Conference Papers by Steffen Boehm
About two weeks ago Martin Parker stood in for Simon Caulkin as the Observer’s management columni... more About two weeks ago Martin Parker stood in for Simon Caulkin as the Observer’s management columnist, while the latter was away on holiday. Well done, Martin, for getting into one of the leading Sunday newspapers, for it is still peculiarly unusual for any critical management scholar to actually make it into the broadsheets, or any ‘news’ for that matter. The critical management studies (CMS) project is maybe two decades old – maybe less, maybe more. Like with anything it is difficult to define the beginning of an event, a critique, a resistance. An event always takes place within history; a particular history of power, knowledge, resistance – critique. We never simply start from scratch. But however we should date the beginning of the CMS project, isn’t it peculiar that to date almost none of the big CMS canons have been able to establish themselves as truly public or ‘specific’ intellectuals, engaging with those public discourses which Ernesto Laclau might call ‘populist’; those discourses that are part of a hegemonic regime of capitalist relations? If CMS is about critiquing ‘management’, which Parker – in his 2002 book Against Management – describes as today’s ‘generalized technology of control’ and ‘hegemonic model of organization’, and if managerialism is indeed so all-persuasive, having entered all spheres of private and public life, then isn’t it ‘strange’ – to say the least – that the CMS project is almost non-existent, as far as its visibility in public discourse is concerned? Equally, isn’t it strange that Boltanski & Chiapello’s now seminal work, The New Spirit of Capitalism , is one of the very first critical assessments of contemporary capitalism using management theory? In fact, it is one of the first Verso books engaging with management literature, which, I guess, tells us a lot about the state of critique today, and specifically the state of critique within the business school and the CMS project. So, on one hand, yes, it is strange that within the two decades of its existence CMS hasn’t really made any inroads into public discourse – nor has it been able to influence general critical social theory. However, what I’d like to suggest in this paper, on the other hand, is that this isn’t strange at all. Let me explain why.
Since 2006, when the Canadian corporation Barrick Gold first received authorization to start expl... more Since 2006, when the Canadian corporation Barrick Gold first received authorization to start exploring the Famatina hills for gold and uranium, the people have been organizing themselves to protect their livelihoods, the hills and the glacier located in the Department of Famatina, in the Argentinean Province of La Rioja. Vecinos de Famatina Autoconvocados en Defensa de la Vida (Famatina’s Self-Convened Residents in Defense of Life), Coordinadora de Asambleas Ciudadanas por la Vida de Chilecito (Chilecito’s Coordination of Citizens Assemblies for Life), Vecinos Autoconvocados de Chañarmuyo (Chañarmuyo’s Self-Convened Residents), Vecinos Autoconvocados de Pituil (Pituil’s Self-Convened Residents) and Vecinos Autoconvocados de Los Sauces (Los Sauces’ Self-Convened Residents ) – these are some of the names of the many people’s assemblies that have been organized to resist the onslaught of mining companies. Their united slogan is: El Famatina no se toca (Don’t touch Famatina).
The people of one of the poorest regions of Argentina – humble, common people – have so far been able to stop large, powerful, transnational corporations, which have closely worked with national and provincial governments supported by corporative media and other powerful institutions: first Barick Gold, recently Osisko Mining Corporation. The transformation of these common people into a political force involved the construction of a new critical consensus (Dussel, 2012), the consensus of the social bloc of the oppressed (Gramsci, 1975). Such construction has been achieved in the space of horizontal autonomous organizations (the assemblies), in public demonstrations (often repressed with violence), in the meetings of the Unión de Asambleas Ciudadanas (Unions of Citizens Assemblies), as well as in the constant awareness and recognition that the struggle will last forever – the mountain will always be there, full of precious metals; therefore, its defense will last the life time of the current activists and go beyond the present generation.
In this paper we will present and discuss the people’s struggle to protect Famatina against transnational mining corporations and their allies through the lens of Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation. To make our argument more understandable for those unfamiliar with the context of Latin American philosophy, we will introduce Dussel’s propositions first, and then present and discuss the case of Famatina in the light of his philosophy of ethics and politics. The data presented here was collected from documents produced by the “Argentinean communities of NO”, a designation provided by Antonelli (2011, p.7) to identify the “network of environmental and citizens’ asambleas (assemblies) as well as other actors who oppose mega-mining projects and share the same “ethical values, epistemic evaluations, and the promotion of citizens’ consciousness disseminating the discourse of NO by different means (professionals, academics, media etc.)”. We have also used data collected during a field trip in August 2012, when we visited Chilecito and the roadblock at El Carrizal, conducting in-depth interviews with a range of activists. Excerpts from these interviews are in italics, making it easy to identify them without repeating the reference. The pictures we took during the research trip will also be presented without specifying the source.
This paper argues that critical studies of organization need to extend their analysis of labour b... more This paper argues that critical studies of organization need to extend their analysis of labour beyond the sphere of value production organized by capital in order to fully apprehend the realities of today’s political economy. One direction in which this analysis must be developed is to radically expand our understanding of ‘labour’ to incorporate the full range of value producing activities, including productive consumption (also called ‘prosumption’) and ‘free labour’. The second direction, which is more theoretically neglected, is to recognize that some contemporary business models do not depend much upon value production at all, but rather on the appropriation of value through the extraction of rents. In this paper we develop this analysis of ‘profit becoming rent’ by returning to Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’, both to highlight the continued significance of enclosure and appropriation in the global circuits of the extractive industries and manufacturing, but also to demonstrate that this logic is at work even in the most advanced socio-economic formations, for example in the basic business model of Facebook.
Pamphlet prepared for a 4th of July event at the 19th EGOS Colloquium ‘Organization Analysis Informing Social and Global Development’, Copenhagen, Denmark, Jul 4, 2003
In times of war we think it should be timely for the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS... more In times of war we think it should be timely for the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) to reflect about the relationship between war and organization. Now, there seems to be an ambiguous silence of organization theorists and practitioners about the theory and practice of war. For us, this seems strange, to say the least, as the event of war is so obviously tied to organization; or does somebody seriously doubt that, besides being military and social catastrophes, the Holocaust, the Cold War or today’s War against Terror are not also events of organization?
One of the main characteristics of the so-called postmodern turn in Organisation Studies has been... more One of the main characteristics of the so-called postmodern turn in Organisation Studies has been the view that reality is fragmented; that is, rather than being a unity or whole, reality is seen as ephemeral collection of fragments: holes, parts, burrows, aphorisms, components, pieces, percentages, shares.
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Conference Papers by Steffen Boehm
The people of one of the poorest regions of Argentina – humble, common people – have so far been able to stop large, powerful, transnational corporations, which have closely worked with national and provincial governments supported by corporative media and other powerful institutions: first Barick Gold, recently Osisko Mining Corporation. The transformation of these common people into a political force involved the construction of a new critical consensus (Dussel, 2012), the consensus of the social bloc of the oppressed (Gramsci, 1975). Such construction has been achieved in the space of horizontal autonomous organizations (the assemblies), in public demonstrations (often repressed with violence), in the meetings of the Unión de Asambleas Ciudadanas (Unions of Citizens Assemblies), as well as in the constant awareness and recognition that the struggle will last forever – the mountain will always be there, full of precious metals; therefore, its defense will last the life time of the current activists and go beyond the present generation.
In this paper we will present and discuss the people’s struggle to protect Famatina against transnational mining corporations and their allies through the lens of Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation. To make our argument more understandable for those unfamiliar with the context of Latin American philosophy, we will introduce Dussel’s propositions first, and then present and discuss the case of Famatina in the light of his philosophy of ethics and politics. The data presented here was collected from documents produced by the “Argentinean communities of NO”, a designation provided by Antonelli (2011, p.7) to identify the “network of environmental and citizens’ asambleas (assemblies) as well as other actors who oppose mega-mining projects and share the same “ethical values, epistemic evaluations, and the promotion of citizens’ consciousness disseminating the discourse of NO by different means (professionals, academics, media etc.)”. We have also used data collected during a field trip in August 2012, when we visited Chilecito and the roadblock at El Carrizal, conducting in-depth interviews with a range of activists. Excerpts from these interviews are in italics, making it easy to identify them without repeating the reference. The pictures we took during the research trip will also be presented without specifying the source.