognition that certain
experiences or issues defy easy solutions, since it does not permit an unproblematic decision for
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either one position (i.e. social or economic). Aporia, then, is chiefly about letting meaning (and
decision) ‘hang in the air’, so to speak, while nevertheless engaging with the irresolvable tensions
and paradoxes of development aid.
Above, I have re-appropriated Derrida’s idea of aporia to make the point that development
aid practitioners’ talk exceeds the possibility of a simple dialectic between ‘either this or that’. In
the following paragraph I will briefly elaborate on the issue of ideological dilemmas so as to
discuss, among other things, that practitioners’ talk directly calls into question a purely functional
understanding of language. Invoking Bhabha (1994) to make my point, I will notably use his
concept of ‘third space of enunciation’. This concept fosters a view of language in which
contradictory meanings stand side by side, mobilized yet unresolved.
‘Ideological Dilemmas’ and the Permeable Boundaries of Discourse
The I … has no contours, it is the blankness of all colors and all nuances, it is open and
translucent welcome of a multiplicity of thoughts … (Serres, 1995, p. 31)
Returning to the issue of ideological dilemmas, the first point I want to make stands in obvious
contrast to the canon of discursive psychology and particularly the assumption that language is
necessarily functional in the sense that ‘(w)hat is picked out in talk depends on the orientation
and interests of the speaker’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002, p.162). In this way, I want
to take issue with the assertion that utterances can always be decoded according to the ‘social
intention’ of the person who did the talking (Davies & Harré, 1990). Discursive psychology
certainly acknowledges that (subject and object) positionings in discourse (Smith, 1988) are not
intentional in any determinate sense. However, discursive psychology holds, at least implicitly,
that discourse is based upon clear-cut boundaries and that people within conversations use
language according to their immediate needs. Discursive psychology therefore exhibits a
tendency to envisage interpretive repertoires as linguistic devices which are ‘invoked according
to their suitability to an immediate context’ (Potter at al., 2002, p. 169). Needless to say,
interpretive repertoires are commonly construed as ‘flexible resources that are artfully and
knowingly invoked by people’ (ibid.). Although it is undoubted that many scholars working on
the basis of Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) scheme of discourse analysis are aware that it is
untenable to denote discourse as an ‘unrealistically closed system’ (Potter et al., 2002, p. 170), it
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can nevertheless be objected that the theory of interpretive repertoires departs from the
assumption that conversations are either (socially) intentional or at least functional. By the same
token, rhetorical analysis operates on the premise that people jostle with contrary themes in order
to position them in a culturally commensurate way. Billig (1987, 2001) clarified that this jostling
is part and parcel of arguing and thinking and that such linguistic ‘maneuvers’ are most frequent
(since rhetorically effective) when people have to deal with ideological topics. It is implied, then,
that contrary themes of commonsense, i.e. ‘lived ideology’ are used in order to either justify or
criticize particular views.
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While ideology is said to provide ‘the resources for thinking about
ordinary life’ (Verkuyten, 2003, p. 141), it is always seen to be performative to the extent that it
provides people with the means for accounting and rendering persuasive their talk. What is
revealed here is that psychological discourse analysis as well as rhetorical analysis both suggest
that people use language to solve the dilemmas inherent in their talk and hence to ‘obscure’ that
their accounts are based on a tense relationship between contradictory repertoires. Stated
otherwise, speakers are assumed to flexibly create the impression of an uncontroversial account
(e.g. Billig, 1991; Edley & Wetherell, 1997; Edley, 2001). The point to be made, then, is that
certain dilemmas, irrespective of the social convention of non-contradiction (Davies & Harré,
1990), remain acute or active since they are not and cannot be solved by rhetorical means. I have
already mentioned that the investigation of NGO practitioners has revealed that development is
typically constructed through the continuous intermingling of socially, economically, and
managerially inclined argumentative threads. It must be added that what is most striking about
this intermingling is that none of the repertoires eventually gains the definitive ‘upper hand’
(Derrida, 1981). We could argue, then, that practitioners’ narratives establish a dialogue between
those repertoires that articulate the social ramifications and merits of development work and those
that highlight its managerial practices and economic premises. To be clear on this, conventional
rhetorical analysis asserts that people, when dealing with ideological dilemmas, always favor one
particular perspective or position. However, the present investigation seems more in accordance
with van de Berg’s (2003) observation that not all dilemmas are solved through the use of
language, since there are cases in which people constantly ‘switch between incompatible
repertoires’ (p. 135). In opposition to van de Berg’s contention that the oscillation between
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Racist talk has become a preferred topic for illustrating how people use interpretive resources to position
themselves as either racist or anti-racist.
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repertoires is intelligible if one takes into account ‘the issue at hand in the conversation’ (ibid.), I
would claim that the interviews revealed a particular overlap of repertoires (cf. above). Therefore
it would seem wrong to sustain the idea that the repertoires are separated through clear and stable
boundaries. What this means, among other things, is that practitioners’ talk does not allow for a
strict separation of repertoires and even less for a judgment of the preferableness of repertoires,
i.e. which one of the contradictory repertoires is favored by the practitioner. Although I have
presented the three repertoires separately (which, of course, fosters the impression of
distinctness), it must remain clear that this analytic distinction between ‘this and not this’
(Lyotard, 1993; cf. Chapter 4) has primarily been performed for reasons of clarity. This said, I
want to point out that the ideological dilemmas stimulated by the mobilization of the social and
the economic arguments of development aid have often remained acute and unresolved which,
however, ‘cannot “in itself” be conscious’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 36). To apply a concept of Bhabha
(1994) to this observation, we can say that practitioners use language in a way that creates a ‘third
space of enunciation’
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in which the mobilization of contradictory positions, irresolvable
antagonisms and ambivalences create a condition in which multiple ‘in-between’ meaning(s)
become possible. More precisely, following Bhabha’s claim that the ‘third space of enunciation’
notably emphasizes that discourse entails the possibility of co-existent meanings, it is evident that
this view challenges the assumption that people, when dealing with controversial themes,
ultimately and necessarily favor a single perspective or argumentative position. Thus while
Bhabha’s concept of a ‘third space of enunciation’ acknowledges the irresolvable antagonisms of
discourse, it also takes into account that the production of meaning is at times subject to the
intermingling of detrimentally opposed positions. I therefore suggest that the single most
important tenet of Bhabha’s ‘third space’ concept is that it does not construe discourse as a
system of simple binary antagonisms. Rather, ‘third space of enunciation’ chiefly implies that
constructions of development are often ‘neither one nor the other’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 25). On the
face of it, the idea of ‘third space’, conceived as the semantic space being engendered through the
‘clash’ of opposing views, leads to a downright rejection of discursive psychology’s proposition
that people necessarily ‘produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction’ (ibid.). Again,
in opposition to certain uses of rhetorical analysis, Bhabha’s ‘third space’ engenders a viewpoint
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Bhabha used the notion of ‘third space’ to show that any cultural identity in the ‘contact zone’ of intercultural
relations is constructed in a hybrid space. ‘Third space’, by implication, does not suggest a mere exchange between
cultures but that living in the ‘in-between’ produces entirely new cultural forms.
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from which it becomes arguable that practitioners’ talk retains difference. Moreover, the notion of
a ‘third space’ entails that the construction of development is enhanced rather than undermined
by the synchronous activation of conflicting (lived) ideologies.
It is obvious that this way of thinking about the use of language allows a dialogic
understanding of communication
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which acknowledges that multiple meanings can be generated
in any one saying. In the following section I will briefly elaborate on how this proposition relates
to practitioners’ subjectivity.
Hybridity and Subject Positions
The self is the One who is not dominated … but to be One is to be an illusion … to be other is to
be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. (Haraway, 1991, p. 177)
A first point I would like to address here relates to Davies and Harré’s (1990) claim that though
people can have many coherent selves in a single story, they nevertheless seek to act rationally.
Consequently, they tend to remedy, resolve or simply ignore contradictions. This observation,
while concurring with the central premises of discursive psychology, is undeniably revealing, and
I have no interest in either rejecting the idea that multiple selves are made possible through
discourse or in scrutinizing Davies and Harré’s view that social conventions induce people to act
as consistent, rational beings.
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After all, Davies and Harré quite reasonably proclaim that one
would undermine the convention of logic and coherence if a person at the same time stated that
he or she was going to Boston and New York. I have already mentioned that the permeable
boundaries between the single interpretive repertoires make it impossible to judge whether the
single repertoires emphasizes only the social or economic features of development. That is to say,
then, that practitioners’ discourse does contain a certain degree of inconsistency (though not on
the level of logic) to the extent that it renders futile any estimate of development in terms of the
social-economic dualism. With respect to the construction of practitioners’ subjectivity, this
observation requires at least two rectifications. First, contradictions do not point at a
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It is noteworthy that Bhabha’s (1994) ‘The Location of Culture’ was inspired by Bakhtin’s work on dialogic
imagination.
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As Harré and Secord (1973) remind us, since any conversation is invariably experienced from at least two
separate positions, there are good reasons to believe that any easy assumption of shared meaning is militated or at
least defeasible (cf. also Pearce, 1989).
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dysfunctional order of reason, but provide the essential basis for thinking not only about the
world but also about the self (Billig, 1987). Second, contradictions create a third space of
enunciation which, by mobilizing two or more semantic frames of reference, enables the
performance of selves on the basis of difference. Having said this, I would like to show how the
undecidability or flux (Hall, 1997) revealed in practitioners’ discourse has a bearing on subject
positions. To this end, I would once more like to refer to Homi Bhabha (1994) who sketched out
the notion of ‘hybridity’ to argue that culture never pertains to strict boundaries. Cultures,
according to Bhabha, always intermingle with each other, meaning that the contact zone of
culture invariably becomes a space of transgression (Foucault, 1998; cf. Chapter, 6) in which new
ways of being are made possible. As with Bhabha’s ‘third space’ concept, hybridity points out the
political immediacy of cultural contact, since it implies that people are always and necessarily
subject to change. According to Lucas (1997), the ‘third space’ represents a ‘zone of mediation
and activity that seeks to subvert’, since it mobilizes contradictory, opposing views to release
difference and enable an ‘in-between-zone’ where ‘no political ideologies could claim
transcendent or metaphysical authorities for themselves’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 148). Needless to say,
as the ‘third space’ establishes a split between oppositional lived ideologies this has, of course,
important implications for the discursive construction of subjectivity. In concrete terms, in view
of my previous assertion that practitioners’ interpretive repertoires are ambivalent, it follows that
the performance of self is to be seen as a process that makes the social and the economic ‘come
alive’ within single utterances. By extension, the performance of subjectivity engenders hybrids
as practitioners within their talk constantly move back and forth along the avowed opposition
between the social and the economic. Hence, Bhabha’s eloquent treatise implies that social and
economic streams of arguments perpetually cross over up to the point where practitioners’ selves
are never simply one ‘thing’ or another. That is, instead of being incompatible antagonisms (i.e.
social versus economic man), the two frames of reference are conjoined in the ‘in-between-zone’
so as to create unprecedented forms of self (and other). Essentially, hybrid selves are enabled by
the social condition of articulation, i.e. through ‘the temporal caesura, which is also the
historically transformative moment, when a lagged space opens up in-between the intersubjective
reality of signs … and the historical development of the subject in the order of social symbols’
(Bhabha, 1994, p. 242; slightly modified). In consequence, conceiving of practitioners’ subject
positions as hybrids means, among other things, that the construction of selves is carried out
within the terms provided by lived ideology (rather than in opposition to them; cf. Chapter 6).
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This clarification is important since it indicates that to become other, people do not necessarily
need to step outside the given commonsense. Hence, instead of striving for a novel language,
people are able to effectuate a split between inherited forms of knowledge and ‘the true’ (Bhabha,
1994, p. 22). Change of the self is hence always achieved within the parameters of the given
semantic order. Obviously then, it is the concept of ‘hybridity’ that shows how language works
dialogically so as to omit monologic discourse. When the avowed polarity between the social and
the economic is exploited, the ‘third space of enunciation’ on the one hand ‘estranges any
immediate access to an originary identity’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2). On the other hand, the ‘third
space of enunciation’ opens up an ‘interstitial passage between fixed identifications’ which, in
turn, creates ‘the possibility of a … hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or
imposed hierarchy’ (p. 4). Hybridity, so it seems, is chiefly about invention precisely because it
disrupts homogenizing claims of culture, economy, etc. and because it engenders ‘borderline
existences’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 218) and the ‘creation of agency through incommensurable (not
simply multiple) [subject] positions’ (p. 231).
Inter-textual Reference and Outlook
In my assessment, it is not exaggerated to claim that ‘agency’ has for a long time been a ‘hot
topic’ in the realm of discourse theory. This is evident from the observation that scholars
keep trying to grapple with the question of whether people determine their selves in a
purposeful and deliberate manner or whether they are more to be seen as the mere ‘by-
product’ of discourse. The question of agency is thereby notably discussed in relation or,
more precisely, in opposition to Foucault’s work in which discourse is described as the social
practice that forms the objects of which is speaks (cf. Berard, 1999). Since the previous
discourse analysis shed light on the subject positions contained in or made possible through
the three interpretive repertoires, it is clear that the analytic focus has not been put on how
practitioners’ define, in a sovereign manner, their individuality, but rather how the three
repertoires each engender different kinds of subjectivity. In view of my previous assertion
that discourses or interpretive repertoires provide the means through which we ‘constitute
ourselves as subjects of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 237), we must further note that the
analysis presumed that discourse, and not practitioners, bring about particular subject
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positions. I would therefore like to point out that my analysis of practitioners’ discursive
practices does not necessarily imply that practitioners were simply determined by discourse.
Instead, I have tried to illustrate that practitioners’ use of language creates a ‘discursive
space’ that ‘categorizes the individual, marks him out by his own individuality, attaches him
to his identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have
to recognize in him’ (Foucault, 1982b, p. 212). Admittedly, this view might still appear to
put too much stress on the force of discourse. I have tried to emphasize that discourse is not
predominantly a repressive force but equally a phenomenon that makes things possible (i.e.
‘real’) in the first place. Consequently, it is clear that Foucault’s investigation of discourse,
power and knowledge as well as his successors’ work on the interrelation between discourse
and subjectivity (e.g. Rose, 1985; 1990; Hollway, 1991; Knights & Morgan, 1991; Newton,
1994) have chiefly been appropriated to construe discourse as a quasi-autonomous
phenomenon that constitutes passive subjects (Berard, 1999). This observation, in my
opinion, makes it necessary to conduct a separate investigation of Foucault’s less known
work in which he identified the human agency of individuals through the notion of ‘aesthetic
of existence’ (Foucault, 1990; 1990b). Chapter 6 will therefore discuss how Foucault related
discourse, power and knowledge to the issue of individual self-determination and resistance.
Before turning to Foucault’s ‘aesthetic of existence’, however, I will reflect on the current
state of discourse analysis and discourse theory in the following chapter. This investigation will
thus first take issue with those accounts which primarily denote discourse analysis as a method. I
will argue that any attempt to equate discourse analysis with method immediately necessitates a
technical perspective of method which, as I will discuss, makes impossible (rather than possible)
valuable research. Claiming that it is misleading to demand ever more sophisticated and thorough
guides and recipes for conducting discursive research, I will reject those accounts which delineate
discourse analysis as an ‘automat’ or ‘robot’ (Lyotard, 1993) pretending to lead us more or less
safely and directly to our ‘research destination’ (Law, 2004). After an evidently polemical treatise
of discourse analysis, I will venture into more serious territory in order to point out that in their
analysis discourse scholars often deploy a type of language which engenders a split between the
constative and performative aspect of language (Derrida, 1992), i.e. between what language says
and what it does. Straying into philosophy, I will make use of selected works by Lyotard,
Deleuze, Barthes and others to present a minor use of discourse analysis, that is, a form of
348
discourse analysis which acknowledges the instability inherent in language and which hence
enables connotative, polysemic interpretations.
349
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371
***
Part III
372
‘Lines of Flight’
***
… , the dominant notion of a “text”, of what I still call a “text”, for strategic reasons, in part – is
a “text” that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed
in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly
to something other than itself, to other differential traces. (Derrida, 2004, p. 69)
The future is the way we react to what is happening, it is the way we transform a movement, a
doubt into truth. If we want to be masters of our future, we must fundamentally pose the
question of what today is. (trans. from Foucault, 1994, p. 434)
To be sure, critique or, more precisely, genealogical and deconstructive reflection of the sort
introduced in the first part of this thesis is incommensurable with, even antithetical to the idea of
textual closure conceived as the process which brings something to a conclusion by finishing a
matter in order to go on and embark on a fresh undertaking. Notwithstanding the possibility that
the ironic tone used in Chapter 2 might have added to the impression that a body of thought was
‘closed’ and ‘overcome’, it must be borne in mind that critique – the way it is defined for the
purpose of this investigation – is fully grasped only if one acknowledges its affirmative
trajectory. Departing from Derrida’s use of the French word ‘clôture’ we can thus gain an
understanding of closure as the dislocation of a text from within the text, meaning that one always
has to remain within the tradition one seeks to overcome. As deployed by Derrida, closure or
‘clôture’ is signified not (only) as a technical term that relates to a finite totality but as a code that
engages with the deconstruction of ‘Euro-American metaphysics’ (Law, 2004), i.e. the
identification and reversion of definitive textual closures. In accordance with Derrida’s ‘clôtural’
readings, which thrive on the tension of ‘belonging and the breakthrough’ (Critchley, 1999, p.
70), the following chapters try to work creatively in and from (and hence not against) the
structured field of the given heritage. It needs to be mentioned, then, that the following
elaborations on the name of respectively method (and in particular discourse analysis; Chapter 4),
373
the business school to come (Chapter 5), the interrelation between discourse, subjectivity and
resistance (Chapter 6) as well as the sociality of social entrepreneurship (Chapter 7) all herald an
ultimate concern for re-searching. Re-search, understood in the present context as searching
‘again’, thus means to search for ‘the second time’ and, by implication, searching for what might
have ‘been lost or forgotten’ on the way (Weiskopf, 2002). The ensuing re-search(es) hence start
from the middle of things or, following Deleuze (1988), from asking ‘what can I see, and what
can I say today?’ (p. 119) in order then to endeavor to find possibilities yet not realized. This
interpretation of research contains a concern for the future (quite apart from the interest of
‘normal science’ (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992) in prediction and universal predication) in that ‘the
imagination of possible futures (and future possibilities) is a source of new experiments and
different possible ways of thinking and acting’ (March, 1995, p. 435). Again, none of the
following chapters tries to impart knowledge of a precise nature since precision, as we know and
will elaborate further, is a double-edged sword that tends to fix, freeze and suppress certain
language games (Lyotard, 1988). The subsequent chapters thus deal with the kind of knowledge
that is ‘indistinct’ and ‘slippery’ (Law, 2004) and as such avoids any semiotic ‘imperialism’. In
line with the nature of their subject matters, the objective of these chapters is more modest or at
least different from Enlightenment determinism, since they are ‘connected to the idea of … that
which is subject to doubt and uncertainty, that which might be’ (Cooper, 1993, p. 288). In
consequence, the trajectory of these texts is less imaginable as a straight line than as ‘lines of
flight’ (plural) calling for consecutive openings. Importantly, lines of flight is the allegory I
borrow (and appropriate) from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in order to envisage a sort of writing
that works by virtue of intensification (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003) and by means of releasing the
opportunities contained or suppressed in their respective hyper-organized fields of inquiry. Lines
of flight are therefore conceivable, among other things, as a politico-ethical process of
multiplication which defies a view of resistance and critique as emanating from outside of (or
even against) power in the form of, for instance, ‘the critical philosopher in his ‘safe seat’’
(Lyotard, 1993, p. xxvii). Instead, lines of flight are part and parcel of any system (of power);
they are virtually everywhere, as Fleming (2002) tells us. This said, the objective of the following
chapters is to bring to the forefront the or, rather, some of the lines of flight inherent in
academia’s intellectual purism and thus to deterritorialize established meanings and fixed
perspectives. Allegorically speaking: against the logic of the migrant who flees from a hostile
space to settle down, that is, re-territorialize in another, I prefer, in accordance with Deleuze and
374
Guattari (1987), not to evade the given heritage altogether but to engage with it, to dismantle it in
order to ‘make new connections’ (p. 15).
375
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Funtowicz, S. O. & Ravetz, J. R. (1992). Three Types of Risk Assessment and the Emergence of
Post-Normal Science. In S. Krimsky & D. Golding (eds.), Social Theories of Risk.
Westport, CT: Prager.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.
Lyotard, J. F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. van den Abbeele. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, J. F. (1993). Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant. London: Continuum.
March, J. G. (1995). The Future, Disposable Organizations and the Rigidities of Imagination.
Organization, 2, 427 – 440.
Steyaert, C. & Hjorth, D. (2003). New Movements in Entrepreneurship. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar.
Weiskopf, R. (2002). Deconstructing “The Iron Cage” – Towards an Aesthetic of Folding.
Consumption, Markets and Culture, 5, 79 – 97.
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4
***
Deterritorializing Discourse Analysis
or
For Discourse Analysis … with a ‘Brief’ Detour
Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off. (Nietzsche,
1968, p. 30)
… it is the road towards libidinal currency that must be opened up by force. (Lyotard, 1993, p.
42; emphasis in original)
‘Premonition’
If we opted to begin in an affirmative fashion we could claim that the present essay seeks to
investigate the potential merits of discourse analysis. As the term ‘potential’ suggests, however,
we
117
have chosen to provide a reading of discourse analysis
118
that does not seek to re-perform
the eulogy as manifest, for instance, in Potter and Wetherell (1987), Edwards (1997) or Parker
117
To increase the persuasiveness and argumentative force of this chapter, I have opted to use the plural ‘we’. I hence
follow Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) eloquent (and witty) claim that since each of us is several, one is already quite
a crowd. Moreover, I prefer to say ‘we’ to partly make myself unrecognizable and hence to reach a point where it ‘is
no longer of any importance whether one says I’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3).
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Notwithstanding the fact that ‘discourse analysis’ appears in the title of this chapter, it is most notably grounded
upon those discursive accounts which had their origins in (discourse) psychology.
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(2002) but which establishes a sense that there are both aesthetical and theoretical puzzles that
need to be addressed. In our opinion, what pushes open and, in one way or another, marks a
hindrance to the ‘blossom’ of discourse analysis is related to two peculiarities: the
territorialization of discourse analysis as method and the use of an over-codifying, ‘hardened’
language.
Addressing issues in succession, the gaze will first be turned towards readings of
discourse analysis which portray the subject matter as a distinct method. Whereas it is quite
possible that discourse analysis is not only a (or even the) method beyond others but also, and
probably even more so, a philosophical position or, as argued by Parker (2000), a paradigmatic
stance characterized by ‘a sensitivity to language’, we shall establish that though most texts on
discourse analysis acknowledge this double condition, there is a prospering tradition which
reduces the matter down to a toolkit approach with a set of do’s and don’ts. What seems to
dampen or de-energize the potential of discourse analysis is that it is perpetually envisaged as a
sort of technological knowledge that lends itself to a consumerist mode of learning, i.e. a sort of
episteme that one can order and provide like a neatly composed meal. Seeking to provide an
answer as to why this conceptualization escapes the austere gaze of the critic, it will be argued
that the field has been successful in protecting and even extending its territory by virtue of an
intriguing amount of ‘identical repetition’ (Cunningham, 2005). This assertion will be
underscored by showing that there is a striking overlap in the wording and structure of such texts.
On the basis of the observation that this mechanic mimicry has, until now, remained a fairly
unreflected affair, it will be posited that this blind-spot is strategic: it makes it impossible to
discern rigid rhetorical conventions as social creations that are due to cunning routinization and
standardization. Moreover, it makes it difficult to see that discourse analysis could actually be
practiced in a different way.
Given that its sophisticated though mimicking rhetoric warrants the field an impressive
gloss and a positive ‘evaluative accent’; Maybin, 2001), it is conspicuous that this quality at the
same time promises to provide the scholar with an ‘automat’, a support device that takes the user
more or less quickly and safely to his or her research destination. As will be discussed, the
method automat holds great promise for redemption in that it pretends to provide the researcher
with an easy way through research and, provided that the prevailing doxa
119
is followed, granting
119
Doxa is opinion, that which everyone knows or, in the case of discourse analysis, everybody should know and
apply.
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him or her a safe seat in academia. Given this situation, it is questionable whether the equation of
discourse analysis and method (i.e. automat) is of any help in educating the nascent scholar (in
his or her desperate quest for answers), since it obscures the fact that discourse analysis is an
inherently creative process that defies any hastiness and, instead, demands passion, patience and
practice, that is, time. Accordingly, what is problematized in the present essay is that the
establishment of discourse analysis as a method does not in itself enable us to craft a text worth
reading, that is, a text that elicits pleasure and that reveals novel insights.
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It will be highlighted
that discourse analysis is not only a method that enables the inquiry of language but that its
language conventions and habits of enunciation themselves represent the very limit of its
expressivity and imaginativeness. Therefore, the first part of the ensuing text works as a
springboard for the discovery that there might be much merit in illuminating and undoing some
of the ‘hinterland’ of method (Law, 2004). Calling for some modesty, serenity and affirmation in
the rhetoric of discourse analysis, we will equally try to increase its readability and appeal or, to
use a term coined by Barthes (1974), the ‘writerliness’ of discourse analysis. Consequently,
opting for a transgression of standards of enunciation, we would like to establish a minor form of
discourse analysis.
Following the first part of the investigation, which aspires to stimulate both thought and
amusement, the ‘secondo piatto’ – which is the main course rather than the dessert – will
approach the question of passion ‘from behind’ so as to draw attention not to what causes
pleasure but what causes displeasure in reading discourse analysis. We will hence argue that the
‘machinery of representation’ (Wetherell, 2001) of discourse analysis rests on a collective of
language conventions that tend to produce rather dry and expressively impoverished texts.
Seeking inspiration from philosophical writers we will analyze selected writings by, for instance,
Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze to show that language and
representation often coincide with ‘territorialization’, that is, the grasping of things in their
‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Contending that all analytic abstraction (though to different
degrees) requires a distinction between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993), it will be argued that
contemporary discourse analysis is particularly occupied with the definite ordering, structuring
and control of meaning. Departing from the premise that language (and interpretation) is
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Note that some scholars have pointed out that these two steps, analysis and writing, cannot be separated
(particularly in qualitative research) and that writing must of necessity be seen as both an analytic and a creative
activity (e.g. Richardson, 1994; van Maanen, 1995).
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simultaneously the limit and possibility of difference (Lecercle, 2002), it will be reflected that
certain types of discourse analysis make use of a language or lexis characterized by a ‘referential
function’. This means that such texts create the impression of representing, more or less
accurately, (an ontologically existing) reality. In a nutshell, where the field of discourse analysis
supports either ‘techno-talk’ (e.g. in rhetorical or conversation analysis) or a ‘journalist genre’
(e.g. in analysis of interpretive repertoires and, to a lesser extent, in analysis of discourse à la
Foucault), it will be argued, on the basis of Barthes’ (1967) notion of the ‘zero-degree’ style, that
such writings hinge on a ‘hardened’ or ‘violent’ language. This type of language is supposedly
insensitive to the temporality of local signification and hence to the undecidability inherent in
meaning (Derrida, 1976). Deliberately inflating the mechanical aspect of discourse analysis, we
will show that there is an implied ‘incompossibility’ (Lyotard, 1993) between what discourse
analysts say about language and how they use language. On the basis of this insight, it will be
possible to see that discourse analysis at times runs counter to its own declaration, namely that we
should venture beyond a functionalistic, mimetic understanding of language and instead provide
new means for tackling the ‘crises of representation’ (Gill, 1998). Though ‘crisis’ remains an
issue, it will not constitute the main focus of the second part of this inquiry. Instead, it will be
posited that the current tradition of discourse analysis needs to give appropriate recognition to
difference (instead of promoting means to ‘manage’ it). It appears, then, that Latour (1997) had a
point when he asserted that words and worlds necessarily go together. On the basis of this insight,
we will suspend the propositional model of language, i.e. the zero-degree style, in order to argue
that discourse analysis should – in the spirit of a tension or ‘tensor’ (Lyotard, 1993) – learn to
appreciate and adopt a more indeterminate, inexact language (van Maanen, 1995), that is, a
language that can accommodate the ambivalence and ambiguity of meaning. To this end, John
Law’s (2004) treatise of the ‘mess in social science research’ is invoked to argue for an
allegoric/metaphoric language that gives rise to indirect expression, non-literal, associative
representation or, to follow in Lyotard’s (1988) footsteps, a preoccupation with the
‘unpresentable’. In the same vein, it will be discussed why the ‘order words’ (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987) discourse analysts seem eager to use should be ‘softened’, ‘made strange’ or
caused to ‘stammer’ (as Bogue (2005) convincingly argued). Furthermore, a space for play and
experimentation is proposed through the use and invention of neologisms which are supposed to
‘disorder’ language in a way that enables novel and unforeseen connections and that prescribe
active and necessarily engaged readings. Assuming that, to enliven discourse analysis, we might
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not get very far with the current ‘system’, Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ will be invoked
to illustrate an irritatingly intense, though arguably inspirational, writing. One of the laudable
effects of this type of writing is, to use a term borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari (1986), the
increase of language’s relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’. Thus, in seeking to propose a
language which is ‘hospitable’ to the unthinkable, to silences or ‘différance’ (Derrida, 1976,
1982), we will establish, in the sense of a pedagogical gesture, that the nascent scholar might find
most inspiration for conducting his or her own discourse analysis not by consulting method
textbooks but by ‘intensive’ (instead of ‘perverse’) readings (Deleuze, 1995) of available
examples of discourse analysis as well as more experimental, or dare we say energetic, textual
performances. Intensive readings, conceived as readings that pose the question if and how a
particular piece of text works or ‘flows’ (Deleuze, 1995) and, especially, if it works for me as a
reader, will be introduced. It will be shown that such intensive readings are a vital precondition
for an adequate appreciation of the aesthetic and creative aspect of discourse analysis and for the
elimination of the parameters which currently seem to keep parts of the field territorialized, i.e. in
a state of stasis.
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Disclaimer
It must be made clear at the outset that it is not possible to account for the entire range and richness of the field of
discourse analysis. While remaining partial in its grasp and scope, this investigation (particularly the first part) has a
clear bias in favor of texts falling into the broad category of psychology. Additionally, while the arguments presented
collectively reject discourse analysis in its current manifestation, it must be emphasized that we genuinely enjoyed
most of the literature on discourse analysis. This said, what is to come tries to follow the spirit of Derrida who
claimed that his ‘double readings’
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(Critchley, 2005) of the works of others represented an act of genuine ‘love’,
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since he only engaged with authors he felt sympathetic with or attracted to (cf. Protevi, 2004). We emphasize that we
hold the texts used for the present investigation in high esteem and that we agree with their supposition that discourse
analysis marks a project which must necessarily be sustained. Nevertheless, we see no merit in the present text
degenerating into a hypocritical backslapping exercise.
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A term Critchley favored over what he saw as the all too often misrepresented and generally overused notion of
‘deconstruction’ (cf. also Chapter 5).
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Derrida wrote: ‘I am very fond of everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from
the deconstructive point of view are texts I like, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for
reading’ (p. 87; quoted in Attridge, 1992, p. 5).
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A First Territory: Discourse Analysis as Method
Interlude I: On Hegemony
Each discourse … is to some degree a jargon … a language of control. (Said, 1983, p. 219)
… all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 32)
To start with a general statement, it seems safe to claim that method is not everybody’s cup of
tea. If we go one step further, or simply follow Rehn’s (1999) suggestion, we could even state
that methods are blatantly ‘ugly’ and that ‘method’, at least the dominant interpretation thereof,
contains the force to render research unreadable. We freely admit that we were occasionally
tempted to proclaim that the discussion on method should not only not be criticized but simply
ignored altogether. By the same token, we felt much sympathy with Rehn (2002) who confessed
that the idea of method actually frightened him. Whoever has been confronted with the issue of
method(ology) in a public context will probably be reminded of some personal experience by
Rehn’s narrative in which he, wittily though tellingly, pointed out that ‘(c)onferences are the
worst. There people you hardly trust enough to watch your coat seem perfectly at ease with
asking personal question such as ‘What’s your methodological standpoint then?’ without feeling
the least bit intrusive. And when I answer ‘Don’t really have one. I don’t like methodology!’ they
laugh nervously and say something about the coffee’ (p. 44). As Rehn’s description shows in an
exemplary way, the question of method cannot be sidestepped, irrespective of how hard we try,
since the ghosts we are keen to put into oblivion will keep haunting us. Given this state of affairs,
we appear well advised to muster the courage to address the issue proactively and notably to
question whether method, in its canonical signification, holds potential benefits for (whatever sort
of) research. First of all, it must be pointed out that both ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ have
acquired an autonomous position in academic discourse. Academic psychology, which in some
ways can be seen as the intellectual backbone of this thesis’s author(s), in particular has
traditionally been characterized by a propensity to derive its identity from method rather than
content (cf. Rose, 1985). Whereas Rose’s cogent appraisal could still be said to be purely
‘descriptive’, it is Roth (2005) who did not shy away formulating evaluative positions on the
basis of which he mentioned, among other things, that ‘(m)ethodology is a fetishism, an
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ideology’ (quoted from abstract). Rehn (2002), who set in motion a comparably un-apoplectic
‘grand attack’ on method, posited that both method and methodology are not simply a fashionable
practicality but that they must be construed as a moral economy, some kind of ‘methodism’
(Rehn, 2002). Whereas these genuinely unmediated appraisals might carry some heuristic value,
or at least some entertainment value, they, in our assessment, give little indication as to why
method and impassioning research are only partially, if at all, ‘compossible’ (Lyotard, 1993). Yet,
while this essay aims to analyze the identified antagonism between method and research from
different angles, the point to be made at this early stage is that certain methods more than others
are prone to territorialize, that is, to inhabit or annex the space of research. Importantly, it is in
this context that Law (2004) stated that the problem of method is not axiomatic, but closely
related to ‘the hegemonic and dominatory pretensions of certain versions or accounts’ (p. 4;
emphasis in original). If we are willing to accept that Law’s assertion, which was made in
connection with social science research, has some ‘truth value’, it is worth pointing out that the
notion of ‘dominatory pretensions’ is appropriate for describing the aspirations of certain forms
of discourse analysis. To illustrate matters on the grounds of psychology, we can say that it is not
uncommon to encounter statements purporting that ‘discourse is a radical new perspective’ which
has ‘implications for all socio-psychological topics’ (Potter & Wetherell, 2001, p. 198). To
extend this illustration to the social sciences, we can turn to van de Berg et al. (2003b) who
advocated discourse analysis on the following grounds: ‘(i)t has been estimated that over 90% of
social research is based on interview data … Social research, whatever discipline or approach
taken, relies heavily on interviewing people about their experiences, opinions, hopes, fears,
reactions, and expectations … It is highly appropriate, therefore, that the methods and theories of
discourse analysis are applied to this practice’ (p. 3). Being eager to avoid some kind of
synecdoche by using a small number of examples (two, to be precise) to infer the qualities of the
phenomenon as a whole, it is nonetheless noticeable that Potter and Wetherell’s use of the word
‘all’ (“implications for all socio-psychological topics”, cf. above) sets in train an image of
discourse analysis that does not construe discourse analysis as one good way (among others) of
gaining a sense of social reality, but arguably as the best and, though this remains implicit for the
most part, the only way to conduct social science research. What we are saying here is that the
statement or, to use an expression derived from their own repertoire, ‘strong view’ (e.g.
Wetherell, 2003) of Potter and Wetherell or van de Berg et al. is not to be taken as a singular
event, an ‘eloper’ so to speak. Rather, we proclaim that there is a greater movement that seeks to
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establish discourse analysis as a sine qua non in social science research. It may seem that
‘hegemony’ or even ‘imperialism’ are terms that might be a bit farfetched for the characterization
the expansive tendencies of discourse. There are, however, sound reasons to believe that
discourse analysis has a strong impact on all topics considered for research, so much so that such
topics are forced to yield to its logic. To illustrate our point, we shall turn to Wetherell, Yates and
Taylor (2001b) who explained that ‘(s)ocial science research uses a range of approaches.
Common ones include, for instance, the survey such as an opinion-poll survey or a questionnaire,
along with the sophisticated statistical techniques which produce at the end of the process,
percentages, bar charts, tables, numbers and reliable and significant data. What are being
transformed, however, are people’s discursive actions … The same point can be made about the
conduct of controlled experiments in disciplines such as psychology while other research
techniques, such as the interview, are even more clearly about operations on people’s discourse’
(p. 4). Importantly, the totalizing tendency expressed in the account of Wetherell and colleagues
is often amplified in the rhetoric of scholars in that discourse analysis is endowed with attributes
such as ‘new’ or ‘progressive’ (cf. Parker, 2002d). Whereas it is intuitively comprehensible that
these attributes give discourse analysis a positive ‘evaluative accent’ (Maybin, 2001), it is at least
questionable whether they are suitable for representing the subject’s current status. For instance,
Banister et al. (1994) mentioned that ‘(d)iscourse analysis in psychology is now a well-
established method’ (p. 94), whereas Parker (2005) recently pointed out that some forms of
discourse analysis have acquired a quasi-mainstream position in psychology. In consequence, it
might appear peculiar at first glance that discourse analysis is still considered by some as a ‘new’
or ‘progressive’ methodology. If we instead subject those claims to the rhetorical microscope
(Billig, 1988), the question becomes not if such utterances are right or wrong but rather what
functions they fulfill and what effects they have. Consequently, though it could easily be argued
that discourse analysis is not, stricto sensu, ‘radical’ (Parker, 2005) or ‘new’ (Potter & Wetherell,
1987), it is far more interesting to see that discourse analysis is presented as a superior
methodological position on account of a juxtaposition of discourse analysis with a ‘simulacrum’
(conceived as an invented hyperreality) that contains a simplified and derogatory notion of what
is called ‘positivist’, ‘traditional’, ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal’ science. The ‘exploitation’ of
discourse analysis’ ‘other’ becomes blatantly obvious in the field of psychology where scholars
have been utterly diligent in reappraising psychology’s subject matters from the vantage point of
discourse theory in order to claim that this latter perspective is superior. In concrete terms,
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‘classical’ topics of psychology such as attitudes (e.g. Billig, 1987; Condor, 1987; Smith, 1987),
gender (e.g. Billig et al., 1988; Walkerdine, 1988; Hollway, 1989), memory (e.g. Edwards &
Middleton, 1986; 1988) and racism (e.g. van Dijk, 1984; Wetherell & Potter, 1986; 1992) have
been rendered amenable to discourse analysis. However, this extension has never been envisaged
as a complementation of the prevailing stock of analytic perspectives, but instead as the
introduction of a novel paradigm which is said to carry enough weight to ‘ascend the throne’. It
appears, then, that the rhetoric employed by discourse scholars is characterized by a ‘molar
segmented line’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 217). This line makes a distinction between,
among other things, proper research (i.e. discourse analysis) and secondary, naïve or simply
moronic research (i.e. the mainstream). It must further be emphasized that this opposition is quite
obviously based on the assumption that the mainstream poses a threat to the ostensibly marginal
tradition of discourse analysis (Abrams & Hogg, 2002). For instance, looking at Parker’s (2002)
portrayal of psychology, we hear that ‘(d)iscourse analysis radicalizes the turn to language in
social psychology, but must also attempt to survive in a still powerful traditional climate of
experimentalism in the discipline … This tradition has been divided … between those stubbornly
clinging to orthodox (mainly trivial) experimental studies … or ostensibly more radical
intergroup experimental studies’ (pp. 182 – 183). Besides its downright tendentious tone, what is
particularly conspicuous in Parker’ account is that such rhetorical denunciations of the
mainstream (i.e. experimental studies) retain a certain amount of elusiveness. It is this
elusiveness, however, which makes it possible, first, to condense positivism into an anonymous,
though purportedly homogeneous, collection of qualitatively inferior research endeavors and,
second, to call for the abandonment of a positivist approach to research. Thus, the rhetoric of
‘newness’ and ‘progression’ as well as the hierarchical dichotomy established on the basis of
these attributes are strategic in the sense that the perpetual emphasis on the shortcomings of
positivism or tradition not only aims at uncovering its limitations but, importantly, at bringing
about a larger ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn, 1970) in social science research. It should be mentioned in
passing that certain discourse scholars (and particularly those working under the aegis of
psychology departments) have come to advance an image of research which leaves scarce space
and little sympathy for anything that is not discursive or has not at least taken the ‘linguistic turn’.
Bearing this in mind, it seems all the more important to call for some modesty and aloofness.
Abrams and Hogg’s (2002) are certainly justified in claiming that discursive practices, though a
central aspect of human conduct, should not be aggrandized to the point of saying that ‘all
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reproductive practices are discursive’ (p. 174). Therefore, while discourse analysis is imaginable
as a ‘powerful addition’ to the available stock of analytic procedures, it can hardly be seen as the
only path of research. As eloquently expressed by Abrams and Hogg, ‘(w)e agree that the
theoretical and methodological developments within discourse analysis are valuable for
understanding society, but see no reason to jettison the whole of social psychology [or social
science quite generally] on that account’ (p. 179).
We have now presented discourse analysis in the wider context of its pretension to power
and shown, in line with Law (2004), the urgency of the need to practice methods without an
accompanying claim for (overall) validity. However, there is more to the story than that. The
point we will now address is that discourse analysis is not only characterized by a ‘will to power’
but that it operates upon an intriguingly stable code of argumentation. In the following paragraph
it will thus be brought to light that the field of discourse analysis shows a considerable amount of
overlap with regard to both the wording and structure of its arguments and that it has come to
cultivate what we would like to coin ‘identical repetition’ in an astoundingly large number of
different works and contributions.
Interlude II: Identical Repetition
… nothing dulls the mind as thoroughly as hearing familiar words and slogans. (Feyerabend,
1975, p. xiv)
Our current tiredness results from the invention of the same and from the possible, from the
invention that is always possible. (Derrida, 1992b, p. 341)
It must be acknowledged that discourse analysis and discourse theory have provided the social
sciences with a worthwhile and, to use the field’s own jargon, ‘radical new perspective’ (Potter &
Wetherell, 2001, p. 198) for inquiring and understanding language, communication, speech and
so forth. Despite this ‘radical new perspective’, it needs to be emphasized that the field
(particularly the branch that has emerged from social psychology; cf. Parker, 1992; 2002; Potter,
Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002) is now marked by a large amount of what we call ‘identical
repetition’ (Cunningham, 2005), that is, the kind of repetition that reduces differences in terms of
logical coherence and stylistic expression to a minimum. Wetherell, Taylor and Yates (2001), for
387
example, argued that (psychological) discourse analysis is developed further by researchers who
add to and extend its very boundaries.
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In contrast to this view, we argue that far from revealing
variability and innovation, the rhetorical strategies expressed in texts on discourse analysis as
well as texts which delineate discourse analysis as a method are marked by an amazing degree of
stability and consistency. What is important, first of all, is that the caricature of positivism, as
explained above, not only represents a forceful rhetoric but also a habitually and relentlessly re-
performed canon which aspires to depict or rather establish discourse analysis as a superior
method. When reflecting on the plethora of texts on discourse analysis emerging from a wide
variety of different disciplines, one gains the impression that it is standard practice to begin a text
on discourse analysis by highlighting the backwardness and deficient status of positivist research.
What happens as a result of the continuous repetition of such statements is that the superiority of
discourse analytic methodology is increasingly reified and thus rendered into a commonplace
which readers (and notably nascent scholars) then take for granted. It is important to notice,
however, that ‘identical repetition’ is a feature which cannot only be detected in the introductory
part of method texts. Instead, identical repetition is an issue that pervades such texts as a whole.
That is to say that whereas the introductory part more often than not makes use of an alarmist
discourse – proclaiming that mainstream research practices and academic tradition at large is in
crisis which in turn can or must be tackled by discourse analysis (cf. above) – , the middle body
of those same texts provides little (if any) illustrations as to how discourse analysis actually
works. Though the middle part of such texts remains rather elusive, they arguably act as a bridge
between the crisis evoked at the beginning and the solution presented at the end. Therefore,
whereas the middle part, the part which is conventionally reserved for illustrating how discourse
analysis works (or should be conducted) becomes almost invisible (or at least secondary
compared with the expansiveness of the alarmist discourse with which these texts are opened), it
is again the last part which makes use of a celebratory, assertive and immodest tone. Somewhat in
opposition to the darkish rhetoric of the opening section, the closing part conveys a more
conciliatory tone that heralds the catharsis of the initial crisis. The conspicuous feature of this
tripartite structure is that it inverts conventional dramaturgy: the climax comes at the beginning
and the end of the plot, whereas the middle part contents itself with a rather demurring tone and a
flippantly hasty advancement. Yet, bearing in mind what psychologists say about the ‘primacy’
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Note that this claim by Wetherell et al. relates to theoretical, methodological alterations being effectuated by
scholars using and applying discourse analysis.
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and ‘recency effect’ (cf. Stroebe et al., 2001), namely that people have a strong propensity to
remember best the beginnings and endings of messages, it becomes clear that this dramaturgy is
well chosen since it ‘exploits’ the readers’ memory capacities locating the ideological message
within these two spaces. Notwithstanding their cunningness, we might like to question whether
these kinds of texts produce any effect other than telling the nascent scholar (or whoever finds
pleasure in reading those texts) that discourse analysis is a good thing to pursue. Although we
will talk a bit more on the promise of method textbooks further down, we can already say on the
basis of our inquiry that the rhetorical delineation and elevation of discourse analysis seems to be
based on a system incorporating a three-part dramaturgy: alarmist discourse at the outset, scarce
illustration of discourse analytic procedures in the middle and, finally, a clause of redemption,
that is, a catharsis which summarizes and underscores the tenets of the discourse analytic scheme
and thus ostensibly puts the crisis to rest. This sort of textual structure, as we discussed, is
naturalized through identical repetition up to the point where it is no longer discernable as a
rhetorical strategy. Bearing in mind that those texts give the scholar little indication of how
discourse analysis works and even less scope for conducting his or her own discourse analysis,
they are on the other hand remarkably successful in fortifying the gloss of the discursive tradition.
Given the dissemination of this identical textual structure across a variety of scholarly
disciplines, it appears that the discursive camp has created a pattern of linguistic behavior which
the following generation will be tempted to adopt. The important point here is that the
prominence and high status of discourse analysis has not emerged in a ‘natural way’ or (only) by
way of its analytic and paradigmatic superiority but, instead, as a result of the in some ways
logical effect of an utterly cunning and effective rhetoric. There is thus a parallel with Feyerabend
(1975) who contended elsewhere that where ‘arguments do seem to have an effect, this is more
often due to their physical repetition than to their semantic content’ (p. 15; emphasis in original).
Accordingly, it is precisely on the basis of the recognition of the rhetorical device of mimicry and
identical repetition that we can identify a difficulty or a sort of dysfunction which needs to be
subjected to close scrutiny. Expressing the state of affairs with the words of Deleuze (1995),
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we could claim that the protagonists of discourse analysis are conceivable as ‘imitators [who]
imitate one another, and that’s how they proliferate and give the impression that they’re
improving on their model, because they know how it’s done, they know the answers’ (p. 128).
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Deleuze was, of course, not addressing discourse analysis but talking about the crisis in contemporary literature.
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While identical repetition quite clearly serves the function of routinizing and standardizing the
way in which discourse analysis is presented, it must be emphasized that the higher the degree of
standardization becomes the more the underlying rhetorical conventions are taken for granted.
Given this function, identical repetition reaches a point where it becomes inconceivable that the
rigid rhetoric of crises and catharsis might in actual fact be a social creation and, by implication,
that discourse analysis could be presented and even practiced in a different manner. Mimicry or
identical repetition can thus be seen as strategic devices which conceal the fact that prevailing
conventions are not ‘carved out of stone’, so to speak, and that prevailing discursive practices are
most clearly linked to the exercise of power (though not in a sovereign sense; cf. Chapters 3 & 6).
It could be argued, therefore, that the repetition of discursive practices is meticulously controlled
by social procedures of prohibition (Foucault, 1981) through, for instance, journal reviews,
publishing houses, conferences and PhD gatherings (cf. Potter, Edwards & Ashmore, 2002).
Since the publishing machine and its restrictive regulative will be discussed further down, it will
suffice to say here that the value of repetition is revealed in its persuasive power: it convinces the
reader that discourse analysis is a worthwhile project which is even granted a privileged position
in the political economy of method. The essential point we are leading up to is that we must
become aware that identical repetition is a social construct and that the field of discourse analysis
by no means has to re-perform its ostensible radicalness, newness and superiority over and over
again. Instead, it could proceed in a more affirmative fashion. Indeed, invention is needed in view
of the current situation. It is Derrida (1992b) who expressed the connection between repetition
and invention with particular eloquence: ‘(i)nvention begins by being susceptible to repetition,
exploitation, reinscription’ (p. 316; emphasis in original). Before adumbrating what an inventive
discourse analysis could look like, it must not be forgotten, however, that discourse analysis is a
forceful institution, i.e. there are relations of power within which it comes into existence and
regulations and practices which sustain its very being (cf. below).
Prevailing introductory texts on discourse analysis, then, provide little help for scholars
endeavoring to carry out a discursive investigation. In addition to that, there is another peculiarity
that becomes apparent, namely that the dramaturgy explained above has become an intrinsic part
of empirical analysis. Being published in books (e.g. Burman & Parker, 1993) and journals (e.g.
Burman, 2005), the ‘war rhetoric’ identified above has crossed over from introductory texts on
method to empirical analysis. It is true that there are noticeable differences between the various
scholarly disciplines, and it would be exaggerated to claim that identical repetition has become
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the hegemonic modus operandi of empirical analysis of discourse. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that the process of identical repetition has gained ground in empirical investigations. Given this
state of affairs, it is necessary, in our assessment, to address those studies which remind us of a
‘copy and paste’ exercise where only the subject matter is changed while the underlying general
line of antagonistic, hyperbolic arguments are left in place. Although one could convincingly
object that the dogma of performativity (which implies that the only stable value in academia is
output; cf. Lyotard, 1984, and also Chapter 1) aids and abets identical repetition, we find that this
is not a good enough counter-argument. Given that what the apparatus of discourse analysis
produces is, contrary to its own assertions, far from novel, revolutionary, and at times not even
especially imaginative, we contend instead that prevailing dramaturgy must be reversed, if not
abandoned altogether. In particular, we would like to see texts that give sufficient attention and
space to concrete textual discursive investigations while at the same time retaining a tone of
modesty and adopting a kind of rhetoric that refrains from the type of expansive claims discussed
above.
As explained above, the process of identical repetition has a propensity to naturalize a
certain image of discourse analysis. Moreover, this process proposes a set of rigid rhetorical
conventions which make it difficult to think that such repetitive texts could be more affirmative in
nature. On the basis of these observations, we would like to use this avowed crisis as a starting
point for addressing the question of how to enliven discourse analysis. Before doing so, however,
the following interlude will show that there are texts ‘out there’ which seek to establish discourse
analysis as a mainly technical endeavor, that is, as a method that provides scholars with an
analytic and intellectual shortcut in their research. What is labeled an ‘automat’ in the following
discussion thus seeks to highlight that the equation of discourse analysis and method rests upon a
set of promises which, in various ways, create the impression that method will relieve the scholar
from the ‘ordeal’ of thinking.
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Interlude III: The Promise of the Automat
… the danger of method is that it gives over to mechanical replacement. (Appelbaum, 1995, p.
89)
… method is not just a more or less complicated set of procedures or rules, but rather a bundled
hinterland. (Law, 2004, p. 45)
It is implied in what has been said before that discourse analysis represents a ‘growth industry’ as
is manifest, for instance, in the ‘veritable explosion’ (Hook, 2001, p. 521) of discourse analytic
practices in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Although it has been
mentioned before that discourse analysis is arguably more than just a method, it sometimes
(particularly in introductions to discourse analysis and general method handbooks) becomes
indistinguishable from simplistic lists of do’s and don’ts (e.g. Parker & Burman, 1993; Hardt-
Mautner, 1995; Richardson, 1996; Antaki et al., 2002). One might conclude that such an appraisal
is unproblematic and that there are even good reasons for it, since method clearly facilitates
research in some ways. However, not everything that looks neat and unpretentious is good per se,
wherefore we shall delve a bit deeper into the issue of method in order to ask whether we should
believe its promises or whether this image has more to do with day-dreaming than serious,
scholarly research. What needs attention in the first place is that most scholars acknowledge that
discourse analysis is not only a method but that it represents a general ‘sensitivity to language’
(Parker, 2000). By implication, we also need to recognize that discourse analysis cannot be
exhaustively characterized, let alone imparted, by a set of rules. However, though many texts
acknowledge that discourse analysis cannot be reduced to method, they often proceed to provide
the kind of recipes which were said to be untenable in the introductions of the same texts. It
would, of course, be preposterous to allege that those people suffer from mental disintegration.
Rather, this rhetorical split is made possible by means of an inserted ‘disclaimer’ (Hewitt &
Stokes, 1975), that is, a verbal device that mitigates or obscures an obvious inconsistency. In
concrete terms, texts which ultimately delineate discourse analysis through a number of ‘steps’
(Parker, 1992) or which limit it to a ‘set of tools’ (Wetherell, Taylor & Yates, 2001) more often
than not initially discuss the irreducibility of discourse analysis to method. To comprehend the
rhetorical function of this inconsistency or paradox, it is helpful to shed some light on particular
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investigations of racist discourse (e.g. Billig, 1991; Wetherell & Potter, 1992) in which the
operation of disclaimers has been thoroughly analyzed. More specifically, it has been shown by
Billig, Wetherell and Potter’s investigations that people tend to present contrary themes within
one interview or conversation which contain, for example, both racist and anti-racist utterances.
The function of disclaimers in relation to racist talk is to disclose one’s awareness of the
inappropriateness of racist statements and, by extension, to immunize the text against imputations
of downright racism. Whereas Billig (2001) has convincingly pointed out that the counter-posing
of contrary themes is particularly effective in the context of ideological messages (such as racist
talk), it is in the context of method that disclaimers appear to be a necessary precondition to avoid
giving any impression of reductionism. Thus it is by clarifying at the outset that discourse
analysis is more than a mere method that scholars create the precondition for introducing a
‘but’
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that subsequently makes possible the description of discourse analysis as a technological
knowledge that still complies with ‘science propre’ (Meier Sørensen, 2003; emphasis in original).
In addition to the fact that disclaimers enable discourse scholars to protect themselves
from potential criticism, it is also worth pointing out that texts incorporating such disclaimers
thrive on a technical understanding of method. This brings us to the point that the equation of
discourse analysis and method, as passed down to us particularly by the second and third
generation of discourse scholars,
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tends to work upon the assumption (or concealed ‘hinterland’;
cf. Law, 2004) that the world is accessible through a set of fairly specific and determinate
processes. The above quote by Appelbaum (1995) to the effect that method tends to encourage
mechanical replacement relates to this view of method. That is, Appelbaum’s notion of
‘mechanical replacement’ can be seen as tantamount to the image of the automat, the machine
that works in a quasi-autonomous manner and thereby renders redundant any deep commitment
or involvement on the part of the researcher. To gain a deeper understanding of the prominence of
this interpretation, which is not least reflected through the bestselling status of method books, it is
helpful to understand that the idea of method is invariably intertwined with the expectation of
rigor, precision, certainty or even redemption, that is, a set of (untenable) promises which
predicate that one will be enabled to master one’s subject matter of research through a series of
(however elusive) recipes. In as much as the image of discourse analysis as method rests on this
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Cf. Billig (1988) or van Dijk (1988) for an extended elaboration on the rhetorical function of ‘but’.
126
In contrast, the founding fathers of discourse analysis were predominantly occupied with conducting analysis or,
more precisely, with deliberating about the ontological and epistemological particularities of discourse.
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set of promises, it can be understood as a ‘moral discourse’ (Rehn, 2002, p. 44) which, by turning
the process of research into a rather easy endeavor, satisfies scholars’ ‘craving for intellectual
security in the form of clarity’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 18). Arguing along the same lines, Law
(2004), who ridiculed the promise of ‘method talk’ in the social sciences, has shown that recipe-
style accounts give rise to the hope of guiding ‘us more or less quickly and securely to our
destination’ (p. 10) in that they function ‘as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible
way with reality’ (p. 11). Following this train of thought, it appears that method works as a ‘fig
leaf’ because it suggests that one is only doing fine if one strictly adheres to the proper
conventions. To push the argument even further, imageries of discourse analysis as method seem
to thrive on the somewhat, psycho-analytically speaking, ‘anal’ desire for control in as much as
scholars seem to find pleasure in ostensible containment. That is to say, the closed body of
method books on discourse analysis gives rise to ‘enjoyment’ through its allegedly programmatic
perfection (first this, then that … and Bob’s your uncle) and the avowed possibility of simple
replication (which is ostensibly made possible by presenting method as a transcendental form of
knowledge; cf. above), so much so that fidelity becomes a viable option.
Having claimed that method works to safeguard the analyst (Abrams & Hogg, 2002), at
least temporarily, we would now like to draw an allegoric comparison with Monty Python’s
famous ‘The Meaning of Life’. Arguably, this comparison is overstretched and it might even be
objected that such a juxtaposition is completely unjust(ifiable). However, given that the present
interlude has no intention of obscuring its polemic energy, the sequence below illustrates how the
presentation of discourse analysis as method works by virtue of sustaining a strong focus on its
technicalities. By the same token, it distracts from the fact that the automat is not in itself able to
put forward any ready-made analysis, let alone solution. To receive a fair idea of the cheerfulness
inherent in the idea of the automat the equivalent of which is the machine that goes ‘ping’ in
Monty Python’s ‘Miracle of Birth’ and also to provide some entertainment, a lengthy excerpt is to
follow.
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MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE (1983)
Part I: The Miracle of Birth
OBSTETRICIAN: So, it’s a bit bare in here today, isn’t it?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Yes.
OBSTETRICIAN: Yes. More apparatus, please, nurse: the E.E.G., the B.P.
monitor, and the A.V.V.
NURSE #1: Yes. Certainly, Doctor.
DOCTOR SPENSER: And, uh, get the machine that goes ‘ping’.
OBSTETRICIAN: And get the most expensive machines, in case the administrator
comes.
[clunk]
[exciting music]
That’s it. Bring in the other machines. Right over here.
DOCTOR SPENSER: [whistling]
OBSTETRICIAN: That’s it. Just behind me.
[music stops]
Lovely. Lovely. Jolly good. That’s better. That’s much, much better.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Yeahhh, that’s more like it.
OBSTETRICIAN: Eehhh. Still something missing, though.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Hm?
OBSTETRICIAN: Hmmm. Mmmmm.
[snap]
OBSTETRICIAN and DOCTOR SPENSER: Patient!
OBSTETRICIAN: Yes.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Where’s the patient?
OBSTETRICIAN: Anyone seen the patient?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Patient?
NURSE #1: Aah! Here she is.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Bring it over here.
[clank]
Mind the machines!
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NURSE #1: Sorry, Doctor Spenser.
OBSTETRICIAN: Come along!
DOCTOR SPENSER: Come along.
NURSE #1: Jump up there. Up!
MRS. MOORE: Ehh.
OBSTETRICIAN: Hallo. Now, don’t you worry.
DOCTOR SPENSER: We’ll soon have you cured.
OBSTETRICIAN: Leave it all to us. You’ll never know what hit you.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Good-bye!
OBSTETRICIAN: Good-bye.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Drips up!
OBSTETRICIAN: Injections!
DOCTOR SPENSER: Can I put the tube in the baby’s head?
OBSTETRICIAN: Only if I can do the episiotomy.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Okay.
OBSTETRICIAN: Okay. Uh, legs up! Doctor, come in. Come on in, all of you.
That’s it. Jolly good.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Come along.
OBSTETRICIAN: Come along. Spread round there. Uh, who are you?
MR. MOORE: I’m the husband.
OBSTETRICIAN: I’m sorry. Only people involved are allowed in here. All
right.
MRS. MOORE: What do I do?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Mhm. Yes?
MRS. MOORE: What do I do?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Nothing, dear. You’re not qualified!
OBSTETRICIAN: Leave it to us!
MRS. MOORE: What’s that for?
OBSTETRICIAN: That's the machine that goes ‘ping’.
[ping]
You see? That means your baby is still alive!
DOCTOR SPENSER: And that’s the most expensive machine in the whole hospital!
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OBSTETRICIAN: Yes, it cost over three quarters of a million pounds.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Aren’t you lucky?!
NURSE #2: The administrator is here, doctor.
OBSTETRICIAN: Switch everything on!
[exciting music]
[ping]
MR. PYCROFT: Morning, gentlemen.
RANDOM: Morning.
MR. PYCROFT: Morning, gentlemen.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Morning!
OBSTETRICIAN: Morning, Mr. Pycroft.
DOCTOR SPENSER: Morning, Mr. Pycroft.
MR. PYCROFT: Oh, very impressive. Very impressive. And what are you doing
this morning?
[music stops]
OBSTETRICIAN: It’s a birth.
MR. PYCROFT: Aahh. What sort of thing is that?
DOCTOR SPENSER: Well, that’s when we take a new baby out of a lady’s tummy.
MR. PYCROFT: Wonderful what we can do nowadays.
[ping]
Aah! I see you have the machine that goes ‘ping’. This is my favourite.
You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way,
it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.
[applause]
Thank you. Thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
Bearing in mind that the above extract has been chosen to extend or express in extremis how
discourse analysis is enamored with technicality, it is beyond doubt that such a simile cannot do
full justice to the complexities and equivocality of discourse analysis. Nevertheless, the excerpt
from Monty Python’s ‘The Miracle of Birth’ in our view aptly captures the cunningness of the
field’s celebratory tone. As revealed in the exchange between the different doctors, the focus of
their discussion rests on the machine, its expensiveness and inherent (though elusive) potential.
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Celebrating the machine that goes ping (‘Lovely. Lovely. Jolly good.’), the doctor even overlooks
the patient whereas Mr. Pycroft (the hospital administrator) who joins the gathering a bit later
discloses that he is actually uninformed of the task at hand (‘And what are you doing this
morning?’). As tangentially discussed in the first two interludes, ‘celebrating’ discourse analysis
directs attention away from the actual analysis or story. As a result, ‘method talk’ is of little help
when it comes to giving instructions on how to actually carry out a particular discourse analysis.
However impressive a given automat (or the machine that goes ‘ping’) may seem, we must
remain sensitive to the fact that any over-reliance on method leads to an empty enterprise or, to
put it bluntly, a ‘self-impoverished con game’ (Simpkins, 1995). Addressing those who intend to
embark on discursive investigations themselves, we must emphasize that the mere celebration of
the ‘machine that goes ping’ may not get them very far.
In summary, depictions of discourse analysis as method work on behalf or, rather, give
rise to deliberate absences which ultimately create the impression that one is warranted a safe seat
in academia. Granted, if we refrained from doubting that method in no way secures a ‘healthy
research life’ (Law, 2004), we could leave it at that and turn to some other issue. However, this
option does not appear appealing enough to us. We therefore prefer to reiterate that simply
making a connection between discourse analysis and method involves some risks. For this reason,
we insist on addressing method as a problem rather than a solution. In particular, whereas
‘recipes’ of discourse analysis are undoubtedly useful in as much as they convey a sense of
assurance and temporary serenity, they also pretend that one will be able to produce enthralling
‘results’. The present investigation thus aims to show that method, in its canonical interpretation,
is only partly attuned to the production of ‘writerly’ texts (Barthes, 1974; cf. below). On the basis
of the above explanations, we will now illustrate that any prolonged quest for the proper
‘automat’ is not only an arduous task but that it is simply misleading, since it ignores, or, worse
still, renders invisible that thorough discourse analysis is always contingent on creativity and, as
will be discussed further down, on reading.
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Interlude IV: Blindfold Method
… there is no method … there is yourself, and you are highly idiosyncratic. (Salusinszky, 1987, p.
67)
… each one is imbued with a quality of uniqueness, of here-and-nowness, while at the same time
owing that quality to the cultural and linguistic crossroads that constitute it … (Derrida,
1992, p. 370)
Writing is irresponsible, perhaps because it flies inevitably towards the multiple rather than
homing in on the one (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 8)
Regarding the field of discursive psychology, which is the underlying topic of the ensuing
section, it has been Parker (2000) in particular who claimed that ‘researchers new to discourse
analysis often face problems because many ‘introductions to discourse analysis’ describe
discourse only from a limited linguistic or sociological point of view.’ Even though it is beyond
question that Parker’s appraisal is well articulated, it seems reasonable to add that the confusion
of ‘researchers new to discourse analysis’ is not only due to the theoretical omissions in the
introductory texts but, as implied in our previous elaborations, also the result of the
transformation of discourse analysis into a prescriptive code. To further deepen this argument we
shall now turn our attention to a particularly insightful book in which a collective of researchers
has been ‘invited to analyze the same textual data’ (van de Berg et al., 2003b, p. 6). Having
brought together a group of scholars consisting of conversation analysts, ethnomethodologists,
cognitive linguists, Goffmanians, critical sociolinguists, discursive psychologists and
Foucauldians (cf. p. 2) to analyze the transcripts of three research interviews, the identified
objective of the book was to ‘facilitate the comparison of different approaches to discourse
analysis’ (p. 7). The editors contended that this ‘exercise’ was valuable in terms of comparing
‘different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches’ and for enabling ‘dialogue and
communication’ (p. 2) between these different perspectives. Although we have no problem in
conceding that the compilation is valuable in as much as it provides a glimpse ‘behind the
curtain’, it must nevertheless be stressed that the book by van de Berg et al. works on the basis of
a fundamental omission, namely that method marks the binding link between the interview
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transcript and the analysis and the overall function of the final text. Although the editors
acknowledge that ‘(t)he analysis of … interviews is seldom straightforward’ (van de Berg, 2003b,
p. 7), it is worth pointing out that this ‘challenge’, as they call it, cannot be reduced to
methodological distinctiveness and differences. Given, for instance, the limitless possibilities of
data selection and omission, and textual structuring and phrasing – i.e. the ‘violent taming’ of text
– , it is intuitively compelling that writing is at least partly idiosyncratic or, to use Lyotard’s word
(cf. above quote), ‘irresponsible’. While the notion of ‘idiosyncrasy’ as advanced by Salusinszky
(1987) quite clearly pinpoints the problematic nature of method fetishism, this is, of course, not to
be mistaken as an awkward attempt of re-inaugurating the authentic author, who we believe to be
‘dead’ (Barthes, 1977; cf. also Chapter 5). Rather, the problem with such approaches is that they
try to relate differences in analysis and texts to method and methodology in a more or less linear
manner while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the, to use a strong word, ‘mannerisms’
inherent in the singularity of writing.
Although it must remain clear that the possibilities of speaking, thinking and writing are
limited by commonsense or lived ideology (Billig et al., 1988), we would like to posit here that
since research is always preoccupied with re-working and re-bundling its material and notably its
texts, method textbooks in particular seem unable to account for creative and idiosyncratic
processes as well as for the ‘analyst’s intuitions’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002), even
though such intuitions are part and parcel of every discourse analysis. Moreover, whereas
precision (of method) raises the expectation that discourse analysis will enable the scholar to
move towards the hidden nucleus at the ‘heart of signification’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 67), it must
remain clear that however meticulously a particular work is crafted, alternative interpretations or
‘findings’ are always imaginable. While we contend that the infinite possibility of reading and
writing does not pose a problem here, this shows us that discourse analysis cannot be precise and
must not even try to be so because such intended precision only obscures the space creativity
occupies in the process of interpretation and writing (Abrams & Hogg, 2002). Since it has been
asserted that this essay is riddled with its own idiosyncrasies, the issue of idiosyncrasies in
general needs to be reflected as a pivotal aspect of the argument being pursued here. In particular,
idiosyncrasies – being of necessity excluded from discussions on method since they do not lend
themselves to the format of repeatable rules – must no longer be ignored or treated as a threat to
the certainty of the avowed rigor and precision of the discourse analytic method. Instead, they
should be hailed as the binding link between the scientific method and artful practice. To put
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some flesh on the skeleton of this assertion, we will give two brief illustrations, one more
proximal and the other more distal to discourse analysis.
It is beyond question that the field of discourse analysis is deeply ‘indebted’ to the
arguably insightful and meticulous works of Michel Foucault. What is noteworthy, and most
important for the argument at hand, is that Foucault never formulated a strict set of rules for
analyzing discourse (Berard, 1999). It appears, however, that this task has been taken on all the
more willingly by the innumerable epigones that succeeded the ‘grand master’.
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Whereas there
are clear indications that Foucault inspired innumerable copycats who were eager to standardize
his at times opaque analytic procedures, they seemed only partially successful in producing texts
that can match up or even come close to their model. Although the issue of style will be treated
more thoroughly further down, this nevertheless seems a good moment to quote a passage from
the work of a candid admirer of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1995). Commenting on Foucault’s
work, Deleuze dubbed him a ‘great stylist’ and argued that Foucault’s ‘(c)oncepts take on with
him a rhythmic quality, or as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of
his books, a contrapuntal one. His syntax [i.e. style] builds up the shimmerings and scintillations
of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding up and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of
its utterances’ (p. 101). Although Deleuze’s affectionate reflection of Foucault’s style does not
seem to require further commentary (since there is little to be added), it is useful in the context of
the present argument, since it exemplifies most clearly that the notion of ‘Foucauldian discourse
analysis’ (Diaz-Bone, 2003) might be a misleading denotation, at least to the extent that one is led
to believe that Foucault’s work or syntax lends itself to simple duplication. This said, we do not
deny that there are writings that have borrowed and appropriated Foucault’s legacy in an
inspiring way so as to produce novel insights and understandings (e.g. Said, 1978; Ferguson,
1990; du Gay, 1996; Rose, 1999). Notwithstanding this brief and selective list of exemplary
Foucault scholars, it is nevertheless conceivable that their investigations are persuasive not
because they rely on some identifiable ‘golden standard’ but because they carry the work of
Foucault to novel grounds or territories where they subject it to a different modus operandi.
Another example – though, as mentioned above, one less directly connected with
discourse analysis – which seems recommendable for exemplifying the futility and inadequacy of
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On the subject of Foucault’s disciples, Fuller (2005) stated: ‘I have no problem with Foucault … , only with [his]
epigones, clones and affiliated drones’ (p. 69). The problem Fuller identified with regard to the misrepresentation of
Foucault’s work is that ‘(o)nce you’ve learned to think like … Michel Foucault … , you never need to think for
yourself again’ (p. 68).
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method leads us to Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘deconstruction’.
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Arguably one of the best
known circumscriptions of deconstruction appears in an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine
and Guy Scarpetta where Derrida (1981) delineated, in a surprisingly straightforward way, that
‘in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-
à-vis, but a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other … or has the upper hand.
To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment’ (p. 41;
emphasis in original). Although Derrida subsequently emphasized in the same interview that
deconstruction is not a means for ‘neutralizing’ hierarchical oppositions and although he
repeatedly pointed out that deconstruction invites no easy solutions and that deconstruction is not
a simple ‘this, and then that’, it is undeniable that deconstruction has invaded everyday life as is
shown not least in the way the concept is used, not to say abused, in newspaper reviews and at
dinner parties. In the context of academia, deconstruction has come to dominate innumerable
scientific publications and PhD theses, and it is conspicuous that many of these texts have
adopted deconstruction as a method that can be applied in a more or less convenient, linear way.
Given this state of affairs, it is noteworthy that Derrida, in many of his texts and interviews,
resisted the demand for a definition of deconstruction.
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Moreover, he was both persistent and
unyielding in pointing out that any attempt at generating a fixed meaning would run counter to
the project of deconstruction as it would imply that it contained an identifiable essence, a kernel
that makes deconstruction amenable to the ‘respectful doubling of commentary’ (Derrida, 1976,
p. 158). Norris (1982) pointed at the very centre of this fallacy when he mentioned that ‘(t)o
present deconstruction as if it were a method, a system or a settled body of ideas would be to
falsify its nature and lay oneself open to charges of reductive misunderstanding’ (p. 1). Taken
together, deconstruction, though appealing to ‘mechanical precision and methodological
repeatability’ (Attridge, 1992, p. 21), cannot and must not be perceived as a method because it
lacks the possibility of being repeated irrespective of the particular context in which it is practiced
and the specific text it seeks to address. This argument could be extended to the point that
deconstruction is not even a model for analysis since analysis always pertains to reduction, an
activity which is clearly antithetical to Derrida’s ‘double readings’ (Critchley, 1999) which
always retained a sense of ambiguity, plurality, and complexity. However, we would like to
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That said, it must not be forgotten that Derrida’s thoughts on language and meaning had and still have a
considerable influence on discourse analysis (e.g. Schapiro, 2001; Potter, Edwards & Ashmore, 2002).
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It must be emphasized that ‘Positions’ (1981) is of the rare cases where Derrida came close to a temporary
stabilization of the term; at least that is how this text has often been perceived.
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pursue the arguments presented in this essay in a different direction. Despite the existence of a
surfeit of accounts which are admittedly insightful and which bring the reader close(r) to
Derrida’s utterly demanding deconstructive readings (e.g. Jones, 2003; 2004b), it must be
recognized that the sheer complexity of Derrida’s artful interweaving and (re)alignment of texts
and intertexts, his inimitable turns, hesitations and unexpected ‘exhalations’ all evade the
possibility of imposing the fixed strictures of method. Jones (2004b) convincingly warned that
accounts which conceptualize deconstruction exclusively through a series of steps which must be
followed if a piece of good research is to be produced fail to ‘take into account the
epistemological, ontological, political and ethical aspect of deconstruction’ (p. 41). We would
add that Derrida’s meticulous, artful, and infinitely sensitive and intimate texts cannot possibly be
captured and prescribed through method, through the ‘robot’ which conveys the promise of
replicating the ‘grand seigneur’ in a time and energy-saving manner.
Going back to discourse analysis after a brief digression on Foucault and Derrida, it must
be borne in mind that a book such as that put forward by van de Berg and colleagues (2003)
which compares the analysis of the same text by different researchers (cf. above) is virtually
incapable of demonstrating how a text comes into being, let alone the system whereby it conveys
its different layers of meaning. Van de Berg’s study is even more unsuitable for providing a
‘machine’, an automat for copying the ‘masters’. Since ‘reflection’ is a term that seems quasi
annexed by qualitative researchers (cf. also Chapter 5), it becomes clear that reflection and
reflexivity in the field of discourse analysis often goes no further than saying that writing is not a
‘mop-up activity’ (van Maanen, 1995) or that nobody can ‘tell us how to write a paper that others
will find interesting’ (Barley, 2006, p. 16). However, given that every copy or identical repetition
undoubtedly loses some of the original’s initial force, it can be asserted that conceiving of
discourse analysis as method leads to a general rarefaction or thinning of the potential
expressiveness of discourse analysis.
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What then is the value of construing discourse analysis as
method, or is there any at all? Departing from the current practice of discourse analysis (rather
than from what discourse analysis could become, since this is yet to happen), it is Roth (2005)
who has put forward the most compelling demonstration that method books only work for those
who have already acquired a certain proficiency in carrying out this sort of research. In line with
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The observation that discourse analysis is thinning out in terms of its expressiveness is my own conclusion. It is,
however, indebted to the comparisons between texts put forward by the founding fathers and mothers of discourse
analysis and those published by subsequent scholars.
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our own understanding, Roth has objected that what makes it impossible to translate method into
actual research is that method textbooks, despite their avowed ‘hands-on’ and ‘real-life’
significance, tend to ignore the complexity of research and, most importantly, to obscure the fact
that doing research presupposes a ‘practical understanding of the doing’. Method books,
following Roth, should therefore carry a sticker as the one shown below in order to warn junior
researchers that they should be wary of expecting anything of worth.
Irrespective of the observation that method textbooks on discourse analysis seem to sell well (and
we do not begrudge the success to either the authors or the publishing houses), the previous
interludes have tried to show that method, while seeking to make us believe that it brings us
‘closer’ to (the truth of) our subject matter (cf. Parker, 2002d), tends to thwart the aesthetic appeal
of research, its readability and, to venture even further, its ‘sublime’ character. Having
adumbrated the limits of method, the following elaborations will point at some of the more
striking peculiarities in the language use of discourse scholars, before talking about and for the
future of discourse analysis. To show these peculiarities, the following reading of discourse
analysis takes the liberty of analyzing the subject by paying attention to the language use of the
discursive camp with the risk of ‘contaminating’ the textual purism
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identified within discourse
analysis. Ultimately reaching the conclusion that discourse analysis has developed a language that
is detrimental to the study of ephemeral phenomena and unsuitable to reflect the undecidability of
meaning, we shall embark upon a theoretical reflection on selected works of Barthes, Lyotard,
Deleuze and others. The aim of this reflection is, first, to challenge discourse analysts’
‘minimalist desideratum’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxi) of writing and, second, to propose a tradition of
writing which does not try to bring style to zero through a language that sidesteps creative
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The notion of ‘textual purism’ relates to Lyotard’s (1988) assertion that philosophy retains a ‘naïve ideal’ in as
much as it seeks to attain a ‘zero degree style’ (cf. Grant, 1993).
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enunciation (e.g. neologisms, metaphors, allegories, etc.), but which rather relies on and
advocates the positive force of intensity and perpetual displacement of meaning.
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A Second Territory: Hardened Language … and some ‘Lines of Flight’
We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge
from our ignorance and transforms one into the other. Only in this manner are we
resolved to write. (Deleuze, 1994, p. xx)
The investigation so far has tried to create an imagery in which the discursive camp is portrayed
as a ‘machinery of representation’ (Wetherell, 2001) that has established and come to hinge on a
rigid set of conventions and a dramaturgy that comes to the forefront not only in texts that depict
discourse analysis as method (e.g. Wetherell et al., 2001) but equally so in empirical
investigations of conversation, language use, speech, etc. What has been taken as a point worth
problematizing, and as a point which calls for prospective invention (Derrida, 1992b), has been
related to those accounts which try to promote discourse analysis as a superior methodological
and epistemological approach by virtue of its promise that it can provide the golden standards and
even shortcuts for good research. In contrast, the following section deals not so much with the
confusion of discourse analysis with method, but with the particular language use coming to the
fore within empirical discourse analysis. To this end, we will first approach language as an
intrinsically paradoxical instrument so as to show that it is at one and the same time the limit and
possibility of representation. Large parts of the argumentative space will thus be occupied by the
observation that discourse analysis works upon a sort of language that creates the impression of
ostensible accuracy and certainty, and thereby establishes discourse analysis as a means for
‘getting things right’, that is, for capturing the essence of discourse.
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Language and Representation
The operator of disintensification is exclusion: either this, or not-this. Not both. Every concept is
therefore concomitant with negation, exteriorization. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 13)
Through words … we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they
are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. (Nietzsche,
1986, p. 306)
As the above comments should have made clear, the notion of ‘discourse analysis’ is
everything but univocal. Rather, it works as an umbrella term for research conducted in, for
instance, the realm of sociolinguistics, speech act, social psychology and so on (for an
overview cf. van Dijk, 1985). However, what is noteworthy in the first place is that discourse
analysis necessarily causes reduction. That is to say that discourse analysis or the analysis of
interpretive repertoires proceeds by way of abstracting repeatable, ideal-type patterns from
people’s talk, conversations, etc. For instance, Potter, Wetherell, Gill and Edwards (2002)
have circumscribed the analytic reduction of their approach thereby making clear that
‘interpretive repertoires … are abstractions from practices in context’ (p. 165; emphasis in
original). To put this in a slightly different manner, in seeking to highlight repeatable patters,
that is, the ‘sameness’ in the argumentative threads people use in concrete interactions
(Potter & Wetherell, 1987), as well as more abstract (i.e. de-contextualized) forms of
discourse (Parker, 2002c), it becomes clear that discourse analysis in the first instance
stresses the identification of sameness (and only in the second instance differences
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or
expectations) in the language use of the analyzed subjects. Though we would not go as far as
Parker (2002d) who contended that certain forms of discourse analysis (i.e. conversation
analysis) hinge on ‘the fantasy of being able to abstract and replicate behavioral regularities’
(p. 9), it is beyond doubt that discourse analysis necessarily turns a blind eye to the
elusiveness and uniqueness of linguistic patterns or, as Derrida expressed it, ‘the play of the
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Difference and variation is, of course an inherent feature of any analysis of interpretive repertoires. After all, the
analyst is foremost interested in displaying how particular utterances take on and change their function according to a
given speech context (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984). However, this orientation mainly focuses on abstraction since
analysis of interpretive repertoires always proceeds by highlighting variation against the background of repeatable
patterns.
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structure’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 352; emphasis in original) contained in people’s argumentative
plotting or discourse. With this in mind, in becomes arguable that certain forms of discourse
analysis operate on the premise of an identifiable centre in which play is reduced to a
minimum. However, this suppression of the play of the structure needs to be understood as
an inevitable effect of analytic abstraction which in turn increases the intelligibility and
hence readability of discourse analysis since its effect is that of ‘reassuring certitude’
(Derrida, 2002; cf. also above). This sort of analytic reduction also obscures the fact that the
boundaries between and within repertoires are in fact permeable and that discourse,
conversation, talk, etc. are always more elusive, paradoxical and ephemeral than is suggested
in (most) discursive investigations (cf. Chapter 3). Although there are notable accounts
which have dealt with the danger of presenting discourse (and interpretive repertoires) as an
‘unrealistically closed system’ (Potter, Wetherell, Gill & Edwards, 2002, p. 170), i.e. a quasi-
autonomous entity, it must remain clear that the suitability of such argumentative
‘concessions’ is rather limited when it comes to overcoming the reductionism, not to say
simplification, entailed in discourse analysis.
It has, then, been shown (in connection with Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’; cf. above)
that analysis always entails reduction. In consequence, the focus of the present argument is
not so much on the analytic and theoretical disintensification of difference and play inherent
in discourse analysis but, instead, on the kind of reduction and disintensification effectuated
by the language use of discourse analysis. Hence, to gain a sense of the difference between
the analytic reduction introduced before and the language-based reduction of discourse
analysis we will investigate below, we first need to illuminate the conditions under which
language renders ‘différance’ invisible or absent and, in extremis, establishes a mimetic view
of reality, that is, a view in which language is said to correspond with reality. In order to
show this difference between analytic and linguistic reduction, we shall argue that language,
by establishing a distinction between ‘this and not-this’ (Lyotard, 1993), has an inbuilt
propensity to define, structure and, by implication, control meaning. One of Lyotard’s main
arguments was that language, in its aspiration to represent reality in a precise manner,
mediates an ostensibly given truth and, on account thereof, tends to immobilize the subject
with which it deals. A similar argument is advanced by Bogue (2005) who posited that
‘(l)anguage’s primary function is … to enforce a social order by categorizing, organizing,
structuring and coding the world’ (p. 111). While both Lyotard and Bogue’s assertions imply
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that language necessarily entails reduction, it is important to understand that this tendency is
not evenly spread out, so to speak, and that different languages (or language games) can be
distinguished according to their relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’ (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1986). Conceding that the degree of (de)territorialization of language is a relative
matter, it becomes comprehensible that certain languages more than others channel the
difference or polysemia inherent in signs or, in other words, subordinate difference to
identity and to sameness (McMahon, 2005). This clarification is requisite for the argument at
hand since it reminds us that not all languages demobilize and dampen the energy of writing
and that not all languages transform meaning into an ostensibly stable form, reducing its
‘material puissance, its opacity’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxi).
To give our argument presented so far a proper name, we will henceforth describe the
disintensifying, territorializing language as ‘hardened’. Importantly, this ‘hardened’ language
is in close proximity with Deleuze’ (1994) notion of the ‘dogmatic idea of thought’, that is,
the kind of commonsense thinking which mediates things by means of stable presentations
and representations. It must therefore be borne in mind that one of the central attributes of
‘hardened’ language is its denotative ambition, meaning that it ‘aspires’ to draw a straight
line between the sign and the signified. In other words, hardened language creates the
impression that there is a linear connection between a given word and some avowed external
reality to which the former refers. That is to say that this type of language leaves little, if any,
space for acknowledging the floating and ephemeral nature of meaning. Therefore, what we
are positing here is that hardened language establishes a ‘referential function’, that is, an
‘alliance with truth’ (May, 2005) which has as one of its most noticeable effects that it refers
to something lying outside of the text, i.e. the phenomenal world or reality. In other words, it
presumes to grasp things in their very ‘thisness’ (McMahon, 2005). Unsurprisingly, in this
particular mode of language, a statement is judged according to its correspondence with
truth. As regards the question of what features of hardened language warrant this referential
function, it is first of all helpful to point at the ‘minimalist desideratum’ (Grant, 1993, p. xxi)
of hardened language, a subject that has been discussed most thoroughly in relation to its
ideal of ‘degree zero style’ (Barthes, 1967; Grant, 1993). Although the issue of style and in
particular its ‘zero degree’ materialization will be discussed in more detail further down, we
can state on the basis of our previous elaboration that there are languages which tend to
establish identity (or sameness; cf. Deleuze, 1994), whereas others tend to enable a space for
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difference. Departing from the assumption that these two extremes are part of the same
continuum, it is the former pole and its ideal of identity or stability in particular which
represents the operations of hardened language. It appears, then, that hardened language, as a
result of its avowed neutrality and objectivity, disables polysemia while at the same time
creating the impression of saying, in a matter-of-fact way, how things are.
What, then, makes our thoughts on language significant and pressing for the realm of
discourse analysis? As has been shown, hardened language promotes, by means of
‘colourless writing’ (Barthes, 1976, p. 76), order and thereby establishes a peculiar
‘equation’ between text and reality. On the basis of this insight, we argue that many
discourse analytical texts accommodate, or are at any rate amenable to, this simplistic
convention. To refine this general claim we must point out that the field is characterized by a
general tendency: the more specialized the level of discourse analysis the higher the degree
of hardened language. Although it is beyond question that this detected tendency marks a
gross simplification, we nevertheless feel that a distinction between macro- and micro-
analytic discourse analysis, as suggested by Parker (2002c), is very useful, since it allows us
to see that there are noticeable differences between the language use of Foucault-inspired
works and those studies interested in ‘local conversations’ or ‘language in use’ (including,
for instance, linguistic pragmatics, rhetorical analysis and ethnomethodologically rooted
conversation analysis; cf. Keller, 2005). The difference we are eager to trace here is one
between what we would like to express through the two concepts of ‘journalist genre’ and
‘techno-talk’. Dealing with the two issues in succession, it is first of all noteworthy that the
notion of a ‘journalist genre’, the peculiarity we assign to Foucauldian work, is related to
Barthes’ (1967) contention that journalistic writing is ‘amodal’, meaning that it pertains to
supposedly neutral utterances. The effect of this genre, as briefly alluded to above, is that it
mediates its subject matter through a disengaged and neutral ‘tone’ and, as an effect thereof,
emphasizes the denotative, i.e. factual, aspect of its statements. To put this observation in
another way, the ‘journalist genre’ denotes a code according to which a given utterance must
be interpreted in the way we would read a dictionary: definitional and literal. To challenge
one the most celebrated exponents of contemporary (critical) discursive psychology, Ian
Parker, we would like to make direct reference to Abrams and Hogg (2002) who have argued
that ‘although discourse can be regarded as the social process par excellence, it is portrayed
by Parker as abstracted, reified and unconnected with individual or social psychological
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processes’ (p. 173; emphasis in original). The concern of Abrams and Hogg cannot be
overestimated since it emphasizes that the ‘journalist jargon’ of discourse analysis tends to
perpetuate ‘idealized data’ (Parker, 2002b), that is, to depict discourse as if it had a real
essence and generally treat it as if it were a real thing that is ‘out there’ and that, by
implication, lends itself to proper analysis. To put it bluntly, ‘journalist jargon’ approaches as
closely as possible a ‘type of communication in which nothing is significant except cognitive
[denotative] meaning’ (Leech, 1969, p. 40).
Whereas ‘techno-talk’, the feature we detect in micro-level discourse analysis, also
advocates denotative meaning, it is also characterized by a code of writing or representation
that is even more strained or ‘digital’ (Wilden, 1987) than what is revealed in Foucault-
inspired schemes of analysis. That is, the analytic conventions and representational practices
used in micro-language and micro-conversation analysis are arguably more powerful in
creating the impression that its statements amount to purely literal, factual and universally
valid meanings which are, then, said to be free from ideology or, to use Billig’s (1999)
cogent phrase, ‘rhetorically neutral’. Although we could pursue these deliberations ad
infinitum, it will suffice to say that both micro and macro-level discourse analysis establish a
relationship with truth. This effect is achieved and sustained in particular by discourse
analysis’s propensity to focus on the denotative meaning of statements. Following Barthes’
(1967), we can see that the ‘indicative mood’, which is an inherent feature of both the
‘journalist genre’ and ‘techno-talk’, marks the pivot for the referential function of language.
In terms of the differences between the two genres, it could be argued that Foucauldian
discourse analysis often retains some ‘writerliness’ (Barthes, 1974; cf. below) in that it
enables polysemic connotations by stimulating, if not presupposing, the reader’s imagination
and engagement with the text. In contrast, micro-analytic frames of discourse analysis are
more ‘effective’ in bringing the play of the sign down to zero thereby stressing that only one,
namely the literal meaning, is on offer. To gain an understanding of this referential function
of ‘techno-talk’, it is helpful to turn to Billig (1999) who contended that conversation
analytic studies have established a ‘highly technical vocabulary’ (p. 546). As Billig
eloquently argued, conversation analysis, irrespective of its claims that it studies language ‘in
its own terms’, is written in a specialized discourse that ultimately rests on a ‘realist tale’.
The ‘realist tale’ Billig identified is the direct result of the use of technical terms which give
the impression of describing ‘objective realities in an unproblematic way’ (ibid.). It appears
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that what Billig had in mind while writing about ‘technical terms’ is reasonably close to our
previous notion of ‘techno-talk’. In addition to that, Billig’s cogent treatise is even more
useful to highlight how ‘techno-talk’ makes possible the referential function of conversation
analysis. For this reason, we would like to briefly discuss Billig’s witty mimicry of
conversation analysts. In particular, Billig points out that conversation analysts, by making
repeated use of technical terms, are supposedly able to underscore the neutrality and
rightfulness or, better, truthfulness of their interpretations. After all, they can always ‘point to
a transcribed text and say ‘Look, there is a preference structure’, as surely as a realist can
kick the table as proof of that object’s existence’ (p. 547). Billig’s take on conversation
analysis is truly convincing and we see much merit in his attempt to put the ‘realist tale’ into
perspective by stating: ‘(l)ike all theoretical perspectives, CA [conversation analysis] deploys
terms which might be called ‘foundational’. These are not terms which are linked to specific
pieces of data, but terms which enable the pointing and the linkages to be made’ (p. 548). As
reflected by terms such as ‘natural’, ‘ordinary’, etc., conversation analysis seems to install a
language game which tries to render the constitutive and performative features of writing and
texts in general invisible or which ‘attempts to conceal all traces of itself as a factory’
(Barthes, 1974, p. 244) while simultaneously emphasizing that conversation analysis does
nothing else but present what is ‘de facto’ occurring in people’s conversations.
To summarize the statements on the status quo of discourse analysis, we propose that
both micro and macro-discourse analysis, by way of a language use that purports to denote
how things literally are, treat their subject matter in a way that ignores that all ‘everyday
human activities do not just appear vague and indefinite because we are still as yet ignorant
of their true underlying nature, but that they are really vague’ (Shotter, 1990, p. 9).
Importantly, if we believe Deleuze’s (1994) claim that ‘difference is behind everything, but
behind difference there is nothing’ (p. 57), it becomes conceivable that Shotter’s assertion
that ‘everyday human activities’ are ‘vague’ does not in itself pose a general problem for
discursive investigations. The issue of vagueness, however, becomes a problem as soon as
we are dealing with hardened language or a dogmatic image of thought that leaves no space
for the very recognition of difference. Given our previous elaboration, it is beyond doubt that
neither micro- nor macro-discourse analytic procedures are especially well attuned to
account, by way of their linguistic performances, for the inherent vagueness and difference
of language and conversation. Though Parker (2002b) and Potter, Wetherell, Gill and
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Edwards (2002) have come to accuse each other of reifying discourse,
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and hence of
pretending that discourse is a stable phenomenon, it must be emphasized that neither
tradition, as discussed above, wins the day, since both sides are prone to depict their subject
matter as if it was real. To reiterate our above claim, it is conversation analysis’ ‘highly
technological vocabulary’ (Parker, 2002b), its ‘techno-talk’ as well as discourse analysis’
‘journalistic genre’ in particular that effectuates and sustains the impression of ‘out-
thereness’ (Law, 2004), that is, the metaphysical assumption of a world that seams to turn
‘towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 67).
Hence, notwithstanding the differences between these somewhat artificially separated
‘traditions’ and though we concede that there are types of discourse analysis which would
undoubtedly escape the objections of our critical reflection, we must nevertheless point out
that their common denominator is the establishment of a ‘static complexity’ (Chia, 1998): a
language that dampens the energies of conversations, talk or texts by turning undecidabilities
and difference into stable ‘structures’.
The paradox or irony here is that discourse analysts more often than not argue for the
flux-like features of language as well as its constitutive and performative aspects (cf.
Wetherell, Yates & Taylor, 2001). Nevertheless, their own linguistic performances mostly
have the opposite effect of bolstering the impression that discourse is a definite ‘being’
(Chia, 1996). As the broader ramifications of this paradox will be addressed further down, it
is important to remember that the richness and difference of social reality escapes both the
‘techno-talk’ and ‘journalistic genre’ as discussed above. In every interpretation (of discourse
as elsewhere) there is always some ‘left over’, some excess, something ‘more to our world’
(May, 2005) which remains unrecognized, unaccounted for or deliberately ignored. Law
(2004), who has used the notion of ‘Otherness’ to frame his observation that all methods
hinge on deliberate omissions (i.e. absences), made clear that ‘events and processes are not
simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp [which is the
perspective discourse scholars are keen to promote] … Rather, they are also complex
because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them (p. 6; emphasis in original). It
follows from the explanations above that the types of discourse analysis discussed so far are
mostly ignorant of the complexity of ‘events’ and ‘processes’ and that they establish a
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This accusation entails, on a second level of abstraction, that the two camps have criticized each other for not
being able to account for difference and to give apt recognition to the relational ontology of truth.
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perspective which seems suitable for grasping discourse in its essence. Derrida (1976),
among others, was skeptical of such denotative, quasi or pseudo-precise endeavors since he
saw them, due to their avowed reference to the ‘real world’, as prescribing meaning in an
authoritative way. By implication, any type of hardened language values truth as mimesis.
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As a result, texts are no longer ‘creators’ but ‘transcribers’ which offer, as Derrida (1981) put
it, ‘the presumed possibility of a discourse about what is’ (p. 191). Given that certain
discourse scholars (e.g. Parker, 1989) would probably support Derrida’s claim, it is rather
peculiar that the field has become accustomed to a hardened language and a dogmatic view
of thought whose idea of mimicry or correspondence ‘is profoundly alien to the sense of
writing’ since it seeks to protect writing ‘against its aphoristic energy, and … against
difference in general’ (Derrida, 1976, p. 18). The observation that hardened language
stimulates a mimetic view of representation shall subsequently set in motion a quest for
language practices or, more precisely, a type of language politics that refrains from
concealing, taming or hiding away the energy and difference which are an integral part
resulting from the fundamental undecidability of writing. Before adumbrating what we
would like to coin ‘minor’ discourse analysis, we will, in the next section, investigate what
we conceive of as the pivotal paradox of what we would call ‘major’ discourse analysis: its
split between the constative and the performative aspect of language. On the basis of the
observation that language (as well as interpretation and representation) is simultaneously the
limit and possibility of difference (Lecercle, 2002), we shall ‘exploit’ this claim so as to find
means for emphasizing the possibilities of language over and above its limits.
Against Representation?
Certainties have no style. (Cioran; quoted in Elias, 2003)
The previous discussion of language and the observation of discourse analysts’ propensity to use
a ‘hardened language’ – which pretends to, demurring and in a factual manner, grasp the kernel
of meaning – has shown that the prevailing language conventions (i.e. ‘journalist genre’ and
‘techno talk’) effectuate a disparity between what discourse analysts say about language and how
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Deleuze and Quattari (1987) overtly challenge mimicry by stating that it ‘is a very bad concept, since it relies on
binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature’ (p. 11).
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they actually use it. Highlighting this claim from a slightly different angle, it could be argued that
the field of discourse analysis both establishes and works on behalf of a peculiar paradox, namely
upon a split between content and style, between the constative and performative aspect of
language (Derrida, 1992b). To speak of a crisis here seems justifiable, especially if one takes into
account that discourse scholars perpetually stress that they have actually solved the ‘crisis of
representation’. The notion of crisis, in our assessment, thus needs to be related to the observation
that discourse scholars use language in a way that emphasizes a correspondence with the
phenomenal world. In other words, the point which worries us here is that once we consider the
possibility that language ‘bleeds internally, so that no category is as stable as it appears’ (May,
2005, p. 76), one is called upon using a language that accommodates this element of ‘more than’
without retaining a dogmatic image of thought. To be sure, in using a hardened language, the
discursive camp still seems to be in good company, at least one finds a fair amount of ‘post-’
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scholars who have ostensibly taken the ‘linguistic turn’ whereas still retaining a what we would
label ‘modernist language’ (van Maanen, 1995), a language, as we have discussed, that pretends
that things can be accurately grasped in their ‘thisness’. As Deleuze (1994) reminds us in this
connection, the dogmatic way of thinking is a central feature of our (Western) heritage; it is ‘our’
thought which is traceable back to Aristotle. Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that
the code of hardened language is instilled in all of us (though to various degrees) by the dogmatic
image of thought and its representational view of language. If we follow Deleuze’s musing
further, it becomes arguable that the dogmatic image of thought has a comforting function, since
in as much as it coordinates and ‘manages’ difference, it provides us with a reassuring view of an
ostensibly stable world. Hardened language, then, coordinates difference and thus assures us that
there is a ‘match between what is inside me and what is outside me’ (May, 2005, p. 77). In sum,
the use of hardened language is not particularly new and if taking, for instance, the realm of art to
make our point, it becomes clear that our previous critique of the referential function of hardened
language was already voiced some decades ago. The arguments of, for instance, Sontag (1967)
illustrate our claim. She argued that interpretation ‘is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of
“meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)’ (p.
7). Following Sontag’s provocative and still topical essay, it is beyond doubt that her claims bear
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E.g. post-modern, post-structuralist, post-colonial, etc.
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some resemblance to Lyotard’s (1993) treatise of the disintensifying effect of representation. In
addition, it is implied in Sontag’s critique that the restless search for (proper) meaning, which was
identified above as the main focus of discourse analysis, is conjoined with the dogmatic image of
thought and in particular with its ideal of mimetic correspondence. However, the simple
observation that hardened language or, more precisely, interpretation is not endemic for the field
of discourse analysis is not in itself an augmentation for the latter’s status quo. Setting out for
novel lines of flight, one is – if following Sontag’s treatise of interpretation – temped to conclude
that we might be forced to dismiss representation altogether. Arguably, such a conclusion is
downright rhetorical, and since this essay aims to speak for discourse analysis, it must become
obvious that the detour taken above was necessary to show that certain, though not all, languages
are violent in their supposed inhibition of play. As Lyotard (1993) made clear in this connection,
one always has at one’s disposal at least two choices of writing: the choice between the
‘intelligent sign’ (which emphasizes definitive or, say, denotative meaning) or the ‘tensor sign’
(which allows for plurivocality and for associations with the unpresentable). Since we will pay
more attention to Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ in order to show how language can be used to
create the space for energies and multivoicedness, it suffices to conclude here that the preferred
mode of representation of the discursive camp is ‘intelligent’, meaning that the field’s ‘minimalist
desideratum’ of ‘zero degree style’ demands static and desiccated performances. What needs to
be borne in mind in this context is that discourse analysts are not ignorant of the performative
aspect of language. This becomes apparent not least through statements to the effect that the
‘distinction between ‘the argument’ and the ‘style of its presentation’ (Potter, Edwards &
Ashmore, 2002, p. 76) is somewhat artificial. There is, however, a problem with the kind of
‘commentary’ Potter et al. have put forward: this problem relates not to what the authors say (we
totally agree) but how they say it. In concrete terms, the problem is that in claiming that style and
content invariably go together, the authors still base their claim on a hardened language, a
language which is anything but performative. In other words, it is not enough to claim that one is
aware of the double condition of language by rejecting the dividing line between content and
style because there is always the danger that the representational function of language slips back
into our musing; not through what we have tried to represent, but through the medium through
which we try to represent it. This means that as long as the premise that style and content are
always intermingled is addressed in a rationalistic, that is, constative fashion and not by way of a
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given text’s linguistic performance, it is not possible to overcome the void between content and
style.
This said, we have reached the core of our problem, the bottom of our concern with
discourse analysis’ (ab)use of language. But this is not all. The contention that the realm of
discourse analysis both effectuates and rests upon a split between content and style represents
only a first step towards a new understanding and practice of discourse analysis. In order to be
able to educate the field, conceived of in the sense of ‘pulling out’ (cf. O’Doherty & Jones, 2005),
we would like to transform the insights gained above into a kind of language politics that
deterritorializes the ideal of correspondence of hardened language and substitutes its dogmatic
image of thought with an image of language that is hospitable to difference rather than identity.
Having outlined the trajectory of the ensuing investigation, it is first of all insightful to turn to
Deleuze and Guattari (1986) who, in their reading of Kafka, made clear that in the ‘minor usage
of language’
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there is no strict separation between form and content. Our previous contention
that certain languages are more suitable than others to account for difference and for the
undecidability of social reality shall thus be read as some kind of reassurance and shall support us
in establishing a minor form of discourse analysis. Consequently, our primary concern is to
advocate a use of language that acknowledges the inseparableness of the constative and
performative aspect of language and which takes into account that there are languages which are
sensitive to difference without relapsing into the categories of the dogmatic image of thought and,
importantly, which includes a sense of narrative aesthetics.
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To set in train such a minor
discourse analysis which aspires to bridge the identified separation between content and style and
consequently makes language resonate with the irrecuperable energy inherent in the ‘ontology of
difference’, a ‘third way of writing’ (Barthes, 1967), that is, a writing that attaches greater
importance to value than fact, appears both indispensable and appealing. To this end, we shall
turn to Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’ which in our view is of considerable heuristic
value for making the transition from a hardened to a more fluid or, to use Deleuze’s expression,
‘liquid or gaseous’ writing (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133).
136
The difference between the major and minor use of language, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that the
former pertains to univocality, to an authoritative voice whereas writers making use of minor language try to efface
themselves and articulate collective voices.
137
In ‘Against Interpretation’ Sontag proposed an ‘erotic of art’ which is supposed to replace the ‘hermeneutics of
art’. Chia and Morgan (1996), in responding to Sontag’s proposition, have delineated the commonalities between the
erotic nature of art and postmodern sensibility, as both are regarded as concepts reclaiming sensation at the expense
of interpretation.
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For Libidinal Interpretation
An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a
disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it disregards properties. (Derrida, 1992b, p.
312)
Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid,
geometric. (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133)
Suppose that there is a possibility that there is more to our world or, rather, discourse, than can be
grasped through hardened language. Additionally, suppose that discourse can in no way be
expressed fully using the referential function of major discourse analysis, since it results in a
dogmatic image of thought. And, finally, suppose that it is not identity or sameness which
captures what things are but, instead, that difference marks the ontology of things (Deleuze,
1994). If we are willing to stretch our imagination in this direction, we might come to sense that it
is not necessary to abandon language or representation prematurely (as suggested by the
provocative essay of Sontag; cf. above) but that we must perform some ‘illegality’ (Derrida,
1992b), since this way we can violate given conventions and reach out for a minor use of
language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) which acknowledges that no category is stable or, even
better, ‘that the idea of a “category” does not capture what is going on in language’ (May, 2005,
p. 76). To aid us on our way towards a language that takes into account that there is chaos or
‘noise’ (Serres, 1995) inherent in both the world and language and which, by means of that
acknowledgement, evades the dogmatic image of thought, we are keen to invoke a highly
intensive linguistic performance: Lyotard’s (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’. The work deviates so
greatly from commonsense writing that it effectuates a rupture with the mimetic ideal of hardened
language. To be sure, one should not mistakenly conclude that we want to use ‘Libidinal
Economy’ as a counter example to major discourse analysis in order to create a kind of new
Utopia (capital letter; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) signposting a straight path into the
future (as if there were only one possible future). As this is not our objective, it must remain clear
that what can be gained from Lyotard’s performance in ‘Libidinal Economy’ is ‘un sens
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directionell (mais non directif)’
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(Damisch, 1975, p. 461). This being said, the text of Lyotard,
which is neither a discourse analysis nor an analysis or critique thereof, is employed to give rise
to a kind of writing which achieves a convergence or, dare we say, harmony between its
argument and the medium through which it is expressed. By implication, the following
expositions, examples, demonstrations simultaneously represent the rejection of the canonical
sense of discourse analysis and the advocation, in its place, of a novel, distal use of language
which is characterized by an ‘energizing gusto’ (Simpkins, 1995). This ‘energizing gusto’ thereby
seeks to transgress hardened language’s propensity to project difference onto a flat plane
(Cooper, 1990) and suggests a kind of language that does not ‘only’ talk of ambivalence,
undecidability and intensities but also performs them.
To begin our reflection on ‘Libidinal Economy’, it is first of all worth noting that
Lyotard’s (1993) self-styled ‘book of evilness’ has often been described as inaccessible for the
reason of its at times bewildering combination of styles and tropes. These were said (by
philosophers) to make it appear more like a piece of avant-garde text than a text on/of philosophy.
However, there is more to Lyotard’s writing than just a moment of madness. To gain a sense of
the argument Lyotard pursued, it is first of all worth noting that though he distinguished between
the infinite energy of libidinal intensities and the disintensifying dispositif of representation, he
came to emphasize that these two phenomena, intensity and representation, often coincide. As
Lyotard (1993) claimed in that respect …
… every intensity, scorching or remote, is always this and not-this, not at all through the effect of
castration, of repression, of ambivalence, of tragedy due to the great Zero, but because
intensity pertains to an asynthetic movement, more or less complex, but in any event so
rapid that the surface engendered by it is, at each of its points, at the same time this and
not-this. (pp. 14 – 15; emphasis in original)
Hence, whereas Lyotard’s performance begins by ‘accusing’ representation of taming or
exploiting energies, by means of its distinction between ‘this and not-this’, he also came to clarify
that representation is not per se a bad thing and that there is no reason to favor libidinal intensities
over immobilizing structures (i.e. representation), because intensities are always dependent on
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That is, a sense of direction without being directive.
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systems/representations.
139
As Lyotard suggested, intensities – to become visible, intelligible,
thinkable – must be subjected to representation. The two phenomena must hence not be
conceived as antagonistic forces, but rather as mutually determining ‘partners’. With this in mind,
the problem Lyotard was addressing in ‘Libidinal Economy’ was not the disintensifying effect of
representation in general but the aspiration of certain structures to represent their subject in a
hegemonic way. This point harmonizes well with our previous observation that not all languages
are hardened and that languages (or language games) can be distinguished in terms of their
relative ‘coefficient of deterriorialization’. Be that as it may, for the purpose of the present
argument it is necessary to note that because the only way libidinal energies can exist, that is,
become comprehendible, is within structures of representation, any flight into an ‘extra-
representational’ space would only be of partial value. As Lyotard saw no utility in advocating a
space beyond representation, he turned to the issue of language in order to consider whether
intensities could be embodied by a particular shape, i.e. style (Simpkins, 1995) According to
Lyotard (1993), style was the key for inhibiting or releasing intensities, an opinion which is
expressed most eloquently in the subsequent quote:
The book, through its text, is like the skin of a body … the exclusions of possible syntaxes and
semantics that constitute style produce on the skin of language the same effects of
intensification, of charge and drainage as can be obtained from certain fleshy surfaces
through the austere rigour of an erotic dispositif. (p. 75; emphasis in original)
To put Lyotard’s unique delineation of style in a slightly different way, one is enabled to see
that the exclusion and reduction of style effectuates the impression of ‘austere rigour’ as
already discussed above in relation to hardened language. Given the contingency between
intensities and style, Lyotard came to favor structures which do not (completely) exploit, that
is, stabilize libidinal energies and which instead allow energies to flow, to materialize or,
better, to exceed the ‘intelligent sign’, i.e. denotative meaning. What is noteworthy here is
that Lyotard was keen not only to stress polysemia (i.e. multiple meanings, as suggested by,
for instance, Sontag or Barthes) but to advocate a language that gives rise to the
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Since representation is the medium through which intensities are allowed to materialize.
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unpresentable or ‘intensities in exodus’ (p. 49). As we are reminded by Lyotard, the notion of
intensity comprises not …
… just the wise polysemia found in the most anodyne of statements, it is the incandescence of a
piece of the body which can have no further assignations, for it invests both the for and
against, and furthermore, it is the transmission of this unthinkable burning to other
libidinal regions … (p. 58)
To exemplify further what Lyotard had to say on libidinal energies, we need to delve into a
brief passage were he was pondering on Klowowski’s (1965) ‘Les Lois de l’Hospitale’. The
selected argument thereby relates to the story’s protagonist, Roberte, where Lyotard gets to
show how her name works as a so-called ‘tensor sign’, as a sign that defies definite
signification and, instead, opens up to multiple becomings, that is, intensities.
… where the name of Roberte is like a disjunctive bar turning at high speed around some point or
other – the gaze, the vullvar slit, the gloved thumb, an intonation – and displacing itself in
an aleatory fashion on the segment which forms this bar. If Roberte is a tensor, it is not
because she is both a slut and a thinker, but because she exceeds, jenseits, both these
assignations in the vertigo … (p. 54; emphasis in original)
Speaking about convention, or rather its violation, we could say, without hesitation, that
Lyotard’s form of writing is somewhat deviant from what one would expect from a work of
philosophy. To put it in a blunt and reductionistic manner, Lyotard set out to emphasize that the
difference inherent to Roberte’s life makes proper meaning (which is, following Lyotard, the
function of the ‘intelligent sign’) impossible wherefore she cannot be reduced to a single, or even
double identity (i.e. the slut and/or the thinker). That is, the immanent intensity and difference in
Roberte leads to a point where there is no longer a clear center or identifiable point that defines
her being. Therefore the name ‘Roberte’ necessarily defies any attempt at definite signification.
‘Turning at high speed’ indicates that the ‘disjunctive bar’ (i.e. the ‘operator of
disintensification’) is impeded in its ability to designate, to signify, to distinguish between ‘this’
and ‘not-this’. As a result of this ‘Roberte’ becomes a ‘tensor sign’ thereby evading the
possibility of saying ‘she’s this or that … or both’. Conceiving of ‘Roberte’ as a tensor thus
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effectuates a paradox in that it keeps the disparate elements of ‘Roberte’ in a state of convergence
that neither reduces one to the other nor keeps them completely apart; Roberte is difference,
intensity in ‘pure culture’ since she is or, more precisely, becomes many things at once without
there being a possibility to separate or localize her elements at any given moment.
Bearing in mind what has been said before on the main argument or content of ‘Libidinal
Economy’, one must be wary not to relapse into a simple signifying exercise, a commentary that
stipulates what Lyotard’s text denotes and what it doesn’t. In other words, where the point so far
has been that Lyotard’s treatise, respectively ‘theoretical manifesto’ (Simpkins, 1995), comprises
a set of arguments on the disintensifying effect of representation, and on the intensifying moment
of the ‘tensor sign’, it is, given the objective of this illustration, more important to see that
‘Libidinal Economy’ is not just a rational, philosophical argument but, and maybe even more so,
a performance that sought to ‘free up’ the identified rigidities by force of the ‘spectacle’, the
‘theatric’. Hence, Lyotard’s style contains an amount of force that is far greater, far more
dangerous than what is contained in language’s constative feature, its argument. In delineating
Lyotard’s mode of enunciation, Sicard (1975) most decisively hit the nail on its head by
contending that ‘Libidinal Economy’ effectuated ‘déplacement, fuite dans le style, fuite de style,
style de fuite’ (pp. 220 – 221; emphasis in original). The invention entailed in Lyotard’s ‘style de
fuite’ thus leads to an essential instability of language where the performative and constative
features of language intermingle in rapid oscillation, leading one to question the separation
between content and style. Lyotard’s (1993) style, and not solely his argument, turns ‘Libidinal
Economy’ into a political project. Indeed, he himself contended that ‘our politics is of flight …
like our style’ (p. ix). Style, as the ‘second-level order of signification’ (Lambert, 2003, p. 125),
gains political momentum here in that its sets language in motion to enable unforeseen lines of
flight. This being said, it must be understood that Lyotard’s seemingly endless sentences, turns
and puns, neologisms, allegories and rich metaphors were part of a code through which he tried to
liberate himself from the confines of traditional writing. Style, as we have contended, had become
Lyotard’s tool for breaching the rigid confines of writing. For this reason, it becomes necessary to
look into how he managed to set textual energies in motion. To this end, it is first of all
noteworthy that the issue of style entails a complex relation with language; Deleuze (1995), for
example, claimed that style ‘is a foreign language within language’ (p. 133). In the following
lines we will thus try to reflect on Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, in a more or less cursory
fashion, using Deleuze’s (1995) understanding of style as ‘a set of variations in language, a
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modulation, and a straining of one’s whole language’ (p. 140). Since we find particularly
appealing the view that style is the aspect which makes language strange, we would further like to
deliberate on how to endow the hardened language of discourse analysis with style that works, as
a kind of parasitical mechanism, against the denotative character of its referential function.
Hence, in what follows, we shall throw some light on Lyotard’s stylistics
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in order to ‘exploit’
those insights for our minor discourse analysis.
Expansive Writing
Before making any further comments on style, it is necessary to mention that Lyotard’s
‘Libidinal Economy’ has stimulated a remarkable amount of commentary, and it even seems
fair to claim that his style has prompted more objections than his actual argument. For
instance, Simpkins (1995) described Lyotard’s writing as a ‘sprawling, aggressive …
polyphonic abstractly lyrical, non-scientific’ (p. 3) mode of enunciation, a mode which
highlights the limits of semiotics through a textual performance, a ‘libidinal drift’. Lyotard
(1988b), while reflecting on ‘Libidinal Economy’, depicted the matter as being ‘a piece of
shamelessness, immodesty, and provocation’ (p. 14) which makes equally clear that these
characterizations relate not primarily to his actual argument but to the way it has been
written, its style. What Lyotard (1998b) himself depicted as a ‘parodic, dandyesque writing’
(p. 30; emphasis in original) has thereby been at the service of experimenting with language,
at the contact-zone of meaning and energy. Indeed, he elsewhere put forward the metaphor of
‘dance’ to create an image of ‘spectacular semiotics’ which is ‘at the same time a sign which
produces meaning through difference and opposition [representing ‘this’ and ‘not this’], and
a sign producing intensity through force and singularity’ (Lyotard, 1980, p. 54).
Notwithstanding the fact that Lyotard repeatedly construed ‘Libidinal Economy’ as an
exception to his other works, it must remain clear that this book has probably been, not least
because of its ‘dandyesque writing’, more powerful in emphasizing that the primary function
of language is not necessarily ‘to be intelligible’ but, rather, to ‘set in motion’ (Lyotard,
1980, p. 50). The first instance of textual experimentation we would like to bring to light
here relates to ‘Libidinal Economy’s’ long sentences. Lyotard’s translator, Iain Hamilton
Grant, commented with regard to that matter that he was confronted with the decision to
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Stylistics or style perhaps seems unfortunately pretentious; however, they appear as the most convenient
alternative for the task at hand.
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either write in ‘comprehensible English’ or to retain the ‘rhythms and distortions of the
original’ (p. ix). Mercifully, Grant opted for the later option, claiming that to sustain the
text’s ‘tempo-rhythmic structures’ and its breathtaking ‘momentum’ there was actually no
other option than to keep as ‘close’ as possible to Lyotard’s textual escapism. The point to be
made here is that Lyotard’s long sentences were not only intensive (in a quantitative sense)
but extensive in the sense that they comprised a plethora of clauses, associations, detours,
puns, hesitations and ruptures, which make language exceed the possibility of simple
denotation. Lyotard’s long or, perhaps even, ‘wild’ sentences undermine the possibility of
hasty reading. In contrast with the way we might read the newspaper during a train-ride or a
magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, Lyotard’s language prescribes deceleration, and a
close and attentive reflection on the artfulness of his creation, his performance. Lyotard’s
writing must therefore be encountered with passion and not (only) with the aspiration to
decipher what his text means in a ‘cognitive’ sense (Leech, 1969), since it remains beyond
the confines of possibility to catch or grasp the nucleus of definite meaning. Where
‘Libidinal Economy’ works beyond sense or, better, beyond the literal sense, Lyotard’s
sentences are, as briefly mentioned before, conceivable as ‘fugitives’, as ‘styles of flight’. It
is thus noticeable that Lyotard’s long sentences, being endowed with recurring but
unforeseeable turns and puns, evade the image of a single, stable, homonymous structure of
language and, instead, give rise to open readings and interpretations where the reader is
invited ‘to discover something for himself’ (Leech, 1969, p. v; emphasis in original). Without
wanting to claim that Lyotard’s writing is totally inventive (in the progressive sense of
Derrida, 1992b), it nevertheless becomes clear that ‘Libidinal Economy’ exploits the
available stock of rule-governed resources so as to put forward ‘inventive propositions’
which determine ‘the extent to which it will be able to engage the listener’s desire’ (Derrida,
1992b, p. 315). What we can deduce from Lyotard’s admittedly daring scripting (daring not
only because it bewilders given writing conventions of philosophy but also because it uses an
intriguingly unflinching, conspiratorial language and, at times, a wording one would consider
better suited to some dimmed bar in the red-light district) is that many things are best
expressed or, better, only expressible or made comprehensible through an expansive,
excessively intense scripting. This way it retains a sense of undecidability and, by
implication, recruits the reader’s curiosity by leaving it open to him or her what one draws
from it. This state of affairs quite clearly reflects Barthes’ (1974) distinction between
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‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts through which he pointed at the merits of polysemous
readings. In concrete terms, he delineated readerly texts as producing social reality through
‘standard representation and dominant signifying practice’ (p. 24) and juxtaposed this
canonical form of writing with its writerly counterpart which was said to share no interest in
reducing the ‘infinite play of the world’ (Barthes, 1974, p. 5). Within his polarity, Barthes
took the instance of the ‘writerly’ text as a counter-force to the static complexity entailed in
the ‘readerly’ text. A central feature of writerly performances, following Barthes (Barthes,
1974), is that they discover ‘multiplicity instead of consistency’ and signify ‘flux instead of
stable meaning’ (p. 246). Barthes’ dichotomy is helpful for seeing that language, as in the
case of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, can be employed creatively not only so that it is used
in an original way but so that it suggests possibilities beyond those that the literal meaning
can offer. To say that Lyotard’s extensive and intensive plotting ignites into a writerly
performance thus implies that it does not stipulate pre-ordained meaning but, instead, works
to release ‘the floating chain of signifieds’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 39). Consequently, writing
always ‘forces a choice upon the writer’ (Barthes, 1967, p. 84) and we can surmise in
Lyotard’s case that he has opted for a code that quite noticeably performs some ‘illegality’ in
the sense of crossing given conventions. In order to establish a greater understanding of
writerly texts, texts that, to reformulate the matter in Barthes’ (1977) own words, create a
‘multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash’ (p. 146), it is important to understand that suchlike texts hinge on a minor use of
language which, in the process of enabling multiple meanings, allows for novel lines of
flight. This minor use of language becomes the epitome of deterriorialization since it
detaches language from its clearly delineated, regularly gridded territory of rules and
regulations (cf. Bogue, 2005). Bearing in mind our complaint that the field of discourse
analysis is characterized by an intriguingly stabilized set of conventions, we are eager to
reach out for a minor exegesis of discourse analysis, a discourse analysis that experiments
with language and thereby simulates invention by ignoring canonical models.
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Anexact Expression
While trying to bestow the field with movement, with style, we are keen to stress that the ‘play
with language’ is ‘an essential prerequisite of the … act of understanding’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p.
17). Having delineated that hardened language, by virtue of its ostensible accuracy, unmistakably
works to conceal or disintensify the play of the structure, it is helpful to glimpse at van Maanen
(1995) who concluded: ‘it seems to me that the more we try to be precise and exact, the less we
are able to say and that the harder we try to follow a rigorous … system, the more we are tempted
to fill it out with uninspired observation … This state of affairs recommends that we put our
theories forward with an awareness of a haunting irony: To be determinate, we must be
indeterminate’ (p. 139). To pursue van Maanen’s line of argument, we intend to discuss John
Law’s (2004) treatise of social scientific research in which he suggested, eloquently and
persuasively, that ‘perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigor, and find
ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight’ (p.
3). Both van Maanen and Law render the deterriorialization of language an important issue of
(social) science and, instead of treating hardened language as an insurmountable matter of fact,
prompt us to appreciate the increase of discourse analysis’ writerliness through the appreciation
of the ‘unready’, that which constantly escapes language’s attempt of ‘grasping’ and ‘holding
tight’. To this end, we must, to say it without hesitation, ‘learn to live with the uncertain,
undetermined and undeterminable – that is when we emotionally and aesthetically appreciate the
unready’ (Weiskopf, 1999, p. 16). Whereas writerliness still implies that discourse analysis
imparts (connotative) meanings (plural), we are called to withdraw from the temptation of
producing the or one, that is, denotative meaning. The polyphony we are advocating here can thus
be achieved by means of delineating the subject matter in contradictory ways, whereby not trying
to reduce it to one or the other interpretation (Sontag, 2001).
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To let meaning ‘hang in the air’,
so to speak, is a worthwhile trope for withdrawing from definitive closure and for stimulating a
peaceful coexistence of alternative interpretations. Furthermore, it is helpful to see that Sontag
(2001), in her sensitive and hearty treatise of Barthes’ work, bestowed this practice with an
aesthetic dimension. Importantly, while Sontag’s account on aesthetic practice was written
against the backdrop of Barthes’ work – which quite noticeably blurs the boundary between
literature and science – we are eager to proclaim that suchlike deliberations must not necessarily
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Cf. also van Maanen (1995) who has taken Karl Weick’s work to depict how the insertion of contradictory views
and statements works to restrain from definitive, closed significations.
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be kept separate from the realm of social science research and, to be ‘precise’, from the field of
discourse analysis. Where Law (2004) has contended that ‘
ovels are ends in themselves, worth reading in their own right. Academic writings are means to other ends’ (p. 11), we are keen to
insert a question mark as to whether Law’s assertion necessarily has to be the case and instead
follow May’s (2005) inspiration who mentioned that ‘(i)t is not only literature that can think
difference. Science can do it too’ (p. 86). Conceiving of aesthetics as practice that allows the
multiple to thrive, this thought becomes a fertile means for making discourse analysis minor,
positioning it outside the prevailing ‘discourse of a moral science’ (Rehn, 2002, p. 45). However,
it must remain pressing that anexact writing is not only an instance of aesthetic practice but also a
rhetorical trope that pays apt heed to the indeterminate, elusive ‘nature’ of discourse, its
processual ‘nature’. Inexactness, being an immanent feature of Lyotard’s and other scholar’s
writing, gives them ‘the benefit of the doubt’ (Leech, 1969, p. 205) and thus increases the force of
enunciation by virtue of retaining an awareness that, as we have been told by Law, things are not
necessarily graspable in their essence, but that they can ‘only’ be sensed in their becoming.
Language that retains a sense of paradox, of inexactness thus escapes the grasp of the dogmatic
idea of thought and, instead of emphasizing the centre or essence of being, gets to stipulate a
logic of ‘and … and … and … ’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25). In other words, the kind of
inexactness exhibited in Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ makes possible to read two or more
meanings simultaneously into a given text without any marked incongruity.
Hence, it is clear that, to increase the writerliness of discourse analysis, we need to
intervene with some force in order to estrange, respectively make strange the current code of
discourse analysis. Deleuze’ (1997) notion of ‘stuttering’ is illuminative in that respect since it
illustrates how language is pushed to its limit in order to cause a particular enunciation to become
more subtle, experimental or ‘molecular’ (Lambert, 2003). Stuttering thus becomes the state or,
better, process we are aiming at in order to reach language’s end, that is, the space where
language is no longer ‘defined by what is says, even by what makes it a signifying thing, but by
what causes it to move, to flow and to explode – desire’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 133).
Where Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction quite clearly implies that invention in the form of
writerliness necessitates a destabilization of language, we would like to pursue Deleuze’s (1997)
cunning musing on the need for disequilibrium: ‘(c)an we make progress if we do not enter into
regions far from equilibrium? Physics attests to this. Keynes made advances in political economy
because he related it to a situation of a ‘boom’, and no longer equilibrium. This is the only way to
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introduce desire into the corresponding field. Must language then be put into a state of boom,
close to a crash?’ (p. 109; emphasis in original). What we can deduce from Deleuze is that to be
enabled to make the transition from the equilibrium of readerly to the disequilibrium of writerly
discourse analysis, language must be released from the ‘trap’ of its very own making. Since
writerliness would not be possible using a language that pertains to a ‘homogeneous system’, we
are willing to follow Deleuze (1995) who longed for a language that is ‘unstable, always
heterogeneous, in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass,
come to pass, a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what
was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed’ (p. 141). To
quote Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we are enabled to reflect that Lyotard’s textual performance,
respectively the inexactness entailed therein, is not a matter for lament since ‘in order to
designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is
a necessary step, or because one can only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way
an approximation; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way’ (p. 20).
Given these telling remarks by Deleuze and Guattari, what remains to be said was expressed most
eloquently by Ullmann (1964): ‘(t)he best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps’ so that
something that is not entailed in denotative meaning ‘can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in’ (p.
99).
Neologism
What comes to the fore if we remind ourselves of Lyotard’s musing on the ‘tensor sign’ is,
among other things, an intriguingly rich use of neologisms. Neologism, or the invention of new
‘words’ places the reader in a position of actively questioning firmly held theoretical and
conceptual investments and conventions. In the case of Lyotard’s work, the reader finds that the
tensor sign not only renders a text polysemous, that is, a source of variegated interpretations, but
that it turns the text into an act of undecidability, a performance that exceeds the boundaries of
proper meaning. Whereas one might object that the use of novel words is simply employed for
reasons of ‘trendyness’, a criticism which was uttered not least in relation to Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) ‘Thousand Plateaus’, Deleuze (1995) himself took up the charge by saying
‘(t)hat’s not just malicious, it’s stupid. A concept sometimes needs a new word to express it’ (p.
32). We are happy to acquiesce with Deleuze’ ‘rectification’. That is, we believe that his claim
undoubtedly applies not only to ‘Thousand Plateaus’ but to the invention of words in any
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pragmatic or conceptual language game. Irrespective of the speaker being a poet, a journalist, a
copywriter or a scientist, neologism implies possibilities that exceed those expressible in the
current available stock of language. Neologisms, following Deleuze, give way to the
‘unexpected’ and, by means of breaking with commonsense, necessarily make the reader think.
Moreover, through their violation of tradition, it becomes clear that neologisms create an
asymmetry between language and reality and thus scrutinize the representational function of
language. To say that neologisms are mere expressions of mannerism and that everything could
be expressed through canonical language (games) ignores the fact that neologism gives rise to a
view that is by default hostile to the doxa or commonsense entailed in our accustomed language.
Neologisms catch the eye of the reader as they make language strange to him or her (though there
are, of course, relative differences in their degree of strangeness). The condition under which
language becomes strange has been depicted by Deleuze (1997) as follows: ‘(w)hen a language is
so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or to stammer … then language in its entirety
reaches the limit’ (p. 113). Again, to grasp the force of neologism it is worth recognizing that it
disrupts the symmetrical relationship between language and the world, as implied in hardened
language. Given this state of affairs, it seems intuitively compelling to ask why the semantic
deviation effectuated by neologism is seen by some as a kind of inspired nonsense. However, if
nonsense is understood in terms of being beyond the literal-minded logic of the mathematician, it
is clearly a view we could acquiesce with in the present context. Furthermore, what we would
like to take from this for the establishment of a minor discourse analysis is that, contrary to those
who have asserted that neologisms are vain or at least not requisite, neologism enable ‘concept-
making’ in that each newly coined word ‘implies the wish to recognize a concept or property
which the language can so far only express by phrasal or clausal description’ (Leech, 1969, p.
44). As such, neologism overspills language because it introduces not only a new word but a
newly formulated idea. Overspilling thus marks the moment of possibility since neologism inserts
into language multiple disjunctions, always doing more than a single sign can say. As a
consequence thereof, neologism moves us towards a new, that is, a more agile image of thought
that reaches out towards what it cannot conceive and gestures at what it cannot grasp. Be that as it
may, to suggest that neologism is a ‘violation’ of lexical rule would be somewhat misleading and
we would like to say that is seems more correct to stipulate that it extends or bends existing rules
in such a way as to effectuate greater generality. Having established that neologism introduces a
noticeable strangeness to language, we would now like to turn to the issue of metaphoric and
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allegoric expression which is an incremental part of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’ and thereby
another fertile means for lifting language beyond its customary use.
Metaphoric and Allegoric Writing
Having posited that discourse analysis ‘zero degree’ style represents an obstacle, first, for
releasing or, better, enabling polysemous interpretations and, second, for sensing the
unpresentable, and having established anexact writings as a means for producing writerly
performances, we will here turn to the two (interrelated) tropes of allegory and metaphor in order
to reflect on how they relate with polysemia, meaning that exceeds the literal. To this end, we
must first of all mention that symbolic language is habitually connected with the genre of
literature (Derrida, 1992) whereas, on the other hand, it is kept outside the sphere of science.
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As mentioned in our discussion of Sontag (2001), this separation is of course somewhat artificial
and there have been writers such as Said (1994) who claimed that ‘(a)ll [academic] writing is
writing and delivers figural language, be they in the codes of (imitation), metaphor, allegory, or
irony’ (p. 3). Said’s point is well put and there have been others who have equally emphasized
that no language is purely literal but that language, however technical or hardened, is irrevocably
haunted by figural speech (e.g. van Maanen, 1995). However, provided that literature marks a
genre that is specifically renowned for figural speech (though there are, of course, notable
differences within the category ‘literature’), it comes as little surprise that scholars have often
sought to enliven science of whatever discipline through literature or art. Taking, for instance,
Feyerabend (1975) to make our point, we discover that he believed that science (and history)
require a new philosophy, new figures, and so he proposed: ‘(a)nd wouldn’t poets … be of great
help in finding such a language?’ (p. xii). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) were equally enthusiastic
about artists since they appreciated their creative use of language or representation. As Albrecht-
Crane (2005) pinpointed, Deleuze was ‘fascinated with writers and their creation of new
connections and strange, new expressions, both in terms of form and content’ (p. 127). What
comes to the fore here is that literature is not only welcomed by scholars for reason of its
aesthetical appeal (which is surely an end in itself; cf. Law, 2004) but, and at times even more so,
because it enables new expressions and forms of knowing which would not have been possible
through the hardened language of mainstream science. As eloquently expressed by Attridge
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For instance, Leech (1969) has pointed out that metaphor is the most important element of poetic language
whereas some have gone as far as claiming that it is the only thing that really matters in poetry.
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(1992), ‘(t)here is one linguistic practice in which we habitually celebrate the unique, instead of
finding it a hindrance, … , in which we welcome being obliged to read the text again (in a
repetition which is always different) in order to apprehend its power or its value: the practice we
call literature’ (pp. 14 – 15). Given the striking amount of ‘identical repetition’ in discourse
analysis’ language ‘toolbox’ (cf. above), the ideality of literature (Derrida, 1992), which is in
some ways diametrically opposed to hardened language, shall become the crux of our argument.
For we would like to use literature’s figurative mode of enunciation to deliberate on how it
stimulates a convergence between the denotative and connotative aspect of language. Though this
is unavoidably at the expense of the content of a particular expression, in our desire to direct the
focus at how things are expressed, i.e. style,
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we are eager to turn to Law’s (2004) cogent
elaboration of allegories and metaphors. Before starting our discussion, it must first of all be
acknowledged that discourse analyses, working upon whatever level of hardened language,
contain powerful means for creating realities, images and expressions. Yet, the concern that
haunts hardened or major discourse analysis is that it seems, as we have contended, utterly
limited in accounting for non-coherence or the ‘paradoxical’ (Feyerabend, 1975). Given this
constraint, we shall come to speak of the merits of metaphorical and allegorical expressions in
order to see how these tropes make possible the emergence of a minor discourse analysis.
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This
said, it is first of all noteworthy that allegory and metaphor are both conceivable as linguistic
enactments which highlight the performative aspect of language (in opposition to its constative
feature; cf. Derrida, 1992b). Whereas both tropes work through symbolism which uses one
(seemingly unrelated) subject or object to represent another, there is somewhat of a difference
entailed regarding their level of abstraction: unlike metaphors which work upon more or less
short figures or images, allegories are often called ‘continued metaphors’ since they extend their
representation over the course of an entire plot, be that a story, a poem or a novel. For reasons of
simplicity we could thus stipulate the difference by claiming that allegory is an extended version
of metaphor. It thus becomes clear that both metaphor and allegory are dealing with expressions
of what would irrevocably remain absent in the form of literal writing. In other words, allegory
and metaphor work by means of expansion since they make ‘manifest what is otherwise invisible.
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Though this shift is to be understood in a relative sense.
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Coming to talk of metaphoric and allegoric expression undoubtedly represents a selection since there would be
other rhetorical tropes which could be summoned here. However, given that metaphor and allegory are considered as
both pivotal aspects of literary practice and helpful devices for deterriorializing the hardened language of discourse
analysis, we believe that this selection is apt to make our point.
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It extends the fields of visibility, and crafts new realities’ (Law, 2004, p. 90). As in the case of
neologism, metaphor and allegory are instances of deterriorialization, since they establish
meaning in a way that rejects the referential function as established by hardened language. The
linguistic deviation caused by figural speech leaves a gap in the comprehension of a particular
text. As such, metaphor and allegory work upon or, better, require association and
imaginativeness on the part of the reader. That is, to fill the gap entailed through symbolic
speech, reader are required to use their imagination to enable themselves to perceive or, better,
establish some deeper connections with the ‘second stage’ (Leech, 1969), that is, connotative
meaning. Hence, unlike (hardened) representation, what is put forward through metaphor and
allegory does not pretend to speak for itself, for reality, but calls for the reader’s own
interpretation. To quote Leech (1969) on the matter, metaphor (and, to some lesser extent,
allegory) ‘depend on the leap the imagination is prepared to take in order to render meaningful
what is apparently absurd’ (p. 131). Being in close proximity with Barthes’ circumscription of
‘writerliness’, the merit we can appoint to allegoric and metaphoric expression is that it includes
ambiguity and ambivalence since it does not ‘only’ allow for multiple interpretations but makes
clear, by means of its overt non-literal imagery, that no interpretation can be original or definite.
To express the issue in Law’s (2004) terms, ‘(a)llegory is necessarily … about piling different
realities up on top of one another. It is about the apprehension of non-coherent multiplicity. It is
about split vision’ (p. 98; emphasis in original). To reiterate the importance of these ideas for our
argument: metaphor and allegory make language strange not only by making texts writerly, that
is, by hailing the reader’s engagement and imagination but, importantly, by emphasizing the
contingency of meaning more generally. Though the intelligibility of metaphors and allegories
rely upon the cultural foundation of commonsense, there are no reasons to believe that all
members of a particular culture would come to share the same understanding. Both metaphor and
allegory necessitate phenomenological experience wherefore they are always bestowed with a
personal touch or shading. As such, we can say that metaphor and allegory do not represent ‘l’art
pour l’art’, a kind of aesthetic practice that operates for its own sake (which, by the way, is not
necessarily a condemnable thing). Rather, these figurative tropes are requisite means to do away
with the ‘realist tale’ we have identified operating within canonical discourse analysis. To
inaugurate a minor use of discourse analysis, we thus invite metaphoric and allegoric writing to
increase – for the sake of a more expansive, non-literal style – the textual appeal of representation
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and, additionally, to allow for novel lines of flight which would not have been possible through a
straightforward, precise and seemingly neutral mode of enunciation.
Reverberations
… we’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us
suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 17).
… there are books (and articles) of the rhizomatic type, and books (and articles) of the root-type,
that is, there are texts clinging to centrality, definitions, representations, and there are
texts exploring molecular flows, shizzes, breaks. Texts drawing maps. (Meier Sørensen,
2001, p. 368; emphasis in original).
… the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always
detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and
its own line of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21),
Notwithstanding the observation that Lyotard and those others who have come to breach existing
conventions were often declared mad, paranoid or simply non-academic/philosophical, we
nonetheless hope that our discussion of ‘Libidinal Economy’ has some value in demonstrating
that discourse analysis could grossly profit, almost unconditionally, from making writing so
pliable and flexible that it would no longer allude to fixities (of discourse), but spur the
recognition that meaning is always ‘performed in the flesh and blood of words’ (Lyotard, 1988b,
p. 13). In our search for a minor discourse analysis in which language is brought close to a
‘boom’ or a ‘crash’, that is, discourse analysis that treats text as a flow, not a code (Stivale, 2005),
we have seen that style becomes the pivot for novel openings. What we had in mind when talking
about style has thereby in no way been related with philosophy’s ideal of ‘zero-degree’ (Grant,
1993) but with a style that is so intense that it ‘amounts to innovation’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 131).
The tenet we have tried to stress through our ‘detour’ to Lyotard and others is that the realm of
discourse analysis seems well advised to stop searching for the true, stop searching for ever more
sophisticated methods and, instead, seek to establish ways of writing that are attuned to account
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for or pay tribute to the ‘ontology of difference’ (Deleuze, 1994). Therefore, we have suggested
that major discourse analysis’ obsession with tree-like structures/writings which inspire ‘a sad
image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented
higher unity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 16) be brought to an end. To formulate our aspiration
in a more affirmative fashion, we have tried to advocate a minor discourse analysis whose
organizing principle reminds us more of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ‘rhizome’, where
language is not used primarily to segment but to enable ‘lines of flight, movements of
deterriorialization and destratification’ (p. 3). When looked at from this point of view, if one
thinks of language as a code of rules which one can either follow or break, it is beyond question
that our argument has come to favor the latter tactic.
Yet, whereas some of our deliberations might have fostered the impression that we favor
the demise of discourse analysis or the creation of something greater than it, it is less the case that
we are ‘against’ discourse analysis in general, but that we favor the demise of the particular
understanding of discourse analysis we have become accustomed to, that is, the territorialized
form of discourse analysis we have coined ‘journalist genre’ and ‘techno-talk’. Both forms, in our
opinion, have never ‘reached an understanding of multiplicity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 5).
The reason we have come to make reference to Lyotard’s intensive linguistic performance is that
it demonstrates, among other things, that writing and style are matters of choice (at least partially)
and that language can be employed to establish ‘unison’ between content and style, between the
performative and constative aspect of language. The point we have been eager to push here is that
a heritage, however persuasive it might appear, is never a passive given but requires an active
process of interpretation and appropriation (cf. Jones, 2002). Pursuing the inspiration we derived
from Lyotard, we wanted to state that at the heart of discourse analysis there is a game to play
which sets out for ‘powerlessness’, searching for forms of textual organizations where ‘(t)here
would be no message in our bottle, only a few energies, whose transmission and transformation
was left and was desired to be unpredictable’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 255). Although our argument
quite obviously strayed into philosophy, it has been reaching out for a kind of representational
practice that gives or can give direction to a field in crisis which so far has exhibited a clear
propensity towards univocal interpretations and, therefore, has constantly fallen short of the
expectation it has evoked (namely, that it is able to tackle the ‘crises of representation’ or the
fallacy of the ‘mirror metaphor’ of language; e.g. Potter, 1996b). In our musing on style, our
elaboration of Lyotard’s ‘Libidinal Economy’, in particular, its immanently intensive, i.e. ‘poetic
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language’ (Leech, 1969) has brought to light that the field of discourse analysis has opted for
what we could, following Sapir (1921), call a ‘low-voltage use of language’. Bearing in mind that
Sapir has compared language with an electric dynamo that has the ability, when running full
‘steam’, to power an elevator, one could contend that language in discourse analysis, as it is used
presently, seems only to have enough power for, say, a reading lamp. Arguably, this comparison
is somewhat hyperbolic; however, the point to be made is that we would like to instill in the field
of discourse analysis what Sapir termed ‘high-voltage use of language’. It is within such a
‘hypersemanticized’ use of language (Weinreich, 1963) that we have identified a potential for not
only incorporating performativity but also for extending the scope or elasticity of connotative
meaning up to the point where language’s hegemonic ‘appeal’ for denoting univocal meaning is
called into question.
Hence, having envisaged the ‘future’ of discourse analysis as being both contingent on
resistance and dependent on an active inheritance of a different kind, there is no way to avoid
conceding that in order to permit ‘new things’ the lifting of some forms of (self-) censorship
would be required. We thus contend that the current purism and concealed censorship of
discourse analysis needs to ‘to break out of prohibitions’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 36). Importantly,
there is a danger here of oversimplifying, of reducing, of defining artificial boundaries, since one
could take these arguments as prescribing ‘this or die’ (Lyotard, 1993). If we had granted some
credibility to Grant’s (1993) assertion that ‘critique desires that the situation be stabilized’ (p.
xxvii), the premonition at the beginning of this essay might have been nonessential since we had
no interest in re-territorializing discourse analysis or defining a finite ‘Gestalt’ for it, but rather in
enabling novel openings which could breach the over-coded ‘shibboleth’ of discourse analysis.
With this in mind, relating style and discourse analysis enables us to derive a new ‘science of
writing’ where the ‘new’ is not meant to kill the ‘old’. Instead, the new, that is: libidinal,
deterritorialized or minor writing, is supposed to work in a different manner in that it does not
aspire to provide a novel set of rules, a method-like grid for keeping separate the good from the
bad. This minor writing aspires to movement and perpetual displacement which elicits the image
of ‘an eternal turning rather than a splitting’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. xxx). In other words, while
critique ‘by default’ seeks for a better situation, a reterriorialization, so to speak, our discussion of
the ideality of literature has been motivated not by the aim of drawing new borders but by the aim
of stimulating a condition of possibility where borders between discourse analysis and literature
are softened and ‘exploited’ for the sake of joyful play. The condition of possibility we have
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sought to establish thus works less through the prescription of ‘you must!’ than through the
approval of ‘you ought’. On the face of it, such a (non-totalitarian) instruction defies definitive
prescriptions (as entailed in some of the method handbooks elaborated above), while,
nevertheless, seeking the ‘exploration of the possible’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985). In the
following paragraph we will now discuss the implications which can be surmised for the
education of the nascent scholar. In so doing, we shall consider the idea that once we have
reached (or at least aimed for) a state ‘after method’ (Law, 2004) we will need a novel scaffold to
direct or, better, give direction to those who want to conduct a discourse analysis.
An Ethos of Reading
There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made … As an assemblage,
a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages … (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 4).
The only question is how anything works, with its intensities, flows, processes, partial objects –
non of which mean anything. (Guattari in Deleuze, 1995, p. 22; emphasis in original)
As a first step towards our minor discourse analysis we have been rejecting the assumption that
the matter is amenable to the automat, to the ‘robot’ (Lyotard, 1993), i.e. to the kind of method
which promises a way around the ordeal of research. Where we have seen that certain expositions
of method operate in the sense of Pandora’s box (which hosts hope as its last evil; cf. also
Chapter 6), we have been relentless in arguing that some hopes need to be questioned and in
particular that the hope that method offers a ‘short-circuit’ by means of which we can accelerate
our writing (which is, of course, an essential imperative in today’s ‘McUniversity’; cf. Parker,
2002b). As was not least implied in the deliberations in the first part of this essay, one can
hypothesize that the scholar new to discourse analysis, the apprentice (which we might remain
throughout our entire life) of discourse analysis might be ‘born in a desert’ if he/she sees
him/herself restricted to method textbooks. Consequently, we must bear in mind that method
neither gives nor saves time wherefore it needs to be accepted that discourse analysis is and will
remain ‘labor-intensive’ (Gill, 1993). Thus, we must say ‘adieu’ to the idea(l) of ‘mechanical
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replacement’ (Appelbaum, 1995); what is on offer at this moment of potential resignation is
Law’s (2004) plea in which he exhorted us ‘(t)o live more in and through slow method, or
vulnerable method, or quiet method’ (p. 11). Discourse analysis, we suggest, can step into the
space outlined by Law (without occupying it in a dominant, territorializing sense, of course). As
implied in Law’s notion of ‘slowness’, we would like to add that good research, good discourse
analysis goes hand in hand with reading. The sort of reading we have in mind might yet be
considered a disincentive since it would involve a slowing-down; though a slowing down in the
name of passion, patience and persistence, a reading that prompts a reflection on what it means to
‘work well’. In the spirit of a pedagogical gesture, we suggest a ‘reading in love’ (Deleuze, 1995,
p. 9), that is, a reading that does not allow for rushing, for cursory, vertical browsing, for
possession. This sort of reading implies an escape from the ‘desert’ associated with method books
and, given Guattari’s (in Deleuze, 1995) cogent comment that ‘(t)he only question is how
anything works’ (p. 22), it becomes conceivable that we have crossed the point where it would
still be appropriate to claim that discourse analysis is a matter of adhering to the proper principles
and standards of method. Since we can no longer ‘hide’ behind the argument of having followed
the canon of method, we advise those working within the field of discourse analysis to set about
an ‘intensive reading’, a reading that asks a particular piece of text ‘whether it works, and how it
works, and who it works for’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 22). The escapism entailed in Deleuze thus
requires, among other things, readings that cross the strict boundary of the respective text at hand
and, thereby, get ‘in contact with what’s outside the book [e.g. intertexts], … as a series of
experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing
the book in pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything’ (Deleuze, 1995,
pp. 8 – 9). Given Deleuze’ (1995) felicitous claim that within a particular reading either
‘something comes through or it doesn’t’ (p. 8), we are keen to suggest that the nascent scholar
might find most inspiration for conducting discourse analysis not by enmeshing him/herself into
method textbooks but by reading, affirmatively though critically, the related work of other
discourse scholars as well as more experimental textual performances (such as, for instance, that
by Lyotard) which might provide novel insights for intensifying our modes of enunciation. This
is not to say that discourse analysis has to be done anew or reinvented each time we opt to carry
out a discursive investigation. There are those who have preceded us, who have swum in this
water before, so to speak, wherefore it would be pitiful if we simply ignored their (potential)
heritage. Importantly, the notion of heritage or inheriting is not exhausted by or restricted to those
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discursive investigations which are prior to our own. Rather, as our reflection on Lyotard’s
‘Libidinal Economy’ has made intelligible, much of what might enliven future discourse analysis,
discourse analysis ‘to come’ might reside outside the sphere of the discursive camp. As a
consequence thereof, discourse scholars and scholars of other fields, be that philosophy,
literature, or any discipline – whether academic or non-academic – might all provide help in
getting us into the water, teaching us some strokes and guiding us through the water so that we
may learn to swim. Though we must not learn to swim in isolation, we must not forget that,
contrary to the promise of method, there will undoubtedly come the day were we ‘must push off
from the shore and conjugate things for ourselves’ (May, p. 112).
Postscript: Passing Comments on the Limits of Possible Writing
… philosophers share the intellectual’s innate distrust of what I call monumentalism, that is, the
idea that you can overpower an opponent by the sheer force, be it political, economic or
simply verbal – the number of long words and twisted sentences amassed on a page.
(Fuller, 2005, pp. 92 – 93; emphasis in original)
Perhaps, rather than saying that anything can happen, it would be more accurate to say that
anything can happen, given the right conditions. (May, 2005, p. 116; emphasis in original)
As Shotter (1997) eloquently pinpointed, contemporary intellectual debate is limited through
explicit strictures which is revealed not least in that academics …
… must function within a culture of domination, of hierarchy, a Cartesian culture of mastery and
possession, and we experience a certain anxiety when we begin to speak out against it, to
“speak the truth to power.” As such, it tends to disorient us, to distract us from the words
we need, we find ourselves saying what we know will be acceptable, rewarded; it is an
anxiety that tends differentially, to silence us, we tend to speak of some things but not
others, in certain styles but not others. (p. 18)
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As implied by our previous deliberations, the use of literary styling signals to the reader that
the account does not function as a map of the world (and, indeed, that the mapping or
mimesis metaphor is flawed altogether; cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), but as an interpretive
activity addressed to a community of interlocutors. For many qualitative researchers, such
writing is especially appealing because it offers a greater expressive range and an
opportunity to reach audiences outside the academy. However, though we have mentioned
repeatedly that style is a matter of choice, we must not obscure the fact that choice is a
relative matter and, as follows from Shotter’s above statement, that the range of the
acceptable might in fact be much narrower than we might wish it to be. In addition to this,
Latour (1987) has delineated that ‘(t)here is something still worse, however, than being either
criticized or dismantled by careless readers: it is being ignored. Since the status of a claim
depends on later users’ insertions, what if there are no later users whatsoever? This is the
point that people who never come close to the fabrication of science have the greatest
difficulty in grasping. They imagine that all scientific articles are equal and arrayed in lines
like soldiers, to be carefully inspected one by one. However, most papers are never read at
all. No matter what a paper did to the former literature, if no one else does anything with it,
then it is as if it never existed at all’ (p. 40). As elaborated before on the background of
Lyotard’s deviant (an odd term, indeed) stylization, it seems all too easy to dismiss or ignore
a text by saying that it is difficult, appalling, or simply non-scientific.
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Provided that certain
ways of writing are favored over others thus raises the question ‘(h)ow can anyone who
“publishes” today accept to leave out of the picture … or rather in the non-published, the
whole complex functioning of the editorial machine: its mechanisms of selection, control,
sanctioning, recruitment, internal promotion, elimination, censorship, and so on?’ (Derrida,
1995, p. 29). The publishing machine is to blame, of course. Yet, blame is maybe not an
option here since it is conceivable that publishers all too well know ‘which side their bread is
buttered on’ (Jones & Böhm, 2004, p. 2). Power or, more precisely, domination (Foucault,
1996) is an issue here, since as van Maanen (1995) convincingly pointed out, it is a common
tactic of elite groups of all sorts to refuse to discuss, and to label as uninteresting or vulgar,
issues that are uncomfortable for them. Though it seems reasonable to say that such moves
are unjustifiable or at least unfair, the problem of deviance nevertheless imposes limits on the
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Note in passing, Fuller (2004) mentioned that continental philosophy is ‘valued more for the idiosyncratic mood
set by their prose than the specificity of their message’ (p. 67).
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intensification of language we have suggested before. On the face of it, ‘zero degree’ writing
is actively sustained by the academic apparatus, since it is beyond doubt that there are
networks within the professional and educational marketing and management world that
potentially exercise influence over curricular norms, textbook content and publishers’ agenda
(Hackley, 2003). To put things bluntly, ‘everyone seeks to flee … in the direction of the
system and its binary ideal’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 29). Provided that once the ‘system’ has
achieved a ‘critical mass’ it has the power to buttress its code of conduct in a self-reinforcing
manner (c.f. Lyotard, 1984), there is little, if any, reason to question that prevailing writing
conventions will work through exclusion. Therefore we must not lose sight of the fact that
the dominant regulations of ‘proper stylization’ will make it difficult for writings which
resist definitive coding and which try to give rise to ‘flows, revolutionary active lines of
flight, lines of absolute decoding’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 22). As Phillips and Hardy (2002)
rightly observed, scholars of discourse analysis ‘face the ongoing struggle of convincing
reviewers and editors that their studies are conducted satisfactorily and their papers written
appropriately’ (p. 79). Talking about the necessity to render one’s analysis ‘satisfactorily’ or
‘appropriately’ should cause a certain uneasiness, since it makes it clear that the ‘tree’, the
structure which treats text as a box of signifiers, is not only looming heavily but is actively
sustained and fortified in the sphere of academic work. In accordance with this, the
publishing industry appears to seek for, to say it without reservation, total control where
everything beyond the mainstream contains little political legitimacy or economic
justification. To shed some light on the large-scale (economic) successes and best-selling
status of method textbooks, it appears that the minor discourse analysis must surrender even
before having fought its first battle. ‘How to escape convention?’ is a difficult question and
one which certainly defies any easy solutions. Withdrawing from the possibility of
converging with the tree-admirers (e.g. Phillips & Hardy, 2002), there is, in principle, still
the option to follow the suit of those who have chosen to sidestep the disciplinary influence
of the publishing industry by means of staging their own textual production. Taking the
realm of organization studies to underscore our point, one finds in the open-access journal
‘Ephemera’
146
or in the independent publishing houses ‘Dvalin’ or ‘Mayflybooks’
147
a type
146
‘Ephemera’ has been staged in 2001 and since then published a plethora of passionate ideas on various topics
relating to, for instance, novel philosophical and theoretical terrains, radical political thoughts and critical treatises on
the closure incepted by essentialist writings.
440
of format which accounts for the fact that it ‘is increasingly hard to publish works grounded
in research and in radical interrogation of the present’ (cf. homepage ‘Mayflybooks’) and
which has taken to heart the experimentation with ideas, concepts, argumentation and jargon.
As contained, for instance, on the homepage of ‘Dvalin’, these sorts of ventures are said to
work ‘as an experiment in alternative forms of academic publishing’ where it ‘tries to
combine non-traditional means and arguments with excellence in execution.’ With this in
mind, it must be added that these open-access platforms render amenable a passionate,
intriguing and undeniably inspiring collection of works which, if published through
traditional channels, would have cost a small fortune, to say the least. All these projects
exhibit a political trend in that they seek to bypass the publishing industry which, to quote
‘Mayflybooks’, ‘is no longer in public hands and hence fails to represent any public.’ In
using the internet to distribute downloadable PDF-files while additionally selling cheap
paperback prints (instead of the more expensive hard-cover books which, following Jones
(2004), run the risk of collecting dust in the library), both ‘Dvalin’ and ‘Mayflybooks’ get to
represent genuine non-profit endeavors which emphasize work that is ‘politically relevant
and aesthetically engaging’ (cf. homepage ‘Mayflybooks’) and thereby devote all efforts to
making those works available to a wide audience. Hence, it is most important here to
remember that such initiatives have given voice to a sort of text, argument or writing format
that else would have run the risk of being entitled ‘ferocious’ or ‘evil’ (cf. Jones &
O’Doherty, 2005) and, by implication, would have been silenced or suppressed.
‘Mayflybooks’, for instance, has taken explicit note of this threat while setting out to engage
with works that are ‘currently excluded by the publishing industries, either because of their
progressive politics or their apparent lack of a mass market.’ What we would have missed if
these publications would have been kept back, retained on some anonymous hard-disks,
escapes the possibility of imagination. To enable a ‘reading in love’, as suggested above, it
remains to recommend that you visit the following links (http://www.ephemeraweb.org,
http://www.mayflybooks.org or www.dvalin.org) and make your first strokes …
147
Run by Alf Rehn, respectively Steffen Böhm and Campell Jones.
441
Outlook
Given that the first chapter of the thesis was devoted to emphasizing the ‘McDonaldization’
of business school education, and, in particular the kind of censorship and non-legitimation
which constituted and sustained this condition of possibility in the first place, Chapter 5
which follows endeavors to put forward some deliberations on how to broaden and enliven
the business curricula by dint of a reflexive stance. The introduction of Derrida’s
deconstructive practice – a code which alludes not to the ostensibly fancy French Methodism
into which Derrida’s critics have turned ‘deconstruction’, but rather to the art of double-
reading as discussed by Critchley (2005) – to an institution which hitherto has been
particularly de-politicized and blinded regarding its own knowledge production, premises
and unquestioned root assumptions could thus be conceived as a profoundly oppositional
gesture that aspires to negotiate a discursive space where the dominant assumptions of
business schools reach their limit and thereby create a space for ‘the advent of something
entirely new’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 89).
442
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5
***
Deconstructive Reflexivity in the Business
School without Conditions
The only attitude (the only politics-judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would
absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an
essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming
questioning. (Derrida, 1995, p. 239)
As we dismiss traditional science’s claim of objectivity and truth we don’t have to play God,
writing as ‘disembodied omniscient narrators’. (Richardson, 1994, p. 518)
Synopsis
The present chapter, to put it in general terms, deals with the concept of ‘reflexivity’ and its
potential to radicalize the business school. Positing that notions of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘reflection’ in
their ubiquitous use have taken on various shadings, I will open the chapter by highlighting those
interpretations which envision (and thereby prescribe) reflexivity as a kind of practice that seeks
to disclose the author’s intentions, assumptions, ideologies, etc., so as to render a particular piece
of writing, that is to say its meaning, more accessible. Illustrating this argument from a
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perspective of qualitative research, I will reveal that the function of this exegesis of reflexivity is
to portray the author’s purposeful persona, thereby exhibiting his/her linear, agentic and
hierarchical relationship with the text. The author is thus envisaged as being in charge of its
meaning. The aim of this chapter, then, is to scrutinize this image of reflexivity by calling into
question if such ‘confessional tales’ make (qualitative) research more authentic or credible. To
this end, I will pinpoint some of the basic root assumptions of this stream of reason and suggest
an alternative meaning of reflexivity, one that focuses on the act of reading and the text itself,
rather than on the author. In so doing, I will first introduce excerpts of Derrida’s work on
literature as well as Barthes’ and Foucault’s investigations of the author (function) in order to
problematize the conception that the intelligibility of a particular utterance or text presupposes
laying bare the (ideological) grounding and/or intentional state of its author. Therefore, by
seeking to dissociate the link between text and author as reproduced by proponents of qualitative
research and by accentuating both the significance of the text’s context as well as of its readers, I
will advocate ‘reflexivity’ as deconstructive practice. In trying to work out the potential tenets of
deconstruction concerning the business school, a brief detour will be taken to portray the kind of
criticism deconstruction has been subjected to. It will be shown, for instance, that Derrida’s
deconstructive work has elicited suspicion and severe opposition both in and outside the context
of academic philosophy. In discussing some of the best established and most infamous
misperceptions of Derrida and his deconstructive work, it will be revealed that his work has often
been portrayed as a purely theoretical or private endeavor which is irrelevant to public or ‘real-
life’ issues or simply as a condemnable, disinterested and thus nihilistic intellectual exercise.
Given the often ignorant, or at least obscure, treatment of deconstruction (Critchley, 1999), I will
point out, among other things, that deconstruction and (antagonistic) criticism, i.e. destruction,
embody different objectives (Patton & Protevi, 2003) and that the two spheres of textual analysis
must therefore be apprehended in terms of their dissimilarity. With this in mind, I will ‘revitalize’
deconstruction as an affirmative act that acknowledges and respects the work under analysis.
Furthermore, I will depict some of the ethical ‘aspirations’ (Jones, 2003) and hitherto neglected
(political) potentials of deconstruction (Patton, 2003) in order to envision the subject matter as a
radical means for ‘deschooling’ (Illich, 1973) the contemporary business school (from within).
Positing that the ‘age of deconstruction’ has already dawned in the humanities (Nealon, 2003) but
only marginally influenced business schools, this treatise will then climax in the
conceptualization of the business school without conditions in which deconstruction will become
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the epitome of free expression and responsible reflection. Claiming a space for deconstruction in
the business school of the future, I will elaborate on the (possible) position and function of
deconstruction in educational curricula and its relationship with mainstream theory.
Reflexivity as Confessional Tales: The Case of Qualitative Research
Researchers ought to be self-reflective, and declare their interests and agenda … (Ogbor, 2000,
p. 268)
… nothing is so much deception as this inner world which we observe with the famous “inner
sense”. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 264)
‘(Self) reflection’, as the term is used in qualitative research (e.g. Woolgar, 1988; Denzin &
Lincoln, 2003), more often than not necessitates that one must start or finish a piece of empirical
work by disclosing one’s relationship with the research topic, one’s moral credentials, one’s
ideological standpoint, one’s affections or reservations towards the subject matter. Such
endeavors seem to be based on the assumption that a scientific text, in order to be
comprehensible, requires commentary (on the author) since it always means more than it
apparently says (Hartman, 2004). In order to illustrate how reflection is denoted as a practice
through which the author is prompted to lay bare his/her implicit assumptions and to reveal
his/her impetus on the subject matter, it is helpful to refer to King (2004) who claimed that
‘(r)esearchers must reflect on the nature of their involvement just as they consider the meaning of
their participants’ contributions’ (p. 20). King thereby suggested that we, i.e. qualitative
researchers, have to put our ‘presuppositions down in writing at the start of the study’ and that we
need to keep ‘a diary in which you record your own feelings’ (p. 20). Moreover, as revealed in
Parker’s (2002) outline of critical (qualitative) psychology, reflexive endeavors should proceed
by way of including ‘an account of the moral-political standpoint of the researcher’ (p. 4).
Despite the brevity of this outline, we are provided with a preliminary insight into one of the
central premises of reflexivity as pursued by qualitative researchers, which is to make explicit the
author’s taken-for-granted assumptions and his/her (ideological) influence in the research process
so as to make his or her interpretations accessible to (and appraisable and revisable for) a wider
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audience. Importantly, reflexivity is perceived in such approaches not only as a means for making
transparent the researcher’s otherwise opaque sense-making practices, but as a moral imperative
of ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’ (cf. Mackenzie Davey & Liefooghe, 2004, p. 181). Mackenzie Davey
and Liefooghe (2004) thus remind us that as ‘researchers we position ourselves as speaking for
the oppressed’ which, according to the authors, is simultaneously accompanied by the ‘danger of
misrepresentation’ (p. 182). In this way, reflexivity is used to counteract the risk to ‘get
things/people wrong’. In other words, reflexivity is a means for undoing or at least mitigating
potential misrepresentations of the research matter as well as for restoring looming power
imbalances between the researcher and the research object (Alvesson & Deetz, 2003). Arguably,
the issue of ‘getting it right’, that is, grasping the truth of the research object, represents a central
concern in this understanding of reflexivity and I am looking forward to suggest some of
Derrida’s works which challenge the contention that one should make the author/writer liable for
establishing the truth. However, before doing so and before suggesting another exegesis of
reflexivity for the future business school, I would like to expand on the topic of qualitative
research and point out that it is autoethnography which most firmly embraces the conception that
there is a constant possibility of deflecting the other’s (i.e. the subject matter of research) view,
since we do not know it properly (cf. also Derrida, 2005) and, by implication, that we should
‘study only our own experiences’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003b, p. 51). Contending that (qualitative)
researchers should look ‘inward’ in order to expose their ‘vulnerable selves’, autoethnographical
studies have paved the way for a perspective in which interpretation is not merely conceived of as
a cognitive and/or perspectivist undertaking (Fay, 1996) but as a process that simultaneously
comprises ‘emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness’ (Ellis & Bochner, 2003, p.
209). By privileging personal/private experience and the introspective skills of the researcher
over the experience of others, autoethnographers have come to thrive on the assumption that
meaning becomes less speculative and diluted and hence more true.
One might object that it is at least questionable whether these kinds of ego-centric
inspection bring us any closer to the truth (cf. also Chapter 4) and whether this sort of self-
disclosure and ‘declarations of love’ displayed in certain reflective (auto)ethnographies (e.g.
Behar & Gordon, 1995; Kulick & Wilson, 1995) are simply a matter of taste. I am thus keen to
assert that such confessional tales and introspective journeys contain no value for the task at
hand: to establish a kind of business school that is reflective of its own root assumptions and that
counteracts the consumerist attitude towards learning (cf. Chapter 1). To clear the ground, I
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would like to stipulate that the ‘confessional tales’ I have identified in relation to qualitative
research disclose their value, if there is any, only in conjunction with the immunization of
research against potential counter-attacks. That is, revealing one’s innermost feelings and
passions, and by laying bare one’s own immersion in the topic, it would evidently infringe upon
social conventions to criticize scholars’ writing. Be that as it may, I would like to ignore the kind
of reverence being implied in the above accounts and leave the sort of reflexivity that focuses
exclusively or predominantly on the perspective of the author open to debate. Since the above
understanding of reflexivity is counterproductive for the argument I am developing below, I opt
to go against the grain of this perspective, and in particular against its obvious concern with
hermeneutic depth. In this context, it is helpful to have a glimpse at Derrida’s (1976) telling
observation that ‘commentary’ [on writing], of whatever level of sophistication and depth, ‘has
always only protected, it has never opened, a reading’ (p. 158; emphasis in original). If we thus
follow Derrida in his dislike of, or shall we say distrust in commentary, little intellectual effort is
needed to argue that neither passionate hyperboles nor endless descriptions of intimate details as
contained in these sorts of (self-) reflective endeavor eliminate the fact that some of these
writings have little more to offer than the author’s emotional spillage or pathos. Being aware of
my impertinence in making such a statement, I consciously chose to be as blunt (and merciless)
as possible in order to underscore that the issue of reflexivity in (qualitative) research, though
undeniably important, is all too often seen as a means of rhetorical self-defense or textual
‘impregnation’. Whilst it must remain clear that the issue of self-defense is diametrically opposed
to the sort of deconstructive reflexivity (cf. also Chapter 2) I will establish below, it is important
to reiterate, then, that the problematic aspect of the above-mentioned undertakings is foremost
revealed through the premise that by putting forward personal confessions of one’s relation with
the subject matter (e.g. sexual deviance, serial killers … social entrepreneurs) one becomes, first,
more credible as an author, since one is assumed to know how the other feels, thinks, acts, etc.
and, second, legitimated to talk in the name of truth (Foucault, 2001). Whereas such writings
arrogate that one is able to look behind or inside the author’s psychological apparatus in order to
unmask and neutralize the elusive operation of his/her ideologies, I contend that the time is ripe to
envision the task of reflexivity as one that does not put the author in the center of attention. The
hermeneutic rhetoric which, as I have briefly mentioned above, is most visibly comprised in
autoethnographical research (Ellis & Bochner, 2003), is thus not pertinent in conjunction with the
sort of deconstructive reflexivity I will promote in this chapter, because there is no such thing as
459
personal consciousness, intention, or even truth one can legitimately refer to. Provided that the
idea of reflexivity in qualitative research is more often than not conjoined with the disclosure of
one’s intentions, hidden agenda, introspective insights or intra-psychic experience, I chose to
qualify this thought as futile, thereby raising the question whether this sort of (self-) reflexivity
has not degenerated into a ‘ritualistic hurdle that one must jump over … ?’ (Ainsworth & Hardy,
2004, p. 168). In order to scrutinize the appropriateness of reflexivity as a form of
confessionalism and to challenge the significance being assigned to the author’s intentions, I will
now turn to selected texts of Derrida whose works I deem most pertinent for dismantling the logic
of reflexive confessionalism.
As a first step, we get to see that Derrida (1995b), in his ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’,
pinpointed that literature makes ‘the author an author who is not responsible’ (p. 28), that is, an
author who is not forced to account for the truth and, therefore, can preserve his/her secret.
Arguably, such a perspective is quite counter-intuitive with respect to both ‘normal science’
(Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992) and public discourse, since one normally assumes that a secret is
discoverable. Derrida, opposing this view, made it unmistakably clear that a true secret can never
be revealed. Derrida therefore contradicted the kind of qualitative research described above which
always seeks to lay bare the secret (i.e. intentions and ideologies) of the author. As we are
reminded by Derrida that the secret (of literature) must be retained because it is the very secret of
a text which ‘impassions’ us, we can translate this claim to our subject matter and argue that one
must refrain from commenting on the author’s intentions, ideologies, etc. and, consequently, on
what a given author wants to express through his/her text. With this in mind, it becomes blatantly
clear that, although one can never know with certainty whether or not there is a secret at all, the
fact that something remains open coincides with the ‘chance of saying everything without
touching upon the secret’ (Derrida, 1995b, p. 23). Extending Derrida’s notion of the secret to the
issue of reflexivity (and representation more generally), it becomes clear that the meaning of a
text, irrespective of it being labeled as ‘literature’ or ‘science’, cannot be fully revealed, least of
all by ‘persecuting’ the author’s intentional or psychological state. Following Derrida’s claim that
meaning must retain a certain elusiveness, there is a second aspect that needs to be considered
more closely, namely that the invocation of the author’s intentional state is often carried out in the
name of transparency or, to put it more subtly, truth. I would therefore like to highlight that the
pervasive idea of the author or the demonstration of his/her ‘entanglement’ with the subject
matter, is linked to the canonical understanding of science and particularly to the assumption that
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research can be separated from fictional, non-realist writings. In other words, pretending that
there is a natural dividing line between literature, which is deemed dubious, and so-called serious
speech acts (cf. Hillis Miller, 2001),
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it is qualitative research (which belongs to the latter
category) which holds that a given text could not get along without its author. In view of this
assumption, the idea of reflexivity as established in qualitative research denotes that author and
text necessarily go together, further assuming that access to or insight into the former would
enable the de-codification of the latter. Notwithstanding its pervasiveness, this view is not as self-
evident as it might first appear and we seem well advised to spend some thought on the
possibility of a non-authored exegesis of reflexivity and the possible merits which would derive
from the dissociation of text and author. In view of this objective, it is Derrida (e.g. 1992b,
1992c) who convincingly argued that an
utterance (or speech act) can be iterated in diverse, that is, universal contexts, whereby it is primarily the context of a given utterance, rather than the
speaker’s intention, that stipulates meaning. In concrete terms, Derrida (1985) asserted that, ‘the
effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth’, to the intended meanings of its
presumed author’ (p. 29; quoted in Halion, 1989). This claim cannot be overemphasized, because
it undermines both the idea that the truth of a particular text can definitively be disclosed as well
as the general primacy of the speaker/author. Regarding the former issue, Derrida mentioned that
it is in particular literature which exceeds the possibility of truth, since it emphasizes the
immanent undecidability of meaning and the elusive relationship between a given text and its
author/writer. For instance, ‘(s)omething of literature will have begun when it is not possible to
decide whether … I am indeed speaking of something (of the thing itself, this one, for itself) or if
I am given an example, an example of something or an example of the fact that I can speak of
something, of my way of speaking of something, of the possibility of speaking in general of
something in general, or again of writing these words, etc.’ (Derrida, 1992c, pp. 33 – 34). What
this reveals is that the recognition that literature retains a secret concerning the question if a
specific utterance represents either truth or fictional imagination. Derrida (1992c) further claimed
the following with respect to the position of the writer of literature: ‘(s)uppose that I say ‘I’, that I
write in the first person or that I write a text, as they say ‘autobiographically’. No one will be able
seriously to contradict me if I claim … that I am not writing an ‘autobiographical’ text but a text
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As Austin contended, literature is ‘parasitical’ on normal speech acts as it is ‘non-serious’ and ‘non-felicitous’.
Specifically, literature, which, following Austin, does not contain any ‘real’ traces in history or identifiable people,
therefore becomes the anti-thesis to his understanding of speech act as it acts ‘non-seriously’, i.e. without reference
to particular (i.e. real) places and people.
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on autobiography of which this very text is an example. No one will seriously be able to
contradict me if I say … that I am not writing about myself but on ‘I’, in any I at all, or on the I in
general, by giving an example: I am only an example, or I am exemplary’ (p. 34; emphasis in
original). On the face of it, literature, as Derrida pointed out, entails every possible relationship
between author and the text. Therefore, the question as to who the ‘I’ truly is or is not remains
non-answerable. It is thus revealed in Derrida’s elaboration on literature that text always exceeds
the limits of true meaning. Essentially, it is important to note that this premise applies not only to
literature (cf. Derrida, 2005) but to all (serious) writing in general (cf. Derrida, 1982). That is to
say that scientific research must equally address the question if it is at all appropriate to ask
whether and how the author has signed his/her text so as to denote (a) particular meaning(s).
Hence, if we are attentive to the implications derived so far, it is important to note that Derrida, in
blatant contrast to John Austin (cf. Derrida, 1988) who asserted that normal speech acts depend
upon a proper context, pointed out that the context in which one might make a normal (i.e. happy)
speech act, cannot be determined, because the intentional origin of speech acts (i.e. the speaker or
writer) cannot control his/her utterances in such a way as to make them unambiguous, happy or
normal. In other words, following Derrida (1977), ‘
o context can entirely enclose it [the intention of the writer]. Nor any code’ (p. 189). With this in mind, it hardly needs mention that
Derrida advocated the detachment of writing/text and context by pointing at the issue of
‘iterability’, meaning that a piece of written (or spoken) text can be removed from its original
context (be that a book, letter or local communication) and placed or ‘cited’, to use Derrida’s
wording, in another context, where the utterance is bestowed with an entirely new meaning.
Derrida (1982) thus used the notion of ‘iterability’ to emphasize the innumerable possibilities of
interpretation as well as to disrupt the ‘authority of the code as a finite system of rules; [and to
propose] at the same time, the radical destruction of any context as a protocol of code’ (p. 9).
Arguably, the lines of flight here are many. Be that as it may, I would particularly like to mention
that what Derrida’s observations teach us regarding the issue of reflexivity is that although the
writer may have had particular intentions with his/her writing, it is at the very moment of
inscription (or reading) that the writing passes into a space beyond the specific context in which it
was produced. By implication, writing causes a rupture which is completely unintended or
uncontrollable by the writer, since, in the process of the text’s dissemination (Derrida, 1981), it
dislocates the text from its initial context. Provided that any written word is principally
polysemous because it can be cited in an infinite number of other (con)texts, it is conceivable that
462
writing creates ‘a space of absent referents and undetermined signifiers’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 9).
Iterability, i.e. the infinite possibility of decontextualization and recontextualization, thus reveals
that writing is irresponsible and undecidable, because it operates outside the control of its very
author. Importantly, provided that utterances (or, more generally, texts) can be repeated in various
contexts, this is not meant to say that iterability is equivalent to a simple repetition of an utterance
in the sense of a self-contained and stable (meaning) unit. What I want to recall, instead, is that
the meaning of an utterance is determined and modified in its very context. It is therefore
imperative to bear in mind that ‘(f)or a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be
readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has
written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is
dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention
or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be
written ‘in his name’’ (Derrida, 1977, p. 180). This extract, which I have chosen for scrutinizing
the link between reflexivity and confessionalism (of the author) as established by the tradition of
qualitative research referred to above, makes clear that a text and an author cannot necessarily be
envisioned as figures and creations that share a synchronous history and a parallel development.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contended in that respect, ‘there is an aparallel evolution of the
book and the world’ (p. 11). In consequence, I advocate that those occupied with the task of
reflexivity should be less concerned with the intentions of an author (that is, following Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘the world’) and instead devote more attention and passion to the text (which, in the
case of Deleuze and Guattari, would be the ‘book’). Favoring a Derridean view of the author as
someone who ‘is not responsible to anyone, not even to himself, for whatever the persons or the
characters of his work, thus of what he is supposed to have written himself, say and do’ (Derrida,
1995b, p. 28), I hope to have provided some reasons not to believe that author and text work like
a tandem, sharing, by virtue of intention, a common trajectory.
In view of Derrida’s (1982) assertion that a particular text ‘continues to produce effects
independently of his [the author’s] presence and of the present actuality of his intentions, indeed
even after his death, his absence’ (1982, p. 5), I would once more like to relate these insights to
the kind of reflexivity identified in conjunction with qualitative research. In doing so, it is first of
all helpful to remember that the exegesis of reflexivity as confessionalism provides us with a
picture that quite peculiarly operates upon the concept of an author who is thought of being in
control of his/her text and therefore responsible and accountable for his/her argument. However,
463
the kind of irresponsibility Derrida prescribed stands in harsh contrast to this view, since it
implies that it must be opportune to say everything as well as to refrain from saying anything at
all. Provided that this freedom of expression will subsequently be established as a central feature
of the unconditional university, I want to pursue this thought and search for a kind of reflexivity
that does not take into account the author and his/her intentions, that is, which retains the author’s
secret. At the same time, I aim at contrasting qualitative scholars’ pseudo-reflective
confessionalism with an image of reflexivity that advocates a concern for text and context (both
conceived in the sense of Derrida). Whereas Derrida’s eloquent elaboration on iterability
emphasizes the relative primacy of context (vis-à-vis the author), I will now expand on the
argument that the author cannot possibly be envisaged as a determining instance by outlining,
first, the function of the author in a text, respectively the primary attention the author has received
in the sphere of (scientific) writing, and, second, by underscoring the often neglected impetus of
the reader in the process of signification.
The Elision of the Author & Reflexivity as Deconstructive Practice
To displace what is given can only be the result of a shock: we must shake up the balanced mass
of words, pierce the layer, disturb the linked order of the sentences, break the structures
of the language. (Barthes, 1986, p. 213)
What matter who’s speaking? (Foucault, 1977, p. 138)
Although I have myself felt sympathetic and passionate towards my research matter(s), and
despite the fact that I was at times overwhelmed (in a positive as well as in the negative sense) in
the course of writing this thesis, I believe that it is crucial to ask ourselves how strong the
standing or denotative force (cf. Chapter 4) of the researcher can become. Given that the writer,
or ‘sculpturer’, to use Barthes’ (1968) wording, occupies a favorable position both in terms of the
so-called ‘classificatory function’ (Foucault, 1984) as well as regarding the interweaving of
textual fragments and the determination or ‘signing’ (Derrida, 1977) of the final plot, questions of
multivoicedness, polysemia, and, by implication, politics and ethics must be looked at critically.
While I would like to refrain from perceiving the writer as a fully rational, purposeful and agentic
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entity but also as a function of discourse, we are reminded by Foucault (1977) that reference to or
the signature of an author operates to establish a sense of the text’s ‘origin’ and, thereby, to
emphasize the property of thought as well as the rightfulness and scientific basis of a given work.
In Foucault’s (1984) words: ‘the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional
principle by which in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one
impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of fiction’ (p. 119). In accordance with both Foucault’s claim that the author
functions so as to elicit the impression of ‘origin’ and of ‘belonging’ and with what has been said
before in terms of iterability, there are many others, among them literary critics such as Susan
Sontag and Roland Barthes,
149
who have pointed out that in order for a text to be understood it
need not contain background information on the author.
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However, as probably all of us have
experienced in the context of art work, being exposed to a painting or a piece of music, one often
resorts to pre-ordained interpretations, especially if the experience or confrontation does not
strike any responsive cord in us. By analogy, being either confused or untouched by a textual
performance often elicits the question ‘What did the author mean?’ Despite the contention that it
is a quasi-natural reflex to turn to the author in order to solve the enigma of demanding writings, I
want to emphasize, in accordance with Foucault (1977), that the author does not necessarily
stipulate the meaning of a given text (cf. above) but that it is writing that establishes the subject
position of the author. Indeed, this argument is provocative, since it directly inverts the canonical
assumption that the author is an essential a-priori and thus orchestrates his/her text, or, more
specifically, its meaning. Provided that this view entails that writing does not describe a linear
succession from author to text, it is through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of ‘aparallel
evolution’ that one senses that the author and the text in fact display different histories and
movements. In other words, the author cannot possibly be related to the text, as there is no stable
and coherent essence in either of those instances that would grant such a coalescence. In
consequence, author and text are asynchronous bodies because the author, following the process
of his/her writing, will pursue or experience developments or lines of flights that are
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Arguably, to depict Sontag and Barthes exclusively as literary critics constitutes a gross reduction of their work,
disregarding their contributions to semiotics, literature, aesthetics, art, etc.
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Foucault (1996) thus tried to decouple the ‘kinship’ between author and text by claiming: ‘I will propose a game:
the year without names. For one year books will be published without the author’s name. The critics will have to
manage with an entirely anonymous production … The author must be an unknown marginal’ (pp. 302 & 304)
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unpredictable from the vantage point of the presence, making him/her a stranger to his/her own
writing. Given the intertextual features and connections (Kristeva, 1980) contained in any given
text, it is beyond doubt that there can be no fixed position or relation between the author, reader,
text and outer text. Such connections are deemed instable, floating, ever-emerging, that is, in a
constant process of ‘différance’. This makes it clear that meaning is transient and, therefore, only
available as a trace that is locally fixed at the moment of singular interpretation. Having come to
the end of an arguably demanding train of thought, we can summarize our observations by noting
that the meaning of a text is not codified in the body of words and sentences, and even less so in
the intention the author. What has so far been left out of the equation, however, is the position of
the reader with respect to a text’s meaning. It is at this moment of potential confusion that we are
reminded by Barthes’ (1977) ‘Death of the Author’ that a text’s meaning is undeniably related to
the performance of the reader. In particular, a text ‘solicits of the reader not simply the reception
but the active, independent, autonomous construction of meaning’ (Landow, 1992, p. 71). Given
that each text, following Kristeva (1980), exhibits intertextual ‘commitments’, it follows that any
sign can be meaningful in different ways and that the meaning given to a text by the writer can
grossly diverge from that of the reader. As Barthes (1977) eloquently pinpointed, ‘the text is not a
line of words but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash’ (p. 146). Or, as Roth (2001) contended, ‘what is important to understand [is that
in] interpretation [it] is … less the author who signs a text and more the reader who cosigns it’ (p.
8). Dismissing, as both Barthes and Roth do, the idea of a linear and hierarchical relationship
between author and text, and leaving out the primacy of the person who does the scripting
(compared to all the intertextual connections of a text),
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we have good reasons to attach more
value to both the reader and the act of reading. By extension, I would like to turn back to the issue
of ‘reflexivity’ in relation to the process of (critical or radical) reading. In doing so, I will make
use of the inspiration derived from the considerations above in order to enliven the business
school ‘to come’ by advocating a responsibility to re-read our own interpretations and
(unreflected) premises from a critical (yet affirmative; cf. below) vantage point. Departing from
the assumption that a given text is bestowed with meaning through cultural commonsense and
ideology (Billig, 1987; cf. also Chapter 3), I will locate the potential contribution of reflexivity by
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With respect to the intertextual connections of a text, Foucault (1974) pointed out that ‘(t)he frontiers of a book
are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its
autonomous form it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node
within a network’ (p. 23).
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laying bare the available discourses we employ in our theoretical reasoning as well as by
identifying the metaphors that penetrate our scholarly texts.
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It is helpful to shed some light on
the constitutive moment of (critical) reading in order to understand not only how we as readers
bestow a particular text with meaning but also to reflect upon how deconstructive reading can
effectuate the transformation of the status quo by means of novel understandings (Patton, 2003).
The issue of reading will thus become the conceptual vantage point of the subsequent
investigation. It is important to note that I do not have in mind the sort of modernist reading that
envisages reading via a free-standing subject (i.e. reader) who simply appropriates, i.e. consumes,
knowledge, but the sort of reflective, i.e. deconstructive, reading which heralds transgressive
possibilities (cf. Chapter 6) and thus opens up ‘to the absolute future of what is coming’ (Derrida,
1994, p. 90). I believe that the reason why there is a relative lack of this sort of deconstructive
reflexivity in ‘normal science’ (Case, 2003) is because researchers are not willing to go beyond
their taken-for-granted assumptions, ideas and norms which circulate in their writings and which
warrant them both a professional identity and a decent life (Fuller, 2005). However, this is surely
not good enough an argument to disregard deconstruction and to sustain the trajectory of the
McUniversity (Parker, 2002b; cf. also Chapter 1). Hence, notwithstanding the fact that leaving
the ‘mainstream’ of research and teaching untouched would avert much conflict and tension, I
contend that deconstruction can and must become a major issue in the future business school,
since it fosters a certain sensitivity towards one’s own writing or analytical practices, one’s
preferred discourse, rhetoric, or representational practices, and the context or historical and
cultural heritage which is inevitably reflected in one’s writing. Seeking to establish an ‘age of
deconstruction’ (Nealon, 2003) in the context of business schools, I would like to follow
Weiskopf and Willmott’s (1997) appeal to address ‘as reflexively as possible, how particular
representations come to be privileged and solidified’ (p. 7). I would also like to stress the need to
throw light on the philosophical underpinnings of our academic work as well as the ethical space
being enabled or disabled therein. It is therefore helpful, first of all, to spend some words on what
deconstruction is and what it is not,
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and what can be achieved through the practices of
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Note in passing that poststructural scholars have conceded that their writing is by no means ideologically neutral.
Rather, as language is never neutral (Barthes, 1967), it is ideology which must gain a key position in our critical
research agendas. However, as ideology is an inescapable part of the social science, its reflection and deconstruction
might be one possible way of breaking out of the problems involved in the premature closure of new and
unconventional ideas.
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As briefly mentioned in Chapter 4, Derrida himself warned his audience of the dangers of strictly defining what
deconstruction is, since deconstruction is not to be transformed into a prescriptive code.
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deconstruction, i.e. what deconstruction has to offer and what it cannot achieve (cf. also Chapters
2 & 4). As a first step towards this end, I seek to illuminate how Derrida and his deconstructive
work have been appraised and tampered with by his critics. Approaching the issue of
deconstruction through the backdoor, so to speak, I deem it important to make a brief detour to
Derrida’s critics so as to counteract some of the more insistent misrepresentations of
deconstruction and to reveal, step by step, its genuine potential for the business school ‘to come’.
Reflection on Derrida’s Critics
They are angry at my texts more than anything else, and I think it is because of the way I write –
not the content, or the thesis. They say that I do not obey the usual rules of rhetoric,
grammar, demonstration, and argumentation; but, of course, if they were simply not
interested, they would not be angry. As it is, they start to get involved but feel that it’s not
that easy, that to read my texts they have to change the rules, to read differently, if only at
another rhythm. (Derrida, 2003, p. 17)
The magnitude of criticism Derrida was subjected to is indirectly reflected in his appreciation of
Gilles Deleuze whom he estimated by virtue of the fact (though, of course, not exclusively) that
he was one of the few contemporary philosophers who never publicly raised his voice against him
(Nealon, 2003).
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Although it is beyond doubt that Derrida appreciated Deleuze not only for his,
say, mute complicity but also, and probably even more so, because he felt a ‘flustering, really
flustering, experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity concerning the “theses”’
(Derrida, 2001c, p. 192). This does not obscure the fact that Derrida’s work has witnessed
immense resistance
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which finds expression not least in the many interviews in which he was
invited to account for (and at times defend) his work, that is, reveal the secret of his
deconstructive work. While the list of critics includes such prominent figures as Habermas,
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Another philosopher which falls into this ‘category’ is Levinas with whom Derrida shared a considerable amount
of ideas (Levinas somewhat preceding Derrida in chronological terms) and whom he appreciated in a surprisingly
unconditional manner (cf. Critchley, 1999).
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Probably one of the best-remembered public objections was the “Cambridge Affair” of 1992 in which a small
number of Cambridge scholars initiated a campaign against the awarding of an honorary degree to Derrida. Several
months of agitation led to letters of objection being printed in the national and international press. Derrida
nevertheless received the award in the same year.
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Foucault, Austin, Searle, Wolin, Sheehan and Eagleton, it was in particular the latter three
opponents who (successfully since effectively) accused deconstruction of being relativist in an
utmost dangerous fashion. Although one might object that such reductionism is blatantly wrong
and that the critics in fact refused to engage with Derrida’s lucid and rigorous work (Borradori,
2003), I would like to make reference to one of the more recent and straightforward adversaries
of deconstruction, neo-Marxist Terry Eagleton, in order to give some examples of the grounds of
relativist nuisance. In concrete terms, Eagleton in ‘After Theory’ (2003) made no secret of his
dislike of Derrida’s (deconstructive) work (while he openly appreciated other proponents of the
‘French school’ such as, for instance, Michel Foucault). What seems to have fueled Eagleton’s
dislike, which is evident in the fact that he somewhat ironically portrayed Derrida as being
enamored with words and their seemingly endless possibilities, is Derrida’s close reading of
texts. It may be argued that Eagleton’s criticism regarding the rigorousness with which Derrida
treated individual texts is unfair, and I believe that Derrida’s apparent ‘love’ of writing and
literature (Hillis Miller, 2001) should be seen as a rare act of genuine scholarship. Refraining
from defending Derrida by laying bare the shortcomings of Eagleton’s argumentation, it is all the
more important to note that Eagleton asserted that postmodern theory (including Derrida’s work)
is outdated because it has proven to be inappropriate for guiding and giving direction to
humankind.
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This claim has been made by others before, causing widespread repercussions. To
gain a deeper understanding of what argumentative threads harmed Derrida’s deconstructive
work, it is important to bear in mind that Eagleton (2003) accused and dismissed postmodern
theory by conjuring up an ostensible loss of ‘totalities, universal values, grand historical
narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge’ (p.
13). Although this is an appalling misinterpretation of deconstructive practice, and postmodern
theory in general, it is clear that Eagleton’s cynical allegation that postmodern scholars have little
to say concerning public/political issues – such as, for instance, the Israel-Palestine altercation –
has partly found favor with both popular culture and certain spheres of the academia. Being
spread by people who are legitimized in speaking the truth (Foucault, 2001), it is beyond doubt
that the idea of postmodernism as a relativist endeavor, a point which Eagleton used as a running
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In his appraisal, Eagleton dismissed the arguments of Althusser, Kristeva, Habermas, Barthes and others, many of
whom have explicitly and actively resisted the prefix ‘postmodernism’ (cf. Learnmonth (2005).
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argument against Derrida,
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has become a sort of pervasive truism that must be taken seriously.
Essentially, seriousness and a sense of alertness are indicated because even the most farfetched
allegations can have appallingly ‘real’ effects. As is the case with Alan Sokal’s (cf. Sokal &
Bricmont, 1998) criticism, or let us say parody of postmodern approaches,
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we find in Eagleton
and likeminded scholars the kind of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988) which, although not relating to
the actual work of Derrida, operate autonomously and with great force, creating a blatantly
negative image of deconstruction. On the assumption that ‘the simulacrum [of Derrida’s
deconstruction] is true’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 166), I will exemplify in Chapter 7 (on behalf of
social entrepreneurship) that Derrida was by no means an advocate of the stream of
postmodernism with a ‘leaning toward relativism’ (Borradori, 2003, p. 17) and that it would
simply be false to believe that his deconstructive practice was not apt for appraising and, in a
wider sense, for addressing ‘real-life’ issues such as justice, responsibility or, to put it bluntly,
ethics. Although I have decided to save this rehabilitation for later, I nevertheless whish to give
voice to Derrida and consider what he had in mind when talking about deconstruction. With this
in mind, I feel particularly compelled to make a number of brief comments on the somewhat
misleading equation of deconstruction with destruction, which in turn will bring us to the point of
appraising the value of deconstruction in terms of radicalizing the business school of tomorrow.
If we agree that Derrida has not always been an easy read, which of course makes it even more
tempting to dismiss his work for lack of ‘clarity and rigor’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 419; cf. also quote
at the beginning of this paragraph), the point to be stressed then is that Derrida’s deviant style
(Lambert, 2003) tells us, among other things, that to deepen our commitment to a future of a
different kind and to open ourselves to the hitherto unthinkable kind of business education, we
actually have to appreciate invention and learn to ‘change the rules’ (Derrida, 1995b) in order to
radicalize the kind of writing (as well as research and teaching) and, by implication, learning
being currently imparted by contemporary business schools.
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Derrida (1999) himself actively denied being a relativist although his deliberations have remained somewhat
‘unheard’.
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Although the counter-reactions to Sokal’s mocking of postmodern jargon (and its misuse of the natural sciences)
and misrepresentation of relativism were immense, the status of what is referred to as ‘postmodernism’ has
nevertheless experienced tremendous and sustainable damage.
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Deconstruction versus Criticism
We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. (Foucault, 1984, p. 45)
The intellect cannot criticize itself … because in order to criticize the intellect we should have to
be a higher being with “absolute knowledge”. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 263)
Deconstruction, as Habermas (1987) claimed, represents a practice that is on the one hand
subversive (since it disrupts prevailing commonsense) but which, on the other hand, provides
nothing to replace that which it has destroyed. Furthermore, as Derrida himself declared that he
did not think that ‘deconstruction ‘offers’ anything as deconstruction’
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(1999, p. 74), we have
seemingly arrived at what could most apoplectically be denoted as the surrender of deconstructive
practice in the face of its own inaptness. However, in trying to stimulate a more affirmative view
of deconstruction,
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we must first of all establish how deconstruction relates to critique.
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Critique, on the face of it, can be discerned as a variegated and at times elusive task, as it means
different things to different people. For instance, critique is most notably related to Kant’s writing
‘Critique of Pure Reason’, in which criticism is envisaged as a third way between dogmatism
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and skepticism.
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The task of critique, according to Kant, is to dismantle common sense, since
common sense is conceived of as being dogmatic. Further developed and appropriated by, for
instance, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, the concept of ‘criticism’ – to become a
workable feature of this analysis – itself requires critical consideration. A first problem related to
the Kantian notion of ‘criticism’ is that the writer or researcher who tries to dismantle common
sense is in fact never fully able to sidestep the common sense of his/her historical/cultural
heritage. Hence, provided that the critic always practices his/her criticism within, and not outside
of, the respective sphere of common sense, Jones (2001) reminds us that there is always ‘some
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Meaning that deconstruction did not simply exchange one truth regime with another.
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That is the kind of view being promoted in certain organization studies (e.g. Chia, 1996).
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To be sure, Derrida evinced his connection with Heidegger in that his work, at times, relates to the latter's German
word ‘Destruktion’. It is noteworthy that Heidegger’s ‘Destruction’ equally heralds positive possibilities or,
according to Böhm and Jones (2001), ‘show the enabling boundaries of excluded possibilities’ (p. 316; emphasis in
original).
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Which is the overriding rejection of the relativity of knowledge.
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Scepticism represents the oppositional strand to dogmatism, which is most fundamentally revealed in the
(over)emphasis of the relativity of human knowledge.
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kind of co-implication of critical reason with common sense’ (cf. Boje et al., 2001, p. 303). The
second problem that has been raised time and again in conjunction with critical reasoning is that
such endeavors themselves are likely to become dogmatic in that they simply replace one
ideology with another. It must therefore be conceded that critical thought has a certain tendency
to overrule the prevailing common sense with a new, equally dogmatic, metanarrative. In view of
the observation that critique or critical thought is linked to its historical and cultural heritage and
while keeping in mind that critical thought runs the risk of exchanging one dogma with another, it
is deconstruction which offers a perspective that is receptive or, better, reflective of the cultural
and historical ‘embeddings’ of (critical) writing, and which simultaneously defers the ‘classic
emancipatory ideal’ (Derrida, 1994) of critical thinking in favor of a textual reflexivity which
dismantles commonsensical representations not from the vantage point of an exterior ‘slasher’,
i.e. destructor,
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but from the very inside of the text (cf. Jones, 2005). The polarity between
inside and outside as pinpointed by Foucault (cf. above quote) is important to the extent that it
concurs with Derrida (e.g. 1981) who has shown, in a convincing manner, that in whatever form
of critical reflection there is never a complete outside or complete outsider. Instead, Derrida’s
deconstructive work has demonstrated that the seemingly exteriorized other, i.e. the supplement
(Derrida, 1976), is always co-implied in the metaphysical system which establishes a particular
centre, the inside. To use Derrida’s (1981) own wording in order to envision this dynamic:
‘closure is constantly being traversed by the forces, and worked by the exteriority, that it
represses’ (p. 5), which means that inside and outside are mutually constitutive and, though often
concealed, one (concept, word, sign, etc.) cannot be thought of without the existence of the other.
The above point makes it even clearer that Derrida’s work is not so much interested in exposing
and enabling the interests or alienated needs of the people which are underlying or suppressed by
a specific argument or ideology (even though some scholars use it in this way), but in studying
the history and interpretations of a given concept and, furthermore, in laying open both the
dominant (i.e. the centre) and the marginal or neglected exegesis of the concept (i.e. the deliberate
absence; Law, 2004). Consequently, it is imperative to remind ourselves that deconstructive
endeavors are not targeted at identifying flaws in the argumentation of the text (which would be
the the objective of logic) or at unraveling the narrator’s deflected self-interests (which forms part
of rhetoric). As mentioned earlier (cf. Chapter 2), deconstruction represents a ‘movement’ which
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Or by a philosopher who practices his/her critique with ‘a hammer’ (Nietzsche, 2004).
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seeks to disclose the binaries with which a logocentric text operates and, secondly and more
importantly, to destabilize the ostensible inconvertibility of these binaries in order to highlight
‘the ever-present possibility of invention, reconfiguration or transformation in our existing,
historically conditioned and contingent ways of understanding’ (Patton, 2003, p. 18). Therefore,
what sets Derrida’s deconstructive work apart from many other critical approaches is that
deconstruction operates without any reference to the material world (e.g.: ‘that is how the world
is’, ‘that is how the world ought to be’) or to the strata outside of the text. Instead, the focus of
Derrida’s endeavor is directed at the text, and the textual practices which bring forward realities.
Bearing in mind that the present chapter seeks to inquire the question of reflexivity in relation to
the business school of tomorrow, I would like to use this constructionist understanding of critical
thinking so as to suggest a kind of reflexivity which makes it possible to work out the essential
undecidability of meaning at the expense of text’s metaphysical groundings, not to say certainties.
What such a textual understanding of critique implies with regard to the task at hand is that
(business) scholars need to read not (only) in the library, but also need ‘to read events, to analyze
the situation, to criticize the media, to listen to the rhetoric of the demagogues, that’s close
reading, and it is required more today than ever’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 67). To be sure, the critical
space being enabled through deconstruction must be seen as an instance of ‘problematization’
which seeks to counteract premature or facile closures (Jones, 2003). Accordingly, in opposition
to the antagonistic exegesis of critique (which aims at replacing one ideology with another), it is
through deconstruction that the two poles of a given concept or idea are presented as irreducible
and irreplaceable, and ‘it is between these two poles … that decisions and responsibilities are to
be taken’ (Derrida, 2001d, p. 45). By implication, deconstruction has no stake in simply
overthrowing the hierarchy entailed in every linguistic opposite, but rather tries to highlight how
the superior and the inferior position of a hierarchy interrelate and to ‘provide new means of
description and therefore new ways of understanding and acting upon the world’ (Patton, 2003, p.
16). The point to be emphasized and repeated here is that Derrida in his deconstructive work has
mostly offered a redescription of existing concepts (e.g. hospitality, giving, cosmopolitanism,
friendship, democracy, etc.), pointing out that there is often a distinction between a conditioned,
calculative or conditional and an unconditional form of the concept. In doing so Derrida did not
naively advocate the latter, hierarchically inferior, exegesis of the concept but tried to show how
one must learn to operate at the interface of or at the void between these two polarities. As in
Chapter 7, where I will try to work out the so-called possible-impossible space of social
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entrepreneurship, I will outline the concept of the unconditional business school and discuss its
irrevocable paradox and literal impossibility in the last part of the present chapter.
Having deliberately put forward an ambivalent portrayal of deconstruction which alludes
both to resistance and complicity, to disengagement and engagement (Egéa-Kuehne, 2005), it is
this ‘double-bind’ which elicits the question if deconstruction can be recommended as a radical
practice or, to be more precise, as a practice for radicalizing the business school. To be sure, if
our understanding of ‘radical’ in this context is synonymous with downright opposition, it is
more than questionable whether deconstruction is the right ‘tactic’. Notwithstanding this brief
rhetorical juncture, it is in the following paragraph that I will argue that deconstruction can
nevertheless be conceived as a radical practice which – by instigating change and movement –
exerts its transgressive force from within the respective tradition, thereby making possible an
involved and affirmative commitment, rather than suspicious exteriority.
Deconstruction as Textual Affirmation and Radical Practice
Metaphysics contains its parasite within itself, as the “unhealable” which it tries, unsuccessfully,
to cure. It attempts to cover over the unhealable by annihilating the nothingness hidden
within itself. (Hillis Miller, 2004, p. 186)
In view of Derrida’s assumption that language is made up of competing discourses and therefore
constitutes a site of exploration and struggle (Weedon, 1987), it follows from this that
deconstruction be understood as an attempt at highlighting the dynamic of (logocentric or
metaphysical) language with the objective of rendering visible both its more evident, canonical as
well as its concealed or deflected poles. As has become apparent in the above paragraph,
departing from such an understanding of language makes it difficult, if not impossible, to qualify
deconstruction as a ‘classical’, i.e. Kantian, form of criticism. Hence, it is equally fair to say that
the notion of ‘deconstruction’ has been conceived by many who have made reference to Derrida,
both affirmatively and critically, as an act of ‘tearing apart’. It is thus important to reiterate that
Derrida (1976) contended that the objective of deconstructive practice is not to ‘destroy structures
from the outside’ (p. 24) but to highlight what has always been inside the text, though elided and
rendered subliminal. This rectification is important to the extent that it reminds us that
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deconstruction is not so much concerned with a detached exterior (Lyotard, 1993; cf. above), but
with the accentuation of a text from the inside, that is, from the structure of the text itself.
According to Spivak (1993), the early English translator of Derrida’s work (cf. ‘Of
Grammatology’, 1976) and one of the leading scholars of feminist and postcolonial theory,
deconstruction is to be seen as unaccusing while ‘situationally productive through dismantling’
(Spivak, 1993, p. 146; cf. also Jones, 2005). While Spivak (1999) highlighted deconstruction as
the epitome of critical intimacy (rather than critical distance), there are other scholars who
refrained from using the epithet ‘critical’ altogether so as to underscore its often ignored
affirmative characteristics (Critchley, 1999; Cohen, 2001; Patton, 2003). Be that as it may, as
deconstruction is envisioned as a form of reading practice, i.e. ‘double reading’ (Critchley, 1999),
by virtue of which a text conveys something other than what is canonically implied, it is exactly
this moment of différance which constitutes not only a departure from or a change of the present
but also an affirmation of what is already self-evident. Deconstruction, as Nealon (2003)
observed, is hence ‘not a demonstration of lack, negativity or neutralization … but is rather the
positive or affirmative force of context breaking’ (p. 163; emphasis in original). It is thus evident
that deconstruction forms part of the canon of presence, reminding us that in order to open up to
new meanings and representational strata we first need to learn the protocols of the prevailing
heritage.
Arguably, Derrida has rarely been related to political radicalism (Patton, 2003), and in
order to use his deconstructive work to radicalize the business school of the future, some
thorough deliberations will be necessary. As a first step it is important to note that the meaning of
‘radical’ can be interpreted in many ways. My understanding of the term thus hinges upon
academic responsibility and faith, as well as an ethos of reading (cf. also Chapter 4). Although I
concede that the kind of radical practice I have in mind is not completely alien to the university
(Fuller, 2005), it nevertheless seems tenable to apply and revitalize the kind of rigorous reading
Derrida pursued in his work, simultaneously highlighting its increasing marginalization in
contemporary institutions of higher education (Parker, 2002b). This pledge seems all the more
appropriate in view of both the observation that business school teaching has come to treat
knowledge as a commodity (cf. Chapter 1) and that Derrida’s critics dismissed and obscured his
work by means of dubious rationalities which might partly explain why the ‘age of
deconstruction’ (Nealon, 2003) has never taken place in business education. Looked at from this
perspective, deconstruction becomes radical not in the sense of pursuing militant opposition, but
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of allowing for tolerance and openness towards the invention of meaning and a future of a
different kind. Taking into consideration that Derrida deconstructed only those texts he genuinely
loved (Protevi, 2004), there is clearly a lesson to learn, particularly in view of the fact that
scholarship, conceived as a careful and passionate encounter with other’s work, requires both
time and tolerance. Furthermore, bearing in mind that ‘it is not implausible to believe that those
who have dismissed Derrida have done so on the basis of secondary texts or on a superficial
reading of a limited amount of his work’ (Learmonth, 2004, p. 11), it becomes all the more clear
that the notion of ‘radical’ takes on an entirely passionate connotation that does not emphasize
war but mutual respect and creative (though heterodox) questioning.
Yet, before we turn to deconstruction in the context of the business school without
conditions, I would like to spend some words on if and how deconstruction relates to matters or
questions of public concern, and in particular to politics (and ethics), in order to address some of
the most relentless and persistent allegations against Derrida.
The Politico-Ethical Space of Deconstruction
Some souls believe themselves to have found in Deconstruction – as if there were one, and only
one – a modern form of immorality, of amorality, or of irresponsibility. (Derrida, 1995b,
p. 15)
Even if I would not wish to inscribe the discourse of emancipation into a teleology, a
metaphysics, an eschatology, or even a classical messianism, I none the less believe that
there is no ethico-political decision or gesture without what I would call a ‘Yes’ to
emancipation. (Derrida, 1996, p. 82)
While allegations against deconstruction have taken on different shadings, it is particularly Rorty
(1989; 1995), who is at one and the same time a fervent admirer of Derrida and one of his most
merciless critics, influencing the view of Derrida as a ‘private ironist’ and that of deconstruction,
more than anything else, as an intellectual endeavor with little, if any, public significance.
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Derrida responded to Rorty’s appraisal of deconstruction by rejecting the private/public distinction. While Rorty
had limited the utility of deconstruction to the private affairs (as a means of ‘self-creation’ and ‘overcoming’, cf.
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Rorty, among others, thus contended that ‘Derrida’s only relevance to the quest for social justice
is that, like the Romantic poets before them, they make more vivid and concrete our sense of
what human life might be like in a democratic utopia’ (Rorty, 1998, p. 310; quoted in Peters,
2004, p. 48). The central premise of Rorty’s arguably provocative statement is that deconstruction
pays no heed whatsoever to public, and by extension, to ethical or political matters. Although
there is a fair number of publications which stress the ethical implications of Derrida’s work
(Jones, 2003; cf. also Chapters 1 & 7) and its political ramifications (e.g. Patton & Protevi, 2003),
it must be borne in mind that Rorty’s (mis)representation of Derrida’s trajectory has established
itself in a persistent manner in the academia. It thus comes as no surprise that, as a result of the
increasing criticism (e.g. Boje, 2001; de Vries, 2001), Derrida and in particular deconstruction are
viewed with a significant degree of suspicion when it comes to issues such as (both individual
and collective) emancipation (e.g. Gabriel, 2001), politics (Patton, 2003) or ethics (Anderson-
Irwin, 2001). However, as is made clear in Chapter 1 as well as below, Derrida’s later work has
been hailed as a (re)turn to issues of politics and ethics, as it is concerned with such topics as
hospitality, justice, friendship, giving or democracy. Considering that these works, which Derrida
mainly produced from the early 1990s onwards, explicitly deal with political and ethical
questions,
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it is even more surprising that deconstruction is still mainly conceptualized and
interpreted in line with Rorty’s rationale, which means that politics and ethics are not taken into
account. To undo part of this dissociation, it is helpful to turn once more to Spivak (1990) who
contended that deconstruction, despite being central to all political endeavors, is itself not able to
found a political program. Given that this statement bestows political significance upon
deconstruction while putting into perspective (not to say downplaying) its potential political
impetus or potentiality, we need to remember that Spivak envisaged deconstruction as an
important, even indispensable enrichment of all political undertakings, because ‘deconstruction
can make founded political programs more useful by making their in-built problems more visible’
(Spivak, 1993, p. 121). As implied in Spivak’s insightful comment, deconstruction is a strategic
move which renders possible the (re)negotiation of whatever program, claim or text. To be sure,
Derrida (1992) dealt with political matters in a most decisive manner in ‘Force of Law’ where he
contended, against the canon, that it is not the law which ensures justice but deconstruction;
Peters, 2004, p. 49), Derrida maintained that his work (in particular his more literary texts) is actually a performative
problematization of the public/private binary.
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Note that Derrida’s earlier work also contains political and ethical implications though this link is more oblique if
compared to his latter writings.
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deconstruction, according to Derrida, is the ultimate instance of justice. This is indeed a
provocative statement. However, in his elaboration on the relationship between justice and the
law Derrida convincingly argued that most juridical systems are, considering their inherent
violence, not tenable as models of justice, since they enforce the rationality of the state apparatus
upon the people instead of pursuing the establishment of a just society. Contrary to the idea that
law and justice form a tandem, Derrida claimed that a juridical system must, in the name of
justice, be subjected to deconstruction. This reveals that Derrida’s deconstructive reading creates
a tension between the law and justice and, by implication, helps to establish a novel, that is, pure
image of justice (Derrida, 1992). As with Spivak who maintained that deconstruction and politics
(must) necessarily go together, Derrida’s appraisal of the jurical system makes it clear that
deconstruction cannot possibly be qualified as a nihilistic or private exercise but as both a
thorough investigation of commonsensical assumptions and a springboard for a so-called justice
‘to come’ (Derrida, 2002), understood as a politico-ethical space opened for a future of a different
kind. Admittedly, the political and/or ethical implications of Derrida’s work could be elaborated
more extensively, addressing a variety of other concepts such as democracy, hospitality, the gift,
cosmopolitanism etc. However, it is not my aim here to depict Derrida as a scholar of ethics or
politics, and even less so to simply equate deconstruction with ethics or politics (cf. Critchley,
1999). Nevertheless, I would like to repeat that deconstruction does, despite all the criticism
mentioned before, carry value for public affairs and societal change. By implication, departing
from the assumption that deconstruction could mitigate the crisis in contemporary business
schools (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005; cf. also Chapter 1), I would now like to turn to deconstruction
in business school curricula.
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Deschooling the Business School or ‘Including’ Deconstruction in Academic Curricula
The liberty of the question … must be stated and protected. (Derrida, 2005, p. 99; emphasis in
original)
The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he
carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-
evident … to reexamine rules and institutions … to participate in the formation of a
political will. (Foucault, 1985, pp. 8 – 9)
Having outlined some of the merits and potential tenets of deconstructive practice, and having
addressed, however briefly and tentatively, some of the most unproductive or hindering
misconceptions of deconstruction, I have advocated a perception of deconstruction as a
momentous reflective practice that could have far-reaching (ethico-political) implications for
academic (business) curricula. It is important to note, then, that the extension of contemporary
business school curricula is not an easy and effortless undertaking, since there is always a danger
of turning deconstruction into a feeble pro-forma exercise that does not unfold the sort of
potential I have just pinpointed. However, despite having high hopes in deconstruction, it would
be naive to assume that deconstruction is the key to a progressive future (May, 2005). In other
words, although deconstruction can lead to a positive extension of business school curricula, the
idea of progress implied in such an extension has little in common with a quest for universal
values or appallingly easy remedies, but with a ‘desperate eagerness to imagine it [the presence],
to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in
what it is’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 41). Hence, in accordance Foucault’s (1984) contention that
‘critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of
reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may
be hoped’ (p. 38; cf. also above quote), I would like to examine how deconstruction can provide a
reflective perspective to (business) education. In order to do so, it is helpful to invoke Ivan
Illich’s (1973) criticism of education systems before proposing a kind of learning which protects
people from being restricted to the kind of logocentric systems as well as determined, pre-
ordained meanings which Derrida (e.g. 1976, 1988) continuously challenged. Hence, Illich
(1973), in line with the argument pursued in Chapter 1, contended in his cogent treatise
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‘Deschooling Society’ that the ‘ethos’ of society needs ‘deschooling’, meaning that it should be
decoupled from prevailing ideas of development and education which, according to Illich, are
perceived by educational professionals as commodities. The problem as pinpointed by Illich is
that schools and universities, as two of the most influential institutions in designing education
curricula, are allowed to monopolize both the production and distribution of education. Illich’s
critique is based on the observation that schooling, i.e. the production and dissemination of
knowledge, draws society into a trap by way of eliciting the impression that knowledge is
‘hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock’ and,
most notably, that ‘knowledge is a thing rather than an activity’ (Gajardo, 1994, p. 715).
Similarly, Derrida (2004) repeatedly expressed his suspicion that the demand for a convention of
academic coherence actually runs counter to a genuine understanding of social affairs. One of the
main problems of the current state of the university, according to Derrida, is revealed in the fact
that knowledge is regarded as clearly structured (for us as researchers) in the ‘external world’
(Cooper, 1989, p. 481) so that the scholars’ sole task is to find means to grasp it and, on a second
note, to sell it. It is with his claim to ‘university responsibility’ that Derrida (2004) most clearly
counteracted the growing tendency of universities to gear their research towards programmable,
calculable and profitable goals. In light of Illich’s contention mentioned above, we must not
forget that the kind of knowledge currently taught in education institutions is still conceived as
being amassable and measurable, and, by implication, that the possession of knowledge operates
as a parameter for a person’s status within society. Derrida (2004) thus convincingly argued that
in teaching there is already (and will increasingly be) a bifurcation between those grades which
are deemed ‘useful’, that is, have practical application in the world, and those which are not, i.e.
those aimed at cultivating critical thought and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What
both Illich and Derrida stressed is that education (or schooling) is increasingly aligned to practical
ends (i.e. ‘profitable applications’ or ‘technical schemas’; cf. Derrida, 2004, p. 59), whereby
knowledge is not qualified in terms of its ability to enable critical thought and to educate
responsible citizens, but instead in terms of its economic utility. While Lyotard (1984), among
others, objected that higher education has increasingly been subjected to the demands of the
market (and state; cf. Chapter 1), it is again Illich who argued that such state- and business-
commissioned education would have the noticeable effect of restricting creativity.
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While
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French philosopher Michel Serres (1993) has similarly pointed at the lack of creative thinking in the academe,
claiming that ‘(e)ducation today produces scientists who, generally speaking, are ignorant outside their own fields,
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applying his critique to other areas such as medical treatment, it is in ‘Tools for Conviviality’
(1975) that Illich suggested measures against the adverse effects of institutionalism. Illich’s
humanist approach is most manifest in his claim that there could be ‘a desirable future’, allowing
people to choose ‘a life of action over a life of consumption’ (Illich, 1973, p. 57). Coming full
circle with Derrida’s vision of the future of the university, it must first of all be clarified that,
unlike Illich’s utopia, he is not concerned with humanist development. Although Derrida’s
‘blueprint’ of a better society is partly the topic of Chapter 7, it is important to note once more
that his elaborations defy the overthrow and simple replacement of our heritage. Furthermore, in
order to illustrate how deconstruction can serve the university as a basis for ethical conduct, I
would like to reflect briefly on the potential contribution of deconstructive practice to a
deschooled society and to an education system which overcomes the deficiencies identified by
both Illich and Lyotard. To be more precise, I would like to consider if and how Derrida’s
deconstructive practice might lead to an improvement of university curricula by raising students’
as well as scholars’ reflective and creative competence.
Foucault, Serres, Derrida and Lyotard all offer helpful ideas both for understanding the
status quo of educational institutions and for encouraging the (radical) extensions or
deterritorialization (cf. Chapter 4) of prevailing strata. For instance, Michel Serres (1995, in
conversation with Bruno Latour) claimed that the kind of scientific methods
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being taught at our
universities are premised upon the idea that reality is predictable and therefore subject to
repetition. The notion of method thus hinges on the objective of mastery and closure, both of
which do not acknowledge the immanent instability and undecidability of social reality. Inventive
methods or anti-methods (Harari & Bell, 1982, p. xxxvi) have therefore been stipulated by Serres
as a means for discovering new connections between and creative translations of existing
theories. It is implied in Serres (1995) that to embrace difference and multiplicity (instead of
fortified certainties) one needs to think beyond determined frames of meaning, i.e. metaphysical
systems. In order to establish a parallel between Serres’ call for inventive methods and
deconstruction, it is important to emphasize that both schemes are based on the assumption that in
order to embrace difference, one needs to appropriate and transform that which is provided to us
by conventional forms of research or teaching. Importantly, thinking ‘outside the box’
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is the
and cultured people who know nothing about science’ (p. 2).
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Note that deconstruction does not fall into the category of ‘method’ (cf. Chapter 4).
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Which is explicitly addressed by Serres and implicitly contained in Derrida’s work.
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merit associated with deconstructive readings. Although scholars like Eagleton (2003) have tried
to ridicule Derrida’s seeming amorousness with text, it is precisely this very solidarity and
relentless endurance with text – be it literary or non-literary (e.g. scientific), philosophical or non-
philosophical – which reveals its other, its supplement so as to delineate the matter (i.e. concept)
in a refreshingly new way. In the light of this positive appraisal of deconstruction, we must not
forget that the increasing administrative requirements of business school staff, the mounting
number of enrolled business students and the required load of supervision might render our quest
too demanding. Be that as it may, I contend that our work load and the performativity demands
are not good enough reasons for sustaining the ‘mercantilization’ of knowledge as currently
performed in many institutions of tertiary education (Lyotard, 1984). On the contrary, I believe
that it is mandatory to offer reflective courses which enable students to step into a critical
dialogue with the epistemological and ontological vindications of mainstream (business)
knowledge they are provided with. I thus contend that deconstructive reflexivity might allow
people to make informed judgments regarding the mostly unrecognized rationalities or
commonsense assumptions one lives by. As briefly mentioned before in conjunction with the
inside – outside polarity, deconstruction has the additional advantage that it does not simply resist
available theories, models or concepts but, rather, seeks to shake up those theories, models and
concepts which arrogate singular truth. Stated otherwise, deconstruction may be seen as a
reflexive loop, extending those latter kinds of theories by first destabilizing what is taken as self-
evident and by showing that there are always alternative views. It is precisely this kind of critical,
reflexive dialogue with mainstream ideas which, I believe, has the potential to emphasize how
‘particular representations come to be privileged and solidified’ (Weiskopf & Willmott, 1997, p.
7), thereby revealing that our predominant way of education could easily lead to our own
‘zombification’
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(Murray, 2005). In consequence, if we were to conceive Derrida as a theorist,
his main contribution would most probably be that he showed that theories must always be on
guard against themselves because the dynamic of language always renders them unstable
(Couzens Hoy, 1993). Thus it may be argued that we must (imperative!) pursue and consolidate
deconstructive endeavors in the business school ‘to come’ so as to exceed whatever exhibits signs
of logocentric closure. Importantly though, talking about the need to reflect upon credited
concepts, theories, models, or, to put it bluntly, commonsense cannot conceal that deconstructive
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Murray (2005) employed the metaphor of ‘zombification’ to circumscribe how traditional management education
prepares students for their roles in retail companies such as Tesco and Walmart.
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practice itself is an infinite task, impossible since never finished (cf. also Chapter 2). Bearing in
mind that deconstruction never works exhaustively or is never completed in a definite sense, it is
Spivak (1990) who mentioned the ‘practical politics of the open end’ so as to clarify that
deconstruction does not incite a grand ideological change, a grand ‘surgical operation’ (p. 105).
Rather, change of whatever magnitude, following Spivak, requires persistent deconstructive
reflection (cf. again Chapter 2). One thing we learn from Spivak is the recognition that
deconstruction can or even must become an inseparable part of prevailing theories. Furthermore,
Spivak reminds us that theory and deconstructive reflexivity need to engage in a constructive
dialogue – in the sense of Serres’ (1993) notion of ‘cross-fertilization’ – as a result of which
novel opportunities can emerge. Consequently, the tenet of both Derrida and Spivak is that the
other must not be conceived as standing outside the centre of prevailing truth, but that the other is
irrevocably linked to the centre for the purpose of the latter’s legitimization. Since deconstruction
is thought to unravel the connections between the metaphysical centre (of commonsense) and its
other (i.e. minor discourse), it also marks the starting point for calling into question the ‘very
foundation of the centre’ (Jones, 2005, p. 390). If we thus succeed in imagining deconstruction as
a confederate of (organization or business) theory and if we cherish the fact that deconstruction
instigates theoretical and conceptual movements, we have at our disposal good reasons to make
deconstruction an inseparable part of our university curricula. What we would gain besides
introducing a rupture with the towering centers of what Derrida called ‘exhaustive accounts’ is a
unique possibility to reclaim a space where meaning may ‘act out’ infinite play. In the following
section, I will provide a more specific account of how I perceive the establishment of the future
business school, i.e. the business school without conditions.
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The (Radical) Business School without Conditions
The place of resistance has to be found, that is, you do not have the university as a place of
resistance. (Derrida, 2001b, p. 255)
The point … is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a
practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. (Foucault, 1984, p. 45)
As implied previously, deconstructive practice – if conceived from the perspective of its
affirmative trajectory – appears somewhat incommensurate with the attribute ‘radical’, at least as
long as we understand this term in the sense of an antagonistic exteriority. Yet, deconstruction
can, not to say must, become radical if it is employed to reduce the ‘‘critical distance’ to zero’
(Böhm & Spoelstra, 2004, p. 99). It follows from this latter exegesis that deconstruction contains
a radical element as it is, contrary to the criticism of Eagleton and others, both a theoretical
discourse and practical venture. Derrida, in his elaboration of the ‘University without Conditions’
addressed the accusation that deconstruction is ‘merely’ theoretical and neutral by contending
that deconstructive endeavors do in fact have a tendency towards ‘practical and performative
transformations’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 241). Notwithstanding the contention that one could easily
provide evidence of deconstruction’s practical merits and tenets (cf. in particular Derrida, 1992d;
1995c; 1999; 2001d; 2002), it is questionable whether those kinds of investigations have been
given sufficient attention in curricula of business schools or acknowledged adequately by
academia in general (Nealon, 2003). Arguably, the question of ‘how much deconstruction is
needed’ is a difficult one. Yet, as far as business school education is concerned, particularly in
view of the sort of knowledge it imparts and the understanding of learning it departs from (cf.
Chapter 1), it appears safe to conclude that ‘THERE’S CLEARLY NOT ENOUGH’. While since
the early 1980s a fair number of advocates of deconstruction have found their way into the field
of organization theory or organization studies (for an overview cf. Jones, 2004), it seems that
their gospel is only taking a back seat in business school teaching. Hence, despite the many
transformations that have been and still are taking place in business schools as regards critical
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reflection, particularly in the UK,
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there are also indications that contemporary business school
education still falls short of critical perspectives (French & Grey, 1996; Grey, 2004; Choo, 2005)
and that those who try to implement such a trajectory are often faced with fierce opposition
(Hagen, Miller & Johnson, 2003; Gillberg et al., 2005). In opposition to the criticism of
‘adversaries’ and despite the fear that deconstruction’s standing in university curricula will be one
marked by discomfort, I will introduce some of Derrida’s suggestions on the space of
deconstruction in the university so as to provide a – however preliminary – vision of the (radical)
business school ‘to come’.
As discussed in Chapter 1, it appears that, at least since the middle of the last century,
knowledge derived from research and disseminated through teaching has increasingly been
qualified against the backdrop of performativity (Lyotard, 1984). As a result, the pressure to
make knowledge saleable, as I pointed out before, has also penetrated contemporary business
school education (Parker, 2002b). Given that this economic imperative has created enormous
changes in terms of professional identity, the governance of academics as well as the generic
understanding of ‘Bildung’ (i.e. education and learning), it is hardly surprising that some people
have proclaimed that the modern university is captured in a perpetual crisis (Peters, 2004) or that
the business school is in a state of emergency (Jones & O’Doherty, 2005). Derrida (2001), in his
treatise ‘The University without Condition’, identified a new responsibility and formulated a new
‘raison d’être’ of the university and its professions which was no longer regulated according to
the logic of supply and demand and which defied the purely technical and instrumental ideal of
competence. Derrida thereby suggested means for dissociating the university from its current
‘end-orientation’ and for establishing an unconditional space for critical resistance, a space
which, by analogy, instigates an departure from the kind of fast-food teaching currently offered at
university business schools. In order to comprehend what the notion of ‘unconditionality’, i.e. the
condition where everything can be said or retained without being held responsible (cf. above)
implies, it is helpful to bear in mind that Derrida established deconstruction as a central
obligation of the future university and as an ultimate instance of resistance. Thus, extending
Derrida’s (2001) elaboration to the task at hand, it can be argued that the business school should
become ‘an ultimate place of critical resistance – and more than critical – to all the powers of
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To the extent that my outsider-perspective allows such an appraisal, the UK is assumed to host a number of
business schools such as Leicester, Lancaster, Keele, Manchester, Warwick, etc. which overtly commit themselves to
a critical (the term may of course be interpreted in various ways) curriculum.
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dogmatic and unjust appropriation. When I say ‘more than critical’, I have in mind
‘deconstructive’ (so why not just say it directly and without wasting time?)’ (Derrida, 2001, p.
235). Indeed, Derrida’s manifesto is strong and ‘does not waste any time’. Admittedly, it appears,
at first glance, that his statement relates to overt resistance and thus opposition (which would be
in obvious contrast to what has been said before). However, this is not necessarily the case, since
Derrida, in the same text, clarified that the statement is ‘referring to the right to deconstruction as
an unconditional right to ask critical questions not only to the history of the concept of man, but
to the history even of the notion of critique, to the form and the authority of the question, to the
interrogative form of thought’ (p. 236). In accordance with what was said at the beginning of this
chapter, the above quote clarifies that critical resistance is an affirmative gesture to the extent that
it relates more to critical questioning as well as the unconditional freedom of speech than to overt
antagonism. It is important, then, not to overlook that the freedom Derrida had in mind while
formulating his vision of the university without conditions quite obviously exceeds what is
generally discussed in terms of academic freedom or academic autonomy (Parker, 2002b). In
particular, the unconditional freedom in Derrida’s university ‘to come’ represents not only a
disentanglement from the economic strictures of the performativity mantra but a ‘declarative
engagement, an appeal in the form of a profession of faith: faith in the university … of tomorrow’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 233). Provided that this form of freedom emphasizes an obligation on the part
of the university and its professionals (i.e. professors) to address its own blind spots and
concealed agenda, it is an unconditional right to demand ‘that the university itself should at the
same time reflect, invent and pose, whether it does so through its law faculties or in the new
Humanities capable of working on these questions of right and of law – in other words, and again
why not say it without detour – the Humanities capable of taking on the tasks of deconstruction,
beginning with the deconstruction of their own history and their own axioms’ (p. 235). Moreover,
it is important to note that Derrida formulated his vision in relation to the university because he
wanted to distinguish ‘the university from all research institutions that are in the service of
economic goals and interests of all sorts, without being granted in principle the independence of
the university’ (p. 236). Thus, it is likely that business schools would fall into the category of
‘institutions that are in the service of economic goals and interests’. What I am saying here is that
the introduction of deconstruction to the business school is a heterodox endeavor, likely to collide
with (and maybe shatter) the prevailing economic orthodoxies. As briefly mentioned before,
performativity or, to use Derrida’s words, economic goals and interests, may always restrict
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deconstructive reflection. Derrida, on various occasions, pointed out that we must not shy away
from asking if the university contains the requisite freedom (or, say, time, patience, and money)
to x-ray its own axioms. At the same time, Derrida has been utterly clear in his appraisal that the
unconditional university (or the Humanities
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) is always in danger of being occupied by or
becoming hostage to the logic of profitability. This reservation cannot be overemphasized, since
it puts into perspective all exaggerated expectations and hopes, reminding us that we must
continuously ask: ‘can the university (and if so, how?) affirm an unconditional independence, can
it claim a sort of sovereignty, without ever risking the worst – namely … being forced to give up
and capitulate without condition, to let itself be taken over and bought at any price?’ (Derrida,
2001, p. 237). Indeed, Derrida’s question will (and must) remain open or undecidable, so to
speak, and it is only time that will show if the business school of tomorrow will be able to raise
the necessary ‘force of resistance’ to sustain its unconditionality. We are thus reminded once
again that the introduction of deconstructive reflexivity to the future business school will demand
persistent efforts where ‘
ou have each time to invent the place of resistance’ (Derrida, 2001b, p. 255). At the same time, it must also remain clear that, despite all obstacles and hardship, the
affirmative and passionate inventiveness (Derrida, 1992b) implied in deconstructive reflexivity
may be even more required within the limits (or limitedness) of the business school than in
Derrida’s humanities.
In this chapter I have established that deconstruction is not merely a speculative or
theoretical operation but may serve as a contribution towards conceiving a possible future for the
business school ‘to come’. Notwithstanding the fact that deconstructive reflexivity cannot be
planned and commanded from the drawing board, so to speak, and that we must accept that ‘what
arrives arrives’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 247), I have tried to emphasize the positive features of
deconstruction and show, among other things, that deconstruction heralds potentialities for both
theory and practice. By example of Derrida’s engagement with the ‘university without condition’,
but also his engagement with, for instance, the war on Iraq or September 11 (Borradori, 2003), I
have suggested a perspective of deconstruction that reveals both its commitment to practical and
theoretical criticism and its potential to stimulate an audacious transformation of mundane affairs
(cf. Derrida, 1992). It should be clear by now that Derrida’s account of the ‘university without
condition’ cannot and must not be understood in a ‘realistic’ sense, because it is impossible to
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Which Derrida (2001) justifies by way of pointing out that the Humanities have historically been linked ‘to the
question of man, to a concept of that which is proper to man’ (p. 234)
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possess infallible methods that will ensure the success of such a concept of university education
and lead us directly to a brighter future. To be sure, the business school ‘to come’ in itself is an
impossibility (and necessarily has to remain impossible) and thus has the structure of a promise
rather than that of a determinate ideal against which particular acts may be measured or towards
which our present arrangement of higher education might be said to progress. The epithet ‘to
come’, by implication, functions as a name for the future understood in such a way that it is not to
be identified with any reality script of the present, but rather with a future that will never be
actualized or imagined from the order of the present. In that sense, the business school ‘to come’
stands for a perpetually open, yet to be determined future or, as Derrida (2002b) argued in
another context, the ‘to come’ denotes a ‘space opened in order for there to be an event, … , so
that the coming be that of the other’ (p. 182). With this in mind, I suggest that we perceive
Derrida’s vision as an utopia (small letter; cf. Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005) and appreciate that
it is exactly the interruptive force of Derrida’s writing, his ‘as if’, which incites our imagination
and reinforces the perpetuation of his work in our scholarly endeavors. Concluding this chapter
with the words of Derrida, it is important to bear in mind that ‘this limit of the impossible, the
‘perhaps’, and the ‘if’, this is the place where the university is exposed to reality, to the forces
from without (be they cultural, ideological, political, economic, or other). … On this border, it
[the university] must therefore negotiate and organise its resistance and take its responsibility’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 247). In view of the fact that Derrida would still have had a lot to say about
deconstruction and its place in and beyond the university of tomorrow, I would like to pay tribute
to Derrida by suggesting a careful and patient re-reading of his work, so as to multiply and iterate
his ideas and appropriate them for our own radical trajectory. Reading and rereading, conceived
of as a ‘task of change and affirmation’ (Jones, 2005) and ‘ethics’ (Hillis Miller, 1987), can be
seen as the valuable inheritance from Derrida. But considering that ‘(i)nheritance is never a given,
it is always a task’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 54; emphasis in original), it is not sufficient to claim that
Derrida’s work is important for envisaging the future of the business school. Essentially, we must
address the burning questions of what we would like to inherit from Derrida and, importantly,
how we would like to use his work in remodeling the future business school. Obviously then,
inheriting Derrida’s work implies ‘active interpretation’ (Jones, 2002, p. 226; emphasis in
original). Suffice it to say: ‘Return to the books!’
488
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6
***
Power, Discourse and Resistance: From Aesthetical Practice … to
Politics of Difference
There are other possible worlds, I know other possible meanings, we can invent other forms of
time. (Serres, 1995, p. 25)
It is certainly true that the inscription of alterity within the self can allow for a new relation to
ethics, but does that necessarily entail the more general case … that the persisting split of
the subject is the condition of freedom? (Bhabha, 1994, p. 240; slightly modified)
Intertextual Associations
To contextualize the present theoretical elaboration on the interrelationship between power,
discourse and resistance, we need to comprehend that this chapter is inspired by some of the
implications derived from the investigation of practitioners’ talk in Chapter 3. In particular, the
issue which the discursive investigation of practitioners’ talk urges us to address, to put things
bluntly, is that of personal agency and the possibility of individual self-determination. Bearing in
mind that the discourse analysis in Chapter 3 departed from the assumption that subjectivity or
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identity are not natural essences of people, but positions made possible by the use of language (cf.
Foucault, 1984), it is all too likely that one conceives of discourse as a deterministic
phenomenon. That is to say that there is a certain danger of misperceiving discourse a constitutive
force which stipulates and restricts personal subjectivities wherefore leaving no space for
individual freedom, if not to say autonomy. In the light of the fact that the view of discourse as
the material grounding of personal subjectivity is canonically related to Foucault’s work on
power and knowledge, I would like to scrutinize the grounds for this relationship in order then to
stress that Foucault himself produced a number of writings which defy a deterministic
conceptualization of discourse. Pinpointing, for instance, that Foucault envisaged identity
performances as creative practices and as a potentiality of individual transgression, I will try to
broaden the current horizon of Foucault’s heritage and hence extend the still narrow reception of
Foucault as a discursive determinist. Essentially, this investigation is deemed relevant and timely
since it puts into perspective not only the findings outlined in Chapter 3, but also our deliberation
on the excellence and entrepreneurship discourse as pursued in relation to the governmentality of
contemporary business schools (cf. Chapter 1). Though I will not relate back to those chapters in
the course of the present investigation, the readers are nonetheless invited to call to mind the main
arguments of these previous inquires and thus to reflect on the interrelation between discourse
and identity implied within them.
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Introduction
To start with an image …
Als Pandora das Fass öffnete und die Übel, welche Zeus hineingelegt hatte, in die Welt der
Menschen ausgeflogen waren, blieb – von allen unbemerkt ein letztes Übel zurück – die
Hoffnung. Seit dieser Zeit betrachten die Menschen das Fass und seinen Inhalt, die
Hoffnung, irrigerweise als Schatz, als grösstes Glücksgut. Dabei haben wir vergessen,
dass Zeus den Menschen wünschte, sie möchten sich weiterhin quälen lassen. Die
Hoffnung ist das übelste der Übel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert. (Yalom,
1994, p. 105).
When Pandora opened the casket and made the evils Zeus had put inside disperse into the world
of man, a last evil remained – unrecognized by anyone – hope. Since that time people
spuriously have regarded the casket and its content, hope, as a treasure, as a blessing of
the greatest kind. In doing so they have forgotten that Zeus had wished that mankind
would let itself be further agonized. Hope is the most evil of evils since it prolongs the
agony of the people. (Yalom, 1993; own translation)
173
By virtue of the extract from Yalom’s ‘Als Nietzsche Weinte (1994) (‘When Nietzsche Wept’,
1993
174
) we are allegorically reminded that mankind and – to further extend the allegory for our
own purposes – particularly those entitled critical theorists, have been driven by the hope for
(individual and collective) emancipation and freedom which so far seem encapsulated and locked
away in Pandora’s box. This state of unsatisfied or unsatisfiable hope seems solidified by those of
us (i.e. organization scholars) who have embarked upon Foucault’s work on power/knowledge to
delineate a rather ‘dark’ picture of emancipation, claiming that discourse operates as a
deterministic scheme of the people. More precisely, (critical) organization scholars (e.g. Alvesson
& Karreman, 2000) alongside certain postcolonial theorists (e.g. Said, 1978; Escobar, 1995) have
come to interpret discourse (à la Foucault) as a constitutive momentum, meaning that discourse is
said to exert its influence by hailing or ‘interpellating’ (cf. Althusser, 1977) subjects and to make
173
Notice that Yalom derived this story from Nietzsche’s (1984) ‘Human, All Too Human’ (cf. p. 58).
174
Which deals with a fictional encounter between Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, and the psychiatrist Josef
Breuer.
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them act according to the respective rationality, that is, regime of truth. For instance, Phillips and
Hardy (2002) have claimed that ‘Foucauldian-informed work often focuses on unmasking the
privileges inherent in particular discourses and emphasizes its constraining effects, often leading
to studies of how grand or “mega” discourses shape social reality and constrain actors’ (p. 21).
Foucault – within Phillips and Hardy (2002) – is thus, unsurprisingly, allocated to the critical pole
of their grid where his analytic scheme is said to lay bare the ‘dynamics of power, knowledge,
and ideology that surround discursive processes’ (p. 20). Turning our gaze once more to the two
utterances by Phillips and Hardy, an image of power is revealed that is, first, conjoined with the
concept ‘ideology’ and, by implication thereof, presumed to ‘constrain actors’. It is beyond
question that such a view operates by means of construing power as an instance which commands
or prescribes particular subject positions and which grants the person limited, if any, liberty in
defining their own being (or becoming). Hence, Foucault’s work on discipline (from which
Phillips and Hardy seem to derive their appraisal of ‘critical’) has provided us with a perspective
that enables us to see how certain documentary and measurement techniques have turned
individuals into cases, that is, made them visible, measurable and, most fundamentally, rendered
them amenable to control (cf. Chapter 1). Given this state of affairs, Foucault clearly contributed
to the understanding of how certain procedures and technologies constituted the individual both
as ‘effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204). Be
that as it may, there are two particular misreadings, or maybe better, one-sided delineations of
Foucault in organization studies which need to be addressed here: first, that Foucault’s work
entailed a critique of ideology and, second, that his understanding of discourse departed from the
univocal assumption that the power-knowledge nexus granted people no possibility for self-
determination. The generic proposition we will get to establish here is that Foucault cannot
possibly be represented as an ideology critic or as a discourse determinist. Moreover, despite the
fact that Foucault’s work (in organization science) has canonically been portrayed from the
perspective of the normalizing force of discourse (cf. Knights & Willmottt, 1989; Alvesson &
Willmottt, 1996; Phillips & Hardy, 2002), we must realize that he has unjustifiably been denied
the credit for contributing to our understanding of individual resistance. It thus appears on the
face of it that both of the above interpretations of Foucault are flawed to the extent that they
conceal that Foucault neither talked of (and at times even resisted the notion of) ideology (or)
critique and that he in fact provided a rich and convincing array of arguments on how subjects
stipulate individualized (though not autonomous) identities. As a consequence of this, and whilst
500
taking seriously Foucault’s eloquent and persuasive commentaries on the matter of power, the
notion of ideology critique seems misleading, since he never acted as a spokesman of how to
proceed in order to reach a brighter future (which is arguably the emancipatory ideal of ideology
critique). As Rabinow clarified in that context, Foucault ‘does not take it upon himself to speak in
the voice of Reason, Justice, Progress, Objectively Better Positions, or even Futility’ (Foucault,
1984, p. 23). It hence follows from this that Foucault’s work does not appear apposite to resurrect
humanism since it refrains from the temptation to exchange an identified discourse, say, ideology,
with a perspective that is more apposite for humankind’s betterment. Foucault’s genealogical
work should therefore not be read as eliciting nostalgia by means of highlighting what has been
lost on the way from past to present. Instead, Foucault advocated a perspective which entailed
that ‘(t)he individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an “ideological” [quotation marks!]
representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power
that we have called “discipline”’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 204).
Regarding the issue of power and critique, which Phillips and Hardy quite obviously
construe as the tenet of Foucault’s work, it is exigent that Foucault (1982) himself posited that
‘the goal of my work during the last twenty years has not been to analyze the phenomena of
power, nor to elaborate on the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to
create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’
(p. 208). Given this premise it is at least questionable if Dick’s (2004) claim that ‘(c)ritical
discourse analysis [i.e. Foucault inspired discourse analysis] assumes that the constructions
individuals make operate not only to ‘make sense’, but also to reproduce or challenge ideological
systems of belief that exist in society at large’ (p. 203) are applicable to Foucault’s analytic
trajectory, since it evokes associations between power (and ideology) and adulterated truth,
respectively ‘false consciousness’.
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We must therefore bear in mind that Foucault, by eliding
the idea of ideology and by emphasizing disciplines (respectively the interrelation between power
and knowledge/truth), established a perspective which ceased to depict the effects of power in
negative terms and which illuminated how social practices fuelled the normalization of certain
‘regimes of truth’. Given this state of affairs, it is worth noticing that Foucault (1984) made
unmistakably clear that we must refrain from envisioning power in terms such as ‘it “excludes”, it
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The notion of ‘false consciousness’ has been coined by Karl Marx to delineate meaning and social relations that
are misrepresented (i.e. false) through ideology and which deflect the ‘true’ social condition of the people. Ideology
critique is thus occupied with releasing people from the grips of the ruling class’s ideology and bringing them closer
to their ‘true’ demands and needs.
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“represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the
knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’ (p. 205).
Acknowledging that Foucault enlivened power as a positive phenomenon (without ever
denying its restrictive force), this brings us to the second shortcoming of organization scholars:
resistance. In line with this observation, we must first take into account that Foucault’s writing
within organization science for the most part has been denied the chance to be interpreted as
speaking of individual self-determination. For instance, in view of those scholars who claimed
that Foucault’s work construes discourse as a ‘muscular’ phenomenon (cf. Alvesson & Karreman,
2000), it becomes conceivable that discourse is primarily envisaged as a constitutive force
(Fournier, 1998) that appears to prescribe univocal and hierarchical control (for a critique of
Foucauldian organization studies cf. also Newton, 1998; Reed, 1998; 2000; Fournier & Gray,
1999; Gabriel, 1999). It is thus hardly surprising that some of those organization scholars who
have appropriated Foucault as an advocate of discursive determinism
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have simultaneously used
this hyperbolic interpretation of Foucault to stipulate a counter-position in which they came to
stress, among other things, that actors are, more or less willingly and freely, able to use discourse
in order to bring about desired ends (cf. Phillips & Hardy, 1997; Hardy, Palmer & Phillips, 2000;
Grant, Hardy, Oswick, Phillips & Putnam, 2004). Yet, whereas the above perspective prima facie
seems to redeem the image of discourse as a deterministic force, it can be argued that it tends to
overstretch the possibilities of (discursive) agency while simultaneously downplaying the
ordering force of discourse. More important, however, is the observation that the polarity
between ‘muscular discourse’ (which is the pole to which organization scholars usually have
appointed Foucault), which views subjectivity as a direct effect of discourse (Weedon, 1987), and
‘discourse autonomy’ (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000), where discourse is only loosely coupled
with people’s subject position, is deemed to collapse once we take into account that Foucault’s
various works, or heritage at large, cannot possibly be allocated to only one side. Stated
otherwise, while Foucault’s work undoubtedly exhibits an interest in the normalizing effects of
discourse, he elaborated equally on the issues of self-determination and resistance in ways that
clearly undermine the possibility to discern him (only) as a maintainer of a totalizing vision of
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For a highly commendable treatise of Foucault’s critics, consult Berard (1999) who has pointed out that scholars
ranging from Rorty, Giddens, Habermas, Jameson, etc. have falsely entitled Foucault as a ‘neo-conservative’ or
simply a ‘fatalist’. Especially insightful in that respect is Giddens’ (1987) appraisal: ‘(t)he individuals who appear in
Foucault’s analyses seem impotent to determine their own destinies’ (p. 214).
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discourse. That is to say that the richness of and variation in Foucault’s work does not justify
reducing him to a single theoretical/analytical position. I am therefore keen to refer to Berard
(1999) who has addressed Foucault’s critics, that is, those who have turned him into a discourse
determinist, in positing that ‘neither Foucault’s theory of power nor his theory of subjectivity
allow for the charges of neo-conservatism and fatalism’ (p. 210). In consequence, what is
required here is to stage a research, that is, a novel search of Foucault’s inheritance in order to
scrutinize the simplistic entitlement of ‘discursive determinist’. Along these lines, the present
chapter aspires to stage an extended discussion of the relation between discourse, power and
subjectivity. Particular emphasis will thereby be put on the interrelation between power and the
space for self-determination or, more precisely, on the issue of individual resistance as it emerges
through Foucault’s (later) work on the aesthetics of the subject, that is, the ‘aesthetics of
existence’. The genuine objective therein is to address the respective questions by invoking some
of Foucault’s ‘minor’ writings which, to my knowledge, seem less prominent in organization
studies. Importantly, rather than reading Foucault univocally as a scholar of autonomous
resistance (which is not tenable anyway), I opt to provide an image of Foucault’s work which
emphasizes that resistance and power are irrevocably co-implied and which, therefore, shall help
to counter-balance, if not reject, those accounts which one-sidedly delineate Foucault as a
discursive determinist. While selected texts by Foucault will be deployed to display how
resistance and individual freedom are made possible through processes of deliberate thinking and
reflection as well as through the aesthetic treatment of the self, we will subsequently turn to de
Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ which gives us at our disposal a scheme for understanding that
‘strategic’ discourse must not necessarily be counteracted by means of conscious deliberation but,
wittingly or unwittingly, by means of creative consumption. Departing from de Certeau’s
imaginative theorizing, we will stimulate a perspective which discerns resistance less as a matter
of purposeful action and agency than as a process by means of which an over-codified, say,
dominant discourse is appropriated through people’s everyday sensemaking (and practices).
Acknowledging that both Foucault and de Certeau’s profound elaborations give rise to an image
of resistance that takes place inside the system of the dominant code (and not outside of it), we
will invoke the allegory of the ‘host’ and the ‘parasite’ in order to illustrate that power and
subjectivity are invariably co-implied in a symbiotic (and not antagonistic) relationship. On the
strength of this discussion, we shall establish a rationale which conceptualizes the issue of
resistance as a matter of nurturing both the possible (Serres, 1995) and difference (Lyotard &
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Thébaud, 1985) and, by implication, as the instance of ultimate justice and responsibility.
Emphasizing, through Lyotard and others, that difference is always at risk of being marginalized
or ignored by means of totalizing discourse (i.e. grand narratives), we shall introduce Lyotard’s
(1984; 1985) concept of ‘paganism’ in order to substantiate the issue of difference and alterity as
a mutual political and ethical event. Moreover, using Lyotard’s work on paganism to outline a
‘politics of difference’, we shall deploy these insights to stimulate an understanding of individual
and collective resistance as the artistic process of ‘enabling difference’.
L’Autre Foucault
Arguably, resistance is an issue of public concern which has been centre stage on the agenda of
critical (organization) research at all times. The renewed emphasis on resistance in organization
studies is thereby predominantly entertained as a matter of direct (and often collective) opposition
and confrontational practice. Within this particular exegesis, Foucault’s work has been granted a
position that is mostly perceived as containing two particular images of power (and resistance):
first, and most prominently, there are those who have enlisted Foucault’s work to subscribe to a
perspective of power as ‘overt control’; a perspective in which individual resistance is hardly an
issue or simply impossible (cf. above). Second, there are those scholars who have invoked
writings of Foucault that construe resistance on the level of the ethical body in a non-absolutist
state. Yet, it would seem misleading to ask which of these two routes of scholarly work is right,
not to say better, since this would necessarily imply that there is one proper way to conjoin
Foucault’s work with the issue of resistance. It is hence not least since Jones’ (2002) insightful
treatise of Foucault’s inheritance in organization studies that we are called upon to acknowledge
that it is not apposite to discern Foucault as a singularity. In accordance therewith, McKinley and
Starkey (1998) have been particularly perplexed by how Foucault’s work has been perceived, that
is, constrained in organization studies. In specific terms, they went on to object that ‘(w)e need to
contest the reading of Foucault’s work as little more than an elaboration of Weber’s “iron cage”
argument in which modern society and modernism are deconstructed as various expressions of a
common theme – the generalization of panoptical or conformist forces in a unitary process of
rationalization and normalization, as a result of which we all inhabit carceral archipelagos of one
form or another’ (p. 233). As discussed above, it must be realized that there is an abundance of
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organization scholars who have opted to read Foucault’s work in a one-dimensional way, that is,
as a unified frame of reasoning where power is taken (using McKinley and Starkey’s wording) to
discipline people through ‘panoptical or conformist forces’. Stated otherwise, organization
scholars commonly read Foucault’s work as a one-fold (i.e. as yielding one meaning), and it is
precisely due to this particular interpretation that we are limited in our understanding of power as
a force which, following Weiskopf (2002), creates ‘(t)he “captive” individual – that is the
“caged”, imprisoned, enslaved, locked up, confined, individuals has been the dominant theme in
this discourse’ (p. 82).
It must be added here that there is another tendency by virtue of which Foucault’s work is
represented as a split, and hence interpreted as a two-fold, so to speak.
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That is, the contribution
of Foucault has quite readily been separated into an earlier phase, consisting of his work on
genealogy and archaeology, and his latter work on transgression and ethics, respectively the
aesthetics of existence. This distinction, however, marks a gross simplification of Foucault’s
work, and though it can be interpreted as a matter of economic pragmatism it is nevertheless
worthy of suspicion. To gain a sense of why we need to overcome this dual imagery, it ought to
be mentioned that the respective divide has been naturalized by, for instance, scholars contending
that Foucault’s earlier work stimulated the ‘death of the subject’ while his latter work seemed to
signify the subject’s re-inauguration, if not redemption. Yet, such a claim is not only problematic
because it, rather than highlighting Foucault’s equivocal and diverse agenda, simplifies the
entirety of Foucault’s work into a two-track agenda, but because it is simply untenable to
delineate his ‘later’ work as signifying a recurrence of the autonomous, self-directing individual.
Hence, what has been interpreted as the instance of Foucault’s ‘homecoming’ to the autonomous
subject for the most part relates to those texts in which he developed the idea of ‘aesthetics of
existence’ (cf. Foucault, 1985; 1990; 1990b). To give a hint of how scholars came to locate a
rupture or even a change of mind in Foucault’s work, we shall invoke a passage of a particular
working session previously published in ‘Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics’: ‘With Plato’s
Alcibiades,
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it’s very clear: you have to take care of yourself because you have to rule the city.
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Notice that Negri (2006) claimed that it was until the publication of ‘Dits et Ecrits’ that Foucault’s work on the
processes of subjectivation and the aesthetics of self and of political care was more or less ignored. Negri thus
asserted that this led scholars to distinguish two routes of Foucauldian analysis: Up to the end of the 60s the
archaeology of knowledge and in the 70s the inquires into the relations between knowledge and power (cf. p. 76).
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Alcibiades was a philosophical successor of Socrates. Plato in ‘Alcibiades I’ put forward a dialogue between
Socrates and youthful Alcibiades where the former confronted the latter in his ambition to pursue a political career.
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But taking care of yourself for its own sake starts with the Epicureans
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… everybody has to take
care of himself. Greek ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of aesthetics of
existence’ (1984, p. 348; emphasis in original). Although passages such as the above, where
Foucault came to highlight ‘personal choice’ in Greek ethics, were interpreted as marking a
radical break with his previous work, it was Deleuze (1988) who argued, both cogently and
convincingly, that there is neither reason to believe that Foucault’s earlier work was concerned
with (discursive) determinism nor that he later came to talk of an autonomous self (which stands
in opposition to the forces of power). As he clarified matters, ‘Foucault’s fundamental idea is that
of a dimension of subjectivity derived form power and knowledge without being dependent on
them’ (p. 101). Accordingly, the pivotal point of Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’ is that the
subject, who is not autonomous, makes creative use of the ‘forces’ by which he/she is
surrounded. Thus, given that authors such as, for instance, Bernstein (1992) or Allen (2000) have,
in accordance with Deleuze, pinpointed that such a thing as the ‘death of the subject’ has never
been explicitly inscribed in Foucault’s work, it follows from this that it would simply be
untenable to claim a return to the subject. This again makes it necessary to turn to those texts of
Foucault through which he explicated how people (can) exert ‘resistance’ through the micro-
practices of everyday conduct. To this end, we must first recollect that the influences of
normalizing power, which are conceived of as ‘producing’ or ‘fabricating’ subjects, are not meant
(only) as negative phenomena (cf. above) but equally as positive phenomena of production.
Nonetheless, it was Foucault (1988) who conceded that some of his work contained ‘too much on
the technology of domination and power’ (p. 19). To be sure, he further clarified that the ‘power
of the disciplinary type’, which had occupied a broad space in his earlier works, had to be put into
perspective, since what he had said about discipline was not to be taken as saying that this
marked the only imaginable manifestation of power: ‘it is clear that it [disciplinary power] does
not adequately represent all power relations and all possibilities of power relations. Power is not
discipline; discipline is a possible procedure of power’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 380). By the same
token, Foucault set out to supplement the ‘technologies of domination’ – which were said to
create ‘docile bodies’ by means of processes of objectification, classification and normalization
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The Epicureans, the school of philosophy founded on the teachings of the Greek Epicurus (342 B.C. – 270 B.C),
recognized as valid only that knowledge which originates and stops in the senses. All other cognition is only the
result of sensations and combinations of many sensations. With respect to pleasure, the Epicureans recognized that it
is the beginning and need of the ‘blessed life’. As a consequence thereof, they took pleasure as a standard by which
they judged every choice and avoidance and made it the guiding principle of a good (that is, painless) life.
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(cf. Foucault, 1997) – with a view of power which granted the individual, as it were, agentic
possibilities. Within the following sub-chapter we shall therefore outline how Foucault came to
envisage resistance as a process of individual ‘self-determination’.
Resistance as Aesthetics of Existence and Problematization: Michel Foucault
In talking about resistance it is first of all interesting to see that Foucault’s (1984) notion of
‘personal choice’ (p. 248) and ‘self-forming activity’ (p. 355) were wrongfully interpreted by
certain scholars as activities which granted people an ‘authentic life’, that is, a life in which we
can ‘be truly our true self’ (p. 351). Besley (2005) eloquently argued (in relation with Foucault’s
(1978) ‘The History of Sexuality, Vol. I’) that it is a ‘common assumption of western culture’ to
assume that ‘if one tells the ‘truth’ about one’s sexuality, this deepest truth about the self will
become apparent and then one can live an authentic life’ (p. 79). In opposition to this rationale,
Foucault related the notion of ‘authenticity’ to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre so as to display the
fallacy implied in presuming a life that is (or can be) in touch with one’s true inner self. Foucault
thereby scrutinized Sartre’s notion of ‘authenticity’ by positing: ‘I think that the only acceptable
practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of
creativity – and not of authenticity’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 351). It must be clear by now that such a
thing as ‘true self’ was alien to Foucault’s thinking and that he dismissed the logic of ‘ideology’
for the same reason, namely that it presupposed a hidden self or essence of truth which has been
‘concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression’ (Foucault, 1997, p.
282). This shift of emphasis is profound since it determines the idea of agency not as a retreat to
an impeded self, but as a creative process of self-regulation. The idea of resistance we can ascribe
to Foucault’s writing on creativity is therefore incommensurable with those views which
proclaimed that he delineated individuals as ‘self-determining agents capable of challenging and
resisting the structures of domination in modern society’ (McNay, 1992, p 4). The difference
which falls into place here is one between resistance from the inside versus resistance as
occurring from the outside. Regarding the former, it is Harrer (2005) who insightfully commented
that ‘Foucault … seems always to have thought of the moral self-constitution as a derivative of,
or a complement to, the constitution of subject through normalizing power and subjugation’ (p.
78). The point thereby has been, following Weedon (1987), that Foucault’s theorizing on the
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subject envisaged the matter as being socially constructed through discursive practices while at
the same time being able to reflect upon these discursive relations that constitute it. The question,
then, is how we must understand resistance in this context and, most fundamentally, what
Foucault had in mind while talking about ‘choice’. This brings us to the issue of thinking and in
particular its potential to create what Foucault coined ‘freedom’. To begin with, resistance,
meaning the ability to chose from the options underlying the variegated set of (contradictory)
subject positions and social practices, materializes in the very moment the thinking subject is able
‘to step back from this way of acting or reacting, … to question it as to its meaning, its
conditions, and its goals’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 388). Stepping back as well as questioning are thus
construed by Foucault as the means by which a subject achieves a state of freedom, that is, a
condition in which self-determination becomes possible. Or, to use Foucault’s (1997) terms,
‘(t)hought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself
from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem … We should permanently
question the experience in which we find ourselves’ (p. 117). It must be reiterated in this context
that Foucault did not problematize disciplinary rules and habits per se. Rather, he pinpointed that
an unreflected way of thinking undermines our own freedom. What Jones, Parker and ten Bos
(2005) derive from Foucault’s deliberations is that to attain freedom you must ‘distance yourself
from your own ingrained habits, from your own relationship with rules and, indeed, from way
you generally think and from how you generally act’ (p. 135). Freedom, that is, the possibility to
problematize and distance oneself from one’s own habitual mode of (self-) conduct, is thus
conjoined by Foucault with ethics. To gain an understanding of how he managed to establish this
nexus, it is first of all helpful to listen to Foucault’s (1991) genuinely rhetorical question: ‘what is
ethics if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?’ (p. 4). On the face of it,
freedom as achieved through deliberate thinking aspires, following Foucault (1984), to transform
‘the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse
practical solutions. It is problematization that responds to these difficulties, but by doing
something quite other than expressing them or manifesting them: in connection with them it
develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will
constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to’ (p. 389). In consequence, what is
needed to achieve (individual) freedom by means of problematization is ‘a demanding, prudent,
“experimental” attitude’ which enables the individual to confront what one is thinking and saying
with what one is doing, with what one is’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 374). Given the practical task of
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‘problematization’, we must again recognize that ethics as ‘aesthetics of the self’ is in close
proximity with the logic of ‘technologies of the self’. The profundity of this claim thereby derives
from the observation that technologies of the self are commonly invoked (by organization
scholars) to explain how people are ‘subjectivated’, that is, turned into subjects of a particular
kind (cf. Chapter 1). However, the technologies of the self are broadened by Foucault (1984) to
encompass not only how people are turned into subjects, but how people act upon themselves in
an ethical manner. Problematization and deliberate thinking (which together comprise the point of
departure of individual freedom) are thus always at the service of finding ways to act upon
oneself in a new manner, a manner which is beneficial for the individual. Foucault (1984) thus
mentioned in this context that ‘this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into
problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response’ (p. 389) is always to
be embraced in its prospective outlook, its potential to change the future of individual conduct.
As Foucault (1988) contended in one of his later interviews, self-determination is made possible
by ‘excavating our own culture in order to open a free space for innovation and creativity’ (p.
163). Thinking and problematization are thus not (only) conceivable as (individual) intellectual
exercises, but as pragmatic, local and creative deeds that bring forward a future of a different
kind. Deleuze (1988) thus made clear on that account that ‘thought thinks its own history (the
past), but [it needs] to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to, think
differently (the future)’ (p. 119). Again, it is most important here to see that Foucault construed
freedom, that is, the process upon which individuals grant themselves another future by means of
personal choice, as a process which entailed on the one hand problematization and, on the other
hand, creativity (and aesthetics). The notion of creativity, so it seems, has became a cornerstone
in Foucault’s writing. For instance, he came to say that ‘(f)rom the idea that the self is not given
to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work
of art’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 351). Essentially, in invoking art, Foucault did not refer to a decisive
ideality of how the subject must be ‘modeled’, a prescriptive art, so to speak. Instead, the art or
‘aesthetics of existence’ comes to represent the sensibility of people regarding what happens
around them, a reflectivity or rationality as alluded to above, which is grounded in the capacity to
perceive and, thus, to chose. In other words, ‘(s)uch an aesthetics of existence … implies the
development of an ability to judge, having the flexibility to change and have various options and
criteria, for reconstructing oneself’ (Tamboukou, 2003, p. 176). Importantly, Foucault’s
‘aesthetics of existence’ is largely inspired by the demand of creating a style for one’s life. After
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all, Foucault (1984) insightfully commented, ‘(w)hat strikes me is the fact that in our society, art
has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is
something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t
everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not
our life?’ (pp. 350 – 351). In follows from this that Foucault has conceived of art or artistic
practice as the central source of emancipation, since it has been taken as the event through which
people define and re-define their limits, the boundaries that define their very being. As alluded to
before in the context of Foucault’s treatise of thought and freedom (and ethics), artistic practices
are taken as a transgressive force (cf. below) by means of which the individual is enabled to
investigate his/her life (in the present) in order to act to enhance it. It must have become clear by
now the ‘aesthetics of existence’ portrays a way of self-making that is on the one hand
empowering but which on the other hand cannot be envisaged as happening in full opposition to
or outside of power. With this in mind, it is in the following paragraph that we shall elaborate on
how Foucault envisaged subjectivity as being practiced or performed within (and not against) the
interstice of power.
Resistance as Transgression: Michel Foucault … Again
But subjectivation to what? To common sense which, turning away from mad flux and anarchic
difference, knows how, everywhere and always in the same manner, to recognize what is
identical; common sense extracts the generality of an object while it simultaneously
establishes the universality of the knowing subject through a pact of goodwill. But what if
we gave free rein to ill will? What if thought freed itself from common sense and decided
to function only in its extreme singularity? (Foucault, 1970, p. 901)
Not least since Foucault’s (1990) ‘Care of the Self’ we have come to see that a key question to
ask is not only how discourse constructs the respective subjects of which it allegedly speaks, but
also how discourse is absorbed by each individual whom that technology addresses (respectively
interpellates; cf. Althusser, 1977). In other words, the shift of focus we have discerned in
Foucault’s work is one from the production of subjects to the consumption by subjects. Though
less known than his work of disciplining and governmentality (cf. Chapter 1), it must be
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recognized that Foucault provided a rationale for understanding the issue of resistance (as ‘care of
the self’ and ‘aesthetics of existence’) through the consumption and appropriation of discourses at
the local level. As Tamboukou (2003) has made clear with respect to the topical realm of feminist
theorizing, ‘it is at the ‘margins of hegemonic discourses’ that women’s practices of self-
representation have emerged, thereby creating ruptures in the tradition of writing the self, and
offering instances of ‘becoming other’’ (p. 26). ‘Becoming other’ is a central figure for
understanding that resistance is not a phenomenon that resurrects the given, respectively a lost
centre or past, but a phenomenon that stimulates a border-crossing move, that is, a move into
novel territories and ways of being. Within his treatise of Bataille, Foucault (1977b) put forward
the concept of ‘transgression’ which fundamentally undermined the dialectic relationship
between power or domination on the one hand and resistance or dissent on the other. The
particularity of transgression derives from imagining resistance not from the perspective of an
identified telos (e.g. liberation or emancipation), but from seeing it as an endogenous experience
of the individual. As with ‘problematization’ where the individual turns the ‘given into a
question’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 389), transgression occurs within the ‘present conditions and limits’
of power (Simons, 1995). In light of Foucault’s (1978) contention that ‘(w)here there is power
there is also resistance, and yet or consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power’ (p. 95), it becomes arguable that the perception of power and resistance as
oppositional, that is, dialectic forces, is to be overcome. By implication, the process of
transgression envisages the phenomena of power and resistance as belonging to ‘the same family,
pieced together by desire and the limit’ (Fleming, 2002, p. 200). It hence follows from Fleming’s
claim that the concept of transgression couteracts the opposition between inside and outside by
means of installing a vision of constant play. As Foucault (1977b) pinpointed with respect
thereto, ‘(t)ransgression, … is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the
lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather,
their relationship takes the form of a spiral that no simple infraction can exhaust’ (pp. 73 – 74).
As briefly mentioned in the context of Foucault’s rejection of Sartre, processes of transgression
contain not the defense of a boundary between a genuine (but threatened) self and an alienating
subjectivity imposed by an outside force but, rather, a practice of difference that brings about a
kind of forward motion (which stands in opposition to the backward motion being revealed in
conjunction with the dialectical view of power – resistance) which enables a novel (ethical)
becoming. Arguably, Foucault’s elaboration on transgression cannot possibly be overemphasized,
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since it has stimulated a shift from the metaphor of resistance as opposition (e.g. defense,
guarding, etc.) to one which highlights movement (e.g. traversing, crossing, permeating, etc.).
Construing the relationship between resistance and power by means of an image that operates
according to the dynamic of the parasite (cf. below), that is, ‘working from within’, it is through
the following paragaraph that we will get to see that this view is integral to de Certeau’s theory of
tactics and strategies. This being said, we shall discuss, through de Certeau, how discourse, power
and resistance intersect and how these processes relate with the issue of consumption.
Resistance as Consumption: Michel de Certeau
Through the preceding discussion we have come to understand that Foucault’s wrongfully
received power-knowledge nexus and the alleged discursive determinism which accompanies it
could be taken as a reason for disenchanted renouncement. To counteract a view of discourse that
is associated with agentive impotence, the previous deliberations have provided a view of
resistance, that is, transgression, which is conceived of as relying upon and absorbing the
condition of power which it seeks to escape. Provided that resistance can occur within the
confines of power (and must not necessarily be practices outside of it) and taking into account
that power ultimately creates the (unstable) condition of its own resistance, we shall turn over to
Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ in order to continue and develop this
line of argument. In opposition to Foucault’s work on the ‘aesthetics of existence’, it is
noteworthy that de Certeau’s work highlights resistance of pre-ordained meaning not primarily as
a matter of purposeful action (e.g. thinking), but as the alteration of signs/discourse through
people’s everyday practices. It is hence worth noting in this context that the theorizing of
resistance does neither end nor begin with the work of Foucault, and that there are philosophical
perspectives beyond (or besides) Foucault which also theorize (tactical) resistance as a process
which is inherent to the system of dominant (i.e. strategic) meaning. Though we are grateful for
Foucault’s work which has helped us in understanding that resistance must not necessarily take
the form of class struggle or otherwise collective antagonism, it is in particular de Certeau who
has spurred a view that interprets resistance as a distinct process of re-appropriation (re-
interpretation) which implies (as with Foucault’s work on transgression) that challenging existing
power relations does not require overthrowing them. De Certeau must therefore be approached as
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having been part of a larger philosophical ‘collective’ or ‘movement’ of which other proponents
such as Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault are, to my knowledge, the most luminous
(cf. Ahearne, 1995). When juxtaposing Foucault’s notion of ‘aesthetics of existence’ with de
Certeau’s tactical resistance, it must be borne in mind that the latter sort of resistance is thought
of less as a process of active and conscious deliberation or thinking as of (creative) consumption.
Individual consumption is thus envisaged by de Certeau as the process by virtue of which the
individual carries out a number of transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy
in which he/she finds him/her-self. Speaking of consumption thus entails that the individual is
always situated within a dominant economic order (of production) which aspires to ‘capitalize
acquired advantages, to prepare future expansion, and thus to give oneself a certain independence
with respect to the variability of circumstances’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 36). To gain a sense of how
de Certeau envisaged tactics and everyday practices as an immanent feature of resistance against
a dominant economic order, it is first of all imperative to understand that he placed the individual
in a ‘calculus of force-relationships’ (de Certeau, 1994, p. 380) that tried to master time and space
so as to turn them into ‘readable spaces’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 36). While the term ‘readable
spaces’ is construed by de Certeau (1984) as the codification of space that ‘makes possible a
panoptic practice’ (p. 36; emphasis in original), it becomes evident that he took Foucault’s
(1977) ‘Discipline and Punish’ as a starting point to search for ‘limits … to the proliferating
mechanisms of ‘discipline’ diagnosed by Foucault’ (Ahearne, 1995, p. 147). This is not to say,
however, that de Certeau’s work on everyday practice was anti-Foucault, but that he took
Foucault’s exegesis of power as discipline to investigate how individuals were able to disrupt the
code of the dominant cultural economy and, consequently, how forms of alterity were enabled
within the given limits. In part, de Certeau’s work on everyday practices has been compatible
with Foucault’s notion of discipline to the extent that it presumed that people are located in a
predominated system of production that is characterized by ‘quasi-invisibility’ (1984, p. 31). The
introduction of ‘everyday practices’ on the other hand was aimed at investigating how people or,
better, ‘users’ operated within a particular strategic space, that is, a force-relationship in order to
appropriate the dominant cultural economy to their own interests and their own rules. Bearing in
mind the dynamic of disciplinary power which is said to transform individuals into cases, it is de
Certeau who has introduced the distinction between production and consumption in order to raise
the awareness that, however restrictive a given system of production might be, it is at the micro-
level of individual appropriation that the person is enabled ‘to manipulate events in order to turn
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them into opportunities’ (de Certeau, 1994, p. 480). To be sure, de Certeau’s idea of consumption
is not too far off from Foucault’s elaboration on ‘aesthetics of existence’, since both grant the
individual a space for creative/aesthetic self-determination. Yet, the means by which self-
determination is attained are markedly different. As mentioned before, it is Foucault who has
related personal freedom with reflective thinking while de Certeau took consumption (or
everyday practice) as the instance of individual resistance. Consumption, following de Certeau
(1994), is thus ‘devious, dispersed and insinuates itself everywhere’ whereas it must remain clear
that resistance manifests itself not ‘through its own products, but rather through its ways of using
the products’ (p. 475). To comprehend if resistance is taking place or not, de Certeau (1984)
advised us that ‘we must first analyze its [strategic meaning] manipulation by users who are not
its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the
image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization’ (p. xiii). Having
delineated everyday practices as well as consumption as ‘victories of the weak over the strong’
(de Certeau, 1994, p. 481), it is noteworthy that consumption marks a tactical exercise by virtue
of which individuals put forward ‘sentences’ that were unpredicted, if not undesired, by the
functionalized space of the dominant economy. Tactical resistance is thus to be understood as a
process of appropriation, of creative re-interpretation as a result of which official meaning is
subverted. Putting himself in opposition to Foucault’s rationale in ‘Discipline and Punish’, de
Certeau made clear that discipline is resisted at every moment by people’s ‘makeshift creativity’
(Levine, 1998). While one could argue that de Certeau was rash in accusing Foucault of not
taking into account the possibility of resistance (especially while taking into account the work
being discussed above), he must at the same time be held in high esteem for his insightful
comments on resistance as creative re-interpretation. Consumption as the process of ‘hidden
production’ thus provides the individual with agency that is circumscribed as the process of
creative utilization of meaning. Within this frame of reasoning, individuals become the
‘bricoleurs’ of their own future, that is, the ‘poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their
own path in the jungle of functionalist rationality’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xviii). With regard to
tactics, it is in particular due to individuals’ signifying practices, the ‘making do’ of new
meaning, that novel wandering lines become possible which trace ‘out the ruses of the other
interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems’ (de Certeau, 1994,
p. 480). Resistance in this perspective is centrally aligned with language (respectively reading)
where it is through concrete speech acts, that is, the use of language by an identifiable speaker,
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that language is appropriated to people’s own ends. De Certeau himself put forward the example
of indigenous minorities to exemplify how they used the official language (of the colonizer) to
‘metaphorize’ its dominant order.
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In making the dominant language function in another register
it is thus possible for the speaker to insert his/her own messages, accents and, thus, to define
his/her own history and future. Arguably, de Certeau has been keen to pinpoint a kind of
resistance that is contingent on reading (interpreting). He thereby highlighted the importance of
reading by showing that reading never simply reproduces the initial (or dominant) meaning.
Rather, the process of reading invariably contains an appropriation of meaning, that is, every
strategic text is always exposed to a reading subject which implies that this individual (being the
‘host’ of a plethora of other texts) can read/interpret the text in several ways, and, ultimately, to
his/her own advantage. By implication, reading becomes pure creativity as well as a kind of
(metaphoric) dreaming which both aspire to put the ‘individual elsewhere, where they are not, in
another world’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 173). To read behind and other than the strategic orthodoxy
is, following de Certeau (1984), a ‘silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers … who
maintain their own views in private and without the knowledge of the “masters”’ (p. 172). As
with Foucault, this space of relative autonomy must be actively created within the given socio-
economic field of force. However, as becomes clear through the above statements, so-called ‘re-
employments’ of meaning are not so much a matter of deliberately setting oneself apart from the
‘knowledge of the “masters”’ as calling into question the discourses by which one is interpellated.
Rather, ‘re-employments’ are (almost) inevitable since there is always an abundance of novel
associations one can derive through the process of reading (cf. Chapter 5). To put this in a slightly
different way, given the rich array of (potential) intertextual combinations which pervade each
singular text, it is conceivable that the reader always gets to invent ‘in texts something different
from what they [the writers] “intended”. He detaches them from their origin, now lost or merely
incidental. He combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized
by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 169). This
being said, it becomes clear that de Certeau’s elaboration on reading exhibits some proximity to
Derrida’s (1981) notion of ‘différance’ as the ‘unfolding of difference’ (p. 10). In both instances
difference is discerned as an irrevocable, though at times concealed, part of the strategic
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In postcolonial studies there are frequent notions of ‘mimicry’ which is taken as the process by which colonized
subjects employ the language of the colonizer in ways that produces a ‘blurred copy’ which ‘locates a crack in the
certainty of colonial dominance’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tifffin, 2000, p. 139).
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apparatus or metaphysical system (or text). Differences are thus already at people’s disposal
while it is only through their creative reading, if not discovery, that novel connections/meanings
are made possible. In accordance with Foucault’s notion of ‘transgression’, reading
(interpretation) activates a movement whose direction, following de Certeau, is ‘incidental’. As
metaphorically expressed by de Certeau, ‘readers are travelers; they pass through lands belonging
to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write’ (p. 174). Again,
de Certeau’s depiction of reading as a voyage into foreign lands is compatible with Foucault’s
notion of transgression as a movement forward, a movement towards new becomings. Yet, while
difference is the point in question in both approaches, it is in particular through de Certeau that
we come to see that difference or resistance is not only implied in every orthodox signification,
but that it is, due to the fissures in the structure of enclosure, almost inevitable. Importantly, the
aesthetics and ethics entailed in de Certeau’s account is that the individual is granted a space
other than that contained by certified forms of writing while it must be acknowledged, following
Ahearne (1995), that ‘the individual … does not hold his or her own truth, but may develop a
differential truth by responding to a series of solicitations and disruptions which come from
‘outside’’ (p. 192). Hence, de Certeau provides us with a cogent model to understand how alterity
is created throughout the process of creative consumption which in turn depends and thrives on
the delimiting structure of enclosure. Within the ensuing lines we shall go on to ‘metaphorize’
this relation between power and subjectivity in order to establish an image which highlights the
constructive relationship between the two phenomena.
Resistance as Parasitic ‘Collaboration’
As with Foucault’s concept of transgression, de Certeau’s tactics are equally conceivable as an
ensemble of ‘ruses and devices’ that use the dominant cultural logic or the prevailing strategic
code in a manner that opens up a sphere of relative autonomy. Tactics are hence borne within
power and feed off the spatial complex of an assemblage of domination that provides ‘some time’
(tactics unfold in time through processes of ‘making do’) to establish a modestly subversive
enclave (de Certeau, 1984). Both the notion of tactics and transgression provide a frame for
understanding how identities or subjectivities are constructed in and through a given field of
force. Most explicitly comprised in Foucault’s elaborations on transgression is that the
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construction of subjectivity marks a process of releasing one-self, that is, letting go of one’s
stable (and confined) identity in order to transcend existing limitations, the border, such as to
become other. Arguably, thinking about identity construction as aesthetic practice must not
constitute an imaginary terrain of harmonious enunciation, but one which equally emphasizes
negotiation and, by implication, social conflict and tensions (Bakhtin, 1981). On the face of it,
while Foucault and de Certeau’s theories outline how dominant discourse can be sidestepped
(transgressed) without actually leaving it, such an image of resistance works less through a
metaphor of either escape or opposition but of ‘parasite politics’ (van Loon, 2000). The parasite
represents an elusive concept and one which is more often than not taken as a negative
phenomenon or form of encounter. However, the image of the parasite is also productive because
it allows a perspective of power, resistance and subjectivity that affirms difference, not sameness.
To attain such ends, we must first bear in mind that the parasite emphasizes the permeability and
openness of the body and thereby undermines the rationale of the subject being a self-enclosed,
stand-alone unity. Moreover, the image of the parasite provides us with a perspective for
envisaging a constructive/productive interrelatedness between power and the subject. Generally
speaking, it seems commonsense to presume that the host feeds the parasite and that the
relationship between the two is unidirectional (and predominantly harmful). However, such a
view relies on an image of the parasite in the sense of, for instance, an infectious disease such as a
virus. Within such a frame the host not only feeds the parasite but also has its overall vitality
threatened. The parasite, in its obvious reading as a virus or as the ivy which twines around the
tree, entails an image of (destructive) opposition where, by extension to the issue at hand, the
individual is subjected to the forces that surround him/her. What I want to bring to the forefront
here is that within the dialectics of power and subjectivity it is the former which represents a
threat or risk to the latter. Thus, if we remind ourselves of the elaborations of Foucault and de
Certeau, it no longer appears compelling to rely on an understanding of parasite as virus. In
consequence, we must address the question of whether the parasite and the host must necessarily
be represented through an antagonistic picture. Provided, for instance, that the virus can lead a
semi-autonomous existence in relation to the host (van Loon, 2000), the notion of symbiosis and
the creation of new life forms seems pertinent to delineate our topic. In specific terms, if we are
willing to work with an image of ‘semi-autonomy’, this enables us to render intelligible, first, that
power and subjectivity are co-implied (Foucault, 1984) and, second, that these processes intersect
at a juncture or transgressive zone where new forms (of identity) are made possible. This view of
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the parasite, so it seems, merits further investigation since it emphasizes the ‘symbiotic’
(quotation marks!) relation between power and subjectivity. This being said, I would like to join
forces with Hillis Miller (2004) who raised the illuminative question: ‘can host and parasite live
happily together … ?’ (p. 177). This question marks an instance which should make us pause and
reflect as to whether ‘happiness’ is really at stake with respect to power and resistance and,
importantly, which of the two phenomena be conceived as the parasite, and conversely the host?
In talking of happiness, it is necessary to mention that ‘parasite’ marks a term which by definition
derives its meaning through the presence of its counterpart, the host. As mentioned before,
‘parasite’ is canonically interpreted in the sense of ‘harmful’ or ‘unfavorable’. Yet, the prefix
‘para’ (deriving from Greek), as Hillis Miller eloquently pinpointed, is associated with terms such
as ‘beside’, ‘to the side of’, ‘alongside’, etc. It can be argued, then, that these terms are more
closely aligned with the idea of Hillis Miller’s ‘happiness’ than with the agonistic picture of
Weber’s ‘iron cage’ that has been considered in conjunction with Foucault’s work on disciplinary
technologies. Yet, happiness as (univocal) positivity relates most cunningly to the possibility of
tactical transformation as delineated by de Certeau, while it seems less apposite to depict the
‘self-forming activity’ (i.e. transgression) as outlined by Foucault (1984). Evidently then, we
shall have another look at Hillis Miller’s work in order to comprehend that it is not necessary to
depict the relationship between power and subjectivity as either ‘happy’ or ‘antagonistic’, but that
it is in fact possible to insert a logic of ‘as-well-as’. Hence, in his treatise of (Derridean)
deconstruction (cf. Chapter 5), Hillis Miller (2004) pinpointed that ‘para’ actually represented ‘a
double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, … interiority and exteriority,
something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously
this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it’ (p. 179). The ambiguity
evoked in Hillis Miller’s image of ‘para’ is important for scrutinizing the contention that parasite
and host, and hence power and the individual, are marked off by a distinct and terminal line. In
accordance with Foucault’s musing on transgression, Hillis Miller’s rationale of ambivalence
enables us to conceive resistance as not so much a matter of defense or (self) protection. Rather,
instead of seeing resistance as a means to reach a certain telos, transgression shall be seen as the
process by which the individual crosses a line and enters novel territories. If one thinks in terms
of ‘inside and outside’, the individual is neither to be envisaged as being fully subjected to power
nor as fully escaping its influence. The image of the host and the parasite implies that power (and
its effect) cannot be allocated to only one party, and this we would endorse . Hillis Miller’s hint
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to ‘proximity and distance’ thereby denotes that the individual, respectively his/her subject
position, is constantly shifting and thereby subject to constant re-negotiation. As with the parasite
and the host, identity and power are always co-implied in such a way that the relation is not one
of polarity but, rather, of constant and contested movement. Power in itself, by implication, is not
only parasitical (in the sense of the ‘iron cage’) but equally the host, the affirmative instance of
possibility which provides the means for the individual’s aesthetic self-creation. Again, this
ambivalent reading of the allegory of parasite and host does not provide a picture of resistance
that escapes power. There is, however, no (reason for) escape anyway, since the in-between zone
of power and subjectivity defies a dialectical synthesis, an inside that is distinguishable from the
outside. As such, neither prefabricated meanings, that is, the strategic structure of enclosure, nor
the individual that finds himself or herself in its stretch will gain the upper hand in any definitive
sense. As indicated through Foucault’s notion of ‘spiral’, it becomes clear that there is no clear
and stable hierarchy contained in the relationship between power and subjectivity and that the
ambivalence between the two events must be conceived as both affirmative and threatening.
Where it has hitherto been discussed that difference is always part and parcel of every field of
force, we shall now come to talk about Michel Serres so as to address the idea that novel
becomings, that is, ‘the possible’, must not be ‘passively’ awaited, but actively nurtured.
Resistance as (the Sensitive Treatment of) the Possible: Michel Serres
By virtue of depicting Foucault and de Certeau’s theories as ‘parasitical resistance’ it has become
clear that the assumption of hegemonic or dominant discourse cannot possibly be sustained. Both
perspectives have so far made clear, in their unique ways, that the relation between power and the
subject (i.e. the ostensible object of domination) cannot be represented through the metaphor of
the ‘iron cage’ as outlined by Max Weber (cf. Weiskopf, 2002). Instead of conceiving the two
ostensible poles as separated by a boundary that keeps apart the inside from the outside, both
‘transgression’ and ‘tactics’ thrive on an image of the boundary as a ‘source of paradox and
contradiction’ (Cooper, 1990, p. 168). This boundary zone, or ‘strategic zone’ (Deleuze, 1988), is
thus the place where the subject is respectively tactically or aesthetically enabled to re-formulate
relations to self and other. Having emphasized that resistance is always inherent to power, it must
be borne in mind that both tactics and transgression might suggest an instance of resistance that is
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a bit too positive and masterful. This being said, we are well advised to refrain from the
temptation of using the parasite metaphor as an explanatory structure that foretells, in a universal
sense (Lyotard, 1984), that individuals by necessity work upon themselves in an aesthetical
manner. Hence, envisaging the boundary as a dynamic field where becoming other is made
possible, we must concede that it is always possible that the potentialities of a particular situation
are not or cannot be realized. Becoming other is thus premised on the (deliberate and active)
release of difference or the ‘multiple’ (to use Serres’ (1995) wording) which is always underlying
the (impression of the) unit. However, as ‘(w)e are fascinated by the unit’ and given the fact that
‘only a unity seems rational to us’ (Serres, 1995, p. 2), one might reasonably surmise that the
allowance of difference and alterity marks not only a creative but also a daring act of ‘letting one-
self in’. Arguably, such a transgression is not everybody’s cup of tea, so to speak, and it can be
anticipated that some people more than others are able to perceive and embrace the ‘background
noise’ which is the irrevocable ground of all becoming. Mankind, according to Serres, has
eradicated its sensitivity for discerning the surrounding noise from which all things are derived.
As such, Serres told us that we have become blinded towards the fact that ‘Being’ is inherently
fragile and, importantly, that it does not represent the ontological condition of man, but only a
brief respite from the noise from which it emerges. Again, noise is infinite possibility, but it is
more often than not feared or ignored altogether. Serres (1995) used the metaphor of ‘sea noise’
to illustrate that ‘(s)o many mariners never saw anything in the noise of the sea; only felt
nauseous, organisms teeming with the sound and the fury, like the heaving gray itself’ (p. 15;
emphasis in original). Noise, though alien or alienating to most of us, is ‘the set of possible
things’ whereas Serres (1995) further reminds us that ‘(w)e cannot predict what will be born from
it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there’ (p. 22; emphasis in original). Somewhat in
contrast to both Foucault and de Certeau’s writing, Serres made clear that the possibilities
inherent to noise are maybe further away than we might expect or want to accept. Provided that,
for instance, lack of artistic style or restrictive forces can prevent the actualizing of potentialities,
it needs to be acknowledged that there are instances which are more rigorous in suppressing the
empowerment of certain people and thereby especially those who are not associated with
mainstream thought. As Serres (1995) contended, ‘the possible is only there if there are keepers,
precisely, only if there are shepherds to tend their flocks on the highlands, only if there are
watchers’ (p. 24). Clearly, despite the noise, the innumerable and irreducible difference always
being present, the possible presupposes a sensitive treatment and openness towards the marginal
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and unknown. Serres thereby made undoubtedly clear that politics does not seem up for the task
of nurturing the possible, since ‘(p)olitics pares down the possible in order to remain stable and
maintain sanity; economy, religion, the army, … , and the administration of our day which
synthesizes them, have the function and a passion to reduce multiplicities, to reduce possibilities,
to work at the confluences’ (p. 24). Provided that we allocate some rightfulness to Serres’ claim,
we have good reasons to search for a code or event which can warrant an adequate treatment of
multiplicity, diversity and alterity. Serres is doubtlessly most univocal in his assertion that the
philosopher (respectively philosophy) must be, or better become, the spearhead for unveiling the
possibilities of the multiple. Following Serres (1995), ‘(t)he philosopher is no longer right or
rational, he protests neither essence nor truth. It is the function of the politician to be right and
rational, it is the function of the scientist to be right and rational; there are plenty of functionaries
of the truth as it is, without adding more, the philosopher does not wrap himself up in truth as in
breastplate or shield, he does not sing nor does he pray to allay nocturnal fears, he wants to let the
possible roam free. Hope is in these margins, and freedom’ (p. 23). As Serres (1995) further
contended, it is the philosopher who must brood ‘over the possible as if it were a fragile newborn
babe, like a bouquet of times, like a multi-branched candelabrum, like a living network of veins
and fibrils, he harkens to the noises and the ringing of changes’ (p. 25). The understanding of the
philosopher and philosophy as the guard of the possible goes well together with Derrida’s musing
on the position and function of philosophy and the humanities more generally (cf. Chapter 5) in
the university of tomorrow (Derrida, 2001, 2001b). It thereby seems intuitively compelling in
both Serres’ and Derrida’s accounts that philosophy comprises a vision for a different future, a
future to come, so to speak. Hence, given these elusive possibilities, we must endeavor to
understand what philosophy or, better, philosophizing means and how these insights can be
translated and implemented so as to enable aesthetical and ethical subjectivities. This brings us to
the issue of looking for how philosophy can give rise to ‘another society’ which is likely to
increase difference and alterity and which is affirmative towards the noise which, as Serres
reminds us, is always around the corner. In other words, what is needed if we acknowledge that
difference must be actively sought and sensitively treated are visions which are pertinent to turn
noise into a (ethical) idea(l). Speaking of ‘idea’ or ‘ideal’ thereby marks a strategic choice which
aspires to sidestep the danger of wiping out the dogma, that is, totalizing discourse of a unified
society by simply replacing it with another. Bearing in mind that we should refrain from putting
forward a prescriptive code of difference and alterity (e.g.: ‘difference must be this and not
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that!’), what then comes to mind for averting another hegemonic terror (Lyotard, 1984) or
metaphysical closure (Derrida, 1978) is Lyotard’s (controversially discussed) concept of
‘paganism’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985). Paganism shall therefore be deployed in the subsequent
paragraph to outline the (potential) political context and ethical obligation of power and
resistance in order then to use these insights for envisaging a just or at least more just society.
Resistance as Politics of Difference: Jean-Francois Lyotard
Where after the meta-narratives, can legitimacy reside? (Lyotard, 1984, pp. xxiv – xxv)
In ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze (1994) introduced, in an utterly persuasive way, the
importance of a philosophy of difference by describing how difference may be internal to the
nature of every Idea (capital letter) or, to be more specific, how every Idea may have multiple
elements which may be differentiated. Deleuze thereby explained that difference and repetition
have a reality which is independent of concepts of sameness, identity, resemblance, similarity, or
equivalence. In accordance thereto, Serres’ (1995) deliberations underscore Deleuze’ assertions
in that he said that ‘(w)e’ve long ago given up the hope for unitary knowledge; there’s
exceedingly little appearance of us living, thinking, or existing as a collectivity, under one law,
indivisible’ (p. 3). Importantly, pure difference is not a factor of negativity (even though we tend
to discern it as such; cf. Serres, 1995), or a negation of sameness and unity, but the possibility of
affirming the actuality of the Idea and, by extension, of becoming other as well as justice.
Speaking in the name of justice, we come full circle with Lyotard’s deliberations on paganism
and difference in order to delineate that the inscription and sustenance of difference
simultaneously represents a political task and an ethical event. As with Foucault who contended
that while the main interest of his later work was the (genealogical) investigation of sexuality (cf.
1978; 1985; 1990) politics was always co-implied, we shall now turn our gaze to Lyotard who
has given rise to a genuinely political project which, importantly, must also be emphasized both
in its moral/ethical outlook as well as regarding its commensurability with resistance. Marking
out Lyotard as one of the most important spearheads of the ‘politics of difference’ (Smart, 1993),
we shall begin this discussion by pointing out that there seems to be a certain fallacy of mimetic
form in many current debates on ‘our future’. In other words, many contemporary ‘futurologies’
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seek to comprehend (or critique) the ‘newness’ of globalization’s gigantism or its speed of
communication (du Gay, 1996) by resorting to an inverted measure emphasizing the ‘local’ in
opposition to the ‘global’ or contesting hierarchical state power by virtue of celebrating the power
‘from below’, such as, for instance, the multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2000; 2004). Summoning
Lyotard’s concept of ‘paganism’ thus characterizes an attempt to propose that any notion of
minority, conceived as an insurgent political will or a resistant cultural force, is never simply a
matter of numbers, that is, a quantitative stipulation of respectively relative predominance or
inferiority (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, pp. 93 – 100). Instead, a minority is a moral or ethical
stance that seeks representation and/or recognition not in order to overthrow the dominant code,
but to establish a fairer and fuller political and cultural representation through making a claim for
individual and social agency. This is the agential claim Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985)
proposed in his ‘politics of difference’ where he pointed out that ‘(e)very one of us belongs to
several minorities, and what is very important, none of them prevails. It is only then that we can
say that the society is just’ (p. 95). Hence, within his treatise of the just society, that is, ‘Just
Gaming’, Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) made clear that the only state of justice that
truly deserves its name is one in which no minority is enabled to dominate the others. However,
since it is conceivable that certain language games will necessarily become excessive, that is,
‘wanting to have too much of it’ (p. 99), a request is made that ways be found for ensuring the
multiplicity of language games as the ultimate momentum of justice. In line with this observation,
we shall try to sketch out a passable horizon of justice by relating to Lyotard’s concept of
‘paganism’.
When we talk of paganism we must not mistakenly interpret its political trajectory as a
modernist prescription of the just (or ethical) society (i.e. a prescription how a society must be).
Lyotard has often been accused precisely because people have misread his concept of paganism
as referring to a new ideology which pertains to ultimate truth. Be that as it may, Lyotard himself
warned against seeing paganism as prescriptive moral imperative with pre-ordained criteria: ‘I
judge. But if I am asked by what criteria do I judge, I will have no answer to give. Because if I
did have criteria, if I had a possible answer to your question, it would mean that there is actually a
possible consensus on these criteria’ (p. 15). To enable difference by a politics that defies
consensus, Lyotard opted to signify paganism as a judgment that works without or beyond pre-
established criteria that can ostensibly be deduced from the ultimate truth (respectively from
consensus). ‘Without criteria’ is thus the endemic characteristic of paganism which marks an
523
ethical (i.e. just) gesture by virtue of denoting non-restriction and non-totalitarian discourse.
However, ‘without criteria’ is not the condition of ‘anything goes’; rather, it entails, following
Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), that ‘(t)he ability to judge does not hand upon the
observance of criteria. The form that it will take … is not only an ability to judge; it is a power to
invent criteria’ (p. 17). Jean-Loup Thébaud, the interviewer of Lyotard in ‘Just Gaming’ (1985),
mused at length on the question of whether or not paganism gets to rely on fixed criteria and,
therefore, must be envisaged, despite Lyotard’s insistent defense, as a classical modernist ideal
that directs or, more precisely, prescribes the way into the future. Yet, within their intellectual
(s)wordplay, Lyotard made unmistakably clear that only if one takes paganism to represent a
‘mimesis of an essence of justice’ (p. 19; i.e. a predefined criterion) could one transform
paganism into a modernist project. With this in mind, we must further recall that Lyotard’s
paganism or pagan politics is indeed prescriptive (though ‘case by case’ and not in the sense of
transcendental truth; cf. p. 28) while it is said to differ from modernist undertakings in that it,
first, represents justice as an ‘idea’ rather than a ‘determining concept’ and, second, that it cannot
be derived from denotative statements, that is, from the model of truth.
This being said, we shall now turn our gaze to the issue of power and subjectivity so as to
claim that it must remain clear at all times that paganism is not a nostalgic condition which
‘implies the representation of something that of course is absent, a lost origin, something that
must be restored to a society in which it is lacking’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 20). Quite the
contrary, paganism thrives upon an idea which is notably different from any clear-cut definition
or moral imperative of justice (cf. Chapter 1). Paganism thus differs from those denotative
statements which prescribe a particular (content of) truth. Essentially, the Idea (capital letter)
Lyotard had in mind is in close proximity with Foucault (1984) who contended that ‘the
questions I am trying to ask are not determined by a pre-established political outlook and do not
tend toward the realization of some definite political project’ (p. 375). Lyotard (cf. Lyotard &
Thébaud, 1985) has thus rejected endeavors such as Marxism upon recognizing that its rationale
contains ‘the deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it
is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw just prescriptions from
a description that is true, in the sense of “correct”’ (p. 23). What is revealed here is a familiarity
with Foucault’s scrutiny of ‘ideology’. That is to say that the analogy between the two authors
revolves in their rejection or dissociation of the connection between truth and justice. In other
words, what enables the association of Foucault and Lyotard (or the other way around) is the
524
observation that both scholars do not believe in an ultimate state of truth from which one could
deduce prescriptions or codes for a just society, and thereby for a better future. While Foucault
directed his attention towards locating ethics or ethical possibilities at the micro-level of
individual self-determination, Lyotard on the other hand reached out to grasp the possibility of
macro-level freedom and to formulate an idea of justice and the just society which gets along
without prescriptive laws. Moreover, he delineated that what he took to represent the idea of
paganism was different from those accounts which conceived the matter as being due to
individual autonomy and self-determination. This is not to say that Lyotard was speaking against
Foucault’s notion of ‘aesthetics of existence’ since he objected in particular (and only) to those
accounts which presumed that there exists a possibility to operate outside the realm of power, that
is, autonomously (a view which Foucault likewise denied; cf. above). However, there seems to be
a difference between Lyotard and Foucault which pertains to the social context in which justice,
and thereby, freedom are discussed. Thus, while the ‘aesthetics of existence’ came to represent
individual resistance, it was Lyotard’s concept of ‘paganism’ which envisaged justice as a
collective endeavor. To attain a state or condition of justice within society one is hence constantly
called upon to question if a specific utterance or language game manages to become hegemonic,
that is, if it is granted the position of singular power. While every language game can in principal
be or become prescriptive, Lyotard made a necessary distinction between ‘instruction’ and
‘slogan’ where it is the former which exhibits a sensitivity towards context and, thus difference,
while the latter pertains to a metaphysical logic of unity and thus contains the potential for
hegemony. Deploying Lyotard’s (1985) own elaborations we get to hear that ‘(a)n instruction is
precisely an indication of what is appropriate to do in a specific pragmatic context … They are
always local. If the context disappears, the instructions no longer have any meaning. They are not
slogans, then. A slogan belongs to a general strategy. And a general strategy presupposes a
permanent context’ (p. 55). While paganism entails local and temporary prescriptions whereas
defying universal value as contained in slogans, it stimulates, on a larger note, an image (i.e. Idea)
of a society that trades on a diverse set of pragmatic instructions that cannot, following Lyotard,
be transformed into a meta-discourse or grand narrative. One can derive from this that a society
which hails pagan politics is held together by ‘(m)essages regulated by different types of
“compass”, and thus positioning several ways of turning reality out. This social universe is
formed by a plurality of games without any one of them being able to claim that it can say all the
others’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 58). It follows from this that pagan politics is a distinct
525
‘politics of difference’ (Smart, 1993) which works on the obligation of enabling difference, that
is, ‘maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives’ (p. 59), while installing
dissensus (and not consensus) as its operational principle. The grounding of such a politics is
revealed in the enabling of language games yet to be recognized and derives its legitimacy from
the very fact that it conveys a sensitivity and tolerance for complete otherness, or what Lyotard
(1988) himself coined as the ‘unpresentable’ or the ‘differend’. This being said, it is conceivable
that resistance is not so much a process of overt opposition but, rather, represents the sort of
political/ethical event by means of which the various language games of a particular pragmatic
context are rendered visible and possible. Bringing all possible voices to the fore or at least
raising the likelihood of their enunciation without granting a single perspective a metaphysical
stance, is, following Lyotard, the condition of justice. To be able to deserve the name, paganism
needs to be on its guard against turning a (local) prescription into a ‘slogan’ wherefore the prime
obligation of paganism is ‘to leave prescriptions hanging, that is, they are not derived from an
ontology’ (p. 59). Resistance as justice, though aspiring to a finality (i.e. the multiplication of
language games), is not to be found in the finitude of territoriality, but in the ‘infinity of
becoming’ (e.g. van Loon, 2000). By the same token, resistance equally marks the moment of
close listening, as the instance which gives rise to language games which have no origin or, stated
otherwise, which are not derivable from metaphysical ‘postulates’. The just society thus operates
through the ‘ought’ (and not the ‘must’), meaning that it takes a transition from a ‘descriptive
game whose goal is knowledge of the given, to a descriptive game (by Ideas) of the exploration
of the possible’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 59). Coming full circle with Foucault, who has
signified ethics as people’s self-actualization through aesthetic practice, one can note that the
making of a (not the) just society is equally conceivable as an artistic process. The image of
resistance as art is thus amenable to a logic in which making difference becomes the ultimate
concern of justice. To be sure, art is the ‘code’ Lyotard invoked to make clear that the antithesis
to paganism are those people who accept the signified as saying the truth. Art, in contrast thereto,
pertains to innovativeness which becomes most obvious in that paganism is envisaged by Lyotard
(cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985) as the ‘move from one game to another, and in each of these
.
182
The specter, according to Derrida (1994), is ‘a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body … It
becomes … some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other.
For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right
away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter . . . One does not know
[whether] it is living or if it is dead. Here is — or rather there is, over there, an unnameable or almost
unnameable thing’ (p. 6).
526
games (in the optimal situation) they try to figure out new moves. And even better, they try to
invent new games’ (p. 61). Arguably, art and artistic paganism are taken as the epitome of
resistance or, following Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985), ‘liberation’ (cf. p. 62), which
aspires, first and foremost, to prevent a particular language game from attaining definitive
significance and legitimacy. The just society, which takes into account that people’s freedom is
all too easily overrun, must be on its guards to make sure ‘that no minority is to prevail upon any
other’ (Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985, p. 96). As such, the just society equally comes to depend on
the artistic invention of new language games as well as on the perpetual deconstruction of those
which aggrandize and strain dominance. In the spirit of Lyotard (cf. Lyotard & Thébaud, 1985),
‘(l)et us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name’ (p. 82).
Outlook
While Chapter 5 has aspired to formulate an instance of critical reflection on the grounds of
Derrida’s ‘university without condition’, Serres’ appeal to see the philosopher as the nurturer of
difference (cf. above) can principally be extended to all realms of human life; provided that they
dare to speak in the name of excess, pleasure, passion and complete otherness. Lyotard’s politics
of difference is, or may become, at once the political economy of the multitude and of otherness,
and the concrete responsibility of the non-performative code. While it has been said that the
humanities are ‘useless’ since they provide nothing which can be directly used or otherwise sold
(Sommer, 2005), I have tried to express my contention that it is the unveiling of difference and
the setting into motion of centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981) and libidinal energies (Lyotard,
1993) which marks the ethico-political momentum of its very disciplines. Having delineated,
through Lyotard’s ‘paganism’, the interrelatedness between difference and justice, I will now
‘exploit’ the idea of justice-as-otherness in conjunction with a (novel) reformulation of the epithet
‘social’ of entrepreneurship. Thus, it will be argued that current formulations of social
entrepreneurship miss out on the critical and/or utopian momentum or madness (Derrida, 2004)
which makes it is ever more urgent to address these shortcomings as a philosophical task. This
being said, it will be Derrida in particular who will be granted a pivotal position in re-envisaging
social entrepreneurship through an ethics of alterity and complete otherness. Derrida’s work shall
527
thus for the most part serve as a springboard for shifting the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’
beyond its performative signification and for giving rise to the recognition that the social realm
and complete otherness belong, principally speaking, to the same family, so to speak. To provide
an argumentative foundation for these very ideas (which might otherwise appear all too common
sense or, even worse, ‘impracticable’), I will first go about showing that the social aspect of
entrepreneurship, and the space ethics is appointed therein, is far removed from an idea of the
‘social’ which truly deserves the name. By emphasizing that the bulk of current interpretations of
social entrepreneurship is diametrically opposed to an ‘ethics of difference’ and by showing that
dominant conceptualization still favor an individualistic, and hence a-social perspective of the
subject matter, I will re-read social entrepreneurship as an event of perpetual ‘becoming social’.
528
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Prolegomenon III
What happens when the other is absent in the structure of the world? Only the brutal
opposition of sky and earth reigns with an insupportable light and an obscure
abyss. (Deleuze, 1984, p. 56)
Scholars such as, for instance, Giorgio Agamben (in his seminal ‘Homo Sacer’; 1998)
have come to say that the 20
th
century is characterized by an almost incredible loss of
ethics; a loss which has made possible many devastating events, where centuries of
genocides represent only the tip of the iceberg. Yet, it would probably be misleading to
depict the 20
th
century as a darkish era which we have luckily left behind, especially
because it has been convincingly argued – by Derrida and others – that the past always
creates its specters
182
which are constantly, yet elusively, actualized in the present: ‘by
definition, they [the specters] pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they
trick consciousness and skip generations’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 36; emphasis in original). In
the present context this implies that ethics was never dead, neither during the 20
th
century nor today. Whichever way we look at Derrida’s thought-provoking quote, it is
beyond all question that even the most (self-declared) avant-garde writer claiming the
end of ethics will necessarily remain with one leg in the past, so to speak, since he/she
will always be haunted by those specters that informed their writing in the first place. Or,
to substantiate this assertion through Derrida’s body of thought, all texts (thus also
those on the end of ethics) circumscribe historical embodiments which ‘are forever
haunted by those specters that informed the thinking of the writer, the spirit of the text
which touches the embodied ghosts of its readers, and the legacy it creates’ (Miller,
2004, p. 11). All this means, then, that even though some have declared the end of ethics
(which seems to be only one out a myriad of avowed ‘endings’ stimulated by the
‘apocalyptic tone in philosophy’; Derrida, 1994, p. 16) there are, so it seems, ghostly
ethical presences which chronically haunt contemporary texts on that very matter.
Instead of an era of dead ethics it rather seems to be the case that both ethical ideas and
ideals resurrect – even in times where the political rhetoric on the state of exception, risk
and apocalypse seems to make redundant, even ridiculous, any affirmative, far-reaching
futurology – through seemingly distal, unrelated concepts (Sloterdijk, 2006; in
conversation with Heinrichs).
534
Coming full circle with Chapter 7, I would like to make it clear that its objective
was precisely to show that ethics is not and cannot be completely obliterated, however
hard one tries, because it is, despite eventual temporary disappearances, literally re-born
in unprecedented and unpredictable semantic ‘containers’ (such as, for instance, ‘social
entrepreneurship’). More to the point still, Derrida’s treatise on specters, ghosts and
revenants, which provided the inspiration for Chapter 7 in the first place, brought to the
fore the question as to how certain managerial concepts and/or neologisms (and thereby
in particular ‘social entrepreneurship) recapture a somehow nebulous ethical spirit.
While addressing this question, I tried to establish a ‘spectropoetics’
183
which seeks to
illuminate the ways in which certain managerial concepts, and above all ‘social
entrepreneurship’, are replete with hopes and positive forward-looking expectations and
to discuss that it is in particular ‘social entrepreneurship’ which conveys a certain
exegesis of ‘ethics’ (notice the quotation mark). Expressed differently, provided that
people have come to say that our (historical) knowledge is exempt from ethics, I opted to
use the subject matter of this thesis, i.e. ‘social entrepreneurship’, to argue for the
contrary: that the presence or, better, the representation of ‘social entrepreneurship’
exhibits ethical traces which already seemed long passé, i.e. rendered a concern from
previous times and hence no longer significant for our present (academic) lives.
184
Yet, showing that managerial concepts such as ‘social entrepreneurship’ are
haunted by at times hardly traceable social/ethical rationalities was ‘only’ a preparatory
maneuver for a double reading of the subject matter; hence a reading whose ultimate aim
was to first disarrange ‘social entrepreneurship’ from its customary territory in order
then to re-arrange or re-territorialize the whole issue of the ‘social’ alongside an
inspirational (my assessment) understanding of relational ethics (cf. below). This
preparatory step, on the face of it, has been necessary for revealing the paradox of ‘social
entrepreneurship’, which is to say that I tried to bring to the fore that the concept
embodies an aporia in that the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) is nothing else but a re-
vitalization of rationalistic, economic and individualistic thought. It is in this way that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) does not pertain to the etymological meaning of the
183
Essentially, Derrida’s spectropoetics has no stake in (not even a hope for) discovering the root of ethical
thought. That is, spectropoetics reveals Derrida’s (1994) anti-ontological position and his appeal for analytic
secrecy, i.e. for that which cannot possibly be grasped by the essentialist philosopher: ‘One cannot clearly see
this “thing” [the spectre, ghost, revenant] (that is not a thing) in flesh and blood, precisely name it in
language or completely know it in knowledge’ (Chen & Lai, 2007, p. 234).
184
To make this clear right from the beginning: Derrida’s work on hauntology, specters and ghosts is not so
much interested in pinpointing the return of the past but rather about the fact that the origin was already
spectral. We live in a paradoxical time, as Derrida (1994) argues in his ‘Specters of Marx’, where the past is
present, and the present is saturated with the past.
535
term (i.e. mingling) as a result of which it can tell us nothing new about an essential
component of man’s ‘good life’ and, as I try to show on the basis of Derrida’s work, about
what in means to be responsible and ethical in the relational space. What I hence tried to
object to through this first analytic step is that it is, at least at second sight/thought,
evident that the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ does in no way form a cout de pied or
counter-force to the avowed loss of ethics, an assertion which I try to substantiate by
showing that ‘social entrepreneurship’ embodies a logic that is probably best described as
schematic, meaning that it adheres to the modus operandi of technical applications, thus
including, among other things, calculable inputs, algorithmic processes and predictable
outcomes.
Admittedly, since such a casual outline might easily appear too nebulous, and
notoriously imprecise (at least if measured along the standards of academic rigor), I
would like to get more concrete by pinpointing the operation of the aforementioned
pseudo-ethics as revealed in the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’. The
reasons why I have chosen to carry out this task on the basis of the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’ are both self-evident and well-reasoned. That is, the selection is self-
evident in light of the fact that ‘social entrepreneurship’, or better the academic
literature thereof, forms the swivel of my thesis. More importantly though, it is
conceptually grounded on the assumption that ‘social entrepreneurship’ envelopes both
the high hopes of the entrepreneurship literature of the 1980s (Steyaert & Dey, 2006) as
well as the socio-ecological concerns that have materialized somewhere towards the end
of the 1990s. This particular coincidence, as I discuss more thoroughly in the following
chapter, has the noticeable effect of concealing that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’, though prima facie dealing with the avowed other or supplement of
economic calculation, rationality and predictability, is de facto grounded on an image of
thought that renders these components its crucial parts.
It is thus through a quasi-Deleuzian (cf. Deleuze & Parnet, 1987) gesture that I try
to destabilize this particularly rigid logic by demonstrating, inter alia, that the exegesis
of ‘social entrepreneurship’ gets to favor order over disorder, predictability over chance,
knowledge over secrecy, parsimony over excess, etc. One could say, then, that I use the
following chapter to start a journey into the muddy waters of management and
organization theory, i.e. into those realms of theory and practice which, according to
Rehn and O’Doherty (2007), form the outside of economic calculation and efficiency. This
journey gains both intensity and direction by way of a comparison in which I juxtapose
536
the economic/managerial underpinning of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) with a view
derived from what I prefer to coin ‘relational ethics’; a view initially formulated by
Emmanuel Levinas (yet, Levinas uses the term ‘ethics as first philosophy’) and taken up
and rendered popular through the later work of Jacques Derrida. To be very schematic, I
would say that I used the work of Derrida to emphasize that an ethical reading of the
‘social’ presupposes a response to the Other (i.e. the epitome of alterity and difference
which cannot possibly be rendered an object of the self or, to use Levinas’ own wording,
an ontology), yet a response that cannot be deducted from fixed rules of ethics. Though
this might come across as an oddity or a typical philosophical (read useless) mental
exercise, I deem this elaboration necessary for highlighting the most essential and
blatant fallacy of the available literature on ‘social entrepreneurship’, namely that it
constantly pretends that the ‘social’ can be reduced to a unified, well-defined and hence
identifiable entity: the individual. One of my main points is that the ‘social’ should be
conceived of as taking place in interaction with others (hence the notion of ‘relation-
ship’), be that people with a face (i.e. those people one really encounters) or the nameless
mass of others who demand and deserve our (responsible) response.
On a larger scope, the intention underlying this move is not only to grant Levinas’
Other a more important role with respect to what it means to be or, more precisely,
become social/ethical but to simultaneously inscribe a certain passivity into
ethical/social deeds. That is, where many, if not most, models of (pro-)social and even
ethical behavior presuppose a person’s willful ability and/or autonomy, I try to
undermine this rationalistic, cognitivistic and individualistic presumption by delineating
ethics as the sort of relationality that is chiefly characterized by radical passivity, i.e. a
kind of passivity which is not only passive to anything outside the person (e.g. the other;
lower case letter) but also to itself, meaning that the given person passively awaits
his/her own becoming-other (or becoming-social, for that matter). My main point,
therefore, is that an ethical reading of the ‘social’ should portray the matter as
encompassing metamorphosing movements and not merely some abstract intellectual
and/or volitional individual exercise.
It needs particular mention that I have formulated the whole relational ethics on
the basis of an apparent imperative: i.e. ‘you must do this or that!’ This might come
across as a paradox, especially if one thinks about the passivity I have just now been
stressing. Yet, the imperative only engenders a paradox if relational ethics is conceived
as a normative code, hence as a code that prescribes and determines fixed pattern of
thinking/acting, and that deals with ultimate judgments of good and right. This, however,
537
is truly not the case because although my treatise of relational ethics is evidently
grounded upon an imperative it refers to an exigency that simultaneously comprises a
powerful invitation to otherness and a space for its very problematization. Accordingly, it
envisions the whole ethical enterprise not as a finality or teleology that delineates a finite
type of being but as a kind of movement that is probably best depicted as a process of
becoming-social; a process driven by the question ‘how to become social?’, whereas not
demanding any conclusion,
185
once and for all. Though this should already be evident by
now, I still want to point out that my exegesis of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship)
envisions the process of becoming as a movement that has nothing in common with the
sort of heroism posited by the academic literature. Hence, rather than rendering the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) a deed of the few and the exceptional I try to construe it as
belonging entirely to the everyday world. Becoming ‘social’ is hence less a question of
turning towards some predetermined other (yet this is clearly part of the whole
endeavor) but of opening up to or becoming capable of the radical practice of ‘loosing
oneself’. In a peculiar sense, this experience points at an ongoing practice of
experimentation, a practice which at the same time can turn out the most dangerous,
appalling and, on the other hand, most fulfilling and divine events imaginable. It is,
therefore, only if one leaves behind the sort of thinking that relies on the distinction of
‘either-or’ and ‘good-bad’ that one is truly able to embrace a logic of immanence, a logic
which affirms that ethics is not about ‘well-thought’ judgment but about the task of
learning to live with otherness, that is, to ‘learn to live finally’ (Derrida, 1994). Obviously
then, sketching the ‘social’ as an event (in-between essences) is what I seek to bring to
the discussion of ‘social entrepreneurship’.
On the Sociological Inquiry of the ‘Social’
It is, however, only at this juncture that we are getting to the actual core of this
prolegomenon, i.e. to the question of ‘how does my ethical exegesis of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) respectively correspond or deviate from the ‘standard’ sociological
inquiry of the subject matter?’ This question, which was raised by one of my supervisors,
is relevant not least because of the fact that my thesis has been submitted at a sociology
department (of the University of Basel). Consequently, it is in the remainder of this
prolegomenon that I endeavor to trace the components that make sociological inquiries
185
Remember: Conclusion equals standstill as a result of which it gets to function as the precondition of an
ontology of being and thus of all truths.
538
(of the ‘social’) unique, or at least to speculate about the largest denominator(s) of
suchlike studies. If all this is at stake, we will probably hardly get around briefly talking
about a) the ‘history’ of sociology and its accustomed understanding of Wissenschaft as
well as b) the overlaps and points of divergence between sociology and the academic
discipline which I have chiefly summoned up in Chapter 7: philosophy. This, as I hope,
will enable us to envision the potential merits of my Derrida-inspired reading of the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
To begin with a):
186
it is hardly a secret that today’s ‘mainstream’ sociology is still
(at least partially) influenced by the scientific approach of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, an approach which was working upon the conviction that social
phenomena should be approached in the same way as physical and biological sciences
dealt with their subject matters. This approach, which is often referred to as positivism
and which has later been transformed into post-positivism, was largely inspired by the
writing of, among others, Auguste Comte, who is widely regarded as the first academic
using the term ‘sociology’ (which is also the preeminent reason why he is often referred
to as sociology’s founding father). Comte’s positivism thus holds that sociology cannot
proceed otherwise than to accept that the only authentic and hence admissible
knowledge is scientific knowledge and, most fundamentally, that this particular form of
knowledge can only be gained from the positive affirmation of theories and the strict
application of pre-determined scientific methods. It is with this stipulation that Comte
came to replace metaphysics in the history of thought with scientific method, thus
stressing, inter alia, the circular dependence between observation and theory in the
quest for truth. Though it is evident that contemporary sociology is anything but
annexed by the (post-)positivist paradigm and that these two perspectives have lost
(part of) their dominant position (where the etymology of dominance being ‘master of the
house’), it clearly holds true that sociology is seen my many, if not most, as a science that
pertains to particular scientific methods. Indeed, this conviction goes back as far as to
sociology’s early days where figures such a Durkheim claimed that to qualify as scientific
one must adhere to a method that is proven not only to illustrate but also to prove
hypothesis. Almost needless to say, then, that many introductory books to sociology still
hold the view that sociology-as-science is chiefly characterized by a ‘commitment to
186
Note that I will carry out this task by inserting as little references as possible. I thereby want to avoid the
impression that I have read everything (of importance) with respect to sociology, that I have a sound
understanding and overview of its scholarly endeavors and that I am hence able to make informed judgments
about sociology’s history, its preferred paradigmatic stance, etc. Concurring with Plato I here like to say:
‘This I know – that I know nothing.’
539
using observations of the real world over time in trying to develop explanations that are
even better than the ones we already have’ (Powers, 2004, p. 6; emphasis in original).
187
Put bluntly, it is not least as a result of Comte’s three-stage development model of
society (which rendered science the highest form of truth-telling, and thus superior to
theology and metaphysics) that academic sociology was established as a science and as a
‘queen science’ as that (Powers, 2004). Furthermore, it is interesting to see that
sociology, respectively Comte’s development model (theology ! metaphysics ! science),
performed a cunning segregation of academia in that sociology was set apart from (read
above) other disciplines, thereby not only leaving behind other social sciences like
psychology
188
but also physical and biological spheres of inquiry.
189
This was by no means
an easy endeavor since it required both a rhetorically sound argumentation
190
and the
putting in place of ‘border controls’ which register trespassers and deserters.
191
Be that
as it may, though it would clearly be inspiring to sketch out a treatise of the exclusionary
practices of academic sociology or, on the other hand, show how sociology in its coming of
age became more hospitable towards a multi-paradigmatic stance (where each new
paradigm bringing along its unique assumptions with respect to the nature of the social
world (i.e. ontology), to the question of how knowledge of the social world should/could be
acquired (i.e. epistemology) or to the particular procedures or set of procedures being apt
for inquiring social reality (i.e. methodology)), I am even more interested to gain a
preliminary understanding of how sociology’s understanding of science translates to the
inquiry of the ‘social’.
Provided that this question invites further elaboration, it seems important to
migrate to point b) so as to say that sociology, in the course of endowing itself with a
recognizable face and a strong academic status, had to stipulate a certain understanding
of its purpose and focus. Sociology’s abovementioned boundary-activities came at a
187
This being said, it should not be ignored that sociology does in fact embrace approaches which do not apply
to any strict definition of science. An insightful comment can be found in Powers (2004) who, while praising
the merits and tenets of scientific sociology (which to him is to be conceived as a real science), mentions that
perspectives that are critical of science (which Powers summarizes under the umbrella term
‘postmodernism’) work as ‘a healthy reminder that we need to take our call to science very seriously … so
that we can work effectively for a sustainable future offering opportunity for everyone’ (p. 40).
188
Importantly, academic psychology carried out a couple of comparable moves for giving itself a legible face.
189
Note in passing that it was particularly due to Weber’s import of interpretivism into the realm of academic
sociology that an even more notable void was engendered between the social and the natural sciences.
190
For instance, Comte’s rhetoric of the superiority of sociology was based on, among other things, the
assumption that his discipline formed the most complex inquiry of worldly facts and that it embraced almost
all domains of human conduct (e.g. criminal justice, religion, business, civics, etc.).
191
To make this clear right from the beginning, academic psychology – which worked as my own academic
hotbed – is not at all more open or inclusive than academic sociology; indeed probably even more restricted
and restrictive.
540
certain cost, meaning that it had to give itself clearly noticeable contours and, by
implication, loosen some of the affiliations with neighbor disciplines (e.g. philosophy).
Hence, in order to identify key differences between sociology’s and philosophy’s scholarly
modus operandi and raison d’être, it needs to be mentioned that the two disciplines were
not so long ago compared/comparable in terms of their objectives and subject area. That
is, Popper (1966), among others, convincingly argued that whereas ordinary people take
their daily struggles and life at large for granted, it is the task of sociologists (and social
scientists in general) as well as philosophers to survey things from a higher plane. This
conjunctive meta-perspective or -task, however, changed dramatically with the rise of
empirical (read scientific) sociology which had the effect, quasi over night, of effacing
(ancient) philosophers such as, for instance, Plato, Socrates or Heraclites from the
semantic field of ‘sociology’.
192
As an example one may mention Plato who was initially
celebrated by Popper (1966) as a great sociologist (Popper’s wording) who – in
conjunction with, for instance, his ‘Republic’ and ‘Law’ – provided wealthy and detailed
observations of the beginnings of society, of tribal patriarchy and of the typical periods
through which social life develops, but later rendered an intuitive rather than a strictly
scientific inquirer, and thus a scholarly figure that clearly did not stand the test of the
modern understanding of ‘scientist’. That is to say, then, that reference to a particular
understanding of knowledge creation and to a set of pre-ordained procedures of
knowledge gathering/production led to a clear-cut distinction between those actors
(only) interested in or enamored with wisdom or abstract knowledge (i.e. philosophers)
from those relying on methods for effecting a precise, read real, understanding of worldly
matters. Notwithstanding the observation that today’s understanding of science, i.e. a
‘body of regular or methodological observations or propositions … concerning any subject
or speculation’, was still applied to circumscribe the trajectory of philosophy during the
17
th
and 18
th
century – which attests to the previous inseparability of science (and hence
academic sociology) and philosophy – , it must not be overlooked that only the more bold
and expansive thinkers would still comply that the ancient Greeks belong, stricto sensu,
to the narrow circle of sociology since they did clearly not depend on the requisite body of
techniques (read tekhne) for investigating social phenomena and for acquiring new
knowledge as depicted, for instance, in theories of logical positivism or empiricism. To be
sure, Plato is not the first and certainly not the only Greek philosopher who could
192
This assertion is only partly true, however, particularly in light of those voices (e.g. Lepenies, 1985) which
have convincingly argued that sociology has in fact a double identity since it has always been caught between
science and the humanities.
541
potentially be labeled ‘sociologist’ (provided, of course, that one would apply an
alternative exegesis of science) in light of their inquiry of social phenomena and matters.
Yet, even though one could continue this discussion by arguing that the Sophists
represent the first great school of thinkers dedicated to social causes (i.e. man’s social
environment) or even by claiming that one should return to Greek philosophy if one
would ‘really’ want to learn something about society, this is a task others are
undoubtedly better equipped for and a task which would actually distract us from coming
to terms with the sociological inquiry of the ‘social’. Therefore, it is in the next paragraph
that I want to enter more illustrative terrains by providing a brief sketch of the
sociological treatment of the ‘social’.
Before delving into the typical, if this is at all an apt qualification, sociological
inquiry of the ‘social’, I would first like to narrate a brief story on the etymological
foundation of the term ‘sociology’. While keeping in mind that sociology is derived from
the two terms ‘socius’, meaning companion, and the preface ‘logy’, which pertains to
‘science’ (respectively knowledge), it becomes evident that sociology, by definition,
represents (itself as) the scholarly guardian of the ‘social’. Yet, sociology has never
restricted the signification of the ‘socius’ or, for that matter, the ‘social’ to ‘companion’ as
can easily be shown with reference to the plethora of topics addressed by sociological
inquires, ranging from A like ‘absolute poverty’ to Z like ‘zero population growth’ (also
note that Wikipedia (sic) lists far over 100 sociological topics beginning with the prefix
‘social’; the list thus starts with ‘social action’ and ends with ‘social trend’). Consequently,
instead of envisioning the prefix ‘socius’ as a univocal, unambiguous term it should
rather be construed as a plurivocal signifier. In light of the, metaphorically speaking,
back-breaking number of topics explored by sociology, it becomes obvious that it is
literally impossible to summarize, in a finite and terminal manner, how sociology as a
discipline goes about inquiring the ‘social’ and what sorts of ‘truths’ it imparts in the
course of its practice. This is precisely the reason why I have chosen a way often taken by
cognitive linguistics, meaning that I opted to work metonymously so as to use a single
characteristic (read concept) of sociology to map the more complex and stratified field of
academic sociology as a whole. Such a metonymous simplification, in my assessment,
seems reasonable for once not least since everyday man, out of reasons of intelligibility
and intellectual thriftiness, commonly use a single or simple entity to identify or explain
a more complex one.
542
Though it is self-evident that a metonymous illustration necessarily runs the risk
of over-reducing, not to say overruling, the complexities of existing works and, by
implication, to slick down sociology’s inherent complexity, I nevertheless believe that
this procedure has some intuitive value for working out the contrast between the
philosophical trajectory of Chapter 7 and sociology’s customary inquiry of the ‘social’. I
hence opt to carry out the illustration in conjunction with the concept of ‘social class’,
thus referring to a societal phenomenon which I never really understood or, more
precisely, which never had any ‘penetrating power’ for my sense of self or sense of
belonging to a particular part of society. Since this is probably not a good enough reason
for justifying my selection I would like to add that ‘social class’ is not only a central topic
of sociological inquires but simultaneously an apt concept for illustrating a field of
inquiry that has been reflected from different paradigmatic and theoretical angles. In
this way, ‘social class’ allows shedding (a bit of) light on how scientific sociological
journeys proceed, i.e. how they bring to the study of their subject matter particular,
theoretically-based and/or empirically-grounded, root assumptions or paradigms which
in turn influence the sort of ‘truths’ being imparted.
Beginning this brief overview with Marx (the economist-turned-sociologist), what
immediately attracts attention is his notion of ‘means of production’, a concept which he
conceived of as preceding and shaping the whole range of societal phenomena (including,
for instance, religion or forms of government). In light of Marx’ assumption that
respectively the availability or lack of certain (read economic) resources would
determine people’s class membership, it becomes obvious that he came to practice a
blatant economic determinism. In concrete terms, Marx’ idea of class, as being defined in
terms of social relationship to means of production, led him to the conclusion that society
or, for that matter, capitalism could be sub-divided into workers (i.e. proletarians) and
capitalists (i.e. the bourgeoisie). Accordingly, Marx was departing from the consideration
that capitalist societies are divided/dividable along the question of ‘who is hiring whom?’
His understanding of class, by implication, has nothing to do with people’s subjective
experience of belonging to a larger community or to a particular stratum of society.
Rather, Marx’ comprehension of class pertains to the identification that there is an
objective difference between those individuals or groups who control (means of)
production and those who in fact produce or provide the goods and services of a given
society. This being said, I hasten to add that Marx still believed that people who sold their
labor in return for (unfair) wages were sharing common interests in that they were
543
equally suppressed (read alienated) by, for instance, the wage conditions and the lack of
decision-making authority being imposed by the capitalist system. Nevertheless, class
interest and sense of membership are, according to Marx, rather elusive and implicit as a
result of which it becomes the task of the intellectual/scholar to raise people’s
consciousness regarding both their collective alienation and their ‘belonging-together’
(read ‘workers of the world, unite!’).
Though parts of Marx’ work exhibit an overt fondness for capitalism (which is
evident from his seminal ‘Capital’ where he mentioned that capitalism represented the de
facto condition of material abundance for all members of society as well as from his claim
that competition among producers would encourage cost-saving, innovation, etc.), he
also predicted that capitalism would engender dangerous and increasing inequalities
(read class division) between the rich (i.e. those in charge of the means of production)
and the poor (i.e. those selling their labor power on the market). Indeed, capitalism was
on the long run supposed to sow the seeds of its own demise. Marx hence came to fancy
the idea that capitalism (read exploitative class-system) would once be overrun by
socialism in the course of world-wide proletarian revolutions which again would later be
transformed into a society devoid of classes (read communism). In summing up, it can be
said that probably one of Marx’ most noteworthy contributions to the realm of academic
sociology goes back to his claim that economic classes are sustained by the glaring
exploitation of the proletarians by the capitalists, a point which he framed in, for
instance, his labor theory of value. Almost needless to say that Marx’ theorizing on class
faced fierce criticism, and that there were many scholars (neo-, post- and anti-Marxists
alike) who came to challenge his objectivist interpretation of class structure. It is in this
context that I would like to lead over to Max Weber who put forward a view of class that
scrutinized the idea that man’s economic position in society would determine people’s
social status as well as their political opportunities or life chances at large.
Weber (by the way, another alleged economist-turned-sociologist), who was
reportedly suspicious of Marx’s simplistic depiction of social class (read economic
reductionism), extended the whole concept of class by suggesting that though different
classes existed in every society there were good reasons to believe that people’s social
status and political affiliation also come into play in the process of their class-ification.
Weber can thus be seen as having extended, even bypassed, Marx’s understanding of
class in that he paid attention not only to the hard-core fundamentals of the social sphere
(i.e. people’s relation to the market or access to means of production) but also to those
factors which he deemed equally essential to and characteristic of humankind, e.g.
544
people’s manner of speech, level of education or leisure activities. One of the crucial
points in Weber’s theorizing was that it rendered class boundaries much more permeable
than Marx’,
193
thus assuming that people’s life style (which includes, yet is not limited to,
the abovementioned ‘soft factors’) would determine their life chances by means of
respectively including or excluding them from certain social spheres. It is with regress to
his distinction between class, power (or party) and status that Weber convincingly
argued that people’s societal rank depends on the particular place in which they find
themselves. Consequently, where there might be some societies in which Marx’ dictum
that material abundance determines people’s class membership applies perfectly well,
there might again be others in which party affiliation is more relevant for people’s social
position.
194
It truly comes as no surprise that scholars frequently come to juxtapose
Marx’ economic determinism with Weber’s approach (which is commonly referred to as
‘cultural’), thus often depicting Weber as the first sociologist who put values center stage
and who thereby counteracted Marx’ assumption that values represent mere by-
products of capitalism’s ruling-class strategy for controlling the masses.
Before entering into the discussion of where the study of Marx and Weber (as well
as sociology in general) – notwithstanding all difference – actually find common ground, I
would like to mention another scholar who had a notable effect on the reception of class:
Pierre Bourdieu. Admittedly, mentioning Bourdieu in relation with the sociological
inquiry of social class represents a partial antilogy since he is not in the first instance
known as a scholar of social class. Yet, first things first. Bourdieu was breaching the
available stock of academic knowledge (though not without taking into account (parts of)
the work of his precursors (e.g. Durkheim, Mannheim, Marx, Weber, Mauss, etc.)) by
incorporating extra-sociological works (such as phenomenology
195
) to provide a whole
set of new concepts (such as, for instance, ‘habitus’, ‘field’ or ‘cultural, social and
symbolic capital’) which he deemed apt for overcoming part of the dualistic, oppositional
thinking of sociology and the social sciences at large.
196
For instance, rather than
193
Yet, it must not be overlooked that Marx believed that classes are not static and that they are constantly
produced and reproduced through the production process. Moreover, Marx also held the view that class-
systems can be changed or even abolished (as he discussed, for instance, in conjunction with communism).
194
Weber thereby marks an early expectation to the objectivist scientific horizon of, for instance, Marx and
Durkheim, which is obvious from the fact that his epistemological focus was notably antipositivist, i.e.
interpretive and/or humanistic.
195
That is, Bourdieu was particularly influenced by, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s as well as Husserl’s
phenomenology which both played a significant role in his formulation of the concept of ‘habitus’.
196
Note in passing that I have intentionally opted to make direct reference to Bourdieu to show that social
class, though forming a crucially important research topic of sociology, has today passed its peak. This
qualification, in my opinion, receives additional support from those voices arguing that social class does in
545
pursuing the study of societies according to the deterministic schema of social class,
Bourdieu sought to find an explanation to the question of how people were influenced by
their social circumstances or conditions and vice versa (thus scrutinizing the then
prevailing distinction between objectivism and subjectivism). Essentially, Bourdieu was
keen to show that although people are always influenced (yet not fully codified) by the
social space (read field) they inhabit, they too have an influence upon that very social
space in that they actively incorporated (read embodied) the set of perceptual schemas
of the field which in turn enabled them to enact and gradually change symbolic orders. In
other words, Bourdieu chiefly imparted the concept of ‘field’ to claim that social actors
are not mere objects of any given super-structure. Rather, field, according to Bourdieu,
represents the arena of social struggle where people become active agents in the
appropriation of capital. Most importantly though, Bourdieu did not concur with Marx’
economic exegesis of capital but instead set out to extend the whole idea of capital by
adding the concepts of social capital (i.e. the potential value of interpersonal relations or
membership in a group), cultural capital (i.e. particular forms of estimated skills,
knowledge and education) and symbolic capital (i.e. prestige and honor). It is in this way
that he came to argue that people acquire a certain position in society by accumulating
different forms of capital. It almost goes without saying that Bourdieu came to reject the
assumption that people’s position in society is determined by a, however defined, social
class.
197
In fact, he set out to envision people as being part of a multidimensional social
space; a space being defined by the amount of desirable resources (read capital) they
possess.
Being once more very reductive (and repetitive), one can say that Bourdieu is
particularly credited for having raised the sensitivity that people are not uni-
directionally influenced by the social space (read field) they inhabit. There exists,
according to Bourdieu, a two-way relationship between the individual and his/her social
space in that the individual gets to embody the implicit rules of the space whereas
simultaneously enacting and thus both reaffirming and altering the structure of the
social space.
198
And, he taught us that we (read sociologists) must dispel the opposition
fact have a rather minor impact on people’s sense of self and that there are other components that hold much
bigger significance for people’s very individuality or identity.
197
Yet, it must remain clear that Bourdieu also showed that certain societal groups in postindustrial society
(and thereby most notably its more elite layers) were able to sustain their privileged position across
generations. It is in this way that he partly got to disapprove the idea that modern society grants its member
equal opportunities.
198
Bourdieu’s theorizing assumed a recursive relationship between the field (i.e. people’s social space) and
people’s habitus (i.e. their acquired way of perceiving, thinking and acting). That is, while a field is thought of
546
between objectivist theories which explain social class with reference to groups that can
be separated by margins objectively drawn in reality and subjectivist models of
understanding which explain class with reference to people’s strategies through which
they actually class others as well as themselves. The (only) alternative, following
Bourdieau, would hence be to simultaneously study class in its being (i.e. the objective,
material existence of structure) as well as its being-perceived (i.e. individual
‘consumption’).
Instead of continuing this sketchy overview with, for instance, the by all means
inspirational critique of the concept of ‘social class’ or by way of listing some of the
alternative theories of societal subdivision, I now prefer to briefly discuss the
overarching viewpoint of the abovementioned perspectives. On the face of it, what is
revealed as the common denominator in this brief excursus is that the concept of ‘social
class’ is used to refer to the hierarchical ordering or segregation of individuals and
groups in any given society or community. Though there are noteworthy differences in
how the matter is conceptualized (including, for instance, the view that class should be
construed as subjective location of people/groups in social structures (of inequality), as
the objective position of people/groups within a given distribution, as the relational
explanation of people’s life chances or as a root of (economic) exploitation and/or
oppression), it is always the case that the construct is used for pinpointing, explaining or
predicting how individuals are organized as members of particular sub-groups of society.
Importantly, though we are talking about commonalities here it should not be
overlooked that a distinction can be drawn between the analytic and empirical writings
on social class, where ‘analytic’, to put it reductively, referring to inquires by, for
instance, Marx and Weber, and ‘empirical’ to approaches which use, for instance,
statistical means to derive statements about how particular socio-economic parameters
(e.g. wealth, income, education, etc.) hand together with concrete social outcomes.
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Moreover, what chiefly comes to the fore in the abovementioned approaches is that the
sociological treatment of social class is quite variegated in that certain scholars envisage
the matter as a social fact, as Durkheim instructed us to do,
200
meaning that the subject
as being constituted by the people participating in it, the concept of ‘habitus’ implies that the field always
transposes its objective structures into the subjective realm of people’s action and thought.
199
Note that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but can also be combined.
200
As a matter of fact, Durkheim did not argue that societal phenomena such as suicide are to be understood
as social facts. What he reminded others to do is to treat such phenomena as if they were social facts. It is
hence partly wrong to position Durkheim as an ontological realist.
547
matter is taken to exist prior to and hence independent of scientific inquiries, a view
shared by Marx and others, or alternatively as a particular social action that must be
approached through an interpretive account in order to arrive at the subjective meaning
attached by individuals (read Verstehen), which points at Weber’s investigation. Yet,
notwithstanding Giddens’ contention that sociology developed into multiple directions,
implying, for instance, that contemporary sociology embraces both nominalist and realist
accounts of reality in its quest for meaning, it must remain clear at all times that it is due
to the overarching premise of sociology being a scientific endeavor that the differences in
theoretical and methodological approaches do ultimately not pose any significant
paradox. What hence unites sociology’s seemingly incompatible jumble of arguments on
the particularities and determinants of social class is that most, if not all, accounts
embrace the idea that the subject matter can be brought back to empirical observations
and/or scientific theories which then allow making statements about society as a whole
or about particular societal phenomena of a given society. By implication, whether social
class is taken to represent those avowedly objective parameters identified by, for
instance, Marx which allow for a clear-cut distinction between hierarchically higher and
lower ranked social layers or those more subjective and elusive factors, as revealed in,
for instance, Weber’s treatise of the social estimation of honor, it is intuitively convincing
that all of these accounts try to empirically identify and/or analytically/theoretically
conceptualize, though on the basis of different paradigmatic assumptions and
methodological procedures, the very essence (realist or nominalist alike) or being of the
phenomenon ‘social class’ (or of those phenomena which are deemed essential for
people’s position in a particular social space, as revealed in Bourdieu’s concept of
‘habitus’ or ‘field’).
Indeed, it requires only a small intellectual leap to see that the study of social class
resembles the quest for (either eternal/transcendent or temporary/local) truth and that
it is assumed that it will sooner or later become possible to formulate a cartography of
the social world as it really is.
201
It is at this point that we have, in my opinion, collected a
sound-enough overview of the typical (though probably not very topical) sociological
201
Admittedly, pretending that the sociological inquiry of class holds the unequivocal view that the matter
must be construed as an objectively existing and thus accurately measurable fact would already reveal a
certain ignorance vis-à-vis Weber’s interpretive analysis of the subject area. Moreover, such an assertion
would grossly overlook that sociology has moved on in many ways, which is evident, for instance, from those
voices which have claimed that the concept ‘social class’ should be approached by a social definitionist (and
not a social factist) approach, since it would only be in this way that one could come to terms not with how
people are defined by the structure of which they are part but how people act as active creators of their own
social reality.
548
treatise of social class or at least an overview which is instrumental for discussing the
particular fold engendered by philosophy in relation to the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
Why Philosophy … Why Not?
Having cursorily illustrated how sociology goes about probing the truth of social
phenomena against the backdrop of the concept ‘social class’, I am keen to once more
emphasize that sociology (conceived here as a manifest academic discipline), though
initially heavily influenced by philosophy,
202
was pretty soon after its official convocation
by figures such as, for instance, Comte or Durkheim
203
‘liberated’ from the latter’s
influence.
204
That is to say, in other words, that the two spheres of academic reasoning
today rely on more or less distinct modes of inquiry and it does not even appear
exaggerated to say that the two strands of social inquiry practice a certain (more or less
visible) hostility towards each other. For instance, pointing at Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1995) claim that ‘philosophy has encountered many new rivals … especially sociology’
(p. 10), I want to make it clear that it is despite, or precisely because of today’s marginal
standing of philosophy in the realm of academic sociology (not to speak of management)
that I felt compelled to use philosophy for probing the ethical possibilities of the ‘social’
(of entrepreneurship). In concrete terms and to substantiate what has been said above, I
sensed that philosophy in general and Derrida’s works on relational ethics in particular
could provide an additional or, to express the matter in socio-economic terms, ‘surplus
value’
205
for counter-acting the empiricist horizon of Big Science. Yet again, using
philosophy in the vicinity of a concept (i.e. the ‘social') so thoroughly policed by academic
sociology immediately raises the question of whether philosophy (which today forms
202
To be humorous for once: this claim is justifiable in light of the fact that early-day sociology often
originated out of philosophy departments (like, for instance, in the case of Adorno who was a double
ordinaries of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt or of Althusser who was a professor of philosophy in
Paris).
203
Obviously, the task of determining the temporal beginning of sociology is anything but a banal exercise
because its periodization can be carried out in quite different ways, e.g. by way of tracing the first official
chair in sociology (which seems to date the emergence of sociology back to Small in the US or to Durkheim in
Europe), by way of the first use of the label ‘sociology’ (which would render either Blackmar or Comte
sociology’s founding figure) or by way of the institutionalized and systematic study of social phenomena
(which would make any endeavor to trace sociology’s ‘origin’ infinitely difficult, not to say impossible).
204
Note that Foucault (1996) pointed out that philosophy today does not exist any more, ‘not that it has
disappeared, but it has been disseminated into a great number of diverse activities … today philosophy is
every activity that makes a new object appear for knowledge or practice’ (p. 29). I thus would also like to
point at Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) inspirational claim that ‘
creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be
indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is call something else’ (p. 9).
205
Note that the original meaning of the concept of ‘surplus value’ (or ‘added value’) dates from Marx’ labor
theory of value which chiefly pinpoints capitalism’s primary mode of exploitation.
549
respectively the virtual outside of sociology or sociology’s other
206
) is at all admissible for
the task at hand?
To be sure, my previous metonymy was not least inspired by the conviction that
there are no sound arguments why the ‘social’ cannot be dealt with by non-sociological
disciplines. Metonymy, since providing only a partial representation or, more precisely,
extrapolation of an indisputably complex field of inquiry, implies right away that I was
never interested in earning the credentials of a sociologist by putting forward an
exhaustive account of the ‘social’ (frankly speaking, I never had the chance to do so).
Hence, where I have neither the intention nor the requisite knowledge to prove to the
(sociologically-inclined) reader that I have grasped the sociological study of the ‘social’ in
its entirety, I also believe that one is not only entitled to speak about the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) provided that one has read everything on the subject matter. This is
to ask, according to Deleuze (1995): ‘why shouldn’t I invent some way, however fantastic
and contrived, of talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I’m
qualified to talk like this?’ (p. 12).
207
On the face of it, all this comes down to claiming
that it sometimes makes sense not to expect the best argument (as defined by the
prevailing knowledge of the day and by the guardian(s) of ‘truth’) but to be open to views
which would even qualify as being naive (i.e. if measured along the ruling standards of
academic excellence) so as to allow for a kind of art brut (Deleuze, 1995), hence a form of
enunciation which is probably not the most profound but maybe a bit less guilty about
and, if I dare to say this, creative in doing ‘science’.
Now that I have literally cleared my throat, I feel better able to pinpoint the
difference between Chapter 7 and the sociological inquiry of the ‘social’ by saying that the
former does indeed not try to say how the social universe actually is and even less so how
it should be (in view of how it looks today).
208
Instead, Chapter 7 tries to envision the
void between how the ‘social’ is (usually construed) and how it could be(come). In
concrete terms, an ethical reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) essentially
206
This claim is reasonable only to the extent that figures frequently associated, for whatever reasons, with
philosophy get related to ‘alternative’ métiers (e.g. Marx with economics and/or sociology but not
philosophy; Foucault with history and/or sociology but not philosophy; Adorno with music theory and/or
sociology but not philosophy; Mauss with ethnology and/or sociology but not philosophy; Zizek with Lacanian
psychoanalysis and/or sociology but not philosophy; Mead with social psychology and/or sociology but not
philosophy; or Baudrillard with cultural criticism and/or sociology but not philosophy).
207
Notwithstanding the sheer annoyance reverberating in Deleuze’s quote, I find his statement worth
thinking of as it undermines the authority of all archivists or gatekeepers of knowledge, be that the doctor
who disallows the patient’s interpretation of his/her malady or the seasoned scholar who advices the young
disciple not to speak and/or write before he/she has read everything imparted by the particular epistemic
community.
208
Note that this would be a task literally catered to the Frankfurt School.
550
attempts to show that responsible relationality is always something else than what
people actually do. Indeed, one could even go as far as saying that relational ethics
exploits the hiatus engendered through sociology in that it tries to venture beyond what
people de facto do in the relational space or what position they inhabit in that very space
so as to bring to the fore what might become imaginable once we leave behind the truth-
seeking image of thought (read commonsense or empirico-scientific reason). In this way,
Chapter 7 is trying to speculate about, even confabulate, yet not thought of alternatives
and futures of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
To be very repetitive, it must not be overlooked that Chapter 7 goes beyond the
horizon of the possible or true in that it rather tries to come up with the depiction of a
possible, yet never fully achievable, future (of the ‘social’). The notion of ‘perhaps’ thus
literally runs through my conceptualization of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship),
presaging what is ‘to come’ without, however, assigning a predictive quality to the
possible. With this in mind, I am eager to construe philosophy as a line of flight for
counter-acting the empirist conversion that there are too many real reasons not to
believe in any possible change of social matters and, by implication, that the only
legitimate endeavor of science would be to content it-self with understanding the social
world in terms of its many manifestations (yet not its inherent possibilities). Taking
refuge in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) inspirational treatise of philosophy, one is put
into a position to claim that the possible world of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) ‘is not
real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that exists only in its
expression’ (p. 17). On the face of it, shuttling between the possible and the speculative
Chapter 7 gets to embrace the idea of the ‘inconceivable’, i.e. ‘a way of replacing the logic
of necessity … with a relationship to the future, to what is coming, to what could come to
us under the modality of the maybe’ (Derrida & Düttman, 1997, p. 3). Importantly, this
conceptual shift, which could be depicted as inducing a state of exception in the available
interpretations of the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’, was not inspired by the idea of
overthrowing the given heritage (of sociology,
209
economics, management) but of
fostering new mediations with those texts which have hitherto taken a dominant position
in our understanding of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship). To emphasize that I have no
stake whatsoever in downgrading the sociological or, more precisely, economic (and
209
Note that I am actually acuminating this assertion to its maximum in that I intentionally turn a blind eye
towards those streams of sociological research which, on the basis of critical interpretations, try to describe
the contours of a more appealing future social reality, thus going beyond mere evidence and, by implication,
beyond the rather stern horizon of ‘scientific’ sociology.
551
managerial/business) reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship), it is in the next
section that I will elaborate on the potential, yet hitherto idle, points of inspiration (read
synergies) that could possibly evolve from the encounter of neighboring disciplines.
On Potential Synergies
All the above being said, I want to make this prolegomenon unambiguous by repeating
that there is nothing generally wrong with, for instance, an economic exegesis of the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship). That is, my Derrida-inspired reading of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship) is not anti-economic in terms of purpose but rather interested in
supplementing the major literature with a minor reading that has the ultimate aim of
extending the field’s prevailing horizon of understanding. My ‘experiment’ in Chapter 7
is, if this adjective is at all admissible, entrepreneurial in the sense that it seeks to spot
an opportunity for complementing both the algorithmic perspective of ethics and the
empirical view of the ‘social’ with a perspective which gives apt weight to the secrecy and
riskiness entailed in all forms of relationality and alterity. I thus genuinely believe that a
philosophical or, more precisely, a Derridean reflection is instrumental in stressing that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) should not be seen as a relational homeostasis based on
harmonious, mutual consent but as a process of endless struggle with intermitted and
extended periods of aporias (i.e. a sense of ‘not knowing where to go’; cf. Derrida, 1993).
Though it is indisputable that relational ethics comes into play exactly at the very
moment where management and economic theory already thought it had tamed the
contender of reason, utility and frugality, all this, however, does not imply that
approaches and ideas imparted by scholars of sociology, economics, business or
management must be eradicated or constrained. Accordingly, Derrida’s work operates
not as a broom that sweeps away academic sociology or its affiliated disciplines but as a
door-opener to sociology’s unsought territories and hence as an urgent reminder that
learning to act responsibly, i.e. practice ethics, means learning to cope with the madness
of the ‘social’ and accepting that there is no absolute advise regarding how to carry out
those deeds. Derrida’s philosophy, at least in my opinion, is best able to characterize the
process of becoming-social as well as to stress that ethics cannot be managed but must be
risked and endured and, as follows thereof, that it necessarily remains excessive, i.e.
beyond bare necessities and the puritan logic of utility.
210
In that sense, reflecting the
210
I deem this connection with excess appropriate, especially while taking into account Rehn and O’Doherty’s
(2007) insightful claim that excess ‘takes many forms; unpredictable and explosive in its manifestations it
always pops up just when we thought we had tamed its wild and protean force’ (p. 108). This brief quote, in
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‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) through relational ethics does not bring about an exegesis
that complies with a preordained system of thinking/acting but rather one that deems
essential all arcane activities. It is only by highlighting those aspects of relationality
211
which cannot be subjected to rational calculation, managerial control and foresight that
the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) can be grasped with respect to its utmost heterogeneity
and paradoxically.
Inasmuch I was persuasive in telling the reader that Chapter 7 does not intend to
simply establish and advertise yet another hierarchical division, a fold determining a
clearly distinguishable inside and outside (e.g. philosophy versus sociology), then the
way is clear for adding that the following chapter practices critique not through overt
antagonism but through a kind of ‘heterogenesis’ that aims at establishing links with
neighboring zones (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), and thus at releasing the plurivocity
currently buried, or at least neglected and obscured, in the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship).
On the face of it, rather than arguing that Derrida’s work can bring about a more
inspiring, not to say true, understanding of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship), the point to
be stressed is that it is both timely and urgent to confront the blatant Totality and
Universality revealed in the available literature with a skeptical, yet vital, gesture.
Hence, rigorous attention to disciplines outside the threshold of sociology or business and
management science is demanded since, to put it bluntly, the field of the outside offers
springboards for multiplying hitherto strictly patrolled and shielded sites of enunciation.
Such a multiplying gesture has as its central objective the differentiation or, to use a
Deleuzian term, the becoming-other of the available stock of thinking (cf. Ott, 2005). To
be sure, philosophy, if conceived of in the above way, does in no way represent a terminal
territory or finality, as it were, for denoting the meaning of the ‘social’ (of
entrepreneurship). Rather, philosophy and in particular Derrida’s ‘ethical’ works,
represent one of the many possible ways in which one can describe the social stratum as
an inherently ethical undertaking and as a highly demanding, risky and infinite event. I
would hence like to emphasize that philosophy, the way I opted to use it, is always more
of a conceptual accelerator (or a Lyotardian (1993) ‘tensor sign’; cf. also Chapter 4) that
seeks to invite experimentation and hence put in motion the stagnancy produced by
transcendental interpretations. As should be clear by now, the theoretical event staged
my assessment, highlights the dangerous (since uncontrollable) aspect of the ‘social’, thus indicating that it
is, among other things, a threatening, anxiety-provoking encounter with otherness.
211
Importantly, the concept ‘relationality’ does not only embrace positively charged patterns of inter-
personality as implied through the etymology of ‘social’ (i.e. fellowship, companionship, etc.) but also its
‘negative doubles’, e.g. competition, betrayal, chicanery, etc.
553
in Chapter 7 should not be understood as a means for providing definitive solutions to
identified problems of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) – read economic reductionism
and/or managerial platitudes – , but rather as a means for renewing the relevant
questions and to intensify dialogue in general. Philosophy, as I believe, has been
appropriate for this particular task, not least since philosophy is, as follows from Deleuze
and Guattari (1994), about becoming and, therefore, about creating something new. By
implication, there might be some wisdom in Deleuze’s (1989) eloquent claim that ‘there
is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence’ (pp. 146 – 147;
quoted in Semetsky, 2006, p. 5).
554
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7
***
‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? – The Becoming
Social of Social Entrepreneurship
There is no politics if there is not at the very center of society … a questioning of existing
institutions, a project to improve them, to make them more just. This means that all
politics implies prescriptions of doing something else than what is. (Lyotard & Thébau,
1985, p. 23)
The question of institutions we need to create is a crucial issue, but one I cannot give an answer
to. (Foucault, quoted in Simpson, 2004, p. 1)
Synopsis
In this last chapter I will bring together, condense and draw conclusions from the thesis’ central
arguments on social entrepreneurship. The general aim in so doing is to qualify the status of the
‘social’ in social entrepreneurship. More precisely, I wish to ask whether the ‘social’ is only an
‘epitheton ornans’ of entrepreneurship (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006), or rather the expression of a
genuine concern for alterity. The title – ‘Social, all too Social’ … or still not Social Enough? –
foreshadows the chapter’s drive to look beyond what is conventionally taken to be ‘social’ in
entrepreneurship and to scrutinize the views of pseudo-ethics or -morality which currently seem
to elate academics; it simultaneously dwells on the possibility of extending the current stock of
academic knowledge by dint of an unconditional, that is to say pure, reading of the ‘social’.
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The chapter is structured as follows: the first part comprises a summary of the main points
of the first two chapters. After discussing that the available academic literature exhibits a
propensity to denote social entrepreneurship either as a moral hyperbole or as an object of
managerial and economic reason, I will further contextualize these interpretations by making two
assertions: on the one hand, they epitomize a broader trend towards ethics, most notably revealed
by the increased popularity of social and ethical questions in the context of business and
management (studies); on the other hand, they exhibit traces of the grand scheme of economics
which pretends to be able to explain (and thereby reduce) all aspects of social life through the
algorithm of give-and-take. Rejecting both routes of thinking in consideration of the fact that they
fail to pay heed to the intimate and fragile experience of otherness, I will for the most part take
issue with those writings which, while ostensibly speaking of the social feature of
entrepreneurship, bestow the subject matter with a transactional, and hence profoundly non-
social, perspective. Invoking texts on ‘social capital’ to ground my critique in the realm of
academic writing, I will illustrate that social capital is in no way more social (or less economic)
than financial capital, since both concepts undeniably depart from a transactional logic; thus,
social capital, as I will discuss, delineates a pale and narrow view of the social aspect of
entrepreneurship. Beginning with the observation that academic work on social entrepreneurship
as yet simply perpetuates the logic of reciprocal ‘do et des’, the second part will counteract this
univocity by establishing an uneconomic, that is, unconditional, perspective of the ‘social’. Next,
to render palpable the difference between conditional and unconditional forms of social action, I
will use the case of development aid to introduce three attributes which allow such a distinction.
To this end, I will first propose that an unconditional reading of the ‘social’ entails a side-
stepping of the circle of economic calculation while at the same time suggesting a vision of the
‘social’ as an intimate encounter with the other’s otherness, that is, an encounter which sees the
other not as a mere alter ego but as a sovereign source of meaning. Second, I will depart from
Derrida’s claim that the call of the other and one’s responsibility to heed it is infinite and
therefore impossible to satisfy. Hence I will attest that the ‘social’, rather than being a fixed or
fixable essence of being, is to be conceived as a process of continuous becoming. In contending
that the ‘social’ takes place or, to put it bluntly, ‘happens’ (Caputo, 1993) in the course of the
encounter between self and other, I will bring to the forefront that every social gesture towards an
identifiable person or group (i.e. help in the particular case of development aid) invariably
implies neglecting all those others who call us and who expect a response. Yet, I will argue that
558
the recognition that the ‘social’ will always fall short or be inadequate, due to the impossibility of
giving attention to all the innumerable others who await our response, is not the end of
responsibility. Rather, Derrida’s paradoxical contention that one can never be responsible
enough, will not be misrepresented as a sign of resignation, but as a plea to intensify one’s
efforts; to keep the social sphere ‘going’ by conceding that becoming social requires hard work,
inescapable suffering and true modesty. Third, given that unconditionality sketches out a space
beyond calculation and beyond instruction, I will discuss that the encounter with otherness
prescribes a journey into unknown territories from which the ‘traveler(s)’ return(s) changed. In
addition to that, I will argue that the pure ‘social’ becomes an insecure, even risky, endeavor
without which, however, invention in the form of mutual transformation would not be possible.
Since my propounding of unconditionality in the realm of development aid might contribute to
the false impression that I am somehow naively ignoring economic and other pragmatic demands
of everyday life (in development work as well as elsewhere), I will use the third part of the
present chapter to clarify that conditional and unconditional aspects of social entrepreneurship,
though being irreducible to one another, cannot be separated stricto sensu. I will hence pinpoint
the hybridity of social entrepreneurship so as to claim that suchlike endeavors always take place
in an economically and pragmatically structured environment. The concept ‘hybridity’, on the
other hand, will be used to show that social entrepreneurial undertakings, in order to qualify as
social, must leave room at the border of their activities for excess, that is, for what is
unprogrammable and incalculable by economic and managerial reason. In opposition to the
current academic literature on social entrepreneurship which sees hybridity as a rather
unproblematic ‘marriage’ of profit- and non-profit technologies, I will argue for a conception of
hybridity as an area of tension which necessitates a constant negotiation between the
unconditional and conditional, between the economic and the uneconomic aspect of social
entrepreneurship. To conclude, I will grapple with the fact that my Derridean musing on the
‘social’ (of entrepreneurship) allows for anything but the formulation of simple codes or
programs and thus provides no easy solutions. In so doing, I will probe both the value and
limitations of Derrida’s ideas for the establishment of a minor social entrepreneurship.
Delineating unconditional social entrepreneurship as both an auxesis and as a nonenforceable
utopia, I will finish the chapter by claiming that social entrepreneurship becomes a matter of
constant movement which oscillates between the irreducible and undeconstructible responsibility
towards the other and the ever-present possibility of complete failure, that is, the aporia of the
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other ‘coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything, or killing
everyone’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 71).
Retrospection and Contextualization
… there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear
completely. And it is … because they are historical that history can very easily suppress
them. (Barthes, 1972, p. 120)
Social entrepreneurship is arguably one of the fastest-spreading buzzwords inside as well as
outside the academic context, and a term which more often than not attracts interest from a broad
range of fields. Virtually non-existent in the 1980s, social entrepreneurship has become a
steadily-growing part of the academic repertoire since the early 1990s, where predominantly it is
used to herald the demise of government-controlled economies and the rise of the ideology of the
responsible and pro-active citizen (Roper & Cheney, 2005; cf. also Chapter 1). Though it is
notable that social entrepreneurship first had its ‘coming out’ in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is
evident that the ‘virus’ these days has crossed geographic boundaries. Nevertheless, to say that
social entrepreneurship is a buzzword being deployed on a global scale might be to exaggerate
and thus it is perhaps better to assert that it is a concept which is still relative to certain situations
or contexts. As such, it is mostly represented (in academia as well as in politics, by venture
philanthropies or business competitions) as either an economic actor or as a moral hyperbole.
What is most conspicuous in the context of academic writing is that the economic and the social
sphere of social entrepreneurship are either artificially held apart or else brought together in a
seemingly unproblematic manner. As a result, the fact that the social and the economic realm are
partly incompatible and that the encounter of these two realms, due to their (partly) incongruous
presumptions and practices, is most likely to engender ideological clashes and conflicts, is rarely
discussed. Before we take issue with this omission and attempt to address it by putting forward a
hybrid conceptualization of social entrepreneurship, I would first like to stress that the current
semantic construal of social entrepreneurship does not necessarily imply that we have to dispose
of this still nascent sign. Instead, as I have tried to make clear over the course of this thesis, it is
important that one must not assume that social entrepreneurship needs to be limited by the
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frontiers of economic, managerial or pseudo-ethical reason. Hence, to disabuse us of the illusion
that social entrepreneurship is as straightforward and unproblematic as the available literature
would have it, I would like to provide a brief summary of the thesis’ discussion hitherto in order
then to contextualize the most eminent meanings of social entrepreneurship on a broader scale.
Summary
The central argument of the first two chapters emphasized that social entrepreneurship is on the
one hand an under-researched concept while on the other hand remarkably stabilized by
economic and managerial discourse (Hjorth & Bjerke, 2006). In accordance with Johnson’s
(2000) overview of the social entrepreneurship literature, I have tried to illuminate that many
scholars define the core of social entrepreneurship by means of its relationship with business
expertise and market-based skills. In this way, they rhetorically bolster their accounts through the
premise that these attributes are needed insofar as one wants to increase organizational
effectiveness and foster long-term sustainability (Reis, 1999). Whereas both Chapter 1 and 2 have
tried to propound novel conceptual groundings that challenge or at least complement the
ostensibly practical, efficient or pseudo-ethical perspectives that are being established in the
business school context, my primary aim was to reveal that prevailing representations quite
evidently ignore the aporetic features of social entrepreneurship. In the course of this
investigation I have made reference to Derrida so as to show that responsible or ethical behavior
requires that there is a decision between (at least) two determinate positions. More precisely, the
ethics of social entrepreneurship is always closely related with the tension(s), or ‘fear and
trembling’
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to use Derrida’s (1995) words, which result(s) from the ever present possibility that
one may take the wrong decision, and hence not respond to and/or wrong a particular person or
group. Essentially, the main point I wanted to bring to light in Chapter 1 was that the social
aspect of entrepreneurship is quite commonly elaborated on in relation to the individual
entrepreneur, a fact which entails a conspicuous paradox, since the social, qua definition,
represents the relational space between people. Thus having highlighted and scrutinized those
accounts which reduce social and ethical questions to the motives, intentions and virtues of the
singular social entrepreneur, my main concern was to show that an individualized view of ethics
invariably ignores the fact that the ethics of social entrepreneur takes place, that is, ‘happens’
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Notice that Derrida borrowed this expression from Kierkegaard’s (2006) investigation of the Old Testament
where Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.
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(Caputo, 1993), in the encounter between people and in view of difference and otherness at large
(Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005). A central point of my critique was that the ethics of social
entrepreneurship is often delineated as something exceptional to human nature. I have thereby
tried to show that this sort of account elevates the figure of the social entrepreneur above the
more mundane and profane instincts and motifs of mankind. Such a view, in my assessment,
remains questionable for at least two reasons. First, it is questionable because it pretends that
ethics takes place outside the everyday practices of the people and, second, because it leads to the
expectation that ethics is reserved only for very exceptional people. In the course of my
deconstructive reading of academic writings in Chapter 2, I have come to argue that the dominant
significations of social entrepreneurship lack any ‘respect for the singularity or the call of the
other’ (Derrida, 1985, p. 71; quoted in Critchley, 1999, p. 18). Therefore, it would be untenable to
say that social entrepreneurship as yet belongs to the domain of alterity-based ethics as defined by
Levinas and Derrida. In an attempt to counteract further hagiographies (that is, the study of the
saints) of social entrepreneurs, I claimed that prospective research should account for present
omissions and in particular highlight the social (not individual) paradoxes and dilemmas social
entrepreneurs are confronted with in the course of their everyday conduct. Taken together, the
common denominator in the argumentation of Chapters 1 and 2 was that the available literature
fails, first, to grasp the relational aspect of social entrepreneurship and, second, tries to solve
ethical questions by formulating rigid best-ethical codes or programs. In concrete terms, I made
reference to Derrida’s (and Levinas’) work so as to decouple questions of ethics from the belief in
an objective moral order. Derrida’s work thus suggested a conception of ethics as a relational
process that is for the most part concerned with the intimate encounter between the ‘I’ and the
‘Other’. Advocating a sort of ethics that pays heed to the singularity of the call from the other,
this simultaneously comprised a critique of those accounts which tried to inscribe ethics into
codes or which sought to address such issues through management-based problem-solving skills.
I thereby argued that conceiving ethics from the perspective of ‘techn!’, and hence reducing
questions of ethics to a quest for ‘rules and practices that allow an action to achieve its ends’
(Foucault, 1988, p. 15), engenders a view of the ‘social’ that lends itself to scrutiny. In concrete
terms, a technical perspective of the ‘social’ is accompanied with at least two equivocal
implications. First, confronting social questions of entrepreneurship with a technical rationality
invariably construes the subject matter as a problem or an obstacle that needs to be resolved by
the best-(management)-practices available (Abrahamson, 1991). In other words, the notion of
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techn! is related with a view that postulates seeing the social as a hierarchically inferior sphere
(vis-à-vis, for instance, the rational world of business; cf. Resch, 2006) and/or as a entity that is
either to be governed, to be mobilized, or simply to be changed (Newman, 2004). Related to this
is the second implication, namely that the notion of techn!, since it postulates the application of
efficient means to important ends and endorses the formulation of problem-solving scripts,
always engenders ignorance of the singularity of social undertakings. On the face of it, since
techn! implies rendering the social amenable to transcendental management procedures, it is
evident that this becomes possible, not to say rational, only if one gets to reduce the complexity
and uniqueness of social entrepreneurial endeavors. Evidently then, a technical scheme of the
social of entrepreneurship, in my opinion, greatly hinders a full understanding of the sign. Such a
conception is inadequate not merely as a deficient reality and/or as an object of management
control, but also for gaining an understanding of the incremental complexity as well as the
controversial and paradoxical features of social entrepreneurship.
In view of the, as yet, narrow representation of social entrepreneurship, what led me to
investigate the sensemaking practices of NGO practitioners in Chapter 3 was related to the
conviction that we should not content ourselves with the image of social entrepreneurship as the
universal model (i.e. grand narrative) of global (economic and moral) betterment. Though, as I
have repeatedly indicated, this thesis has no interest in proclaiming an ‘iron-clad explanation for
everything’ (Faber, 2004, p. xiv), it has surely tried to pinpoint the instability of the meaning of
‘social entrepreneurship’, and to show that its truth is undoubtedly the effect of particular
relations of power-knowledge. To illustrate that there is no metaphysical, conceptual or
philosophical system that can satisfy the desire for identifying the substratum of social
entrepreneurship, I have juxtaposed the dogmatic representation of the ‘social’ in business school
teaching and research (being elaborated in Chapters 1 and 2) with the narratives of development
NGO practitioners (in Chapter 3) so as to reveal the ‘social’s’ immanent polysemia. Most
fundamentally, the point I tried to make in the context of Chapter 3 was that the discourses of
NGO practitioners exhibit the complexity and paradoxical features of social endeavors, and
thereby neither share the euphoric tone of academic writings nor support the univocally positive
denotation of social entrepreneurship. To be sure, notwithstanding the differences entailed in part
I and II, this thesis has no interest in simply ridiculing the signification of social entrepreneurship
in the business school context (though Chapter 2 might have led to such an impression) and
replacing it by the perspective of the ‘social’ which is imparted by NGO practitioners. Rather,
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having pinpointed the differences between parts I and II, my overall aim was to argue that instead
of homogenizing a monologic understanding of the ‘social’ through a kind of protectionist
attitude, we should multiply ‘the paths and the possibility of comings and goings’ (Foucault,
1996b, p. 305) so as to foreclose the possibility that a singular rationality gains the definitive
upper hand. Hence, though I consider this thesis as a critical contribution to the available stock of
academic work, ‘critical’ is not intended as an indication that behind the concept of ‘social
entrepreneurship’ there is only mythology, or nothing at all, but in conjunction with the
conclusion that the meaning of social entrepreneurship always depends ‘on our knowledge, ideas,
theories, techniques, social relations and economical processes’ (Foucault, 1996, p. 406).
Though our departure from the assumption that discourse is always due to identifiable
political, social and economic force relations began in the first part of this thesis, it is within the
following lines that I want to continue along this route so as to contextualize the emergence of
social entrepreneurship in relation to the broader trend towards ethics. I will therefore employ the
ensuing paragraph to construe the discourse of social entrepreneurship as a response to recent
corporate scandals and as part of a broader public ‘campaign’ to appeal to the social and ethical
responsibilities of economic actors. The objective thereby is, first, to show that the neologism
‘social entrepreneurship’ is well in line with other social significations of economic concepts such
as ‘social economy’, ‘social sustainability’, ‘social capital’, etc. and therefore part of a current
pendulousness towards re-inscribing the social/ethical into the economy. Second, I will show that
this ostensibly social movement is conceivable as a subtle disguise of economic reasoning. In
other words, I will illuminate that social entrepreneurship, the way it gets described in scholarly
work, is only prima facie an epitome of social action, since it can be shown, through close
inspection, that the logic of economic circulation is still deeply ingrained.
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The Resurgence of the Social through Ethics
We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and the
institutions that frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich
relational world would be very complex to manage … In effect, we live in a legal, social,
and institutional world where the only relations possible are extremely few, extremely
simplified, and extremely poor. (Foucault, 1982; quoted in Halperin, 1995, pp. 81 – 82)
In general terms, one can say that the meaning of social entrepreneurship can only properly be
grasped if one takes into consideration the broader linguistic context in which the concept is
uttered, since it is the linguistic heritage which provides the ‘rituals of truth’ (Foucault, 1984, p.
205) which determine and enable what can be said or thought at a given moment in time (cf.
Chapters 3, 5 & 6). In agreement with Nietzsche (1984) who convincingly argued that it would be
misleading to investigate present-day man in order to deduct eternal truths about the state and
condition of mankind in general, because ‘everything the philosopher asserts about man is
basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span’ (p. 14; emphasis in
original), we can say that social entrepreneurship is similarly conceivable as a social construction
which is contingent upon the available truth regimes of our present historical period. The
genealogy of social entrepreneurship in Chapter 1 has been a first step in that direction, since it
has revealed that the concept can be construed as one of the latest corollaries of the
performativity game which currently seems to operate as the ruling dogma of business school
teaching. A factor which has only been marginally treated in the context of this thesis, however,
is that social entrepreneurship is not the exclusive invention of university business schools, but
well in line with a broader ‘campaign’ to make society (including the corporate, non-profit as
well as the public realm) more equitable and just. Though this may sound trivial (since self-
evident), I would like to reiterate that social entrepreneurship can be seen (at least partly) as a
response to those voices which have propagated that the social and the political realm are losing
ground vis-à-vis the economic. Though it is hardly tenable to call this trend epoch-making (cf.
Foucault, 1984), it is perhaps not too grand a demand to spend some time considering how the
‘social’ has gained increased recognition in conjunction with the issue of ethics. To begin this
journey, we can claim that ethics, conceived in its broadest sense, is a recurring issue which is at
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times full of hype and at others seemingly passé.
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As with science, technology, politics, etc.,
there are moments where ethics is said to provide the answer to almost everything; these are
followed, often in brief succession, by times where the matter contains no legitimacy and
credibility at all. On the face of it, there is ample evidence that we find ourselves in a period of
high tide where questions of ethics are raised in many spheres of social life, not just in the context
of business (school teaching and research). Yet, what interests me here is the particular kind of
rationality which has come to proclaim the importance of ethics in conjunction with economic
reason and practice. Though a simple answer is out of the question, I would like to propose that
part of the popularity of the topic seems explicable through the strain of thought which predicates
that our capitalist systems lack any sense of humanity. To simplify matters, we can claim that
ethics has been introduced as a kind of antidote to a dystopian scheme of economic globalization
which holds, among other things, that individuals or humanity at large are exclusively assessed
according to their productive power (du Gay, 2003). In view of both the critique and the fear that
economic governance makes value analogous to economic value, whereby invariably disallowing
the ostensibly true human nature to flourish, it becomes intelligible why ethics is hailed as a
promising undertaking for counteracting looming hegemony, not to say de-humanization. In
addition, there are reasons to believe that (business) ethics owes part of its current popularity to
recent corporate scandals which quite evidently raised the public sensitivity towards the
destructive potential of economic conduct. As Waddock (2003) convincingly argued in that
context, ‘if the corporate scandals of the early 2000s accomplished nothing else, they focused
attention on the integrity and ethics of companies and their leaders, or, more accurately, on the
apparent lack thereof’ (p. 2). The demand for a more ethical economy, so it seems, has become a
hotly debated issue. On the level of corporations, one can see that this demand is correlated with
the rise of concepts such as ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘social economy’, ‘corporate
citizenship’, ‘sustainability’, etc., which all proclaim a more equitable, just or circumspect
treatment of the firms’ immediate stakeholders or ecological environment. For instance, given
that the corporate social responsibility (hereon CSR) movement endorses that firms are obligated
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Though largely discredited by positivism in the earlier part of the 20
th
century and the various strands of anti-
humanist critique in the latter part, ethics has today returned as a key term in all kinds of discussions. Public
discourse, especially in the US, seems virtually obsessed with ethics. Long a minor sub-field in philosophy, ethics,
especially medical and business ethics, has become a savvy professional niche; and in the wake of post-structuralism,
ethics has made a return to critical discourse. Unsurprisingly, then, there has been a lot of concerned meta-theoretical
reflection about the meaning of this ‘turn to ethics’ (Walden, 2004).
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to ‘give something back’, it seems justifiable to state that such endeavors, at least at the outset,
were largely concerned with bringing ethical questions back into the sphere of market-based
activities. Though the CSR movement reflects the societal demand to hold corporations and their
leaders to higher standards of conduct (Epstein & Hanson, 2006) or, to put it bluntly, to impose
limits on the selfishness and greed of economic actors (Daianu & Vranceanu, 2005), it is
undeniable that such programs have often served corporations as a fig leaf for proceeding as
usual. Waddock (2003), among others, claimed that, given the recent wave of corporate scandals
and the accompanied public plea to make corporations with greater integrity that were more
accountable and ethical, actual business practice shows that woefully little has actually happened.
Though I have no interest in judging whether or not corporations do in fact walk their ethical talk,
it must be borne in mind that concepts such as CSR often lose their public status precisely
because they are perceived by the people as a mere instrument for sustaining corporations’
overall reputation. It probably comes as little surprise that such concepts are often viewed by their
critics as empty shams which try to obscure the fact that the economic well-being of companies,
and not that of its broader community or ecology, is still the primary emphasis of economic
conduct. Taking into account those voices which claim that ideas such as ‘corporate social
responsibility actually mask a euphemism for … corporations whose hidden agenda includes the
‘servicing’ of global capitalism’ (cf. Murray, 2005; slightly modified), what I want to emphasize
here is that the corporeal use, that is, instrumentalisation, of these concepts has a direct effect on
their life course. In other words, in view of the corporate exploitation of CSR, it becomes
palpable that its appropriation as a rhetorical strategy has – despite its ongoing employment
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–
spurred the demise of its credibility in public opinion and the lowering of its ‘chance of survival’
quite generally. In consequence, we can say that concepts such as CSR obey the rule of
management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996), which is not least supported by the observation that
the concept, after a period of unclouded optimism, seems to have transgressed the climax of its
popularity. At this juncture, we may return to the idea of social entrepreneurship so as to claim
that it is utterly evident that the neologism still finds itself in a period of proliferation. Provided
that the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’ exhibits characteristics that are typical for management
fashions (cf. Chapter 1), one can speculate about its life cycle, that is, if and when it will witness
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Notice that the issue of (corporate) social responsibility is still a ‘hot’ issue in the academe and thereby most
notable in the context of (business) ethics.
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a fate comparable to that of CSR. First in considering the similarities between concepts like CSR
and social entrepreneurship, we can say that social entrepreneurship has been introduced as a
concept that is supposed to fill the moral vacuum engendered by economized global conduct (and
by the impotence of the third or social sector), since it, following O’Connor (2006), ‘responds
morally to the latest round of [corporate] scandals’. Yet, whether social entrepreneurship will be
institutionalized not only as an academic topic, but also as a managerial practice or technology, or
whether it instead remains a transient fashion can only be decided in the future. More important
in the current context, however, is a second observation, namely that social entrepreneurship is
not, or only marginally, taken to represent a corrective measure for confining the potentially
hostile effects of economic governance. That is, in opposition to CSR which is evidently
considered a ‘brake mechanism’ or corrective to an otherwise free-wheeling economy, social
entrepreneurship is frequently conceived as an entity which combines the best parts of the
economic and the social realm. Represented as the copula between profit seeking and social deed
(e.g. Seelos & Mair, 2005), social entrepreneurship is thus by no means a critical discourse,
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but
rather a sign, or ‘hurray word’, which highlights the possible synergies of social and economic
undertakings. Be that as it may, what needs to be reiterated at this juncture is that ‘social
entrepreneurship’ represents an articulation of two ‘incompossible’ concepts (Lyotard, 1993) or,
following Roper and Cheney (2005), ‘a combination of two concepts that do not naturally fit
together and yet which seeks acceptance as common sense’. It is the lack of a natural fit that
renders the term open to resistance and challenge’ (p. 102). Roper and Cheney’s observation
brings to the forefront a general problem of social entrepreneurship research, namely that the
term, despite its broad range of interpretations, obscures the fact that the seemingly
unproblematic ‘marriage’ of economic calculation and social vision presupposes turning a blind
eye towards the tensions and conflicts which might be engendered by such a merging. In other
words, whether one pretends that the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship have an
equal standing or instead favors the social aspect over the economic or vice versa, all these
different significations of social entrepreneurship seem to ignore the dilemmas which emanate
from conjoining the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship and hence fail to grasp the
hybrid possibilities and impossibilities of the concept (cf. below). With this in mind, it is essential
to see that prevailing images of social entrepreneurship, while endorsing an overly simplified
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Though there are a number of noteworthy expecations (e.g. Evers, 2006; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006b).
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relation between the social and economic aspect of entrepreneurship, ‘violate’ the characteristics
that constitute the uneconomic or social aspect of social entrepreneurship. In short, the pseudo-
hybridization of social entrepreneurship entails, among other things, that the ‘social’ is
encapsulated in the logic of the ‘dual bottom line’ (Canadian Centre for Social Entrepreneurship,
2001) meaning that it in no way can operate outside the mechanism of the market. This state of
affairs has been discussed in some detail in Chapter 1, but I would now like to take issue with the
economization of the ‘social’ against the backdrop of writings which employ the concept ‘social
capital’ to explain the (social) cause of social entrepreneurship. What is to be emphasized, then, is
that the social feature of entrepreneurship is mainly envisaged by dint of a transactional logic (i.e.
‘I give to you in order that you give me something in return’) as a result of which it becomes
untenable to talk of the ‘social’ in the etymological sense of the word.
Social Capital or the Calculation of the Social
Money has become the grand test of virtue. (Orwell, 1940, p. 155)
The simple canonical formula of this [capitalist] genre is: I will let you have this, if you in return
can let me have that. (Lyotard, 1992, p. 58)
In view of its as yet young pedigree in the context of academia, it is somehow surprising how
much thought has already been devoted to the question what social entrepreneurship is (Dees,
1998) or in what direction is should develop (e.g. Mair, Seelos & Borwanker, 2005). What is less
surprising, though, is that this quest has for the most part led to the conclusion that ‘the greatest
challenge in understanding social entrepreneurship lies in defining the boundaries of what we
mean by social’ (Mair & Marti, 2006, p. 38; emphasis in original). Hjorth and Bjerke (2006) have
thereby convincingly argued that available texts on social entrepreneurship more often than not
conceive the social ‘as something to be fixed (re-described as forms of economic and subject to
management knowledge)’. I would like to add here that the conventionalism of management
knowledge is on the one hand supported by the avowed ‘flabbiness’ of the third or public sector
(Grenier, 2002) and on the other hand legitimated through the belief in the seemingly unlimited
merits of managerial professionalism such as ‘real world problem-solving creativity’ (Bornstein,
2004), ‘tactical thrust’ (Catford, 1998), etc. To intensify our excursion into the economization of
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the ‘social’, it first needs to be mentioned that what I call economization is unequally pronounced
in the current literature; though some texts reveal their economic legacy at first sight, there are
others in which economic reason is introduced in a more elusive fashion. To start with a more
blatant example: in an article on BBC News Online Wilson
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(2003) came to estimate that
‘social enterprise creates an average of five jobs (a small proportion create more than 20). They
calculate that for every £10,000 it takes to train a recruit, the return to the community is
£100,000.’ In view of Wilson’s contention that social entrepreneurship for the most part
represents a forceful economic actor, one might argue that such statements mimic the mainstream
literature on business or profit entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2), and in particular the route of
research which delineates the matter as an engine of economic prosperity (Hjorth & Steyaert,
2003). Where the allegation that social entrepreneurship is simply ‘old wine in new bottles’
seems to lurk around the corner, I have shown in Chapter 2 that certain scholars counteract this
‘threat’ by asserting that social entrepreneurship is distinguishable from its business opponent,
since it treats profit as a means rather than an end (Schuyler, 1998). Into virtually the same
category of rhetoric fall those writings which seek to position social entrepreneurship outside the
range of economics by claiming that the subject matter not only seeks to increase financial
capital, but equally physical, human, cultural or social capital (e.g. Johnson, 2003; Roper &
Cheney, 2005). To take issue with the perhaps most rigorously discussed form of capital in the
context of social entrepreneurship, I would like to elaborate on the idea of social capital, and
thereby bring to light how this concept capitalizes on ego-centric, calculative and hence non-
social root assumptions.
After all, one can notice that the concept ‘social capital’ has been employed by scholars to
reflect on and explain the issue of social entrepreneurship for a very short time (e.g. Thompson et
al.; 2000; Thompson, 2002; Mair et al., 2005; Stryjan, 2006). What is problematic about social
capital is that it seems to be used by analogy with economic capital, as social capital is argued to
have similar (though less measurable) effects. On the face of it, the notion of capital, be that
cultural, social or financial (Bourdieu, 1986), today seems to be construed as ‘something of a
cure-all’ (Portes, 1998, p. 1). To gain a deeper sense of (the problematic of) social capital, it is
helpful to summon a lengthy quote by Putnam (2000), who takes credit for popularizing the idea
of social capital in the context of research, so as to recall that ‘(w)hereas physical capital refers to
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Alastair Wilson is the development director of the SSE (School for Social Entrepreneurship) based in London.
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physical objects and human capital refers to the properties of individuals, social capital refers to
connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some
have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that
civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a sense network of reciprocal social relations’ (p.
19). Where Putnam’s telling statement identifies the points of difference between social, human
and physical capital, it also proclaims that social capital most notably pronounces the utility of
reciprocity and trust. Provided that this alone does not yet mark a reason for concern, I would like
to add that social capital, by highlighting that ‘trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and
behaviours … bind the members of human networks and communities’ (Cohen & Prusak 2001, p.
4), operates so as to relate people’s social relations with the notion of ‘economic growth’. More
precisely, whereas there is nothing in general to object to in conjunction with common values and
rituals of social exchange, one must not overlook that these attributes are subject to an
instrumental logic, since they derive their value in relation to the increase of the overall cohesion
and, most fundamentally, the productive capacity of an identified social unit (or ‘human networks
and communities’ to use Cohen and Prusak’s terms). Stated otherwise, though words such as
reciprocity, trust and solidarity might lead to the impression that the concept ‘social capital’ takes
issue with the overall communal well-being, it is in fact rendered a leveraging force of
communities, since ‘(w)here people are trusting and trustworthy, … , everyday business and
social transactions are less costly’ (Putnam, 2000, p. 288). Thus following Putnam’s (2000)
metaphoric description that ‘social capital greases the wheels that allow communities to advance
smoothly’ (p. 289), it becomes even more evident that the ‘social’ ceases to comprise any
intrinsic value, but gets transformed into a ‘means to other ends’.
In view of the observation that social capital is chiefly grounded on the two ‘pillars’ trust
and reciprocity, I would like to elaborate on these concepts a bit more thoroughly. Regarding the
issue of trust, it is Bill Drayton – who is said to have created the term ‘social entrepreneurship’ –
who pinpointed the ethical aspect of social entrepreneurship in conjunction with trust. Trust,
following Drayton (2002), thereby represents an invariable prerequisite for enabling or
maximizing the social value of social entrepreneurship. There is, it seems, nothing to criticize
here, given that trust is for the most part viewed as an ingredient of intimate and mutually
beneficial relations. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that trust is often delineated as a basic (and at
times endemic) characteristic of the social or private sphere – where it is said to make redundant
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contractual agreements which determine, de jure, what can be done, must be done, or must not be
done – , I would like to point out that trust is anything but a sign of selflessness. Taking, for
instance, friendship, to punctuate this assertion, I would like to make reference to Aristotle (1984)
who mentioned that friends are those people whom we are willing to care for and whom we trust.
Given that friendship is subject to desire, tension, conflict, or risk, it becomes clear that trust
works both as a ‘barometer’ for assessing and as a corrective for counteracting the risk of
potential deception. In addition, and as briefly discussed in the context of equality in Chapter 3, it
is fundamental to point out that the idea of trust hinges on an economy of the same (Hillis Miller,
2001). That is, Aristotle’s understanding of friends and friendship presumes that it is possible, not
to say required, to establish trustful relationships with one’s others in which one treats the others
as one would treat oneself. By extension, friendship is not so much a matter of accepting the
others for reason of their otherness. Instead, since being based on the assumption that one’s others
are principally similar to us (or can be assimilated to our own will), it becomes traceable that
(Aristotelian) friendship represents an expression of self-interest, since the others are invariably
bound to increase our own wellbeing, pleasure and safety. After all, where trust becomes the
reassuring belief that the other would act according to one’s own presumptions and needs and
where the other gets to reveal his or her value only when acting in accordance with oneself, it is
hardly pertinent to talk of a social, not to say ethical, relationship, but rather of a ‘utility-based
friendship’ (Aristotle, 1984; cf. also Jones, Parker & ten Bos, 2005).
As far as this brief inquiry has shown that the issue of trust, at least the way it gets used in
the context of ‘social capital’, not only endorses assimilation and a condition of similarity but,
more fundamentally, gets to reduce the differences between the I and the other to the egoistic
demands of a singular person (or group), there is, in my assessment, another point that needs to
be addressed, namely the relationship between reciprocity (of trust), ethics and economy. To this
end, I would like to recall that the risk immanent within close relations is said to presuppose trust
as a kind of antidote for shielding off potentially destructive behavior. Trust, so it seems, appears
to warrant that people will act in accordance with what could be denoted as ethical conduct.
However, to achieve such an Aristotelian relationship of mutual trust it is necessary that people
constantly reciprocate the trust they experience from others. In Solymossy and Masters’ (2002)
terms: ‘(w)hen the trust and emotional involvement of one actor for another are not reciprocated
fully by the other, the resulting asymmetry increases the potential for unethical behaviour’ (p.
234). On the face of it, what is revealed through Solymossy and Masters’ assertion is that the
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grand test of ethical behavior comes to rest on the question of whether or not there is symmetry
between giving and receiving. Trust and ethics, in Solymossy and Masters’ view, are hence
correlated in the sense that the violation of reciprocal trust is said to increase the likelihood of
unethical behavior. This brings us to the point of asking whether this necessarily has to be the
case and, most importantly, whether such a correlation does not lead us further away from the
objective of grasping the ethical grounding of social entrepreneurship. This evidently rhetorical
question is based on the observation that Solymossy and Masters’ perspective of ethics as well as
the concept ‘social capital’ both trade on a transactional logic that presupposes that the other
needs to reciprocate one’s deeds in, whenever possible, equal measure. This logic thereby very
much reminds us of the Latin principle ‘do et des’
217
(I give in order that you (also) give
218
)
which represents one of the pivotal maxims in judicial contract law. However, even more
fundamental in the present context of social entrepreneurship is the observation that ‘do et des’,
precisely because it describes the modus operandi of (contract) law, denotes a space beyond the
‘social’ or ethics. In analogy with Derrida’s (1992) investigation of Marcel Mauss’ (1990) ‘The
Gift’, we can say that social interactions which are based on a transactional logic violate the
original meaning of the ‘social’. More precisely, to understand the a-social peculiarity of ‘do et
des’, we must bear in mind that Derrida exposed the irony of Mauss’ work on the gift and giving
by claiming that ‘The Gift’ – which is an anthropological investigation of gift cycles in so-called
archaic societies – uses the lexis of the market and exchange, and thus speaks of anything but the
gift. What led Derrida to this conclusion was that Mauss’ treatise of the gift apparently ‘deals
with economy, exchange, contract (do et des), it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and
countergift – in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the annulment of the
gift’ (Derrida, 1992b, p. 24; emphasis in original; cf. also ‘… In a “Nutshell”’). The point that
must be emphasized here is that the perspective of the gift being established by Mauss, or the
representation of the ‘social’ as entailed in the concept ‘social capital’, do not only ignore that not
all social actions have an immediate purpose, function or rationale (Jones & Spicer, 2005), but
that the transactional logic of ‘do et des’ engenders re-formulating the ‘social’ as part of the
economic. Essentially, to make intelligible that ‘do et des’, irrespective of its broad popularity,
does not necessarily announce the end of wisdom, I will get to refer to Derrida’s work on
217
Notice that ‘do et des’ and ‘do ut des’ are often used interchangeably.
218
Besides ‘do ut des’, (Swiss) contract law also refers to canons such as ‘do ut facias’ (I give in order that you act),
‘facio ut des’ (I act in order that you give), or ‘facio ut facias’ (I act in order that you also act).
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unconditionality further down so as to establish a perspective of social entrepreneurship which is
not based on the assumption, first, that the other needs to behave in accordance with one’s own
desires and will and, second, which concedes that the ‘social’, to qualify as such, must be
construed outside the circle of reciprocity and economic calculation. Before doing so, however, I
would like to make the point that an unconditional exegesis of social entrepreneurship is quite
heterodox (i.e. outside mainstream knowledge), especially if one takes into account that we find
ourselves in a time where the everyday events of the so-called social sphere are commonly
expressed (not only by economists) as an incremental part of the economic realm.
To underscore the contention that the current meaning of social entrepreneurship bears
witness to the broader ‘economization of the universe’, I would first like to make reference to
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, arguably one of the most eminent representatives of the
aforementioned ‘tradition’, who has re-formulated a broad range of social and societal
phenomena such as immigration, racial discrimination, education, drug policies, social welfare,
religion, etc. through economic theory (c.f. Becker & Becker, 1996). Maybe one of his most
daring (and unsettling) endeavors was to explain human ‘courtship’ through the rational of cost-
benefit analysis. Becker’s investigations have, somewhat unsurprisingly, become the object of
harsh criticism. However, the world-view of homo economicus still seems to reap broad appeal
since it appears to provide an intuitively convincing model for making sense of worldly affairs
(Hirsch, Michaels & Friedman, 1990). To illustrate the pervasiveness of economic explanations,
it is helpful to take a step further and address, for instance, the issue of altruism. What is
remarkable in the context of economic reasoning is that altruism has been denoted as a concept
which cannot be distinguished, stricto sensu, from egoism since both sorts of behaviors can be
explained by the logic of ‘personal utility function’ which implies that altruism as well as egoism
basically ‘represent a distinct value to the actor’ (Swedberg, 2006). Turning our gaze to (social)
psychology to deepen this argument, we get reminded that the likelihood of altruistic behavior
depends on the relational bond between the helper and the help recipient, meaning that the closer
the relational ties between the helper and the beneficiary, the higher is the chance of pro-social
behavior. The notion of ‘reciprocal altruism’ (Trivers, 1971; Stroebe, Hewstone & Stephenson,
1996) is thus most apposite for revealing the economic interpretation of pro-social behavior, since
it entails that people pander to others foremost if the ‘costs of helping’ are small and the ‘profit
for the recipient’ is maximized. Furthermore, ‘reciprocal altruism’ implies that help is all the
more likely if the helper assumes that the beneficiary will prospectively be able to reciprocate the
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help, which is most notably the case when both parties have already cultivated a confiding
relationship. This again brings us back to the issue of trust, and particularly to the conclusion that
altruistic behavior is contingent upon the helper’s assumption that the help recipient will
prospectively act in a comparable manner (or would at least have acted in a manner comparable
to that of the helper). Economic theory thus forecasts that as far as people do not hold this
conviction, there will be little chance of pro-social behavior. By implication, economic
representations of pro-social behavior posit that people act as ‘homo reciprocans’ (Andreoni,
1988; 1995) who meticulously calculate their behavior according to the chance of recompense.
Indeed, there appears some truth value in Serres’ (2000) contention that ‘not long ago,
certain people posited economics as the infrastructure of history’ (p. 102). However, though I do
not believe that the high tide of economics is yet over and despite the literal impossibility of
invalidating, in a comparably rationalistic manner, the quasi-axiomatic explanation of economic
theory, it nevertheless lies with us to ask: if it is possible to express all social phenomena through
economic theory, why then shouldn’t we happily embrace the work of Becker and others which
seem to provide a ‘Theory for Everything’ (Lawson, 2004)? Ironic though it may seem, I would
like to answer the question by saying that the danger of economic explanations derives, as
discussed before, from its capacity to overrule alternative forms of human conduct. The logic of
economic calculation thus seems to herald the emergence (if not existence) of a hegemonic
metanarrative in the best sense of Lyotard’s ‘Postmodern Condition’ (1984; cf. also Chapter 1).
However, if economic theory could truly explain the totality of the human cause in general and
social entrepreneurship in specific, why worry? In accordance with Jones, Parker and ten Bos’
(2005) treatise of business ethics, in which they ask ‘if money is all that matters, then where do
people fit in? If profit is the only goal, then why worry about good and bad?’ (p. 131), I would
like to reflect on and put into question the self-contented attempts of economists who try to
express all aspects of humanity through the rational calculation of input-output ratios or, to put it
bluntly, the dogma of ‘cold quantification’ (Jones & Spicer, 2005). In view of the present
argument, it needs to be borne in mind that explanations of social entrepreneurship through social
capital would endorse forgetting everything that cannot be grasped in economic or transactional
terms, such as, for instance, that which is ‘unaccountable and new, experimental, impulsive, … ,
pleasurable, … , passionate, … ’ (Kaulingfreks, 2005, p. 40). In consequence, there seems much
value in Cohen and Prusak’s (2001) account, since the authors have raised their fingers in
warning to say that ‘not everything of value should be called ‘capital’. There is a deep danger of
575
skewing our consideration of social phenomena and goods towards the economic. The notion of
capital brings with it a whole set of discourses and inevitably links it … to capitalism’ (p. 9). To
be sure, I have no problem in conceding that social capital is a worthwhile concept for
representing the reciprocal relations in a given community and to show how trust, solidarity and
mutual obligations relate with a given community’s (economic) prosperity. Yet, social capital
seems less apt for tackling the genuinely social aspect of entrepreneurship at large. With this in
mind, it seems legitimate to ask whether the metaphor of capital ‘can do anything for the human,
cultural, or social’ and if this metaphor can provide anything else but the impression of bringing
‘precision to the discussion and adds weight and importance to these otherwise easy-to-brush-off
aspects of human life (those traditionally located outside the sphere of capital)’ (Hjorth & Bjerke,
2006).
Provided that the as yet scarce publications on social entrepreneurship exhibit a
remarkable interest in the issue of social capital (cf. journal articles (e.g. Thompson et al., 2000;
Thompson, 2002), research reports (e.g. Smallbone et al., 2001), books (e.g. Baker, 2000) or
advocacy networks (e.g. Community Action Network, London)), it was my intention to show that
this concept is arguably futile for understanding the genuinely social, not to say ethical, aspect of
social entrepreneurship. To render this assertion even more palpable, and to establish a space
beyond the pervasive logic of ‘do et des’ so as to give voice to my contention that there is
something more to life than Becker’s economic blueprint, I would now like to illustrate the
tension between conditional and unconditional forms of social exchange and thereby elaborate on
its practical implications in the context of development aid.
On (Un)Conditional Social Action in the Context of Development Aid
In view of my critical reading of social capital, which has sought to illuminate the concept’s
subtle, yet pervasive, economic logic, it is within the current paragraph that I want to establish a
more affirmative trajectory of the ‘social’ through Derrida’s notion of ‘unconditionality’ (cf. also
Chapter 5). The arguments on conditional and unconditional social action will thereby be
established and reflected in the context of development aid. To be sure, development aid has been
chosen as the contextual backdrop of this illustration not just because it has already served as the
analytic focus in Chapter 3, but also because development aid lends itself to inquiring into the
576
area of conflict engendered by the ‘collision’ of social and economic rationalities. Whereas the
above paragraph was dedicated to highlighting the pseudo-ethical and economic over-codification
of social entrepreneurship, I would like to start this investigation by claiming that the realm of
development aid has experienced a similar fate. Given that this argument has already been
developed in Chapter 3, it shall suffice here to recall that development aid, in the early post-
WWII years, was endowed, if not overcharged, with the utopian hope of raising the Third World
onto the level of true humanity (Gronemeyer, 1992) and thus with the idea of harmonizing global
inequalities. In so far as the influx and impact of economic and managerial discourse is
concerned, I have mentioned in Chapter 3 that economic rationalities have underpinned Third
World aid ever since. Yet, what has been most conspicuous is that best-management approaches
to development (NGOs) became presentable roughly within the last 10 to 15 years. Having
asserted that the lexis of management has essentially construed development NGOs as business-
and market-sensitive actors, I have interpreted this recent rupture as a somewhat logical
consequence of the realization that development aid initiatives have constantly fallen short of
their identified goals. In other words, the development aid project in general and the institutions
of the development apparatus in specific have increasingly been problematized as adequate
means for tackling inequalities (or economic differences) between the so-called First and Third
World. Yet, in view of the fact that development aid within the last decades has witnessed far-
reaching suspicion and criticism, these allegations did not only transform the matter into a
malleable project, but also heralded the need for a fundamental modification of its modus
operandi hitherto. In Foucauldian terms, the problematization of development aid at once became
the condition of possibility for complementing or substituting existing (e.g. philanthropic or
humanistic) rationalities with a more market-sensitive code of conduct. By implication, the
problematization of development aid made possible new social realities and hence new subject
positions (Foucault, 1984; cf. also Chapter 6). However, though a managerial governance of
development aid can be conceived as a positive instance that enables new forms of (business and
social) life, I have discussed in Chapter 3 that ‘new managerialism’ also displaces or suppresses
rationalities which do not fit into its ‘equation’. For instance, while announcing a break with the
past in the name of a better future, managerial logics quite evidently operate upon what
Gronemeyer (1992) called ‘optimization imperative’, which transmits the message that all people
involved in development aid must forget their past so as to give way to a more business-sensitive
outlook. That this rationale is both expansive and one-sided, since it exclusively highlights the
577
rationalistic and calculative aspects of development aid while claiming transcendental
applicableness, probably needs no further elaboration. What needs further consideration,
however, is that the discourse of managerialism conceals that there has been and still is
something in development aid that exceeds mere calculated social exchange. To counteract the
hegemonic representation of development through managerial and/or economic discourse (Grillo,
1997; Brigg, 2001), I would now like to establish an unconditional reading of development aid.
Since I would like to illustrate the issue of unconditionality in the context of development NGOs,
it is helpful to once again recall that these organizations are envisaged more and more from the
vantage point of (social) entrepreneurship as a result of which they are primarily construed as
effective and efficient economic actors (cf. above Wilson, 2003). This tendency also becomes
evident in those academic writings which use economic initiatives such as the Grameen Bank to
delineate the (social) cause of social entrepreneurship and, most fundamentally, to advocate the
positive capacity of economic activities in the context of development aid (Ostasiewski, 2005).
Notwithstanding the recognition that such endeavors run the risk of establishing a totalizing
scheme for naturalizing a neo-liberal model of social entrepreneurship (Roper & Cheney, 2005),
which quite evidently ignores the nuances and differences that make up the singularity of social
entrepreneurial events (cf. Chapter 1), my aim here is to take issue with the observation that such
an economic conceptualization of development aid endorses a conditional mode of exchange.
More precisely, the cardinal question which derives from an economic conceptualization of
development aid is whether or not such endeavors will lead to predetermined goals or, as in the
case of the Grameen Bank, if recipients of help will be able to repay their loans.
219
Arguably, this
claim is simplistic, since it denies that the everyday conduct of development aid necessarily
exhibits more complexity and tensions than what is imparted from systems of ‘tactical morality
and strategic rationalism’ (Walden, 2002). Yet, I nevertheless believe that it is not exaggerated to
claim that contemporary development aid not only has a propensity to appropriate the southern
hemisphere to the lifestyle of consumption associated with the West (Rahnema & Bawtree,
1997), but, to put it bluntly, has an immanent tendency to transform gestures of help and aid into
conditional acts of (economic and/or contractual) exchange. In line with this observation, one can
argue that development aid – which at first sight seems to deal with laudable deeds such as help,
care or philanthropy – is nowadays for the most part occupied with endowing aid with a
219
Notice that the Grameen Bank, despite its broad acceptance, has also been criticized because of its disciplining
operation (Brigg, 2001) or in view of its negative social spill-over effects (Develtere & Huybrechts, 2005).
578
transactional logic that demands, for instance, that beneficiaries must act according to the giver’s
premises and practices, and thus have to comply with preordained standards of good
management. By implication, it becomes intelligible that development aid is far removed from
the ancient ideal of Misericordia, that is, the ‘rueful sympathy’ that comes from the heart
(Gronemeyer, 1992).
220
In opposition to the Samaritan, which Gronemeyer used as a conceptual
persona to exemplify how those involved in the early days of development aid used to give
‘without regard to the person in need, the situation, the probability of success, or even the
possibility of injury to the person offering aid’ (Gronemeyer, 1992, p. 53), development aid
organizations today most notably seem concerned with institutionalizing and professionalizing
their decision-making, evaluation and accounting procedures so as to enhance their prospect of
success. The downside of this focus, so it seems, is that decisions are frequently taken with regard
to the chances of (economic) success and less subject to, for instance, people’s immediate needs.
On the face of it, claiming that contemporary development aid has dismissed traditional
conceptions of help and thereby transformed help and aid into an exercise of economic discipline
might indeed be read as the expression of heavy-hearted sorrow in the face of vanishing virtues
and values. To long for a past that is no longer ours, however, would be a futile undertaking since
there is no possibility to turn back the clock (Foucault, 1984). Rather than a misty-eyed view of
the past, I would like to establish a perspective of unconditional development aid in which acts of
giving and helping are carried out beyond seemingly precise predictions of future success and
without the expectation of immediate recompense, payback or return. Hence, bearing in mind that
development aid or Third World aid today has come to rely upon the ostensible precision of cost-
benefit analysis (which reveals, among other things, the ‘maxim of do ut des’; Gronemeyer, 1992,
p. 56; emphasis in original), there is nevertheless reason to believe that development aid can be
extended beyond its current economic conceptualization. In consequence, speaking of a space
beyond economy, that is, a space of unconditionality, brings us to those works of Derrida where
he performed a double reading of concepts such as friendship, hospitality, the gift, etc. (c.f.
Chapters 1 & 2). It is thereby important to recall that the common denominator of these
conceptual genealogies is that they all probed the double condition or ‘double imperative’ of the
respective concepts (Critchley & Kearney, 2004), whereby pinpointing the difference entailed
between unconditional and conditional interpretations of a given term. Though Derrida, to my
220
Which represents, quite evidently, a blatantly romantic image of development aid.
579
knowledge, never became explicit about development aid (organizations),
221
I believe that the
inquiry hitherto and the thesis at large have shown that the topic does in fact lend itself to a
comparable double reading. To be sure, where an unconditional reading of aid and help will
engender a picture that is notably different from its conditional signification, I will now try to
give form to the idea of unconditionality by discussing the main attributes which characterize a
genuine or pure exegesis of help and aid, that is, the ethics of otherness, the ever-becoming of the
‘social’ and the risk of invention.
Ethics: The Encounter with Otherness
… where there is no other, the scene of the other, like that of politics and of society, has
disappeared. (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 210)
If we start from the contention that conditional development aid, i.e. development aid the way it
is currently practiced on a global scale, is for the most part grounded on the premise of rational
thought and economic reason (cf. Chapter 3), it surely remains clear that not just any relation of
help truly deserves the name. In concrete terms, to talk of help, in Derrida’s sense of the word,
would make it untenable to rely on algorithmic or formalized (decision- and calculation-)
procedures (Anderson-Irwin, 2001) because they invariably favor similarity over difference and,
most fundamentally, ignore the existence and value of alterity. Derrida’s (1978) investigation of
‘arche-violence’ singles out this latter problem, emphasizing that there is always a danger in
discourse (i.e. ‘articulartion’) to treat the other not as other, but as a mere alter ego (i.e. second
self). That is to say that arche-violence delineates the possibility that people are prone to construe
the other – as a result of their immanent egoistic, perspective-bound mode of thinking – ‘as
properly a direct object of one’s own action, so that things are said or done to the other as object,
rather than given or presented to the other as a Face’ (Parrish, 2004, p. 4). The problem of arche-
violence is hence quite obviously revealed in the tradition of postcolonial criticism which
proclaims that discourses of help or development aid are to be regarded as violent, since they
appear to reduce the indigenous other to a mere extension of the (western) helper’s own being or
social reality (Escobar, 1992). On the other hand, being or acting non-violently in the sphere of
221
Yet, notice that Derrida (2000b) discussed the role of non-governmental organizations in the context of his
investigation of the ‘New International’.
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development aid
222
implies conceding that the others not only have a right for existence, health,
education, etc., but, most fundamentally, a right for their own truth. After all, non-violence means
accepting the others ‘in their sovereign sources of meaning’ (Parrish, 2004, p. 19). In line with
this observation, the paradox of responsible behavior, following Derrida, means that there is
always a question of being responsible before a singular other, and thereby of accepting the other
as an independent creator of meaning. Letting the other be other and thereby acknowledging that
the other is ‘irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 125;
emphasis in original) manifests the basic condition of non-violence and, by implication, justice.
Derrida (1995) thereby insisted that this type of aporia is ‘too often ignored by the “knights of
responsibility” who presume responsibility and ethics in all aspects of life is quite easily
established’ (Reynolds, 2001) and who pretend that they are ethical by the simple fact that they
act in a dutiful way. Yet, mere dutiful action seems to lead in the wrong direction, since the law
or the generality of duty, as Derrida (1995) reminds us, ignores the difficulties and paradoxes
involved in genuinely responsible events. In concrete terms, acting out of duty means acting on
the orders of a relational script which tells us, in a more or less precise way, what is appropriate
in a given social situation, and thus seemingly relieves us from the ordeal of responsible
deliberation and action. Stated otherwise, dutiful acts do not take into account that responsibility
necessarily touches the ‘inner-most parts of me’ and must hence go ‘right down to my soul, down
to the bone’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 54). It is precisely this recognition which led Derrida conclude that
duty delineates a sort of relationship with otherness which is not only unethical, but even
unfriendly. This is indeed a shattering assessment, but Derrida (1995) convincingly argued that it
would ‘be unfriendly to respond to a friend out of duty. It would be no better to respond to an
invitation or to a friend in conformity with duty, pflichtmässig … It is insufficient to say that the
“ought” … of friendship, like that of politeness, must not be on the order of duty. … As soon as it
yields to the necessity of applying the generality of a prescription to a single case, the gesture of
friendship or of politeness would itself be destroyed’ (p. 8; emphasis in original). Essentially, the
conclusion of Derrida’s elaboration on pro-forma friendship, dutifulness or politeness is that all
friendships (and, by implication, all affirmative social encounters) which are grounded on a duty,
on a set of principles from which we derive rules for our everyday deeds (i.e. prescriptions) are
222
Notice that certain postcolonial scholars have come to endorse a ‘post-development’ era (Escobar, 1992b; 1995)
which emphasizes, among other things, the need to re-frame development as an event that does not represent the
southern hemisphere as a mere extension or even as an inferior supplement to the industrialized or ‘civilized’ North.
581
hollowed by a ‘rhetoric of responsibility’, since ‘(b)y speaking of responsible discourse on
responsibility, we are implying already that discourse itself must submit to the norms or to the
law of which it speaks’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 9; emphasis in original).
In view of the fact that codes or programs of responsibility or duty, by force of
reductionism, always perform a certain insensitivity vis-à-vis the particularity of the singular
other, it is anything but surprising that the logic of give and take, or do et des (cf. also Derrida,
1992, p. 24), is in no way compatible with the idea of the (unconditional) ‘social’, at least insofar
as the ‘social’ is held to describe the space where alterity is encountered and enabled. I would
hence like to begin this excursion into unconditional development aid by invoking a quote by
Derrida (1992) in which he rhetorically asked ‘(d)oes it not suffice in fact to describe
scientifically the objective exchange of values with usurious supplement, in short, the logic of
credit, of interest rates, and of repayment due dates?’ (p. 42). It follows on from this that it is
fundamental, first of all, not to accept prevailing ways of exchange as expressions of social
relations and hence to take issue with conditional help and aid, since the sort of exchange (or
giving in the case of Derrida’s inquiry) which exclusively deals with or takes place in the sphere
of economy, exchange, contract, reciprocity, trust, etc. immediately leads to the annulment of the
‘social’. By analogy with Derrida’s (1999) eloquent treatise on hospitality, one could say that if
one inscribes the ‘social’ into a circle (of exchange) which presupposes that the recipient must
reciprocate the deed of the helper, then one is no longer talking of social action but of conditional
social exchange. In consequence, to prevent the ‘social’ becoming absorbed by economic reason
(Baudrillard, 1983), it becomes arguable that unconditional development aid would have to
exceed the pragmatic demands of everyday life. To be sure, the (economic) demands of
development aid cannot simply be ignored (cf. below), and yet there is still in development aid
something beyond the ritualism of economic calculation. More precisely still, though ‘there are,
of course, rituals and coded gestures … there is also a moment of absolute singularity which is
processed with the heart’ (Simmons et al., 2001, p. 26). In terms of development aid, the
singularity Derrida refers to in his work on ethics implies that one should evaluate the calls from
the others (who require our help) case by case and not by simply applying a pre-ordained set of
decision procedures. In a most hyperbolic sense, to help unconditionally means paying attention
to the fact that each call from the other deserves, if not requires, our notice and thus our efforts.
So if we had to formulate a tentative or ephemeral (not general) principle of help, this would most
likely embody ‘a law which tells or invites us, or gives us the order or injunction to welcome
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anyone, any other one, without checking at the order who he or she is, what his or her nationality
is, it’s a way of being open to whoever comes’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 8). What I particularly want to
emphasize here is that – despite the fact that economic conceptualizations of development aid
have become an incremental and pervasive part of contemporary thinking – the right to alterity
and one’s responsibility to the other(s) remain irreducible, that is, undeconstructible. Importantly,
the implications of Derrida’s work for the realm of development aid are (at least) double and
thereby subtly contradictory. On the one hand, the concept ‘unconditionality’ does away with any
de-contextualized, abstract understanding of help and instead makes help a concrete event which
receives a face, so to speak, in that it pinpoints the singularity of the concrete other. On the other
hand, it follows from Derrida’s notion of ‘essential’ or ‘absolute otherness’ that unconditional
help or aid endorses a particular excess of responsibility; whereby excess does not refer to an
exaggerated kindness or a mere sense of duty (cf. above), but to a sort of responsibility which is
too broad and open for being ‘enclosed’ in prescriptive codes. The apparent paradox is thus
revealed in that unconditional help points at the concrete experience of otherness, while at the
same time stipulating that pure help cannot be experienced or presented (i.e. rendered the object
of static representation) in any definitive sense. For any help that upholds its ‘right’ to be
considered unconditional inevitably must remain elusive, even imperceptible. In other words, if
help were recognized by the beneficiary as an act of benevolence it would inevitably fall into an
economy, a reciprocity of mutual benefit and hence cease to be true help, but a mere ‘help of
utility’, as it were. This said, we are back at the beginning once again: any relation of help that
passes through a living present is an appropriation, a domestication, which destroys alterity. But
yet again, it must be my care for the other, I must be the one committed to the concrete other, the
one who calls me and announces his or her distress, emergency, Notfall. This is, on the face of it,
the aporia of otherness. In the concluding part of this chapter I am eager to consider in greater
depth the double condition of responsible social action, in general, and minor social
entrepreneurship, in particular. Thus I intend to posit, among other things, that the aporia and
apparent impossibility of responsibility is not the end-point of help, but its essential force of
leverage. After all, to reap the profundity of Derrida’s thought, I would like to reiterate that
unconditional help is antithetic or parasitical to conditional help in the sense that it not only
establishes an image of help that operates ‘without asking for a document, a name, a context, or a
passport’, but, following Derrida, overruns, exceeds and exposes the ‘performative force’
(Derrida, 2001) of all calculative social action. In this way, unconditional help denotes, even
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prescribes, opening our relation to the other and hence postulates offering the other all that we
have; that is, unconditional help endorses ‘to open my space, my home – my house, my language,
my culture, my nation, my state, and myself’ (Derrida, 1997b, p. 7). By extension, Derrida’s
delineation of absolute hospitality makes it clear that to talk about unconditional help implies to
disengage with predictions and managerial forecasts and to accept that ‘what arrives arrives’
(Derrida, 2001, p. 247). In view of the observation that excess – conceived as the surplus of
responsibility which exceeds, at every moment, the calculative economy of development aid and
its drive to predict, and thus control, future events in a precise manner – represents the grounding
of unconditional help, it is within the next paragraph that I will reveal how the excess of
responsibility, that is, excessive responsibility, gets to engender a ‘becoming’-perspective of help.
Becoming Social: The Infinite (Since Insatisfiable) Call from the Other
I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without
sacrificing the other other, the other others. (Derrida, 1995, p. 68)
Though I have illustrated the ‘purity’ of development aid against the backdrop of unconditional
help and aid, this is not, however, meant to say that we have attained the high ground of a novel
‘moralism’. Quite the contrary. Though unconditionality emphasizes an event of pure affection
and hence a relation towards the other which must avoid assimilation, acculturation or
appropriation, this further entails a relational space that needs to be ‘re-invented at every second’
(Derrida, 1997b, p. 8). In specific terms, since unconditionality does not impart any set of social
conditions, however rudimentary, to structure the relationship between one person and another, it
does not necessarily give reason for euphoria, such as we might expect had we attained a moral
high ground. Rather, the ‘nature’ of unconditionality implicates that the ordeal of deciding whom
to help and how is never accomplished, and never should end lest the ‘social’ be fixed as the
totalized essence of good conscience. It follows from Derrida’s claim, first, that the social space
cannot be controlled and that we must not try to have done with it since the social is not a
‘surpassable moment’ (Derrida, 1997a, p. 59) and, second, that the question of the ‘social’ is an
infinite task. The ‘social’, so it seems, is infinite (and thus always in a condition of becoming),
and not only because there are infinite aporias, or because these aporias are grounded in an
infinity of social conditions which cannot possibly be mastered (i.e. rendered the object of
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formalized economic structures). Rather, the infinite task of responsibility relates to the
recognition that responsibility is grounded in aporias that make justice an experience of the
‘crucible of undecidability’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001) and hence of the impossible. Importantly
then, the impossibility of unconditional help derives not merely from man’s impulse towards
unity (Nietzsche, 1968), as previously discussed in the context of Derrida’s inquiry of arche-
violence, but also from the fact that every social gesture (be that help, aid, etc.) towards a
particular person invariably ignores all the others which are not explicitly addressed by one’s
deed. Unconditional responsibility is thus a paradoxical condition in the sense that it is literally
impossible to satisfy all those others – both near and distant, both identifiable and anonymous –
which call us and await a response. Despite the contention that the idea of unconditional help
emphasizes the singular encounter with the other, absolute responsibility always exceeds the dyad
of the I and some concrete other, since it, following Derrida (1997b), is not purely a responsibility
for someone or something, but a ‘calling and an answering [to] the other, infinite and beyond
being’ (pp. 36 – 37). The aporia of absolute or unconditional responsibility, which, as Derrida
(1995) reminds us, invariably evokes fear and makes one tremble (cf. below), is therefore not
only the condition of responsibility, but the recognition that the encounter with otherness should
not be normalized (i.e. made amenable to norms and disciplinary mechanisms), but should remain
‘exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 32). By
implication, the attribute ‘responsible’ does not single out an essence of being and thus does not
describe a personality characteristic one can possess in an abstract sense. Rather, responsibility is
only ‘alive’ when it happens, that is, when it takes place in the singular event of responsibility
(Caputo, 1993). To become responsible, social or ethical implies acknowledging the immanent
risk and impossibility of complete openness to the other. The call from the ‘absolutely Other’
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is such that the request that is made of me by the other, by the simple fact that he or she speaks to
me, is a request that is insoluble and thus can (and must) never be finished. Responsibility, by
logical extension, is simultaneously endless and inevitably doomed to fail, since one cannot
possibly be responsible to all to whom one should be responsible. As I will necessarily and at
every moment betray ‘my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the
billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my
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Notice that Derrida (1995) often uses the example of God to illustrate the call from the ‘absolutely Other’ and its
implied responsibility in ‘the absence (apousia) of the master’ (pp. 56 – 57; emphasis in original).
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fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 69), it is beyond
doubt that unconditional help might appear as a mere illusion. And yet, it does not follow from
Derrida’s (1995) ostensible dystopia that one’s decision to respond to one person and not to
another ‘remains finally unjustifiable’ (p. 71) that one is absolved from acting responsibly.
Instead, despite the fact that ‘(m)aking a decision requires that one’s energies and resources are
channeled in certain directions and not others’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001), one must, following
Caputo (1993), enter the field of obligation and keep the idea of complete otherness as a
corrective to remain aware of the particular others to whom one is also obliged. Far from
invoking a sense of stagnation, the recognition of the aporia of infinite responsibility renders even
more urgent the demand for justice, responsibility and ethics. In other words, ‘the distance of the
other does not lead to a lack of responsibility, or to a non-response, turning away, or
complacency. One must act even when the act is bound to fall short, to be inadequate, even sinful
in the sense that one cannot do right by every other’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001).
Returning to the issue of development aid, we can see that doing good, that is, helping and
aiding, does in no way presuppose the image of some heroic individual or organization and even
less requires bestowing help with a determinate meaning. To be sure, a ‘becoming’ view of
development aid highlights the small, the fragile and the accidental, and thus alludes to all those
development initiatives and projects which might never show up on television or newspaper
reports and which will never receive a reward or price, since they are still heterogeneous,
contradictory, unformed or, more precisely, in the process of constant forming and reforming.
The leverage of such an ephemeral, juvenile form of development aid is hence less a matter of
propaganda, political action or overt protesting. Instead, such a minor form of help stimulates
change by inducing processes of becoming-other as well as by undermining stable power
relations and ‘activating lines of continuous variation in ways that have previously been restricted
and blocked’ (Bogue, 2005, p. 114). The potential for positive social change is hence not limited
due to minor development aid’s non-essentialist status, since a minor form of help might arguably
prove more receptive and sensitive to differences and local identity politics (which both seem at
risk of being overrun by the strategic master-plan of development aid). In view of Reynolds’
(2004) contention that becoming just, social or responsible means ‘to keep the future open and
permanently revisable’, we can add that a ‘becoming’ view of development is well in line with
Derrida’s (2004b) claim that ‘it is these weak who will prove to be strongest in the end and who
represent the future … ’ To put it bluntly, the weakest, the minor, do not conceive development
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aid as the ‘reassuring object or the logical or theoretical consequence of assured knowledge
(euphoric, without paradox, without aporia, free of contradiction, without undecidabilities to
decide’ (Derrida, 2000). Instead, minor development encourages becoming-other precisely
because it acknowledges the uniqueness of the other’s voice and because it exceeds the economy
of debt and repayment while construing failure not as an indication of poor planning or
management, but as the ever-present possibility of constant movement, that is, becoming-other.
Minor development aid thus enables, if not invents, a ‘people to come’ by promoting ‘new
possibilities for the future formation of an active, self-determining collectivity’ (Bogue, 2005, p.
114). Evidently, it delineates an alternative path to help compared to the (major) development
machine (cf. Chapter 3) which seems to run ‘without us, without responsibility, without decision,
at bottom without ethics’ (Derrida, 2000). In short, minor development aid delineates a plane of
immanence,
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to use Deleuze’s (2001) term, which exhibits no concern for fixing values, for
predetermining aims and objectives or for establishing stable structures or hierarchies, but for
enabling a ceaselessly open future that cannot be envisioned by available categories or by a
dogmatic mode of thinking (Deleuze, 1994). Thus given that a ‘becoming’ perspective of help or
development aid pays primary heed not to what is (i.e. being), but to what might become possible
at the fissures of presence (Law, 2004), it is within the following paragraph that I want to discuss
in some detail the embodied side of invention and how such a view embraces Derrida’s treatise of
non-knowledge and the secret.
Invention: Fear and Trembling in the Face of the Secret
Wandering includes the risk of error and distraction. Where are you going? I don’t know. Where
are you coming from? I try not to remember. Through where do you pass? Everywhere
and through as many places as possible … (Serres, 2000, p. 98)
What I want to bring to the forefront here is that unconditional development does not ‘merely’
stimulate a space of absolute otherness, but at the same time stresses the inventive and
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In terms of ethics, immanence implies disavowing any reference to judgments of good and evil, right and wrong,
and hence does away with a transcendental model of ethics. A Deleuzian ethics instead stresses the abstract methods
of immanent evaluation which again is compatible with Derrida’s idea of the absolute singularity of responsible
endeavors.
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transformative possibilities of responsible social action. I would like to begin this inquiry with a
brief excursus so as to claim that novelty and innovation are central concerns in today’s studies
on management. Meier Sørensen (2006) thus convincingly extracted the two dominant routes to
innovation, stating that there is one stream of research which emphasizes the role of fantasy,
brainstorming and free interaction, and another that puts centre stage the role of knowledge
sharing and organizational form. In short, innovation, as Meier Sørensen tells us with reference to
Boeddrich (2004), is either seen as the somehow accidental effect of an unstructured, chaotic
environment or, alternatively, construed as the product of meticulously organized knowledge.
Since the first stream of thought, that is, the ‘fantasy route to innovation’, will be briefly
addressed in the concluding part of this chapter, I would here like to take issue with the
commonplace assumption that one (i.e. managers) can, by dint of managerial procedures and
technologies, ‘squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of
innovation and invention’ (Thrift, 2006, p. 281; emphasis in original).
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This view, in my
assessment, falls short in acknowledging that innovation is invariably an embodied practice and
the result of an encounter with otherness which presupposes a certain non-knowledge and the
retention of the other’s secret. To lend apt weight to this assertion I will henceforth talk about
invention instead of innovation. Thus, let me start my investigation of Derrida’s notion of ‘non-
knowledge’ by claiming that the encounter with otherness is a fundamentally insecure, if not
dangerous (Steyaert & Dey, 2006), event because one never knows in advance whether such an
endeavor will turn out a success or whether it will lead to a complete disaster. The notion of
‘invention’ thus takes into account that a ‘becoming’ perspective of development aid does not see
novelty (i.e. the invention of a people and a future to come) as something (literally some thing)
that can be delineated by some utopian social order (cf. below), but rather as a ‘risk-laden
instigation of a movement toward an unknowable future’ (Bogue, 2005, p. 117). This view is in
fundamental contrast to both common sense and management research which share the belief that
novelty presupposes disclosing the secret. Invention, in Derrida’s (1989) understanding, stresses
that the encounter with absolute otherness, and the unconditional responsibility of help and aid,
implies, even necessitates, secrecy. Essentially, the encounter with otherness retains a sense of the
surprise or the secret, since it gives weight to that which is not controllable in terms of time
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Notice that this functionalist understanding of innovation and novelty is well in line with the dominant stream of
entrepreneurship research, where innovation is typically (but not exclusively) discussed in the context of ‘opportunity
seeking’, ‘creative destruction’ or ‘(economic) value creation’.
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(when the other will arrive) or effect (what will happen in the encounter with otherness). In other
words, Derrida’s (1995) claim that ‘(s)ecrecy is essential to the exercise of this absolute
responsibility as sacrificial responsibility’ (p. 67) alludes to an encounter which cannot be
planned (prior to the event), wherefore being/becoming absolutely social endorses opening
oneself towards the other, without hesitation and reservation and without any clear anticipation of
possible consequences (cf. above). Furthermore, following Derrida’s (1995) claim that
responsibility ‘needs to be … unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be
absolutely responsible’ (p. 61), it becomes arguable that to have its own meaning, unconditional
help ‘must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is the madness of the
impossible’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 45). The undeconstructible ‘social’ is hence the subject matter of
pure and unconditional affirmation and, most essentially, something unimaginable and
inconceivable by the current standards of imagining and representation. Unconditionality, so it
seems, implies getting rid of the analytic link between the ‘social’ and ‘economic or political
structures’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 350), since it is only by leaving meaning open or at least elusive
that the ‘social’ gets to escape being inscribed into economic codes of conduct and ideals of good
governance. One gets to see, then, that to be truly social means not only that ‘(t)he “economy of
sacrifice” must lead … to a “sacrifice of economy”’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001), but, in a paradoxical
manner, that one needs to be ‘prepared to be unprepared’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 70) and to accept that
‘what arrives arrives’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 247). On the face of it, where Derrida’s treatise of non-
knowledge and the secret singles out a space beyond economy, it must simultaneously be borne
in mind that it points at the possibility of invention, where ‘inventiveness can consist only in
opening, in un-closeting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage
toward the other’ (Derrida, 1989, p. 60). Moving beyond knowledge thus means unlocking new
areas of sensation and, following Albrecht-Crane (2005), ‘new colours, noises, rhythms, odours,
textures, longings, desires, practices, feelings, beliefs, gestures and knowledges’, thus giving rise
to ‘new ways to appreciate life and new ways to live’ (p. 140). Derrida’s (1989) thought-
provoking claim that ‘the only possible invention is invention of the impossible’ (p. 60) carries
this argument even further, as it implies that invention which simply extrapolates the new from
the given does in fact invent nothing (hence pseudo-invention). True invention, in contrast,
always ‘presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract’ (Derrida, 1992b, p.
312) and hence emphasizes the production of new events which are neither enforceable nor
programmable (Hillis Miller, 2001). It probably hardly needs mention that invention à la Derrida
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does not mimic the route of innovation literature which denotes novelty as the product of
thoroughly planned knowledge-sharing technologies (Meier Sørensen, 2006). After all, the
invention of a different future (Reynolds, 2004) only becomes possible if the secret of non-
knowledge remains untouched or remains ‘irreducible to presence or to presentation’ (Derrida,
1995, p. 65).
There is still another aspect which sets the present understanding of invention apart from
the current literature on innovation: the embodiment of invention. To be sure, Derrida’s work not
only emphasizes the undeconstructible right of alterity and difference, but also provides a view
which construes invention and novelty as events that invariably and necessarily affect our bodily
senses. That is, invention always happens ‘through a crisis in which the body trembles’ (Meier
Sørensen, 2006, p. 135). Derrida’s (1995) beautiful treatise of Kierkegaard’s notion of
‘mysterium tremendum’ is most illustrative of the embodied aspect of invention because it
highlights that the encounter with absolute otherness represents an experience where ‘we neither
know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret. We are afraid of the
fear, we anguish over the anguish, and we tremble’ (p. 54). Fear and trembling, as Derrida (1995)
explained elsewhere, indicate that the encounter with the other or absolute otherness exceeds ‘my
seeing and my knowing’ (p. 54) and thus denote the experience of anticipated (yet unimaginable
and uncontrollable) change. Fear and trembling, signifying the ‘irrepressible shaking’ of the body
(Derrida, 1995, p 53), is nothing else than the embodied, sensual response in the face of an
unknown future and, most fundamentally, the always present possibility of failure (i.e. the chance
to take the wrong or irresponsible decision). It follows, then, that the experience of fear and
trembling is at the same time the precondition of genuine invention and the springboard for
personal transformation or becoming-other. As with Deleuze’s (1994) metaphor of swimming,
fear and trembling signifies movement and ‘means composing the singular points of one’s own
body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also
propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world’ (p. 15). The encounter with otherness,
so it seems, stimulates transformation in the sense that one’s encounter with the other will
invariably lead one (or both) changed. Or, as Meier Sørensen’s (2006) convincingly argued in
that context, the event which makes one fear and tremble is ‘where new and unforeseen
connections … become possible’ (p. 135; slightly modified).
In view of the argument that invention is not simply insecure (in the face of unknown and
uncontrollable risks), but necessarily has to be so (since else there would be no way to talk about
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a future ‘worth living for’), we can intensify this claim by positing that unconditional help entails
that a decision vis-à-vis the secrecy (of absolute otherness) requires a ‘moment of madness’. Yet
again, ‘madness’ neither refers to the risk-taking propensity of some dare-devilish personality –
as proclaimed, for instance, by current entrepreneurship literature (cf. Chapter 2) – nor to an odd
kind of pathology which seems to characterize social man. Instead, invention is mad because it
must necessarily exceed available (technical or economic) rationalities and calculative reasoning
and hence presupposes a courageous ‘leap of faith’ beyond the facts at hand. Madness, on the
face of it, is the only valid category to accommodate the idea that the possibility of invention is
invariably related with a journey into unknown waters, so to speak. Where madness alludes to the
risk and the uncertain future being associated with one’s encounter with otherness, it is implicated
that this encounter heralds a transformative experience where both self and other are
fundamentally affected (i.e. shaken in their foundation). Derrida’s notion of madness must
therefore not lead to the false conclusion that invention, conceived as the establishment of new
ways of living, signifies a miraculous gift, but rather that it presupposes both uncomplaining and
restless work (Serres, 2000). To lend weight to the assertion that the ‘social’ must always remain
both urgent and concrete, it is in the ensuing conclusion that I will come full circle with the
current topic, social entrepreneurship. I will thereby allow for the observation that all social
events subsist in both the past and the future, in and beyond economy, in order then to elaborate
on the role of critical thinking in conjunction with the utopian trajectory of minor social
entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
… the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naiveté
of our ideals, and while we thought that we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may
not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 22)
Lyotard (1988), among others, has written about the importance of doing away with the
ostensible consistency and transcendental explanatory power of grand narratives; at the same
time, he made clear that one should not shy away from the complexity and paradoxes entailed in
small narratives of social reality. This chapter had a comparable aim as I tried to juxtapose the
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limitedness of a performative (i.e. conditional) interpretation of the ‘social’ with the profound
complexity inherent to a pure understanding of the concept. However, this critical engagement
with the commonplace use of the ‘social’ in such concepts like ‘social capital’ or ‘development
aid’ had a broader significance because it adumbrated, by analogy, that the concept ‘social
entrepreneurship’, in its stage of ‘infancy’, has more often than not been prescribed and
instrumentalized by virtue of managerial reason and thereby all too often been construed as ‘a
task of modernizing one’s thought and language’ (Evers, 2006, p. 7). After all, this Derridean
elaboration is anything but indicative of a new master plan of the ‘social’ of entrepreneurship.
Nor does the juxtaposition of conditional and unconditional ways of being or, more precisely,
becoming propagate the establishment of a post-economic era, as suggested by certain
postcolonial scholars (e.g. Escobar, 1995). Instead, unconditionality denotes an artistic (and
invariably risky) balancing act at the interface between social and economic rationalities. To
hence make palpable the realization that Derrida’s ideas do not endorse the obliteration of
economy, but rather conceive the opposition between unconditionality and economy as a fertile
(though burdensome) tension and a leveraging force for responsible social action, I will now
delineate a hybrid modus operandi of social entrepreneurship and, thereafter, discuss if and to
what extent this conceptualization lends itself to the formulation of utopia.
Hybridity: The Perpetual Negotiation of Incommensurate Differences
There is no way of stepping outside the Law entirely; there is no alternative order beyond and
separate from the circuits of power [e.g. economy] within which must operate. (Bogue,
2005, p. 116)
The question over supremacy between the social and the economic aspect of social
entrepreneurship has undoubtedly concerned scholars since the concept entered the sphere of
academia. Anderson et al.’s (2006) elaboration most plainly illustrates this concern, especially the
part where the authors ask: ‘how dominant must the social mission be? Must social goals be the
only aims of the operation, or is some intention to make profits admitted as well?’ As discussed
in Chapter 1, it is not uncommon to encounter texts on social entrepreneurship which proclaim a
‘relative priority’ of ‘social versus economic wealth creation’ (Mair, Seelos & Borwankar, 2005,
p. 434), or vice versa (Drayton, 2006; Goff, 2006). I have thereby briefly argued in the
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concluding part of Chapter 3 that these sorts of enunciations either capitalize on the simplistic
assumption that the ‘social’ and ‘economic’ are strictly distinct spheres or that they can be
harmonized in a more or less effortless manner. Though it is beyond doubt that the enquiry into
the relationship between the ‘social’ and ‘economic’ raises an important issue, I also contend that
the questions asked by Anderson et al. lead us in the wrong direction. That is to say that seeking a
solution to the question ‘how much is enough’ appears futile, since it implies that the ‘social’ and
‘economic’ are measurable attributes and thus amenable to the kind of knowledge which allows
for managerial governance. Having rejected Anderson et al.’s attempt of fixing the ‘social’ of
entrepreneurship, it appears important to endorse an account which throws a different light on the
blend of the ‘social’ and ‘economic’.
Summoning Derrida to begin this quest, we are reminded that the two orders of the
unconditional (i.e. absolute responsibility, friendship, hospitality, etc.) and the conditional (i.e.
economy, law, etc.) are in a relation of contradiction where they remain both irreducible to one
another and yet indissociable. In obvious opposition to the view endorsed by Anderson et al.
(2006) – which seems to suggest that the ratio between the social and the economic can be
determined from the drawing table, so to speak – Derrida’s work implies that the social and
economic sphere of whatever event always belong together and, second, that there is no
possibility of reducing (or appropriating) one domain to the other. By implication, this view, so it
seems, advocates a hybrid conceptualization of social entrepreneurship which takes into account
that the social always impinges on the economic and the economic invariably penetrates the
social realm while neither side is supposed to gain the definitive upper hand (cf. Chapter 3).
There is, however, a constraint inherent in the present use of the term ‘hybridity’, namely that
social entrepreneurship scholars have already construed it as a chiefly innate and stable essence
of organizations. In other words, business and management scholars more often than not use the
concept ‘hybridity’ to circumscribe a static relation between the social and economic aspects of
organizations and thereby pretend that hybridity represents an attribute a given organization can
either possess or not possess. It is important to notice here that there are two slightly different
ways in which such an essentialist perspective of hybridity is established. In a nutshell, there are
first those writings which proclaim that hybridity can be determined through a continuum that
spans a polarity between unambiguous sectors (i.e. business, government) on the one hand and
hybrids (i.e. non-profits, voluntary organizations) on the other. This view holds that organizations
can be described through their position on the continuum, meaning that one can say with
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precision if a given organization is ‘pure’ or hybrid, that is, if it operates on a single set of
practices and logics or if it instead comprises elements of both poles (Billis, 2003). The point
worth adding is that the continuum is employed not just to denote the amount of pureness or
hybridity respectively,
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but, most fundamentally, to employ this knowledge so as to reflect on
how to better manage the given organization and on how to make it more effective (Austin et al.,
2003). On the face of it, the continuum in the first route to hybridity is primarily conceived as a
diagnostic tool which allows one to define proportionate measures for consciously managing the
dynamic fit among the respective elements (Crossan, Bell & Ibbotson, 2005). The second route to
hybridity is basically grounded on the notion of ‘blurring boundaries’.
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In specific terms, this
understanding of hybridity is based on the premise that the conduct of contemporary non-profits
and non-governmental organizations cannot be subsumed under or explained by traditional
schemata of profit- or not-for-profit management. In contrast to the previous view which
presupposes the existence of a spectrum of social and economic indicators, ‘blurring boundaries’
refers to the proposition that the ‘third sector should be seen as an intermediate area with quite
open borders and grey zones’ (Evers, 2006, p. 8). Though this view quite evidently disqualifies
the assumption of distinct organizations or sectors, it is particularly noteworthy that the notion of
‘blurring boundaries’ does not proclaim an equal valuation of for- and non-profit logics and
practices, since it more often than not endorses that the non-profit and/or non-governmental
sectors need to be reshaped, for the sake of their own survival, by virtue of a (business)
entrepreneurial spirit (Evers, 2006). In other words, hybridity, as currently used in conjunction
with ‘blurring boundaries’, is not taken to denote the mutual influence or even co-implication of
social and economic parameters, but as the conscious re-engineering of non-profit and/or non-
governmental organizations according to the logic of the business sector (Crossan, Bell &
Ibbotson, 2005).
What is left out in both of these approaches is, among other things, that hybridity can be
pinpointed as a transient, ephemeral phenomenon; i.e. as a process rather than as a stable essence.
I would like to repudiate this omission by contending that hybridity should be used to delineate
the excessive dynamic of all social action and hence to emphasize that both the strict separation
between economic calculation and social action as well as the idea of managerial governance of
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A distinction which quite obviously implies an unequal hierarchy (Derrida, 1981).
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Notice that ‘blurred boundaries’ stands in opposition to the notion of ‘dual bottom line’ being discussed in the
context of social capital. Essentially, where the former concept endorses the annulment of boundaries, it is the latter
perspective which proclaims that the distinction between the economic and social sphere still persists.
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hybridity are probably more to be seen as theoretical exercises than as true pragmatic, not to say
prudent, possibilities. Moreover, hybridity, in my assessment, should be used to delineate that the
‘social’ is part of a rich and pluralistic (not only economic, but also political, cultural, etc.; cf.
Pile & Thrift, 2001) heritage and presence (Evers, 2006) and, most fundamentally, that these
incommensurable aspects are in constant dialogue or, more precisely, in a relation of perpetual
contestation. It follows from this that though Derrida’s idea of ‘unconditionality’ at first sight
appears to denote a space beyond economy, hybridity, the way I use it in the present argument,
does not mean to ignore the pragmatic demands of social entrepreneurial endeavors nor to ‘brush
off’ the given legacy by dint of Schumpeterian (1975) creative destruction. In light of the
previous inquiry into development in which I came to highlight the inventive side of
unconditionality and proclaimed that such a mode of conduct endorses the view that one should
accept ‘the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing
everything, or killing everyone’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 71) – so that it ultimately remains uncertain
whether the other is a ‘good person, or may be the devil’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 70) – , it must remain
undoubted that this is not to be read as a revolutionary manifesto which exhibits no interest, not
to say respect, for the economics and pragmatics of social entrepreneurship. Quite the contrary,
the understanding of hybridity which derives from Derrida’s (2004) work holds, first, that the
‘social’ is in various parts and to different degrees economically embedded (and vice versa) and,
second, that social entrepreneurship is always ‘torn’ between unconditionality and conditionality
or, to use Derrida’s own terms, must balance ‘a ‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision’ (p. 51) with the
pragmatic reality of the concrete situation. In consequence, I favor a process view over the static
view discussed above because such a perspective takes into account that hybridity, due to its
dynamic and transience, is a source of instability which requires constant negotiation. To be sure,
a processual understanding of hybridity does not pretend that the tensions between the different
logics can be managed (i.e. controlled), but rather reveals that the incompossibility of economic
and social practices and rationalities demands that one constantly and persistently takes issue with
the possibility that one of the two foci might gain a relative priority over the other (Lyotard,
1992). In addition, hybridity emphasizes the complex and paradoxical relationship between the
social and the economic aspect of social entrepreneurial conduct, stressing both that
unconditional social entrepreneurial endeavors necessarily take place in concrete historically,
culturally and economically structured environments and, by implication, that one must
necessarily negotiate ‘between the unconditional and conditional, between the absolute and the
595
relative, between the universal and the particular’ (Critchley & Kearney, 2004p. xi). Hence, in
accordance with Derrida’s conclusion that ‘(t)he undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the
tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign
to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still … to give itself up to the impossible decision,
while taking account of law and rules’ (Derrida, 1999b, p. 66), one can further say that the
contradictions engendered through a hybrid modus operandi are not meant to paralyze social
action, but, far from it, to enable it. This contention cannot possibly be overemphasized because it
implies that though ‘(o)ne is never sure of making the just choice’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 56), one
nevertheless needs to step into the circle of economy and try to act responsibly despite the ever-
present risk, if not certainty, of failure (cf. above). In consequence, the undecidability of the pure
‘social’ as well as the indefinite nature and the impossibility of responsibility are to be conceived
as (or should become) the leverage of all social action. In view of the impossibility of
unconditionality, both economically and practically speaking, it is precisely the tension between
the economic and the uneconomic part of social entrepreneurship which delineates a hyperbolic
sense of the ‘social’ which is the only standard ‘which ought to haunt every judgment of good
conscience’ (Anderson-Irwin, 2001). By implication, this interpretation of hybridity is quite
evidently opposed to the current academic literature on social entrepreneurship which delineates
the issue as a rather unproblematic ‘marriage’ of profit- and non-profit technologies or as a matter
of rational choice. Hybridity, in my assessment, should instead be read as an open, infinite
endeavor which is both riddled and driven by practical and ideological tensions. Again, these
tensions in turn make it necessary that the contradictions are negotiated. This, however, does not
mean that they need to be solved in a managerial sense. That is to say that the contradictions
between the unconditional and conditional, between the economic and the uneconomic aspect of
social entrepreneurship must remain in communication with each other, while nevertheless
keeping them endlessly diverging (Poxon & Stivale, 2005).
My argument for a concept of ‘hybridity’ which implies that social entrepreneurial
undertakings must leave room at the border of their activities for excess, that is, for what is
unprogrammable and incalculable by economic and managerial reason, might lead critical minds
now to argue that this Derridean elaboration of mine has merely capitalized on the appeal (and
force) of fantasy. Yet, there is no basis for such an assertion, since Derrida’s work quite clearly
implies that social, ethical, responsible (or whatever term seems apt to circumscribe the encounter
with absolute otherness) deeds are intimately connected with immediate urgencies and hence
596
concrete events. In the rest of this chapter I will elaborate in what ways this Derridean musing
respectively relates to or diverges from the idea of utopia.
Social Entrepreneurship as Utopia, Perhaps …
… we must revitalize thinking as a critical process; again let thinking throw life into a crisis.
(Meier Sørensen, 2006, p. 137)
Arguably, the contribution of organizations to the social order in today’s society is a modern
truism. Having addressed this question, however preliminarily, in relation to social
entrepreneurship and through selected works of Derrida, I have so far tried to reveal the
immanent difficulty and contingency of all social action. It is thus possible that the implications
and demands which derive from an unconditional reading of the ‘social’ (of entrepreneurship)
might appear expansive (since impossible), and there are virtually a thousand reasons why this
elaboration could be discredited in view of its ostensibly utopian trajectory. To address this
looming appraisal, I will close this chapter by elaborating on the implications of a minor reading
of social entrepreneurship and in particular on how these ideas either diverge from or can be
adjusted to the idea of utopia.
The pivotal question in this context is how to bring together (though not harmonize) the aim
of doing good as well as the idea of positive change and transformation without simultaneously
reifying the image of the individualistic, personally achieving person or society (Best & Kellner,
1991). In terms of the individualized representation of social entrepreneurship (cf. Chapter 2),
one could hence truly object that Derrida’s work does not at all stand in opposition to the current
academic literature, because it seems to construe social entrepreneurship as a messiah-like
person. This is, however, not a completely wrong impression, since Derrida in fact came to talk
about messianicity
228
in several of his works (and interviews) where he revealed, among other
things, the Jewish roots of his thought (Anderson-Irwin, 2001). Yet, I would like to contend that
the present inquiry had no part in affirming the individualized representation of social
entrepreneurship we have inherited from academic literature, since it did not try to re-perform the
228
The notion of ‘messianicity without messianism’, that is, messianism without religion (Derrida, 2004b), reaffirms
the distinction between the philosophical messianic and the various historical messianisms (Reynolds, 2004) and thus
bears witness to the ever-becomingness and temporality of responsible, unconditional events.
597
hopes and dreams of science, especially the route of thinking which establishes the subject matter
as the materialization of hyper-ethical man. That is to say that messianicity does not refer to
individualism and even less so to the passive, or even obedient and idle, awaiting of our
redeemer. To be sure, messianicity is explicitly not utopianism because it refers neither to
daydreaming nor to the mesmerizing idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing individual entrepreneur. It
must additionally be borne in mind that the notion of ‘minor social entrepreneurship’ I will use in
this closing paragraph does not mean to throw out the baby with the bathwater (where bathwater
signifies such virtues as social change and invention, or simply the stimulation of a better future).
Instead, the notion of ‘minor’ retains a focus on change, since it dictates immediate and concrete
urgencies (Derrida, 2000) and calls upon us to take concrete action so as to actively strive for a
different future. Conceiving minor social entrepreneurship from the perspective of messianicity
thus pinpoints, following Derrida (1994), ‘the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that
is, to the most irreducible heterogeneous otherness. Nothing is more ‘realistic’ or ‘immediate’
than this messianic apprehension, straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is
coming’ (p. 248). It should be clear, then, that my previous double reading of the ‘social’ had no
obsession with actively ‘engineering the space of innovation’ (Thrift, 2006, p. 282), but rather
with working out how social change relates with a people and a future ‘to come’. This claim is
significant to the extent that it emphasizes that change always presupposes hard work whereby it
at the same time cannot be enforced. As paradoxical as this may sound, ‘waiting without waiting’
is precisely the modest, yet persistent, preparation of minor social entrepreneurship ‘for someone
or something’ that, in order to happen or ‘arrive, must exceed and surprise every determinate
anticipation’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 250).
In view of the above conclusion that the ‘social’ cannot be reconciled with any sense of
certainty, one (i.e. those who favor unequivocal specifications to human action) might raise the
question of whether this investigation gives any reason for optimism. Worse still, given that this
investigation has done away with the assumption of logocentrism (Derrida, 1976), that is, the
metaphysical belief that social entrepreneurship is an identifiable Being that holds the key for
social problem solving, one might argue that we have lost all that we yearn for: ‘the belief in
goodness, in virtuous men and actions’ (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 40). We could even maximize
potential frustration by proclaiming that since Derrida’s work does not offer easy solutions, i.e.
the sort of solutions that render knowledge performative (cf. Chapter 1), we have reached the
bottom of the valley, that is, nihilism. Though such a conclusion might indeed obtrude at this
598
point, at least from those who expected that this investigation would provide the sort of recipe-
book approach we are used to obtaining from management guidebooks, my argument shall bring
to the forefront the positive consequences of my conclusion. Foremost among these is that we can
release ourselves from the ‘hammer blow of historical knowledge’ (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 42) and in
particular from the kind of truth which tells us that attributes such as ‘good’ or ‘social’ are
inherent, qua definition or due to prevailing metaphysical assumptions, to social
entrepreneurship. I hence prefer to use the epithet ‘minor’ to point out the abolishment of the
assumption that social entrepreneurship is simply about the provision of solutions (e.g. solutions
to the breakdown of western welfare systems; solutions for overcoming poverty, malnutrition,
unemployment or for closing the void between the Third and the First World) and, most
fundamentally, of the assumption that the search for overall solutions (i.e. grand narratives) is to
be regarded as the finality of all thought. In accordance with Deleuze’s (1994) observation that
‘(w)e are led to believe that the activity of thinking … begins only with the search for solutions’
(p. 158), I would like to conclude that instead of seeing social entrepreneurship (exclusively) as a
‘do-gooder’ that seeks the grand ‘solution to everything’ (cf. Drayton, 2006) there are good
reasons to construe the matter as opening up fields of discussion ‘in which there are many
possible solutions, each of which captures something, but not everything, put before us by the
problem’ (May, 2005, p. 83). This shift of emphasis, in my assessment, best accommodates both
Nietzsche’s (1984) contention that there are no ‘aeternae veritates’
229
and hence no eternal
solutions, as well as Derrida’s (2000) suspicion against the certitude of performative systems
which keep searching for simple answers by asking ‘what for? To what benefit?’ After all, ‘a task
whose solution is by the same token the object of knowledge, a task which a simple recognition
would render accessible, would this still be a task?’ (Derrida, 2000).
With this in mind, I would like to conceive of utopia in the present context as being about
the construction of a social space outside existing parameters. It becomes intelligible, then, that
critical thinking becomes an incremental part of such a conceptualization of utopia. In other
words, instead of seeing social change as either an ‘an accidental gift from the gods’ (Meier
Sørensen, 2006, p. 135) or as the result of a sovereign, solution-driven entrepreneur, we could
claim that it is critical reason and even pessimism which characterizes the modus operandi of a
minor social entrepreneurship. Essentially, critical thinking here points less at the contemplative,
229
Ethernal truths (cf. p. 19)
599
detached critique than at the active, entrepreneurial experimenting with the limits of what can be
thought and at the probing of the limits of what can be articulated and what can be done. This
claim leads us to Derrida’s (1995) contention that though the idea of responsibility, the duty of
decision ‘are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia’ (p. 68), we must not miss out
on the transformative horizon of this dynamic because paradox, scandal, and aporia are
themselves nothing other than ‘the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limits’ (ibid.). It is at
this juncture that we can probably sense the echo of Foucault’s thought. In specific terms, if we
would like to give shape to minor social entrepreneurship through a conceptual persona that
expresses the kind of ethos that we have tried to adumbrate in the course of this investigation, one
could say that this figure is less a creative destructor than a deconstructive creator (Steyaert &
Dey, 2006) which (not who, since this again would hint at a distinct idea of human nature)
endeavors to make ‘harder those acts which are now too easy … as soon as people begin to no
longer be able to think things the way they have been thinking them, transformation becomes at
the same time very urgent, very difficult and entirely possible’ (Foucault, 2000, pp. 160 – 161;
slightly modified). In consequence, minor social entrepreneurship retains the possibility of social
change, yet transformation is not achieved by some overbearing, overconfident, (arche-) violent
individual, but by the perpetual deconstruction of prevailing truisms about what it means to help,
to aid, to do good or simply to be social. This trajectory is indeed Nietzschean, at least to the
extent that it endorses putting into question canonical ideas of the ‘social’ of entrepreneurship.
And though some might ask whether we ‘(a)re we all capable of having our self-evidences
continually undermined, … living a life of ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’?’ (Berard, 1999, p.
222), such critical activism, in my view, is still far more positive and valuable than believing in
some super-natural being that will be able to clean up the mess of our world. More than that, I
would like to claim that pessimism is a positive activity, since it enables one to see that current
conceptualization of social entrepreneurship actually distracts us from comprehending that the
state of urgency which is implied in contemporary atrocities, inequalities, oppressions, etc. is
related with the immediate importance of concrete social events. Minor social entrepreneurship,
by extension, points at the genuine and undeconstructible responsibility of all man, and not just of
a class of people who are taken to be ‘all too social’. Hence, there are reasons to believe that
pessimism does not border on the negative, but draws our attention to the as yet rather unsocial
trajectory of social entrepreneurship. I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2 that prevailing
representations of social entrepreneurship gain their legitimacy by proclaiming absolute value(s),
600
which stand in obvious contrast to man’s ‘smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of
becoming and passing’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 9). I see much value in encountering these works
with suspicion so as to construe social entrepreneurship as a collective, mutual task. I would
argue that having been critical about the current signification of social entrepreneurship does not
necessarily signify a ‘blasphemy’, but a responsible examination of those representations which
subordinate social entrepreneurship to the simplified doxa that (super)man can establish
(individually or collectively) a world and life in which we can live most happily. Though this
may sound like an oxymoron, it is fundamental to understand that this inquiry (and the thesis at
large) has tried to raise the moral stakes of social entrepreneurship, since it exemplified that the
more a code like ‘social entrepreneurship’ tends to gleam in the name of ‘ethics’, ‘responsibility’
or ‘morality’, the more there are reasons to use the ‘condition of the question’ (Derrida, 2000b) so
as to emphasize the complex, paradoxical and equivocal aspect of the subject matter. To be sure,
it is only by scrutinizing the idea of social entrepreneurship being a God-like creature, or social
entrepreneurship representing a purely logical, rational endeavor which proceeds – by dint of
management knowledge and technologies – smoothly, effortlessly and without aporia, that we are
enabled to see that these dominant views deeply betray a genuine understanding of what it means
to be(come) social. Since there is no value, and not even rationality, in seeking shelter and
security behind programs, prescriptions and codes of good governance or ethics, it is due to a
minor reading of social entrepreneurship that we can comprehend that it is only by being
skeptical towards our beloved commonplaces that one can truly embrace the possibility of
moving beyond present limits to our individual and collective imagination (Patton, 2003).
In concluding, I would like to recall that minor social entrepreneurship has nothing in
common with the imagining of an impossibly ideal society (as in the case of Third Way Politics;
cf. Chapter 1) and still less with those writings which use utopia as a concept which is not even
intended to be realized (e.g. Morus, 1992). Rather, minor social entrepreneurship emphasizes that
social change is something one is literally pushed into because of the realization that one can no
longer pursue the parameters of the present. Utopia, to put it bluntly, means identifying and
overcoming the deadlock of the current legacy. I would hence like to conceive of social
entrepreneurship as an event of social action that takes issue with the limitations of the status quo
and which enacts new forms of living and thinking. Essentially, this sort of event, while allowing
for becoming-other, neither relies on the brute force of human will nor on the pervasiveness of
strategic enunciations (de Certeau, 1984), but always operates, if not balances, at the nexus
601
between ‘belonging and the breakthrough’ (Critchley, 1999, p. 70). Evidently then, a minor social
entrepreneurship points not at Utopia (capital letter), but at the many small, local and ephemeral
utopias which are made possible by noticing concrete anomalies and disharmonies (Spinosa,
Flores & Dreyfus, 1997) and by setting in motion a process of constant play through which
dominant ways of thinking and acting are thrown into a crises and through which new things are
made happen (Meier Sørensen, 2006). In short, minor social entrepreneurship embraces and
thrives on ‘the ever-present possibility of invention, reconfiguration or transformation in our
existing, historically conditioned and contingent ways of understanding’ (Patton, 2003, p. 18).
To bring to the forefront the profound value of ephemeral and transient knowledge as well
as work out the tenet inherent to Derrida’s notion of non-knowledge and the secret, it is within
the following epilogue that I will get to talk of the end (of this thesis) and the future to come so as
to remind us that uncertainty, undecidability and those aporias which make (and necessarily must
make) us fear and tremble are parts of every responsible prospect. It remains to say, then, that
though the elaboration above has attempted to dissociate the concept ‘social entrepreneurship’
from the idea of sovereignty and particularly from the image of the sovereign social entrepreneur,
it is clear that the response to this plea (however appealing it might be) does not seem to be
around the corner, so to speak. However, though minor social entrepreneurship might be still
construed by some as a dream of thought, ‘this madness is perhaps not so mad’ (Derrida, 2004, p.
60).
602
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***
Epilogue: On the End … and the Future
I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period … it is not anything to get
back to. (Foucault, 1984, p. 347)
Today, perhaps because we are too familiar with at least the existence, if not the operation, of
machines for programming invention, we dream of reinventing invention on the far side of
the programmed matrices. For is a programmed invention still an invention? Is it an event
through which the future (l’avenir) comes to us? … the only possible invention is
invention of the impossible. (Derrida, 1989, pp. 46 & 60)
A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future. (Derrida, 1995, p. 387)
Reaching the physical end of a book, its last page, implicates that one condenses, synthesizes,
wraps up and concludes. In the ‘end’, as convention tells us, everything is said (and done). The
author is allowed (self-contently or even proudly) to exempt him/her-self from his/her
responsibility. Such a view of the ‘end’, however, is largely reminiscent of the metaphor of the
root (book; Meier Sørensen, 2001). Once the end of either the root or the branch has been
reached, there is no other option than to pause or to turn back (along the same trace). Thus the
notion of ‘tracing’, which represents the immanent logic of the tree, endorses either a halt or the
reproduction of ‘the same’. Moreover, the root-type book is based on a linear logic which
envisions the book as a unity, that is, as the ‘One as subject or object’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 8). The middle of a book (or tree) is therefore simply the passage which points at a teleological
end-point; it gets reduced to a Derridean ‘supplement’. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
one ‘will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a
signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject – anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to
fascist concretions’ (p. 9). Though all books invariably come to an (physical) end, it must be
borne in mind that the root or the tree undoubtedly impart a partial image. We must hence not shy
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away from conceding that ‘(t)he end doesn’t mean there’s nothing any more. The problem, there
as elsewhere, is what comes after the end … For everything is achieved, there is nothing to be
found at the end any more; everything is already here – that is to say, beyond the end’
(Baudrillard, 1988, p. 202). To be sure, the ‘One’, that is, the ostensible unity of the book (which
materializes most notably at the ‘end’), is nothing less than a cultural creation or, more precisely,
the result of over-codification: it ‘appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity
by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8).
But if things were so easy why are we musing over ‘(h)ow to end something? If only we knew,
our struggle would have come to completion some time ago’ (Jones & Surman, 2002, p. 190).
Perceiving a certain uneasiness vis-à-vis the image of the tree – not least because it proclaims that
there is, following Baudrillard, ‘nothing to be found’ because ‘everything is already here’,
stretched out in front of us, line by line – should we not hold back and tame our temptation to
construe the book as an enclosed totality of meaning? Should we not dispense with the root-type
view of the book where the end signals a closure, however provisional this may be?
Keeping silent, as Derrida (1995b) contended, would already constitute a modality of
possible speaking/responding which leaves it to the reader how and to what ends the (secret of
the) end gets appointed. The end thus opens up to the future, once (and only when) we suspend
language, that is, ‘a particular determinate language’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 135) which corresponds
with a conception of reality that is ‘univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a
word, communicable’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 1). To iterate and emphasize this position: in order to
enable an opening towards the future there seems no other option than to abandon, as Deleuze
and Guattari advocate, the tree metaphor which engenders an ultimate end, and instead opt for an
insecure and unprogrammable future ‘to come’ (Derrida, 1999). On the face of it, such a future
cannot possibly be commanded from a ‘General’ (to use the term with which Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) delineate the ‘dictatorship theorem’ which hinges on the principle of direction
and unity). In order to let (not make) the future happen, it is essential to employ the principle of
the rhizome and, by implication, a language that allows for multiple entryways ‘along the lines of
an other writing’ (Derrida, 1981, p. 53; emphasis in original). ‘To come’ is or, more precisely,
continuously becomes the condition which evades all possibility of a priori planning and pure
reasoning; on the contrary, it unfolds as a decent (though intractable), never ending and thus open
movement. ‘To come’ simultaneously induces a moment of utopia, conceived as that which is
missing (Levitas, 2000), but might never be attained (Derrida, 2001), and infinite hopefulness and
614
faith. The condition of ‘to come’ must therefore be set apart from those endeavors which try to
force the future ‘to come’. This said, we have reached the point where the ‘to come’ signals the
invention of the impossible, meaning that ‘you can never know beforehand what will happen or
whether anything at all will happen’ (Hillis Miller, 2001, p. 69). Looked at in this way, ‘to come’
always includes the possibility that nothing will happen at all or that the end does not contain, in
any sense, the possibility of a different future. Given this moment of undecidability at the
(physical) end of this thesis, the only category which seems legitimate and which does justice to
our aporia of knowing-not knowing how to proceed (Jones, 2003) is the ‘perhaps’. Thus by
having hope in the future whilst resisting the temptation both to enforce a particular end (as the
root-type book would have it) or to proclaim the Future (capital letter) by way of just another
teleology (Foucault, 1984), it is the ‘perhaps’ which provides a third, forth, fifth … way, i.e. ‘and
… and … and … ’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25), thereby paying tribute to (and thriving on)
the unknown, the secret, without postulating a singular direction. The secret inherent in the
‘perhaps’ is thus not the ‘violence of the rest that is yet to come, the pure horror of the silent
specters that cannot be named’ (Fuglsang & Böhm, 2003, p. 357); instead, the ‘perhaps’ denotes a
positive instance, since it trades on the mysterious secret which, despite being beyond our reach
and control, enlists our imagination and desire. Conceived in this way, the secret of the future
evokes our passion since ‘it is the call of this secret … which points back to the other or to
something else, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 29).
The idea of the ‘perhaps’ thus appears as the only responsible conception of the event(s) ‘to
come’ since it invites us to embrace it with unconditional openness while encouraging us to …
… love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’.
Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming
of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of a possible whose
possibilization must prevail over the impossible. For a possible that would only be
possible (non-impossible), a possible surely and certainly possible, accessible in advance,
would be a poor possible, a futureless possible, a possible already set aside, so to speak,
life-assured. This would be a programme or a causality, a development, a process without
an event. The possibilization of the impossible possible must remain at one and the same
time as undecidable – and therefore as decisive – as the future itself.
(Derrida, 1997, p. 29)
615
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***
Curriculum Vitae
Ich, Pascal Dey, geboren am 12. April 1973 in Brugg (Kanton Aargau) mit Heimatort Marsens
(Kanton Fribourg), habe den ersten Teil meiner obligatorischen Schulzeit in Boll (Kanton Bern)
verbracht, wo ich sowohl die Primarschule wie auch die ersten zwei Jahre der Sekundarschule (5.
– 6. Klasse) besucht habe. Anschliessend absolvierte ich das 7. und 8. obligatorische Schuljahr
zwischen 1986 bis 1988 im Untergymnasium in Bolligen, bevor ich von 1988 bis 1993 das
Gymnasium Bern Kirchenfeld besuchte. Im Jahr 1993 erlangte ich ebenda die Wirtschaftsmatura
(Typus E).
Nach dem Militärdienst und einem Zwischenjahr habe ich von Oktober 1994 bis März 2001
Psychologie an der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Bern studiert. Im
Hauptfach studierte ich Klinische Psychologie (Lizentiat und Abschlussprüfung je Note 6), im
ersten Nebenfach Sozialpsychologie (Abschlussprüfung Note 6) und im zweiten Nebenfach
Psychopathologie (Abschlussprüfung Note 6).
Im Anschluss an eine Management-Trainee Ausbildung bei SBB Cargo in Basel wechselte ich an
den Lehrstuhl für Organisationspsychologie der Universität St. Gallen (HSG), wo ich zwischen
2002 und 2007 als Assistent tätig war. Mein Doktoratsstudium absolvierte ich an der Universität
Basel, wo ich am 15. November 2007 im Fach Soziologie die mündliche Prüfung abgelegt habe
(Abschlussprüfung Note „insigni cum laude“).
Zum Zeitpunkt des Drucks der Dissertation arbeitete ich als Unternehmensberater der Universität
St. Gallen.
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