Human Relations 2010 Brown 525 49

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'Invisible walls' and 'silent hierarchies': A case study of power relations in an architecture firm Andrew D Brown, Martin Kornberger, Stewart R Clegg and Chris Carter Human Relations 2010 63: 525 originally published online 8 January 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0018726709339862 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hum.sagepub.com/content/63/4/525

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human relations

‘Invisible walls’ and ‘silent hierarchies’:   A case study of power relations in an architecture firm

human relations 63(4) 525–549 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0018726709339862 hum.sagepub.com

Andrew D Brown University of Bath, UK

Martin Kornberger

University of Technology, Sydney,  Australia

Stewart R Clegg

University of Technology Sydney,  Australia

Chris Carter

University of St Andrews, UK

Abstract In this article we investigate how power relates to the production of creative identities and outcomes.We report on an in-depth case study of an award-winning creative architecture firm. Our data show how talk about creativity and the creative identities of architects can be analysed as effects of power. Theoretically, our study represents an investigation into the disciplining of professional architects’ discourse about their selves, their organization, and their work. This article adds to debates on creative industries, demonstrating that creativity is deeply embedded in organizationally based relations of power. Keywords architecture, creativity, discourse, identity, power, profession

Introduction All organizations are relations of power – even the most egalitarian. Based on an indepth case study of Earth Architects1 (EA), an innovative and award-winning architectural practice, we investigate how power relates to the production of creative Corresponding author: Martin Kornberger, School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway, Sydney, NSW 2007,  Australia. Email: [email protected]

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identities and outcomes. Drawing on the literatures associated with the creative industries (e.g. Bjorkegren, 1996; Caves, 2000; Drake, 2003; Hartley, 2004), architectural firms (e.g. Blau, 1984; Cuff, 1991; Winch & Schneider, 1993) and the organization of power (e.g. Clegg, 1975, 1989; Foucault, 1977) we analyse how participants talked about the relations of power that structured their working lives. In exploring people’s talk about their everyday work life in EA, we focus in particular on how putatively ‘creative’ work patterns and worker identities are constituted as effects of power. The principal research contribution of this article is to investigate the disciplining of professional architects’ discourse about their selves, their organization, and their work. Architectural practices are prime examples of creative organizations in which skilled professionals turn imaginative ideas into disciplined practices and practices into profits (Caves, 2000; Christophers, 2007; Flew, 2002; Jeffcutt & Pratt, 2002; O’Farrell, 2000). There is broad agreement that firms in the creative industries are both knowledge and symbol intensive organizations that deploy ‘systems of persuasion’ (Alvesson & Karreman, 2004) in order to ‘produce and sell meaning’ (Lawrence & Phillips, 2002: 431). Scholars in organization and cultural studies have focused on various aspects of creative industries: distinct disciplinary forms of regulatory power (Christophers, 2007; Flew, 2004; Gibson & Klocker, 2004); rationalization and creativity (Nixon, 2006; Tschang, 2007); the strategic positioning and identity building of firms and nations (Jones & Smith, 2005; Moeran, 2007), and the importance of location, clusters and networks in developing these industries (Antcliff et al., 2007; Drake, 2003; Turok, 2003). There are also important connections here with research on professional service firms, such as Maister’s (1986) study of Goldman Sachs and the now defunct Arthur Andersen, and his identification of the ‘One-Firm Firm model’, which, inter alia, was characterized by a marked distinction between high-end conceptual work and lower status ‘grind work’. Whereas earlier work on the professions and especially architecture (e.g. Pinnington & Morris, 2002) has focused on the profession itself as the unit of analysis, our study focuses on the variety of ways professionalism and professional identity are voiced, negotiated and sometimes silenced within organizations. Yet there is still a dearth of empirical research on management practices in this area, with recognition that the creative acts of specific individuals are embedded in processes of organizing, despite some notable exceptions (e.g. Maister, 1986), still to be reflected in a large body of empirical work. There is, though, a considerable literature on how creativity is manifested in professional contexts, such as product development teams, which explicitly recognizes ‘that organizational settings are most fundamentally characterized by multiple, powerful normative influences . . . that promote well-aligned but routine behavior’ (Ford & Porter, 2008: 309; Rossiter, 2003). Architectural practices have, occasionally, been analysed by organizational scholars (e.g. Boland et al., 2007; Pinnington & Morris, 2002; Winch & Schneider, 1993) and sociologists (Blau, 1984; Larson, 1993), but these studies have not focused on how relations of power further or lessen creativity. Given the interest in organization studies in the work of Foucault (1977; for example, McKinlay & Starkey, 1997), and the centrality of concerns with the creativity and positivity of power in his later work, this is a surprising omission (but see O’Farrell, 2000). While creativity has become ‘cool’, an element of marginality still attaches to the creative industries, whose hallmark is often promoted as non-routine repetition, in contrast

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to the standardized products and organizations of bureaucracy. Creatives are seen to be facilitated and constrained by complex and reciprocal interactions with evolving social and task environments, in which creativity (variation) is inherently in conflict with organizing (selective retention) (Drazin et al., 1999; Elsbach & Kramer, 2003). Thus, ‘design practices’ joins a celebrated list of management oxymorons: ‘design’ designating creativity and innovation as the hallmark of the unique professional, the increasingly immaterial labourer in a symbolic economy of signs and affect, while ‘practices’, implies a way of ordering imaginative relations to social or physical environments in a manner that is organized, and thus routine. Our study complements previous theorizing by analysing how the notionally creative work of professional architects – as a unique cultural construction – is governed by relations of power to become a disciplined, organized, situated practice subject to routine constraints and characterized by repetition (Clegg, 1975, 1989; Giddens, 1979).

Theorizing power in architectural practices Power, discourse and organization Power in the professions is increasingly seen in terms of jurisdictional regimes, usually supported by state licence. Moreover, important contributions from the sociology of the professions (e.g. Friedson, 1994; Larson, 1993; MacDonald, 1995; Muzio et al., 2008) have emphasized, on a macro-level, how they shape powerfully their members perceptions of themselves, others outside their profession, and ‘appropriate’ patterns of behaviour. Complementing these understandings, there are, at a more micro-level, relations of power that are routinely reproduced in mundane practices of organizing. These micro-politics of power relations, which reproduce and introduce tensions, also shape the nature of professional practice. Following a Foucauldian approach (e.g. Newton, 1998) we understand micropractices as constitutive of the experience of professional workers rather than conflating their organizational reality with the discourse of the profession; or, as Alvesson and Karreman (2000) have argued, we concentrate on ‘small d discourse’ rather than ‘large D discourse’. That is, we frame a Foucauldian inspired analysis of micro-organizational power relations within a more macro-organizational perspective derived from the sociology of the professions. In doing so, we develop a notion of creative power that neither ignores the micro nor overstates the macro. Such an approach hints at the interstices where institutionalized logics and organizational micro-practices meet and transform each other (see Lounsbury, 2008). Theoretically, our primary concern is with the power that is embedded in the overall authoritative structure and design of organizations, rather than deviations from this order, which tend to attract most attention (Brown & Coupland, 2005; Hardy & Clegg, 1996). In so doing, we draw on a conception of organizations as socially constructed by participants (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) through networks of conversations (Ford & Ford, 1995) that feed on and contribute to prevailing discursive practices. From this perspective, the term ‘organization’ is best regarded as a spatial metaphor that refers to a domain of (supposedly) legitimate authority which favours certain linguistic constructions over others; a sphere of dominancy that is constituted by discursive practices. These practices both constitute our case study organization as a regime of truth and discipline participants’ actions by privileging particular forms of language use (Foucault, 1973). We argue

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that the most insidious and potent systems of control in organizations are not generally exercised by direct or coercive means, but through the discursive production of ‘quasifixed’ meanings that reify social orders (Clegg, 1989). Drawing on Gramscian (1973) ideas of hegemonies that sustain relations of domination, there has been some previous work in this field that has explored organizational ideologies (Thompson, 1990). Such views need to be balanced by an understanding that organizations tend not to be discursively monolithic, and that people have the capacity for reflexivity and ‘creative deviancy’ (Worthington, 1996: 102), which provide scope for discretion and resistance. That is, in organizations, control is ‘never total’ (Clegg, 1994: 163). The literature on creativity has evolved from a focus on psychological studies of putatively creative individuals to a sophisticated understanding that novelty is often a product of formal and informal aspects of organizing (Drazin et al., 1999; Elsbach & Kramer, 2003). Many studies of creativity have a strong managerialist orientation and are preoccupied with brokering the ‘challenges’ associated with promoting creativity in organizations (Ford & Porter, 2008: 312), with little appreciation of the role that such discourse might play in shaping power relations. Power operates through the availability of discourses, is shaped by the frequency/intensity of their presence, and the specific situated linkages between organizations, discourse and subjectivity (Fairclough, 1995; O’Doherty & Willmott, 2001) that are built in practice. Our interest is in the organizationally based discourses centred on creativity and creative work that participants reference, evoke and reproduce as they construct the ‘text’ of their organization through acts of ‘languaging’. As language is a ‘representational technology that actively organizes, constructs and sustains social reality’, so our task is to analyse how discursive practices come ‘to form the instinctively shared calibration points for defining local reality’ (Chia & King, 2001: 312) – a ‘reality’ that in architectural practices tends often to collectively emphasize the importance of creativity work. Organizations are discursive regimes that provide participants with important symbolic resources for identity negotiation and for the legitimation of social practices, leading people to constitute themselves, their work and the organization in particular ways. As Jermier et al. (1994: 8) have described them, identities are ‘. . . complex outcome[s] of processes of subjugation and resistance that [are] contingent and perpetually shifting’ (see also Clegg, 1994: 275; Humphreys & Brown, 2002a, 2002b). In creative industries talk about how work is and should be accomplished tends often to be shaped by individuals’ understandings of their selves as professionals and their organization’s notionally ‘creative’ identity (Caves, 2000; Maister, 1986). Fournier (1999) has shown how the label ‘professionalism’ can act as a disciplinary mechanism, which allows for control at a distance through the construction of ‘appropriate’ identities and conducts. How architects’ sense of their selves as creative professionals operating within a well defined matrix of organizationally specific opportunities and constraints is an important topic for research into what it means to be creative, competent, and productive employees. In this article, we comment specifically on the importance of ‘creativity’ as a symbolic term in participants’ definition and articulation of their preferred individual and organizational identities as they engaged in projects of the self (see Grey, 1994; Thornborrow & Brown, 2009).

Architectural practices, identity and power Relations of power structure the activities of a firm of architects just as much as a military bureaucracy: the expression of these power relations is, of course, dissimilar, but the Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com at FUND COOR DE APRFO PESSL NIVE on March 14, 2014

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pervasiveness of the basic phenomenon of people being obliged to act as they might not otherwise do is apparent. Larson (1993: 8) notes that ‘the persistent claim of architects to a special role in the process of construction depends on the implicit ideological appeals to the telos’ (i.e. the building’s reason for being). Rhetorically, the telos has often been represented, at its best, as the expression of a capability for being creative in designing something that expresses the soul of the architect, an opportunity to turn dreams and ambitions into material reality and splendour. A key tension, however, has always existed between the creative ethos and the necessity of winning commissions, often on projects and terms that severely restrict the expression of creativity. In practice, all architects have to deal with many other influential stakeholders, and it is these groups – especially clients – who are often able to dominate proceedings. The distinction between architects’ espoused values and common practices within the construction process is but one example of the contradictions and dilemmas of architectural work (Blau, 1984). The ‘reality’ of elite architectural practice is its constitution in terms of a recognizable signature-style architect’s discourse; while creative in its envisioning, it is not idiosyncratic. It is embedded in almost paradigmatic fixing of fashion in dominant ‘schools’ and counter schools. In some eras the dominance of particular schools has been striking; in her account of the history of architecture in 20th-century America Larson (1993) charts the rise and fall of modernism, which had its origins in ‘between the wars’ Europe, with the Bauhaus being its most striking expression. One of the evident corollaries of the eclipse of modernism from the 1970s was the way in which small architecture practices – known for their novelty and architectural daring – were able to win large commissions in the face of competition from larger practices. The collapse of the dominant school era freed discursive space for other claims to style and creativity. Consequently, reputations for creative genius were built by iconic architectural figures whose buildings were seen not only in functional terms but also as totems of expressivity, as style, and stylization, made a return to practice that had been dominated by architectural modernism (Jencks, 1977; Sklair, 2005, 2006). Increasingly, elite architectural discourse came to emphasize the autonomy of architects, and architectural practice, despite relying on many other groups, including clients. As Larson notes, the rhetoric was associated with a tendency to maintain relatively small architects’ offices – no more than 30 practitioners being seen as the ideal (with regard to the strategy of staying deliberately small, see Mintzberg et al., 1988). This is a finding that resonates with our own case. Today, architecture lies at the interstices of a quintessential pre-bureaucratic form (professional practice) and what is often assumed to be a post-bureaucratic and post-modern form (creative industry). Contemporary architectural practices are a distinctive type of knowledge-based, professional, and creative organization whose status in AngloAmerican societies has been systematically weakened by internal disputes regarding how far architectural knowledge is codifiable and ‘scientific’, or an indeterminate art form (Jamous & Peloille, 1970; Larson, 1993; MacDonald, 1995; Svensson, 1990). In recent times, relatively weak authority over clients and contractors, combined with increased competition, has led them to seek to ‘preserve the core of their jurisdiction in the design area’ and to concentrate ‘more centrally on the aesthetics of design’ (Pinnington & Morris, 2002: 196; see Blau, 1984; Gutman, 1988). The dilemmas arising from architects’ aesthetic and professional commitments are all the more pertinent as architects have occupied more specialist and team-based roles in many building and construction projects. Larson (1993) Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com at FUND COOR DE APRFO PESSL NIVE on March 14, 2014

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highlights that while the discourse of architecture emphasizes the autonomy of the profession, the reality is somewhat different, as architecture is best characterized as heteronymous because the ‘built exemplars of architecture’ (1993: 5) rely on other professions and occupations – such as engineers, builders, quantity surveyors, consultants, etc. – and are, therefore, not the preserve of architects alone. As with other service organizations, firms of architects rely on the expertise of their staff in order to trade and sell a capacity to produce rather than a product: ‘. . . the assets of an architectural practice are its people, and their reputation for providing the service promised’ (Winch & Schneider, 1993: 926). Firms must seek to balance their desire for challenging creative work with commercial constraints but also represent themselves as pursuing aesthetic goals – even at the expense of pragmatic economic gain (Pinnington & Morris, 2002; Winch & Schneider, 1993).2 Larson (1993) discusses architects who choose to lose money on projects they care for, a phenomenon that echoes Blau’s (1984) famous reference to the Daedalian risk inherent in architectural practice.3 The Daedalian risk seems to be an interesting point of difference between architectural firms and many others in the creative industries. It emphasizes the highly disciplined creative ethos that is internalized in the professional socialization of many architects, particularly those who have been trained within theoretically based architectural degrees in universities, rather than in more vocational, practice-oriented contexts. While the ethos of the architect as an artist trained in studio-based architectural education may be well inculcated, the ethos of the architect as a professional agent in a complex organization that is also a business is less well-developed. Architecture, particularly in those moments of punctuation between the dominance of a particular school, is a discourse in which different players compete to gain recognition ‘that gives architects elite status and lifts them above the level of the small or purely local practice’ (Larson, 1993: 100). Architecture functions as a field in which reputations are made through competitions and commissions, which owe far more to peer review by other architects than to judgements by clients. Reputation depends primarily on publications, awards, professional societies, ranking in important design competitions, lectures, nominations to juries in awards programs or elite schools, faculty appointment in a renowned school – in sum, the marks of recognition bestowed by esteemed fellow architects, educators, and architecture critics (Larson, 1993). Thus, while reputation is built discursively amongst communities of practice able to appreciate and negotiate complex significations of style, a living is earned by translating this prestige into projects that clients will fund. It is in this space that we investigate EA.

Research design Research context Earth Architects (EA) was a ‘strong idea firm’ (Larson, 1993: 100) focused on innovative design. Owned and directed by three equal directors, EA was established in 1999 and grew rapidly so that in 2008 it had offices in two major cities and 25 employees.4 Responsible to the directors were four associate directors who led flexible teams of 16 relatively young and inexperienced architects, and two support staff.5 The firm’s directors belonged to The Royal Institute of Architects, responsible for accrediting, evaluating

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and promoting the interests of architects and architecture. Participants described EA as informal, dynamic, and task-focused. Unlike many larger architectural practices EA had not diversified into project management or surveying, having chosen instead to focus solely on creative architecture (including site supervision). It was not only commercially successful but also rich in symbolic capital within the architecture profession, being highly acclaimed for its design accomplishments and numerous national architecture awards. While small, EA was a cosmopolitan firm in that it had successfully transcended the local to become a player within the international architecture scene. Frequent media coverage of its buildings in German, UK and Australian design magazines, and its representation at global architectural events such as the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, were indicators of its reputation within a broader architectural discourse. Staff at EA said that the focus of the firm was ‘Architecture with a capital A’, and that this tended to override financial considerations: ‘We looked at our value chain and we have found that the most important thing is the architecture culture although it does not make any money’ (Oban, director). There was a consensus that their primary concern was to design ‘really unique buildings’ that were sensitive to ‘all the particularities of the site’ (Kylie, graduate architect): ‘What’s interesting for us architecturally in each project will guide you where more time is spent . . . You need to find that groove for each project really . . . And you don’t know where you are going to be led either at the start of a project’ (Robert, architect). Moreover, in translating ideas into designs employees emphasized the non-routine nature of their creative processes and the scope they had for pursuing architectural aesthetics: ‘I mean at the end of the day . . . we can’t be making any money off that project, it’s a beautiful design and the only reason we’re doing it is because it’s a beautiful design, like we absolutely, you love the architecture so you push for it. But from a pure commercial sense it just doesn’t make sense’ (Adam, associate director).

Data collection The primary data for this research were collected between April 2006 and December 2007. The study was framed by an initial intention to produce an ethnographic account of the work experiences of participants in EA. Twenty-five interviews, one with each member of the organization, were conducted in the company’s offices and meeting rooms. The interviews were semi-structured, between 60 and 90 minutes duration, and 24 were audio-taped and professionally transcribed.6 On average each interview transcript had a length of approximately 8000–10,000 words. We asked a broad range of questions concerned with the organization and creative work, such as: ‘What is unique about EA?’ ‘What are the biggest hurdles to creativity?’ and ‘How does teamwork work at EA?’ We also attended and took hand-written notes in design meetings (20 hours), two directors’ strategy retreats (40 hours), four one-day associates’ meetings (30 hours), and made three site visits to ongoing building projects. Our formal data collection was complemented by frequent informal conversations with members of EA, and a wealth of internal company documentation, including the 80-page office manual, working papers and other publications.

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Data analysis We analysed our data informed by an understanding that language is a primary medium through which power is expressed and shaped (Clegg, 1975; Fairclough, 1989), and should thus be the main focus of efforts to analyse how work practices were subjectively constituted through discourse. In line with previous theorizing based on qualitative research we sought to assess our findings by moving iteratively back and forth between data and theory employing a multi-stage inductive approach. At a relatively early stage, inspired by Clegg’s (1975) pioneering account of language games on construction sites, we became interested in how power relations structured the everyday lives of EA’s members in the architectural office (see Kornberger & Brown, 2007). First, we needed to identify power at work in these everyday texts. The transcripts and other data sources were read and instances of talk indexing relations of power were identified and coded following the open coding paradigm recommended by Strauss (1987). The process resulted in the identification of a large number of categories that were more or less continuously revised as new ideas and analytical opportunities presented themselves. Using an initial coding we wrote a lengthy generalized account of what it meant to be an architect at EA and the working practices that governed organizational life, which led us to re-think how specific codes related to each other and to a further process of collapsing, comparing, integrating and discarding ideas and quote material. What is deemed important in the persona of the architect as a creative designer is a sense of unique identity as members of a practice; a commitment to what is recognizable as professionalism, and an espousal of creativity as a supreme value. To affirm their power in relations with stakeholders outside the firm’s practice the central focus is on the need to assert identity, professionalism and creativity as the accounts that best serve the interests of the firm in negotiating projects. These issues lead to a positivity of power mirrored in executive discourse about the firm; however, while there is no shortage of discourse positioning EA in these terms there are other relations of power at work that, in contrast to the discourses of creativity, professionalism and identity, are less overwhelmingly positive; indeed they include some sense of negation and restriction on the part of respondents. Thus, we came to identify as master codes ‘identity’, ‘professionalism, and ‘creativity’ as linked to aspects of power. It is from this final coding that the article has been generated. It is important to note that, as we interviewed them about EA, our interviewees also narrated their own identities. Every interview is always an opportunity for identity work: the stories they told us are similarly attempts to make sense of their past, as well as wishful thinking about the future. As has often been noted in organization studies, work identities are subjectively available to people as self-narratives that organize experiences, facilitate sensemaking and promote individuation (e.g. Brown & Humphreys, 2002; Clarke et al., 2009; Worthington, 1996). Using a qualitative methodological framework, it is important to reflect on the data in relation to the self-presentation of the interviewees.

Creativity, organizing and power at Earth Architects In this section, we analyse creativity and identity discourses at EA as effects of power. While these are intimately related, for ease of presentation we present our analysis in

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four sections. First, we discuss how individuals said that they oriented to commonly shared understandings of how creative work should be conducted. Second, we demonstrate how staff said that their creative work emerged through routine ‘diagramming’ processes, and that how this was mostly the preserve of senior architects. Third, we consider how employees talked about their selves, and how commitment to the organization was engineered through cultural assumptions that mandated high performance. Fourth, we illustrate how members defined themselves as specifically ‘EA professionals’ rather than undifferentiated service providers, and how this was enforced through processes of surveillance and discipline.

The silent hierarchy Senior staff at EA said that structure constrained creativity and intuition, and made many statements, both publicly and in our interviews with them, that what they desired was an ‘open’ and ‘democratic’ office in which employees were involved and empowered in operational and strategic matters. Oban, a director, stressed that any formal office structure or defined routines would restrict creativity and interaction, and that structures and routines (such as job descriptions) should be kept to a minimum. The two key discursive phrases that the directors employed to describe their ideal of an open and democratic office were ‘distributed intelligence’ and ‘dispersed authorship’. ‘Distributed intelligence’ referred to their stated preference that decisions should be made locally by an individual confronted by a specific issue, while ‘dispersed authorship’ implicated their understanding that EA should function as a collective of equals with minimum hierarchy. More junior members of staff, however, stated that while authority structures at EA were generally impalpable, the firm was not un-hierarchical, and that a ‘silent hierarchy’ tacitly structured their creative work: . . . there’s a silent hierarchy in this office, and in that respect it’s something that people would think. They talk about it not existing, but it’s there, well it is for me, I definitely feel that. (Rose, graduate architect) . . . you feel this silent hierarchy going on . . . I would say that there’s a certain language of Earth Architects which is collaborative. If you try and step outside the collaborative language then hierarchy comes back in. (Adam, associate director)

While directors were evidently proud of their putatively egalitarian approach, less senior individuals were adamant that ‘Whenever the boss walks in, you straighten up and start looking busy’ (Abbi, trainee), and that EA’s latent hierarchy and tacit rules were typically learned by newcomers through breaching behaviour (see Garfinkel, 1967): There are a lot of rules . . . The rules come from five years of working somewhere where you are told or emailed that that’s not the right thing to do, not the Earth Architects way of doing things. Let’s not do that any more. So you don’t do it any more. But it’s not like the Ten Commandments. You just remember that the last time that happened, don’t do that again. Even

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like just the way that you talk to each other in the office. Whether or not something is not respectful or something. Those kinds of things. You don’t write that down every time . . . (Christine, associate director)

In short, being creative did not mean being free to do anything at all; it meant being free to do what fully socialized EA architects should do, and indeed did in response to processes of learning and correction: ‘There is like a EA way of just getting through the project’ (Karen, interior designer). Thus did the language of creativity and freedom coexist with a tutelary practice that undercut and contradicted the directors’ espousals regarding the democratic and distributed nature of EA. It was in employees’ construed understandings that they ought to embrace and act upon seniors’ corrections of their conceptions and creative conduct that power was exercised. As an individual who had worked for EA since almost the inception of the organization commented about the need to ‘fit in’: I have had to work with almost everyone in the office at some stage and I’ve had to explain to them how I think the director wants things to be done. So therefore I’m not one where I sit and say this is how things have to be done, but I do explain to people this is what’s happened in the past. I know this is what [EA] likes. You have to decide where you are going to fit in. (Julia, associate director)

In this quote we see two powerful mechanisms at work: first, Julia evokes the idea of an ‘organizational memory’ that one has to absorb in order to fit in. The second dimension of ‘fitting in’ is not cognitive but social: one has to ‘fit into’ the social networks and relations within EA. The poetry of an open and democratic office as espoused by the directors looked very different once it was translated into the prose of everyday organizational life: while there were almost no explicit rules, the tacit organizing of work resulted in a silent hierarchy.

The routinization of creative work At EA staff talked about the importance of ‘design conscience’, by which they meant working on unique and imaginative solutions to the technical problems they faced, their fixation on experimentation and exploration, and their lack of regard for issues of organizational efficiency. The directors in particular pushed the development of a distinctive EA philosophy that differentiated it from other architectural practices: the emergent design philosophy was, the directors posited, a key outcome of the office-wide more-or-less continuous conversations about the production of ideas. Yet, while directors and employees tended to define creativity in opposition to routine, and to talk about the pre-eminence of architecture and aesthetics in their day-to-day work, they also recognized that ideas had to be captured and formalized, generally through ‘diagramming’ processes: The diagram then becomes a kind of process of discovery, of delay that reveals. And here is one of the fundamental principles in the Firm’s ethos: that drawing or diagramming things produces

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a kind of knowledge that is not attainable outside of this process of diagrammatic lines and models. [. . .] In other words, that the drawing produces its own kind of knowledge. (George, director)

As the director explains in the quote, drawing produces a unique knowledge that cannot be obtained outside the architectural process. This insight is interesting in several respects: first, from a professional perspective, the skills of an architect (e.g. drawing) are linked to knowledge production that can be claimed as the area over which architects have jurisdiction (see Abbott, 1988). In other words, drawing and the knowledge it reveals legitimize architecture as a professional body. Second, drawing is ‘made’ a powerful mechanism that sets the parameters of design work. As one graduate architect explains: . . . that basic idea at the start, usually it’s like a diagram and everything that we do in that project should relate back to that one idea . . . everything is based on that philosophy or architecture. (Peter, graduate architect)

Moreover, the power/knowledge that centred on these processes of esoteric knowledge and diagram production was for the most part the privilege of the directors of the firm: ‘. . . we understand that their [directors’] ideas, you know, come above yours basically’ (Peter, graduate architect). The drawing process, which defines and legitimizes architecture as a profession, and represents the mechanism that shapes the design of buildings (Nayak, 2008), has thus to be seen as a central axis around which power relations are structured. Junior staff members were generally occupied with more mundane tasks associated with, for example, documentation, project management and contracts, and claimed ignorance of the ‘the deeper theories’ that drove the directors: ‘I don’t think I fully understand the philosophical depths of where the directors are coming from’ (Kim, graduate architect). The directors understood this invisible division of labour by framing their work as a world of poetics (design) and the work of their staff as a world of techne (documentation), and institutionalized this through a set of inclusionary/ exclusionary practices that sanctioned the directors to focus on key creative issues, and left juniors to deal with the more prosaic requirements of the office: I think there’s an awareness that all of that kind of thinking is happening but I think it’s much more of a part of the directors experience of EA than it is say for the staff. Particularly because as soon as you’re off the design process and you, you know into the next stage of the job so if you’re documenting or you’re doing contract admin and stuff all of a sudden that doesn’t even factor in. And there’s an awful lot of architecture that’s not about design. (Jessica, graduate architect) I’d probably say that it [ideas development] does operate mainly at the very top level. And generally, I guess, the majority of the kind of philosophical ideas etcetera are tossed around between those guys [directors]. (Charles, associate architect)

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Even the most senior architects at EA, though, said that a considerable portion of their time was spent on routine organizational tasks, especially as they related to technical considerations and external constituencies such as building companies. The rhetoric of a concern for ‘Architecture’ thus contrasted with that centred on the need for staff to address practical issues, a tension that senior staff said they sometimes found hard to broker: I think its part of that schizophrenic nature of the practice. Ultimately you are interested in creative design ideas but there is the more technical side to it that you have to understand as well . . . no matter how creative the project is, underlying it there are still, not the uncreative, but the more mundane aspects to each project that you have to deliver a building . . . the industry around is very structured in how information is managed . . . at the end of the day you do have to assimilate that back into a structured system in terms of drawings and specifications and communicating with clients. (Robert, architect)

While even senior staff experienced the schizophrenic nature of EA (being torn between creativity of design ideas and mundane technical and organizational routines), the directors monopolized the poetics of design. This bolstered their position within EA, enabling them to claim responsibility for the production of professional knowledge (for external constituencies), while internally, their diagrams put them ultimately in control of the design of buildings. As such, the creativity of the poetics of architecture exercised important power effects.

Being an EA architect Staff at EA defined the identity of their organization as being focally concerned with Architecture with a capital A. In line with the rhetoric of an open and democratic office, ideas and creative design, combined with a laissez-faire attitude, meant that even junior staff were encouraged to indulge in time-consuming artistic work: The directors have established that the practice operates to ensure that architectural ideas and narratives are the primary driver over all else. In EA all else supports this primary source and the firm has been seen to ruthlessly cut out all that gets in its way. The outcomes are, therefore, the generation and progression of ideas. (Christine, associate director) . . . my interests which is more about, you know, building models for the process of design not show the client the finished result . . . you know, that’s the nice thing about the office, is if you’re working on a project but you want to make a model, then you can make a model, you don’t have to go and feel bad about wasting time. (Martin, graduate architect)

It was not unusual, they said, for the firm to become so fixated on intriguing design possibilities that it produced dozens of models and, in so doing, over-run agreed budgets

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with clients. As Kylie (graduate architect) said: ‘I’ve never associated money with design time’. The point that was made consistently was that people at EA were ‘passionate about architecture’ (Rose, graduate student). This was translated into work norms that prescribed that individuals should work long hours on stressful projects with enthusiasm: It feels like 24 hours a day is expected, in an exaggerated way. I feel like it’s never enough. No matter how many hours I do . . . (Kylie, graduate architect) . . . everyone is working all the time. (Karen, interior designer)

Many people said that they ‘work 80, 90 hour weeks a lot of the time’, but did so ‘quite happily’ (Martin, graduate architect) because they felt pride in being part of a highperforming team that made them, after a successful client presentation, feel ‘like a unified force’ (Rose, graduate architect). A trainee described the often stressful process and the resulting outcome as follows: . . . when you’re finished a project like, you’re pretty proud of yourself because you like what you’ve done. And then, yeah, I think it’s kind of like when people tell about they become parents because it really hurts during birth, but when they’re done, they’re ready for the next one. (Saskia, trainee)

There seemed almost to be a ‘cultish’ dimension to employees’ articulations of their commitment to ‘Architecture’, which they lived out through their affiliation with EA. This meant that the directors did not need to say to staff ‘you work, you work’ (Emil, architect), because everyone knew that others were also working hard: . . . they’ll [employees] work that five hours and they’ll go, you know, ‘that’s not good enough so I’m going to take it home and they keep going’. And because that happens and because pretty much everybody in that office does that, I feel the pressure to do that too. And I feel that pressure is huge . . . (Rose, graduate architect)

While junior employees said that they were happy and enthusiastic about working for EA, they also suggested that the firm and its directors were exploitative and bullying, and only nurturing in ways which best served the company’s interests: I feel like I’m being bullied not to say ‘no’. But passively bullied. (Rose, graduate architect) I guess it [leading] is done with fear and enthusiasm . . . (Christine, associate director)

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Being an EA architect meant to subscribe to the rhetoric of creativity, openness and democracy, whilst working long and stressful hours to be able to combine the rhetoric with the demands of reality. Staff described the power mechanism through which this was achieved as ‘passive bullying’ and characterized leadership as a mixtum compositum of ‘fear and enthusiasm’. Importantly, power was not exercised directly; rather, broken through the prism of creativity, it shaped EA in capillary fashion.

Professionalism and invisible walls Staff were adamant that they were ‘professional architects’, and that at EA ‘the discourse of architecture is architecture too. Buildings are part of the discourse. So architecture becomes a discipline of which buildings are but the experiments’ (Christine, associate director). In particular, they were keen to differentiate between themselves as professionals and ‘service providers’ whose function was merely to satisfy the expressed needs of clients: We are not a service provider. We do projects that are interesting to us. We are professionals. (Oban, director) We don’t just do what people ask us to do – we’re a profession. (Jessica, graduate architect)

Their conception of their selves as professionals was associated with an insistence that it was part of their remit to interpret clients’ briefs, and to work with them to find building solutions that satisfied both EA’s aesthetic aspirations as well as their clients’ needs for functionality: I would say that EA is definitely not a service provider . . . I think you are, if you are an architect, you go in and you look at a brief and you see much more than what you’re given. And you’ve then got to develop, you’ve got to develop that. And so someone might come up to you and say ‘right, I want this house built’. And you say well that’s a completely missed opportunity what you should be doing is this [. . .] you are definitely providing a professional sort of opinion. (John, associate director) Yeah I guess we do tend to probably bang away at the door to get our ideas through as much as we can . . . The way it would seem to work is almost ‘trust us it’s going to be an amazing view’. (Charles, associate architect)

Relatedly, staff talked about their ‘enthusiasm’, ‘passion’ and ‘pride’ that they took in their work rather than ‘just getting things out the door’ (Karen, interior designer). This same attitude was, they said, carried into architectural competitions. As a major source of procurement of new work, for competitions senior EA architects submitted designs that they hoped would win business, but which did not compromise the integrity of the unique EA design philosophy:

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Yeah you do [win pitches], but at the same time that pitch was what we wanted to do and it just happened to coincide with what the client wanted to do. I think that’s very much what, in competitions and things like that, that Oban [director] goes for. It’s very much the attitude is well we’re going to present a project that – well obviously we look at the brief, but our interpretation of the brief is very much our interpretation of the brief, it’s not the client’s. It’s not another architect’s, it’s very much how we want to do the project. (Adam, associate director)

People at all levels were insistent that they were not just professional architects, but specifically ‘EA’ professionals with a distinctive set of skills and modus operandi. This meant that rather than simply delivering a service according to a template, they had always to act as professional EA employees. What this entailed in practice was never clearly articulated, though it evidently served a disciplinary function, encouraging junior staff to invite monitoring from seniors: Yeah, I think EA has a very clear way of doing things and they have a clear way of wanting to relate to people and wanting to relate to clients and establish a position with clients about how EA works . . . I think it does put a lot of responsibility on the project architect to understand what EA would be wanting or how they would be wanting to respond to [a] situation. Which is why I feel that I want to check a lot of stuff with the directors. (Jessica, graduate architect)

Junior staff said that they greatly valued their status as professional EA architects, but that they also found the lack of clearly expressed routines and ethos of unconstrained design-creativity somewhat anxiety-provoking. The junior architects had, in dealing with external constituencies and formulating their designs, to operate according to an implicit rule of anticipated reaction, so as to present to clients ideas that that they felt senior colleagues would appreciate. Clearly, the professional ideal, as embodied by the directors, exercised power over more junior architects, a point that Schön makes in his analysis of a reflective conversation between an architect and a student (Schön, 1983). Failing to conform to the local EA rules regarding what constituted acceptable professional behaviour or design work was an uncomfortable experience – an experience that one of our interviewees summarized succinctly: You’re almost getting smacked constantly because you’re not actually, you don’t see an end result coming . . . There is, there is a lot of invisible walls. (Rose, graduate architect)

Discussion The imagery associated with the creative industries is overwhelmingly positive: the dominant representation is of a free-floating, value creating, avant-garde creative person who does not only draw upon, and produce culture but also creates tangible value in the economy.7 Creative workers increasingly can be seen as the heroic figures of a post-industrial utopian future. In these representations organization plays little role at

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all. The assumption is that creatives occupy informal, free-wheeling organizations that promote creativity and innovation over any other value. In one view from organizational analysis of cultural industries, Lampel et al. (2000) argue that creativity is a resource that cannot be organized. Our article challenges this understanding and argues that talk about creativity and creative identities does not exist outside of power relations.

Creativity as an effect of power It has been argued that the nature of architectural work requires special management practices to handle the creative temperament within an organizational frame: ‘Of all the challenges facing the profession, the problems of motivating architects and sustaining office morale and performance might be the most difficult to address’ (Gutman, 1988: 110). Blau even suggests that ‘architectural practice’ might make as much sense as the term ‘bureaucratic art’ (1984: 10), perhaps because, as professionals, architects are equal, but in working for a firm there are clear hierarchical differences that map on to zones of creativity in practice. Blau (1984) found in her study that 98 percent of interviewees stated that the distinctive characteristic of architecture, compared to other professions, was that it dealt with art and creativity. For her respondents this relation produced motivational problems: the discrepancy between what architects are actually doing and what they think they should do led to low commitment (Blau, 1984). We did not find low commitment at EA; despite the bureaucratic aspects of the ways in which the art in Architecture is constituted, the commitment, cohesion and motivation were high. The question is: how was this accomplished? As the political theorist Haugaard (1997: 69) has argued, ‘Power is the consequence of petty confrontations between actors fighting within or over a regime of truth production.’ It is produced through the strategies and tactics of local conflicts ‘carried out by actors with specific strategies and objectives’, rather than being the effect of some capacities to access resources, or realize real interests, or counter ideologies that obscure these. Power is always embedded in those forms of rationality with which actors will, they think, be held accountable. From an organizational perspective, the power that the junior architects experienced at EA was one with which the directors aspired to create a common sensemaking frame (Colville et al., 1999; Weick, 1995) or, as Haugaard (2000) has posited, a common ‘practical consciousness’, a normative control mechanism that is common in knowledge intensive firms (Alvesson, 1995; Starbuck, 1992). EA’s culture displayed similar schizophrenic tendencies. Work in the firm was ‘rationalized and justified in terms of a greater collective interest’ (Jackson & Carter, 1998: 51). Or, to interpret Townley (1998: 193) from another context, when she suggests that ‘before a domain can be governed or managed it must first be rendered knowable in a particular way’, how the employees learn to know the firm is through the idealization of creativity – even in the midst of the mundaneity of practice. The phrase ‘creative industry’ is an apparent oxymoron: to be creative and to be industrious seem to summon up different and alternate tropes. Not surprisingly the tension between the terms was very evident in EA as employees steered between the worlds of techne and poetics. They reconciled this tension, that is, that they were working in an

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environment that apparently provided many degrees of creative freedom while structuring how this liberty was used, through reference to an ethical ideal of their creative individual and collective identities – even in apparent contradiction of lived experience. Organizing creativity institutes the injunction to ‘Be Creative!’ at the heart of its moral and organizing compass. Thus, EA’s power operated largely through facilitative mechanisms, using forms of institutionalized regulation to achieve their effects, by ‘the continuous and relatively stable presence of a series of ideals, expectations, received ‘‘truths’’, standards and frameworks that provoked individuals to govern their lives in quite particular ways’ (Allen, 2003: 82): Subjects are constituted by the spacing and timing of their own activities as much as they are by those of others who seek to influence their behaviour; their conduct is shaped as much by what they absorb and imagine the ‘truth’ of their circumstances to be as it is by the physical layout, distribution and organization of their settings. (Allen, 2003: 83)

The mechanisms of power also include the ‘code of generalized symbols which guides the transmission of symbols’ to which Luhmann (1979: 111) attends. In the case of EA, these are central to the way the facilitative use of power to be creative was organized, as we see in the tropes and rhetoric of creativity. We know from Foucault that power and knowledge are inextricably intertwined. The myth of the creative professional expressing him/herself and producing meaning does not, typically, explicitly acknowledge power. However, power can be seen in the textual interstices of some of our interviewees, such as Rose’s account of what we could term the ‘joy of work’, a joy that simultaneously produces ‘invisible walls’, ‘silent hierarchies’ and ‘unified forces’. In short, talk about creativity and creative organizations does not flourish outside of power relations, but are an effect of them. Signature architects, as traders in meaning, are governed very subtly: not through bureaucratic power; not through dynamics of teamwork as Barker (1993) analysed; not through empowerment and motivational exercise that get people to work for organizational objectives. Nor are they governed purely through power/knowledge regimes, as in a disciplinary context. Perrow (1986) once remarked that professionals embody rules, meaning that professional organizations can be ‘bureaucracy-lite’ because professionals already have internalized the rules of practice as a result of their professional training. However, with creative architects this is not so clear: their training tends to express the rhetoric of creativity while immediate initial practice often contradicts this. Hence, to keep contradictions at bay, creative power structures experience in ways that are reflexive on a ‘future-perfect’ (Schutz, 1967) ideal of what being a creative professional will be while in the here-and-now, one lives only for those moments of being in a ‘unified force’ that allow glimpses of the promised land, tantalizingly embodied in the figure of the senior Architect. They position the idea of creativity in a way that everyday practice cannot deny, as an ‘aesthetic light on the hill’, pointing to a more perfect future state. The contradictions between these worlds are often experienced in tandem during the same work day, even when the work is differentiated. All EA employees were enveloped in a culture of celebratory creativity that entailed that even though discourses about practices sometimes conflicted, with tensions between

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professional values and organizational realities of briefs and cost constraints, creative power provided the ethical fibre that made sense of it all. The fulcrum of these dynamics was the identity of being an Architect. Creative architects, as professionals engaged in market relations, are subject not only to normal disciplinary and organizational power relations but also those that are condensed through the brief: the nexus between the architect’s professional identity and the market of opportunities for practice. Design-focused architects are often strongly resistant to those power relations that are imposed in ‘the brief’ – the instructions as to the nature of the desired object. The brief, in ostensibly shaping and framing what and how they will do what they do, imposes limits on their creativity. In limiting their creative autonomy it limits their power to talk and draft into being that which is creatively possible in favour of that which the client’s resources and imagination can envisage. In order to realize her creative ideas, the architect has to negotiate and renegotiate her joint sensemaking with the client. The built object invariably emerges as a product of such a negotiated order (Strauss et al., 1963). Hence, much of the work of architects is expressed in discourse around the brief, drawing on the particulars of the professional identity to negotiate the always indexical conceptualization of the building as a complex project, to present to the world something that embodies their professional ambitions – sometimes despite the client’s brief. In terms of organizational discourse this indexical conceptualization of the building finds its mirror image in terms of the discourses that circulate internally, as we have seen. On the one hand, there is the celebration of creativity and EA’s unique identity in which all are engaged in an egalitarian expression of the firm’s essential identity; on the other hand, there are the silent hierarchies and the contradictions of being professional by second-guessing what professionalism (as specified by the senior partners) demands. Hence, the authentic discourse of being an EA architect is already constituted in terms of a dominant imaginary provided through interpretation of the senior partners’ practice. This is not a simple matter of power being exercised causally; nor is it a matter of hegemony. Junior members of the firm are engaged in a voluntarist sensemaking of the contradictions that they see modelled in EA’s practice. As they make sense of these contradictions discursively they begin to construct an imaginary that works as a relation of power with which they seek to shape their practices. These are neither dependent subjects being pushed around, causally, by the directors nor are they judgmental dopes whose consciousness is hegemonized. It is in their imaginary that becoming and being an EA architect is constituted in terms of specific modes of rationality (see Clegg, 1975). In this article, we have identified these modes as ways of being professional, managing identity and, as we discuss next, positing this identity as essentially creative.

Creative identities as effects of power The case illustrates how architects’ subjective construction of their selves as creative professionals was disciplined by discursive practices of creative power. These structured a domain of possible action and subjectivity that conditioned practice and made the situated tensions of the creative person employed as a mundane worker both intelligible and

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practicable (see Maister, 1986). In this respect, the study is similar to Orr’s (1996) analysis of how the fantasy of the hero operated to sustain the work identities of photocopy repair technicians; here the fantasy was more of a future perfect projection that was personified in the here-and-now by the rhetoric and practice of the directors, as the type of Architects that all should aspire to become. The architects identification of themselves as a community of expressive artists, architectural heroes whose creative power constituted what Lacan has described as a fantasy-scenario, gave their reality consistency and maintained their sense of self (Contu & Willmott, 2007). Asserting creativity is a constant refrain; even when the architects bemoan that they are not being creative they are positioning themselves not in terms of who they are but what they aspire to be. While the hero is a potent trope in Western mythology that implicates superhuman abilities, for the junior architects at EA the hero role that subjects enacted preserved the fantasy of artistic freedom in the face of bureaucratic art. Even though they may now be lower case architects the identity of being specifically EA-professionals is significant in this regard: it tells architects who they will want to become and how they will become it. Of course, on a less elevated level their hero-identities were counter-balanced by that ‘awful lot of architecture that is not about design’, as one of our interviewees put it (see Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984). At EA, as in other high commitment organizations, individuals uncritically assumed the subjectivities made available to them, a phenomenon that Burawoy (1985) has discussed as ‘strategizing one’s own subordination’. Their subjectively construed identities were products of power, ‘irreducible to an internal core of meaning’ but rather ‘continuously constituted and constructed’ (Townley, 1998: 199) by individuals intent on ‘realizing the project of the self’ (Grey, 1994: 482). EA was a social locale in which self-reinforcing surveillance served to replicate, reinforce and monitor processes of mutual control. Self-review was not, it seemed, discrete, but more-or-less continuous: under the panoptic gaze the individual ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault, 1977: 202–3). Within this milieu, as Fournier (1999) has argued, ‘professionalism’ constituted a disciplinary logic or ‘software of control’ (p. 293) that, potentially at least, allowed for control at a distance through the construction of notionally ‘appropriate’ ‘professionalized’ identities and conducts. In illustrating this, our article is also a contribution to debates on discursive control within the professions. At EA, being a professional architect meant learning how to constitute creative architectural projects, using conceptions and terminology sanctioned by, or at least consonant with, those of the directors, especially where these gained recognition in the broader professional community. In order to legitimate their claims to competence, junior architects not only had to promote themselves as becoming technically competent, and already creatively gifted, but as able to understand problems and to articulate solutions from a corporate ‘EA’ perspective. In doing so they also did deference to the directors. It was this requirement that, in part, operated to control the margin of indeterminacy or flexibility that junior staff had in the conduct of their work. Employees were, nevertheless, able to comment reflexively on their subject positions, and in doing so implicitly understood how power was being exercised over them by the directors. In short, they were not passive consumers of designated identities but knowingly compliant in their quest for achievement of an idealized identity (see Thornborrow & Brown, 2009).

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Conclusions In this article, we have analysed how creative power structures everyday work life in one architectural practice; architecture, though, feeds on cultural capital that is global by nature – it connects the dream of being part of a global profession that has a mission beyond the immediate work that one may be doing; it is for this reason that the design competitions, the prizes, the models, and the placement of designs in prestigious journals and books were of such importance to EA. Successful architectural performance was, in a Goffmanian sense, linked closely to convincing representations of architecture. Books, competitions and other representations function as media to express creative design beyond the (narrow) boundaries of what clients would commercially fund and aesthetically acknowledge. Although our case study has started to delineate the contours of what we have termed creative power, future research needs to focus on the micro-practices of everyday organizational life and analyse discursive regimes that constitute creativity. Further studies could also focus on the different media in which creativity is performed, and how they effect power relations between professionals, clients and others. In accomplishing this we will not only learn about practices of so-called creative industry members but also about other kinds of knowledge-intensive firms. From the aestheticization of late modernity we witness the increasing intrusion of design into the provision of the consumed environment. In this context, other professionals that are preoccupied with the category of ‘imagination’ might start to share the liminal space of Architecture as Bureaucratic Art, shaped and structured by creative power. Notes 1 Earth Architects (EA) is a pseudonym. 2 Worthington (2005) has delivered an interesting report on the ‘Future for architectural education in Ireland’ that outlines how creative and commercial skills should be balanced in the education of architects. 3 In Greek mythology Daedalus was a renowned and highly skilled craftsman. 4 In order to protect the firm and its employees we have decided to keep the country in which EA operated confidential. 5 The ordinary nomenclature of the firm is to refer to the three owners and partners as ‘directors’. 6 One interview was conducted by phone and could not be recorded. 7 Whilst beyond of the scope of this article, it would be interesting to analyse the discourse of Creative Industries as ideology that promises to combine creativity and commerciality, breaking the old conflict between culture and commerce. The latest report Staying ahead: The economic performance of the UK’s creative industries, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the UK government and written by The Work Foundation, explains: The creative industries are important sources of employment and wealth generation . . . But they are more than that. They are the means by which the nation displays expressive value – a source of pleasure, components of wellbeing and the replenishment of our collectivelycreated culture – and their growth demonstrates the increasing worth we attach to it. The process of expressing value, involving risk-taking, experimentation and imagination, has a wider cascade effect. The more creative and vigorous the core of our national creativity, the more creative and vigorous are likely to be the creative industries and the wider economy and society. (The Work Foundation, 2007: 188)

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Stewart R Clegg is Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Management and Organization Studies Research at the University of Technology, Sydney and he is also a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School and EM-Lyon. A prolific publisher in leading academic journals in social science, management and organization theory, he is also the author and editor of many books, including the following SAGE volumes: Handbook of power (with Mark Haugaard, 2009), Handbook of macro-organization behaviour (with Cary Cooper, 2009), and Handbook of organization studies (with Cynthia Hardy, Walter Nord and Tom Lawrence, 2006). [Email: [email protected]] Chris Carter is from Cornwall and works as a Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research and teaching span the disciplinary areas of organization theory and critical accounting. His PhD was awarded by Aston Business School, where he was supervised by David C Wilson. [Email: [email protected]]

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