Volume 10(3): 503–525

Copyright © 2003 SAGE

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)

Theory after the Postmodern

Condition
articles

Campbell Jones
University of Leicester, UK

Abstract. In the context of an apparent crisis of grand narratives and

continuing reference to the postmodern condition, this article considers
aspects of the development of theory in organization studies over the past
decade and offers some reflections on prospects for the future. These
issues are presented via a reading of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Post-
modern Condition and the way that this book has been received in
organization studies. This ‘paralogical’ reading contests a number of
widespread assumptions in organization studies about Lyotard and
French theory, and provides the opening for a discussion of the future of
theory in organization studies. This involves asking questions about (1)
the consumption of theory in organization studies; (2) the concepts in
currency in organization studies today; and (3) the shifting divisions of
organization studies. Key words. agonistics, critical/critique, ethics,
judgement/judging, knowledge, legitimation, morality, paralogy, perfor-
mativity

‘Today, life is fast. It vaporizes morals. Futility suits the postmodern, for
words as well as things. But that doesn’t keep us from asking questions:
how to live, and why? The answers are deferred. As they always are, of
course. But this time, there is a semblance of knowing: that life is going
every which way. But do we know this? We represent it to ourselves rather.
Every which way of life is flaunted, exhibited, enjoyed for the love of
variety. The moral of morals would be that of “aesthetic” pleasure. Here,

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Organization 10(3)
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then, are fifteen notes on postmodern aestheticization. And against it!

You’re not done living because you chalk it up to artifice.’

Jean-François Lyotard, from the preface to Moralités Postmodernes

(English translation: Lyotard, 1997: vii)

I have been asked to write something that reflects on the state of

organization studies in the light of developments over the past decade
and make projective comments about the next decade. The general frame
is one of ‘W(h)ither Organization Studies?’ which poses questions of the
viability (wither?) and the direction (whither?) of organization studies.
Faced with this, I should admit that I am struck by something peculiarly
anachronistic about this question. It might be that I haven’t been getting
out enough, but most of the work that I read and most of the people with
whom I talk these days are rather suspicious of presupposing a ‘totality’,
that is, a unity that is attributed to things such as an organization, a
society, a discourse or a person. Indeed, it might be that over the past
decade those doing organization studies have become increasingly suspi-
cious of assuming integration, unity and wholeness. To frame it posi-
tively, and a little grandly, in recent years organization studies has
become increasingly attuned to complexity, discontinuity, conflict, resist-
ance and difference.
This kind of story will be familiar to those who have followed the
‘paradigm debates’ of recent years. When, ten years ago, Jeffrey Pfeffer
(1993) laid out his concerns that organization studies did not consist of a
harmonious whole, this involved a certain recognition of a pluralization
of organization studies. He wasn’t happy about this state of affairs, of
course, but on the level of description he shares much with Mike Reed’s
(1992, 1999) description of a shift from an earlier state of ‘orthodox
consensus’ towards a state of ‘pluralistic diversity’, that resulted from the
unravelling of the hegemony of structural contingency theory and a
concomitant destabilization of ‘organization studies’ from the late 1960s
on. It is almost as if Pfeffer and Reed tell pretty much the same story, even
if one is happy about it and the other is not. Because whether one felt that
this was a space of a new freedom or a disastrous return to Babel, by the
end of the 1990s it seems almost ‘agreed’ that there are a variety of
paradigms or discourses on organization, and that organization studies is
no longer the stable unity that it might have been in the past (see, for
example Burrell, 1999; Deetz, 1996; Hassard and Kelemen, 2002; Kele-
men and Hassard, 2003; Westwood and Clegg, 2003). If anything, the new
consensus about organization studies seems to be that there is no con-
sensus.
In such a context, and presented with a request to comment on ‘the
state of organization studies’ I found myself wondering if there was either
something wrong with me or if the editors of Organization had suddenly
taken a U-turn from the claims about heterodoxy and diversity with
which they had launched the journal (Burrell et al., 1994). The state of

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organization studies seemed to be one in which the very idea of an

integrated organization studies had been called into doubt, yet the editors
of the journal were asking me to talk about this fragmented and unstable
object. Perhaps I have fallen into their trap and have come up with the
pluralist description of organization studies that they were after all along.
Or maybe this is just a roundabout way of saying that I’m not sure if the
question ‘w(h)ither organization studies?’ is particularly meaningful.
Rather than taking these difficulties as absolute limits, I propose to take
them as a starting point from which to pose some questions about the
apparent ‘crisis of grand narratives’ to which I have already been
alluding. It is clear that concepts such as narrative, and various other
concepts such as language games and discourse have had a significant
impact on organization studies in recent years (Astley and Zammuto,
1992; Boje, 2001; Grant et al., 1998). Indeed, I have already evoked a
distinction between small narratives and grand narratives to describe the
pluralization of organization studies. But in this article, rather than
stopping with the story about the decline of grand narratives and the
proliferation of small narratives, I will try to examine some of these
concepts in a little more detail. To put it simply, this could be seen as a
critical reading of the new grand narrative of the withering of grand
narratives. I pose these questions about small and grand narratives by
looking at the way that these concepts are introduced by Jean-François
Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition and the way that they have
made their way into organization studies. This will provide a launching
pad for a discussion of the movement of concepts and the state of theory
in organization studies and will suggest, perhaps, some things about
organization studies ‘in general’.

Critical Strategies
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition probably requires little by way of
introduction. His ‘report on knowledge’ was commissioned by the
Government of Quebec and published in French in 1979 and in English
in 1984, and propelled him onto the international scene. When The
Postmodern Condition appeared Lyotard was already a well established
philosopher and activist, having published a surprisingly diverse number
of books on phenomenology, politics and art, and an infamous critique of
Marx and Freud (Lyotard, 1991a, 1993b, 1990a, 1993a). Afterwards he
published works on language and injustice, time, Heidegger, Kant’s
aesthetics, Augustine, and justice (Lyotard, 1988, 1991b, 1990b, 1994,
2000; Lyotard and Thébaud, 1985) and a series of articles on various
aspects of the postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1992, 1997, 1999).
The Postmodern Condition is a short book, and on the face of it appears
to be simpler and more ‘sociological’ than much of Lyotard’s other work.
But this should not lead us to think that it is a straightforward text or that
we are entitled to read it in a straightforward way. Indeed, there are a

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number of aspects of this text that suggest that it is far from easy. To begin
with, there are numerous problems with the meaning of this word
‘postmodern’ which, as Neils Brügger (2001) has carefully documented,
means quite different things throughout Lyotard’s various works. Further,
Lyotard uses it in quite a different way from other thinkers, and hence in
The Postmodern Condition the postmodern condition is not specified as
an epoch, or an epistemology, a style of architecture, art or culture, or an
organizational form. Rather, here the postmodern condition refers to
an apparent ‘crisis of narratives’ that had emerged in the years before the
book was published. Lyotard opens with this explanation:
The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly
developed societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern to
describe that condition. The word is in current use on the American
continent among sociologists and critics; it designates the state of our
culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nine-
teenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the
arts. The present study will place these transformations in the context of
the crisis of narratives. (1984: xxiii)
The difficulties of Lyotard’s text are not restricted to movements of the
meaning of ‘the postmodern’. In particular it is important to be careful
about the way that the text shifts between descriptive and prescriptive
statements, to the point that it is often very hard to tell if Lyotard is
simply describing the postmodern condition or if he is commending or
condemning it. Lyotard’s text oscillates between the first and the second
person, sometimes stating what ‘we’ think and sometimes what ‘he’
thinks. Such oscillations present a major difficulty, and if ignored might
lead one to think that Lyotard simply endorses the postmodern condition
that he describes. In order to address this problem, we should recall the
stress that Lyotard puts on the difference of what ‘is’ from what ‘ought to
be’ and with this the language games of denotation and prescription. In
this Lyotard is very traditional: ‘that which ought to be cannot be
concluded from that which is, the “ought” from the “is” . . . between
statements that narrate and describe something and statements that
prescribe something, there is always some talking to be done’ (in Lyotard
and Thébaud, 1985: 17).
In the light of the difficulties of the meaning of the postmodern and the
slippage between description and prescription, it is unsurprising that
The Postmodern Condition has been read in a number of quite different
ways. In organization studies this has led some to be quite suspicious of
the way that Lyotard’s book has been read. Catherine Casey, for example,
suggests that ‘Little, if any of Lyotard’s work (other than secondary
readings of The Postmodern Condition) has been directly influential in
the field of organization studies’ (2002: 124). While this is an important
reminder about the partiality of readings of Lyotard in organization
studies, Casey nevertheless fails to do justice to the large number of
writers who have, both directly and indirectly, been influenced by

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Lyotard’s work, several of whom I will discuss in this article. But

moreover, Casey offers us little by way of an alternative to the state of
affairs that she diagnoses, preferring to criticize rather than intervene in a
way that would indicate a different direction. Rather than just criticizing
the way that Lyotard has been received, my goal in this article will be to
indicate something of what might be a ‘better’ path.
An alternative critical strategy to Casey’s is suggested in the approach
taken by Hugo Letiche. In a criticism that echoes Casey’s, Letiche argues
that:
Neither attention to, nor much knowledge of, Lyotard’s philosophical
thought has been evident in the postmodernism debate in organizational
theory. A perusal of the literature reveals many citations of the Postmodern
Condition, but a marked lack of references to the rest of Lyotard’s work.
(Letiche, forthcoming)
As we will see, for Lyotard the goal of thought is not continuity or the
resolution of thinking into a complacent consensus, but is grounded in a
notion of inventiveness and difference. In the light of this, Letiche offers
an alternative and inventive reading of Lyotard that challenges organiza-
tion studies to rethink itself and its relation to The Postmodern Condi-
tion. In this article I will try to extend Letiche’s analysis, not by turning to
the wider body of Lyotard’s work, as Letiche does, but by proposing to
look again at The Postmodern Condition. Where Letiche proposes to look
elsewhere in Lyotard’s work to find an alternative reading of Lyotard, I
will suggest that the basis for an alternative reading of Lyotard can be
found in The Postmodern Condition.

The Postmodern Condition

Having established the object of his study as the condition of knowledge
in the most highly developed societies and that this will be placed in the
context of the crisis of narratives, the second paragraph of Lyotard’s
introduction reads as follows:
Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yard-
stick of science, the majority of them turned out to be fables. But to the
extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and
seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then
produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a
discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any
science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind
making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of
Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or
working subject, or the creation of wealth. (1984: xxiii)
Lyotard is not concerned simply with narratives, but with the way that
narratives justify or legitimate themselves in order to take on the status of
something more than mere stories. This concern with the legitimation
of narratives signals a clear relation to Jürgen Habermas’s Legitimation

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Crisis, which appeared six years before The Postmodern Condition and is
a major point of contention for Lyotard’s analysis of the crisis of narra-
tives. The back cover of the English paperback of The Postmodern
Condition simply states that ‘His book is about what Jürgen Habermas has
called “legitimation”. How do we legitimate the criteria for sorting true
statements from false?’ The centrality of this concern with legitimation is
important because it draws attention to questions about the reading of
The Postmodern Condition in organization studies. Strangely, organiza-
tion studies has tended to pay very little attention to Lyotard’s concern
with legitimation, which is odd given that organization studies emerged
out of the shadow of Max Weber and that the legitimation of domi-
nation was one of Weber’s central concerns (see, for example, Weber,
1978, ch. 3).
This reiterates the questions of the partiality of readings of The
Postmodern Condition in organization studies that were raised by Casey
and Letiche. Similar questions can be found by turning to Lyotard’s
discussion of legitimation. He specifies a science as modern if it legit-
imates itself through recourse to a ‘metadiscourse’ that appeals to a
‘grand narrative’. Lyotard is clear that there are a number of grand
narratives that modern science has appealed to and in the opening page
of The Postmodern Condition he lists five. Elsewhere we find this list in
a slightly different form. For example, in The Postmodern Explained to
Children, he writes:
The thought and action of the 19th and 20th centuries are governed by an
Idea (in the Kantian sense): the Idea of emancipation. It is of course framed
in quite different ways, depending upon what we call the philosophies of
history, the grand narratives which attempt to organize this mass of events:
the Christian narrative of the redemption of original sin through love; the
Aufklärer [Enlightenment] narrative of emancipation from ignorance and
servitude through knowledge and egalitarianism; the speculative narrative
of the realisation of the universal Idea through the dialectic of the concrete;
the Marxist narrative of emancipation from exploitation and alienation
through the socialisation of work; and the capitalist narrative of emancipa-
tion from poverty through industrial development. (Lyotard, 1992: 36)
With both of these lists Lyotard appears to be both pluralist and unitarist.
That is to say, there are several grand narratives that have legitimated
modern science but they all share a common kernel. They all legitimate
knowledge in a similar, if not the same way. Still, although for Lyotard
there is no single grand narrative that is more grand than any other, this
pluralism seldom accompanies the Lyotard encountered in organization
studies. For example, Clegg and Hardy (1999: 2) find that Marxism is ‘the
master narrative par excellence’ and Linstead (2001: 218) suggests that
Lyotard’s ‘chief target’ is Hegel. Hassard claims that Lyotard rejects both
‘those reductionist narratives derived from Marx and Hegel’ (1993: 9).
These readings assume that one (or two) of these grand narratives is more
grand than the others. This probably says less about Lyotard than it does

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about the preferences of writers in organization studies, and in doing so

says something interesting about the state of theory in organization
studies. A similar manipulation of Lyotard can also be found in the way
that certain ostensible pluralists leave some of Lyotard’s grand narratives
outside their field of critical vision. For example, Stephen Cummings,
apparently explaining Lyotard, provides examples of metanarratives
which ‘include Marxism, Hegelianism, the model of scientific rational-
ism, Christianity, a Freudian emphasis on the dominance of the uncon-
scious mind, or collective codes of behaviour’ (2000: 213). Despite the
fact that Lyotard consistently identifies the capitalist grand narrative,
Cummings somehow manages to leave this one out of his list. This is
strange, because although organization studies is largely concerned with
productive organization in advanced capitalist economies, very often
Lyotard is represented in such a way as it might appear that he has
nothing to say about the grand narratives that have legitimated the
accumulation of capital.
This might prompt one to look a little closer at Lyotard’s position on
grand narratives and the way that this has been represented in organiza-
tion studies. It might be tempting, and many have used him for this
purpose, to think that when he describes a shift, in recent years, which
results in the delegitimation of grand narratives, that Lyotard thinks that
this is a good thing. Famously, Lyotard remarks: ‘Simplifying to the
extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity to metanarratives’ (1984:
xxiv). But is this incredulity Lyotard’s or is it something in the world that
he is describing? Here we face problems about the standpoint that
Lyotard takes in his text. Although he defines the postmodern in terms of
‘incredulity to metanarratives’, it is not at all clear if this is a description
of how metanarratives are treated in a society like ours or if he is arguing
that we should be incredulous to metanarratives. This equivocation runs
throughout his text, as Brügger (2001) notes. More often than not Lyotard
refers to what ‘most people’ think, or something similar. So, for example
he writes that ‘In contemporary society and culture . . . The grand
narrative has lost its credibility’ (1984: 37) and that ‘Most people have
lost their nostalgia for the lost narrative’ (1984: 41). Whether accurate or
not, this is a description of a social fact. Whether Lyotard personally
agrees with what he describes is a difficult question.
Here we could look further into questions of legitimation. It is impor-
tant to note that Lyotard does not imagine that legitimation is no longer a
problem in this postmodern condition. Far from it. Lyotard is under no
illusion that questions of judgement would ever disappear. Indeed, this is
the question that he presents to us: ‘Where, after the metanarratives, can
legitimacy reside?’ (1984: xxiv–xxv). In organization studies the answer
to the question of where legitimacy can reside after metanarratives has
often been very simple: all that we now have is a plurality of competing
discourses, none of which has any priority over any other. On this
reading, Lyotard is taken to represent an argument about the plurality of

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language games. For example, for Calás and Smircich ‘the end of meta-
narratives emphasizes how the totalizing discourses of previous times,
with promises of all-encompassing theories for each discipline . . . have
given way to fragmentary illuminations and local understandings’ (1997:
xviii–xix; see also Calás and Smircich, 1999; Kilduff and Mehra, 1997).
This version of the postmodern condition reaches its peak in the hands of
Hassard, according to whom:
Lyotard’s epistemology is a language-game approach in which knowledge
is based on nothing more than a number of diverse discourses, each with
its own rules and structures. In Lyotard’s view, each language-game is
defined by its own particular knowledge criteria. Importantly, no one
discourse is privileged. The postmodern epistemology concerns knowl-
edge of localized understandings and acceptance of a plurality of diverse
language forms. Thus postmodernism sees the fragmentation of grand
narratives and the discrediting of all meta-narratives. (1993: 9)
Interestingly, this fits with the kinds of things that were being said in
organization studies before the discovery of Lyotard. In particular it
echoes Kuhn’s (1970) work on paradigms, or more accurately, the specific
inflection that this was given by Burrell and Morgan in their Sociological
Paradigms and Organisational Analysis (1979). In this book, which
argued against the hegemony of ‘functionalist’ organizational studies and
for work coming from alternative positions (what they called ‘inter-
pretive’, ‘radical humanist’ and ‘radical structuralist’ paradigms) there
was a clear concern with totalization of organization studies around a
single set of assumptions about science and society. In this context, and
in the context of the debates about ‘paradigm incommensurability’ that
ensued, Lyotard had a part to play. He was used to plug the gap in
defences of pluralism by what amounted to the imposition of the force of
law—this time in the way that he could act as legitimating force in the
case for pluralism, and in the way that he was presented, it seemed that
the forces of history were on the side of the pluralists. When Lyotard
appeared on the scene, this great French philosopher who had written an
important book on the state of knowledge in the postmodern condition, it
appeared that any resistance to pluralism would be very quickly swept
away by the pressure of French intellectual power and the irresistible
sea-change that he predicted in which grand narratives were a thing of
the past, and that this is a good thing too.
The problem with this is that it ignores a major part of Lyotard’s
argument, insofar as Lyotard does not dissolve legitimation into taste
preference, and also because Lyotard does not unequivocally celebrate
the delegitimation of grand narratives that he has described. In the
postmodern condition, a set of new legitimation criteria present them-
selves for consideration, and it is these new criteria that are Lyotard’s
concern. Brügger summarizes Lyotard’s argument in this way:
[I]n this postmodern epoch three other possibly legitimating criteria appear
within science: performativity, which governs de facto (the technical

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criteria, from which everything is administered in input/output matrices in

which the elements in a process are claimed to be commensurable and
in which the aim is to increase efficiency); consensus, which is achieved
by open discussion, a criterion for which Habermas is made the spokes-
person; and paralogy (disagreement, incommensurableness, innovative-
ness), which Lyotard himself wishes to promote. (2001: 79)
For Lyotard the question is not one of a contest between the grand
narratives and these new criteria. The grand narratives are no longer
convincing. The contest is therefore among these three new criteria. The
critical aspect of The Postmodern Condition is that Lyotard is not at all
happy with the choice that has been made, or how that choice has been
made. To put it bluntly, in the postmodern age, the decision has
been made by, and in favour of, capitalism and techno-science. His
concern with this should be clear when he remarks dryly that the
postmodern capitalist system ‘can count severity among its advantages’
(1984: 62). This system transforms all notions of rights and justice into
questions of calculations of efficiency. In this world, ‘Rights do not flow
from hardship, but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improves
the system’s performance’ (1984: 63). Hence Lyotard’s description of ‘the
system’ as ‘a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumani-
zing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity’
(1984: 63). In this actually existing dystopia, legitimacy becomes a cold
question of efficiency.
The decision makers . . . attempt to manage the clouds of sociality accord-
ing to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their
elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They
allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of
scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its
optimizing the system’s performance–efficiency. The application of this
criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level
of terror, whether soft or hard. (1984: xxiv)
Along with this, the suggestion that ‘The decision maker’s arrogance,
which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the
exercise of terror’ (1984: 64) should make it clear that Lyotard is no fan of
performativity. Having identified performativity as one of the bases of
legitimation after the grand narratives, and the dominant base at present,
Lyotard describes the rise of performativity. Doing so, Lyotard is keen to
expose the relationships between knowledge and power and to see how
these relationships are changing today. In a phrase reminiscent of Fou-
cault, he writes ‘knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same
question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to
be decided?’ (Lyotard, 1984: 9). Lyotard identifies a movement from the
time of Descartes, who realized that scientific research requires financial
investment, to the modern age when it is now a commonplace that the
management of scientific knowledge fuels financial success. In the proc-
ess we see the rise of an ‘equation between wealth, efficiency, and the

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truth’ (1984: 45). Over the course of the past three centuries we therefore
witness the rise of what Lyotard describes as a ‘generalized spirit of
performativity’ (1984: 45), that reaches its peak in the most developed
economies of today. In relation to the new bases of legitimation in
consensus and paralogy, there is little contest.
Performativity criteria are established in relation to both the produc-
tion and the transmission of knowledge. These come together in the
university, something of which Lyotard is highly critical. In this system,
‘The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist stu-
dent, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer “Is it
true?” but “What use is it?” ’ (1984: 51).
In the context of delegitimation, universities and the institutions of higher
learning are called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals—so many
doctors, so many teachers in a given discipline, so many engineers, so
many administrators, etc. The transmission of knowledge is no longer
designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its
emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably
fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions.
(1984: 48)
Against this generalized spirit of performativity, Lyotard poses a question
or ‘metaquestion’ that condenses his objection to performativity. Here,
importantly, he turns back to concepts of legitimacy. While performa-
tivity merely asks of knowledge ‘what is it worth?’, Lyotard turns the
logic of performativity back onto itself and asks ‘What is your “what is it
worth” worth?’ (1984: 54).
For Lyotard, performativity involves a system logic that reduces ques-
tions of justice to questions of efficiency and has no interest in the
unknown because it falls outside the system as currently constituted.
Against this he ‘sketches the outline of a politics that would respect both
the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown’ (1984: 67). This
involves turning away from performativity and towards the other pos-
sible legitimating criteria, consensus and paralogy. Lyotard argues that
consensus, the criteria preferred by Habermas, is inadequate (1984: 60). It
rests on a belief that it is possible to find a metalanguage that could
translate all of the ‘heteromorphous classes of utterance’ into one
another, and the assumption that it is possible for all speakers in
scientific games to agree about this meta-language and that consensus is
the goal of science (1984: 65). Against this, Lyotard argues that ‘con-
sensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the
contrary is paralogy’ (1984: 65–6).
Lyotard defines paralogy, at its most simple, as ‘the search for insta-
bilities’ (1984: 53ff.). Paralogy is not a confirmation of what is known, of
cumulative additions to already existing knowledge. ‘It produces not the
known, but the unknown’ (1984: 60). In this it is akin to what Foucault
has called ‘problematisation’, in which the goal of criticism is not a new
consensus but is one of ‘making facile gesture difficult’ (1988: 155), and is

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reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) insistence that the point of

philosophy, or one might simply say of ‘theory’, is that of creating
concepts. This understanding of creativity of thought clearly owes some-
thing to Bachelard and Canguilhem, who conceived of science as innova-
tion, instituting an ‘epistemological break’ from common understanding,
but it also bears traces of a very classical demand of the difference of
what is from what could be. For Lyotard the goal of thought is not one of
merely stating what is, which is a denotative language game. It also
involves a prescriptive language game, a game of ethics, justice and
politics. Hence Lyotard’s conclusion, despite his suspicions about
consensus, that ‘justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect’
(1984: 66).

Discussion
Perhaps I have gone into too much detail discussing Lyotard’s book, even
though this still does feel a rather rushed condensation of a somewhat
detailed argument. I have gone into this detail not in order to ‘introduce’
Lyotard’s book (it is too late for that) but to show how it can be read in a
way that departs from the reading that has dominated in organization
studies. In particular I wanted to show that while it is possible to read
Lyotard as simply another liberal pluralist, there is much more to his
work. Besides these specific issues, I would like to use this reading of
reception of The Postmodern Condition to open a broader discussion
of the state of theory in organization studies. Although I do not want to
suggest that The Postmodern Condition is indicative of trends in organi-
zation studies ‘in general’, I might use it as a starting point to offer some
reflections on (1) the consumption of theory in organization studies; (2)
the concepts in currency in organization studies today; and (3) the
shifting divisions of organization studies.

Consumption
In recent years several writers have emphasised the role of consumption
of theory in organization studies. Notably, Hassard and Kelemen (2002)
suggest a shift from an emphasis on the production of knowledge towards
an emphasis on the consumption of knowledge in a process which, they
suggest, involves the possibility of unpredictable uses of theory. Like-
wise, Gabriel stresses that ‘organizational theories are not used passively,
in general, but in a creative, opportunistic and individualistic way’
(2002: 133). As Perry puts it, ‘Theory not only travels to unexpected
destinations; it may also be put to unexpected uses’ (1995: 36). I have
myself been interested in the way that theories have been consumed in
organization studies, and in the unexpected uses to which various
theorists have been put in organization studies. I have tried to work some
of this out in relation to the consumption of Foucault and Derrida in
organization studies (see Jones, 2002 and forthcoming). In this I certainly

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concur with Böhm (2002: 336), who defends theory from Parker’s (2002)
recent anti-theoretical gibes, and would argue, contra Parker, that it is not
theory as such that is the problem but the way that theory has been
practised and institutionalized in organization studies.
In an important recent paper, Stephen Linstead (2002) presents ‘organi-
zational kitsch’ as an aesthetic style that involves a kind of auto-parodic
pretence, a self-conscious farce that is no less effective for being ridicu-
lous. While the avant-garde ‘seeks new ways of expressing the inex-
pressible’, kitsch involves ‘new ways of expressing that which has been
expressed so many times that it is instantly recognizable’ (p. 658). Hence,
‘kitsch is reassuring’ (p. 661) because it ‘involves the easy satisfaction of
expectations [and] takes the disturbing and makes it comforting’ (p. 660).
Linstead presents the garden gnome, a cheap object of mass production
that captures this self-conscious farce and is also an unthreatening image
of happiness—to laugh at a garden gnome would be churlish and
unfriendly, so it is better to smirk knowingly. In organization theory,
Linstead finds a perfect analogy in Peters and Waterman’s In Search of
Excellence (1982), in which he identifies a pattern of ‘easy avuncularity,
intellectually undemanding presentations of theory in a digestible way—
and the authors, though they don’t appear to realize it, are mounting a
defence, not of applied theory, but of theoretical kitsch’ (Linstead, 2002:
674). Hence Linstead’s conclusion that ‘In Search of Excellence is the
garden gnome of contemporary organization theory’ (2002: 674).
If there is anything to add to Linstead’s discussion of organizational
kitsch, then it is perhaps to widen the scope of its application. While the
designation of ‘kitsch’ certainly sheds light on contemporary organiza-
tion theory, I am not sure that this is restricted to figures such as Peters
and Waterman. It seems to me that organizational kitsch is very much
part and parcel of not just ‘the mainstream’ but also of much that presents
itself as ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern’ organization studies, and we have
seen this clearly in readings of The Postmodern Condition. When enlis-
ted simply to make an argument for pluralism, one might wonder if
Lyotard has not been effectively disarmed, in a way that makes him say
old things in a reassuring way. The point, if a little simple, should be
clear: in organization studies, In Search of Excellence is not the only
garden gnome.
This raises questions about the way that theory has been done
in organization studies and the way that theory has been imported into
organization studies. Hence the common complaint these days that
theory in organization studies has been done ‘at a distance’. This happens
through secondary readings, in which many of the theorists who have
been imported into organization studies in recent years have made their
way in through what appears to be little more than cartoon-book intro-
ductions. It is almost as if ‘theory’ is done somewhere safely outside
organization studies, and the best we can do is to raid these other sources
(badly, much of the time). Another way that theory is done at a distance

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is through a particular set of expectations with regard to the citation of

theory and theorists. Very often, ‘doing theory’ involves little more than
listing citations in parentheses, regardless of the relation between what is
said and the book that is mentioned. We have seen the consequences of
reading Lyotard at a distance, and it says something rather sad about
the state of theory in organization studies when this is not a marginal
practice but is standard operating procedure in many of the ‘top’
journals.
Against these tendencies, we might ask today whether it is possible to
imagine a different place and status of theory in which organization
studies was not merely a recipient of theory from afar, and if we might
find ways of doing theory that involved less distance from the sources
discussed. I am under no illusion that changing these practices would be
easy. But if theory is to be more than ‘armchair’ speculation (another
name for bad theory that is often given to theory in general) then there
needs to be not only a will but also the space to do this. Of course, a great
deal militates against taking time for reading today, from the compression
of PhD programmes to the pressures of teaching and administrative
demands and the demand to ‘publish or perish’. I am writing this article
under these very pressures, and feel them keenly myself.
Interestingly, questions of time, of taking time and of making time are
major concerns for Lyotard, and one of the problems he has with
performativity is that it leaves no space for activities such as reading,
thinking, reflecting—in short, ‘theory’—that require, and appear to waste,
time. Lyotard stresses the need to resist these pressures, and invites us to
respect the critical intellectual functions that are demanded by knowl-
edge and justice. These have always been at risk and today face over-
whelming threats. If nothing else then it might be this kind of memory of
the critical function that demands a continuing interrogation of our
current situation. This interrogation requires theoretical, and philosoph-
ical, activity that is not compromised by the demand for satisfying and
reassuring answers, whether these are supplied by popular ideology or by
critical orthodoxy.

Concepts
This presents questions about the concepts that are in currency in
organization studies today. Lyotard has been used as a reference point
in discussions of a version of postmodernism that implies, among other
things, paradigm pluralism. In the process many other things that Lyotard
has to say about the contemporary organized world have fallen by the
wayside. This is important not only because it does injustice to Lyotard’s
thought, but because of the way that it is complicit with a more general
denial in organization studies of a set of concepts that includes justice,
judgement, ethics, politics and capitalism. By contrast with the situation
in organization studies, in numerous discussions of Lyotard’s work the
political and ethical dimension of his work are basic starting points (see

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Bennington, 1988; Curtis, 2001; Raffel, 1992; Readings, 1991; Rojek and
Turner, 1998; Silverman, 2002; Williams, 1998, 2000). For example, in
one recent introduction to Lyotard’s work, Malpas writes:
Questions of politics, justice and freedom lie at the centre of Lyotard’s
writing. Whether he is discussing a work of art, a literary text, theological
arguments or even the end of the universe, his focus always falls upon the
social and ethical issues that they evoke. Lyotard is primarily a political
philosopher concerned with the ways in which our lives are organised and
controlled by the societies we inhabit. (2003: 2)
To be generous, this lack of attention in organization studies to Lyotard’s
concerns with ethics, justice and politics might be explained in terms of
translation. For example, Au juste is translated as Just Gaming and
Moralités postmodernes as Postmodern Fables, and in both cases the
‘just’ and ‘morality’ seem to get translated out. But more than this there is
a question of emphasis in relation to the reading of Lyotard in organiza-
tion studies. Even with a title such as Just Gaming, the point is that it is
the gaming rather than a concern for the just that has captured the
attention. Elsewhere (Jones, 2003) I have drawn attention to the place of
ethics, responsibility and justice in Derrida’s recent work, and the way
that this has been largely ignored by those in organization studies who
have expressed an interest in Derrida. Despite the continuing importance
of ethics, justice and politics to Derrida and Lyotard, these are generally
not the things that they been known for when they have been imported
into organization studies.
This is an act of ‘translation’ far more profound than is explicable in
terms of differences of national language. It is indicative of the concepts
that are currently in vogue in organization studies, and this is not
restricted to being a problem of a hegemonic ‘mainstream’. It relates to
questions of theoretical fashion and, perhaps, a hesitancy among even the
most apparently radical in organization studies to even speak of things
such as justice. A couple of years ago I addressed this concern to a
number of well known scholars from across organization studies at
a roundtable discussion at the EGOS conference in Lyon (see Boje et al.,
2001), and to be quite honest I was rather disappointed by the unwilling-
ness of these established figures to address these issues. Rather than take
seriously the fact that many of the post-structural theorists who have
been influential in recent years were both theoretically sophisticated and
politically imaginative, most of these critical scholars of organization
preferred to retrench into exactly the political quietism that I had tried to
call into question.
This says something about how theory has been done in recent years in
organization studies. It might lead one to argue that organization studies
‘in general’ has a tendency for the kitsch, for using theorists in a way that
is imitative of the past rather than radically different. Here again we
might take from Lyotard a hope for difference, for the possibility of
thinking differently. And this applies to the thinking that we do about the

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world, but here clearly also applies to the way that I am reading Lyotard.
Reading not simply to reproduce but to change. To offer alternatives. To
make way for what might be.

Divisions
If offering alternatives applies to reading of theory, then we might well
begin with an alternative reading of Lyotard. Very often, Lyotard has been
accommodated by slotting him in as a ‘postmodern’ theorist, a tendency
that can be traced from Cooper and Burrell (1988) to Hancock and Tyler
(2001), and beyond. Far too often, whether for purposes of conceptual
simplification or not, there has been a tendency to posit a sharp and clear
division between the modern and the postmodern, and to position
Lyotard on the side of the latter (for particularly telling cases of this see,
for example, Power, 1990; Burrell, 1994; Chia, 1995). Perhaps today a
new Lyotard could emerge from reconsidering the continuities between
Lyotard and the tradition of critical thought. This might begin by con-
necting Lyotard’s concern with performativity in relation to the concerns
over the instrumentalization of reason described by Max Weber and the
betrayal of the Enlightenment criticized by members of the Frankfurt
School (Adorno, 1974; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1969; Horkheimer, 1947;
Marcuse, 1964). Of course, much has been made of the differences
between Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, the heir apparent to the Frankfurt
School. We might recall also the positive relation between Lyotard’s
critique of performativity and the critique of instrumentality in Haber-
mas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1987) from which Lyotard bor-
rows one possible formulation of the commodification of knowledge in
terms of the way that knowledge is no longer an end in itself and hence
has lost its ‘use value’ (Lyotard, 1984: 5, and note 16).
Drawing attention to these continuities between Lyotard and a Weber-
ian or Frankfurt version of concern with instrumental rationality is not to
say that there is nothing new in Lyotard’s critique. Indeed, Lyotard’s
work, while not ‘historical’, is alert to the historicity of knowledge, and
there are some clear developments and departures in the way that he
articulates his critique of instrumental rationality. He is concerned with
the possibilities for critique in an age in which many do not take
anything seriously. He is not only concerned with conformity to totaliz-
ing ideologies, but further with the political consequences of the appar-
ent non-conformism that characterizes contemporary liberal
democracies. In this way there are productive continuities, not with
‘postmodernism’ but with the kind of critical account of the postmodern
condition that can be found in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical
Reason (1987) and Slavoj Žižek’s account of ‘post-ideological ideology’
(1989, 1994).
The point of this is that describing Lyotard as postmodern brings with
it at least two problems. First, it runs the risk of losing sight of the way
that Lyotard is concerned with outlining a critique of the postmodern

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condition. Second, it is in danger of denying the important continuities

between Lyotard and modern critical thought, from the Greeks to Kant,
Freud and Wittgenstein, phenomenology and Levinas, Weber and the
Frankfurt School through to contemporary critical theory. In this all too
popular labelling as ‘postmodernist’, Lyotard has certainly been made
manageable, but the cost of this has been to lose much, if not most, of
what he says that is interesting. This is again profoundly ironic, given
that this is the very dynamic that Lyotard identifies, and objects to, in so
much of his writing. Perhaps the only way to try to do justice to Lyotard,
to put this in the language of The Differend, would be to observe this
wrong, to testify to these silences and to find a way of linking phrases in
such a way that Lyotard could be displaced. To put this more simply, it
would be to say that for Lyotard the goal of critical thought is to introduce
a difference, to open up a field of agonistics. Agonistics is not a post-
modern invention, which Lyotard clearly signals by attributing it to
Heraclitus, the dialectic of the sophists and the early tragedians (1984:
84, n.35). It is, for Lyotard, little more than the task of thinking, and of
criticism. This is perhaps what we need to do to, or for, Lyotard.

Conclusion
It might be tempting to conclude here, with this largely negative vision of
the way that Lyotard has been read in organization studies and a largely
negative vision of the state of theory in organization studies. But rather
than concluding on this bitter note, I would like to spend a little more
time in order to complicate the image that I have been painting. Against
the suggestion that Lyotard has simply been consumed by organization
studies, I might move towards a conclusion by speaking of some excep-
tions to the tendencies that I have been sketching out here. This might do
more justice to the variety of ways that Lyotard has been worked with in
organization studies and might also go some way towards a displacement
of Lyotard, by showing that this displacement is already happening.
Hence, in addition to the displacement that has already been performed
by my ‘paralogical’ reading of the reception of The Postmodern Condition
in organization studies, this is a gesture towards a further emphasis on
paralogy, towards making Lyotard a little more contestable.
Among the exceptions to the reading of Lyotard as pluralist, notable is
the work of Pippa Carter and Norman Jackson, who have drawn on The
Differend, Lyotard’s (1988) account of the role of language in ‘victim-
ology’, to look at the role of language in silencing particular victims.
Turning to The Differend, which Lyotard considered his most important
book and is arguably his most philosophically profound work, Carter and
Jackson work with Lyotard’s elaboration of an understanding of language
that extends the conception of language games articulated in The Post-
modern Condition. They draw on two of Lyotard’s examples of victims
(the survivor of Auschwitz and the figure of labour in the relation

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Campbell Jones

between labour and capital), to shed light on the linguistic closures and
silencing that accompany the language of management gurus (Jackson
and Carter, 1998: 156–7; see also, for example, Lyotard, 1988: 9–10). In
‘Negation and Impotence’ they take the concept of the differend to
articulate a vision of linguistic contestation that goes well beyond the
liberal pluralism that characterizes many readings of Lyotard and stresses
the place of language in silencing and victimization (Carter and Jackson,
1996). Equally, Pelzer (2002) has drawn on The Differend in relation to
the silencing of native Americans in history, in the film Dead Man, and in
organizational change management. All of these turn to aspects of Lyo-
tard’s work that have been largely neglected in organization studies and
use this to shed critical light on the politics of the language of organiza-
tion.
A similar recognition of Lyotard as a critical theorist can be found in
other places in organization studies. In the first of two ‘classic reviews’ of
The Postmodern Condition published in Organization in 1997, Kallinikos
(1997) uses Lyotard to outline a critical vision of the state of research and
knowledge in the postmodern condition. In his ‘classic review’ Jacques
(1997) takes The Postmodern Condition as a starting point from which to
offer a scathing criticism of the limitations and restrictions that are
imposed on thought by contemporary organization studies. Czarniawska
(2001) similarly takes the idea of progress by paralogy from The Post-
modern Condition to outline ten productive paradoxes for organization
theory. And Linstead (1994) turns to The Inhuman (Lyotard, 1991b) to
attack the protocols of social science and organization studies that hide
the dangerous and unclean, what he calls the ‘underside of organization’
(Linstead, forthcoming).
In addition to these uses of various works by Lyotard that display a
tendency quite different from that of simply using The Postmodern
Condition to defend paradigm pluralism, we might look at two further
examples of writers who have used Lyotard in organization studies. Both
of these are exemplary in that they do not only turn to Lyotard as
conventionally understood, but transform accepted understandings of
Lyotard and in doing so actively displace Lyotard. The first of these is a
paper by Rolland Munro (2001) that extracts from The Postmodern
Condition a conception of communication and information. Drawing
attention to the place of cybernetics in The Postmodern Condition,
Munro uses Lyotard in order to understand the ‘language of information’
and the place of exteriorization and circulation of knowledge and the
place of computer networks and language in such processes. In addition
to recovering these aspects of The Postmodern Condition, Munro’s essay
is exemplary in the way that it both uses and transforms Lyotard in the
process, drawing attention to aspects of The Postmodern Condition that
have not registered in organization studies.
A second example of a displacement of Lyotard can be found in two
important papers by Hugo Letiche (1992 and forthcoming). Reviewing

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Lyotard’s work for organization studies, Letiche insists on a broader

reading of Lyotard that goes beyond The Postmodern Condition and that
sets this book in the context of his larger work. Letiche draws out
Lyotard’s concern with justice, a theme that we worked with earlier in
relation to questions of judgement and legitimation in The Postmodern
Condition. Letiche stresses the political character of Lyotard and the way
that ‘Lyotard has been occupied, throughout his career, with the theme of
justice’ (Letiche, forthcoming). Letiche offers a powerful critique of the
paradigm pluralism argued for by Schultz and Hatch (1996), arguing that
‘The cutting and pasting of genres (paradigms) that Schultz and Hatch are
calling for goes against the whole thrust of Lyotard’s language philos-
ophy’ (Letiche, forthcoming). Perhaps more important than these
renewed emphases and critical interventions against the way that Lyotard
has been read, Letiche actively transforms Lyotard and calls on others to
engage more seriously with his ideas and their consequences, a responsi-
bility that he lays at the feet of both Lyotard’s critics and his ostensible
proponents.
These displacements of Lyotard might disrupt the conclusions I ven-
tured earlier about the simple consumption of theory in organization
studies. This is the risk of paralogy. It is disconfirming and opens to
contestability, agonistics. Paralogy and agonistics here expose the con-
tested and contestable character of theory. Far from this putting us in a
space of futility, this forces us to confront the difficulty of arguments and
the continuous need for revision. This is to bring to light the role of
repression and silencing, and the work of theory in continually undoing
that repression. This is perhaps one thing we could learn from Lyotard
today. In organization studies, and not only there, theory has often played
the part of silencing, through the machinery of ignorance that is moti-
vated by performativity and the complacency encouraged by a consensus
that is happy enough to repeat what is acceptable in the community.
I do not want to conclude with some kind of blanket advertisement for
Lyotard. I have no hope that I might be able to pull back the curtain and
find a figure who has all of the answers that we need for the future. The
future of theory for organization studies rests as little with Lyotard as it
does with any other heroic figure. A criticism of Lyotard is as necessary
as is his introduction, although neither of these was really my goal here.
But if anything, an alternative conclusion would be that Lyotard, and
many others that we think we might have finished with, are there for the
taking by organization studies. This is to say that there are many spaces
for theory, and much that theory needs to do. Returning to works such as
those of Lyotard, and of many others, may still contain surprises. Rather
than forgetting a book like The Postmodern Condition, perhaps today a
more radical gesture would be to remember it, in the strong sense of
remembering that also involves ‘dismemberment’ or a ‘displacement’.
Perhaps this is the task of theory. Theory not as reflection or as explana-
tion but as exploration of what might be possible. This is not a reflection

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Campbell Jones

only on what is but is also a reflection on what might be. This involves a
renewal of notions such as contestation, paralogy and agonistics, from
Lyotard and beyond. Too often pluralism leads to a dull consensus or
becomes an instrument for denial of the claims of others. By contrast,
paralogy implies the refusal of such closure, and the perpetual opening of
spaces of contestation. Which is to say that without the critical function
of theory in the name of a forever open future, we have nothing but
repetition, which for many is total silence. For Lyotard this means terror,
and even if today this is the harsh reality of organized life, it does not
mean that this is necessary. Nor does it mean that this is just.

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Notes
My thanks to Steffen Böhm, Peter Fleming, Shayne Grice, André Spicer and the
participants at seminars at the University of Leicester and the University of York
for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Campbell Jones teaches critical theory and business ethics at the University of Leicester.
He co-edits a journal called ephemera: critical dialogues on organization (www.
ephemeraweb.org). Address: Management Centre, University of Leicester, Uni-
versity Road, Leicester LE7 1RH, United Kingdom. [email: [email protected]]

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