By David M. Boje, Feb 8, 2007
CHAPTER 13: WHAT STORY CONSULTING NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CRITICAL THINKING AND CRITICAL THEORY?
I was invited as one of several distinguished keynote speakers at the Ritz Carlton Grand Ballroom event at the Academy of Management, Monday Aug 9th 2004 in New Orleans. We Critical Theorists perform most often in the wings, or rooms at the margins, and Critical Thinkers get the grandest ballroom stages. To be invited onto the Grand Ballroom stage with Critical Thinker, Henry Mintzberg (strategists), and renowned Critical Theorist, Stewart Clegg (sociologist) was, for me (storyteller), a great honor.
I reflected on the first time Stewart came to the Academy, back in 1991, when we did perhaps the first-ever Academy of Management session on ‘what is postmodernism?’ We were scheduled, in the margins, when all the heads of the Academy and its divisions were in a meeting, and while a large room, it was not a ballroom, and it was empty, not packed to overflow, like today. As the session organizers Laurie Milton and Steve Armstrong laid out the ground rules for our keynoting, I reflected on the first Academy of Management visit of Critical Postmodernists Douglas Kellner and Steve Best (they combine Critical Theory with Postmodern Theory) to the Chicago meeting in 1999, and we got marginalized to rather small hotel room no where near the main stages of the main hotels. Only the powerful get to be ‘distinguished keynoters’ in the Grand Ballroom where a sizable audience is sure to attend.
I did not kid myself. Stewart and I were not in the Ritz Carlton ballroom event, holding center stage. We had no power here. This ballroom had been scheduled to accommodate an audience-overflow there to hear the great Canadian superstar, Henry Mintzberg. Stewart has attained a certain drawing power since the early days, and more than I have. That’s for sure. We so-called ‘stars’ shared the stage with several journal editors, taking the role of questioners and provocateurs. The topic, what has Critical Theory got to offer Critical Thinking in management education?
As the event took off the questions were posed to Mintzberg, as super-Academy Star, and acknowledged father of several schools of strategy, and someone with a project to reform management education.
Henry was concerned that in its current setup, management education was not doing a good job in apprenticing students in critical thinking. He stressed that you cannot train managers in a classroom. He thought we should focus our attention on training professional managers how to think more critically. Training students without work experience was leading to 2-year MBAs in a kind of superficiality.
Mintzberg focused his keynote on what is Critical Thinking (as a common sense kind of logic), whereas Clegg and I were focused on Critical Theory (e.g. Frankfurt School, critical theorists outside said school, and Critical Management Studies - CMS in our own AoM, as well as poststructuralists such as Foucault, Derrida, & Kristeva). There are quite a few differences in all these traditions. I think we were finding some common ground in the ballroom session, but missing many of the nuanced differences.
What is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking, as you know, has three components, grounds (evidence, observations), claims of cause and effect, and warrants (bridges of grounds relationship to claims). Critical thinking is supposed to afford rational unemotional analysis that is logic-driven of situations thought, such as strategic management of the firm.
To Stewart and I, being Critical Theorists, we view Critical Thinking as emotion-driven.
As story theorist, I also see Critical Thinking from a Critical Theory viewpoint, as an interweaving of four kinds of strategy stories.
First grounds are story of what premises do we have to go one. A premise means (pre + mission). Premise is also partly an emotion, an admonition, or perhaps a dread or fear. Premise can be quite intuitive emotion, such as foreboding. Grounds are feelings about the future, that this or that event of pastness will have a presentiment that in some future scene will resonate, perhaps be climatic intensity. So grounds are about monitoring that which feels like some pattern that could spell disaster.
Second, is the story of claims, what are the cause and effect event sequence or plot? Claim comes from the word clamore, which means emotions like to cry out, exclaim, or assert. Claims are made by claimants who rather than being detached have as stakeholders in the events, with definite will to story, along with bias or emotional investment in how cause and effect episodes get plotted in official stories.
Third, is the story of warrants, which can take one of two forms, retrospective or prospective antenarrative. The retrospective warrant story tells how did we arrive from grounds to warrant across a particular bridge. Alternatively, an antenarrative warrant gives a premonition presaging some grounds that foreshadow some future climatic scene. Both kinds of warrant stories have to do with seeing resonance. James Michener (1989: 298-299) the novelist says he likes to use “resonance” to presage or foreshadow using some word, phrase, or incident in an early part of his narrative that will reappear later with more “intensified significance.”
Fourth, grounds, warrants that bridge to claims can be a construction that is a story where grounds is the beginning of premonition, warrants provide retrospective glance or the presage of antenarrative future, and claims are cried out by claimants (or stakeholders). Michener (1989: 299), for example, thinks of his novels “as seamless webs which could start anywhere, end anywhere” but critics chide him for not providing their expectation of beginning, middle, ending (BME) that ties every thread neatly together, and then punctuating the ending with a dramatic close. Michener finds BME too much like the symphony, where the melodies meet up at the end, and there is some loudly playing instruments to alert the audience its over.
All four kinds of Critical Thinking stories involve intuitive premonition and a negotiation among willful-claimants, who have different logics, emotions, ethics, and aesthetics. In such a ground of cultural diversity, the claims and warrants made will oftentimes be contradictory, or what Bakhtin (1973, 1981) calls polyphonic, polyvocal, and polylogical. Stakeholders co-constructing collective story takes ample time to negotiate, improvise relations among fragments, and sort out agreements, incommensurabilities, emergences, and shape collective memories that may or may not overlap, when all is said and done.
For Mintzberg, the style of critical thinking is centered on his contextual (some would say contingency) understanding of the relation of strategy, system, and environment. The Critical Theory, CMS, and Poststructural approaches have analytic frames that are used to affect a critical analysis.
Critical Thinking and Critical Theory define ‘critical’ quite differently.
What is Critical Theory?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair, 1911 The Jungle
‘Critical Theory’ (with capital CT letters) designates the philosophy, theory, and practice of the directors and associates of the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923, but from 1931 (when Horkheimer took over as director) until several decades ago took a different direction (Boje, 2007, Critical Theory Ethics … book). Horkheimer’s 1933 critique set the stage for what I term the first phase of Critical Theory: an interdisciplinary, empirical, social science that would resolve problems they saw in Marx, Hegel, and Kant.
For example, Horkheimer (1933/1993: 25) points out how the Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative anticipates the end of morality, and helps it along by making a “distinction between interest and duty.” Kant (1785/1993; Section 421, p. 30) wrote of categorical imperative, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, the golderr rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Horkheimer’s colleague Adorno (1963/2000) talks about it as the distinction between Kant’s ethics of conviction, and an ethics of responsibility (or what Bakhtin 1991, 1993 calls answerability ethics). The thesis is that Kant’s writings were influenced and historically contextualized by the dawn of the industrial revolution. This revolution is the gemstone of the Enlightenment, the purge of the transcendental from science, technology, and for our purpose, administrative reason in business and public administration. Horkheimer’s challenge is how can any “society of isolated individuals” acting with ethics of conviction bring about meaningful change in the social order (Horkheimer, 1933/1993: 25)? Horkheimer’s (1974: vii) Critique of Instrumental Reason (a collection of his writing from mid-forties to 1967) asserted that business goals once achieved become instrumental-means to new goals, and that this progression is without ethical moorings). Horkheimer (1974: ix), for a time thought that CT would, after Nazism’s defeat, begin a new day of “authentically human history’ brought about by “reforms or revolution.” Yet new forms of dictatorship emerged after WWII. Horkheimer and Adorno became so disillusion with the prospects of interdisciplinary empirical project being able to prevent the return of Hitler-clones, they turned to a new project.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1947/1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment is regarded as a turning point in CT, and the marker of its second phase, the aesthetic critique of the Culture Industry. Since 1970, Jurgen Habermas has led the third phase of CT, by steering it on the famous “linguistic turn” (Hunter, 2000: ix). Habermas rejected the phase 2 CT focus on aestheticized critique and tried to redeem the phase 1 CT project: the Enlightenment ideal of emancipatory potential of social science using neo-Kantian moral philosophy (ix), which Habermas calls “communicative ethics” (x). Habermas has most recently changed his lens from Frankfurt School (phase 1) to elaborating Luhmann as well as Parson’s structural-functionalist system theory. Habermas (1984, 1987), for example continues Horkheimer’s phase one concern that the life worlds is dominated by technocratic thinking, in storytelling rooted in rationalistic means-end ethics and logic.
The result, in my view, is a move by Habermas away from critical ethics of answerability, and a return to formal, absolutist, universalistic ethics to which Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse, would, I think, most certainly see as insufficient to the problems posed by (phase two concerns with) the Culture Industry.
What is ‘critical theory’ (lower case)? The ‘critical theory’ (little ct) is what is commonly referred to as the work of contemporary scholars, particularly in the fields of business management and public administration, who are making contributions by changing, revising, and critiquing the earlier work of Critical Theory (Frankfurt School). The ‘ct’ movement has resulting in regular ‘Critical Management Studies’ (CMS) meetings in the UK, and in a full-fledged division forming in the Academy of Management under that name (Boje, 2007 Critical theory Ethics… book). In the UK, there are several universities that have CMS programs of study. In particular, Leister and Essex Universities have such programs (Anderson, 2003). In the US, there are token faculty positions in some of the Business and Public Administration Schools doing ‘ct’ work, but they do not run the curriculum for the mass of students coming through their doors. I would say the same is true of ‘ct’ faculty in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere.
Neo-Kantian versions of ethics of answerability for Bakhtin, Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer (these are not quite the same, but general idea is people are complicit in organizations, and cannot escape responsibility as was attempted by munchkins claiming to be doing good while participating in the Holocaust); with Kristeva and another concept of Bakhtin, the poststructral approach is to look at intertextuality (how one text is citing and informing other texts, and therefore complicit in the larger social field). There is also more of a Bakhtinian dialogical reflexive practice in ‘little ct.’ Ann Cunliffe (2002), for example, argues that ‘reflexive dialogical practice’ is a more practical way of sensemaking in management learning, providing an interface of Critical Thinking and ‘critical theory.’
The usual candidates for CT (Frankfurt School) are all males. Yet, there are feminist scholars who have contributed to CT. At the 2006 Academy of Management meetings in Atlanta, several feminist scholars (Joanne Martin, Linda Smircich, Marta Calas, and Anne Cunliffe, among others) put out a challenge to ‘ct’ and ‘CT’ to begin to do more than cite the usual list of white male scholars (Boje, 2007, Critical Ethics… book).
As the New Orleans, Grand Ballroom event continued, questioners gave Mintzberg the floor, and then sometimes Stuart and I were asked to give a counterview. Henry spoke of the need for Critical Thinking managers, and Stuart and I spoke about Critical Theory as being something a little different. Stuart, for example, said he was appalled by the superficial scholarship, bad history, and poor writing style in management texts. So he wrote a proper one, as a way to infiltrate management with ‘critical theory’ of Foucault and Weber. Stuart has the look of a Rod Stewart, and speaks eloquently of sociology, peppered with humor, and his former-DJ keen interest in rock and jazz. For Stuart the management texts were neither good Critical Theory nor proper Critical Thinking.
Finally, it was my turn to give some keynote answers to questions. I expressed my gratitude for being in such distinguished company and have the opportunity to address the audience in such a fine setting. It’s my style to get emotional quickly, to provoke with a story that upsets expectations of proper academic decorum. My story was that management has no trouble Critically Thinking ways to exploit works, as Marx (1867), put it, as vampires and werewolves, sucking the last living drop of blood from the body of labor. I think Critical Theory has much to add to Critical Thinking, by returning ethics of answerability and complicity into the discussion. I was interrupted by a man who stood up and shouted, “Do you call yourself ‘comrade’ in the classroom, because sir you are professing communism?”
It was one of those lighting rod moments Aristotle calls catharsis. The questioner expressing the Academy audience’s predominantly underlying revulsion for Critical Theory that would have anything to do with Karl Marx. There was no time to explain the nuances of State communism, Marxism, and Neo-Marxism, or the variations of first and second phase Critical Theory, and the kinds of Weber, Nietzsche, and feminist versions of ‘little ct!’ The audience had that catharsis emotion of fear and pity, for a commie being called out. “Marx,” I replied, “chapter 10, ‘The Working Day, stands the test of time, remaining an example of the contribution of Critical Theory to Critical Thinking. Marx gave evidentiary grounds, and warrants, for claims that management was stretching the working day. He foresaw a foreboding dark side, how surplus value was gained at the expense of livable wages, in working conditions that were the epitome of the performativity of exhaustion of worker’s lives in a House of Terror. Performativity is the ratio of output quotas, to input (labor time) to the point where the worker drops dead (Lyotard, 1979/1984). Marx tells the story of Mary Anne Walkley. She worked without rest for 26 ½ hours, in a room with 30 other girls. When allowed to sleep, they slept in pairs. The doctor called too late to her deathbed, says Mary diet of working too many hours in an over-crowded room, and sleeping in a poorly ventilated bedroom. She died of apoplexy (Marx, 1867, chapter 10). Marx makes grounds, warrants, and claims constructing a Critical Theory story of Mary’s death by performativity. Just as today, managers at that time claimed that doing sway with ‘sweating’ (then the term for sweatshops) would mean they could not compete with countries allowing use of child and women labor for longer hours. Just as today, Marx in the 1860s looked critically at the state’s factory inspectors, how they failed to monitor violations of wage, overtime, safety, as well as child labor laws. Marx clearly held management accountable, and complicit. For example, the law said children could only work part time (which meant, at that time, 8 hours a day). So managers constructed a relay system, whereby a child would work part time in one owner’s factory, then be sent along to work part time in the next owner’s factory. That way each owner could claim their working children were part-time when the inspectors came by.
Marx admonished the state’s factory inspection system, for its poorly conceived monitoring. Monitoring by the way is part of ‘grounds’ in Critical Thinking. To monitor is to premonish, to give warning beforehand that there is a scandal brewing. Monitoring is not retrospective sensemaking, its more a rebuke that what is going on needs to change. Monitoring is also a claim about cause and effect. It’s an outcry that some problem needs immediate attention, or the clamor could get worse. As a warrant, monitoring defines who’s to blame, and how matters could very well get worse (i.e. its cause & effect logic).
The session in New Orleans closed down without any rigorous expression of the differences between Critical Thinking and Critical Theory, and some ways they might integrate, or complement one another.
NARRATIVE PARADIGM THEORY AND CRITICAL THINKING
I have danced with Walter Fisher’s (1984, 1985a, b, 1989) Narrative Paradigm Theory (NPT) for twenty years. It’s a situation model (or mental representation model) of storytelling, that argues that people as ‘storytelling animals’ attempt to tell a ‘credible,’ ‘comprehendible,’ and ‘coherent’ stories in a ‘storytelling world’ that has ample storylistening and story evaluation competencies. According to NPT people (storytelling animals) tell stories giving mental situation models of people, objects, actions (events), and places (locations). To me, Fisher’s NPT is incommensurate with Walter Benjamin (1936) theory of the death of story competences. Benjamin assumes that such competencies have eroded significantly).
These mental situations model of NPT purports to be an alternative to rationity of Critical Thinking models. NPT elements are called ‘good reasons’ storytellers give for actions and decisions. These are not the same as grounds, claims and warrants, unless you do the number on them that I did above, pointing out the emotional undertones.
Despite protests that NPT is often presented as an alternative to rational choice models, I will argue that Fisher’s theory is nevertheless one of ‘narrative rationality’ that is akin to what in logic is called ‘Critical Thinking.’ People make claims (of cause-effect relations, not as in rational Critical Thinking, but in story thinking), give grounds (evidential reasoning, observations) for their warrants (bridging between grounds and claims). These grounds, claims, and warrant come from renditions of stories with slants of history, attributions, perceptions, values (rooted in cultural context), and character (stereotypes) of other people. For Fisher, there are three tests of ‘narrative rationality’: probability and fidelity of stories that gird decisions about to be made, or already made.
Probability is defined as people’s inherent storylistening skill or competence in evaluating stories and storytellers. Is this story probable or some kind of lie or fantasy?
Fidelity is defined as storylisteners comparing and evaluating what they hear in someone else’s story against their own similar experiences and belief systems. As people listen to stories, they tell stories of themselves to themselves (Stein, 1935).
Critiques of NPT
One critique is “not all human discourse follows the story form and his reference to the subtext of the speaker's or writer's own narratives is less than compelling. Further, he fails to specify how critics are to make their choices between narrative probability or fidelity, and provides no criteria for testing narrative probability… Finally, the logic of good reasons is inadequately developed, as it fails to consider how values can be presented in argument and, once presented, how the ‘relative worth’ of one value can be evaluated against that of another.”
My own critique is that NPT does not distinguish between (1) storyable and unstoryable events, such as trauma, or (2) the differences, and possible retrogression of storytelling and storylistening competencies, or (3) the implications of polyphony on a world of stories and storytelling animals that have been somewhat domesticated in late modern capitalism. Finally, I think that probability (believability) and fidelity (coherence) are not the same thing as authenticity and substance.
Storytelling lacking in authenticity and substance can have probability and fidelity, but be totally misleading. Story consultants to companies, agencies, political campaigns, and universities and colleges just make up a narrative that sounds good, sells, become a cover story for whatever needs a seemingly rational or charismatic justification.
In a recent book I edit on Critical Theory ethics for Business and Public Administration, I develop the idea in my chapter that ‘story ethics’ is possible but we need to consider the decline of authenticity and substance of the storytelling animals in business and public administration.
WHAT CAN CRITICAL THEORY OFFER TO CRITICAL THINKING?
In this book, I have stressed the importance of training story consultants in genealogy. The value is in exploring with clients how the logic of their Critical Thinking has changes over time. From a Critical Postmodern perspective, there are many Critical Thinking logics that compete and negotiate in the storytelling in any kind of collective site such as a complex organization. The stories of grounds, warrants, and claims vary across stakeholders, and change over time.
Critical Theory argues that consumers and employees need protection from more managerialist forms of Critical Thinking. Selective grounds of evidence, warrants from managerialist viewpoint, and claims of peculiar causes for effects upon labor is quite comment.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1947/1973: 121) Culture industry theory, puts it this way:
It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods.
We know the Culture Industry today as the Wal-Mart Effect, McDonaldization imitation (Ritzer, 1993/2002), Disneyfication to cover over labor practices, and the Las Vegasization to make gambling and sex commodification seem like fun for the entire family. Critical Theory sees a very superficial Critical Thinking. In the immortal words of the Temptations, “All you poor, all you needy --- all you do is give it to the greedy” (Lyrics from the song Power, which was banned from play on radio stations, since in Florida consumers were protesting a power company).
What we teach in Critical Theory can be helpful in deconstructing the superficial Critical Theory logic of grounds, claims, and warrants in a story. What I have called for is a resituation that gets past the cast of dualities, hierarchical thinking, and hegemonic reasoning in order to hear from marginal voices, even rebellious ones, that redefine the plot into a different kind of claim (Boje, 2001). Resituation is defined as way to develop a Critical Thinking that is more polyvocal, and more polylogical, than is the case for managerialism seeking to be the only Kantian maxim and presumption of universality.
There is lethargy in Critical Thinking. A certain kind of lazy thinking predominates in management education. Critical Theorist, Herbert Marcuse (1964) for example was concerned that positivism had combined with the positive thinking movement, making it impossible for any but the most superficial Critical Thinking. Marcuse (1964, 1969) develops an ethics that is much more akin to early Marxism, to promoting the revolution. He misses the realization that Adorno and Horkheimer had made, that the Culture Industry rules, effectively subverting and co-opting ethics from achieving the ideals of moral philosophy.
Today ‘little critical theory’ is concerned with story consulting, such as Appreciative Inquiry, where only ‘positive thinking’ stories get told, and there is a dismissal of any kind of deconstruction or genealogical inquiry that might assess the dark side. Only the positive story of the progress possibilities gets told.
Walter Benjamin (1936) was concerned with lethargy of storytelling, how information processing approaches to storytelling where leaving competencies of listening and gelling behind. People are growing more dependent upon pre-digested information, unable to read between the lines, unable to foreshadow how resonates in this scene is set up in the rhythm of a prior scene, too trapped in full explication to learn the ancient storylistening and telling skills.
I think Henry Mintzberg, Stuart Clegg, and I would agree that we are equally concerned about lazy Critical Thinking. Lazy Critical Thinking made people more susceptible to Hitler, the way tyranny creeps back into charismatic leaders storytelling. After WWII Horkheimer and Adorno mounted their challenge against the shallow storytelling and lack of storylistening and story reading competencies. Habermas is unconcerned, arguing that some kind of communicative rationality is going to fulfill his dream of the Enlightenment project.
Take a look at Critical Thinking in story consulting. You might be surprised at what you might find. As the rhetoric goes, you can use story to transform your organization, develop a story out of focus group value-surfacing that will elect a president, or turn around their popularity after an unpopular decision. In this sort of story consulting, Critical Thinking is subverted, and meant to be derailed, in favor of spin. Story consultant walk around telling 2-minute elevator stories, spouting fairy tales, and using archetype cartoon to tell your fortune. Shallow and lethargy of Critical Thinking!
There has not been enough emotion in Critical Thinking.
EMOTION AND CRITICAL THINKING
Nietzsche (1956/1887, p. 255) put it this way:
The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our ‘objectivity’.”
Bakhtin (1990, 1991) also calls for a more emotive reading of ethics, as one of the interanimating discourses of architectonics (cognitive, aesthetic, & ethical). There is opportunity to expand Critical Thinking by looking at emotions, from Nietzsche’s perspective, as different eyes to achieve greater ‘objectivity.’ What’s problematic in Critical Thinking is the dismissal of emotion. Emotion is for Bakhtin a way to get at ethics of answerability. We have a once-occurent obligation to speak out, to put our voice into story, and tell it like it is.
There is ascension of an abuse of emotion in story consulting. The Culture Industry seduces consumer emotions.
Critical Thinking and Critical Theory are really both quite emotional. There is a self-denial of emotion in both. Critical Thinking has a heart of stone when it comes to the plight of works. Critical Thinking, in managerialist hands, in the words of the Rolling Stones, “will never break this heart of stone.” Critical Thinking is contemplation in the abstinence of emotion, and its self-discipline is cognitive. But this self-denial of emotion is what leads to lethargy. How can one understanding ethics without exploring all the emotions of blame, righteous indignation, injustice, and inequality brings with it?
The emotion of foreboding is a premonition (or presentiment) that something harmful to humans or environment is going on. What is ominous for Critical Thinking is the horror that occurs when there is a lack of reflexivity on the emotive-ethical. What is foreboding to Critical Thoery is the denial of emotion in the angry logic of managerialism. Managerialism denies that performativity of sweatshops is harmful to human beings.
Critical Theory ethics objects to the instrumental practical (means-ends) ethics of managerialist Critical Thinking. Presentiment is an emotion, a feeling that some grounds calls for a moral sentiment. There is premonition in grounds that carry into a forewarning of a claim, and into the warrant that something must be done. Grounds are premises, which can sometimes be premonitions, to be on guard about something that is turning frightful.
Critical Theory is particularly sensitive to feelings of worker discontent. In that there is a pre-judging that can be mistaking. Some managers are good people. Not all CEOs whip the works into performativity. Sometimes workers are as unethical as those higher in the hierarchy. Critical Theory can be posing, doing theory work that is not grounded in the lives of workers and consumers. Posing is bystanding, not recognizing one’s own complicity in the story that unfolds.
NOTES
Other distinguished speakers at the ballroom event were James Bailey and Cary Cooper. See Academy Program http://program.aomonline.org/2004/submission.asp?mode=ShowSession&SessionID=1533
http://www.answers.com/topic/narrative-paradigm