The elitist work life creates a sophisticated logic by which the consultants constantly evaluate their current and future value related to potential career opportunities. The consultants strive to constantly do their very best because of personal aspirations and ambitions and in order to reach the performance management goals from the consulting house. It is striking that the consultants do not discern between personal aspirations and the performance management system. Thus, when the consultants explain: ‘I cannot perform mediocre’, ‘I want to be the very best’, ‘I can’t stand losing’, ‘I do not need to be the best at everything, but in my professional field, I would like to be the one you are thinking of’, ‘I’m ambitious, so I always perform 110%’, not only do they express personal norms but also professional norms. The personal and professional norms are integrated. Mr. M and Mr. B use different methods for improvement, but neither of them could live without performance measures; they do not distinguish between themselves and their measurements. Accordingly, marathon and good performance measurements create the same feeling of happiness:
You feel that you are rewarded in some way. The reward is that I become happy, and that I am satisfied with myself. It’s the same feeling you get by running a marathon.
Thus, the elitist working life is clarified through the allegory of elite sport. Mr. M and Mr. B have a passionate relationship to working. Through working, they acquire their greatest joys. Their lives are all about working. They are determined to maintain a place in the elite among the very best. They work methodically and strategically to extend their physical and mental limits in order to improve their efforts. It requires talent, a strong will, overcoming pain; and last, but not least, it requires long intensive working days. The similarities between the rowers’ work life and the consultants’ work life are striking.
As the rowers, Mr. M and Mr. B organize their lives so the exercise premises are always optimal. The elite consists of the best of the best; of those who can endure the greatest desire, will and pain. Lactic acid and blood taste in the mouth. When you want to win gold in the Olympics, you must constantly be at your best and be ready to cope with the next challenge. They challenge and push themselves to be better. They transcend themselves in order to perform their most outstanding. Only if you really want to win, you will win. You are co-creator of your own victory. But you need to want to work hard. If you want to remain in the comfort zone, you will never improve. You have to want to improveme. Mr. M and Mr. B seek improvement that are systematically measured on various parameters. Their improvements are guided systematically and strategically on intricate performance management systems. There is no time for relaxation. Relaxing in the gray zone is for losers. Relaxation creates decline and degeneration. Their improvements are systematically measuring various parameters. Their improvements are guided systematically and strategically through intricate performance management systems. There is no time for relaxation. Relaxing in the grey zone is for losers. Boredom is the enemy. Relaxation creates decline and degeneration. Improvement requires reaching the red zone. Grey zone is not just for losers. Grey zone creates losers, just as red zone creates winners. They strive for the red zone. No breaks. Rather extreme relaxation. The consultants talk about relaxation in terms of: marathon, iron man, mountain climbing, river rafting, hiking in the jungle, crossing deserts on a motor bike. Their relaxation, is contributing to improvement of their work superiority (see also Johnsen et al., 2008).
It is impossible to win the Olympics once and for all. Therefore the contract is more than economic, it encompasses the whole person. The dynamics epitomizes the reflexive self at the heart of the modernist project: We are what we make ourselves (McKinlay, 2002). The victory must be repeatable. Otherwise, the place in the elite is lost. Otherwise, they are just a former elitist. So immediately after the Olympics, the gold medal loses some of its value. Thus, continuous victories are important as they are necessary markers indicating that the performers are on the right quest previously formulated as going: up, up, up. Q, the consultant who knows the Olympic gold rowers, explains:
I do not know why I want to win. But if I did not win, I would clearly feel like a faliure. I would certainly feel that I was heading downward.
Between victories, a downward motion must be avoided and upward measurements works as visible proof of it happening. Thus, the very content of the performance management system is not substantial. It is not of great importance, what is measured. Rather, it is essential that the system is designed to measure improvement, excellence and victories. It is essential for the measurements to determine who belongs in the elite and who does not. However, performance management is an essential and integrated part of the consultants’ work life. Subsequently, performance management systems evaluate individual performance relative to the performance of competitors and this is a welcome and necessary component of a modern work life heading towards qualification as a discipline for the Olympic Games. Without performance management, it would simply be impossible to achieve the goal. It enhances and reinforces a working life based on constant improvement. No rest, breaks or serenity. A working life organized towards new beginnings and without endings. A working life organized as a moral project without end or hope of completion (McKinlay, 2002). In that light, performance management and contemporary work life works together in perfect harmony. However, it is a perfect harmony, which comes with major implications. Ready, Steady, Go!
references
Alvesson, M. and D. Kärreman (2004) ‘Interfaces of control: Tecnocratic and socio-ideological control in a global management consultancy firm’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 29(3-4): 423-444.
Blume, B. D., R. S. Rubin, and T. T. Baldwin (2013) ‘Who is attracted to an organization using a forced distribution performance management system?’, Human Resource Management Journal, 23(4): 360-378.
Johnsen, R., S. L. Muhr and M. Pedersen (2009) ‘The frantic gesture of interpassivity: Maintaining the separation between the corporate and authentic self’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 22(2): 202-213.
McKinlay, A. (2002) ‘Dead selves: The birth of the modern career’, Organization, 9(4): 595-614.
Marescaux, E., S. D. Winne and L. Sels (2013) ‘HR practice and affective organizational commitment: (When) does HR differentiation pay off? Human Resource Management Journal, 23(4): 329-345.
Meriläinen, S., J. Tienari, R. Thomas and A. Davies (2004) ‘Management consultant talk: A cross-cultural comparison of normalizing discourse and resistance’, Organization, 11(4): 539-564.
Muhr, S. L. and L. Kirkegaard (2013) ‘The dream consultant: Productive fantasies at work’, Culture and Organization, 19(2): 105-123.
Sheehan, C., H. D. Cieri and B. Cooper (2014) ‘Exploring the power dimension of the human resource function’, Human Resource Management, 24(2): 193-210. Subramony, M. (2009) ‘A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship between
HRM bundles and firm performance’, Human Resource Management, 48(5): 745-768.
the author
Line Kirkegaard is an assistant professor at the Center of social work. University College Absalon. She holds a PhD in management and organization from Copenhagen Business School.
ISSN 1473-2866 (Online) ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) www.ephemerajournal.org volume 18(2): 383-395
Time to party?
Emil Husted
review of
Dean, Jodi (2016): Crowds and party. London: Verso. (HB, pp 288, £13.59, ISBN 978-1-78168-694-2)
Since the decline of classical Marxist theory and the concomitant proliferation of ‘new social movements’ from 1968 and onwards, two opposing lines of thought have dominated leftist thinking: One that could be called ‘horizontalist’ and one that could be called ‘verticalist’ (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013). While both lines of thought identify with the label of post-Marxism – sometimes even without apologies – their approaches to radical politics differ profoundly. Crudely put, the difference revolves around the question of organization, and whether or not radical politics requires any centralized form of coordination. In the horizontalist camp, authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) and Paolo Virno (2004) argue that the networked and globalized character of contemporary sovereignty demands a networked kind of resistance, that is, a resistance that lacks any center or single point of unity. As they say: ‘It takes a network to fight a network’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 58). This means replacing the essentialist notion of the working class with a more plural and polycentric subject called the Multitude. Through the notion of the Multitude, the horizontalists advocate a less organized version of radical politics that shuns unity and affords autonomy. But perhaps more importantly, like the anarchists, they promote a radical politics that withdraws from established political institutions.
In the verticalist camp, on the other hand, authors like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) agree that the privileged subject of the working class should be substituted by a thoroughly plural and inherently contingent figure. However, instead of completely abandoning the quest for unity, they advocate a revival of ‘the people’ as a necessary component of any radical politics (Laclau, 2006). Through the notion of ‘the people’ – empty as it may be – progressive forces are allowed to unite behind a counter-hegemonic project, capable of contesting and ultimately replacing dominant discourses. Hence, instead of trying to change the world without taking power, as the horizontalists would have it (e.g., Holloway, 2002), the verticalists emphasize the necessity of reclaiming sovereignty by engaging actively with the state (Mouffe, 2009). However, as Simon Critchley (2004) has noted, there seems to be a normative deficit in Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony. While the theory was originally conceived as a conceptual toolbox for the postmodern Left, right-wing forces have also found resonance in concepts like discourse and hegemony (see Éric Zemmour’s (2014) book, Le Suicide Français, for a recent example). This, arguably, constitutes a problem for the Left and its radical aspirations.
With Jodi Dean’s passionate writings, a third line of leftist thought has arrived or, rather, returned. While Dean shares Laclau and Mouffe’s emphasis on the necessity of engaging the state by building alternative hegemonic projects, she rejects their persistent focus on pluralism and contingency as ‘leftist realism’ and scolds them for succumbing to the logic of what she calls ‘communicative capitalism’ (i.e. the current variety of capitalism, made possible by the widespread use of information and communication technologies, which turns democracy into a marketplace by commodifying communication). By making contingency and pluralism the main pillars in their theoretical framework, Dean argues, Laclau and Mouffe implicitly accepts the marketplace as a necessity and thus abandons the revolutionary propensities of leftist thinking prior to 1968. Hence, like Critchley – but in an utterly different way – Dean makes it her project to reintroduce normativity to contemporary left-wing theorizing. The way to do so, she suggest, is through the resurrection of the communist party.