Academic Competence and the RAE

Stephen Dunne, University of Leicester
Stefano Harney, Queen Mary University of London

Are critical scholars in business and management in Britain making themselves incompetent under the pressures of the RAE? We have made a study of over 2300 journal articles in top business and management journals, journals that formed the bulk of those submitted by five star departments in the last RAE. We think this study raises serious questions about the basic competence of the discipline. And to the extent that critical scholars engage with these journals, our study raises troubling questions about the deskilling of these scholars under the regime of the RAE.

We asked nine questions in a content analysis of the top twenty business and management journals, a list compiled from the results of the last RAE (Rowlinson et al.) These questions were designed to mine these 2300 articles for the fundamental social and political issues of the day. The results startled us. Although we began by focusing on the relationship of the most highly rated journals to the major issues of the day, we ended by confronting serious questions about the basic competence of these journals. It is this issue of competence we intend to explore in this piece. We have explored the question of the social responsibility of the business and management scholar raised by this data in another forum, and in a number of recent presentations. Here we want to address what we presume is a more specific audience, an audience of critical scholars. And to this audience we want to raise perhaps an even more fundamental question arising from this data. Is business and management scholarship incompetent?

This question, even with the support of our data, would be dismissed in the mainstream world of business and management scholarship. But for the most part this mainstream world is untouched by what Frederic Jameson has called ‘theory.’ Jameson writes, ‘I believe that theory begins to supplant philosophy (and other disciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.’ He goes on to say, ‘it remains only to say that for theory all uses of language, including its own, are susceptible to these slippages and oilspills because there is no longer any correct way of saying it, and all truths are at best momentary, situational, and marked by a history in the process of change and transformation. You will already have recognized deconstruction in my description, and some will wish to associate Althusserianism with it as well.’1

Jameson may reach the totality of ‘theory’ a little quickly here and we will wish to recognize much besides as well – subaltern studies, queer theory, new feminisms, post-colonial critique, radical black studies, new studies of immaterial labour – as versions of Jameson’s ‘theory.’ But we would agree that all these approaches ‘at once exclude and forestall a great deal of philosophical and systematic writing organized around systems or intentions, meanings and criteria of truth and falsity’ as Jameson says, even if they need sometimes to resist a single banner to do so. Nonetheless this is a very different concept of the critical than the one hawked around the edges of mainstream management journals by critical management studies scholars who advertise the critical or the radical as merely a deeper look at these philosophies and systems. Theory is as Jameson also says in this short powerful piece ‘a search and destroy mission’ setting out against these philosophies and systems to finish them off, not some deep massage therapy out of which they will emerge stronger to serve all of us better. But more to the point, this conception of ‘theory’ is absent from mainstream business and management scholarship.

The problem arises when we acknowledge that once one enters the realm of theory, anything less than this kind of fundamental approach to the materiality of language and the ideology of concepts, philosophies, and systems, anything less than this is simply not a competent approach to the topic. It is this problem we hope to explore in this paper, using the results of our survey of journals judged excellent in our field.

1 Fred Jameson (2003) ‘Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory’, 30:2, Critical Inquiry.