Today’s organisations are increasingly complex with many rules and procedures and little space to think outside the box and take personal responsibility.
In this Transforming Business episode, Martin Parker speaks with Mats Alvesson and Dennis Nørmark, co-authors of Return to Judgement, about how we can tackle this and give workers more space to use their judgement.
They discuss the rise of managerialism, the problem with having an excess of an administrative ‘knowing better class’ and what can be done to give employees their agency back.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Mats Alvesson is Professor at the University of Bath, Lund University and City University of London. Dennis Nørmark is an anthropologist, author and speaker.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Return to Judgement by Mats Alvesson and Dennis Nørmark is available for £19.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
00:38 – What was your motivation for writing this book?
04:05 – Do you think the infantilisation we’re seeing now is different in kind or quality from what we’ve seen in the 20th century?
06:28 – How does this fit with other complaints about modern organising?
10:52 – What are some examples of infantilisation in the workplace?
15:59 – Are there examples from private sector organisations too?
19:13 – Is this primarily a complaint by professionals, or is it wider than that?
21:05 – Are IT systems a way infantilised management gets embedded?
25:49 – What are the solutions?
33:17 – Who do you hope will read this book?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Martin Parker: Hello. My name’s Martin Parker. I’m a professor at the University of Bristol Business School, and I’m really pleased today to be talking to Dennis Nørmark and Mats Alvesson about their new book, ‘Return to Judgement: The Case for Post-Infantilized Management’. Mats Alvesson is a professor at Lund University in Sweden and Bath University in the UK, and also the author of many books on methods and management.
Dennis Nørmark is an anthropologist, author and speaker. So you two have written this very splendid, very provocative book, ‘The Return to Judgement’. Mats, what was your kind of motivation for wanting to write this book? Where did it come from?
Mats Alvesson: Conducted a lot of studies. We investigate what goes on in organisations, and you detect enormous amount of peculiarities, stupidities, what it is and what kind. And you start to think why aren’t people reflecting more, using their judgement, thinking more autonomously, and then taking responsibility for what they are doing. So in many cases then people just seem to obey, to comply, to follow the fashions, instructions, etc..
So there’s a shortage of independent thinking. I can I see that this creates a lot of problems in, you know, organisations in working life and also for people’s lives.
MP: So it comes out of your empirical work, your research into organisations, and observing the ways in which people are almost kind of too obedient. They, they think like a crowd rather than thinking independently?
MA: Yes, exactly. So, if you do in-depth studies, you often encounter situations where you see this kind of phenomena. But then, of course, if you look at the literature, there’s lots of studies indicating that people are not necessarily so independent in the use of judgement, as one would assume. If we look at history, look more broadly at mass media and so on.
There are lot of signs indicating there is a shortage of the use of independent thinking and judgement. Contemporary working life is very much about regulations and policies, structures, procedures, expertise, almost everything. And that means that people tend not to do so much thinking of themselves, which creates a lot of problems.
MP: We’ll come back to those broad themes in a bit, but let me bring Dennis in. So you presumably share this diagnosis of organisations being kind of blocked by a certain kind of conformity. Yeah. And this idea that judgement, independent judgement is really important in management and business.
Dennis Nørmark: Yeah, exactly. You know, I… in my books, I’ve also tried to investigate this subject. Some of the stuff Mats called functional stupidity, stupidity, I’ve called pseudo work in my books. But we just both wanted to get just a little bit deeper into this and find out one of the, what’s the reasons behind this? Who’s doing this and what are their motives and how does it, you know, how does that fit together?
But yeah, that’s been my observations for a long time as well in my books that we are getting constipated in organisations and we’re spending a lot more time with stuff that doesn’t really create a lot of value for the organisation, and which leaves the individual feeling less autonomous, less free, less proud sometimes of what they do.
And as we say, more infantilized in their organisations and it and it’s always been sort of a riddle for me because we live in times where people have access to more information than ever before. We’re very well educated. We know more than we did before. So again, we should basically be more and more qualified to take decisions on our own.
But still we see, you know, a lack of autonomy, especially in the, in the workplace. So it was interesting to try to, to find out why is that when this situation really calls for more autonomy.
MP: Just to sort of thicken this a bit, I mean there’s a sense in which this is the, don’t know whether you agree, the kind of the reinvention of quite an old complaint about bureaucracy because people have been, you know, pretty much ever since the word bureaucracy was invented and so was its critique, the idea that it was, you know, making red tape and da da da da.
Do you think the kind of infantilization we’re seeing now is different in kind or quality from the sorts of critiques of bureaucracy that we’ve seen right the way through in the 20th century?
DN: Yeah. And one of the things that happens in bureaucracy today is that it claims to be in the interest of the people that they’re controlling, you know, it’s because of you. You want this. We want to, we basically just want to help you, want to be better and perform better and be happier and be more and more creature.
So there is a lot of, they try to the bureaucrats today try to sell this as something that is in everybody’s interest. And we’re saying, no, we some of it certainly is because we can’t do without administration, and we say that several times in the book as well. But we have to recognise that administration also becomes a power in society that has its own interests and that sometimes it’s not really so, so much in the interest of the people that are, you know, that are asked to do follow these recipes and follow these instructions and follow these processes as much as they’re told.
So I think we will, we had to, we wanted to explore that a little more. Yeah. You know, the power is always, well at least today, not like the old fashioned type of power which had privilege over other people and could tell them what to do and can force them and even punish them. Now it’s sort of a nice power, a nice bureaucratic system that claims to be only there to help.
MP: And that’s a difference because bureaucracy used to be resented. And now it’s kind of almost implying that it’s sort of embraced that it’s become part of the everyday fabric of our work organisations.
DN: Yeah. It doesn’t even see itself as a bureaucracy necessarily, because you’re right. We’ve historically we don’t like, we all need bureaucracy. If we didn’t have bureaucracy we’d need to have invent it. But the original idea behind bureaucracy was about to, you know, serve the greater good and serve everybody. And there were some sort of rules that had to be followed.
But, you know, today it’s some of the motives are a little bit more dark.
MP: Mats, I mean, I was just thinking about situating this latest book in a kind of a long line, really, of complaints that you’ve had about modern organising. And there is a sense, I think, in which very often when you observe organisations and you’ve done a lot of work like this, that you’re kind of surprised at the very dysfunctional things that people end up doing. Is that a fair summary?
MA: Yeah, definitely. Of course, I mean, we call the concept functional stupidity and the idea is to do things correctly. You follow the recipes, instructions, obedient, the laws, etc., and you do things correctly. But if everybody’s doing correctly within limited frames and very limited time or sorry, cognitive spectrum, then there are lots of things that are not really in line with your limited outlook.
And that leads to a lot of problems, lack of initiatives, the use of standardized solutions that sometimes fit, but often they don’t fit in life. Then sell them so that that one size fits everything, and the tendency is that the contemporary organisation style and actually to them these procedures, policies, standardized solutions extends to use of expertise.
And that tends to be eroding people’s sense of using to own judgement, being creative, taking risks, etc.. So it leads to a lot of disfunctions and in many sectors as you say to consider that more and more resources are being put into schools, hospitals, police force, etc., etc. the outcomes of all this are often quite disappointing.
And of course, sometimes we need much more resources here. But we also need people that can take initiatives, can think, can bypass problematic arrangements. Stupid bureaucratic groups, etc. so there are a lot of dysfunctions that we observe, and in many cases people just accept them and don’t take them seriously. Use their judgement, use the voice in order to speak up and try to resist or create some kind of change.
So, we see that this is kind of expanding over the time. It’s a bureaucracy, as you are saying, Martin. It’s been an evergreen. It’s a problem, but it’s probably been more problematic compared to today when you have so many of these arrangements all over the place which is that it tends to just take over and lead to a lot of problems, difficulties.
MP: Yeah, I was just thinking that there’s, just before we get on to some particular examples from the book, but thinking about the way in which this is a kind of a demand for individualism as well, a certain kind of attempt to stand out against the crowd. I was thinking about, you know, in this 1950s and 1960s, people writing about the organisation man.
Yeah, and that sort of idea, a very gendered, you know, somebody in a suit who just nodded all the time, that kind of thing. And in the sense the sort of the implication there is to be encouraging people to stand out, to be brave enough or authentic enough or something to stand out against the organisation that they’re part of.
MA: Yeah, no, I think that that’s one of the problems, we live in mass society. So we have mass education, we have all fashions. We have massification of professionalism on what we call the knowledge, the knowing better class. And all these groups tend to go down for relatively standardized solutions, following fashions, offering what sounds very good and appealing.
And then there’s a very strict, tendency, I think, to be compliant in any situation. So I would like to have some more variation, a bit more creativity, use of individual judgement, a bit more boldness, some times, of course, within constraints in terms of social responsibility and the need to respect, most laws at least, and to have some degree of bureaucracy.
Definitely. But to be a good doing that and that means that we have like the organisation man or almost in the parodic way in many organisations.
MP: Yeah. Thanks for that. Let’s, let’s move on to some of the, some of the sort of the examples in the book. Now, you and I, Mats, have discussed in the past, universities in particular, in the way in which the particular forms of administration were gradually colonizing the universities that we worked in and that we know about. But presumably you’re also generalizing this to a whole range of different kinds of commercial and state organisations. Dennis, do you wanna just sort of tell us some stories about some of the examples that you’re using in the book.
DN: Sure. In my research. I’ve looked both at the public sector and the private sector. And what we saw is that there is just as much in the private sector as in the public sector, even though the public sector used to be the place we always say, oh, that’s the heavy bureaucracies. And because if the private sector did that, they would go bankrupt.
But apparently they don’t, because I’ve talked to a lot of organisations where private which do this all the time. But if you take the public sector, I have one of my favorite examples, which is also in the book, is of a doctor who works in a big hospital and who was constantly asked to do things that are just plain stupid to do.
Like for instance, ask everybody what they have for breakfast because they’re going to do some screening about their health and do they eat properly. But everybody’s asked not to eat before the operation. So when they enter they get the strange question from the doctor, what did you eat for breakfast? But it said in the paper that I shouldn’t eat anything, right?
Yes, I know but I have to ask you this question because otherwise I can’t get through, you know, the paperwork here or, you know, stuff like this, where you’re asked to ask people if they have a tendency to fall. And you look at a person saying that it’s not relevant to ask this question here, but somebody in upper management had probably some KPIs that says we have to go from this number of people falling accidentally at the hospital to this number of people, because that’s progress.
So everybody have to lose their common sense and start asking these questions, even though it makes no sense in the, you know, in the case with the actual patient. And these are examples about how this, as Mats explained, this system ideas are taking over control of people’s own personal judgement. They makes them feel stupid.
They feel like, that doctor feel he has to excuse himself for asking such a stupid question to the patient. So he’s begging, being infantilized there and so is the patient, actually, because the powers that be, you know, have the right to tell you that that’s what you need to do. You know, even physically, you can’t go through the report, the IT system without asking these questions.
So in this way, the system has total control over him and his judgement. So and these are just, you know, classic examples I’ve seen in my research time and again of people saying, well, I need to do this not because it’s clever, not because it’s smart but because somebody told me to do that. I have to read, there’s a mandatory read about an IT program that I never use, but I have to go through ten PDF pages and sign off that I’ve read it, even though I’m currently not using that program and I don’t plan to. So people are, you know, being asked to do things that they are almost ashamed of doing because it feels like they’re being, you know, talked down to, by the leaders of their organisation and basically wasting their time.
MP: Yeah, nicely put out. Just let me just pull apart two aspects of that, because there’s one way in which you could just say this is inefficient. Yeah, so it’s wasting resources and time and computer space or whatever. You know, it’s kind of it’s just a silly thing to do. But your pitch is almost I guess I’m trying to explore the idea of infantilisation here, that it makes people childlike and resentful and embarrassed and so on. Can you talk about that a little bit more?
DN: Problem is it also it makes it into a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that if you are training people to this all the time, they’re going to keep asking for more procedures and more policies that over time they will start infantilizing themselves, which makes them even worse at their job, even more in need of help and care. And then again, the bureaucracy, the administrative upper class will come and provide this to you, which doesn’t really help you, but just keeps you being more infantilized over time.
That’s what we mean by it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy because you are sort of, you’re fenced in by low expectations. You could say. So over time you start feeling that you that it’s do you sort of get it’s a sort of self learned helplessness that comes to everybody that makes them even more in need of the system around them.
So in this way, you know, we all get spirals, all get spiraled down to more and more independence and more and more dependency on somebody else and, and more and more power grabbing of that, of that group that has the right to tell you what to do.
MP: Now, that’s nicely put. Now, Mats, in the book you’re giving examples from both private sector and public sector organisations. So, you know, Dennis’s sort of picture of, I don’t know, a doctor or something. You know, highly skilled worker, lots of training and so on. But being treated as if they’re kind of incapable of making independent judgements. You’ve got examples of that kind of stuff from private sector organisations too?
MA: Yeah, I write a lot of books and chronicles, and sometimes I get emails from people. So a lot of the material it just comes in through the mail so I don’t have to do that much.
MP: That’s very useful.
MA: It’s quite comfortable. But one person who was senior middle manager in an industrial company was complaining bitterly over the extreme amount of HR instructions and procedures they were asked to comply with. So everything in terms of assessments of wage setting situation, performance appraisals, etc. there were large volumes of text and instructing him to do, and it was also then monitored by the HR department and never in a consultation whether this was necessary or helpful or any complaints really from people there.
So just adapting to the situation. I’m spending a lot of time doing things that he, and a lot of his colleagues, saw as quite meaningless. And there are lots of examples like this. And others from the Swedish police force, where they counted 589 policy documents, which led some people to say that we are fighting a hard battle against organised, the crude organised administration, but assume that it should be the crude organised crime but it’s administration.
So, and the thought that counts for twice as much resources of, 10-20 years. But no more effects in terms of effective crime prevention or crime fighting. So there’s a lot of examples like this. As you were pointing at Martin, this is partly a matter of effectiveness, but it’s also, a matter of people’s sense of meaningfulness at work.
And then it’s worth emphasizing here, there’s a small doing or people. So we think that there are three major problems that we’re pointing at. One is that ineffectiveness on a very large scale, that is, that people tend to feel that this is frustrating. It’s make me a bit cynical or disappointed approach in no meaningful working life. And the third and the small doing or infantilizing of people at work and in life in general, that’s not so, significant outside work, but within the work sector, there’s a tendency that you don’t take so much initiative. You don’t think for yourself. You wait for policies, instructions, management, expertise, coming in and telling you how, what to do, also how to think and feel, so, so quite problematic. We see it, smothering people at work.
MP: Yeah. Yeah that’s really interesting. There’s loads of ways in which I can imagine this conversation going, but let me, let me focus on different categories of people at work because there’s a sense in which somebody might say, but this is basically a complaint of expert professionals. Yeah. And whenever you talk to expert professionals, whether the university professors or senior doctors, they always say the bloody bureaucrats that get in the way.
You know, I want to do the thing that I’m good at, you know, surgery or writing books or whatever it is. And I’d do a lot more of that if it wasn’t for the managers or something like that. So is this primarily a complaint by professionals, or do you think it’s a more a wider thing than that?
MA: I think that if we compare the situation 30, 40 years ago or even a bit more recently, then I think that a lot of people in the university sector definitely would say that now we are all suffering from enormous amount of constraints. Problematic forms that were controlled. So and there was, amongst physicians and school teachers and other groups.
So I think that within that kind of sector or combination of sectors, I think it’s very pronounced, yeah, because it used to be freer professions, but now then all combined forces, legislation, expertise, worries about things going wrong etc. It tends to make people in this former relatively free professions being very kind of vulnerable to all this.
So I think it’s more pronounced. But they also talk to people that have lower administrative jobs that find it very frustrating that this question is limited. Partly it’s a matter of I.T system that tends to be a mixed blessing in many cases. I think it’s most pronounced perhaps within these sectors. But it’s also a general problem.
MP: You mentioned IT systems and I wanted to get onto that. So Dennis, let me ask you this. So one of the features of the contemporary work organisation, whether private or public sector is clearly the way in which information technologies of various different kinds have come to be kind of constitutive of the organisation in various ways.
Do you think that’s one of the ways in which a particular kind of infantilized management gets embedded?
DN: I think you could sort of fall in love with technology if you are in the administrative class, because it gives you the opportunity to get a whole lot of data that feels like it’s almost free to get, but it isn’t. People have to, you know, start registering this and that. So again, it’s actually quite costly. And it becomes a control system too.
And, you know, the more information you got, the more you can get sort of an omnipotent feeling that you can plan everything and you can control everything and everything is just a matter of getting all the data and then we can make a perfect plan for how things work. So, so the world doesn’t work this way. There’s a lot of deviations, a lot of things that goes on, a lot of the things you can’t plan, a lot of things that where you really, really rely on people being able to take a decision in the here and now and do some more trial and error and experiment with stuff.
So the more you can, the more omnipotent feeling you get with all the data you have, all the control measurements, all the systems and all the computers, the more you have a feeling that that you shouldn’t, you can’t really rely on personal judgement and trial and error and experiment anymore, because everything can be sort of planned, but it becomes a very narrow focus.
And people get worse and worse at improvising and actually in the here now solving things. And that means they also tend to ask for more systems. So if there’s a deviation or problem, you maybe tend to ask your managers or professionals for a new policy, for a set of rules, for some standards, for a template or something like that.
And instead of saying, oh, I’ll handle it on my own. But we get so used to everything being framed in systems that we’re not very good at improvising when something happens that shouldn’t have happened. So we, we go back and go back and ask and believe that there must be some omnipotent way of making sure this will never happen again, which is the very naive idea about life, because life doesn’t work that way.
So I think, yeah, we have some grand ideas about how much we can actually plan and predict.
MP: A sort of dream of control that’s always crashing, always going wrong. Yeah. There’s all sorts of interesting historical echoes in this, aren’t there, in terms of the sort of, a particular story we can tell about the 20th century in terms of the construction of large state bureaucracies and bigger and bigger firms and all the rest of it.
And then this idea then, which is expressed by a variety of different authors in different ways, that that kind of shrinks the human being. Yeah. They’re almost they become, well, you know, to use Max Faber, for example, they just become cogs within machines or something along those lines.
DN: The dehumanizing effect of it. Right. Yeah.
MP: Yeah. Because that process has now become so normalized and naturalized that most of us would assume that spending, not most of us, but many of us would assume that spending our lives within an organisation was an entirely normal human thing to do, which clearly wasn’t the case, you know, 100 years ago.
DN: Yeah. That what we use the word homosystemic, you know, we sort of internalizing that, it becomes a part of who we are. And we can’t even think that we could do without it. So yeah. And that leaves us worse off. You know, we try to also look at, you know, we’re not as productive as we think we are.
We haven’t really invented as much as we think we have. Productivity was actually a lot higher later on in earlier history, maybe because people could take more risks, maybe because that expanding bureaucracy hadn’t become so, so deeply embedded in everything. Again, we can’t do without the administration. We can’t do without the bureaucracy, but we have to look, ask that maybe the bureaucrats and administrators to have a more humble and servant approach to what they’re doing, instead of a more arrogant approach, which sometimes is the problem.
That’s why we call it a knowing better class, because it’s the arrogance of the bureaucrats is not good because it means that they think they always right, that it must be their way. It must be, and if people do not follow these instructions, it means it’s because they’re afraid of change or because they’re just dumb or they’re insecure or they lack knowledge, etc., etc. but they could be against it just because it doesn’t work.
MP: So I think hopefully our listeners are clear about the complaint. What do we do about it? So, Mats, what are the solutions that you suggest?
MA: Well, that’s, I want to add one more thing here. And that is I mean, part of the problem is like pure bureaucracy with rules and regulations and procedures and I.T systems and so on. But part of the problem, just as Dennis was mentioning, that’s now is the knowing better class. And that’s large category of people that are kind of experts or claimed experts in a lot of issues that includes everything strategy, innovation, quality systems, risk management, gender issues, diversity issues, HR, etc. So it’s enormous amount of people that claim to have expertise and they offer recipes and solutions for everything.
And there’s a large amount of training, sometimes indoctrination, but various measurements in order to people buy in to this. Typically standardised solutions for how to think and sometimes feel and do things. And it’s slightly outside bureaucracy because this is in one sense more voluntary. But if you have this massive propagation of this is the right way to do leadership, you need to go to the training.
You need to accept advice and mentoring and so on. That is also part of all this. So bureaucracy that’s half the story. Half the story is that and then this increased the expansion of this what we call the knowing better class. And here one problem is that universities then tend to pump out more and more people.
And they like to have some jobs, they become consultants, trainers, experts in various ways. And with that, you also fill organisations with a lot of solutions and recipes. And, one solution perhaps here to answer your question here, Martin, is to try to be a bit more relaxed in this, perhaps not educate as many people in management as we, I mean both Martin and I are management professors, we tend to do perhaps go back a couple of decades and limit the number a bit.
I think that could be a good thing to do. Perhaps. So cut this knowing better class a bit could be one solution. Then, of course, you have a lot of other things tied to get cut down on policies, make obligatory mandatory training voluntary, give people a space to protest, perhaps, or accept deviations, exceptions from all this.
So you can do a lot of things tend to make organisations less standardized, less conformist and open up space a bit more then for people actually think, what should I do? What’s reasonable to do? Do I have a good reason to do this documentation or whatever? And if they don’t see that a good basis, they should have some space then to deviate from what is prescribed, they may need to have a good reason. I have a lot of experience. This is not relevant in this case. So it’s not like a license for doing whatever. But still you can give much more space for people to use their judgement to take initiatives, deviate from all these standardized solutions and recipes that tend to fill contemporary organisations.
MP: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Just as a little sidebar, it’s kind of ironic that you and indeed, I might be arguing for the shrinking of business schools since the expansion of business schools has been paying our salaries for the last several decades. But you know, I kind of agree, there’s a curious sense in which the business school is the almost like the purest case of pushing out a cadre of people who are supposed to know better than the people that they’re managing.
That’s the kind of predicate of managerialism in a sense, isn’t it? Dennis, just on the same kind of theme. One of the things that Mats was kind of suggesting there was that organisations need to be better at accepting deviations, at kind of understanding that not everything can be programed, that sometimes the world is different.
Do you want to say something a little bit about that?
DN: Yeah, exactly. It just live with the fact that whenever you deal with human beings that’s how it’s going to be. And sometimes actually something good comes out of not following the plan, of not following the procedure of actually going a little bit beyond what you thought you would be doing. And again, if you want to, to be innovative.
Yeah. So, that’s one thing. And maybe again, maybe leaders in organisations should stop behaving like bureaucrats. You know, I mean every time there are problems, instead of creating policies and templates etc., etc.. Look at problems as problems. It might be an issue with the people who you have employed, it might be conflict, it might be something hands on as a manager you would need to look at.
But it’s very tempting for many managers to end up behind a desk and just create policies, you know, in, you know, far away from the actual problems out there. So, so yeah. And I think that they’ve learned maybe they’ve learned that in business schools, in business schools, they learned that the right way to do business is create policies, measure performance, do this and do this.
So you could basically do your whole job behind a desk. But that’s not real life. You have to be around people. You have to look at their problems. You have to talk to them. You have to be interested in their situation. You can’t just sit and do a one fits all kind of a solution every time.
So. So, yeah. Live with chaos a little bit more and be with people.
MP: Yes, that’s nice. There’s a real paradox in this, isn’t there? Because many universities would now talk about the importance of critical thinking and so on about, you know, producing citizens who can deal with grand challenges and, you know, the SDG goals and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, very often universities are predicated on the repetition of particular forms of knowledge, kind of programed examinations and certain kinds of tests and roles and so on.
And at the same time, what you’ve got very often in sort of responses to artificial intelligence is this idea that we need to double down on uniquely human characteristics, you know, there’s no point in thinking about repetitive forms of knowledge anymore. Effectively, what we’ve got to do is bank on the idea that human beings are unique and special, and that we can do things that these forms of computation can’t.
So it does seem that you’re on the right side of history in that sense, yeah. What you’re saying is echoed by other people.
DN: Yeah, yeah. And also a lot of the things we ask AI to do is, you know, is again following processes and procedures. That’s what they, that’s what computers are very good at doing. So maybe we could start doing real work and let them do some of the, some of that stuff. I think also, you know, we are there probably in the near future.
One of the people, some of the people that’s going to be we don’t need much of anymore, probably the consultants are probably some of the people who are doing classic white collar jobs, because that’s what the new AI is actually pretty good at doing. So we need somebody to be able to do some very practical skills out there.
And yeah, I hope we are, you know, looking into a future where what we tried to describe this book is, is even more relevant.
MP: Okay. Thanks, Dennis. Mats, last question to you. Who do you hope will read this book?
MA: Well, as many as possible, of course. But I mean, I think the book is for an educated public that has some sense of responsibility and curiosity about how things are going, etc. in society and working life in organisations. Then of course, it always is very nice if some people with some form of power or resources will read the book as well.
But, I think it’s written for a relatively broad audience and address very vital societal concerns in organisations, in work life, in public sector, but also in private sector, so that the idea is that educated public, but also academics. So we have a lot of references and so on. So, it’s quite well researched and backed up.
MP: I would hope so. After all this is a University Press, I think it’s important that you know, because I wanted to kind of frame the book just by concluding as it is, it’s not just a book about management, it’s a book about much wider senses of social change, I think, and the ways in which a particular kind of certain sorts of individual is being cultivated in societies in the global north.
DN: Yeah, exactly. You know, I you know, we were actually a bit afraid that, you know, the society we live in today, if we don’t try to tackle this, if we don’t look, have a critical look at that administration. I think it will fuel all the populism and all the elite bashing that we don’t need. We don’t need people like experts in the elite to dumb down and say anything. We want them, as I said, to be humble and helping and servant instead of arrogant. But I think a lot of people today in the political world are reacting against this arrogance by voting for some political clowns. In my opinion, we’re not very good at solving the real problems of the world. But because people are so fed up with elites, they end up doing that.
So, so hopefully it’s also a book with some who are part of that elite will read it and say, well, that we don’t want to be looked at this way. We actually want to help, our contribution to society can be positive, but it can also be very negative if we are not reflecting on the power that we have.
So I, I hope that we can also help stop the wave of populism. That is just my personal opinion over Europe and over the world, because people are reacting to elites in a negative way, because they felt they’ve been let down by them.
MP: Yeah. Thanks, Dennis. That’s a really nice, provocative way of opening the book up as well. So I’m Martin Parker, I’ve been talking to Mats Alvesson and Dennis Nørmark about their book, ‘Return to Judgement: The Case for Post-Infantilized Management’, published by Bristol University Press. Thanks ever so much for a really intriguing conversation. Both. And, hope the book does really well. All the best.
MA: Thanks, Martin.
DN: Thank you.
Richard Kemp: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Transforming Society podcast. If you’d like to buy a copy of this book or any other book published by Bristol University Press or Policy Press, we have a 50% discount code valid until the 30th of June. Just go to bristoluniversitypress.co.uk, select your book and then enter POD02 at checkout. That’s POD02 at checkout.