Corporate Sorcery
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That’s it. End of update. Now let’s learn about sorcery.
1. Seeing the Narrative Matrix
In the 1970s, when sociologist Stanislav Andreski published Social Sciences as Sorcery, the great psychologist Paul Meehl declared it should be required reading for every PhD candidate.
Most social scientists make the claims they do, Andreski contends, not because they have sound empirical evidence that they are accurately describing reality, but more because they want their personal views to influence others. This, he declares, is closer to shamanism than science. As he so famously puts it, “Pretentious and nebulous verbosity, interminable repetition of platitudes and disguised propaganda are the order of the day.”
Where I once completely agreed I now have almost the opposite view.
When I was in grad school there was a lot of sturm und drang about why the social sciences are considered “soft”. The typical response was that human behavior is more complex than, say, geology. There is of course a point to be made here, but there is also something else going on. What Andreski’s rant misses is that when you move from factual claims to their interpretation, empiricism is no longer enough. Interpretation requires value judgments. Value judgments require, well, values.
You’ve here moved from “What happened?” to “Why does it matter?” You are operating in narrative space. As narrative warfare theorist Ajit Maan observes, the real aim of narrative is not to ascertain the “facts”. It is, rather, to trigger aspects of identity and values to get people to read the facts in a particular way. (Narrative warfare then isn’t really about the facts at all, as is the case with disinformation.) As Maan notes, this relocates what Clausewitz called the “center of gravity” of a conflict. Here, the real “winner” is whoever gets to determine popular meaning.
In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky similarly discuss propaganda as a nonstop “invisible war”, the purpose of which is to set the boundaries of acceptable positions in popular debate. Andreski was right in a way to distinguish between strict empiricism and what he complained to be “sorcery”, “shamanism”, and “witch-doctoring”. Where he was wrong was in imagining it could be any other way.
In any social science, quantitative data only exist within a larger qualitative soup. Variables of interest must be selected and operationally defined. The research must be designed and carried out. Data must be collected, cleaned, and analyzed. Different decisions made along this path can alter the results, possibly to the point of supporting different conclusions.
And, of course, the data must be interpreted. In peer-reviewed papers, the General Discussion is where the authors tell you what they think the results mean. This, Maan would warn us, is narratizing. The more we veer toward narrative and away from reporting the more that Andreski’s dreaded sorcery creeps in. There is an added social dimension here, a game of influence over the lenses used and the size and location of the conscious Overton Window.
Thus, we need to layer something on top of empiricism to better account for this social game. One option would be to adopt more of a “post-structuralist” lens. Following thinkers such as Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Lacan, post-structuralism is the view that, contrary to what many empiricists claim or assume, there is no such thing as a “definitive” interpretation of the same set of claims.
A researcher, like any human using language, is not an “objective observer” as much as a “meaning generator”, someone who interprets through inevitable lenses of identity, values, customs, and beliefs. When someone claims they are “being objective”, to a post-structuralist there is no such thing; and this is not because science doesn’t work but, rather, because narrative involves meaning and meaning cannot be reduced to the empirical.
The more that one’s sense of self gets tied up in the claims being made the more contentious the “narrative space”. This dimension can be added to that of complexity, to how easily cause-and-effect relationships can be established and then used to make predictions.
Andreski’s idea of shamanism is equally applicable to the news media. This doesn’t mean it’s “fake news”. It’s not that “disguised propaganda” has infiltrated the news as much as that is precisely what the news is. The news is more like history than many realize; and, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently put it, there is nothing “relativist” in the fact that history is always told from a certain point of view. Interpretation requires a lens, after all, and you can’t “do history” without buttressing what journalist Caitlin Johnstone calls a particular “narrative matrix”.
It’s easy to talk about “propaganda” if it’s from a different narrative matrix, but the soup you’re swimming in remains largely unnoticed. A fishbowl, it turns out, is also a lens.
Some have argued this also reshapes how the world thinks about war. For example, Russian General Valery Gerasimov (Валерий Герасимов), in trying to better understand modern Western warfare, described what is now sometimes (mis)labeled as the “Gerasimov Doctrine”: There is little difference between wartime and peacetime, wars are fought without being “declared”, and the nonmilitary means of achieving goals now exceed the power of traditional weapons.
Maan calls it “narrative warfare”. Chomsky calls it “invisible war”. Andreski calls it “Sorcery”.
It’s all the same thing. And it’s equally present in the corporate world.
2. Spotting Managerial Sorcery
In any large company, as we move from the level of technical problems to what might be called the managerial, and to finally the organizational, cause-and-effect relationships become more difficult. Wherever the stakes are high (and they are whenever careers are on the line), and gold standards murky, narrative games will be the result.
As prioritization guru Stephan Devaux recently told me, when cause-and-effect relationships are straightforward and the value of time is clearly known, what you should focus on isn’t really a matter of contention.
When value is not clearly known, however, there is no clear gold standard, and so there will be a tendency to focus on unhelpful proxies…like activity. (Compare, say, the job of a nuclear power plant scheduler to that of software product Scrum team PO.) While efficiency and effectiveness are optimal, efficiency as a proxy for effectiveness incentivizes theater, gaming behavior, and the misrepresentation of performance. The result is not unlike measuring how fast teams can throw spaghetti while ignoring there is no wall on which to see what sticks.
In Thinking Like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman argues that our current obsession with viewing everything through an economic cost/benefit lens is in no small part due to the convenient illusion created of being “objective” and “value neutral”. The result of this ubiquity, combined with the societally unfortunate Friedman Doctrine, has been the takeover of corporations by the Finance Class, enforcing for their own benefit the value judgment that the “real” purpose of companies is to maximize short-term profits for major shareholders.
This has done some very bizarre things to the economy. Corporations are now increasingly treated as extractive vehicles. Perhaps ironically, much of what is done in furtherance of ever-increasing “efficiency” actually hampers the long-term effectiveness of the corporation itself. Far from making things more “objective and value neutral”, if the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder profits, then the “value” of a corporation is whatever investors can be led to believe the stock will be worth at some time in the future. (Let the incantations begin!)
A year after Andreski’s book was published, Graham Cleverley’s Managers and Magic arrived on the shelves. Sorcery, Cleverley adds, is how the executive as performer fights for the right audience reaction, meaning the right media gossip and resulting financial speculation. As Ian Mitroff and Ralph Kilmann note, corporations devote a substantial amount of their energy to creating and upholding a desired cultural image as they go about their business, and such efforts can only afford so much political controversy.
It should not be surprising then that a core aspect of executive communication is narrative sorcery. This is not even a “controversial” thing to say. It’s just a simple fact. As noted in Dirsmith, Jablonsky, and Luzi’s “Planning and Control in the U.S. Federal Government”, this is how leadership undertakes to frame meaning (i.e., “control the narrative”). It is how they contain controversy, project rationality, suppress discomfort, manufacture confidence, manage expectations and reactions, and, in a sense, “placate the masses”.
Philosopher Todd McGowan points out that the amount of heavy lifting a narrative is doing is often telegraphed how much euphemistic language it contains. As McGowan so rightly puts it, euphemism’s entire function is to dampen or tamp down, to disguise what is happening, to, in his words, “obfuscate the relationship between the signifier and the act”. (If used to make things seem worse than they are, then that is a “dysphemism”, not a euphemism.)
The more objectionable the action the more the political risk, and the more euphemism will be relied on to frame and manage controversy.
We can hypothesize that when people agree with both the means and ends of some action, there will be little political risk. There will be more risk when people disagree with the means (but not the ends) and more risk still when people object to the ends (but not necessarily the means). There will tend to be the most political risk when people disagree with both the means used and the ends being sought.
Therefore, the more we move up this scale, the more that leadership will rely on euphemistic language to manage controversy, suppress discomfort, and minimize disagreement.
3. Watching the Watchers
In general, the higher the political risk the more euphemism is used to minimize pushback.
Consider, for instance, naming laws aimed at destroying worker protections “right to work”. This is done to suppress controversy, manufacture consent, and conceal what are often highly objectionable realities. If it sounds “Machiavellian”, that’s because, well, it is. (Here in America, for instance, consider all the messaging about spreading “freedom and democracy”. Is that really what is being done?)
In general, the more hierarchical the organization the less egalitarian it will be and the more that organizational complexity and euphemism will be employed to mask forced inequalities.
Notice these are problems Andreski’s lens does not help us solve—in fact, it only further entrenches them. In solidifying a Russellian view of science it also backs the nomenclaturist view of linguistics that is baked within it. The assumption here is that the meaning of a word is simply the object for which it stands. Meaning then is simple and straightforward; there is nothing political about it; and, if you reject this view, then you’re just making trouble.
Thinkers like Saussure and Wittgenstein were among the first to point out the danger of this view. Language is often weaponized. As Saussure was the first to put it, a linguistic “sign” is not a word representing an object in the world, but a mental sound or visual pattern associated with another mental concept. Since the way these mental concepts play out is always in part a social game, and often couched within a particular power dynamic, “meaning” then often becomes a site of political struggle.
Andreski wants us to ignore all this pesky “sorcery” so we can get back to the golden days of a simpler 19th-century view of the world. The problem is that his much-maligned shamanism is there regardless, and the best defense we have—which is to fight fire with fire—would be denied to us by Andreski and his ilk.
The way out comes more from the likes of Horkheimer. As he was one of the first to articulate, understanding is in part a social process, and this aspect of meaning is never exposed by simply explaining things as they occur. One can here add Stuart Hall’s point that when the simple and “common sense” is actually the product of prior determinations you are unaware of, you will then not recognize the work they are doing in framing your present narrative.
The modern skeptic movement of course rejects “critical theory” and analysis as some form of postmodern nonsense. This misses the point. Though science works and empiricism can and should provide us with much-needed guardrails, this does not justify the halo effect many such commentators then try to enjoy. Yes, an astronomer should be an expert in astronomy—this does not magically extend support to other views and lenses.
Many in the modern skeptic movement, for example, seem to have a bizarre Ayn Randian-libertarian-nomenclaturist view of things. Whatever their actual area of scientific expertise, this specialization does not then lend credence to any added political lenses.
Critical theory should piggyback the hegemonic narrative like poison and antidote, even when you are the hegemon. To deny this is to deny the necessity of self-criticism. And yet the prominence of critical theory so rankles the modern skeptic movement that they now seem to spend less time criticizing astrology and flat-earthers than they do complaining about all things “woke”.
As Adorno observed in the 1950s, the language of everyday life unreflectingly reinforces concepts installed by the dominant class. This is also true at work. Consider for the last five or so years all the battles fought over what we are or are not allowed to say at work. Consider the bizarre hegemonic backlash brought by those trying to “keep politics off LinkedIn”, one of the last bastions of collective online performative toxic positivity.
The plain fact is those who do not want you to “talk politics at work” simply don’t want you rocking the boat. They are signaling their support for the status quo. Critical theory is simply an unpacking and critique of the status quo’s narrative sorcery. As such, far from what the modern skeptic movement would contend, critical theory and critical analysis should be considered key aspects of critical thinking.
Now, here we are talking about corporate sorcery.
In another piece we addressed the topic of corporate mythology.
How are they different?
In that article we equated a corporation’s mythology with its dominant public transcript. This is, going back to Mitroff and Kilmann, an organization’s desired cultural image. Corporate sorcery is then the narrative heavy lifting an organization must do to manufacture and sustain its mythology.
The result is a particular narrative matrix. Critical theory is the process of learning to see the matrix and work with it by taking on different lenses. Without this you are left with mono-culture and an absence of alternative perspectives.
Until next time.