“It can be difficult to have your body in India but your mind in America at the same time.” Ashim Ahluwalia’s astonishing documentary John & Jane looks at Bombay’s call centers. Whereas exile means that your mind is in your country of origin while your body is in the host country, outsourcing has created a new category of emigrants whose bodies are in India while their minds are in America. Ahluwalia explains: “I first heard about call centers in 2001. There had already been some TV documentaries and news reports on the subject, but most of these were occupied with business advantages and technological growth. Nobody seems to be curious about the kind of people who worked there.”1
India’s Call Centers and the Globalization of Minds
At night, Namrata, Vandana, and Oaref become Naomi, Osmond, and Nikki. They work in a call center and spend their nights—they work at night because of the time-difference—answering American consumers’ calls to 1-800 numbers. Just like immigrants landing at Ellis Island, they have to change their names. And yet they have not left their own country or crossed any frontier. The frontier crosses them. Every night, they sit down in front of their screens and become American. “For me, the idea of virtual ‘call agents’ with fake identities seemed like science fiction. Who were these Indians who became ‘Americans’ at night?” asks Ahluwalia.2
This metamorphosis is not immediate. Adopting an American forename is not enough to make anyone an American. The candidates have to undergo several transformations, starting with the accent neutralization classes that take away their Indian accents. The number of such training courses on offer in India has exploded as the number of call centers increases and as European and American companies outsource their back office structures. As IDG News Service’s Bangalore correspondent John Ribeiro explains:
The new business in training staff in Western communications skills and etiquette has attracted a number of entrepreneurs, many of them former employees in the hospitality industry … “The art is to ensure that the customer [in the UK] does not distinguish between a call that was taken in the UK and one that was taken in India,” said Sudheesh Venkatesh, head of human resources at the IT and business support services subsidiary in Bangalore of Tesco PLC, a UK-based retailer.3
The courses on offer are designed to initiate individuals into the Western lifestyle and culture. They are courses in what the professional jargon terms “cross-cultural sensitivity,” which in most cases means the phenomenon of acculturation. “For example, employees at Tesco are advised to be current on political developments and favourite UK sports, so that they can talk about these topics with customers.”4 Samit Mallal, who co-wrote the documentary Bombay Calling with Ben Addelman, confirms that “some employees memorize the baseball scores so as to be able to joke with their American clients.”5 But the best tools for globalizing minds are the American TV series in which the call center workers are steeped.
Globalization has increased the need for cross-cultural sensitivity courses designed for, amongst others, executives from multinational companies who require an introduction to the cultures, and lifestyles of the countries they visit. And yet, “Training non-Indians on Indian culture, value and manners is not big business,” explains the director of a training firm in Bangalore: “The culture industry in Bangalore is mainly a one-way street, as most multinationals and outsourcing companies concentrate only on training Indian staff to operate in westernized culture.”6
In 2006, some 350,000 Indian workers swapped their identities every night in return for much more than the average wage.7 This is what has been called “the new Indian dream,” and it has replaced the old dream of emigration. Joseph Confavreux produced the remarkable documentary series broadcast High-Speed India [L’Inde à grande vitesse] for the French radio station France-Culture in March 2007. He explains: “They do not necessarily dream of emigrating, as they did twenty years ago, but some become emigrants at home. During the working day, they live at a European rhythm (language, life style, but also the weather forecast in order to satisfy customers on the other side of the world) before suddenly reverting to an Indian rhythm.”8 These young people “are subsumed into the pseudo-American lifestyle they are forced to adopt—to the point that they undergo a fundamental transformation: they become the job,” comments Indian strategy consultant Radjika Chadha.9 “Bridging continents by telephone, they pitch products and soothe frayed consumer nerves. As they troubleshoot, they dream of America. What is it like to transport yourself to a remote land you’ve never even seen? How does it feel to live so far outside your own body?”10
Discussing Ahluwalia’s John & Jane, the Observer’s Amelia Gentleman notes that: “From soap opera to Bollywood musical, from arthouse documentary to best-selling novel, the call center has … been immortalized as a symbol of contemporary India.”11
According to Chetan Bhagat, whose novel One Night@The Call Center spent six months on the bestseller lists, the call centers encapsulate “the tensions of a nation caught between two eras.” The business is “the interface between the Indian influences of older generations and the western influence that younger Indians are exposed to. It is the melting pot where all cultural influences meet.” As Makarand Paranjape, an English professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, explains, Bhagat’s novel is “an attempt to eroticise the industry, an attempt to make it a culturally exciting place, hip and cool. Of course it’s a bit of a fantasy: there is nothing glamorous about call centers; they are dehumanising, decultured places.” Here, thousands of young male and female college graduates spent the night confined in close proximity (breaking down the traditional distance between the sexes), in US-time, in smart, modern offices, adopting alien American identities, performing mindless tasks but earning salaries larger than anything their parents could aspire to.12
The six workers described in Ahluwalia’s documentary all present symptoms of personality distortion to some degree. After 14 hours of work, we see them abandoning their American identities in the early morning and, like Indian Cinderellas, reverting to what they are—Namrata, Vandana, and Oaref—and going home to sleep. What do they dream of during the day? Of Desperate Houswives, Prison Break, or Jack Bauer, the agent in 24 Hours? The most impressive metamorphosis is that undergone by Naomi, a young Indian woman who bleaches her skin and dyes her hair to look like Marilyn Monroe. She speaks with an American accent, even outside working hours. “Blonde to her eyelashes, she speaks with a kind of cyborg Midwest accent: ‘I’m totally very Americanized.’ ”13
Living by night under house arrest in great call centers filled with the hubbub of phone conversations, these new migrants travel through time, not space. They “teletravel” the continents. They emigrate into the virtual time of telephone networks. Trapped in a virtual world they know only from advertising brochures and TV series, these workers see their identities gradually merging into a fantasy America. “John & Jane is a film about the need for everyone to become a hybrid American. It’s like that in India and I think the whole world is becoming like that. The film is about what it means to be Indian in the twenty-first century. They shape our taste and our aesthetics and in some way, without meaning to, they end up shaping our identities,” says the film’s director.
Certain writers from postcolonial countries unreservedly celebrate multiculturalism, the confusion surrounding identity and the emergence of a global ego that is the product of a montage or collage of heteroclite cultural elements, but they often overlook the effects of the cultural domination and symbolic violence that are at work in the formatting of identities and the neutralization of singularities. Ahluwalia’s film describes the other side of this economic and financial outsourcing: the temporal and cultural migration of what he calls the “souls of the outsourced.” The director shot his film in 35 mm, which is the format used for full-length fictional films, and some scenes appear to have been scripted. Some viewers actually think that it is not a documentary but a work of fiction. According to the director, this ambiguity is deliberate: “It is a documentary because everything is real, but I like that you have to question whether it’s reality or fiction.”
The “Fictionalization” of Workplace Relations
The new management techniques, write Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, “are dependent less on procedures or mechanisms involving objects (as with the assembly line) than on people, and the use of resources they make requiring their physical presence, their emotions, their gesticulations, their voice, and so on.”14 It would be hard to put it better. “Adaptability,” they go on, “—that is, the ability to treat one’s own person in the manner of a text that can be translated into different languages—is in fact a basic requirement for circulating in networks, guaranteeing the transit through heterogeneity of a being minimally defined by a body and the proper noun attached to it.”15
Curiously enough, the authors never refer to call centers, but when they attempt to identify the ideal-types of the new management that emerged in the 1990s, they do use words that describe very accurately the concrete experience of those who work in them. The globalization of markets and outsourcing do make individuals experience an unbearable tension between the need to adapt to a changing environment and the need to assert their identity, between flexibility and individualism. This neo-management therefore has to meet their contradictory demands for autonomy and interdependence. This presupposes less hierarchy and more control. It presupposes forms of behavior that allow its agent enough autonomy to adapt to complex and unpredictable situations within the framework of a scenario that constrains them.
This is a mimetic or fictional economy, as opposed to the libidinal economy described by Jean-François Lyotard. Its goal is to manipulate drives and emotions in order to produce and circulate behavioral models and imitative tendencies. “We call the ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism ‘spirit of capitalism’ … with the proviso that the ideology of capitalism is not reduced to meaning ‘a moralizing discourse, intended to conceal material interests, which is constantly contradicted by practice’, but in the sense that the work of Louis Dumont defines it as ‘a set of shared beliefs, inscribed in institutions, bound up with actions, and hence anchored in the real.’ ”16
The authors do not evoke the role storytelling plays in the theories and techniques of this neo-management (partly because their research stops in the 1990s, but also because of their choice of a corpus of texts in French; it is only recently that French writers have noticed the existence of storytelling). Their analyses do, on the other hand, help to explain its rise. In the early 1980s, the figure of the junior executive gave way to that of the manager, then that of the leader or “coach,” and finally that of the storyteller whose stories speaks to our hearts and not just our reason by supplying visions of the company and the fictions that allow it to function. “Neo-management literature must therefore demonstrate how the prescribed way of making profit might be desirable, interesting, exciting, innovatory or commendable.”17
In the course of his investigations into the sectors of high technology, high finance, and urban services, the American sociologist Richard Sennett also observed the growing “fictionalization” of relations in the workplace. Neo-management’s response to increasingly fierce competition is the fiction that “employees aren’t really competing against each other. And even more important, the fiction arises that workers and bosses aren’t antagonists; the boss instead manages group process. He or she is a ‘leader,’ the most cunning word in the modern management lexicon.”18
The American anthropologist Charles Darrah’s work on “human skills” training in high-tech manufacturing companies confirms the fiction of teamwork. “For instance, Vietnamese workers who composed about 40 percent of the workforce in one company were ‘especially fearful of the team concept, which they likened to Communist work teams’ … Employees learned the portable skills of teamwork through coaching in how to act various company roles, so that every worker would know how to behave in the varied windows of work.”19
When she worked on the assembly line at a Subaru-Isuzu plant, the sociologist Laurie Graham “found the ‘team metaphor was used at all levels of the company’ … She found that people were oppressed in a particular way by the very superficiality of the fictions of teamwork … the fiction of cooperating employees served the company’s drive for ever greater productivity … Subaru-Isuzu uses this fiction of community at work to help justify its fierce resistance to labor unions; moreover the fiction of community helps justify the existence of a Japanese company extracting profits in America to be sent home.”20 As Sennett comments, “To put this more formally, power is present in the superficial scenes of teamwork, but authority is absent.”21
Emotional Capitalism’s New Authority Model
The authority of a story—the story of “change”—has taken the place of power. This is a story written by the market, which uses as many pseudonyms as Pessoa uses heteronyms: internationalization, globalization, technical advances, competition… Power is absent, as in Lars von Trier’s film Le Direktor, in which the boss of a computer company who is unwilling to let his employees see him taking any responsibility hires an actor to play his role. “ ‘People need to recognize we are all contingent workers in one form or another,’ says the manager at ATT during a recent spate of downsizing; ‘We are all victims of time and place.’ ”22
As we can see, one authority model is being replaced by another. The authority of the director has to give way to that of a story, and the company is nothing more than the way it is told, or a score that is conducted by management. Management techniques are beginning to look more and more like those of a theatrical director; partners have to adapt as best they can to their roles in order to make the story look credible to an audience of consumers and investors. The technical synchronization of flows of raw materials and labor power inside the company is giving way to a synchronization based on a story about everyone’s roles and attributes, about their abilities and their useful emotions. In this context, narrative techniques that can keep a reader in suspense can do more than the old repertoires of taboos and constraints to involve the company’s partners and get them to accept the story of a “change” they desire. “Many of those working in the new economy wanted to believe in more than business. For them, the new economy isn’t primarily a financial institution. It’s a creative institution. Like painting and sculpting, business can be a venue for personal expression and artistry,”23 writes the British geographer Nigel Thrift. And as Boltanski and Chiapello note, neo-management has developed “mechanisms … based upon consent and agreement [that] can achieve their objective only by merging with forms that possess the typical features of a grammar of authenticity: spontaneous, friendly relations; trust; requests for help or advice; attentiveness to sickness or suffering; friendship, even love.”24
How can anyone turn down an invitation to be authentic? But how can we fail to notice that the only point of being authentic is to promote the best interests of the company?
Those who are caught up in the mechanisms cannot categorically refuse to participate in these exchanges … But nor … can they be unaware that these more “authentic” relations are reliant on techniques of mobilization … Their emotions … end up interfering with the strategic use they make of themselves and always risk exceeding it, almost without them being aware of it, as when people pass from an emotion that was initially obligatory, and which they thought affected, to a genuine emotion that grips and overwhelms them quite unexpectedly.25
“Capitalism has, they say, a cold face,” writes Eva Illouz in Cold Intimacies, which reprints the “Adorno Lectures” she gave in Frankfurt in 2006. According to Illouz, who teaches sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, industrial capitalism is being transformed into an “emotional capitalism” that appropriates affects to such a degree that emotions are turned into commodities. “In the culture of emotional capitalism, emotions have become entities to be evaluated, bargained, inspected, quantified and commodified … They have also contributed to creating a suffering self, that is, an identity organized and defined by its psychic lacks and deficiencies, which is incorporated back into the market by incessant injunctions to self-change and self-realization.”26
That is why neo-management’s prescriptions often adopt, as Boltanski and Chiapello remark, “a lyrical, even heroic style … numerous references to noble and ancient sources such as Buddhism, the Bible and Plato, or to contemporary moral philosophy (Habermas in particular).”27 As we saw in the last chapter, Homer, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and Joseph Conrad can now be added to the list.
Fictions About Companies or Fictional Companies?
Don DeLillo’s 1977 novel Players is about a company called the Grief Management Council: “Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.”28 Grief Management caters for new needs and is interested in territories previously overlooked by the market: the deserts of pain and torment, the scorched earth of despair and mourning. This fictional company anticipates in astonishing fashion the personal services companies that mushroomed in the 1990s: its “clinics, printed material and trained counsellors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief.”29 Grief Management was as much concerned with physical suffering as moral suffering and published all sorts of educational brochures, offering courses for social or professional groups, and seminars for unhappy couples.
“He’d be so funny when he talked about his job and those people in the field. The stories. Do you believe? Per diem rates for terminal-illness counseling? So if it drags on, forget it, we got you by the balls? And the woman in Syracuse? With the grief-stricken pet, what was it, canary, in Syracuse, that the other one died …”30 DeLillo’s irony is directed against capitalist societies’ tendency to transform all emotions, including the most intimate feelings, such as mourning, remorse, or depression, into commodities. It may have looked overstated in 1977, but “Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions.”31
Five years later, in 1982, the management gurus Peters and Waterman wrote in their bestselling In Search of Excellence: “All that stuff you have been dismissing for so long as the intractable, irrational, informal organization can be managed … what our framework has done is to remind the world of professional managers that soft is hard.”32
At Grief Management, flexibility is the rule:
The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month … Making things seem even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partitions, opened up others, moved out file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief.33
Its head office is in the World Trade Center. “Where else could you stack all this grief?” asks Pammy, who writes brochures for the company. “To Pammy, the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.”34
These lines were written twenty-five years before the Twin Towers collapsed, and before architects proposed replacing them with purely visual phenomena and luminous fictions traced by laser beams. The visionary power of the novel is not, however, restricted to this prophetic remark. Grief Management prefigures the new company that would, in the 1990s, replace the old Fordist model, with its division of labor, its assembly lines, its hierarchical organization, its paternalist management, and its mountains of commodities, whose “immense accumulation” was, for Marx, one of the distinguishing features of the capitalist mode of production.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of finance capitalism facilitated by the conservative revolutions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the globalization of markets, the emergence of new producers in Japan and South-East Asia, and the explosion of the Internet and new information technologies, have completely changed the conditions in which companies produce and optimize their profits. After a cycle of rapid growth (les trente glorieuses, or “the Golden Age of the Long Boom”) based upon a relatively stable form of organization (the Fordist company), capitalism entered a zone of turbulence at the beginning of the 1980s. Management then began to look for a new paradigm that could give leaders a sense of where they were going in a period of profound readjustments that affected management and administration techniques, productive practices, the perimeter of companies, as well as the symbolic discourses and constructions they inspired.
As it made the transitions from the old craft-based factories to the giant bureaucracies of the Fordist era, and from nimble, decentralized Japanese firms to the logo companies of the “new economy,” management experienced the revolutions embodied in the names Fayol, Taylor, Ford, Ohno, and many others. But the last revolution to date—whose emblematic authors include Bill Gates, Phil Knight, and Richard Branson—invokes surprising inventors who are neither engineers nor financiers but novelists. As we saw in the last chapter, the managerial revolution celebrated by the storytelling gurus refers not to Toyota, but to Tolstoy. Its ideal-type is no longer the industrial or commercial company, or even the financial firm, and nor is it the dematerialized logo company of the 1980s. It is a company that produces useful fictions, and can therefore be described as a fiction company.
Don DeLillo’s novel identified with remarkable lucidity the ideal of a postindustrial company that was flexible, nimble, organized into networks, and designed to satisfy immaterial needs, be they cultural or human. Grief Management allows us to identify the three elements that would structure the new capitalism’s rhetoric from the 1990s onwards:
•the first of these elements (its ethos, if you like) takes the form of a constant injunction to change;
•the second (its pathos) concerns the management of emotions and is part of the general process of manipulation and commodification that accompanies the construction of capitalism’s new “subject” (consumer, wage-earner, or manager) as an emotional ego;
•the third (its logos) emphasizes the role of language, especially the use of stories, to manage that emotional ego.
It is thus a work of fiction that diagnosed the organizational crisis and the principles behind company reconstruction, long before the sociologists of labor and the management theorists did so. This reflects not only the genius of the novelist in question, but also the nature of the transformations that are taking place and the growing importance of the narrative function and fiction as agents of change within companies. Confronted with what has become an uncertain environment, the new company that emerged in the 1990s must be prepared to accept change and must be willing to exploit all possibilities. The prevailing state of mind might be described as novelistic because it presupposes an attitude that is characteristic of fictional worlds. The new economy’s ideal-type is the suspension of disbelief that DeLillo captures so well in the phrase: the “need to feel you’re on the verge of a wonderful change”:
“I am on the verge of a wonderful change. I am about to do something electrifying. The very fibers of your being will be electrified, sir, when I tell you what it is I propose to do.” To speak it in words is to see the possibility emerge. Doesn’t matter what. Don’t bother your head over that. For the purposes of this discussion it could be mountain-climbing we’re talking about or this friend of Jack, the oft-mentioned scaly chap who plans to swim the North Sea left-handed. Our lives are enriched by these little blurbs we send each other … The important thing is to seem to be on the verge.35
In the fragmented company, which is subject to the whims of the stock market and the threat of outsourcing and in which there is no longer any possibility of having a career, what could be more natural than feeling you are “on the verge of a wonderful change”? What could be more attractive than the promise of a wonderful story?
The Destructuring Effects of the Apologia for Permanent Change
Looking down from the new Anglo-American heights of the new capitalism, Richard Sennett reaches this conclusion: “The peculiar thing about the contemporary philosophy of capitalism is that disorder seems desirable: the permanent restructuring of a firm is seen as a sign of its dynamism and, on the stock markets, institutional change has a value in its own right.” These frenzied changes are not unrelated to the fact that capitalists now think in terms of a shorter time-span: “In 1960, the value of a company was evaluated on the basis of the profits it could be expected to make over a three-year period; on average, values are now calculated on a three-months basis.”36
The new “post-Fordist” firm breaks the rules of the unity of time and place that governed the Fordist firm and scatters its workforce. According to Sennett, the new capitalism has become “a system that is more neutral, and that promises less in social and psychological terms than the capitalism Max Weber analyzed one hundred years ago.”37 The psychotechnical synchronization of labor processes might be described as a piece of post-Fordist theater. But it is also a spatio-temporal synchronization which ensured that the workforce perceived the temporal continuity that structured its life and work (a career and a working day, paid holidays, alternating periods of work and leisure, in-house training). It created a feeling of being part of a collective endeavor, a company culture, or the great guild of the labor aristocracy. It may well have been illusory but it was also real, as was the feeling of being expropriated and exploited. The Fordist model therefore offered a stable model for productive synchronization and a certain unity of time and place (the factory and the working day). It defined what the Russian semiologist Mikhail Bakhtin called a “chronotope,” or a spatio-temporal structure that was, in his view, a fundamental category of narrative structure.
It is this structuring story that has been destroyed by the apologia for permanent change. In an article on storytelling at the Renault car company, Olivier Blanquart, Pascale Malmaison, and Eddie Soulier write:
All organizations are immune systems and their goal, like that of any organism, is to preserve a certain status quo. But for the decision-makers, the adaptive value of change has becomes greater than that of stability. Mergers, restructurings, the development of technologies, internationalization, compulsory regulations and the implementation of new strategies are propelling the company into the spiral of change. Studies of change, however, confirm that individuals and organizations have an aversion for change.38
The deconstruction of the company’s spatio-temporal identity has done much more to scramble workers’ points of reference than the recruitment of peasants into the factories at the time of the Industrial Revolution: the general order to scatter will sound the death-knell for all “mobilizations,” be they protest-based or productive, and the result will be absenteeism, a lack of motivation, and an increase in depressive symptoms amongst cadres (managers). The consultant Dominique Christian, who was one of the first in France to introduce storytelling, expresses this, not without a certain pathos, in a book entitled Count, Recount? The Narrative Strategy: “A sad cohort of regrets swirl around managers, like a swarm of bats. Remorse for what they have done to others: robbed them. Remorse for what they did not display towards others: solidarity. Remorse for what they are doing to others: exclusion and non-recognition. Remorse for what they are not doing with others: lost opportunities.”39
A writer for the New York Times declares that “job apprehension has invaded everywhere, diluting self-worth, splintering families, fragmenting communities, altering the chemistry of workplaces.”40 Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least 11 times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labor. The skills he or she will use at the age of forty will not be those he or she acquired at school. No one will spend their entire career with the same company: “Career jobs are dead,” writes Yves-Frédéric Livian, professor at Lyon’s Institut d’administration des enterprises. “Careers are no longer made inside companies: there is talk of ‘post-corporate careers’ … But it is the notion of ‘careers without frontiers’ or ‘nomadic careers’ that will become the inescapable point of reference.”41
From 1995 onwards, far from encouraging writers on management to challenge the injunction to change and flexibility, this demobilization inspires them to make more and more proposals aimed at triggering a new emotional remobilization and a renewed commitment. “Hence the plethora of invitations to accept organizational change,” write Blanquart, Malmaison, and Soulier,
ranging from project-management methods to ways of persuading people to accept organizational change, as well as more psychosociological approaches. As well as these tactical approaches to change, we also have the company strategy known as the “learning company” model [which] demands the permanent regeneration of activities and the company itself … takes the form of a need for quicker and more effective learning processes.42
“Two models are often invoked in the new career story,” writes Yves-Frédéric Livian:
The Hollywood movie milieu is often used as a benchmark in descriptions of a world in which individuals and companies collaborate because they can provide services for each other; they come together on a temporary basis to carry out a “project”-type task. Silicon Valley is also used as an illustration. Skills are developed within a dense network of companies, and migrate from company to company in a labor market that is both open and innovative.43
The “big bang” that Peter Drucker called for in the 1980s has exploded the Fordist paradigm. Capitalism’s new ideology prefers change to continuity, mobility to stability, tension to equilibrium, and outlines a new organizational paradigm: a decentralized and nomadic company that recognizes no frontiers, that has been freed from laws and jobs, that is light, nimble, and furtive, and which acknowledges no law but the story it tells about itself, and no reality other than the fictions it sends out into the world.
“Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency.” That ought to be a good summary of new management’s values. It is far from that. These are the titles of the six lectures the Italian writer Italo Calvino was meant to deliver in the United States in 1985–86. He chose what he saw as the six essential values that should be the twenty-first century’s episteme. He wrote the first five, which were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium.44 Death prevented him from writing the sixth. The six values that were, in Calvino’s view, the most valuable heritage of the novel are now central to the “storytelling management” project. All that remains of the sixth lecture is the title—“consistency”; we know that Calvino intended to discuss Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, The Scrivener, which has already been mentioned. It is subtitled: “A Story of Wall Street.”
The success of storytelling from the 1990s onwards is a determinate response to the mutation organizations have experienced. The “network” structure of new companies increases the need for interaction. Collaboration between teams is replacing the old hierarchies, and the circulation of knowledge is replacing the narrow specialization of the assembly line. The autonomy of agents mirrors the outsourcing or automation of production. Getting a company to accept the ideology of change now presupposes that everyone becomes immersed in and surrenders to a shared fiction in the same way that we become wrapped up in a novel. It also presupposes that the company’s culture takes the form of a story about desired change, and that forms of communication both inside and outside the company, modes of institutional cooperation, and forms of technological and social cooperation, all obey the transformational grammar of narrative.
Storytelling thus proves to be the best vector for the ideology of change, and the discursive form of the “mutant” organization. Management therefore tries to inspire in cadres and employees the attitude evoked by Jean Genet in a very different context. The “sudden departure” position (the position Indian women adopt as they squat on their heels, always ready to catch a child or perform some domestic task) implies a particular state of mind which consists, to cite Don DeLillo one last time, in the feeling of “being on the verge of a wonderful change.”