Erik Henningsen
Department of Social Anthropology
One of the themes this book seeks to illuminate is the ways in which
globalisation engenders forms of essentialist thinking. In this chapter I want
to confine myself to this theme by considering an emergent field of
governmental policy wherein such cultural processes feature prominently. In
recent years a concern for the identity and uniqueness of territorial
communities has come to the fore of bureaucrats and politicians attention
everywhere. This has been evident for several decades at the local and regional
level of state governance. To survive and prosper in the global economy it seems,
regions, cities and local communities must come to terms with their identity
and take measures to communicate it in an effective way to the external world. The
apparent success of, for instance, a city like Barcelona in terms of
capitalising on its cultural distinctiveness, has undoubtedly been a source of
inspiration for many others that seek to follow in the same path. As Lien (2004)
shows, today it has become a common expectation of local governments that they
should device policies for the cultivation and utilisation of the identity of
local communities. Increasingly, this line of thinking is becoming the norm at
the national level of government too, as can be witnessed in various attempts
of “nation branding”, and most famously perhaps in the “Cool Britannia”
programme of the New Labour government in the
These forms of policy are clearly expressive of
the struggle for attention and recognition Eriksen point
to as a characteristic feature of globalisation in chapter xx of this book. They
are typically justified by assertions of the urgent need of social actors to be
seen and heard on the global stage, and they find resonance in the desire for
recognition of diverse social groupings and communities. More narrowly speaking,
the stated aims of these policies tend to revolve around the attraction of
capital investments, the promotion of tourism and the stimulation of civil
society. On the national level, strategic uses of identity are thought to
contribute to the furthering of the geo-political interests of the state and to
the promotion of its interests in such matters as trade and cultural exchange
(Leonard and Small 2003). There is thus a wide range of objectives that are to
be served by this field of governmental policy. Here, the interests of local
communities and of artist, intellectuals and other representatives of the
“cultural sector” are to be aligned with those of capital and the bureaucrats
of the state.
This field of governmental policy is crucially dependant
upon, and in a sense made possible by, contemporary forms of management
expertise. Experts of brand management, corporate culture, strategy and the
like provide decision makers with a language and practical procedures that make
identity, culture and uniqueness emerge as manageable entities, that is, as
potential objects of governmental policy. As such management expertise plays an
important enabling role in the global proliferation of this trend of policy
making. And through the practices of identity management they facilitate,
management expertise inevitably comes to impress certain frames of understanding
upon the people who are involved in such processes. To gain understandings of
the cultural processes that unfold in connection with the inclusion of identity
in governmental policy one would therefore be well advised to examine the role
played by management expertise.
In this chapter I propose to view contemporary management
expertise that is concerned with identity and uniqueness as a project of
rationalisation. I intend to characterise this project, illuminating some of
its most salient features. More specifically I want to address the question of how
management expertise comes to influence the thinking of people who are involved
in this form of policy making.
I will do so on the basis of an ethnographic
case study of a development project that was conducted in Rjukan,
a town of about 6000 people, located in the county of Telemark
in southern Norway. The project was carried out by a consultancy firm from
To many Norwegians the town of
The town is located in
the upper parts of Vestfjorddalen, a steep valley –
so steep in fact, that the sun does not enter the town for large parts of the
winter season – that emerges in the North from the mountain plateau of Hardangervidda, the largest national park in Norway and a
favoured target for outdoors activities like skiing and trekking. To the South
the valley ends in
It is a
peculiar location for a town of such considerable size by Norwegian standards,
and a hundred years ago the valley was populated by only a few hundred people
running small farms. Some of their income derived from services paid to
visiting tourists, representatives of the Scandinavian and European
high-society, who came to climb Mt. Gausta, the
highest mountain of the southern part of Norway, that ascend directly from the
Western slopes of the valley, or to view the Rjukan
waterfall in the gorge in the upper part of the valley.
In 1902 the engineer Sam Eyde
and a group of business associates, bought the waterfall, and continued to buy
most of the land and water rights throughout the valley, with the intention of
selling it on to an American or European industrial corporation. While
struggling to find a buyer for the waterfall, Eyde
stumbled upon a technical solution of how to extract nitrogen from air in the
form of saltpetre, through the use of large quantities of electric energy. In
the following years the business partners succeeded in attracting foreign
investors to the project, paving the way for the large-scale industrial
development of Vestfjorddalen and for the
establishment of Norsk Hydro under the leadership of Eyde.
In a few years the population in Vestfjorddalen
grew to more than 10 000 people as the town of
If these events had taken place ten years
later, when the technology for the transportation of electric energy was
radically improved, the industry would most probably not have been located to Vestfjordalen because of its inconveniences of
communication. The town is not only located far away from the nearest port of
shipment. On the way to the coast the products of the industry had to be
transported by boat over
By the mid 1960’s, it was evident that the
production at Rjukan was not going to be competitive in the foreseeable future,
and from this time onwards Norsk Hydro has gradually
withdrawn its activity from the town.
When
talking to people in Rjukan I was often offered the
expression “at Rjukan Hydro was the society”. It
points to the members of the local community’s great reliance upon the company
as not only the sole provider of jobs, but of a wide range of social welfare
arrangements, making it at times difficult to differentiate it from the local
government. A dominant theme in the local historical writing that covers the
most recent period of the town is the struggle to uphold the industrial
activity of Norsk Hydro and to develop an alternative
basis of economic activity (referanse). Since the
sixties the population of Rjukan has slowly but
steadily decreased, accelerated at times by major cut-downs in Norsk Hydro. In 1988 Norsk Hydro
finally shut down its process-based industry at Rjukan.
To gain political acceptance for the shut-down Norsk
Hydro agreed to remain present at Rjukan with a
business that employ about 400 people, and to the donation of a large fund to
the local government. In the subsequent years the fund has been used to finance
various kinds of projects to stimulate economic growth in Rjukan,
several of which has been headed by consultants from
The project I followed thus fall into a line of
activities that seeks to generate ideas for a new basis of existence for the
local community at Rjukan, in the wake of Norsk Hydro. A short time prior to the start of the project
two well known Norwegian investors had publicly announced their interest for a
large scale development of Rjukan as a skiing resort,
and in connection with this an old plan for the construction of an alpine
skiing course from the top of Mt. Gaustad and down to
the bottom of the valley had been revived by local politicians and members of
the business community. If the plan is realised it would allegedly make for the
alpine course with the greatest fall in altitude in northern
As a trend of policy making, the strategic promotion of the identity of
local communities, cities, regions and nation states has gained momentum from
predicaments very similar to that of the town of Rjukan, that is as a counter
measure to the processes of deindustrialisation many regions and urban areas in
the western world have been caught up in during the last twenty years. As such,
these forms of policy making can be seen to be deeply rooted in the workings of
the globalized economy. Political economic analysis
of globalisation point to a series of interrelated structural changes of
economic systems that have been in progress since the early 1970’s, one of the
most important results of which has been a release of capital from its
territorial constraints (Harvey 1989, Castells 2001).
Reasoning from these premises, David Harvey (2001) offers an explanation for
why the cultural identity of cities and regions all over the world have come to
be seen as vital assets in terms of instigating economic development. An
important consequence of globalization is the vanishing of all sorts of local
monopolies. Because of this, the current situation is characterized by a
frantic search by market actors to reassemble monopoly powers by other means.
One such strategy consist in exploiting possibilities for monopoly rent, that
is, the form of rent that arises out of the control of products of so special
quality as to be in principle incomparable to other products. The classic
examples of products that accrue monopoly rent are fine wines and famous works
of art, but as can be readily imagined the cultural distinctiveness of a city
may also lie at the base of such competitive advantages. Thus, if the
competitive pressure that arises from globalization makes a European region
ill-suited as a host for large scale industrial production, it may seek to
restore growth on the basis its unique cultural characteristics that is by
virtue of its “collective symbolic capital”. Two forms of contradictions lie at
the heart of this economic logic,
This line of analysis provides an important
context to the Over kanten project, which brought
together distanced reflection on how the uniqueness of the place could be
exploited for the sake of for instance tourism development with a
particularistic celebration of local identity. To gain a proper understanding
of what went on in the project however, this line of analysis needs to be
complemented by other considerations. All of the people that were involved in
the development project that I spoke to, whether they were politicians,
bureaucrats of the local administration, representatives of the business
community or of the cultural sector, were convinced that the utilisation of Rjukans “uniqueness”, in terms of its natural surroundings,
its position in Norwegian history, its cultural traditions and architecture,
was a key solution to the problems the local community was facing. The
consultants that facilitated the project propagated this position in a rather
dramatic way throughout the project, as a matter of the life or death of the
local community. But more importantly, they provided a language and a set of
procedures for dealing with the uniqueness of the place, a language that makes
it possible to transform such ambitions into an operational policy. The issue
for people at Rjukan was not so much whether or not
they wanted to make strategic use of the identity of the place, but how they
should go about doing it and in this respect management expertise plays a
crucial role by contributing the relevant means. I think it is safe to assume
that in most cases where government actors come to explore or adopt policies
for the utilisation of identity, they do so with the direct or indirect aid of
management expertise.
Contemporary forms of management expertise
direct themselves to all kinds of social entities from business corporations to
the state and from the individual to the nation. And they present themselves
under so many names. On closer examination however, this diversity seems less
compelling. Management thought typically subsumes all kinds of social entities
under the model of the business enterprise. In most cases it works in accordance
with a common formula where “values” or “stories”, “images”, “mission” and
“vision” are the principal conceptual ingredients. Implied in this scheme is a
demand for business enterprises to clarify their identities, in terms of
“values”, or (as is often the case with approaches of a marketing bent) in
terms of “stories”. It demands that business enterprises should decide upon
which “images” of themselves they should project onto the market. Business
enterprises must similarly clarify their purpose (the “mission”) and a desired
future (the “vision”) they will strive to create. Another concept that is
axiomatic to contemporary management expertise is that of “credibility”. What
this amounts to is a demand that there should be a real correspondence between
the images projected onto the market and the values that characterise internal
life of the business enterprise[1]. If
not, the reasoning goes, the disparity will easily be disclosed by conscious
consumers seeking unique experiences and products to identify with, and thus
cause more harm than good for the business entreprise.
It is the close examination of activities that
are guided by this methodology that make it possible to ascertain the
distinctiveness of the recent turn to identity on the local, regional and
national level of policy making. For there is hardly anything unique to the
fact that it is predicated on an instrumentalist or commercialist understanding
of identity, nor to its outward directedness. Studies of nationalism and the
identity formation of modern territorial communities underscore how the
interest of the state and other actors enter into these processes (
To say that management expertise is a form of
rationalisation may seem like a simple truism in view of the classic literature
on the subject (c.f. for instance Whyte 19), but when
one listens to its most recent proponents it is easy to lose track of this
dimension. In their famous essay on modern organisations DiMaggio and Powell
(1983) argues that in contemporary society forms of rationalisation are
increasingly becoming detached from mere considerations of bureaucratic
efficiency and more and more reliant upon the cultural values that structure
organisational fields. In projects such as Over kanten
this process can in a sense be said to have gone full circle. Over kanten had a distinctive anti-rationalistic thrust to it,
and the consultants who headed the project consistently posited it as a
rejection of modern instrumentalism. In conformity with a very pronounced line
of thinking in contemporary management discourse, the project was presented as
a form of re-enchantment.
To gain a proper understanding of how
contemporary management expertise works, it is necessary to pay attention to
both of these dimensions, and this is what I intend to do in the remaining
sections of this chapter. In the next section I consider the “enchanted” manifestation
of management expertise. I then proceed to point out how management expertise
fashion uniqueness into a manageable entity.
“Unique now… or never” is the title of a recent book in the brand
management genre by the bestselling Danish author Jesper
Kunde (2002). It captures quite well the enchanted
mood of contemporary management thought: Now is a moment of great opportunity
for market actors who are able to take advantage of ongoing transformation of
the workings of the economy and of risk of extinction for those who are unable
to adjust to the new order of the day. Contemporary management discourse tends
always to reflect on the coming of post-industrial society, and in most cases
it presents this transition as a revolutionary historical break. There are two
forms of narratives derived from this notion that typically underpin activities
facilitated by management expertise. One is about the urgency for market actors to adjust to the new immaterial logic of
the economy. The other is about the humanism
of the market forces of post industrial society. Both were brought to bear on
the Over kanten project.
A power point slide that was frequently used by the consultants in the
workshops of Over kanten contains a graphical
depiction of the magnitude of the various sectors of the economy from
1901-2021. It showed that from the turn of the year 2000 and onwards, the
sector of the economy called “emotional treatment” grows dramatically to occupy
the by far largest portion, whereas “knowledge treatment” declines and
“industry” and “agriculture” are totally marginalized. The diagram was a
borrowing from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Research, the most famous
representative of which is Rolf Jensen the author of The Dream Society (Jensen 1999) a book of the strategy genre, that
was widely read in the Norwegian business community at the time[3]. In it the author explains how the affluent
societies of the world have passed through a number of stages of economic
development (hunter-gatherer, agriculture, industry, information) to arrive at
the final, post-material, stage of the dream society where the economy is based
on the sale and consumption of the “stories” that attach to products. This was
the point of departure for many of the discussions the consultants facilitated:
How could the local community at Rjukan catch up with
ongoing changes in society. In their lectures the consultants often reverted to
the examples of the Nokia company and the Lego company, both of which are based
in peripheral small towns in other Nordic countries that until recently had
been considered “no-good” places. The colossal growth these towns had
experienced – today the hometown of the Lego company has its own airport and
that of Nokia its own university, it was pointed out – had come about as a
result of their ability to tune in to the new logic of the economy. The dream society
offered great opportunities for market actors, including a town like Rjukan. But to take advantage of this new field of
possibilities a change of the mentality of the local community was required.
One of the workshops of the project was held at
the local high school with a group of about thirty pupils. It lasted for about
three quarter of a work day, during which the consultants guided the pupils
through several sessions of describing the local community and its possible
future states, what was eventually meant to lead to the formulation of a
vision. In one of the sessions the pupils were asked to make suggestions for
their “desired future image” of Rjukan. After
reviewing the answers the pupils came up with, the consultant that headed the
session went on to talk about the importance of having a positive attitude
instead of “whining and complaining” about the troubles the local community was
caught up in. “You need faith to make it happen!” he instructed the pupils. All
of the suggestions they had come up with were quite possible he said. But if
any of it was going to happen, they needed faith in the future they desired,
and for that they needed a vision, a guiding star to tell them were they wanted
to go. He was interrupted by one of the pupils, a girl, who said that all this
talk about faith was fine, but at the end of the day was not what they really
needed money? “I understand what you mean” the consultant responded, and went
on “but don’t say money say strategy.
Strategy is created where there is energy. And energy is found where there is
hope. The most important knowledge we have is hope. Will, knowledge, hope, that
is what attracts capital. Where you find these things – strategy, will,
knowledge – that is where the capital goes! You have uniqueness! You just need
to focus upon it instead of the problems”.
Some of the participants of the project I
interviewed considered such talk about the habit of “whining and complaining”
among the members of the local community as somewhat provoking because of the
ignorance it demonstrated of the work of readjustment they had been engaged in
for a long time. The consultant could however very well have picked up this way
of describing the local community from listening to the discussions of the
project members themselves. Most of the project members I spoke to pointed to a
widespread and destructive mentality of dependence on the – soon to be gone –
Hydro Company, often conveyed through the popular local expression “At Rjukan people sit on their asses and wait for Hydro to come
and change their light bulbs”. And in
workshop sessions, project participants kept on making declarations of the
type: “I think it is about high time for people in Rjukan
to stop complaining about everything and start to think in a more positive way
about what we can do for ourselves”. The consultants elaborated on these
viewpoints, putting them into a larger socio-economic context. Rjukans problem, it was repeatedly stated, was that it was
trapped, not only in the material infrastructure but also in the mentality of
the bygone industrial society. The
project name Over kanten referred to the ambition of
assisting the local community in making the leap into – or at least bringing it
up “on the edge” to have a glimpse of – the new logic of society. To underline
this meaning the front cover of information material from the project, and the
image that was projected onto the slide screen in between workshop sessions,
feature a photograph of two base-jumpers throwing themselves off a mountain –
not unlike one of the steep hillsides of Vestfjorddalen.
The somewhat lyrical, and often humorous, tone
the consultant that headed the project usually would put on when he spoke to
the project members, was partly something that fell natural for him, partly it
was a conscious strategy to engage people as fully as possible in the activity.
The message he brought forward about the coming of the dream society was well
fitted to this end, as it easily lends itself to an enthusiastic style of
presentation. The great optimism of this message does not only ensue from the
prospects of economic growth it profess. It also contains a promise that people
will be brought closer to them selves when taking part in economic activity.
Partly this relates to the imperative of credibility I have pointed out above.
To make strategic uses of Rjukans uniqueness, the
consultants emphasised in workshop sessions, should not – and could not –
entail a corruption of the “authenticity” of its culture and identity. The
message went further however. In lectures the consultants explained that as the
consumers of stories rather than the mere material products, the new logic of
the economy will allow people to “å være seg selv”
(“be themselves”) in a way they were previously denied. The logic behind this
form of reasoning is spelled out in The Dream Society. In a passage of the book
that describes the consequences for business actors of the emergence of the
politically aware consumer Jensen states:
“The traditional, for-profit-only company is on its way to becoming a
thing of the past (…) Consumers will be politically aware, choosing products
from companies that exhibit attitudes similar to their own. (…) At the same
time the big Dream Society companies will encompass those that specialize in selling
sympathy, compassion and aid, or assistance, like the Red Cross and other
organizations, large and small currently collecting donations for charitable
purposes. They should be considered to be companies precisely because all
companies of the future will be selling emotions. Thus they are not
fundamentally different from the other market players” (Jensen 1999:
43-44).
Jensen proceeds over the next thirty pages of the book to depict the
emerging “market for adventures”, “the market for togetherness, friendship and
love”, “the market for care”, “the who-am-I market”, “the market for peace of
mind” and “the market for convictions”. In effect, the book demonstrates how
the market in the emerging dream society absorbs human sociality and culture in
its entirety. What makes this possible is the degradation of utility value to a
secondary position as a driving force of the economy in the dream society.
Instead the economy of the dream society is based upon our dreaming and our
emotions, that is, upon the production, sale and consumption of the stories that attach to commodities. The
craving for stories, Jensen holds “is part of what it means to be human –
integral to any definition of Homo Sapiens. We have always lived in a spiritual
as well as physical world” ( Jensen 1999: 52). Because of this, the total
collapse of culture and society into the market Jensen describe, is not seen to
entail a debasement of the life of human beings. On the contrary, in the dream
society the market will allow us to live out our variegated emotional needs. It
is these needs, the book says, that defines us as human beings. In the economy
of the previous stages of society, based upon the material utility of
commodities and bureaucratic rationality, such needs were effectively repressed.
As significant as the visions of the
contemporary and future society that are produced in such discourse is the way
in which it presents the transition to the post-industrial as an absolute break
and its thoroughly homogenizing construction of the past. Jensen is quite
categorical in his depiction of the societal stages that precedes the dream
society. In his account of the dream society, industrial society and the
information society emerges as not only defined by their reliance upon, but as
totally permeated by, materiality/utility value and instrumental reason. The
inception of stories and emotions, as a force to be reckoned with in the
economy, is in effect presented as coterminous with the emergence of the dream
society sometime in the 1990’s. To say that the Red Cross and contemporary
business organizations are fundamentally alike because they all deal with
emotions makes very good sense when viewed in the light of this contrast image
of the past.
This construction of the industrial past as a soulless
era of pure commoditization, material utility and formal rationality, is the
ideological alibi upon which most versions of contemporary management thinking
rest[4]. It explains how management expertise are able
to present itself as simultaneously a project of rationalisation, through their
aim of converting “soft” assets such as a culture, creativity and identity into
administrative categories, and as re-enchantment, promising to restore a lost
human wholeness. This ambiguity is contained in the expression “soft” which is
commonly used in the management literature and among management consultants, as
a tag on management approaches that focus on phenomena such as identity,
culture, creativity and knowledge. In the context of state governance and administration
of modern organizations softness takes on a specific meaning, pointing to
phenomena that are considered to lie outside the scope of processes of
rationalisation[5].
Softness thus evokes the notion of a precious humanity or “life world” that is
seen to be threatened by the expansion of calculative reason (Habermas 1987). As Sennet (1974)
demonstrates, experiences of forms of alienation, which to some extent must
always accompany capitalism, has throughout its history given rise to
compensatory reactions based on a longing for purified and innocent forms of
sociality. Contemporary management thought feeds of this generic discontent
with the “illness of capitalism”, forging descriptions of organisational life
and economic practices as a landscape of human loss, that in many ways resemble
Webers dystopic image of
the iron cage. It does so by framing these descriptions in evolutionary schemes
similar to that of Jensens, as defining features of
bygone or dying social forms. In this way the introduction of a style of
management that focus on identity can be seen to replace a state of lack of
identification; consumption of sign value replaces a state in which consumption
was purely based upon considerations of utility, and so on.
The evolutionist thinking of management expertise entrust it with a
ready made justification for the use of its services. It provides a harmonising
ideology for the use of identity as an object of policy. This does not mean, it
should be emphasised, that it was merely an ornamental feature of the
interaction that took place in the works shops of the Over kanten
project. During the project period of Over kanten the
local government at Rjukan initiated a revision
process of the plan for its organisation (“kommuneplanen”).
The consultant in charge of Over kanten several times
pointed out the difference between these two enterprises to the project
members. “They” (the planners of the local governmental administration) were
going about in the old fashioned bureaucratic way, he asserted, whereas “we”
(the participants of Over kanten) were proceeding in
accordance with a new and different way of thinking.
The idea of engaging in a form of activity that
transcended the bureaucratic nature and instrumentalism of traditional planning
practices structured the activity that took place in the workshops of Over kanten in important ways. Events like the workshops that
was conducted for the Over kanten project are
generally characterised by a certain indeterminacy of situation. The consultants
of the firm that was in charge of Over kanten usually
pointed out to their clients at the beginning of projects that they consider
the discussions and thought processes that are stirred up in projects to be
highly valuable on their own terms, and as valuable as the strategy documents
that comes out of them. There is accordingly more than one way in which such
projects can be deemed successful. Formally the Over kanten
was classified as a development or planning project, but the way in which the workshops
of the project unfolded often made it difficult to say what type of activity it
exemplified. A great deal of the statements that were made by project members
at the workshops, in group work and plenary sessions, had the form of responses
to the question: Who are we? These activities often featured series of
declarations were people described the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of the
local community, and not at least testified to their commitment to its future
survival. On the one extreme there were statements based on disengaged
considerations of what forms of uniqueness Rjukan
possessed that realistically could serve as a means of creating economic
growth, on the other there were passionate declarations of the speakers
allegiance to the local community and the inherent value of its cultural
traditions. The consultants who headed the sessions generally welcomed all such
types of statements as valuable contributions to the project.
Most of the members of Over kanten
I interviewed during and after the project concluded that in terms of the
quality of the “process” it was a definite success: It generated a lot of
commitment among people and many interesting discussions and creative ideas the
local community could benefit from. Over kanten was
an exploration in the strategic uses of Rjukans
uniqueness, and simultaneously an impressive rally of local patriotic
engagement. This form of productivity, it should be noted, was conditional upon
people’s acceptance of a certain way of speaking and relating to the identity
of the local community.
In a sense the Over kanten project consisted
of a rediscovery of the uniqueness and identity of Rjukan.
This is not to suggest that people at Rjukan were
unaware of these things. The rediscovery that was facilitated by the project
rather consisted of a re-articulation of uniqueness and identity within the
language of management expertise. Partly this is achieved through the framing
of these concepts in the technical vocabulary of management expertise. As I
have pointed out above, reasoning about identity in management discourse is
consistently framed within ideas of market behaviour. Here, uniqueness and
identity is referred to in terms of “values” or “stories” and often used
interchangeably with “market position” or ”selling point”. Shortly below I will
describe how such concepts were put to use in the Over kanten
project with the aim of selecting an appropriate uniqueness for Rjukan. Equally significant as the technical vocabulary of
management expertise is the characteristic manner in which it speaks about
identity and uniqueness. In management discourse uniqueness and identity are
typically talked about as something business enterprises can be or not be in
possession of. It is something they can be endowed with in rich quantity or
have little of. It can be acquired or lost, created or destroyed or even
stolen. A market actor may find that its preferred identity is already occupied
by someone else, and so on. These are common figures of speech when people talk
about identity. In management discourse however they tend to take on a very
literal meaning. The activities of management expertise is on the whole
characterised by an immense trust in language, or, more precisely, in the
capacity of language to reflect the world in an unproblematic way. Management
discourse has little room for ironic playfulness about the meaning of its
concepts.
There is an obvious commonsensical appeal to
this way of talking about uniqueness and identity. It makes it relatively easy
for people of diverse backgrounds to take part in discussions and express their
opinions on these matters. In their preparations for the workshops of Over kanten and other projects, the consultants were careful to
make sure that the activity should not divert into unnecessary intellectualism.
The point of these exercises, they explained, was not to produce sophisticated
academic accounts of the uniqueness of Rjukan, but to
engage people as fully as possible in thinking about how to make use of it.
Another obvious effect of this way of speaking is that it invites people to
think about identity as a form of possession or capital, however unspecified it
may be. This too can be said to make it easy to relate to matters of identity
as it confers a sense of concreteness and usefulness onto this domain of
experience. When project members spoke of the history of Rjukan
in the Over kanten project they typically referred to
them as a range of assets the local community somehow could make use of.
Most of the activities that took place in the workshops at Rjukan was devoted to various kinds of group work,
reflecting upon and giving names to different properties of the local community
(its history, culture, natural landscape, infrastructure, social relations and
so on) and its future scenario’s. With the aid of the consultants the
participants of Over kanten were literally taking
stock of the material and immaterial belongings of the local community, sorting
out which elements that were valuable for its future survival and which
elements it should dispose itself of. Among the latter were its industrial
mentality that was seen to lock the local community in a state of fatalism and
social fragmentation. However, there were also elements of this industrial
mentality that was singled out as highly valuable. As I have indicated above,
in Over kanten great emphasis was placed upon the
need for people to have faith in a future goal in order to create growth.
Several participants I interviewed connected this aspect of the project
directly to the great enthusiasm that is known to have characterized the
pioneering stage of the construction of the industrial town ninety years ago.
During discussions it was often pointed out by project participants that the
local community really was in possession of qualities like “will”, “hope” and
“faith”, but that it was things that had to be “funnet
fram til igjen” (“brought forward again”). In an interview, I talked to one of the project
members about his desire for people at Rjukan to get
excited about some “mega project”, like constructing an alpine course from the
top of
In historians accounts of the enthusiasm of the
first decades of the industrial development at Rjukan
it is seen to emerge as the combined result of the massive nature of the
industrial project that materialized before the workers and engineers eyes, the
forms of social mobility it entailed for the lower sections of the peasant
population in the region, the social reformist character of the housing
programme that was instigated in the construction of the town, the modernist
techno-optimism typical of the time and the charismatic role of Sam Eyde, the industrialist that headed the project. In the
reflections about the past that went on within the framework of Over kanten this chain of causation was in a sense inverted.
Enthusiasm was singled out as a cause
of development, a feature of Rjukans history that
somehow could be seized and made use of by the living descendants of the people
who built the town. To instigate growth and reverse the depopulation trend they
found themselves caught up in, members of the local community had to take hold
of and mobilize possessions of its history like “will” and “faith”. People at Rjukan had to become enthusiastic about something – some project that was yet to
be specified.
The abstraction of enthusiasm from a feature of
Rjukans history into an asset or capital the local
community is in command of is indicative of the style of thinking that
permeates these contexts of interaction. Workshops like these are in a sense
laboratories of abstraction that enable people to assess the diverse features
of a local community as a repository of assets that can be put productive use. It
is a form of thinking that is brought to its extreme conclusion in the more
rigorous management approaches that promote methods for calculating the
monetary value of the identity of business entreprises[6].
In two workshops of the Over kanten project,
that were informally referred to as “branding sessions” by the consultants, the
participants were guided through a four step procedure to arrive at a
proposition for a “future vision” of the local community. One of the workshops
was conducted with the regular participants to the project, and the other with
the pupils of the local high school. In the session that made up the first step
in the procedure, that lasted for about one hour, the students were asked to
name the “foundation values” (byggeverdier) of the local community. “Values are almost
impossible to invent”, the consultant who headed the session explained the
pupils “so we must use the ones we already have. Some values we would like to
carry on into the future, others we can do without”. “What are the foundation
values of Rjukan, what are the values you can build
your future on at this place” he challenged them. The pupils, who already had
been divided into eight groups, were left to discuss the matter for fifteen
minutes and write down maximum five suggestions in the form of a cue (“stikkord”) on a piece of paper. When the time was up
representatives of the groups presented the values they had come up with, sometimes
adding a short explanation to the suggestions and receiving comments from the
consultant and the other pupils. Meanwhile an assistant of the consultant
punched the suggestions into a word document on his laptop that was instantly
displayed on a screen in front of the congregation. Some of the values that
appeared on the screen centered on the natural
facilities of the place and its rich opportunities for outdoor life as in the
suggestions “snow and mountains”, “nature and outdoor life”, “accessibility of
nature”, “
The next step in the procedure was to make a
selection from these suggestions of the five most important foundation values
of the local community. For this end the participants to the workshop were to
cast their votes for the suggestions they favoured. The consultant instructed
the pupils how to make their selection of values using a “filter of
uniqueness”. He explained the criterion in terms of finding an “unoccupied
position”, something Rjukan “can become best at” or
“famous for” in
After he had introduced the pupils to the
“filter of uniqueness” the consultant turned to inspect the screen commenting
on the values they had come up with. “Snow and mountains” and “Hardangervidda” were clear candidates to be the foundation
values of the local community he pointed out. In the European comparison these
values were “very unique”. “Nature and outdoor life” was not as obvious. It
depended on where the local community was put its “level of ambition”. If they
wanted to be “best in the region” then “nature and outdoor life” might work
very well, he said. But it was more doubtfully if they wanted to be best in the
country and definitely not if they wanted to be best in
During his review of the foundation values, the
consultant was challenged by some of the pupils to comment upon “the hospital”
which they favoured as a foundation value, pointing to its importance for
people at Rjukan. A few years earlier when the
regional political administration wanted to close down the hospital at Rjukan members of the local community rallied in protest. A
recent edition of a local history book features a picture of the hospital at
night encircled by thousands of people bearing torches. As it turned out the
struggle to save the hospital proved successful, making the institution into
something like a symbol of the local community’s will to survive and ability to
stand up against the central government. “The hospital has value here – to you
– but it is not unique” the consultant responded, and went on to say that it
was part of the necessary infrastructure of the local community, something that
would have to be secured in the future on the basis of their uniqueness.
Throughout the session the consultant referred to an imaginary family from the
city of
The simplicity of this procedure entrust it with great persuasiveness as
a means of objectifying various properties of a local community and as a means
of selecting among these elements to forge a unique identity for the local
community. For several reasons, I think the example is telling of the ways in
which management expertise comes to influence a broad range of activities where
identity is made into an object of policy.
Firstly, the example illustrates the perceived elasticity the identity of
social entities attains when they are appropriated by management expertise. As
I have pointed out, credibility is posited as an absolute imperative in
management discourse. It demands that the expressions of uniqueness a business
enterprise project onto the external market must be derived from a real, or
authentic, foundation. What this requirement comes to mean in respect to
selection processes such as the one I have described, is to eliminate value
inventions or faking from the range of choices an actor has at its disposal
when deciding upon its identity. Apart from this actors are seen to be free of
manoeuvre in terms of shaping their uniqueness. This comes out particularly
clearly in the context of business organisations where it is usual to talk
about the “implementation” or “cancelling” of an identity or of letting an
“identity die”[7]. As the
example I have described shows, this line of thinking also apply in the case of
a local community. In management discourse, and consultancy projects like Over kanten, values are presented and talked about as mutually
independent objects. They are typically not placed in a arrangement that
indicate that some are more fundamental than others or that they are
interdependent in other ways. Nor are they presented as in any way inescapable.
Through procedures such as the filter of uniqueness values emerge as a
collection of separate objects that irrespectively of each other can be
embraced or rejected in the crafting of the local community’s uniqueness.
Secondly, the example illustrates quite well the principle of selection that management
expertise brings to bear on the identity of territorial communities in this
type of policy making. It basically consists of the adoption of an outsider
perspective on the repertoire of values. In some management approaches this
would imply an assessment of the repertoire of values from the perspective of a
designated market segment or group of people. More commonly, as the example I
have described illustrates, it means to adopt the perspective of a person that
is relatively undescribed except for being
recognisable as a post-materialistic consumer, someone who is in search of
unique experiences and products to identify with. Following Wilks
(1995) this could be described as a matter of having people at Rjukan apply a “global gaze” upon the local community. Through
the filter of uniqueness procedure people at Rjukan is
invited to assume a global standard as a form of “significant other” by which
the local “is defined and judged” (Wilks 1995:127). This
standard finds a clear expression in management discourse. As my discussion of
Jensen (1999) above suggests, strong emotional appeal is usually posited as a
requirement of well functioning values (or stories) in management discourse.
Management discourse also point to distinctiveness and familiarity as
criterions that should be employed in the selection of values[8].
The formulation “snow and mountains” goes well with the flow of descriptions of
values and stories that figure in the management literature. It is something an
imagined sensation seeker from nowhere in particular can be expected to be
aroused by. In this context “the hospital” of course appears as a particularly
useless suggestion. Mainly this is because of its commonality and sheer
dullness for anyone who has not been directly involved in local politics at Rjukan – as a vehicle of identification it has only local
appeal.
Thirdly, the example also illustrates the style of communication contemporary
management expertise relies upon. I have already pointed to the commonsensical
bent of this style of communication. In light of the present example some
further comments can be made. Like many other activities facilitated by
management expertise, the filter of uniqueness is predicated on the use of
“values” as the principal means of describing a social entity. In management
discourse values are talked about in a definite and highly conventionalised
way. “Adventure” and “care” are typical examples of how values are expressed in
management literature and in countless value statements in annual reports. They
always come out in the form of short and uncomplicated expressions that appear
self explanatory. Such descriptions are typically combined to produce accounts
of identities of social entities in the form of inventory lists of values. The
example is also highly illustrative of how such accounts are put together in the
activities of management expertise, that is, by way of first assembling very
comprehensive lists of the values that can be said to characterise a business
enterprise, for then to make a selection of, say, the five most critical ones.
As such the activities of management expertise are expressive of the pervasive
cultural process Scott Lash (2002) terms informationalisation.
In contemporary society, Lash argues, narrative and other complex conceptual
forms are increasingly replaced by forms of messages that have a far greater
immediacy. Informationalisation points to a tendency
of compressing messages to the extent that they are “standing outside of a
systematic conceptual framework” (Lash 2002: 3) as “just” messages. I have
indicated above that this style of communication served to release creativity
among the project members in Over kanten, making it
easy to enter into collective reflections about the uniqueness of Rjukan. Conversely, it can be noted that it is also a
practical prerequisite of this type of activity and one that impose certain
restraints upon the process of reflection upon identity. In order for the activities that unfolded in
the workshops of Over kanten to work, people must be
willing to engage in this style of communication. The workshop sessions at Rjukan brought together people of diverse orientation and
background: farmers, academics, businesspeople, mangers, bureaucrats,
politicians and high school pupils. For the members of a work group to
construct a joint description of the local community within a time frame of on
hour or less, and merge this description with the ones of the other groups,
also within a narrow time frame, it is quite necessary to rely on this style of
communication. This type of work presumes the flexibility of expression that is
engendered by informationalisation. In these contexts
of interaction people who are prone to correct others on conceptual matters,
seeking to integrate descriptions in a more tightly woven conceptual framework
typically stand out as disruptive elements.
A fourth
observation, about the meaning of the
concept of uniqueness as it emerges in management thought, can also be
derived from the example of the “filter of uniqueness”. Analysis of the forms
of contradictions that adhere to the commoditisation of the identity of
territorial communities, in the manner of Harvey (2001), or of globalisation as
a process of massive cultural homogenisation – the movement from “something”
(forms with cultural content) to “nothing” (standardised forms with no content)
according to Ritzer (2004) – is predicated on an
understanding of uniqueness as incomparability or singularity. Management
discourse proceeds from a different understanding of this concept, and for this
reason it is rather indifferent to the problematic of standardisation. The
“filter of uniqueness” the consultants escorted the participants of Over kanten through was not a matter of soliciting incomparable
values, or ones that could be presented as a mystery to be solved by the
outsider. It is rather a method of identifying values there is an obvious
demand for in their surroundings, something many people in the rest of the
country, or even outside its borders, are already in desire of, or identifying
with. As the example demonstrates, to have uniqueness in this context does not
mean to be incomparable, but to be “best at” something, to be in command of a
superior product. As I have pointed out, a future scenario of Rjukan turned into an “Alp village” received special
attention in the Over kanten project. By the time of
the Over kanten project the concept of “alp village”
was well known in the Norwegian tourism industry, and in several other
Norwegian winter sport places were well into the process of developing such
facilities. This was a fact that was reflected upon in group discussions of the
Over kanten project. But as members of the project
came to see the matter it did not necessarily stand in the way of the
uniqueness of the Alp village at Rjukan. The one that
was to be created at Rjukan was not going to be like
any other Alp village. It was to be the one with the biggest and most
spectacular alpine course. It was to be the only alp village that offered the
combined pleasure of winter sports and industrial cultural heritage.
Management expertise is involved in processes of articulating the
identity of territorial communities in all parts of the world. On the basis of
my observations of the Over kanten project I have
tried to describe how management expertise work in these context. I have
pointed to its ability to mobilize and excite people in acts of reflecting upon
the identity of a local community and how this process was contained within a project
of rationalisation. This form of rationalisation, I have described as a set of
ways of speaking about and conceptualising identity, that in turn enable a procedure
of selection of forms of uniqueness the local community should give emphasis to
in its self promotion. To the extent that this description has validity across cases
– as I think it has – indicates that the activities of management expertise
have some important ramifications of in terms of globalisation.
In his description of the ways in which the international beauty contest
system is made manifest in
Anderson, Benedict 1991: Imagined
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Castells, Manuel 2001: The Rise of the
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Harvey, David 1989: The Condition
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Jensen, Rolf 1999: The Dream Society. New York: McGraw Hill
Kunde, Jesper
2002: Unik nå eller aldri.
Lash, Scott 2002: Critique of
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Leonard, Mark and Small, Andrew 2003: Norwegian Public Diplomacy.
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Riise, Jørn Haakon 2004: Unik og ettertraktet. Oslo: N.W. Damm
& Søn
Riles, Annelise 1998: ”Infinity within bracets” in American
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Østerberg, Dag 1997: Sosiologiens nøkkelbegreper. Oslo: Cappelen Akademisk Forlag
follow
What this points to is
reaffirms reimagining as a brand value tool
[1] The
bulk of the activity that went into the development project at Rjukan was
devoted to the formulation of four different future scenario’s of the local
community. This is what the consultants described as the unique approach of the
firm they represented. The rationale behind the approach is to engage people of
(in this case) the local community in a collective reasoning about its possible
future states (“the space of possibility”), activities that in turn is meant to
enable them to choose a vision, the future they want to create for themselves.
The end document of the project at Rjukan contains a list of the values of the
local community, a mission statement, a suggested vision and so on. As such the
project was complicit with the formula I have described.
[2] Weber uses the concept of
rationalization in several senses; as a generic process, when in reference to
gradual historical changes in religious world views or to illuminate the
phenomenon of rational bureaucracy, but he also uses the concept in reference
to particular forms of modern management ideas like Taylors
scientific management. It is on the basis of this last restricted form of usage
that I think my use of the term project of rationalization project is
justified.
[3]
When I asked the consultants about the use of the Dream Society in their
projects they explained that they could think of other books that would be more
interesting to use, but it was quite convenient to use The Dream Society
because it was “common sense” to the business community.
[4] The
concept of ideological alibi is taken from Baudrillard
1972.
[5] In his writing Weber consistently relies on a
metaphorical distinction of soft-hard to illuminate the phenomena of
rationalization. Rationalization is always described as a process of hardening
of social and cultural forms[5]. Ultimately this point to the
interception and breaking off of the dialectical relationships such phenomena
enter into as objects of experience, that is, to their “freezing” or
“stiffening” (Østerberg 1997).
[6] A recent book titled Unik og ettertraktet (“Unique and sought after”) by the
Norwegian consultant Jørn Haakon
Riise presents a method for the measurement of the
”strength of identity” in business enterprises, based on questionnaire
responses from employees (Riise 2004). The book also
presents a more extensive method where this identity index is combined with
three other indexes, measuring the commitment of the employees, their knowledge
creating abilities and the reputation of the business enterprise, to enable a
calculation of the monetary value of the invisible assets of the business
enterprise.
[7] In
a recent book by the management consultant Jørn Haakon Riise it is pointed out
that in the case of merger operations that bring together several identities of
business enterprises, managers must make strategic choices about for instance
whether these identities should be allowed to “live side by side”, if one of
the identities should be allowed to “swallow” others or if an identity should
be “amputated” or “eliminated” (Riise 2004: 147).
[8] A recent report made for the Norwegian Ministry
of Foreign Affairs that makes suggestion for the branding of the Norwegian
national identity points to the “clear link between favorability
and familiarity”. This assumption underlies much of its advices regarding the
promotion of Norwegian national identity abroad. Thus when the report argues
that the Norwegian cultural forms that should be presented abroad should be of
a popular cultural nature – for instance through the promotion of
internationally successful pop groups – it is because “people need to be given
pathways to