Volume 12(5): 747–780 ISSN 1350–5084 Copyright © 2005 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Theorizing Contemporary Control: Some Post-structuralist Responses to Some Critical Realist Questions articles

Hugh Willmott University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract. The paper explores how control in organizations is analysed by counterposing a poststructuralist reading and critique against what is identified as a critical realist account of its nature and significance. Drawing primarily upon Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, it argues that critical realist analysis exemplifies a position in which science is privileged and dualism is defended, in contrast to Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory where dualism is refused and there is a stronger commitment to emancipation. These differences between these versions of critical analysis are related to the more familiar terrain of organizational analysis examined in Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis; and, more specifically, in their discussion of the challenge posed by ethnomethodology to more established, commonsensical forms of analysis. The problematizing of commonsense found in ethnomethodological studies, it is suggested, has affinities with the deconstructive impulse of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory but, crucially, the former lacks the latter’s politicoemancipatory intent (see also Pollner, 1991). In Burrell and Morgan’s terms, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is more radical than radical humanism (e.g. Critical Theory) in rejecting the latter’s ontology as well as refusing the sociological regulationism attributed to interpretivist analysis. The paper closes with a series of reflections upon the relevance of discourse theory for theorizing contemporary control. Key words. control; critical realism; discourse; post-structuralism

DOI: 10.1177/1350508405055947

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Organization 12(5) Articles

Introduction How is control in organizations to be theorized? That was the question posed by the organizers of a symposium on ‘Theorising Contemporary Control’ held at the Academy of Management in 2003 (Delbridge and Reed, 2003). This article is a contribution to a response to that question in which I focus upon two, critical but divergent approaches to, or better framings of, ‘the social’, including the practices that comprise ‘control’. These are Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory. The attention to critical realism arises from the symposium organizers’ paper which I read as informed by critical realism. My responses to six questions that formed the centrepiece of their paper are framed within the (post-Marxist) post-structuralist thinking of Laclau and Mouffe, so this article can also be read as an invitation to engage with their work. Critical realism and discourse theory each provide a philosophically informed and overtly political basis for studying management and organization. Each presents a rich source of inspiration and guidance for interrogating and changing social relations in ways that are unthinkable within orthodox analyses and prescriptions for change. Critical realism is becoming increasingly important for students of organization who are unpersuaded by interpretivist (e.g. symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology) and more recent post-structuralist (e.g. Foucauldian, deconstructionist) turns in the analysis of management and organization (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000a; Fleetwood and Ackroyd, 2004). For example, Reed (2003) concludes that if a realist ontology, and its associated analytical dualism, is accepted, ‘then organization theory and analysis is returned to its original Weberian roots, tradition and location . . .’ (Reed, 2003 [emphasis omitted; see also Thompson and McHugh, 2002: 391). Critical realism is thus mobilized to challenge interpretivist and post-structuralist turns—as exemplified by critiques of Marxist and Weberian analyses of control as well as its rejection of diverse varieties of discourse analysis (Reed, 1997; 1998; Reed, in press). Critical realists regard such ventures as inherently idealist. ‘The root of the incompatibility’ between realism and ‘post-modernism’, Ackroyd and Fleetwood (2000a: 8) write, lies in the latter’s presupposition that ‘the social world is constructed by us; it is merely a social construct; there is no extra-discursive realm that is not expressed in discourse; the social world is generated in discourse’. This position is unacceptably idealist because it is understood to conflate discourse with an ‘extra-discursive’ realm, so that changing the world is conceived to be equivalent to changing the discourse. Such a position may be held by some, perhaps many, constructionists and discourse analysts.1 But it does not apply to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist discourse theory which, I will argue, offers a more satisfactory way of avoiding the Scylla of objectivism/positivism without foundering upon the Charybdis of subjectivism/idealism—each of which

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott is based upon a dualism of structure and agency and/or a belief in a metaphysical ‘necessity’ external to [the human world], such as God, ‘essential forms’ or ‘necessary laws of history’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 106). Laclau and Mouffe accept that there is a difference between the mere existence of objects and their ‘articulation within discursive totalities’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 85) and, indeed, stress that this difference is what makes it impossible for such totalities to become ‘self-contained’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987), a position that signals their distance from idealism. But, at the same time, they emphasize that (claims about) the ‘mere existence of objects’ are themselves discursively identified. As Laclau and Mouffe put it, ‘I will never encounter the object in its naked existence—such a notion is a mere abstraction; rather that existence will always be given as articulated within discursive totalities.’ (1987: 85). The following section sketches the distinctiveness of Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking and highlights some of its key differences with critical realism. Brief commentaries on the questions posed by the symposium organizers are then presented before elaborating further upon key differences between critical realism, which privileges science/understanding and defends dualism, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory which privileges emancipation/change and refuses dualism. I draw this discussion back into the analysis of organization and control by positioning it in relation to the more familiar landmark of Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis and, more specifically, to the challenge posed by ethnomethodology. The problematizing of commonsense found in ethnomethodological studies, I suggest, has affinities with the deconstructive impulse of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory but, crucially, lacks its politico-emancipatory intent (see also Pollner, 1991). In Burrell and Morgan’s terms, Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking is shown to be ‘philosophically’ more radical than radical humanism (e.g. Critical Theory) in rejecting the latter’s ontology as well as refusing the sociological regulationism attributed to interpretivist analysis. The difficulty of locating Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking within Burrell and Morgan’s restrictive 2 3 2 matrix is explicated by appreciating their understanding of the political as an ontology of the social. The article closes with a series of reflections upon the relevance of discourse theory for theorizing contemporary control.

Why Laclau and Mouffe? As Laclau and Mouffe’s work is rarely encountered or applied in organization studies, my attraction to their work merits a brief comment. I have found their analysis exceptionally insightful in thinking through the significance of key post-structuralist insights for developing or, better, reconstructing social and organization theory (see also Willmott, 1994; Newman, 2004). Laclau and Mouffe show how, for example, ‘power– knowledge relations’ and ‘undecidability’ have relevance for analysing

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Organization 12(5) Articles organization without turning one’s back upon issues of political economy which animate many radical forms of analysis, including labour process theory. In my view, Laclau (and Mouffe) offers something new and challenging—an innovative approach that is intimidating and baffling to more casual visitors of their work, and which is, I believe, are barely glimpsed by engaged critics (e.g. Aronowitz, 1986/7; Osborne, 1991), let alone by hostile (e.g. Geras, 1987) and intemperate (Joseph, 2002) adversaries who are closed to post-structuralist thinking. This thinking is illustrated in the following extract which highlights a key difference between critical realism and post-structuralist thinking. In critical realism, the presence of phenomena is attributed to the operation of relatively enduring (‘intransitive’) generative mechanisms, such as ‘structures’ that enable or impede the manifestation of particular actions or relations, such as those characterized as ‘autonomous’. In contrast, for Laclau and Mouffe (1985): . . . the autonomization of certain spheres is not the necessary structural effect of anything, but rather the result of precise articulatory practices constructing that autonomy. Autonomy, far from being incompatible with hegemony, is a form of hegemonic construction. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 140, see also Knights and Willmott, 2002)

Central to Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking is the role of discourse, conceived as ‘articulatory practices’, in processes of hegemonic construction. The construction of ‘spheres’—for example, the different ‘branches and apparatuses of the State’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 140), but it could equally be the construction of ‘individuals’ or ‘organizations’—as ‘autonomous’ is conceived as an outcome of articulatory practices with which actors become identified, and not as an effect of generative mechanisms that are conceived to be productive of autonomy. Critical realism is based upon a stratified ontology which divides ‘the real structures and mechanisms of the world and the actual patterns of events that they generate . . . Such mechanisms combine to generate the flux of phenomena that constitute the actual states and happenings of the world . . . They are intransitive objects of scientific theory’ (Bhaskar, 1998b: 34) ‘which account in all their complex and multiple determinations for the concrete phenomena of human history’ (Bhaskar, 1998a: xvi). In contrast, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) contend that the autonomization of a sphere—such as science that is deemed to disclose the ‘real’ structures (see Bhaskar, 1998b: 34)—is the product of discourse. That science, for example, ‘is able to constitute its objects on the basis of regularities’, Laclau argues, ‘depends on sedimented social practices and a variety of discourse’ (Bhaskar and Laclau, 2002: 92). This standpoint problematizes the stratified, ‘intranstive’—‘transitive’ ontology not because what critical realists characterize as ‘intransitive’ is unimportant for organizing our practices,2 including the practices of organizational control, but because ‘the distinction between intransitivity and transitivity is itself transitive’ (Bhaskar and Laclau, 2002: 93).3

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott For readers whose thinking is founded upon dualisms between action and structure or between realist and nominalist ontologies, Laclau and Mouffe’s framing of ‘the social’ can be bafflingly elusive. It would appear to subvert the exhaustiveness of such distinctions; and indeed it does. The very specification of their approach as ‘discourse theory’ (which is readily taken as evidence of a nominalist position) would seem to contradict, or be contradicted by, their reference to ‘branches and apparatuses of the state’ (read as evidence of a realist position). Crucially, however, the emphasis upon discourse does not render their position anti-realist or even non-realist. Laclau and Mouffe accept that social realities exist prior to their bringing into being by discourse. But the production, reproduction, transformation and representation—of these realities is understood to be accomplished through articulatory practices whose constitution of the social is at once hegemonic and irremediably incomplete, and is therefore inherently subject to contestation. It is hegemonic precisely because the conjectured ‘imaginary closure’4 (Laclau, 1996: 59)—more commonly characterized as an ‘object’ or ‘sphere’—is necessarily the outcome of an exercise of power: it is the product and sustainer of a hegemonic relation in which ‘a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: x). So, for example, people who conceive of themselves, and are identified by social scientists, as ‘members of organizations’ engage in articulatory practices that represent the diversity of their relations as a totality conveyed by the term ‘organizational member’ (or ‘manager’ or ‘worker’). Such practices enable the reproduction of their social relations, including their productive activities. But such practices are also routinely and recurrently dislocated by the co-presence of other fields of discursivity (e.g. kinship relations, sexual relations) that, for the moment at least, are not entirely compatible with them. How, then, does Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking lead us to interpret the everyday and critical realist use of terms such as ‘structure’? Within their framing of ‘the social,’ use of the term ‘structure’ operates as a master signifier that is productive of an imaginary closure with regard to what is thinkable about the field. For Laclau and Mouffe, its plausibility as a master signifier is not attributable to the generative mechanisms invoked by (critical) realists. Instead, the degree of fixity or credibility enjoyed by notions of the ‘individual’ or the ‘organization’, for example, is theorized as the outcome of political articulations. Does this mean, then, that Laclau and Mouffe are voluntarists (Rustin, 1988), giving priority to agency over structure? The answer is ‘No’ because their discourse theory lifts us out of this dualism or, better, refuses to be governed by it. In their thinking, the meaning and significance attributed to ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ is dis-located by a more complex formulation in which processes of identification are central.

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Organization 12(5) Articles Identification is characterized as an ‘adventitious acquisition of being’ (Laclau, 1996: 54) necessitated by ‘the distance between the undecidability of the structure and the decision’ (Laclau, 1996: 54). In other words, because no structure is exhaustive, and its closure is hegemonically and precariously secured, the very logic of identification requires a decision as a condition of moving beyond undecidability. It is in this (continuous) moment of decision that the subject enters or, better, is entered into the inescapable but indeterminate production of ‘imaginary closure(s)’. So, Laclau and Mouffe are determininsts, giving priority to structure over agency? Well, again, ‘No’. For the moment of decision is conceived to exist in a relation of indeterminacy to the structure, ‘it cannot be subsumed under any structural determinism’ (Laclau, 1996: 55). But neither is it autonomous of the structure since it is provoked by the ‘failed structural identity’ (Laclau, 1996: 55), and ‘what counts as a valid decision will have the limits of a structure’ (Laclau, 1996: 57): . . . self-determination is not the expression of what the subject already is but the result of its lack of being instead, self-determination can only proceed through processes of identification. (Laclau, 1996: 55)

Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory conceives of the elucidation of differences to be inescapably partial and hegemonic. The reflexivity of critical realism, in contrast, is restricted to a more limited acknowledgment of the possible fallibility, rather than the inherent partiality, of all interpretations. Critical realists insist upon a fundamental, ontological difference between the (structured) reality of the natural and social worlds (the ‘intransitive’ realm) and knowledge of these worlds (the ‘transitive’ realm). Any theory that fails to respect this difference stands accused of ‘the epistemic fallacy’ of reducing, or conflating, an (intransitive) account of the world with the (intransitive) world itself. Whilst acknowledging the possibility of their own fallibility, critical realists do not hesitate to assert that ‘the world is structured, that it is governed by transfactual laws . . . that there are a multiplicity of mechanisms and structures at work’, etc. (Bhaskar in Laclau and Bhaskar, 2002: 89). Laclau is more cautious and circumspect. He ascribes a crucial role to undecidability and demands the deconstruction of Bhaskar’s core distinction between the transitive (transitory social phenomena such as ‘organizations’) and intransitive (the underlying causal structures or generative mechanisms that are productive of social phenomena such as ‘organizations’) realms so that this difference is recalled as an artefact of discursive practice. The affinity, as well as a key difference, between critical realism and discourse theory is, I suggest, well expressed in Laclau’s assessment that critical realism is ‘not something that discourse theory would reject entirely, but is regarded as one of the possibilities for discursively constructing the real’ (Laclau in Laclau and Bhaskar (2002: 84). This may seem like a splitting of hairs but it reflects a more fundamental division between a conception of social analysis that, in the case of critical

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott realism, is ostensibly founded upon ontological and epistemological claims to which an emancipatory ethics is somewhat precariously attached,5 whereas Laclau and Mouffe’s post-structuralist discourse theory is guided by a self-consciously ethico-political project from which an ontology and epistemology are derived. Critical realism is greatly preoccupied with the question of how to retroduce and apply more reliable ways of knowing the world based upon a realist philosophy of objective (but fallible) knowledge production that is proclaimed to produce emancipatory insights. Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking, in contrast, is motivated primarily by the question of how to change it.6 They commend an immediate and continuous engagement in the practical extension of a democratic revolution in which diverse struggles—of gender, ecology, disability, ethnicity, etc.—are drawn together in a way that relies upon nothing but a respect for the democratic imaginary (as contrasted to a recourse to some metaphysical necessity, such as scientific truth or the laws of history; see also Cruikshank, 2004).

Six Questions; Any Answers? In the following reflections, the purpose of the six questions posed by the symposium organizers are highlighted (Delbridge and Reed, 2003). The intention of my commentary is not to discredit or demolish the framing of the six questions but, rather, to illustrate divergencies between critical realist and discourse theoretic conceptions of the social, including contemporary forms of control, and thereby stimulate further reflection and debate upon the practice of critical analysis. The questions posed by the symposium organizers, I suggest, apply and exemplify critical realist thinking to commend how behaviour, or action, in organizations may best be conceptualized and examined. In Question 5, for example, ‘primary governance mechanisms’, in the form of ‘vertical structures and hierarchies,’ are invoked to explain the reality of ‘contemporary work organizations’. In a similar way, in Question 6, there is an appeal to an overlooked ‘control imperative or dilemma’ as a significant cause of the realities that are represented as the ‘knowledge economy’.

1. What are the most appropriate analytical and methodological tools for capturing the complex interaction between continuity and discontinuity, convergence and divergence in contemporary control forms and practices? (Delbridge and Reed) The notion of ‘capture’ implies a distinction between observer (subject, ‘capturer’) and observed (object, ‘captured’). The idea that ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ are more or less successfully ‘captured’, rather than produced, invokes thinking in which language is assumed to be neutral— a mirror of society, or nature. An alternative to such thinking, is to develop ‘analytical and methodological tools’ (another redolent metaphor), or stratagems, that appreciate how distinctions—such as that between ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ or between ‘convergence and

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Organization 12(5) Articles divergence’—are socially organized and invoked, constructed rather than discovered. Shifting from a ‘realist’ to a critically ‘constructivist’ understanding of discourse, it is worth emphasizing, does not involve a dematerialization of ‘discourse’. In Laclau and Mouffe’s work, discourse is not equated with, or reduced to, texts or abstracted from practices. Discourse is not thought about as something that floats above action (e.g. as ‘rhetoric’ that may somehow be untangled from ‘reality’) as a ‘cognitive or contemplative entity’. Rather, discourse is conceived as ‘an articulatory practice which constitutes and organizes social relations’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 96). ‘Action’, Laclau contends, is ‘something that is entirely inherent to discourse. The notion of discourse could, if you prefer, be replaced by that of practice’ (Laclau in Bhaskar and Laclau, 2002: 81; see also Haworth, 2004).

2. Does the expanding need for knowledge in work generate a change dynamic in which hybridized control strategies and practices facilitate the emergence of more ‘participatory’ forms of organizational governance? It is questionable whether much contemporary employment, especially in the expanding service sector (e.g. care work and call centres), requires more ‘knowledge’ or ‘skill’ than forms of work that it replaces. It may be plausible to argue that more work is either engaged with, or mediated by, information and communication technologies; but it is a leap to suggest that the ‘need for knowledge in work’ is expanding. To do so would appear to involve participating in an ostensibly ‘progressive’, yet inherently technologically determinist, discourse—a discourse that invites interrogation rather than endorsement. In this light, the claim that there is an ‘expanding need for knowledge in work’ is seen to operate to ‘constitute and organize social relations’—for example, by justifying the (selective) expansion of higher education in order to serve this need. One way to think about contemporary control strategies is to contemplate the possibility that modern subjects have been constructed in ways that render them/us resistant to forms of control which are perceived to undermine dignity or are experienced as patronizing. Overtly close supervision in the ‘contemporary’ workplace is probably less acceptable as it is perceived to imply a lack of trust and/or confidence in a person’s capability and competence. In an era when ‘ideology’ and ‘history’ have allegedly ended, why should an employee be closely monitored? As an unvarnished ‘them-and-us’ approach has become less politically acceptable and viable, gurus and managers have conjured up various so-called ‘democratic’, ‘participative’ or ‘high involvement’ styles of management/leadership and work forms—forms that would seem to be defined as much by the absence of overt imposition as by any substantive participation in key decisions that crucially influence job content, job

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott security and employment prospects. The use of the term ‘participative’ invites critical deconstruction. Far from ‘capturing’ some essence of new forms of governance, the notion of ‘participation’ (or its equivalents) can serve to represent contemporary forms of control as congruent with, and confirming of, the self-understanding of modern subjects as ‘autonomous’ agents who differentiate themselves from what they, self-aggrandizingly, regard as the more compliant, deferential behaviour ascribed to their predecessors.

3. Has ‘identity management’ become a more critical aspect of contemporary control and what is its longer-term significance for organizational governance? The study of ‘identity management’ is, I accept, important for understanding control (e.g. Willmott, 1993a; 2003; Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). One possible consequence of providing analyses of ‘identity management’ is to (further) encourage or enable gurus and executives to develop more effective ways of ‘capturing’ employees’ hearts and minds—with the fantastic prospect, according to some commentators, of dissolving controls imposed by management upon a previously infantilized workforce (Cloke and Goldsmith, 2002). On the other hand, by examining ‘identity management’ critically, it may be possible for employees, managers included, to subvert such inflated claims and more ably resist socially destructive effects. Greater emphasis may, for example, be given to discourses (e.g post-feminism) that foster ‘identities’ which challenge and supplant forms and theories of control that are unintentionally and unnecessarily oppressive or demeaning.

4. What sort of ‘coping strategies and tactics’ are managers and workers adopting in the face of powerful forces that are reshaping the control forms emerging in the contemporary world of work? This question assumes that ‘control forms’ are being reshaped by ‘powerful forces’. This formulation risks denying what has been termed the ‘dialectic of control’ (Giddens, 1982), in which control is understood to be the product of a continuous struggle rather than the result of external imposition by ‘powerful forces’. Relatedly, there is an implausible separation of ‘coping strategies’ from the ‘control forms’ to which the strategies are assumed to be a response. An effect of the separation is to exclude consideration of how ‘coping’ practices are constitutive of the ‘control forms,’ and do not exist independently of them. Again, it is relevant to reflect upon the consequences of a discourse that represents the world of work and organization in a way that presents managers and workers as ‘responding’ to ‘powerful forces’ whereas, no less plausibly, they are actively engaged in the reproduction and transformation of the practices to which a ‘powerful force’ is attributed.

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5. Does the model of ‘post-bureaucratic’ control underestimate the degree to which conventional vertical structures and hierarchies remain the primary governance mechanisms in contemporary work organizations? An initial response to this question might be to suggest that much of the literature on ‘post-bureaucratic’ control disembeds its account of practice from the ‘vertical structures and hierarchies’ through which organizing practices are enacted (see Willmott, 2003). But, on further reflection, I am inclined to qualify this judgment in the light of the earlier cautions about claiming to ‘capture’ reality. Answering Question 5 in the affirmative risks being heard to contribute to a (positivist or, better, objectivist) body of knowledge in which ‘the degree’ to which hierarchies remain the primary governance mechanisms can be accurately determined. More defensible, perhaps, is a response that notes how mainstream ‘postbureaucratic’ literature operates with a tightly circumscribed and arguable impoverished language of analysis—what Orwell (1990: 55) terms Newspeak. Its effect is to ‘narrow the range of thought’ to the point where it is unable to contemplate the possibility of a social ontology whose practical, ontic realization is analysed by Laclau and Mouffe in terms of the working out of hegemonic logics—that is, the incarnating of an impossible, totalizing universality by one or other particularity (see Laclau, 1999).

6. In what respects might the ‘control imperative or dilemma’ be seen as the ‘missing subject’ in the discourse of the knowledge economy? I am not persuaded that the ‘control imperative’ is satisfactorily conceived as a ‘missing subject’—as if this subject has simply not yet been spotted, or captured, by theory. Rather, I regard its absence as symptomatic of what passes for the knowledge economy/society. I favour making stronger connections between knowledge (e.g. of ‘the knowledge economy’) and the exercise of power that results in social realities, including identities, being articulated and enacted in particular ways.

Critical Realism Versus Discourse Theory In this section, I attempt to tease out further the differences between Bhaskar’s critical realism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory,

Critical Realism: Privileging Science; Defending Dualism At the heart of the critical realist project is a belief that (a realist view of) the logic ascribed to natural science provides the basis for investigating the social world. The distinctiveness of scientific method is conceived to reside in its capacity to discern the operation of causal laws in the patterning of events. The properties of a ‘magnetic field’, for example, are scientifically certified as the generative mechanism that explains the movement of iron filings. Critical realism asks the question ‘what must

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott the social world be like for a science of this world to be possible?’ Its answer is that the social world must comprise objects equivalent to iron filings, and generative mechanisms equivalent to magnetic fields that are ‘intransitive’—in the sense that such mechanisms are ‘not produced by men’ (Bhaskar, 1975: 21) and ‘operate prior to and independently of their discovery’ (Bhaskar, 1998a: xii). The appeal to a particular formulation of science and its legitimation of critical realism is lucidly made by Lawson (2003): . . . if anything is essential to the scientific process it is [the] movement from a surface phenomenon to its underlying cause . . . this is a move available as much to those who study social phenomena as to those who study natural phenomena . . . there remains every reason to suppose that economists can yet, and successfully, practice science in the sense of (successful) natural science. (Lawson, 2003: 24–5)

Even those, such as Manicas (1998), who are sympathetic to critical realism acknowledge the difficulties encountered when its reasoning is applied to a world comprising ‘objects’ that, arguably, are produced—or reproduced and transformed—more or less intentionally and consciously by the actions of human beings. It may then make much less sense, if it makes any sense all, to retain a conception of science in which structures, mechanisms, powers, etc., are conceived to operate independently of the ‘objects’ of investigation. The difficulty, as Manicas (1998) puts it, is that social structure . . . does not exist in the way that a magnetic field exists. And the reason would seem to be this: that society is incarnate in the practices and products of its members. It doesn’t exist apart from the practices of individuals; it is not witnessable; only its activities and products are.

It is a difficulty that Archer (1998) confronts head-on, defending the retention of the notion of intransitive social properties that have causal efficacy independently of human consciousness. How is her defence constructed? Archer does not deny the activity-dependent quality of intransitive social properties but, following Bhaskar (1989: 35), insists upon the retention of a distinction between the properties ‘possessed’ by social forms and those ‘possessed’ by individuals, with the former comprising positions (functions, rules, tasks, duties), the latter consisting of practices (activities), and with positions predating practices. Only in this way, it is argued, can ‘the slide’ (Archer, 1998: 200) towards some version of structuration theory—where structure is conceived to exist in the generating moments of the constitution of individuals and their practices, rather than as something that has an existence independent of the practices, and which exerts a (more or less acknowledged) influence upon them—be halted. This ‘slide’ must be resisted as it is incompatible with the topography ascribed to science — with the requirement that there are generative mechanisms giving rise to activities. Archer’s case for a social ontology that separates individuals/practices from social forms/ positions is worth quoting at some length:

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Organization 12(5) Articles . . . positions must predate the practices they engender: although activity is necessarily ceaseless for society to be, it is discontinuous in nature because changes in society’s structure then condition practices in distinctively different ways. Thus, the ‘causal effects of the structure on individuals are manifested in certain structured interests, resources, powers, constraints and predicaments that are built into each position by the web of relationships. These comprise the material circumstances in which people must act and which motivate them to act in certain ways’. And these ways which pattern social interaction are incomprehensible without back reference to the conditional influences (which are thus prior) of the position, the resources associated with it and the interests vested in it, none of which can be captured by a seamless web of ‘practices’. (Archer, 1998: 201, citing Porpora, 1989: 206; see also Lawson, 2003: 17, 37, and following pages)

Critical realism defends the separability of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ on the grounds that it makes it possible to expose restrictions upon agency that would otherwise go undetected; and, relatedly, it enables human beings to make more informed, strategic calculations about how to transform the social world in ways that will eliminate such restrictions. There is a happy confluence of science and emancipation in which critical realists’ scientific posture is understood to provide a foundation for critique. As Archer (1998: 203) puts it, separability gives critical realism a ‘cutting edge through identifying contextual constraints upon our freedoms and specifying strategic uses of our freedoms for social transformation.’ The critical realist image of the social world is one of individuals being constrained by the properties of structures that exert causal effects upon their activities by conditioning their interests, resources, predicaments, etc. Social rules and positions ‘are ontologically distinct from social practices’ (Lawson, 2003: 8). Rules govern obligations and prerogatives that are independent of the individuals carrying them out: Each year, for example, I am, as a university lecturer, faced by an array of students who are expected to attend lectures, write essays and sit exams (just as I am expected to give the lectures, etc.). But equally each year the set of individuals facing me as students is found to be different from that of the previous year. The practices are continued but the individuals enacting them frequently change. (Lawson, 2003: 38)

According to critical realists, it is possible to identify the position occupied by individuals—e.g. ‘student’ and ‘lecturer’—and to account for the reproduction of practices in terms of the generative mechanisms that act upon them independently of their knowledge or volition. Critical realists understand that ‘the constituents of social reality include positions into which people essentially slot, positions that have rules associated with them governing the obligations and perks, etc., that fall on, or are on offer to, their occupants’ (Lawson, 2003: 39). On this basis, the existence of generative mechanisms in structuring the social world is retroduced. Overlooked in this representation of ‘the social’, as interpretivist critics of critical realism have noted, is an appreciation of how

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott the reproduction of social relations (e.g. between ‘lecturers’ and ‘students’) necessitates the continuous involvement of the people who privilege these identifications in the course of their interactions and thereby accomplish the institutions recognized as a ‘lecture’ or ‘examination’. Of course, the role of the lecturer pre-exists the current lecture but, as King (1999) puts it, the positions or roles of ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ exist: . . . only insofar as individuals in the past and in the present recognise that role and have a certain set of understandings and expectations about what an individual given that role is to do. What structures an individual’s practices in that role is not the role itself but rather the intersubjectively created notion of what the role is. The individual filling that role is not imposed upon by some prior existent structure independent of any individuals . . . but by the understandings and expectations of individuals who have worked and who now work in the [University]. (King, 1999: 215, emphasis added)

Crucially, it is not necessary to deny the conditioned nature of practices (such as lecturing) in order to question whether this process of conditioning is adequately or plausibly accounted for in terms of the operation of an extra discursive social entity—such as a ‘structure’. In this respect, Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking is superficially consistent with the (ethnomethodological) understanding that rules, roles and positions are not ontologically distinct from practices (to be discussed further in the following section). But, in contrast to much interpretivist analysis, as exemplified by King’s (1999) critique of critical realism, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory problematizes the proposition that ‘social constraint stems from the relationships between individuals which necessarily limits the kinds of practices which any individual can perform’ (King, 1999: 223, emphasis added). Instead of a (dualistic) formulation of the social in terms of seemingly pre-given ‘structure’ (society) and ‘agency’ (individual), the master signifier is ‘discourse’ that is productive of what ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ each aspire to disclose, and is a condition of possibility of their specification. Take as a further example Sayer’s (2004) critical realist conjecture that ‘capitalist firms have to operate with money, employ wage-labour, accumulate capital, etc., to remain capitalist firms’; and, moreover, that such necessity is ‘not merely a matter of logic or definition; for example, the ability of landlords to charge rent is not merely a product of the way the concept of landlord is defined but rather a consequence of their possession of land which others who lack land need to use’ (Sayer, 2004: 10). Sayer’s suggestion is that all forms of discourse analysis, including Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory to which reference is directly made by him (Sayer, 2004: note 4, p. 19), doubt that capitalist firms use wagelabour and accumulate labour, or deny that landlords depend upon their possession of land as a scarce and valued resource. In the case of Laclau and Mouffe at least, this is a weak argument. For their interest resides in the issue of how, for example, the use of wage-labour by firms is

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Organization 12(5) Articles articulated through discursive practices that serve to ensure and/or problematize such use. In Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking, a landlord certainly does not become a tenant simply by being redefined as such. She/he becomes a tenant by participating in discursive practices through which, eventually, she/he is no longer constituted and identified as a landlord but, rather, as a tenant.7 Likewise, it is not credible to argue that the study of capitalist firms as ‘objects’ with ‘necessary features’ (Sayer, 2004: 10) can proceed independently of an analysis of the discursive practices that operate to pre-serve their very existence, including the discourse that attributes necessity to such features. Laclau and Mouffe attend to the discursive practices through which social relations—such as Lawson’s example of the annual cycle of lecture presentation and attendance—are hegemonically reproduced. The internal relationship of ‘lecturer’–‘student’ is understood to be recurrently reconstituted through these practices. Crucially, such practices are not conceived to be the voluntary undertakings of sovereign agents but, rather, are understood as the articulation of hegemonic, yet also precarious, relations in which ‘a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurable with it’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: x). This effect is not produced by ‘a pre-existing structure of material, social and discursive relations’ (Reed, 2000: 528) but, rather, is a contingent outcome of the articulation of discursive practices. In Lawson’s example of the lecturer, his representation of the situation operates to deny or exclude elements that are radically incommensurable with it—that is, other identifications (e.g. transferences and projections) that compete for attention within this relation, de-centre ‘lecturers’ and ‘students’ alike, and thereby problematize its totalizing claims. It is through a process of exclusion that power operates hegemonically to represent as fixed and solid—the ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ or the ‘manager’ and the ‘worker’—what is recurrently constructed and contingent. And it is critical analysis, in the form of discourse theory, that penetrates and potentially disrupts this commonsense solidity.8 What is the critical realist rejoinder to such critiques? In organization studies, at least, the tendency has been to identify, and thereby discredit, all forms of discourse analysis as ‘idealist’. Notably, Reed (2003a: 6; see also Reed, 2000), following Ray and Sayer (1999), argues that discourse analysis treats organization and management as text in which ‘the logics of cultural and economic change have been, ontologically and methodologically, fused into foundational discursive practices and textual practices that lack any sense of connection with social structure.’ Discourse analysis, it is claimed, is interested only in (agents’) talk, and not in the structural context that conditions action, including discourse that is regarded as one of its elements. This argument is founded upon a dualistic logic that divides forms of analysis into what is structuralist and what is not. So, where analysis is deemed to lack a recognizable concept of structure, it must be astructural: it must be a version of symbolic

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott interactionism, phenomenology or some similar processual form of analysis that ‘tends to reduce everything to flows and the constant state of movement and flux which they generate and reproduce’ (Reed, 2000: 528). In which case, it is necessarily conservative, if not relativistic. What, then, is the problem with this argument? Analysis that fails to recognize and embrace a concept of structure consonant with critical realism is swept into the heap of astructuralist thinking where, we are informed, ‘structure has no ontological status or explanatory relevance beyond its “discursive moment” ’ (Reed, 2003a: 6). This thinking lacks the inquisitiveness to investigate the diversity of forms of discourse analysis. Consider, for example, how it seizes upon an apparently ‘extreme’ formulation of a discursive approach where, for example, the assertion is made that ‘the notion of structure [of organization] is illusory’ and that ‘organization is structure but only when structure is recognised to be an effect of language’ (Westwood and Linstead, 2001: 4–5 cited by Reed, 2003a: 3, Reed’s emphasis; see also Reed, 2004). The apparently outrageous notion that ‘structure is illusory’ turns out, however, to be much less shocking when it is placed in the broader, poststructuralist framing of Westwood and Linstead’s argument. Westwood and Linstead, I suggest, are recalling how the term ‘structure’ is deployed to make a (reductionist, and in this sense, ideological) claim about a reality that necessarily overflows any attempt to capture or reflect it. ‘Structure’ is routinely invoked—by managers and academics— to discipline the way in which we enact the social worlds of work and education. In Westwood and Linstead’s words, cited by Reed (2003a: 3) but unheeded by him, structure is ‘a strategy of closure . . . an imposed constraint upon the play of signifiers’; and, I would add, it is a congenitally failing structure. Critical realists assume that ‘structure’ identifies a force that conditions action; and therefore are bewildered if not outraged when it is said to be ‘illusory’. Their outrage is associated with a second assumption: that describing structure as ‘illusory’ announces an idealism and/or voluntarism in which actors are unconstrained (and un-enabled) by the forces conceived as ‘structure’. This reaction is symptomatic of dualistic, zero-sum thinking where the seeming denial of determining, ‘structural’ forces is interpreted as endorsing an extreme voluntarism. When Westwood and Linstead’s contention is placed in the context of their post-structuralist argument, however, it transpires that they are simply noting some, constitutive, truth-producing effects of invoking the notion of ‘structure’. To sum up, critical realists are correct in their assessment that discourse theory ‘fundamentally undermines the proposition that societies and organizations consist of social structures that position social actors within “authoritative and allocative orders” constraining their ability to act in pursuit of collectively shared values and interests’ (Reed, 2004: 414). But this is not because, as is mistakenly assumed, such an approach necessarily reduces social reality to an effect of language or collapses

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Organization 12(5) Articles ontology into epistemology. Notably, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory ‘undermines the [critical realist] proposition’ by re-membering how ontological claims about the existence of ‘social structures’ are expressive of a (hegemonic) discourse, not a reflection of reality. And it further undermines the critical realist proposition by recalling that in Manicas’s words, cited earlier, social structure ‘does not exist in the way that a magnetic field exists . . . society is incarnate in the practices and products of its members’ (Manicas (1998: 318). Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is attentive to the discursive practices that enable ‘the social’—including what Reed, following Giddens, identifies as its ‘authoritative and allocative orders’—to be incarnated.

Laclau and Mouffe: Privileging Emancipation; Refusing Dualism In common with other post-structuralists, Laclau and Mouffe are strongly influenced by the linguistic turn (Rorty, 1967), the significance of which is largely unheeded by critical realists who tend to view it with suspicion, if not hostility. What is the basis of this resistance? Put at its simplest, the denial of ontology is attributed to constructionists on the grounds that constructionism lacks any referent—in the sense that, in the hackneyed phrase, nothing exists beyond the text: The question . . . is not whether or not to do ontology. The question is whether your ontology is correct or not, which means whether it is adequate to your subject matter. (Bhaskar, 2002: 10)

A difficulty at the heart of the critical realist project is the implausibility of its claim to know its ‘subject matter’ independently of the discursive practices that are invoked to disclose/produce it.9 Laclau and Mouffe would, I believe, agree with the necessity, and indeed inescapability, of ‘doing ontology’ (see Laclau, 2004). They would also agree about the importance of conceiving of ontology in a way that is ‘adequate to your subject matter’ (Bhaskar, 2002: 10, emphasis added). But they would perhaps be rather more circumspect in presuming that their ontology is the correct one. The issue hinges, of course, on how the ‘subject matter’ is conceived. I have argued that critical realists understand themselves to approach their subject matter primarily as ‘scientists’ who intend to retroduce the operation of generative mechanisms that have been previously overlooked or imperfectly identified. Their mission is to replace false, ideological understandings with more accurate or correct knowledge, albeit that the latter’s fallibility is acknowledged. Laclau and Mouffe also aspire to critique established forms of knowledge but they do so primarily as ‘politicians’ (with a small ‘p’) who conceive of their subject matter, including themselves, as radically political. Their primary concern is not the epistemological one of revealing phenomena that have been previously overlooked or misrepresented but, rather, the political–ethical one of constructing or advancing a social

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott ontology that is compatible with emancipatory change. As Laclau and Mouffe (2001) put it: There is a process of mutual feedback between incorporation of new fields of objects and the general ontological categories governing, at a certain time, what is thinkable within the general field of objectivity . . . Our approach is grounded in privileging the moment of political articulation . . . This privileging of the political moment of the structuration of society is an essential aspect of our approach. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001:x, xii)

I have stressed that Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking departs radically from contemporary social science where ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, whether separated or elided, assume the status of central concepts, or ‘master signifiers’ in the discourse—to adopt their terminology. Master signifiers are understood to assume a universal structuring function within their discursive fields. Within the field of higher education, for example, ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ are master signifiers that routinely produce a universal structuring function (see earlier discussion). Yet, according to Laclau and Mouffe, even master signifiers remain particular signifiers that are incommensurable with their intended object, and therefore are inherently open to challenge. Their truth is maintained only through continuous hegemonic articulation. As noted earlier, the critical realist critique of non-realist, constructionist ontologies, including Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and complex stance, is that it lacks any referent. What is left out, Bhaskar (2002: 10) declares, is ‘the referent. What realists tried to do was put back the referent’. Constructionists, including ‘discourse theorists’ (Bhaskar, 2002: 10), stand accused of refusing to accept ‘the reality’ of phenomena, such as molecules, atoms, etc. While some constructionists may deny the existence of such ‘reality’, this is not the case for Laclau and Mouffe. They simultaneously accept the existence of referents and insist that whatever reality is ascribed to them, this ascription is the product of a political articulation. For Laclau and Mouffe, the extent to which any ascription becomes solidified as ‘truth’ is the outcome of a hegemonic process—an outcome whose veracity has an indeterminate, politically constituted, relationship to its referent. Since the social world is, for Laclau and Mouffe, inherently open and antagonistic, every effort to fix the meaning of a sign—such as ‘organization’ or ‘control’—is contingent. It is fragile, partial and precarious. Such fixing is necessary, yet it is also impossible: ‘the social exists as an effort to construct that impossible object’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 112). Each discourse emerges in a struggle to arrest the flow of differences and thereby dominate the field of discursivity. As fixings inevitably slip or fail in a process of antagonistic contest, current discourses are displaced, refashioned or supplanted. For Laclau and Mouffe, an antagonism lies at the heart of the social: each political articulation endeavours yet necessarily fails to secure its universality, and thereby reveals the limits of objectivity:

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Organization 12(5) Articles any form of consensus is the result of a hegemonic articulation, and that it always has an ‘outside’ that impedes its full realization. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: xviii)

The emergence and reproduction of discourses occurs as fixings are established around privileged signs. So, within the (increasingly fragmented and unsettled) discourse of organization(s), or within other discourses (e.g. political, economic, communal) where ‘organization’ is privileged, the concept of ‘structure’ (and others, such as ‘strategy’ and ‘performance’) becomes sedimented. Yet this privileged position is inherently unstable—an instability that becomes evident in situations of polysemy where, for example, the status of organization as an entity, which may appear to be fixed, is contested. It is most radically destabilized by those who take a ‘linguistic turn’ that leads them to understand organization, as Westwood and Linstead (2001) note, to be constituted in discourse. The dominant, entitative characterization of ‘organization,’ which has served as a nodal point in the study of organization for many decades, is re-cognized as a construct of a particular discourse, rather than a (universal) reflection of what it aspires to capture. ‘Discourse’, as Chia (2000) has noted, acts to: . . . form social objects such as ‘organizations’ by circumscribing selected parts of the flux of phenomenal experiences and fixing their identity so that it becomes possible to talk about them as if they were naturally existing entities. This entitative form of thinking which is widespread in organizational theorizing, conveniently forgets the fact that organizational action is first and foremost an ontological activity. (Chia, 2000: 514)

Chia eloquently makes the point that accounting for ‘the flux of phenomenal experience’ as ‘organizations’ is an articulation of the organizing power of language. However, his stance would also seem to suggest that ‘parts’ of this flux are ‘circumscribed’ by discourse—as if language is able to demarcate, particular elements as being identifiably ‘organizational’, rather than operating to constitute their identity as ‘organizational’. Relatedly, there is a rather incongruous appeal to ‘the fact’ that ontological activity is the primary quality of organizational action— a claim which disregards its contingent dependence upon the hegemonic ‘action’ of a particular (post-structuralist) discourse.10 Nonetheless, the point is well made that ‘organizational action’ is an ontological activity— an activity that is inclusive of the fixing, and subsequent reflexive elaboration, of organizational action as an object of analysis. At this point, it is relevant to underscore the distinctiveness of Laclau and Mouffe’s material, post-Marxist conception of discourse in which the retention of ‘Marx’ signals its continuity with a radical tradition of thinking that they seek to deepen.11 Their thinking is also differentiated from numerous varieties of ‘discourse analysis’ which, for Laclau and Mouffe’s taste, suffer from an excess of philosophical idealism and/or political liberalism. It is worth stressing once more that Laclau and Mouffe deploy the term ‘discourse’ to disrupt or ‘dislocate’ habitual ways of distinguish-

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott ing between words and what they ostensibly represent. Laclau has commented that his notion of discourse ‘could, if you prefer, be replaced by the term practice’ but he does not do this for two reasons. First, because he wants to signal the centrality and importance of language that tends to be marginalized or neutralized by the term ‘practice’; and, secondly, and ‘more frivolously’, because ‘concepts which don’t provoke the engagement of people are necessarily boring. In order to get some kind of excitement and enjoyment, I prefer the term discourse’ (Laclau in Laclau and Bhaskar, 1998: 9).12 To assume that what Laclau and Mouffe mean by discourse is self-evident—and can therefore be grasped without regard to the context of its use in relation to other key elements of their thinking—is, in effect, to render their work inaccessible or incoherent. Clearly, discourse, for Laclau and Mouffe, is not ‘simply’ a text. Such a view, they argue, is founded upon ‘an assumption of the mental character of discourse’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108). Rejecting both this view and ‘the classical dichotomy between an objective field constituted outside of any discursive intervention, and a discourse consisting of the pure expression of thought’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108), Laclau and Mouffe (2001) ‘affirm the material character of every discursive structure’ (p. 108). What, I believe, they mean by this is that language is embedded in material relations that includes the embodiment of human beings as well as the world of things, such as earthquakes and bricks. As Laclau and Mouffe (2001) explain, an earthquake is not simply an ‘idea’ or a name that can be wished away. Nonetheless, its specificity as an object is constructed through discourses that constitute it—as, for example, an expression of God’s wrath (or creativity) or as a natural occurrence: What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108)

Importantly, these ‘discursive conditions of emergence’ are not theorized dualistically as sets of vocabularies that are arbitrarily applied to give names—such as ‘earthquake’, ‘divine intervention’ or ‘natural phenomena’—to pre-existing objects. Instead, Laclau and Mouffe conceive of such ways of construing objects as an articulation of historically situated and unavoidably contingent and therefore contestable social practices. ‘Natural facts’ are recalled or reactivated (see below) as discursive facts . . . for the simple reason that the idea of nature is not something that is already there, to be read from the appearance of things, but is itself the result of a slow and complex historical and social construction. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 84).

In this way, Laclau and Mouffe pre-empt the criticism that discourse analysis (of organization) ‘does not, indeed cannot, require any further reference to non-discursive entities, practices and relations that are separable from and stand outside processes of textual interaction’ (Reed, 2003a: 7). This (mis)understanding is based upon a dualism—of text and

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Organization 12(5) Articles context, if you like—that Laclau and Mouffe, following Derrida and Lacan problematize and, in their words, ‘reactivate’. The process of ‘reactivation’ involves the simultaneous remembering and dismembering of established theoretical categories and differences—such as ‘text’ and ‘context’ or ‘organization’ and ‘environment’—that have become ‘sedimented’ fetishes.

Breaking with Commonsense Dualism: Beyond the Nominalism– Realism Ontological Divide The preceding elucidation and comparison of critical realist and discourse theoretic framings of the social has been conducted at a fairly abstract level, even where examples have been used to illustrate their differences. How might this discussion be related more directly to contemporary debate in organizational analysis? One possibility is to explore the parallels between Laclau and Mouffe’s efforts to develop post-Marxist discourse analysis and contemporary efforts within organization studies—many of them published in Organization—to break out of a mould that Reed and others (e.g. Fleetwood and Ackroyd, 2004) have been busy attempting to recast. One of the more infuential ‘new starting points’, in Burrell and Morgan (1979, esp. 247–50; 260–70) words, is ethnomethodology.13 Notably, Bittner (1974) argued that established analysis of organizations is founded upon a number of taken-for-granted preconceptions that competent members of society hold to be true about them which are then refined by analysts when developing and testing theory. When reviewed (or, to use Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology, reactivated) in this light, the conclusion is drawn that if the theory of bureaucracy is a theory at all, it is a refined and purified version of the actors’ theorizing. To the extent that it is a refinement and purification of it, it is, by the same token, a corrupt and incomplete version of it. (Bittner, 1974: 74 cited in Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 262)

The ‘new starting point’ for ethnomethodologists is the question of how ‘actors’ theorizing’ is practically accomplished through the activation of their mundane reasoning. This distances ethnomethodologists from forms of verstehen analysis (e.g. symbolic interactionism) that are wedded to the ‘old’ starting point of striving to capture actors’ meanings in ways that, methodologically, are not so dissimilar to organizational analysts’ efforts to capture the distinctive features of bureaucracy. The principal shortcoming of ethnomethodological analysis, from Laclau and Mouffe’s standpoint, is its preoccupation with the matter of how any sense of order or ‘naturalness’ is accomplished in the face of its recurrent disturbances, or radical contingency, as they might put it. Ethnomethodologists are interested in studying the (supposedly universal) methods of sense-making through which, for example, the commonsense notion of organization as an entity comes to be widely accepted and incorporated into authoritative theories

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott of bureaucracy. This interest is pursued without regard to the question of how such notions emerge, resonate and become hegemonic. Unfortunately—and here there are also parallels to be drawn with the illinformed conflation of Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking with diverse, interpretivist formulations of discourse analysis—studies that have some vague resemblance to ethnomethodology’s conception of social scientific work tend to be casually labelled as ‘ethnomethodological’ and collected together as ‘subjectivist’—for no better reason than they are not recognizably ‘objectivist’. This is one of the unintended but nonetheless deleterious effects of the influence of Burrell and Morgan’s (1979: chapter 2) insistence upon the partitioning of objectivist and subjectivist approaches to social science: The nominalist does not admit to there being any ‘real’ structure to the world which concepts [e.g. ‘organization’, ‘control’, etc.] are used to describe. Realism, on the other hand, postulates that the social world external to individual cognition is a real world made up of hard, tangible, and relatively immutable structures . . . The individual is seen as being born into and living within a world which has a reality of its own. It is not something which the individual creates—it exists ‘out there’. (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 4)

Every form of analysis that renounces the ‘old’ starting point then becomes a potential target of accusations that it takes a ‘highly subjectivist stance which denies the existence of social structures and concrete social reality of any form’ (Burrell and Morgan, 1979: 266). When reflecting upon this dichotomy from a post-structuralist standpoint, a fundamental question concerns the status of the claimed difference between realist and nominalist ontologies. Does this mirror a difference that exists ‘out there’ between social scientists, as Burrell and Morgan (1979: 398) claim when they insist that ‘the paradigms reflect four alternative realities?’ Or is it a heuristic device favoured for the political purpose of protecting nascent approaches from assimilation within the functionalist monoculture that, inadvertently,14 is constitutive of a world of paradigm incommensurability and ‘gridlock’ (Willmott, 1993b, 1993c)? If the ‘old’ starting point is adopted, then the dualism is conceived as a more or less adequate mirror of the world ‘out there’. Analysis is deemed to be indelibly nominalist or realist in formulation: if it is not realist, then it must be nominalist, and vice-versa. There is simply no conceptual space for thinking outside of these bifurcated possibilities. If, on the other hand, the ‘old’ starting point is abandoned, and the Paradigms Framework is comprehended as a heuristic device, the possibility opens up of a mode, or modes, of analysis that transgresses the requirements of nominalism or realism. An example of such analysis, it has been suggested, is Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory which places language at the centre of its analysis, yet is not nominalist. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is directly attentive to the privileging of particular identifications. But it does so without shifting, in terms of Burrell and

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Organization 12(5) Articles Morgan’s polarized ontologies, from the nominalism attributed to ethnomethodology to the realism ascribed to functionalism or radical structuralism. Laclau and Mouffe share with ethnomethodologists a concern to highlight the role of language in constituting and laying claims on reality. But they conceive of this process as one of political articulation rather than simply a remarkably skilled, methodological accomplishment.

Political Articulation: The Political as an Ontology of the Social It has been emphasized that Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of poststructuralist thought is founded upon a distinctive social ontology that is ‘political’: every objectivity, or shared sense of social reality, is conceived as a contingent and precarious demonstration of a process in which, as was illustrated earlier by reference to the lecturer–student example, ‘a particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incommensurate with it’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: x). The social is conceived as a discursive space whose features are drawn through processes of politico-hegemonic articulation. It has been noted how critical realism seeks to account for the activities of ‘individuals’ (or agents) by reference to the operation of ‘structures’ comprising interests, resources, predicaments, etc. In contrast, Laclau and Mouffe argue that such interests, etc., are created retroactively by politico-hegemonic articulations that may or may not have the effect of fashioning or engendering a sense of ‘class interest’, for example. Laclau and Mouffe’s position, it is worth noting, does not end up in a counsel of despair. To the contrary, it steps away from notions of ‘the end of history’ and also the ‘Third Way’ where, their respective advocates claim, a win–win solution can, with ingenuity, be found between seemingly irreconcilable adversaries. ‘No doubt’, Laclau and Mouffe (2001: xv) comment, ‘it is a good thing that the Left has finally come to terms with the importance of pluralism and of liberal–democratic institutions.’ ‘But,’ they continue: . . . the problem is that this has been accompanied by the mistaken belief that it meant abandoning any attempt at transforming the present hegemonic order . . . In our view, the problem with ‘actually existing’ liberal democracies is not with their constitutive values crystallized in the principles of liberty and equality for all, but with the system of power which redefines and limits the operation of those values. (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xv)

In this respect, there is some important common ground between the respective value-positions of critical realism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Both are committed to preserving the capacity for critique. For critical realists, the impulse for emancipatory change is located in a dialectic of freedom and constraint where the existence of oppression, resulting from repressive ‘structures’, motivates resistance (Bhaskar, 1994).15 There is the anticipation that, through a process of struggle, oppressive structural constraints will eventually be eliminated as freedom is universalized. Laclau and Mouffe abandon this familiar intellectual

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott landscape with its dualism of agency and structure. No longer is there the reassuring, radical humanist belief that contradictions between properties of agency and properties of structure provide for the possibility, and will fuel the actuality, of emancipatory struggle. Instead, there is a posthumanist understanding that any such contradiction is, and can only be, actively produced through processes of identification (e.g. as members of a class or other oppressed group who pursue emancipatory projects). As Laclau (2000a) puts it: We gain very little, once identities are conceived as complexly articulated collective wills, by referring to them through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups, and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilization. The really important task is to understand the logics of their constitution and dissolution. (Laclau, 2000a: 53)

There is also a rejection of the assumption that an elimination of structural constraints is a precondition of the realization of freedom. Instead, this prospect is viewed as ‘the death of freedom’ (Laclau, 2000b: 208) because dissent, regarded as the guarantor of freedom, is excluded when emancipatory change is conceived to bring about the reconciliation of structure and agency. There is, instead, an anticipation and commendation of the possibility of establishing a new hegemony based upon the radicalization of democracy that involves an ‘extension of democratic struggles for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xv).16

Conclusion: Critical Realism and Discourse Analysis To return to the theme of control and resistance in contemporary work organization, Bhaskar’s critical realism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory converge in their shared rejection of a crude economism that privileges the wage/labour–capital relation as the necessary and inevitable driver of (emancipatory) change in modern society. Laclau and Mouffe place emphasis upon the diversity of relations of subordination and associated struggles that arise whenever these relations are transformed into sites of antagonism. As they put it, ‘many social antagonisms’, of the kind also alluded to by Bhaskar, are ‘crucial to the understanding of contemporary societies, belong to fields of discursivity which are external to Marxism, and cannot be reconceptualized in terms of Marxist categories’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: ix). In capitalist work organizations, processes of identification are understood to be discursively accomplished rather than tendentially predetermined by the structure of the wage labour/capital relation. There is some affinity here with Bhaskar’s (1994) criticism of Marx for emphasizing the wage-capital relation ‘at the expense of the totality of master–slave relations (most obviously those of nationality, ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, age, health and bodily disabilities generally)’ (Bhaskar, 1994: 333), even if Bhaskar gives primacy to class without

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Organization 12(5) Articles any theoretical justification (Bhaskar, 2002: 198) and criticizes Laclau and Mouffe for refusing to make this commitment, although they do not deny its possibility or exclude its likelihood. Nonetheless, they each usefully point to relations that are marginal to, or simply absent from, Marx’s conception of social relations and emancipatory change. Where they diverge very significantly is in their respective views of how these relations are satisfactorily theorized. For Bhaskar and critical realists, the diversity of master–slave relations is recognized, but each sphere of activity is understood to be structured by a particular, dominant set of relations. For example, in a discussion of relations in work organizations, ‘interests’ are identified as ‘causal powers’ that are attributed exclusively to the respective positions of ‘capital’ and ‘labour’: . . . capitalists have an interest in maximising profit because they are in a competitive zero-sum relationship with all others occupying the position of capitalist. Here again, as something built in to a social relation by a web or relationship, interests confront the actor as an external force. Interests are a force that expresses itself in actors’ motives, and through motives, in their actions. In other words, actors are motivated to act in their interests, which are a function of their social positions. Again, this doesn’t mean that actors always with necessity act in their interests, but if they don’t they are likely to suffer. (Porpora, 1998: 353)

For Laclau and Mouffe, in contrast, ‘the space of the economy is structured as a political space’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 76–7). This means that ‘interests’ are socially organized and identified rather than conceived as an ‘external force’ that is given by the occupation of positions. Through a fundamentally political process of identification, people are understood to attribute interests to themselves and to others. There is, then, no ‘external force’ requiring certain people, deemed by Porpora to be ‘capitalists’ tout court, to maximize profit or to suffer if they fail to fulfil this requirement. That is because, from Laclau and Mouffe’s standpoint, such people are subject to a plurality of identifications that compete with that of ‘capitalist’ or, indeed, ‘worker’. But, to repeat, this does not rule out the possibility that such identifications will become primary and transformational. Appreciating the politics of economic space is important for understanding how relations of subordination—where human beings can exert little or no control over decisions that affect them—can develop in which there is an acceptance of their existence because some other identification and associated obligation (e.g. with the community, with God, etc.) effectively diffuses the potential of relations of subordination to be transformed into relations of oppression. Workers, or wage labourers, participate in a relation of subordination to an employer, or capitalist, upon whom they depend for their income. But this relationship is not

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Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott antagonistic per se. It becomes antagonistic only when the valency of the worker identity is subverted by some other identification. An example is the advent of a minimum wage. The discourse accompanying its commendation and introduction fuels an expectation of increased spending power amongst the low paid—the fulfilment of which is, of course, conditional upon receiving an increase of income. Where workers find themselves excluded from decision-making about their remuneration by the relations of subordination, the expectation of increased spending power may be thwarted. Even so, identifications other than that of ‘worker’ or ‘wage earner’ may moderate any tendency for relationships with employers to become unsettled by increased elements of antagonism. Their resistance is discursively organized, not compelled or obstructed by the operation of structural forces or generative mechanisms. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) illustrate this view by reference to the subordination of women and the rise of the feminist movement. This movement, they suggest, began with a demand for political equality that was broadened to economic equality and most recently has been extended to sexual equality: If, as was the case with women until the seventeenth century, the ensemble of discourses which constructed them as subjects fixed them purely and simply in a subordinated position, feminism as a movement of struggle against women’s subordination could not emerge. Our thesis is that it is only from the moment when the democratic discourse becomes available to articulate the different forms of resistance to subordination that the conditions will exist to make possible the struggle against different types of inequality. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 154)

Pivotal to Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of emancipatory change is the rise of democratic discourse that acts to subvert the naturalization of relations of subordination and promotes their transformation into relations of oppression. In the case of workers’ struggles, the emergence of early social antagonisms is connected to the disruption of established artisanal identifications posed by a capitalist system that devalued their skills and status. Later struggles are related to reformist—as contrasted with more radically revolutionary—ambitions aimed at an amelioration of relations in production rather than any more fundamental change in control over the decisions affecting working life. One way to account for this emphasis upon reform is by reference to the hegemonic role played by a technocratic or engineering discourse, especially in North America, with which very large sections of the population came to identify and subscribe. Shenhav (1999) makes a similar argument in a rather hyperbolic and unhelpfully totalizing way when he attributes the process of ‘redefining economic conflict’ to a particular group (engineers) rather than to a discourse that has secured and coalesced the identifications of many, different groups. Nonetheless, its hegemonic operation is lucidly expressed:

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Organization 12(5) Articles By redefining industrial conflict as a mechanical problem rather than as a result of political struggles, engineers were able to universalize their particularlistic interests, to depoliticise the conflictual nature of their rationality, and eventually to monopolise industrial discourse and almost completely silence alternative ideological voices . . . The institutionalization of management systems gave objective and universal status to valueladen assumptions such as economic maximization, efficiency, and standardization. These assumptions came to constitute a system of invisible domination defining what is legitimate and what is not in business, politics, law, art, culture, science and religion. (Shenhav, 1999: 3)

Democratic discourse has been at the margins of struggles in the workplace, with the emphasis being placed upon improving wages and conditions and resisting particular decisions rather than taking control and responsibility for decisions.17 Yet, accompanying the reduced appeal and influence of the labour movement as a source of identification, Laclau and Mouffe note the rise of ‘new social movements’, often focussed upon ‘single issues’, that seek to democratize control over environmental and sustainability concerns, for example. The emergence of these new social antagonisms is interpreted as ‘a moment of deepening of the democratic revolution’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 163) that, in principle, may spread to the exertion of democratic control upon economic institutions. Rather than identifying work relations as the very font of all social antagonism, these relations are conceived to offer one possible, albeit important, locus of emancipatory struggles which may, and often are, intertwined with ‘other social relations in which workers are enrolled’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 163). For students of work and organization who are drawn to analysis that holds out the possibility of, and endeavours to support, emancipatory struggles, Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘post-Marxist’ discourse theory has at its centre a commitment to challenging relations of subordination. It does not, however, limit these relations to, or automatically privilege the significance of, capital–labour relations. Instead, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory facilitates an exploration of the connections and dislocations of different forms of subordination. It addresses the potential for articulating and developing ‘chains of equivalence’ amongst diverse struggles. It anticipates and promotes the construction of a ‘new left wing hegemonic project’ guided by a more inclusive and active vision of how to address and challenge diverse forms of contemporary control, including sexist and racist relations of subordination as these intersect in the organization of workplaces.

Notes I would like to thank Todd Bridgman, Alessia Contu and Ismael Alamoudi and the two referees for their comments upon an earlier draft of this article. 1 Reviews of discourse analysis (e.g. Hardy and Phillips, 2002; Putnam and Fairhurst, 2000) note that its forms are highly diverse, and that they can be

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categorized in a variety of ways. Phillips (2003: 222) differentiates discourse analysis from ‘traditional qualitative methods’, arguing that discourse analysis is not concerned with reporting actors’ meanings or ‘frames of reference’. Rather, it ‘examines how language constructs phenomena’ and, so doing, ‘views discourse as constitutive of the social world . . . and assumes the world cannot be known separately from discourse’ (Phillips, 2003:222). When it comes to specifying different forms of discourse analysis, however, the only approach identified as attending to ‘context’ (as contrasted with ‘text’) in a ‘critical’, as contrasted to ‘descriptive’, manner is critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA is allied, notably in the work of Fairclough (1995) and associates (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997), to a realist philosophy of science. Other forms of analysis that are broadly compatible with Phillips’ definition—inasmuch as they ‘examine how language constructs phenomena’—are unacknowledged and, effectively, rendered invisible (see Torfing, 1999; Phillips and Jørgensen, 2002; Anderson, 2003 for more inclusive overviews of discourse analysis). Foucauldian analysis (e.g. Knights and Morgan, 1991) is unrecognized, as is the work of Laclau and Mouffe (2001) that is the primary source of inspiration for this article. Critical realism and discourse theory share the understanding that human history is conditioned. But Bhaskar is comfortable with the dualistic conceptualization of this history in terms of ‘action’ and ‘structure’. He ‘distinguish(es) sharply between the genesis of human actions, lying in the reasons, intentions and plans of people, on the one hand, and the structures governing the reproduction and transformation of social activities, on the other’ (Bhaskar, 1998b). Laclau and Mouffe would not disagree with Bhaskar that, for example, ‘the reason why garbage is collected is not necessarily the garbage collector’s reason for collecting it’ because, like Bhaskar, they understand what is characterized as ‘agency’ to be conditioned. But they also refuse to take as given or adequate the status of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ as if these were self-evident ‘causes’ of social reproduction/transformation rather than the products of particular discursive articulations. As this claim seems to invite misunderstanding, it is probably necessary to stress that Laclau and Mouffe do not deny the existence of referents that are conceived by critical realists to occupy an intransitive dimension, and nor are they suggesting that referents are determined by signifiers. Rather, they argue that the contention, for example, that global warming exists or that the earth had a certain shape fifteen million years ago (Bhaskar’s examples) are more persuasively conceptualized as products of hegemonic discourses than as features of an intransitive dimension. As Laclau puts it, ‘this intransitivity of objects which is supposed to be behind all experience as the ground of all the regularities is simply one more discourse that can not be conceded to be different in quality from the discourses which are seen as transitive . . . the intransivity of the object is in itself transitivity.’ (Bhaskar and Laclau, 2002: 84) An example of such imaginary closure is the unity attributed to an organization or an individual. As Bhaskar (2002: 190) puts it, ‘Critical realism is not designed to support the interests of any particular political tendency or faction. It is oriented to the pursuit of truth and understanding. However, through critical realism positive values are generated by rational argument which show that capitalism is evil and immoral.’

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There has been a tension in critical realism that has been progressively worked through by Bhaskar: the tension is between science and emancipation. As Bhaskar (2002: 3) acknowledges, critical realism initially offered an alternative philosophy of science to that of positivism and post-positivists such as Kuhn and Feyerabend. In this incarnation, the emancipatory impulse (which, arguably, was the latent inspiration for his critique) was barely acknowledged: it was subordinated to the objective of providing a more robust epistemology. Many critical realists, including those who have invoked critical realism in the defence of certain, dualistic forms of organizational analysis, have not followed Bhaskar beyond the earlier stages of his thinking—where his preoccupation is with science—albeit with some suggestions about how critical realism has emancipatory significance, or, at least, is compatible with an emancipatory social science. As his thought has developed, Bhaskar (2002) has wrestled more directly with the question of emancipation. Critical realism is recast as dialectical critical realism and, most recently, as transcendental dialectical critical realism in which a spiritual dimension is incorporated (see, for example, Bhaskar, 2002: 26; see also Bhaskar, 2000). That move—alternatively courageous or crazy—has indeed put the post-materialist cat amongst the critical realist pigeons. However, Bhaskar has yet to work out whether this dimension is consistent with his critical realist foundations. He simply asserts that it is. Followers of critical realism are now somewhat split between those who, in Laclau’s terminology, are identified with the earlier epistemological terrain and are reluctant to follow him further, and others who see no particular difficulty in reconciling the earlier and later stages of his thinking (e.g. Archer). This may, or may not, involve becoming a tenant. For the landlord may already be a tenant of some other landlord. Conversely, when authority is ascribed (e.g. by critical realists) to the concepts of ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ or ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, commonsense ways of thinking about the social world are endorsed rather than problematized; and the status quo is unwittingly reinforced (see also Dyrberg, 1997). By embracing and endorsing commonsense conceptions of the social world—as comprising individuals (agents) whose freedom or sovereignty is either restricted or promoted by social conditions (structures)—their hegemonic grip is further strengthened. There is a presumption that the ‘subject matter’ exists independently of its discursive identification—for example, in the case of critical realism, by appealing to a particular, realist account of science in which there is an assumption of the existence of ‘the intransitive objects of scientific theory’ (Bhaskar, 1998b: 34). The conceit of this claim is then hedged by acknowledgement of the fallibility of all knowledge, but such reflexivity is not really ‘built in’ to critical realism. This is perhaps best understood as an inconsistency or slip as, in the same article, he advises that it is ‘inappropriate to thing of “organizational discourse” as discourse about some pre-existing, thing-like social object called “the organization.”’ Laclau and Mouffe conceive of the horizon of post-modernity as stimulating the problematizing of the foundational assumptions of Marxism and, especially, its privileging of the wage labour–capital relation as the antagonistic pivot of revolutionary transformation. Their ‘post-Marxist’ challenge arises

Theorizing Contemporary Control Hugh Willmott not (just) because identities of consumption are understood to have become as significant, and perhaps more significant, than identities of production, but because doubt is caste upon the Marxian premise that the labour-capital relationship is intrinsically antagonistic. Rather, this relationship is understood to become antagonistic only when a tension exists between how workers are constituted (e.g. as consumers) outside, as well as within, the relations of production such that their treatment as wage labour is incompatible with their broader sense of identity and aspiration: ‘the more [that] democratic-egalitarian discourses have penetrated society, the less will workers accept as natural a limitation of their access to a set of social and cultural goods. Thus, the possibility of deepening the anti-capitalist struggle itself depends on the extension of the democratic revolution’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 103). But, of course, there is nothing essential or permanent about the meaning of such ‘democratic-egalitarian discourse’. It can be invoked in polysemic ways so that, for example, the intensification of productive effort on the shopfloor—or in the call centre or the liberation/ occupation of another country—can be represented, pursued and defended in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’, as George Bush put it in recent interviews with Arab media (see also Willmott, 1993a; 2003). There is a struggle over their meaning and potency; and the remembering, or reactivation, of the dependence of the (particular, normative) meaning of democracy upon the (universal, ethical) moment of reactivation is at the heart of Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of the irreducibly political constitution of the social; see Critchley (2002) to whom I am indebted for this insight. 12 Given that it is well over twenty years since Laclau elected to use the term discourse, and with the benefit of hindsight, it may now be viewed as an understandable but rather unfortunate choice, especially in the context of organization studies where the term ‘discourse’ has become so polysemic as a consequence of its excessive and ill-defined use. 13 Of course, ethnomethodology comprises a variety of approaches. The variant I am attending to here is close to what Pollner (1991) calls radical ethnomethodology. There is not the space here to justify fully what may be viewed by some as a rather improbable or distant parallel between ethnomethodology and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Silverman’s (1975, especially p. 296 and following pages) discussion of organizational structures may usefully be consulted in this regard. The following quote is indicative of his position: ‘. . . structures or relations are not, in themselves, “really” bureaucratic (or otherwise)—for both the recognition of social relations (as the product of underlying structures) and their display (as bureaucratic) depend upon interpretive practices which provide ways of attending to the world’ (Silverman, 1975: 296). 14 Burrell (1999) brushes aside the critique of the ‘paradigm mentality’ and its associated gridlock (Willmott, 1993a). His defence of incommensurability repeats, rather than justifies, the point—made, albeit somewhat obliquely and fleetingly, in Burrell and Morgan (1979: 397–8)—that their belief in incommensurability had its origins in politics as well as in epistemology (Burrell, 1999: 396). This political defence of incommensurability is, I would argue, fully examined and challenged in Willmott (1993b). By claiming that there is ‘a failure to recognise this [defence]’, Burrell (1999: 396) evades the challenge.

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It is conceived as an ‘inner urge that flows universally from the logic of elemental absence’ (Bhaskar, 1994: 299)—the absence being the lack of a social structure that enables the full realization of this urge. 16 Although key to Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist thinking, this is not something that can be elaborated here. The gist of the idea is that there are multiple, overlapping relations of subordination that are productive of ‘democratic struggles’ whose common commitment to,and mutually reinforcing significance for, emancipation is lost when they are hierarchically ordered—for example, when class struggle is placed at the centre, and all other struggles are located at the margin in a derivative relation to class. 17 In the UK and US at least, the discourse of democracy has been managerialized by being translated into notions of involvement, participation and empowerment.

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Organization 12(5) Articles Knowledge, Management Lives, Studying Management Critically and Fragmenting Work. He has published widely in social science and management journals and currently is a member of the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies and Journal of Management Studies. Further details can be found on his homepage : http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/ hcwhome. Address: The Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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