Only Penguins: A Polemic On Organization Theory From The Edge of The World

Only Penguins: A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World*
Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

'After us, there's only penguins.' (Anonymous Tasmanian bush philosopher, traditional)
Abstract
Stewart R. Clegg University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
The paper is a reflection on some of the conditions associated with being an Australian Management scholar in the Organization Studies field.
Descriptors: Organization Studies, Australia
Stephen Linstead Sunderland Business School, University of Sunderland, UK

Graham Sewell University of Melbourne, Australia
Introduction: The Australia Syndrome

Not too long ago, we three Aussies were sent a copy of the following unsolicited note from an ambitious colleague to their head of department.' The colleague had recently arrived in Australia from the United States. Names have been changed to protect both the worthy and the unworthy.
'You might find it of use to know that my forthcoming Journal of Pelmanism article appears to be the only "A" journal publication by any Australian pelmanism academic this year. There are only three "A" (top rated) journals on pelmanism. I have reviewed the issues so far this year and no other Australian academics are among the authors. Also, as far as I have been able to find out, there has never before been an "A" journal article carrying the University of Billabong name in any field of procrastination. If this is true, it would make my Journal of Pelmanism article the most prestigious publication (in terms of international recognition) in the history of the Department of Procrastination.'
Organization
Studies 2000, 21/0 103-117 C 2000 EGOS 0170-8406/00 0021-0006 $3.00
We were intrigued by how easy it appeared to be to become Australian, and to leap to the top of the eucalyptus tree in a single jorellian bound by virtue of an article researched and completed in the United States without even cracking a tinny.2 (To be fair, the article did involve research in two countries, but there were four co-authors, which might have merited the demolition of a slab). We were not only intrigued, but also perhaps more than a little ropeable at the suggestion that our own publications were less than fair dinkum. But we can spot a raw prawn, and after washing down a couple of Balmain Bugs from the barbie with a drop of the Rothbury Estate, waxing ruminant under the jacarandas and lemon-scented gum trees, we hunted for tall poppies to chop down.3 Of course, why no other Australians published in this journal, which was
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edited, published in America, and A-rated by Americans, could be a question, to our ethnocentric correspondent, of nothing other than quality. A recent demographic survey of the city in which the University of Billabong is situated revealed 88 different nationalities in a population of less than a quarter of a million. Multiculturalism is a real issue here; managing diversity an active and daily agenda. In the room across the corridor from our pelmanist at the time of the above incident sat a colleague who had a handful of publications in English, but a long list published out of Sarajevo where many of his relatives remained under artillery bombardment. A tiny doctoral student from Beijing (who has published two scholarly books in Mandarin) recently offered to help one of us (who is over 1.83m and 90kgs) to move a heavy bookcase. She explained that during the Cultural Revolution her family had been rusticated. Working as a farm mechanic at the age of eight, she said, had made her strong. Imperialism takes on many forms.4 Yet as Bob Connell notes, even today, long after the trip to Europe, New York, or LA was a mandatory prerequisite to any serious recognition, Australians remain impressed by an 'international' reputation, by 'international' publications. They do so, moreover, to a degree that exceeds 'cultural cringe' or our fondness for cutting down our own 'tall poppies' - it is a product of a colonial heritage, the English language, and North American, or North Atlantic, intellectual hegemony.
"'International" means, more precisely, North American and European . . the imperial centres, not other colonies. . . To publish in prestigious journals in North America or Europe you have to write like a North American or European, cite North American or European sources, situate yourself in North American or European debates. That is what the editors and referees demand. And why shouldn't they? That is to say, to gain maximum prestige in Australia you need to see the world from the North Atlantic.' (Connell 1991: 70)
Connell should know: these words were published whilst he was working in the University of California system, having himself undergone the metamorphosis of travel and relocation.5 To take a slightly different point of view on the same subject, some years ago Lord (Norman) Tebbit, the British politician, was involved in a debate on unemployment. Tebbit was famous for telling the unemployed to 'get on their bikes' and look for work, but his argument here was a critical one. He observed that unless the problem of long-term unemployment was tackled directly, by the time the economy recovered, it would be too late for many of the workforce - they would have lost the skills they had, or else those skills would be outmoded. 'For all the use they will be' he said 'they might as well be in Australia'. Tebbit's point was a telling one - the 'Australia syndrome' became synonymous with being out of touch and out of the game.6 This is still a real function.7 One of us learnt it when he failed the 'cricket' test that Tebbit set. At the time, the author in question was on a sojourn in European climes. He had been there almost twelve months, when, with winter's chill deepening and the university elite's trickery getting more treacherous, the desire to return
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from Tebbit-land to Australia proved too strong. Tebbit once said, famously, that anyone living in England (actually the author in question was living in another part of the British Isles - but that only exemplifies the extreme chauvinism of Tebbit's remarks) who did not support the Test team at cricket had no place to be there. Rather than cheer for the English Test Team, the author supported the Aussies - and if they weren't playing then, whoever was trying to beat the Poms. (For the game of cricket, incidentally, this is a fairly successful strategy for backing a winning streak. Australia did win the World Cup in Cricket in 1999, after all!) When news of his antipodean sympathies and estrangement from the host institutional culture leaked out, eventually reaching some super-egos who were, of course, in control, well, that was enough to confirm the rough and ungentle ways that one would expect from one who was not 'one of us'. The only thing to do with such an ungracious wretch as might decline a 'glittering prize', especially when they seemed destined to prefer the 'wooden spoon', was to spew.8 And spew they did. In further evidence, one of us who is currently working in the United Kingdom has been told by a publisher that market research on a recently published edited volume has necessitated a revision because 'there are too many Australians in it', although the readers liked the content. It is interesting that under the cloak of anonymity, they didn't even bother to dress ethnocentrism up as anything else! In addition, he has even more recently been referred to as a 'young Australian gentleman', despite the fact that he is, well, . . . approaching his prime, shall we say, and unused to being referred to as a gentleman, one might also add. Patronizing, perhaps? Of course, everyone knows, don't they, that all Australians are young, brash, full of energy, unschooled, lacking in sophistication and - despite the fact that good qualities such as enthusiasm are conceded - have a lot to learn. Maybe we'll have a better image now that there's a Nobel prizewinner, Kary Mullis, who surfs. It really doesn't bother us. We couldn't give a rat's arse, as we might say. Australians are used to performing a metaphorical function for the both the Old World and the New. Are we really so far from the action, though, that we're not only past the touchline, but also barely able to get a seat in the stand? While we don't think so, we do think the issue deserves consideration. In what follows, we ask some questions about what it means to write organization theory from the edge of a world defined by NATO.9 What themes are emerging, what themes could or should emerge; what is legitimately distinctive about Australian thought; what relationship does Australian organization studies have to the NATO mainstream and its internal critiques; how might local and global connect in a Euro-Austral-Asian society, and some questions about difference and relatedness. We think we live in a unique space: geographically, ontologically and, potentially at least, epistemologically. Geographically, we are marginal to Europe, to Asia, and to the Americas. Ontologically, as a continent of plurality and diversity, officially recognized as such through the postmodern mode of multiculturalism, much of our being is marginal to the mainstream of other existences.
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Epistemologically we are marginal, a place where all the signs may read the same - in the same language - as the Empires of now and then, but where the methods for making sense of them seem altogether more various. It is not unusual for it to be the far-flung corners of Empire that harbour resistance. We think that being marginal is important for the field marginal through choice, that is, not marginalized, unwittingly and by others, the mere objects of repression. To stand resolutely outside the mainstream bestows advantages as well as disadvantages, and we think that much of what we do that is distinctive derives from this position.
Writing Organization: A Thumb Nail Dipped in Tar10

One of the continuing projects of Western intellectual imperialism in the 20th century has been to make the world ideologically safe for capitalisms. Capitalisms, because there was never one kind, and the old Marxist diatribe against capitalism was always a bit of afurphy (see Clegg and Redding 1990). Clearly some capitalisms were better than others: preferably those that looked at least a little bit like the United States, though they didn't have to: they could be based on military dictatorship, fascism, racial supremacism" or 'gangster capitalism' - for instance, Batista's Cuba or Yeltsin's Russia. The United States and its allies staunchly supported all of these types in the post-war era. That the world would be ideologically safe for capitalism - the American version, at least - was not left to chance. Following the First World War, the major US charitable foundations - Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller pursued an intellectual agenda of shaping social science in the United States and Europe. They provided funding to selected institutions that became centres of excellence - for example, the Harvard Business School - and provided travelling scholarships for academics and administrators to go to the United States to be trained. As part of this project of pacifying the 'periphery', one of the most influential 'Australian' social scientists of the century, Elton Mayo (although Britain could claim him too, as he was technically born a British subject, though of Irish ancestry) received much of his research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation (Smith 1998). Born and educated in South Australia, Mayo failed his medical exams at the University of Adelaide, travelling in Europe and Africa before returning to take a degree in philosophy (Trahair 1984). On reaching the United States in 1922, Mayo's personal need to renounce his origins from beyond the intellectual pale seemed particularly urgent, although this is hardly surprising when you consider the attitude toward Australian academics at the time (then as now, perhaps). This was neatly summed up by Bronislaw Malinowski (himself an emigre, first to Britain and then to the United States) who commented that, in Mayo, he had met the only truly scientific mind to come from an English-speaking country. Surprisingly, for Malinowski at least, he was to be found '... at a backwater university in sub-tropical Australia' (Malinowski, quoted in Smith 1998). This, of course,
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is a snide reference to the University of Queensland where Mayo was a lecturer in logic, ethics and psychology, in which he became a full Professor before leaving Australia. At what is now the Queensland University of Technology Garden's Point Campus, in a bend of the Brisbane River, visitors may see the Elton Mayo Building. Anyone reading a recent and extensive study of Mayo's role in the Human Relations School (O'Connor 1999) would be hard pressed to glean that he had ever been anywhere near Australia. This is not surprising for, once in the United States, Mayo never returned to his country of birth (Smith 1998). After the Second World War, this US funding pattern extended to global dimensions, especially the prestigious L.S.E. in England. Here reliable minds such as von Hayek (1944) prepared the world for a purer capitalism than the 'road to serfdom' that emerged out of the Second World War experience of planning. US intelligence must have been aware, however, that the L.S.E. not only embraced iconoclastic orthodoxies in economics and social science, but also iconoclastic contra-orthodoxies, some of which proved highly attractive to de-colonizing elites from the upper echelons of the detritus of the British Empire, refurbished as the 'Commonwealth'. Conveniently opposite Bush House, the fame of its academics spread far and wide through their availability for commentary on the BBC World Service, broadcast everywhere where the Empire was under attack; so there was never a singular hegemony - there never is. However, for the most spectacular winner of the War, the United States, there was no such sense of soft socialism. As Connell points out, in terms of the more orthodox agendas, the post war funding regime sought to 'restructure intellectual agendas' around functionalism in anthropology and sociology, behaviouralism in political science, human capital theory in economics, individual difference theory in psychology and education, and modernization theory generally (Connell 1991: 71). This ideology spread a particular view of the world, of science, and, of course, of normality. The emphasis on 'excellence' effectively suppressed self-critique, which, on anything other than technical matters, was interpreted as a display of intellectual weakness. In those areas of the social sciences that came closest to the interests of business, this suppression of critique was most noticeable, and as we have seen, it remains so (Mills and Hatfield 1999). Mainstream journals frequently reject not only shoddy research, but also ideas that don't fit the favoured paradigm. These may assume various manifestations. They could include styles that don't disguise the rhetorical status of their theorizing: methods that won't measure, or don't depend on philosophically naive speculations concerning an alleged isomorphism between the world and the word, the material and the symbolic. Alternatively, they may be critiques that refuse to comfort the academic community with their readiness to be pigeon holed or the tenacity of their commitment to critique - refusing to be a sitting target.'2 Imperialism rejects those who don't subscribe to its language game - the unintentionally ironical discourse of 'liberal democracy', 'The New World Order', and 'The End of History'."3 Meanwhile, those of us who remind
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Imperialism of its ugly consequences for most of the world's population are frequently denounced as 'irrationalist' in a manner that is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union's treatment of dissidents through it's mental 'health' system. Of course, imperialists seek to constitute their language games as fact, in order to disguise the horrors and degradations of their reality. In attempting to draw attention to the obfuscatory nature of this discourse, the pervasive and enveloping (and, for some, inescapable), phantasm of hyper-reality, postmodernists have clearly debunked modernist claims to, or implications of, having laid a universal foundational truth. Their radical epistemological position has, however, been wrongly interpreted as an ontological anaesthesia and a political paralysis, which it equally clearly is not. Rather, it is a moment for drawing breath before the existential commitment that its awareness necessitates. Imperialism is not just a language game. It is a violent, economic compulsion. It is institutional corruption on a massive scale. It is cultura imperialistica as our Brazilian friends refer to it. It is written on the racked bodies of child labour in the so-called 'Third World'. It is confirmed in the rituals of the orthodox churches and denied in the lives of those who are able to dance to alternate rhythms (Clegg 1996; Connell 1991: 72). Mind you, if those inhabitants of Western liberal democracies who are still relatively comfortably off ever needed reminding that their own position is increasingly precarious under global capitalism, then they need look no further than the treatment of people outside this unrepresentative minority (Gray 1998). The chickens of the international division of labour that started in the 1960s are coming home to roost, as economic convergence, in terms of working conditions at least, seems to be convergence around the lowest common denominator. Here in Australia, the doomed wildlife of Mururoa Atoll and the missing ones of East Timor are our neighbours; the wreck of the Rainbow Warrior rests in a New Zealand harbour, an unavenged act of war by a foreign power on neutral soil. Speaking against the assumptions of the powerful is not a win-win language game. Within Australia's own borders also lives a huge community of the dispossessed - those whom we know as Aboriginal peoples or Koori4 - for whom the traditional indices of social stress cannot begin to convey the extent of their exclusion from society. Yet, for mainstream organization theory, such issues and such people seem not to exist, except as shadows on the wall thrown by the light of American experience. You think we might exaggerate? Let us tender some evidence. The best selling text Organization Theory in Australia by Robbins and Barnwell (1998) does not cite a single Australian academic journal (although mention is made of the Australian Financial Review and the Business Review Weekly Australian analogues of the Financial Times and the Economist, respectively). Nowhere in this book are Mayo's Australian origins mentioned; it is as if he arrived at Harvard from Kansas - a blow-in, like a Wizard from Oz. Fred Emery's work with Trist is cited, but socio-technical
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systems theory is rarely mentioned, any more than the Tavistock Institute, or Emery's antipodean origins (for which, see Dunphy and Griffiths 1998).'" The small numbers of non-Americans cited are usually contingency theorists: Donaldson is the only Australian to join the roll of honour. None of Donaldson's critics, however, are similarly honoured, neither the English Reed nor the Aussie Clegg, whose absolute omission from the chapter on power, even his sturdiest adversaries might find puzzling (and he didn't write this bit - honest!). Australian organizational thought literally seems not to exist - Australia is merely another field experiment in the global laboratory of universalizing US management theory.16 Silenced voices have, however, found a way to become audible in other spheres. There is internal critique on the margins of the American mainstream."7 Also, despite the fragmentation of experience, and the recognition of the elusive nature of difference that frustrates our efforts to fix and control the world, we can make and trace connections from the peripheries to the centres. Some commentators, for instance, have noted how the Handbook of Organization Studies (Clegg et al. 1996) has not only created, but legitimated, spaces and voices other than those of NATO - while using NATO to legitimate these."8 For example, analyses of gender that were developed by writers such as Connell (1991: 73) that connect economic discrimination and gender discrimination, patriarchy and rationality, marriage and power, schooling and domestic violence, have found an echo in the work of Calds and Smircich (1996). Environmentalists who have connected the movement of goods with the decimation of forests, the poisoning of rivers and lakes, and even the fall of governments, link with Egri and Pinfield's (1996) contributions. Norbert Elias' configurational sociology emphasized both the fluidity and instability of categories and their relationships within a field, emphases echoed in Burrell (1996), who identified the need to move between conditions of fragmentation and wholeness in a precursor to the Pandemonium (1998) he was subsequently to create. The interconnectedness of human and other forms of planetary life that defies artificial geo-political or conceptual boundaries is obvious. Similarly, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour's various studies of scientific work trace the interpenetration of systems - political, financial, social, medical, biological, agricultural - with those of the laboratory. These studies (see, especially, Callon 1986) are a discernible influence on Clegg's (1989) 'circuits of power' framework, that marked both the Handbook's discussion of power (Hardy and Clegg 1996) and its 'Representation' (Clegg and Hardy 1996). It is neither possible nor desirable for Australian social science, and particularly organization studies, to reject the mainstream per se, although it may find mainstream agendas irrelevant and unsatisfying. It is far better to engage and to try and change it. We need to find an appropriate mode of engagement without our concerns becoming derivative, although derivation seems to be the international shortcut to legitimation, as Connell (1991: 73) observed. Yet, in defence of derivatives, one must never forget that the America of Talcott Parsons was also that of Harold Garfinkel. The mean streets of the city of Gary Becker were also those of Howard Becker.
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Goffman and Burke were refreshed and chilled by the same rains as were Lawrence and Lorsch. Once Upon a Time in America, both Stephen Robbins and Harold Robbins analyzed organizational politics and interpersonal conflict, although it took a middle class Italian, Sergio Leone, to hold up the mirror to the self-perpetuating myth of the American Dream. Some of these pianissimo resonances could vibrate with more feeling in all of our work. Monolithic ideologies are rarely impregnable when one gets close enough to them to observe the cracks. NATO will always be implicated in what we do, and yet we have to address that on our terms. One of the reasons we are Australian is that it offers a refreshing escape from the claustrophobia of both the mainstream and of customary and patterned oppositions. We think of the First World versus the Third, the North versus the South, the Occident versus the Orient, or the Centre versus the Periphery. Here is where we find that room of our own within and between discourses, avoiding entrapment, let alone willing submission. We won't offer ourselves up but neither do we want to reject, but, rather, engage. Imperialism colonizes those who get too close without opposing it vigorously on its own ground. Thus, Australia is potentially a new discursive space as well as a new geographical location, and in both senses it offers new resources for those who wish to remain excitingly ambiguous, categorically transgressive, marginal and joyful abominations - like the platypus. Equally important is that Australia is not a Terra Nullius upon which we can build an intellectual New Jerusalem untainted by the spectre of our own ignoble colonial past. On the contrary, recognizing and confronting this past means that it is less likely that we shall ever be co-opted by the mainstream; our celebration of difference remains vivid and vital rather than fading into the bland greyness of homogeneity.
Organizational Dreaming
Voice
Improvizations for an Antipodean
From the picture we have painted, the reader may get the impression that Australian organizational researchers are all iconoclasts of some sort or another. Of course, this is far from the truth and most Australian scholars either willingly or on sufferance - play the game of cultural imperialism, knuckling down and complying with the demands of the 'A' listed journals. All of us have played this game. There is no shame in bowing to this 'fact-of-life' although another unacknowledged 'fact-of-life', of course, is that those who do play the game will never end up getting the recognition they deserve, their card being indelibly marked 'Outsider'. Still, the 'outsider' has a celebrated provenance in both sociology (Simmel, Becker), philosophy (Wilson, Sartre), and literature (Beckett, Camus), one whose affiliation we would not necessarily deny. We would argue that, up to point, Australian organizational studies is able to capitalize strategically on its 'outsider' status, championing the causes of fellow dissenters in a loose alliance of intellectual Mensheviks.
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In the light of this 'outsider' discourse, it should hardly seem surprising that a former penal colony, trying to come to terms with its history as the 'Fatal Shore', should embrace the work of Foucault so vigorously in its sociology, organization theory, and even its accountancy.'9 The reaction that greeted the first presentation of what became a paper called 'Radical Revisions' (Clegg 1989) to an audience of American and European organization theory notables in a Dutch kasteel in 1988 illustrates the riskiness of this strategy. 'What did Foucault have to do with anything organizational?' The response was an angry, puzzled, awkwardness that rapidly turned to evasion of the text, evasion of the author, evasion of the other -yet a rapid acceptance of the piece for publication in this very journal. How puzzling was this? Foucault attempted to theorize the body as both a physical fact and a social artefact; to connect physical and intellectual processes through 'discourse'; to recognize that pushing the physical to the farthest boundaries of 'limitexperience' changed the nature of rationality and thought. His labours underscored the extent to which categories that appear fixed and immutable are permeable, an invitation to transgression. The practices by which boundaries are constructed and domination achieved are one object of postFoucauldian analysis; mapping flows of power in institutions is another; observing the microphysics of power is a third. In Australia, perhaps because of our disciplinary history, these concerns flowered fast and early and were already a main stay of discussions at Griffith and Sydney Universities, at least, in the 1970s. The study of transgression and subversion is an outgrowth of Foucault's work, one with both material and intellectual aspects. Elizabeth Grosz (1994), in arguing for 'corporeal feminism' theorizes the feminine body through its physical flows and fluids. Mapping post-Cartesian rationality onto masculinism (Bordo 1986), Grosz argues for an alternative feminine intellectual practice. However, she resists any easy oppositional categorization of masculinity/femininity, distinguishing masculinities/femininities from the actions of real men and women. Connell (1994) also explores the bewildering varieties of masculinity. Although neither of these work on organization theory, through their theory, they reflect the ambivalence of our country. It is one where The Man from Snowy River and The Adventures of Priscilla - Queen of the Desert were filmed, featuring the same actor; where Les Patterson and Les Girls are equally iconic, and where Iron Men mingle with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras as major cultural and tourist events. Perhaps Australian organization theory can take such conjunctures into an area identified by Harlow and Hearn (1995) as in need of development - the grounded theorizing of gender and organizational culture at one and the same time? The measure of support that Foucault might give to the mutual shaping of bodies and minds takes our argument even further into the organizational context. The microphysics of 'capillary power' indicate that flows are reversible, that transformative forces can emerge from the most seemingly trivial phenomena, that interlocking relationships can dramatically change because of the power that flows through them. They do so, not as a
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commodity, but as a change in the relationship, a change in the circuits of interpenetrating systems (Bateson 1972). It might seem as if we are arguing that the convict past, the creation and origin in a disciplinary society, made Australia fertile soil in which Foucault's metaphorical seed might flourish. However, the uniqueness of this place resides not just in its history, estranged, cruel, and unusual as it was. There is also the sheer physicality of the Australian experience that is so pervasive: the glitter and sleaze of Kings Cross; the grandeur of Kings Canyon; the redness of the Queensland dust; the lucidity of the Perth sunlight, the aqua blue of Sydney Harbour and the sails of the Opera House (financed through a lottery); Melbourne's bewilderingly fused aroma of freshly roasted Italian coffee, Vietnamese mint, Chinese dim sum, Greek pastries, and meat pies; the sparkle of everyday life, and the wine-scented taste of friendship flowering in the sun, as well as the aroma of the forestoak - these are a few of our 'Favourite Things' around which we improvize life, art, and science. These reverberate through our conceptual schemes (Linstead and Grafton-Small 1992). Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the concluding chapter of the Handbook of Organization Studies. Here Clegg and Hardy (1996) explicitly located themselves in this place at the outset. Their obsessive sense of place, rather than being no more than a whim, or of as little consequence as the inconsequential whirr of cicadas, as mere background noise, for us was perhaps one of the most significant aspects of their being so, being there, being then. We must be aware of, and celebrate difference and diversity in thought and experience if organization theory is to prove itself equal to the challenge of Australian realities. Power, knowledge and language are central to this enterprise. Understanding silence must be its process. Indigenous forms of transgressive rationality, organizational dreaming, may prove to be its most valuable resource. As we write this, there is a review of the development of Australian jazz on TV. One of the early movers on the Sydney jazz scene, centred on The Basement, left Australia in the 1960s to play in the United States. He claimed that, despite the technical excellence of the musicianship in the United States, the improvization was highly structured 'you were expected to know and use particular fills, set phrases, and you had to fit in. It took me a long time to learn the language, and eventually I had to come back because I felt so constrained'. He goes on to discuss the place of indigenous music in the jazz canon, arguing that although increasingly incorporated into contemporary playing technique, it is still not part of Australian musical consciousness - partly because the music is still of such great symbolic importance to the ethnic originators. Only when experience touches musical consciousness will it surpass technique and emerge through improvization. The story could serve as a metaphor for the relationship between Australian organization theory and mainstream US organization theory. Of the latter, one might say that it is characterized by great technical virtuosity, but that its explorations are so highly structured and formalized that they can
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become self-alienating. Theorizing is not improvization. You must follow the score. But Australian organization theory still has the opportunity to come back home, to play the illegitimate fills, to transgress the genres, to make the forbidden links and reject the easy ones. There is something to be said for launching into theorizing without knowing quite what will happen (the realization of difference) yet knowing that it will be resolved (the inescapability of relatedness). Jazz is, after all, subversive of orthodoxies - another reason why we like it and why it usually plays in some of our work - listen and you'll find it there - and there is every reason for organization theory in Australia to become the same. Improvization cannot take place without thought and feeling merging, seamless and inseparable, in unity. Australian organization theory could make its own way by unlocking some of the categories of mainstream organization theory, and by encountering doubt, uncertainty, variation and error in the physicality, temporality and fluidity of the processes of organization. Unashamedly, that is our preference. Alternatively, it could carry on doing business as usual, being an imperialistic puppet 'translating' American texts for local consumption, or pretending that it is really a provenance of midAmerica at the bottom of the South Pacific. In this way, if it plays its cards and dollars right, it can pick up some overseas credibility from time to time. Doubtless much of it will try to do so. But is it always appreciated? Or is this a contest that you can never win? It was a Professor from a Business School in one of the newer provincial British Universities - let us call it Wurzel Business School (again to protect the worthy and unworthy) - who gave the lie to this strategy. They remarked respectfully at ANZAM '98 (the collective gathering of Australian and New Zealand Management scholars) that our scene seemed orthodox, dull, even quiescent. Of course, such people should know: Australia must be nowhere compared to some place on the margins of the dreary outer suburbs of a British West Midlands town. Alternatively, was this meant as some strange irony, as a peculiarly culturally self-deprecating remark? Perhaps.
Notes
* The first version of this paper was written five years ago and presented at a joint ISA (International Sociological Association) RC 17 (Research Committee 17: Sociology of Organizations) and APROS (Asia Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies) Conference in Mexico (1995), in a session convened by Jean-Franqois Chanlat. Steve resuscitated it recently and we began to rework it, still in a much more preliminary version than this, for the 1999 ANZAM (Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management) Conference in Tasmania in December, the theme of which was 'From the Edge' - a ready-made
context. l. We are all Australians, though born British, while one of us is currently working in the United Kingdom. We consider that this makes a difference to our identity, and to our work as the paper argues. It makes us both more marginal - as 'outsiders' from where we came - and less marginal - but with connections already established to a metropolis. 2. A number of Australian technical terms - colloquialisms - have been left untranslated, for local colour. Interested readers should consult The Macquarie Dictionary, or failing access to this, consult Note 3. 3. On the assumption that some readers may not have a Macquarie Dictionary to hand, here's help with the vernacular terms. 'To crack a tinny' is to open a cold can of beer - always of beer cold never warm. A 'slab' is a carton of 24 coldies or tinnies - bottles or cans
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Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell bought ice-cold from the freeze room in the grog or bottle-shop (the grog or bottle-shop is the place where one buys liquor to take away and drink off the licensed premises, maybe at a Bring Your Own [grog] Restaurant). To be 'ropeable' is to be a very angry, a BYO while if something is 'fair dinkum' then it's 'pretty bloody good' to use a piece of vernacular that should travel OK. A 'raw prawn' is what one throws on the barbecue, but is also where as in 'don't come the raw prawn with me, mate' a synonym for being a fool the inflection should rise dramatically on the 'mate' to add the appropriate emphasis. Balmain Bugs are another shellfish found in the waters around Australia: in Sydney they are called Balmain Bugs while in Queensland one knows them as Moreton Bay Bugs. They are a delicious crustacean and highly prized as seafood. Rothbury Estate is the ideal accompaniment it is an excellent Hunter Valley (one of Australia's premier wine to a tasty dish of Bugs regions, in NSW [that is New South Wales], a few hours north of Sydney in the hills at the back of Newcastle) Chardonnay, reputedly the favourite tipple of an ex-Premier of the State, who did a great deal to popularize both it and the varietal grape. Popular culture has it that Australians are deeply suspicious and resentful of 'Tall Poppies' and have been since the earliest days of white occupation, settlement and colonization. A 'Tall Poppy' is anyone who is held to be too sure of themselves, who stands out from the crowd, who puts on airs and graces, who might be mindful that Jack is not as good as his Master, who, might indeed, be prepared to make any claims other than the egalitarian regarding social stratification. Hence, that is they are cut down to size, usually through Tall Poppies are typically chopped down deeply laconic, ironic and satirical humour. There is an exception, however, and that is in it is acceptable to excel at sports and not be a Tall Poppy if one sporting achievement retains a down-to-earth demeanour and integrity. The explanation for the egalitarian quality of Australian life goes back to a number of roots, including the traditional Irish-Catholic disthe 'squattocracy' or 'Bunyip taste for the airs and graces of the Anglican ascendancy Aristocracy' of the early days of settlement, as well as the traditions of mateship forged between people in a harsh and unforgiving environment, as well as a distaste for the conventions that were embedded in a society in which many settlers were from Convict stock and others could claim the distinction of not being so. Incidentally, it is a matter of pride to have descended from the people who arrived on the 'First Fleet' of convict ships that settled Port Jackson, as Sydney was initially known by the settlers, especially if one is descended from one of the convicts. Unfortunately, none of us can claim this honour. Many of the convicts were undoubtedly petty thieves; others were, of course, the victims of circumstances of extreme poverty and sometimes bigotry and politics: there were a healthy number of Irish Nationalists and Trade Unionists (such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs) who were deported to some of the colonies that subsequently federated in 1901 to become Australia. 4. It even surfaces in journals such as this, from time to time. One of us wrote the following friendly response to an initial appreciation of an earlier draft of this paper from there is no reason Organization Studies. 'I think you don't really grasp what Australia is but seeing it through a Euro-centric lens does not help. It makes little why you would sense to think of us as an extension of Anglo-Saxonism as we are today. Also, would we be somehow more authentic if we cited only Aussie writers? I don't understand this. The point is that what some of us do here has sprung from a native soil watered by many post-colonial some of which are expressed by writers in many cultures. Through them, as well concerns as through the best of the rest of the OT world, we try to reflect on our life, our culture, and our organizations. We pay homage where homage is due: it is important that we have our national pride. It is not Gallipoli, but it is important for Australians to know that Elton Mayo was sprung from settlers on this soil and that Fred Emery, lionized in parts of Europe, was if only because the rest of the world, and even some of us, are not aware. one of us Personally, it is important to me, if no one else, that the world knows me as an Australian: not a Brit, not a European, but an Aussie. That is what I choose to be, which does not mean that there isn't a substantial legacy of being Brit, being European, but that the legacy is overlaid by something different and important at least for those of us who are so overlain. It finds expression in part in what I hope is a definite 'larrikinism', that is, distaste for pomposity, for pretentiousness, and for cant. Some of that is native: but it has flowered and been hot-housed here, and some of that overlay has made the specificity of what we do, and what makes what we do distinctive, so that it is recognizable in the work. That our local sense doesn't translate well, doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is the oft-unreflected cultural imperialism that assumes and presumes that we and the rest of the non Anglo/US world are somehow as if we had no need already incorporated in the world of some place else's assumptions we have to speak through of assumptions of our own. Perhaps the language is the problem it and so seem subsumed by it, even as we try to give it our own sense of voice.'
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5. He has since returned and works now at the University of Sydney. 6. Paul Matters, the Secretary of the South Coast Labour Council, reminded us of this allusion in his 1994 R.W.Kirby lecture on industrial relations delivered at the University of Wollongong. 7. Just before he migrated to Australia, one of the authors was advised by a senior colleague at one of his former UK institutions that, in doing so, he was committing 'professional suicide'. Another of the authors, who had been an economic migrant some years earlier, was also presumed at the time to be committing such suicide by his erstwhile European colleagues. One wonders whether the same judgements - albeit made in some cases nearly 25 years ago - would have been made of a colleague migrating to an English-speaking country elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere? Somehow, we doubt it. 8. To 'spew' means to be overly concerned, overly worried, to panic unnecessarily. 9. North Atlantic Theory of Organizations. 10. The sub-title is borrowed, and here acknowledged, from Bob Connell (1991). The title, Connell reminds us, 'is a quotation from a famous outbreak of nostalgia for the bush, Banjo Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow": And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected (And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar); 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are". The ambivalence in Paterson's celebrated defence of the bush is clear enough if you look for it.' (Connell 1991: 76) 11. Come to think of it that looks a lot like the United States for most of the 20th century. 12. One of the authors of this piece was once advised in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom at a conference that he, unlike a co-author of a decade previously, at least looked like a radical organization theorist. If one is to be known by one's works, it seems to be the case that the works in question should invariably be glossed in the most one-dimensional way, as well as be the works of a decade previously. Suffice is it to say that this was enough to send the author in question straight to a hairdresser for what proved to be the most unflattering crop of his tonsorial career. At least, it changed his appearance. Some years later, when he had returned to Australia, he met a 'big-noted' North American leadership theorist at a seminar at an institution in Sydney that aspires to academic leadership in the field of management. In the course of conversation, the author was greeted in these precise words as his name-badge hove into the view of the big shot: 'I know of you - you're a Marxist, aren't you?' Well, the author in question never was, in any formal sense, any more than he was a Weberian or a structuralist, but these labels are not such instant dismissals nor such ready reckoners, are they? Mind you, the bloke in question was, literally, a bit one-eyed. 13. Anybody who has kept half an eye on geo-political events this decade - from the Persian Gulf, through the Balkans, to East Timor and Irian Jaya - might wryly make the observation that 'History' has barely started. 14. A term commonly used to show respect for this particular group of Australians by employing their own language rather than that of the colonizers, the construction of 'Aboriginality'(the capitalization is the only acceptable form) being a bitterly disputed phenomenon. Koori, however, is hardly ideal as a term, as strictly speaking it refers only to those groups of tribes indigenous to south-eastern Australia. Other similar groups include the Murri of Northern Queensland; the Yangwa, of the Northern Territories; and the Anungu, of the Red Centre. 15. The Sustainable Corporation: Organizational Renewal in Australia is an excellent Australian book, charting the impact that the Organizational Renewal Movement, fired by Tavistock Institute socio-technical ideas, had in Australia, particularly in the development of Industrial Democracy concerns. Now, of all the social theory perspectives of post-war organization theory, industrial democracy is the one that has been least relevant in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the latter, one is tempted to say that this was because of the antipathy of the British Unions, in a Labourist mode, to the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy during the 1970s and the subsequent limiting of that movement by the politics of Thatcherism in the 1980s. In the United States, the notion of industrial democracy has never been seen as mainstream: it was associated largely with the descendants of the 'Scandinavian' states of the northern mid-west, or with ESOP schemes. Consequently, socio-technical theory has never been a major movement in the United States. 16. Clegg did write this bit: I have called Australia home for over 23 years now, and virtually the entirety of my reasonably prolific output has been written from and published from
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here. The exception in the career proves the rule. In the early 1990s, I located myself briefly in Scotland in order to convert my intellectual capital from that of an Australian Sociology Professor to that of a European Organization Theorist so that I might return and assume a position in an Australian Business School. Achieving such a career destination was an even more remote possibility from a collocated Sociology department than from another hemisphere. But that is another story - albeit one that is, in part, a manifestation of the themes of this narrative. That after virtually a whole career spent in Australia, I still see myself reviewed or written-up as a 'European' Organization or Social Theorist, puzzles me greatly. What do I have to do to be taken for what I am? I think that I am a hybrid - in which I choose the Australian to be predominant - although, having said that, one realizes that claims to authorial privilege are suspect. 17. It is much more significant in Europe through conferences like the annual Labour Process conference in the United Kingdom as well as the international conferences of SCOS (Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism), or in Australia through APROS (Asia Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies). 18. It may be noteworthy, or it may be coincidence, but the lead editor of this volume was commissioned by the publisher in question to create the volume while he was residing in Europe rather than Australia. 19. Many Anglophone readers may be forgiven for thinking that Foucault was considered to be main stream in his own country. Far from it; most French social scientists much more closely resemble their North American counterparts than they resemble Foucault. Recently, a famous French sociology professor who commissioned one of us to write an article on 'power' for an International Encyclopedia expressed surprise that the abstract should feature Foucault's contribution. It doesn't account to much in his native tongue. Yet, believe it or not, Foucault's work from Discipline and Punish on, especially, struck a responsive chord with Australian academics across many diverse disciplines. Sceptical readers might wish to consult The Foucault Legacy (O'Farrell 1997).
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Bordo, Susan 1986 'Anorexia Nervosa: psychopathology and the crystallization of culture' in Feminism and Foucault: reflections on resistance. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds.), 87-118. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Burrell, Gibson 1996 'Normal science, paradigms, metaphors, discourses and genealogies of analysis' in Handbook of organization studies. Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy and Walter R. Nord (eds.), 642-658. London: Sage.
Burrell, Gibson 1998 Pandemonium. London: Sage. Calas, Marta, and Linda Smircich 1996 'From "The woman's point of view: feminist approaches to organization studies"' in Handbook of organization studies. Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy and Walter R. Nord (eds.), 218-258. London: Sage.
Callon, Michel 1986 'Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brienne bay' in Power, action and belief a sociology of knowledge. Sociological Review Monograph 32. J. Law (ed.). London: Routledge. Clegg, Stewart R. 1989 'Radical revisions: power, discipline and organizations'. Organization
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Clegg, Stewart R. 1996 'The rhythm of the saints'. Electronic Journal of Radical Organization Theory 1/1: 1-6.
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Clegg, Stewart R., and S. Gordon Redding, editors 1990 Capitalism in contrasting cultures. Berlin: de Gruyter. Connell, R.W. [Bob] 1991 'A thumbnail dipped in tar or: Can we write sociology from the edge of the world?' in Postmodern critical theorising: special issue of Social Analysis, Vol. 30. Anna Yeatman (ed.), 68-76.
Dunphy, Dexter, and Andrew Griffiths 1998 The sustainable corporation: organizational renewal in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
O'Connor, Ellen S. 1999 'The politics of management thought: a case study of the Harvard Business School and the Human Relations School'. Academy of Management Review 24/1: 117-131.
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Grosz, Elisabeth A. 1994 Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. London: Allen and Unwin. Hardy, Cynthia, and Stewart R. Clegg 1996 'Some dare call it power' in Handbook of organization studies. Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy and Walter R. Nord (eds.), 622-641. London: Sage.
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Mills, Albert J., and Jean Hatfield 1999 'From imperialism to globalization: internationalization and the management text' in Global management: universal theories and local realities. Stewart R. Clegg, Edurado Ibarra-Colado and Luis BuenoRodriguez (eds.), 37-67. London: Sage.
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Only Penguins: A Polemic On Organization Theory From The Edge of The World

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Only Penguins: A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World*

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Stephen Linstead Sunderland Business School, University of Sunderland, UK

Introduction: The Australia Syndrome

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Writing Organization: A Thumb Nail Dipped in Tar10

Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Improvizations for an Antipodean

Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

Stewart R. Clegg, Stephen Linstead, Graham Sewell

Bateson, Geoffrey 1972 Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballentine.

A Polemic on Organization Theory from the Edge of the World

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