Fact or Fiction
3 Aug 2009
Movies, music and television provide more than entertainment. Researchers in the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies (CMOS) believe popular culture plays an important role in how employees perceive their jobs and the organisations employing them.
You’ve just returned home from a gruelling day at work. Eager for a little comic relief, you flop onto the couch and turn the on television just in time to catch The Simpsons.
As you surrender to a few easy laughs, CMOS members and Professors of Organisation Studies in the School of Management, Carl Rhodes and Bob Westwood, believe you may be looking for more than amusement. You’re likely to be seeking solace too.
Television shows like The Simpsons or The Office “are not just a bit of light-hearted comedy. They contain quite a bit of satire about modern organisations and quite a bit of commentary about the modern manager and what he or she is up to,” explains Westwood.
Carl Rhodes
“What is most interesting is that when we look for stories about work in popular culture they are almost always critical – not critical of the value of work itself, but critical of what it means to work for organisations and for a ‘boss’,” adds Rhodes.
Take for example Roy Orbison’s ‘Working for the man’ or the EasyBeats ‘Friday on my mind’. Cinema also showcases characters like the ruthless and unscrupulous Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, or the icy and intimidating Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada.
These fictional – and some might say realistic – bosses contradict the type of manager and work environment commonly portrayed in management books.
“Many organisations have developed a habit of representing themselves in a celebratory way, imagining that with the right managerial techniques they can become utopian havens where people happily pursue corporate goals and submit themselves entirely to managerial agendas,” says Rhodes. “Studying popular culture suggests this is naive, utopian and selfish, and that paying attention to the cultural meanings of work reveals a more complex picture.”
This includes how people construct their professional identity and their role within an organisation. “It’s not just a bit of candy floss,” says Westwood. “Popular culture provides fresh avenues and different ways of looking at the phenomenon all management and organisational studies scholars are interested in.”
Westwood, who joined UTS on 1 August, has been collaborating with Rhodes for nearly a decade. He hopes his move to UTS will encourage others to undertake innovative research in this area. Recently, Rhodes and Westwood published their book, Critical Representations of Work and Organization in Popular Culture, which further explores this topic.
Bob Westwood
Though Westwood’s current research applies post-colonial theory to management and organisation studies, he believes the work he has done with Rhodes has helped to fill some of the gaps in conventional organisation and management studies.
“In the last 20 or 30 years there’s been quite a lot of formal work on gender in organisations,” says Westwood. “But rather less on masculinity and certainly rather less on masculinity from a critical point of view – how it’s performed and how it’s constrained within an organisational context.”
Westwood believes popular culture can provide interesting insights. For example, television drama Life on Mars reveals the ways masculinity is linked to time and space, while films like Glengarry Glen Ross dramatically expose the limitations and contradictions in stereotypes of masculinity, encouraging alternate forms to be explored.
Likewise there are lessons for organisations. “Popular culture, and comedy in particular, suggests organisations take themselves far too seriously and that regular people can see through the banal forms of manipulation they continue to pursue,” says Rhodes.
For all researchers, the lesson lies in recognising the value of mass media. “Sceptics think popular culture is an unworthy topic of study because it is ‘fictional’ – better they might say to study actual organisations,” says Rhodes. “Fiction has always played an important part in culture and provides people with a means to understand and reflect on their own experience as well as to learn about the meaning of other people’s experience.
“If one wanted to learn about the culture of 19th century Britain would it be better to read a history book of the time or to read Charles Dickens? Well, maybe both, but Dickens does a pretty good job. And the same goes today in an era where popular culture is produced and distributed through the mass media. People who write and produce fiction are often much more culturally attuned to the spirit of the age than those who present their ideas as facts. Especially when those ‘facts’ are proposed to be at the service of organisations.”
Fiona Murray
Marketing and Communication Unit
Photographer (posters): Joanne Saad
Photographer (C Rhodes): Fiona Murray
Photographer (R Westwood): Mark Lehn
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