Editorial

Organization
17(5) 507–515

Organizing value © The Author(s) 2010

Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1350508410374242
http://org.sagepub.com

Craig Prichard
Massey University, New Zealand

Raza Mir
William Paterson University,  Wayne, NJ, USA

Abstract
In this essay, we argue that the recent financial collapse, the ensuing recession and the work of key
social movements have created conditions for a reengagement of critically-inclined organizational
theorists with various forms of value analysis. We then introduce the seven articles in this special
issue and highlight how each makes a contribution to this reengagement.

Keywords
Exploitation, neoliberalism, value relations

‘Shoot the bankers, nationalise the banks’ was the simple headline in a Financial Times column
on 19 January 2009 (Stephens, 2009). Hardly the advice one expects from a serious newspaper
looking to recommend itself to the global business elite. But there it was. And it wasn’t flippant
or an entirely light hearted remark. Below the headline columnist Philip Stephens argued that UK
Prime Minister’s Gordon Brown was off the mark in suggesting that there was ‘rising public
anger’ over the behaviour of British banks. ‘Unbridled rage would have been a more accurate
description of public mood’, he said. There’s a sense that we may have been here before.
In his introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker suggests that Karl Marx ‘wrote
as though his pen were dipped in molten anger’ (Tucker, 1978: xxxviii). What propelled Marx’s
pen, Tucker argues, was his utter rage that seemingly reasonable economic theory and supposedly
civil society could justify the theft and alienation embedded in the wage–labour relationship. If
we take Philip Stephen as the emotional barometer of public discourse, it would seem that in the
last three years many have come to share the sentiment that drove Marx’s pen—and for much the
same reasons.
But how would critically inclined students of organization such as the readers of this Journal
explain such responses and what particular conceptual resources would they reach for in response?

Corresponding author:
C. Prichard, School of Management, Massey University PN214, Private Bag 11–222, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Email: c.prichard@massey.ac.nz

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Our field’s stock in trade analysis of organizing processes and practices has, in recent times, been
grounded in analysis of relations of meaning and power. Largely ignored, forgotten or ‘outsourced’
to conventional economic frameworks, has been earlier debate that drew on a third category—
relations of value.
The seven articles in this special issue are a response to this forgetting. Each presents analysis
and arguments that connect the political, symbolic and exchange moments of organizational
processes and practices. These articles offer various means of responding to the contemporary
context—a context reshaped over the last three years by financial collapse, recession and a parade
of various global social movements. Before introducing each article let us briefly turn to sketch in
the context.
As we write this introduction, more than a year has passed since the FT’s ‘Shoot the bankers,
nationalise the banks’ headline. Across Europe, entire economies have stalled as bankruptcy threatens
and public spending austerity measures have brought popular protests to the streets. Unemploy-
ment has reached a 20-year high in Britain and in the US the recession has put more than 8 million
people out of work, seen the loss of trillions of dollars in savings and put the country through what
President Obama described as a ‘great trial’. Large corporations have been seen as the forefront of
the crisis, epitomized by the news that the merchant banking firm Goldman Sachs (a name that may
well prove a liability in more straitened times) was facing both civil proceedings and criminal
investigation for possible double dealing.
Obama placed a significant portion of the blame for the financial collapse and the ensuing reces-
sion on financial institutions. In late April he told an audience not far from New York’s famous
financial district that: ‘A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can
get, however you can get it. That’s what happened too often in the years leading up to this crisis.
Some—and let me be clear, not all—but some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded
or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business or save
for retirement’.1
One can appreciate Obama’s directness but what explanation is offered for this state of affairs?
The US President suggests that a kind of collective amnesia descended on some of these elite
financial firms. Some ‘forgot’ to maintain the expected principles of the ‘free market’ and some
forgot what lies behind every dollar traded and leveraged. The source of this value ultimately
lay in the energy, effort, labour and work of millions of Americans intent on pursuing the liberal
expectation of home ownership, higher education, business ownership and a financial secure
retirement.
One can appreciate the rhetorical poise of this explanation. It is an attempt after all to invoke the
need for more principled business practice and to prepare the ground for a new regulation of finan-
cial markets. A more problematic explanation would have it that this ‘forgetting’, this collective
absent mindedness, is at the very core of the neo-liberal economic regime that created the condi-
tions for the crisis and the recession (Boyer, 2001; Harmes, 2001; Harvey, 2005).
While the regime was financially built around the extension of cheap credit and a long housing
market boom, it centred ideologically on the social relations of the consumer as the primary locus
of responsibility over health, happiness and wellbeing. The ‘home’ that formed an important
element of this calculus was not a merely symbolic object in the formation of the family as institution,
or the social organization for the formation of primary social relations. It was an asset that could be
leveraged for a financial return. The upshot of this ideological construction was a kind of global
‘forgetting’ based on the social relations of the market.
Despite this situation, challenges to the neo-liberal regime have also come from other quarters.
Moving behind the banners of ‘fair trade’, ‘anti-globalization’, ‘global debt’ and more recently

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‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’, multiple groups and constituencies including farmers, small
business people and consumers have confronted world leaders, corporations and supra-national
bureaucrats over the equality and sustainability of flow of value in exchange relations. Alongside
direct action, such movements have along the way contributed significantly to broadening the
debate on ‘value’. These social movements have raised a counter ideological position that requires
the neo-liberal consumer to take an interest in the social, political, economic and environmental
genealogies of our food, clothing, shelter, technologies and energy use. In some cases, this counter
discourse has forced states, firms and individuals to reconsider organizing practices that simply
identify value in terms of monetary units, and have sought to broaden forms of value that are
understood to be exchanged in market relations. Market exchange relations are redefining them-
selves to incorporate political, social and ecological relationships between people, and between
people and their environments. In some instances, such work challenges institutionalized gover-
nance structures that organize the distribution of economic surplus—(see Reinecke’s empirical
analysis of the setting of fair trade prices in this volume).
The above discussion suggests that events of the last three years have significantly changed the
economic and political landscape across the developed western economies offering up for increased
contention their core organizing practices and processes. At the same time, popular movements
formed in response to neo-liberal economic and political ideology are forcing a re-examination of
how we conceptualize exchange relations. These shifts pose a problem as well as an opportunity
for critically inclined organization researchers, both to offer a counter-theoretical analysis of events
such as the economic crisis that militates against neoliberalism as well as to theorize the dissent of
working people against policies that continue to bail out the corporations that caused the crisis
while imposing harsh reductions in public spending on working people in the name of post-crisis
‘austerity’.   

Re-engaging with value

In late 2008, as waves of fear and uncertainty over savings, jobs and businesses swept much of the
planet and governments scrambled to prop up failing economic institutions, a conference took
place in Wellington, New Zealand, under the title ‘Contemporary Critical Theories’. The event
brought together a number of organization theorists, and identified itself as a venue for ‘alternative
ways of describing, explaining, interpreting, understanding, and prescribing social, economic, and
political affairs’.2 The programme listed the following as possible approaches that would be wel-
come: ‘Deconstruction and Politics, Poststructuralist Political Theory, Perspectives in Discourse
Analysis, Philosophy of Social Science, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Critical Theory,
Psychoanalysis, Rhetorical Analysis, Postcolonialism, Feminist Theories and Practice’. What was
surprising was that despite the swirling economic crisis and the continuous conversation between
attendees about these events, neither the programme, the 26 articles presented at the event, nor any
of the critical theoretical resources recommended made any connection with the crisis.
This was not an isolated incident. A review of articles presented at the following year’s Critical
Management Studies Conference, EGOS Conference, or the Critical Management Studies Division
at the Academy of Management shows a similar pattern. The major economic events of the day and
the changing character of organized economic relations were mostly absent from the key gatherings
of the critically-inclined management and organization studies community. How is this possible?
Two explanations suggest themselves. First, our written work and our research is often ‘out of
date’. We study temporally dispersed practices and processes and are governed by lengthy publi-
cation and evaluation structures. These constraints often detach us from current events. Second and

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more concerning is the fact that such a separation is compounded by the increasing detachment of
critical organizational theorists from analysis of the economic relations. Gibson Burrell, one of the
founders of this Journal, once quipped that the field of organization studies had emerged as a result
of the successful subcontracting of the study of political and symbolic features of organizations
from economics. In other words, the problem is not with our organizing practices but with the
implicit ‘contract’ we appear to have made with our close disciplinary neighbour. Our ‘contract’
appears to carry an implicit veto on organizational analysis that links economic and political and
symbolic relations (see Marsden, 1999 and Rowlinson, 1997 for exceptions to this rule). Of course
the strengths of critically inclined organizational analysis has been found in its analysis of the
political and symbolic dynamics of organizing, while an analysis of how relations of power and
meaning, in/form and are in turn in/formed by exchange relations, that is, relations where value
flows between the positions (as energy, effort, income and surplus), have increasingly become our
Achilles heel.
That has not always been the case. Some of the original core texts of critical organizational
scholarship have been strongly informed by analysis of value relations. For instance Burrell and
Morgan’s study of sociological paradigms (1979) dedicated at least one of their two radical para-
digms to analysis that draws on Marxian analysis of exchange relations. Gareth Morgan’s best
selling textbook (1986) follows up the discussion of sociological paradigms with twinned chapters
that put the case for a Marxian analysis of capitalist crisis, and for organizations as instruments of
exploitation (chapters 8 and 9). Such work was not, of course, speaking from a hollow chamber.
It backed itself with work by the likes of Kenneth Benson (1977), Richard Brown (1978) Stewart
Clegg (1981) and Wolf Heyderbrand (1977).
Clegg’s ‘Organization and Control’ published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1981 is a
central example of this strand of work. It offers a multi-layered conceptual framework that links
changing rates of capital accumulation with differential forms of control of an organization’s labour
process and the formation of organizational rules. The basic argument is that organizations are for-
malized around different rule sets. These rule sets are outcomes of historical moments that are
framed by particular rates of surplus value accumulation, different occupational structures and the
particular histories of inter and intra organizational conflict. In other words, the article offers a form
of analysis that connects wider accumulation patterns and particular relations of power. Clegg’s
article is a companion to his 1980 magnum opus with David Dunkerley, Organization, Class and
Control, and a prelude to a 1989 edited collection entitled Organization Theory and Class Analysis:
New Approaches and New Issues, all of which might be regarded as a high water mark for published
work that explicitly connects exchange and power relations. So what has happened since?
Almost 30 years from Clegg’s 1981 article, this concern with the interpenetration of value and
power relations but their analytical separation has largely disappeared. Such work appears to have
been subsumed, by our concern with identity, power and discourse. Ironically, discussions of value
creation and value appropriation are observed mostly in the realm of strategic management, where
its purveyors are scholars of neo-classically informed economic theory—particularly authors
representing the resource based view of the Firm (RBV). For example, both editions of the highly
successful Sage Handbook of Organization Studies handed the concern for the organization of
economic relations to RBV guru Jay Barney. Brief mentions of more critically inclined analysis are
made across this text but these are marginal and undeveloped. Writing in the concluding chapter of
the 1996 Handbook, Hardy and Clegg note,

the employment relationship of economic domination and subordination is the underlying sediment over
which organizational practices are stratified and overlaid, often in quite complex ways. (1996: 633)

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The assumption here is that while exchange relations are the underlying sediment of organizations,
they are subsumed into the political relations of domination and subordination and can thus be read
off from the latter.
In a similar vein, but a decade later, Willmott (2005) notes (in his presentation of Laclau and
Mouffe’s work as a form of organizational analysis), that

Workers, or wage labourers, participate in a relation of subordination to an employer, or capitalist, upon

whom they depend for their income. But this relationship is not antagonistic per se. It becomes antagonistic
only when the valency of the worker identity is subverted by some other identification. (2005: 770)

Like Clegg and Hardy, Willmott references exchange relations—workers are dependent on employers
for a wage—but this relation is analytically subsumed by the cultural/symbolic politics of
identification.
Is there a way to reverse this trend; to bring exchange relations and questions of value back to
the forefront of critical organizational scholarship? Let us return briefly to the issue of the economic
crisis. Organizational theorists need to get their hands dirty and join economists operating in the
critical tradition to offer a way out of the crisis, and to theorize ways in which working people can
make sense of the corporate malfeasance that brought this about. For instance, they could help link
the crisis to an increased pattern of inequality that began in capitalist societies in the late 1970s
(Alegretto, 2006). At a broader theoretical realm, they could explain esoteric corporate offerings
like synthetic collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps through Marxian terms.
Vakulabharanam (2009) discusses how in the 19th century, Marx had presaged these instruments,
through reference to ‘fictitious capital’ in Chapter 29 (Components of Banking Capital) of Capital,
Volume 3, predicting that fictitious capital would intensify the problem of over-accumulation of
capital through the creation of asset bubbles. Of course, the creation of these asset bubbles happens
through the agencies of corporations, the very units of analysis that should be the stock in trade of
us organizational theorists. Likewise, we can shift the debate from a discussion of business ethics
to one of the nature of capitalism itself. The financial crisis of 2008 can be seen as a variant of the
crisis of overaccumulation (Bello, 2006). All these issues inexorably link back to questions of
value, of exchange relations and exploitation, terms that need to be rescued from the penumbra of
the consciousness of organizational researchers.
The point is not merely that organizational studies should focus on the economic crisis. The
broader point being made through this introduction, and the articles that comprise this special
issue, is that we organizational theorists ignore the issues inherent in regimes of value creation,
appropriation and distribution in society and in corporations at our own peril, and no amount of
reflection on issues of identity and power relations will offset the losses from this act of collective
shrugging on the part of the organizational researcher. This special issue is a small attempt to relocate
a few organizational debates back into the terrain of value.

Seven articles on value

The special issue comprises five full length articles and two shorter and more polemical ‘Speaking
out’ pieces. These two pieces by Adam Arvidsson and David Harvie and Keir Milburn present
contrasting forms of Marxian-inspired value analysis and offer strongly divergent visions of
contemporary capitalisms. The overall purpose of Harvie and Milburn’s piece is to illustrate how
value can be said to discipline, or organize, labour in contemporary capitalisms. Harvie and
Milburn draws on Diane Elson’s ‘Value Theory of Labour’ and shows how this approach allows

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us to consider value as both labour and that which is valued—sets of beliefs or commitments. Such
a categorization is then illustrated with a discussion of the managerial practice of benchmarking.
Arvidsson’s article, entitled ‘After Capitalism, Ethics?’, takes a quite different tack. For Arvids-
son western economies are in the midst of a thorough ‘crisis of value’. Such a crisis, which is in
part connected to the financial crisis and as a response to neo-liberalism, is created, more impor-
tantly, through a collective rediscovery of social production (aided and abetted by new forms of
electronic communication). Contra Harvie and Milburn, Arvidsson argues that labour in the con-
temporary period has overflowed efforts by capitalist relations of production to discipline it and
new relations of production, which Arvidsson calls ethical value, are creating the possibilities for
quite different economic structures.
The first of the five full length articles is ‘Creating “value” beyond the point of production:
branding, financialization and market capitalization’ and comes from Hugh Willmott’s keyboard.
This work picks up Arvidsson’s point regarding the importance of social production in the forma-
tion of value in contemporary capitalism. But rather than see new forms of social production as a
challenge to contemporary capitalisms, Willmott shows how this labour, the work of consumers in
this case, is valorized and privately appropriated through the development and valuation of brands.
The following article, from Juliane Reinecke deals with the politics of value distribution in a
commodity chain governed by novel price setting arrangements. Entitled ‘Beyond a subjective
theory of value and towards a “fair price”: an organizational perspective on fairtrade minimum
price setting’, the article draws on Reinecke’s ethnography of the Standards Committee of the
Fairtrade Labelling Organization (FLO). The article firstly offers a glimpse of the political process
of setting the price of the coffee trade under the Fair Trade labelling scheme, and then turns to the
challenge that such arrangements pose to conventional market processes. Reinecke suggests that
the key feature of this explicitly political price setting process is identifying common moral grounds
among the stakeholders upon which the negotiations of a fair trade price can proceed.
The political division of ownership in partnership structures is the topic of the next article. Pro-
duced by members of a Manchester Business School group lead by Julie Froud, and entitled ‘Own-
ership matters: private equity and the political division’, the article explores how claims on the
value realized by UK private equity firms are organized to favour general over limited partners.
Noting the popular resistance against private equity firms as owners of major public companies,
the article concludes by suggesting a number of policy options that flow from its ownership-based
analysis.
Resistance to the threat posed to local communities by Casino operators is the target of the next
article. Authored by Lynne Andersson and Lisa Calvano, and entitled ‘Hitting the jackpot (or not):
value extraction in Philadephia’s casino controversy’, the article provides a detailed analysis of
the conflict over the building of casinos in Philadelphia. Drawing on David Harvey’s accumulation-
based framework, the article brings to light the seductivity of neo-liberal discourse as the basis
for urban development strategies and the value commitments that form the platform for resistance
to this.
The final article in this special issue aims to make a critically-informed contribution to the
Resource-Based View of the Firm. Authored by Marlene Le Ber and Oana Branzei and entitled,
‘Towards a critical theory of value creation in cross-sector partnerships’, the article draws together
key strands of thinking from critical theories. Based on a standpoint approach and using the notion
of voice, the article then builds a socially critical framework for analysing the value distribution
aspects of cross sector partnerships. The article illustrates the framework with analysis of a series
of health sector partnership between firms and NGOs. The overall purpose of the work is to develop
theoretical frameworks that can deal with both social and economic objectives.

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Before closing this introduction we would like to recognize and thank the reviewers who read
and offered comments and suggestions on all the articles submitted to the special issue. Their
names are listed below in alphabetical order. Thank you!

• Boon, Bronwyn,
• Cederstrom, Carl
• Clark, Gordon
• Cooke, Bill
• Cronin, Bruce
• Dar, Sadhvi
• De Cock, Christian
• Dowling, Emma
• Fleetwood, Steve
• Gleadle, Pauline
• Gregory, Abigail
• Haski-Leventhal, Debbie
• Haslam, Colin
• Hewer, Paul
• Jaros, Steve
• Langley, Paul
• Levy, David
• Llewellyn, Nick
• Madra, Yahya
• Marens, Richard
• Marsden, Richard
• McKenna, Bernard
• Mohun, Simon
• Morgan, Glenn
• Muniesa, Fabian
• Murtola, Anna-Maria
• Power, Marilyn
• Pullen, Alison
• Rowlinson, Michael
• Sayers, Andrew
• Selsky, John
• Smircich, Linda
• Sotirin, Patricia
• Stablein, Ralph
• Stone, Melissa
• Teague, Paul
• Tomlinson, Frances
• Toms, Steve
• Warhurst, Chris
• Whitehead, Steve
• Williams, Karel
• Wright, Steve
• Zanoni, Patrizia

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Notes
1 Available from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-wall-street-reform
2 Available from: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/criticaltheories/Conference.aspx

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Biographies
Craig Prichard wrote his PhD at the University of Nottingham and his research and service work
contributes to the development of critical studies of management. He is the current Chair of the
Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management, an Associate Editor of
the journals Management Learning and Organization and a Coordinator (with Deborah Jones)
of New Zealand’s OIL (organization, identity and locality) research network. He teaches critical
approaches to leadership, change and management knowledge for Massey University’s College of
Business in New Zealand and in 2010 he was awarded one of five Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for
Teaching Excellence. Address: School of Management, Massey University PN214, Private Bag
11–222, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

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Prichard and Mir 515

Raza Mir, PhD, University of Massachusetts, is the Seymour Hyman Professor of Management at
William Paterson University in New Jersey, USA. He is also an Associate Editor of Organization.
His research mainly concerns the transfer of knowledge across national boundaries in multinational
corporations, and  issues relating to power and resistance in organizations.  He has published in
journals from a variety of disciplines, including Academy of Management Learning and Education,
Cultural Dynamics, Journal of Business Communication, Organizational Research Methods and
Strategic Management Journal. Address: Christos Cotsakos College of Business, William Paterson
University, 1600 Valley Road, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA. Email: mirr@wpunj.edu

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