Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
Clifford Geertz’s (1983) pronouncement on the refiguration of social thought is
both an instance of and a guide to that class of hybrid we call post-modern. One
such phenomenon – the global intertextuality which manifests itself in the
transplanting of Japanese organizations in American soil – is the subject of this
essay. Both the refiguration of social thought and the transplant organization
are, in Geertz’s terms, blurred genres: the products of transgressed and
overlapping boundaries. The former is the result of the migration of semiotic
modes of analysis into the social sciences and of recent developments in the
organization sciences (see, as examples, Fiol, 1989, 1991; Stuart and Fuller,
1991; Wattel, 1995); the latter results from the coincidence of Japanese and
American styles of organizational behaviour. One specific involution in this
relationship is this essay, which is itself the genetic result of at least three pairs
of cross-fertilization. First, we use semiotic tools of analysis (developed
principally by humanities scholars) to conduct an examination of a corporate
organization (an endeavour which is typically the domain of social science).
Second, the subject of our discussion is the transplant organization, itself the
inmixing of two different cultures. Third, we use a film, Rising Sun, as the major
example in our discussion and thus splice together the genres of the film
analysis and the organizational study.
What, we ask, is the role of narrative fiction, especially films, in the study of
organizations? Are they legitimate sources for “data” to interpret the various
facets of organizational life? How are they different from the so-called
“rigorous” methods of organizational analysis? In this essay, we argue that
filmic representations provide a unique approach to understanding
organizations. However, this contention rests against an overwhelming belief
Journal of Organizational Change
that what organizational scientists and film writers do are worlds apart.
Management, Vol. 9 No. 3, 1996,
pp. 44-61. © MCB University Press,
Organizational scientists observe, report and analyse the organizational reality
0953-4814 as it exists “out there”, whereas film writers invent reality or “make things up”.
This modernist notion that there is an objective world out there waiting to be Filmic
discovered and reported accurately by the scientific observer is in direct representations
opposition to the post-modernist view that organizational reality is socially
constructed (Gergen, 1985, 1994) and mediated by many language games
(Astley and Zammuto, 1992; Mauws and Phillips, 1995; Thatchenkery, 1992)
that inhabit the field of organization science and practice. For example, as
Phillips (1995) points out, social scientists often do what writers do: they create 45
rather than discover.
Similarly, fictive writers do something that social scientists do, “they test
ideas against evidence, they generalize, they pose testable questions about the
social world, and they try to remain faithful to details of external experience”
(Phillips, 1995, p. 627). In addition, according to Phillips (1995), the two
communities produce texts whose status is often ambiguous. Many stories look
like attempts to test some assumptions or, loosely speaking, hypotheses (such
as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) while accounts of many social scientists
look like the products of narrative fiction (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) such as in
ethnographic case studies (Rosen, 1991; Van Maanen, 1988). As Phillips (1995)
points out, some works such as Carlos Castaneda’s The Teaching of Don Juan
are seen as both scientific and fictitious.
Thus, the conventional belief that social science and narrative fiction are
mutually exclusive is a doubtful proposition (Denzin, 1991). Good narrative
fictions provide us with detailed and plausible life-worlds that are “complex,
ambiguous, unique, and subject to the situational logic, interpretation,
resistance, and invention that characterize real organizations” (Phillips, 1995, p.
634). As such, stories are a valuable resource in our quest to understand how
organizations work (Boje, 1995). It is for this reason that we wish to analyse
Rising Sun.
Synopsis
Before we start our analysis, it is important to provide a synopsis of the film for
the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the story-line.
Rising Sun is a big city murder mystery which renews the conventions of the
genre by focusing on the cross-cultural relationships between the Japanese and
American members of a Japanese transplant organization. The film’s early
scenes introduce us to a crucial location: the Nakamoto Corporation boardroom.
At first we come to know it as the site of the negotiations for Nakamoto’s
proposed acquisition of Microcon Corporation, a small US company which
possesses a vital defence technology. Two of the pivotal characters we meet at
this time are Richmond, an unethical American attorney who works for
Nakamoto, and US Senator Morton, who is trying to block the acquisition. Our
second exposure to the boardroom occurs later that night: during a posh party
celebrating the opening of Nakamoto’s Los Angeles building, a murder victim
(Cheryl Austin) is discovered on the boardroom table. (This juxtaposition of the
negotiations and the murder contains some of the film’s more interesting
implications.)
JOCM A pair of detectives, Web and Connor (played respectively by Wesley Snipes
9,3 and Sean Connery), are called on to unravel the mystery. Having worked in
Japan for many years, Connor is well respected by the Japanese and deeply
knowledgeable about the culture. Web, an African American, is a novice in such
cultural relations. The key element in their investigation is a CD-ROM recording
produced by Nakamoto’s 24-hour video surveillance system. The recording
46 indicates that Eddie Sakamura, the murder victim’s boyfriend and the son of a
Japanese business magnate, strangled Cheryl while having sex with her on the
boardroom table. The strangulation appears to be accidental in that Cheryl likes
to have her sexual experience intensified by temporary asphyxia. Eddie just
went a little too far this time.
However, with the technical assistance of Connor’s Japanese African
American girlfriend, the detectives discover that the digital recording has been
manipulated and falsified to frame Eddie Sakamura. When Sakamura turns up
with the original unrevised CD-ROM, we learn that Senator Morton was
Cheryl’s boardroom lover, and that Richmond murdered her after Morton leaves
the scene. Richmond’s motivation: he uses the recording of the married Morton’s
tryst to blackmail the Senator so that he will stop trying to block the Microcon
sale.
At the end of the film, Connor goes off to play golf. Web, who is attracted to
Connor’s girlfriend Jingo, drives her home. In a very ambiguous final scene,
neither Web nor the spectator can decide whether Jingo is responding sexually
to the detective.
Deconstructing science
Beginning in the eighteenth century, science has struggled to repudiate this
kind of self-legitimating language game, which it regards as the product of
superstition, ignorance, prejudice and ideology. What’s the alternative?
Whereas primitive narrative does not require any form of legitimation outside
the realm of its own performance, scientific knowledge claims to validate itself
by the objectivity, rigour and systematicity of its procedures – the renowned
and time-tested scientific method. However, Lyotard contends that the vaunted
method is just another self-validating narrative. He identifies two specific forms
of narrative on which the claims of scientific objectivity depend: one is political,
the other philosophical. The political narrative is represented by the
Enlightenment which is a narrative of the gradual emancipation of humanity
from slavery and class oppression. Science supposedly played a key role in this
movement by making knowledge available to all and thereby helping in the
JOCM attainment of absolute freedom. The philosophical narrative is Hegelian in
9,3 character in that knowledge is regarded as a prime part of the gradual evolution
through history of self-conscious mind. Lyotard maintains that these grand
narratives subordinate, organize and account for local narratives (e.g. stories
about scientific discoveries or personal growth and self-actualization), which in
a circular and self-fulfilling fashion confirm the grand narratives of the
48 emancipation of humanity and/or the reality of a pure self-conscious Spirit.
Thus, according to Lyotard, the claims for scientific objectivity are paradoxical:
the scientific knowledge which depends at one level on the suppression and
denunciation of narratives, is thereby condemned to a dependence at a higher
level on a narrative of legitimation, a “meta-narrative” or “grand narrative”
(Connor, 1989, p. 30). To quote Lyotard (1984, p. 29):
Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without
resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no
knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of presupposing its own
validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on
prejudice.
The very existence of this critique suggests that the naturalizing process which
privileged science is no longer as seamless as it once was. The result is a
conceptual space within which it is possible to pursue the claims to knowledge
made by other narratives and other texts (Boje, 1995; Boland and Tenkasi, 1995;
Gergen, 1994; Thatchenkery, 1992).
We may be guided in this endeavour by the new historicist work of Stephen
Greenblatt (1988), which is derived in part from the historical modes of enquiry
Michel Foucault (1970) deployed in the Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. The new historicists look for epistemic similarities between
the different discourses in a given historical period. Thus, Greenblatt (1988)
locates parallel narratives in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in seventeenth-
century reports of New World exploration. This parallel is neither direct nor
obvious; rather, it is the discursive relationships (which emerge only as a result
of Greenblatt’s interpretative work) between non-fiction expositions of
particularly important states of affairs and their figural representation in a
theatrical fiction. Rather than privilege either of these texts, Greenblatt treats
them as co-equal representations of the discursive dominants of the period.
Implications
We believe that an organizational analysis of feature films should take these
assumptions into consideration. The practice we employ juxtaposes an analysis
of the film with relevant commentary from the field of organizational studies,
assuming – as we do – that both the film and the studies are parallel
representations, each contributing in its own way to our understanding of
organizations. In some cases, the film text unambiguously projects its
knowledge of the organization; in others, we must extract the complex meaning
from images and filmic action.
We treat these images and incidents as signifiers whose logic may be traced
back to the organizational knowledge of the film’s collective makers. Not having
been derived from the deliberate study of organizations, this knowledge is not
available as a systematic and formal articulation; rather, it is tacit, inexplicit,
and figural. Nor is it the insight of an autonomous modernist creator. Following
the post-modern dictum that “language speaks us”, we see the film language
and its implied organizational knowledge as a cultural formation which
expresses itself through the collective agency of the film’s producers, directors
and writers. In their effort to manufacture a gripping and plausible dramatic
spectacle, they attempt (both deliberately and intuitively) to root the film in the
cultural exigencies of the moment. When they succeed (the box office tells us
about the magnitude of Rising Sun’s cultural success), it is because the film has
managed to capture something significant – in this case, something significant
about the transplant organization. For this reason, we contend that Rising Sun
may be seen as being loosely equivalent to a research report about a transplant
organization. What distinguishes these representations of organizations is not
the representations themselves so much as the rules of interpretation brought to
bear on them.
JOCM Rising Sun and the transplant organization
9,3 So what does Rising Sun have to tell us about the transplant organization?
Much of the argument to follow reflects Derrida’s claim that authors cannot
control the received meaning of their texts. In similar fashion, we see Rising Sun
as a deconstructive assault on the notion that managers/authors can construct
a strategic plan which then mechanistically governs the corporation’s activities.
50 The name of the Nakamoto Corporation, the stoic presence of its executives,
and its commanding Los Angeles tower, present themselves as the signifiers of
a well ordered management strategy, one that emphasizes control and
predictive power. Yet the film’s unfolding events prove that the appearance of
organizational stability is a modernist façade behind which is a virtual pastiche
of widely dispersed human interactions amid unpredictable power relations.
The executives, Ishihara and Richmond, are the principal representatives of
Nakamoto’s efforts to control the outcome of the Microcon negotiations. Seizing
on Senator Morton’s dalliance with Cheryl Austin, they are opportunistic in
their appropriation of events which can serve their interests. They are able to
deploy the significant resources required to alter the CD-ROM record of the
resulting murder. By framing Sakamura, they deflect attention away from
themselves and thereby construct a screen which conceals their involvement
and misdirects their opponents.
In brief, they are able to build an organizational system which, for a while,
successfully moves Nakamoto closer to its goal, the acquisition of Microcon. But
in every system, as in every text, there is an element of free play which defies its
author’s attempts at total control. In an organization, the element of free play
and unpredictability is a function of people and the multiplex vagaries of their
behaviour. For any number of reasons, people can not or will not do as they are
expected. In this category we place Web, Connor and Sakamura, in as much as
they resist Nakamoto’s will to power and eventually frustrate the company’s
efforts.
Cross-cultural barriers
Let us now consider an example of a hybrid which does not succeed. Having
used bilingual titles to ease us into the cross-cultural experience to follow, the
film temporarily deprives its spectators of that comforting sense of meaning
and purpose and plunges them into disorientation and uncertainty. Recall our
contention that this filmic experience is the equivalent of the experience of a real
actor in a chaotic organization like Nakamoto. This disorientation and the need
for adaptation is the dark side of new organizational forms (Zald, 1993). In an
editorial to a special issue of Organization Science on this topic, Victor and
Stephens (1994) argue that such new organizational forms extract a price from
JOCM everyone involved because of the incessant demand for innovation and
9,3 adaptation. In another study, Miner and Robinson (1994) show that such
organizations generate career patterns reflecting an underlying logic of
organizational learning, rather than producing simple atomistic exchanges
between unfettered actors. And Mirvis and Hall (1994) argue that the new
workers must, more than anything else, integrate diverse experiences into their
52 identities. The spectators of Rising Sun are, at times, placed in a comparable
situation.
The first time this happens is immediately after the titles when we see shots
from a Serge Leone-type cowboy film with an ersatz Clint Eastwood character
played by an unnamed Japanese actor. The scene just does not make any sense.
It disorients us because – with the possible exception of the Japanese actor – it
is inconsistent with the expectations that we bring to our screening of Rising
Sun. Why are we watching a cowboy film when what we have been expecting
is a late twentieth-century Japanese-American business conflict? For the few
moments before we discover that the cowboy film is actually a film within the
main film, the narrative logic of what is happening escapes us. Our inability to
make sense of what we are seeing momentarily threatens to breach the
somnambulistic state of the spectators and to remind us that we are attempting
to enter into the film’s imaginary world. We are unable to make more than a
superficial interpretation of what is going on: in part, because we are being
initiated into a hybrid life-world, a borderland where unfamiliar cultural forms
and practices deconstruct that smooth and relatively continuous experience we
call reality.
We contend that this is what happens as a normal and everyday occurrence
in the transplant. Managers and employees are regularly confronted with faulty
communication, confusion and disorientation as they struggle to find the
cultural equivalents (like the juxtaposed English and Japanese titles) which
forge a common meaning and a common purpose. These equivalents are, of
necessity, hybrids or blurred genres which typically produce some disruption
(even as they allow meanings to be shared) partly because it is rare to find exact
cultural equivalents; partly because the hybrids must overcome a culture’s
monological resistance to innovation. People generally prefer the old way of
doing business. This is one of the problems faced by the transplant
organization and is represented in the film by one Detective Graham, a
character whose national chauvinism and racism make it impossible for him to
understand or to empathize with the Japanese.
Cultural hegemony
Orchestrating much of the action within Rising Sun’s interdependent social
environments is the fear of an apparent shift of socio-economic power from the
United States to Japan. The presence of a Japanese-built Japanese building on
US territory suggests to more than one character that all the power relations of
a dominant west are in danger of being reversed, that a new master narrative is
reiterating itself, one in which Japan is the logocentric master and the west the
subservient.
Within the film world, the Japanese yen is strong enough for the Nakamoto
executives to be able to buy anything they want. This includes the complicity of
Americans whose labour and expertise support the Japanese enterprise – even
when the interests of that enterprise conflict with those of the United States.
The French post-structuralist Althusser (1971) describes such a situation (one
in which people are compelled to act unwittingly against their own interests) in
terms of the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. the reproduction of
a given set of dominant organizing principles which establish hierarchies,
orchestrate behaviour, vest decision-making power, dispose labour and other
resources, and generate and accumulate capital. This control over the
circumstances of production is doubly powerful in that it also affects values in
other domains. The result is hegemony, a mode of economic and organizational
life which pervades the cultural domain and works there either to maintain or
to revise dominant values and the actions which follow from them. The
Japanese-American transplant is of special interest in this regard because of its
interface on US soil of dominant Asians and less powerful Americans, an
unprecedented and particularly uncomfortable condition for Americans to bear.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the eroticized figure of the murder Filmic
victim, Cheryl Austin. Our intent will be to strip away that eroticism so that we representations
can see her as a human and symbolic resource, subject to the management
decisions of the transplant organization. We start with the reminder that
constant work (of two sorts) is required to keep in place and maintain (i.e.
reproduce) any particular set of relations of production. The first kind of work
is economic. The second is ideological. Working in tandem, they organize the 57
mental life of people so that a prevailing, though factitious, order of things
assumes the appearance of the natural and the necessary. Japanese
appropriation of the erotic body (Cheryl) symbolically serves this end and
typifies the way in which the influence of powerful managers extends beyond
the formal boundaries of an organization. What is at stake in Rising Sun is the
ideological control of a home-grown American image and its appropriation for
support of a potential colonial power whose hegemonic and monological will
threatens to take over the US as a system of production.
A statuesque blonde from Kentucky, Cheryl conforms to the profile of a
fashion model. In Detective Graham’s words, she could have been a Rose Bowl
queen – a fresh and robust epitome of innocent sexuality and middle-class
American culture. As such, Cheryl represents a familiar ideal of American
womanhood: she is the ultimate object of desire, the incarnation of sexuality.
She is the best that America has to offer in this domain. Of this, the Japanese
(Eddie Sakamura in particular) are well aware. They too are subject to the
seductive power of her image. And it comes as no surprise that their world is
populated with Cheryl look-alikes: the tall blondes who seem rather absurd
juxtaposed with their short and ageing Japanese partners at the Nakamoto
party; and the women at the Japanese brothel where Sakamura houses Cheryl.
These objects of desire are at once both trivial and culturally significant. That
is, the eroticized female body can be commodified with relative ease and
assigned a monetary value which, though high by middle-class standards, is
inexpensive in relation to the corporate budget of a billion-dollar transplant
organization. In this respect, it is of no particular consequence since it is a
consumable in abundant supply. (Detective Graham, ever the realist, aptly
describes Cheryl’s body as a piece of sushi – a raw commodity that has special
appeal for the Japanese.)
On the other hand, the erotic body in its symbolic aspect is of major cultural
importance: first, because of its role as a signifier of excellence; and, second,
because of its nascent connections to the issue of motherhood and (symbolic)
reproduction. As a signifier of excellence, the beautiful female body says that
whatever it accompanies is powerful, valuable and to be attended to. Which is why
it appears so frequently in mass media productions, in advertisements, and in the
company of rich and impressive men. The beautiful female body participates in
the reproduction of the relations of production because it is drawn towards power
and is then used to make that power attractive. As a source of psychological and
physical pleasure, it is a reward; as a signifier of excellence, it is a legitimation. In
either case, Cheryl is a domestic resource which comes under the control of the
JOCM Japanese and raises the spectre of the foreign appropriation and monopolization of
9,3 the very stuff that sustains American culture.
Managing ambiguity
Had the film ended at this point, it would leave us with little else to ponder about
the characteristics of the transplant. But the film continues beyond its formal
resolution and returns us to the complex cross-cultural uncertainties of a life
without grand narratives.
In the closing interaction, Web once again plays the American naïf who Filmic
thinks he understands what is going on (namely, that the crime has been solved representations
and the perpetrators punished). In this respect he is, temporarily, a projection of
the audience which has also concluded, temporarily, that the film and plot have
achieved resolution and closure. Yet, a fissure opens between Web and the
audience through the agency of Jingo. Her frustrating response (“If you say so”)
to his claim to understanding raises an initial doubt. Jingo’s statement is the 59
necessarily deconstructive endnote which keeps the mystery intact and avoids
closure despite disclosure. Furthermore, the sense of mystery expands as Jingo
suddenly begins to let down her hair (a signifier which usually suggests female
sexual receptivity). This significant action is countered by the revelation that
she is Connor’s woman, a fact which, within Web’s repertoire of cultural
responses, inhibits a sexual advance on his part. Other than the fact that she has
let down her hair, her demeanour seems to project an icy indifference when she
says goodbye. Last, when the door which she has closed behind her suddenly
swings open, Web (and the audience) is left in a state of uncertainty about what
is going on. Instead of a neat package of clarifications and answers, we are
suddenly left with questions? Is the apparent resolution of the murder mystery
an illusion? What exactly is Jingo trying to tell Web?