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FROM FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO

CAPITAL AS FICTION
GLOBALIZATION AND THE INTELLECTUAL CONVERGENCE OF
BUSINESS AND THE HUMANITIES

Sarika Chandra

GLOBALIZE OR BUST

In his book Secular Vocations, Bruce Robbins relates the following anec-
dote: “In the fall of 1972, when I was starting graduate school, the
professor in charge of the Wrst year colloquium asked us all what we
would say if a businessman held a gun to our heads and demanded
to know why society should pay for us to study literature” (84). This
was met by a “painfully prolonged and embarrassed silence. . . . We
did not seriously expect to have our brains blown out, but we were, I
think, more nervous than usual” (84). This scenario, meant to drama-
tize what was, already a generation ago, the oncoming crisis of legit-
imacy of the humanities in the United States assumes, of course, that
the legitimacy of business is not itself in question. And what, from the
same conventional standpoint, could be less proWtable than the work
of the literary critic—especially if that work takes up the critique of
capitalist enterprises themselves? The anecdote reafWrms what most
of us still tend to take for granted: that the relationship between those
who work in the humanities and those in business (and in the acade-
mic disciplines associated with business) is an antagonistic one. And it
is as evocative today as it must have been in 1972—perhaps even more
so, given the increased defensiveness on the part of the humanities as
the challenge from corporate interests has come to seem still more
threatening and inevitable, virtually total, in the form of globalization.
Nevertheless, while those of us who work in the humanities prob-
ably now imagine the businessman’s gun held permanently to our
heads, the emergent and now largely consolidated reality of global-
ization has changed, in perhaps unexpected ways, the manner in which

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50 SARIKA CHANDRA

the humanities and the business disciplines both legitimate them-

selves and—in actual practice—reshape their own objects of study
with respect to each other. While the humanities have made concerted
efforts to “globalize” their own objects and methods of work, even to
the point of regarding the corporate world itself and its culture as a
possible and legitimate object of critique, the intellectual wing of this
very same corporate world has found in literature and even in recent
literary and cultural theory a strategy for its own adaptation to glob-
alization. Yet neither camp appears to be particularly aware of, or
concerned with, what its supposed “antagonist” thinks about what it
is doing. This essay will examine and analyze, especially in the case
of contemporary management theory, the surprising but fundamen-
tally blind afWnities that have emerged between the humanistic and
culture disciplines and the academic and theoretical face of business
in the historical context of globalization.1 This development solidiWed
in a signiWcant way in the 1990s, a decade that saw the effects of a
rapid shift from Keynesianism toward more global paradigms of orga-
nization in management and business in general. By way of conclu-
sion, this essay will offer some theoretical speculations as to what
might account for such afWnity.
For literary and cultural critics, the term “globalization” and the
kinds of issues associated with it have become familiar territory. My
concern here is not to document or question this broad and obvious
development, but rather to note how it has often seemed—in a subtle
replay of the above “gun-to-the-head” scenario—to force the human-
ist scholar to accept the basic tenets of a corporate-led, and acclaimed,
globalization.
Take, as one fairly typical example of this, Haun Saussy’s edited
collection Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, including
essays by critics from Emily Apter to Linda Hutcheon and Jonathan
Culler, and its attempt to take stock of the profession now that para-
digms of globalization have become prevalent. Saussy’s essay, “Exquis-
ite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” is ripe with questions
of threatening budget cuts and the eroding status of literature in its
national conWgurations. David Ferris, writing in the same collection,
wonders if the humanities themselves might now be a thing of the past
(90). Explicitly or implicitly, this impending erasure is attributed to the
increasing corporatization of society and the university, spearheaded
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 51

and championed by business. Writing in a past PMLA special issue on

“globalizing literary studies,” Giles Gunn conWrms this disciplinary
common sense, observing how “globalization conjures up in many
minds the spectacle of instantaneous electronic Wnancial transfers,
the depredations of free-market capitalism, the homogenization of cul-
ture, and the expansion of Western—by which is meant American—
political hegemony” (19). For Gunn, corporate-driven globalization is
a given that, even if one remains opposed to it, requires literary stud-
ies to adapt or face possible extinction. Meanwhile, Grant Farred, no
celebrant of globalization, concedes that “the susceptibility to corpo-
ratization includes . . . not only the ‘streamlining’ or ‘upgrading’ of
academic or bureaucratic functions in the university but the restruc-
turing of academic curricula” themselves (42). And the list could go
on. With increasing pronouncements of the end of the humanities
as we have known it, and the ever-impending threat of obsolescence,
the Weld has sought to theorize and justify its continued relevance—
if any—in a global context. Arguments for how to do this range from
denationalizing literary studies to incorporating cultural material
from the newly created “global” peripheries into the curriculum to
articulating more concretely how culture and literature continue to
inform us about the intricacies of globalization. But while globaliza-
tion’s internationalizing reality purportedly helps to challenge older,
national and regional parochialisms, accepting this new reality appears
to require accepting, however grudgingly, the “depredations of free-
market capitalism,” and so forth. The emergent “globalized” version
of the humanities does not, in principle, demonstrate any reluctance
to be critical of corporate practice. But at the same time one notes a
tendency on the part of critics in the humanities to converge in fairly
unmistakable ways with the corporate rhetoric of globalization. Take,
for example, Paolo Virno’s recent Multitude: Between Innovation and
Negation, in which the author celebrates the Wgure of the entrepreneur
as an embodiment of innovation and creativity. Although, it is true,
Virno is at pains to extract the notion of entrepreneurial innovation
from its corporate integument, in the end it is hard to see how his
entrepreneur differs in any signiWcant way from the conventional
self-image of a corporate CEO. At any rate, the distinction remains a
vague one for Virno.
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52 SARIKA CHANDRA

The more signiWcant point here, however, is that corporate/

business structures themselves are seen as the driving forces of glob-
alization. This widespread acceptance of the corporate narrative of
globalization as a fait accompli has produced scholarship showing
the effects of globalization on literary and cultural texts, and assess-
ing what the larger implications of these effects supposedly are, not
only for literary study but, in principle, for all its related disciplines
as well. Questions about the effects of globalization are, of course,
highly relevant, but they seem to be prompted by a perceived, a pri-
ori, need to “globalize” our curricula, striking an unmistakable note
of afWnity with a corporate executive’s call for the technological up-
grade and “restructuring” of the—in this case, literary-critical—work-
place. The central premises here imagine and project literary study as
something that has to be changed in direct response to processes of
globalization. Thus prompted by corporate capital, it might seem that
literary studies has in fact no other choice, if it is to preserve a place
for itself as a discipline in the new world order, except to become
“globalized.”
Accounts of globalization subscribed to by university administra-
tions but not less so by the humanities themselves essentially function
as narratives of obsolescence. As Evan Watkins explains in Throw-
aways: Work Culture and Consumer Education, people and practices do
not just become obsolete with the advent of “new” technologies, or
new economic or cultural conditions. Rather, the concept of the “obso-
lete” is itself the necessary creation of the discourse of the “new.”
Watkins maintains that “obsolescence involves conditions of both
cultural and economic production in the present, not what has sur-
vived uselessly” (7). His term “throwaways” describes the coding of
“isolated groups of the population” as those “who haven’t moved
with the times” (3). In fact, the notion of obsolescence suggests that
entire institutions can be rendered ineffective if they do not produce
work useful in a global context.
Of course, responses to globalization from within the humanities
are not universally accommodating. A critically and theoretically ori-
ented literary and cultural studies remains one of the few intellec-
tual milieus in which the corporate metanarrative of globalization
is explicitly subject to question. Indeed, the response to globaliza-
tion by theorists such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Immanuel
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 53

Wallerstein, and Saskia Sassen, to mention only a few, has been to link
the study of economics, Wnance, marketing, and technology directly
to the critique of culture.2 This of course is not an entirely new trend
and reXects the ways in which Marxist theory has shaped or inXu-
enced many of the “culture disciplines,” most notably “cultural stud-
ies” itself. The latter Weld, by extending the tools of literary analysis
to objects traditionally considered nonliterary and working via a vari-
ety of disciplines, has become, in a sense, the ideal place to house dis-
cussions on corporations and corporate culture themselves. The Weld
of cultural studies, given its origins in Marxist theory, tends to see
itself in direct opposition to corporate structures. Indeed, cultural
studies scholars such as Andrew Ross (Low Pay, High ProWle: The Global
Push for Fair Labor, and No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden
Costs), Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello (Global Village or Global Pillage),
and Arjun Appadurai (Fear of Small Numbers, Globalization, and Moder-
nity at Large) have called for a direct engagement of scholarship with
anticorporate activism, urging an advocacy of corporate globalization’s
victims that probably could not have been pursued anywhere but in
the culture disciplines. Timothy Brennan, in At Home in the World, has
even issued a call to study and critique the highly inXuential work of
corporate globalization’s analysts, mouthpieces, and management
gurus, from Robert Reich to Tom Peters and the late Peter Drucker,
pointing out that it is this literature that truly shapes decision-making
at the highest levels in the United States. I see my own work here as
an extension of this emergent study/critique of globalization from
within disciplines such as cultural studies.
But, as will become more evident below when I turn to manage-
ment theory’s rather curious interest in certain of these very same,
purportedly radical theories, there is more to the picture here than one
might think—at least along the lines of the “gun-to-the-head” meta-
phor that still underlies the way most humanists think about what
“business” thinks of them. SufWce it here to say that the contemporary
trend in cultural studies and related Welds to move from the “cultures
of globalization” directly or indirectly into questions of economics,
Wnance, technology, and so forth may in fact strike the business theo-
rist who happens upon it less as a threat or minor inconvenience than
as an intriguing invitation to intellectual travel along the same route
but in the opposite direction, from business back to culture.
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54 SARIKA CHANDRA

THE BUSINESS OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE

Business has a fairly long history of addressing cultural issues when

they are relevant to the bottom line, such as in the area of personnel
relations. AfWrmative action policies as well as fear of lawsuits over
discrimination have led Wrms to institute diversity initiatives and
sensitivity training aimed at broadening the perspectives of their em-
ployees and giving the appearance, at least, of a diverse workplace.
But why would business theorists develop an interest in the even
less “proWtable” sphere of literature and literary and cultural theory?
I will cite and analyze some recent phenomena in business theory cir-
cles that directly conWrm such an interest below. But Wrst, the larger
picture needs to be adjusted. It has become increasingly clear that just
as forces of globalization have seemingly placed the culture disci-
plines into a crisis of legitimacy, the theoretical and academic branch
of business has also sensed itself when faced by globalization. And
although academics in the business disciplines are mainly charged
with training their students and readers for nonacademic jobs in the
practical, real world of corporations and the global marketplace, the
sense of crisis—leading to the global economic meltdown that began
with the “sub-prime” Wnancial crisis of 2007 and 2008—and of an
urgent need to adapt to the sweeping changes of globalization has
become so pervasive in the corporate world that help from any quar-
ter—even from the impractical world of culture and literature—has
been looked at with serious interest. In an almost perfect inversion of
the patterns in the humanities, the business disciplines have engaged
with and responded to globalization by, among other things, turning
to literary and cultural subjects.3 So, for example, if disciplines such
as cultural studies have sought to understand the ways in which Wrms
sell their products in order to examine corresponding cultural sit-
uations, disciplines such as management and marketing, in a conWr-
mation of this same logic,4 have sought to better understand cultural
situations so that their experts can sell products more effectively or
better manage a more diverse pool of employees. This in itself may
not be a new trend, but it has become sharper and taken on new
dimensions in a contemporary global context.
The turn of business toward humanities and culture is most obvi-
ous on the level of the curricula and in the scholarship generated by
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 55

management theory. Here I analyze the various ways in which the

functionality of both literary texts and of literary/cultural theory for
management theorists Wts into their own narratives of obsolescence,
helping to produce information that is globally up-to-date. I read this
trend as symptomatic of a crisis of capital experienced as a crisis of
legitimacy by those in the Weld of management theory. Business dis-
ciplines have long ofWcially recognized the value of a liberal arts/
humanities education to the future leaders of corporate capital. But
this recognition has, in recent years, taken an increasingly practical
and institutional form. The 1990s saw the proliferation of a combined
Wve-year degree leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts
together with a Masters in Business Administration at a variety of
academic institutions, including Columbia, Rutgers, and New York
University. Brochures marketing these degrees emphasize that they
provide a different kind of education. In 2001, NYU’s program stated
the following on its Web site:
Within the corporate world, the MBA is the preferred degree for posi-
tions at both the entry and executive levels. However, a growing num-
ber of executives feel that today’s complex corporate scene requires
skills that are not part of the MBA curriculum: solid writing proWciency,
the ability to think analytically, the skill to understand concepts and
communicate them effectively and with imagination. A good liberal arts
program develops these abilities almost as a matter of routine.5

Such descriptions, while parading the instrumental value of liberal arts,

are already subtle indications of business’s own form of globalization-
anxiety. Today’s complex corporate scene apparently can no longer
be mastered solely by an MBA skill set, much less good old-fashioned
business sense.
Moreover, in the very moment that they pronounce the instru-
mental value of liberal arts, management theorists have also responded
to the perceived crisis unleashed by globalization by promoting the
idea that, as a “culture” in its own right, business has to rethink itself
entirely, seeking knowledge and inspiration wherever it can Wnd it.
As stated above, knowledge of the cultural patterns of employees as
well as of the individuals making up corporate target markets is of
crucial importance to business and management intellectuals. Michael
Veseth, a writer on marketing and management, points out in Selling
Globalization, for example, that “international marketing textbooks are
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56 SARIKA CHANDRA

Wlled with studies of global strategies defeated by language, culture,

or local practice” (53). Such cases of international failure have led
management theorists to the conclusion that it is not enough simply
to have knowledge about the cultural patterns of the people in their
target markets. Rather, culture itself has emerged as a crucial term
guiding reorganization and restructuring. This dates at least as far
back as the 1980s, when the notion of culture began gaining more and
more currency among American business theorists due to the per-
ceived threat of competition from Japanese businesses. Michael Row-
linson and Stephen Procter, writing in “Organizational Culture and
Business History,” explain, for example, that “Japan’s economic suc-
cess was believed to owe something to the cultural characteristics of
its corporations. In response, several American writers perceived a
need to celebrate the cultural virtues of successful American corpo-
rations” (371). Along, then, with the idea of a national-cultural busi-
ness organization, which requires more analysis than I can provide
here, a changed notion of culture itself makes its appearance, one no
longer limited to the instrumental emphasis on gathering cultural in-
telligence so as to better manage employee relations and target mar-
kets. Culture was now also to provide managers with more effective
ways of narrating American organizations themselves. The category
of culture, that is, underwent a needed expansion so as to be able to
link it directly to the categorical plane of the national itself. And yet,
at the same time, with the increase in global economic interlinking,
the idea of corporate culture and identity have themselves become
increasingly delinked from the national. That is, in the wake of an
accelerating tendency toward the dissolution of both national and
institutional boundaries, corporations implicitly came to think of the
organization itself as something transcending the national and the
regional. The organization then has become what is in effect a uni-
versal, leaving management theory with the task of theorizing the
idea of institutional organization as a culture in itself.
Writings by inXuential writers such as Peter F. Drucker and Tom
Peters serve as good examples of this trend. Drucker pronounces that
in a globalized knowledge economy, “every organization has to build
the management of change into its very structure” (2006, 144). He
argues: “An organization’s members live in a particular place,” and
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 57

“need to feel at home there” (144). Yet “the organization,” he claims,

“cannot submerge itself in the community nor subordinate itself to
the community’s ends. Its ‘culture’ has to transcend community” (144).
The question of culture becomes sharper for Tom Peters, whose work
draws directly from the cultural theories of postmodernism—at least
as Peters understands the latter.6 Peters, dubbed the “Father of the
Post-modern Corporation” by the Los Angeles Times, is the author of
best sellers such as Liberation Management, The Circle of Innovation, and
Re-Imagine! In all of these tracts, Peters emphasizes the pressing need
of business to adapt to the global age. In Re-Imagine!, marking Sep-
tember 11, 2001, as the “real” start of the (global) twenty-Wrst century,
Peters argues for organizational structures to be rethought as “virtual
spaces.” It is, says Peters, the terrorists—the better “businessmen”—
who have truly learned this lesson and taken it to heart: “ The terror-
ists conceived the ultimate ‘virtual organization’—fast, wily, Xexible,
determined” (2003, 3). In order to prevail against them, then, the need
for American business to “reinvent,” “reimagine,” and so on becomes
even greater. The once standardized “postmodern” notion according
to which all practices are effectively instances of “culture,” and struc-
tured via narratives that themselves can be altered, has clearly found
its way into Peters’s thinking. Among such narratives are, for Peters,
those of literary Wction itself. In Liberation Management, for example,
Peters writes that “the richness of life, which we accept as private
selves and when we turn to novels or poetry, seems abandoned at the
front door of the business or public agency establishment” (1992, 375).
And he urges businessmen and -women to enter through a different
door, adopting novels and poetry as pedagogical tools.7
The last couple of decades have seen a rise in the direct appear-
ance of literary Wction in management courses themselves. Even a
quick perusal of university catalogues will yield a number of exam-
ples. The reading list of a course offered at the Harvard Business
School titled “ The Moral Leader” includes Shakespeare’s Macbeth and
Conrad’s “ The Secret Sharer,” as well as Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon
and Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. The students taking the course would
also have read the philosophy of Aristotle, Confucius, and Machia-
velli. According to the description, such works might help “to clarify
the issues of personal character and sound, practical judgment that
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58 SARIKA CHANDRA

are crucial to resolving these issues well.”8 Another course, entitled

“Literature, Ethics and Authority,” at MIT’s Sloan School of Manage-
ment, requires students to read Melville’s Billy Budd, Sophocles’ Anti-
gone, and Timothy Mo’s The Monkey King.9 Such titles seem to be fairly
common fare across the country in management curricula, which, for
the most part, tend to concentrate on a recognized, older set of Wc-
tional classics with one or two contemporary and lesser-known works
for good measure. The description of a course entitled “Management
through Literature,” offered at Maryville College in Tennessee, nicely
sums up the ofWcial reasons for the adoption of literature into man-
agement courses:

Despite efforts to compartmentalize our experience, to value only those

attributes that contribute to their own narrow purposes, to nurture
“bureaucratic” man, [organizations] are increasingly in need of creativ-
ity, commitment, and innovation from their members. Fostering that
creativity requires them also to embrace the whole of our nature and
our experience. Successful managers then must possess, more so than
ever, insight, wisdom, sensitivity, and understanding. . . . Great litera-
ture affords us the opportunity to learn from others who have wrestled
with these perennial questions about our nature, our experience, and
our existence.10

The effort to de-“compartmentalize” is symptomatic of the ways in

which older business practices will not do in the globalized present.
“Great” literature is to afford the lessons of “wisdom” and “creativ-
ity” even when the ultimate end of these virtues is a better-managed
business.
In order to better understand the role of literary Wction for man-
agers, it is necessary to analyze the practice of their own version of lit-
erary criticism as part of an attempt to produce new and up-to-date
work in the contemporary global context. Alongside the general trend
toward culture and literature in management, the question of how to
deal with virtual organizations has prompted speciWc branches within
management—“organization studies” and “public administration”—
to take up literary and cultural theory for help in solving administra-
tive problems for corporations.11 Such work can be found in scholarly
books, edited volumes, and prominent academic journals such as Jour-
nal of Management Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, and
Journal of Management Inquiry.12
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 59

Let us take as one instance of the above Jay D. White’s employment

of such theory to explain “local interconnected problems” in public
administration. In “Knowledge Development: Views from Postpositiv-
ism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism,” White argues that “the
narratives that guide public administration” should be “considered
in light of postmodernism” (173). Invoking the postmodern disbelief
in grand narratives, he further claims that “problem-solving in the
postmodern era will proceed incrementally as small problems are
addressed one at a time using local knowledge” (173). For White,
postmodern theories can help identify and solve problems such as
those resulting from “job dissatisfaction, or low organizational com-
mitment, or job stress, or work overload, or occupational burnout”
in order “to preserve a greater sense of public administration as a
whole” (175).
What appears to be the outright fallacy of instrumentalizing
cultural theory in this way will of course not be lost on cultural theo-
rists who see their work as antithetical to the administrative needs
of corporations. Especially in the wake of theorists such as Lyotard,
Baudrillard, and other canonized standard-bearers of theories of post-
modernism, the latter have been understood as openly advocating
the fragmentation and disruption of any notion of knowledge poten-
tially utilizable in the service of modernizing metanarratives. At the
same time, of course, many have also pointed out how readily, if sur-
reptitiously, the postmodern celebration of the fragmentary and the
unstable chimes in with the dominant tones of the capitalist order since
the crisis of Fordism in the early 1970s.13 But nor should one ignore
here the way in which a more celebratory view of postmodernism
with its emphasis on micro-practices also continues to Wnd a space
within certain circles of antiglobalization, anticorporate cultural the-
ory, especially those that place their emphasis on small victories
against speciWc corporations over and against the purportedly utopian,
if not downright “totalitarian” idea of a structural or systemic change.14
From here the outright instrumentalizing of postmodern micrologies
for management theory by critics such as White may not seem such
a long leap. This is not to say, by any stretch, that critics and theorists
in the humanities should be held directly responsible for the ways
in which management theory reads—and arguably dramatically mis-
reads—postmodern theory. All I wish to do here is to point to a question
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60 SARIKA CHANDRA

that would require a great deal more space for the sort of airing it
deserves: namely, what is it about cultural theory, especially in its post -
modern variant, that management theorists Wnd so attractive and
useful? My principal interest here remains, I wish to stress, the exam-
ination of the way ideas labeled as postmodern have been employed
by management theorists and professionals since the 1990s.
Either way, one cannot fail to note here how, in attempting to
think through what are, in effect, problems of capital through stories
and Wction, White’s methodological approach is not that far aWeld
from the work of many cultural and literary theorists. Consider for
example, that for White, storytelling is, purportedly, an effective solu-
tion to administrative problems primarily because, reframed as sto-
ries, problems become open to reinterpretations that lead to “creative
solutions.” Indeed, “reinterpretation” with an emphasis on producing
solutions to complex issues from different points of view has become
a signiWcant “concern” for multinational corporations that increas-
ingly have to deal with the varied cultural assumptions of their em-
ployees and customers. One notes here how White’s proposal goes
beyond this mainly practical emphasis on interpretation to an episte-
mological one, calling on public administration theory, in effect, to
recognize that “interpretation” and narrative are, Wnally, all there is.
To bolster this notion, White draws upon Jameson’s idea of pastiche.
Jameson, he writes:

argues that Westerners have lost their ability to deal with the present or
the future. He calls this “pastiche,” meaning the imitation of dead styles.
One example he uses is the Western fascination with nostalgia Wlm, sug-
gesting that only the past is meaningful. . . . His second argument starts
with Lacan’s deWnition of schizophrenia as the inability to engage fully
in speech and language. . . . One corrective for the problems of pastiche
and schizophrenia is the willingness to engage in telling stories about
the past, the present, the future. (171)

Although White may have some vague afWnity with Jameson’s ap-
proach, he does not distinguish Jameson’s critical metacommentary
on postmodernism from those theories that are more accepting of
“fragmentation” and the “dissolution of metanarratives” as interpre-
tive strategies. Jameson, of course, does not claim that pastiche is an
imitation of “dead styles,” or that pastiche in its “postmodern” form
could be overcome by a “storytelling,” conceived here as a sort of
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 61

executive tool capable of solving muddled administrative problems.

Why, then, if the content of the theory is either glossed over or itself
converted into a pastiche, invoke the authority of Jameson at all—or,
that of the other cultural theorists of postmodernity now making reg-
ular appearances in management theory? Part of the answer here is
simply that it authorizes business critics such as White to introduce
the concepts of culture and narrative into a management discourse in
which such notions are otherwise unavailable. But more signiWcantly,
White invests in the narrative of “dead styles” because this reading
of pastiche allows him to imply that those who continue to use older
or “past” management practices to solve present and perhaps future
problems employ dead management styles. The concept of pastiche is
employed so as to “code” certain practices and people as obsolete in
favor of those considered “up-to-date.” According to White, story-
telling can be a corrective to these outmoded management method-
ologies. His claim is that scholarship in management theory “most
closely approximates the conventional meaning of a story” because it
“include[s] case studies, descriptions of administrative and political
events, logical arguments, and interpretations” (172). While case stud-
ies and events can indeed be read as stories, postmodern theory—
however we are to understand its continued meaning, if any, in the
context of globalization—even lacks any consensus as to what the
conventional meaning of a story might be, much less on how to apply
it to solve administrative problems. Indeed, there is a paradox in
White’s appropriation of the cultural theorists of postmodernism. On
the one hand, he sees himself as their proponent, reading them in a
purely instrumental spirit as providing ways to identify problems. He
advocates casting aside the possibility of “a grand narrative for pub-
lic administration as a whole” so as to study only “the development
of interconnected, local problems of society” (175). Although lacking
entirely the philosophical overtones of, say, a Lyotard, the distrust of
“totality” once typical of much postmodern theory (Jameson obviously
excepted) here seems to have found a secure home in the world of
organizational administration. But, on the other hand, White equates
postmodernism with pastiche, or as he says, with “dead styles,” sug-
gesting that postmodernism is a pathology that is to be overcome by
storytelling. He asks: “What should be the role of public administration,
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62 SARIKA CHANDRA

if any, in dealing with the problems of postmodernism such as the

pastiche and schizophrenia that Jameson fears? If society is really as
fragmented as Lyotard claims, what role, if any, does public adminis-
tration have in bringing it together?” (173). That is, the fact that the
“grand narratives” have become eroded within the organizational wing
of business (as well as in the world at large) is itself seen as purely a
problem of public administration. Evidently the underlying anxiety
in “postmodern” business-intellectual circles that the complexities of
globalization have now exceeded the organizational capacities of con-
ventional business and management thinking is to be dispelled by a
corresponding panacea, according to which all one has to do is insert,
somehow, this new level of complexity itself into the ofWces, produc-
tion lines, and boardrooms in order for the “grand narrative” of global
capital to reassemble itself.
Another management theorist, Mary Jo Hatch, shares White’s ideas
about the corrective effects of storytelling. She begins her article
“ The Role of the Researcher” by suggesting that there is a crisis in
organization and management theory similar to that in the social sci-
ences. She writes that

after visiting nearly all of the other social sciences, the crisis of represen-
tation Wnally reached organization theory in the early 1990s. The crisis
Wrst took shape in the 1980s within the Welds of sociology and especially
cultural anthropology where it centered on ethnography (e.g., Clifford
& Marcus, 1986; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). According to Vidich and Lyman,
it arose as a challenge to traditional beliefs that ethnography provides
“an unmodiWed and unWltered record of immediate experience and an
accurate portrait of the culture of the ‘other.’ (359)

For Hatch, the debates about the nature of inquiry in ethnography

(which actually start earlier than she indicates) can also help question
the idea of “objective” experience in organization theory (359). Citing
Gérard Genette, along with Derrida, Geertz, and Foucault, she argues
that “different ways of knowing are constructed within and through
different narrative perspectives” (370). Hatch believes that “the accep-
tance of varied writing practices with respect to narrative positions
should contribute to greater pluralism of perspectives” in manage-
ment. She argues in favor of postmodernist critiques because they
show how “modernist [social] scientists ignored their inXuence on the
objects of study and buried their interpretive biases” (368). And “like
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 63

traditional ethnography,” she writes, organizational theory “places

the researcher outside the frame of the study” and can gain from
“interpretive, feminist, and postmodern approaches” (368). Hatch ana-
lyzes Geertz’s ideas, posing them as a solution to the “crisis” in man-
agement. Citing his narration of the famous Balinese cockWght in The
Interpretation of Cultures, she shows that Geertz, as both the narrator
and as a character, “is visible in the text” (364). She further argues,
“this visibility is a kind of consciousness of self in relation to the sci-
entiWc work, one which permits the author to comment on his or her
own role as researcher” (364). Leaving aside for the moment that
Geertz is no postmodernist, anyone might agree that reXection on the
role of the researcher him- or herself in management theory would
beneWt this as it would any Weld. However, the reXexivity proposed
by Hatch parts company with what is proposed in Geertz’s work. His
project is to study what “anthropological analysis amounts to as a
form of knowledge” (5). Hatch may be interested in the reXexive
nature of research but only insofar as it produces solutions to the per-
ceived crisis in management. She claims that, in ways analogous to
the crisis in ethnography, the crisis in management is partly over “rep-
resentation.” However, instead of reXection on representation lead-
ing to inquiry about the production of knowledge itself, it leads here
merely to a new conception of effective managerial practices—“analy-
sis of the narrating practices of organizational researchers may have
direct beneWt for managers” (Hatch, 371). Such analysis, she claims,
can offer an “alternative to the authority relationship,” and could help
“organizations transition from the authoritarian relationships typical
of hierarchical structures to inXuence-based, largely egalitarian rela-
tionships” (364).
Several issues need explicating here. To begin with, it is difWcult
to ascertain from Hatch’s analysis how organizations can become egal-
itarian. She addresses managers, offering them advice about how to
make effective decisions by adopting a less hierarchical form of inter-
action. But, read carefully, Hatch’s “advice” seems to have more to do
with the appearance of such a form of interaction than with its real-
ity. It is difWcult to imagine egalitarian relationships being fostered
within existing corporate structures in which managers are given more
authority and information precisely so that they can exercise a dis-
tinctly non-egalitarian form of control over other employees. Hatch’s
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64 SARIKA CHANDRA

notion of pluralism in fact Wts perfectly well within the contours of a

corporate ideology that, ever since the adoption of AfWrmative Action
policies, has moved to, in effect, redeWne discriminatory policies as
“pluralistic” through retooled corporate and managerial rhetorics and
mission statements. As the looming shadow of globalization has dri-
ven management theorists in the direction of postmodernism, the
question of pluralism has become all the more emphatic as corpora-
tions realize that to compete in a global market they need to employ
in a systematic way the expertise of diverse sets of people from across
the world. Even so, however, pluralism, in addition to being an ideol-
ogy to be cultivated in keeping with the postmodern leanings of var-
ious corporations, has also emerged as a problem. So, for instance, in
“Managing Multicultural Teams,” a 2006 article by Jeanne Brett, Kris-
tin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern, published in the Harvard Business Review,
the authors acknowledge that, while “multiculturalism teams” can
offer many advantages, a number of problems nevertheless arise due
to such things as miscommunication based on differences in accents,
in work values, and so forth. Although the authors propose dealing
with such issues by implementing better communicative systems, the
subtext here is clearly enough the fact that pluralism has become as
much a part of the problem as of the solution. As is, in any event,
already sufWciently clear from Hatch’s arguments, “pluralism” and
“different cultural perspectives” are, in the end, not really proposed
as “solutions” to problems—as they would be in certain forms of post-
modern cultural theory—but in fact constitute the “crisis” itself affect-
ing many organizations in the context of globalization. Hatch is more
interested in helping managers deal with the different perspectives of
their employees than she is in questioning a form of knowledge. Her
solution-based approach to administrative problems implies, per-
haps, that the “crisis” in management is less a “crisis of representa-
tion” than a crisis resulting from threats to business competitiveness,
proWtability, and the accumulation of capital generally. However else
managers may view employees as cultural subjects, they are bound
to perceive “different cultural perspectives” as possible hindrances in
generating proWt—hence the need to manage diversity effectively. But
why the claim that literary and cultural theory can help in this pro-
cess? Obviously, management theorists do not want to change the fun-
damental nature of corporations. They are not inclined to adopt what
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 65

David Harvey or Fredric Jameson—much less Karl Marx—have to say

about the fundamental need for changes in the mode of production.
Nevertheless, they seem eager to appropriate literary and cultural top-
ics and theories, once emptied of their political content. This is evident
in the way management theorists dismiss Marx’s economic theories
but, evidently seeing no contradiction here, draw on culturally ori-
ented theories by Marxists such as Jameson. The proWtability and
functionality of culture is the important principle here. But, given that,
it also becomes clear how those aspects of literary/cultural studies
that emphasize culture tout court, shorn of politics, economics, and
so on, might lend themselves in unintended ways to management
theorists whose Wnal interest in culture only concerns its manipula-
bility for purposes of proWt making.

FROM LITERARY FICTION TO FICTIONAL CAPITAL

The contradictions that emerge from management theory’s resort to

postmodernism, and cultural/literary theory generally, become even
more acute if we again consider the privileged role of Wction for such
theory. The above mentioned Tom Peters, for example, asks, in Liber-
ation Management, “if Wction and poetry (drama, opera, etc.) capture
life better than other cultural media, and who would disagree with
that, then why not think of Wction as a model for organization?” He
goes on to say that organizations are Wction—especially the knowl-
edge based, professional service Wrms that are tomorrow’s best mod-
els (1992, 375).
At this point, Bruce Robbins’s anecdote about the businessman
pointing a gun at the head of a literary scholar becomes curiously
reversed. Why pose Wction as a model for organization? Peters says,

If you’re lucky, your organization—that is “organization”—doesn’t exist.

You can’t Wnd it. People aren’t in their ofWces. They’re not doing what
they’re supposed to be doing—not passing paper to and from. . . . Where
are they damn it? If you can answer that question you are Newtonian and
in trouble. In the old days we wanted an answer to that question. . . .“He’s
in the ofWce. . . .” But now ambiguity deWnes the market. So doesn’t it fol-
low, as day follows night, that ambiguity must be . . . the organization?
Um, how do you do a “chart-and-boxes” depiction of ambiguity? (379)
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66 SARIKA CHANDRA

Peters’s emphasis on Wction (and/or culture) has an afWnity with what

some cultural and critical theory sees as the ambiguity in processes
of globalization themselves. As Harvey has noted, it isn’t always clear
whether the problems are created by globalization or whether glob-
alization is what makes it possible to see the problems. According to
Peters, organizations must be ambiguous and in Xux so as to match
the Xux and ambiguity of the market. We can at least partly under-
stand this obsession with the Xux and ambiguity purportedly to be
found in Wction as a (no doubt largely mystiWed) reXection of or on
the transformations in capital Xows themselves in their now global-
ized circuits. In the third volume of Capital, Marx refers to the system
of credit in general as “Wctitious capital.” The buying and selling of
shares on the stock market neither creates new value nor injects in-
creased capital into the Wrm whose shares are being traded. “Fictitious
capital” is different from the money originally supplied for use in pro-
duction. It is an additional amount of money that allows for the cir-
culation of income or proWt. In fact, this circulation represents claims
to future income or proWts, making it appear that the amount of cap-
ital has increased. Thus the increase in price of shares, to take the most
obvious example of Wctitious capital, creates the illusion that the stock
market is creating value. More speciWcally, Wctitious capital refers to
a form of capital injection that makes a claim on future productivity
and proWt. The illusion of Wnancial value created by Wctitious capital
also appears to magnify the effectiveness of the management and mar-
keting disciplines increasingly responsible for coming up with “cul-
tural” (or “Wctional”) strategies for gaining market share or managing
cultural diversity. If the valorization of Wnance capital itself depends
on a future proWt that may turn out to be Wctional, that is, if it all
comes to depend on what buyers and sellers imagine will happen,
why waste efforts on “Newtonian” organizational structures?
In The Condition of Postmodernity and in his more recent book
A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey documents how along with
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and World Trade
Organization have come to command tremendous global power. In
addition, new Wnancial instruments and markets have proliferated,
decentralizing Wnancial activities and Xows. The global Wnancial sys-
tem has, as a result, become “so complicated that it surpasses most
people’s understanding. The boundaries between distinctive functions
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 67

like banking, brokerage, Wnancial services, housing Wnance, consumer

credit, and the like have become increasingly porous at the same time
that new markets in commodity, stock, currency, or debt futures have
sprung up, discounting time future into time present in bafXing ways”
(1990,161). In other words, the seeking of proWt through Wctional cap-
ital transactions has become bafXing even for those business theorists
and practitioners responsible for studying and disseminating ways to
understand Wnancial systems. Perhaps business theorists such as Peters
conclude that organizations are Wctional because it is not at all clear
to them how to go about understanding the nonWctional reality of the
present system as a whole. Possibly, then, we see a turn by manage-
ment theory to culture and the cultural and even to literary Wction
because the latter can be posed as new ways of representing the com-
plexities and ambiguities of Wnance capitalism and globalization them-
selves while remaining plugged into the old narrative of corporate
uses of culture in relation to marketing products and managing per-
sonnel diversity. Peters’s assertion that organizational conundrums
and the way in which organizations are run have “more in common
with convolution within convolution in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost
than with [management theory’s] latest pronouncements” suggests
that literary Wction has come to stand in for the complex relations
of Wctional capital (1992, 379). In other words, the current realities of
Wnance capital—especially its increasing “Xight forward” into the
realm of essentially Wctional future realization and proWts—have
become so complicated that attempts to understand them slide out of
the “business” narrative entirely, leaving behind only the cultural as
that which encompasses the “Wctional” in both senses, literary and
Wnancial. Peters’s “organizational conundrums”—in other words, the
seemingly inexplicable aspects of organizations with respect to capi-
tal itself—are best reXected in literary Wctions.
This turn toward Wction, then, along with questions such as
whether organizations “really” do exist, seems also to emerge from
and reconverge with the theoretical underpinnings of postmodern
theories. Peters writes in Liberation Management: “Instead of the frantic
pursuit of total comprehension (via central-control schemes) let’s revel
in our very lack of comprehension!” (1992, 491). From this it would fol-
low that notions of chaos and cognates such as conundrum, convolu-
tion, ambiguity, and so forth also ought to lead Peters more toward
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68 SARIKA CHANDRA

postmodernist Wction with its emphasis on the dissolution of meta-

narratives, fragmentation and, indeed, chaos. However, he chooses a
list of authors and titles that for the most part are not an easy Wt with
postmodernist paradigms. The disparity between the choice of theory
and choice of Wction here is analogous to that which crops up in the
thinking of Jay White and Mary Jo Hatch as they argue paradoxically
both for and against postmodernist theories.
Literary Wction comes to serve a twofold purpose here. Literature
helps management theory to grapple with the “perennial questions”
if only because “perennial questions” can still appear to have answers
in a world mystiWed by the global and increasingly Wctional nature of
Wnance capital. But literary Wction is also usable because of its per-
ceived emphasis on universal motivations and behavior, categories
that, in a time of increasingly diverse markets, appear to be paramount.
Generally speaking, only the “great” works can fulWll this purpose,
especially those that wrestle with “perennial questions,” that have
passed the “test of time” and are therefore at least on the surface in a
better position to provide answers for an incomprehensible present
that seems to be in constant Xux. A classical bent in selecting its own
canon of Wction is symptomatic in fact of management theory’s own
“postmodern” lack of secure metanarratives now that all the rules
appear to have changed. Things seem to be in chaos, and therefore
turning to the old standards such as Beowulf and Billy Budd provides
management theory with a way to hold onto something that, for it,
seems to be “creative” and new. Precisely by bestowing a quality of
timelessness on these works of literary Wction, management theory
attempts to Wnd continuity when discontinuity seems to rule the day.
Postmodern literary Wction itself would, on the contrary, appear to
dissolve narratives of greatness, timelessness, and continuity. This
explanation for the disparity between the choice of Wction and choice
of theory might then also help us to understand why certain manage-
ment theorists paradoxically argue both in favor of and against post-
modern theories. They appropriate such theories in order to argue for
inclusion of varied perspectives yet only insofar as it permits them to
come up with new and reliable corporate strategies that themselves
would eventually dissolve postmodern perspectives. As I have demon-
strated earlier in regard to White’s work, postmodernism is under-
stood to be a pathology to be overcome—not, as postmodern theory
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 69

actually holds, endlessly reproduced—through storytelling. Postmod-

ern conditions themselves here are understood as a beckoning to return
to a recognizable set of older Wctional works that are read for their
potential to guide managers through perplexing market conditions.
Literature also endows management theorists with an obvious
quantum of cultural capital through appropriation of “timeless” lit-
erary works. In a maneuver that demonstrates just how abstract and
tenuous the game has become, management theory turns to literature
and philosophy for the “knowledge” to run the knowledge-based
Wrms. Moreover, the idea of the knowledge-based economy leads us
back once more to Wctional capital, since, with industrial production
being farmed out to the peripheries, such a “Wctional” principle helps
to cement the illusion that Wrms do not sell products at all but only
knowledge. It is as if the potential crisis of Wctional capital—given the
distinct likelihood that the future valorization of this capital through
real production and proWts will not come about—could be warded off
by reverting to a dimension in which “knowledge” and indeed all val-
ues are the stuff of Wction. At the very least, the turn to these particu-
lar works of Wction in management theory masks a nervousness about
capitalism to which management theory may be understandably
unwilling to admit. The production of cultural knowledge becomes
displaced from the culture disciplines themselves, suggesting that it
is not only the literary critic who is nervous but also the business-
person. The “postmodern” move to appropriate a traditional litera-
ture—as well as anthropology and philosophy—that itself does not Wt
postmodernist paradigms speaks to that nervousness, since afWrming
the relativizing and anti-universalist principles of postmodernist Wc-
tion would be tantamount to an admission that those who have been
responsible for understanding (so as to exploit) the workings of cap-
ital may not be able to do so anymore. Yet even this turning toward
the history of Western thought and “great” literature seems somehow
coerced and masks fear and nervousness about globalization. The con-
tradictory, overlapping, and largely unconscious relationship between
business and the humanities enters into effect here too in the sense
that what is “new” to the disciplines of business and management is
in fact valued for its being “timeless”—an antidote to both the dan-
gerous “Wctionality” of capitalism’s present material conditions and
the material dangers of the new.
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70 SARIKA CHANDRA

“ Timeless” though it may be, meanwhile, the functional quality

of literature and philosophy remains intact. The course description for
“ The Moral Leader” at the Harvard Business School ends by stating,
“the course also uses several case studies to illustrate this framework
and to help students link the works of Wction to on-the-job issues.”15
This is indeed a curious inversion of Robbins’s anecdote about the
businessman with a gun—one that makes it harder to draw the line
between the frivolous and the practical object of study, and harder to
know at whom, humanist or business manager, the gun should now
be aimed.

Notes

1. More speciWcally, I will analyze scholarship by management academics

and writings by popular management gurus, along with course material from
business management courses offered at various universities in the United States.
2. See for example, Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Glob-
alization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,
or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Saskia
Sassen, Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales and Subjects (New York: Routledge,
2007); Immanuel Wallerstein, Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
(New York: New Press, 2003).
3. True, this inverse mirroring is also uneven. For the most part, while liter-
ary/cultural theorists turn to corporate practices as a subject of study, manage-
ment theorists are not only conducting their own studies on cultural issues but,
as we shall see below, have also started to practice their own version of literary
studies in order to Wnd solutions to corporate problems in readings of literary
texts and by consulting theory in the Welds of cultural studies, literary studies,
and anthropology by the likes of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François
Lyotard, and James Clifford. We have yet to see major literary and cultural theo-
rists taking a serious interest in management theory qua theory.
4. A logic already noted as long ago as the 1940s by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
5. Combined BA/MBA Degree, New York University Catalogue, Spring 2001,
http://www.nyu.edu/cas/bamba.htm (accessed March 8, 2006).
6. Discussions of postmodernism in management theory became prevalent
in the 1990s. One could pursue a course of study examining the viability of the
concept of postmodernism in a global context for management and also for cul-
tural theory. And much could be said about this issue. My interest here is to exam-
ine the way ideas labeled as postmodernism have been employed in management
discourse.
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FICTIONAL CAPITAL TO CAPITAL AS FICTION 71

7. This beckoning of business-management and organization theory into

the riches and wisdom of culture, and especially of literary Wction, is not re-
stricted to Peters but characterizes an entire movement within the intellectual and
academic sphere of business.
8. “ The Moral Leader,” Elective Curriculum MBA, General Management
Course 1562, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass., http://www.hbs.edu/
mba/admin/acs/1562.html (accessed March 2, 2005).
9. “Literature, Ethics and Authority,” MIT OpenCourseWare, Sloan School
of Management, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., http://dspace.mit.edu/html/1721.1/
36889/15-269ASpr ing-2003/OcwWeb/S loan-S chool-of-Management/
15-269ALiterature—Ethics-and-AuthoritySpring2003/Readings/index.htm
(May 5, 2007).
10. In this course, students have been required to read, among other texts,
David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused; Beowulf; Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; Miller’s
Death of a Salesman; Melville’s Billy Budd; and Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
11. While both organization studies and public administration focus on the
nature of corporate structures, public administration tends to place emphasis on
those businesses and organizations that are deWned as statutory: agencies such as
transportation, housing, agriculture, and quasi-government enterprises. And
this distinction has become increasingly less clear as the idea that all organizations
should be streamlined and structured as for-proWt corporations has taken hold.
12. See for example, Maria A. Dixon, “ Transforming Power: Expanding the
Inheritance of Michel Foucault in Organizational Studies,” Management Commu-
nication Quarterly 20, no. 3 (2007): 283–97; E. M. Essex and C. Mainmelis, “Learn-
ing from an Artist about Organizations: The Poetry and Prose of David Whyte at
Work,” Journal of Management Inquiry 11, no. 2 (2002): 148–59; and Daniel Hjorth,
“Organizational Entrepreneurship: With DeCerteau on Creating Heterotopias (or
Spaces for Play),” Journal of Management Inquiry 14, no. 4 (2005): 386–99.
13. See for example, Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Peter Dews, “ The Limits of Disenchantment,”
New Left Review 213 (September–October 1995): 61–76; and Terry Eagleton, The
Illusions of Postmodernism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1996).
14. See for example, some of the essays in The Globalization Reader, ed. Frank J.
Lechner and John Boli (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), especially Abigail Abrash,
“Amungme, Kamoro and Freeport: How Indigenous Papuans Have Resisted the
Largest Gold and Copper Mine,” and Peter Eigen, “Closing the Corruption Casino:
The Imperatives of a Multi-Lateral Approach.”
15. “The Moral Leader,” Elective Curriculum MBA, Harvard Business School.

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