Nick Butler, University of Leicester
I hope that the truth of my books is in the future. (Foucault, 1996: 301)
For some years, Foucault has been a popular mainstay in certain strands of management and organisation studies (see e.g. McKinley and Starkey, 1998; Jones, 2002). But despite this apparent familiarity, and with a few notable exceptions, Foucault’s historical method is rarely used in such research. It is my suggestion that this method – the archaeology of knowledge – can be productively applied in management and organisation studies, particularly in terms of the history of management consultancy.
What does the archaeology of knowledge do? As Foucault tells us, the aim of archaeology is to create a ‘fiction’ which might one day gain the status of a ‘truth’ (Foucault, 1996: 213). In other words, rather than repeating a commonsensical idea about the past, archaeology tries to make historical materials yield new meaning. Examples of such ‘new truths’ are pervasive throughout Foucault’s work: the asylum does not cure madness with psychological treatment, it establishes a disciplinary regime of work, guilt and religious morality; ‘man’ is not a universal or timeless figure who bears the promise of freedom, but a very recent figure in our history who is soon to disappear; the prison does not rehabilitate or reform, it serves to produce and reproduce delinquency; sexuality has not been prohibited by medical discourse, it has been constantly incited and stimulated (see Foucault, 2006a; 2006b; 2002; 1991; 1998).
In this paper, I want to describe how, precisely, it might be possible to introduce a ‘new truth’ into the history of management consultancy by conducting an archaeology of knowledge. I will begin by outlining the conventional history of management consultancy, which usually dates the origins of the profession back to Frederick W. Taylor at the turn of the twentieth century (see e.g. Hyman, 1961; Tisdall, 1982; Kipping, 1997). This history takes for granted the conventional definition of management consultancy, i.e. an advisory service on the basis of technical expertise provided to a client in exchange for a fee. On this view, management consultancy has no properties or positive content of its own: the technical knowledge on which an advisory service is based refers to an independent area of expertise such as production management, accounting, marketing, human resources management, IT systems design, etc.
I will then go on to show how an analysis of the discourse of management consultancy leads towards a very different story of the origins of management consultancy. Instead of describing how independent areas of expertise came to form the basis of an advisory service, I suggest that we should pay attention to the way in which management consultancy itself is established as a form of technical knowledge. This discourse of management consultancy emerged in the years after the Second World War and is inextricable from attempts to professionalize the industry by such organisations as the Institute of Management Consultancy in the UK and business schools in Europe and the United States.
In sum, my paper will argue that Foucault’s method of archaeology can be used as a productive way to approach and reconfigure historical narratives in the fields of management and organisation studies. I will demonstrate this by looking at how it might be possible to introduce a ‘new truth’ about the history of management consultancy, a ‘counter-memory’ about the past which will have an effect in the present and, as a consequence, on the future.
References
Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1996), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, trans. L. Hochroch and J. Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, M. (1998) The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2002) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2006a) History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. London and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2006b) Psychiatric Power: Lecture at the Collège de France, 1973-1974, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hyman, S. (1961) An Introduction to Management Consultancy. London: Heinemann.
Jones, C. (2002) ‘Foucault’s Inheritance / Inheriting Foucault’. Culture and Organization 8: 3, 225-238.
Kipping, M. (1997) ‘Consultancies, Institutions and the Diffusion of Taylorism in Britain, Germany and France, 1920s to 1950s’. Business History 39: 4, 67-83.
McKinlay, A. and K. Starkey (1998) ‘Managing Foucault: Foucault, Management and Organization Theory’, in A. McKinlay and K. Starkey (eds.) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. London: Sage.
Tisdall, P. (1982) Agents of Change: The Development and Practice of Management Consultancy. Heinemann: London.