Journal of Management Education http://jme.sagepub.

com/

In the Tribe of Sisyphus: Rethinking Management Education from an ''Entrepreneurial'' Perspective

Daniel Hjorth Journal of Management Education 2003 27: 637 DOI: 10.1177/1052562903257938 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jme.sagepub.com/content/27/6/637

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators

Additional services and information for Journal of Management Education can be found at: Email Alerts: http://jme.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://jme.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://jme.sagepub.com/content/27/6/637.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Dec 1, 2003 What is This?

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

10.1177/1052562903257938 JOURNAL OF MAN AGEMENT EDUCA TION / December 2003 Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

Article

IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS: RETHINKING MANAGEMENT EDUCATION FROM AN ENTREPRENEURIAL PERSPECTIVE

Daniel Hjorth Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute (ESBRI) Malm University
In this article, Camuss reading of the myth of Sisyphus provides an entrepreneurial perspective on management education. Traditionally management has been constrained by the conceptually limiting horizon of management knowledge and practice, with an emphasis on control and efficiency. As such, learning processes have come to reproduce a manipulable homo oeconomicus. Sisyphuss desire to create, the absurdity of his dignified revolt, in short, his entrepreneurship, exemplify a transformative and playful force central to learning processes. Embracing the opening toward a metaphorical style, this article introduces Sisyphean entrepreneurship as a novel way of thinking about and organizing learning processes in management education. Keywords: Sisyphus; entrepreneurship; management education; Michel de Certeau; tactics of revolt

In this article, Albert Camuss (1942/2001) The Myth of Sisyphus is made to interrupt and disturb the text to force it to return to the possibilities of a metaphorical style, a style responding to this special issue as an opportunity to perform a destabilization of the monopoly of scientific writing when it comes to management education. My text seeks to be performativeit tries to show how the theme of this special issue, interpreted as an opening toward literary imagination (metaphors), can have an effect on how we think about management education.
Authors Note: I extend my gratitude to the editors of this issue for their encouraging and inspiring responses throughout the process. Thanks especially to Michael Gent for his effort, for working with this text.
JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION, Vol. 27 No. 6, December 2003 637-653 DOI: 10.1177/1052562903257938 2003 Organizational Behavior Teaching Society

637

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

638

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

The article will proceed according to the following structure. This introduction will include a brief discussion of openness (such as a literary language compared to a scientific) related to management education and its pedagogy. In the following section, I will describe how I approach Camuss reflection on the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphean life directs us to the art of the tactician, which resembles the way Entrepreneurship operates in relation to managerial domination. Michel de Certeaus (1984) concept of tactics helps us to describe these operations. The next section will bring us back to the problem of management education. I will introduce Entrepreneurship (with a Big E) as differentiated from managementand from managerial entrepreneurship as produced in the highly successful enterprise discourse that influenced most management education programs during the 1980s and 1990s. This articles entrepreneurial perspective is related to a philosophy of passion and revolt as exemplified in Camuss Sisyphus, which will fuel the discussion and help us to prepare for how to deal with the normalizing and disciplining forces of management and management education. In the final section, I will try to affirm Sisyphuss way of relating to life while discussing how management education can become transformed through the cultivation of an entrepreneurial creativity.
PROBLEM TO RESPOND TO

Here is the problem this article takes up: How can management education be anything but part of the production of the manipulable homo oeconomicus, manifest in the enterprising individual, in managerialism providing scripts for and dressing up managers in new clothes for parading under the banner of entrepreneurship? I will come back to this problem as my essay prompts its reformulation stressing different nuances. The description of how I will use the myth of Sisyphus will include not so much the myth itself, but Camuss use of it. I regard the essay form, as well as the use of metaphors, as ways for the writer, speaker, or indeed, management educator not only to become performative but alsoand this is the second part of the result of this discussionto become Entrepreneurial. As it pertains to management education, I read Sisyphuss philosophy of revolt, according to Camus, as a philosophy of Entrepreneurship. This is the reason for my interest in Camuss Sisyphus and why Entrepreneurship is made to disturb the order of management. Through a Sisyphean philosophy of revolt, through an Entrepreneurial perspective on learning, I believe it is possible to avoid the erection (I believe that word is appropriate here) of a hierarchical relationship between educators and students in contexts of learn-

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

639

ing and the conceptually limiting horizon of a calculating rationality central to management. These outcomes relate to an ostensive element central in practices of traditional pedagogy that assumes that concepts and metaphors can be made distinct:
Literary history thus contrives the belief that the text articulates the real. In this fashion, it transforms the text into an institution, if we define the institution as the instrument that renders credible the adequation of discourse and reality by imposing its discourse as the law governing the real. Certainly literary history by itself would not be sufficient to produce this result. Each specific institution is supported, rather, by others in a network which constitutes the web of belief. This consideration reintroduces the relationship of discourse to pedagogy and to the institution, two forms of the same structure: all institutions are pedagogical, and pedagogical discourse is always institutional. (de Certeau, 1997, p. 32)

Instead of performing meaning, as in composing by the use of metaphors, concepts are assumed to have a literal meaning, as if locatable in a universal dictionary.1 This assumption becomes even worse in critical pedagogy that invents outside positions from where judgments can be made. Such an appreciation of a disciplined individuals ability to tame every desire to participate (as someone already engaged) goes back to a Galilean habit of thought that Descartes drew into prominence . . . detachment (Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1997, p. 6). When we cannot make sense of something, we have learned not to intensify our engagement but to detach and ostensively seek the objectively discovered essence. This tendency exists in my text, I have to admit, to the extent that it has been distanced from the essay form through this framing, typical of academic writing and education. Such framing thrives on a belief that it provides the reader with analytical resources to tame and dissect the direct language of art or everyday practice. I try to disturb the academic framing, though, and in doing so perform one way of dealing with challenges deriving from so-called critical pedagogy (e.g., Elliott & Reynolds, 2002; French & Grey, 1996; Grey, 2002). The challenges pertain to interacting with managers less as objects and more as cocreators of knowledge (Elliott & Reynolds, 2002, p. 520) and avoiding both representing managers as pariahs and retreating into more esoteric academic discussions (cf. Fournier & Grey, 2000). In this article, I want to direct thinking on management education away from a position governed by criticism and toward a movement of participation (cf. Hjorth, 2001). Such a move

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

640

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

is related to the main issue touched on above: The force of participation is sought in an aesthetisation of education exemplified in this text by the use of the essay as a form and of metaphors as figures of speech/writing.

How I Use Camuss Sisyphus

The myth of Sisyphus actually consists of several myths. At least, there are multiple versions of Sisyphuss story and their origins are not secured.

Sisyphuswho married his brothers daughteris the son of Aelus (the King of Thessaly) and Enarete and the founder of Corinth. He was sly and evil. He used to waylay travelers and murder them. He chained the god of death, Thanatos,2 so that the deceased could not reach the underworld. Hades3 intervened and Sisyphus was punished. In the realm of the dead, he is forced to roll a rock to the top of a hill, a task that fails eternally as the stone keeps rolling back, forcing Sisyphus to repeat the hard labor all over again, and again, and again. But Sisyphus is also known to have been in conflict with Hermes son Autolycus, who had gotten the gift (from his father Hermes, the gods messenger, who was also the god of thieves) of being such a skillful thief that he couldnt be caught. Sisyphus did catch him, though, and in addition seduced his first daughterAnticliawho later married Laertes and gave birth to Odysseus, the doubt remaining as to who the real father was. His punishment is also described as the work of Zeus. Zeus had carried off Aegina and this secret was disclosed to her fatherAsopus, the river god by Sisyphus. Having betrayed Zeus, he was punished by him through being forced into the eternal adventure of pushing that stone up the hill.
CAMUSS MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Camus (1913-1960) is usually described as an existentialist. Initially Sartre was a great influence in Camuss life. He and Sartre were joined in their political activities on the Left Bank, but Camuss criticism of Marxism and especially of Soviet methods pulled him apart from Sartre. Camus was an activist, journalist, and editor. He wrote plays for the theatre and directed theatre plays himself. In 1957, he was the second youngest ever to receive the Nobel Prize, the year after he had published the novel The Fall (Camus, 1956/ 1991). He died in a car crash in 1960. The Myth of Sisyphus (published in 1942) is part of a set of works referred to as The Absurds. The Absurds represent, according to Camus, a realistic view of life and describe how one can live in the absence of a universal

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

641

logic. To live is to live the absurd, Camus said. He adds, The revolt is one of the few consistent philosophical positions . . . it means demanding an impossible clarity. . . . It is not striving towards anything, for it is without hope, but also without the kind of resignation that one would expect (Camus, 1942/2001, p. 47, my translation). Relying on Nietzsche, Camus noted that the rule that should guide absurd life is to obey ones passion which is both the easiest and most difficult of all. Absurd life is characterized by the remark that Camus has picked up from Dostoyevskys character Kirilov (from the novel Evil Spirits, 1993), uttered just before his suicide, that all is well. Camuss Sisyphus is also described using these words (see below).
RETURNING TO THE PROBLEM VIA CAMUSS SISYPHUS

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds ones burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a mans heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (Camus, 1942/2001, p. 99)

In this paragraph, Camus brings together the numerous conversations with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kirkegaard that he has had throughout his essay. His words express an affirmative philosophy, one that is passionately moved by living fully and that answers the question with which Camus opens his text: Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy (p. 9). In this discussion, Camus declares that his drama has three main characters: irrationality, human yearning (for clarity), and the absurd that emerges from the coincidence of the previous two. To illustrate his thesis, Camus quotes Kirkegaard as one who not only had discovered absurd life but who also had lived it: The best dumbness is not holding ones tongue but to speak (p. 26). Quite contrary to what one might think should follow from the experience of lifes absurdityin other words, that one decides to shut up Kirkegaard keeps on striving with his shoulder set to the giant rock. Checking dumb in the dictionary we learn something important about speech: dumb: lacking the power [italics added] of speech (Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, 1993). To interpret Kirkegaards statement, we might construct a new sentence: The best way to lack the power of speech is to speak. This may indeed strengthen the sense of absurdity and appear as hopeless in the perspective of the educational situation. However, Michel Foucaults

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

642

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

(Foucault, 1972) note on the relation between dominant discourse and the judgment of normality helps to clarify this: From the depths of the Middle Ages, a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men (p. 217). This description of the relation between the dominant discourse and the subject of speech allows us to understand one problem with pedagogy in the context of management education: pedagogical efforts normalize subjects of speech to be able to include them in the dominant order of managerial discourse. It is when students have acquired the proper skills of speaking this language that they simultaneously become normal and lose their power of speech. The life of the student, as well as that of the teacher, resembles what Camus described as the absurd life:
The professor . . . is the paradigmatic guardian of the flame and the individual whose avowed autonomy metonymically signifies the double purpose of the institutionto preserve an embedded knowledge system and to encourage individual intellectual productivity (Schmelzer, 1993, p. 131)

In a world where rationality has by now received some major blows, how can transformative speech in the context of formal educational processes escape silence and affect common discourse? When the subject of speech is continuously a target for the common discourse of men, normalizing forces produce dumbnessstupiditydefined through its deviation from reigning truth regimes. What are the conditions for transformation, for learning as a creative act? How could we frame the reason(s) for cultivating a desire to create as being central to the organization of learning processes?
SISYPHUS: LIFE IS ABSURD, ALL IS WELL, LIVE PASSIONATELY IN REVOLT

These two questions should be seen as forming an arena for dealing with an issue that, in its ordinariness, should always be referred to as special. One could say that the questions spring from Camuss more general oneIs life worth living?while being limited in this essay to the area comprising the formal organizing of learning processes. We should then ask whether such educational life, focusing on management education in particular, is worth participating in? Is it, indeed, even possible? Camus has formulated his reading of the Sisyphus myth as part of the answer. Sisyphus represents someone who has realized that there is no particular ground to stand on while proclaiming that an essential or fixed truth has been found that is worth living for. Yet he is someone who still deals with this dilemma as a human with dignity. Camus has implicitly defined him as facing the absurdity of the double the irrationality of the world and the human yearning for claritywith the

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

643

rebellious act of still making an effort. Gnter Grass (1999) has formulated this idea more eloquently:
My godlessness notwithstanding, all I can do is bend my knee to a saint who has never failed me and cracked some of the hardest nuts. O Holy and (through the grace of Camus) Nobelified Sisyphus! May the stone not remain at the top of the hill, may we roll it down again and like thee continue to rejoice in it, and may the story told of the drudgery of our existence have no end. Amen.

From Sisyphus we can learn that merely living with the vital stubbornness of human dignity is radical enough. Camus cannot see this as something other than a philosophy of revolt, an attitude toward life that carries one through the absurdity of a groundless existence. Should that not be enough, we might rightfully ask ourselves? Is it also necessary to educate, to engage in the work of changing lives in various directions through creating learning processes that are sensitive to the uncommon discourses of the other? Certainly Camus would answer that living with Sisyphuss stubbornness is worthy enough, is radical enough, and does in itself make people pregnant with manifestations of revolt. He also added that we have to act as if we participated in transforming peoples lives (1942/2001, p. 72) for it is only through such striving that we can defeat that normalizing element of management education with its continuous references to external authorities.
MANAGEMENT AND EDUCATION

Management education, as I have claimed above, brings together two complex and highly productive/successful discourses in modern society. On one hand, management has emerged into prominence as the rationality of organizational life. On the other, our pedagogy4 (from Greek ped- meaning child, boy, and + aggos meaning leader; Paidaggos meaning slave who escorted children to school), which was intended to support the practices of education (educareto rear, to erect by building, bring up; and educereto lead forth, to draw out, to bring out as something latent) seems to have contributed to a determination of management education as limited to either instigating external pieces of knowledge or pulling out what is subconsciously known. Both ways, authoritative/patriarchal or Socratic/ dialogical, pedagogy has gotten stuck with a model of a student who is not part of knowledge creation and who is perceived as passive as long as knowledge is simply received from above or pulled out from what is already there. Education, or learning processes, must be approached as creativeas Entrepreneurialto become central to human lives. Learning has to be a

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

644

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

Sisyphean creation process that operates on the strategically dominant situation through tactical acts of poaching, driven by a passion/desire expressive of what Camus calls a philosophy of revolt in the context of the absurd life. This seems like a plausible point of departure, as this situation would be quite similar to the one todays business school students meet: (a) in their everyday life, overdetermined and overcoded by the hyperproductivity of mass media and (b) in their relation to academic knowledge, which, in the case of management education, represents the world as more or less controllable through the use of managerial concepts. The problem of education is a problem of dealing with dominant strategies suggesting that the self be shaped in certain ways rather than others. Management education is tied to a general model of pedagogy that has as its central motif and mandate control and efficiency. Control is often exercised as a contra- + rotulus, literally against what is rolling, against movement. Michel de Certeau (1984) provides an affirmation of the possibilities for creation inherent in relation to dominant strategies. He describes such possibilities using the concept of tactics. Occupying the gaps or interstices of the strategic grid, tactics produce a difference or unpredictable event which can corrupt or pervert the strategys system (Colebrook, 1997, p. 125). De Certeau describes tactics as
the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. . . . It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of opportunities and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its positions and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment. (pp. 36-37)

Transformed into a positive problem, inspired by reading this quote from de Certeau, we would formulate our question as how to live life to make use of lifes offerings and create ones movement, ones transformation, ones learning? How to educate in the context of business schools to avoid confirming the celebration of a managerial role focused on control and efficiency (the manipulable homo oeconomicus)? Camus Sisyphus answers by saying that a philosophy of revolt is how the absurd life of the managerial need for control can be handled. This brings us to an affirmative relationship to lifes freedom and calls for our passion to create ourselves:
I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. . . . This transformation of ones self by ones knowledge, ones practice is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

645

experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? (Foucault, 1983)

Educational systems are designed to transform individuals: childrenbecoming-pupils, pupils-becoming-students, students-becoming-graduates, and graduates-becoming-professionals. These order-words (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Massumi, 1992) of the language of education transform bodies through their speech-act effects: Oh, come on, you are no longer a child, are you? I really thought I could expect something more of students. Try to act like a professional, will you. Like the order-words of the judge, transforming the condemned into a criminal, or the I do of the persons participating in the wedding ceremony, the order-words of teachers transform bodies. If learning processes should become creative acts of self-formation, or relating to oneself as a work of art, Entrepreneurial attitudes characteristic of Camuss the absurd life of Sisyphusrevolt, passion, and freedomseem helpful. A playful tactic of transformative insinuations can consume the productivity of order-words in unexpected ways, including posing a dialogic relation as an alternative to the inevitably hierarchized position of the teacher, as this role is passed on within the history of the schooling system.

Management Educators as Members of the Tribe of Sisyphus

MANAGERS: LIFE IS MANAGEABLE, EVERYTHING NEEDS TO CHANGE, CALCULATE HOW FAST YOU CAN REACH CONSENSUS

Through Camus, we sense the absurdity of everyday organizational and educational lifefor example, the absurdity of the change and renewal hysteria of this age of speed and flexibility. Where does this urge come from, this axiom of the discourse on excellence: not only that change and renewal is a constant necessity for survival but also that managers should take the initiative to bring about change and renewal? In a time when Entrepreneurship is becoming rationalized (in the Weberian sense) and the role of the Entrepreneur has risen to the status of a star, the question of how and why we participate as educators, indeed the question of how and why we assume responsibility for initiating learning processes, is framed by the assumed telos of renewal, flexibility, and speed. Presently, the key to living up to this challenge is tied to the enterprising self, the managerial entrepreneur. This language emerges as natural, indeed even inevitable, when we attend to the complex history of the manipulable homo oeconomicus that has

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

646

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

shaped the modernist consciousness in which individual freedom is central and practiced as a governable form of conduct (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991; Dean, 1999). The social has been redescribed as a form of the economicfor instance, the metaphor of human capital (Becker, 1964; Dean, 1999; Foucault, 1989; Gordon, 1991).Thus, it has been possible to enlarge the domain of the market to comprise almost everything, including students. These are now represented as consumers of knowledge; and not only consuming students but also enterprising studentsstudents engaged in the enterprise of consuming knowledge. As Lyotard (1984) has noted, those who master the game of money-technology-proofs also master reality. This reality is manageable through the use of a certain (often instrumental) knowledge, and students are examined in relation to the standards set by this reality: celebrating predictability, control, and consensus. Again, in Foucaults (1972) words, a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men (p. 217). How, then, could management education be something else than a celebration of mainstream? How could it challenge the truths of enterprise discourse? That is, how can education be anything but part of the production of the manipulable homo oeconomicus, manifest in the enterprising individual; is managerialism dressing up managers in new clothes and giving them the name of Entrepreneur?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP BEYOND ENTERPRISE DISCOURSE

The question, however, is of course double. We not only wonder whether one should speak up or remain silent, be dialogic or monologic. We also ask whether learning processes inevitably contribute to this production of the enterprising student or whether there are alternative possibilities that are not already doomed to fail as effects of the dominant form of power. We can rephrase this question in the context of our present discussion: Is there any hope for entrepreneurship that is not managerial Entrepreneurship? With Camuss Sisyphus in mind we would answer yes to this question. Michel de Certeaus (1984) concept of tactics can help us frame the possibility of such an answer. The type of Entrepreneurship I am proposing (big E Entrepreneurship) answers fully to the entre- and -prendre, to the moving into the in-between (entre) and grasping (prendre) the moment as an opportunity. It relies on the dominant discourses and mainstream forms of power and their supporting system of normsbut it tactically poaches on these discourses and forms of power. This Entrepreneurship adopts tactical ruses that make up a specific

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

647

mode of deviation, a spontaneous, unpredictable, and arbitrary deviation from the norm (Colebrook, 1997, p. 120). Tactics grow like fungi in the cracks of dominant strategies. They make up a silent production, a consumption of what is officially produced in unexpected, perverting, and transformative ways. This consumption-as-production swarms and throbs forming into a polymorphous carnival that infiltrates everywhere (de Certeau, 1997, pp. 139-140; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2003). What I am proposing is an attempt to adopt tactics to unsilence students creativity. The Sisyphus story challenges us to move beyond economy to include life as an arena for Entrepreneurship and learning. A philosophy of desire and passion (as we find in Deleuze) seems helpful here. This is also what Camus introduces in describing how a life in revolt could be lived. Such a life is one where we intensify our relation with life and connect with other desires to increase our possibility to create. In the Sisyphus myth, we can do nothing else than roll the stone on to the top of the hill, and it cannot but roll back down again. It is precisely because there is no prospect of fixation (at the top), nor any universal reason for engaging in or avoiding the work of rolling it up there again, that we need a philosophy of revolt to find reasons for doing it (cf. Camus, 1942/2001, and Grass, 1999, above). This is, of course, a radically different form of Entrepreneurship than what enterprise discourse promotes (e.g., through the airport-kiosk-bookrack literature on managerial entrepreneurship). Big-E Entrepreneurship seems impossible to theorize about based solely on scientific knowledge; but it is possible to imagine and practice through the openings of metaphorical literary expression (c.f. Hjorth, 2003). It is Don Quixote rather than, say, Ted Turner, who becomes the hero of Entrepreneurship. Don Quixote, like Sisyphus, concentrates on the desire to live. He seems to live as if there is only one real action, namely that of transforming oneself. Certainly, the official interpretation of Don Quixote is that he is a fool. And the rational manager has been taught that Don Quixote is, at best, pathetic:
Don Quixote symbolizes forcefully Mans frequent and pathetic incapacity to understand the world in which he lives. But Don Quixote, in the end, recognized his own madness and gained his freedom from it. And so, in a world that sorely needs balance and clarity of thought, in a world where man sometimes appears dangerously mad, we may be able, with our growing understanding of the technology of information processing, to restore a measure of reason [italics added]. (Simon, 1945, pp. 286-287)

From an Entrepreneurial perspective, emphasizing passion, revolt, desire to create, Simons comment describes Don Quixote as an Entrepreneur-

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

648

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

becoming-manager: individualized as he is disconnected from the grand life of his adventure and normalized as he discovers sanity. It could also describe a management student-becoming-graduate. Management education should not stop educating students to become managers. There are, however, troublesome elements in both management and management education that combine to marginalize the creative, playful, and passionate student. The very word student, through its history and participation in an assemblage of discourses, including that of the schooling machine, is an order-word. It individualizes and normalizes with the help of practices of writing, grading, and examining (Hoskin, 1998). Additionally, enterprise discourse, dominant in the production of concepts and strategies for management education, responsibilizes and individualizes students to engage them in the business of living. Knowledge becomes a commodity demanded by knowledge consumers and delivered by knowledge producers. Freedom is restricted to the model of customer choice and techniques for participation along with new ways of measuring performance. What can be done? Against an ostensive pedagogy that reinforces the control elements of management, I have implied a perfor- mative pedagogy where tactical acts of dumbness or stupidity defined from within the dominant discourseare seen as crucial to the cocreation of learning processes:
Surveillance and examination presuppose the temporal priority of theory over practice, while the performative pedagogy of the postmodern resists this separation. This moment shaped the dilemma. The deviation is not standard. The postmodern theorist exceeds eccentricity and transgresses the norm by questioning the truth claims the system privileges. (Schmelzer, 1993, p. 133)

Let us rethink management education, inspired by Camuss Sisyphus, and through putting de Certeaus (1984) concept of tactics into use.

Rethinking Management Education From the Perspective of Camuss Sisyphus

Beyond a critique of knowledge and discourse foreign to the tribe of Sisyphus, we find the madness of Sisyphus itself. We need to move from criticism to participation in this madness if we want to venture into a discussion of why or how Sisyphuss choice should be sought for in the context of the formal organization of management education. Is he a pragmatist, then, our friend Sisyphus? Does he trust his actions while seeing no reason for finding the theory behind them or the grand narra-

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

649

tive that describes them? Is she Rortys friend, an ironist Sisyphus with a philosophical taste for an edifying conversation that preserves the absurd hope, according to Camus, that every interpretation leaves open a space for play. And that this space will not become filled, in spite of all promises of epistemologists of scientific knowledge (Rorty, 1980, 1989; Spinosa et al., 1997). It seems difficult to detach reasons for Entrepreneurship/tactical learning processes from the people directly concerned. In this essay, these people are teachers and students5 in contexts of specific courses. However, we do not remain sitting on the stone, that is, we cannot rest sitting on the fat textbooks of management with all the standardized solutions and inscribed praises of technological views on knowledge and the postponing of life through didactic cases yearning for live action. This is only how the boredom of adults in professional sectors is rehearsed in the boredom of schools (de Certeau, 1997, p. 135). We are not left with utter passivity. Indeed, to quote de Certeau again, the progress of our knowledge is measured by the silence it creates. And if we make students speak in our interestthe managerially correct version of entrepreneurship, the one consistent with the manipulable homo oeconomicusthey cease to speak and to be spoken to. The student that we want to see as enterprising, as an entrepreneur of herself or himself, will silently fall out of the learning process and appear in the teachers discourse as one taught the proper way of being a good student. The difficult task, one that might best be handled by joining the tribe of Sisyphus, is to stick to this local context of learning formed by participating people, and there-and-then pursue the rolling onto the top of the hill. This is why Sisyphus is for Camus a figure of revolt; because he does not, in spite of all the good reasons for it, sit on the stone. And it is the movement or expression of vigorous dissent we have in mind when imagining this revolt. Sisyphus affirms life with human dignity as her acts express familiarity with the continuous becoming of life in its multiplicity of forms: she knows that the stone will not remain at the top of the hill; she knows that there is no ideology providing the right/legitimate answer to why we should roll it up there; and she knows that there is no theory or grand narrative that can keep it there once it has started to roll down again. Sisyphus is on the move and is in this sense antithetical to the telos of managementcontrol. Sisyphus is in this respect a generative metaphor for the learning individual. This is one who is on the move, beyond control, and embracing the playful attitude manifest in the madness of what Camus described as a philosophy of revolt. Sisyphus practices the art of the tactician in de Certeaus (1984) sense: making use of the moments of cracks in the dominant discourse to move into these in-betweens (entre-) and create/grasp opportunities (-prendre) to transform the situation.

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

650

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

A tactic, de Certeau notes, is an art of the weak (p. 37) that introduces play into the foundations of power (p. 39). The wit of everyday narrating has, when tactically used by the student, the effect of a transformative element, a playfulness, introduced into the seriousness of scientific discourse as reproduced authoritatively within the management education context (cf. Steyaert & Hjorth, 2002). And the figure of Sisyphus is, in our text, a candidate now for being a symbol of the educator and now for being a symbol of the student. This oscillation, possible to interpret as doubt or vagueness, should be related to as an emphasis on the always-disappearing boundary between participants in learning processes that are creation processes. When these processes work, they are cocreated by those taking part. Such cocreation is held together by an instability that is also the result of this cocreation. When it breaks down, we fall into the technical predictability, and thus boredom, of monologue. What Montaigne (1978) said about the wordthat it belongs, in equal parts, to the speaker and the listenerseems like a condition for the emergence of learning processes. Together, then, with Camuss Sisyphus in revolt, we have to add Rortys (1980, 1989) edifying converser and de Certeaus (1984) tactician. This becomes a new, multifaceted metaphor for the educator who puts her or his trust in the immense creativity of the cultures of students. Compassion is needed to embrace this multiplicity of voices to avoid silencing the creative swarms and centrifugal murmurs filling the cracks of silence like fungus. Our task as educators, as edifying conversers, is perhaps not one of taming but one of cultivating imagination dialogically (Chia, 1996) and of transforming the capricious movement of the swarming cultures of students into multiple learning processes. The perhaps paradoxical nature of this role calls for it to be performed by a Sisyphus. This is so because the genesis of learning is so fundamentally marked by play through which the most complex task of understanding and relating ourselves to the worldhow to establish our first ontologyis achieved. We need repetition la Sisyphus to establish a ground and boundaries within which play can reemerge (Winnicott, 1971). Without this genesis and repetition no dialogic participation can take place (Hjorth, 2001). If we profess ourselves members of Sisyphus tribe, we might still conclude that there are probably numerous silent histories of speaking up in the form of remaining silent that need to be told by students of learning processes. Today there are probably several swarming forms of Entrepreneurship escaping the official version of the enterprising individual. This article desires to unsilence those stories and voices. The dominant version can always be creatively consumed, and we have sought to cultivatewith the help of the Sisyphus mytha playful mode of participation. The madness or

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

651

absurdity that Camus finds in Sisyphus is possible in the tactical acts of poaching on the increasingly economics-oriented practices of management education exhausting our business schools today. Why? Because our stone a conversation entailing both speaking up and remaining silent in learning processesmust not stop rolling. And because there are too many forces trying to shut off the conversation (keep the stone at the top of the hill), we must engage in the drudgery of keeping it going. From this follows another conclusion related to the task of keeping the conversation going. This conclusion points to ourselves, asking us not to seek a preferential right to interpretation. Reflecting on the theme of this special issue, should we wonder how we could avoid silencing what we want to address? Where is the voice (a metaphor signifying democratic participation) of the student in this essay. Where is the student as author in the list of contributors to this special issue?

Notes
1. This will only lead to a reduction of education to instruction in the results of normal inquiry, as Rorty (1980, p. 363) has put it. 2. Thanatos is the personification of death and dwells in the lower world. In the Illiad, he appears as the twin brother of Hypnos (sleep). 3. Hades is the lord of the dead and ruler of the nether world. He is the son of Cronus and Rhea. When the three sons of Cronus and Rhea divided the world, Hades was given the underworld and Zeus and Poseidon took the upper world and the sea, respectively. Hades does not allow his subjects to leave his domain. [So, Sisyphus is not caught really.] Hades possesses the riches of the earth and is referred to as the Rich One. 4. I am being ostensive here only to make the point that we would have to break with the way these concepts have been understood in practice; but also to show that there is already a discontinuity in the way we know them from cultures of education and their signifying function in an early Greek use. 5. We have to strike through the word student as an act of resistance to the ordering effect of this word as it participates in the assemblage of discourses on the schooling system. Learner would perhaps be an alternative.

References
Becker, G. S. (1964). Human capital. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (Eds.). (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Camus, A. (1991). The fall. (E. McDonald, Ed. and Trans.). New York: Vintage. (Original work published 1956) Camus, A. (2001). Myten om Sisyfos [The myth of Sisyphus]. Viborg, Denmark: Albert Bonniers Frlag. (Original work published 1942)

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

652

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / December 2003

Chia, R. (1996) Teaching paradigm shifting in management education: University business schools and the entrepreneurial imagination. Journal of Management Studies, 33(4), 409428. Colebrook, C. (1997). New literary historiesNew historicism and contemporary criticism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Certeau, M. (1997). Culture in the plural. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, M. (1999). GovernmentalityPower and rule in modern society. London: Sage. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateauscapitalism & schizophrenia. London: Athlone. Dostoyevski, F. (1993). Onda andar [Evil spirits] (S. Dahl, Trans.). Falun, Sweden: Wahlstrm & Widstrand. Elliott, C., & Reynolds, M. (2002). Manager-educator relations from a critical perspective. Journal of Management Education, 26(5), 512-526. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Harper Colophon. Foucault, M. (1989). Resum des cours 1970-1982 [Rsum of the courses 1970-1982]. Paris: Juilliard. Foucault, M. (1997). Michel Foucault: An interview by Stephen Riggins. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel FoucaultEthics, subjectivity and truth. Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (Vol. 1, pp. 121-133). New York: New Press. Fournier, V., & Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 53(7), 7-32. French, R., & Grey, C. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking management education. London: Sage. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 1-51). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grass, G. (1999). To be continued. Nobel speech presented in Stockholm, Sweden. Grey, C. (2002). What are business schools for? On silence and voice in management education. Journal of Management Education, 26(5), 496-511. Hjorth, D. (2001). Rewriting entrepreneurshipEnterprise discourse and entrepreneurship in the case of re-organizing ES. Vxj, Sweden: Vxj University Press. Hjorth, D. (2003). Rewriting entrepreneurshipFor a new perspective on organizational creativity. Malm, Sweden: Liber/CBS Press/Abstrakt. Hjorth, D., & Steyaert, C. (2003). Entrepreneurship beyond (a new) economy: Creative swarms and pathological zones. In C. Steyaert & D. Hjorth (Eds.), New movements in entrepreneurship. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Hoskin, K. (1998). Examining accounts and accounting for management: Inverting understandings of the economic. In A. McKinlay & K. Starkey (Eds.), Foucault, management and organization theory (pp. 93-110). London: Sage. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Massumi, B. (1992). A users guide to capitalism and schizophreniadeviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merriam-Websters collegiate dictionary (10th ed.). (1993). Springfield, MA: MerriamWebster. Montaigne, M. de. (1978). Essais [Essays]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013

Hjorth / IN THE TRIBE OF SISYPHUS

653

Schmelzer, M. (1993). Panopticism and postmodern pedagogy. In J. Caputo & M. Yount (Eds.), Foucault and the critique of institutions (pp. 126-136). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Simon, H. A. (1945). Administrative behaviour. New York: Free Press. Spinosa, C., Flores, F., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1997). Entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the cultivation of solidarity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steyaert, C., & Hjorth, D. (2002). Thou art a scholarSpeak to it!: On spaces of speech. Human Relations, 55(7), 767-798. Winnicott, D. (1971). Playing and reality. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at Templeman Lib/The Librarian on March 27, 2013