F O U C A U L T L I S T S
Michel Foucault was a French historian well known for his chaotic working methods.
He based suppositions and theories on texts and impressions from prayer books, paintings and other individual items,
without worrying about major interrelationships or even
quoting his sources.
Foucault is thus regarded more as a philosopher than as a
true historian.
And it was exactly this controversial thinker whom Wisse Dekker cited in February of this year (1987, PV 2005) when beginning his speech of acceptance for an associate professorship in Leiden:
‘Leiden in travail: new dimensions in management’.
A history-related title, linked to a forward-looking business subject.
At first sight a surprising and illogical combination.
But a closer look reveals that Dekker provides a useful
method of analyzing corporate cultures.
A Chinese encyclopedia
In his speech Dekker quotes from a
Chinese encyclopedia compiled by Foucault (Actually by Jorge Luis Borges,
PV 2005) which gives the following categorization of the animal kingdom:
Animals which belong to the emperor
Embalmed animals
Tame animals
Sucking pigs
Sirens
Fabulous animals
Stray dogs
Animals mentioned in this list
Animals which run amok
Animals which cannot be counted
A normal initial reaction on reading this list is to burst out laughing.
It's also normal that you then try to discover a system in the list, which unfortunately doesn't seem to exist.
After that you can't be blamed for abandoning it and
getting back to daily life.
But that's not what Foucault does.
He doesn't spend much time wondering whether something is reasonable, but quickly gets down to - for him - the much more relevant question as to why the categories are as they are.
"What kind of people did these Chinese have to be to
make sense of such a categorization, while we find it absurd?
And then Foucault starts a logical and ordered process of
analysis which can very usefully be applied to cultural analyses in companies.
So that's how Wisse Dekker has helped us to link history and management.
The order of things
One of the first reasonable assumptions one can derive from the encyclopedia is that the Emperor of China was an important man:
he's named separately and he's the first on the list.
So it also seems probable that sucking pigs occupy a higher position in the Chinese hierarchy than stray dogs.
And you can also guess something about animals which have
broken a jug.
So bit by bit it's possible to use an illogical text to
ask logical questions; questions which are useful if we want to know more about the
writer.
And it's precisely because the Chinese encyclopedia makes
an unordered impression that you're forced to look behind the text and thus gain a more
ordered impression of the Chinese world.
Things get more difficult when the texts look reasonable.
Then you're less likely to start reading between the lines.
After all, the lines themselves are interesting enough.
But Foucault gives convincing demonstrations of how logical texts can turn out to be illogical once you've looked behind the facade.
The history of madness
In another of his works, ‘The
History of Madness’, Foucault examines the development of virtues and vices.
Drawing on 13th-century texts originating in Paris and Amiens,
he cites the ‘twelve oppositions which together account for the management of the human soul’
and then produces a sequence like that in the Chinese encyclopedia.
But at first sight much less crazy
(incidentally Foucault only gives 10 of the 12
oppositions, and unfortunately here too without citing the source):
Faith and Superstition
Hope and Despair
Magnanimity and Meanness
Chastity and Lechery
Wisdom and Madness
Patience and Wrath
Gentleness and Hardness
Cooperation and Disunity
Obedience and Rebellion
Perseverance and Inconstancy
Working on the basis of this sequence, this categorization,
we could conclude that in Northern France around the time of the 13th century the issue of Faith was number 1 in the top 10 of virtues
and that Superstition immediately came at the top of the list of vices.
Wisdom and Madness are in fifth place.
Actually, a little strange, that they crop up in a list of virtues and vices.
We Europeans of the 20th century don't immediately view
qualities like reasonableness or unreasonableness in terms of good and evil.
The madness of reasonableness
Two centuries later in the Renaissance, however, we find that madness is still regarded as a vice and it has even progressed to the top position in the list of human frailties.
The following list of vices originates from this period:
Madness
Self-love / egoism
Flattery
Forgetfulness
Sloth
Lust
Absent-mindedness
Softness / tenderness
Eating tasty food
Deep sleep
We can still imagine how self-love, flattery, laziness and lust can be seen as vices
- even if we would tend to call them weaknesses now -
but according to our standards the other elements no
longer belong to this list of values and standards.
Lists as an instrument of power through
the ages
With his lists Foucault clearly shows what a cultural change involves: elements are added to the lists of good and bad.
Other elements disappear from the list, whereas others rise or fall on the list.
It's a hit parade of what's right and what isn't, of what's normal and what isn't, of what's acceptable and what isn't
and thus a source of tips of how you can get to the top and how you won't.
It's a guide for the well-intentioned, for careerists and
for people who want to belong to the group.
People who don't conform to prevailing lists will not gain positions of power.
The lists dominate the country, the area or the company more than the people do:
this is one of Foucault's favorite conclusions.
If you want to change a corporate culture, then you first
have to work your way up via the list in order to try and change its order or composition.
And that's a pretty long-term project.
Not something you do on the spur of the moment.
That's one of the reasons why cultural changes take place
so terribly gradually.
Company lists
The Foucault lists under discussion here can also be found in companies, but they don't look like lists.
Nevertheless they can be distilled out of documents or events.
They can be revealed, for instance, by decisions which are seemingly obvious but still don't get taken.
Or they are manifested in what someone says or writes, in the terms used on forms, the way the internal telephone directory is categorized and the amounts used in calculations.
Most readers of newspapers and magazines would accept that Reed-Elsevier has a list where short-term profit scores high and where there's certainly a place for innovation,
but probably not higher than fifth place.
Kluwer also seemed to attach importance to short-term profit, but it wasn't number one on their list.
The quality of the authors would be a good tip for the top.
Strategic plans from the 1970s contain many texts based on lists in which employment, reasonableness, justice and social involvement score highly.
Such a list points to a non-market-oriented company.
It's a simple fact that if you put the customer first then
society in general comes afterwards, and vice versa.
Your own lists
It's a very tricky business for people in an organization to discover their own ‘list’;
they think that everything they do, say or read is absolutely normal.
Someone who lives in accordance with a list doesn't see
his list as a list.
But it's a very different story with competitor information.
When you look at someone else you can see much more easily how 'right' and 'wrong' are ordered than in your own case.
So that's the best place to start if you want eventually to recognize your own lists with a view to changing them.
